Apple’s declining software quality • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#671

Post by coldtea » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 2:46 PM UTC

thenewwazoo wrote: post #438

coldtea wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For OS X, the decline began under Jobs with 10.7 So what issues do you have with 10.11? Because I don't see anything to complain about. Then again, I also didn't see anything troubling in 10.10, 10.9 and 10.8, with the exception of their ill-fated transition to a new DNS backend, which they later reverted. A few bugs here and there, yes. Nothing I haven't seen since 10.2, or that's not comparable to the kind of iss…

I'll take a crack at that: - UI non-responsiveness: it is extraordinarily frequent that I will chord a tab change in Safari or in iTerm2, and the system will not respond for sometimes multiple seconds. It's the same with creating tabs in Safari. ⌘-t or ⌘-{ do not respond. - Application switching focus failures: ⌘-tab will raise another window, but window focus will not follow. This has caused me to lose work. ⌘-tab,…

>UI non-responsiveness: it is extraordinarily frequent that I will chord a tab change in Safari or in iTerm2, and the system will not respond for sometimes multiple seconds. It's the same with creating tabs in Safari. ⌘-t or ⌘-{ do not respond.

Ok, for this I can't say much, because every since 2010 or so I've used Chrome in place of Safari. As for iTerm2, I've tried to switch to it several times over the years (later mostly because of Tmux integration) but always found it to be buggy and reverted to the Terminal.

>Application switching focus failures: ⌘-tab will raise another window, but window focus will not follow. This has caused me to lose work. ⌘-tab, ⌘-w will sometimes close an iTerm2 tab that's behind the Safari window I'm looking at.

Hmm, haven't seen this -- and I use ⌘-tab and the ~ variant heavily.

I have seen lagginess in focus when switching full-screen apps use, and I sometimes start typing before that happens. This got a little better in 10.11 though (either faster focus switch or less transition time).

>- discoveryd: My Apple TV's network name is currently "Apple TV (5)". Macs sometimes do this too.

DNS issues I've had (and mentioned in another comment). They tried a transition to a new DNS backend which was buggy. They reverted back to the old one with 10.11 (or sometime in 10.10.x) though and has been OK since then.

>Slow laptop wakeup: I almost always have to tap a keyboard key to wake the display after opening my laptops (MBr and MBPr). Almost always. But not always.

Do see this from time to time (though it almost always works in my case).

Could be a sensor issue though -- not a software thing (the display up sensor not registering, but tap working ok).

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#672

Post by rmah » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 3:04 PM UTC

bluedino wrote: post #414

nostrademons wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, I think it's a perception problem. As someone whose starry-eyed Mac obsession predated Windows 95 - Apple's software has always been buggy. It was buggy under Sculley, it was buggy under Amelio, and it was buggy under Jobs. I remember getting plenty of sad Macs under System 6 and 7, and early versions of OS X weren't any better. We just didn't care because Steve Jobs was really good at distracting us with promis…

>> Apple's software has always been buggy. It was buggy under Sculley, it was buggy under Amelio... Classic Mac OS was buggy by design - it didn't have multitasking and memory protection, it was single user... Windows had that same problem before 2000 (well, NT 4, but not many people used that). I use OS X daily and I use Windows 7 daily. I have far fewer issues with OS X for whatever reason that may be. My computers…

Jeez, you're talking about something designed and built in 1982-1983 (over 30 years ago) and meant to run on something with 128KB of RAM with no hard drive and a 400KB floppy disk.

You try fitting all that plus a GUI those constraints.

What's amazing is that it had the features it had and that it worked at all.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#673

Post by mikeash » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 3:53 PM UTC

neximo4 wrote: post #632

mikeash wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying updates have always required a restart. You said you remember a time when this was not the case, and I'm pretty sure such times never existed.

No they haven't. On the 'Steve Jobs' versions of OS X updates never needed a restart, such versions as Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion. The only exception was on major updates where a DVD was required for the update. They even used to use that it used to do this to bash windows. The 'Steve Jobs' OS X versions were very refined. Somewhere around Lion everything went downhill. Mountain Lion's flaws were slowly more pron…

Here's a screenshot of Leopard requiring a restart for an update:

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--L-qfNFHD...

Here's one for Snow Leopard:

http://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/mac-os-x-...

Lion:

http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Screen-S...

And just in case you think this was real but you got the era wrong, here's a screenshot of 10.3 requiring a restart for all sorts of updates, including a Safari update and a Daylight Saving Time update:

https://systemfolder.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/softupdpant...

Plus a normal OS update:

http://sillydog.org/graph/temp/ss_swupdate01.jpg

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#674

Post by mikeash » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 4:02 PM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #609

mikeash wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I simply don't see the implied accusation of lying with "I find that hard to believe." It's merely implying that the statement is wrong. You seem to be interpreting it as an accusation based on the idea that a person making this statement about himself is very unlikely to be incorrect. I don't see that as at all unlikely, and you'll observe here that the statement was in fact quite wrong. As for levels of uncertainty…

> You seem to be interpreting it as an accusation based on the idea that a person making this statement about himself is very unlikely to be incorrect. I'm interpreting it as an accusation based on the prior explanation, which is less about likelihood of correctness and more about questioning the single authoritative root source of information. In truth, that reasoning is really my explanation of what I see in practi…

In my experience, calling bullshit is almost always about saying the person is wrong, not lying. Maybe carried away by braggadocio, but not outright lying.

You say it's questioning the single authoritative root source of information. I say there is no authoritative root source of this information. People's memories are bad, even about their own lives, and when they say something improbable about their own lives, it's not an implicit accusation of lying if you say you think they're wrong.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#675

Post by KirinDave » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 4:07 PM UTC

melted wrote: post #486

KirinDave wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but that's because Skylake is buggy as hell. It's a bit of a bummer. MS cannot publicly blame Intel for the raft of skylake bugs, but it's first gen hardware, first gen software, and first-gen firmware. For what it's worth, my Surface Book (obviously a product they care a lot about) has basically gotten to a crash rate equal to my mac, which is maybe 1 actual problem every 2 weeks). I suspect the Surface 4 Pro…

You should take your Mac to the store and have them take a look. Or at least run hardware diagnostics. I've been using Macs for well over a decade and in that time I have maybe seen 4-5 crashes total, across multiple laptops and desktops. A crash every two weeks is not a normal situation in OS X.

If you use virtualization, it is.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#676

Post by rsync » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 4:25 PM UTC

tolmasky wrote: post #503

nostrademons wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, I think it's a perception problem. As someone whose starry-eyed Mac obsession predated Windows 95 - Apple's software has always been buggy. It was buggy under Sculley, it was buggy under Amelio, and it was buggy under Jobs. I remember getting plenty of sad Macs under System 6 and 7, and early versions of OS X weren't any better. We just didn't care because Steve Jobs was really good at distracting us with promis…

I think you've touched on something key: people's acceptance of bugs is often outweighed by the new features they get. In other words, if the "new functionality" is perceived to outweigh the costs of the lack of reliability, the product will be deemed "less buggy" because people "understand" why there are issues. This made total sense in some of Apple's biggest products: OS X and iPhone. When OS X first came out it c…

"I think you've touched on something key: people's acceptance of bugs is often outweighed by the new features they get. In other words, if the "new functionality" is perceived to outweigh the costs of the lack of reliability, the product will be deemed "less buggy" because people "understand" why there are issues."

Right - which is why we have all of the snow leopard nostalgia: because none of the newer releases have given us anything substantive that we really needed to justify the hassle and the bugs.

I am trying to think of something - anything - that compels me to upgrade SL on my mac pro, and all I can think of is that nifty take-a-picture-of-your-signature in the Preview app that you can then insert into PDF documents.

Ok, and maybe USB3 ?

That's all I can think of.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#677

Post by kllrnohj » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 4:57 PM UTC

VeilEm wrote: post #439

digi_owl wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft finally got a handle on security & software quality just as the world ceased to care about them. Not quite. They got a handle on security when Linux list a fire under their ass. Competition, true honest to market competition, spurs improvement. The thing about Apple is that they may have competition on hardware, but they have no competition on Software. If you buy a Mac or a iPhone, you have already throw…

> They got a handle on security when Linux list a fire under their ass. I have my doubts that all 0.02% or whatever of PC users who are dedicated to using Linux as their desktop OS influenced Microsoft to do anything but if you have data to show otherwise I'd be interested in it.

The obvious example would be netbooks. MSFT moved very fast to counter Linux on that front.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#678

Post by Rapidwire » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 5:16 PM UTC

melted wrote: post #534

r00fus wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some combination of (Windows on VMWare, startup utilities,corporate virus/malware protection tool and external monitors) are my bane. I've given up keeping VMWare open, and I experience very very few issues - even on an older OSX release (again, due to corp IT).

Lucky you, VMWare is getting rid of Fusion anyway.

Where did you read that?

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#679

Post by terinjokes » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 5:24 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #671

thenewwazoo wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take a crack at that: - UI non-responsiveness: it is extraordinarily frequent that I will chord a tab change in Safari or in iTerm2, and the system will not respond for sometimes multiple seconds. It's the same with creating tabs in Safari. ⌘-t or ⌘-{ do not respond. - Application switching focus failures: ⌘-tab will raise another window, but window focus will not follow. This has caused me to lose work. ⌘-tab,…

> UI non-responsiveness: it is extraordinarily frequent that I will chord a tab change in Safari or in iTerm2, and the system will not respond for sometimes multiple seconds. It's the same with creating tabs in Safari. ⌘-t or ⌘-{ do not respond. Ok, for this I can't say much, because every since 2010 or so I've used Chrome in place of Safari. As for iTerm2, I've tried to switch to it several times over the years (lat…

I see the input focus lags behind the UI after cmd-tab almost every day, for AG least the last two OS releases.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#680

Post by illumin8 » Fri, Feb 05, 2016, 5:28 PM UTC

jarjoura wrote: post #586

Animats wrote: post #372

This has to be a management problem. Apple has total control over the hardware, total control over third party developers, and $203 billion in cash. What are they doing wrong? Apple has the resources to approach software like aerospace. Formal interface specs, heavy Q/A, tough regression tests, formal methods. It's expensive, but Apple ships so many copies that the cost per unit is insignificant. Microsoft did that,…

2 possible causes for this: 1) Apple still develops the OS using waterfall over the year. Entire sweeping changes are made only at x.0 releases that trickle down to teams that have to work around the instability all year long and there's no other approved way to get in significant changes. 2) They keep adding more apps to the core OS image that can only be updated with a full software update now. This makes delivery…

#2 is just not true. They deliver point releases that add new core functionality all the time. For example, Photos for OS X was delivered in 10.10.3. A point release that came mid-year and delivered a huge amount of new functionality, including photo streams shared between iOS and OS X.

They also deliver many bug fix releases throughout the year, on both platforms. The 9.x releases have seen them add support for WatchOS 2, and many other things.

It's a huge ecosystem, and many teams, that all have to line up their product release schedules, and now 4 operating systems (OS X, iOS, tvOS, WatchOS) that have features that all work together. This is not trivial.