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Apple’s declining software quality

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Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#71

Post by glhaynes »

knughit wrote: post #46
daheza wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't read much about Jobs but I wonder how he achieved the perfection in his product. Force the teams to work overtime to correct the bugs? Did he double the QA size in order to catch all these bugs? Did he demand that all code checked in must be at incredibly high standards, thus forcing the devs to QA more of their own code?

He went on stage and gave a sock presentation that made everyone forget about the bugs. Users judged the book by it's well-kerned prettily animated cover. This is the same old tripe about the young generation's moral decline, and rose-tinted rearview glasses.

Imagine how many "this never would've happened if Steve were still alive" articles would be written if the iTunes 13 installer were to delete users' entire hard drives like iTunes 2's did (http://www.wired.com/2001/11/glitch-in-itunes-deletes-drives...).

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#72

Post by rm_-rf_slash »

partiallypro wrote: post #57
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #7

While I agree that Apple's software quality has declined in recent years, I fear that their hardware and other advantages (even with superior hardware and software I don't trust a Google-or-Amazon-based phone for a second to be anything but a data mine for them), I fear Apple's existing lead in general quality will allow them to become (remain?) complacent and allow things to slide.

I don't even know if Apple owns the hardware quality title anymore. The Surface line from Microsoft is astounding in quality, and it's only a few generations old. This latest line did have some bugs (mostly due to Intel,) but overall when I walk into a Best Buy, and I feel a Surface Book and look over at a MacBook, one feels like the future, while one feels like it's hugging the past. The problem with Apple, and I've…

I think Apple will remain in style for this broad generation of consumer computing (mobile devices physically separate from our bodies). No other company has quite the holistic philosophy and approach that Apple commands, even if their dominance lacks perfection. Google and Amazon are ok, and Microsoft has a while to go, even if it is clear that they are trying very, very hard.

Once the nanomachines are here, there is no guarantee that Apple will remain relevant.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#73

Post by ctulek »

koralatov wrote: post #38
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #22

Is Apple's software quality truly declining? I've been an OS X user for a couple years now, and I'm perfectly happy with my laptop and its updates. Whenever I read articles like these, I wondered if the software quality has actually declined, or if it's received too many features to be properly maintained, or if now it has so many more users that the flaws have become more apparent.

Depending how long ago you started using a Mac, you may have started using them after the slide started. From my own experience, and the experience of other Mac users that I know, I think that the quality of their software has had a marked decline in the last decade or so. The exact reasons aren't totally apparent, but it seems like there's too much rush to add new 'features' without fixing and refining existing ones…

The main reason could be that they don't have a competitor in UNIX devices at the moment, at least when it comes to hardware quality.

Beside that, if you want to do mobile development, you need a OS X at hand, again, not much alternatives.

All companies have a life time at the end, and I think Apple is enjoying its 90s of Microsoft era.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#74

Post by ktRolster »

dplgk wrote: post #10

There's just no way in hell Steve Jobs would be putting up with this and I wish he was alive to tear some people a new one. I didn't like Jobs but respect his ability to achieve things. Perhaps, the years of oversimplifying applications has created an Apple that can't handle complex applications? Or, there's a chicken and egg question: XCode and the surrounding tools are atrociously buggy and hostile to the developer…

> There's just no way in hell Steve Jobs would be putting up with this

Maybe. I felt like the quality started going downhill shortly after iOS came out, starting with low-level APIs, then xcode, then making it into user-level applications.

My theory is that a lot of the really experienced engineers (the one who started with NEXT and OpenStep) left when they were rich after the iPhone stock jump.

So really there is nothing Steve Jobs could have done unless he had a developer education program or something.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#75

Post by btreesOfSpring »

ssharp wrote: post #36
dplgk wrote: post #10

There's just no way in hell Steve Jobs would be putting up with this and I wish he was alive to tear some people a new one. I didn't like Jobs but respect his ability to achieve things. Perhaps, the years of oversimplifying applications has created an Apple that can't handle complex applications? Or, there's a chicken and egg question: XCode and the surrounding tools are atrociously buggy and hostile to the developer…

OSX doesn't need to handle that many hardware and driver issues, so I don't see how that's relevant to a Windows comparison. I've been using OSX since just after Panther. I generally agree with the idea that some things started getting worse after Snow Leopard, but I still don't think it's come close to a point where I'd actually move back to Windows or try out desktop Linux. And I'd say Windows had far more issues t…

just curious, what software were you using for audio production under windows?

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#76

Post by pi-err »

> it’s tragic that Aperture and iPhoto were axed in favor of the horrifically bad Photos app (that looks like some Frankenstein “iOS X” app)

I find Photos.app to be the best Apple app I've ever used. It's simple, modern, works amazingly well between iOS and OS X, transparently manages 100GB of data between iCloud and local storage.

This entire piece is surfing on Mossberg's take and goes way too far.

From what we know, Apple does seem to be sorting out big challenges on software side:

- transition to Swift on 2 platforms, which won't happen until they decide to only support 64-bits OS X and iOS at some point in 2017 or 2018 or later

- OS X and iOS foundations are actually super solid. Accidents happen, both codebases are now much more mature and stable. Probably the best they had for decades

- manage the largest updates in history yearly. You hear of bugs because everybody gets to experience them at the same time. Windows never got that many million devices updated overnight

On top of that, they do seem to have conflicting marketing priorities. They don't know what to do with iTunes - as a brand, as an app, as an experience. They're obviously conflicted whether a user should depend on the AppStore to do stuff (feature creep in Notes.app).

IMO this "apple software sucks" is more a consequence of a stalled marketing than an engineering problem.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#77

Post by zimpenfish »

koralatov wrote: post #43
ssharp wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSX doesn't need to handle that many hardware and driver issues, so I don't see how that's relevant to a Windows comparison. I've been using OSX since just after Panther. I generally agree with the idea that some things started getting worse after Snow Leopard, but I still don't think it's come close to a point where I'd actually move back to Windows or try out desktop Linux. And I'd say Windows had far more issues t…

It's sad that so many people, myself very much included, now stick with OS X merely because ``it's not quite shitty enough to switch''. When I switched to the Mac initially, I switched because it was vastly better option than XP; now, I feel that lead has been eroded and that Windows 10, while different, isn't far behind OS X in most respects.

Windows 10 is -in my limited experience- awful. Admittedly I don't use it for much more than gaming, light browsing, and occasional ssh sessions but it's painful to use, the apps aren't great, and it frequently craps out with weird error messages (e.g. "The required TCP protocols not installed on this machine" actually meant "The NAS isn't responding").

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#80

Post by rloc »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #22

Is Apple's software quality truly declining? I've been an OS X user for a couple years now, and I'm perfectly happy with my laptop and its updates. Whenever I read articles like these, I wondered if the software quality has actually declined, or if it's received too many features to be properly maintained, or if now it has so many more users that the flaws have become more apparent.

I'm on the last El Capitan.

Actually I have to restart the Finder every few days because the network drives either disappear or are no longer reachable. Sometimes the shortcuts disappear as well especially the ones that are located on a network drive (I tried both smb and afp).

I've also noticed a lot of slowness throughout the OS. The spinning colored wheel shows up very often compared to previous OS versions and on all kind of actions.

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