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If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

macworld.com

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Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#71
post #3

Apple's software quality has certainly slipped. I'm not sure if I'm just getting old but I find software quality in general seems to have slipped. Or is it just because there's more software around?

I think that the slip in quality we are seeing is a result of increased complexity more than anything else.

I'm not so sure, at least in the context of Apple because they have slipped far more than their competitors. Android is way more stable and has far fewer bugs than iOS as a simple example.

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#72
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate?

Safari is famously behind on supporting PWAs, most notably their implementation is missing web push notifications.

Not having web push is a feature. They're the 3rd party toolbar or BonziBuddy of the modern web—often enabled, but rarely wanted—however nice an idea they were in theory.

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#73

Yesterday I prepared a few years old Windows laptop for my daughter to use in school. It took me a few hours just to install updates, remove bloatware (my oh my, the amount is staggering!) and fix privacy settings. And this was for Windows 10 which I hear is a mild version of a mess that Windows 11 is. I was instantly reminded why I appreciate Apple software more.

I wish we had more options though. Between Windows and Apple there's no other real competition. Linux is cool and all... but not user friendly (not even Ubuntu)

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In reality, you just don't realise how much bloatware osx has. Install a firewall and watch as studentd or 100 other services you never use contacts apple. Edit: List of most recent and trying not to include things that may be useful to me syncdefaultsd, nsurlsessiond, apsd, cloudd, transparencyd, mapspushd, cloudphotod, akd, parsec-fbf, appstoreagent, AddressBookSourceSync, com.apple.iCloudHelper.xpc, familycircled,…

Hey so I’ll be getting my first MacBook Pro in a couple weeks, so I’m still learning the details about OS X. I’m coming from a windows / Linux background. I thought the OS shipped with its own firewall? Would you recommend using a third party firewall despite having its own?

Little Snitch https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#75

Yesterday I prepared a few years old Windows laptop for my daughter to use in school. It took me a few hours just to install updates, remove bloatware (my oh my, the amount is staggering!) and fix privacy settings. And this was for Windows 10 which I hear is a mild version of a mess that Windows 11 is. I was instantly reminded why I appreciate Apple software more.

You should probably just toss Fedora on it if she only intends to browse the web and edit documents.

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In reality, you just don't realise how much bloatware osx has. Install a firewall and watch as studentd or 100 other services you never use contacts apple. Edit: List of most recent and trying not to include things that may be useful to me syncdefaultsd, nsurlsessiond, apsd, cloudd, transparencyd, mapspushd, cloudphotod, akd, parsec-fbf, appstoreagent, AddressBookSourceSync, com.apple.iCloudHelper.xpc, familycircled,…

Hey so I’ll be getting my first MacBook Pro in a couple weeks, so I’m still learning the details about OS X. I’m coming from a windows / Linux background. I thought the OS shipped with its own firewall? Would you recommend using a third party firewall despite having its own?

Windows and Linux user for 25 years [EDIT Windows for 25, Linux for 20, to be more precise], heavy macOS user (in addition to those) for the last 10 or so.

If it has a firewall of any kind, I've never noticed nor interacted with it. I've also never installed a third party firewall.

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In reality, you just don't realise how much bloatware osx has. Install a firewall and watch as studentd or 100 other services you never use contacts apple. Edit: List of most recent and trying not to include things that may be useful to me syncdefaultsd, nsurlsessiond, apsd, cloudd, transparencyd, mapspushd, cloudphotod, akd, parsec-fbf, appstoreagent, AddressBookSourceSync, com.apple.iCloudHelper.xpc, familycircled,…

Hey so I’ll be getting my first MacBook Pro in a couple weeks, so I’m still learning the details about OS X. I’m coming from a windows / Linux background. I thought the OS shipped with its own firewall? Would you recommend using a third party firewall despite having its own?

Get little snitch. This is a firewall that dosen't care what apple thinks is useful.

There was some controversy in the previous year because apple tried to deprecate the firewall hooks and allow their junk passed the replacement they offered.

I'm leaving apple for linux as we speak for two reasons, privacy and they can't help but mess with shit every time they release an update.

The most recent, this week they released an update and now their airport service listens on port 5000 making a conflict with running a dev flask service locally.

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a Mac, Safari is the best browser (as defined by being fast, battery efficient and native app) by a far margin compared to other mainstream choices, only matched by the Orion browser (but I may be biased).

Since Internet Explorer is not supported anymore by most websites Safari has become the new worst browser in regards to having really bad CSS and Web API Support.

...and bad PWA support, shaky VOIP/WebRTC support, the worst codec compatibility in the game, a lack of desktop notification options, need we go on?

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#79
This morning I plugged in my macbook and tried to turn it on. No dice. Hammered the external mouse and keyboard. No luck. Opened up the clamshell, started testing USB-C ports to figure out which one wants to charge today. Hammered the "on" button. It started asking out loud in what to me sounded like an old school macintalk voice for a username... I have to assume I provoked some sort of accessibility feature. Hammered some more buttons in frustration, switched USB ports again, got an apple logo. Then a "reset password" screen. Reconnected to power and it finally booted up, telling me that there was a problem. This is not an unusual experience.

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#80
post #3

Apple's software quality has certainly slipped. I'm not sure if I'm just getting old but I find software quality in general seems to have slipped. Or is it just because there's more software around?

> Apple's software quality has certainly slipped.

I've been using and supporting Apple software since the 90s and I think this is more an artifact of most bugs not being especially memorable than anything else. People have complained about bugs after every release, a fair fraction of the complaints circulating online will be attribution error or overly-generalizing a niche condition as global, etc. and that seems to have been basically constant since OS X 10.2 or so.

There is one more interesting discussion, however, which I think is probably a legitimate trade-off: the entire industry has been moving to faster releases since it's easy to ship updates over the internet to huge audiences. When that wasn't possible and update cycles were measured in years, teams did spend more time on QA so you probably did have a somewhat lower chance of seeing bugs of the sort which were caught by that kind of process but at the expense of taking much longer to see new features or get fixes for bugs which slipped through either due to complexity or limited trigger conditions. Since the amount and complexity of software has generally been increasing, I think that this is generally the right trend with the addition of telemetry to collect crash reports, but it does seem like this could increase the perceived number of bugs even if the duration of time where you're exposed to a particular bug decreases.

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