Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple’s declining software quality

sudophilosophical.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

701–710 of 723 posts

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#701

Post by neximo4 »

mikeash wrote: post #673
neximo4 wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sor…

I could have sworn the restart requirement was rare.

I stand corrected.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#702

Post by mamcx »

thirdsun wrote: post #636
mamcx wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because is harder to develop for developers. I'm dreaming to revive the kind of development made famous by FoxPro/dbase (or more exactly, mix Acces+Excel+Databases). Form building is another area that is far more complex that it need to be. The problem now is the multi-platform: Everyone (or most) want it, but not good toolkit exist to work on...

FileMaker comes to mind. It actually is a nice development platform for beginners, but has major shortcomings in other areas. Wouldn't recommend it these days.

Is the same problem with Excel/Acces and similar.

They have a good tool, but the language them use for glue things are not a match for the task the tool do.

For example, Excel. VBA have impedance mismatch with the way excel visualy work. If, isntead, it have a more array-based language and bit more functional, then the way you use excel will be the way you code for it.

That is in fact the power FoxPro have. You can make forms with tables, because, forms ARE tables. The syntax and basic operations work fine with the relational storage. You can SELECT INTO ARRAY and stuff like that, or just not use SQL.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#703

Post by wodenokoto »

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…

The original iPhone wasn't slow at all. One of its main selling point was the speed of menus and apps (I forget what they actually called apps before the app store).

I think you forget how crazy slow feature phones were. Opening a GPS app and finding your location could take 5-10 minutes in 2007 on a feature phone.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#704

Post by LinuxBender »

vonklaus wrote: post #621
tolmasky wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

wow, I couldn't put my finger on it, but this is why I am starting to hate apple. I spend a lot of time on the computer so I like a lot of things apple does, mostly the interface and the UI. To clarify what UI means to me, it is how simple and intuitive it is to use the device, and give it the instructions to do what I want. I am willing to forgive a lot because this is good. Apple has always been a fairly closed sys…

I agree with your summation. To add to this, there are many things going on under the hood that none of us asked for that are taking up system resources, dialing home and draining battery life.

Some time, try this yourself:

    sudo opensnoop

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#705

Post by race2tb »

Lets see. They are arogant fascists who think they know better than their customers. They charge a lot more but do not provide anything more than their competitors and often less. The company lives and dies on marketting and perception. They are the micrsoft of the Unix world and I hope they go to 0 because they are bad for progress and bad for technological diversity.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#706

Post by spronkey »

rsync wrote: post #676
tolmasky wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Handoff is a really useful feature (when it works).

Also SL mamed Expose (that weird non-proportional grid view) that was reverted to the Leopard-style in Mission Control (of which Mavericks/Yosemite had the best implementation, and they've now broken its utility in ElCap thanks to hiding thumbnails by default. FFS.)

But apart from that... I think I preferred the Apple apps back in 2009-or-so.

To be honest, I think the latest Apple release cycles have been more about "remove a feature so that we can add it in again and sell it to our users again". Think multi-monitor support, something that worked perfectly in SL and earlier, and then broke fantastically with the full screen apps in .. Lion? ML? One of the two.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#707

Post by spronkey »

rsync wrote: post #700
parasubvert wrote: post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AirPlay; much better multi-display support; tags in Finder; Spotlight enhancements. More than anything, the iCloud/iOS continuity features were also big if you had an iPhone or iPad, everything is just much easier to keep in sync. I'm a Safari user (better battery usage for the # of tabs I have open) and it too has improved with El Capitan though that's irrelevant for Chrome/FF users.

ok, airplay I guess - although I've never used it, I do see people using it to good effect. Worth mentioning that airplay is just userland software - nothing special, and no reason it couldn't have been added to SL. I don't know about multi display, though - I've been under the impression that that is broken in new and fascinating ways with every single release...

Yeah absolutely. Snow Leopard's multi-display was great. As was Leopard's, Tiger's, and Panther's.

Then Apple broke it massively in Lion, and only finally resolved most of the (severe, productivity-destroying) issues with Mavericks.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#708

Post by spronkey »

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…

One of the things about OS X is that most of the time it's put on high quality, but non-exceptional hardware. So things like bad RAM, flakey power supplies, bad GPU drivers etc are almost never an issue with a stock machine.

Windows, not so much. The only stability issues I've had with windows have been related to poor drivers, almost exclusively from nVidia or ATI/AMD. The equivalent hardware for Apple machines either didn't exist at the time, or was running much less ambitious drivers.

I probably have more issues with my Macbook Air (relating to sleep, hibernate, and wake-up) than I do with my Windows machines these days.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#709

Post by spronkey »

pwthornton wrote: post #444
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…

OS X and iOS are both way more stable than any pre-OS X Apple OS. I can't believe people forget it. When people talk about OS X having issues, they often mean some new feature is a little flaky. Classic Mac OS lacked basic stability and security features like preemptive multitasking and memory protection. Classic Mac OS was just like the pre-NT Windows: crash prone.

That's not a high bar though. The only other high profile desktop OS around at the time, Windows NT, was more stable than any pre-OS X Apple OS for a long, long time.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#710

Post by spronkey »

dkonofalski wrote: post #549
mahyarm wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that photos is a lot better than iPhoto & co. The performance is blazing and I migrated from lightroom to it because of it. I can't find a faster and easier to use photo library management app. Lightroom is really slow compared to it.

You just convinced me to give Photos another chance. I absolutely hated it when they gave up on iPhoto and Aperture because I felt like I lost a lot of features if I moved to Photos. Ever since then, though, I haven't found a photo solution that works quite as well as any of the Apple products I've used in the past so I'm willing to give it another shot.

Photos.app is atrocious from a UI perspective. It's an iOS app shoehorned onto OS X. How to back up your library to, oh, I don't know, an external disk? Drink the kool aid or else.
Post reply on HN