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Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

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Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#751

Post by trbutler »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #536
trbutler wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe it or not, it was a huge deal. I went to two launch parties -- one hosted by CompUSA and one by a local place -- the night it came out. This wasn't in Silicon Valley, but in the U.S. Midwest (St. Louis, MO). Hundreds of people stood in line at midnight to get the first copies at the two places I went to and the same thing happened all over the world. (Of course, CompUSA also had a whole display of upgrades to…

The value just wasn't there in giving your old computer a software update. Most notably, that computer with Windows 95 on it also had a CD drive.

Well, computers were expensive enough many of us just kept upgrading parts to make something like Windows 95 work. My 486 slowly morphed into a Pentium system with largely the same parts over the course of three years during that time. But Windows 95 worked great on my 486 -- it felt like a great upgrade at the time.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#752

Post by dwaite »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #290
cjk wrote: post #286

As a former Apple employee that left in part due to declining software quality (back in 2015!), and the relentless focus on big flashy features for the next yearly release cycle, I could not agree more. I recently had to do a full reinstall of macOS on my Mac Studio due to some intermittent networking issue that, for the life of me, I could not pin down. Post-reinstall, everything's fine.

Also as a former Apple engineer.... I've explained in another thread how this kind of thing happens. It may be the same at other large companies. Bugs come in (via Radar) and are routed to the team responsible. Ever since Jobs came back (and Apple became valuable again) it has also become very much top-down with the engineers, for better or worse, not calling the shots. Just an obvious example — there are of course n…

> Just an obvious example — there are of course no engineers in the decision to make a "Snow Leopard" release or not. That is a "marketing" decision.

I think it is more that the decision to SAY Snow Leopard was a bug fix-only release was a marketing one. The reality is that release also sported things like 64-bit Intel ports of all apps, added Grand Central Dispatch (e.g. an entirely new code concurrency system) and included a from-scratch Finder rewrite.

I always saw these releases (I bundle Mountain Lion in) were all about trying to rein in excessively long release cycles. Short release cycles tend to not have enough time to introduce new bugs, while extended release cycles create a sense of urgency to get code in under the wire.

Now, release cycles have moved to be staged across a fairly predictable annual calendar. If there's an issue where features are getting pushed out 6 months or a year earlier than they should, that is a management and incentives problem.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#753

Post by FofXisNull »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #440
cameldrv wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most of this is just downstream of the Mac being eclipsed by the iPhone in terms of Apple’s revenue. The Mac just isn’t critical to Apple’s business like it was in 2009 when Snow Leopard came out. They would have started development on SL in 2008, when the iPhone was still a fairly niche product and there wasn’t even an App Store. Now, ios gets the executive attention and it will generally get the best develo…

Yeah I think this is the one, in terms of number of users, revenue, etc. The iPhone is more than 50% of their revenue, Mac is only ~8. Lower volume and higher price, but it doesn't come anywhere near their phone. Same with tablets, although they share an app revenue income stream with the iphone which makes up for the difference in hardware sales.

By itself Apple's AirPods alone generates twice the revenue ($18B) vs Macs ($8B). So we can see where Apples priorities are.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#754

Post by andrekandre »

franzkappa wrote: post #650
nextos wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux power management is pretty good. The problem is that defaults favor desktop and server performance. On a MacBook Air 11, my custom Linux setup and Mac OS had the same battery autonomy, despite Safari being much more energy efficient. The real problem is that, just like the grandparent post pointed out, Apple's software quality has been declining. The Tiger to Snow Leopard epoch was incredible. Apps were simple,…

> Robustness should come from better languages that are safe by construction. Nahh, robustness comes from the time you can spend refining the product not from some magic property of a language. That can help but just a bit. There was no Swift in Snow Leopard. Nor there is not much Rust in Linux (often none) and even less (none) in one of the most stable OS available, FreeBSD. They should just release a new version wh…

  > They should just release a new version when the product is ready and not when the marketing says to release it.
bingo, the yearly wwdc-turned-marketing-extravaganza cycle has kind of ruined for apple i think

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#755

Post by usefulcat »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #740
hamstergene wrote: post #375

I keep being tempted to write same post but named "Does all software work like shit now?", because I swear, this is not just Apple. Software in general feels more bugged as a new norm. Most websites have an element that won't load on the first try, or a button that sometimes needs to be clicked twice because the first click did nothing. Amazon shopping app needs two clicks every now and then, because the first one di…

Every once in a while I think „There is no public bugtracker for closed source software — wouldn’t it be great to have something like Github issues, but for all the software that is developed behind closed doors?“ Like, at least we had a central place to vent about the exact same stuff you just listed, and who knows, in the best case, at least some companies might feel shamed into picking up issues with the most upvo…

I think the risk is that unless people think that reporting a bug there might actually cause it to be fixed, few will bother to report bugs and you'll end up with mostly people just venting, thus perpetuating the cycle.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#756

Post by qingcharles »

alt219 wrote: post #223
booleandilemma wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure about that? Look for the trashcan symbol on the upper-right of the context menu. I agree that having "more options" to begin with was a jarring experience coming from windows 10 though.

Except for when the placement of the icon strip with the trashcan symbol changes to the bottom of the context menu because of the location of the context menu on the screen. Bonkers. No idea why the UI committee would’ve okayed that one.

You're right. I just checked. That's odd.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#757

Post by 9dev »

DidYaWipe wrote: post #359
pickdan wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all fairness, you do need to hold down the command key to show the file location in Sequoia. It is an interesting default behavior to pretend the files location doesn't exist, mobile-centric.

In all fairness, secret hotkey BS may as well not exist. Are you supposed to mash every modifier key and every combination thereof on every screen and in every menu, looking for hidden goodies? Absurd.

No: you are supposed to read the documentation to learn about power user features. Microsoft also doesn’t shove the advanced keyboard shortcuts in your face; you need to read the manual to learn stuff like this.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#758

Post by moi2388 »

wickedsight wrote: post #468
chii wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> first job 13+ years ago any QA... such QA jobs no longer exists. Ever since the software dev world has moved to doing one's own QA during development, software has been consistently worse in quality. May be there's a correlation there!

The problem is Agile. Not the way it was intended at some point, but the way it has become through Agile consultants and SAFe. Also the fact that it's become the default for any project and that Waterfall has become a bad word. Companies abuse Agile so they don't have to plan or think about stuff anymore. In the past decade, I haven't worked in (or seen) a single team that had had more than 2 weeks of work prepared a…

I couldn’t agree more. I’ve had literal conversations with tech leads who say “no, we aren’t going to talk about database design, we’re agile”.

Not even architecture is being discussed properly under the guise of being agile, it’ll come by itself.

Absolute insanity.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#759

Post by ksec »

hamstergene wrote: post #375

I keep being tempted to write same post but named "Does all software work like shit now?", because I swear, this is not just Apple. Software in general feels more bugged as a new norm. Most websites have an element that won't load on the first try, or a button that sometimes needs to be clicked twice because the first click did nothing. Amazon shopping app needs two clicks every now and then, because the first one di…

>Safari has had a bug when opening a new tab and typing "search term" too quickly, it opens URL http://search%20term instead of doing a Google search. 8 years ago I've opened a bug for that which was closed as a duplicate, and just recently experienced this bug again.

While webkit might have some much needed improvements in the past few years, it is still the behind Blink and Gecko. Safari, the browser itself. Has been awful for the past 10 years. At least on Desktop. And some of these are not issue with Webkit because other webkit browser does it better.

The Address bar is far the worst compared to Chrome ( OmniBar ) and Firefox ( I believe it used to be call Awesomebar ). I have experience the same bug you mentioned and I believe I filed it way earlier.

Opening Bookmarks with too many items continue to pause and jank for 11 years now.

Tab Overview continue to re-render all the tabs. Causing Paging and Kernel_Task CPU spike. My Kernel_Task is currently 80TB at 240 days uptime. That is 333GB of write per day. Simply killing the SSD.

And no Tab Sleeping.

Apple just doesn't give a fuck any more about their software.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#760

Post by ksec »

cjk wrote: post #286

As a former Apple employee that left in part due to declining software quality (back in 2015!), and the relentless focus on big flashy features for the next yearly release cycle, I could not agree more. I recently had to do a full reinstall of macOS on my Mac Studio due to some intermittent networking issue that, for the life of me, I could not pin down. Post-reinstall, everything's fine.

>As a former Apple employee that left in part due to declining software quality (back in 2015!), and the relentless focus on big flashy features for the next yearly release cycle, I could not agree more.

Oh Thank You so much. 2013 I was already questioning on some of the features it keeps adding that were useless. Yosemite with continuity was the only useful feature in the past 10 years.

Yes. relentless focus on big flashy features for the next yearly release cycle was exactly what I felt like it was. And that was the big reason why I dislike Craig Federighi.

Edit: Thinking about it more, former Apple employee that worked during 2005 - 2010 is probably a lot more prestige than post 2015.

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