81–90 of 131 posts
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Doesn't excuse user data loss
He didn't say it was an excuse, though; he just provided another perspective that may explain why Apple made the new Podcasts app that way.
The position of Apple today reminds me a lot of Microsoft after they peaked (~2000?). Cocky to the point of arrogance because of market position, past innovations and brand loyalty (e.g., it is cool to own Apple). But loyalty and market sentiment can only endure so much amidst plummeting product quality, nonsensical pricing (e.g. dongles) and lack of any meaningful innovation (thinner doesn't count). Apple doesn't li…
It wasn't obvious at the time, but I think in retrospect the case can be made that Apple's ability to innovate effectively (both in terms of time and quality) died with Jobs. Jony Ive made a good effort to keep pushing hardware design forward, but without Jobs to curb his worst impulses (in my opinion), the end was result was "thinner above all else" (as you mention). If someone can come up with a corporate structure…
Oh stop. Apple's effectiveness was entirely a product of its time. You had designers building the Zune and calling it competitive but really there was no competition for the products Apple was building for a market that was screaming for a better balance of form vs function.
This picture of Apple's innovation includes no part of OSX, which was always an OS that was technically capable but superbly messy and extremely behind on the times.
Innovate effectively? For a long time of Jobs' tenure, Cocoa was being supported on BOTH Objective-C and Java, and when they ripped it out, they actually chose Objective-C, not Java, as their platform of choice (in retrospect: wow), only to have to build yet another platform (Swift) just a few years later (Swift of course, based off of MacRuby, which they initially tried to build Cocoa on top of internally, so I hear).
Innovate maybe, but effectively no. There is a whole host of broken, abandoned, and outright bad decisionmaking in the OS layer at Apple. Apple's success has everything to do with their success with industrial design, UX design & marketing, and just a bit of being at the right place at the right time.
IMO this interpretation fits the timeline much more cleanly: Apple was churning out the same iPhones and Macbooks long before Jobs left, just as they had been before with the iPod. The butterfly switches, the thin above all else, that's all part of Apple's MO dating back years. Lack of FM radio on the iPods, lack of IR sensors on their early phones, removal of removable batteries, headphone jacks, USB-A, etc, is all part of the DNA. A $5000 screen is not surprising to anyone who saw the Powermacs of the last generation. Butterfly switches look an awful lot like bendy iPhones, which look an awful lot like DOA Powerbooks.
I'm really not sure what part of this is new post-Jobs, but I have a good feeling this is a great case study of confirmation bias. If you believe Jobs was a one-of-a-kind irreplaceable visionary who was single handedly responsible for Apple's success, then you have no choice but to interpret any action Apple makes post-visionary as a failure, otherwise you were wrong about the one-of-a-kind irreplaceable visionary.
And it would be a pretty big blow to most to be wrong about Steve Jobs.
The other interpretation, of course, is that Jobs was not a magical visionary, just a smart guy who made a couple of right decisions, got lucky on lots of others, while still getting it wrong on plenty of occasionss (Macintosh TV cough Apple TV cough Apple TV2), just like most fallible humans.
I always find it strange when OS updates affect apps in this way. It just shouldn't happen. It reminds me of when Linus preaches that "the kernel should never break userspace". Why would a OS update suddenly cause the Mail app -- developed by the same company as the OS, for what it's worth -- to have these strange (and catastrophic) data syncing issues? And, just to add, I am tired of OS updates updating and/or relea…
I wish I only lost mail data in the upgrade to Catalina. I lost 400GB of data when the installer repartitioned the hard drive and the files that were in folders in root went bye bye. I know I'm not supposed to put stuff there, but it was a family video project I was putting together for my wife for Christmas, and she would have seen it anywhere else. There should have at least been a notice or a warning or some kind…
I’ve never used Mail because I’ve never felt comfortable with Apple’s apps when it comes to long term data storage. Here Mail is said to delete data. This has happened before, IIRC. Someone in this discussion has written that their old downloaded podcast episodes were deleted on upgrade. In the distant past, Apple has also broken compatibility in data formats (for its iWork apps) and left those who upgraded with almo…
To be fair Firefox did that recently with their transition to WebExtensions too, and Chrome will soon do something similar when they move to Manifest v3. Sadly all mainstream browsers have become "move fast and break stuff", mainly in their desperate bid to keep pace with the de facto standard that is Chrome. But most of them don't have browser dev teams the size of Chrome's...
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You have a very outdated vision of what constitutes an OS. (Or perhaps a very Linux-centric vision.) Nowadays an OS is far more than just a kernel. It's the associated userland libraries, frameworks, and basic utilities. And yes, the scope of these basic utilities have expanded far beyond just shell-utilities like sh or cat; they now include things like a graphical mail client.
How is that a Linux-centric vision? Linux distributions have always tightly coupled application updates to OS (distribution) updates. In fact, this was often a criticism of Linux and one of the motivators for a lean immutable system like Fedora Silverblue, where you install and update applications out-of-band with Flatpak.
As a daily Mac user who started to use macOS (OS X) about 7-8 years ago, I find the insurmountable number of bugs of macOS Catalina alarming. Don’t get me wrong, the situation is still much, much compared to Windows or Linux[0], buy it is alarming to see the general quality of macOS software to decrease. I personally think it’s due to Apple engineers trying to do so much; I remember being impressed by the number of n…
I think the prior perceived quality of Apple software was propped up by a lot of people internally grinding very hard on a far smaller set of products than the company ships today. That might work when you are at 10k people, not 120k.
It’s really time for Apple to make a good faith effort to improve its software development process. Honestly it seems more like an executive leadership issue, incessant and hasty product changes come at the cost of stability.
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> For some reason Giving you the other side of this: Podcasts was essentially a disk-space-leak made app, if you subscribed to any podcasts that you never actually listened to (but still listened to others, and therefore regularly opened the app.) It would just pile up new unplayed episodes forever, eventually taking up tens of GBs of space, on a device that doesn't have all that much space to spare.
That's a piss poor excuse. Never assume; at a minimum ask! I have many podcasts saved that as the OP points out, are no longer publicly available. A few are now locked behind a paywall but many others aren't available - period.
At least with Windows, Microsoft will never intentionally delete or cause user data to disappear. Bugs have happened (the one where files in the original Documents folder after relocating to a new location would be deleted was pretty bad), but it usually results in an apology, delaying further rollout of the patch and a fix for the issue. Instead of pretending "it's best for our users, they never should've put stuff there in the first place".
I have earned many thumbs down on the net for saying that Apple can't write software for shit. Apple is a design company, they make nice hardware, nice really looking hardware and sometimes performing hardware. That's it, a nice hardware design company. There software is straight up garbage and has been for a long time. Just as I have always been suspicious of those whose main OS is windows and they are not writing n…
Then I compared iPhone and android the ux and form innovations start with Apple and are borrowed by android. Same for OS X and windows, specially the gestures and form it’s flowing from Apple.
Why do people use Mail? (genuine question)