Apple’s declining software quality

Apple has been declining since about 2011 not only in software quality, but also in hardware quality, in innovating hardware, and in innovating software.

When I got my first Mac, it had Mac OS X Tiger on it, and everything about it really felt like it had the user in mind. These days everything about using it feels like it has shareholders in mind. The features being added seem like the kind of things you'd have executives brainstorming up in a committee, and then demanding that engineers implement.

It's a shame. It no longer does The Right Thing™ by default, and there are more hardware and software bugs than I can ever remember in an Apple product. I've listed them before but here's a short list again:

- This mid-2013 Mac Pro wakes up every few hours at night, even though I have disabled every "wake from sleep" setting that exists in OS X

- My mid-2013 MBP has, several times this week, turned on while closed, and continued as if it was opened (playing YouTube videos or whatever else it be doing), only shutting back off after about 120 seconds or so

- Every time I turn this Mac Pro on, it doesn't recognize the wired Apple keyboard that's plugged into the Apple Cinema Display, and says it's looking for a bluetooth keyboard, until I unplug and replug the keyboard in at least 3 or 4 times

- My MBP once emitted a (very) loud buzzing sound from its speakers, for absolutely no reason, that lasted about 3 or 4 seconds, startling everyone nearby, when no sound-based programs were running

- Yesterday I tried syncing my iPhone to remove about 200 songs, and iTunes said it would remove them, and then "did" remove them, but they were still there on the device, and iTunes once again showed them being present; it took a full iPhone reset to clear them off.

Um, Quicktime? iTunes? Apple's software was always terrible (as a Windows user).

QuickTime was always way ahead of the game in terms of playing videos with a fantastic user interface. They kept innovating the UI so that it would get out of your way while still letting you do the basic things people need to do to watch a video. Even today I feel like QT is one of Apple's non-failures. The only thing I don't like about it is that you can't easily rewind a few seconds backwards. It requires a really steady hand to make sure you don't jump too far back.

I'm getting an error as of 9:43am UTC -6

EDIT: Looks okay now 10 minutes later.

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 and it seems to increase with each release. Is this a symptom of what's going on inside Apple or a cause - perhaps Apple's own developers are dealing with the same hellish development experience and are just happy when something can compile without crashing Xcode.

Or, perhaps, at some point, software becomes too complex for humans to deal with.

Windows got so much flack over the years. It wasn't the prettiest but it worked and did what it said. Sure it BSODed sometimes and had some memory problems but it handles infinity more hardware/software/driver situations than OS X. Visual Studio is a dream, if you're into that ecosystem. MS dev tools are actually very nice.