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.
I agree. I won't write a list of the problems in detail, but I've been a Mac user since the 80's because I've always preferred Apple's elegant design and ease of use. But lately, it's hard to figure out how to do things, and it's very buggy. Both I and my son have had to reset our phones to fix problems. It looks like my wife will have to reset hers to deal with a problem with music synchronization.
And the design as way harder to master than it should be. For instance, to search for a track in Apple Music, you have to be in any tab except iTunes Store. OK, there's some logic to it, but it simply is not intuitive. Why can't there be something that specifically says "Apple Music" that makes it obvious that that's where you go to find tracks? I'm an experienced computer user, and in fact a software developer, and when I first purchased Apple Music I was mystified about how to search for a track in Apple Music. I had to Google it. My wife, who isn't used to Googling for these kinds of answers and isn't a technologist, has no choice but to ask me or the kids how to do things like that.
In the Music app iOS, to make it show only the tracks you've downloaded, you have to click on the pulldown where you select Artists/Albums/Songs/etc. It's a switch on the bottom of that pulldown. When you're thinking "What tracks do I have downloaded?" this is just not obvious. When you get used to it, it's fine. But if you're a naive user, you really have to have a friend who's an experienced user just in order to figure out how to do such basic things. Naive users may not even understand that the Artists/Albums/Songs/etc. pulldown is a menu. And even if they know it is a menu, it's not intuitive to think that there's an on-off switch for showing all songs at the bottom of it, which relates a fundamentally different concept.
It all just seems like really poor design. I don't know what their problem is. But my son, who has always been an Apple user because I've been one, and who is applying to colleges like MIT to do engineering, is seriously considering switching to Android so that he doesn't have to deal with so many bugs. (Not that I know that Android is better.)
Good UIs have discoverability, but increasingly the software has - whatever the opposite of discoverability is.
Simple example: Mail tries to guess settings for you. If you don't want it to do this - it regularly gets them wrong - you have to uncheck a box in the Advanced tab for every account you have. (Because obviously, that's where you're going to look.)
Then, instead of making the change, you have to click any other account, just so you can get a save dialog.
And if the account is disabled, it ignores your change until you enable the account. Then you can finally save the change and start modifying the settings.
Elsewhere, the latest version of Logic Pro is so bad it's been causing outrage on user forums all over the Internet.
Product management seems to have become completely clueless about user needs, basic UI designer, or QA.
I have no idea who's in charge now, but whoever it is has no idea what they're doing.
Setting up a plain IMAP account in Apple Mail is so much harder than it should be. It used to keep the wrongly guessed settings, even if you overwrote them, so you'd have to delete the account and start over for it to actually work.
Also their usage of words like "account", "mailbox" and "folder" never ceases to confuse me...
My last solid OS X machine was a 17" MBPro with a G4. I forget the OS - Cheetah maybe? That year I also had a developer Intel box. It seems like it was that transition that I could really feel things were going awry.
I'm not talking about the dev box, it was what came after. I had a MBPro 15" Intel machine that was really buggy hardware-wise. yOu could no longer apply updates without rebooting (something we all disapprovingly looked down on at Windows). The software just didn't work anymore either, or at least it felt like it didn't.
I think a lot of this was tied to more and more embedding of Apple apps, just like Microsft did. That and gaining some sort of complacency because they were not the scrappy underdog.
I've been waiting for another Snow Leopard where Apple just says "no more 'features', just bug fixes and stability" (for iOS as well). bUt I think that's just a pipe dream at this point and the train of more is better had already left the station.
I've experienced a similar issue with song removal. I've also had to jump through a bunch of hoops to finally delete a few old apps that kept coming back after being deleted as well.
I tend to agree that the bugs in OSX during the last few iterations are quite unbecoming of a company with Apple's legacy and reputation. I hope it's just a temporary glitch in their process.
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.
There is a technical reason for this, and it's not a QT program problem, but rather a QT container problem. The QT container file does a horrendous job at synchronizing audio and visual streams. QT playback software exploits this problem, though, by intentionally lagging the start of a video by a few frames in order for the audio and visual streams to match up on the timeline. By not having to track the sync after the initial playback lag, the file plays more "reliably" and "quickly" but this also means that the decoder has no reference point from which it can scrub backwards. Because the "quick" in QuickTime really is a misnomer. This is lazy time, not quick time.
That's not true at all. QuickTime container can represent each frame timestamp exactly, and it has got some advanced features like edit lists. Every frame has got a start and stop time, and each sync sample is marked as such, it's even possible to mark on which sample each sample depends. In Matroska for example the stop time is so unreliable you often have to analyse the frame content or wait for the next frame to know the duration of a sample, and who knows if the sync flag is true or not.
You are probably referring to the delay introduced by b-frames, but the mov container has got a atom ('cslg') to store the max and min offsets and put everything in sync again.
Unfortunately third party mov demuxers don't support cslg or edit lists, so they only supports the simplest mov files.
No, I am referring to the delay introduced by compressed audio streams within QT container files. The issue I refer to does not seem to occur for lossless audio. In these situations, the cslg atom, among others, allow the QT format to reliably copy edited stream data without re-writing to the container file.
AAC, like MP3, introduces a padding of silence at the beginning of the stream. Because modern QT container files do not compensate for this, all audio and video streams within this type of QT file will be off sync by default. QT playback software waits for the audio stream to begin (waits for silence padding to end) before video playback begins, even though the streams themselves line up 1:1 in the container file. This is lazy engineering, not an advanced feature.
QuickTime on OSX has a nice feature to quickly move forwards and backwards when watching a video--just swipe horizontally with two fingers to the left or right. It's a little flaky at times, but works for the most part.
It definitely is now. Quicktime was always pretty bad. iTunes worked well in comparison to its contemporaries when it came out which is why the iPod did so well initially (before Apple had a music store). Safari on Windows was always awful and was discontinued without notice leaving users insecure without knowing it.
Issues around the sunset of Aperture or iPhoto, bad Photos, Final Cut Pro X, etc are most certainly not software quality problems, but product management problems.
On such large apps that need large teams of engineers, without good product management and also project management, even great engineers can do a terrible job despite all their efforts or heroics "on the ground".
While I agree that Apple's software quality has declined in recent years, I fear that their hardware and other advantages (even with superior hardware and software I don't trust a Google-or-Amazon-based phone for a second to be anything but a data mine for them), I fear Apple's existing lead in general quality will allow them to become (remain?) complacent and allow things to slide.
I agree with your concerns about a Google or Amazon phone being a datamine in your pocket, but I think that, for most people, it's not an issue: they simply want a phone that works for them and don't give much thought to how much information about them is being squirrelled away.
A huge factor in Apple's sliding software quality is lock-in: once you're on iOS using an iPhone, it's so much easier to simply stay on iOS than it is to move platform. Most people, myself included, will look at the effort required to move and decide that, really, the grass probably isn't greener enough to make climbing the fence worth it. Once you add in some other Apple devices --- say a laptop or an iPad --- staying becomes even easier.
Then you decide to pull the trigger and move. I did and I am happy that I did. I still have a mac for my primary machine, but literally everything else is Android and Windows. I consciously make sure my data is portable. No lock in and it's not that hard.
The reverse is also true - once you decide to leave Apple, the lock-in becomes something you don't go back to. I used to be entirely Apple devices, MacBooks & iPods & iPhones & AirPlay everywhere. But I was fed up enough with my iPhone 4 that I got a Nexus 5 instead - which led me to a Chromecast, a Galaxy Tab A with S-Pen, which led me to a Samsung TV. The grass has definitely been greener for me. I still have my new MacBook Pro, but I don't "love" it like I used to love Apple products.
I'm happy going Apple with my tablet and Android for my phone (actually I changed again and went Windows Phone). So I still can access all those old games I had on my previous iPhone through my iPad, but I can enjoy new things and try out other phones and operating systems, and spend less money doing so.
I don't even know if Apple owns the hardware quality title anymore. The Surface line from Microsoft is astounding in quality, and it's only a few generations old. This latest line did have some bugs (mostly due to Intel,) but overall when I walk into a Best Buy, and I feel a Surface Book and look over at a MacBook, one feels like the future, while one feels like it's hugging the past.
The problem with Apple, and I've said this for ages, is that Apple is fashion. It's a status symbol, Sony used to be that same way, and look at it now. It had similar business verticals, pushed the same proprietary nonsense instead of adopting what the rest of the industry is doing and they were drowned as they began to expand their portfolio of devices.
Apple makes great quality devices, but Apple also enjoys massive hardware margins. Hardware margins diminish with time, no company has successfully escaped it. So the question is, at what point does Apple go out of style?
I think Apple will remain in style for this broad generation of consumer computing (mobile devices physically separate from our bodies). No other company has quite the holistic philosophy and approach that Apple commands, even if their dominance lacks perfection. Google and Amazon are ok, and Microsoft has a while to go, even if it is clear that they are trying very, very hard.
Once the nanomachines are here, there is no guarantee that Apple will remain relevant.
> The problem with Apple, and I've said this for ages, is that Apple is fashion. It's a status symbol, Sony used to be that same way, and look at it now. It had similar business verticals, pushed the same proprietary nonsense instead of adopting what the rest of the industry is doing and they were drowned as they began to expand their portfolio of devices.
Apple already did this when Microsoft released Windows and NEC made "clones" that worked really well for a lot less price.
The Pro line is rarely upgraded, you can get a Razer laptop with better specs, for a similar price, but you'll have to trade out the silver for black and a stupid logo. Otherwise...eh, the Pro line is less than impressive these days. I honestly think the iPad Mini and iPhone are their only superior devices now. Of course all they need is the iPhone, that's basically their only real money maker.
You mean "expect", not "suspect." "Suspect" refers to people or facts, "expect" refers to events. (I suspect that English is not your first language, so I expect that you will occasionally make mistakes like this.)
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.
I haven't read much about Jobs but I wonder how he achieved the perfection in his product. Force the teams to work overtime to correct the bugs? Did he double the QA size in order to catch all these bugs? Did he demand that all code checked in must be at incredibly high standards, thus forcing the devs to QA more of their own code?
They weren't perfect by far. For years I've seen people struggle to figure out something as basic as creating a playlist or syncing to a new device. It's perhaps always been better software than windows counterparts, it always fallen short of the "intuitive" goal it's aspired to (and frankly, bragged about)
He went on stage and gave a sock presentation that made everyone forget about the bugs. Users judged the book by it's well-kerned prettily animated cover.
This is the same old tripe about the young generation's moral decline, and rose-tinted rearview glasses.
Imagine how many "this never would've happened if Steve were still alive" articles would be written if the iTunes 13 installer were to delete users' entire hard drives like iTunes 2's did (http://www.wired.com/2001/11/glitch-in-itunes-deletes-drives...).
With Jobs, it wasn't so much what you have right now as it was where he was taking you. To the bright, beautiful future where everything was different and better. One could overlook the imperfections because the vision was so appealing.
Now that he's gone (and without anyone with his charisma to take over), the public is left to contemplate the ignoble reality of the current product sitting in front of them. The sense of wonder and possibility is absent.
The Steve Jobs method: hire really good people and inspire them to work to the best of their ability.
Apple UIs were better because they were doing what ESR suggested at a time when the rest of the world was smashing every new option into the right-click menu. Occasionally I'll still hear someone say, "Oh, just put that in the right-click menu." The right click menu isn't a trashbin to dump things that don't fit elsewhere. In any case, here is ESR's UI advice: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cups-horror.html
OSX doesn't need to handle that many hardware and driver issues, so I don't see how that's relevant to a Windows comparison.
I've been using OSX since just after Panther. I generally agree with the idea that some things started getting worse after Snow Leopard, but I still don't think it's come close to a point where I'd actually move back to Windows or try out desktop Linux.
And I'd say Windows had far more issues that BSODs and memory problems. I've used Window for music production for years (by the time I switched everyday stuff to OSX, I was locked into my music workflow and haven't cared to spend the time learning a new package like Logic, even after all these years). The way I survive Windows problems is pretty simple: never plug in an ethernet cable. I'm sure things are far better now, but for a large part of the past 15 years, doing so opened you up to a lot of problems and required utilizing software you simply should not have to install in order to have a functional system.
Also, a high percentage of OSX users have no idea what XCode is, let alone care if it's not as nice as VisualStudio.
It's sad that so many people, myself very much included, now stick with OS X merely because ``it's not quite shitty enough to switch''. When I switched to the Mac initially, I switched because it was vastly better option than XP; now, I feel that lead has been eroded and that Windows 10, while different, isn't far behind OS X in most respects.
Windows 10 is -in my limited experience- awful. Admittedly I don't use it for much more than gaming, light browsing, and occasional ssh sessions but it's painful to use, the apps aren't great, and it frequently craps out with weird error messages (e.g. "The required TCP protocols not installed on this machine" actually meant "The NAS isn't responding").
As far as workflow and window management goes, OS X is a good half decade behind Windows, and in a lot of system-level ways, it feels a decade behind. I use a MBP Retina at work, and it feels primitive compared to Windows 10, which I use everywhere else. Everywhere else, I'm doing audio, video, and photo editing though. If your day to day work is more CLI and *nix oriented, I can understand the appeal of OSX... although some of the variations of Vim that I see people running might as well be GUIs.
I switched to OSX originally because the company I was working for was all-Apple. I probably wouldn't have thought XP was shitty enough to change otherwise, even though it obviously was.
Conversely, I'm now working at a company that's all-MS, but even after two years now (albeit, only a month on W10, previously on W7), I'm still not feeling much of a desire to switch to Windows at home. My Macbook is getting pretty old now and I'm going to want to replace it sometime soon and it's going to be another MBP.
The funny thing is I actually switched from OS X to Windows XP, primarily because Apple made me angry when they refused to do anything to continue Classic app support. (If I'm going to lose all of my favorite apps anyway and have to start over, might as well start over on the OS that has 10 times more apps, right?) (Also, I still hold a grudge over the "free forever" .Mac service.)
I wouldn't say Windows 10 is behind OS X at all. In some contexts, like a corporate workplace, it's at least a decade ahead, and always has been. (Then again, Apple and Mac fans generally discount that environment entirely.)
The biggest problem Windows 10 has are:
1. Crummy HighDPI support (and yes, they've been working on this, but the work is WAY too slow-- this should have been solved 5 years ago, guys)
2. Crummy third-party apps, made by developers who have no respect for the OS or its users
3. The new "constantly updates, and occasional ads" philosophy Windows 10 is taking. I wouldn't even mind the ads much if they weren't so stupid. (Stop trying to sell me the copy of Office 365 I ALREADY OWN!)
Regarding your last point about many people not knowing what XCode is: I assume GP was theorizing that Apple's declining software quality is related or even in part caused by their bad development environment and tools, compared to competitiors.
Xcode 4 was a definite backward step in UX terms, in my view, from which the product has yet to recover. Xcode 4 has the dubious distinction of being one of only a handful of products that I've used daily for a good period - in Xcode 4's case, 20 months - without ever finding a way that I could be happy using them.
(Sometimes I just throw my hands up and decide that something, whatever it is, is just never going to be my cup of tea, and that's that. I've done that with a few software packages and/or styles of working. But in Xcode's case, I'm pretty sure it's them, not me. Because Xcode 3 was fine...)
> The way I survive Windows problems is pretty simple: never plug in an ethernet cable. I'm sure things are far better now, but for a large part of the past 15 years, doing so opened you up to a lot of problems and required utilizing software you simply should not have to install in order to have a functional system.
I don't think that's really true. From 2K onwards windows was pretty solid if you kept it up to date. I never used any firewall/antivirus/etc., just disabled unneeded services (admittedly the defaults in 2K and XP were poor), didn't run executables attached to suspicious emails etc.
Give me a break. Steve Jobs put out plenty of crap products and buggy software over the years. Don't pretend like he had a perfect record just because he's dead.
For OS X, the decline began under Jobs with 10.7. I'd always assumed it was simply that Apple no longer cared about computers; in Jobs' own words, “milk the Macintosh for all it's worth and get busy on the next great thing.”
10.7 was a pretty low point, but OSX quality has been inconsistent throughout, with a few high points late in release cycles. And it's always panned in .0 releases (same historical issue with initial hardware revisions).
So what issues do you have with 10.11? Because I don't see anything to complain about. Then again, I also didn't see anything troubling in 10.10, 10.9 and 10.8, with the exception of their ill-fated transition to a new DNS backend, which they later reverted.
A few bugs here and there, yes. Nothing I haven't seen since 10.2, or that's not comparable to the kind of issues I have with Windows 10 or the Ubuntu box I use for development (actually that's far worse, but I digress).
Caveat: i havent used it on my main machine yet, so a lot of this is impressionistic; feel free to correct.
Still a total disregard of Fitt's law. Horribly inconsistent keyboard support. Behaviour that should be trivially configurable seemingly set in stone. Still, I think, impossible to cut a file in Finder. However many shots that take, apple can't get WiFi working properly. The transparency is an abomination.
If you want something more 'big picture', I think all the changes introduced over the lifetime of OSX have been a bit piecemeal with no overall, unifying process. For example, full-screen mode gets bolted on, rather than nicely integrated with other window actions. Notifications blossom into a side panel, but there's an overlap with bouncing icons in the dock. Etc. There are some great ideas there, but we could really do with an OS11 that picks the best ones and presents them together, in a clean interface, in which they all belong.
>Still a total disregard of Fitt's law. Horribly inconsistent keyboard support. Behaviour that should be trivially configurable seemingly set in stone. Still, I think, impossible to cut a file in Finder. The transparency is an abomination.
Well, those are not software quality issues. Some of those are design decisions, and have been with us forever, not random accidents: "Cut", for example, has never been on the Mac. Transparency in 10.11 is so lightweight you don't even notice it -- nothing Vista-like about it.
As for "total disregard of Fitt's law" that's not some decline either, as it's not worse or better than it has ever been in OS X.
>However many shots that take, apple can't get WiFi working properly.
Well, that qualifies as buggy software. But I have to wonder.
I've had an iBook, 2 MacBookPros (1 company issued), an iMac, a MacBook Pro Retina (current), 2 iPads and 2 iPhones thus far. And I've travelled all over the US, Europe and in several parts of Asia. I've never had any trouble with wifi, even to non-chain, el-cheapo motels.
The only offender has been my iPhone(s), which indeed I've not been able to connect to 3-4 places (restaurants etc) while traveling, over many hundreds of locations over 8 years. And I can't even know if it was because of the iPhone crapping out, or they using some crappy, third party router.
So I wonder, what are all those wi-fi issues people mention in forums etc.
>And I've travelled all over the US, Europe and in several parts of Asia. I've never had any trouble with wifi, even to non-chain, el-cheapo motels. So I wonder, what are all those wi-fi issues people mention in forums etc.
I agree with this 98%, with the exception of early releases of Yosemite, which really did seem to have a WiFi problem on the rMBP (even with Apple Airport Extreme base stations), in that it would disconnect a lot and you'd have to recycle your WiFi off/on. Annoying but not a deal breaker. And fixed within a month or two.
Otherwise I'd suspect there are some hardware + driver variations of Macbooks that may have had issues for others.
Compare to Windows where it's called "Cut" but is really "Copy and mark for maybe deleting if you paste later". It doesn't remove files when they go to the clipboard (which is what cut does literally anywhere else).
And then Paste becomes a destructive operation that deletes your original files, or if you prefer, paste turns into "Move Item Here."
They've taken two different approaches to avoiding accidental data loss by overwriting the clipboard, but I wouldn't say one is inherently more right than the other. Windows makes new actions but has the interface pretend that it's doing the same thing as normal cut and paste. OS X makes the UI less standard, but describes what's being done more explicitly.
- UI non-responsiveness: it is extraordinarily frequent that I will chord a tab change in Safari or in iTerm2, and the system will not respond for sometimes multiple seconds. It's the same with creating tabs in Safari. ⌘-t or ⌘-{ do not respond.
- Application switching focus failures: ⌘-tab will raise another window, but window focus will not follow. This has caused me to lose work. ⌘-tab, ⌘-w will sometimes close an iTerm2 tab that's behind the Safari window I'm looking at.
- Mouse pointer lag: Probably related to the input lag above, the trackpad will not respond for multiple seconds after I begin touching it. If I "wake" it with a two-finger scroll, it will often lose half the input and instead click.
- AirPlay stuttering: even two ethernet-wired systems will still lose data between them. It's a crappy experience.
- discoveryd: My Apple TV's network name is currently "Apple TV (5)". Macs sometimes do this too.
- Slow laptop wakeup: I almost always have to tap a keyboard key to wake the display after opening my laptops (MBr and MBPr). Almost always. But not always.
That's just off the top of my head. Many of these have followed me between OS X revisions and different hardware. It amazes me that such bugs stick around.
Just a quick nitpick: discoveryd was reverted on the last release... OSX is back using mDNSResponder again. You can't really say "It amazes me that such bugs stick around" if you're not actually on the newest version.
>UI non-responsiveness: it is extraordinarily frequent that I will chord a tab change in Safari or in iTerm2, and the system will not respond for sometimes multiple seconds. It's the same with creating tabs in Safari. ⌘-t or ⌘-{ do not respond.
Ok, for this I can't say much, because every since 2010 or so I've used Chrome in place of Safari. As for iTerm2, I've tried to switch to it several times over the years (later mostly because of Tmux integration) but always found it to be buggy and reverted to the Terminal.
>Application switching focus failures: ⌘-tab will raise another window, but window focus will not follow. This has caused me to lose work. ⌘-tab, ⌘-w will sometimes close an iTerm2 tab that's behind the Safari window I'm looking at.
Hmm, haven't seen this -- and I use ⌘-tab and the ~ variant heavily.
I have seen lagginess in focus when switching full-screen apps use, and I sometimes start typing before that happens. This got a little better in 10.11 though (either faster focus switch or less transition time).
>- discoveryd: My Apple TV's network name is currently "Apple TV (5)". Macs sometimes do this too.
DNS issues I've had (and mentioned in another comment). They tried a transition to a new DNS backend which was buggy. They reverted back to the old one with 10.11 (or sometime in 10.10.x) though and has been OK since then.
>Slow laptop wakeup: I almost always have to tap a keyboard key to wake the display after opening my laptops (MBr and MBPr). Almost always. But not always.
Do see this from time to time (though it almost always works in my case).
Could be a sensor issue though -- not a software thing (the display up sensor not registering, but tap working ok).
A lot of awful software shipped under Steve Jobs. X Code has always been a buggy mess, iTunes bloated greatly under Steve (remember Ping?), iMovie '08, etc etc.
There are also many libraries available to decode and encode these files in various languages.
The reason why XML property lists look this way is that they were a direct translation of the older NeXT "property list" format, which was sort of like binary JSON. Dumping an alternating list of keys and values isn't pretty XML, but it ensured minimum translation headaches from the old format.
It's still hideous. Case in point, although this is a combination of things I guess but, when I upgraded to a iPhone6S+ 2 months ago I backed up my 5s in iTunes then restored on the 6S+. 22 apps could not be restored, among them 6 of Apple's own apps.
That Isaacson book really leveled him for a lot of people.
OP is right about him not putting up with crap. Sure, not everything that came out of Cupertino was rock solid. But I think as much of an aesthete that he appears to be have been, it's also pretty evident that he was incredibly shrewd and knew he had to ship at some point.
The cruddy software might be coming from Apple repositioning itself from an innovation to a legacy brand. Acquiring Beats (can you imagine Steve championing this - lol), less of a focus on the high-end workstations for consumer electronics and watches, removing the grunt from high-end apps like Logic and FCP. Certainly no longer the underdog we root for, as the article points out.
> That Isaacson book really leveled him for a lot of people.
To me it actually had the opposite effect: after reading it I had a newfound respect towards Apple and Jobs. The book was honest and fair, I don't know why people think it does a disservice to him since everyone knew he was an asshole. This is coming from someone that avoids Apple products, FWIW.
> What’s more, thanks to the popularity of iTunes on PCs, Apple has become a major Windows software developer. “We’ve got cards and letters from lots of people who say that iTunes is their favorite app on Windows,” noted Jobs. “It’s like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in Hell.”
That quip apparently caused Bill Gates to become quite angry:
iTunes was awesome on Windows when it came out (until about 4.0?). Compared to its contemporaries, Music Match, which was a bloated piece of junk, and Winamp 2.x which while awesome, had a steep learning curve to get really useful (J for the win) and had an extremely unpleasant UI.
It forced a bundled QuickTime install (still does I believe), and back then, it tried hard to become the default media player on your system (even reverting your "no" choice after updates). This led many people to remove QuickTime, only to discover now their iTunes refused to work. It would fail halfway through sync's and upgrades of iDevices routinely, had a generally pretty buggy interface that wasn't very responsive most of the time. It's iDevice backup process was cumbersome for normal users, and often failed without the user knowing (leading to very upset individuals when they needed to restore but couldn't).
Now it seems every new version redesigns the UI in major ways, causing even long term users to not know what to click, etc...
If you really just listen to music, maybe it's fine. For all other purposes, it was/is horrible, however I can't complain because it generated quite a lot of work for my side repair/contract business back then.
I had whatever version was around when the video ipods came around (and a bodgy bit of hardware that was). I couldn't sort videos the way I wanted to - itunes says that that file extension means "tv episode" instead of "movie"? Sorry, it's a tv episode. Not to mention the terrible UI with tiny targets that doesn't blend in with the user's desktop theming. Maybe that was v4+, but all I remember is hating to use itunes (including managing updates as already mentioned)
The software that went with Microsoft's Zune media player was amazingly good. Sadly, even though it was available separate from the Zune hardware, almost nobody downloaded and tried it.
iTunes sucks everywhere. And it's a horrible UX that it's needed for syncing an iPhone. A better UX would be just to plug it in and move things around.
It's worse on Windows. The Windows version would hash file names or something. Probably to get the search features working. So once you imported your files you didn't know what was what. The Mac version probably just uses spotlight and file names were always readable.
My iTunes library has made several round-trips across platforms and I've never encountered anything like that. My music, apps, books, and podcast files all have consistent, readable naming schemes.
iLife was very important to Steve, he dedicated a lot of time demoing the apps on stage. He was a huge fan of ripping out all the features of iMovie.
Same with iTunes (which has gotten a ton of criticism over the years), he was the one that kept cramming everything under the sun into it.
I don't know if he was as passionate about X Code, but he sure liked to brag about having the best development environment. Interface Builder in particular seems right out of Steve Jobs' brain (even if it sucks).
It does a great job of getting you from zero to an app, but it breaks down terribly once you try to do anything custom with it. The fact that it hides code from the developer drives me nuts.
Ooh I forgot about that feature. It does at least answer my big problem with IB: you execute code you didn't write and can't read. I'll have to give live rendering another look.
I won't start a religious war here, but IB is awesome in demos and less awesome in real world. Versioning alone is enough to make you go crazy (especially back in the .nib days!).
I understand both sides of the argument - it took me considerable time to wrap me head around IB and for the longest time I just assumed I simply wouldn't "get it".
Interested to how you do versioning on UI with or without IB though. Personally I just maintain branches until an agreed upon design is in place.
What mature products deteriorated (apart from iTunes) and in what concrete ways?
Mail is much better than it was even a year ago, XCode too, the OS is stable...
And FCPX didn't deteriorate over 7 -- it was a written-from-scratch reboot of the platform that just happened to cut some features people used (most got back with a vengeance).
There a number of examples in the surrounding threads. I find most software getting worse these days on all platforms. See CADT: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
Yes, good software applications from Apple have been the historical exception rather than the rule. Great hardware, good OS, mediocre software for the most part. This reflects the company's priorities as a hardware vendor: they make very little money from software, and hence have little direct incentive to put a lot of resources into it.
I don't agree with great hardware, if we're talking about durability and easily fixable. At least the Macbook line seems designed to fail after a number of years or be too expensive to continue fixing in favor of buying a new one. Apple products, besides the high end desktops, seem disposable, no matter how well made it looks.
Years is still a long time to measure the lifespan of a laptop. Plenty of less-expensive laptops fail at the one-year mark, some fail at two, some laptops equally as expensive as a Macbook will fail before five years are up. Some Macs fail before five years, some last beyond that.
And five years is a long time when it comes to computers.
The software that had "the focus of Steve" was generally very high quality. However there were a number of rotting products at Apple while he was still in charge.
The problem now is none of the SVPs seem to have that attention to detail, or they are too stretched doing numerous things.
> There's just no way in hell Steve Jobs would be putting up with this
Maybe. I felt like the quality started going downhill shortly after iOS came out, starting with low-level APIs, then xcode, then making it into user-level applications.
My theory is that a lot of the really experienced engineers (the one who started with NEXT and OpenStep) left when they were rich after the iPhone stock jump.
So really there is nothing Steve Jobs could have done unless he had a developer education program or something.
>> "My theory is that a lot of the really experienced engineers (the one who started with NEXT and OpenStep) left when they were rich after the iPhone stock jump."
While possible true I think the real issue is resources being spread too thin. Remember they had to delay the release os OS X one year as all their engineers were working on iOS? Now they're doing yearly releases of both OS's. I'm sure they've hired more engineers but pre-iOS there were probably lots of engineers who had been working exclusively on OS X for years and were able to maintain quality. New people take time to get up to speed.
I agree. I don't think this is a Steve Jobs thing at all. In fact, I think post Steve Jobs Apple actually pays a lot more lip service to better software than they did before.
I simply think the attempts to build stuff in common with iOS is taking its toll.
Aren't you contradicting yourself? If post-Jobs they only pay lip service to quality but with Jobs they actually took action, doesn't that suggest Jobs may have been a positive influence on quality?
I think the action they take is about the same. They pay more lip service these days. I wouldn't be surprised if they are actually putting more work into better quality these days, but stuff is just more complex (e.g., everything is cloud based. Imagine OSX today, except running MobileMe, .Mac, etc. as the cloud backend instead of iCloud, which while it has its issues, is way better than those disasters).
Ah ok... maybe you have a different usage, but "lip service" is used to indicate "all talk, no action". So paying more lip service to something means they're churning out more empty words without the activity to back it up.
>>Or, perhaps, at some point, software becomes too complex for humans to deal with.
I'd say rather that things need to be simplified and features removed in order to improve quality. Every new Mac or iOS release touts XXX number of new features. If you want to offer the best products, having more features isn't necessarily a prerequisite.
Its interesting to think about - is feature creep uniquely in the domain of software? I don't think so. There is plenty of software that has been immune to it (think everyday developer tools, command line stuff, etc). Often the apps with the least amount of feature creep are the ones where they are bounded by the APIs they talk to, i.e. if the API (which they don't control) is static, they can't really add any more features.
Outside of software, we see a similar thing, a wrench (or spanner) hasn't gotten many new features, because the bolt that it turns isn't changing. the goal is roughly the same. The only appreciable changes have been in ergonomics, and even these are effectively static.
On the other hand, we have cars, which are suffering from so much feature creep it is unbelievable. every year, car engines get a little bit more efficient, but they also get heavier, bloated with more systems, infotainment, seat adjustments, window adjustments, etc.As a result, the efficiency of the improved powertrain seldom makes appreciable performance difference. (yes, there are outliers).
Cars then, might be the equivalent of "the ultimate app" which does everything for you, but loses sight of its purpose. Meanwhile, we have a long history of leaving single tools alone, and they tend to work great.
The trouble is that in the world of physical tools, the workflow changes/context switching between using one tool and then another is easy. Meanwhile, in software, feature creep ends up being the solution for poor context switching between apps. In an ideal world, working on an image in photoshop and then pixelmator, and then illustrator, and then publishing to wordpress would be as seamless as using a wrench, then a screwdriver, and then cleaning things up with a rag. Unfortunately, software interface constraints almost necessitate feature creep as the "simplest" way to add functionality, even when convoluted menus, hotkeys, and naming conventions obscure utility.
Awesome analogy about context switching. It's definitely true. The "unix philosophy" never really worked well for GUIs and that's been a big problem for composability.
Interestingly, the Unix philosophy works great in machine to machine communications. It is pretty excellent at handling the needs of the IoT and distributed systems, networks, sensors, etc. You hit the nail on the head about GUIs.
Ironically, it is the "handoff" features that Apple was traditionally best at. BUT, I have this feeling that most of what we hate can be described as "too little, too soon". After all, it could be argued that Apple is aiming for an environment which is "document focused" with their focus on standardized APIs (Adobe is working on this, too), but none of this works yet, because software is still written from an "Apps" POV. In the real world, we change the tool relative to the job, and the best tools are specific single tasks. given the experience so far, I'm far from convinced that a 2D GUI should ever try duplicate that.
I think it boils down to asking what the product is actually for, or rather, what fundamental human need does it solve? That's a rather tough answer for computers, but for cars it's easy - getting from point A to point B. Every modification to a car is in pursuit of either making the job more efficient or making the job easier/more comfortable for the customer.
I think the fact that the answer is so tough for computers is why feature creep is so common with software. When your tool can literally do anything you want it to, why say no? The constraints are actually in the mind of the customer.
This is very good point. The constraints are in the mind of the customer, but also in the UI. i.e. a panorama viewing app is not great in vertical orientation on an iPhone. There are physical as well as mental constraints in the UI of a computer.
On the topic of cars, it is true that modifications strive toward comfort, but they also strive for marketability. While a leather-wrapped dashboard may be comfortable to look at, it is primarily focused at adding something to market. This same phenomenon exhibits in software, where features are added to increase marketability, "Look! this ERP software has a social network built in!". The utility of a given feature is often perspective-based, especially when the user is not well aware of their actual needs, or the user and purchaser are not the same person.
Plenty of product are ruined because they don't allow you to do that one thing you really need to do.
Feature creep is necessary for closed applications.
The ideal is a set of simple tools around a simple and open file format. As soon as you lock in folks to your application (as Apple loves to do), you're on the hook for being all things to all people, or getting panned that your software is only for the lightest casual usel
They (Designers and Product people) will one day learn that the single greatest feature and design, the most objective one is raw speed.
Always go faster for a long time. Meaning tackle long aged hardware, long uptime, and just generally maintain same performance. Across everything, from device hardware and speed locally on the device to the wifi/4G signals, ISP, to the backend and their software and hardware. Performance in speed is the greatest subjective design and feature.
Unfortunately the time to invest in it requires convincing the designer and product that integrating A/B tests for hearts vs star for favoriting isn't worth it for the long run.
> I'd say rather that things need to be simplified and features removed in order to improve quality.
I'd say they need to fix the features they've implemented, and only release new features when they're fully cooked.
Removing features is terrible: it is not an improvement to me when my stuff breaks or when I'm forced into a dumbed-down, lowest-common-denominator use-case.
It's funny -- on the one hand, people SAY they want this (only fully cooked new features). Yet everyone is really quick to jump up and down and complain and bash $company for lacking innovation when their new OS or the next version of their software comes out and the focus has been on stability/bug fixes.
Not just Wall-Street types either; I see this primarily from tech people. Examples: Android M, OS X Snow Leopard (I think, I may have that release wrong but there was one there that was definitely 'not many new features'), basically anything where the next version isn't predominantly new shiny.
I agree with a lot of the sentiment in this discussion and from the article. It feels like Apple software is getting worse from my perspective but I wonder if a change in the target market has a part to play. Perhaps the HN crowd is not a significant Apple demographic any more?
When I got my first Mac back in the PowerPC days it was definitely a step up. In the past I feel that Apple was targeting power users. Today I think they are going after casual users. Probably capitalizing on the general popularity of iOS.
I've still got a couple of old Macs but they're all running Windows now. Visual Studio still has the occasional lock-up whatever hardware it's on. At least you don't have to sign in to an app store to update it though.
> Windows got so much flack over the years. It wasn't the prettiest but it worked and did what it said.
No. Just No. Windows loves to "forget" things. Things like Bluetooth devices. Or wifi devices. Windows likes to update your laptop for you when you're trying to close it ("Don't turn off your computer..." Wait, what? I have a plane to catch!). Windows scatters files all over the place! And that registry. UGH!
When closing your laptop Windows goes into standby. It should only install updates when shutting down and it tells you that beforehand. So it "did what it said" ;)
> Windows scatters files all over the place!
Just have a look into your Library folder on OS X. Also some programs don't use that, but create a dot folder in your home directory. Maybe I'm missing something though? I haven't used OS X much lately.
Library is pretty well organized. Settings go in Library/Preferences, cache files in Library/Caches, persistent files that don't need to be exposed to the user go in Library/Application Support, and they're all organized by app name or bundle ID.
Apps which use dot folders in the home directory need to be smacked until they stop, but the OS can't really control where (non-sandboxed) apps put things, it can only establish conventions and encourage apps to follow them.
I can't look it up right now, but I think it's called "Library Support" or something? Anyway: When I was writing a program for Mac OS I had to choose the name of the folder myself. Using the app name or bundle ID seems to be just a convention, I don't see the difference to %AppData% on Windows or ~/.config on Linux.
Also I remember a tool I used when I had a Macbook which helped you remove all the files when uninstalling something. I think it was this one: http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/25276/appcleaner
I remember some programs even putting files in other directories than Library Support.
Oh look, OSX has touched this usb stick, and vomited it's dotfiles onto it. Did it ever write to the stick? Nope, just need to throw those trash dotfiles onto every. single. thing. it. sees.
I think there's plenty of blame to go to both of them. There's no defensible reason to put dotfiles in every single folder, and there are many, many reasons why it may not be desired of various levels of vehemence.
> Windows got so much flack over the years. It wasn't the prettiest but it worked and did what it said.
No. Just No. Windows loves to "forget" things. Things like Bluetooth devices. Or wifi devices. Windows likes to update your laptop for you when you're trying to close it ("Don't turn off your computer..." Wait, what? I have a plane to catch!). Windows scatters files all over the place! And that registry. UGH!
> the years of oversimplifying applications has created an Apple that can't handle complex applications?
Ah, you've fallen for the illusion. Those "simple" Mac apps you love are fantastically complex to implement. It's the user experience that is simple, and it takes a ton of sophisticated engineering to pull that off.
You can think of it as there being a certain fixed amount of complexity in the user attaining some goal. You can make your software simpler by foisting the complexity on to the user: just make them do all of the nit-picky tasks.
If you want to make it simple for them to achieve their goal, your app is going to have to contain that complexity itself.
>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.
You probably wasn't paying attention when Job was running things.
OS X 10.1 was a mess -- it took until several updates to become somewhat usable. The Finder was half-arsed for a decade. Mail.app had several issues. The Windows versions of iTunes was crappy. OS X releases that are now praised as "the best ever" etc, got tons of complaints for introducing bugs and instability. XCode has been historically crap (and it's much better now). And don't even get me started on the state of their Cloud offerings under Jobs.
Hardware wise the same. Every new release, from the original iPod to the iPad was met with complaints and bickering ("No wifi? Less space than a Nomad? Lame") -- even if it actually took wifi and batteries 5 more years to even start making practical sense to have on such a device for syncing. Aside from specs people complained about, there were also all kind of other HW issues, from the overheating G4 Cube, to the logic boards dying on G3 iBooks, to cooling goo spilling from G5 towers, the crappy "round" mouse, and lots of other stuff besides.
That said, I don't buy the "Apple software went downhill as of late" thing. First, because as said there were always issues. Second, because in normal use I don't see any particular decline. If anything things have got better, to the point where we complaint about trivial stuff. The thing is Apple of today puts out a heck of a lot more software and hardware products than the rosy Apple you remember.
I'd take iTunes in the back and kill it though -- as the latest redesigns are absolutely crap from a UX perspective. Then again, I wouldn't call that a programming quality issue -- more of a "idiotic focus and shoving on our faces of BS online music platform issue".
>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.
The opposite. XCode was "atrociously buggy" in the 3/4/5 era and before, and has gotten quite better in the 6/7 series (despite having to support a whole new language).
In fact a large list of early XCode 6 crashing bugs have been squashed months ago -- which was (as reported) around 90% of them.
Oh joy. I remember those days when people were angry because plugging your iPod into a new PC means wiping your library!
> That said, I don't buy the "Apple software went downhill as of late" thing.
Perception on Mac after people switch from Windows to Mac OSX immediately is awesome. The perception is different if you use Mac OSX for a long time and suddenly you see computer frozen every few days and requires a hard reboot. Many of that have to do the software you are running at the time, but why a sudden OS freeze, mouse couldn't move? That can't be a fault with Office / Skype, it has to be either a OS issue, or underlying hardware issue.
Mac OSX is generally really great, it doesn't feel slow compare to a lot of the PC out there. Polished UI and very responsive. In some release you do see slowness opening between finders or moving from one setting view to another. Those are defects people will cry and ask those defects weren't caught by the performance team.
Maybe the grass is greener on the other side. I was using an iMac for a couple months on a job a while back after using only Ubuntu for 5+ years and I found the whole Mac UI extremely sluggish and confusing.
My main computer is an OSX both at work and at home.
Honestly it isn't very responsive compared to recent lung desktops or even the latest windows 10. Or at least it mostly feels that way when using Eclipse, so maybe its the JVM.
That's interesting because 'back in the day' the IT department accidentally installed safari on my win XP box and as a long time mac user I thought 'finally some font rendering done right'. I guess it's down to taste or it perhaps it didn't work well for screens with low pixel density or people who like really small text and ui settings.
Wasn't that a Windows issue, though? I feel like font-rendering on Windows, in general, is far inferior to font-rendering and aliasing on the Mac. Especially with the new HiDPI displays popping up, Apple's stuff looks far better to me than any display I've ever seen on Windows.
font-rendering on Windows, in general, is far inferior to font-rendering and aliasing on the Mac
That's because Windows has to deal with so many more differences in hardware. E.g. look at these pixel-level variations in LCD screens. http://www.digitalversus.com/tv-television/screen-technology... I don't understand how it would be possible to support subpixel rendering on some of those. IIRC when I last used Windows (XP?) it let you choose from 8 different schemes. But that still wouldn't nearly be enough!
OS X and IOS can be tweaked to support a much smaller subset of that mess.
That said, I don't buy the "Apple software went downhill as of late" thing. First, because as said there were always issues.
I fully agree. I jumped on the Mac and OS X bandwagon in 2007. The first few releases of Leopard (10.5) were quite hellish, because I was constantly having Wifi problems. My HP Laserjet didn't work until 10.5.2 (in 10.5.0 and 10.5.1 it would just print a few pages and get stuck). Snow Leopard was a smoother ride, but only after a couple of dot releases.
I think there was a low point around Lion and Mountain Lion (lots of new features, but they were not polished enough). But since Mavericks it's been smooth sailing for me.
People also seem to have overly romantic recollections of past Apple software. Sure, Aperture and iPhoto were killed in favor of Photos. But Aperture was crap. Version 2 was still acceptable, but 3.x had constant hangs and slowness. And they were always trailing behind badly with RAW support. As many people, I have bought Aperture 2 & 3 and switch to LightRoom pretty soon after because of Aperture's lack of polish. A while ago I tried the new Photos. And although it does not have all of Aperture's features, it's a far better application in terms of speed and user experience.
tl;dr: I don't see this drop in quality.
Of course, App Store and iTunes need to be burned down to the ground and rewritten from scratch.
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.
What? The UI is totally fine. Just because it's a grid of photos doesn't mean it's just "an iOS app shoehorned onto OS X." The app is written from the ground up for OS X. It's not just some basic half assed port of the iOS version. The UI is different. The editing tools are more powerful. The performance is blazingly fast. Go give the Photos app on Windows 10 a shot if you want to see what the competition is up to. That is a pathetic Windows (mobile) 10 port.
> If anything things have got better, to the point where we complaint about trivial stuff.
This is the key. We're definitely spoiled by how solid a lot of the basics are.
I can fault them for some of the cloud service issues nowadays, but even those work better than they did in years past.
Apple has always had strange hardware and software issues, just like everyone else. Just today I was trying to buy Windows 10 to install it on a PC I'm building, and the MS storefront and my Live account couldn't sync the deletion/addition of a credit card until I logged out of everything, closed the browser, and logged back in. No one is getting this stuff working flawlessly.
Microsoft's OAuth stuff is ridiculously buggy. I've tried half a dozen times to get my Office 365 Microsoft account properly linked with my (identical email address) MSDN Microsoft account, and it's always wrong. Every time I go to login to some Microsoft OAuth site, it picks the wrong cookie, so I have to logout whatever account it thinks I'm using and login repeatedly with the right one.
> The opposite. XCode was "atrociously buggy" in the 3/4/5 era and before, and has gotten quite better in the 6/7 series (despite having to support a whole new language).
Xcode 3/4 were a lot harder to work with (IB and Instruments separate, had to use Clang on command line etc), but I don't recall them being particularly buggy. Xcode 7 with Swift is the buggiest version I have used. It crashes on me 10+ times a day with all of the instant compiler checks it does. The progression from 3 to 7 is amazing, but I feel it has come at the cost of stability.
Xcode 3's code completion made everything run so slowly that I had to turn it off, and for a while I just copied and pasted method names out of the Cocoa header files.
Much better in my opinion. For example they've fixed all the issues with iMessage interoperability on OSX/iOS. There are a time when if you used Messages on the Mac you had to suffer through missing messages, duplicate messages, out-of-order messages, etc. Now, as far as I can tell, it's working flawlessly. Even better that it now includes SMS messages.
> There's just no way in hell Steve Jobs would be putting up with this
Says everyone who disagrees with any decision Apple makes. "Steve would have had the same opinion about this I do!" Statements like this are just you projecting your own opinion onto him.
> 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.
Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs ... that's the guy with the skeuomorphic preferences, right? The one who, at the first iPhone release, told developers that they don't need native apps because using HTML + WebView is enough, right?
Not everybody hates skeumorphism, especially when not taken to an extreme (okay, Apple under Jobs often did take it to an extreme... like the leather Calendar app). But skeumorphism, when used properly, provides affordances and hints to the user.
> told developers that they don't need native apps because using HTML + WebView is enough
That's because the SDK wasn't ready for developers yet. You must remember that, first and foremost, Jobs was a great salesman. If you don't yet sell it, it's a piece of crap and unnecessary, right? And when you _do_ sell it, it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Oh really. That, I wasn't aware of. Well, at least they saw the cash cow that the App Store could become at some point, and acted. It's good to change your mind when new information comes to light.
I hear that repeated a lot, but I haven't seen any real evidence to back it up.
It seems equally plausible, especially given how quickly they announced the SDK after the iPhone release, that Apple was preparing for it but not ready yet (and/or wanted to give themselves time to work out the early kinks in all of the other parts: working with AT&T, supporting the new device and new OS, etc, etc).
What was amazing was the '07 jailbreak experience was like 1000% better than what I'd experienced with Palm or WinMobile.. tap, tap, app appeared on home screen with a "lickable" loading progress bar.
I seriously doubt that jailbreakers invented the smooth experience - they just likely unlocked the functionality that existed before Apple was ready to push it out (I'm guessing Steve wanted apps in the store at launch).
Yeah the UI assets had to be there in the first place. Compared to SBSettings, the jailbreak era control center, which looked like someone taped together the buttons, and it becomes apparent that Job's statement was just salesmanship.
"Apple board member Art Levinson told Isaacson that he phoned Jobs “half a dozen times to lobby for the potential of the apps,” but, according to Isaacson, “Jobs at first quashed the discussion, partly because he felt his team did not have the bandwidth to figure out all the complexities that would be involved in policing third-party app developers.”
Apple had already established a model for selling third party software on the iPod video line through iTunes -- with select partners only.
When WWDC 2007 rolled around, after the release of the iPhone, Jobs presented web apps as the solution for developers, without the need for an SDK. It was only after months of sustained outcry from the development community, and the nascent jailbreaking scene, that Jobs announced that they would prepare a public SDK for the next year, after they decided on a method of signing and sandboxing applications.
None of which contradicts my thesis: that it wasn't rejected, but that Apple wasn't ready at the time of release to undertake the task of opening it to all comers.
The supposition that it was only due to the outcry of the development community is exactly that, a supposition.
"The one who, at the first iPhone release, told developers that they don't need native apps because using HTML + WebView is enough, right?"
Nowadays we have plenty of people complaining that they have to have "apps" for everything when they have a perfectly good web browser on their phone, so he wasn't that far off.
Seems like many people are not making enough of the distinction between choices and bugs. Sure there are bugs in lots of stuff, and that's an entirely valid conversation, but there's also a layer of confounding choices. Some make sense from an "corporate" perspective, some...
-iTunes bloat is a choice, and bugs.
-Mail.app is mostly bugs. (non-standard .mbox was a choice)
-Final Cut X was a choice.
-Eschewing strong AppleScript support in native applications is a choice.
-The app store(s) are a choice.
-Allowing core utilities like Contacts and iCal to stagnate and be outshone by 3rd parties (BusyMac) was a choice.
-Aperture+iPhoto=Photos was a choice. (So was selling Aperture after it was EOLed)
In that case, allow me to summarize some of the choices that went into building the Mac App Store.
- It's a web view. No local caching of layout or anything. If your network connection hiccups, instead of a reasonably rendered error message, you get this: http://i.imgur.com/5xNgwMH.png
- Text in the search box is blurry. I'm not 100% sure why, but I think someone made a choice to render it with its y-position at a half pixel increment. And then nudge it down so it comes into focus when you click on it. Because really, what sort of asshole would still be using a low DPI screen? http://i.imgur.com/gj3mqrz.png
- How many Install buttons does an update need? Eh, let's choose two. Two's a nice number. And have that "Update All" button stick around even though all updates were already installed. https://i.imgur.com/p9QoCqZ.png
- Earlier today, though it didn't lend itself to screenshots, my Xcode "Install" vs "Installing" button that couldn't decide what mode it wanted to be in and just bounced back and forth instead. Why choose one when you can be both!
- The "Check for Unfinished Downloads" menu. Do you know what happens when a download doesn't finish? Or why it's not presented in a sane way in the normal UI? Me neither. Instead of gracefully handling errors, let's choose to bury them in a secret menu that people will happen upon via StackOverflow searches when their installation keeps failing with no indication of why. https://i.imgur.com/xkgP0lc.png
This is exactly my point. Apple has been making these choices for a while, but they're being swept into a convo about bugs, and thus capacity/engineering. I think atp.fm dip into this for a second in their most recent (yesterday) podcast episode.
> 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.
Remember Antennagate? The iPhone 4 had a serious hardware fault that significantly degraded it's signal. Jobs himself was the one who said to a customer "You're holding it wrong"
It feels a little clichéd to say it, but I do feel that Snow Leopard, outdated now as it is, was some kind of fortuitous confluence of factors that resulted in OS X being as close to perfect as it's ever been.
Even putting aside the iOS-style elements being added, my experience has been that each version of OS X has been slightly worse than the last, and tends to introduce strange little anomalies and instabilities on hardware that was otherwise working just fine. Sometimes these issues are fixed in the next major version, but sometimes they aren't; and even when they are fixed, there are an equal number of new issues introduced.
My perspective is perhaps coloured by having switched to the Mac during the Tiger era, which was about equal with Snow Leopard in terms of stability and 'completeness'. Since then, with the exception of Snow Leopard, it's been downhill. (I realise, of course, that Tiger benefitted from 11 point updates and thus more polish than any version before or since, but the point stands.)
I've noticed the same thing, but with one proviso: Only after an upgrade, rather than a clean install. And with quite literally every major OSX release since Snow Leopard.
Just generalized instability and "weirdness" for lack of a better term. The problems always seem to go away after a fresh load.
It sucks that this is required, but between Time Machine bringing my apps and settings back, and launching the upgrade at night before bed, it's not really that much of an annoyance.
I'd still rather use OSX than any other OS at this point. But I think we need a Snow Leopard 2, a release that only tightens up the backend stuff with no new shiny features.
Your post reminded me of something: after years of doing Time Machine enhanced updates, last year I did a fresh install without Time Machine. I think that this made things better, but I can't really be specific why.
I think you have rose colored glasses about Snow Leopard. It had plenty of bugs and hiccups.
People deride the "iOS style" features of El Capitan but first, what specifically are you referring to besides Launcher? Do you think adding Notifications to OS X is bad? I find them extremely useful, and like the integration better than the spotty support Growler had among third party software.
I never use Launcher but it's not there for me. It's no skin off my nose that it exists for other people. And it's not like Finder or Spotlight have lost functionality, if anything I feel Spotlight in El Capitan is much better than it was in Snow Leopard or any prior OS X.
Mission Control works great and I think is much more elegant in El Capitan than in previous OS X releases. Granted in older OS X you could arrange your desktops in grids instead of just left to right but I only use about 3-4 desktops anyway, so I don't mind.
OS X has also improved for power users since Snow Leopard as well. Lion introduced FileVault 2 which I find to be a fantastically easy to use encryption system, that I have had no problems with. I enjoy my Retina screen and the Retina support that later versions introduced as well. Air Drop is also handy since my wife and coworkers have Macs as well.
In my mind, each new release of OS X, like each new release of iOS or anything really, has good things and less good things in it. But on the whole I'm glad to be running El Capitan today rather than Snow Leopard. I don't pine for those days.
I don't have a particular issue with any of the iOS stuff ported over, but it's a lament I hear quite frequently from other Mac users.
You're right that there's a certain amount of rose-tinting with regards to Snow Leopard. It certainly wasn't perfect, and I wouldn't really want to switch back to it; the world has moved on since then, and SL isn't really competitive as a primary OS now.
With that said, though, my use-case in OS X hasn't dramatically changed since Snow Leopard --- mostly web-browsing, some IM, using the Terminal for various tasks --- but OS X's stability has changed in that time, for the worse. Apps crash more often, the OS itself is generally less stable and prone to random freezes which require a hard-restart. Doing a fresh install didn't fix these issues, and my fianceé's MacBook has them too, which makes me think it's not just hardware issues.
I think what I'm really looking for is Snow El Capitan: a year where nothing new is added and Apple throw intense focus on fixing the various weirdnesses that are introduced during their breakneck release cycle.
It's less about Snow Leopard having been supposedly perfect and more about how OS X feels like it's just floundered around randomly since then.
In fact, for me, I can honestly say that OS X has almost strictly regressed in terms of my day-to-day experience. Spotlight now covers up way too much of the screen for almost no gain; if I'd wanted that, I'd have just used Alfred. Mission Control is still not as powerful and flexible as Expose + Spaces, and now it even goes so far as to hide desktop thumbnails even on my dual 27" monitor setup. Seriously?
What's most shocking to me is how much Windows has caught up from a UX perspective. I have Windows 10 on my (primarily gaming-oriented) desktop. Since I don't use the desktop for much programming, I almost never find myself wishing that it was running OS X instead. That's a real blow to the magical grip that OS X once held over me. Cortana is just as good as spotlight -- better, even -- and it manages to be much more space efficient as well. Windows Explorer is so much more useful than the bafflingly overly simplistic Finder. On Windows, if I want to tile windows, I can -- get this -- just drag them to the side, top, or any of the four corners. On OS X, I have to either fiddle with their impressively clunky split-screen full-screen app disaster or use a third-party tool like Spectacle or BetterTouchTool.
I could go on, but I'll leave it at this: there was a day where I never wanted to touch Windows again because I felt OS X was so much better. Now I find myself only really sticking to OS X for two reasons: (1) it still has better touchpad interaction on a laptop; (2) it's still based on Unix so I prefer it for programming.
It's less about Snow Leopard having been supposedly perfect and more about how OS X feels like it's just floundered around randomly since then.
Agreed. It's not that Snow Leopard was some magic release that can never be bettered, it's that it has never been bettered. I can't think of any new features since then that I really value in OS X.
there was a day where I never wanted to touch Windows again
I switched from Windows to OS X back in 2006 thinking I would run Boot Camp for Windows 90% of the time. Boy was I wrong. But nowadays, if the Surface Book trackpad was as good as the Macbook's (it might be, I don't know) and cygwin was better integrated into the OS, I would be very tempted to switch back.
Reviewers seem to think the Surface Book trackpad isn't quite as good as the MacBook Pro, but it's close. (No idea if they're comparing against the new Force Touch trackpads, which I personally think are a regression):
hmmm, why do you feel that the new Force Touch trackpads are a regression? I've yet to use one, but I have other products that use Force Touch functionality, and I'm a big fan of my older Apple Trackpad.
It's just a matter of what you're used to. I'm a recent Mac convert and I can't stand the old clicky trackpads, but I love the haptic click on my MBP's trackpad.
I kept trying them in the Apple Store every week, and at first I thought it was amazing - it feels like an actual click! - but it feels like a mushy, unsatisfying click. The more I played with it, I noticed I was triggering lots of accidental clicks, accidentally moving files around on the desktop etc. I tried tweaking the settings (for sensitivity and click feel) but couldn't find any that gave me what I wanted. Disabling Force Touch and making the main Force Touch click standard for all clicks would be very close to what I want, but there's no way to do that.
I ended up purchasing a non-Retina MacBook Pro, in large part because of the trackpad. The click on the old 2012-era trackpad is sharp, solid, satisfying & deliberate, no accidental clicks.
I have a Surface Book from work, and I hate the trackpad. It feels (just the default out of the box, no specific tweaking) that its "mushy"-it feels like there's more resistance moving my fingers around on it than my MBP.
OSX is known to have a not so good window manager, in example. Well, instead of improving it, by implementing other WM's standards (look at almost all the Linux WMs and Windows', they have maximize buttons, they stack on the border of the screen, etc) they chose to not be smart and not, oh god not copy what works the best. They chose to "force" fullscreen instead of maximizing, to not implement stacking shortcuts, etc. They are going backwards. And sadly you can say that for a lot of things about OSX
For programming especially, yes. I can see that point.
IMHO, an Android programmer in particular will find OSX more comfortable and supportive than Windows because Android Studio and drivers and stuff mostly _just work_ on a Mac.
Example: get adb to talk to a Kindle Fire from your windows machine and then do that same thing from your Mac
Example: install genymotion on your Windows machine and fiddle around with VirtualBox and what have you, and then install genymotion on your Mac
Example: use something like GitBash (Android devs just have to use Git a lot) on Windows and then compare that experience to using a real Unix command line on OSX
Example: watch Tor Norbye give a talk about Android Studio productivity tips and notice that he can't help but give you Apple keyboard shortcuts.
Macs appear to be what most Android programming expert-types and the Android dev team itself use, day to day.
Android dev just seems to go a bit smoother on Macs than on Windows.
I develop on Windows and don't see the value on such examples.
Never used Genymotion, rather HAXM or real devices.
There are quite a few nice GUIs for Git, also no one has forced me to use Git so far.
I will become productive with Android Studio the day they are able to match what I already had with Ant, ndk-build and Eclipse ADT/CDT in terms of IDE/build performance and C++ support.
Keyboard shortcuts are the least that I care about in Studio.
"Never used Genymotion, rather HAXM or real devices."
Genymotion is miles and miles ahead of HAXM. Real Devices are best, though. But using real devices is much easier on OS X, due to not having to even think about drivers. I had to use Windows at a big corporate gig for a while, and that was one of the absolute worst parts of it: drivers.
"There are quite a few nice GUIs for Git, also no one has forced me to use Git so far."
It's pretty pervasive. Just about any major library is in git. Most projects are using git, too.
I use git on Windows every day and don't have any problem. I mostly use command line (the vim shell works just fine for entering commit messages), and TortoiseGit for when I want to look at history. For a difftool, I use BeyondCompare (company already had a license), which is really good.
As someone running Arch, I have no idea how devs can put up with OSX or Windows. Both are awful, both you cannot fix yourself, and both get in the way all the time of what you want to do.
For me, if I'm missing something, its a pacman or AUR search away. If I need development features of anything it exists as a -git repo as well, and I can super fast insert my patches and get what I need immediately. No updates or any of this insanity stand in my way, and my systems been stable for almost three years since I built it, I just subscribe to the Arch announcements mailing list for major updates that might cause problems. We just got Linux 4.4 yesterday, and I booted today and kept on rolling as per usual.
Very similar experience here: As a mac guy, I only have a single gaming / audio PC running Windows 10 in the living room and I'm very impressed with how snappy, useful and flawless everything works.
Frankly, my usage on this machine is very limited - no development environment, editors or other applications, didn't even configure a mail client. Just Steam, Kodi and Roon.
I don't have any intention to switch platforms and still think the third party applications available on Windows are, while available in huge quantities, mostly subpar and terribly designed, however the core parts Microsoft delivers with the OS really, really impressed. Very solid.
> People deride the "iOS style" features of El Capitan but first, what specifically are you referring to besides Launcher?
So much hideousness.
Like breaking Save As... with a clunky autosave set up.
Like a badly thought-out full screen mode that couldn't even cope with an external monitor being connected (this being something that worked on the 512k Mac).
Like automatically terminating background apps, and purging resources within apps (so that Safari would reload all your background tabs randomly).
Like App Sandboxing which is so restrictive as to rule out an entire class of applications from the piss-poor Mac App Store, and to continually fill the Console with Apple's own system services getting dinged for sandbox violations.
Like discoveryd.
Like abstracting away the filesytem, so that you hit "Move" on an document and get a crippled filepicker appearing from the title bar.
Have they actually added anything good since 10.6? Some window management has improved a bit. Startup is immensely better. iMessage is getting there (though iChat AV was still better at group video chat than anything since, including Hangouts). You mention AirDrop, but that's a mess (and the awful Chooser was still a better way of finding other Macs to connect to than the Finder is today).
One wonders if the yearly release schedule has something to do with this. It's got to be a constant rush to tick off the new feature boxes, and then we don't get the period of bug fixing and stability before the engineers all rush off to start implementing next year's new additions.
For a long time it was effectively on a two year clock; they had releases in 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009, and 2011. Now it's half that.
I once saw a very nice chart about the number of users for a great, cool start-up everyone knows about. The CEO illustrated: "You see that inflexion point on the release day? That's what happens for every release. If we postpone it by 3 months, we not only lose 3 months of new customers (painting the 3-months area between lower and higher sales). We also miss on the offset." and he painted the unlimited area between the lower sales and higher sales. And he talked about the recurrence of the inflexion for each release, and he talked about the immobilized capital inventory.
But their growth primarily comes from hardware, how much would OS X updates influence that growth?
Their hardware from 2008 is running El Capitan, so there isn’t much persuasion for existing customers to upgrade. It seems like if someone is going to switch to Mac, they would do it regardless of any features introduced in the last 3-4 OS X releases.
I don’t know, I’m not a sales guy. But it seems like the tradeoff of losing your customer base due to unreliable software isn’t worth it.
OSX updates are driven by iOS updates, which are the main revenue generators. Apple must release iOS every year to follow phone releases; OSX has to follow suit in order to support iOS "integration" features (Handoff, Photos etc etc).
Because release cycles are so short, test cycles are shorter as well; and of course new hardware is tested first (and foremost), so updates to older hardware will see more bugs, and updates are always buggier anyway (because it's harder for developers to predict the state of your system pre-migration).
I certainly see the yearly release cycle for OSX as being a big factor for the perceived fall in quality. In addition, there is probably a glut of "peak Air", people who switched to Mac when the Air was unrivalled and have not bought anything since. Their hardware is less and less tested with each update, so they're feeling the pinch. Apple don't care, because they want new money from them.
Are they really losing a significant percentage of their customer base due to unreliable software though? I doubt it. I expect that most people who use OS X and care about bugs probably have a negative perception of Windows (whether that's still warranted or not). So that leaves Linux. And as good as desktop Linux has become, it's still not the OS for people who don't want to spend time dealing with strange computer issues. So what's left to switch to?
Mac Mini is 1.5 years old, Mac Pro is >2 years old, 13" Macbook Pro is 1 year next month (and conspicuously absent from rumors of Apple's upcoming announcement event, gotta release those watch bands though).
The iPhone is definitely on a 1-year cycle, but it's not really something they put effort into maintaining on their computers. MacBook Air and iMac are probably the closest.
I blame iOS/Mac features tie-in like Continuity. OS X definitely gets the short end of the stick from that.
If you think their software quality is bad, you should look at their software development software quality. I'll just leave this: http://www.textfromxcode.com/
Apple seems much more concerned with adding new features than fixing bugs, even if that means a significant portion of their users have a bad experience.
The punchline that "it just works" is not lost in time. Lot of Apple designed software are more like talking points when they release iPhone or do a big media event.
Mac OS as lot of Apps which need update, Photos -- was more of an attempt to catch up with Picasa
Similarly notes and icloud as well need updates. It feels like Apple just wants to through sometime out since they are trying to catch up with others in the market and once that is done, you have to wait another year just to get an update.
Software development and updates should be iterative and not based on media events.
Notes just received a pretty significant upgrade. And Photos was upgraded recently as well -- for better or worse. You picked the two most recently upgraded apps as being in need of an upgrade.
Is Apple's software quality truly declining? I've been an OS X user for a couple years now, and I'm perfectly happy with my laptop and its updates.
Whenever I read articles like these, I wondered if the software quality has actually declined, or if it's received too many features to be properly maintained, or if now it has so many more users that the flaws have become more apparent.
> or if it's received too many features to be properly maintained
That means that it's not properly maintained, which means declined.
> or if now it has so many more users that the flaws have become more apparent
More eyes do find rarer bugs, and hundreds of millions of eyes is a LOT.
But I can tell you from personal experience that all sorts of little simple things that used to work don't and it gets very obnoxious. I've been using Apple stuff since ~2004 (ignoring the iPod I had earlier) and I do think things are worse.
Anecdotally I've noticed a significant degradation of quality over the last year or so, everything from updating a new iOS device from on iCloud backup, general iOS bugs, OS X wifi connectivity issues etc etc. It's been noticeable.
Besides little long time bugs (like my device prompting for password because it's been 48 hours since last TouchID when it's actually been like 8) there are bugs in new things.
Since 9.0 (or so) using CarPlay I find that it occasionally messes up the audio engine on the phone requiring a restart to a fix. That means instead of my old weeks and weeks of uptime it now varies between 24h and 7d or so.
Having your phone not have audio work correct? Horribly obnoxious. Especially when 70% of what you do is listen to music and podcasts.
I gave up on Podcasts and switched to Overcast because Apple (despite years) was unable to correctly sync which podcasts I'd listed to and which I hadn't. I'm wary to buy things from iTunes because I end up with 2 or 3 copies in my library of some songs, randomly.
I STILL randomly get corrupted songs on my phone and occasionally have to reload all 45GB of music (everything I own, just easier since I have the space) to fix the issue. Don't know why.
I think I'm in the same boat, only a Mac user for less than 5 years. It seems to me that it's never been perfect, but that it remains somewhat above its alternatives, especially with the hardware/software integration they can have... but it can't compete with its own reputation.
Depending how long ago you started using a Mac, you may have started using them after the slide started.
From my own experience, and the experience of other Mac users that I know, I think that the quality of their software has had a marked decline in the last decade or so. The exact reasons aren't totally apparent, but it seems like there's too much rush to add new 'features' without fixing and refining existing ones, and that annual releases aren't giving them sufficient time to polish what's already there. It's no accident that Tiger was incredibly stable and 'complete' after having nearly three years of work done on it.
I'm not advocating they work for three years on each version of OS X, but even 18 months, and fewer new 'features' per release, would give them more time to improve the quality of what they're releasing.
Indeed, I rarely have any kernel panics, or system crashes on OS X, and especially iOS with the latest iPhone. Other than iTunes, their software (that I use) has been pretty good lately.
I've actually had more problems with the hardware. My late 2011 Macbook Pro was just returned from the offsite Apple Repair with it's 3rd logic board (that being said, it's still under an extended warranty from Apple, which is at least a consolation prize).
I'm not sure any OS really suffers from system crashes these days. The expected quality bar is now much higher (Fyi: I use Windows, Mac and Debian every day).
Actually I have to restart the Finder every few days because the network drives either disappear or are no longer reachable. Sometimes the shortcuts disappear as well especially the ones that are located on a network drive (I tried both smb and afp).
I've also noticed a lot of slowness throughout the OS. The spinning colored wheel shows up very often compared to previous OS versions and on all kind of actions.
That spinning colored wheel issue went away for me when I upgraded from 4GB RAM to 20GB. It was constant and terrible in El Capitan before I did that, though.
I'm not really sure, it's hard to point to something that's just plain broken. I noticed that some small UI features that I don't like in El Capitan, it seems slower, but nothing's crashing or preventing me from working.
Part of it might be that Apple is moving in direction that many professionals/developers don't like.
iTunes is different story though, that piece of junk needs to get replaced. Half the time it would even find my iPod and I doubt Apple cares because "get an iPhone".
My 2013 Macbook Pro keeps crashing with Firefox, a few times every day. I cannot use Firefox anymore, I had to switch to Chrome. And as I am writing this Mail crashed because I wanted to forward an Email with a large picture in it. And messages has crashed numerous times, I don't use that either anymore.
So yes, for me Apple's software quality truly has declined sind Snow Leopard.
I was probably unclear: The whole computer freezes, and there is nothing I can do except a "hard" reset, i.e. pressing the power button until it shuts off.
But there are more issues still, e.g. that the computer will only connect to my bluetooth radio after a restart.
Firefox is nowhere related to Apple of course, but it is so bad on Mac. I recently went back to Chrome because it just works so much better on my macbook. (El Capitan)
I've been using OSX since 2003 and I think it's better than ever. My guess is some people are just nostalgic for a time when computers were easier to master/understand.
On OS X this is especially true: OpenGL implementation has fallen behind the competition, the filesystem desperately needs updating, the SDK has needed modernizing for years, networking and cryptography have seen major gaffes. And that’s with regards to the under-the-hood details, the applications are easier targets: it’s tragic that Aperture and iPhoto were axed in favor of the horrifically bad Photos app (that looks like some Frankenstein “iOS X” app), the entire industry have left Final Cut Pro X, I dare not plug my iPhone in to my laptop for fear of what it might do, the Mac App Store is the antitheses of native application development (again being some Frankenstein of a web/native app), and iCloud nee MobileMe nee iTools has been an unreliable and slow mess since day one.
I've found myself thinking along similar lines. The two biggest offenders in my opinion are (1) feature bloat and (2) poor UX/UI decisions. iTunes is a prime example of how the confluence of both can turn a relatively simple and popular app into a quasi-unusable nightmare.
I've also noticed a lot more freezing and kernel panics on my iPhone, to the point where I've stopped updating the OS for fear of what might be introduced in the next version.
Feature bloat is a problem in virtually every piece of software people have ever used.
Time and time again a startup comes along with "-foo- simplified", gets people to switch with it's ease, bloats up the product over time, and then loses to the next guy.
"The best thing for Apple to do is to re-take their position as a leader of software quality before it's too late: consumers know that Apple's hardware is the very best, but more and more their using apps made by Google and Microsoft and Facebook."
I'm glad to see that other people have noticed this. iTunes has always been a pain to use, but otherwise Apple's software used to be incredibly robust and worked well. Nowadays Apple seem to be pushing out updates without proper testing. It's got to the point where I'm hesitant to actually update my devices for fear they'll become unusable. And that's never good.
At one point both my MacBook and my iPhone were suffering from regular graphical glitches. It's still an occasional problem, but at least Apple have got on top of it for the most part. I just wish they'd do something to stop my iPhone from kernel panicking and automatically restarting itself every so often.
It's got to the point where I'm hesitant to actually update my devices for fear they'll become unusable. And that's never good.
Sadly, this doesn't seem to be specific to Apple either. It has become almost the norm in many parts of the software industry, to the extent that I don't voluntarily update any software that is installed and working any more, other than essential security updates. These days, even that is only done after a search to see which supposedly essential Windows updates are actually important for security, because I no longer trust Microsoft to be honest about what their updates are for either.
My default assumption otherwise is that running any sort of updater on application software, or heaven forbid on drivers or the whole OS, has a better than even chance of breaking something I care about, and that every time a browser auto-updates there is a close to 100% chance it will break something I care about or change something in a way I don't want or need. But since almost everyone is now producing similar levels of unreliable and unstable products, there's little you can do to get away from it.
Combined with the version ratcheting problem we were discussing a week or so ago here on HN, also in connection with Apple but also a much wider problem within the industry, it's becoming almost impossible to simply choose and use software you actually want, and to upgrade if and when a better version for your needs is available. This is not a good thing.
It's undeniably true that Apple software has lacked in quality in the last couple of years. I say this as my Siri stopped working altogether, Photos app upgrade destroyed my library and my iPhone keeps telling me the songs I downloaded aren't there.
While my point of view is strictly limited to security, I really don't think Apples software quality has declined. I think it's always been really shit, but has been receiving unprecedented amounts of attention lately.
Software quality is a nebulous and divisive topic. There are many parameters to software quality – reliability, speed, user experience, design, discoverability, and more – and a move towards any of these virtues leads to sacrifices in others, especially on a limited time schedule. Additionally, a number of forces influence software quality over time, like accommodating for different use cases, changes in platform, changes in hardware, changes in design preferences, changes in market, changes in expectations, and more. Finally, software is not like digging a hole, say, where more people really can dig a hole faster than fewer people: in fact, more people can often slow down a software project.
Nobody knows this better than the technology titans of today: Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle have all experience unanticipated software problems and regressions and high profile bugs. These are organizations with thousands of programmers writing and maintaining millions of lines of code for billions of devices. And these devices are machines which require perfection: one slight ambiguity of intent, any minor breach of contract, any single unexpected 0 where there should be 1 or vice versa … has the capability the bring down the whole system. In fact, it often does. Countless kernel panics, stack overflow errors, null pointer exceptions, and memory leaks are plaguing poor users and tired system administrators and overworked programmers right now. Machines are fast, but they can be awfully dumb.
And no company is feeling the pain of software’s nebulous nature and hardware’s mindless computing more than Apple right now. The underdog that many loyal fans rooted for is now the world’s (perhaps previous) most valuable company. With that, comes insanely high expectations: they need to grow the world’s biggest company every quarter to keep Wall Street happy, and even harder, they have to keep those nerds that kept them alive through the hard times happy too. And with release after release of the most revolutionary operating system ever, it’s tempting to picture Apple like an actual Titan, in particular Atlas, holding the world upon his shoulders. But it seems more and more every day that another Greek tale is more fitting: it’s time to admit that Apple have flown too close to the sun.
Walt Mossberg, technology journalism’s elder statesman, has this to say about Apple’s software quality:
In the last couple of years, however, I’ve noticed a gradual degradation in the quality and reliability of Apple’s core apps, on both the mobile iOS operating system and its Mac OS X platform. It’s almost as if the tech giant has taken its eye off the ball when it comes to these core software products, while it pursues big new dreams, like smartwatches and cars.
On OS X this is especially true: OpenGL implementation has fallen behind the competition, the filesystem desperately needs updating, the SDK has needed modernizing for years, networking and cryptography have seen major gaffes. And that’s with regards to the under-the-hood details, the applications are easier targets: it’s tragic that Aperture and iPhoto were axed in favor of the horrifically bad Photos app (that looks like some Frankenstein “iOS X” app), the entire industry have left Final Cut Pro X, I dare not plug my iPhone in to my laptop for fear of what it might do, the Mac App Store is the antitheses of native application development (again being some Frankenstein of a web/native app), and iCloud nee MobileMe nee iTools has been an unreliable and slow mess since day one.
This isn’t the first time that a prominent member of the Apple community has criticized Apple’s software quality. Here’s Marco Arment from January of 2015:
Apple’s hardware today is amazing — it has never been better. But the software quality has fallen so much in the last few years that I’m deeply concerned for its future. I’m typing thi...
The worst thing about Apple is not the drop in quality, but the way in which every fan and user kicking and screaming about it doesn't make them realize how awful their products are.
If we could just have a rule that said "don't get Apple's first version of a product", but they continue to be terrible. I recently lost my entire music collection because my Apple Music subscription ended, and now I have to download them all one by one via iTunes - even though I only want to stream them to save the disk space.
This happened across both Windows and OS X, of course.
I bought a first gen apple product with this in mind (new macbook), and it's been surprisingly good. My usb adapter sucks, yes, so that's a pain, but since it's not my primary computer it doesn't matter so much. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone as their primary computer. That being said, when the next one comes out I'm ditching this one and getting the new one; first-gen apple products are really mostly proof-of-concept it seems. (iPad 1 vs iPad 2, for example)
I'm glad someone has written about this because it's something I've noticed over the past few OSX major releases. The interesting thing is that speed and stability appear to have been getting better for my use cases. However for the first time in my 20 years as an Apple user, this has been at the expense of visual fidelity. Both iOS and OS X seem to be slightly "glitchier" and applications end up in bad states where the only clear path to a fix is relaunching.
Not to be a stickler, but this particular part of the discussion seems unfair to me. Application bugs should be blamed on the app developer, not on OS X. (Unless, of course, it's one of Apple's built-in apps.)
I fully agree with this article. So much stuff on OS X is neglected. The recent releases only focused on minor updates of the UI, while many components in the lower layers have not seen updates since OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (2011). And if they do, it gets as bad as the disaster around discoveryd introduced with OS X 10.10 Yosemite [1].
On a small sidenote, Apple's ticker symbol is actually AAPL, not APPL. I hope you did not invest into the wrong company's stock!
It's surprising just how bad Apple's software has got in a seemingly small space of time.
Yosemite was the biggest disgrace of all. My mouse or keyboard would not wake the iMac after it went to sleep. And the beach ball was seen so frequently that my 1500 CHF iMac was useless after just 2 years. El Capitan finally fixed the sleep issue and the beach ball is seen much less, but I'd expect much more for the price I paid. The profiteering of Apple with regard to having an SSD with the iMac also severely annoys me.
My iPhone seems to have numberous glitches and software issues too. And for a fine example of just "what the hell are apple thinking" - the original incarnation of the battery monitor in iOS was it. What's the use of seeing the percentage of the battery an app has used - a completely useless statistic unless it included the time too. I still don't find it a particularly useful feature, as I am sure my battery is draining too fast, but the battery monitor gives me no simple way to prove this.
iOS low battery mode disabling itself once charge goes over 80% is really annoying, but maybe I'm just used to how it behaves on the platform they copied the feature from...
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadWhen 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.
And the design as way harder to master than it should be. For instance, to search for a track in Apple Music, you have to be in any tab except iTunes Store. OK, there's some logic to it, but it simply is not intuitive. Why can't there be something that specifically says "Apple Music" that makes it obvious that that's where you go to find tracks? I'm an experienced computer user, and in fact a software developer, and when I first purchased Apple Music I was mystified about how to search for a track in Apple Music. I had to Google it. My wife, who isn't used to Googling for these kinds of answers and isn't a technologist, has no choice but to ask me or the kids how to do things like that.
In the Music app iOS, to make it show only the tracks you've downloaded, you have to click on the pulldown where you select Artists/Albums/Songs/etc. It's a switch on the bottom of that pulldown. When you're thinking "What tracks do I have downloaded?" this is just not obvious. When you get used to it, it's fine. But if you're a naive user, you really have to have a friend who's an experienced user just in order to figure out how to do such basic things. Naive users may not even understand that the Artists/Albums/Songs/etc. pulldown is a menu. And even if they know it is a menu, it's not intuitive to think that there's an on-off switch for showing all songs at the bottom of it, which relates a fundamentally different concept.
It all just seems like really poor design. I don't know what their problem is. But my son, who has always been an Apple user because I've been one, and who is applying to colleges like MIT to do engineering, is seriously considering switching to Android so that he doesn't have to deal with so many bugs. (Not that I know that Android is better.)
Simple example: Mail tries to guess settings for you. If you don't want it to do this - it regularly gets them wrong - you have to uncheck a box in the Advanced tab for every account you have. (Because obviously, that's where you're going to look.)
Then, instead of making the change, you have to click any other account, just so you can get a save dialog.
And if the account is disabled, it ignores your change until you enable the account. Then you can finally save the change and start modifying the settings.
Elsewhere, the latest version of Logic Pro is so bad it's been causing outrage on user forums all over the Internet.
Product management seems to have become completely clueless about user needs, basic UI designer, or QA.
I have no idea who's in charge now, but whoever it is has no idea what they're doing.
Also their usage of words like "account", "mailbox" and "folder" never ceases to confuse me...
Isn't it Jonny Ives? He has a very sensitive eye for physical design. But he may know, or care, nothing about good software design.
I suggest "obscuratationalism"
My last solid OS X machine was a 17" MBPro with a G4. I forget the OS - Cheetah maybe? That year I also had a developer Intel box. It seems like it was that transition that I could really feel things were going awry.
I'm not talking about the dev box, it was what came after. I had a MBPro 15" Intel machine that was really buggy hardware-wise. yOu could no longer apply updates without rebooting (something we all disapprovingly looked down on at Windows). The software just didn't work anymore either, or at least it felt like it didn't.
I think a lot of this was tied to more and more embedding of Apple apps, just like Microsft did. That and gaining some sort of complacency because they were not the scrappy underdog.
I've been waiting for another Snow Leopard where Apple just says "no more 'features', just bug fixes and stability" (for iOS as well). bUt I think that's just a pipe dream at this point and the train of more is better had already left the station.
There is a technical reason for this, and it's not a QT program problem, but rather a QT container problem. The QT container file does a horrendous job at synchronizing audio and visual streams. QT playback software exploits this problem, though, by intentionally lagging the start of a video by a few frames in order for the audio and visual streams to match up on the timeline. By not having to track the sync after the initial playback lag, the file plays more "reliably" and "quickly" but this also means that the decoder has no reference point from which it can scrub backwards. Because the "quick" in QuickTime really is a misnomer. This is lazy time, not quick time.
You are probably referring to the delay introduced by b-frames, but the mov container has got a atom ('cslg') to store the max and min offsets and put everything in sync again.
Unfortunately third party mov demuxers don't support cslg or edit lists, so they only supports the simplest mov files.
AAC, like MP3, introduces a padding of silence at the beginning of the stream. Because modern QT container files do not compensate for this, all audio and video streams within this type of QT file will be off sync by default. QT playback software waits for the audio stream to begin (waits for silence padding to end) before video playback begins, even though the streams themselves line up 1:1 in the container file. This is lazy engineering, not an advanced feature.
On such large apps that need large teams of engineers, without good product management and also project management, even great engineers can do a terrible job despite all their efforts or heroics "on the ground".
A huge factor in Apple's sliding software quality is lock-in: once you're on iOS using an iPhone, it's so much easier to simply stay on iOS than it is to move platform. Most people, myself included, will look at the effort required to move and decide that, really, the grass probably isn't greener enough to make climbing the fence worth it. Once you add in some other Apple devices --- say a laptop or an iPad --- staying becomes even easier.
I don't believe that. You're just as locked into Android after using it for a while as you would be with iOS.
The problem with Apple, and I've said this for ages, is that Apple is fashion. It's a status symbol, Sony used to be that same way, and look at it now. It had similar business verticals, pushed the same proprietary nonsense instead of adopting what the rest of the industry is doing and they were drowned as they began to expand their portfolio of devices.
Apple makes great quality devices, but Apple also enjoys massive hardware margins. Hardware margins diminish with time, no company has successfully escaped it. So the question is, at what point does Apple go out of style?
Once the nanomachines are here, there is no guarantee that Apple will remain relevant.
Apple already did this when Microsoft released Windows and NEC made "clones" that worked really well for a lot less price.
EDIT: Looks okay now 10 minutes later.
also:
> consumers know that Apple’s hardware is the very best, but more and more their using apps made by Google and Microsoft and Facebook.
"they're", not "their".
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.
This is the same old tripe about the young generation's moral decline, and rose-tinted rearview glasses.
Many releases had critical flaws that needed a point release in less than 2 weeks.
Now that he's gone (and without anyone with his charisma to take over), the public is left to contemplate the ignoble reality of the current product sitting in front of them. The sense of wonder and possibility is absent.
http://inventor-labs.com/blog/2011/10/12/what-its-really-lik...
Apple UIs were better because they were doing what ESR suggested at a time when the rest of the world was smashing every new option into the right-click menu. Occasionally I'll still hear someone say, "Oh, just put that in the right-click menu." The right click menu isn't a trashbin to dump things that don't fit elsewhere. In any case, here is ESR's UI advice: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cups-horror.html
I've been using OSX since just after Panther. I generally agree with the idea that some things started getting worse after Snow Leopard, but I still don't think it's come close to a point where I'd actually move back to Windows or try out desktop Linux.
And I'd say Windows had far more issues that BSODs and memory problems. I've used Window for music production for years (by the time I switched everyday stuff to OSX, I was locked into my music workflow and haven't cared to spend the time learning a new package like Logic, even after all these years). The way I survive Windows problems is pretty simple: never plug in an ethernet cable. I'm sure things are far better now, but for a large part of the past 15 years, doing so opened you up to a lot of problems and required utilizing software you simply should not have to install in order to have a functional system.
Also, a high percentage of OSX users have no idea what XCode is, let alone care if it's not as nice as VisualStudio.
Conversely, I'm now working at a company that's all-MS, but even after two years now (albeit, only a month on W10, previously on W7), I'm still not feeling much of a desire to switch to Windows at home. My Macbook is getting pretty old now and I'm going to want to replace it sometime soon and it's going to be another MBP.
I wouldn't say Windows 10 is behind OS X at all. In some contexts, like a corporate workplace, it's at least a decade ahead, and always has been. (Then again, Apple and Mac fans generally discount that environment entirely.)
The biggest problem Windows 10 has are: 1. Crummy HighDPI support (and yes, they've been working on this, but the work is WAY too slow-- this should have been solved 5 years ago, guys) 2. Crummy third-party apps, made by developers who have no respect for the OS or its users 3. The new "constantly updates, and occasional ads" philosophy Windows 10 is taking. I wouldn't even mind the ads much if they weren't so stupid. (Stop trying to sell me the copy of Office 365 I ALREADY OWN!)
I really liked XCode, a lot more than Visual Studio, until they remade it to look like iTunes (around 2012).
So there is definitely some preference involved for those people who say Visual Studio is better (and of course, vice versa).
(Sometimes I just throw my hands up and decide that something, whatever it is, is just never going to be my cup of tea, and that's that. I've done that with a few software packages and/or styles of working. But in Xcode's case, I'm pretty sure it's them, not me. Because Xcode 3 was fine...)
I don't think that's really true. From 2K onwards windows was pretty solid if you kept it up to date. I never used any firewall/antivirus/etc., just disabled unneeded services (admittedly the defaults in 2K and XP were poor), didn't run executables attached to suspicious emails etc.
So what issues do you have with 10.11? Because I don't see anything to complain about. Then again, I also didn't see anything troubling in 10.10, 10.9 and 10.8, with the exception of their ill-fated transition to a new DNS backend, which they later reverted.
A few bugs here and there, yes. Nothing I haven't seen since 10.2, or that's not comparable to the kind of issues I have with Windows 10 or the Ubuntu box I use for development (actually that's far worse, but I digress).
Still a total disregard of Fitt's law. Horribly inconsistent keyboard support. Behaviour that should be trivially configurable seemingly set in stone. Still, I think, impossible to cut a file in Finder. However many shots that take, apple can't get WiFi working properly. The transparency is an abomination.
If you want something more 'big picture', I think all the changes introduced over the lifetime of OSX have been a bit piecemeal with no overall, unifying process. For example, full-screen mode gets bolted on, rather than nicely integrated with other window actions. Notifications blossom into a side panel, but there's an overlap with bouncing icons in the dock. Etc. There are some great ideas there, but we could really do with an OS11 that picks the best ones and presents them together, in a clean interface, in which they all belong.
Well, those are not software quality issues. Some of those are design decisions, and have been with us forever, not random accidents: "Cut", for example, has never been on the Mac. Transparency in 10.11 is so lightweight you don't even notice it -- nothing Vista-like about it.
As for "total disregard of Fitt's law" that's not some decline either, as it's not worse or better than it has ever been in OS X.
>However many shots that take, apple can't get WiFi working properly.
Well, that qualifies as buggy software. But I have to wonder.
I've had an iBook, 2 MacBookPros (1 company issued), an iMac, a MacBook Pro Retina (current), 2 iPads and 2 iPhones thus far. And I've travelled all over the US, Europe and in several parts of Asia. I've never had any trouble with wifi, even to non-chain, el-cheapo motels.
The only offender has been my iPhone(s), which indeed I've not been able to connect to 3-4 places (restaurants etc) while traveling, over many hundreds of locations over 8 years. And I can't even know if it was because of the iPhone crapping out, or they using some crappy, third party router.
So I wonder, what are all those wi-fi issues people mention in forums etc.
Apple Notes would like a word with you. Specifically the word 'Cut' under the Edit menu.
Apple Calendar would also like the word with you.
Terminal. Script Editor.
Not sure how you come to some conclusion that Cut is not "on the Mac".
My Apple devices regularly need me to switch WiFi off and on, in my home which has an Airport Extreme and Express, both with latest firmware.
We're talking about Cut for files (in the Finder), not inside apps.
I agree with this 98%, with the exception of early releases of Yosemite, which really did seem to have a WiFi problem on the rMBP (even with Apple Airport Extreme base stations), in that it would disconnect a lot and you'd have to recycle your WiFi off/on. Annoying but not a deal breaker. And fixed within a month or two.
Otherwise I'd suspect there are some hardware + driver variations of Macbooks that may have had issues for others.
I think you're proving his case rather well.
And then Paste becomes a destructive operation that deletes your original files, or if you prefer, paste turns into "Move Item Here."
They've taken two different approaches to avoiding accidental data loss by overwriting the clipboard, but I wouldn't say one is inherently more right than the other. Windows makes new actions but has the interface pretend that it's doing the same thing as normal cut and paste. OS X makes the UI less standard, but describes what's being done more explicitly.
- UI non-responsiveness: it is extraordinarily frequent that I will chord a tab change in Safari or in iTerm2, and the system will not respond for sometimes multiple seconds. It's the same with creating tabs in Safari. ⌘-t or ⌘-{ do not respond.
- Application switching focus failures: ⌘-tab will raise another window, but window focus will not follow. This has caused me to lose work. ⌘-tab, ⌘-w will sometimes close an iTerm2 tab that's behind the Safari window I'm looking at.
- Mouse pointer lag: Probably related to the input lag above, the trackpad will not respond for multiple seconds after I begin touching it. If I "wake" it with a two-finger scroll, it will often lose half the input and instead click.
- AirPlay stuttering: even two ethernet-wired systems will still lose data between them. It's a crappy experience.
- discoveryd: My Apple TV's network name is currently "Apple TV (5)". Macs sometimes do this too.
- Slow laptop wakeup: I almost always have to tap a keyboard key to wake the display after opening my laptops (MBr and MBPr). Almost always. But not always.
That's just off the top of my head. Many of these have followed me between OS X revisions and different hardware. It amazes me that such bugs stick around.
Then I clicked Chrome in the dock, hit Cmd-Q, and watched Safari disappear while Chrome opened a new window. Guess it's not just you.
Ok, for this I can't say much, because every since 2010 or so I've used Chrome in place of Safari. As for iTerm2, I've tried to switch to it several times over the years (later mostly because of Tmux integration) but always found it to be buggy and reverted to the Terminal.
>Application switching focus failures: ⌘-tab will raise another window, but window focus will not follow. This has caused me to lose work. ⌘-tab, ⌘-w will sometimes close an iTerm2 tab that's behind the Safari window I'm looking at.
Hmm, haven't seen this -- and I use ⌘-tab and the ~ variant heavily.
I have seen lagginess in focus when switching full-screen apps use, and I sometimes start typing before that happens. This got a little better in 10.11 though (either faster focus switch or less transition time).
>- discoveryd: My Apple TV's network name is currently "Apple TV (5)". Macs sometimes do this too.
DNS issues I've had (and mentioned in another comment). They tried a transition to a new DNS backend which was buggy. They reverted back to the old one with 10.11 (or sometime in 10.10.x) though and has been OK since then.
>Slow laptop wakeup: I almost always have to tap a keyboard key to wake the display after opening my laptops (MBr and MBPr). Almost always. But not always.
Do see this from time to time (though it almost always works in my case).
Could be a sensor issue though -- not a software thing (the display up sensor not registering, but tap working ok).
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/...
There are also many libraries available to decode and encode these files in various languages.
The reason why XML property lists look this way is that they were a direct translation of the older NeXT "property list" format, which was sort of like binary JSON. Dumping an alternating list of keys and values isn't pretty XML, but it ensured minimum translation headaches from the old format.
OP is right about him not putting up with crap. Sure, not everything that came out of Cupertino was rock solid. But I think as much of an aesthete that he appears to be have been, it's also pretty evident that he was incredibly shrewd and knew he had to ship at some point.
The cruddy software might be coming from Apple repositioning itself from an innovation to a legacy brand. Acquiring Beats (can you imagine Steve championing this - lol), less of a focus on the high-end workstations for consumer electronics and watches, removing the grunt from high-end apps like Logic and FCP. Certainly no longer the underdog we root for, as the article points out.
To me it actually had the opposite effect: after reading it I had a newfound respect towards Apple and Jobs. The book was honest and fair, I don't know why people think it does a disservice to him since everyone knew he was an asshole. This is coming from someone that avoids Apple products, FWIW.
http://www.righto.com/2012/02/apple-didnt-revolutionize-powe...
I agree with OP. There is no way Steve would have allowed some of the current stuff to see the light of day.
You clearly never used iTunes for Windows.
via an All Things D event:
> What’s more, thanks to the popularity of iTunes on PCs, Apple has become a major Windows software developer. “We’ve got cards and letters from lots of people who say that iTunes is their favorite app on Windows,” noted Jobs. “It’s like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in Hell.”
That quip apparently caused Bill Gates to become quite angry:
https://books.google.com/books?id=6e4cDvhrKhgC&lpg=PA463&ots...
It forced a bundled QuickTime install (still does I believe), and back then, it tried hard to become the default media player on your system (even reverting your "no" choice after updates). This led many people to remove QuickTime, only to discover now their iTunes refused to work. It would fail halfway through sync's and upgrades of iDevices routinely, had a generally pretty buggy interface that wasn't very responsive most of the time. It's iDevice backup process was cumbersome for normal users, and often failed without the user knowing (leading to very upset individuals when they needed to restore but couldn't).
Now it seems every new version redesigns the UI in major ways, causing even long term users to not know what to click, etc...
If you really just listen to music, maybe it's fine. For all other purposes, it was/is horrible, however I can't complain because it generated quite a lot of work for my side repair/contract business back then.
Whip the Lama's A WinAmp is still better.
IME, every terrible thing about iTunes applies equally to both platforms.
Same with iTunes (which has gotten a ton of criticism over the years), he was the one that kept cramming everything under the sun into it.
I don't know if he was as passionate about X Code, but he sure liked to brag about having the best development environment. Interface Builder in particular seems right out of Steve Jobs' brain (even if it sucks).
Here he is introducing X Code: https://youtu.be/Rh5spZrzu6c?t=59m3s
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/recipes/xcode_help-I...
Interested to how you do versioning on UI with or without IB though. Personally I just maintain branches until an agreed upon design is in place.
Mail is much better than it was even a year ago, XCode too, the OS is stable...
And FCPX didn't deteriorate over 7 -- it was a written-from-scratch reboot of the platform that just happened to cut some features people used (most got back with a vengeance).
And five years is a long time when it comes to computers.
The problem now is none of the SVPs seem to have that attention to detail, or they are too stretched doing numerous things.
Maybe. I felt like the quality started going downhill shortly after iOS came out, starting with low-level APIs, then xcode, then making it into user-level applications.
My theory is that a lot of the really experienced engineers (the one who started with NEXT and OpenStep) left when they were rich after the iPhone stock jump.
So really there is nothing Steve Jobs could have done unless he had a developer education program or something.
While possible true I think the real issue is resources being spread too thin. Remember they had to delay the release os OS X one year as all their engineers were working on iOS? Now they're doing yearly releases of both OS's. I'm sure they've hired more engineers but pre-iOS there were probably lots of engineers who had been working exclusively on OS X for years and were able to maintain quality. New people take time to get up to speed.
I simply think the attempts to build stuff in common with iOS is taking its toll.
I'd say rather that things need to be simplified and features removed in order to improve quality. Every new Mac or iOS release touts XXX number of new features. If you want to offer the best products, having more features isn't necessarily a prerequisite.
Outside of software, we see a similar thing, a wrench (or spanner) hasn't gotten many new features, because the bolt that it turns isn't changing. the goal is roughly the same. The only appreciable changes have been in ergonomics, and even these are effectively static.
On the other hand, we have cars, which are suffering from so much feature creep it is unbelievable. every year, car engines get a little bit more efficient, but they also get heavier, bloated with more systems, infotainment, seat adjustments, window adjustments, etc.As a result, the efficiency of the improved powertrain seldom makes appreciable performance difference. (yes, there are outliers).
Cars then, might be the equivalent of "the ultimate app" which does everything for you, but loses sight of its purpose. Meanwhile, we have a long history of leaving single tools alone, and they tend to work great.
The trouble is that in the world of physical tools, the workflow changes/context switching between using one tool and then another is easy. Meanwhile, in software, feature creep ends up being the solution for poor context switching between apps. In an ideal world, working on an image in photoshop and then pixelmator, and then illustrator, and then publishing to wordpress would be as seamless as using a wrench, then a screwdriver, and then cleaning things up with a rag. Unfortunately, software interface constraints almost necessitate feature creep as the "simplest" way to add functionality, even when convoluted menus, hotkeys, and naming conventions obscure utility.
Ironically, it is the "handoff" features that Apple was traditionally best at. BUT, I have this feeling that most of what we hate can be described as "too little, too soon". After all, it could be argued that Apple is aiming for an environment which is "document focused" with their focus on standardized APIs (Adobe is working on this, too), but none of this works yet, because software is still written from an "Apps" POV. In the real world, we change the tool relative to the job, and the best tools are specific single tasks. given the experience so far, I'm far from convinced that a 2D GUI should ever try duplicate that.
I think the fact that the answer is so tough for computers is why feature creep is so common with software. When your tool can literally do anything you want it to, why say no? The constraints are actually in the mind of the customer.
On the topic of cars, it is true that modifications strive toward comfort, but they also strive for marketability. While a leather-wrapped dashboard may be comfortable to look at, it is primarily focused at adding something to market. This same phenomenon exhibits in software, where features are added to increase marketability, "Look! this ERP software has a social network built in!". The utility of a given feature is often perspective-based, especially when the user is not well aware of their actual needs, or the user and purchaser are not the same person.
Feature creep is necessary for closed applications.
The ideal is a set of simple tools around a simple and open file format. As soon as you lock in folks to your application (as Apple loves to do), you're on the hook for being all things to all people, or getting panned that your software is only for the lightest casual usel
Always go faster for a long time. Meaning tackle long aged hardware, long uptime, and just generally maintain same performance. Across everything, from device hardware and speed locally on the device to the wifi/4G signals, ISP, to the backend and their software and hardware. Performance in speed is the greatest subjective design and feature.
Unfortunately the time to invest in it requires convincing the designer and product that integrating A/B tests for hearts vs star for favoriting isn't worth it for the long run.
I'd say they need to fix the features they've implemented, and only release new features when they're fully cooked.
Removing features is terrible: it is not an improvement to me when my stuff breaks or when I'm forced into a dumbed-down, lowest-common-denominator use-case.
Not just Wall-Street types either; I see this primarily from tech people. Examples: Android M, OS X Snow Leopard (I think, I may have that release wrong but there was one there that was definitely 'not many new features'), basically anything where the next version isn't predominantly new shiny.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
When I got my first Mac back in the PowerPC days it was definitely a step up. In the past I feel that Apple was targeting power users. Today I think they are going after casual users. Probably capitalizing on the general popularity of iOS.
I've still got a couple of old Macs but they're all running Windows now. Visual Studio still has the occasional lock-up whatever hardware it's on. At least you don't have to sign in to an app store to update it though.
No. Just No. Windows loves to "forget" things. Things like Bluetooth devices. Or wifi devices. Windows likes to update your laptop for you when you're trying to close it ("Don't turn off your computer..." Wait, what? I have a plane to catch!). Windows scatters files all over the place! And that registry. UGH!
> Windows scatters files all over the place!
Just have a look into your Library folder on OS X. Also some programs don't use that, but create a dot folder in your home directory. Maybe I'm missing something though? I haven't used OS X much lately.
Apps which use dot folders in the home directory need to be smacked until they stop, but the OS can't really control where (non-sandboxed) apps put things, it can only establish conventions and encourage apps to follow them.
Also I remember a tool I used when I had a Macbook which helped you remove all the files when uninstalling something. I think it was this one: http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/25276/appcleaner I remember some programs even putting files in other directories than Library Support.
Oh look, OSX has touched this usb stick, and vomited it's dotfiles onto it. Did it ever write to the stick? Nope, just need to throw those trash dotfiles onto every. single. thing. it. sees.
No. Just No. Windows loves to "forget" things. Things like Bluetooth devices. Or wifi devices. Windows likes to update your laptop for you when you're trying to close it ("Don't turn off your computer..." Wait, what? I have a plane to catch!). Windows scatters files all over the place! And that registry. UGH!
Most likely because dogfooding
Like it or not, but MS tends to be very good with productivity software, be it Word, Excel, or Visual Studio.
Ah, you've fallen for the illusion. Those "simple" Mac apps you love are fantastically complex to implement. It's the user experience that is simple, and it takes a ton of sophisticated engineering to pull that off.
You can think of it as there being a certain fixed amount of complexity in the user attaining some goal. You can make your software simpler by foisting the complexity on to the user: just make them do all of the nit-picky tasks.
If you want to make it simple for them to achieve their goal, your app is going to have to contain that complexity itself.
You probably wasn't paying attention when Job was running things.
OS X 10.1 was a mess -- it took until several updates to become somewhat usable. The Finder was half-arsed for a decade. Mail.app had several issues. The Windows versions of iTunes was crappy. OS X releases that are now praised as "the best ever" etc, got tons of complaints for introducing bugs and instability. XCode has been historically crap (and it's much better now). And don't even get me started on the state of their Cloud offerings under Jobs.
Hardware wise the same. Every new release, from the original iPod to the iPad was met with complaints and bickering ("No wifi? Less space than a Nomad? Lame") -- even if it actually took wifi and batteries 5 more years to even start making practical sense to have on such a device for syncing. Aside from specs people complained about, there were also all kind of other HW issues, from the overheating G4 Cube, to the logic boards dying on G3 iBooks, to cooling goo spilling from G5 towers, the crappy "round" mouse, and lots of other stuff besides.
That said, I don't buy the "Apple software went downhill as of late" thing. First, because as said there were always issues. Second, because in normal use I don't see any particular decline. If anything things have got better, to the point where we complaint about trivial stuff. The thing is Apple of today puts out a heck of a lot more software and hardware products than the rosy Apple you remember.
I'd take iTunes in the back and kill it though -- as the latest redesigns are absolutely crap from a UX perspective. Then again, I wouldn't call that a programming quality issue -- more of a "idiotic focus and shoving on our faces of BS online music platform issue".
>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.
The opposite. XCode was "atrociously buggy" in the 3/4/5 era and before, and has gotten quite better in the 6/7 series (despite having to support a whole new language).
In fact a large list of early XCode 6 crashing bugs have been squashed months ago -- which was (as reported) around 90% of them.
Oh joy. I remember those days when people were angry because plugging your iPod into a new PC means wiping your library!
> That said, I don't buy the "Apple software went downhill as of late" thing.
Perception on Mac after people switch from Windows to Mac OSX immediately is awesome. The perception is different if you use Mac OSX for a long time and suddenly you see computer frozen every few days and requires a hard reboot. Many of that have to do the software you are running at the time, but why a sudden OS freeze, mouse couldn't move? That can't be a fault with Office / Skype, it has to be either a OS issue, or underlying hardware issue.
Mac OSX is generally really great, it doesn't feel slow compare to a lot of the PC out there. Polished UI and very responsive. In some release you do see slowness opening between finders or moving from one setting view to another. Those are defects people will cry and ask those defects weren't caught by the performance team.
That's because Windows has to deal with so many more differences in hardware. E.g. look at these pixel-level variations in LCD screens. http://www.digitalversus.com/tv-television/screen-technology... I don't understand how it would be possible to support subpixel rendering on some of those. IIRC when I last used Windows (XP?) it let you choose from 8 different schemes. But that still wouldn't nearly be enough!
OS X and IOS can be tweaked to support a much smaller subset of that mess.
I fully agree. I jumped on the Mac and OS X bandwagon in 2007. The first few releases of Leopard (10.5) were quite hellish, because I was constantly having Wifi problems. My HP Laserjet didn't work until 10.5.2 (in 10.5.0 and 10.5.1 it would just print a few pages and get stuck). Snow Leopard was a smoother ride, but only after a couple of dot releases.
I think there was a low point around Lion and Mountain Lion (lots of new features, but they were not polished enough). But since Mavericks it's been smooth sailing for me.
People also seem to have overly romantic recollections of past Apple software. Sure, Aperture and iPhoto were killed in favor of Photos. But Aperture was crap. Version 2 was still acceptable, but 3.x had constant hangs and slowness. And they were always trailing behind badly with RAW support. As many people, I have bought Aperture 2 & 3 and switch to LightRoom pretty soon after because of Aperture's lack of polish. A while ago I tried the new Photos. And although it does not have all of Aperture's features, it's a far better application in terms of speed and user experience.
tl;dr: I don't see this drop in quality.
Of course, App Store and iTunes need to be burned down to the ground and rewritten from scratch.
This is the key. We're definitely spoiled by how solid a lot of the basics are.
I can fault them for some of the cloud service issues nowadays, but even those work better than they did in years past.
Apple has always had strange hardware and software issues, just like everyone else. Just today I was trying to buy Windows 10 to install it on a PC I'm building, and the MS storefront and my Live account couldn't sync the deletion/addition of a credit card until I logged out of everything, closed the browser, and logged back in. No one is getting this stuff working flawlessly.
I bet it would be easy to find an "OS X is on a slippery slope..." article for each OS X release.
Xcode 3/4 were a lot harder to work with (IB and Instruments separate, had to use Clang on command line etc), but I don't recall them being particularly buggy. Xcode 7 with Swift is the buggiest version I have used. It crashes on me 10+ times a day with all of the instant compiler checks it does. The progression from 3 to 7 is amazing, but I feel it has come at the cost of stability.
Much better in my opinion. For example they've fixed all the issues with iMessage interoperability on OSX/iOS. There are a time when if you used Messages on the Mac you had to suffer through missing messages, duplicate messages, out-of-order messages, etc. Now, as far as I can tell, it's working flawlessly. Even better that it now includes SMS messages.
Says everyone who disagrees with any decision Apple makes. "Steve would have had the same opinion about this I do!" Statements like this are just you projecting your own opinion onto him.
Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs ... that's the guy with the skeuomorphic preferences, right? The one who, at the first iPhone release, told developers that they don't need native apps because using HTML + WebView is enough, right?
Just to make sure we're on the same page here.
> told developers that they don't need native apps because using HTML + WebView is enough
That's because the SDK wasn't ready for developers yet. You must remember that, first and foremost, Jobs was a great salesman. If you don't yet sell it, it's a piece of crap and unnecessary, right? And when you _do_ sell it, it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.
I understand the plan was to work with select third parties on a case by case basis, sort of akin to standalone game consoles.
It seems equally plausible, especially given how quickly they announced the SDK after the iPhone release, that Apple was preparing for it but not ready yet (and/or wanted to give themselves time to work out the early kinks in all of the other parts: working with AT&T, supporting the new device and new OS, etc, etc).
I seriously doubt that jailbreakers invented the smooth experience - they just likely unlocked the functionality that existed before Apple was ready to push it out (I'm guessing Steve wanted apps in the store at launch).
"Apple board member Art Levinson told Isaacson that he phoned Jobs “half a dozen times to lobby for the potential of the apps,” but, according to Isaacson, “Jobs at first quashed the discussion, partly because he felt his team did not have the bandwidth to figure out all the complexities that would be involved in policing third-party app developers.”
Apple had already established a model for selling third party software on the iPod video line through iTunes -- with select partners only.
When WWDC 2007 rolled around, after the release of the iPhone, Jobs presented web apps as the solution for developers, without the need for an SDK. It was only after months of sustained outcry from the development community, and the nascent jailbreaking scene, that Jobs announced that they would prepare a public SDK for the next year, after they decided on a method of signing and sandboxing applications.
The supposition that it was only due to the outcry of the development community is exactly that, a supposition.
Nowadays we have plenty of people complaining that they have to have "apps" for everything when they have a perfectly good web browser on their phone, so he wasn't that far off.
-iTunes bloat is a choice, and bugs.
-Mail.app is mostly bugs. (non-standard .mbox was a choice)
-Final Cut X was a choice.
-Eschewing strong AppleScript support in native applications is a choice.
-The app store(s) are a choice.
-Allowing core utilities like Contacts and iCal to stagnate and be outshone by 3rd parties (BusyMac) was a choice.
-Aperture+iPhoto=Photos was a choice. (So was selling Aperture after it was EOLed)
-FFF
In that case, allow me to summarize some of the choices that went into building the Mac App Store.
- It's a web view. No local caching of layout or anything. If your network connection hiccups, instead of a reasonably rendered error message, you get this: http://i.imgur.com/5xNgwMH.png
- Text in the search box is blurry. I'm not 100% sure why, but I think someone made a choice to render it with its y-position at a half pixel increment. And then nudge it down so it comes into focus when you click on it. Because really, what sort of asshole would still be using a low DPI screen? http://i.imgur.com/gj3mqrz.png
- How many Install buttons does an update need? Eh, let's choose two. Two's a nice number. And have that "Update All" button stick around even though all updates were already installed. https://i.imgur.com/p9QoCqZ.png
- Earlier today, though it didn't lend itself to screenshots, my Xcode "Install" vs "Installing" button that couldn't decide what mode it wanted to be in and just bounced back and forth instead. Why choose one when you can be both!
- The "Check for Unfinished Downloads" menu. Do you know what happens when a download doesn't finish? Or why it's not presented in a sane way in the normal UI? Me neither. Instead of gracefully handling errors, let's choose to bury them in a secret menu that people will happen upon via StackOverflow searches when their installation keeps failing with no indication of why. https://i.imgur.com/xkgP0lc.png
A+ design work right there. Excellent choices.
Remember Antennagate? The iPhone 4 had a serious hardware fault that significantly degraded it's signal. Jobs himself was the one who said to a customer "You're holding it wrong"
Visual Studio is nice, if you're not writing in Rust, Perl 6, Ruby, Objective C, D, Scala, Smalltalk...
Even putting aside the iOS-style elements being added, my experience has been that each version of OS X has been slightly worse than the last, and tends to introduce strange little anomalies and instabilities on hardware that was otherwise working just fine. Sometimes these issues are fixed in the next major version, but sometimes they aren't; and even when they are fixed, there are an equal number of new issues introduced.
My perspective is perhaps coloured by having switched to the Mac during the Tiger era, which was about equal with Snow Leopard in terms of stability and 'completeness'. Since then, with the exception of Snow Leopard, it's been downhill. (I realise, of course, that Tiger benefitted from 11 point updates and thus more polish than any version before or since, but the point stands.)
Just generalized instability and "weirdness" for lack of a better term. The problems always seem to go away after a fresh load.
It sucks that this is required, but between Time Machine bringing my apps and settings back, and launching the upgrade at night before bed, it's not really that much of an annoyance.
I'd still rather use OSX than any other OS at this point. But I think we need a Snow Leopard 2, a release that only tightens up the backend stuff with no new shiny features.
People deride the "iOS style" features of El Capitan but first, what specifically are you referring to besides Launcher? Do you think adding Notifications to OS X is bad? I find them extremely useful, and like the integration better than the spotty support Growler had among third party software.
I never use Launcher but it's not there for me. It's no skin off my nose that it exists for other people. And it's not like Finder or Spotlight have lost functionality, if anything I feel Spotlight in El Capitan is much better than it was in Snow Leopard or any prior OS X.
Mission Control works great and I think is much more elegant in El Capitan than in previous OS X releases. Granted in older OS X you could arrange your desktops in grids instead of just left to right but I only use about 3-4 desktops anyway, so I don't mind.
OS X has also improved for power users since Snow Leopard as well. Lion introduced FileVault 2 which I find to be a fantastically easy to use encryption system, that I have had no problems with. I enjoy my Retina screen and the Retina support that later versions introduced as well. Air Drop is also handy since my wife and coworkers have Macs as well.
In my mind, each new release of OS X, like each new release of iOS or anything really, has good things and less good things in it. But on the whole I'm glad to be running El Capitan today rather than Snow Leopard. I don't pine for those days.
You're right that there's a certain amount of rose-tinting with regards to Snow Leopard. It certainly wasn't perfect, and I wouldn't really want to switch back to it; the world has moved on since then, and SL isn't really competitive as a primary OS now.
With that said, though, my use-case in OS X hasn't dramatically changed since Snow Leopard --- mostly web-browsing, some IM, using the Terminal for various tasks --- but OS X's stability has changed in that time, for the worse. Apps crash more often, the OS itself is generally less stable and prone to random freezes which require a hard-restart. Doing a fresh install didn't fix these issues, and my fianceé's MacBook has them too, which makes me think it's not just hardware issues.
I think what I'm really looking for is Snow El Capitan: a year where nothing new is added and Apple throw intense focus on fixing the various weirdnesses that are introduced during their breakneck release cycle.
In fact, for me, I can honestly say that OS X has almost strictly regressed in terms of my day-to-day experience. Spotlight now covers up way too much of the screen for almost no gain; if I'd wanted that, I'd have just used Alfred. Mission Control is still not as powerful and flexible as Expose + Spaces, and now it even goes so far as to hide desktop thumbnails even on my dual 27" monitor setup. Seriously?
What's most shocking to me is how much Windows has caught up from a UX perspective. I have Windows 10 on my (primarily gaming-oriented) desktop. Since I don't use the desktop for much programming, I almost never find myself wishing that it was running OS X instead. That's a real blow to the magical grip that OS X once held over me. Cortana is just as good as spotlight -- better, even -- and it manages to be much more space efficient as well. Windows Explorer is so much more useful than the bafflingly overly simplistic Finder. On Windows, if I want to tile windows, I can -- get this -- just drag them to the side, top, or any of the four corners. On OS X, I have to either fiddle with their impressively clunky split-screen full-screen app disaster or use a third-party tool like Spectacle or BetterTouchTool.
I could go on, but I'll leave it at this: there was a day where I never wanted to touch Windows again because I felt OS X was so much better. Now I find myself only really sticking to OS X for two reasons: (1) it still has better touchpad interaction on a laptop; (2) it's still based on Unix so I prefer it for programming.
Agreed. It's not that Snow Leopard was some magic release that can never be bettered, it's that it has never been bettered. I can't think of any new features since then that I really value in OS X.
there was a day where I never wanted to touch Windows again
I switched from Windows to OS X back in 2006 thinking I would run Boot Camp for Windows 90% of the time. Boy was I wrong. But nowadays, if the Surface Book trackpad was as good as the Macbook's (it might be, I don't know) and cygwin was better integrated into the OS, I would be very tempted to switch back.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-surface-book-solving-...
I ended up purchasing a non-Retina MacBook Pro, in large part because of the trackpad. The click on the old 2012-era trackpad is sharp, solid, satisfying & deliberate, no accidental clicks.
Well said. For nearly a decade, every OSX was clearly better than the previous. The GUI kept getting more efficient, bugs disappeared.
Now when there's a new OSX version, my first thought is, "Oh no, what's going to break?"
IMHO, an Android programmer in particular will find OSX more comfortable and supportive than Windows because Android Studio and drivers and stuff mostly _just work_ on a Mac.
Example: get adb to talk to a Kindle Fire from your windows machine and then do that same thing from your Mac
Example: install genymotion on your Windows machine and fiddle around with VirtualBox and what have you, and then install genymotion on your Mac
Example: use something like GitBash (Android devs just have to use Git a lot) on Windows and then compare that experience to using a real Unix command line on OSX
Example: watch Tor Norbye give a talk about Android Studio productivity tips and notice that he can't help but give you Apple keyboard shortcuts.
Macs appear to be what most Android programming expert-types and the Android dev team itself use, day to day.
Android dev just seems to go a bit smoother on Macs than on Windows.
Never used Genymotion, rather HAXM or real devices.
There are quite a few nice GUIs for Git, also no one has forced me to use Git so far.
I will become productive with Android Studio the day they are able to match what I already had with Ant, ndk-build and Eclipse ADT/CDT in terms of IDE/build performance and C++ support.
Keyboard shortcuts are the least that I care about in Studio.
Genymotion is miles and miles ahead of HAXM. Real Devices are best, though. But using real devices is much easier on OS X, due to not having to even think about drivers. I had to use Windows at a big corporate gig for a while, and that was one of the absolute worst parts of it: drivers.
"There are quite a few nice GUIs for Git, also no one has forced me to use Git so far."
It's pretty pervasive. Just about any major library is in git. Most projects are using git, too.
Usually the projects are SDK only.
My current customer is using subversion and the third party projects, if any, use the internal Maven repository or vendoring for the C++ libraries.
For me, if I'm missing something, its a pacman or AUR search away. If I need development features of anything it exists as a -git repo as well, and I can super fast insert my patches and get what I need immediately. No updates or any of this insanity stand in my way, and my systems been stable for almost three years since I built it, I just subscribe to the Arch announcements mailing list for major updates that might cause problems. We just got Linux 4.4 yesterday, and I booted today and kept on rolling as per usual.
Personal opinion. Most Linux GUIs are awful to me.
"both you cannot fix yourself"
Moot point, as the vast majority of people, even tech oriented people, wouldn't do that if they could.
"and both get in the way all the time of what you want to do."
Again, completely depends on your personal workflow.
"For me, if I'm missing something, its a pacman or AUR search away."
Mac App Store, Fink, or Homebrew.
"If I need development features of anything it exists as a -git repo as well"
Git works just fine on OS X.
"No updates or any of this insanity stand in my way"
Except for, what you just mentioned, which are updates.
"We just got Linux 4.4 yesterday, and I booted today and kept on rolling as per usual."
Same thing happens with OS X updates.
I don't have any intention to switch platforms and still think the third party applications available on Windows are, while available in huge quantities, mostly subpar and terribly designed, however the core parts Microsoft delivers with the OS really, really impressed. Very solid.
So much hideousness.
Like breaking Save As... with a clunky autosave set up.
Like a badly thought-out full screen mode that couldn't even cope with an external monitor being connected (this being something that worked on the 512k Mac).
Like automatically terminating background apps, and purging resources within apps (so that Safari would reload all your background tabs randomly).
Like App Sandboxing which is so restrictive as to rule out an entire class of applications from the piss-poor Mac App Store, and to continually fill the Console with Apple's own system services getting dinged for sandbox violations.
Like discoveryd.
Like abstracting away the filesytem, so that you hit "Move" on an document and get a crippled filepicker appearing from the title bar.
Have they actually added anything good since 10.6? Some window management has improved a bit. Startup is immensely better. iMessage is getting there (though iChat AV was still better at group video chat than anything since, including Hangouts). You mention AirDrop, but that's a mess (and the awful Chooser was still a better way of finding other Macs to connect to than the Finder is today).
For a long time it was effectively on a two year clock; they had releases in 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009, and 2011. Now it's half that.
The thing is, we don't need a new OS every year, and most people I know don't want to update their devices either.
Where is the demand coming from?
Can't release new iOS features which involve the Mac without a corresponding OSX release.
I once saw a very nice chart about the number of users for a great, cool start-up everyone knows about. The CEO illustrated: "You see that inflexion point on the release day? That's what happens for every release. If we postpone it by 3 months, we not only lose 3 months of new customers (painting the 3-months area between lower and higher sales). We also miss on the offset." and he painted the unlimited area between the lower sales and higher sales. And he talked about the recurrence of the inflexion for each release, and he talked about the immobilized capital inventory.
Their hardware from 2008 is running El Capitan, so there isn’t much persuasion for existing customers to upgrade. It seems like if someone is going to switch to Mac, they would do it regardless of any features introduced in the last 3-4 OS X releases.
I don’t know, I’m not a sales guy. But it seems like the tradeoff of losing your customer base due to unreliable software isn’t worth it.
Because release cycles are so short, test cycles are shorter as well; and of course new hardware is tested first (and foremost), so updates to older hardware will see more bugs, and updates are always buggier anyway (because it's harder for developers to predict the state of your system pre-migration).
I certainly see the yearly release cycle for OSX as being a big factor for the perceived fall in quality. In addition, there is probably a glut of "peak Air", people who switched to Mac when the Air was unrivalled and have not bought anything since. Their hardware is less and less tested with each update, so they're feeling the pinch. Apple don't care, because they want new money from them.
The iPhone is definitely on a 1-year cycle, but it's not really something they put effort into maintaining on their computers. MacBook Air and iMac are probably the closest.
I blame iOS/Mac features tie-in like Continuity. OS X definitely gets the short end of the stick from that.
Apple seems much more concerned with adding new features than fixing bugs, even if that means a significant portion of their users have a bad experience.
Mac OS as lot of Apps which need update, Photos -- was more of an attempt to catch up with Picasa Similarly notes and icloud as well need updates. It feels like Apple just wants to through sometime out since they are trying to catch up with others in the market and once that is done, you have to wait another year just to get an update. Software development and updates should be iterative and not based on media events.
Whenever I read articles like these, I wondered if the software quality has actually declined, or if it's received too many features to be properly maintained, or if now it has so many more users that the flaws have become more apparent.
That means that it's not properly maintained, which means declined.
> or if now it has so many more users that the flaws have become more apparent
More eyes do find rarer bugs, and hundreds of millions of eyes is a LOT.
But I can tell you from personal experience that all sorts of little simple things that used to work don't and it gets very obnoxious. I've been using Apple stuff since ~2004 (ignoring the iPod I had earlier) and I do think things are worse.
Anecdotally I've noticed a significant degradation of quality over the last year or so, everything from updating a new iOS device from on iCloud backup, general iOS bugs, OS X wifi connectivity issues etc etc. It's been noticeable.
Since 9.0 (or so) using CarPlay I find that it occasionally messes up the audio engine on the phone requiring a restart to a fix. That means instead of my old weeks and weeks of uptime it now varies between 24h and 7d or so.
Having your phone not have audio work correct? Horribly obnoxious. Especially when 70% of what you do is listen to music and podcasts.
I gave up on Podcasts and switched to Overcast because Apple (despite years) was unable to correctly sync which podcasts I'd listed to and which I hadn't. I'm wary to buy things from iTunes because I end up with 2 or 3 copies in my library of some songs, randomly.
I STILL randomly get corrupted songs on my phone and occasionally have to reload all 45GB of music (everything I own, just easier since I have the space) to fix the issue. Don't know why.
From my own experience, and the experience of other Mac users that I know, I think that the quality of their software has had a marked decline in the last decade or so. The exact reasons aren't totally apparent, but it seems like there's too much rush to add new 'features' without fixing and refining existing ones, and that annual releases aren't giving them sufficient time to polish what's already there. It's no accident that Tiger was incredibly stable and 'complete' after having nearly three years of work done on it.
I'm not advocating they work for three years on each version of OS X, but even 18 months, and fewer new 'features' per release, would give them more time to improve the quality of what they're releasing.
Beside that, if you want to do mobile development, you need a OS X at hand, again, not much alternatives.
All companies have a life time at the end, and I think Apple is enjoying its 90s of Microsoft era.
I've actually had more problems with the hardware. My late 2011 Macbook Pro was just returned from the offsite Apple Repair with it's 3rd logic board (that being said, it's still under an extended warranty from Apple, which is at least a consolation prize).
Actually I have to restart the Finder every few days because the network drives either disappear or are no longer reachable. Sometimes the shortcuts disappear as well especially the ones that are located on a network drive (I tried both smb and afp).
I've also noticed a lot of slowness throughout the OS. The spinning colored wheel shows up very often compared to previous OS versions and on all kind of actions.
I'm not really sure, it's hard to point to something that's just plain broken. I noticed that some small UI features that I don't like in El Capitan, it seems slower, but nothing's crashing or preventing me from working.
Part of it might be that Apple is moving in direction that many professionals/developers don't like.
iTunes is different story though, that piece of junk needs to get replaced. Half the time it would even find my iPod and I doubt Apple cares because "get an iPhone".
So yes, for me Apple's software quality truly has declined sind Snow Leopard.
But there are more issues still, e.g. that the computer will only connect to my bluetooth radio after a restart.
On OS X this is especially true: OpenGL implementation has fallen behind the competition, the filesystem desperately needs updating, the SDK has needed modernizing for years, networking and cryptography have seen major gaffes. And that’s with regards to the under-the-hood details, the applications are easier targets: it’s tragic that Aperture and iPhoto were axed in favor of the horrifically bad Photos app (that looks like some Frankenstein “iOS X” app), the entire industry have left Final Cut Pro X, I dare not plug my iPhone in to my laptop for fear of what it might do, the Mac App Store is the antitheses of native application development (again being some Frankenstein of a web/native app), and iCloud nee MobileMe nee iTools has been an unreliable and slow mess since day one.
I've found myself thinking along similar lines. The two biggest offenders in my opinion are (1) feature bloat and (2) poor UX/UI decisions. iTunes is a prime example of how the confluence of both can turn a relatively simple and popular app into a quasi-unusable nightmare.
I've also noticed a lot more freezing and kernel panics on my iPhone, to the point where I've stopped updating the OS for fear of what might be introduced in the next version.
Time and time again a startup comes along with "-foo- simplified", gets people to switch with it's ease, bloats up the product over time, and then loses to the next guy.
"The best thing for Apple to do is to re-take their position as a leader of software quality before it's too late: consumers know that Apple's hardware is the very best, but more and more their using apps made by Google and Microsoft and Facebook."
*they're
At one point both my MacBook and my iPhone were suffering from regular graphical glitches. It's still an occasional problem, but at least Apple have got on top of it for the most part. I just wish they'd do something to stop my iPhone from kernel panicking and automatically restarting itself every so often.
Sadly, this doesn't seem to be specific to Apple either. It has become almost the norm in many parts of the software industry, to the extent that I don't voluntarily update any software that is installed and working any more, other than essential security updates. These days, even that is only done after a search to see which supposedly essential Windows updates are actually important for security, because I no longer trust Microsoft to be honest about what their updates are for either.
My default assumption otherwise is that running any sort of updater on application software, or heaven forbid on drivers or the whole OS, has a better than even chance of breaking something I care about, and that every time a browser auto-updates there is a close to 100% chance it will break something I care about or change something in a way I don't want or need. But since almost everyone is now producing similar levels of unreliable and unstable products, there's little you can do to get away from it.
Combined with the version ratcheting problem we were discussing a week or so ago here on HN, also in connection with Apple but also a much wider problem within the industry, it's becoming almost impossible to simply choose and use software you actually want, and to upgrade if and when a better version for your needs is available. This is not a good thing.
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Software quality is a nebulous and divisive topic. There are many parameters to software quality – reliability, speed, user experience, design, discoverability, and more – and a move towards any of these virtues leads to sacrifices in others, especially on a limited time schedule. Additionally, a number of forces influence software quality over time, like accommodating for different use cases, changes in platform, changes in hardware, changes in design preferences, changes in market, changes in expectations, and more. Finally, software is not like digging a hole, say, where more people really can dig a hole faster than fewer people: in fact, more people can often slow down a software project.
Nobody knows this better than the technology titans of today: Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle have all experience unanticipated software problems and regressions and high profile bugs. These are organizations with thousands of programmers writing and maintaining millions of lines of code for billions of devices. And these devices are machines which require perfection: one slight ambiguity of intent, any minor breach of contract, any single unexpected 0 where there should be 1 or vice versa … has the capability the bring down the whole system. In fact, it often does. Countless kernel panics, stack overflow errors, null pointer exceptions, and memory leaks are plaguing poor users and tired system administrators and overworked programmers right now. Machines are fast, but they can be awfully dumb.
And no company is feeling the pain of software’s nebulous nature and hardware’s mindless computing more than Apple right now. The underdog that many loyal fans rooted for is now the world’s (perhaps previous) most valuable company. With that, comes insanely high expectations: they need to grow the world’s biggest company every quarter to keep Wall Street happy, and even harder, they have to keep those nerds that kept them alive through the hard times happy too. And with release after release of the most revolutionary operating system ever, it’s tempting to picture Apple like an actual Titan, in particular Atlas, holding the world upon his shoulders. But it seems more and more every day that another Greek tale is more fitting: it’s time to admit that Apple have flown too close to the sun.
Walt Mossberg, technology journalism’s elder statesman, has this to say about Apple’s software quality:
On OS X this is especially true: OpenGL implementation has fallen behind the competition, the filesystem desperately needs updating, the SDK has needed modernizing for years, networking and cryptography have seen major gaffes. And that’s with regards to the under-the-hood details, the applications are easier targets: it’s tragic that Aperture and iPhoto were axed in favor of the horrifically bad Photos app (that looks like some Frankenstein “iOS X” app), the entire industry have left Final Cut Pro X, I dare not plug my iPhone in to my laptop for fear of what it might do, the Mac App Store is the antitheses of native application development (again being some Frankenstein of a web/native app), and iCloud nee MobileMe nee iTools has been an unreliable and slow mess since day one.This isn’t the first time that a prominent member of the Apple community has criticized Apple’s software quality. Here’s Marco Arment from January of 2015:
If we could just have a rule that said "don't get Apple's first version of a product", but they continue to be terrible. I recently lost my entire music collection because my Apple Music subscription ended, and now I have to download them all one by one via iTunes - even though I only want to stream them to save the disk space.
This happened across both Windows and OS X, of course.
On a small sidenote, Apple's ticker symbol is actually AAPL, not APPL. I hope you did not invest into the wrong company's stock!
[1] http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/01/why-dns-in-os-x-10-10-i...
Yosemite was the biggest disgrace of all. My mouse or keyboard would not wake the iMac after it went to sleep. And the beach ball was seen so frequently that my 1500 CHF iMac was useless after just 2 years. El Capitan finally fixed the sleep issue and the beach ball is seen much less, but I'd expect much more for the price I paid. The profiteering of Apple with regard to having an SSD with the iMac also severely annoys me.
My iPhone seems to have numberous glitches and software issues too. And for a fine example of just "what the hell are apple thinking" - the original incarnation of the battery monitor in iOS was it. What's the use of seeing the percentage of the battery an app has used - a completely useless statistic unless it included the time too. I still don't find it a particularly useful feature, as I am sure my battery is draining too fast, but the battery monitor gives me no simple way to prove this.