Such a tiny thing, yet so infuriating.

It doesn't help all the review channels (magazines, newspapers, blogs, vblogs, videos, etc.) focus their attention exclusively upon new features in a new release. You need someone as persuasive as Jobs to pull off convincing those channels to review refinements to add stability as new features. The people Apple has put forward to hopefully capture that role hasn't resonated with the public yet.

But software QA should never be an episodic, herculean, release-bound effort. There are ways to market it positively, but I'd always rather use the finite PR time surrounding a release marketing and selling the quantum leaps that set me apart from the competition, not the incremental steps.

In the age of Big Data, instrumented apps and online-inline updates delivery, a possible initial pass at identifying problem areas to shore up that is actually hitting people in their daily workflows is to simply track on the search engines the popularity of complaints about major bundled applications, subsystems and components. An OS X release should not, for example, let the first-page results for Contacts be about entries disappearing [1], three updates into its lifecycle.

There is still plenty of space for innovation here, I think. There are auto crash reports, but no systematic, automated means for a publisher like Apple to send targeted offers to users sending crash reports that pass a specified threshhold (number of crashes, kind of hardware, stack trace pattern, etc.) to update their app to an instrumented one that give developers not just the results of instrumenting the one or a handful of users who happen to persist enough through the now-familiar troubleshooting dance, but hundreds or even thousands of users at the same time, opening up opportunities to automatically search for commonalities and assist with the manual troubleshooting.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=mac+contacts+%22el+capitan%2...

http://macperformanceguide.com/topics/topic-AppleCoreRot.htm...

I find the core iOS and OS X operating systems to be just fine, thank you: frequent security and other updates that I get on a timely basis (compare to my Android Note 4, which I really like, but getting updates is infrequent).

On the other hand, I think that the web services like iCloud and Siri have a lot of catching up to do.

Then i went back developping on android for a small project, and found that image file names couldn't have space, or uppercase letters.

Steve Jobs was that guy. He did not care about anything but 'is this a great product and would I use it?'. Stock price or someone's feelings be damned.

I've felt this way for many times of the last few years but the one that hit me hardest (even though this is more esoteric rather than design or technical faults - which imo there have been many) when I walked in the Apple store and saw the center piece of the store - Watch Bands - not the Watch. No, man, that aint right. I like to think Jobs would have fired that person on the spot.

And there's the biggest issue right there. Even more so for other companies.

What has changed is the importance of the Apple's software. When it was a minority player that offered advantages over the status quo, we overlooked the issues.

Now that it is the status quo, we are no longer comparing it to anything else, but to an ideal - as we should be.

I think the idea that there is a decline is false, but the increasing criticism and demand for quality is absolutely appropriate, since it is absolutely Apple's responsibility to improve our experience of their products.

Keeping customers happy is important. Keeping "Wall Street" happy is the root of most problems.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2013/06/30/the-six-ha...

Cloud services is the one area where newer companies like Google and Facebook have a distinct advantage over Apple and is really the only threat (Android can never be as stable as iOS because of the vertical integration). Cloud services are amazing because they add so much value in the mobile era where you can easily operate from multiple devices without syncing nightmares. Google's cloud services are the thing which makes Android better than iOS in the areas its superior.

Up until now Apple's offerings were so ridiculously terrible than no one even used them, whether it was iDisk or MobileMe or whatever other branded services they churned through—they were utterly unusable. In the iCloud era it's actually become usable which exposes all the warts in new features which would have been hitherto impossible, whether it's iCloud app developer woes, message syncing issues, or Photos complaints, these things have all become usable now and at least arguably competitive with Google's offerings in the same spaces.

Sure there are warts, and sure it's annoying OS X doesn't get the love it deserves as iOS drives the company, and sure they're struggling with the scope of maintenance they're now saddled with, but that's not really the sky-is-falling narrative that tech bloggers have been pining to snap onto the Tim Cook era.

To be honest, with the Retina MacBooks, the memory consumption has only increased with the 2x graphics and images becoming more common on the web. But the RAM on a MacBook Pro is seriously lacking. 16GB is simply not enough even without running a VM. All it takes is around 100 browser tabs and an IDE for the ram to exhaust.

I wish they had a 32GB version that's not a desktop. And no, their hardware isn't necessarily perfect - despite what the fans like to believe. I have seen 4/15 MacBooks with pretty uneven display backlight that normal users don't notice. The best thing about MacBooks in 2016 is still the trackpad and a pretty design - everything else is outdated now. You can find equivalent or much better in all other aspects of hardware.

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.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-google-microsoft-where-do...

That said I'm not too upset with 10.12 or whatever the heck we are running right now. What bugs me is iOS 9. Long pauses, freezing up, graphical glitches, first-party apps crashing, sound lagging...it's just terrible.

I guess I'm happy that I haven't had the old problems of not syncing up, the phone getting hot and eating battery life, apps not refreshing, etc. But the current iPhone experience reminds me of amateur hour shit I'd expect form a low-end, no-name smartphone.

Notes sync was broken between 10.7 Lion and 10.8 Mountain Lion. Now it won't sync without iCloud.

To downgrade iTunes 11 to 10 on Mavericks 10.9, I had to replace some system libraries. That broke the Mac App Store. I use a friend's laptop to get binaries of apps that they download that are only on the App Store (e.g. Shazam, LINE).

If Apple fixes USB sync, I might force myself to get over the new GUI (which is awful - no track name & artist on the iTunes MiniPlayer?).

If Linux developers get USB sync to work reliably, and make some UI scripting tool similar to AppleScript, then I would consider switching.

"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

However, the major thing that bugs me is Apple's services. iCloud, iMessage and Apple Music have had some terrible issues. Especially when they launched Music, it was not only buggy, it was SLOOOOW. I can't believe that the giant Apple can't even compete with little Spotify in terms of ease of use, speed and stability.

It shouldn't take 10 seconds to search for a track, and not take a few seconds to start playing a track. Spotify is, and have (the past 4 years when I've used it) been INSTANTLY on when playing tracks.

However, now Apple is essentially the iPhone company. The iPhone has a new version, with new hardware and new capabilities, every year. This basically means a new iOS, new apps, and often, new capabilities in OS X (Hand-off, whatever is happening with photo sharing this year, etc), and new features in XCode. (Plus all the watch stuff last year.)

I'm all for being agile and moving fast, but there's just not enough time to do this right. Sure, it might help to have more focus, and they have plenty of people and money. They just don't have enough time.

If you want me to bother to help you find bugs in your system, you have to make it easy to file bugs and you have to make me feel like part of the team when I do that. Apple does not.

Before I even get into interface issues, let's just say that Apple's bug reports are like a ginormous black hole. I've filed plenty of bugs that have never been properly closed or even updated, and it makes no sense. In any other system I've seen, you would at least be able to see that your issue had been assigned to someone, and given a priority, etc. Apple has none of that.

The only thing worse than filing a bug that no one responds to is having to spend 20-30 minutes writing it in the first place, and Apple excels there, too.

Their reporting system is too complex (too many fields that should not be necessary, especially the ones that seem to ask the same question twice). It's not automated in any way. It is not integrated with the OS; e.g. why can't I turn on a "developer mode" on my Mac or i-device that lets me instantly do things like "compose new bug report for this OS version" or "compose new bug report for this version of this application", etc.?

Also, despite Apple's attempt to redo the web interface a few years back (because developers had complained endlessly about the even-worse previous bug reporting page), today's web interface is still mostly a repaint to look iPhone-like. It doesn't really address core usability problems. It has created new ones though; for instance, right at the bottom, right where you'd expect to say "submit" and send in your last 20 minutes of writing, is the DELETE BUG AND OBLITERATE FOREVER button!! I once destroyed a bug report that I'd spent a long time writing and I was extremely frustrated. It made me instantly decide that Apple didn't really need to see my bug report after all. And that is a broken system.

I don't think there is, in fact, a "problem" that can be "solved" to return Apple to the glorious design thought leader status we all know and love. The "problem" is that Steve Jobs is dead, and his unique talent was coordinating a huge number of talented designers/programmers/businesspeople to passionately care about meticulous levels of detail in product design.

At this point, the board-meeting-and-shareholder conversation will continue listing the problems with Apple's "management" or "perception" or "process" or whatever. Their efforts are entirely futile.

While this is all happening, Linux's software quality continues to rise. KDE Plasma 5.5 is beautiful and stable. GNOME 3.18 is Stable and very useable. XFCE, Mate, and Enlightenment are rock stable.

This isn't new; During KDE 4.x, Microsoft directly ripped off KDE's first plasma interface for Windows 7. Before Vista was released, They were showing off wobbly windows in demos, weeks after it was first accomplished in the Compiz window manager for GNOME (now part of Unity).

> 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 they’re using apps made by Google

> and Microsoft and Facebook.

I'm not sure whether it's not too late already. I switched last fall to an Android phone using only iPhones before that. (I just didn't see the point anymore in paying 2x for an iPhone, which can't do anything better). I started using Google apps like Inbox, Google Calendar, Google Keep, Google Now, Google Fit and now, even I would go back to an iPhone today, there is no way, I'll use Apple Apps again (not as they are today).

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/BS-wilowvB4-dvPFL_VrUQ

Now that this combination is gone their software is slowly but surely going bad.

But another bigger issue is that Apple is still focusing too much on user interaction rather than system interaction.

The real advantages which we are gaining from technology is not a better input format or navigation scheme, but rather the use of weaker or stronger algorithms to remove the need for the user to interact with their machines.

This.

I would never buy a car from Apple, EVER. You make computers, not cars. It would be like Ford suddenly making a PC, how stupid does that sound? Ford would be the laughing stock of the tech industry. But for some reason since a decent computer hardware company thinks they need to get into cars, they think people are going to buy it?

This is the sort of delusional thinking that makes companies go bankrupt.

EDIT: Looks okay now 10 minutes later.

* There are many more integration points between their products now. Shipping only the Mac or only the Mac and an iPod or even a first gen iPhone that can only get data into system apps via a USB cable is very simple compared to what they're making today. For Apple's best-cast customer, who owns a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad, an Apple TV, an Apple Watch, and who uses iCloud, how many integration points are involved now? Integration points are like the exponent on software complexity. It's where software goes to die.

* They are still essentially a fat client company that's trying to build more cloud-oriented applications. This leads to additional complexity in the product that other companies just don't have to deal with. An obvious example that jumps to mind is iTunes vs. Spotify. If iTunes was just Apple's version of Spotify, how much better would it be?

* Brain drain. Apple's stock made a lot of people a lot of money, and if you work there, you can't participate in the mobile revolution they started. Steve Jobs's passing could also be a natural book end for people in their careers to try something new, or find a job where they're not working 80 hours regularly, or to just take some time off.

I guess the last one isn't really "concrete", and is more just me speculating, but I threw it out there because of a decent amount of anecdotal evidence I've seen. Here are some other things that are also just speculative but interesting to consider:

* Apple is a product company that succeeds or fails on innovation. As capable of an executive as Tim Cook clearly is, he's not a product person. How does this trickle down into the product development process?

* Product development was micromanaged by Steve Jobs basically until he died. That leaves a HUGE vacuum in an organization and executive team he built to amplify his personal strengths and weaknesses. Who is filling that vacuum now? Is it Jony Ive? Does his new role of "Chief Design Officer" mean he's kind of the new Steve Jobs, in charge of product design, retail stores, office space, etc.?

* If Jony Ive has the final say of all software still (not clear to me in this new role), how good is he at software? How interested is he in it personally? He clearly loves the physical design of things. Steve clearly loved software. If Jony is in charge, does he have that love as well? Does he devote the time and attention into the software as he does with the hardware? Or, to take the iTunes example again, is Eddy Cue basically in charge of that product?

* How good are the people there at software design without Steve? There's a great story about Steve Jobs coming into an iDVD design meeting where he ignored what the team came up with and drew a window on a whiteboard with one area to drag files and one button that says "burn".[1] Is that just one story? How important was that to the day-to-day of the products they shipped? Who does that now?

The key point to me is that, according to Steve himself, Apple is a software company.[2] They make hardware so they can make really great software. Software is what's most important, and I hope stories like this are a bit of a wake up call to re-center their focus on what's truly important.

[1] http://dandemeyere.com/blog/5-most-inspiring-steve-jobs-stor...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEeyaAUCyZs

Shotwell, Music, Nautilus, and Gedit are brilliant and simple to use applications.

Spotlight: This has become extremely unreliable (and ridiculously slow) for me. More often than not, it won;t return results, except for an icon for the topmost result which flashes in the search bar for an instant after I hit a key. If I hit enter while that icon is visible, spotlight will open the app/document.

Data Detectors: What happened to these? I used to love them, but they never seem to work correctly for me anymore.

Safari Autofill: Why can't Safari simply autofill my email address like it used to? Why does it have to show me the opaque contact box, where I'm not sure which email it will autofill for me.

Time Machine: Hasn't worked for me in years.

Calendar: I was a ridiculously heavy user of iCal in the mid to late 2000s. Can't use it anymore. I'm not sure what specifically went wrong with it (just seems a lot more clunky). It used to be far more keyboard friendly (I liked Apple Mac apps when every app had a default layout with the side bar, that showed my organization hierarchy at a glance.)

Contacts: To be fair, this (and Address Book) has always been an unholy skeumorphic mess.

Expose: After years of making Expose unusable, starting with Lion, it's actually back to being pretty good now (now that it works closer to what it did in Tiger).

Dashboard: I was one of the few that actually used dashboard. I wish Apple would just kill it instead of what they are doing to it right now.

Dock: I think the Dock has gotten much better over the years, but I think the Windows start bar is superior at the moment.

Force Quit: Why don't my apps force quit like they used to? Force quit used to be extremely reliable, but now it doesn't seem to actually do a force quit at all.

iWork: Haven't dared to go back to iWork since the refresh. Pre-refresh I loved Pages and Keynote. I happened to use Keynote to present a ppt a year ago, and while the conversion was pretty good, the presenter mode was extremely gimped and uncustomizable. I may be misremembering, but I think it used to be far more customizable in terms of being able to pick the info to display on the presenter screen, etc. Numbers was always terrible, so I'm not even considering that.

iTunes: Do I really need to say anything?

QT Player: I think it's improved, but I'd switched to VLC way back.

Quick Look: The switch in the QT engine means the vast majority of my videos don't quick look any more (I think it was Perian that made them work). Maybe I need to search the net again, to see if there are more plugins for this.

Finder: Still as clumsy as ever for file management, but seems to be better at parallelizing tasks. However, file/folder metadata takes way too long to load. It used to be a lot better (I remember I used to have the inspector window in always open mode. I wouldn't dare to do that anymore).

Bah, that was way too long...once I started, couldn't stop, and I can probably go on for much longer. (I'm one of those guys whose 2nd favorite part about an OSX release, after the Siracusa review, would be the Macrumors "Little things" thread).

FTFY

----

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.

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 this on a computer whose existence I didn’t even think would be possible yet, but it runs an OS with embarrassing bugs and fundamental regressions. Just a few years ago, we would have relentlessly made fun of Windows users for these same bugs on their inferior OS, but we can’t talk anymore.

    In Fortune’s story, Lashinsky says Steve Jobs summoned the entire MobileMe team for a meeting at the company’s on-campus Town Hall, accusing everyone of “tarnishing Apple’s reputation.” He told the members of the team they “should hate each other for having let each other down”, and went on to name new executives on the spot to run the MobileMe team. A few excerpts from the article.

    “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continues, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?”

    Jobs was also particularly angry about the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg not liking MobileMe:

    “Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us.”

Jim Dalrymple, in response to Mossberg, writes:

    I understand that Apple has a lot of balls in the air, but they have clearly taken their eye off some of them. There is absolutely no doubt that Apple Music is getting better with each update to the app, but what we have now is more of a 1.0 version than what we received last year.

    Maybe we expect too much from Apple’s software. But Apple’s hardware doesn’t have little problems like this.

About 2 days ago, I discovered from my closet, my very first old and abandoned HTC Desire (The OEM version of the very first Nexus One). Powered it on, updated to Android 2.3 (Last official update) and I thought heck, I wonder if this thing is still usable.

So, I carried it along with my iPhone for the next few days. Remember, this phone was purchased sometime in 2010. So, I was assuming the battery was probably dead. But, to my pleasant surprise. It wasn't. But,even if it was, no biggie, I realized it was replaceable. Then, I had the phone throw a bunch of insufficient space errors on me. I was so used to the Apple eco-system that I just thought I should delete some existing apps to make some space on my phone. And in this process, I discovered that I could actually expand my storage by purchasing a new memory card for just ~$5 because the desire has a provision for adding a memory card and transferring all my apps and their data to the SD card. Cool!

Now, to the most interesting part. The software. In my experience, when I turned it on, I had to re-auth some of my previous Google accounts and from there, pretty much everything just worked. I didn't notice even a single crash in my entire 1 week heavy usage with this phone. What a pleasant surprise. What was even more relaxing was that, when I opened the music app and played a song, the music just played! I was so invested into Apple's ecosystem of iTunes Match and Apple Music and deluded by them that I didn't realize that I was being shoved with a poor user experience under the guise of subscribing to a premium music service.

For example, on my android, I have a playlist X. I click on track A. In just under a second the song starts playing. I can do this while my phone is still in my pocket just using the remote on the headset. On my iPhone, I click on a track A under playlist X (also using remote) and in my mind, I'm actually quite anxious if this thing will start playing immediately or if it will get stuck waiting to download the track from the cloud forcing me to take my phone out and close the music app, open it, evade the Apple music interface I want to avoid, select my playlist from the playlist tab and find the track I want to play again. What a nightmare. What's worse is my whole phone freezes when using certain apps and sometimes I'm forced to restart it. On the HTC I had to do this absolutely 0 times in the same time period.

When we buy a smartphone, we buy it assuming certain basic use cases - Make calls, listen to music, take pictures. If your smartphone can't even fulfil these basic needs, especially when you charge a premium, then something is seriously wrong with you.

Despite being a 6 year old discarded device, my android phone is far more stable than my current iPhone. It actually came as quite a shock to me. I have some devices still on iOS7 and they're definitely quite not stable enough. This made me realize my original point - Apple's focus has been too much on just pushing updates rather than on stability. This gives you the illusion that you're innovating faster than the others when in reality it isn't.

The reason I took time to explain my experience is not because I want to start some kind of iPhone vs Android flame war, nor suggest that Apple is dying, etc. etc. nor that we all should be buying Androids (I still find iPhone has an edge for my use case, infact).

I just simply want to demonstrate how a company whose selling point is "Everything just works" has consistently failed to deliver and yet how we (atleast me) still been thinking they're the superior ones.

1a) The title bar colour changing feature occasionally bugs out. It will show white over white, or some other non-contrasting colour. This happens with no particular reason as far as I can tell

1b) The title bar sometimes stays on top of a 'fullscreen' app, meaning that for example you have the top title bar icons and text sitting over the camera display view. This happens with no partiuclar reason as far as I can tell.

2a) I have noticed that in the portrait/landscape rotation, sometimes the app veiw gets bugged to sticking one way when the screen display itself rotates. For example, All of the content of the app rotates back around to a portrait orientation but is still trapped in a landscape layout on a portrait display. This is rare but seems to have no particular cause that I can recreate.

2b) The above can sometimes happen in the camera app. When you rotate the camera the icons (flash, hdr, etc) rotate for you. Sometimes rotating it causes them to 'stack up' on one another as if they adjust in one axis but not the other. I most noticably found this when I rotated having had the flash options open (force flash, auto, no flash) and they all collapsed to being on top of one another rather than closing that selection pane.

3) The 'zoom back to home screen' animation sometimes interacts strangely with folders. In that the icons of the folder will do the 'fly out' animation but only confined to the final size of the folder GUI box on the screen. It looks buggy and seems to be a corner case situation. I can't recreate it when I intentionally open a folder > lock my phone > unlock my phone but I've noticed it many times so I should try to pay more attention to its causes.

4) Since iOS9, I can press my 5S's home button to get the screen to light up and recognise my thumb print, but sometimes it will activate siri even if I press it very rapidly. This is a 5S that I purchased in November so I don't believe the home button is faulty. My suspicion is the screen initiation routines on the 5S are a little laggy and sometimes the button registers as a press-and-hold for Siri.

5) Right now I have 2 'unread' emails in one email account, despite there not being any as verified by Outlook on my home PC and the 'unread emails' folder which I added to the mailboxes screen of Mail. I suspect if I remove and re-add the account it'll clean this up but Mail is the only place reporting 2 unread emails.

6) Some apps can have their text input boxes bug out, whereby I can't tap the input cursor part-way back in the window and as I delete text it highlights words and goes wierd. I suspect this may be a buggy implementation in the app itself but I'd have expected that to be a pretty robust UI object, so I figured I'd include it.

Anyway, the above are just examples of the sort of lack of polish I'm noticing build up over time. As said, the biggest increase in it came when they switched to the flat UX design, because I suspect they created so many new UI changes that there were inevitably fresh bugs that had been stamped out in the old design. Nevertheless, a number have stuck around and it's frustrating because I noticed more polish and less of these little rough edges back in the 3GS and even my 4S days on iOS5.

The biggest bugbear is that I don't really know of an easy way to submit these bug reports. I guess I have to jump on the apple dev boards or something but there's no nice way of going 'here's a bug, please consider looking at it or asking me for more information if needed!'.

There are going to be upgrades -- that is GOOD. But we need to -feel- like there's something new and better and worth the inevitable bugs that -change- is guaranteed to introduce. Those who react to this problem of 'change produces bugs' by saying 'nothing should change' or "don't change what isn't broken" are inevitably in the wrong. Change needs to happen, but more importantly the right changes need to happen.

iCloud is really confusing -- there is just no simple way to understand what it does, what its for, how to use it, how it can go wrong, what happens when it goes wrong ... and on and on. It needs to be turned into something more modular with better boundaries between its unrelated aspects.

- iCloud needs to change faster. In my opinion we've been on on a slow path towards an iCloud account being _required_ for OS X usage -- the slowness of this progression has drastically complicated the introduction of iCloud features. In my opinion, doing iCloud right _requires_ iCloud to be present and configured. Just pull off the bandaid -- require an iCloud identity for each user account and redesign the rest of the setting system to assume its presence ... Re-implement the process by which all the system provided apps query for settings to use the new model designed to keep up with modern users expectations.

In my mind iCloud needs a new statement of purpose. I'd propose this: iCloud is about:

- establishing identity of person for usage of apple services - establishing the ability to mutate configurations associated with that person on any device that person uses. The other _services from apple should not_be called 'iCloud'. I'd like to see iCloud become:

- a screen which is ONLY about configuring 'the iCloud account associated with this user'. This should be about proving who you are to apple so that you can synchronize your other system settings to/from cloud and other devices. Nothing else.

- The rest of iCloud should be folded into a generic interface to all 'system integrated internet services'. I imagine a screen designed to manipulate a data model that looks something like: Service Provider -> User Identities -> Devices -> Services

From one place I can configure my authentication credentials for various service providers, and then decide which services from each provider I want to enable on each of my devices.

The associated settings are synced to iCloud and onward to each device. iCloud is one place to define all the system<->internet integrations for all your devices. The implementation of those services is _not_ part of iCloud. I should be able sit on my mac and configure which mail accounts I want my phone to check -- this is iCloud -- actually downloading the mail on my phone, not iCloud. I think iCloud should implement a user-facing synchronized management console for describing the set of network service integrations to enable for each of my devices -- it should also expose an api by which applications can gain access to these service configurations. That's what iCloud should be in my opinion. Its a lot of _change needed_ to get there, but no change here is worse I think by far...

I'd like to see apple change more about OSX -- change something low-level, long-lived ... Do something controversial that forces the most ossified of unix curmudgeons to learn new tricks. How about a new default shell (fish! ... something homegrown)!

My advice for apple: Keep moving the world forward, don't go into maintenance mode, improve things that need improving, embrace the fact that not all change is churn. Someone at apple needs to stand up for that mantra in the face of all this criticism and prove to the world that can still improve things by changing them. That's the only way this perception of 'declining quality' is going to change.

And I don't even attempt to trust big things, like backing up my data with iCloud or using Apple music. Hell no.

It seems clear they've stretched their talent too thin over the years, and the yearly release cycle probably also has something to do with it. On the other hand, their hardware comes out roughly yearly and does not exhibit these kind of problems. Their hardware is still very good.

OS X Yosemite was a travesty, made worse by the fact that as an iOS developer I HAD to run it, I couldn't stay on Mavericks like I would've greatly preferred. Yosemite had a lot of good things to add, but at the same time it was plagued with tons of bugs and horrifically un-optimized graphics code (full screen blur with no caching brought my Macbook Pro Retina to it's knees many times). El Capitan has been a huge step in the right direction but I can't help but notice so much of the OS's new features weren't so much optimized or fixed as simply regressed.

Additionally, speaking as a developer, many of Apple's API's and SDK's are outright terrible. iCloud implementation for any iOS app is a nightmare, as is using the shared keychain. Then there's the constant obfuscation of the file system on both iOS and OS X which just drives me insane, and the tendency of all Apple apps to operate as if they are the only app you'll ever use for any given purpose, which seems obnoxious at it's best and outright nefarious at it's worst.

Looking at Apple laptops, the newest Intel processor I can get is a 5th gen Broadwell, and it's only in the 13" retina. The 15" retina has 4th gen Haswell. And the 13" pro? Some old processor from 2012. 6th gen Skylake is shipping everywhere from every other laptop manufacturer.

The 13" Macbook Air still has a sub-HD display. (1440x900) Yet, I can now get a 4K display on a Razer Blade Stealth with 100% Adobe RGB at a competitive price. Even their 'retina' laptops are low res by comparison.

The only hardware they have that looks reasonably impressive at the moment is the iMac 5K, but that's a desktop.

Nope. See Brooks' Law.

They're getting better at software, distributed systems, etc. But everyone else is getting better faster, and catching up on design.

And you hear how Apple employees are forced to work, using codebooks to talk over lunch and without a lot of cross communication for fear of project leaks and you go, "Oh. That's why they're struggling to keep moving forward."

They're basically buying a lot of their core tech and repackaging it these days to keep velocity. But that too isn't a silver bullet, as it fragments the tech space.

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.

I stand corrected.

Windows 10 on the same MBP, has none of these issues. OS X crashes significantly more often than any Windows machine I've used in the last 5 years (Windows 7-10). Apple used to brag about how OS X was more stable than Windows, but I think that Microsoft's need to make Windows compatible with so much hardware and software has actually resulted in a more robust and harder to crash OS.

- iphone screen turning black with siri enabled and repeating that she couldn't hear what I said or something like that

- closing lid on macbook, re-opening -> no more wifi until you reboot

- itunes download progress disappearing after a few seconds, changing tab and coming back would show it again for a few seconds

- randomly losing wifi

I might be cursed when it comes to Apple software but that also means I won't go near an Apple car, even though I hope they have very different standards from the OS/phone teams.

Meanwhile, last time I was on an airplane (December), every single older woman over the age of 60 had an iPhone. This means that it's not only reached critical mass (the late majority on the technology adoption curve has been achieved), but now it's no longer hip.

I'm not sure what will be next, but I'm guessing it won't be Apple's.

Were I gambling man, I'd have shorted Apple's stock right there after that airplane ride.

Apple computers in 2005-2006 became awesome when they went Intel and OSX was solid, everyone loves to code on a pretty front end backed by *nix. Then iOS in 2007+ was solid for many versions. Slowly, it has been getting worse.

From the user and developer point of view, the only major drawback would be applications. Devs porting over apps to linux and users not having some of their favourite apps available.

It's becoming clear that Apple is not paying enough attention to the under the hood details of an OS and the security situation. And maintaining the OS is a huge investment from Apple. So it only feels natural to base Mac OS on linux and, as I said earlier, focus on the distinguishing features.

Technically though, it would still be a huge challenge as there are lots of factors to consider,but in the long term everyone wins Apple,linux though maybe not Microsoft.

I have been thinking about this idea of Apple using linux instead of its proprietary Mac OS for a long time, and have considered the transition only at a very high level. I would like to hear what the HN community thinks of this idea.

Edit: So instead of forking a version of linux and developing it independantly like what Apple did previously, a better model might be where Apple periodically forks from upstream projects and makes its modifications. Something like what Linux mint does with Ubuntu. So this way, they continue to get the latest and greatest developments from upstream projects without investing additional resources into maintaining their forked OS(this is currently what is happening with Mac OS).

  https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7257238?tstart=0

It's because of things like this that I usually wait until the .4 release to upgrade. El Cap is at .3 and I'm feeling stupid for breaking my rule.

I honestly dread Apple software updates because I know they're not going to fix anything I care about, and they're going to break stuff or arbitrarily replace perfectly fine, working features with new half-assed implementations that are buggy and don't work as well.

The latest example came just a couple days ago when I finally updated to the latest iOs, hoping maybe they've made it possible to remove the "radio" feature from Music. They haven't, and as bonus they replaced the "app close" screen with an ugly, broken one for no good f'ing reason; and the top info display with service/time/battery level now covers the top 20 pixels of several apps, obscuring the view in those programs. And they've added a few new crappy apps I have no interest in using, but can't remove.

I still think their hardware is awesome, but their software is going down the drain.

I used OSX for the first time in a few months yesterday, having installed Windows 10 on my Macbook a few months back.

For about 5 minutes I started to think that I missed it, it looks so nice, but within 10 minutes I'd had two fundamental networking issues crop up that slowed and then stopped me from doing my work without a reboot.

I own a fully pimped out top of the line 2014 15" Retina Pro ($4k to buy at the time). For at least a year it had a WiFi bug that required me to enter a command at the terminal in order to disable some aspect of networking so that I get full WiFi speed. If I don't my WiFI is limited to 10Mbps, once the command is run I get nearly triple that (i.e same as when I plugin ethernet). Why was I having to manually type commands at the command line in order to get my $4k laptop to connect properly to WiFi? 229 pages of people's issues here in just one thread:

https://discussions.apple.com/message/29742198?tstart=0#2974...

Also google "slow wifi MacBook pro"

It's possible this has been resolved in more recent updates and/or El Capitan.

Final issues yesterday was network access to my NAS, just random connectivity. Sometimes I can get access sometimes I can't. If I try to connect with an incorrect account password then access hangs and I'm not prompted to login again, so I have to reboot to get a network login window. It's just so frustrating, because I would love to stick with Apple. I've had none of these issues with Windows 10, or even Manjaro when I tried it again recently. But I do really miss lots of 3rd party software that I can only get on OSX.

  iOS          Logitech      VPN
  
  9.1          OK            OK
  9.2          Fail [1]      OK
  9.3 Beta 2   OK            Fail [2]

[1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7372797?start=0

[2] https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/30939

I bought a Mac this summer to do some OS X-specific development, and I was truly shocked by how bad things had become on the desktop. Performance is generally poor, UI has apparently gone out the window, and the UNIX features that Apple once heralded have been hidden below new toolkits and proprietary replacements of old systems (discoveryd anybody?).

In many ways, I was reminded of how things were both on System 9 and during the early releases of OS X. It's not nearly as bad now as it was then, but Apple also doesn't have nearly as many reasonable excuses to for such a regression in quality.

I run Parallels and Windows 10 on my MacBook Pro and Windows runs smoother in there than it does on my Windows laptop...Maybe that points to superior hardware and integration, but I think it's also because OS X is more efficient than Windows and it's 500 lb sack of goiter it drags around in the form of legacy support for everything in the last 30 years.

I used to be a Windows computer, Android phone user. Now I'm an iPhone and MacBook Pro user. Every ecosystem has issues. I find that iOS and OS X still give you the smoothest ride though.

- They at least offer updates, many other vendors offer few to none. Is that how you achieve quality? My wife's iPhone4S is still receiving updates and she's been happy with the device since 2011 to today. I've always used competitor's products and never achieved this. As a result, we will continue and increase our scope of purchases from Apple.

- Software is hard, many pieces of software that I've dug into I'm left amazed it even works.

I'm not outright dismissing this blog, but I wish it included who is the leader of software quality- since the statement is that it's not Apple.

My experience leads me to think that if they're an example of failing software, wow... what about the rest?

Multiple password prompts, having to login twice after a restore, terrible multi-monitor support, lack of window management, unclear system prefs (or things have moved again since the last update), hidden options (holding the option key is so unintuitive) and shortcuts, networking tools are poor, weird update process, notifications blocking the UI of apps, strange finder UI.

There are a lot of UX issues that make it a frustrating experience.

I was a fairly late converter to OS X having used Windows and Linux before. I used to hear people berate Windows similar issues to those above, and I'm surprised on switching to OS X that things aren't all that different/better.

This is an incredibly stupid bug and it's eating up my disk space (until I clean it up of course). I am literally talking about 10 entire albums at a time every time I make a purchase. It's been going on for the last year. I'm not sure why I still use iTunes anymore to be quite honest. I buy my songs through iTunes and then they get uploaded to google music, and I think I've just been going about it as a matter of habit all this time.

This is the kind of revolutionary thinking Jobs had when he went OS 9 -> OS X... could Linux set them free on the desktop by open sourcing the desktop OS X?

I know, I know, it sounds ridiculous, but there's bits of OS X I like...and bits of Linux I like, as far as technology, architecture, speed, GUI frameworks... like some combo of the two would be a killer OS for the ages and open source too.

And OS X -- it's hardy bad by any stretch. Mostly it's fantastic. There are the rare glitches, but as other commenters have said, there are several factors at work, what with increasing complexity, efforts to get platforms to work more closely together, proliferation of multicore CPUs, 64-bit, evolution of security and networking technologies, bringing Swift and modern programming language patterns into the technology stack, dealing with changes in unstable third party platforms, and preparing for whatever unknown things Apple has in the oven.

Apple is trying to bring the future to us. Doing this kind of work, over multiple versions with plans spanning years or even decades, is not simple. This kind of work has been likened to rebuilding a 747 aircraft while it's flying. IMHO it's probably even harder than that, and Apple is doing a damn good job so far.

Admittedly there's a lot of assertion here, from my own experience of things working just fine, and not much (even anecdotal) evidence, but I just wanted to say one needs to view the small bugs in the perspective of all the significant work that is being undertaken.

However, I generally avoid most of the default software that comes with both OS's with one exception: Windows Explorer is lightyears ahead of finder. Finder is really quite terrible and behind in usability and UI from Explorer. So while I avoid Finder, I still use Explorer for many tasks...so many that I don't bother with most "organizer" apps.

There's some things on Windows networks that are really nice, like WDP (which is much nicer than VNC).

Both OS's are pretty rock solid in my experience and across multiple machines. It's actually the Linux machines I come in contact with that are super flaky.

However, I've found that software on my work Mac is pretty crashy/flaky compared to Windows. I also notice that app developers seem to play more monetization games in OS X-land compared to Windows e.g. I just had a free app I've used for a year auto-update and disable itself because the author decided he wanted to turn it into a paid app. To be fair, the crashy flakiness seems to coincide much more often with some combination of opening-closing the lid and losing VPN connection to some servers.

Either way, both OSs seem to be about even to me for 90% of what I do, and the parts where they are better than one another don't really overlap.

[1] https://marco.org/2015/01/04/apple-lost-functional-high-grou...

System Preferences -> General

Not to mention Facebook itself... We all know FB has fallen flat many times but its never been busted for weeks at a time to my knowledge

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.

(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...)

Many releases had critical flaws that needed a point release in less than 2 weeks.

The people that are nostalgic for defined benefit pensions never seem to remember the corrupt Teamsters' pension funds. They only remember how their Fidelity 401k did in 2008.

It happens that CEOs manipulate the business to show a short term profit at the expense of long term, but if investors find out about it the stock will promptly tank to reflect the long view.

A common related idea is that CEOs gut businesses to satisfy Wall Street. This makes no fiscal sense at all. It can very well be true that Wall Street and CEOs often have conflicting and/or mistaken ideas about which way a business should turn, but it is never about gutting a business.

And yes, if a business can make more money by being "parted out" than as a business, then parting it out makes sense.

While done from a UK perspective, I think part 2 and 3 takes a trip over the Atlantic.

Plus I can, you know, close the tab. One of the worst things about these enormous "javascript applications" is the high startup time (remember how much we hated Flash intros with loading screens?) that leads to leaving the tab open, which means that tab's disgustingly-high memory use is a constant rather than only occasional cost (I'm looking at you, Asana!)

Ecoute uses the same library as the default app, shows a nice simple grid or list of your albums/artists/playlists and is well designed. When you use any controls in either app it will be picked up in both. It doesn't matter in which app you start a playlist/play/pause/skip/whatever. With that in mind, using Ecoute as default app was as easy as replacing the icon in the dock. No need for a default music app setting in my opinion.

More here: http://www.pixiapps.com/ecouteios/

But there are more issues still, e.g. that the computer will only connect to my bluetooth radio after a restart.

Don't insert ads into an app in a way that misleads users. You'd be pissed if you opened a book, started reading at Chapter 1 and found that the first 3 chapters you read were just a tease of another book, yours starts on Chapter 4.

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.

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"

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.

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.

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!)

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.

As the villain in the Incredibles said:

"When everyone's a superhero, no-one will be."

That's where the alarm is, and personally I use it several times a day, to wake me up and to remember the occasional meeting or random events I would otherwise forget about.

I hate ios Photos, mostly because of the white backgrounds however.

Early iOS had wonky reset issues too.

Starting with 10.7 and seeing the decline coming, I was happy that Ubuntu ran very well on that laptop and that held me over until I left Apple hardware entirely.

I actually like the photostream. It's an easy way of getting recent phone snapshots onto my computer for exporting or doing whatever I want -- without keeping them around forever.

My multi-select comment refers to this: double-click on a photo in the thumbnails. You're now viewing an enlarged photo. Now there's also a double-row of thumbnails to the left of it. You can use this double-row to navigate, but not to multi-select. You must hit the back arrow to get to the OTHER thumbnail view in order to multi-select. I constantly make this mistake, it's so non-intuitive that you can't multi-select thumbnails to (say) export multiple photos.. not in THIS mode, at least, you now have to hit a back arrow to do the exact same task!

I'm not sure if they've fixed this in Photos, but a big gripe of mine with iPhoto was its "sharing" behavior. If you deleted your photos from your computer, it ALSO deleted them from your 'shared' sites; eg, Facebook or whatever. To me, this was absolutely asinine behavior as many of us use multiple computers, can't store our entire photo libraries on them at all times, and so on. For example, my workflow is to take a lightweight laptop with me when I travel, and the SSD can't hold my whole photo library; just enough to do quick edits, upload, then delete.

I'll have to experiment with Photos' 'sharing' support, but I'm afraid of breaking stuff from past experiences.

When a new product category is introduced, customers primarily care about ease of use and relevance to their lives. Radical vertical integration is usually necessary to achieve this, because any friction in the product's interface is on top of the friction of getting consumers to use a product that they're completely unfamiliar with. Hence, the market is totally dominated by one company that makes everything from the chips to the hardware to the OS to the apps. This is Apple. This is the Apple II in 1976, the Mac in 1985, the iPhone in 2007, the iPad in 2010, and now the Apple Watch in 2015. (It's also Netscape in 1993, Yahoo in 1998, Amazon in the early 2000s, and AWS today.)

As the market matures, more competitors enter. An ecosystem of third-party apps develops. Hardware supplier prices drop as more hardware manufacturers develop expertise and enter the market. Customers start to value compatibility, options, customizability, and adherence to standards over raw ease of use. This is Google now and was Microsoft in the 80s & 90s. This is MS-DOS in 1981, and Windows 3.1 in 1991, and IE5 in 1999, Google Search in 2000, Chrome in 2008, and Android in 2011-present.

Eventually the technology moves up-market. Customers start to care more about security, stability, reliability, and performance. That's Microsoft now and IBM in the 70s & 80s. That's mainframes in the 80s, and MS Office and Win7 now. At this point, the technology is already being disrupted, but the disruptive technology isn't reliable enough for a segment of the market.

Finally, you get to the point where customers care about brand and compatibility with existing installations. This is maintenance work, where the company becomes a consulting outfit to keep all the technologies they invented a generation ago running. That's IBM now.

Who cares ? They are siphoning profits from the market and selling more phones than they ever have before. They have periphery businesses e.g. Apple Pay, App Store that are doing very well and I am sure more will come in the future. They are never going to be the company that goes for market share above all else.

> Apple today is in the position of GM in GM's glory days

I don't think so. Apple seems to be quite happy just to acquihire their way out of any innovation slump. There are a ridiculous number of companies especially in the VR space that they have acquired that we have seen no evidence of in their problems.

Pretty exciting times ahead I imagine.

"The Great One"

I can almost see Don Draper standing in the shadows behind the car.

I understand the plan was to work with select third parties on a case by case basis, sort of akin to standalone game consoles.

I was wrong. I had forgotten that I do use several default apps, taking them for granted, and overstated my case.

The other day I was trying to send a link to a friend: instead of clicking the standard share icon, you have to click the arrow (that looks like an email forward?), which pops up a non-standard share UI instead of the standard sheet. Never mind the fact that to dismiss a video you have to first swipe it down (minimizing it into some bizarre picture-in-picture frame), then slide it off from there, instead of using a "Back" button/gesture like every other app in iOS.

And yet, here we are five years later, and Google Maps is still on the iPhone, shows no evidence of leaving, and Google's iOS apps are ALL still present and better than ever, and Google is still the default search bar in Safari. Meanwhile, Apple Maps is a great product too and has been worked on and polished for several years. "Remember Apple Maps" betrays a mindset where you read one article a few hours after it was released, half a decade ago, and you have no updated impression of the product at all. Apple Maps is, in fact, rock-solid for me right now. It is, in fact, now superior to Google Maps for transit directions, and in some other ways.

So really, I'm not sure what you are talking about, at all.

There's the fact that iOS currently doesn't allow replacing the system hooks for Maps and Safari with Google Maps and Chrome (or any other store apps), but that's not the type of problem the parent was complaining about.

http://www.righto.com/2012/02/apple-didnt-revolutionize-powe...

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.

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

#grumpy #getoffmylawn

I'm dreaming to revive the kind of development made famous by FoxPro/dbase (or more exactly, mix Acces+Excel+Databases).

Form building is another area that is far more complex that it need to be. The problem now is the multi-platform: Everyone (or most) want it, but not good toolkit exist to work on...

Put yourself on 144p quality. Watch a few videos till you get to an ad. It seems like they disregard your preference and pump up to 4k for your ad, which sucks when it takes 2 minutes to download a 30 second advertisement.

I can't figure out how Google can release any software like that.

Google can't blame IOS/Apple for that.

For what it's worth, my Surface Book (obviously a product they care a lot about) has basically gotten to a crash rate equal to my mac, which is maybe 1 actual problem every 2 weeks). I suspect the Surface 4 Pro will get that love next as the other Skylake power issues sort out.

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.

Can't release new iOS features which involve the Mac without a corresponding OSX release.

That may be true.

But in the context of iOS vs Android:

1. Most features come from apps - both have strong app ecosystems, and iOS probably has the stronger app ecosystem because it serves wealthier people. To a certain extent that applies to reliability.

2. Some features are native to the OS. So you see a competition, and Android is certainly faster there, via the rooting community, competition between OEM's , etc. But Apple usually respond - at least when things appeal to the mainstream , and don't negate their strategy.As for the question of reliability - i'm not sure Android is viewed as more reliable(think security vulnerabilities like stagefright). But yes, maybe Google can lead Apple here ,because they seem stronger technologically. The only question will they do this permanently or will it just buy them some time and would it be enough ?

Also , let's not forget the network effect embedded in iOS via iMessage(which many users say it prevents them from moving to Android).

>> the shift from reliability to branding & maintenance reflects how you're perceived for choosing the product.

I'm not sure that's true. it all depends on how psychologically important that product is to you, versus how important is the features/reliability differential.

I have my doubts that all 0.02% or whatever of PC users who are dedicated to using Linux as their desktop OS influenced Microsoft to do anything but if you have data to show otherwise I'd be interested in it.

But you can install Linux on it for sure :)

The supposition that it was only due to the outcry of the development community is exactly that, a supposition.

Because of Apple making OSX Unix based, it cut into sales of other Unix companies like SGI, and also GNU/Linux cut into sales of SGI and others as well.

But making OSX Unix based solved a lot of problems that Classic MacOS had that they couldn't solve.

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

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

Compare that with the _desktop_ Windows 7 machine. It first crashed intermittently (memory failures), but after I changed the motherboard, it has not crashed at all. But then again, I am not using, for example, the most cutting-edge graphic drivers.

I remember quite some crashes during the Windows XP times, but I've since taken a more conservative approach to hardware and drivers.

You try fitting all that plus a GUI those constraints.

What's amazing is that it had the features it had and that it worked at all.

Pity that nobody remembers Windows NT4, it was miles better than OS7. I stopped using mac altogheter after starting to use it.

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

You clearly never used iTunes for Windows.

Distrowatch is a shitty indicator of anything other than Distrowatch hits. Plenty of people like myself have been using Ubuntu for years and not gone to Distrowatch for years.

Out 'in the wild', I've never seen a distro that's not Ubuntu or openSUSE (desktop anyway). Most statistics on sites such as Wikipedia or Steam also point to Ubuntu's dominance (according to Steam's hardware/software survey, Ubuntu is about 7x more popular than Mint Rosa, which of course is also Ubuntu-based).

> In implementing a new UI, Ubuntu acquired a lot of new bugs, broken features and reliability issues.

To be honest, most of the issues I've ever had with Ubuntu are upstream issues. The 'Unity' interface these days pretty much IS the equivalent of 'legacy'. It's certainly not as radical as Gnome Shell or even some of the happenings in KDE Plasma-land. No one uses Compiz any more, except apparently Ubuntu (yes, I realize eventually we'll have a non-Compiz Unity interface).

xfce - that's what I use. And I'm an even grumpier old man at 40 :-)

Convertible tablets like Microsoft Surface don't count -- those are laptops with detachable keyboards.

For example, if I state "I had chicken for lunch" and you reply "I find that hard to believe.", I think the implication is clear that you think I'm lying. Alternatively, if a third party says "kbenson had chicken for lunch" and you say "I find that hard to believe", there is not a clear implication that the third party is lying, nor that where they got the information from is lying, as there are multiple locations in the chain of authenticity of such a statement where a mistake or purposeful misrepresentation could have happened, so it's not clear where fault may lay.

So, when someone states "I don't use any of the default iPhone apps" and another person replies directly to them with "I find that hard to believe", I think the implication that they are lying is clear (whether or not they were actually lying).

Now, as for your specific assertion, I think you are obviously correct in the general sense. Although am interested in your opinion on how you would classify someone that is very loose with regard to their statements and their certainty regarding those statements. If I made a statement asserting something, but thought there might be a 15% chance I was wrong if I really looked into it, would I be lying if I stated it as a fact due to the false certainty implied?

Specifically, in this case, if the author was 85% certain they didn't use any default Apple apps and stated as much without qualifying with "I think", or "probably", they may believe they are correct, but be ultimately wrong. Was it a lie to imply a higher level of certainty than existed? I'm not entirely sure how I would classify that. (Note: I don't mean to imply a specific state of mind for the original commenter, this is purely a thought experiment and that statement was handy).

- 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.

I have been running Arch for 7 years before switching to NixOS. I found using no desktop environment, just a tiling window manager and only text-mode software (except firefox and a document viewer) incredibly robust. So few moving parts I never had a major hiccup.

Exactly. Sounds like you agree with nextos:

> A nice Linux set up with minimal software (e.g. xmonad, mutt, emacs or vim) is a joy to use

Ubuntu is both a commercial AND a community project. The goal has always been to take the power of Linux, make it usable for 'general users' and take it to the market winning new users.

The PC market is shrinking, so much so that all the major manufacturers are struggling (e.g Dell going private, HP splitting itself etc). Meanwhile the growth in the next billion units is a) in China b) on 'mobile' devices.

IF you were in charge of strategy what would you do?

> They gave their main demographic a slap in the face ... > Now, according to DistroWatch, Ubuntu is below Mint and > Debian in terms of popularity.

The demographic for 'traditional' Linux is something like 2-4% of the PC market: the biggest thing that's happened since the 2000's is OSX has stolen developer user-base from Linux. These users are well -served (arguably habituated) by the older interfaces, but more general users are not well-served. Even if you put aside the goal of winning new users, you simply cannot build a successful business on 2% of the market (particularly when that 2% of desktop users is not orientated towards buying anything and hates advertising).

It's tough to serve more than one users-base, but Linux (Ubuntu in this case) can as it's very flexible. There's still a massive pot-pourri of software and options in the repositories! I find self-described 'geeks' complaining about Unity really bizarre - if you're a power user it's literally 3 commands (touch .xinitrc; vim .xinitrc; exec <wm-of-your-choice) to change the interface.

> That's an argument in favor of incremental evolution and refactorings IMO

That works if the old thing can be incrementally improved. The issue for Linux is that it's simply fallen behind the significant changes in the client market. At an infrastructure and applications level the FOSS/Linux environments aren't competitive to the other mobile offerings. And, it's basically impossible to maintain one complete stack for the desktop and a different one for the mobile space at the sizes the Linux companies are.

> Now I'm 30, and I just want the damn thing to f'ing work reliably. > I don't need rounded corners, or transparency, or animations or even a desktop background.

The thing is that puts you in the 2%, the things you care about are quite different. General users do care about animations, basically the whole UI "experience": to get them to change you really have to show them something different. Of course, you have to have some level of stability, but you don't win new users by telling them you are so much more stable - users just restart the app or device, they carry a battery charger everywhere and just shrug and plug-in. You only really have to read some of the comments in this thread to see what I mean ;-)

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.

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.

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.

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.

I forgive most faults that happen because it's almost as if I can forgive them not working all the time since 99% of the time, everything is awesome. On Windows, that same forgiveness manifests itself as me not using my Windows machines as much as my Macs. I still love to use my PCs, but not for anything that I need to rely on the majority of the time.

Now, though, Apple is making changes to things (iPhoto/Aperture were a really great example) where it seems like the change is just to bring parity of some sort to OS X and iOS rather than introducing new features. iPhoto was buggy as hell when they added Faces and Places to it, but I totally forgave that because 99% of the time it was making my life way easier than it was before by detecting faces properly. If it crashes every now and then, it at least saved the data, so I was still better off than I was before the update. I still like Final Cut X (I know, I know... I'm an outlier), but convincing me that a switch like iPhoto/Aperture -> Photos is worthwhile is much harder since there's nothing to distract me away from those issues and I've somehow managed to actively lose features that they convinced me were necessities in the past.

I hope this is not an indicator of things to come. One thing that gives me some hope is that they've gone back to alternating between feature updates and stability updates. Leopard was cool, but Snow Leopard was incredible to me. If that pace comes back, I'll be happy again. Until then, Apple needs to get their software game back in line with the rest of the company.

Right - which is why we have all of the snow leopard nostalgia: because none of the newer releases have given us anything substantive that we really needed to justify the hassle and the bugs.

I am trying to think of something - anything - that compels me to upgrade SL on my mac pro, and all I can think of is that nifty take-a-picture-of-your-signature in the Preview app that you can then insert into PDF documents.

Ok, and maybe USB3 ?

That's all I can think of.

Apple always makes up for bugs with newer devices with faster CPU and GPU units that make OS code run faster. That means buying a new Apple device to get better performance. The older Apple devices are left out of updates eventually and if they do update to a newer OS version it runs slower.

Apple is driven by an upgrade model to buy a new Apple device every three years or so. In the PC world Windows 7 can still run on old Pentium 4 systems and if I am not mistaken some of them can upgrade to Windows 19, the 32 bit version but it can still work. For example I used to have a Macbook that only ran up to 10.7 and 10.8 needed a newer Intel CPU to install. Anyone with an iPhone 4 is going to find the latest iOS slow as well.

It is in Apple's business model to sell customers a new device every few years or so and phase out old Apple devices.

Apple doesn't care if their software isn't the best quality as long as it is easy to use and will keep people buying new Apple devices to run things faster.

I myself like GNU/Linux better than OSX, because it can run on older PC systems and it runs quite fast and has a good quality to it. GNU/Linux is virtually unknown to the average consumer and when people get tired of Microsoft they usually just buy an Apple device. Apple devices are easier to maintain and use. You even got toddlers using iPads, that is how easy they are to learn to use.

Apple has saved up billions just in case they have problems. Apple has done well financially in an uncertain economy where other companies are struggling.

Only Alphabet seems to be doing better for some reason. Google's parent company. Google's Android needs better quality as well and since Oracle sued them over the Java API they have to change the way the OS works. The Web Services seem to earn a lot of money and Google's AI is very advanced.

Compare this to today's Apple, where upgrades add "hundreds of features" but feel mostly the same (except everything runs a bit more slowly). There's no coherent vision of what the future of the software should be like.

Apple has always been a fairly closed system and it didn't bother me more than not having the features I wanted. In El Capitan, it was different. Things didn't work well and Apple took over my whole system. With SIP(system integrity protection) I had no control. It would seem to turn protection back on after being disabled, and it takes a nontrivial amount of time to turn it off because you have to reboot the entire system into recovery mode, wait for it to connect to the internet and download a bunch of apple shit, and then select a language preference and then type a command into bash and reboot.

Deleting apps is difficult, changing settings is difficult, having siri take up 10% of my iphone is annoying, removing apps destabalize the system, installing my system from time machine reinstalls their system and settings and overrides mine.

I disabled most of apples applications and processes, the system in fairly stable, although I think I went to far with disabling notification center, but your point is correct.

tl;dr users are willing to accept a lot for revolutionary changes. Evolutionary changes with only marginal improvements are not going to make me forget that they unpredictably disallow me from using sudo and are fucking up all my devices doing things I don't want them doing in the first place.

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

It's also the case that it's incredibly hard to test things like battery life, wifi connectivity and the effects of heavy processor workloads in a systematic way. You hope that your vendors do a good job (and I bet Microsoft's contract with Intel involves penalties for these major defects to try and incentivize Intel to handle these).

Look at the first Iphone4. How did they miss something as simple as skin contact causing significant antenna interference? Most of us hit it immediately. The answer: hardware in the real world is really hard.

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.

Whip the Lama's A WinAmp is still better.

I agree with you, mobile is more of an extrapolation, or an evolution than an entirely new phase or era. We're into the point where English becomes imprecise to define where something is truly different.

And, I completely agree about the loop between being customer-driven and then finding out that it's just a short-term shift. The worst part is that it's fundamentally difficult to tell if something is a short-term trend or a long-term shift.

Where I was going was a much more limited view of 'trends', more like a season in the fashion market. Most businesses have to respond on an annual basis to what their customers wants - they can believe that something is a temporary trend, but can't afford not to respond.

Perhaps we're in violent agreement on the nature of trends, and divided by time-frame and response.

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.

Apple seem to have the same mentality. They used'to get away with it, but mostly because they replaced it with something better. Now they just seem to drop features entirely. That's not a good way of going. As much as I despise Steve Jobs, he never let that quality of a product drop to the degree that big customers (or even smaller customers) left Apple without a major fight to keep them.

It's looking like Apple's obsession with making great and quality products is taking a bit of a backward seat. I think they probably need to worry a little less on their schedule, and more on polish and feature completeness.

Rather remarkable I'm actually saying this, to be honest! Apple would be the last people I would have guessed needed this advise...

We're talking about Cut for files (in the Finder), not inside apps.

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.

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

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.

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/recipes/xcode_help-I...

You say it's questioning the single authoritative root source of information. I say there is no authoritative root source of this information. People's memories are bad, even about their own lives, and when they say something improbable about their own lives, it's not an implicit accusation of lying if you say you think they're wrong.

Why? Because in iOS 9.2 Apple released it with a bug that causes the viewport to zoom incorrectly on these web pages. This affects LibreOffice's OpenGrok, which I browsed regularly on my iPad.

They still haven't fixed this, and it's a major regression. iOS updates are few and infrequent. Consequently I'm seriously questioning what their updates actually do to my iPad and iPhone.

I don't think it's overly harsh to expect people, when talking about their own actions (and obviously when understanding the topic and terminology), and when in a discussion which is not a light hearted banter, to expect someone to put enough thought into that statement to make it true, at least to the degree it requires additional information to make them reconsider.

This theoretical exchange in a discussion regarding the merits of Chicken illustrates my point of view: Person 1: I don't eat chicken. Person 2: Are you sure? Person 1: Okay, yes, I eat chicken.

Person 1 has, at this point, proven themselves unreliable in their statements. Whether that is from a lie or mistake is both unprovable,and to me, irrelevant, because the end result is the same. I may or may not converse with them further, depending on other cues, but functionally, what's the difference to Person 2 or observers. I don't think that's overly harsh, just stating the realities of the situation. Sometimes people tell small lies, sometimes they make mistakes, but every occurrence affects your view of them slightly unless you expected that statement to be untrue.

So, to bring this full circle, the original commenter that asserted they didn't use default Apple apps may have lied, but it's far more likely they were mistaken, but in the end, I'll view their statements with a bit more skepticism now, as they've proven themselves capable of making a simple, assertive blanket statements about their behavior that they will recant at the slightest question.

Even so, I still feel the original reply carried an implied accusation of deception, for the reasons we've covered in depth. Regardless of whether the replying commenter was eventually correct, I don't think they had cause to use the wording they did at the time they did. We don't agree, which is fine, but that's why I felt compelled to make the statement I did, and while my wording may have been overly harsh (which I've already admitted), I don't believe my message was.

I assume we're done here, since your last statement was a single sentence whose purpose was to call into question my attitude, understanding, and actions, and offered little additional to discuss? In truth, I found that somewhat belittling, but am trying to ignore that aspect, as I may be misinterpreting it (and I try to be more forgiving of speech directed towards myself than to others). I've tried to be civil, and while this discussion wasn't light hearted, I did find it informative.