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Tumblr Co-Founder: Apple's Software Is In a Nosedive
mrspoonsi writes Respected developer Marco Arment is worried about Apple's future. In a blog post, he writes, "Apple's hardware today is amazing — it has never been better. But the software quality has taken such a nosedive in the last few years that I'm deeply concerned for its future." Arment was CTO at Tumblr, before he left to start Instapaper. "Apple has completely lost the functional high ground," says Arment. "'It just works' was never completely true, but I don't think the list of qualifiers and asterisks has ever been longer." He blames Apple prioritizing marketing for the problems with Apple's software. Apple wants to have new software releases each year as a marketing hook, but the annual cycles of updating Apple's software are leading to too many bugs and problems, he says: I suspect the rapid decline of Apple's software is a sign that marketing has a bit too much power at Apple today: the marketing priority of having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality. Maybe it's an engineering problem, but I suspect not — I doubt that any cohesive engineering team could keep up with these demands and maintain significantly higher quality."
Surprising absolutely nobody.
He makes the claim that their software quality has taken a nosedive, that they're introducing tons of bugs and functional regressions, but he doesn't give a single example of any of that. He just makes the unsubstantiated claim.
Apple Computer - proudly going out of business since 1979!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The hell you say!!!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
The calendar and face-time applications work great, but it took them years to get it sorted out. That's what has me tied to my iPhone.
"Apple's hardware today is amazing — it has never been better."
Tell that to the people baking their $3000 MBP.
...to hear, because I'm aching to get a rMBP.
I cant stand the bullshit anymore that I have to put up with linux desktop. Had enough.
"Apple's hardware today is amazing — it has never been better.
So board soldered RAM, non upgradeable parts, antennas that stop working when you put your hand on it (exactly where you were meant to put your hand), bendable phone frames, baking portables in the oven, the list is huge, if this is better then they were shite before.
But they are right about the software, never has it been more insecure and more geared towards grabbing up your data and marketing/profiting from it.
Queue the fanbois to the defense.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
This is an interesting claim, and I'd like to hear about ideas--not just suspicions. Besides, is this really news? Innovation at Apple hasn't changed much since Steve Jobs lost his battle with cancer. It really isn't enough to "build bigger and faster;" it's also important to build smarter. With their new HQ under construction, I'm sure there is going to be a slump during the transition because you can't do both things at once.
Apple's hardware today is amazing — it has never been better
That may be true if we look at performance in absolute terms, but except for being an early adopter of some components, Apple's hardware is overall not very special compared to the rest of the market. In the past, there were periods when Apple's hardware was actually better than what any other vendor offered.
There have been some serious bugs with the forced timeine of the OS releases. Maybe AAPL should consider going back to release-when-ready. For us using Yosemite has been a blessing (faster) and a curse (bugs). Mostly the bugs are annoying and do not interfere with daily operations and I'm sure the coders are working to fix them. This is why we only upgraded a couple of machines to the new OS X 10.10.x
I have to wonder if part of the problem is simply not being good enough (or it simply not being possible to be good enough, given the intricacies of finding suitable people and getting them up to speed) at adding new people fast enough to support their various new things.
Time was when Apple pretty much made hardware, MacOS, and one pet project or another over the years(Clarisworks/Appleworks, Hypercard, the occasional foray into some quasi-server thing with IBM, etc.)
Now they make hardware, OSX, iOS(shared in part; but only in part, with OSX), iWork, iLife(with applications from both increasingly showing up on both OSX and iOS), a pretty massive 'cloud' operation to keep delivering all that ITMS, web-app versions of some of its formerly native-only applications, Safari/webkit, Final Cut Pro, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting.
Even if you have unlimited money, turning a small, focused, group that does a few things into a larger and more heterogenous operation requires significant talent, and probably a certain minimum amount of time that just can't be escaped.
Yearly major releases and more frequent bug fixes was a solved problem long before billg co-founded the Evil Empire...
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Marco Arment "respected developer" provides literally not a SINGLE example about this software "nosedive". This is blog by assertion. This blogger is somewhat famous for his strong assertions that get a lot of traffic.
And he doesn't measure this supposed nosedive IN CONTEXT. In other words, Apple is in trouble if Microsoft or Linux software was taking off free of bugs and integration glitches. Having to use Windows at work (and just listen to corporate IT dealing with Windows 8 "upgrades" before saying microsoft is taking off and Apple is nosediving), Mac and home and develop for linux this is FAR from true. Window 8 has had no GUI stability, the Windows bluetooth stack is glitchy beyond belief, the supposed development model for windows apps (for those familiar with the metro stuff) is super confusing. Trying to develop desktop apps for linux is a joke unless you go cross-platform.
Apple offers a relatively cogent, clear development model. The App store and app sales model is relatively straightforward. The installed base is not ludicrously fragmented the way linux is. And yes, parents AND grandparents seem to run into fewer problems using apple products than linux and other solutions (anyone trying to go down the linux path with parents / grandparents will learn some important lessons quickly).
Perhaps some other posters can give us some useful details of this nosedive.
I had all sorts of weird issues with my MBP when Yosemite rolled out-- it's relatively new hardware, but there were substantive issues with memory management within some of their applications. Mail, particularly, seems to have real issues in this latest release(here's a link., but it's not unique.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I used to be an Apple supporter. Apple used to be stable. After being a huge proponent of apple from 99-2012, I am running for the door. Every new version of apple software has less features(for an actual power user) and is less stable. Oh how I used to love apple! Oh how I hate Apple, and want them out of my creative professional life!
Apple products are never going to get better, because Apple has gotten a taste of "moron money", and us creative professionals and academics are no longer a concern.
I suspect that Apple has been hiring 20 somethings to write the software, because they are sooo smart, and not because it saves money(of course apple hasn't enough money).
When you are as All In with a company as I was with apple, it takes a long time to get away. I'm going on 3 years, and have not completely replaced apple in my workflow. I have been changing components of my apple software with third party components, and I'm almost done!
OMG I can't wait to never buy an apple product again!!!!!!!
I can't comment on Apple specifically, but hard release dates belong in the realm of unicorns. No serious software company would ever have hard release dates unless the product was already finished before announcing it. It's just asking for trouble. Either you break your word on the software release date, or you release buggy software. Bug fixing and software development in general timelines are *estimates*, not hard deadlines. Anyone who has taken a college class or gone through a single release cycle knows that.
... I second what the author says about the software.
I used to be a whole-hearted apple fan. Now I only use linux for computing (on a converted chromebook) and my iPhone 5C and Apple TV are the last things I use that are apple. IOS 8 is totally twitchy with lots of app crashes, poor battery management (my phone died with 8% battery life the other day), and a footprint so large that I can hardly do anything on my 16gb phone ( less than 1 year old) anymore. My Apple TV can't seem to handle displaying album art correctly but other than that works for the most part.
Yosemite caused my old apple laptop to slow down to such a crawl that it has essentially become unusable. Whereas with Snow Leopard and even Lion (to a lesser extent though) it was great. I was fortunate enough to not suffer with the wifi issues others did, but things of the sort have plagued the latest software releases.
I think apple would do themselves a favor by slowing down a bit, and doubling down on reducing footprint size and upping the speed of the current features instead of always trying to add new stuff. Basically we need a repeat of the change from leopard to snow leopard; i.e. we need a "Snow Yosemite."
The overall polish of iOS and well thought out UX design (for the masses, mind you) has kept me an iPhone fan since I bought the first one back in 2007. This news is too bad.
Apple's kit may look pretty and cost a pretty penny, but their quality is lacking and lagging. As to software: AFAIK they once had a daughter company called Claris that made some software. Now they just distribute a variant of BSD Unix.
I would have killed for annual releases at various places. We were rolling out every few weeks or so, driven by customer demand and putting out fires. The annual release cycle is only a problem if a bunch of suits come in during month 11 and pile on a whole bunch of feature requests. Maybe that's the problem.
Then they came out with Final Cut Pro X and when their users complained about the rampant bugs, overly simplified iMovie style interface and defeaturization, Apple told their user base to go fuck themselves -- as Apple is want to do and Premier went back to being on top again.
http://fortune.com/2011/06/22/...
https://discussions.apple.com/...
Anyway, far from being a learning moment for Apple -- this has been wholly adopted as their corporate ideology when it comes to their user apps. A lot of it is a focus on iOS and trying to make everything fall in line with iOS -- this was clear as early as 2007 when a trip to the Apple store had their laptop and desktop add-ons shunted to dusty corners while iPhone cases and accessories dominated the store. So this has beed a mentality years in the making based solely on spreadsheets of product sales and not user needs regarding user experience.
Even Woz wrote a rant (now pulled it seems) about ditching OS X in favor of Linux over the frustration of the mounting shit-pile of bugs and anoyances with OS X You can read comments about Woz' post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
Tumblr is more awful than anything Apple puts out (or MS for that matter).
Apple's hardware today is amazing â" it has never been better.
From my perspective the overwhelming majority of Apple hardware is no better than what I can buy from my local retailer, unless you're talking about the iPhone in which case it is no better than what i can get in a phone from Samsung. I would say Apple had much better hardware ~10 years ago when they were still using the PowerPC G5 CPUs (and were the largest volume seller of RISC PCs in the world).
I would pay Apple for a license for their OS to run on a PC. I would not pay Apple for the hardware they want to force me to buy to run their OS.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The hardware hasn't become less serviceable, it's that the hardware has shrunk to the size where it's not economical to break out the audio from the video, or the CPU from the audio and video, or the eithernet, disk controller, etc. As a result you end up with a tiny circuit board that costs pennies to produce, is easily maintainable and fits inside today's slim devices.
If you want a repairable computer with a separate chip for every application, I have a coal plant to sell you
moox. for a new generation.
Finder has always been pretty bad, but now with Yosemite you can't open Finder windows. Clicking on the icon does nothing. I have about forty users out of sixty-seven that have this problem. Unfortunately, about half of them are artists so they are having a lot of trouble using the command line as a work-around. I took three of the laptops to an Apple store, and they said they see that problem pretty often but don't have a fix. I shipped one of the laptops back for repair, and Apple reinstalled the OS, but the problem is still there. It is very frustrating that Apple forces people to use the command line.
Another unrelated problem is the fact that Apple doesn't reconnect to network drives. NetWare used to require you to reboot DOS/Windows when there was a problem. Microsoft, because their servers are so unreliable, would automatically reconnect in the background. That made Windows appear much more reliable than it really was. Apple should copy the same decision because it is an absolute and utter pain to have to reconnect all of your network drives by hand after rebooting or changing networks. Due to having a lot of locations from buying over a dozen small competitors, we have a lot of different network drives so Apple's decision is painful for us.
As a long time Apple and iPhone user (back to Lisa). I am so happy to see this getting some press. I upgraded to Yosmite, and found my computer nearly unusable. I can't type 4 words without a spinning beachball while the machine catches up. This is on a Core I7. There is such a lack of quality in my iPhone I truly regret buying it. If I ask Siri "Read new text messages" 50% of the time it will say "You have no messages" even if there are new ones on the unlock screen notification. It also seems to answer the question differently if I say "Read Latest Text Messages" instead of "Read new text messages." Totally bonkers. I've had to reset my iPhone about 5 times this week, because the keyboard thinks its still in landscape mode, but the rest of the screen elements know i've rotated back. I've been on the phone with Apple about my ringtone settings not actually changing the ringtone, dispite the options screen clearly showing it. This is on a totally freshly restored iPhone.
1) Is someone trying to short AAPL? 2) Slow day at /.? "Let's have another Apple fanboi flamefest."
"Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens." - Schiller
Viewing this tweet shows that Arment is a big fan of Scott Forstall, who ran iOS development until he was pushed out after Jobs passed away.
https://twitter.com/marcoarmen...
Not sure if he is chums with him, but taking potshots after your favorite is pushed out isn't uncommon.
As any developer knows, there will always be bugs, and they will be found when you have a billion, and growing, users.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
I'm not a prophet by any stretch, but I've been using computers since 1982. I've seen a thing or two, seen a company or two make great products and then fall. They all fall eventually.
Apple make great hardware. Their software, while meaning well, has never been "great". I agree with the article. I've seen it myself. I'm in a great position to evaluate HW and SW since I work with Windows and related HW, Apple HW/SW, as well as BSD and Linux. I literally see it all. MS, while often derided, makes some really good SW these days, especially their "cloud" stuff like Azure. Nothing touches it.
Let's just be honest for a moment. Apple have not innovated much since the iPod and iPhone. Everything since is simple another iteration of the original idea.
MS realized it missed the boat on the Internet back in the late 90s and took over 10 years to course correct with their new CEO and newfound direction as a services company as well as their perennial Office and other stuff.
Linux and the OSS companies largely copy either Apple or MS or both. Some good stuff comes from OSS, especially FreeBSD, the notion of jails and ZFS and OpenBSD with their audits.
Apple is riding the wave of past glories. The watch will be a loss leader. It's nothing. Android is basically 80% of the worldwide market for smartphones. Apple do really well in the US, but not so much overseas. OS X is fragile and nothing more than a semi-pretty GUI atop a badly-hacked UNIX-like OS. Why they simply didn't take FreeBSD and use that as the solid base eludes me and others regularly. I guess they had to eat their own dogwood to somehow make Steve feel good about resurrecting NEXT.
Apple glomming onto Webkit for Safari as well as Opera and others is fast tracking the browser world to have one standard -- Webkit. This is a monoculture and is not good. Mozilla may or may not survive well without Google's handouts. We'll see. Microsoft is about to release another browser based on their Trident rendering engine. Time will tell if it's any good or just another attempt to embrace and extend. Under Satya Nadella, MS may yet emerge to be the winner, as they are desperately trying while Apple is simply basking in past glories.
I installed iTunes last week on my Windows PC in order to search for some iOS games I saw on Android...my God, the iTunes UI sucks a lot!!!
First of all, the different areas of the Window are no longer cleanly separated. Trying to find where each UI element starts and stops was near impossible without mouse over.
Secondly, the scroll bars appear only on mouse over. In order to scroll, I had to constantly move the mouse over the area to scroll in order to make the scroll bar appear.
Thirdly, for some odd reason, scrolling lists in iTunes are horizontal.
Forthly, I could not find where games were. I uninstalled iTunes, thinking that games were removed from it, but then after seeing that Apple still does not have their game catalog online, I had to install iTunes again. I then found out that iOS games are listed under the Apps section.
He has not been involved with Tumblr since ca 2010 if I remember correctly.
When a Pages document in iCloud storage is open across multiple iOS/OSX devices, Pages routinely declares it can see multiple versions and can't decide which one it should keep. One of the options it offers you is to keep both of them, leaving you to manually look at both and figure out which one is the best. This happens even without simultaneous access, and edits often get distributed randomly between versions, requiring manual cut-and-paste merging.
Apple should go to the Dropbox people, hat in hand, and say:
Yes, Steve was a dick when he talked with you years ago. We don't want to acquire you - we want to hire you to host iCloud file storage. We want a cloud back end that Just Works, and cross-platform sharing will be a plus.
I would pay for that service, in a heartbeat.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Part of the solution would be for Apple to decouple application updates from operating system updates.
I see no reason why a bug fix to Safari (of which there are plenty required) has to be delivered in the same way as an iOS update when they already have a perfectly good app updating mechanism (the App Store). Plus customers are used to apps updating frequently and automatically, adding Apple to the mix isn't going to be something strange for them.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
You can have yearly releases as long as you're willing to ruthlessly cut features that aren't sufficiently stable. If frequent updates are more important than features, then that's achievable.
The problem would be if marketing had a hand in both direction AND quality control. That's the recipe for disaster.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Ok, so I'm a Mac user, as well as being an IT guy who supports Mac, Windows, and Linux. In general, I don't think that I can say I've noticed anything like a "nosedive" in software quality. The quality of Apple's software has, over a long span of time, been relatively consistent. It's pretty solid and stable in most circumstances, doing most of the things that Apple users typically do, with some exceptions. At regular intervals, Apple decides they're going to improve something, and a bunch of things break for a while following a major release, and then most of it settles down and gets fixed. If you want a stable experience, don't upgrade to the newest major release until it's been out for a couple of months. Just like Windows, and a lot of other software.
Then there are random inexplicable things. File sharing, for example. Apple decides they're going to standardize on SMB because it's faster and more widely used, which sounds like good news, right? Yeah, except that it's over a year later, and Apple's file sharing is still buggy. Apple's advice is to not use OSX with file servers. Similarly, they just can't seem to get their Mail application to be reliable. They keep rewriting these things, and every new rewrite has new problems. You wouldn't think email and file sharing would be such strange high-tech features that Apple's software engineers would be unable to handle it. But Apple has kind of always done that kind of thing.
As far as the yearly release cycles, I don't see any reason why this should be a major concern. Having a yearly release cycle shouldn't be impossible to keep up with, as long as the changes for each release are not overly ambitious. For example, Apple could release OSX v10.11 next year, and it can basically be a maintenance release. No new features, just bug fixes and performance improvements. Their OS updates are free these days, so who's going to complain?
How about the SMB problem on Mavericks that has been around since it's release? ACL corruption, file corruption, and file deletion all caused by this problem. Apple has yet to fix it or even acknowledge that their rewrite of SMB has been a complete frak up from the beginning. 10.9.5, the last release in the 10.9.x series, still causes rampant SMB problems and Apple has abandoned it for what? Frakking Yosemite eye candy?
Apple has obviously produced many innovative products over the years... but they fell behind a while ago and part of the reason is because they can succeed regardless. Apple has done an excellent job of isolating themselves from the rest of the competition. The reason companies like Apple and Bose continue to thrive is not because they make great products (far from it) - it's because they market themselves as if they do and make it virtually impossible to make an accurate comparison. Bose always has their products displayed in a separate section of stores so that they cannot be compared to other speakers. Apple products have Apple OSes and only run approved software - they give the illusion of superiority. Another advantage is that most people who invest in Bose or Apple products do so because they believe they are the best - as a result, they were convinced before they even touched the product. It's like the ridiculous scam emails you receive from Nigeria - they are purposely worded poorly to weed out people too smart to fall for the scam. The people who buy Apple products appreciate things like the "Lightning" connector - they love gimmicks like "iPhone speaker docs" and were happy to run out and buy new ones when "Lightning" was released despite the fact that it makes a lot more sense to just stream via wireless. Apple sells $50 chargers like crazy and they are 98% profit - they made a killing by switching to a new, proprietary connector and complaints were minimal. The competition is forced to conform to standards - the people who buy non-Apple products often do so because they hate feeling like a sucker. The new iPhone finally introduces NFC, which has been available on Android for years, and locks it down to their own Apple Pay system - they market things so well that people see this as an "awesome feature" and even use it as an example of Apple's innovation. The bottom line is that anybody expecting too much out of Apple is going to be disappointed - they have already won and the free market has given them no reason to care about staying ahead of the curve. People camp out for days when the a iPhone is released - the rest of the market does all of the R&D for them and they already know what works and what doesn't. They have an insanely loyal customer base because they suck people into their world and it's difficult to get out (most people don't want out). They're the best because they tell you they are the best and they make it difficult to prove by changing the rules of the game. They get away with putting 1GB of RAM into the iPhone 6 while the new Android devices have to cram in 3GB to stay competitive - Apple has no real competition other than themselves. In a world where pennies per device can add up to billions of dollars the deck is still stacked. Some day they will collapse... but today people seem just as convinced as ever that Apple continues to revolutionize the tech world and they're more than happy to buy their overpriced, locked down hardware and proprietary accessories and software. Brainwashing is powerful stuff and most of the world really doesn't know that much about technology - they know what they're told and what they hear/read/etc - most people don't have a lot of time to think for themselves. At the end of the day these purchases really aren't that big of a deal to most people - they get excited for a few days and then use their devices for day-to-day work or entertainment - it's pretty much all the same crap. People love Apple, people love Beats by Dre, people love Bose (one of the pioneers of being successful cranking out overpriced, gimmicky junk) - marketing trumps quality every single time and you are seeing the masters at work. These guys don't want well-informed individuals buying their stuff - they want clueless people who are successful in other areas of life because they're influential all-around. Genius and proven. So talk about their nosedive in software quality... or the Mac Book Pros that are blowing up... or the new devices that barely improve upon the old ones... but as a company they know exactly what they're doing and they're doing just fine.
One thing in Apple's favor is that their primary competitor (still Microsoft) keeps doing so many things wrong with their software. I recently bought a Surface Pro (for the hardware, which is on par with Apple's in terms of quality design and manufature) and Windows 8.1 has managed to break so many of the things they'd finally gotten right in Vista 2.0 (Win7).
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Jobs was a brilliant software architect. This legacy's remnants can still be found in the core of OSX. BeOS and OSX were great advancements in the software world. What is Apple's long term strategy for make new advancements in their core technology? Adding/iterating on layers on top of what already exists is great until a critical point is reached when your stretching your software to do things which was never intended in its initial design. What major innovation to its core software has Apple made since OSX and iOS were initially released? This article just adds another notch in argument that Apple is somewhat rudderless in the technology department. Apple needs to spend less time marketing and more time engineering technology.
He should talk.... Their own software his horrible. I have to load their site via safari just to use it or get any thing to load half the time. It crashes if you go full screen on a video and I cant get out of the screen with out going to the home screen then closing the app then scrolling all the way down to where I was. Its the buggiest iOS app I try to use....
my 1st mac was a gen 2 Air bought late 2010 - overall _LOVE_ it/BY FAR best laptop I've ever owned!
that said:
1. keychain has never worked consistently/reliably - I'm sure it's fixable but it's NEVER "just worked" & for what I paid I shouldn't have to shovel time at it. this has gotten way worse w/the mini I bought the kids to the point it's effectively just nuisance pop-ups
2. iTunes content - recently upgraded my 4s to a 6+ & for reasons I don't get my content (books & movies as well as music) is inconsistently available among my phone, air & the mini. again, probably solvable but isn't this part of the Apple premium?
3. iCloud - don't even get me started... like kicking a puppy... on the plus side their push email TORCHES verizon sms on latency & hey!, it's also free!
don't get me wrong - overall I love my various apple devices (family has an air, mini, ipad air, ipad mini, gen 1 ipad [still works], 6+, 5s & two 5s touches for kids) but there is merit to story. I love the devices but definitely use google's apps where possible...
footnote: time machine is still the shinzzle! (that said, did they ever fix time capsule or is it still POS?)
I updated to fix security vulnerabilities, but now I, too, encounter more bugs with old and new features.
My favorite new bug: Last week, an incoming iPhone call caused my MacBook to play a ringtone to indicate that the call was available for Handoff transfer. The call went to voicemail but my MacBook kept playing the ringtone, for one hour, before I realized what was going on and canceled the notification. My phone had been sitting 1 foot away from the MacBook the entire time, yet some sloppiness in the Handoff protocol, combined with lack of fault correction like software timeout on the MacBook, caused my computer to play a ringtone for an hour while waiting for user input.
My favorite old bug: Yesterday I experienced a repeatable application crash while creating new appointments in the OS X Calendar program.
Two years ago I received a personal follow-up for my detailed bug report in iPhoto. Now, the Apple bug report forms are outdated such that it is sometimes impossible to submit a bug for the latest version of released software.
Simplicity is the essence of design. Simplicity in design implies a tractable set of unit tests. Apple's quality control is lacking.
More evidence for my hypothesis that MBA managers are driving the American economy into the ground. Contrast him with Steve Jobs who was not an MBA. He brought the company back from the edge, after being destroyed by another MBA, Jim Sculley.
If you want a strong perspective against MBA's, I recommend reading John Ralston Saul's "The Unconscious Civilization" . Here is part of a summary of his arguments against MBA's:
They fear all the most effective qualities of capitalism itself (risk, innovation). “No matter how badly the MBAs are doing, they just go on hiring clones of themselves.” They preach capitalist ideology, but only simulate it through unproductive preoccupations like mergers and acquisitions. Their incomes skyrocket, the economy founders, the middle class erodes.
They profit by flipping between nationalization and privatization; “an unnecessary move in either direction merely makes money for the political friends of the party in power”. Privatization of government functions is foolish, as business is better suited to fuelling real growth.
Contrast this with real innovators like Elon Musk, who has created disruptive companies in four separate sectors (banking, transportation, space launching, and energy production). Please note that he is NOT an MBA and openly says that he disagrees with their methods.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
"Apple's hardware today is amazing — it has never been better."
BULLSHIT! from 2007 to 2009 they were #1 in least failures in laptops. Now they're beat by ASUS, Toshiba, MSI, Samsung, and Sony. They're 6th place in quality! SIXTH! Guess which place they are in price vs speed. I'll give you a hint: Fujitsu and Avatar beat them.
My PowerBook from 2003 crashed only twice that I can remember in the four years I used it. The hardware and software for it were rock solid. For my new late 2012 MacBook, it locks-up probably twice a month.* While still a hell of a lot better than Windows, it is pretty bad in comparison. Apple should start working on making OS X reliable again.
* I'm not including reboots due to Finder locking-up. If I rebooted every time it locked-up, I would have to reboot most days.
What ever happened to the "we'll release when it's ready" approach to product development?
Oh...that's right...stockholders and their never ending quest for higher stock prices and profits and using customers as their QA department to cut costs.
But, it's not limited to just public companies. My favorite development environment (which I won't name as it's not relevant), went down the tubes for the longest time. It took a near-death experience for them to realize that they needed to get back to the "ship it when it's ready" mentality. They still have issues, but they are improving. Just wish the cost of the next major "upgrade" wouldn't cost me another vital organ donation.
I have used Apple software since the early 00s. Like any software, there have always been bugs. There always will be.
I have had no more problems (and possibly less) with Yosemite and iOS 8 than with any other release. Those who use words like 'nosedive' either have short memories or are in need of clicks.
Let us recall the software update of a decade ago that erased every external drive with a space in the volume name - and let us be happy that things like that do not happen any more.
A.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
If you want a repairable computer with a separate chip for every application, I have a coal plant to sell you
Or an original IBM PC/XT. All the chips were socketed, and every IO device (except maybe the KB) required it's own card on the ISA bus.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
iWork and iLife.
After iWork '09, the iWork applications had very little in the way of updates, but the Keynote and Pages applications were very capable. Pages didn't have all the features of Microsoft Word, but the typography and page layout capabilities were exceptional in comparison, and users had a fairly clear list of improvements that they suggested - mostly improvements to mail merge, tables-of-contents, footnoting, indenting, and creating indices. Keynote was excellent. Numbers was simply not what people expected from a spreadsheet and it had the most suggestions for improvements. However, by and large the apps were quite good and a bargain.
iWork '13 destroyed everything that made the iWork applications great. Not only did the UI regress, but the feature set, rather than meeting user requests / expectations, jettisoned swathes of functionality - in exchange for compatibility with iCould and the web version. The highly usable productivity software became a Google Docs wannabe overnight. Worse, the old version ceased to be available. Subsequently, improvements to iWork have included no restoration of the functionality of the product, but changes in the file format (that introduce incompatibilities with older versions). iWork took a nosedive.
iLife hasn't fared much better. iLife originally included GarageBand, iMovie, and iDVD for creating DVDs (with menus, title graphics, scene previews, and control over flow between menus - simple, but functional). iDVD is gone. Even Apple's "pro" video tools no longer support similar functionality to what iDVD provided in 2009 -- there is nothing available that can claim the same function, and you can no longer obtain the abandoned software. GarageBand has some added instruments and lessons, but at the loss of their video / podcast scoring and advanced podcast authoring capabilities. The filters are now more primitive and skewed specifically towards guitars (why?). iMovie has gone through various iterations of UI and library management changes that make moving between versions confusing and it focuses on iCloud and iMovie Theater - features almost completely unused because of their awkward implementation and storage requirements (particularly in iCloud) that are ridiculous.
Aperture, their prosumer photo database and editing app, is about to be jettisoned and replaced with an upgraded iPhoto with many of the most professional and workflow-related features of Aperture removed. Aperture will no longer be available afterward. In effect, their ceding this software to Adobe's Lightroom and their subscriber-based pay-to-play model.
A lot of people will also probably bitch about Final Cut Pro X, Motion, Compressor, and those video tools. However, I think Apple is doing OK there. They released FCPX prematurely - they needed to wait until they got FCP7 project importing working, but the changes they made were really necessary. Where they have failed is the workflow and integration points of FCPX - Motion - Compressor, and they've dropped the ball on creating optical media. There was also still some room to keep Shake in the mix.
I don't worry too much about things like Apple ID as that's more or less par-for-the-course for that sort of service these days. Nobody does it much better. However, I chafe at the idea that they are spending so much development money, time, and effort on that dog called 'iCloud'. It's a disaster of a service and it's dragging down their productivity software.
Yeah, I wouldn't want to be known for that cesspool, either.
I don't know if it's marketing or like he says but I totally agree that the quality has plummeted. I have never had so many bugs as in the last year.
Apple iTunes on Windows = Big Smelly Pile of Schrodinger Bug Sh8t. And it's about the only way to get photos off an iPhone.
It's silly how mandatory it feels to jailbreak. Even with jailbreaks, it's a lot of work to restore ios to even its previous GRAPHIC level. You know a company is hostile towards its users when it utterly deletes a successful theme with zero user choice.
The real standout is the strange little gray shading that appeared on all my backgrounds. A picture of a sunny day became overcast. A portrait became ludicrous. What went wrong with backgrounds betwixt 6 and 7? Not only did we lose the ability to set a background without a strange gradient appearing (sometimes, it is internally based on the brightness of your background), which is entirely without purpose (some hypothesize it would be there to make the clock easier to read, but not only is it present when you are on your home screen, it is present even if that background is NEVER set to appear when the clock is visible, so, it assuredly has zero purpose except customer griefing), but we ALSO lost the ability to even pinch and zoom the background properly.
The workaround is a set of wallpaper editing apps that duplicate the pinch and zoom work that was free in ios 6 and part of the interface, combined with a jailbreak, then winterboard, then a mod for winterboard that removes the gradient (alternatively, you can jailbreak, then go into the files and delete the gradient .PNG files that ruin all your shit).
And that's just raw presentation. Functionality appears to appear and disappear at random. Each upgrade takes hours of research about whether to press the "go" button, and it just feels so temporary, like I'm renting the functionality.
One of the bigger reasons i'm stuck not wanting to upgrade from 10.6: kernel panics via ipfw when using sshuttle. I need shuttle and would rather not use a shitty VPN protocol to slow down my already slow 3Mbit connection so i'm stuck with 10.6 before they broke ipfw.
On top of that: basically all the author said, 10.6 reflected what Apple used to be focused on for software, it was the only major release to focus on non-feature based improvements, ever since then each update brings features i have no interest in and only seem to fragment current features, then also degrade the rest of the experience by bloat and bugs.
It's more complicated than that, with Microsoft you expect it to be shit but you use it anyway (or install something else on the hardware). Apple is and has been 99% marketing for a long time, as in people expect things to "just work" like it says on the trendy minimalist box
When something built on the sandy foundation of marketing-driven fad consumerism and becomes un-hip (Blackberry!) the downward slide gains momentum
Dear Leader Jobs has been gone for a few years now which is where the slide started, then a bunch of crappy / underwhelming releases one after the other... people start to wake up
You're judging them by the content instead of judging their technical expertise. It's the equivalent of an ad homenin attack. I've seen several technical presentations from them, and they are impressive, especially with their methods of efficiently sharding existing MySQL databases with zero downtime.
In terms of revenue, Apple is following the money. iOS has made Apple the wealthy powerhouse that it is today, not OS X. They don't want to lose the installed base or be perceived as just a phone company; OS X gets them mindshare and stickiness in certain quarters that matter (i.e. education and youth) for future iOS revenue.
But they don't actually want to invest much in it; it's increasingly the sort of necessary evil that is overhead, so it makes sense for them to shift to an iOS-led company. In the phone space, where the consumer upgrade cycle is tied to carrier contracts and upgrade cycles, it's important to have "new and shiny" every single year; consumers standing in AT&T shops are fickle people that are easily swayed by displays and sales drones that may or may not know anything about anything.
So the marketing rationale at Apple is (1) follow the revenue, which is mobile and iOS, (2) do what is necessary to stay dominant there, which means annual release cycles at least, and (3) reduce the cost of needed other business wings as much as possible so as to focus on core revenue competencies without creating risk, which means making OS X follow iOS.
It makes perfect business sense in the short and medium terms. In the long term, it's hard to see what effect it will have. It's entirely possible that they could wind down the OS X business entirely and remain dominant and very profitable as a result of their other product lines. It's also possible that poor OS X experiences and the loss of the "high end" could create a perception problem that affects one of their key value propositions, that of being "high end," and that will ultimately also influence their mobile sales down the road in negative ways as a result.
I'm a Linux switcher (just over five years ago now) that was tremendously frustrated with desktop Linux (and still dubious about its prospects) after using Linux from 1993-2009, but that has also in the last couple of months considered switching back. I switched to OS X largely for the quality of the high-end applications and for the more tightly integrated user experience. Now the applications business is struggling (the FCP problem, the Aperture events, the joke that is the iOS-synchronized iWork suite) and third-party applications have declined in quality (see: MS Office on OS X these days) as other developers have ceded the central applications ground to Apple. Meanwhile, the user experience on iOS remains sound but on OS X it has become rather less so as a result of the iOS-centricity of the company.
What to do? I've considered a switch back to Linux, but the Linux distros I've tried out in virtual machines have been underwhelming to me; the Linux desktop continues, so far as I can tell, to be in a worse state for my purposes than it was in 2008. I have no interest in Windows (I have Win7 and Win8 installations in VMs for specific applications, and even in a VM window they make me cringe; just complete usability nightmares).
It's a frustrating time for desktop users in general, I think; the consumer computing world has shifted to mobile/embedded devices and taken most of the labor, attention, and R&D with it. The desktop, needed by those of us that do productive computing work, has been left to languish on all fronts. It's completely rational in many ways at the macroeconomic level, but at the microeconomic level of individual workers and economic sectors, it's been a disaster.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Even with the latest IOS 8.(whatever), Safari privacy mode is so Broken. No matter how many times I close the windows, exit the app, and re-boot the ipad, screens from privacy mode flash while browsing... Not a good thing when a bunch of people share the ipad..
this never happened on IOS 7
You can no longer add videos to playlists in iTunes
Why should old apps break in the new OS?
Exactly. Windows is famous for doing this. I have to rewrite my viruses, trojans, and worms each time they release a new version of Windows. Why can't those assholes maintain binary backward compatibility? I mean, what's *ACTUALLY* stopping UEFI from having been designed so that my MBR + TSR virus couldn't still run on modern hardware? Are these guys idiots or something?!?!?
Time was they were trend setters. While the iPhone wasn't the first smart phone, by a long shot, it was the first one that got real regular consumer popularity. Also while the iPad didn't invent tablets, it made tablets something to own and defined what they'd be.
However now they are getting beat on features left right and center. That amazin' new iPhone 6+? Ya it's 2011 calling, something about a "Galaxy Note". Samsung was rolling out their 4th generation large screen phone by the time Apple decided one was good to make. Apple can't claim to be a mobile leader anymore. They are a player for sure, but others are being first to market with new features.
Never mind design flaws that were made for aesthetics (the antenna that failed when you grabbed it, the 6+'s bending too easily, etc).
They are all about making shiny, fashionable, devices and charging a massive premium for them. That's fine, I guess, if that's what you like, but don't try and sell it as something amazing.
While a thin device is nice, we've already gotten past the "don't care" point, as you note. My Samsung Note 3 makes me perfectly happy, doesn't need to be any thinner. And it has a removable cover so I can replace the battery. I'll take a slightly thicker device if it means I can get at the battery, since that dies long before the rest.
My wifes Macbook Amateur laptop won't charge when the machine is below some 5 degrees C or so. It will run from the mains adapter, but the battery refuses to charge. We have to warm up the laptop (by playing a computer game for instance) before it starts charging. It actually has some sort of message in the status icon of the battery about this. This for a machine aimed at traveling professionals.
So much for Professional high quality hardware. Although it did survive a drop from 1.5 meter onto the tarmac. But so did my Sony Vaio; and that charges just fine at the same temperature.
Also, the wifi of the Mac sucks, compared to the Vaio, and a Samsung Galaxy Note. It's not stable, and far less sensitive.
I will not buy more Mac hardware, nor the Vaio actually (heat issues). Lenovo looks promising.
c) People want less bugs
I'd rather have fewer bugs.
The horribly useless comment system on Tumblr is his design I believe. If there was something before it, I shudder at the thought of what would be worse than the current system. It makes Slashdot Beta look like Slashdot Classic. I've found more useful information in Youtube comments than on Tumblr. Do we really need a whole line for every single person who ever liked or relinked or appreciated some post?
I read the internet for the articles.
I run Linux Mint on my MB Pro. The only complaint I have is that the camera is non-functional (there's active work on solving this in the community, though), but I've been quite happy with it otherwise.
sorry to ask the obvious, but... So why is this taking more than a day to solve?
Method A:
(1) Put the Apple Camera driver in IDA Pro
(2) Disassemble it to see what it does
(3) Do what it does
Method B:
(1) Throw a logic analyzer on the camera connector
(2) See what the host pokes
(3) Poke the camera the same way
Method C:
(1) Set up two machine kernel debugging
(2) Build a kernel that does early entry debugger (there's a place to uncomment in bsd_init.c)
(3) Set breakpoints
(4) Step through the load of the camera driver initialization
(5) Step through the camera driver operations you want to be able to duplicate
(6) Do the same things
Even if it's downloading a wad of firmware to the camera, this should be pretty blatantly obvious from any of these three methods, and if you have a Mac, you obviously have a license for Mac OS, and therefore a license to use the blob.
Is it just that no one who can do this care about the camera working?
I gave my iPhone to my daughter and bought a Nexus 5 precisely because getting the operating system (iOS 7 at that point) was just one big piece of suckage [...]
I had exactly the opposite problem with Android [...]
You didn't hate your daughter enough to give her "one big piece of suckage" and take the good stuff for yourself?
Sorry for the AC...
- How many times a day does Xcode bring down OS X and force a reboot on you? (Multiple times per day for me, just pressing the big "PLAY" button can cause a reboot...)
- How are you doing with external libraries on Apple's mandate that all iOS binaries be both armv7 and arm64? (This is a major pain - not my code but everyone else's libraries...then how do you test??!?!?!??!)
- How many times per day does Xcode delete a source code file on you when you launch your external editor? (About 10 times per day I have to go back and restore a local file from vercon...)
If your answer is none to any of the above or you don't have these problems, you cannot understand the question.
Their main competitor in the personal computing space is Microsoft. Their main competitor in the much bigger mobile device space is Samsung. And right now, Samsung is devouring them with their Galaxy line of phones, tablets, and smart watches.
Finding God in a Dog
A big problem with MacOSX and iOS is legacy support. Apple is abandoning compatibility with older software and even older hardware which is perfectly capable of handling the computational demands of the newer software. This in turn is destroying access to older files due to the lack of software to read them.
The gaping lack of examples in Marco's blog post has me scratching my head. I'm curious what exactly has ticked this guy off to the extent that he uses the term "nose dive" to describe the software quality.
All of us power users of computers, no matter the operating system, will have a list of gotchas that we've encountered. I've got a very short list of squawks, nothing approaching serious, for Yosemite. I spend my days cranking out software on a Mac. This includes building apps in Xcode and Eclipse (for Android). Also includes running various apps for database management and image generation (Photoshop). I simply have not encountered anything awful. And I have a low threshold for pain.
That said, I count myself among the users of Apple computers who are ever fearful of what the company will become now that Jobs is gone. So far, I'm delighted with Yosemite.
mod +5 funny
Being wrong since 1997.
Fewer features in each release. More time to fix bugs, test, "get it right the first time".
It would be Tumblr. They can't drop in quality because they're already at the bottom.
Your last link is by Geoff Wozniak.
Not Steve "Woz" Wozniak.
First of all, iTunes.
I dislike it and refuse to install it on my PC. It's bloated and not user friendly. It clearly epitomises Apple's philosophy of making the user do things Apple's way. It's well overdue for a rethink and I expect to see that come soon.
With regards to iOS, it is on the cusp of greatness. It has some very nice features, it's user interface is fluid and easy to use and the design works well.
However, they need to take some time to make everything work well together and make the OS and apps more integrated.
For example:
- If users want to access my music stored in Dropbox or Google Drive or even a samba share, facilitate a method of saving that into the music library.
- Let users backup photos to Dropbox or Onedrive in the background as with iCloud backup. It's a real waste of time having to keep the app open and the screen unlocked.
- Similarly, let users sync music and videos in third party apps which permit it. Like Spotify and Plex.
- Third party app defaults would be pretty cool. Like being able to select Chrome or Gmail as default apps.
- Allow a bit more customisation such as changing control centre quick options.
It's really frustrating as Apple could come out with the best features in the world, but as long as they impose these arbitrary restrictions, iOS will always feel hamstrung.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
Apple has some software problems for sure; let's just start with iTunes. However, calling it a "nosedive" is simply lame. I feel he's just trying to gain some attention.
I am an OSX and iOS user. While I don't think either one is perfect, I have recent Windows and Android experience, and have no desire to use either on a regular basis. Problems? Yes. Nosedive? Not at all.
It's a bad comment system because it's not a comment system, and wasn't designed to be one.
An MBA is *not* the accounting/financial person that you seem to be suggesting.
MBAs are whatever they were before business school. That might be an accounting or financial person but it also might be a scientist or engineer. When I went to business school a few years ago the finance and accounting people were a minority, there were more scientists and engineers.
An MBA is not like other graduate programs. You do not focus on a particular field and delve deeply into it. An MBA program is an overview of all the major fields/components of an organization. Accounting and finance are a small part of a program. Marketing, consumer behavior, strategy, operations, new product development, organization behavior (psychology of individuals and groups), management, economics, statistics, law, entrepreneurship, etc are all part of the overview.
The point of this overview is so that you can understand other people's perspective, their needs and concerns. This allows you to more effectively communicate with them and to be more persuasive in your discussion with them.
That's it, that's all an MBA is. An overview of the major components of a business/organization and major topics related to its operation. This overview facilitates are broader understanding and better communication. It does not turn an engineer into an accountant, a marketing person, etc. It turns an engineer into an engineer that can more effectively communicate and be more persuasive when talking to an accountant, marketing person, etc.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Has any upgrade for any vendor in the past worked 100%?
Windows: NT to XP, reformat drive. Win 7 to win 8, reformat drive.
iOS: hard reset
OSX: reinstall
Android: hard reset (really, my Z1S update to jellybean IS horrible)
BB: new device
Nokia: don't upgrade
Linux: reformat drive and reinstall (distro upgrades not the kernel--usually rollback the kernel!), back in the 90's reformat and reinstall
Commodore: don't upgrade
PS2-4: rollback.
XBox: rollback, or don't upgrade
PalmOS: reinstall
Yes, this is a guy from a web service, which you only upgrade the data layer and that's it. YOu can update the presentation layer, but 98% chance you'll rollback and redo it after 1st deployment (facebook and google). Webapp get the luck that they can instantly rollback, but they must work on a live server--risking daily downtimes.
Only upgrade I ever seen go smoothly is.... turbotax. Hmmm, if the whole biz is about $$$, sort of makes sense that upgrades work out of the box.
Until companies look at upgrades as serious business (they won't since PassS is the big thing, hence the web-app way), this is not going to get any better.
Apple has reached the stage that Microsoft reached in the 90s. I hope they learn from their mistakes faster than Microsoft did.
I've been a Mac user for 20+ years now and an iPhone user since 2007. Quite frankly, the hardware and software has never been better from my own experience. Go do a Google search and you'll quickly find that every new software release Apple has put out is "the worst ever." Same goes for hardware. Every time Apple has had a keynote, there have been torrents of negative reactions about how they're losing their way and going downhill. "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." Remember that?
Those are just a few. The point is, over all Apple's QA is improved dramatically. The problem is that the iPhone is far more popular than anything else Apple has ever made. It's not that the software has gone downhill; it's that there is far more scrutiny on it -- particularly in the media. "It just works" is truer today than it ever has been.
How about having to change your email password in three places in order to get things working again. Email app preferences, in account info and in smtp setting, and in system preferences, internet accounts. Helped a family member with that one last night. Still, a vast improvement compared to when they were on MS Windows.
Yeah, FREE (as in beer) and UNAVAILABLE (as in roast dodo).
The "forced upgrade policy" means that a generation of
Macintoshes is arbitrarily decared too old for the installer to put a newer OS onto it.
My MacPro, four Xeon cores and 20GB of RAM, with six drive bays,
doesn't have a MacOS upgrade path beyond 10.6.8, won't load any Safari
browser version that came with 10.7+, and most prebuilt browsers
of other pedigree are just as OS-intolerant (TenFourFox being the notable exception).
Apple's OS and app install process discriminates on the basis of last-time-we-got-paid-for-hardware.
oh.
Which product are we talking about here? All I know is that it must not be the one I have (Mac Mini) because that thing, while it doesn't suck, is totally and completely average. This $600 product's design is every bit as elegant as its $360 competition (if unfortunately, no better and therefore hardly amazing unless you're showing it to 1990s time travellers).
I'm a mac user but far from a fan boy, I just think the combination of software and hardware is the best you can get right now (used Desktop linux for 10 years before switching to mac and at some point in life I decided my time one of the most valuable things in life, still use linux for many things thou)
Now, what baffles me is that people in slashdot complain about new shinny software having bugs. I'm not saying it's not a problem, but why are you (supposedly knowledgeable slashdot people) upgrading to a .0 version in the first place? I personally don't see any reason to do it, and every time I've upgraded I've done it in the last stages of a certain version, right now I'm using 10.9.5 in three different machines, it's rock solid for me and I don't plan to upgrade to Yosemite any time soon. Main problem is when you buy new hardware and you're stuck with the latest version.
At first, podcasts could be played in the iTunes app -- OK, I like having all my audio in one place. But then the iTunes app was renamed Music, so you can't keep your podcasts in there anymore. But here's a terrible Apple Podcasts app, which if you're not careful when turning on your sync options will delete years' worth of saved podcasts out of your desktop iTunes app with no warning and no recovery options (sucks if you exclude your iTunes library from your Time Machine backups because of sheer size... they're just gone...). And only the Apple Podcasts app will sync your podcasts back to iTunes (sure, there are other podcast apps if you want to sync to the cloud somewhere, but who wants their audio files all over the place?). Sigh...
Apple's last 12 month's at software have been pretty impressive. The iCloud / Continuity / Handoff stuff is awesome and well-integrated into their OSes and I don't see Microsoft replicating that soon enough. Google without a real desktop OS isn't even in a position to compete with it yet.
That said, their hardware and software both have their fair share of frustrating warts. Finder sucks, Yosemite broke GPU-switching and some of the newest Macbooks suffer embarrassing Bluetooth vs Wifi conflicts. Some good, some bad, Apple seems to be the way they've always been.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
What a history revisionist you are !
The *BIGGEST* __contribution__ by John Sculley to Apple is ...
...
... drum roll please
APPLE NEWTON
If you call THAT "innovation", of fuck, PIGS CAN FLY !!
The author's name is the citation.
10 years ago, all "Macs suck" articles came from PCMag & ZDNet. If a benchmarking report came out showing Windows as the winner, you could bet that Microsoft paid for it. Now it is Apple Enthusiasts that are blasting Apple's poor quality.
As the article states "Just works" was never exact... but it was close enough in 99% of cases that it was true. Remembering the last time you spent a weekend (re)installing the OS was a problem for Windows, not Macs.
That's not for your benefit. That's a trophy case for the poster.
Social media like Tumblr works as on a reward system: the user only keeps posting because of the positive reinforcement he or she feels from seeing the appreciation of the readers spelled out line for line. It quantifies one's likeableness and gives one a score of their social impact. It becomes a game, a never-ending attempt to win more lines -- not comments, but lines -- in the comment section. The longer it is visually, the better. Whether you derive any useful information from it is irrelevant: its goal is to provide motivation to the poster.
He designed that system perfectly.
No doubt if they litigate hard enough, they can pull up before crashing.
Requiem for the American Dream
When were Apple machines serviceable? I bought one in 98 or 99, the only "service" you could do on it was to add in a stick of RAM.
Face it. There are always problems like this when you try to run linux as a desktop. All the smart people in the projects are too busy trying to write Assembly code that is 2 lines smaller out of a million lines and all the dumb people are volunteer college kids with esoteric interests that switch projects every 5 months. Linux has been around for 24 years and it has never in any year been better then paid software for end users.
Making a lot of claims with no objective evidence. BFFs with Michael Dell perhaps?
The back of the 10.4 server box said "Open source made easy" - and that's what it was, a lot of open technologies pulled together and given focus by Apple. Samba, bind, Apache, MySQL, openldap, etc all controlled with a pretty decent gui. Even the Mach kernal had an open version you could download and use with a bad-like user land (darwin).
Then in 10.5 they started removing the open parts and closing it all up. 10.4 could be a windows domain controller thanks to leveraging samba- today's OS X server can't, because Apple decided to replace samba with a closed implementation.
Not only has Apple made more work for themselves, they are actively pushing away the users that help grow the platform. Sure, the grandparents don't care if there's a decent xserver included- but the young person who helps keep their computers working (and tells them what to buy) does.
I embraced OS X when 10.4 for intel came out, because I could run anything. I could compile my Unix tools and use them on a nice, more focused platform. Now that's much more difficult, and instead of looking forward to what's next from Apple, I'm wondering how much longer I can stand to stay in the ecosystem.
There isn't much evidence they actually fix them in a current product, though. They fix them in a different product that does something else.
They really do a lot of leaving broken stuff behind them, telling you, if you want that fixed, you need to upgrade. Unfortunately, instead of ending up more stable, what you end up is with new bugs and a product that doesn't do what it used to do, which, oddly enough, was what you bought it to do.
I wish someone would force them to fix products they ship until they work as initially described. Sure, that'd slow them down on this breathless rush to upgrade. But would that be a bad thing? I don't think so.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I mean MacOS, for example, didn't have any kind of memory separation. Applications had statically assigned memory, but they were free to write to the memory of others freely. That's one of the reasons why MacOS was nearly unusable for any webbrowsing around Version 6 and 7. In fact back then it emulated 68k code on the Power platform.
Then came MacOSX, taking an ancient version of some BSD and removing all the good bits replacing them with proprietary stuff. Even MacOSX 10.3 was hardly usable. It did work for a while, but after a week of uptime it became increasingly sluggish.
Software quality never was particularly good at Apple. They always just competed with Microsoft, not with any meaningful quality standards.
Same goes for hardware. Logic board failures were common during "evil Steve's" reign. Macs just became much more fragile than the industry standard. Batteries were glued in. Harddisks were really hard to replace. Even things like the Apple Airport had design flaws leading to mass breakdowns.
I guess the point why this now looks like a sudden decrease in quality is that the "reality distortion field" is gone. Apple is no longer the underdog which invests significant amounts of its money into engineering. Apple is, particularly since "evil Steve" a marketing driven company.
I was looking to buy my daughter a new laptop for college. We bought an ASUS laptop that had good ratings. It was on woot so it wasn't going to cost a fortune if it went bad. It had troubles right away and had to be sent off for repair. Now it seems to be fine. Apple hardware is still the best. Way not cheap. But ... Windows 8.1 is every inch as good as Mavericks, and better then Yosemite. On a laptop the touchscreen is useful - if only marginally. It is not better then Mountain Lion. Almost all of the new "features" in MacOS are useless and there are more and more bugs. I really don't need my computer to ring when I get a call. On Windows 8.1 for every piece of stupidity there is a really nice feature. Getting the Asus to work on the otherwise all Apple network is maddening. Those bugs are not on the MS side.
I feel stuck. You have to pay close to Apple prices to get good hardware, but the software and just plain strangeness of Apple is making me regret buying so much Apple gear. Getting out of the Apple ecosystem is tough and expensive. One thing that hasn't been mentioned - at least as far as I can see, is Time Machine. It has gottne flaky too. When you try to get to your backups, sometimes they are there, and sometimes that slice is grayed out. You have to mount the backup as a drive to get it to work. Sometimes. Not Thrilled. Now my backups are locked, good luck if I need to get something - which is very likely with a big OS switch.
Getting out of the lock in, even if i keep using some apple products, will be long and hard.
This article has more posts than others in the "most discussed" box on the front page.
Has Apple paid to suppress this?
Did anyone even try windows 8? Really buggy from my perspective.
And linux running flawless without bugs (except possibly for running the kernel without loading some drivers that causes a kernel panic...)? Never seen that happening.
Never downloaded a crappy buggy android app? Or had android os filling upp the memory over time?
Sure osx, ios has flaws but it seems like the strategy from most sw development companies that the end user is the tester!
While it is not an excuse, looking at Microsoft I say they are doing pretty well.
1) Hubris. It also could be that over time, Apple management has been filled with "yes men" at the expense of and lack of staff with technical expertise. Where someone that knows a bit about something might say "no, that is a horrible idea, perhaps we should go in a different direction", you get people that say "YES! We'll make it work somehow!". They also have a rabid fanboy market, and they think that can pretty much get away with anything (and they largely can, but over time, it will creep up to bite them). It is like the Toronto Maple Leafs selling tickets, it really doesn't matter how horrible the team is and they will still sell the tickets every year, even if they keep raising prices. A great example of this is the whole iMap fiasco. They had a licence with Google for the Google Maps application, it was very specific about what that included. Google made a new version of the application that included Text-to-Voice directions (which is pretty great). Apple wanted it. Google said no, that was not part of our current licence, however if you wish to licence this new version we would want better Google branding on it so people know who made it. Apple then threw a petulant fit and said fine we'll make our own! Whoever though that they could come out with something in a few months to compete with a product that Google had been perfecting for the better part of a decade must have been high. They even bought Nokia map data, but it isn't as easy as that either. Anyway Apple is probably more subject to Hubris than any company I can think of, though it is also one of the most profitable of all time also, so perhaps some of it is deserved if you look at it from that perspective...
2) It just works? Everything you just said plus more, software bugs real and intentioned... My girlfriend does Apple support. Every night (yea!) I get an update of all the issues she had that day (if I want one or not). That said I do get to know second hand some of the issues Apple products are currently having and how prevalent they are (calls upon calls etc...). The Apple ID one for example is one have have heard a lot of. Parents complaining about their 300$ bill, and having to explain to them that little Jimmy has a Clash of Clans in game purchase addiction or whatever, and it all goes to your credit card. Also instances of romance gone wrong and Apple ID access, ouch. Let me tell you the day OS8 come out, was also a busy day for support... The list of things goes on far more than I am willing to type here. Many of which should not exist in the first place if any real thought was put into it like Apple would like the public to believe.
3) Private Garden + Profits. This makes Apple a lot of money. You basically corner and lock in an entire market, then rape it for more and more profits every way you can, and Apple has been very successful at it. However Apple's focus has not been consumer centric for a long time. It's focus is locking you in, keeping you, and making you pay in every conceivable way. This does not lend itself to good software, from the perspective of giving the consumer what it wants. iTunes has had its problems. Part of which is that it is everything plus the kitchen sink, has legacy issues, and is bloated as hell. One such example was that of breaking links to non-iTunes acquired songs making them not playable or syncable. Apple's solution was to make iTunes capable of fixing a single link, one at a time. However iTunes would regularly break hundreds or even thousands at a time making it basically useless. It was so prevalent at one time an opensource group took it on itself to create a java application that would fix the links for you. However each time Apple did an update, they would "accidentally" break the 3rd party software. The developers would fix it, then Apple would break it again, until finally the group gave up. This went on for years, and was a known issue to Apple who could have easily fixed it. However Apple would much rather you buy all your music from their iTunes store, which co-incidentally never
I've still got 10.7 on my Windows desktop. Made the crucial error of upgrading to the latest release. I would not advise this. Was able to roll back only after I moved the .ITL file or...something...to another folder or...something. Once in awhile it tosses up a "Out of space" error or..something. Which is of course nonsense as I have 1TB of space here with like 75% available.
... on /.!
also see jobs comment about ballmer and apply it to aapl.
Marco Arment followed up his post with another after, talking about how much he regretted the first post. http://www.marco.org/2015/01/0.... He says: "This morning, my words were everywhere, chopped up and twisted by sensational opportunists to fuel the tired “Apple is doomed!” narrative with my name on them. (Or Tumblr’s name, which was even worse.) Business Insider started the party, as usual, but it spread like wildfire from there. Huffington Post. Wall Street Journal. CNN. Heise. Even a televised CNBC discussion segment." Both are worth a read. He does have valid points about the bugginess of Apple's software, but still makes the case that it's better than the competition. About the post, he says, he woke to "an unstoppable nightmare of embarrassment and guilt. Most people, myself included, aren’t accustomed to that level of scrutiny. Those who are usually have PR training, editors, and handlers to protect them from publishing flippant blog posts before they go to bed."
He blames Apple prioritizing marketing for the problems with Apple's software.
Apple has always prioritized marketing over functionality. Apple was always like this. Just as you get smart enough to figure it out, there are 10 more suckers behind you willing to buy into the hype.
captcha: products
Since updating to IOS8 my Mail interrupts and stalls any functionality on the iPad,for as much at 30 seconds until it conmects and downloads mail. I cannot stop it from doing so as,the settings do not change this behaviour..spare me the upgrade..I am stuck. Further, Snow Leopard works almost flawlessly but now Apple does not support it for security so I have computers that are not allowed online at all other than to grab a specific software update. I cannot update these to a Yosemite without losing assorted hardware I need to use. Apple ought to simply charge a fee for those who want to continue to use an older OS. I would gladly pay 100 dollars to be safe. It is not all about fashion..it ought to be about needed usability..
Yep. Been an Apple support specialist since the mid 80s. With the exception of the nightmare of the 7.5 era (when Macs basically didn't even work. They crashed, IIRC, every 42 seconds like clockwork) I've never seen anything near the level of dissatisfaction with Apple software (from my client base) or the number of problems from an admin / support perspective. I could probably write a book about it, but I think what it boils down to is exactly this: When Apple lost Steve Jobs, they literally lost their mind. I was never a Jobs fanboy, and largely did not believe that he was solely responsible for the quality and usability we saw coming out of Apple in terms of their Software. Now I'm a complete convert. Nearly everything Apple (software-wise) has done since Steve began relinquishing control has been a disaster. Then need to go back to the Snow Leopard and iOS 6 and re-think everything they've done since, in every software package they've touched - Mac OS & Server, iOS, iWork, iLife, etc. It's all gone straight to hell. Apple's fanboys are doing everyone in injustice by pretending everything is fine - it's so far from fine it's hard to comprehend.
I'm so glad I'm not the only one thinking the same thing. OS X is Apple's sales platform now...iTunes...AppStore..iBooks....it's all about selling, and less about working well.
and I made the call. It's my account after all.
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Was NeWS used w/ any window manager other than Sun's own OpenLook/OpenWindows? Which was a very ordinary UI, and which Sun abandoned when they buried their differences w/ OSF. It would have been interesting to have an FOSS version of NeWS working today w/ today's window managers, and see how it compares to either X11 or Wayland
Since top level management read a small blip about Agile they consider constant delivery and no docs as the panacea for everything wrong with software development. This idea makes managers think they can just stuff a story into a backlog, put in first place, and have it all ready for delivery three weeks from now (by cutting testing to half a day at the end of a sprint). Short term sales figures show they are right, consumers and businesses alike shop for features. I've seen multimillion dollar international sales contracts for software and not a single line in there asks about proof of quality or having access to test plans and test results. As long as customers favor features over quality any complaints about the lack of quality is nothing but bovine excrement. Demand to see the test plans and test results before paying a penny and demand a warranty. As far as software companies go, stop setting arbitrary delivery dates and instead provide decent requirements and expectations, then ship when the work is done. It might take four or five weeks, but it saves you managers from apologizing for crappy products in press releases.
When Steve jobs first left apple, we heard similar complaints of declining software quality.
Then when he returned and started the iDevices trend - we heard about declining software quality.
Then after Steve Jobs passed, we heard about declining software quality.
The bottom line is that Apple is always releasing something new - and a bit half baked. This has been going on for the better part of two decades now. If you want stable Apple products wait about 3-6 months after release before adopting.
Apple has never been good at long-term software maintenance. Apple DOS was a mess and self-destructed. MacOS was another mess and self-destructed. Then they bought NeXTStep and it's following pretty much the same path.
Apple tends to do something quick and flashy out of the gates and then it falls apart over the next decade.