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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."
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.
What if you are holding it wrong? And have you tried to buy a new Apple device, perhaps it has the bug fixed?
wiping out a phone's ability to make phone calls, for instance (8.0.1, iPhone 6), is somewhat of a faux pas
Somewhat? Sounds more like "the biggest faux pas you can make where a phone is concerned." :-P
"iTunes on Windows has also gone downhill over the last few years, and they've completely abandoned Safari on Windows."
Which is to say that it has fallen from the top of the turd pile to somewhere close to the bottom.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
iTunes has always been a swiss army knife. If a swiss army knife were made out of rusty nails, bits of string and some pudding. By chimpanzees.
Starts out a music player that syncs to your iPod. Okay, fine. You might not love it, but it's got a simple mission and generally works.
Then we'll add the music store! Now you can buy music with it! And manage the DRM that came with it. So now you've got account management.
Well now it's going to handle videos, too! Still i"Tunes" but now with video. All right.
Now streaming! Now it's your hub to zap stuff to your AppleTV or remote speakers. It's a server now, too!
Then phones! Okay so now it'll handle phone activation and software updates. And sync contacts, and email, and calendars. And photos! But you'll have to go into iPhoto to import or export your photos. Wouldn't make any sense to have a product called 'iTunes' handle photos, too, right? That would be feature creep!
And then we'll add on the app store! So you buy and manage your phone apps with iTunes!
I'm sure I'm leaving out a half-dozen other features shoehorned into a music player. I'm also sure I got the order of the release of those features wrong, but you get the idea.
And to top it all off, every damn version has a completely different interface, unrelated to previous releases. It's worse than Microsoft Office.
Apple needs to kill iTunes with fire and start over. Have a program that handles music play lists. Have another program that syncs stuff to your phone. Have another program that streams media to other devices. But cramming all that into one ancient program is a mess.
Not that I care. I switched to Android.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
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?!?!?
iTunes stopped syncing with devices years ago. It just ... doesn't work. It won't copy new tracks over, instead just sitting at "Waiting for items to copy" or some BS like that.
I know what you mean.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a iPod (a G5 with 2GB of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Firefox will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 2 GHZ machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
iTunes has always been a swiss army knife. If a swiss army knife were made out of rusty nails, bits of string and some pudding. By chimpanzees.
Oh come on now, that's not fair! There is really no need to insult chimpanzees like that. They can at least use sticks to get ants out of ant mounds. And there is no way that whoever designed iTunes could manage that.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
No, my...not complaint, because I don't use it, but point of derision is iTunes' bloat and feature creep. The name makes it that much more ridiculous.
Apple is supposed to be about stuff that Just Works. Simple, intuitive. Great for grandma! Well we've bought grandma a Mac, an iPhone, and an AppleTV because we're tired of fixing her windows crap and we want everything to Just Work for her.
Okay Grandma, you've got music on your computer you want to stream through the AppleTV. Where do you go?
"Is there an iAppleTV program?"
Nope, you go through iTunes.
"Well I guess that makes sense..."
Okay Grandma, now you want to watch a movie on your TV. Where to?
"Ummmm...iMovie, I guess?"
Nope, iTunes! Streams everything. Now what if you want photos to show up there so you can show the ladies from bridge club the pictures you daughter emailed you from her trip to Wisconsin?
"iTunes, right?!"
Of course not! iPhoto does pictures!
"Oh. So I pick my pictures on iPhoto and they show up on the TV?"
Once you share them in iTunes, naturally!
"... Naturally."
Okay now let's get your phone synced up. Let's say you want to sync your Michael Buble playlist to your phone. Where do you think you go?
"Ummmm...is there an i-iPhone program? Or iSync?"
Nope, iTunes!
"Well that makes sense. Syncing music."
Of course! Now let's get you some apps! To the App Store!
"Oh, you mean this button on the bottom of the screen that says 'App Store?' I'm getting the hang of this!"
No, no silly granny! You can't buy iPhone apps from the App Store! You need to go to the App Store! In iTunes!
"... Of course. But what about my address book so I can send you a check for $12 on your birthday? Do I put that on my phone from Contacts?"
Of course not! iTunes!
"So...mail?"
iTunes!
"Okay, I get it. iTunes for everything."
Now let's get those pictures you snapped of your granddaughter off your phone! Where to?
"iTunes?"
Of course not! It's iPhoto for that!
"Naturally. Now, I also took a video. So I get that from iMovie?"
Nope, guess again!
"iTunes, then?"
Silly Granny! iPhoto gets videos off your phone!
"Okay, got it. iPhoto for photos and videos. So I also have this copy of Boynton Beach Memoirs I torrented off Pirate Bay (granny is a leet h4xx0r it seems). So I put that on the phone through iPhoto?"
Ugh, of course not! If you want to put videos ON your phone, you use iTunes!
"...Fuck it. Fuck all this shit. Fuck you, fuck Steve Jobs, fuck it all. I want a pen, a rotary phone, and a phonograph."
And this is the glue that holds together the Apple ecosystem. Phone to Mac? iTunes. Mac to AppleTV? iTunes. Unless unless unless... It doesn't Just Work. It's complicated and stupid.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.