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."

Comments

well if it's gonna be that kind of thread...

[Thud457]

Apple Computer - proudly going out of business since 1979!

Re: Nosedive

[meta-monkey]

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.