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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."
There is a indeed a heated response to it. Not sure if I can be called "rabid Apple cult", but I can definitely be called long-term user (1990 onwards).
The guy is right. The quality at the moment is noticeably poor, and rather than being pleased at new updates I now regard them with suspicion. Concrete examples exist both on the Mac and on iOS - wiping out a phone's ability to make phone calls, for instance (8.0.1, iPhone 6), is somewhat of a faux pas. On the Mac side I get daft things such as this, which slowed my 2011 iMac to a crawl until I invoked an obscure command to sort it. I get silly synchronising problems with iTunes, both the dreaded "waiting for changes to be applied" hangs and also things like "there was a problem copying these items, see iTunes for details". iTunes, of course, never has any details about it.
Then there's functional quality. The whole OS is increasingly feeling like a Zelda game, memorising which magic multitouch incantation to invoke next to do something wonderful. They also trash things - Expose now looks neater, but is far less functional as it no longer exposes ever window but does this pretty-yet-useless grouping thing. They confuse things - I have no idea what my workflow for photos is anymore, is my photo just on the phone, shared in iCloud, just on iPhoto, where does it go if I edit it, how do I delete a shared photo from just one device without taking it all out of the others - that kind of thing.
Then there's online - the Apple ID situation is farcical. Users: "give us a way to merge Apple IDs please". Apple: "here's Home Sharing! A totally new way of sharing things that's not at all confusing". Users: "err...no. Give us a way to merge Apple IDs please". Apple: "here's Family Sharing! A brilliant new way of letting multiple ids get access to the same content, possibly, but only allowing one credit card to pay for it! Give your 13 year old access to the family credit card today!". Users: "Sigh. Give us a way to merge Apple IDs please". I await with wonder what other non-solution is going to be offered to me in the coming years.
I agree with the premise entirely. I think Apple's software quality has dropped, and dropped significantly. Bugs, functionality, usability...it's all there, and it's all worse than it used to be.
Cheers,
Ian
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...
All (or most) of those hardware faults you mentioned are all done to get a certain aesthetic from the hardware. This is where all their decisions come from. Every iPhone has to be thinner than the last. I'm not sure who they're consulting, but most people I know don't care if their phone is 0.05 centimeters thinner than last year. Once phone makers got to around 1.0 - 0.8 cm, I think that most people really stopped caring how thin their phone was. Now they want more battery life, stronger glass, more storage, and other non-aesthetic features. Then again, people keep on buying the phones they make, so there must be a large number of people who want them. Maybe it's just a self perpetuating cycle, where people buy Apple because they had Apple last time, and they have so much invested in the ecosystem. If they switched to Android or Windows phone, there's a lot of stuff they spent money on that just plain won't work with the other devices. I'm due for a new phone soon, and I have an Android phone. I know it's something I think about when considering whether or not I should change to iOS or Windows Phones, and I've maybe invested $30 in apps. Somebody who's spent money on iTunes music, movies, books, and apps would be very tied into the Apple platform than I am to Android.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I'm sorry that this is the first time that you have ever upgraded an operating system. it must be tough wading into an area that is brand new to you.
1) when a new OS comes out, some apps designed for the old OS have problems. This works out over time as most apps are updated. Some old unsupported apps are left in the dust and no longer work under new OS versions. this has been true since DOS.
2) while a new OS is often more efficient than the old OS in many ways, it can also be more resource intensive in some ways. On last gen hardware this can manifest itself as "some stuff got slower". This has been true since DOS.
re iTunes it has allways been a shizzshow. I expect in 2015 Apple will announce that it is discontinuing iTunes in favor of bringing the iOS Music app to mac and win, the way it did the same thing with Photos. Also agreed with Safari on windows, which was always a shizzshow in its own right. There was never a big reason to choose safari over chrome on Win. also apple refused to use windows design schemes, so the app always looked fugly.
My kid hasn't made a phone call in years. Now if you broke text messaging There'd be hell to pay
Didn't they do just that if the person you were texting moved from an iPhone to Android?
Shachar
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.
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.
But even if it were \ OSX 10.0 was a huge increase in bugs from OS9.
OS9 didn't have pre-emptive multi-tasking or even protected memory. That's bigger than any bug in OSX 10.0.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"I had exactly the opposite problem with Android - getting music on to my S3 was a nightmare; after wasting many hours fighting with it, I finally had to buy software to sync over the air, and that never worked all that well..."
I have the S3. Copied all my music to a 64gb card and popped it in, with no issues. My music goes everywhere with me, played through bluetooth, aux jack or cassette adaptor.
I haven't tried to sync using iTunes for years. with iTunes match all my songs are synced automatically. Any app purchases in iTunes are pushed to my iphone automagically. what reason is there to ask iTunes to sync?
Because people buy music outside of the iTunes store?
itunes match works for content from the iTunes store, content from amazon, ripped CDs and pirated stuff. It uploads all of your music to the cloud, and then makes it available to download to any other computer or iOS device. Even better, if you upload a crappy 128kbit/s MP3 it will download a high-quality 256bit/s AAC.
It actually works pretty well. Just sayin, people keep complaining about issues that were solved years ago...
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.
sudo nvram boot-args=debug=0x10
My kid only makes a phone call when she's mad about something. Because, apparently, text messaging isn't loud enough. Or something.
So I had this explained to me by my much younger brother. He said that people his age (18) don't like making phone calls because they see it as intruding on the receiving parties time by forcing them to answer now. Where as a text message is more of an answer when you can affair. This makes total sense with your kid calling you when mad. Because he/she is mad calling you is there way of inconveniencing you with there anger just like an angry child might throw a toy at you.
He may well have made the right decision... or he may have just made the decision to use a 'mature unix' foundation, because it was basically just reusing his baby from NeXT (and we all remember how that company was taking the PC world by storm right? =scoffs=)
Jobs personally spearheaded NeXT with a small group of engineers. He knew exactly what he was doing. I remember him talking about NeXTStep and he openly boasted about its portability and high degree of hardware abstraction. He tried to sell this idea to other software companies but no one bit. It is no coincidence that OSX is so portable. It is by design.
You seem to imply that if someone is not a coding ninja, then they have nothing to contribute to software. I strongly disagree with this. Job's strength was that he saw the broad arcs of software design. He realized that simplicity and cleanness was key to good software, to maintainable software, to portable software. He realized that if software was not written properly at its earliest stages, it would remain inherently flawed no matter how much it was maintained.
It is no coincidence that Jobs made his best software when he was working with a small team of engineers. This is how he created NeXT. And this is how he created the original iPhone.
As for your comment on NeXT, well it became OSX, so it was in the end extremely successful. And another little thing came of of NeXT workstations. Tim Berners Lee first implemented hypertext on a NeXT workstation...that was the beginning of the web as we know it today. If you had every used an NeXT workstation (as I did), you would realize that the cleanness and elegance of the OS likely had a lot to do with Tim Berner Lee's invention. There was simply nothing like it at the time.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)