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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.
"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."
Tumblr is more awful than anything Apple puts out (or MS for that matter).
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.
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
> 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.
What you have there is a great argument for NOT UPGRADING SO MUCH. It's true. Software "engineering" is anything but. If you fix a bug, you will likely create another (if not two). So the obvious thing is to avoid gratuitous upgrade cycles.
In corporate IT management, this is pretty standard and pervasive.
It's an idea that's even managed to catch on with consumer PC users.
You've just made the guy's argument for him. Congrats.
So slow the beast down and actually treat users of old kit like they are valued customers of a luxury brand. Model yourself after Rolls Royce rather than Dell.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
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.
Being wrong since 1997.
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.