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

Nosedive

[horm]

Surprising absolutely nobody.

Re: Nosedive

[Em Adespoton]

Other than your username, this is almost verbatim what I was going to say. iTunes "integration" and "where did my files actually go?" are the top gripes, but there's plenty more along that line, including such beauties as drag and drop now failing on older versions of Photoshop in Yosemite (really? precision placement is no longer an issue Apple?).

For the first time in twenty years I'm seriously considering moving off Apple hardware, purely because of the current unreliability of the software (which wouldn't be an issue, save for the forced upgrade path -- you can't run a version of Safari on 10.6.x that will actually load content on sites like Youtube).

Re: Nosedive

[phantomfive]

For comparison, contrast that with OSX 10.1 through OSX 10.4. Each version got faster, more usable, and had fewer bugs than the previous version.

"Make each version better than the previous." That should be the goal of every software team everywhere.

Re: Nosedive

[MightyMartian]

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, and having to use the iTunes software to move songs, video and books off my computer. iTunes may actually be the worst software I've seen any major software house produce. If its designers and coders had any sense of honor, they'd find the highest building they could, and leap off of it.

Android has its flaws, but when I plug my into my computer's USB port, I can copy files on and off without trouble, create new directories, without any hassle at all.

The worst part of my saga is that my wife went out and bought an iPhone and an iPod, and I was trying to show her how to move all her MP3s on to those devices, and I discovered the newest version of iTunes is every bit as awful and non-intuitive as its forebears. After an hour of fucking about, my wife finally admitted that she should have gone with Android.

Re: Nosedive

[jedidiah]

Once you're committed to the ecosystem, it's probably hard to change. You're used to Apple's little quirks and would probably find Windows annoying. You may have a lot of expense tied up in software or even hardware that only works with other Apple kit.

Thunderbolt storage array? Good luck with that. Commercial MacOS apps? Good luck with those.

This coming from someone associated with Tumblr?

[the_humeister]

Tumblr is more awful than anything Apple puts out (or MS for that matter).

Seen it coming

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Any actual examples?

[jedidiah]

> 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.

Re:This coming from someone associated with Tumblr

[jandrese]

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?