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

Any actual examples?

[Guspaz]

He makes the claim that their software quality has taken a nosedive, that they're introducing tons of bugs and functional regressions, but he doesn't give a single example of any of that. He just makes the unsubstantiated claim.

Re:Any actual examples?

[gstoddart]

OK, I'll give you one.

I updated my iPod touch a few months ago. It originally came with iOS 7.x, and I got the new hotness of iOS 8.x. Two of my apps stopped working. Some stuff got slower. And I got annoyed.

I wish I'd left the fscking thing the way it shipped. Because, quite frankly, there was no net benefit in the upgrade, and some net losses in functionality.

They may think it's OK to upgrade the software until the device breaks. But for what it costs, I expect the device to last several years. I will probably never apply another Apple update to it again.

iTunes on Windows has also gone downhill over the last few years, and they've completely abandoned Safari on Windows.

So, yes, I'm afraid as a consumer I'm increasingly of the opinion that their software quality is going the wrong direction in favor of putting out the new shiny and expecting us to buy it.

Re:Any actual examples?

[_xeno_]

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.

This isn't just me. This is everyone in my family, quite a few people on Facebook when I went there to ask for help, and I recall Adam Savage tweeting about something like that. It's basically impossible to get new music off of iTunes and onto an iDevice and has been for several years now. (There is a solution: factory reset the iDevice and copy everything over again in its entirety. The last time I did that metadata copied over wrong so tracks with one name would actually play an entirely different track. At that point I gave up.)

If I were more cynical I'd think that was the point (force everyone to buy off the iTMS) but I think instead the article is correct: Apple just doesn't care to fix very common bugs.

Here's another one everyone who's had to touch a Mac in the past five years will be very familiar with: SLEEP_WAKE_FAILURE.

Re:Any actual examples?

[geoskd]

He makes the claim that their software quality has taken a nosedive, that they're introducing tons of bugs and functional regressions, but he doesn't give a single example of any of that. He just makes the unsubstantiated claim.

across 4 different iPhones and three PC's, I have never once had an iOS update that didnâ(TM)t brick the phone. For the last two, I made the appointment at the Apple store before I attempted the update. The last one was done in the apple store with the whole store watching. Bricked it so badly that the phone had to be replaced under warranty.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Of Course

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to be an Apple supporter. Apple used to be stable. After being a huge proponent of apple from 99-2012, I am running for the door. Every new version of apple software has less features(for an actual power user) and is less stable. Oh how I used to love apple! Oh how I hate Apple, and want them out of my creative professional life!
Apple products are never going to get better, because Apple has gotten a taste of "moron money", and us creative professionals and academics are no longer a concern.
I suspect that Apple has been hiring 20 somethings to write the software, because they are sooo smart, and not because it saves money(of course apple hasn't enough money).
When you are as All In with a company as I was with apple, it takes a long time to get away. I'm going on 3 years, and have not completely replaced apple in my workflow. I have been changing components of my apple software with third party components, and I'm almost done!
OMG I can't wait to never buy an apple product again!!!!!!!

Re: Nosedive

[Noah Haders]

I would say the biggest problem affecting the desktop is the total brain drain of people pulled out to work on iOS. It's clear that's where the company sees the growth and that's where it's investing the mind-hours to do it right. People on the desktop software are becoming sentinels and janitors.

There was a cute anecdote in the steve jobs book. Once the iPHone started development, steve would walk the halls and snatch the best developers and move them to the iOS project. Literally, one day the developer was in his cubicle, and the next his entire cubicle was empty but instead of getting laid off they were moved to a different building with different responsibilities.

The future is coming quickly, too. iPhoto is no longer under development, and instead apple is bringing the iOS photos app to the desktop. iTunes is next, or shall I say, it is currently underway, just not announced yet.

The 8.0.1 thing was a disaster, there's nothing you can say. I hope heads rolled. I also agree that we don't need to be making a new OS every 12 months.

Not sure what to think

[nine-times]

Ok, so I'm a Mac user, as well as being an IT guy who supports Mac, Windows, and Linux. In general, I don't think that I can say I've noticed anything like a "nosedive" in software quality. The quality of Apple's software has, over a long span of time, been relatively consistent. It's pretty solid and stable in most circumstances, doing most of the things that Apple users typically do, with some exceptions. At regular intervals, Apple decides they're going to improve something, and a bunch of things break for a while following a major release, and then most of it settles down and gets fixed. If you want a stable experience, don't upgrade to the newest major release until it's been out for a couple of months. Just like Windows, and a lot of other software.

Then there are random inexplicable things. File sharing, for example. Apple decides they're going to standardize on SMB because it's faster and more widely used, which sounds like good news, right? Yeah, except that it's over a year later, and Apple's file sharing is still buggy. Apple's advice is to not use OSX with file servers. Similarly, they just can't seem to get their Mail application to be reliable. They keep rewriting these things, and every new rewrite has new problems. You wouldn't think email and file sharing would be such strange high-tech features that Apple's software engineers would be unable to handle it. But Apple has kind of always done that kind of thing.

As far as the yearly release cycles, I don't see any reason why this should be a major concern. Having a yearly release cycle shouldn't be impossible to keep up with, as long as the changes for each release are not overly ambitious. For example, Apple could release OSX v10.11 next year, and it can basically be a maintenance release. No new features, just bug fixes and performance improvements. Their OS updates are free these days, so who's going to complain?

Re: Nosedive

[thestudio_bob]

On the Mac side I get daft things such as this [apple.com], which slowed my 2011 iMac to a crawl until I invoked an obscure command to sort it.

What was the obscure command to fix this? Have the exact same issue.

Tim Cook is an MBA

[catchblue22]

More evidence for my hypothesis that MBA managers are driving the American economy into the ground. Contrast him with Steve Jobs who was not an MBA. He brought the company back from the edge, after being destroyed by another MBA, Jim Sculley.

If you want a strong perspective against MBA's, I recommend reading John Ralston Saul's "The Unconscious Civilization" . Here is part of a summary of his arguments against MBA's:

They fear all the most effective qualities of capitalism itself (risk, innovation). “No matter how badly the MBAs are doing, they just go on hiring clones of themselves.” They preach capitalist ideology, but only simulate it through unproductive preoccupations like mergers and acquisitions. Their incomes skyrocket, the economy founders, the middle class erodes.

They profit by flipping between nationalization and privatization; “an unnecessary move in either direction merely makes money for the political friends of the party in power”. Privatization of government functions is foolish, as business is better suited to fuelling real growth.

Contrast this with real innovators like Elon Musk, who has created disruptive companies in four separate sectors (banking, transportation, space launching, and energy production). Please note that he is NOT an MBA and openly says that he disagrees with their methods.

Re:Tim Cook is an MBA

[RandCraw]

There's a wonderful article "The Case Against Credentialism" by James Fallows in the The Atlantic (1985) which reads as if it were written today: http://www.theatlantic.com/edu...

It assesses professional degrees like MBAs as being inherently worth next to nothing, essentially serving a broken agenda in which our highly credentialed leaders know everything about form but nothing about function. Maybe virtual expertise is enough to govern a virtual world?

Too bad the US political parties didn't read this prior to the 2000 election. Maybe the would have fielded worthier candidates (and staff), and the US could have saved about a million lives and a few trillion bucks). Such is the cost of driving under the influence, I guess.

Re:Tim Cook is an MBA

[catchblue22]

Sigh. You kids today...

Alas. I didn't have time to check the name and now my entire argument is refuted. Oh wait.

A short history on JOHN Sculley can be found here. Of note:

In the early 1990s, Sculley led Apple, at enormous expense, to port its operating system to run on a new microprocessor, the PowerPC. Sculley later acknowledged such an act was his greatest mistake, indicating that he should instead have targeted the dominant Intel architecture.[24] After a bad first quarter in 1993, Apple's board forced Sculley out.[25] He was replaced by German-born Michael Spindler, who had been Chief Operating Officer, who was also ousted a year later.[26]

Sculley did not have technical expertise. He pivotal strategic technical decisions such as described above without the expertise to do so. He didn't understand that using a mature UNIX foundation would allow his company to port the operating system (relatively) easily and quickly from one processor to another. This is exactly what Jobs did. It allowed him to (relatively) smoothly port OSX from PowerPC to Intel to ARM. In my opinion, this was Job's most important technical decision and it is what allowed Apple to become successful again.

WRONG!

[slashmydots]

"Apple's hardware today is amazing — it has never been better."
BULLSHIT! from 2007 to 2009 they were #1 in least failures in laptops. Now they're beat by ASUS, Toshiba, MSI, Samsung, and Sony. They're 6th place in quality! SIXTH! Guess which place they are in price vs speed. I'll give you a hint: Fujitsu and Avatar beat them.

Re:No...

[jafac]

Yes; I'm looking back at my "mac fanboi problems" from the 1990's, and the reason I bought Macs then, was to run Mac OS, or some mac-only software - the hardware was always pretty much playing "catch up". The fishtank-iMac was the first glimmer of hope on the hardware front. The dual G5 was amazing, even if OS X was kind of rough.

But at a certain point, it became obvious that the OS team was being pillaged of talent for the i-device (iOS) team. The fact that Apple pulled all support for PPC kind of put a knife in it for me. And that's when I went over to PC hardware.

Windows 8 was an amazing opportunity for Apple - and they totally blew it. Microsoft tripped, stumbled, and Apple could have curb-stomped them with a great development effort to tune-up OS X. They blew that opportunity off. And Microsoft STILL isn't really on their feet yet.

Now: I have a macbook pro - because it's just an "insanely great" piece of hardware. But the ONLY reason I'm running OS X is to be able to use VMWare Fusion. If VMWare Fusion's features were available on Linux, that's what I would be running on my MBP.

Unconvinced

[Alrescha]

I have used Apple software since the early 00s. Like any software, there have always been bugs. There always will be.

I have had no more problems (and possibly less) with Yosemite and iOS 8 than with any other release. Those who use words like 'nosedive' either have short memories or are in need of clicks.

Let us recall the software update of a decade ago that erased every external drive with a space in the volume name - and let us be happy that things like that do not happen any more.

A.