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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 Computer - proudly going out of business since 1979!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
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.
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.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
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.
> 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.
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.