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Apple Seems To Have Forgotten About the Whole 'It Just Works' Thing (zdnet.com)
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, writing for ZDNet: "It just works." This is the phrase that Steve Jobs trotted out year after year to describe products or services that he was unveiling. Well, Steve is now long gone, and so it the ethos of "it just works." 2017 was a petty bad year for Apple software quality. Just over the past few weeks we seen both macOS and iOS hit by several high profile bugs. And what's worse is that the fixes that Apple pushed out -- in a rushed manner -- themselves caused problems. A serious -- and very stupid -- root bug was uncovered in macOS. The patch that Apple pushed out for the root bug broke file sharing for some. Updating macOS to 10.13.1 after installing the root patch rolled back the root bug patch. iOS 11 was hit by a date bug that caused devices to crash when an app generated a notification, forcing Apple to prematurely release iOS 11.2. iOS 11.2 contained a HomeKit bug that broke remote access for shared users. And this is just a selection of the bugs that users have had to contend with over the past few weeks. And it's not just been limited to the past few weeks. There's no such thing as perfect code, and sometimes high-profile security vulnerabilities can result in patches being pushed out that are not as well tested as they could be. But on the other hand, Apple isn't some budget hardware maker pushing stuff out on a shoestring and scrabbling for a razor-thin profit margin.
"It's thinner, whiter, and has a slightly more recessed Apple logo, and at twice the price you'll know you're better than everyone else."
The result will be a sales goldmine.
It isn't just bugs, either. A lot of their recent software efforts seem sloppy and confused. Interfaces that were elegant and useful are now cluttered, ugly and non-intuitive, lacking in some highly desirable functionality, yet messed up with unwanted changes from previous versions. When I switched from Windows to Mac in 2010, I did so solely because of their highly desirable software; not because of their overpriced shiny hardware. But now that benefit is waning, and I know several people beside myself who are considering abandoning the Apple ship. They need to get their act together.
To be fair it was a pretty bad year for Tom Petty.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
If you want a real eye-opener as to how MacOS is doing, open the Console and look at the system.log chat.
This is where most system process and apps dump their error and warning messages - not just when something crashes or some part of the UI hangs, but also errors that were caught and handled.
It's a ridiculous torrent of messages like this:
> iTunes[774]: tid:18d2f - Mux ID not found in mapping dictionary
> iTunes[774]: tid:18d2f - Can't handle disconnect with invalid ecid
> AOUDownloadCount[21315]: ERROR|AOUDownloadCount.m|700L|Error:AOUDownloadCount::createLockFile:plist file is not exist.
> AOUDownloadCount[21315]: ERROR|AOUDownloadCount.m|493L|Error:AOUDownloadCount::getDownloadCountInfo:file locked failed.
> AOUDownloadCount[21315]: ERROR|AOUDownloadCount.m|376L|Error:AOUDownloadCount::sendDownloadCountInfo:get DownloadCountInfo failed.
> com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.quicklook[21327]): Endpoint has been activated through legacy launch(3) APIs. Please switch to XPC or bootstrap_check_in(): com.apple.quicklook
> kcm[21335]: DEPRECATED USE in libdispatch client: Setting timer interval to 0 requests a 1ns timer, did you mean FOREVER (a one-shot timer)?
> com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.imfoundation.IMRemoteURLConnectionAgent): Unknown key for integer: _DirtyJetsamMemoryLimit
> com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.TMHelperAgent.SetupOffer): Service only ran for 7 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 3 seconds.
> GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent[21387]: 2017-12-19 14:56:55.942 GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent[21387/0x700002adb000] [lvl=2] -[KSEngineInvocation(KeystoneThread) runKeystonesInThread] Failed to upload Keystone statistics: (null)
> GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent[21387]: 2017-12-19 14:56:56.985 GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent[21387/0x700002adb000] [lvl=2] -[KSEngineInvocation(KeystoneThread) runKeystonesInThread] Finished with engine thread
> GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent[21387]: 2017-12-19 14:56:57.629 GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent[21387/0x7fff977bc340] [lvl=2] -[KSAgentApp(PrivateMethods) checkForUpdatesUsingArguments:invocation:error:] Finished update check.
> diagnosticd[21406]: no EOS device present
> com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.imfoundation.IMRemoteURLConnectionAgent): Unknown key for integer: _DirtyJetsamMemoryLimit
> com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.quicklook[21428]): Endpoint has been activated through legacy launch(3) APIs. Please switch to XPC or bootstrap_check_in(): com.apple.quicklook
> Console[21403]: BUG in libdispatch client: kevent[vnode] monitored resource vanished before the source cancel handler was invoked
Thousands and thousands of messages. Often the same messages repeated every few minutes... 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. No fixes in sight.
The kicker is that while all of this is happening in the background, my Mac is just sitting idle and appears to be functioning kind-of okay. I don't get any visible reports of errors or warnings; the apps continue to work okay - with occasional bouts of UI hangups and app crashes.
MacOS doesn't "just work" any more. It's just gotten very good at hiding the junky, poorly designed state of its apps. Apparently, MacOS is so good at this that devs don't really need to consider bugs a high priority. The consequences are no longer pinpointed to the app that's at fault - they are more generalized, like spontaneous freezing, anomalous behavior, and cryptic error messages.
Obviously, this is a big problem for Apple. I switched to MacOS sometime around Lion / Mountain Lion. I've noticed that ever since Mavericks, performance and stability started trending south. High Sierra is pretty bad. Still not Windows-level bad, but... the gap is narrowing, and not because Windows is improving.
Their target is no longer innovation or excellence, but next quarter's earnings reports.
Honestly I would really like someone to mention a tech company (or any company for that matter) that once they hit Wall Street, they didn't suddenly develop a myopic "What Can We Do This Quarter To Make The Executive Stock Options Fatter?"
Every time I worked for a privately held consulting or software company - it totally rocked. As soon as they went public? It was all downhill from there.
I'm a firm believer that it's the vision of the controlling entity that can make or break it - in the case of Jobs? He was a fastidious tyrant - but people followed him and respected him and made shit that "just works". With him being gone? Where's the rallying entity? It sure isn't Tim Cook or Wall Street.
Never have a philosophy which supports a lack of courage
That was always, at best, "It just works - as long as you only want to do what we let you do."