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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.
1. Photo syncing between iTunes and iOS devices via USB is broken - many people are having issues syncing photos. Some sync, some don't, particularly if you have a large photo library.
2. Nested albums in Photos is broken - they don't show on iOS devices
3. Nested albums in Photos don't show up reliably on Apple TV
Apple needs to take a year and fix bugs on all their products and get back to the "just works philosophy".
And he said something about the "alternative medicine" experiment probably cost him his life. Crazy.
That has me worried too. Apple seem to be dropping the ball a lot lately, not on bugs but on what they used to be really good at: taking new-ish technology and presenting it in an easy to use, attractive and reliable package. Like the fingerprint scanner in the iPhone, and in fact the iPhone itself is an embodiment of that idea. But where is Apple these days? Take HomeKit: home automation is a field that cries out to be improved in terms of ease of use, security and interoperability. Apple entered that market with... something that we had years ago: remote control of lights from our phones, using WiFi, a protocol ridiculously unsuitable for large scale home automation. They lag behind in maps, voice assistants, and their new smart speaker has little to be exited about. With $250 billion in the bank, you'd think they have the funds and manpower to bring some of that old Apple innovative spirit into new areas and improve on good ideas of others, but no. I still prefer my iPhone over Android ones, but I'm afraid Apple are on their way to become irrelevant.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Totally agree, following a recent experience with an iPad Pro. Previously you could use Siri from across the room, much like you would do with an Amazon Echo or Google Home. Want to start some music, ask Siri. Want to Set an alarm, ask Siri.
The latest version of iOS disables Siri if you have a cover on your iPad. So if you're baking and just want a times, you'd have to wash your hands, walk to your iPad and remove the cover.
So for a product which is intended to have a cover over it whenever it's not being used, unlike say an iPhone, Siri is permanently disabled when it's not in use. This, Apple support has stated, is by design, though it looks more like they rolled out a feature to disable Siri on iPhones when they're in a pocket and then didn't care about any knock-on consequences. Rather than acknowledge a mistake, or even to make available a toggle so the end-user can choose, they just say this is what they want and the customer needs to live with it.
Tech companies need a strong leader who is detail obsessed. E.g. consider Microsoft back in the Bill Gates days
https://www.joelonsoftware.com...
In those days we used to have these things called BillG reviews. Basically every major important feature got reviewed by Bill Gates. I was told to send a copy of my spec to his office in preparation for the review. It was basically one ream of laser-printed paper.
I rushed to get the spec printed and sent it over to his office.
Later that day, I had some time, so I started working on figuring out if Basic had enough date and time functions to do all the things you could do in Excel.
In most modern programming environments, dates are stored as real numbers. The integer part of the number is the number of days since some agreed-upon date in the past, called the epoch. In Excel, today's date, June 16, 2006, is stored as 38884, counting days where January 1st, 1900 is 1.
I started working through the various date and time functions in Basic and the date and time functions in Excel, trying things out, when I noticed something strange in the Visual Basic documentation: Basic uses December 31, 1899 as the epoch instead of January 1, 1900, but for some reason, today's date was the same in Excel as it was in Basic.
Huh?
I went to find an Excel developer who was old enough to remember why. Ed Fries seemed to know the answer.
"Oh," he told me. "Check out February 28th, 1900."
"It's 59," I said.
"Now try March 1st."
"It's 61!"
"What happened to 60?" Ed asked.
"February 29th. 1900 was a leap year! It's divisible by 4!"
"Good guess, but no cigar," Ed said, and left me wondering for a while.
Oops. I did some research. Years that are divisible by 100 are not leap years, unless they're also divisible by 400.
1900 wasn't a leap year.
"It's a bug in Excel!" I exclaimed.
"Well, not really," said Ed. "We had to do it that way because we need to be able to import Lotus 123 worksheets."
"So, it's a bug in Lotus 123?"
"Yeah, but probably an intentional one. Lotus had to fit in 640K. That's not a lot of memory. If you ignore 1900, you can figure out if a given year is a leap year just by looking to see if the rightmost two bits are zero. That's really fast and easy. The Lotus guys probably figured it didn't matter to be wrong for those two months way in the past. It looks like the Basic guys wanted to be anal about those two months, so they moved the epoch one day back."
"Aargh!" I said, and went off to study why there was a checkbox in the options dialog called 1904 Date System.
The next day was the big BillG review.
June 30, 1992.
In those days, Microsoft was a lot less bureaucratic. Instead of the 11 or 12 layers of management they have today, I reported to Mike Conte who reported to Chris Graham who reported to Pete Higgins, who reported to Mike Maples, who reported to Bill. About 6 layers from top to bottom. We made fun of companies like General Motors with their eight layers of management or whatever it was.
In my BillG review meeting, the whole reporting hierarchy was there, along with their cousins, sisters, and aunts, and a person who came along from my team whose whole job during the meeting was to keep an accurate count of how many times Bill said the F word. The lower the f***-count, the better.
Bill came in.
I thought about how strange it was that he had two legs, two arms, one head, etc., almost exactly like a regular human being.
He had my spec in his hand.
He had my spec in his hand!
He sat down and exchanged witty banter with an executive I did not know that made no sense to me. A few people laughed.
Bill turned to me.
I noticed that there were comments in the margins of my spec. He had read the first page!
He had read the first page of my spec and written little notes in the margin
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
This is why Dell's quality across the board has improved since they were taken private. They are not under the lash of shareholders demanding stuff the next quarter, otherwise lawsuits are threatened. Dell can do what the hell it wants to. Charge off a ton of earnings for R&D? Perfectly fine.
Apple needs to do the same if it wants to remain a player long term. Otherwise, they may end up suffering a fate similar to Sony with regards to consumer electronics in the early 2000s, especially with companies like Samsung coming out with innovative products on a constant basis.