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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.
âoeIt just doesnâ(TM)t workâ
-Steve Jobs
Next year they'll relaunch everything with the slogan:
It just works. Again.
It still works. It's main job is not to be user friendly or make everything work seamlessly. "It just works" means the Apple brands works exceedingly well in extracting money from its fanbase. Sometimes it does by making a path breaking pioneer product or concept with great user friendliness, At other times by other means. In the end it just works, separating money from its users.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
That summary is so full of typos and missing words it's just embarassing.
"so it the ethos"
"petty bad year"
"over the past few weeks we seen"
Do I need to go on?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Look, software will [always] have bugs. Apple's software is no different.
Has anyone investigated?
Maybe iOS users are using their devices wrong.
Linus: "I got my Wi-Fi back!"
Lucy: "I got an iTunes update!"
Charlie Brown: "I got a brick."
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
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.
I'm a daily user of Mac OS, Windows and Linux. Of the three, Mac OS is still the best option. Windows is and always has been horrible and the UI changes that keep coming along are terrible, plus they keep rebooting my machine for updates. Linux is reliable although having upgraded my machines to systemd I don't really think Linux users can cast stones anywhere.
The main advantage of Apple has always been the tight integration of hardware and software and I have to say that having used Macs for nearly 20 years now, we're in no way in some terrible low point in Apple software quality. It has always been a bit variable. I remember complaining to Apple multiple times about Terminal.app on Tiger which wouldn't open bash about 50% of the time you started it. Took them until 10.4.6 to fix that one I believe. Every time we have one of these articles people proclaim that it is because Jobs is gone but there were issues when he was around. It really isn't all that different to how it was except that they have a lot more users today than they did back in the PPC days and yet for all that success we still haven't had the promised plague of viruses and malware that Windows got despite the switch to Intel and the increasing user base. I'd say it works well enough and I'll keep buying because it saves me time and money in my business.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
It is now...
It just looks good.
Apple is now just another Sony, IBM, Microsoft, etc.
The drive provided by Steve has left the company. Their target is no longer innovation or excellence, but next quarter's earnings reports.
The Shine if off the Apple.
As someone who still has a Fat Mac in his garage, it is just sad.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When they are competing against Windows 10, the bar is set very low. It doesn't have to be insanely great anymore, just not insanely awful.
Given the prices they now charge a more honest slogan would be:
It just works...for us.
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.
Just curious. How much development work has Apple outsourced?
It's only just begun.
Like all other makers, When Apple releases a product, and especially when it is rushed there are problems. Software problems are the easiest and cheapest to fix, so I expect Apple trying to rush out their new hardware before Christmas, they had slacked on the software testing. While iOS 11 and OS X has it bugs, there hasn't been any Something Gates about it current line of hardware, the iPhone 8 and X have been touted for its build quality (compared to the Google Pixel which had some cheap parts on it). Its Face ID on the X seems to work better then most people expected. In terms of hardware the really hit it off and got a release before Christmas. The software on the other hand seems like it was rushed. With little time testing on the new hardware. Especially the X which Apple wanted to keep secrete so it was really limited to Apple Employees, for real world testing. But software being software it is just a wireless push away from being fixed. Vs a Screen Gate, or a Antenna Gate, or a Bend Gate which is hard for Apple to fix because they had already sold the hardware.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
That was always, at best, "It just works - as long as you only want to do what we let you do."
Once Apple got the large user-base, they started to find out that maintaining a field full of Apple products is not as easy as selling new products into an empty field.
I got my first macbook because I wanted to try something different than windows XP. it was configured in less time than I used to use just to get rid of bloatware on a new computer
When I got my iPhone 3s, it as amazing how easy it was to get it to work. Back then "smartphones" were a pain to configure and get to work, connected it to the Macbook, a few questions and it worked too, emails contacts etc synchronized. Of course today that seems trivial as it just works on all platforms(i assume), but back then it was not something you just did.
Today some of the features that were supposed to work between my iDevices, did not work like handoff, send SMS from computer etc , and it took a lot of rebooting, resetting, reinstalling etc to get it to work.
Latest issue was that I could not use my iPhone as a hotspot. It said I should contact my cell provider which in turn said I should call Apple. But, alas, I didn't have Apple care and there are no real Apple stores in the country.
So I waited for my next(company paid) iPhone to call Apple with the 90 day(iirc) included Apple support for getting help.
It turned out to be a configuration issue that got carried over between each new iPhone when I restored(reset network configuration in settings that also will make it forget wifi passwords etc).
In all fairness the apple support was quite good and they spent a lot of time ensuring me that they would help me until it was resolved when they handed me over to another supporter. I might even choose to pay for Apple care next time. I didn't know that they could remote control my iPhone screen when I called them, but it worked nicely.
So with all the features we have today, it seems they can't keep up with "it just works". :)
L'Idiot
Literally just got back from a 45-mile round-trip to my nearest Apple Store where I had an appointment to cure a failure of my Mac Mini. It turned out that the High Sierra update "doesn't play well with HDDs" according to the Apple Genius who attended my machine. The "fix" was to wipe the entire machine and perform a clean installation of *Sierra*, with the instruction to me, "Don't upgrade yet..."
It is absolutely inconceivable that Jobs-era Apple would have allowed this to happen: had he still been with us, the roll-out would have been cancelled before it had even started.
It is self-evident that Apple's quality control has deteriorated markedly since Steve passed away.
The big problem for Apple is that with most hardware manufacturers significantly raising their game on producing gear at least as good as Cupertino's, the only unique differentiator they had up until now was the bullet-proof reliability derived from having both hardware and software built in-house. But with software quality reduced to a steaming pile of poo, all that's left is some stupidly over-priced hardware.
This won't be sustainable. Apple need to get their quality mojo back, or here starts the slide to oblivion...
I'm not convinced this year was a bad thing for Apple. They've spent so much time focusing on hardware and gimmicks to attract more eyes over the past 5 years that they needed on really bad year to straighten them out. I suspect now that they've shipped such a major upgrade to the iPhone and the MacBook (despite the MacBook's "upgrade" being shit), they can spend the next 2-3 years focusing hardcore on getting back to basics: software and ecosystem quality.
Holy crap. Sometimes I flame Apple, but I never... I have never said or read something so .. so...
Wow. "Apple is Sony" is probably the most vicious, mean-spirited, nasty-ass HATEFUL thing I have ever read on Slashdot. (I mean, I remember reading where some guy mentioned his wife had died a few weeks earlier and an AC replied to discuss what her corpse must look like, but you just topped that piece of shit.)
And when I think of all the reasons I don't buy Apple products (especially the iOS stuff; I could still theoretically imagine a situation where I might buy a new Mac), I realize that it's for exactly the same reasons I don't ever buy Sony products. Daaamn.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
1) Apple's software and hardware has always had bugs. They had a whole OS X release that had 'no new features' just dedicated to fixing bugs. It ALSO had bugs. At best, this article is revisionist history. At worst, it's feeble scaremongering.
2) How many people here have actually encountered the bugs mentioned or the deleterious effects of the bugs mentioned? Sure, if you installed High Sierra, it had a bad exploit in it, but was anyone here actually rooted before the patch went out? The patch having a bug isn't really a surprise, and frankly, it was an obviously better bug than the exploit. Would you rather they had sat on the exploit to make sure a relatively minor file sharing bug didn't roll out? That's stupid. That would be MUCH worse. The patch process in this case is working as intended. Fix the major bug, worry about the little ones later.
As for the iOS date bug, not only does iOS have a weird date-related bug every goddamn year, this one only affected you if you had a *repeating* local notification. It's a rare edge case. To be sure, it's a bug, but virtually the only people that noticed were the world's nerd population. It wasn't bad enough to make headline news.
3) Apple will always ship software with bugs, and making an appeal to the amount of money only makes sense if you don't stop to think about it. You can't throw more programmers at things and necessarily reduce the number of bugs—indeed, you're likely to make so much extra management overhead that things get fixed more slowly. The issue isn't COST, it's TIME. Apple's on an aggressive release schedule, just like everyone else. Android had its own share of bugs this year, as did Chrome and Windows. Bug free software doesn't exist, and I haven't seen any evidence that it's worse this year than previous years, mainly because I remember that I've had to deal with plenty of annoying bugs in the past. They could try to slow down their release schedule, but they'd catch hell from the Mac community because it would look like they're abandoning the platform, and they certainly can't miss the iOS treadmill without looking like they're faltering, no matter how good their intentions or end result. So they do their best in the time they've got, and they're doing about the same as they always have.
Apple's real challenges, in my opinion, are on the hardware side. Shipping the touchbar was a bad idea, because it was a weirdly tone-deaf answer to the pro community needing better hardware. They've also been shipping keyboards that are measurably worse in reliability than previous keyboards, and it's costing them money every time someone walks in with a piece of dust under the spacebar and it gets replaced under warranty. In general, I feel like they've stopped testing things in the real world and only let people test in blank, white rooms with no dust or pets or crumbs.
Apple's fine. The software is fine. The hardware is a bit of a rollercoaster, but it's mostly okay. Nothing to see here, move along.
I switched back in I think May to an iPhone SE. It was my first Apple product and I switched because I grew pissed at the battery sucking, slow as shit Samsung 7 Edge. I bought that device on launch day with my wife getting one as well. For the first 3 months it was great, but as updates came down the pipeline the phone slowed down. Not even a year later it couldn't hold a charge through a full day. Yes I had Outlook installed, yes apps ran. It was still unacceptable. There were tons and tons of posts on XDA and the subreddits for the S7E that confirmed - Samsung's updates broke this shit.
So when I got my iPhone SE, I was surprised at how fluid and smooth it felt. The setup process was far easier and shit really did work. I received a handful of updates and my battery life not got impacted, my phone never seemed to slow down. I bought a Macbook Pro - I'd always been interested in a *NIX device with good hardware support/setup. I got AirPods, I got an Apple TV, Apple Watch Series 3, and now I have an iPhone X. All of my stuff is updated to the latest and greatest releases. No problems have been found. I haven't had these bugs - sure the UI for the Apple TV seems a bit stupid, but it works. And pairing my stuff together - making it work seamlessly has been a treat.
This isn't meant to be a cheap shot, but it's reflective of my experiences. Look, I love Linux - I loved Ubuntu and Fedora. But I wanted a *NIX environment that was nice to use when I wanted it to be nice - and able to do heavy lifting when I wanted to get dirty. I used to love Android's customization, but as I hit into my 30s, got married, got a job, have plenty of disposable income, and left college I found I don't have time to piss around. I find I just want to spend money and not worry about the details. Now this article proclaims Apple is doing really shitty at that - and indeed for enterprises they are. For me - no problem. Maybe I'm special or unique in my experiences, but I'll admit I'm a believer.
Without the fanatical micromanagement of an anal retentive obsessive compulsive at the helm, it's really just any other company. Sad when the loss of a visionary results in the loss keeping marking from making engineering decisions, that's a change in corporate values.
Call Job's what you will, but single mind and driven were definitely some of the qualities. He had a unique perspective, and though I was never an apple fanboy, I appreciated his contribution to the craft of technology...I think that's the biggest change.. it's so seldom a craft anymore. The only long rang vision for young companies is to divine something cutsie and get swallowed by a big company getting rich in the process - no ownership of a piece of art or legacy that can improve the world.
My Note 8 cost as much as an iPhone. I like being able to actually use a pen for sketching, annotating PDFs, and scrolling around an RDP session (makes clicking small buttons easier, given my largish fingers). I also like being able to load up 50 GB of music from my laptop, straight to a microSD card - and then pop that card into the phone. Fast - really fast - transfer of a ton of music. Too bad iPhones don't allow either option...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
"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."
Not yet.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
When your only competition is the clusterfsck that is the Android ecosystem, you get to cut back on design and QA to chase more profit.
I have recently bought an iPhone to port some of my games to iOS. Really, I haven't seen such a sloppy OS for a very long time - and I've been a user of various strange devices like Openmoko ones, mostly with community maintained software, so that speaks of something. The number of small weird glitches, animations that jump out or don't finish properly, errors solvable only by clicking "try again" for a few times, config options that take effect only after toggling them more than once... various kinds of little bugs, displaying the overall messiness and untidiness. A lot of them discovered during the first day with the device, and not even using it as a phone, just trying to get through menus to learn how to use it.
Tons of stuff that came out under Steve Jobs was as buggy as fuck. Remember the Mobile Me email that didn't work? Or the early versions of iOS (then called iPhone OS) that took like 6 hours to sync with iTunes? Apple are not magical. As an Apple developer I can tell you that Mac OSX has always been as buggy as fuck to develop for. However, it's still BETTER than most alternatives. Better than Windows, better than Android, better than Linux, better than [WHATEVER]. But it aint magical. Everyone makes mistakes, all software has bugs. Some of those bugs will be facepalming annoying, but it happens to the best of us.
Apple has lost all the NeXT guys and now you have a bunch of people who don't get it. Swift was a good idea for mobile development, but it's also caused apple to target the dumbest common denominator internally as well as third party devs. The node and python generation can't write reliable code that doesn't leak memory, run slowly etc. They don't understand threads and think even driven programming will solve all the worlds problems. To add to that mess, TIm Cook lets Johny Ive screw things up constantly.
Computers need ports. Pro machines should be upgradable. Core i5s aren't reference chips. ultrabook chips shouldn't be in desktops. Some people need more than 256GB of storage.
Apple should heat up competition by doing the following:
Offer AMD Ryzen CPUs in some models to keep costs down while quadrupling speed. Remember the mac mini is a dual core ultrabook chip from 2014.
Standardize on AT LEAST 16GB of RAM with pro machines having 32GB or more.
Offer SSDs that are 512GB standard with larger options at normal prices.
Update Safari more than once a year, hire devs to work on webkit fulltime.
Bring back pro products and update them
Reintroduce a server line, even if it's a mac mini with a rack mountable 1u case.
Update OpenGL because not everyone wants metal
Remember that MacOS is unix and stop trying to screw things up
Relicense additional software under the apache 2 license that's under APSL such as launchd, make them github projects or something that takes patches easily
Ive should only touch the lowend machines. Those people want pretty and useless.
Reintroduce iBook or macbook branding and push them for the 90%, turn macbook pro into a pro platform again
offer a 17" display on MBP
Apple stuff never "just worked". So nothing has changed.
Thats what you get when you hire cheap third world H1B workers. You get third world code. Then we wonder why millenials are sitting in their parents basement begging for Bernie Sanders to pay off their student loans while Bernie helps more foreign aliens steal their jobs
Thin... or like a trashcan.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Ive isn't going to change how it works; he has no skills in that area. He's going to change how it looks.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Apple is not short of money.
And because they are not short of money, they are not short of time, except inasmuch as they aren't taking care of business. They have a bug list. They don't address it anywhere near the way they should.
What they are short of is competence.
And yes, I'm a Mac user.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
QA is seen s optional and apparently Apple is right. People still stand in line to buy their consumer electronics giving Apple probably the best year they ever had. All those who are annoyed by all these Apple bugs...stop buying Apple! Anyone who still buys Apple products endorses this lackluster approach to quality. Your choice!
Yes, but that is not because there is no means to overcome the outdatedness. Vendors intentionally do not push the updates available. No wonder, they already made the sale. Google is at fault for not adding mandatory upgrades for 5 years into their license agreements.
I used to think that about Microsoft. Right until their Surface line. I actually have my desktop running the latest version of Windows 10, but on my Surface Pro ... that one is ticked to run the Current Branch for Business. It seems Microsoft put just as much effort into testing their own hardware as everyone else's: i.e. let the insiders do the bug checking. Unfortunately few insiders seem to run on Surfaces.
For over one year my SP3 would refuse to wake properly when the SP4 keyboard was attached and folded back into the tablet position. This was fixed (probably by accident) when the new SP (SP5 but who needs numbers right?) keyboard was released forcing Microsoft to write a new driver.
The latest version of Windows 10 locks up the on-screen keyboard if I am in vertical orientation and I open the start menu.
It's like super basic things don't get checked even on hardware where they 100% control the entire chain, and that includes BIOS, Firmware, Drivers, Hardware and Software.