Slashdot Mirror
Apple is Postponing Release of New Features To iOS This Year To Focus on Reliability and Performance: Report (axios.com)
For a change, Apple plans to not push new features to iOS devices this year so that it could focus on reliability and quality of the software instead, Axios reported on Tuesday. From the report: Apple has been criticized of late, both for security issues and for a number of quality issues, as well as for how it handles battery issues on older devices. Software head Craig Federighi announced the revised plan to employees at a meeting earlier this month, shortly before he and some top lieutenants headed to a company offsite. Pushed into 2019 are a number of features including a refresh of the home screen and in-car user interfaces, improvements to core apps like mail and updates to the picture-taking, photo editing and sharing experiences.
The dev model used to be "Steve will yell at you, fire you, berate you, or otherwise ensure that you didn't fuck up constantly".
That's over with, good or bad.
The new dev model clearly isn't up to snuff, so just pausing -- stopping new development, won't work. The entire development model must be fixed, and quite honestly some people don't produce, or produce well, without someone looking over their shoulder and yelling.
NOTE: if you take objection to that statement, then you're likely 'part of the non-producers'. Good devs exist, a whole boat load of them, but it only takes one dev claiming to properly test, follow coding guidelines, and 'being a prick' to sour a whole team.
Just like OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard
This doesn't sound very Agile. Customers need new versions of software every few months. It doesn't matter if the software works, or is secure. The most important thing is to complete the Sprints to get to a release milestone and to a release. Customers really want that more than anything else.
Horray for Apple!
I detest the continuous introduction of useless and stupid bells and whistles and new "features" being pushed on me.
Instead, they want to fix problems and make the machine run better? I'm all for it.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
That's a good move.
I do not begrudge Apple, but I have never been impressed by their products, mostly because of refusal by Apple to inter-operate with other devices. Am I alone?
.
Apple needs to fix its software development process.
Being mostly out of the Apple ecosystem, I was surprised the other day when I was driven by a friend. She was answering calls without using the hands-free Bluetooth car connection, and I asked her why. She told me that she had forgotten the charging cable at home, and that keeping the bluetooth on would drain the battery faster, and battery didn't last very long, as, you know, she added apologetically, "my phone it's an Apple".
I'd put my friend as a typical Apple user: well-off and absolutely not technically oriented, She will probably keep buying iPhones, as her computers are all from Apple, and learning new things is a hassle. But anyway I found it curious to find a typical Apple user apologizing for her choice of smartphone. That's not how Apple got to the top, and, even if it's just anecdotal evidence, has a sound of bells tolling in the distance.
So I'd suppose that Apple has to take that into account and improve it's battery-consumption act.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
See subject: Your MASSIVE FAIL in this life is you're nothing more than a chattering little do-nothing "ne'er-do-well" online & you know it...
* Is that the best your "phantasyland FAKE NAME" (for your fake lie of a so-called 'life') can manage?
APK
P.S.=> When a FAKE NAME do nothing like YOU does better than I have? Then talk (you're all talk & no action)... apk
Looks like a bunch of millennials.
Agile would say you test continuously. But I've found in practice that as an org grows in size and teams work (more) independently - that the integration areas become brittle when the teams don't work together. Usually due to competing priorities. As an iOS user I have noted the high rate of new bugs - and seemingly orphaned technologies that just don't work together (yeah - and what's up with Siri -- "she" is still only good for scheduling meetings, unless you live in Derry and then every meeting has a bovine twist to it)
My serious point though is that for an organization to take a step back must mean there's a pretty big problem going on under the covers. Sure this isn't Bill Gates and Security at MS. It's one thing to tune the organization and prioritize areas that need help - but to declare a dedicated focus on quality of features suggests something bigger.
After nearly 2 decades in this business and having been forced to use every flavor of the month software process (and even having to follow DO-178 in the aviation industry and having to test to 100% code coverage), I've learned there's only one thing that matters when it comes to the quality of your code... how good your engineers are.
Good engineers write less bugs than bad engineers and no software development practice is going to change that. How long your sprints are, having software reviews before every checkin, forcing people to write tons of tests, waterfall vs agile, blah blah blah. That's all B.S. and doesn't mean a damn thing. You want high quality software? Then fire your bad engineers and hire better ones.
Focusing on bugs is not necessarily a bad thing but that's not going to fix the problem at Apple.
Definitely the right idea. Security and stability matter a great deal to most people, informed or not. Take your car example. Toyota and Lexus are extremely popular for the average Joe or the person with money to waste, in the US or in other countries that do business with Japan. Why? Reliability/stability is the main common theme. And with techie devices, like phones, security is basically another measure of reliability/stability.
If Apple wants to keep it's name clean, it had better get things RIGHT. The one big selling point is their stuff is fast and doesn't break much (isn't compromised much). If they don't do that correctly, why not get the competitors?
and they can not walk and chew gum at the same time. Pathetic
Does it run "Goat C"?
There are new features in iOS 11.3: http://www.iphonehacks.com/2018/01/ios-11-3-features.html - heck people have complained about some of the new features here on Slashdot already https://apple.slashdot.org/sto...
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Every single time an android user tells me how great their phone is, I realize that they just didn't understand that ALL phones do that, that there are easier ways, that there's no need to pay through the nose to do those things, or that they didn't realize certain things were even possible because "android doesn't have that".
I have personally never found a selling point for an android device over their competitors, certainly not one that justifies the price difference. But people are happy to live in ignorance because they don't actually buy the device to do those things, they buy the device to go on YouTube occasionally or order their shopping or stick the kids on a game. And there, pretty much, you don't require any particular specialities and everything else is just a "toy" to play with.
Android is a designer brand sold on the fact that "I've heard android are better". I've yet to find that to be true. However, most people spend a lot of money on an android device, use it for everything they were ever going to anyway (i.e. not very much) and are happy that it does that. Fair play to them. But in terms of VALUE for money, I can't even begin to justify that over any other devices.
17.10 is an absolute shambles!
And probably 5 years running too.
It certainly seems like Apple isn't the only one with this problem. The entire tech industry seems based around relentless production of new versions with flimsy features no one wanted, often sacrificing more than just stability but valued features that users make extensive use of.
I'm kind of convinced that the technology industry turned to consolidation to eliminate competition and is just using feature/version revisions to force users into paying for support or upgrades to keep up profits. Actual growth is very low and development investment is also low, which accounts for a lot of the reason quality is low.
I think the industry generally is lacking in compelling innovation and is more interested in just consolidation and rent-seeking; needless fake innovation is just window dressing and forced obsolescence.
Improved reliability and stability is good.
Improved backward compatibility and legacy support would be even better.
Apple needs to stop killing off apps by changing the OS (iOS & MacOS) such that it orphans legacy software. We still need to use the tools we used yesterday, last year, last decade, last century, last millenia (wow, we're in a time we can say all that!)
Nice deflection but this is an apple problem, lets not harp on how there is no more innovation anywhere just because apple cant.
Microsoft software hasnâ(TM)t got better, and is even less worthy of trust.
How about Apple producing a new Mac Mini. Or a Mac Pro. Or any reasonable computer for those who already have a display?
Cook is a terrible CEO.
Put Steve Wozniak in as CEO and bring the spirit of Apple back to its roots.
Nice deflection but this is an apple problem, lets not harp on how there is no more innovation anywhere just because apple cant.
No, really. My first thoughts are Microsoft, then VMware, and probably more after that. Apple would be not off that list, but my experience has been more positive with Apple than some of the others.
I'll pick on VMware as an example -- each of their last 3 releases has had major bugs for months after the release. The good/bad news is that staying on a previous release wasn't much of a loss in terms of new features, because there weren't many. Yet you sort of paid a price in support and compatibility if you lingered at an old release, so you had some motivation to upgrade.
And at the same time the user interface has been withering, with more and more functionality only offered in the Flash-based user interface, and the most recent release completely does away with the Windows client in favor of a third-rate web interface that hasn't gotten better in 3 or so releases.
Meanwhile, little significant innovation is seen in these releases. The only compelling feature is vSAN, but it's expensive to license and it's not clear how compelling it really is.
The notion of exploiting speculative execution was known and in public academic conferences many years ago when these chips were being designed. AMD took measures seriously and the hardware plugged the biggest holes, at a performance cost. Intel took the riskier path for greater performance and sales, until the shit hit the fan.
It wasn't a lack of knowledge, it was a lack of will and ethics on Intel's part.