14 ms·

It Just Works

253 points by danielandrews 11y ago

stdbrouw 11y ago
I dunno. I've never experienced any of the problems described in the post. Always kind of dangerous to extrapolate from n=1. It also feels somewhat myopic to claim that people don't like apps like Notes or Calendar because there's more featureful alternatives. The point of stock apps isn't to please the power user.
- benologist 11y ago
  Dismissing bug reports because "it works on my machine" is also a kind of dangerous extrapolation, especially with the near-certainty that any large piece of software has bugs.
  - stdbrouw 11y ago
    Not dismissing anything, just pointing out that the author's standard of evidence is somewhat lacking.
    - aidos 11y ago
      You don't have to look far for the evidence. For any issue you can normally find several huge forum posts on the apple support forums (with no helpful responses from Apple).
      - gress 11y ago
        All software has bugs. Apple software has a giant audience and the Internet can magnify an issue that affects a small number of users to make it seem as though it's a giant problem. If a problem affects 5,000 users it's easy for it to appear as if it's a huge issue when it in fact is affecting a tiny % of the user base. Not that bugs should be ignored, but an active forum posting is not evidence that there is a major issue.
        aidos 11y ago
        Could definitely be a factor. Then again, there are plenty of people who don't post on those forums (like myself). I recently got a new MacBook Pro after my previous 6yo machine was stolen. Would love to say that I was shocked at the bugs I've run into, but I was fairly well prewarned. Things like internet dropouts caused by the DNS issue. I was told it would be a problem, and it was. But people had been complaining about it for ages. Seems unlikely to be just a few users experiencing it. I know I'm just another single datapoint but, after hacking on macs most of my waking hours since 2004, I too feel the basic quality is really slipping. Cloud services are something else altogether. I've been saying for years that Apple can't be trusted to handle data and syncing. Now they're pushing deeper into it things are getting messy. My best friend and I frequently have this conversation as he jumps into their services but he's also lost faith. A message he recently sent me: "Apple syncing is so fucked man. After the first round of Photos craziness where I lost tons of albums (thankfully no photos), for some insane reason, I’ve just lost a ton more. Any albums from 2012, 2013 and 2004 are totally gone. Head in hands shit." And this from someone who until recently would try to fight their corner.
        bsder 11y ago
        Dude, there are Bluetooth mice that are incompatible with current versions of OS X. Let that sink in. Apple screwed up their Bluetooth stack so badly that it is incompatible with a mouse. Something which has been in the Bluetooth standard forever. Something which is solely dependent upon their software because they use the same chip as everybody else. That is beyond a bug. That's contempt for the end user.
        gress 11y ago
        Almost all Bluetooth mice are compatible with current versions of OS X. Apple does support the human interface device standards. You have found a mouse that doesn't implement the Bluetooth spec properly. That is contempt for the end user. Let that sink in.
        bsder 11y ago
        > You have found a mouse that doesn't implement the Bluetooth spec properly. That is contempt for the end user. The mice I have work perfectly with all incarnations of Windows I have (XP, 7, and 8) and OS X version 10.6 (don't have access to 10.7 and 10.8 anymore). So, which is more likely, those mice all implemented the Bluetooth spec wrong yet still managed to work, or Apple screwed up their stack?
    - vacri 11y ago
      "anecdata!" is not a rebuttal to "hey, this is how I feel about X, from my experiences".
      - stdbrouw 11y ago
        But that's not what the author is saying! He's not saying "here's how I feel", he's saying "this is the state of Apple software".
- jostmey 11y ago
  My wife's Macbook has been a huge disappointment. The login is slow, the computer crashes all the time, and safari stopped working. And it's just over two years old. So N = 2.
  - gress 11y ago
    If the computer crashes all the time and Safari has stopped working then it is faulty and you should schedule a Genius Bar appointment.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  "I dunno. I've never experienced any of the problems described in the post." Ok, then what's your favorite list of bugs. You know you have one. Right?
hahainternet 11y ago
A very interesting article. I'm not part of the Apple ecosystem so I have no way to judge its veracity, but in my experience this is a feeling common to quite a lot of users regardless of product or manufacturer. Is this driven by competition? complacency? capriciousness? I've no idea.
- paulojreis 11y ago
  Loss of focus and feature creep. They've became an engineering company (as opposed to an "appliances" company, I guess). This, of course, IMO.
  - hahainternet 11y ago
    > Loss of focus and feature creep My point is though that I've heard this sentiment from Google customers, Microsoft customers etc. In fact to me it seems that I can only think of a few examples of software that seems to consistently improve in people's opinions. Is there something fundamentally broken in how we develop and produce software as an industry? Is there a reporting bias? It's probably a combination of both with many other unseen factors IMO.
    - sosborn 11y ago
      >Is there something fundamentally broken in how we develop and produce software as an industry? I would argue that this is indeed the case. The need to continue upping that version number results in the inevitable bloat and cruft. Nobody is interested in putting out a maintenance release, and quite frankly, if a company released a major software update without new features we would collectively deride them for it. (Don't talk to me about Snow Leopard, even though they talked up the maintenance aspect of it they still promoted at on of new features.)
    - volaski 11y ago
      I think the difference is Google or Microsoft never promised "it just works". Apple on the other hand used to "just work", at least before Steve Jobs passed. Nowadays the contrast is too huge that people notice it more. As an analogy, people just shrug when McDonald's releases another unhealthy (but affordable) menu, but if a chef who used to get New York Times 5 star reviews starts cooking shitty food and screwing his customers and not care much because he still gets lots of customers based on his existing reputation, then people start hating.
omarforgotpwd 11y ago
I think Apple software is generally good but occasionally buggy, especially close to release. Apple's iOS-era policy of free updates every year has just subjected more people to these bugs more often.
gskye 11y ago
I've been watching apple's software quality decrease over the past few years with increasing disappointment . It still astounds me that their test suites haven't caught the multitude of issues i've seen before shipping. It makes me wonder if Apple actually uses their own products. Don't even get me started on the Remote app...
planetjones 11y ago
It's really frustrating for me just how many bugs Apple software has. Let's look at a simple one - the icons on iOS safari for frequently visited websites. They "randomly" assign the wrong favicon e.g. I click the Facebook icon and it loads Hacker News. This has been present since iOS 8. Yesterday I pulled down the notification screen and it occupies only 50% of my screen. Cue another reboot of the iPhone. My iMac. Upgrading to Yosemite was the worst mistake ever. Now I have to use a cheap mouse and keyboard, as Apple's Bluetooth versions no longer wake the sleeping iMac. I have tried every solution on the Internet to this and none fix it. The beachball is becoming ever more prominent on the iMac too. Very disappointing for a machine which isn't 3 years old. My Macbook Air. It's better, but the power button no longer does anything when I press it. Apple products have a huge premium and the quality of the software is not matching the price tag. I am not surprised to see the stock falling; usually when IBM buy your products en masse you know something is wrong :) I don't know what the culture at Apple is. But I don't think their software developers can be anything other than the "norm" - and I am extremely worried about their automated testing culture. Maybe someone can comment. EDIT: I just remembered my Apple Cr*p folder home to Podcasts, Tips, Apple Watch, Calendar, Health, Apple Store, Apple Maps, Videos, Reminders and Newstand. Podcasts actually cost me money when it started downloaded podcasts over 3G despite me saying wifi only. I think that bug got fixed, but I'll never trust it again. I also forgot about the white elephant that is the Apple Time capsule I purchased. It's slow over wifi from the iMac and was one of the causes of my beachball, but the main issue was it kept saying it couldn't back up because the disk was locked. For a company like Apple who should supposedly simplify backup, the product is a shambles. Maybe this is better now, but I won't be upgrading.
- ino 11y ago
  > My Macbook Air. It's better, but the power button no longer does anything when I press it. Press and hold. It's this way to prevent accidental logouts which were frequent in my case when it was just a press.
  - rbritton 11y ago
    Thanks. That's something that would have been really helpful to see a note on. It changed the behavior of a button that's been consistent for as long as I can remember.
deleted 11y ago
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mijustin 11y ago
"Like every tech company nowadays, Apple wants to do it all." I'd say that Apple has always wanted to do it all. They've always built the OS + the hardware + the software. Arguably, it's that "end to end design" that's helped them achieve their success.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
drb311 11y ago
"It just works" is a tricky promise to make good on. Microsoft never made this promise and nor does Google. As a Google fan I accept a certain amount of flakiness as part of the brand identity. It's always celebrated a quirky, rough feel. In some ways, Google is starting to get TOO slick. People expect Apple to be innovative and reliable; too push the boundaries without ever falling over them. It's hard to do either consistently, successfully, at scale. It might be impossible to do both.
- x0x0 11y ago
  I suggest the difference is I, and other people I know, keep finding apple bugs so common and frequent that it's essentially clear there is no testing at all. viz the discoveryd fiasco. Either nobody there could be bothered to use stuff on a network or an exec forced it to be released anyway. Or trouble connecting iphones to itunes, etc.
- at-fates-hands 11y ago
  >>>> People expect Apple to be innovative and reliable; This is because your investment in their hardware is at a premium price. People expect when they drop 2-3K for a PC that both of things are going to be a given. Obviously, in the last few years, this hasn't been the case.
- cptskippy 11y ago
  > As a Google fan I accept a certain amount of flakiness as part of the brand identity I agree with you however I feel like they've been trying to shrug that off and grow up and that's left me a little underwhelmed. I got two thirds of the way through that article and realized that the way he felt about Apple was how I felt about Google. They keep thrusting crap upon us that no one asked for, remove stuff we do like, or neglect things until people abandon them. Meanwhile Microsoft has been dramatically stepping up it's game but everyone still looks at them like the Catholic Priest that molested them as a child.
  - wineisfine 11y ago
    Thats a great Microsoft analogy there! Spot on
davidw 11y ago
I got a Mac for my new job, and I gave it a few weeks, but ended up putting Parallels on it so I can use Ubuntu. I just don't like how Macs work, and don't like that I can't customize it (focus follows the mouse, dammit!) like I can Linux. There are a lot of things that 'just work' on Ubuntu (for me, at least), like git bash completion, that seem to require more fiddling on the Mac.
geophile 11y ago
Major Apple applications have become inscrutable and frustrating. - iTunes, Music and the iTunes store are a mess. I understood the old iTunes organization. Navigation within my music collection has become highly non-intuitive. It seems that there are multiple paradigms (long list of tracks, and another sectioned off by album), and it isn't always clear why one or the other is used. I keep forgetting how to get to the store. Once there, the integration with the stuff I've bought is unclear (especially for video content). I once got extremely confused watching a series, not realizing that one particular view of the episodes were ordered by POPULARITY, not in chronological order. And ratings! I get the 0-5 star rating system. Then they added the heart icon for -- uhh -- something. Why not just use the existing rating system? Why do I have to rate things again for a different purpose? - Podcasts have become very confusing. I want to be able to control what is physically present on my devices, to control data usage on my phone, and space usage on all devices. They've intentionally made that difficult. - Photos is a disaster. There are many different organization paradigms, and it is unclear why some of my recent photos appear in some of them but not others. What are the differences among events and photo stream? Why do some pictures show up in the by-date organization but not photo stream? What's in the cloud? When does it sync with my phone? Why is it easy to sync with my phone by cable but not IP? If current trends continue, my beautiful Mac hardware will be nothing but a boot loader for VMWare and Linux.
- why-el 11y ago
  iTunes is absolutely terrible. I did several updates for my girlfriend and friends, and none of them figured out iTunes. Most of them downgraded.
  - geophile 11y ago
    Spotify is a possible replacement (even without their streaming and music finding services), but I find that application quite buggy.
    - afandian 11y ago
      Spotify's approach to customer engagement and accountability is a little better than Apple's in that they have a product support forum. But their contempt for the customer seems to be about the same WRT to removing features on a whim. They removed a deal-breaker feature a couple of years ago (filter a list for a song) and have only just managed to put it back, only half working, now. I don't know how bad iTunes has got (haven't used it in 5 years) but I can't recommend Spotify as a replacement. If anyone does have any suggestions, I'd be very glad to read them!
leonroy 11y ago
Excellent article. I too find myself looking at ways I can reduce my reliance on Apple these days. For me it's getting burnt with Aperture, discoveryd causing all my Airplay speakers to constantly act up, $1000 Thunderbolt displays flickering on my $6000 Mac Pro as well as parts of my iTunes library getting spoilt by the new Apple Music stuff. List goes on, but Daniel is right, I just don't really have much (if any) faith in Apple when it comes to my data. I think that this erosion of trust will take years to rebuild. The sad thing is that Apple in the mid 90s had a similar rep for flaky products and Tim Cook was widely credited for tightening ops to improve product manufacture, quality and reliability.
msluyter 11y ago
Yes, I've also noticed an increasing number of software bugs on my Macs. FWIW, I wanted to try out the Dell XPS "Developer Edition," which appears to be about as close as you can get to a Macbook level build quality in a linux box (without having to jump though the hoops of installing linux on a macbook itself), and you simply can't order it from Dell's website. A chat with a rep suggested that it's out of stock. So, I think Apple is creating market opportunity -- a high quality linux based laptop aimed at developers that, like the Mac, doesn't require constant fiddling or kernel rebuilds to get working.
- lqdc13 11y ago
  I would get ThinkPad W550s instead. Plus you can get 32gb RAM unlike most laptops.
- gshubert17 11y ago
  Any knowledge or experience of System 76 laptop computers as Linux machines?
  - navait 11y ago
    I purchased a system 76 Gazelle laptop, and it's a pretty reliable . Wifi, audio and dual monitors worked out of the box, but it has trouble with 3 monitors(includes laptop screen) My main complaint is the battery life.(This is probably a linux issue) At best I get 2.5 hours, which needs serious improvements. However, so many things on linux lack polish, crash at random times, or have UI problems. Apple would have to screw up a lot more to get anywhere near the disaster of desktop linux,
    - zxcvcxz 11y ago
      >However, so many things on linux lack polish, crash at random times, or have UI problems. Apple would have to screw up a lot more to get anywhere near the disaster of desktop linux, This is just not true at all. Apple is way more buggy in all those areas for me. I use fedora with GNOME and haven't had one single problem. My grandparents even use it. If I bought them a mac I'd have to fix it every time I come over, with Linux I don't.
serve_yay 11y ago
Apple makes things that "do more" than their products of old, and we expect them to do more than devices past. The combination of features plus our expectation that all our devices be aware of what is happening on the others at all times is a recipe for a combinatorial explosion of unpredicted states, race conditions, you name it. I too miss the simplicity and "it just works" factor of past days. But it's a lot easier to pull that off with an iPod and a Mac, than iPhone + Mac + iPad + watch, etc. They're the biggest company in the world and nobody needs to make excuses for them - I'm not saying "well, it's to be expected and it's not their fault." But I always think, who would be able to do this better than Apple? And I think the answer to that question reveals the depth of the situation we're in. As much as Apple screws up, could you imagine using a watch + phone + PC + tablet from some other vendor, and it being better? That's what really sucks about now - Apple screws up and they're the best we can hope for.
- ariwilson 11y ago
  Yes, I use one of each of those from Google and they all work pretty well :).
  - serve_yay 11y ago
    Mm hmm.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > As much as Apple screws up, could you imagine using a watch + phone + PC + tablet from some other vendor, and it being better? I use a phone, watch, tablet, TV dongle, and PCs from a combination of 5 different hardware and 3 different core software vendors (on all but the watch and TV dongle, not the same vendors for both on the same device), and I have a pretty good experience working across them for the things that need to work across them. Perhaps Apple's ingrained culture is less well adapted to dealing with diversity than those of vendors who are used to having to deal with it because they don't control all aspects of the experience.
swang 11y ago
1. I'm still on 10.9. Still have not moved over to Yosemite. Mavericks runs smooth for me. 2. It is 2015 and iTunes/iPhone syncing is still the absolute worst. I just want to add a couple of albums to my iPhone, why do I need to connect over a cable (wifi syncing almost never works for me) and why do I need to wait more than 5 minutes? I don't want to sync my entire phone again! (If you know how to not have iTunes do this, please tell me. It is the worst).
- visarga 11y ago
  I too am on 10.9 and it feels great. I used to use 10.10 and it was crashing when I did VNC. Now it's stable as a rock. It was very difficult to downgrade, because Apple cut almost all the ways. Fortunately, my laptop originally shipped with 10.9 and I was allowed a web download of the OS from the boot loader. On a tangent note, I am frustrated with the slowness of Chrome, too.
baseballmerpeak 11y ago
When it works, it is brilliant and seamless. On the other hand, there is not any redundancy, in the sense that if one piece of the equation (OS + the hardware + the software) is rubbish, it cannot be readily replaced by substitution (e.g. swapping Windows for Linux).
- steverb 11y ago
  I dunno, Windows 7 runs brilliantly on my MacBook.
  - slantyyz 11y ago
    I have found that Windows tends to run faster than OSX itself does on the same Mac. Hell, my 2008 Macbook can run the latest version of Windows 10 in 64 bit, but can't run the latest version of OSX. Win 10 runs snappy, while Lion (the last supported OS) is now a crufty pig on it.
willcodeforfoo 11y ago
I've been increasingly feeling the same way, especially about OS X, but what's the alternative for a developer-friendly desktop operating system that looks and works beautifully (almost) out of the box?
- flavor8 11y ago
  Ubuntu.
- iamd3vil 11y ago
  Linux Mint is working for me pretty well for the past 1 year. Check it out.
  - at-fates-hands 11y ago
    I would second Mint. I made the switch a while back and am in the process of dumping Windows altogether so I can do all my development with Linux.
- yellowapple 11y ago
  Slackware. Before everyone here laughs at me, let's start with some disclaimers: * While not as involved as with some other distros (like Arch or Gentoo), Slackware's install process is still a bit involved; namely, you have to manually setup partitions before starting the install program (the Slackware install environment provides `fdisk` and `parted` for this, and details are well-documented). * You have to make a single edit in `/etc/inittab` in order to get Slackware to boot into a graphical environment by default. Once you get past those hurdles, Slackware is pretty much what you're asking for: * Ships with multiple desktop environments / window managers, including KDE, Xfce, Window Maker, and Openbox (in order from most to least pretty/easy-to-use by default), among others. Even more are available on Slackbuilds.org (see below). * Most (if not all) Slackware software packages include development headers (unlike most GNU/Linux distributions which have separate `-dev` packages for development headers), making it very convenient if you need to develop against some library. * The underlying system is simple and easy to troubleshoot; no plethora of fragile moving parts like you see in OS X or Ubuntu. * Ships with the full GCC suite. * Fast. * Things "just work". * Compatible with a lot of different language runtimes/compilers/etc. (for me, I've seen Erlang/Elixir, Ruby (w/ RVM), Perl, Rust, Julia, and assorted other LLVM-oriented languages work out-of-the-box without needing to deviate from `./configure && make && sudo make install`; not that you have to even `./configure && make && sudo make install`, though (see below)). * Plethora of third-party software packages available on Slackbuilds.org (installation of which is automatable if you download/install `sbopkg`). It's not for everyone, of course, but it's worked well for me over the last several years.
suresk 11y ago
The thing about saying "it just works" and attempting to hide everything from the user is that it is really, really frustrating when it doesn't "just work". The amount of hardware and software bugs I've encountered in Apple products has been steadily increasing, to the point where I'm really only happy with my iPhone (and even that has some problems) - - Connecting a wired keyboard to a Thunderbolt display that is connected to my MBP rarely worked after disconnecting/reconnecting my MBP. I'd have to change which USB port the keyboard connected to - until discovering that this was a common problem that connecting a USB extender fixes. It just works? - We use Apple TVs in our conference rooms to connect our laptops to and project via a projector/tv. The Apple TVs routinely reboot, fail to connect, and drop connections. I've had my laptop lock up for several minutes trying to connect to one. - iMessage routinely gets into a state where it shows ghost notifications that I have to clear by deleting conversations one-by-one until I find out which one is causing it. - iMessage routinely reorders previous messages. - Safari randomly uses the wrong favicon for frequently visited websites. And so many more. It is really disappointing that I'm not really that surprised when something doesn't work or feels clunky. At this point, I trust my Windows machine more than I do my Mac.
twsted 11y ago
My thesis: part of this feeling comes from the fact that more eyes are on the OS and the apps, but many issues existed before. - I have some complaints about OS X: wifi, bluetooth, etc. - I like iTunes as it is today (not considering the synchronization process) - I struggle with the weakened "iWorks" applications
bilbo0s 11y ago
"...In my opinion, Yosemite is the worst non-beta Mac OS release I’ve ever used – and I’ve used everything other than the public betas of 10.0 ..." ??? Personally I find Yosemite AND Windows 10 to be wanting in most every respect. But I think there is a bit of a tendency to view the past through rose colored glasses. There is no way that Yosemite is worse than 10.0 or 10.1. I know I'm going to date myself a bit here... but 10.1 on that Titanium powerbook, that sagged like rubber if you held it from one end by the way, had to be the single worst computing experience of my life. That INCLUDES waiting for time on the mainframe, punchcards in hand, in the basement of the computer science building at the University of Wisconsin. "... While I didn’t run into any data loss issues or anything particularly catastrophic..." That right there should tell you it's better than early OSX. Thank who- or whatever you deem divine for Perforce... because I once lost an entire Solaris build of the Photoshop engine to early OSX. And it waited until I had fixed quite a few bugs to make the engine work on BSD before it crapped on me too. AWESOME times!!! No actually it SUCKED!!! Maybe I'm just being harsh on 10.0 and 10.1, or maybe harsh on Titanium powerbooks??? I don't know. Maybe other people were not as annoyed as I was with the crashes and slowness. But it was BAD!!! HORRIBLE actually. I think Vista was a sack of crap... but even Vista gave a better experience than the early OSX versions. Though Vista and early OSX probably are neck and neck for worst desktop OS experiences to date. I don't know... I could be wrong. I mean... I also think Windows XP has probably delivered mankind the BEST desktop OS experience to date. So what do I know ??? Anyway... Yosemite is bad... but for those too young to remember... BELIEVE me when I say... early OSX was FAR, far worse.
- sosborn 11y ago
  > early OSX was FAR, far worse. Not all of them though.
bane 11y ago
I dunno, I just don't use Apple produced software on my Mac for the most part and the experience is mostly fine. I use Windows at home and Mac for work, so I probably spend a bit more time on my work Mac. I loath finder with a passion that would reduce stars to quarks, but that's just because its poorly designed, not particularly buggy. And outside of the OS, that's pretty much all the Apple software I tend to use on a day-to-day basis. I learned a long time ago to just stop trying to make their software work, and I don't know why people keep returning to it after years of dealing with increasingly bad software. Just avoid it. My day pretty much consists of Chrome, iterm2, MS-Office and a handful of other apps, and things work mostly fine. I could probably have an absolutely equal day on a Windows laptop since most of what I use is cross-platform or has an equivalent. My only real gripe is that I wish the screen animation and updating was more "snappy" like in windows. It always feels like it's just making the little graphics hamsters work a little extra hard to do things like scrolling quickly. I think the larger point here is that the apps apple makes all have better replacements in their segment. I can kind of see that for a terminal application or whatever that's tossed in with the OS, but for other kinds of applications, ones you pay good money for, Apple really should be more neck-and-neck with the competition. There's also really little excuse these days for the huge ecosystem of addons and patches that unfuck missing and broken core OS features. Bettertouchtool, for example, shouldn't actually need to exist. But there's something like half a dozen applications kind of like it, and zero support for what it does built in OS X. People don't really complain about it too much because once you install and set these little widgets up, you forget about them. But the user should never have to install this stuff in the first place. This seems to me like a combination of a lack of focus, lack of dedicated teams, lack of product ownership and vision, and lack of attention to detail in the software development practice at Apple vs. the software design teams.
- waz0wski 11y ago
  > My only real gripe is that I wish the screen animation and updating was more "snappy" like in windows. It always feels like it's just making the little graphics hamsters work a little extra hard to do things like scrolling quickly. on 10.8/9/10 You can change the mission-control animations speed with this tweak: defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0.1 It's still kind of crap, doesn't perform well on 3+ displays, but faster. The 10.11 beta noticeably improves animation speed / "feel" of animations around the whole OS, even on 3+ display systems with many windows open.
post_break 11y ago
I got into Apple in 2006, loved the ride up to Snow Leopard. Then things got weird. UI choices that made little sense. Hardware bugs that were impossible to diagnose or fix. Like my parents Mac Mini that would show snow on the display after it went to sleep. Try troubleshooting that remotely. My work rMBP has some similar issues where my monitor just goes green. And then it also has a SystemUI freeze for upwards of 30 seconds that is completely impossible to fix. DiscoveryD, oh god why. Apple just doesn't seem as focused on a main goal of shipping stable and perfect solutions. The "me too!" attitude shows it. Oh and lets not forget when they ship iWork with missing features and then slowly add them back over time...
- baldfat 11y ago
  I am a HUGE Apple Hater so take this as it be. I have always had issues with stability with Apple's OS. Everyone else always said I was crazy but I have dozens of people see me repeat the crash over and over again doing simple one or two step processes. Start with Apple OS 7 up to just yesterday when Adobe Photoshop crashed every time I switch the color palate to 2 color.
  - sosborn 11y ago
    > Adobe Photoshop crashed every time I switch the color palate to 2 color. You can probably blame Adobe for that. In their infinite wisdom they implemented their own window management system for their products on OS X.
    - baldfat 11y ago
      Well you can blame 95% of Windows problems the same way. Don't blame Microsoft vendor A implemented it their own way ...
- pavedwalden 11y ago
  This may or may not be what you mean by "goes green" but I've noticed that when DVI cables go bad it often results in green noise all over the screen. My office had a mix of both HDMI and DVI adapters for their macbooks, and I only ever saw it with DVI, but either way it might be worth swapping cables and seeing if the problem isn't with your macbook.
LordHumungous 11y ago
Boot times for my Macbook Pro have gotten really long since a recent upgrade to Mavericks. Went from ~3 seconds to ~30 seconds.
- angerZen 11y ago
  El Capitan does a lot to rectify that (at least in the beta so far).
mkozlows 11y ago
It's certainly the case that OSX, at least, has gotten flaky as heck, but at the same time: What's the competition? While Apple was releasing Yosemite, Microsoft was going down the Windows 8 rabbit-hole, releasing the worst version of Windows since ME. And while desktop Linux has been getting better over time, I don't think anyone would say that it "Just Works" yet. The only desktop/laptop OS that actually does "Just Work" is ChromeOS; and while that's a wonderful experience for its use cases, there are still plenty of situations that it's not great for.
- baldfat 11y ago
  Windows 8 has been solid (Except people don't like the GUI) Windows 10 gives you the start button back (I don't like start buttons) Linux - There really are good use cases for Linux. Your's might fit this one. Works for me and I dual boot for the odd time I need another OS (About twice a quarter) Chromebook - Limited to "normal" users workflow cases.
  - aikah 11y ago
    The whole Metro UI stunt was a mistake, It should never have happened. I'm really curious about who's to blame for that stuff, I don't think it's Sinofsky, because it's just so stupid. But at the same time there is very little difference between 7 and 8 so why would anyone want to buy yet another license ? That's the problem right here with Windows. Worse it looks like they removed some features from 7 to 10. Aside from gamers who always need yet another version of directx frankly it becomes harder and harder to justify the cost of Windows for each new computer bought.
    - baldfat 11y ago
      I actually like it. I just hit Windows key and type. WOWZ
    - tim333 11y ago
      Yeah, I'm also curious how 8 happened. I think it may have been some institutional committee type effect because it seems to dumb for a smart individual to do. It didn't really effect me because I just skipped 8 but three of my friends / family who don't follow tech bought a new computer unaware of what Microsoft had done and were shocked / horrified to find things didn't work as before. My cousin figured it took him about 100 hours to get some stuff working again and the other two basically stopped using their computers. It was particually painful with my dad whos 80ish and slowing down a bit but who could use 7 but who was unable to work 8. I have lasting resentment to Microsoft over that - the amount of pain and inconvenience they caused their regular users. And for what? I think the brilliant reasoning was if they force people to use a phone interface on their computers they'll be used to that interface and buy windows phones and tablets. That worked out well for them with the recent $7.6 bn write off on Nokia and presumably lots of well meaning employees losing their jobs. At least the new management seem to have returned to trying to treat their customers well rather than inflicting unpopular stuff in a misguided attempt to get more money.
kaffeinecoma 11y ago
Do you rely on Time Machine? Drop to the shell right now and try "tmutil compare -n" to see which files are not making it onto your backups. For me, Time Machine randomly ignores certain files, for no discernible reason. Files that have sat on my disk literally for years will never get backed up. It's happened to me on two different Macs, and I've lost data because of it.
- jre 11y ago
  I ran into the same issue. After a restore from my time machine backup, I discovered that some files where missing (with no apparent pattern). Fortunately, I had a non time machine backup, but pheew that was a close one...
  - kaffeinecoma 11y ago
    I discovered it when visiting an old project after a whole OS wipe-and-restore from TM. A week later I found that 'git' wouldn't recognize a project dir due to some missing pieces. I had a 2nd TM drive, and was able to manually restore files. For my other machine, no such luck. I had a 2nd backup offsite (Backblaze) but it was months before I noticed the damage, and so the old files were no longer available via the offsite. I think the worst part is not knowing what you've lost. I have thousands of music and photos on that machine, and every once in a while I come across something that's gone.
- maxwelljoslyn 11y ago
  "-n" doesn't seem to be a valid flag for "tmutil compare". (OS X 10.8). What flag or comparison property did you mean? I'm running the unflagged command now. Thanks for the heads up. I appreciate it. If this comes up bad I'll need a second backup solution. Edit: Thanks again, parent: Time Machine was indeed missing some of my music!
xenadu02 11y ago
It seems clear Apple feels the same way given that El Capitan and iOS 9 are light on fancy new features. My hope is that both represent a "Snow Leopard" style polish release. I know that dumping discoveryd has solved my WiFi/AirPlay/AirDrop issues so they seem to be listening.
karmakaze 11y ago
There's an easy way to explain all these artifacts: Apple no longer does things "as if they themselves are the user", or if they do then they've significantly lowered their standards.
Joeri 11y ago
Consistently delivering high quality software features is impossible. Even great teams mess up every once in a while. The way apple used to get around that was to throw things away, or to send them back to the drawing board. There was someone at the top who detected when things weren't ready, and prevented them from getting released or dared teams to do better, even at great cost. In the jobs era there were many things which were rumored to ship and cut at the last moment. Apple has stopped not shipping things, and it's what will turn them into just another software company.
- mkempe 11y ago
  They've forgotten how to say "No."
chejazi 11y ago
This trend has been very apparent to me, starting a couple years after Steve Jobs passed. I waited until July 2015 to upgrade from Mavericks to Yosemite because of all the bugs I kept hearing about.
arturhoo 11y ago
The discoveryd fiasco was the biggest let down for me. Every single Macbook in the office suffered connectivity issues and it took them too long to go back to the old, perfectly fine state. It's almost 20 years of internet ferociously consuming and producing digital music and pictures and no one has been able to improve upon what Winamp and Foobar2000 or a minimally organized photo folder delivered - Picasa worked quite well, but I guess, as google reader, being stable and functional is not enough. How can a 600B dollar company sustain a buggy software like iTunes for so many years? Dreadful experiences include podcasts, album art, and even simple music organization! Apple Music... what makes you, the biggest digital music store in the world, release a cloud based product that thinks that a live version of a song is the same one as the album version? It seems Apple is trying to make its user base - that helped it become the most world's most valuable company - user their version of every digital service/product possible but at the cost of lacking in the areas that made it thrive in the first place. Heck, even my last MBP had hardware issue (staingate)...
volaski 11y ago
I switched to mac when when MS lost its mind and came up with Vista--it was unusable, so much so that switching cost to mac was lower than trying to get Windows to work. Nowadays the only reason I stay with Mac is because I make iOS apps and realize it will be annoying if I abandon Mac. Apple is no more in a "just works" business. It's in a lock-in business. I used to be delighted to download their new OS's, and I'm sure everyone used to too, but nowadays I NEVER download their new versions and try not to upgrade as much as possible, I've been burned too many times and lost so many hours of productivity because the upgrade fucked me up
- kazinator 11y ago
  > Apple is no more in a "just works" business. It's in a lock-in business. No such change has happened between 2007 (MS Vista time frame) and now. People familiar with Apple since 1980-something know very well that it's always been about both of the above: just works for the end user, and a lock-in business. If anything, it's less locked in now than it used to be, because of the use of Intel processors (that was a big shocker in the Mac world). You can get a bootleg OS/X image to run under VirtualBox. I have such an image running over top of Windows 7; I use it to compile and test OS/X binaries of a FOSS program that I developed. In the 1980's I had a clone of an Apple II+ computer. Apple did their best in their operating system software to detect clones and try not to run on them. Clones were the illegal work of the devil, according to Apple. By contrast, the IBM PC's spawned a thriving clone market.
  - yellowapple 11y ago
    Whether lock-in has bettered or worsened depends on perspective. While OS X can be shoehorned to run on Hackintoshes and VMs now, I can't remember any time when it was virtually impossible to install a custom operating system on Apple hardware until the iPhone came out (and, eventually, when the iPhone 3GS closed up the bugs that allowed the bootloader's security checks to be cirvumvented; said bugs were the only way to install a custom OS - like Android - on an iPhone). As far as I know, the software on Apple's desktops and laptops has always been unrestricted (as I know firsthand; literally all my PowerPC Mac hardware runs OpenBSD nowadays).
Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
I don't understand why the hacker scene these days is full of proud OSX users. What happened to the proud Linux hackers we've always had? They told me to use OSX at the job I recently started, and I only lasted a week before I told them I wanted to install Linux.
- geniium 11y ago
  maybe a week isn't enough...
  - Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
    It was more than enough.
- enraged_camel 11y ago
  Because OSX provides a reasonable middle ground between usability and control. You can use it as a regular user when you want to do things like listen to music, watch movies and browse the Internet, and you can also use it as a "hacker" by leveraging its "Unixness". It also integrates extremely well with other parts of the Apple ecosystem, unlike Linux.
- jsolson 11y ago
  Part of the 'pride' behind being a Linux hacker came from heavily customizing, breaking, fixing, and generally maintaining your dev kit. I have a friend who's taken on a motorcycle rebuild project and I can see a lot of analogs there. For me, personally, I realized that having a system which I can take from zero to 'dev ready' in less than an afternoon (which I did recently with a freshly shipped MacBook) is the main 'feature' I want from my dev software stack. I don't love all of OS X's defaults, but I customize very few things. The bigger issue for me, though, is hardware. I know this varies dramatically from developer to developer, but weight, size, battery life, and display quality (in roughly that order) are my primary concerns with laptop hardware. I recently switched my work laptop from a Chromebook Pixel (first gen) to an 11" MacBook Air and I've been thrilled with the change. That said, the leap in display quality and general machine 'feel' from the Air to the MacBook I use for personal developer is almost as big, for me, as the leap from the Pixel to the Air. Apple builds hardware that feels 'right' to me in a way that other manufacturers that I've encountered don't. So, I can't speak for others, but there's why I'm a proud OS X user instead of a proud Linux user.
JimmaDaRustla 11y ago
As an Android, linux, and Windows user...I've been having the most outrageous time getting anything to work as expected with my girlfriend's iPhones. Issues, upon issues, upon issues of how services or software is expected to work...yet never having desired results. A few days ago, I held her iPhone 6 for the first time since she got it a month or two ago. I felt like I was holding the greatest piece of mobile technology in existence, except I knew it ran iOS and only iOS.
afterburner 11y ago
It never really "just worked". People have been complaining about, for example, iTunes, ever since it came out. Apple stuff always had a ton of annoyances. Perhaps the experience was more restricted before, or Jobs' pitch more convincing.
mbrock 11y ago
Why don't Apple just make a laptop that runs iOS? Call it... iBook!
kybernetyk 11y ago
I'm frustrated with Apple when it comes to services. Don't misunderstand me: I love their hardware. I love OS X. It's the best computing experience since my C64 days. But when it comes to services I tend to avoid them as much as I can. Latest example: Apple music. I was a little annoyed by Spotify's continuously disappearing music tracks so I was eager to try out iTunes Music. But the problems started when I tried to get into the trial: You need a valid* credit card. Now valid is a pretty interesting definition because I'm from Germany, currently living in Germany but my banking is done via a Dutch bank (back from when I lived there). So my credit card is dutch. And I live in Germany. But it's the EU so it shouldn't be a problem, right? Right. And no one has ever raised an eyebrow when I used a credit card that has been issued by a Dutch bank with my German address (not even the online poker websites I frequent from time to time). Not even once I had any problems with that. I'm paying my taxes in Germany via my Dutch bank account. The German tax office accepts it (they even issue transfers to that account). So if the German tax office (which still hasn't completely switched to electronic tax filing) can deal with that case then everyone on this planet should be able to. Well, expect for Apple. I just can not use that credit card with anything iTunes related. I get always an "invalid country error". Now I'm in Germany, I'm from Germany, my iTunes account is a German iTunes account. But the fact that my credit card has been issued by a bank in a country that's just 20km from my current residence makes it invalid for Apple. A country that is part of the EU. It's like I wouldn't be able to use a credit card from California when I were living in Washington. So I have to buy those pre-paid iTunes cards to top up my account. And so I had to add three months of pre-paid money to my iTunes account just to start the 3 months free trial. Everything OK? Nope! I was too bold and I opted for a "family account". Now the most funny thing: Even though I am in the free trial period for the "family account" and I have enough money in my iTunes account to pay for the service I can't use the family sharing feature because for that I would need a valid credit card. iTunes just aborts with an "add a valid credit card" error when I try to configure family sharing. It's like Kafka has risen from his grave and started a music streaming service. /rant
- wineisfine 11y ago
  That's strange I'm Dutch, living in Germany and don't have these issues with my Dutch Visa card. You do know you can change your country/App Store country? I can even hop between country store and use different visas per store.
kraig911 11y ago
I dislike photos - like for my life I can't figure out how to delete a photo. Itunes is a huge mess. Creating a playlist with apple music is just difficult. I have to add it to my playlist then go to my my music and create a playlist there? weird. Podcasts I giveup. I understand this guys gripe. I have to say this though to me things aren't great anywhere. I've lost data on google drive, and messages on gmail. Adobe Cloud is so problematic to me I get extremely frustrated that i have to have 4 versions of illustrator installed to use the features and export to SVG like we all need. I think somewhere with everyone implementing AGILE the question of quality being important has been forgotten in the rush to push releases often.
guscost 11y ago
> People lose their minds when Google services go down because it happens once a year. When Apple services go down, people just shrug or write a blog post like this. Well hang on a minute, I thought people lose their minds when Google services go down because Google is a software company and their core products are online services. When Apple services go down, it isn't as noteworthy since Apple is a hardware (dare I say fashion?) company. But when Apple sells a cellphone that can get faraday-caged by your hand, that's when people freak out. Now is that any excuse for Apple services to be broken as often as they are? Not at all, it projects a shoddy brand image. And when it's a service that is required to make the hardware function, users won't care which part of the "experience" is breaking. Anyway, good writeup.
wineisfine 11y ago
It keeps on being strange that Steve, just one man, had so much influence on quality control. I find it mind boggling.
- mkempe 11y ago
  alternatively: his successor is lacking in passion, focus, and integrity.
deleted 11y ago
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ihnorton 11y ago
1000x this. I've turned to dtrace twice in the past several weeks to find fixes for serious issues on other people's computers. One was a segfault at startup in iTunes caused by a corrupted cookie cache. The other one was a corrupted plist that prevented adding new exchange accounts or calendars to mail (with no indicators at all -- the new account would just hang indefinitely).
nathan_long 11y ago
My first iPod had a scroll wheel. No matter what I was listening to, I could fast forward or reverse as much or little as I wanted. It was the first Apple-designed product I owned, and I learned why people loved Apple stuff. My current iPod (Nano, a few generations old) has a touch screen with controls that vary based on what it thinks I'm doing. If I'm listening to a known podcast, I can swipe once and tap once to back up 30 seconds. I can't easily go forward. If I'm listening to a long track that it doesn't recognize as a podcast, the "back 30 seconds" isn't there. I think the consistent, physical control was better than the inconsistent touchscreen control. But they don't sell it anymore.

253 points by danielandrews 11y ago

I dunno. I've never experienced any of the problems described in the post. Always kind of dangerous to extrapolate from n=1. It also feels somewhat myopic to claim that people don't like apps like Notes or Calendar because there's more featureful alternatives. The point of stock apps isn't to please the power user.

benologist 11y ago
Dismissing bug reports because "it works on my machine" is also a kind of dangerous extrapolation, especially with the near-certainty that any large piece of software has bugs.
- stdbrouw 11y ago
  Not dismissing anything, just pointing out that the author's standard of evidence is somewhat lacking.
  - aidos 11y ago
    You don't have to look far for the evidence. For any issue you can normally find several huge forum posts on the apple support forums (with no helpful responses from Apple).
    - gress 11y ago
      All software has bugs. Apple software has a giant audience and the Internet can magnify an issue that affects a small number of users to make it seem as though it's a giant problem. If a problem affects 5,000 users it's easy for it to appear as if it's a huge issue when it in fact is affecting a tiny % of the user base. Not that bugs should be ignored, but an active forum posting is not evidence that there is a major issue.
      - aidos 11y ago
        Could definitely be a factor. Then again, there are plenty of people who don't post on those forums (like myself). I recently got a new MacBook Pro after my previous 6yo machine was stolen. Would love to say that I was shocked at the bugs I've run into, but I was fairly well prewarned. Things like internet dropouts caused by the DNS issue. I was told it would be a problem, and it was. But people had been complaining about it for ages. Seems unlikely to be just a few users experiencing it. I know I'm just another single datapoint but, after hacking on macs most of my waking hours since 2004, I too feel the basic quality is really slipping. Cloud services are something else altogether. I've been saying for years that Apple can't be trusted to handle data and syncing. Now they're pushing deeper into it things are getting messy. My best friend and I frequently have this conversation as he jumps into their services but he's also lost faith. A message he recently sent me: "Apple syncing is so fucked man. After the first round of Photos craziness where I lost tons of albums (thankfully no photos), for some insane reason, I’ve just lost a ton more. Any albums from 2012, 2013 and 2004 are totally gone. Head in hands shit." And this from someone who until recently would try to fight their corner.
      - bsder 11y ago
        Dude, there are Bluetooth mice that are incompatible with current versions of OS X. Let that sink in. Apple screwed up their Bluetooth stack so badly that it is incompatible with a mouse. Something which has been in the Bluetooth standard forever. Something which is solely dependent upon their software because they use the same chip as everybody else. That is beyond a bug. That's contempt for the end user.
        gress 11y ago
        Almost all Bluetooth mice are compatible with current versions of OS X. Apple does support the human interface device standards. You have found a mouse that doesn't implement the Bluetooth spec properly. That is contempt for the end user. Let that sink in.
        bsder 11y ago
        > You have found a mouse that doesn't implement the Bluetooth spec properly. That is contempt for the end user. The mice I have work perfectly with all incarnations of Windows I have (XP, 7, and 8) and OS X version 10.6 (don't have access to 10.7 and 10.8 anymore). So, which is more likely, those mice all implemented the Bluetooth spec wrong yet still managed to work, or Apple screwed up their stack?
  - vacri 11y ago
    "anecdata!" is not a rebuttal to "hey, this is how I feel about X, from my experiences".
    - stdbrouw 11y ago
      But that's not what the author is saying! He's not saying "here's how I feel", he's saying "this is the state of Apple software".
jostmey 11y ago
My wife's Macbook has been a huge disappointment. The login is slow, the computer crashes all the time, and safari stopped working. And it's just over two years old. So N = 2.
- gress 11y ago
  If the computer crashes all the time and Safari has stopped working then it is faulty and you should schedule a Genius Bar appointment.
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
"I dunno. I've never experienced any of the problems described in the post." Ok, then what's your favorite list of bugs. You know you have one. Right?

hahainternet 11y ago

A very interesting article. I'm not part of the Apple ecosystem so I have no way to judge its veracity, but in my experience this is a feeling common to quite a lot of users regardless of product or manufacturer. Is this driven by competition? complacency? capriciousness? I've no idea.

paulojreis 11y ago
Loss of focus and feature creep. They've became an engineering company (as opposed to an "appliances" company, I guess). This, of course, IMO.
- hahainternet 11y ago
  > Loss of focus and feature creep My point is though that I've heard this sentiment from Google customers, Microsoft customers etc. In fact to me it seems that I can only think of a few examples of software that seems to consistently improve in people's opinions. Is there something fundamentally broken in how we develop and produce software as an industry? Is there a reporting bias? It's probably a combination of both with many other unseen factors IMO.
  - sosborn 11y ago
    >Is there something fundamentally broken in how we develop and produce software as an industry? I would argue that this is indeed the case. The need to continue upping that version number results in the inevitable bloat and cruft. Nobody is interested in putting out a maintenance release, and quite frankly, if a company released a major software update without new features we would collectively deride them for it. (Don't talk to me about Snow Leopard, even though they talked up the maintenance aspect of it they still promoted at on of new features.)
  - volaski 11y ago
    I think the difference is Google or Microsoft never promised "it just works". Apple on the other hand used to "just work", at least before Steve Jobs passed. Nowadays the contrast is too huge that people notice it more. As an analogy, people just shrug when McDonald's releases another unhealthy (but affordable) menu, but if a chef who used to get New York Times 5 star reviews starts cooking shitty food and screwing his customers and not care much because he still gets lots of customers based on his existing reputation, then people start hating.

omarforgotpwd 11y ago

I think Apple software is generally good but occasionally buggy, especially close to release. Apple's iOS-era policy of free updates every year has just subjected more people to these bugs more often.

gskye 11y ago

I've been watching apple's software quality decrease over the past few years with increasing disappointment . It still astounds me that their test suites haven't caught the multitude of issues i've seen before shipping. It makes me wonder if Apple actually uses their own products. Don't even get me started on the Remote app...

planetjones 11y ago

It's really frustrating for me just how many bugs Apple software has. Let's look at a simple one - the icons on iOS safari for frequently visited websites. They "randomly" assign the wrong favicon e.g. I click the Facebook icon and it loads Hacker News. This has been present since iOS 8. Yesterday I pulled down the notification screen and it occupies only 50% of my screen. Cue another reboot of the iPhone. My iMac. Upgrading to Yosemite was the worst mistake ever. Now I have to use a cheap mouse and keyboard, as Apple's Bluetooth versions no longer wake the sleeping iMac. I have tried every solution on the Internet to this and none fix it. The beachball is becoming ever more prominent on the iMac too. Very disappointing for a machine which isn't 3 years old. My Macbook Air. It's better, but the power button no longer does anything when I press it. Apple products have a huge premium and the quality of the software is not matching the price tag. I am not surprised to see the stock falling; usually when IBM buy your products en masse you know something is wrong :) I don't know what the culture at Apple is. But I don't think their software developers can be anything other than the "norm" - and I am extremely worried about their automated testing culture. Maybe someone can comment. EDIT: I just remembered my Apple Cr*p folder home to Podcasts, Tips, Apple Watch, Calendar, Health, Apple Store, Apple Maps, Videos, Reminders and Newstand. Podcasts actually cost me money when it started downloaded podcasts over 3G despite me saying wifi only. I think that bug got fixed, but I'll never trust it again. I also forgot about the white elephant that is the Apple Time capsule I purchased. It's slow over wifi from the iMac and was one of the causes of my beachball, but the main issue was it kept saying it couldn't back up because the disk was locked. For a company like Apple who should supposedly simplify backup, the product is a shambles. Maybe this is better now, but I won't be upgrading.

ino 11y ago
> My Macbook Air. It's better, but the power button no longer does anything when I press it. Press and hold. It's this way to prevent accidental logouts which were frequent in my case when it was just a press.
- rbritton 11y ago
  Thanks. That's something that would have been really helpful to see a note on. It changed the behavior of a button that's been consistent for as long as I can remember.

deleted 11y ago

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mijustin 11y ago

"Like every tech company nowadays, Apple wants to do it all." I'd say that Apple has always wanted to do it all. They've always built the OS + the hardware + the software. Arguably, it's that "end to end design" that's helped them achieve their success.

deleted 11y ago
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drb311 11y ago

"It just works" is a tricky promise to make good on. Microsoft never made this promise and nor does Google. As a Google fan I accept a certain amount of flakiness as part of the brand identity. It's always celebrated a quirky, rough feel. In some ways, Google is starting to get TOO slick. People expect Apple to be innovative and reliable; too push the boundaries without ever falling over them. It's hard to do either consistently, successfully, at scale. It might be impossible to do both.

x0x0 11y ago
I suggest the difference is I, and other people I know, keep finding apple bugs so common and frequent that it's essentially clear there is no testing at all. viz the discoveryd fiasco. Either nobody there could be bothered to use stuff on a network or an exec forced it to be released anyway. Or trouble connecting iphones to itunes, etc.
at-fates-hands 11y ago
>>>> People expect Apple to be innovative and reliable; This is because your investment in their hardware is at a premium price. People expect when they drop 2-3K for a PC that both of things are going to be a given. Obviously, in the last few years, this hasn't been the case.
cptskippy 11y ago
> As a Google fan I accept a certain amount of flakiness as part of the brand identity I agree with you however I feel like they've been trying to shrug that off and grow up and that's left me a little underwhelmed. I got two thirds of the way through that article and realized that the way he felt about Apple was how I felt about Google. They keep thrusting crap upon us that no one asked for, remove stuff we do like, or neglect things until people abandon them. Meanwhile Microsoft has been dramatically stepping up it's game but everyone still looks at them like the Catholic Priest that molested them as a child.
- wineisfine 11y ago
  Thats a great Microsoft analogy there! Spot on

davidw 11y ago

I got a Mac for my new job, and I gave it a few weeks, but ended up putting Parallels on it so I can use Ubuntu. I just don't like how Macs work, and don't like that I can't customize it (focus follows the mouse, dammit!) like I can Linux. There are a lot of things that 'just work' on Ubuntu (for me, at least), like git bash completion, that seem to require more fiddling on the Mac.

geophile 11y ago

Major Apple applications have become inscrutable and frustrating. - iTunes, Music and the iTunes store are a mess. I understood the old iTunes organization. Navigation within my music collection has become highly non-intuitive. It seems that there are multiple paradigms (long list of tracks, and another sectioned off by album), and it isn't always clear why one or the other is used. I keep forgetting how to get to the store. Once there, the integration with the stuff I've bought is unclear (especially for video content). I once got extremely confused watching a series, not realizing that one particular view of the episodes were ordered by POPULARITY, not in chronological order. And ratings! I get the 0-5 star rating system. Then they added the heart icon for -- uhh -- something. Why not just use the existing rating system? Why do I have to rate things again for a different purpose? - Podcasts have become very confusing. I want to be able to control what is physically present on my devices, to control data usage on my phone, and space usage on all devices. They've intentionally made that difficult. - Photos is a disaster. There are many different organization paradigms, and it is unclear why some of my recent photos appear in some of them but not others. What are the differences among events and photo stream? Why do some pictures show up in the by-date organization but not photo stream? What's in the cloud? When does it sync with my phone? Why is it easy to sync with my phone by cable but not IP? If current trends continue, my beautiful Mac hardware will be nothing but a boot loader for VMWare and Linux.

why-el 11y ago
iTunes is absolutely terrible. I did several updates for my girlfriend and friends, and none of them figured out iTunes. Most of them downgraded.
- geophile 11y ago
  Spotify is a possible replacement (even without their streaming and music finding services), but I find that application quite buggy.
  - afandian 11y ago
    Spotify's approach to customer engagement and accountability is a little better than Apple's in that they have a product support forum. But their contempt for the customer seems to be about the same WRT to removing features on a whim. They removed a deal-breaker feature a couple of years ago (filter a list for a song) and have only just managed to put it back, only half working, now. I don't know how bad iTunes has got (haven't used it in 5 years) but I can't recommend Spotify as a replacement. If anyone does have any suggestions, I'd be very glad to read them!

leonroy 11y ago

Excellent article. I too find myself looking at ways I can reduce my reliance on Apple these days. For me it's getting burnt with Aperture, discoveryd causing all my Airplay speakers to constantly act up, $1000 Thunderbolt displays flickering on my $6000 Mac Pro as well as parts of my iTunes library getting spoilt by the new Apple Music stuff. List goes on, but Daniel is right, I just don't really have much (if any) faith in Apple when it comes to my data. I think that this erosion of trust will take years to rebuild. The sad thing is that Apple in the mid 90s had a similar rep for flaky products and Tim Cook was widely credited for tightening ops to improve product manufacture, quality and reliability.

msluyter 11y ago

Yes, I've also noticed an increasing number of software bugs on my Macs. FWIW, I wanted to try out the Dell XPS "Developer Edition," which appears to be about as close as you can get to a Macbook level build quality in a linux box (without having to jump though the hoops of installing linux on a macbook itself), and you simply can't order it from Dell's website. A chat with a rep suggested that it's out of stock. So, I think Apple is creating market opportunity -- a high quality linux based laptop aimed at developers that, like the Mac, doesn't require constant fiddling or kernel rebuilds to get working.

lqdc13 11y ago
I would get ThinkPad W550s instead. Plus you can get 32gb RAM unlike most laptops.
gshubert17 11y ago
Any knowledge or experience of System 76 laptop computers as Linux machines?
- navait 11y ago
  I purchased a system 76 Gazelle laptop, and it's a pretty reliable . Wifi, audio and dual monitors worked out of the box, but it has trouble with 3 monitors(includes laptop screen) My main complaint is the battery life.(This is probably a linux issue) At best I get 2.5 hours, which needs serious improvements. However, so many things on linux lack polish, crash at random times, or have UI problems. Apple would have to screw up a lot more to get anywhere near the disaster of desktop linux,
  - zxcvcxz 11y ago
    >However, so many things on linux lack polish, crash at random times, or have UI problems. Apple would have to screw up a lot more to get anywhere near the disaster of desktop linux, This is just not true at all. Apple is way more buggy in all those areas for me. I use fedora with GNOME and haven't had one single problem. My grandparents even use it. If I bought them a mac I'd have to fix it every time I come over, with Linux I don't.

serve_yay 11y ago

Apple makes things that "do more" than their products of old, and we expect them to do more than devices past. The combination of features plus our expectation that all our devices be aware of what is happening on the others at all times is a recipe for a combinatorial explosion of unpredicted states, race conditions, you name it. I too miss the simplicity and "it just works" factor of past days. But it's a lot easier to pull that off with an iPod and a Mac, than iPhone + Mac + iPad + watch, etc. They're the biggest company in the world and nobody needs to make excuses for them - I'm not saying "well, it's to be expected and it's not their fault." But I always think, who would be able to do this better than Apple? And I think the answer to that question reveals the depth of the situation we're in. As much as Apple screws up, could you imagine using a watch + phone + PC + tablet from some other vendor, and it being better? That's what really sucks about now - Apple screws up and they're the best we can hope for.

ariwilson 11y ago
Yes, I use one of each of those from Google and they all work pretty well :).
- serve_yay 11y ago
  Mm hmm.
dragonwriter 11y ago
> As much as Apple screws up, could you imagine using a watch + phone + PC + tablet from some other vendor, and it being better? I use a phone, watch, tablet, TV dongle, and PCs from a combination of 5 different hardware and 3 different core software vendors (on all but the watch and TV dongle, not the same vendors for both on the same device), and I have a pretty good experience working across them for the things that need to work across them. Perhaps Apple's ingrained culture is less well adapted to dealing with diversity than those of vendors who are used to having to deal with it because they don't control all aspects of the experience.

swang 11y ago

1. I'm still on 10.9. Still have not moved over to Yosemite. Mavericks runs smooth for me. 2. It is 2015 and iTunes/iPhone syncing is still the absolute worst. I just want to add a couple of albums to my iPhone, why do I need to connect over a cable (wifi syncing almost never works for me) and why do I need to wait more than 5 minutes? I don't want to sync my entire phone again! (If you know how to not have iTunes do this, please tell me. It is the worst).

visarga 11y ago
I too am on 10.9 and it feels great. I used to use 10.10 and it was crashing when I did VNC. Now it's stable as a rock. It was very difficult to downgrade, because Apple cut almost all the ways. Fortunately, my laptop originally shipped with 10.9 and I was allowed a web download of the OS from the boot loader. On a tangent note, I am frustrated with the slowness of Chrome, too.

baseballmerpeak 11y ago

When it works, it is brilliant and seamless. On the other hand, there is not any redundancy, in the sense that if one piece of the equation (OS + the hardware + the software) is rubbish, it cannot be readily replaced by substitution (e.g. swapping Windows for Linux).

steverb 11y ago
I dunno, Windows 7 runs brilliantly on my MacBook.
- slantyyz 11y ago
  I have found that Windows tends to run faster than OSX itself does on the same Mac. Hell, my 2008 Macbook can run the latest version of Windows 10 in 64 bit, but can't run the latest version of OSX. Win 10 runs snappy, while Lion (the last supported OS) is now a crufty pig on it.

willcodeforfoo 11y ago

I've been increasingly feeling the same way, especially about OS X, but what's the alternative for a developer-friendly desktop operating system that looks and works beautifully (almost) out of the box?

flavor8 11y ago
Ubuntu.
iamd3vil 11y ago
Linux Mint is working for me pretty well for the past 1 year. Check it out.
- at-fates-hands 11y ago
  I would second Mint. I made the switch a while back and am in the process of dumping Windows altogether so I can do all my development with Linux.
yellowapple 11y ago
Slackware. Before everyone here laughs at me, let's start with some disclaimers: * While not as involved as with some other distros (like Arch or Gentoo), Slackware's install process is still a bit involved; namely, you have to manually setup partitions before starting the install program (the Slackware install environment provides `fdisk` and `parted` for this, and details are well-documented). * You have to make a single edit in `/etc/inittab` in order to get Slackware to boot into a graphical environment by default. Once you get past those hurdles, Slackware is pretty much what you're asking for: * Ships with multiple desktop environments / window managers, including KDE, Xfce, Window Maker, and Openbox (in order from most to least pretty/easy-to-use by default), among others. Even more are available on Slackbuilds.org (see below). * Most (if not all) Slackware software packages include development headers (unlike most GNU/Linux distributions which have separate `-dev` packages for development headers), making it very convenient if you need to develop against some library. * The underlying system is simple and easy to troubleshoot; no plethora of fragile moving parts like you see in OS X or Ubuntu. * Ships with the full GCC suite. * Fast. * Things "just work". * Compatible with a lot of different language runtimes/compilers/etc. (for me, I've seen Erlang/Elixir, Ruby (w/ RVM), Perl, Rust, Julia, and assorted other LLVM-oriented languages work out-of-the-box without needing to deviate from `./configure && make && sudo make install`; not that you have to even `./configure && make && sudo make install`, though (see below)). * Plethora of third-party software packages available on Slackbuilds.org (installation of which is automatable if you download/install `sbopkg`). It's not for everyone, of course, but it's worked well for me over the last several years.

suresk 11y ago

The thing about saying "it just works" and attempting to hide everything from the user is that it is really, really frustrating when it doesn't "just work". The amount of hardware and software bugs I've encountered in Apple products has been steadily increasing, to the point where I'm really only happy with my iPhone (and even that has some problems) - - Connecting a wired keyboard to a Thunderbolt display that is connected to my MBP rarely worked after disconnecting/reconnecting my MBP. I'd have to change which USB port the keyboard connected to - until discovering that this was a common problem that connecting a USB extender fixes. It just works? - We use Apple TVs in our conference rooms to connect our laptops to and project via a projector/tv. The Apple TVs routinely reboot, fail to connect, and drop connections. I've had my laptop lock up for several minutes trying to connect to one. - iMessage routinely gets into a state where it shows ghost notifications that I have to clear by deleting conversations one-by-one until I find out which one is causing it. - iMessage routinely reorders previous messages. - Safari randomly uses the wrong favicon for frequently visited websites. And so many more. It is really disappointing that I'm not really that surprised when something doesn't work or feels clunky. At this point, I trust my Windows machine more than I do my Mac.

twsted 11y ago

My thesis: part of this feeling comes from the fact that more eyes are on the OS and the apps, but many issues existed before. - I have some complaints about OS X: wifi, bluetooth, etc. - I like iTunes as it is today (not considering the synchronization process) - I struggle with the weakened "iWorks" applications

bilbo0s 11y ago

"...In my opinion, Yosemite is the worst non-beta Mac OS release I’ve ever used – and I’ve used everything other than the public betas of 10.0 ..." ??? Personally I find Yosemite AND Windows 10 to be wanting in most every respect. But I think there is a bit of a tendency to view the past through rose colored glasses. There is no way that Yosemite is worse than 10.0 or 10.1. I know I'm going to date myself a bit here... but 10.1 on that Titanium powerbook, that sagged like rubber if you held it from one end by the way, had to be the single worst computing experience of my life. That INCLUDES waiting for time on the mainframe, punchcards in hand, in the basement of the computer science building at the University of Wisconsin. "... While I didn’t run into any data loss issues or anything particularly catastrophic..." That right there should tell you it's better than early OSX. Thank who- or whatever you deem divine for Perforce... because I once lost an entire Solaris build of the Photoshop engine to early OSX. And it waited until I had fixed quite a few bugs to make the engine work on BSD before it crapped on me too. AWESOME times!!! No actually it SUCKED!!! Maybe I'm just being harsh on 10.0 and 10.1, or maybe harsh on Titanium powerbooks??? I don't know. Maybe other people were not as annoyed as I was with the crashes and slowness. But it was BAD!!! HORRIBLE actually. I think Vista was a sack of crap... but even Vista gave a better experience than the early OSX versions. Though Vista and early OSX probably are neck and neck for worst desktop OS experiences to date. I don't know... I could be wrong. I mean... I also think Windows XP has probably delivered mankind the BEST desktop OS experience to date. So what do I know ??? Anyway... Yosemite is bad... but for those too young to remember... BELIEVE me when I say... early OSX was FAR, far worse.

sosborn 11y ago
> early OSX was FAR, far worse. Not all of them though.

bane 11y ago

I dunno, I just don't use Apple produced software on my Mac for the most part and the experience is mostly fine. I use Windows at home and Mac for work, so I probably spend a bit more time on my work Mac. I loath finder with a passion that would reduce stars to quarks, but that's just because its poorly designed, not particularly buggy. And outside of the OS, that's pretty much all the Apple software I tend to use on a day-to-day basis. I learned a long time ago to just stop trying to make their software work, and I don't know why people keep returning to it after years of dealing with increasingly bad software. Just avoid it. My day pretty much consists of Chrome, iterm2, MS-Office and a handful of other apps, and things work mostly fine. I could probably have an absolutely equal day on a Windows laptop since most of what I use is cross-platform or has an equivalent. My only real gripe is that I wish the screen animation and updating was more "snappy" like in windows. It always feels like it's just making the little graphics hamsters work a little extra hard to do things like scrolling quickly. I think the larger point here is that the apps apple makes all have better replacements in their segment. I can kind of see that for a terminal application or whatever that's tossed in with the OS, but for other kinds of applications, ones you pay good money for, Apple really should be more neck-and-neck with the competition. There's also really little excuse these days for the huge ecosystem of addons and patches that unfuck missing and broken core OS features. Bettertouchtool, for example, shouldn't actually need to exist. But there's something like half a dozen applications kind of like it, and zero support for what it does built in OS X. People don't really complain about it too much because once you install and set these little widgets up, you forget about them. But the user should never have to install this stuff in the first place. This seems to me like a combination of a lack of focus, lack of dedicated teams, lack of product ownership and vision, and lack of attention to detail in the software development practice at Apple vs. the software design teams.

waz0wski 11y ago
> My only real gripe is that I wish the screen animation and updating was more "snappy" like in windows. It always feels like it's just making the little graphics hamsters work a little extra hard to do things like scrolling quickly. on 10.8/9/10 You can change the mission-control animations speed with this tweak: defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0.1 It's still kind of crap, doesn't perform well on 3+ displays, but faster. The 10.11 beta noticeably improves animation speed / "feel" of animations around the whole OS, even on 3+ display systems with many windows open.

post_break 11y ago

I got into Apple in 2006, loved the ride up to Snow Leopard. Then things got weird. UI choices that made little sense. Hardware bugs that were impossible to diagnose or fix. Like my parents Mac Mini that would show snow on the display after it went to sleep. Try troubleshooting that remotely. My work rMBP has some similar issues where my monitor just goes green. And then it also has a SystemUI freeze for upwards of 30 seconds that is completely impossible to fix. DiscoveryD, oh god why. Apple just doesn't seem as focused on a main goal of shipping stable and perfect solutions. The "me too!" attitude shows it. Oh and lets not forget when they ship iWork with missing features and then slowly add them back over time...

baldfat 11y ago
I am a HUGE Apple Hater so take this as it be. I have always had issues with stability with Apple's OS. Everyone else always said I was crazy but I have dozens of people see me repeat the crash over and over again doing simple one or two step processes. Start with Apple OS 7 up to just yesterday when Adobe Photoshop crashed every time I switch the color palate to 2 color.
- sosborn 11y ago
  > Adobe Photoshop crashed every time I switch the color palate to 2 color. You can probably blame Adobe for that. In their infinite wisdom they implemented their own window management system for their products on OS X.
  - baldfat 11y ago
    Well you can blame 95% of Windows problems the same way. Don't blame Microsoft vendor A implemented it their own way ...
pavedwalden 11y ago
This may or may not be what you mean by "goes green" but I've noticed that when DVI cables go bad it often results in green noise all over the screen. My office had a mix of both HDMI and DVI adapters for their macbooks, and I only ever saw it with DVI, but either way it might be worth swapping cables and seeing if the problem isn't with your macbook.

LordHumungous 11y ago

Boot times for my Macbook Pro have gotten really long since a recent upgrade to Mavericks. Went from ~3 seconds to ~30 seconds.

angerZen 11y ago
El Capitan does a lot to rectify that (at least in the beta so far).

mkozlows 11y ago

It's certainly the case that OSX, at least, has gotten flaky as heck, but at the same time: What's the competition? While Apple was releasing Yosemite, Microsoft was going down the Windows 8 rabbit-hole, releasing the worst version of Windows since ME. And while desktop Linux has been getting better over time, I don't think anyone would say that it "Just Works" yet. The only desktop/laptop OS that actually does "Just Work" is ChromeOS; and while that's a wonderful experience for its use cases, there are still plenty of situations that it's not great for.

baldfat 11y ago
Windows 8 has been solid (Except people don't like the GUI) Windows 10 gives you the start button back (I don't like start buttons) Linux - There really are good use cases for Linux. Your's might fit this one. Works for me and I dual boot for the odd time I need another OS (About twice a quarter) Chromebook - Limited to "normal" users workflow cases.
- aikah 11y ago
  The whole Metro UI stunt was a mistake, It should never have happened. I'm really curious about who's to blame for that stuff, I don't think it's Sinofsky, because it's just so stupid. But at the same time there is very little difference between 7 and 8 so why would anyone want to buy yet another license ? That's the problem right here with Windows. Worse it looks like they removed some features from 7 to 10. Aside from gamers who always need yet another version of directx frankly it becomes harder and harder to justify the cost of Windows for each new computer bought.
  - baldfat 11y ago
    I actually like it. I just hit Windows key and type. WOWZ
  - tim333 11y ago
    Yeah, I'm also curious how 8 happened. I think it may have been some institutional committee type effect because it seems to dumb for a smart individual to do. It didn't really effect me because I just skipped 8 but three of my friends / family who don't follow tech bought a new computer unaware of what Microsoft had done and were shocked / horrified to find things didn't work as before. My cousin figured it took him about 100 hours to get some stuff working again and the other two basically stopped using their computers. It was particually painful with my dad whos 80ish and slowing down a bit but who could use 7 but who was unable to work 8. I have lasting resentment to Microsoft over that - the amount of pain and inconvenience they caused their regular users. And for what? I think the brilliant reasoning was if they force people to use a phone interface on their computers they'll be used to that interface and buy windows phones and tablets. That worked out well for them with the recent $7.6 bn write off on Nokia and presumably lots of well meaning employees losing their jobs. At least the new management seem to have returned to trying to treat their customers well rather than inflicting unpopular stuff in a misguided attempt to get more money.

kaffeinecoma 11y ago

Do you rely on Time Machine? Drop to the shell right now and try "tmutil compare -n" to see which files are not making it onto your backups. For me, Time Machine randomly ignores certain files, for no discernible reason. Files that have sat on my disk literally for years will never get backed up. It's happened to me on two different Macs, and I've lost data because of it.

jre 11y ago
I ran into the same issue. After a restore from my time machine backup, I discovered that some files where missing (with no apparent pattern). Fortunately, I had a non time machine backup, but pheew that was a close one...
- kaffeinecoma 11y ago
  I discovered it when visiting an old project after a whole OS wipe-and-restore from TM. A week later I found that 'git' wouldn't recognize a project dir due to some missing pieces. I had a 2nd TM drive, and was able to manually restore files. For my other machine, no such luck. I had a 2nd backup offsite (Backblaze) but it was months before I noticed the damage, and so the old files were no longer available via the offsite. I think the worst part is not knowing what you've lost. I have thousands of music and photos on that machine, and every once in a while I come across something that's gone.
maxwelljoslyn 11y ago
"-n" doesn't seem to be a valid flag for "tmutil compare". (OS X 10.8). What flag or comparison property did you mean? I'm running the unflagged command now. Thanks for the heads up. I appreciate it. If this comes up bad I'll need a second backup solution. Edit: Thanks again, parent: Time Machine was indeed missing some of my music!

xenadu02 11y ago

It seems clear Apple feels the same way given that El Capitan and iOS 9 are light on fancy new features. My hope is that both represent a "Snow Leopard" style polish release. I know that dumping discoveryd has solved my WiFi/AirPlay/AirDrop issues so they seem to be listening.

karmakaze 11y ago

There's an easy way to explain all these artifacts: Apple no longer does things "as if they themselves are the user", or if they do then they've significantly lowered their standards.

Joeri 11y ago

Consistently delivering high quality software features is impossible. Even great teams mess up every once in a while. The way apple used to get around that was to throw things away, or to send them back to the drawing board. There was someone at the top who detected when things weren't ready, and prevented them from getting released or dared teams to do better, even at great cost. In the jobs era there were many things which were rumored to ship and cut at the last moment. Apple has stopped not shipping things, and it's what will turn them into just another software company.

mkempe 11y ago
They've forgotten how to say "No."

chejazi 11y ago

This trend has been very apparent to me, starting a couple years after Steve Jobs passed. I waited until July 2015 to upgrade from Mavericks to Yosemite because of all the bugs I kept hearing about.

arturhoo 11y ago

The discoveryd fiasco was the biggest let down for me. Every single Macbook in the office suffered connectivity issues and it took them too long to go back to the old, perfectly fine state. It's almost 20 years of internet ferociously consuming and producing digital music and pictures and no one has been able to improve upon what Winamp and Foobar2000 or a minimally organized photo folder delivered - Picasa worked quite well, but I guess, as google reader, being stable and functional is not enough. How can a 600B dollar company sustain a buggy software like iTunes for so many years? Dreadful experiences include podcasts, album art, and even simple music organization! Apple Music... what makes you, the biggest digital music store in the world, release a cloud based product that thinks that a live version of a song is the same one as the album version? It seems Apple is trying to make its user base - that helped it become the most world's most valuable company - user their version of every digital service/product possible but at the cost of lacking in the areas that made it thrive in the first place. Heck, even my last MBP had hardware issue (staingate)...

volaski 11y ago

I switched to mac when when MS lost its mind and came up with Vista--it was unusable, so much so that switching cost to mac was lower than trying to get Windows to work. Nowadays the only reason I stay with Mac is because I make iOS apps and realize it will be annoying if I abandon Mac. Apple is no more in a "just works" business. It's in a lock-in business. I used to be delighted to download their new OS's, and I'm sure everyone used to too, but nowadays I NEVER download their new versions and try not to upgrade as much as possible, I've been burned too many times and lost so many hours of productivity because the upgrade fucked me up

kazinator 11y ago
> Apple is no more in a "just works" business. It's in a lock-in business. No such change has happened between 2007 (MS Vista time frame) and now. People familiar with Apple since 1980-something know very well that it's always been about both of the above: just works for the end user, and a lock-in business. If anything, it's less locked in now than it used to be, because of the use of Intel processors (that was a big shocker in the Mac world). You can get a bootleg OS/X image to run under VirtualBox. I have such an image running over top of Windows 7; I use it to compile and test OS/X binaries of a FOSS program that I developed. In the 1980's I had a clone of an Apple II+ computer. Apple did their best in their operating system software to detect clones and try not to run on them. Clones were the illegal work of the devil, according to Apple. By contrast, the IBM PC's spawned a thriving clone market.
- yellowapple 11y ago
  Whether lock-in has bettered or worsened depends on perspective. While OS X can be shoehorned to run on Hackintoshes and VMs now, I can't remember any time when it was virtually impossible to install a custom operating system on Apple hardware until the iPhone came out (and, eventually, when the iPhone 3GS closed up the bugs that allowed the bootloader's security checks to be cirvumvented; said bugs were the only way to install a custom OS - like Android - on an iPhone). As far as I know, the software on Apple's desktops and laptops has always been unrestricted (as I know firsthand; literally all my PowerPC Mac hardware runs OpenBSD nowadays).

Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago

I don't understand why the hacker scene these days is full of proud OSX users. What happened to the proud Linux hackers we've always had? They told me to use OSX at the job I recently started, and I only lasted a week before I told them I wanted to install Linux.

geniium 11y ago
maybe a week isn't enough...
- Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
  It was more than enough.
enraged_camel 11y ago
Because OSX provides a reasonable middle ground between usability and control. You can use it as a regular user when you want to do things like listen to music, watch movies and browse the Internet, and you can also use it as a "hacker" by leveraging its "Unixness". It also integrates extremely well with other parts of the Apple ecosystem, unlike Linux.
jsolson 11y ago
Part of the 'pride' behind being a Linux hacker came from heavily customizing, breaking, fixing, and generally maintaining your dev kit. I have a friend who's taken on a motorcycle rebuild project and I can see a lot of analogs there. For me, personally, I realized that having a system which I can take from zero to 'dev ready' in less than an afternoon (which I did recently with a freshly shipped MacBook) is the main 'feature' I want from my dev software stack. I don't love all of OS X's defaults, but I customize very few things. The bigger issue for me, though, is hardware. I know this varies dramatically from developer to developer, but weight, size, battery life, and display quality (in roughly that order) are my primary concerns with laptop hardware. I recently switched my work laptop from a Chromebook Pixel (first gen) to an 11" MacBook Air and I've been thrilled with the change. That said, the leap in display quality and general machine 'feel' from the Air to the MacBook I use for personal developer is almost as big, for me, as the leap from the Pixel to the Air. Apple builds hardware that feels 'right' to me in a way that other manufacturers that I've encountered don't. So, I can't speak for others, but there's why I'm a proud OS X user instead of a proud Linux user.

JimmaDaRustla 11y ago

As an Android, linux, and Windows user...I've been having the most outrageous time getting anything to work as expected with my girlfriend's iPhones. Issues, upon issues, upon issues of how services or software is expected to work...yet never having desired results. A few days ago, I held her iPhone 6 for the first time since she got it a month or two ago. I felt like I was holding the greatest piece of mobile technology in existence, except I knew it ran iOS and only iOS.

afterburner 11y ago

It never really "just worked". People have been complaining about, for example, iTunes, ever since it came out. Apple stuff always had a ton of annoyances. Perhaps the experience was more restricted before, or Jobs' pitch more convincing.

mbrock 11y ago

Why don't Apple just make a laptop that runs iOS? Call it... iBook!

kybernetyk 11y ago

I'm frustrated with Apple when it comes to services. Don't misunderstand me: I love their hardware. I love OS X. It's the best computing experience since my C64 days. But when it comes to services I tend to avoid them as much as I can. Latest example: Apple music. I was a little annoyed by Spotify's continuously disappearing music tracks so I was eager to try out iTunes Music. But the problems started when I tried to get into the trial: You need a valid* credit card. Now valid is a pretty interesting definition because I'm from Germany, currently living in Germany but my banking is done via a Dutch bank (back from when I lived there). So my credit card is dutch. And I live in Germany. But it's the EU so it shouldn't be a problem, right? Right. And no one has ever raised an eyebrow when I used a credit card that has been issued by a Dutch bank with my German address (not even the online poker websites I frequent from time to time). Not even once I had any problems with that. I'm paying my taxes in Germany via my Dutch bank account. The German tax office accepts it (they even issue transfers to that account). So if the German tax office (which still hasn't completely switched to electronic tax filing) can deal with that case then everyone on this planet should be able to. Well, expect for Apple. I just can not use that credit card with anything iTunes related. I get always an "invalid country error". Now I'm in Germany, I'm from Germany, my iTunes account is a German iTunes account. But the fact that my credit card has been issued by a bank in a country that's just 20km from my current residence makes it invalid for Apple. A country that is part of the EU. It's like I wouldn't be able to use a credit card from California when I were living in Washington. So I have to buy those pre-paid iTunes cards to top up my account. And so I had to add three months of pre-paid money to my iTunes account just to start the 3 months free trial. Everything OK? Nope! I was too bold and I opted for a "family account". Now the most funny thing: Even though I am in the free trial period for the "family account" and I have enough money in my iTunes account to pay for the service I can't use the family sharing feature because for that I would need a valid credit card. iTunes just aborts with an "add a valid credit card" error when I try to configure family sharing. It's like Kafka has risen from his grave and started a music streaming service. /rant

wineisfine 11y ago
That's strange I'm Dutch, living in Germany and don't have these issues with my Dutch Visa card. You do know you can change your country/App Store country? I can even hop between country store and use different visas per store.

kraig911 11y ago

I dislike photos - like for my life I can't figure out how to delete a photo. Itunes is a huge mess. Creating a playlist with apple music is just difficult. I have to add it to my playlist then go to my my music and create a playlist there? weird. Podcasts I giveup. I understand this guys gripe. I have to say this though to me things aren't great anywhere. I've lost data on google drive, and messages on gmail. Adobe Cloud is so problematic to me I get extremely frustrated that i have to have 4 versions of illustrator installed to use the features and export to SVG like we all need. I think somewhere with everyone implementing AGILE the question of quality being important has been forgotten in the rush to push releases often.

guscost 11y ago

> People lose their minds when Google services go down because it happens once a year. When Apple services go down, people just shrug or write a blog post like this. Well hang on a minute, I thought people lose their minds when Google services go down because Google is a software company and their core products are online services. When Apple services go down, it isn't as noteworthy since Apple is a hardware (dare I say fashion?) company. But when Apple sells a cellphone that can get faraday-caged by your hand, that's when people freak out. Now is that any excuse for Apple services to be broken as often as they are? Not at all, it projects a shoddy brand image. And when it's a service that is required to make the hardware function, users won't care which part of the "experience" is breaking. Anyway, good writeup.

wineisfine 11y ago

It keeps on being strange that Steve, just one man, had so much influence on quality control. I find it mind boggling.

mkempe 11y ago
alternatively: his successor is lacking in passion, focus, and integrity.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

ihnorton 11y ago

1000x this. I've turned to dtrace twice in the past several weeks to find fixes for serious issues on other people's computers. One was a segfault at startup in iTunes caused by a corrupted cookie cache. The other one was a corrupted plist that prevented adding new exchange accounts or calendars to mail (with no indicators at all -- the new account would just hang indefinitely).

nathan_long 11y ago

My first iPod had a scroll wheel. No matter what I was listening to, I could fast forward or reverse as much or little as I wanted. It was the first Apple-designed product I owned, and I learned why people loved Apple stuff. My current iPod (Nano, a few generations old) has a touch screen with controls that vary based on what it thinks I'm doing. If I'm listening to a known podcast, I can swipe once and tap once to back up 30 seconds. I can't easily go forward. If I'm listening to a long track that it doesn't recognize as a podcast, the "back 30 seconds" isn't there. I think the consistent, physical control was better than the inconsistent touchscreen control. But they don't sell it anymore.