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Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

• skorecky 11y ago
  I think there is a decline in the quality of Apple's software. However I think there is a correlation between the amount of users and complaints / bugs found. Now that Apple has a large and growing user base the seeming quality is also degrading. However I could be wrong, just my opinion. Personally I haven't had as many issues as described in the article e.g. Preview has always worked fine for me. However the biggest issue I do have is anything network related. Getting new messages in Mail is terribly slow, iTunes constantly gives me an error then loads the album or whatever just fine afterwards.
  • treve 11y ago
    Try running an up-to-date OS X on a machine that came with a magnetic disk. It's become practically unusable.
    • skorecky 11y ago
      I am
    • pearle 11y ago
      This is my experience. I have a late 2013 iMac with a spinner running El Capitan and it's one of the absolute worst OS experiences I've ever had and I've been using computers since the 80s.
    • wtallis 11y ago
      Until six months ago I did most of my day-to-day web browsing on a 2007 MBP with a 7200 RPM 160GB drive. I had to upgrade because the dying GPU was destabilizing the system, but with 4GB of RAM and competent ad-blocking, it was fine for the light use it was getting, and that did include Spotlight searches.
    • X-Istence 11y ago
      I'm running on a 2012 Mac Mini Core i7 with 16GB of ram with a spinning rust hard drive. El Capitan has sped up the OS for me compared to the previous OS X release. Yosemite was so bad that I found myself avoiding using my Mac Mini instead using my rMBP with an SSD because the Mac Mini just felt so incredibly slow. With El Capitan they feel similar to me. Certain disk operations of course are slower, but overall the usability has increased under El Capitan versus Yosemite. Based upon informal replies on Twitter when I posted about my upgrade experience, I wasn't the only one that noticed a distinct speedup compared to Yosemite on older hardware.
    • poopsintub 11y ago
      Mid-2012 MBP with 2.5 Ghz i5, 4GB ram here. I thought Mavericks sped it up, but Yosemite is unnoticeable. I couldn't tell you if it is faster or slower than when I bought it, to be honest. All the problems people mention in the thread, I'm somewhat surprised by. I guess I'm lucky enough to not have wifi issues, rely on iTunes, or Apple Music.
  • speeder 11y ago
    I am trying hard to not update. I am using a old mac mini, and I can't afford a new one... every time I update xcode, it get slower and more unstable, specially because the memory consumption jumps up, it is now in a point where it uses more memory than the mac mini has in first place (meaning it is constantly trashing with swap... crashes are common too, project corruption is also getting increasingly common). I lucked out that my current client had a old non-updated iPod to allow me to use (you can't use new version iOS with old Xcode).
    • skorecky 11y ago
      Apple does very aggressively update software to work best with the latest hardware. Sadly this does cause some negative effects for older generation users but without taking advantage of the newer stuff those users get screwed as well.
  • simmons 11y ago
    > e.g. Preview has always worked fine for me. That's the first thing that went through my mind when I read the complaint about Preview crashing. Then I got to thinking about how Preview can eat up a lot of memory in certain situations (maybe large complex documents rendered to retina framebuffers), so maybe it's a memory issue. Journalists may not be as likely as people like me to insist on ridiculous amounts of RAM.
    • sawwit 11y ago
      There is a huge memory leak in Preview since El Capitan and the display of PDFs sometimes fails when you zoom in. I have no idea how many users are affected by this, but it seems strange that Apple hasn't fixed it yet. Perhaps it is just a tricky bug.
  • venomsnake 11y ago
    Try it with modernist cuisine's official pdf-s. That is the test i use when I really want to make a pdf reader suffer.
• mmastrac 11y ago
  It's not just software. While I'm still a fan of Macbooks, I'm getting close to abandoning ship thanks to the increasingly un-repairability of these things. I have a Macbook from ~2008 that's still functional as a media PC thanks to memory/SSD upgrades and battery replacements over the years. My current Macbook Pro has memory soldered on to the motherboard and a battery glued to the case. The SSD is technically replaceable, but the specs that this laptop shipped with are going to be the specs that it dies with. When the battery goes, I'll have to either risk destroying the machine or pay way too much to Apple to do the job for me. At that point I'll probably just switch to a brand with a more reasonable user-servicing model, assuming those still exist.
  • yuhong 11y ago
    The EPEAT fiasco is my favorite here.
  • givinguflac 11y ago
    While I agree with you, when your current Mac is older and relegated to media PC duty, are you going to need more than the 8 or 16GB of RAM it shipped with? As for batteries, it's almost the exact same price to buy a battery a replace it yourself as it is to have Apple do it, and you don't have to deal with proper recycling (hopefully you would.) I'm hoping we see a reverse trend but who knows.
    • gburt 11y ago
      If and only if you live near an Apple store. Otherwise you might be without your machine for a week or two during that period: that is a serious cost for many people in our profession.
      • givinguflac 11y ago
        That's certainly a valid concern; I have never been in that situation so yeah that could be trouble. Aren't there typically local repair centers that do authorized repairs? If not that's a huge oversight even if they only allowed battery swaps. That said, I have a 2006 MBP that is ancient and still works when wired to power even though I can replace the battery it works fine as an email/web browsing headless with a monitor.
• Spooky23 11y ago
  The Apple Music thing is my pet peeve. I bought a $2500 iMac. I carry a nearly $1000 phone. I don't want Apple Music. Leave me alone. I get periodic full screen ads when I try to listen to music. Is that too much to ask?
  • ChrisLTD 11y ago
    Agreed. I've seen these ads twice in the music player on my iPhone in the last couple of weeks.
  • marklawrutgers 11y ago
    They're not done squeezing money out of you yet.
  • kough 11y ago
    Oh, fully agreed. Have you gotten one of those ads when you don't have good network connectivity? Fails to load, fails to respond even if you go into airplane mode -- you have to wait until it can talk to Apple servers again before being able to use the app. Just happened to me yesterday. I just bought my first iPhone (switching from an Android, the droid maxx - great battery life) largely because I missed being able to easily sync music with my phone. What do I get? Broken music player. Two of the four tabs at the bottom of the Music app are Apple Music-related (radio, "connect"). The UI for switching between displays of my library - artist, album, song - has degraded terribly. And I had to painstakingly delete all of the "cloud" versions of things I'd bought long ago from iTunes. Figured out how to only show music local to my device and now there's an annoying bar across the top of the app at all times. I mean, fuck, how do you screw up the best mobile music player interface that hard? Just to encourage adoption of a shitty streaming service, with no way to opt out? Do people not care about syncing music to their phone and listening to it offline anymore?
    • alva 11y ago
      "Have you gotten one of those ads when you don't have good network connectivity? Fails to load, fails to respond even if you go into airplane mode" Had this happen twice today on my long commute. After 15 minutes, gave up trying to make my very expensive phone play music. This on top of the usual iTunes complaints is pushing me to abandon Apple until things improve.
• 27182818284 11y ago
  I've been using OS X since just Leopard, but I've noticed a decline as well. I'm not excited for new releases anymore. For example, I haven't moved to El Capitan. By contrast, I couldn't wait for Snow Leopard--I was really excited to use it.
  • marssaxman 11y ago
    Snow Leopard was the peak, in my experience; like you, I felt like each new version of OS X through 10.6.8 came as an improvement. Since then, I greet each new release with a sigh - "okay, let's find out what previously straightforward process they've decided to complicate with a bunch of fancy animations this time".
    • AlexandrB 11y ago
      I think people mythologize Snow Leopard. Personally I had multiple very annoying issues[1] in SL that were never resolved until I upgraded to Lion. While I wont say that OS X release after SL have been bug free or had fewer bugs than SL it has always been a trade off - some things got better and others got worse. The only constant is iTunes, it seems to get progressively worse with every release :( [1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2256080?start=0&tstart=0 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2256080?start=0&tstart=...
      • marssaxman 11y ago
        It's not that Snow Leopard had fewer bugs than its successors, but that it was the last update which clearly had fewer bugs than its predecessors. Since then, each new version has changed things around without seeming to make life better overall. What's more, as the iOS tail has come to wag the Mac OS dog, Apple's concept of an "improvement" has increasingly diverged from mine. Most of the things they've added since Snow Leopard have ranged from useless to annoying as far as I'm concerned. I don't want an app store, I don't understand workspaces, the new fullscreen mode makes my second monitor worthless. Every new version seems to have new hotkeys and swipe gestures that do strange and incomprehensible things when I trigger them by accident, which I would disable if I had any idea what they were called or where to look for their settings. I don't think this is just an age thing, either, or a romanticism about the past; my family got our first Macintosh in 1985, and I have used every single version of Mac OS since System 0.9. There have definitely been better and worse eras. I have nostalgic feelings about System 5, and to a lesser extent about Mac OS 8. I don't so much feel nostalgic about 10.6.8 as I have simply felt annoyed by each update since.
• kozukumi 11y ago
  iTunes has been awful for years. The only reason it hasn't got worse is because devices are more powerful. I do think they are producing more and more buggy-on-release software with a video game mindset of "patch it post launch". Sadly it is the way software appears to be today. I have no problem with fixing problems post-launch (obviously!) but shipping a product just to meat a deadline (looking at Microsoft with Windows 10 here as well!!) is a pain in the ass for users. There is a big difference between shipping an MVP (a HN favourite!) and a buggy piece of shit product. Will it harm Apple (or Microsoft, or ...) in the long run? Probably not. Sadly users seem to be used to this kind of thing now from all the main players so what alternative do they have? On a positive I have found Android L to be a solid release which is probably the only solid major point release I have used from any major software company in many years.
  • aczerepinski 11y ago
    When did iTunes remove drag and drop adding songs to your phone? That's probably the specific date that I'd pin the decline to. When they said "let's take something simple and make it more complicated."
  • __jal 11y ago
    As the joke goes, iTunes would be a great operating system, if only it had a decent MP3 player.
• ghrifter 11y ago
  Two apps I use the most on my iPhone are Podcasts and Music. On my PC (windows) I use iTunes often. Both the iPhone apps and the modern version of iTunes are an utter, over-designed mess. It felt like the core programming functionality was there, until some UX designer got a hold of the front end of those apps and decided to fubar it beyond recognition. There is _Literally_ no way to just look at all music on your iPhone. You have to have it in playlists or add the songs you want to a playlist, or just shuffle all songs. *Edit: No way to look at all iPhone songs while not using iTunes with your iPhone plugged into your PC.
  • irq 11y ago
    This just isn't true. You can easily browse your songs on an iPhone in the Music app by album, artist, song, genre, etc. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, or maybe you're not familiar with the UI?
    • ghrifter 11y ago
      I have iOS 9.2 and updated Music to the latest version. There is no "view all songs". But perhaps you found some way? Like I just want to see all songs, not playlists, not genres, everything. I'd love to find out :)
      • brandonmenc 11y ago
        Go to "my music" and where it says "Artists" (it's pink) with the downward carrot, press it - you'll get a list where "songs" is an item. The reason you couldn't figure it out is because Apple has completely abandoned usability in favor of a comically flat UI aesthetic.
        • ghrifter 11y ago
          Wow. Many thanks! Such a dumb UI decision.
          • brandonmenc 11y ago
• martinald 11y ago
  I use both Windows 10 and OS X on a rMBP all day at work. I definitely think Windows 10 is way more stable and polished. I constantly have problems with OS X WiFi connecting/dropping out, this has only been a recent thing since 10.11 (before OS X wifi support was incredible). I also have problems with Spotlight screwing up. I use spotlight for launching apps, and it often just loses all the apps which I use all day every day. Instead of finding 'Skype' for example, it'll return a list of all the times I've mentioned Skype in emails instead. Again, this broke in 10.11. I never really use the new features in OS X, which is fine, but 10.11 especially has so many regressions in it for me it is pretty annoying. It also absolutely blasted my unix config in a really hard to fix way, which hasn't ever happened on a previous OS X update.
  • sehr 11y ago
    Ugh, I have to make spotlight reindex my entire hard drive every few months too
  • makecheck 11y ago
    Definitely should download Alfred (on Mac App Store) as a replacement for Spotlight. I use it basically for launching and quick math, etc. but it can do almost anything. It doesn't have any of the slowdowns that Spotlight does, and it still has a small interface by default that can move anywhere on the screen.
  • captaindiego 11y ago
    Spotlight has been straight broken for me since 2008, especially when using large external drives (stuck "scanning" for >5 hours every time the drive is power cycles, using a whole core). I just gave up and now forceably disable spotlight.
    • martinald 11y ago
      You raise a good point, but like many of these things it's not totally broken, just temporarily. Just when you're about to try and look for a fix/alternative, it starts working again. So you get that impression of everything being a bit creaky but never really getting motivated to spend some time fixing it.
• jszymborski 11y ago
  And so the pendulum swings, as it always does. Apple will begin sitting on it's laurels while core services and products degrade, while Microsoft enters a quiet, user-first renaissance under new leadership. If you switch Apple and Microsoft in the above paragraph, it sounds a lot like the past...
  • brickmort 11y ago
    Apple will begin sitting on it's laurels while core services and products degrade, while Microsoft enters a quiet, user-first renaissance under new leadership. (buzzer sound)
  • AlexandrB 11y ago
    > while Microsoft enters a quiet, user-first renaissance under new leadership I'm not holding my breath. A lot of decisions around Windows 10 have been, in my opinion, user hostile. If Apple drops the ball, the most likely outcome is that we return to the bad old days where there's Windows - it's ugly and it sucks but everyone know how to use it - and nothing a whole lot better.
• paxtonab 11y ago
  ...[Mossberg] fingered iTunes for the desktop "I dread opening the thing" This is so spot on. It feels like they rearrange iTunes every month, especially the mobile version. Recently I noticed that I'd be searching for a song (that I have on my phone) and it would default to their streaming service.... Why would I want to use my data to stream a song that I already have on my phone?
  • midnitewarrior 11y ago
    If Steve were alive, people would be getting fired after comments from Walt such as these.
    • slantyyz 11y ago
      >> If Steve were alive... Well, if he was alive, a lot of weird design choices would not have been made. Like the pencil sticking out of the iPad, that weird battery pack, the magic mouse with the charging port on the bottom, etc.
      • Bud 11y ago
        Can we grow up and get over the stupid fucking "pencil sticking out of the iPad" meme? The thing charges enough for several days' usage in ONE MINUTE. Get over it, people. Same thing for Magic Mouse. You think you can design it better? You have a better place for that port? The damn thing needs a few MINUTES of charge time per month. It's a non-issue. The port is exactly where it should be.
        • slantyyz 11y ago
          You might be willing to give them a mulligan on their recent design choices, but I'm not. Apple has historically had smart, sensible designs -- even Apple haters can't deny that. The amount of time required to charge doesn't change the fact that no reasonable person would consider the pencil or the mouse charging method a good design. >> Same thing for Magic Mouse. You think you can design it better? You have a better place for that port? Well, there are already mice with charging ports where a cord would normally go. It's a solved problem.
• sithadmin 11y ago
  >Mossberg pointed to "a gradual degradation in the quality and reliability of Apple’s core apps." He fingered iTunes for the desktop ("I dread opening the thing"), and the Mail, Photos, and iCloud programs. As somebody that's used a Mac for 90%+ of all computing-related tasks since OS X was released, all of the above-mentioned apps/services have been dead to me for years. I honestly can't remember the last time I purposely used any of the above. What's driving me away is a combination of flaky behavior on the desktop (bizarre wifi glitches; bizarre NFS/SMB/AFP mount behaviors; increasing system instability), and a lack of differentiation across both the desktop and mobile platform. There was a time when I needed a Mac or i-Device to do things I cared about/needed, but those days are long over. Almost all of my compute activity happens on a server in my homelab or 'the cloud', and Linux and Android meets or exceeds my needs for completing other tasks. I just swapped my iPhone 6+ for a Nexus 6P, and my current MacBook (12" model) will probably be my last when I retire it in 3-4 years.
  • drhayes9 11y ago
    Do you have any recommendations for a music player that isn't iTunes?
    • TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
      I use Vox. It's not the best player ever, but it's free, it's better than iTunes, and it does all I want.
    • sithadmin 11y ago
      I use Spotify for most stuff, and Amazon Prime Music (with a library I uploaded) for more unusual stuff.
    • theOnliest 11y ago
      Swinsian (http://swinsian.com http://swinsian.com) is good...it's like what iTunes used to be (when it was actually usable).
      • STRiDEX 11y ago
• aditya 11y ago
  Wow, that's a lot of media hoopla. Let's be real, Apple's never been a software company -- they've always made excellent hardware and good enough software that people will deal with because they want their amazing hardware. No one has ever said anything about any Apple software compared to what people say about their hardware. Software's not in their DNA and I think all this media attention will just fade after a while and people will keep using and loving Apple hardware and putting up with their miserable software. For the record, I use Notes/Mail/Photos on my iPhone, and Preview has never crashed for me.
  • runjake 11y ago
    "Let's be real, Apple's never been a software company -- they've always made excellent hardware and good enough software that people will deal with because they want their amazing hardware." If you swapped all occurrences of "hardware" and "software" in the above statement with each other, you'd have what people said about Apple in the 1990s.
  • k-mcgrady 11y ago
    I completely disagree. One of the main reasons I switched to OS X was the iLife software. I've heard a lot of people say the same. The reason I use an iPhone over Android? Again, the software.
  • dasil003 11y ago
    Apple definitely had some misses over the years, but this is deeply unfair to a company that has basically designed the entire landscape of consumer software that we see today. The Apple was copied by IBM, Mac OS was copied by Windows, and iOS was copied by Android (which was pre-existing but was completely redesigned in the image of iOS). If you want to see a hardware company that doesn't get software, look no further than Sony. Apple's main problem is that they don't get cloud services. This is where Apple can't compete with Google in the same way that Sony couldn't compete with Apple.
  • TranquilMarmot 11y ago
    It would be nice if there was better Linux support from Apple. I haven't tried it, but from reading guides it seems like installing Linux on a Macbook comes with a whole set of gotchas and workarounds.
• beloch 11y ago
  I stopped using OSX shortly after Lion came out, surprisingly because of hardware problems and comically poor support from Apple (I'm not going to go into that again here). Since then I've been using Linux for work and Windows, as always, for gaming and blurays (because there's no other viable choice). Something weird has happened though. When I left OSX, it was already a bit buggy. A lot of stuff didn't work properly and wasn't well thought out. Windows, aside from the unfortunate Metro experiment, has just gotten better. Over the life of Windows 7, the only time I had BSOD's was when the SSD with the OS got too close to full. If I kept some free space on my OS partition, BSOD's simply did not happen. Windows 8 was even more stable. It just works. Yes, I added Classic Shell so I could just completely avoid Metro, and the result is an OS that just works and doesn't get in the way. I have privacy concerns about W10 which have prevented me from upgrading, and that really is the one major fly in MS's ointment. Free upgrades are nice, but I'd prefer to pay for an OS where my data isn't treated as a product. Will I continue to use Windows? Well, there's no other choice for gaming and blurays, so yes. Privacy concerns aside, this is more palatable than ever. Linux continues to be a workhorse for me, and I don't miss OSX one bit. Edit: I should mention that I tend to customize certain aspects of my OS rather extensively. I like things to be a certain way. Linux is fantastic for this. Windows is good too. OSX is really hit or miss. Some things aren't too bad, but other things are an absolute chore. It's amazing that an OS can restrict hardware and customization choices to the extent OSX does and still be buggy.
  • kmfrk 11y ago
    The OS has been pretty good after El Capitain. It was some serious garbage in some of the prior versions, though that also made me question why bother. The software is another matter.
    • KirinDave 11y ago
      El Capitan has been way worse for my software engineering life than any 3 previous versions put together. The first week was pure misery. And I've still gone back to routine crashes if I have a VM open. It hasn't been this bad for me in years.
• FreedomToCreate 11y ago
  Walt Mossberg outlined the issues really well. A lot of programs are becoming bloated, and as the company expands the number of people working on its products fragmentation across the platform is inevitable. Essentially Apple is the first company in history with such as large distributed platform of devices utilized by an unprecedented number of people, and unlike every other company, it wants to keep a tight grip on every aspect of that. By the time is addresses an issue, it loses sight of another. This is how I imagine Apple is functioning right now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5C8rnpAbIs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5C8rnpAbIs
• jhh 11y ago
  What scares me is their inability to fix things. Apple Music has been slow and unreliable as hell and with awful usability from the start. And it has not really improved at all. They likely see the problem but can't execute.
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• ewillbefull 11y ago
  I haven't used Apple software in a long time, but Google is not immune to this either apparently. If you use the YouTube app, and especially if you use Chromecast, you'll experience countless bugs as it fails to reconcile state changes between the devices or properly buffer videos. I'm considering setting up a raspi or something and installing an ad blocker on it to replace my Chromecast. I don't think this is what Google wants but its product is difficult to use any other way. Hangouts / Google Calendar are also really clunky and seem poorly tested. Things often go out of sync or you're randomly asked to re-login several times a month, and only during video chats.
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    • ino 11y ago
      Google maps was always very buggy for me on Android, but fine on iOS. Hangouts is bad. Very slow and bloated everywhere. On mobile it only syncs notifications at random. Audio and video quality is total crap, and even with this new web beta thing where it's supposed to be better, it's still much worse than skype. The most incredible thing, and I am ashamed of typing this but whatever, is that I've actually felt an improvement in my life after turning off hangouts in gmail. WTF.
• yggydrasily 11y ago
  The problem is that Steve Jobs isn't around any more to give the company the proper focus and hold everyone to a high quality standard. The recent slippage in quality and focus mirrors what happened in the late 80s and early 90s after Steve was forced out. There was considerable leftover momentum in the short term which allowed the company to coast for while and keep up some semblance of health, but eventually the lack of focus caught up with them. They became "beleaguered" in the mid-90s and only recovered when Steve came back (and axed products that weren't working, focused resources on new problems, simplified the product line, etc). It took many years, but he eventually turned them into a powerhouse. Now that he's been gone for a while, we are seeing a similar phenomenon. In the short term after he left, the company had considerable momentum (due mostly to the iPhone) which carried them along for a number of years, but without someone at the top who had his ability to maintain focus, the company is starting to slip again. This time, there may be no coming back.
  • agumonkey 11y ago
    You got me imagining Steve Jobs doing a proper 2nd coming of the Christ now that he is somewhere higher. Classic Steve.
• dasil003 11y ago
  My take on this is not that Apple has gotten worse, but that they have actually gotten better at cloud services. Whereas no one actually used MobileMe or iDisk, their new generation of cloud services is actually being used. It's true that they're losing ground because Google has defined a bar for cloud services that they can't reach, but they are trying and not entirely failing at it. The secondary aspect is the surface area of what they are dealing with. This is a far cry from the old Mac OS days where they were really a PC company. Now they have to make OS X, iOS (for both phones/tablets), and tvOS all work together seamlessly. If quality was exactly the same, they would have far more bugs just based on the cartesian complexity of possible interactions. I hope they can sort it out because I'm feeling the pain just like everyone else, but I don't see any better alternatives at the moment.
  • Analemma_ 11y ago
    > My take on this is not that Apple has gotten worse, but that they have actually gotten better at cloud services. Which isn't saying much, since they're still terrible. Their cloud-synced Notes.app is almost unusable; every time I add a note on the phone there's maybe a one-in-three chance it'll sync to the desktop immediately, a one-in-three chance it'll sync the next day, and a one-in-three chance it'll appear three days later or more. If Apple has in fact gotten better at cloud services, it's only because they were so abysmal before that there was nowhere to go but up.
    • tluyben2 11y ago
      For me it always 'syncs' but in a very original way; I get 3-4 copies after a sync on all devices. Not even sure how you make a bug like that. Not complaining though it is better than no sync.
    • parasubvert 11y ago
      I have used that Notes app every day since 2007 and still have notes dating back to that time. Sync works fine (and near immediately if you refresh on a device) but doesn't actively push, I find.
  • 11y ago
• untog 11y ago
  I don't much care about the software - I haven't used iTunes in years, don't use Mail, etc. etc. - it's the operating system I care about. Wi-fi has been buggy on OS X for literally years now. And each new major release seems to bring some new pain point where it refuses to turn on, refuses to connect, doesn't transmit data... and on and on. There's no way Apple can't know about this - it must drive their own employees crazy. Yet, nothing gets done. If I were in the market for a new laptop right now I'd be taking a serious look at a Surface Book - it's the first thing I've seen that looks like it could rival a Macbook in the hardware department. Sadly, I'd have to do a lot more research into getting a decent POSIX environment set up on it before I could take the plunge.
  • stestagg 11y ago
    I've found that wifi is buggy generally with lower end APs. It may be Apple employees generally have a better class of router/wifi
    • api 11y ago
      Recent Macs have a wifi chip that requires WME/WMM extensions (Wireless Multimedia) in most cases. For most APs it will have issues if these are switched off. Rumor is it's a chipset thing not a software thing.
      • wtallis 11y ago
        Got any more information on that? I usually leave WMM off on account of it being extra complexity that doesn't seem to make anything work better, and I haven't noticed any particular issues with my six month old rMBP. Which chipsets are supposedly afflicted? (side note: I wish they'd never stopped using Atheros WiFi.)
        • api 11y ago
          It was a while back and The Goog is not delivering, but I do distinctly remember this being an issue and that enabling this extension fixed it. But maybe only certain MBPs are affected.
• Gys 11y ago
  Since I updated to 10.11.3 (a few days ago) my Air crashes about once a day. It used to be once in a while and in the past months about once in a week. iTunes give we some weird null error if I switch accounts. Since a few weeks I think (do not use it often, only for updates). My iphone 6 often refuses to show the 'copy'-popup the first time I select something. So I regularly have to selected something again, just to get the popup. This used to work the first time. Just some examples that come to mind.
• dangoor 11y ago
  I think the latest episode of ATP has a good take on this in their segment "Why are we so critical of Apple?": http://atp.fm/episodes/155 http://atp.fm/episodes/155 They have a bunch of gripes, but at the same time there's still a lot that makes them happy and they're not about to start using Windows or Linux instead. This is exactly how I feel: yeah, there's stuff they need to do better and some of their stuff has either gotten totally crufty (iTunes) or was a bit too early (Apple Music, Apple Watch), but overall I still prefer Apple's products to their competitors at this point in time.
• OWaz 11y ago
  Well just today I called my wife, neither my mic nor the speaker in my phone were working. I couldn't hear the phone ringing and when she picked up we couldn't communicate. She instead called me and everything started to work. I have no clue where the fault lies and it's concerning because what if I was calling 911?
• SCAQTony 11y ago
  My hand is raised! My El Capitan upgrade was slower, did not run Open GPL, (till an recent upgrade) and iTunes keeps getting more confusing.
• SatoshiRoberts 11y ago
  Apple should step up it's software game, but it's hard to compete will so many startups singularly focused on executing one thing. Music, messaging, news. All these things are entire billion dollar industries, we can't expect them to hit a home run on everything.
• SatoshiRoberts 11y ago
  Apple should step up it's software game, but it's hard to compete will so many startups singularly focused on executing one thing. Music, messaging, news. All these things are entire billion dollar industries, we can't expect them to hit a home run on everything.
• SatoshiRoberts 11y ago
  Apple should step up it's software game, but it's hard to compete will so many startups singularly focused on executing one thing. Music, messaging, news. All these things are entire billion dollar industries, we can't expect them to hit a home run on everything.
• javajosh 11y ago
  The problem is that there is no reasonable alternative. If you want a retina display, solid construction, and anything even close to a reasonable command line, then MBPr and OSX are my only real options. Apparently, engineering and producing a high-quality laptop is a really hard problem. Only Apple and Lenovo seem to be able to do it. And if you go Lenovo, then you are stuck installing Linux who's device drivers are only as good as the time volunteers have given them. And even then the hardware isn't as good, so it's not even worth considering Windows instead of Linux. I believe that the solution is to introduce some sort of modular laptop standard such that people can build them to taste, and manufacturers can focus on building user installable components at various cost/performance points - like the desktop gaming PC market. Modularity would have additional security and openness benefits.
  • massysett 11y ago
    My days installing Linux on PCs are over. Futzing with the device drivers is way too much trouble. However if I had to I would buy a Lenovo, leave Windows on it, and run Linux in a VM. Overall I am happy with my Mac though. I think techies and press people find a lot more faults with Mac software than most users do. But it could be that after years of using Linux desktops my standards for good GUI software are extremely low.
  • darkstar999 11y ago
    Have you looked at Dell's XPS 13 Developer edition? It seems like you are totally ruling out linux even if it comes supported by the hardware manufacturer. I can't imagine Dell released this thing with poor driver support.
    • bronson 11y ago
      Basically the same price as the Air, maxes out at 8GB. I keep hoping someone will just destroy Apple's offering, especially for a product as stale as the Air. One day. One worry: Linux still has some issues with retina screens, doesn't it? (though distros have gotten a lot better than two years ago when retina was broken everywhere) > I can't imagine Dell released this thing with poor driver support. I guess you didn't live through Dell (and everyone's) Netbook offerings.
• wwweston 11y ago
  I'm having similar thoughts about OS X itself. I have two MacBook Pros right now. One is a 2008 champ that's still going despite having been dropped several times. It's got an SSD and maxed out RAM, running Snow Leopard. It actually does really well. One is the last 2012 pre-retina that just dropped out of Apple Care last August. It's running Mavericks. It has sleep/wake issues. Firefox can actually trigger a restart of the entire machine. It actually seems notably less stable than Snow Leopard. I'm afraid to upgrade. I actually don't know anyone who didn't have problems with Yosemite. I've been trying to figure out if El Capitan is actually better. Or, if not, how I can escape the platform after pretty much 15 straight years of making it my personal choice.
  • KirinDave 11y ago
    Come join us on the Surface side. The SB is a slick laptop, and you can use whatever you need just fine on Win10. I won't lie, there's bullshit over here. I can name a dozen things I hate. But at least on the Win10 SB I feel productive. On the OSX I feel like I'm constantly dealing with an abandoned system that only sort of runs now.
  • nier 11y ago
    Did you run memtest and took a look at how the hard drive is doing with SMART Utility?
• InclinedPlane 11y ago
  Apple has always had problems with software quality. In the past, Jobs was around to not only provide a reality distortion field to distract people from that fact but also to drag the company forward on specific projects and products (such as OS X) which kept the balance of quality to crap high enough. He also kept the company away from making big design or UX mistakes. Since Jobs has been gone Apples has been making missteps at an increasing rate, consider, for example, this set of gems: https://twitter.com/jonyiveparody/status/674749292494491648 https://twitter.com/jonyiveparody/status/674749292494491648 Apple's edge has always been that it was well plugged into the aesthetic sensibilities of its market, which is an unusual combination of skills to be tied to reasonably high quality engineering (the same dynamic that existed between Jobs and Woz since the first, really). It's somewhat inevitable that it would go away eventually, it's more sad that nobody cracked the formula so that more companies could have the same level of success. Clunky design is still the norm almost everywhere, and that's only slowly changing.
• VeejayRampay 11y ago
  Their software was never great to begin with. But there was a form of uniqueness, some innovation. That much is gone now. Despite the fact that they're developing for their own hardware, despite the hundreds of billions, their software is neither especially fast nor particularly reliable.
  • DigitalJack 11y ago
    I can't compare to windows 10, but I had to send my mbpr in for a screen replacement and while I waited for it to come back, I installed ubuntu on my old mbp. The desktop was a singularly terrible experience of bugginess. The bugs I experience in OSX are nothing compared to that experience. The only bug I notice right now is sometimes my wife's computer isn't accessible through Finder, and vice versa. Annoying but we have a work around. At work I use windows 7, and it makes me want to punch the wall several times an hour. Some of that is (I think) the corporate crap that my company installs. Every day is a super horrible experience, and I have not been able to pin down where the problem is stemming from. Working on my mac at the end of the day is an absolute pleasure by comparison. I'll concede though that I really don't like the design of itunes and haven't ever thought it was good. It's definitely worse now than in the past though. RE iphone/android... I switched to android for a year. It's not been horrible, but also not great. Really the main problem I have is the awfulness of the google app store. 25,000 five star reviews for the AT&T app, yeah right. In fact it's rare to find anything less than 4 stars. It's all rigged reviews out the wazoo, probably fed by the mechanical turk.
    • VeejayRampay 11y ago
      I hear your point, but I feel like the comparison is not fair to Ubuntu. Like I said, Apple develops their own software for their own hardware. They control the whole thing. One can HOPE that everything will work out of the box. Ubuntu on the other hand has a MUCH harder task at hand depending on the computer and it's a known fact that common hardware has better support (Intel chipsets in general for example). The libre community is also spreading itself thinner by having to support every other architectures and hardware under the sun with little funding. So my point was that given the extremely favorable conditions Apple is benefiting from (their own hardware, extremely forgiving users, bajillions of cash, advertising), they're not delivering the goods anymore.
• midnitewarrior 11y ago
  Yes, but they love the Microsoft apps on Mac and iPhone. Strange times are these in which we live.
• KirinDave 11y ago
  It's practically downvote bait in here to talk about how happy, overall, I've been with my move to the Surface product line or how much more I like the current incarnation of Win10 and the devkit than any of the other options. But yeah, I never thought I'd say I was happier using the Microsoft variant but here I am. And that's with 2 OS revs full of crashes, poor power management, and a replaced device because rev0 literally tore its hinge apart. I still enjoy the thing more than opening up my "work" laptop and struggling with OSX's halfhearted core apps and awkward expression of UNIX and just... the least amount of system stability surrounding virtualization I've had with any of the OSs I've tried.
  • mwcampbell 11y ago
    What do you mean by awkward expression of UNIX?
• 1024core 11y ago
  I used to be fairly content with Apple: the iOS ecosystem (or walled garden) was pretty decent, and OSX is basically Unix. I was happy. Then, after a few years of iOS use, I switched to Android. Suddenly, I was an outcast among friends: any group SMS conversations I had been a part of, I would no longer get. I get it: Apple uses iMessage, and it is not present in Android. But at least Apple could warn the sender that it is unable to deliver the message to me, instead of silently dropping it! Friends started calling me: are you OK? And I had to patiently explain to them the iMessage fiasco. I tried everything to disavow iMessage on my phone number; but nothing works. I still don't get messages in group conversations, months later. This totally soured me on Apple. Instead of being a greedy little fuck, why can't they just play nice? They are the biggest company in the world; they don't have to be giant pricks too!
  • LeoPanthera 11y ago
    > But at least Apple could warn the sender that it is unable to deliver the message to me, instead of silently dropping it! It's harsh, but this only happens if you don't follow the instructions. Deregister and turn off iMessage: https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage If you follow this, you'll never miss a message.
    • 1024core 11y ago
      I did follow the instructions. I deregistered several times, and Apple knows that my number is not registered with iMessages anymore.
      • digi_owl 11y ago
        Basically it seems that the imessage app on iOS basically can't be bothered to check every number every time a group message is sent. So once it has found you were a imessage number you are forever an imessage number within that group. The only way to break it, as best i know as an outsider, is for everyone else in that group that are imessage users to delete the group and start over. Likely it is another one of Apple's "usability optimizations", like how they would broadcast every last SSID you had been in contact with to try to speed up reconnects.
• headgasket 11y ago
  The real cook has left the kitchen, for good. Honestly could we have really expected anything else, over time? Do you remember Apple in the Scully to Amelio days? Barbarians at the gates, again.
• Cartwright2 11y ago
  I dread helping anyone with iTunes related issues. The syncing process is dangerous, it's far too easy to wipe someone's collection of music / family photos / pictures. I'm not sure if this is an isolated issue but I start sweating bullets as soon as I have to connect an iDevice to iTunes. What really shocks me is that instead of showing a big red warning message before a destructive sync, it silently goes ahead and wipes data without even asking. And there's no easy way to tell what a sync is going to do. After any iTunes sync I generally think "Ok, now let's assess the damage". To add insult to injury it's almost impossible to make a file-for-file backup before decimating a device with iTunes sync. In fact, the iTunes sync process is the main reason I stick to Android despite it having a whole other ecosystem of flaws. I'll take a USB Mass storage device and robocopy / rsync, thanks. They actually work.
  • aantix 11y ago
    The second I see iTunes is syncing I think to myself "oh fuck, oh fuck" and look to force quit the app as soon as possible. Then I spend the next half hour looking at the connected device to ensure my collection is still there. It's part of the reason why I switched over to the (defunct) Rdio. Managing the individual iTunes music files was just too stressful.
    • LeoPanthera 11y ago
      I never understood this. You keep all your music in iTunes. What harm could possibly come even if it did accidentally wipe your device? The worst possible scenario is that you'll have to wait a few minutes to sync it back again.
      • hussong 11y ago
        Not an iTunes user, but I guess some people just want to do a selective sync to certain devices to keep storage use in check and maintain library navigability on the device. That can be quite a bit of work which you wouldn't want to lose to technical failure.
• shmerl 11y ago
  Apple should wake up and stop their lock-in retardation. But they are too busy continuing it.
• ggregoire 11y ago
  Apple fan here. I almost use no Apple software (each one has a better alternative, Chrome, Gmail, Spotify, Evernote and so on) and I have absolutely no complaints about OSX or IOS. I just replaced my Air 11" on Mavericks for a Pro 13" Retina on El Capitan (mostly to code and Internet) and I love it.
• clamprecht 11y ago
  I never see anyone from Apple commenting in these threads - why not?
  • tachyonbeam 11y ago
    Because they have a huge culture of secrecy internally. They're afraid of getting fired if anyone found out they commented.
• tenpoundhammer 11y ago
  I wonder if this is related to a problem hiring engineers, Apple seems to be in a full on war to employee software developers in silicon valley. They are competing with hot startups, self employment, and variety of other concerns. Many of the issues that I'm hearing about Apples software quality appear to be caused by a company who is trying to do too much with too few engineering resources. They are getting stretched thin and having to make more quality sacrifices than their customers are willing to tolerate. I bet that if they opened an additional engineering office in a less contentious area of the united states they would be able to staff teams more easily, with longer average tenures, and tap into the talent pool and skills that they are currently unable to hire at the volumes they require. I would suggest Portland, Oregon as I'm a native Oregonian, and because we have some of the best software engineers in the world!
  • tater_sent_me 11y ago
    They also pay poverty grade wages and demand cult like obedience just for the pleasure of working at ~Apple~~~.
• tasdev 11y ago
  I had a debate about this the other day with a friend. I am firmly of the belief the quality is bordering on poor and that if this was a decade ago, the Apple fanboys would be all over Microsoft for the same performance - remember the taunts about Windows performance and crashing from the Switch campaign? I'm sick of constant random iOS reboots, out of date OpenGL, poor/reduced quality apps (Photos I'm looking at you), the growing monolithic nature of iTunes and the fact I feel like I'm running Windows ME all over again. I wish they'd stop spending so much time on marketing new features -- who cares, really -- and spend a few years making stuff great.
  • tluyben2 11y ago
    > iOS reboots Is that common? I have and use a 5s for years now and I have a spontanious reboot every 6 months maybe. And I am a very active user. Same for my wife (same phone). I have a new Samsung as well; it gets stuck every 2 days enough to have to reboot it.
    • tasdev 11y ago
      It hasn't been that common since the latest updates but particularly early iOS9 was very frustrating. I see it most commonly when using Safari or AirPlaying anything, but have also had it happen randomly when using Settings, presumably because Springboard.app has died.
• deleted 11y ago
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• nostrademons 11y ago
  It's kinda weird to read commentators talking as if this was the end of a golden age of Apple. From my perspective, their application software has always sucked. It was there because you need apps to bootstrap a platform and attract enough users to attract developers. But you can't really expect a consumer electronics company to have the best application for a given niche once the niche has been identified and attracted companies that really want to make it their bread-and-butter. XCode and occasionally FaceTime & iMovie are the only bundled applications that I ever use on my Mac. When I get a new computer, the first things I do are usually download Chrome, MacVim, Google Photos, and VLC. I use Hangouts over iMessage, Google Calendar over the built-in calendar, and Google Docs over the office suite. On my iPhone, getting Google Maps and Yelp is a top priority, lest I end up navigating off a mountain. This is not a new habit; I've operated like this since getting a Mac in 2009 after a 10-year hiatus from Apple products. Perhaps I was just less brainwashed than most Apple fans, and the end of the brainwashing may itself be news with big consequences for product adoption. But IMHO anyone who used the whole integrated Apple software suite and never looked elsewhere has been missing out on some seriously nice features this whole time.
  • Eric_WVGG 11y ago
    Could you please express your opinions without using the term "brainwashing"? I think Safari and iMessages are vastly superior to Chrome and Hangouts and that doesn't make me an idiot.
    • pyre 11y ago
      Well, one thing about Safari is that upgrades seem to be tied to the OS. As a web developer, this makes testing things on different versions of Safari a bit difficult. Also, you have to upgrade the entire OS to get a new version of Safari, so if you were holding out on an OS upgrade you might be forced to upgrade if you need to test things on the latest version of Safari.
      • bphogan 11y ago
        The alternative is that I need to have 30 versions of Chrome laying around because they update every week or two. Surely there has to be a middle ground. :)
• 27182818284 11y ago
  Safari is a great example of this. Do a search for "safari is the new IE6" and there are lots of complaints about it falling behind other browsers. Off the top of my head, for example, it doesn't support the blocking of form submission with the required attribute, which makes the required attribute pretty useless and frustrates developers.
• venomsnake 11y ago
  If iPhone was just able to be mounted as a flash drive, roughly 90% of the itunes complaints would have been nonexistent. Getting content to the iphone is absurdly, needlessly complicated.
• gnicholas 11y ago
  Yep—Airdrop from iOS to Mac is still a mess, even with new hardware and latest software. And don't get me started on how iOS 7 broke BT from my iPhone to my car, and then Apple told me to get my car's firmware updated. Really Apple? You release a software update, it breaks connectivity with my car, and you tell me to get my car fixed?
  • captaindiego 11y ago
    I've never seen airdrop actually function. I remember when it first came out I watched some excited people try to use it and then it failed completely. Nobody I know with an iphone even bothers trying to use it anymore.
    • gnicholas 11y ago
      Yeah, it works only between iOS-iOS or Mac-Mac for me. Rarely works cross-platform. I even called AppleCare to troubleshoot, and the level 2 tech I spoke with said that it "might not work reliably" on pre-2014 devices. I pointed out that Apple's website claims compatibility for post-2012 devices (my MBA is 2013), and he said I was being argumentative. He also couldn't cite any documentation for his 2014 claim. I now use Dropbox instead of AirDrop, which is inefficient—especially given my slow upstream connection—but at least works reliably.
• Ensorceled 11y ago
  What I really hate is that Googling for problems brings you to Apple Forum discussions from 2014, 2013 and sometimes even earlier. If they are not fixing serious bugs that have been around for a couple of versions now, just how much cruft are they accruing. Worse, issues that were fixed, like my iPhone playing a random song at a random loudness instead of returning to Audible, have returned. My Fall 2015 Mac Book Pro has already crashed more often than my Fall 2013 did in two years. Apple support claims the logs show it is software, not hardware, so I'll take their word for it. Our UX guy summed up the other serious issue with Apple software, they are focusing more on design now rather than UX. There is a great article on FastCompany about it http://www.fastcodesign.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-design-a-bad-name http://www.fastcodesign.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-desi.... Stuff may look fine but it no longer functions in a natural, intuitive fashion; it no longer "just works". The font selection in iOS is a great example, it's almost like it's picked specifically to be hard to read. Killing misbehaving iOS apps has become a pain, the current app is never in focus, swiping is clumsy and swipe up to kill will often swipe left or right instead. iTunes as a whole is another example of this. It was never great but it's become increasingly difficult to find what I'm looking for and make it do what I want. I find myself cursing my computer and my phone on a regular basis now instead of the once in a blue moon I used to.
  • makecheck 11y ago
    The thing is, design is supposed to mean "how it works" (and not just fonts, etc.); they're just not designing anymore. When Jony Ive once said in a video that things should look like they haven't been designed, I thought "yeah they sure look that way, they're crappy now". I shouldn't have to turn on half of the Accessibility settings to return to what I'd consider a normal interface, either. (And the real problem with any non-default setting is that many apps clearly don't test with that; e.g. with the "bold" or "larger" font settings, a lot of things start to truncate or just not lay out as nicely.)
  • dplgk 11y ago
    > What I really hate is that Googling for problems brings you to Apple Forum discussions from 2014, 2013 and sometimes even earlier. This is really the kick in the nuts while your down. You find those useless forums where the suggestion for every problem is "Reset your PRAM" and there 100 pages in the thread going back for years and you realize "Yep, I'm never going to fix this terrible problem".
• sathio 11y ago
  I can't believe nobody mentioned HFS
• evanx 11y ago
  i guess it's hard to write large stable apps in ObjectiveC? I wouldn't like to. Maybe Swift will change things, but it'll take a while, given their legacy.
• deleted 11y ago
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• X-Istence 11y ago
  I'm an Apple fan, and I am unhappy with the state of software, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that I hate Apple software. I am also not nearly disgruntled enough to even consider switching platforms to something else (like Linux for example). No matter the platform people will always have gripes and issues with the software. It's amazing how much choice we all have these days, and it's simply not possible to cater to everyone's whims. I feel like over the last couple of years the landscape has changed tremendously, and what once may have been a simple blog post that mostly got ignored the news can spread further and wider than ever before. Things that are simple complaints of "I wish this worked better" now get twisted and restated as "X hates Y".
• tristor 11y ago
  My experience has been that every new release of OS X is more unstable than the previous. I'd very much like to go back to Mavericks. It was the last release I used that seemed to be decently stable. Yosemite and El Capitan have so many problems. * I've had to switch to a wired ethernet -> TB adapter and turned Wi-Fi off altogether because of Wi-Fi instability, despite having enterprise-grade WiFi APs in my house (Ruckus and Ubiquiti). * Peaking out the CPU usage and GPU usage at the same time almost guarantees a kernel panic despite Apple's hardware diagnostics reporting no problem and my Fluke temperature probe not showing temperatures going above 90C (although to be fair, that's very hot... that's standard Macbook Pro temps). * Crazy audio issues for SPDIF, despite it being a basic standardized protocol that's had kernel support since OSX was released, every time they come out with a new version they manage to make SPDIF output break in strange ways. * Sleep/Resume/Hibernate no longer works reliably, many times instead of waking up the system will simply reboot. * Bluetooth devices (specifically Magic Trackpad 2) will disconnect and then reconnect randomly for no apparent reason. I don't even use any of the Apple provided software other than OS X itself, but I still have seen the product go rapidly downhill. I went from being an Apple hater to being a hardcore Mac user, to now back to being an Apple hater that's just waiting until I can find a decently reliable Linux ultrabook (Lenovo X1 Carbon maybe?). The repairability of a laptop isn't even a concern to me at this point, I consider buying a laptop a sunk cost of being in a technical job. I just need it to work reliably because I depend on it for my livelihood and it's currently unacceptable. The other day I was working remotely and in a conference call with the CTO and had a kernel panic twice in a row because I was doing `vagrant up` in the background which kicked me out of the call. How does that look for my professional reputation when I have technical difficulties during a call and I'm supposed to be a senior level technical staffer? Totally unacceptable.
• chrisblackwell 11y ago
  OSX fan here: Everyone is completely misunderstanding our recent criticisms of Apple software. We don't hate Apple software! We have seen a steady decline over the last few years, and so we are expressing our concerns. This does not translate to us hating the software. We know what Apple can do when it really focuses on the quality of it's software (see OSX Snow Leopard). I still think OSX is more stable and useable then any other OS out there. Yes there are annoyances, but they are trying to move the ball forward. The only piece I would agree has gone completely off the rails is iTunes. OSX is still strong, and I believe Apple will right the ship. After all, Apple employees use Mac's themselves to build iOS.
  • ld00d 11y ago
    Even with the problems, I still prefer OS X to anything else. Apple claims a higher standard, and everyone wants to hold them to it. They're falling short of their standard, but they're falling to a higher point than the alternatives IMO.
    • Caprinicus 11y ago
      Right, but I think it's still important to note because the user experience has gotten worse even if it is still the best.
  • Ensorceled 11y ago
    Exactly, moving my SO from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 and then, months later, to Windows 10 made me appreciate OS X despite it's recent downturn.
• cowholio4 11y ago
  Sure, we have dumb apps on our iPhone that we don't use and some of the preinstalled applications on OSX aren't that great. But bashing Preview and touting the alternative Adobe Acrobat Reader!? Are you serious? Firstly, they are different products. Preview handles multiple file formats and Adobe Reader is meant for PDFs. Secondly, Preview allows you to edit, combine and covert pdfs all of which you would have to pay Adobe to unlock these features. Preview is such an amazing tool and I would go as far and say it's one of OS X's killer applications.
• tn13 11y ago
  I think this is regression to mean. No one was expecting the Apple world to grow at the same speed did they ? I think part of the reason why app's core apps such as Apple news or Mail client appears to be so horrible is not because they are worse but because everyone else (app makers) is getting better. Whether it is Flipboard's News app or Microsoft's Outlook they are specialist at building that and Apple is not. I think it is time for Apple to focus on the platform and development tools rather than continuing to build other kind of software.
• skrowl 11y ago
  Love him or hate him, Steve Jobs would never have let this happen.
• sxcurry 11y ago
  Apple in headline - check. Apple bad - check. Mention Steve Jobs - check. Talk about your personal piece of software that "always crashes" - check. You are golden!
• rubyfan 11y ago
  OSX 10.5 and maybe 10.6 were the last good OSX offering. Similarly I'd peg iOS 5 or 6 as the last good iOS versions. Both of these systems has been in steady decline. The iOS-ization of OSX killed it. Desktop user don't need stupid shit like an App Store, terrible default security options that mimic an iPhone, full screen mode default when you maximize, notifications (aka. productivity interruptions), etc. my list could go on... There was once a time Next and maybe Apple had programmers and educational users (educated users) in mind in building some of their software. That seems to be gone. What are we left with now Ubuntu - that's another ghetto just a different kind?
• archildress 11y ago
  All of these complaints seem to really be picking up steam. Would be really interested to hear from an Apple employee what the inside talk is like.
• LargeCompanies 11y ago
  Personally, Apple better release something cool and jaw droppingly innovative either the iPhone 7 with needed features (waterproof & wireless charging), Apple TV cable TV service or something amazing as Im slowly losing interest. Android isn't exciting either nowadays.
• lurkinggrue 11y ago
  "I dread opening the thing." Hmm, that was my reaction to iTunes in 2003.
• lumpybacon 11y ago
  After a few years of fiddling with Windows and Linux on a custom-built PC, I'm looking to get a computer that "just works", as this is a time in my life when I really can't afford to deal with any hassles (not that there was anything particularly bad with my setup; it's just the little things that add up). I had my eye on a Mac (mainly for OS X), but it's increasingly looking like a bad time to get one. Is it really, or are these complaints overblown? I'm having some trouble sifting through these conflicting experiences on my own.
  • andreyvit 11y ago
    Depends on your definition of a hassle. I am a happy user of Apple software, I love iTunes. I do experience occasional issues — AirDrop not finding peers, iOS asking for a password when it's not supposed to, iMessage failing to sync SMS read states between the Mac and the phone. If you're okay with occasional problems like that, go ahead and try it.
    • lumpybacon 11y ago
      I suppose every operating system is going to have little problems like that, and if that's all there is, I can manage. It's just that I really liked OS X back in the Leopard and Snow Leopard days. I could almost describe it as a "magical" experience using them, but I'm worried that that magic's gone in these latest versions, as all this recent complaining seems to indicate. Can you perhaps tell me how newer versions of OS X fare as a UNIX-based operating system for development, compared to Linux? I've heard that it's become more locked down. How about its app "ecosystem"? I remember that a lot of apps, by developers small and large, were of really high quality.
      • keithpeter 11y ago
        What development tools do require access to? A short list of the 'little things that add up' (your post up the tree) with your current set up may be of interest as well as people could then comment on the likelihood of those or similar.
• antidamage 11y ago
  Nothing new here. We've all hated iTunes for years.
• imron 11y ago
  I'm glad to see Apple getting more and more flak for this. Hopefully they'll do something about it.
• KillerRAK 11y ago
  Loyal user for 10+ years. Apple is getting old and their apps, particularly iTunes, have transformed into an atrocity.
• EvanPlaice 11y ago
  I love Apple's OS and hardware. It's one less thing I have to worry about condtantly fixing. With that said. Their consumer apps have always been overly simplistic candy glossed shit, Made worse by the fact that they can't be removed without lower level hacks. I may not fall with their target demographic but I'd never buy into the platforms/services of a company who won't let me have a choice over something as simple as what Apps I have loaded on my machine.
• pmarreck 11y ago
  I smell a heck of a lot of Technical Debt in the new bugs I'm seeing. Simple example- I copy a URL in Safari, quickly switch to another app to paste, and it pastes the PREVIOUS clipboard, NOT what I just copied. That has to be a state-management bug.
• rglover 11y ago
  I'm quite happy with OSX.
• andrewstuart 11y ago
  My iPhone 5 cannot run the newest version of Safari - too slow. I was forced to switch to Google Chrome. Safari used to be fast two versions ago but something changed in a recent upgrade and now it is useless.
• welly 11y ago
  The only Apple software I use is the operating system. Everything else (including the core utilities) are third party. Google Docs for word processing/spreadsheets, BusyCal for calendaring, Chrome for web browsing. I may occasionally fire up the core Calculator app but with Numi in my menu bar and Alfred a quick Option-Space away, I rarely even use that. Having been burnt by Apple disregarding other software I've been a big user of in the past, I'm not going to let them do it again.
• andrewstuart 11y ago
  Every third time I try to unlock my iPhone screen it will accept only the first letter pressed. To proceed I have to hold the button down to turn off the phone, and then cancel the poweroff, which seems to reset the screen lock keyboard input.
• bwb 11y ago
  Weird, I love apple software? it always works for me...
• slantaclaus 11y ago
  I'm glad this is a thing now in the media. The company surely has enough resources to get this handled
• gaia 11y ago
  Error. 53.
• daveheq 11y ago
  I've never run into so many bugs as since Steve Jobs died, Tim Cook and friends are just throwing things at the wall now and their own apps are just breaking like plates.
• ksec 11y ago
  Apple software was only good, or comparatively good in the era when Windows Software was absolutely crap. But that is no longer the case anymore. Windows Software still may not be as good, but the gap has definitely shrunken a lot. That is why it no longer feel good. And once you add the truly dreadful ones like iTunes which, again is the biggest pile of crap in Human computer history, and the services that is called iCloud lagging behind Google, Yahoo and even Microsoft.
• kentonv 11y ago
  (Rant warning.) Apple products have always been buggy. If you do anything slightly unusual, you quickly find that everything breaks. It's as if they don't actually systematically test anything and instead only fix the bugs that the developers themselves happen to notice in day-to-day use. Here's me ranting about it in 2011: https://jx4slc83qru3hgkkkt1v.oasis.sandstorm.io/ https://jx4slc83qru3hgkkkt1v.oasis.sandstorm.io/ Here's me ranting about it in 2014: https://plus.google.com/+KentonVarda/posts/FEUGQ7mxkUL https://plus.google.com/+KentonVarda/posts/FEUGQ7mxkUL And here's me ranting about it in 2016: My wife's Macbook has a fun feature. It scans the network looking for audio receivers. When it finds one, it hijacks the receiver, switching it away from its current input and over to the Macbook's audio. This happens for example while watching movies, while the Macbook is in the other room with no one touching it, even though it has never been intentionally asked to use the TV room receiver for any purpose (though there is another receiver in another room that she uses regularly). As Denon receivers have no apparent access control, there is no way to stop this except to set up some sort of firewall between the Macbook and the receiver. (I do in fact use the receiver's network protocol, so disconnecting it is not a good option.)
• mk3 11y ago
  It's every year the same story... It's the end of apple this and this is the end of apple that. I think it's the new iPhone is doomed type of stuff.
• diebir 11y ago
  Well, Apple software does kind of suck in some areas (tragically broken package manager is one area!!), but it is not too unstable. I have got here a 2 year old MacBook Pro. The uptime on this thing is usually around 60 days, at least. I have at all times around 40 tabs open in Chrome and do heavy Java development in IntelliJ IDEA. I don't think this laptop has ever crashed in these 2 years. Just never happened. I reboot once in a while when something like audio goes crazy or just in case after running out of memory with IntelliJ and a handful of other JVMs a few times in a row. I have no illusions on usability of Apple software. I think they are teeming with idiots (iTunes, already mentioned package management, photo import app, text editor), but the OS is kind of rock solid. Why wouldn't be, it's a POSIX OS and consequently is relatively simple and logical, at least from API standpoint. There are two things that drastically help with stability: 1. My account does not have admin privileges and I never give admin password to any prompts, unless I know for certain why. 2. I never install any software as administrator. If something does not want to install into ~/Applications (you know, drag and drop), I take it apart and "convince" to install. 3. I guess there's #3, no updates. Only clean OS installs once in a few years. It's a little scarier than the same tactic on Linux, where I am sure that this is not a real problem, but in most cases it's not an issue on Mac OS X either.
• sirmiller 11y ago
  Not sure about the "fans", but us mere mortals are quite ok with the quality.
• lips 11y ago
  This decade, TL;DR: As Apple becomes the first computer maker to transition into a luxury goods company, they realize that the smoke and mirrors sufficient for keeping the pseudo-proles happy in other sectors aren't sufficient. Corinthian leather doesn't break your wi-fi.
• erlend_sh 11y ago
  Did the article title not bother anyone else? The title has 3 mentions of "Apple" and none of "Windows" in it, but the article is really a feature showcase piece for Windows 10.