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Apple went from building fantastically reliable software on beautiful, powerful devices, to... Well, this. Even die hard apple fans don't use their built in app

Apple went from building fantastically reliable software on beautiful, powerful devices, to... Well, this. Even die hard apple fans don't use their built in apps for calendar, music, mail, or really anything, because the design is so bloated. Their hardware performance lags the rest of the market at their price point, and skirt the lines of programmed obsolescence. And now apparently their major OS updates go out without quality control for things like a blank root password, or random crashed and freezes. I tried to use OSX's logs last week - they were spammed to death with warnings and errors from OS components and bundled software. Half the OS services break or emit warnings, because the date component considers December 2017 as an illegal month. I know everyone called it after Jobs stepped out of the leadership chair, but is that really what's responsible for the decline? Can an apple insider comment here?

aaomidi 9y ago
My avoidance of their built in apps is just simply that I don't want to be locked in to the apple eco system. Apple has always took a closed approach to their software and it's going to hurt them in the long run.
- b11484 9y ago
  I feel like it might have been the right direction a few decades ago. There was a lot of shovel ware and crappy software that was produced. I think they had the right idea to lock down the software availability have better quality control. It's very similar to video game companies in the late 80's/ early 90's. Atari had a big problem with really bad games, and people lost faith in the quality of games. Nintendo started giving their games the "Nintendo Seal of Approval" to prove to consumers that the games had been thoroughly checked for bugs and such. I can see why Apple would take the same direction, but we've come a long way with software development, especially with the rise of open source development.
- threeseed 9y ago
  Apple has relied on closed software for 40 years. They are now fast approaching the first trillion dollar company. When exactly is this approach going to stop working for them ? And what evidence is there that people are suddenly going to flock to open source software ?
  - aaomidi 9y ago
    I never mentioned open source software. I meant software made by other companies that don't lock you into their platform such as Google.
- fatbird 9y ago
  Every time I think their walled garden will hurt them, I end up at my parents trying to help them through various issues on their Android devices, which come from different vendors so it's all kind of different even between devices when it should be the same, and I realize that the walled garden has some really obvious benefits that the HN crowd is somehow uniquely unable to appreciate.
  - walterstucco 9y ago
    What you are describing are not the benefits of a walled garden but the benefits of having someone that fixes things for you Apple walled garden is the one that's different from the rest It's even in their motto "think different" That's why leaving it looks so difficult
  - aaomidi 9y ago
    I don't think anyone here looks at this topic with a black and white lens. There are various pros and cons to each and usually for developers the cons of a walled garden outweighs the pros.
anon1385 9y ago
>Apple went from building fantastically reliable software When was this? > Even die hard apple fans don't use their built in apps for calendar, music, mail, or really anything, because the design is so bloated That has been the case for as long as Apple has made calendar, music and email apps. People have complained about Mail since the first version (it used to be that most "die hard apple fans" were using Entourage). I hardly need to mention how unpopular iTunes has always been. The Jobs revisionism every time an Apple product has a bug is extremely tiresome. The famously hated 'skeuomorphic' version of iCal was apparently a specific request from Jobs[1]. The single worst GUI control I've ever had the displeasure to use was the old 'thumbwheel' volume control in Quicktime Player. On the hardware side look at the puck mouse. Those kinds of things were worse than mere bugs in my opinion because they were deliberate and reflected the design philosophy of company at the time (or the inability of anybody working there to tell Jobs to fuck off and stop sabotaging products), and lasted for years before they were replaced. [1] https://www.cultofmac.com/189707/steve-jobs-himself-is-responsible-for-calendar-and-game-centers-hideous-skeuomorphic-designs/ https://www.cultofmac.com/189707/steve-jobs-himself-is-respo...
- DonHopkins 9y ago
  ProDOS was quite an improvement over DOS 3.3.
threeseed 9y ago
> Apple went from building fantastically reliable software on beautiful, powerful devices When ? Seriously when. I have used MacOS since 4.1 and never remember a period where there was the case. Especially during this phase of the development lifecycle i.e. we have only just had the 2nd point release update. I worked at Apple pre and post Jobs and nothing changed. Because he never managed any of the teams directly and his involvement had been less and less for years prior.
- 27182818284 9y ago
  Obviously responses are going to be pretty dependent on the person. For me personally the peak was Snow Leopard, then it plateaued for a bit, and then I feel like it has been downhill starting with Mavericks. Snow Leopard was so good I used to evangelize and talk about how great an OS it was with people who probably didn't know OS stood for operating system. It was that good. Now, heck, I haven't even installed the latest because I hear nothing but bad and in the on-stage demos there isn't a single thing that makes me think, "ooh I want that" It obviously has a product-market fit with a lot of people, I'm just not one of them. I'll eventually update just to make future updates easier on myself, but I have no pressing need.
  - mikeokner 9y ago
    Yep, agree 100%. 10.6.8 on the early unibody Macbook Pros was excellent.
  - snowwrestler 9y ago
    Snow Leopard had problems when it was released. I recall major issues with Mail and WiFi, among others. It was especially frustrating because Apple had made such a big deal about how 10.6 was going to focus on stability and fixing bugs. Of course it did become very reliable. We remember Snow Leopard that way now, because we remember the last stable version of it. El Cap is very stable for me today. High Sierra certainly still has a chance to get there too. So, I agree with the GP that Apple has never been in a place where they could release v0 of a new OS X major version without issues. That has certainly not been my experience. I always wait at least a few months before upgrading, sometimes longer.
dchuk 9y ago
Anecdotally, I've been running High Sierra Betas for a few months now and have experienced zero issues. I'm also a die hard apple fan that uses all of the built in apps except for Music (I prefer Spotify). One data point.
- blowski 9y ago
  Similar to me, except I'm not quite a die-hard fan. None of their software is perfect, but it's good enough when compared with the alternatives.
- ReverseCold 9y ago
  Another +1 for that. There are occasionally bugs, but nothing that I can remember specifically (which is a good thing).
- alwillis 9y ago
  Same here—running the latest public beta of High Sierra 10.13.3 on a 9-year old iMac with no problems.
yodsanklai 9y ago
> Even die hard apple fans don't use their built in apps for calendar, music, mail, or really anything, because the design is so bloated. I'm not a "die hard apple fan" (just a long time mac user), and I have no problems with most of their apps. Overall, I'm still very satisfied with my MBP.
garyrob 9y ago
I've been an apple fan since the '70's. My first Mac was a Mac Plus. At that point, I truly was a diehard fan because I viewed it as 10X better than the PC world. The engineering was amazing, both for hardware and software. It did have practical problems based mostly on not enough memory being available, but I forgave it because it was so darn beautiful in so many ways. I would tell everyone who would listen to get a mac, and a number of people who would have otherwise been using PC's got into the mac world because of me. My affection for Apple has been slowly diminishing over the years. At this point, the fact is that their software is absurdly unreliable and isn't even well designed in the UI department, even though great UI was their main way of attracting fans. I do still use all the built-in apps, including iTunes. They enable me to do what I want to do even though I regard some aspects of iTunes' design as ridiculously bad. I don't have a lot of motivation to change. I've figured out that, for instance, in order to do a search of Apple Music, you have any of the iTunes tabs selected EXCEPT Store. I can use it even though I find the design to be very lacking. I have pretty much lost all my loyalty to Apple at this point, between the unreliability and the poor design. The main thing that's keeping me in the Apple world is the fact that I just have to believe that reliability has gotten so bad that no matter what kinds of blinders they've been wearing, they're going to have to see that something is seriously wrong, and start to seriously work to address the situation. And I'd rather not have to adjust to new OS's, and I'd like to be able to stay familiar with Apple software so I can keep helping people I know who are using it (in many cases, due to me). I am hopeful that in a year or two, reliability (if not UI design) will be decent again. I'm even hoping that this will be explicitly addressed by Tim Cook in his next keynote. The reliability situation is so obviously bad that he really should discuss it. I think Steve Jobs might have done so if things had gotten to this point--but I don't think they would have gotten this bad under him, even though there were major problems under his tenure.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- tjr225 9y ago
  Are they really unreliable? I use a 2013 macbook pro (that I bought refurbished mind you) and it works just as well as the day that I bought it, except that the mute key doesn't work. The 2015 mbpr I used at my previous employer seemed just as sturdy. I also abused an iphone 5s for years until an upgrade to an iphone 7 earlier this year. Seems like a pretty stable device. I don't see these problems. Now I'm stuck with a thinkpad at work that has garbage battery life and an infuriating track pad. Every Android phone also turned out to be a turd (Galaxy S3, Moto X). Now that I have a file browser on iOS I don't think I'll ever go back- especially when you consider that Apple is basically the only company in the big 5 that at least publicly goes to bat for your privacy.
malz 9y ago
Apple makes 90% of their revenue from iOS devices. The answer to "why the decline" is it's not material to their business or stock market performance.
- JohnnyConatus 9y ago
  I think your right. But if the idea is the halo effect that keeps me in the ecosystem, they need to do better on the OS/laptop front and on the Siri front. Both are slipping.
- JustSomeNobody 9y ago
  But, iOS 11 is a dog. A buggy, wet, smelly one. So while most of their income comes from iOS devices, this doesn't in itself explain the decline in quality for Macs because it has been a decline across the board.
  - lostgame 9y ago
    Why is this downvoted? Has nobody used iOS 11? It’s caused nearly as many problems for people as High Sierra.
    - yborg 9y ago
      It was a step back from iOS 10 on older hardware. I upgraded an iPad Air and iPad Pro first gen and the UI stuttering/stalls makes both machines feel slower. I decided beforehand not to even try on the 5S, which was a good decision except that Apple constantly nags to update and downloads the entire 1.1 GB update file to my 16 GB device without asking me (yes, I have background App updates turned off) and forces me to delete it manually to get storage back. It's infuriating.
  - dcow 9y ago
    I stayed on iOS 10.1. Other than 10.1 being RAT-able, it was a great choice.
m3kw9 9y ago
Nice blanket statement, i don’t think you speak for any die hard Apple fans here. I’m a die hard fan, and I still use all their native apps. I’m not sure how you say they are bloated, notes is probably the best in class of notes apps out there. The calendars and reminder features are stripped down to a fault, but still useful because it just works for me. The stability of the software is getting worse, but with any issues, people are 10x more sensetive than other platforms that have all the same issues.
- chaostheory 9y ago
  > people are 10x more sensetive than other platforms that have all the same issues. As a fellow current Mac user, I can understand why people, especially techies, are frustrated. Apple is well funded with high standards, making them a fashionable, luxury company that focuses on tech. They have a high price point for their products from which people expect high quality. More importantly, they control both the hardware and software stack. Unlike MS which has to cater to an infinite number of different hardware combinations from different vendors, Apple development teams just deal with a much smaller set of hardware products and components which theoretically should result in a more secure and stable product. As other HN users have pointed out, there are hints as to why this is happening: https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/21/14037686/apple-macbook-macos-focus-mobile-features-ios https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/21/14037686/apple-macbook-m... Apple is hollowing out the OSX/Mac OS team in favor of iOS. While they did limit High Sierra's scope, maybe they needed to push back the release date as well given that they gutted the Mac OS team? Regardless, the natives are getting restless.
- tempthrowaway23 9y ago
  Try notational velocity, or nvalt. I think you'll like it.
- labster 9y ago
  > I’m not sure how you say they are bloated Evidently you're not an iTunes user. But agreed on the fact that most Apple applications are pretty decent, with the exception of iTunes (bloated) and Pages (not bloated enough).
timdeneau 9y ago
The fix: stop the annual release cycle. There isn't a customer demand for it, and it’s a hassle for basically everyone. The issues in 10.12.x get fixed with 10.13, but 10.13 has the same amount of different issues, so it’s a wash. There’s no stable version anymore.
- Joeri 9y ago
  There’s no stable version anymore. I'm still running El Capitan, and not having any issues. Admittedly, I would have upgraded had my mac been eligible, because I'm just that sort of person, but there's nothing in Sierra or High Sierra that would make a meaningful difference to me.
- reubenswartz 9y ago
  The problem is the OS X annual release cycle is tied to the iOS annual release cycle, which is tied to the annual iPhone upgrade cycle, which is the core part of Apple's business. I wish there was a way to update a module to get whatever iOS-tied goodies Apple wants to offer, without overhauling the whole Mac OS.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    They should sell a new generation, with nothing changed except the generation number. It has all the benefits of a new release without the hassle of changes.
- breatheoften 9y ago
  I disagree with this assertion 100%. They should keep making investment in and improvement to the yearly release process and build the knowledge necessary to do this with fewer errors...
  - dcow 9y ago
    I found the scrum master (;
  - ethbro 9y ago
user5994461 9y ago
>>> I know everyone called it after Jobs stepped out of the leadership chair, but is that really what's responsible for the decline? Can an apple insider comment here? It's simple. There is noone to whip developers when they ship major bugs. Quality goes down. Tyrannic leadership has its pros and cons. Try to imagine the internal tantrum after the company shipped an update and it crashed steve's iphone.
- greedo 9y ago
  So you worked at Apple during this timeframe, and had personal experience of this management style? Or you're just regurgitating what you saw in a Reddit post?
chapium 9y ago
Great support for terminal, low amounts of notifications, and good peripheral support are mostly why I enjoy OS X. Cloud based alternatives to their built in apps are vastly better.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
brian-armstrong 9y ago
I actually think Jobs was responsible for this decline. If you read stories about the iPhone's development, you come across anecdotes that Apple tapped its top engineers to get the iPhone out the door. They worked long hours and weekends. Many lost spouses and relationships. It was extremely taxing. Again this is another anecdote, but it seems many of these engineers left around the release of the iPhone 4. The iPhone pipeline became a never-ending treadmill. The tax of losing much of the top talent across all engineering functions has slowly taken its toll on Apple since. I would not be surprised if the institutional knowledge of OSX has either left or been promoted up the ladder, leaving that team with new hires unfamiliar with its inner workings.
- ethbro 9y ago
  So, essentially the IBM problem of seeing how long brand momentum can keep a train moving?
  - martin1975 9y ago
    ...and an epic example of the bigger they are the harder they fall in the making. Am typing this from Sierra OSX, btw, not cynical, just kind of bummed about the decline of OSX' quality.
    - ethbro 9y ago
      Some of this seems the inevitable fate of all large tech companies. Apple / Amazon / etc compensates highly to retain engineering talent -> overweight tech salaries -> engineers burning out / leaving for more interesting startup opportunities -> successful startups being reacquired Unfortunately, doesn't work so well for things like operating system codebases (NeXTSTEP acquisition aside).
      - brian-armstrong 9y ago
        I'm not sure the salaries have anything to do with it, and I vaguely recall Apple being middle of the pack there anyway. I think it's more about appealing to peoples' ambitions and desire to be recognized in this case. Imagine if a VP of Engineering addressed you directly to 'make a big impact' on the company's new secret product. Many engineers would want to impress this person, consequences be damned.
givinguflac 9y ago
Your comment is ridiculous. You're seriously taking a 4 post thread on apple support forums as the sky is falling? I use high Sierra daily on my 2013 mbp and have had 0 freezes.
- themagician 9y ago
  Of course it’s ridiculous. Has the number of reported problems with Macs increased over the last 10 years? Sure. Their market share has also increased like crazy. Today’s Mac doesn’t seem anymore unpolished than yesterdays. They just support a lot more software and devices than they ever used to. Get a Mac and use it the way you might have 10-15 years ago when they only supported a few dozen peripherals and 3rd party software titles and you probably won’t ever have a problem either. And don’t act like Macs never froze. The pinwheel/beachball of death has been a joke since OS X was first released. The biggest difference is back then you probably didn’t spend 12 hours a day in front of the machine. People have this ridiculous hindsight bias. Were some cars in the 1950s more reliable or better? Well, yeah. They had no electronics, no features other than a radio and you didn’t drive as much because there were fewer places to go. And they even seemed safer because there was less reporting on accidents when in reality you were like 7 times more likely to die in a car accident in the best car in the 50s than the cheap east piece of crap made today.
  - chris_wot 9y ago
    Where did you get this from? > The biggest difference is back then you probably didn’t spend 12 hours a day in front of the machine.
    - themagician 9y ago
      Because screen usage, in all forms, was a lot less 10-15 years ago than it was today.
- eeks 9y ago
  YMMV certainly. As it does for all of us. What I can say however is that the overall perceived stability and performance of my Mac has declined since the good old days of Moutain Lion. My 2017 MBP often freezes upon resume, there is a palpable lag with the overall UI experience, and the OS experience is bloated with the App Store/iCloud/iTune Store shenanigans. For the last part, I know things have been adding up for a while, but I feel we are now reaching a tipping point. Enough of a tipping point that I now find myself relying more and more on my 2015 OpenBSD Thinkpad for work, music and movies although it has half the computing power of my Mac. The downside is the missing ecosystem, the lack of seamless synchronization with my other iThings, which keeps me one foot in. For the moment that is, because I am slowly exploring self-hosted alternatives. And once I am confident my self-hosted system can match Apple's for most of the required features, I'll say goodbye to a 15-year relationship for good. small edit It's a two-way street: my expectations are probably higher that what they used to be.
fatbird 9y ago
I feel like there's been a very noticeable decline in the quality of Apple software (and perhaps hardware, given issues like battery related shutdowns). Then I got a PC this summer so I could play a wider variety of games, and I find that Windows 10 has a whole host of issues like lost profiles that didn't exist before, and still some of the legendary video driver flakiness. Then I try to help my father with his Android phone, and find UX lunacy. It's not an Apple problem, it's an industry problem. Software should, generally, be more reliable now than it was 10 years ago: There's more experience building, designing, and using it, so some best practices should have floated to the top, at least. But in every segment I look, I find it's just generally worse. Everyone is shovelling worse software into the pipeline than before, and this includes industrial control systems with which I'm familiar, even aside from consumer software.
- toyg 9y ago
  The industry does not optimise for reliability, we optimise for speed of release. See the explosion of Rails, followed by the explosion of browser-based UI kits: simplicity of development is what people want, because all pressure comes from time-to-market. This is a natural consequence of dealing with a still-booming field. I don’t think there is a solution unless we start talking laws, and you can bet everyone here would hate that.
rimliu 9y ago
I am using built in Calendar app and iTunes wihout problems.
cs2818 9y ago
> Half the OS services break or emit warnings, because the date component considers December 2017 as an illegal month. This has been frustrating me as well. The console has become a constant stream of these errors, the out of bounds month one is particularly annoying.
ajmurmann 9y ago
I would consider myself somewhat of an Apple fan. Yet, I've never used any of their built-in apps except XCode. ~99% of what I do is in Chrome, iTerm and various JetBrains IDEs. I even avoid XCode and use AppCode when possible. It's always been that way for me. I don't use macOS because the apps are amazing, or the UI is great. I use it because it gives me a Unix based system that can reliably do things like connect to an external projector, that has good enough support and pretty , non-flashy hardware. That's Apple's value offering to me and many other developers I know.
lawkwok 9y ago
I think people just have short memories. This kind of "hard freezing" is nothing new. Apple is just much more in the spotlight than ever before. I personally had this issue with the 2010 MacBook Pro. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2420192 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2420192
duncan_bayne 9y ago
I've been programming professionally since 2000, working professionally on a range of operating systems: Windows, Linux, OSX and FreeBSD. I've dabbled with Solaris SPARC back in the day, and grew up with AmsDOS and MS DOS. I've never had the pleasure of using a Lisp Machine, but enjoy Common Lisp and have a (jealous / nostalgic) feeling for what a LispM must have been like. I mention all of this to give context to my post; I'm not writing from a position of OS ignorance. Anyhow: I'm continually surprised by the support for proprietary operating systems and hardware amongst IT professionals in general, and programmers specifically. I've been running a mix of Xubuntu devices (older ThinkPads for the children) and FreeBSD (for my personal laptop and the home NAS / Minecraft etc. server) and enjoying ease of deployment (simple shell scripts), low cost, high confugurability and especially high reliability in the case of FreeBSD. Windows users used to tell me that NIX was fine, but to get a job, they needed to program for Windows. That's probably still the case in many fields, but not in the Web dev circles I frequent. OSX users tell me that they want both performance, reliable hardware with out of the box support. These days a good XPS or X1 Carbon will eat most or all Mac systems alive, have (in my experience) better build quality, and work well with Linux out of the box. At the company where I work there is a growing number of users who are eschewing the latest turn of the Apple upgrade merry go round and are switching to Dell and Lenovo systems w/ Linux (and FreeBSD, in my case). Everything we need to do for our client still works, and we get more control, cheaper prices and an escape from the frankly "consumer" attitude Apple has these days (imagine - a pocket computer that won't let you install software of your choice!) So if you're in the market for something better and cheaper than Apple, I suggest you take a look at Linux (maybe Ubuntu to start with?), FreeBSD or one of the many alternatives. You might just like it :) Edited to add: Oh yeah, and don't forget the advantage of being able to continue using devices well past the point their manufacturers wish you'd buy something new (or force you to, in the case of Apple). I recently installed FreeBSD on a 16 year old laptop as an experiment, and it works fine. Slow, sure, but fast enough to run Emacs, Firefox, and Ruby. In a (frustrating) pinch I could probably do around half of my daily work on it.
- lispm 9y ago
  > a pocket computer that won't let you install software of your choice! My Ubuntu tablet did not let me either. It was a major disappointment. Anyway, the OS is no longer maintained and the best thing to do is to use it as a large clock. I'm now using a large iPad Pro, probably the best piece of personal computer hardware I've seen so far... 500GB SSD, fast ARM processor, 120Hz screen with fantastic colors and brightness, LTE, four speakers with excellent sound, ... I cannot program Lisp on it, but I could not do that on the Ubuntu tablet either and the Ubuntu UI/UX was lacking. I always liked SUN's hardware, incl. the SPARC machines. Solaris was nothing I would run on my machine. I never liked it. Not its UI, not the OS APIs, not the documentation, it's like food one does not like. > I recently installed FreeBSD on a 16 year old laptop as an experiment, and it works fine. My Macbook runs nicely a 4k screen with full scaling UI support. That's more important to me, than trying to use old hardware. I have old laptops around, but nothing is compelling to use. The new machines with fast/large SSDs, low-power CPUs, high-res screens, external 4k screens, are more interesting to me. 2018 again won't be the year of the Linux desktop - it is just not there for people who value UI/UX more than low-level configurability.
stephenr 9y ago
> Even die hard apple fans don't use their built in apps for calendar, music, mail, or really anything [Citation needed]

aaomidi 9y ago

My avoidance of their built in apps is just simply that I don't want to be locked in to the apple eco system. Apple has always took a closed approach to their software and it's going to hurt them in the long run.

b11484 9y ago
I feel like it might have been the right direction a few decades ago. There was a lot of shovel ware and crappy software that was produced. I think they had the right idea to lock down the software availability have better quality control. It's very similar to video game companies in the late 80's/ early 90's. Atari had a big problem with really bad games, and people lost faith in the quality of games. Nintendo started giving their games the "Nintendo Seal of Approval" to prove to consumers that the games had been thoroughly checked for bugs and such. I can see why Apple would take the same direction, but we've come a long way with software development, especially with the rise of open source development.
threeseed 9y ago
Apple has relied on closed software for 40 years. They are now fast approaching the first trillion dollar company. When exactly is this approach going to stop working for them ? And what evidence is there that people are suddenly going to flock to open source software ?
- aaomidi 9y ago
  I never mentioned open source software. I meant software made by other companies that don't lock you into their platform such as Google.
fatbird 9y ago
Every time I think their walled garden will hurt them, I end up at my parents trying to help them through various issues on their Android devices, which come from different vendors so it's all kind of different even between devices when it should be the same, and I realize that the walled garden has some really obvious benefits that the HN crowd is somehow uniquely unable to appreciate.
- walterstucco 9y ago
  What you are describing are not the benefits of a walled garden but the benefits of having someone that fixes things for you Apple walled garden is the one that's different from the rest It's even in their motto "think different" That's why leaving it looks so difficult
- aaomidi 9y ago
  I don't think anyone here looks at this topic with a black and white lens. There are various pros and cons to each and usually for developers the cons of a walled garden outweighs the pros.

anon1385 9y ago

>Apple went from building fantastically reliable software When was this? > Even die hard apple fans don't use their built in apps for calendar, music, mail, or really anything, because the design is so bloated That has been the case for as long as Apple has made calendar, music and email apps. People have complained about Mail since the first version (it used to be that most "die hard apple fans" were using Entourage). I hardly need to mention how unpopular iTunes has always been. The Jobs revisionism every time an Apple product has a bug is extremely tiresome. The famously hated 'skeuomorphic' version of iCal was apparently a specific request from Jobs[1]. The single worst GUI control I've ever had the displeasure to use was the old 'thumbwheel' volume control in Quicktime Player. On the hardware side look at the puck mouse. Those kinds of things were worse than mere bugs in my opinion because they were deliberate and reflected the design philosophy of company at the time (or the inability of anybody working there to tell Jobs to fuck off and stop sabotaging products), and lasted for years before they were replaced. [1] https://www.cultofmac.com/189707/steve-jobs-himself-is-responsible-for-calendar-and-game-centers-hideous-skeuomorphic-designs/ https://www.cultofmac.com/189707/steve-jobs-himself-is-respo...

DonHopkins 9y ago
ProDOS was quite an improvement over DOS 3.3.

threeseed 9y ago

> Apple went from building fantastically reliable software on beautiful, powerful devices When ? Seriously when. I have used MacOS since 4.1 and never remember a period where there was the case. Especially during this phase of the development lifecycle i.e. we have only just had the 2nd point release update. I worked at Apple pre and post Jobs and nothing changed. Because he never managed any of the teams directly and his involvement had been less and less for years prior.

27182818284 9y ago
Obviously responses are going to be pretty dependent on the person. For me personally the peak was Snow Leopard, then it plateaued for a bit, and then I feel like it has been downhill starting with Mavericks. Snow Leopard was so good I used to evangelize and talk about how great an OS it was with people who probably didn't know OS stood for operating system. It was that good. Now, heck, I haven't even installed the latest because I hear nothing but bad and in the on-stage demos there isn't a single thing that makes me think, "ooh I want that" It obviously has a product-market fit with a lot of people, I'm just not one of them. I'll eventually update just to make future updates easier on myself, but I have no pressing need.
- mikeokner 9y ago
  Yep, agree 100%. 10.6.8 on the early unibody Macbook Pros was excellent.
- snowwrestler 9y ago
  Snow Leopard had problems when it was released. I recall major issues with Mail and WiFi, among others. It was especially frustrating because Apple had made such a big deal about how 10.6 was going to focus on stability and fixing bugs. Of course it did become very reliable. We remember Snow Leopard that way now, because we remember the last stable version of it. El Cap is very stable for me today. High Sierra certainly still has a chance to get there too. So, I agree with the GP that Apple has never been in a place where they could release v0 of a new OS X major version without issues. That has certainly not been my experience. I always wait at least a few months before upgrading, sometimes longer.

dchuk 9y ago

Anecdotally, I've been running High Sierra Betas for a few months now and have experienced zero issues. I'm also a die hard apple fan that uses all of the built in apps except for Music (I prefer Spotify). One data point.

blowski 9y ago
Similar to me, except I'm not quite a die-hard fan. None of their software is perfect, but it's good enough when compared with the alternatives.
ReverseCold 9y ago
Another +1 for that. There are occasionally bugs, but nothing that I can remember specifically (which is a good thing).
alwillis 9y ago
Same here—running the latest public beta of High Sierra 10.13.3 on a 9-year old iMac with no problems.

yodsanklai 9y ago

> Even die hard apple fans don't use their built in apps for calendar, music, mail, or really anything, because the design is so bloated. I'm not a "die hard apple fan" (just a long time mac user), and I have no problems with most of their apps. Overall, I'm still very satisfied with my MBP.

garyrob 9y ago

I've been an apple fan since the '70's. My first Mac was a Mac Plus. At that point, I truly was a diehard fan because I viewed it as 10X better than the PC world. The engineering was amazing, both for hardware and software. It did have practical problems based mostly on not enough memory being available, but I forgave it because it was so darn beautiful in so many ways. I would tell everyone who would listen to get a mac, and a number of people who would have otherwise been using PC's got into the mac world because of me. My affection for Apple has been slowly diminishing over the years. At this point, the fact is that their software is absurdly unreliable and isn't even well designed in the UI department, even though great UI was their main way of attracting fans. I do still use all the built-in apps, including iTunes. They enable me to do what I want to do even though I regard some aspects of iTunes' design as ridiculously bad. I don't have a lot of motivation to change. I've figured out that, for instance, in order to do a search of Apple Music, you have any of the iTunes tabs selected EXCEPT Store. I can use it even though I find the design to be very lacking. I have pretty much lost all my loyalty to Apple at this point, between the unreliability and the poor design. The main thing that's keeping me in the Apple world is the fact that I just have to believe that reliability has gotten so bad that no matter what kinds of blinders they've been wearing, they're going to have to see that something is seriously wrong, and start to seriously work to address the situation. And I'd rather not have to adjust to new OS's, and I'd like to be able to stay familiar with Apple software so I can keep helping people I know who are using it (in many cases, due to me). I am hopeful that in a year or two, reliability (if not UI design) will be decent again. I'm even hoping that this will be explicitly addressed by Tim Cook in his next keynote. The reliability situation is so obviously bad that he really should discuss it. I think Steve Jobs might have done so if things had gotten to this point--but I don't think they would have gotten this bad under him, even though there were major problems under his tenure.

deleted 9y ago
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tjr225 9y ago
Are they really unreliable? I use a 2013 macbook pro (that I bought refurbished mind you) and it works just as well as the day that I bought it, except that the mute key doesn't work. The 2015 mbpr I used at my previous employer seemed just as sturdy. I also abused an iphone 5s for years until an upgrade to an iphone 7 earlier this year. Seems like a pretty stable device. I don't see these problems. Now I'm stuck with a thinkpad at work that has garbage battery life and an infuriating track pad. Every Android phone also turned out to be a turd (Galaxy S3, Moto X). Now that I have a file browser on iOS I don't think I'll ever go back- especially when you consider that Apple is basically the only company in the big 5 that at least publicly goes to bat for your privacy.

malz 9y ago

Apple makes 90% of their revenue from iOS devices. The answer to "why the decline" is it's not material to their business or stock market performance.

JohnnyConatus 9y ago
I think your right. But if the idea is the halo effect that keeps me in the ecosystem, they need to do better on the OS/laptop front and on the Siri front. Both are slipping.
JustSomeNobody 9y ago
But, iOS 11 is a dog. A buggy, wet, smelly one. So while most of their income comes from iOS devices, this doesn't in itself explain the decline in quality for Macs because it has been a decline across the board.
- lostgame 9y ago
  Why is this downvoted? Has nobody used iOS 11? It’s caused nearly as many problems for people as High Sierra.
  - yborg 9y ago
    It was a step back from iOS 10 on older hardware. I upgraded an iPad Air and iPad Pro first gen and the UI stuttering/stalls makes both machines feel slower. I decided beforehand not to even try on the 5S, which was a good decision except that Apple constantly nags to update and downloads the entire 1.1 GB update file to my 16 GB device without asking me (yes, I have background App updates turned off) and forces me to delete it manually to get storage back. It's infuriating.
- dcow 9y ago
  I stayed on iOS 10.1. Other than 10.1 being RAT-able, it was a great choice.

m3kw9 9y ago

Nice blanket statement, i don’t think you speak for any die hard Apple fans here. I’m a die hard fan, and I still use all their native apps. I’m not sure how you say they are bloated, notes is probably the best in class of notes apps out there. The calendars and reminder features are stripped down to a fault, but still useful because it just works for me. The stability of the software is getting worse, but with any issues, people are 10x more sensetive than other platforms that have all the same issues.

chaostheory 9y ago
> people are 10x more sensetive than other platforms that have all the same issues. As a fellow current Mac user, I can understand why people, especially techies, are frustrated. Apple is well funded with high standards, making them a fashionable, luxury company that focuses on tech. They have a high price point for their products from which people expect high quality. More importantly, they control both the hardware and software stack. Unlike MS which has to cater to an infinite number of different hardware combinations from different vendors, Apple development teams just deal with a much smaller set of hardware products and components which theoretically should result in a more secure and stable product. As other HN users have pointed out, there are hints as to why this is happening: https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/21/14037686/apple-macbook-macos-focus-mobile-features-ios https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/21/14037686/apple-macbook-m... Apple is hollowing out the OSX/Mac OS team in favor of iOS. While they did limit High Sierra's scope, maybe they needed to push back the release date as well given that they gutted the Mac OS team? Regardless, the natives are getting restless.
tempthrowaway23 9y ago
Try notational velocity, or nvalt. I think you'll like it.
labster 9y ago
> I’m not sure how you say they are bloated Evidently you're not an iTunes user. But agreed on the fact that most Apple applications are pretty decent, with the exception of iTunes (bloated) and Pages (not bloated enough).

timdeneau 9y ago

The fix: stop the annual release cycle. There isn't a customer demand for it, and it’s a hassle for basically everyone. The issues in 10.12.x get fixed with 10.13, but 10.13 has the same amount of different issues, so it’s a wash. There’s no stable version anymore.

Joeri 9y ago
There’s no stable version anymore. I'm still running El Capitan, and not having any issues. Admittedly, I would have upgraded had my mac been eligible, because I'm just that sort of person, but there's nothing in Sierra or High Sierra that would make a meaningful difference to me.
reubenswartz 9y ago
The problem is the OS X annual release cycle is tied to the iOS annual release cycle, which is tied to the annual iPhone upgrade cycle, which is the core part of Apple's business. I wish there was a way to update a module to get whatever iOS-tied goodies Apple wants to offer, without overhauling the whole Mac OS.
- user5994461 9y ago
  They should sell a new generation, with nothing changed except the generation number. It has all the benefits of a new release without the hassle of changes.
breatheoften 9y ago
I disagree with this assertion 100%. They should keep making investment in and improvement to the yearly release process and build the knowledge necessary to do this with fewer errors...
- dcow 9y ago
  I found the scrum master (;
- ethbro 9y ago

user5994461 9y ago

>>> I know everyone called it after Jobs stepped out of the leadership chair, but is that really what's responsible for the decline? Can an apple insider comment here? It's simple. There is noone to whip developers when they ship major bugs. Quality goes down. Tyrannic leadership has its pros and cons. Try to imagine the internal tantrum after the company shipped an update and it crashed steve's iphone.

greedo 9y ago
So you worked at Apple during this timeframe, and had personal experience of this management style? Or you're just regurgitating what you saw in a Reddit post?

chapium 9y ago

Great support for terminal, low amounts of notifications, and good peripheral support are mostly why I enjoy OS X. Cloud based alternatives to their built in apps are vastly better.

deleted 9y ago

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brian-armstrong 9y ago

I actually think Jobs was responsible for this decline. If you read stories about the iPhone's development, you come across anecdotes that Apple tapped its top engineers to get the iPhone out the door. They worked long hours and weekends. Many lost spouses and relationships. It was extremely taxing. Again this is another anecdote, but it seems many of these engineers left around the release of the iPhone 4. The iPhone pipeline became a never-ending treadmill. The tax of losing much of the top talent across all engineering functions has slowly taken its toll on Apple since. I would not be surprised if the institutional knowledge of OSX has either left or been promoted up the ladder, leaving that team with new hires unfamiliar with its inner workings.

ethbro 9y ago
So, essentially the IBM problem of seeing how long brand momentum can keep a train moving?
- martin1975 9y ago
  ...and an epic example of the bigger they are the harder they fall in the making. Am typing this from Sierra OSX, btw, not cynical, just kind of bummed about the decline of OSX' quality.
  - ethbro 9y ago
    Some of this seems the inevitable fate of all large tech companies. Apple / Amazon / etc compensates highly to retain engineering talent -> overweight tech salaries -> engineers burning out / leaving for more interesting startup opportunities -> successful startups being reacquired Unfortunately, doesn't work so well for things like operating system codebases (NeXTSTEP acquisition aside).
    - brian-armstrong 9y ago
      I'm not sure the salaries have anything to do with it, and I vaguely recall Apple being middle of the pack there anyway. I think it's more about appealing to peoples' ambitions and desire to be recognized in this case. Imagine if a VP of Engineering addressed you directly to 'make a big impact' on the company's new secret product. Many engineers would want to impress this person, consequences be damned.

givinguflac 9y ago

Your comment is ridiculous. You're seriously taking a 4 post thread on apple support forums as the sky is falling? I use high Sierra daily on my 2013 mbp and have had 0 freezes.

themagician 9y ago
Of course it’s ridiculous. Has the number of reported problems with Macs increased over the last 10 years? Sure. Their market share has also increased like crazy. Today’s Mac doesn’t seem anymore unpolished than yesterdays. They just support a lot more software and devices than they ever used to. Get a Mac and use it the way you might have 10-15 years ago when they only supported a few dozen peripherals and 3rd party software titles and you probably won’t ever have a problem either. And don’t act like Macs never froze. The pinwheel/beachball of death has been a joke since OS X was first released. The biggest difference is back then you probably didn’t spend 12 hours a day in front of the machine. People have this ridiculous hindsight bias. Were some cars in the 1950s more reliable or better? Well, yeah. They had no electronics, no features other than a radio and you didn’t drive as much because there were fewer places to go. And they even seemed safer because there was less reporting on accidents when in reality you were like 7 times more likely to die in a car accident in the best car in the 50s than the cheap east piece of crap made today.
- chris_wot 9y ago
  Where did you get this from? > The biggest difference is back then you probably didn’t spend 12 hours a day in front of the machine.
  - themagician 9y ago
    Because screen usage, in all forms, was a lot less 10-15 years ago than it was today.
eeks 9y ago
YMMV certainly. As it does for all of us. What I can say however is that the overall perceived stability and performance of my Mac has declined since the good old days of Moutain Lion. My 2017 MBP often freezes upon resume, there is a palpable lag with the overall UI experience, and the OS experience is bloated with the App Store/iCloud/iTune Store shenanigans. For the last part, I know things have been adding up for a while, but I feel we are now reaching a tipping point. Enough of a tipping point that I now find myself relying more and more on my 2015 OpenBSD Thinkpad for work, music and movies although it has half the computing power of my Mac. The downside is the missing ecosystem, the lack of seamless synchronization with my other iThings, which keeps me one foot in. For the moment that is, because I am slowly exploring self-hosted alternatives. And once I am confident my self-hosted system can match Apple's for most of the required features, I'll say goodbye to a 15-year relationship for good. small edit It's a two-way street: my expectations are probably higher that what they used to be.

fatbird 9y ago

I feel like there's been a very noticeable decline in the quality of Apple software (and perhaps hardware, given issues like battery related shutdowns). Then I got a PC this summer so I could play a wider variety of games, and I find that Windows 10 has a whole host of issues like lost profiles that didn't exist before, and still some of the legendary video driver flakiness. Then I try to help my father with his Android phone, and find UX lunacy. It's not an Apple problem, it's an industry problem. Software should, generally, be more reliable now than it was 10 years ago: There's more experience building, designing, and using it, so some best practices should have floated to the top, at least. But in every segment I look, I find it's just generally worse. Everyone is shovelling worse software into the pipeline than before, and this includes industrial control systems with which I'm familiar, even aside from consumer software.

toyg 9y ago
The industry does not optimise for reliability, we optimise for speed of release. See the explosion of Rails, followed by the explosion of browser-based UI kits: simplicity of development is what people want, because all pressure comes from time-to-market. This is a natural consequence of dealing with a still-booming field. I don’t think there is a solution unless we start talking laws, and you can bet everyone here would hate that.

rimliu 9y ago

I am using built in Calendar app and iTunes wihout problems.

cs2818 9y ago

> Half the OS services break or emit warnings, because the date component considers December 2017 as an illegal month. This has been frustrating me as well. The console has become a constant stream of these errors, the out of bounds month one is particularly annoying.

ajmurmann 9y ago

I would consider myself somewhat of an Apple fan. Yet, I've never used any of their built-in apps except XCode. ~99% of what I do is in Chrome, iTerm and various JetBrains IDEs. I even avoid XCode and use AppCode when possible. It's always been that way for me. I don't use macOS because the apps are amazing, or the UI is great. I use it because it gives me a Unix based system that can reliably do things like connect to an external projector, that has good enough support and pretty , non-flashy hardware. That's Apple's value offering to me and many other developers I know.

lawkwok 9y ago

I think people just have short memories. This kind of "hard freezing" is nothing new. Apple is just much more in the spotlight than ever before. I personally had this issue with the 2010 MacBook Pro. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2420192 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2420192

duncan_bayne 9y ago

I've been programming professionally since 2000, working professionally on a range of operating systems: Windows, Linux, OSX and FreeBSD. I've dabbled with Solaris SPARC back in the day, and grew up with AmsDOS and MS DOS. I've never had the pleasure of using a Lisp Machine, but enjoy Common Lisp and have a (jealous / nostalgic) feeling for what a LispM must have been like. I mention all of this to give context to my post; I'm not writing from a position of OS ignorance. Anyhow: I'm continually surprised by the support for proprietary operating systems and hardware amongst IT professionals in general, and programmers specifically. I've been running a mix of Xubuntu devices (older ThinkPads for the children) and FreeBSD (for my personal laptop and the home NAS / Minecraft etc. server) and enjoying ease of deployment (simple shell scripts), low cost, high confugurability and especially high reliability in the case of FreeBSD. Windows users used to tell me that NIX was fine, but to get a job, they needed to program for Windows. That's probably still the case in many fields, but not in the Web dev circles I frequent. OSX users tell me that they want both performance, reliable hardware with out of the box support. These days a good XPS or X1 Carbon will eat most or all Mac systems alive, have (in my experience) better build quality, and work well with Linux out of the box. At the company where I work there is a growing number of users who are eschewing the latest turn of the Apple upgrade merry go round and are switching to Dell and Lenovo systems w/ Linux (and FreeBSD, in my case). Everything we need to do for our client still works, and we get more control, cheaper prices and an escape from the frankly "consumer" attitude Apple has these days (imagine - a pocket computer that won't let you install software of your choice!) So if you're in the market for something better and cheaper than Apple, I suggest you take a look at Linux (maybe Ubuntu to start with?), FreeBSD or one of the many alternatives. You might just like it :) Edited to add: Oh yeah, and don't forget the advantage of being able to continue using devices well past the point their manufacturers wish you'd buy something new (or force you to, in the case of Apple). I recently installed FreeBSD on a 16 year old laptop as an experiment, and it works fine. Slow, sure, but fast enough to run Emacs, Firefox, and Ruby. In a (frustrating) pinch I could probably do around half of my daily work on it.

lispm 9y ago
> a pocket computer that won't let you install software of your choice! My Ubuntu tablet did not let me either. It was a major disappointment. Anyway, the OS is no longer maintained and the best thing to do is to use it as a large clock. I'm now using a large iPad Pro, probably the best piece of personal computer hardware I've seen so far... 500GB SSD, fast ARM processor, 120Hz screen with fantastic colors and brightness, LTE, four speakers with excellent sound, ... I cannot program Lisp on it, but I could not do that on the Ubuntu tablet either and the Ubuntu UI/UX was lacking. I always liked SUN's hardware, incl. the SPARC machines. Solaris was nothing I would run on my machine. I never liked it. Not its UI, not the OS APIs, not the documentation, it's like food one does not like. > I recently installed FreeBSD on a 16 year old laptop as an experiment, and it works fine. My Macbook runs nicely a 4k screen with full scaling UI support. That's more important to me, than trying to use old hardware. I have old laptops around, but nothing is compelling to use. The new machines with fast/large SSDs, low-power CPUs, high-res screens, external 4k screens, are more interesting to me. 2018 again won't be the year of the Linux desktop - it is just not there for people who value UI/UX more than low-level configurability.

stephenr 9y ago

> Even die hard apple fans don't use their built in apps for calendar, music, mail, or really anything [Citation needed]