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I've been using all Apple products for almost 10 years, still do, but I've almost lost faith in Apple's ability to engineer reliable software. It's gotten reall

I've been using all Apple products for almost 10 years, still do, but I've almost lost faith in Apple's ability to engineer reliable software. It's gotten really bad lately. It's sad, because I really like their whole infrastructure with iCloud and sync between devices. I don't know what happened, maybe they just have too many products and operating systems to support.

smt88 9y ago
They have literally hundreds of billions of dollars in cash to spend on supporting their products. "Too much to handle" can't explain it. It must be cultural.
- dawnerd 9y ago
  Very likely it’s design over function and new features over stability. They need to skip adding whatever their latest “innovation” is for a year and nail down their current systems. These yearly cycles are not giving the teams enough time to qa and bugfix.
jcoffland 9y ago
If you ever look under the covers at how Apple products are programmed you will know why. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft but if you compare, for example, the programming documentation on MSDN to Apple, it's night and day. Microsoft has clearly documented 95% of their APIs and for the most part, they are stable. Apple's APIs change constantly and are poorly documented. The documentation they do have is incomplete and full of dead links. How can you write good software on top of this?
- millstone 9y ago
  I agree that Microsoft's documentation is stellar for their Windows APIs. Apple's is noticeably worse. However Microsoft's APIs are not "more stable" than Apple's - in fact the Microsoft APIs change constantly. See Win32 -> MFC -> WinForms -> Silverlight -> WPF -> UWP -> WinRT... Or for languages, maybe you want to use or C++/CLI or C++/WinRT or C# or VB.NET or F# or JavaScript or the language they'll introduce next week. The treadmill is real and exhausting; what is a modern Windows app anyways? For comparison Apple wants you to write Mac or iOS apps in Swift, or in Objective-C if you can't use Swift.
  - jcoffland 9y ago
    Microsoft's APIs are added to constantly. Apple continually breaks backwards compatibility.
    - steeleduncan 9y ago
      Microsoft abandon the entire API, and replace it with something new every couple of years (the grandparent comment has a good list). This has the benefit that once software does work it should continue working more or less indefinitely. Apple have mutated the same API over many years, however Xcode's default settings drift, deprecations are frequent, and the new macOS is rarely backward compatible with a large application. This means that each summer when the new Xcode/macOS combination is released you have to spend some time getting up and running again. I doubt that the ideal situation of a continually developed API with perfect backwards compatibility exists. In that case the getting your code building and running with the new Xcode/macOS each summer is likely less time consuming than rewriting against a new API every 5/10 years. If you are maintaining well established code, then the opposite is true.
      - pas 9y ago
        You can still install .NET 1.1 and run shit. I recently installed something that was probably first targeted Windows 98. The APIs listed by GP are deprecated and the platforms are not shipped/enabled by default, but that's worlds apart from intentionally breaking them (with almost no communication). Of course, I still prefer a good package manager and direct access to the source on GitHub/GitSomewhere, but MSDN is very well maintained.
    - blub 9y ago
      MS has backwards compatibility for existing software, but it's a gamble to start a new project using MS tech, you don't know what they will cancel, rename or invent next year. Apple doesn't have backwards compatibility for existing software and stuff breaks regularly from version to version. However, one can count on Objective-C to pretty much work (although Swift is still work in progress). So both suck, basically.
- danieldk 9y ago
  When it comes to macOS, it seems that it simply stoped caring. Especially when it comes to features for their traditional UNIXy user base. Some examples: - It took them years to bring back features to Pages (e.g. linked text boxes). - Keynote now crashes on presentations that worked with older versions of Keynote (e.g. presentations converted with PDFToKeyNote). - XQuartz still doesn't permit native resolution in windows (meaning HiDPI-capable Gtk3+ are scaled up and blurry). - Location services steals focus from XQuartz, making X11 applications unusable. - macOS regularly crashes on my MacBook Pro with two external displays when the display configuration changes (e.g. one display is turned off)). - I regularly run into a bug where my MacBook Pro does not charge when the adapter is plugged in (even though the status icon shows the charging status). Plugging out and in again fixes this. - Many basic UNIX utilities are buggy and never updated or fixed. E.g. take grep: $ echo "1234 1234 1234" | egrep -o '^....' 1234 123 4 12 - macOS provides no trivial way to semi-automatically install drivers for Bonjour printers anymore if they support Postscript. Pretty annoying if you need scanner functionality. - Preview.app/PDF kit have become pretty much useless. E.g. form filling for a lot of work forms does not work correctly any more (it used to work find pre-10.12 or 10.11). And since 10.13 Preview.app crashes all the time while regenerating a PDF document using LaTeX (a use-case that worked fine before), sometimes when zooming. Moreover, going through a slide deck with the arrow keys often makes weird jumps through the slides. ...and I could go on for a while. macOS used to be so far ahead of the curve on the UNIX desktop (and perhaps the desktop in general) that even with all the current deficiencies, macOS is still a reasonable desktop. But it is clear that macOS is now beyond its high point. And if Apple does not lose their 'iOS is the future of the desktop'-blinders, things will only go further downhill. What makes this even more sour is that Mac prices have gone up a quite a bit. A reasonable MacBook (and not the near-EOL Air) with more than one port and a 256GB SSD starts at 1749 Euro. When I started using a Mac as a student ten years ago, an up-to-date Mac Mini was 500 Euro and a reasonable specced (and upgradable) MacBook was ~1000 Euro. I think the last Mac Pro and the iMac Pro show the disconnect with their traditional user base. People do not want overpriced works of art. They want a stable macOS. They want an upgradable tower Mac Pro, they want a memory-accessible Mac Mini, they want a MacBook Pro that stops optimizing for thinness but has a larger battery, MagSafe, and perhaps one or two USB 3.0 ports during the transition period.
  - 9y ago
- kalleboo 9y ago
  I could go on and on about how bad Apple's developer documentation is. So much stuff is missing an overview document or sample project, so you have documentation on the 10 classes but not how they fit together. Sample code that does exist won't compile on the latest Xcode 1/4 times, especially if it's Swift. I've found code that won't compile even in the Swift language documentation. There's almost never any documentation what can go wrong and why. These days I prefer Stack Overflow answers to Apple's own documentation since it's more up-to-date
mrweasel 9y ago
Apple have been getting worse at producing high quality software, in my opinion. Still Apple delivers higher quality stuff then anyone else, so you don't really have anywhere to go. I recently got an AppleTV, allowing my to cancel my TV via fiber delivered by my ISP. While I have seen a little weirdness from the AppleTV, is not even close to leave of stupidity seen in the tv-box delivered by my ISP. Apple would pretty much have to send a guy to my house and jam a screwdriver into the AppleTV to hit the low level of quality found in other TV boxes.
- hedora 9y ago
  From what I’ve heard of Apple TV, it does not compare favorably to a $35 Roku stick. Point taken about cable tv boxes though. The cable company keeps offering to pay me to put one in my house. I fell for that once. Never again. (It is not worth the closet space or hassle of returning the equipment after a few years.)
  - pfranz 9y ago
    Any specifics? I had an older Roku and it was incredibly underpowered, but it did work. Is an AppleTV 6x better? Probably not, but its worked out very well for my needs. With the Roku I wished for a single store to buy/rent tv film I wasn't streaming (I think I mostly used Amazon, but I never have been a fan of their app).
flafla2 9y ago
A personal anecdote: when upgrading my High Sierra to the latest version (security fix to the passwordless root fiasco) macOS automatically made an APFS snapshot of my computer in case something went wrong. This is fine, except the snapshot was never removed. There was absolutely no documentation on this all happening, let alone any UI indicating it (even in Disk Utility!!!). All I saw initially was ~80GB of space used by mysterious “system files” (according to the system profiler). Except they weren’t files at all, it was all hidden in the file system. So there was literally no way to diagnose this issue without using poorly documented Apple-proprietary command line utilities. Even fdisk didn’t reveal the issue! If I, a computer science student, have to spend hours trawling forums to solve what should be a trivial issue, then I don’t know how the hell Apple expects the lowest common denominator to cope.
- newman314 9y ago
  Can you share what you did to remove the snapshot? This could explain why I suddenly saw a bunch of storage show up as used.
  - flafla2 9y ago
    To identify snapshots on your machine: $ sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots / To “thin” (basically force an auto delete) local snapshots: $ sudo tmutil thinLocalSnapshots / 10000000000 4 ... where the big number is the size in bytes you want to delete. To delete specific snapshots (identified with the first command): $ sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots [date] ... where [date] is the timestamp of the snapshot shown in listlocalsnapshots Source: man tmutil, and [1] [1] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/solution-reclaim-storage-back-from-system.2073174/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/solution-reclaim-storag...

smt88 9y ago

They have literally hundreds of billions of dollars in cash to spend on supporting their products. "Too much to handle" can't explain it. It must be cultural.

dawnerd 9y ago
Very likely it’s design over function and new features over stability. They need to skip adding whatever their latest “innovation” is for a year and nail down their current systems. These yearly cycles are not giving the teams enough time to qa and bugfix.

jcoffland 9y ago

If you ever look under the covers at how Apple products are programmed you will know why. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft but if you compare, for example, the programming documentation on MSDN to Apple, it's night and day. Microsoft has clearly documented 95% of their APIs and for the most part, they are stable. Apple's APIs change constantly and are poorly documented. The documentation they do have is incomplete and full of dead links. How can you write good software on top of this?

millstone 9y ago
I agree that Microsoft's documentation is stellar for their Windows APIs. Apple's is noticeably worse. However Microsoft's APIs are not "more stable" than Apple's - in fact the Microsoft APIs change constantly. See Win32 -> MFC -> WinForms -> Silverlight -> WPF -> UWP -> WinRT... Or for languages, maybe you want to use or C++/CLI or C++/WinRT or C# or VB.NET or F# or JavaScript or the language they'll introduce next week. The treadmill is real and exhausting; what is a modern Windows app anyways? For comparison Apple wants you to write Mac or iOS apps in Swift, or in Objective-C if you can't use Swift.
- jcoffland 9y ago
  Microsoft's APIs are added to constantly. Apple continually breaks backwards compatibility.
  - steeleduncan 9y ago
    Microsoft abandon the entire API, and replace it with something new every couple of years (the grandparent comment has a good list). This has the benefit that once software does work it should continue working more or less indefinitely. Apple have mutated the same API over many years, however Xcode's default settings drift, deprecations are frequent, and the new macOS is rarely backward compatible with a large application. This means that each summer when the new Xcode/macOS combination is released you have to spend some time getting up and running again. I doubt that the ideal situation of a continually developed API with perfect backwards compatibility exists. In that case the getting your code building and running with the new Xcode/macOS each summer is likely less time consuming than rewriting against a new API every 5/10 years. If you are maintaining well established code, then the opposite is true.
    - pas 9y ago
      You can still install .NET 1.1 and run shit. I recently installed something that was probably first targeted Windows 98. The APIs listed by GP are deprecated and the platforms are not shipped/enabled by default, but that's worlds apart from intentionally breaking them (with almost no communication). Of course, I still prefer a good package manager and direct access to the source on GitHub/GitSomewhere, but MSDN is very well maintained.
  - blub 9y ago
    MS has backwards compatibility for existing software, but it's a gamble to start a new project using MS tech, you don't know what they will cancel, rename or invent next year. Apple doesn't have backwards compatibility for existing software and stuff breaks regularly from version to version. However, one can count on Objective-C to pretty much work (although Swift is still work in progress). So both suck, basically.
danieldk 9y ago
When it comes to macOS, it seems that it simply stoped caring. Especially when it comes to features for their traditional UNIXy user base. Some examples: - It took them years to bring back features to Pages (e.g. linked text boxes). - Keynote now crashes on presentations that worked with older versions of Keynote (e.g. presentations converted with PDFToKeyNote). - XQuartz still doesn't permit native resolution in windows (meaning HiDPI-capable Gtk3+ are scaled up and blurry). - Location services steals focus from XQuartz, making X11 applications unusable. - macOS regularly crashes on my MacBook Pro with two external displays when the display configuration changes (e.g. one display is turned off)). - I regularly run into a bug where my MacBook Pro does not charge when the adapter is plugged in (even though the status icon shows the charging status). Plugging out and in again fixes this. - Many basic UNIX utilities are buggy and never updated or fixed. E.g. take grep: $ echo "1234 1234 1234" | egrep -o '^....' 1234 123 4 12 - macOS provides no trivial way to semi-automatically install drivers for Bonjour printers anymore if they support Postscript. Pretty annoying if you need scanner functionality. - Preview.app/PDF kit have become pretty much useless. E.g. form filling for a lot of work forms does not work correctly any more (it used to work find pre-10.12 or 10.11). And since 10.13 Preview.app crashes all the time while regenerating a PDF document using LaTeX (a use-case that worked fine before), sometimes when zooming. Moreover, going through a slide deck with the arrow keys often makes weird jumps through the slides. ...and I could go on for a while. macOS used to be so far ahead of the curve on the UNIX desktop (and perhaps the desktop in general) that even with all the current deficiencies, macOS is still a reasonable desktop. But it is clear that macOS is now beyond its high point. And if Apple does not lose their 'iOS is the future of the desktop'-blinders, things will only go further downhill. What makes this even more sour is that Mac prices have gone up a quite a bit. A reasonable MacBook (and not the near-EOL Air) with more than one port and a 256GB SSD starts at 1749 Euro. When I started using a Mac as a student ten years ago, an up-to-date Mac Mini was 500 Euro and a reasonable specced (and upgradable) MacBook was ~1000 Euro. I think the last Mac Pro and the iMac Pro show the disconnect with their traditional user base. People do not want overpriced works of art. They want a stable macOS. They want an upgradable tower Mac Pro, they want a memory-accessible Mac Mini, they want a MacBook Pro that stops optimizing for thinness but has a larger battery, MagSafe, and perhaps one or two USB 3.0 ports during the transition period.
- 9y ago
kalleboo 9y ago
I could go on and on about how bad Apple's developer documentation is. So much stuff is missing an overview document or sample project, so you have documentation on the 10 classes but not how they fit together. Sample code that does exist won't compile on the latest Xcode 1/4 times, especially if it's Swift. I've found code that won't compile even in the Swift language documentation. There's almost never any documentation what can go wrong and why. These days I prefer Stack Overflow answers to Apple's own documentation since it's more up-to-date

mrweasel 9y ago

Apple have been getting worse at producing high quality software, in my opinion. Still Apple delivers higher quality stuff then anyone else, so you don't really have anywhere to go. I recently got an AppleTV, allowing my to cancel my TV via fiber delivered by my ISP. While I have seen a little weirdness from the AppleTV, is not even close to leave of stupidity seen in the tv-box delivered by my ISP. Apple would pretty much have to send a guy to my house and jam a screwdriver into the AppleTV to hit the low level of quality found in other TV boxes.

hedora 9y ago
From what I’ve heard of Apple TV, it does not compare favorably to a $35 Roku stick. Point taken about cable tv boxes though. The cable company keeps offering to pay me to put one in my house. I fell for that once. Never again. (It is not worth the closet space or hassle of returning the equipment after a few years.)
- pfranz 9y ago
  Any specifics? I had an older Roku and it was incredibly underpowered, but it did work. Is an AppleTV 6x better? Probably not, but its worked out very well for my needs. With the Roku I wished for a single store to buy/rent tv film I wasn't streaming (I think I mostly used Amazon, but I never have been a fan of their app).

flafla2 9y ago

A personal anecdote: when upgrading my High Sierra to the latest version (security fix to the passwordless root fiasco) macOS automatically made an APFS snapshot of my computer in case something went wrong. This is fine, except the snapshot was never removed. There was absolutely no documentation on this all happening, let alone any UI indicating it (even in Disk Utility!!!). All I saw initially was ~80GB of space used by mysterious “system files” (according to the system profiler). Except they weren’t files at all, it was all hidden in the file system. So there was literally no way to diagnose this issue without using poorly documented Apple-proprietary command line utilities. Even fdisk didn’t reveal the issue! If I, a computer science student, have to spend hours trawling forums to solve what should be a trivial issue, then I don’t know how the hell Apple expects the lowest common denominator to cope.

newman314 9y ago
Can you share what you did to remove the snapshot? This could explain why I suddenly saw a bunch of storage show up as used.
- flafla2 9y ago
  To identify snapshots on your machine: $ sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots / To “thin” (basically force an auto delete) local snapshots: $ sudo tmutil thinLocalSnapshots / 10000000000 4 ... where the big number is the size in bytes you want to delete. To delete specific snapshots (identified with the first command): $ sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots [date] ... where [date] is the timestamp of the snapshot shown in listlocalsnapshots Source: man tmutil, and [1] [1] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/solution-reclaim-storage-back-from-system.2073174/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/solution-reclaim-storag...