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I people tend to have a bit of rose tinted glasses on about Apple's software quality of yore. There have always been big stability issues with new features and

I people tend to have a bit of rose tinted glasses on about Apple's software quality of yore. There have always been big stability issues with new features and apps. And they've simply never been good at the UX for anything that involves a network connection or has to sync across multiple systems (besides Safari). The big difference is that more and more computing requires syncing and networking, which is their traditional weak point.

lapcat 4y ago
> There have always been big stability issues with new features and apps. But they got fixed. At times there were 2 full years between major Mac OS X releases. 2 years of bug fix updates. And that was when Apple only had 1 major operating system! Now with the relentless yearly schedule, there's never time to fix bugs before they start working on the next big thing and adding brand new bugs. The problems just keep piling up year after year. The software is now underwater in technical debt. Part of OS stability is simply not shipping new major versions too often. The new major versions are always buggier than the previous major version with many minor patches. Not to mention, Apple now pushes everyone to install the latest OS immediately. In the old days, you had to go out to the store and buy a new Mac OS X version on disc, so everyone wasn't upgrading to 10.N.0 on day one. Slower adoption means that fewer consumers have to suffer the early growing pains of new software.
ynx 4y ago
Been on macOS since 10.3. In general, the .1 or .2 patches were solid, and if one release seemed like a stinker the next one tick-tocked its way into stability/quality pretty reliably, and staying on N-1 version while N was out was a pretty good choice if you wanted to keep your setup as-is without falling TOO far behind. Also, Safari was really bad, early on. It was rendered unusable for me when a runaway bookmark sync problem with iCloud turned the default set of bookmarks into 30+ thousand copies.
- ben7799 4y ago
  You're thinking of recent Apple. You have to consider the first half of Apple's lifetime too. Especially in the second half of the 1990s Apple was in very very tough shape due to poor software and uncompetitive hardware. Their fans wouldn't admit it but the company definitely knew what they were up against. There's pretty much been no point 2000-present where Apple quality has been worse than it was Pre-2000, and their prices have never been more competitive either.

lapcat 4y ago

> There have always been big stability issues with new features and apps. But they got fixed. At times there were 2 full years between major Mac OS X releases. 2 years of bug fix updates. And that was when Apple only had 1 major operating system! Now with the relentless yearly schedule, there's never time to fix bugs before they start working on the next big thing and adding brand new bugs. The problems just keep piling up year after year. The software is now underwater in technical debt. Part of OS stability is simply not shipping new major versions too often. The new major versions are always buggier than the previous major version with many minor patches. Not to mention, Apple now pushes everyone to install the latest OS immediately. In the old days, you had to go out to the store and buy a new Mac OS X version on disc, so everyone wasn't upgrading to 10.N.0 on day one. Slower adoption means that fewer consumers have to suffer the early growing pains of new software.

ynx 4y ago

Been on macOS since 10.3. In general, the .1 or .2 patches were solid, and if one release seemed like a stinker the next one tick-tocked its way into stability/quality pretty reliably, and staying on N-1 version while N was out was a pretty good choice if you wanted to keep your setup as-is without falling TOO far behind. Also, Safari was really bad, early on. It was rendered unusable for me when a runaway bookmark sync problem with iCloud turned the default set of bookmarks into 30+ thousand copies.

ben7799 4y ago
You're thinking of recent Apple. You have to consider the first half of Apple's lifetime too. Especially in the second half of the 1990s Apple was in very very tough shape due to poor software and uncompetitive hardware. Their fans wouldn't admit it but the company definitely knew what they were up against. There's pretty much been no point 2000-present where Apple quality has been worse than it was Pre-2000, and their prices have never been more competitive either.