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A story an old engineer at Apple told me: When working on MacOS 8.x (not sure which point release), they surveyed users, and their number one complaint was boo

A story an old engineer at Apple told me: When working on MacOS 8.x (not sure which point release), they surveyed users, and their number one complaint was boot time. It took long for the system to boot (around 45s on average at the time). They looked into it but also asked the question, why do people care about boot times at all? At this point, the systems were capable of sleeping, so reboots should be rare. They found that people were rebooting because of instability, not just once a day or once a week. While they did improve the boot times, they put more effort into making the OS more stable. When the new release shipped, people stopped complaining about boot time, but not because it was vastly improved, instead because they were doing it less often. The moral of the story is to make sure you understand both what your customers are asking for and why your customers are asking for it.

tmpz22 3y ago
> The moral of the story is to make sure you understand both what your customers are asking for and why your customers are asking for it. One reason engineers enjoy questioning the premise of a difficult feature is to avoid the work entirely. The problem with this is not that engineers are lazy its that the success metrics after the goal posts are moved can be futzed in a way that ultimately is detrimental to users. Did Apple really improve boot times and OS instabilities to a complete resolution or did an aspiring PM or Lead achieve the bare minimum of the goal to claim victory internally?
otikik 3y ago
Trust people when they report there's a problem, but don't trust them with the solution. Otherwise we would get faster horses instead of cars.
- biogene 3y ago
  That's a nice way to put it!
- munificent 3y ago
  If I remember right, in "The Inmates are Running the Asylum", Alan Cooper says there are two golden rules: * The user is always right. * The user is not always right. And then the explains the first point is that the user should be treated as the authority on what their problem is. You can't just tell them they're "doing it wrong" or rationalize away their pain. The second point is that users are not designers and shouldn't have to be. They'll often come up with ideas for solutions, but you shouldn't take those as what needs to be done.
  - Pannoniae 3y ago
    The first point is really common in programming. If you ask a "stupid" question, you don't get an answer like "here's how to do it, but by the way, you could also do this instead" but just flame you with "you shouldn't have been doing X". Good example is FTP. Obviously, for anything requiring any kind of security, use SFTP. But I kid you not, almost all FTP-related questions on the internet have answers like "are you still using that INSECURE protocol in 2020??" without being constructive at all. Even if it's just some random hobby project. Or a legacy system they can't change. Doesn't matter, it's more important to score points from virtue-signaling than actually helping the poster.
    - reaperducer 3y ago
      Even if it's just some random hobby project. Or a legacy system they can't change. Or a modern system. My brand new image scanner only transfer files wirelessly via HTTP or FTP. People in places like HN freak out with "Oh noes! Teh securities!" But its wireless connection is as a wifi access point that only allows one client to connect, and only stays active for a few minutes. Not every computer is inside NORAD.
  - deanCommie 3y ago
    Bill Hader puts it this way for writers/artists/creatives, and I think it applies perfectly here too: "When people tell you that there is a problem, they're always right. When they tell you how to fix it, they're always wrong."
- eviks 3y ago
  We'd also get intergalactic ships
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
jeffbee 3y ago
That certainly sounds about right. I definitely lost more time to the fact that a Quadra would freeze with high probability during a scan than I ever lost to intentional reboots.
pvg 3y ago
Apple's customers had been screaming for better stability for years and Apple repeatedly tried and failed to deliver a meaningful solution. Even MacOS 8 introduced very limited memory protection that didn't help much in most practical cases. In context, it's really a story about an organization's capacity and will to rationalize - this very nearly killed Apple as a business.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- musicale 3y ago
  > In context, it's really a story about an organization's capacity and will to rationalize - this very nearly killed Apple as a business What damaged Apple's Mac business in the 1990s might been due to tunnel vision and self-delusion, but the driving issue was a loss of obvious differentiation vs. cheaper PCs running Windows. They were all beige boxes with a serviceable GUI that ran the same software, and customers didn't see the value in paying Apple's premium prices. With the return of Steve Jobs, Apple resolved the PC differentiation issue by refocusing on design in both hardware (iMac) and software (OS X); Apple also sidestepped Windows dominance by focusing on non-PC devices such as the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.
Someone 3y ago
> When working on MacOS 8.x (not sure which point release), they surveyed users […] They found that people were rebooting because of instability, not just once a day or once a week. That didn’t require a survey. The OS didn’t have memory protection and typically got patched at startup by ten or so different extensions from both Apple and numerous third parties. The rules for patching were unclear, to say the least (1), so an extension might, for example, have a code path where it allocated memory inside a patch to a system call that might be moving memory around (a no-no, as the memory manager wasn’t reentrant) And that had to run code that typically was compiled with a C compiler of the time, with very, very limited tools to prevent out of bounds memory writes.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
Mac OS X took time to shut down though. When a friend first showed my wife Mac OS X and went to shut it down she frowned, "That's something I liked about the Mac, it would shut down instantly." "You'll have to find something else to like about Mac OS," he said.
- rob74 3y ago
  Well, most of the time it's not like you have to sit beside your (desktop) computer and wait until it has finished shutting down, so I guess that's less of an issue than the startup time...
ninkendo 3y ago
It's an immutable law of the universe that consumer computers will always take at least 30-45 seconds to boot. If yours is faster, wait a few years... the developers will allow enough regressions to slip in that it'll go back up again.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Every time I’ve had a computer that would boot faster than that, it seems I’d be stuck with a monitor that would take 30 seconds to come on and decide to display something.
  - interpol_p 3y ago
    Probably because your monitor’s OS is booting
    - bombcar 3y ago
      I should start thingsthathaveanOSandshouldnt.net or something.
  - jimmaswell 3y ago
    My Kaypro 1 boots into CP/M right away if the screen is already warmed up.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  The hack around this would be to use your smartphone as your computer. Connect a keyboard to it. Do heavy stuff in the cloud.
  - noduerme 3y ago
    Or run the 68k mac OS 9 in emulation. It's fun to watch it boot up like lightning.
musicale 3y ago
By the time Mac OS 8.0 was released in 1997, Macs all had MMUs and Apple was already working on merging Mac OS and NeXTSTEP; the first iteration was released in 1998 as Rhapsody.

tmpz22 3y ago

> The moral of the story is to make sure you understand both what your customers are asking for and why your customers are asking for it. One reason engineers enjoy questioning the premise of a difficult feature is to avoid the work entirely. The problem with this is not that engineers are lazy its that the success metrics after the goal posts are moved can be futzed in a way that ultimately is detrimental to users. Did Apple really improve boot times and OS instabilities to a complete resolution or did an aspiring PM or Lead achieve the bare minimum of the goal to claim victory internally?

otikik 3y ago

Trust people when they report there's a problem, but don't trust them with the solution. Otherwise we would get faster horses instead of cars.

biogene 3y ago
That's a nice way to put it!
munificent 3y ago
If I remember right, in "The Inmates are Running the Asylum", Alan Cooper says there are two golden rules: * The user is always right. * The user is not always right. And then the explains the first point is that the user should be treated as the authority on what their problem is. You can't just tell them they're "doing it wrong" or rationalize away their pain. The second point is that users are not designers and shouldn't have to be. They'll often come up with ideas for solutions, but you shouldn't take those as what needs to be done.
- Pannoniae 3y ago
  The first point is really common in programming. If you ask a "stupid" question, you don't get an answer like "here's how to do it, but by the way, you could also do this instead" but just flame you with "you shouldn't have been doing X". Good example is FTP. Obviously, for anything requiring any kind of security, use SFTP. But I kid you not, almost all FTP-related questions on the internet have answers like "are you still using that INSECURE protocol in 2020??" without being constructive at all. Even if it's just some random hobby project. Or a legacy system they can't change. Doesn't matter, it's more important to score points from virtue-signaling than actually helping the poster.
  - reaperducer 3y ago
    Even if it's just some random hobby project. Or a legacy system they can't change. Or a modern system. My brand new image scanner only transfer files wirelessly via HTTP or FTP. People in places like HN freak out with "Oh noes! Teh securities!" But its wireless connection is as a wifi access point that only allows one client to connect, and only stays active for a few minutes. Not every computer is inside NORAD.
- deanCommie 3y ago
  Bill Hader puts it this way for writers/artists/creatives, and I think it applies perfectly here too: "When people tell you that there is a problem, they're always right. When they tell you how to fix it, they're always wrong."
eviks 3y ago
We'd also get intergalactic ships
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

jeffbee 3y ago

That certainly sounds about right. I definitely lost more time to the fact that a Quadra would freeze with high probability during a scan than I ever lost to intentional reboots.

pvg 3y ago

Apple's customers had been screaming for better stability for years and Apple repeatedly tried and failed to deliver a meaningful solution. Even MacOS 8 introduced very limited memory protection that didn't help much in most practical cases. In context, it's really a story about an organization's capacity and will to rationalize - this very nearly killed Apple as a business.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
musicale 3y ago
> In context, it's really a story about an organization's capacity and will to rationalize - this very nearly killed Apple as a business What damaged Apple's Mac business in the 1990s might been due to tunnel vision and self-delusion, but the driving issue was a loss of obvious differentiation vs. cheaper PCs running Windows. They were all beige boxes with a serviceable GUI that ran the same software, and customers didn't see the value in paying Apple's premium prices. With the return of Steve Jobs, Apple resolved the PC differentiation issue by refocusing on design in both hardware (iMac) and software (OS X); Apple also sidestepped Windows dominance by focusing on non-PC devices such as the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.

Someone 3y ago

> When working on MacOS 8.x (not sure which point release), they surveyed users […] They found that people were rebooting because of instability, not just once a day or once a week. That didn’t require a survey. The OS didn’t have memory protection and typically got patched at startup by ten or so different extensions from both Apple and numerous third parties. The rules for patching were unclear, to say the least (1), so an extension might, for example, have a code path where it allocated memory inside a patch to a system call that might be moving memory around (a no-no, as the memory manager wasn’t reentrant) And that had to run code that typically was compiled with a C compiler of the time, with very, very limited tools to prevent out of bounds memory writes.

JKCalhoun 3y ago

Mac OS X took time to shut down though. When a friend first showed my wife Mac OS X and went to shut it down she frowned, "That's something I liked about the Mac, it would shut down instantly." "You'll have to find something else to like about Mac OS," he said.

rob74 3y ago
Well, most of the time it's not like you have to sit beside your (desktop) computer and wait until it has finished shutting down, so I guess that's less of an issue than the startup time...

ninkendo 3y ago

It's an immutable law of the universe that consumer computers will always take at least 30-45 seconds to boot. If yours is faster, wait a few years... the developers will allow enough regressions to slip in that it'll go back up again.

bombcar 3y ago
Every time I’ve had a computer that would boot faster than that, it seems I’d be stuck with a monitor that would take 30 seconds to come on and decide to display something.
- interpol_p 3y ago
  Probably because your monitor’s OS is booting
  - bombcar 3y ago
    I should start thingsthathaveanOSandshouldnt.net or something.
- jimmaswell 3y ago
  My Kaypro 1 boots into CP/M right away if the screen is already warmed up.
quickthrower2 3y ago
The hack around this would be to use your smartphone as your computer. Connect a keyboard to it. Do heavy stuff in the cloud.
- noduerme 3y ago
  Or run the 68k mac OS 9 in emulation. It's fun to watch it boot up like lightning.

musicale 3y ago

By the time Mac OS 8.0 was released in 1997, Macs all had MMUs and Apple was already working on merging Mac OS and NeXTSTEP; the first iteration was released in 1998 as Rhapsody.