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Apple have never learnt how to build software sustainably. They let the bugs, misfeatures, and tech debt pile up over time. They addressed this once with a huge

Apple have never learnt how to build software sustainably. They let the bugs, misfeatures, and tech debt pile up over time. They addressed this once with a huge “0 new features” iteration with Snow Leopard to catch up on the worst of it, but never resolved the root of the problem, so it started to build up again. Now it seems like they don’t care enough about software quality to even do that. They need somebody else in charge of software who will actually change the way they do things.

kossTKR 2y ago
Amen to that. Please for the love of all things remember your future defining ‘human design’ with brilliant UX in early macos and hypercard. Now you have unlimited money and don’t give a single f? Do better please! Where is the passion, catering to pro’s, any idealism? Hardware is great but software gets worse and worse..
- ramesh31 2y ago
  >Where is the passion, catering to pro’s, any idealism? It died 14 years ago.
  - JKCalhoun 2y ago
    I know what you're saying, but the Cult of Jobs had its downsides too. I think Apple started to die with the iPod and got worse the more successful it became. Then again, maybe I always prefer the underdog.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      You do remember the crash prone classic MacOS, the ridiculous Performa line, the Copland disaster and that Apple was almost bankrupt? Also the classic MacOS where you (the user) had to pre allocate memory per application and where holding down the mouse button stopped any application from running in the background.
      - veidr 2y ago
        Apple basically _did_ die, after Performa/Copland (and let's not forget Open Transport!!) The resuscitation was truly miraculous.
        scarface_74 2y ago
        And QuickDraw GX and another quickly abandoned technology that came with System 7 Pro.
        JKCalhoun 2y ago
        When I started at Apple it was to work on Quickdraw GX. It was very cool tech. Closer to what Apple would get from NeXT years later. My guess is as to why it failed (and this was also the common sentiment at the time) — it was an optional install and not a default. It's hard to imagine anyone writing an app around a component (extension) that few people had in the OS.
        scarface_74 2y ago
        What a throwback. And I just thought about the other abandoned tech that came with System 7.1 Pro - PowerTalk.
      - officeplant 2y ago
        It's wild but my own issue free MacOS era was OS9 on my iBook G3 clamshell. Had to replace a harddrive (bounced down a stairwell, but held together) and upgraded the ram, but other than that fine experience. My next Mac was a 2008 Macbook Pro (non-unibody) that had backlight issues out of the box, failed display cable two years in, and then the GPU failed. (Nvidia plague era, and Steve Jobs silence plague era of shit-ass fan curves) To this day I still refuse to trust Apple's fan curves and install fan control software. Especially the M1 iMac with the cut down graphics that they only gave one fan and a smaller heatsink. Watched it break 100C regularly. The m1/m2 mac mini might be the only one I've never had issues with the stock fan curves so far, but I still bump them up anyway for peace of mind. I don't see a reason to let an SoC hit 98C even if its rated to do so.
mulletbum 2y ago
They aren't even doing hardware well in some cases, their bread and butter. Bluetooth has been broken on both editions of their Pro Max Phone (15 & 16). It cuts out and has all kinds of weird issues, but no fix has come for years now. This was why I always paid a premium for their phones, they did hardware and software well. Not anymore, their so focus has been on their processors.
- achierius 2y ago
  What makes you think that's not a software problem too?
- no_wizard 2y ago
  Are you using any Bluetooth headsets designed for their special sync protocol? I noticed no issues with any certified headsets but any of my nice Bluetooth headsets from a few years ago that don’t leverage the newer protocol instead only standard Bluetooth have issues syncing and such. This tends to be an Apple issue. They introduce proprietary thing and eventually unless your hardware supports said thing it will have a degraded experience in some way
  - codr7 2y ago
    We use to have a saying for this behavior, embrace and extend something...
    - no_wizard 2y ago
      I think the difference is intentional vs unintentional. Apple has the MFI program for these things. You can get certified and tested in relatively short order. They also aren’t removing the original protocol support or anything like that. What I will say is that I think they don’t devote as much QA resources to getting it right as they do their own protocols, hence the difference. With Microsoft it was very different. They wanted to subsume or shutdown whatever they targeted with EEE
  - xxpor 2y ago
    Headsets have been fine IME, but the killer is car bluetooth. Can't swap that out easily.
roydivision 2y ago
I have no idea how Apple prioritise their bug fixing, but it really looks to me like bugs only get fixed when adding new features, if at all. This is such a trivial big win as well, create a software dev team to focus on the outstanding bugs. Head it with one or two senior developers, make it the first step in onboarding new developers. What a great way to learn, and make a difference. This is not rocket surgery, and Apple really do have a bad reputation here, even with the muggles.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > This is such a trivial big win as well, create a software dev team to focus on the outstanding bugs. Head it with one or two senior developers, make it the first step in onboarding new developers. What a great way to learn, and make a difference. Sounds nice on paper. In practice, the seniors assigned to the team will see it as a career dead-end (because fixing bugs doesn't get management attention, but flashy new features do), juniors lack the experience to avoid edge cases or to navigate the project structure, and the seniors/intermediates on the "actual" development team don't have time to waste on reviewing and aiding code of juniors and bugfixes because then they have ownership over that...
  - codr7 2y ago
    Sounds more like process problems than strategy problems to me.
lapcat 2y ago
> They addressed this once with a huge “0 new features” iteration with Snow Leopard to catch up on the worst of it This is a myth, though a myth created by Apple itself and Bertrand Serlet's tongue-in-cheek keynote slide. Snow Leopard actually had a number of new features: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard#New_or_changed_features https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard#New_or_c... Moreover, Mac OS X 10.6.0 was much buggier than its immediately predecessor Mac OS X 10.5.8. There were some really bad bugs in those early Snow Leopard releases. The Snow Leopard that everyone remembers and loves was not version 10.6.0 but rather version 10.6.8 v1.1, which was released almost two years after 10.6.0. Major OS updates invariably introduce more bugs than they fix. That's an iron law of software development. What Apple used to do, which they no longer do, is spend a long amount of time just fixing bugs in minor updates to the operating system. Now, unfortunately, Apple is on a rigid yearly OS update schedule. Worse, Apple doesn't just fix bugs between those yearly updates; instead they keep introducing new features even in the "minor" updates. So we never get a "stable" version. It's constant change for the sake of change.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  Yeah it seems like there’s a serious fundamental problem, or multiple, beyond just the yearly cadence. Because they still managed to fix all the egregious bugs by August every year, as late as Mojave in 2019. From my recollection at least.
  - JimDabell 2y ago
    > Yeah it seems like there’s a serious fundamental problem, or multiple, beyond just the yearly cadence. My argument is that they were never building and have never built software at a sustainable pace, even before the yearly cadence. They race ahead with tech debt then never pay it off, so the problem gets progressively worse. A while back, that merely manifested as more and more defects over time. More recently, they began failing to ship on time and started pre-announcing features that would ship later. And now they’ve progressed to failing to ship on time, pre-announcing features that would ship later, and then failing to ship those features later. This is not the yearly cadence. This is consistently committing to more than they are capable of, which results in linear growth of tech debt, which results in rising defects and lower productivity over time. It would happen with any cadence.
JKCalhoun 2y ago
Imagine that the last Major OS release was going to be a bug fix release ... but then AI happened. And imagine this happens every year with some new feature demanding it be shipped. Having said that, here's the reality of bugs that are assigned to a team. Feature work comes first. The (older) engineers don't want this — they want to fix bugs, refactor code, get rid of tech debt. But ever since Jobs returned to Apple, it's become top-down and the engineers are no longer driving the ship. Management want the features. So, the slippery part is this: once you defer a bug for an OS release and ship your product, deferring that bug in the next OS is a no-brainer. You already shipped with the bug, why is it so important this time around? So users/devs learn to work around the bug. Occasionally, as an old-timer, I would on a whim just fix an arbitrary bug that was "bugging" me. Sadly though, the process had become so top-down though that I would also need: 1) someone to code-review the changes (and so already you are encountering your first obstacle requiring "buy in") and then 2) get permission from "management" (this might be the BRB, bug review board) in order to submit the fix and the Radar. (There are periods though when they are lax and bugs can be submitted with little justification — or we would just make up some bullshit to get the bug fix in). I recall the early days with fondness when a dev just checked fixes in. Me: Craig, are you working on the Crop tool in Photos? Craig: Yeah, why? Me: How does it pick the default for whether to use Portrait or Landscape? Half the time I think the default it picks is wrong. Why not look at the image bounds and default to Landscape if it is wider than it is tall? Craig: Good idea. I'll make the change now and write a Radar for it later. Also, a shout out to Brendan who would push back when in a feature meeting with something like, "Okay, which of these features can we drop? Because we have some serious technical debt we need to address that was not own your feature list."
- scarface_74 2y ago
  > But ever since Jobs returned to Apple, it's become top-down and the engineers are no longer driving the ship. Management want the features Were you using Macs before Jobs came back? The entire operating system for PowerPC based Macs was technical debt with parts of the OS running under emulation. It was a buggy unreliable crash prone mess.
  - 2y ago
smallmancontrov 2y ago
Framing Snow Leopard as a "bugfix release" didn't happen for enlightened reasons, it happened because they cannibalized the Mac OS team and sent everyone to work on iPhone. The skeleton crew left behind lost the capacity to do anything but bugfixes. This is why Snow Leopard was so buggy on release but unlike previous releases actually did get better: management stopped pushing new features, and even a skeleton crew was able to polish it over time. If you look at a map of tentpole Mac OS features, you can see that the ambition vanished with the iPhone's release and didn't recover for a decade.

kossTKR 2y ago

Amen to that. Please for the love of all things remember your future defining ‘human design’ with brilliant UX in early macos and hypercard. Now you have unlimited money and don’t give a single f? Do better please! Where is the passion, catering to pro’s, any idealism? Hardware is great but software gets worse and worse..

ramesh31 2y ago
>Where is the passion, catering to pro’s, any idealism? It died 14 years ago.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  I know what you're saying, but the Cult of Jobs had its downsides too. I think Apple started to die with the iPod and got worse the more successful it became. Then again, maybe I always prefer the underdog.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    You do remember the crash prone classic MacOS, the ridiculous Performa line, the Copland disaster and that Apple was almost bankrupt? Also the classic MacOS where you (the user) had to pre allocate memory per application and where holding down the mouse button stopped any application from running in the background.
    - veidr 2y ago
      Apple basically _did_ die, after Performa/Copland (and let's not forget Open Transport!!) The resuscitation was truly miraculous.
      - scarface_74 2y ago
        And QuickDraw GX and another quickly abandoned technology that came with System 7 Pro.
        JKCalhoun 2y ago
        When I started at Apple it was to work on Quickdraw GX. It was very cool tech. Closer to what Apple would get from NeXT years later. My guess is as to why it failed (and this was also the common sentiment at the time) — it was an optional install and not a default. It's hard to imagine anyone writing an app around a component (extension) that few people had in the OS.
        scarface_74 2y ago
        What a throwback. And I just thought about the other abandoned tech that came with System 7.1 Pro - PowerTalk.
    - officeplant 2y ago
      It's wild but my own issue free MacOS era was OS9 on my iBook G3 clamshell. Had to replace a harddrive (bounced down a stairwell, but held together) and upgraded the ram, but other than that fine experience. My next Mac was a 2008 Macbook Pro (non-unibody) that had backlight issues out of the box, failed display cable two years in, and then the GPU failed. (Nvidia plague era, and Steve Jobs silence plague era of shit-ass fan curves) To this day I still refuse to trust Apple's fan curves and install fan control software. Especially the M1 iMac with the cut down graphics that they only gave one fan and a smaller heatsink. Watched it break 100C regularly. The m1/m2 mac mini might be the only one I've never had issues with the stock fan curves so far, but I still bump them up anyway for peace of mind. I don't see a reason to let an SoC hit 98C even if its rated to do so.

mulletbum 2y ago

They aren't even doing hardware well in some cases, their bread and butter. Bluetooth has been broken on both editions of their Pro Max Phone (15 & 16). It cuts out and has all kinds of weird issues, but no fix has come for years now. This was why I always paid a premium for their phones, they did hardware and software well. Not anymore, their so focus has been on their processors.

achierius 2y ago
What makes you think that's not a software problem too?
no_wizard 2y ago
Are you using any Bluetooth headsets designed for their special sync protocol? I noticed no issues with any certified headsets but any of my nice Bluetooth headsets from a few years ago that don’t leverage the newer protocol instead only standard Bluetooth have issues syncing and such. This tends to be an Apple issue. They introduce proprietary thing and eventually unless your hardware supports said thing it will have a degraded experience in some way
- codr7 2y ago
  We use to have a saying for this behavior, embrace and extend something...
  - no_wizard 2y ago
    I think the difference is intentional vs unintentional. Apple has the MFI program for these things. You can get certified and tested in relatively short order. They also aren’t removing the original protocol support or anything like that. What I will say is that I think they don’t devote as much QA resources to getting it right as they do their own protocols, hence the difference. With Microsoft it was very different. They wanted to subsume or shutdown whatever they targeted with EEE
- xxpor 2y ago
  Headsets have been fine IME, but the killer is car bluetooth. Can't swap that out easily.

roydivision 2y ago

I have no idea how Apple prioritise their bug fixing, but it really looks to me like bugs only get fixed when adding new features, if at all. This is such a trivial big win as well, create a software dev team to focus on the outstanding bugs. Head it with one or two senior developers, make it the first step in onboarding new developers. What a great way to learn, and make a difference. This is not rocket surgery, and Apple really do have a bad reputation here, even with the muggles.

mschuster91 2y ago
> This is such a trivial big win as well, create a software dev team to focus on the outstanding bugs. Head it with one or two senior developers, make it the first step in onboarding new developers. What a great way to learn, and make a difference. Sounds nice on paper. In practice, the seniors assigned to the team will see it as a career dead-end (because fixing bugs doesn't get management attention, but flashy new features do), juniors lack the experience to avoid edge cases or to navigate the project structure, and the seniors/intermediates on the "actual" development team don't have time to waste on reviewing and aiding code of juniors and bugfixes because then they have ownership over that...
- codr7 2y ago
  Sounds more like process problems than strategy problems to me.

lapcat 2y ago

> They addressed this once with a huge “0 new features” iteration with Snow Leopard to catch up on the worst of it This is a myth, though a myth created by Apple itself and Bertrand Serlet's tongue-in-cheek keynote slide. Snow Leopard actually had a number of new features: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard#New_or_changed_features https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard#New_or_c... Moreover, Mac OS X 10.6.0 was much buggier than its immediately predecessor Mac OS X 10.5.8. There were some really bad bugs in those early Snow Leopard releases. The Snow Leopard that everyone remembers and loves was not version 10.6.0 but rather version 10.6.8 v1.1, which was released almost two years after 10.6.0. Major OS updates invariably introduce more bugs than they fix. That's an iron law of software development. What Apple used to do, which they no longer do, is spend a long amount of time just fixing bugs in minor updates to the operating system. Now, unfortunately, Apple is on a rigid yearly OS update schedule. Worse, Apple doesn't just fix bugs between those yearly updates; instead they keep introducing new features even in the "minor" updates. So we never get a "stable" version. It's constant change for the sake of change.

MichaelZuo 2y ago
Yeah it seems like there’s a serious fundamental problem, or multiple, beyond just the yearly cadence. Because they still managed to fix all the egregious bugs by August every year, as late as Mojave in 2019. From my recollection at least.
- JimDabell 2y ago
  > Yeah it seems like there’s a serious fundamental problem, or multiple, beyond just the yearly cadence. My argument is that they were never building and have never built software at a sustainable pace, even before the yearly cadence. They race ahead with tech debt then never pay it off, so the problem gets progressively worse. A while back, that merely manifested as more and more defects over time. More recently, they began failing to ship on time and started pre-announcing features that would ship later. And now they’ve progressed to failing to ship on time, pre-announcing features that would ship later, and then failing to ship those features later. This is not the yearly cadence. This is consistently committing to more than they are capable of, which results in linear growth of tech debt, which results in rising defects and lower productivity over time. It would happen with any cadence.

JKCalhoun 2y ago

Imagine that the last Major OS release was going to be a bug fix release ... but then AI happened. And imagine this happens every year with some new feature demanding it be shipped. Having said that, here's the reality of bugs that are assigned to a team. Feature work comes first. The (older) engineers don't want this — they want to fix bugs, refactor code, get rid of tech debt. But ever since Jobs returned to Apple, it's become top-down and the engineers are no longer driving the ship. Management want the features. So, the slippery part is this: once you defer a bug for an OS release and ship your product, deferring that bug in the next OS is a no-brainer. You already shipped with the bug, why is it so important this time around? So users/devs learn to work around the bug. Occasionally, as an old-timer, I would on a whim just fix an arbitrary bug that was "bugging" me. Sadly though, the process had become so top-down though that I would also need: 1) someone to code-review the changes (and so already you are encountering your first obstacle requiring "buy in") and then 2) get permission from "management" (this might be the BRB, bug review board) in order to submit the fix and the Radar. (There are periods though when they are lax and bugs can be submitted with little justification — or we would just make up some bullshit to get the bug fix in). I recall the early days with fondness when a dev just checked fixes in. Me: Craig, are you working on the Crop tool in Photos? Craig: Yeah, why? Me: How does it pick the default for whether to use Portrait or Landscape? Half the time I think the default it picks is wrong. Why not look at the image bounds and default to Landscape if it is wider than it is tall? Craig: Good idea. I'll make the change now and write a Radar for it later. Also, a shout out to Brendan who would push back when in a feature meeting with something like, "Okay, which of these features can we drop? Because we have some serious technical debt we need to address that was not own your feature list."

scarface_74 2y ago
> But ever since Jobs returned to Apple, it's become top-down and the engineers are no longer driving the ship. Management want the features Were you using Macs before Jobs came back? The entire operating system for PowerPC based Macs was technical debt with parts of the OS running under emulation. It was a buggy unreliable crash prone mess.
- 2y ago

smallmancontrov 2y ago

Framing Snow Leopard as a "bugfix release" didn't happen for enlightened reasons, it happened because they cannibalized the Mac OS team and sent everyone to work on iPhone. The skeleton crew left behind lost the capacity to do anything but bugfixes. This is why Snow Leopard was so buggy on release but unlike previous releases actually did get better: management stopped pushing new features, and even a skeleton crew was able to polish it over time. If you look at a map of tentpole Mac OS features, you can see that the ambition vanished with the iPhone's release and didn't recover for a decade.