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Apple has lost the functional high ground

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• owenwil 12y ago
  This discussion is just going around in circles with nobody adding real useful commentary to the discussion other than "I perceive Apple's software quality to be worse based on my own anecdotal experience." This opinion is being perpetuated by a few people and it's just going everywhere. I don't think the software quality dropped, it's all about perception. Just a few years ago, everyone was moaning about software quality with Lion but nobody remembers that now, because bad headlines are easier to create than good ones. Yosemite has some bugs, yes, but so do almost every other major releases of Operating Systems. Apple does have some bugs to iron out, but in six month's time when they're fixed, everyone will forget and start complaining about something else. Perhaps a few happened around the same time, but that's no indication that things are getting worse. People just like to complain. Those who want to experience a lower "functional high ground" should switch to Ubuntu and discover how much further ahead OS X is. To the everyday user, there is no drop in software quality. They wouldn't have even noticed unless articles like this continued to circulate. People are just noisier these days.
  • nextstep 12y ago
    I think you nailed it. To most people (i.e. the majority of the world who doesn't read tech regurgitation) there has been no dramatic shift in software quality from Apple. There have been some hiccups with cloud services or OS updates that affected a lot of people, but these got resolved and Apple still ranks very highly in customer satisfaction.
    • yourad_io 12y ago
      > To most people there has been no dramatic shift in software quality from Apple. [...] Apple still ranks very highly in customer satisfaction. Source?
    • danieldk 12y ago
      Apple still ranks very highly in customer satisfaction. But is dropping. In fact, Samsung has surpassed them in consumer satisfaction for smartphones: http://www.iphoneincanada.ca/news/samsung-surpasses-apple-in-consumer-satisfaction/ http://www.iphoneincanada.ca/news/samsung-surpasses-apple-in...
  • uptown 12y ago
    Maybe. It's just odd to me that each new version of OSX seems to revisit basic problems like stable wifi. I would have assumed the way things like that were implemented wouldn't have changed much from version to version. And "Back to my Mac" seems to get screwed up with each major OSX update. Still no solution for that one.
    • DigitalJack 12y ago
      I may just not use whatever it is that has bugs in OSX, but I've got a 2009 Mac Book Pro that I've been using since it was new, and I always upgrade the OS after a month or so from release. I've only ever noticed a bug in Lion or Mountain Lion (don't recall which) where time machine would get borked if I put the computer to sleep when it was in the middle of a backup. That was super annoying, but it was fixed eventually. I've never had any issues with wifi or graphics or whatever. I suspect these issues come about from hardware changes and the related drivers in the various models. Windows has the exact same problem, exacerbated by the freedom users have to mix and match hardware. My work computer running windows 7 would crash once or twice a week, always due to video driver (or the underlying hardware). While Apple's ecosystem is limited, they actually have a rather large diversity of hardware to support now, and I'm sure that is the source of many issues. Makes me afraid to upgrade actually since my computer works so well.
  • gress 12y ago
    I think there is more surface area for people to notice bugs, and we're suing the systems far more so we feel problems more acutely. More importantly, even if it's true that there is a slight increase in bugs now that they've moved to an annual schedule, there is no logic to the idea that the should now just abandon the schedule and go slower. They are in a highly competitive situation. The solution is not to go slower, but rather to improve their processes and practices.
    • JonathonW 12y ago
      Who are they competing against to go faster? In the desktop space, Microsoft's on (at least) a 2-year cadence, and that was in response to Apple speeding up their release cadence. Ubuntu's also on a two-year cadence (for LTS releases), but I'd be surprised if they're even on Apple's radar in any significant way. On mobile, Android's also slower than Apple. Android 4.x lasted three years before being replaced by Android 5 this fall; the releases in between were all primarily Snow Leopard-style performance and stability updates. If Apple's fast release cadence is having adverse consequences (which, FWIW, I'm not convinced that it is), there's no one to blame except Apple: they're the ones setting the expectation of rapid releases.
  • baddox 12y ago
    I don't doubt that there is some bias toward remembering more recent complaints more. However, I don't know if you can pull the "it's anecdotal" card on something like this, because unlike most scientific studies (like on the effectiveness of a medical treatment), personal experience is a crucial part of the definition of "software quality." Also, I think it's reasonable to assume that most software, especially in unjailbroken iOS devices, is deterministic, and thus conclude that the experience of a bug is the result of a software problem. I'm a big iOS user, and I definitely share the experience of a steady decrease in software quality. I should add that while I use OS X and generally install the upgrades promptly, I spend the vast majority of my time in Emacs and Chrome, and thus probably don't really "use OS X" enough to notice any software quality issues. It seems fine to me.
    • derefr 12y ago
      > I think it's reasonable to assume that most software, especially in unjailbroken iOS devices, is deterministic, and thus conclude that the experience of a bug is the result of a software problem One major factor people tend to forget is that software can end up executing different code paths on different hardware. In other words—software can be both bug-free on a recent Mac, and yet horribly bug-riddled on an older Mac. This produces a very divergent set of personal experiences where people tend to talk over one-another because everyone is seeing a different part of the elephant.
      • baddox 12y ago
        Absolutely so. That's why I was careful to limit my criticism to unjailbroken iOS devices, both because I have much more personal experience with them, and because the hardware and software combinations are much smaller than with OS X. But even in the example you provide, the experiences of the person with the old bug-riddled Mac are completely valid, and point to real software quality issues (assuming the new OS X version is officially supported on the hardware). The bug-free experience of another person with a recent Mac does not cancel out or in any way diminish of the person experiencing bugs.
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  • IBM 12y ago
    I agree. People said Snow Leopard was the last good OS X update but I couldn't tell a difference between that and any of the subsequent updates. The 'Apple software quality is declining' meme only seems to be coming from the Apple developer bubble.
    • sjwright 12y ago
      The latter point releases of Snow Leopard represented a point in OS X history when there was great stability in user expectations of the Mac operating system. It wasn't perfect, but most things worked perfectly. Performance was excellent. System stability was high, too. The problem with Lion is that it started dicking around with previously stable user expectations -- a perfect example being the skeu Address Book that had inferior usability. Mountain Lion improved things a bit. Mavericks improved things further, and represents another high point in OS X history. Yosemite once again dicks around with previously stable user expectations -- a perfect example being the new aesthetic which looks crisp in retina but looks fussy and unfinished in low resolution. Spotlight is no longer a drop down menu for no reason. Time Machine no longer spins. The green buttons now do different things. It's even more difficult to enable TRIM on third party SSDs.
      • abrowne 12y ago
        > Time Machine no longer spins. This started with 10.9 (or 10.8?) FWIW.
  • mhuffman 12y ago
    I disagree, you did not see the same amount of complaints with snow lion. Observational and anecdotal experiences are still experiences and are evidence that something is going on. If you owned a restaurant and suddenly your customers started complaining after you changed your recipes, would you still think it is nothing to worry about? And just because Ubuntu sucks worse than OSX, does not mean that OSX is not starting to suck.
    • pdabbadabba 12y ago
      > snow lion ...Snow Leopard? The problem with your response is that I don't know that anyone has ever actually provided reliable evidence that the number of complaints has gone up. GP's view, which I share, is that people always complain about new releases, forgetting that the previous release had its problems as well. As GP said, bad headlines are easier to make than good ones. Simply reiterating that you think the previous release had fewer problems, and that there are anecdotes out there about problems in the current release, is hardly a refutation of this. This is entirely consistent with GP's view. I for one have experienced no significant change in reliability on the road from Snow Leopard to Yosemite (for what that's worth).
      • toyg 12y ago
        > people always complain about new releases, forgetting that the previous release had its problems as well It might be true, but this attitude makes it very hard for developers not to discount all complaints, including ones grounded in reality. Just because people are paranoid about new releases being crap, it doesn't mean that they are not crap. Personally, I've experienced a number of really bad bugs in Yosemite. One of the most annoying is four-finger swipes to bring up launchpad: the "blur" animation starts and then just hangs midway, leaving a half-transparent launchpad that works with keyboard controls but not mouse-clicks. Or the infamous "backbreak", where you do two-finger swipes to go back in a browser window and somehow it fails mid-way, leaving an unusable browser page and breaking all two-finger gestures until you close that window (not tab, the whole window). And of course the awful dark corners on the volume icon once you disable transparencies, something you have to do to maintain a decent framerate on a two-year MBP-retina that was perfectly capable to handle all this up to and including Mavericks. And let's not even talk about the wifi dns bug, which I've lost any hope to see permanently fixed in my lifetime. These are bad because they affect very visible UI elements used hundreds or thousands of time per day; the sort of thing that used to be rock-solid and did not significantly change in new releases. I would understand if a newish feature like Finder tabs had a few bugs, but not trackpad gestures that have been there, working fine, for years.
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    • adriand 12y ago
      There a super annoying issue with iMessages on Yosemite where the first time you click on the iMessages window, it doesn't gain focus properly (and you can't start typing a message), and the second time you click on it, the entire window changes position by the delta between the top-left corner and the spot where you click the second time. It makes the whole experience of using iMessages very aggravating. The whole "use OS X for all messages including SMS" thing is one of their key marketing messages, and it's broken on my Macbook and on my iMac. I logged a bug for it and was told it was a duplicate of another one already in the queue, which was well over a month ago. It seems like something that should be relatively easy to fix. That it hasn't been tells me that there is likely a very large list of bugs in a similar category (or worse), so they just haven't gotten to this one yet.
      • redditmigrant 12y ago
        This doesnt even begin to address the countless ways in which messages on the laptop falls out of sync with the messages on my iphone sitting next to the laptop. Im not even talking about 2 second delays, Im talking about 10-15 minutes of the laptop not getting the message. Similar annoyances exist with receiving calls on the laptop. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesnt. The troubling thing for me is that these arent some esoteric features, these are the features that they choose to highlight so I presume a higher bar for them.
  • king_magic 12y ago
    You don't think Apple's software quality has dropped? Guess you havn't had a hanging Safari or Chrome tab take down the entire OS. Yosemite is riddled with blantently broken issues like this. I'd love to enumerate them for you, but frankly, Apple should be doing that with a flood of automatic updates. Of which I've seen 1 since installing Yosemite. As an everyday user, there has been a massive drop in quality. Far, far worse than previous OS X upgrades. This is just not a case of people wanting to complain for the sake of complaining. I've been saying it for weeks now: Yosemite is Apple's Windows Vista.
    • engi_nerd 12y ago
      My Yosemite seems to be taken down the most by a hung iBooks. And iOS8 made my 3rd generation iPad almost unusable. Just another bit of anecdata.
      • rkeniger 12y ago
        upvote for "anecdata"
    • revscat 12y ago
      I have not seen any of the issues with Safari or Chrome that you are reporting. The opposite, in fact: Safari this is so much faster than Chrome under Yosemite that it has become my primary browser. I'm a developer, by the way, and have both browsers open most of every working day. If anything, I have seen an increase in quality with Yosemite.
    • coldtea 12y ago
      >You don't think Apple's software quality has dropped? Guess you havn't had a hanging Safari or Chrome tab take down the entire OS. No, I haven't.
      • king_magic 12y ago
        Well, good for you. But remember - there were plenty of people who had absolutely no problems with Vista. And plenty who did. Were those unhappy Vista users all imagining it?
  • bushido 12y ago
    > This discussion is just going around in circles with nobody adding real useful commentary to the discussion other than "I perceive Apple's software quality to be worse based on my own anecdotal experience." This opinion is being perpetuated by a few people and it's just going everywhere. You quoted the unreliability of anecdotal experience and then went ahead and added your own anecdotal immediately in the next paragraph: I don't think the software quality dropped > Those who want to experience a lower "functional high ground" should switch to Ubuntu and discover how much further ahead OS X is. I am sure most would agree with you that OS X at it worst is way ahead of Ubuntu, except that's not really the benchmark the users who are going around in circles are using, it quite evident in almost each one of these anecdotal commentary that an older version of OS X is the Benchmark I think the real complaint people have is that a lot of these people switched to Apple for superior well tested hardware and software, thus avoiding problems that they would not need to wait six months to be fixed. The key take away I think is NOT that recently OS X has some bugs, rather that the seemingly increasing in occurrence of bugs that more advanced users are experiencing is perceived as a sign on discarding their Test Everything Well Before Shipping culture that important to these people. > To the everyday user, there is no drop in software quality. The core market for Apple until quite recently was not the everyday user but developers, designers and the more tech savvy. ----- I am unsure if your comment was designed to substantiate your thought that "This discussion is just going around in circles with nobody adding real useful commentary to the discussion", if it was, at that you succeeded.
    • boynamedsue 12y ago
      FWIW I think writing server components are far, far better on Ubuntu Desktop than OS X. Package management is amazing and it matches my Ubuntu server deployments for production.
    • heyts 12y ago
      I agree with you on many points and it seems obvious that apple is spread too thin these days and tries to do too much. I dont think this statement is true however: > The core market for Apple until quite recently was not the everyday user but developers, designers and the more tech savvy. Historically the core market of Apple Computer has been graphic-designers, journalists and the education market. Developers have only been on the platform post OS X because of unix.
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  • ksk 12y ago
    >This opinion is being perpetuated by a few people and it's just going everywhere. Well, you're attacking others' opinions for being opinions, and not facts, but your claims are nothing more than opinions too. Sorry, I don't know what your point is? Just to add my own anecdote, my dad recently asked that his macbook air be reformatted to make it 'fast' again. Meanwhile, the '08 PC that I'm using now is running Win8.1 like a champ. > Yosemite has some bugs, yes, but so do almost every other major releases of Operating Systems. Heh, so Apple is just .. like everyone else? No need to hold Apple to a higher standard if that is the case. The entire point of people complaining is that Apple shouldn't be shipping buggy products like the competition. >Apple does have some bugs to iron out, but in six month's time when they're fixed, everyone will forget and start complaining about something else. Well, why would Apple fix the bugs if nobody complained? They wouldn't even know about them. Of course that is presuming they fix the bugs they know about. >To the everyday user, there is no drop in software quality. So why are the everyday users complaining? Some of the bugs that I've personally come across. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6601963?tstart=0 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6601963?tstart=0 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6604139 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6604139 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4766577 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4766577 http://rustyshelf.org/2014/10/01/it-just-works/ http://rustyshelf.org/2014/10/01/it-just-works/ -- Oh.. And http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/10/01/it-just-works http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/10/01/it-just-works Ok, maybe Gruber is not your everyday user... :)
    • coldtea 12y ago
      >Heh, so Apple is just .. like everyone else? No need to hold Apple to a higher standard if that is the case. The entire point of people complaining is that Apple shouldn't be shipping buggy products like the competition. So, they would use magical unicorn dust to remove all bugs? Of course they'll gonna have bugs on OS X, every OS has bugs. If Apple was held on a higher standard wasn't because OS X didn't have bugs, but because it had better usability, nicer design (where it matters), and a UNIX core to boot. >So why are the everyday users complaining? Because they were always complaining. I remember simila discussions after every OS version. Wi-fi and graphics card issues in particular (like the ones you linked to) have been with us since 10.0. For graphic cards issues it's usually the driver (so Nvidia/ATI, not Apple), and models get updated, so it's not like some core OS X kernel component that can be fixed and stay fixed. And for Wi-fi there are also tons of Wi-fi routers, repeaters, setups etc, there will always be some incompatibilities. I had my fair share of such in Windows and Linux too.
  • maguay 12y ago
    The problem I've seen is that it's not just geeks this time. Sitting around a New Year's party with mostly non-geeks, everyone was discussing how they were hesitant to install new versions of iOS now thanks to bugs et al (both existent ones and media trumped-up stuff). That's both a direct and a perception problem that Apple has got to fix, stat. The only good thing for Apple is, the same discussions included frustrations over both Android and Windows 8. Maybe the thing is that now, everyone's an early-adopter geek.
    • rtpg 12y ago
      Thing is nobody complains about Android updates breaking everything (though there are a lot of complaints about updates not happening), because the upgrades are usually well tested (despite having many more hardware platforms). Win8 there was Metro, but I really didn't hear much about Windows being broken. iOS and OS X have stability issues, ones that other systems seem to deal with more gracefully now.
      • CamperBob2 12y ago
        How many Android users ever get updates, though? Win8 there was Metro, but I really didn't hear much about Windows being broken. Huh? People screamed bloody murder about Metro. Arguably, it played a large part in the downfall of Steve Ballmer.
        • danieldk 12y ago
          How many Android users ever get updates, though? All the time, a lot of functionality is updated through Google Play services, and many of the apps are updated outside the OS. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/12/android-2-3-gingerbread-four-years-later-the-os-just-wont-die/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/12/android-2-3-gingerbre...
      • hokkos 12y ago
        No complains about android ? Lollipop is the worst Android update ever, there is a bug where the system process take up RAM until the phone can barely use one app without killing the last one and slow everything. https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=79729 https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=79729
  • chromejs10 12y ago
    I agree 100%. Marco just posts random complaints these days. There are no specific examples of what is actually broken. An OS is about as big of a project as you can get. What evidence is there that Mac OS X is any more broken than any other widely used operating system?
  • aik 12y ago
    Alternatively, perhaps people are responding because they are having (or have had) similar experiences. Personally I have been very frustrated with iOS in the past year or two due to crashes and other bugs. Granted, a good number have been resolved in recent patches, but I'm still getting way more crashes than I used to several years ago (weekly+), and shaking off the previously frustrations and regaining trust is a time-consuming process. Perhaps it's also lack of QC for new releases. When iOS 7 and 8 were released, pretty much everyone I knew were experiencing frequent crashes and other issues. As someone else pointed out, there is more surface area for bugs to occur. Hopefully QC will step it up.
  • vacri 12y ago
    You're annoyed that 'no-one remembers Lion', because people either upgraded from it or stuck with Snow Leopard to avoid it? It's a bit disingenuous to complain that no-one remembers the issues with an OS that folks aren't really using anymore and has been out of support for several months now. No-one in the Ubuntu world much remembers Ubuntu 11.04 either - so what? Does that mean that the currently-used operating systems shouldn't have their flaws discussed?
  • krschultz 12y ago
    Ubuntu should not be the bar. Maybe Windows - but Windows has a significantly more difficult task. Apple controls all of the hardware & software. I would expect significantly fewer bugs than the other platforms. This is also not just about Yosemite. The fact that the iOS update rates are significantly lower this year is a sign users were not happy with the previous update.
  • tolmasky 12y ago
    > Apple does have some bugs to iron out, but in six month's time when they're fixed, everyone will forget and start complaining about something else. That's the whole point: we'll start complaining about something else because in 6 months when the bugs are theoretically fixed we'll have another OS X release waiting for us right around corner (approx 4 months away) which will put us right back at square one! Tiger's lifespan was from November 2005 through October 2007. So, if we accept the premise that all the OSes were equally buggy and it also took Tiger 6 months to get the bugs worked out, then you still had another 18 months of a stable OS. This reasonably allows customers to decide whether to be early adopters or waiters: its perfectly fine to hold off those 6 initial months since you then still get 3/4 of the products lifespan with some assurance that its stable. That's just not the case anymore, if you wait those 6 months then now you've got another release right around the corner, you're perpetually in upgrade mode. Not to mention that most the bugs will probably ship in the major release anyways since (non-security) bug fix release have more or less merged with the new features that introduce new bugs release.
    • snowwrestler 12y ago
      My MacBook Air is running 10.8 Mountain Lion. I regularly receive security updates (including the pushed NTP fix), as well as application updates like Safari and iTunes, and 3rd party updates for apps like Chrome, Firefox, MS Office for Mac, Evernote, DropBox, Coda, etc. I don't know what the "official" lifespan of 10.8 is, but it has every appearance of being fully supported by Apple today. And yes, it is very stable.
      • yuhong 12y ago
        I wonder why it is not documented, but at this point they tend to support the current release and previous two releases.
      • reberhardt 12y ago
        I loved Mountain Lion and also found it to be very stable. I stayed on it as long as I could, but the new versions of several of the apps I use required Mavericks, and after holding out for a while I upgraded. Mavericks was when I started noticing issues... Graphics driver issues, trackpad gestures randomly not working for periods of time, WindowServer crashing when opening the notification center (wat?), so on and so forth. Mac OS is still my favorite, but I've gotten an irking feeling that in the interest of capturing the mainstream market and making things look pretty and full of features, Apple has skimped on stability and quality. Just my two cents
  • ibejoeb 12y ago
    I haven't had significant problem with OS X. iOS is trickier. For a more concrete criticism of functional software, thoughtfulness of design, and reliability, though, I submit Apple ID, iTunes, App Store, etc. This has been the buggiest and most opaque set of services I've dealt with recently. I have 3 different accounts now, each connected to developer credentials and app store purchases. 1 original account seems to have turned into 3 by way of failed sign-ins via iTunes and multiple failed password reset attempts. Each of these has 3 or 4 nonsense trivia questions associated with it. I have a folder in KeePass dedicated to managing this stuff. I have a spreadsheet that attempts to map these things to purchases. I can't automatically install updates because App Store downloads have associated themselves with different accounts. I've given up in a way. I have years-old versions of software that I don't update just due to the complexity of signing in. I don't know how people deal with it.
  • protomyth 12y ago
    Since Apple's bug database is private, what would be an objective criteria that you would accept? For my own part, I have more bugs reported on 10.9 and 10.10 then any other releases. My everyday users hate iOS 8 and 10.10 due to network, Finder, and file share issues.
  • JoshuaDavid 12y ago
    > Those who want to experience a lower "functional high ground" should switch to Ubuntu and discover how much further ahead OS X is. I did exactly that (12.04 LTS), and am not going back. Configuring some things (I'm looking at you, Silverlight) is a pain, but most stuff is pretty painless. OS X looks much shinier, granted, but in terms of usability I prefer Ubuntu.
  • rdtsc 12y ago
    > They wouldn't have even noticed unless articles like this continued to circulate. We should clearly find a way to squash and punish the infidels from voicing their opinion. I feel there is a bit of dissonance here between: > should switch to Ubuntu and discover how much further ahead OS X is. > People just like to complain. I've used Ubuntu for some time. Now on 14.10. Can you point out how ahead OS X is? Not saying it isn't. Just there is nothing I lack or wish I had in Ubuntu 14.10 that I don't already have. I like the interface. The ecosystem of packages. All hardware I want to work works. Also I paid $0 for the OS, (But donated to it before, you can too here: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/contribute http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/contribute if you feel like it is lacking major functionality)
    • SkyMarshal 12y ago
      I used Ubuntu exclusively from 2009 till Feb 2014, at which point I joined a startup, got a MBPr 15", and have been using it exclusively since. And I agree, OS X offers a few marginal benefits, and some drawbacks, but it's not much further ahead. OS X advantages: - Entertainment: OS X has better entertainment options and ecosystem, iTunes mainly, though Amazon MP3, Amazon Prime Video, and Netflix are negating this as advantage. - 3rd party desktop apps: I find little gems in both OS X's app store and in Ubuntu's "store" and repo's, but the best on OS X are generally better than the best on Ubuntu. Notepads like Quiver which integrate Markdown and LaTeX, Slack's only native app (or native-wrapped web app) is on OS X, Kindle native app for OS X, etc. That said, Ubuntu's good enough that I wouldn't miss OS X in this respect. - Overall better for lay people and non-techies. Gestures, etc. Still complex though, just as difficult as Windows for non-techies to learn. For example, I'd love to recommend to my almost 70yr old parents they switch from Windows to Mac, but the learning curve now is too steep. This is one of the disadvantages of adding lots of features to an OS - higher learning curve. OS X disadvantages - Stability:Price ratio: OS X is significantly worse. About the same stability as desktop linux but at a much higher price. I can crash both OS's by abusing memory (eg, too many apps open + too many browser tabs). A free OS I can forgive, an expensive one tailored to a single custom hardware configuration I can't. - Lock in: little things like having to take your Mac to a service center to replace the battery, or the inability to copy your entire home partition over to a new computer, etc. - FOSS: personal preference, like knowing my computer has the many eyeballs effect. - Overall better for power users. Tiling window managers, ability to keybind everything to Vim keybinds (file manager, all browsers, even Emacs), means you can easily dispense with mice and gestures altogether and use a much faster and more powerful interface.
  • gurkendoktor 12y ago
    One difference between 10.7 and 10.10 is that 10.7 cost money and 10.6 kept working as before. It was considered perfectly normal to stay on the old system and be productive. (The Windows world is still "sane" in that way.) Now Apple and the internet army of Early Adopters have united and it works like that- 1. iOS 8 is released and you have to update (if you want to receive security updates) 2. If you accidentally enable iCloud Drive or use a new version of iWork, you need the Yosemite Developer Preview (or wait for 10.10.0) 3. Now you are using iOS 8.0 and 10.0.0 and live through six terrible months. It's a lot harder to be a "slow adopter" nowadays, especially if you live deep in the Apple ecosystem (iCloud, iWork).
• smoyer 12y ago
  I've long said that the Apple hardware is second to none ... and I have a G3 Wallstreet that not only still runs, but it's battery lasts for a couple hours. My mid-2012 rMBP is pretty amazing too, but I quickly became irritated by OSX. It's now running Linux Mint with the XFCE WM now and I couldn't be happier (note that with a kernel upgrade, it even supports my Thunderbolt Cinema display). The one thing I wonder is: "Are we in the minority?" Do the "unschooled masses" simply accept that this is how computers have to be?
  • scotty79 12y ago
    Two previous mac books died on me after a year or so (they were already used for a year or two when I bought them). One died due to GPU solder problem. The other due to some unspecified damage to HDD controller. Hope our new retina will live longer. If only my girlfriend that actually uses it would allow me to kill the osx and put Windows 10 there it would save us both a lot of frustration. Mac OSX is hardly usable. I get how developers can get used to it. Once you start Terminal you have a fairly usable sort of linux computer. I still don't get how graphic designers use it. Its UI is so buggy, glitchy, uncooperative towards hardware (wacom tablet! or just ordinary mice). As for the hardware it's really powerful and the price is right or better than right for those components. The thing is that you wouldn't build PC out of those component yourself, because you'd rather use processor that's 8% weaker but costs half as much.
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    • bluthru 12y ago
      >If only my girlfriend that actually uses it would allow me to kill the osx and put Windows 10 there it would save us both a lot of frustration. That's a terrible idea from a battery perspective.
      • scotty79 12y ago
        It's rarely used when disconnected from a charger.
• fpgeek 12y ago
  The decline of "It just works" is one side of the problem. The other, more painful side (driven by the iOS-ification of the OS, I suppose) is: "When it doesn't work, you're helpless".
  • gress 12y ago
    How have users of OSX become more helpless than they were at any point in the past?
    • fpgeek 12y ago
      To take a simple example, faster OS updates combined with more aggressive OS version requirements for Apple apps (e.g. iPhoto) mean that getting the latest app bugfixes demands much more upheaval in your computing environment than it used to.
      • gress 12y ago
        Sorry, what has that to do with helplessness? The claim was that the influence of iOS makes OSX less able to help themselves.
        • fpgeek 12y ago
          In the past, when you were having a problem with an Apple app you had a relatively large window during which you could just update that app without touching anything else to see if the upgrade fixed your problem. In trickier cases you might even try installing a specific version that wasn't the latest and so on. Today, far more often, updating the app you're having a problem with requires an OS upgrade, bringing in tons of unrelated changes and triggering updates to other apps and ... If you don't see how the first scenario involves wider options for self-help, plus greater agency and control than the second, I don't know what to say.
          • gress 12y ago
            The only difference in the scenarios is the rate of change. If you are arguing that change itself reduces users agency then I won't argue with you, but I'll say that it is a problem that is broader than Apple.
• kweinber 12y ago
  I feel like the software really hasn't changed enough for me to feel differently about Apple at all. However the the fact that the hardware is GLUED together and non-upgradeable in all models is the thing that has me looking elsewhere. Is anyone else frustrated that their retina machines are completely obsoleted on purpose and that even the minis have memory chips soldered into them for no reason but wasteful planned obsolescence? I think that Apple is going to hit a major backlash when people realize that their memory and hard drives are trapped and limited for no real technical reason.
  • empthought 12y ago
    Unfortunately for tinkerers, these processes allow Apple to produce very small and lightweight hardware. These qualities are more valuable to consumers than tinkerability.
    • vinceguidry 12y ago
      Except that they're not needed to get to small and lightweight. Those qualities are driven by the size of components decreasing due to die improvements. So they can stick smaller, better components onto boards every year. Look at enough device tear downs, and you realize that lack of repairability is more about laziness than it is about legitimate tradeoffs.
      • empthought 12y ago
        There are physical limitations on socket sizes and construction that can allow owners to reasonably upgrade the equipment without damaging it. There are design limitations on arranging components in such a way that they can be accessed. Also the majority of users never open their machine; why should they have to pay more so the privileged few can pay a little less for storage and RAM? As someone who has recently assembled a commodity PC (Mini-ITX) and someone who has fiddled with RPi hardware, I can see the disadvantages facing a consumer hardware manufacturer attempting to satisfy a tinkerer's urges. Notebooks, all-in-ones, and Mac Mini-sized desktops are just at the edge of serviceability, and clearly the mobile and tablet product lines are well beyond it.
• corford 12y ago
  A friend of mine has just joined apple in a systems role and can't believe what a mess it is behind the scenes. He described it as being like "1000 startups all working on their own thing but owned by the same parent company" (with all the cross-group communication mayhem that implies).
  • gress 12y ago
    That sounds like essentially a good thing. The idea 1000 startups are likely to be better at innovating than one monolithic bureaucracy seems like a familiar one here on Hacker News.
    • corford 12y ago
      Sounds good but apparently the reality is a horrendous 'mish mash' of different tech stacks and fairly poor cross-group communication. Throw a marketing driven release cycle in to the mix (as the article implies) and it's no wonder a few cracks are appearing. The age old problem of being a monster sized company I guess. No one is immune.
      • commandar 12y ago
        It sounds surprisingly like how I've traditionally viewed Microsoft. Microsoft has always had a lot of really great technologies, but they've traditionally struggled to leverage them in a cohesive way. You'd see them completely reinventing the wheel between different groups while simultaneously turning around and shoehorning in MS tech places where it just didn't make any sense. Throw in all the in-fighting between different groups and you have a recipe for the company's malaise through the 2000s. One of the clearest examples I can think of is Microsoft's acquisition of Danger and the disaster that became the Kin: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/07/a-post-mortem-of-kins-tragic-demise/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/07/a-post... tl;dr - Microsoft buys out existing, successful mobile company, scraps their existing technology stack to rebuild with MS technology while building multiple, competing mobile platforms internally, internal turf wars ensue, and in the meantime their carrier partner basically loses patience with the whole thing and seals the fate of the entire project.
• corbinpage 12y ago
  I mean, all software has bugs. To me, the major difference between Apple's OS's and the Windows/Linux/Androids of the world is that Apple _fails smoother_. A typical bug may result in an iOS app freezing and then quitting on the user. However frustrating this may be, Apple's "something went wrong" user experience is much better than the annoying pop-up alerts, blue-screens of death, and cryptic error messages of the other platforms. These error messages are only relevant to a small, small subset of power-users, so why show them to everyone else? The other 99% of users are just going to quit and restart the application anyway (as we've been trained to do), so why not smoothly lead them down this path?
  • gbog 12y ago
    > I mean, all software has bugs. That's a cool mantra to repeat but it do not seem to match reality. For instance, in over 10 years of daily usage, I do not think having ever noticed any bugs in vim, grep and PostgreSQL. Just to take grep, for instance: if it says the string is not in the file, I have 100% confidence it is not in the file. So not only grep do not freeze my PC, it is also deterministic, which means perfectly reliable when one talks its language. OSes are more complex you will tell me. Yep, but you said "all software has bugs".
    • pdabbadabba 12y ago
      Well, if we're being pedantic, the fact that you have never noticed a bug in Vim, grep, and PostgreSQL does not mean they don't exist. If you google, e.g., "postgresql bug" you will find evidence of this. The charitable reading of GP's comment is, of course, that virtually all software has bugs, or that all complex software has bugs. Or, even better, that it is extremely difficult to write bug-free code, and this difficulty rapidly increases with the complexity of the software.
    • eddieroger 12y ago
      You can't acknowledge that an operating system is more complex, but then not give it the benefit of the doubt of halting a system on a bug. If grep or vim fail, they just abort. If Postgres fails, you maybe get a corrupted database and it aborts. If OS X kernel panics, the machine halts. All software has bugs. Also, if Postgres' bugs were unnoticeable, why did 9.3 get to 9.3.5 before the went to 9.4? Just because you didn't notice a bug doesn't mean someone else wasn't affected by it, and just because you notice bugs in OS X (which I'd bet you didn't) doesn't make them big issues.
• visakanv 12y ago
  > I fear that Apple’s leadership doesn’t realize quite how badly and deeply their software flaws have damaged their reputation, because if they realized it, they’d make serious changes that don’t appear to be happening. Instead, the opposite appears to be happening: the marketing-driven pace of rapid updates on multiple product lines seems to be expanding and accelerating. I've come to realize (or believe, rather) that very often, leadership is actually more aware of flaws than journalists and commentators think they are. It's hard to imagine that tens of thousands of really smart people within an organization haven't thought about these things themselves. If Apple or any other company isn't making serious changes, I don't think it's because their leadership is ignorant about something we know. More often than not, I think it's because they know something that we don't. Highly recommend reading Daniel Ellsberg's thoughts on Secrets: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsberg-limitations-knowledge http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsber... > "First, you'll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn't, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn't even guess. In particular, you'll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn't know about and didn't know they had, and you'll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well."
• vinceguidry 12y ago
  I suspect Apple's software development practices have never really been all that great, it's just that they worked harder when Jobs was around to make sure the product worked. Now without his influence, quality has been steadily slipping. If Apple's not careful, they could wake up in a few years and find they're just another tech company.
• themoonbus 12y ago
  Can anyone give specific examples of OS X backsliding in the feature department? The article he links to talks about having to tweak some settings, and not liking Messages... not really egregious issues in my book. I've been pretty satisfied with how it's progressed (and I'm far from a fanboy. There were times in my life when I was using Linux, Windows, and Mac OS on a daily basis.) I can think of several features that have improved my productivity... mission control, handoff, updated notifications, the new spotlight to name a few. They also finally fixed multi-monitor support in 10.9 which was a huge deal for me. I do feel far more productive in OS X than other OS's, but perhaps that's just familiarity at this point. I'm curious to hear what other people's major complaints are.
  • JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Speaking of the OS not as the desktop, but what traditionally an OS means: device support, memory and process management, application environment, file system and networking. As a developer, I find OS X to be immature, undocumented, arcane and volatile. Online Core documentation is very sketchy, often no more than a listing of argument types. Googling for help results in only questions, rarely answers. Versions add new APIs as quickly as they obsolete the old standard ones, leaving everybody hopping to update, often several times per year.
    • themoonbus 12y ago
      I'm speaking 100% from the perspective of a user, which is what I believe the post was focused on. I've never developed for Apple platforms.
    • yoklov 12y ago
      Depending on what you're doing its still frequently better than Win32 (which has an extremely broad range of API and documentation quality), or linux (which is just downright screwy at times). Although all bets are off if you're including headers from within mach. You're better off finding what you need in POSIX at that point, or, failing that, an external library.
  • PhantomGremlin 12y ago
• blinkingled 12y ago
  > Windows is still worse overall Ugh, no it isn't. That myth from Windows ME era must die. For as much as the Windows 8 / Metro thing is an annoyance, under the hood it is a solid OS - I am running it heavily loaded - 4/5 HyperV VMs, IDEs, SQL Server etc and it is thoroughly reliable even counting suspend / resume. Edit: Elaborating a bit - I got a Win 8 Pro license for $39 when it initially went on sale. I run it on my HP Z series Workstation that I got refurbished for $1199+$(Disks+ 16G ECC RAM). It allows me to run with 5 disks, a 8 Core Xeon CPU, 32GB RAM. The OS came with a very good hypervisor that allows me to run older version of Windows in cheap memory footprint, RHEL 7 and Server 2012 - all decently supported. If I tried doing that on Mac hardware, even ignoring the considerable cost increase, getting a reliable hypervisor on a Mac is itself a challenge. Last time I tried Fusion and Parallels they were complete toys compared to HyperV. So no, for techies Windows is still a darn attractive ecosystem - if you are just browsing and emailing any OS from 2013 onwards works fine, including Linux if you find the right hardware.
  • walterbell 12y ago
    Is that with client hyper-v? How does it compare to vmware workstation?
    • blinkingled 12y ago
      Yes, the version that ships with Win 8 Pro. It is hands down better in most aspects compared to VMWare workstation. The integration is better, the footprint is smaller, performance and reliability is great and you get it for free. VMWare might have an edge in the OS Support department - it supports more host and guest OSes than HyperV. But I have had very good experience running DragonFly BSD, Various Linux distros (RHEL7, Centos 6.x, Ubuntu LTS etc.) and Windows 7 of course. Sure you don't get as many bells and whistles compared to VMWare but if you don't need them then HyperV is great.
      • walterbell 12y ago
        Glad to hear it's working well. Have you tried storage features like reverting to snapshots/checkpoints (e.g. reset a disk to known state on each reboot), or shrinking of unused space in thin-provisioned disks?
• breatheoften 12y ago
  As a person who uses OSX in technical environments that are not well-connected for long periods of time (at sea research) -- my strong perception is that a huge host of the 'not behaving as I would want or expect' issues have to do with the way cloud services are getting integrated 'transparently' into so many places across the various systems and applications. 'Transparent' integration of network services has always been a concept with oversold value -- take as an example: NFS, which, even when implemented in tightly controlled high-availability networks, comes with a lot of obscure failure modes that are basically unresolvable because the consumers of the service have essentially no visibility into the notion that there is a network involved. Hiding the operation of the network completely from the user leads to application design where there is just no sensible way for the user to build an expectation mind for how things are going to behave -- or what the source of mis-behaviour might be at any particular time. It makes things these problems feel exceedingly random. I get to see all sorts of application quirks that pop up when the network is not behaving exactly as the application designer would've hoped when they decided that some cloud api call or another should transparently affect some aspect of their ui which wouldn't even necessarily seem like a cloud behavior to a user ... Just listening to music from your own iTunes library without a network or with a spotty network is an exercise in extreme annoyance. I understand that the cloud's not going away -- but I would love to see apple add standard UI somewhere in all their applications to in some way indicate when network operations are in effect and something about the status. Attempting to build this kind of 'awareness of network activity' into the ui might really help application designers avoid including codepaths that amount to 'if network is bad: goto random-ruin' throughout their application's ...
  • vezzy-fnord 12y ago
    Seamless network transparency is certainly not infeasible, see 9P and Styx. NFS is rather crufty in comparison.
  • empthought 12y ago
    What would you like besides the network status and network activity indicator in the upper left hand corner of the screen?
• datashovel 12y ago
  It would be interesting to find what kinds of stories give a user who submits more karma. negative or positive? It would be quite ironic if creating negativity on Hacker News is what builds karma.
  • datashovel 12y ago
    it's obvious negativity in comments aren't good for karma, but stories with negative premise is unclear to me.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
• raspasov 12y ago
  Personally, I've been using Yosemite and iOS 8 every day. iOS 8 - no complaints whatsoever, at least on iPhone 5 and 6. I've heard some people complain that on iPhone 4/4S it could be slow but that's a few years old hardware and Apple probably doesn't spend the majority of their time optimizing that most likely. Yosemite - major bug is that my WiFi stops working once in a whole (~once a day) and have to turn it off/on. Overall, I think the the criticism is definitely a little bit overblown.
• lkdeveloper 12y ago
  Also before yosemite release apple announced a public beta, which is kind of unusual for apple since they always wait until the party to release stuff. Does that mean some part of apple’s QA is now offloaded to public?
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
• philliphaydon 12y ago
  While there's a bunch of things I wish Apple would fix in OSX... If Photoshop stopped crashing all the time and Finder stopped freezing because external hdd's were too slow. I would have less issues with OSX. I can't believe people swear by OSX for graphic design despite the fact that Photoshop crashes all the time.
• bane 12y ago
  I don't know, I've been a Mac user off and on since Macs were 68k based, had a 2007 MBP that I was really unhappy with (of my still functioning machines from that era, it's easily the worst, by $300 netbook is easily a better machine at 1/10th the cost). The last 3-4 years or so my daily driver at work is a rMBP. I use Windows 7 at home, but feel about as comfortable in front of either system. If I compare any of the last 3-4 versions of OS X to Win 7, I'd say they're roughly comparable. There's pluses and minuses on both sides. I just spent a few days writing some Python code on Windows, and the experience was generally about as good as OS X. Win7 is the most rock solid non-x-nix OS I've used, and once you learn your way around it generally flows well. I don't perceive a huge downgrade in quality on OS X. Things change, bugs get introduced. I don't aesthetically like where Apple is going with their flat design, but the chrome of most apps I use takes up so little real-estate of what I use that I can ignore it. I think you have to do a bit more work to get an OS X machine into a real usable state than Windows. But once it's working it's relatively pain free. I don't think it's as stable as Win 7. But it's like comparing 4-9s uptime to 3-9s uptime. On a day-to-day level I don't really notice it as much. I'd say uptime on my Win 7 machines is better, but Microsoft forces restarts and updates too frequently to make that kind of claim. It's nice that OS X is a x-nix in the sense that what I do on it is more easily translatable to other x-nix systems so deployment is easier. And that's great until it isn't, because some tool or library or something is different or not available. But then again, development on Windows forces you to assume all sorts of crazy non-standard stuff as a constant. I don't really know where this perception that it's getting worse is coming from. I recently fired up my 2007-era MBP and it really feels like a worse experience, top-to-bottom. Modern OS X really is nicer. I suspect that people are finally starting to look at Apple products more critically (at long last). Perhaps it's because the pace of innovation seems to have slowed down, perhaps it's because Jobs is gone, but I'm starting to notice Apple pundits are finally starting to see that things aren't perhaps as good as they dreamed, and looking for ways to push the fruit forward.
• Animats 12y ago
  This is striking, considering that Apple is a wealthy company with a small product line. They have the money to put resources behind getting their products fixed. They have total control over the hardware environment, so they don't have to worry about compatibility with external hardware. Microsoft has put a lot of work into making Windows fixable. The two big developments for Windows 7 were 1) requiring all signed kernel drivers to pass the Static Driver Verifier, and 2) running incoming crash dumps through a classifier system which attempts to identify similar crashes and sends them to the same maintainer. Those two tools put a big dent in crash-for-unknown-reason problems. Is there any indication that Apple has developed similar tooling for their systems?
• bluedino 12y ago
  I haven't had any issues with Yosemite (the last buggy release for me was Mountain Lion), but iOS in my iPad and iPhone are a mess since iOS 7. Messages breaks in every way possible. Safari went from crashing twice every half hour to freezing and continuing to play videos after I've closed tabs, and getting stuck full screen.
• smacktoward 12y ago
  I tend to look for the simplest explanation to a question, as quite often the simplest explanation is the correct one. So in that spirit, if the question is "why does it seem like OS X isn't of the quality it used to be?", the simplest answer might be that Apple just doesn't care about OS X anymore. I mean, look at their financials (http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AAPL/3797471556x0x789040/ED3853DA-2E3F-448D-ADB4-34816C375F5D/2014_Form_10_K_As_Filed.PDF http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AAPL/3797471556x0x789...) On page 29 they list their net sales for all their major products from 2012 through 2014. And the things that jump out from that page are: 1) The iPhone business generates 4x as much revenue for Apple as Macs do -- and if you add in iPad sales that figure goes up to 5x; and 2) The iPhone business has grown by more than 10% each year, while Mac sales have been essentially flat. So if you're Apple, where does the Mac fit in your product line these days, exactly? People still buy them, so it's not like you completely don't care about them, but the importance of those sales to your bottom line is diminishing year by year as sales of mobile devices dwarf sales of Macs. And there's no indication that those trends are going to turn around anytime soon -- no new major piece of hardware coming from Intel or somewhere that's likely to light a fire under sales of conventional PCs, or software package so compelling it would drive the Mac into new vertical markets. All of which means that maybe, if you're Apple, you see the Mac business as basically a cow to be milked at the lowest cost possible until it dies of natural causes. You don't cut the hardware build quality (at least, not yet), but you don't put a whole lot of effort into developing revolutionary new features for OS X or wringing every last bug out of new releases of OS X, either. You just do the minimum possible to keep those existing Mac customers from jumping ship, or at least to delay the moment when they do jump ship for as long as possible. And by the time that day eventually comes, you won't care because Macs will be a footnote to your real business, your device business.
  • ldesegur 12y ago
    In order to build iOS apps, you need to run XCode on MacOSX. The latest releases of XCode have been so unstable that I wonder how much longer before developers finally get discouraged to develop for Apple Hardware.
    • 12y ago
• lispm 12y ago
  > Geoff Wozniak he wasn't even using Apple's software... using the Mac as a Terminal... I'm using two Macs (Macbook Air and Quad-Core Mac mini) all the time. There are a lot of annoying bugs in the Mac OS. But I can't say that it is more. Some of the recent stuff is quite cool and very useful. There are some things I don't like (iCloud, iTunes speed and stability, ...), but in general the latest OS works quite good.
• krschultz 12y ago
  "having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality." ... "We don’t need major OS releases every year. We don’t need each OS release to have a huge list of new features." I would argue everything we know about software engineering process says that more releases is better. Incrementalism lowers risk for engineers and for users. Once a year doesn't sound often enough to me, going the other way would just repeat Microsoft's failings. However it is possible that the core of his point, that marketing trumps what engineering can accomplish while maintaining quality, may be true. There seemed to be a lot of bolt on features in the last iOS & Mac OS X releases that didn't necessarily need to be pushed out right now, and some of the regressions are painful.
  • rsync 12y ago
    "I would argue everything we know about software engineering process says that more releases is better. Incrementalism lowers risk for engineers and for users. Once a year doesn't sound often enough to me, going the other way would just repeat Microsoft's failings." Yes, but that can be in the form of .X releases, not X. releases. Which is to say, by all means release X.2 and X.3 and ... X.9 and so on ... keep polishing ! But OSX releases 5.X and 6.X and ... 9.X ... and so on. Those aren't the actual numbers of course, but it is major releases that keep coming rather than minor releases.
  • TomVDB 12y ago
    He's not about talking about bug fix updates (the more the better), he's talking about major releases that introduce more features.
• bsclifton 12y ago
  Having drops in software quality doesn't surprise me at all. Anybody that used Mac OS back in the System 7 days likely remembers seeing the bomb message and getting intimate with macbugs (G^FINDER) to try to save your work. I think the only way you'll see a dramatic rise in quality would be if software becomes their core business (instead of hardware)... which isn't happening.
• eccstartup 12y ago
  I don't agree with owenwil. Apple is actually making bugs release after release. It really brought pain upgrading to Yosemite, waiting the fucking hours copying files in the so-called "a few minutes". As I can recall, upgrading from 10.8 to 10.9, Preview begins to blur when scrolling, and more memory taken. Then in the release of Yosemite, MATLAB GUI won't work at first, then goes the ugly color theme for mobile devices. Few will upgrade to 10.10 if there were not Swift support.
  • rsync 12y ago
    "It really brought pain upgrading to Yosemite, waiting the fucking hours copying files in the so-called "a few minutes"." I don't understand how this basic piece of wisdom has not filtered down to everyone, everywhere that owns a computing device: Don't upgrade. Always reinstall. Always. In 1995, don't upgrade windows 3.x to win95. Reinstall. In 2000, don't upgrade to winXP. Reinstall. In 2008, dont upgrade to Snow Leopard. Reinstall. In 2020, don't upgrade to Novell Carnival Ride. Reinstall. Don't. Ever. Upgrade. Always reinstall.
    • eccstartup 12y ago
      Because AppStore told me that I can upgrade.
      • mitchty 12y ago
        So you're going to listen to the "AppStore"? I always reinstall and rsync my home directory back and reinstall applications on osx. I never have any of the problems people seem to have here. Just as an anecdotal point. Upgrades "work" but honestly I don't trust upgrades on any operating system. I'm working on finishing up ansible plays to get things sorted out entirely. Upgrade if you want, but accept you probably have skeletons in your closet.
        • eccstartup 12y ago
          If I don't listen those who provide the service, am I going to listen to you? If Apple cannot give me a good solution, why would I buy its product? I know you are good at backing up your files and reinstalling, but I don't want this stuff bother me every release like this. I am just not that free, dude.
• CoolGuySteve 12y ago
  Former OS X developer here. I'd say the biggest change in the development methodology happened when Bertrand Serlet was replaced with Craig Federighi. With Bertrand, we would move in giant monolithic releases where every group would just dump in whatever they had ready and the whole thing would get released with nightly builds. With SnowLeopard in particular, I remember three dozen releases in a row where Xcode was unusable due to obj-c garbage collection issues. Random stuff you didn't expect like CoreGraphics would have showstopper issues and then we'd report it and it would get fixed by the next week. This resulted in extremely late releases that had a ton of bugs that we piled patches onto as time went on. Craig moved the organization onto a sprint system, where we would develop new features for 2 weeks and then spend a week fixing bugs. After 10 or 12 or 16 of these cycles, we would deem it ready and ship it out. I felt this produced more stable but more conservative software. It seemed like giant rewrites and massive features would be very difficult to introduce and if they did get done, wouldn't happen until two thirds or so into the release cycle. On the other hand, Craig has consistently been able to release on time with most of the features promised. I was only there up to the release of Lion (the first Craig release), so I don't know how updates and patches worked from then on. Maybe they're worse now. But I've been using OS X all this time, and honestly I don't think it's any worse than before. What has changed is that releases and features happen more often. Tiger and Leopard had a good 2 years to mature and get patches while their delayed successors missed target dates. In the meantime they stagnated with ancient unix tools, safari build, QuickTime frameworks, graphics drivers etc. They felt stable because they were just old, sort of like Debian stable. Meanwhile, the development versions of Leopard and Snow Leopard (the two I spent most of my career at Apple developing) were downright horrible and unreleasable. Each of those releases went gold and had an almost immediate .1 release to fix glaring issues. It's just that you remember them better because they had a longer history as a stable legacy OS than the modern versions.
  • toyg 12y ago
    you remember them better because they had a longer history as a stable legacy OS than the modern versions. Does this tell us anything about the state of modern commercial OS development? Users like stability and predictability in their software. Sure, they like new whizz-bang as well, but that excitement lasts for a week after you buy a new machine, and then they want stability every day for years. That conflicts with commercial pressures to sell Shiny New Things every few months. Flat icons? Let's make them skeuomorphic. Skeuomorphic icons? Let's make them flat! Tabs are stupid, let's make them all windows. Windows are stupid, let's make them all tabs! Multitasking is great, let's have more dashboards. Single-tasking is great, let's have more fullscreen! And so on and so forth, rinse and repeat. I think hardware waves used to hide most of this game, since every year new hardware was so much more powerful than before, you could justify this constant churning as "adding more stuff". This has not really been true on the desktop for almost a decade now, so the long-term patterns emerge and they are quite ugly to see.
• coldtea 12y ago
  The article is completely devoid of content. Any particular gripes he had with latest OS X version? And most importantly, anything for which similar things couldn't be said for OS X version's from 10.1 to 10.9? FWIW, I find Yosemite a fine and stable release.
• lnanek2 12y ago
  Couldn't agree more. I can't open my coworkers KeyNote presentations because my copy is a year newer. My two year old Macbook Retina Pro black screens half the time it tries to wake up from sleep and yes, I've wiped every startup program and kernel extension. I'm just glad it isn't my work Macbook Pro which black screens on login half the time and insists I forgot my password and won't let me time my password in another quarter. I suspect it has something to do with disk encryption since it started after they turned File Vault or whatever it is on.
• fsk 12y ago
  One example for me: A recent OS update broke XAMPP/mysql. It took me a couple of hours to figure out what setting I had to change to make it work again.
• brohoolio 12y ago
  From an enterprise standpoint the wifi on 10.10 is basically a DDos attack. I know they are trying to put in a feature to send files between devices but it doesn't work on a college campus at all, which should be an environment they are testing in.
• zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
  It's not just the functional high ground that Apple has lost, it's the look and feel battle. To me, both Windows 8 and Windows 7 look way, way more modern than the latest Mac OS. There's animation, there are colors, consistent and solid keyboard support, strong consistency (why can't I still rename a file in the Mac OS file dialog but I can in Finder? They both look identical!). For a little while, Mac OS had the UNIX foundation advantage over Windows but these days are gone. Today, I use git, ssh and bash seamlessly on Windows. I think Apple just lost contact with its users.
• rtpg 12y ago
  The thing I don't get in this discussion is that somehow the issue is that OS releases are too soon. If we assume that we were on a bi-yearly cycle instead, wouldn't that mean 2 times as many features would break in an instant? Shouldn't Apple be doing updates faster (and smaller) instead of sooner? Whatever happened to agile? Considering the amount of third party software now in the ecosystem, faster updates seem the only way forward. Unless you want your entire dev setup to be broken for 3 months every 2 years while all of your tools update to the 100 different incompatible changes.
• ChuckMcM 12y ago
  I just have this vision of OS X like a model of the golden gate bridge made out of dried pasta. If you grab one end and point it in a different direction a lot of noodles break and its crappy until you get them fixed. If you turn it very slowly you can do so without breaking any noodles, but it takes a long time to get to a new orientation. My assertion is that OS X (and Windows for that matter) are trying to serve two masters, one is the 'appliance user' who never puts anything on their device except for what came out of the App store, and the 'computer user' who uses their machine as a tool to develop software for themselves, or appliance users. While not a mainstream idea, I think a Macbook with IOS would be a better "answer" for application users than a Macbook with OSX, and a Macbook with OSX and none of the appliancey features might be a better Macbook for developers. Developers would no doubt run IOS in a VM on their Macbook which would both provide them a test platform when delivering new code, and a place to use their own appliancy type apps, away from the core development world. Windows could do that as well, splitting into an 'end user' and a 'developer' mode. That said, it is really frustrating all around.
  • ericd 12y ago
    I think that might work well in practice, but I think a lot of us hold out hope that a lot of the 'appliance users' will dig deeper and become proper 'computer users', and we worry that going the separate route will prevent that, and create a population with a low computer literacy rate. Unfortunately, that seems to be the way we're going, with many people adopting iPads as their main computing platform.
• 23david 12y ago
  Losing the high ground to what? Ubuntu 14? Windows 8? Chrome OS? I'm not running OSX as a server OS and don't plan to. But even with the latest 10.10.1, I still see uptime in terms of weeks including mandatory reboots due to OS updates. I think it's easy to say that other desktop OS's are years behind and falling farther behind with each release. As has happened in prior OSX releases, this latest release may have been rushed. The next release will probably address current bugs.
  • kimdouglasmason 12y ago
    "I still see uptime in terms of weeks including mandatory reboots due to OS updates." This now applies to every OS out there. Windows, iOS, Linux, ChromeOS (aka Linux :). It's simply not a bragging point anymore. "I think it's easy to say that other desktop OS's are years behind and falling farther behind with each release." You're right that it's easy to say. That makes you technically correct - the best kind of correct :). I personally disagree, and think this XKCD strip is relevant: http://xkcd.com/934/ http://xkcd.com/934/
• intopieces 12y ago
  By what measure is Apple losing reputation? Their sales are at an all time high in a market that is losing ground to tablets. This is the second post on HN today about how terrible OS X is, and I just don't see it. And I hardly consider the yearly updates major OS changes. Yosemite was pretty big, but that was the first big one in a few years it seems.
• visarga 12y ago
  Very unhappy with Yosemite. I've never had so many system crashes. I think I need to install the one 2 versions ago.
• WoodenChair 12y ago
  I've used OS X daily through every public release (including the public beta). I actually wrote a column about OS X during its early days. All of these articles are anecdotal, and I agree with other commenters here who say it's all about perception. The fact of the matter is that Apple has had some high profile "quality scandals" the last year (some would argue 2/3 were not deserved): - iOS point release that bricked phones and was pulled - Bendgate - iCloud hacking scandal None of them actually were OS X bugs, but you couple that with some minor OS X bugs and everything goes into a whirlwind of negative perception. What are the major OS X bugs that everyone is referring to though? I haven't experienced them, but that's anecdotal, so that opinion is just as worthless as everyone else's. I heard people are having some Wifi issues - that sucks - but where is the showstopper that's affecting everyone? On the other hand, I do feel that iOS and Swift have been buggy enough for developers the last couple of years that its hurt Apple's rep in a legitimate way amongst the intelligentsia - programmers who have a pedestal to preach from. But let's be real - in terms of day to day problems, things are much much better than they were during Mac OS X 10.0 to 10.2, and yes, they're still better than Windows/Linux (which will always be plagued by the huge number of hardware configurations they must support).
• TomVDB 12y ago
  I'm surprised that he's complaining about OS X and not iOS 8. Coming from an iPhone 5 with iOS7 going to a 6 with iOS8, it was a major regression in terms of minor annoyances. Particularly: - selecting text for cut and paste in a text edit field is often very broken. I hit this one daily. I used to be a prolific iOS typer, but I've gone back to using my MacBook Air 11 just for this reason. - selecting text in a browser windows brings out the weirdest bug, where the window gets stuck scrolling all the time. I have this OCD thing where I continuously select and deselect text for no reason whatsoever. As a result, this hits me many times per day. The only way to fix it is to kill Safari. - When you have your phone open in landscape. Power it down. Then switch it on again in portrait, iOS doesn't detect the change in orientation. You have to rotate to landscape and back before it notices. There are just minor things, but when they hit time and again, they get annoying real quick. And they don't get fixed.
• minusSeven 12y ago
  Can anyone post some specific bugs OP here is talking about ? I would love to know them.
• eonil 12y ago
  I feel like Apple software quality has been degraded because I always expected kind of top and flawless. It has been and must be to keep its position. As far as I remember, in earlier versions of OS X, I just didn't care on visuals so much because it was very flawless, so everything felt smooth like a fluid and nothing bugged me. With 10.10, I see visual/animation glitches very frequently on same hardware. And it is getting bugging me up and it feels flawed. I believe this is because of moving on to a new visual styles. But if this sustains, it's just a matter of time to hit the bottom.
• Xixi 12y ago
  Just a couple weeks ago someone asked me how Yosemite was compared to Mavericks. My answer: "they are the same modulo a couple minor UI tweaks". I guess it's because I use very little Apple softwares, despite using almost exclusively Apple hardware. Turns out Yosemite is perfectly fine to use Sublime Text, the Terminal and Firefox.
• Demiurge 12y ago
  What I always wanted to know is, why doesn't OSX have the option to disable mouse acceleration?
  • jokoon 12y ago
    haha, you can use a paying software to fix that. crazy right ?
• bla2 12y ago
  I bet Jony Ive will go back to focusing on design and someone else will run engineering again. Apple tends to prefer internal promotions but I wouldn't be surprised if summertime external becomes new head of software. Maybe someone who has a NeXT background.
• phazmatis 12y ago
  In mavericks, I could hit command-space and start typing, and knew that even though the spotlight box hadn't popped up yet, my text was being captured. Now in yosemite, it's more like... hit command-space, start typing "chrome", wind up with a box 1.5 seconds later filled in with "ome". This is only a problem on my i5 mac mini. My macbook pro (same year - late 2012) is just barely fast enough to pop open the window in time to capture my text input. But that just shows that their UI stack is too deep to provide the kind of snappy user interactions they are shooting for.
  • DigitalJack 12y ago
    Maybe there is something odd about the mac mini that causes this; my 2009 mac book pro with mavericks has no problem with it. I tried, but couldn't hit a character fast enough to cause a miss. It wouldn't surprise me to find out there was something hardware related with the mini that leads to this.
• buro9 12y ago
  having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality. Maybe it’s an engineering problem, but I suspect not — I doubt that any cohesive engineering team could keep up with these demands and maintain significantly higher quality. And yet, OpenBSD springs to mind for not just the timeliness of their releases (every 6 months) but also the quality and features within each release.
• jokoon 12y ago
  I have a macbook pro, and honestly I cannot set to believe any OS like mavericks, in this age, cannot run properly with 2GB of ram. Everything is slow. 3MB of L2 cache processor, there's no excuse.
• cpg 12y ago
  Lest we don't forget, interacting with SMB file shares has been a constant pain for years now, pretty much in every release. I will spare the details from before, but in Mavericks, when things looked like were being fixed, one cannot delete an entire folder. It would delete the contents, but not the folder, then one had to delete the folder by itself after it was empty. In Yosemite some folders are left "locked" without being able to do anything to them from OS X. This was similar and worse before. And don't get me going on how it leaves .DS_Store, ._.DS_Store, .apdisk and ._.apdisk crapola laying around. Oh, how about driving everyone to properly support case-sensitiveness? All sorts of things do not work or crash, or simply refuse to install if installed in case-sensitive volumes. How about fixing random video corruption in Yosemite? https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/364883/Screenshots/video-corruption.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/364883/Screenshots/video... How about training the "geniuses" at the stores that there are other standards for video cabling? (And that one should not have to buy thunderbird-enabled monitors to be able to have more than one monitor on a macbook?). My MacBook Pro froze and rebooted out of the blue this past week. It was pretty much idle. has never done that before. And on and on ...
• pedalpete 12y ago
  I'm going to suggest that the 'functional high ground' was relied on a unique combination of marketing, market penetration and era. Of course, we know Apple always pushed the 'it just works' mantra, but this was when Apple was supporting a small number of devices, and when they had forced everybody to update to new hardware in order to run OSX anyway, so what you had was an OS that worked VERY well for a small number of people on a small number of devices. Those few (like myself) who claimed that OSX was not any better than windows (my first experience with OSX had me in a reboot loop trying to get Pages or Keynote working), were a minority of the OS users and a tiny percentage of overall computer users. As OSX has grown in popularity, the 10% who dislike the newest versions has gone from a few tens of thousands (may hundred thousand) to a few million. Some of them very vocal, like Marco. Lastly, I mentioned the 'era'. When OSX was gaining in popularity, many people were moving from Windows '98 and XP. They had skipped Vista and didn't try Windows 7. Moving to OSX was a massive improvement, as it was a much more modern and cleaner OS. Those same people are now used to the bells and whistles of OSX, and each new upgrade shows minor improvements and a few odd little features that, from what people tell me, come with the recommendation of "turn off the new stuff". Those who complain about Microsoft OS quality, didn't compare Apple OS quality of a similar era. If you compare OS9 to 98 or XP, I think you'd find that it's a much more even comparison, and Microsoft may even come out on top.
• gladimdim 12y ago
  Btw Gnome 3 looks and feels almost like Mac OS. But it works and does not crash like Mac OS. Everyone who uses Mac OS should try modern Linux distributions. They do not suck so much as 2 years ago.
• chj 12y ago
  I hate every single new OS X release, because that means I have to struggle with wifi issues all over again.
  • danieldk 12y ago
    And changes to Xcode that break compilation a handful of open source libraries/utilities that I use.
• leonroy 12y ago
  Marco's article seems a little hyperbolic since as I recall Leopard for instance was hugely unstable on release. Conventional wisdom with OS X has always been to wait a few point releases before jumping in. With Microsoft it was to wait until at least SP1. I don't think things have changed that drastically. * SMB support still sucks. * OS X Server is still a monumental turd and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple kills it a release or two down the line. * Yanking Spaces in Mountain Lion and going to Mission Control followed by Yosemite finally getting (flaky) multi-monitor support is classic Apple focusing on the consumer before the pros. * Active Directory in Yosemite is a bit buggy but anyone who's used Leopard will remember that the gold master wouldn't even allow AD logons if your domain was .local - I mean did anyone at Apple even test something as basic as that!? It goes on, but I honestly don't think Apple have changed for the worse. They're not any better in my personal opinion either. The biggest problem we face with Apple at my company and it could certainly create the impression of increasing bugginess, is that Apple's release cycle is much shorter now. No more 18 month releases with $100 upgrade fees. Every developer in our shop can click 'Upgrade' on their machine and fuck their whole environment up. It used to be much harder for them to do that in the past which goes back to my original point. Don't upgrade a production machine until you're at least a few point releases in! (that goes for your iOS devices too...)
• nocman 12y ago
  For anyone wanting to read the Geoff Wozniak post quoted in the article, here's the archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20150105063342/http://wozniak.ca/why-i-quit-os-x https://web.archive.org/web/20150105063342/http://wozniak.ca... Perhaps he removed the original article because of increased traffic. At any rate, I got a 404 when I clicked the link.