
Apple has lost the functional high ground - milen
http://www.marco.org/2015/01/04/apple-lost-functional-high-ground
======
CoolGuySteve
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.

~~~
throwawayosx
current apple engineer... the sprint (milestone) development system is still
in place... it's not the problem though, it's the problem is the focus on new
useless [imo] features at the expense of core functionality and quality

hope marco, geoff and others keep writing these articles so that eventually
tim or someone sees one and shakes things up. pressure from the bottom has not
worked so far

~~~
23david
would be interesting to hear what the distinction is between useless and core
features.

Maybe I'm just not hitting core features with OSX 10.10, but the features I'm
using seem fine. And not seeing stability issues with third-party software.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Fwiw I can crash the entire OS by abusing tabs in Chrome. Too many tabs open
=> System freeze, hard reboot required. OS X Mavericks on MBPr 15".

That shouldn't be possible. Crash the browser yes, not the whole OS.

~~~
wortendyke
I was also experiencing something like this. I would open lots of tabs, and at
some point the machine would freeze and I would need to do a hard reboot. This
got worse after installing Yosemite, where I could rarely go a day without
having to reboot my system.

I was about to take my laptop in to see if it was a hardware issue when a
coworker pointed me to a forum where someone suggested turning off automatic
graphics switching. I did that about two weeks ago, and since then I haven't
had a single occurrence of the issue. You may want to try the same thing to
see if it helps.

~~~
23david
Interesting! Wonder if it's a quality control issue with the code handling the
graphics switching. Afaik, Apple engineers write custom video drivers for
every supported hardware device. Wonder if Intel is now contributing more to
the graphics driver updates and maintenance.

------
blinkingled
> 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.

~~~
rertrree
Windows are getting better and better.

95/98 crashed all the time, xp crashed if you really tried. Windows 7 hasn't
crashed once after two years of daily usage, and/or keeping it running without
a restart for months. Even when the system locks up due to user abuse( me ),
and would require a reboot on anything older, you just wait a minute and it
recovers.

~~~
jeena
I'd like to throw in my experience with Linux here. My backround is that I
used Windows 2000 and XP from 2001 to 2003 after that Linux for three years
and then OS X until 2013, now back on Linux.

I bought a used ThinkPad because I heard that that is the hardware which would
work best with Linux now and I installed Ubuntu on it. Everything worked ok
but just the OS filled up half of my small 128 GB SSD and running only Firefox
for browsing got up the load to over 0.5, which made everything not so snappy.

A couple of months ago I moved to archlinux with Gnome 3.x, it was a bit more
complicated to install, that I admit, but it was so worth it! After
installation the system used less then 3 GB of my SSD, and now running just
firefox the load is on about 0.01 which makes this ThinkPad from 2010 one of
the snappiest computers I ever used. All animations are smooth, not a single
application ever crashed or hanged itself and so on. But yeah admitedly I
mostly only do development, email and websurfing on it.

------
owenwil
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.

~~~
king_magic
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.

~~~
bratsche
> Guess you havn't had a hanging Safari or Chrome tab take down the entire OS.

I haven't seen that happen on either of my Macs.

I've experienced exactly one major new issue in Yosemite, and it's only
affecting one of my Macs: when my iMac Retina sleeps, it often doesn't wake
correctly and ends up doing a system reset so all my terminal state is lost.
It's really fucking annoying. I managed to work around it by changing
something in the sleep settings.

~~~
whichdan
I've experienced a similar issue with my 2012 iMac: after waking from sleep, I
find that all of my terminal tabs are in a "Restored" state, so the history is
correct, but anything running ends up detached. It's frustrating, and only
started happening with Yosemite.

------
breatheoften
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 ...

~~~
empthought
What would you like besides the network status and network activity indicator
in the upper left hand corner of the screen?

~~~
drabiega
I think he was thinking something to indicate that the current thing you were
doing is using the network: an alternative wait cursor would be a nice touch.

------
visakanv
> 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-
ellsber...](http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsberg-
limitations-knowledge)

> "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."

------
themoonbus
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
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.

~~~
yoklov
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.

------
smacktoward
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/3797471556x0x789...](http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AAPL/3797471556x0x789040/ED3853DA-2E3F-448D-ADB4-34816C375F5D/2014_Form_10_K_As_Filed.PDF))
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.

~~~
rsync
"So if you're Apple, where does the Mac fit in your product line these days,
exactly?"

It worries me that everyone, everywhere has been asking for a retina MBA for
about three years now, and it keeps not coming.

I'm suspicious that the "new MBA", whatever that is, will be the first step of
a "mac" becoming an iDevice. It will be a "macbook" running iOS.

I hope I'm wrong.

~~~
CamperBob2
I wouldn't be surprised if there _is_ no Mac in a few years. Recall that one
of Jobs's less-noticed, er, _innovations_ was removing the word "Computer"
from the company's name.

Yes, you need a Mac to write iOS apps. No, that is not some kind of immutable
law of nature, as any game console developer who works in Windows or Linux can
attest.

On a long-enough timeline, being in the "computer" business may turn out to be
more trouble than it's worth to Apple.

------
Animats
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?

------
ChuckMcM
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
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.

------
fpgeek
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
How have users of OSX become more helpless than they were at any point in the
past?

~~~
fpgeek
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
Sorry, what has that to do with helplessness? The claim was that the influence
of iOS makes OSX less able to help themselves.

~~~
fpgeek
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
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
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
Unfortunately for tinkerers, these processes allow Apple to produce very small
and lightweight hardware. These qualities are more valuable to consumers than
tinkerability.

~~~
vinceguidry
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
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.

~~~
vinceguidry
It's not just tinkerers. If you crack your screen, the glass is generally
glued onto the screen, necessitating replacement of the entire display
assembly, which isn't all that much cheaper than just buying a new one. They
do this on purpose to force people to buy more devices.

The only reason they get away with it because we don't force them to take
repairability seriously. As someone noted, most customers prefer new devices.

~~~
empthought
You only need to purchase more devices if you make it a habit to break the
ones you have. No one's being forced to do anything in the repairability case.

------
smoyer
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
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.

~~~
eddieroger
> Mac OSX is hardly usable.

You cite anecdotes that you don't even pretend to justify with examples. Are
you speaking from experience? I'd bet not. And it's interesting that you think
putting Windows 10 on your girlfriend's machine would solve your problems -
moving my entire family to a Mac running OS X has solved all of mine.

~~~
scotty79
To list problems I had with Mac OSX over last few months I'd need at least few
blog posts.

But that would be redundant because a lot of them are not unique. When I'm
infuriated by something I search for solutions an I'm seeing lots of people
expeiriencing same glitches or "featurs" and sharing some workarounds (working
if I'm lucky) often paid, or just piling up comments about the issue.

Are you sure your familiy still uses computers you migrated to mac osx? Maybe
after that stunt they are just afraid to ask you about anything else?

There was a joke where a guy who was sneezing went to the doctor but the
doctor made a mistake and perscribed him a laxative. When the guy shows up at
the doctors again in few day a the doctor asks "Do you still sneeze?" guy
replied "I don't dare..."

~~~
eddieroger
> Are you sure your familiy still uses computers you migrated to mac osx?
> Maybe after that stunt they are just afraid to ask you about anything else?

Yeah, I'm positive, since they're not entirely without problems and I still
get pinged periodically. I also live relatively near them and talk to them all
the time.

It's worth pointing out that while you say your issues with OS X are numerous
and well documented on the Internet already, you didn't like to any of them.
So it's still unjustified anecdotes. Here's a practical one I just dealt with
- there's one hold out in my family on Windows, and he wants to set up a
syncing calendar between his computer and iPhone. Outlook can't natively
support CalDAV - the backend his company's server runs uses IMAP and
Cal/CardDAV - so I could either pay for a plugin or convert him to
Thunderbird. If he had a Mac, it'd have been a two minute deal since the
built-in tools have CalDAV support. But that's just one example, of course.

~~~
scotty79
Don't even get me started on iPhone. Putting mp3 ringtone on it is some
serious trick coercing of itunes even on Mac. Ios web browser can't even
download arbitrary files. You can't mount iphone as a thumbdrive to move files
around.

As for mac, magic mouse is basically useless as clicking causes unwanted
scrolling especially in adobe apps and google maps. All praise to good people
who made Mouse Prefs app and give it away for free. They should get a pot of
gold from apple.

Finder is such a piece of crap that basically first advice given to mac users
is buy a file manager. It can't display directories above files. You need to
install xtra finder for that.

Image browser is nowhere near the functionality of Fast Stone on windows. Also
3rd party browsers are far behind.

Network drive doesn't autoconnect sometimes and often disconnects. Remote
folders visible in finder window don't show up in save dialog of a web
browser. Folders disappear from favorites in finde for no aparent reason.
Finder sometimes doesn't indicate if contents of the remote dir ar still
loading so when seeing empty remote dir you don't know if it's empty or it
just didn't load yet.

Some high dpi usb mouse can't be used because it feeds mouse move events too
fast for mac osx and they swamp mouse down event so dragging a window becomes
very hard and deliberate operation.

Dropown menus on finder got damaged after some use. Clicking away from the
dropdown menu on some button locks this button, as if it didn't register mouse
down event until it gets mouse up event that somehow got swollowed by
dissaperaing menu.

Computer sometimes closes very slowly. Finder just hangs and blocks computer
restart. Multiple desktops, multiple fullscreen apps, fullscreen apps at all
just get in a way. Switching them with gestures is source of additional
confusion.

Additional monitors display weird lines when they are turning on an off.

I even installed clean yosemite in hopes that it will fix some obvious
defects. It didn't help much.

So far my expeirience with mac that costed three times any of my previous
computers is that it's pile of failing crap.

Yosemite is pretty win 98. Maverics was the same but with different skin. Even
linux wasn't that bad. At least not for the last 5 years.

------
raspasov
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.

------
pedalpete
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.

------
coldtea
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.

------
bane
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.

------
phazmatis
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
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.

------
lnanek2
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.

------
zak_mc_kracken
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.

------
WoodenChair
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).

------
cpg
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...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/364883/Screenshots/video-
corruption.png)

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 ...

------
leonroy
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...)

------
TomVDB
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.

------
krschultz
_" 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
"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.

------
corford
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
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
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
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...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2010/07/a-post-mortem-of-kins-tragic-demise/)

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.

------
philliphaydon
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.

------
corbinpage
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
> 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".

~~~
eddieroger
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.

------
eonil
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.

------
rtpg
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.

------
eccstartup
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
"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
Because AppStore told me that I can upgrade.

~~~
mitchty
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
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.

~~~
mitchty
Fair enough, but then a followup question, and don't take it the wrong way. If
there is a known, os agnostic, way to fix issues with upgrades, and you do not
employ that solution, is arguing about upgrading without trying that option
productive? I understand you don't listen to the os vendor, but in that case I
can't see the logic you'll use as all os's have issues/quirks/edge cases and
"trusting trust" of someone. If you're not getting value out of OS X, then
honestly you should be moving off it regardless of what anyone says.

As a note, here is how I do the entire thing, I rsync my home dir on each home
wifi connect (scripted for years with ControlPlane), and midnight as well. I
also rsync before upgrading, then I upgrade the os, rsync again, reinstall the
os and rsync home dir back and reinstall vmware.

Sounds hard right? Takes about overnight really most for the rsync back and
that just happens while I sleep. I do the same thing for linux/freebsd also.
As an example, freebsd 10 upgrade had issues with bhyve not working after
upgrading. For linux as an example, things can be markedly worse for things
like ubuntu upgrades. Which is/isn't my experience as a (thankfully now ex)
devops admin. Nothing is perfect, especially upgrades. That said I have tested
the tires out on upgrades of OS X and not really seen issues that others do.

I understand no time, but setting this up, which granted for me is trivial as
vmware is about it that I reinstall, the rest is in ~/Applications, means its
trivial to not encounter dragons needlessly. I understand you might have the
adobe creative suite or whatever installed and reinstalling might be worse
than crossing into mordor, but this wisdom is passed on not just by me but
from those that came before me. The rsync bit could be improved but I'm lazy
and it works well enough.

~~~
eccstartup
The first thing I have to think if I want to reinstall instead of upgrade is,
how to backup MacTeX & homebrew. I have to consider if it will generate pdf
documents correctly. (MacTeX is installed in /usr/texbin/) Reinstalling MacTeX
is not that hard compared with reinstalling homebrew. Homebrew, though bottled
most package, will take a long time compiling a version gcc with openmp
support, let alone recalling who to install. And gcc is not the only thing
that need a compiling job. Maybe, years later, I will follow the path of
reinstalling or moving back to Linux.

~~~
mitchty
So I compile llvm+gcc often with home-brew, the compile time on my laptop
takes total about 5.5 hours. But I setup vagrant and vmware to allow me to
automate this all away and create txz's of the install.

And as for mactex it seems to work fine for what I use, though it installs to
/usr/local/texlive when I tested it a month ago.

------
jokoon
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.

------
buro9

        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.

------
nocman
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...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150105063342/http://wozniak.ca/why-
i-quit-os-x)

Perhaps he removed the original article because of increased traffic. At any
rate, I got a 404 when I clicked the link.

------
lispm
> 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.

------
bsclifton
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.

------
intopieces
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.

------
Xixi
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.

------
bluedino
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.

------
bla2
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.

------
brohoolio
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.

------
lkdeveloper
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?

------
gladimdim
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.

------
fsk
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.

------
23david
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
"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/)

------
visarga
Very unhappy with Yosemite. I've never had so many system crashes. I think I
need to install the one 2 versions ago.

------
chj
I hate every single new OS X release, because that means I have to struggle
with wifi issues all over again.

~~~
danieldk
And changes to Xcode that break compilation a handful of open source
libraries/utilities that I use.

------
Demiurge
What I always wanted to know is, why doesn't OSX have the option to disable
mouse acceleration?

~~~
jokoon
haha, you can use a paying software to fix that.

crazy right ?

------
vinceguidry
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.

------
minusSeven
Can anyone post some specific bugs OP here is talking about ? I would love to
know them.

------
datashovel
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
it's obvious negativity in comments aren't good for karma, but stories with
negative premise is unclear to me.

