
It Just Works - danielandrews
http://www.danielandrews.com/2015/08/05/it-just-works/
======
geophile
Major Apple applications have become inscrutable and frustrating.

\- iTunes, Music and the iTunes store are a mess. I understood the old iTunes
organization. Navigation within my music collection has become highly non-
intuitive. It seems that there are multiple paradigms (long list of tracks,
and another sectioned off by album), and it isn't always clear why one or the
other is used. I keep forgetting how to get to the store. Once there, the
integration with the stuff I've bought is unclear (especially for video
content). I once got extremely confused watching a series, not realizing that
one particular view of the episodes were ordered by POPULARITY, not in
chronological order. And ratings! I get the 0-5 star rating system. Then they
added the heart icon for -- uhh -- something. Why not just use the existing
rating system? Why do I have to rate things again for a different purpose?

\- Podcasts have become very confusing. I want to be able to control what is
physically present on my devices, to control data usage on my phone, and space
usage on all devices. They've intentionally made that difficult.

\- Photos is a disaster. There are many different organization paradigms, and
it is unclear why some of my recent photos appear in some of them but not
others. What are the differences among events and photo stream? Why do some
pictures show up in the by-date organization but not photo stream? What's in
the cloud? When does it sync with my phone? Why is it easy to sync with my
phone by cable but not IP?

If current trends continue, my beautiful Mac hardware will be nothing but a
boot loader for VMWare and Linux.

~~~
bzudo
I totally agree with you on Photos. Everything about it is overly complicated.
It should be a simple as take photo, it's on my phone, automatically added to
my computer and in the cloud. Edit/delete anywhere. At least they got rid of
the Camera Roll.

If I do plug my iPhone into the computer, I should be able to drag and drop
photos from my phone through Finder. No application needed. I miss the old
iPod Classic and it's external hard drive functions.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
"If I do plug my iPhone into the computer, I should be able to drag and
drop..."

This may sound petty, but this is the biggest reason I don't use an iPhone.
Smartphones are more than consumption devices. They are tiny computers and I
want the flexibility of using a tiny computer.

~~~
tonylemesmer
Not at all petty. This and being forced to use iTunes are my primary reason
for disliking iPhones.

Having said that, my Android phone is rooted, so there's probably an argument
that I could have an iPhone and root it to achieve what I want.

~~~
jen729w
Not disagreeing that it's horrible, but you don't actually need to use iTunes
to use an iPhone. I can't remember the last time I opened iTunes.

iTunes Match worked great for me, but now Spotify has all but replaced any
dependence I have on Apple for music.

------
planetjones
It's really frustrating for me just how many bugs Apple software has. Let's
look at a simple one - the icons on iOS safari for frequently visited
websites. They "randomly" assign the wrong favicon e.g. I click the Facebook
icon and it loads Hacker News. This has been present since iOS 8. Yesterday I
pulled down the notification screen and it occupies only 50% of my screen. Cue
another reboot of the iPhone.

My iMac. Upgrading to Yosemite was the worst mistake ever. Now I have to use a
cheap mouse and keyboard, as Apple's Bluetooth versions no longer wake the
sleeping iMac. I have tried every solution on the Internet to this and none
fix it. The beachball is becoming ever more prominent on the iMac too. Very
disappointing for a machine which isn't 3 years old.

My Macbook Air. It's better, but the power button no longer does anything when
I press it.

Apple products have a huge premium and the quality of the software is not
matching the price tag. I am not surprised to see the stock falling; usually
when IBM buy your products en masse you know something is wrong :)

I don't know what the culture at Apple is. But I don't think their software
developers can be anything other than the "norm" \- and I am extremely worried
about their automated testing culture. Maybe someone can comment.

EDIT: I just remembered my Apple Cr*p folder home to Podcasts, Tips, Apple
Watch, Calendar, Health, Apple Store, Apple Maps, Videos, Reminders and
Newstand. Podcasts actually cost me money when it started downloaded podcasts
over 3G despite me saying wifi only. I think that bug got fixed, but I'll
never trust it again. I also forgot about the white elephant that is the Apple
Time capsule I purchased. It's slow over wifi from the iMac and was one of the
causes of my beachball, but the main issue was it kept saying it couldn't back
up because the disk was locked. For a company like Apple who should supposedly
simplify backup, the product is a shambles. Maybe this is better now, but I
won't be upgrading.

~~~
ino
> My Macbook Air. It's better, but the power button no longer does anything
> when I press it.

Press and hold. It's this way to prevent accidental logouts which were
frequent in my case when it was just a press.

~~~
rbritton
Thanks. That's something that would have been really helpful to see a note on.
It changed the behavior of a button that's been consistent for as long as I
can remember.

~~~
afandian
It happened when the moved the button onto the keyboard. People kept hitting
it by mistake and sleeping their machines.

------
suresk
The thing about saying "it just works" and attempting to hide everything from
the user is that it is really, really frustrating when it doesn't "just work".

The amount of hardware and software bugs I've encountered in Apple products
has been steadily increasing, to the point where I'm really only happy with my
iPhone (and even that has some problems) -

\- Connecting a wired keyboard to a Thunderbolt display that is connected to
my MBP rarely worked after disconnecting/reconnecting my MBP. I'd have to
change which USB port the keyboard connected to - until discovering that this
was a common problem that connecting a USB extender fixes. It just works?

\- We use Apple TVs in our conference rooms to connect our laptops to and
project via a projector/tv. The Apple TVs routinely reboot, fail to connect,
and drop connections. I've had my laptop lock up for several minutes trying to
connect to one.

\- iMessage routinely gets into a state where it shows ghost notifications
that I have to clear by deleting conversations one-by-one until I find out
which one is causing it.

\- iMessage routinely reorders previous messages.

\- Safari randomly uses the wrong favicon for frequently visited websites.

And so many more. It is really disappointing that I'm not really that
surprised when something doesn't work or feels clunky. At this point, I trust
my Windows machine more than I do my Mac.

------
bilbo0s
"...In my opinion, Yosemite is the worst non-beta Mac OS release I’ve ever
used – and I’ve used everything other than the public betas of 10.0 ..."

???

Personally I find Yosemite AND Windows 10 to be wanting in most every respect.
But I think there is a bit of a tendency to view the past through rose colored
glasses.

There is no way that Yosemite is worse than 10.0 or 10.1. I know I'm going to
date myself a bit here... but 10.1 on that Titanium powerbook, that sagged
like rubber if you held it from one end by the way, had to be the single worst
computing experience of my life. That INCLUDES waiting for time on the
mainframe, punchcards in hand, in the basement of the computer science
building at the University of Wisconsin.

"... While I didn’t run into any data loss issues or anything particularly
catastrophic..."

That right there should tell you it's better than early OSX. Thank who- or
whatever you deem divine for Perforce... because I once lost an entire Solaris
build of the Photoshop engine to early OSX. And it waited until I had fixed
quite a few bugs to make the engine work on BSD before it crapped on me too.

AWESOME times!!! No actually it SUCKED!!!

Maybe I'm just being harsh on 10.0 and 10.1, or maybe harsh on Titanium
powerbooks??? I don't know. Maybe other people were not as annoyed as I was
with the crashes and slowness. But it was BAD!!! HORRIBLE actually. I think
Vista was a sack of crap... but even Vista gave a better experience than the
early OSX versions. Though Vista and early OSX probably are neck and neck for
worst desktop OS experiences to date.

I don't know... I could be wrong. I mean... I also think Windows XP has
probably delivered mankind the BEST desktop OS experience to date. So what do
I know ???

Anyway... Yosemite is bad... but for those too young to remember... BELIEVE me
when I say... early OSX was FAR, far worse.

~~~
sosborn
> early OSX was FAR, far worse.

Not all of them though.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
I don't understand why the hacker scene these days is full of proud OSX users.
What happened to the proud Linux hackers we've always had? They told me to use
OSX at the job I recently started, and I only lasted a week before I told them
I wanted to install Linux.

~~~
jsolson
Part of the 'pride' behind being a Linux hacker came from heavily customizing,
breaking, fixing, and generally maintaining your dev kit. I have a friend
who's taken on a motorcycle rebuild project and I can see a lot of analogs
there.

For me, personally, I realized that having a system which I can take from zero
to 'dev ready' in less than an afternoon (which I did recently with a freshly
shipped MacBook) is the main 'feature' I want from my dev software stack. I
don't love all of OS X's defaults, but I customize very few things.

The bigger issue for me, though, is hardware. I know this varies dramatically
from developer to developer, but weight, size, battery life, and display
quality (in roughly that order) are my primary concerns with laptop hardware.
I recently switched my work laptop from a Chromebook Pixel (first gen) to an
11" MacBook Air and I've been _thrilled_ with the change. That said, the leap
in display quality and general machine 'feel' from the Air to the MacBook I
use for personal developer is almost as big, for me, as the leap from the
Pixel to the Air. Apple builds hardware that feels 'right' to me in a way that
other manufacturers that I've encountered don't.

So, I can't speak for others, but there's why I'm a proud OS X user instead of
a proud Linux user.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
The hardware is very nice. I'm typing this into a Macbook running Arch Linux.
However, I don't know if it's fair to say you can't get up and running in an
afternoon these days, even if you have a heavily customized system like I do
([https://sr.ht/-77r.png](https://sr.ht/-77r.png)). I expect that the sort of
people who invest heavily in making their Linux setup their own are people who
have the hardest time with OS X - everything just felt wrong for me, and it
was very difficult to use because of this.

~~~
jsolson
Personal preferences will naturally remain personal. There were a bunch of
things that felt unfamiliar to me on OS X, but few that felt 'wrong'. Then
again, I made the switch back in 2005 or so to a PowerBook G4. Linux was a
very different beast then, and just having it run on a laptop was a bit of an
effort. Expecting decent battery life (or all of your hardware to be
functional) was more or less out of the question.

Another factor is that there a bunch of things people want/expect from a
window manager that I never took advantage of, the biggest two being virtual
desktops and focus-follows-mouse. I imagine if I had a strong dependency on
either of those, the switch to a Mac would've been considerably more painful.
On the other hand, features like Expose felt very natural to me (and at the
time Linux equivalents were... poor).

These days my life consists almost entirely of running full-screen apps and
trackpad swiping between them, which would probably drive most X11 users batty
:)

------
stdbrouw
I dunno. I've never experienced any of the problems described in the post.
Always kind of dangerous to extrapolate from n=1. It also feels somewhat
myopic to claim that people don't like apps like Notes or Calendar because
there's more featureful alternatives. The point of stock apps isn't to please
the power user.

~~~
benologist
Dismissing bug reports because "it works on my machine" is also a kind of
dangerous extrapolation, especially with the near-certainty that any large
piece of software has bugs.

~~~
stdbrouw
Not dismissing anything, just pointing out that the author's standard of
evidence is somewhat lacking.

~~~
aidos
You don't have to look far for the evidence. For any issue you can normally
find several huge forum posts on the apple support forums (with no helpful
responses from Apple).

~~~
gress
All software has bugs. Apple software has a giant audience and the Internet
can magnify an issue that affects a small number of users to make it seem as
though it's a giant problem.

If a problem affects 5,000 users it's easy for it to appear as if it's a huge
issue when it in fact is affecting a tiny % of the user base. Not that bugs
should be ignored, but an active forum posting is not evidence that there is a
major issue.

~~~
bsder
Dude, there are Bluetooth mice that are incompatible with current versions of
OS X.

Let that sink in.

Apple screwed up their Bluetooth stack _so_ badly that it is incompatible with
a mouse. Something which has been in the Bluetooth standard _forever_.
Something which is _solely_ dependent upon their software because they use the
same chip as everybody else.

That is beyond a bug. That's _contempt_ for the end user.

~~~
gress
Almost all Bluetooth mice are compatible with current versions of OS X. Apple
does support the human interface device standards.

You have found a mouse that doesn't implement the Bluetooth spec properly.
_That_ is contempt for the end user.

Let that sink in.

~~~
bsder
> You have found a mouse that doesn't implement the Bluetooth spec properly.
> That is contempt for the end user.

The mice I have work _perfectly_ with all incarnations of Windows I have (XP,
7, and 8) and OS X version 10.6 (don't have access to 10.7 and 10.8 anymore).

So, which is more likely, those mice _all_ implemented the Bluetooth spec
wrong yet still managed to work, or Apple screwed up their stack?

~~~
gress
It's entirely possible that a mouse can have a noncompliant implementation and
happen to work with a relaxed implementation of the host. Perhaps Apple made
their stack more compliant.

If your logic were correct then all Bluetooth mice would have stopped working.
They haven't.

------
gskye
I've been watching apple's software quality decrease over the past few years
with increasing disappointment . It still astounds me that their test suites
haven't caught the multitude of issues i've seen before shipping.

It makes me wonder if Apple actually uses their own products. Don't even get
me started on the Remote app...

------
drb311
"It just works" is a tricky promise to make good on. Microsoft never made this
promise and nor does Google.

As a Google fan I accept a certain amount of flakiness as part of the brand
identity. It's always celebrated a quirky, rough feel. In some ways, Google is
starting to get TOO slick.

People expect Apple to be innovative and reliable; too push the boundaries
without ever falling over them. It's hard to do either consistently,
successfully, at scale. It might be impossible to do both.

~~~
cptskippy
> As a Google fan I accept a certain amount of flakiness as part of the brand
> identity

I agree with you however I feel like they've been trying to shrug that off and
grow up and that's left me a little underwhelmed.

I got two thirds of the way through that article and realized that the way he
felt about Apple was how I felt about Google. They keep thrusting crap upon us
that no one asked for, remove stuff we do like, or neglect things until people
abandon them.

Meanwhile Microsoft has been dramatically stepping up it's game but everyone
still looks at them like the Catholic Priest that molested them as a child.

~~~
wineisfine
Thats a great Microsoft analogy there! Spot on

------
mkozlows
It's certainly the case that OSX, at least, has gotten flaky as heck, but at
the same time: What's the competition?

While Apple was releasing Yosemite, Microsoft was going down the Windows 8
rabbit-hole, releasing the worst version of Windows since ME. And while
desktop Linux has been getting better over time, I don't think anyone would
say that it "Just Works" yet.

The only desktop/laptop OS that actually does "Just Work" is ChromeOS; and
while that's a wonderful experience for its use cases, there are still plenty
of situations that it's not great for.

~~~
statenjason
I've suggested ChromeOS to family members that use facebook, email, and
limited spreadsheets. Ultimately, I backtracked when they asked about
printing. Telling them they have to buy a new printer that's Cloud Print
compatible is a tough sell, especially if they've purchased one within the
last year.

I have found that Chrome Boxes are excellent machines for demoing web products
at tradeshows. Cheap, relatively hardened, fast enough, and sync bookmarks and
settings.

~~~
yellowapple
You can actually setup any machine as a Cloud Print server (i.e. publishing
its own printers as Cloud Print capable printers) so long as it can run Chrome
or Chromium. Even a Raspberry Pi will do the trick:
[http://www.howtogeek.com/169566/how-to-turn-a-raspberry-
pi-i...](http://www.howtogeek.com/169566/how-to-turn-a-raspberry-pi-into-a-
google-cloud-print-server/)

~~~
statenjason
You can run a bridge, but then it's another machine to set up and maintain.
How are security and Chrome updates handled? A cron job? What if that fails?
Suddenly the simple Chromebook is more complex.

I wouldn't mind running that hack myself, but there's no way I'd drop it on
someone who couldn't debug if something went wrong.

~~~
yellowapple
> but there's no way I'd drop it on someone who couldn't debug if something
> went wrong.

One approach I've done to make things more debuggable (not for this specific
setup, but for Unix-running home servers in general) is to SSH in (I used to -
with the user's permission, of course - setup forwarding of port 22 on the
user's router/gateway/etc., but nowadays I usually setup a remote tunneling
script that the user can kickoff somehow). I also tend to build systems that
run for months - if not years - without any maintenance, so there's that, too
:)

Still doesn't address the "another machine to set up and maintain" issue, but
if I did my job right, it would be as inconspicuous as a wall clock.

------
post_break
I got into Apple in 2006, loved the ride up to Snow Leopard. Then things got
weird. UI choices that made little sense. Hardware bugs that were impossible
to diagnose or fix. Like my parents Mac Mini that would show snow on the
display after it went to sleep. Try troubleshooting that remotely. My work
rMBP has some similar issues where my monitor just goes green. And then it
also has a SystemUI freeze for upwards of 30 seconds that is completely
impossible to fix. DiscoveryD, oh god why.

Apple just doesn't seem as focused on a main goal of shipping stable and
perfect solutions. The "me too!" attitude shows it.

Oh and lets not forget when they ship iWork with missing features and then
slowly add them back over time...

~~~
baldfat
I am a HUGE Apple Hater so take this as it be.

I have always had issues with stability with Apple's OS. Everyone else always
said I was crazy but I have dozens of people see me repeat the crash over and
over again doing simple one or two step processes. Start with Apple OS 7 up to
just yesterday when Adobe Photoshop crashed every time I switch the color
palate to 2 color.

~~~
sosborn
> Adobe Photoshop crashed every time I switch the color palate to 2 color.

You can probably blame Adobe for that. In their infinite wisdom they
implemented their own window management system for their products on OS X.

~~~
baldfat
Well you can blame 95% of Windows problems the same way.

Don't blame Microsoft vendor A implemented it their own way ...

------
leonroy
Excellent article.

I too find myself looking at ways I can reduce my reliance on Apple these
days. For me it's getting burnt with Aperture, discoveryd causing all my
Airplay speakers to constantly act up, $1000 Thunderbolt displays flickering
on my $6000 Mac Pro as well as parts of my iTunes library getting spoilt by
the new Apple Music stuff. List goes on, but Daniel is right, I just don't
really have much (if any) faith in Apple when it comes to my data.

I think that this erosion of trust will take years to rebuild. The sad thing
is that Apple in the mid 90s had a similar rep for flaky products and Tim Cook
was widely credited for tightening ops to improve product manufacture, quality
and reliability.

------
msluyter
Yes, I've also noticed an increasing number of software bugs on my Macs. FWIW,
I wanted to try out the Dell XPS "Developer Edition," which appears to be
about as close as you can get to a Macbook level build quality in a linux box
(without having to jump though the hoops of installing linux on a macbook
itself), and you simply can't order it from Dell's website. A chat with a rep
suggested that it's out of stock.

So, I think Apple is creating market opportunity -- a high quality linux based
laptop aimed at developers that, like the Mac, doesn't require constant
fiddling or kernel rebuilds to get working.

~~~
gshubert17
Any knowledge or experience of System 76 laptop computers as Linux machines?

~~~
navait
I purchased a system 76 Gazelle laptop, and it's a pretty reliable . Wifi,
audio and dual monitors worked out of the box, but it has trouble with 3
monitors(includes laptop screen) My main complaint is the battery life.(This
is probably a linux issue) At best I get 2.5 hours, which needs serious
improvements.

However, so many things on linux lack polish, crash at random times, or have
UI problems. Apple would have to screw up a lot more to get anywhere near the
disaster of desktop linux,

~~~
zxcvcxz
>However, so many things on linux lack polish, crash at random times, or have
UI problems. Apple would have to screw up a lot more to get anywhere near the
disaster of desktop linux,

This is just not true at all. Apple is way more buggy in all those areas for
me. I use fedora with GNOME and haven't had one single problem. My
grandparents even use it. If I bought them a mac I'd have to fix it every time
I come over, with Linux I don't.

------
hahainternet
A very interesting article. I'm not part of the Apple ecosystem so I have no
way to judge its veracity, but in my experience this is a feeling common to
quite a lot of users regardless of product or manufacturer.

Is this driven by competition? complacency? capriciousness? I've no idea.

~~~
paulojreis
Loss of focus and feature creep. They've became an engineering company (as
opposed to an "appliances" company, I guess). This, of course, IMO.

~~~
hahainternet
> Loss of focus and feature creep

My point is though that I've heard this sentiment from Google customers,
Microsoft customers etc. In fact to me it seems that I can only think of a few
examples of software that seems to consistently improve in people's opinions.

Is there something fundamentally broken in how we develop and produce software
as an industry? Is there a reporting bias? It's probably a combination of both
with many other unseen factors IMO.

~~~
volaski
I think the difference is Google or Microsoft never promised "it just works".
Apple on the other hand used to "just work", at least before Steve Jobs
passed. Nowadays the contrast is too huge that people notice it more. As an
analogy, people just shrug when McDonald's releases another unhealthy (but
affordable) menu, but if a chef who used to get New York Times 5 star reviews
starts cooking shitty food and screwing his customers and not care much
because he still gets lots of customers based on his existing reputation, then
people start hating.

------
mijustin
_" Like every tech company nowadays, Apple wants to do it all."_

I'd say that Apple has _always_ wanted to do it all. They've always built the
OS + the hardware + the software. Arguably, it's that "end to end design"
that's helped them achieve their success.

------
willcodeforfoo
I've been increasingly feeling the same way, especially about OS X, but what's
the alternative for a developer-friendly desktop operating system that looks
and works beautifully (almost) out of the box?

~~~
iamd3vil
Linux Mint is working for me pretty well for the past 1 year. Check it out.

~~~
at-fates-hands
I would second Mint.

I made the switch a while back and am in the process of dumping Windows
altogether so I can do all my development with Linux.

------
JimmaDaRustla
As an Android, linux, and Windows user...I've been having the most outrageous
time getting anything to work as expected with my girlfriend's iPhones.
Issues, upon issues, upon issues of how services or software is expected to
work...yet never having desired results.

A few days ago, I held her iPhone 6 for the first time since she got it a
month or two ago. I felt like I was holding the greatest piece of mobile
technology in existence, except I knew it ran iOS and only iOS.

------
swang
1\. I'm still on 10.9. Still have not moved over to Yosemite. Mavericks runs
smooth for me.

2\. It is 2015 and iTunes/iPhone syncing is still the absolute worst. I just
want to add a couple of albums to my iPhone, why do I need to connect over a
cable (wifi syncing almost never works for me) and why do I need to wait more
than 5 minutes? I don't want to sync my entire phone again! (If you know how
to not have iTunes do this, please tell me. It is the worst).

~~~
visarga
I too am on 10.9 and it feels great. I used to use 10.10 and it was crashing
when I did VNC. Now it's stable as a rock. It was very difficult to downgrade,
because Apple cut almost all the ways. Fortunately, my laptop originally
shipped with 10.9 and I was allowed a web download of the OS from the boot
loader.

On a tangent note, I am frustrated with the slowness of Chrome, too.

------
omarforgotpwd
I think Apple software is generally good but occasionally buggy, especially
close to release. Apple's iOS-era policy of free updates every year has just
subjected more people to these bugs more often.

------
bane
I dunno, I just don't use Apple produced software on my Mac for the most part
and the experience is mostly fine. I use Windows at home and Mac for work, so
I probably spend a bit more time on my work Mac.

I loath finder with a passion that would reduce stars to quarks, but that's
just because its poorly designed, not particularly buggy. And outside of the
OS, that's pretty much all the Apple software I tend to use on a day-to-day
basis. I learned a long time ago to just stop trying to make their software
work, and I don't know why people keep returning to it after years of dealing
with increasingly bad software. Just avoid it.

My day pretty much consists of Chrome, iterm2, MS-Office and a handful of
other apps, and things work mostly fine. I could probably have an absolutely
equal day on a Windows laptop since most of what I use is cross-platform or
has an equivalent.

My only real gripe is that I wish the screen animation and updating was more
"snappy" like in windows. It always feels like it's just making the little
graphics hamsters work a little extra hard to do things like scrolling
quickly.

I think the larger point here is that the apps apple makes all have better
replacements in their segment. I can kind of see that for a terminal
application or whatever that's tossed in with the OS, but for other kinds of
applications, ones you pay good money for, Apple really should be more neck-
and-neck with the competition.

There's also really little excuse these days for the huge ecosystem of addons
and patches that unfuck missing and broken core OS features. Bettertouchtool,
for example, _shouldn 't_ actually need to exist. But there's something like
half a dozen applications kind of like it, and zero support for what it does
built in OS X. People don't really complain about it too much because once you
install and set these little widgets up, you forget about them. But the user
should _never_ have to install this stuff in the first place.

This seems to me like a combination of a lack of focus, lack of dedicated
teams, lack of product ownership and vision, and lack of attention to detail
in the _software development_ practice at Apple vs. the software design teams.

~~~
waz0wski
> My only real gripe is that I wish the screen animation and updating was more
> "snappy" like in windows. It always feels like it's just making the little
> graphics hamsters work a little extra hard to do things like scrolling
> quickly.

on 10.8/9/10 You can change the mission-control animations speed with this
tweak:

defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0.1

It's still kind of crap, doesn't perform well on 3+ displays, but faster.

The 10.11 beta noticeably improves animation speed / "feel" of animations
around the whole OS, even on 3+ display systems with many windows open.

------
afterburner
It never really "just worked". People have been complaining about, for
example, iTunes, ever since it came out. Apple stuff always had a ton of
annoyances. Perhaps the experience was more restricted before, or Jobs' pitch
more convincing.

------
serve_yay
Apple makes things that "do more" than their products of old, and we expect
them to do more than devices past. The combination of features plus our
expectation that all our devices be aware of what is happening on the others
at all times is a recipe for a combinatorial explosion of unpredicted states,
race conditions, you name it. I too miss the simplicity and "it just works"
factor of past days. But it's a lot easier to pull that off with an iPod and a
Mac, than iPhone + Mac + iPad + watch, etc.

They're the biggest company in the world and nobody needs to make excuses for
them - I'm not saying "well, it's to be expected and it's not their fault."
But I always think, who would be able to do this better than Apple? And I
think the answer to that question reveals the depth of the situation we're in.
As much as Apple screws up, could you imagine using a watch + phone + PC +
tablet from some other vendor, and it being better? That's what _really_ sucks
about now - Apple screws up _and_ they're the best we can hope for.

~~~
ariwilson
Yes, I use one of each of those from Google and they all work pretty well :).

~~~
serve_yay
Mm hmm.

------
davidw
I got a Mac for my new job, and I gave it a few weeks, but ended up putting
Parallels on it so I can use Ubuntu. I just don't like how Macs work, and
don't like that I can't customize it (focus _follows_ the mouse, dammit!) like
I can Linux.

There are a lot of things that 'just work' on Ubuntu (for me, at least), like
git bash completion, that seem to require more fiddling on the Mac.

------
kaffeinecoma
Do you rely on Time Machine? Drop to the shell right now and try "tmutil
compare -n" to see which files are not making it onto your backups. For me,
Time Machine randomly ignores certain files, for no discernible reason. Files
that have sat on my disk literally for years will never get backed up. It's
happened to me on two different Macs, and I've lost data because of it.

~~~
jre
I ran into the same issue. After a restore from my time machine backup, I
discovered that some files where missing (with no apparent pattern).
Fortunately, I had a non time machine backup, but pheew that was a close
one...

~~~
kaffeinecoma
I discovered it when visiting an old project after a whole OS wipe-and-restore
from TM. A week later I found that 'git' wouldn't recognize a project dir due
to some missing pieces. I had a 2nd TM drive, and was able to manually restore
files.

For my other machine, no such luck. I had a 2nd backup offsite (Backblaze) but
it was months before I noticed the damage, and so the old files were no longer
available via the offsite. I think the worst part is not knowing what you've
lost. I have thousands of music and photos on that machine, and every once in
a while I come across something that's gone.

------
xenadu02
It seems clear Apple feels the same way given that El Capitan and iOS 9 are
light on fancy new features. My hope is that both represent a "Snow Leopard"
style polish release.

I know that dumping discoveryd has solved my WiFi/AirPlay/AirDrop issues so
they seem to be listening.

------
baseballmerpeak
When it works, it is brilliant and seamless. On the other hand, there is not
any redundancy, in the sense that if one piece of the equation (OS + the
hardware + the software) is rubbish, it cannot be readily replaced by
substitution (e.g. swapping Windows for Linux).

~~~
steverb
I dunno, Windows 7 runs brilliantly on my MacBook.

~~~
slantyyz
I have found that Windows tends to run faster than OSX itself does on the same
Mac.

Hell, my 2008 Macbook can run the latest version of Windows 10 in 64 bit, but
can't run the latest version of OSX. Win 10 runs snappy, while Lion (the last
supported OS) is now a crufty pig on it.

------
nathan_long
My first iPod had a scroll wheel. No matter what I was listening to, I could
fast forward or reverse as much or little as I wanted. It was the first Apple-
designed product I owned, and I learned why people loved Apple stuff.

My current iPod (Nano, a few generations old) has a touch screen with controls
that vary based on what it thinks I'm doing. If I'm listening to a known
podcast, I can swipe once and tap once to back up 30 seconds. I can't easily
go forward. If I'm listening to a long track that it doesn't recognize as a
podcast, the "back 30 seconds" isn't there.

I think the consistent, physical control was better than the inconsistent
touchscreen control. But they don't sell it anymore.

------
volaski
I switched to mac when when MS lost its mind and came up with Vista--it was
unusable, so much so that switching cost to mac was lower than trying to get
Windows to work. Nowadays the only reason I stay with Mac is because I make
iOS apps and realize it will be annoying if I abandon Mac. Apple is no more in
a "just works" business. It's in a lock-in business. I used to be delighted to
download their new OS's, and I'm sure everyone used to too, but nowadays I
NEVER download their new versions and try not to upgrade as much as possible,
I've been burned too many times and lost so many hours of productivity because
the upgrade fucked me up

~~~
kazinator
> _Apple is no more in a "just works" business. It's in a lock-in business._

No such change has happened between 2007 (MS Vista time frame) and now. People
familiar with Apple since 1980-something know very well that it's _always_
been about both of the above: just works for the end user, and a lock-in
business.

If anything, it's less locked in now than it used to be, because of the use of
Intel processors (that was a big shocker in the Mac world). You can get a
bootleg OS/X image to run under VirtualBox. I have such an image running over
top of Windows 7; I use it to compile and test OS/X binaries of a FOSS program
that I developed.

In the 1980's I had a clone of an Apple II+ computer. Apple did their best in
their operating system software to detect clones and try not to run on them.
Clones were the illegal work of the devil, according to Apple. By contrast,
the IBM PC's spawned a thriving clone market.

~~~
yellowapple
Whether lock-in has bettered or worsened depends on perspective. While OS X
can be shoehorned to run on Hackintoshes and VMs now, I can't remember any
time when it was virtually impossible to install a custom operating system on
Apple hardware until the iPhone came out (and, eventually, when the iPhone 3GS
closed up the bugs that allowed the bootloader's security checks to be
cirvumvented; said bugs were the only way to install a custom OS - like
Android - on an iPhone). As far as I know, the software on Apple's desktops
and laptops has always been unrestricted (as I know firsthand; literally all
my PowerPC Mac hardware runs OpenBSD nowadays).

------
arturhoo
The discoveryd fiasco was the biggest let down for me. Every single Macbook in
the office suffered connectivity issues and it took them too long to go back
to the old, perfectly fine state.

It's almost 20 years of internet ferociously consuming and producing digital
music and pictures and no one has been able to improve upon what Winamp and
Foobar2000 or a minimally organized photo folder delivered - Picasa worked
quite well, but I guess, as google reader, being stable and functional is not
enough.

How can a 600B dollar company sustain a buggy software like iTunes for so many
years? Dreadful experiences include podcasts, album art, and even simple music
organization! Apple Music... what makes you, the biggest digital music store
in the world, release a cloud based product that thinks that a live version of
a song is the same one as the album version?

It seems Apple is trying to make its user base - that helped it become the
most world's most valuable company - user their version of every digital
service/product possible but at the cost of lacking in the areas that made it
thrive in the first place. Heck, even my last MBP had hardware issue
(staingate)...

------
guscost
> People lose their minds when Google services go down because it happens once
> a year. When Apple services go down, people just shrug or write a blog post
> like this.

Well hang on a minute, I thought people lose their minds when Google services
go down because Google is a software company and their core products are
online services. When Apple services go down, it isn't as noteworthy since
Apple is a hardware (dare I say fashion?) company. But when Apple sells a
cellphone that can get faraday-caged by your hand, that's when people freak
out.

Now is that any excuse for Apple services to be broken as often as they are?
Not at all, it projects a shoddy brand image. And when it's a service that is
required to make the hardware function, users won't care which part of the
"experience" is breaking.

Anyway, good writeup.

------
twsted
My thesis: part of this feeling comes from the fact that more eyes are on the
OS and the apps, but many issues existed before.

\- I have some complaints about OS X: wifi, bluetooth, etc.

\- I like iTunes as it is today (not considering the synchronization process)

\- I struggle with the weakened "iWorks" applications

------
kraig911
I dislike photos - like for my life I can't figure out how to delete a photo.

Itunes is a huge mess. Creating a playlist with apple music is just difficult.
I have to add it to my playlist then go to my my music and create a playlist
there? weird.

Podcasts I giveup.

I understand this guys gripe. I have to say this though to me things aren't
great anywhere. I've lost data on google drive, and messages on gmail. Adobe
Cloud is so problematic to me I get extremely frustrated that i have to have 4
versions of illustrator installed to use the features and export to SVG like
we all need. I think somewhere with everyone implementing AGILE the question
of quality being important has been forgotten in the rush to push releases
often.

------
Joeri
Consistently delivering high quality software features is impossible. Even
great teams mess up every once in a while. The way apple used to get around
that was to throw things away, or to send them back to the drawing board.
There was someone at the top who detected when things weren't ready, and
prevented them from getting released or dared teams to do better, even at
great cost. In the jobs era there were many things which were rumored to ship
and cut at the last moment. Apple has stopped not shipping things, and it's
what will turn them into just another software company.

~~~
mkempe
They've forgotten how to say "No."

------
kybernetyk
I'm frustrated with Apple when it comes to services. Don't misunderstand me: I
love their hardware. I love OS X. It's the best computing experience since my
C64 days.

But when it comes to services I tend to avoid them as much as I can. Latest
example: Apple music.

I was a little annoyed by Spotify's continuously disappearing music tracks so
I was eager to try out iTunes Music. But the problems started when I tried to
get into the trial: You need a valid* credit card.

Now valid is a pretty interesting definition because I'm from Germany,
currently living in Germany but my banking is done via a Dutch bank (back from
when I lived there). So my credit card is dutch. And I live in Germany. But
it's the EU so it shouldn't be a problem, right?

Right. And no one has ever raised an eyebrow when I used a credit card that
has been issued by a Dutch bank with my German address (not even the online
poker websites I frequent from time to time). Not even once I had any problems
with that. I'm paying my taxes in Germany via my Dutch bank account. The
German tax office accepts it (they even issue transfers to that account). So
if the German tax office (which still hasn't completely switched to electronic
tax filing) can deal with that case then everyone on this planet should be
able to. Well, expect for Apple. I just can not use that credit card with
anything iTunes related. I get always an "invalid country error".

Now I'm in Germany, I'm from Germany, my iTunes account is a German iTunes
account. But the fact that my credit card has been issued by a bank in a
country that's just 20km from my current residence makes it invalid for Apple.
A country that is part of the EU. It's like I wouldn't be able to use a credit
card from California when I were living in Washington.

So I have to buy those pre-paid iTunes cards to top up my account. And so I
had to add three months of pre-paid money to my iTunes account just to start
the 3 months free trial.

Everything OK? Nope! I was too bold and I opted for a "family account". Now
the most funny thing: Even though I am in the free trial period for the
"family account" and I have enough money in my iTunes account to pay for the
service I can't use the family sharing feature because for that I would need a
valid credit card. iTunes just aborts with an "add a valid credit card" error
when I try to configure family sharing.

It's like Kafka has risen from his grave and started a music streaming
service.

/rant

~~~
wineisfine
That's strange I'm Dutch, living in Germany and don't have these issues with
my Dutch Visa card. You do know you can change your country/App Store country?
I can even hop between country store and use different visas per store.

~~~
kybernetyk
Is your iTunes account maybe registered to your old Dutch address? Because the
iTunes error I get (and the people on the Apple support line) tells me that I
need a credit card for the country my iTunes acc is registered in.

>You do know you can change your country/App Store country?

Not that easily. (I'm not talking about clicking the flag in the iTunes store
front but changing the personal data associated with the account). For that I
need to contact Apple support. And then there's the issue that there are
enough stories where people who frequently used their iTunes account from
foreign countries got their account suspended. (Add a fake address in the
Netherlands I would have to use and this is a risk I don't want to take).

/edit: That's the message I get:
[http://i.imgur.com/IWfI8np.png](http://i.imgur.com/IWfI8np.png)

~~~
wineisfine
Right yes, but you dont need to contact Apple support, you can just change
countries, after being logged in on Apple.com. I changed my account frequently
because sometimes I had to pay things with my Dutch visa and other times with
the German one. Been doing this for years. Also, it makes no sense for Apple
to ban an account that a) does nothing illegal b) they allow these country
changes c) are legit Visa card transactions that they make their profit on.

So all you're issues, are basically void, because it is possible, without
contacting support. And after switching countries, a few minutes later it's
activated. Give it a go.

------
karmakaze
There's an easy way to explain all these artifacts: Apple no longer does
things "as if they themselves are the user", or if they do then they've
significantly lowered their standards.

------
ihnorton
1000x this. I've turned to dtrace twice in the past several weeks to find
fixes for serious issues on other people's computers. One was a segfault at
startup in iTunes caused by a corrupted cookie cache. The other one was a
corrupted plist that prevented adding new exchange accounts or calendars to
mail (with no indicators at all -- the new account would just hang
indefinitely).

------
chejazi
This trend has been very apparent to me, starting a couple years after Steve
Jobs passed. I waited until July 2015 to upgrade from Mavericks to Yosemite
because of all the bugs I kept hearing about.

------
LordHumungous
Boot times for my Macbook Pro have gotten really long since a recent upgrade
to Mavericks. Went from ~3 seconds to ~30 seconds.

~~~
angerZen
El Capitan does a lot to rectify that (at least in the beta so far).

------
wineisfine
It keeps on being strange that Steve, just one man, had so much influence on
quality control. I find it mind boggling.

~~~
mkempe
alternatively: his successor is lacking in passion, focus, and integrity.

------
mbrock
Why don't Apple just make a laptop that runs iOS?

Call it... iBook!

