
Apple’s declining software quality - pljns
http://sudophilosophical.com/2016/02/04/apples-declining-software-quality/
======
Animats
This has to be a management problem. Apple has total control over the
hardware, total control over third party developers, and $203 billion in cash.
What are they doing wrong?

Apple has the resources to approach software like aerospace. Formal interface
specs, heavy Q/A, tough regression tests, formal methods. It's expensive, but
Apple ships so many copies that the cost per unit is insignificant.

Microsoft did that, starting with Windows 7. Two things made Windows 7 stable.
The first was the Static Driver Verifier, which examines driver source code to
check if there's any way it can crash the rest of the OS. This includes buffer
overflows. The driver may not work, but it won't take the rest of the kernel
down with it. All signed drivers have passed the Static Driver Verifier, which
anyone can run. Driver-caused crashes stopped being a big problem.

With the driver problem out of the way, any remaining kernel crashes were
clearly Microsoft's fault. (This has the nice problem that kernel bugs could
no longer be blamed on third party drivers.) Microsoft had a classifier system
developed which tries to group similar crash reports together and send the
group to the same developer. It's hard to ignore a bug when a thousand reports
of crashes from the same bug have been grouped together.

That's part of how Microsoft finally got a handle on their software products.
Is Apple doing anything like this?

~~~
nostrademons
Nah, I think it's a perception problem.

As someone whose starry-eyed Mac obsession predated Windows 95 - Apple's
software has always been buggy. It was buggy under Sculley, it was buggy under
Amelio, and it was buggy under Jobs. I remember getting plenty of sad Macs
under System 6 and 7, and early versions of OS X weren't any better.

We just didn't care because Steve Jobs was really good at distracting us with
promises about how great things were going to be, really soon now.

The comparison with Microsoft is instructive. Microsoft software was even
buggier than Apple's _during their period of greatest dominance_.
Win95/Win98/WinME would crash all the time, and was an open barn door for
security. Early versions of IE were pieces of shit. Even later versions of IE
(6-9) were pieces of shit. Microsoft finally got a handle on security &
software quality _just as the world ceased to care about them_.

Apple's been driving change in the computer industry since the iPhone was
introduced in 2007. New products are _always_ buggy - the amount of work
involved in building up a product category from scratch is massive, and you
don't know how they'll be received by the market, so there're frantic changes
and dirty hacks needed to adapt on the fly, and they often invalidate whole
architectural assumptions. It's just that most of the time, this work goes on
when nobody's paying attention, and so by the time people notice you, you've
had a chance to iron out a lot of the kinks. Apple is in the unenviable
position of trying to introduce new product categories while the whole world
is looking.

The Apple Watch is buggy as hell, but I still find it useful, and pretty cool.

~~~
bluedino
>> Apple's software has always been buggy. It was buggy under Sculley, it was
buggy under Amelio...

Classic Mac OS was buggy by design - it didn't have multitasking and memory
protection, it was single user... Windows had that same problem before 2000
(well, NT 4, but not many people used that).

I use OS X daily and I use Windows 7 daily. I have far fewer issues with OS X
for whatever reason that may be. My computers don't magically reboot or
bluescreen nearly as much. It might happen every 6 months at the most, where
with Windows it probably happens every 2 months.

~~~
pwthornton
I agree that OS X is more reliable. I have both a Mac and a PC in my office,
and my 5K iMac has never crashed. I had some weird issues with Windows 10
after I upgraded my laptop, where it would hang after an update.

~~~
AJ007
I switched from using Windows for 20 years to OS X (excluding Linux for work
related stuff.) This is the first time I've been able to work from a laptop
with my productivity level as good or better than a desktop. The design and
usability surpassed what I expected. I haven't noticed any bugs.

~~~
lostlogin
I can't imagine having a different brand of computer, but there are lots of
OSX bugs that cause my teeth to grind. The Finder doesn't remember that I only
want one layout ever, and it resets to a random alternative setting regularly.
There are still progress bars that pop over, and can't be hidden. The data
display which shows used disk space and it is nearly all "other" is a bug as
far as I'm concerned. My AppleTV(8) has stopped incrementing itself, but its
not ideal. And as a genuine question, has anyone not had strange Xcode
behaviour or crashes at least once per day? I currently have a slow motion
simulator that changes views over 5-10ish seconds.

------
dplgk
There's just no way in hell Steve Jobs would be putting up with this and I
wish he was alive to tear some people a new one. I didn't like Jobs but
respect his ability to achieve things.

Perhaps, the years of oversimplifying applications has created an Apple that
can't handle complex applications?

Or, there's a chicken and egg question: XCode and the surrounding tools are
atrociously buggy and hostile to the developer and it seems to increase with
each release. Is this a symptom of what's going on inside Apple or a cause -
perhaps Apple's own developers are dealing with the same hellish development
experience and are just happy when something can compile without crashing
Xcode.

Or, perhaps, at some point, software becomes too complex for humans to deal
with.

Windows got so much flack over the years. It wasn't the prettiest but it
worked and did what it said. Sure it BSODed sometimes and had some memory
problems but it handles infinity more hardware/software/driver situations than
OS X. Visual Studio is a dream, if you're into that ecosystem. MS dev tools
are actually very nice.

~~~
coldtea
> _There 's just no way in hell Steve Jobs would be putting up with this and I
> wish he was alive to tear some people a new one. I didn't like Jobs but
> respect his ability to achieve things._

You probably wasn't paying attention when Job was running things.

OS X 10.1 was a mess -- it took until several updates to become somewhat
usable. The Finder was half-arsed for a decade. Mail.app had several issues.
The Windows versions of iTunes was crappy. OS X releases that are now praised
as "the best ever" etc, got tons of complaints for introducing bugs and
instability. XCode has been historically crap (and it's much better now). And
don't even get me started on the state of their Cloud offerings under Jobs.

Hardware wise the same. Every new release, from the original iPod to the iPad
was met with complaints and bickering ("No wifi? Less space than a Nomad?
Lame") -- even if it actually took wifi and batteries 5 more years to even
start making practical sense to have on such a device for syncing. Aside from
specs people complained about, there were also all kind of other HW issues,
from the overheating G4 Cube, to the logic boards dying on G3 iBooks, to
cooling goo spilling from G5 towers, the crappy "round" mouse, and lots of
other stuff besides.

That said, I don't buy the "Apple software went downhill as of late" thing.
First, because as said there were always issues. Second, because in normal use
I don't see any particular decline. If anything things have got better, to the
point where we complaint about trivial stuff. The thing is Apple of today puts
out a heck of a lot more software and hardware products than the rosy Apple
you remember.

I'd take iTunes in the back and kill it though -- as the latest redesigns are
absolutely crap from a UX perspective. Then again, I wouldn't call that a
programming quality issue -- more of a "idiotic focus and shoving on our faces
of BS online music platform issue".

> _Or, there 's a chicken and egg question: XCode and the surrounding tools
> are atrociously buggy and hostile to the developer and it seems to increase
> with each release._

The opposite. XCode was "atrociously buggy" in the 3/4/5 era and before, and
has gotten quite better in the 6/7 series (despite having to support a whole
new language).

In fact a large list of early XCode 6 crashing bugs have been squashed months
ago -- which was (as reported) around 90% of them.

~~~
yeukhon
> The Windows versions of iTunes was crappy.

Oh joy. I remember those days when people were angry because plugging your
iPod into a new PC means wiping your library!

> That said, I don't buy the "Apple software went downhill as of late" thing.

Perception on Mac after people switch from Windows to Mac OSX immediately is
awesome. The perception is different if you use Mac OSX for a long time and
suddenly you see computer frozen every few days and requires a hard reboot.
Many of that have to do the software you are running at the time, but why a
sudden OS freeze, mouse couldn't move? That can't be a fault with Office /
Skype, it has to be either a OS issue, or underlying hardware issue.

Mac OSX is generally really great, it doesn't feel slow compare to a lot of
the PC out there. Polished UI and very responsive. In some release you do see
slowness opening between finders or moving from one setting view to another.
Those are defects people will cry and ask those defects weren't caught by the
performance team.

~~~
igrekel
My main computer is an OSX both at work and at home. Honestly it isn't very
responsive compared to recent lung desktops or even the latest windows 10. Or
at least it mostly feels that way when using Eclipse, so maybe its the JVM.

~~~
yeukhon
I usually think UI in most Java-based applications are very slow on Mac OSX
but that's just my limited experience with Java-based UI on this platform.

------
koralatov
It feels a little clichéd to say it, but I do feel that Snow Leopard, outdated
now as it is, was some kind of fortuitous confluence of factors that resulted
in OS X being as close to perfect as it's ever been.

Even putting aside the iOS-style elements being added, my experience has been
that each version of OS X has been slightly worse than the last, and tends to
introduce strange little anomalies and instabilities on hardware that was
otherwise working just fine. Sometimes these issues are fixed in the next
major version, but sometimes they aren't; and even when they _are_ fixed,
there are an equal number of new issues introduced.

My perspective is perhaps coloured by having switched to the Mac during the
Tiger era, which was about equal with Snow Leopard in terms of stability and
'completeness'. Since then, with the exception of Snow Leopard, it's been
downhill. (I realise, of course, that Tiger benefitted from 11 point updates
and thus more polish than any version before or since, but the point stands.)

~~~
ebbv
I think you have rose colored glasses about Snow Leopard. It had plenty of
bugs and hiccups.

People deride the "iOS style" features of El Capitan but first, what
specifically are you referring to besides Launcher? Do you think adding
Notifications to OS X is bad? I find them extremely useful, and like the
integration better than the spotty support Growler had among third party
software.

I never use Launcher but it's not there for me. It's no skin off my nose that
it exists for other people. And it's not like Finder or Spotlight have lost
functionality, if anything I feel Spotlight in El Capitan is much better than
it was in Snow Leopard or any prior OS X.

Mission Control works great and I think is much more elegant in El Capitan
than in previous OS X releases. Granted in older OS X you could arrange your
desktops in grids instead of just left to right but I only use about 3-4
desktops anyway, so I don't mind.

OS X has also improved for power users since Snow Leopard as well. Lion
introduced FileVault 2 which I find to be a fantastically easy to use
encryption system, that I have had no problems with. I enjoy my Retina screen
and the Retina support that later versions introduced as well. Air Drop is
also handy since my wife and coworkers have Macs as well.

In my mind, each new release of OS X, like each new release of iOS or anything
really, has good things and less good things in it. But on the whole I'm glad
to be running El Capitan today rather than Snow Leopard. I don't pine for
those days.

~~~
nilkn
It's less about Snow Leopard having been supposedly perfect and more about how
OS X feels like it's just floundered around randomly since then.

In fact, for me, I can honestly say that OS X has almost strictly regressed in
terms of my day-to-day experience. Spotlight now covers up way too much of the
screen for almost no gain; if I'd wanted that, I'd have just used Alfred.
Mission Control is still not as powerful and flexible as Expose + Spaces, and
now it even goes so far as to hide desktop thumbnails even on my dual 27"
monitor setup. Seriously?

What's most shocking to me is how much Windows has caught up from a UX
perspective. I have Windows 10 on my (primarily gaming-oriented) desktop.
Since I don't use the desktop for much programming, I almost never find myself
wishing that it was running OS X instead. That's a real blow to the magical
grip that OS X once held over me. Cortana is just as good as spotlight --
better, even -- and it manages to be much more space efficient as well.
Windows Explorer is so much more useful than the bafflingly overly simplistic
Finder. On Windows, if I want to tile windows, I can -- get this -- just drag
them to the side, top, or any of the four corners. On OS X, I have to either
fiddle with their impressively clunky split-screen full-screen app disaster or
use a third-party tool like Spectacle or BetterTouchTool.

I could go on, but I'll leave it at this: there was a day where I never wanted
to touch Windows again because I felt OS X was so much better. Now I find
myself only really sticking to OS X for two reasons: (1) it still has better
touchpad interaction on a laptop; (2) it's still based on Unix so I prefer it
for programming.

~~~
HillaryBriss
For programming especially, yes. I can see that point.

IMHO, an Android programmer in particular will find OSX more comfortable and
supportive than Windows because Android Studio and drivers and stuff mostly
_just work_ on a Mac.

Example: get adb to talk to a Kindle Fire from your windows machine and then
do that same thing from your Mac

Example: install genymotion on your Windows machine and fiddle around with
VirtualBox and what have you, and then install genymotion on your Mac

Example: use something like GitBash (Android devs just have to use Git a lot)
on Windows and then compare that experience to using a real Unix command line
on OSX

Example: watch Tor Norbye give a talk about Android Studio productivity tips
and notice that he can't help but give you Apple keyboard shortcuts.

Macs appear to be what most Android programming expert-types and the Android
dev team itself use, day to day.

Android dev just seems to go a bit smoother on Macs than on Windows.

~~~
zanny
As someone running Arch, I have no idea how devs can put up with OSX or
Windows. Both are awful, both you cannot fix yourself, and both get in the way
all the time of what you want to do.

For me, if I'm missing something, its a pacman or AUR search away. If I need
development features of anything it exists as a -git repo as well, and I can
super fast insert my patches and get what I need immediately. No updates or
any of this insanity stand in my way, and my systems been stable for almost
three years since I built it, I just subscribe to the Arch announcements
mailing list for major updates that might cause problems. We just got Linux
4.4 yesterday, and I booted today and kept on rolling as per usual.

~~~
st3v3r
"Both are awful"

Personal opinion. Most Linux GUIs are awful to me.

"both you cannot fix yourself"

Moot point, as the vast majority of people, even tech oriented people,
wouldn't do that if they could.

"and both get in the way all the time of what you want to do."

Again, completely depends on your personal workflow.

"For me, if I'm missing something, its a pacman or AUR search away."

Mac App Store, Fink, or Homebrew.

"If I need development features of anything it exists as a -git repo as well"

Git works just fine on OS X.

"No updates or any of this insanity stand in my way"

Except for, what you just mentioned, which are updates.

"We just got Linux 4.4 yesterday, and I booted today and kept on rolling as
per usual."

Same thing happens with OS X updates.

------
mwfunk
I blame the stock market pressure towards growth. The stock market rewards
growth at the expense of everything else. It's like a kid pinching his arm to
blow up a mosquito that was biting him- it's forced to grow and grow and grow
until it pops. It's no longer acceptable to simply run a profitable business
with happy employees and customers.

It creates a push towards constant acceleration in all things- shorter release
cycles, more product categories, etc. This supplies the continuous growth that
shareholders demand right up until the point where it kills the host.

Also, "success hides failure". If you're a titanically successful corporation,
any internal argument along the lines of "we shouldn't do X anymore, we should
do Y instead" can be shot down with "well, look at how successful we were
while we were doing X! X must not be so bad after all." It degrades an
organization's ability to be reflective and self-critical.

These are problems for all successful companies, which become bigger and
bigger problems with increasing success.

~~~
shmageggy
> Also, "success hides failure". If you're a titanically successful
> corporation, any internal argument along the lines of "we shouldn't do X
> anymore, we should do Y instead" can be shot down with "well, look at how
> successful we were while we were doing X! X must not be so bad after all."
> It degrades an organization's ability to be reflective and self-critical.

See: Kodak.

~~~
digi_owl
Innovators dilemma i think the official term is.

------
graeme
The decline seems real to me. A shortlist of things I've noticed:

* Spotlight no longer finds things as easily. I used to use it for everything. Since updating to El Capitan, it has missed some exact match folders. Planning to switch to Alfred.

* iWork was gutted in '13\. People used to use Pages professionally. I'm now using Pages '09, and planning to transition to Word or Latex. I tested Pages '13 intensively, and it fails for even basic publishing.

* Siri can only work with default Apple apps. And those default apps are getting worse. So Siri takes a hit with every app that declines. I used to use Mail, now I don't.

* Constant Wifi issues. I frequently have to turn off wifi, then turn on. On my home network. This never happened pre Mavericks.

* In general, all my Apple default software on my iphone is sitting in a folder titled "apple", which I never use. I don't think I use any Apple default App.

* I avoid icloud. It sends scary "do you want to delete all these files" messages if you ever unsync a device, and it's not clear which actions produce which effects. iTunes has a history of destroying files on syncs, so I can't trust iCloud. Even now, itunes will add apps to my device if they're in my library but I deleted them from my phone. It does this without asking! Any other cloud app has figured out how to handle deletions from one device.

Pages 09 hit the hardest. It was wonderful software. I used it for print
publishing, and it just worked. Easy to use, incredibly powerful. Have a look
at their manual for the level of care they put into their software, as
recently as 2009.

Pages 13 can't do half of that. Very basic stuff like "facing pages" for books
has been left out.

[https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/0/MA663/en_US/Pages09...](https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/0/MA663/en_US/Pages09_UserGuide.pdf)

 __Edit: __A comment below pointed out that, I do in fact use default apps. I
had taken them for granted. These ones work well and I use them:

Messages, Phone, camera, photos, clock, wallet, calendar, music (UI got worse
on this one). Reminders I use occasionally because of the Siri integration.

There are some issues with some of them, but mostly they work pretty well.

On the mac, the only default apps I use frequently are textedit and Preview.
Previews remains excellent. I use spotlight, but as noted above it got worse.

~~~
tkinom
Agree on all the items.

Not just Apple, I see similar issues with Google.

Google's Youtube IOS app has issue playing video correctly. It can't even
buffer the segments correctly.

Google latest Android Map crashes all the times 1-2 minutes into the
navigation, extremely dangerous when I have to restart the navigate while
driving. I can't depend on it at all.

I have to roll back to the default factory install older version google map to
make it work. Lately I see the older stable version start crash more often,
probabaly cause by the "update" on the server API side.

It will be a very scary world if this type of SW development processes are
applied to tomorrow's "self driving car".

~~~
VonGuard
All iOS issues with Google software, I suspect, have more to do with Apple
being dicks to Google than with Google fucking up. Remember, Apple is really
trying hard to rid iOS of all Google programs. Remember Apple Maps?

~~~
tkinom
The crash issues I had with google map was on Android. I check the reviews on
Google Play Store, it is not just me or my Android devices, almost everyone
had that crash issues at that time.

I can't figure out how Google can release any software like that.

Google can't blame IOS/Apple for that.

~~~
wstrange
I suspect some of those crashes are hardware related.

Anecdotal for sure, but Google Maps has been solid for me on Nexus devices.

~~~
Rumudiez
Anecdotal * 2 = still anecdotal, but my 1st gen moto g has never given me any
problems with Maps, other than being a little laggy from time to time.

Samsung?

~~~
talldan
Rock solid for me on my OnePlus One, too. I've used it for some fairly long
driving trips as well, where it's been running for a few hours.

------
pi-err
> it’s tragic that Aperture and iPhoto were axed in favor of the horrifically
> bad Photos app (that looks like some Frankenstein “iOS X” app)

I find Photos.app to be the _best_ Apple app I've ever used. It's simple,
modern, works amazingly well between iOS and OS X, transparently manages 100GB
of data between iCloud and local storage.

This entire piece is surfing on Mossberg's take and goes way too far.

From what we know, Apple does seem to be sorting out big challenges on
software side:

\- transition to Swift on 2 platforms, which won't happen until they decide to
only support 64-bits OS X and iOS at some point in 2017 or 2018 or later

\- OS X and iOS foundations are actually super solid. Accidents happen, both
codebases are now much more mature and stable. Probably the best they had for
decades

\- manage the largest updates in history yearly. You hear of bugs because
everybody gets to experience them at the same time. Windows never got that
many million devices updated overnight

On top of that, they do seem to have conflicting marketing priorities. They
don't know what to do with iTunes - as a brand, as an app, as an experience.
They're obviously conflicted whether a user should depend on the AppStore to
do stuff (feature creep in Notes.app).

IMO this "apple software sucks" is more a consequence of a stalled marketing
than an engineering problem.

~~~
rconti
I don't see how anyone could call Photos.app the best app they've ever used.
Right off the bat, I can never tell you why I'm in a mode where I can multi-
select or not. When I double-click on a photo, all of a sudden an intermediate
navigation thumbnail bar thing pops up, but it doesn't let me do the things
the main thumbnail view does.

I don't know when I can use the back arrow or not.

Flagging no longer shows up on the pictures, so I have to look up to the menu
bar to see if a photo is flagged.

I've got a few shared galleries with family. Does anyone know which photos are
going to show up in Photos vs Albums (All Photos) vs Shared (Activity and your
named shared galleries) and the My Photo Stream under Albums?

Virtually every time I recreate a photo library or get a new device, I need to
turn off all the icloud syncing crap and photostream crap about 3 times before
it finally starts syncing photos. And sometimes when it does, I click on a
photo thumbnail and the wrong photo pops up.

Photos is effing TERRIBLE from a UI/UX, features, and functionality
standpoint.

~~~
arrrg
Eh, I think you could say a lot of similar things about iPhoto. That was one
shitty app, certainly much, much, much, much more shitty than Photos …

There are always many things “wrong” (in your case it’s mostly your specific
use case and the place you are coming from, basically mostly your own
preferences and biases?) with something, always, always, it’s impossible to
avoid. Can’t design for everyone, just can’t.

PS: Check the menu. It’s absolutely crucial for OS X software. It’s a design
paradigm Apple has been unflinchingly following forever, with iPhoto, with
Aperture, with everything. They will hide all the custom stuff and little
features there that depends on subjective preference there. For example, check
View, then Meta Data to get your hearts on the thumbnails.

(Deactivate My Photo Stream. It’s deprecated and Apple will hopefully mothball
it soon. I agree, it’s confusing, but that’s the debt you acquire when
unthinkingly doing stuff. I agree that sucks, definitely. The All Photos album
is also confusing, I agree. Apple should have abolished it and had, but people
were whining about it. Basically, the Photos view has all your photos in
chronological order, the All Photos album has all of your photos in the order
you imported them. Also, don’t you have to explicitly share photos for them to
be shared? Which is exactly what you want? I’m not sure what your multi-select
point is all about. You obviously cannot multi-select when Photos just shows
an overview. I agree that’s a tradeoff, but in my view one that’s very well
worth it.)

In summary: Photos is modern, blazingly fast, cruft free and extremely
logical. I love it. So much better than iPhoto ever was.

~~~
rconti
iPhoto was pretty bad, but it seems better than Photos. Perhaps I'm just more
used to it. Thanks for the tip about the hearts, but I didn't mean in the
title bar of the program, I meant overlaid on the photo itself -- the old
flagging method was much easier to see at a glance.

I actually like the photostream. It's an easy way of getting recent phone
snapshots onto my computer for exporting or doing whatever I want -- without
keeping them around forever.

My multi-select comment refers to this: double-click on a photo in the
thumbnails. You're now viewing an enlarged photo. Now there's also a double-
row of thumbnails to the left of it. You can use this double-row to navigate,
but not to multi-select. You must hit the back arrow to get to the OTHER
thumbnail view in order to multi-select. I constantly make this mistake, it's
so non-intuitive that you can't multi-select thumbnails to (say) export
multiple photos.. not in THIS mode, at least, you now have to hit a back arrow
to do the exact same task!

I'm not sure if they've fixed this in Photos, but a big gripe of mine with
iPhoto was its "sharing" behavior. If you deleted your photos from your
computer, it ALSO deleted them from your 'shared' sites; eg, Facebook or
whatever. To me, this was absolutely asinine behavior as many of us use
multiple computers, can't store our entire photo libraries on them at all
times, and so on. For example, my workflow is to take a lightweight laptop
with me when I travel, and the SSD can't hold my whole photo library; just
enough to do quick edits, upload, then delete.

I'll have to experiment with Photos' 'sharing' support, but I'm afraid of
breaking stuff from past experiences.

~~~
arrrg
You can display hearts on the photos by going to the view menu! (As well as
titles if they exist, the file format, …) That info is overlaid!

(I also think it’s entirely reasonable to only have the thumbnail bar for
photo navigation. I think the one in iPhoto worked exactly the same? It just
maybe wasn’t displayed by default? If you give it all the functionality of all
the other views there are consequences to that, knock on effects. For example,
which image should be displayed enlarged if you select more than one in the
bar? Keeping it simple keeps it simple.)

~~~
rconti
Ah, I see, if you turn things on in the view menu, it enables it to be
overload ONLY in the main thumbnail view mode. When you're viewing a single
photo, the heart/title/etc is not overlaid on the full size photo or the nav
bar thumbnail.

------
gtrubetskoy
It is not fair to single out Apple - all the software has gone downhill in the
past couple of years - browsers, websites, apps, appliances, virtually
everything.

My suspicion is that it's the proliferation of new ways of doing things - new
languages, no-sql/key-value db's, new hosting platforms such as AWS, docker,
big data stuff like hadoop, storm and spark, all kinds of embedded software
(tv's, cars), etc - we've got a _lot_ of new stuff lately, a lot of us don't
understand what we're doing and we've introduced a _ton_ of bugs.

~~~
mamcx
Agreed. Everything is more complex. Web apps is each iteration harder.. Native
App development too (for example, .NET xaml is far harder than winforms and it
than VB/Delphi).

~~~
petra
And most of this is unnecessary complexity.why haven't anybody came up with
better tools to attack that ?

~~~
CaptSpify
Because we don't need better tools. If things are getting worse, that shows we
had the tools already. The problem IMO: We keep trying new tools where they
aren't needed.

#grumpy #getoffmylawn

~~~
petra
OK not new tools. But great tools. Most of the tools the web offers are pieces
of shit - many developers will agree to that.

And many complain that the web stack sucks. The simple example - you have to
learn css, html, javascript, and some backend language - just to build say a
business site, when you could do so, at a higher level, just by pointing and
clicking and entering some code with something like microsoft
lightswitch(which was discontinued).

------
roymurdock
Here is the author's list of gripes:

 _On OS X this is especially true: OpenGL implementation has fallen behind the
competition, the filesystem desperately needs updating, the SDK has needed
modernizing for years, networking and cryptography have seen major gaffes. And
that’s with regards to the under-the-hood details, the applications are easier
targets: it’s tragic that Aperture and iPhoto were axed in favor of the
horrifically bad Photos app (that looks like some Frankenstein “iOS X” app),
the entire industry have left Final Cut Pro X, I dare not plug my iPhone in to
my laptop for fear of what it might do, the Mac App Store is the antitheses of
native application development (again being some Frankenstein of a web /native
app), and iCloud nee MobileMe nee iTools has been an unreliable and slow mess
since day one._

I've found myself thinking along similar lines. The two biggest offenders in
my opinion are (1) feature bloat and (2) poor UX/UI decisions. iTunes is a
prime example of how the confluence of both can turn a relatively simple and
popular app into a quasi-unusable nightmare.

I've also noticed a lot more freezing and kernel panics on my iPhone, to the
point where I've stopped updating the OS for fear of what might be introduced
in the next version.

~~~
bpicolo
Feature bloat is a problem in virtually every piece of software people have
ever used.

Time and time again a startup comes along with "-foo- simplified", gets people
to switch with it's ease, bloats up the product over time, and then loses to
the next guy.

------
TheAceOfHearts
Is Apple's software quality truly declining? I've been an OS X user for a
couple years now, and I'm perfectly happy with my laptop and its updates.

Whenever I read articles like these, I wondered if the software quality has
actually declined, or if it's received too many features to be properly
maintained, or if now it has so many more users that the flaws have become
more apparent.

~~~
c06n
My 2013 Macbook Pro keeps crashing with Firefox, a few times every day. I
cannot use Firefox anymore, I had to switch to Chrome. And as I am writing
this Mail crashed because I wanted to forward an Email with a large picture in
it. And messages has crashed numerous times, I don't use that either anymore.

So yes, for me Apple's software quality truly has declined sind Snow Leopard.

~~~
czhiddy
How is Firefox crashing an Apple issue, assuming you don't hit the same
problems with Chrome?

~~~
c06n
I was probably unclear: The whole computer freezes, and there is nothing I can
do except a "hard" reset, i.e. pressing the power button until it shuts off.

But there are more issues still, e.g. that the computer will only connect to
my bluetooth radio after a restart.

------
matthewmacleod
I've heard this said a lot recently, but I must admit it hasn't been my
experience. I've had generally no problems with any version of OS X, having
used it since Tiger; upgrades seem to have led to general improvement, with
the usual proviso of various broken bits and pieces in the first release,
pretty much in line with the advice that's always been in place for Apple
services – don't use the first release. The same for iOS.

Regarding the specifics pointed out by the author: OpenGL support does and
always had lagged behind (sucks) and there have been security gaffes (sucks).
I don't agree that the SDK needs 'modernizing', whatever that means, however.

Apple has problems with software quality, granted. But is it realistically any
worse than any other provider, or is it getting worse? That's not my
experience, at least.

------
mattkevan
There's a weird combination of things going on with these articles – a mix of:

1\. Forgetting how truly crap things used to be

MacOS is better now than ever. Systems 7-9 fell over about every 10 minutes,
10.3 was the first version of OS X to be good enough for work and 10.5
'Leper'\- nuff said.

2\. Ostalgie [0]

Maybe Windows wasn't _that_ bad after all...

3\. 'Steve Jobs wouldn't have allowed it'

Good grief – Apple have had a long history of stinkers even when Jobs was
around. Remember Ping, brushed metal UI, Apple Maps v1, Mobile Me, the iCloud
launch...

4\. Civilisation is crumbling

Things were always better than they are now. And the sky is always falling.

That's not to say there aren't problems, there are. Point them out for sure,
but I don't think that these 'things are getting worse' conversations are very
helpful. Just seems like negative opportunism.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostalgie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostalgie)

~~~
ConroyBumpus
Somewhere in the dark recesses of my closet is a "System 7.5 sucks less"
shirt. What's old is new again, I suppose.

------
jernfrost
While I think this is exaggerated I also think there is truth to it. I would
not blame this on inability to make quality products but bad high level
choices. What is xCode today used to be multiple separate apps. The synch
process for iPhone used to be separate programs. Now we are getting these huge
monolithic programs like xCode and iTunes. Making big monoliths just isn't
good software engineering IMHO. They should stick more to the original sound
Unix philosophy. Make smaller apps which do a few things well. I think if
users find it cumbersome to use multiple programs together, then the solution
isn't to combine them all into one but to create an Operating System
environment which makes it easy to use multiple programs together.

I think xCode e.g. which I use every day could easily be made into 3 different
programs. 1) Project management and configuration. One program where you
define which pieces go into your project. How they are compiled, deployed etc.
2) An Editor component which does syntax highlighting, refactoring, code
navigation etc. 3) A GUI designer.

Sure integration has its benefits. But it also has many big disadvantages.
Many people like to use different editor components, e.g. AppCode does
refactoring and code navigation better in many people's view than xCode. Yet
it becomes an incomplete solution as they do not have as sophisticated GUI
design and project management tools. But it these were separate tools which
could just as well be used with AppCode one could inspire much more diversity.

Likewise the monolithic iTunes locks out any kind of alternative third party
solutions. There should be one synching applications which can sync content
like pictures, books, music etc. But that is all it should do. Movies, Music,
Apps etc should be separate apps and we should allow alternative third party
alternatives to these. People might want other ways to display and organize
their iTunes music e.g.

~~~
st3v3r
"I think xCode e.g. which I use every day could easily be made into 3
different programs. 1) Project management and configuration. One program where
you define which pieces go into your project. How they are compiled, deployed
etc. 2) An Editor component which does syntax highlighting, refactoring, code
navigation etc. 3) A GUI designer."

We used to have that. The GUI designer being separate was never a good
situation, considering how one would connect the IBOutlets and IBActions.

------
ldjb
I'm glad to see that other people have noticed this. iTunes has always been a
pain to use, but otherwise Apple's software used to be incredibly robust and
worked well. Nowadays Apple seem to be pushing out updates without proper
testing. It's got to the point where I'm hesitant to actually update my
devices for fear they'll become unusable. And that's never good.

At one point both my MacBook and my iPhone were suffering from regular
graphical glitches. It's still an occasional problem, but at least Apple have
got on top of it for the most part. I just wish they'd do something to stop my
iPhone from kernel panicking and automatically restarting itself every so
often.

~~~
Silhouette
_It 's got to the point where I'm hesitant to actually update my devices for
fear they'll become unusable. And that's never good._

Sadly, this doesn't seem to be specific to Apple either. It has become almost
the norm in many parts of the software industry, to the extent that I don't
voluntarily update _any_ software that is installed and working any more,
other than essential security updates. These days, even that is only done
after a search to see which supposedly essential Windows updates are actually
important for security, because I no longer trust Microsoft to be honest about
what their updates are for either.

My default assumption otherwise is that running any sort of updater on
application software, or heaven forbid on drivers or the whole OS, has a
better than even chance of breaking something I care about, and that every
time a browser auto-updates there is a close to 100% chance it will break
something I care about or change something in a way I don't want or need. But
since almost everyone is now producing similar levels of unreliable and
unstable products, there's little you can do to get away from it.

Combined with the version ratcheting problem we were discussing a week or so
ago here on HN, also in connection with Apple but also a much wider problem
within the industry, it's becoming almost impossible to simply choose and use
software you actually want, and to upgrade if and when a better version for
your needs is available. This is not a good thing.

------
rm_-rf_slash
While I agree that Apple's software quality has declined in recent years, I
fear that their hardware and other advantages (even with superior hardware and
software I don't trust a Google-or-Amazon-based phone for a second to be
anything but a data mine for them), I fear Apple's existing lead in general
quality will allow them to become (remain?) complacent and allow things to
slide.

~~~
koralatov
I agree with your concerns about a Google or Amazon phone being a datamine in
your pocket, but I think that, for most people, it's not an issue: they simply
want a phone that works for them and don't give much thought to how much
information about them is being squirrelled away.

A huge factor in Apple's sliding software quality is lock-in: once you're on
iOS using an iPhone, it's _so_ much easier to simply stay on iOS than it is to
move platform. Most people, myself included, will look at the effort required
to move and decide that, really, the grass probably isn't greener enough to
make climbing the fence worth it. Once you add in some other Apple devices ---
say a laptop or an iPad --- staying becomes even easier.

~~~
SyneRyder
The reverse is also true - once you decide to leave Apple, the lock-in becomes
something you don't go back to. I used to be entirely Apple devices, MacBooks
& iPods & iPhones & AirPlay everywhere. But I was fed up enough with my iPhone
4 that I got a Nexus 5 instead - which led me to a Chromecast, a Galaxy Tab A
with S-Pen, which led me to a Samsung TV. The grass has definitely been
greener for me. I still have my new MacBook Pro, but I don't "love" it like I
used to love Apple products.

------
Grue3
Um, Quicktime? iTunes? Apple's software was always terrible (as a Windows
user).

~~~
sdegutis
QuickTime was always way ahead of the game in terms of playing videos with a
fantastic user interface. They kept innovating the UI so that it would get out
of your way while still letting you do the basic things people need to do to
watch a video. Even today I feel like QT is one of Apple's non-failures. The
only thing I don't like about it is that you can't easily rewind a few seconds
backwards. It requires a really steady hand to make sure you don't jump too
far back.

~~~
AndrewUnmuted
> you can't easily rewind a few seconds backwards

There is a technical reason for this, and it's not a QT program problem, but
rather a QT container problem. The QT container file does a horrendous job at
synchronizing audio and visual streams. QT playback software exploits this
problem, though, by intentionally lagging the start of a video by a few frames
in order for the audio and visual streams to match up on the timeline. By not
having to track the sync after the initial playback lag, the file plays more
"reliably" and "quickly" but this also means that the decoder has no reference
point from which it can scrub backwards. Because the "quick" in QuickTime
really is a misnomer. This is lazy time, not quick time.

~~~
galad87
That's not true at all. QuickTime container can represent each frame timestamp
exactly, and it has got some advanced features like edit lists. Every frame
has got a start and stop time, and each sync sample is marked as such, it's
even possible to mark on which sample each sample depends. In Matroska for
example the stop time is so unreliable you often have to analyse the frame
content or wait for the next frame to know the duration of a sample, and who
knows if the sync flag is true or not.

You are probably referring to the delay introduced by b-frames, but the mov
container has got a atom ('cslg') to store the max and min offsets and put
everything in sync again.

Unfortunately third party mov demuxers don't support cslg or edit lists, so
they only supports the simplest mov files.

~~~
AndrewUnmuted
No, I am referring to the delay introduced by compressed audio streams within
QT container files. The issue I refer to does not seem to occur for lossless
audio. In these situations, the cslg atom, among others, allow the QT format
to reliably copy edited stream data without re-writing to the container file.

AAC, like MP3, introduces a padding of silence at the beginning of the stream.
Because modern QT container files do not compensate for this, all audio and
video streams within this type of QT file will be off sync by default. QT
playback software waits for the audio stream to begin (waits for silence
padding to end) before video playback begins, even though the streams
themselves line up 1:1 in the container file. This is lazy engineering, not an
advanced feature.

~~~
galad87
From what I read on
[https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/QuickT...](https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/QuickTime/QTFF/QTFFAppenG/QTFFAppenG.html)
it seems it's possible to explicitly represent the delay.

------
eCa
Down currently, Google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Us-
NZtX...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Us-
NZtXc2TAJ:sudophilosophical.com/2016/02/04/apples-declining-software-
quality/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

------
kmfrk
The worst thing about Apple is not the drop in quality, but the way in which
every fan and user kicking and screaming about it doesn't make them realize
how awful their products are.

If we could just have a rule that said "don't get Apple's first version of a
product", but they continue to be terrible. I recently lost my entire music
collection because my Apple Music subscription ended, and now I have to
download them all one by one via iTunes - even though I only want to stream
them to save the disk space.

This happened across both Windows and OS X, of course.

~~~
crystalclaw
I bought a first gen apple product with this in mind (new macbook), and it's
been surprisingly good. My usb adapter sucks, yes, so that's a pain, but since
it's not my primary computer it doesn't matter so much. I wouldn't recommend
it to anyone as their primary computer. That being said, when the next one
comes out I'm ditching this one and getting the new one; first-gen apple
products are really mostly proof-of-concept it seems. (iPad 1 vs iPad 2, for
example)

------
mattcantstop
I love that an article entitled "declining software quality" is not pulling up
because of "Error establishing a database connection" :)

~~~
pljns
I didn't suspect so much traffic, we're back up now :)

~~~
zzzeek
apple's stock symbol is AAPL, not APPL.

also:

> consumers know that Apple’s hardware is the very best, but more and more
> their using apps made by Google and Microsoft and Facebook.

"they're", not "their".

~~~
pljns
Thank you!

------
newscracker
I read this article thinking it would provide some new information in 2016 or
even a lot of details about what "declining software quality" the author has
been experiencing. Instead, I found that it's a poorly written re-hash and re-
linking of what others have written about in the last couple of years.

The author's limited experience is mentioned in a few sentences without a lot
of details. The whole article could've been trimmed down to just two
paragraphs including the links to the other articles, considering that the
linked articles are not "recent news" to have additional commentary and
considering that other people have already written about it with commentary.

------
sdegutis
Apple has been declining since about 2011 not only in software quality, but
also in hardware quality, in innovating hardware, and in innovating software.

When I got my first Mac, it had Mac OS X Tiger on it, and everything about it
really felt like it had the user in mind. These days everything about using it
feels like it has shareholders in mind. The features being added seem like the
kind of things you'd have executives brainstorming up in a committee, and then
demanding that engineers implement.

It's a shame. It no longer does The Right Thing™ by default, and there are
more hardware and software bugs than I can ever remember in an Apple product.
I've listed them before but here's a short list again:

\- This mid-2013 Mac Pro wakes up every few hours at night, even though I have
disabled every "wake from sleep" setting that exists in OS X

\- My mid-2013 MBP has, several times this week, turned on while closed, and
continued as if it was opened (playing YouTube videos or whatever else it be
doing), only shutting back off after about 120 seconds or so

\- Every time I turn this Mac Pro on, it doesn't recognize the wired Apple
keyboard that's plugged into the Apple Cinema Display, and says it's looking
for a bluetooth keyboard, until I unplug and replug the keyboard in at least 3
or 4 times

\- My MBP once emitted a (very) loud buzzing sound from its speakers, for
absolutely no reason, that lasted about 3 or 4 seconds, startling everyone
nearby, when no sound-based programs were running

\- Yesterday I tried syncing my iPhone to remove about 200 songs, and iTunes
said it would remove them, and then "did" remove them, but they were still
there on the device, and iTunes once again showed them being present; it took
a full iPhone reset to clear them off.

~~~
garyrob
I agree. I won't write a list of the problems in detail, but I've been a Mac
user since the 80's because I've always preferred Apple's elegant design and
ease of use. But lately, it's hard to figure out how to do things, and it's
very buggy. Both I and my son have had to reset our phones to fix problems. It
looks like my wife will have to reset hers to deal with a problem with music
synchronization.

And the design as way harder to master than it should be. For instance, to
search for a track in Apple Music, you have to be in any tab except iTunes
Store. OK, there's some logic to it, but it simply is not intuitive. Why can't
there be something that specifically says "Apple Music" that makes it obvious
that that's where you go to find tracks? I'm an experienced computer user, and
in fact a software developer, and when I first purchased Apple Music I was
mystified about how to search for a track in Apple Music. I had to Google it.
My wife, who isn't used to Googling for these kinds of answers and isn't a
technologist, has no choice but to ask me or the kids how to do things like
that.

In the Music app iOS, to make it show only the tracks you've downloaded, you
have to click on the pulldown where you select Artists/Albums/Songs/etc. It's
a switch on the bottom of that pulldown. When you're thinking "What tracks do
I have downloaded?" this is just not obvious. When you get used to it, it's
fine. But if you're a naive user, you really have to have a friend who's an
experienced user just in order to figure out how to do such basic things.
Naive users may not even understand that the Artists/Albums/Songs/etc.
pulldown is a menu. And even if they know it is a menu, it's not intuitive to
think that there's an on-off switch for showing all songs at the bottom of it,
which relates a fundamentally different concept.

It all just seems like really poor design. I don't know what their problem is.
But my son, who has always been an Apple user because I've been one, and who
is applying to colleges like MIT to do engineering, is seriously considering
switching to Android so that he doesn't have to deal with so many bugs. (Not
that I know that Android is better.)

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Good UIs have discoverability, but increasingly the software has - whatever
the opposite of discoverability is.

Simple example: Mail tries to guess settings for you. If you don't want it to
do this - it regularly gets them wrong - you have to uncheck a box in the
Advanced tab for every account you have. (Because obviously, that's where
you're going to look.)

Then, instead of making the change, you have to click _any other_ account,
just so you can get a save dialog.

And if the account is disabled, it ignores your change until you enable the
account. Then you can finally save the change and start modifying the
settings.

Elsewhere, the latest version of Logic Pro is so bad it's been causing outrage
on user forums all over the Internet.

Product management seems to have become completely clueless about user needs,
basic UI designer, or QA.

I have no idea who's in charge now, but whoever it is has no idea what they're
doing.

~~~
hussong
Setting up a plain IMAP account in Apple Mail is so much harder than it should
be. It used to keep the wrongly guessed settings, even if you overwrote them,
so you'd have to delete the account and start over for it to actually work.

Also their usage of words like "account", "mailbox" and "folder" never ceases
to confuse me...

------
earlz
If you think their software quality is bad, you should look at their software
development software quality. I'll just leave this:
[http://www.textfromxcode.com/](http://www.textfromxcode.com/)

Apple seems much more concerned with adding new features than fixing bugs,
even if that means a significant portion of their users have a bad experience.

------
nxzero
In my opinion, Apple's alway been just as buggy as any other company, it's
just easier to see now due to their size.

------
Patrick_Devine
I use OSX as a glorified terminal and the odd game. Unfortunately it's not a
great gaming machine, and it's a horrible terminal. Out of the box, OpenSSL
and OpenSSH are shipped broken and insecure, and I'm not sure how anyone could
seriously use Safari. Games often come late or don't work as well as their PC
counterparts and sometimes require remapping joystick buttons with a third
(fourth?) party application.

So by default, to do even the most basic of operations, you have to install
homebrew and Chrome. I'm not sure how things got this bad. When OSX came out
it was kind of forgivable for the first few years, but now that I've been
using it for 16 years it's unforgivable.

~~~
jsz0
> I'm not sure how anyone could seriously use Safari.

I seriously use Safari everyday. Works fine for me. In my experience it's
noticeably faster, more stable, and more battery friendly than Chrome.

~~~
x0
I want to use Safari but I just cannot deal with having no favicons.

------
raimue
I fully agree with this article. So much stuff on OS X is neglected. The
recent releases only focused on minor updates of the UI, while many components
in the lower layers have not seen updates since OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (2011).
And if they do, it gets as bad as the disaster around discoveryd introduced
with OS X 10.10 Yosemite [1].

On a small sidenote, Apple's ticker symbol is actually AAPL, not APPL. I hope
you did not invest into the wrong company's stock!

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/01/why-dns-in-
os-x-10-10-i...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/01/why-dns-in-
os-x-10-10-is-broken-and-what-you-can-do-to-fix-it/)

------
hb42
Issues around the sunset of Aperture or iPhoto, bad Photos, Final Cut Pro X,
etc are most certainly not software quality problems, but product management
problems.

On such large apps that need large teams of engineers, without good product
management _and also_ project management, even great engineers can do a
terrible job despite all their efforts or heroics "on the ground".

~~~
iMark
Any sufficiently advanced product management problem is indistinguishable from
a software quality problem.

------
Osiris
OS X has major Thunderbolt issues. OS X crashes nearly every time I put it to
sleep with a Thunderbolt monitor connected (10.9 through 10.11), daisy chained
Apple monitors aren't detected, Thunderbolt monitors aren't aways detected
when plugged in (as in they don't turn on), waking up a machine after
disconnecting Thunderbolt monitors sometimes results in a black screen where
the OS thinks the monitors are connected.

Windows 10 on the same MBP, has none of these issues. OS X crashes
significantly more often than any Windows machine I've used in the last 5
years (Windows 7-10). Apple used to brag about how OS X was more stable than
Windows, but I think that Microsoft's need to make Windows compatible with so
much hardware and software has actually resulted in a more robust and harder
to crash OS.

~~~
dingo_bat
I'm not much of a mac user. I've never seen an OS crash since windows 7
arrived. Neither on windows (7, 8, 10) or on OSX. Are scenarios where the
entire operating system crashes really occurring in significant numbers?

------
Keats
As a very casual Apple user (ie I don't own any devices but I sometimes uses
my girlfriend imac/macbook), I would say that this has been my opinion for a
couple of years now. Pretty much everytime I use OSX or an iphone I run into
bugs, as a short list from the top of my memory:

\- iphone screen turning black with siri enabled and repeating that she
couldn't hear what I said or something like that

\- closing lid on macbook, re-opening -> no more wifi until you reboot

\- itunes download progress disappearing after a few seconds, changing tab and
coming back would show it again for a few seconds

\- randomly losing wifi

I might be cursed when it comes to Apple software but that also means I won't
go near an Apple car, even though I hope they have very different standards
from the OS/phone teams.

~~~
jshevek
It is even worse every time Apple pushes out a major iOS release.

------
MicroBerto
The sentiment in this thread rings true to me. Usually the techies (ie HN
readers/commenters) are ahead of the curve, so it will only be so much time
before the cries from the general populace become louder.

Meanwhile, last time I was on an airplane (December), _every single older
woman over the age of 60 had an iPhone_. This means that it's not only reached
critical mass (the _late majority_ on the technology adoption curve has been
achieved), but now it's no longer hip.

I'm not sure what will be next, but I'm guessing it won't be Apple's.

Were I gambling man, I'd have shorted Apple's stock right there after that
airplane ride.

~~~
natch
I wouldn't discount all the people who don't give a shit about being hip, but
just want their devices to be safe and kick ass.

Apple haters seem to often have the misconception that people like Apple
products for their style appeal. It's easy to think that, and not wonder if
there are possibly some more important reasons.

~~~
MicroBerto
That's very well, but this entire thread is about how Apple's devices are
slowly _not_ kicking ass as much anymore.

So, if we're not buying them for style... they're not working _as_ well...
they cost $800... they have questionable tax and manufacturing practices... at
what point does the public call it all into question?

This thread, in my opinion, is a sign of bigger and worse things to come for
the company. The canary is singing.....

------
drawkbox
It seems at Apple, engineering and software quality has taken a further back
seat since maybe iOS7. Success can do that to the company, high flying bizdev
starts to dictate over engineering and solid deliveries, sometimes forgetting
what business they are in. Similar to what happened to Microsoft under Ballmer
for a decade with Vista/Windows Phone etc.

Apple computers in 2005-2006 became awesome when they went Intel and OSX was
solid, everyone loves to code on a pretty front end backed by *nix. Then iOS
in 2007+ was solid for many versions. Slowly, it has been getting worse.

------
hellofunk
I tend to agree that the bugs in OSX during the last few iterations are quite
unbecoming of a company with Apple's legacy and reputation. I hope it's just a
temporary glitch in their process.

------
dineshp2
It would seem sensible for Apple to fork an OS like Debian and focus on the
distinguishing features of Mac OS such as the UI,gestures,power usage
optimizations and Apple specific applications.

From the user and developer point of view, the only major drawback would be
applications. Devs porting over apps to linux and users not having some of
their favourite apps available.

It's becoming clear that Apple is not paying enough attention to the under the
hood details of an OS and the security situation. And maintaining the OS is a
huge investment from Apple. So it only feels natural to base Mac OS on linux
and, as I said earlier, focus on the distinguishing features.

Technically though, it would still be a huge challenge as there are lots of
factors to consider,but in the long term everyone wins Apple,linux though
maybe not Microsoft.

I have been thinking about this idea of Apple using linux instead of its
proprietary Mac OS for a long time, and have considered the transition only at
a very high level. I would like to hear what the HN community thinks of this
idea.

Edit: So instead of forking a version of linux and developing it independantly
like what Apple did previously, a better model might be where Apple
periodically forks from upstream projects and makes its modifications.
Something like what Linux mint does with Ubuntu. So this way, they continue to
get the latest and greatest developments from upstream projects without
investing additional resources into maintaining their forked OS(this is
currently what is happening with Mac OS).

~~~
mikey_p
Except Apple already did this once, and honestly the under the hood bits are
mostly fine. Virtually all the bugs that people complain about are in
userspace programs, like Mail, Safari, or especially Finder. Using a different
kernel and switching form BSD to GNU under the hood isn't going to fix any of
that.

~~~
arc0re
If Apple made a new OS, using a Linux kernel, and getting rid of the NeXT
framework stuff (no more Objective C bullshit, no more deprecated Carbon, or
Cocoa/ObjC/Swift), I think it would work pretty well.

------
FussyZeus
I wouldn't say it's degraded to the point of being Windows _yet_ , but it is
definitely in danger. Personally I noticed the software quality started taking
a dive around iOS 7. 7 was practically a beta.

OS X Yosemite was a travesty, made worse by the fact that as an iOS developer
I HAD to run it, I couldn't stay on Mavericks like I would've greatly
preferred. Yosemite had a lot of good things to add, but at the same time it
was plagued with tons of bugs and horrifically un-optimized graphics code
(full screen blur with no caching brought my Macbook Pro Retina to it's knees
many times). El Capitan has been a huge step in the right direction but I
can't help but notice so much of the OS's new features weren't so much
optimized or fixed as simply regressed.

Additionally, speaking as a developer, many of Apple's API's and SDK's are
outright terrible. iCloud implementation for any iOS app is a nightmare, as is
using the shared keychain. Then there's the constant obfuscation of the file
system on both iOS and OS X which just drives me insane, and the tendency of
all Apple apps to operate as if they are the only app you'll ever use for any
given purpose, which seems obnoxious at it's best and outright nefarious at
it's worst.

------
xutopia
It's undeniably true that Apple software has lacked in quality in the last
couple of years. I say this as my Siri stopped working altogether, Photos app
upgrade destroyed my library and my iPhone keeps telling me the songs I
downloaded aren't there.

------
e40
For me, this is a great example of what we're talking about:

    
    
      https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7257238?tstart=0
    

""Disk Not Ejected Properly" error after EL Capitan goes to sleep and wakes up
again."

It's because of things like this that I usually wait until the .4 release to
upgrade. El Cap is at .3 and I'm feeling stupid for breaking my rule.

~~~
e40
Btw, disabling "power nap" made the problem go away.

------
diogenescynic
The UI and UX has also become much less intuitive and more complex. iTunes
used to be very easy to use. Every few updates and they are constantly making
you relearn where to find things which is annoying. The same thing is
happening to the Music app on iOS. It's not nearly as good as the original
iPod software. They've added features that don't improve the experience at
all.

~~~
arprocter
The 'maximize' button now making a window take over your whole screen being
one of the oddest.

And disappearing scroll bars - why?!

Didn't this company write the HIG book?

~~~
arc0re
you can force the scroll bars to be always visible. Look in your general
settings

~~~
arprocter
Thanks!

System Preferences -> General

------
jlarocco
I've been complaining about this for a while now, and I'm glad more people are
experiencing it and complaining.

I honestly dread Apple software updates because I know they're not going to
fix anything I care about, and they're going to break stuff or arbitrarily
replace perfectly fine, working features with new half-assed implementations
that are buggy and don't work as well.

The latest example came just a couple days ago when I finally updated to the
latest iOs, hoping maybe they've made it possible to remove the "radio"
feature from Music. They haven't, and as bonus they replaced the "app close"
screen with an ugly, broken one for no good f'ing reason; and the top info
display with service/time/battery level now covers the top 20 pixels of
several apps, obscuring the view in those programs. And they've added a few
new crappy apps I have no interest in using, but can't remove.

I still think their hardware is awesome, but their software is going down the
drain.

------
elevensies
If we believe what SV CEOs are saying about the scarcity of software
developers and the difficulty of hiring, that they are limited by supply and
not demand, then I'd expect that Apple is dedicating more of the limited
resources to iOS, and OS X will continue to suffer. I think iOS is responsible
for much more of their business and I don't see that changing.

~~~
HillaryBriss
Yeah. It looks like iPhone/iPad sales make up about 80% of revenue while Mac
sales make up about 10%.

[http://cdn.macrumors.com/article-
new/2015/01/piechart115.jpg](http://cdn.macrumors.com/article-
new/2015/01/piechart115.jpg)

------
robeastham
Had been on OSX for desktop pretty much exclusively for the last 15 years up
until recently. Have jumped to Windows due to my current focus on VR.

I used OSX for the first time in a few months yesterday, having installed
Windows 10 on my Macbook a few months back.

For about 5 minutes I started to think that I missed it, it looks so nice, but
within 10 minutes I'd had two fundamental networking issues crop up that
slowed and then stopped me from doing my work without a reboot.

I own a fully pimped out top of the line 2014 15" Retina Pro ($4k to buy at
the time). For at least a year it had a WiFi bug that required me to enter a
command at the terminal in order to disable some aspect of networking so that
I get full WiFi speed. If I don't my WiFI is limited to 10Mbps, once the
command is run I get nearly triple that (i.e same as when I plugin ethernet).
Why was I having to manually type commands at the command line in order to get
my $4k laptop to connect properly to WiFi? 229 pages of people's issues here
in just one thread:

[https://discussions.apple.com/message/29742198?tstart=0#2974...](https://discussions.apple.com/message/29742198?tstart=0#29742198)

Also google "slow wifi MacBook pro"

It's possible this has been resolved in more recent updates and/or El Capitan.

Final issues yesterday was network access to my NAS, just random connectivity.
Sometimes I can get access sometimes I can't. If I try to connect with an
incorrect account password then access hangs and I'm not prompted to login
again, so I have to reboot to get a network login window. It's just so
frustrating, because I would love to stick with Apple. I've had none of these
issues with Windows 10, or even Manjaro when I tried it again recently. But I
do really miss lots of 3rd party software that I can only get on OSX.

------
walterbell
On the flagship iPad Pro with Logitech keyboard and IPSEC pre-shared-key VPN:

    
    
      iOS          Logitech      VPN
      
      9.1          OK            OK
      9.2          Fail [1]      OK
      9.3 Beta 2   OK            Fail [2]
    

Meanwhile, iOS 9.3 beta is slower than iOS 9.2, especially on older devices,
[http://www.cultofmac.com/406805/caveat-emptor-
ios-9-3-beta-1...](http://www.cultofmac.com/406805/caveat-emptor-
ios-9-3-beta-1-is-slower-than-ios-9-2/)

[1]
[https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7372797?start=0](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7372797?start=0)

[2]
[https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/30939](https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/30939)

~~~
jacquesm
I think we can take that as evidence that regression testing is hard.

~~~
walterbell
Yes, although the VPN regression was reported in iOS 9.3 Beta 1 and remains
unfixed in iOS 9.3 Beta 2.

------
woodruffw
All throughout elementary and middle school, I used Macs. My schools had them,
and my family had one that I used for all my work. I went from System 8, to 9,
all the way through 10.0 to 10.6.8.

I bought a Mac this summer to do some OS X-specific development, and I was
truly shocked by how bad things had become on the desktop. Performance is
generally poor, UI has apparently gone out the window, and the UNIX features
that Apple once heralded have been hidden below new toolkits and proprietary
replacements of old systems (discoveryd anybody?).

In many ways, I was reminded of how things were both on System 9 and during
the early releases of OS X. It's not nearly as bad now as it was then, but
Apple also doesn't have nearly as many reasonable excuses to for such a
regression in quality.

------
halis
Aside from getting to the top of Hacker News, I don't think this article
achieves much. Listing things like Photos instead of iPhoto is more of a
product development decision than a systemic quality problem.

I run Parallels and Windows 10 on my MacBook Pro and Windows runs smoother in
there than it does on my Windows laptop...Maybe that points to superior
hardware and integration, but I think it's also because OS X is more efficient
than Windows and it's 500 lb sack of goiter it drags around in the form of
legacy support for everything in the last 30 years.

I used to be a Windows computer, Android phone user. Now I'm an iPhone and
MacBook Pro user. Every ecosystem has issues. I find that iOS and OS X still
give you the smoothest ride though.

------
BuckRogers
I think the decline is overstated. Couple related points-

\- They at least offer updates, many other vendors offer few to none. Is that
how you achieve quality? My wife's iPhone4S is still receiving updates and
she's been happy with the device since 2011 to today. I've always used
competitor's products and never achieved this. As a result, we will continue
and increase our scope of purchases from Apple.

\- Software is hard, many pieces of software that I've dug into I'm left
amazed it even works.

I'm not outright dismissing this blog, but I wish it included who is the
leader of software quality- since the statement is that it's not Apple.

My experience leads me to think that if they're an example of failing
software, wow... what about the rest?

~~~
cableshaft
That's the vendors fault really, forcing their crap software onto the OS and
not wanting to invest to keep things up to date to allow updates. Google and
Microsoft both do regular updates to their OS, and if you go with a non-vendor
phone (like Nexus), you'll get all those updates.

But yeah, the software situation from most phone vendors is atrocious.

------
talldan
The biggest annoyances for me are quite minor, but common occurrences.

Multiple password prompts, having to login twice after a restore, terrible
multi-monitor support, lack of window management, unclear system prefs (or
things have moved again since the last update), hidden options (holding the
option key is so unintuitive) and shortcuts, networking tools are poor, weird
update process, notifications blocking the UI of apps, strange finder UI.

There are a lot of UX issues that make it a frustrating experience.

I was a fairly late converter to OS X having used Windows and Linux before. I
used to hear people berate Windows similar issues to those above, and I'm
surprised on switching to OS X that things aren't all that different/better.

------
danjoc
Is it only their software? I don't really see their hardware as first class
anymore either.

Looking at Apple laptops, the newest Intel processor I can get is a 5th gen
Broadwell, and it's only in the 13" retina. The 15" retina has 4th gen
Haswell. And the 13" pro? Some old processor from 2012. 6th gen Skylake is
shipping everywhere from every other laptop manufacturer.

The 13" Macbook Air still has a sub-HD display. (1440x900) Yet, I can now get
a 4K display on a Razer Blade Stealth with 100% Adobe RGB at a competitive
price. Even their 'retina' laptops are low res by comparison.

The only hardware they have that looks reasonably impressive at the moment is
the iMac 5K, but that's a desktop.

~~~
willtim
Add to that thin power cables that fray easily. A poor keyboard (relative to
my thinkpad). Glued-in internal battery. Heavy (relative to
plastic/composites) aluminium case that dents easily and attenuates wifi.
Glossy glass screen that cracks easily and is far too reflective. The trackpad
is good for scrolling but right-click is too awkward. The whole design
philosophy is form over function.

------
patrickaljord
I actually enjoy those little quality fails on Apple and Google apps. Kind of
re-assuring that even billion dollar companies can do the same stupid mistakes
I make with my code. Quality is hard, especially when you need to ship.

------
popmystack
Along with a few other issues with OS X updates over the last month or so,
iTunes continually downloads previous purchases that have already been
downloaded like 5 times.

This is an incredibly stupid bug and it's eating up my disk space (until I
clean it up of course). I am literally talking about 10 entire albums at a
time every time I make a purchase. It's been going on for the last year. I'm
not sure why I still use iTunes anymore to be quite honest. I buy my songs
through iTunes and then they get uploaded to google music, and I think I've
just been going about it as a matter of habit all this time.

------
martin1975
This is for entertainment purposes only type of question - what if they moved
just the desktop to Linux instead of OS X and port Cocoa atop Wayland? Leave
the mobile stuff on iOS, which it seems it's good for.

This is the kind of revolutionary thinking Jobs had when he went OS 9 -> OS
X... could Linux set them free on the desktop by open sourcing the desktop OS
X?

I know, I know, it sounds ridiculous, but there's bits of OS X I like...and
bits of Linux I like, as far as technology, architecture, speed, GUI
frameworks... like some combo of the two would be a killer OS for the ages and
open source too.

~~~
aroman
If this happened I would be unimaginably happy. Actually, one could argue that
the move to open source Swift _and_ invest resources into making it run on
Linux could be keeping this option open.

And really, I don't think it's very ridiculous. As you've said, it's more or
less exactly what Apple did with BSD/Mach and the OS 9 -> OS X transition.

------
natch
I happen to disagree about software quality getting worse. Most of the people
in this thread bashing Xcode don't even know how to spell it, which should
tell you something about their level of ignorance on the matter. I use it
every day and the Xcode team has been knocking it out of the park.

And OS X -- it's hardy bad by any stretch. Mostly it's fantastic. There are
the rare glitches, but as other commenters have said, there are several
factors at work, what with increasing complexity, efforts to get platforms to
work more closely together, proliferation of multicore CPUs, 64-bit, evolution
of security and networking technologies, bringing Swift and modern programming
language patterns into the technology stack, dealing with changes in unstable
third party platforms, and preparing for whatever unknown things Apple has in
the oven.

Apple is trying to bring the future to us. Doing this kind of work, over
multiple versions with plans spanning years or even decades, is not simple.
This kind of work has been likened to rebuilding a 747 aircraft while it's
flying. IMHO it's probably even harder than that, and Apple is doing a damn
good job so far.

Admittedly there's a lot of assertion here, from my own experience of things
working just fine, and not much (even anecdotal) evidence, but I just wanted
to say one needs to view the small bugs in the perspective of all the
significant work that is being undertaken.

~~~
symlinkk
I don't think releasing stable software is harder than rebuilding a 747 while
it's flying. Especially for one of the most valuable companies in the world.
If they can't deliver stable, high quality, easy to use software, while also
meeting their goals, then they need to change their goals. >multicore CPUs
>64-bit >"evolution of security and networking technologies" (?) >Swift
>"unstable third party platforms" (?) >"whatever unknown things Apple has in
the oven" Yeah none of these things are valid reasons to release broken
software.

~~~
natch
Obviously opinions differ on whether the software is stable or broken. I think
is stable, and not broken, and I'm speaking as someone who actually uses it.

------
bane
My home systems are Windows and my Work machine is a mac. I find I'm more
productive on Windows for Office/Browser like stuff and more productive on my
Mac for dev kinds of things.

However, I generally avoid most of the default software that comes with both
OS's with one exception: Windows Explorer is lightyears ahead of finder.
Finder is really quite terrible and behind in usability and UI from Explorer.
So while I avoid Finder, I still use Explorer for many tasks...so many that I
don't bother with most "organizer" apps.

There's some things on Windows networks that are really nice, like WDP (which
is much nicer than VNC).

Both OS's are pretty rock solid in my experience and across multiple machines.
It's actually the Linux machines I come in contact with that are super flaky.

However, I've found that software on my work Mac is pretty crashy/flaky
compared to Windows. I also notice that app developers seem to play more
monetization games in OS X-land compared to Windows e.g. I just had a free app
I've used for a year auto-update and disable itself because the author decided
he wanted to turn it into a paid app. To be fair, the crashy flakiness seems
to coincide much more often with some combination of opening-closing the lid
and losing VPN connection to some servers.

Either way, both OSs seem to be about even to me for 90% of what I do, and the
parts where they are better than one another don't really overlap.

------
ixtli
I'm glad someone has written about this because it's something I've noticed
over the past few OSX major releases. The interesting thing is that speed and
stability appear to have been getting better for my use cases. However for the
first time in my 20 years as an Apple user, this has been at the expense of
visual fidelity. Both iOS and OS X seem to be slightly "glitchier" and
applications end up in bad states where the only clear path to a fix is
relaunching.

~~~
Bud
Not to be a stickler, but this particular part of the discussion seems unfair
to me. Application bugs should be blamed on the app developer, not on OS X.
(Unless, of course, it's one of Apple's built-in apps.)

------
jsz0
I use a lot of Apple's software and, for the most part, it works great for me.
The only outstanding issue I can think of at the moment that I'd like to see
fixed is Safari/OSX is slow opening new tabs because of the new 'favorites'
page. Temporarily I've gone back to opening new tabs with 'empty page' to
solve the problem. On a daily basis I'm using OSX for 8-10 hours and iOS for
2-4 hours. Everything pretty much just works as expected.

------
ChuckMcM
I got the same feeling as the author when I read Mossberg's comments. If
someone who is that big of an Apple fan is seeing the cracks in the stucco, it
is something Tim Cook really needs to pay attention too. Marco Arment kicked
off a similar storm last year at this time[1].

[1] [https://marco.org/2015/01/04/apple-lost-functional-high-
grou...](https://marco.org/2015/01/04/apple-lost-functional-high-ground)

------
bsg75
> they need to grow the world’s biggest company every quarter to keep Wall
> Street happy

Keeping customers happy is important. Keeping "Wall Street" happy is the root
of most problems.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2013/06/30/the-six-
ha...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2013/06/30/the-six-habits-of-
successful-private-companies)

------
dasil003
I've been using Apple hardware since cutting my teeth on an Apple //e and then
progressing through a continuous chain of Macs now totaling well over a dozen
since the late 80s, and my perception is not that things have gotten worse of
late—it's been up and down the whole time. My take on this is that Apple has
actually _improved_ at their traditional weakness of cloud services to the
point where now people _use it_ enough to complain.

Cloud services is the one area where newer companies like Google and Facebook
have a distinct advantage over Apple and is really the only threat (Android
can never be as stable as iOS because of the vertical integration). Cloud
services are amazing because they add so much value in the mobile era where
you can easily operate from multiple devices without syncing nightmares.
Google's cloud services are the thing which makes Android better than iOS in
the areas its superior.

Up until now Apple's offerings were so ridiculously terrible than no one even
used them, whether it was iDisk or MobileMe or whatever other branded services
they churned through—they were utterly unusable. In the iCloud era it's
actually become usable which exposes all the warts in new features which would
have been hitherto impossible, whether it's iCloud app developer woes, message
syncing issues, or Photos complaints, these things have all become usable now
and at least arguably competitive with Google's offerings in the same spaces.

Sure there are warts, and sure it's annoying OS X doesn't get the love it
deserves as iOS drives the company, and sure they're struggling with the scope
of maintenance they're now saddled with, but that's not really the sky-is-
falling narrative that tech bloggers have been pining to snap onto the Tim
Cook era.

------
asadkn
Apple fans blow expectations way out of proportions. Apple products are fairly
decent but far from perfect. Being a web dev, the only reason I use a MacBook
Pro is for having a performant Photoshop without a VM. Otherwise I prefer
Ubuntu due to the hardware choice and for almost every other aspect.

To be honest, with the Retina MacBooks, the memory consumption has only
increased with the 2x graphics and images becoming more common on the web. But
the RAM on a MacBook Pro is seriously lacking. 16GB is simply not enough even
without running a VM. All it takes is around 100 browser tabs and an IDE for
the ram to exhaust.

I wish they had a 32GB version that's not a desktop. And no, their hardware
isn't necessarily perfect - despite what the fans like to believe. I have seen
4/15 MacBooks with pretty uneven display backlight that normal users don't
notice. The best thing about MacBooks in 2016 is still the trackpad and a
pretty design - everything else is outdated now. You can find equivalent or
much better in all other aspects of hardware.

~~~
parasubvert
>16GB is simply not enough even without running a VM. All it takes is around
100 browser tabs and an IDE for the ram to exhaust.

Browsers are notorious memory leakers. I find my rMBP 16 GB is fine even with
an IDE and VMs, but I do have to restart Chrome or Safari at least once a day.

> I wish they had a 32GB version that's not a desktop.

There have been limitations with Intel chipsets there until the latter half of
2015. I'd expect to see a 32 GB and maybe even a 64 GB MBP this year.

------
planetjones
It's surprising just how bad Apple's software has got in a seemingly small
space of time.

Yosemite was the biggest disgrace of all. My mouse or keyboard would not wake
the iMac after it went to sleep. And the beach ball was seen so frequently
that my 1500 CHF iMac was useless after just 2 years. El Capitan finally fixed
the sleep issue and the beach ball is seen much less, but I'd expect much more
for the price I paid. The profiteering of Apple with regard to having an SSD
with the iMac also severely annoys me.

My iPhone seems to have numberous glitches and software issues too. And for a
fine example of just "what the hell are apple thinking" \- the original
incarnation of the battery monitor in iOS was it. What's the use of seeing the
percentage of the battery an app has used - a completely useless statistic
unless it included the time too. I still don't find it a particularly useful
feature, as I am sure my battery is draining too fast, but the battery monitor
gives me no simple way to prove this.

~~~
arprocter
iOS low battery mode disabling itself once charge goes over 80% is really
annoying, but maybe I'm just used to how it behaves on the platform they
copied the feature from...

------
jff
Wasn't there an article some years back that pointed out how whenever someone
dares criticize Apple, they're always careful to mention how they use Apple
products everywhere and Apple stuff is still very nice, but please Mr. Jobs if
you could refrain from deleting everything on my phone when I plug it in I'd
be ever so grateful...

------
jcoffland
This will be controversial but I believe Linux will become the desktop of
choice in the long run. Here's why. Tech like Docker is making it easier to
deploy whole systems of software, not just in the cloud. Google has put most
of the apps 99% of users use 99% of the time on the Web. Everyday users are
moving away from the desktop anyway. And the whole litany of other typically
quoted reasons to use Linux like security, package management, lack of
viruses, performance, ect. Finally companies like Microsoft and Apple will
find it too expensive to maintain their subpar OSes when they make all their
money elsewhere anyway. E.g. iTunes, iPhone, enterprise software[1]. It
probably still a long ways off though.

[1] [http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-google-microsoft-where-
do...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-google-microsoft-where-does-the-
money-come-from/)

~~~
tychuz
Linux on desktop is not subpar? Well that is news.

------
vidoc
Silly question but we read all the time those complains from tech journalists
or 'apple geeks' about those macos bugs, while I'm not a huge fan of the OS
myself, my complains are usually UI or performance related, rarely on actual
bugs: curious, is there an obvious, known list of bugs those guys are talking
about?

------
bluedino
I might pine for the days of Snow Leopard, but part of that was the hardware -
for the first time you got some powerful Intel hardware running a mature
version of OS X. It was bliss compared to a G4 running 10.2 or the original
MacBook Pro on 10.4. Plus, SSD's started to enter the mainstream in 2010.

That said I'm not too upset with 10.12 or whatever the heck we are running
right now. What bugs me is iOS 9. Long pauses, freezing up, graphical
glitches, first-party apps crashing, sound lagging...it's just terrible.

I guess I'm happy that I haven't had the old problems of not syncing up, the
phone getting hot and eating battery life, apps not refreshing, etc. But the
current iPhone experience reminds me of amateur hour shit I'd expect form a
low-end, no-name smartphone.

------
peterburkimsher
In iTunes 10.7 with iOS 6.1.3, it is possible to sync Safari bookmarks,
contacts, calendars, photos, and music over USB. I don't always have Internet
access, particularly when on a plane.

Notes sync was broken between 10.7 Lion and 10.8 Mountain Lion. Now it won't
sync without iCloud.

To downgrade iTunes 11 to 10 on Mavericks 10.9, I had to replace some system
libraries. That broke the Mac App Store. I use a friend's laptop to get
binaries of apps that they download that are only on the App Store (e.g.
Shazam, LINE).

If Apple fixes USB sync, I might force myself to get over the new GUI (which
is awful - no track name & artist on the iTunes MiniPlayer?).

If Linux developers get USB sync to work reliably, and make some UI scripting
tool similar to AppleScript, then I would consider switching.

------
cphuntington97
Even the article is buggy!

"The best thing for Apple to do is to re-take their position as a leader of
software quality before it's too late: consumers know that Apple's hardware is
the very best, but more and more their using apps made by Google and Microsoft
and Facebook."

*they're

------
jafingi
I think it's a management problem. I agree that the software quality have been
declining the past years. Snow Leopard is probably the most stable OS I've
ever used, and since then, the OS have become bloated IMO.

However, the major thing that bugs me is Apple's services. iCloud, iMessage
and Apple Music have had some terrible issues. Especially when they launched
Music, it was not only buggy, it was SLOOOOW. I can't believe that the giant
Apple can't even compete with little Spotify in terms of ease of use, speed
and stability.

It shouldn't take 10 seconds to search for a track, and not take a few seconds
to start playing a track. Spotify is, and have (the past 4 years when I've
used it) been INSTANTLY on when playing tracks.

------
reubenswartz
Apple's software has never been perfect-- but the competition was often much
worse, so it looked really good. (I switched to Mac because I couldn't take
WindowsXP crashing all the time.)

However, now Apple is essentially the iPhone company. The iPhone has a new
version, with new hardware and new capabilities, every year. This basically
means a new iOS, new apps, and often, new capabilities in OS X (Hand-off,
whatever is happening with photo sharing this year, etc), and new features in
XCode. (Plus all the watch stuff last year.)

I'm all for being agile and moving fast, but there's just not enough time to
do this right. Sure, it might help to have more focus, and they have plenty of
people and money. They just don't have enough time.

------
makecheck
Frankly I think a big part of their quality decline is their approach to bug
tracking. And maybe their internal bug tracker is just as bad as their
external one.

If you want me to bother to help you find bugs in your system, you have to
make it easy to file bugs and you have to make me feel like part of the team
when I do that. Apple does not.

Before I even get into interface issues, let's just say that Apple's bug
reports are like a ginormous black hole. I've filed plenty of bugs that have
never been properly closed or even updated, and it makes no sense. In _any_
other system I've seen, you would at least be able to see that your issue had
been assigned to someone, and given a priority, etc. Apple has none of that.

The only thing worse than filing a bug that no one responds to is having to
spend 20-30 minutes writing it in the first place, and Apple excels there,
too.

Their reporting system is too complex (too many fields that should not be
necessary, especially the ones that seem to ask the same question twice). It's
not automated in any way. It is not integrated with the OS; e.g. why can't I
turn on a "developer mode" on my Mac or i-device that lets me instantly do
things like "compose new bug report for this OS version" or "compose new bug
report for this version of this application", etc.?

Also, despite Apple's attempt to redo the web interface a few years back
(because developers had complained endlessly about the even-worse previous bug
reporting page), today's web interface is still mostly a repaint to look
iPhone-like. It doesn't _really_ address core usability problems. It has
created new ones though; for instance, right at the bottom, _right_ where
you'd expect to say "submit" and send in your last 20 minutes of writing, is
the DELETE BUG AND OBLITERATE FOREVER button!! I once destroyed a bug report
that I'd spent a long time writing and I was extremely frustrated. It made me
instantly decide that Apple didn't really need to see my bug report after all.
And _that_ is a broken system.

------
natural219
"This is a blank problem. No, this is a _blank_ problem."

I don't think there is, in fact, a "problem" that can be "solved" to return
Apple to the glorious design thought leader status we all know and love. The
"problem" is that Steve Jobs is dead, and his unique talent was coordinating a
huge number of talented designers/programmers/businesspeople to passionately
care about meticulous levels of detail in product design.

At this point, the board-meeting-and-shareholder conversation will continue
listing the problems with Apple's "management" or "perception" or "process" or
whatever. Their efforts are entirely futile.

------
anonbanker
Microsoft started declining first, back with Windows Vista (7 was pretty much
a bugfix). Apple lost it's way when Forestall was booted (regardless of what
you think about skeumorphism).

While this is all happening, Linux's software quality continues to rise. KDE
Plasma 5.5 is beautiful and stable. GNOME 3.18 is Stable and very useable.
XFCE, Mate, and Enlightenment are rock stable.

This isn't new; During KDE 4.x, Microsoft directly ripped off KDE's first
plasma interface for Windows 7. Before Vista was released, They were showing
off wobbly windows in demos, weeks after it was first accomplished in the
Compiz window manager for GNOME (now part of Unity).

------
elrodeo
> The best thing for Apple to do is to re-take their

> position as a leader of software quality before it’s too

> late: consumers know that Apple’s hardware is the very

> best, but more and more they’re using apps made by Google

> and Microsoft and Facebook.

I'm not sure whether it's not too late already. I switched last fall to an
Android phone using only iPhones before that. (I just didn't see the point
anymore in paying 2x for an iPhone, which can't do _anything_ better). I
started using Google apps like Inbox, Google Calendar, Google Keep, Google
Now, Google Fit and now, even I would go back to an iPhone today, there is no
way, I'll use Apple Apps again (not as they are today).

------
ryanlol
While my point of view is strictly limited to security, I really don't think
Apples software quality has declined. I think it's always been really shit,
but has been receiving unprecedented amounts of attention lately.

------
dredmorbius
The narrow scope of accessibility on Apple desktops -- something I'd hope the
company would be more concerned with as its most loyal and oldest users age --
is a similar shambles. This isn't something which (yet) affects me directly,
though it does those around me. Some thoughts and observations ... for which
Apple's own feedback dialog is too short to submit the whole piece:

[https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/BS-
wilowvB4-dvPFL_VrUQ](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/BS-wilowvB4-dvPFL_VrUQ)

------
vlunkr
There's very little real content in this article. The author complains about a
couple of things, quotes others that have as well, then goes on to hypothesize
about why the quality is declining.

~~~
pljns
You're right, thanks for the criticism. I'm experimenting with blogging, and
I've learned my posts need to be even more substantive.

------
WhoIsSatoshi
My iPhone has wiped my contacts out of the blue 3 times last year. I have
resorted to manually doing monthly backups. This never happened before. Apple
Maps, which was awesome (Bless Forstall), is now cluttered with icons and
logos on new queries that obfuscate my previous searches while I'd WANT the
new searches. It feels like UX is going downhill, and it pisses me off. More
than anything, what was meant as a personal device I can trust, has become
just "another personal device". Wake Up Apple.

------
etler
My theory on the decline of Apple software is that they're starting to have
the Windows legacy problem. Years ago Apple was able to wipe the slate clean
and build a modern toolset exactly the way they wanted without having to worry
about legacy support, but now they don't have that luxury. Refactoring
technology is hard, and it's way harder when you have a lot of developers
dependent on the things you want to refactor, and it's even harder when you
have a huge ecosystem like an OS.

------
ThomPete
I think the reason for this is that Jobs actually was a software man more than
a hardware man. For hardware he had Ives.

Now that this combination is gone their software is slowly but surely going
bad.

But another bigger issue is that Apple is still focusing too much on user
interaction rather than system interaction.

The real advantages which we are gaining from technology is not a better input
format or navigation scheme, but rather the use of weaker or stronger
algorithms to remove the need for the user to interact with their machines.

------
xufi
I agree a bit. I feel like for example regarding ios on the iPhone. Ever since
Forstall left, its gotten very sluggish and has too many uncessary apps
(Health/Tips/News???) We dont need all of those apps built in. Same goes for
the computer. Some of the stuff such as Wifi calling could be easily
implemented in a simple update and not pushed into a re release. The design
asthetic they had has also gone stray which doesnt make me look at how some of
the icons look ridiculous

------
at-fates-hands
_If that brand name is tarnished by regressions and performance problems, what
consumer would buy a car from the brand?_

This.

I would never buy a car from Apple, EVER. You make computers, not cars. It
would be like Ford suddenly making a PC, how stupid does that sound? Ford
would be the laughing stock of the tech industry. But for some reason since a
decent computer hardware company thinks they need to get into cars, they think
people are going to buy it?

This is the sort of delusional thinking that makes companies go bankrupt.

------
fgandiya
I'm getting an error as of 9:43am UTC -6

EDIT: Looks okay now 10 minutes later.

------
nikdaheratik
Apple has _not_ gotten substantially more buggy IMO, but they've made some
questionable UX choices (and put more MSFT like stuff in their OS). Windows
has gotten much less buggy but is still doing stupid nonsense that probably
started with management. So their software advantage has eroded some, but
that's as much MSFT getting less stupid and Apple getting more like MSFT in
their approach to stupid nonsense in their OS.

------
speg
The past two days there has been a badge on my calendar icon on the dock. I'll
go in and see a new event in inbox but the badge stays..

Such a tiny thing, yet so infuriating.

------
drtse4
Sorry, you lost me at "rockstar developer" (actually at that brilliant quote
about the "inferior OS", c'mon we are engineers right?).

------
yourapostasy
In my time using Apple Mac gear since the Mac 128K days, Apple has put a
moratorium on new features and focused exclusively upon stability and bug
fixes for an OS release only twice in my memory; once under Mac OS, and once
under OS X. Software quality at the polish and attention to detail level is a
Sisyphean entropic struggle for everyone, though. It's just that Apple's
enormously successful "It just works" marketing message from 20006-2009
continues to doggedly trot out with its fans today, so Apple gets tarred with
the same bar to clear today despite an enormously more complex operating
environment since then.

It doesn't help all the review channels (magazines, newspapers, blogs, vblogs,
videos, _etc._ ) focus their attention exclusively upon new features in a new
release. You need someone as persuasive as Jobs to pull off convincing those
channels to review refinements to add stability as new features. The people
Apple has put forward to hopefully capture that role hasn't resonated with the
public yet.

But software QA should never be an episodic, herculean, release-bound effort.
There are ways to market it positively, but I'd always rather use the finite
PR time surrounding a release marketing and selling the quantum leaps that set
me apart from the competition, not the incremental steps.

In the age of Big Data, instrumented apps and online-inline updates delivery,
a possible initial pass at identifying problem areas to shore up that is
actually hitting people in their daily workflows is to simply track on the
search engines the popularity of complaints about major bundled applications,
subsystems and components. An OS X release should not, for example, let the
first-page results for Contacts be about entries disappearing [1], three
updates into its lifecycle.

There is still plenty of space for innovation here, I think. There are auto
crash reports, but no systematic, automated means for a publisher like Apple
to send targeted offers to users sending crash reports that pass a specified
threshhold (number of crashes, kind of hardware, stack trace pattern, _etc._ )
to update their app to an instrumented one that give developers not just the
results of instrumenting the one or a handful of users who happen to persist
enough through the now-familiar troubleshooting dance, but hundreds or even
thousands of users at the same time, opening up opportunities to automatically
search for commonalities and assist with the manual troubleshooting.

[1]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=mac+contacts+%22el+capitan%2...](https://www.google.com/search?q=mac+contacts+%22el+capitan%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8)

------
pearle
I wonder how much does this relate to Bertrand Serlet leaving the company. It
seems to me that the quality of Mac OS X dropped quickly after he left.

------
race2tb
Lets see. They are arogant fascists who think they know better than their
customers. They charge a lot more but do not provide anything more than their
competitors and often less. The company lives and dies on marketting and
perception. They are the micrsoft of the Unix world and I hope they go to 0
because they are bad for progress and bad for technological diversity.

------
autoreleasepool
For a desktop OS, what's the alternative? Windows 10? Ubuntu? I've used both
recently and neither felt like a step up from OS X.

~~~
slgeorge
On the Ubuntu side it really comes down to what you want from your operating
system. If your desktop is primarily for development, and you want to be in
control of your environment then it's viable. I say that as someone whose been
using Linux since 2000 though ;-)

I consume all the walled garden media stuff through Android and iOS - they're
devices like my fridge. My desktop is the centre of my creative world, I don't
want someone telling me how to do it there. And yes, I'm willing to trade-off
my own time to obtain that control.

------
rajacombinator
Apple has never had quality software aside from the OS. (Ok Safari is pretty
good too.) Ultimately it boils down to, too many khaki + button up wearing MBA
white dude types, only 1 Steve Jobs. (Sadly seems Jony Ive is not a
replacement.) Their culture is antithetical to hiring good people, and without
a slave driver to instill fear (Jobs), no one cares about quality.

------
jimmcslim
Apple could do a lot worse than looking at Lloyd Chamber's 'Apple Core Rot'
series of posts and start addressing everything on that list...

[http://macperformanceguide.com/topics/topic-
AppleCoreRot.htm...](http://macperformanceguide.com/topics/topic-
AppleCoreRot.html)

------
mark_l_watson
I disagree and agree.

I find the core iOS and OS X operating systems to be just fine, thank you:
frequent security and other updates that I get on a timely basis (compare to
my Android Note 4, which I really like, but getting updates is infrequent).

On the other hand, I think that the web services like iCloud and Siri have a
lot of catching up to do.

------
bsaul
I used to complain a lot about ios sdk. I found it so miserably out of date
and clunky, and full of undocumented weird behaviors that i constantly had to
fight to create fancy UIs...

Then i went back developping on android for a small project, and found that
image file names couldn't have space, or uppercase letters.

------
ralphc
You guys are scaring me. I have Lion on my Core 2 Duo MBP and Mountain Lion on
my i7 MBP. I've been content but Google says that Chrome won't get updates for
these after April and I've been thinking about upgrading. Now I'm thinking
about just going back to Firefox.

------
FallDead
I honestly thought it was just me, but I agree the software quality has been
at an all time low...

------
perseusprime11
I hate to break the news but the incentives that are needed to be a top notch
Hardware company are orthogonal to the incentives needed to be a top notch
software company. Microsoft cannot be a hardware company and Apple cannot be a
software company. They can try!

------
alexnewman
I have tried every iphone since the iphone 3. I always sell it on ebay 3
months later. Usually it's because of the battery issues. My new 6s is the one
exception. Everyone is talking about how much the suck even with more revenue
and a better product.

------
ksk
Another thing is the forced updates. Now you constantly get nagged about
updates on iOS, almost daily, even if you have learnt your lesson and decided
not to upgrade your phone's OS because Apple _WILL_ eventually slow your phone
down.

------
chaostheory
To be fair, Apple seems to be addressing this with the last release. El
Capitan had fewer new features and concentrated mainly on performance issues.
I hope they do the same in the next release. I don't care for more features at
this point.

~~~
mrweasel
>El Capitan had fewer new features and concentrated mainly on performance
issues.

Well if that was their goal I think they failed. I skipped Yosemite, so I'm
comparing to Mavericks. El Capitan feels much slower, I don't think I ever
seen the beach ball so often.

~~~
chaostheory
weird, it felt faster than Mavericks to me. I'm pretty sure that Mavericks
eats up more RAM than El Capitan but then again I could be wrong.

Still, having Apple acknowledging the problem is a win. I've tried migrating
to Ubuntu and Windows 10. Didn't work. If I could justify a new Mac Pro, it
would probably mitigate the problem. I just wish they had a Mac Pro lite. I
don't want yet another converted laptop e.g. mini & imac

------
justinhj
One thing I've noticed is that Apple product users (myself included) always
think Mac and iPhone software was so much better 5 years ago. Is it really? I
think if you look at it in detail there are features that take turns at being
bad.

------
donatj
Calendar invites from exchange in Mail.app don't show the date of the event in
10.11 - I have been patiently waiting for this to get fixed because I figured
it was obvious. Still waiting.

------
Patronus_Charm
There is a lot of truth in this article. I feel like on some occasions I
gravitate to other OSs because Apple has kinda put the quality aspect on hold
for their software releases.

------
vudu
Apple needs a 'No man'. (as opposed to a 'Yes man').

Steve Jobs was that guy. He did not care about anything but 'is this a great
product and would I use it?'. Stock price or someone's feelings be damned.

I've felt this way for many times of the last few years but the one that hit
me hardest (even though this is more esoteric rather than design or technical
faults - which imo there have been many) when I walked in the Apple store and
saw the center piece of the store - Watch Bands - not the Watch. No, man, that
aint right. I like to think Jobs would have fired that person on the spot.

------
JustSomeNobody
> they need to grow the world’s biggest company every quarter to keep Wall
> Street happy, ...

And there's the biggest issue right there. Even more so for other companies.

------
zepto
Honestly, I just don't see it. Not because the problems aren't real, but
because it's always been like this.

What has changed is the importance of the Apple's software. When it was a
minority player that offered advantages over the status quo, we overlooked the
issues.

Now that it _is_ the status quo, we are no longer comparing it to anything
else, but to an ideal - as we should be.

I think the idea that there is a decline is false, but the increasing
criticism and demand for quality is absolutely appropriate, since it is
absolutely Apple's responsibility to improve our experience of their products.

------
dorkrawk
What are some companies, shipping consumer software of comparable complexity
to Apple, who ship exemplary high quality software? How are they doing it?

------
solomatov
I don't feel any substantial difference in software quality of Apple products.
IMO, it's more or less the same for the last 10 years.

------
clamprecht
Very few (if any) comments from Apple employees here. Do they not read HN, or
do they have a policy against posting on public forums?

------
jad
I think there are a few concrete things going on:

* There are many more integration points between their products now. Shipping only the Mac or only the Mac and an iPod or even a first gen iPhone that can only get data into system apps via a USB cable is very simple compared to what they're making today. For Apple's best-cast customer, who owns a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad, an Apple TV, an Apple Watch, and who uses iCloud, how many integration points are involved now? Integration points are like the exponent on software complexity. It's where software goes to die.

* They are still essentially a fat client company that's trying to build more cloud-oriented applications. This leads to additional complexity in the product that other companies just don't have to deal with. An obvious example that jumps to mind is iTunes vs. Spotify. If iTunes was just Apple's version of Spotify, how much better would it be?

* Brain drain. Apple's stock made a lot of people a lot of money, and if you work there, you can't participate in the mobile revolution they started. Steve Jobs's passing could also be a natural book end for people in their careers to try something new, or find a job where they're not working 80 hours regularly, or to just take some time off.

I guess the last one isn't really "concrete", and is more just me speculating,
but I threw it out there because of a decent amount of anecdotal evidence I've
seen. Here are some other things that are also just speculative but
interesting to consider:

* Apple is a product company that succeeds or fails on innovation. As capable of an executive as Tim Cook clearly is, he's not a product person. How does this trickle down into the product development process?

* Product development was micromanaged by Steve Jobs basically until he died. That leaves a HUGE vacuum in an organization and executive team he built to amplify his personal strengths and weaknesses. Who is filling that vacuum now? Is it Jony Ive? Does his new role of "Chief Design Officer" mean he's kind of the new Steve Jobs, in charge of product design, retail stores, office space, etc.?

* If Jony Ive has the final say of all software still (not clear to me in this new role), how good is he at software? How interested is he in it personally? He clearly loves the physical design of things. Steve clearly loved software. If Jony is in charge, does he have that love as well? Does he devote the time and attention into the software as he does with the hardware? Or, to take the iTunes example again, is Eddy Cue basically in charge of that product?

* How good are the people there at software design without Steve? There's a great story about Steve Jobs coming into an iDVD design meeting where he ignored what the team came up with and drew a window on a whiteboard with one area to drag files and one button that says "burn".[1] Is that just one story? How important was that to the day-to-day of the products they shipped? Who does that now?

The key point to me is that, according to Steve himself, Apple is a software
company.[2] They make hardware so they can make really great software.
Software is what's most important, and I hope stories like this are a bit of a
wake up call to re-center their focus on what's truly important.

[1] [http://dandemeyere.com/blog/5-most-inspiring-steve-jobs-
stor...](http://dandemeyere.com/blog/5-most-inspiring-steve-jobs-stories)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEeyaAUCyZs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEeyaAUCyZs)

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Apple need to pull a "no new features" release for the next OS X and iOS.
They've done it before.

------
bedhead
iTunes somehow managed to go from one of the single-most enjoyable software
experiences to literally unusable. Repeat: UNUSABLE. Bizarre to think that the
application that played arguably the largest role in Apple's trajectory to
hyper-success is now dysfunctional beyond words.

------
idiotclock
Meanwhile the Gnome apps are amazing.

Shotwell, Music, Nautilus, and Gedit are brilliant and simple to use
applications.

------
LoSboccacc
agreed 100%. from the trash icon that doesn't change label to eject anymore
when dragging a volume to the scroll bars that cover text on top of the safari
timeline debugger, there are plenty little paper cuts to be found where eyes
don't scour often.

------
existentialmutt
I bought an album on iTunes last week and it downloaded everything except for
tracks 1 and 5.

------
ntnlabs
iPhone ecosystem needs XDA community. And I say this with full responsibility.
Cydia is great, but instead of a store only, the fine hw should be
brainstormed by a bunch of lunetics and hackers. So we could see what is the
hw capable of.

------
erichocean
After the death of Jobs and the ouster of Scott Forstall, this is a dog-bites-
man story.

------
ryanmcbride
Probably anecdotal but the default podcast software has been crashing a ton
lately.

------
sksixk
i've been using mac os x as my primary os since the first version (still do on
my MBA) and i've never gotten the impression that their software quality was
any good: finder, itunes, etc.

------
addicted
Some of my most common issues on my mac (these are things which used to work,
but don't work as well anymore):

Spotlight: This has become extremely unreliable (and ridiculously slow) for
me. More often than not, it won;t return results, except for an icon for the
topmost result which flashes in the search bar for an instant after I hit a
key. If I hit enter while that icon is visible, spotlight will open the
app/document.

Data Detectors: What happened to these? I used to love them, but they never
seem to work correctly for me anymore.

Safari Autofill: Why can't Safari simply autofill my email address like it
used to? Why does it have to show me the opaque contact box, where I'm not
sure which email it will autofill for me.

Time Machine: Hasn't worked for me in years.

Calendar: I was a ridiculously heavy user of iCal in the mid to late 2000s.
Can't use it anymore. I'm not sure what specifically went wrong with it (just
seems a lot more clunky). It used to be far more keyboard friendly (I liked
Apple Mac apps when every app had a default layout with the side bar, that
showed my organization hierarchy at a glance.)

Contacts: To be fair, this (and Address Book) has always been an unholy
skeumorphic mess.

Expose: After years of making Expose unusable, starting with Lion, it's
actually back to being pretty good now (now that it works closer to what it
did in Tiger).

Dashboard: I was one of the few that actually used dashboard. I wish Apple
would just kill it instead of what they are doing to it right now.

Dock: I think the Dock has gotten much better over the years, but I think the
Windows start bar is superior at the moment.

Force Quit: Why don't my apps force quit like they used to? Force quit used to
be extremely reliable, but now it doesn't seem to actually do a force quit at
all.

iWork: Haven't dared to go back to iWork since the refresh. Pre-refresh I
loved Pages and Keynote. I happened to use Keynote to present a ppt a year
ago, and while the conversion was pretty good, the presenter mode was
extremely gimped and uncustomizable. I may be misremembering, but I think it
used to be far more customizable in terms of being able to pick the info to
display on the presenter screen, etc. Numbers was always terrible, so I'm not
even considering that.

iTunes: Do I really need to say anything?

QT Player: I think it's improved, but I'd switched to VLC way back.

Quick Look: The switch in the QT engine means the vast majority of my videos
don't quick look any more (I think it was Perian that made them work). Maybe I
need to search the net again, to see if there are more plugins for this.

Finder: Still as clumsy as ever for file management, but seems to be better at
parallelizing tasks. However, file/folder metadata takes way too long to load.
It used to be a lot better (I remember I used to have the inspector window in
always open mode. I wouldn't dare to do that anymore).

Bah, that was way too long...once I started, couldn't stop, and I can probably
go on for much longer. (I'm one of those guys whose 2nd favorite part about an
OSX release, after the Siracusa review, would be the Macrumors "Little things"
thread).

------
ryanmarsh
Make Apple Great Again

FTFY

------
RyanMcGreal
Cache since server is currently overwhelmed:

\----

Software quality is a nebulous and divisive topic. There are many parameters
to software quality – reliability, speed, user experience, design,
discoverability, and more – and a move towards any of these virtues leads to
sacrifices in others, especially on a limited time schedule. Additionally, a
number of forces influence software quality over time, like accommodating for
different use cases, changes in platform, changes in hardware, changes in
design preferences, changes in market, changes in expectations, and more.
Finally, software is not like digging a hole, say, where more people really
can dig a hole faster than fewer people: in fact, more people can often slow
down a software project.

Nobody knows this better than the technology titans of today: Apple, Google,
Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle have all experience unanticipated
software problems and regressions and high profile bugs. These are
organizations with thousands of programmers writing and maintaining millions
of lines of code for billions of devices. And these devices are machines which
require perfection: one slight ambiguity of intent, any minor breach of
contract, any single unexpected 0 where there should be 1 or vice versa … has
the capability the bring down the whole system. In fact, it often does.
Countless kernel panics, stack overflow errors, null pointer exceptions, and
memory leaks are plaguing poor users and tired system administrators and
overworked programmers right now. Machines are fast, but they can be awfully
dumb.

And no company is feeling the pain of software’s nebulous nature and
hardware’s mindless computing more than Apple right now. The underdog that
many loyal fans rooted for is now the world’s (perhaps previous) most valuable
company. With that, comes insanely high expectations: they need to grow the
world’s biggest company every quarter to keep Wall Street happy, and even
harder, they have to keep those nerds that kept them alive through the hard
times happy too. And with release after release of the most revolutionary
operating system ever, it’s tempting to picture Apple like an actual Titan, in
particular Atlas, holding the world upon his shoulders. But it seems more and
more every day that another Greek tale is more fitting: it’s time to admit
that Apple have flown too close to the sun.

Walt Mossberg, technology journalism’s elder statesman, has this to say about
Apple’s software quality:

    
    
        In the last couple of years, however, I’ve noticed a gradual degradation in the quality and reliability of Apple’s core apps, on both the mobile iOS operating system and its Mac OS X platform. It’s almost as if the tech giant has taken its eye off the ball when it comes to these core software products, while it pursues big new dreams, like smartwatches and cars.
    

On OS X this is especially true: OpenGL implementation has fallen behind the
competition, the filesystem desperately needs updating, the SDK has needed
modernizing for years, networking and cryptography have seen major gaffes. And
that’s with regards to the under-the-hood details, the applications are easier
targets: it’s tragic that Aperture and iPhoto were axed in favor of the
horrifically bad Photos app (that looks like some Frankenstein “iOS X” app),
the entire industry have left Final Cut Pro X, I dare not plug my iPhone in to
my laptop for fear of what it might do, the Mac App Store is the antitheses of
native application development (again being some Frankenstein of a web/native
app), and iCloud nee MobileMe nee iTools has been an unreliable and slow mess
since day one.

This isn’t the first time that a prominent member of the Apple community has
criticized Apple’s software quality. Here’s Marco Arment from January of 2015:

    
    
        Apple’s hardware today is amazing — it has never been better. But the software quality has fallen so much in the last few years that I’m deeply concerned for its future. I’m typing this on a computer whose existence I didn’t even think would be possible yet, but it runs an OS with embarrassing bugs and fundamental regressions. Just a few years ago, we would have relentlessly made fun of Windows users for these same bugs on their inferior OS, but we can’t talk anymore.
    

This is still as true today as it was last year. Macs and iPhones have gotten
thinner, more beautiful, and more powerful; the Apple Watch and the new Apple
TV are magnificent additions to the product line up. But I’d speculate that
part of the problem Apple is having is that if it took 1,000 engineers to
write software for Mac when that was the only product, it doesn’t necessarily
take 4,000 people to write software for four product lines. In fact, 10,000 of
the same grade of engineers might not even do it, especially without proper
management and unified goals. Apple may not have listened to rockstar
developer Marco Arment, but Walt Mossberg will definitely get there attention.
Here’s an anecdote about Steve Jobs from the last time that Mossberg
complained about Apple’s software quality:

    
    
        In Fortune’s story, Lashinsky says Steve Jobs summoned the entire MobileMe team for a meeting at the company’s on-campus Town Hall, accusing everyone of “tarnishing Apple’s reputation.” He told the members of the team they “should hate each other for having let each other down”, and went on to name new executives on the spot to run the MobileMe team. A few excerpts from the article.
    
        “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continues, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?”
    
        Jobs was also particularly angry about the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg not liking MobileMe:
    
        “Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us.”
    

It really is time for Tim Cook to take action as drastic as this regarding
software quality on Apple’s existing platforms. What worries me is that APPL
the stock ticker and Apple the company are in a (self-driving) crash course
with one another: APPL needs to launch new products to drive growth and Apple
needs to improve the products that have already shipped. The most valuable
asset that Apple own is their brand, and that’s the brand that’ll drive sales
of any car that may or may not be in development. If that brand name is
tarnished by regressions and performance problems, what consumer would buy a
car from the brand? In fact, anecdotally, talking to my friends, the Apple Car
already has an uphill battle with the kerfuffle surrounding the Maps launch.

Jim Dalrymple, in response to Mossberg, writes:

    
    
        I understand that Apple has a lot of balls in the air, but they have clearly taken their eye off some of them. There is absolutely no doubt that Apple Music is getting better with each update to the app, but what we have now is more of a 1.0 version than what we received last year.
    

John Gruber, in response to Dalrymple:

    
    
        Maybe we expect too much from Apple’s software. But Apple’s hardware doesn’t have little problems like this.
    

The best thing for Apple to do is to re-take their position as a leader of
software quality before it’s too late: consumers know that Apple’s hardware is
the very best, but more and more their using apps made by Google and Microsoft
and Facebook. If this trend doesn’t turn around, Apple will find their
breakout product and all of its growth will be owned by competitors. And when
the time comes to launch their car, they’ll find that loyal fans and everyday
consumers have lost trust in the brand. Having said that, I’m still a Mac user
at home and at work, my iPhone is a wonderful device that I enriches my life,
and I’m still finding new ways to make use of Apple Watch. And to give credit
where credit is due: Logic Pro X has improved a lot recently, and Music Memos
is a welcome addition to Apple’s music line up. I even use Apple Maps. Apple
can do this. It’s not too late. But for sake of all us poor users, and Apple’s
tired system administrators and overworked programmers, I hope they started 6
months ago.

~~~
Bud
Gotta put some newlines in your quotes, so we can read them. :)

------
ishanr
The fundamental decline started when they moved towards flat design.

~~~
hackaflocka
That's what happens when you put a hardware designer (Ive) in charge of
software design.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
“The iPhone could not be synced because it could not be found.”

------
radicalbyte
On Windows, Apple software has always been bad.

------
mikelyons
Apple's stock ticker is AAPL not APPL

------
shurcooL
It is unfortunately happening.

------
neya
I jumped ship from Android to Apple about 5 years ago. I always gave Apple the
benefit of doubt, each time they released new updates with bugs. But, of late,
the focus for Apple has been to release new features without actually caring
about the stability. I'd much rather prefer a system that is old and stable
than new and unstable. Let me explain.

About 2 days ago, I discovered from my closet, my very first old and abandoned
HTC Desire (The OEM version of the very first Nexus One). Powered it on,
updated to Android 2.3 (Last official update) and I thought heck, I wonder if
this thing is still usable.

So, I carried it along with my iPhone for the next few days. Remember, this
phone was purchased sometime in 2010. So, I was assuming the battery was
probably dead. But, to my pleasant surprise. It wasn't. But,even if it was, no
biggie, I realized it was replaceable. Then, I had the phone throw a bunch of
insufficient space errors on me. I was so used to the Apple eco-system that I
just thought I should delete some existing apps to make some space on my
phone. And in this process, I discovered that I could actually expand my
storage by purchasing a new memory card for just ~$5 because the desire has a
provision for adding a memory card and transferring all my apps and their data
to the SD card. Cool!

Now, to the most interesting part. The software. In my experience, when I
turned it on, I had to re-auth some of my previous Google accounts and from
there, pretty much everything just worked. I didn't notice even a single crash
in my entire 1 week heavy usage with this phone. What a pleasant surprise.
What was even more relaxing was that, when I opened the music app and played a
song, the music just played! I was so invested into Apple's ecosystem of
iTunes Match and Apple Music and deluded by them that I didn't realize that I
was being shoved with a poor user experience under the guise of subscribing to
a premium music service.

For example, on my android, I have a playlist X. I click on track A. In just
under a second the song starts playing. I can do this while my phone is still
in my pocket just using the remote on the headset. On my iPhone, I click on a
track A under playlist X (also using remote) and in my mind, I'm actually
quite anxious if this thing will start playing immediately or if it will get
stuck waiting to download the track from the cloud forcing me to take my phone
out and close the music app, open it, evade the Apple music interface I want
to avoid, select my playlist from the playlist tab and find the track I want
to play again. What a nightmare. What's worse is my whole phone freezes when
using certain apps and sometimes I'm forced to restart it. On the HTC I had to
do this absolutely 0 times in the same time period.

When we buy a smartphone, we buy it assuming certain basic use cases - Make
calls, listen to music, take pictures. If your smartphone can't even fulfil
these basic needs, especially when you charge a premium, then something is
seriously wrong with you.

Despite being a 6 year old discarded device, my android phone is far more
stable than my current iPhone. It actually came as quite a shock to me. I have
some devices still on iOS7 and they're definitely quite not stable enough.
This made me realize my original point - Apple's focus has been too much on
just pushing updates rather than on stability. This gives you the illusion
that you're innovating faster than the others when in reality it isn't.

The reason I took time to explain my experience is not because I want to start
some kind of iPhone vs Android flame war, nor suggest that Apple is dying,
etc. etc. nor that we all should be buying Androids (I still find iPhone has
an edge for my use case, infact).

I just simply want to demonstrate how a company whose selling point is
"Everything just works" has consistently failed to deliver and yet how we
(atleast me) still been thinking they're the superior ones.

------
neximo4
I remember the time OS X didn't even have to restart for an update. Gone are
those days.

~~~
mikeash
I don't, and I've been using it since the Public Beta.

~~~
neximo4
Every update needs a restart. How does your mac update without a restart, the
latter updates require an installation where OS X isn't running.

~~~
mikeash
I'm saying updates have always required a restart. You said you remember a
time when this was not the case, and I'm pretty sure such times never existed.

~~~
neximo4
No they haven't. On the 'Steve Jobs' versions of OS X updates _never_ needed a
restart, such versions as Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion. The only exception
was on major updates where a DVD was required for the update.

They even used to use that it used to do this to bash windows.

The 'Steve Jobs' OS X versions were very refined. Somewhere around Lion
everything went downhill. Mountain Lion's flaws were slowly more pronounced.

It also used to be than a new OS X version used to be faster despite it
running on the same hardware. Its hard to say if this has changed.

~~~
mikeash
Here's a screenshot of Leopard requiring a restart for an update:

[http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--
L-qfNFHD...](http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--
L-qfNFHD--/18fc9hrtp1eznpng.png)

Here's one for Snow Leopard:

[http://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/mac-
os-x-...](http://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/mac-
os-x-10.6.3-update.JPG)

Lion:

[http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/02/Screen-S...](http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/02/Screen-Shot-2012-02-01-at-5.40.37-PM.jpg)

And just in case you think this was real but you got the era wrong, here's a
screenshot of 10.3 requiring a restart for all sorts of updates, including a
Safari update and a Daylight Saving Time update:

[https://systemfolder.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/softupdpant...](https://systemfolder.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/softupdpanther.jpg?w=516&h=586)

Plus a normal OS update:

[http://sillydog.org/graph/temp/ss_swupdate01.jpg](http://sillydog.org/graph/temp/ss_swupdate01.jpg)

~~~
neximo4
I could have sworn the restart requirement was rare.

I stand corrected.

------
pbreit
Irony? "Error establishing a database connection"

------
NamTaf
I have noticed corner situations of the iOS UX degrade over the time I started
with a 3GS to now. This degridation was most obvious when they moved to the
new flat design theme. Here's some examples:

1a) The title bar colour changing feature occasionally bugs out. It will show
white over white, or some other non-contrasting colour. This happens with no
particular reason as far as I can tell

1b) The title bar sometimes stays on top of a 'fullscreen' app, meaning that
for example you have the top title bar icons and text sitting over the camera
display view. This happens with no partiuclar reason as far as I can tell.

2a) I have noticed that in the portrait/landscape rotation, sometimes the app
veiw gets bugged to sticking one way when the screen display itself rotates.
For example, All of the content of the app rotates back around to a portrait
orientation but is still trapped in a landscape layout on a portrait display.
This is rare but seems to have no particular cause that I can recreate.

2b) The above can sometimes happen in the camera app. When you rotate the
camera the icons (flash, hdr, etc) rotate for you. Sometimes rotating it
causes them to 'stack up' on one another as if they adjust in one axis but not
the other. I most noticably found this when I rotated having had the flash
options open (force flash, auto, no flash) and they all collapsed to being on
top of one another rather than closing that selection pane.

3) The 'zoom back to home screen' animation sometimes interacts strangely with
folders. In that the icons of the folder will do the 'fly out' animation but
only confined to the final size of the folder GUI box on the screen. It looks
buggy and seems to be a corner case situation. I can't recreate it when I
intentionally open a folder > lock my phone > unlock my phone but I've noticed
it many times so I should try to pay more attention to its causes.

4) Since iOS9, I can press my 5S's home button to get the screen to light up
and recognise my thumb print, but sometimes it will activate siri even if I
press it very rapidly. This is a 5S that I purchased in November so I don't
believe the home button is faulty. My suspicion is the screen initiation
routines on the 5S are a little laggy and sometimes the button registers as a
press-and-hold for Siri.

5) Right now I have 2 'unread' emails in one email account, despite there not
being any as verified by Outlook on my home PC and the 'unread emails' folder
which I added to the mailboxes screen of Mail. I suspect if I remove and re-
add the account it'll clean this up but Mail is the only place reporting 2
unread emails.

6) Some apps can have their text input boxes bug out, whereby I can't tap the
input cursor part-way back in the window and as I delete text it highlights
words and goes wierd. I suspect this may be a buggy implementation in the app
itself but I'd have expected that to be a pretty robust UI object, so I
figured I'd include it.

Anyway, the above are just examples of the sort of lack of polish I'm noticing
build up over time. As said, the biggest increase in it came when they
switched to the flat UX design, because I suspect they created so many new UI
changes that there were inevitably fresh bugs that had been stamped out in the
old design. Nevertheless, a number have stuck around and it's frustrating
because I noticed more polish and less of these little rough edges back in the
3GS and even my 4S days on iOS5.

The biggest bugbear is that I don't really know of an easy way to submit these
bug reports. I guess I have to jump on the apple dev boards or something but
there's no nice way of going 'here's a bug, please consider looking at it or
asking me for more information if needed!'.

------
breatheoften
I've see a lot of talk from various places that the 'issue' with the decline
in software quality from Apple stems from 'changing too much, too fast' \-- I
think its actually the opposite -- not changing enough and not changing it
fast enough.

There are going to be upgrades -- that is GOOD. But we need to -feel- like
there's something new and better and worth the inevitable bugs that -change-
is guaranteed to introduce. Those who react to this problem of 'change
produces bugs' by saying 'nothing should change' or "don't change what isn't
broken" are inevitably in the wrong. Change needs to happen, but more
importantly the right changes need to happen.

iCloud is really confusing -- there is just no simple way to understand what
it does, what its for, how to use it, how it can go wrong, what happens when
it goes wrong ... and on and on. It needs to be turned into something more
modular with better boundaries between its unrelated aspects.

\- iCloud needs to change faster. In my opinion we've been on on a slow path
towards an iCloud account being _required_ for OS X usage -- the slowness of
this progression has drastically complicated the introduction of iCloud
features. In my opinion, doing iCloud right _requires_ iCloud to be present
and configured. Just pull off the bandaid -- require an iCloud identity for
each user account and redesign the rest of the setting system to assume its
presence ... Re-implement the process by which all the system provided apps
query for settings to use the new model designed to keep up with modern users
expectations.

In my mind iCloud needs a new statement of purpose. I'd propose this: iCloud
is about:

\- establishing identity of person for usage of apple services \- establishing
the ability to mutate configurations associated with that person on any device
that person uses. The other _services from apple should not_be called
'iCloud'. I'd like to see iCloud become:

\- a screen which is ONLY about configuring 'the iCloud account associated
with this user'. This should be about proving who you are to apple so that you
can synchronize your other system settings to/from cloud and other devices.
Nothing else.

\- The rest of iCloud should be folded into a generic interface to all 'system
integrated internet services'. I imagine a screen designed to manipulate a
data model that looks something like: Service Provider -> User Identities ->
Devices -> Services

From one place I can configure my authentication credentials for various
service providers, and then decide which services from each provider I want to
enable on each of my devices.

The associated settings are synced to iCloud and onward to each device. iCloud
is one place to define all the system<->internet integrations for all your
devices. The implementation of those services is _not_ part of iCloud. I
should be able sit on my mac and configure which mail accounts I want my phone
to check -- this is iCloud -- actually downloading the mail on my phone, not
iCloud. I think iCloud should implement a user-facing synchronized management
console for describing the set of network service integrations to enable for
each of my devices -- it should also expose an api by which applications can
gain access to these service configurations. That's what iCloud should be in
my opinion. Its a lot of _change needed_ to get there, but no change here is
worse I think by far...

I'd like to see apple change more about OSX -- change something low-level,
long-lived ... Do something controversial that forces the most ossified of
unix curmudgeons to learn new tricks. How about a new default shell (fish! ...
something homegrown)!

My advice for apple: Keep moving the world forward, don't go into maintenance
mode, improve things that need improving, embrace the fact that not all change
is churn. Someone at apple needs to stand up for that mantra in the face of
all this criticism and prove to the world that can still improve things by
changing them. That's the only way this perception of 'declining quality' is
going to change.

------
draw_down
I've used Apple computers since 2003, I think the decline is unquestionable.
As many others note, more and more little bugs and problems seem to crop up
than ever before. Everyone in here has an anecdote, so here's mine- on my work
laptop, the hot corners just stop working for no discernible reason, and I
have to kill the Dock process to get them back. Many small things like that.

And I don't even attempt to trust big things, like backing up my data with
iCloud or using Apple music. Hell no.

It seems clear they've stretched their talent too thin over the years, and the
yearly release cycle probably also has something to do with it. On the other
hand, their hardware comes out roughly yearly and does not exhibit these kind
of problems. Their hardware is still very good.

------
joesmo
I'm glad someone wrote this extremely overdue article which would have, in
general, been just as accurate two years ago as now. When Yosemite shipped
with Safari that worked on only one of my three macs, I knew there was
something seriously wrong. Constant bluetooth and RF wireless problems making
peripherals hard or impossible to use. iTunes is so shitty, there is not a
single redeeming thing about it. 4k support that works, but only sometimes and
requires you to plug and replug your monitors till things line up magically.
Shutdown/restart haven't worked properly for years and will frequently make
the machine hang. Sometimes sleep does so as well, usually at the most
inopportune times. The list could go on for quite some time.

------
rogersmith
I suspect this reflects a wider trend which is most probably a consequence of
the ease to ship software nowadays (no need to manufacture physical medium
anymore, just ship a hotfix), which incites software companies to skip QA and
let early adopters find the bugs themselves...

~~~
nxzero
True, though it's also easier to test code too, right?

~~~
rogersmith
But why pay for QA testers when users settle for using buggy products.

Plus this trickles down, if I'm a small start-up founder and I see market
leaders get away with half-assed releases despite having a lot more resources,
why should I strain my limited budget by investing in QA?

------
camperman
"But I’d speculate that part of the problem Apple is having is that if it took
1,000 engineers to write software for Mac when that was the only product, it
doesn’t necessarily take 4,000 people to write software for four product
lines. In fact, 10,000 of the same grade of engineers might not even do it,
especially without proper management and unified goals."

Nope. See Brooks' Law.

------
sebeticus
Declining? I didn't realize quality could go lower than 0.

------
sebeticus
Declining? I didn't know software quality could go any lower than 0.

------
KirinDave
I think this goes back to Apple's Other Big Problem.

They're getting better at software, distributed systems, etc. But everyone
else is getting better faster, and catching up on design.

And you hear how Apple employees are forced to work, using codebooks to talk
over lunch and without a lot of cross communication for fear of project leaks
and you go, "Oh. That's why they're struggling to keep moving forward."

They're basically buying a lot of their core tech and repackaging it these
days to keep velocity. But that too isn't a silver bullet, as it fragments the
tech space.

------
akshayB
The punchline that "it just works" is not lost in time. Lot of Apple designed
software are more like talking points when they release iPhone or do a big
media event.

Mac OS as lot of Apps which need update, Photos -- was more of an attempt to
catch up with Picasa Similarly notes and icloud as well need updates. It feels
like Apple just wants to through sometime out since they are trying to catch
up with others in the market and once that is done, you have to wait another
year just to get an update. Software development and updates should be
iterative and not based on media events.

~~~
freyr
Notes just received a pretty significant upgrade. And Photos was upgraded
recently as well -- for better or worse. You picked the two most recently
upgraded apps as being in need of an upgrade.

