This seems pretty fair. I think that most of the big 4 tech companies are batting about a b/c grade in most areas. Ive an iMac pro and Im pretty happy with it, I skipped a macbook pro update to go with the iMac pro as my home computer. I am aware of most of the complaints about it, but for what I do(write code, play music) its pretty much the perfect machine. Hopefully they will continue improving the mac lineup and cater more to their pro users on the other form factors as well. The iPhone 8 was a good upgrade for me. I dont want to use my face to unlock the phone and I like the home button, so the iPhoneX isnt for me. The iPhone 8plus has proven to be a great incremental improvement from the 6plus I used previously. Apple did, however have a pretty weak year in software, I would call that a d to d-. Lots of bad bugs were released, and I think most people noticed a palpable decrease in code from apple in the past year or two. They have somewhat redeemed themselves with Logic 10.4, as it is a really really really good update.
macOS has just been killing me recently. XCode as well. Builds lock up my Mac for almost an hour without resources even being utilized according to top or Activity Monitor. If the software reliability of the Mac hadn’t declined so sharply in the past couple years (in my experience at least) I would have bought an iMac Pro as well.
This seems to confirm my suspicions about Apple's software quality: it has fallen off a cliff over the past 2 years. I'm not sure what's even happening. iOS used to "just work", and now I have daily crashes and freezes on a brand new phone. I literally cannot use Snapchat and Tinder at the same time - it causes them both to crash. Turning off wifi and bluetooth no longer actually turns them off, and so I have lost all control over my own device's power usage.
I have been a faithful iOS user since the 3G, and yet the SE I just bought will probably be my last iPhone. Everything since iOS 8 has just been a travesty. Can anyone explain this?
I find this to be one of those things in life where people with negative experiences are just significantly louder than people with positive ones. It's like hunting for an apartment - you're only going to find bad reviews, because when something works as expected people don't usually feel the need to praise it.
I've had a generally rock solid experience with iOS11 so far (and I have a 6+ with a degraded battery to boot - things still operate fine, never needed to reinstall fresh or anything).
I _will_ say that Tinder has a huge issue in their app, where whatever the hell they're doing in the background balloons out of control and seems to cause some kind of memory pressure on the device. I don't use Snapchat so I can't comment if it's the same issue there, but on my phone it's Tinder-specific: literally no other app has this issue, but the simple act of opening Tinder and swiping through a few will cause the device to go crazy and silently kill other apps in the background for some reason.
I originally thought this was just my 6+ (i.e, maybe the degraded battery or something), but I've tried it on some development devices I have and it exhibits the same thing for me. My best guess is that the crowd that uses Tinder is willing to ignore that kind of issue because... well, it's Tinder, people are on there for a reason.
Re: wifi/bluetooth, I actually vastly prefer the way it is now. It took some getting used to but it just makes more sense.
Of course, your mileage and experiences may vary, so what do I know.
With Apple I feel like it’s more about whether or not you deviate from the golden path they develop and test for. It’s harder to stray from it on iOS but not impossible and doing so results in a very frustrating experience.
Well it can go either way. I'm fed up with misguided developments in both hardware and software of smartphones – both Apple and Androids – and have lost all excitement I used to have about that. Same goes for some of my family.
I am not loud about that because I don't care anymore because none of the devices on the market suit my needs, and I gave up on that ever changing.
I think my case is more common than any loud opinions out there.
> [I] have lost all excitement I used to have about that. Same goes for some of my family.
I actually think this is a part of the problem. We watched essentially a completely new product category invented in front of our eyes and watched it mature. The lowest hanging fruit were picked years ago (by 2012, in fact![1]). Android caught up to iPhone in a very serious way. What's left to do?
I feel like both platforms are in a state where they're 'innovating' just for the sake of it, for marketing, because people still expect the giant leaps that we had in the earlier years. Everyone knows this (Apple made a whole ad about 'not much has changed'[2]).
I still think a awful lot of things are left to do that are not moonshots.
Phones physically break a lot. There should be better ways than rubber cases or glued rings to help people not drop the gigantic phones we have now.
Wearable integration is limited and uninspired. Aside from bulky watches and bracelets nothing got attention.
Bluetooth connectivity still seems like a dumpster fire, things like airpod are coming, but it’s far from a solved problem in my opinion.
In the same vain communication among devices owned by the smae person is still primitive. We now have computers, phones, tablets, speaking cylinders, NAS and media serveds and short of buying every single one of them from the same company they won’t speak together.
> Wearable integration is limited and uninspired. Aside from bulky watches and bracelets nothing got attention.
I actually think this is a symptom of the same problem. 'Wearables' were/are an attempt at creating a next 'iPhone' - new device category to get big wows for every year. Unfortunately, the market need wasnt/isnt really there for it, apart from some fitness accessories.
If I am using my 6 when the battery is <50% and the phone has gotten too cold, I can reliably cause the phone to shut down if I try to use Snapchat. In combination with your Tinder experiences, this can confirm OP's experience using both apps, where each seems to be using an outsize portion of system resources.
I have a 6 (for work) and a 6S (for me). Both batteries are still in good (and very good for the 6S) condition. I run pretty much stock phones; I don't install many apps and the ones I do are generally well behaved (nothing like Facebook, Snapchat, etc). iOS 11 on the 6S was (is?) a complete sh%$show. Very unstable. Tried normal releases, betas, dev betas, DFU after DFU after DFU. Nothing helped. I finally went back to 10.3.3 and could not be happier. The 6 is running fine on ios 11. It lags when opening iMessage or email, but that's probably more due to the 1GB RAM than anything else.
This is definitely true imo. But regardless, the amount of issues I’ve had with macOS especially have been pretty bad recently, and getting worse with each release.
Personally I’m kind of torn at this point. I definitely don’t like the potential driver issues that often come with Linux. But in my recent experience, macOS is now less reliable than most Linux installations I’ve had were.
I stayed on iOS 10 because of these reasons. As for the wifi/Bluetooth issue. I can't believe someone at Apple can't figure out a triple toggle: On/Disconnect/Off
I'd suggest that people who don't like the new behavior of the WiFi/Bluetooth toggles provide feedback to Apple. [1] There's no feedback page for iOS that I know of. So provide the feedback for both iPhone and iPad. If thousands of users do it, then it might probably help change the minds of those deciding how iOS should work.
>This seems to confirm my suspicions about Apple's software quality: it has fallen off a cliff over the past 2 years. I'm not sure what's even happening. iOS used to "just work", and now I have daily crashes and freezes on a brand new phone.
For what it's worth, I have seen nothing of the short. So where that leaves us?
>* I literally cannot use Snapchat and Tinder at the same time - it causes them both to crash.*
So maybe that's in Tinder and Snapchat? Why would it be the iOS's fault? I use 100s of other apps (never used those 2), and don't have a problem.
>Turning off wifi and bluetooth no longer actually turns them off, and so I have lost all control over my own device's power usage.
That's an explicit decision from Apple, and is meant to make it easier to use their BT/WiFi based peripherals, not some software fault caused by a bug. Besides that's only true for the shortcut menu -- you can still switch off both totally from the Preferences.
I have an SE as well, have experienced similar terrible quality in software experience.
It may be that the SE is an ignored and untested platform. A lot of native Apple software is just poorly designed for it. By which I mean super low density information display, that leaves touch controls squeezed down to unusable sizes. And some of the controls are just buggy. The audio controls in portrait mode from the slide up pane overlap in their hit targets, making it unreliable to play pause etc.
I suspect many of these issues go away on the bigger phones. I just really don't want a bigger phone. And seeing the low quality trend of all of Apple's software these days, Android is looking more and more appealing. If I'm going to have to buy a bigger phone, I'll probably just jump ship entirely to check it out, as I feel that i have nothing to lose on the software quality side anymore.
I've noted that my wife has had a much easier experience with her iPhone X than I've had with my 7 Plus with the latest OS. I don't think its just size, its the focus is one the latest and greatest only...
Funny, playing with an X in the store was also kind of the last straw for me. Too many animations that make the phone unresponsive. I miss the old days, before unnecessary animation permeated and degraded the UI.
You can turn off some of the excess animation in the accessibility settings. They get replaced with a sort of weird fade in/out, but so far I've preferred it to things flying all over the place, and my phone feels more responsive. (iPhone 6+)
Could Swift be the reason why Apple software post 2010ish has been so buggy? I'm just trying to put 2 and 2 together here because Swift was released with iOS7 circa 2010.
I guess part of it also has to be the fact that Scott Forstall was probably a better VP of iOS software than the one who replaced him, looking at the downgrade in quality. The one right at the top of the pyramid does make a difference.
I believe firing Scott Forstall was not a good move for the company's future. Whatever the reason cited was (Apple Maps) at that time, that hasn't improved after all these years. I'm not talking about the U.S. and a few other countries, where there have been big improvements — in many other countries in the world, Apple Maps is useless even in major cities.
No, the Swift project was started in 2010, it was only released in 2014, and it was new to most of Apple at that time. Apple didn't start shipping things built with Swift until 2015, and even then it was only a tiny proportion of their software. Even today, the vast majority of their software is Objective-C, because Apple aren't just going to rewrite everything in Swift just because.
>Could Swift be the reason why Apple software post 2010ish has been so buggy? I'm just trying to put 2 and 2 together here because Swift was released with iOS7 circa 2010.
That makes a lot of sense to me. Swift is a great language, but it did a lot to turn iOS development into more like Javascript development. I fear that with the addition of garbage collection rather than reference counting, programmers have become lazy and forgotten they are still working within the constraints of what’s essentially an embedded device. In the Objective-C days, devs were more exposed to that side of things on a regular basis, and I think that experience deeply affects the way one thinks about resource usage and optimization. I have no doubt that a bulk of Apple’s application teams writing Swift today are former web devs, not systems or embedded developers as was the case when mobile software first came about from ‘07-‘12ish
> Swift is a great language, but it did a lot to turn iOS development into more like Javascript development. I fear that with the addition of garbage collection rather than reference counting, programmers have become lazy and forgotten they are still working within the constraints of what’s essentially an embedded device. In the Objective-C days, devs were more exposed to that side of things on a regular basis
Swift is nothing like JavaScript at all. It's not garbage-collected, it's reference counted with ARC – exactly like modern Objective-C.
They’re not even close to the same thing though. ARC gives deterministic performance rather than GC’s effectively random pauses.
Compare a UI framework that uses garbage collection on the hot path to one that uses ARC, it’s night and day when it comes to smooth animations and responsiveness.
I'm aware people call refcounting garbage collection. That doesn't make an equivalency, and (to use your terms) it doesn't make tracing GC and refcounting the same thing.
You're being needlessly pedantic, plenty of people have conversations about "refcounting vs GC", do you always come in with an "aaaactually, refcounting is a kind of GC" whenever you hear the discussions?
Surely, learnig concepts the wrong way is worse than not learnig them at all.
Putting two algorithms that belong to the same domain, automatic memory management, against each other, tends to lead to conclusions that aren't necessarily correct.
For example, any reference counting implementation that uses cycle collectors or hazardous pointers, has a partial tracing GC implementation as well.
I know I’m feeding a troll right now, but you haven’t shown that anyone here has learned anything the wrong way other than using the word GC in a different way than the book you linked.
Yes, refcounting is a kind of GC. Very nice, you’re very smart.
But colloquially nearly everyone knows what everyone else is talking about when they say “this uses refcounting” or “that uses GC”.
We all know what each other mean, you’re being incredibly tedious by correcting people’s use of a very common term.
I had been using Apple phones and computers since 2008, and in the last few years everything got so crappy that I'm using XFCE4 on a Chinese Thinker i35, and I couldn't be happier. I can use the extra money to take my girlfriend on a trip.
XFCE really has improved over the last few years. After the Windows 10 debacle I went completely gnu/linux and settled on Manjaro-XFCE as my daily driver... and I am loving it, but I do remember XFCE back in the early 2000's, which at the time drove me to KDE.
When I do harder work I tend to drop into awesome, but not everyone can handle a tiling window manager.
I always dipped between GNOME and KDE because XFCE and LDXE never impressed me, but for the last half-decade of development or so XFCE seems to be doing very well.
I've moved all of my systems over to it and couldn't be happier.
I would like to use a tiling WM for development but Sway (understandably) still has a long way to go. Not really interested in awesome or i3 at this point with Wayland on the horizon.
I’m interested in moving back to Linux as my main platform, so I’m curious: have they fixed the battery life problem on the usable, portable laptops? Last I looked, this was vastly better on macOS, so I stayed (although I am enjoying my Chromebook ultraportable as a cheap travel machine).
The Mac is highly optimized for battery life both in its hardware, software, and mix of software taking advantage of their own hardware. Can't beat that.
Xfce4 is definitely very light on resources, though.
I think iCloud cheated on its end of semester tests! It didn't deserve such high grade... the only thing it can always do correctly is iPhone backups, just that, like someone said there. It's slow, expensive and clumsy.
While I agree on the expensive part (especially if you have multiple devices, 5 GB are ridiculous), iCloud it's not at all clumsy. Photo sharing, app sync and backups are so simple everyone I know can use it, whereas the settings on Android are imo genuinely clumsy. But iCloud is just a part of Apple's cloud services, and as far as I'm concerned 3.4 is way to high in a world where Google exists. At this point, I'm not even sure they realize how far behind Google they actually are.
just a point from the other side. I use iCloud and it is quick, cheap, and seamless. $9.99/mo for 2TB is a great deal. And the file/photo/video syncing is painless and automatic.
iCloud photo library syncing is a mess, to put it politely. The number of things you can do that accidentally trigger a full re-upload of your entire photo library is a minefield. Don't get me started on photoanalysisd either... Having re-uploads/photoanalysisd run repeatedly on large libraries is not fun.
Increasingly the Google Photos iOS/desktop uploader apps offers a significantly more robust sync experience for me on my Apple devices.
The pricing is fine until you hit the 2TB cap (very easily done if you use Family Sharing especially), at which point you are hosed. Even offering the ability to pay $x per GB over this cap would be a lifeline. Again Google have much better options for this. That the default free amount of storage hasn't changed in years from 5GB for all your devices is arguably pretty mean in 2018.
Is there a way to tap into the iCloud photo library/stream with third party tools. I'd like to do that for an independent backup. The Amazon Prime photo app managed to do it, but I'd like something I can replicate photos to my own home server and not necessarily involve yet another cloud service.
It works when you have a local hard drive that can hold your entire photo album. Otherwise, it doesn't.
Honestly, I don't understand iCloud for photos. I understand iCloud drive, it's a server. iPhoto's interaction with iCloud feels suspiciously like sync, so I actually have no confidence in it.
Current Macbooks are not so great, but there has never been a better time to get an iMac.
I don't know about Final Cut, but Logic has been getting constant and significant updates. Today we received 10.4 which included new plugins and features for free.
To be honest I'm starting to fall in love with the Mac again after a couple of years of frustration. Hopefully this is only the beginning.
It's hard to take a 4.0 on hardware reliability seriously when individual specks of dust can still take your laptop out of commission for 5+ days while Apple completes a $400 repair. The keyboard has to work, and it still doesn't.
I haven't had this problem so bad it needed a repair. When stuff gets stuck under a key, I just mash it a few times and it fixes itself. I should probably used canned air, but I don't have any at the moment, and the mashing trick works.
That didn't work for my new MacBook Pro. I have a b key that either types 0 b's or 2 b's. Took it to the Apple store and they blew air under it which did nothing. I now have to find time to send it in. I just am at a loss how they could design something with such a poor feel and so fragile. I guess I should be happy I use an external keyboard at work.
Hopefully you just got a dud keyboard. My down arrow key went stiff earlier today and I mashed it a while and it didn't help. Then I blew into the key (from the side) with my mouth (still no compressed air) and that fixed it.
I put a keyboard cover on the thing within the first five seconds after opening and almost never use the built-in keyboard anyway and never take the cover off.
I can't tell if you're joking or not but putting a dust cover over your laptop and/or not using it aren't really viable solutions to a poorly designed keyboard.
Long time Apple customer and 2017 was easily the worse year in over a decade. Not only quality and throttlegate but faliure to release the HomePod for Christmas and still not improving Siri.
My own experience with the Apple Watch battery life is that its just fine. It could be longer, sure.
Wearing the watch for 23 hours a day is manageable if you are diligent about when you charge it [1] and when you use flight mode [2]. Personally I do not bother with this but if you were someone who valued sleep tracking via your Apple Watch then you can find ways to make it work.
Apple Watch series 3, no cellular: Usually ~75% charge remaining after wearing it for 16 hours. Maybe the cellular ones are a lot more power hungry, but I could charge this one only every other day with no problems.
To provide some context, my opinion is that a useful smart watch should require charging only about once a week. Current battery technology just isn't there yet. Like the Newton PDA, Apple Watch is the right product but ahead of its time.
In the world of software, Apple should be getting a D or F. Their recent security issues are perhaps the worst of any large corporation ever. When such gaping security issues exist, it's simply not reasonable to presume other areas of lesser importance are better maintained. Any person who has used OSX over the years is well aware of the drastic drop in quality and corresponding increase in issues. With such a limited amount of hardware there's no reason for their hardware issues.
That's just all the hyperbole Apple gets. Security is one of the biggest strongpoints of Apple. Look at recent Meltdown/Spectre issue, macOS, iOS, tvOS all got fixes deployed immediately, just press a button to install. Meanwhile how many vulnerable Android phones and unpatched Linux boxes are out there.
Vulnerabilities come and go on every system, but Apples is actually very good at mass deploying fixes to their whole product line very fast.
A few years ago, I was thinking about switching to an Android phone, to try out android app development. I changed my mind when I read a serious article titles something like “which anti-virus software packages should you run on your android phone”.
> Their recent security issues are perhaps the worst of any large corporation ever.
Apple's security problems recently may be obvious and occasionally severe, but they have been limited in scope and quickly fixed. I don't think they even come close to Intel's recent woes, Microsoft around the turn of the century, or Equifax, especially as Apple's security has had some very visible wins against the US government recently.
