Interesting post about Apple OS quality

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Posted on
Wed Oct 23, 2019 4:39 pm
jay (support) offline
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Interesting post about Apple OS quality

This is a good read, and is what I've been hearing from my contacts inside Apple for years now. It's really starting to hurt them IMO. This is also why we keep saying that they are extremely unlikely to ever fix the driver bugs.

FWIW, I finally got my iPhone paired with my car (which had been working fine for years on prior iOS versions but which broke immediately after upgrading to 13), but not completely. In order for it to work, I had to pair it as an audio device (not a hands free device). So I can still listen to music/audiobooks and control them from the car's controls, but the phone is still manual. This works for me since I never talk on the phone while driving anyway, but it does just go directly to the quality (or lack thereof) of iOS 13. And this will undoubtedly fall in the category of a non-regression bug in the next OS release (read the article linked above for clarification) so it will also likely never get fixed.

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Posted on
Wed Oct 23, 2019 4:50 pm
chobo offline
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Re: Interesting post about Apple OS quality

Saw this. Truly a sad state of affairs across all Apple platforms. Steve's perfectionism wasn't always a good thing, but it sure did lead to exceptionally well-designed and functional hardware and software. Not sure we'll ever get back there... :(

Posted on
Wed Oct 23, 2019 5:55 pm
DaveL17 offline
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Re: Interesting post about Apple OS quality

I saw this on Daring Fireball. It seems odd to me that a company of Apple's size wouldn't have engineers working on NOTHING BUT non-regression bugs. I know that doesn't add to the short-term bottom line (to please the shareholders), but I feel it would add to the long-term bottom line.

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Posted on
Wed Oct 23, 2019 10:20 pm
RogueProeliator offline
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Re: Interesting post about Apple OS quality

This is a good read, and is what I've been hearing from my contacts inside Apple for years now. It's really starting to hurt them IMO. This is also why we keep saying that they are extremely unlikely to ever fix the driver bugs.

Interesting and likely spot-on article... thanks for posting that, Jay.

Consumers are probably at least partially to blame for the culture -- it seems like the news/blogs/reviews (and their readers after reading them) can't stand it when a new product or update is simply a small refinement of what we had. Not exclusive to Apple -- Google, Samsung, etc. Having said that, Apple has more money than probably several small countries, they could invest their energy into creating a great product. They have the smallest attention to detail on their hardware, seems strange their software can't have that focus.

The note about the complexity of software, though, is spot on. It doesn't seem like ANYONE can get major updates right -- Apple, Google, and Microsoft have ALL seen the quality of their updates go significantly down in the last few years. Even seemingly small updates have you almost holding your breath for issues.

Adam

Posted on
Thu Oct 24, 2019 8:56 am
jay (support) offline
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Re: Interesting post about Apple OS quality

DaveL17 wrote:
I feel it would add to the long-term bottom line.


I think this is the most salient point. Steve Jobs understood this, which is what gave us Snow Leopard. That release was primarily a hardening release - where they caught up on old bugs, focused on performance, and had little direct customer-facing new functionality. It was, IMO, the most stable/reliable initial release of Mac OS X ever (and probably the most reliable over all as well). According to sources, Steve's plan (pushed by the OS team) was to have every other OS release (the modifier releases, so Snow Leopard to Leopard, Mountain Lion to Lion, etc.) be a "hardening" releases. That never was fully realized even when Steve was alive, but there was still some motivation to get it done. Now that Steve's gone, I'm afraid we'll never see a release like that because leadership at the top doesn't understand the necessity. Some releases have claimed to be "hardening" releases since then, but unfortunately the QA around those releases made them anything but seamless.

And this security push that started a few years ago is really getting out of hand. For instance, I just installed the latest security update for High Sierra (yes, my dev Mac is still on High Sierra because of the work/pain it takes to migrate to newer versions of Xcode). I had long since disabled the lock screen functionality part of the screen saver so that I don't need to log in after screen saver kicks in. However, after the update and a subsequent screensaver activation, I had to log in. This sort of overzealous, user UNFRIENDLY change in the name of "security" is really starting to materially effect macOS from a UX perspective.

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