'If Apple Keeps Letting Its Software Slip, the Next Big Thing Won't Matter' (macworld.com) 116
If Apple can't improve the reliability of its software, the next big thing won't matter, argues Dan Moren in an opinion piece for Macworld. From the report: Uneven distribution: As sci-fi writer William Gibson famously said, "the future is already here -- it's just not evenly distributed." While Gibson's comment resonates mostly on a socio-economic level that is borne out by Apple's not inexpensive technology, it's also embodied geographically by the company's work: if you're interested, you can see which Apple features are available in which regions. Many of these, of course, are due to restrictions and laws in specific regions or places where, say, Apple has not prioritized language localization. But some of them are cases where features have been rolled out only slowly to certain places. [...] It's surely less exciting for Apple to think about rolling out these (in some cases years old) features, especially those which might require a large degree of legwork, to various places than it is for the company to demonstrate its latest shiny feature, but it also means that sometimes these features don't make it to many, if not most of the users of its devices. Uneven distribution, indeed.
To error is machine: It's happened to pretty much any Apple device user: You go to use a feature and it just doesn't work. Sometimes there's no explanation as to why; other times, there's just a cryptic error message that provides no help at all. [...]
Shooting trouble: Sometimes what we're dealing with in the aforementioned situations are what we call "edge cases." Apple engineers surely do their best to test their features with a variety of hardware, in different places, with different settings. [...] Nobody expects Apple to catch everything, but the question remains: when these problems do arise, what do we do about them? One thing Apple could improve is the ease for users to report issues they encounter. Too often, I see missives posted on Apple discussion boards that encourage people to get in touch with Apple support... which often means a lengthy reiteration of the old troubleshooting canards. While these can sometimes solve problems, if not actually explain them, it's not a process that most consumers are likely to go through. And when those steps don't resolve the issues, users are often left with a virtual shrug.
Likewise, while Apple does provide a place to send feedback about products, it's explicitly not a way to report problems. Making it easier for users to report bugs and unexpected behavior would go a long way to helping owners of Apple products feel like they're not simply shouting their frustrations into a void (aka Twitter). If Apple can't improve the reliability of its software [...] it at least owes it to its users to create more robust resources for helping them help themselves. Because there's nothing more frustrating than not understanding why a miraculous device that can contact people around the world instantaneously, run incredibly powerful games, and crunch data faster than a supercomputer of yesteryear sometimes can't do something as simple as export a video of a vacation. While Moren focuses primarily on unfinished features to help make his case, "there is also a huge problem with things being touched for no reason and making them worse," says HN reader makecheck. "When handed what must be a mountain of bugs and unfinished items, why the hell did they prioritize things like breaking notifications and Safari tabs, for instance? They're in a position where engineering resources desperately need to be closing gaps, not creating huge new ones."
An example of this would be the current UX of notifications. "A notification comes up, I hover and wait for the cross to appear and click it," writes noneeeed. "But then some time later I unlock my machine or something happens and apparently all my notifications are still there for some reason and I have to clear them again, only this time they are in groups and I have to clear multiple groups."
"Don't get me started on the new iOS podcast app," adds another reader.
To error is machine: It's happened to pretty much any Apple device user: You go to use a feature and it just doesn't work. Sometimes there's no explanation as to why; other times, there's just a cryptic error message that provides no help at all. [...]
Shooting trouble: Sometimes what we're dealing with in the aforementioned situations are what we call "edge cases." Apple engineers surely do their best to test their features with a variety of hardware, in different places, with different settings. [...] Nobody expects Apple to catch everything, but the question remains: when these problems do arise, what do we do about them? One thing Apple could improve is the ease for users to report issues they encounter. Too often, I see missives posted on Apple discussion boards that encourage people to get in touch with Apple support... which often means a lengthy reiteration of the old troubleshooting canards. While these can sometimes solve problems, if not actually explain them, it's not a process that most consumers are likely to go through. And when those steps don't resolve the issues, users are often left with a virtual shrug.
Likewise, while Apple does provide a place to send feedback about products, it's explicitly not a way to report problems. Making it easier for users to report bugs and unexpected behavior would go a long way to helping owners of Apple products feel like they're not simply shouting their frustrations into a void (aka Twitter). If Apple can't improve the reliability of its software [...] it at least owes it to its users to create more robust resources for helping them help themselves. Because there's nothing more frustrating than not understanding why a miraculous device that can contact people around the world instantaneously, run incredibly powerful games, and crunch data faster than a supercomputer of yesteryear sometimes can't do something as simple as export a video of a vacation. While Moren focuses primarily on unfinished features to help make his case, "there is also a huge problem with things being touched for no reason and making them worse," says HN reader makecheck. "When handed what must be a mountain of bugs and unfinished items, why the hell did they prioritize things like breaking notifications and Safari tabs, for instance? They're in a position where engineering resources desperately need to be closing gaps, not creating huge new ones."
An example of this would be the current UX of notifications. "A notification comes up, I hover and wait for the cross to appear and click it," writes noneeeed. "But then some time later I unlock my machine or something happens and apparently all my notifications are still there for some reason and I have to clear them again, only this time they are in groups and I have to clear multiple groups."
"Don't get me started on the new iOS podcast app," adds another reader.
Apple Mail on MacOS is another (Score:4, Interesting)
When I upgraded to Big Sur mail would disappear and sometimes even whole folders would appear empty when I started the application and no amount of persuading would bring them back. Only solution was a restart. No actual mail was lost as its stored in gmail and as bugs go it was minor but still, you'd think they might have noticed something so obvious but no Big Sur update fixed it. Now I've upgraded to Monterey the bug seems to have gone again, hopefully for good.
Re:Apple Mail on MacOS is another (Score:5, Funny)
You were gmailing it wrong. Restarting it wrong? Upgrading it wrong. I don't know what you were doing, but rest assured since it was an Apple product it was entirely your fault as it is widely known that Apple products are practically perfect in every way and anyone who disagrees is a hater.
2021 disclaimer: It is necessary in these modern and trying times to point out that this post is sarcastic and in no way reflects the true feelings of the poster who himself has often been accused not completely incorrectly of being "a hater".
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Yeah, stupid Apple user, you were doing it wrong.
The cult of Apple is insular and makes them think they can do no wrong, the proof in their staggering over-capitalization.
They do it their own way, heterogeneity be damned, compatibility be screwed, and an army of their minions, shocked at these words, will mod me as troll rather than looking in the mirror.
Their QA has become horrific. They used to have geek pride in wonderful quality, setting a lovely experience and expectation, until they were so freaking r
Re:Apple Mail on MacOS is another (Score:5, Interesting)
Their QA has become horrific. They used to have geek pride in wonderful quality, setting a lovely experience and expectation
When was that? I've used Macs from most eras including the Lisa/XL (and still own an accelerated SE and the last of the dome-shaped iMacs, they're small enough that I haven't had to get rid of them yet, although that's coming) and I don't remember Apple ever having quality software. They used to have very high quality hardware, most of the NuBus macs were built phenomenally well with the peak probably being the IIci, but their software has always been spectacularly crashy and using classic MacOS on the internets meant having two antivirus programs or being owned rapidly. Early OSX was pretty stable and reliable, but what I'm hearing from friends who still use it is that it's gone to shit too. So when did Apple have quality software? The Apple ][ days?
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There was a time, early in the macOS era, when the combo of the darwin port to x64 was finished, where it was pretty bullet-proof.
The iPhone 4-5 were fairly good, and rapid patching meant reasonable protection.
I've been around a long time in the Apple "era". PR#6.
They used to try, and prided themselves in doing so. Now, the walled garden walls in their dev efforts. The mold is now so monolithic, that like Microsoft, they just don't care and the results are obvious. Innovation is stagnant, and feature-fear a
It's not just Apple (Score:2)
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Their QA has become horrific. They used to have geek pride in wonderful quality, setting a lovely experience and expectation
When was that? I've used Macs from most eras including the Lisa/XL (and still own an accelerated SE and the last of the dome-shaped iMacs, they're small enough that I haven't had to get rid of them yet, although that's coming) and I don't remember Apple ever having quality software. They used to have very high quality hardware, most of the NuBus macs were built phenomenally well with the peak probably being the IIci, but their software has always been spectacularly crashy and using classic MacOS on the internets meant having two antivirus programs or being owned rapidly. Early OSX was pretty stable and reliable, but what I'm hearing from friends who still use it is that it's gone to shit too. So when did Apple have quality software? The Apple ][ days?
It probably depends on what you are doing. For video work that I do, the Final cut software is great. And I sometimes use Premiere, so it has some things it does well, but if I had to choose it would be FC. The Adobe Creative suite is also better on Macs. I have SDR and audio software that I needed the company to bring out a Mac version before I would recommend it for critical emergency work. Windows 10 had a tendency to rename audio drivers, often requiring a scorched earth reinstall. And if you are in the
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You need to compare their software to other sofeware of the same era. Mac software was great in the early days. It certainly had it's quirks, but basically it was better than the alternatives. There were some glitches around the time of the Apple III, but the Mac II was also good. I was switched by work to a MSWind machine after that, so I lost track, but it justified it's higher prices. I didn't like how it was difficult to exchange media with other systems, but even that was addressed.
I switched back
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Hmm, I think I only have word 5.1a on my SE. It's got a Radius accelerator, 16 MHz I think. Smokin'! It was a great little machine for its day and in its way, although frankly that Macs had no graphics acceleration hardware but also had no text mode was frankly kind of offensive once the Amiga appeared.
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It depends on your use case. I've never had or wanted a graphic accelerator. The "no text mode" was, however, annoying.
Re: Apple Mail on MacOS is another (Score:2)
You beat me to it. It doesnâ(TM)t retrieve gmail on its own or even if I tell it to get all new mail.
I have to retrieve Junk mail first and see the 200+ messages downloaded. Then, I can go to inbox and they will come down.
It have something to do with that anonymized mail thing they released (and seems to fail once a week or so). But, my phone has no problem getting my mail in a timely fashion.
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You beat me to it. It doesnâ(TM)t retrieve gmail on its own or even if I tell it to get all new mail.
I have to retrieve Junk mail first and see the 200+ messages downloaded. Then, I can go to inbox and they will come down.
It have something to do with that anonymized mail thing they released (and seems to fail once a week or so). But, my phone has no problem getting my mail in a timely fashion.
That's bizzare. I do get gmail fine, along with my other email addresses. iPhone and Mac. I even have one account that was forced onto Outlook webmail that was such a PITA that I forward it to one of my gmail accounts.
Did you ever get anywhere with finding out why? Seems almost like a setting is messing with it.
Mobile hotspot feature on iPhone. (Score:2)
On the iPhone 8, the mobile hotspot feature would not activate most of the time. If you just left it on, but were not connected to it, eventually it would not be discoverable. Turning the feature off and on again seldom worked. If you went in and changed the password for it and then saved, then went and changed the password back, I found that would work most of the time. It's still the same with iPhone 12, except that changing the password is less likely to work.
It's not just Mail.app (Score:2)
Things can be globally broken in hard-to-diagnose ways.
My wife runs her life on iCloud - Mail, Calendar, Messages, Reminders. Her current machine is a 2019 big iMac, which has NEVER worked reliably.
Various forms of search just stop working - Spotlight, Mail search, text search in Pages. Rebooting sometimes temporarly fixes things.
That iMac is under full Apple Care and has had a lot of attention from Apple, but no resolution of these problems.
It smells like hardware, because she also has a 2014 Macbook Air
Apple wants to sell you the new shiny (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple has no apetite to support existing products when new ones are just being announced with higher price points.
Apple has a nasty habit of re-releasing apps, on both iOS and macOS, with new appIDs (bundle identifiers) for the latest OS release. This means that the respective iTunes store considers these a brand new app, not an upgrade, so doesn't offer these to users as an upgrade even though it would run perfectly fine on their device. And then, after a couple of point releases, they set the "minimum OS version" to the current OS so you can't "buy" it on older releases any more. GarageBand is a good example of this: the original v10 releases were available to everybody; the current v10 releases are only available to macOS Big Sur and Monterey users; and the previous v6 releases can't be run on 64-bit macOS releases - leaving a bunch of paying customers in between in the lurch.
Software Engineering (Score:4, Insightful)
Software engineers hate to test and document, software companies don't hire the number of testers needed and software triage is often an extreme pain due to the sheer level of poor coding.
The whole "if houses were built the way programmers wrote programs" meme is not only alive and well, it has been fed repeatedly on the very best of the hearts, brains and livers of actually skilled software engineers in the US' "hire-at-will" 60-hour-week mindset. That there aren't many skilled programmers is down to a heavy emphasis on sports and exams in education as opposed to any of that learning stuff. No, the whole edifice needs a complete rebuild.
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What usually happens is a bug gets logged on the system and then ignored. Nobody takes ownership of it. Nobody else can submit the same bug because it would be a duplicate.
Thunderbird is one of the best examples of this. There are bugs going back over a decade, often quite fundamental things like improper mbox handling. Every few years another duplicate bug gets added, or someone comments about how it should really get fixed, and then it goes back to being ignored.
Re: Software Engineering (Score:3)
At least with OSS we can fix it ourselves, if we have ridiculous amounts of time or bounty it.
An even greater list of bugs happens in closed source, but no one sees it.
Nope. Wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
Software engineers hate to test and document ...
Nope. Wrong.
Software engineers hate to test and document against perpetually moving targets(!).
Which is just about precisely what Dan Moren is talking about. And he is right, by Apple standards that is. In recent years Apple has been fiddling about with iOS and macOS in ways that do not emphasize or fit Apples reliability in features, integration and stability. It's almost as if there is a slight creep in hipsters at Apple who know think they know "UI/UX" but couldn't be bothered to cover the whole stack with their insight, a habit Apple precisely has been know to avoid like the plague in the past. Mostly. A habit that separates all the Apple/Steve Jobs wannabees from *actual* Apple ... as in "yes we care about design and UX and all that and we know it's paramount but we also actually know, build and control the technology that enables it".
There have been some missteps lately and it shows.
This is part and parcel why I've left the Apple camp a few years back, along with their excess post-Jobs pricing strategy.
Recently Apple silicon has me craning my neck, because once again Apple is showing the industry how things are done, but I'm not holding my breath anymore.
And that's also for some of the reasons Moren points out.
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P.S. Apple should abandon Safari.
Given how it compares to other browsers, it feels like they have already.
Re:Nope. Wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Software engineers that whinge about perpetually moving targets are babies. Targets are based on information. Well-run organizations gather and evaluate information constantly. As a result, targets change. Would you rather keep polishing a useless and static piece of software? Requirements are NEVER set in stone. Pretending requirements should or could be unchanging is setting yourself up for a life of bitter disappointment.
First off, I am a professional software engineer for over 20 years. Moving targets drain a lot of time and resources. I had a product that our client asked to change. Within a day of receiving the new code, the same client filed a bug whose content was almost verbatim of what they requested a week ago. Targets change based on new information, but at least keep a target steady for a week or two. And when a target is moved, let engineering know so we don't waste cycles on the outdated plan. I would suggest re
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This is part and parcel why I've left the Apple camp a few years back, along with their excess post-Jobs pricing strategy.
Apple has literally never overcharged so much for their computers as when a Mac IIci with a two page mono display, 5MB RAM and an 80MB disk cost $8500. (A IIfx with a two page color display, graphics accelerator, and 8/120 would have been around $12k.) You could build a slammin' PC with accelerated graphics (we're talking 2d here, keep in mind that until the Quadras literally no Macintosh came with any graphics acceleration whatsoever unless you bought a Macintosh II with a 8*24 GC card that cost literally
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I remember the error messages on OS/2. You would get a number and a short description of the problem. If you looked up the help on that number you would get several pages of information on exactly what it meant, why it happened, how to fix it etc. IBM had amazing documentation and they bundled it with the system.
Only shit engineers don't write tests (Score:5, Insightful)
Software engineers hate to test and document, software companies don't hire the number of testers needed and software triage is often an extreme pain due to the sheer level of poor coding.
Professionals want unit tests and write a ton and most document quite well. Your statement is like saying "Athletes hate cardio and stretching." You have shitty software engineers if they don't document their code or write tests. Anyone who has been doing this for a while knows the importance of documentation and unit tests. You can debate how well they did, but all good programmers make a decent effort with unit tests and documentation. Those that don't really suck at their job and probably life, generally.
I have probably worked with over 1000 software engineers over a few decades. I have worked with the best from the open-source community down to the worst you get from budget offshore operations. The good ones write rather nice, often brief, documentation. They also write decent unit tests. The reason is they have a ton of shit going on in their head and can't remember it all in short-term memory anyway. The other pattern: the best tend to write less code. When you're assaulted with 100,000 lines of clever code, you're probably dealing with a novice who doesn't know their way around common libraries.
Well-run companies rely on unit tests heavily. You never save money or time by skipping tests. Unit and integration tests let you write code faster and focus more on the new features and not confirming you didn't break any old features and have to spend weeks fixing something that could have been fixed in an hour if it never made it to production. Most top professionals also are aware they'll be handing off the project so they can work on another, so they tend to write unit tests. They have had to explain their code enough times they've learned it's just much better to tell the next guy, read the docs and ask me if you have any questions. They've also had to present to stakeholders and often are good at making those pointless flow diagrams that provide no value if you actually read them, but look REALLY impressive before you do.
FINALLY (Score:2, Interesting)
mac os as of late, fucking sucks.
I just went a serviced a lab of 30 machines, running maviercks, not a single issue, they just needed new browsers installed.
They don't care, they teach basic photoshopping to highschool kids, they don't need cloud shit and this and that.
I've been working on the inside as an ACMT for years and I'm about to quit over this crap. I put in my notice, I've had enough.
Apple, get your fucking shit together and quit acting like fascis
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Re: pedantic and incredibly driven (Score:4, Insightful)
> They need a pedantic and incredibly driven hard-ass...
I hate to agree, but Jobs' departure (which roughly coincided with my own return to Apple quality assurance) was about the peak of software quality. Some of it was management lack of fear of bugs in the absence of a high-ranking pedant, some of it was the consequence of a hardware-schedule-driven software release cycle, and some of it was cultural: a lack of old-fashioned testing and test planning in favor of automating whatever was easy to automate. More at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse... [linkedin.com]
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I think you're overstating the fact, but they are doomed to mediocrity if they are run by people with mediocre vision. OTOH, they should take HP as a warning. And Scully.
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Enron
Kodak
Blockbuster
Market juggernauts can still crash and burn.
Re: I've said it a million times (Score:2)
Heat soak. One or two hot products are carrying the load for everything else, making the whole company look artificially good. Business textbooks are overflowing with similar examples.
Lost confidence in Apple (Score:2)
Back in the day I switched to iPhone from Android and bought the IPhone 6s max. The reason was my repeated experienced with android phones where strange stuff happened instead of the thing that was supposed to happen. Things just worked on that phone and that version of iOS so I was very happy with the change.
Since then I upgraded to IPhone Xr and now to iOS 15, and as that phone is getting too banged up, I will most likely fairly soon change to some Android phone instead as for last two years at least iPh
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I don't want the CCP spying on me... which is probably Apple's biggest benefit right now (not Chinese), but then again... you then get Apple spying on you. Hard to say what is worse.
For tha creepy feeling that someone is reading your mail and browsing your memory, probably the same.
For practical consequences, I'd be far more worried about Apple if you live in the USA, and more about the CCP if you live in China.
Because there is some harmless content that might get you in trouble here (such as an innocent naked childhood photo), and I think Apple is a lot more likely to report you to the police over it. The CCP will probably not bother to inform US police.
In China having stuff critical
Re: Lost confidence in Apple (Score:2)
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Things like:
1)Touch screen not registering occasionally. Though this was much more common in ios 14, and seems to happen very seldom right now but still happens.
2)On launching and app the app dies instantly and you have to click again to launch. This happens on all apps about 1/3 the time.
3)The phone not ringing when people call even when not on silent. Not common, but does happen.
4)Camera app taking a long time to start showing picture occasionally. Very seldom, only seems to follow murphys law as in when
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Not sure which iPhone I've been touching occasionally since we use it at work for music (coworker's old phone) but it is really horrible at registering swipes. Even my broken-screen Moto X4 is better. (I have one that isn't broken, but it needs a battery, and no time to get it into the shop, and it's held together in part with adhesive and I'd rather let someone with more delicate fingers handle that.)
It's bad at wifi, but Android is kind of bad at it too now. It doesn't detect very quickly when it can see
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My wife has an iPhone 11. It's... Okay. Had to pay extra to get a reasonable amount of memory I see to recall. So far the issues we have had are:
1. Gets very hot when doing video chats. Apple said it was normal to be too hot to hold the phone, as long as it doesn't show any errors on screen.
2. Storage filled up with cached data from WeChat. probably more an issue with the app itself but had to go in and manually clear everything out.
3. iCloud is the only decent backup option because iOS kills background app
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4. Sometimes the touch screen stops working and you have to force a power cycle.
That happened to my iPhone 11. It's a warranty repair; a bunch of 11's went out with a faulty screen controller and that's one of the symptoms. Mine was even more annoying; it would sporadically stop working.
iPhone 11 Display Module Replacement Program for Touch Issues [apple.com]
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Apple said it was normal to be too hot to hold the phone
Whaaa? It's never normal for the phone to be hot enough to not be able to hold it.
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I recently switched to iOS because my OnePlus 5 is no longer supported on any US networks... Landing in the States to the message of my SIM is no longer provisioned was very rude.
Re: Lost confidence in Apple (Score:2)
Re: Lost confidence in Apple (Score:3)
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Android phones are also getting worse. Perhaps it's the vendor supplied software, perhaps some other reason, but I much prefer the phone I had a year ago (which I'd already had for several years) to the one I have currently. I was forced to switch by TMobile abandoing the frequencies it worked on in the switch to 5G. A bad mistake, I should have switched carriers instead. To someone who didn't insist that I have everything connected to the internet. (Perhaps Jitterbug would work? Or perhaps the Pine,
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It's not just Apple. It's like everyone now. :(
Cryptic error messages (Score:3)
To error is machine: It's happened to pretty much any Apple device user: You go to use a feature and it just doesn't work. Sometimes there's no explanation as to why; other times, there's just a cryptic error message that provides no help at all.
This has been an issue on every computer system I have ever used.
Re: Cryptic error messages (Score:2)
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I agree. But for some reasons a lot of Apple lovers claim that Apple products are the exception. It is time to think different. On the other hand talked to some of their hardware engineers in some past and they do know their stuff. Also management wise, the hardware teams are well run. So they do really deserve credit.
You have clearly never talked to an Apple user, they complain about this like everybody else.
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Funny thing, when asked to defend the choice for Apple products, they came with a cost calculation, showing that the Apple ecosystem is cheaper than the microsoft system. Looked at the numbers: macbo
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Sometimes there's no explanation as to why; other times, there's just a cryptic error message that provides no help at all.
This has been an issue on every computer system I have ever used.
Try AIX on POWER. The OS and the machine will both have a plethora of unique and useful error messages that you can easily look up and find a solution for. IBM is bad at a lot of things but they're great at error messages. Presumably they had a severe need for that :D
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I would say it a cultural thing that dates back to the 1960's and mainframes. You also get proper release notes with change logs and everything. This has continued in the Lenovo server division as well. Compare a BIOS or BMC release for a Lenovo server to a Dell server. There is a world of difference.
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It's not just computers. Manuals have increasingly become useless. Cars give error messages by flashing an icon that has no explanation, and if you don't already know what it means (and the proper words) then you can't find it in the manual, if it's listed at all. This extends to all levels.
Partially its that as things become more complex it's harder to describe what they're doing, but that's only a part of the problem. I'm strongly convinced that companies have decided that it less important to tell peo
Headline and first line are about different issues (Score:1)
"If Apple Keeps Letting Its Software Slip, the Next Big Thing Won't Matter"
"If Apple can't improve the reliability of its software, the next big thing won't matter"
Letting software slip and not improving its reliability ARE TWO TOTALLY DIFFERENT ISSUES !
And the headline is in quotes, for extra SHITEDITORINESS.
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They're often for the same underlying quality control reasons. Poorly implemented new features tend to break existing software, and cause release dates to slip.
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No unrelated. If people stop trusting you, they won't gamble on you. So your "Next big thing", which requires people to pay you money for something unexpected, will flop when nobody trusts you enough to take the gamble.
Emulating Microsoft? (Score:2)
In similar news, Microsoft has slashed their testing department, and seems to rely more on its insider program to report bugs. So far it seems they can get away with it (customers are not running away in droves), so maybe Apple management is trying a similar cost-cutting approach.
In both cases, switching to another vendor is a major effort and perhaps financial investment. That vendor lock-in is apparently strong enough to keep most customers.
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I suspect it's not so much "emulating Microsoft" as it is "being enabled by Microsoft". If your best competitor is slack and shoddy, then you only need to be slightly better to beat them.
Back in the day, the Mac had to be bullet proof, or else no one would switch to using one. Every review, every guy in the pub had to be complimentary about it because you definitely would lose something by switching from Windows. Nowadays, people can just buy Macs because they look pretty - we're no where near as "locked in
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I looked at StatCounter in the mean time, and apparently Mac on the desktop is sitting at a solid 25% in North America and 16% in Europe. That is more than I (dimly) remember from a few years ago. Apparently you are right, Apple gains market share simply by neglecting their quality standards less.
Some of it might be due to the UI changes in Windows though. Those were not a failure in programming, but an unpopular design choice. When Windows 7 went out of support two years ago, I guess some people tried Appl
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It's like they thought: Our users are so loyal or locked in that they won't bother go somewhere else if things are a little flaky. And the sad part is that, for the most part they're right.
Microsoft are also doing nasty things like installing various unnecessary apps like Twitter, Facebook, etc. when using their own install media, trying
Domination first, conquer later (Score:2)
Half-assed can be laid at the feet of SteveJobs who isn’t here to defend. And Cook won’t touch SJ prerogatives.
AAPL for a BIG company doesn’t act the leader Apple should. This emerges in public view of the Epic legal proceeding after award behavior. It has always been thus, top down Pirate flag!
Tesla Pi phone is the first serious competition Apple faces if ElonMusk musters licenses to pull it together as a full vertical integrated communication platform. Irony is sweet when Apple pays to t
AppleCare & OS Technical Issues (Score:1)
As a long-time Apple user, my first Apple II a long time ago, and my first Mac computer a 1989 SE30, I have a reasonable amount of experience with both hardware and software issues. My technical experience is in Electrical and Systems Engineering, including a former instructor in Unix. My current 2019 MacBook Pro is, in car terms, a lemon with dozens of case numbers (Apple's trouble ticket tracking method). The common issues I see are the following.
% Too much emphasis on features, versus fixing the under
Does not matter (Score:2)
People have been complaining about helldesk (Score:2)
for years. Apple, Microsoft, Google, all of them Have Issues. Smaller, more nimble, companies may be more easily contacted, but it often takes knowing someone who can bypass the various gatekeepers.
And not just in software. Several years ago I had a highly repeatable weird glitch while closing the top of my German convertible. Couldn't seem to get it fixed. Complained to Warren Brown (RIP) at the Washington Post during an online chat, and two days later I got a call from a regional engineering guy at t
Picking on Apple? (Score:2)
I'm no fan of Apple - can't stand their UI choices, their walled garden, and their attitude. But realistically, it seems to me that list of complaints applies pretty much across the entire consumer tech landscape. I've had weird shit happen on my Android phones, and good luck getting help with that anyplace other than user forums.
It's been a very long time since I used Windows with any regularity, but I hear a litany of similar complaints about it all the time - and when I am forced to use it, I have to hol
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Technology used to be more or less a tool engineered to solve a problem. Once you've solved the problem, the only refinement left is optimizing the solution -- for cost, energy, reliability, etc.
The problem is that at some level of optimization, the problem is effectively solved and no useful optimization is left outside of extreme use cases.
There's no money in that, though. You'll sell enough technology to people interested in solving the problem and they won't need to buy it again.
To make an economy out
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He's an Apple user writing in an magazine about Apple products. Of course he's going to write about Apple. That it wasn't praise this time is merely him reporting his experiences and projections.
I don't use Apple, and I've got unfavorable comments about Gnome and KDE. So your general point is correct, but your complaint is unreasonable. Given where he's writing, of course he's commenting about Apple.
So what's with the whining ? (Score:1)
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Owned /used Macs since the Performa as my first one. Pretty much all mac's that I owned have been reliable and no issues with software.
When the performas came out they had janky AF ATA buses and they were still running classic MacOS, which was frankly a turd compared to competing operating systems like Windows NT or the Unix of your choice. If you didn't have problems you were lucky. I've been using Macs since before the performas were around, and have used several since after they went away (thankfully... the only macs with sharp edges that would cut a bitch in a second) and Apple has always had software problems. OSX was a massive step i
iPhone user (Score:2)
I'm an iPhone user since the iPhone 4, and have watched usability decline as "features" have been forced into the interface that give way to bugs. The notifications bug mentioned in the summary are one of several examples for me. Does it make it unusable? No. But the beauty of a smartphone is that it gives you access to many services quickly. If your software impacts the "quickly" aspect, it can get frustrating.
I'm also a frequent windows user and have always been frustrated when I come across a bug or poo
Buy the Dip (Score:2)
Apples in the toilet, blah, blah, blah!
Been hearing that song for thirty years.
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Yes, I'm sure that a "Dan Moren" opinion piece for MacWorld will have a huge effect on the $2.5T company that is Apple.
I expect that his piece will knock maybe $800 billion off Apple's worth. Then "Dan Moren" can buy $5,000 of Apple stock, and publish a positive article about Apple that could add maybe $1 Trillion to Apple's market cap, and clear a profit of $2,000-$3,000.
Tim Cook is frantically negotiating with Apple's board as we speak to offer "Dan Moren" a $10 billion stock option package. It's a desper
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Tough crowd ...
Apple doomsayers, a very tired fad (Score:2)
I'm pretty confident I could write a large book composed of nothing but a short paragraph of each "Apple's going down!" announcement.
They do stumble from time to time, but it should be pretty self-evident that they know what they're doing, they know what we like.
Announcements like this have almost zero informational value, it's just more click-bait.
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Not very effective clickbait. It doesn't even have the words "quantum" "blockchain" or "covid" in it.
macOS Vista (Score:2)
Personally, I like how they went from having commercials poking fun at Vista's "cancel or allow" to implementing and expanding upon it in their own OS over a decade later.
"It just works" is a thing of the past, and it's a shame.
Why does Safari still freeze on scroll? (Score:2)
I encounter fewer bugs in Apple software than anybody else's, but there is a tendency for a few well-known problems to hang around for years. When you browse certain websites (reason.com, flyertalk.com), Safari scrolling will freeze and the page has to be reloaded, whereupon you will have to quickly scroll down to the page after where you left off before it freezes again. This has been going on for years, through three annual macOS upgrades through Catalina. I go to the software review sites and find that "
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I could use Chrome instead, but Google has mysteriously decided to remove the ability to print Chrome content, which I occasionally need to do.
There is a plugin for Chrome that converts a web page into an e-book (.epub or other formats). It is very good quality, you should try it.
People don't buy Apple products for software (Score:2)
Point is, Apple can go a long way down on software before anyone cares so long as their hardware doesn't start to suck like a mid-2000s Toshiba and you still look sharpish when you sport their
Think buggier (Score:2)
Case in point: Apple's own video software - Quicktime Player. After upgrading to Monterey, try recording a video and watch the video stop recording at 10:55, with nothing but a cryptic error message.
After reporting the bug, I was asked to restart my Mac in safe mode and see if the bug still showed up in Quicktime Player. No, it didn't
To error is machine (Score:2)
Podcast app (Score:2)
I'm grateful to TFA for mentioning the Apple podcast app, which whatever you think of the design has been broken since at least version 15.0 and possibly earlier. (The 'Up Next' queue simply doesn't work anymore.)
See this thread [apple.com] if you really, really want to spend your day reading a litany of complaints.
Cyberspace (Score:2)
Gibson is deep without interpretation and there's no heavy-handed metaphors, at least in the first 8 books of his that I read. WTF is this article talking about? The example both compares to the entire industry and shows how it's NOT a super problem.
Apple is responsible for seamlessly integrating software with hardware and allowing apps . . . this guy is whining about the safari tabs (which sucked, and I had to google how to change it). Neith
Innovation is key (Score:1)
Sorry, but I'm not buying this. This article sounds more like an epic case of gaslighting in an effort to keep Apple distracted from what it does best which is innovation. That said, it's very difficult to come up with the next big thing so Apple has to release incremental product upgrades to maintain revenue. Their own silicon is a big deal but it's not apparent to the consumer. The iPod and the iPhone were game changers. But now everyone expects them to do that again and are regularly making spoiler
Only thing I run is Xcode and (Score:2)
Lets face it Apple is for consumers only. and really comes down to not the best tech, just the most expensive. But they do have the most loyal and vocal koolaid drinkers as customers.
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That's part of their problem. If their own users held Apple's ass to the fire, or even considered leaving for another platform, then Apple would have to work harder on their products. Instead, many of Apple's users defend their behavior, or find a flaw in another platform and state that at least Apple isn't as bad as that. It makes them feel better in the face of the haters but it only perpetuates their issues. They're satisfied as
Apple does one thing well (Score:1)
On the other hand Apple is gre
Apple Notes (Score:2)
Are we just using this story as an excuse to post complaints about Apple's software? I've got a couple.
Notes for OS X, which I used for many years, has developed a new glitch where the cursor spontaneously jumps to the top of the document. (Sometimes once an hour, sometimes once every few seconds). This happens with my new M1 Macbook (running Big Sur) but never with my old 2015 Macbook (running Mojave).
My iPhone hot spot never, ever shows up on any device unless I go to Settings and turn it off and on. T
Lost interest (Score:2)
The worst thing about Apple... not that they're the only ones guilty of this, is they come out with some you-beaut idea, and then they lose interest, it decays, get buggy and is abandoned. It seems actually more dangerous sometimes to commit your data to a big corporation's app, because they're only interested in where the big money is. I'm sure we can all name a long list of Apple programs, and features that were good, that you used, and got dumped.
Though... kinda wish Microsoft would dump MORE stuff.
Random shutdown on MacBook Pros (Score:2)
Random shutdown issue for MacBook Pros have been present for 4-5 major OS revisions now. You can easily find this issue on the net. It's obviously not individual hardware failure because a)removing the offending thunderbolt ethernet extension or b)plugging in said thunderbolt ethernet adapter avoids the issue. I think the third way to avoid it is to keep the CPU minimally busy. (4~5% battery life hit). It's been present at least since Sierra if not before, and they couldn't be bothered to fix it in Hig