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Software Apple

'Apple Needs a Snow Sequoia' (ofb.biz) 81

Posted by msmash from the shifting-focus dept.
uninet writes: The same year Apple launched the iPhone, it unveiled a massive upgrade to Mac OS X known as Leopard, sporting "300 New Features." Two years later, it did something almost unheard of: it released Snow Leopard, an upgrade all about how little it added and how much it took away. Apple needs to make it snow again. Current releases of MacOS Sequoia and iOS/iPadOS 18 are riddled with easily reproducible bugs in high-traffic areas, the author argues, suggesting Apple's engineers aren't using their own software. Messages can't reliably copy text, email connections randomly fail, and Safari frequently jams up. Even worse are the baffling design decisions, like burying display arrangement settings and redesigning Photos with needless margins and inconsistent navigation.

Apple's focus on the Vision Pro while AI advances raced ahead has left them scrambling to catch up, the author argues, with Apple Intelligence features now indefinitely delayed. The author insists that Apple's products still remain better than Windows or Android alternatives -- but "least bad" isn't the premium experience Apple loyalists expect. With its enormous resources, Apple could easily have teams focus on cleaning up existing software while simultaneously developing AI features.

Further reading: 'Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino' .

'Apple Needs a Snow Sequoia' More | Reply

'Apple Needs a Snow Sequoia'

Comments Filter:

  • It's honestly puzzling... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Friday March 28, 2025 @08:39AM (#65264791) Journal
    I assume that there are some perverse incentives at the level of individual product managers and such("oversaw 27 new features" vs. "fixed bugs" as a resume/promotion item); but Apple seems like they should be about as well-placed as anyone in the industry to just sit back and fix their shit without too much worry about needing to slap marketing tickboxes on the packaging.

    Thanks to the success of their CPUs; they can deliver pretty high-desirability mobile hardware (less important, since people don't care as much about volume or power draw; but their desktops are also made quite credible by the M-series CPUs) along with excellent(by the blighted standards of 'mobile') supported lifetimes for phones and tablets. They are also in a good enough position in terms of software that it's hard to see them as materially behind the competition on anything terribly important(if anything, MS seems to be doing their best to shove regression after regression after obnoxious ad into their offerings; while Google is forever dithering and most Android users are getting puked on by Samsung or one of the other less tasteful Android OEMs).

    If they can't sit back, relax, and pay down technical debt and fix outstanding bugs; who can?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      "If they can't sit back, relax, and pay down technical debt and fix outstanding bugs; who can?"

      Why think that anyone can? Modern software is a mile high stack of shit. Didn't use to be that way, and there's no reason to believe the quality we get today will ever be what we used to have.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        There really are only two outcomes long-term: Fixing things and re-respecting KISS or failure. The narrow road of "just barely good enough" grows more narrow and eventually vanishes with raising complexity.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by dfghjk ( 711126 )

          We been in the "redefining good enough" phase for a long time now. KISS went out the window with object oriented programming. We have an entire generation of programmers now who don't know anything other than building on top of software they don't know and whose work needs to be no better than the crap that forms their foundation.

          Now the challenge is just to be good enough for the reset button to not get pressed.

          • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

            by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 )

            KISS went out the window with object oriented programming.

            I don't remember that album; but admittedly I stopped paying attention after Alive II.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Malc ( 1751 )

            It's nothing to do with C++. Probably more likely the switch to web-based everything and/or smart phones. There seems to have been a generational change sometime after 2010.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by gweihir ( 88907 )

            Now the challenge is just to be good enough for the reset button to not get pressed.

            While I sort-of agree, avoiding that reset buttom gets infeasible at some point that is not too far ahead. And worse, that button will not help anymore a short time later.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        "If they can't sit back, relax, and pay down technical debt and fix outstanding bugs; who can?"

        Why think that anyone can? Modern software is a mile high stack of shit. Didn't use to be that way, and there's no reason to believe the quality we get today will ever be what we used to have.

        For the same reason the article author (or anyone) shouldn't say apple *needs* to do anything.

        Apple is worth $3.7 trillion dollars, a good chunk of that as cash in the bank.
        They could stop selling product today and continue operating, paying all bills and employees, for decades without issue.

        Yes that is a stupid extreme, but that is exactly why the question was asked.
        Apple can afford to spend an entire Facebook worth of money on QA and Still have more money than Facebook!

        Given that, it is a very good questi

    • I completely agree - less features and more quality ("non-functional") would go a long way. Just like I really don't care what chip is inside* I just want the longer life battery - the feature is less important than the non-functional requirement of working longer without a charge.

      (I sort of do care, in so much as flitting between x86 and Arm can be a pain, and cross compiling is just painful)

      Sadly, once the product managers get hired, they're keen to make an impact so push for more features at the expense

  • Downhill since Jobs? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by simlox ( 6576120 ) on Friday March 28, 2025 @08:43AM (#65264803)
    My impression is that Steve Jobs was the ultimate quality assurance they had. Since he died the quality have been lowered and lowered. Apple just became a normal company hunting short term profit.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by laughingskeptic ( 1004414 )
      Steve Jobs confused "aesthetic" for "design" and Apple has been stuck in this rut since. Bugs and usability didn't matter so long as things looked good.
      • I would say Jobs was aesthetics plus functionality. Maybe he didn't bring good design, but he knew bad design when he saw it.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by leptons ( 891340 )
          > but he knew bad design when he saw it.

          Nope. "You're holding it wrong" will live longer than Apple will.

          • My take is that Jobs WAS what the GP claimed but then he went batshit, eventually culminating in a juice fast-exacerbated death from cancer. What kind of dipshit thinks that mainlining sugar is better than medicine? Anyway, before that he was serious about things actually working.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by leptons ( 891340 )
              You're probably not too far off there.

              I think at this point, Apple has turned into a cargo cult.

              • And yet, their hardware remains unbeatable.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by leptons ( 891340 )
                  It all depends on how you define "hardware" and "unbeatable". It honestly doesn't matter what their hardware does if their software is crap, and their software is crap and always has been crap. That's my opinion under my definition of "crap".

                • And yet, their hardware remains unbeatable.

                  They have very fast mobile/low power hardware, but they do not have the fastest of anything. Apple doesn't have a Threadripper equivalent for example (neither does Intel, h0 h0 h0) and they also don't have a GPU to rival AMD or NVidia. Also, the laptops throttle pretty badly in most conditions, so you can beat them in endurance. Apple is certainly making processors that perform very well in their respective ranges, but the area they are covering these days is limited.

        • I used Mac OS X heavily back when it was called Mac OS X, 10.2 and 10.3 especially. I liked both systems but they were slow as ass - intentionally slow, it was the animations that caused the problems, regardless of the hardware. On top of that you had things like many system error messages would consist of a dialog box and wording along the lines of "Network error: -34". No... useful text. Nothing that would help you diagnose the issue. Not even an "Error while writing to X". Just a number.

          To put it another

          • "Nothing that would help you diagnose the issue. Not even an "Error while writing to X". Just a number."

            That was tradition! They had to do that in order to make it more like classic, where EVERY error was completely worthless.

            On the other end of the spectrum you had AIX, where every error has a unique code, not one that's used for twenty different faults, AND you usually get a useful description. Do they still do that? Even if all you had was the number it was still useful.

    • I wouldn't go that far. MacOS has been pretty annoyance-free for the most part. I tend to use straight-stock configuration so I don't have to change much between versions, and my frustration level with MacOS - which is the driving factor in changing how I work - is pretty low, overall. It's nowhere near as bad as what I saw with Win10. Granted, I've not used Windows regularly in 15 years, I'd say, but when my kid asked me to check something on his system, I was lost like a babe in the woods. What used
      • True. I have a macbook M1 and I never had any problems with MacOS, except that fact that I have to go through many hoops to run programs I download from the internet instead of the app store. The only other issues I have are hardware related. My 8GB ram is always full because who thought 8GB in 2020 was enough? And I can't upgrade the ram or ssd and if any of them fail, the whole laptop is toast (pretty sure it's impossible to find a technician who can solder/desolder an SSD around where I live).

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by mccalli ( 323026 )
      Bear in mind Snow Leopard was a response to Leopard, and both happened under Steve's watch.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Entrope ( 68843 )

      Just make sure you're holding that phone the right way, or else he'll blame you for it having poor signal reception.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      I'm very picky and stubborn in terms of quality. I should be the next CEO for Apple. :P

  • Less "features" please (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SoonerPet ( 893902 ) on Friday March 28, 2025 @08:57AM (#65264841)
    I'd really just prefer a stripped down Sequoia at this point. I already turn off/disable Apple Intelligence and Siri, they are useless to me and serve no purpose. I have no desire to talk to my computer, and anything I'd ask it to do I could do quicker with my own mouse and keyboard. I'm just tired of all the gimmicks both in MacOS and Windows. On the windows side I run a stripped down Win10 IOT LTSC version with all the cruft removed, it's fairly usable at that point. I just want my OS to stop changing major functionality on a whim because some bean counter decided it was time to change the settings app, or right click options, or network settings etc.. after it's been the same and perfectly usable for decades.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      I think the problem is they have lost track of what they are selling (Microsoft) and what they are building (MacOS team).

      These products are not Operating Systems, they are OS + Application bundles; but they still treat it like OS development. Applications, first or third party should provide 'features' and functionality beyond hardware abstraction, switching between applications, an (extensible) shell, storage and volume management, IPC, and networking.

      Let the application guys create 'stuff' show that it wo

  • Reading the long and obvious list of bugs and glitches makes me wonder if they already have turned to vibe coding for developing their OS & Apps, and now they're getting to a point where no one has a clue how to correct the bugs introduced by the LLM.

  • Long road (Score:3)

    by SouthSeb ( 8814349 ) on Friday March 28, 2025 @09:58AM (#65265003)

    As a longtime Mac user, I've been feeling and talking about exactly this with colleagues for some time now. Since "El Capitan", the OS started to suffer greatly from visible lack of direction and feature creeping.

    Several things that just worked became buggy or changed for worse. Tons of absolutely unneeded, expendable small features were added. Settings in the System Preferences change of place or get obfuscated on each new update. All for the "necessity" of launching a new major update every year.

    In the first 10 or 15 years we eagerly awaited for each new version release and updated it immediately. But at least since 2016 it's been "whatever... I'll update when I have nothing better to do".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      As a longtime Mac user, I've been feeling and talking about exactly this with colleagues for some time now. Since "El Capitan", the OS started to suffer greatly from visible lack of direction and feature creeping.

      You misspelled Snow Leopard, or maybe Mountain Lion. :-D

      But seriously, I mostly blame the decision to merge Mac and iOS development. It took three years for the iOS side of the house to drag the Mac side down enough for you to start noticing, but having them under the same team resulted in constant attempts to merge these very different platforms, always to disastrous effect. The downhill slide for macOS began very clearly when Forstall left Apple and iOS got merged under Craig. Nothing against Craig her

  • I'd like a nice patch for BT; it's wonky. I have a trackpad, and a music output device, and if I use the trackpad while listening to music, the music just drops. It eventually resumes, but it's annoying. My desk is covered with electronics projects and all kinds of wires probably generating all kinds of RF, so that might be a contributing factor.

    • Are both devices BT or is one of them USB3? I remember hearing something about some USB3 ports causing harmful interference for BT while in use. If possible, it might help to move any USB3 plugs away from the BT transmitter.

      • Yep, both the trackpad and the radio/audio are BT. Hmm. All of the USB 3 plugs are in the back of the Mac Mini, so they shouldn't be a problem. I could reposition the radio/audio device and see how that works.

  • I understand that users don't like change. It's the same reason they don't like other computer platforms - things are in a different place, they look different, and they have a different name. That's part of what keeps people where they are, and "in their comfort zone".

    When you release a new OS, that changes how things look, where they are, and what they're named, you're fundamentally changing your brand, so you should make those changes very sparingly.

    Apple seems to have forgotten about brand familiarity

  • After switching to Tuxedo OS recently, I'm firmly in the camp that MS and Apple have some catching up to do. The simple desktop customization out of the box is awesome, does things I couldn't getting Windows to do even using desktop enhancement apps. Also less disjointed all around on the settings side. That's not even getting into 'power user' options like changing out window mangers. Just need mainstream support.

  • I would love nothing more than a point release that addresses the OS's shortcomings for institutional device management. It is entirely too easy for device management to be broken by a bad link in the Volume Ownership > SecureToken > Bootstrap Token chain, where the only fix is a wipe/repave.

    Apple has been openly hostile to institutional device management, even though K12/academia in general has historically been such a huge market for them. They simply have to get over this obsolete idea that he/sh

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vux984 ( 928602 )

      " They simply have to get over this obsolete idea that he/she who possesses the device owns the device."

      You are mistaken, it's really:

        "Apple owns the device."

  • Messages can't reliably copy text, email connections randomly fail, and Safari frequently jams up.

    I'm not at all denying that these issues exist, but I haven't experienced any of this. Safari is my primary browser, I use the shit out of it (30 tabs and two windows open right now) and while I do have to nuke it once in a great while I've never had a browser/OS configuration that didn't require at least as much effort.

    That said... the point about Photos' redesign is spot on. That one I use a lot, too, and it feels like an Engineer threw a few features in there without really paying attention to how pe

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tzanger ( 1575 )

      Messages "delete" always says it will delete from all devices but never does. It can take HOURS for a device that was dead/off/disconnected to "catch up" with the global state of an iMessage count. Search is *horribly* broken (Chatology used to be a great third party tool for that but was discontinued). If you're scrolling back looking for a message and you receive a new one from the same person the UI jumps to the new message. They removed the two-finger slide left to reveal message time, instead opting fo

  • Complaints about one OS, must be made in the context of everyone else. If you think MacOS is buggy, how does it compare to Windows? At least MacOS doesnt' shove ads down my throat and distract me when I am trying to launch a program. How does it compare to Ubuntu or your favorite Desktop Linux variant? I love Desktop Linux, but...I also like having the apps I need even more and thus, Linux is server-side for me. In fairness, every complaint these people are writing about moving shit around and things b

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nadir ( 805 )
      Intellij crashing daily ? I run it on Linux and it never ever crashes (I have 4 projects open, one of which with 1M lines of code).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      Yeah, the ads built into the OS, obscene levels of slowness to do... literally everything... somehow making Explorer consistently worse... all these things are an immediate detractor. It's been unusable for years and has only gotten worse.

      Linux has also gotten worse for Desktop use. A decade ago there were promises of just-around-the-corner Wayland replacing X outright. Now you need them both to do anything, and Wayland is still anything but mature. A lot of this functionality feels like it's regressed. Upg

    • Complaints about one OS, must be made in the context of everyone else.

      The complaints are being made in the context of older versions of the same OS, which were of higher quality.

      Yeah, Windows is trash, but that doesn't make it OK for new versions of Mac OS to be less stable than old versions.

      I mean, it's OK with me since Linux keeps getting better on average (with occasional major setbacks like GNOME 3 ofc TBH, but there's no perfection anywhere alas) but it's really not a reasonable thing for Apple customers to be expected to enjoy.

  • I switched to Mac due to them being provided by my employers (from Linux) around 2017, but I've only bought Macs myself since due to the vastly superior hardware and not having to ever have to deal with Windows again.

    The UNIX environment is "OK" and `brew` makes it quite tolerable.

    But there are so, so many bugs. In addition to all the points the fine article makes, my personal pet peeves:

    * Apple Music is stupid when it comes to switching audio devices. It's not a bluetooth stack problem (which is another, d

  • I'm constantly have apps completely freeze and having to kill and restart them, and every new version of osx seems to make nfs worse and worse. Very frustrating...

  • They are building a surprisingly deep application platform including client and server hardware

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