Apple’s declining software quality

This has to be a management problem. Apple has total control over the hardware, total control over third party developers, and $203 billion in cash. What are they doing wrong?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/0/MA663/en_US/Pages09...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the author's list of gripes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Forgetting how truly crap things used to be

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

2. Ostalgie [0]

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

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

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

4. Civilisation is crumbling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Down currently, Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Us-NZtX...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1] http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/01/why-dns-in-os-x-10-10-i...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- randomly losing wifi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://discussions.apple.com/message/29742198?tstart=0#2974...

Also google "slow wifi MacBook pro"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think the decline is overstated. Couple related points-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2013/06/30/the-six-ha...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-google-microsoft-where-do...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even the article is buggy!

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

*they're

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"This is a blank problem. No, this is a blank problem."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> and Microsoft and Facebook.

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

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

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

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/BS-wilowvB4-dvPFL_VrUQ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If that brand name is tarnished by regressions and performance problems, what consumer would buy a car from the brand?

This.

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

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

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

EDIT: Looks okay now 10 minutes later.

Apple has not gotten substantially more buggy IMO, but they've made some questionable UX choices (and put more MSFT like stuff in their OS). Windows has gotten much less buggy but is still doing stupid nonsense that probably started with management. So their software advantage has eroded some, but that's as much MSFT getting less stupid and Apple getting more like MSFT in their approach to stupid nonsense in their OS.

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

Such a tiny thing, yet so infuriating.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=mac+contacts+%22el+capitan%2...

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

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

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

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

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

http://macperformanceguide.com/topics/topic-AppleCoreRot.htm...

I disagree and agree.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think there are a few concrete things going on:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile the Gnome apps are amazing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

iTunes: Do I really need to say anything?

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

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

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

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

Make Apple Great Again

FTFY

Cache since server is currently overwhelmed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    In Fortune’s story, Lashinsky says Steve Jobs summoned the entire MobileMe team for a meeting at the company’s on-campus Town Hall, accusing everyone of “tarnishing Apple’s reputation.” He told the members of the team they “should hate each other for having let each other down”, and went on to name new executives on the spot to run the MobileMe team. A few excerpts from the article.

    “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continues, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?”

    Jobs was also particularly angry about the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg not liking MobileMe:

    “Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us.”

Jim Dalrymple, in response to Mossberg, writes:

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

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

The fundamental decline started when they moved towards flat design.

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

On Windows, Apple software has always been bad.

Apple's stock ticker is AAPL not APPL

It is unfortunately happening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Irony? "Error establishing a database connection"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nope. See Brooks' Law.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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