Apple has lost the functional high ground

http://www.marco.org/2015/01/04/apple-lost-functional-high-ground

by milen • 12 years ago

453 294 12 years ago

owenwil• 12 years ago

This discussion is just going around in circles with nobody adding real useful commentary to the discussion other than "I perceive Apple's software quality to be worse based on my own anecdotal experience." This opinion is being perpetuated by a few people and it's just going everywhere.

I don't think the software quality dropped, it's all about perception. Just a few years ago, everyone was moaning about software quality with Lion but nobody remembers that now, because bad headlines are easier to create than good ones. Yosemite has some bugs, yes, but so do almost every other major releases of Operating Systems.

Apple does have some bugs to iron out, but in six month's time when they're fixed, everyone will forget and start complaining about something else. Perhaps a few happened around the same time, but that's no indication that things are getting worse. People just like to complain.

Those who want to experience a lower "functional high ground" should switch to Ubuntu and discover how much further ahead OS X is.

To the everyday user, there is no drop in software quality. They wouldn't have even noticed unless articles like this continued to circulate. People are just noisier these days.

nextstep• 12 years ago

I think you nailed it.

To most people (i.e. the majority of the world who doesn't read tech regurgitation) there has been no dramatic shift in software quality from Apple. There have been some hiccups with cloud services or OS updates that affected a lot of people, but these got resolved and Apple still ranks very highly in customer satisfaction.

yourad_io• 12 years ago

To most people there has been no dramatic shift in software quality from Apple. [...] Apple still ranks very highly in customer satisfaction.

Source?

microtonal3• 12 years ago

Apple still ranks very highly in customer satisfaction.

But is dropping. In fact, Samsung has surpassed them in consumer satisfaction for smartphones:

http://www.iphoneincanada.ca/news/samsung-surpasses-apple-in...

uptown• 12 years ago

Maybe. It's just odd to me that each new version of OSX seems to revisit basic problems like stable wifi. I would have assumed the way things like that were implemented wouldn't have changed much from version to version.

And "Back to my Mac" seems to get screwed up with each major OSX update. Still no solution for that one.

DigitalJack3• 12 years ago

I may just not use whatever it is that has bugs in OSX, but I've got a 2009 Mac Book Pro that I've been using since it was new, and I always upgrade the OS after a month or so from release.

I've only ever noticed a bug in Lion or Mountain Lion (don't recall which) where time machine would get borked if I put the computer to sleep when it was in the middle of a backup. That was super annoying, but it was fixed eventually.

I've never had any issues with wifi or graphics or whatever. I suspect these issues come about from hardware changes and the related drivers in the various models. Windows has the exact same problem, exacerbated by the freedom users have to mix and match hardware. My work computer running windows 7 would crash once or twice a week, always due to video driver (or the underlying hardware).

While Apple's ecosystem is limited, they actually have a rather large diversity of hardware to support now, and I'm sure that is the source of many issues. Makes me afraid to upgrade actually since my computer works so well.

gress7• 12 years ago

I think there is more surface area for people to notice bugs, and we're suing the systems far more so we feel problems more acutely.

More importantly, even if it's true that there is a slight increase in bugs now that they've moved to an annual schedule, there is no logic to the idea that the should now just abandon the schedule and go slower. They are in a highly competitive situation. The solution is not to go slower, but rather to improve their processes and practices.

JonathonW• 12 years ago

Who are they competing against to go faster? In the desktop space, Microsoft's on (at least) a 2-year cadence, and that was in response to Apple speeding up their release cadence. Ubuntu's also on a two-year cadence (for LTS releases), but I'd be surprised if they're even on Apple's radar in any significant way.

On mobile, Android's also slower than Apple. Android 4.x lasted three years before being replaced by Android 5 this fall; the releases in between were all primarily Snow Leopard-style performance and stability updates.

If Apple's fast release cadence is having adverse consequences (which, FWIW, I'm not convinced that it is), there's no one to blame except Apple: they're the ones setting the expectation of rapid releases.

baddox3• 12 years ago

I don't doubt that there is some bias toward remembering more recent complaints more. However, I don't know if you can pull the "it's anecdotal" card on something like this, because unlike most scientific studies (like on the effectiveness of a medical treatment), personal experience is a crucial part of the definition of "software quality." Also, I think it's reasonable to assume that most software, especially in unjailbroken iOS devices, is deterministic, and thus conclude that the experience of a bug is the result of a software problem. I'm a big iOS user, and I definitely share the experience of a steady decrease in software quality.

I should add that while I use OS X and generally install the upgrades promptly, I spend the vast majority of my time in Emacs and Chrome, and thus probably don't really "use OS X" enough to notice any software quality issues. It seems fine to me.

derefr3• 12 years ago

I think it's reasonable to assume that most software, especially in unjailbroken iOS devices, is deterministic, and thus conclude that the experience of a bug is the result of a software problem

One major factor people tend to forget is that software can end up executing different code paths on different hardware. In other words—software can be both bug-free on a recent Mac, and yet horribly bug-riddled on an older Mac. This produces a very divergent set of personal experiences where people tend to talk over one-another because everyone is seeing a different part of the elephant.

IBM• 12 years ago

I agree. People said Snow Leopard was the last good OS X update but I couldn't tell a difference between that and any of the subsequent updates. The 'Apple software quality is declining' meme only seems to be coming from the Apple developer bubble.

sjwright• 12 years ago

The latter point releases of Snow Leopard represented a point in OS X history when there was great stability in user expectations of the Mac operating system. It wasn't perfect, but most things worked perfectly. Performance was excellent. System stability was high, too.

The problem with Lion is that it started dicking around with previously stable user expectations -- a perfect example being the skeu Address Book that had inferior usability.

Mountain Lion improved things a bit.

Mavericks improved things further, and represents another high point in OS X history.

Yosemite once again dicks around with previously stable user expectations -- a perfect example being the new aesthetic which looks crisp in retina but looks fussy and unfinished in low resolution. Spotlight is no longer a drop down menu for no reason. Time Machine no longer spins. The green buttons now do different things. It's even more difficult to enable TRIM on third party SSDs.

mhuffman4• 12 years ago

I disagree, you did not see the same amount of complaints with snow lion. Observational and anecdotal experiences are still experiences and are evidence that something is going on. If you owned a restaurant and suddenly your customers started complaining after you changed your recipes, would you still think it is nothing to worry about? And just because Ubuntu sucks worse than OSX, does not mean that OSX is not starting to suck.

pdabbadabba4• 12 years ago

snow lion

...Snow Leopard?

The problem with your response is that I don't know that anyone has ever actually provided reliable evidence that the number of complaints has gone up. GP's view, which I share, is that people always complain about new releases, forgetting that the previous release had its problems as well. As GP said, bad headlines are easier to make than good ones. Simply reiterating that you think the previous release had fewer problems, and that there are anecdotes out there about problems in the current release, is hardly a refutation of this. This is entirely consistent with GP's view.

I for one have experienced no significant change in reliability on the road from Snow Leopard to Yosemite (for what that's worth).

revscat3• 12 years ago

Every release since SL has been met with the same vague complaints.

mgkimsal2• 12 years ago

OT but... I had an argument with wait staff, then the manager, at a local restaurant I used to go to.

"Everything OK?"

"Well, no, not really. This chicken sandwich is... different than it used to be. It tastes different from 2 weeks ago, but the menu hasn't changed. Did you change the recipe?"

"No, nothing's changed. This is the same"

"No, really, it's changed."

Back and forth, slightly escalating - manager comes over.

Same dialog.

He comes back about 10 minutes later.

"The recipe hasn't changed at all. We just use different ingredients".

Well... it's... a bun, chicken patty, tomato, lettuce and mayo. The bun and chicken had changed. But not the recipe. But they didn't apologize for any misunderstanding or anything - quite irate that I was making a "big deal" out of it.

Back story was I'd been going there for about 2 years, 1-3x per month, getting the same thing. It's what I liked best there. Then it was changed. Except not. And it was bad. But there was nothing on the menu to indicate "new" on it. And I was 'wrong' for registering dissatisfaction with the new change that wasn't a change.

king_magic3• 12 years ago

You don't think Apple's software quality has dropped? Guess you havn't had a hanging Safari or Chrome tab take down the entire OS.

Yosemite is riddled with blantently broken issues like this. I'd love to enumerate them for you, but frankly, Apple should be doing that with a flood of automatic updates. Of which I've seen 1 since installing Yosemite.

As an everyday user, there has been a massive drop in quality. Far, far worse than previous OS X upgrades. This is just not a case of people wanting to complain for the sake of complaining. I've been saying it for weeks now: Yosemite is Apple's Windows Vista.

engi_nerd• 12 years ago

My Yosemite seems to be taken down the most by a hung iBooks. And iOS8 made my 3rd generation iPad almost unusable.

Just another bit of anecdata.

revscat3• 12 years ago

I have not seen any of the issues with Safari or Chrome that you are reporting. The opposite, in fact: Safari this is so much faster than Chrome under Yosemite that it has become my primary browser.

I'm a developer, by the way, and have both browsers open most of every working day.

If anything, I have seen an increase in quality with Yosemite.

coldtea4• 12 years ago

You don't think Apple's software quality has dropped? Guess you havn't had a hanging Safari or Chrome tab take down the entire OS.

No, I haven't.

bratsche• 12 years ago

Guess you havn't had a hanging Safari or Chrome tab take down the entire OS.

I haven't seen that happen on either of my Macs.

I've experienced exactly one major new issue in Yosemite, and it's only affecting one of my Macs: when my iMac Retina sleeps, it often doesn't wake correctly and ends up doing a system reset so all my terminal state is lost. It's really fucking annoying. I managed to work around it by changing something in the sleep settings.

raarts• 12 years ago

You don't think Apple's software quality has dropped? Guess you havn't had a hanging Safari or Chrome tab take down the entire OS.

No, I haven't. I really don't know what all the fuzz is about. I love my MBA, no problems, no bugs that I'm aware of. Develop on it, run Parallels. Battery life is fantastic.

jsz0• 12 years ago

Guess you havn't had a hanging Safari or Chrome tab take down the entire OS.

According to the contents of my ~/Library/Application Support/CrashReporter logs my last Safari crash was August 3rd 2014 which IIRC would have been a 10.10 DP release. I don't doubt you are having this problem but it's hard for me to relate considering my freshest CrashReporter log for any app is VLC from November 3rd 2014. In my experience using 10.10 on 3 different Macs (Mac Pro 4,1, MacMini late 2012, rMBP early 2013) the worst issue I've encountered is somehow when using multiple displays and setting SilverLight video to fullscreen my Dock occasionally gets set to auto-hide. Pretty sure that's some ugly hack being done by the SilverLight plugin since it has never happened with Flash or HTML5 full screen video.

My gut feeling is these different experiences might be due to migrating data between OSX releases. I had migrated/upgraded from 10.4 to 10.8 and finally did a fresh install / setup for Mavericks which was then upgraded/migrated to 10.10 DPs. Looking at an older backup from November I see some files ~/Library/Application Support/ renamed as .incompatible. so I wonder if perhaps the 10.10 DPs were doing something unique to dump old app data? It just seems odd to me that some of us are having little to no issues while others are reporting these major issues. It could of course also be machine specific (driver) causes but at least for the last 2-3 generations of machines there isn't really enough variation in hardware to justify that theory.

r00fus2• 12 years ago

Guess you havn't had a hanging Safari or Chrome tab take down the entire OS.

Pray tell, how did you diagnose this? Was flash running on either of those pages?

Hengjie• 12 years ago

I'll give you a more specific example, going to theverge.com and playing one of their videos in Chrome, will cause OSX Yosemite to switch from integrated to discrete graphics. That is typically enough to crash the whole system, allowing you to only move your mouse around.

bushido• 12 years ago

This discussion is just going around in circles with nobody adding real useful commentary to the discussion other than "I perceive Apple's software quality to be worse based on my own anecdotal experience." This opinion is being perpetuated by a few people and it's just going everywhere.

You quoted the unreliability of anecdotal experience and then went ahead and added your own anecdotal immediately in the next paragraph:

   I don't think the software quality dropped

> Those who want to experience a lower "functional high ground" should switch to Ubuntu and discover how much further ahead OS X is.

I am sure most would agree with you that OS X at it worst is way ahead of Ubuntu, except that's not really the benchmark the users who are going around in circles are using, it quite evident in almost each one of these anecdotal commentary that an older version of OS X is the Benchmark

I think the real complaint people have is that a lot of these people switched to Apple for superior well tested hardware and software, thus avoiding problems that they would not need to wait six months to be fixed.

The key take away I think is NOT that recently OS X has some bugs, rather that the seemingly increasing in occurrence of bugs that more advanced users are experiencing is perceived as a sign on discarding their Test Everything Well Before Shipping culture that important to these people.

To the everyday user, there is no drop in software quality.

The core market for Apple until quite recently was not the everyday user but developers, designers and the more tech savvy.

-----

I am unsure if your comment was designed to substantiate your thought that "This discussion is just going around in circles with nobody adding real useful commentary to the discussion", if it was, at that you succeeded.

boynamedsue• 12 years ago

FWIW I think writing server components are far, far better on Ubuntu Desktop than OS X. Package management is amazing and it matches my Ubuntu server deployments for production.

heyts• 12 years ago

I agree with you on many points and it seems obvious that apple is spread too thin these days and tries to do too much.

I dont think this statement is true however:

The core market for Apple until quite recently was not the everyday user but developers, designers and the more tech savvy.

Historically the core market of Apple Computer has been graphic-designers, journalists and the education market. Developers have only been on the platform post OS X because of unix.

username3• 12 years ago

These discussions criticizing Apple usually precede a new product that explains everything.

notsony• 12 years ago

people switched to Apple for superior well tested hardware

Hardware which you have to bake in an oven and drill holes in the case.

Hardware which has RAM soldered and proprietary hard drive connectors.

There is better hardware out there - which runs Linux - and at more competitive price points than what Apple offers.

TheOtherHobbes• 12 years ago

The key take away I think is NOT that recently OS X has some bugs, rather that the seemingly increasing in occurrence of bugs that more advanced users are experiencing is perceived as a sign on discarding their Test Everything Well Before Shipping culture that important to these people.

Apple products are clearly becoming less stable and usable, in ways that are very basic and obvious. Extreme computing skills are not required. I can think of the following bugs without trying too hard:

iCloud Notes fail to sync between my Mac, iPad and iPhone. (I've tried everything I can to fix this. Nothing worked.)

iPhoto makes two copies of all my photos when I download them from them my iPhone/iPad.

Windows/OS X networked file sharing seems deliberately broken, possibly at the Apple end. (You have to install the previous version of Samba to get it to kind-of work some of the time.)

I can't use FaceTime on my Mac because some weird sample rate issue makes everyone sound like a chipmunk.

Incoming FaceTime calls don't always ring on all devices, and some are simply ignored on all devices. (This is particularly unhelpful, especially for business calls.)

iTunes is an outstanding example of terrible software design. (Why is it still impossible to access app content directories from iTunes in any useful way? Why is the app icon layout editor so crufty and clumsy? And so on...)

All these features Just Don't Work[tm]. And it's not as a result of god-mode tweaking. They've simply never worked.

tl:dr; - Apple really needs to improve its software game.

I think the actual problem is complacency and a culture that favours style-over-substance marketing over solid UX engineering.

There's a lot of interest in trivia like flat icons, but clearly no one in or near the C-Suite cares about more basic usability issues.

ksk2• 12 years ago

This opinion is being perpetuated by a few people and it's just going everywhere.

Well, you're attacking others' opinions for being opinions, and not facts, but your claims are nothing more than opinions too. Sorry, I don't know what your point is?

Just to add my own anecdote, my dad recently asked that his macbook air be reformatted to make it 'fast' again. Meanwhile, the '08 PC that I'm using now is running Win8.1 like a champ.

Yosemite has some bugs, yes, but so do almost every other major releases of Operating Systems.

Heh, so Apple is just .. like everyone else? No need to hold Apple to a higher standard if that is the case. The entire point of people complaining is that Apple shouldn't be shipping buggy products like the competition.

Apple does have some bugs to iron out, but in six month's time when they're fixed, everyone will forget and start complaining about something else.

Well, why would Apple fix the bugs if nobody complained? They wouldn't even know about them. Of course that is presuming they fix the bugs they know about.

To the everyday user, there is no drop in software quality.

So why are the everyday users complaining?

Some of the bugs that I've personally come across.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6601963?tstart=0

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6604139

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4766577

http://rustyshelf.org/2014/10/01/it-just-works/

Oh.. And

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/10/01/it-just-works

Ok, maybe Gruber is not your everyday user... :)

coldtea4• 12 years ago

Heh, so Apple is just .. like everyone else? No need to hold Apple to a higher standard if that is the case. The entire point of people complaining is that Apple shouldn't be shipping buggy products like the competition.

So, they would use magical unicorn dust to remove all bugs?

Of course they'll gonna have bugs on OS X, every OS has bugs.

If Apple was held on a higher standard wasn't because OS X didn't have bugs, but because it had better usability, nicer design (where it matters), and a UNIX core to boot.

So why are the everyday users complaining?

Because they were always complaining. I remember simila discussions after every OS version.

Wi-fi and graphics card issues in particular (like the ones you linked to) have been with us since 10.0.

For graphic cards issues it's usually the driver (so Nvidia/ATI, not Apple), and models get updated, so it's not like some core OS X kernel component that can be fixed and stay fixed.

And for Wi-fi there are also tons of Wi-fi routers, repeaters, setups etc, there will always be some incompatibilities. I had my fair share of such in Windows and Linux too.

maguay2• 12 years ago

The problem I've seen is that it's not just geeks this time. Sitting around a New Year's party with mostly non-geeks, everyone was discussing how they were hesitant to install new versions of iOS now thanks to bugs et al (both existent ones and media trumped-up stuff). That's both a direct and a perception problem that Apple has got to fix, stat.

The only good thing for Apple is, the same discussions included frustrations over both Android and Windows 8. Maybe the thing is that now, everyone's an early-adopter geek.

rtpg2• 12 years ago

Thing is nobody complains about Android updates breaking everything (though there are a lot of complaints about updates not happening), because the upgrades are usually well tested (despite having many more hardware platforms). Win8 there was Metro, but I really didn't hear much about Windows being broken.

iOS and OS X have stability issues, ones that other systems seem to deal with more gracefully now.

chromejs10• 12 years ago

I agree 100%. Marco just posts random complaints these days. There are no specific examples of what is actually broken. An OS is about as big of a project as you can get. What evidence is there that Mac OS X is any more broken than any other widely used operating system?

aik• 12 years ago

Alternatively, perhaps people are responding because they are having (or have had) similar experiences. Personally I have been very frustrated with iOS in the past year or two due to crashes and other bugs. Granted, a good number have been resolved in recent patches, but I'm still getting way more crashes than I used to several years ago (weekly+), and shaking off the previously frustrations and regaining trust is a time-consuming process.

Perhaps it's also lack of QC for new releases. When iOS 7 and 8 were released, pretty much everyone I knew were experiencing frequent crashes and other issues.

As someone else pointed out, there is more surface area for bugs to occur. Hopefully QC will step it up.

vacri• 12 years ago

You're annoyed that 'no-one remembers Lion', because people either upgraded from it or stuck with Snow Leopard to avoid it? It's a bit disingenuous to complain that no-one remembers the issues with an OS that folks aren't really using anymore and has been out of support for several months now.

No-one in the Ubuntu world much remembers Ubuntu 11.04 either - so what? Does that mean that the currently-used operating systems shouldn't have their flaws discussed?

krschultz2• 12 years ago

Ubuntu should not be the bar. Maybe Windows - but Windows has a significantly more difficult task. Apple controls all of the hardware & software. I would expect significantly fewer bugs than the other platforms.

This is also not just about Yosemite. The fact that the iOS update rates are significantly lower this year is a sign users were not happy with the previous update.

tolmasky• 12 years ago

Apple does have some bugs to iron out, but in six month's time when they're fixed, everyone will forget and start complaining about something else.

That's the whole point: we'll start complaining about something else because in 6 months when the bugs are theoretically fixed we'll have another OS X release waiting for us right around corner (approx 4 months away) which will put us right back at square one!

Tiger's lifespan was from November 2005 through October 2007. So, if we accept the premise that all the OSes were equally buggy and it also took Tiger 6 months to get the bugs worked out, then you still had another 18 months of a stable OS.

This reasonably allows customers to decide whether to be early adopters or waiters: its perfectly fine to hold off those 6 initial months since you then still get 3/4 of the products lifespan with some assurance that its stable. That's just not the case anymore, if you wait those 6 months then now you've got another release right around the corner, you're perpetually in upgrade mode. Not to mention that most the bugs will probably ship in the major release anyways since (non-security) bug fix release have more or less merged with the new features that introduce new bugs release.

snowwrestler• 12 years ago

My MacBook Air is running 10.8 Mountain Lion. I regularly receive security updates (including the pushed NTP fix), as well as application updates like Safari and iTunes, and 3rd party updates for apps like Chrome, Firefox, MS Office for Mac, Evernote, DropBox, Coda, etc.

I don't know what the "official" lifespan of 10.8 is, but it has every appearance of being fully supported by Apple today. And yes, it is very stable.

mc32• 12 years ago

One big question which I have not seen addressed is major release support. Has that changed with the quick release cycle? I think it used to be current and two previous major versions --which in a 2yr release cycle means six years of patches/bug fixes. But with the current release cycle could mean shorter support, unless they support current plus three or four previous releases.

For some orgs LTS matters, for others it may not.

ibejoeb• 12 years ago

I haven't had significant problem with OS X. iOS is trickier.

For a more concrete criticism of functional software, thoughtfulness of design, and reliability, though, I submit Apple ID, iTunes, App Store, etc. This has been the buggiest and most opaque set of services I've dealt with recently. I have 3 different accounts now, each connected to developer credentials and app store purchases. 1 original account seems to have turned into 3 by way of failed sign-ins via iTunes and multiple failed password reset attempts.

Each of these has 3 or 4 nonsense trivia questions associated with it. I have a folder in KeePass dedicated to managing this stuff. I have a spreadsheet that attempts to map these things to purchases. I can't automatically install updates because App Store downloads have associated themselves with different accounts.

I've given up in a way. I have years-old versions of software that I don't update just due to the complexity of signing in. I don't know how people deal with it.

protomyth• 12 years ago

Since Apple's bug database is private, what would be an objective criteria that you would accept? For my own part, I have more bugs reported on 10.9 and 10.10 then any other releases.

My everyday users hate iOS 8 and 10.10 due to network, Finder, and file share issues.

JoshuaDavid• 12 years ago

Those who want to experience a lower "functional high ground" should switch to Ubuntu and discover how much further ahead OS X is.

I did exactly that (12.04 LTS), and am not going back. Configuring some things (I'm looking at you, Silverlight) is a pain, but most stuff is pretty painless. OS X looks much shinier, granted, but in terms of usability I prefer Ubuntu.

rdtsc2• 12 years ago

They wouldn't have even noticed unless articles like this continued to circulate.

We should clearly find a way to squash and punish the infidels from voicing their opinion.

I feel there is a bit of dissonance here between:

should switch to Ubuntu and discover how much further ahead OS X is.
People just like to complain.

I've used Ubuntu for some time. Now on 14.10. Can you point out how ahead OS X is? Not saying it isn't. Just there is nothing I lack or wish I had in Ubuntu 14.10 that I don't already have. I like the interface. The ecosystem of packages. All hardware I want to work works. Also I paid $0 for the OS, (But donated to it before, you can too here: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/contribute if you feel like it is lacking major functionality)

SkyMarshal2• 12 years ago

I used Ubuntu exclusively from 2009 till Feb 2014, at which point I joined a startup, got a MBPr 15", and have been using it exclusively since. And I agree, OS X offers a few marginal benefits, and some drawbacks, but it's not much further ahead.

OS X advantages:

- Entertainment: OS X has better entertainment options and ecosystem, iTunes mainly, though Amazon MP3, Amazon Prime Video, and Netflix are negating this as advantage.

- 3rd party desktop apps: I find little gems in both OS X's app store and in Ubuntu's "store" and repo's, but the best on OS X are generally better than the best on Ubuntu. Notepads like Quiver which integrate Markdown and LaTeX, Slack's only native app (or native-wrapped web app) is on OS X, Kindle native app for OS X, etc. That said, Ubuntu's good enough that I wouldn't miss OS X in this respect.

- Overall better for lay people and non-techies. Gestures, etc. Still complex though, just as difficult as Windows for non-techies to learn. For example, I'd love to recommend to my almost 70yr old parents they switch from Windows to Mac, but the learning curve now is too steep. This is one of the disadvantages of adding lots of features to an OS - higher learning curve.

OS X disadvantages

- Stability:Price ratio: OS X is significantly worse. About the same stability as desktop linux but at a much higher price. I can crash both OS's by abusing memory (eg, too many apps open + too many browser tabs). A free OS I can forgive, an expensive one tailored to a single custom hardware configuration I can't.

- Lock in: little things like having to take your Mac to a service center to replace the battery, or the inability to copy your entire home partition over to a new computer, etc.

- FOSS: personal preference, like knowing my computer has the many eyeballs effect.

- Overall better for power users. Tiling window managers, ability to keybind everything to Vim keybinds (file manager, all browsers, even Emacs), means you can easily dispense with mice and gestures altogether and use a much faster and more powerful interface.

Zardoz84• 12 years ago

You should try Kubuntu (aka, install KDE in your Ubuntu). Far much better that Unity, and you can customize ANYTHING. Even, you could do that look&feel similar to OS X .

The only thing that I appreciate from OS X (I don't have it, but I thought about getting it, and I have some contact with it on a friend's mac), was am assumption that is very polished in all aspects. Reading this article makes to think that isn't true any more.

dllthomas• 12 years ago

I really don't expect OS X has it, but something I wish I had on Ubuntu was a notification daemon that 1) let me pull up a history, and 2) would batch lower priority notifications...

gurkendoktor7• 12 years ago

One difference between 10.7 and 10.10 is that 10.7 cost money and 10.6 kept working as before. It was considered perfectly normal to stay on the old system and be productive. (The Windows world is still "sane" in that way.)

Now Apple and the internet army of Early Adopters have united and it works like that-

1. iOS 8 is released and you have to update (if you want to receive security updates)

2. If you accidentally enable iCloud Drive or use a new version of iWork, you need the Yosemite Developer Preview (or wait for 10.10.0)

3. Now you are using iOS 8.0 and 10.0.0 and live through six terrible months.

It's a lot harder to be a "slow adopter" nowadays, especially if you live deep in the Apple ecosystem (iCloud, iWork).

smoyer• 12 years ago

I've long said that the Apple hardware is second to none ... and I have a G3 Wallstreet that not only still runs, but it's battery lasts for a couple hours.

My mid-2012 rMBP is pretty amazing too, but I quickly became irritated by OSX. It's now running Linux Mint with the XFCE WM now and I couldn't be happier (note that with a kernel upgrade, it even supports my Thunderbolt Cinema display).

The one thing I wonder is: "Are we in the minority?" Do the "unschooled masses" simply accept that this is how computers have to be?

scotty796• 12 years ago

Two previous mac books died on me after a year or so (they were already used for a year or two when I bought them). One died due to GPU solder problem. The other due to some unspecified damage to HDD controller.

Hope our new retina will live longer. If only my girlfriend that actually uses it would allow me to kill the osx and put Windows 10 there it would save us both a lot of frustration.

Mac OSX is hardly usable. I get how developers can get used to it. Once you start Terminal you have a fairly usable sort of linux computer. I still don't get how graphic designers use it. Its UI is so buggy, glitchy, uncooperative towards hardware (wacom tablet! or just ordinary mice).

As for the hardware it's really powerful and the price is right or better than right for those components. The thing is that you wouldn't build PC out of those component yourself, because you'd rather use processor that's 8% weaker but costs half as much.

bluthru• 12 years ago

If only my girlfriend that actually uses it would allow me to kill the osx and put Windows 10 there it would save us both a lot of frustration.

That's a terrible idea from a battery perspective.

eddieroger3• 12 years ago

Mac OSX is hardly usable.

You cite anecdotes that you don't even pretend to justify with examples. Are you speaking from experience? I'd bet not. And it's interesting that you think putting Windows 10 on your girlfriend's machine would solve your problems - moving my entire family to a Mac running OS X has solved all of mine.

mschuster91• 12 years ago

One died due to GPU solder problem

Let me guess, NVIDIA GPU? The Windows laptop world got hit pretty hard by that one, too. It wasn't just Macs affected, it was a systemic failure (brought by EU-mandated lead removal in solder, iirc).

rimantas• 12 years ago

  > you have a fairly usable sort of linux computer.

You have unix computer.

fpgeek3• 12 years ago

The decline of "It just works" is one side of the problem. The other, more painful side (driven by the iOS-ification of the OS, I suppose) is: "When it doesn't work, you're helpless".

gress7• 12 years ago

How have users of OSX become more helpless than they were at any point in the past?

fpgeek3• 12 years ago

To take a simple example, faster OS updates combined with more aggressive OS version requirements for Apple apps (e.g. iPhoto) mean that getting the latest app bugfixes demands much more upheaval in your computing environment than it used to.

bane4• 12 years ago

I would be pretty happy if each release didn't fundamentally break key pieces of software I use every day. The last update broke Jabber and VPN for me. I'm one of three OS X machines in my group and was the first to upgrade to Yosemite. My canary in the coal mine experience has waived the rest of the team off.

Now I can't call into our daily VTCs or work remotely as easily as everybody else. The Windows users with Putty are running circles around the Mac users in these terms.

MS-Office windows keep disappearing when I go on-off my second monitor. Mice continue to work poorly (especially over the trackpad), on computer build by the company that popularized them.

At least multi-monitor support is generally better at last. I honestly can't believe the software shipped in the state it was the last few releases of the OS. I upgraded to Yosemite purely because of that. Still, it's sometimes buggy and I've had more than one experience where dragging windows over to another monitor cause all kinds of mayhem.

Now if only I could get an OS level window Maximize that worked right and maybe good tiling window support, and fix how broken Finder is, I'd be relatively happy.

I had a choice, Windows or a Mac, and after I saw the atrocious Dell hardware my company had on offer, I really had no choice but to go Mac. But sometimes....sometimes....

kweinber• 12 years ago

I feel like the software really hasn't changed enough for me to feel differently about Apple at all.

However the the fact that the hardware is GLUED together and non-upgradeable in all models is the thing that has me looking elsewhere. Is anyone else frustrated that their retina machines are completely obsoleted on purpose and that even the minis have memory chips soldered into them for no reason but wasteful planned obsolescence?

I think that Apple is going to hit a major backlash when people realize that their memory and hard drives are trapped and limited for no real technical reason.

empthought6• 12 years ago

Unfortunately for tinkerers, these processes allow Apple to produce very small and lightweight hardware. These qualities are more valuable to consumers than tinkerability.

vinceguidry3• 12 years ago

Except that they're not needed to get to small and lightweight. Those qualities are driven by the size of components decreasing due to die improvements. So they can stick smaller, better components onto boards every year.

Look at enough device tear downs, and you realize that lack of repairability is more about laziness than it is about legitimate tradeoffs.

gress7• 12 years ago

They've been like this for years. Nobody upgrades CPUs in laptops or all in one machines. If a backlash was coming it would have hit by now.

jeremyjh• 12 years ago

I really doubt most consumers care about glue. They buy a new phone every two years, they won't bat an eyelash about buying a new computer every four years. I think the glue is less about planned obsolescence and more about selling more upgrades up-front, although I doubt even that makes a difference with most of their users. I bought a mini when they first came out and I upgraded the ram myself because it saved like $100; but I suspect this was happening to a single-digit percentage of their minis.

corford2• 12 years ago

A friend of mine has just joined apple in a systems role and can't believe what a mess it is behind the scenes. He described it as being like "1000 startups all working on their own thing but owned by the same parent company" (with all the cross-group communication mayhem that implies).

gress7• 12 years ago

That sounds like essentially a good thing. The idea 1000 startups are likely to be better at innovating than one monolithic bureaucracy seems like a familiar one here on Hacker News.

corford2• 12 years ago

Sounds good but apparently the reality is a horrendous 'mish mash' of different tech stacks and fairly poor cross-group communication. Throw a marketing driven release cycle in to the mix (as the article implies) and it's no wonder a few cracks are appearing.

The age old problem of being a monster sized company I guess. No one is immune.

rifung• 12 years ago

That actually sounds awesome.. guess it just shows I wouldn't know how to run a company.

I work at Amazon and actually hate how much communication we have to do between teams; it just adds so much overhead

corbinpage• 12 years ago

I mean, all software has bugs.

To me, the major difference between Apple's OS's and the Windows/Linux/Androids of the world is that Apple _fails smoother_.

A typical bug may result in an iOS app freezing and then quitting on the user. However frustrating this may be, Apple's "something went wrong" user experience is much better than the annoying pop-up alerts, blue-screens of death, and cryptic error messages of the other platforms.

These error messages are only relevant to a small, small subset of power-users, so why show them to everyone else? The other 99% of users are just going to quit and restart the application anyway (as we've been trained to do), so why not smoothly lead them down this path?

gbog• 12 years ago

I mean, all software has bugs.

That's a cool mantra to repeat but it do not seem to match reality.

For instance, in over 10 years of daily usage, I do not think having ever noticed any bugs in vim, grep and PostgreSQL. Just to take grep, for instance: if it says the string is not in the file, I have 100% confidence it is not in the file. So not only grep do not freeze my PC, it is also deterministic, which means perfectly reliable when one talks its language.

OSes are more complex you will tell me. Yep, but you said "all software has bugs".

pdabbadabba4• 12 years ago

Well, if we're being pedantic, the fact that you have never noticed a bug in Vim, grep, and PostgreSQL does not mean they don't exist. If you google, e.g., "postgresql bug" you will find evidence of this.

The charitable reading of GP's comment is, of course, that virtually all software has bugs, or that all complex software has bugs. Or, even better, that it is extremely difficult to write bug-free code, and this difficulty rapidly increases with the complexity of the software.

eddieroger3• 12 years ago

You can't acknowledge that an operating system is more complex, but then not give it the benefit of the doubt of halting a system on a bug. If grep or vim fail, they just abort. If Postgres fails, you maybe get a corrupted database and it aborts. If OS X kernel panics, the machine halts. All software has bugs.

Also, if Postgres' bugs were unnoticeable, why did 9.3 get to 9.3.5 before the went to 9.4? Just because you didn't notice a bug doesn't mean someone else wasn't affected by it, and just because you notice bugs in OS X (which I'd bet you didn't) doesn't make them big issues.

chetanahuja• 12 years ago

"Apple _fails smoother_."

Umm.. not any more apparently

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/10/01/it-just-works

"My iPhone 6 rebooted after I changed the home screen wallpaper. Tapped a new image in the wallpaper settings, and poof, it rebooted. Worse, it never stopped rebooting. Endless reboot cycle."

userbinator• 12 years ago

The other 99% of users are just going to quit and restart the application anyway (as we've been trained to do), so why not smoothly lead them down this path?

The fact that 99% of people want to be completely ignorant about the systems that their lives are centered around, and partially controlled by, does not mean they should be restricted from any opportunity to do otherwise. To answer your question,

so why show them to everyone else?

It gives the opportunity for someone to be curious and search for a solution, or at least mention the error to someone who can help. Even if they don't remember the message completely, telling someone "it couldn't foo the bar" even if they don't know what that means is far, far better than "something went wrong". We are told to be as detailed as possible when asking questions or writing bug reports, but these opaque error messages encourage the exact opposite.

This is from someone who has been asked to troubleshoot others' Apple laptops.

visakanv• 12 years ago

I fear that Apple’s leadership doesn’t realize quite how badly and deeply their software flaws have damaged their reputation, because if they realized it, they’d make serious changes that don’t appear to be happening. Instead, the opposite appears to be happening: the marketing-driven pace of rapid updates on multiple product lines seems to be expanding and accelerating.

I've come to realize (or believe, rather) that very often, leadership is actually more aware of flaws than journalists and commentators think they are. It's hard to imagine that tens of thousands of really smart people within an organization haven't thought about these things themselves.

If Apple or any other company isn't making serious changes, I don't think it's because their leadership is ignorant about something we know. More often than not, I think it's because they know something that we don't.

Highly recommend reading Daniel Ellsberg's thoughts on Secrets: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsber...

"First, you'll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn't, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn't even guess. In particular, you'll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn't know about and didn't know they had, and you'll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well."

vinceguidry3• 12 years ago

I suspect Apple's software development practices have never really been all that great, it's just that they worked harder when Jobs was around to make sure the product worked. Now without his influence, quality has been steadily slipping.

If Apple's not careful, they could wake up in a few years and find they're just another tech company.

themoonbus4• 12 years ago

Can anyone give specific examples of OS X backsliding in the feature department? The article he links to talks about having to tweak some settings, and not liking Messages... not really egregious issues in my book. I've been pretty satisfied with how it's progressed (and I'm far from a fanboy. There were times in my life when I was using Linux, Windows, and Mac OS on a daily basis.)

I can think of several features that have improved my productivity... mission control, handoff, updated notifications, the new spotlight to name a few. They also finally fixed multi-monitor support in 10.9 which was a huge deal for me.

I do feel far more productive in OS X than other OS's, but perhaps that's just familiarity at this point. I'm curious to hear what other people's major complaints are.

JoeAltmaier• 12 years ago

Speaking of the OS not as the desktop, but what traditionally an OS means: device support, memory and process management, application environment, file system and networking.

As a developer, I find OS X to be immature, undocumented, arcane and volatile. Online Core documentation is very sketchy, often no more than a listing of argument types. Googling for help results in only questions, rarely answers. Versions add new APIs as quickly as they obsolete the old standard ones, leaving everybody hopping to update, often several times per year.

themoonbus4• 12 years ago

I'm speaking 100% from the perspective of a user, which is what I believe the post was focused on.

I've never developed for Apple platforms.

yoklov• 12 years ago

Depending on what you're doing its still frequently better than Win32 (which has an extremely broad range of API and documentation quality), or linux (which is just downright screwy at times).

Although all bets are off if you're including headers from within mach. You're better off finding what you need in POSIX at that point, or, failing that, an external library.

PhantomGremlin• 12 years ago

Can anyone give specific examples of OS X backsliding in the feature department?

There was a 475+ post discussion just yesterday on this. I'm sure you could find plenty of examples there. :-)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8832943

I don't think it's "backsliding in the feature department" as much as bugs.

themoonbus4• 12 years ago

Missed that post, thanks!

CodeWriter23• 12 years ago

Yosemite is much more memory/swap intensive than Mavericks. On my 4GB 'Air, with 3 apps open, it swaps about 40 times as much as Mavericks. So much so, that SSD lifespan is a concern.

*Based on my own informal tests using vm_stat to measure pageout activity.

twright2• 12 years ago

Two come to mind:

10.6: No new consumer facing features, just a big ironing out of 10.5.

10.7: Removed 2D Spaces layout to a left/right one. Totally ruined my workflow. Also got rid of scroll-bars.

10.8: ?

10.9: Not exactly OS level, but iWork took a huge backslide feature wise.

10.10: Blurs everywhere. It can put a hit on overall performance of applications, especially visual ones like Photoshop+RAW images or video editing.

Nothing comes to mind for [10.8, 10.9] which might say a bit to your point. However, Messages has been in since 10.8 and items are still out of order? They need to iron out just like they did with 10.6, otherwise the bugs and deep issues will compound year after year.

themoonbus4• 12 years ago

Yeah, I still haven't gotten over the layout of spaces to be honest, but overall I think mission control improves my productivity so I've accepted it at this point.

Yosemite seems to run fine on my old Macbook pro, but I don't do any heavy lifting with it.

NelsonMinar• 12 years ago

Mavericks SMB file sharing implementation is completely broken. They shipped a new implementation (no longer using Samba maybe?) and the new implementation does not work correctly. Many painful details at http://www.macwindows.com/mavericks-filesharing.html

blinkingled7• 12 years ago

Windows is still worse overall

Ugh, no it isn't. That myth from Windows ME era must die. For as much as the Windows 8 / Metro thing is an annoyance, under the hood it is a solid OS - I am running it heavily loaded - 4/5 HyperV VMs, IDEs, SQL Server etc and it is thoroughly reliable even counting suspend / resume.

Edit: Elaborating a bit - I got a Win 8 Pro license for $39 when it initially went on sale. I run it on my HP Z series Workstation that I got refurbished for $1199+$(Disks+ 16G ECC RAM). It allows me to run with 5 disks, a 8 Core Xeon CPU, 32GB RAM. The OS came with a very good hypervisor that allows me to run older version of Windows in cheap memory footprint, RHEL 7 and Server 2012 - all decently supported.

If I tried doing that on Mac hardware, even ignoring the considerable cost increase, getting a reliable hypervisor on a Mac is itself a challenge. Last time I tried Fusion and Parallels they were complete toys compared to HyperV.

So no, for techies Windows is still a darn attractive ecosystem - if you are just browsing and emailing any OS from 2013 onwards works fine, including Linux if you find the right hardware.

walterbell3• 12 years ago

Is that with client hyper-v? How does it compare to vmware workstation?

blinkingled7• 12 years ago

Yes, the version that ships with Win 8 Pro. It is hands down better in most aspects compared to VMWare workstation. The integration is better, the footprint is smaller, performance and reliability is great and you get it for free. VMWare might have an edge in the OS Support department - it supports more host and guest OSes than HyperV. But I have had very good experience running DragonFly BSD, Various Linux distros (RHEL7, Centos 6.x, Ubuntu LTS etc.) and Windows 7 of course. Sure you don't get as many bells and whistles compared to VMWare but if you don't need them then HyperV is great.

droopyEyelids• 12 years ago

Where did you get the refurb HP workstation?

blinkingled7• 12 years ago

Straight from HP. Many people don't know it but the HP Business outlet has really good quality hardware (Laptops, Desktops, Workstations and Options) for a really good price. You can browse the list of available hardware and prices here - https://h41183.www4.hp.com/pps-offers.php - it's updated daily and if you keep an eye you will find what you need one day or the other.

_almosnow• 12 years ago

To add something, I actually like Windows 8 and their Metro stuff. I have a 55' LED screen hooked to a PC that I use as my 'media center'. Metro looks gorgeous on it, most of the time I use it for playing music but it had proven useful for other things like opening the allrecipes app and having the recipe displayed while I'm cooking [1].

Aside from that, that PC is always on and being used for days at a time and it never becomes snappy, never drops out of the internet, not anything. And it does it all while using ~2GB ram, I know it's not little, but come on, OS X barely makes it with 4GB.

[1] http://imgur.com/lKYss9D - Check it out, notice the smile on my face.

twright2• 12 years ago

That sounds cool, and I can really see that working well. But I'd argue that you're not really using Windows 8 strenuously in the way that people who complain about it do. It's like claiming Windows XP is stable because Solitaire never crashes.

I completely agree with your final OSX comment, it takes up way too much memory.

rertrree• 12 years ago

Windows are getting better and better.

95/98 crashed all the time, xp crashed if you really tried. Windows 7 hasn't crashed once after two years of daily usage, and/or keeping it running without a restart for months. Even when the system locks up due to user abuse( me ), and would require a reboot on anything older, you just wait a minute and it recovers.

jeena• 12 years ago

I'd like to throw in my experience with Linux here. My backround is that I used Windows 2000 and XP from 2001 to 2003 after that Linux for three years and then OS X until 2013, now back on Linux.

I bought a used ThinkPad because I heard that that is the hardware which would work best with Linux now and I installed Ubuntu on it. Everything worked ok but just the OS filled up half of my small 128 GB SSD and running only Firefox for browsing got up the load to over 0.5, which made everything not so snappy.

A couple of months ago I moved to archlinux with Gnome 3.x, it was a bit more complicated to install, that I admit, but it was so worth it! After installation the system used less then 3 GB of my SSD, and now running just firefox the load is on about 0.01 which makes this ThinkPad from 2010 one of the snappiest computers I ever used. All animations are smooth, not a single application ever crashed or hanged itself and so on. But yeah admitedly I mostly only do development, email and websurfing on it.

wyager2• 12 years ago

under the hood it is a solid OS

As someone who used to get paid to find bugs in low-level windows software, I must emphatically disagree.

At least on the hardware side of things (USB stack, included hardware drivers, etc.), the quality is really quite poor compared to the Linux equivalents. I can't speak to the quality of the OS X equivalents.

et13373• 12 years ago

Did you just espouse Linux hardware support as a paragon of quality?

...wow.

bane4• 12 years ago

As an experiment, all of my daily work is done in a Virtualbox VM guest (Win 7) running on a Win 7 host. I'll spin up some CentOS VMs when I need something Linux-like and usually putty into them. I have a couple other machines one my network I RDP into (the lack of an RDP equivalent on OS X is one annoyance, VNC is just not as good).

It works pretty well. There's some occasional performance issues, but that's mostly due to the amount of RAM and cores I have configured for the VM. But snapshots and full-system backups means that the next time I move machines all I'll really have to do is move my image over and install Virtualbox again to get up and running.

silverlake• 12 years ago

I switched from PC to Mac in 2014 and it has been shocking. In 20 years with Windows I've rarely had issues, but I've got a long list of problems with my new Mac. The MacPro hardware feels great, but the OS crashes every few days. I've already had the logic board replaced once. I'm seriously considering selling my mac and getting a new broadwell pc this year.

yellowapple2• 12 years ago

I've had the opposite experience, typically. At an old job, I was trying to use a Windows 7 workstation for the same tasks as I'd use my GNU/Linux-based home workstations (and the Macbook I'm using at my current job): running VMs with VirtualBox, running local installations of PostgreSQL, etc. Windows was the more painful one, for me at least.

Granted, I'm not a fan of OS X by any means; far from it. However, the one redeeming quality is the fact that it's Unix underneath all the buggy Aqua and Finder and Cocoa and such, so at least I'm able to set it up with MacPorts (and/or Homebrew) and get some proper work done with it just like I would on any other Unix-like OS. You can't do that with Windows, at least not easily (and certainly not as painlessly).

That said, the presence of virtualization extensions in one's CPU would make a significant positive difference; if the Mac you used lacked VT-x (which could be checked by running "sysctl machdep.cpu.features" and seeing if there's a "VMX" entry somewhere in the output of that), it would certainly explain your difficulties with VMWare and Parallels.

It's also worth mentioning that HyperV isn't exactly equivalent to VMWare Fusion or Parallels; it's more equivalent to VMWare ESXi, Xen, or KVM.

otis_inf• 12 years ago

Agreed, windows 8.1 isn't that bad. I hated it to death when I migrated to it due to the dreadful metro shit, but thankfully you don't have to deal with that if you spent some time making sure it's out of your way so booting to desktop and a quicklaunch bar is in place. the rest you get used to. I moved from XP to windows 8 and I missed the start menu a week or so, as I already used a quicklaunch bar for ages in XP.

Now, windows server 2012 R2 on the other hand... aargg...

breatheoften• 12 years ago

As a person who uses OSX in technical environments that are not well-connected for long periods of time (at sea research) -- my strong perception is that a huge host of the 'not behaving as I would want or expect' issues have to do with the way cloud services are getting integrated 'transparently' into so many places across the various systems and applications. 'Transparent' integration of network services has always been a concept with oversold value -- take as an example: NFS, which, even when implemented in tightly controlled high-availability networks, comes with a lot of obscure failure modes that are basically unresolvable because the consumers of the service have essentially no visibility into the notion that there is a network involved.

Hiding the operation of the network completely from the user leads to application design where there is just no sensible way for the user to build an expectation mind for how things are going to behave -- or what the source of mis-behaviour might be at any particular time. It makes things these problems feel exceedingly random. I get to see all sorts of application quirks that pop up when the network is not behaving exactly as the application designer would've hoped when they decided that some cloud api call or another should transparently affect some aspect of their ui which wouldn't even necessarily seem like a cloud behavior to a user ... Just listening to music from your own iTunes library without a network or with a spotty network is an exercise in extreme annoyance.

I understand that the cloud's not going away -- but I would love to see apple add standard UI somewhere in all their applications to in some way indicate when network operations are in effect and something about the status. Attempting to build this kind of 'awareness of network activity' into the ui might really help application designers avoid including codepaths that amount to 'if network is bad: goto random-ruin' throughout their application's ...

vezzy-fnord• 12 years ago

Seamless network transparency is certainly not infeasible, see 9P and Styx. NFS is rather crufty in comparison.

empthought6• 12 years ago

What would you like besides the network status and network activity indicator in the upper left hand corner of the screen?

drabiega• 12 years ago

I think he was thinking something to indicate that the current thing you were doing is using the network: an alternative wait cursor would be a nice touch.

r00fus2• 12 years ago

Case in point, something as simple as Expandrive.app - it makes SFTP/S3/WebDAV simply accessibly, but also causes huge failure modes as other Apps try to access what they consider to be a local file (think auto-save).

"Transparency" requires reasonably complex caching and invalidation (see: your browser).

FiatLuxDave• 12 years ago

This is a great observation/suggestion! Voted up, and suggest others do the same.

mcmancini• 12 years ago

I think this observation is spot on. My parents are in a rural location and for years had horrible random and difficult to trace problems with their computers while they were on satellite internet. The mysterious problems went away when they were able to upgrade to cellular internet. I think the problems were due to the painfully high latency over the satellite connection, but in many cases it was difficult to prove.

Another personal frustration, which perhaps you might share, is the implicit assumption that everyone not only has high-speed internet, but uncapped internet service. My parents had a hefty internet bill the other month because my dad upgraded his iPhone, and there was a lot of occult downloads happening, I assume for Photo Stream or whatever it's called now.

datashovel2• 12 years ago

It would be interesting to find what kinds of stories give a user who submits more karma. negative or positive? It would be quite ironic if creating negativity on Hacker News is what builds karma.

datashovel2• 12 years ago

it's obvious negativity in comments aren't good for karma, but stories with negative premise is unclear to me.

raspasov• 12 years ago

Personally, I've been using Yosemite and iOS 8 every day.

iOS 8 - no complaints whatsoever, at least on iPhone 5 and 6. I've heard some people complain that on iPhone 4/4S it could be slow but that's a few years old hardware and Apple probably doesn't spend the majority of their time optimizing that most likely.

Yosemite - major bug is that my WiFi stops working once in a whole (~once a day) and have to turn it off/on.

Overall, I think the the criticism is definitely a little bit overblown.

lkdeveloper• 12 years ago

Also before yosemite release apple announced a public beta, which is kind of unusual for apple since they always wait until the party to release stuff. Does that mean some part of apple’s QA is now offloaded to public?

philliphaydon• 12 years ago

While there's a bunch of things I wish Apple would fix in OSX...

If Photoshop stopped crashing all the time and Finder stopped freezing because external hdd's were too slow. I would have less issues with OSX.

I can't believe people swear by OSX for graphic design despite the fact that Photoshop crashes all the time.

bane4• 12 years ago

I don't know, I've been a Mac user off and on since Macs were 68k based, had a 2007 MBP that I was really unhappy with (of my still functioning machines from that era, it's easily the worst, by $300 netbook is easily a better machine at 1/10th the cost). The last 3-4 years or so my daily driver at work is a rMBP.

I use Windows 7 at home, but feel about as comfortable in front of either system.

If I compare any of the last 3-4 versions of OS X to Win 7, I'd say they're roughly comparable. There's pluses and minuses on both sides. I just spent a few days writing some Python code on Windows, and the experience was generally about as good as OS X. Win7 is the most rock solid non-x-nix OS I've used, and once you learn your way around it generally flows well.

I don't perceive a huge downgrade in quality on OS X. Things change, bugs get introduced. I don't aesthetically like where Apple is going with their flat design, but the chrome of most apps I use takes up so little real-estate of what I use that I can ignore it. I think you have to do a bit more work to get an OS X machine into a real usable state than Windows. But once it's working it's relatively pain free. I don't think it's as stable as Win 7. But it's like comparing 4-9s uptime to 3-9s uptime. On a day-to-day level I don't really notice it as much.

I'd say uptime on my Win 7 machines is better, but Microsoft forces restarts and updates too frequently to make that kind of claim. It's nice that OS X is a x-nix in the sense that what I do on it is more easily translatable to other x-nix systems so deployment is easier. And that's great until it isn't, because some tool or library or something is different or not available. But then again, development on Windows forces you to assume all sorts of crazy non-standard stuff as a constant.

I don't really know where this perception that it's getting worse is coming from. I recently fired up my 2007-era MBP and it really feels like a worse experience, top-to-bottom. Modern OS X really is nicer.

I suspect that people are finally starting to look at Apple products more critically (at long last). Perhaps it's because the pace of innovation seems to have slowed down, perhaps it's because Jobs is gone, but I'm starting to notice Apple pundits are finally starting to see that things aren't perhaps as good as they dreamed, and looking for ways to push the fruit forward.

Animats• 12 years ago

This is striking, considering that Apple is a wealthy company with a small product line. They have the money to put resources behind getting their products fixed. They have total control over the hardware environment, so they don't have to worry about compatibility with external hardware.

Microsoft has put a lot of work into making Windows fixable. The two big developments for Windows 7 were 1) requiring all signed kernel drivers to pass the Static Driver Verifier, and 2) running incoming crash dumps through a classifier system which attempts to identify similar crashes and sends them to the same maintainer. Those two tools put a big dent in crash-for-unknown-reason problems. Is there any indication that Apple has developed similar tooling for their systems?

bluedino• 12 years ago

I haven't had any issues with Yosemite (the last buggy release for me was Mountain Lion), but iOS in my iPad and iPhone are a mess since iOS 7.

Messages breaks in every way possible. Safari went from crashing twice every half hour to freezing and continuing to play videos after I've closed tabs, and getting stuck full screen.

smacktoward• 12 years ago

I tend to look for the simplest explanation to a question, as quite often the simplest explanation is the correct one.

So in that spirit, if the question is "why does it seem like OS X isn't of the quality it used to be?", the simplest answer might be that Apple just doesn't care about OS X anymore.

I mean, look at their financials (http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AAPL/3797471556x0x789...) On page 29 they list their net sales for all their major products from 2012 through 2014. And the things that jump out from that page are:

1) The iPhone business generates 4x as much revenue for Apple as Macs do -- and if you add in iPad sales that figure goes up to 5x; and

2) The iPhone business has grown by more than 10% each year, while Mac sales have been essentially flat.

So if you're Apple, where does the Mac fit in your product line these days, exactly? People still buy them, so it's not like you completely don't care about them, but the importance of those sales to your bottom line is diminishing year by year as sales of mobile devices dwarf sales of Macs. And there's no indication that those trends are going to turn around anytime soon -- no new major piece of hardware coming from Intel or somewhere that's likely to light a fire under sales of conventional PCs, or software package so compelling it would drive the Mac into new vertical markets.

All of which means that maybe, if you're Apple, you see the Mac business as basically a cow to be milked at the lowest cost possible until it dies of natural causes. You don't cut the hardware build quality (at least, not yet), but you don't put a whole lot of effort into developing revolutionary new features for OS X or wringing every last bug out of new releases of OS X, either. You just do the minimum possible to keep those existing Mac customers from jumping ship, or at least to delay the moment when they do jump ship for as long as possible. And by the time that day eventually comes, you won't care because Macs will be a footnote to your real business, your device business.

ldesegur• 12 years ago

In order to build iOS apps, you need to run XCode on MacOSX. The latest releases of XCode have been so unstable that I wonder how much longer before developers finally get discouraged to develop for Apple Hardware.

empthought6• 12 years ago

The latest releases of Xcode have been massive improvements.

rsync3• 12 years ago

"So if you're Apple, where does the Mac fit in your product line these days, exactly?"

It worries me that everyone, everywhere has been asking for a retina MBA for about three years now, and it keeps not coming.

I'm suspicious that the "new MBA", whatever that is, will be the first step of a "mac" becoming an iDevice. It will be a "macbook" running iOS.

I hope I'm wrong.

CamperBob23• 12 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if there is no Mac in a few years. Recall that one of Jobs's less-noticed, er, innovations was removing the word "Computer" from the company's name.

Yes, you need a Mac to write iOS apps. No, that is not some kind of immutable law of nature, as any game console developer who works in Windows or Linux can attest.

On a long-enough timeline, being in the "computer" business may turn out to be more trouble than it's worth to Apple.

ericd2• 12 years ago

I believe this has to do with the increased power consumption requirements of feeding the retina display. To maintain the same battery life with a retina display, they'd need to include a bigger battery, increasing weight/size, and res just isn't the priority for the MBA, compared to weight/size and battery life.

untog• 12 years ago

In pretty sure the Retina MBA doesn't exist because of battery concerns. It's not a coincidence that retina screens arrived at the same time as the departure of DVD drives (and so, more internal space for the battery).

The Air never had that space spare.

alayne2• 12 years ago

Mac sales have not been flat http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/07/mac-achieves-highest-u-s-pc...

kimdouglasmason2• 12 years ago

You're comparing market share (in your link) to revenue figures (in the post you responded to). Apples and oranges.

Over a 2 year time-frame (end of 2012 to end of 2014), Mac revenue increased by a measly 3.6%. iPhone revenue increased by 30%, and was over 4x Mac revenue in 2014. iPads alone generated more revenue than Macs (though to be fair, iPad revenue actually decreased slightly over the period).

As for units, for every Mac that Apple sold in 2014, they sold 9 iPhones. (mental image of Kramer saying '9, Jerry!')

Personally, I think smacktoward nailed it. It's fairly obvious that iOS is top priority at Apple, and it follows that is where the bulk of the design and engineering work is going.

I suspect that inside of Apple, this quote from Jobs is still considered relevant. I can guarantee you that Apple execs don't want Apple to be a truck maker.

"When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this transformation is going to make some people uneasy... because the PC has taken us a long way. They were amazing. But it changes." - Steve Jobs

gurkendoktor7• 12 years ago

I like the idea of following the money, but I would argue that iOS is actually in a worse state than OS X. UIKit used to be AppKit's clean and modern sibling, now we have to struggle with bullshit like automaticallyAdjustsScrollViewInsets, the n-th way of implementing view controller rotation, the duality of AutoLayout and struts & springs and an UITextView that gets worse instead of better. If you want to see some examples, follow @steipete on Twitter and look at the radars he files (I think there were 3-4 in December).

Or just start using a custom keyboard full-time on iOS 8. It's still bordering on unusable for me on iOS 8.1.1. I love the empty screen the App Store gives me when I want to write a review.

gurkendoktor7• 12 years ago

Oh, and most importantly, you cannot stay on an old iOS version even for one day if you care about the security of your devices. So iOS releases should really be completely, 100% rock-solid, but they aren't.

lispm• 12 years ago

Geoff Wozniak

he wasn't even using Apple's software... using the Mac as a Terminal...

I'm using two Macs (Macbook Air and Quad-Core Mac mini) all the time. There are a lot of annoying bugs in the Mac OS. But I can't say that it is more.

Some of the recent stuff is quite cool and very useful. There are some things I don't like (iCloud, iTunes speed and stability, ...), but in general the latest OS works quite good.

krschultz2• 12 years ago

"having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality." ... "We don’t need major OS releases every year. We don’t need each OS release to have a huge list of new features."

I would argue everything we know about software engineering process says that more releases is better. Incrementalism lowers risk for engineers and for users. Once a year doesn't sound often enough to me, going the other way would just repeat Microsoft's failings.

However it is possible that the core of his point, that marketing trumps what engineering can accomplish while maintaining quality, may be true. There seemed to be a lot of bolt on features in the last iOS & Mac OS X releases that didn't necessarily need to be pushed out right now, and some of the regressions are painful.

rsync3• 12 years ago

"I would argue everything we know about software engineering process says that more releases is better. Incrementalism lowers risk for engineers and for users. Once a year doesn't sound often enough to me, going the other way would just repeat Microsoft's failings."

Yes, but that can be in the form of .X releases, not X. releases.

Which is to say, by all means release X.2 and X.3 and ... X.9 and so on ... keep polishing !

But OSX releases 5.X and 6.X and ... 9.X ... and so on. Those aren't the actual numbers of course, but it is major releases that keep coming rather than minor releases.

TomVDB2• 12 years ago

He's not about talking about bug fix updates (the more the better), he's talking about major releases that introduce more features.

bsclifton• 12 years ago

Having drops in software quality doesn't surprise me at all. Anybody that used Mac OS back in the System 7 days likely remembers seeing the bomb message and getting intimate with macbugs (G^FINDER) to try to save your work.

I think the only way you'll see a dramatic rise in quality would be if software becomes their core business (instead of hardware)... which isn't happening.

eccstartup4• 12 years ago

I don't agree with owenwil. Apple is actually making bugs release after release. It really brought pain upgrading to Yosemite, waiting the fucking hours copying files in the so-called "a few minutes". As I can recall, upgrading from 10.8 to 10.9, Preview begins to blur when scrolling, and more memory taken. Then in the release of Yosemite, MATLAB GUI won't work at first, then goes the ugly color theme for mobile devices. Few will upgrade to 10.10 if there were not Swift support.

rsync3• 12 years ago

"It really brought pain upgrading to Yosemite, waiting the fucking hours copying files in the so-called "a few minutes"."

I don't understand how this basic piece of wisdom has not filtered down to everyone, everywhere that owns a computing device:

Don't upgrade. Always reinstall. Always.

In 1995, don't upgrade windows 3.x to win95. Reinstall.

In 2000, don't upgrade to winXP. Reinstall.

In 2008, dont upgrade to Snow Leopard. Reinstall.

In 2020, don't upgrade to Novell Carnival Ride. Reinstall.

Don't. Ever. Upgrade. Always reinstall.

eccstartup4• 12 years ago

Because AppStore told me that I can upgrade.

CamperBob23• 12 years ago

I think iOS lulled us into forgetting that longstanding truth. For a few years, every iOS release meant my iPhone got better -- and occasionally even faster. That changed when iOS 5 came along, of course. Apple really had us conditioned to think that their OS releases were getting unequivocally, monotonically better... at least for a while.

CoolGuySteve• 12 years ago

Former OS X developer here.

I'd say the biggest change in the development methodology happened when Bertrand Serlet was replaced with Craig Federighi.

With Bertrand, we would move in giant monolithic releases where every group would just dump in whatever they had ready and the whole thing would get released with nightly builds. With SnowLeopard in particular, I remember three dozen releases in a row where Xcode was unusable due to obj-c garbage collection issues. Random stuff you didn't expect like CoreGraphics would have showstopper issues and then we'd report it and it would get fixed by the next week.

This resulted in extremely late releases that had a ton of bugs that we piled patches onto as time went on.

Craig moved the organization onto a sprint system, where we would develop new features for 2 weeks and then spend a week fixing bugs. After 10 or 12 or 16 of these cycles, we would deem it ready and ship it out.

I felt this produced more stable but more conservative software. It seemed like giant rewrites and massive features would be very difficult to introduce and if they did get done, wouldn't happen until two thirds or so into the release cycle.

On the other hand, Craig has consistently been able to release on time with most of the features promised.

I was only there up to the release of Lion (the first Craig release), so I don't know how updates and patches worked from then on. Maybe they're worse now.

But I've been using OS X all this time, and honestly I don't think it's any worse than before.

What has changed is that releases and features happen more often. Tiger and Leopard had a good 2 years to mature and get patches while their delayed successors missed target dates. In the meantime they stagnated with ancient unix tools, safari build, QuickTime frameworks, graphics drivers etc.

They felt stable because they were just old, sort of like Debian stable. Meanwhile, the development versions of Leopard and Snow Leopard (the two I spent most of my career at Apple developing) were downright horrible and unreleasable. Each of those releases went gold and had an almost immediate .1 release to fix glaring issues.

It's just that you remember them better because they had a longer history as a stable legacy OS than the modern versions.

toyg5• 12 years ago

you remember them better because they had a longer history as a stable legacy OS than the modern versions.

Does this tell us anything about the state of modern commercial OS development? Users like stability and predictability in their software. Sure, they like new whizz-bang as well, but that excitement lasts for a week after you buy a new machine, and then they want stability every day for years.

That conflicts with commercial pressures to sell Shiny New Things every few months. Flat icons? Let's make them skeuomorphic. Skeuomorphic icons? Let's make them flat! Tabs are stupid, let's make them all windows. Windows are stupid, let's make them all tabs! Multitasking is great, let's have more dashboards. Single-tasking is great, let's have more fullscreen! And so on and so forth, rinse and repeat.

I think hardware waves used to hide most of this game, since every year new hardware was so much more powerful than before, you could justify this constant churning as "adding more stuff". This has not really been true on the desktop for almost a decade now, so the long-term patterns emerge and they are quite ugly to see.

rdtsc2• 12 years ago

Flat icons? Let's make them skeuomorphic. Skeuomorphic icons? Let's make them flat! Tabs are stupid, let's make them all windows. ...

My guess the other problem is simply this -- they hired so many developers, designers, managers. They produced a great stable OS, worked hard, then it was making billions of dollars. Ok, what next? Institute 4 day weeks? (maybe not a bad idea, but I am being hyperbolic here a bit).

So there is perhaps some pressure from the inside to develop new features. Designers say "flat is best now" so they get to work and feel busy. Developers want to build the next internal restructuring. Managers probably want to be responsible for some new awesome feature and seal their legacy.

collyw• 12 years ago

Users like stability and predictability in their software. Sure, they like new whizz-bang as well, but that excitement lasts for a week after you buy a new machine, and then they want stability every day for years.

After years of linux use, I was always excited to see new releases, and how it was catching up with Windows and OSX. Ubuntu by version 10.4 was great, and I loved it, but then I hit the upgrade button and it borked the install (actually that happened a lot before 10.4, with various distributions).

Nowadays I am very wary of system upgrades, because more likely than not something won't work and I can't be bothered to reinstall everything the way I like it.

Ten years ago I enjoyed installing the various flavour of Linux and seeing what new shiny whizz-bang they contained - now I see it for what it is: some novelty eye candy, that rarely adds any real usability). Now I prefer rolling releases, and I am using XFCE, as it is basic and works.

The thing is, it has taken me dozens of installs of Linux to realize that the new shiny whizz-bang shiny features are usually a lot of crap, and my guess is that most "normal" users are still at the stage where shiny is far more exciting than stable. I would expect that Apple fans are even more geared to that attitude. Shinny new crap is what sells, not stable and boring (how many people do you know that use Debian stable, and compare that to Ubuntu users).

throwawayosx• 12 years ago

current apple engineer... the sprint (milestone) development system is still in place... it's not the problem though, it's the problem is the focus on new useless [imo] features at the expense of core functionality and quality

hope marco, geoff and others keep writing these articles so that eventually tim or someone sees one and shakes things up. pressure from the bottom has not worked so far

23david10• 12 years ago

would be interesting to hear what the distinction is between useless and core features.

Maybe I'm just not hitting core features with OSX 10.10, but the features I'm using seem fine. And not seeing stability issues with third-party software.

bsaul2• 12 years ago

In case you know someone in charge : the wifi performances issues on yosemite are still not completely solved. This is my only gripe with this version so far, but having to turn off bluetooth to get a good connexion from time to time really feels like working on broken software.

rado• 12 years ago

Keyboard input language switching between apps has been broken for 10 years now. Yosemite broke it further.

dhspector• 12 years ago

Yikes. Whats you're telling us is bug fixing and the incurring of the deep, deep, technical debt isn't seen as a problem. Unfortunately this debt is also being shackled to the 3rd party developers since we have to compensate for Apple's bugs. Not fun.

pgib• 12 years ago

It's just brutal in Yosemite. This is the first release to which I regret upgrading. I've never had so many issues on my laptop, and it has never been so slow. My FileVault encryption has been stuck at 99% since I upgraded and enabled, and Apple marked my radar report as a duplicate. They can't/won't tell me if I'm forever hooped or if it will ever be fixed. At this point, I'm looking to spend a day rebuilding my whole system.

nathanvanfleet2• 12 years ago

But how did things like NSURL defaultCache and other base-components get broken in iOS8? There seemed to be work on the fundamentals that broke them right? It's not just that the new flashy stuff stuttered or crashed...

glasz• 12 years ago

pressure from the bottom has not worked so far

wait, this is causing friction? they fired forstall to get total gleichschaltung and now ppl elsewhere are revolting? i hope this'll come to fruits. this whole cozy-collaboration-and-nobody-saying-no thing has to stop.

visarga2• 12 years ago

Yosemite has regressed, in my opinion. All Screen Sharing sessions cause my MacBook Pro to freeze for 5 minutes after they are closed. I had to reboot the laptop many times.

DigitalJack3• 12 years ago

You should consider showing this behavior at the genius bar if that is feasible for you. It's not normal for Yosemite.

esaruoho• 12 years ago

Have you reported this to http://bugreport.apple.com/ ? I know most of my Yosemite / Mavericks bugs were tagged as duplicates, but there might be some sort of a "wow, so many duplicates, let's fix this" type of ranking re: bugs reported to the Radar.

I, for one, would wish Mr. Federighi would push out a Snow Yosemite. No new features, simply bugfixing. I have taken to simply posting screenshots on my blog about various AppleQA issues. I wish there was a way to really make a difference, god know I'm fanatical enough about wanting Apple stuff to just work.

pi-err• 12 years ago

But I've been using OS X all this time, and honestly I don't think it's any worse than before.

Agreed. Yosemite has been flat out the best OS X version I used. Zero bug except a few Airplay issues. I'm even using beta builds for production, this thing is that stable.

I'm suspecting that Marco's point shows how a maturing part of the developer/consumer now takes a larger mindshare. Not a bad thing, it's just that it doesn't tell much on the product.

edit: Marco says this gets him 7.8m/s traffic, so there has to be something for _many_ here.

bane4• 12 years ago

Craig moved the organization onto a sprint system, where we would develop new features for 2 weeks and then spend a week fixing bugs. After 10 or 12 or 16 of these cycles, we would deem it ready and ship it out. I felt this produced more stable but more conservative software. It seemed like giant rewrites and massive features would be very difficult to introduce and if they did get done, wouldn't happen until two thirds or so into the release cycle.

I've noticed this problem too in Agile shops. Small iterations happen fast on well scheduled. But big new efforts tend to be like swimming up-river. Whatever comes after Agile is probably going to formalize a long-track parallel cadence for a dedicated team to grind away on. Then once that's released it goes into the normal sprint cadence.

It seems to usually be "solved" right now by lots of weeping, halting production and blowing up of anybody else's schedule.

dragonwriter• 12 years ago

I've noticed this problem too in Agile shops. Small iterations happen fast on well scheduled. But big new efforts tend to be like swimming up-river. Whatever comes after Agile is probably going to formalize a long-track parallel cadence for a dedicated team to grind away on.

That seems to be a not-that-uncommon practice in Agile/Lean environments with the resources to implement it already (you don't see a lot of coverage of it in books about "Agile" software methods specifically, though I've seen considerable coverage of it in "Lean" software development books -- which tend to address the kind of pragmatic metamethodology the Agile manifesto calls for, while "Agile" books, ironically, tend to focus on more on narrow prescriptive methodologies, particularly Scrum and close variants.)

The immediate and longer-term (or multiple potential solutions with different risk profiles without a strict "this one is for now, this one is the long term objective solution" division) in parallel thing that Google has done in lots of areas for a long time (and people outside often question with "why is Google doing both X and Y when they have overlapping use cases".)

exAppleToo2• 12 years ago

The good thing about the nightly builds was you didn't have to use them, and people could respond quickly to showstoppers rather than wait for a sprint. There was a quicklook team to catch bugs which stopped nightly builds from release to general dev, and unless you really needed that build ( to test a new API) you didn't install until quality is restored. With fortnightly builds, if that is now what is happening, there will be massive instability every 2 weeks, until the final round of bug fixing cycles. Which can't finish because the OS has to be release at an event.

exAppleToo2• 12 years ago

The good thing about the nightly builds was you didn't have to use them, and people could respond quickly to showstoppers rather than wait for a sprint. There was a quicklook team to catch bugs which stopped nightly builds from release to general dev, and unless you really needed that build ( to test a new API) you didn't install until quality was restored. The xCode bug was therefore unusual, as they could have fixed it the next day ( and with enough heat they would have).

With fortnightly builds which are only then released to Engineering, if that is now what is happening, there will be massive instability every 2 weeks, until the final round of bug fixing cycle stops all features being added.

Which can't finish in time because the OS has to be released at an Apple event. Except for 10.0 when the date was known months in advance the old OS cycles were released when ready ( when show stoppers were 0). Of course that did lead to some wrangling about what a show stopper was, but consider if iOS 8 was not released with the HealthKit bugs, and other major issues, and instead we got what was in iOs 8.1, or 10.1 instead of 10.0.

Still some issues but mostly robust. Apple needs to decouple software from hardware releases.

coldtea4• 12 years ago

The article is completely devoid of content.

Any particular gripes he had with latest OS X version?

And most importantly, anything for which similar things couldn't be said for OS X version's from 10.1 to 10.9?

FWIW, I find Yosemite a fine and stable release.

lnanek2• 12 years ago

Couldn't agree more. I can't open my coworkers KeyNote presentations because my copy is a year newer. My two year old Macbook Retina Pro black screens half the time it tries to wake up from sleep and yes, I've wiped every startup program and kernel extension. I'm just glad it isn't my work Macbook Pro which black screens on login half the time and insists I forgot my password and won't let me time my password in another quarter. I suspect it has something to do with disk encryption since it started after they turned File Vault or whatever it is on.

fsk• 12 years ago

One example for me:

A recent OS update broke XAMPP/mysql. It took me a couple of hours to figure out what setting I had to change to make it work again.

brohoolio• 12 years ago

From an enterprise standpoint the wifi on 10.10 is basically a DDos attack. I know they are trying to put in a feature to send files between devices but it doesn't work on a college campus at all, which should be an environment they are testing in.

zak_mc_kracken• 12 years ago

It's not just the functional high ground that Apple has lost, it's the look and feel battle.

To me, both Windows 8 and Windows 7 look way, way more modern than the latest Mac OS. There's animation, there are colors, consistent and solid keyboard support, strong consistency (why can't I still rename a file in the Mac OS file dialog but I can in Finder? They both look identical!).

For a little while, Mac OS had the UNIX foundation advantage over Windows but these days are gone. Today, I use git, ssh and bash seamlessly on Windows.

I think Apple just lost contact with its users.

rtpg2• 12 years ago

The thing I don't get in this discussion is that somehow the issue is that OS releases are too soon. If we assume that we were on a bi-yearly cycle instead, wouldn't that mean 2 times as many features would break in an instant?

Shouldn't Apple be doing updates faster (and smaller) instead of sooner? Whatever happened to agile?

Considering the amount of third party software now in the ecosystem, faster updates seem the only way forward. Unless you want your entire dev setup to be broken for 3 months every 2 years while all of your tools update to the 100 different incompatible changes.

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

I just have this vision of OS X like a model of the golden gate bridge made out of dried pasta. If you grab one end and point it in a different direction a lot of noodles break and its crappy until you get them fixed. If you turn it very slowly you can do so without breaking any noodles, but it takes a long time to get to a new orientation.

My assertion is that OS X (and Windows for that matter) are trying to serve two masters, one is the 'appliance user' who never puts anything on their device except for what came out of the App store, and the 'computer user' who uses their machine as a tool to develop software for themselves, or appliance users. While not a mainstream idea, I think a Macbook with IOS would be a better "answer" for application users than a Macbook with OSX, and a Macbook with OSX and none of the appliancey features might be a better Macbook for developers. Developers would no doubt run IOS in a VM on their Macbook which would both provide them a test platform when delivering new code, and a place to use their own appliancy type apps, away from the core development world. Windows could do that as well, splitting into an 'end user' and a 'developer' mode.

That said, it is really frustrating all around.

ericd2• 12 years ago

I think that might work well in practice, but I think a lot of us hold out hope that a lot of the 'appliance users' will dig deeper and become proper 'computer users', and we worry that going the separate route will prevent that, and create a population with a low computer literacy rate. Unfortunately, that seems to be the way we're going, with many people adopting iPads as their main computing platform.

23david10• 12 years ago

Losing the high ground to what?

Ubuntu 14? Windows 8? Chrome OS?

I'm not running OSX as a server OS and don't plan to. But even with the latest 10.10.1, I still see uptime in terms of weeks including mandatory reboots due to OS updates. I think it's easy to say that other desktop OS's are years behind and falling farther behind with each release.

As has happened in prior OSX releases, this latest release may have been rushed. The next release will probably address current bugs.

kimdouglasmason2• 12 years ago

"I still see uptime in terms of weeks including mandatory reboots due to OS updates."

This now applies to every OS out there. Windows, iOS, Linux, ChromeOS (aka Linux :). It's simply not a bragging point anymore.

"I think it's easy to say that other desktop OS's are years behind and falling farther behind with each release."

You're right that it's easy to say. That makes you technically correct - the best kind of correct :). I personally disagree, and think this XKCD strip is relevant:

http://xkcd.com/934/

intopieces• 12 years ago

By what measure is Apple losing reputation? Their sales are at an all time high in a market that is losing ground to tablets. This is the second post on HN today about how terrible OS X is, and I just don't see it. And I hardly consider the yearly updates major OS changes. Yosemite was pretty big, but that was the first big one in a few years it seems.

visarga2• 12 years ago

Very unhappy with Yosemite. I've never had so many system crashes. I think I need to install the one 2 versions ago.

WoodenChair• 12 years ago

I've used OS X daily through every public release (including the public beta). I actually wrote a column about OS X during its early days. All of these articles are anecdotal, and I agree with other commenters here who say it's all about perception. The fact of the matter is that Apple has had some high profile "quality scandals" the last year (some would argue 2/3 were not deserved):

- iOS point release that bricked phones and was pulled

- Bendgate

- iCloud hacking scandal

None of them actually were OS X bugs, but you couple that with some minor OS X bugs and everything goes into a whirlwind of negative perception. What are the major OS X bugs that everyone is referring to though? I haven't experienced them, but that's anecdotal, so that opinion is just as worthless as everyone else's. I heard people are having some Wifi issues - that sucks - but where is the showstopper that's affecting everyone?

On the other hand, I do feel that iOS and Swift have been buggy enough for developers the last couple of years that its hurt Apple's rep in a legitimate way amongst the intelligentsia - programmers who have a pedestal to preach from. But let's be real - in terms of day to day problems, things are much much better than they were during Mac OS X 10.0 to 10.2, and yes, they're still better than Windows/Linux (which will always be plagued by the huge number of hardware configurations they must support).

TomVDB2• 12 years ago

I'm surprised that he's complaining about OS X and not iOS 8.

Coming from an iPhone 5 with iOS7 going to a 6 with iOS8, it was a major regression in terms of minor annoyances.

Particularly: - selecting text for cut and paste in a text edit field is often very broken. I hit this one daily. I used to be a prolific iOS typer, but I've gone back to using my MacBook Air 11 just for this reason. - selecting text in a browser windows brings out the weirdest bug, where the window gets stuck scrolling all the time. I have this OCD thing where I continuously select and deselect text for no reason whatsoever. As a result, this hits me many times per day. The only way to fix it is to kill Safari. - When you have your phone open in landscape. Power it down. Then switch it on again in portrait, iOS doesn't detect the change in orientation. You have to rotate to landscape and back before it notices.

There are just minor things, but when they hit time and again, they get annoying real quick. And they don't get fixed.

minusSeven• 12 years ago

Can anyone post some specific bugs OP here is talking about ? I would love to know them.

eonil• 12 years ago

I feel like Apple software quality has been degraded because I always expected kind of top and flawless. It has been and must be to keep its position.

As far as I remember, in earlier versions of OS X, I just didn't care on visuals so much because it was very flawless, so everything felt smooth like a fluid and nothing bugged me.

With 10.10, I see visual/animation glitches very frequently on same hardware. And it is getting bugging me up and it feels flawed. I believe this is because of moving on to a new visual styles. But if this sustains, it's just a matter of time to hit the bottom.

Xixi• 12 years ago

Just a couple weeks ago someone asked me how Yosemite was compared to Mavericks. My answer: "they are the same modulo a couple minor UI tweaks". I guess it's because I use very little Apple softwares, despite using almost exclusively Apple hardware.

Turns out Yosemite is perfectly fine to use Sublime Text, the Terminal and Firefox.

Demiurge• 12 years ago

What I always wanted to know is, why doesn't OSX have the option to disable mouse acceleration?

jokoon2• 12 years ago

haha, you can use a paying software to fix that.

crazy right ?

bla2• 12 years ago

I bet Jony Ive will go back to focusing on design and someone else will run engineering again. Apple tends to prefer internal promotions but I wouldn't be surprised if summertime external becomes new head of software. Maybe someone who has a NeXT background.

phazmatis• 12 years ago

In mavericks, I could hit command-space and start typing, and knew that even though the spotlight box hadn't popped up yet, my text was being captured. Now in yosemite, it's more like... hit command-space, start typing "chrome", wind up with a box 1.5 seconds later filled in with "ome". This is only a problem on my i5 mac mini. My macbook pro (same year - late 2012) is just barely fast enough to pop open the window in time to capture my text input. But that just shows that their UI stack is too deep to provide the kind of snappy user interactions they are shooting for.

DigitalJack3• 12 years ago

Maybe there is something odd about the mac mini that causes this; my 2009 mac book pro with mavericks has no problem with it. I tried, but couldn't hit a character fast enough to cause a miss.

It wouldn't surprise me to find out there was something hardware related with the mini that leads to this.

buro9• 12 years ago

    having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering
    teams to keep up with while maintaining quality. Maybe it’s an engineering
    problem, but I suspect not — I doubt that any cohesive engineering team
    could keep up with these demands and maintain significantly higher
    quality.

And yet, OpenBSD springs to mind for not just the timeliness of their releases (every 6 months) but also the quality and features within each release.

jokoon2• 12 years ago

I have a macbook pro, and honestly I cannot set to believe any OS like mavericks, in this age, cannot run properly with 2GB of ram.

Everything is slow. 3MB of L2 cache processor, there's no excuse.

cpg• 12 years ago

Lest we don't forget, interacting with SMB file shares has been a constant pain for years now, pretty much in every release.

I will spare the details from before, but in Mavericks, when things looked like were being fixed, one cannot delete an entire folder. It would delete the contents, but not the folder, then one had to delete the folder by itself after it was empty.

In Yosemite some folders are left "locked" without being able to do anything to them from OS X. This was similar and worse before.

And don't get me going on how it leaves .DS_Store, ._.DS_Store, .apdisk and ._.apdisk crapola laying around.

Oh, how about driving everyone to properly support case-sensitiveness? All sorts of things do not work or crash, or simply refuse to install if installed in case-sensitive volumes.

How about fixing random video corruption in Yosemite? https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/364883/Screenshots/video...

How about training the "geniuses" at the stores that there are other standards for video cabling? (And that one should not have to buy thunderbird-enabled monitors to be able to have more than one monitor on a macbook?).

My MacBook Pro froze and rebooted out of the blue this past week. It was pretty much idle. has never done that before.

And on and on ...

pedalpete• 12 years ago

I'm going to suggest that the 'functional high ground' was relied on a unique combination of marketing, market penetration and era.

Of course, we know Apple always pushed the 'it just works' mantra, but this was when Apple was supporting a small number of devices, and when they had forced everybody to update to new hardware in order to run OSX anyway, so what you had was an OS that worked VERY well for a small number of people on a small number of devices.

Those few (like myself) who claimed that OSX was not any better than windows (my first experience with OSX had me in a reboot loop trying to get Pages or Keynote working), were a minority of the OS users and a tiny percentage of overall computer users.

As OSX has grown in popularity, the 10% who dislike the newest versions has gone from a few tens of thousands (may hundred thousand) to a few million. Some of them very vocal, like Marco.

Lastly, I mentioned the 'era'. When OSX was gaining in popularity, many people were moving from Windows '98 and XP. They had skipped Vista and didn't try Windows 7. Moving to OSX was a massive improvement, as it was a much more modern and cleaner OS. Those same people are now used to the bells and whistles of OSX, and each new upgrade shows minor improvements and a few odd little features that, from what people tell me, come with the recommendation of "turn off the new stuff".

Those who complain about Microsoft OS quality, didn't compare Apple OS quality of a similar era. If you compare OS9 to 98 or XP, I think you'd find that it's a much more even comparison, and Microsoft may even come out on top.

gladimdim• 12 years ago

Btw Gnome 3 looks and feels almost like Mac OS. But it works and does not crash like Mac OS. Everyone who uses Mac OS should try modern Linux distributions. They do not suck so much as 2 years ago.

chj• 12 years ago

I hate every single new OS X release, because that means I have to struggle with wifi issues all over again.

microtonal3• 12 years ago

And changes to Xcode that break compilation a handful of open source libraries/utilities that I use.

leonroy• 12 years ago

Marco's article seems a little hyperbolic since as I recall Leopard for instance was hugely unstable on release.

Conventional wisdom with OS X has always been to wait a few point releases before jumping in. With Microsoft it was to wait until at least SP1.

I don't think things have changed that drastically.

* SMB support still sucks.

* OS X Server is still a monumental turd and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple kills it a release or two down the line.

* Yanking Spaces in Mountain Lion and going to Mission Control followed by Yosemite finally getting (flaky) multi-monitor support is classic Apple focusing on the consumer before the pros.

* Active Directory in Yosemite is a bit buggy but anyone who's used Leopard will remember that the gold master wouldn't even allow AD logons if your domain was .local - I mean did anyone at Apple even test something as basic as that!?

It goes on, but I honestly don't think Apple have changed for the worse. They're not any better in my personal opinion either.

The biggest problem we face with Apple at my company and it could certainly create the impression of increasing bugginess, is that Apple's release cycle is much shorter now.

No more 18 month releases with $100 upgrade fees.

Every developer in our shop can click 'Upgrade' on their machine and fuck their whole environment up.

It used to be much harder for them to do that in the past which goes back to my original point. Don't upgrade a production machine until you're at least a few point releases in! (that goes for your iOS devices too...)

nocman• 12 years ago

For anyone wanting to read the Geoff Wozniak post quoted in the article, here's the archive.org link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150105063342/http://wozniak.ca...

Perhaps he removed the original article because of increased traffic. At any rate, I got a 404 when I clicked the link.

Apple has lost the functional high ground

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