Apple Software Quality Questions

http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/01/18/apple-software-quality-questions/

by ingve • 12 years ago

191 147 12 years ago

coldcode• 12 years ago

Jean-Louis was always pretty honest about stuff. The problem is Apple has too many things going on and only the big stuff gets attention. Take XCode for example, please take it way before I shoot something.

cmelbye2• 12 years ago

Xcode is the number one reason why I don't do more iOS development. It just takes so much longer to do anything compared to languages that I can edit in a fast, simple text editor and run/test from terminal.

m_mueller• 12 years ago

Comparing it to to dynamic languages is a bit unfair - there's good reasons why iOS apps need to be compiled for the device. The big issue with Xcode for me is not its development speed (I think it has a workflow speed that's not much off from Visual Studio and its profiler is bar none), the problem is that it has become so damn unstable and that certain features are obscurely hidden.

kybernetyk• 12 years ago

If it's only about the editor/terminal workflow:

1. You can change the editor in XCode (clicking on a file in the IDE will open that editor - for example MacVim).

If that's not enough:

2. CMake has support for XCode projects. You can develop native iOS applications without ever launching XCode.

72deluxe7• 12 years ago

What's so bad about it? I use it for native OSX development with C++ and I have found it very useful, particularly with integration into Instruments for monitoring memory usage, network usage, thread behaviours, as well as the static code analysis for finding dead stores, memory leaks, pointless bits of code etc. (very useful!)

The navigation bar makes navigating the projects easy enough, plus I have added steps in the script sections for builds to package up 3D models/resources into the app, set dylib target references, bundle resources into the executable etc.

Finding where functions are called (callers and callees) from the quick menu is a lifesaver too. I find that I miss the back/forward buttons when I use anything else for editing.

As the project is quite large I could not possibly imagine doing this in a text editor.

rwbcxrz• 12 years ago

You don't even have to go into depth to find flaws in Yosemite like this one: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/152038/prevent-redr...

The flickering menubar icons drive me insane. It's proof that Apple has is either unwilling or unable to commit enough resources to OSX to ensure that its quality is consistent with what users have come to expect.

ploxiln• 12 years ago

The seeming paradox, as this article points out, is that Apple is putting more and more billions into R&D.

lancewiggs• 12 years ago

Seems to work fine if displays are not separate spaces. I switched to that very quickly.

jsz02• 12 years ago

Quality is important but it's also important to move the platform forward. This flickering menubar issue sounds like an issue maybe related to the changes with multi-monitor support and/or the changes made to improve UI performance on HiDPI displays. Just speculation so who knows but if so they might be a necessary evil. As far as the level of quality we expect this is where I start to wonder if I'm living in a parallel universe or something. My experience over the years is misbehaving menubar apps could make the entire menubar stop working sometimes even requiring a restart and icon cache issues in the dock/menubar were not uncommon. I haven't had any of those problems on 10.10 yet so maybe I'm more inclined to believe these changes (and bugs they may cause) are for the best interest of the platform over the long term. Who knows though -- if I was experiencing the blinking menubar problem I might miss the days of only dealing with an occasional menubar crash.

rab_oof17• 12 years ago

Might consider Bartender.

Check that UISystemServer is not crashing repeatedly (flapping).

20kleagues• 12 years ago

I bought my Mom an iPad over an android tablet telling her that everything will just work. After the iOS 8 update, I am shying away from answering her questions about bugs, and questioning my decision about the iPad. People who are non-tech proficient form the biggest consumer-base for Apple, and it is terrible that Apple is forgetting how it gained this loyal consumer-base in the first place - through reliable software which 'just works'. It only makes more business sense to go back to their original software quality even if it requires dumping regular releases, because they will start losing (probably already have) customers real soon if they don't.

AtmaScout• 12 years ago

I've considered changing from iPhone to Android mainly due to iOS 8 update. It was such a disheartening experience. Sometimes I wish I even still had iOS6 installed.

zachberger• 12 years ago

So many people say this but I switched to iPhone from Android at the iPhone 6/iOS 8 release and I have no complaints..

rdtsc3• 12 years ago

Believe it or not I had a successful experience with giving my mom an Ubuntu laptop and me administering it (mostly remotely) for the last 7-8 years.

She mostly uses the browser for news and some articles, skype to talk to us, and knows basic GUI file operations enough to view picture we send her.

I would log in periodically and update her packages. When we visit or she vists and brings her laptop I'd switch her to the next LTS release.

I am just very happy with Ubuntu, it has worked really well for us.

aceperry2• 12 years ago

Pretty cool idea, I never thought of remotely admin into an Ubuntu laptop. I know it's easy to do, just never thought of it.

I know that's what a lot of industry does for windows systems, but hey, you got to do a lot to keep windows on line.

lloeki2• 12 years ago

When we visit or she vists and brings her laptop I'd switch her to the next LTS release.

Best part for me was when I found out on such an occasion that mine did it on her own.

on_and_off• 12 years ago

Kinda the same thing here. My parents wanted to buy a tablet and my father does not want an Apple product for various reasons. I bought them a Nexus 10 (it was a year ago), anyway since I am an Android dev it is easier to provide support for this product. Personally, I have found this tablet pretty meh, but they don't have the same usage than me at all and they just love this tablet for pretty much the same kind of usage you describe : surf the web, mails, hangouts, view pictures, ...

visarga3• 12 years ago

Don't get me started with iPads and iOS 8 - there is no way to set a screen time limit for children by their parents. I would like to keep Wikipedia, Alarms and a few other apps fully open, but to limit Youtube and gaming time. No way to do it with Apple's software or with third party software (iOS does not allow parental apps).

The iPad, as it is, is very tempting for kids (and not only kids). To leave such a toy in the hands of a child is like leaving a big bag of chocolates in their room and telling them to eat responsibly when they are alone. Apple wants parents to police their iPads by hand instead. I have many other things to do than police children's gaming. We are in the age of computing now, if they haven't realized. I want nice stats with total time per app per day, like some parental control apps offer on Android.

In practice I was forced to confiscate their iPads and give them Android phones with big screens and good parental controls instead. Never gonna buy an iPad/iPhone for my kids again.

I am sure Apple does it for self serving reasons like "Don't limit their gaming time in any way, and sales with soar!"

masterleep• 12 years ago

It really is astonishing how lacking the Parental Controls are on iOS.

Razengan• 12 years ago

See Guided Access.

quesera• 12 years ago

To leave such a toy in the hands of a child is like leaving a big bag of chocolates in their room and telling them to eat responsibly when they are alone.

This is painful to read. There's very little chance of having a respectful conversation about this topic, so I should just move on silently. Shortly, I will. But not before suggesting that, respectfully, perhaps there's another way to approach the problem?

You currently have one downvote, and it isn't from me, but I feel so strongly repelled by your comment that I can understand the impulse to click the arrow and try to forget what you've written.

Apple wants parents to police their iPads by hand instead.

I don't think Apple takes a strong position on parenting at all -- but if they did, and it was the position you describe, I would be emphatically in agreement with them. I wouldn't use the word "police" though.

gress3• 12 years ago

This is a great comment - while many people are complaining about Apple adding too many features and introducing bugs, you are asking for more features.

This is exactly the dilemma Apple faces and is the reason that simplistic answers like 'stop releasing every year' are unhelpful.

The real interesting question is - is there a way for Apple to both maintain the pace of development and improve quality simultaneously.

That seems to be a challenge worthy of the most valuable company in the world.

droopyEyelids2• 12 years ago

As a recent switcher to Android, I acknowledge iOS has flaws but I am so grateful my parents aren't on it. (everything having multiple menus with multiple nesting levels, no conventional behavior between apps, crazy carrier customizations, multiple levels of caches to clear)

sudo-i• 12 years ago

I can't wait for the day when I can use WiFi and Bluetooth simultaneously without issues.

eg. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4113552

mrmondo• 12 years ago

Quite honestly Yosemite is the most buggy Apple product I've ever used - it has made working with OSX a chore. Apple has not fixed one of the bug reports I filed during the beta phase (which I'm not convinced has finished).

visarga3• 12 years ago

I tried to downgrade to Mavericks yesterday, it was almost impossible. The installer refuses to wipe clean and install a lower version unless you do some magic to the disk first and use web install. It took over 5 hours and I downloaded Mac OS 4 times from different sources, including Apple.

The ram it on our throats with free upgrade, then block our path to downgrade, unless we have a time machine backup to restore from. I didn't.

wiredfool• 12 years ago

My wife and I have identical MBAirs, except that I got mine when it was shipping with Mavericks and she got Yosemite. I get about twice the batter life, and a lot less trouble with Pages/Numbers.

I'm thinking of wiping hers and installing from TimeMachine, then pulling in just her user data.

sbuk3• 12 years ago

You didn't use the first few versions of OS X then? Or System 7? Or for that matter the first release of OS8? The newton, whilst technologically interesting, was flaky as hell. Actually, Lion was pretty ropey...

Doctor_Fegg• 12 years ago

System 7.0, and 7.1 especially, were terrific: a consistent, understandable UI and (in my experience at least) pretty stable.

The issues came with 7.5 and onwards, when Apple kept bolting on more and more features without any regard to either interface consistency or stability. Draw your own parallels.

rab_oof17• 12 years ago

SJ used to be relentless about nitpicking to keep quality up. Probably not happening consistently across all apps and platforms as much. Tim may need to appoint a Quality Czar whom is detail-oriented, accepts no bull and has "wrath of God" authority to make folks take them seriously.

Long-standing, time-wasting bugs I've noticed:

- Mdns broadcast disabling doesn't work.

- Swift playground in Xcode crashes regularly.

- Mobile Safari regularly crashes randomly on backspace in text areas.

- App Store installs corrupted apps but they don't show as corrupted until reboot, and then future downloads fail.

- Mail.app synchronously hangs the UI when processing new email notifications (probable not using a background queue).

bake• 12 years ago

To add one to your list, HealthKit hasn't worked on my iPhone 6 for months -- loads no step counts, pulls no data from third-party apps (despite settings), and renders some apps completely unusable (e.g. Jawbone UP when trying to use the M8 coprocessor as the pedometer).

asd• 12 years ago

HealthKit seems a bit half-baked. I can see it being really useful in the future once everything is "Healthkit enabled™," and data magically flows in, but it certainly has many bugs.

As an example, for a while I was manually entering my weight every couple days. After two weeks or so of doing this, the data simply vanished without a trace. This happened again after one of the early updates. After that, I simply gave up. Yes, a bug report was sent, but who knows what really happens once it goes through the 'Gates of Radar.'

MekaiGS• 12 years ago

Spotlight's Search the Web option regularly disappear after you've entered your query in the box; it's been super frustrating.

droopyEyelids2• 12 years ago

My ability to search for installed apps goes, but I always can get a SERP for them. Also highly frustrating.

rab_oof17• 12 years ago

On the privacy front: iOS Spotlight still falls back to searching the web without permission, leaking privacy info. And all the Privacy and Spotlight settings are set correctly.

OSX Spotlight is blocked by policy in Hands Off!

132• 12 years ago

The funniest one is an auto correct bug. If you make a text area that is limited to n characters, and auto correct changes the word you are typing to be n + 1 characters Safari completely crashes. I learned this one several times filling out a very long web form and just gave up and moved to Chrome.

rab_oof17• 12 years ago

I bet there's multiple issues in the text input / autocorrect buffer bounds checking. It's possibly an exploitable security issue too, or at least a nice area for research.

rab_oof17• 12 years ago

Update: I forgot the worst. FileVault 2 + HFS+ corrupting metadata and becoming un-fsck-able (Repair). TimeMachine restore and 5 hours loss per incident.

Also Xcode 6.1 took a week to fix a docset feed bug that they duplicated a docset dmg url. I found the exact correct dmg url, and it still took 3 days to fix. Everyone had broken Xcode Tools docsets until they fixed it. (!)

iBooks can use 100% CPU trying to connect to the (nonexistent) internet when reading an ePub.

All-in-all, these aren't show stoppers, just a collection of things to whine about. It would cause more happiness if they were fixed, but they're mostly navigable.

Flow4• 12 years ago

Regarding your app corruption, docset bug, filesystem corruption and general filesystem slowness, are you sure you don't have a bad SSD/HD or bad RAM?

jakobegger3• 12 years ago

Another one: when printing in Calendar, weeks start with Tuesday (everybody hates Mondays, so maybe that's a feature, not a bug)

webwielder• 12 years ago

I continue to be flabbergasted that so many otherwise savvy observers believe that a random assortment of software annoyances constitutes a crisis at Apple. Articles like this could have been, and were, written at any time in the past fifteen years.

Spooky23• 12 years ago

Apple is an incredibly mercurial company that sometimes gets too busy telling you what to do that they can't execute small things.

Look at poor iMovie, which has had most useful features stripped by this point. Or Pages, which actually broke file compatibility with little or no benefit. Or the situation with Wifi, which is a fuckup of monumental proportion.

rab_oof17• 12 years ago

On a mid 2012 13" non-retina (the 16 GiB hackable, 2 SSD one) MBP, fixed wifi by doing a clean Yosemite install, no transfer settings and then deleting network preferences plists. :(

Works, stable on 10.10.1. (Discoveryd mdns announce disablement doesn't flag doesn work at all though.)

132• 12 years ago

It's something that is noticeable though. Rather than things just working and maybe a few bugs, it's buggy as hell and might just work. We have up to the second major update beta and the volume level overlay is still buggy (transparent corners are black) on a lot of Macs when the UI transparency is turned off. It feels like there's no quality control at all.

rab_oof17• 12 years ago

A lot of stuff works on Yosemite. It's not that bad or I would've migrated back to Mavs. YMMV.

bluthru2• 12 years ago

Maybe. I kind of hope this groundswell spurs another "Snow Leopard" type release.

jalfresi2• 12 years ago

I hope so too. I really like the idea of Tick-Tock OS releases; first one is features, second one is performance/refactoring

rab_oof17• 12 years ago

Anecdotally, Yosemite (clean install) had an order of magnitude more breakage than Mavericks. YMMV. Perhaps we're so used to the unreasonable expectations of almost everything working that more breakage than usual precipitaes a whinefest "crisis" that gets picked up on TechCrunch as "news." That somehow Apple is "over" because of a few bugs that are fixed in the next patch release. (New releases are buggy, obviously. Best to wait for everyone else to sort them out or help catch them in beta.)

visarga3• 12 years ago

I just rated Yosemite 1 star on App store and wiped everything and installed Mavericks. It is so much better now. The last OS was just a shameless cloud infestation ridded with bugs.

I use Remote Screen for work, and EVERY time I disconnect my MacBook Pro freezes completely for 1-3 minutes (no mouse, just a froze desktop). Sometimes I need to hard reset it. Screen sharing used to work nicely in 10.9, 10.8, 10.7 and so on. Why was it necessary to mess with something good?

vitd• 12 years ago

Oh man, this happens to me too. So infuriating! I've taken to just hard rebooting it, as it takes about 20 seconds to boot and log in.

lmg643• 12 years ago

I had an issue with Mac Mail and after the upgrade it just stopped synching my exchange files correctly and that was the end of it. Called apple support, very friendly guy, talked me through it, we tried a few fixes, there was a workaround but it wasn't the same again. Moved over to MS Outlook and haven't gone back. Kind of a shame.

robbyt• 12 years ago

When I read reports of massive Yosemite bugs, I think that I am ether lucky, or I'm just a really bad QA tester.

I've personally had very few problems on my 3 different Apple computers.

rimantas2• 12 years ago

Same here. Three computers on Yosemite (including iMac from 2008), two iPhones, two iPads. I would not say zero problems, but those are mingo glitches at worst. Text messaging from any device alone was worth the upgrade.

coldtea• 12 years ago

I'm considering in staying with Yosemite and iOS 8, and haven't seen any singificant breakage over previous versions.

If anything it's better than Mavericks. And Mail woes are 99% gone too.

Just to add another viewpoint, since only people with negative experiences tend to write.

Of course all software has bugs, but not everybody is bitten by all of them. Some are legitimate complaints. Other are by peoplw who install every BS addon, haxie etc they find, have el-cheapo external peripherals, or blame third party software issues to the OS maker.

(That said, I've had the "22 px sheet" bug, and it's the second point release already --I run the beta--, it should have been fixed by now, and I dislike how they abandoned Aperture).

adamnemecek• 12 years ago

I still have the Yosemite wifi issues. It really rustles my jimmies. At the same time, I forgot how much faster ethernet is over wifi so that's nice.

flippyhead• 12 years ago

God me too, spend so many hours trying to fix but still, no dice.

izacus• 12 years ago

On the other hand, I'm still (on 10.10.2) experiencing severe window server bug where desktop just slows down to a crawl (all animations, window switching, missing control etc. run with less than 1fps) after some time of using the machine. Rebooting the system helps for awhile... and then it slows down again.

The issue seems to be limited to only nVidia equipped rMBPs, but honestly, I did not expect a brand new laptop (I have mid-2014) for 3kEUR to stutter just running desktop animations you know?

bshimmin• 12 years ago

I have this too with Yosemite - mid-2012 rMBP, 16GB RAM. It feels snappy when freshly rebooted, but after a period of time (hours? Probably not minutes...) all desktop animations start to become really quite obviously sluggish. Swiping between spaces is painful.

You do not expect this on an expensive machine that is barely two years old.

I also have wifi dropout issues, Mail is increasingly slow and unpredictable, and iTunes... Christ, don't get me started on iTunes.

My wife's 4 year old MBP, with 4GB RAM, was usable with Mavericks but is now basically unusable with Yosemite. I'm hoping more RAM and an SSD might sort it out, but I'm not overly hopeful.

I've been a more or less full-time Mac user since about 2003 and I don't remember being this frustrated with their software before.

Joe8Bit• 12 years ago

Agreed, upgraded since the beta and had few issues, and only then on beta releases that have since been fixed. Not sure how constructive this comment is, but thought it was worth seconding your experience.

matthewmacleod• 12 years ago

Yeah, I have to add my voice to this viewpoint too.

I definitely have annoyances with Yosemite – GUI performance on a rMBP is lower, which is particularly noticeable during Mission Control use. I've also got the irritating slowdown/flickering menu bar bug that I've seen people report. But generally everything else has been pretty great.

I do wish Apple was more public about bug tracking – I'd love to see a public database of known bugs so we can track progress or something like that.

garblegarble• 12 years ago

If anybody's interested in seeing some public information about known bugs, there's public user-driven "mirror" called Open Radar ( http://openradar.appspot.com ) that's really helpful. If you file a bug with Apple you can copy/paste the description (as well as any responses from Apple) there to help others

Cowicide6• 12 years ago

since only people with negative experiences tend to write

I haven't found that to be the case at the Apple subreddit on Reddit.

IMO, it depends on the topic and where the discussion is located.

gurkendoktor2• 12 years ago

or blame third party software issues to the OS maker

I think we are seeing exactly the opposite effect: People who use third-party software are complaining less.

Safari is buggy (swipe-to-go-back gesture sometimes freezes until I reboot), iWork has been ruined, Apple's photo ecosystem is a terrible mess, iCloud reliability (for documents) is a joke.

If I was using Chrome/Firefox, MS Office, Lightroom and Dropbox instead, I would have very few complaints about Apple's software quality.

coreyoconnor• 12 years ago

No question that Apple's quality has gone done. However, who's has gone up? Or better yet: Who is actually building quality software systems? Comparing only in the same problem domains as Apple: All of my Android devices have been rife with equivalently bad issues. Windows? Different quality issues, but just as bad. Google web systems? Same case. Better in some aspects, worse in others. Perhaps I'm old and jaded. Still, seems like we've reached a point in software development where building quality systems is not possible with existing methodologies. Where some problems, while we are able to develop 90% solutions, the last 10% might as well be impossible. The even more jaded part of me wonders: Does it even matter?

fidotron• 12 years ago

Precisely. One wonders exactly what Lovecraftian horrors Microsoft will have in Windows 10 that will allow them to compete with the new levels Google and Apple have reached.

The dreamy days of OS X Tiger on a G4 PowerBook now seem like they must have been figments of the imagination.

jalfresi2• 12 years ago

Man I LOVED Tiger; best OS upgrade ever. It truly felt like a brand new machine and the features were not only useful they felt futuristic!

rtpg• 12 years ago

Windows quality has gone up significantly since XP. I no longer associate Windows with constant crashing like I used to. Android has also gotten miles better, I haven't had any weird system-related bugs in so long (the worst I've gotten is some slowness).

The main issue is that Microsoft and Android developers (I guess mainly Google) are getting their shit together (resulting in some decent software), whereas Apple software quality is in a freefall, failing in some extremely basic use cases, and has been for a while.

Desktop OSs are one thing, but in 2 years do you think iOS will be more usable than Android on comparable hardware? I already don't think so. The momentum is definitely against Apple

happyscrappy2• 12 years ago

Updating your Android version is likely to break telephony and Android will probably never be secure for non technical users. Apple is pushing the limit with things like answering my phone on my laptop. Would someone even dare try this on Android? Maybe Apple is moving too fast, that is a matter of opinion, but they are certainly moving forward fast.

slantyyz• 12 years ago

> Windows quality has gone up significantly since XP. I no longer associate Windows with constant crashing like I used to.

This.

Apple's long term strategy on hardware had me getting ready to leave their ecosystem over a year ago (they discontinued the unibody Macbooks that I love so much, which were a perfect balance of size, power and end-user expandability). It didn't help that I have one of the early 2011 MBP's with the overheating and GPU issues. Mine just died over the Christmas holidays.

The only way my 2011 MBP would run without glitching and crashing was... surprise, surprise, running Windows 8.1 in Boot Camp. And in general, it felt and ran faster than OSX did.

That experiment led me to install Windows 8.1 on my 2008 Macbook -- which can't run anything newer than Lion. It was a pig, nearly unusable until I installed Windows on it, and now it's snappy enough to use daily.

While there's something to be said about Apple not looking to the past when providing OS upgrades, I think there's also something to be said about Microsoft's strategy of providing backwards compatibility to older hardware.

nightski• 12 years ago

If you only view the associated cost of these failures through the lens of quarterly profits, then they probably don't matter (at least in the short term).

But there has to be a point where as professionals we look at the opportunity cost of these failures and hold ourselves responsible for the damage they cause.

If you add up all the time and opportunity lost due to bugs, duplicated effort, and substandard solutions (which is nearly every piece of software today including my own) it just about makes one sick.

Apple is no more responsible for this than anyone else in the industry except for the fact that they are a platform creator. I feel that companies such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft should be held extra accountable not so much for the failure in where they have led us in the past, but our acceptance of their visions in the future.

pjmlp• 12 years ago

But Android and Windows systems cost half the price of a Mac one, there is a quality expectation given the price difference.

rikkus• 12 years ago

Others have said Windows. I'd say Windows Phone, too. It might be missing some things I'd like (Google stuff like Hangouts and Plus, which will likely never come) but otherwise it's a great OS, stable, fast, well designed and consistent.

pbreit• 12 years ago

Classic JLG going off on apps when all anyone cares about are MacOS, iOS and iCloud.

programminggeek• 12 years ago

I don't think there is as much of a fear of someone important getting angry like Steve Jobs used to. Without that fear, they are more likely to ship bugs.

Cowicide6• 12 years ago

That may be the case, but I've also noticed that too many Apple users have been less critical than they used to be and easily go on the attack of even the smallest constructive criticism of the company's products.

Maybe it's time for Mac users to get much more vocal and critical with Apple and quit apologizing for their mistakes to others?

I remember back in the day when there were Mac user uproars over the tiniest Mac OS flaws and I took pride that I was a part of a group of consumers that asked.. no, --demanded-- high quality products from Apple. Steve Jobs really seemed to take pride in that as well, in my opinion.

I hope threads like these are a sign that Apple consumers are ready to get back to our old-school roots of being demanding users that expect the best hardware and software for our money.

Consumer complacency breeds corporate complacency. I'm not critical of Mac products because I hate them. I'm critical of Mac products because I utilize them and need them for business. Otherwise, I frankly wouldn't give a shit.

rab_oof17• 12 years ago

I file bugs on every issue encountered. I suggest others do as well. The way Apple works (or used to) is that all bugs get read and possibly fixed, however there is little/no feedback as to timeline or whether a fix will occur. It's pompous, pseudotheatrical silence rather than engagement.

b3tta• 12 years ago

IMHO currently the worst bugs are in discoveryd, which replaces mDNSResponder for Bonjour.

If you remove a service on OSX 10.10 it's removal will be broadcast. But it doesn't stop there. No... Most of the time the service will be published again after that and after a second or so it will be finally removed. How the hell did this pass even the most basic QA checks?!

rab_oof17• 12 years ago

discoveryd is shit. The unofficial no broadcast argument breaks WiFi. You can't disable discoveryd, or it breaks DNS and DHCP.

If there's somwthing you want to block (multicast DNS), get icefloor and/or (Hand Off OR Little Snitch). I use the former and latter.former. OSX Yosemite contains the awesome pf firewall forked from FreeBSD which was forked from OpenBSD. (Apple send some cash to FreeBSD and OpenBSD plz.)

blazespin• 12 years ago

Apple and Android are in a sack race to the goal line of Billions of dollars in profit. They're both stumbling a lot, but I think it's pretty clear that Apple is winning.

planetjones• 12 years ago

I think apple are facing the same problems a lot of other companies face - it's no longer green field development and the existing codebase means they're being weighed down by regression. Maybe not enough automated tests. However some bugs are basic error really. Take the frequently visited icons on mobile safari. They keep getting the wrong favicon - that's just shoddy programming and testing.

yaeger• 12 years ago

I think it is not so much the legacy code that is the problem.

I think it is the fact that more and more features are being introduced and many seem to have effects on each other in a way apple has not foreseen.

Like the Wifi issue seems to have something to do with the ad-hoc networks being used for handoff or for making telephone calls from your Mac etc.

Ever since iCloud and its background services was introduced it seems the bugs happen more and more frequently. I think we need a maintenance release of Mac OS this year instead of yet another set of new features that will clash with the existing ones.

jsz02• 12 years ago

Most of the articles I've read on Apple software quality seem like larger industry wide issues to me. For example with the iTunes issue mentioned in this article this is a problem that every metadata / library based media player has to deal. If you let more than one app touch your audio files then you're pretty much guaranteed to have problems. Different apps/services may not write or sort on the same tags. No one's fault exactly just the way things are. The example of dictionary / thesaurus lookup moving to a system wide text service is an instance of a feature clearly being improved but if the users aren't aware it changed is that really an improvement? The entire industry sucks at user education. There's no good reason every major software developer shouldn't have hours and hours of free training/how-to videos available for users to cope with change. For the issue of GMail SMTP rejecting iWork file format attachments it's the industry wide problem of users being stuck between the best interests of various companies. Apple wants to change/improve the iWork format but Google wants to protect users from files it can't scan. Again no one is really at fault it's just the way things are.

wodenokoto• 12 years ago

I disagree. Companies are at fault here. It's apple's job to test common use cases, such as sending emails through common 3rd party services. And it is googles job to send the files its users wish to send.

72deluxe7• 12 years ago

I would agree. Has anyone tried to upload a file such as a CV to a website using Safari? It's impossible - the file selection "browse" button area is entirely MISSING. As local file access is not possible on the iPad, they just pretend it doesn't exist and you have to resort to installing bloated massive stupid apps to work around a daft problem within Safari.

jbergens• 12 years ago

I think they have issues all over the chart. We've had severe problems with changes in Safari's handling of javascript. Other have had problems with network connections etc. There seems to be a number of problem in many places.

_pmf_• 12 years ago

Maintaining software is not as fun as greenfield development, and Apple's strategy of assuming that their users should just throw away three year old devices seems not to work out any longer.

Cowicide6• 12 years ago

Apple's strategy of assuming that their users should just throw away three year old devices seems not to work out any longer.

Yeah, as I've been saying...

Some may call all of this growing Apple consumer angst and issues "back luck", but I bet Steve Jobs would call it "bad karma".

Consumers with early 2011 MacBook Pros that died after 2-3 years didn't feel like they got a very good ROI on a 3-4,000 dollar laptop, go figure. Especially those that paid hundreds more for extended Applecare and had the defective GPU fail quickly after it expired.

walterbell2• 12 years ago

A visual interpretation of changes in Apple's org chart:

http://www.bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts/

http://www.bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts-update/

72deluxe7• 12 years ago

Very witty - is the implication that Apple now has no leader and the end nodes are floating off without guidance?

walterbell2• 12 years ago

From a comment on the article, a roundup of writers on this topic, http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/mac-experts-weigh-in-...

Flow4• 12 years ago

I currently have two Macs. A late 2013 rMBP 13" which works flawlessly, and an iMac 27" with 680mx(later 2012?).

The iMac has felt wonky for lack of a better word. It doesn't hang or crash more than Mavericks did, but f.lux causes WindowServer to crash randomly which makes all users to be logged out in a microsecond. I've reported this of course.

Another thing that troubles me is the amount of rubbish logging done by the system. Have Console.app open for a while and see what nonsense it barfs out. How can it work at all with all those problems?

mech4bg• 12 years ago

I had a lot of WindowServer crashes with my 30" external monitor at work when I upgraded to Yosemite. Found huge discussion threads on it on Apple's forums - it's been fixed in 10.10.2, so if you get on the beta channel for updates that should hopefully solve it for you. It fixed it for me and the latest beta seems solid. It was happening to me every time I unlocked my computer, and I would lose all my windows/tabs - maddening.

perlpimp• 12 years ago

that model of rmbp has flickering keyboard light issue. if you set your display and keyboard brightness to about 2 bars, in a very dark room keyboard will flicker.

Flow4• 12 years ago

Ouch, I haven't noticed that, but I'm sure I will now :-P

I've noticed some logging about the touchpad causing some restart. The mouse pointer used to make a slight jump every time that was logged.

Animats• 12 years ago

The first rule of Apple software quality is that you don't talk about Apple software quality. All Apple software is, by definition, perfect.

Look at Rolex watches. They're a pure status symbol. They don't keep time all that well. Rolex doesn't even submit them for Swiss chronometer certification any more.

eridius3• 12 years ago

Skimming this, I just wanted to reply to this one bit:

Befuddled users found they couldn’t send Pages 5 files through Gmail. It’s now fixed, as the What’s New in Pages screen proudly claims…
> ° Updated file format makes it easier to send documents via services like Gmail and Dropbox
…but how could such an obvious, non-esoteric bug escape Apple’s attention in the first place?

And the answer, if I recall correctly as to what was going on, was that this wasn't a bug with Apple's software at all. It was a consequence of the file format actually being a package, meaning it was really a document. Apple software all worked with documents just fine, and you'll find that if you tried to use Mail.app to send it, it would all Just Work™. The issue is that Gmail and other such services never even considered the idea that a user might want to send a whole folder and did not have any way to support that.

So the "fix" was to change the file format to actually be a compressed archive of the package (I assume it was a zip file, but I don't know how to go back and check). This made it work with all of the stupid software out there that assumed users would only want to transfer individual files.

Sure, perhaps the Pages team could have foreseen this issue. But that doesn't make it a bug in their software, just a case of only prioritizing compatibility with other aspects of Apple's software ecosystem.

jakobegger3• 12 years ago

Claiming that "this is not a bug" sounds a lot like "you are holding it wrong".

Software that doesn't perform as the user expects is almost always a bug. Yes, these folder-packages have been a problem for years. No, that doesn't mean Apple can just leave the problem as is.

For example, try emailing an app. Doesn't work. You need to zip it first. But why doesn't Mail.app just zip the file when I select it?

Why doesn't Safari automatically zip any package that I select for uploading?

Apple came up with the idea of packages, so they better fix the issues around them. Saying that Google should fix Gmail helps no-one.

eridius3• 12 years ago

But why doesn't Mail.app just zip the file when I select it?

It does. That's the whole point of my comment. Mail.app has always supported emailing folders.

vbezhenar• 12 years ago

I think that Apple is a victim of its decision to release new OS version every year. Users expect a lot of changes from iOS n+1 or OS X m+1. You can't just fix all bugs and release a new version. And constant feature improvement introduces new bugs and deadline frames won't allow to release properly tested fixes for old bugs.

I believe that feature-wise OS X 10.10 and iOS 8 are quite nice. Apple really should adapt something like Intel's tick-tock strategy. Release iOS 8 with new features at 2014. Release iOS 8S with all bugs fixed in 2015. Release iOS 9 with new features at 2016 but allow customers to downgrade to iOS 8S if they want to, for at least a year. They'll have to support 2 iOS versions, but people will have a choice between new features and stability.

paulojreis• 12 years ago

I believe that feature-wise OS X 10.10 and iOS 8 are quite nice.

My feeling is that this embodies the problem pretty well. Apple releases, typically, weren't seen (by tech people) as "quite nice", feature-wise. The "ahhh" moments in keynotes were more or less experience-related. iOS 8 and Mavericks keynotes, however, were full of "ahh" moments related to technical advances.

It seems (to me) that they jumped on the "creeping featurism" bandwagon.

nodata• 12 years ago

I think that Apple is a victim of its decision to release new OS version every year

Why? Why is one year the problem, would two years fix it? Why not 14 months?

fpgeek• 12 years ago

I'd say a fixed cadence, especially when combined with a relatively inflexible scope (pre-announced features, features tied to new hardware, etc.), is, at a minimum, a significant contributor to the problem. If there's an unexpected problem late in the development cycle, what's going to give?

rab_oof17• 12 years ago

Internal product churn and massive refactoring is bad. Make the UI themeable and keep the core mostly the same. However there is drive to converge the iOS and OSX APIs to where there may only be one platform.

lelf• 12 years ago

If more developers knew what backward compatibility is, I'd be happily using Snow Leopard right now. The most frustrating part is there's nothing fundamentally new worth all the bugs and a constant envy for new hardware.

cpach• 12 years ago

From time to time I have thought about switching to Centos as my desktop, where every release is supported for ten years. The question is, in the year 2023, will I really still want to use an OS from 2014? I’m not sure about that. In the end I think I’m really better off sticking with OS X for the foreseeable future.

72deluxe7• 12 years ago

Has anyone found Safari under Yosemite and iOS8 to be of "disappointing" quality? I know of DNS being broken in Yosemite but my wife and I find Safari to be extremely irritating- it just sits there at 20% of address bar progress after entering an address and pressing Enter.

EDIT: And another thing - Spotlight now takes a significant amount of time to get results. I notice a large difference between my personal i7 2012 MBP with Yosemite and the 2008 single-CPU (quad core) Xeon running Mavericks at work. Maybe it's the disk difference, but I sometimes wonder if Spotlight is doing anything as there is no search indication / activity indication.

fredsted• 12 years ago

I had that problem when one of my system DNS servers were incorrect.

72deluxe7• 12 years ago

Mine are both set to Google's.

psp• 12 years ago

Ahh, finally a blog touching this! I've been quietly pissed off for a while at being unable to get Apple TV to connect or closing a full screen video tab in Safari without killing the whole process. And other bits and pieces that occasionally just don't work goddamnit.

hackaflocka3• 12 years ago

As some others have pointed out elsewhere, OS X Yosemite used to bork your old XAMPP installation. I spent 1.5 entire days restoring my XAMPP. I believe the XAMPP people have released a fix that prevents the borking. "Madness" is right.

Apple: I am NEVER going to upgrade OS X again if my current version is working fine.

hackaflocka3• 12 years ago

It took Apple 2 years to correct the name of my local university in "Maps" (after I had filed 3 correction reports via Maps, each spaced a month apart).

I think a little expectations management might be in order here.

hackaflocka3• 12 years ago

Slightly off-topic, but I also find some of Apple's software workflow philosophies baffling. E.g., sometime back they got rid of the Save As button.

I was once playing around with editing a photo using Preview. I tried a crop etc. Eventually, I closed the app without committing to any of the edits (by Saving anything). Imagine my shock (and horror) when I discovered that the "playing around edits" I had done had all been permanently applied to my original image. Despite never having saved anything. All the edits were being applied in real-time, even if I was just trying something to see how it would look (without committing a save). So, they apparently have decided to even get rid of the Save button in some cases.

Apple Software Quality Questions

Related Stories