For the past six months or so, I’ve become increasingly concerned about the quality of Apple software. From the painful gestation of OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) with its damaged iWork apps, to the chaotic iOS 8 launch, iCloud glitches, and the trouble with Continuity, I’ve gotten a bad feeling about Apple’s software quality management. “It Just Works”, the company’s pleasant-sounding motto, became an easy target, giving rise to jibes of “it just needs more work”.
Even if the endless list of complaints from die-hard Apple users and developers is somehow entirely nothing but anti-Apple propaganda, Apple is still left with a growing perception problem.
Personally, as a semi-long-time Apple user (since 2003 I believe), I’ve never thought of Apple’s software as “particularly good” – the rest was just worse. However, considering the general quality of software, that’s not saying much (software is of horribly low quality when compared to other tools we use). Now that we no longer have Windows XP but Windows 7 and up, now that we no longer have Android 2.x and Symbian but Android 5.0, people are beginning to realise what I knew all along: Apple’s software isn’t good. It was just a little bit less crappy than everyone else’s.
Mainstream support for Windows 7 ended on January 13, so this statement should rather say “Windows 8 and up”. (Extended support is yet to end in 2020 though.)
Just because Windows 7 won’t get new features (which is what the ending of mainstream support means) does not mean that there’s any good reason not to target it.
No, ending of mainstrean support means that Windows 7 won’t get bugfixes and online/phone support. Only security fixes will be shipped.
Actually point 6) on this page explains it all better.
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy
The reason to not target Windows 7 is which one exactly? It has the leading market share, it’s still a supported product and, let’s face it, Windows 8 is not going to replace it. Added bonus, target Win 7 and your software will work fine on Win 8.
Maybe it is time for Apple to slow down major releases of OSX and iOS, and to concentrate on ironing out the existing issues with more subsequent minor releases.
Or to stick to the Ubuntu scheme, where people have the choice between rock solid LTS releases or the more risky releases that are issued every 6 months.
Some issues in OSX Mavericks were to be fixed in Yosemite, but the latter release introduced new issues, so you never have a issue-free release anymore.
Additionally Apple should look at itself and seriously question some of it software products that are below par on functionality and/or ease of use: Finder and Numbers come immediately to my mind. And the bloated iTunes should be split up in at least 3 seperate products: one sync product for iDevices, one music/video player + manager, and one store for buying content
I absolutely agree with the Ubuntu idea; if there’s one thing I think Ubuntu has done really well is their version and support cycles. That being said, I don’t think it’s in Apples’ culture to “admit” that any of their releases are “unstable”, but having an OSX “LTS” which is supported for more than a cycle would be a dream come true for IT personnel.
One other thing I think Apple needs to do is what Steve Jobs did when he re-took Apple; I think they either need to cut their product line or formally spin-off several of their product divisions into other companies. They’re having the same problem they had in the late 80s/early 90s; too many products. Jobs’ cut it down to 10 products. They need to do it again. They have laptops, desktops, minis, all-in-ones, iPads, iPods, watches and televisions; those are just the lines, and some lines have several products.
I think probably the biggest thing might be getting *all* apps and systems on both sides to run on ARM and Intel. Once thats done Apple could very successfully merge several product lines.
For example, Apple could ditch tablets and laptops, instead offering only convertibles. Imagine docking an iPad into a bluetooth/wireless charge keyboard (look ma – no ports or plugs!) and having it gracefully switch to a full OSX experience, then just picking it up and having it switch to iOS-mode as you travel to the office. It’s a thing, we have the technology to do it today. Dock an iPhone to a monitor, switch to OSX mode, browse the web on a 27″ Retina monitor. Get an Apple iPad stand connected to a second display and full keyboard/mouse; drop your ‘Intel iPad Pro” in and have a full workstation.
Eventually, Apple could reduce iOS and OSX to mere shells, much like MS has done.
About the only concession would be relegating Intel processors to “pro” devices, and having heavy-duty apps like Photoshop require such a “pro” device to function, as the A* processors aren’t quite beefy enough to offer a good experience.
There’s no reason an A* processor couldn’t land in a mini to create an ultra-cheap ultra-small mac-mini capable of running email, web browsers, office stuff and the like – which is what 90% of users need. If you could get your hands on a $150 Mac capable of handling day-to-day tasks, would you do it? Yeah.
That is a ridiculous idea. Apple has been able to leverage their resources to enable them to support that ecosystem off a common code base. For Apple to spin off products and lines into different companies would either require them to become, in part, an OS provider (which is not in their DNA), or to completely lose one of their biggest selling points, which is being able to supply what they used to call their digital lifestyle experience.
Apple already has a remarkably streamlined product lines compared to their competitors. Compare their phone line to Samsung Or their laptop line to Samsung. Or their desktop (all-in-one) line to Samsung.
Apple has 3 laptop lines, one of which is clearly becoming obsolete soon (the non-retina Macbook pro), 1 line of phones (selling phones that were designed year ago and are being sold pretty much unchanged doesn’t count as having multiple lines), the iPads (could argue they have two lines here are the Air and Mini are clearly different, but the rest are essentially older products being sold cheaper. They have am iMac line (same product, different sizes) and one MacPro. That is fewer products in total than Dell probably has desktops alone.
All very true, but they still make tons of money and certainly can afford to put resources into fixing the software. But hey can’t be assed as they make tons of money from people buying into an illusory quality digital lifestyle…well, the quality bit is ever becoming an illusion. But people put up with windows so imagine they will continue on with Apple. Feeling smug too, which is what gets my goat, as being a delusional middle class narcissist seems to be an Apple requirement.
“people are beginning to realise what I knew all along: Apple’s software isn’t good. It was just a little bit less crappy than everyone else’s.”
That just sounds so pretentious. Complaining that no software has met your arbitrary standard for “good”, makes it so there’s just no pleasing you. We live in a relative world and the only way we can realistically rank things as “good” and “bad” is to compare them against stuff that actually exists. We refer to all kinds of imperfect things as good be it food, music, or people, and if we were to have some mythically high standard for each of those… ugh what a sadly negative world it would be.
When something costs me 1000 euros more than the alternatives (e.g. Mac Book 15 vs ThinkPad Workstation W), I expect a certain quality level.
My comment isn’t about value. It’s about Thom finding no software that meets a non-existant threshold for good.
And your comment backs up what I’m saying. Your view of what one can expect is based on comparisons with other things that exist in reality. You’re not looking at a ThinkPad Workstation W and going “ugh, this is a rubbish laptop, it’s not as fast as the ThinkPad that will be out in 2025”.
Use terms like good and bad when comparing things that actually exist.
I’ll give you a very specific definition of good – functions consistently with the defined functionality and raised expectations.
For example – grep, less, vi are examples of great software.
You’re off by an order of magnitude in the cost differential: A comparable W-series costs just about the same as the Macbook counterpart in the US, and about a couple of hundred euros less in Euroland. Apple is retarded with the Euro pricing indeed, but even there is still not one grand differential.
Apple does not target the low end, but at the middle/high levels they’re actually not that bad of a value.
Edited 2015-01-19 17:55 UTC
As somebody who has had at least one mac since 2003, I think the real issue is that newer version of OS X are less stable than previous versions. You can live in the Apple ecosystem and be oblivious to the quality of software outside of it, but you can’t have Apple users forget how stable their systems used to be. The joining of the OS X and iOS code bases seemed to come at the detriment of desktop mac users.
That’s certainly my experience with Yosemite on my 2014 MacBook Pro, especially if weird glitches that require a restart are counted, rather than just complete crashes.
In fact, I’m just about to restart it because the Finder crashed, had to be force quitted, and now won’t reopen. It’s coming up with “You can’t open the application “Finder†because it is not responding” when I try to relaunch it.
My Windows 7 desktop definitely has fewer issues and a longer uptime than my newer and less heavily used MacBook.
“Now that we no longer have Windows XP but Windows 7 and up” seems like a big stretch. Windows 7 has been available for more than 5 years.
In my experience Windows 95/98/nt4/2000 were better than OS9 and XP was better than the first versions of OSX.
Vista (before the 1st servicepack and driver availability) was arguably worse than Tiger and Leopard but both had their trouble going from “the old era” to “modern times”
Windows 7 and Snow Leopard both came out at roughly the same time and were both basically polished versions that finally give consumers great, reliable software
After that both had some updates to accomodate the mobile world and went into the rapid release cycle that they are still getting used to.
It seems that they are always on exactly the same stage in their development track. Even the fact that both are now giving away their OS-Updates for free.
Apple definitely has lost their “perfect” image though. When people around me write FB-posts like “Yosemite.. shall I, shall i not?” and receiving mostly “I wouldn’t” answers (and the same advice for updating an ipad2 to anything past ios6) even when these updates are free…there is a problem
P.S. Apple hardware is better on average than “Windows-OEM-hardware”, which is expected because they only cater to the top of the market. But this topic is about software and not about “better together”
Technical Debt is the bane of long term software.
There is always a push to add new features (especially with new ideas like iOS-iCloud-OSX ecosystem). There is less of a push to fix bugs.
Apple was better when it did small but great software engineering. Pages and Numbers were NOT Word and Excel, and they could have kept them small and light, and fixed problems.
For a formal Too Big To Fail Technical Debt Bankruptcy and Default, see iTunes. The main problem with iTunes is that you all but need to use it with your iOS device (including Apple TV). It couldn’t be fixed 5 years ago. It couldn’t be fixed 10 years ago. It Carbon-dates back to OS9!.
The problem is that Debt is exponential. When you don’t fix the little problems when the code is simple and short, by the time it is buried in thousands of additional lines and many additional layers, what would be an easy fix is now almost impossible.
Apple (or Microsoft too, Google soon) needs to specify some time, maybe just after a release or even take a sabbatical year and just fix every last bug, and maybe add the lightest weight features (Why can’t Android do zeroconf or adhoc?).
Actually, they managed to port iTunes to Cocoa a while ago, while maintaining the exact same design as the carbon-based iTunes…
I’m puzzled.
I use all three operating systems every day as a professional cross-platform developer.
While there are weaknesses and strengths in all operating systems, I find OS X leaps and bounds above the competition in most metrics.
Curiously I have some big issue with OSX which made it unreliable for my work,
When having both the wifi and ethernet, it insisted on only using the wifi connection (which was unfortunately flaky), disabling the wifi didn’t make OSX pick the ethernet connection as a backup, and curiously the enternet connection worked fine on other platform.
Resolution : Installed linux on it and I can do my work smoothly. and decide what connection to use as priority.
I admit that Apple hardware is nice, but the software is not my cup of tea.
Disclaimer : I am mainly a linux/windows use, the lack of control in animation (and control in general) in OSX/IOS make me wince to no end, sure windows and linux are not that reliable, but when they break, I can partially understand why and have more control in the fixing process.
Is this Apple is Doomed (The Remix)? So first its
“no one is buying Mac’s, Apple’s Doomed!”, then Mac’s outsell PC’s at a time when PC sales are down!
“No one wants an iPad, its just a giant iPod”, then iPad sells at a faster rate than anything else before it.
“Teens dont want iPhone’s, Apple’s doomed!” then iPhone 6 sells more than Apple has eve sold ever.
“Apple doesn’t care about Content Development Pro’s, they abandoned the MacPro”, then they release the redesigned MacPro that is built for complete kickassery! And then the very same pundits chime “Its way too powerful for what I do, who would need that?” Sells like hotcakes.
So I guess this Spring/Summer, Apple is gonna be doomed again, and then be the best application and OS developer again? I tell ya, these 24 hour news cycles, must be absolute hell!
Mac’s outselling PC’s? In which universe? Apple said there are about 80 million OSX and 800 million IOS devices…in total…ever! Every year roughly 300 million pc’s are sold
iPad never sold at a faster rate than anything else either. About 20 million per quarter and now way less (and that statement was about an iPod Touch, not an iPod)
I never heard “Teens don’t want iPhones” and I certainly don’t think teens are the main focus of Apple so even if teens would abandon iPhones entirely they wouldn’t be doomed (immediately)
Apple did completely abandon content development pro’s for years. Please provide some source that says the MacPro sold like hotcakes. That machine was a statement (we can still innovate) and we haven’t heard much from it since. The 5K Imac seems more targetted to their real needs anyway
http://bgr.com/2014/02/14/iphone-ipad-mac/
Um, per the article, #5 buddy, ahead of iPhone. But dont let facts get in the way of your point. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/05/18/24-7-wall-s…
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larissafaw/2013/01/09/is-apples-iphone-…
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/12/20/apples-new-mac-pro…
He won’t be winning the lottery for those WWDC passes anytime soon. BTW, he magically wins every year.
Simple… Jobs not there anymore. He was the one getting all worked up if someone made a crap software. That someone would have got fired.
The dev at Apple are not scared anymore, getting lazy are being far less creative.
I remember back around 2002-3 seeing ads for the Powerbook G4 that compared it to a unix workstation from the likes of Sun or SGI. It was obvious that these were designed to be serious, reliable machines, that just happened to be compatible with MacOS stuff and MS Office. OS X and Linux then proceeded to eviscerate the Unix workstation market, to the point that high end Macs, or PCs with workstation-grade GPUs and server-grade everything else running Linux are literally the only options left. Now everyone who wants to switch to OS X for the unixy stuff has already done so, so that market segment gets taken for granted. Some of the unix tools in OS X haven’t been updated in NINE YEARS. Now the big competition is Windows 8.x (on the desktop) and Android, which are largely designed for people who ten years ago would have refused to touch a computer at all. Apple’s new ads reflect this – they’re one step above “look at the shiny toys, must buy.” As Microsoft and Google have shown, these rubes will buy basically anything if you advertise it well enough and the software at least nominally lives up to the promised feature list. From a business perspective, it makes sense to throw your money where it’ll get the best return, which now means marketing and new features instead of stability and code quality.
tl;dr software sucks because people will buy sucky software
I’ve just come back from giving a presentation with my MacBook Pro, without booting into Windows 7 to get the job done. Not the best idea considering OS X’s flakey support for external displays.
There were problems getting the projector recognised (no luck with HDMI), it wouldn’t mirror the display after getting it working with a Thunderbolt-DVI adapter, there were glitches with moving things from one screen to another (necessary because of the lack of mirroring, and OS X’s insistence on opening things on the MacBook’s screen even though they were launched from the projected desktop), but it finally seemed to be working well enough to do the job.
Unfortunately, after taking a break long enough for the projector to go to sleep, the MacBook stopped recognising it. Turning it off and on and plugging and unplugging didn’t solve anything. Selecting “detect displays” caused Mac OS X to lock solid, requiring a hard reset by holding down the power button. After that restart it finally detected the projector again and I could finish what I was doing.
I like the Mac OS X interface and some of the software available for it, but when I need consistency, compatibility and reliability I boot into Windows 7. Obviously YMMV…