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Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408
To cut down on bugs, Apple is changing how it develops its software
The initial release windows of both iOS 12 and iOS 13 saw users complaining about a plethora of bugs both major and minor. Apple has plans to mitigate this problem when iOS 14 launches next year, according to sources who spoke with Bloomberg.
People familiar with the shift told the publication that a major factor contributing to iOS 13's rough launch window was the fact that many Apple developers were making daily or weekly commits of new changes at varying levels of readiness and quality, and those features were enabled by default regardless of their readiness. This meant that test builds were often unusable for stretches of time due to one problematic feature or another, which limited the amount of time testers spent with the software.
Under the new methodology, new test builds of Apple's future operating systems will turn certain features deemed to be buggy or to cause usability issues off by default. Testers will be able to opt-in on a feature-by-feature basis in many cases, reducing the likelihood that they will be working with "unlivable" builds.
Bloomberg's sources provided some insight about how Apple assesses the reliability and state of its own software features, as well.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday November 26 2019, @12:15AM (7 children)
Mac in the 90s, exploring new grounds, desktop publishing, digital audio and video... rock solid OS even without memory protection and preemptive multitasking, which windows users touted while rebooting from their BSOD or random glitches.
Mac adopting OSX on the early 00, very limited OS but complete in a couple of years, as good as most unixes
Mac now, doing basically the same things it needed to do in the 00... unstable??? Maybe it's the drivers, that's the only thing changing.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @01:06AM (5 children)
Your nostalgia filter is too thick, friend. Mac and Windows were equally unstable in the 1990s.
In the 2000s, Mac adopted OSX, Windows transitioned to NT everywhere, both OS platforms stabilized at the same time.
(Score: 0) by Coligny on Tuesday November 26 2019, @06:33AM (1 child)
Nope, no paper clip reboot. That was disc/cd ejection. Reboot was either keyboard combo with the starter key (apple/optioon/start(¿?)=>reboot) or the software interupt combo then the hex command. Or the power button in the front/back some macs had hardware switches dedicated for interrupt and reboot.
Well famous was the “error 11”
Stable up to 7.5.3
7.6 was bleh
8 was super bleh
9 was ok, I guess
Powerbook sleep mode was not realistically usable before OsX beta though
If I wanted to be moderated by mor0nic groupthinking retards I would still be on Digg and Reddshit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @02:53PM
Yes, paper clip reboot. The programmer's switch was an optional feature which had to be physically installed on the side of the case. If you didn't install the external switch, you had to reach inside the case with a paper clip to push the internal switch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmer%27s_key [wikipedia.org]
SM 0 3F3C 0001 A895
G 0
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday November 26 2019, @01:16PM (2 children)
I was exclusively using apple from 84 to 2001 and apple hardware with Linux later. The dreaded bomb was a once every two year thing. Unless you installed Microsoft office, which on my PowerPC stayed installed for a grand total of two hours. Linux is less stable than system7 but honestly it does a lot more.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @03:37PM
You're saying one of three things here, buddy. Either you used your Mac once every two years, or your memory is very faulty, or you're simply lying.
(Score: 2) by mechanicjay on Wednesday November 27 2019, @07:29PM
This is a curious comment to me. My Apple Macintosh in the early 90's was lucky to get 2 hours of run time in between reboots. I started as a linux user in 2006, which was a revelation in stability for me. Linux for me, as a rule, just kinda runs until you tell it to stop.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Tuesday November 26 2019, @10:56AM
No. They change and drop a shitload of stuff. The peak was achieved with Snow Leopard (10.6.8). After that, it went downhill.
The worst thing was "Apple Persistence". I can only assume that marketing thought it was a great idea to drop the proven Open/Save As/Save/Revert workflow for that shit in order to sell more of their Time Machine pods. It might be a thing to have a versioned file system, but what they did was the worst way imaginable.
I haven't had any horror encounters, but I heard that the sandboxing of application takes its toll, too, especially wrt performance. Then, there's the SIP lockdown, which perverts the meaning of "root". The right way would have been to run entirely rootless and have appropriate admin rights. The latest fads are controls for Apple Events, which went into the system hardly completely thought out, let alone documented anywhere (except frustrated developer's blogs) and coprocessor based boot signing.