Jean-Louis Gassée writes in Monday Note that the painful gestation of OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) with its damaged iWork apps, the chaotic iOS 8 launch, iCloud glitches, and the trouble with Continuity, have raised concerns about the quality of Apple software. “It Just Works”, the company’s pleasant-sounding motto, has became an easy target, giving rise to jibes of “it just needs more work”.
"I suspect the rapid decline of Apple’s software is a sign that marketing is too high a priority at Apple today," writes Marco Arment. "having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality." Many issues revolve around the general reliability of OS X.
"With Yosemite, I typically have to reboot my laptop at least once a day, and my desktop every few days of use," writes Glenn Fleishman. "The point of owning a Mac is to not have to reboot it regularly. There have been times in the past between OS X updates where I've gone weeks to months without a restart."
I know what I hope for concludes Gassée. "I don’t expect perfection, I’ve lived inside several sausage factories and remember the smell. If Apple were to spend a year concentrating on solid fixes rather than releasing software that’s pushed out to fit a hardware schedule, that would show an ascent rather than a slide."
(Score: 2) by E_NOENT on Tuesday January 20 2015, @10:15AM
From a linked article at http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/01/18/apple-software-quality-questions/ [mondaynote.com]
I suspect the rapid decline of Apple’s software is a sign that marketing is too high a priority at Apple today: 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.
This seems all too common. Marketing and cyclical releases control things at $JOB for me, and that approach certainly has its risks.
I'm not in the business... I *am* the business.
(Score: 2) by Leebert on Tuesday January 20 2015, @11:27AM
It would seem that Apple can't even manage to make a working Podcast app these days. Even when they had one that was working perfectly fine to start with.
(Score: 5, Informative) by TheRaven on Tuesday January 20 2015, @11:35AM
Yosemite itself seems fine, but a number of the bundled apps have serious regressions. For example, Preview now crashes if the file it had open goes away and doesn't remember the page number if the file changes. This is really frustrating if you're using it for LaTeX previews. If you happen to click on Preview while pdflatex is running, Preview crashes. If you click after it's finished, it jumps back to page 1. With the previous release, if the file went away it would just use the old one and it would remember the page number for replaced files.
Mail.app is regression city. It's significantly slower, the unread counts in smart mailboxes are normally wrong (or just missing) and a load of other things are annoying. On the plus side, they fixed the regression in previous release where smart mailboxes were updated too aggressively so that if you had one for unread mail it would remove the message that you were reading if you sent a reply.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2, Informative) by TheRealMike on Tuesday January 20 2015, @03:46PM
The OS has regressions too. Yosemite broke the drivers for my digital signature smartcard stick for months and when the manufacturers finally got a Yosemite-compatible release out, it came with the huge caveat that due to bugs in the new OS you might sometimes have to reboot the computer to get things working.
There have been a bunch of other annoying regressions too. Yosemite is a pretty awful upgrade. I didn't need the new look, it's not better than the old look, and it's just been buggy as hell.
(Score: 1) by ramloss on Tuesday January 20 2015, @11:04PM
Interesting timing of this article after the couple hours I spent last night trying to convince Time Machine that in fact there is enough space in my backup drive. I'm exactly in the same situation as this guys:
Re:Yosemite and Time Machine [apple.com]
This bug effectively prevents me from doing any more backups, erasing one of the main advantages that I have found over using Windows. Add this to mail, and notes, and iWork etc. and I'm becoming quickly fed up with OS X. And all this for what, a different typeface and some translucency? pfft!
I've recently been forced at work to change to an hp workstation with windows 7 which starts to seem much more comfy by the minute.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20 2015, @11:44AM
Done everything from video encoding to picture creation and all the daily management of TB of files.
I haven't rebooted win7 in 122 days... Since the power went out for longer than my UPS can do.
Come a long way since 95 reboot 5 times a day...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20 2015, @02:24PM
Oh yeah? Well I've had my atari running for 40 consecutive years and played all pacman variants on it and this either isn't in any way related to the article at hand...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20 2015, @04:13PM
I almost feel sad for the M$ sockpuppets who praise the Windows OS. They sure hit this site running!
(Score: 1) by kanweg on Tuesday January 20 2015, @04:54PM
I have to restart mine every two weeks or so for a new security update. What gives?
Bert
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20 2015, @09:47PM
http://m.xkcd.com/350/ [xkcd.com]
...except that the AC is trying to do it on bare metal, on 1 machine.
-- gewg_
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20 2015, @11:54AM
Apple is not in the business of making computers but in the business of making money. And it's been fabulously successful at that. Any perceived quality will go up or down as dictated by the Allmighty Buck. This should not surprise you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20 2015, @01:06PM
My MacBook Pro works fine, no reboots required unless for system updates.
Mail.app? I never use it and would never expect much of it. Pages is nice for basic posters etc.
Only other Apple software I use is Final Cut Pro X which works well though I'm always open to switching to other (Adobe) if necessary.
Apple makes a great notebook computer to use other software on.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20 2015, @01:11PM
What we see happening at Apple is the obvious result of them running out of stock of Steve Jobs' demonic black wyrm jizz which the remaining execs drink every day. We saw something similar when he was away from '85 onwards. Up until that point he'd secretly been spiking the company coffee machines and water fountains with his unholy seed and without it, boy did we see Apple begin to suffer.
In late '94 Woz got his naive ass kidnapped by some very worried Cupertino type desperate to reinvigorate the ailing corp. and after only two weeks of Chinese water torture, Woz spilled the beans about Jobs' black seed. From there it was academic, to survive Apple needed the demon seed Jobs' sack could provide and so they set to buy out NeXT and reclaim Jobs for their own, and look how successful it made them.
Now armed with the knowledge and ammunition to take on the personal computing word again Apple stormed the marked fuelled by demon seed in their bellies but disaster was waiting just around the corner. When Jobs was first diagnosed with a terminal cancer Apple realised what was about to happen to them; without Steve's jizz they were fucked!
Moving Steve to a schedule allowing for chemo and public appearances they started to milk him for every last little swimmer they could collect to store for future use however this was not going to be enough. Now, just over three years after his death, Cupertino is running out of the precious seed. They've used up all of Job's 'banked for the future' innovations that were to keep the company afloat relying heavily of rehashed versions of existing devices, no new ideas left.
The megre supply of Jobs' jizz left is now so heavily rationed that only the board can now partake, the company is floundering, a storm is comming and Apple will eventually sink
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday January 20 2015, @03:13PM
This. Parent speaks the truth.
How could anybody actually hold onto their AAPL stock with a straight face after Steve-O kicked the bucket? Short-city time, fellas.
(Score: 2) by quacking duck on Tuesday January 20 2015, @03:27PM
Have you actually *looked* at AAPL for the last five years, i.e. "after Steve-O kicked the bucket"?
You can argue against *continuing* to keep the stock, but up til now those holding onto the stock since Jobs died are definitely not straight faced, they've been laughing all the way to the bank.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by theluggage on Tuesday January 20 2015, @01:55PM
"having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality."
And therein lies the problem. Even if Apple could keep up with it, its a strain for third party developers and even "serious" SOHO or self-employed professionals, let alone larger businesses supporting Mac users.
(Eeeh, when I were a lad I remember spending t' thick end of a year preparing to upgrade a VAXCluster from VMS 4 to 5... now get orf my lawn!)
What is the justification for major new OSX and iOS releases every year? Even mobile OSs have been around for 7-8 years now and should be reaching maturity, and OS X grew up with Snow Leopard. Its not like there's a flood of completely new computer usage paradigms coming down the pike and if you need to (e.g.) update (and break!) the wifi drivers in order to add support for 5K displays then there's something horribly wrong with the structure of the OS: it ought to be possible to upgrade drivers and subsystems as and when they are needed, and ready.
...and pushing an alert to every Loo-less cluser exhorting them to upgrade to version X.0 of the OS on day 1 is just frothing insanity.
Its not just Apple - even Linux distros (who you'd think should be less driven by commercial pressures) seem to think we need a new alliterative animal every 6 months.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20 2015, @02:51PM
What is the justification for major new OSX and iOS releases every year?
But Apple's Secret Sauce isn't that it works anymore... Since the iPod it has been that it is *Cool.* If you don't have the Latest, you aren't cool, and their economics is built on people throwing away their year old hardware. And that which is old is not cool, to the marketing world.
QED
(Score: 2) by quacking duck on Tuesday January 20 2015, @03:35PM
If by "throw away" you mean "sell or pass down" their year-old hardware.
My mom has someone's twice-passed down iPhone 4. A friend was, until two months ago, using an *original* 2007 iPhone. Never had a case on it, never cracked the screen in almost 7 years. For people who don't care about the latest thing, the previous generations are just fine.
You want true throwaway junk, look at the vast majority of Samsung's smartphone lineup. I know no one who has a passed-down S3 or S4, never mind the cheaper stuff, they all died and went to e-recyclers before they could go on to new owners.
(Score: 1) by Jesus_666 on Tuesday January 20 2015, @06:48PM
What is it with expensive smartphones and ridiculous manufacturing flaws?
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday January 21 2015, @05:03PM
Meh, my experience is the opposite.
My father just bought an S3 about six months ago. He loves it. I've got an old S3 that I'm still using too -- cracked the screen a little while ago (unprotected six foot drop onto tile...), but it does make a *very* nice IP cam and file server. Also my backup phone should anything happen to my S5, as it does still work perfectly well, just a spiderweb across the front.
My mother, on the other hand, is constantly telling me how much she regrets updating her iPad. Keeps running slower and slower each time. Last time I was home I had to switch her from Safari to Chrome because I couldn't get Safari to load a single website without crashing.
Every Apple product I've ever bought is currently sitting in my scrap bin, and very few of them lasted more than three years. Most of them were repaired more than once during that time. Meanwhile I've got ten year old PCs and six year old phones from *other* manufacturers (Dell, Samsung, HP) still in daily use.
(Score: 2) by quacking duck on Thursday January 22 2015, @03:27PM
We're both offering mere anecdotes of course; naturally there must be some still using second-hand S3 and S4s even though I don't know any personally.
I haven't trashed a single Apple product I bought (or bought by parents), going all the way back to the family's 1992 LC II, which still booted when I checked last year (it was used by me and then my younger siblings for probably 7 years). Original 2001 iPod still works though the battery is obviously pretty much gone after 13 years. Sold my 2006 Macbook in October. My 2009 iPhone 3GS was sold to a third owner 2 years ago... admittedly it wasn't doing well with the latest iOS update, Apple really shouldn't release updates for older devices if they compromise performance that much. My dad's just-replaced 2007 iMac still runs fine, and could technically be upgraded to the latest OS X for free.
Meanwhile, the Thinkpad laptop I retained after my last company closed was "dead" after just 3 years. Technically a part can be replaced but after looking it up it's not worth the part cost or my time and effort.
All this to say though, the AC's comment about "throwing away their year-old [Apple] hardware" is bullshit at best, because no one who plays the annual upgrade game throws it away, and many like me who *don't* do annual upgrades are working fine on hardware that's 2 or more years old.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday January 22 2015, @03:40PM
Very true, but I think there is some truth to the AC's comment as well. If only because every time Apple updates iOS, they push the same updates to even the oldest devices, and there's always a stream of complaints after every update that the older devices become too slow and can't handle the update. My experience with Android, on the other hand, is that after 2-3 years none of the updates will install anyway ;)
Just compare the results of searching 'ios too slow after update' and 'android too slow after update'. What I'm seeing are the iOS results are all about the OS itself, where the Android ones are largely about specific apps. I think Apple gets too eager with the eye-candy sometimes. Although, yes, the other part of that is that Android devices vary too much which means it's a lot more effort for manufacturers to backport updates to older devices. So they just don't. But sometimes that's actually better.
(Score: 2) by quacking duck on Thursday January 22 2015, @09:58PM
We're pretty much in agreement there, I did say earlier that "Apple really shouldn't release updates for older devices if they compromise performance that much."
Apple targets iOS updates to be installable on devices 3 generations back, so 2014's iOS 8 can be installed onto 2011's iPhone 4S, and iOS 7 installs onto 2010's iPhone 4. There's always a slew of performance problems for the first couple months until the version x.1 release comes out, then it's often tolerable if not exactly acceptable.
Where Apple definitely fails their customers is blocking the ability to roll back iOS on the oldest supported hardware, if the user wants to.
(Score: 3, Funny) by jasassin on Tuesday January 20 2015, @01:55PM
I don’t expect perfection, I’ve lived inside several sausage factories and remember the smell.
Why did you live inside so many sausage factories? I suppose every party you go to is a sausage fest? Seriously, WTF?
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20 2015, @03:27PM
Cultural literacy is your friend.
He's making a reference to the famous quote, Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made. [nytimes.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday January 20 2015, @02:04PM
having major new releases every year is clearly impossible
Maybe they should have ended the quote there. Can't do anything "major" in a year unless you downgrade "major" to mean "new color scheme and a few marketing checkboxes", or you do huge changes that suck.
I'm not a OSX guy at this time although I had a PPC mac mini 1st gen for awhile. If all the fawning press coverage claims the current gen is the ultimate never to be surpassed perfection, maybe they're correct and there's nothing for the engineering team to do but F stuff up.
Imagine trying to technologically innovate the common sock. At some point you have to step back and wait for tech to change, you've got a perfect commodity, spray painting it blue and gluing it shut is innovation, although useless.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by quacking duck on Tuesday January 20 2015, @03:20PM
Apple would be well advised to heed their founder's own words:
Source: BusinessWeek, Oct. 12 2004
I have no qualms defending Apple against unwarranted or hypocritical attacks, but don't hesitate to call them on some of their mis-steps.
The UI changes in Yosemite in particular look like Apple is repeating Microsoft's mistake with Win8, trying to unify mobile and desktop environments, just more slowly. My dad got a new iMac and his biggest complaint is that the green button in the titlebar no longer zooms, but puts the app into fullscreen and hides the menubar and Dock. Holding a modifier key while clicking the green button triggers the old behaviour, but there's no excuse for redefining the default behaviour: there are perhaps a dozen or two non-gaming apps out there where this is actually useful, he uses none of them, it's an utter waste of screen space for most apps.
Their obsession with unifying Mac and iOS app features, though a laudable goal in terms of Continuity and Handoff, often means stripping away functionality from their Mac apps. Adding some back in a later release, *maybe*, after a *year* or two, is no way to keep people using those apps in the first place.
iTunes just gets messier with every major release.
I still have a beef with Maps, though I've come to realize problems with outdated info probably stems from their reliance on TomTom data, but that's still no excuse; as the end user I'm using *Apple's* Maps, so either they hold TomTom's feet to the fire to get data updated faster (it'll still route through a road that's been closed for over a year, and one time it directed me onto a bus-only corridor) or they kick them to the curb and get a more reliable supplier. Apple really screwed up by not buying Waze before Google did.
Thankfully neither I or my family have had any of the major stability problems others are facing. I just rebooted my Macbook Pro with Yosemite after about 100 days uptime (it does sleep when I'm away and overnight), and wifi is stable.
But a week or two ago MacDailyNews.com, probably the loudest and most outspoken of the mainstream Mac/Apple news sites in their near-unwavering support, wrote an open letter demanding Apple pay better attention to quality, because for once they were personally affected by wifi and other problems (like the iOS 8.0.1 debacle), and couldn't ignore it any longer. When the Fox News of the Apple world calls out the very company they cheer on, Apple needs to sit the hell up and take notice.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20 2015, @04:20PM
The fear of having that asshole calling you a worthless POS in front of everybody for putting out a buggy, hard-to-use app or utility was enough to keep everyone working nights and weekends.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20 2015, @05:24PM
I blame the success of the iPhone.
Or rather, what was done to get the iPhone to market ahead of the competitors. There have been OS X releases I've been happy with but I've never been happy with iOS. It's not just poor execution; it's got a bad architecture - and Apple just keeps making it worse.
I also used to do Android Platform Development (not Apps) for Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications. They hired me in part because they had poor software quality, and wanted to fix it. Sony Ericsson was at one time the leading smartphone vendor but Apple displaced them.
If Apple doesn't fix its quality problems, someone is going to displace Apple. No amount of patents or advertising is going to prevent that.
Apple isn't going to be able to take a year to focus just on fixing things. It's not that they have the cash but that the idea won't sell internally. However there are all kinds of ways that individual Apple employees could advocate for improved quality within their own groups as well as the groups who make the software they depend on.
Consider that clang has static source code analysis, and that Xcode provides a nice GUI front end for it. Is ALL of the iOS and OS X subject to static analysis? I don't know but expect that it's not.
Here is a very simple test for you, for any operating system. I got it from the team that sat next to mine in Monroe 1 in 1989, where I did QA for MacTCP. I used it with great success when I was a "Debug Meister" in 1996:
Use some manner of script to reboot the box as soon as it starts up - I used an AppleScript: "tell Finder restart" - but one could use a LaunchCtl script, or an init script on linux.
(Or systemd.)
The box will repeatedly reboot. Eventually the kernel will panic.
In my case, I isolated an edge case in the OpenTransport ethernet driver's shutdown procedure. I'll tell you later how I actually debugged it - it took a month, as I required overnight rebooting before I'd get a crash.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 21 2015, @09:43AM
"man null" or "man zero":
/dev/null we all know about. /dev/zero, when read, is an infinite stream of zeros.
But lookee here:
OK...
Apple's QA people have lots of spare boxen lying around. Try altering the permissions of /dev/null or /dev/zero then working through the test plan for your product.
Just now I also read the man page for strncpy (on Linux, not BSD. OS X has some of both kinds of man pages). It had a lengthy discussion of failure modes, some of which produce crashes, some which enable the kinds of buffer overflows that enable arbitrary code execution or privilege escalation, some of which leak the passwords of Sony's root users.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20 2015, @05:53PM
Apple is the epitome of change for the sake of progress. The larger part of its customer base wants style and flash over substance.
So why spend the time and money on QA? Besides, QA tends to slow the tide of new shiny feature releases which is in conflict with selling the new hotness....so.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Wednesday January 21 2015, @12:14AM
Gold-plated shit is still shit, and Apple is selling shit. Eventually, Apple will lose its luster and go the way of other former successes in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Wednesday January 21 2015, @12:12AM
I have been noticing this quality problem myself. I have two early 2008 Macs, an iMac and a MacBook. Yosemite will run on the iMac but the MacBook is limited to Snow Leopard and cannot be upgraded (except to Windows or Linux, the former a backward step).
Snow Leopard is fast and lean, and very responsive, making my MacBook a pleasure to work with. But starting with Mountain Lion going forward to the present with Yosemite, the OSes have been slow to respond and buggy. None of the bugs have been particularly painful, and in one case, the semi-broken DVD player app that I think broke in Mountain Lion, is now fixed in Yosemite. But I've had problems getting Windows networking to work with Yosemite, and have run into a sufficient number of difficulties to come to the conclusion that Yosemite needs rebooted at least once a week. I've run into strange bugs I call "quirks" with Preview, Safari, and the Finder.
This story is no surprise to me. I think Apple has lost its edge. I hope it doesn't turn into a new Borland, a once venerated company destroyed by its upper management because it released shoddy products so unusable that no one wanted to buy them. Anyone remember Borland C++ 5.0 from twenty years ago? What a piece of shit! And it's hard to believe that Borland, after buying Ashton-Tate, the producer of the DOS database app family dBase, because it did the same thing, took A-T's stupidity in its production of dBase IV, a slow, clunky, and bug-ridden piece of schlock, and took it one step further, creating dBase V. There is a reason why we called it "CrashBase". Oh, and there is WordPerfect, a terrific and very stable DOS-based word processor. A bitch to use but extremely powerful. They saw the writing on the wall and created a Windows version that was so god-awful slow that it was literally unusable and that was the end of the company. I could go on.....
The moral is simple here: Shit and a good reputation doesn't sell products after a while. Apple needs to get its act together before it goes the way of the others. If I owned any Apple stock I'd dump it now because I don't see them doing anything. Perhaps Oracle will buy that big donut Apple is building in Cupertino. It's the right shape.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 21 2015, @02:01AM
You left out a huge part of the story.
M$ told WordPerfect "These are the APIs we will be using for Lose95".
When Lose95 actually released, M$ had used an entirely different set of APIs. [google.com]
...and M$'s own wordprocessor was built with the real deal, gaining an anti-competitive edge.
It's just another case of a M$ "partner" getting stabbed in the back.
-- gewg_