So I'd like to talk about the decline in... well I was going to say "software quality" but I kind of feel like that isn't right. Software since Windows 95 onwards has always been " a bit shit" but somehow things have gotten worse. Not in the sense we can do less. But that we seem to be breaking things quicker. Products that once worked but were "a bit shit" would on occassion receive updates that made them "a bit less shit". Now the opposite seems in effect. What is "a bit shit" over time becomes "completely fucking broken".
My own personal experience of this is with Apple products. I'm no fan boy by any means. My first exposure to Apple products was when in early 2011 when a friend donated a 2010 Macbook Pro to help me start my own software company. I was genuinely impressed. Build quality was good. Performance was plentiful for developing the web apps on which my business was founded. Having a unix like OS under the hood was definitely a step up from the Windows computers I had. It travelled the world with me and the software I wrote on it made me a relatively well off man. All told it did about 5 years of hard work with me all over the place and at the end when it could finally do no more I sold the parts off on Ebay and got a few hundred quid back (off topic, when I put it on ebay the met police phoned me up to ask about the history of the macbook as it "resembled one stolen from an embassy recently" to which I responded "but they all the look the same, are you seriously telling me you're phoning up every person selling a macbook on ebay?" to which he replied "... yep, that about sums it up"). Over its life time the software updates didn't do much to it. There wasn't really much to fix.
I replaced it with a Macbook Pro 2015. The build quality was again good but there just seemed to be a glitchiness to the software. It asked for updates more frequently and it was harder to tell it no. Dialogs wouldn't behave correctly to keyboard input. Programs that had ran fine for years would need assistance to work correctly. I was having to google strange behaviours more often to find workarounds. And, each update, would seem to just make the problems worse. Not so much it broke entirely. But enough that it pissed me off more.
Same thing happened with my phones. I had an iPhone 4S for many years and it was bombproof. Alas though I eventually changed to an iPhone SE and immediately noticed a drop in software quality. Keyboard not hiding or showing correctly at random times, scroll panes not scrolling all the way down, apps randomly closing, UI inconsistencies and just outright hiding or disabling stuff that you need. And again, each update seemed to just add more annoyances. The most recent of which is that now when I listen to podcasts using headphones the volume will randomly cut out for minutes at a time.
Other examples of the phenomena are: PS3 removing linux support partway through my company doing some product demos on it. The trackpad on my friend's recently purchased Lenovo laptop stopped working after a windows update. Another friend has a Samsung phone that now randomly turns on the camera flash after a software update. My business partner had a Macbook Air but that became unusably slow after an OS update. Numerous other friends who's Android phones from various manufacturers became unusably slow after a few years of software updates.
It just seems that the market incentives have shifted. The Internet, perhaps rather than being just a tool for delivering much needed software fixes. Is in actual fact, more of a tool for companies to fuck with your shit so that you'll have to buy a new one. Nearly everyone I have spoken to who has experienced these problems brought on by software updates has just shrugged and said "oh well, it was time a for a new X anyway". Or they'll advise "what you need to do is install this tool, then this patch, then roll this back, then reinstall the OS, then look at this youtube video, then get this DLL of a forum...". To which I reply "that is what I do for a living, for a lot of money an hour, you're literally describing a day of work that I won't get paid for to fix something that I didn't break in the first place, you're crazier than me if you're thinking I'm spending my Sunday doing that".
I'm now at a point where I genuinely wouldn't know where to buy a laptop/phone/tele or anything really that I could trust to work properly out of the box and not get bricked by updates in a year or twos time. My friend calls it "crapitalism". It's all the stress, misery and shafting your fellow man of capitalism. But also none of the products work and you can't buy fun drugs.
The only ray of light in this sorry tale is Nintendo. My friend bought a Switch recently. We have played through Mario Odyssey, In To The Breach, Captain Toad's Treasure Tracker and a few other games. It works. It works well. We are having "fun". It doesn't seem to need any updates. Or at least the ones it does need haven't broken anything that we can see. So yeah, fuck buying other things.
It's all a bit s**t
So I'd like to talk about the decline in... well I was going to say "software quality" but I kind of feel like that isn't right. Software since Windows 95 onwards has always been " a bit shit" but somehow things have gotten worse. Not in the sense we can do less. But that we seem to be breaking things quicker. Products that once worked but were "a bit shit" would on occassion receive updates that made them "a bit less shit". Now the opposite seems in effect. What is "a bit shit" over time becomes "completely fucking broken".
My own personal experience of this is with Apple products. I'm no fan boy by any means. My first exposure to Apple products was when in early 2011 when a friend donated a 2010 Macbook Pro to help me start my own software company. I was genuinely impressed. Build quality was good. Performance was plentiful for developing the web apps on which my business was founded. Having a unix like OS under the hood was definitely a step up from the Windows computers I had. It travelled the world with me and the software I wrote on it made me a relatively well off man. All told it did about 5 years of hard work with me all over the place and at the end when it could finally do no more I sold the parts off on Ebay and got a few hundred quid back (off topic, when I put it on ebay the met police phoned me up to ask about the history of the macbook as it "resembled one stolen from an embassy recently" to which I responded "but they all the look the same, are you seriously telling me you're phoning up every person selling a macbook on ebay?" to which he replied "... yep, that about sums it up"). Over its life time the software updates didn't do much to it. There wasn't really much to fix.
I replaced it with a Macbook Pro 2015. The build quality was again good but there just seemed to be a glitchiness to the software. It asked for updates more frequently and it was harder to tell it no. Dialogs wouldn't behave correctly to keyboard input. Programs that had ran fine for years would need assistance to work correctly. I was having to google strange behaviours more often to find workarounds. And, each update, would seem to just make the problems worse. Not so much it broke entirely. But enough that it pissed me off more.
Same thing happened with my phones. I had an iPhone 4S for many years and it was bombproof. Alas though I eventually changed to an iPhone SE and immediately noticed a drop in software quality. Keyboard not hiding or showing correctly at random times, scroll panes not scrolling all the way down, apps randomly closing, UI inconsistencies and just outright hiding or disabling stuff that you need. And again, each update seemed to just add more annoyances. The most recent of which is that now when I listen to podcasts using headphones the volume will randomly cut out for minutes at a time.
Other examples of the phenomena are: PS3 removing linux support partway through my company doing some product demos on it. The trackpad on my friend's recently purchased Lenovo laptop stopped working after a windows update. Another friend has a Samsung phone that now randomly turns on the camera flash after a software update. My business partner had a Macbook Air but that became unusably slow after an OS update. Numerous other friends who's Android phones from various manufacturers became unusably slow after a few years of software updates.
It just seems that the market incentives have shifted. The Internet, perhaps rather than being just a tool for delivering much needed software fixes. Is in actual fact, more of a tool for companies to fuck with your shit so that you'll have to buy a new one. Nearly everyone I have spoken to who has experienced these problems brought on by software updates has just shrugged and said "oh well, it was time a for a new X anyway". Or they'll advise "what you need to do is install this tool, then this patch, then roll this back, then reinstall the OS, then look at this youtube video, then get this DLL of a forum...". To which I reply "that is what I do for a living, for a lot of money an hour, you're literally describing a day of work that I won't get paid for to fix something that I didn't break in the first place, you're crazier than me if you're thinking I'm spending my Sunday doing that".
I'm now at a point where I genuinely wouldn't know where to buy a laptop/phone/tele or anything really that I could trust to work properly out of the box and not get bricked by updates in a year or twos time. My friend calls it "crapitalism". It's all the stress, misery and shafting your fellow man of capitalism. But also none of the products work and you can't buy fun drugs.
The only ray of light in this sorry tale is Nintendo. My friend bought a Switch recently. We have played through Mario Odyssey, In To The Breach, Captain Toad's Treasure Tracker and a few other games. It works. It works well. We are having "fun". It doesn't seem to need any updates. Or at least the ones it does need haven't broken anything that we can see. So yeah, fuck buying other things.
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