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: 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.