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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, 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.