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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: 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_