Comment by sdegutis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdegutis | Hacker News Reader

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Apple has been declining since about 2011 not only in software quality, but also in hardware quality, in innovating hardware, and in innovating software.

When I got my first Mac, it had Mac OS X Tiger on it, and everything about it really felt like it had the user in mind. These days everything about using it feels like it has shareholders in mind. The features being added seem like the kind of things you'd have executives brainstorming up in a committee, and then demanding that engineers implement.

It's a shame. It no longer does The Right Thing™ by default, and there are more hardware and software bugs than I can ever remember in an Apple product. I've listed them before but here's a short list again:

- This mid-2013 Mac Pro wakes up every few hours at night, even though I have disabled every "wake from sleep" setting that exists in OS X

- My mid-2013 MBP has, several times this week, turned on while closed, and continued as if it was opened (playing YouTube videos or whatever else it be doing), only shutting back off after about 120 seconds or so

- Every time I turn this Mac Pro on, it doesn't recognize the wired Apple keyboard that's plugged into the Apple Cinema Display, and says it's looking for a bluetooth keyboard, until I unplug and replug the keyboard in at least 3 or 4 times

- My MBP once emitted a (very) loud buzzing sound from its speakers, for absolutely no reason, that lasted about 3 or 4 seconds, startling everyone nearby, when no sound-based programs were running

- Yesterday I tried syncing my iPhone to remove about 200 songs, and iTunes said it would remove them, and then "did" remove them, but they were still there on the device, and iTunes once again showed them being present; it took a full iPhone reset to clear them off.

Few things here.

My last solid OS X machine was a 17" MBPro with a G4. I forget the OS - Cheetah maybe? That year I also had a developer Intel box. It seems like it was that transition that I could really feel things were going awry.

I'm not talking about the dev box, it was what came after. I had a MBPro 15" Intel machine that was really buggy hardware-wise. yOu could no longer apply updates without rebooting (something we all disapprovingly looked down on at Windows). The software just didn't work anymore either, or at least it felt like it didn't.

I think a lot of this was tied to more and more embedding of Apple apps, just like Microsft did. That and gaining some sort of complacency because they were not the scrappy underdog.

I've been waiting for another Snow Leopard where Apple just says "no more 'features', just bug fixes and stability" (for iOS as well). bUt I think that's just a pipe dream at this point and the train of more is better had already left the station.

I agree. I won't write a list of the problems in detail, but I've been a Mac user since the 80's because I've always preferred Apple's elegant design and ease of use. But lately, it's hard to figure out how to do things, and it's very buggy. Both I and my son have had to reset our phones to fix problems. It looks like my wife will have to reset hers to deal with a problem with music synchronization.

And the design as way harder to master than it should be. For instance, to search for a track in Apple Music, you have to be in any tab except iTunes Store. OK, there's some logic to it, but it simply is not intuitive. Why can't there be something that specifically says "Apple Music" that makes it obvious that that's where you go to find tracks? I'm an experienced computer user, and in fact a software developer, and when I first purchased Apple Music I was mystified about how to search for a track in Apple Music. I had to Google it. My wife, who isn't used to Googling for these kinds of answers and isn't a technologist, has no choice but to ask me or the kids how to do things like that.

In the Music app iOS, to make it show only the tracks you've downloaded, you have to click on the pulldown where you select Artists/Albums/Songs/etc. It's a switch on the bottom of that pulldown. When you're thinking "What tracks do I have downloaded?" this is just not obvious. When you get used to it, it's fine. But if you're a naive user, you really have to have a friend who's an experienced user just in order to figure out how to do such basic things. Naive users may not even understand that the Artists/Albums/Songs/etc. pulldown is a menu. And even if they know it is a menu, it's not intuitive to think that there's an on-off switch for showing all songs at the bottom of it, which relates a fundamentally different concept.

It all just seems like really poor design. I don't know what their problem is. But my son, who has always been an Apple user because I've been one, and who is applying to colleges like MIT to do engineering, is seriously considering switching to Android so that he doesn't have to deal with so many bugs. (Not that I know that Android is better.)

Good UIs have discoverability, but increasingly the software has - whatever the opposite of discoverability is.

Simple example: Mail tries to guess settings for you. If you don't want it to do this - it regularly gets them wrong - you have to uncheck a box in the Advanced tab for every account you have. (Because obviously, that's where you're going to look.)

Then, instead of making the change, you have to click any other account, just so you can get a save dialog.

And if the account is disabled, it ignores your change until you enable the account. Then you can finally save the change and start modifying the settings.

Elsewhere, the latest version of Logic Pro is so bad it's been causing outrage on user forums all over the Internet.

Product management seems to have become completely clueless about user needs, basic UI designer, or QA.

I have no idea who's in charge now, but whoever it is has no idea what they're doing.

Setting up a plain IMAP account in Apple Mail is so much harder than it should be. It used to keep the wrongly guessed settings, even if you overwrote them, so you'd have to delete the account and start over for it to actually work.

Also their usage of words like "account", "mailbox" and "folder" never ceases to confuse me...

"I have no idea who's in charge now, but whoever it is has no idea what they're doing."

Isn't it Jonny Ives? He has a very sensitive eye for physical design. But he may know, or care, nothing about good software design.

> ... whatever the opposite of discoverability is

I suggest "obscuratationalism"

I've experienced a similar issue with song removal. I've also had to jump through a bunch of hoops to finally delete a few old apps that kept coming back after being deleted as well.

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