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Comment by roymurdock | Hacker News Reader

> From my perspective, their application software has always sucked.

I think the main problem is not the application software (aside from iTunes and Apple Maps) - the main problem is the OS level software.

During the "golden age" of apple, apps would just work. Didn't matter if it you were using Apple-provided software or "better" 3rd party stuff - crashing, lagging, stuttering was minimal.

Now, many users are seeing much more lag, beach balling, and kernel panicking than before, across all of their applications. [1] Combine this with some poor decision making in the UX/UI department of certain Apple apps and you get a lot of people who are unhappy with their entire software stack.

But the app is the closest piece of software to them, so instinctively it makes more sense to blame declining app quality, when it's actually more a function of OS stability.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11034071

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When was this golden age?

I've been a Mac user for about 10 years and it was never better than now, probably the opposite. Every edition had bunch of bugs I hated. Before then I regularly tested Mac for local computer magazine and it didn't look better either. I even managed to freeze Mac OSX 10.1 with first mouse click when it arrived in our lab.

Before then we had lots of fun looking at ways you could hang by that time absurdly obsolete old Mac OS....

My experience with the MBP + iPod Touch/iPhone since 2009. Using apps like iTunes, Final Cut Pro, iMovie, Garage Band, and Logic Pro.

So the golden age for me has been 2009-2015 from Snow Leopard -> Mountain Lion (trailing off steeply w/ El Capitan) and from iOS 1 - 7, w/ iOS 8, 9 introducing issues.

I'll second this. I started with the beta of OS X (2000?) after several years with Red Hat, and the period of Snow Leopard through Mountain Lion was the best. Especially Snow Leopard. I recently reinstalled it on an old Mac Mini and a 2006 MacBook Pro and was amazed how fast it was compared to Mountain Lion on a 2011 MBP.

I rue the days I upgraded my iPhone and iPad to ios9. Both are slugs now and they don't sync with Messages on the MBP anymore.

I have a feeling you have new Apple products.

I have a three year old MacBook, and I believe, a four year old Ipad2. I want to believe it was just the iPad and too much JavaScript, but my laptop is not what I expect from a three year laptop. That wheel is spinning way too much. Chrome brings it to unusuable, but figured it was my fault. I only have 4 gigs. Actually, I though 4 gigs would be enough?

I do not believe in buying a new computer every two years.

I always though if an evil dictator ran Apple, they could force us to by new product, but they would have to do it sly. Just enough wheel spinning, to make us buy. If Apple does that; I'm gone forever.

Actually, I've been done with new Apple products for awhile. I will just repair my older products. I still believe in the company though. I hope they don't get cute?

> I do not believe in buying a new computer every two years.

It wouldn't help anyway, because that damn ball spins even on new computers.

I keep getting told I'm "doing too much". Apparently a $2500 laptop should be confined to no more than a handful of concurrent Apple-approved applications and nothing more... ? (and even then, you'll still get those beach balls).

I have a 2014 retina MBP and I run VMWare daily with Windows 7 and allotted 8 cores and 8 GB of RAM, leaving the same amount for the Mac side, and I never see a beachball. I always have at least two browsers with a few dozen Windows, outlook, slack, and a ton of software in the VM, and still don't have an issue. YMMV.

that's the danger in posting this sort of ancedote. there's always someone who's "never seen a beachball". It's not that I truly don't believe you, but I think you're in the minority. I see beach ball behaviour on pretty much every mac user in my coworking space daily.

Personally, I'm on my fourth mac over the last 8 years, various models, had both spinning disk and SSD, 4, 8 and 16gigs of ram. Wife has had various macs going back to ... 2002?

I can't recall a working day go by without pauses, hangs and beachballs. And... I've had the equivalent behaviour on Windows models and Linux machines going back to at least the late 90s. :(

Interestingly, I have an MBP that's eight years old now. It has maxed out RAM about where you're at (4GB) and an SSD... and it's running Snow Leopard. And I get beachballs less often than I do on some newer machines running higher releases.

This is one of the things that makes me think the OS is declining.

If you haven't installed an SSD in your machine I definitely would.

Clear Chrome's cache every two weeks, and restart Chrome every night. There. Done.

YMMV, but I had to manually delete Chrome cache files. Clearing from prefs took a long time, but the files remained over machine restarts.

I don't. My MacBookPro is late 2011 and my iPad2 was inherited from wife.

Both work fine although iPad is indeed more slugish than it was.

But I also use an old iPod which is still on IOS4 and that isn't great either (skips certain songs/podcasts...).

I could complain about all of them, but my point is that the same was true in any previous year.

"During the "golden age" of apple, apps would just work."

nope. Ive been using apple software for 20 years.

apple software has ALWAYS been crap. its just also been less crap than the opposition.

hell, before OS X, a crashed app would force you to restart the entire computer....

I still remember long afternoons debugging a CodeWarrior application, and having to restart after every successful replication of the problem...

You just reminded me of the time when IIS extensions (ISAPI) executed in kernel space and I was tracking down a bug...

The last 2 versions are the worst for old systems. Before Yosemite beach ball was a rarity. Now its a daily occurrence.I have tested El Captiano on newer systems and its silky smooth. They are kind of forcing me to upgrade. But this experience has made be wary of buying Apple products.

Really? This sounds way too empirical... And: have you ever used the first versions of OS X? Have you ever heard about MobileMe?

My thoughts after reading through this thread from 5 days ago on Apple's declining software quality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11034071

I had actually never heard of MobileMe before reading that thread...somehow I was busy/oblivious enough not to have ever used it.

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