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Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Apple is a hardware leader, but IMO their culture is toxic for building software.

Yes, they have great software achievements in OS X, iOS, Safari, etc. however those happened in spite of their toxic culture, for other reasons. As an inspiring market leader, Apple is able to attract a lot of talented software developers and they also have huge pockets, plus whatever faults they have, it's in Apple's DNA to ship polished products.

However I believe building software is their weakness, because building great software is also about collaboration, about building communities, about establishing standards, about reuse and composition. It's what Google and Microsoft are good at.

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As someone who worked at Apple I can say you are talking rubbish.

Firstly, Apple doesn't pay all that great. Other startups and companies pay much better. And as a software developer the culture is actually pretty good but obviously depends a lot on what team you are in. It's an interesting mix of enterprise and startup with an amazing history. Teams are smaller and more cohesive. The frustrating part is the lack of collaboration between teams but that is hardly specific to Apple.

Secondly, Apple absolutely builds communities where required and contributes to standards. Where on earth did you get the idea they weren't doing this ?

Is their software actually any better than anyone else's? Or is it that their software is only expected to work on their hardware so they can fully optimize it for their hardware and it seems better? I have a MacBook and an iPhone, but you would be hard pressed to tell me macOS and iOS are truly better than the alternatives.

One could write a book on that topic. My stance is that they prioritize what and how they do differently than most competitors, and that would be end user experience and polish.

E.g., the iPhone UI's smoothness was a result of their prioritizing smoothness over other factors, like ease of implementation. If you look at how they did it (view objects are backed by GPU rendered layers), it's not really developer friendly. Because developer friendliness is not their priority, at all.

So, what you should get from Apple is the most polished experience, and they exert a great deal of control to make sure that the designed experience actually arrives at the end user. They got this really right with hardware, but they still struggle with the software part. Sure, most software Apple produces is beautiful and works really well. But things are crumbling. Looking at the various fiascos - Maps, Me, then iCloud Syncing, increasing number of problems with OSX quality - this controlled approach does not seem to work that well on software. You can control all possible states and usage scenarios of a physical device, but good luck with that on a OS consisting of 4 billion bytes, or a massive neural network (Siri). IMO they need to let go and open up at the software side.

That's ridiculous, Views are backed by objects to the core.

You can even take a PDF screenshot of the whole screen and it will be pixel perfect.

Their API's are easy to develop and coherent, yes, they are different than other API's, but more and more other API's start to copy Apple, like Android did and does, and it's the norm right now.

I also have a Mac and a iPhone, and I disagree with you.

I think their current culture is toxic for both. Their hardware is polished but IMHO has prioritized form over function at an extreme level, and seems to be developed in complete isolation from the user base.

Such form over function, the current MBP is faster, slimmer and with much more battery life than any other.

The difference is that Apple can make it beautiful and funcional, and others just can't.

That's ironic, Apple IMHO is one of the few companies that takes UX seriously.

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