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Comment by rapsey | Hacker News Reader

> Their product line has slimed, they have clear and concise build processes, and are still sitting on a mound of cash.

The mac line is regressing in terms of hardware and software. While they used to have one of the best mobile dev environments, they now have the worst development environment. XCode is a bigger mess every release. Every macOS has more bugs then the last.

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The Mac line is regressing according to people who bought the first iteration of a new Mac product, violating a cardinal rule in place since the Titanium Powerbook. To my eyes, this is more like adherence to a time-honored Apple tradition.

When the second generation won't exist for half a decade, I don't think the old rules are still in effect.

Software is getting less reliable as well.

You are not going to convince someone who ran 10.0 that we have reached some unprecedented low in Apple software quality.

At that time they had a proper excuse though - it was brand new, they had financial issues, their old OS was antiquated so they had to rush, etc, etc. They then worked diligently for like a decade to reach a peak in terms of features, design and quality around the time of Steve's death in 2011.

Now they don't really have any excuses.

Sun did an rewrite and upgrade of Solaris into version 10 with quite a bit of reliability. All that work cost just under $300 million. Apple has over 100x that money. You'd think they could at least afford the SDL & static analysis Microsoft was using if not a total rewrite of Mac OS X into the greatest OS ever made.

They also have differentiators of usability, cool factor, UNIX support & privacy given Microsoft's turn with recent Windows. There's also a software ecosystem to further monetize & develop. Apple is screwing up big time in letting Mac OS languish.

So what would the return on that money be?

The dev market for laptops is X. The random Joe Sixpack market for iToys is 100x or 1000x. If they are going to invest some giant figure in development, it will be for Joe Sixpack toys and not the best OS to ever live.

(That is if throwing money at the problem would actually make a better OS. I suspect Microsoft throws more money at OS than all the other OS companies combined. They still have some massive failures).

What would the return be on vertical integration that Apple does in general? About nothing vs good strategies for COTS acquisition and supply chain. So, why does Apple do these things? To reduce risk to brand or products caused by 3rd parties plus allow them to control key aspects of technology to benefit themselves.

Similarly for Mac OS. The main alternatives to watering down experience of their developers or power users are a scheming competitor with history of screwing its own ecosystem up arbitrarily and Linux distros that are lame compared to Mac/UNIX experience. I say that as an Ubuntu user.

If they want their own fabs and phones, it seems fitting to also ensure their desktop experience for developers or power users is similarly low risk or tuned to their needs. Redmond and Linux surely aren't.

It's not in the nature of operationally minded people to think long-term. They think about the next quarter, or at most towards the end of the current accounting year.

To put it another way: all they do is tactics - not strategy.

I don't remember 10.0 as buggy. Slow, definitely.

Then, respectfully, you don't remember 10.0.

I also mainly remember the slowness. I ran it on a 300 Mhz PowerBook iirc. (It wasn't my main machine/OS though.)

He said its getting less reliable - not that we reached an all-time low.

There seems to be a very obvious regression in quality - but that doesn't mean its worse than how it was 15 years ago (or worse than anything else in the market right now)

Fair enough, but for many people love for Apple has always been a combination of admiring the solid design of an individual product alongside the brand of "think different" innovation. If you feel that Apple hasn't really done anything astonishingly innovative since 2010 (the iPad, and the iPhone 4, i.e. Retina), you are losing the brand identity half of the value prop.

That Apple, as if they were making washing machines or minivans, cares about Consumer Reports recommendations is far more damaging to their mystique than getting not getting a CR recommendation.

I think that's true for those that look at products as some sort of cultural artifact, but for many of us it was simply easier to replace the current laptop with the new model and know you'd have quality components.

The same could not be said for most popular non-apple laptops (HP, Dell, Compaq, etc...).

You might buy a Compaq and two years later buy the same model and have completely different (usually terrible) video card, screen, etc...

Memories. I had two partners that always had to have the latest and greatest. They both bought ti-books. I was on a pismo.

One of the laptops started peeling apart in 6 months.

The other was dropped by airport security and fell (almost)completely apart. Now, any laptop would have smashed, but given what happened to the other guys ti-book....

Yeah pretty much since android studio replaced eclipse, things got better on the android side. Though I still find android a pain from an ecosystem perspective.

Haven't done a lot of straight up native apps, but I use the tools for react native & cordova stuff.

Android dev has improved by leaps and bounds. iOS dev has drastically regressed.

I'd argue that Swift is one of the best things that happened to iOS development in the past few years.

Compiler that regularly crashes. Dev environment that regularly crashes, behaves strangely and is full of bugs. Really long compile times.

I disagree with the Xcode sentiment. While it's horrible in its current state, it has consistently gotten better with every release, although honestly the progress is so slow that it feels like the only thing that can salvage it is perhaps architecture redesign and rewrite from scratch.

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