I loved Apple products and still do, but as both a user of and a developer for their systems, I feel the quality has been steadily going downhill the last few years.
I suspect one reason is that they like one-person teams so much. I like one-person projects too! But there is always pain when you have to hand such a project to a new person, because the old one quit, or died, or whatever.
Overzealous secrecy even when not warranted for any actual business-relevant reason also probably inhibits software quality. As does change for change's sake.
[1] EDIT: except maybe Mac OS X 10.6? Does anybody remember any critical bugs in that one? I think that might be the unicorn.
Snow Leopard. What a wonderful high-point in Desktop OSes that was. Seriously considering rolling back one or two of my old computers, even just to have a living breathing reference-point.
You evangelized it to friends back then even. Like "Dude you have to get this"
I've just gone and ordered it [0], along with an external optical drive, cause internal drive my 2008 macbook is kaput.
[0] https://www.apple.com/ie/shop/product/MC573Z/A/mac-os-x-106-...
Google "10.6.0 font problems", this caused a major headache at my work
I've been getting very disillusioned with macOS, but the workflow pain on the other platforms has been enough to keep me coming back to macOS, thus far.
Working on a Linux machine would be the closest thing to perfection (in terms of workflow), but there are so many workarounds needed, and the selection of apps just isn't there.
Operating systems suck. I'm obviously annoyed, as I've just run into lots of issues lately.
Indeed, we tend to forget the problems. I tend to have the same feeling (10.5 and 10.6 were rock-solid), but with a little digging I found this comment from 2008-me on another website:
And a lot doesn't. My printer (a Laserjet 5L, connected through a parallel to USB converter) works without a hassle on GNU/Linux. It worked terrible on Leopard until 10.5.2, after a certain number of pages, it just refused to print anything but empty or mangled pages.
Similarly, the wireless support is quite bad in Leopard. E.g. I worked for two months on the Eduroam wireless network full-time. On a MacBook plus Leopard, the connection was constantly dropped, and it usually took ten minutes to authenticate succesfully. A friend, who has an Ubuntu laptop OTOH, had no problems connecting at all.
[snip Linux rant, irrelevant]
That was my first version of OS X & it was a fantastic experience. Played around with XCode, Homebrew, and all sorts of fun technical stuff. Also had it booting on a laptop with a RAID1 setup. Never had an issue with it.
Before that was OS 9. I only ever used it to play Bugdom & can't remember any bugs. Was only 10 when I was introduced to it.
Before that was OS 8. I hardly remember what I ever accomplished with it. Was only about 6 when it was released.
Remember when iTunes 2.0 would wipe out hard disks?
https://apple.slashdot.org/story/01/11/04/0412209/itunes-20-...
The problem was an installer script that ran "rm -rf" as root:
https://www.cnet.com/uk/news/itunes-2-0-an-analysis-of-what-...
https://github.com/valvesoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/17/scary_code_of_the_w... (article)
I can imagine myself doing the same thing as well had I not heard about this back then
-It appear genuinely involuntary
-It's a (collective) human mistake not a design flaw
-It was quickly fixed
-Frankly if it's the only noticeable bug linked to the conversion of a huge userbase to a new file system this is actually a huge success
I believe the leadership insists in keeping up a pretension that this is not actually the case. To be fair, most of that "infinity" is sitting in offshore bank accounts and can only be used as leverage for borrowing rather than being spent directly.
Or , they could pay the tax and use the money (crazy idea I know).
Or just use the super low interest rates and borrow against the money, which is exactly what they have been doing.
On the other hand, good review would much more likely have caught a bug like this than good tests would. "Why are you passing the password as the password hint?" Simple as that.
Again, there's a balance to be struck, and I don't claim code review is a panacea. But I do think it's a very worthwhile, and in the general case necessary, part of an engineering culture strongly oriented toward reliability.
I mean I agree with your general point in that testing too much is also a bad thing, but too often I hear this used as an excuse for not testing at all. And that's how we end up with legacy monstrosities that you can have no confidence in modifying that so many of us have to deal with.
"It just works" was retired some time ago. "Think different" is the modern day mantra. It's less of an open-ended commitment.
Biting.
The classic Apple problem is they they compatibility have much less corporate employees than other tech companies and they're stretched too thin, despite all their money.
Of course, nine women can't make a baby in once month, but loosely speaking the narrative that's been mentioned is how Apple doesn't have two women to make two babies in 9 months.