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Engineering is not organized by platform, but function. Apps that are cross-platform have engineers who move back and forth between macOS and iOS. Lots of code is also reused between the two. Both platforms use essentially the same tooling and languages (if anything, iOS development is more painful), though certainly iOS codebases tend to be better because they are newer.

A fight for attention by a specific, resource-starved macOS engineering team could not be more incorrect. That’s simply not how Apple works. You have to come up with a different explanation for these perceived quality problems.

> You have to come up with a different explanation for these perceived quality problems.

The developmental move to agile deadline-driven feature-sprints under Craig Federighi.

Well, customizable menu-based keyboard shortcut support is not a cross-platform feature. So maybe there's no one responsible for it? Which amounts to a management/resource-allocation problem as suggested above. The team organization you describe would contribute to the problem of this sort of Mac-specific thing being marginalized and de-prioritized, exactly as described above.

No. There is no fight for recognition or status of the kind the parent extrapolates. “Resource allocation problem” is general enough that it could explain basically every bug, so that’s not particularly helpful.

The way to think about this is that the menu bindings are AppKit features which share resources with UIKit.

An interesting theory would be one which identifies (i) who in the organization gets to gate what ships and decides it’s good enough (ii) what are their incentives. At a company like Apple which is huge, has marketing deadlines, and is coordinating hardware, software, and services releases, both items have very subtle and interesting answers.

The iPhone integrations (assuming you mean Handover) are one of my favourite parts of the MacOS/iOS ecosystem and one of many reasons why I can't see myself moving away from either OS for a long time.

I've also experienced very few bugs in MacOS which have affected me on a day to day basis. Not saying they aren't there, but to me the MacOS team are doing a pretty great job.

For any feature on OSX there are some people who love that feature. But the reality is the core reliability of OSX has been declining for years, and many of the bugs are becoming more egregious. Especially some of the recent security issues. They are all symptoms of an under-resourced team. I have no doubt the OSX engineers are heroes to a person. But I can't imagine they have the resources they need. I also can't imagine Apple really cares when accessories appear to be on track to generate more revenue than macs in a few years.

I administer approximately 30 macbooks. 2018s with a few 2017s still in there. They're mostly unreliable garbage.

In particular, zoom.us, our teleconferencing solution, crashes them regularly with spewed messages about GPU stuff in console. We're about at the point of running windows vms so my salespeople can have a reliable conferencing solution.

The keyboards also do not hold up at all. I've gotten into a shouting match at an apple store after buying their "warranty" and learning that a keyboard repair would mean the laptop would disappear for a week. That's not a warranty; that's some Dell consumer-grade bullshit. I basically had to buy a floater laptop on the spot. Two of the laptops, including my cofounder, have keys that don't work, but they're too busy to deal with Apple's bs to get them repaired. I'm aware that after the WSJ embarrassed them the wait is supposedly shorter, but it's not anything reasonable. They should be able to do a keyboard swap in an hour while you wait.

Their busted ass OS also has automatically (!!!) disabled Filevault, refused to turn it back on, including spending 6 hours on technical support and an OS wipe. We had to take that laptop into the mac store for them to service. Folks, don't wait on installing an mdm -- just because you turn Filevault on, it can silently disable itself.

My company uses zoom.us on Win/Mac/Linux. Out of necessity, I also use TeamViewer, NoMachine, and occasionally Skype, Slack, and often just end up phoning them. I can only assume each needs deep integration into the OS because they all have problems. With zoom.us, I've had black screens (when trying to record?), keyboard input problems (where only alpha-numeric characters worked and other characters sent garbage), the mouse would stop working when certain applications got focus, and audio/video problems. These were mostly on Windows--I believe the black screen was on Linux. Screen sharing software also doesn't play well with each other or I imagine other software that messes with audio/video. zoom.us does seem to scale and perform better than the other solutions. I'm not sure it's a great representative of how good the OS is.

Apple's keyboards used to be excellent. After the new keyboards came out a few years ago they've been delicate (I've come around on my opinion about how they are to use--but I'm still not a fan of the layout). Replacing them is also a nightmare. So far a keyboard cover has seemed to not have me baby it and prevented a repeat of any issues.

Is there a PC laptop vendor you would recommend?

I've worked at a company that had Dell ProCare[1]. If you have issues, they'll send a technician onsite for a same-day or next-day repair. I've seen everything from keyboards to screens to entire mainboards get swapped out on the spot by technicians.

For consumer grade stuff, I'm not a fan of Dell. But their business laptops and support services are solid, from what I've seen.

I haven't experienced any of the other vendors, but any vendor with a business line (such as HP or Lenovo) have similar support services. And just as critical: they design their business laptops with that need in mind. If you pay for a service level that includes on-site support, very few issues are un-repairable by a field technician. And they even make access to things like the hard drive easy, since corporations don't like to relinquish control of potentially sensitive business data.

Apple offers enterprise support[2] (not sure if that's an indication that the service is priced out of the SMB range) with similar onsite services. But their machines aren't exactly designed to be easily repaired. So if an Apple Store would have to send it off to a repair depot, I doubt a field technician would be able to do much more.

[1] https://www.dellemc.com/en-us/services/support-services/pros...

[2] https://support.apple.com/applecare-enterprise-service

My MBP (2016 model, touchbar, macOS Mojave) kernel-panics every time the battery runs out, while attempting to wake up after I plug it in. I frequently work away from my desk and have symptoms of ADHD (inattentive variety) so this actually happens at least 3 times a week.

The MBP I had previously (same model, exchanged out due to keyboard keys sticking) did the same thing.

Ditto, except in my case the previous is an MBA. (I still have it, but the battery's dying, so it does it at about 26% instead.)

Additionally I find if the battery hits 5%, it doesn't actually register that it's charging in time to save it. Fair enough, but call it zero (so implicitly I'm warned earlier).

It’s called macOS. It hasn’t been called OS X for years, and it was never called OSX.

The macOS team still does a great job at making features that demo well. For the past few years, everything below the surface layer is becoming increasingly flakey.

- I upgraded to 10.13, and my stock graphics cards would slow, freeze, and then crash window server, logging me out. I spent the money to buy a hot new GPU from Apple's latest recommendation list, and it no longer crashes (though I'm having trouble getting both of my Apple displays to work, since apparently most of the "DisplayPort to dual-link DVI" adapters in the world are actually single-link).

Other issues I've run into recently with new or revamped features:

- Dark mode works great sometimes, and other times it's an unreadable mess.

- Xcode 10's new text editor broke control-T, which has worked correctly in every text field since the earliest days of Mac OS X.

- The new security around contacts/calendars broke my app. It doesn't work like it used to, it doesn't work like the documentation says it should, and it doesn't log anything useful to help diagnose the problem.

- The recent documentation, overall, is a big step down. developer.apple.com used to have long-form articles describing how things were built. Now, it's mostly just HTML versions of header files, and half the descriptions are "No overview available."

- The new WKWebView teases improved performance (and not being deprecated, like WebView), but removed major features I was using, or planned to.

- Dragging toolbar items in Safari 12 seems completely broken.

- You can set almost any accessibility option via script, except menubar transparency, for no apparent reason.

It was no coincidence that Macs used to be simple. "Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability"! When you've got only one color scheme, you can make it 'just work' everywhere. Once you've got more than one color scheme, now you have to go check everything to make sure this doesn't happen: https://twitter.com/KenHatesSoftwar/status/11059512173713530... (which depends on the dark-mode setting, the reduce-contrast setting, the desktop wallpaper setting, ...)

Multiply this by every permutation of settings. I don't think it's feasible any more for single-developer Mac shops. There just aren't enough hours in the day to make everything work well. Even Apple is struggling.

My next project isn't another Mac app. It's a web app in Clojure. CSS is still terrible to work with, but (with grid and flex) it's slightly less awful than it used to be, and much more consistent. And Clojure is infinitely more pleasant than Swift.

> Xcode 10's new text editor broke control-T, which has worked correctly in every text field since the earliest days of Mac OS X.

I couldn't believe this, so I tried it. To clarify: in Xcode 10.2.1, typing control-T between two characters in a line exchanges the two characters, as expected. But typing control-T at the end of the line does not perform the special case of exchanging the two characters at the end of the line; instead it exchanges the last character of the line with the newline, thereby moving the last character onto the next line. Off to bugreporter...

I’ll tell you as an Apple employee—engineers and first/second level managers don’t give a shit about market share or which platform makes the most money. Most of the engineers I work with are very personally motivated because macOS is their favorite operating system.

Yes, there is feature creep and it does have a bit to do with executive mind-share. But don’t attribute to greed what you could attribute to the age old problem of managing software complexity.

I thought you worked on UIKit ;)

I don't doubt the rank and file are dedicated to the projects they work on. But I imagine the people higher up the chain care very much where the money comes from, and priorities will naturally fall out of that.

It’s dangerous to craft rich narratives without access to even the slightest bits of ground truth.

I did make it very clear twice I am just imagining, and have no ground truth. It does appear to have struck a nerve - it is not an uncommon scenario in this industry. Like I said, I don't know if that's what is actually happening at apple.

“Making it clear” doesn’t do anything to mitigate the danger. The danger is in doing the thing.

The way to win the game is to not play.

Narratives in general can be very dangerous, even if there is a lot of truth in them. In fact, our worldviews are constructed out of narratives that define our sense of origin, meaning, morality, and destiny.

There's no "OSX team" at Apple. That would go against Apple's whole corporate structure.

Surely there is some team that develops OS X. That is the OS X team.

Well, officially, OS X doesn't exist anymore. It's "Mac OS" now I believe. But yes, they'd be the Mac OS team

macOS

The full name was always "Mac OS X" and the most-major version number is still 10, so...

No, much of the codebase is shared, and where the codebase is not shared the teams usually are. There are undoutably exceptions to this, and this may fall into one of those, but your blanket statement is just not how Apple operates internally.

Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but they are right. there isn't an OSX team. Apple doesn't slice things up that way. If there were an OSX team then surely there would be a manager for that team, right? The only person that could plausibly fill that role is Craig Federighi... but he arguably fills the same role for iOS, too.

In the Scott Forstall days, there was a distinct iOS team (Scott) and a distinct OSX team (Craig). now there isn't.

Sure, there is one exec, but there must be someone under him who is responsible for OS X.

Nope. Craig’s directs are responsible for apps and all the platforms those apps ship on or cross-platform technologies that power apps.

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here. macOS is a product. With releases, features, etc. Someone or some group of people must necessarily make decisions about what makes up "macOS 10.14.5". Even if that team is "Craig and his direct reports" or whatever, and even if that team has other responsibilities.

For example, I believe if macOS had a dedicated VP with specialized software teams like the type we are speculating here, my guess is we would have fewer bugs of this sort than we do now.

This is my take as well.

> Even if that team is "Craig and his direct reports" or whatever, and even if that team has other responsibilities.

And if those "other responsibilities" are iOS, tvOS, and watchOS, then there is no "macOS team." There is the software engineering organization.

I don’t get what you’re trying to express. Is there anyone at Apple who works only on Mac OS? The senior most such person is the de facto boss of Mac OS.

I think you're not grasping the difference of how Apple is structured compared to most companies, and why I made the comment I did, which is completely verifiable.

Apple slices up departments by function, not by product, which is why there are organizations under Tim Cook such as Software Engineering, Hardware Engineering, Internet Services, etc. Everyone and no one is responsible for shipping all the products as a result of this structure. Software Engineering in particular is responsible for all of the operating systems that powers Apple hardware.

Similarly, this is how smaller departments under each SVP/C-level org are subdivided, and so on to the team level. Each team may be responsible for a particular product, which includes all the experiences for that product across operating systems. There is no single engineer responsible for just macOS/iOS/tvOS/watchOS. Everyone is responsible for everything, and similarly no one is responsible for anything.

Apple's structure is unique compared to other companies, and contrary to how most are run, which probably contributes to your confusion.

> In the Scott Forstall days, there was a distinct iOS team (Scott) and a distinct OSX team (Craig). now there isn't.

Frankly, maybe that's exactly the problem. He left in 2012, and that definitely feels like around when things started going downhill.

I don't know what stuff is like under the hood, but from a user perspective, iOS and macOS are two very different platforms that are good at very different things. I'm sure there is a lot of tech that can be shared between them, but some individual focus would likely be beneficial as well.

No, but there certainly is a macOS team.

There is, presumably, a team responsible for the feature described in the article. Unless there isn't, in which case, that would explain some of the problems.

Is there some credible source as to what percentage of revenue or profit MacOS drives versus the rest of the org?

I'm sure there are lots. This shows iphone dwarfs all other sources of revenue https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/Q4-18-Data-Summary.pdf

Apple is a phone manufacturer. Computers are a side business.

A side business that is still a requirement for anyone to ship software into Apple’s iPhone ecosystem, so there’s at least some incentive for Apple to continue supporting it.

But given that developers have no choice in the matter, they’re stuck putting up with whatever issues Apple doesn’t bother to fix. I’m sure Apple is well aware of that when prioritizing what bugs are important.

Don't forget us devs who are required to use OSX as a matter of corporate policy. I'd much rather be on Linux

I always show people this[1] graph when they complain about Macs feeling like an afterthought to Apple. It's because they are, in terms of total profit.

[1]http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Apple-...

If spun off into its own business, the Macintosh business would still be a fortune 500 company.

I get that Apple makes more revenue from other products, but the Mac is still extremely profitable. They ought to give it some attention on those grounds, if nothing else.

According to their recent financials, 8% of revenue (vs 54% from iPhone, 10% from iPad, 20% from services, 9% from everything else (wearables, accessories, etc).