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Comment by MatthiasP | Hacker News Reader

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MatthiasP

There is a good chance that macOS is being neglected precisely because Apple is moving away from x86.

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Fwiw, Apple had been building OS X on x86 for five years prior to announce of the last shift.

https://youtu.be/ghdTqnYnFyg

Not sure how this impacts theory of neglect.

Is it correct that the best folks from any given team at Apple are assigned to new, big initiatives?

Unlikely. I think they are just spread very thin, internal communications between groups is still broken, the dev process is/was broken (but is supposedly being fixed), and departments probably still don't cooperate. Priorities lie with features that sell the eco-system, not fixing bugs.

And because they hoard profit instead of hiring more QA staff.

From personal anecdote I find that it's just poor culture which prevents qualified people from getting hired. Even with tons of reqs open, no one new as added to the staff.

Engineers should do QA. QA is unnecessary

> Engineers should do QA

Yes, they should. The vast majority of QA should be automated unit and integration tests.

> QA is unnecessary

This is objectively false. Even if you perform 99.999% of all QA in an automated way, you're still going to miss those edge cases, like the infamous daily kernel panics due to buggy support for external USB-c displays that only real humans testing your product in the real world with 3rd-party devices can find. QA is still extremely important, and when companies like Apple neglect it, they end up shipping buggy and disappointing products.

I’ll take 99.999%. I doubt a normal sized QA team would have caught this bug you mentioned.

It is quite plausible, that the quality problems of Catalina and iOS13 at the launch were a consequence of shifting the development team around to also support the development of MacOS on ARM.

its possible, but im not convinced

1. mac os has been buggy for quite a few releases already

2. outside of drivers and apps, ios and macos are basically the same kernel and userspace/libraries, so there isnt much to port

On the surface, there isn't so much new in Catalina oder iOS 13, that you would think that things break so badly, but they did. Starting a new branch of the development always is a disruption. Developers would be reassigned to new groups, probably the best ones even, new developers would join the existing groups. This process probably has started like 2-3 years ago and intensified like 1-2 years ago, especially after they had the first silicon to play with - and I assume the CPU will be sufficiently different from an iPhone so that you want to at least optimize your code for it, there might also be entirely new features to support.

"at the launch"

mac os at large has a quality problem. I have gotten more kernel panics on my personal and work laptops in the last 6 months than I have on my windows machines in the past 5 years.

I think the difference is, that Apple threw everything they could to fix iOS13, as their survival depends on it, so it did stabilize, while Catalina still hasn't recovered.

I don't quite agree -- I think iOS has been decreasing in quality as well. Apple in general is producing software of lesser quality than it has in the past, in my opinion. Very disappointing as I used to be a huge fan of their products :\

iOS has also been buggy

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