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Comment by mberning | Hacker News Reader

Apple is badly, badly in need of a “code red” style freeze on new features for macOS and iOS. Even very basic things which should be rock solid are not. I just had a kernel panic when copying files to an smb mount. No issue when I do the same copy mounted as nfs. Ridiculous in this era.

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Long ago, the release speed in the entire industry accelerated. I knew that quality would nose dive as a result because there was no way to develop and fully test an entire OS (even for a phone) as frequently as each is being released. All operating systems are now effectively permanently in beta.

It's not just about release speed. The whole industry is aligned towards new, towards features, towards impact.

Going around making the world better doesnt rank, isnt visible work, isnt tracked or roadmaps, isnt rewarded, and frankly, it's not as fun being a 0.1X hacker tackling the gross ugly old shit, especially when the org wont say thank you either.

I would pay $100 per year for macOS if it meant they would go slower and make it rock solid.

This is where technology goes from being disruptive in a positive sense, to being disruptive in a negative one.

I understand the relentless need to innovate, do cool stuff, etc., but somewhere along the way a line was crossed.

A good time to throw in the term exnovation.. there's a reason you rarely hear it, but there's a reason somebody came up with it.

Sometimes I wonder whether Douglas Adams was the most prescient sci-fi writer when he came up with the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. Year by year it seems to get closer, and I can't help feeling recent AI developments will only accelerate it.

But Apple has had the right idea- they release a new version of their desktop and mobile OSes about once a year. I would surmise that their OS reliability and stability issues have more to do with the switch from Objective-C to Swift than anything else. Heck they change Swift dramatically each year (or they did in the first few years). Swift 2 was RADICALLY different from Swift 1. Swift 3 was radically different from Swift 2...

There haven't been radical changes like that since Swift 3. And it's much easier to write reliable code in Swift than Objective-C.

> But Apple has had the right idea- they release a new version of their desktop and mobile OSes about once a year.

That's not the right idea. Mac OS X 10.3 through 10.7 all took well over a year of development. Yearly major releases is too fast. https://robservatory.com/a-full-history-of-macos-os-x-releas...

> I would surmise that their OS reliability and stability issues have more to do with the switch from Objective-C to Swift than anything else.

There's no evidence of this. Apple itself was one of the slowest adopters of Swift, because it needed ABI stability to put Swift in the OS. https://blog.timac.org/2022/1005-state-of-swift-and-swiftui-...

I don’t understand why Apple doesn’t invest more in testing and bug-fixing. It is not as if they can’t afford it. Bugs lead to unhappy users, which in turn leads to brand damage. You’d think it would make business sense to spend more on improving quality and hence preventing further such damage, possibly even reversing some of the damage already done-convince people “Apple is different now”, some people will forget their past bad experiences

Successful companies do not operate on common sense kind of framework. That's an art available only to peons.

It still amazes me that in the 21st century no computer can use a couple of extra monitors reliably without sometimes not detecting them, getting in the wrong resolution, or other strange issues.

Me too. Sometimes it's even just one monitor.

I don't know whether to blame the monitor or the KVM, but one of my desktops on Windows will try to feed my monitor an unsupported resolution at boot.

Not if I switch to another KVM input and back. Not if I wake it after suspend. Not if I boot the Linux install. Just Windows on a fresh boot.

Don't get me started on the mess that seems to be HDMI.

Display conformance to the communication standards are a hot mess. That’s generally the biggest problem

I just had a kernel panic when copying files to an smb mount.

Apple rewrote the SMB code to make it closed-source starting with 10.12, I believe; the immediately noticeable effect was that it became far buggier.

Hahaha, spend more money and end up with inferior result.

Must have had some serious managers involved.

Don't know what happened with iOS 16, but Spotlight has been painfully slow. Results used to be nearly instant, now it can take 6+ seconds to show an app I searched for

I installed a few apps since upgrading to iOS 16 when it came out, and those apps never show up in Spotlight. I've updated with patches, restarted the phone, deleted and re-installed since then; still broken. The main one is Slack but I've seen it with others, too.

Messages gives me a spinning ball every time I try to search. It’s maddening!

Even if it finds some search results, taking one won’t take you to it, just some random message partway there.

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