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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

>...more on short-term gains instead of long-term quality...

Considering that Tim has been CEO for 11 1/2 years now, and things are still going incredibly well for Apple...it seems pretty hard to argue that he is too focused on the short term.

(FWIW, I mostly agree about their software quality.)

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I people tend to have a bit of rose tinted glasses on about Apple's software quality of yore. There have always been big stability issues with new features and apps. And they've simply never been good at the UX for anything that involves a network connection or has to sync across multiple systems (besides Safari). The big difference is that more and more computing requires syncing and networking, which is their traditional weak point.

> There have always been big stability issues with new features and apps.

But they got fixed. At times there were 2 full years between major Mac OS X releases. 2 years of bug fix updates. And that was when Apple only had 1 major operating system! Now with the relentless yearly schedule, there's never time to fix bugs before they start working on the next big thing and adding brand new bugs. The problems just keep piling up year after year. The software is now underwater in technical debt.

Part of OS stability is simply not shipping new major versions too often. The new major versions are always buggier than the previous major version with many minor patches. Not to mention, Apple now pushes everyone to install the latest OS immediately. In the old days, you had to go out to the store and buy a new Mac OS X version on disc, so everyone wasn't upgrading to 10.N.0 on day one. Slower adoption means that fewer consumers have to suffer the early growing pains of new software.

Been on macOS since 10.3. In general, the .1 or .2 patches were solid, and if one release seemed like a stinker the next one tick-tocked its way into stability/quality pretty reliably, and staying on N-1 version while N was out was a pretty good choice if you wanted to keep your setup as-is without falling TOO far behind.

Also, Safari was really bad, early on. It was rendered unusable for me when a runaway bookmark sync problem with iCloud turned the default set of bookmarks into 30+ thousand copies.

You're thinking of recent Apple. You have to consider the first half of Apple's lifetime too.

Especially in the second half of the 1990s Apple was in very very tough shape due to poor software and uncompetitive hardware. Their fans wouldn't admit it but the company definitely knew what they were up against.

There's pretty much been no point 2000-present where Apple quality has been worse than it was Pre-2000, and their prices have never been more competitive either.

Speaking of software quality, anyone notice in Apple Music how the categories all start with Apple? Apple Dance music, Apple Country, Apple Pop... like are they trying to make it intentionally difficult for me to use my eyes to find music? I know that I'm using Apple Music... why does every category need to remind me of that while simultaneously impeding my ability to locate things alphabetically? Of course, when I use Siri I can just say "play Dance music" and it works. Hmm.

It could be worse. If you were on Android, about half of Google's 1P apps start with "Google", and about half don't, even ones that probably should (like Google Home).

> anyone notice in Apple Music how the categories all start with Apple?

No-- where are you seeing this?

Almost nothing in the Apple Music app on iOS or MacOS starts with "Apple Music" for me. Only really the "Apple Music" radio stations, which is necessary to distinguish them from the generic playlists and third-party radio stations.

Soon in supermarkets near you: the Apple Apple. Beautiful, healthy, tasty; no buttons!

I hear they even named one varietal of apple the "Macintosh"... someone must be a fan I guess.

(/s)

Cutting it into quarters requires a special knife that costs $500

But it’s the nicest knife I own… and I’m saving the box.

And what's the last revolutionary consumer technology that has come out of Apple? The original successful Macs, the iPod, the iPhone, iTunes, those were all under Jobs.

I don't know about revolutionary, but Apple's service revenue alone for 2022 was larger than the revenue of McDonald’s and Nike combined. Things can be wild runaway successes without being revolutionary.

https://finbold.com/apple-services-2022-statistics/

You might dismiss it, but for me AirPods are the biggest QOL improvement from tech since smartphones. Bluetooth headphones were atrociously hard to use before them.

apple's bluetooth experience is so refined it's practically revolutionary in general. I used to fight bluetooth mouse/keyboard problems all the damn time, I'd have keyboards that suddenly stopped responding or would repeat a key over and over again, mice that would suddenly scroll like an inch at a time, etc. The best experiences were on an Intel NUC that might only have an issue once a day or a couple times a week, but it still was occasionally temperamental and barring that every single other platform I've used ranged somewhere between "highly flaky" and "completely unusable". When it's happening multiple times per day it's just not acceptable.

even a dell latitude business laptop is something else I'd consider that should probably be close to the intel nuc level of "mostly works with minimal flakiness" but it flatly was not... and the intel NUC was extremely flaky compared to everything apple I've used. And everything besides the NUC that used Intel wireless chipsets was a complete disaster that was basically unusable. When I have to put a USB bluetooth adapter in my B550 motherboard to get something that works... yeah.

know what I haven't had to fuck with since getting an intel macbook for work, and a M1 MBA for around the home? bluetooth problems. somehow apple can figure it out, even when using that same flaky intel hardware. nowadays I can just reliably assume that any connection problem means my peripheral has a dead battery for some reason.

Watch and airpods are both rather successful products that capture about 30% industry market share every year.

What revolutionary consumer technology has emerged since the iPhone, from any company?

The iPad

M chips, airpods, watch

When the iPhone was introduced , there were already 1 billion phones being sold each year. Sj said he wanted Apple to sell 10 million to capture 1% of the market.

There can’t really be anything bigger than the phone market that has 90%+ world wide penetration.

Quite the standard you’ve set there!

M1, M2, AirPods

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