Why Apple products are well designed and buggy
blog.oleganza.com
blog.oleganza.com
Where is the "It just works" in that statement ? If this were to be true, it would seem that for Apple a finished product is a product that has a cool design but is functionally flawed. I have to disagree.
The author seems to confuse REAL bugs with lack of features. I think Apple does risk a lot every time they release something new, but I have not experienced a big number of crashes or performance issues.
E.g. a simple app used by millions should have little bugs. If on the other hand, it's a very complex pro-tool and takes a lot of time and sweat to make every part work great together, you may 1) skip some features 2) not optimize performance in some areas and 3) postpone a lot of silly bugs and rare crashes to be fixed later. Xcode is much more complex beast than Mail. And occasional quirks do not diminish usefulness of the rest of it.
Mail, however, is used by much more people, it's simpler and allows for more polish. Even the Mail may have some weird use cases where it behaves badly and there are of course still some bugs.
Of course, everybody is trying hard to make well-designed and bug-free product. But we all have constraints and we need to prioritize. If I allocate that much of time for the development, I would try to execute a limited but finished design so that I have just enough time to fix just enough annoying bugs. If I spend more time on design, I'll annoy people with bugs even more. If I spend less, I may not complete the whole vision. And that will be a waste of time because you won't see the coherent product. And, of course, if I define very narrow scope and spend most of the time polishing it, it'll be either awesome (e.g. Clear app for iPhone) or not very useful.