Apple Delays Work on Next Year's iPhone, Mac Software to Fix Bugs
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
So relying on reading code also relies on having the people who wrote the code available to explain the “why”. Or documentation.
It's also a lot more effort to dive into the code to understand what a method does (again, this typically includes background information related to things outside of the method itself) than to read an ideally well-formed sentence that precisely answers the main questions about the method's usage.
That said, I also feel like this, mixed with them not really shipping much new UX/device innovation, signals a distinct chapter away from Jobs. I really want to see the vision Apple has taken with the M-series chips applied to new devices. I don't know what that looks like. I don't have the vision. Maybe it's their VR headset? Maybe it's humanoid robotics? I need Apple to tell me.
Don't know if anyone else can relate to this feeling.
If somebody has a preference for a release of Windows, it can range. Some love XP, some 7, some even might say "Screw the pushiness - I can make it shut the hell up, and 10 was better under the hood". Hell, I think I've seen comments to the effect of "95 was the best ever".
But having a favourite release of Mac OSX means it's Snow Leopard. I've seen comparisons between $current and $current_minus_one, but never in regards to "That was my favourite" - likely because anyone invested enough in Mac OS releases to have a favourite, favours Snow Leopard.
It's a shame because I really liked my white MacBook. It was a nice machine.
edit: I must have misremembered as I've been corrected below. Leopard was the last PowerPC version.
10.4 Tiger - Classic (on PPC) and x86
10.5 Leopard - no Classic, PPC and x86
10.6 SL - x86 only
There are some early developer previews of 10.6 on PPC that have leaked and are being played with, but 10.5.8 is the last PPC release.
With "share price over all" mentality, instead of clearing up funding toward declining companies like GameStop and AMC, you get a sudden resurgence of investment toward them via weird things like gaming passive index investing as scammers and hopeful suckers encourage and fall victim to the efforts of C-level grifters who have decided to spend their allegedly exceptionally valuable expertise perpetuating the scam instead of cutting it short.
They do this all while attacking the immune system (short sellers) that is trying to accelerate us toward being rid of their sludge. It's a meta-human autoimmune disease.
I realize I'm taking this to the extreme, but there are small steps that echo this tendency to live or grow at any cost. Forcing out annual products with exuberant marketing campaigns as a substitute for substance is an indicator of weakness or outright lack of understanding that sometimes to go forward you have to take some steps backward.
They made sense when iOS/Android were feature-leap-frogging.
They make little sense anymore but to support new hardware features.
False! A foundational concept in Constraint Theory is that "Large Batch Sizes Increase Lead Time".
Apple should figure out how to release smaller batches more often to improve quality. They should figure out how to release the first day of the quarter, every quarter. And work backward on what needs to happen to make that happen. Then release first of the month, every month. Once again, work backward on how to make that happen.
For example, we release to the iOS App Store and Google Play Store first thing on Monday, every Monday. And we worked backwards to figure out what we needed to do to make that happen.
When something goes wrong, the batch size is small enough that we can quickly figure out what happened. Also, the release train is reliable enough that engineers can push back on PMs. "You are not getting this feature this Monday. You'll get it next Monday".
Large batch sizes and long release cycles are terrible for quality!
I understand their goal of pushing you to buy a new device, but this doesn't really do that. It makes me hesitant to buy a new one in case it will also perform this badly. There's nothing inherent to the hardware that should make it perform this badly and I don't think that it did that when it was new. Ergo I think their software has taken a nose dive into extreme unreliability.
I literally had a work face, a workout face, and a Tesla watchface. I moved between them frictionless-ly, and now it's a press-hold-swipe-close movement. And yet, there's no swipe feature replacement -- you just can't swipe anymore. The gesture has no associated action.
I know some people hate the swipe, because they accidentally swiped between watch faces (it never happened to me), but if the swipe gesture is dead, why not offer it as a feature flag?
And it's like they don't want you to think your watch has multiple watch faces anymore. They macbook-keyboard-ruined watchOS for me and it's worse because they took something away that had been there this whole time -- a cardinal sin. Bah freakin' humbug.
It also takes much more precise scrolling to check whether I've gotten the current Stand hour. Used to be continuous scrolling and you just had to get one small bar somewhere within the screen. Now it's a bunch of fullscreen pages and you need to scroll down to the exact page and no farther.
The new UI is prettier, but it's definitely not as efficient.
EDIT - I'd also like to be able to kick the date/time off of the widget stack so that I could have two useful widgets immediately on screen. I'm not swiping up to look at the date and time, I have both of those on my watch face. This should really be a widget from the Clock app if someone wants to have it there, but otherwise let me delete it.
Trying to tap widgets further down the stack also behaves weirdly. In the iOS app switcher cards you can tap on the background cards near the left side of the screen to open an app from further back in the stack without having to scroll to it first. The one to the left of the current app is a pretty easy target, the second one to the left is a bit of a narrow line along the edge. But it works, you tap either of them and they activate.
Not so with the watchOS 10 widget stack. You can see the next two widgets in the background along the bottom of the screen, but if you try to tap on them they just disappear.
They're past due for an iOS 12 style polish pass on all of their platforms. But now their attention is going to be focused on launching and iterating a whole new one (visionOS) so it's hard to get optimistic.
Swipe to Change Watch Faces: YESI've had to set up focus modes with schedules so that my work and sleep faces are activated automatically at certain times of the day, this has helped a bit with reducing my frustration with this change, but I really hope they revert this in an update (unlikely, I know).
Using an iPhone and Apple Watch these last few years has felt like death by a thousand cuts. The number of times I've felt like throwing all of my devices out a window and going back to the olden days of flip phones and writing letters to people have been astronomical this year.
The worst part is the lack of communication when things go wrong. You can't just connect your phone to your computer and run `adb logcat` like you can on Android to at least hope for a glimmer of a clue behind the bugs. If you don't have XCode, you're mostly SOL.
I died that death of a thousand cuts on Linux and Android and after being hesitant to spend the money for years, my expectation for Apple was that at least the devices would work very well! But they're increasingly becoming what they were supposed to be better than.
Is it just me or does Snow Leopard feel like 4-5 years ago? I've been using macOS since the original X (10.0.0) was released. This is what getting old (40) feels like... Paired with a pandemic, Catalina feels like yesterday.
Sonoma 14.1 2023
Ventura 13.6 2022
Monterey 12.7 2021
Big Sur 11.7 2020
Catalina 10.15 2019
Mojave 10.14 2018
H. Sierra 10.13 2017
Sierra 10.12 2016
El Cap 10.11 2015
Yosemite 10.10 2014
Mavericks 10.9 2013
Mtn Lion 10.8 2012
Lion 10.7 2011
Snow Leo 10.6 2009
Leopard 10.5 2007
Tiger 10.4 2005
Panther 10.3 2003
Jaguar 10.2 2002
Puma 10.1 2001
Cheetah 10.0 2001
I believe Mavericks was also when Apple stopped charging for OS upgrades.
> Last month, the company completed the first version of its next iPhone, iPad and Mac operating systems. That iteration is known as M1 since it’s the first major milestone.
> Apple is lifting the pause this week.
So it's a pause for at most one month, most probably not a chance for a release like Snow Leopard.
>In 2019, he overhauled the way Apple develops software in a further attempt to stave off problems
>That year, he also adopted what is known within Apple as “The Pact.” The agreement calls for employees to never knowingly allow “regressions” — when software that once worked stops functioning correctly — and quickly fix mistakes. Federighi’s policies have helped: Apple software releases have been less buggy in recent years, and fewer features had to be delayed.
Lmao.
It feels like Tim Cook has been selling off the reputation of reliability (their moat!) for a few years now.
One can argue that buildings and other structures need regular maintenance to stay safe to use. Yes they do; however, that is because their components are exposed to the elements and wear out. Software isn't like that. Bits don't go bad if you neglect them for too long. And you'll eventually run out of bugs and vulnerabilities if you stop adding new features no user ever asked for.
They do... Other than in the obvious physical sense (bit rot), your assumptions about the environment that the code runs in might change (y2k), the foundation your software is being built on is being actively and continuously updated in ways that may break your code (ipv6, forward incompatible security fixes), the resources your code uses are finite and the constraints around the resource usage may change... Looking at it from just first principles maintaining a Very Large software system in production is immensely complex.
> the resources your code uses are finite and the constraints around the resource usage may change
How? A chat app or a web page has no business using several gigabytes of RAM. About the only thing that I can think of that does push the available resources on modern devices to the limit is AI. Which is very niche and gimmicky, at least right now.
But then yes, it makes sense to update OSes to support new hardware. But only for that. Adding a couple of drivers doesn't warrant a major OS release. Neither does exposing new hardware capabilities via APIs so apps could make use of them. And redesigning UIs just for the sake of it is indefensible, plain and simple.