One of my pet peeves is engineers making excuses for incompetence.
They're not good data, they're some of the worst. Your idiosyncratic one-off experience should be addressed, but not necessarily generalized from. I feel like this is an important, perhaps even the most fundamental prerequisite for information literacy.
Data shows 100% reliability then?
An anecdote is "I forgot to pray before bed last night and now I have a headache. See God is punishing me." and other people agreeing with this happening to them.
Saying, "here is a documented pixel bug that was released on day x but wasn't fixed until day y" is evidence and data.
Once its documented as a real bug then its no longer in the land of weird anecdotes.
How you categorize that is up to you. You can be dismissive of what that bug broke as an "unimportant feature" but its no longer an anecdote.
Or do we just do that for brands we're not fanboys of like __true__ engineers?
you can pretend it doesn't matter, but bad word of mouth is all it takes for me.
That's fine, but it's also entirely different from saying that the phones are objectively unstable and bad for everyday use.
Battery started discharging rapidly, I got it replaced, barely a year later it’s dying again.
The screen is eating up the battery like me drinking water on a hot California weather.
Is it enough data so that, as a consumer looking to purchase one, I would be concerned? Probably.
Is it enough data that I'd expect some engineer at Google (or wherever) to pay attention and address? Certainly, I would expect some engineering team to pay attention to public forums and address issues as they arise. It doesn't seem to be happening. If these phones are supposed to be a flagship items, and I think it's reasonable to claim that they are, it's also reasonable to expect flagship support.
The firm that has an interest in everyone thinking there's no data, and that we should withhold judgement.
There's not a lot of good choices here, either you assume that because there's no info, everything is fine, or you assume that the one guy complaining is one of many.
They lost the batterygate lawsuits, right? Guess you missed that fiasco that resulted in Apple paying out over half a billion. In this case Apple deliberately degraded previous user experiences on older phones, which means previous behavior (in this case performance) stopped working, done deliberately by Apple.
yes, it didn't go to zero, but it didn't do what it once did as decided remotely by Apple).
Apple also promised user data security, sold user data, and got hauled before Congress in 2011 for that. But I guess your user data was safe in offshore data silos.
I could go on, but I think your recall on iPhone downsides stopped working.
The battery degraded because it was a battery, and the performance had to degrade along with it because of physics.
Apple didn't decide remotely to weaken performance. That performance was on borrowed time. What Apple did wrong was not making it clear upfront that the performance was on borrowed time and wasn't sustainable.
> Apple didn't decide remotely to weaken performance.
It's amazing when people just make crap up without even looking something as simple as this up. Apple lost the "batterygate" lawsuit because they specifically did slow down performance on old phone with an update.
A quote [1]: "Apple has agreed to pay up to $500 million to settle a class action lawsuit that accused the tech giant of slowing down older iPhones to encourage people to buy the latest model. Apple faced a wave of criticism -- and lawsuits -- after acknowledging in 2017 that its iOS software slowed down the performance of some older iPhones."
All the court docs [2]. Knock yourself out.
If you're going to shill, at least take a moment to google a claim before making up nonsense.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-to-pay-up-to-500m-to-...
[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6431809/in-re-apple-inc...
Apple lost because they did a bad thing, but I disagree with your characterization of what the bad thing was. In particular I will note that your quote says that they settled and what they were accused of, which is very different from a verdict.
They settled because discovery pulled out docs showing they knew full well what they did, on purpose, and they settled for a half billion dollars because they stood to lose far more in court if a jury saw that evidence. There is no "we were trying to be nice" defense that would counter their internal documents and discussions demonstrating otherwise.
Apply doesn't hand out half billion payouts for touchy feely reasons.
Of course they made the update on purpose and knowing what it would do, but that is not the bar for being malicious and causing truly unnecessary slowdowns.
(If it's unclear, when I wrote above "The only thing they did on purpose" I meant the only relevant problem they caused on purpose. Obviously they do a million things on purpose.)
I'm not going to read a thousand pages of documents to look for maliciousness, if you're not going to point to a specific one, and you're not linking to a news article that has any relevant quotes of those documents.
Reading all of that is not "simple".
Can't you show me the specific evidence that made you so sure? I'm not asking you to search through, just for the information you already had.
> Apply doesn't hand out half billion payouts for touchy feely reasons.
I keep saying they did a bad thing. That is not disputed.
Let’s not share this absolute misinterpretation of what happened.
Apple fcked up big time on communication, that’s for sure, but it was an absolutely well meaning feature for an old device, lengthening their lifespan. They saw a bunch of random poweroffs due to degrading batteries not being able to output enough power to the CPU, and pushed an update that decreased the CPU clock down a bit. This of course degraded performance, and not having informed the buyers, making it a choice, they lost a lawsuit. But if they would actually do the communication well, it could have been an excellent positive PR, them fixing a bug for a 4 or so years device!
Let's not spin what happened, which has concrete and irrefutable evidence. Here's all the court docs [1]. Apple got caught, most definitely did degrade performance without warning and on purpose, and certainly people at Apple knew some of those device owners would upgrade. That they spun it as a feature once caught is classic spin. Apple is no idiot at marketing - if they thought people would see this as positive PR, they would have announced it and touted it. They did not. The 7 million+ pages of Apple discovery made all this clear. This is why Apple settled for a half billion - they were certainly going to get hammered in court.
Read the court docs, not Apple PR.
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6431809/in-re-apple-inc...
I worked on Pixel, left Google in October. I agree vehemently with what you're saying, its just, you're barking up the wrong tree on a couple different levels, the easy one above, and a more difficult one below.
Management did what you wanted a few years back, #1 and #2 and #3 priorities were "stability above all else" since Pixel 6.
This unfortunately didn't do anything in practice, other than enable newly minted middle managers to punch down, hoard work[1], and hide poor decision making and lying easily.[2] Net negative effect on product of course.
What managers wanted to legislate was "care about your features", but I observed over years that you simply can't enforce that. Ironically, given the above behavior from the new management layer, people got more detached. Unit test coverage went up, I'd bet, which is also a lesson in unit tests have significantly diminishing returns. E2E tests are hard and flaky, but they pay 100x dividends in these situations.
What you want to legislate is the truffle hunting that lowest level management does is bad. i.e. say we can definitely do whatever pet thing some guy 3 levels up says we need to copy from iOS this year. Then, hold it back because it's not done, but still announce it. Then, layer on a special process to get you on the betas to get the feature you thought you were buying. All of this keeps each individual happy and yet, remarkably, leads us directly back to the initial situation we were trying to fix.
From all this, you can also derive why things only launch, and never improve (tl;dr: management has 0 incentive to do anything other than latch onto the latest vague ask / iOS copying from above)
[1] Estimate everything takes 3-5x engineers it did 3 years ago. it's a huge win: I'm managing this team because I did it myself 3 years ago, so this makes clear what a talented engineer I was/am. When I solely listen to the vague asks from people 3 steps above, they'll want to give me the headcount I need to get their pet project done, so this gives me more reports. My compensation scales with report count. And if the estimate is questioned in any depth, well, we're making sure we have enough to deliver this Priority™ at high Quality™. Also, no one is going to question it anyway, my manager made me a manager because they trust me.
[2] it's very easy to work around blatant irresponsibility by flipping it into "the guy lower on the totem pole is insufficiently committed to quality and collaboration [taking forever to do anything]"