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Comment by ninkendo | Hacker News Reader

There’s no easy answer here, starting from scratch and rethinking everything carries a very high risk of disaster.

They just need to start giving a shit. Care about bugs for once. The whole software org needs to take the time to go through their (clearly) enormous backlog of bugs, and shore up what they have.

The problem isn’t the architecture or vision or rethinking their stack, it’s that what they have is barely holding together under its own weight. They need to do the unsexy work of going through and shoring it up.

As for Siri, just give the job to OpenAI. Let them write the new thing, they’ll probably be done in a month.

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People keep talking in this thread about iOS / macOS being bug-ridden messes. I have to wonder if this is from users still on Intel chips.

My work MacBook with a now 3+ year old M1 Max? Rock solid. Rarely run into any problems at all. My iPhone? Also rock solid. Rarely run into any problems.

My Intel-based MacBook? Buggy mess. Like Apple has left the Intel side of the house to die on the roadside. As someone who still uses that at the time expensive device, I find this annoying. But I understand why they’re not investing resources into Intel bug fixing.

It's not processor dependent. The OS is just buggy. Actually the only thing that is processor dependent is dtrace failing on Apple silicon and not fixed for years.

Other bugs are very generic. I get focus bugs, password input box broken on lockscreen, search just not working in settings app, xcode crashing if I even look at it wrong, and lots more...

Did you see the part where I said macOS on my M1-based laptop is great?

Yes, that's why I'm saying - no, they're not better and I do see issues on Apple silicon. You got lucky so far.

For years now. I guess I’ve had a good run.

Why would my mother care about dtrace?

Agree that they can't start from scratch. But they could acknowledge their shortcomings wrt to software and start moving things in the right direction. I had never seen so many complaints about software quality at Apple than the last release of MacOS with their networking issues and many other.

They are in a decent position where they already set expectations that they will deprecate and retire old stuff on a regular basis compared to Microsoft which is trying to preserve backwards compatibility forever.

Giving it to OpenAI won't solve their problem with Siri (although some of that expertise could help). Part of it has to be engineered into their platform with better extensibility while also preserving privacy, security, etc. And that work could also enable their platform APIs, Shortcuts and such to have access to a much more powerful set of things.

Maybe the problem is how the goal and objectives are set up which results in maligned incentives - "innovating" for the sake of innovation instead of fixing existing problem. The first results in nice power point presentations, the second doesn't.

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