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Comment by eloisius | Hacker News Reader

They could throw some small portion of their billions of dollars into proper quality control and reproduce it themselves if they wanted to. It’s an industry-wide malaise, but it isn’t inevitable. It’s amazing that every year it becomes more and more economically nonviable for basic shit to meet the most modest standards of usability, yet we can use the power consumption of a small country to have Copilot in Notepad.

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The way I see it, money can’t buy one of the most important ingredients: the motivation to do the best work of your life. No matter how much cash you throw at a problem, you’re likely just going to get people who want to "do their job" from 9 to 5. Those are exactly the kind of workers that companies like the Apple of 2026 are looking for. It’s a big ship, and it needs to stay steady and predictable. People who want to achieve something "insanely great" or "make a dent in the universe" are just a distraction.

In my experience, shipping a product as polished as Mac OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard requires a painful level of dedication from everyone involved, not just Quality Assurance.

As long as neither the New York Times nor the Wall Street Journal writes about how bad Apple’s software has gotten, there’s even no reason for them to think about changing their approach.

The drama surrounding Apple’s software quality isn’t showing up in their earnings. And at the end of the day, those earnings are the "high order bit," no matter what marketing tries to tell us.

Well, if there's one thing history has shown us (including the history of Apple's own insurgency against the PC), it's that complacency and stagnation make the incumbent a target for every newcomer who does have the drive to make a dent in the universe. And there are always a lot of people with that drive. This is how we keep ending up in the cycle of chaos > new paradigm > perfect software that probably should not be improved upon > collapse under weight of new features > chaos > new paradigm... repeat.

> They could throw some small portion of their billions of dollars into proper quality control and reproduce it themselves if they wanted to.

How?

How do you reproduce something when you have no idea of the cause and it's not happening on any of your machines?

And remember they don't have just this one unreproducible bug reported. They have thousands.

If you have experience writing software, you're going to end up with a lot of unreproducible bug reports. They're a genuine challenge for everyone, not just Apple.

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