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Comment by mszmszmsz | Hacker News Reader

We need a new "snow leopard" release. No new features. Cleaning up the mess. Ethically speaking, there's no excuses for Apple. They're sitting on a huge pile of resources. Don't have the team competent enough to handle stuff? Hire them. Yet I know that's not how capitalism works.

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As someone who witnessed a lot of the quality decline at Apple from the inside, hiring more people is decidedly not the answer. All that does is encourages management to engage in more churn, which is the source of these sorts of bugs.

The answer, unfortunately, is that features need to be sunsetted/removed, the engineering org shrunk, and for a smaller group to concentrate on a reliable product core.

It's not about the sheer numer of people, it's about their quality as managers, engineers, art directors and designers. Hire the best, pay them accordingly. Things can thrive without austerity, given enough good resources.

I disagree. A lot of the problems come down to part A of the system not coordinating well with part B. Take the brouhaha about the Tahoe window corners: obviously there wasn't enough communication between folks designing the window frame art and the folks implementing the window resize logic.

You can hire the best, but coordination among a group of people scales quadratically.

I'm really surprised they don't attempt to make the Mac a more work-focused machine.

Try building a graphics editor in SwiftUI. This is not really possible in 2026 in SwiftUI. I build a zoomable pannable page setup was incredibly difficult but possible.

Then try adding WYSIWG text editing to that. I got halfway to building one using CoreText to render to Canvas which works but then there's this fight with their NSAttributedString which is opaque and horrible, making it impossible to store CMYK colours alongside the text runs. There's also no way to capture iPad keyboard input in SwiftUI.

In the end, I have to build things that fit within platform constraints if I want to use SwiftUI.

The fact that e.g. Canva and Figma bypass almost all their APIs and draw to canvas should be a wake-up call for them.

Also PDF generation is painful enough that I'm considering a Java based web-service for document export on macOS.

I think it's an extremely recurring theme.

User: I will be so happy if Foo doesn't keep changing its UI and focuses on fixing bugs for a few versions

Foo's devs: Keep changing its UI and adding more bugs

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