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Comment by leephillips | Hacker News Reader

'Apple has in the past been known to make things with the ultimate attention to detail and things that "just work"'

I don't know why people continue to believe this. Apple has released versions of the Finder with amateurish bugs that delete files[1] and versions of Mail that randomly delete messages[2]. Several versions of Mail on iPhone send hundreds of copies of a message when emailing a link from Safari[3].

The Maps fiasco is not a departure from software excellence on the part of Apple, but just more of what we should expect by now: shiny stuff that doesn't work.

[1]http://tomkarpik.com/articles/massive-data-loss-bug-in-leopa... [2]http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=12758081&... [3]http://lee-phillips.org/iphoneUpgradeWarning-4-2-1/

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"shiny stuff that doesn't work"

Give me a break. Name an international company with 100% success in user happiness and usability with their product(s). Go ahead, try it.

Also, don't act like Android hasn't had faults and failings on their own. Or Windows.

Things aren't ever perfect. The only time there is a real binary system is CS. The world is gray, and Apple has been consistently better than bad. They've been good for me for the most part, with some minor annoyances sure, but to say that their software is "shiny stuff that doesn't work" just shows that you aren't really well versed in the domain that the hyperbole is supposed to explain.

I didn't claim that others' products were perfect. That would be strange. My point was that Apple enjoys an undeserved reputation for quality.

"Apple has been consistently better than bad"

I think my links show that this is just not true, but that might depend on what you mean by "consistently".

Their track record shows a cynical, almost sinister pattern of choices on their part: hoard $120 billion in cash while shipping software with a beautiful visual design that, under the glossy surface, is unreliable, inadequately tested, and, in some cases, demonstrably hobbled together by inexperienced or incompetent engineers: shiny stuff that doesn't work.

This is a deliberate choice, since with all that cash they could hire the best talent and make it policy to ensure that nothing gets out the door that would earn a CS undergraduate a failing grade. Instead, they've chosen to invest in maintaining the illusion that their software "just works" and is empowering, while harboring an increasingly obvious contempt for their customers.

ref 1 dates back to 2007, ref 2 is an isolated 'bug report' which no one else seems to corroborate and ref 3 seems to be written by you. You're not making any kind of case here for Apple being overrated.

"ref 1 dates back to 2007"

And?

"ref 2 is an isolated 'bug report' which no one else seems to corroborate"

It's one link to a report of a well-known, real problem. Apple Mail botched IMAP semantics just as the Finder botched file copying semantics. Both problems are reliably absent from real, mature software. And even in the one link I provide, several users are reporting disappearing messages. I would call that "corroborated", wouldn't you?

"ref 3 seems to be written by you"

It was, so you can be sure it's true.

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