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He wasn't saying that their online services aren't big or aren't profitable, he was saying that they aren't very good. And I would have to agree with him on that. I don't think I've ever heard anyone argue that either iCloud or iTunes are good pieces of engineering.

Seriously. Miserable load times in iTunes, not being able to use the same Apple ID to access different teams in iTunes Connect, lack of an API to the dev portal, lack of OAuth support, laughable reporting in iTunes connect, cryptic sync errors with iCloud. The list goes on and on.

They fail at even the most basic stuff too.

Like how when you launch a new app on the App Store, for the following 6-8 hours users get random errors ("not available on store", "not available in this country", sporadically missing from search, etc) when they try to download it as it propagates through the app store CDN. This even affected the recent OS X updates launched on the Mac App Store. Imagine if Amazon CloudFront worked like that!

And imagine if Amazon had to shut down their whole site when they updated one product like the Apple Store Online.

> And imagine if Amazon had to shut down their whole site when they updated one product like the Apple Store Online.

Most of that is just hype machine on Apple's part. I doubt there is a technical reason to do so.

It makes sense to shut it down during keynotes, events, etc. But the store also goes into "we'll be back" mode once or twice a month for routine updates.

>> Apple has proven over and over again that they're utter crap at online services.

> Yes. They only have the most successful online app and music store service on the planet.

> And one of the biggest backup online service (iCloud) too.

> Oh, and the most popular online computer shop.

> Utter crap indeed.

I really don't understand this argument. The quality of the code powering something is completely orthogonal to the amount of money said thing can generate. As long as the transaction goes through, money can be made. That doesn't mean that behind the scenes it's not a complete disaster.

>I really don't understand this argument. The quality of the code powering something is completely orthogonal to the amount of money said thing can generate. As long as the transaction goes through, money can be made. That doesn't mean that behind the scenes it's not a complete disaster.

Completely orthogonal my ass.

Where does any idea about the quality of code comes from? From an operational point of view, not only it WORKS, but it works in a CRAZY scale.

Hundrends of millions of customers with hundrends of millions of credit cards, serves multi-TB of stuff every day, handles music, video, apps, updates, etc. (Oh, and it's not even that which is down -- it's their developer portal).

So where does the ideas about the "quality of code" come from? Have you SEEN the code?

If not, we just have the "works, serves more than half-a-billion, at a Facebook like scale, with more credit cards than even Amazon" to go by.

It works, at a huge scale, and poorly.

Post a new app to the App Store. Poll various friends to see when they can actually access it. You can watch their database replication slowly happen in real time over the course of hours, as the app randomly appears for more and more people. People will often be able to access the app through a direct link but not through search for a few hours before everything synchronizes. You have to give it about twelve hours before you can reliably count on all users being able to access it.

Let's compare this to, for example, Google search. The scale on Google's end is much larger. What's worse, they're indexing external content that they have no control over. Despite these handicaps, they have no problem with rapid, coherent updates. More than once, I've typed up a reply to a comment like this, posted it, then hit up Google for some additional information and found my own comment posted just minutes ago among the top results.

Google, working with external data they don't control, serving vastly more requests of vastly more complexity, is able to provide coherent results within a few minutes, while Apple takes hours to roll out new data that you explicitly send them.

That kind of stuff is where ideas about code quality come from. No amount of "but they make lots of money and are popular" can counter this.

I would say that while you're correct about Google being faster the reasons are probably less obvious.

Whereas Google is going for absolute fastest delivery of content, Apple is trying to deliver a full ACID database system with guarantees their licensing vendors will sign off on. This likely means massive replication and it likely means that Apple is enforcing a lot of service guarantees to ensure these are atomic transactions.

On the other hand, Google just really wants you to have blisteringly fast load times. Different problem domain in my opinion. One is an index with few guarantees necessary, the other would not be obliged to sell you content if one of its guarantees failed. Different strokes for different folks.

Granted Apple could be faster, but I don't think it's fair to compare their propagation to Google's.

I don't understand. Apple needs to make a lot more guarantees about integrity and atomicity, which is why their data integrity sucks and their transactions are not atomic?

I could kind of sort of understand if apps took twelve hours to show up on the store, in general. But no, they take twelve hours overall to show up after a long period of bizarre, inconsistent rollout.

The speed difference is much less important than the fact that Apple presents its users with a wildly inconsistent view of their database for any recent changes for a period of hours. Of course, updating changes quickly would be one way to fix this, but the speed is not in itself the problem.

>It works, at a huge scale, and poorly.

If it manages to push 1 billion apps and 1 trillion notifications, billions of songs, TB of video and such, with no major complaints other than "it takes 12 hours for an app to appear for everyone" that's doing great in my book.

Well, it seems we come down to a pure difference of opinion. We appear to agree completely on the facts, I just happen to think those facts means their operation is fairly poor, while you think it's great. So, we can't do much now but move on....

The standard car's internal combustion engine works at a crazy scale, however it still dumps over half of the energy of the fuel as heat through the radiator. Things can work pretty badly and still scale.

If it's as good as the "standard car's internal combustion engine" then it's mighty near great.

Seing that the other alternatives to "standard car's internal combustion engine" are either off the market or marginal/niche.

People complained in this post that it wasn't good. As in: crap compared to the standard.

For the analogy with cars to hold, it would have to be like a seriously brain damaged internal combustion engine -- not like the "standard car's" one.

If we're going with cars, it's more like say, 1960s British cars. Amazing industrial design, good engines and overall performance, etc., but crap electrical systems compared to other companies of the time -- yet people bought them because the overall package was still good, often largely due to how amazing the E-Type looked. Saying "the Jaguar electrical system sucks; for a company who makes such amazing products it's an embarrassment" was perfectly true, even if you still buy a Jaguar (along with lots of other people).

(although I think it was mainly other British marques who had horrible electrical systems at the time, and was more a 1950s thing)

We know what frameworks and other tools they use. Those suck (which is a personal evaluation, sure, but the marketplace has pretty much validated my opinion on this). The performance/feature characteristics visible to the end user also suck.

Apple's developer and support forums are pretty worthless compared to other vendors. A lot of information is missing or hidden, and finding anything worthwhile requires a lot more clicks than finding something at Google.

The whole iOS approval process is...Kafkaesque.

>We know what frameworks and other tools they use.

We only know about SOME of them (e.g WebObjects).

>Those suck (which is a personal evaluation, sure, but the marketplace has pretty much validated my opinion on this).

In the same way that the marketplace has validated DOS and then Windows over UNIX? Javascript over LISP? VHS over Betamax?

Actually, WebObjects was one of the finest web frameworks (including in it's Java incarnation). Sure, there are newer things now, but nothing extremely better. Not to mention even giants like Facebook and Yahoo use PHP for christ's sake. It was also one of the most popular in its range, when it was available. It just didn't make sense for Apple to participate in that market.

>The performance/feature characteristics visible to the end user also suck.

Compared to what? In the same scale? Never hard any real issue with ITMs (at least none that I didn't have with online services 1/10 it's size).

WebObjects. Essentially a legacy from NeXT, almost 20 years old, and even Apple abandoned it for everyone except internal use. Finding competent people for that is...nontrivial.

They also use a lot of Sun/Oracle in general (especially in the early 2000s). Look how well that worked out for eBay.

Given the runaway success of the iPhone for hardware reasons (and I guess iOS, and third party developers), you can't really claim the success of the App Store is due to the quality of the App Store. The iPhone was successful first, then demand for apps, then Apple built the App Store once regular people were jailbreaking their devices and doing their own development.

I'll concede iTunes was successful for music on its own, but that's more for licensing reasons than anything else; I find what.cd a vastly superior experience as a user, even independent of money, and Gazelle/BT are open source. Both are better than what the RIAA came up with for sure. Arguably Spotify, Rdio, Pandora, etc. are better.

Netflix has done a way better job on video than Apple, too.

Did you just compare a BitTorrent tracker to iTunes?

Anyways ignoring that, the "App Store" was built alongside iPhone and released at the same time. So I'm not sure where you're getting yo facts from.

But Netflix has done a much better job on video. And I agree that iTunes is a little weak.

Third party apps on the iPhone were originally supposed to just be web apps run in Safari. iTunes was just for the loading of music (and I think video?) and basic activation and such. The iPhone was announced in January 2007, and released in June 2007. The SDK was announced in October 2007, released in early 2008. You had to wait until users upgraded to iOS 2.0 (released summer 2008) to actually run those apps.

No you're right... Still, I find it hard to believe that they built the entire iPhone SDK and App Store in less then a year. I'm going to guess it was part of the original idea, just delayed for some reasons.

Of course they didn't build the SDK in less than a year. It's a pared-down version of what they use to create their own apps.

The App Store and iPhone 3G were launched a year after the original iPhone. That is also when the SDK was released and 3rd party apps were introduced.

"Given the runaway success of the iPhone for hardware reasons..."

I wish there were more folks who could see that. Your comments about Apple on this thread are worth contemplating.

There seems to be this silly idea that Apple is now "more than a (proprietary) hardware company". But if we took away the design-patented, hermetically-sealed enclosures, what is the value of Apple? What's left that we can use? Can any of it stand on its own?

It should be obvious, but only after you tie users to a particular piece of hardware do the other opportunities like playing middle man to digitized consumables like music, software or books arise. I surmise it is those opportunities that cause people to believe Apple is more than a hardware company. But maybe Apple is just a hardware company that, outside of their area of expertise - hardware, is very opportunistic? "Good artists copy, great artists steal."

How many times have we seen Apple "borrow" from third party software that supplements Apple's OS functionality and proceed to incorporate others' ideas into their next OS version?

Are all the components of Apple's allegedly diversified business dependent on the success of Apple hardware? Try the following thought experiment:

Subtract the fact of the Apple hardware with its attractive form factor and imagine other companies designing the world's most popular mp3 players, phones and tablets. Imagine Apple does not make, sell, or have made hardware enclosures or the cheap, Chinese-made electronics that are hidden inside. Now, ask yourself, "What is the value of Apple?"

The value of iTunes without Apple hardware?

The value of the AppStore without Apple hardware?

The value of Apple's latest Mach/BSD hybrid OS without Apple hardware? OK, but how easily can Apple's graphics layer run on other hardware?

...

Filemaker Pro for Windows? Eureka!

Yes, Apple is much more than just a hardware company.

> Oh, and the most popular online computer shop.

No, they don't. Amazon is bigger.

Also the pure online hardware buying part is by far the weakest part of the argument.

The Apple Retail Stores are innovative (sort of; not that uncommon outside of computers, even in design, but bringing that to computers, sure). The Apple Online Store is pretty boring and simple -- limited SKUs, wasn't international for a fair bit, etc. The backend infrastructure to customize orders and manage manufacturing is somewhat less advanced than Dell was. It's just a question of making amazing hardware that people will do anything to buy. I don't think a random startup would have a hard time with the online store portion.

For their computer sales only?

I don't think so. How many people buy computers off of Amazon?

But even if so, that's a negligible pedantic correction. It's still in the top two.