Why Apple is the cross-section of great hardware, design and shitty software | Hacker News Reader

Why Apple is the cross-section of great hardware, design and shitty software

medium.com

30 pointsmeteorash20 comments

You're deferring a lot of ideas in this essay ("enough said", "I'll leave that for another day", etc.) without actually going in depth on anything, and that leaves a lot of your gripes sounding really shallow. Pick one topic and stick to it.

yes, my point here is not to argue the pros/cons of flat design or rant about the many different weird errors Xcode spews out. there is enough literature out there detailing those.

my topic is merely to highlight that major software coming out from Apple are either buggy or stale.

> And where does Apple store these pictures? As a massive proprietary lump of data that is illegible to any other software or life form.

Go to ~/Pictures, right click the iPhoto Library, click "Show Package Contents". Suddenly, photos!

I agree with the poster, though. From a purely technical POV, Apple's software is pretty bad. I have been using OS X since 2008, and it's much worse than Linux and Windows when it comes to stability and performance. It regularly uses much more memory than either OS, behaves badly under load, occasionally freezes up when connecting to external devices, takes more time to respond to certain events, is extremely hard to customize etc. iTunes is so bad that I prefer using almost anything else to play my music. Safari is an okay browser at best; it certainly can't compete with either Firefox or Chrome.

I'm able to overlook all these technical issues because OS X is marginally better designed than Windows and Linux, does most of what I need to do without me having to jump through hoops, gives me great battery life, allows be to do an astounding number of basic computing tasks right out of the box[1], and runs all the software I need it to run. The fact that the OS X UI has remained functionally the same for over a decade is also a plus. I use OS X, but very little of Apple's other software. I browse the web using Firefox, listen to music using Clementine, use iTerm as my terminal, Google Docs for documents, Gmail for email, etc.

I would switch to Linux in a heartbeat, but I feel the userland changes far too much far too often. At 23, I'm far too old for that.

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[1] These include cropping pictures, annotating PDFs, slicing video, recording my screen, recording video or voice, syncinc contacts and calendars, looking up words in a dictionary, reading mail, importing pictures from a digital camera, backing up my files, viewing (but not editing) ODF, XLSX, DOCX, etc. It even includes an on-line partitioning tool (Disk Utility), and a graphing calculator (Grapher).

The OS is supposed to use memory. That's what it's for: to be used. Using memory is a feature, not a bug. Let the OS manage memory instead of demanding a lot should be left in an used state.

You also didn't make much effort to argue your points. Consider Safari vs Chrome. Safari has better UI IMO, and Chrome is a fork of Safari's internals. So what's better about Chrome on Mac? I use both regularly. Chrome's adblock works better but it's not obvious what else is better and you didn't tell me.

Saying Chrome is a fork of Safari as if it's a bad thing and the only word on the subject is a bit disingenuous. Safari is built on WebKit which is built on KHTML (which predates Apple having their own browser). Chrome was also built on WebKit but Google has now forked it themselves into Blink which will be used by Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Iron, etc so they don't have to deal with Apple while improving the code.

As for Safari itself, I don't know about Mac OS X, but I know it was a disaster on Windows. But then, Apple has always only barely been able to develop Windows software. That's one of the reasons Apple abandoned it. iTunes it seems Apple only develops on Windows because they have to and they do as little as possible with it, hence the slow, custom UI that violates all Windows UI guidelines.

I didn't say it's a bad thing to fork, I said it requires further explanation how a fork -- with worse UI imo -- is better. Worse UI and similar internals -- where is the way better part?

I don't wish to defend windows safari, only mac.

It's also worth pointing out that Safari's UI is not open source and not part of WebKit. Additionally, I find Chrome's UI (which is open source) superior to Safari, but it's subjective, of course.

> The OS is supposed to use memory. That's what it's for: to be used. Using memory is a feature, not a bug. Let the OS manage memory instead of demanding a lot should be left in an used state.

When I purchased my MBP, it came with 4GB of memory. This was apparently enough for Linux, but not for OS X. I was able to open 40-50 browser tabs, play music, run several terminal sessions, run my text editor, and a host of other software on Linux. OS X, though, it started swapping like crazy if I opened 20-30 browser tabs and my media player. It would completely freeze up for minutes at a time if I tried to run too many applications at once. It was so bad that I problems getting work done. I eventually invested in more RAM, which immediately fixed all my performance issues.

This is not a one-off thing. OS X Lion is known to have issues with memory management, and several hacks exist to make things better. The easiest method, though, is to throw money at the problem and upgrade your RAM.

> You also didn't make much effort to argue your points. Consider Safari vs Chrome. Safari has better UI IMO, and Chrome is a fork of Safari's internals. So what's better about Chrome on Mac? I use both regularly. Chrome's adblock works better but it's not obvious what else is better and you didn't tell me.

I, too, love the Safari UI. But Safari lacks the customizability of Chrome and Firefox. Also, despite having switched to a multi-process architecture, Safari still sometimes freezes randomly if one tab is doing too much work. This doesn't happen too often, though.

> Chrome is a fork of Safari's internals.

It is not. Both Chrome and Safari use WebKit as their layout engine, but that's where the similarity ends. They have separate JavaScript engines and network code. In any case, WebKit has not been an Apple-only project for a very long time now. Google contributes as much to WebKit as Apple does. And there are tons of other companies that work on WebKit, including Nokia, RIM, Samsung, Adobe, and Intel. See http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/02/11/apple-google-nearl.... So WebKit != Apple.

As for iTunes: I don't think I can add much to what people all over the Internet have already said. It's does far too many things, and does all of them poorly. It has several UI issues. E.g, it's hard to see your media library and currently playing playlist at the same time – something I want to do very often. The search is quite bad, since the only way to use advanced search operators is by creating a smart playlist. If you make changes to your media library using something other than iTunes, those changes will not be reflected in iTunes unless you rescan your library. So, if I buy an album off Bandcamp and drop it into ~/Music/, iTunes won't pick it up. I'll have to drop it into iTunes to add it to my library. Oh, and when iTunes is scanning my media library, it completely blocks the UI. I could go on all day. I use Clementine for my music, which is clunky and ugly but manages my media library much better than iTunes.

> The OS is supposed to use memory.

Erm, no. The OS is supposed to virtualize the hardware. It should use the optimal amount of resources for that.

> That's what it's for: to be used.

Not necessarily by the OS. You do know that these things called "Applications" exist and use memory, don't you?

This article contains little support for the statements it makes. I also don't agree that their software is shitty. iOS may have been a bit stale, but I have two family members (my mother and grandma), who had never used a computer before and could use an iDevice without much instruction. iOS < 7 was very simple and logical (I haven't made my mind up about 7 yet) and the applications (iPhoto, iMovie et al.) work well and are very usable for a non-expert users (who don't care what iPhoto stores its metadata in).

I think the more serious problem that Apple should solve is the hiccups in their cloud services. A significant (but different) subset of my iTunes Match songs is not playable most of the times. iMessage messages arrive in a more or less random order on random devices. Facetime calls come in on some devices, but not others. Most of my iOS wielding friends/family (and myself) have switched to other services. Facebook Chat works great, Skype is acceptable for video calling.

Another threat is the lack of differentiation in their product portfolio. So far, uniformity worked well for them, but some people switch to platforms to get a larger (phone) screen, a better camera, a cheaper phone, etc.

> Apple has to put its cash to work

Throwing cash at it does not make better software. See the Mythical Man Month. Or don't. But Apple is aware of it.

I do not agree Apple's software is "shitty", but there is certainly room for improvement. But the bottleneck isn't cash (nor is the bottleneck desire. they want to improve things and are working on it).

Would be interesting to try to imagine where the bottlenecks are, because I think we can suppose there are some bottlenecks.

Maybe Apple locked itself when locking in its users?

1. you can switch between apps and close them with gestures. That's been available for several versions now. It's just that's a stupid idea so nobody does it.

2. I use "contacts" all the time.

3. So what if other phones had flat design? now Apple has it. It's not a mark against Apple if they fail to make you orgasm with delight with every feature they add. Sometimes it's good enough if the phone just works without having to monkey with customisation options for days.

Not worth your time. At all.

1 day old, has no comment, but only this shitty post.

tl;dr - dude opens Medium account -> wonders what topic to write on -> picks Apple cos he owns an iPod, iPhone and Macbook -> realizes & rehashes what most people have known for years -> that Apple's hardware is world class, iTunes is bloated and iOS is a walled-garden and late-comer to flat UI.

you mistake your understanding to be that of the general public as well. it is an opinion piece and the idea is to get common people to realize and think about what you may have "known for years".

Such as the difference between "intersection" and "cross section."

I know it's a cheap shot, but it strikes me as carelessness to not even get the title right.

We are discussing it on HN, right?

Go back to Windows.

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