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Comment by pdabbadabba | Hacker News Reader

> snow lion

...Snow Leopard?

The problem with your response is that I don't know that anyone has ever actually provided reliable evidence that the number of complaints has gone up. GP's view, which I share, is that people always complain about new releases, forgetting that the previous release had its problems as well. As GP said, bad headlines are easier to make than good ones. Simply reiterating that you think the previous release had fewer problems, and that there are anecdotes out there about problems in the current release, is hardly a refutation of this. This is entirely consistent with GP's view.

I for one have experienced no significant change in reliability on the road from Snow Leopard to Yosemite (for what that's worth).

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> people always complain about new releases, forgetting that the previous release had its problems as well

It might be true, but this attitude makes it very hard for developers not to discount all complaints, including ones grounded in reality. Just because people are paranoid about new releases being crap, it doesn't mean that they are not crap.

Personally, I've experienced a number of really bad bugs in Yosemite. One of the most annoying is four-finger swipes to bring up launchpad: the "blur" animation starts and then just hangs midway, leaving a half-transparent launchpad that works with keyboard controls but not mouse-clicks. Or the infamous "backbreak", where you do two-finger swipes to go back in a browser window and somehow it fails mid-way, leaving an unusable browser page and breaking all two-finger gestures until you close that window (not tab, the whole window). And of course the awful dark corners on the volume icon once you disable transparencies, something you have to do to maintain a decent framerate on a two-year MBP-retina that was perfectly capable to handle all this up to and including Mavericks. And let's not even talk about the wifi dns bug, which I've lost any hope to see permanently fixed in my lifetime.

These are bad because they affect very visible UI elements used hundreds or thousands of time per day; the sort of thing that used to be rock-solid and did not significantly change in new releases. I would understand if a newish feature like Finder tabs had a few bugs, but not trackpad gestures that have been there, working fine, for years.

Holy shit! Thanks for the tip! My MBP is only a little over one year old, but disabling transparencies gave a peppy speed-up. I have also noticed a more "sensitive" left-swipe on the trackpad since Yosemite -- it is infuriating to be constantly trying to scroll down a page and have it send my back a page in a browser.

Wifi DNS bug? Thanks for putting a name to a very persistent annoying problem in this household with--holy crap--12 Apple devices.

Also thanks for that Launchpad description. Keeps happening to my kids and I couldn't figure out why. I'm really disappointed in Apple. I'd really rather have reliable wifi than, say, Continuity.

> Or the infamous "backbreak", where you do two-finger swipes to go back in a browser window and somehow it fails mid-way, leaving an unusable browser page and breaking all two-finger gestures until you close that window (not tab, the whole window).

This bug is driving me crazy on 10.9.5, along with a couple of other issues. Sadly not limited to Yosemite. (I think Mavericks is worse than its reputation, I really miss 10.6 and 10.8.)

> It might be true, but this attitude makes it very hard for developers not to discount all complaints, including ones grounded in reality.

I think this is a problem for outside observers, not competent developers. Unlike us, Apple developers have ready access to statistics about bug reports and other forms of support requests that we do not. This data, presumably, is not subject to the same biases that infect an anecdote-driven discussion of software quality by outsiders.

In my experience, you get a bug report for every hundred or thousand affected users, if that; so excuse me for not having much faith in such statistics.

> This data, presumably, is not subject to the same biases

... but it's likely subject to many other biases, e.g.

* "hey, this bug was reported by iLife devs, better prioritise ahead of that bug that has affected millions of users for almost two years -- them people are not going to shout at me in the canteen."

* "hey, this bug was very well-reported by very technical server people, let's prioritise it ahead of that bug affecting millions of semi-literate consumers"

* "hey, this bug blocks the release of $shiny-new-iPhone-feature, let's prioritise it ahead of that bug affecting the trackpad of penny-pinching laptop users"

And so on, and so forth.

I wasn't talking about the biases that affect a team's response to a given bug but, rather, the ability merely to know whether a given release has more bugs or fewer bugs than others, and the biases that can effect this count.

> In my experience, you get a bug report for every hundred or thousand affected users, if that; so excuse me for not having much faith in such statistics.

But the number of reports should still be roughly proportional to the number of bugs in the wild, shouldn't they? That's all that is necessary to compare one release to another, particularly if all you're looking for is significant quality degradation, on the scale discussed in the article. And is it really your position that these statistics are worse than a few users' anecdotal views about which release is better?

> But the number of reports should still be roughly proportional to the number of bugs in the wild, shouldn't they?

That's just an article of faith. Regardless, part of the problem is where those bugs are. Maybe file-tagging involves millions of LoCs and it's now completely bugfree, but if wifi connections keep having DNS problems because of one single bug, overall experience is much more affected than it would be in the opposite case (bugfree wifi and buggy file-tagging).

> And is it really your position that these statistics are worse than a few users' anecdotal views

When "a few users" are your most ardent evangelists (Arment, Gruber etc), I'd say you should worry regardless.

Yes, I meant Snow Leopard. Sorry. I have experienced many problems since Yosemite and am a long time OSX user. Maybe because I use my computer extensively every day in the same ways, it is more obvious to me than a casual user, but there are definitely new (and bad) issues with Yosemite, wfiw.

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