Apple Software Quality Questions
mondaynote.com
mondaynote.com
If anything it's better than Mavericks. And Mail woes are 99% gone too.
Just to add another viewpoint, since only people with negative experiences tend to write.
Of course all software has bugs, but not everybody is bitten by all of them. Some are legitimate complaints. Other are by peoplw who install every BS addon, haxie etc they find, have el-cheapo external peripherals, or blame third party software issues to the OS maker.
(That said, I've had the "22 px sheet" bug, and it's the second point release already --I run the beta--, it should have been fixed by now, and I dislike how they abandoned Aperture).
The issue seems to be limited to only nVidia equipped rMBPs, but honestly, I did not expect a brand new laptop (I have mid-2014) for 3kEUR to stutter just running desktop animations you know?
You do not expect this on an expensive machine that is barely two years old.
I also have wifi dropout issues, Mail is increasingly slow and unpredictable, and iTunes... Christ, don't get me started on iTunes.
My wife's 4 year old MBP, with 4GB RAM, was usable with Mavericks but is now basically unusable with Yosemite. I'm hoping more RAM and an SSD might sort it out, but I'm not overly hopeful.
I've been a more or less full-time Mac user since about 2003 and I don't remember being this frustrated with their software before.
I definitely have annoyances with Yosemite – GUI performance on a rMBP is lower, which is particularly noticeable during Mission Control use. I've also got the irritating slowdown/flickering menu bar bug that I've seen people report. But generally everything else has been pretty great.
I do wish Apple was more public about bug tracking – I'd love to see a public database of known bugs so we can track progress or something like that.
In the end, I believe it is more worthwhile to just file bugs [1] en-masse to have a "this issue is public" checkbox in their bug reporting interface. If enough people request this feature hopefully they will add it.
I haven't found that to be the case at the Apple subreddit on Reddit.
IMO, it depends on the topic and where the discussion is located.
I think we are seeing exactly the opposite effect: People who use third-party software are complaining less.
Safari is buggy (swipe-to-go-back gesture sometimes freezes until I reboot), iWork has been ruined, Apple's photo ecosystem is a terrible mess, iCloud reliability (for documents) is a joke.
If I was using Chrome/Firefox, MS Office, Lightroom and Dropbox instead, I would have very few complaints about Apple's software quality.
She mostly uses the browser for news and some articles, skype to talk to us, and knows basic GUI file operations enough to view picture we send her.
I would log in periodically and update her packages. When we visit or she vists and brings her laptop I'd switch her to the next LTS release.
I am just very happy with Ubuntu, it has worked really well for us.
I know that's what a lot of industry does for windows systems, but hey, you got to do a lot to keep windows on line.
One of the worst things is if machine won't boot (happened once due to hard drive failing). Otherwise it uses a few dynamic dns sites so I can know its IP ( + a few links to the show me the IP links in her browser toolbar, just in case).
If there is a problem and need to help her with the desktop, there is x11vnc.
So for example, my mom would say "I am not sure where to find the pictures". I would move the folder to her Desktop from ssh, hoping the would see it. But if not I ssh in, then launch x11vnc then connect to it with a vncclient and then move around her desktop to see what the problem might be.
She would see the mouse move and buttons getting clicked.
Bandwidth is not a problem because, we have have something like 50Mpbs connections, latency is usually the issue as the signal has to go half way around the world.
Still not perfect, but better.
Disallow password login, use key-based auth (using a dedicated, passphrase-protected key that you can copy around).
An alternative is to have a "shortcut" that help them fire a SSH client connecting to a server of yours, with port forwarding allowing you to connect back, so you don't have to worry about firewalls and other appliances being reset.
Best part for me was when I found out on such an occasion that mine did it on her own.
The iPad, as it is, is very tempting for kids (and not only kids). To leave such a toy in the hands of a child is like leaving a big bag of chocolates in their room and telling them to eat responsibly when they are alone. Apple wants parents to police their iPads by hand instead. I have many other things to do than police children's gaming. We are in the age of computing now, if they haven't realized. I want nice stats with total time per app per day, like some parental control apps offer on Android.
In practice I was forced to confiscate their iPads and give them Android phones with big screens and good parental controls instead. Never gonna buy an iPad/iPhone for my kids again.
I am sure Apple does it for self serving reasons like "Don't limit their gaming time in any way, and sales with soar!"
Establishing rules for my toddler is relatively easy when in the context of a physical object (e.g. don't touch the TV, you can only read books or do puzzles during quiet time).
The same toddler has a MUCH harder time recognizing the distinction when dealing with different apps on a single physical device. If I leave two devices in a room and tell him not to touch one, I'll get compliance. If I give him access to a device but tell he that he can't watch movies, compliance drops and he exhibits much less awareness that he broke a rule.
I don't fault apple at all for the lack of parental controls, but do see a use if they were included.
This is painful to read. There's very little chance of having a respectful conversation about this topic, so I should just move on silently. Shortly, I will. But not before suggesting that, respectfully, perhaps there's another way to approach the problem?
You currently have one downvote, and it isn't from me, but I feel so strongly repelled by your comment that I can understand the impulse to click the arrow and try to forget what you've written.
> Apple wants parents to police their iPads by hand instead.
I don't think Apple takes a strong position on parenting at all -- but if they did, and it was the position you describe, I would be emphatically in agreement with them. I wouldn't use the word "police" though.
Apple's main theme is the 'curated experience'.
This is exactly the dilemma Apple faces and is the reason that simplistic answers like 'stop releasing every year' are unhelpful.
The real interesting question is - is there a way for Apple to both maintain the pace of development and improve quality simultaneously.
That seems to be a challenge worthy of the most valuable company in the world.
I agree that certain teams might need to slow down and reduce the scope of what they do in a cycle - but I think it would be better for them to calibrate to a sustainable scope rather than skipping a cycle altogether.
The dreamy days of OS X Tiger on a G4 PowerBook now seem like they must have been figments of the imagination.
The main issue is that Microsoft and Android developers (I guess mainly Google) are getting their shit together (resulting in some decent software), whereas Apple software quality is in a freefall, failing in some extremely basic use cases, and has been for a while.
Desktop OSs are one thing, but in 2 years do you think iOS will be more usable than Android on comparable hardware? I already don't think so. The momentum is definitely against Apple
Via Google Voice/Hangouts the answering/calling of a phone through a Mac or other PC has been around before Apple's introduction of it. Also, things like SMS MightyText for Android were also things I've enjoyed on my Android/Mac combo well before Apple made it available within the OS:
http://blog.mightytext.net/welcome-to-the-party-apple/
Granted, I did use an iChat/AIM combo setup to text phones (and receive texts) via my Mac in the past, but it was a cumbersome utilization and didn't work with all carriers.
>Maybe Apple is moving too fast, that is a matter of opinion, but they are certainly moving forward fast.
Bugs that hinder workflow moves me backwards. And, these Mac OS and iOS bugs aren't just a matter of opinion. I don't think it's time to slam all that is Apple, but the company is overdue for some customer backlash and constructive criticism, in my opinion.
Then again, maybe this is all just bad karma from Apple completely ignoring the faulty early 2011 MacBook Pro GPU/logic board failures and not issuing a recall and replacement program as they should.
This.
Apple's long term strategy on hardware had me getting ready to leave their ecosystem over a year ago (they discontinued the unibody Macbooks that I love so much, which were a perfect balance of size, power and end-user expandability). It didn't help that I have one of the early 2011 MBP's with the overheating and GPU issues. Mine just died over the Christmas holidays.
The only way my 2011 MBP would run without glitching and crashing was... surprise, surprise, running Windows 8.1 in Boot Camp. And in general, it felt and ran faster than OSX did.
That experiment led me to install Windows 8.1 on my 2008 Macbook -- which can't run anything newer than Lion. It was a pig, nearly unusable until I installed Windows on it, and now it's snappy enough to use daily.
While there's something to be said about Apple not looking to the past when providing OS upgrades, I think there's also something to be said about Microsoft's strategy of providing backwards compatibility to older hardware.
But there has to be a point where as professionals we look at the opportunity cost of these failures and hold ourselves responsible for the damage they cause.
If you add up all the time and opportunity lost due to bugs, duplicated effort, and substandard solutions (which is nearly every piece of software today including my own) it just about makes one sick.
Apple is no more responsible for this than anyone else in the industry except for the fact that they are a platform creator. I feel that companies such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft should be held extra accountable not so much for the failure in where they have led us in the past, but our acceptance of their visions in the future.
I believe that feature-wise OS X 10.10 and iOS 8 are quite nice. Apple really should adapt something like Intel's tick-tock strategy. Release iOS 8 with new features at 2014. Release iOS 8S with all bugs fixed in 2015. Release iOS 9 with new features at 2016 but allow customers to downgrade to iOS 8S if they want to, for at least a year. They'll have to support 2 iOS versions, but people will have a choice between new features and stability.
My feeling is that this embodies the problem pretty well. Apple releases, typically, weren't seen (by tech people) as "quite nice", feature-wise. The "ahhh" moments in keynotes were more or less experience-related. iOS 8 and Mavericks keynotes, however, were full of "ahh" moments related to technical advances.
It seems (to me) that they jumped on the "creeping featurism" bandwagon.
Why? Why is one year the problem, would two years fix it? Why not 14 months?
What needs to 'give' is over-promising. And the best way to achieve that is to maintain a fixed cadence so that they can gather a more and more accurate understanding of what can be delivered with high quality in that timeframe.
The flickering menubar icons drive me insane. It's proof that Apple has is either unwilling or unable to commit enough resources to OSX to ensure that its quality is consistent with what users have come to expect.
Check that UISystemServer is not crashing repeatedly (flapping).
Long-standing, time-wasting bugs I've noticed:
- Mdns broadcast disabling doesn't work.
- Swift playground in Xcode crashes regularly.
- Mobile Safari regularly crashes randomly on backspace in text areas.
- App Store installs corrupted apps but they don't show as corrupted until reboot, and then future downloads fail.
- Mail.app synchronously hangs the UI when processing new email notifications (probable not using a background queue).
As an example, for a while I was manually entering my weight every couple days. After two weeks or so of doing this, the data simply vanished without a trace. This happened again after one of the early updates. After that, I simply gave up. Yes, a bug report was sent, but who knows what really happens once it goes through the 'Gates of Radar.'
If OSX/iOS were more open source (beyond the kernel and some libs), I think it would be easier to get external developers contributing valuable fixes and offload some support to the community.
It doesn't make much sense to keep the OS totally closed, because the business model is in selling good HW. Sure, control the platform end-to-end ensures quality, but delegating some can be mutually-beneficial.
It's like a small business owner "control-freaking" so they don't put out napkins for fear people will take too many, making it a pain for everyone to accomplish a common task. There is a reasonable amount of control / final say-so that's necessary, but there is "penny-wise, pound-foolish" also.
But maybe if Apple open source Mac OS X, which you do want to use despite the annoyances, then open source will magically help it become perfect?
Two bads always makes a good, right?
OSX Spotlight is blocked by policy in Hands Off!
Also Xcode 6.1 took a week to fix a docset feed bug that they duplicated a docset dmg url. I found the exact correct dmg url, and it still took 3 days to fix. Everyone had broken Xcode Tools docsets until they fixed it. (!)
iBooks can use 100% CPU trying to connect to the (nonexistent) internet when reading an ePub.
All-in-all, these aren't show stoppers, just a collection of things to whine about. It would cause more happiness if they were fixed, but they're mostly navigable.
- App Store likely has a problem with storeaccountd / installer framework from the exception traces I've seen (debug menu on).
- HFS+ can corrupt itself irreparably (it's not ZFS). BTDTBTTS.
Apple introduced a new virtualisation framework in Yosemite, hence the rereleases of the most widely used virtualization items (Parallels and Fusion).
1. You can change the editor in XCode (clicking on a file in the IDE will open that editor - for example MacVim).
If that's not enough:
2. CMake has support for XCode projects. You can develop native iOS applications without ever launching XCode.
The navigation bar makes navigating the projects easy enough, plus I have added steps in the script sections for builds to package up 3D models/resources into the app, set dylib target references, bundle resources into the executable etc.
Finding where functions are called (callers and callees) from the quick menu is a lifesaver too. I find that I miss the back/forward buttons when I use anything else for editing.
As the project is quite large I could not possibly imagine doing this in a text editor.
I've personally had very few problems on my 3 different Apple computers.
I use Remote Screen for work, and EVERY time I disconnect my MacBook Pro freezes completely for 1-3 minutes (no mouse, just a froze desktop). Sometimes I need to hard reset it. Screen sharing used to work nicely in 10.9, 10.8, 10.7 and so on. Why was it necessary to mess with something good?
I think it is the fact that more and more features are being introduced and many seem to have effects on each other in a way apple has not foreseen.
Like the Wifi issue seems to have something to do with the ad-hoc networks being used for handoff or for making telephone calls from your Mac etc.
Ever since iCloud and its background services was introduced it seems the bugs happen more and more frequently. I think we need a maintenance release of Mac OS this year instead of yet another set of new features that will clash with the existing ones.
EDIT: And another thing - Spotlight now takes a significant amount of time to get results. I notice a large difference between my personal i7 2012 MBP with Yosemite and the 2008 single-CPU (quad core) Xeon running Mavericks at work. Maybe it's the disk difference, but I sometimes wonder if Spotlight is doing anything as there is no search indication / activity indication.
The iMac has felt wonky for lack of a better word. It doesn't hang or crash more than Mavericks did, but f.lux causes WindowServer to crash randomly which makes all users to be logged out in a microsecond. I've reported this of course.
Another thing that troubles me is the amount of rubbish logging done by the system. Have Console.app open for a while and see what nonsense it barfs out. How can it work at all with all those problems?
I've noticed some logging about the touchpad causing some restart. The mouse pointer used to make a slight jump every time that was logged.
Maybe it's time for Mac users to get much more vocal and critical with Apple and quit apologizing for their mistakes to others?
I remember back in the day when there were Mac user uproars over the tiniest Mac OS flaws and I took pride that I was a part of a group of consumers that asked.. no, --demanded-- high quality products from Apple. Steve Jobs really seemed to take pride in that as well, in my opinion.
I hope threads like these are a sign that Apple consumers are ready to get back to our old-school roots of being demanding users that expect the best hardware and software for our money.
Consumer complacency breeds corporate complacency. I'm not critical of Mac products because I hate them. I'm critical of Mac products because I utilize them and need them for business. Otherwise, I frankly wouldn't give a shit.
I was once playing around with editing a photo using Preview. I tried a crop etc. Eventually, I closed the app without committing to any of the edits (by Saving anything). Imagine my shock (and horror) when I discovered that the "playing around edits" I had done had all been permanently applied to my original image. Despite never having saved anything. All the edits were being applied in real-time, even if I was just trying something to see how it would look (without committing a save). So, they apparently have decided to even get rid of the Save button in some cases.
Look at poor iMovie, which has had most useful features stripped by this point. Or Pages, which actually broke file compatibility with little or no benefit. Or the situation with Wifi, which is a fuckup of monumental proportion.
Works, stable on 10.10.1. (Discoveryd mdns announce disablement doesn't flag doesn work at all though.)
Is that Apple's tagline for the product now?
If you remove a service on OSX 10.10 it's removal will be broadcast. But it doesn't stop there. No... Most of the time the service will be published again after that and after a second or so it will be finally removed. How the hell did this pass even the most basic QA checks?!
If there's somwthing you want to block (multicast DNS), get icefloor and/or (Hand Off OR Little Snitch). I use the former and latter.former. OSX Yosemite contains the awesome pf firewall forked from FreeBSD which was forked from OpenBSD. (Apple send some cash to FreeBSD and OpenBSD plz.)
Apple: I am NEVER going to upgrade OS X again if my current version is working fine.
I think a little expectations management might be in order here.
Look at Rolex watches. They're a pure status symbol. They don't keep time all that well. Rolex doesn't even submit them for Swiss chronometer certification any more.
The ram it on our throats with free upgrade, then block our path to downgrade, unless we have a time machine backup to restore from. I didn't.
I'm thinking of wiping hers and installing from TimeMachine, then pulling in just her user data.
The issues came with 7.5 and onwards, when Apple kept bolting on more and more features without any regard to either interface consistency or stability. Draw your own parallels.
Yeah, as I've been saying...
Some may call all of this growing Apple consumer angst and issues "back luck", but I bet Steve Jobs would call it "bad karma".
Consumers with early 2011 MacBook Pros that died after 2-3 years didn't feel like they got a very good ROI on a 3-4,000 dollar laptop, go figure. Especially those that paid hundreds more for extended Applecare and had the defective GPU fail quickly after it expired.
> Befuddled users found they couldn’t send Pages 5 files through Gmail. It’s now fixed, as the What’s New in Pages screen proudly claims…
> > ° Updated file format makes it easier to send documents via services like Gmail and Dropbox
> …but how could such an obvious, non-esoteric bug escape Apple’s attention in the first place?
And the answer, if I recall correctly as to what was going on, was that this wasn't a bug with Apple's software at all. It was a consequence of the file format actually being a package, meaning it was really a document. Apple software all worked with documents just fine, and you'll find that if you tried to use Mail.app to send it, it would all Just Work™. The issue is that Gmail and other such services never even considered the idea that a user might want to send a whole folder and did not have any way to support that.
So the "fix" was to change the file format to actually be a compressed archive of the package (I assume it was a zip file, but I don't know how to go back and check). This made it work with all of the stupid software out there that assumed users would only want to transfer individual files.
Sure, perhaps the Pages team could have foreseen this issue. But that doesn't make it a bug in their software, just a case of only prioritizing compatibility with other aspects of Apple's software ecosystem.
Software that doesn't perform as the user expects is almost always a bug. Yes, these folder-packages have been a problem for years. No, that doesn't mean Apple can just leave the problem as is.
For example, try emailing an app. Doesn't work. You need to zip it first. But why doesn't Mail.app just zip the file when I select it?
Why doesn't Safari automatically zip any package that I select for uploading?
Apple came up with the idea of packages, so they better fix the issues around them. Saying that Google should fix Gmail helps no-one.
It does. That's the whole point of my comment. Mail.app has always supported emailing folders.
The only thing I can think of is that maybe your email provider modifies the message in-flight because it contains an executable. And that's something Mail.app can't possibly work around. Although if manually zipping your app fixes it then I don't know why that would be.