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Comment by Crito | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the whole idea of a massive company producing software for a very small restricted set of hardware that this sort of thing isn't supposed to happen? Random bullshit like this is expected with systems like Windows that aim to support a whole mess of possible hardware configurations, that's not really the case here.

What went wrong? Have they grown complacent? Cutting corners on QA?

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I have two very competent friends that, in the past couple of months, have quit Apple because they were working in groups with toxic cultures. One was IS&T, the other was hardware (I don't want to name the exact group). They had very detailed accounts of the issues they encountered. They didn't have great things to say about other groups they were familiar with, or had previously worked in, either.

My last company worked extensively with browsers from various companies, at a deep level. Safari was, by far, the one that crashed the most and had the most general implementation problems. My experience with their other software is not much better, and I avoid what I can. And then there is the ghastly iWorks rewrite. The only software I've ever thought highly of from Apple is Mac OS X.

I would guess there are deep cultural problems at Apple that are being allowed to fester, and perhaps this extends to some OS X groups. Yet Apple continues to produce beautiful devices that people buy for their dopamine hits (okay, I admit, maybe iPhones are pretty nice). I wish Microsoft would seize the opportunity and make an OSX-like OS* that runs common productivity and creative apps so we could not be beholden to Apple, as I am for Mac.

* Apparently they did this once but the project was canned

> Yet Apple continues to produce beautiful devices that people buy for their dopamine hits. I wish Microsoft would seize the opportunity and make an OS X-like OS* that runs common productivity and creative apps so we could not be beholden to Apple, as I am for Mac.

Would you not class devices like Dell's XPS 13 (2015) [1], Microsoft's Surface 3 & Pro 3 [2][3], Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon (3rd gen) [4] as beautiful?

Windows can also run many of the productivity and creative apps that are commonly found on Macs. Which apps do you use?

[1] http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-13-9343-laptop/pd

[2] https://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/products/surface-3

[3] https://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/products/surface-pro...

[4] http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x1-ca...

I can imagine these devices are beautiful, and I'd love if I could run a good MAC OSX-like OS on them that also runs common productivity apps. I combined too many unrelated points the in above quote and made what I wrote confusing.

Totally subjective opinion, but it seems like since ~10.8 the reliability of OSX has gone down substantially. I remember 10.5 and 10.6 being rock-solid on a hackintosh, and now I have wifi / bluetooth issues all the time, sometimes the graphics go all 16-colors-only, consisting of bright red + black-only or a weird mix of like green, purple, orange (it's kind of trippy, but it requires a reboot to fix).

Display mirroring / resolution switches goof up my jazz sometimes, unlocking can take up to ~ a minute (from just the lid shut state), browsers eat RAM like it's their job, etc etc.

If this is the best we can do in a $2800 (late 2014 15" rMBP maxed out) computer where the company produces the hardware and software, color me unimpressed.

> hackintosh

I get the sentiment of what you're saying and I agree with it, but I have to disagree with you - You can't blame the stability of your 'hackintosh', running the OS on a completely unsupported configuration.

That was OP's point... It was stable on even a hackintosh. And now is struggling on a rMBP.

I feel the same. For our build farm at work we have to reboot our Mac Minis every two weeks otherwise they just stop being able to talk to the network. This started when we updated to Mac OS 10.9 and hasn't been any better with 10.10. The lone circa-2006 Mac Pro we have in the farm has had no issues though.

I still have a Macbook running 10.6.8 (SL) and indeed, it's rock solid. Never crashes. Never an issue with wifi, either. It's a workhorse. I've replaced the battery a few times but I'm glad I've never upgraded the OS. And I use it for development from my couch and it never leaves the house.

Of course, the caveat there is that I'm a Python dev. If I were a front-end dev (or, say, a mobile dev who needed the latest XCode to write iOS 8 apps) there's no way I'd be able to get away with this.

> Have they grown complacent? Cutting corners on QA?

Based on 10.10 and iOS 8, I think the answer's a pretty clear "yes".

Seems more likely that the opposite would be true. Small group of people, with zero-external oversight/review. They are far more likely to miss something.

I guess the fact that the hardware set is very tightly controlled helps, some, but still.

I'm not at all claiming that Open Source software doesn't have bugs - it obviously does. But you have a much larger test group, and many more people reviewing the code (usually).

10.10 has been failboat full steam ahead for wifi since the public beta. I'm not sure why, but their testing and QA seems to be terrible in this arena.

Jobs no longer screaming over their shoulder has made them lazy.

It's almost cliche at this point, but I must ask: who this type of shit be happening if Steve were still alive?

I think it's only cliche because it's highly pertinent.

I'm curious if steve would get personally involved in when stories like this get a lot of attention on any influential site. For some reason, I can imagine him going down to the group responsible for a high profile fuckup and firing someone over the problem. That alone would probably serve as motivation (not a good source of motivation, but motivation nonetheless) for people to be more careful about the quality of the software they write. His mercurial and toxic way of dealing with things he's not happy about may have kept quality higher.

It is cliche because it is inane: plenty of stupid things happened under his watch. If you want to see software complaints from his era, just look up iTunes for Windows.

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