Today, however, the company really doesn't understand how to make, maintain, or market software. It sees software as a way to spread their control of their hardware further into your life. It's going to be the death of Apple, mark my words.
Having said that, I see Apple more as a hardware manufacturer than as a software one. You don't hear Jony Ive and his seductive British accent passionately talking about iOS or OSX as many times as he does about new hardware. It doesn't see software in the same way it sees hardware.
Still, I can't complain about Apple offering free OSX upgrades, including major ones, for quite some time now and also managing to maintain backward compatibility for a rather large span of devices (my early 2011 MBP still flows nicely with OSX El Cap).
Usually with iPhone/iPod Video upgrades, getting the latest version of iOS with an older device can significantly degrade performance. (And I'm sure it's the same with iPads.)
At least on a Macbook you can reinstall the operating system, but an iPhone 4 is stuck like that.
Is this claim based on anecdotal evidence or some other source?
http://mashable.com/2015/12/31/iphone-4s-ios-9-lawsuit/#l.Zf...
Edit: I'm not sure if this has been fixed with the later iOS 9 versions.
It affects iPad, too.
But you're right: it's definitely not exclusive to iPhones. Planned obsolescence, some would argue.
Us hardware manufacturers are still looking for a fix. Our customers are angry at us and blaming us, and we can't do anything. There's no way for our customers to even tell Apple what's wrong, either.
If you’re a great software designer, you probably want to work for a company that says, “Software is in our DNA.” A company where the CEO gets up on their hind legs at every all-hands meeting and announces “Our success depends upon shipping the world’s greatest software designs.”
Why would you want to go work for a company where at every such all-hands, you have to sit through executive after executive talking about their hardware logistics prowess, and their hardware design prowess, and their hardware margins numbers, and so on?
It would be the same thing going to work at Google. Here you are, the Jony Ive of software design, being told that the stock price depends upon the math that drives ad click-through.
I recall a softare designer few years back publicly rage-quitting Google because Google didn’t believe in design, they wanted to A/B test everything in the belief that you could hill-climb to a good-enough result. It was almost as if they believed that human designers subtracted from design rather than created it.
Whether you agree or disagree, why go to work at a company that thinks what you do is a distraction or even an outright harm to their main product?
I am convinced that an A/B testing algorithm error is responsible for Google Maps.
I know Google have scads of data about how people use maps. I can't understand how they get from all that data to the product which can be incredibly frustrating to use.
Yes, it's difficult. It's less that Apple needs to hire a famous designer and more that it has to give a designer (there are many badasses in-house) serious authority. Apple has to realize it's lost the software leadership that it used to take pride in for that to happen.
(Edit: This is not a compliment)
It's how I've felt for decades as a Mac user: boy they suck, but they suck less than any of the (desktop) alternatives.
(edit: I see you updated your post to clarify -- now this is redundant.)