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Comment by ohthehugemanate | Hacker News Reader

Apple went from building fantastically reliable software on beautiful, powerful devices, to... Well, this. Even die hard apple fans don't use their built in apps for calendar, music, mail, or really anything, because the design is so bloated. Their hardware performance lags the rest of the market at their price point, and skirt the lines of programmed obsolescence. And now apparently their major OS updates go out without quality control for things like a blank root password, or random crashed and freezes. I tried to use OSX's logs last week - they were spammed to death with warnings and errors from OS components and bundled software. Half the OS services break or emit warnings, because the date component considers December 2017 as an illegal month.

I know everyone called it after Jobs stepped out of the leadership chair, but is that really what's responsible for the decline? Can an apple insider comment here?

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> Even die hard apple fans don't use their built in apps for calendar, music, mail, or really anything, because the design is so bloated.

I'm not a "die hard apple fan" (just a long time mac user), and I have no problems with most of their apps. Overall, I'm still very satisfied with my MBP.

I actually think Jobs was responsible for this decline.

If you read stories about the iPhone's development, you come across anecdotes that Apple tapped its top engineers to get the iPhone out the door. They worked long hours and weekends. Many lost spouses and relationships. It was extremely taxing. Again this is another anecdote, but it seems many of these engineers left around the release of the iPhone 4. The iPhone pipeline became a never-ending treadmill.

The tax of losing much of the top talent across all engineering functions has slowly taken its toll on Apple since. I would not be surprised if the institutional knowledge of OSX has either left or been promoted up the ladder, leaving that team with new hires unfamiliar with its inner workings.

So, essentially the IBM problem of seeing how long brand momentum can keep a train moving?

...and an epic example of the bigger they are the harder they fall in the making. Am typing this from Sierra OSX, btw, not cynical, just kind of bummed about the decline of OSX' quality.

Some of this seems the inevitable fate of all large tech companies.

Apple / Amazon / etc compensates highly to retain engineering talent -> overweight tech salaries -> engineers burning out / leaving for more interesting startup opportunities -> successful startups being reacquired

Unfortunately, doesn't work so well for things like operating system codebases (NeXTSTEP acquisition aside).

I'm not sure the salaries have anything to do with it, and I vaguely recall Apple being middle of the pack there anyway.

I think it's more about appealing to peoples' ambitions and desire to be recognized in this case. Imagine if a VP of Engineering addressed you directly to 'make a big impact' on the company's new secret product. Many engineers would want to impress this person, consequences be damned.

Is there a reason innovative work always seems to feature such insane burn out? You hear it everywhere you see really major strides being made.

The thing I find disturbing is that moving slower doesn't just result in the thing coming slower. It seems to result in never shipping or a lack of innovation. It's like there is some kind of activation energy that must be overcome and the effect is non linear. Real innovation only ships at the threshold of collapse.

I find it disturbing because if true it means innovation is Molech, a god that demands a kind of human sacrifice in the form of burnout, destruction of health, loss of relationships, etc.

I suspect this is nowhere near universal as we might think. Maybe it comes from viewer’s bias or a personality flaw common to individuals obssessed enough to invent, but nothing about progress benefits from personal destruction. There must be examples of progress without pain. Did inventing the internet cause anyone grief?

> Did inventing the internet cause anyone grief?

Well it could certainly be said to have caused Al Gore some grief...

I've been an apple fan since the '70's. My first Mac was a Mac Plus. At that point, I truly was a diehard fan because I viewed it as 10X better than the PC world. The engineering was amazing, both for hardware and software. It did have practical problems based mostly on not enough memory being available, but I forgave it because it was so darn beautiful in so many ways. I would tell everyone who would listen to get a mac, and a number of people who would have otherwise been using PC's got into the mac world because of me.

My affection for Apple has been slowly diminishing over the years. At this point, the fact is that their software is absurdly unreliable and isn't even well designed in the UI department, even though great UI was their main way of attracting fans.

I do still use all the built-in apps, including iTunes. They enable me to do what I want to do even though I regard some aspects of iTunes' design as ridiculously bad. I don't have a lot of motivation to change. I've figured out that, for instance, in order to do a search of Apple Music, you have any of the iTunes tabs selected EXCEPT Store. I can use it even though I find the design to be very lacking.

I have pretty much lost all my loyalty to Apple at this point, between the unreliability and the poor design. The main thing that's keeping me in the Apple world is the fact that I just have to believe that reliability has gotten so bad that no matter what kinds of blinders they've been wearing, they're going to have to see that something is seriously wrong, and start to seriously work to address the situation. And I'd rather not have to adjust to new OS's, and I'd like to be able to stay familiar with Apple software so I can keep helping people I know who are using it (in many cases, due to me). I am hopeful that in a year or two, reliability (if not UI design) will be decent again. I'm even hoping that this will be explicitly addressed by Tim Cook in his next keynote. The reliability situation is so obviously bad that he really should discuss it. I think Steve Jobs might have done so if things had gotten to this point--but I don't think they would have gotten this bad under him, even though there were major problems under his tenure.

Are they really unreliable? I use a 2013 macbook pro (that I bought refurbished mind you) and it works just as well as the day that I bought it, except that the mute key doesn't work. The 2015 mbpr I used at my previous employer seemed just as sturdy.

I also abused an iphone 5s for years until an upgrade to an iphone 7 earlier this year. Seems like a pretty stable device.

I don't see these problems. Now I'm stuck with a thinkpad at work that has garbage battery life and an infuriating track pad. Every Android phone also turned out to be a turd (Galaxy S3, Moto X). Now that I have a file browser on iOS I don't think I'll ever go back- especially when you consider that Apple is basically the only company in the big 5 that at least publicly goes to bat for your privacy.

Apple hardware still seems excellent to me. It's the software that's unreliable.

^ This. Apple's hardware is second to none, and iOS is mostly alright but it feels like MacOS lags behind further and further with each release. Though I suppose Apple isn't selling the software so they have no reason to improve it.

I respectfully disagree about iOS being mainly airtight. The biggest problem is probably that new iOS updates frequently destroy battery life. Also there have been bizarre problems with the spell checker. But I do agree that macOS is worse.

I've personally had different experiences in a professional workspace. I'm currently sitting at a ~15% replacement rate (e.g.: Apple saying they cannot fix it, and giving us a new one) across ~12 touchbar MBP's. We have 2 of the 13" MBP's sans touchbar and they've been relatively trouble free.

That's similar to Macbook Air's, which I despise in the workplace simply because they seem to randomly die much more than other models.

All of our 2012-2015 MBP's are still going very strong. We have not replaced a single one.

I've had a Late 2013 MBPR (basically maxed specs at the time) since 2013 and with every major OS update performance very noticeably gets worse. It's literally a matter of installing the update, rebooting and being more sluggish, it's not gradual, it's poor software.

Do you have a dedicated nVidia chipset? If so, you'll also be encountering a plethora of driver bugs introduced in High Sierra, most noticeable watching videos in a browser or viewing WebGL content.

The USB stack has been a joke since they rewrote it and made it closed source to hide their incompotence.

I would have stopped installing updates long ago if I wasn't regularly forced to update XCode.

Agreed, I remember the day when I looked forward to OS updates as often they made your computer faster.

My brand new (3 month old) MBP 15' "Y" key stopped working for a day, had to clean the keyboard. Sometimes when I power on this mac I hear this scratching sounds coming from the laptop. Trackpad is noisier than the previous gen. USB peripheral hell. Speaker issues. Several kernel panics.

Now my older Mac's were never perfect, but I don't recall having so many hardware issues so soon. And living somewhere, where there is no official Apple store, getting anything fixed is a week+ of no computer.

The fix: stop the annual release cycle. There isn't a customer demand for it, and it’s a hassle for basically everyone.

The issues in 10.12.x get fixed with 10.13, but 10.13 has the same amount of different issues, so it’s a wash. There’s no stable version anymore.

There’s no stable version anymore.

I'm still running El Capitan, and not having any issues.

Admittedly, I would have upgraded had my mac been eligible, because I'm just that sort of person, but there's nothing in Sierra or High Sierra that would make a meaningful difference to me.

The problem is the OS X annual release cycle is tied to the iOS annual release cycle, which is tied to the annual iPhone upgrade cycle, which is the core part of Apple's business. I wish there was a way to update a module to get whatever iOS-tied goodies Apple wants to offer, without overhauling the whole Mac OS.

They should sell a new generation, with nothing changed except the generation number. It has all the benefits of a new release without the hassle of changes.

I disagree with this assertion 100%. They should keep making investment in and improvement to the yearly release process and build the knowledge necessary to do this with fewer errors...

I found the scrum master (;

Agreed.

If there was no yearly release deadline, and the project were resourced identically, my experience points to there being even fewer releases of identical quality.

Deadlines needed.

Simply more / better QA resources required.

100% agree with this. I can't figure out what they even think the yearly releases schedule is buying for them (particularly on the macOS side) when it's obvious it's costing them on the QC front.

The best strategy seems to be to treat the current release as a beta, and hang back at least one release. If you upgrade to 10.(n-1) just before 10.n is released, you're on a release that's had about two years to mature. Though I skipped Yosemite entirely.

That's been my strategy for the past few update cycles. I just upgraded to Sierra this past July. I'll upgrade to High Sierra next July. Since another major release of iOS seems imminent after the "battery issue" I think I'll hold off on that upgrade for a little while longer, too. Latest and greatest doesn't hold the same appeal to me as reliability.

Anecdotally, I've been running High Sierra Betas for a few months now and have experienced zero issues. I'm also a die hard apple fan that uses all of the built in apps except for Music (I prefer Spotify).

One data point.

Similar to me, except I'm not quite a die-hard fan. None of their software is perfect, but it's good enough when compared with the alternatives.

Another +1 for that. There are occasionally bugs, but nothing that I can remember specifically (which is a good thing).

Same here—running the latest public beta of High Sierra 10.13.3 on a 9-year old iMac with no problems.

Nice blanket statement, i don’t think you speak for any die hard Apple fans here. I’m a die hard fan, and I still use all their native apps. I’m not sure how you say they are bloated, notes is probably the best in class of notes apps out there. The calendars and reminder features are stripped down to a fault, but still useful because it just works for me. The stability of the software is getting worse, but with any issues, people are 10x more sensetive than other platforms that have all the same issues.

> people are 10x more sensetive than other platforms that have all the same issues.

As a fellow current Mac user, I can understand why people, especially techies, are frustrated. Apple is well funded with high standards, making them a fashionable, luxury company that focuses on tech. They have a high price point for their products from which people expect high quality. More importantly, they control both the hardware and software stack. Unlike MS which has to cater to an infinite number of different hardware combinations from different vendors, Apple development teams just deal with a much smaller set of hardware products and components which theoretically should result in a more secure and stable product.

As other HN users have pointed out, there are hints as to why this is happening: https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/21/14037686/apple-macbook-m...

Apple is hollowing out the OSX/Mac OS team in favor of iOS.

While they did limit High Sierra's scope, maybe they needed to push back the release date as well given that they gutted the Mac OS team?

Regardless, the natives are getting restless.

> I’m not sure how you say they are bloated

Evidently you're not an iTunes user. But agreed on the fact that most Apple applications are pretty decent, with the exception of iTunes (bloated) and Pages (not bloated enough).

iTunes is bloated, but there's no good replacement. And it's less bloated than it used to be, since they removed iPhone app management.

I do hope they have a skunkworks project to rewrite the whole thing from scratch, though. It could really use it.

> people are 10x more sensetive than other platforms that have all the same issues.

To be fair it's because they charge 3-4x what other platforms charge (the ones that do) and use to have a slogan saying "It just works". People paid the Apple tax because they didnt have to deal with these issues and now they do and still pay the Apple tax.

>> they charge 3-4x what other platforms charge

Wait... where is this 3-4x number coming from? Are there any examples?

ProAm is probably referring to desktops. I don't feel it's hard to get something equivalent or very near equivalent in power to a Mac Pro and spending 3x less.

When it comes to laptops, the Apple tax is only about 2x more unless you compare it to an MS Surface Laptop which is about equal in price and quality.

Yes I was mainly referring to desktop and laptops. Phones were mostly in the 2x range for a longtime until other companies began to push their 'flagship' phones at high prices as well. I've never been an Apple person but I used to recommend Apple to my non-technical friends and family and say, 'Your going to pay a bit more but not have to worry about it not working, getting viruses (back when this was an issue), etc...' but I don't feel that way anymore.

Sure, so where is this 3-4x coming from? We would all love to have something comparable to MBP for 1/4 the price, but.. where is it?

Xiaomi Mi Air 12, 13 and 15.

Hmm that does not seem to be fighting the MBP... more like fighting the $1000-$1300 HPs, Dells, and so on

E.g. http://www.techradar.com/reviews/xiaomi-mi-notebook-pro/2

Well it’s a windows laptop, so yes they say what else you can get that is directly comparable.

It’s the price of the midrange Windows laptops, but the specs and build quality of the MacBooks.

The downside is Windows of course. But it is supposed to work pretty well under Linux.

>> It’s the price of the midrange Windows laptops, but the specs and build quality of the MacBooks.

"specs and build quality of the MacBooks"? Great, can we see that mythical laptop that is 3-4x cheaper than equivalently-specced MBP or not? Url?

Or is it just empty talk?

Why the hostility?

I think it’s more like 2.5 to 3 times cheaper than 3 to 4, but it’s pretty easy to find.

A$1400: https://www.lightinthebox.com/xiaomi-laptop-15-6-inch-intel-....

A$3500: https://www.apple.com/au/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MP... (with weaker CPU and GPU)

You know those are drastically different displays right?

Yes. It also has a much better selection of ports than a MacBook.

It also doesn’t come with OSX. Pretty sure you can find some other differences too.

I’m sure for some people the screen is a deal breaker. Others won’t care.

You replied to a comment that says:

> can we see that mythical laptop that is 3-4x cheaper than equivalently-specced MBP or not?

So, how is it even remotely equivalent?

Are you serious? Every single person has specs they care about and ones they don’t.

I don’t think the resolution is interesting at all, but I agree some will.

For some people the great MPB trackpad is enough to sell it. Some people want the Xiaomi NVidia GPU. Some want retina screen, some want resolutions with better Linux support.

If you don’t like it don’t get it. But don’t nitpick to try to find some way they aren’t exactly the same: no one thinks that they are.

Nevertheless they are both high quality, i7, 16GB aluminium notebooks which suit developers.

"much better selection of ports"

How so? It does not seem to have a single Thunderbolt 3 port. MBP has four of them. Instead, Xiaomi has a bunch of USB-whatever &c. That is not "better", that is strictly "worse" and cheaper.

You can easily build a comparable one for 1/4 of the price. Especially for what most Mac users do with their PC/laptops. Apple has always extraordinarily overcharged/taken advantage of their customers. Of course this is my opinion, and like I said I even used to recommend them to less than technical folks because it used to 'just work'.

>> You can easily build a comparable one for 1/4 of the price.

Ok please show us the laptop that is 1/4 of the price of the same-specs MBP. Or how one could build one.

Just go spec it out for yourself. Im not doing a homework assignment for you to prove that Apple fleeces it's customers. Especially in regards to a discussion on how Apple quality has dropped so significantly over the past 8 years.

>> Just go spec it out for yourself.

I do it like once a month, and this "3-4x" claim is strictly false. If you spec MBP versus Dell or HP or Lenovo or whatever with the same parts, Apple may be anything between 5%-30% more, nowhere near 300%-400% that you claim.

Ive been following Apple for 10+ years and Im not wrong. Am I exact? No, but close enough. They used to charge you $100 to write software for your own iPhone. But a semantical argument isnt the one Im making.

>> Im not wrong.

Sure thing. Long as you remember to show us the laptop 3-4x cheaper than the equivalent MBP.

Just look at amazon, Laptops with 7700hq and gtx1060 start at about $1k. Equivalent MBP cost almost $3k, while having ddr3 instead of ddr4 and way worse GPU that other vendors pair with this processor.

... ok, I have trouble finding that, from Dell or Lenovo or HP or whoever I can actually buy and get warranty and whatever. BTW --- same parts --- 2GB+/sec SSD, comparable monitor, processor, graphics, battery life, Thunderbolt etc. If it is there I will (well, everyone would) obviously buy right away, but I have trouble finding it.

Have you actually looked at other laptops?

True, most doesn't come with nvme ssd, but you can always upgrade (which you cannot on a macbook), processors and graphics are way better for half the price, and you usually get a matte screen in which you can actually see anything besides reflections.

> Im not doing a homework assignment for you

You made a claim. If you can't back up that claim with some basic evidence, we tend to call that claim "bullshit".

Given that other posts identify a laptop with a 1920x1080 display to a retina MacBook Pro, the concept of "equivalent" is clearly not the same for everyone.

Apple makes 90% of their revenue from iOS devices. The answer to "why the decline" is it's not material to their business or stock market performance.

I think your right. But if the idea is the halo effect that keeps me in the ecosystem, they need to do better on the OS/laptop front and on the Siri front. Both are slipping.

But, iOS 11 is a dog. A buggy, wet, smelly one. So while most of their income comes from iOS devices, this doesn't in itself explain the decline in quality for Macs because it has been a decline across the board.

Why is this downvoted? Has nobody used iOS 11? It’s caused nearly as many problems for people as High Sierra.

It was a step back from iOS 10 on older hardware. I upgraded an iPad Air and iPad Pro first gen and the UI stuttering/stalls makes both machines feel slower. I decided beforehand not to even try on the 5S, which was a good decision except that Apple constantly nags to update and downloads the entire 1.1 GB update file to my 16 GB device without asking me (yes, I have background App updates turned off) and forces me to delete it manually to get storage back. It's infuriating.

I stayed on iOS 10.1. Other than 10.1 being RAT-able, it was a great choice.

> Apple went from building fantastically reliable software on beautiful, powerful devices

When ? Seriously when. I have used MacOS since 4.1 and never remember a period where there was the case. Especially during this phase of the development lifecycle i.e. we have only just had the 2nd point release update.

I worked at Apple pre and post Jobs and nothing changed. Because he never managed any of the teams directly and his involvement had been less and less for years prior.

Obviously responses are going to be pretty dependent on the person. For me personally the peak was Snow Leopard, then it plateaued for a bit, and then I feel like it has been downhill starting with Mavericks.

Snow Leopard was so good I used to evangelize and talk about how great an OS it was with people who probably didn't know OS stood for operating system. It was that good. Now, heck, I haven't even installed the latest because I hear nothing but bad and in the on-stage demos there isn't a single thing that makes me think, "ooh I want that" It obviously has a product-market fit with a lot of people, I'm just not one of them. I'll eventually update just to make future updates easier on myself, but I have no pressing need.

Yep, agree 100%.

10.6.8 on the early unibody Macbook Pros was excellent.

Snow Leopard had problems when it was released. I recall major issues with Mail and WiFi, among others. It was especially frustrating because Apple had made such a big deal about how 10.6 was going to focus on stability and fixing bugs.

Of course it did become very reliable. We remember Snow Leopard that way now, because we remember the last stable version of it. El Cap is very stable for me today. High Sierra certainly still has a chance to get there too.

So, I agree with the GP that Apple has never been in a place where they could release v0 of a new OS X major version without issues. That has certainly not been my experience. I always wait at least a few months before upgrading, sometimes longer.

To be honest, Snow Leopard was an immediate improvement on the abomination that was Leopard.

The only reason, to me, that I remember Snow Leopard as being so good is because Leopard was a steaming pile of slow shit.

Ditto on Snow Leopard. I had to muck through the version history to figure out which release I was considering the "last good, exciting release." Turns out we all agree. The divide is... stark. That said, High Sierra seems to trend back up towards the level of ambition we saw in the 200x releases.

    2001 10.1 Puma:          First OS X to ship by default
    2002 10.2 Jaguar:        GPU compositing, Mail.app, Address Book, MP4
    2003 10.3 Panther:       Safari, iChat AV, Journaled FS, Apple's PDF engine
    2005 10.4 Tiger:         Spotlight, Dashboard, Automator, Core Image/Video
    2007 10.5 Leopard:       Core Animation, Time Machine, Boot Camp, 64 bit, intel
    2009 10.6 Snow Leopard:  App Store, XCode overhaul with LLVM
    2011 10.7 Lion:          Launchpad, auto-save documents, multi-touch
    2012 10.8 Mountain Lion: Game Center, Notification Center
    2013 10.9 Mavericks:     iBooks, Apple Maps, iCloud integration
    2014 10.10 Yosemite:     Skeuomorphism -> Fisher Price, Continuity & handoff
    2015 10.11 El Capitan:   San Francisco font, Metal API
    2016 10.12 Sierra:       Siri, Auto Unlock, Night Shift
    2017 10.13 High Sierra:  HEVC, APFS, VR

I also remember Mac OS / OS X having lot of problems years ago. Well, actually much more than now, since the last 5/6 releases always have run without any issue on my Macs. Worst machine ever was the cube :) I don’t see any decline, I actually would say things have improved a lot (I’m a Mac user since the early 2000)

When was Apple great? Snow Leopard 10.6.

Most of the early OS X problems were resolved: Pretty much any printer you bought would work instantly; there was a healthy ecosystem of well-supported native apps; bundled apps worked well and used open standards (Mail, Address Book, iCal); networking worked well, including sharing files between Macs and PCs. And built-in utilities worked great, like printing to PDF and opening PDFs in Preview.app.

And hardware was quite good around that time too – with unibody notebooks (both plastic and aluminum) released during that time.

Things went downhill with 10.7 Lion and beyond, when Mac OS X imitated iPhone OS and usability started to decline:

- Bundled utility apps suffered: iCal and Address Book got photorealistic leather, and lost key functions like column-based navigation for your contacts and easy handling of multiple networked calendars.

- Flagship apps lost core functionality in the name of simplification: iPhoto took up the whole screen but lost core functions; iMovie was dumbed down (prior to 10.6); Final Cut Pro X left a massive gap in functionality from Final Cut Pro; Aperture was discontinued.

- Things just got worse for no valuable reason. Example: watch a Quicktime movie full-screen on a multi-monitor setup, and all the other monitors just show... textured linen.

- Reliability declined. I don't have data to back this up, and I'd really like to find an objective source for "reliability" on the Mac. But I no longer say "it just works" seriously anymore. That used to be mostly true, but it's no longer true for me. Personal example: constant problems when adding or removing my external display – permanent sleep that requires a hard reset, or display will repeatedly not be detected, or built-in keyboard and trackpad won't work until I plug in my wired keyboard again, type something, then remove it again.

I would consider myself somewhat of an Apple fan. Yet, I've never used any of their built-in apps except XCode. ~99% of what I do is in Chrome, iTerm and various JetBrains IDEs. I even avoid XCode and use AppCode when possible. It's always been that way for me. I don't use macOS because the apps are amazing, or the UI is great. I use it because it gives me a Unix based system that can reliably do things like connect to an external projector, that has good enough support and pretty , non-flashy hardware. That's Apple's value offering to me and many other developers I know.

>Apple went from building fantastically reliable software

When was this?

> Even die hard apple fans don't use their built in apps for calendar, music, mail, or really anything, because the design is so bloated

That has been the case for as long as Apple has made calendar, music and email apps. People have complained about Mail since the first version (it used to be that most "die hard apple fans" were using Entourage). I hardly need to mention how unpopular iTunes has always been.

The Jobs revisionism every time an Apple product has a bug is extremely tiresome. The famously hated 'skeuomorphic' version of iCal was apparently a specific request from Jobs[1]. The single worst GUI control I've ever had the displeasure to use was the old 'thumbwheel' volume control in Quicktime Player. On the hardware side look at the puck mouse. Those kinds of things were worse than mere bugs in my opinion because they were deliberate and reflected the design philosophy of company at the time (or the inability of anybody working there to tell Jobs to fuck off and stop sabotaging products), and lasted for years before they were replaced.

[1] https://www.cultofmac.com/189707/steve-jobs-himself-is-respo...

ProDOS was quite an improvement over DOS 3.3.

>>> I know everyone called it after Jobs stepped out of the leadership chair, but is that really what's responsible for the decline? Can an apple insider comment here?

It's simple. There is noone to whip developers when they ship major bugs. Quality goes down.

Tyrannic leadership has its pros and cons. Try to imagine the internal tantrum after the company shipped an update and it crashed steve's iphone.

So you worked at Apple during this timeframe, and had personal experience of this management style? Or you're just regurgitating what you saw in a Reddit post?

I feel like there's been a very noticeable decline in the quality of Apple software (and perhaps hardware, given issues like battery related shutdowns). Then I got a PC this summer so I could play a wider variety of games, and I find that Windows 10 has a whole host of issues like lost profiles that didn't exist before, and still some of the legendary video driver flakiness. Then I try to help my father with his Android phone, and find UX lunacy.

It's not an Apple problem, it's an industry problem. Software should, generally, be more reliable now than it was 10 years ago: There's more experience building, designing, and using it, so some best practices should have floated to the top, at least. But in every segment I look, I find it's just generally worse. Everyone is shovelling worse software into the pipeline than before, and this includes industrial control systems with which I'm familiar, even aside from consumer software.

The industry does not optimise for reliability, we optimise for speed of release. See the explosion of Rails, followed by the explosion of browser-based UI kits: simplicity of development is what people want, because all pressure comes from time-to-market. This is a natural consequence of dealing with a still-booming field.

I don’t think there is a solution unless we start talking laws, and you can bet everyone here would hate that.

My avoidance of their built in apps is just simply that I don't want to be locked in to the apple eco system.

Apple has always took a closed approach to their software and it's going to hurt them in the long run.

I feel like it might have been the right direction a few decades ago. There was a lot of shovel ware and crappy software that was produced. I think they had the right idea to lock down the software availability have better quality control.

It's very similar to video game companies in the late 80's/ early 90's. Atari had a big problem with really bad games, and people lost faith in the quality of games. Nintendo started giving their games the "Nintendo Seal of Approval" to prove to consumers that the games had been thoroughly checked for bugs and such.

I can see why Apple would take the same direction, but we've come a long way with software development, especially with the rise of open source development.

Apple has relied on closed software for 40 years.

They are now fast approaching the first trillion dollar company. When exactly is this approach going to stop working for them ? And what evidence is there that people are suddenly going to flock to open source software ?

I never mentioned open source software. I meant software made by other companies that don't lock you into their platform such as Google.

Every time I think their walled garden will hurt them, I end up at my parents trying to help them through various issues on their Android devices, which come from different vendors so it's all kind of different even between devices when it should be the same, and I realize that the walled garden has some really obvious benefits that the HN crowd is somehow uniquely unable to appreciate.

I don't think anyone here looks at this topic with a black and white lens. There are various pros and cons to each and usually for developers the cons of a walled garden outweighs the pros.

Great support for terminal, low amounts of notifications, and good peripheral support are mostly why I enjoy OS X. Cloud based alternatives to their built in apps are vastly better.

I think people just have short memories. This kind of "hard freezing" is nothing new. Apple is just much more in the spotlight than ever before.

I personally had this issue with the 2010 MacBook Pro. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2420192

> Half the OS services break or emit warnings, because the date component considers December 2017 as an illegal month.

This has been frustrating me as well. The console has become a constant stream of these errors, the out of bounds month one is particularly annoying.

Your comment is ridiculous. You're seriously taking a 4 post thread on apple support forums as the sky is falling? I use high Sierra daily on my 2013 mbp and have had 0 freezes.

Of course it’s ridiculous. Has the number of reported problems with Macs increased over the last 10 years? Sure. Their market share has also increased like crazy.

Today’s Mac doesn’t seem anymore unpolished than yesterdays. They just support a lot more software and devices than they ever used to.

Get a Mac and use it the way you might have 10-15 years ago when they only supported a few dozen peripherals and 3rd party software titles and you probably won’t ever have a problem either.

And don’t act like Macs never froze. The pinwheel/beachball of death has been a joke since OS X was first released. The biggest difference is back then you probably didn’t spend 12 hours a day in front of the machine.

People have this ridiculous hindsight bias. Were some cars in the 1950s more reliable or better? Well, yeah. They had no electronics, no features other than a radio and you didn’t drive as much because there were fewer places to go. And they even seemed safer because there was less reporting on accidents when in reality you were like 7 times more likely to die in a car accident in the best car in the 50s than the cheap east piece of crap made today.

Where did you get this from?

> The biggest difference is back then you probably didn’t spend 12 hours a day in front of the machine.

Because screen usage, in all forms, was a lot less 10-15 years ago than it was today.

YMMV certainly. As it does for all of us.

What I can say however is that the overall perceived stability and performance of my Mac has declined since the good old days of Moutain Lion. My 2017 MBP often freezes upon resume, there is a palpable lag with the overall UI experience, and the OS experience is bloated with the App Store/iCloud/iTune Store shenanigans.

For the last part, I know things have been adding up for a while, but I feel we are now reaching a tipping point. Enough of a tipping point that I now find myself relying more and more on my 2015 OpenBSD Thinkpad for work, music and movies although it has half the computing power of my Mac.

The downside is the missing ecosystem, the lack of seamless synchronization with my other iThings, which keeps me one foot in. For the moment that is, because I am slowly exploring self-hosted alternatives. And once I am confident my self-hosted system can match Apple's for most of the required features, I'll say goodbye to a 15-year relationship for good.

small edit

It's a two-way street: my expectations are probably higher that what they used to be.

> You're seriously taking a 4 post thread on apple support forums ...

Err... that thread seems to have 21+ pages (at the time of writing this comment), including many "Me too" style of comments. Doesn't seem like an isolated problem. :/

The parent is confused by the same thing I was, which is on first load the page only shows 3 "helpful" comments, and you have to click a link to see all 21 pages.

Some time in the early 2000s a friend of mine who was on the core team of an immensely popular open source project wrote what I consider to be the most important PPT slide ever in software development. It simply read:

  "Nobody cares if it works for you".

While your experience feels very important to you, as you willingly demonstrate by extrapolating your subjective experience to near universal truth, it isn't significant or important. What portion, or proportion, of users, and the experience they have, is important is not even that easy to figure out. You have certain problems and certain users that carry more weight, and it isn't always obvious why and how.

I'd be careful to use the number of posts on Apple's support forums as any indicator of how big an issue is. Apple's support forums are, after all, fairly pointless in that there is a close to zero chance that they will be helpful. It is the wailing wall of Apple products – people come there to moan, to be joined by others who moan, to a deity that never shows itself nor provides meaningful response.

However, there appears to be a consensus that Apple isn't delivering the software quality one would expect from a company with their resources. There also appears to be some consensus that things are getting worse, if you read forums and discussion threads. It would be wise to at least investigate the mounting discontent with Apple from the ranks of professionals.

Nobody but you cares if your 2013 MBP has had zero freezes.

I've been programming professionally since 2000, working professionally on a range of operating systems: Windows, Linux, OSX and FreeBSD. I've dabbled with Solaris SPARC back in the day, and grew up with AmsDOS and MS DOS. I've never had the pleasure of using a Lisp Machine, but enjoy Common Lisp and have a (jealous / nostalgic) feeling for what a LispM must have been like.

I mention all of this to give context to my post; I'm not writing from a position of OS ignorance.

Anyhow: I'm continually surprised by the support for proprietary operating systems and hardware amongst IT professionals in general, and programmers specifically.

I've been running a mix of Xubuntu devices (older ThinkPads for the children) and FreeBSD (for my personal laptop and the home NAS / Minecraft etc. server) and enjoying ease of deployment (simple shell scripts), low cost, high confugurability and especially high reliability in the case of FreeBSD.

Windows users used to tell me that NIX was fine, but to get a job, they needed to program for Windows. That's probably still the case in many fields, but not in the Web dev circles I frequent.

OSX users tell me that they want both performance, reliable hardware with out of the box support. These days a good XPS or X1 Carbon will eat most or all Mac systems alive, have (in my experience) better build quality, and work well with Linux out of the box.

At the company where I work there is a growing number of users who are eschewing the latest turn of the Apple upgrade merry go round and are switching to Dell and Lenovo systems w/ Linux (and FreeBSD, in my case). Everything we need to do for our client still works, and we get more control, cheaper prices and an escape from the frankly "consumer" attitude Apple has these days (imagine - a pocket computer that won't let you install software of your choice!)

So if you're in the market for something better and cheaper than Apple, I suggest you take a look at Linux (maybe Ubuntu to start with?), FreeBSD or one of the many alternatives. You might just like it :)

Edited to add: Oh yeah, and don't forget the advantage of being able to continue using devices well past the point their manufacturers wish you'd buy something new (or force you to, in the case of Apple). I recently installed FreeBSD on a 16 year old laptop as an experiment, and it works fine. Slow, sure, but fast enough to run Emacs, Firefox, and Ruby. In a (frustrating) pinch I could probably do around half of my daily work on it.

> a pocket computer that won't let you install software of your choice!

My Ubuntu tablet did not let me either. It was a major disappointment. Anyway, the OS is no longer maintained and the best thing to do is to use it as a large clock.

I'm now using a large iPad Pro, probably the best piece of personal computer hardware I've seen so far... 500GB SSD, fast ARM processor, 120Hz screen with fantastic colors and brightness, LTE, four speakers with excellent sound, ...

I cannot program Lisp on it, but I could not do that on the Ubuntu tablet either and the Ubuntu UI/UX was lacking.

I always liked SUN's hardware, incl. the SPARC machines. Solaris was nothing I would run on my machine. I never liked it. Not its UI, not the OS APIs, not the documentation, it's like food one does not like.

> I recently installed FreeBSD on a 16 year old laptop as an experiment, and it works fine.

My Macbook runs nicely a 4k screen with full scaling UI support. That's more important to me, than trying to use old hardware. I have old laptops around, but nothing is compelling to use. The new machines with fast/large SSDs, low-power CPUs, high-res screens, external 4k screens, are more interesting to me.

2018 again won't be the year of the Linux desktop - it is just not there for people who value UI/UX more than low-level configurability.

Okay, serious question: what is the UI / UX experience you get from your OSX system that you think is lacking on Ubuntu? Or one of the other free OSs?

Perhaps my requirements are different.

Firefox, Emacs, SLIME, CCL, Roswell, Ruby, Node, RubyMine, and SyncThing run pretty much identically on all OSs I've tried. Spotify still doesn't support FreeBSD (no Widevine), so I run that in a Linux VM. Kerbal Space Program I haven't tried on FreeBSD, only Linux and OSX (I do have an old MBP I keep around as a gaming and movie machine, as it has a 15" screen and DVD drive).

I found Ubuntu configuration easier than Windows last I tried (Vista) and file based configuration in FreeBSD is the easiest of all, especially courtesy the excellent FreeBSD Handbook.

Also I run a tiling window manager (StumpWM) to avoid unnecessary window chrome, and also to avoid using the mouse.

The last time I used OSX extensively was back in 2011 or so, at Lonely Planet, where we had a fleet of iMac pairing stations. They were ludicrously hard to set up identically; all our attempts at the time to create a "pairing environment setup script" failed to varying degrees. And the screens, as large and beautiful as they were, were the devil in our weirdly lit office because they weren't available in matte options.

Possibly it comes back to your description of "food you don't like", but I really didn't enjoy my time on Apple devices.

Example:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI

Ubuntu/Linux is catching up with Wayland to the macOS compositor from years ago.

> Possibly it comes back to your description of "food you don't like"

I like that macOS deals nicely with hiDPI ('Retina') screens.

> Firefox, Emacs, SLIME, CCL, Roswell, Ruby, Node, RubyMine, and SyncThing run pretty much identically on all OSs I've tried.

Personally I prefer to use the LispWorks IDE (which has a nice port to macOS) and the Clozure CL IDE over GNU Emacs/Slime. GNU Emacs/Slime are not bad, but UI-wise it's a nightmare.

> and also to avoid using the mouse

I use trackpads since a few years.

I hope no year will ever be the year of the Linux desktop. I use Debian and it is awesome, both on the server and desktop. So as long as Linux is a niche, all is well. How awful if it would become mainstream, think viruses etc. So it's a good thing that people like you don't like it. Keep it up!

I am the first to criticise Apple for absurd decisions with their newer hardware, and the declining quality of their software. But, 2016 MBP keyboard and touchpad aside, the build quality of Macs is a good step above the best ThinkPad or Dell XPS, and has been for many years.

Apple's machines are far less likely to exhibit issues like coil whine, interference on audio outputs, creaks and squeaks, physically broken connectors, electrical noise on USB bus, unstable network cards, poor battery life or longevity, display flickering, poor display uniformity, backlight bleed etc etc etc.

Dell's XPS range has had massive issues with Killer wireless dropouts, crackling audio jacks, mysterious battery drain, flickering screens, and a bunch of other stuff I can't remember right now.

Lenovo's ThinkPads are consistently equipped with sub-par LCD panels (caveat: I have not tried their OLED models yet). I haven't yet met a ThinkPad that didn't have coil whine coming from either itself or its power adaptor. I haven't yet met a ThinkPad that didn't either have or develop some kind of creaking panel.

Until the last couple of years, Apple was about the only manufacturer that cared about making their laptops near-silent, whereas Dell and Lenovo were content putting in stock standard high-RPM fans and running them conservatively. I still find Apple machines superior in this regard.

These might seem like petty little things, but they are the sorts of things that drive me absolutely nuts over the ownership life of a machine.

I'd also posit that neither the high end ThinkPads, nor Dell's XPS, are actually really any cheaper than Apple's machines when you consider like for like.

I've had friends w/ swelling batteries destroying their MBPs, keyboard issues (dust causing problems), repeated breaking of cables (that was a few years ago, mind you), fragility to liquid spills (MacBook Air destroyed by a spilled drink that would most probably have been saved by a ThinkPad drip tray).

I'll grant you the screen on my 2011-era X220 is inferior in almost every way to the current Mac screens (except that it's matte, which makes a big deal when working while commuting). But everything else is just fine.

That said I've owned a much more recent ThinkPad - a cheaper 'consumer'-class e550 that was a pile of crap. Keys wore flat, screen market, whole thing flexed ... just not up to traditional ThinkPad standards. Unsurprising at the price I guess.

Perhaps you've had bad experiences with lower-end ThinkPads?

i can clearly hear electronic crackling noise when something starts exercising the SSD to its full speed. but yes, otherwise very quiet machines. MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015)

> Even die hard apple fans don't use their built in apps for calendar, music, mail, or really anything

[Citation needed]

I am using built in Calendar app and iTunes wihout problems.

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