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Comment by iansinnott | Hacker News Reader

> Apple has long taken pride that “it just works”, but seems to have convinced itself that is inviolate fact

This. Apple's inability to admit fault coupled with decreasing software stability makes life difficult in many ways. For instance, aside from the obvious detrimental effects of OS bugs, it's often quite difficult to find specific solutions without a specific error message. "$APP silently fails" or "Why is my framerate so low?" don't always lead to answers, even though there are probably many others running into the same issues.

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> Apple's inability to admit fault

I noticed people stopped using "reality distortion field" since Steve Jobs died, but the idea is still alive to some extent.

I'm not sure software stability is decreasing, these sort of problems have existed for as long as I can remember.

It definitely is. I just got a new 16" MacBook Pro and have had several ridiculous bugs. I frequently have to delete the keyboard layout preferences file in order to set it to ISO.

The most annoying one is that the whole thing crashes if you unplug it from a dock while it is asleep. You can get around it by setting it to never sleep while plugged in, but guess what? That setting magically resets itself if it crashes.

Indeed, MacOS 9 was buggy as hell and worse than Windows 98 in terms of stability. OS X apparently fixed some of that for a couple of years, so it looks like Apple is now reverting to its old ways.

OSX was developed by NeXT

Yeah, people forget how buggy macOS has been. Both Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion were public admissions that they needed to focus on quality. They haven’t had a proper one of those in a while.

That said, I can’t remember a time when bugs have been as long-standing as they are now. SMB file shares have been completely broken for nearly 3 years now (the solution is to buy the program AutoMounter), and USB-C docks have been broken since day 1 and still are on Big Sur.

I use a usb-c dock with some version of OS X on my work laptop and it totally works 28/30 days. The other two days I usually notice it’s not working when the CPU throttles because the battery is now at 4% and is “not charging” (I still haven’t figured out the difference between the “charging” and “plugged in but not charging” icons.)

Personally I think that the quality started increasing between the first few releases (i.e. tiger better than panther, or at least definitely better than jaguar), but it then started decreasing at some point. I would not be able to say which release was at the "peak".

Its also really hard to report bugs. So things don't get fixed.

Company policy is more like "it just works, our software has no bugs" (goes ahead and pushes one bug fix update per week).

The irony.

>Apple's inability to admit fault

Like? Because Apple admits fault all the time.

E.g.:

1) with the updated Mac Pro design and extended apologies for the old Pro format.

2) with the revised keyboard in the new Macbook Pros.

3) Changing from "skeuomorphic" (bad term, but I'll use it) UI to a flater look

and tons of other instances...

I clearly remember the upgrade to Yosemite, and how it crippled Spotlight for anyone who (1) didn't have a SSD (2) did an OS upgrade, not a clean reinstall. Ask around the Apple forums, you'll only get a lot of Apple apologists and fanboys telling you to turn it off and on again, not a peep (and certainly no fix) from Apple.

Or a better example of the general sentiment that I think OP is going for, Apple stopped updating it's OpenGL implementation, and invented their own API. Definitely a user-hostile choice, but they defend it by saying that Metal is better than OpenGL. But now Vulkan exists, but Apple will never defend it's use of Metal over Vulkan, because reasons.

>I clearly remember the upgrade to Yosemite, and how it crippled Spotlight for anyone who (1) didn't have a SSD (2) did an OS upgrade, not a clean reinstall.

I clearly don't remember that case. How was it anything that couldn't be solved by, e.g., at worse removing the spotlight index folder (.v100 or something similar)?

>* Or a better example of the general sentiment that I think OP is going for, Apple stopped updating it's OpenGL implementation, and invented their own API. Definitely a user-hostile choice, but they defend it by saying that Metal is better than OpenGL.*

How is it "user hostile"? As a user I could not care less if Apple uses OpenGL or Metal, but I do care that they get better performance (which Metal gives). I'm also in favor in Apple having easier control of the graphics stack to tailor it better to OS X -- that's the whole point of MacOS in the first place - that it can do its own thing and have a differentiated offering.

>But now Vulkan exists

So? Let any interested party build a Vulcan facade for Metal (if the goal is easy porting).

If the goal is features unique to the plarform, then Metal is the way to go.

It's the 'know-better-than-thou' arrogance that's user hostile here...

You say you don't care but there are lots of users that get left out in the cold by such 'upgrades', yourself included. "We don't give an f about you or your workflow or your programs, git gud" is an incredibly hostile attitude, and why there is a fair amount of Apple hatred right now.

Not to mention the clearly lackluster if not abysmal recent record of Apple designing systems that work should make you tremble to be their guinea pigs...

Apple has come a loong way from its reputation of producing dream machines with the durability of titanium cockroaches...and not in a good way.

A few examples of Apple begrudgingly admitting fault after five years of miserable failure in something that would bankrupt a smaller company can very reasonably be described as "Apple's inability to admit fault."

If they had been fixed in 30 days then maybe you could argue they were good examples.

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