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Comment by augment_me | Hacker News Reader

You need to get your head out of your bubble and realize that this bug does not move the needle on anything meaningful.

I work at a superscalar and we have also had about 40% increase in breaking bugs in prod year-to-year due to a lot of slop code. However, the engagement and revenue generated is up from the features. Why bother make a timeline and spend time and resources on things that the average user does not care about? Does the average person care about the OpenGL compatibility? No, so why would you spend effort on this instead of for example user engagement? Answer that.

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Why make the computer do anything but maximize dopamine and dollars flying out of your wallet? Why ship a calculator app you can't sell subscriptions on, a command line interface, an email suite? Can't make money on it so why do it right? Why let a hammer be a hammer and not let you gamble crypto with it too?

If the customer wants these things and is paying for it, why shouldn't we? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And if your idealism can pay your bills, good for you!

Why even work in tech with that attitude? You are wasting your time on this earth. The margin is better in selling crystal meth and fentanyl, and has a far tighter product market fit.

I dont hold this attitude myself, I actually don't have any of the products I work with because they are kind of exploitative, but its what the people want and most people have very low self-control, mixed with that neoliberalism has convinced them that their path is completely in their hands.

Also it pays me really well so I can take my family and friends on trips and live a nice life :)

Because if you make enough decisions like that in a product that affects consumers and developers, eventually you turn into Adobe. Or worse, this guy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49984862

Sure, but it doesn't change the argument. Adobe is doing really well if you look at the revenue. Adobes business is selling to governments and other large corporations that need compliance, its not to cater to the HN developers. Apple is the same, except in their case its the status symbol of having Apple products.

No-one gives a shit if some subset of internet warriors thinks that you will have a downfall in 10 years because of some obscure esoteric corner cases that don't affect your mainline business. Even if they are right you will probably not be around the business at that time and will have made bank.

Engineers and their companies are super users on whom the whole Apple ecosystem depends. If we can’t run our applications on Apple’s operating system, or they break things for our users, we will leave.

Take that lesson back to your company as well. It is easier than ever to switch between clouds and AI providers. It’s easier than ever to replace any software in house. This isn’t an idle threat; I’ve already moved off of several software platforms this year for other providers, and I’m probably doing the same for millions of dollars worth of business every year in the future as well. And my company isn’t immune to it either - our biggest customers are always looking for options to bring software in house. The more we disrupt them with “small bugs”, the more likely they are to leave.

That is just plain false and assigning over-importance to yourself.

Apple's ecosystem depends on every middle-class person around the globe wanting to be able to signal that they have an Apple phone and use the same features as their social group. Engineers are a small subset, they barely move the needle.

It’s true and I’m not. If the engineers can’t build software for your OS, your users won’t have software to use.

We’re also talking about MacOS, not iOS. Engineers make up a big segment of MacBook users. Apple is only 9.5% of the personal computing market.

Ask the average Apple user if their device experience is getting better or worse over time. Most I know tell me things like they see small bug now where they didnt before, sometimes things dont work as they should, and more things needs a reset or even hard reset to fix. All very generic user reports.

All the bugs users are seeing are things developers picked up on earlier than users did, and shouted about in forums and bug reports. The fact Apple is not listening to its canaries down the coal mine is leading to the general slipping of its reputation.

Apples ecosystem replies on every middle class person around the globe having the frictionless experience Apple is known for. They erode that, and they slowly erode their customer base.

Actually, it seems like the people don't really give a shit, because Apple is still making bank, and is growing year-to-year like never before: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/revenue

In fact, since Covid and LLMs, the ARR has sped up its growth. They should really be eroding under all this shitty software, no?

Check out the graphs posted in this comment, it seems like maybe its beginning:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50143703

> Apple's ecosystem depends on every middle-class person around the globe

I have terrible news about the distribution of iPhones and the middle class globally.

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