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Comment by k-mcgrady | Hacker News Reader

>> "(People arguing 'its just a beta, it'll obviously change over time': what happened to Apple's relentless pursuit of quality before introducing something to the public? What's the point of secrecy if you're showing off v0.8 and not v1.0?) "

They haven't really introduced it to the public. They introduced it to developers at a developer conference so they can prepare their software for it. Every single iOS release has been like this. Buggy as hell for the first few betas with several feature changes along the way. When it's released 4 months down the line it's usually solid (excluding Maps).

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Err. They also have placed imagery and video of it all over their (general, not developer) pages for iOS. They've provided high res imagery and video for the media. It's effectively introduced.

And I say that as someone now running iOS 7 and OSX 10.9. I see a lot of potential in both, but iOS needs a fair amount of polishing.

What are the default apps like in OSX 10.9? I absolutely hated the calendar, notes etc apps in 10.8, have they improved as much (visually) as the iOS default apps?

Calendar.app in OS X now looks pretty much exactly like it does in iOS 7. Same color scheme, same typeface, etc... Notes is still yellow, but the top bar is now polished grey to match in with the rest of the UI, so it really isn't that bad. Game Center looks like it does in iOS 7 as well, and Reminders... haven't checked that out yet.

I read there are still a huge number of show-stopping bugs in iOS7. Things like using a date picker causing a kernel panic. How are you running it? On a tertiary device or on your phone? Just curious.

I'm not FireBeyond but I've been using iOS 7 effectively all day yesterday (I'm in Australia) on my primary phone (iPhone 5) and it's crashed to reboot maybe twice, that's all. The majority of apps I use work perfectly or have tiny things that don't and some visual aberrations. Date picker, for example, has been fine in the instances I've used it. It's very stable and there is little lag. There's a ton of small bugs around the place like music controls and the time on the lock screen sometimes overlapping and they'll be fixed in time.

It's been perfectly usable as my primary device.

How does 'crashed to reboot twice in a day' convert to 'it's very stable'?

It's this wilful disregard of negatives that bugs me about Apple culture. The good things are lauded, the bad things are ignored, unless they're bad things in other OSes, then they're highlighted as why Apple stuff is better.

It's like at my last workplace, the Apple fan who was always getting another box from Foxconn telling me that Android was crap because he occasionally saw me swipe twice on my phone - ignoring that he was doing the same on his iphone. He didn't realise it until I pointed it out to him that he was doing it. It's a really odd cultural phenomenon.

Seriously? This is the earliest beta of this release. Only bricking twice a day sounds "pretty stable" to me.

I've had an iPhone5 since it came out and I've had one instance of needing to hard-reboot the device. Can't remember the details.

OTOH, My previous phone, a Galaxy S2, had far more issues. Multiple times in my ownership -- at least 4 that I can remember -- I literally had to remove the battery to restart the device.

In many ways I wish I had a hybrid device. The fit and finish of the hardware itself is much better from Apple. Some OS features and especially Google-provided web services are much better on Android. (Speech-to-text for one..) But having owned an Android for 2 years and an iPhone for 8 months, the iPhone is definitely, definitely more stable.

In some ways it seems like Apple v Microsoft on the desktop again. Apple controls the OS and the hardware so yes it BETTER be more stable. And it is.

We seem to be speaking a different language. To me, 'bricking' means you've hosed the system and it can't be recovered without low-level tools. A reboot crash is not 'bricking'.

My pedantometer also suggests that 'pretty stable' and 'very stable' are not the same thing. :)

Can't speak for FireBeyond or dorian-graph but I too am running it on my regular, everyday iPhone 5 and have found it surprisingly stable.

Any actual crashes seem to be a result of doing too many things at once, particularly during an animation (eg: close out of an app and double-click for multitasking before the animation is finished). The crashes seem to cause a restart of the Springbord app rather than a complete system reboot, so it comes back within 10 seconds and hasn't lost any data (it even keeps the same song playing in the background).

Before I had an iPhone 5 I used a Samsung Galaxy S which crashed much more frequently on stable versions of Android. I had to remove the battery at some points too to get it to start. I've never owned a Windows Phone so I can't comment on them.

I'm not apart of the Apple culture—I've had an iPhone for about 6 months and before that I used Android for ~ 2 years and had never owned any Apple products aside from a MbP—and I am not disregarding bad things. You've read a single comment of mine which was made in the context of using iOS 7 Beta 1 as a daily user. I've only made comments on iOS in 2 locations on the internet, once on this HN story and once in an invite-only forum. In the forum I listed many things that I don't like at the moment and feel needs polishing.

What's hilarious about your comment is that by a couple of ultra-geeks at uni I was called an Android fanboy because I used my SGS a lot, modded it, etc., haha. It would be hard for you to have been more wrong in your assumption, in regards to me. You will forever find in every group/culture people that ignore bad things and laud the good things, I've seen the same when I used Android regularly and elsewhere.

It would be hard for you to have been more wrong in your assumption, in regards to me.

Speaking of assumptions, I didn't call you a fanboy. I said it was a peculiarity of Apple culture. Given that I only have "a single comment of mine" on which to evaluate, it sounded like so many other comments on Apple equipment, where failures are papered over.

And given that it's a beta, not an alpha, two reboot crashes in one day is still definitely not what I'd characterise as "very stable". I'd even be wary of using that for an alpha - a "very" stable software suite simply shouldn't be crashing that often, regardless of where it is in the cycle.

Agreed, folks are far too critical for a beta release that has yet to evolve. Of course, there are still major improvements that need to be addressed, but people need to understand that Apple will not ship anything shitty when it comes time to release it to the general public.

How are complaints about the new Safari icon different from complaints about leather iCal in its time, or even Ping? This is not a leaked alpha version, this is what Apple is publicly marketing, and I don't see where they have a record of ever backtracking (in less than two major releases).

> people need to understand that Apple will not ship anything shitty when it comes time to release it to the general public

The apologists said this about Apple Maps as well

There wasn't much they could do to improve Maps without getting it in the hands of millions of people.

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