Apple needs a solid two years of working on its software with one underlying philosophy guiding all of their decisions: It just works.
I don’t think they have the courage to do such a thing.
@simonwoods They did that during last year's software cycle I believe -- am hopeful may be next year again?
Not that it affects me much these days. Have moved on from both macOS and iOS. iPadOS is the only thing that remains -- and am ok if it stays on an older version for longer.
@amit It needs to be substantial; you're far from alone in switching away and I wouldn't be surprisied if the voices of those who leave become louder over time. The manner in which they treat all of their systems, as if they are all similar enough to update at the same rate, is totally unreasonable.
We're starting to move over to all-Apple and I really just want it to be good, even if it means updating at later release dates but even that doesn't look like a safe strategy at the moment. If it goes back to being good then I feel better being all-in on a company that is putting its reputation at risk re: privacy, security, and so on.
@simonwoods The years when Mac OS X was at its “best”, Apple was on a 18-24-month release cycle and even occasionally threw in a release aimed mostly at stability/bug-fixing (there were lots of under-the-hood changes, 64-bit and GCD and who knows what else, but little user-facing).
I have argued before, especially since Apple doesn’t have to sell new Mac OS X versions and thus has less need of a bunch of new doo-dads every release, that they should slow down and fix and improve things (even if they have to keep they yearly cycle to keep iOS integration compatibility). (And even when they did sell OS upgrades, lots of people still skipped every other one, because all those showy new features didn’t seem worth the price and the hassle.)
Apple is absolutely suffering from the incessant socio-economic, late capitalist push for more, new, faster, spiraling out of control into the end.
@smokey @hjertnes There is absolutely nothing about the yearly release cycle that makes sense for the Mac, whilst everything about it delivers great pain to the OS.
I thought Apple was... premium? This isn't premium, it's bullshit. As for reasonable alternatives, if the highest priced option loses everything to justify the high price then everything else becomes reasonable.
This is the stuff that some of the hipster pundits have been worrying about since Jobs died. It's exactly this, that Apple would just turn into Microsoft from 20 years ago. It's super sad.
@hjertnes My wife was trying to buy AppleCare for her newly bought iPad Pro. She needed to get help over the phone because the machine was showing vague error messages with no practical route for solving the problem. Whilst she was talking to the support person, they were able to get it working (this was the good part of it, that support was able to get it working). They eventually were able to get her to the payment screen, where she tried to enter her debit card details.
The form was broken. Like it had a bug. On the iPad... on Safari. She had to use Chrome for the basic form to work.
That's one personal story where as far as I'm concerned the "standards company", which is literally supposed to be the justification for the Apple hype (and premium label), have failed in a big way.
@hjertnes (Note: I wrote a bunch more but it was rant-filled nonsense. I've deleted it now and just hope they get their shit together with these weird buggy releases. Hopefully by the time I get my first Mac they will have stabilised Catalina and then I can just stay on that release for as long as possible.)
@simonwoods After being a part of many software projects over the years I can say that all software have bugs no matter if you have the QA resources to discover them or not. And most companies can't justify fixing most of them.
Some problems like the ones your wife experienced, even though they suck, are not major (that's the one where your phone explodes or you loose data or it effects almost everyone). And you have to expect some issues in all software.
A buggy release is not a release with bugs, but rather a release with bugs where you constantly run into problems. For example on iOS 7 springboard (the homescreen grid with icons) constantly crashed.
@hjertnes The problem was major. We're talking about money and an official Apple page that, had I not been totally aware of the context, I would have assumed was suspicious to the point of contacting my bank's fraud team just to make sure.
You don't fuck around when it comes to people's banking, and a dismissive "it's just bugs" defense is flimsy at best.
Also, springboard problems very much exist in iOS 13. I could list more but you can easily read the web to see how much of a train wreck these releases have been, specifically by Apple's standards... which is the point, they are premium and so they have standards against which they want us to hold them.
I don't think it does Apple and Apple users any good to hide behind the standards of others. It's exactly why Jobs said "We just can't ship junk."
@simonwoods If it is a web page, then it is not related to a OS release.
This may be a major problem, but it is not a major OS release problem.
@simonwoods I can't remember any issues worth mentioning in the last two releases (maybe three can't remember) of both iOS and OS X
@hjertnes @simonwoods I don't mind (most) bugs. What I worry about is that it's become death-by-1,000-cuts with Apple lately and the trend doesn't feel like it's heading in the right direction. I have to assume they'll pull out of it and we'll all look back and say, "Well, that sucked for a while, didn't it?" and go about our business. I'm counting on this because the alternatives are worse.
