I'd just like to point out that this is likely not to get better with this (arbitrary) decision to release a new OS every year. It used to be that we'd have a new release roughly every 2 years (from 2003 - 2011). This meant: 1. it was in development for 2 years and thus probably stabler to begin with, and 2) there were then 2 years to iron out the bugs. You'd get the new OS, there were some understandable kinks, but then by 6-12 months later it was pretty solid and you had another year of a solid OS ahead of you. It was perfectly reasonable to wait on the OS and let the early birds kick the tires first.
This is no longer possible. It feels that as soon as version N is out, they are scrambling to make version N+1. There is no downtime. There is no stabilization phase. You are eternally in brand-new isn't fully working mode. Of course the software is going to be worse.
Couple this with the stark reality that Apple has simply run out of ideas in terms of software. Every new version of OS X boils down to: 1. arbitrary UI tweak (forcing developers to refresh), 2. Gimmick features in Mail.app/Safari (RSS in Mail/Safari, Postcards in Mail, yet another 3d effect to re-arrange your tabs in Safari, annotations in Mail, etc etc etc), and 3. regressions of features that worked for years. Occasionally .Mac/MobileMe/iCloud will be renamed in hopes everyone forgets about the last round of data loss bugs/hopefully people get excited about this vague thing they don't really know the scope of.
>This meant: 1. it was in development for 2 years and thus probably stabler to begin with
No. Shorter release cycles don't imply loss of quality. I claim the opposite in fact. Rolling releases are much better for quality. You're releasing smaller more focused features and battle-testing them in the field.
>There is no stabilization phase.
There are always stabilization phases. Not every major release will be an overhaul. Most will be incremental updates.
Mac OS X: The 2000-2003 period included three full releases (not counting 10.0, since that was the culmination of several years of work), and didn't have quality problems. The 2003-2011 period had four releases. So I don't see an obvious lesson that one year is sustainable.
iOS: 2007-2011 four updates at one year intervals before the decline in quality that lots of people perceive starting with iOS6. Again, hard to say one year is the culprit.
I do think Apple needs to restrain itself, and work on figuring out which features can be shipped without compromising quality. But whether it needs to do longer releases or do smaller releases is hard to say.
As for Mac OS, when I read Siracusa's review, I was thrilled. There aren't consumer features, but they're doing so many things to make desktop machines more responsive and efficient. It's even more exciting than Snow Leopard.
There's nothing wrong with yearly release cycles, Apple's problem seems to be that they've tied their OS to the hardware cycle.
It doesn't really matter if the OS is completely done, or still has a fair number of bugs. It MUST release at the same time as the new phone.
Combined with this is the fact that the apps are bundled with the OS. While certain enhancements definitely need operating system support, there's no good reason they couldn't be updating Safari or mail or notes to quash little bugs throughout the year. Instead you have to wait for a .1 release or the next full OS (since they never seem to do .2s).
>I'd just like to point out that this is likely not to get better with this (arbitrary) decision to release a new OS every year.
Release dates are arbitrary and inconsequential. Scope and freeze dates are what matters.
>Couple this with the stark reality that Apple has simply run out of ideas in terms of software. Every new version of OS X boils down to: 1. arbitrary UI tweak (forcing developers to refresh), 2. Gimmick features in Mail.app/Safari (RSS in Mail/Safari, Postcards in Mail, yet another 3d effect to re-arrange your tabs in Safari, annotations in Mail, etc etc etc), and 3. regressions of features that worked for years.
> It used to be that we'd have a new release roughly every 2 years (from 2003 - 2011). This meant: 1. it was in development for 2 years and thus probably stabler to begin with, and 2) there were then 2 years to iron out the bugs.
Doesn't this discussion boil down to the trade-offs between slower and more rapid release cycles? For example, releases after 2 years of development are far more complex, with all the disadvantages that entails. Technology reaches users more slowly (solutions to some bugs/features could take 3 years or more) which also delays feedback to developers. etc.
I think the opposite is true. iOS7/8 was a giant transition that was staged over two releases. I suspect the next few years will be much less major reworking and much more tuning up and adding capabilities.
Apple's OSX design work seems stagnant as well. I find Gnome since version 3.12 (yes Gnome) looks better than Yosemite. I use Yosemite at work every day and find it's a step down from Mavericks. Most of the improvements seem to be to apps I never use (Maps, Safari). The new dark top bar is embarrassingly ugly compared to Gnome dark theme. The icons look childish and half-baked.
Gnome's design in minimal, clean, and feels out of the way instead of being flashy. Most importantly Gnome is improving rapidly. The new 3.14 looks amazing, where they revamped all the small details (icons, resolutions). A great demo of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhK_2M0B8Qo
I used to love getting new OSX releases. I'm really surprised to see it get sidelined in recent years. Maybe all of the good designers are working on iOS?
I second your enthusiasm for Gnome. It really is in a great place right now and is my shell of choice on Linux. But I disagree with the Yosemite criticism. Unlike Linux, OS X actually has a large degree of uniformity between third-party apps thanks to Cocoa and (historically) the human interface guidelines. Apple just can't make sweeping changes to the OS X design without severely damaging the coherence of the OS X ecosystem; design changes have to be incremental. And they're doing a pretty good job. Yosemite brings design changes specifically optimised for high-DPI (font, line weights) and a general toning down of brashness (e.g. the new dock). I imagine the new 'dark mode' (which, let's face it, will be unseen by most consumers) is just a signal of things to come; I wouldn't be surprised to see a dark set of Cocoa controls in a future release too. But it'll take time.
Honestly, I'm glad that Apple isn't being brash on the Mac. They can get away with it on iOS (the 6->7 transition) because it's such an active platform, with so much demand, that developers have put in the time and money to re-design, but a similar design transition on OS X would take much much longer and I imagine would be a lot more painful for the end user.
Gnome looks nice, and has it's "own" look - but is nowhere even near the quality of Yosemite IMO.
And talk about quality issues! Any given thing is way more likely to break on a linux desktop environment. I love FOSS and have been a Gnome and Ubuntu user for years but integrating a thousand FOSS projects together presents many challenges to quality.
that is a matter of opinion - I find gnome to be incredibly ugly and unpolished. Large margins, padding issues, often badly rendered fonts (fuzzy, weird aliasing) just to name the few.
Yes Gnome is the best thing you can get under Linux, but lots of stuff like the scrolling behaviour and smoothness still isn't on par with what OS X offers.
Apple has had a decline in software quality since around the Intel transition. Prior to that OS X had become really very respectable, but during it lots of typical things started happening, like suspend not quite working sometimes, and external display support going to hell. It doesn't seem like they ever recovered.
It's hard to admit now, but at one point I even liked XCode, but again, that was before they iTunesd it.
Maybe it's age, but in my mind they definitely did get worse, and as a result I've moved to Windows (7) as my main machine after over a decade in Mac land.
I literally went the opposite. I switched to OSX soon after the Intel transition and loved it, after a decade in Windows land. I honestly just much prefer the look and feel of Apple products and software. I find them more enjoyable to use, consistent, more intelligently thought out and much less hassle.
I also used to hate Xcode 3 but as of Xcode 5 I've really grown to like it.
You're my bizarro opposite. I bet you hate the colour blue ;)
I disagree with the decline after Intel. I'd say their quality grew a lot more after the Intel transition. That's when Apple started picking up steam and gained a higher adoption rate for their operating system. Especially with developers.
My iPhone 6+ has shown more bugs in 2 weeks than the three iPhones I had prior to that (the original, 3G, and 4). Has hard locked at least half a dozen times, particularly when receiving calls.
It's completely insane. The custom 4.4 Android ROM I use on a beaten up old Galaxy S3 is more stable than iOS 8 on my iPad.
If you told me a month ago that Apple's flagship OS would be less stable than a heavily patched AOSP build [0] maintained by a few part-time indie ROM devs I would have laughed in your face.
[0] International GS3 never got an official Android 4.4 release. So it runs with a lot of 4.3 code, including drivers and radios, forward ported to 4.4, all held together with parts of other Samsung device code releases.
Similarly, Safari frequently locks up or crashes on my iPad -- behavior that started with 8.0.0 and has continued through 8.0.2. I rarely remember this happening in the past.
Oh man, the crazy bugs I've seen in iOS 8 on my 5S. Last week I had an alarm go off, unlocked my screen, and it kept going. And going. Disabling the alarm in the Clock app did nothing. Re-locking and re-unlocking the screen did nothing. In the end, I had to just power the device off.
iOS 8 does this weird thing where notification banners half the time can be dismissed with a swipe up (the normal way) and half the time with a home button click (they don't respond to swipes). Same app, same notifications.
Also don't even get me started on the orientation confusion (in app - clicking back to the home screen is fine) and general lagginess and freezing on 8.0.2 on a €999 phone that's a week old.
It feels like it's missing even some of the most basic QA.
On a 5s with iOS8 I have seen the Touch ID system completely vanish. It wouldn't lock and I could launch Mint without any kind of authentication (the mint app has integrated Touch ID which previously worked well).
I've had 6+ since release and I can honestly say I've not had a single problem with it. I am heavy user and iOS developer myself. So yeah ... no idea how you get so many supposed issues.
>Is Apple experiencing a problematic decline in software quality?
No, blogs and articles are experiencing a problematic decline in long and medium term memory.
Apple has always (under Jobs or not) had ups and downs, in both software and hardware quality control.
Remember how OS X 10.1 was unusable, the problems with Lion, when it first came out? The file-loss bug in the FS? And tons of other things besides.
As for hardware, well, Jobs first love child was the cube, with the overheating problem (and the not-selling-well problem). Then we had the iBook G3 logic board issues (for tons of models). Battery issues. The G5 Pro cooling goo leak issue. Etc etc. And of course, as any long time Mac buyer knows, a classic advice is "never buy the first revision of a product".
Part of it, for hardware, is that a bug in a production run e.g. for Dell doesn't affect that many people (because Dell puts out 50+ different models, whereas Apple puts out a few, so each of Apple's has tens of millions of buyers). And of course the press doesn't care much for a fault in Dell or HP or whatever production run, whereas the slightest BS in an Apple production run is a "*gate". And of course Apple does more daring stuff with machining, weight, thinness, internal design etc than most companies, so there's always a chance to screw some things that's bigger than in just assembling some brick-sized plasticy laptop.
I'm an iOS developer and I've filed 20 different API bugs with Apple for iOS 8 versus a previous record count of 7 that I filed against iOS 4.
This is anecdotal (I'm just one developer) but forum grumblings seem to confirm that lots of developers are seeing their apps broken by buggy changes in iOS 8.
You took the word out of my mouth! It is by far and it is also losing some of its legendary attention to detail.
I've noticed the amount of patches going up as well as the stability of software go a little bit down. But that's not all, most major unix tools in Mac OS X are 2 to 3 years outdated and Safari is a bug nest.
To bring some balance to my criticism I fell that innovation at Apple has not decreased but the quality of products has.
As referenced in this article[0] a major blocker for shipping newer versions of the command line toolchain is the fact that newer versions of these tools moved to an incompatible GPLv3 license.
I've noticed this over the past few years. What I've also noticed is a move by Apple towards marketing not what their products can do, but by counting how many new features they they've added to their software. They're still far ahead of their competitors in terms of quality and usability of their products, but not what they once were.
>I think the difference is that people are finally feeling the confidence to state the obvious - why is the software so sucky?
I agree; the Jobs distortion field is wearing off. There's a lot of cognitive dissonance to get past (this must have been better before because I liked it before), and this dawning recognition is getting projected onto Apple.
It is difficult to maintain focus on software as a hardware company (and vice versa). While Steve Jobs was around he was able to emphasize importance of both hw & sw. Over time the part of the company which brings the money receives increasing investment at the expense of the other. For Apple, maintaining a balance will be a challenge going forward. QA seems to be the first compromise.
(PS: Had to paste these links into Notes.app after copying the urls from mobile safari's share sheet, and then copy from there to paste here because mobile safari won't allow paste in text fields from its own share sheet in ios8... How's that for QA)
Yosemite has been great but I still run into a few bugs here and there with iOS 8.0.2. I think they should consider decoupling hardware and software releases.
This comments section has lots of people saying "x was when things got really bad" followed by people saying "actually x was the pinnacle." (And some then following up with "it was actually y when it got bad.")
This has been the pattern in The Comments since I started using Apple stuff 15 years ago. Likewise, "Apple used to innovate and now they're out of ideas."
Which isn't to say that things haven't perhaps taken a downturn lately: there have unquestionably been an unusually large number of publicized missteps in the last couple of months. Some technical, some social, some real, and some media-hyped. But an apparent clustering at one moment doesn't assure or even imply a long-term trend. Five and ten years from now I feel confident the same comments will be being made.
People get annoyed at the un-Steve-like-ness of Cook's apparent focus on quantifiable things like "CustSat". But, when you're serving literally hundreds of millions of customers in a blog-driven media world, it's hard to know what would be a better way to measure these things. If customers are becoming less satisfied, you can be certain the executive team knows it.
Still, it seems apparent that there's an immediate PR issue. (And simultaneously, it should be noted, iPhones are flying off the shelves in unprecedented numbers and at likely higher ASPs than ever.) If I were Cook, I'd do what I could to make really sure we got our act together in the short term, look for some opportunities to buy back some goodwill, and then I'd probably keep doing roughly what we'd been doing for the last decade or so while weighing the feasibility of some of the commmon suggestions, such as decoupling OS releases from hardware releases.
I suspect this is more reflective of a scale issue than a direct decline attributed to the capabilities of the company.
I suspect that when a company reaches a certain amount of market penetration where the number of active users reaches into the 100s of millions, that number of eyeballs over that many devices begins to show the cracks which maybe got glanced over previously.
My comparison for this is, of course, Microsoft. As they were coming up, we were forgiving of their set-backs, but into maturity, people started looking for alternatives, their had to be something better because their stuff was SO buggy. I point to the Vista 'fiasco' as an example. Was it really a 'fiasco'? Or was it just that, even when what was considered a small number of people upgraded, and recognized issues, that small number of users was so large that it brought major attention to the issues.
When 10% of your users have issues and you have 10 million users, that's 1 million voices.
When 10% of your users have issues and that's 100 million users, it's considerably larger.
Diversity of hardware platforms further exacerbates this issue. When it was just the iPhone1-3, the hardware wasn't considerably different. Bring on the iPhone 3, and increased pixel count, and you start to notice a few more minor issues, then iPhone 5 with different screen layout, handled well by apple, but not seamless. Now start adding some devices having fingerprint scanners and some without, some with health data gathering and fingerprint scanners some with one of these things, some with none. Sure, you 'should' be able to test for these small differences, but it gets considerably more complicated with each iteration. Apple has done a good job of getting people to retire old hardware, or not cause a fuss about not being able to upgrade, but they're still getting into a realm of device numbers they hadn't experienced before.
Yes, but in my experience this is an industry-wide problem not specific to Apple.
I know I'm getting a bit old so there's surely some amount of 'get off my lawn, kids' going on here, but I kind of expect new software to mostly suck these days for many reasons but with the 'webification of everything' (in terms of pervasive use of JavaScript, throwing out all the old UI frameworks and replacing them with web DOMs or web DOM like systems, replacing graphics systems with WebGL/Canvas, etc) being a primary cause.
I own 2 separate apple PCs. And seriously considering replacing one of them (Mac Mini) with Mac Pro ($3000 starting price !!) for video work. And probably getting another mac laptop for wife.
I got on the apple fan train kinda late, like right around when they transitioned to Intel.
With that said, I sometimes feel Apple hitting it big with iPhones was similar to someone winning a lottery. Often when someone wins jackpot, he grows distant from friends/family because of his money. He loses his direction in life due to the sudden infusion of wealth.
[+] [-] tolmasky|11 years ago|reply
This is no longer possible. It feels that as soon as version N is out, they are scrambling to make version N+1. There is no downtime. There is no stabilization phase. You are eternally in brand-new isn't fully working mode. Of course the software is going to be worse.
Couple this with the stark reality that Apple has simply run out of ideas in terms of software. Every new version of OS X boils down to: 1. arbitrary UI tweak (forcing developers to refresh), 2. Gimmick features in Mail.app/Safari (RSS in Mail/Safari, Postcards in Mail, yet another 3d effect to re-arrange your tabs in Safari, annotations in Mail, etc etc etc), and 3. regressions of features that worked for years. Occasionally .Mac/MobileMe/iCloud will be renamed in hopes everyone forgets about the last round of data loss bugs/hopefully people get excited about this vague thing they don't really know the scope of.
[+] [-] macspoofing|11 years ago|reply
No. Shorter release cycles don't imply loss of quality. I claim the opposite in fact. Rolling releases are much better for quality. You're releasing smaller more focused features and battle-testing them in the field.
>There is no stabilization phase.
There are always stabilization phases. Not every major release will be an overhaul. Most will be incremental updates.
[+] [-] hyperpape|11 years ago|reply
iOS: 2007-2011 four updates at one year intervals before the decline in quality that lots of people perceive starting with iOS6. Again, hard to say one year is the culprit.
I do think Apple needs to restrain itself, and work on figuring out which features can be shipped without compromising quality. But whether it needs to do longer releases or do smaller releases is hard to say.
As for Mac OS, when I read Siracusa's review, I was thrilled. There aren't consumer features, but they're doing so many things to make desktop machines more responsive and efficient. It's even more exciting than Snow Leopard.
[+] [-] MBCook|11 years ago|reply
It doesn't really matter if the OS is completely done, or still has a fair number of bugs. It MUST release at the same time as the new phone.
Combined with this is the fact that the apps are bundled with the OS. While certain enhancements definitely need operating system support, there's no good reason they couldn't be updating Safari or mail or notes to quash little bugs throughout the year. Instead you have to wait for a .1 release or the next full OS (since they never seem to do .2s).
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] coldtea|11 years ago|reply
Release dates are arbitrary and inconsequential. Scope and freeze dates are what matters.
>Couple this with the stark reality that Apple has simply run out of ideas in terms of software. Every new version of OS X boils down to: 1. arbitrary UI tweak (forcing developers to refresh), 2. Gimmick features in Mail.app/Safari (RSS in Mail/Safari, Postcards in Mail, yet another 3d effect to re-arrange your tabs in Safari, annotations in Mail, etc etc etc), and 3. regressions of features that worked for years.
Siracusa begs to differ.
[+] [-] stock_toaster|11 years ago|reply
I dunno. Continuity seemed to me to be novel and useful when it was presented. Healthkit is new, and not really "just a refinement".
[+] [-] hackuser|11 years ago|reply
Doesn't this discussion boil down to the trade-offs between slower and more rapid release cycles? For example, releases after 2 years of development are far more complex, with all the disadvantages that entails. Technology reaches users more slowly (solutions to some bugs/features could take 3 years or more) which also delays feedback to developers. etc.
[+] [-] gress|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark2456|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dmix|11 years ago|reply
Gnome's design in minimal, clean, and feels out of the way instead of being flashy. Most importantly Gnome is improving rapidly. The new 3.14 looks amazing, where they revamped all the small details (icons, resolutions). A great demo of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhK_2M0B8Qo
I used to love getting new OSX releases. I'm really surprised to see it get sidelined in recent years. Maybe all of the good designers are working on iOS?
[+] [-] Osmium|11 years ago|reply
Honestly, I'm glad that Apple isn't being brash on the Mac. They can get away with it on iOS (the 6->7 transition) because it's such an active platform, with so much demand, that developers have put in the time and money to re-design, but a similar design transition on OS X would take much much longer and I imagine would be a lot more painful for the end user.
[+] [-] msane|11 years ago|reply
And talk about quality issues! Any given thing is way more likely to break on a linux desktop environment. I love FOSS and have been a Gnome and Ubuntu user for years but integrating a thousand FOSS projects together presents many challenges to quality.
[+] [-] albeva|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] legulere|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gress|11 years ago|reply
However after a few months of using it as my daily OS, I find it far cleaner and more productive than prior OSX versions.
[+] [-] fidotron|11 years ago|reply
It's hard to admit now, but at one point I even liked XCode, but again, that was before they iTunesd it.
Maybe it's age, but in my mind they definitely did get worse, and as a result I've moved to Windows (7) as my main machine after over a decade in Mac land.
[+] [-] afro88|11 years ago|reply
I also used to hate Xcode 3 but as of Xcode 5 I've really grown to like it.
You're my bizarro opposite. I bet you hate the colour blue ;)
[+] [-] dfischer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redacted|11 years ago|reply
If you told me a month ago that Apple's flagship OS would be less stable than a heavily patched AOSP build [0] maintained by a few part-time indie ROM devs I would have laughed in your face.
[0] International GS3 never got an official Android 4.4 release. So it runs with a lot of 4.3 code, including drivers and radios, forward ported to 4.4, all held together with parts of other Samsung device code releases.
[+] [-] jdp23|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derefr|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|11 years ago|reply
Also don't even get me started on the orientation confusion (in app - clicking back to the home screen is fine) and general lagginess and freezing on 8.0.2 on a €999 phone that's a week old.
It feels like it's missing even some of the most basic QA.
[+] [-] tvon|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enraged_camel|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] albeva|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|11 years ago|reply
No, blogs and articles are experiencing a problematic decline in long and medium term memory.
Apple has always (under Jobs or not) had ups and downs, in both software and hardware quality control.
Remember how OS X 10.1 was unusable, the problems with Lion, when it first came out? The file-loss bug in the FS? And tons of other things besides.
As for hardware, well, Jobs first love child was the cube, with the overheating problem (and the not-selling-well problem). Then we had the iBook G3 logic board issues (for tons of models). Battery issues. The G5 Pro cooling goo leak issue. Etc etc. And of course, as any long time Mac buyer knows, a classic advice is "never buy the first revision of a product".
Part of it, for hardware, is that a bug in a production run e.g. for Dell doesn't affect that many people (because Dell puts out 50+ different models, whereas Apple puts out a few, so each of Apple's has tens of millions of buyers). And of course the press doesn't care much for a fault in Dell or HP or whatever production run, whereas the slightest BS in an Apple production run is a "*gate". And of course Apple does more daring stuff with machining, weight, thinness, internal design etc than most companies, so there's always a chance to screw some things that's bigger than in just assembling some brick-sized plasticy laptop.
[+] [-] owenwil|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gilgoomesh|11 years ago|reply
This is anecdotal (I'm just one developer) but forum grumblings seem to confirm that lots of developers are seeing their apps broken by buggy changes in iOS 8.
[+] [-] elpachuco|11 years ago|reply
You probably mean not causation?
[+] [-] pc2g4d|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordhy|11 years ago|reply
I've noticed the amount of patches going up as well as the stability of software go a little bit down. But that's not all, most major unix tools in Mac OS X are 2 to 3 years outdated and Safari is a bug nest.
To bring some balance to my criticism I fell that innovation at Apple has not decreased but the quality of products has.
[+] [-] ffreire|11 years ago|reply
[0]: http://robservatory.com/behind-os-xs-modern-face-lies-an-agi...
[+] [-] bsbechtel|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smackfu|11 years ago|reply
Maybe not a good thing.
[+] [-] virtue3|11 years ago|reply
More APIs == more bugs, more nastiness under the hood and a rats nest of keeping track of the OS.
[+] [-] say_what_say|11 years ago|reply
I think the difference is that people are finally feeling the confidence to state the obvious - why is the software so sucky?
[+] [-] pessimizer|11 years ago|reply
I agree; the Jobs distortion field is wearing off. There's a lot of cognitive dissonance to get past (this must have been better before because I liked it before), and this dawning recognition is getting projected onto Apple.
[+] [-] billions|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrismealy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0x0|11 years ago|reply
http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/2jbfgp/osx_appears_t... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8450848
(PS: Had to paste these links into Notes.app after copying the urls from mobile safari's share sheet, and then copy from there to paste here because mobile safari won't allow paste in text fields from its own share sheet in ios8... How's that for QA)
[+] [-] itg|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glhaynes|11 years ago|reply
This has been the pattern in The Comments since I started using Apple stuff 15 years ago. Likewise, "Apple used to innovate and now they're out of ideas."
Which isn't to say that things haven't perhaps taken a downturn lately: there have unquestionably been an unusually large number of publicized missteps in the last couple of months. Some technical, some social, some real, and some media-hyped. But an apparent clustering at one moment doesn't assure or even imply a long-term trend. Five and ten years from now I feel confident the same comments will be being made.
People get annoyed at the un-Steve-like-ness of Cook's apparent focus on quantifiable things like "CustSat". But, when you're serving literally hundreds of millions of customers in a blog-driven media world, it's hard to know what would be a better way to measure these things. If customers are becoming less satisfied, you can be certain the executive team knows it.
Still, it seems apparent that there's an immediate PR issue. (And simultaneously, it should be noted, iPhones are flying off the shelves in unprecedented numbers and at likely higher ASPs than ever.) If I were Cook, I'd do what I could to make really sure we got our act together in the short term, look for some opportunities to buy back some goodwill, and then I'd probably keep doing roughly what we'd been doing for the last decade or so while weighing the feasibility of some of the commmon suggestions, such as decoupling OS releases from hardware releases.
[+] [-] pedalpete|11 years ago|reply
I suspect that when a company reaches a certain amount of market penetration where the number of active users reaches into the 100s of millions, that number of eyeballs over that many devices begins to show the cracks which maybe got glanced over previously.
My comparison for this is, of course, Microsoft. As they were coming up, we were forgiving of their set-backs, but into maturity, people started looking for alternatives, their had to be something better because their stuff was SO buggy. I point to the Vista 'fiasco' as an example. Was it really a 'fiasco'? Or was it just that, even when what was considered a small number of people upgraded, and recognized issues, that small number of users was so large that it brought major attention to the issues.
When 10% of your users have issues and you have 10 million users, that's 1 million voices. When 10% of your users have issues and that's 100 million users, it's considerably larger.
Diversity of hardware platforms further exacerbates this issue. When it was just the iPhone1-3, the hardware wasn't considerably different. Bring on the iPhone 3, and increased pixel count, and you start to notice a few more minor issues, then iPhone 5 with different screen layout, handled well by apple, but not seamless. Now start adding some devices having fingerprint scanners and some without, some with health data gathering and fingerprint scanners some with one of these things, some with none. Sure, you 'should' be able to test for these small differences, but it gets considerably more complicated with each iteration. Apple has done a good job of getting people to retire old hardware, or not cause a fuss about not being able to upgrade, but they're still getting into a realm of device numbers they hadn't experienced before.
[+] [-] Stubb|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allsystemsgo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] georgemcbay|11 years ago|reply
I know I'm getting a bit old so there's surely some amount of 'get off my lawn, kids' going on here, but I kind of expect new software to mostly suck these days for many reasons but with the 'webification of everything' (in terms of pervasive use of JavaScript, throwing out all the old UI frameworks and replacing them with web DOMs or web DOM like systems, replacing graphics systems with WebGL/Canvas, etc) being a primary cause.
(awaiting the downvotes...)
[+] [-] dba7dba|11 years ago|reply
I got on the apple fan train kinda late, like right around when they transitioned to Intel.
With that said, I sometimes feel Apple hitting it big with iPhones was similar to someone winning a lottery. Often when someone wins jackpot, he grows distant from friends/family because of his money. He loses his direction in life due to the sudden infusion of wealth.
I feel that way with Apple.