Apple's Software Quality Crisis: When Premium Hardware Meets Subpar Software

On the most recent episode of ATP podcast, an anonymous person wrote in to say that when they worked at Apple until ~2013, there was effectively no QA team on macOS.

Granted that was over a decade ago, and "no QA team" doesn't mean no testing, but given the numerous bugs in macOS today, and that they almost never get fixed, I'm not surprised.

(FWIW, I do not experience this bug you mentioned)

The Feedback Assistant issue you mentioned is probably one of the worst aspects of their software ecosystem. I haven't had a response on a single ticket that I've filed in there. It feels like an abandoned program, which is terrible UX considering its purpose.

For what its worth, I can't reproduce this on 15.3 (24D60). I don't have a "Custom color" option. I see "Colors" and I click a Plus button to add a new color. Also I have my system connected to a caldigit dock and I'm using a mouse, not the trackpad.

The entire settings app rewrite is the canary of how Apple's software development process is broken, especially for the mac.

My indicator for if Apple is for the customer vs for Apple is how macOS 'negotiates' YPbPr instead of RGB for non-Apple branded monitors (some LG monitors also get a pass) which results in worse color quality. I believe this to be carefully engineered to be a plausible bug rather than a real one.

BTW I have found a workaround using BetterDisplay and an EDID override (to more closely match what the monitor is actually telling macOS).

Desktop icons snapping to the grid has been broken forever too. Every once in a while I'll have a space in the "grid" that just won't accept anything to be placed in it.

And god, don't even get me started on how the icons rearrange themselves when you're organizing your home screen / control center. I can't believe they actually shipped it like that and still haven't made it any better.

> - stop dragging and notice how the color cursor continues jumping around erratically (it's impossible to actually select the exact color you want)

Tried dragging color cursor for 30 seconds+, no issues at all. MacOS 15.3.1 (24D70) on 16" M2 Max.

I, and many others in our personal capacity, have been shouting from hn-rooftops how Apple’s software capacity has been in a state of, since a decade or so (or more really) that calling it bad would be an understatement. It’s downright pathetic. It’s disgustingly incompetent. And I haven’t not even started on its services like iCloud. Because those go beyond pathetic.

I mean for god’s sake these morons (yes, “morons”) have not yet figured out how yo sync browser tabs which is something new browsers get right in a few days to few weeks time, and sometimes on top of their incompetently done iCloud and related SDKs.

Apple sometimes comes across as a glasshouse built as marketing, too much money, (sadly) a huge army of fans and loyalist apologists (and not demanding customers), and an absolute lack of decent competition; and the biggest of it — a deliberate attitude of non-openness!

I mean everything Apple is closed! So how can anyone even quantify how bad their iOS is, how smelly their cloud suites are, how ridiculous their security is!! If you can’t see what happens behind a wall and the entity behind that wall has money more than most nations and a PR and tech propaganda machinery rivaling some of “those” nation states, how can you even be sure!

Nothing wrong with the "creating products that prioritize user experience over features" - or more accurately what Jobs said: create products that start with the user experience and the user’s needs first and then work your way to the tech (as far as I remember)

The opposite approach is starting with some tech and then trying to find a use for it, e.g. folding phones, second 1/2 screen on laptop, etc, instead of trying to actually create a usable, quality trackpad for instance.

The critique is still valid: Apple, for their software, seem to not have the same focus on quality as Jobs once insisted on. Their physical products are very much still top notch, and the products on the whole are still developed with this mindset as far as I’m concerned. It’s just the software quality that has taken a hit for some reason.

I can assure you that if you "went back to linux" you are the furthest thing from the target audience you can be.

Not to downplay your experience, but it is almost certainly not what Apple uses for user feedback.

Apple's behavior makes sense when you realize that Apple caters to potential customers more than current ones. Their products are made to demo well to prospective customers. Every Apple product owner/user is inadvertently doing sales demos to onlookers.

I've got a Polestar 2. The map is shown inside the dashboard. The calls appear on the centre display.

I think it's a limitation of the vehicle's implementation.

What Linux CarPlay alternative do you use?

Personal pet peeve: CarPlay not pausing what you are playing when you hit the infotainment power button is really dumb.

> around 2016 I had to move back to Linux because the software experience and the user experience is just too poor, outright buggy and changes all the time.

Honestly, I have difficulty believing someone could find these kinds of issues to be less of a problem on Linux than on Mac

The CarPlay "limitation" is likely to be a road safety/liability issue.

I love that I had to install a shim service [0] with the same ID as Apple Music's since it can't otherwise be turned off, which was causing Apple Music to appear every time I pressed a media key but had no media playing.

That's the kind of shiesty KPI-boosting tactic I'd expect from Windows, not a machine I paid almost $4000 for. Apple comes installed with a ton of irremovable bloatware and somehow gets a pass.

[0] https://lowtechguys.com/musicdecoy/

It really is bad. I mean, the navigation design is bad to start with (just back, no forward? Genres are under Search?), and it’s buggy. It hangs randomly and sometimes it just doesn’t make sound (you had one job!).

Apple Music on Mac definitely needs a ground-up rewrite, though I worry it'll lose uncommonly used features, like the ability to upload and stream your own music. I think a lot of Apple Music weirdness is from the fact that it's been built up over the years upon iTunes, which was essentially a completely different product that offered different thing. No one is really buying digital music any more, but they still need to handle everyone's old libraries and purchases, so there's a weird disconnect between your local music library and your cloud Apple Music library. So there are completely separate screens for viewing e.g. an album in your local library versus "in the cloud" even though they're both views for the same content.

Incidentally the iOS Music app has generally been pretty good to me, but starting in the most recent iOS update has been having crashing issues. I'm not sure what exactly causes it, but it's typically when I rearranged the queue then minimize the player to get back to the home/library screen.

> iTunes was such a stable, usable piece of software

It used to be the case a long time ago. I think it was decent up to iTunes 5 or 6. They crammed into it iPod apps and stuff, which resulted in a terrible UX. Then came the UI lag.

If Spotify doesnt work they are dead in the water. If Apple Music doesnt work, thats a rounding error.

The podcast app is the same shoddy-ness. Re-arranging things in the queue is such a PIA.

I never liked iTunes. I always found it horrible and difficult to find my way around. Apple Music makes me miss those days.

It's a bit hit and miss for sure. If you turn off the subscription and Apple Music portal stuff it works fine though. I use it with a cable to sync to my iPhone with offline files I ripped with XLD from CDs. It's all the network crap that breaks it.

I concur. To add, I wonder how much of the “old guard” is still at Apple? Apple used to be perfectionistic when it came to software, even during the 1985-1996 interregnum when Steve Jobs was absent. Besides Steve Jobs, Apple also had people like Bruce Tognazzini and Don Norman who cared deeply about usability. When Apple purchased NeXT and built Mac OS X, Apple’s usability focus was married to reliable, stable infrastructure, culminating with Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which I believe was the pinnacle of the Mac experience. (Though I’m partial to the classic Mac OS from a UI point of view, Mac OS X had a better UX due to its stability.)

I suspect a lot of Apple’s decisions in the past decade regarding software is due to an increasing number of Apple employees who are not familiar with the philosophies of 1970s-era Xerox PARC, the classic Mac, NeXT, and Jobs-era Mac OS X. Granted, it’s possible to be too introspective, too focused on the past. Unfortunately Apple’s software is losing its perfectionistic qualities, which has long been the selling point of the Mac compared to Windows and Linux.

Linux seems like the opposite to me a slow marathon to achieve perfection. With pipewire, systemd and wayland there's less cruft than ever and you get the best out-of-the-box experience since it's inception.

> a gradual industry-wide race to the bottom in terms of quality

I'm going to disagree. This is a false nostalgia.

15 years ago the market for consumer laptops that were not MacBooks straight up sucked. If you walk into a Best Buy today, almost any laptop you buy is going to blow any laptop from back then out of the water in terms of build quality. And credit where it's due, in no small part it came from playing catch up with Apple.

I've been using fundamentally the same Linux setup for over ten years now. I think the biggest change it went through was migrating the audio system to Pipewire, which took about an hour to figure out and hasn't need attention since.

I have no solutions to offer for smartphones sadly.

It's ironic you would pay a premium when the biggest reason for continued "new features" is to justify an SaaS sales model.

Excel '98 probably covers 95% of users use cases. But here we are.

I have this conversation with my partner quite often. We'd like to use operating systems, software that stays "still" and doesn't break usage workflow every release with changes just for the sake of change. We both think that major commercial operating systems/software is largely feature complete. And everything done nowadays is just for keeping up the "freshness" appearance with all sort of meaningless GUI overhauls or features of doubtful usefulness that marketing branch everywhere pushes.

It really feels like the quality was replaced by... lipstick on a pig. And honestly, I am fed up with all this pandering of the changes as a breakthru, live changing technology.

A side effect of employing tens of thousands of full time people that do product development is that matter how good your product currently is, there is an entire organizational hierarchy that has to justify its existence. The result is that every great product keeps picking up parasitic features and functionality. Intended to add value, but paradoxically removing overall value.

There is a fine line between staying ahead of the competition and enshittification and most companies don't find it.

The most recent examples that come to mind are Spotify and Slack. Products that were, at one time, a pleasure to use, but have since been significantly degraded by a continual assault of minor features and re-working of UI.

for a long time, iDevices could not copy&paste. locking to one of those versions with no new features would be horrendous. not all new features are bad or trivial.

Edit: pedant patrol

iOS doesn't even need more features, it needs way less. Sadly that isn't how the world work.

For my one use case I noticed that the newest iOS release doesn't appear to be tested on the iPhone SE 3. The "Press home to unlock" and "X new notification" texts are now laid on top of each other on the lock screen. You're looking right at it when picking up your phone, so you can't miss it, yet Apple QA did.

Yea im also getting tired of the constant updates and featuritis.

I still have a 16” Intel Macbook pro and looking for my next machine and am seriously considering a Linux notebook for the first time. Im mostly coding and doing docker stuff. No excel and photoshop is a bit of an issue though.

This is basically Debian.

Yeah annoys me too.

You can turn them back on everywhere in Settings -> Appearance -> Show scroll bars always.

I mean as a user I haven’t thought about a scroll bar in years. The way the OS works with the hardware for touchpad usage means it’s just not a big deal.

Even when I used a mouse on a Mac desktop it still never bothered me. Looks cleaner, feels sleeker and doesn’t impact functionality.

You don't need an Apple account to install an adblocker. You just install it from here https://adguard.com/en/adguard-mac/overview.html

And you don't have to pay for it, just close the ask.

> I know a lot of people don't like it, but since Microsoft introduced it I've had no trouble authenticating into SMB shares in home and SMB environments.

Same. I get that people don't like having to "buy" into an ecosystem. But credit where it's due - Microsoft eliminated dozens of different logins over the last decade. If you jump between multiple machines all the time, it's legitimately a decent experience. You can even be simultaneously logged into your personal and work OneDrives at the same time under the same user and everything just pretty much works.

You can log into your Mac and your AppleTV and your iPhone and your iPad and all the services Apple has to offer with your Apple account. How is Microsoft offering the same thing any better?

Yep. A lot of software companies are suffering from this short-term-ism that results in incentive structures that value things that move the stock price rather than make for a strong long term company.

It may eventually blow up in faces, but a lot of the people making money on it today won't be around to see it.

Apple seems like the kind of company that would greatly benefit from having someone opinionated at the helm to keep the different teams oriented towards a unified vision and to intervene when a team produces something crappy

Yep... same with google...

Make old chat system better (or just maintain it?)... meh boring...

Make new google chat.. talk.. alo.. i mean hangouts? Yep, promotions, bonuses!

> as shitty as Microsoft's.

If I ever feel down on the Mac, I can go to a PC and try make a pdf or view one. Clunky AF.

Mac software might be at a low-point, but it hasn’t burnt down yet.