Apple has lost the functional high ground

[Andrew Kimery]

I don’t have any personal experience with 10.9 or 10.10 so I can’t comment on whether or not the bugs being talked about were really all that problematic or more of the tempest-in-an-Internet-teapot variety (
10.8.x is the most recent OS I’m running and one of my machines is still on 10.6.8!).

I wonder how much the annual OS X upgrade cycle has to do with the annual iOS upgrade cycle? Mobile devices (especially ones on contracts like phones) need an annual hook to keep people locked in and if you want to keep expanding the functionality between mobile and desktop then I guess you need to keep the desktop OS on a faster update cycle too.

[Charlie Austin]

“…an OS riddled with embarrassing bugs and fundamental regressions.”

Well, that’s specific. Be nice if he maybe noted what he was talking about…

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~ My FCPX Babbling blog ~
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[John Davidson]

[Charlie Austin] “”…an OS riddled with embarrassing bugs and fundamental regressions.”

Well, that’s specific. Be nice if he maybe noted what he was talking about…
“

That’s what I was thinking too. I find Yosemite to be much more tightened up than Mavericks was. This point last year we were still having IMAP issues and all sorts of fun stuff. This year Yosemite has been surprisingly stable. Just the SMB upgrades alone were worth it.

Do you think this has something to do with annoyance at having to rewrite Instapaper’s safari plugin?

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[Marcus Moore]

Arment hasn’t owned Instapaper for a few years, so probably not.

[Walter Soyka]

I feel very strongly that this is true:

“The problem seems to be quite simple: they’re doing too much, with unrealistic deadlines. We don’t need major OS releases every year. We don’t need each OS release to have a huge list of new features. We need our computers, phones, and tablets to work well first so we can enjoy new features released at a healthy, gradual, sustainable pace.”

But it’s not just about users — it’s about developers, too [link]. IMHO, an OS should above all be a stable platform for development, but when third-party developers are forced to spend extra time on QA to keep up with fast OS changes, it takes away from feature development. When the OS developer is focused principally on new features, it takes away from their ability to resolve OS bugs reported by developers.

Of course, the flipside is that rapid OS development with piles of high-level features and libraries is good for new apps which are well-positioned to exploit them — but eventually, they will become “legacy” apps, too; then, see above.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Peter Dearmond]

Some additional perspective on this is offered at John Gruber’s blog: https://daringfireball.net

[Phil Hoppes]

[David Mathis] “Side note, I have been considering jumping to Linux. Problem is, which flavor? Just my rambling tangent and two cents, carry on!”

Curious… for what? All of my personal data servers are Linux. I run CentOS. RedHat has gotten goofy IMHO on their Fedora releases. I use to like KDE but now find the desktop next to worthless. For a server I want stability and reliability. I don’t need gee-wiz interfaces. CentOS is built on Red Hat Enterprise releases. They are quite stable and if you doing anything with LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) installation is a snap.

[Helmut Kobler]

I was saying the same thing a year ago in the last few paragraphs of this article: https://library.creativecow.net/kobler_helmut/Mac-Pro-review/1

And the bugginess seems even worse now, not better.

The one thing I can dispute about this new blog entry you brought up is where the blame goes. I say it goes directly on Tim Cook, who has been at the helm while Apple slowly but steadily squandered its most valuable asset: reliability and ease of use.

I can’t help notice that as soon as Jobs died, Cook began creating a “kinder, gentler” Apple — one with longer vacations for employees, with matching contributions to charities, with $20,000 subsidies for egg freezing and with mea culpas to scoundrels and shake down artists like Jesse Jackson during his ridiculous crusade over minority hiring in Silicon Valley.

This has been Tim’s unique mark, and it’s all been done in tandem with a noticeable drop in product quality. I don’t think Tim is strong enough to ride herd over the sprawl that Apple has become due to its growth. Jobs could but Cook can’t. And Tim seems too interested in creating a culture that embodies his “progressive” values, instead of having a laser focus on the products themselves and attracting people who have that same focus (as opposed to those seeking a cushy, perk-laden job at a rich company).

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Los Angeles Cameraman
Canon C300 (x2), Zeiss CP.2 lenses, P2 Varicam, etc.
http://www.lacameraman.com

[Shane Ross]

This is true of any software. We ALL want the software to be made stable before new features are released. WE have this talk all the time about NLEs too. We want Avid/FCP/Adobe current feature set to be trouble free, BEFORE we add new ones. Adding new onto the troubled old is just piling garbage on top of garbage.

It’s not just Apple, it’s everyone. The only way to market (“sell”) a new release, to pay for all the work poured into it…is to add new features. If A new version came out that was just a bug fix…companies would have a hard time getting people to pay for that. “What? Pay to have things work like they should have the first time you released it? HA!” Thus why they make a new version…that fixes some old bugs, but has new features to bring in the cash.

Although Apple hasn’t charged one red cent for any new release of FCX….beyond your initial buy in. Buy it once, updates forever it seems. And now the OS is free…well, that’s covered by the high high cost of the hardware.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Chris Harlan]

Nice Boris review. I use it all the time, though mostly RED/Avid FX, these days.