Apple is now so focused on marketing-driven goals that its software quality has “taken a nosedive” in the last few years, argues a blog post by Instapaper creator and former Tumblr lead developer Marco Arment.
[OS X is] riddled with embarrassing bugs and fundamental regressions [and] I fear that Apple’s leadership doesn’t realize quite how badly and deeply their software flaws have damaged their reputation
People are sticking with OS X not because they love it, he suggests, but because Windows is worse and desktop Linux is too much hassle.
The issue, believes Arment, is that Apple is so focused on releasing a major new version of OS X each year that it is making it impossible for engineering teams to maintain quality.
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.
Twitter commentators seem largely in agreement. What are your views? Would you like to see a slower pace of development in order to have greater reliability? Or do the new features make any glitches worthwhile? Take our poll, and let us know your views in the comments.
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I think this only applies to Yosemite and iOS 8. Mavericks was a solid OS, and so was Mountain Lion. Yosemite is a lot more stable now with the latest software update, and iOS 8 is pretty stable now too. It was just the initial release had some big bugs.
Umm, Mavericks is the worst release Apple has ever released, period. Yosemite is much better in every respect. The problem however started with OSX 10.5
Saying “period” doesn’t make you come across as someone with an authoritative voice we should listen to, it’s makes you sound stupid. Not sure if that’s what you were going for.
As Steve Jobs said, you can’t connect the dots before hand.
In 2013 Apple had a big reorganization and it included a change in the people who define the software (and the design, but Marco does not protest against that… in this post).
2013 brought a new look and more interoperability. 2014 brought most desired features…
Apple fixes its problems not fast but rightly.
And we have to leave the cradle and become users.
OS X has always been unstable prioritising marketing. The only time they’ve done a reliable release was due to marketing; OS X Snow Leopard.
“OS X has always been unstable prioritising marketing” said the PC fan boy. I’ve encountered at best, FIVE kernel panics in over ten years, and six major releases of OSX. That’s not just my machine, that’s ALL of the 50+ Macs I support. The number of bluescreens, failed boots, corrupted registries, bad updates, and endless torrent of malware on the PC side is astronomically greater than any faults with OS X. Let’s try to have a little intellectual integrity, shall we?
As a mac user since 2006, I’d hardly call myself a PC fan boy — perhaps next time skip the allegations when they have no foundations.
His points are spot on but investors panic when Apple doesnt introduce a game changer fast enough so to keep the stock value growing they have to “wow” us annually.
It goes beyond this as Apple is becoming a company that defies what Steve Jobs created. I have replaced my iPhone 6plus three times as a result of defective hardware/software; my husband has replaced his twice; and my daughter once………Apple has lost its focus and I am very disappointed as I have been loyal to Apple since day 1….
You must have the worst luck ever. No person in my circle of users has has to replace any hardware- so your experience is not indicative. I feel bad for you, but I don’t think your issues translate to a wider sampling of users.
so his anecdotal evidence isn’t indicative, but yours is? lol
I agree with Bruno. In 10 years and more than 20 Apple devices I’ve had exactly TWO hardware issues: recalled hard drive on an iMac and a stuck power button on an iPhone 4. That’s pretty freaking spectacular if you ask me.
Are you serious? 3 Times, husband 2 times, daughter 1 time? Only iPhone 6/6 Plus? Come on, nobody will believe that… And you don’t get a phone replaced for broken software, you just restore it.
Some people can’t take care of their things. Every day I see people with broken screens and no case on their phone. Faulty design or poor care? I’ve had a cell phone since the early 90’s and I’ve never broken one. You milage may vary.
I don’t think I’ve agreed with an article so wholeheartedly in as long as I remember! The two quotes could have come from my lips!
Between the atrocity that is iTunes, the fact that junk mail filtering has stopped for iCloud accounts and the black text on dark blue background buttons, OS X Yosemite doesn’t even seem like it’s ready for beta testing.
“the fact that junk mail filtering has stopped for iCloud accounts”
Junk mail filtering not only works just fine for my iCloud email addresses, but for the first time since Leopard I feel like it’s listening to my suggestions for what is and isn’t junk.
I sent a copy of your reply to the second tier Apple tech support person I’ve been working with. According to what I’ve been told, the mail client no longer processes junk mail. Everything is done at the server. Clicking the “this is junk” button no longer does anything if you have an iCloud account. For weeks prior to the election I was getting well over 300 emails in my inbox per day, with similar lunacy between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I got a final email from Apple tech support confirming this two days ago so I’m in the process of testing Thunderbird.
And Safari’s grey text on a grey background.
Unusable for me.
And don’t get me started about the grey sidebar (thankfully there’s a hack).
Apple, if you don’t want us to read it then don’t show it!!!
i have stopped filing bug reports as Apple never addressed those and things are getting messier than ever – be it Xcode, OS X, or iOS.
100% Agree here.
Also they are removing features and terminating software that make no sense at all.
I got a MacMini just to use GarageBand to make Podcast but they eliminated that feature with no replacement. It doesn’t make sense to me.
I guess this is the Post Steve Apple.
You can still make a Podcast with Garageband… Here is a youtube video to help you learn the new way of doing it in the latest Garageband.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ3KTu8LLHw
Nope, this is just a work around that any basic audio editing software can do. The Podcast Specific tools were removed. Ironic since Apple started the Podcast concept and GarageBand was the Go To Tool to do that.
And don’t let me start with Apple Aperture which was abandoned too. This make people who are serious about their work think twice before committing to any Apple software since its future is so unreliable.
So what exactly are you wanting that you can do with the work around.. If you are complaining that you can embed images anymore then ok I guess. Apple just realized as most people that no one ever looked at their screen while listening to a podcast. People listen to podcasts not watch them. Sure the links might be nice every once in a while but nothing I couldn’t listen to and search for when needed…
I think Marco’s post on this was EXTREMELY short sighted. Not that it was a bad post, but there are so many far reaching issues/concerns here that he just didn’t touch. To name a few: the OS is quickly becoming too complex. Gone is the day that an OS was simply a machine interface for other software. To reach the level of non-complexity he wants, we’d have to move back to a simple OS with almost zero features, and allow the apps to take over everything else. Heck, even Android is moving away from this simple theme to meet market demand. That last part is the second complexity it today’s tech World. The consumer is expecting more and more. Gone are the days of “tight code”, simply because to “just make it work” doesn’t apply when you put it up against “wetware” (i.e. humans) To just make it work takes a LOT of code and a LOT of time. But trying to keep up with the sloppy coding of Android, or some farther forks of Linux just won’t cut it any more. Sure they crank out some really cool features, but they fail far more often than does OSx, iOS or any flavor of Windows. Speaking of Windows, has anyone noticed that Windows is becoming more of a “it just works” OS these days…..
huh? most my friends have switched to Android in the last year BECAUSE it’s so smooth. Users don’t care how sloppy the code is. Android made a choice to play the long game and it’s working remarkably well. They through everything they could under the hood, stuff Apple fans dreamed and begged Apple for and then figured out how to make it work. The OS was a mess 6 years ago, but now it’s stable and really making me think about switching over like my friends. Apple’s trying to have their cake and eat it too, closed simple system, and not letting apps do the heavy lifting to fill in OSX’s/iOS’s weaknesses. How many apps have been pulled from the app store lately?
Marco Arment makes some good points about the state of Apple’s software. I agree with him on some points and hope Apple tries to make 2015 the year of perfecting what we have before they add anything to it. Much of the appeal of Apple’s software has been that for the most part “it just worked” and did so well. Since the introduction of iOS 7, it seems that the quality has taken somewhat of a hit. It took 6 months until 7.1 came out (and finally made my iPad’s usable) to fix several serious issues and major performance issues – especially on older devices. iOS 8 has been out for a while (8.1.2 as of this writing) and there’s still a ton of bugs to work out. With the last update my iPhone 6 frequently lags when navigating through my home screens and in and out of folders. It is embarrassing that it’s happening and even more so that its occurring on their flagship devices. Apple has the chance – during this year’s annual software refresh – to commit to keeping their software at the top of the pack. We have plenty of features – now we need them to work reliably. I never should have to reboot to make things work right. Or live with issues. Apple has always excelled at providing a user experience that’s above and beyond. Let’s hope they remember that as they unveil iOS 9 and OS X 10.11 at WWDC. To be clear, OS X has been pretty good for me (Yosemite) with a few annoying small bugs. I’ve had a lot of issues with iOS on my iPhone 6 that make it frustrating to use reliably. I do hope that they focus on quality rather than feature quantity – but I still feel they’re far ahead of anyone else quality wise. I think Apple will address this with the next round of major updates and I’m not too worried about their future.
I’ll take odd glitches and annoying little bugs over crashes any day. And that is my experience running Yosemite and iOS 8. And on previous-gen hardware no less.
My experience with Yosemite has been that this is the most unpolished version of OS X I’ve ever used (And I used Cheetah), however it is also the most useful and sturdy version of OS X I’ve used in a while. This machine had so many problems running Mavericks, problems that either got a lot better or went away completely after upgrading to Yosemite. This is also the first version of OS X that I haven’t been forced to abandon some older program to use. And Dark Mode, as broken as it was leading up to the release is perfect. I set it immediately and haven’t looked back – best UI for OS X ever.
My experience with iOS 8 is similar, I actually couldn’t contain myself and installed the GM a few weeks before it officially went out. I had no issue running .0, which is first for me with iOS.
I think what’s happening here is the old guard, which expects military creases and spit polish to be the norm are upset that Apple is prioritizing core stability and features over that. Cook has proven that he is the best person to lead Apple, in more ways that one. He’s also proven that he’s not sitting in an ivory tower.
Did we already completely forget where Apple was at this time last year? AirDrop on Mac wouldn’t talk to AirDrop on iOS! THAT was unacceptable. Fixed. iCloud was somewhere between a train wreck and a laughing stock. I can’t remember the last issue I had with cloud syncing (on both first-party and third-party software). Skewmorphism on OS X, Springboard crashes, iCloud making OneDrive look like a good alternative… That’s old news now.
Marko Arment is an intelligent guy, I listen to him a lot in podcasts (and you should too), but he is one of those people who still doesn’t get that the Steve Jobs Apple is gone. It’s been replaced with an Apple that is wound tighter than a watch, ships on time, gives openly to charity, vocally supports minorities and marginalized groups, brings the hammer down on suppliers that break the law, and doesn’t hold grudges at the company’s expense.
The dust hasn’t completely settled, and that’s the source of some of their problems right now, but Apple is now in a far better position to live in current times and to handle it being the world’s biggest and most influential technology company. Of course the exact contrast of text on a button is further down the priority list than it was when Steve would stomp down the hall and demand an entire department stop what they’re doing to change the hue of an icon. That was okay when Apple was US-centric and video iPods were the biggest thing they sold. Now there are more important things to do first.
Things have been getting, are getting, and will continue to get better. I deeply enjoy the Apple products in my life, flaws and all. Because while they are not perfect, and never will be, they are always better. 2015 looks extremely promising for Apple.
@AeronPeryton:
Good read. I think that’s the most measured and sane response to the world of technology in general, let alone Apple in particular that I’ve read in response to Ament’s post. Nicely done. And my general position too.
Not really sure what you’re talking about. iCloud has been a disaster the last few months. App developers are livid because a) nothing on their apps sync with iCloud for some reason or b) Apple’s randomly deciding not to let the app do what it was designed to do and had been doing for some time.
I never mind reading someone’s insights and reviews or comparisons to other OS’s, but simply saying it’s better is meaningless. Nothing you’ve written speaks to a person who’s used a different OS.
I don’t agree with the premise of the question. Yes there are software issues. Yes Apple is probably taking on too much too soon. But I don’t think its because of marketing. Let’s not forget prior to iOS 7 there were plenty of complaints about iOS lacking features Android had, about the interface being stale, etc. Heck the Verge ran a long story about iOS getting stale called ‘It’s Always 73 Degrees and Sunny’. In my view the issue is the old guard allowing iOS to get stale and now the new guard is forced to play catch up. Which results in not polished software due to making a lot of changes in a short amount of time.
To add my opinion. I didn’t see any glitches/bugs in the iOS 8 or Mac OS X Yosemite and I use them daily.
For a long time, Apple has followed a cyclical pattern in which they release 1-2 OSes with lots of new features that is riddled with stupid bugs, followed by a release that restores the OS to its previous glory with respect to stability. Leopard was released with tons of new features, but was relatively unstable, however the stability issues were addressed in Snow Leopard. The OS also took a notable dip in quality when Lion was released, however was restored to its previous glory with the release of Mountain Lion and Mavericks. I would argue that the Mavericks -> Yosemite update is less stable, however is nowhere near as bad as Snow Leopard -> Lion was.
Assuming that Apple continues this trend, I fully expect the next OSX release to fix lots of these issues in favor of piling on a swath of new features. With iOS 8 and Yosemite, Apple has positioned themselves well to remain a dominant competitor in the evolving, multi-device tech landscape, and I still have faith in them to ensure the stability of their product moving forward.
That being said, the bugs are annoying and it feels like many of them should have been fixed prior to the OS’s launch, even if the release had to be pushed back a month or two.
Snow Leopard was a special case. Much of it was a completely rewritten and a lot of old code was removed including support for the PowerPC. It had a smaller footprint on disk and in memory. Most of the upgrade was “under the hood” and only a few obvious new features were added.
I think it’s time for Apple to do this again for both OS X and iOS with special attention being given to iTunes.
I agree with his assessment. While I haven’t experienced a lot of issues with Yosemite I have seen a huge jump in memory usage with the new OS that has impacted battery life and performance.
With iOS 8 I still experience a lot of bugs. The one that bothers me the most is the music app not synchronizing properly from iTunes but there are still issues with 3rd party keyboards and other issues.
I’m getting pretty frustrated with the issues on my phone particularly because it is the one piece of tech I keep on me at all times which makes it very personal to me and thus the most frustrating.
I pretty much disagree with the majority of what’s being said here.. Yosemite has been a very solid piece of software for me. I am a network engineer, and I run a lot of things in VMs, which tend to push the system to the limit.
Yosemite has been probably the most solid and glitch free experience for me since Snow Leopard days. All the apps and tools that I use worked out of the box, and majority of the new features (Continuity etc) have been great as well. I don’t remember this ever being the case with past MacOS upgrades.
I suspect a couple of reasons why people are having issues:
(1) They attempt to run 10.10 on old hardware – I think the guy that Marco’s article linked to complained about Macbook Pro fans spinning up, which rarely happens with the Haswell MBPs. Guess what – if your Mac is 5 years old. Don’t expect modern software to run butter smooth on your 7 year old Core i3 MacBook.
(2) People do in-place OS upgrades. Do yourself a favor and do a clean install. I do this once a year, as part of the annual OS X upgrade. Yes it’s more work to re-install the apps, but it’s imperative to a stable machine to completely remove all of the crud that piled up and start fresh from time to time.
I am pretty certain that those of us who do both of the above things have a lot less to complain about.
i think you’ve managed to support part of the point that arment is making. the hardware cycle has never been as short as 5 years, and neither should it be when you’re talking about $1000+ equipment.
Loaded question. Stop sensationalizing. I promise I’ll click regardless.
The hardware quality is also not as good as before, my last 3 MacBook Pro (2009,2010) all have a dead battery, meanwhile my iBook (2001), PowerBook G4 (2003) and iBook G4 (2005) are still running and never had any problem. Similarly my last 3 iMac (2007,2009,2012) all had to be serviced (drive,display) while my iMac (2002), eMac (2004) and iMac G4 (2006) are still running and never had any failure.
I totally agree with Marco and others on this, just take a look at some of the “Made by Apple” products on the Mac Appstore and you’ll have a hint of the current “quality software is secondary” trend at Apple.
The main reason I moved to Macs was because it’s been widely known that it provided the best experience for Music Production. DAW software (Digital Audio Workstation) available for Windows and Macs tends to work more stable on Macs, and one of the flagship products on this arena (Apple’s Logic Pro) is only available for Macs and it’s used widely by top producers and music studios around the world. Logic Pro used to be the perfect blend of Apple’s Hardware+Software experience.
These days I’m very concerned that Apple might abandon Logic Pro as they did with Aperture considering the trend that they’ve shown with this software package over the past year:
The current version of Logic (Logic Pro X) was plagued from the beginning with numerous critical bugs, so Apple had to release seven updates to take it to the current 10.0.7 version. This latest one still has many bugs that either were present since the first release or that were introduced later on, and those bugs have not been squashed yet. Logic Pro X 10.0.7 was released in May of 2014, so it’s been 7 months without an update to what used to be one of Apple’s poster-child software to show how powerful Macs are.
The result is that users are abandoning Logic Pro in favor of its main competitor “Ableton Live”, which even though is not free of bugs it is backed by a company that its passionate about their software and they work constantly on updating it.
All in all I think that products like Logic Pro and Final Cut might suffer the same fate as Aperture down the road, essentially because Apple is not focused anymore on providing great hardware+software on the Mac platform… that’s why they’ll start abandoning their flagship software products as they don’t seem to care anymore about the “Mac App Store”.
iOS 8 Beta 1 wasn’t a Beta, it Seemed like an Alpha Release to me. And That started with iOS 7. I have never seen such a buggy Beta and final release in iOS. And I’m sorry, but I believe that it’s like this because Forstall is missing. Even if iOS 6 had basically no new features and Maps was bad, Forstall would never have released such a buggy version and this shows what is important to the new iOS Leadership (Ive and Federighi)… And I’m really sad about this.
I voted Yes…in fact, within this comment box, using the latest Yosemite and Safari, I will be unable to highlight text properly after I have typed a certain amount of text…there a many simple little things like this that should work, that don’t, I just don’t get how they can release something that works, but, hampers our UI experience, the Finder being one of them…I’ve not had to relaunch finder so much in any other OS X, it’s just not a smart business move. Others have wifi & bluetooth issues. And, sometimes my iOS devices have a hard time finding 5GHz wifi networks. These are basic things that should work and not take up our time trying to get them to work, after I get home, power-cycle the iPhone to get wifi calling to work, etc. I just don’t recall having to give so many power cycles before, or having continued issues with basic things.
FYI: If you haven’t upgraded to Yosemite yet, wait for 10.10.3. That was the old rule of thumb I used to use and recommend again.
*note: I sometimes, if not often, but not always have to power-cycle my iPhone to get wifi calling to work.
Aperture: why even release a product like this if you are not going long-term with it?
Also: Apple has stopped giving security updates for 10.6 snow leopard and 10.7 lion. Not smart business. Especially when businesses are the last to update their OS’s.
They need to slow down a bit, go back to being the best and innovating, don’t try to lead, others can do that, and keep the bugs that come with.
We need faster internet everywhere before we need to be doing more in “the cloud”. The internet is not up to par, and we have cell data limitations that make it so we could not possibly afford to store our photo library in the cloud, or get throttled on unlimited plans when we go beyond a certain point. Well, unless you live in another country, then you have fast internet, but, the US is behind.
I have had software issues with all of my apple devices. With Mavericks it was WiFi and Time Capsule – both fixed by AppleCare. Now it’s logging on, being locked out until I reboot and the problem has been escalated to ‘engineers’ by an AppleCare supervisor. Safari also seems to trigger the ‘spinning wheel of death’ and forces a reboot. Don’t get me wrong AppleCare Specialist are helping me with all of these issues. However, my AppleCare plan is something I never want to use.
FYI the polls don’t appear in Chrome!
Strange – works fine in the current version (39.0.2171.95 (64-bit)) here.
I don’t think it necessarily needs to be all or nothing. Sure they can slow down features. Rather than launching all of the new features mentioned at WWDC in the next update – release them over a year. Use WWDC as a year ahead preview. Then launch half of the features in the next iOS, but then update that software with more features every 2 months or so. It gives developers time to integrate the features in their apps. With iOS 8 Apple added the ability for one app to launch another, and bring up a certain post, by interfacing through the OS. However, if you click an Instagram link in Twitter it’ll take you to that app’s browser. It’ll also help with learning fatigue. Sometimes I find there are features I never use because they were released alongside a few dozen others and got lost in the mix.
Had mac computers (desktop, laptops) for years and always bragged about how they are so reliable even being used most everyday. For the first time I’m disappointed with Yosemite. Mega-bugs that make me want to scream.
Please send the results of this poll to any contacts you might have at Apple. It’s very troublesome to see how far they’ve declined since Steve jobs death.
Two words: SNOW MAVERICKS