I am biggest fan of apple. Please apple don’t become another BlackBerry.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Now Seeking More Software Engineers Than Hardware Engineers
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I am biggest fan of apple. Please apple don’t become another BlackBerry.
That’s a completely different fruit.
Better predictive text for when your keyboard gets a dust speck in it?
About freaking time... a lot of their software needs help. I've been on the phone several times with Apple developers regarding iTunes on Windows, and how it botches up it's backups. It needs a rewrite from the ground up.
I've also given feedback recently on a recent iOS updating bug on my iPhone 7 which didn't patch the phone but instead went in a continuous downloading loop, without applying the patch. I had to reboot the phone in order to make it work properly again. It may have been a freak one-off issue but clearly the quality of much of their software has gone downhill, and hopefully this additional hiring helps make some meaningful improvements.
I've also given feedback recently on a recent iOS updating bug on my iPhone 7 which didn't patch the phone but instead went in a continuous downloading loop, without applying the patch. I had to reboot the phone in order to make it work properly again. It may have been a freak one-off issue but clearly the quality of much of their software has gone downhill, and hopefully this additional hiring helps make some meaningful improvements.
Software doesn't just mean iOS, iTunes etc. Software also means writing algorithms that allowed Google to leapfrog Apple in photography esp. Night Sight. with just a single camera - good software can often overcome hardware limitations.
Apple badly needs to focus better on hiring top-quality software engineers, particularly because in Silicon Valley especially - they're fighting for enormous mindshare between rivals like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, etc. as well as smaller trending "unicorn" startups.
Apple badly needs to focus better on hiring top-quality software engineers, particularly because in Silicon Valley especially - they're fighting for enormous mindshare between rivals like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, etc. as well as smaller trending "unicorn" startups.
Just because someone calls out BS does not mean he has hit a nerve.
Aside from the fact that you probably get paid really well, being an engineer for Apple must suck... They probably come up with some great innovative ideas only to get stifled all the time because Apple trickles out updates and changes so slooooowly.
And to add to that, I can only imagine the amount of pressure a software engineer endures, Especially given how stringent Apple is with amount of expectation that they have moving forward with implementation, and software seems to take the most scrutiny, given Apples hardware expectations usually have strong reputation.
I’m so glad that Apple is also expanding its Internet of Things / home automation ecosystem with brand new products like the recently updated Time Capsule and Airport.
Oh wait.
Oh wait.
True, but if you worked for Apple, it's unlikely that you'd be asked to cover multiple bases (hardware and software) and likely that you'd even be prohibited from doing more than one job. Large team mega-organization environments are very different from start-up environments.
What? You’re absolutely wrong. 9/10 they don’t test it on devices, they test it on software tools. They don’t need to grab an iPhone everytime they want to see if it’s working.
Also, skills in software don’t translate over to hardware. That’s like saying a builder would be able to create a website and vice versa.
It's their software that needs more fixing, not the hardware. Especially on the iPad Pro. Those who edit video don't want to store 10s of gigabytes of data in the cloud, or on the photo stream, unorganized. While the hardware has a TB of storage, there's no file system to store anything on it. Not to mention you can't work on two Word documents at the same time, which every other computer can do. It needs a lot of work.
iOS on the iPad Pro needs a serious overhaul.....hopefully these new software engineers etc. they are hiring are not just for the Services because I assume it's for their new Services......a mess
Surprising considering how bad Apple Music (Android), iTunes (Windows) and Siri are.
So now they have successfully developed MacBooks with failing keyboards, failing displays, failing speakers and bending iPads, they can slow down on developing hardware and focus on software.
When I was designing CPUs it was pretty hard to decide most days whether I was a software engineer or hardware engineer. I wrote buttloads of code. And a lot of hardware engineering is writing code in specialized languages.
(Narrator: he was a hardware engineer)
For a large and wealthy company, it baffles me how Apple can only focus on one thing at a time.
Not really.
I'm a hardware guy and while I can write C/Objective C/C++; my main language for development is Verilog.
It would be such a rare occurrence for me to write software for release that you might see a unicorn first.
The hardware people I know don't cross the line into software development. They might write a System C model occasionally, but almost never core for release. I understand software but have no desire to do it.
My recompile costs a million or more and takes 6 months.
In the same vein, a CS major or software engineer is normally not qualified to do hardware design.
The mentality is very different.