What's wrong with Apple?

[MEMSMaster]

Here's a good summary of analysis throughout the industry of current Apple iOS software quality concerns:

http://mjtsai.com/blog/2014/10/11/apples-software-quality-decline/

It isn't just a few isolated malcontents who have these concerns.

 

[aristobrat]

And even with the products! They are not well made anymore!

I have a rMBP from 2013 that needed to replace the motherboard twice after one year of usage! Thank God i bought AppleCare!

My iPhone 5s came with a broken display right out of the box!

When were they ever consistently well made?

Here's a blurb from a MacWorld review from back in 2003.

Quality-Control Issues

We can't check the vital signs of every computer Apple ships. We can, however, report on the quality of the PowerBooks we've received, and that report is not encouraging. Of six 15-inch PowerBooks Macworld ordered from a non-Apple retailer, three had to be returned. One repeatedly locked up and experienced kernel panics after being unplugged from an external monitor, another's fan ran constantly, and another displayed only the magenta video channel when plugged into an external display. So if you absolutely must have this PowerBook now, be prepared for potential problems.

The screen on the 1.25GHz 15-inch PowerBook used for this review exhibited a white blotch about the size of a dime when we put a white background (such as a blank Microsoft Word document) on the desktop. And the latch on this PowerBook locked inconsistently -- the lid occasionally popped up after it had been closed for a couple of seconds. Reports of such latch problems are widespread on the Discussions area of Apple's Web site and on other Mac-related sites.

We understand that the first version of a computer is likely to have a few problems, but if our small sampling is any indication of how other 15-inch PowerBooks are leaving the factory, Apple might benefit from cocking a sterner eye toward quality control.

http://www.macworld.com/article/1027456/15inchpowerbookg4s.html

 

[iamMacPerson]

My 6 plus was much better quality wise then my 6. Just was too big. Others here have agreed the 6 plus quality is better then the 6.

I'm hoping ios8.1 is better.

Interesting. My brother is getting the regular iPhone 6 so I will be sure to compare them. If true that seems rather redundant.

Here to iOS 8.1!

Sounds like you didn't experience iOS 7.0 through 7.0.3 on the 5s. THAT was far buggier than any version of iOS 8 that I've installed so far.

Except for the Verizon iPhone 4 (which ran a custom version of iOS 4 for the CDMA radio) the iPhone 6 Plus is the first iPhone I purchased on the date of release. The 5 I had to get in October 2012 because of my Early Upgrade Date (when VZW was still doing that). The 5s I didn't get till April 2014 so it shipped with iOS 7.1.

But, I think a big part of this has to do with coinciding a new OS with new hardware. Recall that the early versions of iOS 7 crashed the apps twice as often on the 5s than other iPhones, with Safari crashing and occasionally causing the phone to restart. A big part of this has to do with what the actual changes to the OS are.

iOS 7 primarily focused on the UI. The underlying code was not extensively retooled, except in the case of the 5s where Apple had to do an end-to-end transition to 64-bit, not only with iOS but with the bundled apps as well. This would be the equivalent of the OS X 64-bit transition that took 10.4 through 10.7 to complete, all occurring in one update. The "white screen of death" random reset issues, Safari crashes, and Touch ID "fade" issues were much more specific to the 5s, and not surprisingly, centered on the key hardware revisions (the 64-bit A7 and Touch ID).

I remember reading those articles. I think what it eventually came down to was iOS apps not being updated to 64-bit. I never had the white screen issues, Safari crashed every now again but not as bad as it does now (at least on my 6 Plus). I also did experience the degrade with my iPhone 5s, and it really wasn't fixed for me until I did a fresh reinstall of iOS 7.1.2.

It is worth noting however that my iPad mini 2nd Gen Retina (which I recently sold) had similar, albeit less common bugs especially Safari. I noticed that when typing on either my iPhone or iPad on these forums, the app would freeze and I would either have to wait for it to refresh or quit Safari entirely and relaunch it.

iOS 8 is more of a extensive change under-the-hood, so the bugs are more spread out. This is a similarly broad expansion of the OS as OS X Leopard 10.5 was, and recall how many updates that OS required before it found its stride, and it had more than 2 1/2 years in development.

You might be confusing Leopard 10.5 with Snow Leopard 10.6. IMO, 10.6 was a lot larger rewrite then 10.5. Now, 10.5 did have some changes under the hood, but 10.6 had quite a few more and perfected 64-bit computing under OS X. From 10.0-10.5, the Finder was written in the Carbon API. With 10.6 the Finder was re-written in Cocoa.

 

[100thMonkey]

Apple is selling massive quantities of electronics. Manufacturing is not perfect and gets better through time.

I ordered my 5S the night that it went on sale with Apple and it has lasted nicely. I have had a 15 rMBP for a few months and I am really happy with it. I hold off several days to weeks before installing any OS upgrades. There's a reason why early adopters are on the bleeding edge.

The continuity feature of Yosemite of abso-freakin-litely amazing. NO ONE ELSE HAS ANYTHING like it....and people expect that it will be flawless before it makes it to general release...clearly they aren't parents. Improvement takes time.

But yes, if Apple hired more staff to do more testing so that their products were perfect upon release, I would three times as much and get everything on the bleeding edge. But the pain in that case would be the price point as opposed to early adopter issues.

 

[SusanK]

I'm not good with dates, but I do remember product introductions. The beginning of Apple's software quality problems on the Mac side started with OS X Lion and also with the versions of iLife after the ones that included iMovie 06 HD. I think that was also around the time Bertrand Serlet left, who had headed OS X development. Now Scott Forstall who was heading iOS has been gone for some years. And of course Steve Jobs has been gone for three years, but even before then he probably had taken on a "big picture" role for some time and had been less hands-on.

My own theory is that Apple is a victim of its seemingly unstoppable success. I tried several years ago to get bugs hammered out with Apple's engineering team going through all the right channels and they were recalcitrant. I have the same networking issues between my Macs today that I had years ago. Mavericks cleaned up some bugs with TextEdit and QuickTime but many bugs linger. I don't think Tim Cook uses the products enough to know when something isn't right. I'm sure many people remember the summer before iOS 6 came out. All the developers running betas of it said Maps weren't ready. It was a train wreck everyone saw coming. How did the CEO of Apple not see it? Back when I was trying to get Apple to pay attention to bugs in the Mac OS the general feeling in society was that Apple had superior technology to Microsoft. There is a lag in what the media reports and what the situation actually is.

There's a saying in medicine that a patient does not all of a sudden deteriorate—the doctor all of a sudden notices. I think that's what's happened. The bugs I use to encounter were on the Mac side, and I don't think people use their Macs as heavily as I do mine so these were things people didn't care about. But when it hits iOS--that's when people care. That's when people notice.

I'm not sure if the problems Apple has with software have to do with Jobs dying or not. The timeline coincides with when he became sick and was technically CEO but may have not been hands on. Tim Cook was apparently a whiz at whittling away fat and pitting manufacturers against each other, improving margins. Jony Ive is apparently a whiz at staring into the distance and coming up with designs. Steve Jobs, though he wasn't an engineer, was fascinated with software and GUIs. He certainly knew a good user experience from a bad one. Of course Apple has tens of thousands of employees. But the ones at the top do seem to make a difference.

I, too, have an all Apple ecosystem. And it doesn't work anymore—whether it's controlling my Apple TV, screensharing and file sharing between Macs, AirPlay audio dropping out, or various WiFi issues—things don't work great.

Excellent post. I am a longtime Apple user who like the OP no longer speaks of or recommends Apple. If someone else bring up the topic I may comment.

Your timeline is interesting. I bought a Mac running Lion. It would not connect to my AE. I returned it to Apple. I don't do out of the box problems. One year later I purchased a Mac running Mountain Lion. I love it. I have not upgraded to Mavericks.

My iOS devices run iOS 6. Too many issues experienced by friends with 7.0. Seemed to be debugged with point updates but then iOS 8.

Steve's death was a huge loss to the company. Cook was great at operations. CEO, not so much. I often wonder if he uses the products very much. Do others do his updates and put the device in his hand? Possibly he is given a device that is operating well and has no idea of what the average user endures.

Scott Forstall's absence is palpable. Discharging Forstall was a huge mistake.

I don't even want to comment on the entry into the fashion world. I miss Apple when it just worked. My things do work. They are not the latest but they work. I hesitate to think about the time they are finished.

I miss the real thing.

 

[tennisproha]

the problem is they are still selling their products like hot cakes. until they see a sales decline, I doubt they will care much honestly.

I feel like when Steve said these products should be an extension of ourselves and help us live better, he really meant it. you believed him.

with Tim, he seems very halfhearted about it when he speaks about the human connection. and his lingo of "awesome", "epic", "killer", and "amazeballs" is very off putting to me. a CEO of his nature shouldn't talk like that, I feel. if it was John Legere saying that, I'd be fine with it. but not Tim. I think it kills his credibility.

 

[Yun0]

Nothing is wrong. Brace yourself for a slew of deniers.

nothing is wrong with

every year is like this. every. single. year.

its getting old people..if is "so bad now" then sell ur idevice & go to android instead of pointing fingers at just cause the guy beside u is (sheep is 90% of society today)

 

[oldmacs]

nothing is wrong with

every year is like this. every. single. year.

its getting old people..if is "so bad now" then sell ur idevice & go to android instead of pointing fingers at just cause the guy beside u is (sheep is 90% of society today)

iOS 7.0 (Installed on launch day) on my iPhone 4 was less buggy than iOS 8 is on my iPhone 5. iOS 7 was of course slow on my 4 but there were FAR less bugs with it.

 

[cycledance]

they don't have to establish their brand anymore. they just sell stuff now. and they want u to buy more and more and upgrade often.

too many devices. i made a thread about this long ago where i suggested that apple should aggressively slim down on devices and i was attacked by everybody. they don´t have unlimited software engineers. they put them all over the place.

the mac part of apple is around 15% of the income. it's all about iphone, ipad, the music and app stores and the accessories. beats is probably bigger than the mac.

 

[iososx]

the problem is they are still selling their products like hot cakes. until they see a sales decline, I doubt they will care much honestly.

Now we're getting to the truth!

Apple has become too fat & happy, a typical corporate giant.

Clumsy and lumbering along drifting left and right under the weight of their own greed.

They have so much cash and other resources they know nothing can prevent them from doing whatever they want for their own benefit. Customers have been less important, profit taking the center of all activity.

Oh sure profits are the goal of any enterprise, yet a balance can be reached without sacrificing either customer satisfaction or a high level of revenue.

 

[borostef]

But hasn't that always been the case?

The difference now is that the guy who was entirely comfortable saying "NO", constructively, is no longer there.

I agree... This is what happens when you try to please everyone... You end up with a product that breaks more things then it fixes... IOS 8 is not a finished product, at least I hope so, because if it is finished then... Damn! It has made my user experience so much worse... Broken Pages app, broken airplay to Apple TV, problems with iCloud sync, to mention just a few...

 

[oldmacs]

Mavericks and iOS 8 were both rushed. Hopefully Yosemite has not been!

Double hoping that the public beta will have helped the stability

 

[Winona Northdakota]

What's wrong with Apple?

You're looking at the past with rose-colored glasses. There has never, ever been a time when everything "just worked" all the time.



Since you didn't come to the world of Apple until 2007, you missed the OS X transition. That was fun. You had a new OS that was incredibly slow, buggy, missing tons of basic functionality, and had almost no applications that ran on it, and an old OS that while tried and true, was built on archaic underpinnings and had all kinds of fundamental issues that could not be solved without the total rewrite that was OS X. To get anything done, you had to install both OSes (Macs for a time all shipped with two different operating systems preinstalled, both fully bootable - imagine that…) and switch between them depending on what you needed to do, what software you needed to run, and how adventurous you were feeling. It took many years for OS X to slowly turn from an unusable mess to a fast, stable, and useful operating system, and many years for developers to port their applications over.



I would say that I spend far more time being productive and far less time struggling with the operating system and the hardware on my Apple products than at any other time in memory. Yes, I freely acknowledge that Apple's yearly release cycles seem to be resulting in releases that probably should not have been made available to the public in their initial form, and that there are areas of iOS and OS X that are just fundamentally broken or poorly thought out. The thing is, this describes all Apple products - past, present (and future) and also every tech product anyone has ever produced, ever.

Wrong. My 2003 iBook came with OS X 10.3 installed. If I wanted to run Mac OS Classic, I had to run it from within OS X using the Classic environment. I couldn't stand-alone boot up from OS 9. The Classic environment wasn't a separate OS, but integrated into OS X 10.3 through 10.5 on PPC Macs. All my classic apps ran along side my OS X apps and were integrated to OS X. I could cut and paste and use OS X network services, etc. USB devices worked as long as there was classic environment support for those devices.

 

[crashoverride77]

Why do you think that using metal instead of plastic makes something better. Seriously, you need to answer this.
Sony Xperia Z3, including the Compact are both amazing phones, as is latest Android OS.
If you pay similar money for a Windows Laptop as a MBP then you will get a high quality machine, make no mistake.

Stop being such a fanboy and accept that other manufacturers also make some pretty decent products. Some growing up required.

Im not a fan boy by any means.
Yes using metal/aluminium and other higher quality materials than plastic and fake leather makes the product of better QUALITY. I mean apple is known for this and you will not find anyone that tells you otherwise apart from you. Please tell me what windows laptop is comparable to the new mac book pros. I tell you which, NONE. Same goes for the ipads. Im purely talking build quality, not features or the OS.

I also never said all other manufactures make crap. Lenovo at the moment seem to be making very nice products. But even their new yoga pro 3 (just announced last week) cannot compare to the aluminium unibody design of the MacBooks, thats just fact. And guess what if you find a laptop thats of similar build quality to mac book pros what design do you think it has, yeah unibody. I wonder where they got that idea from.
Im am very grown up, you the one that made that comment ranting about apple build quality, saying its the same as Sony, and its junk since the 90s.

----------

This site has become depressing to read. Every thread is full of people bitching about Apple. Yet people I meet in the real world who use Apple products all genuinely enjoy their products and don't really have any major complaints the way people on here seem to portray their experiences. I don't know if theres legions of paid shills on here or just that people who aren't having any major issues don't come on here to complain but you can't read a single thread without the majority of it being bitching. Then everyone acts like they are a super important power user who the littlest bug just completely destroyed their system of doing things they've finely honed for years and its just all ruined now.

And Sony Vaio laptops were/are super flimsy. Press down on the keyboard, and the whole top piece flexes down severely. Theres zero flex on a MBP. Barely any on the Air's. Apple's laptops are FAR ahead of Sony in build quality and design.

Last, people have known for years that the X.0 releases can be buggy. Yet people jump in head first into brand new OS's and features. If you want the stability of later X.1 and X.2 releases then stay on the prior OS and don't update so fast. I've been on iOS 8 since the early betas, and haven't had nearly half the issues some people are complaining about. The GM, and 8.1 are far better than some of the betas were.

totally agree with you, this site is degrading very rapidly. Every thread is bend gate this, safari is snappier that, fix iOS bug fest, yosemite looks ugly, bring back the ancient UI look we had for years etc.
Every normal person knows of what quality the mac books are, there is no debate. There is a reason it constantly wins best laptop, best quality etc. Thats also the reason you can buy apple laptops from 6-7 years ago and they still look and work great for the specs they have. Try doing that with a windows pc.
Also we all know that software is not perfect and maybe apple has been slacking off with their .0 releases recently(iOS and osx) but compared to the alternatives its not even worth mentioning. I mean I can count, on 1 hand, the number of times I had issues with my mac/ios device. I actually tend to work with theses machines rather than fix them. Sometimes I just don't know what people are doing here. Complaining about iOS 8 etc when even my mum, who updated herself, has no problems and she doesn't even know what a forum is.

 

[Sydde]

The Classic environment wasn't a separate OS, but integrated into OS X 10.3 through 10.5 on PPC Macs.

Sorry to be pedantic, but 10.5 killed Classic, if you wanted to run classic apps, you had to be able to boot into 10.4. They also killed Shapeshifter stone dead with 10.5, which was quite lamentable.

 

[CEmajr]

Say what
If you think a Mac book air/ pro retina is the same quality as any other manufacturer you are in denial.
If you think an iPad air is the same as any android plastic tablet you are in denial again
If you think the iPhone 5-6 is the same as any android phone, apart from HTC M8, then you are also in denial

That's 3 ticks on the denial sheet, congrats. Comparing Apple build quality with Sony's is joke of the month.

Well said. I've personally spent over $1000 each on a couple of Windows laptops before finally coming over to the Mac. The used 2011 MBP that I purchased for $850 has outlasted and outperformed any of those laptops going on over 3 years now. Usually my Windows laptops would conveniently start to have problems right around the time the 1 year warranty was set to expire. Despite them having very good specs.

Similar experience with the Android phones I've tried. Just sloppy and inefficient. Just about every time I tried to use one on a regular basis it eventually had problems of some sort that made it less reliable than an iPhone.

But the deniers would tell you people are only paying more for Apple products for the logo. No I'm paying more for the reliability and quality. In the long run I've actually found Macs to be cheaper than PCs of similar specs due to how long they last, less maintenance they require, and their much higher resale value. It's a similar situation with the Iphone.

 

[doug in albq]

Now we're getting to the truth!

Apple has become too fat & happy, a typical corporate giant.

Clumsy and lumbering along drifting left and right under the weight of their own greed.

They have so much cash and other resources they know nothing can prevent them from doing whatever they want for their own benefit. Customers have been less important, profit taking the center of all activity.

Oh sure profits are the goal of any enterprise, yet a balance can be reached without sacrificing either customer satisfaction or a high level of revenue.

This. Apple is no longer "lean & mean."

Also, now Apple has a bean-counter CEO instead of a "Crazy One" CEO.

Here's to the (missing) Crazy Ones...

 

[Padmini]

I've been an Apple user since the first iPhone was released (I was so impressed with the iPhone that I bought one as soon as they became available here in Japan, after I had already purchased an iPod touch, iMac, and an AEBS). It used to be that I would recommend Apple wholeheartedly to my friends and family, because everything just worked. I had an epiphany this morning, as I again waited for my iPhone to connect to my iMac's shared iTunes Library (it never did): things haven't "just worked" in years!

I haven't been able to view my iMac's shared iTunes Library on my iOS devices in at least a year. My iMac has always run the latest version OS X and the latest iTunes, and is routed through an AirPort Extreme Base Station (the dual channel 802.11n version) so I'm 100% Apple here, computers, software and network.

I haven't been able to get text shortcuts to reliably sync between devices for about a year. New rMBP - syncs. New rMini - doesn't sync. New iMac - doesn't sync. New iPhone 6 - doesn't sync. Old MBA - doesn't sync. Kind of ridiculous, really.

Speaking of text shortcuts, make sure not to trigger them in mobile Safari, in webforms. Instant lock-up and crash. I've reported this issue to Apple more than once, since iOS8 Beta 1 was released, but the problem persists, even in 8.1 Beta 2.

These things, combined with the random lock-ups, freezes and crashes (again, on top-of-line, new devices) are making me kind of hate Apple. I love the design, but the reliability of their software has really gone to hell in the past few years.

/ rant

#worksforme

I can't even begin to stop rolling my eyes at the ridiculous arrogance of this thread title.

 

[Act3]

#worksforme

I can't even begin to stop rolling my eyes at the ridiculous arrogance of this thread title.

and how is the OP asking a question being arrogant?

 

[borostef]

#worksforme

I can't even begin to stop rolling my eyes at the ridiculous arrogance of this thread title.

Actually, I think your comment is much more arrogant than the question in the thread title...

 

[enzo thecat]

I agree with the OP's general assessment of things. Although maybe never perfect, Apple products used to be much more stable and INTUITIVE. Now, things seem a complete mess. And I am hearing complaints from lots of others in public too. I just redid my business with windows machines and have been pleasantly surprised how stable they are. Apple is blowing it IMHO.

e

MBP, 2 iphones, 8 ipads.

 

[Winona Northdakota]

Sorry to be pedantic, but 10.5 killed Classic, if you wanted to run classic apps, you had to be able to boot into 10.4. They also killed Shapeshifter stone dead with 10.5, which was quite lamentable.

Perfectly fine. You are correct, I should have stated up to OS X 10.5, instead of through.

 

[tennisproha]

I don't understand how you could regress with a new OS update. iOS 8 is still iOS right? I mean it's not like each update is a new OS from scratch. they are just adding features to iOS 7 and calling it iOS 8. how can you break something that was previously working on the same OS? someone explain that please.

 

[matttye]

I agree. No iOS version has ever been perfect but it used to be a hell of a lot less buggy than it is now.

My main bugbear with older versions was lack of features - now it's instability.

I've just set up five Windows 8.1 tablets for work and I'm tempted to get one myself. It just works better than iOS 8 IMO.

I don't understand how you could regress with a new OS update. iOS 8 is still iOS right? I mean it's not like each update is a new OS from scratch. they are just adding features to iOS 7 and calling it iOS 8. how can you break something that was previously working on the same OS? someone explain that please.

They change so many things with each update that it's very easy to break something - which they do a lot lately.

 

[andyp350]

I agree that there is enough problems in iOS now that the "it just works" statement is definitely no longer true. I still feel its pretty much true for OSX though. I haven't had a single problem with my rMBP since I got it at the beginning of the summer.
I would argue however that despite the problems we've had in the software in the past few years I still find it the most reliable and easy to use mobile platform.