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I'm considering in staying with Yosemite and iOS 8, and haven't seen any singificant breakage over previous versions.
If anything it's better than Mavericks. And Mail woes are 99% gone too.
Just to add another viewpoint, since only people with negative experiences tend to write.
Of course all software has bugs, but not everybody is bitten by all of them. Some are legitimate complaints. Other are by peoplw who install every BS addon, haxie etc they find, have el-cheapo external peripherals, or blame third party software issues to the OS maker.
(That said, I've had the "22 px sheet" bug, and it's the second point release already --I run the beta--, it should have been fixed by now, and I dislike how they abandoned Aperture).
On the other hand, I'm still (on 10.10.2) experiencing severe window server bug where desktop just slows down to a crawl (all animations, window switching, missing control etc. run with less than 1fps) after some time of using the machine. Rebooting the system helps for awhile... and then it slows down again.
The issue seems to be limited to only nVidia equipped rMBPs, but honestly, I did not expect a brand new laptop (I have mid-2014) for 3kEUR to stutter just running desktop animations you know?
> or blame third party software issues to the OS maker
I think we are seeing exactly the opposite effect: People who use third-party software are complaining less.
Safari is buggy (swipe-to-go-back gesture sometimes freezes until I reboot), iWork has been ruined, Apple's photo ecosystem is a terrible mess, iCloud reliability (for documents) is a joke.
If I was using Chrome/Firefox, MS Office, Lightroom and Dropbox instead, I would have very few complaints about Apple's software quality.
I still have the Yosemite wifi issues. It really rustles my jimmies. At the same time, I forgot how much faster ethernet is over wifi so that's nice.
Yeah, I have to add my voice to this viewpoint too.
I definitely have annoyances with Yosemite – GUI performance on a rMBP is lower, which is particularly noticeable during Mission Control use. I've also got the irritating slowdown/flickering menu bar bug that I've seen people report. But generally everything else has been pretty great.
I do wish Apple was more public about bug tracking – I'd love to see a public database of known bugs so we can track progress or something like that.
>since only people with negative experiences tend to write
I haven't found that to be the case at the Apple subreddit on Reddit.
IMO, it depends on the topic and where the discussion is located.
Agreed, upgraded since the beta and had few issues, and only then on beta releases that have since been fixed. Not sure how constructive this comment is, but thought it was worth seconding your experience.
I bought my Mom an iPad over an android tablet telling her that everything will just work. After the iOS 8 update, I am shying away from answering her questions about bugs, and questioning my decision about the iPad. People who are non-tech proficient form the biggest consumer-base for Apple, and it is terrible that Apple is forgetting how it gained this loyal consumer-base in the first place - through reliable software which 'just works'. It only makes more business sense to go back to their original software quality even if it requires dumping regular releases, because they will start losing (probably already have) customers real soon if they don't.
Believe it or not I had a successful experience with giving my mom an Ubuntu laptop and me administering it (mostly remotely) for the last 7-8 years.
She mostly uses the browser for news and some articles, skype to talk to us, and knows basic GUI file operations enough to view picture we send her.
I would log in periodically and update her packages. When we visit or she vists and brings her laptop I'd switch her to the next LTS release.
I am just very happy with Ubuntu, it has worked really well for us.
I've considered changing from iPhone to Android mainly due to iOS 8 update. It was such a disheartening experience. Sometimes I wish I even still had iOS6 installed.
Don't get me started with iPads and iOS 8 - there is no way to set a screen time limit for children by their parents. I would like to keep Wikipedia, Alarms and a few other apps fully open, but to limit Youtube and gaming time. No way to do it with Apple's software or with third party software (iOS does not allow parental apps).
The iPad, as it is, is very tempting for kids (and not only kids). To leave such a toy in the hands of a child is like leaving a big bag of chocolates in their room and telling them to eat responsibly when they are alone. Apple wants parents to police their iPads by hand instead. I have many other things to do than police children's gaming. We are in the age of computing now, if they haven't realized. I want nice stats with total time per app per day, like some parental control apps offer on Android.
In practice I was forced to confiscate their iPads and give them Android phones with big screens and good parental controls instead. Never gonna buy an iPad/iPhone for my kids again.
I am sure Apple does it for self serving reasons like "Don't limit their gaming time in any way, and sales with soar!"
As a recent switcher to Android, I acknowledge iOS has flaws but I am so grateful my parents aren't on it. (everything having multiple menus with multiple nesting levels, no conventional behavior between apps, crazy carrier customizations, multiple levels of caches to clear)
No question that Apple's quality has gone done. However, who's has gone up? Or better yet: Who is actually building quality software systems?
Comparing only in the same problem domains as Apple:
All of my Android devices have been rife with equivalently bad issues. Windows? Different quality issues, but just as bad. Google web systems? Same case. Better in some aspects, worse in others.
Perhaps I'm old and jaded. Still, seems like we've reached a point in software development where building quality systems is not possible with existing methodologies. Where some problems, while we are able to develop 90% solutions, the last 10% might as well be impossible.
The even more jaded part of me wonders: Does it even matter?
Windows quality has gone up significantly since XP. I no longer associate Windows with constant crashing like I used to. Android has also gotten miles better, I haven't had any weird system-related bugs in so long (the worst I've gotten is some slowness).
The main issue is that Microsoft and Android developers (I guess mainly Google) are getting their shit together (resulting in some decent software), whereas Apple software quality is in a freefall, failing in some extremely basic use cases, and has been for a while.
Desktop OSs are one thing, but in 2 years do you think iOS will be more usable than Android on comparable hardware? I already don't think so. The momentum is definitely against Apple
Precisely. One wonders exactly what Lovecraftian horrors Microsoft will have in Windows 10 that will allow them to compete with the new levels Google and Apple have reached.
The dreamy days of OS X Tiger on a G4 PowerBook now seem like they must have been figments of the imagination.
Others have said Windows. I'd say Windows Phone, too. It might be missing some things I'd like (Google stuff like Hangouts and Plus, which will likely never come) but otherwise it's a great OS, stable, fast, well designed and consistent.
But Android and Windows systems cost half the price of a Mac one, there is a quality expectation given the price difference.
If you only view the associated cost of these failures through the lens of quarterly profits, then they probably don't matter (at least in the short term).
But there has to be a point where as professionals we look at the opportunity cost of these failures and hold ourselves responsible for the damage they cause.
If you add up all the time and opportunity lost due to bugs, duplicated effort, and substandard solutions (which is nearly every piece of software today including my own) it just about makes one sick.
Apple is no more responsible for this than anyone else in the industry except for the fact that they are a platform creator. I feel that companies such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft should be held extra accountable not so much for the failure in where they have led us in the past, but our acceptance of their visions in the future.
I think that Apple is a victim of its decision to release new OS version every year. Users expect a lot of changes from iOS n+1 or OS X m+1. You can't just fix all bugs and release a new version. And constant feature improvement introduces new bugs and deadline frames won't allow to release properly tested fixes for old bugs.
I believe that feature-wise OS X 10.10 and iOS 8 are quite nice. Apple really should adapt something like Intel's tick-tock strategy. Release iOS 8 with new features at 2014. Release iOS 8S with all bugs fixed in 2015. Release iOS 9 with new features at 2016 but allow customers to downgrade to iOS 8S if they want to, for at least a year. They'll have to support 2 iOS versions, but people will have a choice between new features and stability.
> I believe that feature-wise OS X 10.10 and iOS 8 are quite nice.
My feeling is that this embodies the problem pretty well. Apple releases, typically, weren't seen (by tech people) as "quite nice", feature-wise. The "ahhh" moments in keynotes were more or less experience-related. iOS 8 and Mavericks keynotes, however, were full of "ahh" moments related to technical advances.
It seems (to me) that they jumped on the "creeping featurism" bandwagon.
Internal product churn and massive refactoring is bad. Make the UI themeable and keep the core mostly the same. However there is drive to converge the iOS and OSX APIs to where there may only be one platform.
> I think that Apple is a victim of its decision to release new OS version every year
Why? Why is one year the problem, would two years fix it? Why not 14 months?
You don't even have to go into depth to find flaws in Yosemite like this one: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/152038/prevent-redr...
The flickering menubar icons drive me insane. It's proof that Apple has is either unwilling or unable to commit enough resources to OSX to ensure that its quality is consistent with what users have come to expect.
SJ used to be relentless about nitpicking to keep quality up. Probably not happening consistently across all apps and platforms as much. Tim may need to appoint a Quality Czar whom is detail-oriented, accepts no bull and has "wrath of God" authority to make folks take them seriously.
Long-standing, time-wasting bugs I've noticed:
- Mdns broadcast disabling doesn't work.
- Swift playground in Xcode crashes regularly.
- Mobile Safari regularly crashes randomly on backspace in text areas.
- App Store installs corrupted apps but they don't show as corrupted until reboot, and then future downloads fail.
- Mail.app synchronously hangs the UI when processing new email notifications (probable not using a background queue).
A visual interpretation of changes in Apple's org chart:
Jean-Louis was always pretty honest about stuff. The problem is Apple has too many things going on and only the big stuff gets attention. Take XCode for example, please take it way before I shoot something.
When I read reports of massive Yosemite bugs, I think that I am ether lucky, or I'm just a really bad QA tester.
I've personally had very few problems on my 3 different Apple computers.
Most of the articles I've read on Apple software quality seem like larger industry wide issues to me. For example with the iTunes issue mentioned in this article this is a problem that every metadata / library based media player has to deal. If you let more than one app touch your audio files then you're pretty much guaranteed to have problems. Different apps/services may not write or sort on the same tags. No one's fault exactly just the way things are. The example of dictionary / thesaurus lookup moving to a system wide text service is an instance of a feature clearly being improved but if the users aren't aware it changed is that really an improvement? The entire industry sucks at user education. There's no good reason every major software developer shouldn't have hours and hours of free training/how-to videos available for users to cope with change. For the issue of GMail SMTP rejecting iWork file format attachments it's the industry wide problem of users being stuck between the best interests of various companies. Apple wants to change/improve the iWork format but Google wants to protect users from files it can't scan. Again no one is really at fault it's just the way things are.
I just rated Yosemite 1 star on App store and wiped everything and installed Mavericks. It is so much better now. The last OS was just a shameless cloud infestation ridded with bugs.
I use Remote Screen for work, and EVERY time I disconnect my MacBook Pro freezes completely for 1-3 minutes (no mouse, just a froze desktop). Sometimes I need to hard reset it. Screen sharing used to work nicely in 10.9, 10.8, 10.7 and so on. Why was it necessary to mess with something good?
I think apple are facing the same problems a lot of other companies face - it's no longer green field development and the existing codebase means they're being weighed down by regression. Maybe not enough automated tests.
However some bugs are basic error really. Take the frequently visited icons on mobile safari. They keep getting the wrong favicon - that's just shoddy programming and testing.
If more developers knew what backward compatibility is, I'd be happily using Snow Leopard right now. The most frustrating part is there's nothing fundamentally new worth all the bugs and a constant envy for new hardware.
Has anyone found Safari under Yosemite and iOS8 to be of "disappointing" quality? I know of DNS being broken in Yosemite but my wife and I find Safari to be extremely irritating- it just sits there at 20% of address bar progress after entering an address and pressing Enter.
EDIT: And another thing - Spotlight now takes a significant amount of time to get results. I notice a large difference between my personal i7 2012 MBP with Yosemite and the 2008 single-CPU (quad core) Xeon running Mavericks at work. Maybe it's the disk difference, but I sometimes wonder if Spotlight is doing anything as there is no search indication / activity indication.
I can't wait for the day when I can use WiFi and Bluetooth simultaneously without issues.
I currently have two Macs. A late 2013 rMBP 13" which works flawlessly, and an iMac 27" with 680mx(later 2012?).
The iMac has felt wonky for lack of a better word. It doesn't hang or crash more than Mavericks did, but f.lux causes WindowServer to crash randomly which makes all users to be logged out in a microsecond. I've reported this of course.
Another thing that troubles me is the amount of rubbish logging done by the system. Have Console.app open for a while and see what nonsense it barfs out. How can it work at all with all those problems?
I don't think there is as much of a fear of someone important getting angry like Steve Jobs used to. Without that fear, they are more likely to ship bugs.
Slightly off-topic, but I also find some of Apple's software workflow philosophies baffling. E.g., sometime back they got rid of the Save As button.
I was once playing around with editing a photo using Preview. I tried a crop etc. Eventually, I closed the app without committing to any of the edits (by Saving anything). Imagine my shock (and horror) when I discovered that the "playing around edits" I had done had all been permanently applied to my original image. Despite never having saved anything. All the edits were being applied in real-time, even if I was just trying something to see how it would look (without committing a save). So, they apparently have decided to even get rid of the Save button in some cases.
I continue to be flabbergasted that so many otherwise savvy observers believe that a random assortment of software annoyances constitutes a crisis at Apple. Articles like this could have been, and were, written at any time in the past fifteen years.
IMHO currently the worst bugs are in discoveryd, which replaces mDNSResponder for Bonjour.
If you remove a service on OSX 10.10 it's removal will be broadcast. But it doesn't stop there. No... Most of the time the service will be published again after that and after a second or so it will be finally removed. How the hell did this pass even the most basic QA checks?!
I had an issue with Mac Mail and after the upgrade it just stopped synching my exchange files correctly and that was the end of it. Called apple support, very friendly guy, talked me through it, we tried a few fixes, there was a workaround but it wasn't the same again. Moved over to MS Outlook and haven't gone back. Kind of a shame.
As some others have pointed out elsewhere, OS X Yosemite used to bork your old XAMPP installation. I spent 1.5 entire days restoring my XAMPP. I believe the XAMPP people have released a fix that prevents the borking. "Madness" is right.
Apple: I am NEVER going to upgrade OS X again if my current version is working fine.
Ahh, finally a blog touching this! I've been quietly pissed off for a while at being unable to get Apple TV to connect or closing a full screen video tab in Safari without killing the whole process. And other bits and pieces that occasionally just don't work goddamnit.
From a comment on the article, a roundup of writers on this topic, http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/mac-experts-weigh-in-...
It took Apple 2 years to correct the name of my local university in "Maps" (after I had filed 3 correction reports via Maps, each spaced a month apart).
I think a little expectations management might be in order here.
Classic JLG going off on apps when all anyone cares about are MacOS, iOS and iCloud.
The first rule of Apple software quality is that you don't talk about Apple software quality. All Apple software is, by definition, perfect.
Look at Rolex watches. They're a pure status symbol. They don't keep time all that well. Rolex doesn't even submit them for Swiss chronometer certification any more.
Apple and Android are in a sack race to the goal line of Billions of dollars in profit. They're both stumbling a lot, but I think it's pretty clear that Apple is winning.
Quite honestly Yosemite is the most buggy Apple product I've ever used - it has made working with OSX a chore. Apple has not fixed one of the bug reports I filed during the beta phase (which I'm not convinced has finished).
Maintaining software is not as fun as greenfield development, and Apple's strategy of assuming that their users should just throw away three year old devices seems not to work out any longer.
Skimming this, I just wanted to reply to this one bit:
> Befuddled users found they couldn’t send Pages 5 files through Gmail. It’s now fixed, as the What’s New in Pages screen proudly claims…
> > ° Updated file format makes it easier to send documents via services like Gmail and Dropbox
> …but how could such an obvious, non-esoteric bug escape Apple’s attention in the first place?
And the answer, if I recall correctly as to what was going on, was that this wasn't a bug with Apple's software at all. It was a consequence of the file format actually being a package, meaning it was really a document. Apple software all worked with documents just fine, and you'll find that if you tried to use Mail.app to send it, it would all Just Work™. The issue is that Gmail and other such services never even considered the idea that a user might want to send a whole folder and did not have any way to support that.
So the "fix" was to change the file format to actually be a compressed archive of the package (I assume it was a zip file, but I don't know how to go back and check). This made it work with all of the stupid software out there that assumed users would only want to transfer individual files.
Sure, perhaps the Pages team could have foreseen this issue. But that doesn't make it a bug in their software, just a case of only prioritizing compatibility with other aspects of Apple's software ecosystem.