“If You Can’t Stand By a Feature, You Shouldn’t Launch It.”
Jason Snell, on The Talk Show:
[… Apple] decides to do a big feature. The circus comes to town, they build the feature, they launch it, they leave town, and that feature sits there.
And the problem is, there’s bugs, things are broken, and in Year Two, you’re like, “You’re going to fix all the things that were broken in the thing you shipped last year, right?” And in the last decade, I would say, a lot of times what happens is they just don’t. And if you’re lucky, they’ll fix it Year Three or Year Four, […] give it a polish.
The thing that troubles me most about Apple software quality in general is the feeling like they don’t have the people to own the thing that they launch. They build the thing that they launch, and then those people go off and do something else, and nobody is maintaining and improving the thing that’s there.
Via Marcin Wichary:
I think this is spot on, and said really well. Are you honest with yourself about resourcing and focus for right after the launch and then later on? Have you really thought about worst case and best case scenarios vis-à-vis bug reports, latency, user feedback, and craft/quality however you define it? Have you actually started to make room for those outcomes ahead of time?
For me, an ongoing tension with Apple is Finder, so central to my (and I imagine many people’s?) use of a Mac, but rewritten at some point eons ago in a new framework that caused all sorts of problems, and then pretty much abandoned like a proverbial American city’s downtown.
Revealing files in the Finder and Mail’s table view sort indicators have been broken for me since Big Sur. Disk Utility still doesn’t work as well as before its El Capitan rewrite. But these aren’t even big new features.
This is what happens when you release major OS updates every year: you have to keep launching new features.
Previously:
- Glow Leopard
- Child Safety Features in appleOS 27
- Will Disk Utility Ever Work Properly?
- Remaining Issues in Big Sur
- Disk Utility in El Capitan
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I almost completely rely on command line tools fd-find and ripgrep now to find files on my Mac (Sequoia). Not sure about the Finder but Spotlight especially is a joke.
Small refinement of @JeffJohnson's point; this is what happens when you release major OS updates every year *and maintain exclusive privileges for your own apps*.
No one would care if Finder sucked because Apple was Great Gatsbying its way though life, if the user's choice of file browser for the system was enforced with the same regulatory framework as that of Web Browsers. There's any number of better apps you could use, if macOS was designed such that you could get rid of Finder *and never have to use it for anything*.
Same with Disk Utility, same with every piece of secondrate shovelware in the "sealed system volume".
Instead of major OS releases, I wish Apple would do year-based naming throughout a calendar year and just add OS features as they’re ready and as appropriate for new hardware. No one bought an M2 MacBook Pro and was bothered it came with macOS 12.4. Mid-OS-cycle hardware releases like that have gone on for ages.
No one will care if a just-released iPhone is running iOS 29.7 as long as the OS and hardware do things that appeal. Saying, "My new phone comes with iOS 30!" is not motivating people. This would also better corresponds to how Apple has taken to announcing many OS features that they are upfront in noting will not be included at the outset of an OS release.
For a company that has hardware as its economic driver and has been increasingly less attentive to its software, it’s ironic that they’re committed to annual software releases which have only complicated development and support. Hopefully, Termus will try a different approach.
