Setting the Bozo Bit on Apple

"And I am surprised when they actually get something right, like Apple Silicon."

The difference is hardware vs software. Apple's hardware teams have been on a roll, churning out world class products. Their software teams, on the other hand, have been in a downward spiral for years in terms of quality, usability, and design. Worse yet, it feels somehow intentional, as if their software teams have been directed to focus primarily on enabling new moneymaking services and reducing development costs by turning everything into a minimal effort, cross-platform app.

@freediverx That sounds about right, though there was also a big software component to the Apple Silicon transition, and they pretty much nailed that.

Agreed. I should have been more specific that I was referring mainly to user-facing software and user interfaces. Apple TV back-end services work fairly well, but the interface design for the TV app makes me want to throw a rock at it (or go back to pirating content.)

They seem to employ highly competent people for certain things, and functionally incompetent people for everything else. By functionally incompetent, I mean that the work is no different from what an incompetent person would produce, whatever reason the cause is.

The code running on the image processor to compute depth from the LIDAR and the difference between the two image sensors is an example of competence. Similarly, the people who worked on Rosetta II did a good job, but notice that they worked closely with the hardware since some of the emulation burden was moved to silicon.

I contrast this with my experience of Swift, which I found slow, and Swift UI, which I found to be crap. Contrast this with a lot of the software shipped with the OS which is getting worse for no apparent good reason.

My overall impression is the closer software is to hardware the better it is. The closer software is to the user, the worse the engineering... and the more controlling management wants it to be.

I wonder whether the incentives given to both kind of software engineers differs substantially (make it work, versus make us money, for example). Perhaps they belong to different organizations managed by different people.

And to think that they're previewing the Microsoft store apps Music and TV on Windows now to replace (and disable) iTunes. It's a tragic irony that the bloated iTunes on Windows is functionally superior to the new in-box apps and that this is actually an argument for using Windows as an iOS user. Not to worry—Apple will soon put it all right!

Could he use pocket cast of some other podcast app?

> My overall impression is the closer software is to hardware the better it is. The closer software is to the user, the worse the engineering... and the more controlling management wants it to be.

Could this be about the types of management that get to have an opinion?

You need deep specialised knowledge to have an opinion on how silicon should work.

Anyone can have an opinion on ui and user facing functionality.

@Rob jonson: Yes, it could be that too.

The linked post from last year titled "The Apple Services Experience Is Not Good Enough" sums up my views pretty well.

What I think isn't discussed enough are the likely reasoning and motivation behind this decline. It's pretty obvious why we're seeing a tidal wave of self-promotional advertising ($). But I feel that the "crappy fit and finish" are driven by a strategy to make all their software cross-platform and cheaper to maintain. It's the Googleification of Apple and suggests there are no plans to improve and refine in any meaningful way so long as everything more or less works.

And then there is the fact that you can't add mp4 files to Music on iOS from iOS without having to involve a Mac

I don't have anything else to add to the discussion, but I think Rob jonson is right on the money here.

I keep running into these weird examples of the dichotomy between the bits of Apple that know what they're doing, and the bits that don't, and I think the most recent one I ran into very neatly illustrates the point made by @Rob Johnson. It's the Certificate Assistant, accessible from Keychain Access. Have a play with it; it's incredibly flexible, thoughtful, and versatile, and honestly, I wish there were a CLI equivalent available on other platforms! (certool, the CLI provided by macOS, is obsolete and less functional. GNUTLS provides something close, but no e-cigarette.) Now use Keychain Access to export your certificate together with its private key. For me, even though both items are selected, I end up just with the public part (certificate); the private key is not even touched. I can easily see that leading to data loss: export what you think is a p12 bundle, delete the private key from the keychain, gone. It really is like the priorities are looks and marketing nowadays; the realism, functionalism, pragmatism, and humility are all absent, presumed missing, swallowed up in a lifestyle cult ...

Rewrites in Swift can’t be blamed for all the software quality problems but I bet it has a lot to do with many of them.

Xcode code completion and commands like Jump To Definition, Option Clicking for Documentation, etc. hasn’t seem to have recovered since they rewrote all that in Swift.

I knew it was all going wrong for sure when I notice in a recent update that System Preferences had been transmogrified into "System Settings". Why? Why after all these years? When I run into something I'm not familiar with on MS, no one says - oh yeah, we'll make that into what you know. I've about given up on iTunes because it is so insistent that I listen to the music I OWN, from CDs etc via Apple Music. And where does one go for movies you've downloaded in the past? Yes I know or can figure it out but it's not the "intuitive interface" we were always so proud of. Spotlight Search, much touted at its debut and quite handy, no long seems to find anything on my computer and will not open dictionary.

As long as we’re griping about Apple software….

It’s mind-boggling to me that the functionality and features of the iOS Music app are in many ways a step backward, compared to the features of good ol’ click wheel iPods. The incredibly useful ‘Genius’ music playlist building feature has been gone from iOS for many years. It would be so much better with the larger library of downloaded tunes that I can fit on an iPhone. But nope. And the ‘Artists’ listing in the Music app actually behaves like the ‘Album Artists’ tag has traditionally behaved… so any tunes by a given artist that are from a compilation alum, won’t appear under their name.

Apple used to have the music listening experience—and music library organizing experience—down to a science. And now, for no apparent reason, the experience has degraded. A real shame. Just because the app is now oriented around streaming music moreso than a library of saved music files, is no reason to make the latter experience worse.

> I contrast this with my experience of Swift, which I found slow, and Swift UI, which I found to be crap. Contrast this with a lot of the software shipped with the OS which is getting worse for no apparent good reason.

This was warned of in this very comment section on this very blog. IIRC, someone by the name of "has" predicted that swift was making everyone do all this work in to get things back to where they already were, and it was going to set software behind by several years.

> The incredibly useful ‘Genius’ music playlist building feature has been gone from iOS for many years. It would be so much better with the larger library of downloaded tunes that I can fit on an iPhone.

Wasn't one of the marketing angles of Apple Music that they were proud that they were using "human curation" for the service?

I just recently upgraded my old 2009 iPod to the iFlash Quad with 1TB storage. It was quite the ordeal. Thankfully I have a Windows PC with iTunes, so it mostly just worked, and I got "Genius" on the iPod. One of the few good things about Windows is that it can run really old software, unlike my new MBP which can only run things that are compatible with OS X 10.13 -- AFAIK there's no way to get iTunes on it. Hopefully the Windows version lasts forever. It really is a shame that the world's richest company makes so much software that is functionally worse than what they put out 10 years ago. One would think that with so much of their leadership having been there for 20+ years, they'd have the institutional knowledge about how they've turned the ship in the wrong direction. As a Mac user for 30+ years I'm often frustrated by the current Mac OS and how software no longer works how it should, or just no longer works at all.