Writer, Talker, Lover
On Software Quality
I disagree about a noted decrease in software quality over the last two or three years. My first personal Mac was the original 20” Core Duo iMac released in 2006. Much of Apple’s software didn’t work properly when I jumped into OS X as a full-time user. GarageBand crashed incessantly, video playback in iTunes was often jittery while VLC played back the video fine, and I had more kernel panics in 10.4 than 10.5, 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8 (dev builds) put together. Marco’s experience says that stability and ease of use is getting worse. My experience says things are considerably better. Unless there is some sort of objective measurement that I don’t know about, I think this is BS.[…]Apple’s software quality is declining.
I’m not just talking about the most recent releases of everything, or the last couple of months — I’ve noticed this trend for about 2–3 years. As Apple’s software has grown to address larger feature sets, hard-to-solve problems such as sync and online services, shorter release cycles, increasingly strong competition, and Apple’s own immense scale, quality has slipped.
