The decline seems real to me. A shortlist of things I've noticed:
* Spotlight no longer finds things as easily. I used to use it for everything. Since updating to El Capitan, it has missed some exact match folders. Planning to switch to Alfred.
* iWork was gutted in '13. People used to use Pages professionally. I'm now using Pages '09, and planning to transition to Word or Latex. I tested Pages '13 intensively, and it fails for even basic publishing.
* Siri can only work with default Apple apps. And those default apps are getting worse. So Siri takes a hit with every app that declines. I used to use Mail, now I don't.
* Constant Wifi issues. I frequently have to turn off wifi, then turn on. On my home network. This never happened pre Mavericks.
* In general, all my Apple default software on my iphone is sitting in a folder titled "apple", which I never use. I don't think I use any Apple default App.
* I avoid icloud. It sends scary "do you want to delete all these files" messages if you ever unsync a device, and it's not clear which actions produce which effects. iTunes has a history of destroying files on syncs, so I can't trust iCloud. Even now, itunes will add apps to my device if they're in my library but I deleted them from my phone. It does this without asking! Any other cloud app has figured out how to handle deletions from one device.
Pages 09 hit the hardest. It was wonderful software. I used it for print publishing, and it just worked. Easy to use, incredibly powerful. Have a look at their manual for the level of care they put into their software, as recently as 2009.
Pages 13 can't do half of that. Very basic stuff like "facing pages" for books has been left out.
Edit: A comment below pointed out that, I do in fact use default apps. I had taken them for granted. These ones work well and I use them:
Messages, Phone, camera, photos, clock, wallet, calendar, music (UI got worse on this one). Reminders I use occasionally because of the Siri integration.
There are some issues with some of them, but mostly they work pretty well.
On the mac, the only default apps I use frequently are textedit and Preview. Previews remains excellent. I use spotlight, but as noted above it got worse.
I noticed the trend with Snow Leopard. Also the tendency towards iOS-ification of Mac OS, so I decided to switch back to Linux. I think Apple's best hour came with Tiger and Leopard. Simple applications that did one thing well and were robust. Now there's a lot of feature bloat.
A nice Linux set up with minimal software (e.g. xmonad, mutt, emacs or vim) is a joy to use, but takes time to set up and learn to use. So it's not for everyone.
Interestingly, I've experienced the same issue Apple is suffering with Ubuntu. Edgy Eft (6.10) was incredibly simple and nice. Like OS X Tiger. Now there are dozens of services running and something always gives trouble. I guess the old adage applies, make things as simple as possible but no simpler...
Ubuntu has been doing the same thing as Apple with their new UI, trying to jump in on the tablet bandwagon, with this belief that tablets are the future. This is fairly stupid, considering that Ubuntu's marketshare was pretty much 100% PC, 0% tablets. They gave their main demographic a slap in the face, and they never really did acquire any tablet market. Now, according to DistroWatch, Ubuntu is below Mint and Debian in terms of popularity.
There's something to be said about reinventing the wheel just for the sake of reinventing it, change for the sake of change. Constantly redesigning UIs that were working perfectly well, chasing after fads. In implementing a new UI, Ubuntu acquired a lot of new bugs, broken features and reliability issues. That's normal. Newer code is buggier code. You might think this "old" code is crufty, it might not be designed in the ideal way you like, but by throwing it away, you throw away years of testing and fixes too. That's an argument in favor of incremental evolution and refactorings IMO.
Maybe I'm biased. When I was 16, I used to find colorful desktop backgrounds and fancy UIs cool. Now I'm 30, and I just want the damn thing to f'ing work reliably. I don't need rounded corners, or transparency, or animations or even a desktop background. I'd be OK with a bland UI that looks like Windows 98, so long as the machine can do all I need it to reliably and fast.
> according to DistroWatch, Ubuntu is below Mint and Debian in terms of popularity.
Distrowatch is a shitty indicator of anything other than Distrowatch hits. Plenty of people like myself have been using Ubuntu for years and not gone to Distrowatch for years.
Out 'in the wild', I've never seen a distro that's not Ubuntu or openSUSE (desktop anyway). Most statistics on sites such as Wikipedia or Steam also point to Ubuntu's dominance (according to Steam's hardware/software survey, Ubuntu is about 7x more popular than Mint Rosa, which of course is also Ubuntu-based).
> In implementing a new UI, Ubuntu acquired a lot of new bugs, broken features and reliability issues.
To be honest, most of the issues I've ever had with Ubuntu are upstream issues. The 'Unity' interface these days pretty much IS the equivalent of 'legacy'. It's certainly not as radical as Gnome Shell or even some of the happenings in KDE Plasma-land. No one uses Compiz any more, except apparently Ubuntu (yes, I realize eventually we'll have a non-Compiz Unity interface).
> Now I'm 30, and I just want the damn thing to f'ing work reliably. I don't need rounded corners, or transparency, or animations or even a desktop background
xfce - that's what I use. And I'm an even grumpier old man at 40 :-)
I noticed that recently, how tablets have gotten much bigger (12-13") and detachable keyboards are now the norm, I'm seeing them everywhere. It makes me laugh to think that the killer feature a tablet can have... Is a keyboard! I feel like we've sort of come back full circle. Netbooks were getting popular before tablets, because people had a need for a computing device that was more portable than traditional laptops.
A Microsoft Surface, or a big iPad with a keyboard, those things are basically, like you said, thin and light laptops.
I've been pretty happy with Xubuntu for the last few years. It gives me a nice, no-frills desktop UI but still has access to the entire Ubuntu package ecosystem.
If you want something reliable you may want to put some time into installing a minimal Linux or BSD and creating a simple setup.
I have been running Arch for 7 years before switching to NixOS. I found using no desktop environment, just a tiling window manager and only text-mode software (except firefox and a document viewer) incredibly robust. So few moving parts I never had a major hiccup.
>Now I'm 30, and I just want the damn thing to f'ing work reliably. I don't need rounded corners, or transparency, or animations or even a desktop background.
Exactly. Sounds like you agree with nextos:
> A nice Linux set up with minimal software (e.g. xmonad, mutt, emacs or vim) is a joy to use
Immaturity leading to think that following market trends instead of believing in (and even 'still understanding') you're own quality, will be the only way to sustain your business. Jitter.
Every business (and I'd argue project) needs to grow and change with how the world is developing. The Palm Pilot software was perfectly fine in 2004(?) but wouldn't stand a chance serving users-needs in 2016.
The Linux distro's actually serve multiple 'customer' segments. On the client side there are at least two customers (at a minimum), one is end-users, the other is the OEM's who pay for Linux to be preloaded. The traditional OEM's need a solution to the PC market shrinking while the devices market has eaten their lunch.
It's true you have to determine the difference between a short-term 'trend' and a long-term shift. I'm sure you don't think that the mobile market is a short-term 'trend'.
> wouldn't stand a chance serving users-needs in 2016
I'll allow some simili-troll (only in appearances) rewrite :
... wouldn't stand a chance serving users-needs-that-they-think-they-have in 2016.
Trends go both ways, people think new shiny will make their life gloriouser so they run after that, then business run after that 'need' because that's what the milk machine wants. This leads to a constant spiraling where trends wave in and out, shifting properties by tiny amount most of the time. Maybe that's the best the universe can provide, and if businesses didn't play that game they'd take blows too deep to sustain.
I don't know how to describe mobile. I believe it will be the tail of the so called computer era, not a next phase. If I extrapolate, soon we'll have thumbnails computers in the single digit Watt consumption and GFLOPS. They won't be a thing anymore. Maybe I'm going Kurzweil too much.
> I don't know how to describe mobile. I believe it will be the tail of the so called computer era, not a next phase.
I agree with you, mobile is more of an extrapolation, or an evolution than an entirely new phase or era. We're into the point where English becomes imprecise to define where something is truly different.
And, I completely agree about the loop between being customer-driven and then finding out that it's just a short-term shift. The worst part is that it's fundamentally difficult to tell if something is a short-term trend or a long-term shift.
Where I was going was a much more limited view of 'trends', more like a season in the fashion market. Most businesses have to respond on an annual basis to what their customers wants - they can believe that something is a temporary trend, but can't afford not to respond.
Perhaps we're in violent agreement on the nature of trends, and divided by time-frame and response.
Switch to a distro with rolling releases. I've been a happy Gentoo user for over a decade. It was a scary time when Gnome 3 came out and I had to mask a lot of updates, but eventually Mate became stable enough for me to switch over from Gnome 2. Total control the whole time. If something doesn't work, it's my own fault. Of course XFCE, KDE, etc. have been available the whole time too.
> This is fairly stupid, considering that Ubuntu's marketshare was pretty much 100% PC, 0% tablets
Ubuntu is both a commercial AND a community project. The goal has always been to take the power of Linux, make it usable for 'general users' and take it to the market winning new users.
The PC market is shrinking, so much so that all the major manufacturers are struggling (e.g Dell going private, HP splitting itself etc). Meanwhile the growth in the next billion units is a) in China b) on 'mobile' devices.
IF you were in charge of strategy what would you do?
> They gave their main demographic a slap in the face ...
> Now, according to DistroWatch, Ubuntu is below Mint and
> Debian in terms of popularity.
The demographic for 'traditional' Linux is something like 2-4% of the PC market: the biggest thing that's happened since the 2000's is OSX has stolen developer user-base from Linux. These users are well -served (arguably habituated) by the older interfaces, but more general users are not well-served.
Even if you put aside the goal of winning new users, you simply cannot build a successful business on 2% of the market (particularly when that 2% of desktop users is not orientated towards buying anything and hates advertising).
It's tough to serve more than one users-base, but Linux (Ubuntu in this case) can as it's very flexible. There's still a massive pot-pourri of software and options in the repositories! I find self-described 'geeks' complaining about Unity really bizarre - if you're a power user it's literally 3 commands (touch .xinitrc; vim .xinitrc; exec <wm-of-your-choice) to change the interface.
> That's an argument in favor of incremental evolution and refactorings IMO
That works if the old thing can be incrementally improved. The issue for Linux is that it's simply fallen behind the significant changes in the client market. At an infrastructure and applications level the FOSS/Linux environments aren't competitive to the other mobile offerings. And, it's basically impossible to maintain one complete stack for the desktop and a different one for the mobile space at the sizes the Linux companies are.
> Now I'm 30, and I just want the damn thing to f'ing work reliably.
> I don't need rounded corners, or transparency, or animations or even a desktop background.
The thing is that puts you in the 2%, the things you care about are quite different. General users do care about animations, basically the whole UI "experience": to get them to change you really have to show them something different. Of course, you have to have some level of stability, but you don't win new users by telling them you are so much more stable - users just restart the app or device, they carry a battery charger everywhere and just shrug and plug-in. You only really have to read some of the comments in this thread to see what I mean ;-)
IIRC, Snow Leopard was actually the best release -- essentially Leopard but with a focus on stability and performance, plus the code signing stuff.
It's the last OS X release that felt like an improvement to me, and one of the last OS X releases that I trusted. Every one since has actually had feature regressions (let's make a formerly visible folder invisible!) or stability issues.
I still have a 2008 Macbook Pro running Snow Leopard and it's more stable than a 2012 MBP running Mavericks and performs about as well.
Mavericks was tough to give up, stable, fast. No discoveryd. IMHO, its the best release of OS X. Maybe everyone has amnesia but pre 10.3, OS X wasn't really usable full time. Each 10.2.x release was a whirlwind of changes.
Very true statements. However, those were growing pains. I feel like Apple's problem now is that it has completely given up on its overarching philosophy: to make software simple.
Instead, they're just offering us their own versions of things just because they can, not because their's is any better. Maps being exhibit A, and Apple's mail client not changing in 10 years (aside from some minor adds and removes) are examples of this.
Apple used to mean software for people who were not technology savvy. Now it means phone software for people who are not technologically savvy, and computer software that's just like everyone else's. Frankly, I can never figure things out on an iPhone. They're too confusing in their interface. Especially compared to my beloved Newton 2000.
Regarding Mail, I don't really want it to change. Other than the improvements in stability and speed that I've noticed over the years, Mail.app is pretty much exactly what I want in a mail reader on OSX. Sometimes Apple's changes seem purely for the sake of change and result in reduced usability (e.g. Photos), I don't want that to happen with mail.
> Apple's mail client not changing in 10 years (aside from some minor adds and removes) are examples of this
How is Mail.app supposed to change though? It still completes the task that it was designed for. I'll agree that Mail's stability has been spotty across releases, but how are you expecting them to change such a core app?
Don't worry. I remember. cifs.kext is hella more stable nowadays than back then. I used to have the entire OS come to a grinding halt if a mounted Samba (or NFS) share disappeared (e.g. mount local share at home, put laptop to sleep, wake laptop at school).
I remember that in (I think 10.3) they "fixed" the issue by having a timeout dialog popup and ask if you wanted to disconnect... only it was too sensitive and would popup (and then go away before you could react) if there was any jitter in the network connection.
I'm so glad both my work and personal machines are still on 10.9. I've been contemplating updating, but everything I've ready continues to say I shouldn't.
Absolutely. Snow Leopard was the pinnacle. I could run for months without a reboot and did a tremendous amount of heavy work on that old Macbook Pro.
Starting with 10.7 and seeing the decline coming, I was happy that Ubuntu ran very well on that laptop and that held me over until I left Apple hardware entirely.
Interesting. Snow Leopard was OS X's peak for me. It was Leopard with perf and stability improvements. Lion was when the iOS influence came to the mac.
I think we're heading for a synthesis of these opposing trends, the common core being a fatigue with complex bloated user interfaces, and a return to simpler design. Personally I enjoy command line interfaces, especially in full screen with huge fonts, and I've been using Ratpoison (one of the first tiling X window managers) like this since like 2004. But I also enjoy, at least in principle, tablet-style UIs. Neither is based on overlapping windows, for one thing, and they are both helpful for my quasi-ADHD/OCD tendencies.
Mac OS now is in a weird limbo between the Unix heritage, the Mac heritage, and the iOS heritage. I think unifying these strands is an enormous challenge, but also really cool and inspiring. Maybe Apple are going to focus on making cars or whatever, and some weird little upstart is going to come along and make something totally new. You can see people starting to talk about Slack as an operating system, but that's still very primitive.
Chat and command lines are interesting because they represent a huge paradigm that's been overshadowed by the "GUI" paradigm, namely the paradigm of queries and responses: you ask the computer something and get something back, perhaps asynchronously. It's such a useful, coherent model. Easy to program with. Portable across interfaces. Good for exploration. Cognitively appropriate. Etc etc.
I think the complexity and bug-riddenness of most "modern" desktop operating systems come from an over-complicated and incoherent model of operation. Mobile represents a new start. It currently lacks in flexibility, but it's probably a good thing to start with rigid simplicity than to try for flexible complexity, and unless you can perfect a genius UI right away I do think those are the options, if you're aiming for the general public who don't want to learn vim.
I also think the divide between application programmers and computer users is politically a Bad Thing and also a result of exaggerated complexity. Unix was always about user scripting, and it managed that because of textual data, worse-is-better, and RTFM. Apple might not be the company to get back to this, because they're making tons of money from making shiny coherent appliances for people who pay to think as little as possible.
So just generally I'm not holding my breath for Apple to come up with a wildly new and interesting paradigm here. They're a dinosaur. A very pretty dinosaur. I'm more interested in startups with weird ideas, like maybe let's use e-ink displays, cheap ultralight computers, cloud servers, natural language processing, and the interactive fiction adventure exploration paradigm to provide a new style of terminal gadget that's even cooler than Linux. (If you steal this idea, please don't fuck it up.)
Google's Youtube IOS app has issue playing video correctly. It can't even buffer the segments correctly.
Google latest Android Map crashes all the times 1-2 minutes into the navigation, extremely dangerous when I have to restart the navigate while driving. I can't depend on it at all.
I have to roll back to the default factory install older version google map to make it work. Lately I see the older stable version start crash more often, probabaly cause by the "update" on the server API side.
It will be a very scary world if this type of SW development processes are applied to tomorrow's "self driving car".
> Google latest Android Map crashes all the times 1-2 minutes into the navigation
I haven't had these issues, but I have had significant issues with its performance. 15+ seconds to initialize. At least 3+ seconds needed to swap between transit options. Moving to navigation mode feels sluggish. And this is on a Nexus 6, with no issues with other apps.
When I choose "walk" as the navigation mode it puts an Uber route on there, which when selected gives me an ad to try Uber for the first time. I don't have Uber installed on my device. I don't want to take a fucking Uber, I want to see how long it'll take me to walk somewhere!
I get the feeling that something happened in the Google org responsible for maps. It was always a snappy app that was useful to me. Now it's slow and appearing to be an avenue for ads on the device that I bought directly from Google. Unacceptable.
That Uber ad was seriously misleading and annoying when I was traveling last month. I wanted to walk across the city. WALK. I get directions, it gives me a route and a time, it seems quicker than I expected, but not by too much. Start moving and look at it while I'm going and realized they wanted me to get in a car. The time it would've taken a driver to get to me, I'd have been halfway to the destination on foot.
Don't insert ads into an app in a way that misleads users. You'd be pissed if you opened a book, started reading at Chapter 1 and found that the first 3 chapters you read were just a tease of another book, yours starts on Chapter 4.
Yeah, Google web apps must have some scary Javascript bloat going on. I remember when GMail was lightning fast; now it takes 5-10 seconds just to load the first page of my inbox and chat windows.
I've switched to the Basic HTML version full-time. It's way, way faster, even having to reload the entire page for most actions (remember when the whole point of AJAX was faster webpages?). I miss a few features, but it's not even close to being worth using the many-times-slower interface and associated higher system load to get those back. Some of those features (inline "track this package" links in Amazon emails in the mailbox view, for instance) shouldn't require javascript/AJAX at all, but are simply absent, which is frustrating, but again, it's still worth it.
Plus I can, you know, close the tab. One of the worst things about these enormous "javascript applications" is the high startup time (remember how much we hated Flash intros with loading screens?) that leads to leaving the tab open, which means that tab's disgustingly-high memory use is a constant rather than only occasional cost (I'm looking at you, Asana!)
All iOS issues with Google software, I suspect, have more to do with Apple being dicks to Google than with Google fucking up. Remember, Apple is really trying hard to rid iOS of all Google programs. Remember Apple Maps?
I don't think it's just Apple's fault. Every time I try to use the Youtube app on my iPhone, I can never find the things I'm looking for, because they seem to ignore all of Apple's interaction guidelines and implement the Android UI instead.
The other day I was trying to send a link to a friend: instead of clicking the standard share icon, you have to click the arrow (that looks like an email forward?), which pops up a non-standard share UI instead of the standard sheet. Never mind the fact that to dismiss a video you have to first swipe it down (minimizing it into some bizarre picture-in-picture frame), then slide it off from there, instead of using a "Back" button/gesture like every other app in iOS.
Got any actual evidence for this? Yes, I remember Apple Maps; I worked on the team. Apple Maps was the result of Apple being smart and not wanting to be beholden to Google Maps forever; eventually you have to roll your own.
And yet, here we are five years later, and Google Maps is still on the iPhone, shows no evidence of leaving, and Google's iOS apps are ALL still present and better than ever, and Google is still the default search bar in Safari. Meanwhile, Apple Maps is a great product too and has been worked on and polished for several years. "Remember Apple Maps" betrays a mindset where you read one article a few hours after it was released, half a decade ago, and you have no updated impression of the product at all. Apple Maps is, in fact, rock-solid for me right now. It is, in fact, now superior to Google Maps for transit directions, and in some other ways.
So really, I'm not sure what you are talking about, at all.
I wouldn't be so sure. I run Google apps on Android, and although I'm not sure the situation has gotten worse, it definitely hasn't gotten better. I can concur that navigation will crash without warning mid-route, maps will suddenly decide I'm somewhere very, very far away (and change the results list to "match"), and so on. It's not unusable by any means, but it could stand improvement.
Back when iOS 6 was released with Apple Maps and no YouTube, Google could be forgiven for problems with their replacement apps, as Apple had somewhat surprised them with the timing of the removals. That was three years ago, though. In the present tense, it's hard to imagine what you mean; it's not like iOS has some library to inject crashes into Google apps, or Apple is preventing updates to those apps from being published on the store (as ruled out by the frequency of updates).
There's the fact that iOS currently doesn't allow replacing the system hooks for Maps and Safari with Google Maps and Chrome (or any other store apps), but that's not the type of problem the parent was complaining about.
If you look at YouTube on android, I see evidence that they are f'ing up there in how advertisements are presented.
Put yourself on 144p quality. Watch a few videos till you get to an ad. It seems like they disregard your preference and pump up to 4k for your ad, which sucks when it takes 2 minutes to download a 30 second advertisement.
The crash issues I had with google map was on Android. I check the reviews on Google Play Store, it is not just me or my Android devices, almost everyone had that crash issues at that time.
I can't figure out how Google can release any software like that.
> Google's Youtube IOS app has issue playing video correctly. It can't even buffer the segments correctly.
Do you have t-mobile? T-mobile started throttling everyone's videos. I had problems similar to the one you describe and had to turn off tmobile's throttling 'feature' in order to get youtube to work correctly.
1. it has no back button. sometimes I watched video a, then from the recommend list there is video b and video c
I select video b, then the recommend list update
if I want to see video c, I have to search again
2. there is no sound volume button, each time I have to use the button in ipad
Completely agree with the Wifi issues. My Macbook has become extremely unreliable, it often takes me five minutes connecting/disconnecting to get online.
Recently I've additionally seen random network slowdowns that are impossible to debug, and they happen only on a single Macbook -- all other machines on the same Wifi are fine. Completely unreliable.
Glad someone else noticed that they hobbled Pages '13. You used to be able to link text boxes in Pages '09 and they removed that feature, and countless others in order to "align" the functionality with their inferior iOS product.
Pages is the only piece of software I have on my Mac where I need to keep the previous version safe because it was so much better!
Indeed. I'm in constant dread that they'll make Pages 09 incompatible on a future OS update.
I have a migration plan, but it will be a lot of work. Whereas my Pages 09 workflow is perfect. Pages 09 did exactly what I wanted it to. I've heard no one say similar things about Pages 13.
Clock has bugs. I've had alarms not go off 3 times in the last year. Pictures to prove it because when the alarm goes off it's no longer "on" (its switch is slide to the off position) so the fact that the switches are still on 30 minutes after the alarm time past means the alarm didn't go off. Nearly missed a flight.
Music once it went flat UI is now complete crap. It drives me nuts all the time and I use it often because there really isn't an alternative.
While I'm ranting one thing that's been bad from the beginning is the locked music UI. The next track button is just a few mm from the volume slider which means about once every 2 weeks I blow my ears out trying to skip to the next track. That "feature" carried over to the toolbar menu (or whatever the slide up menu is called)
IMO the default music app being not very good is OK. The real sin is not allowing others to compete. Android default music player(play music, even the name is crap) is awful. But it's not a problem because there are literally hundreds of free and paid music players that will scratch your particular itch so well, that you won't be able to use anything else after that.
Have your tried something like Ecoute on iOS? It's a third party music player and I use it full time since Apple Music was trying show up everywhere in the music.app
Ecoute uses the same library as the default app, shows a nice simple grid or list of your albums/artists/playlists and is well designed. When you use any controls in either app it will be picked up in both. It doesn't matter in which app you start a playlist/play/pause/skip/whatever. With that in mind, using Ecoute as default app was as easy as replacing the icon in the dock. No need for a default music app setting in my opinion.
Pages is an abomination. My partner was nearly in tears trying to do the most basic of table formatting.
iOS app 'screenshots' (in task selection mode) are often dated, even after multiple openings of the app. I get that they are meant to be just that, snapshots, but if those aren't up to date, you may as well just show the app icon.
Up to once a week, now, iCloud (in OS X settings) asks me to verify my password when "nothing has changed" (no purchases, etc). It then spins for a long time and there's no acknowledgement that it 'succeeded'.
> Up to once a week, now, iCloud (in OS X settings) asks me to verify my password when "nothing has changed" (no purchases, etc). It then spins for a long time and there's no acknowledgement that it 'succeeded'.
Only once a week?
Try refusing to log in. You'll get pestered every five minutes, sometimes more often than that.
Try disabling it after not logging in, and it asks you to log in to disable it, and then start pestering you even more frequently. Completely asinine.
I too noticed the wifi issues when I got my new MBP with Mavericks. I had to stop/start the wireless service frequently. I eventually narrowed it down to some incompatibility between my Cisco Surfboard cable modem / WAP and the MBP. I reconfigured it as a bridge and connected a low-end Linksys WAP I had laying around. It solved the problem. I still think this is Apple's problem, since I'd used that WAP for years with many devices and never encountered an issue.
Wi-Fi issues is a big one. I had a MacBook that stopped connecting when on OSX, even over reboots.
I had to reboot the access point in the end so perhaps it wasn't an Apple problem. Yet no other devices were having issues and I've not had a problem with it since it's been running Windows.
This is a bit of a tangent, but is Wi-Fi becoming more finicky in general, perhaps due to spectrum congestion? I find I somewhat frequently have Wi-Fi related problems of the sort you're describing on a variety of devices. It seems Wi-Fi from about 5 years ago was perhaps slower but more reliable. Am I just imagining this?
The gutting of iWork hit my office hard. I'd be using Numbers, Keynote, and Pages for years in a professional environment. The lack of support for some of even the most basic desktop publishing features is mind boggling. (e.g. There is no longer a way to rotate column header labels in the new Numbers. What? Why not?) There are a hundred trivial features like this that were totally scrapped across all iWork software. Really basic stuff. It was a disaster for anyone using the software professionally.
The apps on Mac are always sideshows. My understanding was that one of the earlier versions of iMovie was essentially a 1-man, (or small # of people) effort that was shipped, and eventually replaced.
The difference is that everything worked.
My personal opinion, based purely on speculation is that once Jony Ive & company rolled over everyone in the company, as with any corporate struggle, their priorities are the only ones that really matter. The Apple Music nonsense, that somehow managed to break an already broken product is a similar story I'm sure.
Lots of attention was paid to the visuals in Yosemite, but "unimportant" things like broken wifi, and gratuitous changes like discoveryd were allowed to see the light of day. I think Jobs was the only person able/willing to tell anyone to go fuck off, and the company is suffering from that loss.
What annoys me the most is when my mba awakes from sleep, there are around 10 processes that update their state and it means my CPU usage is at 100% per core for a few minutes. The computer is unusable during that period.
On the WiFi issues I have noticed that when using a normal 2.4GHz router in combination with any Bluetooth mouse, keyboard etc. causes lots of issues for me.
Typically I would be getting really slow speeds and intermittent disconnects.
Switching to a 5GHz WiFi router solved a lot of problems in the WiFi department for me on both El Capitan and Yosemite.
If you literally use none of these apps, I would be really surprised.
Since we're sharing anecdotes: I've never had a problem with WiFi connectivity or Spotlight on El Capitan across multiple devices. I don't use iWork or Siri, so I can't speak to that. iCloud seems fine to me, but I don't use it extensively.
Oops. I'll edit my comment. I use all of those. I was taking the ones that worked for granted.
Well, actually, I don't use Safari, but that's a very particular use case. I wanted to block sites, so I disabled Safari, enabled parental controls, and am using the Google app because it's less convenient and less likely to suck me into time wasters.
Though actually, the dictation search in Google now is better than Safari. And I like being able to have my homepage be a google search. Impossible in Safari.
The only issue I have with spotlight on El Capitan is a strange issue where sometimes after entering the first character the cursor jumps to start again and overwrites the first character, turning a search for "text" which should open TextEdit to "ext" which opens Extractor.
well, it may be a bit of an exaggeration (I'm not the author), but do you think usage of clock to set alarms (or calculator) is strategic to apple's future? I hope not. Whereas use of the browser or maps or email services is. And most people I see using iphones don't use apple's offerings in those (not trivially substitutable) areas.
As for my SO, syncing iphone 5 to mac (on 10.10) just doesn't work anymore. I'm going to have to spend hours debugging why the fuck not soon. And recently her iphone has stopped connecting to wifi. To make it connect, you have to delete the wifi credentials then reboot the device. She already walked through a reset with apple over the phone but it continues to happen. It's infuriating.
I'm always baffled by heavy Calculator users, to be honest. I've never understood the popularity of dedicated calculator apps or widgets, on any platform. 90% of the time you can simply round numbers in your mind, and if precision is necessary for big numbers that's likely a job for Excel.
Same for clock apps. Clock in your taskbar, sure; but who would ever start a dedicated clock app? I barely touch Contacts and always from other apps. Photos is terrible, but that's been the case for a while now, the obsession with hiding the filesystem has degenerated in an unusable interface (sharing in particular is just mystifying).
Of your list, I do use Messages (you don't really get a choice, if you want to receive SMS texts...) and Safari (again, no real choice), as well as the Camera simply because I use it so little it's not worth my time looking for a better app.
That's where the alarm is, and personally I use it several times a day, to wake me up and to remember the occasional meeting or random events I would otherwise forget about.
I hate ios Photos, mostly because of the white backgrounds however.
Good point. I never really used alarms until Siri, because it was too cumbersome. Now setting and deleting alarms via Siri is probably the best voice-recognition experience I've ever had.
Calling someone a liar without providing any proof, or even good reasoning on why it's likely beyond the minimum "I find that hard to believe." provided, is an asshole move. Please don't do that.
> Since we're sharing anecdotes
Well, some of his points were anecdotes, some were observations about how he interacts with apple, and some were specific accounts of problematic functionality.
> iCloud seems fine to me, but I don't use it extensively.
The claims were that it had some poorly worded confirmations for deleting files when you unsync a device (subjective but testable), that iTunes has a history of destroying files on syncs (should be testable with some searching), and that iTunes will add apps to his computer after he deletes them from his phone (probably needs clarification, but definitely testable).
Responding to a comment with an accusation that it's full of anecdotes and then responding to a portion of that comment which has real, testable assertions with a hedged anecdote is not a useful way to further relevant discussion.
Since it was a statement by you about your own actions, saying he thinks you are wrong in that wording is calling you a liar. It could, and I think should, have been worded differently if the intent was to probe whether you were being hyperbolic or mistaken. E.g.
"I'm not sure how someone would go about not using any Apple app, such as calculator, camera, clock, contacts, messages, phone, photos, safari. Do you not require a lot of what these apps provide, or have actually found good alternatives for each of them?"
or
"I really can't imagine not using any Apple apps. How do you get by without any of them?"
In each of these cases, the problem is presented as a failure of the asker's imagination or knowledge, and we ask for clarification on this point. IMO, this is a much more civil way to converse than starting out by questioning the veracity of someone's statements about theirself.
I didn't say he lied, I said he was called a liar (but really, it's more that the strong implication was that he lied, that was overly strong wording on my part). Specifically, I think the wording "I find that hard to believe" has different connotations depending on whether you are talking to the root source of some information, or someone relaying that information.
For example, if I state "I had chicken for lunch" and you reply "I find that hard to believe.", I think the implication is clear that you think I'm lying. Alternatively, if a third party says "kbenson had chicken for lunch" and you say "I find that hard to believe", there is not a clear implication that the third party is lying, nor that where they got the information from is lying, as there are multiple locations in the chain of authenticity of such a statement where a mistake or purposeful misrepresentation could have happened, so it's not clear where fault may lay.
So, when someone states "I don't use any of the default iPhone apps" and another person replies directly to them with "I find that hard to believe", I think the implication that they are lying is clear (whether or not they were actually lying).
Now, as for your specific assertion, I think you are obviously correct in the general sense. Although am interested in your opinion on how you would classify someone that is very loose with regard to their statements and their certainty regarding those statements. If I made a statement asserting something, but thought there might be a 15% chance I was wrong if I really looked into it, would I be lying if I stated it as a fact due to the false certainty implied?
Specifically, in this case, if the author was 85% certain they didn't use any default Apple apps and stated as much without qualifying with "I think", or "probably", they may believe they are correct, but be ultimately wrong. Was it a lie to imply a higher level of certainty than existed? I'm not entirely sure how I would classify that. (Note: I don't mean to imply a specific state of mind for the original commenter, this is purely a thought experiment and that statement was handy).
I simply don't see the implied accusation of lying with "I find that hard to believe." It's merely implying that the statement is wrong. You seem to be interpreting it as an accusation based on the idea that a person making this statement about himself is very unlikely to be incorrect. I don't see that as at all unlikely, and you'll observe here that the statement was in fact quite wrong.
As for levels of uncertainty, I think blanket statements cover a pretty wide range. "I don't use the default apps" could be low or high certainty. If you said something like "I totally definitely absolutely never use the default apps" while you are actually somewhat unsure, then sure, that seems like a lie to me.
> You seem to be interpreting it as an accusation based on the idea that a person making this statement about himself is very unlikely to be incorrect.
I'm interpreting it as an accusation based on the prior explanation, which is less about likelihood of correctness and more about questioning the single authoritative root source of information. In truth, that reasoning is really my explanation of what I see in practice. I cannot recall an instance where someone said "I find that hard to believe" to someone's statement about their own current actions that did not also carry a clear "I call bullshit" connotation. That is, while logically "I find that hard to believe" used in this way can mean that a person thinks you might be wrong, I find that in practice it is not used this way, so it's irrelevant in this context. Specifically, I think the statement as used hear carried a clear "I call bullshit" connotation, which is an implication of lying.
That said, I freely admit my experience in the use of this expression in English might be influenced by region, or even my own biased interpretation, and you or others may have experiences where it was used by or to you in reference to an assertive statement about your action in which there was not a clear "I call bullshit" connotation, in which case I would happily hear them and use them as counter evidence to my own experiences.
> "I don't use the default apps" could be low or high certainty.
To me, assertive statements like this do not exhibit low certainty at all, specifically because it's referencing current state. If it's about the past, it's open to recollection issues, if it's about the future, it's about possible future actions, but when you state "This is what I do", to me that is meant as a clearly defined statement of truth.
In my experience, calling bullshit is almost always about saying the person is wrong, not lying. Maybe carried away by braggadocio, but not outright lying.
You say it's questioning the single authoritative root source of information. I say there is no authoritative root source of this information. People's memories are bad, even about their own lives, and when they say something improbable about their own lives, it's not an implicit accusation of lying if you say you think they're wrong.
> In my experience, calling bullshit is almost always about saying the person is wrong, not lying. Maybe carried away by braggadocio, but not outright lying.
I'm not sure that follow most people's interpretations. Wikipedia[1] even asserts it's usual use in response to statement that are "deceiving, misleading, disingenuous, unfair or false". Personally I see it used, and use it myself (sparingly) when responding to someone you think is knowingly misleading you (possibly in jest). I would be offended if anyone but a close friend called my statements bullshit and I believed them, as I would interpret that as an accusation of me intentional misrepresentation.
> I say there is no authoritative root source of this information.
Sure there is, in the instances I am (and have been) referring to. That doesn't mean it's infallible, but in the absence of a third party witness or evidence to the contrary, sometimes all you have is the statement of the person about themselves. The only way to find a fault in those situations is for them to admit it. Related to what we've been discussing, I'm not sure I would distinguish between a lie or a mistake when someone recants immediately after a statement and questioning of said statement when in regards their own actions in the way we've been discussing. I consider both acts of bad faith (if someone puts so little thought into their words that they must recant at the slightest questioning, then I view it as not better than a lie).
"I'm not sure I would distinguish between a lie or a mistake when someone recants immediately after a statement and questioning of said statement when in regards their own actions in the way we've been discussing. I consider both acts of bad faith (if someone puts so little thought into their words that they must recant at the slightest questioning, then I view it as not better than a lie)."
I'd suggest you really ought to lighten up, understand informal discourse for what it is, and stop projecting your own harsh views of other people onto other people.
> understand informal discourse for what it is, and stop projecting your own harsh views of other people onto other people.
I don't think it's overly harsh to expect people, when talking about their own actions (and obviously when understanding the topic and terminology), and when in a discussion which is not a light hearted banter, to expect someone to put enough thought into that statement to make it true, at least to the degree it requires additional information to make them reconsider.
This theoretical exchange in a discussion regarding the merits of Chicken illustrates my point of view:
Person 1: I don't eat chicken.
Person 2: Are you sure?
Person 1: Okay, yes, I eat chicken.
Person 1 has, at this point, proven themselves unreliable in their statements. Whether that is from a lie or mistake is both unprovable,and to me, irrelevant, because the end result is the same. I may or may not converse with them further, depending on other cues, but functionally, what's the difference to Person 2 or observers. I don't think that's overly harsh, just stating the realities of the situation. Sometimes people tell small lies, sometimes they make mistakes, but every occurrence affects your view of them slightly unless you expected that statement to be untrue.
So, to bring this full circle, the original commenter that asserted they didn't use default Apple apps may have lied, but it's far more likely they were mistaken, but in the end, I'll view their statements with a bit more skepticism now, as they've proven themselves capable of making a simple, assertive blanket statements about their behavior that they will recant at the slightest question.
Even so, I still feel the original reply carried an implied accusation of deception, for the reasons we've covered in depth. Regardless of whether the replying commenter was eventually correct, I don't think they had cause to use the wording they did at the time they did. We don't agree, which is fine, but that's why I felt compelled to make the statement I did, and while my wording may have been overly harsh (which I've already admitted), I don't believe my message was.
I assume we're done here, since your last statement was a single sentence whose purpose was to call into question my attitude, understanding, and actions, and offered little additional to discuss? In truth, I found that somewhat belittling, but am trying to ignore that aspect, as I may be misinterpreting it (and I try to be more forgiving of speech directed towards myself than to others). I've tried to be civil, and while this discussion wasn't light hearted, I did find it informative.
It's funny, I was just regretting the latest OSX update that I made. My MacBook Pro (work laptop) is 2 years old and was great when I first set up my dev environment. Now, I need to restart every couple of days.
I should spend some time partitioning the disk and installing Linux.
> I should spend some time partitioning the disk and installing Linux.
That hour spent might save you twenty. But if you want the best experience you need a laptop that was certified for OEM Linux, like some of the Lenovo boxes. The user experience is better than a macbook. Rock solid OS. Everything just works. Seamless upgrades. A bunch of warm hearted people will carefully apply themselves to making the system work better while you sleep.
Just a note, I was sick of Spotlight too, and I switched to Alfred, which is actually the "father" of spotlight. And it is way better than Spotlight now. You should give it a try
Preview was pretty cool, and for the most part still is, but now it doesn't update any more when viewing a PDF not in page mode but in continuous scroll mode. That basically means I cannot use it for previewing Latex PDFs anymore.
Skim.app is very suitable for Latex PDF preview (it even supports syncing given you have an Editor that supports it too, e.g. Emacs AUCTex or TexShop).
BTW, to fix these issues by software dev process is not that hard.
* Start by use/create a full functional regression system.
* It is not that hard to create system level functional test coverage for wifi, Siri, search, etc.
* Require ALL SW developers to run full tests every evening, weekend.
Code are not allow to checkin or merge upstream if any test failed.
* The test system should submit report on all test scripts pass/fail and performance characterization to central server every night.
* Spotlight no longer finds things as easily. I used to use it for everything. Since updating to El Capitan, it has missed some exact match folders. Planning to switch to Alfred.
* iWork was gutted in '13. People used to use Pages professionally. I'm now using Pages '09, and planning to transition to Word or Latex. I tested Pages '13 intensively, and it fails for even basic publishing.
* Siri can only work with default Apple apps. And those default apps are getting worse. So Siri takes a hit with every app that declines. I used to use Mail, now I don't.
* Constant Wifi issues. I frequently have to turn off wifi, then turn on. On my home network. This never happened pre Mavericks.
* In general, all my Apple default software on my iphone is sitting in a folder titled "apple", which I never use. I don't think I use any Apple default App.
* I avoid icloud. It sends scary "do you want to delete all these files" messages if you ever unsync a device, and it's not clear which actions produce which effects. iTunes has a history of destroying files on syncs, so I can't trust iCloud. Even now, itunes will add apps to my device if they're in my library but I deleted them from my phone. It does this without asking! Any other cloud app has figured out how to handle deletions from one device.
Pages 09 hit the hardest. It was wonderful software. I used it for print publishing, and it just worked. Easy to use, incredibly powerful. Have a look at their manual for the level of care they put into their software, as recently as 2009.
Pages 13 can't do half of that. Very basic stuff like "facing pages" for books has been left out.
https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/0/MA663/en_US/Pages09...
Edit: A comment below pointed out that, I do in fact use default apps. I had taken them for granted. These ones work well and I use them:
Messages, Phone, camera, photos, clock, wallet, calendar, music (UI got worse on this one). Reminders I use occasionally because of the Siri integration.
There are some issues with some of them, but mostly they work pretty well.
On the mac, the only default apps I use frequently are textedit and Preview. Previews remains excellent. I use spotlight, but as noted above it got worse.