Something atypical for Apple is iOS 13’s notably buggy rollout. Since June, when Apple hosted its annual WWDC software shindig, the company has been releasing developer and public beta versions of its new OS for iPhones. This is usually a fertile time for communities of early users to share notes about their experiences online, and provide useful feedback to Apple on how the software works. This year, some developers say they’re surprised by what feels like a scattershot release.
“iOS 13 has felt like a super-messy release, something we haven’t seen this bad since iOS 8 or so,” Steve Troughton-Smith, an app and game developer, tweeted earlier this week. Troughton-Smith frequently blogs about his experiences coding for Apple platforms. “Definitely needs a lengthy period of consolidation and bug fixing,” he says of the new mobile OS.
Virtually everyone who’s been testing iOS 13 seems to advise waiting for 13.1. Regardless, it’s iOS/iPadOS release time, which means Federico Viticci’s must-read review has been published. It’s an insanely long read this year, so grab a few coffees and enjoy his excellent work.
Dark Mode is pretty good. Much better than Windows 10’s implementation. Even on an LCD, it is a delight to look at.
…aaaand Apple is slowly sliding down the path of your average technology company. Impressive hardware running crappy software. Whoever promoted Tim Cook (a hardware guy) to the CEO position made a mistake.
Google and Microsoft are the most software-first companies right now.
Tim Cook’s supposed to be a supply-side genius, so the crap quality of hardware (awful keyboards, battery recalls, etc.) is probably on his shoulders. Their worsening software probably isn’t his fault though… People who used to work for a mostly defunct mobile phone developer might have some theories about that.
You know that you just can name the”mostly defunct mobile phone developer” right?
BTW I believe that the worsening software is Tim Cook’s fault. Hardware companies just don’t “get” software, and Tim Cook is running the company like a hardware company: “Give the customer impressive ‘featues’ under a rigid timeline, you see, never mind fixing bugs and working on UI consistency, these just distract the company from the big picture”. This was the magic behind Steve Jobs management style BTW, a software-first company who made hardware that met the software’s needs and fit the software like a glvoe. Tim Cook is instead taking the company back to the 90s era of “boutique hardware manufacturer” and hoping that inflated prices and huge margins will cover the software R&D bill.
*Impressively specced hardware. Apple always adds things like 3 thunderbolt ports, or makes it the cheapest 5k video editing display at the time simply because no one else offers these things. In the modern market these are just edge cases unimportant to 99.9% of actual users, but it makes them feel good about the purchase. The actual hardware and engineering have taken a severe nosedive. I believe one of the current models has a 50V backlight pin next to a pin leading directly to the CPU on models without a GPU (and directly to the GPU instead if it has one). It used to be a nice, 0V grounded pin next to it. You might as well assume the hardware is disposable. Apple care + recalls after class action lawsuits regarding these faults end up in people getting entirely new computers to replace failed ones, which keeps them feeling good and buying again.
Apple hardware was never all that reliable. Do we have to remember the defective SuperDrives or the iPods that broke all too easily? People were just willing to put up with this kind of crap if it meant having good software. Software bugs are the worst. They cannot be repaired and they are not fixed under warranty. Your device can literally have a crippling software bug the moment it’s out of the box and you are sad out of luck.
Yeah, iOS 13 feels like it’s still in beta 3 or so. Not surprising when you consider that Apple started 13.1 betas midway through the 13 beta cycle. I can’t for the life of me understand why they just didn’t push the release date back and call 13.1 the initial release. The differences between 13 (buggy as all get out) and 13.1 even in public beta form are astounding. It reminds me of Windows Vista pre-SP3, though fortunately we won’t have to wait years for the fixed release this time.
Because Tim Cook can’t manage software. The reason old Apple rarely had to deal with such embarrassments is that they largely stuck to the good ol’ software development rule of “80% of the stuff takes 80% of the time, the rest 20% takes the other 80% of the time”. Do you think Jobs wanted the original iPhone to ship without video recording? But in software you have to be flexible with your requirements, and it’s better to implement 3 features well (music, browser, video playback), than 5 badly (the Nokia way).