iOS 13 and macOS 10.15 Catalina have been unusually buggy releases for Apple. The betas started out buggy at WWDC in June, which is not unexpected, but even after Apple removed some features from the final releases in September, more problems have forced the company to publish quick updates. Why? Based on my 18 years of experience working as an Apple software engineer, I have a few ideas.
Interesting look at the inner workings of Apple and how they may contribute to Apple’s recent struggles.
Maybe Apple just need to realize that we don’t need a new model of everything every year, nor do we always need a new major os version in September. If it’s not ready, then it can wait for polish. At this point, there’s no need for a new model of everything every year anyway as there’s not enough differentiating factors to tempt most people into upgrading that often. Iteration over revolution is a good thing.
They could have a model every year if they were truly Agile. Aka, make one feature and only start on a new one once the first feature is done. But Tim Cook is yet another “planning by schedule” type of CEO, aka how every other technology company (except maybe Google) is run.
They tried slow rolling the hardware and MacOS, and everyone lost their minds. No new models or OS this month? Cue the articles about MacOS/Apple dying and the wales of thousands of fanbois crying about losing bragging rights.
I agree that new models for low single digit gains are silly, and Apple shouldn’t move until something compelling comes along, like AVX512. But whatever, my 2015 MacBook Pro still works fine.
darknexus,
That’s sacrilege to the marketing people, haha.
One problem with upgrading MacOS is the features that have been removed or no longer work smoothly. Since 10.7 this list includes OpenMP removed: gcc not included with Xcode, hard to build Xcode apps to support OpenMP. Hard to support debuggers outside Xcode: hard to test and develop many C projects. OpenGL deprecated: poor layering system introduced that causes screen flickering. Some openGL apps fail to load or resize properly. Poor spinning disk performance due to APFS non-contiguous sections. Poor flash drive performance due to default usage of spotlight.
Many Safari extensions disabled. Dashboard removed. Specific issues with Catalina include iClicker and iClicker Cloud, Adobe Acrobat 2017, Endnote 8, Remote Proctor Now, older versions of Adobe Creative Cloud, Trend Micro Anti-virus FireEye Security.
For my work, MacOS is much less competitive than a few years ago. Windows 10 with Windows Subsystem for Linux is impressive. We have some System76 laptops that are promising, but the support for hi-dpi displays remains weak.
crab,
I heard that openCL was depreciated as well, although I don’t know if it still works & how well.
https://www.overclock3d.net/news/software/mac_gaming_in_peril_as_apple_depreciates_opengl_and_opencl_support/1
Of course apple is known to depreciate things after a while, but they’re not even supporting vulkan, the next-gen open replacement.
https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/264694-khronos-brings-vulkan-macos-ios-apple-refuses
I don’t think apple wants to invest in mac-os features because their goal is to depreciate mac-os in favor of IOS. I don’t know if they’re going to come out and officially say it any time soon, but mac-os is bitrotting away and it appears they’re ok with this.
When was the last time valgrind worked properly on MacOS? I mean, maybe it’s my fault for coding in C (clearly I haven’t seen the light) because I support a wide range of OSes, but MacOS used to be a fantastic UNIX workstation.
OneNote and MS Todo are probably the only things I use at work daily that don’t have Linux versions…
Yes. Yes, and more Yes. Windows with WSL if you can’t get away with pure Linux.