Being married to a release cycle based on hardware, not software, makes sense for iOS - certain features of the mobile operating system depend on new hardware features in iPhone and iPads - but it makes less sense with OS X, which does not have an annual hardware update cycle. A number of iOS features aren’t available, at least not fully, because OS X 10.10 Yosemite isn’t out yet. “The problem is that, now, iOS and OS X are inextricably linked. That’s pretty much what I said back in October: Instead, the opposite appears to be happening: the pace of rapid updates on multiple product lines seems to be expanding and accelerating.” “I fear that Apple’s leadership doesn’t realize quite how badly and deeply their software flaws have damaged their reputation, because if they realized it, they’d make serious changes that don’t appear to be happening. We need our computers, phones, and tablets to work well first so we can enjoy new features released at a healthy, gradual, sustainable pace. We don’t need each OS release to have a huge list of new features. “We don’t need major OS releases every year. “The problem seems to be quite simple: they’re doing too much, with unrealistic deadlines. (Remember antennagate?) However, it’s only under Tim Cook that Mac users have come to expect problems, that we simply don’t trust the company any more. It would be easy to blame this on Tim Cook many of these problems have occurred on his watch, but Steve Jobs’ Apple had its share of gaffes too. Maybe it’s an engineering problem, but I suspect not - I doubt that any cohesive engineering team could keep up with these demands and maintain significantly higher quality.” “I suspect the rapid decline of Apple’s software is a sign that marketing is too high a priority at Apple today: having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality. Arment suggests that this may be because marketing has taken over the company: I no longer want to be the first to install an update to iOS or OS X, because I simply don’t trust that Apple will get it right. We now need to treat Apple’s OS and application releases with the same extreme skepticism and trepidation that conservative Windows IT departments employ.” “It just works” was never completely true, but I don’t think the list of qualifiers and asterisks has ever been longer. “Apple has completely lost the functional high ground. Arment suggests that Apple has lost the functional high ground, and says: Today, I spotted an article by Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper and the Overcast podcast app. I was wondering if it was just me getting cynical, but more and more seasoned Apple users – I’ve owned Macs since 1991 – have been echoing these problems. In September, I wrote an article, Why Has So Much Gone Wrong for Apple Recently?, listing a half-dozen gaffes and bugs that had plagued the company in the previous month. I was chagrinned that the articles that get the most views are the ones about problems with Apple software: sync problems with iOS devices and iTunes, AirDrop not working, the problems with Apple’s Family Sharing, difficulties getting Handoff and Continuity to work, and more. This weekend, I was looking at the statistics for this website.
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