Marco Arment was the voice behind the Apple has lost the functional high ground blog post that has gone viral over the past few days.
With the benefit of hindsight, Marco updated his post with a link to What it’s like to be popular for a day:
You might think this is a dream come true for a blogger, but it’s horrible.
Instead, I looked back at what I wrote with regret, guilt, and embarrassment. The sensationalism was my fault — I started it with the headline and many poor word choices, which were overly harsh and extreme. I was being much nastier and more alarmist than I intended. I edited some words to be more fair and accurate, but it was too late. I can’t blame the opportunists for taking the bait that I hastily left for them.
Whether you agree with Marco’s post or not, there’s no doubt it started a lot of good conversation about the state of Apple software and, hopefully, it raised awareness within Apple of the growing perception that there are fit and finish issues.
I continue to feel the same love for Apple products. My sense is that the world came rushing to Apple’s door (when they had relegated Apple as a niche player for such a long time) and pushed them into a new role, that of a world leader. As the requirements, demand, and pipeline grew, Apple had to grow rapidly to fill this new role. A tough adjustment for anyone to make.
At the same time, Apple was in a brand new kind of horse race, with Android and Samsung. The kind of horse race that rewards quick reactions and short term thinking and brings about feature cram. Tough to resist. Feature cram places incredible stress on testing and QA, especially when the calendar drives the release schedule (as opposed to, “we’ll ship when it passes all its tests”).
When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, one of the first things he did was simplify the product line. Whatever his intent, this ended up reducing the demands on QA and testing, giving them more bandwidth to do their jobs right.
Not sure if simplifying is the right answer here, but I can only imagine that the best minds at Apple are working on this problem.
I’ve never had any major software issues with any Mac since getting my first Apple ][+ low those many years ago.
Arment has a very bad tendency to not think before going off. I would like to see how well he handles managing a 100+ engineers on a huge piece of software used by millions of people and produce incident free, on time.
I stopped reading and listening to anything he says sometime ago and have not been any worse for it.
Has Apple wiffed on a few updates, yes. Has it been catastrophic for the majority of Apple users, no. Do Apples products to this day, just work, yes. My 70 year old father can attest to that.
there is a line from “Gone with the Wind” that I think applies here, said by Rhett to Scarlett:
“You’re like the thief who isn’t the least bit sorry he stole, but is terribly, terribly sorry he’s going to jail”
Marco’s original post seems to be more honest. And this regret post seems to imply he should have censored his true feeling to take the edge off.
I agree with his first post. I don’t think he was wrong or heavy handed. He’s clearly very frustrated and his post made that clear. Good for him.
I, too, have spent dozens of hours working with Apple support for nearly a year to resolve a boatload of issues. I have cycled through two executive team members and multiple engineers. They all seem to want to help but the problems are inherent to iOS and as such they can’t specifically help me. I’ve given gigs of logs with no resolution. I’ve gone from iOS 7 to iOS 8, purchased an iPhone 6, and completely wiped the phone clean multiple times without restoring any data from backup. The problems persist. It’s terribly buggy for me.
I’m glad to see the headlines these issues have been getting from prominent developers and bloggers lately.
I agree completely. The past year has cost Apple almost all of the good will I felt towards the company, which was considerable. I am no longer confident that Apple will sort out their little glitches and mis-steps, and I’m more likely to dread than anticipate a new release.
“Whether you agree with Marco’s post or not, there’s no doubt it started a lot of good conversation about the state of Apple software and, hopefully, it raised awareness within Apple of the growing perception that there are fit and finish issues.”
No. Let’s be clear here: It started a lot of useless opinion-sharing. Nobody has the evidence outside of Apple. And if there is really a quality problem (which I doubt), they have the real measurements on it and likely changed something months ago.
Marco’s post is just useless opinion. I think he’s wrong, but whatever. But there’s no argument that his first post was intentionally argumentative and trolling. And, again, I think intentionally argumentative, trolling, and just plain wrong.
Yeah, I’ve been a Mac guy for a long time, with the exception of ’04 to ’07 when I had Windows on my desk and a Dell laptop for work and my G3 was no longer viable and there was no iPhone on Fido yet.
My 2011 24″ iMac is the most stable computer I have ever owned and that’s saying something because I stuck with XP for a very long time, was burned by Vista and move to Win 7 two years after it was released. With the exception of some incorrect RAM (too fast for the bus), My iMac remains on for weeks or months at a time. I have never been happier with my hardware and have no regular, repeatable issues to speak of. And that’s with me running Office 2008 so I can keep using Entourage.
Marco may want to soften the tone of his piece, but the original tone really isn’t something that can be softened without being flatly retracted.
Marco’s thesis only works if you can point to some time when Apple has some kind of year over year nigh-perfect quality.
That doesn’t exist. Nor has it ever. There’s not been a single product cycle where you can’t point to real bugs and problems. It’s got nothing to do with being “overcomplicated”. the iTunes 2.0 installer had a bug that would wipe your volume if the name had a space in it. Mail has had long-standing bugs dating back over 5 full versions.
Prior to 10.2, there was a bug in the filesystem code that randomly truncated large files.
And if anyone seriously thinks Apple can, given the pace of competition in this industry, stop releasing new features and just “fix bugs”, they have, literally, no clue how things actually work.
Marco is comparing today to something that didn’t exist. He might as well compared it to the 1950s of “Happy Days”, both are about as realistic.
Mac software issues are a tempest in a teapot.
1 Mac software has never been perfect. There are always glitches or features that we pay attention to only when they cause us pain
2 Apple’s policies are not about the developer, they are about the user.
3 Most all of this talk sounds like whining
So software exists only in two states? Perfect and not-perfect? And all values of not-perfect are equal?
that would be an interesting reply had I said that. Apple’s quality has always been all over the map. like any company, they will have cases where it is good and where it is not so good. the examples I gave showed that.
The “apple’s quality is going down” meme isn’t even new. It’s pretty regular, about once a year, maybe once every other year. Usually, there will be some kind of misstep and then you see the “they’re doing too much too fast” posts. Maps, mobile me, etc.
Same thing with hardware.
If I wanted to be really mean, I could have focused solely on things like their less-well known but far more consistent problems in areas like server software, which has almost non-existent documentation, and finding the person who knows what’s going on in a given area is sometimes like chasing a questing beast.
and for anyone who’s ever worked for an Apple Authorized Repair Center, Apple’s “famed quality” has clearly never even heard of GSX. Which is where I’m convinced they send people they hate too much to fire. GSX is ugly on every level.
Oh, and the “custom stores” wherein when you buy something, your invoice may have something to do with what ou bought, it may not.
the regular 2-week plus wait times on custom builds of hardware.
Apple is, even with all that, pretty good about quality, but like any company, like EVERY company, they have their missteps. Pretending there’s some great “new” problem is simply at odds with reality
Seeing as you did say that, I’ll take the compliment.
Yeah, you did. Otherwise why even say “It’s never been perfect!” Why even bring ‘perfect’ into the discussion? As far as I can tell just because it’s the stock response. “There are lots of bugs and poor design decisions now? Well, there have always been bugs. There seem to be more now? Well, there have always been bugs. People are no longer confident that the bugs and poor design decisions will be fixed? Well, there have always been bugs.”
Exactly this. The only explanation I can come up with, is that people have a very short memory. There’s a very long list of things that have gone wrong in years past.
Simple example: anyone remember iOS 2.0? The one that shipped with the 3G and enabled the App Store? It was terrible. Apps would not launch half the time without requiring a reboot. People lost access to their phone for days as Apple’s activation servers crashed under the load.
I would argue previous iOS versions were worse, much worse. iOS 2.0 is the quintessential example.
So I have a question for Dave (and anyone else who thinks Apple is going down the path of feature cram): what newly introduced features in either iOS or OS X do you think aren’t necessary or beneficial and shouldn’t hace been added? I’m not an OS X user but I can’t think of one iOS feature I’d ask Apple to take back. I use Control Center, AirDrop and Handoff every day. Extensions have made apps like 1Password much more functional and easy to use. Personally I think there’s very little Apple has done that wasn’t necessaary to move the platforms and Apple forward. Android is getting much better when it comes to UI design and smoothness. Apple can’t afford to slow down.
Or how about OX 10.0 and 10.1? 10.0 was unbearable – almost completely useless. 10.1 fixed many of those issues, but was still far from what we expect today.
Nice observations in the article, Dave. And as much as the “dark side” likes to think we Apple users are blind followers, there is nothing wrong with strong criticism, in my opinion.
I mostly went with recent memories for people who don’t know OS 7/8, 10.0, 10.1, the Cube, countless overheating computers, …
Or the ridiculously long lines of people for the 3G, 3GS, and 4. Apple’s and AT&T’s websites crashing for each launch. It was amazing people would put up with this every year.
If anything, Steve Jobs’ insistence on form over function for many of these releases caused these problems. IMO, the iPhone 6 and iOS 8 launch have been pretty smooth by traditional Apple standards. That’s what makes me so disappointed about Marco’s rants; he knows better.
I suspect it’s that we now expect more of Apple than we used to, but that’s a sign things have improved.
Quote Fail:
note the bolded bits. “nigh”. A synonym for “nearly”. Modifies “perfect”. It’s important.
The amount of reflection from prominent non-sensational bloggers all around seem to say he was right to a point, and I agree. I think he might have gone a little too far, but it sparked a debate around the blogosphere where the overall consensus seemed to find a middle ground. In the end, I’m glad he brought it up. It was a worthwhile debate that can only benefit the Apple ecosystem.
my macs and iOS devices are working fine. macs flawlessly; iOS 7 had crashed a few times for me but no longer.
not running into the supposed quality issues.
I think Yosemite in particular is very demanding on hardware from a generation that’s starting to fail. Yes, blame should be assigned there, but you’re doing it wrong if you’re blaming the software.
“I was being much nastier and more alarmist than I intended.”
That’s what the Internet is all about.
I said it on the other thread, but it’s worth repeating it here.
As much as I often disagree with Arment, he’s a mensch for apologizing like that, and he’s earned respect for it.
I dunno, I bore 10.0 pretty well on my G4-350.
(It helps that the contrast was with MacOS 9, which was … not good, in any modern context, and could not remotely compete with even Windows 95, which at least had preemptive multitasking.)
10.1 was a huge improvement, though.
I found it puzzling how harsh the criticism was. Apple is far from perfect. But the eternal question about the competition puts things in perspective. Apple may not be great, but its better than the alternatives.
Sigh. You can always find people like the guy in this thread who’s having tons of issues with a device or the OS on it. We tend to point to those people as the norm, but they’re not. I’ve run Macs for, well, ever – since the 128k Mac and haven’t run into any nightmares like that. Those situations are outliers as is their opposite, the person who never sees any issue no matter how small.
What I have run into are glitches here and there, speed issues with 10.00, etc. Occasionally I swear at Safari. The hotspot connection between my Air on Yosemite and my 6 on 8.1 can be flaky. I think, behind all the BS that Arment’s post stirred up, that this is the kind of thing Apple needs to correct. I love the idea of being able to just select my phone and have it enable my hotspot on demand from the Air… but if it only works some of the time it becomes a frustration and the perception isn’t of a cool feature but of a cool but slightly buggy and unreliable feature. It turns people off from trying that stuff in the future.
This will become increasingly important as Apple makes a push to integrate home and health functions. If I can tell Siri to lock my front door and turn out the lights in the living room as I go to bed that’s nice. If she fails to do that 30% of the time, that’s annoying.
What can Apple do? Simple – stop insisting on yearly major updates to the OS. Deliver then when they’re ready, even if that’s 18 or 24 months apart. Scale the updates so that they should fit in 24 months or less, but stop making the releases so rigidily date driven.
It’s not so much feature cram as it is feature cram into a rigid 12 month schedule. I like all the features but I could also have waited another 6 months for them to be polished and more reliable.
One more thing specifically about Marco’s regret – he talks about his post as if it was something he tossed off before bed and gee, how was he to know it would get attention. What Marco seems to have a problem acknowledging is his status in the Apple community. He has almost 78,000 followers on Twitter. He has a highly regarded podcast with a co-host who also has a significant presence in the Apple community (Siracusa). He was an early Tumblr employee and basically wrote the initial infrastructure for it and then had one of the early break out apps from a solo iOS dev (Instapaper).
Despite all of this, he seems oddly reluctant to deal with the fact that his voice has reach and power. Perhaps this was a good wakeup call for him.
And yet I’ve run a 6 with iOS 8 and, while there are minor issues here and there, don’t find it terribly buggy in the least.
individual experiences != trends. I’m not saying you aren’t having problems, but that you (and perhaps I) are atypical.
A couple of non-tech types I know have complained about some issues after upgrading to Yosemite. Most of their issues seem to be due to having to do some things differently and they like it “the old way’ better. A couple issues are bugs that Apple seems to have corrected with the latest beta (and introduced a couple new ones), so updates will help here. My experience is that there are fewer show-stopper bugs, but more annoying glitches. Over all, across a number of my Apple devices, things work “good enough”, but long-time Apple users will not be satisfied with that. Nor should they be.
Yep. Used all OS X versions from .0 through .10 and, if anything, versions 10.6 through 10.10 gave me less headaches, maybe not in numbers of problems (can’t say with any certainty), but certainly in severity. I, e.g., had no major driver issues (not even with more delicate stuff like audio interfaces and video capture boards) since 10.6 – in earlier times even minor updates sometimes broke drivers and existing software. Plus, there is the fact that most preinstalled software in early OS X versions did not have much functionality that could be broken.
Marco might think of a time when he was less critical, or just in a better mood. Whenever my granddad complains that my grandma’s cooking used to be better, she says ‘your teeth were’.
and it depends on what you care about. In my last job, we had to use Google Apps and Gmail. Mountain Lion was fine, Yosemite is fine. mavericks was a nightmare.
So by that measure, Yosemite is BETTER in terms of quality.
Arment is not new. He is not new to writing, the english language, intent or anything else. He used the words and tone he intended. It’s the backfiring of said words and tone he regrets.
If Apple went to a 2-year cycle, they’d be crucified over it. Do you think their competition would stop adding features?
or do you think you wouldn’t get two years of features crammed in the way we get one year now?
Anyone using OS X 10.0 or 10.1 should remember that Apple themselves knew that it was not ready for prime time.
I remember getting 10.2 and finally seeing that OS X could actually run on a computer and do steal work.
I was around for OS 7 and have some “experience” with bad software.
BTW- let’s start a movement to bring back the blue Apple in the center of the menu bar.
Although not suggesting a two year cycle, I don’t know of a broad swath of the public clamoring for specific yearly updates. I don’t need to fire up my machine every September for the mandatory update fest, you know?
Marco did say some true things and it wouldn’t have become viral if there wasn’t a degree of truth, but he does get very hyperbolic and go off without thinking when he decides to rant.
I think all of us in the Apple community (and even the engineers inside Apple) would agree that the demand to create a major new iOS release every single year when a new iPhone launches has put Apple in a bind in terms of the polish their OS’ used to have. But I don’t think its nearly as bad as Marco made it to be. My family and non-techie people I know all still use their iPhones happily, no disdain towards Apple.
Its funny, so many Apple fans criticized Scott Forstall saying iOS got “stale” under his leadership. And now when Craig takes over the last 2 releases and has made them more exciting and bigger releases, everyone is now saying Apple is biting off more than they can chew and they’d rather see less new features but more stable software. You really can’t please fans. Craig seems to appeal more to the geekier side, while Scott really had a deep intuitive sense for the average person. Its a shame Scott couldn’t work well with the team Jobs left in charge, I often wonder what iOS would be like today with him still there.
I doubt most people would know or care. Windows is on a long update cycle so OS X wouldn’t suffer much by this. iOS either, really.
Anwyay, if you’d actually read my comment I’m saying that they should remove the requirement to ship every 12 months and allow UP TO 24. Quicker is better if it doesn’t compromise quality.
Since you missed that the first time, here’s the point – date driven releases sacrifice either features or quality. You don’t get all three. IF you constrain by date and insist on a certain mass of features, quality slips. If they want to continue to insist on 12 month releases and to raise the quality then they need to ratchet back on features. If they insist on features and quality and the features can’t be done to high quality in 12 months, then you relax the date constraint.
Ppeople expect a new iPhone and a new iOS release every year. That’s something they’ve been trained on.
The public, the industry, the press, would eviscerate apple were they to go to some “could be meat, could be cake” release cycle.
As well, there is no, none, literally no proof whatsoever that a longer release cycle increases quality. In theory, it allows for more time for testing, but that is not the guarantee everyone seems to think it is. Lots of products in this world have long release cycles. They also have bugs. Lots of them.
were we to compare to Windows, how long was the release cycle for Vista? Windows 7? Windows 8? In terms of bugs alone, are you going to show how they had fewer bugs because of the length of the release cycle, which is what you’re saying here?
You always have to have a ship date. One you announce. And it can’t be based on “when all the bugs are squashed” because that literally will never happen.
The idea that ratcheting back on features is going to work is just silly. They were hammered over Snow Leopard being essentially a release with not much worth moving to.
You seem particularly dense.
1) Apple never has announced of time release dates until WWDC.
2) you forget that OS X was not on a yearly cycle around the iPhone release.
3) They could reset expectations – there’s nothing sacred about a yearly cycle and if they said that they were anticipating delivering feature releases every 2 years with incremental releases along the way and a Snow Leopard-like release in between they’d be fine.
4) the tech press has been throwing fits over Apple for decades. Apple doesn’t give a crap and neither does anyone with half a brain. If Apple thinks that it’s best move the release schedule to 18 months or whatever they’ll do that, the press will bitch and moan and it will continue to be fine because most end-users won’t care about the extra 6 months.
5) Yes, longer release cycles DO raise quality unless they cram new features in. Or are you willfully missing the point that you can’t insist on significant new features, refuse to adjust the yearly schedule and also whine about quality? Something has to give and right now, that is starting to be quality. Want higher quality? Then you code the same amount of features as now and give them a bit more time. No one is saying that all bugs need to be fixed, btw… nice straw man.
TLDR? Don’t bitch about quality and also insist that yearly releases are non-negotiable.
um…for someone throwing around the dense thing, you seem to have missed that I wasn’t “bitching” about quality, I was pointing out that the nigh-magical level of quality people ascribe to Apple has never existed. It has never existed regardless of dev cycles. I am not the one having some huge problem with Apple software quality. In fact, from my POV, Yosemite was actually a noticeable improvement in a few key areas.
But you keep on raising and burning down that strawman. It seems to make you happy.
On the other hand, Mavericks has always worked fine with GMail for me, but Yosemite’s Mail vomits all over itself on a regular basis with the same accounts.
So, by that measure, Yosemite is WORSE in terms of quality.
The problem is no one is ascribing a nigh-magical level of quality to Apple’s older releases. No one. People are saying, “Okay, we had glitches before, but they seem to be a lot worse now, and it takes longer to get them fixed, if they ever do.” And the response is, “Oh yeah, well, Apple was never perfect you know.” The only people bringing up magic and perfection are the people defending the current quality level.
Speaking of straw men.
Or maybe, just maybe, people see different bugs and conditions depending on usage, and so trying to ascribe some objective level of quality is going to be rather impossible.
Nah. Can’t be that.
I don’t actually have any real issues with Yos. Sorry?
Also, the fact is, you can’t tell quality levels by public comments. Those are always weighted more heavily towards problems. Because people don’t spend a lot of time writing blog posts about “Hey, not having any problems yet.”
Just doesn’t happen in anything close to complaint levels.
So you can’t even take public comments as any real indicator, the normal bias of such things prevents that.
Just so. Why so much hate, then, for the people who are having issues?
Just as other people having problems doesn’t mean that you must be too, your not having problems doesn’t mean that no one is. It works both ways.
Also has nothing to do with the straw man “Apple’s never been perfect!” dismissal.
But the fact is each individual makes a judgement of quality based on their own experiences and doesn’t need public comments. I don’t need to read a blog to see that Yoesmite mail shits the bed on me on a regular basis, and that Messages doesn’t work worth a damn, and that I had to hack the system fonts just to be able to read anything, or that IOS 8 alarms under 3 minutes often don’t pop up a dialogue to dismiss the alarm, and so on and so forth. People are quite capable of noticing what’s going on on their computer right in front of them and forming an opinion on the evidence of their own senses.
And more and more, the impression people are getting from their computers is a negative one, of things not working right, and that the things that aren’t working right are more likely to keep not working right, and may be get worse, than to get better. That’s the problem. And the tendency of some people to close ranks, deny that people are having those experiences, and attack and try to silence those who say they are, does not make those impressions go away.