Benjamin Mayo:
Marzipan apps are ugly ducklings. As soon as you use them, you can just know these are not at one with the system. You detect that there’s a translation layer of some kind at work here, just like when you use Slack on the Mac you instinctively feel that it’s a web app in a thin wrapper. The underlying implementation is exposed to the user with a bevy of performance sluggishness, UI quirks and non-standard behaviours. That’s bad.
Lots of detail here to back up Benjamin’s opinion. It’s early days yet, so I’d expect this experience to get better over time.
I debated calling this post ‘Home, News, Stocks and Voice Memos for Mac’ because it’s not really a comment on the Marzipan project initiative. After all, I don’t expect the solution Apple ships next year to have the same laundry list of drawbacks that these Mojave apps do. It’s a critique of the apps that are shipping now to customers of macOS. These apps are preinstalled with the OS. News was even unceremoniously placed into the middle of my Dock upon upgrading. And they are not good, simple as that. I would have been mildly happier if Apple had offered these apps as optional App Store downloads affixed with a beta label.
And:
Functionally, they are a win. These apps make the Mac do things it couldn’t before. That shouldn’t excuse them from blame, though. These are mediocre, bordering on bad, experiences. It’s not a good poster child for the future of the Mac.
Interesting for Apple to officially ship something like this, rather than hiding it in a beta until it is ready for prime time.
Good to know.
Apple’s hardware remains the best you can buy, but things are definitely slipping on the software side. We all know what Steve Jobs would say when presented with a new, cool, but imperfect new app or software feature. Something like, “This is s***! Why are you trying to get me to sell s***?”
These days I feel like you could show Tim Cook the exact same thing and he’d say, “Great. Ship it.”
A bit hyperbolic, but there’s no question that Steve Jobs had unreasonably high standards. Its also unreasonable to expect current Apple leaders, NOT led by Steve Jobs, to have those same unreasonably high standards. There was only one Steve Jobs. But its not like he didn’t ship his own share of software turds.
You also need to consider that the market is completely different 7 years after his death. He left the company when it could still be considered an underdog, with a bunch of competitors that were incompetent at software. Things have changed 7 years later.
There’s a video of Jobs when he was forming NeXT on Youtube, part of it shows a meeting discussing target ship date for their first product. One of the engineers wanted to delay a year to perfect the product. Jobs however shot it down because as he put it “the rest of the world is not standing still.” He understood the importance of compromise for the sake of timing.
He had better intuition when it came to these things, and he probably pushed his teams to work harder than anyone in the world can. But its nonsense to suggest Apple today no longer understands or cares about quality in their software. iOS and macOS remain best in class in terms of polish and UX.