> Apple has so much money that they can actually afford to be world class in both

This is what gets me. Think about only bugs, not a single wishlist feature, just bugs. Limit to obvious-to-normies defects: so, UI bugs (ultra-low contrast oddity with certain backgrounds while scrolling lock screen notification center) or popular-feature bugs (AirDrop demands “everyone“ to receive from people in contacts, apparently in at least a couple cases).

At least in the case of UI bugs, no secret sauce seems to be required to resolve them. No particularly special feats of engineering. It seems simply dollars can fix them: QA & engineering. When I discover these obvious defects, update iOS multiple times over the course of months, and continue to experience them, I can only assume Apple prioritized having cash on hand over investing in my (our) experience.

Having recently worked at Apple on the software side, my general experience was that it was fiefdom driven, there is no internal standardization on quality or process. Low level teams compete on ideas and careful politicking usually wins over quality or merit.

For AI, there were top down directives to find new ways to experiment with and incorporate into core products and processes, but as you went down the management chain, management became more conservative. First and second line managers were strongly incentivized to keep their products, roadmaps, and interfaces stable and predictable by similarly conservative stakeholders. And as such, they were generally unwilling to officially dedicate much effort to AI other than the minimum “look at how much we’re using Claude”.

In particular due to the lack of central tooling, any team trying to do much with AI essentially had to reinvent much of the stack themselves. So even small projects were largely untenable due to inevitable required scope creep.

Minimizing shipped defects is qualitatively simpler in physical engineering because the set of possible defects you have to account for is astronomically smaller.

I am a physical engineer by background but have also spent much of my career in high-reliability software systems. The problems of reliability in software systems make physical systems look like child’s play. The levels of effort are on different scales.

An important difference is that software correctness is mostly binary. In physical engineering you can usually spend a bit more money to over-engineer a component if you have any doubts or are lazy, and that works. Effort does not scale nearly as well when it comes to reliable software.

Ask any giant company that's been disrupted by a startup: money does not buy taste, or quality, or core competence. It can help, if leaders understand those things.

Apple is ultimately a hardware company that's so good they can monetize software and services. But they are not really a software company, or a services company. I think Ternus' promotion recognizes that: software and services are worth a lot of money, but they're value adds to hardware.

Big E Engineering vs little e engineering.

IMO the barriers to entry are just much different, and it’s reflecting in the workforce. There’s cultural differences too, but I think the education differences is the biggest cause.

The Face ID bug that caused a reboot on iPhone 18 pros was a clear example that they put little quality control into software.

World class in comparison to their present competition in hardware and software? Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Meta, Intel, AMD, Nvidia...

I feel like this might be inherent to software and hardware development.

With hardware you pretty much get to restart on every product you make. Sure, you have many of the same (types) of components, but with every iteration, you move them around and pretty much have to rethink how every part fits together and interacts. And it has to work when devices get to consumers, because you can't visit everyone to solder on a wire you forgot. (You can always tell people they're holding the phone wrong though.)

With software you have this continuous blob that you keep adding features to. You never really get to rethink how it all goes together from the ground up when the design changes, you just slap a transparent UI on top of you existing code and call it a day. If it turns out there are bugs, not a problem, you just push an update and hope that fixes more than it breaks.

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> The incredible engineering in the hardware is prized above software quality.

then let me root and customize the software to my liking

That's an amazing phrase.

I disagree. They deserve the criticism. Among things software is one of the few things we should get correct.

I don’t think anyone is asking for the world I just want software that dosent crash and makes sense to use.

Just a couple weeks ago Apple Music was leaking GBs of memory.

They could go a long way if they 1) slowed down the major OS releases (I mean, like stop them altogether, actually?) and 2) give priority to all bugs and not keep kicking bugs down the road because: we-already-shipped-with-those-bugs-so-they-must-not-be-that-big-of-a-deal.

I'd add 3), more pair-programming between senior engineers and junior engineers—to hopefully make junior engineers better engineers.

I have to say though, when I knew I was heading out of the company (Apple) within a year, I tried to be a "mentor" to the junior engineers at Apple. And they wouldn't have me. I suppose I was too old… To be sure, they knew Swift better than I did, ha ha.

(Oh well, I tried. I did push back very publicly against management during some of the team meetings—I was told by a few of the junior engineers as I was retiring that they appreciated that example.)

Apple used to have maintenance releases. They used to be known for their taste.

They should absolutely cop the criticism. It’s not like they don’t have the resources to make their software better.

From an Apple employee culture perspective, software team is second or third class to the hardware group.

A friend on the App Store software team wasn't invited to a private iPhone Duo preview, because she wasn't in the hardware division. She felt so disrespected and is considering leaving.

My sister (on the hardware team) shared that its a constantly cycle of non-hardware folks getting shafted and then they complain loud enough until they get 'equal' treatment until the next unfair thing rolls out.

As a user, I'm much closer to 'the masses' than to the power users and still I have to say that Apple's software keeps getting worse.

Dude, my M5 MacBook Pro gets too hot to touch while idling, and it's all background system processes. You don't understand the criticism of their software because instead of listening to the criticism, you've dismissed it as power user fantasy without even understanding the problems.

And friend, I didn't pay for an eight thousand dollar machine for software "designed for the masses" instead of serious professionals and computer enthusiasts. "The masses" are not spending eight thousand dollars on a premium laptop marketed towards professionals. This is an expensive machine and I should be in the driver's seat, not Apple. It should not take arcane, brittle incantations to turn off Siri and dozens of background "AI" services that melt my computer and literally burn my fingertips in exchange for recommending filenames in Pages.

And that's not even mentioning the multitudes of extremely serious system and driver bugs piling up over the last several major versions, nor the grotesque and inconsistent Liquid Glass malarkey.

My main problem with modern Apple software is I feel the design has been on a near constant gradual decline trend overall (except for the huge dip with Liquid Ass of course) and it has gotten buggier too. I'm just never going to update my iPad because I updated my other Apple devices and I deeply regret it.

I actually have felt this way for a fairly long time but Apple always baits me. Like the twelve or fifteen different times Apple OSes have finally supported some parts of WebM on certain devices sometimes when it works. Oh my god, I gotta update so I can have another couple WebMs load successfully only in Safari and not in any other app that doesn't decode it itself. Or back when I used an iPhone, third party keyboards - I use a lot of jailbreak tweaks but I gotta give that up so I can upgrade for third-party keyboard support that is so ass that nobody would ever use it. Heck, I wish I had updated my iPad even less. One fewer major version and I could've made use of the virtualization support that was dormant - but Apple fixed the glitch that let you use it on Apple Silicon iPads, so now you can't. Thanks! This is important to do because it helps... Uhh, security, probably? Something like that.

Since Snow Leopard or so, most of my Apple software upgrades have been bitter sweet at best, but usually just bitter, like I've been baited into having a worse experience.

Of course, it is probably apparent that I simply don't like Apple very much, especially not anymore. And I hate to have to justify myself by doing this, but we lack the maturity needed for me to avoid it, so... I am going to point out the obvious that this is hardly limited to Apple. GNOME 3 may be the single biggest downgrade any desktop system I've ever used has been. It has improved over time, but GNOME 3 has never been even close to as relatively good for its time as GNOME 2 was. Same for KDE 3 -> KDE 4 although I think as a rare standout KDE Plasma 6 is genuinely getting better continuously over time and remains one of the things I am excited to update. Windows 10 -> Windows 11 was so bad that it seemingly durably made several of my friends switch to Linux full time and just simply give up on things that absolutely can't be made to work on Linux - that is a powerful statement, and months later it seems they were indeed not fucking around. Android has been enshittifying at an alarming pace, too, although I don't feel like the Android experience from a software perspective is degrading or getting worse, but Google really knows how to blow their own leg off and by god they're going to do everything they can to make sure that all of the advantages they have over Apple are rendered meaningless so they can drag themselves kicking and screaming out of accidentally having succeeded at something.

I don't feel like it should be necessary for me to justify this, because Apple's recent growing incompetence in shipping working software and release engineering stands on its own regardless of industry trends. I'd SSH into my Mac Mini, but I can't. I have to go reset it, because it's been on for 60 days and can no longer open new network sockets. (I am not making this up. macOS genuinely has/had that bug and mine genuinely is in that state right now.) It's not that everyone else is doing great. When it comes to Linux systems it's easy to give them a lot of slack because they simply have no goddamned money, but still, things could be better. It's just that Apple is richer than ever and yet worse than ever at shipping software. I struggle to square the circle.

I find manually tagging people in photos and especially videos to be an incredibly frustrating experience on macOS (and impossible on iOS).

For as much as Apple is pushing memories in Photos it is surprising to me that the ability to specify who is in a photo/video is so overlooked.

Not who you are responding to, but common workflows like “show me the picture I just took” or “copy the damned image file elsewhere” are completely broken.

God help you if you own a camera and try to store its photos in apple photos.

Unprecedented disruption of something you could have asked Siri to do a decade ago?