Captain Obvious

lkrupp said:

Andy Ihnatko posed an excellent question on MacBreak Weekly some months ago. Ever since the death of co-founder Steve Jobs glitches like this bring the termites out of the woodpile to complain that quality has gone down. This is patently untrue of course but Ihnatko asks the question, “What would it take for you to abandon the platform?” The griping and complaining comes from all points whether it’s about hardware, software, new features, removed features, altered features, you name it. But what would make you abandon the platform?

Let’s here it from the complaining crowd, the “Steve is dead” crowd, the Apple is going down crowd, the ones who incessantly complain about anything Apple does or releases these days. And before the trolls chime in, we know who you are and we know you don’t own any Apple equipment or software.

As someone who used to work for a Mac software developer, and has used Macs for over 20 years, I can tell you that in the last 2-3 years software quality HAS declined. The number of problems and miscues I have seen lately is far above what I used to see on Mac OS X -- the stability is starting to remind me of what I used to see with Mac OS 9.
The reasons are manifold, but it comes down to one thing -- a lack of focus and priority on quality. Apple is a big behemoth of a company now and lack of focus is one of the less attractive results of that growth.

If they don't address these issues and the slide continues, I will in fact evaluate whether it makes sense to move to Linux. I like the convenience of the Apple "ecosystem", but not at the price of constant stability issues. After this kext issue broke access to some of my applications, I am abandoning using the App Store and the Apple ecosystem for critical applications like 1Password. I rely too much those applications to let them be impacted by Apple's lousy quality control.

The problem was worse than just lack of connectivity -- the App Store apparently uses some aspect of the Ethernet functionality to authorize purchased apps. After the kext got onto my system it locked me out of a number of applications I have installed on other computers.

And their internal communications with customer support must be pretty lousy, because I called Apple support and managed to get a 3rd-tier support person on the phone and they never mentioned this or gave any indication of being aware of it.

Who gives a rats' ass about software quality? Just admire your Apple Watch instead...