I'd just like to point out that this is likely not to get better with this (arbitrary) decision to release a new OS every year. It used to be that we'd have a new release roughly every 2 years (from 2003 - 2011). This meant: 1. it was in development for 2 years and thus probably stabler to begin with, and 2) there were then 2 years to iron out the bugs. You'd get the new OS, there were some understandable kinks, but then by 6-12 months later it was pretty solid and you had another year of a solid OS ahead of you. It was perfectly reasonable to wait on the OS and let the early birds kick the tires first.
This is no longer possible. It feels that as soon as version N is out, they are scrambling to make version N+1. There is no downtime. There is no stabilization phase. You are eternally in brand-new isn't fully working mode. Of course the software is going to be worse.
Couple this with the stark reality that Apple has simply run out of ideas in terms of software. Every new version of OS X boils down to: 1. arbitrary UI tweak (forcing developers to refresh), 2. Gimmick features in Mail.app/Safari (RSS in Mail/Safari, Postcards in Mail, yet another 3d effect to re-arrange your tabs in Safari, annotations in Mail, etc etc etc), and 3. regressions of features that worked for years. Occasionally .Mac/MobileMe/iCloud will be renamed in hopes everyone forgets about the last round of data loss bugs/hopefully people get excited about this vague thing they don't really know the scope of.
>This meant: 1. it was in development for 2 years and thus probably stabler to begin with
No. Shorter release cycles don't imply loss of quality. I claim the opposite in fact. Rolling releases are much better for quality. You're releasing smaller more focused features and battle-testing them in the field.
>There is no stabilization phase.
There are always stabilization phases. Not every major release will be an overhaul. Most will be incremental updates.
> No. Shorter release cycles don't imply loss of quality. I claim the opposite in fact. Rolling releases are much better for quality. You're releasing smaller more focused features and battle-testing them in the field.
The jury is out on this. We have seen that longer release cycles with teams that take things seriously can be very successful (mission critical software). We've also seen that short release cycles can be very effective. The context of your software matters a great deal here, as well as the basic mechanics of how your software is delivered. You can't just take the philosophies of web sites and apply them across the board and declare it objective fact:
1. Take for example the fact that with a web service you can deploy quickly to a small subset of users, and grow it as it proves itself. This is quite ideal, but regardless of whether its even practically possible with OS software, its certainly not what Apple does. The combination of a short release cycle with a worldwide release means that "catching your bug" may mean catastrophic data loss for a large amount of customers.
2. With a web service you have the option of rolling back a bad version, or, simply deploying yet another release. Again, whether its possible with OS's or not, Apple certainly doesn't (or can't?) employ this strategy. The best they can do oftentimes is simply remove the update, but everyone that has it installed keeps having the bug until a) your fix is out and b) they actually install said fix.
> There are always stabilization phases. Not every major release will be an overhaul. Most will be incremental updates.
There certainly could be stabilization phases, but the proof is in the pudding and thats not how it feels. All the last releases have seen major additions, and most the regressions I run into either take years to fix (dual monitor support) or still remain increasingly broken (Messages to name just one example). There is a simple reality to having a year to stabilize without the pressure of a PR push of new features vs. balancing your stabilization with coming up with compelling things to slap on a website and show in a keynote.
In theory, but Apple has seemed to copy the MS playbook of releasing software by an arbitrary date—whether or not it is ready. They seems to add more features, instead of fixing bugs. It seems the only time I get a Software Upadate pop up is for Camera RAW, iTunes or a patch for the exploit of the day.
Mac OS X: The 2000-2003 period included three full releases (not counting 10.0, since that was the culmination of several years of work), and didn't have quality problems. The 2003-2011 period had four releases. So I don't see an obvious lesson that one year is sustainable.
iOS: 2007-2011 four updates at one year intervals before the decline in quality that lots of people perceive starting with iOS6. Again, hard to say one year is the culprit.
I do think Apple needs to restrain itself, and work on figuring out which features can be shipped without compromising quality. But whether it needs to do longer releases or do smaller releases is hard to say.
As for Mac OS, when I read Siracusa's review, I was thrilled. There aren't consumer features, but they're doing so many things to make desktop machines more responsive and efficient. It's even more exciting than Snow Leopard.
The period between 2000 and 2003 is kind of hard to draw any conclusions from or the classify as "not having quality problems". That period started with quality problems and saw Apple scrambling to make Mac OS X a reasonable OS to replace OS 9. For example, 10.1 re-introduced disc burning which was missing from 10.0. OS X 10.0 was also riddled with kernel panics and really sluggish. 10.1 continued to have pretty severe crashes and sluggishness, and I remember Jaguar being the first thing that approached actual usability. Panther arguably ended this transition period (where people were still unsure whether to "make the jump") and ushered in the more stable phase I'm referring to (2003 - 2011).
And sure, if Apple only focused on a very sensible amount of changes, then of course a year would be enough. The problem is the contention of a 1 year release cycle and "150 new features!".
There's nothing wrong with yearly release cycles, Apple's problem seems to be that they've tied their OS to the hardware cycle.
It doesn't really matter if the OS is completely done, or still has a fair number of bugs. It MUST release at the same time as the new phone.
Combined with this is the fact that the apps are bundled with the OS. While certain enhancements definitely need operating system support, there's no good reason they couldn't be updating Safari or mail or notes to quash little bugs throughout the year. Instead you have to wait for a .1 release or the next full OS (since they never seem to do .2s).
A problem with yearly releases is that Apple only seems to give support out for the most ~3 recent versions. (At least in OSX world; I believe there is still no shellshock patch for 10.6.) So do you have support for ~4 years, or ~10 years?
>I'd just like to point out that this is likely not to get better with this (arbitrary) decision to release a new OS every year.
Release dates are arbitrary and inconsequential. Scope and freeze dates are what matters.
>Couple this with the stark reality that Apple has simply run out of ideas in terms of software. Every new version of OS X boils down to: 1. arbitrary UI tweak (forcing developers to refresh), 2. Gimmick features in Mail.app/Safari (RSS in Mail/Safari, Postcards in Mail, yet another 3d effect to re-arrange your tabs in Safari, annotations in Mail, etc etc etc), and 3. regressions of features that worked for years.
Continuity is really interesting since it really highlights just how far we've gotten from the original promise of seamless integration between Apple products. For starters, its taken years to get to this feature (with incredibly confusing pitstops in the middle, such as the existence of a feature called Airdrop on Mac AND iPhone that didn't work between them....).
All in all though, continuity is another disappointment to me. We are still stuck in app-land. Handover is app-to-app. So when I'm listening to a podcast in Safari, I won't be able to handover to Overcast on my phone. I actually have to wait for marco arment to write a desktop podcast player, and worse, I have to use it, to get this basic functionality. Again, an aggressive misunderstanding of what it means to have true continuity: reading the same data on two devices, not using the same app on both. But Apple thinks wallet first, and "App" is their ecosystem's bread and butter, and so this way it will stay.
This is particularly depressing since I remember, 10 years ago, having (what I believe to be) much more impressive interconnectivity between my Mac and my Nokia phone through Saling clicker. When someone called me, my music would pause. I could control my mac with a really cool remote. Instead, we seem to be living in a parody of that world where now if someone calls me 10 devices in my house go off since Apple "connected" them all together to ring simultaneously, its maddening.
> It used to be that we'd have a new release roughly every 2 years (from 2003 - 2011). This meant: 1. it was in development for 2 years and thus probably stabler to begin with, and 2) there were then 2 years to iron out the bugs.
Doesn't this discussion boil down to the trade-offs between slower and more rapid release cycles? For example, releases after 2 years of development are far more complex, with all the disadvantages that entails. Technology reaches users more slowly (solutions to some bugs/features could take 3 years or more) which also delays feedback to developers. etc.
What's funny is that Apple seems to have found the anti-sweetspot for its release cycles.
For example, for an app like Safari, it would make so much more sense to release very frequently (ala Chrome/Firefox) separate from the yearly OS cycles. Instead, new web standards features/JS improvements/what-have-you are inexplicably tied to fluff features like 3d tabs. On the other hand, features that would make more sense to not mutate constantly on your user get changed way too frequently (for example Mail, which quite frankly doesn't need constant updating, yet still broke Gmail for so many people on Mavericks release and should have really been caught beforehand). This strikes a balance that lacks the benefits of continuous deployment AND slow sober releases.
I think the opposite is true. iOS7/8 was a giant transition that was staged over two releases. I suspect the next few years will be much less major reworking and much more tuning up and adding capabilities.
Apple's OSX design work seems stagnant as well. I find Gnome since version 3.12 (yes Gnome) looks better than Yosemite. I use Yosemite at work every day and find it's a step down from Mavericks. Most of the improvements seem to be to apps I never use (Maps, Safari). The new dark top bar is embarrassingly ugly compared to Gnome dark theme. The icons look childish and half-baked.
Gnome's design in minimal, clean, and feels out of the way instead of being flashy. Most importantly Gnome is improving rapidly. The new 3.14 looks amazing, where they revamped all the small details (icons, resolutions). A great demo of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhK_2M0B8Qo
I used to love getting new OSX releases. I'm really surprised to see it get sidelined in recent years. Maybe all of the good designers are working on iOS?
I second your enthusiasm for Gnome. It really is in a great place right now and is my shell of choice on Linux. But I disagree with the Yosemite criticism. Unlike Linux, OS X actually has a large degree of uniformity between third-party apps thanks to Cocoa and (historically) the human interface guidelines. Apple just can't make sweeping changes to the OS X design without severely damaging the coherence of the OS X ecosystem; design changes have to be incremental. And they're doing a pretty good job. Yosemite brings design changes specifically optimised for high-DPI (font, line weights) and a general toning down of brashness (e.g. the new dock). I imagine the new 'dark mode' (which, let's face it, will be unseen by most consumers) is just a signal of things to come; I wouldn't be surprised to see a dark set of Cocoa controls in a future release too. But it'll take time.
Honestly, I'm glad that Apple isn't being brash on the Mac. They can get away with it on iOS (the 6->7 transition) because it's such an active platform, with so much demand, that developers have put in the time and money to re-design, but a similar design transition on OS X would take much much longer and I imagine would be a lot more painful for the end user.
Fair enough, OSX is still a fine operating system. My taste for change is that of early adopters so I'm at least happy Gnome is filling that void for me.
Gnome looks nice, and has it's "own" look - but is nowhere even near the quality of Yosemite IMO.
And talk about quality issues! Any given thing is way more likely to break on a linux desktop environment. I love FOSS and have been a Gnome and Ubuntu user for years but integrating a thousand FOSS projects together presents many challenges to quality.
that is a matter of opinion - I find gnome to be incredibly ugly and unpolished. Large margins, padding issues, often badly rendered fonts (fuzzy, weird aliasing) just to name the few.
When was the last time you used it? Things have vastly improved recently.
> often badly rendered fonts (fuzzy, weird aliasing)
Gnome-tweak-tools and the infinality package makes fonts and aliasing comparable to OSX. As with most Linux things, it requires a bit of tweaking. Mostly due to politics and FOSS, as is the case with the fonts.
Yes Gnome is the best thing you can get under Linux, but lots of stuff like the scrolling behaviour and smoothness still isn't on par with what OS X offers.
Apple has had a decline in software quality since around the Intel transition. Prior to that OS X had become really very respectable, but during it lots of typical things started happening, like suspend not quite working sometimes, and external display support going to hell. It doesn't seem like they ever recovered.
It's hard to admit now, but at one point I even liked XCode, but again, that was before they iTunesd it.
Maybe it's age, but in my mind they definitely did get worse, and as a result I've moved to Windows (7) as my main machine after over a decade in Mac land.
I literally went the opposite. I switched to OSX soon after the Intel transition and loved it, after a decade in Windows land. I honestly just much prefer the look and feel of Apple products and software. I find them more enjoyable to use, consistent, more intelligently thought out and much less hassle.
I also used to hate Xcode 3 but as of Xcode 5 I've really grown to like it.
You're my bizarro opposite. I bet you hate the colour blue ;)
Xcode 6 (the latest version) has a really good set of features but there's a huge number of crash bugs all through the app (and supporting tools like Instruments). Depending on what you're doing, you can get stuck in constant crash loops.
Fortunately, Xcode keeps perpetual auto-backups; otherwise you'd lose your changes multiple times per day.
I disagree with the decline after Intel. I'd say their quality grew a lot more after the Intel transition. That's when Apple started picking up steam and gained a higher adoption rate for their operating system. Especially with developers.
My iPhone 6+ has shown more bugs in 2 weeks than the three iPhones I had prior to that (the original, 3G, and 4). Has hard locked at least half a dozen times, particularly when receiving calls.
It's completely insane. The custom 4.4 Android ROM I use on a beaten up old Galaxy S3 is more stable than iOS 8 on my iPad.
If you told me a month ago that Apple's flagship OS would be less stable than a heavily patched AOSP build [0] maintained by a few part-time indie ROM devs I would have laughed in your face.
[0] International GS3 never got an official Android 4.4 release. So it runs with a lot of 4.3 code, including drivers and radios, forward ported to 4.4, all held together with parts of other Samsung device code releases.
Similarly, Safari frequently locks up or crashes on my iPad -- behavior that started with 8.0.0 and has continued through 8.0.2. I rarely remember this happening in the past.
I can crash my entire iPad every time I try to start a slideshow while connected via AirPlay in one of my apps (Portfolio). From the technical side of things all it does is load a full resolution image into a CALayer instance and fade it in, which has worked on every previous iOS version but for some reason crashes the entire device on iOS 8.
Oh man, the crazy bugs I've seen in iOS 8 on my 5S. Last week I had an alarm go off, unlocked my screen, and it kept going. And going. Disabling the alarm in the Clock app did nothing. Re-locking and re-unlocking the screen did nothing. In the end, I had to just power the device off.
Thank you for the confirmation — I have had the same bug with the alarm sound several times now. What I found is that I could stop it only by opening the Clock app, and selecting a new alarm sound (e.g., by editing an alarm), triggering it to play that sound instead, which I could then easily stop.
iOS 8 does this weird thing where notification banners half the time can be dismissed with a swipe up (the normal way) and half the time with a home button click (they don't respond to swipes). Same app, same notifications.
Also don't even get me started on the orientation confusion (in app - clicking back to the home screen is fine) and general lagginess and freezing on 8.0.2 on a €999 phone that's a week old.
It feels like it's missing even some of the most basic QA.
On a 5s with iOS8 I have seen the Touch ID system completely vanish. It wouldn't lock and I could launch Mint without any kind of authentication (the mint app has integrated Touch ID which previously worked well).
I've had 6+ since release and I can honestly say I've not had a single problem with it. I am heavy user and iOS developer myself. So yeah ... no idea how you get so many supposed issues.
>Is Apple experiencing a problematic decline in software quality?
No, blogs and articles are experiencing a problematic decline in long and medium term memory.
Apple has always (under Jobs or not) had ups and downs, in both software and hardware quality control.
Remember how OS X 10.1 was unusable, the problems with Lion, when it first came out? The file-loss bug in the FS? And tons of other things besides.
As for hardware, well, Jobs first love child was the cube, with the overheating problem (and the not-selling-well problem). Then we had the iBook G3 logic board issues (for tons of models). Battery issues. The G5 Pro cooling goo leak issue. Etc etc. And of course, as any long time Mac buyer knows, a classic advice is "never buy the first revision of a product".
Part of it, for hardware, is that a bug in a production run e.g. for Dell doesn't affect that many people (because Dell puts out 50+ different models, whereas Apple puts out a few, so each of Apple's has tens of millions of buyers). And of course the press doesn't care much for a fault in Dell or HP or whatever production run, whereas the slightest BS in an Apple production run is a "*gate". And of course Apple does more daring stuff with machining, weight, thinness, internal design etc than most companies, so there's always a chance to screw some things that's bigger than in just assembling some brick-sized plasticy laptop.
I'm an iOS developer and I've filed 20 different API bugs with Apple for iOS 8 versus a previous record count of 7 that I filed against iOS 4.
This is anecdotal (I'm just one developer) but forum grumblings seem to confirm that lots of developers are seeing their apps broken by buggy changes in iOS 8.
You took the word out of my mouth! It is by far and it is also losing some of its legendary attention to detail.
I've noticed the amount of patches going up as well as the stability of software go a little bit down. But that's not all, most major unix tools in Mac OS X are 2 to 3 years outdated and Safari is a bug nest.
To bring some balance to my criticism I fell that innovation at Apple has not decreased but the quality of products has.
As referenced in this article[0] a major blocker for shipping newer versions of the command line toolchain is the fact that newer versions of these tools moved to an incompatible GPLv3 license.
Oh come on, that's far from serious. There are 6 pieces of software there that are old because newer versions are GPLv3. Grep could be replaced with bsdgrep, and nano could be replaced with pico and nobody would notice. The other 4 aren't that important for day to day use except bash and OSX should have switched users to zsh a long time ago, or simplified the shell by using tcsh as default.
The older version of openssh is rather perplexing, though, but they haven't updated any of the other bsd utilities really and the pf firewall is ancient too.
I've noticed this over the past few years. What I've also noticed is a move by Apple towards marketing not what their products can do, but by counting how many new features they they've added to their software. They're still far ahead of their competitors in terms of quality and usability of their products, but not what they once were.
Readit News
This is no longer possible. It feels that as soon as version N is out, they are scrambling to make version N+1. There is no downtime. There is no stabilization phase. You are eternally in brand-new isn't fully working mode. Of course the software is going to be worse.
Couple this with the stark reality that Apple has simply run out of ideas in terms of software. Every new version of OS X boils down to: 1. arbitrary UI tweak (forcing developers to refresh), 2. Gimmick features in Mail.app/Safari (RSS in Mail/Safari, Postcards in Mail, yet another 3d effect to re-arrange your tabs in Safari, annotations in Mail, etc etc etc), and 3. regressions of features that worked for years. Occasionally .Mac/MobileMe/iCloud will be renamed in hopes everyone forgets about the last round of data loss bugs/hopefully people get excited about this vague thing they don't really know the scope of.
No. Shorter release cycles don't imply loss of quality. I claim the opposite in fact. Rolling releases are much better for quality. You're releasing smaller more focused features and battle-testing them in the field.
>There is no stabilization phase.
There are always stabilization phases. Not every major release will be an overhaul. Most will be incremental updates.
The jury is out on this. We have seen that longer release cycles with teams that take things seriously can be very successful (mission critical software). We've also seen that short release cycles can be very effective. The context of your software matters a great deal here, as well as the basic mechanics of how your software is delivered. You can't just take the philosophies of web sites and apply them across the board and declare it objective fact:
1. Take for example the fact that with a web service you can deploy quickly to a small subset of users, and grow it as it proves itself. This is quite ideal, but regardless of whether its even practically possible with OS software, its certainly not what Apple does. The combination of a short release cycle with a worldwide release means that "catching your bug" may mean catastrophic data loss for a large amount of customers.
2. With a web service you have the option of rolling back a bad version, or, simply deploying yet another release. Again, whether its possible with OS's or not, Apple certainly doesn't (or can't?) employ this strategy. The best they can do oftentimes is simply remove the update, but everyone that has it installed keeps having the bug until a) your fix is out and b) they actually install said fix.
> There are always stabilization phases. Not every major release will be an overhaul. Most will be incremental updates.
There certainly could be stabilization phases, but the proof is in the pudding and thats not how it feels. All the last releases have seen major additions, and most the regressions I run into either take years to fix (dual monitor support) or still remain increasingly broken (Messages to name just one example). There is a simple reality to having a year to stabilize without the pressure of a PR push of new features vs. balancing your stabilization with coming up with compelling things to slap on a website and show in a keynote.
iOS: 2007-2011 four updates at one year intervals before the decline in quality that lots of people perceive starting with iOS6. Again, hard to say one year is the culprit.
I do think Apple needs to restrain itself, and work on figuring out which features can be shipped without compromising quality. But whether it needs to do longer releases or do smaller releases is hard to say.
As for Mac OS, when I read Siracusa's review, I was thrilled. There aren't consumer features, but they're doing so many things to make desktop machines more responsive and efficient. It's even more exciting than Snow Leopard.
And sure, if Apple only focused on a very sensible amount of changes, then of course a year would be enough. The problem is the contention of a 1 year release cycle and "150 new features!".
Are you referring to his Yosemite review? Is it out yet?
It doesn't really matter if the OS is completely done, or still has a fair number of bugs. It MUST release at the same time as the new phone.
Combined with this is the fact that the apps are bundled with the OS. While certain enhancements definitely need operating system support, there's no good reason they couldn't be updating Safari or mail or notes to quash little bugs throughout the year. Instead you have to wait for a .1 release or the next full OS (since they never seem to do .2s).
Deleted Comment
Release dates are arbitrary and inconsequential. Scope and freeze dates are what matters.
>Couple this with the stark reality that Apple has simply run out of ideas in terms of software. Every new version of OS X boils down to: 1. arbitrary UI tweak (forcing developers to refresh), 2. Gimmick features in Mail.app/Safari (RSS in Mail/Safari, Postcards in Mail, yet another 3d effect to re-arrange your tabs in Safari, annotations in Mail, etc etc etc), and 3. regressions of features that worked for years.
Siracusa begs to differ.
I dunno. Continuity seemed to me to be novel and useful when it was presented. Healthkit is new, and not really "just a refinement".
All in all though, continuity is another disappointment to me. We are still stuck in app-land. Handover is app-to-app. So when I'm listening to a podcast in Safari, I won't be able to handover to Overcast on my phone. I actually have to wait for marco arment to write a desktop podcast player, and worse, I have to use it, to get this basic functionality. Again, an aggressive misunderstanding of what it means to have true continuity: reading the same data on two devices, not using the same app on both. But Apple thinks wallet first, and "App" is their ecosystem's bread and butter, and so this way it will stay.
This is particularly depressing since I remember, 10 years ago, having (what I believe to be) much more impressive interconnectivity between my Mac and my Nokia phone through Saling clicker. When someone called me, my music would pause. I could control my mac with a really cool remote. Instead, we seem to be living in a parody of that world where now if someone calls me 10 devices in my house go off since Apple "connected" them all together to ring simultaneously, its maddening.
Doesn't this discussion boil down to the trade-offs between slower and more rapid release cycles? For example, releases after 2 years of development are far more complex, with all the disadvantages that entails. Technology reaches users more slowly (solutions to some bugs/features could take 3 years or more) which also delays feedback to developers. etc.
For example, for an app like Safari, it would make so much more sense to release very frequently (ala Chrome/Firefox) separate from the yearly OS cycles. Instead, new web standards features/JS improvements/what-have-you are inexplicably tied to fluff features like 3d tabs. On the other hand, features that would make more sense to not mutate constantly on your user get changed way too frequently (for example Mail, which quite frankly doesn't need constant updating, yet still broke Gmail for so many people on Mavericks release and should have really been caught beforehand). This strikes a balance that lacks the benefits of continuous deployment AND slow sober releases.
Dead Comment
Gnome's design in minimal, clean, and feels out of the way instead of being flashy. Most importantly Gnome is improving rapidly. The new 3.14 looks amazing, where they revamped all the small details (icons, resolutions). A great demo of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhK_2M0B8Qo
I used to love getting new OSX releases. I'm really surprised to see it get sidelined in recent years. Maybe all of the good designers are working on iOS?
Honestly, I'm glad that Apple isn't being brash on the Mac. They can get away with it on iOS (the 6->7 transition) because it's such an active platform, with so much demand, that developers have put in the time and money to re-design, but a similar design transition on OS X would take much much longer and I imagine would be a lot more painful for the end user.
And talk about quality issues! Any given thing is way more likely to break on a linux desktop environment. I love FOSS and have been a Gnome and Ubuntu user for years but integrating a thousand FOSS projects together presents many challenges to quality.
> often badly rendered fonts (fuzzy, weird aliasing)
Gnome-tweak-tools and the infinality package makes fonts and aliasing comparable to OSX. As with most Linux things, it requires a bit of tweaking. Mostly due to politics and FOSS, as is the case with the fonts.
Newer Gnome apps have clean padding and margins.
However after a few months of using it as my daily OS, I find it far cleaner and more productive than prior OSX versions.
It's hard to admit now, but at one point I even liked XCode, but again, that was before they iTunesd it.
Maybe it's age, but in my mind they definitely did get worse, and as a result I've moved to Windows (7) as my main machine after over a decade in Mac land.
I also used to hate Xcode 3 but as of Xcode 5 I've really grown to like it.
You're my bizarro opposite. I bet you hate the colour blue ;)
Fortunately, Xcode keeps perpetual auto-backups; otherwise you'd lose your changes multiple times per day.
If you told me a month ago that Apple's flagship OS would be less stable than a heavily patched AOSP build [0] maintained by a few part-time indie ROM devs I would have laughed in your face.
[0] International GS3 never got an official Android 4.4 release. So it runs with a lot of 4.3 code, including drivers and radios, forward ported to 4.4, all held together with parts of other Samsung device code releases.
Also don't even get me started on the orientation confusion (in app - clicking back to the home screen is fine) and general lagginess and freezing on 8.0.2 on a €999 phone that's a week old.
It feels like it's missing even some of the most basic QA.
No, blogs and articles are experiencing a problematic decline in long and medium term memory.
Apple has always (under Jobs or not) had ups and downs, in both software and hardware quality control.
Remember how OS X 10.1 was unusable, the problems with Lion, when it first came out? The file-loss bug in the FS? And tons of other things besides.
As for hardware, well, Jobs first love child was the cube, with the overheating problem (and the not-selling-well problem). Then we had the iBook G3 logic board issues (for tons of models). Battery issues. The G5 Pro cooling goo leak issue. Etc etc. And of course, as any long time Mac buyer knows, a classic advice is "never buy the first revision of a product".
Part of it, for hardware, is that a bug in a production run e.g. for Dell doesn't affect that many people (because Dell puts out 50+ different models, whereas Apple puts out a few, so each of Apple's has tens of millions of buyers). And of course the press doesn't care much for a fault in Dell or HP or whatever production run, whereas the slightest BS in an Apple production run is a "*gate". And of course Apple does more daring stuff with machining, weight, thinness, internal design etc than most companies, so there's always a chance to screw some things that's bigger than in just assembling some brick-sized plasticy laptop.
This is anecdotal (I'm just one developer) but forum grumblings seem to confirm that lots of developers are seeing their apps broken by buggy changes in iOS 8.
You probably mean not causation?
I've noticed the amount of patches going up as well as the stability of software go a little bit down. But that's not all, most major unix tools in Mac OS X are 2 to 3 years outdated and Safari is a bug nest.
To bring some balance to my criticism I fell that innovation at Apple has not decreased but the quality of products has.
[0]: http://robservatory.com/behind-os-xs-modern-face-lies-an-agi...
The older version of openssh is rather perplexing, though, but they haven't updated any of the other bsd utilities really and the pf firewall is ancient too.