You probably wasn't paying attention when Job was running things.

OS X 10.1 was a mess -- it took until several updates to become somewhat usable. The Finder was half-arsed for a decade. Mail.app had several issues. The Windows versions of iTunes was crappy. OS X releases that are now praised as "the best ever" etc, got tons of complaints for introducing bugs and instability. XCode has been historically crap (and it's much better now). And don't even get me started on the state of their Cloud offerings under Jobs.

Hardware wise the same. Every new release, from the original iPod to the iPad was met with complaints and bickering ("No wifi? Less space than a Nomad? Lame") -- even if it actually took wifi and batteries 5 more years to even start making practical sense to have on such a device for syncing. Aside from specs people complained about, there were also all kind of other HW issues, from the overheating G4 Cube, to the logic boards dying on G3 iBooks, to cooling goo spilling from G5 towers, the crappy "round" mouse, and lots of other stuff besides.

That said, I don't buy the "Apple software went downhill as of late" thing. First, because as said there were always issues. Second, because in normal use I don't see any particular decline. If anything things have got better, to the point where we complaint about trivial stuff. The thing is Apple of today puts out a heck of a lot more software and hardware products than the rosy Apple you remember.

I'd take iTunes in the back and kill it though -- as the latest redesigns are absolutely crap from a UX perspective. Then again, I wouldn't call that a programming quality issue -- more of a "idiotic focus and shoving on our faces of BS online music platform issue".

>Or, there's a chicken and egg question: XCode and the surrounding tools are atrociously buggy and hostile to the developer and it seems to increase with each release.

The opposite. XCode was "atrociously buggy" in the 3/4/5 era and before, and has gotten quite better in the 6/7 series (despite having to support a whole new language).

In fact a large list of early XCode 6 crashing bugs have been squashed months ago -- which was (as reported) around 90% of them.

I fully agree. I jumped on the Mac and OS X bandwagon in 2007. The first few releases of Leopard (10.5) were quite hellish, because I was constantly having Wifi problems. My HP Laserjet didn't work until 10.5.2 (in 10.5.0 and 10.5.1 it would just print a few pages and get stuck). Snow Leopard was a smoother ride, but only after a couple of dot releases.

I think there was a low point around Lion and Mountain Lion (lots of new features, but they were not polished enough). But since Mavericks it's been smooth sailing for me.

People also seem to have overly romantic recollections of past Apple software. Sure, Aperture and iPhoto were killed in favor of Photos. But Aperture was crap. Version 2 was still acceptable, but 3.x had constant hangs and slowness. And they were always trailing behind badly with RAW support. As many people, I have bought Aperture 2 & 3 and switch to LightRoom pretty soon after because of Aperture's lack of polish. A while ago I tried the new Photos. And although it does not have all of Aperture's features, it's a far better application in terms of speed and user experience.

tl;dr: I don't see this drop in quality.

Of course, App Store and iTunes need to be burned down to the ground and rewritten from scratch.

Oh joy. I remember those days when people were angry because plugging your iPod into a new PC means wiping your library!

> That said, I don't buy the "Apple software went downhill as of late" thing.

Perception on Mac after people switch from Windows to Mac OSX immediately is awesome. The perception is different if you use Mac OSX for a long time and suddenly you see computer frozen every few days and requires a hard reboot. Many of that have to do the software you are running at the time, but why a sudden OS freeze, mouse couldn't move? That can't be a fault with Office / Skype, it has to be either a OS issue, or underlying hardware issue.

Mac OSX is generally really great, it doesn't feel slow compare to a lot of the PC out there. Polished UI and very responsive. In some release you do see slowness opening between finders or moving from one setting view to another. Those are defects people will cry and ask those defects weren't caught by the performance team.

Xcode 3/4 were a lot harder to work with (IB and Instruments separate, had to use Clang on command line etc), but I don't recall them being particularly buggy. Xcode 7 with Swift is the buggiest version I have used. It crashes on me 10+ times a day with all of the instant compiler checks it does. The progression from 3 to 7 is amazing, but I feel it has come at the cost of stability.

Much better in my opinion. For example they've fixed all the issues with iMessage interoperability on OSX/iOS. There are a time when if you used Messages on the Mac you had to suffer through missing messages, duplicate messages, out-of-order messages, etc. Now, as far as I can tell, it's working flawlessly. Even better that it now includes SMS messages.

This is the key. We're definitely spoiled by how solid a lot of the basics are.

I can fault them for some of the cloud service issues nowadays, but even those work better than they did in years past.

Apple has always had strange hardware and software issues, just like everyone else. Just today I was trying to buy Windows 10 to install it on a PC I'm building, and the MS storefront and my Live account couldn't sync the deletion/addition of a credit card until I logged out of everything, closed the browser, and logged back in. No one is getting this stuff working flawlessly.

I bet it would be easy to find an "OS X is on a slippery slope..." article for each OS X release.

That's because Windows has to deal with so many more differences in hardware. E.g. look at these pixel-level variations in LCD screens. http://www.digitalversus.com/tv-television/screen-technology... I don't understand how it would be possible to support subpixel rendering on some of those. IIRC when I last used Windows (XP?) it let you choose from 8 different schemes. But that still wouldn't nearly be enough!

OS X and IOS can be tweaked to support a much smaller subset of that mess.

OP is right about him not putting up with crap. Sure, not everything that came out of Cupertino was rock solid. But I think as much of an aesthete that he appears to be have been, it's also pretty evident that he was incredibly shrewd and knew he had to ship at some point.

The cruddy software might be coming from Apple repositioning itself from an innovation to a legacy brand. Acquiring Beats (can you imagine Steve championing this - lol), less of a focus on the high-end workstations for consumer electronics and watches, removing the grunt from high-end apps like Logic and FCP. Certainly no longer the underdog we root for, as the article points out.

To me it actually had the opposite effect: after reading it I had a newfound respect towards Apple and Jobs. The book was honest and fair, I don't know why people think it does a disservice to him since everyone knew he was an asshole. This is coming from someone that avoids Apple products, FWIW.

http://www.righto.com/2012/02/apple-didnt-revolutionize-powe...

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/...

There are also many libraries available to decode and encode these files in various languages.

The reason why XML property lists look this way is that they were a direct translation of the older NeXT "property list" format, which was sort of like binary JSON. Dumping an alternating list of keys and values isn't pretty XML, but it ensured minimum translation headaches from the old format.

And five years is a long time when it comes to computers.

I agree with OP. There is no way Steve would have allowed some of the current stuff to see the light of day.

Same with iTunes (which has gotten a ton of criticism over the years), he was the one that kept cramming everything under the sun into it.

I don't know if he was as passionate about X Code, but he sure liked to brag about having the best development environment. Interface Builder in particular seems right out of Steve Jobs' brain (even if it sucks).

Here he is introducing X Code: https://youtu.be/Rh5spZrzu6c?t=59m3s

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/recipes/xcode_help-I...

Interested to how you do versioning on UI with or without IB though. Personally I just maintain branches until an agreed upon design is in place.

You clearly never used iTunes for Windows.

IME, every terrible thing about iTunes applies equally to both platforms.

It forced a bundled QuickTime install (still does I believe), and back then, it tried hard to become the default media player on your system (even reverting your "no" choice after updates). This led many people to remove QuickTime, only to discover now their iTunes refused to work. It would fail halfway through sync's and upgrades of iDevices routinely, had a generally pretty buggy interface that wasn't very responsive most of the time. It's iDevice backup process was cumbersome for normal users, and often failed without the user knowing (leading to very upset individuals when they needed to restore but couldn't).

Now it seems every new version redesigns the UI in major ways, causing even long term users to not know what to click, etc...

If you really just listen to music, maybe it's fine. For all other purposes, it was/is horrible, however I can't complain because it generated quite a lot of work for my side repair/contract business back then.

Whip the Lama's A WinAmp is still better.

via an All Things D event:

> What’s more, thanks to the popularity of iTunes on PCs, Apple has become a major Windows software developer. “We’ve got cards and letters from lots of people who say that iTunes is their favorite app on Windows,” noted Jobs. “It’s like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in Hell.”

That quip apparently caused Bill Gates to become quite angry:

https://books.google.com/books?id=6e4cDvhrKhgC&lpg=PA463&ots...

Mail is much better than it was even a year ago, XCode too, the OS is stable...

And FCPX didn't deteriorate over 7 -- it was a written-from-scratch reboot of the platform that just happened to cut some features people used (most got back with a vengeance).

Ah, you've fallen for the illusion. Those "simple" Mac apps you love are fantastically complex to implement. It's the user experience that is simple, and it takes a ton of sophisticated engineering to pull that off.

You can think of it as there being a certain fixed amount of complexity in the user attaining some goal. You can make your software simpler by foisting the complexity on to the user: just make them do all of the nit-picky tasks.

If you want to make it simple for them to achieve their goal, your app is going to have to contain that complexity itself.

I'd say rather that things need to be simplified and features removed in order to improve quality. Every new Mac or iOS release touts XXX number of new features. If you want to offer the best products, having more features isn't necessarily a prerequisite.

Outside of software, we see a similar thing, a wrench (or spanner) hasn't gotten many new features, because the bolt that it turns isn't changing. the goal is roughly the same. The only appreciable changes have been in ergonomics, and even these are effectively static.

On the other hand, we have cars, which are suffering from so much feature creep it is unbelievable. every year, car engines get a little bit more efficient, but they also get heavier, bloated with more systems, infotainment, seat adjustments, window adjustments, etc.As a result, the efficiency of the improved powertrain seldom makes appreciable performance difference. (yes, there are outliers).

Cars then, might be the equivalent of "the ultimate app" which does everything for you, but loses sight of its purpose. Meanwhile, we have a long history of leaving single tools alone, and they tend to work great.

The trouble is that in the world of physical tools, the workflow changes/context switching between using one tool and then another is easy. Meanwhile, in software, feature creep ends up being the solution for poor context switching between apps. In an ideal world, working on an image in photoshop and then pixelmator, and then illustrator, and then publishing to wordpress would be as seamless as using a wrench, then a screwdriver, and then cleaning things up with a rag. Unfortunately, software interface constraints almost necessitate feature creep as the "simplest" way to add functionality, even when convoluted menus, hotkeys, and naming conventions obscure utility.

Ironically, it is the "handoff" features that Apple was traditionally best at. BUT, I have this feeling that most of what we hate can be described as "too little, too soon". After all, it could be argued that Apple is aiming for an environment which is "document focused" with their focus on standardized APIs (Adobe is working on this, too), but none of this works yet, because software is still written from an "Apps" POV. In the real world, we change the tool relative to the job, and the best tools are specific single tasks. given the experience so far, I'm far from convinced that a 2D GUI should ever try duplicate that.

I think the fact that the answer is so tough for computers is why feature creep is so common with software. When your tool can literally do anything you want it to, why say no? The constraints are actually in the mind of the customer.

On the topic of cars, it is true that modifications strive toward comfort, but they also strive for marketability. While a leather-wrapped dashboard may be comfortable to look at, it is primarily focused at adding something to market. This same phenomenon exhibits in software, where features are added to increase marketability, "Look! this ERP software has a social network built in!". The utility of a given feature is often perspective-based, especially when the user is not well aware of their actual needs, or the user and purchaser are not the same person.

Feature creep is necessary for closed applications.

The ideal is a set of simple tools around a simple and open file format. As soon as you lock in folks to your application (as Apple loves to do), you're on the hook for being all things to all people, or getting panned that your software is only for the lightest casual usel

Always go faster for a long time. Meaning tackle long aged hardware, long uptime, and just generally maintain same performance. Across everything, from device hardware and speed locally on the device to the wifi/4G signals, ISP, to the backend and their software and hardware. Performance in speed is the greatest subjective design and feature.

Unfortunately the time to invest in it requires convincing the designer and product that integrating A/B tests for hearts vs star for favoriting isn't worth it for the long run.

I'd say they need to fix the features they've implemented, and only release new features when they're fully cooked.

Removing features is terrible: it is not an improvement to me when my stuff breaks or when I'm forced into a dumbed-down, lowest-common-denominator use-case.

Not just Wall-Street types either; I see this primarily from tech people. Examples: Android M, OS X Snow Leopard (I think, I may have that release wrong but there was one there that was definitely 'not many new features'), basically anything where the next version isn't predominantly new shiny.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Maybe. I felt like the quality started going downhill shortly after iOS came out, starting with low-level APIs, then xcode, then making it into user-level applications.

My theory is that a lot of the really experienced engineers (the one who started with NEXT and OpenStep) left when they were rich after the iPhone stock jump.

So really there is nothing Steve Jobs could have done unless he had a developer education program or something.

While possible true I think the real issue is resources being spread too thin. Remember they had to delay the release os OS X one year as all their engineers were working on iOS? Now they're doing yearly releases of both OS's. I'm sure they've hired more engineers but pre-iOS there were probably lots of engineers who had been working exclusively on OS X for years and were able to maintain quality. New people take time to get up to speed.

I simply think the attempts to build stuff in common with iOS is taking its toll.

Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs ... that's the guy with the skeuomorphic preferences, right? The one who, at the first iPhone release, told developers that they don't need native apps because using HTML + WebView is enough, right?

Just to make sure we're on the same page here.

> told developers that they don't need native apps because using HTML + WebView is enough

That's because the SDK wasn't ready for developers yet. You must remember that, first and foremost, Jobs was a great salesman. If you don't yet sell it, it's a piece of crap and unnecessary, right? And when you _do_ sell it, it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.

I understand the plan was to work with select third parties on a case by case basis, sort of akin to standalone game consoles.

It seems equally plausible, especially given how quickly they announced the SDK after the iPhone release, that Apple was preparing for it but not ready yet (and/or wanted to give themselves time to work out the early kinks in all of the other parts: working with AT&T, supporting the new device and new OS, etc, etc).

"Apple board member Art Levinson told Isaacson that he phoned Jobs “half a dozen times to lobby for the potential of the apps,” but, according to Isaacson, “Jobs at first quashed the discussion, partly because he felt his team did not have the bandwidth to figure out all the complexities that would be involved in policing third-party app developers.”

Apple had already established a model for selling third party software on the iPod video line through iTunes -- with select partners only.

When WWDC 2007 rolled around, after the release of the iPhone, Jobs presented web apps as the solution for developers, without the need for an SDK. It was only after months of sustained outcry from the development community, and the nascent jailbreaking scene, that Jobs announced that they would prepare a public SDK for the next year, after they decided on a method of signing and sandboxing applications.

The supposition that it was only due to the outcry of the development community is exactly that, a supposition.

I seriously doubt that jailbreakers invented the smooth experience - they just likely unlocked the functionality that existed before Apple was ready to push it out (I'm guessing Steve wanted apps in the store at launch).

Nowadays we have plenty of people complaining that they have to have "apps" for everything when they have a perfectly good web browser on their phone, so he wasn't that far off.

So what issues do you have with 10.11? Because I don't see anything to complain about. Then again, I also didn't see anything troubling in 10.10, 10.9 and 10.8, with the exception of their ill-fated transition to a new DNS backend, which they later reverted.

A few bugs here and there, yes. Nothing I haven't seen since 10.2, or that's not comparable to the kind of issues I have with Windows 10 or the Ubuntu box I use for development (actually that's far worse, but I digress).

- UI non-responsiveness: it is extraordinarily frequent that I will chord a tab change in Safari or in iTerm2, and the system will not respond for sometimes multiple seconds. It's the same with creating tabs in Safari. ⌘-t or ⌘-{ do not respond.

- Application switching focus failures: ⌘-tab will raise another window, but window focus will not follow. This has caused me to lose work. ⌘-tab, ⌘-w will sometimes close an iTerm2 tab that's behind the Safari window I'm looking at.

- Mouse pointer lag: Probably related to the input lag above, the trackpad will not respond for multiple seconds after I begin touching it. If I "wake" it with a two-finger scroll, it will often lose half the input and instead click.

- AirPlay stuttering: even two ethernet-wired systems will still lose data between them. It's a crappy experience.

- discoveryd: My Apple TV's network name is currently "Apple TV (5)". Macs sometimes do this too.

- Slow laptop wakeup: I almost always have to tap a keyboard key to wake the display after opening my laptops (MBr and MBPr). Almost always. But not always.

That's just off the top of my head. Many of these have followed me between OS X revisions and different hardware. It amazes me that such bugs stick around.

Then I clicked Chrome in the dock, hit Cmd-Q, and watched Safari disappear while Chrome opened a new window. Guess it's not just you.

Ok, for this I can't say much, because every since 2010 or so I've used Chrome in place of Safari. As for iTerm2, I've tried to switch to it several times over the years (later mostly because of Tmux integration) but always found it to be buggy and reverted to the Terminal.

>Application switching focus failures: ⌘-tab will raise another window, but window focus will not follow. This has caused me to lose work. ⌘-tab, ⌘-w will sometimes close an iTerm2 tab that's behind the Safari window I'm looking at.

Hmm, haven't seen this -- and I use ⌘-tab and the ~ variant heavily.

I have seen lagginess in focus when switching full-screen apps use, and I sometimes start typing before that happens. This got a little better in 10.11 though (either faster focus switch or less transition time).

>- discoveryd: My Apple TV's network name is currently "Apple TV (5)". Macs sometimes do this too.

DNS issues I've had (and mentioned in another comment). They tried a transition to a new DNS backend which was buggy. They reverted back to the old one with 10.11 (or sometime in 10.10.x) though and has been OK since then.

>Slow laptop wakeup: I almost always have to tap a keyboard key to wake the display after opening my laptops (MBr and MBPr). Almost always. But not always.

Do see this from time to time (though it almost always works in my case).

Could be a sensor issue though -- not a software thing (the display up sensor not registering, but tap working ok).

Still a total disregard of Fitt's law. Horribly inconsistent keyboard support. Behaviour that should be trivially configurable seemingly set in stone. Still, I think, impossible to cut a file in Finder. However many shots that take, apple can't get WiFi working properly. The transparency is an abomination.

If you want something more 'big picture', I think all the changes introduced over the lifetime of OSX have been a bit piecemeal with no overall, unifying process. For example, full-screen mode gets bolted on, rather than nicely integrated with other window actions. Notifications blossom into a side panel, but there's an overlap with bouncing icons in the dock. Etc. There are some great ideas there, but we could really do with an OS11 that picks the best ones and presents them together, in a clean interface, in which they all belong.

Well, those are not software quality issues. Some of those are design decisions, and have been with us forever, not random accidents: "Cut", for example, has never been on the Mac. Transparency in 10.11 is so lightweight you don't even notice it -- nothing Vista-like about it.

As for "total disregard of Fitt's law" that's not some decline either, as it's not worse or better than it has ever been in OS X.

>However many shots that take, apple can't get WiFi working properly.

Well, that qualifies as buggy software. But I have to wonder.

I've had an iBook, 2 MacBookPros (1 company issued), an iMac, a MacBook Pro Retina (current), 2 iPads and 2 iPhones thus far. And I've travelled all over the US, Europe and in several parts of Asia. I've never had any trouble with wifi, even to non-chain, el-cheapo motels.

The only offender has been my iPhone(s), which indeed I've not been able to connect to 3-4 places (restaurants etc) while traveling, over many hundreds of locations over 8 years. And I can't even know if it was because of the iPhone crapping out, or they using some crappy, third party router.

So I wonder, what are all those wi-fi issues people mention in forums etc.

Apple Notes would like a word with you. Specifically the word 'Cut' under the Edit menu.

Apple Calendar would also like the word with you.

Terminal. Script Editor.

Not sure how you come to some conclusion that Cut is not "on the Mac".

My Apple devices regularly need me to switch WiFi off and on, in my home which has an Airport Extreme and Express, both with latest firmware.

We're talking about Cut for files (in the Finder), not inside apps.

I agree with this 98%, with the exception of early releases of Yosemite, which really did seem to have a WiFi problem on the rMBP (even with Apple Airport Extreme base stations), in that it would disconnect a lot and you'd have to recycle your WiFi off/on. Annoying but not a deal breaker. And fixed within a month or two.

Otherwise I'd suspect there are some hardware + driver variations of Macbooks that may have had issues for others.

I think you're proving his case rather well.

And then Paste becomes a destructive operation that deletes your original files, or if you prefer, paste turns into "Move Item Here."

They've taken two different approaches to avoiding accidental data loss by overwriting the clipboard, but I wouldn't say one is inherently more right than the other. Windows makes new actions but has the interface pretend that it's doing the same thing as normal cut and paste. OS X makes the UI less standard, but describes what's being done more explicitly.

-iTunes bloat is a choice, and bugs.

-Mail.app is mostly bugs. (non-standard .mbox was a choice)

-Final Cut X was a choice.

-Eschewing strong AppleScript support in native applications is a choice.

-The app store(s) are a choice.

-Allowing core utilities like Contacts and iCal to stagnate and be outshone by 3rd parties (BusyMac) was a choice.

-Aperture+iPhoto=Photos was a choice. (So was selling Aperture after it was EOLed)

-FFF

In that case, allow me to summarize some of the choices that went into building the Mac App Store.

- It's a web view. No local caching of layout or anything. If your network connection hiccups, instead of a reasonably rendered error message, you get this: http://i.imgur.com/5xNgwMH.png

- Text in the search box is blurry. I'm not 100% sure why, but I think someone made a choice to render it with its y-position at a half pixel increment. And then nudge it down so it comes into focus when you click on it. Because really, what sort of asshole would still be using a low DPI screen? http://i.imgur.com/gj3mqrz.png

- How many Install buttons does an update need? Eh, let's choose two. Two's a nice number. And have that "Update All" button stick around even though all updates were already installed. https://i.imgur.com/p9QoCqZ.png

- Earlier today, though it didn't lend itself to screenshots, my Xcode "Install" vs "Installing" button that couldn't decide what mode it wanted to be in and just bounced back and forth instead. Why choose one when you can be both!

- The "Check for Unfinished Downloads" menu. Do you know what happens when a download doesn't finish? Or why it's not presented in a sane way in the normal UI? Me neither. Instead of gracefully handling errors, let's choose to bury them in a secret menu that people will happen upon via StackOverflow searches when their installation keeps failing with no indication of why. https://i.imgur.com/xkgP0lc.png

A+ design work right there. Excellent choices.

Says everyone who disagrees with any decision Apple makes. "Steve would have had the same opinion about this I do!" Statements like this are just you projecting your own opinion onto him.

I've been using OSX since just after Panther. I generally agree with the idea that some things started getting worse after Snow Leopard, but I still don't think it's come close to a point where I'd actually move back to Windows or try out desktop Linux.

And I'd say Windows had far more issues that BSODs and memory problems. I've used Window for music production for years (by the time I switched everyday stuff to OSX, I was locked into my music workflow and haven't cared to spend the time learning a new package like Logic, even after all these years). The way I survive Windows problems is pretty simple: never plug in an ethernet cable. I'm sure things are far better now, but for a large part of the past 15 years, doing so opened you up to a lot of problems and required utilizing software you simply should not have to install in order to have a functional system.

Also, a high percentage of OSX users have no idea what XCode is, let alone care if it's not as nice as VisualStudio.

Conversely, I'm now working at a company that's all-MS, but even after two years now (albeit, only a month on W10, previously on W7), I'm still not feeling much of a desire to switch to Windows at home. My Macbook is getting pretty old now and I'm going to want to replace it sometime soon and it's going to be another MBP.

I wouldn't say Windows 10 is behind OS X at all. In some contexts, like a corporate workplace, it's at least a decade ahead, and always has been. (Then again, Apple and Mac fans generally discount that environment entirely.)

The biggest problem Windows 10 has are: 1. Crummy HighDPI support (and yes, they've been working on this, but the work is WAY too slow-- this should have been solved 5 years ago, guys) 2. Crummy third-party apps, made by developers who have no respect for the OS or its users 3. The new "constantly updates, and occasional ads" philosophy Windows 10 is taking. I wouldn't even mind the ads much if they weren't so stupid. (Stop trying to sell me the copy of Office 365 I ALREADY OWN!)

I don't think that's really true. From 2K onwards windows was pretty solid if you kept it up to date. I never used any firewall/antivirus/etc., just disabled unneeded services (admittedly the defaults in 2K and XP were poor), didn't run executables attached to suspicious emails etc.

I really liked XCode, a lot more than Visual Studio, until they remade it to look like iTunes (around 2012).

So there is definitely some preference involved for those people who say Visual Studio is better (and of course, vice versa).

(Sometimes I just throw my hands up and decide that something, whatever it is, is just never going to be my cup of tea, and that's that. I've done that with a few software packages and/or styles of working. But in Xcode's case, I'm pretty sure it's them, not me. Because Xcode 3 was fine...)

No. Just No. Windows loves to "forget" things. Things like Bluetooth devices. Or wifi devices. Windows likes to update your laptop for you when you're trying to close it ("Don't turn off your computer..." Wait, what? I have a plane to catch!). Windows scatters files all over the place! And that registry. UGH!

Oh look, OSX has touched this usb stick, and vomited it's dotfiles onto it. Did it ever write to the stick? Nope, just need to throw those trash dotfiles onto every. single. thing. it. sees.

> Windows scatters files all over the place!

Just have a look into your Library folder on OS X. Also some programs don't use that, but create a dot folder in your home directory. Maybe I'm missing something though? I haven't used OS X much lately.

Apps which use dot folders in the home directory need to be smacked until they stop, but the OS can't really control where (non-sandboxed) apps put things, it can only establish conventions and encourage apps to follow them.

Also I remember a tool I used when I had a Macbook which helped you remove all the files when uninstalling something. I think it was this one: http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/25276/appcleaner I remember some programs even putting files in other directories than Library Support.

Remember Antennagate? The iPhone 4 had a serious hardware fault that significantly degraded it's signal. Jobs himself was the one who said to a customer "You're holding it wrong"

The problem now is none of the SVPs seem to have that attention to detail, or they are too stretched doing numerous things.

Now that he's gone (and without anyone with his charisma to take over), the public is left to contemplate the ignoble reality of the current product sitting in front of them. The sense of wonder and possibility is absent.

http://inventor-labs.com/blog/2011/10/12/what-its-really-lik...

This is the same old tripe about the young generation's moral decline, and rose-tinted rearview glasses.

Many releases had critical flaws that needed a point release in less than 2 weeks.

Apple UIs were better because they were doing what ESR suggested at a time when the rest of the world was smashing every new option into the right-click menu. Occasionally I'll still hear someone say, "Oh, just put that in the right-click menu." The right click menu isn't a trashbin to dump things that don't fit elsewhere. In any case, here is ESR's UI advice: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cups-horror.html

When I got my first Mac back in the PowerPC days it was definitely a step up. In the past I feel that Apple was targeting power users. Today I think they are going after casual users. Probably capitalizing on the general popularity of iOS.

I've still got a couple of old Macs but they're all running Windows now. Visual Studio still has the occasional lock-up whatever hardware it's on. At least you don't have to sign in to an app store to update it though.

Visual Studio is nice, if you're not writing in Rust, Perl 6, Ruby, Objective C, D, Scala, Smalltalk...

Most likely because dogfooding

Like it or not, but MS tends to be very good with productivity software, be it Word, Excel, or Visual Studio.