A nice Linux set up with minimal software (e.g. xmonad, mutt, emacs or vim) is a joy to use, but takes time to set up and learn to use. So it's not for everyone.
Interestingly, I've experienced the same issue Apple is suffering with Ubuntu. Edgy Eft (6.10) was incredibly simple and nice. Like OS X Tiger. Now there are dozens of services running and something always gives trouble. I guess the old adage applies, make things as simple as possible but no simpler...
There's something to be said about reinventing the wheel just for the sake of reinventing it, change for the sake of change. Constantly redesigning UIs that were working perfectly well, chasing after fads. In implementing a new UI, Ubuntu acquired a lot of new bugs, broken features and reliability issues. That's normal. Newer code is buggier code. You might think this "old" code is crufty, it might not be designed in the ideal way you like, but by throwing it away, you throw away years of testing and fixes too. That's an argument in favor of incremental evolution and refactorings IMO.
Maybe I'm biased. When I was 16, I used to find colorful desktop backgrounds and fancy UIs cool. Now I'm 30, and I just want the damn thing to f'ing work reliably. I don't need rounded corners, or transparency, or animations or even a desktop background. I'd be OK with a bland UI that looks like Windows 98, so long as the machine can do all I need it to reliably and fast.
Distrowatch is a shitty indicator of anything other than Distrowatch hits. Plenty of people like myself have been using Ubuntu for years and not gone to Distrowatch for years.
Out 'in the wild', I've never seen a distro that's not Ubuntu or openSUSE (desktop anyway). Most statistics on sites such as Wikipedia or Steam also point to Ubuntu's dominance (according to Steam's hardware/software survey, Ubuntu is about 7x more popular than Mint Rosa, which of course is also Ubuntu-based).
> In implementing a new UI, Ubuntu acquired a lot of new bugs, broken features and reliability issues.
To be honest, most of the issues I've ever had with Ubuntu are upstream issues. The 'Unity' interface these days pretty much IS the equivalent of 'legacy'. It's certainly not as radical as Gnome Shell or even some of the happenings in KDE Plasma-land. No one uses Compiz any more, except apparently Ubuntu (yes, I realize eventually we'll have a non-Compiz Unity interface).
Really? In such a short time it's considered 'legacy' now? The Gnome 2.x interface is legacy, but I wouldn't consider Unity to be so.
xfce - that's what I use. And I'm an even grumpier old man at 40 :-)
Convertible tablets like Microsoft Surface don't count -- those are laptops with detachable keyboards.
I have been running Arch for 7 years before switching to NixOS. I found using no desktop environment, just a tiling window manager and only text-mode software (except firefox and a document viewer) incredibly robust. So few moving parts I never had a major hiccup.
Exactly. Sounds like you agree with nextos:
> A nice Linux set up with minimal software (e.g. xmonad, mutt, emacs or vim) is a joy to use
The Linux distro's actually serve multiple 'customer' segments. On the client side there are at least two customers (at a minimum), one is end-users, the other is the OEM's who pay for Linux to be preloaded. The traditional OEM's need a solution to the PC market shrinking while the devices market has eaten their lunch.
It's true you have to determine the difference between a short-term 'trend' and a long-term shift. I'm sure you don't think that the mobile market is a short-term 'trend'.
I'll allow some simili-troll (only in appearances) rewrite :
... wouldn't stand a chance serving users-needs-that-they-think-they-have in 2016.
Trends go both ways, people think new shiny will make their life gloriouser so they run after that, then business run after that 'need' because that's what the milk machine wants. This leads to a constant spiraling where trends wave in and out, shifting properties by tiny amount most of the time. Maybe that's the best the universe can provide, and if businesses didn't play that game they'd take blows too deep to sustain.
I don't know how to describe mobile. I believe it will be the tail of the so called computer era, not a next phase. If I extrapolate, soon we'll have thumbnails computers in the single digit Watt consumption and GFLOPS. They won't be a thing anymore. Maybe I'm going Kurzweil too much.
I agree with you, mobile is more of an extrapolation, or an evolution than an entirely new phase or era. We're into the point where English becomes imprecise to define where something is truly different.
And, I completely agree about the loop between being customer-driven and then finding out that it's just a short-term shift. The worst part is that it's fundamentally difficult to tell if something is a short-term trend or a long-term shift.
Where I was going was a much more limited view of 'trends', more like a season in the fashion market. Most businesses have to respond on an annual basis to what their customers wants - they can believe that something is a temporary trend, but can't afford not to respond.
Perhaps we're in violent agreement on the nature of trends, and divided by time-frame and response.
Ubuntu is both a commercial AND a community project. The goal has always been to take the power of Linux, make it usable for 'general users' and take it to the market winning new users.
The PC market is shrinking, so much so that all the major manufacturers are struggling (e.g Dell going private, HP splitting itself etc). Meanwhile the growth in the next billion units is a) in China b) on 'mobile' devices.
IF you were in charge of strategy what would you do?
> They gave their main demographic a slap in the face ... > Now, according to DistroWatch, Ubuntu is below Mint and > Debian in terms of popularity.
The demographic for 'traditional' Linux is something like 2-4% of the PC market: the biggest thing that's happened since the 2000's is OSX has stolen developer user-base from Linux. These users are well -served (arguably habituated) by the older interfaces, but more general users are not well-served. Even if you put aside the goal of winning new users, you simply cannot build a successful business on 2% of the market (particularly when that 2% of desktop users is not orientated towards buying anything and hates advertising).
It's tough to serve more than one users-base, but Linux (Ubuntu in this case) can as it's very flexible. There's still a massive pot-pourri of software and options in the repositories! I find self-described 'geeks' complaining about Unity really bizarre - if you're a power user it's literally 3 commands (touch .xinitrc; vim .xinitrc; exec <wm-of-your-choice) to change the interface.
> That's an argument in favor of incremental evolution and refactorings IMO
That works if the old thing can be incrementally improved. The issue for Linux is that it's simply fallen behind the significant changes in the client market. At an infrastructure and applications level the FOSS/Linux environments aren't competitive to the other mobile offerings. And, it's basically impossible to maintain one complete stack for the desktop and a different one for the mobile space at the sizes the Linux companies are.
> Now I'm 30, and I just want the damn thing to f'ing work reliably. > I don't need rounded corners, or transparency, or animations or even a desktop background.
The thing is that puts you in the 2%, the things you care about are quite different. General users do care about animations, basically the whole UI "experience": to get them to change you really have to show them something different. Of course, you have to have some level of stability, but you don't win new users by telling them you are so much more stable - users just restart the app or device, they carry a battery charger everywhere and just shrug and plug-in. You only really have to read some of the comments in this thread to see what I mean ;-)
It's the last OS X release that felt like an improvement to me, and one of the last OS X releases that I trusted. Every one since has actually had feature regressions (let's make a formerly visible folder invisible!) or stability issues.
I still have a 2008 Macbook Pro running Snow Leopard and it's more stable than a 2012 MBP running Mavericks and performs about as well.
Early iOS had wonky reset issues too.
Instead, they're just offering us their own versions of things just because they can, not because their's is any better. Maps being exhibit A, and Apple's mail client not changing in 10 years (aside from some minor adds and removes) are examples of this.
Apple used to mean software for people who were not technology savvy. Now it means phone software for people who are not technologically savvy, and computer software that's just like everyone else's. Frankly, I can never figure things out on an iPhone. They're too confusing in their interface. Especially compared to my beloved Newton 2000.
How is Mail.app supposed to change though? It still completes the task that it was designed for. I'll agree that Mail's stability has been spotty across releases, but how are you expecting them to change such a core app?
I remember that in (I think 10.3) they "fixed" the issue by having a timeout dialog popup and ask if you wanted to disconnect... only it was too sensitive and would popup (and then go away before you could react) if there was any jitter in the network connection.
Starting with 10.7 and seeing the decline coming, I was happy that Ubuntu ran very well on that laptop and that held me over until I left Apple hardware entirely.
Mac OS now is in a weird limbo between the Unix heritage, the Mac heritage, and the iOS heritage. I think unifying these strands is an enormous challenge, but also really cool and inspiring. Maybe Apple are going to focus on making cars or whatever, and some weird little upstart is going to come along and make something totally new. You can see people starting to talk about Slack as an operating system, but that's still very primitive.
Chat and command lines are interesting because they represent a huge paradigm that's been overshadowed by the "GUI" paradigm, namely the paradigm of queries and responses: you ask the computer something and get something back, perhaps asynchronously. It's such a useful, coherent model. Easy to program with. Portable across interfaces. Good for exploration. Cognitively appropriate. Etc etc.
I think the complexity and bug-riddenness of most "modern" desktop operating systems come from an over-complicated and incoherent model of operation. Mobile represents a new start. It currently lacks in flexibility, but it's probably a good thing to start with rigid simplicity than to try for flexible complexity, and unless you can perfect a genius UI right away I do think those are the options, if you're aiming for the general public who don't want to learn vim.
I also think the divide between application programmers and computer users is politically a Bad Thing and also a result of exaggerated complexity. Unix was always about user scripting, and it managed that because of textual data, worse-is-better, and RTFM. Apple might not be the company to get back to this, because they're making tons of money from making shiny coherent appliances for people who pay to think as little as possible.
So just generally I'm not holding my breath for Apple to come up with a wildly new and interesting paradigm here. They're a dinosaur. A very pretty dinosaur. I'm more interested in startups with weird ideas, like maybe let's use e-ink displays, cheap ultralight computers, cloud servers, natural language processing, and the interactive fiction adventure exploration paradigm to provide a new style of terminal gadget that's even cooler than Linux. (If you steal this idea, please don't fuck it up.)
Not just Apple, I see similar issues with Google.
Google's Youtube IOS app has issue playing video correctly. It can't even buffer the segments correctly.
Google latest Android Map crashes all the times 1-2 minutes into the navigation, extremely dangerous when I have to restart the navigate while driving. I can't depend on it at all.
I have to roll back to the default factory install older version google map to make it work. Lately I see the older stable version start crash more often, probabaly cause by the "update" on the server API side.
It will be a very scary world if this type of SW development processes are applied to tomorrow's "self driving car".
I haven't had these issues, but I have had significant issues with its performance. 15+ seconds to initialize. At least 3+ seconds needed to swap between transit options. Moving to navigation mode feels sluggish. And this is on a Nexus 6, with no issues with other apps.
When I choose "walk" as the navigation mode it puts an Uber route on there, which when selected gives me an ad to try Uber for the first time. I don't have Uber installed on my device. I don't want to take a fucking Uber, I want to see how long it'll take me to walk somewhere!
I get the feeling that something happened in the Google org responsible for maps. It was always a snappy app that was useful to me. Now it's slow and appearing to be an avenue for ads on the device that I bought directly from Google. Unacceptable.
Don't insert ads into an app in a way that misleads users. You'd be pissed if you opened a book, started reading at Chapter 1 and found that the first 3 chapters you read were just a tease of another book, yours starts on Chapter 4.
Plus I can, you know, close the tab. One of the worst things about these enormous "javascript applications" is the high startup time (remember how much we hated Flash intros with loading screens?) that leads to leaving the tab open, which means that tab's disgustingly-high memory use is a constant rather than only occasional cost (I'm looking at you, Asana!)
The other day I was trying to send a link to a friend: instead of clicking the standard share icon, you have to click the arrow (that looks like an email forward?), which pops up a non-standard share UI instead of the standard sheet. Never mind the fact that to dismiss a video you have to first swipe it down (minimizing it into some bizarre picture-in-picture frame), then slide it off from there, instead of using a "Back" button/gesture like every other app in iOS.
And yet, here we are five years later, and Google Maps is still on the iPhone, shows no evidence of leaving, and Google's iOS apps are ALL still present and better than ever, and Google is still the default search bar in Safari. Meanwhile, Apple Maps is a great product too and has been worked on and polished for several years. "Remember Apple Maps" betrays a mindset where you read one article a few hours after it was released, half a decade ago, and you have no updated impression of the product at all. Apple Maps is, in fact, rock-solid for me right now. It is, in fact, now superior to Google Maps for transit directions, and in some other ways.
So really, I'm not sure what you are talking about, at all.
There's the fact that iOS currently doesn't allow replacing the system hooks for Maps and Safari with Google Maps and Chrome (or any other store apps), but that's not the type of problem the parent was complaining about.
Put yourself on 144p quality. Watch a few videos till you get to an ad. It seems like they disregard your preference and pump up to 4k for your ad, which sucks when it takes 2 minutes to download a 30 second advertisement.
I can't figure out how Google can release any software like that.
Google can't blame IOS/Apple for that.
Anecdotal for sure, but Google Maps has been solid for me on Nexus devices.
Samsung?
Do you have t-mobile? T-mobile started throttling everyone's videos. I had problems similar to the one you describe and had to turn off tmobile's throttling 'feature' in order to get youtube to work correctly.
1. it has no back button. sometimes I watched video a, then from the recommend list there is video b and video c I select video b, then the recommend list update if I want to see video c, I have to search again
2. there is no sound volume button, each time I have to use the button in ipad
Recently I've additionally seen random network slowdowns that are impossible to debug, and they happen only on a single Macbook -- all other machines on the same Wifi are fine. Completely unreliable.
Pages is the only piece of software I have on my Mac where I need to keep the previous version safe because it was so much better!
I have a migration plan, but it will be a lot of work. Whereas my Pages 09 workflow is perfect. Pages 09 did exactly what I wanted it to. I've heard no one say similar things about Pages 13.
Music once it went flat UI is now complete crap. It drives me nuts all the time and I use it often because there really isn't an alternative.
While I'm ranting one thing that's been bad from the beginning is the locked music UI. The next track button is just a few mm from the volume slider which means about once every 2 weeks I blow my ears out trying to skip to the next track. That "feature" carried over to the toolbar menu (or whatever the slide up menu is called)
Ecoute uses the same library as the default app, shows a nice simple grid or list of your albums/artists/playlists and is well designed. When you use any controls in either app it will be picked up in both. It doesn't matter in which app you start a playlist/play/pause/skip/whatever. With that in mind, using Ecoute as default app was as easy as replacing the icon in the dock. No need for a default music app setting in my opinion.
More here: http://www.pixiapps.com/ecouteios/
iOS app 'screenshots' (in task selection mode) are often dated, even after multiple openings of the app. I get that they are meant to be just that, snapshots, but if those aren't up to date, you may as well just show the app icon.
Up to once a week, now, iCloud (in OS X settings) asks me to verify my password when "nothing has changed" (no purchases, etc). It then spins for a long time and there's no acknowledgement that it 'succeeded'.
Several more.
Only once a week?
Try refusing to log in. You'll get pestered every five minutes, sometimes more often than that.
Try disabling it after not logging in, and it asks you to log in to disable it, and then start pestering you even more frequently. Completely asinine.
I had to reboot the access point in the end so perhaps it wasn't an Apple problem. Yet no other devices were having issues and I've not had a problem with it since it's been running Windows.
The difference is that everything worked.
My personal opinion, based purely on speculation is that once Jony Ive & company rolled over everyone in the company, as with any corporate struggle, their priorities are the only ones that really matter. The Apple Music nonsense, that somehow managed to break an already broken product is a similar story I'm sure.
Lots of attention was paid to the visuals in Yosemite, but "unimportant" things like broken wifi, and gratuitous changes like discoveryd were allowed to see the light of day. I think Jobs was the only person able/willing to tell anyone to go fuck off, and the company is suffering from that loss.
Typically I would be getting really slow speeds and intermittent disconnects.
Switching to a 5GHz WiFi router solved a lot of problems in the WiFi department for me on both El Capitan and Yosemite.
Bluetooth interferes with 2.4GHz Wifi, therefore most Macs with bluetooth keyboards/mice struggle a bit on networks at this frequency.
5GHz is pretty much a requirement these days to get the best from a newish Mac.
- calculator - camera - clock - contacts - messages - phone - photos - safari
If you literally use none of these apps, I would be really surprised.
Since we're sharing anecdotes: I've never had a problem with WiFi connectivity or Spotlight on El Capitan across multiple devices. I don't use iWork or Siri, so I can't speak to that. iCloud seems fine to me, but I don't use it extensively.
Well, actually, I don't use Safari, but that's a very particular use case. I wanted to block sites, so I disabled Safari, enabled parental controls, and am using the Google app because it's less convenient and less likely to suck me into time wasters.
Though actually, the dictation search in Google now is better than Safari. And I like being able to have my homepage be a google search. Impossible in Safari.
As for my SO, syncing iphone 5 to mac (on 10.10) just doesn't work anymore. I'm going to have to spend hours debugging why the fuck not soon. And recently her iphone has stopped connecting to wifi. To make it connect, you have to delete the wifi credentials then reboot the device. She already walked through a reset with apple over the phone but it continues to happen. It's infuriating.
Same for clock apps. Clock in your taskbar, sure; but who would ever start a dedicated clock app? I barely touch Contacts and always from other apps. Photos is terrible, but that's been the case for a while now, the obsession with hiding the filesystem has degenerated in an unusable interface (sharing in particular is just mystifying).
Of your list, I do use Messages (you don't really get a choice, if you want to receive SMS texts...) and Safari (again, no real choice), as well as the Camera simply because I use it so little it's not worth my time looking for a better app.
That's where the alarm is, and personally I use it several times a day, to wake me up and to remember the occasional meeting or random events I would otherwise forget about.
I hate ios Photos, mostly because of the white backgrounds however.
Good point. I never really used alarms until Siri, because it was too cumbersome. Now setting and deleting alarms via Siri is probably the best voice-recognition experience I've ever had.
> Since we're sharing anecdotes
Well, some of his points were anecdotes, some were observations about how he interacts with apple, and some were specific accounts of problematic functionality.
> iCloud seems fine to me, but I don't use it extensively.
The claims were that it had some poorly worded confirmations for deleting files when you unsync a device (subjective but testable), that iTunes has a history of destroying files on syncs (should be testable with some searching), and that iTunes will add apps to his computer after he deletes them from his phone (probably needs clarification, but definitely testable).
Responding to a comment with an accusation that it's full of anecdotes and then responding to a portion of that comment which has real, testable assertions with a hedged anecdote is not a useful way to further relevant discussion.
I was wrong. I had forgotten that I do use several default apps, taking them for granted, and overstated my case.
"I'm not sure how someone would go about not using any Apple app, such as calculator, camera, clock, contacts, messages, phone, photos, safari. Do you not require a lot of what these apps provide, or have actually found good alternatives for each of them?"
or
"I really can't imagine not using any Apple apps. How do you get by without any of them?"
In each of these cases, the problem is presented as a failure of the asker's imagination or knowledge, and we ask for clarification on this point. IMO, this is a much more civil way to converse than starting out by questioning the veracity of someone's statements about theirself.
For example, if I state "I had chicken for lunch" and you reply "I find that hard to believe.", I think the implication is clear that you think I'm lying. Alternatively, if a third party says "kbenson had chicken for lunch" and you say "I find that hard to believe", there is not a clear implication that the third party is lying, nor that where they got the information from is lying, as there are multiple locations in the chain of authenticity of such a statement where a mistake or purposeful misrepresentation could have happened, so it's not clear where fault may lay.
So, when someone states "I don't use any of the default iPhone apps" and another person replies directly to them with "I find that hard to believe", I think the implication that they are lying is clear (whether or not they were actually lying).
Now, as for your specific assertion, I think you are obviously correct in the general sense. Although am interested in your opinion on how you would classify someone that is very loose with regard to their statements and their certainty regarding those statements. If I made a statement asserting something, but thought there might be a 15% chance I was wrong if I really looked into it, would I be lying if I stated it as a fact due to the false certainty implied?
Specifically, in this case, if the author was 85% certain they didn't use any default Apple apps and stated as much without qualifying with "I think", or "probably", they may believe they are correct, but be ultimately wrong. Was it a lie to imply a higher level of certainty than existed? I'm not entirely sure how I would classify that. (Note: I don't mean to imply a specific state of mind for the original commenter, this is purely a thought experiment and that statement was handy).
As for levels of uncertainty, I think blanket statements cover a pretty wide range. "I don't use the default apps" could be low or high certainty. If you said something like "I totally definitely absolutely never use the default apps" while you are actually somewhat unsure, then sure, that seems like a lie to me.
I'm interpreting it as an accusation based on the prior explanation, which is less about likelihood of correctness and more about questioning the single authoritative root source of information. In truth, that reasoning is really my explanation of what I see in practice. I cannot recall an instance where someone said "I find that hard to believe" to someone's statement about their own current actions that did not also carry a clear "I call bullshit" connotation. That is, while logically "I find that hard to believe" used in this way can mean that a person thinks you might be wrong, I find that in practice it is not used this way, so it's irrelevant in this context. Specifically, I think the statement as used hear carried a clear "I call bullshit" connotation, which is an implication of lying.
That said, I freely admit my experience in the use of this expression in English might be influenced by region, or even my own biased interpretation, and you or others may have experiences where it was used by or to you in reference to an assertive statement about your action in which there was not a clear "I call bullshit" connotation, in which case I would happily hear them and use them as counter evidence to my own experiences.
> "I don't use the default apps" could be low or high certainty.
To me, assertive statements like this do not exhibit low certainty at all, specifically because it's referencing current state. If it's about the past, it's open to recollection issues, if it's about the future, it's about possible future actions, but when you state "This is what I do", to me that is meant as a clearly defined statement of truth.
You say it's questioning the single authoritative root source of information. I say there is no authoritative root source of this information. People's memories are bad, even about their own lives, and when they say something improbable about their own lives, it's not an implicit accusation of lying if you say you think they're wrong.
I'm not sure that follow most people's interpretations. Wikipedia[1] even asserts it's usual use in response to statement that are "deceiving, misleading, disingenuous, unfair or false". Personally I see it used, and use it myself (sparingly) when responding to someone you think is knowingly misleading you (possibly in jest). I would be offended if anyone but a close friend called my statements bullshit and I believed them, as I would interpret that as an accusation of me intentional misrepresentation.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit
> I say there is no authoritative root source of this information.
Sure there is, in the instances I am (and have been) referring to. That doesn't mean it's infallible, but in the absence of a third party witness or evidence to the contrary, sometimes all you have is the statement of the person about themselves. The only way to find a fault in those situations is for them to admit it. Related to what we've been discussing, I'm not sure I would distinguish between a lie or a mistake when someone recants immediately after a statement and questioning of said statement when in regards their own actions in the way we've been discussing. I consider both acts of bad faith (if someone puts so little thought into their words that they must recant at the slightest questioning, then I view it as not better than a lie).
I'd suggest you really ought to lighten up, understand informal discourse for what it is, and stop projecting your own harsh views of other people onto other people.
I don't think it's overly harsh to expect people, when talking about their own actions (and obviously when understanding the topic and terminology), and when in a discussion which is not a light hearted banter, to expect someone to put enough thought into that statement to make it true, at least to the degree it requires additional information to make them reconsider.
This theoretical exchange in a discussion regarding the merits of Chicken illustrates my point of view: Person 1: I don't eat chicken. Person 2: Are you sure? Person 1: Okay, yes, I eat chicken.
Person 1 has, at this point, proven themselves unreliable in their statements. Whether that is from a lie or mistake is both unprovable,and to me, irrelevant, because the end result is the same. I may or may not converse with them further, depending on other cues, but functionally, what's the difference to Person 2 or observers. I don't think that's overly harsh, just stating the realities of the situation. Sometimes people tell small lies, sometimes they make mistakes, but every occurrence affects your view of them slightly unless you expected that statement to be untrue.
So, to bring this full circle, the original commenter that asserted they didn't use default Apple apps may have lied, but it's far more likely they were mistaken, but in the end, I'll view their statements with a bit more skepticism now, as they've proven themselves capable of making a simple, assertive blanket statements about their behavior that they will recant at the slightest question.
Even so, I still feel the original reply carried an implied accusation of deception, for the reasons we've covered in depth. Regardless of whether the replying commenter was eventually correct, I don't think they had cause to use the wording they did at the time they did. We don't agree, which is fine, but that's why I felt compelled to make the statement I did, and while my wording may have been overly harsh (which I've already admitted), I don't believe my message was.
I assume we're done here, since your last statement was a single sentence whose purpose was to call into question my attitude, understanding, and actions, and offered little additional to discuss? In truth, I found that somewhat belittling, but am trying to ignore that aspect, as I may be misinterpreting it (and I try to be more forgiving of speech directed towards myself than to others). I've tried to be civil, and while this discussion wasn't light hearted, I did find it informative.
I should spend some time partitioning the disk and installing Linux.
That hour spent might save you twenty. But if you want the best experience you need a laptop that was certified for OEM Linux, like some of the Lenovo boxes. The user experience is better than a macbook. Rock solid OS. Everything just works. Seamless upgrades. A bunch of warm hearted people will carefully apply themselves to making the system work better while you sleep.
Given how basic the concept of a playlist is to iTunes, I was surprised to find this was not fixed immediately.
My understanding is that the desktop version of Pages was brought in line with the iOS version. Simple things like paragraph styles were taken out.
FWIW updating to El Capitan fixed this for me.
* Start by use/create a full functional regression system.
* It is not that hard to create system level functional test coverage for wifi, Siri, search, etc.
* Require ALL SW developers to run full tests every evening, weekend.
Code are not allow to checkin or merge upstream if any test failed.
* The test system should submit report on all test scripts pass/fail and performance characterization to central server every night.
* Spotlight no longer finds things as easily. I used to use it for everything. Since updating to El Capitan, it has missed some exact match folders. Planning to switch to Alfred.
* iWork was gutted in '13. People used to use Pages professionally. I'm now using Pages '09, and planning to transition to Word or Latex. I tested Pages '13 intensively, and it fails for even basic publishing.
* Siri can only work with default Apple apps. And those default apps are getting worse. So Siri takes a hit with every app that declines. I used to use Mail, now I don't.
* Constant Wifi issues. I frequently have to turn off wifi, then turn on. On my home network. This never happened pre Mavericks.
* In general, all my Apple default software on my iphone is sitting in a folder titled "apple", which I never use. I don't think I use any Apple default App.
* I avoid icloud. It sends scary "do you want to delete all these files" messages if you ever unsync a device, and it's not clear which actions produce which effects. iTunes has a history of destroying files on syncs, so I can't trust iCloud. Even now, itunes will add apps to my device if they're in my library but I deleted them from my phone. It does this without asking! Any other cloud app has figured out how to handle deletions from one device.
Pages 09 hit the hardest. It was wonderful software. I used it for print publishing, and it just worked. Easy to use, incredibly powerful. Have a look at their manual for the level of care they put into their software, as recently as 2009.
Pages 13 can't do half of that. Very basic stuff like "facing pages" for books has been left out.
https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/0/MA663/en_US/Pages09...
Edit: A comment below pointed out that, I do in fact use default apps. I had taken them for granted. These ones work well and I use them:
Messages, Phone, camera, photos, clock, wallet, calendar, music (UI got worse on this one). Reminders I use occasionally because of the Siri integration.
There are some issues with some of them, but mostly they work pretty well.
On the mac, the only default apps I use frequently are textedit and Preview. Previews remains excellent. I use spotlight, but as noted above it got worse.