[HN Gopher] Apple Needs a Snow Sequoia
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Apple Needs a Snow Sequoia
Author : trbutler
Score : 41 points
Date : 2025-03-27 22:32 UTC (27 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (reviews.ofb.biz)
(TXT) w3m dump (reviews.ofb.biz)
| asadotzler wrote:
| I don't think that's quite right. Snow Leopard was a lot of
| changes to a lot of the OS code base and wasn't great out of the
| gate, taking multiple dot releases, like all large-scale software
| updates do, to stabilize and bugfix enough to be "good."
|
| There is no silver bullet, just a lot of lead ones and the answer
| to Apple's quality problem is to begin baking QA back into the
| process in a meaningful way after letting it atrophy for the last
| decade or so.
|
| Hire more humans and rely less on automation. Trust your
| developers, QA, and user support folks and the feedback they push
| up the chain of command. Fix bugs as the arise instead of
| assigning them to "future" or whatever. Don't release features
| until they're sufficient stable.
|
| This is all basic stuff for a software company, stuff that Apple
| seems to have forgotten under the leadership of that glorified
| accountant, Cook.
| 1over137 wrote:
| Why do any of that? What they're doing has made them infinitely
| rich, and that's all that matters. /s
| bigdubs wrote:
| Adding to this, a solution might be enabling continuous
| releases and leaning into release channels could help in terms
| of getting more out to users.
|
| In practice it's a challenge because the OS bundles a lot of
| separate things into releases, namely Safari changes are tied
| to OS changes which are tied to Apple Pay features which are
| tied to so on and so on.
|
| It would require a lot of feature flagging and extra complexity
| which may reduce complexity.
|
| Another way is to start un-bundling releases and fundamentally
| re-thinking how the dependency graph is structured.
| mberning wrote:
| Hard to disagree. You would think for a company obsessed with
| performance per watt and battery life that every release would be
| as fast if not faster that its predecessor and more efficient to
| boot.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| ...and speaking of Snow versions, bring back those cool welcome
| videos when you first purchase a Mac!
|
| I miss those. Unfortunately, since Apple doesn't do the whole
| space theme anymore, you'd probably get some really boring drone
| shots of California at best before a Setup Assistant faded into
| view from behind a Redwood or something.
| blitzar wrote:
| That assistant had better be Clippy. "It looks like you're
| trying to setup your Mac, Would you like help?"
| geerlingguy wrote:
| > In the 22 years since I became a "switcher", this is the worst
| state I can remember Apple's platforms being in.
|
| Indeed, I remember three times when Apple went a bit overboard on
| the feature front, but dialed it back and made some of the most
| stable and useful OS versions:
|
| OS 8.5/8.6 pushed a bunch of features and were the last big
| pushes pre-OSX, but then OS 9 fixed a TON of bugs, and added a
| few smaller quality of life improvements that made running
| 'Classic' Mac OS pretty good, for those who were stuck on it for
| the transitional years.
|
| Mac OS X 10.0 rewrote _everything_, and especially 10.0 was _dog_
| slow, with all the new Quartz graphics stuff in an era where GPU
| accelerated 3D display widgets wasn't quite prevalent. 10.1
| patched in a bunch of missing features (like DVD Player--it was
| still a pretty useful tool back then), and fixed a couple of the
| most _glaring_ problems... but 10.4 Tiger was the first OS X
| release that was 'fast' enough OS X was a joy to use in the same
| way OS 9 was at the time. At least on newer Macs.
|
| And then of course Snow Leopard, which is the subject of the OP.
|
| macOS 13/14/15 have progressively added more little bugs I track
| in my https://github.com/geerlingguy/mac-dev-playbook project;
| anything from little networking bugs to weird preferences that
| can't be automated, or don't even work at all when you try
| toggling them.
|
| That's besides the absolute _disaster_ that is modern System
| Preferences. Until the 'great iOSification' a few years back,
| Apple's System Preferences and preference pane were actually a
| pleasure to use, and I could _usually_ remember where to go
| visually, with a nice search assistant.
|
| Now... it's hit or miss if I can even find a setting :(
| karel-3d wrote:
| Ahh Apple Vision Pro.
|
| I entirely forgot it existed! They still sell that?
| nashashmi wrote:
| [delayed]
| rcarmo wrote:
| There are some factual "gaps" there about how good Snow Leopard
| was, but I understand the sentiment. As someone who's been a Mac
| user since System 6 and has been consistently using Macs
| alongside PCs _daily_ for over 20 years I can say that Apple's
| software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has
| steadily decreased.
|
| For me, Spotlight is no longer (anywhere) near as useful to find
| files (and sometimes forgets app and shortcut names it found
| perfectly fine 5 minutes ago), and there is no longer any way to
| effectively prioritize the results I want (apps, not internet
| garbage).
|
| Most of the other examples in the article also apply, but to be
| honest I've been using GNOME in parallel for years now and I
| consider it to be my "forever desktop" if PC hardware can ever
| match Apple Silicon (or, most likely, if I want something that is
| _just a computer_).
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