to the largest Apple community on Lemmy. This is the place where we talk about everything Apple, from iOS to the exciting upcoming Apple Vision Pro. Feel free to join the discussion!
Apple Hardware
Apple TV
Apple Watch
iPad
iPhone
Mac
Vintage Apple
Apple Software
iOS
iPadOS
macOS
tvOS
watchOS
Shortcuts
Xcode
Community banner courtesy of u/Antsomnia.
Apple has been releasing bug fixes across its entire OS offering for the past six months like it's going out of fashion. I used to measure laptop uptime in months, now it's weeks and days. Quality control is not what it used to be.
Source: I've been using Apple hardware since 1985.
I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. The unfortunate reality is that any sufficiently large software project with a lot of engineers touching the code is going to have bugs. At least someone at Apple is trying to fix these as opposed to ignoring/pretending they don’t exist
Except that these bugs are being found after release, which means that alpha and beta testing is not finding these bugs and the internal testing process isn't finding them before release either.
I can’t speak specifically to apple’s testing process, but as someone who has worked in software QA, it’s simply not possible to catch all the bugs. Obviously no one wants bugs, so I’ve witnessed past employers try everything from adding more manpower to attempting engineering culture changes to adding public beta programs. None of these meaningfully reduced production bugs. If you or anyone else knows a better way, I’m listening :)
I've been writing software for over 40 years, I hear you!
That said, I think that the current crop of updates coming out of Apple are symptomatic of a larger issue, namely that it has effectively isolated itself from its customer base and as a result has lost touch with the reality of using Apple equipment.
I've used Apple gear for a very long time and this appears to happen in waves. I'm not sure what breaks the cycle, but something does and things get better .. for a time.
I suspect that the current crop of releases are driven by an accountant wanting to cash out on the latest AI craze with no regard for the existing user base.
The latest example of this is Apple sharing all your photos with their AI system:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/03/apple_enhanced_visual_search/
@cantankerous_cashew @apple_enthusiast Especially when it’s being delivered to the masses. We’re not talking about a couple 100,000, we’re talking millions.
Or beta testing is finding them but Apple’s ridiculous feedback requirements are preventing them from being reported. Or they are getting reported and they’re being ignored because Apple is all in on the ai hype train.
Yes, especially with macOS, we need a Snow Leopard 2.0 moment.
Isn’t this related to rolling out their apple intelligence stuff?
It seems like they are releasing and patching “on-the-fly” with this stuff.
I have no idea what's driving this, other than to observe that there were several subsequent fixes to do with sandboxes which was causing all manner of grief for applications being prevented from accessing their own files.
It just occurred to me that this might be happening because they are doing on-device inference for their apple intelligence, they likely have to push model updates to the phone. I bet we are seeing more updates because they are tuning the models.