Alexandra Mintsopoulos, writing on Medium:
I’ve been watching the story about Apple’s “declining software quality” unfold over the past year with amusement but never felt the need to write anything contesting this narrative until John Siracusa (on episode 155 of Accidental Tech Podcast) came to the conclusion that the problem must be real because the story keeps coming back up. To John’s credit, he allowed for the possibility that this is a perception problem but ultimately concluded otherwise because “no one else seems to be disagreeing”. I disagree.
I, too, haven’t commented much on the year-long Apple’s declining software quality story. I just haven’t found it to be true from my own experiences. iOS is better than ever, OS X feels rock solid, and Apple’s apps are as reliable as they’ve always been.
To be clear, Apple’s software is far from perfect — all software has bugs — and when they ship things like discoveryd they deserve some amount of backlash for it. But I think it’s a little far fetched to claim that the overall quality of Apple’s software is lower than its historical average.
Alexandra really hits the nail on the head in regard to the iTunes argument:
iTunes has been the target of complaints for as long as anyone can remember and it seems clear that it will be reworked much like Photos, iWork, or Final Cut have been (and likely receive the same backlash for missing functionality). The reason it hasn’t been done sooner is obvious: it has hundreds of millions of users and transacts billions of dollars in sales, revamping it from the ground up is akin to fixing an airplane while it’s in flight and won’t be done lightly.
iTunes is a bit of a shit sandwich. But I have no doubt that Apple is working on a major new version that fixes all (or most) of its problems. There’s no way the company is just filled with dolts that are blissfully unaware of the problems in front of them. I don’t blame anyone for wanting to remind them from time to time, but let’s all keep a rational, level head about it.
