The quality of Apple's software
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I've spent - literally - 12 hours restoring my iPhone after it lost the plot and refused to sync with iTunes. iTunes, no matter how much I swore at it, refused to sync my phone. It would simply hang and become unresponsive. Eventually, after endless reboots of both phone and macbook I restored my phone and applications in a sequence that consisted of: 1. connect devices 2. wait for the sync to start 3. wait until it hangs (usually after half a dozen apps were restored) 4. Force quit iTunes, sometimes by rebooting the machine - sometimes with a hard reboot - and a reboot of the iPhone (since the iPhone still thought it was syncing even though it wasn't connected to the Macbook. 5 restart everything. Go back to 1. I'm on iOS 8.0.2 and the Macbook on Mavericks 10.9.5 - both the latest and greatest. Yet my iPhone, in the last few weeks, has become like the Android device I had but could no longer use because of crashes. The Macbook hangs, iTunes freezes - or just crashes and disappears - and iPhone apps crash several times a day. I kind of expected this from Android apps - the bar for getting you app in the store is low, and hardware is varied - and the iPhone, until now, has been rock solid. Impressively solid. So what's happened here? Is this the beginning of what's come through the pipeline since Jobs shuffled off this mortal coil? Is this what happens when you no longer have a single person calling BS and everyone else simply agreeing (if that was even the case). Is Apple now a collections of fiefdoms, Microsoft style, with each group becoming more focussed on the internal struggle than the external customer? Is it now easier for them to say "Yes, it's OK to ship" because the other option is to face backlash from a superior or be mocked by other groups? I'm sad. Deeply sad at this. Apple software never "Just worked" as the marketing said, but it was always reasonably robust. Microsoft long ago took on the attitude of "We'll never make it perfect. so design it to fail" and we have excellent error reporting, crash dialogs that look for solutions online, and an OS that pro-actively helps you with apps that are unresponsive. My Windows 7 machines are so reliable that a crash (and I can't remember that last OS crash) is a shocking event. Maybe it's time for Apple to start realising that it's software smells just like everyone else's.
cheers Chris Maunder
The quality or lack of suggest why the execs sold $143 million dollors worth of shares[^]
Every day, thousands of innocent plants are killed by vegetarians. Help end the violence EAT BACON
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I've spent - literally - 12 hours restoring my iPhone after it lost the plot and refused to sync with iTunes. iTunes, no matter how much I swore at it, refused to sync my phone. It would simply hang and become unresponsive. Eventually, after endless reboots of both phone and macbook I restored my phone and applications in a sequence that consisted of: 1. connect devices 2. wait for the sync to start 3. wait until it hangs (usually after half a dozen apps were restored) 4. Force quit iTunes, sometimes by rebooting the machine - sometimes with a hard reboot - and a reboot of the iPhone (since the iPhone still thought it was syncing even though it wasn't connected to the Macbook. 5 restart everything. Go back to 1. I'm on iOS 8.0.2 and the Macbook on Mavericks 10.9.5 - both the latest and greatest. Yet my iPhone, in the last few weeks, has become like the Android device I had but could no longer use because of crashes. The Macbook hangs, iTunes freezes - or just crashes and disappears - and iPhone apps crash several times a day. I kind of expected this from Android apps - the bar for getting you app in the store is low, and hardware is varied - and the iPhone, until now, has been rock solid. Impressively solid. So what's happened here? Is this the beginning of what's come through the pipeline since Jobs shuffled off this mortal coil? Is this what happens when you no longer have a single person calling BS and everyone else simply agreeing (if that was even the case). Is Apple now a collections of fiefdoms, Microsoft style, with each group becoming more focussed on the internal struggle than the external customer? Is it now easier for them to say "Yes, it's OK to ship" because the other option is to face backlash from a superior or be mocked by other groups? I'm sad. Deeply sad at this. Apple software never "Just worked" as the marketing said, but it was always reasonably robust. Microsoft long ago took on the attitude of "We'll never make it perfect. so design it to fail" and we have excellent error reporting, crash dialogs that look for solutions online, and an OS that pro-actively helps you with apps that are unresponsive. My Windows 7 machines are so reliable that a crash (and I can't remember that last OS crash) is a shocking event. Maybe it's time for Apple to start realising that it's software smells just like everyone else's.
cheers Chris Maunder
I've had similar problems a couple of times. The solution for me was to switch cords, or switch USB ports. I'm aware that just because it sounds like a similar problem, doesn't mean that it is.
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I've spent - literally - 12 hours restoring my iPhone after it lost the plot and refused to sync with iTunes. iTunes, no matter how much I swore at it, refused to sync my phone. It would simply hang and become unresponsive. Eventually, after endless reboots of both phone and macbook I restored my phone and applications in a sequence that consisted of: 1. connect devices 2. wait for the sync to start 3. wait until it hangs (usually after half a dozen apps were restored) 4. Force quit iTunes, sometimes by rebooting the machine - sometimes with a hard reboot - and a reboot of the iPhone (since the iPhone still thought it was syncing even though it wasn't connected to the Macbook. 5 restart everything. Go back to 1. I'm on iOS 8.0.2 and the Macbook on Mavericks 10.9.5 - both the latest and greatest. Yet my iPhone, in the last few weeks, has become like the Android device I had but could no longer use because of crashes. The Macbook hangs, iTunes freezes - or just crashes and disappears - and iPhone apps crash several times a day. I kind of expected this from Android apps - the bar for getting you app in the store is low, and hardware is varied - and the iPhone, until now, has been rock solid. Impressively solid. So what's happened here? Is this the beginning of what's come through the pipeline since Jobs shuffled off this mortal coil? Is this what happens when you no longer have a single person calling BS and everyone else simply agreeing (if that was even the case). Is Apple now a collections of fiefdoms, Microsoft style, with each group becoming more focussed on the internal struggle than the external customer? Is it now easier for them to say "Yes, it's OK to ship" because the other option is to face backlash from a superior or be mocked by other groups? I'm sad. Deeply sad at this. Apple software never "Just worked" as the marketing said, but it was always reasonably robust. Microsoft long ago took on the attitude of "We'll never make it perfect. so design it to fail" and we have excellent error reporting, crash dialogs that look for solutions online, and an OS that pro-actively helps you with apps that are unresponsive. My Windows 7 machines are so reliable that a crash (and I can't remember that last OS crash) is a shocking event. Maybe it's time for Apple to start realising that it's software smells just like everyone else's.
cheers Chris Maunder
The best product of Microsoft is Windows XP. Although sometimes is crushes, it is the most stable of all windows out there (until Windows 7). What happened to Microsoft? Bill Gates retired. Although it is the face of the company, Bill Gates is a techie guy and as all techie guy it cares for the detail. That's why Windows XP, Visual Studio 98/2003/2005, VirtualPC (first version) and a lot other great products are developed (either created or perfected) by Microsoft. Then techie lead retired and business guys got the lead. Result was Windows Vista. Techie guys do care about the product, business guys do care for the company (and money). So the product itself, the contact with OEM and other details become meaningless. Now Apple do the same mistake. Steve Jobs although having a trade talent is a techie guy. It do cares for the product and created or perfected great products like iPhone, iPod, TrueType fonts, etc. Now Apple is collapsing under the care of the company itself and the money. Instead caring for the product, Apple is trying to bind the already won market to itself. On the other hand Google is so techie company that goes for what every techie wants: experimenting. Experimenting products never "just works", they are experiments, they are meant to challenge the tester to find the mistakes. But the problem is simple users do not want to experiment, they want something that "just works". So under-techie is bad, over-techie is also bad (unless you have billions of dollars to spent like Google).
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I have to agree on iTunes. It is not good. It was always buggy on Windows and wireless syncing very hit and miss. If all devices, the PC and the router (was Netgear, now Draytek) were rebooted, then a sync might happen. I moved to a MacBook, thinking that I will start to develop some apps and iTunes seems to be just as bad. I did once have four devices showing and being willing to sync wirelessly, but now I am lucky if one or two show. Again, multiple reboots sometimes solve the problem. So yes, "It doesn't just work". I'm probably holding them wrong.
Got to agree about iTunes. It keep losing my apps and music. Pretty rough realy. I have two iPads, at least I have one and my wife has the other. No problems except I upgraded mine from IOS6 to 7. Bad move. I will not be touching IOS8 with a barge pole, even if it has a rubber glove on the end. IPhones, lots of them and no problems at all. My Android phone, not so much, thanks. I hate it and it hates me.
I may not last forever but the mess I leave behind certainly will.
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I've spent - literally - 12 hours restoring my iPhone after it lost the plot and refused to sync with iTunes. iTunes, no matter how much I swore at it, refused to sync my phone. It would simply hang and become unresponsive. Eventually, after endless reboots of both phone and macbook I restored my phone and applications in a sequence that consisted of: 1. connect devices 2. wait for the sync to start 3. wait until it hangs (usually after half a dozen apps were restored) 4. Force quit iTunes, sometimes by rebooting the machine - sometimes with a hard reboot - and a reboot of the iPhone (since the iPhone still thought it was syncing even though it wasn't connected to the Macbook. 5 restart everything. Go back to 1. I'm on iOS 8.0.2 and the Macbook on Mavericks 10.9.5 - both the latest and greatest. Yet my iPhone, in the last few weeks, has become like the Android device I had but could no longer use because of crashes. The Macbook hangs, iTunes freezes - or just crashes and disappears - and iPhone apps crash several times a day. I kind of expected this from Android apps - the bar for getting you app in the store is low, and hardware is varied - and the iPhone, until now, has been rock solid. Impressively solid. So what's happened here? Is this the beginning of what's come through the pipeline since Jobs shuffled off this mortal coil? Is this what happens when you no longer have a single person calling BS and everyone else simply agreeing (if that was even the case). Is Apple now a collections of fiefdoms, Microsoft style, with each group becoming more focussed on the internal struggle than the external customer? Is it now easier for them to say "Yes, it's OK to ship" because the other option is to face backlash from a superior or be mocked by other groups? I'm sad. Deeply sad at this. Apple software never "Just worked" as the marketing said, but it was always reasonably robust. Microsoft long ago took on the attitude of "We'll never make it perfect. so design it to fail" and we have excellent error reporting, crash dialogs that look for solutions online, and an OS that pro-actively helps you with apps that are unresponsive. My Windows 7 machines are so reliable that a crash (and I can't remember that last OS crash) is a shocking event. Maybe it's time for Apple to start realising that it's software smells just like everyone else's.
cheers Chris Maunder
I have always viewed it with a get what you paid for attitude. If you want the best hardware buy Apple gear. If you care more about getting the best software you buy MS "gear".
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Coffee time: apple makes pretty good computers, but so does everyone else. With apple, though, it's really not a case of "you get what you pay for"; you pay well over the odds, but you still only get a pretty good computer. Of course, with Windows, you get baby blocks and the ribbon, so they're bucking to get rid of their pretty-good-software status.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
Having used both Apple machines and PCs (and some of the best PCs out there) I still feel that the Quality of the Apple hardware is far higher than the industry average and I'm willing to pay the premium to have a machine that looks and performs consistently well over it's full lifetime. My PC laptops always seemed to start creaking, or the letters on the keys rubbed off, or the rubber pads underneath cam away or the chassis cracked. Never with an Apple device. I'm no fanboi, but I like good hardware and Apple definitely has that nailed.
cheers Chris Maunder
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I've had similar problems a couple of times. The solution for me was to switch cords, or switch USB ports. I'm aware that just because it sounds like a similar problem, doesn't mean that it is.
I thought exactly the same thing and tried it, but still no luck. It did seem like it was a connection issue - though truly it's a software issue because surely there'd be some communication on both sides to ensure they were actually still in contact. One interesting thing I did notices is that if you purchase an app on the phone and also a different app on the computer then sync, it was getting all very confused as it tried to transfer the purchase from the phone while transferring other purchases to the phone. I would *love* to walk through the code to see what was going on. You just know that, if you sat down with the dev who wrote that code years ago you'd get a "Oh yeah - that bit was always a bit dodgy but we had to do it this way because something else over here and..." sort of thing.
cheers Chris Maunder
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The best product of Microsoft is Windows XP. Although sometimes is crushes, it is the most stable of all windows out there (until Windows 7). What happened to Microsoft? Bill Gates retired. Although it is the face of the company, Bill Gates is a techie guy and as all techie guy it cares for the detail. That's why Windows XP, Visual Studio 98/2003/2005, VirtualPC (first version) and a lot other great products are developed (either created or perfected) by Microsoft. Then techie lead retired and business guys got the lead. Result was Windows Vista. Techie guys do care about the product, business guys do care for the company (and money). So the product itself, the contact with OEM and other details become meaningless. Now Apple do the same mistake. Steve Jobs although having a trade talent is a techie guy. It do cares for the product and created or perfected great products like iPhone, iPod, TrueType fonts, etc. Now Apple is collapsing under the care of the company itself and the money. Instead caring for the product, Apple is trying to bind the already won market to itself. On the other hand Google is so techie company that goes for what every techie wants: experimenting. Experimenting products never "just works", they are experiments, they are meant to challenge the tester to find the mistakes. But the problem is simple users do not want to experiment, they want something that "just works". So under-techie is bad, over-techie is also bad (unless you have billions of dollars to spent like Google).
Plamen Dragiyski wrote:
it is the most stable of all windows out there (until Windows 7).
So you mean that Windows 7 is the most stable? Personally I've found Win7 way, way better than XP both in terms of stability and security (obviously). Looking forward to Windows 9.
cheers Chris Maunder
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Plamen Dragiyski wrote:
it is the most stable of all windows out there (until Windows 7).
So you mean that Windows 7 is the most stable? Personally I've found Win7 way, way better than XP both in terms of stability and security (obviously). Looking forward to Windows 9.
cheers Chris Maunder
In WinXP a lot of OEM production drivers have kernel level bugs leading to exception in kernel-space, handled by WinXP double-fault handler producing the blue-screen-of-dead. The statistics shows that for Win7 the OEM technology got better. It seems Win7 was the last Windows, which received kernel-code attention. The Win8 seems to add only user-space features (however in closed-source like Windows only win-programmers and reverse-engineers knows).
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I've spent - literally - 12 hours restoring my iPhone after it lost the plot and refused to sync with iTunes. iTunes, no matter how much I swore at it, refused to sync my phone. It would simply hang and become unresponsive. Eventually, after endless reboots of both phone and macbook I restored my phone and applications in a sequence that consisted of: 1. connect devices 2. wait for the sync to start 3. wait until it hangs (usually after half a dozen apps were restored) 4. Force quit iTunes, sometimes by rebooting the machine - sometimes with a hard reboot - and a reboot of the iPhone (since the iPhone still thought it was syncing even though it wasn't connected to the Macbook. 5 restart everything. Go back to 1. I'm on iOS 8.0.2 and the Macbook on Mavericks 10.9.5 - both the latest and greatest. Yet my iPhone, in the last few weeks, has become like the Android device I had but could no longer use because of crashes. The Macbook hangs, iTunes freezes - or just crashes and disappears - and iPhone apps crash several times a day. I kind of expected this from Android apps - the bar for getting you app in the store is low, and hardware is varied - and the iPhone, until now, has been rock solid. Impressively solid. So what's happened here? Is this the beginning of what's come through the pipeline since Jobs shuffled off this mortal coil? Is this what happens when you no longer have a single person calling BS and everyone else simply agreeing (if that was even the case). Is Apple now a collections of fiefdoms, Microsoft style, with each group becoming more focussed on the internal struggle than the external customer? Is it now easier for them to say "Yes, it's OK to ship" because the other option is to face backlash from a superior or be mocked by other groups? I'm sad. Deeply sad at this. Apple software never "Just worked" as the marketing said, but it was always reasonably robust. Microsoft long ago took on the attitude of "We'll never make it perfect. so design it to fail" and we have excellent error reporting, crash dialogs that look for solutions online, and an OS that pro-actively helps you with apps that are unresponsive. My Windows 7 machines are so reliable that a crash (and I can't remember that last OS crash) is a shocking event. Maybe it's time for Apple to start realising that it's software smells just like everyone else's.
cheers Chris Maunder
Chris Maunder wrote:
Apple software...was always reasonably robust...
My first 'real' computer was a Powermac 6100 running OS 7.5.x. Hardly robust! My first 'real' computer manual was 'Sad Macs, Bombs, and Other Disasters' to try to make sense of all the crashes! Then I got my first Windows machine and never looked back. :)
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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I've spent - literally - 12 hours restoring my iPhone after it lost the plot and refused to sync with iTunes. iTunes, no matter how much I swore at it, refused to sync my phone. It would simply hang and become unresponsive. Eventually, after endless reboots of both phone and macbook I restored my phone and applications in a sequence that consisted of: 1. connect devices 2. wait for the sync to start 3. wait until it hangs (usually after half a dozen apps were restored) 4. Force quit iTunes, sometimes by rebooting the machine - sometimes with a hard reboot - and a reboot of the iPhone (since the iPhone still thought it was syncing even though it wasn't connected to the Macbook. 5 restart everything. Go back to 1. I'm on iOS 8.0.2 and the Macbook on Mavericks 10.9.5 - both the latest and greatest. Yet my iPhone, in the last few weeks, has become like the Android device I had but could no longer use because of crashes. The Macbook hangs, iTunes freezes - or just crashes and disappears - and iPhone apps crash several times a day. I kind of expected this from Android apps - the bar for getting you app in the store is low, and hardware is varied - and the iPhone, until now, has been rock solid. Impressively solid. So what's happened here? Is this the beginning of what's come through the pipeline since Jobs shuffled off this mortal coil? Is this what happens when you no longer have a single person calling BS and everyone else simply agreeing (if that was even the case). Is Apple now a collections of fiefdoms, Microsoft style, with each group becoming more focussed on the internal struggle than the external customer? Is it now easier for them to say "Yes, it's OK to ship" because the other option is to face backlash from a superior or be mocked by other groups? I'm sad. Deeply sad at this. Apple software never "Just worked" as the marketing said, but it was always reasonably robust. Microsoft long ago took on the attitude of "We'll never make it perfect. so design it to fail" and we have excellent error reporting, crash dialogs that look for solutions online, and an OS that pro-actively helps you with apps that are unresponsive. My Windows 7 machines are so reliable that a crash (and I can't remember that last OS crash) is a shocking event. Maybe it's time for Apple to start realising that it's software smells just like everyone else's.
cheers Chris Maunder
I dealt with the same problem, at length, while upgrading from my iPhone5 to my iPhone6+. If your iTunes library is on a network location, then you are dealing with a "known" issue, at least, there are a couple of long threads on the Apple forums about it that helped me get past it (there are also multiple stories of the uselessness of Apple support). The solution for older devices is to downgrade iTunes, since this bug was apparently introduced in the latest version. For those of us with new devices, that require the latest version of iTunes (they refuse to sync with older versions), the only solution is to copy the apps folder from your network iTunes library location to a local hard drive. Then you have to remove all apps from within iTunes and re-add them from the local folder (though you may also have to tweak your settings to keep iTunes from just re-copying them back to their network location). Even then, the sync may fail for specific apps (I had 2), requiring you to delete those apps from the device to get the sync to finish. Just don't ask how much time I wasted figuring this out... and no, I won't provide my opinion Apple's software, since I don't think this forum software will allow me to use that sort of language!
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I dealt with the same problem, at length, while upgrading from my iPhone5 to my iPhone6+. If your iTunes library is on a network location, then you are dealing with a "known" issue, at least, there are a couple of long threads on the Apple forums about it that helped me get past it (there are also multiple stories of the uselessness of Apple support). The solution for older devices is to downgrade iTunes, since this bug was apparently introduced in the latest version. For those of us with new devices, that require the latest version of iTunes (they refuse to sync with older versions), the only solution is to copy the apps folder from your network iTunes library location to a local hard drive. Then you have to remove all apps from within iTunes and re-add them from the local folder (though you may also have to tweak your settings to keep iTunes from just re-copying them back to their network location). Even then, the sync may fail for specific apps (I had 2), requiring you to delete those apps from the device to get the sync to finish. Just don't ask how much time I wasted figuring this out... and no, I won't provide my opinion Apple's software, since I don't think this forum software will allow me to use that sort of language!
Yeah - I do have my iTunes media on a network drive, and I cannot believe how poor the network support is. Do they understand multithreading? Network timeouts? The thing that absolutely kills me, though, is that if iTunes, for any reason, can't find your network drive then it defaults to using your local drive for the iTunes folder without telling you and without trying to reestablish the connection. Suddenly some files are on your local machine, the rest are on the network, and iTunes thinks that half your library is now missing.
cheers Chris Maunder
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I've spent - literally - 12 hours restoring my iPhone after it lost the plot and refused to sync with iTunes. iTunes, no matter how much I swore at it, refused to sync my phone. It would simply hang and become unresponsive. Eventually, after endless reboots of both phone and macbook I restored my phone and applications in a sequence that consisted of: 1. connect devices 2. wait for the sync to start 3. wait until it hangs (usually after half a dozen apps were restored) 4. Force quit iTunes, sometimes by rebooting the machine - sometimes with a hard reboot - and a reboot of the iPhone (since the iPhone still thought it was syncing even though it wasn't connected to the Macbook. 5 restart everything. Go back to 1. I'm on iOS 8.0.2 and the Macbook on Mavericks 10.9.5 - both the latest and greatest. Yet my iPhone, in the last few weeks, has become like the Android device I had but could no longer use because of crashes. The Macbook hangs, iTunes freezes - or just crashes and disappears - and iPhone apps crash several times a day. I kind of expected this from Android apps - the bar for getting you app in the store is low, and hardware is varied - and the iPhone, until now, has been rock solid. Impressively solid. So what's happened here? Is this the beginning of what's come through the pipeline since Jobs shuffled off this mortal coil? Is this what happens when you no longer have a single person calling BS and everyone else simply agreeing (if that was even the case). Is Apple now a collections of fiefdoms, Microsoft style, with each group becoming more focussed on the internal struggle than the external customer? Is it now easier for them to say "Yes, it's OK to ship" because the other option is to face backlash from a superior or be mocked by other groups? I'm sad. Deeply sad at this. Apple software never "Just worked" as the marketing said, but it was always reasonably robust. Microsoft long ago took on the attitude of "We'll never make it perfect. so design it to fail" and we have excellent error reporting, crash dialogs that look for solutions online, and an OS that pro-actively helps you with apps that are unresponsive. My Windows 7 machines are so reliable that a crash (and I can't remember that last OS crash) is a shocking event. Maybe it's time for Apple to start realising that it's software smells just like everyone else's.
cheers Chris Maunder
Chris Maunder wrote:
Yet my iPhone, in the last few weeks, has become like the Android device I had
I don't think its fair to compare hardware based on how buggy the software is. My Android phone has been far more stable softwarewise than either my wife or daughter's iPhone. The hardware, not so much (my Motorola hardware is not aging well). You really have to chalk your problems up to the new don't-test-release-often culture that pervades all phone software. In other words, congratulations, you've just become an Apple alpha tester.. they just knew you wanted to participate :)
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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I've spent - literally - 12 hours restoring my iPhone after it lost the plot and refused to sync with iTunes. iTunes, no matter how much I swore at it, refused to sync my phone. It would simply hang and become unresponsive. Eventually, after endless reboots of both phone and macbook I restored my phone and applications in a sequence that consisted of: 1. connect devices 2. wait for the sync to start 3. wait until it hangs (usually after half a dozen apps were restored) 4. Force quit iTunes, sometimes by rebooting the machine - sometimes with a hard reboot - and a reboot of the iPhone (since the iPhone still thought it was syncing even though it wasn't connected to the Macbook. 5 restart everything. Go back to 1. I'm on iOS 8.0.2 and the Macbook on Mavericks 10.9.5 - both the latest and greatest. Yet my iPhone, in the last few weeks, has become like the Android device I had but could no longer use because of crashes. The Macbook hangs, iTunes freezes - or just crashes and disappears - and iPhone apps crash several times a day. I kind of expected this from Android apps - the bar for getting you app in the store is low, and hardware is varied - and the iPhone, until now, has been rock solid. Impressively solid. So what's happened here? Is this the beginning of what's come through the pipeline since Jobs shuffled off this mortal coil? Is this what happens when you no longer have a single person calling BS and everyone else simply agreeing (if that was even the case). Is Apple now a collections of fiefdoms, Microsoft style, with each group becoming more focussed on the internal struggle than the external customer? Is it now easier for them to say "Yes, it's OK to ship" because the other option is to face backlash from a superior or be mocked by other groups? I'm sad. Deeply sad at this. Apple software never "Just worked" as the marketing said, but it was always reasonably robust. Microsoft long ago took on the attitude of "We'll never make it perfect. so design it to fail" and we have excellent error reporting, crash dialogs that look for solutions online, and an OS that pro-actively helps you with apps that are unresponsive. My Windows 7 machines are so reliable that a crash (and I can't remember that last OS crash) is a shocking event. Maybe it's time for Apple to start realising that it's software smells just like everyone else's.
cheers Chris Maunder
We used to be an Apple shop here: Macbook pros mostly. Lately we've been finding that their over-priced hardware is rather unreliable so we've moved on to Lenovo. Don't have much experience of their software recently, but certainly they are slipping in the quality department.
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It started with Maps... I haven't upgraded my Mac to the latest OS just yet - and can't update my aging i-devices.. perhaps we need to adopt the 'wait for someone else to find the bugs' approach I've used for Windows for so long. One hopes that inside castle Apple, buts are being kicked and will get sorted out - but for now I join you in your sadness.
PooperPig - Coming Soon
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Having used both Apple machines and PCs (and some of the best PCs out there) I still feel that the Quality of the Apple hardware is far higher than the industry average and I'm willing to pay the premium to have a machine that looks and performs consistently well over it's full lifetime. My PC laptops always seemed to start creaking, or the letters on the keys rubbed off, or the rubber pads underneath cam away or the chassis cracked. Never with an Apple device. I'm no fanboi, but I like good hardware and Apple definitely has that nailed.
cheers Chris Maunder
The air bender, otherwise known as the iPhone 6!
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iTunes is one of the worst software application ever designed created that made it into existence. They should shoot whom ever devised it and fire the entire software team. The people responsible for the green light of releasing this "thing" should be staked and burned alive. I'm even more flabbergasted by the fact they manage to make it worse with every release... I feel your pain, bro. Moral support for you.
V.
(MQOTD rules and previous solutions)iTunes is Jobs's way of making sure you are tied to the Apple mother ship in Cupertino, CA. You will buy music only from iTunes and nowhere else. You already have the CD? Too Frikking Bad!
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Chris Maunder wrote:
Yet my iPhone, in the last few weeks, has become like the Android device I had
I don't think its fair to compare hardware based on how buggy the software is. My Android phone has been far more stable softwarewise than either my wife or daughter's iPhone. The hardware, not so much (my Motorola hardware is not aging well). You really have to chalk your problems up to the new don't-test-release-often culture that pervades all phone software. In other words, congratulations, you've just become an Apple alpha tester.. they just knew you wanted to participate :)
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
patbob wrote:
I don't think its fair to compare hardware based on how buggy the software is.
Hardware is nothing without the software, and it's understood that when we talk about the reliability of a machine we usually talk about hardware and software combined.
cheers Chris Maunder
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No, it started with the death of Steve Jobs. But Maps was the big flag of things to be. Clearly the developers either don't use it themselves or have no life.
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I've spent - literally - 12 hours restoring my iPhone after it lost the plot and refused to sync with iTunes. iTunes, no matter how much I swore at it, refused to sync my phone. It would simply hang and become unresponsive. Eventually, after endless reboots of both phone and macbook I restored my phone and applications in a sequence that consisted of: 1. connect devices 2. wait for the sync to start 3. wait until it hangs (usually after half a dozen apps were restored) 4. Force quit iTunes, sometimes by rebooting the machine - sometimes with a hard reboot - and a reboot of the iPhone (since the iPhone still thought it was syncing even though it wasn't connected to the Macbook. 5 restart everything. Go back to 1. I'm on iOS 8.0.2 and the Macbook on Mavericks 10.9.5 - both the latest and greatest. Yet my iPhone, in the last few weeks, has become like the Android device I had but could no longer use because of crashes. The Macbook hangs, iTunes freezes - or just crashes and disappears - and iPhone apps crash several times a day. I kind of expected this from Android apps - the bar for getting you app in the store is low, and hardware is varied - and the iPhone, until now, has been rock solid. Impressively solid. So what's happened here? Is this the beginning of what's come through the pipeline since Jobs shuffled off this mortal coil? Is this what happens when you no longer have a single person calling BS and everyone else simply agreeing (if that was even the case). Is Apple now a collections of fiefdoms, Microsoft style, with each group becoming more focussed on the internal struggle than the external customer? Is it now easier for them to say "Yes, it's OK to ship" because the other option is to face backlash from a superior or be mocked by other groups? I'm sad. Deeply sad at this. Apple software never "Just worked" as the marketing said, but it was always reasonably robust. Microsoft long ago took on the attitude of "We'll never make it perfect. so design it to fail" and we have excellent error reporting, crash dialogs that look for solutions online, and an OS that pro-actively helps you with apps that are unresponsive. My Windows 7 machines are so reliable that a crash (and I can't remember that last OS crash) is a shocking event. Maybe it's time for Apple to start realising that it's software smells just like everyone else's.
cheers Chris Maunder
Taken from a long time Linux user who got desperate with OSX, Apple also has the logging functionality, however it is deeply buried. If you open up a terminal and type sudo dmesg, you get a full dump of system status, and what crashed. Furthermore, you have event log where software drops its guts to in the Apple system settings, or if you want to be Unixy about things, try in the command line to see what you have in /var/log , or even better, tail /var/log/system.log , which was still the default logging place for Tiger, when I last used a Mac. There are a number of reasons why an install might fail, as other mentioned, bad cable, funky port, maybe bad block in your iphone, etc. If you have issues, it is recommended to open a terminal and tail -f the log to see why, while the happen.