“I recently wrote about Apple’s string of bad luck, with bad press, a bad keynote stream, the U2 album spamming fiasco, and, above all, the iOS 8.0.1 update that bricked a lot of users’ iPhones,” Kirk McElhearn writes for Kirkville. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, as much of my work depends on Apple’s product cycle… the annual release cycle is becoming problematic for many reasons.”
“I’ve increasingly had the feeling that Apple is finding it difficult to keep up with all these releases, and that quality is slipping. This generally isn’t the case with hardware – no, the iPhone 6 doesn’t really bend, unless you apply a lot of pressure to it – but rather with software,” McElhearn writes. “Bugs abound; shoddy releases are followed by broken updates.”
“Something has to give,” McElhearn writes. “Apple is great at showing us how wonderful our world will be with new products, but they’ve been less successful lately at delivering on their promises. It’s time for Apple to take a step back, slow down, and get things right, instead of just getting things shipped.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote just yesterday:
There have been a lot of mistakes in recent years at Apple (Maps, the so-called live webcast at Apple most important event in years, the inexplicable (unless the work environment caused it) iOS 8.0.1 release, etc.). Perhaps Tim Cook should rethink some aspects of the culture at Apple? What really should constitute a badge of honor at Apple? Working all day, all weekend and all night in order to squat out iOS 8.0.1? And then have to do it all over again, in a panic, to get iOS 8.0.2 out the door? Or taking the time necessary to do the job to the best of your ability correctly the first time? People with proper sleep and lower stress do better work. Many major medical studies prove these facts.
Working long hours simply for the sake of working long hours is counterproductive. It really doesn’t prove anything except that you have no life and, despite all of their work on Apple Watch, Apple executives still do not understand basic human health requirements and are incapable of properly staffing their departments so that they can function without requiring sleep-deprived, mistake-prone employees to feel they must fire off emails at 2:00am.
Driving too hard and too fast leads to accidents.
We speak from experience. We’ve done both methods. As employees and as managers in the television, financial, and online media industries. You can push people to a point that’s productive. When you exceed that point, it’s not a badge of honor. It’s not an “I love this company!” statement. It’s just mismanagement. It’s simply not healthy and it leads directly to diminished quality, increased turnover, and production declines.
Uh…No!
They’ve done far too little except in their advocacy of gay marriage.
Granted, they have come out of the closest advocating FAR too many liberal causes while competing in a non-partisan business world.
Whatever, as long as their business is drum tight and second to none …
Don’t waste a click! ™
More software QA, fewer waste-of-time Gay Pride marches pushing your California fruitcake far-left agenda on people who do not want it and the over 50% who remain your customers in spite of such bullshit, certainly not because of it.
Fruitcake? Really? Get a life, bigot.
So agenda = anything you personally dislike?
And what’s it called when someone disagrees with a belief being pushed? Oh yeah, racist, sexist, homophobe, bigot, misogynist, and a few more I’m not recalling I’m sure!
Far left? Do you actually study politics, clearly you don’t understand it.
If you think the software engineers are spending their time at rallies and parades you know nothing of Apple.
Betteridge’s law of headlines strikes again
A day without FUD is like a day without sunshine.
Even when you take forever to do something, you can still make mistakes – I submit any Microsoft software product in the last 5 years as and example. Sexual preference is not a factor in this discussion either. I do not think Apple needs to slow down or speed up because I think they are quite good at setting their own pace. As for making less mistakes – that is always a good thing – however several of the mistakes are not real. For instance the iPhone 6 bending thing is just haters spreading FUD, not a real issue, problem, or a mistake.
As with most stories with titles that ask a question, we can safely answer with a simple: No.
Also, MDN’s take seems to assume that Apple employees are working long hours simply for the sake of working long hours. Bad assumption.
I dunno, at least it’s not easy to compromise with a removable battery or SD card hack like the “features” that are being touted on lesser android phones. These are software bugs that can be fixed. I was working during the 8.0.1 release so I decided not to mess up my phone and computer with an update while working – unless you are having a problem with the current version, you work in computer journalism, computer IT or are a paid beta tester, do not update on the first day – never worth the risk.
Tim Cook can’t catch a break. Last year ‘not innovating enough’ this year ‘innovating too much’. 🙂
Oh and homophobes? Fuck off. I’m straight but I find your infantile prejudice vomit-worthy.
I love when I find my exact comments already posted, and together no less. 🙂
Yup. Apple just needs to step up it’s QC procedures, and perhaps move deadlines a little earlier to allow for proper QC testing, bug fixes, etc.
Let’s not forget that Apple is the only mobile device company which actually puts out bug fixes, feature additions, and major OS updates on a regular basis, and usually pretty quickly after a problem is discovered, and not only permits but encourages users of older models to upgrade to the latest OS.
Somebody didn’t have anything to write about today.
Yesterday: Apple lost the ability to innovate.
Today: Apple is innovating too fast.
whatever!
Hah beat you to it. But have a recommend anyway 😉
There’s always going to be problems, especially with software as it becomes more complex and the user base grows. There are a series of things that just can’t be tested “in-house” and will be discovered along the way by users. People who have never done software development – will NEVER understand that. This is nothing new – OS X has had many missteps, but is always drowned out by the noise coming from the iPhone.
However, I do think that Apple should to move towards an all-year-long release schedule rather than trying to release everything in the Fall. Both OS’s being released at the same time makes sense since they use the same core code base. But hardware updates can be scattered throughout the year.
For the past few years it seems like they’ve moved everything to the Fall just to pump up the Holiday sales figures. And I don’t blame them – God forbid their Holiday quarter financials drop from the previous year. The doomsday-sayers would be out in droves.
So basic MDN sticks it’s finger in the wind to see which way it’s blowing and bases its editorial comments on that.
Welcome newbie.
Apple has SO MANY products and services out there, and they’re seeking to get into more. I do wonder how they stay atop it all.
Slow down? If Apple got any slower time would actually go backwards. They need better quality control and testing. Especially with software. They’re turtle slow with everything else… can you say Apple TV?
Except for the map fiasco, Apple has made no serious mistake over the past few years, particularly regarding product and software features. Thinking that it is possible to produce bug free software indicates a profound lack of knowledge of the current reality of software creation.
“They’re not doing enough!” “They’re doing too much!” “They’re not doing enough!” They’re doing too much!” and so on and so on …
Can’t win.
KIRK! Isn’t this a bit ironic considering the extremely recent Wallnut Street On Dope, cocaine induced insistence that Apple come up with new stuff now Now NOW!?
Apple is pacing itself just fine from my perspective. The minor blundering is merely typical of a behemoth company stumbling over its own legs as it gets used to its new size. Of course, then there’s the iOS 8.0.1 blunder that was ENORMOUSLY stupid. That one I worry about.
I messed up a bold tag ending. Sorry folks. Ran out of coffee. It should say:
Wallnut Street On Dope, cocaine induced insistence that Apple come up with new stuff now Now NOW!?
Apple is pacing itself just fine from my perspective. The minor blundering is merely typical of a behemoth company stumbling over its own legs as it gets used to its new size. Of course, then there’s the iOS 8.0.1 blunder that was ENORMOUSLY stupid. That one I worry about.
The mistake is the question. This isn’t about doing too much. We’re talking about teams here. You can have more teams, each doing something different.
This issue is simply recognizing that your team isn’t done and reporting to your management that it is.
If the culture allows for that across many teams, the whole company image slips.
Wanna guess what Tim is talking about with his division heads?
I think you’re on to something JT016. I was saying to some colleagues a couple days back that Apple seems resolved to the fact that their security update releases are not going to be perfectly coordinated. They have changed their language in their initial announcements to infer that it’s going to take time for the updated Downloads page and the security documents to show up on the Internet after their initial announcements.
*Sigh* At least they’re being realistic. I haven’t seen them perfectly coordinate a security update in a couple years now. It’s all about getting teams to work in sync with each other.
Correct. There was the report that this was the same manager who was in charge of the Maps initial release. If so, this manager was probably released as well.
What people seem to be forgetting is that iOS 7 ushered in the new interface, but iOS 8 really brought serious under-the-hood changes, including the ability for Pay, Watch, and other significant changes/updates. Yes, the 8.0.1 bug was a BIG F up, but how about a little praise to Apple for issuing 8.0.2 very quickly to solve the problem? Was that moving too fast as well?
Blogger. Read by mistake.
I should know better. The topic of the blog aside, it’s still a blog. Written by someone who lives in the basement of his parent’s house. Based on guesses, assumptions and knee-jerk opinions, and lacking any empirical research on the details.
I must remind myself of that going forward.
Stuff like this is good only for generating clicks and getting fanboys up in arms. But facts and empirical truth are nowhere to be found. Sadly, rants like the one above are what passes for investigative journalism today.
Just keep telling myself, “It’s only a blog. It’s only a blog…”
Surely all the good Apple-beat journalists are writing for print publications like MacWorld, MacUser, and MacWeek. Oh, they don’t publish those any more? Then I guess all those writers should starve rather than stoop to writing for a (gasp) blog. Some of the best Mac information has always come from blogs and websites that are essentially blogs. You would, perhaps, prefer that our only source of information should be press releases? Really objective source, that.
I think I’m going to start an blog and make it very clear that I live above ground, just to be counter-culture.
These bloggers make me sick. Half of them are saying that Apple isn’t doing things fast enough and the other half is saying they’re trying to do too many things at once. They’ve got so many other companies to go after that could be used as an example but they always have to pick Apple. Wouldn’t it make more sense to pick struggling companies like BlackBerry, Nintendo, Sony or HTC to offer sagely advice to.
They are all begging for hits, and like parasites attach themselves to the frontrunner with made up news (FUD).
Being left behind is not any fun, so why not go forward like an attached leach. These writers have no morals and only want the money that comes with hits.
“I recently wrote about Apple’s string of bad luck, with bad press, a bad keynote stream, the U2 album spamming fiasco, and, above all, the iOS 8.0.1 update that bricked a lot of users’ iPhones,”
fiasco (n) – a complete and ignominious failure. Would you really say that a group of people being pushed an album that they didn’t want warrants such a comparison? Especially when many, many people were more than happy to get the album for free? I would just call it a sub-optimal distribution method.
Damned if they do damned if they dont.
They are either doing Too much or not doing enough..
Come on…
How many “things” Apple does has never been the issue. The concerns are these:
1) Is Apple doing the right things to ensure maximum value for the long term?
2) In accomplishing #1, is Apple sacrificing quality and user satisfaction?
A lot of people have legitimate gripes in both areas. Users are still waiting for a new Mac Mini, Apple TV, mid-range tower Mac, and new iPods, not to mention significantly greater enterprise involvement. It took two years before Apple finally shipped a 5.5″ iPhone, now they can’t keep them in stock. That’s being too slow.
With regard to #2, Apple has released some really crappy software updates in the past few years and made several hardware and software design choices that are definitely not user-friendly. Anyone who is honest should acknowledge that software updates are buggier than they used to be. I would also point out that the GUIs are LESS intuitive than they were under Forstall/Jobs.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde must be running this website. For every balanced, intelligent and well-articulated news or opinion, there’s the usual, crappy FUD peddled by fame-whoring charlatans.
Obviously there’s no quality control on this site. It’s just an aggregator of any article that references Apple. The more they go down that path the more it’s not worth it to come here anymore.
That slippage includes UI and Usability including,gratuitous animation that is distracting, poor readability because of fonts and a lack contrast (blue on black is bad and so is grey on grey), invisible option that appear when mouse over them (Mail), inconsistencies across apps, increasing clicks to do simple tasks, centring text, the list goes on…