“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.
I do wish Apple could do more. Having been in software engineering I have some appreciation for the difficulties. In manufacturing you can add another line and double output. You can’t simply add more engineers and linearly increase output. For Apple it is not a question of money but logistics.
My guess is that they could add more people to do more testing and documentation of bugs.
MDN, when you say “lately,” just what do you mean? The Apple Maps situation happened a while ago. Also, some of these “horrible events” are a lot less important than some people/groups make them out to be.
I am a perfectionist, myself, so I am not advocating letting Apple coast by on “good enough.” But the hyper-scrutiny on Apple combined with an impossible expectation of perfection seems a bit ridiculous to me.
first you complain that Apple is not doing enough. Now you complain Apple’s doing too much.