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Has Apple Software Quality Has Taken a ‘Nosedive’?

2 minute read

Marco Arment is the closest thing in Apple’s 300,000-strong developer community to a superstar. He co-founded Tumblr. He created Instapaper and Overcast. He’s co-host of Accidental Tech Podcast — a weekly gabfest with a big Apple following and a catchy theme song.

Arment has been complaining for some time about a problem I’d felt but hadn’t figured out how to put into words.

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On Sunday, he did it, more harshly than I might have, on marco.org.

Apple’s hardware today is amazing,” he begins, “it has never been better. But the software quality has taken such a nosedive in the last few years that I’m deeply concerned for its future. I’m typing this on a computer whose existence I didn’t even think would be possible yet, but it runs an OS riddled with embarrassing bugs and fundamental regressions. Just a few years ago, we would have relentlessly made fun of Windows users for these same bugs on their inferior OS, but we can’t talk anymore.

“Apple has completely lost the functional high ground. ‘It just works’ was nevercompletely true, but I don’t think the list of qualifiers and asterisks has ever been longer. We now need to treat Apple’s OS and application releases with the same extreme skepticism and trepidation that conservative Windows IT departments employ.”

Read more at Fortune.com.

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