[aditya]

Wow, that's a lot of media hoopla.

Let's be real, Apple's never been a software company -- they've always made excellent hardware and good enough software that people will deal with because they want their amazing hardware. No one has ever said anything about any Apple software compared to what people say about their hardware.

Software's not in their DNA and I think all this media attention will just fade after a while and people will keep using and loving Apple hardware and putting up with their miserable software.

For the record, I use Notes/Mail/Photos on my iPhone, and Preview has never crashed for me.

[runjake]

"Let's be real, Apple's never been a software company -- they've always made excellent hardware and good enough software that people will deal with because they want their amazing hardware."

If you swapped all occurrences of "hardware" and "software" in the above statement with each other, you'd have what people said about Apple in the 1990s.

[Xixi]

I remember Steve Jobs saying that Apple is a software company, and then quoting Alan Kay: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.". Apple certainly has the talent in-house to be a software company (llvm, webkit, cups, swift, metal, etc., even if they didn't start the first three) but somehow it doesn't seem to reach the higher level apps (iTunes, Podcast, etc.).

I suspect poor product management: I strongly doubt llvm or swift are driven like iTunes.

[brandonmenc]

> Let's be real, Apple's never been a software company -- they've always made excellent hardware and good enough software that people will deal with because they want their amazing hardware.

Wrong.

This may be less true recently, but for a good decade Apple had the superior OS and were the only ones who got device and media integration right - that's all software.

[k-mcgrady]

I completely disagree. One of the main reasons I switched to OS X was the iLife software. I've heard a lot of people say the same. The reason I use an iPhone over Android? Again, the software.

[slantyyz]

>> good enough software

I dunno. I may not be on Apple any more, but I thought some iterations of their software were really damned good, like Snow Leopard, older versions of Mail, Keynote, iPhoto, iMovie (the one that no longer supported plug-ins - was that 08?), Safari, and so on.

For me, iLife (iPhoto and iMovie in particular) has always been a very compelling reason for non-techies to switch from Windows to Mac. It's probably the only thing that I miss from Mac since switching to Windows.

[TranquilMarmot]

It would be nice if there was better Linux support from Apple. I haven't tried it, but from reading guides it seems like installing Linux on a Macbook comes with a whole set of gotchas and workarounds.

[dzamo_norton]

For a long time I ran Debian in VMware Fusion in fullscreen mode on my iMac. There's a penalty but it's faster than you might think. My interest at the time was an effort to recover some sense of control over data privacy. Gradually I moved bits and pieces into the guest and these days I simply run Debian bare metal on a Lenovo. When my colleague wants to collaborate on a Keynote or Pages document she shares it on iCloud and I do pretty well editing in Firefox.

[dasil003]

Apple definitely had some misses over the years, but this is deeply unfair to a company that has basically designed the entire landscape of consumer software that we see today. The Apple was copied by IBM, Mac OS was copied by Windows, and iOS was copied by Android (which was pre-existing but was completely redesigned in the image of iOS).

If you want to see a hardware company that doesn't get software, look no further than Sony. Apple's main problem is that they don't get cloud services. This is where Apple can't compete with Google in the same way that Sony couldn't compete with Apple.