Tragically I think this is the answer - all of Apple's talented developers have most likely shunted over to iOS and the quality of macOS has been left to rot.
What's infuriating is that High Sierra, as referenced in its naming scheme, is supposed to be minor improvements on top of plain Sierra, but it breaks so many things that I am drawn to compare it to Vista - half-baked, unfinished, should never have been released. And yet Apple have previously managed good releases like this - Snow Leopard (my all-time favourite OS) and Mountain Lion were successful. High Sierra is a train wreck. I am holding all company laptops back from upgrading because I can't trust the thing.
I hear this all the time but I’m not sure it’s true.
iOS is in the exact same place. The number of weird bugs and subtlety broken interactions I’ve seen has been growing exponentially.
Even as I type this my Safari address bar is pushed halfway into my status bar, making them overlap.
A couple of weeks back my phone became unusable in the middle of the Everglades as I was relying on it to get back to my hotel. A message notification got stuck on screen and it blocked input with anything system related.
I couldn’t even turn it off because the strange new reset procedure isn’t exactly discoverable and the normal slider couldn’t be intersected with!
Those are just anecdotes, but it happens often enough I’m sure most users of iOS 11 will be able to identify that this is just par for the course on iOS these days.
I'm not saying the developers actually are moving, or would make any difference to buggy software if they did, but Apple can shift iDevices by the shipload, faster than they can build them. They've become a phone company first and foremost, and it feels like their computer lineup is suffering as a result. As such, I can easily believe that developers see no future in macOS and are willingly moving over to iOS.
> all of Apple's talented developers have most likely shunted over to iOS
This gets trotted out a lot, but I have trouble believing it. I don't think Apple considers developers to be in short supply--and if they do, it's very stupid of them and they should reexamine that thinking.
I know that demand > supply for skilled developers right now, but Apple has enormous amounts of money in the bank. They can't use a tiny fraction of that to get themselves more, or better developers? I doubt that shareholders would notice/care if a few millions of dollars went towards a hiring blitz for, say, 100 really good engineers with salaries so competitive that Apple could poach them from wherever else they work.
I'm not saying that "throw bodies at the problem" is always a good solution, but Apple can easily afford to throw really, really talented bodies around, and if short-staffing is their problem, it seems like the solution is obvious.
Am I missing something here? Would adding a bunch of beyond-competitive senior developer salaries dent Apple's numbers more than I think they would? Are there really just not that many developers willing and able to work on this at any price? If not, is the problem with "willing" or with "able"?
I'm not saying Apple themselves have shunted the developers, I'm thinking that the developers themselves have moved jobs of their own accord since they see no future in macOS. It's been obvious for a while now that Apple only considers iDevices as their money-spinners. Their actual computers have been long neglected, and their updates for the last several years have been to include more iDevice-like features, so I would think the macOS developers would willingly believe Apple themselves aren't wholeheartedly behind maintaining their desktop OS. It just feels like there is very little willingness from Apple to build a good desktop OS any more, and no sense hiring macOS developers as a result.
Money won't be enough to attract the best developers. The best developers want to do the new and shiny. Apple is in maintenance mode as far as software - no judgement but working on the next iOS release is nothing exciting. On the hardware side there is still some exciting stuff going on.
I suspect the answer is more that Apple refuses to grow its teams beyond a certain size. It's not a lack of money or talent; rather they value a certain way of working (look at all the stuff about collaboration in the new building). But the size of the company and product range has pushed those teams beyond their limits.
It doesn't matter as much if an iOS upgrade breaks stuff as a Mac OS upgrade. The iOS market is so strong that developers rush to make their software compatible. Within a month of the iPhone X introduction I had dozens of apps with updated that just said they were updating to support it better.
Mac updates are a lot slower if ever.
Fortunately, the only apps I really care about besides the browser are developer related tools. Those are usually updated relatively fast on Macs and Windows.
iOS 11 didn't break things because of API updates. It literally broke phones. I had three friends switch to Pixel because of iOS 11 bugs, like not being able to make calls. Apple told them all to upgrade to a new iPhone.
If that was a widespread problem. It would have been another "gate". Like "BatteryGate", "AntennaGate", and "Bendgate". There hasn't been a "Bendgate".
There also haven't been widespread reports that Apple told people that couldn't make calls on there phones to buy another phone - if that were true there would be yet another class action suit. The lawyers would have been salivating.
I wrote this in another comment, but it's relevant here:
It wouldn't surprise me if in the next few years Apple slowly winds down all things Mac. Marketing, updates, upgrades etc. and while doing that makes XCode Windows compatible.
I'd like to see Linux support, but it wouldn't surprise me if it didn't happen unfortunately.
> The Mac line may not be Apple’s biggest seller, but it’s not like it’s losing them money. It’s a huge revenue stream.
Totally, though one that's only getting smaller as a % of their revenue. At some point it might start to seem like a distraction.
I've seen companies drop profitable products before, even those that were a larger % of overall business than Mac is to Apple, so it's not clear that it won't happen. I hope it doesn't, but it might :)
> Also don’t underestimate the impact of the fact that every employee at apple uses Mac.
It will be interesting to see what happens here. Could be an early warning sign of things to come.
What's infuriating is that High Sierra, as referenced in its naming scheme, is supposed to be minor improvements on top of plain Sierra, but it breaks so many things that I am drawn to compare it to Vista - half-baked, unfinished, should never have been released. And yet Apple have previously managed good releases like this - Snow Leopard (my all-time favourite OS) and Mountain Lion were successful. High Sierra is a train wreck. I am holding all company laptops back from upgrading because I can't trust the thing.