[novok]

Apple could hire more engineers to make it's software less buggy at least and to fix a lot of long time small annoyances. And to double their devtools engineer count to make the entire company and all of their external developers more effective.

[pwinnski]

You think adding more engineers would make their software less buggy? Really? This seems contrary to literally everything I have ever read, experienced, or in any way known for my entire career, including reading books written about software engineering 30+ years ago.

[theonemind]

As far as I understand it, you probably can add engineers to make software less buggy, but:

1. the improvements will probably come at roughly the logarithm of the number of people added at best (and, you can do worse without discipline and/or with a dysfunctional organization, possibly even negative), and

2. after their ramp-up period, like 6-9 months, during which each person might contribute a small negative load in mistakes, draining existing talent's time with questions, etc., and

3. you prioritize and value fixing bugs over adding new features, and

4. you probably want to structure those engineers in ways where they can contribute off of the critical path, like QA, dedicated to straight bug fixing, etc., and

5. You probably need an almost "microkernel" like team for very large projects--because the communication overhead grows as n^2, you need a small core, and ways to scale and build without growing the communication overhead--teams working on well defined and isolated subsystems off core, various "modules" that interface with the "microkernel core team" without imposing n^2 communication overhead between everyone working it, without breaking the product or making serious mistakes from not having n^2 connections

just thoughts, really. my intuition is: do everything right, and you can get log(added people) productivity increase time delayed (with a short term dip as those people get up to speed), up to, unfortunately, negative gain if you do much wrong

[rsj_hn]

One way it can work is if devs are already overcommitted on multiple projects, so letting them focus more does help. E.g. horizontal scaling, rather than piling more devs onto the same project.

[Gigachad]

They could create more products with their own teams. Apples cloud offering pales in comparison to Google's and part of the reason is they are just missing too many services. iCloud web feels like a bare minimum effort that doesn't get any attention.

I don't know how successful this would be, but they could also start building and selling more apps/programs but perhaps this could be seen as anti competitive.

[greedo]

Apple has always focused on a few products, with the exception of the Performa days where there were a zillion models of Mac sold.

[Gigachad]

They have been consistently releasing new product lines. We don't need 20 different models of the macbook but there are plenty of software experiences that Apple has no offerings in.

[threeseed]

iCloud web is a bare minimum effort.

They are trying to push you to use native apps on their devices not use the web.

[Gigachad]

Which is why it just doesn't work so well compared to Google products. I'm an Apple user on basically every platform but cloud services are a collaborative experience so I'm not going to host anything on iCloud when it works like crap for half the people I need to work with.

They have become a little better at this, facetime can now be joined by Android and web users as long as an ios user starts the call.