There were big quality issues in that era too, we just don't remember them so well. Antenna-gate, the PowerBooks that basically barbecued your legs,...
Except they were fixed and fixed quickly. The MobileMe team had a battering session with SJ once..
I don't think Steve Jobs would let a 'Your battery is under 10%', 'interruptive' notification stay this long on a phone.
If you took out a screenshot of system preferences from OS X tiger or something and compared it to today, see how easy it is to find things on that one. Even with simple things such as the wording of 'General' vs 'Appearance'.
I have never bought an Apple device that so much as had a spec of dust in the box.
But I’ve never had a Dell or HP laptop come without a bezel scratch or something like that. So in my books, Apple are still a league ahead on quality, even.
it blows my mind every day how they screwed up somewhat very good native mail client. once I've updated to iOS14, daily:
- my mail will disappear. I would open a folder and see emails from 2007 at the top... wait and see he is loading them again and more are popping up.. takes few minutes to catch up with 2021.
- my contacts will not work when I start typing email. literally sometimes the do sometimes they don't
- emails that previously were formatted well, would be crashing with odd CSS issues I never seen before
- I would click email.. start reading, then it would shift to the next email.. on its own!
- I had few emails automatically disappear for good... only to find them in trash folder.
Its a disaster. A classical situation where after a system update I'm banging my head against the wall "why the heck did I do that??"
I really hate promoting Steve Jobs as some kind of miracle worker - But I swear there is a correlation between his death and the hard to quantify decline of software quality at Apple since.
I clearly remember at the time all of the rampant speculation about the downfall of Apple and thinking it's all bullshit, that the people doing the real work are still there and still care and his absence would make little difference, which was true immediately, but gradually over the last decade? perhaps individual work ethic is not enough in a large megacorporate structure to overcome corporate pressures. Perhaps, in such a large structure you really do need someone pushy and particular enough at the top to get emotional and pissed at people when small details suck to prevent it adding up over time.
My 12" Macbook's keyboard basically never worked and then the battery decided it wasn't happy and decided to bloat out which pushed out the bottom panel of the laptop. Really put me off their laptops, though I'm still a fan of iOS devices.
The tibooks whose paint rubbed off from wrist rubbing? With the flexy keyboards? And the dvd drive that would flex into the disk if your wrist was resting above it? The 1st gen intel MacBooks which had a heat pipe that would short out the system when it got warm? The 24” iMacs that would cook the hard drive after 2 years due to bad thermals? (And eventually, the backlight too).
I haven't had issues with hardware other than the butterfly keyboard, but I have been astounded at issues with first-party software. For the last 48 hours podcasts have just not worked on my iPhone 13 Pro Max, for instance. Apple Music is a disaster. This might not be a QA really but OS updates have introduced bugs and constant crashes for those products for me.
Like every odd numbered version of OS X? Leopard in particular.
(I will say one thing about leopard, I iinstalled a boot disk of it on an intel machine and I was able to boot an old ppc mini. That was impressive at the time)