[benreesman]

I don’t know what’s going on with Apple lately. They’ve built one of the world’s best brands after a near-death experience via a ruthless focus on and fanatical commitment to providing a holistically premium experience (for the people who want their version of that) to justify their premium pricing and huge margins. If you like what they do, it Just Works from purchase on. Or did until recently.

Just today I had an experience that was so Kafkaesque it felt like a mean spirited prank, and because they never fuck up this badly, I had no contingency plan for one of the times it matters a lot.

Any advice on how to get the “we fix things for loyal customers by doing what’s required” people on the phone would be appreciated, but based on the runaround, infinite hold Ferris wheel the primary support line apparently is now, I’m not getting my hopes up.

[SamuelAdams]

The Apple today is very different from the Apple of 20 years ago. The brand is the same, yes, but the people are all largely different. You see this all the time in the video game industry, ie Blizzard, Bungie, 343 industries.

Maybe the newest group of programmers and engineers are dealing with a very complicated code base? Maybe no one fully understands everything involved until something breaks?

[MichaelZuo]

It's likely not a single person understands the entire MacOS stack anymore, at least since Mavericks, all the pre-1985 old guard engineers having retired by then.

[Clamchop]

Interesting take given that a Mac today has virtually nothing in common with a Mac of the late 1990s, let alone 1984.

[MichaelZuo]

Says who?

[Kwpolska]

Mac OS X is a descendant of NeXTStep. It shares no code in common with classic Mac OS.

[MichaelZuo]

How is Mac OS Classic sharing lines of code, or not, even relevant to the question?

[benreesman]

Just my N=1 anectdote, but I’ve been having almost universally great experiences until maybe 2 or 3 months ago.

On the software side, I tend to tolerate more security risk (within reason) to delay updates until a consensus emerges that they’re robust, because I’m not a high value target to anyone north of “script kiddy” and run a tight ship on the easy stuff, so the EV of an abruptly unusable work machine vs. getting pwned weighs heavily relative to winding up in the crosshairs of anyone sophisticated enough to exploit a recent CVE. My online banking is properly 2-fac’d, if anyone wants to read my browser history or email and cares enough to go ti that trouble, I’ll want them that I’m not important enough for it to be worth the trouble.

This would clearly change if my work went back to having demanding security requirements, but it doesn’t just now.

It’s really the customer service, fulfillment, Apple Store experience (it used to feel like stepping into the least stressful room in the mall and now it’s a zoo).