Apple – Let the Pain Begin!

After yet another flurry of untested and buggy software releases in the form of iOS and Yosemite, Apple was no longer concerned about the less than 50% adoption rate of iOS 8 at yet another boring event with lame jokes. They appeared to ignore the fact that even the close to 50% adoption rate for iOS 8 was primarily driven by the new iPhones.

The entire ecosystem that made Apple what it was while Steve Jobs was around is steadily crumbling. Personally, I think Apple made too much money to be bothered about quality, user experience or the identity the company had under Jobs.

Dis-jointed, un-related, un-tested and buggy software appears to be the order of the day with no one taking any responsibility for anything. Apple forums as well as other Apple related forums are riddled with the huge amount of bugs in almost all Apple software and firmware as it stands today.

Consider a brief history of the last few years,…

• Change to Apple “Maps” in iOS. A complete disaster which continues till date.
• iOS 7 made the UI/UX pretty bad for iDevice users, buggy at release and killed older devices by it’s slow response time.
• Bug riddled Mavericks released with “under the hood” changes.
• Even buggier Yosemite release with “over the hood” changes like transparent windows and a new font and plenty of new bugs.
• iOS 8 with lots of feature announcements. None delivered and an extremely buggy update killed all the new iPhones.
• More iOS 8 updates, still riddled with bugs and not much fixed and still an incomplete release.
• Killed Aperture in favour or vapourware.
• Deteriorating quality of hardware across the Apple lineup.
• Un-reliable iCloud destroying user data just like Apple Mail did for Gmail accounts earlier.

I installed Yosemite on a clean MacBook Pro and upgraded Mavericks on my iMac. The result in both cases is similar…Extremely buggy and pathetic.

I had also installed the public beta of Yosemite on a secondary partition, the only way of removing or making any changes to the disk after that was to manually wipe out the disk since the OS X disk utility cannot deal with it’s own created partitions. Reminds me of the initial versions of the DOS “fdisk” and “chkdsk”. Well, even after this, I had to re-login to my iCloud account on one of my iPhones to get the text messaging forwarding to work, but, now I have multiple Macs listed on my iPhone with no way of removing them.

In short, both OS X and iOS are extremely buggy as of now and the ecosystem has also broken down to a large extent. The health kit is still flaky, the home kit and the Aperture replacement yet to come. All in all, the current state of Apple software and firmware is in tatters.

The major saving for Apple is that for most users, a device, like a phone, is more of just a phone and therefore continues to sell and make money since the competition in this bracket still does not exist. Neither Google nor Microsoft are anywhere close, but, Apple is desperately trying to go to their level to compete. All of these companies are more into technology with complete dis-regard to the user and the UI/UX they offer.

Personally, I do not foresee this trend in Apple changing and Android might begin to bite into the Apple share a lot more in the coming years. For those of us who are already invested heavily in Apple, it would be difficult to figure out a different path.