Are Apple's Best Days Behind Us?

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Tuesday, June 5, 2018

Have you noticed a decline in Apple’s software quality over the past few years?

I have been asking this question of users of Apple’s products among my friends, family, coworkers, and others over the past year or two and the results have been quite telling. They have all reluctantly answered YES. None of them have anything against Apple and they all are long time users of Apple’s products, but they are all tumbling to the fact that the software quality used to be better. It’s not just limited to the Mac side either; they are noticing the same decline on iOS as well.

If only the problems were limited to software. The lack of updates for the desktops are so well covered that it’s not worth going into great detail here. When Apple came out in late 2017 and announced they had designed themselves into a corner with the Pro and were going to come out with something new, but not until 2019, I had to ask:

How hard is it to design a workstation class motherboard with Xeon chips (or slightly modify a reference motherboard), slap it in the old cheese grater case, and put it out in 2018?

This is what Apple should have done or at least announce as it would have made the pro market immensely happy. Instead Apple essentially issued an apology and continually reiterates how important the Mac is to them while still not updating it. Why? A year ago I built a file server with server grade equipment (Xeon E5 proc, server motherboard, ECC memory, etc… and it trounces the lowest Mac Pro at less than half the price. How did I pull this off? Simple: I used hardware that’s 4 years newer than the Pro and I didn’t need an overpriced graphics card! Apple has since put out the iMac Pro, but it starts at $5,000 which is quite expensive for what you actually get. With the state of the Pro and the price of the iMac Pro, my colleagues and I ask:

Where’s the reasonably price Mac for the software developer?

The Mini is a whole other question. I know people who bought Minis and make them into cheap headless servers. At $lastJob, I had a Mini so I could do the occasional iOS development and I preferred to use Macs. If the Mini didn’t exist (or had been allowed to be crippled then languish as it has now), I would have been stuck on Windows or Linux. The only reason I got a Mac at all is because of the price point; they would not have bought a normal iMac, much less the iMac Pro or the Pro. For those who will only spend a small amount of money to get into the Apple ecosystem or want a machine to perform some small headless tasks, they ask:

Where’s the budget priced Mac?

Yesterday was WWDC and I no longer really care. I, and many others I know, would previously watch the whole thing live with baited breath to see what was announced. I can recall about 2 hours at work where we all didn’t actually do anything because we were busy watching. We would even take a very late lunch (it started at noon in this timezone) just so we wouldn’t miss anything. Now, I don’t watch it live and neither do most of those I know who used to do so. At best we peruse the news later to see if there was anything of interest. I suppose it is mostly that there have been too many where at the end we ask:

Is that it?

At $currentJob I do a lot of C++ development. Those who do so know that it takes a long time to compile hundreds of C++ files and this is a job that will parallelize quite well. I currently use an iMac for the job but I would like something that’s faster. I don’t use Xcode because, let’s face it, it’s not the best IDE and it’s quite poor at anything that’s not Obj-C or Swift. Instead I use CLion which has it’s own issues (slow tasks which consume the CPU for minutes), but it’s much better than Xcode. In discussing the situation with my colleagues who have similar desires, one of them was doing something that’s quite compelling. She is running Visual Studio in a headless VM and remotes into it, but uses a Mac for all her other tasks. I looked at this and realized I could build a compute node with a high core-count CPU, maybe a Threadripper, put Windows on it (or Windows on ESXi on it), run VS, and have a fast dev environment. This would be a fast machine, not too expensive, and have a very very real possibility of being faster than the Pro Apple may or may not put out in 2019. This left me pondering:

I’ve been a loyal Apple user for ~30 years now and a loyal Apple customer for ~20 years, and I’m concluding that in development of a cross-platform application, I’d be happier on a Windows machine. What’s happened?

Any one of the above taken in isolation is concerning but the four put together is outright worrisome. I’ve silently wished that the above weren’t true hoping that it’ll change, but it seems to be getting worse rather than better. It is with great reservation that I’m now asking:

Are Apple’s best days behind us?


Legacy Comments:

metafora - Jun 30, 2018

oice Memos lost another practical characteristic: Play back via bluetooth. Radio stations, journalists and filmmakers are just three of the most affected communities. My called to Apple met with unusual doses of skepticism. A supervisor, identified just as “Michael”, said she will look into it and called us back to the next Monday. (Update: 30 days later and still no called back)