Apple was the gold standard for software for most of the first 35 years (excepting a few years after 1995) of its existence. Apple used to hold a reputation for building the best software in the industry.
On a side note, sometimes getting older feels like being in a Twilight Zone episode. Like I woke up and, for some reason everyone is calling records and 45s 'vinyls'.
Or I mention 'Cary Grant' and people just stare at me blankly because his memory has been erased from existence.
This Apple comment is one of those moments: it feels like yesterday Apple's talent for software was common knowledge, and suddenly today I'm in a parallel universe where Apple has always created buggy garbage.
I am not saying that Apple has always built bad software.
I am saying that design is their forte and that their engineering culture is mostly focused around it, software is built to impress.
Their products are meant to be the final form, not a tool to build something else.
And this has implications for the quality of the code, fortunately they also inherited a lot from the Unix culture, but overall I've rarely been impressed by the quality of their software, and I've sometimes been appalled by it.
Itunes, Quicktime or the first iterations of OSX...
If we're talking about reliability post-2010 I fully agree with you. Let's just leave it there. I'm pretty sure I have two threads in my HN comment history (probably several years old) in which I argued against the view that iTunes and QTP started out bad. It's just not a topic I have energy to drone on about more than once a decade.
On a side note, sometimes getting older feels like being in a Twilight Zone episode. Like I woke up and, for some reason everyone is calling records and 45s 'vinyls'.
Or I mention 'Cary Grant' and people just stare at me blankly because his memory has been erased from existence.
This Apple comment is one of those moments: it feels like yesterday Apple's talent for software was common knowledge, and suddenly today I'm in a parallel universe where Apple has always created buggy garbage.