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.
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...