Opinions vary, but I've never found Apple software to be particularly good. Their hardware is almost always exceptional.
I'd go further and say I am constantly frustrated by how difficult their software can make basic tasks. I often find many of their UX patterns unintuitive, or even feel user hostile at times. Small example, I really want to view passwords as I type them in. I constantly miss type passwords on touch screens. User error maybe, but frustrating experience.
XCode is my least favourite IDE that I use regularily.
100% agree. As someone who used both Mac and PC for 30+ years, and still use both, Mac OS (and iOS) aren't very intuitive. Lots of hidden functions. The way they organize settings is tough to find. It's always a struggle.
My experience is similar. Great hardware. Software is good until there is something I want to do that isn't very obvious, then it's either a hassle or not possible.
My favourite example being looking for the volume mixer, and after looking online the top advice seemed to be to pay for a 3rd party application for that... Wtf?
There are so many basic gaps in functionality and so many underbaked & poorly designed Mac OS features that I end up papering over with paid 3rd party applications.
In order for that to actually be a money-making strategy for Apple, those third-party apps that address weaknesses in the OS would have to be sold through the Mac App Store so that Apple gets a cut. I've been a Mac user since before there was a Mac App Store, and I've never bought such a utility through the App Store. I have paid for several such apps over the years in ways that did not generate any direct revenue for Apple, and most of those apps likely could not be distributed through the App Store because of how they muck around with private APIs and other OS internals.
Those third-party apps do increase the overall appeal of Apple's platform, but suggesting that Apple might want to encourage that situation rather than improve their OS themselves sounds like a broken windows fallacy.
XCode is one of the worst pieces of software in history. Imagine writing a code editor that couldn’t keep its syntax highlighting from crashing for multiple years.
You must be a fetus. Apple was leagues ahead of everyone else with the inception of the Mac all the way through Windows 7...
Microsoft finally caught up around that time, but has since added a whole new dimension of enshittification that the only conclusion that can be reached about tech as a whole is that it all sucks and will always suck.
The Feb 2nd episode of the "The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge" podcast may be of interest to you, its title is "Should Canada Include Nuclear Weapons In Its Defence Strategy?", and offers a perspective on the subject.
Do you ever make a purchase due to having seen an ad, ideally by clicking on the ad? If not, then in some sense you're still getting something without paying for it. (You're paying with your time, but that's not valuable to anyone unless it ultimately results in paying with money.) But better to screw the people pushing ads than the content creators!
I would say not very often, but yes, very recently even. I've been researching new backpacking gear this summer, looking on sites that are known to me, so I've been seeing lots of ads for that type of stuff naturally.
One store kept popping up that I was not familiar with. So I clicked eventually, and did some online searching about the company to make sure they are legit.
Turns out they are a local independent store. I've made two purchases from them since, and price compared against them for other purchases. Their ads are more likely to catch my eye in the future now.
> I've been researching new backpacking gear this summer, looking on sites that are known to me, so I've been seeing lots of ads for that type of stuff naturally.
I personally have a long list of products not to buy. If you somehow repeat the same ad and I remember your product, I stop buying said product. If youre wasting your money on spamming ads, your product sure as shit isnt better than competitors', since they waste less on ads, more on product.
I dont use ad blockers, they make it harder for me to find out who has the poorer product.
Wow, that sounds like a ton of work. I think a better idea is to use an ad-blocker, but run a program in the background that downloads the ads (or maybe just samples them, to save bandwidth and resources), processes them to find brand names, and then stores these brand names in a database so you can find their relative frequency and assign a score to each. Then you can just query the db when you want to buy something to find that brand's acceptability score.
Being owned by Meta (or Facebook at the time) was a selling feature for me when settling on it. The main reason being that they use it heavily internally, and have a vested interest in its success as a result. They've built it to meet their needs, dogfood features internally, and feel the same pain as everyone else when it comes to breaking changes and backwards compatibility.
This gave me a lot of confidence in React compared to other frameworks at the time I was evaluating it. It turned out to be a great choice now 8+ years later, and I feel the same way today.
When I loaded up the link, before viewing the comments in here, the very first thing I did was look for "Rebecca purple", and I was happy to find it. Not really a comment on your remarks, but thought I would share it.
I'm influenced by the having a daughter born around this time, and Rebecca's story sticks with me.
I mostly agree, this is always my thought about this stuff. As you say, it is so far in the future that a new government will be in power, and can freely reverse these decisions. Or we'll just end up there anyways because that's the trajectory we are already on.
Something more immediate would have a bigger impact, probably a tax, but taxes don't often work in politician's favour. We have rebate incentives for electric cars, but that only really only helps to swallow the price difference. We can't rely on peoples morals only unfortunately.
DRY is great guideline. KISS is another one. I find that it is not uncommon for the two of them to butt heads a little, and it can be tricky to find the correct balance. In general, I am finding that I favour repetition over abstraction more and more.
I'd go further and say I am constantly frustrated by how difficult their software can make basic tasks. I often find many of their UX patterns unintuitive, or even feel user hostile at times. Small example, I really want to view passwords as I type them in. I constantly miss type passwords on touch screens. User error maybe, but frustrating experience.
XCode is my least favourite IDE that I use regularily.