Filip Novotny This year was for Apple extremely prolific. In addition to the expected things, such as new versions of both operating systems or tablet updates, the Californian company also presented the Apple Watch, the iMac with Retina display or the biggest jump for the iPhone category so far. However, some customers are not satisfied with some of the changes, and we certainly cannot say that 2014 did not also bring a few problems to Apple. So, in order not to stay only on a positive wave, let's take a look at them now.
Probably the biggest disappointment this year was experienced by those who anxiously awaited new generations of devices with the attribute mini. Both iPad and Mac have indeed received updates, but not as much as we might imagine. While the 3rd generation iPad mini at least boasts a Touch ID sensor and gold color – though not a faster chip – the smallest of the Macs has de facto taken a step back with the new model. How they showed proven benchmarks, the latest Mac mini has deteriorated in performance compared to its previous generation from 2012.
Hand in hand with this is the release of the new operating systems iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite. While there are certainly those who would like to go back to the days of iOS 6 or Mountain Lion, I don't want to get into the issue of design at this point. Especially with the mobile operating system, there are far more significant practical shortcomings, of which unfortunately the latest version of iOS has perhaps the most of all the versions released so far. Just remember to catastrophic update version 8.0.1, which made it impossible for many users to use Touch ID and even caused a loss of mobile signal.
However, it is not only these most obvious problems, in the eighth version of iOS, errors and various stutters are the order of the day. These are often bizarre bugs that we are not used to from previous iterations of the Apple mobile system. If you use a non-system keyboard, it often happens that it does not start at the moment of need or does not type at all. If you are using Safari, you may experience missing content. If you want to take a quick snapshot, the lock screen shortcut may not work. If you ever unlock your phone, you might not be able to do it because the touch sensor is stuck. Although in most cases these are not radical crashes of the BSOD type à la Windows, if the keyboard does not type, the browser does not view and the animation causes a crash instead of a smooth blend, it is quite a problem.
If we then take together the not entirely successful updates of some hardware and unfinished business on the software side, we find that both problems can have the same negative impact for Apple. If a customer pays a few thousand more for a device that offers him practically nothing extra compared to the previous generation, and then introduces several new errors into the device with a software update, he can hardly trust anything new from Apple.
Already at this moment there are a number of - admittedly less technically gifted - users who, with each new update, prefer to ask whether it is necessary for them at all and whether something will go wrong with their much-needed device. If more people start to think like this, Apple will hardly be able to boast of the fastest transition to new versions of operating systems in the industry. Similarly, the California-based company could be hurt by a lack of confidence in upgrading to newer hardware, with the replacement cycle of our electronic devices seemingly accelerating.
Apple may also face a similar problem in the field of a new product category, which it plans to enter at the beginning of 2015. The Apple Watch smart watch is likely to garner a great response among traditional users of Apple electronics, but the Californian company is grinding its teeth on another target group as well. Apple, strengthened by Angela Ahrendts and several other famous names in the fashion industry, is thinking about introducing its brand as a premium accessories manufacturer. It wants to grab a part of this market by selling several price-graded models.
However, this goes somewhat against the idea of replacing electronics in one to three years. While gold Rolexes are a lifetime investment, no one can guarantee you at the moment that you won't change them in twenty-four months with a gold-plated Apple Watch. The Apple Watch (which will reportedly cost up to $5 in its highest configuration) may not work forever with the latest updates that Apple prepares for it, or perhaps the next generation of the iPhone. A chronometer from Breitling will be compatible with your wrist fifty years from now.
Today's Apple, which seems to be constantly accelerating the pace, would paradoxically benefit next year from slowing down and taking a moment to think about what is really essential. Is it really necessary to release two new operating systems every year if there is not enough time left to debug them. What's the point of a short development cycle, if the biggest bugs are fixed for a quarter of a year in a new system, we wait another quarter for application updates from developers, and for the remaining six months nothing significant happens and we wait again for the next big update? Apple has clearly fallen victim to its own promise of releasing two systems a year, and its plan is now showing its fundamental limits.
At the same time, the frantic pace does not only negatively affect the software itself, but also limits the capabilities of the new and in many ways great hardware. Just look at the reviews of new products that we have published so far on Jablíčkář. "The new hardware and the larger display could have been handled better," says v review iPhone 6 Plus. "Apple overslept with the development of iOS for the iPad, and this system absolutely does not take advantage of the iPad's performance or display potential," they wrote we are after testing the iPad Air 2.
Apple should therefore slow down the introduction of new products and focus its efforts on something quite different. We can call it a longer development cycle, better testing, more thorough quality assurance, it's quite unimportant. What is important is that at the end, the elimination of all current errors, the avoidance of similar unfinished business in the future, and finally the proper use of the hidden potential of current software and hardware are important.
However, if we look at today's situation, there is probably nothing to indicate that Apple intends to slow down the pace. It is preparing a completely new product in the form of the Apple Watch for ordinary users, is preparing to improve its music services with the acquisition of Beats Music, and at the same time is slowly returning to the corporate sector as well. The harbingers of this are new corporate applications in the Apple-IBM collaboration and the expectation of an iPad Pro (or Plus), which could stand alongside last year's Mac Pro.
While we've never seen so many excellent products from Apple, and the brand's popularity across different walks of life has never been so high, we also don't remember so many embarrassed or disapproving voices from customers. Although the Californian company never paid much attention to their wishes, in the current situation, it could make an exception with a calm heart.
Amen
Good article. I'm glad that there are also critical voices here, because Apple is really not doing very well from the point of view of user comfort. Personally, what irritates me the most about iOS 8 is that when I switch or start an application, instead of the actual application, something like a screenshot from the memory is displayed, which does not actually respond to anything, and I can see the controls that I desperately tap on, but nothing it doesn't respond until the app actually loads. When apps take longer to run on older hardware, why does it have to be cheaply masked with a cached screenshot?!
Damn, I'm also.. annoyed.
I don't mind this, you can tell it's a screenshot when you tap on it, because my iPad 2 can't have multiple things running at once ;-). Besides, on my new Air 2 it's so fast that it usually doesn't even show up :-D.
For two months now, I've been using Yosemite on my home Wi-Fi network at a speed of 40-100 kB/s with a paid connection of 4 mB/s, while when the macbook is on, the internet is also slow for other computers in the network. Dozens of proven repair guides don't work. At least from the point of view of solving the problem, such an embarrassing situation could not occur on Windows.
If the speed also decreases for others, it means, in my opinion, that the system takes the network card as worse, or rather, it does not take it as 802.11ac, but as something lower, for example 802.11b. Have you tried a clean install of the system? Alternatively, you can still downgrade to Mavericks.
Sebastian Page from idownloadblog.com had a problem with this, he talked about it in the Let's talk iOS podcast about a year and a half ago. He only solved it by claiming the iPhone, it had some kind of defective chip and when the iPhone connected, it made it impossible for others on the network to surf the Internet.
Yes it's right. There are really many of these problems and in practically all products. After a new apple TV update, it happens that it starts disconnecting from the device, appears in the network with numbers, etc. The discussion forum is full of this. And the awkwardness of the unusable (beta) cloud for photos, because there are no applications, (I'm not even talking about the prices of the apple cloud compared to the competition) etc... if it happened on Windows, then the criticism is heard much more. Apple growers are more loyal, but the question is at what point does loyalty become stupidity. And on this border, Apple should start being damn careful. Criticism from users of competing users is not nearly as destructive as criticism from users of the criticized platform…
So when the beta comes out, you can't expect miracles from it :-). I personally know what a beta can look like, I work in development. Sometimes I would take her from experience and other times not ;-). I recommend simply not solving the betas at all, if you don't enjoy having it first. But then you have to reckon with limitations.
PS: Apple is lucky that most things work, especially when connecting multiple things, they work really well and compared to the competition, I can say that it works! True, in recent years I would say that quality is at the expense of quantity, which is already bad! For me personally, a new MAC OS or iOS could come out once every 2 years, with the fact that once a year there would be some larger package of something that is interesting and already well prepared. Who wants to upgrade all devices every 3/4 years, when the OS doesn't bring anything super interesting and it's stuck with errors like a pig, at least at first. Or if the quality simply cannot be maintained, the version should be moved by a month...2...3. Having finished with apples, I didn't necessarily wait for a new version.
Nice article. I had no idea that errors were so striking on iOS. Personally, I have not encountered anything similar (as in the screenshots) on my iPhone 5 with iOS 8.
I recorded all the errors in the screenshots on my iPhone 6 Plus. It's usually nothing big, but all those little mistakes add up in the end.
I wonder if something similar is happening on the iPhone 6, I feel like the 6 Plus has a lot more problems than the 6, but that's just my subjective feeling. You are right that these are small bugs, but the user of apple devices expects their products to work flawlessly, this should not happen, especially in this case, when it comes to software flaws.
I agree, if I pay over 20 for a phone and not 6 for Android, I want everything to work. Of course, there are and will be mistakes, so if I react quickly and make a correction, it probably won't be possible to do anything else. It is possible not to come up with a strengthened version at the beginning ;-).
It is so. Safari, see the picture, but my 5S also completely refuses to rotate the phone (it's not locked, I'm not a monkey) and just sometimes leaves me in landscape until I turn off the application and turn it on again. It makes me angry…
I was already afraid that I might be the only one having these problems lately. Every now and then the multitouch gestures on the iPad stop working (closing the application, switching the application) and I have to reach for the hw button, the calendar in landscape mode cannot be scrolled to the next week in the weekly view (iOS7 and iOS8), it is first necessary to move to the previous week and before the shift stabilizes (inertia of the animation), so it is possible to scroll to the next one, displaying some outdated screenshots when starting the application (see my colleague's comment below), practically completely canceling the iPhone 4 (if I had known that it would shut down iOS7 so quickly, I would not have updated it at all) – receiving a call is a lottery (often the slider to accept a call does not work), launching the camera as well, the rest is so slow that it is almost a shame to talk. I reset Mac OS X "preventively" about 4 to 7 times a week - depending on the load - it started with 10.9, but Yosemite brought it to "perfection" - after a while the system becomes so slow that even the Dock animations are jerky and some applications become unstable (I have a theory that the "dubious" memory compression or memory management in general is to blame). It's true that I don't have all the latest hardware, but I've just never been used to so many errors, and even though I'm a really big apple fan, I've never thought so often before that I'd give up on this platform... unfortunately, I didn't find a suitable alternative. So, even worse, still probably the best.
May I ask what kind of Mac you have (what configuration)? I observe the same thing with these loaded animations, but it has to be on the MBP 13″ 2010 since Lion, so I don't think that this is related to memory compression. I would say that it has to do with the graphics drivers and the general power management of the graphics accelerator. On some Macs, it helped me to fire the kext responsible for GPU power management - typically Macs with NVIDIA graphics. It does not affect all Macs and different people observe problems from different versions of OS X, which means that it has a lot to do with the specific configuration. On the above-mentioned MBP, I can even observe an improvement on Yosemite (I wasn't hoping for it anymore) - the switching of surfaces doesn't work anymore, but Mission control lags after a few hours/days of uptime and it's almost usable. All in all, it's a tragedy and I don't understand why it's such a problem to test it on the few configurations that I support. I guess Apple doesn't care.
MBP 13″, Mid 2009, 8GB RAM, 256 SSD, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M. Colleagues who have a 15" with two graphics cards had big problems in Yosemite and it was solved by one of the last updates... paradoxically, the first version of Yosemite worked for me probably the best of all - every other update seems to me to be worse (measured only subjectively from the user's point of view) . When the biggest workload subsides, I'll try a completely clean installation. Otherwise, I mentioned the animation as an extreme case that it also cuts, otherwise it will very easily happen that I open a tab and Safari consumes 90% of the CPU and the other 90% of the WindowManager, or they won't catch up to me (more precisely, they will end prematurely - due to the MathtKernel crash) calculations in Mathematica, which run without problems immediately after the system is restarted, "internal applications" start to crash, Safari and Mail are the most common culprits... it's just as if the whole system is gradually "rotting" to the point where it becomes almost unusable and ripe for a reset. Just a note - I went to the Apple store to look at the newer MPB 13″ with retina display and I was surprised how slow the actual graphic response was (dock response, window movement, scrolling, etc.) - the delays were certainly small (measured in absolute terms case), but in the final they caused that discomfort in control, when one feels that it is simply not smooth and does not react as expected. It was, I think, the weakest HW configuration, but still... not exactly the last cheap model...
On that Mid 2010, which I now use privately, I have a problem mainly with the fluidity of the animation after a long time running. Sometimes it helps to freeze all desktops and applications and start again, but of course it is a spring. Sometimes Mission control lags so that you can't even see the animation, even after a restart. However, I don't notice a problem with application crashes and functionality problems, Safari runs normally, just like Mail, and I really have a lot of messages in it. For me, the current beta 10.10.2 has certainly improved performance compared to the previous hundredth update, when I look in the System information for kernel extensions, I see that the graphics drivers are also updated in my case. I've always said that a clean install isn't necessary for OS X, but with Yosemite it's the first time I've seen a visible difference, so I definitely recommend it if you've only upgraded. You have NVIDIA, so I also recommend that you at least try to disable the GPU power management, it should help you: sudo mv /System/Library/Extensions/AppleGraphicsPowerManagement.kext/ /System/Library/Extensions/AppleGraphicsPowerManagement.disable
... I've had the machine for a long time, so I'm already thinking about an upgrade, probably some 13" Retina, but as you write, a lot of people report performance problems there too, just check discussions.apple.com or the macrumors forum and you'll be able to buy new HW right away and so I have quite a dilemma. I'm still wondering, the SSD you put there additionally, is it by any chance something with a SandForce controller? You don't really understand NVIDIA chipsets, and it could theoretically be the source of the problem.
I don't want to pick on anyone here, but maybe it's because I switched to an iPhone from Android and despite the many problems you mention, I feel like I'm in heaven with the iPhone. I have an old type 4S 16GB, I have iOS 8.1.2 there, and although I can observe the occasional lack of smoothness (mainly when scrolling down the bottom menu), according to Android it's heaven and earth. So far I haven't come across any app that doesn't work. I also started the XPlane, it ran perfectly smoothly. As someone who likes technology, I'm excited to see how an 800Mhz dual core can work with 512MB of RAM. You won't run anything with this configuration on Android. I have Ubuntu on my computer, the connection with the iPhone is fine. Now I ordered a Mac Mini, I'm waiting for it because I had 16GB of Ram put in it. I'm curious to see how these two devices will work together. Nothing is without problems. Windows is a plague for the computer, Ubuntu works, but it has clouds of bugs and no one cares about them, because it's free. Apple has never been exactly cheap, but you still get good quality for your money. If you are not satisfied, nothing prevents you from selling iŽeleza and buying cheaper from a competitor.
It's quite a fun thing to keep writing about Android as a secondary OS. As a big supporter and user of Apple products, I could not write such nonsense. In addition, a person who probably has minimal demands on a phone can write about 4s as he pedals "normally". The fact that I run something on ancient HW does not mean that it cannot be used elsewhere in a much more comfortable way. With the absence of LTE, lousy internal memory and a huge weight for 3.5 inches, I don't know what the use of such a phone is at the moment? Probably not for work, right? The bazaars are bursting with an endless supply of iP4s/5 that nobody really wants. Maybe I would recommend to face the truth and try more apple devices than to generalize on a few examples. Or Apple is exactly targeting the undemanding users of your type, and then everything is fine.
Phone for work? How do you imagine it? Are you calling randomly generated numbers and offering a "good" credit card? How do you want to work with your phone? I need a desktop for work. Everything else is bullshit. Maybe for some frikulin presentation of some poor sales representative, maybe. Maybe I'm undemanding, but the 4s strikes me as a revelation in the flood of that stuck Android shit, and I even dare to say that by Android standards, the 4S with iOS 8.1.2 works not normally, but luxuriously. Have fun, you "demanding" users.
These discussions are pointless at a time when it is about personal preferences, not an opinion on a specific product or problem. Claiming about Android that it is a second-rate OS is not serious just because of its advantages, such as the fact that it is open source. It also fully satisfies many users. . .
My favorite phone is also the iP 4 because it covers all my needs in the areas for which the phone is in principle useful, and what's more, it fits in my pocket :-) I use other means for "non-telephone" communication needs, so I don't really have a problem. I realize this with joy and satisfaction every time I read similar contributions.
And one more little addition. I'm not saying that the actions I do on the phone can't be done more comfortably elsewhere. They are going. For example, on a Mac book or on an iPad or on an iPhone 6, but the actions that I need to do on the phone can be done on the 4S just fine. I can only see the constant lamentations and insults about Apple, how things are going wrong with it, how it coughs on customers and how Cook is a voracious beast. How is it not possible to buy a frame on Alza for a few sixes and cram it into a Mac mini. How it all comes together. How everything was better before. You are like old grandfathers who remember the time fifty years ago and sigh, how everything was great before and that dick cost them.
Yes, it is true that Apple has more and more bugs in the newer ios. A friend on a 6plus who switched from android is stuck with the swift keyboard in messages. Now the question is whether it is ios or swift. Maybe my iPhone is completely stuck. I didn't quite understand it because I already have a 4th generation iPhone and this has never happened to me. In Yosemite, my mac doesn't want to connect to capsli many times. and it even happened to me twice that I had to pull the capsli out of the socket because no one could connect to the WiFi... well, Apple should take action... on the one hand, it's nonsense, but all in all, it's a problem that such a premium brand like Apple shouldn't have... .
I honestly hate iOS 8, I have an iPod Touch (the "latest") and gold iOS 7 or whatever it was first. Since iOS 8, when I want to pull the shutter from the bottom on the locked screen, it doesn't respond at all, even after several attempts, the display even turns off, then when I want to skip a song, it doesn't respond either, I have to press 2x or 3x. The whole thing crashes terribly, the App Store loads so slowly that I'd rather turn it off before I find something. I used to have an iPhone 4S, which was great, then an iPhone 5 and I abandoned it after a while because I had to charge it 2 or 3 times a day. There would be more iOS on it than just what I wrote here.