Comment by grumple
8 hours ago
The response from apple is insane, “please keep trying to reproduce this for us”. That is your job, apple engineer. As a manager of a large software org, a response like that from one of my engineers would drive me insane. Fix the damn problem or provide a timeline for addressing it. When you think the fix is released, then ask them if their issue was resolved.
I read the comments before the link and thought this was a bit harsh, but reading that response I now feel the same way you do.
The reporter ALREADY provided a minimal example and Apple is like "yup we're going to keep changing things and you need to keep rerunning the code you sent us and reporting here because we won't bother to run your minimal example ourselves".
Just wow.
Giving the Apple engineer (but not Apple) the benefit of the doubt I guess their policy is not to make any promises or announcements in that channel. They have probably said as much as they are allowed.
Forward looking statements can come from anyone and become sticky when considering security laws. Imagine everyone at Apple was sharing their full triage and timeline for every issue; one can then make informed decisions about their stock price, and investors could sue if those statements turned out to be misleading. At a certain point, the risk is too great.
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> please keep trying to reproduce this for us
There's an engineer that's used to solely interacting with agents.
You need to get your head out of your bubble and realize that this bug does not move the needle on anything meaningful.
I work at a superscalar and we have also had about 40% increase in breaking bugs in prod year-to-year due to a lot of slop code. However, the engagement and revenue generated is up from the features. Why bother make a timeline and spend time and resources on things that the average user does not care about? Does the average person care about the OpenGL compatibility? No, so why would you spend effort on this instead of for example user engagement? Answer that.
Why make the computer do anything but maximize dopamine and dollars flying out of your wallet? Why ship a calculator app you can't sell subscriptions on, a command line interface, an email suite? Can't make money on it so why do it right? Why let a hammer be a hammer and not let you gamble crypto with it too?
If the customer wants these things and is paying for it, why shouldn't we? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And if your idealism can pay your bills, good for you!
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Because if you make enough decisions like that in a product that affects consumers and developers, eventually you turn into Adobe. Or worse, this guy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49984862
Sure, but it doesn't change the argument. Adobe is doing really well if you look at the revenue. Adobes business is selling to governments and other large corporations that need compliance, its not to cater to the HN developers. Apple is the same, except in their case its the status symbol of having Apple products.
No-one gives a shit if some subset of internet warriors thinks that you will have a downfall in 10 years because of some obscure esoteric corner cases that don't affect your mainline business. Even if they are right you will probably not be around the business at that time and will have made bank.
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Engineers and their companies are super users on whom the whole Apple ecosystem depends. If we can’t run our applications on Apple’s operating system, or they break things for our users, we will leave.
Take that lesson back to your company as well. It is easier than ever to switch between clouds and AI providers. It’s easier than ever to replace any software in house. This isn’t an idle threat; I’ve already moved off of several software platforms this year for other providers, and I’m probably doing the same for millions of dollars worth of business every year in the future as well. And my company isn’t immune to it either - our biggest customers are always looking for options to bring software in house. The more we disrupt them with “small bugs”, the more likely they are to leave.
That is just plain false and assigning over-importance to yourself.
Apple's ecosystem depends on every middle-class person around the globe wanting to be able to signal that they have an Apple phone and use the same features as their social group. Engineers are a small subset, they barely move the needle.
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