Comment by redthrowaway
12 years ago
I really can't see Apple adopting a more iterative approach to product development. "Perfect the first time" is so deeply engrained in their corporate identity that the CEO feels the need to personally apologize when they don't achieve it (see: Apple Maps). Compare that to the new Google Maps, which was pretty shitty when it went to open beta but has been getting progressively less so.
Google's users cut Google the necessary slack to allow them to release imperfect products and improve on them. Apple's do not.
Apple does plenty of iteration, just in a different way. Think about copy and paste on iPhone, MMS messaging, multitasking, etc. They work depth-first rather than breadth, so instead of dozens of half-working features, you get one or two complete features. I think it opens Apple up to more criticism, especially combined with their secrecy, but the criticism and even trolls only help contribute to more buzz.
I'm looking at the Dock at the bottom of my MacBook Pro and I can't help but think that most of the apps are half baked and most of them I don't even use.
I've replaced Safari with Firefox. I haven't fired up iChat in a while because I just use GMail chat instead. iTunes is really wonky when you want to play music off of an NFS server. I've never fired up FaceTime or PhotoBooth. The X11 app is so buggy it's ridiculous. I use Terminal all the time, but it's got some serious memory leaks. Time Machine breaks half the time in unexpected ways. Calculator works pretty well, although I find myself using the R console more and more instead.
I feel like the Mac software side of things just doesn't get any love anymore. Apple is so focused on iPhone/iPad that the OSX applications are stretched completely thin and rarely get any love and attention. The machine has really just turned into a glorified terminal and browser where I run the occasional Linux virtual machine or the odd game in Steam. Any serious heavy lifting is left for Linux, and most applications have migrated to the web.
I don't believe those applications are half-baked as much as your needs are more advanced than the target of those applications. Those applications work extremely well for the typical mac user. Firefox would just confuse my sister, and she wouldn't even know what an NFS server is. Linux would just make her stop using a computer.
And how is iChat half baked because you use Gmail chat? I could say the same for Gchat when I use iChat. (Not saying that ichat can't be improved, but your line of logic doesn't follow.)
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Looking at mine...
I prefer Safari over all other browsers, due to speed and better UI, although it loses on security to Chrome. Firefox, meanwhile, didn't have Retina display support until half a year after that MacBook Pro was released, still doesn't have disappearing scrollbars, and has no smooth zoom, and I have many other sorts of complaints about it.
iTunes, despite all the various crappiness, doesn't have much good competition and usually works well. Playing music off an NFS server is not a normal use case.
Preview is a brilliant PDF reader.
I use Gmail chat, but if I weren't using a Mavericks beta with broken Messages.app, I would also be using that for iMessage. FaceTime also works well.
Mail.app is pretty great; it has some flaws, but is better than most of the competition not named Gmail.
Terminal is a great terminal app (you'd think this wouldn't be hard to achieve, and I think iTerm is roughly on par now, but the latter used to be quite terrible).
edit: oh, and QuickTime Player is nice; might not support all the codecs of other players, but the seeking/frame stepping is nice and smooth, compared to VLC which can't step backwards at all.
YMMV, but I think the suite of default Mac apps is not bad at all.
Regarding the Terminal application, check the scrollback settings. My colleague wondered why it took 20 seconds to start and ate up 2 gigs of memory... turns out Terminal was storing scrollback all the way back to when he first bought the machine, eating up just a little bit of memory every day as he used it more.
>copy and paste on iPhone, MMS messaging, multitasking
As I recall Apple tried to say things at the time that amounted to "you don't really need that." Every single iPhone user I knew at the time drank the Steve Jobs koolaid and talked about how yeah, they didn't need those features.
My experience was a little different. Nobody I know thought that you didn't need copy and paste or MMS messaging.
The only case you mention where I saw a lot of koolaid drinking is multitasking, and that's probably because there is a kernel of truth in that case - it's tricky to do right without harming battery life or user experience. (That's only a reason why it might take longer to implement well, though. Definitely not a reason to leave it out of the platform permanently.)
The koolaid drinking about iOS products that bothers me the most is the claim that an active stylus isn't worth including. Anyone who's used OneNote can see the potential there. If anything gets me to drop iOS, this will be the reason.
Definitely. And also, people have short term memories. No one will remember what didn't work after it eventually gets fixed. It becomes the new normal. One day, no one will care that Apple maps weren't great when they first debuted.
> "Perfect the first time" is so deeply engrained in their corporate identity that the CEO feels the need to personally apologize when they don't achieve it (see: Apple Maps).
Apple Maps wasn't a failure of "perfect the first time", it was a failure of iteration: it was an existing Apple app using Google data that, as part of an OS update, Apple "upgraded" with a new version using non-Google data that performed, in many users opinion, less well than the previous version.
> Compare that to the new Google Maps, which was pretty shitty when it went to open beta but has been getting progressively less so.
When Google maps was released to "open beta", it wasn't a new version of base app delivered as part of the OS bundled into a premium-priced hardware device that was widely seen as a downgrade in functionality from the prior version. It was a free web application that added to, rather than replacing, the existing options in the space.
> Google's users cut Google the necessary slack to allow them to release imperfect products and improve on them. Apple's do not.
Google's users get mad when they perceive Google to make products worse in subsequent versions just as much as Apple users do. Google tends not to put premium price tags on its first public release of products, while Apple does, and people paying premium prices for products are less inclined to grant the maker slack.
I'm not sure where this "perfect the first time" thing comes from, but so far every first version of the product I've seen from Apple was far from perfect. It is true that Apple spends a lot of time on visual design and polishing the limited set of scenarios to their complete satisfaction, but I don't think is can be called perfect.
For example, first version of iPhone OS did not have copy-paste functionality. On a device that has keyboard with keys sized 1/4 of my fingertip size. Now try getting a long URL or email from one app to another in this setup. Perfect? Yeah, right.
Another iOS thing - it gained multitasking (for apps other than select few) only in the 4th version. For years we've been told multitasking is evil - right up to the point when they got to make it usable and then it suddenly became newesest bestesest thing ever.
Now we can look at hardware. Macbooks are extremely popular, but I've personally seen a number of Macbooks dying at 2 years of age from exactly the same symptoms (failure of graphics subsystem). It's a reasonably nice piece of hardware, but perfect? No way. And it still doesn't have docking capability, after all these years.
And those are just random things, if I tried, I probably could list dozens of deficiencies in Apple products. Both first and current versions. It doesn't make them especially bad - all their competitors have their sets of faults - but let's not buy into the "perfect" hype too much.
So I can attribute this "perfect the first time" myth to a definite success of Apple marketing, but, unfortunately, there's little substance behind it.
While the feature set may not have been perfectly filled, I think that you're highlighting areas where their 'perfect the first time' philosophy clashed with customer frustration. They hadn't figured out how to do copy/paste 'perfectly', so they didn't do it. Same with multitasking. While I agree, these things were not perfect even when they did launch, Apple has always preferred to leave out a feature than to push something out half baked. This is why they still haven't integrated NFC into the iPhone.
> Google's users cut Google the necessary slack to allow them to release imperfect products and improve on them. Apple's do not.
Also an excellent point. The reason people line up for many hours for the privilege of spending $500 is because they expect perfection. These are the consumers that Apple has courted, and so far they have reaped the rewards from it by earning the trust of their users. To change that would damage their brand in a huge way.
I think the Apple Maps situation is a little different since they actually took away the product people were previously using.
I'm not sure you can work iteratively when your product is equally as much about the hardware as the software. Apple can't just iterate on a hinge issue because they pushed a MacBook line out quickly.
Software companies, especially ones that are service-based, have a distinct advantage in deployment.
Apple is fairly unique in that its product is both hardware and software.