#CookMustGo Campaign

[Danfango]

There's nothing like a contrast to reset the senses.

I suggest you can go and buy a Dell with Windows 11 on it and a Google Pixel 6A.

 

[Timpetus]

Apple did its best work when it was up against the ropes.

Can you imagine how much they would have stuttered to a halt if instead of iTunes back in 2001 they came out with the Mac Apple Music app? One (the original iTunes) was elegant, the other (Apple Music) is cumbersome and just plain unpleasant to use.

They didn't have time or money back then to make poor or middling software. They needed hits. Their rate of innovation in software and the quality of it was so much better than now.

Their biggest liability for their original core customers who stuck with them through the dark days is their financial success. They can ride their coattails for a century or longer at this point. They have inertia and agglomeration on their side and shareholders as their constituency—in large part I'm sure because stock is how the executives themselves get paid.

This may undercut your point a bit, but it's just a difference in how they got to the result: iTunes was based on purchased software. I know because I actually had SoundJam MP before Apple bought it and turned into iTunes! Still, Apple did great things when times were tough, and I hope they can find a vision to at least come close to the insane greatness Steve Jobs had as his north star.

 

[NT1440]

This may undercut your point a bit, but it's just a difference in how they got to the result: iTunes was based on purchased software. I know because I actually had SoundJam MP before Apple bought it and turned into iTunes! Still, Apple did great things when times were tough, and I hope they can find a vision to at least come close to the insane greatness Steve Jobs had as his north star.

Apple Silicon seemingly gets no credit, which is wild because it’s the best thing to happen to computers in the last decade.

This transition will be a big deal in hindsight, but nobody seems to give Tim credit for the incredible success Apple has had in extricating itself from the ******** timelines of Intel over the last decade and a half.

 

[OneBar]

or people just have no choice

No one is forcing you to buy anything. You could have no phone, a land line, Android, generic flip phones, TracPhones, etc.

 

[Smartuser]

These forums are really going nowhere fast. I love when I have to see threads like this on the front page because it drives "engagement".

 

[DHagan4755]

I had to double check the start date of this topic to make sure it wasn't made on April 1.

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

Can you imagine how much they would have stuttered to a halt if instead of iTunes back in 2001 they came out with the Mac Apple Music app? One (the original iTunes) was elegant, the other (Apple Music) is cumbersome and just plain unpleasant to use.

if you’re trying to demonstrate how much better Apple used to be at software, you chose a bad example because Apple just bought Sound Jam and turned it into iTunes, it was not a Apple developed thing.
If you’re suggesting Apple should start purchasing more companies just to integrate their apps into their OS’s well…
Apple Music was originally Beats Music.
Apple Weather was originally Dark Sky.
Apple Classical was originally Primephonic.
Apple News+ was originally Texture.
Shortcuts was originally Workflow.
So… i’m not quite sure what you’re asking. Apple to purchase better companies? I guess?

 

[swingerofbirch]

And it's worth remembering that profits come from people buying products. Someone out there likes what Apple is making...

People in the US regularly decry that "everything" is made in China yet continue to buy Chinese made goods. By your logic we should deduce people prefer Chinese made goods. It's not just a completely free marketplace; it's the power of agglomeration and inertia. People may use it without loving it.

if you’re trying to demonstrate how much better Apple used to be at software, you chose a bad example because Apple just bought Sound Jam and turned it into iTunes, it was not a Apple developed thing.
If you’re suggesting Apple should start purchasing more companies just to integrate their apps into their OS’s well…
Apple Music was originally Beats Music.
Apple Weather was originally Dark Sky.
Apple Classical was originally Primephonic.
Apple News+ was originally Texture.
Shortcuts was originally Workflow.
So… i’m not quite sure what you’re asking. Apple to purchase better companies? I guess?

I know that it was SoundJam MP. My point was that they wouldn't have had the option of putting something as bad as bas as Apple Music on the Mac is today out on the market back in 2001 when iTunes came out because they needed hits.

And while I didn't use SoundJam MP, they didn't obviously didn't ruin it. They were writing good software. The whole point of buying NeXT was also to buy an OS (and also all the engineers—essentially a merger). Just because they bought it doesn't mean they didn't need to keep working on it. OS X went through radical revisions and added on features in the first few versions.

They bought Siri, as well. But they've iterated on it terribly, focusing on the quality of the voice rather than features.

I'm still curious why they bought Beats because they didn't keep the employees and they completely changed the app. I still find that to be a bizarre purchase. Maybe it was for the licensing rights to stream?

I never used Texture, but I'm guessing it had to have been better than Apple News is. BTW, while I have an iPhone, I use it for calls and photos. I just prefer a large screen and keyboard, so my evaluation of these apps is on the Mac.

All of my points stand regarding the software. It doesn't matter if they bought it, had in-house employees write it, or contracted it out (which they do regularly now). It's the end product that matters. And the end products now are frankly bizarrely bad—probably in large part due to the dizzying array of frameworks they have (SwiftUI, Catalyst, UIKit, etc).

But yeah, if they're able to buy good tech and iterate on it, that's great. But the problem seems more systemic. There are so many first party apps on the Mac that are just bad across the board. They have the same look, the same ungainly, un-Mac like interface: News, Podcasts, Music, etc. The only first party app I use from Apple is Notes. And back in the halcyon days I used every iWork/iLife app. But like I said, there are thriving third party apps, so it is what it is. Good enough, but not like it was.

 

[Abazigal]

It's time to start a #CookMustGo campaign , not only is Apple destroying our devices with substandard software causing battery drain and over heating , price increases, the overall quality , both hardware and software of Apple Products has hit rock bottom , how much longer are Apple customers going to tolerate this pathetic poor performance from a company who were the tech industry leaders with standards which every other company strived to archieve.

Poor performance relative to...?

Facebook?

Google?

Samsung?

Amazon?

Netflix?

Disney?

Intel?

Apple is pulling away from the competition and the gap is only going to get even wider as time progresses.

 

[Analog Kid]

By your logic we should deduce people prefer Chinese made goods.

Do you think they don't? People have prioritized low cost over other considerations. They may talk about other priorities, but when push comes to shove the market sorts on price and features.

Depending on the luxury tier, people may sort first on one or the other, but it's always those two.

 

[ThomasJL]

It is hypocritical to praise Tim Cook's Apple leadership while criticizing Steve Ballmer's Microsoft leadership. Just like Cook, Ballmer achieved record profits and pleased shareholders. Both men led an era of subpar software with an abnormally high level of bugs. So if you praise Cook, then you should also praise Ballmer because you believe that record profits for the company and for the shareholders is more important than creating products meant to be the most user-friendly tools to help users.

 

[casperes1996]

All of my points stand regarding the software. It doesn't matter if they bought it, had in-house employees write it, or contracted it out (which they do regularly now). It's the end product that matters. And the end products now are frankly bizarrely bad—probably in large part due to the dizzying array of frameworks they have (SwiftUI, Catalyst, UIKit, etc).

Speaking as a programmer, I must say that I don't think your analysis here holds at all. The development environment for Apple's platforms has frankly never been better. Or at least not within the past 12 years I've been interacting with it. Catalyst *is* UIKit. It's just the codename for the UIKit implementation on macOSutilising some styling and View components from AppKit to Macify the experience a bit more than a straight 1-1 port of UIKit, but it is still UIKit in its API. UIKit as UIKit only runs on iOS, or as an iOS app running on an Apple Silicon Mac, but that is "something you can do" not something that is a Mac native experience. Then there's AppKit, the traditional macOS GUI toolkit. And SwiftUI. But SwiftUI is more of a new frontend way of interacting with the system UI layouts - It builds on top of UIKit and AppKit (depending on the platform) and uses UIKit/AppKit under the hood. It is not so much an entirely separate thing as it is a declarative interaction model with Swift-centric APIs that interact with the traditional GUI toolkit under the hood. Really the Mac still has one true GUI toolkit. AppKit. It then has UIKit support through iOS apps and Catalyst to allow for a wider software library of ports from the wider Apple ecosystem but aside from a brief dogfooding period to demonstrate the technology being good to go, Apple doesn't really use this for Mac applications. It is meant to broaden the available software base without a great barrier to entry and works great for some use cases. And then there's SwiftUI that wraps all of this in a declarative style. It is not fragmentation of toolkits. It's rather streamlined and nice to interact with. SwiftUI to me is a cross platform (Apple platforms like iPadOS, macOS, tvOS) analog to something like QML for describing Qt layouts. With QML the language is different but it's still QtWidgets underneath.
But there's also a lot more to the development story than the GUI toolkit and Apple just has the loveliest frameworks and libraries to use these days. The only thing I could ask for is support for modern OpenGL and Vulkan implementations in the driver stack but I can live with a focus on Metal and MoltenVK as a solution. But hey, going against your point I'm asking for *more* frameworks now
If you want to see something cursed btw, look at the window decorations for Steam's chat related windows. They implement Windows-style window decorations. That has nothing to do with availability of Catalyst or SwiftUI. Frameworks don't design UIs. Designers do.

 

[casperes1996]

It is hypocritical to praise Tim Cook's Apple leadership while criticizing Steve Ballmer's Microsoft leadership. Just like Cook, Ballmer achieved record profits and pleased shareholders. Both men led an era of subpar software with an abnormally high level of bugs. So if you praise Cook, then you should also praise Ballmer because you believe that record profits for the company and for the shareholders is more important than creating products meant to be the most user-friendly tools to help users.

That certainly depends what you're criticising. I don't subscribe to the "There's big profits so it must be great" idea, but I do like Tim Cook and what he's doing. He's not the products guy Jobs was but he points Apple in good directions as far as I can see. The Apple Watch is one of the greatest experiences I've ever had with any device. Never really and bugs at all and just such an elegant and clean experience. Apple Silicon is fantastic, and sure. Bugs are frustrating. But software complexity is also greater than ever with massively concurrent and distributed systems all around us. And frankly, the Jobs days also had very buggy releases. Cheetah for example. Ironically named after such a fast cat was a sluggish mess with numerous bugs and performance issues. Lots of products were released with horrendous hardware defects and class action lawsuits followed, Ping happened - When thinking of the past it's easy to remember the great and forget the bad. All the best music was from the past. But that's not because the past made better music than now (although I personally might say that) it's because the music from the past that survives in our memory has already been filtered.

Steve Balmer on the other hand was absolutely crazy

 

[swingerofbirch]

Speaking as a programmer, I must say that I don't think your analysis here holds at all. The development environment for Apple's platforms has frankly never been better. Or at least not within the past 12 years I've been interacting with it. Catalyst *is* UIKit. It's just the codename for the UIKit implementation on macOSutilising some styling and View components from AppKit to Macify the experience a bit more than a straight 1-1 port of UIKit, but it is still UIKit in its API. UIKit as UIKit only runs on iOS, or as an iOS app running on an Apple Silicon Mac, but that is "something you can do" not something that is a Mac native experience. Then there's AppKit, the traditional macOS GUI toolkit. And SwiftUI. But SwiftUI is more of a new frontend way of interacting with the system UI layouts - It builds on top of UIKit and AppKit (depending on the platform) and uses UIKit/AppKit under the hood. It is not so much an entirely separate thing as it is a declarative interaction model with Swift-centric APIs that interact with the traditional GUI toolkit under the hood. Really the Mac still has one true GUI toolkit. AppKit. It then has UIKit support through iOS apps and Catalyst to allow for a wider software library of ports from the wider Apple ecosystem but aside from a brief dogfooding period to demonstrate the technology being good to go, Apple doesn't really use this for Mac applications. It is meant to broaden the available software base without a great barrier to entry and works great for some use cases. And then there's SwiftUI that wraps all of this in a declarative style. It is not fragmentation of toolkits. It's rather streamlined and nice to interact with. SwiftUI to me is a cross platform (Apple platforms like iPadOS, macOS, tvOS) analog to something like QML for describing Qt layouts. With QML the language is different but it's still QtWidgets underneath.
But there's also a lot more to the development story than the GUI toolkit and Apple just has the loveliest frameworks and libraries to use these days. The only thing I could ask for is support for modern OpenGL and Vulkan implementations in the driver stack but I can live with a focus on Metal and MoltenVK as a solution. But hey, going against your point I'm asking for *more* frameworks now
If you want to see something cursed btw, look at the window decorations for Steam's chat related windows. They implement Windows-style window decorations. That has nothing to do with availability of Catalyst or SwiftUI. Frameworks don't design UIs. Designers do.

You obviously know about worlds that I do not.

I have just noticed so many glitches in the first-party "cookie cutter apps."

Here is the type of thing I have come to expect from Apple's first party apps now (this is from the Books apps—frankly I think so few people use it that one even notices):

 

[BigMcGuire]

You obviously know about worlds that I do not.

I have just noticed so many glitches in the first-party "cookie cutter apps."

Here is the type of thing I have come to expect from Apple's first party apps now (this is from the Books apps—frankly I think so few people use it that one even notices):

View attachment 2187643 View attachment 2187644

I use Apple Books and have for years, I'm not even sure how you get that view.

This is the top left hand corner of the Apple Books app for Mac OS. Almost looks like you're running the iPad / iOS app on Mac OS? <shrug>.

 

[swingerofbirch]

I use Apple Books and have for years, I'm not even sure how you get that view.

View attachment 2187648 This is the top left hand corner of the Apple Books app for Mac OS. Almost looks like you're running the iPad / iOS app on Mac OS? <shrug>.

Click on your name in the lower left hand corner of the side bar.

Then click on Books.

Then scroll upward.

I don't know what to call it, but the background is not drawn correctly and the content shows up behind the title bar and UI elements.

 

[BigMcGuire]

Click on your name in the lower left hand corner of the side bar.

Then click on Books.

Then scroll upward.

I don't know what to call it, but the background is not drawn correctly and the content shows up behind the title bar and UI elements.

Ah thank you - yeah I've had this happen before on my iOS devices. (Not happening now on my Mac OS device but I've seen it happen before).

Apple Books is finally getting some attention. Still hoping for full margin use of my iPhone screen someday .

(Had no idea I could get this menu in Mac OS Books, LOL).

 

[heretiq]

It's time to start a #CookMustGo campaign , not only is Apple destroying our devices with substandard software causing battery drain and over heating , price increases, the overall quality , both hardware and software of Apple Products has hit rock bottom , how much longer are Apple customers going to tolerate this pathetic poor performance from a company who were the tech industry leaders with standards which every other company strived to archieve.

Please tell me this a joke.

 

[ikir]

if you’re trying to demonstrate how much better Apple used to be at software, you chose a bad example because Apple just bought Sound Jam and turned it into iTunes, it was not a Apple developed thing.
If you’re suggesting Apple should start purchasing more companies just to integrate their apps into their OS’s well…
Apple Music was originally Beats Music.
Apple Weather was originally Dark Sky.
Apple Classical was originally Primephonic.
Apple News+ was originally Texture.
Shortcuts was originally Workflow.
So… i’m not quite sure what you’re asking. Apple to purchase better companies? I guess?

Based is a totally different from copy&paste. Go to a developer and says that realising a software integrated with all the services it is just simple as a bought an existing one.

 

[AlixSPQR]

I don't agree at all with the OP, but making huge profits isn't sure to last.

”Nokia reported sales of over 34 billion euros in 2005, up 16 percent from 2004. The overall yearly net profit increased by 13 percent to over 3.6 billion euros. Mobile phone sales exceeded expectations for the year 2005.” /YLE

 

[casperes1996]

You obviously know about worlds that I do not.

I have just noticed so many glitches in the first-party "cookie cutter apps."

Here is the type of thing I have come to expect from Apple's first party apps now (this is from the Books apps—frankly I think so few people use it that one even notices):

View attachment 2187643 View attachment 2187644

So just to be clear, when I said I disagreed with your analysis, I was only really responding to your comment that the reason for software issues potentially being framework related.

There are definitely software shipping that is somewhat neglected. Books, News, Weather on the Mac all feel a little undercooked to me at the moment. Heck even something as big as Music has a lot of issues. But my point was that it's an issue of attention, development effort and quality assurance, not framework used

That said a lot of the software is still really good - the pro apps like the Final Cut Studio suite, Logic Pro, the iWork apps work nicely for me, Safari is still the best browser, etc.

 

[jayryco]

It's time to start a #CookMustGo campaign , not only is Apple destroying our devices with substandard software causing battery drain and over heating , price increases, the overall quality , both hardware and software of Apple Products has hit rock bottom , how much longer are Apple customers going to tolerate this pathetic poor performance from a company who were the tech industry leaders with standards which every other company strived to archieve.

wow this is dumb

 

[OnawaAfrica]

It's time to start a #CookMustGo campaign , not only is Apple destroying our devices with substandard software causing battery drain and over heating , price increases, the overall quality , both hardware and software of Apple Products has hit rock bottom , how much longer are Apple customers going to tolerate this pathetic poor performance from a company who were the tech industry leaders with standards which every other company strived to archieve.

lol switch to android and windows.

 

[MauiPa]

Well, I go ahead and buck the trend of this somewhat hateful thread. 1) Ventura beta has been bug free for me, 2) my M1 13 MBP absolutely the best computer I have ever owned, 3) my iPhone X still runs the latest iOS betas (also bug free for me), 4) my HomePods and HomePod minis sound spectacular, 4) opening Mac with my Apple Watch, unlocking my watch with my iPhone - awesome. 5) features like airdrop, continuity - years ahead of competition.

OK, I, like everyone else, would like to see RAM and SSD prices lowered. But despite common hater threads, comparing Apple Silicon Mac prices to comparable specced and comparably performing Windows PCs do not reflect a price premium, and that is before you adjust the windows machines for thermal throttling and pathetic battery life.

So, Tim Cook helped build a very successful and innovative Apple, and you want to can him. LOL

How is Dell Silicon, and HP silicon working out? How is Samsung OS (we know Exynos was a bit of a flop) working out?

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

Based is a totally different from copy&paste. Go to a developer and says that realising a software integrated with all the services it is just simple as a bought an existing one.

Of course but the point is the same.