SJ used to be relentless about nitpicking to keep quality up. Probably not happening consistently across all apps and platforms as much. Tim may need to appoint a Quality Czar whom is detail-oriented, accepts no bull and has "wrath of God" authority to make folks take them seriously.
Long-standing, time-wasting bugs I've noticed:
- Mdns broadcast disabling doesn't work.
- Swift playground in Xcode crashes regularly.
- Mobile Safari regularly crashes randomly on backspace in text areas.
- App Store installs corrupted apps but they don't show as corrupted until reboot, and then future downloads fail.
- Mail.app synchronously hangs the UI when processing new email notifications (probable not using a background queue).
Update: I forgot the worst. FileVault 2 + HFS+ corrupting metadata and becoming un-fsck-able (Repair). TimeMachine restore and 5 hours loss per incident.
Also Xcode 6.1 took a week to fix a docset feed bug that they duplicated a docset dmg url. I found the exact correct dmg url, and it still took 3 days to fix. Everyone had broken Xcode Tools docsets until they fixed it. (!)
iBooks can use 100% CPU trying to connect to the (nonexistent) internet when reading an ePub.
All-in-all, these aren't show stoppers, just a collection of things to whine about. It would cause more happiness if they were fixed, but they're mostly navigable.
Definitely not, it's 2 years old and memtest86+, prime95, iozone and iperf for 24 hours each. These are all independent soft errors. Furthermore, I'm continually running stuff that is doing gpg signing/verification and sha256 checksums in VMs... They would fail. Also, there would be kernel panics... I've had zero.
- App Store likely has a problem with storeaccountd / installer framework from the exception traces I've seen (debug menu on).
- HFS+ can corrupt itself irreparably (it's not ZFS). BTDTBTTS.
The funniest one is an auto correct bug. If you make a text area that is limited to n characters, and auto correct changes the word you are typing to be n + 1 characters Safari completely crashes. I learned this one several times filling out a very long web form and just gave up and moved to Chrome.
I bet there's multiple issues in the text input / autocorrect buffer bounds checking. It's possibly an exploitable security issue too, or at least a nice area for research.
To add one to your list, HealthKit hasn't worked on my iPhone 6 for months -- loads no step counts, pulls no data from third-party apps (despite settings), and renders some apps completely unusable (e.g. Jawbone UP when trying to use the M8 coprocessor as the pedometer).
HealthKit seems a bit half-baked. I can see it being really useful in the future once everything is "Healthkit enabled™," and data magically flows in, but it certainly has many bugs.
As an example, for a while I was manually entering my weight every couple days. After two weeks or so of doing this, the data simply vanished without a trace. This happened again after one of the early updates. After that, I simply gave up. Yes, a bug report was sent, but who knows what really happens once it goes through the 'Gates of Radar.'
The SOP is basically never give any feedback to users. You won't know until it's either fixed or it's not months later.
If OSX/iOS were more open source (beyond the kernel and some libs), I think it would be easier to get external developers contributing valuable fixes and offload some support to the community.
It doesn't make much sense to keep the OS totally closed, because the business model is in selling good HW. Sure, control the platform end-to-end ensures quality, but delegating some can be mutually-beneficial.
It's like a small business owner "control-freaking" so they don't put out napkins for fear people will take too many, making it a pain for everyone to accomplish a common task. There is a reasonable amount of control / final say-so that's necessary, but there is "penny-wise, pound-foolish" also.
Funny how open source hasn't resulted in a desktop Linux or Android or ChromeOS or BSD that you want to use, yet. Not for want of effort or money or forks.
But maybe if Apple open source Mac OS X, which you do want to use despite the annoyances, then open source will magically help it become perfect?
On the privacy front:
iOS Spotlight still falls back to searching the web without permission, leaking privacy info. And all the Privacy and Spotlight settings are set correctly.
Long-standing, time-wasting bugs I've noticed:
- Mdns broadcast disabling doesn't work.
- Swift playground in Xcode crashes regularly.
- Mobile Safari regularly crashes randomly on backspace in text areas.
- App Store installs corrupted apps but they don't show as corrupted until reboot, and then future downloads fail.
- Mail.app synchronously hangs the UI when processing new email notifications (probable not using a background queue).