Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software, Software Update, Bad Apple, Snow Leopard
It just works. Usually.
The latest festival of issues with Snow Leopard alongside a round of people unhappy with the latest iPhone update both suggest that Apple might need to work a little harder on pre-release testing. One thing Microsoft does rather well is gets a lot of people testing software releases in extended public betas. Of course that didn't go so well for Vista, which was a mess for many people, but it seems to have gone better for Windows 7.
Apple, secretive as always, doesn't get really wide testing of new software builds, and when those updates finally get released there seems to be an ever increasing, ever louder response from customers that things aren't going swimmingly.
Snow Leopard was supposed to be a cleanup of Leopard, but it appears that some people are having lots of issues. In my own case, some fonts were pretty messed up, and Keychain was jumbled pretty badly. The fixes in both cases weren't onerous, but they were nasty enough that it made me wonder how thoroughly the release had been tested. I still don't hear new mail sounds from MobileMe, a problem that has been going on at least since Leopard was released. I'm not alone in this, but not everyone has the problem.
Most of the people I know had flawless upgrades, and of course here at TUAW we are more likely to hear about problems, which is also true of the Apple forums where people are able to report the smallest or the largest bugs.
Therefore, from my perspective it's hard to say for certain if things are slipping away from Apple quality control, but it's starting to look that way. Apple was quick to release 10.6.1, which was a good effort, but it is not quieting down the roar of users who don't think that this latest release of Snow Leopard 'just works.' What's your perception? Does Apple have some work to do?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 5)
kaslings said 5:23PM on 9-16-2009
Absolutely agree. May I also add that iLife is a great example. The places/faces are nice, but they required quite a bit of finessing, and x.x.1 releases to fix. Check the support boards for faces.db rebuilding, and places going missing.
iTunes had some elements that I really don't feel were improvements and would have been nice to voice feedback over if it was beta tested, as well.
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Javier Carro said 5:17PM on 9-16-2009
Well for me it just worked smooth, although this time I installed from scratch to clean up a bit my disk.
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Brian said 6:09PM on 9-16-2009
A lot of beta testers did a lot of hard work to try and iron out these things, but they cannot catch everything. How hard is it when one persons works fine and another does not. Difficult to track down these errors.
Maybe these unpaid volunteers didn't get everything right but they tried their hardest.
skalpa said 9:41PM on 9-16-2009
Of course nobody will never blame volunteers who beta test software: whatever those people do is always welcome.
But, as for Apple, I'm +1 on:
- They should use more of this cash to pay additional Q.A teams members
- They should use more of this cash to pay the additional developers they seem to be always missing to support features on more than 6 months old hardware.
Michael Jones said 1:09PM on 9-19-2009
@Brian:
Agreed, but I think much of the beta testing problem isn't with the testers themselves, it's with the fact that Apple releases software when the developer community is still saying it needs work.
In the weeks coming up to the Snow Leopard launch, a lot of people who were using developer builds were of the opinion that "it's nice, but not quite ready." Yet Apple went ahead and released it anyways.
On the iPhone side, it was worse, as developers had not received a new beta build of OS 3.1 since July, and while Apple did correct a number of known issues between that build and the released version, they did not give developers an opportunity to test the final build and verify that it was bug free.
Not to mention they added new features to the final build (such as the App Genius functionality), which increases the probability that new bugs may have been introduced without proper time for testing.
-wsn said 5:17PM on 9-16-2009
You are not alone...
My New MBP13 was updated from 10.5 and it was all wonky after.
I then did a complete wipe and load... still wonky.
Wonky = Beachballs, Hangs, Both QT's being exports badly, etc.
I am thinking 10.6.1 just fixed a 'oops' and 10.6.2 will be the one that will address things.
And for the record my install base is 97% all Apple Apps. (iWork09, iLife09, etc)
Cheers
-wsn
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-wsn said 5:20PM on 9-16-2009
...and anyway to fix 'tabs' ...the old terminal command does not work now.
(Open in new tab default, not holding a key and clicking)
jonathan said 9:48PM on 9-17-2009
get glims
Mvn said 5:20PM on 9-16-2009
Would totally agree, after having my iPhone shutdown several times after the 3.1 release and an almost windows like experience with iTunes 9 which crashes all the time. It appears the marketing dept are calling the release dates over the engineering dept. Would prefer stable releases over trying to get it out to suit analysts or before Microsoft (zune HD).
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-wsn said 5:24PM on 9-16-2009
IMHO, I agree that it was rushed, and that Exchange support is also not 'really ready yet.
(and before the questions fly in ...yes its a 2007 R+ Exchange box that is working fine with my iPhone via AS and via Windows and Outlook07, not so much under 10.6.1 ..mail in general is still kinda wonky as well)
Ryan Trevisol said 6:46PM on 9-16-2009
*hint* if your phone continues shutting down after you restore 3.1 *without restoring a backup*, Apple will replace it for you, even if it's out of warranty.
Your Cool Uncle TUAW
PS - I got some fireworks in the garage, I'll let you shoot them off if you promise not to tell your Auntie TUAW.
David said 5:20PM on 9-16-2009
Apple will never be able to predict all the hiccups that might occur, especially when you are doing an update. I was able to make a fresh start and start from scratch with a fresh install with no plug-ins and legacy software.
I know that not all people are able to do this, but then you might wanna wait out anyway.
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MS said 5:37PM on 9-16-2009
Compared to Microsoft, Apple have a miniscule number of hardware, driver and software combinations to test against. I'm sure there are not millions of user having problems, but there does seem to be a significant number, so it really isn't excusable for such a small number of variables to have caused so many problems.
David said 6:10PM on 9-16-2009
I can only speak for myself you know, and the only problems I encountered has been with third party software that had not been updated yet. I do miss some of the old plugins though, such as WideMail and a updated version of Growl that supports the new 64bit System Preferences.
Brian said 6:14PM on 9-16-2009
Small - you are joking right.
And remember Microsoft does not do their own hardware drivers save the generic ones.
JSipprell said 7:35PM on 9-16-2009
What's worked *really* well for a number of SL 'upgrades' I've done is this:
1. Have an absolute latest up-to-date backup of the system volume; whether via TM or one of the disk imager/cloners.
2. Boot SL install disc, reformat the system volume, perform clean install.
3. Do a full migration from the backup.
This cleans out some of the kruft and won't require reinstallation of applications, configuration, etc.
tom.latta@hotmail.co.uk said 5:22PM on 9-16-2009
My personal experience has been flawless, but I have a MacBook (less than a week old) that shipped with Leopard preinstalled and I upgraded to Snow Leopard on a virgin system. My partner however, that's a different story. She has a 2yr old MacBook that was running Leopard and upon installing Snow Leopard, I've been working through fixing all manner of bugs and incompatibilities. The promised increase in speed is nowhere to be seen (in fact, it's noticeably slower under Snow Leopard) and the well-documented Keychain bug is a real b&£%h...
I think that the incompatibilities are inevitable, given that quite a lot of the underlying foundations of Leopard were tweaked, and Apple can't really be expected to press third-party developers to ensure their products will work as advertised in Snow Leopard but, I'm not sure given that this was meant to be an update more than a new OS, Apple could've done a better job with ensuring many popular apps would work successfully. I have several friends with Macs, but I am considered the expert in the group, and I have been advising them to hold off on Snow Leopard for now...
As for quality control, I agree that Microsoft seems to have done a good job with getting a wide range of beta versions of Windows 7 out to a wide community in order to make sure it's running fairly smoothly when it came to the RTM. I think Apple should try to shed some of their secretive product launch ideas in order to make sure things are properly tested by the people who really matter, the end user.
As a side note, I got a copy of the RTM version of Windows 7 Pro through my University's MSDNAA site. I installed that on my desktop PC about the same time I installed Snow Leopard on my partner's MacBook and I spent a fraction of the time making sure it worked as I wanted it to than I did with Snow Leopard.
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Michael said 5:23PM on 9-16-2009
SL was without a doubt one of the poorest quality releases since.... dare I say 10.0.0
That aside... I always tell people regardless of which OS they use to clean install any "major" revision upgrades.
From professional understanding and knowledge... upgrades are haphazardness at its best. Never the less... the experience on the Mac side is much better then that on the Windows side. Still no excuse for the issues that are abound though.
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andrey said 6:01PM on 9-16-2009
totally agree with michael. i've never upgraded to new os x releases (my first one was panther), always did the clean install. and have never experienced problems discussed here or elsewhere.
takes more time to manually import all the data (i don't use migration assistant either) but it's worth every minute spent as you get a stable and glitches-free system.
Robert said 8:22PM on 9-16-2009
I don't know about that; I upgraded from the previous version of X for all the major revisions after 10.1, as 10.0 was utterly horrifying (10.2, 10.3, and 10.4, with 10.4 still being supported and no real reasons to get Leopard, I haven't moved to it) along with a triple booted Linux (much faster than X prior to 10.3, a little bit faster than 10.3 and 10.4) and OS 9 (which I deleted when OpenSUSE was released for PPC) and never encountered a problem. I've got a ppc system though; perhaps Apple's quality control has worsened? They definitely have a larger advertising budget than back in the PPC days...