Apple is the new Microsoft

Originally published on Tumblr.

I hear it all the time. “Apple is the new Microsoft.”

What most people mean is that Apple is now in the near monopolistic position that Microsoft was in the early 2000s. What my peers mean is that the quality of Apple’s software is approaching Microsoft’s. It’s operating systems and core applications are getting worse with each release.

Some days I find this idea depressing. Most days I have more pressing things to worry about.

I don’t know an engineer over 35 who doesn’t agree. I’m using that somewhat arbitrary age limit because I think a bit of perspective is needed to understand how broken things are in Appleland.

Before we had DOS and Windows, we had several variants of Unix (AT&T and Berkeley), VAX/VMS (DEC), and MVS (IBM). They were all multi-user and multi-processing operating systems. No one ever thought of rebooting them.

Windows was built on an unstable foundation (DOS), so it had to manage its own multi-tasking since it couldn’t rely on an operating system kernel to do it. Constant crashes and required reboots surprised no one. When Microsoft and IBM collaborated on a real operating system kernel for Windows 9x / OS2, we expected the stability of our Unix / VMS systems. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The Windows 9x operating systems were as unstable as their predecessors.

Apple’s history isn’t so different. Its original operating system, Mac OS, or Classic Mac OS, was designed to run one application at a time, just like DOS. When the application crashed, the OS usually crashed along with it. In the late ‘90s, Apple bought NeXT, which gave them access to a modern operating system.

NeXT’s kernel was a modified Unix BSD kernel, modified to support near real-time audio and video playback requirements. It was very stable. I remember at most two system crashes in the 5-6 years I used NeXTSTEP as my primary operating system. Apple’s OS X and iOS operating systems are direct descendants of NeXTSTEP.

Plenty of people have written about the deterioration of OS X in great detail. I’ve mostly ignored it. As long as the operating system didn’t interfere with my day-to-day work, I’ve put up with the occasional crash. The only alternative, going back to running Linux on a laptop, has never been very appareling. But I’m starting to consider it. Bugs in Apple’s software are starting to make my life difficult, and waste a lot of time.

A few weeks ago my Calendar application stopped working. Nothing I tried fixed the problem. So I upgraded to Mavericks, Apple’s latest operating system, with some trepidation. I’d read that the Mail application was unstable, but we were two minor releases in, so I hoped that Apple had fixed the dot 0 problems. I was wrong.

Mavericks fixed Calendar, but Mail was unusable. I had to switch to a third party mail reader. Apple blames the problems I encountered on Google’s non-standard implementation of IMAP. Somehow every other mail reader — including Apple’s iOS Mail program — has managed to deal with this “problem”.

Two weeks after my upgrade, Calendar stopped working, again. I tried everything I could think of to fix it. I failed, so I finally called Apple’s support. The first thing they asked me to do was reboot my laptop. I couldn’t believe they thought that would fix the problem, and I was stunned when it did. I then realized that installing Mavericks had forced a reboot, and that’s almost certainly what had resolved the issue the first time.

Having to reboot an operating system to fix an application problem is the symptom of a disease.

I have a few theories about the source of this particular problem. None makes me feel very good. They all imply a large degree of incompetence.

Given the complexity of the OS X environment (OS and applications), these two examples seem trivial, but they aren’t. Two key applications — so key that they form the core of Apple’s iCloud suite of application — don’t work properly. One is unusable, and one requires a system reboot when it gets “stuck”. And this is the third minor release of Mavericks.

Maybe all of the Apple’s smart engineers are now working for the iOS team, although probably not. iOS crashes are fairly routine. So maybe all of Apple’s smart engineers have left the company.

I’m happy that Linux is still an option. I love my Apple hardware, but I won’t put up with the software getting much worse. It’s amazing to think that my computing environment was more stable in the 80s than it is now. Yes, it was less complex, but we should have been able to keep up with the complexity we’ve been introducing. Some fundamental knowledge has either been forgotten or is being ignored.

Neither is very encouraging.