Ask HN: How is Apple able to make quality software?

The quality of their software has declined significantly in the past 15 years. That said, it&#x27;s still pretty good and this is probably down to reducing scope.<p>Apple&#x27;s software only runs on their hardware, they regularly exclude recent and capable devices from running the latest versions and they deprecate and ignore insustry standards liberally (OpenGL, Vulkan, Nvidia GPUs). This makes their software much simpler to write. Compare that to Android, which runs on anything, or Windows, which I hear can do crazy stuff like run apps from the 3.X days.

Android was a pure empire defense reaction by Google. Quality was not the priority but market capture through low prices was the game. Just like what they did with free email&#x2F;free video. Youtube did not end up producing better Quality than Netflix&#x2F;HBO&#x2F;Disney. And gmail totally lost opportunities to become social media or whatsapp.<p>Quality always drops if the main goal is market capture ie get as many cows into the corral focusing only on total milk flow, and afterwards worry about the quality of milk of individual cows.<p>Apple had already captured and locked in those who could afford higher prices (people who have 1000 bucks to throw away don&#x27;t care about price). Add in the Telco&#x27;s subsidizing iphone to play their own empire defense games, and Apple Quality got into the hands of enough people.<p>Microsoft still has had better software people and stacks than Apple, it just lost the consumer market (windows phone was any day better than android too bad they gave up on it - 2008 gfc influenced lot of decisions). For large businesses what Microsoft cloud&#x2F;stacks offers is a thousand times better than what everyone else does.

Starting with their founders, Apple believed in quality and Microsoft believed in quantity. That&#x27;s where control of hardware matters.<p>MS hacked in backwards compatibility with old apps and hardware, whereas Apple transitioned hardware from Motorola to PPC to Intel to Apple Silicon with incredible, seamless emulation layers as bridges.<p>Post-Jobs, Apple isn&#x27;t really the same. For all the &quot;simplicity&quot; of iOS, way too much is hidden from sight like &quot;pull down or swipe to reveal search boxes, scroll bars&quot;, etc, settings are hidden, redundant, or impossible to figure out, text is impossible to select without a mouse or trackpad, things happen after a delay (WTF) and items move around, so I am playing whack a mole. A simple &quot;paste&quot; key or screen button would save hours of poking and waiting around. Half my clicks are by mistake, trying to scroll. (Pages finally adopted a &quot;lock text&quot; toggle to fix this, a small miracle that was a few minutes work to create in HyperCard), Command C and V are adjacent on keyboards and I always hit the wrong one. (Same for the pop up copy&#x2F;paste on iOS ) But mainly, the upgrade cycle is too short ( to support each year&#x27;s new phones) to do sufficient testing. And it&#x27;s still better than windows. My non geek brother got so fed up with windows updates repeatedly breaking his device drivers that he&#x27;s now happy with Ubuntu, bought from and supported by Dell.<p>Microsoft seems suspended somewhere between the past, because their life depended on bespoke apps, and their &quot;all cloud, all AI&quot; future. No doubt, they are too large to have any kind of focus like Apple has shown. And Apple has killed off both good and bad software products. The good being HyperCard and the bad being iTunes, now part of Finder, their second worst software product behind iTunes.<p>When MacOS turns further into iOS, especially with lockouts, I&#x27;ll go back to Linux, which I have used on and off for a long time.<p>Quality at Apple is the ghost of Steve Jobs. Fragility and ugliness are the ghost of the (still living) Bill Gates. The present at both seems to be a bit of scrambled eggs as they try to create an elusive future less real visionaries on board.<p>All IMO

I mean, yeah, there are multiple reasons. Outside of MS having to write something that&#x27;s universally compatible with way more hardware, it&#x27;s also that Windows is very anachronistic and backwards-compatible in comparison to macOS. Their OS has a lot of baggage, which makes porting difficult but makes customers (especially corporate ones) happy. You can still run plenty of NT programs built in the 90s on Windows 11, while macOS will be happy to obsolete some piece of software after only a few years. This is also what leads to the whole UI inconsistency thing - the reason why you can still get the NT 3.5 dialogue boxes is because Windows has an immeasurable amount of stuff packed into it.<p>But to be fair, Apple has also been slipping in the UI department a bit - it&#x27;s always jarring to see programs have different title bar button sizes (and title bar sizes themselves), as if it&#x27;s not standardized. Also, their stubbornness to stick to the whole &quot;workspaces, not windows&quot; paradigm from the 90s makes macOS extra annoying to use.

IMHO, legacy code and backward compatibility.<p>Apple users are forced to update so that stuff keeps running smoothly, now, try to tell a Windows 11 user that he can no longer run that piece of historical software that was so cool in Windows 95 ;)<p>Besides that, no Windows version was fully developed from scratch, all of them still have legacy code bloating around.

So many factors concur. - Windows still has 2x the market of Apple in the US only. - Windows has lots of legacy code and architecture to maintain. - Apple users are acquainted with a learning curve, while Windows users are prone, they just want features, not quality. - Apple prices are A LOT HIGHER, if not double or triple, especially for non-US buyers. - Custom hardware makes it much easier to avoid pure bugs, because hardware predictability is a good thing for software reliability.

They have a team of 10K+ developers but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to make great software. I think you need to remember they take their time to release things and don’t rush. So maybe the software you use today was 3 years in the making.<p>You don’t need pixel perfect software, it’s all about how it works and the problems it solves for the end customer.

iOS is generally more efficient than Android due to ARC, AOT compilation and the way it aggressively manages apps.

I’m sure fewer hardware choices is a huge factor.<p>I’m also not wholly convinced they do better software. There are <i>some</i> things that are better, but having been a True Believer in the past, and having left…<p>I can tell you that from my own experience, the software quality is nowhere near what it was 10+ years ago.<p>The butterfly keyboards were the final straw for me. The attitude of Apple at shoveling that crap out the door, and gaslighting their user base with the usual “a small number of users have experienced this issue” bullshit… I was done.<p>iOS is good. macOS is shit.<p>They force feed you their drivel, and by God, you’ll love it.<p>Oh yeah, and you’ll preach the Apple gospel while you’re at it.

UX wise:<p>Excel &gt; Numbers<p>Powershell &gt; zsh<p>Explorer &gt; Finder