Grade: B- (average score: 3.4, median score 4, last year: 3.5)
After a few years of yo-yoing between good and bad scores, Apple managed a second straight year of largely positive comments from our panel. Not that a B- is a grade to get excited about, especially compared to the praise for Apple’s hardware, but it’s a second year of positivity from a group that generally can’t maintain enthusiasm about software quality for more than a year at a time.
Tom Bridge said, “macOS Monterey is an incremental improvement, but there’s a long way to go here. Apple only just expanded bike directions for Maps beyond a few core cities, and they have a long way to go to bring the Maps experience to an appropriate level of experience everywhere they promise it. Overall, the Mac’s software is aging poorly. Calendar, Mail and Contacts remain stuck in a much earlier, much less interesting world of personal information management. Mail cannot scale to meet the needs of modern mail experiences, and that’s, frankly, a bit criminal in this world. While Monterey is an improvement over Big Sur — especially for organizations that support Macs at scale as part of business environments — there’s a long way for Apple to go. It feels as if the bold Apple is gone, and it’s replaced by a meek Apple, afraid of making big strides.”
Charles Arthur said, “iOS and macOS were solid updates. But iPadOS still lags, making some things either impossible or too much work to do, and drives one back to the Mac.”
Brent Simmons said, “When that app that I write crashes, it’s due to Apple’s crashing bugs. I’d really like better software reliability.”
John Siracusa said, “Though Apple did a good job of not introducing any new egregious bugs in 2021, there’s still a giant backlog of old bugs waiting to be addressed. I applaud Apple’s new policy of holding back new features if they’re not yet up to snuff, but that can’t be the only tool for increasing software quality. At some point, Apple has to look at its existing products holistically and fix everything that’s preventing them from doing their job—even issues that are ‘preexisting’ and ‘not a regression.’”
Peter Cohen said, “Especially high marks for efficiency and invisibility of Rosetta 2.”
Rosemary Orchard said, “I have been quite disappointed by the iOS 15 rollout. It was still very buggy when it launched publicly, and this was only saved by the fact that it didn’t auto install for most people. Shortcuts, in particular, clearly needs extra support – the team have done amazing things, but the apparent lack of testing and continuous breaking of both automations and actions within Shortcuts, and no magic of handling unsupported actions on another device (e.g. Vibration on Mac could just be skipped) or attempt to do so, results in a poor experience for those of us who use it—and is offputting to anyone who attempts to use it and them immediately encounters a bug.”
Shelly Brisbin said, “It’s not that iOS 15 was unspeakably buggy, but a combination of new features that didn’t launch when or how they were advertised, and a few odd bugs and feature changes in the accessibility suite got my attention. Private Relay was delayed, and still doesn’t seem to work in some cases. On the accessibility side, though they’re back in 15.2, iOS 15 initially did away with a number of Siri commands that VoiceOver users relied on to manage phone call and voicemail behavior. Then Apple didn’t address the issue for some time.”
Allison Sheridan said, “An unsung hero of macOS is Continuity. The enhancements made with macOS Monterey and iOS 15 to capture text are a game changer. Adding that to copy and paste between OSs and it’s an extremely powerful productivity enhancement. I find myself using these tools constantly and would feel impaired without them.”
Casey Liss said, “I don’t feel like I’m actively fighting Apple software all the time — excepting iPad multitasking — but I do still miss the days of the late aughts and early 2010s when things really did just work. In much the same way Google lost its way on ‘Don’t be evil,’ I think Apple has largely lost its way on ‘It just works.’ Things don’t just work anymore.”
Brian Mattucci said, “Mostly good, but I’ve had some buggy experiences especially involving the Apple TV remote in Control Center, which I’ve always found to be slower and less reliable than the Apple TV app that is no longer available.”
Michael Tsai said, “iOS software quality seems OK. Monterey introduced fewer new problems than other recent upgrades. However, the baseline level of macOS bugginess remains very high. The bundled media apps are not very good. SwiftUI still seems unready for desktop apps.”
John Gruber said, “If we’re talking bugs and glitches, I think Apple is doing very well. But Apple’s software design is starting to scare the hell out of me. Look no further than this summer’s Safari tabs saga, across all three platforms. Perhaps it’s still true that all’s well that ends well, but I find it deeply troubling that these Safari UI redesigns ever made it past the whiteboard stage. And what the hell is going on with Shortcuts for Mac? Functionally it’s pretty good but design-wise it looks like it was made by people who have never used a Mac.”
Gabe Weatherhead said, “macOS Monterey was a big disappointment for me. Shortcuts on macOS is bad. I regularly have to reboot my M1 MacBook Pro because the trackpad stops recognizing multi-touch. The menu bar does not seem to know about the MacBook Pro Notch. It just feels like these teams are not coordinating and there are too many product managers in the kitchen. I wish it felt more consistent across devices and overall I wish it was more reliable.”
Benjamin Mayo said, “The summer of Safari changes probably defined the year, but in credit to Apple, the problems were resolved before the redesign was shipped to end users. I know everyone has a different experience when it comes to software bugs, but I continue to be happy. I’ve had a relatively bug-free year across all the operating systems.”
Lex Friedman said, “iOS is exceptional. I use fewer of Apple’s default apps than ever, though. Safari and Messages: all day every day. But I don’t use Apple’s apps for Mail, Calendar, video chat, word processing, podcast listening, etc.”
Marco Arment said, “iOS 15 and watchOS 8 have been very high-quality releases. macOS Monterey is a quality regression from Big Sur, though.”
Dan Moren said, “Software quality feels better than last year, but it’s still mainly middling. At least iOS 15 and macOS Monterey have settled down after a few point releases.”
Zac Hall said, “iPadOS multitasking finally feels like it’s out of beta and ready for real use.”
Nick Heer said, “For years, there seems to have been a tick-tock cycle to Apple’s software cycle: some years are more feature-heavy, and some years are about quality and stability. This year felt like neither; more like engineers being pressured to deliver under extraordinary circumstances for the second year running. There were big problems: MacOS Monterey bricked some Macs, a software update overheated some models of HomePod to the point where they stopped working, Siri is still Siri, and Shortcuts shipped broken across all platforms. But there are little things that also do not work correctly that are as aggressively grating. On my Mac, every Quick Look preview flashes bright red. When I use CarPlay, audio sometimes doesn’t initiate and I have to reconnect my phone. Nine of the bugs I filed in 2021 were about scroll position not being maintained in several high-profile applications. Searching Maps still returns locations thousands of kilometres away, even when there is a matching result around the corner. Podcasts was a mess. From nearly every vendor, including Apple, it feels like users’ continued patronage is taken for granted. I wish it still felt like there was a fight for my business.”
Adam Engst said, “Apple’s operating systems are just doing too much, and they’re too complex to ever be really great in this way. That’s not to say that the problems are terrible, and Apple does fix things much of the time, but it feels as though we’ve entered an age where there will be constant small quirks and problems that will be difficult or impossible to pin down and that may just go away on their own. Which is good, but also annoying.”
Dave Mark said, “I’d like to see Apple take some time off from rolling out new features and dedicate a release cycle to fixing bugs, seeking and responding to feedback. I’d especially love to see some attention paid to cleaning the scams from the App Store.”
Dr. Drang said, “So many applications seem to drift along from year to year. I continue to think Apple needs to hire more programmers and fewer emoji designers.”
Rob Griffiths said, “The continued inability to fix longstanding bugs in the OS is really grating. And there’s seemingly less attention paid to details in the OS and bundled apps.”