>> Apple has proven over and over again that they're utter crap at online services.
> Yes. They only have the most successful online app and music store service on the planet.
> And one of the biggest backup online service (iCloud) too.
> Oh, and the most popular online computer shop.
> Utter crap indeed.
I really don't understand this argument. The quality of the code powering something is completely orthogonal to the amount of money said thing can generate. As long as the transaction goes through, money can be made. That doesn't mean that behind the scenes it's not a complete disaster.
>I really don't understand this argument. The quality of the code powering something is completely orthogonal to the amount of money said thing can generate. As long as the transaction goes through, money can be made. That doesn't mean that behind the scenes it's not a complete disaster.
Completely orthogonal my ass.
Where does any idea about the quality of code comes from? From an operational point of view, not only it WORKS, but it works in a CRAZY scale.
Hundrends of millions of customers with hundrends of millions of credit cards, serves multi-TB of stuff every day, handles music, video, apps, updates, etc. (Oh, and it's not even that which is down -- it's their developer portal).
So where does the ideas about the "quality of code" come from? Have you SEEN the code?
If not, we just have the "works, serves more than half-a-billion, at a Facebook like scale, with more credit cards than even Amazon" to go by.
Post a new app to the App Store. Poll various friends to see when they can actually access it. You can watch their database replication slowly happen in real time over the course of hours, as the app randomly appears for more and more people. People will often be able to access the app through a direct link but not through search for a few hours before everything synchronizes. You have to give it about twelve hours before you can reliably count on all users being able to access it.
Let's compare this to, for example, Google search. The scale on Google's end is much larger. What's worse, they're indexing external content that they have no control over. Despite these handicaps, they have no problem with rapid, coherent updates. More than once, I've typed up a reply to a comment like this, posted it, then hit up Google for some additional information and found my own comment posted just minutes ago among the top results.
Google, working with external data they don't control, serving vastly more requests of vastly more complexity, is able to provide coherent results within a few minutes, while Apple takes hours to roll out new data that you explicitly send them.
That kind of stuff is where ideas about code quality come from. No amount of "but they make lots of money and are popular" can counter this.
I would say that while you're correct about Google being faster the reasons are probably less obvious.
Whereas Google is going for absolute fastest delivery of content, Apple is trying to deliver a full ACID database system with guarantees their licensing vendors will sign off on. This likely means massive replication and it likely means that Apple is enforcing a lot of service guarantees to ensure these are atomic transactions.
On the other hand, Google just really wants you to have blisteringly fast load times. Different problem domain in my opinion. One is an index with few guarantees necessary, the other would not be obliged to sell you content if one of its guarantees failed. Different strokes for different folks.
Granted Apple could be faster, but I don't think it's fair to compare their propagation to Google's.
I don't understand. Apple needs to make a lot more guarantees about integrity and atomicity, which is why their data integrity sucks and their transactions are not atomic?
I could kind of sort of understand if apps took twelve hours to show up on the store, in general. But no, they take twelve hours overall to show up after a long period of bizarre, inconsistent rollout.
The speed difference is much less important than the fact that Apple presents its users with a wildly inconsistent view of their database for any recent changes for a period of hours. Of course, updating changes quickly would be one way to fix this, but the speed is not in itself the problem.
If it manages to push 1 billion apps and 1 trillion notifications, billions of songs, TB of video and such, with no major complaints other than "it takes 12 hours for an app to appear for everyone" that's doing great in my book.
Well, it seems we come down to a pure difference of opinion. We appear to agree completely on the facts, I just happen to think those facts means their operation is fairly poor, while you think it's great. So, we can't do much now but move on....
The standard car's internal combustion engine works at a crazy scale, however it still dumps over half of the energy of the fuel as heat through the radiator. Things can work pretty badly and still scale.
If we're going with cars, it's more like say, 1960s British cars. Amazing industrial design, good engines and overall performance, etc., but crap electrical systems compared to other companies of the time -- yet people bought them because the overall package was still good, often largely due to how amazing the E-Type looked. Saying "the Jaguar electrical system sucks; for a company who makes such amazing products it's an embarrassment" was perfectly true, even if you still buy a Jaguar (along with lots of other people).
(although I think it was mainly other British marques who had horrible electrical systems at the time, and was more a 1950s thing)
We know what frameworks and other tools they use. Those suck (which is a personal evaluation, sure, but the marketplace has pretty much validated my opinion on this). The performance/feature characteristics visible to the end user also suck.
Apple's developer and support forums are pretty worthless compared to other vendors. A lot of information is missing or hidden, and finding anything worthwhile requires a lot more clicks than finding something at Google.
>We know what frameworks and other tools they use.
We only know about SOME of them (e.g WebObjects).
>Those suck (which is a personal evaluation, sure, but the marketplace has pretty much validated my opinion on this).
In the same way that the marketplace has validated DOS and then Windows over UNIX? Javascript over LISP? VHS over Betamax?
Actually, WebObjects was one of the finest web frameworks (including in it's Java incarnation). Sure, there are newer things now, but nothing extremely better. Not to mention even giants like Facebook and Yahoo use PHP for christ's sake. It was also one of the most popular in its range, when it was available. It just didn't make sense for Apple to participate in that market.
>The performance/feature characteristics visible to the end user also suck.
Compared to what? In the same scale? Never hard any real issue with ITMs (at least none that I didn't have with online services 1/10 it's size).
> Yes. They only have the most successful online app and music store service on the planet.
> And one of the biggest backup online service (iCloud) too.
> Oh, and the most popular online computer shop.
> Utter crap indeed.
I really don't understand this argument. The quality of the code powering something is completely orthogonal to the amount of money said thing can generate. As long as the transaction goes through, money can be made. That doesn't mean that behind the scenes it's not a complete disaster.