John Siracusa

Yeah, that's I mean, that's not surprising, but it is sad. Like it is even in big companies with all the money in the world is difficult to allocate sufficient budget for testing and to maintain that budget because it's just a cost center. Those people never make anything right. And you can explain their value and how they're adding value to the product by making sure things don't break.

Yeah, that's I mean, that's not surprising, but it is sad. Like it is even in big companies with all the money in the world is difficult to allocate sufficient budget for testing and to maintain that budget because it's just a cost center. Those people never make anything right. And you can explain their value and how they're adding value to the product by making sure things don't break.

But eventually somebody somewhere is going to decide they are not convinced by that argument and they can save money on next year's budget by trimming just a little bit from all those engineers spending all that time working on tests. And it's annoying because every time something changes, they have to change the test. And it's like, why are we paying all the like?

But eventually somebody somewhere is going to decide they are not convinced by that argument and they can save money on next year's budget by trimming just a little bit from all those engineers spending all that time working on tests. And it's annoying because every time something changes, they have to change the test. And it's like, why are we paying all the like?

Very frequently, they'll look at like, here are the people we have making new features for our products. And here's how much we're paying for the people to test them. And they're like, why is that testing so much? Sometimes it's almost as much as you're paying for the products to make them. Sometimes it's even more if you have a complicated thing. And just people want to cut it.

Very frequently, they'll look at like, here are the people we have making new features for our products. And here's how much we're paying for the people to test them. And they're like, why is that testing so much? Sometimes it's almost as much as you're paying for the products to make them. Sometimes it's even more if you have a complicated thing. And just people want to cut it.

People want to say, we shouldn't be spending money on that. Can we slim that down? Could we cut the testing team in half and just have them work smarter and not harder? And that's how you end up in a situation where you have Apple with more money than they know what to do with.

People want to say, we shouldn't be spending money on that. Can we slim that down? Could we cut the testing team in half and just have them work smarter and not harder? And that's how you end up in a situation where you have Apple with more money than they know what to do with.

We just have incredibly insufficient testing, like so much worse testing than like open source projects run by volunteers, like on a percentage coverage basis, right? If the Unix conformance suite is like the only thing that is testing the command line tools.

We just have incredibly insufficient testing, like so much worse testing than like open source projects run by volunteers, like on a percentage coverage basis, right? If the Unix conformance suite is like the only thing that is testing the command line tools.

It's basically just saying, like, I hope nothing breaks, and those command line tools no one ever uses because we're not looking at them, and the fact that we have this automated test suite for the Unix compliance is the only thing that's ever going to find them because we're sure as heck not paying anybody to make sure that stuff doesn't break, which is why, over the course of decades, so many things break in macOS and other operating systems.

It's basically just saying, like, I hope nothing breaks, and those command line tools no one ever uses because we're not looking at them, and the fact that we have this automated test suite for the Unix compliance is the only thing that's ever going to find them because we're sure as heck not paying anybody to make sure that stuff doesn't break, which is why, over the course of decades, so many things break in macOS and other operating systems.

Maybe they pay enough people to do it in iOS, or maybe there's just fewer moving parts on iOS because it seems like iOS has less... breakage over time for less-used features. Even things like screen time, they were broken from day one, so that doesn't count. But on the Mac, just so many parts of the operating system, it's so clear that no one has looked at them for so long.

Maybe they pay enough people to do it in iOS, or maybe there's just fewer moving parts on iOS because it seems like iOS has less... breakage over time for less-used features. Even things like screen time, they were broken from day one, so that doesn't count. But on the Mac, just so many parts of the operating system, it's so clear that no one has looked at them for so long.

And they just slowly, you know, get ignored and fade into the background until all of a sudden they break. And the question is, how long does it take for someone to notice that they break? And then how long does it take to get them fixed? We just saw that with the disk cloning thing that SuperDuper relied on.

And they just slowly, you know, get ignored and fade into the background until all of a sudden they break. And the question is, how long does it take for someone to notice that they break? And then how long does it take to get them fixed? We just saw that with the disk cloning thing that SuperDuper relied on.

Not an obscure feature, like being able to make a bootable version of the operating system, but it's not something that Apple apparently tests anywhere or uses for anything that they care about. And so when it broke, it took, whatever, like three months to get a fix out the door. And they didn't even notice it broke until...

Not an obscure feature, like being able to make a bootable version of the operating system, but it's not something that Apple apparently tests anywhere or uses for anything that they care about. And so when it broke, it took, whatever, like three months to get a fix out the door. And they didn't even notice it broke until...

Well, they would have noticed if they had looked at the bug reports, but you know how that goes. They did file feedbacks. They did file feedbacks that those things were broken, but who's to say whether those feedbacks had any effect? We do know that the feedbacks were filed early in the beta process. That beta became a release. That release shipped.

Well, they would have noticed if they had looked at the bug reports, but you know how that goes. They did file feedbacks. They did file feedbacks that those things were broken, but who's to say whether those feedbacks had any effect? We do know that the feedbacks were filed early in the beta process. That beta became a release. That release shipped.