Death by a Thousand Cuts

Craig Hockenberry, on Marco Arment's piece that exploded all over the news earlier this week:

The reasons Marco’s piece got a lot of initial attention was because the basic message resonated with a lot of people in our community. But as usual, idiots with ulterior motives twisted the original message to suit their own purposes.

The good news is that none of the problems us geeks are seeing are show stoppers. We’re not complaining about software quality because things are completely broken. There’s still a lot to love about OS X and iOS.

But this good news is also bad news. Our concerns come from seeing the start of something pernicious: our beloved platform is becoming harder to use because of a lot of small software failures.

Craig is spot on here. The discontent arises from a slow creep of bugs, not some epoch of crippled software. iOS and OS X still function, they just aren't as solid as they've been in the past, and if the current trend isn't routed they will continue to degrade further.

Apple is trapped between a rock and a hard place. If they slow down to patch the bugs they will be eviscerated by the media, feeding the same Apple-is-doomed pundits that just devoured Marco's piece. If they don't, the current bugs will fester as new ones join them, and both platforms will continue to chip away at the longstanding ideal that Apple's products, unlike those of their competitors, “just work.”