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Apple Inc. is overhauling how it tests software after a swarm of bugs marred the latest iPhone and iPad operating systems, according to people familiar with the shift.
The worst part is that anyone with any experience in these things knew testing was broken within Apple years ago. My first post on it with that tag was from 2015 (and it looks like I missed blogging about one of my favorite QA fails from that year). Worse, it wasn't limited to a single product. The QA fails were systemic.
Look, if I had a good idea testing was broken from outside of Apple over four years ago, why the heck couldn't they tell they needed to head off this disaster asap from inside the company?
The worst part is that this description from Bloomberg, if accurate, makes it sound like the push is for code-side fixes. I don't hear that they're going to hire quality QA engineers to better test -- manually and with automation -- those daily builds.
There's a push to make the daily builds testable, which they weren't before, but hiding unready code behind featuregates shows that Apple doesn't yet really understand code management or how continuous deployment is supposed to work.
Again, from Bloomberg:
Test software got so crammed with changes at different stages of development that the devices often became difficult to use. Because of this, some โtesters would go days without a livable build, so they wouldnโt really have a handle on whatโs working and not working,โ the person said.
I feel for them. If this happens, QA should be given the power to say that all new development must stop and the current build needs fixing. In the world of Scrum, you don't get your points (aka "say you're done with your work") until it's tested and approved. Sounds like QA isn't getting the opportunity to say no at Apple. That's broken.
The truth is that QA is exceptionally undervalued as a whole in our industry. As this disaster shows, QA testers (and quality engineers) are very nearly literally worth their weight in gold. At 200 lbs, one's worth $4.7 million at today's gold prices. Not that far from the mark for Apple.
I installed Catalina on a partition so I could play around with SwiftUI. I certainly like how clean the syntax is, and figured if this was the future of the AppleOSes (all of ’em), it might be a good time to break down, throw away the Xamarin, and learn Swift “for real”.
Problem is, though the tutorial on Lists in SwiftUI at Apple renders amazingly, it’s ultimately a pretty crappy intro that assumes that you’re already familiar with Swift. That might not be insanely unfair for most reading about SwiftUI, but it’s not super helpful to me. How do you set up reading from that local json file in a fresh project? What’s an underscore mean in these contexts? What’s the difference between private and fileprivate and is its use as anti-pattern as it looks?
This tutorial on Medium covers exactly the same material in a much more novice-friendly fashion, ending exactly at the same place. It might be improved if it had the slick rendering in the right column of Apple’s, but if I have to chose one tutorial over the other, it’s the one that starts slow and ramps up painfully deliberately over the flash-bang, everyone already understands most of this tutorial every time.
It is no secret that technology can be used for good or for ill. This case is no different. The app in question allowed for the crowdsourced reporting and mapping of police checkpoints, protest hotspots, and other information. On its own, this information is benign. However, over the past several days we received credible information, from the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau, as well as from users in Hong Kong, that the app was being used maliciously to target individual officers for violence and to victimize individuals and property where no police are present. This use put the app in violation of Hong Kong law. Similarly, widespread abuse clearly violates our โApp Storeโ guidelines barring personal harm.
We built the โApp Storeโ to be a safe and trusted place for every user. Itโs a responsibility that we take very seriously, and itโs one that we aim to preserve. National and international debates will outlive us all, and, while important, they do not govern the facts. In this case, we thoroughly reviewed them, and we believe this decision best protects our users.
Iโm looking forward to the removal of Facebook and Twitter from the App Store as well as the removal of Mail, Messages, and cellular calling service from iPhones.
It takes a courageous company to do this in the name of stopping violence. Congratulations, Apple.
(Look, I donโt know how the app is primarily used or where it belongs on the devil-angel meter. But from what little context I have, this was not a well-reasoned or convincing memo defending its removal.)
I donโt know why they moved this up, but if theyโre really shipping it on Tuesday, just five days from now, I donโt understand why theyโre releasing 13.0 at all. The iPhones 11 already have it installed, of course. But for upgrades I donโt see why Apple is releasing it.
The release with the 11 is perfect face saving. It's not like iOS 13 was skipped. But it's not worth it in bandwidth, user frustration, messaging, etc to release a version for five days. Madness.
The reason this is a fail is because there's apparently no process in place to skip the version. What world requires you to ship bad software when a fix is coming out of the pipe right behind it?
The contractor who spoke to The Guardian said that "the regularity of accidental triggers on the watch is incredibly high," and that some snippets were up to 30 seconds in length. Employees listening to Siri recordings are encouraged to report accidental activations as a technical problem, but aren't told to report about content.
This is completely believable, and gives the entire story some credence. My stupid watch is always shooting off Siri because I've bent my wrist back to pick up something or similar. Can't imagine what sorts of curses I've sent their way.
Question: Why did they think they needed to listen to "real" requests?
If I ran a company based on privacy, instead of listening in on 0.01% of users' calls to Siri, I'm getting thousands of my employees to dogfood Siri with on-premise iPhones and use those samples to make it better.
Believe me, Siri is still nascent enough you'll find plenty of issues to fix with just that. Just get it to the point that everyone working at Apple is Siri-ing through their days happily and you'll have a heck of a product.
But I’d forgotten one of the most important reasons I liked the older MBA model until just recently, when its paltry 128 gig SSD filled again and my usual cleaning and ruthless deletions still left me with a pretty full drive:
The 2017 MacBook Air has an upgradeable hard drive.
SSD prices from Apple are insane. I checked for both models of MacBook Air, as Apple still sells the 2017 version for $999. The upgrade from 128 gigs is the same for both: $200 for 256 and $400 for 512.
Sheesh.
Now I’ve seen just enough about the OWC SSD upgrades for the older MacBook Air like mine to make me a little wary of buying, but the prices can’t be beat. For “just the drive”, the prices are:
240 gigs: $113
480 gigs: $179
1000 gigs: $280
That is, I get to keep my 128 gig drive on the chance the new drive ever dies and I get to add a terabyte of storage to my MacBook for $280 (plus tax and $9 for the pentalobe screwdriver), $120 less than buying a MBA with 512 gigs from the stable – or, in this case, $420 less, since I bagged the MBA for $700, nearly $300 off of the same model’s current price on apple.com.
Apple, you crazy. I mean seriously, one extra user-accessible port – itself apparently just a quick hack on a normal m.2 port. WHY APPLE WHY?!! – adds tons of extra life to your old Macintosh. How much can soldering the hard drive directly to the board really save you on a unit? How much lost goodwill does that savings cost you later? Revenge of the Mezzanine slot, I suppose.
Though with butterfly-keyboard-gate, I guess the SSD is pretty low on the ole “cust-sat” worry list.
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