The Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back

Apple claims to have $4.7 bil­lion good­will in its Q2 of 2015 re­port. Roughly a 2% in­crease on its num­ber for its 2014 fiscal year. I ques­tion this given long­time in­flu­en­tial Apple users Marco Ar­ment and Craig Hock­en­berry seem­ingly har­bour­ing less good­will to­wards Apple of late. See their re­spect­ive pieces titled “Apple has lost the func­tional high ground” and “Death by a thou­sand cuts”. Craig Hock­en­berry said in an­other post lament­ing Apple’s soft­ware qual­ity de­cline “[…] we now have more em­pathy for the bull­shit that folks using Win­dows have suffered with for years.” This res­on­ated with me. I now feel a sense of power­less­ness using cur­rent Apple products (Watch in­cluded) which I have only ever felt be­fore when using Win­dows.

A re­cent dis­cov­ery I have made with Apple’s Health app—whose re­lease or lack thereof was an­other fiasco—is sig­ni­fic­ant for no other reason then it is the straw that broke the camel’s back. I can’t res­ist put­ting my pro­ver­bial pen to paper and adding my thoughts to the Apple qual­ity de­cline dis­course..

I re­cently star­ted re­cord­ing my weight using the Health app. My meas­ure­ments not being spaced reg­u­larly, led me to dis­cover a po­ten­tial mis­nomer in the in­ter­face. I will con­cede the pet­ti­ness of this com­plaint on its own, however when put into the above con­text, it be­trays the re­cent, sys­tem­atic and dis­ap­point­ing lack of scru­pu­lous­ness on Apple’s part. I am fairly cer­tain that my “daily av­er­age” weight is not 92.57 based on the data I entered into Health:

Let $A$ be the set of data points in the health app and $B$ be the set of dur­a­tions such that $B_i$ is the dur­a­tion between the date of meas­ure­ment $A_i$ and the date of meas­ure­ment $A_{i+1}$. Apple’s “daily av­er­age” is simply:

The cor­rect daily av­er­age ad­jus­ted for the time between meas­ure­ments is:

I copied the num­bers into Google Sheets as Num­bers doesn’t sup­port time series chart (sigh) to help il­lus­trate the dif­fer­ence. It should be visu­ally clear that the weighted av­er­age is closer to the middle of the long down­wards slope, and there­fore closer to the true over­all daily av­er­age.

This mis­take, al­beit re­l­at­ively small, is one that I would not ex­pect from tal­en­ted en­gin­eers. This has me won­der­ing if Apple’s qual­ity as­sur­ance (QA) woes of late stem not from poor QA, but from poor en­gin­eer­ing. The above has me con­cerned that it is the lat­ter, a far more ser­i­ous issue for Apple as it be­trays ser­i­ous tal­ent re­ten­tion prob­lem, which could take years to put right.

I won the lot­tery this year and will be going to WWDC in June. I hope Apple will im­press us and turn things around. If not, I may well be at­tend­ing Google IO in 2016.

This art­icle has been altered since its ori­ginal re­lease on 7 May 2015:

• A para­graph about my re­cent ex­cel­lent ex­per­i­ence up­dat­ing my Nexus 4 to An­droid Lol­li­pop has been re­moved as it de­trac­ted from the main issue.
• A con­clu­sion has been added.