Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall with the Macbook Pro Keyboard
Having interfaced with Apple in a different way (apart from owning a new MBP and an iPhone X) I&#x27;d say the issue is, and continues to be, growing pains.<p>They&#x27;re certainly losing the lead in software engineer talent (giving it away to whom, I&#x27;m not sure). But the single most horrible experience I&#x27;ve had with Apple in the last year was trying to get software published on the App Store.<p>That&#x27;s a department that&#x27;s so large that it&#x27;s become a classic bureaucracy -- middle managers run amok, pettiness, lack of professionalism, etc.<p>I was trying to publish a piece of software using their less extortionate subscription options and I was told by a young woman manager that I would have to have feature X in order to qualify. I added feature X in a couple days and got back to her. She was surprised (disappointed?) and then told me I&#x27;d have to have feature X + feature Y in order to qualify.<p>I have a couple of contacts from the &quot;good old days&quot; and sent a very angry email. Middle manager woman disappeared, her boss called me and apologized within a few minutes.<p>If I didn&#x27;t have that contact I probably wouldn&#x27;t have gotten past her.<p>What has happened to Apple that their dev teams work <i>against</i> devs, compile times (this is 2018 remember) are now counted in minutes for small projects, my MBP crashes when plugging in an external monitor, etc?<p>They&#x27;ve grown too fast. My contact told me that their App Store team is now interfacing with over 2 million developers. How do you grow to accommodate that?<p>Now, what is the <i>answer</i> to all of this? Fix the marketing driven culture. Thinner isn&#x27;t better. The number of apps on the app store isn&#x27;t a meaningful metric. New languages are cool only if you can actually pull them off. Etc.