Apple’s declining software quality
This has to be a management problem. Apple has total control over the hardware, total control over third party developers, and $203 billion in cash. What are they doing wrong?<p>Apple has the resources to approach software like aerospace. Formal interface specs, heavy Q&#x2F;A, tough regression tests, formal methods.  It&#x27;s expensive, but Apple ships so many copies that the cost per unit is insignificant.<p>Microsoft did that, starting with Windows 7. Two things made Windows 7 stable. The first was the Static Driver Verifier, which examines driver source code to check if there&#x27;s any way it can crash the rest of the OS. This includes buffer overflows.  The driver may not work, but it won&#x27;t take the rest of the kernel down with it. All signed drivers have passed the Static Driver Verifier, which anyone can run. Driver-caused crashes stopped being a big problem.<p>With the driver problem out of the way, any remaining kernel crashes were clearly Microsoft&#x27;s fault. (This has the nice problem that kernel bugs could no longer be blamed on third party drivers.)  Microsoft had a classifier system developed which tries to group similar crash reports together and send the group to the same developer.  It&#x27;s hard to ignore a bug when a thousand reports of crashes from the same bug have been grouped together.<p>That&#x27;s part of how Microsoft finally got a handle on their software products.  Is Apple doing anything like this?