I've been meaning to try Branch with you both. And Arment's post about Apple sucking up is a perfect piece to try with.

Increasingly, I too find that Apple products "don’t 'just work' nearly as often as they used to." It's not that the quality has gone down, but that market demands products that must utilize big data, cloud computing, and social, and Apple sucks at them.

Siri sucks compared to Google's voice rec. iTunes Match is a complete shit show, and Messages is unreliable. We all know about Apple Maps. The last great OS release was Snow Leopard, and since then the things they've added are features I never use.

Thoughts?

yea, i agree. but on the flip side, they are still killing it in general with design and aesthetic. i still feel like some of the best apps come out on apple first (and android later, if at all).

apple doesnt do server/cloud technology well, and the stuff they are getting into needs this. maps has huge server investment on our side (see the atlantic article on how google builds maps). voice search is the same.

Few people seems to think that apple's problem is scalability, I think they have all the talents and money to build a well engineered, fully-scalable architecture, part of their problem is a coherent approach to the cloud; iMessage, iTunes Match, iCloud storage are all over the place and kinda of set apart from their social efforts (twitter, Facebook, google+)