Not so long ago, Apple built its reputation on a simple promise: it just works. Today, it feels very different. Their latest OS releases, complete with the highly accessible molten glass UI for both Mac and iPhone, were shipped with unforgivable UI and UX bugs. With thousands of engineers, designers, and testers on a single product, you have to wonder — how are these not seen? What are all those people doing if not ensuring the basics work smoothly? I’m all for the notion of, “If it doesn’t ship, it doesn’t exist.” But shipping should never come at the expense of standards.
This isn’t just an Apple problem. Across the tech industry (especially SaaS), when companies face financial cuts, one of the first casualties is often the QA (Quality Assurance) team. Testing is absorbed by engineers, who already struggle with the demands of building features at speed. It’ll come as no shock that quality suffers. Products are pushed out with half-assed functionality, broken flows, unintuitive gestures, or regressions that frustrate the very people they’re meant to serve. Ultimately, trust suffers.
The irony is that small, non–VC-funded startups, who could be forgiven for missing a detail or two, often show more care than the giants. They have limited resources, yet often manage to get the mechanics right. Meanwhile, the companies with every resource at their disposal ship shitty software and shrug it off as iteration.
At the root of this is culture. VC-backed companies are told to ship at warp speed. Deadlines and growth matter more than refinement or stability. Engineers aren’t rewarded for preventing bugs; they’re rewarded for releasing feature upon feature. And design teams are caught in the same cycle: polish is a luxury, not a requirement. But I suppose when there’s little consequence, why care about first impressions at all?
Care has quietly slipped out of the holistic design process. The patience to test thoroughly, the pride in details, the discipline to say “not yet” or even ask “is this better than it was?” — these values are hard to find in a field of slop. The result is a landscape where even the biggest players can’t be trusted to release a stable product.
In a culture obsessed with speed, the real challenge isn’t how fast you can ship, but whether you can still ship with care and stay relevant.