Monterey, iOS and iPadOS 15.1, tvOS 15.1, WatchOS 8.1 released

[OtinG]

Apple released the following updates today:

• macOS Monterey
• iOS 15.1
• iPadOS 15.1
• tvOS 15.1
• WatchOS 8.1

[OtinG]

Just installed tvOS 15.1. Will test out today, but not much new was added other than for SharePlay support, as well as HomePod 15.1 Software with Lossless and Dolby Atmos support.

I did experience the typical remote 2021 lag after the update. I think it takes a few minutes after an update before the remote 2021 reconnects with the ATV 4K.

[OtinG]

I’m currently installing iOS 15.1 on my iPhone XR. Will test it out today.

I’m sticking with iPadOS 14.8 on my iPads though.

[tomsem]

Updated pretty much everything, except for one of our iMacs.

[pwalker8]

Monterey will likely be the last supported version for my 2015 27 inch iMac. Right now, I have no plans to upgrade to Monterey, instead, I will likely downgrade it to Sierra and use it as a media server when the new macs come out, probably next Spring. I would be very surprised if the Drobo drivers were upgraded for Monterey.

I was running the Monterey beta on my 2018 macbook pro. Went ahead and updated everything else to the latest and greatest. No real issues that I've noticed. For me, the big reason for updating to the latest and greatest is to stay current on the security fixes.

[OtinG]

Big Sur was the last update my MacBook Pro 2014 was eligible for, but I still have Mojave running on it so I can run a few older 32-bit apps. So no more OS updates for my two old Macs, except for security updates.

So far no issues with iOS 15.1 or tvOS 15.1 since I updated yesterday. I'm going to skip iPadOS 15 unless they fix the new Home page layout issues and the issues with the changes to Safari tabs and the bookmarks sidebar. I think I read that 15.1 reversed some of the Safari updates due to user reactions.

[OtinG]

Apple is already beta testing the 15.2 versions of iThingies OSes and the 12.1 of macOS. That is a lot of major updates for newly released OSes. I still believe they must have taken a huge hit in productivity due to the pandemic causing developers to work from home. Too many distractions I guess. At any rate the bug counts were off the chart and several promised features were not ready for the initial releases.

That is a shame too. I had always advocated for more work-at-home opportunities to help lesson the transportation impact on the environment. But it looks like this accidental experiment in same was a failure, at least in the tech industry. Looks like they are going to have to go back to chaining people to their desks. Maybe in the future new management techniques will be developed for work-at-home employees to ensure work gets done and the quality is top notch. I also noticed that school-at-home in my location was pretty much a failure too. Again, perhaps they can develop better management techniques to ensure the kids are actually studying, the teachers are actually teaching, and the kids are getting the educational attention they need.

Oh well, no discipline equals a major failure. Figure out how to retain discipline and maybe it will work better in the future. It would certainly be beneficial not to have to cram employees into overcrowded geographical locations near work centers and let them work from home, even half way around the globe.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by OtinG

Apple is already beta testing the 15.2 versions of iThingies OSes and the 12.1 of macOS. That is a lot of major updates for newly released OSes. I still believe they must have taken a huge hit in productivity due to the pandemic causing developers to work from home. Too many distractions I guess. At any rate the bug counts were off the chart and several promised features were not ready for the initial releases.

That is a shame too. I had always advocated for more work-at-home opportunities to help lesson the transportation impact on the environment. But it looks like this accidental experiment in same was a failure, at least in the tech industry. Looks like they are going to have to go back to chaining people to their desks. Maybe in the future new management techniques will be developed for work-at-home employees to ensure work gets done and the quality is top notch. I also noticed that school-at-home in my location was pretty much a failure too. Again, perhaps they can develop better management techniques to ensure the kids are actually studying, the teachers are actually teaching, and the kids are getting the educational attention they need.

Oh well, no discipline equals a major failure. Figure out how to retain discipline and maybe it will work better in the future. It would certainly be beneficial not to have to cram employees into overcrowded geographical locations near work centers and let them work from home, even half way around the globe.

As a developer, good developers rarely need to have managers cracking the whip over them. If you have developers who can't work from home, then odds are pretty good they aren't very productive at the office either.

I doubt the issue is work from home, I suspect the issue is more a lack of corporate focus on quality and fixing bugs and too much focus on adding as many cool new features as possible. I also suspect there is a lack of overall vision on what they want to accomplish. A lot of the old guard is gone at Apple, and I don't know that anyone has stepped up to take their place.

Watching the last two major OS releases, I really don't know what they are trying to do. From a UI point of view, things work differently and have different capabilities depending on which platform you are on. Features that are not part of whatever the buzz is about at a given time are poorly supported and bugs are frequently ignored.

Let me give an example. When I bring up the AppleTV app on my iMac, it has a bunch of playlists, none of which have anything to do with AppleTV. Rather they are the old playlist from iTunes. I can add movies to a playlist, but those playlist don't show up on my iPhone, iPad or AppleTV device. Not terribly useful. The way Apple handles audiobooks and music have similar issues.

[OtinG]

Well I respectfully disagree. Just because you did your job well from home doesn’t mean others did too. I’ve seen the way many people worked from home during the pandemic, and work is not the word I would use. Some workers do have better discipline, but many don’t. I think there is a reason Apple is trying to corral their employees back into the office. And certainly there is no getting around the extraordinarily larger than usual number of bugs and the inability to get promised software features added before the deadlines of releases. Apple really screwed the pooch this year in OS development. So there is definitely a major issue that needs to be dealt with.

Granted with the pandemic many workers were also at home with SOs and kids as well, but there will always be interruptions regardless. Same with home school attendance. Plenty of interruptions and too little attention from teachers caused a huge drop in test scores in many of the area schools.

[tomsem]

iOS 15.1 was primarily to deliver SharePlay, not to fix issues. Same with macOS 12.1. Of course those will also deliver bug fixes. Then it is on to the next beta. I don’t think the quality issues are anything out of the ordinary, at least I have not run into anything I could attribute to the update in question.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by OtinG

Well I respectfully disagree. Just because you did your job well from home doesn’t mean others did too. I’ve seen the way many people worked from home during the pandemic, and work is not the word I would use. Some workers do have better discipline, but many don’t. I think there is a reason Apple is trying to corral their employees back into the office. And certainly there is no getting around the extraordinarily larger than usual number of bugs and the inability to get promised software features added before the deadlines of releases. Apple really screwed the pooch this year in OS development. So there is definitely a major issue that needs to be dealt with.

Granted with the pandemic many workers were also at home with SOs and kids as well, but there will always be interruptions regardless. Same with home school attendance. Plenty of interruptions and too little attention from teachers caused a huge drop in test scores in many of the area schools.

I'm not talking just about me, I'm talking about the various people I've worked with over the years. I've been doing work from home off and on since the late 80's. You either get your work done or you don't and everyone in the work group knows who isn't getting their work done.

I don't think you understand life for IT workers in Corporate America. There is rarely anyone standing over your shoulder cracking the whip. It's very easy for a worker to skate by doing the minimum. Everyone knows who is doing that, but the manager is too busy going to meetings with other manager and usually there are a couple of guys doing 90 percent of the work so the work gets done.

Yea, there is a reason that Apple (and many other companies) want workers to come back to the office. That's what they are use to and they equate fannies in the seats with work getting done. Of course, that's not really what happens. You can goof off in the office just as easy as you can at home. As long as you have that 10 percent doing 90 percent of the work, work gets done. I knew a guy who ran is real estate company from his cubical. Everyone knew what was going on because everyone around him heard him on the phone. But they had a contractor doing the real work and the customer was happy with the contractor.

Things like bugs and features not being right is a management issue, not a worker issue. It indicates that management is not focused on the right stuff. I've seen it happen in a lot of companies over the years and it's never because the worker bees are goofing off.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about my dealings with Apple. I had been using Books on CarPlay to listen to audiobooks in the car. One release categories disappeared from Car Play. It was still in Books on the phone, but you could access it via CarPlay anymore. I called in and reported the problem. I talked with their support staff several time. They had me load a tracer program on my phone, plug it into the car and send them the log of what happened. About a month later, customer service called me back and told me the developer said that is the way it was suppose to work. Yea, right. The developer screwed up, and since they were already working on the next release, he was busy on other stuff and didn't want to be bothered. It's still not fixed. This was before the pandemic. What we have seen since the pandemic is just business as usual.