Marco Arment was the voice behind the Apple has lost the functional high ground blog post that has gone viral over the past few days.

With the benefit of hindsight, Marco updated his post with a link to What it’s like to be popular for a day:

You might think this is a dream come true for a blogger, but it’s horrible.

Instead, I looked back at what I wrote with regret, guilt, and embarrassment. The sensationalism was my fault — I started it with the headline and many poor word choices, which were overly harsh and extreme. I was being much nastier and more alarmist than I intended. I edited some words to be more fair and accurate, but it was too late. I can’t blame the opportunists for taking the bait that I hastily left for them.

Whether you agree with Marco’s post or not, there’s no doubt it started a lot of good conversation about the state of Apple software and, hopefully, it raised awareness within Apple of the growing perception that there are fit and finish issues.

I continue to feel the same love for Apple products. My sense is that the world came rushing to Apple’s door (when they had relegated Apple as a niche player for such a long time) and pushed them into a new role, that of a world leader. As the requirements, demand, and pipeline grew, Apple had to grow rapidly to fill this new role. A tough adjustment for anyone to make.

At the same time, Apple was in a brand new kind of horse race, with Android and Samsung. The kind of horse race that rewards quick reactions and short term thinking and brings about feature cram. Tough to resist. Feature cram places incredible stress on testing and QA, especially when the calendar drives the release schedule (as opposed to, “we’ll ship when it passes all its tests”).

When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, one of the first things he did was simplify the product line. Whatever his intent, this ended up reducing the demands on QA and testing, giving them more bandwidth to do their jobs right.

Not sure if simplifying is the right answer here, but I can only imagine that the best minds at Apple are working on this problem.