If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter
macworld.com
macworld.com
When handed what must be a mountain of bugs and unfinished items, why the hell did they prioritize things like breaking notifications and Safari tabs, for instance? They’re in a position where engineering resources desperately need to be closing gaps, not creating huge new ones.
There seems to be a prioritization problem at the very least. Which I get, on some level who wants to work on the broken things? But if they threw some money at this they could fix it.
Somehow Apple took a UX flow that was fine and made something that regularly makes me feel stupid because I don't understand what I'm supposed to do to make it behave in a way that makes sense.
Notifications are such a simple thing, but they somehow made them complex.
Yeah, same here.
In light of a grandchild comment to this one about notification center on iPhone, I'll offer that on Mac you can do a two-finger swipe from the right side of the touch pad to get notification center. It doesn't have search, but they are grouped in stacks chronologically. There is no default hotkey, but you can set one in system settings.
Yes, been about six months.
It’s the sort of software apple makes when they’re at their best. Much better than the built in podcast app.
Play #27 of Show, then #26, and after playing #26, it will automatically choose to go on with #27 again.
One annoying bug: if you switch to a different podcast sometimes, even when the new podcast starts playing, it continues to show the cover art of the previous podcast for a while. Super annoying.
What’s even more frustrating is how buggy streaming music to a HomePod mini is.
Even though I’m the only person in my household using it, I frequently get errors that I can’t play something because someone else is playing something, which turns out to be something I played a while ago.
Things seemed better before the latest HomePod software upgrade…
They ignore them. Red dot? Ignore. Blinking red dot jumping in the docker? They live with it. They say macOS is terrible because it has red dots, sometimes worse than Windows. One is colorblind which helps, but really, they got used to Windows nagging them, Youtube nagging them, websites where the cookie banner and the consent form. They try to deactivate as many notifications as they can, but they tend to avoid the cross itself, or they avoid clicking on the Slack icon to remove the dot. They just let it jump on the sidebar.
The only thing I’ve learned about dealing with these new notification types is that you can hover over them and swipe left to right to dismiss them. Unfortunately the notification will reappear sometimes. It seems like this happens for calendar notifications but not Messages notifications.
Anyone else have tips for how to deal with this? In ready to turn off notifications completely, which is unfortunate because I like to have calendar notifications (but only once).
* Select a desktop (even this is questionable as an action) * Re-arrange a desktop * Add a desktop * Remove a desktop
----
Nearly all of the time, I want to remove a desktop because I have too many of them.
I would expect a sane UI where the X button is always shown _and_ deleting a desktop results in a new X in the exact same spot (so I can quickly close multiple desktops).
Instead, I have to hover to reveal the x, click it. Everything then shifts to a magic new location where I have to repeat hover, find X, click it.
Drives me up the wall.
Before they were an annoyance; but now they’re just utterly baffling to me. I have no idea what I’m supposed to click half the time and they seem to come back randomly for me too.
Ideally, the notifications should have two very simple views: a linear list by time, a grouped-by-application list and the ability to mark and sweep them away.
Or maybe at the most, an archive all notifications sweep that you can re-open if you remember that you wanted to see an old notification.
My biggest pet peeve right now is that my iPhone bongs when charging. Not when the charger is plugged or unplugged (its a different sound). It seems to happen when the charge passes 20% and then again when it passes 80%. But there is never a notification on screen, just a sound. Googling for this is impossible, since you wind up with a million questions about the sound the phone makes when a charger is plugged in.
On the other hand, developers (and specifically, ones with engagement KPIs) want as disposable notifications as possible.
At 80% iOS notifies that it is charged enough, so you can unplug if you want to avoid supercharging it.
If you’re manually dismissing every notification, consider going to your System Preferences and changing the notification type for those apps.
> all my notifications are still there for some reason and I have to clear them again, only this time they are in groups and I have to clear multiple groups.
Last I checked notifications over a week old are auto-cleared, so ignore the cleanup and only open Notification Centre when you need to check on a previous notification.
I usually swipe notifications away. Then forget about them. Lock the screen and go „ah, damn.“
But obviously, this shouldn‘t be forced on normal people.
Apple has lost what they had.
I have never been a big fan of Apple's software, but I must say that this is not just an Apple problem, it's a software industry problem.
The amount of software I use daily that has actually improved in the last 5 years as opposed to getting worse is getting frustratingly low as the years go on.
I have just upgraded to the latest version of Android and pretty much every UX change is worse than what it used to be, and I've felt the same way since 3 or 4 versions ago. Same with Windows, Spotify, YouTube, FB, Twitter, even Google search has gone downhill (not being able to get to the source image from an image search; although apparently that was due to a legal compliance reason).
We have come to a point where we have large companies employing thousands of people who need a purpose. Engineers re-writing the app in the most fashionable language/framework, designers deciding the UI isn't "fresh" anymore, PMs on a crusade to "simplify" the experience by removing features. These changes happen so frequently that the software barely has a chance to live up to its prior version before the next change happens.
Fix your bugs. There are plenty. It’s not that they have no purpose. They want to add things to their resume so the next place will give them a pay bump or get that promotion.
If your strategy was to hop around between jobs every 12+ months or climb the ladder, would you bother making things better? You’ll be gone soon and it will be the next persons problem.
Because they aren't building UIs to be useful for pleasant for users anymore. Once these data-driven companies have enough users locked in, they begin optimizing the user interface to manipulate user behavior for profit. They shift from helping you do what you want to manipulating you into doing what they want you to do.
It's actually gotten so bad that open source software with it's notoriously unpolished interfaces is actually starting to be the better, more useful and more aesthetic option, without having improved much at all.
I realize it's still actually possible to get Spotify to do what I want, but that stuff is increasingly buried beneath dark patterns.
Surely if some company focussed on making software that puts the user at the centre they'd be able to carve out a pretty decent niche for them.
Sadly if they we're a public company their investors would probably be unhappy because they'd be sacrificing the all important "growth", but a private company might be able to get away with it.
It gets people (in your example, designers, but the same organizational disease affects engineers and product managers too) promoted. Perhaps somebody got promoted this cycle for "making a decent UI", but you're not gonna get promoted next cycle for "sticking to it".
And managers get promoted by "growing" teams to build stuff.
When performance and promotion criteria incentivize "having impact", which is understood to mean "launching stuff", this is what results. It's a analog of "teaching to the test" [0], or a special case of "gaming the metrics" [1] or "you are what you measure" [2]. I don't know if there's a term for the general phenomenon.
I agree it sucks, but while I'm invoking cliches, I should remind myself: don't hate the player(s), hate the game.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test
I'd say more that they keep people relevant, particularly architects and CTOs. You can't go in front of the board and say "Everything is great and we're keeping it just the same!" You can't say that in front of the CEO, you can't say that in front of the investors. You have to keep selling the idea that Big Changes Are Coming and Our Userbase Will Increase.
So you add bloat that nobody wanted and credit anything good that happens to it.
I work for a company based in a foreign land and while there are downsides, one of my biggest reliefs was to find that there is very little interest in 'change for the sake of change'.
The biggest benefit is you get a literal timeline that's unmanipulated by promoted tweets. I have no idea how anyone does anything remotely useful with the native twitter UI.
Twitter is great when it serves its purpose of being a 140 char log of people that matter.
This is a good change -- it makes Safari much easier to use on iPhones with current screen sizes. But then they said "okay, we're making one big change to Safari... let's see if there's any other changes we can roll in, since we're making people learn new UI anyway". So they made all those other changes to how tabs behave in iOS Safari. And then kept on going and updated iPadOS Safari and MacOS Safari -- gets them a whole "we're improving Safari this year" slide in the keynote, etc etc etc.
...and then, to their credit, they listened to beta feedback and rolled back most of the poorly considered UI changes.
So much of whats wrong with modern SWE right here in this sentence
I love working on broken things just as much as working on new things. Sometimes the reason something is broken is because it was a difficult problem. I love those difficult problems.
Hooked up a Western Digital external drive that I had used on previous Macs and launched Time Machine. And that's when it started. Time Machine presented what seemed like a stack of Finder windows in the middle, a timeline with hash marks on the right-side and the only button highlighted was the "Cancel".
No menu, no other actionable buttons, no right-click menu. Nothing. So after hitting various key combos and mouse buttons, I decided that my 30+ minutes trying to use Apple's built-in backup software to backup a few folders was better spent finding 3rd party software.
And that was another user experience fail in my opinion for Apple and any "total quality" experience.
And that's not even talking about Safari or XCode or Pages or Numbers or iBooks not syncing and so many others.
I've used it since 2013. Every time I've bought a new MBP, I simply use time machine to restore and my new one looks exactly like my old one. Never had an issue.
I find it far easier to use than Duplicity, Iron Mountain ConnectedBackup, or Carbonite, all of which I've used at other jobs. (All of those require fine-grained backup tweaking that requires a lot of diligence to check boxes and set policies, and then fuss with awkward dialogs when trying to recover... duplicity is so effing weird... Time Machine just works and the time scroll seems very clever compared to the other three.)
I'd be interested to hear your problem(s) with it?
To be fair, it's less insane in Monterey than it used to be. No wooshy space background, faster to launch, easier to scroll. But do we really need the "stacked window" view, for instance? Was that chosen originally because it's clearer than choosing a backup date from a dropdown menu, or was it chosen originally because we wanna look like we're using a sci-fi machine to GO BACK IN TIME woooo? I mean, we know the answer here, right?
Also, Time Machine is intended for full system backups, and using it for just a handful of folders not as easy as using it for everything.
The TM UI is solely about recovery. It backs up "everything" not on the "skip list". And out of the box it defaults to just the system drive (vs the system and external drives).
And that's an interesting facet here. This is a case of going in to a bookstore and scanning up and down the shelves and not finding what you want, and being frustrated, because you don't realize that you're simply in the wrong section. The TM UI in this case was frustrating because it had no options to do what the person wanted to do. And by design, it would not do what they wanted to do.
It's not a UI fault of TM per se, specifically this aspect of the TM experience. TM excels at full drive recovery, and recovering "a few, select" files. In the middle, it's not so good.
It's worked great for me. I've recovered from it several times, both entire systems and a few files. I use it solely on my main drive, and I use BackBlaze for the entirety of it all as a hat tip to offsite DR.
Over the years, I've lost a couple of TM volumes to strange corruption. Not that much of a crisis, I just reset it and start over.
But there’s still no good alternative to Apple’s old routers. I tried to buy a new router for gigabit internet last year, and the interfaces are so piss-poor and the performance so pathetic across the board that I ended up getting the last generation of Airport Extreme instead. I get 800ish down, 500ish up on wifi, so as far as I can tell I’m not missing out on anything aside from 6E, which my devices don’t support anyway.
I really hope Apple starts making routers with Apple Silicon soon. With incorporated Time Capsule backups, too. That’s the only way that they’ll stop neglecting the software.
I just replaced the previous generation of equipment in my partner's house (1920's plaster and lath construction) with a set of eero6s. A set of four gives full strength signal throughout the entire place (including the basement)s and all of the outside areas. (Not really that impressive though because it's a small lot.)
There's no drop at all as you wander from zone to zone.
I ended up getting a Linksys Velop MX8400C 2 pack from Costco for $230, since that was the lowest price I could find for something that did PPPoE login and could be hardwired together. I wanted the ability to do multiple VLANs via wireless like Meraki, but I could not find anything. Even the Meraki Go stuff does not do it.
This bit me and I've not fully recovered yet. I had some stuff backed up manually, but some stuff I just trusted to the time machine backups. Now that some of the backups are unrecoverable I only have easy access to the stuff I backed up manually. I'm interested in trying CCC, but part of the reason things went south for me was apparently due to closing my laptop mid backup to a network TM volume and I'm curious if CCC can handle that any better. Do you use CCC for network backups and have you ever had issues with it?
I have been super happy with CCC. I use it to back up my Macbooks to my NAS. Sometimes wired, sometimes wireless. And yes, it doesn't break when it gets interrupted. And their documentation is amazing. All the use cases and error cases are documented with solutions and everything.
I think I had two or three recoveries so far and have been happy with it. Even when it didn't work for some reason their documentation had workarounds.
At this point, my decision to use a particular piece of software or a specific feature within an OS/App/Website/etc based on perceived risk of that software being neglected.
Usually you can make this call based on features being added, but most of the time it's a gamble.
I stopped using Time Machine years ago when they started using hidden permissions on Time Machine backups that made it impossible to "garden" my family's backups on the network backup drive. Even as root, you couldn't delete old backups -- you had to log in to the particular user's computer to delete old backups.
And then they came out with APFS which didn't support the directory hardlinks which Apple invented and Time Machine depended on. WTF Apple?
You can no longer do that, AFAIK. Not even from the same user account or from root, since TM volumes are set by APFS as read-only except to Time Machine itself.
I had that problem repeatedly, but used the same backup drive with Monterey and it worked flawlessly, with better feedback (TM's menu gave a percentage on the pre-copy, "counting file changes" stage), so I was pleasantly surprised.
I gave up and wrote a Python script that calls Borg Backup. At least it's more customisable.
It took me a few hours just to install updates, remove bloatware (my oh my, the amount is staggering!) and fix privacy settings. And this was for Windows 10 which I hear is a mild version of a mess that Windows 11 is.
I was instantly reminded why I appreciate Apple software more.
2. Then there is another software called 10AppsManager (2) to remove further bloatware like Onedrive, Skype, etc.
3. After that I visit ninite.com (3) to get the usual software without toolbars and spyware.
4. For other software like ffmpeg I use choco or chocolatey (4).
I am now a full time linux user but this was the least painful way to get my PC running before that. I'm sure things have changed or improved since, but this really worked for me 2 years ago.. hope this helps someone.
(1) https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
I am forced to use a Windows machine sometimes for work, and to me the unpardonable sin is that Windows seems to randomly reboot _without asking me_! I come to my office and all my open sessions are gone. How do you turn this off?! I try turning off the setting but it randomly turns itself back on.
Also, how do people set up a reasonable dev environment not built around Visual Studio? On my Mac I just use Terminal + MacVim (with my plugins), so I don't have particularly demanding needs. I tried WSL, but its just Linux side-by-side with Windows, not integrated with windows. If that's what I wanted I would just use Linux, but I need a command-line where I can still build Windows apps. Currently I use bash-for-git (so I can run `cmake --build ...`) but its so non-standard in lots of ways that it drives me a little nutty.
I like it far more than Ninite and it is a good way to find some open source software that you may not have heard about or used before, quickly install the programs, and keep them up to date with only a few clicks.
Perhaps I should spend more time figuring this out. Meh.
> Some services … share your WLAN access data with your facebook contacts
Is that true? There’s no citation but seems a lot more flagrant a violation than I’d expected from Windows.
Edit: List of most recent and trying not to include things that may be useful to me syncdefaultsd, nsurlsessiond, apsd, cloudd, transparencyd, mapspushd, cloudphotod, akd, parsec-fbf, appstoreagent, AddressBookSourceSync, com.apple.iCloudHelper.xpc, familycircled, trustd, AssetCacheLocatorService.xpc, imagent, indentyservicesd, com.apple.sbd, studentd, airportd, configd, parsecd, com.apple.geod.xpc, com.apple.geod.xpc, avconferenced, rapportd, trustd, remindd, helpd, syspolicyd
Long list right.... that's from the previous 3 hours.
Most Apple users will definitively want those on, and will break your system in subtle ways if you disable them. I wouldn’t make such assumptions about whatever you use the service or not. If you don’t use a service, it typically will have very little traffic if any at all.
I thought the OS shipped with its own firewall? Would you recommend using a third party firewall despite having its own?
Restarting really is a big deal for me as my workspace consists of several dozen open windows, some of them I have to login, navigate to a particular place, etc... also you lose your train of thought. It has gotten that bad for me, that I have to take screenshots before restarting every time, so I don't lose track of where I was.
I understand not everybody has my same use case but for me it truly is a PITA.
Of course, the alternative is to just click on "Install Later" every 8 hours for the rest of your life, and then the one time you miss that button for a few pixels and click on "Install Now" everything gets closed and obliterated in an instant. But yeah, at least now I have the latest version of Safari which I haven't used in 10 years.
Huh? I think I restart my Mac for updates perhaps quarterly, and I can't recall it ever being forced.
If i disable apple updates on a macbook, it will show the notification but will never update without my permission, good luck doing that on windows.
And Apple's built-in apps aren't harmful, they're just unnecessary. In the early 2000s, my parents got me a Mac that came with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. :-)
Loaded down with crap.
What businesses want Xbox companion and xbox game bar running on all their work computers - seriously -> if you are on Microsoft search for xbox on your work computer.
Does Candy Crush Saga still come on the business pro ISO installs? That used to make the office laugh - who is paying $200/machine to get candy crush saga pre-installed.
In fact, the trick was they also had a separate app called app updater that would reload these things even if you uninstalled Candy Crush.
Too funny! The only way to get candy crush to go away was to uninstall it, then uninstall app updater - though people didn't date do that biz side because they didn't know what else app updater supported.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/candy-...
The last time I looked at Windows computers at Best Buy a year ago, anything mid-level and below was almost unusable because McAfee was using all the CPU.
I bought a Windows laptop (wanted to game with a modern-ish GPU). Step 1 was uninstall McAfee, and turn on Windows Defender for some modicum of protection. There are error popups for software I haven't installed when it boots. My parents have a new Windows computer which was showing popups advertising an extended warranty when I visited this weekend.
A fresh install of Win10 from the Microsoft ISO is very different from the typical factory configuration found on new hardware.
Installation and updates took about 30 minutes.
Updating the machine is a `sudo dnf update` and done.
Though I did get in trouble when I shelled into his machine did and update and rebooted without checking he was using it first - killing his call to his (not)girlfriend in the process.
He's just start secondary (high) school and they are using Google Classroom so all he really needs is a browser and a webcam/mic.
All the windows computers at the computer shop ship with bloated 3rd party crap. Except the apple computers. It’s also not Google’s fault that most android vendors don’t support old devices for long. Or Linux’s fault that hardware vendors make linux drivers an afterthought.
As a consumer, I don’t care why any of this happens. I just want the things I buy to work properly.
Bloatware is still there, iMovie, Garageband, iWork is IMO bloat. Slightly more quality bloat maybe but I don't need 20GB taken up by stuff I'll literally never use.
Recent Mac OS updates are monolithic signed binaries that load into the protected disk partitions reserved for the OS. This is security feature to limit which processes can modify the OS. The downside is that it can’t do differential updates. I hope that, at some point, Apple will work out how to securely do differential updates and speed this up, but I’m satisfied with slower updates if it maintains security.
It might have some aesthetic value, but it's not necessarily nicer, just different and more trendy. Which quickly wears off.
Seriously, I am using Windows 11 since official release and I am getting to a point where things are just the way I like them. I was lucky enough to have a machine that just met the TPM/processor requirements cutoff.
There are a few annoyances: I would like to use the dashboard/widgets for weather, etc but they force their newsfeed on you.
MacOS updates are fairly slow, though, so I don't know if it's a clear win. But I also don't think anything has gotten significantly worse in recent years; there have always been good parts & bad parts.
Meanwhile I've been on Ubuntu for more than a decade and as far as I can remember, for example, printing consists of printer just magically appearing in my apps without me ever having to install anything and I press print and it prints. That's user friendliness to me. At least for my workflows (mostly web browsing, software dev and office stuff), there is vastly less fiddling and head scratching to keep things working on Ubuntu.
I was attempting to edit videos. I plug in an external hard drive with my footage, and... nothing. Well, not nothing. It's there in Devices & Printers. It's able to be ejected safely. Troubleshooter has no problems.
But nothing in Explorer or any other obvious place you'd think. Panicking, I plugged the same drive into Chrome OS. Literally three seconds later I was browsing my footage.
That's the point I got up from my desk and said, "I'm done." I'm so over Windows.
They spend how much time and effort shoving a Linux environment into things when they apparently can't even support widely-used filesystems. The fact my external drive is mountable by both Chrome OS (where the code for mounting is open source) and macOS (a closed-source OS used by a minority of the populace) but not Windows is an utter joke. I shouldn't have to spend all this time trying to access my files in 2021. This is something that should Just Work.
This was just the straw that broke the camel's back. I've had several minor and major annoyances with Microsoft's treatment of Windows ever since Windows 8, and none of them have gotten better.
- WTF is "3D Objects" and why does it always bubble up from the pits of hell even when I delete it? Microsoft is very opinionated about the User folder in general, while I think they should be as hands-off as possible. Stop adding folders I didn't ask for and stop resurrecting them after they're deleted. Why is this so hard?
- Ditto the last point for OneDrive.
- Windows 11-specific, but adding ads to the taskbar? In a paid OS that the OEMs are already footing the bill for and bundling whatever extra crapware they want? https://betanews.com/2021/09/04/microsoft-crowbars-ads-into-...
- Obscuring local account creation to a ridiculous degree in Windows 10 (you need to literally disable Wi-Fi or unplug Ethernet to even see the option) has gotten even WORSE in Windows 11. Now you can't even set up a local account at all unless you shell out extra for Windows 11 Pro! They've learned nothing from the Xbox One always-online debacle, and honestly looking back, this should have been the dealbreaker. But I thought, "hey, I don't create accounts that often, this is something I can live with." No longer.
- The amount of analytics and data-gathering in Windows is the worst it's ever been, and worse than any comparable OS. "You can turn it off though." Well, maybe. Until Windows Update decides it knows better and turns it back on.
- This is purely aesthetic, but Windows 8 and 10 looked utterly horrible if you did anything more than look at the desktop and open the Start Menu. Clashing styles and UX edicts from decades of past releases, in very visible places. It gives the impression Microsoft just doesn't give a shit. And don't tell me "it's too hard to update everything in time for release." It's not everything, and Microsoft is a big boy with lots of money and developers. They decided they just don't care.
And today, I read this:
"Microsoft to Block Windows 11 Browser Workarounds" https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-11/259208/windows-1...
It's not getting better or even staying the same. Microsoft is actively making Windows worse for their own ends. Thankfully I have the choice and ability to install an alternative, but my heart goes out to those with no choice. It's Orwellian.
Every team is going to want to do this differently. Find good abstractions that are generic enough to let people do with them as they please. Don't force your model down my throat, I'll probably just gag it up and come after you instead.
The issues at Apple stem from the top. Replacing Radar alone solves nothing.
My music collection traveled with me from OS update to OS update for about 13 years with no problem. And now pretty much everything is broken, some files can not be played even though they are on disk, half of the album covers are gone, syncing with the phone gives a ton of errors. What happened to this app and why - I have no idea. It was my worst day as a long-time Apple user and needless to say how maddening it was. Oh, the backups don't help, the new app does the same thing to the backup copy too.
Seems like Apple doesn't care about your local music collection anymore, nobody even bothered to test.
Listening to my own local library has been a continually worse experience over the last 2 years. Not to mention, I use wired headphones with a lightning adapter 70% of the time, which somehow causes even more issues. Disconnects. Will refuse to play unless I unplug/replug or restart my phone altogether, increasing/decreasing the sound now has occasional lag that can take upwards of 5 seconds (and you have to unplug or restart to fix).
If I thought I had a shot of whatever job is in charge of this, I’d apply in a heart-beat just to fix all of this for my own needs.
MacOS, on the other hand, I feel is increasingly a pain to use these days. It is not so much that the OS has gotten worse, but that there have been weird UX decisions along the way compared to Windows. I don’t like how MacOS manages windows or full-screen apps; I don’t really like the finder still; and I think the dock is a big waste of space on high resolution displays and never quite hides reliably the way I think it should when set to hide when not in use.
I should say, I loved the dock back in the OSX days, I just think The Windows taskbar is better these days.
It is a shame because I think Apple is at an all time high with their hardware design and build quality. Their laptops are second to none. The OS just feels like a chore to use half the time.
I also prefer: ... → Position on screen → Left
And rather than go to Apple you instead randomly press buttons and then are surprised when random things happen.
Okay.
Is there an easy way to do that in the moment? Genuine question.
I (we) have many Apple devices and in my experience ‘it just works’ until it does not. And if not you are out of luck. No errors, no warnings, nothing. It ‘just does not work’. Googling mostly does nog give any usable solutions.
I would love to gave an instant phone or chat service. For free, because I feel like like really paying a lot already.
I agree in principle but in practice Apple made a lot of bad bets with the previous generation across the entire product line.
Intel failed to meet its targets time and time again, which hit Apple's production schedules especially hard since they tend to make big updates infrequently rather than continuously updating internals to be as fast as possible.
The USB-C ecosystem never got as convenient or extensible as they had hoped. Only now do I see a lot of good USB-C docks and peripherals coming out and it's still not as robust as you would want if you're building your entire product suite around it.
Some stuff there just was no good alternative, particularly SD cards.
The TouchBar was a dud.
The low-profile switches on their keyboards had big reliability issues.
And many more! Part of being a bold innovator is knowing when an idea didn't work out. The latest generation shows that they're willing to defer to practical needs rather than doubling-down on failed ideas.
Apple keeps on moving shit around on OSX for no good reason and it's just annoying.
Which then creates the problem that now I'm using the "compact" tab layout that everyone in the betas screamed bloody murder about until they added that switch, god this layout is really annoying if you have any extensions up in the toolbar and/or more than about four tabs. But at least I don't have to deal with using fucking Chrome or losing all my text expansion shortcuts because Firefox refuses to support those.
My inner paranoid wonders if this is a deliberate tactic to boost the numbers of people using the "compact" layout by someone whose next performance review is riding on that layout: "see, boss, look at what the telemetry says - everyone's switching to Compact! We should just drop the old look and give me a major bonus!".
It wouldn't have happened under Joni.
But then, I don't do betas and usually wait until the first big patch to update the OS.
I've been using and supporting Apple software since the 90s and I think this is more an artifact of most bugs not being especially memorable than anything else. People have complained about bugs after every release, a fair fraction of the complaints circulating online will be attribution error or overly-generalizing a niche condition as global, etc. and that seems to have been basically constant since OS X 10.2 or so.
There is one more interesting discussion, however, which I think is probably a legitimate trade-off: the entire industry has been moving to faster releases since it's easy to ship updates over the internet to huge audiences. When that wasn't possible and update cycles were measured in years, teams did spend more time on QA so you probably did have a somewhat lower chance of seeing bugs of the sort which were caught by that kind of process but at the expense of taking much longer to see new features or get fixes for bugs which slipped through either due to complexity or limited trigger conditions. Since the amount and complexity of software has generally been increasing, I think that this is generally the right trend with the addition of telemetry to collect crash reports, but it does seem like this could increase the perceived number of bugs even if the duration of time where you're exposed to a particular bug decreases.
I think there's _less software around_, insofar as there's fewer discrete software titles around, but each title has far, far more software code behind it.
I remember as a sprog, running my cracked copy of Adobe Photoshop 6.0 - that in order to do anything "cool" in PS (especially when you just can't grok how to paint, even with a Wacom) you needed a huge smattering of third-party Photoshop plug-ins: Alienskin, Kai's Power Tools, Flaming Pear, FilterFactory, etc - but nowadays while plug-ins are still a thing I find myself getting-by with only Photoshop's stock functionality. It certainly doesn't help that Apple continues toward completely locking-down their platforms: in-proc and binary plug-ins for Photoshop on iOS will never be a thing.
The other is the fact that server based software has an almost zero time deployment cycle, and even native code for desktop/mobile can be shipped really quickly. This makes software mostly an iterative process. If fixing bugs on a weekly basis in a major mobile app is no biggie, and almost nothing gets blocked because of a bug that can be just fixed next week, you just get a lot more bugs shipped to users.
Bad software is more due to needing to ship stuff ASAP for marketing, the board of directors, and for the investors. This decline in software can really be matched up with the increase of startup culture.
I would also argue that complexity is developers own doing, trying to strap every new fangled library, engine, tool, API ,buzzword of the day, etc. to their program...when there is zero reason to. Nothing about what modern software does is more complex than it was in the 2000s
A few days went by and more and more people were reporting the same issue. It took a quick update to fix, but I still find it hilarious to think about all my ex-colleagues walking around in 65 degree weather all the time, never even thinking about this issue.
Okay, what about Apple Wallet? It'd be really nice to add my digital driver's license, health insurance cards, auto insurance card, frequent shopping cards - basically make it so I don't have to carry my phone and wallet. Can I do that? Not really.
Alright, so what about their iWork suite? On second thought, forget about it. People are using Google Docs or Office 365. Next...
That's the problem with Apple software. It all feels kind of half baked and neglected. Apple built their reputation on It Just Works and now it feels like it sorta kinda works, I guess.
If Apple's software were a tenth as dazzling as their new hardware then it would be awesome. It's not even close. Their software division needs help.
> Alright, so what about their iWork suite? On second thought, forget about it. People are using Google Docs or Office 365. Next...
For collaboration, yeah, you're stuck with what everyone uses. But considering the actual software itself, iWork is very nice in my experience. Fast, reliable, and the interface isn't a total shitshow like every other office app out there.
Same. I currently have a HomeKit thermostat, doorbell, and cameras in my house. Not really sure where GP is getting his info. They all work really well.
It's frankly both puzzling and saddening how much Apple has lost in term of QA, user interface and vision in the last 10 years. I always feel that Tim Cook doesn't have a clue about what made Apple special and is slowly destroying it by not making sure to keep those qualities
EDIT: I do recognize Tim Cook's qualities, he is amazing at managing supply chain and apple does this better than anybody with very little impact in terms of chip shortage. He's original decision to target privacy as a marketing argument was on point (unfortunately the csam controversy kind of destroyed this) and under his tenure Apple has done tremendously well financially.
But the issue, is that Apple also benefits from its reputation and in the last few years, they've destroyed it by producing shoddy software, by having major hardware issues over multiple revisions (keyboards, staining screens)...
Well their shares have never been higher so as long as that's the metric by which a CEO's performance is judged then you can forget about Apple caring about SW QA and other such "nonsense".
Also, before Jobs passed away, Cook was Apple's supply chain mastermind so it makes sense his strengths are with the HW side of things, which, during the current silicon shortage, is an absolutely killer skillset to have, as proven by how little Apple was affected by it in comparison to other companies.
When it comes to quality SW, Cook might not be the ideal CEO for the job (like notifications on the new MBP can get hidden behind the notch; WTF, how did this pass QA?! Pretty sure Jobs would have sent them back to the drawing board) but Apple can always rely on the faithful developer base building great quality SW instead of them and then taking a 30% cut on their sales on the Apple store. Basically another win for Apple.
As far as I know, things like driving license need user adoption. It's getting there - https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/09/apple-announces-first...
Apple Wallet also supports some forms of ID, transit cards and even vaccine certificates.
I think the main cause of this isn't so much Home, but the available third party hardware. I wish Apple would make a smart switch (I know that's fairly out of scope for them), but one high quality smart switch that actually worked reliably would resolve 90% of home tech issues.
Homepods are similarly bad with basic actions. I have five of them in multiple rooms. If you want to adjust the volume on all of them and say "make volume 50% everywhere" it fails. I have to whisper the command to my phone so the homepods don't hear me and then it can adjust volume on all of them.
Volume and playing on homepods generally from the phone is a shitty experience. Often the homepods lose the phone connection and then I can no longer control them from the device. Really it feels like nobody at Apple actually uses these things in their personal life.
I also have a gigabit network connection with a stupidly fast access point in a two bedroom apartment so it's not an issue of network speeds or signal.
I'm only able to get away with it because I don't have to send anything other than PDFs to other people very often, but Apple's office-type apps are the only ones of their sort that I don't hate, aside from a few less-integrated and less-stable open source alternatives (Abiword, Gnumeric, that kind of thing—and I'm not even 100% sure those are still around). Google docs and Office 365 are terrible and I pity people who have to use them.
Trying to fix broken Apple bits is always time-consuming and almost always fruitless. They have trained me to believe "it just works" or it just doesn't and I am just hopeless.
Everyone posting on the failures of Apple should seriously try Linux Mint (in a VM if nothing else). It's a wonderful experience.
- Not being able to click a tab unless you drag it to the center of the tab bar
- Make a "drag a link/anchor into a new window" feature; except it triggers way too easily from ordinary scrolling, forcing you to spend the next 15-30 seconds figuring out how the FUCK do you close it with an non-obvious swipe gesture. Apparently buttons with "Close" or a big X are too complicated.
It only gets updated once a year, so any updates they do make are slow to hit users. This wouldn't be so bad if they were more up to date with Firefox and Chrome.
Apple launched the WebKit revolution, but Google grabbed the ball and ran with it, Apple didn't give chase, and now they are behind. A pity.
It's not
- I have a Logitech trackball mouse and occasionally it’s unresponsive. On Ubuntu and windows no issue. I checked several places and it’s a known issue
- MST doesn’t work. Works on literally every other operating system. This isn’t a big deal until you want dual monitors with a single cable without daisy chaining the monitors, e.g using a thunderbolt dock
https://www.apple.com/hk/en/ios/ios-15/features/
Another neat new feature is screen sharing in FaceTime. But there’s a huge list of improvements, it’s clear they’re investing heavily in software.
I haven't been in the Mac ecosystem for that long (since 2015), but what I've noticed is that Apple, like most software companies, tend to accentuate the new and fancy features.
I would personally love a release that simply fixes/stabilizes/improves old existing issues, with zero new things. Optimally a combination of both, but I'd settle for solidifying the base.
I guess that kind of talk is not popular in the board room.
And I'm far from the target customer, not really using any of Apple's software. I like it as an Ubuntu-like platform where everything is supported.
I don't care about upgrades to their internal tools which I don't use anyways (Mail/Maps/Safari/whatever). But I presume to be a minority as well, so this is just a rant. I've seen zero reason to upgrade to Monterey, just as I have with the previous releases, and only running Big Sur[0] now because I bought an M1 which is fucking awesome.
[0] Which was a huge letdown in terms of various changes that seemed to be changes just for the sake of changes.
Like many others have reported, Catalina drops my ethernet connection once or twice every day, regardless what adapter I use. (I've tried three different hardware devices so far. All fail in the same way.) Apple will not acknowledge the problem so there no hope of it being fixed.
If MacOS's services get any worse, I'll be left with a $2500 pumpkin.
Turns out that at one point "App & privacy limits" were enabled, and this _silently_ disabled Carplay!
I IMMEDIATELY noticed the improvement in application startup times after upgrading and have seen a big difference between my work laptop (macOS Catalina) and my personal laptop (macOS Monterey). Everything has been more stable in Monterey for me personally. I've noticed that the weird occasionally-crash-my-laptop-when-using-a-dock bug has been resolved. Connecting my AirPods has become more reliable and the connection doesn't flake out anymore.
I think “unevenness” shows what’s in the main focus for a company: Google Maps are great almost everywhere, but you can’t buy a Google Pixel phone except in a handful of countries. Apple’s the opposite: iPhones are available everywhere in the world on the same day, but software is spotty.
An example, Macbook Pro back around 2013 had hardware volume and mute switches that worked instantly. Useful when going to a cafe, hitting mute as upon opening the lid to avoid blasting the room with music. Now with toucbbar, I get to the cafe, open the lid, the computer starts playing music and it takes 10-30 seconds to respond to touchbar controls.
I moved from PC to Apple back around 2005 for improved reliability, quality and simplicity. My first 10 years where great but the quality has declined so significantly that I've started trying linux distros.
On one case I flew to Sydney left it over the weekend. Picked laptop up on Monday. They had replaced logic board. Powered on, full charge, quick test, closed laptop went to airport flew home. Opened laptop in Bali, screen went black, laptop dead. Without ever plugging it in. There goes one return flight to Sydney. More or less same thing happened when repairing in Bangkok.
Such has been my adventure with Macbook pros since 2017, yet my 2007 27" iMac and 2005 Mac Mini work perfectly to this day.
But you know, I installed Windows 10 via bootcamp recently and even simple stuff like mapping caps lock to control requires either changing a registry setting or installing power tools. Also, the ads. Similarly, I can’t stand the UI of Android TV compared to tvOS.
So as much as I find Apple products infuriating a times, the alternatives are even worse.
So I stick with Apple. But its products no longer bring me joy. They are just another slightly less shitty tech product I put up with.
There’s a slogan for you: less shitty than the other guys.
Sigh.
Anecdotes are fine as a place to start or to tell the story, but don’t tell us anything about the general state of Apple software.
I can see why they do it, though. Apple Doom always gets a lot of clicks.
I wouldn't use a MacBook myself though. They certainly are damn fine machines for the price (M1), but I really don't like MacOS having a bunch of stuff I don't need, like Garage Band. I know Windows has a ton of bloat as well, and MacOS's bloat is more useful, generally speaking. It's not for most people, but any popular user friendly Linux distro like Ubuntu has little bloat. Unfortunately, those aren't as user friendly as MacOS or Windows (I assume this will garner some opposing opinions).
It's on this list from Apple, but the additional comment in the table row makes it sound like it had been gone for a bit and now it's default again? This was a store-new machine and it was installed on there - don't know why it would be there otherwise.
I'm watching very closely at the issue, that with iTunes I was able to sync files to iphone/ipod/ipad and SEE THE PROGRESS BAR. Since iTunes was discontinued and we were forced to use Finder for the same task - you no longer see any progress bar when syncing files to one of the apps on your device.
From 0 to 10, what would HN rate this UX mistake?
Here is a thread on Apple forums: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/130051
Here is Apple's official guidelines: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
"Don’t make people sit around staring at a static screen waiting for your app to load content or perform lengthy data processing operations. Use progress indicators to let people know your app hasn't stalled and to give them some idea of how long they’ll be waiting."
Go figure.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29227450
TL;DR: Certain Accessibility features relating to the pointer can cause your Mac to run out of memory on certain apps.
I bring this up because something as simple as the MOUSE POINTER can bring the system to its knees if not implemented correctly, and they expect all this heavily integrated functionality (AR, Siri, iCloud scanning) to work flawlessly? I fear even if Apple stopped adding new features entirely, they'd have a decade of corner cases to clean up.
I work on Mac, Win and Ubuntu all day. Mac & Win are neck-and-neck for crazy weird bugs I encounter as an every day, non-super user that are un-googlable (or return SEO garbage).
once mac os x is gone, their OS surface is so tiny and locked down that they don't really have to worry ever again.
Samsung still makes cheap tablets that are awesome in terms of hardware, right?
Meanwhile every piece of software Apple ever shipped for Windows was hot garbage. It sounds like whatever made their Windows stuff bad is afflicting OS X now.
More insidious issues are the non-cloud alternatives to Apple features such as local sync and backup, which seem to be getting neglected as they try to push users to increasing expensive cloud storage and cloud offerings. Syncing photos and doing backups to a computer has been super buggy, but also severely lacking in basic functionality such as choosing an alternate disk for iPhone backups... Most people don't have 512 gb of free space on their primary computer drive and if they don't they cannot backup their iphone to an external storage.
I've been trying to use safari on my laptop ever since I found out that it enables much better battery life compared to chrome (almost 2x).
But there are just so many stupid annoyances. The address bar is non-deterministic. I enter first three letters of a site I visit very often, and press enter. In chrome, it always takes me to my site. In safari it does that 9 times out of 10. But one time it will do a Google search for the entire web address of my website!? How is this even possible? I can't understand what abominable logic is running underneath that this can happen.
Another stupidity is that home and end keys either don't do anything, or they do something entirely unexpected.
I still use it because the battery usage is just so much better.
With Chrome, I was running out of juice in 2-3 hours. With Safari it is easily 5-6 hours before I need to reach for the charger.
It's ok to just be a device company.
Then again, if they did this my device spending would increase by an order of magnitude, so maybe the status quo is for the best.
There is a memory leak down the network stack (probably within security library/ TLS layer) that has been reported over 6 months ago but has yet to be fixed. Depending on the app's network usage this is leading to several GBs of leaked memory per day.
Is this good for user-helpful software? No, of course not, but the company’s goal is revenue.
Everything else... gets supported. Kinda. Reminders has always been broken. The Music app works great for subscribers, but everything else in the app feels like it got handed off to offshore interns. Even Finder has problems, and it used to be solid.
And it’s coming to every bit of software and technology you “own” or rent.
Imagine if you put some product managers in charge of a standard hard cover book. Within two years it would have a tanning attachment.
Kind of a weird sentence that both tries to pretend like Apple is the only way to do things and betrays that it’s inferior to products that already can.
What next big thing? The only thing I've seen so far is evolutionary updates, where the evolution goes really as slow as it sounds.
So I personally like the negative exposure. I really hope it lights a fire under Apple.
There were some smart/motivated/creative people at Apple. And they did it with this FrankenLanguage called Objective-C.
Apple software doesn't make new/cool things anymore. They produce "catch up" features. I can't decide if Swift is causal or symptomatic, but I worry it's a little of both. Objective C made me groan and giggle in the space of 10 minutes, but I felt creatively empowered when I did things in that ecosystem. With Swift and newer libraries/frameworks from Apple, I often just feel like I'm in a computer language variant of the line at the DMV. Follow the rules, just try to figure out how to get the compiler to grant me a result that is close enough to what I want.
Apple is victim to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
It feels like the macOS desktop experience peaked with Snow Leopard and it's been slowly sliding downhill ever since.
Real time update: Now my Bluetooth is acting up in a way I've never seen before. Thanks Big Sur!