Apple's Software Quality Crisis | Hacker News Reader

Apple's Software Quality Crisis

eliseomartelli.it

1,196 pointsajdude1,198 comments

Here's my personal canary in the coal mine that something must be fundamentally broken in Apple's software development process:

- on a recent macOS version, right click on the desktop, select 'change wallpaper' => the new settings panel opens

- click on 'Custom Color'

- now hold and drag around the 'color cursor' in the color selection circle for a few seconds

- stop dragging and notice how the color cursor continues jumping around erratically (it's impossible to actually select the exact color you want)

- same thing happens when using the linear slider below the color circle

This bug doesn't lurk deep in some obscure part of the settings panel, it's the only way to change the desktop background color. A QA specialist would stumble over this in 5 minutes of trying to break the app.

I made it a hobby to check this bug after each OS update, it's broken since the new settings panel was introduced in Ventura. As a good citizen I also wrote a Feedback Assistent ticket (FB13805690 - 21-May-2024) with attached screen recordings and all, but of course I could just as well have sent that report into a black hole :)

On the most recent episode of ATP podcast, an anonymous person wrote in to say that when they worked at Apple until ~2013, there was effectively no QA team on macOS.

Granted that was over a decade ago, and "no QA team" doesn't mean no testing, but given the numerous bugs in macOS today, and that they almost never get fixed, I'm not surprised.

(FWIW, I do not experience this bug you mentioned)

If you look at the macOS feature history, it's pretty clear that the bulk of the team got shifted to iPhone in 2007 and never really recovered. The widely acknowledged Snow Leopard high water mark happened shortly after.

To be fair, Apple can still pull off the occasional amazing feat of vertical integration -- HDR, APFS, keeping audio latency under control despite the relentless assault of apathy from all directions -- but they never had the same level of consistent drive forward, at least not until a year or two ago when the big push for AI integration started. Apple gets ragged on here, but I think their integration is actually some of the best. They were putting neural cores in chips back when that sort of thing got mocked, not lauded, and every step has been thoughtfully tied in rather than airdropped from a ChatGPT science fair project. But they never got good at building or deploying leading-edge models themselves; I hope they turn it around because this is important.

That may be unlikely. Mark Gurman reported recently for Bloomberg News that “people within Apple’s AI division now believe that a true modernized, conversational version of Siri won’t reach consumers until iOS 20 at best in 2027.”

That's a bummer to hear. They have the money to buy talent and they really ought to be able to pull this off inside of 2025. But if there's no will, there's no way.

Their modus operandi is usually to wade in late with a better solution. remember how awful bluetooth was until they applied it well?

That sounds prudent. There's no reason for them to continue this embarrassment of cramming the product full of worse-than-useless "AI" features. Wait until you can separate the good from the bad from the ugly and choose to just do it good.

Snow leopard is fondly remembered but was buggy has hell when initially released. It got good, with time…

iOS becomes good a year after release, then Apple stops you from installing stable version, forcing install of unstable version with unwanted features.

What I tend to do is to only install/buy late in the yearly cycle, then stay on that for a year.

Good approach. Sadly, it only lasts a few months before iOS with maximum hardening (lockdown mode + Apple Configurator supervised) falls to another zero day. Then the only option is DFU reinstall, which forces unstable iOS install.

Perhaps I was just lucky, but 10.6.0 was equally stable as 10.5.8 for me. It did improve with time, and there’s little opposition to 10.6.8 being the best OS X release there was (except maybe 10.9.5), but for me at least it was a great OS even at launch.

I wish for snow leopard strategy to be applied to modern scaled operating systems. Let's all agree to spend a year fixing and optimizing rather than making existing functionality worse or launching half baked ideas.

HDR was a one-hit-wonder, and has dramatically fallen behind the competition.

See my longer comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43249634

I thought APFS had all kinds of problems in the beginning.

you think this is a Bertrand Serlet vs Craig Federighi style issue?

I was in a QA role on MacOS in 2010-2013. There isn’t a QA team, rather each group of developers and EM had a QA embedded with them.

I think they mean, having a whole bunch of people doing end-to-end user-scenario tests all-day - like videogame playtesters - whereas what you’re describing sounds more like SDET work.

You're correct ... but then various teams took various measures to try to get rid of QA. So it's spotty.

I worked at Apple on Mac OS X until 2008. For QA, Bertrand believed in a lightweight touch, with dedicated QA staffing only at the top of the stack (plus a few key places like the filesystem), with the idea that any bugs will bubble up and be found through real-world usage. Most QA was informal, through heavy dogfooding.

You felt a real sense of ownership to the thing that you worked on. You worked hard and fixed bugs because it felt like it mattered, because you thought about how e.g. your mom would end up using the product, and also Steve Jobs would see it, so it had to be great. Also, teams were small. Something would involve only 1-2 people, and then we would look over at Redmond and they'd have dozens of people working on the same thing. The need-to-know secrecy was not just for PR value; it helped keep circles of communication tight, cutting out a lot of noise, so you could just focus. The organization was stable (and relatively flat, around 5 levels from junior engineer to SJ). I think in my 9 years or so there, there were no major reorgs. Avie phased himself out and retired, and Bertrand moved up. The only major disruption was when the iPhone project happened.

Release cycles were annual. Throughout most of the release cycle, it was pretty free up to each team and engineer to decide what to work on and how to prioritize it. Near the end of a release, it would get more and more strict on what you were allowed to change, up to the point where Bertrand sometimes would even ask to see code diffs.

I don't really know what is going on over there now. They have moved to a more agile approach, with more frequent integration checkpoints. In theory this should be better, but I suspect there's less sense of ownership and more of a feeling of a software factory. But it's probably mostly to do with the fact that the systems are way more complex, both the tech and the org, with way more moving parts. Even the programming language itself (Swift) is a moving target. I know (from talking to friends) there's a lot more politics and career-building going on, the kind of corporate douchebaggery that would not have been tolerated under Steve Jobs. People are thinking about RSUs and their promotions, rather than the products.

Ultimately, I think it boils down to this observation by jwz at Netscape, that there's "two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company." Post-iPhone, Apple has filled up with the latter. A majority of the people at Apple now didn't work there under SJ, and the senior management who did experience that is now aging and retiring. At least from the outside, as a customer and end-user, it feels obvious that the founder-led product-obsessed culture is gone.

> - stop dragging and notice how the color cursor continues jumping around erratically (it's impossible to actually select the exact color you want)

Tried dragging color cursor for 30 seconds+, no issues at all. MacOS 15.3.1 (24D70) on 16" M2 Max.

Ah now it's getting interesting :) So far I could reproduce the issue across several machines, also on new demo machines at the Apple booth of electronic discounters - so I don't think it's something about my configuration, but maybe it has something todo with how I'm using the trackpad (but I'm just sliding around with the right-hand pointer finger).

PS: the mystery might be solved => that buggy 'Custom Colour' UI item only shows up under specific circumstances, which for my specific usage pattern is 'obvious' - see my sister comment for details.

You need to have a color selected to begin with. This bug won't appear when switching from an image/dynamic to color. Only color selected -> close app -> reopen -> top right custom color. But even then, it's a MINOR thing, it doesn't stop me from selecting the right color at all...

For what its worth, I can't reproduce this on 15.3 (24D60). I don't have a "Custom color" option. I see "Colors" and I click a Plus button to add a new color. Also I have my system connected to a caldigit dock and I'm using a mouse, not the trackpad.

I am on 15.3.1 and when I attempt it, it stays in place on the color I selected without issue.

What is this "Custom Color"? I clicked the "+" icon to open the color picker and did as described and I cannot reproduce this.

Sequoia 15.3.1 (24D70)

Interesting, yeah. It doesn't happen when adding a new color to the "Colours" row at the bottom even though this happens with the same color selection UI widget.

I see this Custom Colour thingie at the top-right corner of the Wallpaper section, above a "Show on all Spaces" checkbox and left of a fairly big representation of the current desktop background.

After a bit of tinkering: this Custom Colour element is replaced with something else depending on the current background mode. If you selected a wallpaper image, it shows the name of the wallpaper. If you select a predefined colour, it shows the name of the color. When adding a custom colour, it will show an interactive element which allows to change the color in place, and that shows the buggy behaviour for me.

Ok, this at least explains why other people don't stumble over this as an obvious bug, I assumed it would be obvious, because the first thing I always do on a new Mac is to customize the background color by right-clicking the desktop, and since that moment I have that buggy Custom Colour element sitting there.

Not a great UX either way though.

PS: ...and now after adding a new custom color via the to bottom row of predefined colors, the bug in the 'Custom Colour' widget is gone and nobody will believe me it was ever there. Great :D

PPS: nope, it's coming back after going through the 'desktop => right-click => change wallpaper...' route again, phew.

I tried it, and apparently if you click if from the "+" button, it works totally okay for this popup and subsequent opening of that custom color popup, BUT, if you close the settings, open them again and press the "Custom Colour" colour directly, you will enter the bugged one.

I don't see Custom Color anywhere. Does anyone have a SS of where I should be looking? I'm on 15.3.1.

It is not straightforward – first, you need to choose a custom colour via Wallpaper settings menu Colours section, by clicking on "+" button and choosing any custom colour, THEN, at the top section of this settings menu, a "Custom Colour" box appears with your chosen colour. IF you close the settings, and open them again, clicking on this custom colour will open the bugged popup, where dragging the cursor around is certainly taking more frames that it should, resulting in it lagging crazy

Closing and reopening Settings seems to be the missed requirement. I'd disagree with the original assertion that a pro tester would find this in five minutes. The steps to repro are not nearly as simple as originally implied. In fact, they are narrow enough that I'm willing to forgive Apple missing it. (Not fixing it, OTOH, after it's been reported...)

Yup, I've been following along and I also finally got the bugged one by: reopening Change Wallpaper after having closed it with a custom color being selected; and then clicking "custom color".

In a way it's a perfect little example of how a bug can seem obscure to some (most) users/developers but seem glaring and unacceptable to a few (the few who happen to use the relevant feature a lot).

If some engineer at Apple ever gets to fixing this, that would make an exceptional story! Really interesting WHY these circumstances exactly lead to the bugged popup, I can't even imagine what's going wrong there.

I was able to reproduce this, but only by following your very specific set of instructions. Never in a million years would I have found this on my own.

Are you on Apple Silicon? Those are some of the weird parts of the OS that need to offer both an Intel and Apple version since apps can call it.

This is an incredibly tiny bug in a component that dates back to NeXT [1], but you should use Feedback Assistant and report to Apple.

[1]: http://euclid.psych.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/colorpick.html

Where does the link you posted say anything about a bug?

I’ll grant I might just be mole-eyesing it, it’s been a long day.

It doesn't - just a source for the component having existed in its current form since the NeXT days.

Lol, I can reproduce it now, it's hilarious. Thanks for pointing it out.

You need to close and reopen the setting after adding a color. Then in the top right there will be a custom color button.

Wooow indeed. I was just about to post "can't replicate it", but now I can.

It seems the difference is that with the "custom color" button, Settings applies the colour directly to the background, whereas the plus button at the bottom only applies it when you're done. Applying it directly seems to be computationally expensive (ass various elements of the UI need to figure out whether to render their text in black or white, depending on the colour - would be my guess at least).

Successfully replicated after trying this!

Desktop icons snapping to the grid has been broken forever too. Every once in a while I'll have a space in the "grid" that just won't accept anything to be placed in it.

And god, don't even get me started on how the icons rearrange themselves when you're organizing your home screen / control center. I can't believe they actually shipped it like that and still haven't made it any better.

Oh, I envy you, I have the exact opposite problem. Sometimes new icons start stacking up one over the other on the top right corner.

If you try moving one of the icons anywhere, it snaps back to the top right corner right away.

I haven't found a fix. The only fix is moving the icons away from the Desktop into another folder using a Finder window.

That is actually a feature called ‚Stacks‘. Open the context menu on your desktop and de-select ‚use stacks‘.

No, I know stacks and they're not them. In my case, new icons (e.g. downloads, files that I save, etc.) appear on top of each other, as if the desktop lost track of their position. It's clearly a bug that hasn't been fixed in a long time.

Just checked this in 15.4 Beta (24E5206s) on this 2023 M3 Max and it doesn't happen for me.

Reproduces for me. I'm on your build but there's a new beta out today fwiw

The entire settings app rewrite is the canary of how Apple's software development process is broken, especially for the mac.

I mean ok, the old one was already a bit overloaded and unwieldy, so a redesign was probably overdue and Ill give them the benefit of the doubt here but WTF is with the 1-2 second delay when switching between the menus in there? Are they doing web requests upon opening every settings page or what? This is real amateur hour.

I use an iPhone 13 mini, and I experience no delays within the settings app.

I was talking about the settings app in macOS.

Oh, I see. There is a slight delay (closer to 1 second or less) switching menus inside of Settings on my M3 Air.

There is no reason for the delay to be more than 100ms. The 1 sec delay must be due to some extremely inefficient lazy init or a bunch of io happening when you switch between screens

We’re (largely) not running OSes from spinning metal anymore, so even if there were some I/O that needs to happen (there shouldn’t be), a second would be an indication that the app was doing it badly. A modern SSD will read multiple gigabytes in a second, if the reads are sequential and you don’t wait for each one to complete before starting another. Unfortunately, we as a species have not figured out the programming tools necessary to make that natural.

They appear to be launching each settings screen as a separate app and retaining it until Settings is quit. How many resources this requires, or how much this contributes to the lag, I don't know, but...

Open Activity Monitor, and type in System Settings into the search. Then open the Settings app and press the down arrow key through all of the menus. You'll notice that each one of them appears as their own line item in Activity Monitor until you quit Settings, and if you keep going up and down through the menus, it'll (probably) get slower and slower; it seems like there's a memory leak or something going on there, and my hunch is that each old settings menu was thinly wrapped in a SwiftUI view and gets launched as soon as you click its nav item.

That’s not too different than the old app, but instead of .app bundles, the UIs and stuff were bundled in .prefPane bundles.

They're not .app bundles, they're .appex (extension!) bundles from /System/Library/ExtensionKit/.

Yea some other commenter mentioned that they most likely re-wrote the whole thing Swift.

So is Swift just too crappy for this kind of UI, that accesses low level system stuff? or are the devs just incompetent? Who knows…

SwiftUI is not swift. It's about framework not language. But even that doesn't matter

I think Apple has decent QA for low level stuff (remember how they quietly converted every iphone to APFS and back just to test that it will work later) but bad QA for final GUI.

Most of cocoa/objc stuff was written long ago and back when QA was better. If this was cocoa and objective c today it would be equally buggy.

> SwiftUI is not swift. It's about framework not language.

True, imo.

> But even that doesn't matter > Most of cocoa/objc stuff was written long ago and back when QA was better. If this was cocoa and objective c today it would be equally buggy.

I don't think I agree about this entirely. Although you can write unperformant code in any language and framework, SwiftUI is a different world of heavy abstraction. Writing a list view in AppKit using the documentation available allows for and encourages much more deliberate implementation in such a way that it'll be an almost night and day difference compared to the likely NavigationSplitView they're using in Settings. It's an inverse relationship with performance that SwiftUI takes; efficiency of piecing together the high level details first, and little to no control or clarity on how you'd optimize for performance.

My hunch is that with Settings, they're using a NavigationView or NavigationSplitView and not letting each view be recreated on selection, so they're sticking around in memory. However, if they were recreating each pane on selection, it seems like the render of the view waits for some kind of I/O, maybe reading their .plist or interacting directly with a system level CLI, which is why there's a delay before the UI renders.

Another possibility is a combo of both, they're retaining the views in memory AND triggering I/O immediately on selection, so the reads and threads accumulate quickly without being released

Are they doing web requests upon opening every settings page or what?

At least some of them are actually web pages:

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-ma...

Hmm, and using React even! No wonder it’s slow and bloated.

You gotta wonder if this has been a reaction to a shrinking Cocoa/ObjC and SwiftUI talent pool

Could be that nowadays a lot of UI code will probably converge on web-first stuff like React, since it has a larger talent pool, as you said, and is inherently cross platform. Microsoft's newer apps like Teams are also built in React.

To be fair, Windows really had the same type of issues going from the old Control Panel to Settings. I still get large delays for some of the screens in Windows Settings.

I think it's pretty crazy how slow a lot of the newer things in Windows 11 are. Explorer is super slow, Settings are slow. Sometimes I think even if I wanted to make things that slow (without using sleep statements), I wouldn't know how do it.

Make opening a settings page require multiple queries to Microsoft servers. That way you get lag with a bonus of variability and in the case of broken wifi, extreme lag as it waits for the connections to time out.

I'm not saying this is what happens. But it's scarily plausible and it really shouldn't be.

If it was happening, they could at least spy us asynchronously.

You can certainly test the theory pretty easily with Wireshark

I was lazy that day. But today! I just used procmon, filtered to include "systemsettings.exe", turned off all the other guff and just saw network packet meta data (no content).

And yes, as you browse around system settings there are TCP connections to MS servers. I don't know that they are "blocking" though and have run out of care factor.

You see it in Windows 10, as well. Seeing the "working on it" when navigating folders, as if I'm using 5400 RPM hard disk drives.

using win 7 with 5400 RPM drives... it's still fast...

To be fair, NTFS is just slow and awful and we’ve all known about it for a while.

I’m sure the new UI piled on top doesn’t help, but as a consolation, the core software is shit too.

Windows 11 is insane to me now. Latest update pressing the button to bring up the power options (power off sleep etc) takes like 1-1.5 seconds from button press for the menu options to come up.

I’m just so done with Windows, it is complete garbage now and I don’t use that term loosely, I’ve been using it since Windows 3.1.

Chrome removed ublock origin for me today and I thought to myself why am I even on this OS anymore? What’s keeping me here? Decided to use the outrage over that to just make a clean break from Windows too.

I installed Ubuntu tonight, but this time I’m sticking with it. It already feels so good to have the software behave in a way that makes sense and isn’t some dark pattern meant to harm me and extract value somehow from me.

I already split time. I have an old Dell laptop running Ubuntu that I do a lot of types of dev on plus general browsing (I'm actually on it right now). I use Windows for games and gamedev, though as I use Godot for gamedev I could pretty easily do that on Linux as well.

Ubuntu isn't what it used to be, unfortunately. I'm pretty much in love with Aurora [1] nowadays. It's an immutable distro (for a smartphone-like upgrade experience) based on Fedora and KDE, rock solid, sane defaults, a good selection of dev tools, proper nvidia support if you want it, and it feels really snap!

[1] https://getaurora.dev/

Just curious, what do you think Aurora itself does better than regular fedora kde?

I haven't used plain Fedora much, but Aurora just 'feels' more coherent, polished and stable than other distro's I have used in recent years. I tend to notice bugs/rough edges in all of them, but Aurora somehow just works. Having a strictly fixed core allows it to be fine-tuned better, I guess? Or perhaps it's just in my head. :-)

All non-core software is provided by Flathub (through the Discover app) and Brew (for cli apps). Both have worked flawlessly for me as well.

It also pisses me off, but I am not paying for Apple prices on personal devices, and since Slackware 2.0 back in 1995, that there is always something that makes me waste weekends on GNU/Linux, so Windows it is.

Mint and/or Fedora, depending on how new your software needs to be.

Ubuntu pushing snaps like MS was the last straw.

You want to escape slow UI and bad corporate rulers... and you chose Ubuntu?!

Dude... Mint, Arch / Manjaro, Void, even Alpine is better. Plenty of good and very lean+mean options out there.

Ubuntu is the Windows of the Linux world. Has been for several years now.

Try looking up what Canonical did and still does with the Snap store.

It's not just the OS itself, where some of the slowness can at least be explained by the silo-ed nature of development and the large amount of moving parts. But even when MS gives a small-ish team free reign and a fresh start, the software is just agonizingly slow and buggy.

An example: new PowerToys https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/

The FancyZones "window snap" UI takes upwards of half a second to activate when dragging a window and the Zone Editor is at around 5s. All in all it is only very slightly less buggy than 3rd party tiling WMs like komorebic.

The PowerToysRun utility input is extremely variable, takes between 1 and 20(!) seconds. A lot of the plugins shipped with it simply don't work or have no suggestions/hints once you enter their prefix. The search relies on WindowsSearch, which is about 500x slower than https://github.com/sharkdp/fd and has not improved since Win7. Who cares, nobody ever searches for files, right? As a whole, PTRun is simply worse than https://github.com/Flow-Launcher/Flow.Launcher which uses the same UI kit as far as I can see. WTF?

The most frustrating thing with PowerToys is trying to remap keys (like caps lock to Ctrl). It feels like it's done by intercepting the keypress at runtime in the app rather than being configured at the system level, so if you happen to, say, hit your new Ctrl key when the CPU is pegged, it'll revert back to caps lock and then also get stuck. So you have to go into PowerToys to unbind the key, turn off caps lock, then rebind it.

There's another app that does this in the registry I think, but I keep forgetting the name of it.

The registry method is Ctrl2Cap by SysInternals.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/ctr...

It's the first thing I download whenever I'm setting up a new Windows machine.

I fix this by going into task manager and viciously force quitting any system process that has an enigmatic name or isn't plainly doing something I want to happen. Often it's updating Edge, or it might be indexing temp files for searching with the shitty search function that I don't use. Sometimes it's "Windows Problem Reporting" that's making things glitch and lag. Oh, sometimes there's a whole second copy of Explorer running invisibly, quitting that can help.

Is this always safe to do? I think I broke my PC once by killing some important system tasks

I don't know! It's a reckless thing to do, but satisfying. I tend to stick to killing the same relatively small set of processes, really, and have never noticed any ill effects in about a year. If I was less lazy, I'd research them all - but then I'd want to also research how to stop them running in the first place - and in some cases, like Edge, that threatens to be such a mission that I don't want to embark on it. (I have a script that's supposed to uninstall Edge, but I thought I should read and understand it before I run it, and that was months ago and I never did ... so I still have Edge.)

The answer to that is relatively easy, WinUI 3.0 being shoved into Windows, even though UWP has failed to get adoption, after so many reboots even those of us that were deep into it got pissed off and moved elsewhere, leaving the Windows team as the only group of folks still trying to push it.

Go have a tour on Github for the endless collection of issues, some of them 5 years old, when Project Reunion was announced.

The login screen and start menu both require a key press to start the process (enter pin or start typing search term) and both then drop all subsequent keystrokes for an indefinite period until they’ve finished initialising, displaying, and maybe phoning home and loading ads. It’s infuriating. It turns a simple open-loop “press win key, type search term, enter” into “press win key, wait for visual confirmation, type” which adds both computer latency and your own reaction time to the overall time taken.

I wouldn't qualify it as fair, both are pretty horrible.

At least the window settings app can be resized like normal apps

Tsk, copying ideas from Apple.

But that's considered normal in the Windows world.

Unfortunately, to stay on top Apple doesn't have to do well for the customer. They only have to do better than wintel/android machines.

Presumably Windows machines with AMD processors, too.

To be actually fair, Mac Preferences has worked fine for decades.

Control panel has sucked since windows 2.0

They rewrote many of their tools in SwiftUI.

So far, I am not willing to ship anything in SwiftUI. I don't think it's up to the task.

And it's still missing certain things Cocoa had well before 2015...

That’s ok because it’s simple enough to escape SwiftUI. Use SwiftUI for the simple bits and UIKit for the harder parts. It’s not a nice solution, but it works

I consider use of UIViewRepresentable to be a kludge, and basically removing the advantages of SwiftUI.

I know that SwiftUI has some native wrappers, like maps, but the way that SwiftUI works, is so radically different from UIKit, that I think mixing them is problematic.

it's comically bad. the UI is a mess, the search functionality is broken, you can't resize the window horizontally. it's feels like a hello world first project in a new language type of app.

also - it's such a bummer that they have decided to shit the bed so hard on software at a moment when their hardware lineup is arguably at its pinnacle. like, the hardware has been firing on all cylinders since M1 but the software degradation is making it less and less pleasant to use.

right on the money.

Arguably a worse bug in that same panel is how their hyped up live photo desktops don’t work at all and its been that way for years. They all need to be pulled from apples servers that silently time out your download. If you are lucky you can get maybe one or two downloaded.

The Feedback Assistant issue you mentioned is probably one of the worst aspects of their software ecosystem. I haven't had a response on a single ticket that I've filed in there. It feels like an abandoned program, which is terrible UX considering its purpose.

A few years ago, I filed a Feedback Assistant bug report regarding an issue I was experiencing in Final Cut. In response, I was contacted by Final Cut developers who worked with me to replicate the issue and then shipped a fix.

Just one anecdote, but some reports definitely get looked at.

The Pro Apps team is more focused on customer happiness since it’s more niche and high-value-users.

Ya they are competing hard. They are core Apple Value.

I had the same happen for a bug that would toggle off "Do not create a new Apple Ad Identifier Code" (or whatever it was called). It meant that even if you explicitly opted out of Apple's Ad tracking, you would get opted back in with almost every iOS update.

I assume this would have landed them in hot waters with EU privacy regulators, so they were very keen to replicate the bug and then have me check if it no longer happened.

On the other hand, the "first screenshot fails to display screenshot preview and doesn't flash the screen" has been in iOS for 3 versions now. I've reported it thrice, and no one has given the tickets a second look, marked it DUPLICATE, or anything. And every time I mention it, at least 3-4 other people comment on also experiencing the bug, so I assume Apple must be pretty aware.

Do you know how to reliably replicate the iOS screenshot bug? It occasionally happens to me but I haven't been able to decipher a pattern.

Sadly, no. It is more rare to happen right after a reboot though.

My suspicion is that there's a really gnarly race condition as the root cause, and they haven't been able to find it.

Feedback Assistant is a UI for Radar.

You will never get a response to tickets unless it is affecting a lot of people and they need more information e.g. crash reports.

They are all read/triaged though.

Can confirm.

That's still absolutely terrible

I, and many others in our personal capacity, have been shouting from hn-rooftops how Apple’s software capacity has been in a state of, since a decade or so (or more really) that calling it bad would be an understatement. It’s downright pathetic. It’s disgustingly incompetent. And I haven’t not even started on its services like iCloud. Because those go beyond pathetic.

I mean for god’s sake these morons (yes, “morons”) have not yet figured out how yo sync browser tabs which is something new browsers get right in a few days to few weeks time, and sometimes on top of their incompetently done iCloud and related SDKs.

Apple sometimes comes across as a glasshouse built as marketing, too much money, (sadly) a huge army of fans and loyalist apologists (and not demanding customers), and an absolute lack of decent competition; and the biggest of it — a deliberate attitude of non-openness!

I mean everything Apple is closed! So how can anyone even quantify how bad their iOS is, how smelly their cloud suites are, how ridiculous their security is!! If you can’t see what happens behind a wall and the entity behind that wall has money more than most nations and a PR and tech propaganda machinery rivaling some of “those” nation states, how can you even be sure!

Now tell us how you feel about windows.

Don't get me started on Windows!

Your whataboutery could have been literal but shame you turned it into howaboutery. Close.

> And I haven’t not even started on its services like iCloud.

I feel like a lot of the Apple issues come from the fact they keep building on top of iCloud. It’s only very recently that people started trusting the sync.

It’s like MS, where anything built on top of sharepoint is going to be garbage.

My indicator for if Apple is for the customer vs for Apple is how macOS 'negotiates' YPbPr instead of RGB for non-Apple branded monitors (some LG monitors also get a pass) which results in worse color quality. I believe this to be carefully engineered to be a plausible bug rather than a real one.

BTW I have found a workaround using BetterDisplay and an EDID override (to more closely match what the monitor is actually telling macOS).

Seconding this. Feels actively anti-user even if this is just a bunch of heuristics that end up choosing the wrong thing. Honestly, why is this not a dropdown?

Related bug: macOS defaults to variable refresh rate when available instead of remembering my choice of 144hz. This is confounded by my hub (Caldigit TS3 Plus), which has trouble with variable refresh rates that result in a black screen.

The cherry on top: either I use a HDMI cable and deal with BetterDisplay forcing RGB to fix YCbCr, or a black screen when using DP through my hub due to the above bug.

Sometimes I wish Apple would get broken up just so macOS could have a chance at getting more love.

I bought a custom HMDI dongle that forced 4k RGB HDR for my OLED LG from M1 Mac.

Interesting. Could you post a link to the dongle?

I'd go with a caldigit TS4 + their hdmi/dp active adapter.

Not sure what the other guy uses, but I use this Anker with my LG OLED to get RGB 4k@120 HDR with my M1 MacBook Pro:

https://www.anker.com/products/a8317?variant=42329259475094&...

On mine, Apple TV+ (the official app as well as Safari) will refuse to play 4K through a similar adapter (VMM7100) on an OLED C2 42 from Cable Matters with the latest 120Hz supporting firmware. I assume it is because HDCP is broken. It works fine with the Mac Mini's built in HDMI. Frustratingly there is no great way to debug this, but if you open up Safari and look in the network tab, you can see the resolution of the video being streamed.

Does your adapter work at 120Hz without updating the firmware? If it does, does it support HDCP?

Ah yeah you just reminded me of the rabbit hole I went down a couple years ago.

Yeah I had to flash the firmware on the Anker dongle, following this guide: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/dp-usb-c-thunderbolt-to...

I just tried streaming 4K through the Apple TV app on my M1 Macbook Pro and no issues, so I'm assuming HDCP works.

> Sometimes I wish Apple would get broken up just so macOS could have a chance at getting more love.

As much as I like the integration between the phone and macOS I like the idea of desktop Mac getting more love.

It’s very on brand for Apple to remove an option to trigger / customise something that should “just work”.

Example: iCloud Photos syncing is complete crap on macOS. If it has synced recently it’s not going to do it again. So you sit there like an idiot waiting 10 minutes for a photo you just took on your phone e to show up. When a pull to refresh or refresh button would have fixed it.

iCloud Photos syncing is crap on iOS too. iOS will randomly stop uploading photos to the cloud "to optimize performance". Every time something's not uploading, I check my iPhone settings only to find that it's "optimizing performance" again. Even if it's on a full battery and I'm barely even using it. There is no way to turn this off - you have to manually catch it every single time it decides to "optimize performance" and tell it to sync for an hour. If you took enough photos for it to take longer than that hour to upload them all, you'll have to do this multiple times as it goes right back to "optimizing performance" after that hour. Again, there is no way to turn this off.

I ran into this issue with the Sonoma update. My display (4k LG) was negotiating RGB just fine before, but not anymore. The BetterDisplay workaround hasn't worked for me. The poor colors and fuzzy edges around all the text is causing eye strain too. I'm beyond furious.

I used to use an EDID patcher written in Ruby but it stopped working on some version of macOS. Contained in that script is how it patches the EDID data which is what I got to work with BetterDisplay.

FWIW, here's the hacked script[0] which only keeps the EDID data patching part. Be warned it's very hacky with the base64 EDID to be patched hard-coded in line 8 of the script. It prints out the patched EDID base64 which should be entered back into BetterDisplay (which is also where you can get the unpatched base64 EDID).

[0] https://gist.github.com/karmakaze/f795171a6a795491e754c3d092...

I think that Apple, perhaps naively, expects display manufacturers to adhere to spec when in reality they often don’t.

Either way macOS has no trouble with my 27” 2560x1440 Asus and Alienware monitors. Both connect with 10bit RGB no problem, at least over USB-C and DisplayPort (haven’t tried HDMI).

macOS really wants to do different things for TVs vs monitors, so if it decides your monitor is a TV for whatever reason, it’ll probably prefer YCbCr and also not offer any HiDPI modes except exactly 2x

2560x1440 is a strong indicator of a monitor, but 4k over HDMI tends to get detected as a TV

That makes some amount of sense, I avoid using HDMI if at all possible. Even on other platforms I’ve generally had less trouble out of DisplayPort and USB-C DP alt mode. I wish it became standard for TVs to have at least a single DisplayPort, it’d make hooking computers up more pleasant.

The same thing happens under Linux with some monitors and AMD graphics drivers. A lot of monitors have poor standards compliance (and the standards aren't great either).

My monitor has a strange EDID that requests timings with such short vblank that my GPU doesn't have time to reclock memory between frames, preventing switching to low power modes. But because I use Linux I can supply an EDID with standard timings in software, using the drm.edid_firmwire kernel boot option, which works perfectly. Linux gives you vastly more options for fixing broken things than MacOS.

I JUST BOUGHT A NEW MONITOR AND WENT DOWN THIS RABBIT HOLE AHHHH Almost returned this perfectly fine monitor thanks to Apple, thank god for BetterDisplay though, actual gem of an app

I'm just glad we've moved beyond SwitchResX...

The entire apple monitor settings are just awful. I have a small portable projector which accepts 4k input but just downscales it to 1080p.

I cannot get osx to actually output at 1080p, all it does is output at 4k and scale the result.

The downscaling in the projector adds input lag and just drives me crazy. I really wish they'd just let you control these things rather than poorly guessing.

I didn't know about better display, I guess I should try it and see if it can fix this problem.

Does the 1080p resolution show up if you go to Advanced > Show Resolutions as List and then tick "Show all resolutions" under the list? The resolution you are looking for is probably 1920 x 1080 (low resolution). If you choose a non "low" resolution the OS will output at 4K but scale the UI to the virtual resolution.

I still won't forgive Apple from dropping 1080i resolution from macOS. I've got a home theater Mac mini hooked up to my TV which only supports 720p or 1080i. I've always displayed 1080i fine, and then one upgrade later, it's suddenly "Fuck you, user. Use 720p LOL."

There is no reason why YCbCr should be visually worse than RGB if the conversion is accurate

It depends on the exact meaning of "YCbCr" and the meaning of "RGB". Is it BT.601? BT.709? BT.2020? Adobe RGB? Display P3?

Also extra fun is guaranteed if one end of the video cable is encoding with e.g. BT.601 primaries, while the other end is decoding as e.g. BT.709, or vice versa.

RGB to YCbCr conversion and back is well defined, and RGB->YCbCR->RGB should give you back the original RGB values, no matter what the colorspace was.

Lossless roundtrip conversion is only true for schemes like YCoCg-R [1]. It is not true for Rec.601, Rec.709, etc. because these standards require quantizing to 8bits (actually even less than 8bits due to the 16-235 thing).

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

I'm not talking about mathematically exact reconstruction, I'm talking about not being able to see the difference.

I first noticed it around 2014 on a 1080p Dell display (maybe ~24") with an i7 MacBook Pro of the day.

It was the poor non-crisp pixels that led me to even knowing there were even RGB/YPbPr modes.

was it maybe with 4:2:2 or 4:2:0 subsampling? at 4:4:4 there should be no difference

I once spent hours trying to find out why apple's font rendering is so atrocious for a 1440p monitor on a m3 macbook air (reddit just keeps telling everyone to get higher resolution screens). Turns out it's related to the color scheme - the colors were fine, but the pixels are somehow located wrong, making everything look super pixelated.

BetterDisplay provided a workaround, but it needs to be selected every time the monitor is hooked up.

(I guess that's normal for Apple stuff nowadays - when I hook up my ipad to my projector, I need to tell it every single time not to use the audio output of the projector, but keep using the bluetooth speaker.)

They also removed subpixel antialiasing several years ago. Since then, “1x” screens (i.e. ~110ppi or lower) have looked like shit on macOS compared to the same display driven by Windows or Linux.

Successfully reproduced. Rough. Maybe they counted on people bailing out after attempting to trudge through the sloppy mess that is the newish Settings app before they even got to the Change wallpaper section, forgetting that there was another path.

And that also raises a huge issue: The problem isn't just functional defects, but also design defects and regressions. The new Settings panel is pretty much universally hated, from all the feedback I've seen. Apple is spending time dicking around with things that already worked and that will not drive sales through changes... so WTF? This faffing points to a major priority-setting problem within the firm.

Look at the state of Xcode, a tool that's fundamental to the iPhone's appeal. Every developer knows that this thing needs a massive rewrite. The word is that nobody within Apple even understands it thoroughly anymore, so it's way past time to strap it on and build a modern tool from the ground up that's maintainable, instead of slapping band-aids on Project Builder indefinitely. Come on, Apple, you can afford to throw resources at this for a year and just get it DONE.

Meanwhile, Apple is letting open, "urgent" QA personnel requisitions sit unfilled for YEARS. We can all see the results.

Go back to Project Builder :)

> The new Settings panel is pretty much universally hated

Data-point of one, but: the new Settings panel is very much appreciated by the non-technical users I support, because it approximates the iPhone settings panel they're accustomed to. Personally, I hate it, but I also like that my colleagues are better able to discover and make changes for themselves. I figure learning new tech is a core part of my job description (but not theirs), so my frustration counts for less than their comfort, so I suck it up.

Xcode, however? I completely agree with you there.

Bit late to this thread, but you mention their design defects which bother the shit out of me. It’s been this way a long time now, but I hate, absolutely HATE how they changed save as (cmd+shift+s) to duplicate document in some of their apps. And then you close the duplicated document because that is not what you wanted, and it asks you if you really want to delete it. Delete what? It does not exist on the file system! I know one might say that technically it does or something because of versioning or some shit… the way every other OS and non-Apple app works was not broken. And I dont know anyone who likes pasting in text formatting as a default. MS broke that too. Why would ya change the functionality of an existing keyboard shortcut?

Try as I might for the last 30 minutes, having read all the other comments in this thread so far, I can't reproduce this on 15.3.1.

Did you try it with numerous pointing devices, or one in particular? It took only one try on a trackpad, M3 MBP

I only tried a trackpad.

Having now retried it, I wasn't able to reproduce it until re-launching the wallpaper selection screen, then it was chaotic again. Bizarre.

initially also cannot, but now can. open wallpaper setting > choose + in color section, choose any color, close popup, (IMPORTANT) close setting panel.

now reopen the wallpaper setting again, click on top right custom color and do this, somehow the behavior is different. Now it change the wallpaper color as you drag over the colors rather than mouseup. My guess is clicking on + button at the bottom is triggering the popup config to update on mouseup, while opening it fresh will configure it to trigger on update, until the + button is clicked.

Mine was horrendous scroll jank in response to a moderate amount of highlighting in Notes. Mfs trying to harness AI and they can’t even render text properly… in 2025.

Works for me on latest macOS. Maybe your hardware is SOL? Can you share the video?

Reminds me of the butterfly keyboard issue of the 2016-2019” model year MBs.

If your warranty is still active could try to get the trackpad replaced.

To pile on, though can't repo on demand, sometime in January, Airplay between Mac and AppleTV just started randomly disconnecting.

Oh god please don't get me started on Airplay bugs.

I honestly have some work to do this month.

"Hey, let's rewrite the framework again and not do any regression testing or test against old implementations or see what happens with any codec that is not exactly what we are expecting for any reason." - Airplay devs, every year.

Cannot reproduce (15.3.1 on me3max)

I can't repro this on macOS 15.3.1 with an Apple Studio Display. What display are you using? It's likely something related to color space translation.

Edit: Repro-ed using the additional steps you mentioned below. As someone who handles external bug reports and writes them, it's so often the case that there are additional steps or a specific start state required, which both prevents reproducing the bug and narrows the affected user base.

Yeah - also can't reproduce. Maybe some helper is messing around with you?

> A QA specialist would stumble over this in 5 minutes of trying to break the app.

Yes, but code reviewers signed off on it, our unit tests have 100% code coverage and they all passed. It must be okay.

Fewer QA means more $100,000 bonuses to overworked Apple devs (2nd hand experience).

I wasn’t able to replicate that bug on my Mac, but when I tried to do so I ran into an instance of another bug that has been annoying me for many years: windows that open far away on the screen from where I clicked. Here is where the color picker appeared on my screen after I clicked on the custom color button in the change wallpaper window:

https://gally.net/temp/20250304macoswindowopeningposition.jp...

That’s not a bug. The color picker always opens at the bottom left no matter which app opens it. Has always been like that.

Sounds a bit like “you’re holding it wrong” tbh.

I understand your point, once you have absorbed the Apple logic it is reinforced continually and makes sense. But opening a dialog near the use interaction point is a very reasonable expectation.

For me, I’ve never noticed any logic to it, I just know I need to hunt for it.

Colors is not just a dialog! It's a standalone application opening in a new window which you can open just like all other applications on macOS and also remembers the last opened place.

Mine is, on iOS:

* in safari private mode, open image picker

* switch to different app (e.g. go to WhatsApp to save a new image)

* go back to safari

the image picker can now no longer be spawned from that safari private tab, you'll have to open a new tab to re enable the image picker.

Can't reproduce. Second one this thread where someone had this error "for years" but I can't reproduce. Smells of a setting that's been migrated for years from an old version, as where I'm writing from is a clean macbook with a clean account (M3, about a year old now).

EDIT: can repro. But it's very important to note: you need to have a color selected already. So select a color with the + sign, close the app, open it, top right click custom color, and then the bug appears, although not like you describe: the color selection is easy, it jumps around for 20ms during dragging. If this is what we call "low quality" I'm happy to stay on Mac.

Might be a reason why it wasn't fixed if you didn't include that vital step in your repro.

Just tested on M1 Pro, 15.0 (Settings version) on Sonoma.

After initial custom color selection by clicking on the "+" (which works fine) and then reopening the Window to click "Custom Color" and then selecting the color again... it doesn't just jump for 20ms - it goes into full on psychotic flash jump behavior and basically continues to do so hands-off for 5 entire seconds before it stops at a random color.

There is 2 options now:

1) nobody has ever tested this workflow at Apple, automated or not.

2) it was tested and discovered but then pushed into the backlog as non-priority. Here the question arises - for how long?

The bug probably generates zero lost dollars so nobody at Apple cares anymore. THIS is what used to be different.

It's interesting to me that there's such a big difference between our experiences, even though the bug we find is the same. I'm running an M3 Pro 15.3 Sonoma. If you don't believe me I can provide a screen recording but from here yes, it's buggy, but it's such a small issue (milliseconds vs your seconds) that I'd give Apple a pass on this. But I get that you wouldn't!

My deep-seated guess is that the switch from a simple language like Objective-C to the complex Swift language with its humongous compile times has caused developer productivity to be broken. No time to fix bugs, no time to refactor, no time to re-iterate on improving features because time is all taken up by compilation and grokking complexity.

Compile time issues are almost always type inference issues. Reducing chained functions and multiple levels of protocol witness indirection usually speeds this up dramatically.

The other big time sucks are C++ interop and dozens of micro-dependencies (react-native).

This has been going on for years. I used to do a lot of iOS development, and have an eye for bugs. Almost every Apple app/service has been regressing in quality.

Take basic functionality - a phone app (calling). After certain audio sessions use (calling via WhatsApp) I can’t make regular calls over cellular - the UI app immediately cancels the call. Only reboot helps.

Or notes - for many years/iOS versions, they lived with a bug where a text note may just become blank - and only restarting Notes app makes it visible again.

Or AppStore - if an app has to be updated (I have auto updates off) - and I press Update - it gets downloaded, installed - and then AppStore is back to showing “Update” button! If you just go to the app, it’s a new version. But if you press that “Update”, it will redo update from scratch.

Sometimes I’m so frustrated, and thinking of my options - it’s either move to Android, or go get hired at Apple with a mandate to fix bugs in various products… but knowing Apple secrecy culture/silos, it’s not going to work, and requires change in their hiring process/perf review/QA.

> Sometimes I’m so frustrated, and thinking of my options - it’s either move to Android, or go get hired at Apple with a mandate to fix bugs in various products…

Those aren’t options, they’re fantasies. Like dreaming of suing out of existence a company that wronged you, or fixing the world by ruling it, or winning the lottery without playing.

Android isn’t perfect either, it’s a different set of frustrations. And why would Apple ever need to hire you for that specific task, do you really believe there aren’t engineers inside just as frustrated as we are?

The way I see it, the yearly release cycle is to blame. No one inside the company has time to do anything properly anymore. Features are announced and rushed every year, and we’re reaching the point where by the time something which was announced at a WWDC is out of beta, we’re preparing for the next one.

What these companies need to do is slow down and stop chasing every shiny thing. You know, like Apple used to do with macOS. Tim Cook needs to go.

While I agree that it's Tim Cook's responsibility to set the course and influence the culture, I doubt a new CEO will be able to so.

I'm not saying nobody can be like Steve Jobs, but Steve Jobs was an anomaly when it comes to C-Levels, and even when it comes to management in general, at least from reading things like www.folkore.org and interviews with people who worked with him.

And I'm not even talking about talent or vision or whatever, it's just about saying no to pointless features that are there for someone's ego or so that someone can get a promotion.

Tim Cook overrides the advice of high-ranking employees in the name of greed and profit, even when warned such decisions will sour long term relationships.

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/02/26/testimony-on-external-pur...

I’m not saying anyone will be better than Tim Cook, I’m saying he’s actively bad. Will his successor be actively bad too? Maybe, but the sooner we find out, the better.

Why is this stuff not reported in the mainstream media?

The general publics opinion of Apple is that they are golden and untouchable, the best tech company out there. The reality is much different.

> Why is this stuff not reported in the mainstream media?

- Because a lot of journalists are Apple fanbois

- The press publishers don't want to sour relationships with Apple (because of advertising deals)

- Publishing bad things about Apple would infuriate the many Apple fanbois among the readers, causing a shitstorm against the medium

By your logic, Apple would never get bad press. And neither would any other brand, since all of them have fans. Both of which are obviously and provably false.

Can you show some examples where Apple have got bad press in the mainstream media?

There’s a whole Wikipedia page just for criticism of Apple. Which itself links to other pages of more criticism. Take your pick, plenty of mainstream media articles listed there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Apple_Inc.

Bad press that never affects them somehow.

Of course it does. They changed course several times specifically because of bad press. Like killing the CSAM device scanning, or reinstating Epic’s developer account, or not killing web apps in the EU, or apologising for the crushing ad, or, or, or.

There is even a joke amongst Apple developers who all know that Apple’s claim of “don’t go to the press, it never helps” is a blatant lie as it’s the one thing that works.

> By your logic, Apple would never get bad press.

Not "never", but it is indeed my observation that the press is much "nicer" in their reporting and much more "forgiving" to Apple than to other similar companies.

In some circles, this observation already has become a running gag when the pen pusher is again too impressed of some Apple marketing.

My understanding is that negative press of apple gets you blacklisted from media events and early review devices.

The advertising deals with apple are not that lucrative, iirc.

So bad reviews are avoided to ensure the media gets the early review clicks.

Good point.

The owners of the stock are embedded everywhere in high, medium and low places. It's in the top ten of nearly every major index and mutual fund. No one is going to complain about Apple until the stock tanks.

So a good trader or shortseller (like the now defunct Hindenburg Research) would make such news public to attempt to make a profit off it.

So why isn't that happening?

That link alone has references to Associated Press and Bloomberg. It’s not hard to do a basic web search and find more, the trial has been covered by many outlets.

Tim Cook strikes me as a bean counter.

That's exactly what he is. He's an industrial engineer who rose up in logistics inside Apple.

Back in the 90s, Apple seemed to have a lot of these same problems. Software quality was declining and they had real trouble executing on anything strategic. They aren't there yet, but they certainly seem to be headed down a similar path.

Steve Jobs wasn't an anomaly because he was Steve Jobs; he was the anomaly because he was the founder and CEO. Founder C-suites can foundationally get away with actual innovation in a way that the board refuses to permit for their successors.

I have been saying this for years: consistent deterioration of ACs/DoDs. There is no limit to scrum and especially the constant refinement to ACs/DoDs.

Yes, you may implement a solution more efficiently by not overengineering it. But at some point constant seek to reduce "complexity" so that more features fit into sprint (funny how story point measure complexity, not time, but sprint is sized in both time and SP capacity) is bound to hit feature completeness. Once you cross over that metaphorical Rubicon it's game over - quality starts to slowly go downhill.

You will not notice it immediately. That edge case that was ignored may not surface for months or years. It may take several idiosyncrasies to line up for a feature to be declared FUBAR. At some point that technical debt does bite you back, but at that point the process (tm) has already optimized away most if not all opportunities for deep refactorings fixing previous rushes to deliver.

First off - it's a sprint forecast, not a sprint commitment. A sprint is timeboxed in the sense of guaranteeing some delivery of incremental functionality for a product on a regular basis. It's aim is not to backdoor the mapping of time to points.

Furthermore, Sprint Planning/Refinement are just innocuous ceremonies whose only aim is to facilitate productive discussion between a Product Owner/Manager and an Implementation team as regards delivery timelines and priority ordering thereof. Done properly, it allows a pragmatic approach to achieving a predictable software delivery cadence via mutual compromise.

If the process turns into 'fit as many features into the sprint as possible' at the expense of Performance/Stability/Functionality or Technical Debt accumulation, you're really just doing the 'fast' version of Cheap/Fast/Good Waterfall Project Management.

Most consumer electronics companies are like this. It's not only a yearly release cycle but a Christmas release cycle. New Shiny Thing has to be in the stores by late November so all development has to be done in August so the factories can start producing the first trial batches.

I never buy products when they are first released. I prefer to wait at least 3-4 months so that production has had time to tweak all the settings and weed out the funky first component deliveries. Also the software devs will have fixed the worst bugs by then.

I am entirely sure that a notes app can be updated in january.

> What these companies need to do is slow down and stop chasing every shiny thing

Who is dealing in fantasies now, friend? :)

Apple's software really isn't in crisis. It's just very low quality relative to what people who've written software for a living know to be possible.

But it doesn't matter - Apple is a prestigious jobs guarantee program for rich kids first, entity that delivers value to consumers second.

It's not that they're chasing shiny things. They're cosplaying competence and they genuinely don't know it. They think they're actually competent, elite really, because they attend 'elite' schools, get good grades and go work at the 'best' places.

They have it ingrained in them that anything a poor person says can be disregarded because poor people are losers, because they're poor. They're an unintentional suicide cult. They genuinely don't know it. You can't convince them of anything because they are rich. If you complain - go see a therapist, there's something wrong with you.

You can youtube search Garys Economics. It's a poor kid who slipped into the rich kids club and defected. It's quite eye opening.

> Who is dealing in fantasies now, friend?

I said they need to, not that I think they will. But they have in the past. There is a reason Snow Leopard is still lauded today.

> It's just very low quality relative to what people who've written software for a living know to be possible.

No, it’s low quality relative to what Apple users came to expect. There was a time when “it just works” was an aspirational goal which permeated their decisions and you could see the results.

> Apple is a prestigious jobs guarantee program for rich kids first, entity that delivers value to consumers second.

What a bizarre conspiracy theory. No company gets to that stratospheric level of success by making hiring incompetent rich kids their primary goal.

Feel free to tell me where I said it was a primary goal.

It’s right there in the bit I quoted. That’s what the word “first” means.

By the way, I did catch the rant you posted before. I tried to reply to it but after writing it up and hitting reply, you had already deleted it.

It is first in the context of the two goals being mentioned, in the context of discussing software quality.

You've gone ahead and made it the first goal in the context of all goals a company has (thus making it 'primary').

That's not a legal move - switching contexts and claiming that the sentence plucked out of its original context and inserted into your context becomes a 'conspiracy theory'.

That's on you, not me :)

And yes, I edit my posts plenty. Including this one.

> The way I see it, the yearly release cycle is to blame.

I don't see a connection between yearly release cycles and a broken notes application. They shouldn't be doing anything that is particularly affected by such changes and the problem they are trying to solve has been mostly solved for 40+ years now.

While it certainly applies to some things, there's a different, bigger issue happening as well.

My understanding is that Apple outsources loads of software not seen as "critical". I think that's the first place for them to look.

The release cycles seem to lead to an annual reshuffling of teams to meet deadlines causing quality issues for anything that is not an advertised feature.

Some of this could be resolved by open sourcing their less important apps like Files, Notes or Home which barely ever get touched, yet are full of quirks and bugs. Those apps should be public examples of good SwiftUI coding.

> The way I see it, the yearly release cycle is to blame. No one inside the company has time to do anything properly anymore. Features are announced and rushed every year, and we’re reaching the point where by the time something which was announced at a WWDC is out of beta, we’re preparing for the next one.

At many places where I've worked, the mentality is: "If that bug didn't block last year's release, then why would it block this year's release?" So it survives one release, it never gets fixed.

Current head of Apple hardware is in the line of CEO succession. If he becomes CEO at some point in the future, could he have a positive influence on software culture within Apple?

In my experience, hardware people in the top decision making roles are the cause of degradation of software quality, not the solution. They often don't understand the nature of software and software product management.

Depends on the person. The CEO position is about setting a vision and hiring the right people to execute.

Under this climate? Very hard I think.

I have run into these same issues, it's particularly frustrating once you see a Reddit thread from a couple years ago outlining the exact issue. For a large consumer-focused company like Apple this can only be explained by ignorance.

From a developer perspective many of these inconsistencies are rooting from inconsistent access patterns - operating system (ABI?), applications (ICP?), remote (TCP, HTTP, LDAP, FTP, ...?). All of these are "execution" or "information" but have to be programmed against differently.

> this can only be explained by ignorance.

s/ignorance/apathy

On Notes:

1. If you copy some text

2. Select other text

3. Paste the text you copied to replace the selected text

Notes will crash. This has been known for years.

Also if you turn off all suggestions in Spotlight on iOS and just use it as an app launcher, it will still take seconds for Spotlight to show you the results. For something that's supposed to be an indexed look up.

I cannot reproduce that Notes crash.

I can't reproduce the crash. Does it happen every time for you or only after a few times?

Select/Copy/Paste has been bad from the start on iOS, another I can’t get over is how the backspace behavior has the absolute worst timings for jumping to words and paragraphs.

>I can’t get over is how the backspace behavior has the absolute worst timings for jumping to words and paragraphs.

I wish they implemented backspace like they do with fine scrubbing on seekbars. i.e. you could move your finger up & down while holding the backspace key to select the granularity of deletion between letters, words and paragraphs.

And the auto complete on proper nouns. I'm typing someone's name and it'll often get corrected and will take more than one attempt for what you actually intended to stick.

No, Ellie isn't a typo and I didn't actually mean Emma.

Not just proper nouns. Often it tries to autocorrect a real but less-commonly-used word to a more common but completely different word.

Never used an iPhone, but TBF these functionalities are equally hard on Android phones I used (but I never used any "higher end" phones such as Pixel). I came to the conclusion that human fingers are not exactly the best tools for them.

Not sure about iOS, but Android has sort of magnifier when users start to select so they can clearly see what characters they are selecting. It definitely helps. However, what I should want is some sort of arrow keys that I can press to select characters instead of relying on my fingers.

Notes on my laptop would take minutes to load, it was only fixed in the latest macOS release, after more than a year.

I keep annual journals in Notes and I’ve noticed (on iOS) that the keyboard becomes increasingly laggy as the year drags on / as the note length increases. I can only assume they are synchronously flushing the file to disk on the main thread during the keyboard callback handler.

I don’t mean to be rude, but that’s how an iOS intern would implement it.

> I don’t mean to be rude, but that’s how an iOS intern would implement it.

A bad one maybe

I wonder why they don't bother fixing it. Clearly it hasnt hurt their bottom line much, but you'd think they'd sell more phones if they were still the kings of "it just works" (and they aren't).

On Mail:

Cannot get notifications for new mail on iOS.

On Languages:

Cannot swipe-to-type and dictate in less spoken languages even though this has been possible on Android for over a decade.

Hmm. Can’t reproduce Notes on neither iOS 18.3.1 nor iPadOS 18.3.1

> can’t make regular calls over cellular

That's extremely serious because the call you're trying to make could be an emergency call. A bug like that would have top priority in the org I used to work in. If I'd had to guess it cancels the call because there's a crash in a process somewhere. Possibly because of audio handover between apps.

I did a MS in Telecoms Engineering. Our Telephony teacher Claude Rigault drummed it into us that when people can't make emergency calls, pople die, thus the importance of reliability.

There are also a bunch little of usability bugs related to selecting, copying and pasting text. The auto-complete has become more adversarial then helpful. There are bugs related to search in pdf documents in safari. There are (or at least were until recently) bugs when searching for settings in the settings app.

Can't think of any more at the top of my head ... it feels a lot like Windows, where there are a bunch of eternal bugs one just sort of knows and works around, even though it's a kind of shitty and occasionally very frustrating experience.

Notes is so bad. Often copy and paste just breaks. It will copy some string of characters from a different part of the note than you selected, until you restart.

Reminders too. For at least 5 years, creating multiple reminders in a certain order will not create multiple reminders, and will just append the text to the end of the first one. Surprise — hope you didn’t set any important reminders in that batch!

And the great thing about their standardization between iOS and macOS code means the exact same bugs exist in both versions. Yay.

One of the weirdest regressions is basic search on iOS. Just clicking into the search screen takes 1s before I see anything (it's probably booting up internally). And each keypress sometimes seems to take another 1s before it updates the results.

Sometimes 3s will pass before I even see anything after I've already typed in my search term (I'm always searching for a local app btw - it's how I open apps).

It's like it waits on an http request for every keystroke.

Also, you used to be able to search for an app in any of the secondary languages you have in your settings. Which is great because apps have different names in different languages (Settings vs Configuración vs Réglages), so it would be annoying to have to remember which word to search based on which language is primary. For years it would show you multilingual results (e.g. you can search for "Settings" as long as English is one of your secondary iPhone languages yet "Configuración" or "Réglages" would still show up).

It was the sort of polish I came to expect from Apple. Well, that stopped working a couple years ago.

Try disabling everything labeled “suggestion” in settings. This drove me crazy too and pretty much went away after I disabled Siri and safari suggestions.

The article makes some great points about how iOS software is regressing, but it still feels so much better than almost any other software I use on a daily basis.

I’ve only ever noticed maybe like a few actually bothersome bugs in the however many years I’ve been using iPhones which is pretty impressive.

Anyway, hope they get it together. Performance and optimization are a very difficult and very thankless job that might not get you promoted the same way cool sexy feature work does. Such is corporate life I guess.

> The article makes some great points about how iOS software is regressing, but it still feels so much better than almost any other software I use on a daily basis.

I face none of the issues on my Samsung S23 phone, which the parent commentator describes - no issues in phones calls (I make 4-5 calls daily, mix of WhatsApp & regular calls), no major issues in Google Keep (which I use 2-3 times daily, specially never of a note becoming "blank"), and again no major issues in the Google App Store or updates (which I use on an average once a week).

So maybe, the software quality varies by user experience rather than one platform being universally better.

I use Apple-Silicon MacBook Pro and Mac Mini for software development. I hardly ever use Apple software for business/personal/productivity. Jetbrains IDE tools, Docker, Homebrew work great. I install Chrome browser and use Google services, AWS and GCP consoles, etc. via the browser. YouTube for video, Google Music app.

As for all Apple software, I might use Preview or Numbers (spreadsheets) on occasion, and I'm forced to use Finder, which I hate. And Terminal works well. I avoid Safari.

Apple "PC" hardware is solid. I use third party apps though, little Apple software, there are better alternatives. I've used Android since the HTC Dream (I think it was the first Android phone in the USA) and have stuck with Android since, with few problems.

Edit: I thought the Apple Vision Pro would be interesting (I couldn't justify the expense) but I saw the value supposedly would be greatest for those fully bought into the integrated Apple app ecosystem and iCloud. I'm not the target user.

MacOS is a lot less solid than it used to be. Not just in UI terms, but the current networking stack is garbage compared to the Snow Leopard era, we've had versions of the OS ship that couldn't read FAT32 properly, frameworks are breaking all over the place, and they have locked down any attempt to fix it.

Snow Leopard and other releases were a mess and macOS had huge network bottlenecks that limited throughput to 2gbps even with a 10gbps or faster network card until recently. macOS is way ahead of windows or Linux in terms of kernel and os guarantees for user security. There will be bugs when products change so I’m glad they continue to evolve the stack.

> Apple "PC" hardware is solid. I use third party apps though, little Apple software,

Same. I have two "deal-brakers" when it comes to notebooks: 1) it's got to sleep consistently and without problems when I close the lid. 2) it should be silent when I'm doing simple things or nothing at all.

I have never seen a Linux or Windows laptop that does these things well. Even Intel MacBooks would spin up the fans seemingly at random. I don't think I've ever heard the fan in my M1 MBP. I'm looking forward to the new M4 MBA to replace an older Windows 10 laptop, which spins up its fans all the time, and sometimes doesn't sleep, sucking the battery dry in the process.

I'm on a Lenovo Yoga 6 w/Gentoo and Sleep/Hibernate work as expected. Mostly quiet, until heavy work.

Had to swap the WiFi module to get the power management to work properly.

My Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Nano gen 1 running KDE Plasma Arch Linux with an intel i5 meets your criteria.

I have Lenovo ThinkPad T14s AMD, which always goes to sleep and wakes up just fine. Bluetooth works, it's fast, quiet and has a long battery life.

AND I can use Linux, which is a dealbreaker for me as my favorite operating system.

https://asahilinux.org : Exists

With many things not working, and without mainline Linux support. And with platform that is not x86.

Yes, arm and riscv are interesting. I will definitely test them in the next ten years if they still get better. For now, x86 is still the best platform for me.

Hmm every day i notice that the button to open photos and send them via iMessage doesn’t load the photos half the time. I close the widget, open it again, boom it works. This bug was introduced 5 or more years ago and no one has fixed it. It drives me crazy.

I moved out of iPhone because of one such thing: the call log can only be 100 items long, like what? The most powerful processor ever, hundreds of GB and i can't see who I called last month?? I was done at that moment.

That doesn’t seem to be correct (any more?) I just spent a while scrolling back through the call log.

It goes back to 2019 - certainly more than 100 calls

Indeed, this restriction was eased in a recent iOS version. Prior to this update, it was true that only the most recent 100 records could be displayed. Moreover, it is amusing to note that after deleting the first most recent record, one can still view the 100th record. This effectively displays 101 records. It is perplexing why this decision was made, as it deliberately limits the user interface to display only 100 records.

God damn lol. I'm interestingly not regretting the shift though. It truly is useful more often than I thought to request desktop sites and actually see desktop sites, or open two apps side by side.

The notes bug drives me nuts when I am working on a longer document.

>phone app

I'm triggered. How many times have you reached for the 'end call' button, but the other person ended the call a moment earlier than you, and as you press down the screen immediately flips to your "recent calls" screen and you call a random person straight away?

This is such a common and terrifying experience for me, and yet it's been the default UX on the Phone app since probably day 1.

the ipad skype apps puts the call button where the hangup button is, so if someone hangs up right when you are going to click it, you call them again.

and this is such an easy fix, just don't make components touchable for X milliseconds after they are visible, some value below average human reaction time.

this could of course get in the way of people quickly navigating via muscle memory, but there's a probably a threshold where it can prevent one without affecting the other.

I literally posted about this issue with pretty much the exact same proposed solution in 2017

https://medium.com/p/31773fe6bbd5

This happened so often for me. But lo and behold, they fixed it. I recently installed iOS 18, and the phone app now prevents accidental touch input after the other person has ended the call. This took almost 18 years!

This is a symptom of a more general problem that I named (clumsily... "Rerender/Reflow/Repopulation Delayed Interaction Timeout Missing") in a 2017 blog post!

https://medium.com/p/31773fe6bbd5

I consider it by far the most annoying bug in touch UI's today.

Solution: There must be a small interaction-ignoring delay instituted when any control has just moved to its final rendered location.

Here's my favorite UI/UX bug which has been there for years:

In Calendar (macOS) create a new event.

In the start or end time, type in the Minutes field, but type slowly.

For example, type "2" pause a bit, then type "1"

If there's more than ~300msec pause between the two keypresses, the 2 changes into "02" and then the 1 overrides it, so you end up with "01" instead of 21.

Works with any two kepresses. Same problem in the date fields.

Completely wrong, and super bad for accessibility.

My favourite one is getting voicemail spam with no records in my call log for a number to block. Lovely.

Spam callers rotate the fake numbers they use for Caller ID, so blocking individual numbers doesn't work.

I'm cooked then.

Same feeling about Mac OS. What am I going to do? Move to Windows? I suppose I could install Gentoo or read the entire Arch wiki. However, I am no longer an unemployed 23-year-old. Don't have the time or care to bother with recreational sysadminning.

I had an iPhone I was fixing up. I backed up what was necessary, disconnected the old iCloud account, and created a new one to use when updating the OS. I created a spam-blocking address (mailgw) for this account. It created fine and I logged in from the phone without problem. I did the OS update, but then I got a dreaded error that it couldn't log in. I tried to log in with the account on the PC and it has been deleted. Apple deleted the account out from under the phone and now it's iCloud locked, all within less than half an hour. I called but they said I'd have to go to an Apple store and produce the original receipt. If this was really about theft, why couldn't I just regain control from the AppleID that had been logged in for years from the phone? I checked from that account but it had no option to report that the phone was fine. This was a many-year-old phone and the receipt was long gone. So Apple basically bricked the phone, with no recourse. I will never buy an Apple device again.

> why couldn't I just regain control from the AppleID that had been logged in for years from the phone?

Maybe Apple is doing this in an automated way to prevent people using several accounts for storage.

On Google Drive, if you run out of space, you can create a new account, and switch when needed.

> Maybe Apple is doing this in an automated way to prevent people using several accounts for storage.

And Apple's attempt to stop people from "stealing" a few dollars a month in storage somehow justifies bricking a $1000 piece of hardware?

Google doesn't care, because Google has WAY better anti-abuse features which cost money and so has weighed the risk of the "Google carelessly wrecks someone's online identity" headline against "someone might squeeze us for an extra 5GB of space."

Yeah personally speaking I created a separate account just for my WhatsApp backup, but once that breached 15GB as well... I caved and bought the 100GB google one plan.

When you upgrade MacOS 15.3.0 apple automatically enables Apple intelligence and then turns on Apple intelligence reporting (15 min intervals) by default.

You are not prompted or asked to enable.

After disabling Apple Intelligence when you do the next mini update to 15.3.1 Apple intelligence is enabled. Again no prompt and your previous choice to disable is ignored.

This IMO is a bad sign for Apple software quality. Looks like they are moving to more dark user methods seen in Windows 11.

I thought only MS was doing that. I have over 25 admin on/off switches for copilot in the M365 ecosystem that were forced ON in the last year. On the power platform- The authorized consent to move data between regions for ai was AUTOMATICALLY set to YES also and it was sending prod data around to read it and give advice. I guess they sneak it in with some EULA update.. When I open tickets I always get sent to the wrong copilot team because they cant keep track of it and I have to go through a forced AI agent before opening tickets also now. The rushed updates broke a lot of their own JS and its been a bad bad year with over 200 hours wasted on this since last year where I normally spend less than 40 hours a year with such nonsense.

That seems completely illegal.

Legality only matters when the law is enforced. That's basically never been the case when it comes to privacy or corporation-against-consumer fraud.

This issue was so annoying since “apple intelligence” debuted. I would have to manually toggle off for each device that updated.

But at least since 15.3.0, for me, it’s no longer an issue.

One man's "dark pattern opt-in" is another man's "stunning rate of user adoption".

This was also the case for iOS 18.3.0 and 18.3.1.

True Tone is also turned on after every OS update.

This is particularly annoying when you calibrate your screen for some modicum of colour accuracy.

Bluetooth is also turned on after every OS update. I don't understand why macOS does these. They can't be bugs because they have been around for years.

Because a newb might complain that their earbuds/pencil is not working.

That they cannot be bugs definitely does not follow. One look at Windows tray icons, monitor recognition, sound volume management, and many other things will tell you that much. Broken since forever. So definitely big companies and tech giants can keep bugs in there for many years. Also note the bugs on iOS described by someone else here in this thread.

This is not a bug, it's a feature.

By "volunteering" your data for third party advertising (...remember, you agreed to Apple's ToS), they get to sell referrals and you get nothing.

Sounds fair?

My main Apple computers predate modern LLMs, and will forever be stuck on Ventura & 10.14. The M4 Mini I just purchased (to replace MacPro5,1) will never go online, and I have physically removed all wireless "features" [why does bluetooth constantly turn itself back on?!] — love the OS (particularly the fluidity of screensavers) but the OS is so enmeshed in wanting to "be helpful" (== I don't want your AI schizo ==) that I won't plan to update any online machines any further than 2023 operating systems (== "pre-AI" ==).

The best news in all this is it may finally push me into running Linux as my main online machine, which I've been putting off for only three decades now (68k->PPC->Intel->Silicone).

What is even worse is that I have all automatic updates turned off but my mac still auto updates all the time.

My current plan is to basically never move on from macOS 14 and perhaps move away from macOS entirely when the time arrives that I’d be forced to upgrade (new hardware needed, etc)

For reasons I am not sure about,

When a new major version of macOS is released macOS developers seem obsessed with quickly releasing a new version of their apps that will only run on the newest operating system.

From then on any updates and bug fixes are only available on the latest macOS

If you don't upgrade to the latest and greatest macOS you are out of luck.

I fear the day when all new apps must target the M* chip and everyone on the x64 side has a paperweight

This made even worse when Apple dictates when your computer is no longer allowed to run the latest and greatest OS¹.

On the Windows side, a majority of applications tend to work on a wider range of operating systems.

¹ There are various ways of bypassing this and installing the latest OS in a most unsupported manner.

> When a new major version of macOS is released macOS developers seem obsessed with quickly releasing a new version of their apps that will only run on the newest operating system.

This is encouraged by Apple to help with their planned obsolescence of old OS versions. With new macOS versions there is often a requirement to rebuild your apps with the latest version of Xcode which ships alongside it. This is because Apple changes lots of its internal APIs etc between OS versions, and only the latest version of Xcode supports those changes.

Also the App stores only allow new and update submissions for apps built with the latest SDK, which in turn must be coded on the latest version of Xcode, which itself cannot be run on older versions of macOS.

Is this all a conspiracy to keep people buying new computers and phones? I cannot say, but if I wanted to keep people bying more of my product this is how I would do it.

I'm not a macOS dev, so not talking from direct experience, but you can select a minimum deployment target in Xcode as low as macOS 10.13, I believe. There must be a reason some devs choose not to support that.

Well he explained the "reason": Apple makes it very easy for devs to choose the option they want, less work from the point of view of devs.

All because they are constantly deprecating API/framework when in general they are just moving things around and nothing really changes. You have to be a hardcore believer to not find issue with the behavior, it's so convenient for their business model.

Meanwhile on the Windows side you can find obscure software from the Vista era and chances are it will work without issues.

I think it's OK as long as I can keep my development tools and productivity tools.

I'm intrigued by Apple products because my working laptop is a MacBook Pro. I'm thinking about buying one for studying MacOS internals and app development, so as long as I'm not forced to update XCode, homebrew, caffeine, sublime text and a few other tools, I think it's fine.

Set your Mac to English (UK) and Siri to English (US), or the other way around. Then it will complain that Apple Intelligence only works if Siri and your Mac have the same language.

Problem solved B-).

> and then turns on Apple intelligence reporting (15 min intervals) by default.

That feature is so misunderstood, it feels like no one read the help text or tried it and is just going off the misplaced outrage of everyone else.

That setting is not about sending information to Apple, it is a personal private report for yourself.

There are enough legitimate reasons to criticise Apple, we don’t need to make up a problem which isn’t there and distract from the ones that exist.

I don't want any goddamn reports!

Which is a valid but entirely different complaint from claiming those reports are being sent every 15 minutes. What sense would that even make? They could just log your data anyway without you knowing or providing a setting for it. Why would they make it a toggle for something you need to provide authentication to access?

Are those reports backed up in the automated backup tool which posts an encrypted backup to your icloud which only Apple can decrypt and view?

Not that I’m aware of, and neither do I care. I don’t use nor do I plan to turn on Apple Intelligence. You can visit the relevant section in System Settings yourself and peruse to your satisfaction the comprehensive explanations and links they make available.

This is the stupidest feature to be mad about. Why go through all the trouble of creating Private Cloud Compute and ensuring every request is private, to then add a separate visible feature to get a report of your activity? It would be significantly cheaper and easier to simply not having gone through the effort and log everything like every other provider does. The reporting feature is for you. It is so you know what was sent and can make informed decisions. It is a feature that adds transparency. It gives you more control over your data than if it didn’t exist.

Clearly Apple did a poor job of communicating what the feature does. But rallying about it will only make them less likely to add other transparency features in the future. Save your breath and complain about the things they do do wrong. There are plenty of those to pick from.

> After disabling Apple Intelligence when you do the next mini update to 15.3.1 Apple intelligence is enabled

Lemme list some of my recent nitpicks:

I never used Bluetooth that much because I had no devices either for the phone or tablet, so I kept it disabled. But every major or minor iOS update was turning it on - I ofc understand that some devices may want to reconnect after update. But that doesn't explain why since v18.2.1 it suddenly stays disabled in my case on both devices after update's done.

Then there's iOS ongoing conversation screen that never ever allows me to access springboard when I want e.g. check the notifications. It just constantly pops up like on rubber-band and after few angry swipes, pressing the lock button back and forth finally lets me in. Do I by any chance "hold it wrong"? No idea but widget shouldn't block me from accessing phone - it should allow to swipe up and hide into status bar area.

And the control center changes in the latest iOS: these little widgets are stubborn, reorder themselves, can't change the size and tend to bug out to the point of flying "outside" the grid. It is baffling they managed to finally add icons custom positions on springboard but control center is like beta of the feature that should be here years ago.

Yesterday I've got a homepod mini for all the plugs, switchers and so on. Because for few years iPad cannot be the hub. During initial device asks for few things, like enabling voice recognition, location and then there's Apple Music offer for free for 3 months. I'm not using it and it will rather stay that way but now the offer is permanently presented in both tablet and phone settings right under my account and "family" represented by me and my partner.

After seeing the predatory tactics, dark patterns in last 2 Windows releases (I'll skip Google - because that's their default behavior for years) it seems that Apple too caught the trend. But also quality of the software overall isn't there anymore - no matter which company. Instead we're getting visual changes, or doubtful features that are being forced upon us like this Apple Intelligence or photos scanning.

I'll just hop on this chain since you commented recently.

I recently updated a very carefully managed (over many years) local Apple Music library to sync with cloud Apple Music. One funny (captive laughter) side effect was performance issues I had long since learned to live with just disappeared. For some insane reason running a completely local library is much, much laggier than one that is constantly syncing with the cloud.

The real fun, however, was when I recently created a smart playlist and noticed it was missing tracks that obviously should have been matched. I luckily found an older smart playlist with the same rule and lo and behold this one contained the tracks that were missing. So two smart playlists, exact same single rule (equating to "not Favourited"), with > 1000 difference in total tracks.

This is stressing me out. How can I trust any of my smart playlists anymore? Is my library corrupt, or is it just a bug? Who knows, and who knows when or if it will ever be fixed. I can list numerous other bugs with playlists in the macOS Apple Music app that have existed across 2 or more previous major releases.

Apple intelligence cannot be enabled in my country, yet sometimes when I do an action in Mail (desktop), I get a popup with a summary of my email asking me something about it.

> After disabling Apple Intelligence when you do the next mini update to 15.3.1 Apple intelligence is enabled.

This should be criminal. And I believe it might actually be criminal in EU.

I drank the "creating products that prioritize user experience over feature checklists" kool-aid back in ~2013 sometime, and got myself a first Macbook when I worked at a software startup the first time. While it certainly gave a more "premium" impression in terms of hardware/UI/UX for the first few years, around 2016 I had to move back to Linux because the software experience and the user experience is just too poor, outright buggy and changes all the time.

Even basic UX like "Can still see navigation map on CarPlay when someone calls you" seems to be just not thought of at all, or not being able to move the cursor left/right because the current iPhone keyboard mode only allows number. There are a thousands of these tiny cuts that just makes it such a pain to use daily.

Which is a darn shame, because the hardware is truly amazing, from everything from the displays, to keyboard and trackpads, to the general feeling and the CPU. But the software experience been so shit for the last decade that it's hard to justify going back.

The CarPlay "limitation" is likely to be a road safety/liability issue.

Yes, I agree. If I'm navigating, then an incoming call shouldn't block the entire screen with the avatar of who is calling, the map has to remain visible at all times. If even one person from Apple would have tested the scenario of "I'm navigating with a map and someone calls me", they'd see how dangerous their current implementation is.

I have had to reject/hang up so many calls because someone calls exactly when I'm trying to figure out where to go by looking at the map. In my mind, what Apple is currently doing should be outright illegal.

Preach!

Nothing wrong with the "creating products that prioritize user experience over features" - or more accurately what Jobs said: create products that start with the user experience and the user’s needs first and then work your way to the tech (as far as I remember)

The opposite approach is starting with some tech and then trying to find a use for it, e.g. folding phones, second 1/2 screen on laptop, etc, instead of trying to actually create a usable, quality trackpad for instance.

The critique is still valid: Apple, for their software, seem to not have the same focus on quality as Jobs once insisted on. Their physical products are very much still top notch, and the products on the whole are still developed with this mindset as far as I’m concerned. It’s just the software quality that has taken a hit for some reason.

Can I ask what the fascination with the Apple trackpad is? My other daily driver is a Thinkpad and I actually vastly prefer using the smaller one on it. You're not flinging your wrist across the zipcode and the clicks are more tactile.

... I'm sorry but I think you're missing the forest for the trees. You might prefer a smaller trackpad, but then why? Just increase the sensitivity to reduce your finger movements.

Anyway, Apple's trackpad is good because it perfectly captures intent, whatever the situation and the number of fingers. It's flawless. You got half your palm on the side of the trackpad while writing? Nope, not picked up. You quickly flick with half your palm on there? Boom, got it. Five finger gesture? No prob fam.

...unless that intent is to right click something. In which case I have to move across the vast expanse of trackpad to find the secret magic area on where it lives.

I'm not familiar with all of the trackpad gestures, but that's part of my big frustration with macOS in general - discoverability absolutely sucks. Half of the stuff I need to do is hidden behind a set of arcane keystrokes that I am apparently supposed to memorize.

Settings -> Trackpad and it's all right there.

Exactly. They’re complaining about the defaults, yet you’re on Hacker News where most people on here probably have the most cursed settings you can think of.

> ...unless that intent is to right click something. In which case I have to move across the vast expanse of trackpad to find the secret magic area on where it lives.

I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't disbelieve you, I just don't even know what you're trying to do. It must be a feature I've never attempted to use.

I just click with two fingers, anywhere. Boom, right click. Didn't even know there was another way.

Bottom right corner there's a hidden area for right clicking.

I never use the two finger click. I am particularly uncoordinated always end up moving the cursor and miss the target. Maybe it's just not for me.

You can also enable tapping (for left and right clicks). If you’re not pushing the trackpad maybe you’ll have less issues with the cursor moving while you do it?

Everybody has different trackpad habits and they can be hard to put into words. For example, trackpads used to have buttons at the bottom, and you'd naturally use your fingers for pointing, and the thumb for clicking. Now the buttons are gone, and new users click with their index fingers, which can be tiring and inaccurate on some trackpads (especially older/cheaper mechanical ones).

Right-clicking also has a history. Because Mac trackpads only had one button (unlike PC touchpads), the way to right-click was to point with either your index or middle finger (high precision), then put down the other of these two fingers on the trackpad while doing the thumb-click. It will not move the cursor, so there is no loss of precision. At least that's what I did for a long time. (Although I don't lose precision if I hold down two fingers and press with one of them either.)

And it gets more confusing when Apple changes the defaults. They've flip-flopped between touch-to-click and press-to-click at least once. I'm not sure if using the bottom right corner was ever the default for right-clicks? And then they also removed the video clips that taught you some gestures in the system settings. And I think the whole "deep press" gesture is an anti-feature that only confuses people, the dictionary lookup used to be a three-finger tap and that was fine. But the Magic Trackpad 2 needed a headline feature, sigh.

I think people give up too easily when they have to unlearn old habits. I've been using the macbook trackpads for over a decade now and it's more comfortable than a mouse. Just the fact that I can zoom in and freely scroll left and right makes all the difference compared to a mouse, so even when I use an external mouse with the laptop on a stand I reach for the trackpad for the gestures. It's like an extension of my mind at this point. And one technique that is not immediately clear is that to drag things you can click with one finger and drag with another, eg click on the icon with the index finger and then move it with the middle finger, easier than pushing the index finger around while keeping it depressed.

Regarding dragging, macOS also has an "accessibility" option to drag with three fingers. (It used to be a regular trackpad setting.)

It is a rather obscure feature, and yet it has such a dedicated following (me included) that a re-implementation of it was recently merged into libinput. The downside is that tap-and-drag is disabled when three-finger dragging is enabled, which makes it a bit harder to go back and forth across operating systems.

Settings -> Trackpad :)

How was I supposed to know to look in settings for features I don't know exist?

It's usually worth checking.

I don’t mean this in a bad way but would not expect this kind of answer from HN’er…

does clicking with two fingers not right click like it does on win + (common) linux?

Maybe I should try a Thinkpad but otherwise the Macbook trackpad is the only one that really works for me and doesn't feel awkward. The gestures are right and the feel is right. I agree about size. It could be smaller.

Thinkpads are okay now, still mostly hinged and no haptics, maybe they have it on the most expensive carbons.

It was the first good trackpad that supported gestures that are now common, things like two finger swipe to scroll (inertial scrolling was huge), pinching, two-finger for right click. I still see people using windows laptops with a mouse plugged in because in general windows laptops have touchpads that suck, and it was way more common a decade ago. Innovation in the windows laptop space was adding unusable gimmicks like a scroll stripe or right-click by tapping in a corner. And then apple introduced a haptic trackpad so you can do a tactile click anywhere, none of that bullshit tap to click where you have to keep your hand lifted so you don't accidentally tap on something. And windows laptops are still lagging behind, at least they got rid of buttons and have hinged touchpads, now we wait for them to catch up and add haptics.

some windows laptops have a haptic touchpad from sensel, which is reportedly good

To be fair, I use a mouse on a MacBook. Because even the best trackpad is still more cumbersome, painful, and inaccurate than a mouse.

While still anecdotal, I'll give you two data points:

The trackpad on my Thinkpad E495 is hanging and has lost the ability to register clicks, and had been like that after only two years of use. I think the reason is that the whole construction with lots of space is collecting dust. You can use the physical buttons above the pad, and some people like this retro design even, but IMO it's just reducing space and adds a border and height distance for your finger to travel, so arguably outdated and objectively worse.

The Elan trackpad on my Thinkpad x13 gen 2 has been defective from the start and registers palm contact where there is none, with the effect that the touchpad stops responding like every 30s; this is a known defect.

The trackpad works extremely great with macos. The acceleration curve, smoothness of scrolling, multi-gesture support that closely matches the UI paradigms, click anywhere and it perfectly registers, etc. It truely is to me the primary pointing device for mac and I immediately bought the external trackpad when trying external keyboards.

But none of that properly transfers to windows, and most of its hardware tweaks become irrelevant. I also didn't mind the Surface laptop trackpads, but vastly prefer a mouse with extra buttons for windows machines TBH (there are a ton of great mice too, so all things considered it's fine that way)

Folding phones are great though. I love mine, absolutely worth the purchase price. It's like a portable mini tablet and great for reading.

Worth the purchase price seems wild to me, but I guess things are all relative, have never owned an iPhone either, partly due to price and partly due to inferiority of software. That said, despite flagship folding phones seeming insanely expensive for what they are, they do seem like good and potentially better physical products than the standard static rectangle.

I'm not that price sensitive when it comes to phones, but I open and close my Galaxy Fold several times per day minimum.

Ya everyone derives different value from their stuff. Is that how you're judging value for price or just the quality of the folding bit? I do quite like the Galaxy Fold, but I think my needs from any kind of smartphone pretty much could top out at a Pixel 2, rocking a 7 atm.

Yeah I guess I don't really know how to translate the value of the folding feature into dollars, except that I don't feel any need for an ebook reader anymore, so I guess it's at least base phone price + price of a Kindle or similar.

> except that I don't feel any need for an ebook reader anymore

Is that just because you get a little more space due to folding? Personally I just loathe how much time my phone steals from me, and value the ebook reader on the basis that it has its specific purpose; no colour, barely does anything, I can't be messaged on it or watch videos, it's not as viable to use as anything but a reading device. But now that I think of it, I don't necessarily value those features in a way that makes me want to spent more than I did on it.

The way I think of the value I can derive from my phone is similar to how I assess how much value I could hypothetically get from an iPad Pro. Although it's nicer, faster, etc.. than my old as hell iPad, it doesn't do anything substantially different or that much better in terms of what I'd likely do with the device, and it seems like I only ever need one of them, since it's kind of just consumption technology, but if I was marking up A4 PDFs regularly, it might offer more utility.

Yeah it means I don't need to carry about two devices instead of one, and it fits in my pocket due to the folding. In practice I often want to read things when I'm on the move or in bed or otherwise not necessarily near my other device, so having one device that does it all is useful. A case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

"top notch" indeed. Oh wait, it's a 'dynamic island' now.

Personal pet peeve: CarPlay not pausing what you are playing when you hit the infotainment power button is really dumb.

That's not been my experience. If I hit power off on my volume knob, it's effectively pause to CarPlay. Does your car treat it more like mute?

Yeah both cars where I have had it treat it as mute. Maybe a setting I guess.

It pauses for me when I hit the mute switch though. I pretty much never power it off.

I can assure you that if you "went back to linux" you are the furthest thing from the target audience you can be.

Not to downplay your experience, but it is almost certainly not what Apple uses for user feedback.

I went back to Linux because I can at least decide when I'm ready for updates that changes my workflow. Neither Windows nor macOS gives me that experience. I wouldn't put Linux on a pedestral when it comes to UX/UI/design, but at least it doesn't rugpull me once a year (or more often with Windows) with forced updates.

As someone who cares deeply about UX that doesn't get in the way and allows professionals to do their work effectively, I'd be a hardcore Apple fanboy if the UX was actually good for that.

I’m not sure where you saw forced updates. I’m usually 2 to 3 major versions of macOS behind.

> I’m not sure where you saw forced updates. I’m usually 2 to 3 major versions of macOS behind.

I remember being nagged about upgrading to the latest OS version at least once a day if not more often. Opening my wife's laptop just now, I saw another one of those notifications, begging to update where the only options were "Restart" or "Later".

This is one of my least favorite aspects of modern UI design practices, the user doesn't have any agency. Everything's a choice between "Yes" and "ask again later".

The update notification has a close icon when you hover the popup window. I use it all the time.

It'll ask me again later (a few days? a week?), but it won't make any changes immediately, nor will it schedule any changes.

I'm a chronic procrastinator when it comes to updating macOS, and I can confidently say that it asks me about updating _at most_ once a week (if even that), not every day and certainly not multiple times in the same day.

You can turn off automatic updates if you want. You can even control security sensitive updates and App Store app updates separately.

You can dismiss that by clicking on the notification without clicking on either option. It will pull up the System Settings, which you can then close.

I’m currently 1 behind and the upgrade nagging is ramping up

I basically stay on whatever macos version I have until they pull security updates for it. Seems to work alright so far. My last two OSs were mojave and now Sonoma (due to the new mac coming with it) having skipped all the rest including the latest sequoia.

> around 2016 I had to move back to Linux because the software experience and the user experience is just too poor, outright buggy and changes all the time.

Honestly, I have difficulty believing someone could find these kinds of issues to be less of a problem on Linux than on Mac

If you haven't tried out the various Linux desktop environments for a long try, give it a try yourself. I'm having a way more stable experience with Gnome than I ever had with Windows or macOS the last decade or so, especially when I can chose when I want to upgrade, and I don't get nagged about it once a day.

But before that, I'd agree with you, it would have be stupid to prefer anything Linux over OSX or Windows, back when they were rock-solid. But today?

I've been using KDE for around a year. It has a few bugs but overall it's much better in my experience than either Windows or macOS. KDE 6.2 and above have been really marvelous — I actually donated $100 (I think) to them because I was really happy with the work they were doing.

KDE actually has working focus stealing prevention!

I've encountered fewer show-stopping bugs in Linux than macOS lately. And of the software that I use on both, the macOS versions have more problems. Honestly, the main thing holding me back from replacing my M1 MBA with a linux laptop is the wonderful speed and battery life. If the software problems get bad enough to negate those I'm switching.

What Linux CarPlay alternative do you use?

I don't, I still use my horrible iPhone 12 Mini for CarPlay. Waiting for it to either get too old to get updates, or for it to break before I move back to Android, I guess.

So given the choice you still choose CarPlay.

I've got a Polestar 2. The map is shown inside the dashboard. The calls appear on the centre display.

I think it's a limitation of the vehicle's implementation.

It is not, Android Auto still shows me the map while there is an incoming call, which CarPlay doesn't, on the same car. CarPlay's "incoming call" widget/popup blocks the entire view, I think Android Auto just displays something in a corner or something.

Apple's behavior makes sense when you realize that Apple caters to potential customers more than current ones. Their products are made to demo well to prospective customers. Every Apple product owner/user is inadvertently doing sales demos to onlookers.

I think it has more to do with a gradual industry-wide race to the bottom in terms of quality. Reliability, attention to detail, correctness occupy a tiny fraction of the "budget" compared to security, slopping out features, and beating competition to market. I suspect that startup culture being the crucible where a large portion of engineers learned their chops and the massive amount of new blood in the industry who are primarily there for money are the biggest factors.

I concur. To add, I wonder how much of the “old guard” is still at Apple? Apple used to be perfectionistic when it came to software, even during the 1985-1996 interregnum when Steve Jobs was absent. Besides Steve Jobs, Apple also had people like Bruce Tognazzini and Don Norman who cared deeply about usability. When Apple purchased NeXT and built Mac OS X, Apple’s usability focus was married to reliable, stable infrastructure, culminating with Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which I believe was the pinnacle of the Mac experience. (Though I’m partial to the classic Mac OS from a UI point of view, Mac OS X had a better UX due to its stability.)

I suspect a lot of Apple’s decisions in the past decade regarding software is due to an increasing number of Apple employees who are not familiar with the philosophies of 1970s-era Xerox PARC, the classic Mac, NeXT, and Jobs-era Mac OS X. Granted, it’s possible to be too introspective, too focused on the past. Unfortunately Apple’s software is losing its perfectionistic qualities, which has long been the selling point of the Mac compared to Windows and Linux.

I think you have rose colored glasses on. System 7-8 at least were crash proned disasters and the 68K emulator was so bad on the first gen PPC computers you basically had to use SpeedDoubler - a much better third party emulator.

Half the OS was still running under emulatiom

> I think you have rose colored glasses on. System 7-8 at least were crash proned disasters

I think that is what was said:

> (Though I’m partial to the classic Mac OS from a UI point of view, Mac OS X had a better UX due to its stability.)

Linux seems like the opposite to me a slow marathon to achieve perfection. With pipewire, systemd and wayland there's less cruft than ever and you get the best out-of-the-box experience since it's inception.

Woah now, saying something positive about systemd will bring a bunch of crusty greybeards out of the woodwork who want their Linux to be as close to BSD4.4 as possible.

Jokes aside, I'm in agreement. Audio was still slightly buggy for me using a Elgato XLR USB interface, but it consistently worked with annoying workarounds. Linux is in a very good place for even normal consumers these days, I'm hoping Valve ends up making SteamOS a generalized gaming platform that will pull more market share away from Windows in that specific niche. I'm so ready.

I don't get the systemd hate, as a user I find it quite nice. Centralized place all services live and I can see all the stuff I use and need. Good CLI for inspecting services and getting logs.

But like, I don't manage linux servers and stuff so I am sure it sucks in certain very specific ways for people who need to deal with it day in and out.

I remember my young days of using Slackware with init.d. That was hell.

I've managed Linux systems of all sizes and don't really get it either. Systemd is largely a good thing, though there are occasionally bugs that make if frustrating to deal with.

It's those bugs and weird cases (and the fact that -IME- systemd provides zero diagnostic help when you hit them) that are the killer.

In my professional experience, I've come to understand that the systemd project has an assload of accidental complexity that the systemd folks are unwilling to reduce. At least once a year, we'll have a production-down page from a customer whose root cause turns out to be systemd failing in some bizarre and entirely inscrutable way. After a ton of digging, we'll eventually find someone who has run into something similar, and either got no response, or a "Wow, that's weird. Well, there's nothing WE can or should do." response from the systemd people.

"Solving" these issues is very frustrating, because we usually end up changing things from one way that the docs indicated would work just fine, to a different way the docs indicate would work just fine... which doesn't give us any confidence that what we did won't suddenly stop working next year. A project that is as fundamental as systemd wants to be really should be aggressively reducing complexity to the minimum required to get the job done and regularly documenting caveats and quirks as they're discovered and deemed "E_WONTFIX".

I have the occasional annoyance like "VLC has choppy audio for a few seconds after I seek," and "Gnome has gone full douchebag with notifications for everything and removing all the settings."

Other than that, though, Ubuntu on any old laptop (expensive thinkpads are my favorite) is my go-to daily driver. Except at work where I'm learning to deal with a (new, shiny, powerful) Macbook that I will use to... connect to a Linux VM because that's the only way to work on our software. Seriously, a whole fleet of zillion dollar macbooks so we can all ssh into beefy VMs to build/test/deploy on Linux.

IT onboarding made a point that if you want to get a Windows laptop and wipe it for Linux, you need permission and a "good reason." How about "this is stupid just let me work on stuff." Of course it's about tech support and security, which is fair enough but I feel like they have it backwards. Support Linux and then require special permission for the $4000 ssh client...

After spending a couple of days with homebrew and building some things natively on aarch64, though, I might make a hobby out of moving stuff local. It really is a beautiful machine.

IMO the main argument for devs to use linux is that Docker can run without a VM (and without Docker Desktop which is now payed) in linux. If you do docker stuff with any sort of frequency it will save years-worth of your time.

Did pipewire actually build in their pulseaudio and JACK emulation, or is it still acting as a shim between already-running pulseaudio and JACK daemons?

Also, (FWIW) I've a fine time with JACK2, openrc, and xorg. I had to do some manual work to tell JACK which sound card to use and to set up the pulseaudio backfill for software that doesn't know how to speak to JACK, [0] but everything else just works.

[0] The "tricky" part was disabling all pulseaudio backend modules but the JACK backend. This was -of course- not tricky at all.

It's a reimplementation of a pulseaudio server and a reimplementation of the jack client library. See https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ...

Ah. Glad to hear that they finally got that done. Good for them! (I hope it's feature complete, and hope there aren't any subtle bugs in it! (And if there happen to be any bugs, I hope they're super committed to acknowledging them and fixing them.))

Thanks much for the link to the FAQ.

> a gradual industry-wide race to the bottom in terms of quality

I'm going to disagree. This is a false nostalgia.

15 years ago the market for consumer laptops that were not MacBooks straight up sucked. If you walk into a Best Buy today, almost any laptop you buy is going to blow any laptop from back then out of the water in terms of build quality. And credit where it's due, in no small part it came from playing catch up with Apple.

I am not referring to hardware. Hardware quality has largely improved, software quality has largely gotten worse.

I think there was a sweet spot in the late 2000s and early 2010s, more specifically, the Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard eras.

On the Windows side of things, this was when Microsoft got serious about security, with plagued earlier versions of Windows XP (worms were so rampant around 2005) until later service packs helped fix things. Windows 7 was solid and performant. While my favorite version of Windows is 2000, 7 was another high mark for Windows.

Much has been said about Snow Leopard, but it was the pinnacle of Mac OS X, the refinement of an already great OS, Leopard. I would gladly used Snow Leopard today if it weren’t for needing current web browsers and up-to-date security patches.

Even the Web was better back then. By 2008 many mainstays of modern Web life, such as social media and YouTube, were already in existence. Google was excellent. Internet Explorer’s dominance was successfully challenged, and there was an ecosystem of standards-compliant browsers (later IE versions, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera). Web developers were coding to standards instead of only writing for one browser. Yes, ads existed, and there was also malware, but ads were less intrusive, and malware can be avoidable with more careful browsing.

I miss 2009- and 2010-era computing, when Windows and Mac OS X were at their peaks, when the browser ecosystem was diverse, and when many commercial websites like Facebook were still pleasant to use.

I think regarding the combination of usability and stability the Win XP/7 era was still unbeatable.

WinXP was just an ugly face on Windows 2000 Workstation without an EOL version of DirectX for gaming.

Oh, Win 2000...that was my fav OS. I stretched using it until XP is almost history. But XP was good for me too, especially comparing to 10/11.

As someone who recently walked into a Best Buy with a family member and bought a laptop, I respectfully disagree.

All that store sells is hot garbage.

Yea I totally agree. This is selective memory.

Perhaps there were peaks and troughs in individual technologies. Late 2000s / early 2010s felt like a good time for operating systems, for instance.

But is everyone forgetting having to navigate through Flash websites and Java Applets using Internet Explorer, for instance?

Also, people are just forgetting. There’s nostalgia in this thread about the iTunes desktop app, for instance. That program has been a pile of trash for as long as I can remember back in the 2000s.

iTunes is one of the best software of all times, you are crazy. It existed before even OS X was a thing (under another name but still).

It only became "problematic" when they tried to overload it too much to be able to "support" Windows for the iPod/iPhone without having to develop dedicated software.

They largely killed it and the replacement is lackluster. The best version was around version 10-11 with the colorized album view.

To this day there are no audio library management software that come close to what iTunes was. Apple Music, being a fork, is the closest thing, but it's not really the same thing at all.

> build quality

Tell that to Dell and their shit trackpads and prone to death battery charging circuits. And the joy of soldered RAM so you cannot upgrade can't be overstated enough.

I got Homepods for all my rooms. Woops. The unpredictable bad behavior is maddening. All intermittent but frequent problems:

• I ask Homepods to play some music, and music starts playing in another room.

• I ask a room to play something, it says that is not in my library. I ask again. Same response. The problem comes in two flavors: One, I have to power cycle the Homepod to get things to reconnect. Or two, there is a halflife of disconnect where each time I ask there is an independent 1/2 chance of resolving the problem.

• I ask the Homepod to play something in multiple rooms. Some rooms play others don't. Sometimes, one room will start and stop playing randomly. Sometimes all the rooms will start and stop playing randomly.

• I ask a Homepod to play in a Zone. Same issues as asking for multiple rooms explicitly.

• Sometimes paired Homepods will both play, sometimes only one.

• Sometimes Homepods in a pair respond differently. If I carefully ensure only one hears me, it might be the one that starts the music that the other one refuses to do.

I can go on, but my experience is Homepods don't scale. A single pod or pair are much more reliable. Obviously, the more components a system has the greater chance of a problem, but it shouldn't be every day, or multiple times a day, for an integer we normally think of as "small N".

To say my Homepod use has been shaped by these failures is an understatement.

Apple has completely dropped the ball on Homekit. The app interfaces are completely ridiculous. Bad parody of bad app interfaces ridiculous.

This is disappointing to hear. I was thinking of getting some HomePods to replace my Sonos system which has got progressively less reliable over the years to the point of being virtually useless now.

Are there any modern home audio setups that connect to streaming services and actually work reliably? At this point I’m thinking of just going back to an iPod and dock like it’s 2006.

It’s not a simple plug in and stream product, but ever since replacing Sonos with Control4 we’ve been incredibly happy. Josh on top of it for voice and it “just works”.

As I said, not a direct comparison, but starting to think consumer level stuff like Sonos and HonePods just doesn’t have the right incentive structure anymore to deliver the level of quality we all seem to be asking for.

I'm testing out Wiim in a couple rooms as a replacement for Sonos and the initial results have been positive, though I haven't been using them long. So far my biggest complaints are that every model in their lineup has a different protocol compatibility list and that the Spotify integration isn't as well-polished.

I really like my HomePods and have had zero issues.

Siri is not smart, but plays music, sets timers and turns off lights just fine, and that’s all I want.

Siri often can't tell the difference between off and on.

Setting timers has got worse it now on a significant proportion of timer requests replies I can't find that in your Library.

Alexa is much more reliable.

If your Sonos speakers are old enough, take a day out and downgrade them all to S1. Just like magic it will all start working like it did the day you got it.

I have Sonos and they work perfectly, I love them. If you think Sonos is bad (recent app update included) go look at the HomePod subreddit, it is basically non stop issues. Having said that, I use Airplay a bunch and it is fine for me. I have had problems with Airplay in the past that were 100% solved by checking and improving wifi signal strength.

And it’s not just through siri - everything home seems to have a life of its own. It works most of the time, but that, especially at home is not enough.

That’s really weird, I have HomePods gen 1 & 2 (and a few mini’s) and they’ve worked fine so far. More often than not my room mates are more of a problem than the HomePods. Usually someone will connect their call to a random HomePod, which is usually pretty disconcerting.

I will say though I rarely ask the HomePods themselves to play music and almost always use a phone to start the music. I have ~7 connected around the house. I used a few different voices though so I know which one responded so I know which one to go after if I set a timer, since 3 share an open loft area and for that it can be a bit weird which one gets the request.

> I have HomePods gen 1 & 2 (and a few mini’s)

I have mostly HomePod Mini pairs, and a couple individual Homepods. I do have quite a few rooms, but my network is solid. Perhaps having a series of wired WiFi repeaters gives Homekit trouble, but nothing else has issues.

> almost always use a phone to start the music

This works better for me too. I still have (much less frequent) trouble casting to some random room's speakers.

But that is cumbersome compared to just asking, especially for multiple rooms. Since "Zones" don't show up in the iOS and macOS volume/speaker-group interfaces at all, as far as I can tell.

And then there is Apple's design choice to only let each room appear in one "Zone". No idea why each zone can't simply be its own set. Leave it up to users to care if two people are fighting over what plays in some joint room - it would be a problem that reflected editable zone definitions, not a bug.

The whole system is inexplicably janky: by design, lack of original effort, subsequent inattention, and bug.

It's janky because it's poorly thought out and they tried to give too much with too little capacity.

It's stupid that you have to stream for a phone in the first place when you could have something connected to power act as a local server and not deplete the battery from your phone (and enjoy the unreliability of wifi on top).

Apple has just made a poor decision for the "wow" factor that never makes for a great working product in the end. The hardest part is saying no to stuff that don't make sense and the way they have implemented Homepods/Homekit is just a testament of that.

> It's stupid that you have to stream for a phone in the first place when you could have something connected to power act as a local server and not deplete the battery from your phone (and enjoy the unreliability of wifi on top).

You aren’t streaming from your phone? I was under the impression that HomePods only stream phone calls. Media is accessed by the HomePod itself, and your phone either gets updates from it on what is playing or your phone is telling it what to play. Evidenced by if you disconnect wifi on your phone the HomePod will continue the current song without your device.

My take: over success breeds complacency. Apple knows where its money is coming from. It has carved out an extremely hard to establish hardware production chain via iphone and macbooks, and is able to provide a certain consistent level of quality for it. Software is an afterthought, especially for software that is not in service of this primary hardware revenue source. From a business point of view it literally does not make sense for them to do anything differently. Of course, disruption is always a possibility. Google was the undisputed AI leader for years, but their reputation as a House of Knowledge was overshadowed by their comfort as a search, cloud, and advertisement business. These are steady services that just need to be reliable to remain profitable, no invention required.

For a while I was surprised by Mircrosoft's signs of life around generative AI by the time OpenAI came about, but it seemed to relapse into complacency too.

I honestly believe there is some unstated law of success, I think there is a "ceiling" to success, at which point it becomes impossible to expand. It has something to do with the correlation between success in complexity. As a business grows more successful, it becomes more tied down to various commitments, constraining its ability to innovate without assumptions. There's a limit to what any given entity can handle.

I like this take. To add to that, it feels that for a company to maintain their software effectively, there needs to be a certain level of cross-departement knowledge, people who can connect the dots between frontend and backend for example, because usually it is in these transitions between two layers that bugs start to form. I feel like this becomes increasingly more difficult in large, complex company's where every departement is self-contained and there is not much vertical movement amongst colleagues, only horizontal. Which makes it really hard to solve issues that are not solely linked to one part of the process. So success doesn't only breed complacency, it decreases the possibility to do cross-departmental work because all the departments become to big to effectively facilitate this.

Anecdotally, Apple Music has deteriorated exponentially for me. iTunes was such a stable, usable piece of software, but I can't get reliable use out of Apple Music for the life of me. It _feels_ like a shoddy Electron app. But that's not fair to the actual Electron (or similar) apps that actually work. For all its many design and product flaws, Spotify actually works.

I never liked iTunes. I always found it horrible and difficult to find my way around. Apple Music makes me miss those days.

It really is bad. I mean, the navigation design is bad to start with (just back, no forward? Genres are under Search?), and it’s buggy. It hangs randomly and sometimes it just doesn’t make sound (you had one job!).

The podcast app is the same shoddy-ness. Re-arranging things in the queue is such a PIA.

podcast app is the worst, I can never find what I'm looking for

> I can never find what I'm looking for

Overcast might be the app for you. No affiliation, I just like it.

Another vote for Overcast.

Overcast is definitely the least worst of the iOS podcast apps but it does have its own set of UI/UX annoyances.

Unfortunately, Overcast's update towards the tail of last year ruined it for me and many others. It no longer functions reliably in my experience.

I've used Downcast forever. No complaints. No idea how it compares to Overcast.

My main issue with podcast alternatives is that onbe feature I use is walk into a room and ask Siri to play a podcast. That works with Apple but not anything else. What is the latest podcast has to sync across devices.

However any maintainance or search for podcasts is crap with Apple and better elsewhere.

have you tried their "books"? you cannot search by almost anything! Extra-strangely, selecting book language is macos-only feature! Does anyone even maintain it?

Apple Music, at least when I last used it, could not handle copying podcasts to my old iPod Video - this is now handled in Finder, as best as I can tell. It will copy the tracks, but it doesn't properly flag them as podcasts so if I switch to another track and then go back to the podcast it does not remember my location.

Never had that problem with iTunes.

If you set your podcasts as AudioBooks and copy them in THAT area, it remembers where you were, at least. But you have to play them through Books.

I did find that workaround and then I just scrapped that Mac (because it was a Mac Mini that lost OS support) and went back to using gtkpod on Linux.

If Spotify doesnt work they are dead in the water. If Apple Music doesnt work, thats a rounding error.

It's a bit hit and miss for sure. If you turn off the subscription and Apple Music portal stuff it works fine though. I use it with a cable to sync to my iPhone with offline files I ripped with XLD from CDs. It's all the network crap that breaks it.

Apple Music on Mac definitely needs a ground-up rewrite, though I worry it'll lose uncommonly used features, like the ability to upload and stream your own music. I think a lot of Apple Music weirdness is from the fact that it's been built up over the years upon iTunes, which was essentially a completely different product that offered different thing. No one is really buying digital music any more, but they still need to handle everyone's old libraries and purchases, so there's a weird disconnect between your local music library and your cloud Apple Music library. So there are completely separate screens for viewing e.g. an album in your local library versus "in the cloud" even though they're both views for the same content.

Incidentally the iOS Music app has generally been pretty good to me, but starting in the most recent iOS update has been having crashing issues. I'm not sure what exactly causes it, but it's typically when I rearranged the queue then minimize the player to get back to the home/library screen.

The upload-and-stream-your-own-music feature, as handled by the Mac desktop Apple Music app, seems to be 90% bug and 10% working. I can’t imagine a rewrite being worse than the status quo.

Funnily enough that's the one feature that works pretty well for me and is keeping me on Apple Music as opposed to Spotify.

Considering the state of every recently made/"remade" first party Apple app I cannot imagine how horrible the Music app would be after they got done with it.

That feature is the single worst thing Apple has done I have ever encountered: it stole my music library.

At some point when migrating from one Mac to another, it "forgot" which songs were actually mine. It's all Apple Music now. I have songs that the application _knows_ were added to my library in 2003, but for which it steadfastly maintains they're Apple Music downloads. Worse: some songs have been replaced with other recordings. Other are "unavailable" for unexplained reasons.

Oof, I would be livid if that happened to me, too. Maybe I just threaded the needle and got lucky or something, but I'm disappointed to hear mine isn't a universal experience.

I love that I had to install a shim service [0] with the same ID as Apple Music's since it can't otherwise be turned off, which was causing Apple Music to appear every time I pressed a media key but had no media playing.

That's the kind of shiesty KPI-boosting tactic I'd expect from Windows, not a machine I paid almost $4000 for. Apple comes installed with a ton of irremovable bloatware and somehow gets a pass.

[0] https://lowtechguys.com/musicdecoy/

They’ve been doing that bullshit with the media keys since it was still itunes

I use Apple Music on my Windows work computer and it's pretty good. I still have iTunes on my home Windows PC (I use it for ripping CDs) and it takes much longer to start.

> I use it for ripping CDs

may I introduce you to cyanrip or EAC? https://github.com/cyanreg/cyanrip https://www.exactaudiocopy.de/en/index.php/resources/downloa...

I own dbPoweramp which I believe uses EAC, but iTunes is just easier (I rip to ALAC) and is good enough. Apple will probably drop support soon, but until then I'll stick with it.

Thank you for introducing me to cyanrip. Rare to see a ripper that supports HDCD and doesn’t require me to decode them manually with ffmpeg.

To be fair iTunes had become such a kitchen sync software. The Windows version is universally hated I think, I remember hearing jokes about iTunes on regular TV talk shows.

The experience of browsing the iTunes store is laughably bad...

The back button that goes back multiple steps while losing context of stuff you had clicked in between, the way the search box is in a whole other part of the UI and it has a three mode toggle. The way that clearing the search phrase does a new search for "".

The other day I bought an album on Bandcamp and imported it. Music app adds a "show complete album" link when I view the album in my library. Instead of doing anything useful this link clicks through to a whole different album in the iTunes store.

Or yesterday I browsed to "Joni Mitchell" and got some kind of curated homepage for the artist with background image art etc. The albums are grouped under a series of headings ("60s/70s" and "80s/90s") that don't include all her albums. There's no way to 'view all'.

You literally can't reach say "Blue" without going back out and searching for it explicitly.

Just idiotic and broken features left right and centre.

> iTunes was such a stable, usable piece of software

It used to be the case a long time ago. I think it was decent up to iTunes 5 or 6. They crammed into it iPod apps and stuff, which resulted in a terrible UX. Then came the UI lag.

what is Music doing to you? Other than being slow to launch I really don't have any issue. I have made multiple lists and use it daily to listen to music. I don't recall it crashing in recent memory or not doing what I expect? Tbf, I currate my own music and lists and don't use the streaming a lot. Occasionally I use the station feature I guess, and it's passable. I'm certainly no power user though.

I am not an Apple Music subscriber and don't stream much music besides SomaFM, so I may not be in the norm.

I always have selected on the sidebar Library -> Songs with View -> Column Browser enabled. And I search only using the "Filter" text input on this view. It's as close to how iTunes used to be in the early days of OS X (sans brushed metal).

What I see on the screen is just mostly dense text except the small thumbnail at the top for whatever is currently playing. There is no other related artwork or graphics loaded. I fear once a re-write of this app happens, this view is gone... replaced with lots of fancy graphics and loads of whitespace padding everywhere.

I have a consistently reproducible, if edge-case crash in Apple Music for at least a couple years now. I host a DAAP server (using the OwnTone software) to listen to my music with using Apple Music. It doesn't happen with a freshly-opened Music instance, but if it's been open for a while, then I pause, then restart the server instance, Apple Music crashes. I've reported every crash with a copy/paste of the repro steps in the comment.

It basically is an Electron app; most of the UI is server-driven. It's just not HTML and js.

News, Books, and TV are all similar.

Just curious, why did they decide to use Electron instead of native? After all those are Apple MacOS software.

It's not electron, but it is a WebKit view (HTML based)

So is the App store on all platforms AFAICT.

Thanks. MSFT at least is using C# though.

It's not a web view except for some of the account-related screens.

Do you have a source for that? Because that's news to me...

It's not actually Electron; it's a bit of an unholy mishmash of webkit doing layout of things that are sometimes native views with interaction handling that's also a bit of both. It just has many of the same problems that that Electron apps have, which is also why the interactions are so janky.

So it’s like those late 90s ActiveX IE iframes in Windows programs all over again? That sucks. iTunes did seem to have some of it too in the Store section.

Yep and they all suck. The hardware is nice but why do you pay so much to run shitty software that does not even focus on local stuff? If I want some cloud stuff, Google is cheaper...

It's like buying a car because it looks very nice and has a great engine but the driving experience is absolutely terrible.

Apple Music is basically the same as an Electron app. But it uses a native framework and technology and Apple’s markup language for the views - Apple Markup Language

My last experience with iTunes was a long long time ago, in the iPod days, when you needed to use it to sync music, but it was a horrible piece of software back then.

It’s more horrible now. Syncing now opens a Finder window with an inconsistent look and feel, and sometimes fails to copy new songs in a synced playlist. The playlist view has the album art taking up half the screen, but there’s no way to shrink that section. And there’s no visual indication for whether shuffle is on - it has no grey box around it when enabled.

I kind of think they made it shitty on purpose to push everyone towards a subscription. Many of these issues apply to locally stored songs and playlists, which is how I use it.

Did you use it on Windows? I never understood the hate for iTunes. It was a dream for someone like me who'd spend hours customizing their library. A far cry from today's software from Apple.

In fact, I was never able to use Apple Music because it handled bad internet atrociously. And last time I checked (2022?) it was still not fixed.

Yes, I used it on windows, I also spent lots of time curating my music library, but I mostly used winamp for that.

It's a meme created by idiots who for some reason wanted to shit on Apple. Hilariously now the same memers will defend Apple tooth and nails even though Apple has never been so bad at software.

iTunes was a great software, even people using it on Windows liked it a lot.

> iTunes was such a stable, usable piece of software

Excuse me?

iTunes was IMO always bad. I will grant that the Mac desktop version of Apple Music is possibly even worse than iTunes ever was, though.

(This is slightly off topic, but I find it both amusing and rather infuriating that the iCloud payment system doesn’t accept Apple Pay. Oddly, it seems to accept PayPay. Really, just about everything involving the account and payment system in iCloud and Apple Music is awful.)

Ah, you know, now that I think of it, Apple Music has this pretty bad bug where after a couple of hours of playing music my playlist will stop playing and nothing I do will make the playlist usable again. This never happened in iTunes.

I canceled my Apple Music subscription a few years ago after leaving the app open for long times would heat up my computer and use 100% of the cpu. It no longer feels like they have the "it just works" feeling they used to in all of their software.

It really is sad how Apple can't keep such a simple app, that has been working more or less flawlessly for the modern history of the company, working correctly. Bugs I've seen include:

- After waking from sleep, the current song plays silent audio (skipping forward and back again kickstarts it to start playing again) - When streaming with lossless audio, somewhere in the first ten seconds of the song, it'll skip - Mouseover events don't trigger when scrolling moves an item behind the mouse — you have to get the cursor to leave and reenter the object in question - Radio stations randomly stop playing sometimes - And I haven't seen this one in a while, but for a long time, albums in my library would randomly have a song or two split out into its own separate album. So I'd have two of the same album, one with (say) track 5 and the other with tracks 1-4 and 6-10. Deleting and re-adding the albums would at least temporarily fix this.

iTunes was such a piece of garbage. It would literally get stuck in a login loop whenever you tried to open it and it was pretty unintuitive design. Apple Music is not perfect but 100x better than iTunes. However, I never bought Macs for Music. It has always just been the most ideal development machine.

iTunes used to be extremely buggy for me, and things got a bit better with the Apple Music app. But, within the last week a bug which messes up all the album artwork on a synced iPhone struck my partner's device - I've not seen that one since iTunes.

I had to cancel Apple Music because, bewilderingly, sometimes I'd click a song to play and it just, wouldn't, play. Like, the most basic, simple thing I'd expect a music app to be able to handle. No error. Just nothing. This would happen two or three times a week. It feels utterly insane to say in 2025 that I chose my preferred music subscription service because I prefer a service where I give them money then they give me the ability to play music, but Apple physically cannot even manage that.

Yep. I have completely abandoned Apple Music (after 4 years with them and the destruction of my local library btw), it just sucks. Both on the phone and the mac. Spotify just works, it's faster, more pleasant and has the relevant features in the right place.

The only thing missing is lossless audio. But I have been listening to 256kpbs AAC since basically the first iPod so I'm not going to care that much at this point...

> Premium Hardware, Struggling Software

This sums it up well. The hardware is great, the software isn't.

I recently programmed the same app for iOS and Android. iOS took twice as long, simply because Apple's APIs suck. Case in point: The background task APIs (plural, yes, unfortunately) are so bad that Apple felt compelled to publish a video "Background execution demystified" [1]. If a dev creates an API and then has to publish docs "[my API] demystified", then the API sucks. Period.

I value stability and the freedom to configure the OS to my liking. macOS is stable but forces countless things on me that I do not want. Windows offers freedom but comes with many glitches. Linux is extremely stable and puts me first by letting me configure it. I love it.

[1]: https://wwdcnotes.com/documentation/wwdcnotes/wwdc20-10063-b...

> Apple felt compelled to publish a video

Context is important.

This was a WWDC session and Apple records & publishes all WWDC sessions.

I don't really see how that makes a difference. A talk with the title "my API demystified" is an equally bad sign.

> A talk with the title “my API demystified”

But that’s not the title of the session.

The title of the session was “Background execution demystified”

Background execution is a computer science topic that many don’t understand well. Much like font antialiasing or other computer science topics that people don’t have to deal with daily.

Note: I’m not saying Apple APIs are great. I was just originally pointing out the context of your post.

I spent an afternoon watching and re-watching this video just to figure out how the otherwise-undocumented behaviors of the API work. It was exclusively about Apple's implementation, and not in any way about the general CS topic.

If the API didn't suck, there wouldn't be such video there.

Also WWDC videos are infamously used as reference because often documentation suck. And it shows.

Absolutely. I did a little bit of iOS development at some point and was genuinely shocked by how bad the documentation was and by how often WWDC videos was the best documentation available.

To give a concrete example: At WWDC20 Apple showed off a new Core Data feature called "derived attributes" [1]. Only many months later did they add the bare minimum of written documentation covering a fraction of what was shown off at WWDC [2].

1: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/230/ 2: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/120159

But you know, Apple is a struggling company that doesn't have enough money to pay devs for documentation. /s obviously.

Microsoft may produce some half-assed software but at least their documentation is generally pretty solid (and easy to find).

Slightly unrelated, but that reminds me of all the thousands of "Git demystified" videos out there. There's a lot of confusing software out there!

It's too bad that Linux doesn't come with Apple Silicon. And while 20s me would have loved configuring things, once I had a family and a lot less time, I just want it to work.

You can get a thinkpad and it will in fact just work :D

the point is thinkpad hardware is not nearly as good as Apple Silicon hardware

My work Macbook sometimes drops random characters from the lock screen password input. You hit a key and a black dot does not appear; the password is consequently rejected.

It's not exactly this: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/458099/macos-lock-...

The system is not lagging at all.

It's not this:

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/08/29/mac-wont-accept-correct-l...

It's a bit like this, but only for the system password dialog and nowhere else:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1azl16n/macos_skippi...

I thought I was the only one dealing with this!

Made me consider that my magic keyboard was getting old or having bluetooth issues, but it does not happen on ANY other inputs.

Same here. I have never unlocked the macbook successfully the 1st time around (for a good 10 years), I always get a "wrong password" and have to re-enter.

My initial guess is that the text edit control has "select all content" set initially, so when you enter the 1st character, it's selected, and when you enter the following characters they overwrite that, essentially chopping off the 1st letter of the password (which is then incorrect, obviously). Unbelievable that this was never fixed (especially with IT-managed laptops that lock themselves very quickly).

This one affects me too. It's maddening.

Wow I've run into this too! I made my own keyboard with custom firmware so I assumed it was from that, but it's been completely reliable outside of the password prompt.

Oh my god, I just thought my typing accuracy mysteriously dropped off at the Lock Screen.

My password is long enough that it’s not clear whether a new dot has appeared, but I get frequent rejections.

To be clear, I diagnosed the missing dot issue by typing very slowly and carefully. The issue appears in repeatable streaks for me. For instance, the second character of the password might be dropped. If I repeat this several times, typing very deliberately and slowly, I can see the behavior repeat: no response for second character. Two workarounds are to just backspace and try again until the behavior goes away, or just notice that a character was dropped and type it again.

I always thought this was due to Bluetooth issues or me mistyping the password. Thanks for confirming that this was not the case.

Surveillance cameras and WiFi sensors of keystrokes will be disappointed when this is fixed.

Thanks for pointing out that I'm not crazy

I use a 6-digit PIN to unlock my iPhone. I get it right less than half the time. Often one or two numbers just fail to register. ISTR someone else confirmed this bug.

Same. When I boot my computer and reach the password prompt, whatever character I type first inputs two dots, I have to clear those two dots first and type the password again. It is very annoying.

I believe this can occur when specific USB HID peripherals are connected. Try unplugging all your USB devices.

This happens to me if external monitors are connected. It was way worse last year when I literally had to wair for the monitor to "light up", and after a recent update the situation got better but it's still there if I type fast without "waiting" for the external monitors.

I think a major part of the problem is Apple's attitude towards bug reports: they basically DO NOT WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU. Which means that rare bugs go unnoticed and get swept under the rug.

I know that it's difficult to triage and process bug reports at scale, but I guess that's where some of those hundreds of billions of dollars could be put to good use.

This rings so completely true to me. Every time I notice a reproducible bug and try to report it to Apple I'm stunned by how difficult they make the process. Even reporting something as basic as incorrectly transcribed podcasts is an awful experience.

Triaging and categorising bug reports at scale really feels like something LLMs should be able to assist with significantly.

It seems to me like the iPad in particular has the worst software quality. Not that iOS on the iPhone is perfect, but it really seems like their workflow is to build for the phone first, then hammer it in place to work on the iPad as an afterthought.

There's so much basic stuff that doesn't work, like if you pull out the keyboard into its split mode, it constantly covers the text input that you're typing in - even in Apple's own apps. The split keyboard may as well not exist for how impossible it is to use.

But there's also just been a lot of usability issues seeping into iOS over time in general. Like those text effects they added in the latest iOS update that constantly force their way onto my messages when I don't want them. And more recently, the "recent emojis" tab doesn't update to my recently used emojis. I think it's been stuck on whatever were my recent emojis were when I did the last iOS update.

I would pay a premium for a system that never gets any new features except for bug & security patches.

In fact, that's more or less what iOS was for a long time, and I loved every second of it.

Once you have a good feature set, you can spend years and years ironing out 100% of the bugs and vulnerabilities and you'd build a rabid fanbase of crotchety tech-saturated users like me. I want something that Just Works.

What? iOS without new features? When? Every release since 1.0 had a big splashy feature

Initially it was building out the basic feature set. Now it seems every time they add a new swipe or icon it breaks my mental model of how my phone works without adding something that I needed.

Apple is caught by their own success: the iPhone is mammoth hit but they've reached the end of its growth. So they've got a whole organization built around making it more compelling to grow the sales, but they should really switch gears: put the iPhone into maintenance mode and invent something completely new. Easy to say, hard to do, trillions on the table if they pull it off.

> I would pay a premium for a system that never gets any new features except for bug & security patches.

[thousands of Enterprise Sales employees suddenly start listening]

Sorry, it's Apple software. Nevermind!

for a long time, iDevices could not copy&paste. locking to one of those versions with no new features would be horrendous. not all new features are bad or trivial.

Edit: pedant patrol

Copy paste was added to like, iPhone OS 3.

It is technically incorrect to say that iOS could not copy paste at any point, as the copy paste feature was present in the first version of the software called "iOS".

To use a version of iPhone OS that can't copy or paste, you'd have to use the original iPhone or the 3G (not 3GS!)

This is basically Debian.

I've been using fundamentally the same Linux setup for over ten years now. I think the biggest change it went through was migrating the audio system to Pipewire, which took about an hour to figure out and hasn't need attention since.

I have no solutions to offer for smartphones sadly.

Amazing. The mental peace you've gained this way probably vastly outweighs the initial investment and missing out on the newest "features".

My archlinux has moved from a bunch of scripts to just a window manager with Chrome. At the end of the day, you realize you don't really need all these gadgets and notifications but just a terminal and a browser.

Yup, my core applications are Kitty, Vim, coreutils, Firefox, and pcmanfm.

100%. I'm not OP but have had similar experience. My basic UX hasn't changed beyond trivialities in pretty well over 10 years. Contrast that with SaaS and many modern mobile apps that get completely redesigned every couple of years whether you want them to or not, and you have zero control on even the timing of the update. I've found a lot of refuge in open source as complete redesigns just for the hell of it (or to justify a full-time job) are nearly unheard of, but there are definitely tradeoffs. Usually (though not always!) the UX isn't great, but it will be functional. As a person who prefers function over form (though does harbor an intense appreciate for the latter), this is often a good trade.

I just wish the Linux desktop experience were better. I'm going to give Deepin a try as it is focused on desktop experience.

It's honestly pretty great on a desktop PC these days. Laptops are hit or miss depending on the model.

I'm using Ubuntu but it has a few issues. Overall it's OK because I treat it as a development machine for my side projects.

Exactly. Fedora on the desktop is wonderful, and on laptop is really good assuming reasonably supported hardware. I have a framework 16 and 13 and both run fedora really well.

SailfishOS is pretty decent on mobile, as in a simple system that moves slowly. You can get support for Android apps with an emulation layer. Even banking apps tend to work well. Sadly, to get a license from the US you'd need a EU IP address.

You probably would, but that's the number one complaint about Debian: "Where is my fix of new shiny?"

My complaint isn't about new shiny, but new safe. Sandboxing apps on Linux is getting better but it still has a ways to go to catch up to macOS.

I'm talking about things like how a weather app shouldn't have access to the filesystem, or camera, or microphone, etc... A calculator shouldn't be able to see my location or even what networks I'm connected to.

Did you consider Qubes OS?

A side effect of employing tens of thousands of full time people that do product development is that matter how good your product currently is, there is an entire organizational hierarchy that has to justify its existence. The result is that every great product keeps picking up parasitic features and functionality. Intended to add value, but paradoxically removing overall value.

There is a fine line between staying ahead of the competition and enshittification and most companies don't find it.

The most recent examples that come to mind are Spotify and Slack. Products that were, at one time, a pleasure to use, but have since been significantly degraded by a continual assault of minor features and re-working of UI.

Reworked UI's (and also renamed products) are the bane of my tech existence. I think I'm going to learn Emacs, build up the musculature of my C-C and C-X pressing fingers, and live out my days in the terminal.

I was about to do the same if VSCode does that too. For now it's fine.

That, and the effects of allowing "new feature demos" at WWDC. The various groups MUST come up with something that demos well. "See how easily I can...", and now the slightest breath does something dramatic, and usually wrong.

Oh, there is a gazillion of bugs and broken fundamentals to justify the existence of those thousands for a long while!

One doesn't get credit at a tech company for fixing a bug, but for introducing a Process that would prevent all such bugs forever. Or at least until the promotion goes through.

There's other economics to it at play which you hint at.

The "pay a premium for no new features" tends to imply a "I paid $99.99 for this once, all future updates for bug and security patches are free".

This in turn means that there's no money incoming (especially as the software goes further and further from feature parity with competition) to pay those developers who are doing the bug and security fixes.

While new features can be (often are) buggy, the new features and upgrades that are coupled with the software (and hardware) that have people buy ${new thing} in turn subsidizes the effort to fix ${still supported thing}.

It's ironic you would pay a premium when the biggest reason for continued "new features" is to justify an SaaS sales model.

Excel '98 probably covers 95% of users use cases. But here we are.

This has to be related to the curse of "can it scale?" that our industry is in love with. I think it is safe to say that MS Access and related programs were probably already covering a large majority of use cases back when they existed. On modern machines, they could probably cover larger companies better than folks want to admit.

Will they work for the largest companies out there? Of course not. This despite the fact that they probably did help get those companies off the ground.

iOS doesn't even need more features, it needs way less. Sadly that isn't how the world work.

For my one use case I noticed that the newest iOS release doesn't appear to be tested on the iPhone SE 3. The "Press home to unlock" and "X new notification" texts are now laid on top of each other on the lock screen. You're looking right at it when picking up your phone, so you can't miss it, yet Apple QA did.

> doesn't appear to be tested on the iPhone SE 3

Reminds me of the old days working at Motorola. Your feature branches were merged into a biweekly dev branch, which needed to be “sanity tested” before it could get merged into the branch that the QA folks validated. Every software engineer was on a lab rotation: when it was your turn, you and a couple others that made up your team went to a different building and descended into the hardware lab where you didn’t come out until you had created a working mobile phone network from scratch and tested it with a wide variety of phones -basically anything that could work. They had shelves with bins of everything: early unreleased smartphones (this was way before the iPhone), junky flip phones, RAZRs, StarTacs, bag phones, etc.

It was honestly a lot of fun to see the hardware side of what you were working on, and to ensure that documentation and checklists were always sufficient.

Apple is probably way too secretive to do anything like that :(

Ah, I wish I could get a job like that -- both hardware and software. I need to take out the STM32 dev board I purchased a few years ago and started writing software for it.

Yeah that is very frustrating. I recently went to Ubuntu and picked the minimum installation. I then installed a bunch of development tools such as `build-essentials` and `git`. Other than Youtube crashing on Firefox, the whole experience, at least for the programmer part of me, is very satisfying.

BTW debugging still takes a lot of effort to setup in VSCode / or have to write init scripts for GDB which I suck at. I think Visual Studio debugger beats everything on Linux for that purpose.

Maybe I really need to try out Windows LTSC?

Yea im also getting tired of the constant updates and featuritis.

I still have a 16” Intel Macbook pro and looking for my next machine and am seriously considering a Linux notebook for the first time. Im mostly coding and doing docker stuff. No excel and photoshop is a bit of an issue though.

I have this conversation with my partner quite often. We'd like to use operating systems, software that stays "still" and doesn't break usage workflow every release with changes just for the sake of change. We both think that major commercial operating systems/software is largely feature complete. And everything done nowadays is just for keeping up the "freshness" appearance with all sort of meaningless GUI overhauls or features of doubtful usefulness that marketing branch everywhere pushes.

It really feels like the quality was replaced by... lipstick on a pig. And honestly, I am fed up with all this pandering of the changes as a breakthru, live changing technology.

Windows 10 LTSC edition.

That's what I think too. I prefer the same UI for 30 years. I don't care about any "UI new age" stuffs.

TBH I don't even care about security anymore, like our data has been sold left and right already. As long as I don't get phished, I avoid 80% of the bad actors out there.

I already removed some update software from Ubuntu, those update notifications are very frustrating.

Ironically, this is EXACTLY what Google Keep (their notes app) is. Just a simple, cloud based sticky notes app that has barenones to no formatting features except for a basic checklist. It's perfect for me and has been that way for at least a decade. Knock on wood tho

I think the pressure to keep adding new features on a yearly basis is more likely to please the investors/shareholders rather than the users. As an user, I know what I expected to get when I purchase the device, and just want it continue provide the same functionality. Occasionally adding new features without impacting existing functionality is nice, but I’m completely happy with the device just keep doing what it does. On the other hand, the investors/shareholders are the ones who would expect the company to regularly come up with new products, new features, with the hope of driving business growth. With Apple’s stellar track record of growth (especially under Tim Cook), the pressure will only get more severe.

I recently got an M4 Mac Mini which is an amazing piece of hardware. (When it came in the mail I couldn't believe it could fit in the small box it was in!)

My wife was angry about the large volume of advertising, both on web sites and on the desktop, on the machine out of the box. Part of it was needing an adblocker, which meant switching to Firefox, because installing an adblocker on Safari requires an Apple account which my wife doesn't have and wouldn't want to make.

I was amused that, by default, I got numerous nags in the form of 1999 retreads of the confirm dialog from the 1984 original mac. I'd contrast that to Microsoft's nags which look like a modern HTML-inspired interface [1].

Apple's model of "local account but you get nagged into attaching an Apple account so you can use the store and other services" is inferior, in my mind, to Microsoft's model where you can use use your Microsoft account to log into the desktop and your XBOX and all the services that Microsoft has to offer. I know a lot of people don't like it, but since Microsoft introduced it I've had no trouble authenticating into SMB shares in home and SMB environments.

[1] I won't apologize for thinking that's an advance, particularly since HTML/CSS has been adding things like Flexbox and Grid which are exactly what the doctor ordered for application development.

You don't need an Apple account to install an adblocker. You just install it from here https://adguard.com/en/adguard-mac/overview.html

And you don't have to pay for it, just close the ask.

Thanks, I'll give it try!

Do you need a blocker if you run PiHole?

It seems to do the job for the house very nicely.

Probably not. I don't own one as I'm lazy. I actually paid for AdGuard and use it on my iPhone and iPad. It comes with a mini PiHole implementation built in.

Oh wow. Thanks for this.

I just run Pihole in a container, and a spare one is on a NAS. I’ve learned the hard way, losing DNS is a shit show and a spare server saves you.

Added complexity has its downsides.

Yeah it's not perfect on iOS but better than maintaining your own stack. Basically it creates a VPN to localhost then proxies the DNS and traffic over that. It only modifies the DNS using a blocklist and passes your normal traffic straight through.

Works well. Even the crappiest nasty sites won't get through it.

Yes you still do. Sophisticated companies (Amazon, Google, Meta, many others) will serve ads from the same domains that serve the content you actually want. Pihole can't block the ads without blocking everything. Ad blockers are necessary to block specific pieces of content from amazon.com, youtube.com, etc., while still letting you use the service. It's a constant cat and mouse game, but ublock origin does a good job of staying updated.

You can log into your Mac and your AppleTV and your iPhone and your iPad and all the services Apple has to offer with your Apple account. How is Microsoft offering the same thing any better?

You can't log into your Mac with your Apple account; you still need a local account created first, and it has its own login and password separate from the Apple ID associated with it (if any).

That's preferable to Windows 11 requiring a cloud account in my book.

I installed Windows 11 last year without cloud account.

Maybe because it's Pro version? I don't remember doing any incantation but it's possible that I didn't connect internet during installation.

It's not possible using the current install process, not even on Windows Pro (tested with a fresh install on a notebook that had a Windows 10 Pro OEM license registered/activated like is typical). The various hacks to trick the process don't work anymore.

Ouch. The only reason I use Windows is because as a consultant clients make me use a bazillion different VPNs which often works better/only in Windows.

Otherwise I would use something like Xubuntu.

So it's sad to know that my next Windows machine will require a Microsoft cloud account.

> I know a lot of people don't like it, but since Microsoft introduced it I've had no trouble authenticating into SMB shares in home and SMB environments.

Same. I get that people don't like having to "buy" into an ecosystem. But credit where it's due - Microsoft eliminated dozens of different logins over the last decade. If you jump between multiple machines all the time, it's legitimately a decent experience. You can even be simultaneously logged into your personal and work OneDrives at the same time under the same user and everything just pretty much works.

Microsoft takes its time and has a lot of inconsistencies but eventually gets to some sort of desirable convergence state.

They are a lot less idealistic and have an approach of working on it slowly but surely in the open. Apple on the other hand tries to maintain an unrealistic image of perfection and thus is always playing some sort of binary game, which is why things get stuck and never evolve beyond a certain point.

I use to like Apple approach to things; with age I understand that Microsoft approach actually makes a lot more sense, especially if you need to maintain things over time.

We should be glad that Microsoft "won" the desktop PC war because if Apple software had been used for critical software we would be in a lot of trouble as a society; I'm joking but barely...

Here's what I find most puzzling about these things: Apple does amazingly helpful WWDC sessions on how to profile and improve your code, how to prioritize performance...but when it comes to their own apps, it's like they forget everything they know?

Messages on Mac is one of my biggest annoyances. How do you make one of the most used messaging tools and have the keyboard lag so badly while typing - sometimes even skipping typed letters? It's a complete mystery to me.

There's always been a lot of room for them to optimise performance on macOS to a level that they do iOS, but modern Apple basically wants macOS to go away and sees it as more of an annoyance, so they don't spend any time tuning it. Then the elephant in the room is SwiftUI itself, there's a performance cliff there, wherein if you've optimised everything else, you might just hit the brick wall that's the layout engine with no recourse or ability to even peak under the hood. We're at a point now where building a fully native macOS app, with the first-party toolchain, will give you far worse performance (in terms of responsiveness not resource usage) than something like Electron. I have a suspicion teams inside of Apple are also running up against these issues as they start to actually adopt the framework.

> modern Apple basically wants macOS to go away and sees it as more of an annoyance, so they don't spend any time tuning it

[citation needed]

What sort of citation would you be looking for here? It's generally accepted that it's not a priority for them, the discrepencies in performance and features between UIKit vs AppKit have always existed and are even more pronounced in SwiftUI. Due to how it's used they can't apply the same business model to the mac as they can iOS and therefore can't extract as much value from it, this is reflected in revenue.

Oh, the leadership keeps saying that MacOS is separate from iOS and they care about MacOS.

And then they keep adding iOS UIs into MacOS, produce horrible laggy iOS-optimised software for it, and call it a day.

Actions speak louder than words.

Doesn't mean they want macOS to go away though. Merging code-bases is a bad thing now?

They are not just "merging codebases". They are literally letting it stagnate in all the parts that matter, and all the user-facing parts are iOSified, or literally delegated to iOS with "you can run iOS programs directly now".

And yes. Merging codebases is a bad thing when it's done without any care for one of the paradigms. The one that they don't like, don't understand, and want to go away.

A modestly sized list of WiFi networks (30-40 items) slows down and stutters while scrolling on a M4 MBP. SwiftUI is a performance disaster, and I refuse to use it outside of toy single screen projects

Yeah it's in a really bad spot on macOS still, iOS performance is a lot better. I'm sure all of this can be overcome but I'm not certain it's a priority for them.

Considering how good the hardware is supposed to be, iOS is not that great actually. This is why Androids that have benchmarks score way lower than iPhone can actually feel smoother to use. Apple is brute forcing the thing and making all their customers pay, it's useless to have the most powerful chip if you waste all its power running garbage code.

And this is exactly how macOS and iOS feel nowadays: the hardware is supposed to be great but it doesn't feel that good because the software sucks.

I agree with you, just my obsevations from using SwiftUI "in anger" for the last few years, performance is atrocious on macOS and acceptable on iOS, especially with some tuning.

Oh yes, I agree, it's not as bad on iOS for sure. But acceptable for a premium device is a very low bar to clear. It becomes much less acceptable over the years as well, infuriating.

In my country the mainline iPhone start around 1k€ and even the "e" is over 700€. If I had paid 2-300€ like a low-end android device I would find it acceptable but Apple only sells stuff that is the high end of pricing, therefore it is not acceptable.

Apple is a large company. The people making those videos do not also work on Messages.

Messages on Mac freezes up for 5-10 seconds every time I get a Screentime request. It’s a hot mess.

Poke around on jobs.apple.com looking at developer positions and everything will become clear. There seem to be at least an order of magnitude more outsourced software development jobs than jobs within the US/EU.

You don't outsource to India because you want to get better quality products. You do it so you can pay a terrible Indian programmer $30,000/yr instead of hiring a great Indian programmer for $300,000/yr in Cupertino.

I used to think these reports were exaggeration until i had to use the apple tv app to watch severance. I am beyond shocked how bad this app is and how every interaction feels like a downer. Buttons miss hover effects, icons are off center by a few pixels. Whole interaction workflows were obviously never tested and just don't work. I hope the explanation is just that the app was outsourced but if this is the level of quality apple works at now, users are doomed. The other issues i see daily are more signs of just stopping to invest any resources whatsoever into base components. I don't understand how google image search can show me faster image results than quicklook from an image that is sitting in my dock on my local hard drive. Or how the finder is unable to browse network drives without freezing, giving up or taking 30 seconds to show thumbnails or even file names.

Man I just got a mini-itx case and use a full-blown windows desktop next to my TV. Bought a "fly-mouse" (wireless mouse that works with gyroscope), set screen DPI to 200%.

One thing I didn't expect is that my family ends up using the TV quite a lot for planning stuff, like doing google sheets, planning trips on google maps, booking planes/restaurants/concerts/etc. We have a small normal wireless mouse and keyboard for such occasions.

No regrets, open platform > closed junk. Can also play steam games on TV. Can't wait until Steam OS works well on desktop so I can ditch windows too. If you only care about media and not gaming you can get a case small enough that can fit hidden away in a cabinet.

Bazitte is solid. Added PWA/electron wrappers for any web apps I frequently use (netflix/youtube/etc.) and added them as non-steam-games to my library. Have a steam controller and it is about as easy to use as any streaming stick.

WOW that is sick! I can just customize my OS with a dockerfile!?

It seems support for nvidia is rudimentary (my living room PC has a GTX 1070), but will keep an eye out. Might try the beta during my vacation.

Do try a fly mouse, those are great for normal web browsing.

Yup! And if you are a little more technically inclined, combine it with nix home-manager/flakes/etc. and you have an entirely declarative, immutable, reproducable setup that largely works ootb and is easy to deploy.

Nvidia has been doing some work with open source drivers lately so hopefully support does improve.

It's not just Apple guys, it's everywhere.

Software quality has seriously declined across the board, from Spotify to Slack to core operating systems like Windows and macOS. I think a major factor is corporate culture, which largely ignores software quality. Another issue is that many engineers lack a solid understanding of CS fundamentals like performance, security, and reliability (perhaps this is why many are not able to solve basic algorithmic questions like linked lists or binary trees during interviews)..

I've seen code written by so-called "senior" engineers that should never have made it past review; had they simply paid attention in their CS 101 courses, it wouldn't exist.

On top of that, as long as poor software quality doesn’t hurt a company's bottom line, why would executives care if their app takes 20 seconds to load?

Consumers have become desensitized to bloat, and regulators remain asleep at the wheel..

All of that can be summarized with Electron, web developers and high availability of workworkforce with somewhat low salary…

Except none of Apple stuff is Electron based, and as far as I am aware of Apple salaries are competitive with top companies - so none of your arguments really hold up.

My reply was mostly for the parent comment.

Apple software is still top tier when you start comparing to Slack, Teams, and all the non-native friends. Apple Music does not take close to 1GB of RAM. There are very few native applications these days because of the cost. And lower cost availability is based on the web stack and lower entry level of skills.

MacOS may have bugs but in general they are well engineered. Starting from secure enclave that none of the competitors have, or just raw performance and battery life that is not just hardware. I haven’t seen a single bug in my Watch for over a year. I guess it depends what you use.

The most bugs that we see these days are originating from the choices behind the tech stacks. Python and pure JavaScript are still too popular. Every post here with Rust name on it gets attention because of its promise of some level stability reduced resource footprint.

Dev at Apple seems immensely political and corporate. From the outside it looks very much as there are points for shipping $new_thing, even if no one out there wants $new_thing.

The whole marketing cycle is based on a endless stream of $new_things that give Tim Cook something to talk about during those slick presentations - presumably so he doesn't spend all his time making prayer gestures and talking slowly.

There doesn't seem to be anyone in charge of overall user experience who can say "Why does Facetime get so confused by different numbers and devices owned by one person? Why does the shared clipboard only work some of the time? Did the Settings app really need a new UI? Why hasn't Finder been updated since forever?"

And so on.

> Why does the shared clipboard only work some of the time? Did the Settings app really need a new UI? Why hasn't Finder been updated since forever?"

These are like smallest of the small annoyances.

Compare Facetime and Zoom, for example. Issues are on completely new universum. Zoom has new RCE about almost every month. They just don’t give CVEs for them because they can be mitigated on server update.

Web-based apps definitely lose when you compare RAM use, and probably also when you look at the average app installation size. Spotify.app filling half a CD is absolutely bonkers. But these are also the easiest two metrics to measure, and that makes it tempting to look at a huge trend in software quality and reduce it to "Chromium eats RAM".

It is much harder to quantify how many bugs or delays one encounters in a single day of macOS/iOS compared to earlier versions, or in native apps vs web apps, and so it never happens.

There are plenty of us that would love to just sit and fix things all day, but then you get a poor performance review for not shipping new features and find yourself out of a job :)

I wonder how can I join MSFT or Apple just to fix stuffs? Don't care about salary as long as it's on par with my current one.

That's not how Apple works. You'd be given requirements specific to your team and expected to implement them. End of story. You wouldn't be empowered to seek out other teams and fix their stuff (or even necessarily talk to them). It's deliberate and intentional to have very few people with that cross-functional power.

You're right and not right. There were the infrequent occasions when an engineer would be tracking down a problem they were having and end up in another teams framework/code. A Radar would be created, a polite code diff attached and, often, the team would take the patch and roll it into the next build.

It did not happen often though to be sure.

There are power/perf teams at Apple that have this as their core job responsibilities

I tried to convey that there are exceptions, but I'm not sure I succeeded.

I thought this once, it's a disappointing experience. You'll hear all the right things, and 3 years in, realize nothing you do matters to anyone, and that's because all the managers who were so excited about your passion for software quality haven't met with you in a 2 years. And then it clicks, they got promoted by knowing the game: features, resembling the rushed planning deck, delivered yearly. (This is a whole lot easier to whine about after banking the salary for 7 years, of course)

You know, money fucked up Apple. When I started there (1995) no one came to Apple as a "career move". Everyone there was passionate about the machine, the code, the UI.

Not so after the iPhone.

Hi man, you are the John Calhoun that I read about here (https://usesthis.com/interviews/john.calhoun/)

Just want to say thank you for your work.

BTW I never used any 90s Apple product back in the day, but I always appreciated the products, the manuals, the designs.

I am.

HN is a beautiful place that I can directly speak to people I look up to :)

100%. You nailed it. Very heartening to hear this, always been unsure of my most personal analysis, as it was limited to one corp in one era.

Vastly different circumstances (shitty state school x print design gig => 2008 philosophy dropout waiting tables => build a point of sale app startup, iPhone OS 2 => sold it => 2016 Google).

I had at nigh-religious appreciation for the things I learned from the culture of roughly that era. folklore.org type stuff. Grew up on Gruber. And learning so many of your cohort on Twitter. Took me from a waiter to an engineer.

I ended up being ashamed to mention stuff I learned from it, people rarely were in touch with the culture as I understood it. Many soulless vampires afoot once the money comes in.

I'll never forget asking a (wonderful!) colleague why they wanted to work on Team X, expecting "I'm really passionate about [form factor] because [use case]" or "Well, given $LOCATION, my options were [Google Cloud | this team | Google Play Books]"...instead it was "well, coming out of $IVY_LEAGUE with $STEM_MAJOR, my best options were finance or programming, and finance seemed worse"

I had far too many out-of-left-field interactions like that. And it poisons the place in many ways that, to me, ultimately damn it to mediocrity.

If you got hired on as an L4, didn’t mind missing out on promotions, and were ok working with your manager it could definitely work.

Ah it's a pity that they don't hire that many in Canada, especially in Quebec.

Yep, fixing bugs/performance is just not valued by big companies

No one gets promoted doing it

Honestly, I don't think it's a culture thing or a CS fundamentals thing.

I think it's the fact that software is 100x, or maybe even 1,000x, more complex that it was just 25 years ago.

Apps are built on so many libraries and frameworks and packages that an average application will have 100x the amount of code. And they're all necessary. A typical phone app is 200 MB, when Word 4.0 was less than 1 MB.

But it's not just the sheer number of lines of code that can have bugs. It's the conceptual complexity of modern software. An app has to have an interface that works with the mouse and with touch, large screens and small screens, regular resolution and retina, light mode and dark mode, it works offline and online with sync functionality, it works in 20 different languages, it works with accessibility, it works with a physical keyboard and an on-screen keyboard, over mobile data and over WiFi, it works with cloud storage and local storage, it goes on and on.

There are so many combinations of states to reason about. When I was building software for Win32 back in 1995, you worried about screen sizes and color depths. That was about it.

Software's just gotten incredibly complex and there's more to reason about and software quality is just going to suffer. Like, I love Dark Mode at night, but at the same time I can't help but wonder what bugs would have gotten fixed if engineering resources hadn't gone into, and continue to go into, Dark Mode for each app.

MacOS had more screen sizes to target in 2011 than the iPad does today; in any case, Apple has always tolerated having iPad apps that are blown-up phone apps. Mouse support for iPad apps has existed as an accessibility feature before it was deemed a core feature. Even that isn't any kind of technological leap, mouse support has been part of Android for at least 15 years now.

None of these really explain the sloppiness and unfocused nature of Apple software, which has been best-in-class until recently.

Except those iPad apps also have to have a Web app now, and if you don't have a custom MacOS app your iPad app has to look good when run in MacOS. You then have to support all iPhone models. But also maybe Windows and probably Android. 25 years ago you could slap "IBM PC Compatible" on software and basically design for like 5 color depths and maybe a few resolutions.

Update cycles were on the order of a year, not a week (which also means all new features need to be ported to all the platforms above in that timeframe). Not even mentioning the backend infrastructure and maintenance to run and sync all of these when 25 years ago everything was on your local hard drive and maybe a floppy disk or CD-R.

> And they're all necessary

No. No they aren't.

I lean toward "culture" as the problem. Although, allowing for your 100x or 1000x complexity, how much of that complexity is from feature pile-on?

I imagine putting AirPlay in the software stack, just as an example, caused code perturbations all over the place. Sidecar feels like another disruptive feature. Never mind Catalyst, juggling Swift and C binaries, Swift UI....

This stuff Apple brought upon themselves. I'm sure there will be plenty of opinions though as to whether some of these were worth the cost of disruption, on-going maintenance.

Some rose-tinted glasses looking at the past. There was a time when your entire computer would crash if you just looked at it funny.

Raw stability of software is much higher -- there are just more minor annoyances because there is also much more software.

> And they're all necessary. A typical phone app is 200 MB, when Word 4.0 was less than 1 MB.

On native platforms, no it’s not.

I know this for a fact because I maintain moderately complex, functional phone apps that have binary sizes that sit below the 30MB mark. I use multiple desktop and mobile apps from other developers that also match this description.

The cause of the bloat there can be attributed to the following things, mostly:

- Apps including gobs of poorly optimized analytics/marketing garbage

- Third party libraries unnecessarily including their own gobs of poorly optimized analytics/marketing garbage

- Apps being wrappers of a web tech stack project built by devs who have zero dependency discipline, resulting in a spiral fractal tree of dependencies that takes up way more space than it needs to

Engineers who care about good engineering are pretty much a thing of the past. Today the game is buffing your resume with as many complex tools as possible, and jumping to the next thing before your pile of complexity crumbles under its own weight.

I agree. The frameworks and tools we use are so complicated, but we’re also so tied to the complexity that it’s pretty much an anti pattern to go outside the framework/toolkit.

I haven’t fully thought this idea out, but I’ve been feelin it recently.

Left pad.

The reason everything is built on millions of layers is not because it is actually required, but because we have invested a whole lot of time in building frameworks so that mediocre programmers can get fast results.

I would call it a culture issue, where we are not able to seperate out places where this is fine, new interesting apps are great, I want as many as possible.

From places where it's destructive, I would be happy if none of the ways I interact with an os had changed since windows 7, but it had gotten faster, more secure, and resilient.

Agile. Sprints. Firing QA departments.

I see these trends as negatively impacting app quality.

"User pain" as a euphemism for "lowest common denominator" apathetic / fear driven development.

Like, playing the Vulcan game of Kal Toh where you remove rods unintelligentlly and still believe your constructed structure (the app) is fully coherent, and instead it dissolves into uselessness.

This.

I’d like to hear from the HN comments. Does anyone here work for a modern and popular software company (something I might have used recently) and think that the software they make is really and truly bulletproof? Like no backlog of hundreds of unfixed bugs and polish items that won’t stop growing?

I don’t think I have met anyone who works at one of those places yet. I’d like to.

The SQLite people post here sometimes

Yep, like the new Sonos app a few months ago.

I just don't understand why Apple UI designers hate scroll bars with such a passion.

It's probably just me, but I feel that many apps on Apple follows the same pattern. For example checkout and compare the scroll bar experience on ChatGPT website (Chrome) between a Mac-book and a Windows laptop.

Yeah annoys me too.

You can turn them back on everywhere in Settings -> Appearance -> Show scroll bars always.

Yeah that was already done. But it doesn't help too much. They kinda still fade in and out sometimes -- but I can't get a proof right now. In addition, they are still too narrow.

OK at least VSCode still does this ->

- Turned on "Always show Scrollbar" in MacOS setting

- Turned on "visible" in VSCode for vertical scrollbars

Check the explorer window -> scrollbar doesn't show up unless your mouse somehow touches the area.

But this is probably a VSCode thing though.

That isn't a VSCode thing. I have "always how scroll bars" enabled at the OS level and across many apps it only shows when the mouse is over the scrollable area. You know, because the accessibility setting is really just a poorly worded suggestion now.

Wait, does that mean there is an option to actually always show scroll bars under Accessibility? I need to check it out.

This is actually a kind of important setting to turn on if you're doing web development. At my work the developers use MacBooks and it's not rare to get bug reports about double scrollbars and whatnot which are caused by certain nested views with bad CSS, but it wasn't caught before release because the developer doesn't have scrollbars turned on, so you don't see it until a Windows user tries it.

I mean as a user I haven’t thought about a scroll bar in years. The way the OS works with the hardware for touchpad usage means it’s just not a big deal.

Even when I used a mouse on a Mac desktop it still never bothered me. Looks cleaner, feels sleeker and doesn’t impact functionality.

I don't know, but missing scrollbars is very frustrating in some cases. I literally missed some configurations because of that when I first used a Mac. There was a configuration window that needed some scrolling to show all options, but I missed that because there is no scroll bars.

Yeah but I agree that everyone has their own flavors. I personally prefer the Windows 2000 ones...I'm old. Never liked the flat ones, looks soulless.

You missed an indication that you need to scroll, that's certainly bad design, though fixing it doesn't require the full fat bar (not that I'd object to a proper global setting for users who like that!).

(flatness is a universal cancer, though, even compared to the ugliness of the old Win)

Apple's scroll bar allergy leads to some quite funny (to me, anyway) problems with major websites. Some companies seem to have their entire web dev + QA + management staff on Macbooks, because on any other desktop platform their websites are COVERED in useless scrollbars that scroll maybe one or two pixels. I've even seen scrollbars cover up half part of a company's logo.

All of that money spent on hyper expensive laptops, and people still end up with terribly ugly websites!

Yep - overflow: scroll rather than overflow: auto. I've seen Google fall foul of this

> why Apple UI designers hate scroll bars with such a passion.

It takes courage.

Disappearing scrollbars pisses me off as well.

But I can tell you how/why (I think) it happened.

They dropped them in iOS when the iPhone rolled out. It made sense given the small display area where even a 10 to 12 pixel column makes a difference.

And then, sadly, there came the slow roll to make both MacOS and iOS look the same and so they started auto-hiding on the Mac as well.

It's the form-before-function that I loathe ever since Jony started making round mice or USB connectors impossible to find.

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of designers in software.

- designers who come from an advertising/visual design/motion design/packaging/print (although those are a dying breed)/etc background.

Those people care more about how things look in a video commercial or on a giant billboard, and they care about visual aesthetics and making something that catches your eye because it looks really good.

- designers who come from an interaction/HCI/usability/accessibility/etc background

Those people care about things more from a systems point of view, how features will behave across a variety of contexts/modalities, how users come to understand them over time, etc. They had more of a voice in the 80s/90s (Don Norman, Bruce Tognazzini, etc are in that category) but have been increasingly in the minority ever since.

(Designers who come from an industrial design background are a bit of a wildcard - some will put superficial fit & finish above all else, while others really get how good ergonomics, tactility, etc can translate to software).

Honestly, there's value in both. Users will judge a book by its cover, and you want interfaces to look attractive and be compelling - designers from the latter group will be content with designing interfaces that just look like black and white wireframes.

But at the same time, you don't want pure aesthetics to run completely orthogonal to core usability. So it's a balance, and software interfaces are usually worse off when that balance is out of whack.

Anyways, I'll let you guess what category of designers are overrepresented in Apple's ranks. Hint: their current head of interface design comes from a magazine design background.

I have work provided macbook pro.

Siri/intelligence is disabled through company managed profile.

When there is some noise in the room a popup appears saying "You do not have permissions to use siri".

There is nothing you can do, siri is disabled (can't enable or disable it myself, it's managed) but this stupid popup appears all the time so many times per day.

There is nothing in settings to make it go away.

I was having a similar problem due to company managed profile. IT forced lock-computer and turn off screens on 2 minutes of inactivity. MacOS atrocious window management completely fumbles to restore window positions when external monitors are connected.

Meaning _every_ _single_ _time_ I step out of my workstation all my windows would reset back to my laptop screen instead of my external monitor.

My solution? Install 3rd party tool to prevent my computer from locking automatically. Congrats IT you played yourself.

Like I get the lock-computer settings, but why also turn off the screen? It annoyed me enough I opened an IT support, but like always IT people don't care about the workers worflow.

They also didn't let me change my wallpaper forcing me to use company-brand wallpaper. That is just petty.

I have a similar issue, but it is about key stroke lagging when entering the password if there are external monitors connected. Eventually I installed caffeine and problem solved :)

Yes I used Caffeine as well...

So IT not only reduced the security (because I couldn't use a sane setting like 15 minutes of inactivity), but also had 3rd party software running in my user account...

Yeah, really hate screen lock.

I'm wondering if sufficient knowledge of MacOS internals is good enough to disable some features by hack.

Mark Zuckerberg on a podcast with Joe Rogan (massive grain of salt, please) talked about the protocol that Airpods use to connect. Apple is reluctant to share the protocol under the guise of "security" and "privacy". But when Meta finally had a chance to review it, it was apparently all unencrypted and all the keys were stored in plaintext.

But this tracks with a lot of other explanations they have put out over the years about why they can't put out basic features or fix UI flaws.

For interpreting Apple PR, I have re-appropriated Hanlon's Razor: “Never attribute to User Experience that which is adequately explained by incompetence or indifference”

As someone forced to use a Windows laptop for work with the new job, I've stopped complaining about my Mac. It's so much worse on the other side of the fence...

Working on Windows makes me appreciate the Mac ecosystem so, so, so very much.

Yeah. Apple doesn't have to run faster than the bear. It only needs to run faster than the next guy. Which, as it turns out, is not that hard to do.

I work at a 90% Windows shop. Obviously major benefits to being on the "main platform".

I tried using a Windows laptop for my first two months.

I couldn't do it.

What exactly did you find so much worse in windows?

The built-in bloatware (LinkedIn, TikTok, Clipchamp, etc.), the constant nagging (like full-screen reminders to buy Office 365 to "protect" your PC), Edge is basically forced on you. MSVC has insane licensing terms — you can’t use it outside of Visual Studio or VS Code, not to mention it's lacking support for C. Windows seems actively user and developer hostile.

Beyond that, Windows' architecture is a mess, I hate it (There's a reason Microsoft has to ship WSL2). macOS runs all of my tools fine, just like Linux does.

Why use MSVC at all? You can hook up alternative compilers to both VS and VSC with ease.

What’s windows bringing to the table at that point?

I hate Win11. It is horrible, but the first few points don't really make sense. I use it in 2 environments. - enterprise version: no bloatware, no ads, and edge is there but never has to be used for anything - professional version: bloatware is uninstalled in like 2min after OS install, another 2min later all ads are disabled. And it usually stays like that after updates too. Edge is never used at all.

Windows architecture is great. the WinAPI is better documented and more comprehensive than anything on Linux or Mac.

There are so many other issues. - The file explorer gets slower and more broken with each update. context menus randomly don't show, or take literally 30 seconds to load. - The renderer crashes randomly once a week (it's not a huge issue, but the screen goes black for 10 seconds or so) - the settings dialog is bad. goes through like 5 different layers of Windows generations and recently makes the old dialogs hard to find but doesn't offer adequate replacements (looking at network and sound) - and much more...

I uploaded a video because no one can show me this alleged slowness or context menu stuff, it's all "vibes" and it is getting ridiculous on hackernews.

I have a huge problem with windows - some api uses "@" for something, so all my folders with @ in the name(it sorts alphabetically before everything and is easy to type - on macos it's option-8 for similar, Linux I use @ as well) and because of that Windows API most applications crasb if you last saved into a path with @ in it and do file->open. Notepad++, notepad.exe, handbrake, VLC, mplayer, and so on.

Its a frustration, but it is my fault for developing a stupid habit back before metadata or changing colors of folers or what ever exists now to force an arbitrary sort order.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx_t8SUwrEk

Not the OP, but one thing I've run into is that I've had three or four Windows installs (both Windows 11 and Windows 10) just fail to upgrade - one of them new upgrades just stopped showing up, I had to install an 'enablement package' and that fixed it but there was literally no warning or instructions of what to do, I just had to Google it when I noticed I wasn't getting updates.

The others just failed with random hexadecimal error codes, again I had to Google to try and work out what was going on.

With one of them I had to use the command line and diskpart etc. to expand the recovery partition because apparently the default size when I'd made that Windows 10 install was no longer big enough, and Windows Update couldn't work this out (the error code from the failure was nondescript, took ages to find out what was actually wrong) and couldn't fix it. Had to do it manually in Powershell.

Another one I think might have fixed by running sfc and dism recovery commands in the command line, again it would be nice if Windows could work this out itself!

To be fair, macOS isn't much better in this regard, the error codes can be quite cryptic, for example what is a -2003F.

For some reason, a game I play called DCS can be buggy and I've been told by the support to sfc /scannow and dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth. For some reason on every install of Windows 11 I've ever done, it always picks up tons of broken files. This is installing using the latest at the time Microsoft ISO. I've had this issue on multiple different systems, a modern gaming pc, a Mac with bootcamp, an older Lenovo M93p and when installing inside VMWare or KVM.

I do get less application and operating system crashes on a Mac though.

With every Windows release since 8, it feels more and more like the OS is actively antagonistic towards the user. This has come to a peak with Windows 11.

Not too long ago I booted up an old laptop and put a fresh install of Windows 7 on it for kicks. Amazing how much of a breath of fresh air that was.

As someone who works on both I don't notice a difference. Mac sucks just as much as Windows (or visa versa). There's things each does better and things each does worse.

Once people start saying "forced to use [...] for work" you've got to analyse platforms from a different angle.

Namely: How good is this platform after Corporate IT cheaps out on hardware, and loads as much 'security' crapware as possible?

On Windows, there are incredibly cheap laptops available, and corporate IT has loads of crapware like antivirus and crowdstrike and profiles and enterprise endpoint management to slow it down.

On Mac, there aren't any cheap hardware options, and there's a medium amount of "security" crapware.

On Linux, corporate IT let you manage it yourself, because they don't know how to. They can't develop the skills either, because anyone who can manage Linux gets promoted out the set-up-new-users-laptops department.

Or at some point, corporate IT bans desktop Linux because they can’t manage it.

Linux users then start using Windows VMs to contain the worst of it.

Great point. I use both Mac and windows. Love my windows pc, but I have certainly used corporate windows laptops that make me want to throw them out the window - minutes to boot, minutes to open anything, etc. between Mac and windows, they've each got their pros and cons but nothing that would make me choose one over the other.

The answer with any discussion of this nature is to immediately disregard any and all answer that doesn't come in, unprompted, with an explanation.

Which is about 90% of the comments here. Not a joke. I have counted 18 and see only 2 with specific gripes. Worthless comment section. (Sorry, but I did include yours too)

I was 16 when I first met the first big "Mac is better than Windows" argument in person. I asked why, and they mentioned a number of things that didn't feel relevant to the people at the table, but the one that stood out was a particular feature that was indeed quite useful. Well, I didn't know how to respond at the time, but as soon as I got home, I checked with windows and the feature was right there.

I don't think they were wrong for their preference. In fact, back then there was a lot of major differences in the workflow for these OS that isn't as big nowadays, specially if you're someone who can actually use google for more than 20 seconds. But the interaction proved to me the importance of being able to back your stance, because, if you don't, you may as well be just another 16 year old idiot with 0 technical or practical knowledge of the stuff that dictated your preference. They don't learn how to resolve their problems with them either, if they hide the reasons from others. So, again, worthless - take up screen space that could have better comments, while informing nothing and helping no one.

Damn you're worked up. Some of my gripes with Windows come down to peripherals, where I'll spend a lot of time troubleshooting why my bluetooth device or speakers or mic don't work. There also seems to be no way to bypass using a password or PIN on startup without changing the registry. I'd like my computer to just stay on at all times so I can remotely connect to it, but what do you know, a forced update caused it to restart, and because it requires a passeord to get to the desktop I have no way of getting Parsec to connect. Yeah I tried to disable automatic updates but nothing seems to stick. Why is the mic on my PS5 controller connecting and disconnecting ten times a second. Ok let me just try to unpair the controller, oh it just... won't unpair.

Are the ps5 controllers supported without having to buy software? If not, then I sarcastically say "I'm shocked that a competitor's peripheral works poorly on their product"

Because why wouldn't it work poorly?

You alluded to this but I wanted to emphasize that a lot of this is just legacy baggage in terms of reputation that windows will have to carry for a long time

I think that when people talk about how shitty windows is compared to Mac/apple they are talking about stuff that was probably true at some point

For many, memories of using windows include blue screens of death, programs crashing often and windows itself crashing often. On top of that, windows was a cesspool for a hot minute while Microsoft got its act together and put better security in place to address malware as the internet got popular.

These are obviously not the same, not nearly as bad as they were back then

I mostly enjoyed windows, and to a lesser degree Linux until a few years ago when an employer made me switch to Mac - which for the sake of my brain’s plasticity I readily embraced

The main differences I noticed at the time were: a much better window manager, a much saner way of installing applications, an overall hard to explain smoothness along with the ability to bring over some of my favorite little Linux tools

Fast forward to today and it’s really just a matter of preference. Mac helped Linux a ton, but nowadays they are all so customizable that you can more or less achieve what you’re trying to do most of the time on any of them

Today, I use all three out of necessity - Mac and Linux for work, windows for gaming, but I can surely tell you that overall my best decision was to just not get involved in holy wars lol

What did it for me was a period of: “I see you are delivering an important presentation. Let me force install an update and reboot three times. Right now.” I’ve spent too long watching reboots to have Windows in my life for my limited time on the planet.

Yeah one wart about Windows is that you always have to lookup these weird registry hacks after getting a fresh install. Disabling this automatic reboot was one of them. Otherwise that would make your computer completely useless for things like

- gaming - watching movies - presentations - anything where you want to let some calculation run unattended for a few hours - anything where you really don't want your PC to shut down unexpectedly while you’re working…

Well that covers pretty much everything I guess.

And to add insult to injury, Windows 10 for a while took away the ability to Update & shut down. It’d go into some sort of hybrid sleep so you’d keep getting a reboot prompt right after starting up again.

They are totally different.

Macs come working. When something breaks, it is impossible to fix, because they didn’t include a button to fix it. But it comes working!

Windows PCs come broken out of the box, but the user adapts and eventually gains a pile of workarounds, which is sort of like the windows equivalent of a UX.

I'll somewhat echo this. I think simply switching puts the new OS at a huge disadvantage, because not being used to something can make it seem bad.

Until fairly recently, I would have agreed, but Microsoft is actively enshittifying Windows now by pushing things like cloud-only logins and ads in Start while simultaneously removing configurability (e.g. vertical taskbar was removed in Win11). I'm not a fan of macOS, but at least Apple is not all in on ads the way Microsoft seems to be these days.

I don't have a cloud login. I log into windows with a windows user account. I don't have ads in start, and i can make my taskbar vertical.

literally everything you said was false, but i can only disprove a majority of it with a single screenshot

https://i.imgur.com/XR1aj5b.png

not only no ads in start, no ads anywhere, ffs

Everything that I described above, I observed personally. The no-vertical-taskbar thing has been an open issue in the tracker for many years; if it works now, I'm glad to hear it.

Regarding local accounts, it is supported by Windows, but the installer will straight up refuse to let you create such an account now (so you have to install using a cloud account and log into it at least once to create a local account). Previously, there used to be workarounds like installing without Internet, or certain incantations you could do in the "recovery" terminal during installation, but they have been killed off one by one. If you haven't seen this yourself, it just means that you haven't installed Windows 11 recently.

Just to let you know i am booting a VM to install windows 11 while recording with OBS studio. Check this space for updates. I'll admit if i am wrong.

looks like this is correct. I didn't have to do this before, so there's some software switch in the iso i have that triggered a "must update" - which makes sense.

Not to shift the goalposts, but you can disable the microsoft login after you set it up. I'm 99% sure that apple and google both require you to give them a username and password, as well.

I am getting the 24H2 disk image now. The one i was using is `Win11_22H2_English_x64v2.iso` - which is real old. It makes sense to me that microsoft wouldn't want you to use an old installer without being connected to the internet.

The download is probably going to take longer than my edit timeout, if so and anything changes about my comment i'll make a reply

found this https://github.com/memstechtips/UnattendedWinstall while i'm waiting. Says it bypasses the microsoft login.

> I'm 99% sure that apple and google both require you to give them a username and password, as well.

I have no idea about Google, but with Apple, they require you to create a local account when installing. After that, the Settings app will pester you to link it to your Apple ID, but this can be ignored, and only shows up when you are in Settings on your user account page.

you're wrong. Kind of.

https://youtu.be/b1OGTumhFEA

specifically https://youtu.be/b1OGTumhFEA?t=2091

i installed windows 11 without a cloud login. Without a CD key. I actually ran the windows installer 3 times since you commented and i first replied. So i kinda lost track of what it was doing this time - i didn't notice it said it was going to reboot before the screen went black, i missed that it was waiting for input with the language selection. But i didn't edit the video at all, so you can scrub around and make sure. Ignore my dig at the end, like i said, i installed windows 3 times.

https://github.com/memstechtips/UnattendedWinstall you put the XML file in the iso. well, that's what i did. they have an automated thing that makes a bootable USB stick but i don't need that. I actually have a microsoft account because i use the xbox for windows and copilot. I don't use it to log in to windows - and even if i reinstalled i'd use the regular ISO and log in and then dis-associate my account with my windows install after it finished installing, as microsoft says you can do inside the installer

screenshot https://i.imgur.com/DGJgf87.png

I gotta say i completely understand microsoft doing this, and had i been in the voting meeting where this was decided i probably would have voted to have the default be "cloud login" - the average person isn't going to be able to do anything if the forget their password, short of taking the computer to best buy to have it wiped and reinstalled (or whatever). in the video link, you can see it ask me security questions, which we all probably know are a poor way to ensure continuous access.

So this "drop an xml file on the iso" is proof positive that i take full responsibility for the data on this operating system - if i forget my password and my security questions, i'm locked out. period. Microsoft can't help because i told them i was smarter than the average user.

The question isn't the default but rather the ability to opt out. And no, "drop XML on your ISO image" is not an acceptable bar for that.

But, more importantly, it's not a given that this will continue working onwards. As things are, there have already been three different ways to force the installer into letting you use a local account, the most recent one of which involved using the recovery terminal when booted from ISO - that's already way past most users. And yet Microsoft methodically killed each and every method every time, so I fully expect your suggested workaround to stop working. They seem to be very determined to ensure that no "non-enterprise" version of Windows lets people do that.

what do you reckon it costs microsoft to support people that "opted out"? what amount of legal boilerplate would indemnify Microsoft against lawsuits over lost data because someone chose to opt out?

If the only option is to modify the installer the only people who are going to opt out are the sort of people that understand that microsoft has no responsibility to our data, and pretending they do is silly. It's pure CYA from Microsoft.

If you personally don't like it, then use their automated thumb-drive creation tool (at that same link) to make a new bootable USB stick that installs with the "opt out". I modified the ISO because i was installing on a Virtual Machine. If i was gunna do it on metal i'd use a USB stick because all my optical drives are USB and not that fast.

I don't think we disagree, i think we're coming at this from different sides. I don't expect microsoft to spend more money than they have to.

I need to remind here that the very notion of a cloud account didn't exist for literally decades in the past, and I don't recall anyone suing Microsoft about losing a password etc. The legal angle for such things is firmly covered by EULAs, anyway - I worked for Microsoft for 15 years, and I can assure you that the lawyers there are very adept at such things. And then, of course, Apple clearly doesn't have any legal issues despite only having local accounts on macOS even today. Nor are cloud accounts free of legal issues themselves, what with GDPR etc. In fact, I'm pretty sure that cloud accounts are more "legal heavy" on the whole.

I would believe that it was purely about costs if they simply removed the checkbox from the installer but still left the command line workaround - that is plenty sufficient to ensure that the user "understands that Microsoft has no responsibility", and generally to prevent the clueless from shooting themselves in the foot. But given that even such advanced techniques were removed shortly after they were discovered, I'm certain at this point that it is a concerted effort to drive all non-enterprise users towards cloud accounts. And given that Microsoft is heavily investing into ads, and generally has a Google envy for a very long time now, I think that it any product decision that clearly correlates with more ability to track users and collect their data is likely to be at least partially motivated by that, just as it is in case of Google.

Windows is great. Windows laptops are universally garbage.

They become a lot better when you install Linux.

As someone who makes video games in C++ I’m going to have to disrespectfully disagree.

But I will admit that SteamDeck is great. It’s deeply ironic that the best API for Linux gaming is Win32.

Games are the one thing that’s much better in Windows. But then the best way to play them is to run Linux with whatever compatibility layer.

Not to actually run windows.

If Linux is the best way to run games then why does Linux have a mere 1.45% user share on Steam? And I believe that includes SteamDeck.

Better doesn't always win. Steam Deck has also still sold millions.

Unless you happen to play one of the many games with "anti-cheat", which doesn't work on Proton.

So what's actually better about Windows? Other than the fact some legacy software still runs on it...

Because for developing, say, financial apps in C++, Linux is much, much better IMO.

Better profilers (Superluminal). Better debuggers (Visual Studio).

Linux package managers are an abomination and a failed model. As evidenced by Docker being required both to reliable build and reliably run modern software.

glibc is an abomination of bad design ideas from the 80s. Compilers relying on whatever random ass version of a .so you have is broken AF. The fact that you can’t target an arbitrarily version of glibc or runtime environment is an embarrassment.

Once upon a time I shipped a popular-ish game with Linux support. 1% of Linux users represented 50% of bug reports. And no it’s not because Linux players were more reliable at reporting Linux issues. It has been a few years, but supporting more than SteamDeck is likely similar. At least for non-proton builds.

I like Portage when it works. When it doesn't, I don't like portage very much.

I'm not sure if you can "alternatives" glibc in Gentoo, but the "whatever .so you have" isn't a thing there, you can slot different versions if you need to.

If I want to test some software I'll use Ubuntu with docker or whatever, but to deploy to production I will make it run on Gentoo. Hell or high water.

Windows software still ships every .dll it needs, unless it is a Microsoft one. Do a search for msvc.dll or whatever sometime and marvel at the pagination.

> Windows software still ships every .dll it needs

This is the correct thing to do

> Better profilers (Superluminal). Better debuggers (Visual Studio).

That's not a platform issue, that's a "these companies simply don't ship Linux versions".

> Linux package managers are an abomination and a failed model.

Ironic then that some Windows tools (Chocolatey) model them and Windows has WSL because tons of devs find that model easier.

> As evidenced by Docker being required both to reliable build and reliably run modern software.

Docker doesn't do away with that model, it just allows you to isolate specific versions of libraries and tools you need in a namespace/container.

The standard model for shipping Windows software is to ship all the libraries needed with the software. Which isn't much different than what Docker is doing.

> glibc is an abomination of bad design ideas from the 80s. Compilers relying on whatever random ass version of a .so you have is broken AF. The fact that you can’t target an arbitrarily version of glibc or runtime environment is an embarrassment.

Maybe it's a bad model, can't speak to that. But you can statically link a C/C++ runtime with your software if you want, or ship alternative glibc versions.

Also, if we're talking about shipping games on Steam, you can simply target the Steam runtime. It'll work on Steam deck + any Linux system.

I am so glad that I'm not the only one thinking package managers are complete nonsense. Even on macOS I have always found Homebrew or MacPorts to be rather dumb (at least the latter is saner in some ways).

Package managers have so many fundamental problems it's hard to even get started. But they appeal to the Linux type of person because it's a very communist type approach to things, authoritarian and panopticon like way.

At least nowadays they are trying to allow installing software in some more convenient way but I'm not holding my breath considering there are competing implementations.

Well, except for battery life.

Hardware support also varies from laptop to laptop. If you want one to run Linux without a hassle, you have to shop around for that specifically.

What? The only 'great' Windows since 7 is LTSC.

Win10/Win11 with O&O Shutup are perfectly fine.

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

Does shutup10 allow you to decide which updates (if any) you want to install, uninstall the Microsoft Store (and keep it uninstalled), uninstall Edge (and keep it uninstalled), remove other unwanted bloatware (and keep it removed), control all group policy settings (without having them reverted every time MS feels like it), and receive security update support for several years longer than the retail version?

No?

Well, then, it might be "perfectly fine", but it's not "great."

Disagree. Somewhere inbetween respectfully and disrespectfully.

I mean, respect is what it's about, isn't it? Respect for the user. LTSC still upholds that, while the conventional retail and corporate installations don't. No third-party add-ons can repair a closed-source OS that has been intentionally corrupted and degraded by its manufacturer. I desperately wish they could, but they can't.

Conway's Law applies ("A product reflects its producer's org chart"), as does Gresham's Law ("The bad drives out the good.") A pressing question for Apple users is whether the same corrosion is at work at their own vendor of choice.

Counter-Argument: Win11 Pro with Shutup is actually pretty great. I’m actually not totally sure if Shutup is even needed but I’ve used it for so long I don’t really care to A/B test.

The complaints are more philosophical than practical imho.

> A product reflects its producer's org chart

Facts.

I know the feeling. I'm forced to use a Mac laptop for work, and it's really made me appreciate Linux.

Which distro do you use? I've run a mac and Linux laptop and the Linux setup keeps sending me back to Mac.

Please try a distro [0] maintained by a company making their own Linux laptops.

[0] https://pop.system76.com/

NixOS, for me. I deal with a lot of wild development environments, so flakes + direnv has probably saved me hundreds of hours and a few system reinstalls.

Nix is also availible for Mac, but I'll warn you that it may ruin Macports and brew for you forever.

can confirm. nix + home-manager has been the configuration and dotfiles solution i’d been searching for.

it’s not flawless, but its strengths outweigh the weaknesses.

i still need homebrew for casks, but that’s fine.

I run Fedora these days. Ubuntu is the worst.

Always has been unless you're an "email and eBay" sort of user.

Really? I always found Ubuntu to be fantastic. All the third party packages you want just existed for it, loads of bundled stuff, PPAs, plus all the stuff from Debian. And you could pay them not a lot of cash to give you support for it too.

it's fantastic if you're on an LTS version about 2 years after it's released. Again, if you're a email & ebay user you won't notice, because even the in-between non-LTS releases work fine for that.

When you start wanting to replicate experiments, or run software you find on github, then you will learn the pain of ubuntu 20.04. or 22.04. Otherwise you can have the fun experience of most linuxes in the mid to late 90s where you are compiling arbitrary libraries to bootstrap some other library so you can find out where the package you actually want to compile's make file fails at.

Give me a rolling release distro or a source based distro any day.

ninja: all of this should be read as me saying:

"Why yes, i do in fact have several machines and VMs of ubuntu server installs, ranging all the way from 16.04 to 24.04; because that's the only way i can guarantee i can run any software posted on the internet."

It's more about the DE than the distro in my experience. Gnome is budget Mac, but KDE and XFCE are chefs kiss

I set up Mint for a friend a few years ago and it took me about an hour never having done it before. What did you find difficult about it?

can't agree more, to the point i ask if the new job mandates mac,if yes i will end the process right away.

even windows is better due to wsl.

I agree, but my M1 MacBook work laptop is by far the fastest dev machine I've ever laid hands on. It struggles a bit from the UX standpoint, two things:

1. I have the same desktop layout every time, from left to right: slack desktop app, a two column wide emacs window, a 90col wide terminal. I also have two chrome windows--1 which is the same width as the slack window and overlays it, and another the same width as the emacs window which overlays that one. The problem is every single time I wake my laptop from sleep the terminal window has shrunk to fewer columns and I have to drag it back to full width.

2. Sometimes the external monitor support bugs out. I don't know if that's my hub ("pluggable" something or other) or the OS or both.

Then of course there's all the warts of homebrew, and the fact that it's not easy to build some software..

However, the performance of the Apple silicon is nothing short of astonishing. I'm curious about the AMD chips that ship in the new Framework as I look towards an upgrade to my personal laptop, but it's basically between that and a new M4 Max Macbook. Never thought I'd see the day.. will probably wait a year or so before deciding but it's interesting that Apple is even a contender.

For the 1st point, I struggled with the same, then a short applescript thanks to claude, attached to a keyboard shortcut on karabiner solved the painpoint. There's also an app called Stay which should do something similar with a ui, but my solution is good enough for me at this point.

lmfao if you're joking, good one, if not... yikes

"I don't want solutions! I want to complain. Meh!"

No, it's just that I don't customize systems anymore. It's not worth the hassle of maintaining a bunch of extra stuff just to fix issues that shouldn't be there in the first place. All those extra ux tweak programs just end up costing time to keep them working across updates, etc. because they're not part of the system.

That would've been a much better comment in the first place. I do understand where you're coming from, though. In my case, however, a single Brewfile is enough.

Reading back I see I came across as kind of an asshole, I'm sorry for that. I genuinely thought at the time you might be kidding but I wasn't sure--pretty sure I got it wrong. I've grown (probably too) cynical about ux tweak over the years, in the past I did it a lot (even ran stumpwm and i3wm for a while) but over time I kept getting burned by the effort it takes to maintain nonstandard stuff and gave up. I appreciate it's fun, I'll try to remember that.

Thanks for your 2nd reply :) I'd also prefer everything worked out-of-the-box, but where the world fails, you unfortunately need to patch it. If it would have taken me more than 30 minutes I'd probably skip and learn to live with it, but it was kind of easy and i find it useful every day.. for the cynical part, i think you can't beat me on that, I'm in my late 40s and seen too much :)

I'm curious about your dock/hub. There's a good chance I just ordered the same one as I try to build a more sophisticated home station. Which one and how does it bug out?

Pluggable TBT3-UDC3, input freezes and screen goes all pschedelic with greens and violets and then patterns and lines as everything melts to white noise. Flipping the lid open and closed and/or unplugging the thunderbolt cable and plugging it back in again repeatedly seems to cool the vibes

Thanks for elaborating, I guess I got the TB4 version of the same one, it arrived DOA so will see if a replacement has those issues

My favorite is how when I close my macbook with an external display plugged in, the laptop screen remains on (and lit up!) with seemingly no way to configure this behavior. Sometimes a window will end up on that (non-visible) screen which can be very confusing.

That seems like a misconfig or a broken lid sensor or something. I’ve been using MacBooks with a single external monitor as my only display (MacBook closed) for over a decade and I’ve never had the laptop display stay on when closed with an external display. Maybe time to visit the Genius Bar?

My M1 has been like this since I got it so assumed it was by design, but perhaps not. My old macbook doesn't behave this way.

Huh.. maybe that's why it always runs out of battery on the rare occasion I put it in a backpack and take it somewhere...

Try Prompt from Panic for your terminal emulator

? How is this possible? I have zero issues on my Macbook, while Linux is consistently a PITA for me.

For me the biggest gripe is that I cannot configure it as I want and that it assumes I'm computer-illiterate. On top of that a lot of the approaches chosen by Apple regarding e.g. the UI are simply counterintuitive to me.

I still prefer it to Windows but (at least for me) it is inferior to a properly setup Linux box with stuff like a titling WM. But if I would to recommend someone a computer just for browsing, email, etc. then a Mac would be my top choice.

Ha. I have to use Linux (Arch) sometimes, and it's made me appreciate OpenBSD :)

Corp IT recently banned my Indy with IRIX 6.5.32 daily driver from the network for some bureaucratic reason. I feel your pain.

I'm confused. Is this sarcasm? Your OS was last released, according to Wiki, in Aug 2006. How can it possibly be secure?

It wasn’t that secure from the start. The lpr user was a nice way to get into Irix.

That said, my favorite Unix.

It definitely wasn't! I remember the irix 5.x and earlier days. By default, it shipped without any X11 authentication enabled. This meant everyone on the network could keylog your machine.

I doubt it’s a target unless someone was actively profiling the company in question, building out a plan, and seeking to actively exploit the company’s network from that machine. Even then, how many attackers know IRIX well enough to pull it off?

If we were talking about a networked DOS machine, Windows XP, or even classic MacOS this lack of updates would be more serious… but niche UNIX workstations? Not as certain they’re still targets.

Agreed. The hardware is excellent, but the customizability, and overall snappiness of the UI are far inferior to my XFCE setup.

What are you guys running when you are writing code?

I run IntelliJ and a browser, and mostly call it a day.

Got my workchats and email in one virtual desktop, a checkpoint of what I was previously working on in another, YouTube playing music in another. All controllable with hotkeys, with a UI customized down exactly how I want it. And with no fear of an "update" breaking my setup.

I've taken to vim on a vt320 alongside my main monitor for docs/testing/etc

Work code: vscode, slack, teams, browser. These are always open. Outlook if I want to check my mail.

Personal code: Vim (more recently, zed) and a browser.

It is really wild that all these little community groups manage to consistently outperform massive corporations.

Linux is better than Windows on most counts for sure, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to use it full-time without making significant concessions on preferences about how desktop environment stuff works. If you’re someone who grew up on Macs there’s almost nothing in the Linux desktop space that tries to replicate that set of patterns… it’s all Win9X-type taskbar setups, mobile-type setups (GNOME, Pantheon), old niche *nix setups (e.g. WindowMaker), and of course minimal tiling WMs. There’s no clones of Mac OS of any flavor.

I’m proficient with more or less every modern desktop and can get by on any of any of them if I have to, but being happy doing so is another matter.

Gnome is not that different from Mac. You have your Mac-style status bar at the top, dock for apps which you can float or hide, typical window management, etc.

Gnome's top bar isn't a global menu, though. It's completely different and IMO pretty much useless.

KDE has a global menu bar that works like the one in MacOS.

Kind of. Last I checked it’s broken under Wayland, and under X11 there’s a lot of apps that don’t populate it.

I'm using it under Wayland right now. Though you are right that there are apps that don't populate it.

It's pretty hit or miss. And so far, for me, nothing comes close to topping Hyprland -- I'm perfectly happy without a global menu bar at the moment.

Gnome is very different from Aqua.

I used Gnome daily for a really long time. Gnome 3 is actually pretty good these days but it took a while to get there.

Aqua is still pretty solid but some of the shine is starting to fade.

I have all the Apple Intelligence stuff turned off yet I got a pop up ad in the OS for “Image Playground”

Apple’s solution? Turn off Image Playground in Screen Time settings. Ridiculous.

I use GNOME daily on one of my laptops and I don’t agree at all. It has some surface-level similarities, but overall is more comparable to something like iPadOS or Samsung DeX when connected to an external screen+KB+mouse.

The global menubar is the biggest difference, but there’s also a pervasive difference in philosophy throughout the desktop; where macOS will have power user functionality tucked away in a menu or hidden behind a modifier key (progressive disclosure), GNOME will just remove the function altogether.

Pantheon is very similar, except dressed up in an (admittedly pretty) skeumorphic theme that reminds me of OS X 10.9 Mavericks.

That’s not to say it doesn’t have its charms, I use it after all, but it’s not a Mac OS analogue in any way.

> If you’re someone who grew up on Macs there’s almost nothing in the Linux desktop space that tries to replicate that set of patterns… it’s all Win9X-type taskbar setups, mobile-type setups (GNOME, Pantheon), old niche *nix setups (e.g. WindowMaker), and of course minimal tiling WMs. There’s no clones of Mac OS of any flavor.

Have you seen https://hyprland.org?

I know of it but haven’t tried it. It looks kin to minimal tiling WMs like i3, but with a lot of polish applied. It’s nice I’m sure, but it’s not all that Mac-like.

Have you checked out Pop_OS?

Yep. Their tweaked GNOME variant isn’t too bad, but it doesn’t fit the bill much more than vanilla GNOME does. Not that enthusiastic about what I’ve seen of COSMIC so far.

Part of the issue is that people who don’t use Mac’s think it’s only about the looks. The looks are secondary and it’s about all the little pieces of functionality that have been a part of macOS for decades at this point.

What about hyprland makes you think of Mac? These two things barely resemble each other at all.

He said he never found a solution. Hyprland is customizable, so he can make one?

I "grew up" (from college, before then didn't use computer much) on Linux and I use a Mac at work, it's pretty easy to switch back and forth for me. Just need my tiling WM, my always on screen. I do miss that you could close the laptop lid on Linux without it sleeping. But otherwise, not much complaints either way.

My Mac only sleeps on closing if it’s not plugged in and connected to external monitors. That’s how I would want it to work. How are you wanting it to work? Closing it keeps it on no matter whether it’s plugged in or not?

I want it to stay awake when I close the lid and go with it from my desk to meeting rooms. You can set Linux to basically always ignore the laptop lid close signal, which is what I want.

There's an app for that.

I went from daily driving mac and being very used to the desktop environment, and i am really hating everything i've tried in Linux.

Why is there no macOS clone for Linux? Since there is not, maybe now would be a good time for a project to start.

Such a project is something I’ve daydreamed about on many occasions, but the scope is quite daunting, especially if one wants to do it right and e.g. make sure that all core utilities adhere to the HIG and actually populate the global menubar for example.

What about “Pop! OS” ?

Don’t forget the awkward underscore in the name: “Pop!_OS”?

I believe there are a few projects like that:

https://elementary.io/

https://pearos.xyz/

https://ubuntubudgie.org/

Probably better to select and contribute to one rather than starting your own

Unfortunately those are all so far from replicating a macOS experience that the work needed to fill the gaps is about as much as would be needed starting from scratch. Resemblances in all three are surface level at best, and are far from complete even in that aspect.

Others have mentioned a few specific distros. There are also tools like https://github.com/RedBearAK/toshy or https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto which make the keyboard and other aspects of the OS behave more Mac-like.

For me, Toshy's out of the box config make it pretty painless to switch between MacOS and Asahi on the same machine.

The funniest thing for me is that on a Mac you can use EMacs-style motion commands (^A, ^E, ^K, etc) just about anywhere you enter text. No suck luck on Linux which requires using Windows's braindead Home/End buttons outside of the terminal.

GNU stuff should support the Emacs shortcuts. In theory GNOME apps too.

> No suck luck on Linux which requires using Windows's braindead Home/End buttons outside of the terminal.

Not really; I have it set up on my box so that I can press Alt + U as a shortcut for home and Alt + O as a shortcut for End (and many other such shortcuts; it's fully customizable), and this works system-wide in every application and even on the raw Linux console without X11/Wayland running.

It's the other way around for me, it's all the concessions I have to make on Mac that make it so annoying. All the defaults I don't like, and the inability to change them or find alternatives like I can on Linux.

> preferences about how desktop environment stuff works

Having used KDE plasma, I am convinced that there is no other DE that has more knobs to make things exactly how you want it. Though I never liked the global constantly changing bar on the top in Macs anyway so can't comment on whether KDE can be made to do that.

I’ve spent time using KDE and it indeed has a lot of knobs. The options are nice but it’s still a struggle to get it configured the way I like, partially because there are no knobs for some things while some of the existing knobs control things that don’t make that much of a difference to me.

As mentioned elsewhere in the thread the issue with its global menu bar is the sheer number of apps that don’t populate it. Even the same exact Electron apps that populate the menubar on macOS don’t bother under Linux. Over half the time it sits up there empty.

I was forced to use a Linux laptop for a work once. It actually managed to make me appreciate Windows!

You have to pay me to run Windows bare metal. The user experience is terrible and of the lowest quality compared to Mac OS and Linux. Even Windows OS 11 IoT LTSC requires work around to not create a Microsoft account, and this is their embedded solution.

Last week I spent a whole day trying to resurrect a Windows 10 IoT LTSC because of a corrupt WMI repository. It crashed out software and to the client it looks like our software is bad where it is the OS that is bad. Client's automation was down until a replacement was sent out and installed.

I've had to implement number of software changes because of buggy Windows drivers. From Intel NICs to touch screen HID messaging. Microsoft talks about backwards capability but it is subjective and only truly bound to the most used applications. Enabling tablet mode on Windows will break their API.

There has never been a Linux system I couldn't resurrect and keep working. With Windows, it is always re-install the OS and all applications. Even the laptop I'm writing this on is the same OS installation that has passed between 4 different computers. You cannot get that quality of OS installation from Microsoft.

Took me a month to convince IT to reinstall Windows on my work laptop. Microsoft's update broke the QA VM environment and would freeze with an infinite loop. Uninstalling the update nor repairing the OS did anything to fix their issues.

Even today I experienced Ctrl+X is broken and does not work in Visual Studio for the git comment text box entry.

Linux makes you use the terminal and read manuals and edit configs to accomplish the most basic tasks. At least neither Windows nor macOS need that. Linux is fine for servers, but I can't fathom using that on my actual computer.

That's a... like 20 years old talking point by now?

I mean, you can probably find _a_ Linux that's like what you say, but top Linux distros are nowhere like that.

I prefer config files a lot to settings GUIs. Two most important points that come to mind:

1. I can manage them in Git 2. GUIs change all the time. With configs you have a much higher probability that some solution you googled will still work even when it is a couple of years old.

But GUIs show you all available options without having to read the docs. They only change when you install updates. You can simply not install updates that you don't like.

Linux fanboys are completely delusional, if we listened to them, we would design an airliner cockpit with a keyboard and a single display to run a terminal and input everything as commands.

They have just invested too much of their ego into knowing the arcane commands (and typing them well and fast) when it doesn't have much value, so they try to get dividends on that poor investment any way they can.

There is no reason to not make a proper GUI for pretty much everything, unless the devs are lazy or trying to save time/money.

I mean I know how to use a unix system through the terminal, it's a basic skill for a software engineer, but I'm not enjoying any of that. Most CLI software is ridiculously user-hostile too. Oh you don't remember whether it's "update" or "upgrade"? Or which order the parameters need to be? Or whether it's one dash or two? Well fuck you, go read some manuals and come back when you're ready.

And it's not just discoverability. A well-designed GUI is impossible to get into an invalid state. A CLI, on the other hand, offers infinite possibilities for invalid commands.

Using commands is nothing special and can barely be considered a "skill" (you are just typing stuff instead of pushing buttons, no significant difference).

But since it's obtuse and need a large investment (memory for command retention, typing proficiency and other tricks), people who had to suffer through that associate their ego with it and declare it superior so they can shame other people into compliance (even though they would be wasting time).

As you said, a command interface allows you to shoot yourself in the foot in about a million ways, therefor it is a terrible tool.

It is like having to handle a knife that is extremely to avoid cutting yourself with because it has no handle and has an edge on both sides. Makes absolutely no sense, someone who doesn't complain about such a "tool", is an idiot.

> There is no reason to not make a proper GUI for pretty much everything

Until you realize there are like 10 competing "standards" for settings, from config files in various incompatible formats in random places (not even obeying the XDG standard paths), to GSettings which is a Windows registry knockoff (and I bet KDE has its own - incompatible - equivalent), etc.

And don't you dare try to centralize all that into a common system - last time someone tried something similar by centralizing system service management with systemd, people lost their shit. Orders of magnitude more effort has been wasted ranting and arguing about it than fixing its issues (if they were real in the first place, and not just theoretical or outright made up).

Well I understand what you mean. At an individual developer level, it may look like it's not worth the trouble and just go with a simple terminal-based interface and a simple text file configuration.

But that's basically giving up because things look too hard. And this is why, even when there is a GUI, it tends to be pretty bad on Linux. There is an incentive problem.

As for the various competing standard and other nonsense (how many goddam distros are there in the first place?) its just inherent to the Marxist type of organisation, where there is no process to decide who has power and everyone is given equal weight in decision power regardless of their qualities (or lack thereof).

Linux as a thing just works because there is a benevolent dictator for the core part (paid by the "nasty" corporation the Linux zealots keep complaining about) and they get a lots or "second-hand" use of tools that were developed for other reasons.

The GUI problems just highlight the inherent weakness of this type of organisation/way of working, and makes you appreciate capitalism/meritocracy and commercial OS a lot more.

To be fair, the situation has improved for some specific distros but the only way to significantly change things would be to make it a commercial operation. This is what was tried with Ubuntu, and all the zealots are fighting everything tooth and nail; complaining about any meaningful improvement (recently, "snaps").

So, yes, I realize, but in my opinion it's still not a valid reason to not make a GUI. There are options. Or you can just forget Linux and make the tool with a GUI for an OS where it will be appreciated.

Windows makes you open Registry Editor and tweak completely inscrutable key/value for those.

I have a windows for work, Mac as a laptop and Linux on my workstation desktop. Windows is by far the worst, I don’t think Linux is vastly superior to Mac, they both have some things they do better than the other. My main issue is arm vs x86.

Arm is worse or better, in your eyes? I've only used it on servers and aside from build annoyances and slower than x86, it is indistinguishable.

M1 Mac is so nice. Hope to get an M4 soon..

I hope to get an M5. The problem is my M1 just keeps working so well. :(

Have not had that "problem" to this extent on any other generation of machine. Albeit, my current work is not particularly CPU limited.

A couple of my M1 machines were purchased on the day of launch at the Apple Store so they’re the 8GB RAM models. They’re still very good running Apple software (even Final Cut Pro) but I find myself running out of RAM with a few web browsers running at the same time. The base model of the M4 mini now has 16GB by default which I’m sure would be just fine for me.

Ouch.

Mine has 64GB. I usually max RAM, and get about double the SSD I think I need. Knowing that at a minimum, I will use my latest laptop, and 2-3 older models around the house and my quick-carry bag for convenience, at any given time.

Beyond convenience, the old laptops are continually synced, as multiple onsite backups. So I get great long term value from consistently choosing higher end RAM/SSD specs.

But in this case good specs for the M1 has saved me money via an unprecedentedly long upgrade schedule.

I am feeling more pressure to update two old x86 laptops to M1, than any pressure to upgrade my M1. Never had this upside-down problem before. Apple did just a great job with that M1.

There are many issues with using Linux for a corporate workstation. For instance, if the organization uses a proxy, setting it up is a PITA, as many Linux applications don't respect the http[s]_proxy environment variables. Some only accept upper-case, others only lower-case, while many have their own configuration settings for using a proxy.

Additionally, in certain industries Linux support is non-existent, with many applications developed exclusively for Windows and no viable alternatives available. Running a VM is another PITA due to driver issues. Wine ditto.

In the end, I found that running WSL2 provided a more manageable experience. I feel that Microsoft really hit the nail with WSL for productivity. Apparently, you can even run graphical applications from WSL although I don't have a lot of experience with that.

Compare the median sale price of a Windows laptop vs Mac. The qualify bar should be significantly higher for anything with an Apple logo on it just to justify the price tag.

I just spin up a ubuntu server vm and use it as my dev machine. VScode remote is pretty solid these days.

I use my mac as a on the go computer for work (it's really light, and proprietary software works always), but I have a linux VM that I sync the needed project on it before I go out. If I have to use containers for extra services (DB,...) I may as well use a VM I can configure as I like.

There's more than 2 sides to the fence. Desktop Linux is actually awesome, even better if you are even remotely technical.

I'm forced to use Apple and Microsoft products at work regularly. They're all so much worse than desktop Linux that it's not even funny.

This is exactly what happens to me. I get the company laptop, think "maybe Linux isn't that great anymore... how is modern FAANG handling things?"

Then the ads come in, and any of my doubts evaporate instantly. The home PC runs NixOS, it's been that way for 6 years now and it will probably remain that way until the advertising glut is satiated. Even then, it won't be easy getting me to switch away from desktop Linux.

Linux is nice if, like nixos users, you want to spend hundreds of hours over several years writing every QoL feature totally custom for your unique use case.

For me, Mac is 99% of what I liked about Linux, and there is ALWAYS an existing QoL solution—usually reasonably polished—for everything it lacks.

Windows has none of the benefits ofLinux, none of Homebrew or even the AUR, a tiny fraction of the QoL third party features from Mac (usually unpolished)—to say nothing of the first party QoL features—plus the hardware is comically bad. Diving board trackpads are normal on $3k windows machines in 2025, 500nits displays, whistling fans on about 17 high-end laptops I tried in the past 6 months. Truly the worst experience imaginable. Abominable, even.

Windows can at least open a Linux shell without running a VM. It's far from my first choice, but I will always reach for a Windows device over a Mac for software development.

I don't really butt heads with people that demand good defaults. I just hate on-device advertising with such a passion that I could never personally support Apple or Microsoft. Not having to deal with first-party services, nag notifications and constant advertising is well worth the week or two it takes to set up NixOS.

None are actually better than any other, they're al great but fir different types of users and what they value.

That's not true and your opinion is subjective. Windows 11 is a great developer platform.

How can their opinion be both “not true” and subjective? Windows 11 might be an ok developer platform though (does Cygwin still work?)

Use WSL2 so you get best of both worlds.

Windows, an OS that's compatible with almost all hardware and devices.

Linux on WSL2, an OS which is probably the best for most work.

If you have some hardware that only works with Windows I guess I can see some value there.

It's not true, because it's subjective.

For many years, Windows has had WSL and now it's the second generation WSL2 and you can run graphical Linux even without a VM. It has a decent package manager out of the box, a great open-source terminal. Containers and VMs are also available out of the box. Windows also has a developers' hub, which allows you to install toolchains easily, including IDEs such as VS Code.

Meanwhile, macOS comes with its own version of CLI tools such as find, which have quite different parameters than Linux, it doesn't have a package manager, when I install an app on my iPhone, it somehow decides that I want to install it on my macOS, too, etc. And I won't even mention how poor the menubar is! I have at least 10 apps I need to install to make macOS usable - PopClip, Moom, Bartender, etc., while the Windows equivalent for things like Dock and menubar are working pretty well, including notifications - I've accidentally have clicked so many times on notification banners, covering my scroll bar or window controls. Not to mention that so many times I'm typing something in window, which has my input focus, then another window pops up, steals my input focus, and I end up trying parts of my password in the wrong window due to that!

There are so many things wrong with macOS, Apple doesn't really care to improve it, and the System Settings is growing out of control! Windows' settings are much better organized!

And, yes, macOS freezes and crashes not less frequently than Windows. In fact, I haven't had any such issues with a heavily constrained Windows 11, running in VMware Fusion!

Also, Windows now has a free equivalent of the paid CleanMyMac app, and it works pretty well. Not to mention the free security software. But even with CleanMyMac, uninstalling software leads to tons of junk all over the place.

I installed windows 11 in a VM on my Linux machine for some testing recently. You still have to agree to allow MS to sell your information about 5 times during setup, and you're rewarded with Candy Crush and Xbox apps in your startup menu. I don't know how people put up with it, honestly.

Professionals don't use the "designed to be cheap for OEMs to license" Windows versions.

A lot of comments are either using home or edu or whatever, or are running in restrictive environments like on a corporate network where your IT department controls everything.

I like Linux. I use mostly Gentoo. I also like BSD but I can never think of anything to use it for. It's so good it's boring, which is great for production, not my favorite to mess around on.

I never really liked Mac OS X. I liked OS7-9, though, even though there was no real multitasking no multi-user.

But my main desktop is Windows on the metal. I ran Windows in a GPU accelerated VM for four years or so, and that was fine too.

One can get Windows Pro licenses for peanuts on eBay. I've never understood those running Home! I've always been using Windows Insider, and it is way more stable than macOS beta releases, which are notoriously broken!

windows pro legitimate licenses (as opposed to leaked volume licensing keys like you get on ebay or the facebook ads) are $120-$180 in my experience, and realistically, if you don't want to be "the product" that's a fair price.

But even with all that being said, there's other ways to get Pro versions, if the home user experience is that frustrating. and it is, i know!

if you ever do buy a license key on ebay, do a web search for the key you get. If it comes back with any results, immediately email the seller and say "it didn't work, says it's in use" or whatever. Keep doing this till they give you one that doesn't come up on a search. Usually they'll just refund your money after 2 keys, sometimes with a nasty message. What they're doing is unethical, IMO; so if all you want is a potentially valid key, you might get it for free.

anyone remember FCKGW?

Those are legit volume licenses from reputable sellers. You don't get media; you don't get anything but a license code. Plus, I only use those at home, of course - I would never use such licenses for business!

I mean.. at least system settings are in one place on OSX instead of scattered between the control panel, new system settings thing, and a few other spots.

Not all developers are UNIX people, there is a world outside UNIX that also requires software development.

> That's not true and your opinion is subjective.

I think everyone who comments on an OS war thread should see this banner in big red letters underneath the comment box

With official linux support on Windows, I really love developing on Windows, it's the best of both worlds. Mac on the other hand feels like a second hand citizen to both linux and windows depending on what you're doing.

As someone who wants to be productive at work, I chose Windows over Mac and Linux. Thankfully I had a choice.

Any system you have deep knowledge and experience with makes all the others look like garbage, because you don't know the right menus, can't intuit what you are trying to do and don't know the right workarounds/what the designers intended. As someone who uses MacOS, Windows and Linux on the regular, let me just say, uh... man, Solaris is pretty bad!

I helped my little brother put together a gaming PC a few years ago. Before that, I hadn’t even touched a windows computer in a very long time.

I was blown away by how difficult and opaque everything was. I’m sure a lot of it was just unfamiliarity, but a lot of it definitely was not. I actually could not believe how hard of a time I had

I've had the same experience. MacOS had lots of features intended to make it friendly for casual users, which made it a pain when you wanted to modify it, but if you wanted to modify something, you generally could; it just took some extra steps compared to Windows 7. By contrast, I spent an hour figuring out how to uninstall Edge on Windows 10 this afternoon, and I suspect it's going to reinstall after the next update like all of the other bloatware did.

100% ever since I switched to design and no longer using windows, I forgot what blue screen of death looks like :D

Ironically, I have the reverse opinion.

Yeah, it’s been a while:

- Music (the app, not the service): almost unusable UI/UX, sync problems, two search fields, etc.

- Calendar is confusing, glitchy UI.

- Mail is a disaster… even the simple search filter doesn’t deliver as expected.

- Safari “Inspector”: will swallow async errors, unusable for development.

- Control panel: messy, ugly and slow.

- Spotlight: was good, doesn’t work so well anymore (web results, why?).

- Finder: visual glitches, extremely slow in some contexts (file list doesn't update).

- (pre installed) tools and commands slowly disappearing from Terminal/Shell

In general all the nice little touches and the refined experience are gone…

The most strange thing is that no one pays apple to put all the crap on the dock by default. At least HP gets money for bloatware.

Yeah what happened to finder? About 6 months ago my mac just stopped giving good results. Before that finder was basically magic, and now it just has junk?

switch to spotify, proton cal, proton mail, firefox, raycast

I want a decent player that syncs with my phone, not a service (I buy my music on BandaCamp)… how hard is it? Also: most of the above were good at a certain point.

also big bandcamp fan here actually, since i make music. i wish the app was better. i am very sad about spotify as a company. still an improvement from apple music though.

When i type on iMessages, any time the message gets longer than ~8 sentences, ie... a mildly long message, it starts to lag extremely bad, where 1 keystroke has like a 250ms delay. it gets worse the more characters get added on

ive tried every single fix i can find, from turning off AI to predictive text. nothing fixes it. so many other people have this issue... it is absolutely insane a messaging app cannot message

I’ve had this occasionally but luckily it hasn’t persistently.

Also annoyingly, I don’t consistently get messages on my Mac. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t, with no way of knowing what I’m missing without looking at my phone.

iMessage gets synced automatically, but SMS needs to be enabled explicitly on the phone for it to forward them to your Mac.

In comparison, my experience with a Quest 3s with MetaHorizonOS.

It has a screen recording feature that when you use it the first time it asks you whether it can use the microphone. It claims that this can be reset somewhere in the settings. So the first time I used the feature, I disabled the mic.

A couple days later I wanted to record with mic and searched through the settings but found nothing. Googled it and discovered little. Many posts and answers pointing out that other feature settings require a factory reset to be able to alter initial settings made.

I searched again in the settings, fiddling here and there but found nothing in the settings nor anything that fixed the setting.

In the end, I had to do a factory reset. Then I was able to enable the mic for screen recording.

The device is good enough but the UI is a nightmare. Bulk deletion of notifications? Not possible. Getting out MetaHorizion? Three to four menus until a pause button can be used.

Much prefer my Apple devices - no BS, no factory reset.

Quality is a synonym for care. And if the leadership doesn't care, the teams building the software won't care (at least, not as much).

Putting a logistics guy like Tim in charge was great for ensuring Apple kept shipping existing hardware products and growing revenue, but almost guaranteed that quality across the board would falter. For all of his faults, the one thing that Steve Jobs did that's impossible to replicate by force is care.

I would bet that the reason for the drop in quality is the focus on delivering features in order to secure promotions and ongoing positive performance reviews.

Yep. A lot of software companies are suffering from this short-term-ism that results in incentive structures that value things that move the stock price rather than make for a strong long term company.

It may eventually blow up in faces, but a lot of the people making money on it today won't be around to see it.

I don't even know if it's stock price or just human hubris. "I joined the team, implemented "amazing" feature, got promoted/got hired at x".

Google is by far the worst of this. It seems 75% of their products are pet-projects turned abandonware.

Indeed. It's a Tragedy of the Commons type of issue with the way most corps are run nowadays. When you're just starting out it's understandable to be very short-term focused as next year doesn't really matter much if you go belly up next week. But once companies have some establishment, it's insane to me how little thought goes into long-term planning. That is, until you realize the incentive structure they've built essentially penalizes executives/management for sacrificing short-term opps for long-term health. For example, but slicing R&D to the bare minimum (and often below that level) and driving revenue high up and to the right by pumping up sales/marketing efforts, you can look like a business genius, and just as it starts to really hurt the company you're moving on to the next gig, and often with an exit bonus of some kind.

Yep... same with google...

Make old chat system better (or just maintain it?)... meh boring...

Make new google chat.. talk.. alo.. i mean hangouts? Yep, promotions, bonuses!

I mean, it's not always like that, at Google it always depended on the business unit.

To be honest, I think it's sort of simplistic to try to characterize a 185k person company and its culture with this sort of lack of nuance, whether it's Google, Apple, or anywhere else.

I got promoted 7 times (from SWE 3 all the way to VP of Engineering, so I ended up in the top 0.01% or something crazy by level) during my time there, and pretty much only made things better, did migrations, etc.

I did build some new stuff, but I don't believe they were ever a meaningful part of a promo packet. All my promo packets were about fixing things or making existing things better, and the impact of doing so on developer productivity, efficiency, etc.

> and pretty much only made things better, did migrations, etc.

Maybe you are right.

From the outside however, the situation looks very different:

- reader? destroyed

- Google+? Forced upon us and then destroyed as soon as communities started to form.

- Search? Hasn't been working correctly since around the time Google+ launched. At some point it became so bad I used DDG and Bing out if spite. The difference was that small.

(and before anyone says "it is impossible to create or run a working search engine in 2025": Marginalia and Kagi both work very much better than Google these days, although Marginalia admittedly only in certain niches.)

Picasa? Replaced with a w3b service.

Sure, but they've also had tons of products that have run for decades.

After 18 years of living, i'll give you the best view I got:

While I do think Google kills products it shouldn't, my view there tends more towards when things are killed that cost basically nothing to support (IE have 1-2 people working on them, have not large prod costs, and not significant privacy/etc issues over time that require serious engineering rewrites/cost), have lots of happy users, don't meaningfully conflict with some other product strategy, and don't need lots of new features.

When those are killed, I think it's dumb.

Reader falls into this category.

Picasa would not.

lots of things on killedbygoogle do not - i think they were fine to kill, whether the process by which they were killed was a good one or not.

Google+ - eh, there's a lot to hate there but it was also Google experimenting with a more top-down approach to product building. I tend to be a fan of cultural and process experimentation - you have to be able to adapt your culture and processes as a company grows, or you will end up in a really bad place. You will never get this right 100% of the time, and it is worth doing it on important things sometimes, so that the results actually matter.

In this case, G+ also got caught up in the existential crises of the day (social) in a way that was unhelpful overall, and had leadership (Vic) that I think were just not good. He had good folks working for him (Bradley, et al) but I think it would have gone a lot better with someone else in his seat.

I say this as someone who was working on a small product at the time that was slated to become the backend/etc for youtube comments, and got crushed by G+-in-youtube mandates. The Youtube folks were wonderful - happy to figure out what the best thing was, decided to ditch their own thing for ours even though we were a little team (3 people) in a different org, and they were a big team who had spent a bunch of work on comments. They didn't like the top-down G+ mandate anymore than we did. In the end, it wasn't the fact that there was a top-down mandate that was bad. It's that it was not a well thought out strategic mandate.

I do also think Google often doesn't know how to start small and grow a user base over time.

But the rest, i think there is tons of hyperbole around. I think it was fine to kill Picasa - just because some percent doesn't like the replacement doesn't mean it wasn't okay to kill. Part of development and product life cycles is that you are not going to get it right all the time for all people. That's normal.

In the end, they've created products lots of people loved, and have enough users of roughly any product that you can't kill anything without have a large group of unhappy people. The answer to that is not to avoid killing anything. At most, it's "be thoughtful in how you support its death". Sometimes Google learned from its mistakes here, and sometimes it didn't. I had a hand in a number of divestitures and such because of my background and sometimes weird roles, and tried to make sure we did the right thing when I could - previous mistakes were helpful in pushing things for the better.

For example: Sketchup was divested rather than killed, which went really well.

Niantic was also spun off rather than killed, and I think that turned out really well as well.

etc.

Picasa could have had the same promising future as Sketchup.

For Google+ I cannot say, but what I know is that even if the launch, the initial iterations and the leadership was bad, destroying the thing just as people starting to settle in might make sense in a short sighted way but it destroyed any chance google had to be trusted in the next decade. Just watch how people openly discussed here and elsewhere from time to time if GCP will continue to exist.

It also probably destroyed any chance google had to capture a significant chunk of social media and as time passes I think this is a good thing.

Same goes for search. People have complained for years, but the quality keeps declining. And I am starting to think this is a great thing since we now see more promising search engines that wouldn't have had a chance against 2012 Google Search.

"Picasa could have had the same promising future as Sketchup."

Depends what you mean. if you mean should have been spun out - it was a day and age that Google was still too young and immature to do that sort of thing, so yeah, no idea what would have happened.

If you mean it would have won or stayed viable - I dunno. Personally - i doubt it. Desktop apps were dying, and things like photo features were being moved into the basic OS distribution. Maybe it would have survived long enough to be killed by Apple Photos, or some halfway-lightroom product Adobe would have launched if Picasa stayed popular, but I doubt it - i think it would have died before then. But the vast majority of photos aren't on desktop anymore, and it's hard to see how picasa would have survived, even with picasa web.

But right or wrong, I also think killing it was within the range of reasonable product decisions to make.

As for G+, I don't actually disagree with that view. Google, like lots of tech companies, had (and still has, though they are better than they used to be!) a lot of trouble understanding the social aspects of products and trust. They want things to win becuase they are technically good, or because they are cool, or ...

Even when Larry spent time pushing on trying to improve user trust, by being careful about what and how things were shut down, it was pretty clear they overall didn't get how humans work.

The bad news, though, is i think this is pretty common in tech companies - while some do in fact get it, i think they are pretty few and far between :(

Apple seems like the kind of company that would greatly benefit from having someone opinionated at the helm to keep the different teams oriented towards a unified vision and to intervene when a team produces something crappy

I have a feeling that user testing just gets completely avoided.

One thing which bugs me since the last redesign of the horrible apple photos app, is that they changed its order of showing picture?!

After going on a trip, i like creating a album and sharing it with my family, I also put there some comments, and try to turn it into a story. I believe this is what an album is supposed to do, tell a story.

Therefore rendering the pictures by default from oldest picture to the newest one is very important.

This however did not fit properly into the new design of the Photos app, as they changed it to `Date added`.

Whatever that means, at the end of the day, it starts showing pictures from the newest one, to the oldest one. Which means it’s the opposite way. Think about watching a movie backwards…

Man every time I read someone complaining about the new photos app it feels like they never even tried looking for a solution. "It changed, so it's broken."

1. Open shared album

2. Tap "Sort" button in the bottom left corner

3. Select "Sort by oldest first"

I don't know if they could have done it any simpler than this.

Yes i do that :) but now i also need to tell that to my family constantly. Its not like you need to change it once, you need to change it for every single album

Two taps per album. Absolute downgrade. 1-star.

The reality is that the new default order does make sense for albums you keep adding to.

- I added photos to the album

- Where? I don't see them

- idk, scroll somewhere in the middle, they're from 2019 and 2023

Sharing albums is also a huge pain. Inviting new members doesn't work half of the time.

As an iPhone user, I can only agree that Apple's software quality is just going backwards. Keyboard is terrible, it suggests words that are completely unrelated. Control center is becoming worse at every update. You can't still select text in the messages. Wifi is always unstable. You can't turn off wifi, etc.

Also my father used to use the feature of announcing outgoing calls when call is made by Siri, they removed it and I saw that many blind people also used to use this feature. I don't know what they thought while removing this feature.

Yeah!!! What’s with their word prediction? More than 12 years and buggers still can’t predict my first name which I have typed a trillion times at least and is my name in the iOS and iCloud and contact and what not!!!!

The thing is slowly I am moving to so much non-Apple things that at one might I might go back to a much cheaper Android. Because anyway normal sized phones are not coming from Apple either.

> For years, many of us have willingly paid the "Apple tax", the premium price for Apple products justified by superior user experience, design, and ecosystem integration. But if software quality continues to decline, this value proposition becomes increasingly difficult to defend.

Just today I was thinking how the best hardware gets crippled by software that has become as shitty as Microsoft's.

By now it has become incredible that “Doesn't Suck” was once motto and slogan for the user experience on Apple devices.

> as shitty as Microsoft's.

If I ever feel down on the Mac, I can go to a PC and try make a pdf or view one. Clunky AF.

Mac software might be at a low-point, but it hasn’t burnt down yet.

> If I ever feel down on the Mac, I can go to a PC and try make a pdf or view one.

After a restart (which happens a lot because the machine crashes a lot[0]), my Windows 10 box won't be "ready for use" for a good 10 minutes. I've seen it take 30 minutes. I've done macOS updates that have taken less time.

Oh and macOS doesn't randomly reboot to apply updates. Still haven't found a way to prevent Windows from doing that.

[0] I suspect the 3080 but it frequently crashes when idle on the desktop which shouldn't be stressing anything GPU-wise.

There is a tool called Windows Update Blocker which i use on a Win10 server that i run:

https://www.sordum.org/9470/windows-update-blocker-v1-8/

I don't really get this criticism. If I want to make a PDF, I open up Word and save as PDF. To open it, I double click the file.

You can save anything you can print as a PDF since what, Windows 7? And the OS comes with a PDF reader since what, Windows 8?

And Word comes bundled by default on windows?

> And the OS comes with a PDF reader since what, Windows 8?

Which one, the Edge browser? Don't you have to install Sumatra PDF or Acrobat?

Word isn't bundled by default but you can print anything to PDF. Windows ships with a PDF printer installed, so you could print from Notepad to PDF if you'd like.

PDF readers haven't been required for over 10 years? Chrome shipped with a PDF viewer eons ago and of course the old version of Edge and current Chromium Edge (and now Firefox, as of a week or two ago) have PDF viewers.

macOS Preview is limited to PDF 1.4. That kind of sucks. Not a deal breaker for most PDFs, but I've come across one or two that won't render and I had to figure out why.

Preview is vastly better than any stock Windows reader. It lets you read, edit and share nearly all PDFs. I can’t recall every getting stuck.

Yes, most PDFs are version 1.4 or less until you get into the business world where more complex PDFs requiring a 2.0 reader exist.

That said, the Edge PDF viewer also lets you read, edit, and share nearly all PDFs.

I do it in windows near daily. It’s slow, taking a long time to open and a long time to make them. I’ve tried using the browser, notepad and Word.

I’m surprised you find it fine. It’s more clicks and slower at each step than on a Mac.

PDFs open just as fast in Edge as they do in Preview. Printing to PDF is no different from macOS or Windows.

> And Word comes bundled by default on windows?

Yes. When you type "word" in the search bar, you get directed to MS Word Online, a free version of MS Word.

For all the other programs, and browsers as well, hit "print" and select "print to PDF".

> Which one, the Edge browser

Yes. I hate Edge and have disabled it, but I have to give it to them that their PDF reader is much better than the one built into other operating systems. It's optimised for simplicity and common PDF interactions (highlighting, filling out forms, etc.). Plus, unlike all the other PDF readers, Edge has some excellent security features that have been implemented because of its browser nature.

The way Edge has turned into a shitty shell of its former self is a true software tragedy. It was well on the way to become the best browser available until Microsoft decided to Microsoft all over it. Still, works fine for opening PDF files.

Just today I was thinking how the best hardware gets crippled by software that has become as shitty as Microsoft's.

Apple software has always been crap. People put up with it because the hardware was nice and shiny and distracted from the many bugs and severe UI issues.

I know people tend to get very upset by this but if I’m not mistaken the M1, M2 and I think the M3 processors all now have “unfixable” hardware level security bugs on par with SPECTRE that destroy the concept of a Secure Enclave AFAIK.

https://wccftech.com/macs-running-apples-m1-m2-and-m3-chips-...

So essentially they might be fast but they all have genuinely fatal flaws in them.

But it’s not just the software that stinks.

when I learned that fact it made me feel as if I want to switch away on a hair trigger, I do wonder if other modern arm platforms are safer, or just less scrutinized, and if Apple is still safer than Intel?

Apple creates excellent hardware but mediocre apps. Look at Reminders app for instance. Try to create a task. And then drag it to another list. Absolutely not a smooth experience. Feels like it‘s not a finished product. Now compare that to another app: Things3, where the drag and drop of list items is rasor sharp: You have the feeling you have full control over the item.

That’s just one experience. Another: Look at Photos app. Apple recently changed it. Total chaos. No lists anymore but tiles. I have to scroll up and down to find out where my lists of photos are. Germans call it „verschlimmbessern“, making it worse by trying to improve.

Or look at Finder app. And compare it to any competing product.

No app created by Apple really convinces me. None of them. Every product by an indy dev is magnitudes better.

While I worked at Apple in 2021-22 their issues seemed about the same as nearly every other company producing consumer apps and devices; bloated slow garbage with very mediocre quality. Their engineering culture is terrible, especially as it relates to transfer of the “Apple ethos” to the next generation of devs. Apple is going to be indistinguishable from the rest of the pack within the next decade.

But most of all it seems like it was designed by people who don’t even know what it is for. That combined with the superficial “implement my Figma masterpiece in code” development approach that includes little to no user testing. Tog weeps. Don Norman weeps. Observe how much breaks when you do something as trivial as bump the default font size by one notch. I am sure it is pixel perfect at default size though.

Enter a birth date in a contact entry without a year. Watch as it jumps to the next day when you save because you are editing the date after 0000 of the next day in utc time. That bug has now been in MacOS/iOS for at least 17 years.

Sorry, got in to rant mode. I really want “less but better” from things in my life. We as consumers aren’t rewarding companies that take this approach apparently.

> Enter a birth date in a contact entry without a year.

I’m glad I’m not the only one. It’s mind boggling. I’ve had to start putting in my best guess just to have it save…

For exclusively Apple ecosystem users, how do you handle these feature gaps? Just get used to working around them and ignore?

I feel like every time I swap to the Mac ecosystem it's a litany of "Hunh, that weird tiny thing doesn't work" issues.

PS: USB-C DisplayPort MST (display daisy-chaining) support that's been missing for... a decade and counting?

I don't even understand this bug description. It's an edge case I guess I never ran into, so pretty easy to handle.

That said, it's not like everything is perfect, just 100% better than my drive-by experiences trying to have a gaming PC (dead, again), and an Android phone for testing purposes.

To clarify their issue, you can celebrate someones birthday without knowing the year they are born, you only need to know the reocurring date. You can't enter a birthday in apple contacts without a year, if you attempt it it sets it as the date of tomorrow.

My experience with apple is something's either a 2 minute fix or unfixable which to be fair is a reasonable way to do things though much less appealing to me (though less relevant for many users as stock android/windows continue to give users less and less control).

Are we talking about the Contacts app on macOS? I just added the birthday "9/22" to a contact. On blur, the value changes to "September 22". On save, I see the value "September 22" reflected in the birthday field of the contact.

Ahh mine is worse. My contacts app will secretly delete the birthday from the contact after 0-10 minutes.

> Just get used to working around them and ignore?

Pretty much. It's not like the other operating systems are better in this regard. In general there's a lot more software that's buggy like this than software that's reliable

I accept them as I do in windows and Linux because I have built workflows around the things I do want on each of them respectively. I’ve long since given up the dream of any one platform or technology choice meeting all my needs, for me at least, it’s a fools errand.

This bug I can’t even replicate so :shrug:

FWIW, I've had the expiry month of credit cards stored in Safari increment on occasion (leading to failed online payments, trouble getting a flight, etc.) several times, to the extent that I now always include the expiry month in the card nickname. Mind boggling.

I thought I must have misentered it once and it’s always stuck on that but now you’ve got me thinking

If you hit save too fast while a numeric dial control - like the sort used in the iOS Clock app for alarms - is still (barely) spinning.. it will happily just silently keep its old value.

This is easy to repro by spinning an alarm's minutes and hitting save before it's completely and utterly stopped.

This UI bug (?) has existed for as long as I can remember.

Thanks for sharing. Which teams are better and which are worse? I guess all the system software teams are better?

Having joined a large established FAANG, it's become quite apparent that in any large established entity with so much management and meta work, with strong incentives driving more energy towards the meta work than where the rubber meets the road, it's inevitable for product quality to deteriorate.

Internally the prioritized output becomes the meta work, not what reaches customers. What reaches customers is almost some kind of accidental byproduct of what the vast majority of people in the org spend their time on day-to-day.

My past experience is dominated by startups. The fake work I'm incentivized to spend time on would have been fire-able levels of misplaced priorities / waste everywhere else I've worked as an IC developer.

I've never worked for Apple, I'm assuming this pattern plays out everywhere at this scale.

Interesting observation. I suppose most startups haven't existed for long enough for the meta-optimizing employees to be promoted over work-optimizing employees, yet.

Meta optimizing employees have issues hiding at smaller companies where one person has a vision of what needs to happen and quickly identify someone not pulling in one direction.

Once you get big enough, upper management has tough time figure out who is meta optimizing over work-optimizing. Not to mention there might be multiple meta optimizing employees.

IME, it's around 100-150 employees which lines up with Dunbar's Number. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

I've seen high performance organizations at 600-800, thanks to execs that spent quite a bit of time talking across levels: When at that size, some ICs get CEO 1:1s, you have some chances of quality control. After all some execs had been coders. The problem is that none of them had ever been middle managers, which meant they had no idea of how to tell a good one from a bad one.

TAs the company kept growing, and hired middle managers from bigger tech, they that Jira was the way to go, as it allowed for nice reports aggregating "insights"across the organization. In under a year, point-centered management arrived, and with it an exodus of top talent, all of which had massive amounts of equity anyway. Execs then wondered what happened, and why ability to ship features kept declining. I think they still don't know.

I'd also be curious as to how it relates to span of control (~4-15 direct reports) and therefore levels of management for a given org size, as information hiding about actual work performed seems tied to managerial masking.

There is no budget for this kind of stupidity, if a start up employs to many people like this they won’t succeed.

Matches my brief FAANG experience well: the vast amount of time devoted to performance reviews and the gaming of them versus actual productive work was… something I’d never encountered in my previous 15 years of work.

Well compensated hoop jumping at least!

Same. The compensation is substantially better at FAANG, but in terms of actual on the ground work being rewarded, almost never the case.

Meta-work (lots of "cross functional" documents, alignment meetings, sync ups with senior tech leads to brown nose, deliberately creating low quality output to justify hiring more people/growing one's "scope") is 90% of it.

Any actual output is largely accidental, coming from the 20% still naive, or idealistic enough to actually care about what they produce.

You can really see this when trying to build apps with Swift & SwiftUI. The language and the framework seem to be optimized for nice terse WWDC demos but both fall apart pretty quickly when you start to do any heavy UI lifting with them. And I think that's starting to bleed into their own native UI now too. The lousy macOS settings app is a good example.

Unfortunately there don't seem to be any good alternatives to Apple. Windows is even worse.

Their new wifi network selector is laggy as fuck. The old one was perfectly fine. This is just like windows reimplementing basic UIs in their UI-framework-of-the-year.

Yes, I was a fairly early SwiftUI guinea pig, when I'd mistakenly assumed it was solid because of how Apple was pushing it, and your "WWDC demo" is spot-on.

The DSL could've been better (while still syncing between code and direct-manipulation GUI painter). And the interaction model seemed like it wasn't to be trusted, and was probably buggy (and others confirmed bugs). The lack of documentation on some entitlements APIs being demoed as launched left me shouting very bad words on multiple days (which is not something I normally do) before I made everything work.

I could feel this, and ended up wrapping all my UI with a carefully hand-implemented hierarchical statechart, so that the app would work in the field for our needs, the first time, and every time. Normally, for consumer-grade work, I would just use the abstractions of the interface toolkit, and not have to formally model it separately.

Don't get me started on what a transparently incompetent load of poo some of the Apple developer Web sites were, for complying with the additional burdens that Apple places on developers, just because it can. Obvious rampant data consistency problems, poor HCI design, and just plain unreliable behavior. I think I heard that at least some of that had been outsourced, to one of those consulting firms that everyone knows isn't up to doing anything competently, but that somehow gets contracts anyway.

KDE 6.3 is pretty great these days.

"in the beginning was the command line"

All of these modern "declarative" frameworks seem to be optimized for hello world kinds of apps. Jetpack Compose, too.

And SwiftUI is just being too smart sometimes: https://tonsky.me/blog/swiftui/

Not sure about other people, but for me, my UI framework making its own heuristic decisions about how to lay out and style my views is the last thing I want. It robs me of the certainty that my UI will look and work the way I intend. And this is why, as an Android developer, I still build my apps with decade-old tried and true technologies.

Except those technologies are now deprecated and you don't know when they might be removed. Jetpack Compose is now the vendor-favored way to build apps, so best practice is to use that.

I don't care what "best practices" are. Seemingly everyone sticks to these, yet here we are discussing that software quality everywhere throughout the industry has taken a dip.

> Except those technologies are now deprecated and you don't know when they might be removed.

Views and activities and XML layout will never be removed, of that I'm certain. After all, Compose does use views in the end. That's the only way to build UIs that the system itself understands. And, unlike SwiftUI, Compose itself isn't even part of the system, it's a thing you put inside your app.

I don't care about deprecations. Google has discredited itself for me and its abuse of the @Deprecated annotation is one of the reasons. The one thing that's very unfortunate is that all tools unquestionably trust that the person who puts @Deprecated in the code they maintain knows what they're doing, and nothing allows you to selectively un-deprecate specific classes or packages; you can only ignore all deprecations in your class/method/statement.

And, by the way, I also ignore the existence of Kotlin. I still write Java, albeit it's Java 17. The one time I had to deal with Kotlin code (on a hackathon) it felt like I'm coding through molasses.

Yeah that view builder syntax is a perfect example of optimizing for the wrong thing. It makes for nice short examples but in real apps your compile times explode trying to untangle these crazy generics and the compiler very often just throws up its hands and tells you to figure it out. This means you just start commenting out bits of code until you find by trial and error what it doesn't like.

That this is shipping in the native UI framework for a trillion dollar tech company is astonishing.

Ironically Linux with KDE is very good for being both pixel perfect, responsive and enjoyable to work with.

What a time to be alive.

Windows is only worse if you don't consider the freedom of choosing the hardware it runs on and its ability to be modified to run as you see fit.

Apple is really losing the plot because they really need their software to be good to sell their hardware. Microsoft doesn't even have to care that much because there is not a relevant alternative coming out any time soon (as the various Linux failures have shown), but at least you don't have to give them a lot of money (in fact as close to zero as possible if you really want to).

Agreed I was there at that time. I was in two different “orgs” in my 5 years, SWE and AI/ML

I saw poor management (lots of ex Amazon) running new grads/jr engineers into the ground (features features)

It’s all about new features. If anyone with experience expresses an idea to address technical debt they are literally put on PIP

I will point out I was at Google for a similar length of time and saw nothing but amazing code, yet the problem was is building anything but the ads money maker.

If there was a way to combine Apples magic marketing brainwashing with Google’s engineering it would be an amazing thing to watch

> It was designed by people who don’t even know what it is for.

This rings especially true with Windows.

There was a not-so-serious rumor that the whole MS design department uses Macs.

This may or may not be true, but recent UX changes make it clear that the designers don’t really use Windows beyond a superficial level. Many common interactions have become increasingly tedious and visually sluggish, both due to excessive animations and performance issues. Explorer in particular has become barely usable for anyone who frequently manages files.

Apple can stay far ahead simply by not falling even faster than Windows. Finder and Spotlight have gotten worse, but they remain light-years ahead of their Windows counterparts.

Ummmm, what? Spotlight I'll grant you, but Finder is hands down the worst file browser on any operating system.

There's no up button, no split screen, you can't copy a path easily, you can't show hidden files easily, you can't customize the columns in list mode, the column mode won't let you go up, there's no cut and paste.

Windows Explorer sucks, but not nearly as bad as finder. Dolphin, thunar, and Nautilus on Linux have all those features and more. I have to drop to terminal or install mucommander just to do basic things in the macOS filesystem.

Try command + click on the folder in the top of the window to go up

Yes, Apple Finder is so freaking slow, browsing a moderately large folder is challenging, nevermind a network share.

Not sure I even agree about spotlight. Maybe I’m misunderstanding something but can never find what I’m looking for. Even when I’m in the directory, searching for a file in that directory. It’ll just show me random download files.

Granted, I haven’t even tried to use it in years. So maybe it’s not so bad these days?

My spotlight cannot even find some of the applications I have installed

The last time I had a computer running MacOS, you couldn't even type the directory you were looking for into Finder; you had to use a dropdown menu.

It is hidden behind a keyboard shortcut -there is no menu. cmd-shift-g I think. But it is literally the only way I know to get to folders besides the designated shortcuts (documents, pictures, etc) and I've been a daily mac user for many years.

Finder always felt like it was built with usecases and workflows in mind that had no intersection with my own.

Luckily there are Norton commander clones available for osx.

Going up is also a shortcut: CMD+arrow up.

I assume they didn't expect users to use directory hierarchies much and thought everybody would dump their files into flat dirs and search them with spotlight.

> There's no up button

Display the path bar at the bottom and you can get to any level of parent in 1 click. Without the path bar you can also right-click on the current folder name at the top of the window to also navigate to any level of parent.

> no split screen

This is not something I've ever found a use for in any OS, I always just open 2 windows. It does have tabs, and you can drags stuff between tabs, albeit with some delay. This seems minor, unless for very specific workflows.

> you can't copy a path easily

Right-click file or folder, when you then press Option, Copy changes to copy path.

> you can't show hidden files easily

Command+Shift+. toggles hidden files on and off. I find this pretty easy to remember, since dots prefix hidden files.

> you can't customize the columns in list mode

Right-click the headings and you can add/remove the ones you want? Is that what you're talking about?

> there's no cut and paste

Instead of an option when copying, it's an option when pasting. Command+C to copy, then add Option while pasting... Command+Option+V. I almost never use Cut, even on Windows of Linux, I don't want to cut something, get interrupted, do something else, and lose my file. Having it move, then delete the source with the paste action, is safer.

It sounds like you haven't used Finder that much, or weren't willing to learn or adapt your behaviors.

There are some things about other file explorers I like, but I don't find myself struggling to use Finder at all. I mostly miss column view when I'm on anything that isn't Finder.

Spotlight has been broken on both of my Macs since Sequoia. It doesn't find anything under Downloads dir even though it should be indexed. Or any non-Apple apps under Applications. Re-indexing did nothing.

Can you upload a video showing exactly what you mean by explorer is sluggish?

Have you tried searching with Explorer? Or opening the start menu or a folder? I'm currently 100% a Windows shop, and it's embarrassingly slow on my silly fast computer.

To be fair, searching with Spotlight has been equally slow and useless for me… Whenever I need to find a file and mistakenly use Command F in my Finder, the complete cessation of activity that inevitably results reminds me yet once again to just go to my terminal to use trusty GNU’s find instead.

"Everything.exe"

but more to the point you have to enable indexing and let the indexing service run. Microsoft caught flak for "SearchIndexer.exe" using 25% of a CPU 24/7 that i think it's much less aggressive now. But i don't use that search because windows searches CIFS shares slowly, too. Everything.exe indexes and the searches are near enough instant that it's not even worth splitting hairs or stopwatch timers.

Context menu alone takes a few hundreds milliseconds to load every time. And then you have the infamous "show more options" to click if you want to do most of things (in my use case).

Open a folder isn't much faster either, there is visible delay. with the current-day hardware there is no reason why this isn't instant.

Compare it with Windows XP or Windows 7, the difference is night and day.

Interaction with OneDrive is horrible too, this is particularly bad because it was fine on Win10. When a folder is syncing it constantly "refreshes" itself which causes you to lose the focus if you're renaming files. This is the single most annoying thing because I do close a doc -> immediately rename it all the time.

Something went way wrong around IIRC Vista.

I still had spinning rust when I upgraded. Win7 was fine. UI wasn't quite as snappy as XP, but it still felt pretty responsive.

After upgrading? EVERYTHING took forever. The friggin' start menu lagged noticeably on almost every interaction.

Upgrading to a solid state disk mostly fixed it, so they had clearly done something foundational that'd radically increased disk IO system wide. Solid state's fast, but it's not fast enough, if they'd kept going down that road. Eventually it'd start to show up there, too.

Windows 7 with spinning rust microsoft did ReadyBoost, where something could have incredibly fast seek times but mediocre throughput.

Vista was the worst windows, other than 8 and ME.

Suffice to say if windows was actually slow when i used it, i would not use it. I didn't use ME, XP, Vista, or 8. There's a pattern here. I did use Xp x64 edition, but that came out ~2 years after XP, and did not have the pre-service-pack issues XP did.

It’s comforting knowing that I’m not the only one being driven crazy by the renaming file focus thing. Now when I paste a file and go to rename, I wait and watch the focus selection switch 3 times before I know I’m good to type

i replied to this person who ignored what i asked for, and i uploaded a video and linked it. I right clicked, clicked "rename" and then typed a name, pressed control-Z and then enter.

If we're talking about a transactional file sync service preventing you from editing a file while it's synchronizing; then i am not sure what to tell you. Both you and the person you replied to seem to merely like complaining.

this isn't a video. I specifically asked for a video. so i'll make one, and you show me where the sluggishness is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx_t8SUwrEk

you'll note that, apparently, everything you said prior to your last paragraph is shown incorrect.

You are not even using the default context menu? Like, it looks nothing like that with my stock Win11 computer.

i don't get it. Where's the sluggishness? Do you think i also modified my system to somehow run faster or otherwise tampered with the video evidence i provided?

Are you serious? who cares about the context menu, it's such a non-issue it took me like 15 seconds to figure out how to get the "archive" and rename commands back. The rest of the stuff in there is all software that added context menu items.

I get the feeling you haven't really used windows since win95 or something. like, you have a windows machine at work that you don't like because it's slow for whatever reason. Three people made specific complaints, i responded with a video and a screenshot disproving what they said, and... yeah i don't get it.

just installed win 11 pro an hour ago and https://i.imgur.com/61AdEBR.png context menu looks fine. Maybe they fixed it? i didn't change any settings at all.

(not OP) I open the “videos” folder and it takes 10 seconds to show the files list (there’s only like 50 files). I tried various forum solutions (whose existence proves it’s a bug) and nothing worked. Only happens on the videos folder.

As far I remember, Microsoft design team used Sketch, which is... mac only.

Now they are using Figma, but as far I know, yeah, they all use macs lol

I don't disagree, but the average business user is someone who uses the M365 suite and a handful of webapps. We are getting ready to roll it out and our test users haven't had many complaints. IT is a different story, however, for the reasons you stated. It's like they just shuffled all the system and config menus for fun.

TBF a ton of windows users aren't primarily from the platform, and have either a second machine or more experience on other OSes.

The dev community might be an outlier, but people choosing a windows machine to get WSL on a mainstream and well-supported hardware is not uncommon.

Same for those with a macos work laptop but a windows gaming machine, or artists using a mac for personal stuff and windows for 3D/2D creation.

Having Windows designers making platform transitions easier kinda makes sense, though I agree it shouldn't penalize existing users as much as it does now.

> It was designed by people who don’t even know what it is for.

> This rings especially true with Windows.

Just take a look at the Windows 11 "Control Panel" or whatever is called and how that looks like just another UI on top of the main system, that does not make sense

For what it’s worth, I think the contact bug you mention is fixed, at least in latest iOS (18.3.1).

Screen recording of me trying to reproduce that: https://streamable.com/n97j9m

> Sorry, got in to rant mode. I really want “less but better” from things in my life. We as consumers aren’t rewarding companies that take this approach apparently.

If *becoming the most valuable company in the world* isn't being "rewarded", then what possibly is?

No, it's the hypercapitalist endless drive for ultra short-term, next quarter profits at the cost of anything else that causes this. Obvious irony being that Apple would've never become this big if Jobs had followed this approach.

This of course is the #1 reason of the downfall of the West, above all else - pure short-termism.

This saddens me, as I learned the lessons of less but better through Apple over 20 years ago through Steve and Jony, which ultimately led to Rams. It was a pretty transformative lesson in my life, and extended far beyond tech or products.

I hope they are able to course correct with the right leadership. A culture that cares deeply about the little things is hard to build and has to be supported at the highest levels.

Late last year after an OS update, notifications in macOS mysteriously stopped popping up. They were getting triggered and could be seen by opening the right sidebar, but the banners were no longer popping up in the corner anymore. I had been using them to remind me of any upcoming meetings in my employer's Google calendar, so when they stopped appearing, I suddenly found myself unintentionally missing those meetings altogether. (I found a workaround by using Slack's Google calendar integration to send me reminders there.)

Well, turned out that although the Focus -> Do Not Disturb settings had been disabled, the settings were behaving as though they were enabled anyway! It was set to only allow certain apps to show banners. Only when I changed this setting (a few months later nevertheless) did notification banners finally start working properly as before. Perhaps I ran into an extreme edge case that the Apple engineers overlooked somehow, but it does make me wonder whether they are doing anything at all to identify and cover such edge cases.

edit: Looked further, found that the cause ultimately turned out to be the 'Allow notifications when mirroring or sharing the display' setting under Notifications, which was off by default. I use an external monitor almost the entire time but I would expect that setting to be on by default, at the very least.

I really hope someone high up the chain at Apple reads this post because it's only the tip of the iceberg in describing the myriad of things wrong with Apple's software experience lately. For a company so flush with cash and resources, it boggles the mind how they could let things get this bad.

It's been bad since iTunes became a garbage heap.

There are pockets of competence, but it's not a company priority (even the audio/video apps suffer). That such mediocrity has crept into the OS is even worse.

Feedback doesn’t work so I stopped reporting them. Bugs take about a decade to be fixed and they’re introducing them in a faster pace.

It sends as if nobody at Apple is either a power user or an “abuser” (like many old people who have 50+ email windows open on their iPad because the ui is not very good for them anymore)

I’d love to work at some for a year and only fix bugs and performance issues. It’s very rewarding work imo.

Did anyone mention that on AppleTV I now get ads on my home screen?

----

I am also using a Macbook for work and in addition to the fantastic battery life and the fact that it mostly "just works" I feel parts of the experience has significantly improved since last I used Mac, for example I can now remap ctrl and fn!

On the other hand I still miss the consistency and ease of use of Windows XP, Gnome 2 or KDE Plasma.

Then again, Windows manages to get a little bit worse every release, Gnome 2 was replaced with Unity (on Ubuntu) and later Gnome 3 which I understand still breaks extensions and which I still don't like despite trying hard.

When my Shield started showing ads I installed another launcher—wish Apple were nearly as open.

The quality crisis is systemic throughout the whole economy. So many fields are getting more disorganised, messy and chaotic.

On the one hand things are moving faster, doing more with less, being more responsive etc. But this comes at the expense of quality and long-term reliability / support. Applies to hardware too.

Sounds a bit hyperbolic, do you have some actual evidence of this?

Automated AI code writing to the rescue!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I reported a bug in their mmap syscall on Apple Silicon. You can hard freeze the computer in about 4 syscalls (basically system C functions). It's still there and they won't fix it, or acknowledge that it's a vulnerability.

The frustrating thing is it locks the IO system, but the kernel thinks everything is fine. One by one each thread that does IO never returns. So you frantically click around wondering why your computer isn't doing anything.

Curious what the bug is

Publish it. Let it get abused. Eventually they might fix it.

MacOS has gone downhill like crazy indeed. On an M4, searching my safari history is super slow, searching for a password in the Passwords app is also really slow. I mean these are just lists. Apps steal focus all the time, Finder window column widths reset whenever they feel like, search in Mail sometimes just refuses to work. iCloud tab syncing? haha, not today, maybe next week again. You could probably write a dissertation on the new, new system preferences app.

I have a bug with Safari poor sync since about 4 years (passwords wouldn't correctly update both ways) but the tabs issue was also extremely annoying.

I just went with chrome. I used to really like Safari, I really wanted to use it, but Apple is just not competent enough anymore, no matter how good looking it is, no matter how many interesting features it has, if it doesn't work all is irrelevant.

> Feature prioritization over optimization: Engineering resources appear focused on new capabilities rather than fixing existing performance problems;

This point really cuts to the heart of my frustration with Apple lately. I switched from Windows XP Pro to OS X 10.2 in order to have a dead simple, bulletproof desktop experience without all the nonsense. I recently booted my old macbook to grab some files and was shocked at how lovely and simple 10.2 was.

> I call on Apple to return to its roots - creating products that prioritize user experience over feature checklists. The company that once proudly created products that "just work" needs to reclaim that ethos.

But this is a mythic past, not the real one, embarrassing software bugs have always been present! Moreover, it's never been limited to just software, remember premium laptop keyboard design fiasco, for example.

That's not true in my experience. I started at Apple in 1995 and user experience was king. Honestly, Jobs return was more or less the start of the decline (but, not of the stock price of AAPL of course).

Why did Apple engineering culture decline then? It became top-down, no longer bottom-up.

Apple had to switch CPU architectures and build their just to make their OS feel as snappy as KDE and Gnome does on mid-tier hardware. I wonder how long it will take until enough technical debt accumulates to a point where Mac OS feels like it drags again.

The absolute worst was the transition to SSDs if you were stuck on a hard to upgrade HDD-based Mac. It became super clear that Apple devs stopped caring in the span of a year.

Mojave made my Mac Mini mid-2015 without an SSD completely unusable.

A recent blog post in the Apple fanboy world posited that Apple has slow, non-user-adjustable animations that make the OS feel slow. That's basically why a user thinks KDE or Gnome is snappier. It has nothing to do with CPU architecture.

I still have an Intel Mac and it doesn't feel significantly slower than one with Apple silicon.

> KDE or Gnome is snappier.

Last time I installed Gnome I had to install an extension to remove the 150ms delay on alt-tabbing that is present even when animations are disabled. It became snappy after that.

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2741/remove-alttab-de...

As for KDE I did not find how to disable animations when using Wayland. I would be happy to know (while keeping Wayland).

(I still prefer using customizable OSS software over "we know better than you" closed source software)

Rubbish. You Linux-only guys post this nonsense on any thread criticising competing OSs thinking the rest of us have no experience using them. I daily-drive older hardware (Xeon E5 with 16GB RAM and GTX 1080 ti), which is essentially all midtier is, and GNOME is a stuttery mess. It struggles to drive 4K. It's slow to load software, and what is available is often a UX mess (what have they got against menus?!). Discoverability is low. Disk access is slow. Tried BTRFS, ZFS and Ext4 - none of them make a difference. KDE is no better - how many modals or check boxes are needed for one option?

See, we can all pour scorn on other operating systems. The real problem lies in the expectations that people place upon these platforms. Despite my complaints, I actually enjoy using Linux on a desktop (laptops are another story). If I listened to a lot of you, my expectations would definitely not be met.

I use Linux, Apple OS and Windows.

Apple OS. Indeed.

You got me! Not a daily user since it was OS X. Started on Tiger, but still often use it

I'd consider the tools in the iPhone's Photos app to be amongst the most "core" features - yet there've been glitches in it for the past year where if you annotate a picture (say, by adding text), the position of everything you've added is screwed up when you hit 'Done'. I'm sure that's the tip of the iceberg.

They design AirPods and its cases to break on impact. They make it so slippery that it would be a stretch not to say that they designed it felicitate fatal falls. And after all this, they used glue to glue it in such a way that it comes off if it didn’t fall. Then they just ask you to buy a new case — yes, they don’t glue or do such lowly repairs. They have the gall to explicitly say that it would be repairable by glue but they won’t do that. Not to mention batteries which are designed for obsoletion. Cases and parts are made perfectly irreparable. And that’s just AirPods case!!!!

Premium hardware my foot! They are lucky to be in a convenient duopoly.

Is this a real problem, or a perceived problem?

I know people like to complain about Apple's software quality - but is this actually an issue - or just the popular thing to say?

It’s not worse than Microsoft.

But somehow, Microsoft and Apple are inferior to their previous selves.

New features and bug fixes, yes. But we seem to lose a lot. In terms of quality, performance and unfeatures.

I'm aware of UI inconsistencies, like this dated article below.

https://www.corbinstreehouse.com/blog/2021/10/macos-12-monte...

But was curious is are people having stability & reliability type of software quality problems.

I am. Many of my old launchd services don’t work anymore. Well they run, the job begins, but then it can’t write to its files. I have no clue how they borked the permissions but something is up. The script works when I run it myself. As far as I can tell the launchd process should run the script as me the user in terms of permissions. It manages to run the script but doesn’t write to file. I am at a loss and gave up on debugging those services for now.

Is this a real bug? I recently got a MacOS device for the first time, and I have been frustrated that I couldn't get my custom service to work. Just like you, the script writes to files when I run it myself, but does nothing as a service.

I've been debugging it on and off for a couple of months because I assumed I messed something up.

It worked fine on mojave, that is how I know it wasn’t my doing. The only variable change is the os. Another bug: sound turns on after I’ve muted it if any media starts playing. Defeating the entire purpose of muting audio. I guess macos knows best and I ought to play any and all audio out of those generous speakers at an appreciable volume no matter my surrounding. God forbid it were the other way and my video plays for a half second on mute before I notice.

Using macOS since Tiger as daily driven. Never been worse. Needs a “Snow Leopard” year.

> Never been worse.

How so? Would you mind giving examples.

Note: I'm not disagreeing. Just curious what software quality issues you're having exactly.

Not who you responded to but I've been looking now after reading this discussion and here are some things I've come up with in the last minute or so.

- Why when I drag the Safari window up to go full screen with the tiling manager does it leave a large gap around the window? When I double click the top bar it aligns the top and bottom with the edges but still leaves a gap on the sides.

- Why does the settings dialog have so much lag? It takes a couple of seconds to launch and then when navigating around there is a roughly one second lag between panels.

- Why can't I uninstall default Mac apps that I have never opened?

- If I open up task view using F3, why is there no option to exit the window or program?

- If I have a Safari window open in a smaller window and double click the task bar, why does it maximize the way it does? Leaving a large section open.

> - Why when I drag the Safari window up to go full screen with the tiling manager does it leave a large gap around the window? When I double click the top bar it aligns the top and bottom with the edges but still leaves a gap on the sides.

It's a feature. System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Tiled windows have margins.

> - Why does the settings dialog have so much lag? It takes a couple of seconds to launch and then when navigating around there is a roughly one second lag between panels.

Each 'panel' is actually an app extension that runs its own process. Similar to extensions and control panels in classic MacOS.

> - Why can't I uninstall default Mac apps that I have never opened?

This is annoying.

> - If I open up task view using F3, why is there no option to exit the window or program?

You mean 'Misson Control'? Dunno, but there is an inexpensive addon that addresses this. https://www.fadel.io/missioncontrolplus

> - If I have a Safari window open in a smaller window and double click the task bar, why does it maximize the way it does? Leaving a large section open.

The modern macOS UX is an amalgamation of Classic MacOS and NeXTSTEP, neither of which really has the concept of "maximised" in the same sense as Windows does. The action you describe "zooms" the window to best fit the content. The parallel to "maximised" is full screen.

> It's a feature. System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Tiled windows have margins.

That corrected it, thank you.

> You mean 'Misson Control'? Dunno, but there is an inexpensive addon that addresses this

Having to pay $9 to solve an issue that every other OS has implemented is wild.

Icons with no text everywhere.

The icons in the top bar getting extreme spacing

Spotlight search is a complete mess

Update nagging every time i wake my mac from sleep

Basically the whole iOSification of macOS

I see others have responded with specifics. That's cool and all but it seems a bit futile to me because Apple has all this data internally and could act upon it if they wished.

Certainly with "crashers" there are crash reports from the field (you and I) that are sent back home and filtered into various databases. Internal tool allow Apple to see the "top crashers" (and you can filter to specific OS, hardware, etc.). There will be Radars filed for these and they will be sent to the appropriate teams.

The issue of course is the degree to which these take priority over feature work, etc. If Apple decided to do nothing but address these for a year or two we could have nice things again.

hey sure!

Not an exhaustive list but some simple recent examples:

in Messages on macOS across 3 Macs I own, turning on and off the global 'read receipts' setting has no effect, not even from the perspective of iOS. The iOS setting does seem to work though.

Bugs in iOS mail where notifications just freeze the app.

Layout issues in macOS settings.

Memory leaks in WindowServer.

Many iCloud services inconsistent and non-reliable.

Apple Pay not showing correctly in Apple Account settings.

Lots of little hiccups...

Idk but sometimes slack just takes over the screen and crashes the display drivers pretty regularly. You could put that to badly written software but I don't think display drivers should crash.

My own experience has been the opposite. Early versions of OS/X were dire, things like a kernel panic when removing an already ejected USB stick.

People like to point at Snow Leopard as being the peak of reliability but there are two things to consider about that. The first is that the previous versions were so bad that they had to stop creating new features and do a bug fix only release. The other is that it still needed countless updates through the following year.

If you want an example of something they have done exceptionally well take a look at the rollout of APFS on the iPhone. They replaced the filing system on millions of phones with barely a murmur from the community.

I think you are correct, people like to whinge (especially here).

And yet I think we're at another point where things are so bad that we need another bug-fix-only release. (Or two or three in a row.)

When I bought my first Mac (M2) I could reliably freeze the screenshot app by clicking 2-3 buttons in the right order. It was fixed months later at least. To this day the mouse hover zoom animation for the dock freezes regularly and it happens on two separate devices. "Coincidentally" this animation was disabled by default. The preinstalled image viewer cannot open more than about 50 images without randomly distributing them across multiple windows and/or spamming a series of error messages telling me that some of the files cannot be accessed. When I click on certain video files in the file open dialog, some thumbnail process allocates over 25GB memory within seconds and the system becomes near unusable for a minute or two.

I would say it’s roughly comparable to Windows 10/11, which fell off a cliff in terms of quality. But to be fair Mac OS can handle much longer uptimes, today my Macbook force rebooted after about 250 days and it ran perfectly fine up to that point.

I don’t have any issues, but I am that person who uses just web browser and terminal on Macbook. Almost all software comes from Nix package repository.

In the current MacOS release, if I type Time Machine in the System Settings search box, it shows what I was looking for: "Show Time Machine status in the menu bar".

But if I click that, it shows the switch for the Keyboard Brightness menu bar control, and doesn't show anything about the Time Machine menu bar item!

Apple cannot figure out how to do a search in settings for the life of them. It's been broken on iOS basically since it was added. Do any googling about iOS settings search and you'll only find people talk about it to rant about how bad it is.

The absurd thing is that Apple pioneered searching settings in early MacOS. You type your query and a spotlight effect shined on the corresponding Preferences Panel for the selected candidate of your search results. Hence why Spotlight was called that originally.

somewhat similar problem, but I always go for time machine settings, it always wants me to open the time machine drive. Searching for time machine worked better on my imac dv. Not to mention you can only use google as your search engine in spotlight when major browsers have let you change it for the last decade or two

VoiceOver user here. I experience a ton of small to medium issues since my first OS upgrade. In my book iOS 5 was the last relatively bugfree version I used.

* Around iOS 8, the back button in Safari would crash voiceover. Bug was fixed with next OS update, so I had to deal with it for at least 8 months. * Since roughly iOS 11, VoiceOver cursor will randmly jump away from the currently selected item. So you actually never know what you will invoke when double-tapping. * My Apple Watch requires a different way of tapping for the first time I enter my passcode after battery was empty. This bug persists even after completely unpairing and re-setting up. * With previous Watch OS, I accidentally tried to download the premium voice from within the Apple Watch App. Apparently, thats not how this is supposed to be done. However, the single attempt to use the watch app to do this, I coulld never successfully download the premium voice from the watch directly again. Something whent stuck, and the menu item doesn't even appear on the watch.

And these are just a small selection of things I could explain in a single paragraph. I could actually write a book about small to medium bugs I experienced with Apple Software in the last 12 years. For instance, sometimes you need to tap a boolean setting three times for it to toggle. If you have an eye for bugs, you see one per day on Apple devices...

Not sure why this was dead. VoiceOver is an iOS/macOS feature and the comment author was expressing that the software quality has been declining.

This is an important issue IMO. After having worked on accessibility for mobile and web applications for several years, I gained a lot of empathy for assistive technology users. Apple should know better.

My canary was the iOS 18 update on my iPhone SE 2nd generation.

In all my years of using iOS, i never had long pauses, but switching between safari and other apps i sometimes had pauses around 10 seconds. Maybe it is the SwiftUI change; i'm not sure.

I did upgrade to the SE v3 and haven't really seen many pauses. But i am not a power user by any means and was seeing the problem often, along with some other glitches.

Just to be clear: it wasn't like the applications were lagging, it was as if the entire OS was crawling.

It's not even just Apple. All the major tech software I use feels like it has significant regressions on the daily. It's super frustrating.

I tried a Macbook again when the M1 chips came out, and wasn't impressed with the performance. Despite incredible benchmarks, the interface just felt bloated and sluggish.

The biggest issue for me though was Darwin's weird psuedo-complete unix environment. All of my production servers are Linux, and it's a real pain to have to torture software that works great on Linux over to Apple's OS. Homebrew is nice, but even that would fail sometimes, and if the software wasn't available I would have to wait for someone smarter than me to port it. Also, it's weird that the community has to maintain this despite Apple having a gajillion dollars because they simply do not care about OSS.

More of a personal ancedote, but in the end all I'm really using a computer for is a web browser, code editing, and running linux production software locally. Just made more sense to stay on Linux, which I run on an excellent Framework laptop. It feels nice to be out of the software bloat treadmill.

What distro do you run on the framework? Ubuntu feels bloated and the software is old. The framework laptop is much, much worse than a MacBook Pro. The comparison isn't even remotely apples to apples.

I wish there was a perfect solution, but man. Comparing a framework laptop with ubuntu to an MBP with MacOS is crazy from anything but a cost perspective.

Xubuntu. It doesn't feel bloated at all. The software I use is Firefox and VSC, which update almost on a weekly basis sometimes, neither of them feel "old". I've actually been considering switching to something else from VSC because it changes too much and is getting kind of bloated for me, I really just want a text editor with syntax highlighting and a file list on the left panel.

If I was to nit-pick, I would say that having competing package managers apt and snap is annoying and I've considered switching to Debian over that.

The real surprise to me was that I liked the Framework trackpad more than the Macbook one. I assumed that would be the best thing about the Macbook and was surprised when it wasn't.

I sold it to a friend and she loved it. To each their own I guess.

I feel like M chips are for those who’s upgrade cycle is over 5 years like me. Coming from MBP 2015 to M2 is stunning.

this makes me feel less crazy

apple ebbs and flows in terms of how on the ball they are in any given area, but it feels we're at a strange inflection point where their hardware is the best it's ever been and the software is inexplicably in a death spiral

i've been a heavy safari user for a while, mainly because i do make extensive use of the tab and history syncing across all my devices, and safari is the only actual browser you get on iOS - might as well use the native version.

lately safari has this habit of, on some websites, entirely locking up my device while loading web pages. like full on hard lock can't switch windows, nothing can be done, sometimes for upwards of 30 seconds. to go to my electric company's website, i have to use chrome. otherwise my computer becomes unusable.

i am not suggesting that their website isn't awful (it is) but it is inexcusable that on an M2 max laptop with 64 GB of ram that loading a slow or bulky website should make my computer completely unusable. i do not understand how this hasn't been addressed. it was intermittent before but it's a daily occurrence now.

this along with all the weird visual glitches, notifications snapping between sharp-edged boxes and rounded boxes repeatedly, sudden drops in frame rate on my iPhone display that seem to start and end for no reason, and it's starting to feel like everyone at apple uses their devices as beautiful paperweights primarily and doesn't actually interact with the software at all...

the thing that frustrates me deeply is i've explored the android ecosystem extensively (i've owned several samsung and pixel devices, even very recent ones as second phones) and find that whole space even worse and more unpleasant, with the shovelware play store and a general unpleasant and janky UI that has never felt right to me. so it's like... what's the GOOD option now?

Remember when OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 was released with 'zero new features' and with focus on fixing bugs and improving things?

Good times.

Since this thread might actually catch the eye of some people who are responsible for these kinds of things (nothing ever seems to happen with stuff that comes up in the Apple Support forums), I'll add my current pet peeve bug:

On iOS, I use the notes app to keep track of my workout routine. Just a simple table with columns for exercises and rows for workout sessions. For a while now, there's a bug where the text gets confused about which row it should display on. Only in some columns though. So in one or a few columns, the entry for the last workout will be a few rows above where it should be – sometimes it's between rows. When I press the cell in the bottom row to input a new entry, the text marker will end up somewhere above. This bug is quite inconsistent, but often persists between reboots of the app. It seems to have something to do with there being empty cells in a column

Anyone else experience this?

My personal annoyance is Apple abandoning AppKit in favor of SwiftUI, which breaks down immediately once you do more complex interactions than basic demo apps. NSScrollView and NSCollectionView must be among the most buggy UI components, but SwiftUI ScrollView is so barebones (and also buggy), it's basically useless.

I call it ShitUI because you can tell immediately when a view uses it. It's absolutely incredible how bad it is and that macOS is becoming cluttered with these awful UIs. Have you seen the WiFi menu? How can they fuck up a menu? I just don't understand.

Techrot is real and it's there in almost every major big tech product. Google does definitely take the gold medal in this category though as I have never seen so many bugs in production software by a trillion dollar company as I have seen in Google's.

1. Maps crashes almost every ride on Car Play (this used to happen a lot back in 2023 and was fixed for majority of 2024. Seems like it regressed again)

2. Trying to expand reviews on Google Maps expands the wrong review (100% reproducible, not an edge case)

3. Firebase Auth has terrible reliability when it comes to SMS delivery and fail rate of like 5-10%.

4. Gmail keeps opening links with the wrong account (Click on Google meet link from an email in account number 2, as in .../u/2/... . Link opens with account 0 and now you gotta switch accounts again).

5. Gemini is famously unreliable and produces wrong results for seemingly simple queries.

And many more I can't recall on top of my head but surely exist.

All software development is ultimately dominated by complexity management asymptotics.

Every tuple of

    (engineers, organizational structure, choice of language, ...)

Generates a function mapping from <complexity of problem> to <complexity of solution>

The asymptotic behavior of this function determines the most complex problems you can solve before the complexity of your solution (the software) blows up and becomes unmanageable.

Apple's function currently has subpar asymptotics on the software side, so they've hit the bounds of complexity that they can properly handle.

There are a lot of things you can do to improve your asymptotics: engineering org structure improvements, switch to programming languages with better complexity function asymptotics, etc. etc., but any of these changes require an organization with the executive function and insight to actually make the jump, which is by no means a given.

There’s a far larger surface area of software for bugs to occur in these days.

Of course that’s balanced by larger teams working on said software.

This suggests Apple is under-invested in QA, which is a pretty easy fix for a sufficiently senior manager.

Apple’s senior management hopefully read HN. Maybe these posts are being read by the right people.

Using the backend services (iTunes Connect, etc.) is painful.

Also, don't get me started on the current state of "documentation." At one time, Apple had a huge team of ridiculously overqualified documentation people. They often had better chops than the engineers.

This reminds me of the recent reading of "Inside Macintosh" on archive.org. I really hope they produce similar paper documentations nowadays. I'd love to hold a dictionary of obscure Mac internal knowledge.

We had the whole set.

It was amazing, and spoiled me. There was a similar set of books about BSD UNIX, as well. Don't remember the exact title, but it was pretty awesome.

Right now, it looks like they are relying completely on, on headerdoc comments.

It can work, but someone needs to spend a lot of time on these comments, and they need to do so, at a “holistic” level, coordinating all the various systems.

They have done a fairly good job, so far, but it’s really starting to fray; especially in the newer systems.

Yeah, what a pity. I love reading vintage computer manuals. They were well written, sometimes even with a bit of humour. I can imagine myself carrying a Powerbook and some manuals going into the mountains to write some software.

I wish Apple would put more of their operating systems on a public git repository, make people sign CLA’s who make contributions, and vigorously defend their IP if people try using it in a manner that violates their terms of service.

They should also setup a public bug tracker so people can follow issues they care about.

Over time, a community/network of people inside and outside of Apple would evolve that fix issues and improve areas of the operating system they care about. Some sort of reputation system would emerge where people who write quality bug reports or create quality patches would get more attention from Apple.

It wouldn’t be open source, but it would at least be better than the way it works today.

Maybe they should just make it open source.

Figure I’ll add my own obscure bug that’s never fixed. Apple finally released a Dvorak keyboard for iOS. Except a lot of times it bugs out and stays in QWERTY mode just for swipe typing even when you’re in the Dvorak layout.

Freeform also works incredibly bad on my iPad (sluggish, unstable, crashing). It’s definitely a software issue. I never had such performance issues with Notability.

But yes. The overall decline in Apple’s software quality is evident and sad.

Apple has no decent solution for the issue of the cursor moving if you accidentally touch the touchpad while you're typing text (other than disabling the touchpad and using a mouse).

Like they couldn't implement some heuristic that could be enabled in settings, to ignore touches that occur close to simultaneously with textual keystrokes.

Several times a day, I'm typing, and suddenly, the cursor jumps in the middle of earlier text where a fragment of the tail end of my typing goes before I notice and stop. I then have to undo that, and retype it at the end.

Glad to know this isn't just me. I thought I was going crazy.

The poster mentions issues with Notes and Freeform. I use these apps with an Ipad Mini 6, and suffer from freezes, latency, high power draw and crashes. I was previously considering getting a more powerful device like an Ipad Pro, but according to OP this won't fix it at all. Paraphrasing a redditor, the Freeform app seems to have been developed as a demo tool to use in Apple Stores.

In theory, there should be some sort of paid app that uses all the incredible hardware for an actual good experience.

So many comments are about devs pushing for features only, but I’d argue we don’t even get that on time.

Apple Intelligence is chronically late, and systematically underwhelming and mostly useless.

Everyone is part of the problem: I see many developers stopping when it’s good enough, managers firing QA because it works well enough, users having not much choice, and finally, users being used to software of dubious quality everywhere accepting it as normal (so they will pay anyways).

Another issue I have is with the Messages app. My girl sometimes sends me voice messages from her iPad, and sometimes the voice messages come as .caf files. These files are pretty much unplayable from the iPhone in the Messages app. It happens intermittently because we send a lot of voice messages between each other. I use an iPhone 15, not sure what her iPad model is. It also happens sometimes when I record voice messages on my Mac (Sequoia 15.3.1) and it shows up as .caf files on her iPhone and it renders it unplayable. I then have to record the message with my phone before she can play it. There was another case that happened (haven't been able to reproduce it yet), but I sent a voicenote with my Mac via Messages and we literally could not open the conversation again. It became so laggy typing a message in the conversation (even after waiting for a lot of time for the conversation to open). The way I resolved it is by deleting the conversation, that fixed it. But obviously I recovered the conversation, and the issue still persisted. I updated my iPhone to 18.3.1 and that was how the issue got resolved.

Agreed; Apple's software quality is rapidly approaching unacceptability.

I'm in a regular video call friend group, every day we call and chat for a bit. A few days ago we "officially" decided to just call in Discord instead of Facetime. Discord's mobile app has its own set of issues, for sure, but we would regularly hit an issue with Facetime where especially as people join and leave the call, other peoples' microphones would become shadow muted; it would look like its sending audio from their end, but no one else could hear them. For non-video participants, this could mean minutes of not being heard before realizing the issue, leaving the call, and re-joining, which fixes things.

Also Facetime related: If you use your iPhone as a continuity camera for your Mac, if you get a Facetime call while your iPhone and Mac are close to each other, you cannot answer the call on your iPhone. If you think about the implications of that, it sounds crazy; like "there's no way that got through testing", but its true. Your iPhone displays an ungrokable error message that took me, a tech guy, several Googles to understand what was going on. The only option in this error message is "Disconnect". You click that, and you're taken back to the home screen. If the other person has not disconnected from the Facetime call, you can manually launch the Facetime app and join the call from there. But if they've left it, you just missed the call, and it does this Every Single Time. I had to turn off Continuity Camera. Its crazy!

That's just the latest ones; the list of issues is really quite endless, and it only gets longer the more of Apple's services you decide to inflict upon yourself.

> Agreed; Apple's software quality is rapidly approaching unacceptability.

But since sales go brrrrr and so does the stock, why should they care?

I was literally just talking about this the other day—every app on my Mac that gives me trouble is from Apple (Music, Podcasts, Keynote). And don’t even get me started on the declining UX quality in iOS. It feels like the cracks are really starting to show now. I know Apple’s developer quality has been on a downward trend for a while, but at this point, it’s impossible to ignore.

Glad it's not just me thinking that. The amount of UI bugs I encountered in the last few macOS versions is fairly annoying.

Very often, when I switch input keyboards between English/Mandarin, the popup that appears to indicate the selected language just won't go away automatically. I have to manually go and click somewhere to get rid of it. Also had loads of issues with notifications not rendering correctly.

Was this run through ChatGPT? It’s formatting with numbered lists and bullet points with bold titles followed by colons is identical.

This is not only an Apple problem. Most software developed today is in a terrible state. What boggles me the most is that how users are immune against it - it's so normal that software doesn't work or has bugs that most users don't even get upset - it's just the way it is. It's software - what can you do? :(

Just a note to say that I have the exact same issue as the author in Freeform on my 13 inch iPad Air. It heats up to the point that the screen dims, and then dims again and the iPad is uncomfortable to hold. It doesn’t take long for this to happen either.

In contrast, the iPad does not overheat when painting for extended periods in procreate.

Author here, incredible how much more demanding applications (at least on paper) don't suffer from the same pitfalls of Apple's native apps.

By the looks of it, it's a widespread issue.

I have experienced data loss with Apple and the support team telling me the knew about it but could not pinpoint the issue.

I had entries disappearing from my Contacts (iCloud). The customer support asked for me to get back when I notice the issue so they could get logs to debug. My best friend contact entry disappeared overnight. I called the representative the day of and told him that the contact disappeared between yesterday night and today morning. His answer was that I needed to pinpoint more accurately when the contact disappeared, because iPhone generates a lot of logs and and engineers don’t have time to go through them. Ah!

Needless to say I stopped storing my contacts with iCloud and my trust eroded. “Funny enough” I also had issues with my Health data, years of it disappeared. Support could not do anything. The data magically came back a month later or so.

I have an issue with Messenger notifications on one device, a laptop. The messages get delivered just as quickly on this laptop as on other devices, but the notifications can take minutes to come up. Also, the number of unread messages sometimes gets stuck out of sync, for example showing 1 when I have no unread messages. I've tried rebooting, and I've tried disabling and re-enabling notifications.

I'm still on Sonoma, so the next thing I could try is updating to Sequoia, but that feels foolish. Only one thing is wrong. It could be worse. How often does updating software actually make it better? Apple should feel like the exception to that cynicism, but it doesn't, which is bad news for them, since their entire business is predicated on being the exception.

A premium product that's worth the money. That's such an easy thing for people to stop believing in if the reality doesn't live up to it.

Message notifications are just a mess. At this point it only notifies me for about half my messages no matter what device I'm on.

I was just thinking the other day how there is a ton of friction now after they moved on from skewmorphic. Say what you will but I always knew exactly where my specific home directory folders were because they looked so distinct in the finder sidebar. Now I have to actually read the damn folder names because everything looks the same.

Yes, my wife recently lost a bunch of files on her iPad. The files just dissapeared and are nowhere to be found. Of course I thought that it must have been a "user error", but some research showed that this a bug that affects a bunch of people [1][2] (might only affect files that you've written into with an apple pencil).

If apple can't even guarantee the users documents, I wonder what else might be wrong.

[1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255156283?sortBy=rank

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ipad/comments/19evmb8/files_disappe...

long term consequences of running an H1B gulag and underpaying relative to industry

Apple makes a nice computer hardware. For running Linux.

iPhone is a trap. We see already in GB with removal of encryption. It is not the time for drooling over some UI animation. It is time to protect your data and learn to live in a surveillance state. All the people which are pretending to be a techie and use those types of devices called "smartphones" are plain stupid.

Every stroke on your Mac is collected. Just install Little Snitch and watch it real-time. Same with Windows. Simplewall app is showing it clearly.

This is not only a hostile computing and dark patterns' bonanza. They want AI governance over there in the headquarters of a global capital.

It is time to stop filling their baskets with cash. Use your old devices as long as possible. Do not update prematurelly. Educate yourselves. Protect your data.

Degoogled phone is a nice start for this UX.

The phenomenon of software quality/usability going down aka the second system effect isn't specific to Mac OS, to say the least. I actually left Linux behind on the desktop which has gross regressions since 2016 yet unlike Mac OS hasn't gained a single app or end user feature to make up for it.

A company like apple can look at all their code, pull out the LCD, and build that directly into their hardware, or at least allow user programmable microcode, no need to keep doing these general branch prediction strategies that are complex and a security nightmare.

Who the hell I'm I kidding, they can't even make sure that the apple logo isn't cut off the top of the screen.

Alot of people in this thread are claiming that it's a race to the bottom to deliver features the fastest, aside from hardware, and the admittible many features needed to create a seemless ad, what software new gamechanging software features have Apple (or any company) made in the last 5 years? AI? The Camera App? Continuity? Messaging? LOL sorry but none of that is interesting in the slightest.

Idea: everyone, anytime you hit a bug or error, post a screenshot to the social media of your choice and tag it say #applesoftware. Over time this might start attracting PR attention, which seems to be most effective at getting Apple to do anything.

Apple’s software quality has certainly taken a hit in recent updates.

I’ve been experiencing issues like home screen widgets not updating or showing incorrect data (like wrong date/times).

Notifications are another frustration, especially with Signal Messenger, where they just don’t come through reliably.

The camera app also seems to have a bug where the screen goes black, making you think the camera is broken, but force closing and reopening the app fixes it.

Finally, sharing content from Safari to Gmail often causes the entire UI to freeze until I force close Safari.

These are small but annoying issues that seem to be affecting the overall experience, and it’s disappointing for a platform that once prided itself on stability and polish.

A couple of months ago I bought new Magic Mouse with USB-C charging port, at first I was excited, finally Apple released new revision with USB-C port. Next thing I know scroll doesn’t work at all. And the mouse doesn’t stand stably on my desk. After hours of talking to Apple representatives at the phone call, they decided they will ship a replacement part.

I was so happy to finally have replacement delivered. But wait, exactly same scrolling issue doesn’t stop following me. After a little bit research on the internet, I realized it’s known issue to Apple already, which Apple still refuses to fix. Long story short - one needs to update macOS to 15.1 to fix that.

I feel there's a cliff drop of quality in both hardware and software with the release of Big Sur, the version where I believe they rewrote a lot of the softwares. It's very obvious when I replaced my 2015 MacBook Pro with a 2020 MacBook Pro M1, everything downgraded, but now I'm getting used to software being clunky and buggy.

I always really liked a lot of apple software, like Preview.app. It's a viewer for almost everything, images, documents, 3d models, but it doesn't feel bloat at all, I'm glad Apple doesn't seem to change the app much. Also shocked the first time I found out TextEdit.app is also a WYSIWYG HTML editor.

I think this is everything, for example YouTube has about 20 different bugs, a few off the top of my head. 1) video is often cut off making chess content annoying to watch 2) replying to people sometimes removes their username leaving just an @ symbol 3) you can’t edit comments on web mobile 4) sometimes you’ll try to fast forward and end up selecting content on the screen 5) don’t get me started on Shorts polluting the experience etc. etc.

Smaller teams with fewer managers and clearer direction on what improves user experiences would be a good plan. Sites like this end up with so many features that aren’t needed.

I still remember the story of an IMAP bug Apple mail had for years and years. I forgot exactly what the bug was that was open with Apple, but Apple’s way of addressing the bug was turning off the feature in an update and closing out the ticket.

In general if I buy some hardware and the OS is ok, but any supplier apps are just an afterthought. If that be from Huawei, Samsung, Microsoft, Apple, etc, a TV, a phone, a computer. On my iphone I have a folder with all the Apple apps, just in case) but otherwise I use other apps. I also have an extra Samsung phone, same thing.

Supplied apps are free and therefore paid for otherwise. Normally full of ads and only sporadically receive updates to repair bugs or add new features.

The goal is often only to keep my tight to their platform, be it Samsung, Apple, etc. Those apps are an investment in the future which probably do not do well in a companies one quarter horizon.

One of the craziest ones are basic search in osx has been broken for 10 years now - it might work for a while but for power users it almost always gets weird then stops working.

Another wild one is syncing photos between iphone and mac meant ‘this photo will sync at random point in the next 5 days’ - it’s just recently been fixed after like 8 years of not working.

And don’t even try to use their stupidly simple proprietary apps like Numbers where basic spreadsheet functionality is bizarre or missing.

Mac is still my favourite but i don’t get why a trillion dollar company can’t fix their software for what’s ‘pennies’ for them.

I worked at Apple. I was literally driven out of town due to my constructive criticism of how terrible our software and processes were. There was zero focus on quality and maintainability. ( I worked at Google and Netflix).

I'd really love to hear more about your experience, what were the major issues with process and how would you fix them? I'm running a startup as a software dev looking to have a fast polished product with the Apple-esque perception of the past, but need to know what to avoid doing. Any good resources on running a software company implementing a focus on quality as part of the process that doesn't limit growth?

Mine is that running multiple network extensions (like Tailscale, Little Snitch, a VPN) causes networking to randomly stop working. The only solution is to not use more than one network extension at a time.

My personal pet peeve is how Apple used to be the Best of the Best in photography, including Dolby Vision HDR support for both video and still images, but now their software has failed to catch up to Chrome and fails at the most trivial operations.

As a random example: It is impossible to use any non-Mac device to produce a HDR image that an Apple device can handle correctly:

JPEG XL is "supported". Narrator: No it isn't. The point of this file format is proper HDR support, but Apple loads it as an 8-bit SDR image no matter what.

AVIF is "supported" and even loads as HDR... on one device only. You can't forward such an image via any iOS or MacOS app. It becomes a non-picture file attachment.

My Nikon Z8 can generate glorious HDR HEIF files -- the native Apple image format -- which doesn't work either. Why? Because Apple software can't handle "HEIF", they can only handle the incredibly specific tiny subset of it that very specifically the iOS Camera app produces. Nothing else works properly, or even at all.

You can spend thousands on a camera, thousands on an iPhone or iPad, thousands on a Macbook and... they can't handle pictures. PICTURES!

Meanwhile a $500 TV from ALDI will happily show me HDR images in a dozen formats because they use Chrome OS or Google TV.

I've started to wonder whether there might be any internal resistance at Apple to the move to SwiftUI, which has brought some benefits but also a whole host of odd behaviors in all kinds of places.

There's probably an alternate history where they would have stuck with AppKit for a few more years until LLMs got to the point they are now, and then dove in to leveraging LLMs to make AppKit development easier (essentially leaning into human language "declarative" programming rather than conventional declarative programming).

Shortcuts.

Have you tried using Shortcuts on ANY Apple device? It's a fucking mess.

It is impossible to write Shortcuts with code. Consequently, this means that you're stuck with the no-code workflow builder.

Unfortunately, the no-code builder is a hog! Moving actions around within the panel will cause Shortcuts to lock up. Sometimes, Shortcuts will just refuse to reorder actions when you move them. Exiting and re-opening is the only fix.

Then there's running Shortcuts. Shortcuts appear like they can run anywhere on first glance. Try running a Shortcut to append text to a note on Apple Watch. You can't. But Shortcuts will gladly spin lock for two minutes doing whatever the fuck before yielding a "Remote Message Execution timeoit" that is Apple speak for "watchOS doesn't support appending to notes," or "you're saving a file into an iCloud directory that doesn't exist, and I'm not going to create it for you because no" or "your phone's off and I could connect to iCloud, but I'd rather not and piss you off instead."

But say you go through ALL of that and build your perfect complex shortcut that makes your life much easier. You'll find out later that year when the new iOS drops that a few of the actions in your Shortcut were silently changed and now the entire thing doesn't work!

You'll spend hours fixing it, wishing you were on Android the entire time but remembering that your Apple Watch actually is useful sometimes and everything on that side is SO MUCH WORSE because Apple has insane economies of scale and patents the shit out of everything.

This is just the tip of my iceberg of grievances with Apple software.

AirPods whose case dies every three days and often fails to switch between devices despite it being a flagship feature. Accidentally changing tracks when you raise-wake your phone. LITERALLY EVERYTHING about the keyboard. I could easily go on.

But, hey, at least Apple Intelligence can summarize my emails so I can think even less.

I miss the Apple that made Apple Mail, Calendars, Reminders and Notes. Those apps were made _before laptops were mainstream_ but are STILL the best at what they do while being mostly private and on-device.

If you want to type your shortcuts, there’s a tool that turns code into plist imports. https://scpl.dev/

Unfortunately, the tool you linked doesn't support Shortcuts after iOS 14 and the tool _they_ linked seems alpha quality. But I'm very interested in how these develop!

I believe emojis are pretty popular this days, yet searching for one on macOS has been broken for years

1. Press Fn key twice to open Emoji picker

2. Type to search

3. Hover an emoji

4. Press Esc to empty search for box and start a new search

5. Type

You can't type. Focus is lost somewhere, impossible to search again for an emoji without closing the panel and open it again. My coworkers have all installed a third-party emoji picker to work around this issue, which is absurd from Apple's standpoint.

How can Apple engineers not be aware of such issues? Did they ever inserted an emoji from macOS?

I'm not sure if anyone else experiences this but there's a bug in the display settings where:

- high resolution high refresh rate display (max res and refresh rate are higher than DP1.2 bandwidth)

- attached to dock through DP

- macbook lid is closed and plugged into dock

the attached display defaults to the highest resolution, even though it's unsupported by TB3. This leads to a black screen. Changing the resolution by opening the lid doesn't fix this because closing the lid will return the external display to the default resolution.

Apple should Open Source its OSes and internal apps. Of course this is very NOT-Apple, but it would allow folks to fix their apps. There's really no advantage to keeping it all proprietary. Apple's software teams are completely under water whereas Apple customers are diehards and would gleefully help fix issues. It would avoid the need to reproduce problems internally prior to ranking their importance for the internal team to fix. Besides, MacOS roots are in Open Source.

I wish.. First they should let their paying customers run whatever applications they want on the box they own. Annoying that so few linux apps exist over here because of the $99 developer fee

This is not specific to Apple. Its the modern "agile" culture of hacking shit script kiddies pushing early, regardless of known bugs and broken features, under direction of management. Then management forcing you to move onto the next hack without allowing you to go back and clean up your previous work. Its probkem is now endemic to the modern era of software development. Agile is the worst fucking thing ever created for our industry.

Apple Music sends ads to my Lock Screen, every time I search it’s automatically set to “Apple music” despite being turned off and no subscription so gives me no results, I have to change the option every time, every few months I get an ad I have to dismiss opening my music collection. The listening queue doesn’t seem to work anymore I can’t add things to it and repeat no longer works in a sane way.

I feel this would be unthinkable in the time before Tim Cook’s Apple.

I tried an iPhone for three months or so, ending a month ago, and I was really disappointed by the experience. I thought Apple was still a company that focused on UX, but it was eye-opening to see that they had lost their way.

There are four distinct ways to go back (swipe from the left/right side, press the X, press the left arrow, swipe down), whereas Android has one way that always goes back to the previous screen. The inability to set volumes separately, the fact that folders hold exactly 9 icons and leave the other 60% of the screen empty, the fact that a very commonly-used button (the back arrow) is at the hardest-to-reach part of the screen, all of that just made for a really frustrating experience.

Linus basically echoes all my gripes in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhew95wMmP8

After that, I bought a Nothing 2, and I love it. It's snappier than the iPhone, feels premium, and Android has stolen all of the good ideas iOS had and added more.

I used Android for the better part of a decade, and once I switched to an iPhone I never really had any issues around not having a back button, considering the amount I hear complaining about it.

Basically every app lets you swipe from the left to go back. Occasionally you'll have a bottom sheet you can swipe back down to where it came from, but it's generally pretty intuitive. I can't think of many times I felt "stuck" and unable to go back.

It's not about getting stuck, as then that would be terrible. It's just about the thousand papercuts my experience was.

I forgot the biggest annoyance that ultimately made me abandon the experiment: the keyboard is ATROCIOUS. On Android, I just hit keys in the general vicinity of what I want, and it writes the right thing, every time. On iOS, with the exact same keyboard, it kept making mistake after mistake.

Both the stock keyboard and SwiftKey were terrible on iOS. I'd understand the stock keyboard being bad, whatever. I don't understand how SwiftKey can be great on one platform and horrible on the other.

I went from using a series of Android phones, including a number of flagship phones and finally tried iPhone in 2018 after custom keyboards became available (no way I'd accept the built in back then).

At that point the cheapest iPhone option available outperformed every android phone I'd used at that point and I was sold.

Still think the software could need some love but at least it does not feel like my phone has to do a call to a lagging wev service to open the camera.

Yep, things weren't great 7 years ago.

i've got some issues with my older iMac from 2015 after my internal SSD failed and i'm booting from an external that all appear to be software related with little I can do about it as my Mac is out of support, even though these issues must have existed previously, it's so frustrating.

-- On Monterey no disk images will mount and no external drives or SD card. Everything is fine on older versions of OS, some forum posts suggest others with the same issue, but without any resolution. The only way to get DMG images to mount is to use a third party mounter like FastDMG, upgrading to Ventura fixes the issue with Disk images and my SD card, however this is not an officially supported OS for my model, so I have to use OpenCore Legacy patcher to achieve this. External drives still do not mount, the OS just doesn't see them at all, even in the recovery mode for these OS versions However running another MacOS inside Parallels I can access them, so they must be accessible somehow.

-- This is all perhaps caused by my firmware being out of date, i'm running 173.0.0.0 and it should be something like 530.0.0.0, this is updated with the operating system, however it has been found that on custom order macs with SDD's rather than the standard fusion drive, such as mine, the firmware update fails due to it incorrectly looking for a drive via the sata port. Apparently this is fixed on 195.x but you have to open up the iMac and plug in a drive into the Sata port just to get it to do this.

Extremely frustrating considering I paid a lot extra to spec this model up but due to Apple's mistake with the firmware updates (Or other unknown issue) I'm left with these problems. Since the machine is no longer in support, Apple aren't interested in helping.

Screen time tracking has been broken for a while. The tracker will count powered down device time as use. There are multiple apple support and reddit threads noting that it’s indeed broken, and apple controls the mechanisms to track screen time natively, so there isn’t a suitable 3rd party option either.

Title should be something like “Apple Pencil Pro causes iPad to overheat and slow down”. This sounds really annoying, but the overly broad title is just clickbait.

iPad OS is largely dysfunctional in a myriad of other areas too. I like my iPad but the number of times Chrome or a simple app just freezes is getting out of hand. Also there is a bug where the iPad will freeze if I had a Bluetooth device connect while the device is locked. I think this got fixed in some recent update but it happened frequently for well over a year and it'll lock the iPad for 15-60 minutes at a time.

These issues are becoming more recurring. Meanwhile Apple is trying to sell me on some stupid intelligence that I do not need.

In my experience, this bug - lags and overheating when drawing with the Apple Pencil - exists since iPadOS 16. When searching for it on the web, I found lots of reports and no indication that it is solved, including by hardware replacements.

In any case, HN's guidelines ask to use the original title of an article, unless it is misleading or linkbait. I'd agree that Apple's software quality has been going down.

I hate many details from Apple's software, but most stuff people are complaining about is solved by downloading an app/plugin that does it. However, this should not be the case when you're paying for a 'premium' OS. It's highly frustrating and time consuming.

At this point I think I've spent more time tweaking macOS settings, downloading and testing stuff than I did when I had Ubuntu as my work OS. Ridiculous.

The Apple experience seems very luck based. Sometimes it goes great but if you hit the perfect storm of issues you're just totally out of luck

I also do agree that their modern software is shockingly bad, and it is strange because, as others note, what they offer to third parties is generally quite good so third party applications are often quite amazing. It seems like Apple are unable to develop for themselves

I have two AppleTVs (2021 models), and they cannot play video on other streaming services after watching something on Apple TV+. Typically the view loads for the video, shows the first frame, and overlays the loading circle element until reboot. Killing apps and reloading doesn't fix it.

I'm not sure how this is possible, but it's trivial to replicate and is only resolved by rebooting the device.

We have a good set of feature requests from app store that would make catching issues like this infinitely easy.

1. Revamp TestFlight - 10k users is very little when user base is 100m+ users. 2. Improve phased roll out capabilities 3. Introduce a/b testing at release level to test old/new binaries at binary level (vs at feature, which is also a must have).

These 3 can catch 99% of release bound issues, no problem.

> Feature prioritization over optimization: Engineering resources appear focused on new capabilities rather than fixing existing performance problems;

People are keeping their phones longer they used to, which is obviously a problem for device makers. Therefore they must lean on new feature development too sell new phones. "Increased reliability and stability" is not a good consumer sales pitch

> "Increased reliability and stability" is not a good consumer sales pitch

It is when Apple is claimed to be a quality boutique shop.

> claimed to be a quality boutique shop

Have they made that claim anytime in the last few decades?

Perhaps that's the vibe behind their marketing, but you'd have to be blind to their size, sales, and market value to believe it.

> Have they made that claim anytime in the last few decades?

I'm not sure that Apple themselves ever really did.

So it becomes even more important when people stop associating Apple's software with quality when it was people who started to associate it as such in the first place.

Should there be a better way of reporting and displaying bugs?

For displaying the bugs, I'm thinking of something like what invision was - showing the interface of for example the desktop and showing the number of bugs associated with different elements of the desktop.

By displaying bugs as posts on a forum, I feel that we lose track of how degraded the performance of the system actually is.

It's just said that Apple seems to not care. Just to add to this long list:

Open a link from an email on an iPhone or iPad, then go back to Mail by tapping on the top left corner. If you now delete an email, this email gets deleted but the view does not update to move to the next email. If you now hit delete again, you are deleting the next email without noticing it.

This seems like the natural progression of agile and promoting frequent releases - more shallow features and bugs, less optimisation

So if they were using waterfall, they would produce fewer bugs? Or what are you trying to say?

In Apples position I would set up a little task force that goes through everything single bug mentioned in this thread and fixes it.

I would really love to hear how development at Apple is going nowadays. Fixing many of the things requires cross-team collaboration and I thought that was a no-go.

The mail got broken. Somewhere in 18 iOS release. I am also getting weird touch issues. Almost impossible to reproduce and I have no time for 20 Genius Bar appointments to prove it. I will buy another iPhone in 5 years again, maybe the one I have is the unlucky one.

I’m inclined to believe that their reporting software might be buggy and does not reports bugs accurately to the right team.

With all the bugs, idk how little this task force would have to be, though.

Mail on iOS doesn’t even have push any more, the new Photos app is garbage, Music randomly spews “content not available” errors and works remarkably poorly with mobile data for a mobile app, watchOS is so chock-full of bugs and glitches that just go unfixed major version after major version etc.

It’s pretty bad. Somehow most other software is even worse. Genuinely impressive at this point.

I would trade push in iOS Mail for the standard rules (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mail/mlhlp1017/mac) available in the desktop client since the past 20 years. Can't believe it is still not implemented.

Yea, I used to use Apple Notes for everything until their recent big update where it became very jittery. (even on an iPhone). The web-version of Apple Notes always sucked.

I am using Notion now, and even though that is kinda janky on an iPhone, it is still better than Apple's own notes, and of course, their web-version is much much much better than Apple's.

Try noteplan

My favorite iOS bug is opening a social media link say...Facebook, Instagram etc which displays a corresponding "Open in App" App Store banner which should take you to the app but almost always takes me to the App Store even if the app is already installed. Completely breaking deep-linking from the web.

Aside from security fixes and improvements I rarely use anything in OS X that wasn't there many versions ago. I wish they'd try a "long term support" model instead of annually releasing bug ridden OS versions that don't provide me any benefit. The main benefit seems to be to Apple, planned obsolescence etc

Huh let me guess: it is Apple Intelligence causing it

Now while it is true that some aspect of the Apple experience suck, my experience is that Windows and Linux are also sucking more (Linux less than MS, but still, not helpful)

I definitely would want more transparency for Apple but this is one of the things they "no can do", they just fix it one day (usually) and off you go.

OP here, Apple Intelligence is not yet available in Italy. I don’t even want to imagine how my iPad will overheat with Apple “Intelligence”.

Ah I guess I misread, it is only available on Macs so far in the EU https://support.apple.com/en-bw/121115

Still, I think maybe it could be some related service running on the background

Tell me about it. My iPhone cannot backup up, neither could me predecessor phone.

Escalated all the way to developers. Their 'analysis'. Whatsapp is supposedly blocking 4TeB on my iCloud account which is not available.

I asked whether they might have misread that as WhatsApp says 4GiB and even if , that would still be an iOS bug (why allow that?).

No reaction anymore.

Here's a weird bug. If you have on your iphone, photo slide show (i had it set to cities and nature), and then with a charger wire in then just try to use your phone, the touch digitizer goes crazy, as if there's some weird interference. Switch back to a standard wallpaper mode, and the problem goes away. iphone 14pro

Software problems like we are seeing are not something that happen over night. They slowly appear until you can’t see them. It takes years of bad design and decisions to get what we have.

I see this throughout the industry and can’t help conclude the problem started about 5 years ago, and we thus we are now seeing the results of Covid and possibly WFO.

I don't think this has to do with Covid or WFH. It is more likely that Apple is focused on showing huge profit margins, at the expense of hiring qualified staff, due to a quarter by quarter focus, in a mature market. When one person leaves, they don't get backfilled. You can hide a lot of sins with the aggressive push from marketing and focusing on hardware performance. How do you measure software experience? How do you brag about it?

You are right that it has been a cumulative process, and the issues will continue to accumulate. But it has nothing to do with Covid or WFH. It started years before that.

If there was a competitive market, this thread would be a marketing gold mine.

If the computer industry endgame is for users to consume media via simple voice interfaces and AI, what is the business model for serving the smaller market of professional users who need powerful, classic HCI interfaces for creating new artifacts?

I recently had to setup a Mac and the App store didn't let me add an account, it always asked for my billing details and then complained that the fields where empty when they weren't. As a workaround I had to perform the billing setup on an Android (!) phone using the Apple Music app...

Window placement with multiple monitors is broken beyond belief. I am hoping someone from Apple is reading this thread.

If you open the lid and connect screen in a short time. It sometimes end up showing every desktop in mission control as black square. And only way to fix it is disconnect and reconnect the screen again. The bug is there for so long and I already have the muscle memory to perform the sequence. How did they messed up such a basic function?

There is no way that apple employee did not hit the bug at all given the requirement to trigger the bug is so simple.

I used to do thousands of interviews across the industry and I vividly remember Apple backend devs being almost always unmitigated disasters. They would always pick Java and could barely use it - to the point where a for loop would be challenging. Their Swift guys were fairly decent though IIRC.

I have been reporting several bugs through the Feedback app you get access to when you are part of the beta program. There is to many menus and no search option to find the right “department” to report to, so I have almost stopped giving feedback on bugs.

I guess the fixes have to start there first.

Author here, I used the Apple's Product Feedback page[0] countless times, I don't have the Feedback app since I'm running the _stable_ builds of all their OSes.

[0] https://www.apple.com/feedback/

Did not know about that form, thanks

After updating to iOS 18.3.1, my iPhone 14 Pro Max has encountered many strange bugs. For example, the camera's balance indicator randomly disappears. Additionally, the battery drains significantly faster. I hope Apple can fix these weird bugs as soon as possible.

I recently switched from an Android to an iphone and the writing experience (keyboard, text selection, scrolling) are so frustrating. I initially thought I must not be used to it but then found so many people had the same problem. I didn't expect this from Apple.

Apple is known for their refusal to fix bugs.

One example where it is almost 2 years since they "made" a fix, but have not yet released it.

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=254545#c32

True! I experience many iOS bugs every day. I try to report them, but I feel I always get a response - "have you tried to turn off and on?"

They treat us as dump users.

Even when the device is for PRO users, they don't want our feedback as they think the software is perfect.

My daughter uses one of my old 2017 Macbook pros (nice hardware, everything works fine). I learned yesterday that she cannot use Pages because OSX cannot be upgraded to 10.14, which is a requirement for Pages (I suspect the same thing will happen with other Apple software).

Something there doesn't add up. Mojave came out in late 2018. It's simply not the case there is any 2017 Apple hardware it doesn't support. Indeed, laptop support goes back to anything made in 2012 or newer.

The World needs more Snow Leopards.

>Memory Management Problems

I suspect some quadratic or worse algorithm in the handwriting curve rendering.

I have had issues involving connecting external monitors that cause my Mac laptop to freeze for _14 years_. 3 different Mac laptops, numerous external monitors.

It doesn't happen often, maybe once every one or 2 months. But it requires a full reboot.

Apple really should slow down their release cycles and focus on quality for a while. Apple Music on macOS is such an embarrassment. The UI is a mess. Airplay is broken. I just want my old fashioned but decent Mac applications back.

My chuwi tablet running debian trixie works almost fine. I've not yet managed to make the camera work. Everything else worked out of the box.

Battery life is short, but you can buy like 6 of them instead of an ipad. Also I like to hack.

The big sign of Apple’s deterioration has been iOS 18. It is a disastrous launch with a terrible photos app, worse autocorrect, bugs, … on their flagship product. Hard to trust where they go from here. At some point it’ll affect security.

You're only now realizing this? Software quality at Apple has been in a freefall since Cook's appointment. If you sincerely think iOS 18 is the turning point, then I don't even understand what you use your iPhone for.

I never used any Apple products before Cook's appointment. Why did it go down?

Apple became a service company. When they were making bespoke software to compliment their hardware, things were great. Then Cook was instated and it became all about margins. Good software isn't funded by Apple anymore unless it sells a subscription service or similarly low-margin recurring revenue.

I guess it is inevitable.

When software is so bad that tactics “just throw more hardware inside” stops working.

The iOS Mail app has gotten so bad. It shows errors for no reason whatosover. The other day I typed a message and hit sent (and status showed all synced) but it was not sent and not even in draft.

Any recommendations for an alternative?

A few yeas ago my friend had his iphone replaced three times under warranty. Every single time the mic failed and it came up with a message after boot that an audio device had failed. His next phone was an Android one.

(Digging out old alt account for reasons)

I'm a former employee from the SWE org of ~13 years, left around a year ago.

This is a huge problem that the company needs to address ASAP. If you're in the Apple SWE org and reading this, please go up the chain as far as you're able to make things like this understood: Apple needs a bugfix release. They need all hands on deck going through radars and fixing things. No new features until these things get settled.

Care about error logs. Look at the number of Error logs happening per second on a customer build. Every one of those was considered by someone to be important enough to notice that it likely needs fixing. There are showstopping bugs buried in there.

Figure out your concurrency bugs. The whole company seems to be using the swift Concurrency framework wrong (at least a year ago, I doubt things have changed since then.) Stop abusing semaphores and DispatchGroups to work around async/sync barriers. It makes the compiler shut up but causes deadlocks later. Every "Just a sec" on Siri on HomePod is very likely caused by this. Stop putting off the important refactors needed to make this work.

Start caring about compiler warnings. Get the swift team to allow warnings to be disabled on a line-by-line basis so you can work from a zero-warning baseline and attack it from there.

Fix the build system. It's horrific that coordinated changes to multiple frameworks are so god damned impossible to do, and result in broken builds so often. You probably don't need to go full monorepo, but if you're going to continue with thousands of individual projects, make it so coordinated submissions is possible.

Fix Xcode. Or at least just jettison it. Pay a boatload of money to JetBrains or something and get an IDE that works internally, bless it as the way to go, and announce publically that Xcode is deprecated. You don't have the resources to fix it any more, it's time to take it out to pasture.

Fix the development milestones. The current system is designed for tentpole features to reach a certain maturity level before a certain date before a punt decision: But it just encourages punting (slipping to the B or C or E release) to a milestone with less scrutiny. Allow for bolder changes later in the process if they're in the name of improving stability. Allow for groups which are not part of a tentpole feature, to fix things at any time without having to deal with bug deadlines. Zero bugs is a joke, it's just denial, encoded into process.

The milestone system also lacks the mere vocabulary necessary to describe "time dedicated to fixing bugs in shipping code". Like it doesn't even exist as a concept. "Escape" makes it seem like it's a rarity, it's not. Nobody seems to follow the pact any more. Probably because the pact pretends that escapes are rare. They're everywhere. The development process needs dedicated time spent not doing feature work so that old bugs can be addressed.

There are a lot more things I could go on about, but people already know this. The problem is that senior leadership doesn't care enough. They don't foster a culture of excellence where they actually sweat these small details. They only care about features, and it's a disease. Get somebody up there who gives a shit.

Apple is in the hardware business. At some point, they used software to lure people in buying expensive hardware.

Since now their hardware is a bit better than others, maybe they care less of software quality.

"Feels too hot" is hardly an objective measurement. Why worry about something that "may" occur. Use your device. If it fails take it in a get it replaced under warranty.

Added an objective measure updating the post.

It reached ProcessInfo.ThermalState "serious" when writing notes with the pencil.

The biggest tragedy with Apple iPhones is that you can't install GrapheneOS on them. Non-profit 100% open source is the only feasible way forward for cellular devices.

Oh my gosh. Everyone can always do better, but also, has no one else here had to use Microsoft Teams recently?

I crisis in quality and also a crisis in innovation. How many years has it been since a software innovation which matters to end users? It’s been new emojis for a decade.

My issue, macOS:

Use Notes and enable pop-up from the corner of the screen.

I've been unable to select the Note that pops up from the corner, without creating a New note. Then only that new one pops up.

I use Apple software and hardware all day every day. There was a patch ~13 years ago where things were really rough but I haven't noticed many issues over the past few years.

I don't know if this mentioned by anyone, or just me. but I have noticed that macos updates gets downloaded twice.

So, if the update is 20GB, 40GB of data get used.

About a year ago I changed from android to ios, thinking id have better integration with my laptop.

A year on and my main take away is that ios is slow, buggy and has frustrating ux. The over use of modals and no consistent pattern for going back are frustrating. The UI lagging and glitching out and application crashes are so much worse and more frequent than I had on an old pixel.

I dont think ill stick with ios for my next phone but i dont plan on replacing it for 3 years so it's going to be a frustrating 4 years with a supposedly premium device that is objectively an inferior product.

Till very recently there was a bug where PDFs from the internet archive would show in inverted colours in mac os Preview. It was there for some time.

Never wanted anything more than an iphone that runs android

Imagine if all messaging apps could talk to one another, that'd be the day

This is not the only instance of the software quality crisis in Apple.

<Warning: long and extremely critical rant incoming>

TL;DR Apple just does not have a qualified team (from the top) or the right team size (the one in the company is far too small).

I test beta releases of Apple’s OSes and report issues. I’ve seen a few factors over several years:

* There is not enough QA (or probably no QA at all) at Apple. So many bugs just creep through to release even after having been reported with tons of information and system logs provided. There is no attention paid to any bug report unless it is known and believed (by someone at Apple) to affect hundreds of users. Even then there’s little chance of attention to it.

* There is no feedback loop from Apple back to the bug reporter — you toss your bug report and assume it goes into some black hole.

* The direction of software development in Apple has moved to taking whatever is done on iOS — with a mediocre approach and plan — everywhere else. This includes things like Catalyst (the main reason you’d hate a macOS app from Apple). Try navigating Reminders or Music or any other Catalyst app on macOS with the keyboard — it’s as if the developers have never ever heard of tab order or have never used a keyboard that has non-alphabetical and non-numeric keys.

* Continuing on the previous point, Apple’s own app developers know something about how to create a mediocre iOS app, but over time the developer base has changed such that it has no knowledge of or history with desktop operating systems. I have no idea what top executives like Craig Federighi are even doing and why (I’m sounding generous here) they’re seemingly held hostage to such poor quality.

* When you look at the issues across device platforms and OSes, Apple seems to have one tiny team of software developers who work part time on all of those. Monday is iOS OS day, Tuesday is iPadOS day, Wednesday is macOS day, Thursday is iOS app day, Friday is iOS app day, Saturday is Apple Intelligence day and Sunday is a tvOS, homeOS and AirPods day. Apple’s services get a few hours here and there every few months.

A couple of months ago I had an iPhone in my hands for half an hour, for the first time. I was helping to debug some WiFi and also a minor printer issues, and all there was was this iPhone.

It was hard to use. It was all full of inconsistencies and some things that were simply illogical, which left me wondering for a while. Maybe I just was forced to deal with the wrong apps and it might have been a similar experience in Android, but Apple's marketing department really does a superb job at selling those devices.

I’ve had three show-stopping bugs across core apple software in the last month — I wish the competition was better!

Apple is just milking the market at this point. They are the Phone Company from the sketch ( https://vimeo.com/355556831 ). Literally.

macOS is another example. The System Settings menu is a hot garbage now, its search is literally unusable. For example, try to look for "shortcuts".

Then there are constant popup windows asking me to approve file access or some other BS. I can't do that permanently anymore, it's just for up to 30 days.

Another annoyance: it's impossible to speed up animations after the switch from Intel to ARM. This makes spaces literally unusable for me. I gave up and got a second monitor as a result.

I want a MacBook Air with Linux running on it perfectly, audio, microphones everything. Would be so nice.

Yeah, especially if the touchpad worked flawlessly too. A distant dream

question for all the linux users out there, which DE most closely follows the windowing style on a mac(preferably out of the box/with a script)? I've enjoyed the multi-virtual-desktop windowing style during my stay here but as noted, the experience isn't keeping pace

Vanilla GNOME has most of the features you'd expect from Mac windowing. It doesn't go out of it's way to replicate the Mac desktop, but IMO it's much simpler as a result.

Been running GNOME for about 2 years now and the experience is really smooth. If you've got a Magic Trackpad, it works wonders on modern Linux. I also recommend GSConnect or Valent for a handoff-like experience with your phone:

https://valent.andyholmes.ca/

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1319/gsconnect/

I wouldn't call Apple's hardware as premium quality. Premium price yes, quality no - not since PowerPC times.

I was an owner of the original crackbook, have had a magic keyboard, magic mouse both fail shortly after warranty period, I can't count the number of power leads that have started fraying (thank goodness for USB C!).

Ass for iPhone screens - seem to be very breakable compared to other manufacturers.

> Ass for iPhone screens - seem to be very breakable compared to other manufacturers.

That one always seemed weird to me, some people break their screen, iPhone or otherwise, regularly, but I've never even scratched one.

People think just because they hit the lottery (and broke their screen) it must mean the iPhone screen is just crap. I also have never broken an iPhone screen. Statistics are hard for people to understand.

I don't know why people, on this forum of all places, are raving so much about a piece of consumer electronics.

Comment typed on an industrial-grade system.

Because that's what the article claimed?

No manufacturer can even come close to the translucent pinstripe g4, so easy to open, so much expandability. Hard to imagine it was made by apple, same goes for my 2012 mbp

I moved to Android this year. iOS accessibility just doesn't make the iPhone worth it anymore. Braille becomes more and more unstable in VoiceOver every year, and Android works way better with Windows and Linux than iOS does, and Mac accessibility, frankly, sucks.

but the hardware premium is kinda real... i have been using my macbook air 11 daily for 10 years (I am writing this comment on it), and it works flawlessly. somehow i don't think other brands are so well made, or they weren't so well made 10 years ago.

Yes but... but... Did you update it to the latest version of Mac OS (Sequoia) with all the security patches via official Apple channels ?

No you did not.

I don't think you can update any 10-year-old windows computer to the latest version of windows (11) with all security patches via official microsoft channels.

(Also, lol @ "via official Apple channels", you're aware Open Core Legacy Patcher is a thing and have hedged against people mentioning it.)

What are you comparing to?

Wow, how dare you omit that Windows 11 24H2 IoT LTSC exists.

I mean, there's an official way of installing without TPM, I'm pretty sure I can get Windows 11 on some pretty old hardware

https://time.com/3264528/best-laptop-under-500/ This is a 2014 article, for a Budget/Mid Laptop, with a compatible processor and double the minimum RAM

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/discussions/windows11/he... Post marked as solution talks about installing W11 on a 10 Y/O Thinkpad

I consider the WinBootMate thing suggested in your second link to be similar to OCLP. Third party solutions to enable installing on hardware the vendor doesn't want you installing it on.

Did you even notice that the link marked as solution is a third party software vendor?????? They charge money for that solution.

I actually didn't, but I still think the point stands

https://www.techpowerup.com/329691/microsoft-loosens-windows...

Microsoft does let's you bypass it (Regardless of them putting up a disclaimer) so the example stands, you can do it hardware and software wise without losing updates or security*

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-on-de...

* I think you only really lose some performance on cryptographic operations and tranparent encryption

The Microsoft support page you linked says that it's unsupported.

I don't know what point you're trying to make here, but it's falling flat.

Microsoft removed the mandatory requirement, so now instead of refusing to install it just gives a disclaimer that it's "unsupported" as per the linked page

So you can install Vanilla Windows 11, no third party, on decade old hardware without losing anything other than performance (And an annoying disclaimer)

Microsoft removed that. TPM is a hard requirement unless you unwisely remove the requirement via 3rd party tool.

You can easily patch a config file in Windows and install it on old hardware and get regular updates as usual.

OCLP is more complicated and limited as it's not a "some manifest config limitation", but actual support parts of OS being removed, so they have a big lag and a bunch of issues, and limit your updates

So yeah, no contest comparision between Mac and Win

Not 10 years old, but I have a 2017 laptop that updated to Windows 11 just fine. It's somewhat slow though and I enjoy the dual-booted Linux on it more.

Not quite sure what you're trying to say, but the MacBook Air 11" 2015 model supports macOS Monterey[1] which got a security update 6 months ago[2].

[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/103260

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_Monterey

It's well-known that old versions of macOS get security updates quite late, if ever [1].

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/11/psa-apple-isnt-actua...

iOS 18.3.1 bricked my wifi and bluetooth. Can't connect to anything. MacBook Pro cannot open discord, slack, mail due to an os issue. Apple has such great hardware but the software has so many bugs, you start looking around for alternatives.

I use Apple M1 in my work, and comparing to a PC, it has really good performance. I would blame Apple for a lot, but not for the performance. Namely, for:

- lack of repair support (either you pay through your nose for the screen replacement or you'll get a nasty stripe on second-hand screen that has been fitted into your machine)

- unrepairable devices (e.g. split Hard Disk chips to not be removable)

- artifically non-inclusive ecosystem that refuses e.g. Bluetooth file transfers from Android device

- idiotic policy of waiting on forgot password

> Apple should return to its roots - creating products that prioritize user experience over feature creep. Apple needs to reclaim that ethos.

This is the good, old enshittification, which started with Google and Windows, https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/. I wouldn't expect that Apple listens to this.

Does he mean that the software worked for three months after the hardware swap?

I fail to see the quality crisis if you’re just sticking with iPhone and Mac.

I’ve yet to find a better phone+computer setup if what you’re looking for are good quality native apps, integration between pc and handset, and a usable Unix environment for programming and other work.

Still way better than Microsoft’s spyware and adware sadly.

Why is device overheating considered a software problem?

If one is not a device for mining, which can not be overheat-able at all, the problem is too much bloatware.

Probably something chewing up CPU cycles.

If the hardware can't run at full power, cooling and power consumption are out of balance. What's the point of building such hardware?

So you can put it in your pocket

It may not be perfect, but the alternatives I've tried have so far been even worse. I have a Windows 11 gaming PC, and oh boy that is an OS that deliberately tries to give you a bad day, and Linux ... well, if you don't want config tinkering to replace your day job then it's simply not something usable for most modern hardware as it doesn't even have a display server that actually works well (Wayland breaks almost all Electron apps, which is like, most apps these days, and makes X11 apps look tiny and horrible due to the clusterfuck that is fractional scaling on Linux) and for some reason every now and again my vanilla Linux install simply just crashes. It has also borked itself mid video call for reasons unclear. Definitely not an OS I'd like to use for any professional work since it seems to have the stability of Win 2000.

Software quality across the board is in decline IMO.

Lack of focus.

I want UNIX not emojis.

Okay, sure, but what about “memojis”.

Stuff went downhill since iOS 13 and macOS 11

Since I can't fight the windmills I just lowered my expectations and tried to alleviate the pain as much as possible.

My iphone starts playing spotify after connecting to car's bluetooth? Screw it, I just removed spotify. Macos opens itunes every time when I connect to bluetooth headphones? – Can't remove itunes but here's a script that monitors and kills it. Macbook constantly overheating? – cooling pad is a solution (kind of). Airdrop almost never works? Okay, there's no airdrop, we send everything via IM. Management of photos is complete dumpster fire – that's ok, Photosync and locally hosted photobank is a solution.

Anyone remember OS 8 or 9? Not great.

>But if software quality continues to decline, this value proposition becomes increasingly difficult to defend.

If software quality keeps declining, this proposition isn’t just difficult to defend — it’s indefensible and an insult to consumers. Apple has lagged behind Android for a decade, and its software now fails at tasks Symbian OS handled effortlessly.

I've dealt with clunky software all my life, but Apple is the first ecosystem where things are outright unfixable. "It just works" — until it doesn’t, and then you’re out of options.

A few examples of Apple's atrocious software design:

- Rather than universal "open with" controls, iOS forces you to open files with a random selection of apps. Want to edit an image in Snapseed? Too bad, Photos won’t let you. But it will let you use it to "find products on Amazon". I get that this is up to the app developers - but a simpler solution would've been global "Open With" functionality.

- Call recordings over 20 minutes freeze the Notes app, making them impossible to move. No fix for months.

- Changing a wallpaper takes nearly six steps.

- The Home Screen follows non-Euclidean geometry whenever you try to move an icon

- The Settings app search is useless: searching "Camera" shows privacy settings, not the Camera app settings (which aren’t in the Camera app, because of course they aren’t).

- Probably a dozen other niggles you just learn to "live with" on a $1000 phone (and which people with a $200 Android don't even have to think about)

No company has as much contempt for its users as Apple, both from their design philosophy of keeping as much control away from users as possible, and the pricing strategy that pretends like this shitfest is a premium experience. But the users are also to blame - they create the cult that enables this.

On most forums, complaining about Apple just gets you a "why did you buy it then lol" response from users - and absolute silence from Apple.

In a better world, this company would be boycotted by consumers. This forces it to reset and try harder.

I can't help but think Apple should have focused more on hiring the top engineers/designers than on the diversity of their workforce.

The sad thing about this is that in the Android ecosystem, you are likely to get just as shitty software on a much, much shittier hardware. You cannot have nice things. Oh, and just buy a new one while we're at it, lmao.

I dont agree with shittier hardware. The flagship phones of companies like Oppo and OnePlus are incredible, easily on par with the construction quality of the best iPhones, with often many more features.

On the software side at least on Android you have the power to do something about it. You can flash custom firmware or launchers, hell you can even code your own to completely replace the android interface if you want.

High end Android phones have pretty good hardware, in some cases feels better than the equivalent iphone. IMO the main problem of Android is that sofware updates are dropped way too fast. My in-laws have a Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 tablet (launched in 2015), stuck on Android 7.0 (released on 2016, also youtube app just dropped support for). Last security update in 2019.

On the other hand the iPhone batteries seems to go to trash way faster than Android. I think Android has better battery management systems (and also just bigger batteries). Every single person I know who uses iPhones older than 3-4 years can't get through a single charge per day.

On the software side Android got a bad rep from the early days when it was much worse than iOS, but these days it is pretty much just as slick and much more customizable.

>"Apple tax" It's not what you think. Apple siphons all data they can and sells it, that's the real tax.

airdropping from phone to computer doesn't even work anymore idk what to think

This is eating almost every Apple device and not to mention the entire Apple' devices ecosystem as well.

Again ?

Feels like we have been here before.

recently switched from android to ios and it's buggy as hell

Apple Music's desktop UI/UX has been absolute garbage in comparison to iTunes before it since release. I have been patiently waiting for what, five years now(?), for someone to improve it, but they just haven't.

I don't think it's changed in any notable way since its initial release in 2019 and it's still beta quality at best. Do they even have people working on it?

Wait, wasn't AI supposed to beefmaxx all of their developers 5x??

Antidotal rage bait with zero supporting facts. Jump on the bandwagon!

Nothing infuriates me more than the fact that when you get a missed call, tapping on the call notification doesn't call them back, instead it takes you to their contact!!!

What's worse is that this is a regression, so they actively made life a little more difficult for everyone in the new release.

Perhaps this should be an option but I far prefer that tapping on a notification not do something that potentially notifies the sender that I saw the notification, certainly not calling them. I want to initiate that action knowingly and intentionally.

Personally, I prefer that. I don't want to talk to people, usually. I want to go to the contact, see what communication forms we have in common, and send them a message.

I bet that they A/B tested this on users and this is not just a random change.

could this complaint be generalized to the software quality of anything that's been built upon for many years? as the churn in the workforce happens you lose nuance and expertise and systems become more and more complex to maintain and understand. management demands new features be slapped atop legacy systems. they want software to ship faster (look at how AAA game developers use nvidia AI features as a crutch to ship unoptimized games).

i often think back to ryan dahls infamous nodejs rant:

"There will come a point where the accumulated complexity of our existing systems is greater than the complexity of creating a new one. When that happens all of this shit will be trashed."

iCucks in shambles, many such cases

A good writeup of just a smaller subsection of my grievances with Apple under Cook's recent leadership: stellar hardware increasingly hobbled by bungled software.

Funny enough, I had the exact issue the OP had with my M1 iPad and Notes, writing down Kubernetes coursework and notes by hand to try and make it "stick" better mentally (an entirely different post, someday) only for Notes to crash, losing most of my work since the last time I opened the app. It got so bad that I was regularly synchronizing and duplicating notes to preserve my work ahead of the next crash, and splitting notes up into quarter-chapters to reduce the likelihood of app crashes and iPad overheating.

Apple has been so feature-focused to keep up with shareholder demands and industry fads, that they've neglected the core user experience. iTunes used to be the best way to organize and consume music, and nobody has really taken up that mantle since Apple abandoned it in favor of their streaming service. Same with local media and shared libraries, now tucked away into obscure apps in favor of more streaming platform priority.

That feature-focus extends to general OS stability as well. Safari gulping down battery life on my iPhone because it's not properly suspending tabs anymore. iPad suddenly no longer charging without any error message or warning until a reboot is triggered or the battery completely dies. Siri responding as far away as physically possible from the actual speaker, including on devices I don't even own, bypassing multiple other devices that stand between the speaker and the responding device. The AppleTV needs weekly reboots because apps don't load video streams properly, giving a black screen with audio or an HDCP error message despite every other device in the chain showing it's the AppleTV not engaging HDCP. HomePods suddenly ceasing music playback without any command to do so, often mid-song.

It's just getting worse and worse, to the point (pre-RIF) I was seriously looking into an honest-to-god HiFi to replace stereo homepods in my bedroom. I've already ditched the Music app in favor of Plex's Music App (don't even get me started on how awful it is, but it's still better than Apple Music), I've all but given up engaging in music discovery via CarPlay, and I've long since moved local media onto a Plex Server in lieu of a single, simple, efficient iTunes library. That's just the media side of things, too.

Don't get me wrong, Apple's kit is still lightyears better than an equivalent Windows 11/Android setup, especially for my family members who don't want to wrangle with confusing UX and have largely moved into a streaming-only lifestyle - though even they're increasingly frustrated with Apple's updates breaking things or forcing them to rework their processes.

But that only works for so long before users get so sick and tired of it, that they'll take a chance on an upstart competitor.

This makes me want to work for their hardware teams (as a software engineer), not their software teams.

But hey Apple would never hire me anyway...

Author here, crashing is another issue I have with notes, but it's more sporadic.

> Apple's kit is still lightyears better than an equivalent Windows 11/Android setup

That's sadly true, but I think as users/power users we shouldn't settle for the "best of the worst", when it's clear that the direction of Apple software quality took a dramatic shift.

> ...we shouldn't settle for the "best of the worst"

That, right there, is general life advice more people need to hear.

iPad OS is just terrible.

I would disagree with the conclusion. It sounds like a faulty line of hardware on the M2 Air then.

My partner is the IT manager at a school where they have over 1000 iPads (10th gen) deployed with iOS 18 and there are no reported issues like this. We ourselves have iPad Pro M2's without these issues which we both use all day every day. Our kids have 3x 10th gen iPads too. No issues.

YMMV but they just work for us and the software, which not perfect, is probably the least shit out there.

I mean the trash heap in my office is mostly Surface machines as a comparison...

But are they using mentioned pencils?

iPad 10th Gen doesn't even support the Apple Pencil Pro. Are they using any Apple Pencils at all?

Correct. Which is the point. The user complains that the problem is a software crisis when the software is fine on completely different hardware. That would suggest by elimination it's not a software problem, or is a software problem tied to particular hardware.

(incidentally they mostly use USB-C apple pencils and some clone ones when they lose them and the parents don't want to buy a genuine replacement one)

It is a software problem when a pen is used; you aren't using a pen so it doesn't impact you.

I don't understand why you thought it was constructive to point out the difference between a "software problem Vs. a software problem only when the pen is used." The article was very clear on that point already, it isn't adding to the conversation.

It is a software issue, I also have the same issue on my M2 pro.

The issue is, that each new line you draw, gets added to a group. This will start causing lagging at some point of time.

If I highlight my whole screen in Notes or Freeform and use the `separate` tool to remove all things from the group. The lagging immediately stops. You can read more about this here [1].

Apple has many issues with “scalability” like this. Another one for instance is the imessage and its replies. If you use them too much (50 replies to message or more) it start not rendering some of the messages.

This suggests a type of culture, where things are important to look nice in demos, but are not actually usable daily.

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/ipad/comments/zqh5rt/ipad_glitching...

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