Apple routed a graphite pipe through the iPhone Duo's hinge to dissipate heat
pcmag.com
pcmag.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8bxkCKNiuA
They have a similar video comparing the M6 to the M5.
Idk if you’ve ever worked on… anything… but the last 10% of the apparent work is the hardest. It’s incredibly ambitious to take an idea from 90% to 100%.
Knowing what we know today, probably a good choice as search engines themselves are quickly getting less usage due to AIs. (I for one would never have predicted there would be something that could replace search engines, but then I also thought Facebook was here to stay forever for everyone. Happy to be wrong)
Yes Apple has "copied" or brought out its own version of particular products before, usually in a much better state.
I wouldn't say that at all. Correct me if I misremember, but the original iPhone didn't even have an ecosystem of apps outside a few Apple-sanctioned ones. I was thoroughly unimpressed when it came out, at the missed (in retrospect, deferred) opportunity.
My older Palm device felt superior in nearly every way I cared about.
Lowest cost of production is what that formfactor provides.
Palm's devices, by contrast, felt like a polished river stone in the pocket. I know which I prefer.
Maybe, but to compete with the iPhone everything else that goes into the production of a smartphone would have been way more expensive. More compute requirements, better screens, way more software engineering headcount.
The Palm as it was in 2007 was made of plastic, the screen was resistive touch and also made of plastic. The iPhone was made of aluminum, the screen was capacitive and was made of glass.
The iPhone in your pocket should've felt more like a polished stone than the palm.
And yet, due to the shape Apple chose, it did not.
"You're feeling it wrong" from the same folks as "you're holding it wrong". Yeesh.
Given that depending on the Palm you're talking about it had 90 degree angles on the chassis and the iPhone was completely rounded. Not only was it rounded everywhere but it was also Aluminum with a glass screen.
but this discussion always has the tendency to go completely off teh rails because there are so many people unable to talk rationally about apple products.
innovation basically never happens in a vacuum, and especially apple products have historically "come second" into a product category -- and just nail the implementation so well that they just felt great to use. (and yes, smartphones were well established by the time the iphone was released. thats what i'd call the product category there. dialing in to ever narrower definitions to make it into a "new" category is exactly the reason why this can never be settled - because you can call _every_ product a new product category like that)
So now we got endless discussions about "who was first" even though its completely meaningless to ask this question -- because that "previous product" also took inspiration from other products, and if you squinted enough, could also be called "just an iteration" vs a "innovation".
You’re right that Apple isn’t usually a first mover within a product segment. But that have a tendency to nail what they consider to be a better execution of that product.
That full package of capacitive touch, a UI and UX optimised for touch, inertial scrolling with pinch and zoom came together to form something much greater than the sum of the individual parts: an experience that could convince you to part with physical buttons
Also I think it took me almost a decade to find a touch keyboard (fleksy) I liked as much as the iOS keyboard. I think people also take for granted how far ahead their quiet innovations in the touch keyboard were without fanfare.
The ones in 2007 were unusable, the original android ones were terrible and I didn't much like swiftkey. Google Keyboard came much later but lacked some of the smoothing and tappiness of the Apple one
The biggest thing that drove iPhones success was that it truly felt different. The interface, the touch screen.
I remember it just feeling so different, it was easy to use no complicated jammed in UI.
It felt like the next generation of mobile UI's was born as it didn't feel clunky like the others.
The apps part was rectified pretty quickly but even the kind of halfway decent web apps available after iPhone launch beat treo apps.
So the Android polish wasn't quite there on release either.
They were by no means the first smartphone nor were they the first touch phone but the "iphone moment" was coined because they figured out how to make frontier tech mainstream.
They also weren't the first to make an MP3 player but it sure felt that way with the ipod. I don't know how people have rewritten this history in their minds
To be fair here, you're replying to a thread where people were discussing mechanical engineering, and hardware. Not software.
Held to that metric, the software layer isn't part of the original discussion.
Not saying that discussing other things is wrong, but the comment you replied to seems to be "The hardware was an enormous cut above".
The touch screen was shocking on the Palm and the UI was an absolute mess.
First, everyone copies. In computing space, let me give you a funny example. Apple iOS home screen is a copy and evolution of PalmOS user interface, down to four buttons, pages, graffiti area and so on.
Palm's phone (Android running one) copies Apple Watch's user interface as home screen like a revenge, with a iPhone X-esque camera bump. Funny, ironic, real.
Second, Apple is a slow moving company. They don't rush things. They are the last company to move OLEDs on their phone, because they want to implement without any apparent flaws and with a long life. i.e.: My parent's Samsung A9 2018 phones have screen burn-in, but my iPhone X doesn't. They are at a similar age.
Like them or not, their engineering is solid and novel. At least give them that. My 18 year old Mac still boots despite being dropped (I fell on top of it) and bent badly, and gone through three batteries.
My 12 year old MacBook Pro still runs like day one despite being hammered for years for high performance computing, and its disk still shows ~10% wear.
Like every company, Apple makes mistake (these keyboards were bad, yes), but they are sometimes misunderstood (you can only charge that upside down, but charging it for 2 minutes gives you 8 hours of use, so get a coffee and flex at least).
I think Apple is more of a hardware company than a software company these days. They invested enough time, resources, and patience in ARM for it to now compete with the once-mighty Intel x86 architecture. That kind of progress requires patience, so I don’t think we can simply call Apple a slow company or say it isn’t innovating.
I didn’t use slow in a negative way. On the contrary, my context behind that “slow” was “patient, detail obsessed and immaculate”. Also I didn’t mean that they are not innovating. Again, they innovate and bake well, then release things, which is how I like my hardware.
Thanks for your reply though. Seems like I missed the point I was trying to make by a mile.
A sloppy mechanical engineer can be sued for malpractice and lose their license to practice. If they do something unethical they can't blame it all on management and could end up being held personally responsible with fines and even jail time.
Sometimes I think it we might be better off if the same held for software engineers.
2. X Android phonemaker uses said tech in half-baked manner
3. Apple releases phone with polished version of tech
4. "Apple copied X phonemaker"
Mind you, I've not owned any apple hardware in probably 5 or 7 years, but that's just been my luck when I did.
That said, I think over the years I have gotten three or four random checks in the mail from Apple over the keyboard, and they fixed it outside of warranty. With those MacBooks, you have replace the entire bottom assembly (keyboard, battery, speakers, etc.) and it isn't cheap.
Keyboard is finally back to semi decent now. The old scissor is still better. But I think 2024 or 2025 they finally make some minor changes that is closer to old scissors.
God help you if you own a camera and try to store its photos in apple photos.
For as much as Apple is pushing memories in Photos it is surprising to me that the ability to specify who is in a photo/video is so overlooked.
For most companies I'd say this is a natural tradeoff, but Apple has so much money that they can actually afford to be world class in both. Or at least, you'd expect they could. Maybe being world class in software would require delays to the hardware side of the business?
Regardless, it's definitely a weakness of the culture and I'd venture that weakness is why Apple has essentially failed at AI.
For AI, there were top down directives to find new ways to experiment with and incorporate into core products and processes, but as you went down the management chain, management became more conservative. First and second line managers were strongly incentivized to keep their products, roadmaps, and interfaces stable and predictable by similarly conservative stakeholders. And as such, they were generally unwilling to officially dedicate much effort to AI other than the minimum “look at how much we’re using Claude”.
In particular due to the lack of central tooling, any team trying to do much with AI essentially had to reinvent much of the stack themselves. So even small projects were largely untenable due to inevitable required scope creep.
This 100% describes my experience working there in the core teams of iOS 10+ years ago.
IMO the barriers to entry are just much different, and it’s reflecting in the workforce. There’s cultural differences too, but I think the education differences is the biggest cause.
How often do skyscrapers fall over, or bridges collapse, or your CPUs fail unexpectedly, or submarines implode. Rarely. In fact, I bet most people reading this thought of the same few examples.
Then look at software. When is the last time you encountered a bug? Have you ever heard of bug free software? Even at the elite, smartest, most educated levels of software, there are still bugs everywhere. Humans are essentially incapable of writing bug free software. And it isn’t because a bunch of uneducated dummies that didn’t get degrees are the ones writing it (as you arrogantly implied). It’s because it’s way fucking harder to do perfectly or near perfectly.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t incredibly hard physical engineering. Obviously there is insanely difficult engineering in nearly any variety. But if you ask a civil engineer to design you a perfect bridge, they probably will. Ask a software engineer with all the experience and education in the world to build you a perfect podcasting app, it simply isn’t happening.
When skyscrapers fall or bridges collapse, the negligent engineers who knowingly signed off on them go to jail. When was the last time a software developer or manager went to jail over a known bug?
Civil Engineers (the ones building bridges and skyscrapers) have a culture of institutional accountability. They are certified members of a professional organization and when they sign off on a project, they do so by affixing their personal seal to it. This is their binding endorsement of the soundness of the architectural drawings. The presence of that seal can be used as evidence in court against them (criminal or civil).
It’s also possible for engineers to be stripped of their seal by the organization for failures far less severe than a bridge collapsing, such as conflicts of interest.
There isn’t anything like that in software, even though the stakes are much lower. Far more common is a total disclaimer of warranty whatsoever.
What? That's backwards.
I guess you think that this "culture" is somehow made up and not an inherent part of the job or something?
It's straightforward: building collapses, people die => someone needs to be held accountable. Otherwise we'd be having people die all over. So there HAS to be something like this in place. It's not a choice, it's not a "culture". It's an inherent property of the universe we live in.
In that same way, this responsibility also inherently means an engineer can flag something as unsafe and he's legally protected. It can't be any other way, or nobody would want to do the job.
Also, signing off on a project is quite a bit easier when it comes down to pulling up some tables and calculating some structural loads according to well known formulas. Add some safety factor and voila - it's safe! Impossible for software.
Regardless, the simple fact is that software just matters less in almost every case, so no one gets held accountable. It lets the culture of unaccountability breed within IT / software eng, and here we are.
You want a podcast app, I will give you a formally verified podcasting app with zero bugs. I will engineer the shit out of it. Just give me a year and $500,000. Oh, you don't want to? And that right there is why we have bugs. Not because it is hard, but because nobody gives a shit. Even though companies lose way, way more than what it would cost to prevent severe bugs from happening, some things you literally cannot prevent without government regulation, as engineering itself went through after a period of nobody giving a shit and a lot of people dying as a result.
So it is harder because there is so much freedom in terms of what features a program can have and what the set of requirements can be. And that's just for getting to version 1.0. Software is expected to change much more than hardware is and if the requirements for version 1.7 can only be met by a severe change to the architecture or an ugly hack, the ugly hack will look very tempting.
Having said all that, I'm not sure I disagree all that much with you. A lot of this could be improved with more big E Engineering in the software world.
One way could be with some kind of professional engineer certification. It should be reasonably easy to get the first time by passing a test on some hard and concrete software engineering principles. But if you are ever found to break them, you lose the license and will have to go through a lot to get it back. That of course only works if companies care about people having this certification.
Which leads (as you mention) to government regulation. As someone who works with medical device software I can see that it actually works. The regulations succeed in forcing us to figure out a reasonably complete set of requirements early, but it is an ordeal. For a recent project we had working prototypes for basically all functionality and still we spent four calendar months doing nothing but requirements before we started developing the actual product.
And yet medical devices still have software bugs. There are 24 software related recalls in the FDA medical device recall database just this year so far: https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfRes/res...
My POV (and most people's, I think) is that software is buggier because software people are wildly unserious compared to hardware people (and other engineering disciplines like civil engineering). Which is an alright trade-off in the very large majority of cases, as software is rarely very important and is easy to update, whereas hardware and bridges are very high-stake and extremely costly to update.
> if you ask a civil engineer to design you a perfect bridge, they probably will. Ask a software engineer with all the experience and education in the world to build you a perfect podcasting app, it simply isn’t happening
The civil engineer gets to rely on extremely high-quality very-serious civil engineering work, built over millenia. The software engineer relies on shaky (ie buggy) work from past nowhere-as-serious software engineering work, built over ~70y.
The fact that the software engineer can do anything at all on such small and buggy past work shows how easy it is compared to civil engineering.
In my mind, saying "software engineering is shown to be harder by the presence of bugs" is akin to saying "LEGO building is harder, people build stuff that collapses all the time"
Yes, exactly? That's what makes it easier.
Software engineering has been a thing for, if you squint, 70 years? Comparing that to thousands of years of humans trying to pile up rocks in various ways to make houses is unserious.
Moreover, there are only so many rocks you can pile up on top of each other. Software can be infinitely complex.
How often is the civil engineer asked to add major features to his 80% finished pile of rocks? Or to move the whole pile by 50m? How long is he expected to continue feature development on it after it's been built?
> extremely high-quality very-serious civil engineering work, built over millenia
Translation: When randomly piled up rocks resulted in many dead humans we dutifully wrote down not to do that particular thing again. Repeat for a couple thousands of years and you get your very serious civil engineering work.
Fantastic analogy, and I assume you already know where I'm going with this.
The Titan submersible [0] implosion was by all accounts due to studiously ignoring best practices and test results. They shipped fast.
In contrast, James Cameron's Deepsea Challenger [1] was a slow and methodical build, and has heavily redundant backup systems for everything. For example, the ballast release system operates by demagnetizing coils that hold the ballast; that way if they have a system failure or power loss, it fails open, and they ascent. If that somehow fails, the supports for the ballast will corrode from sea water before the oxygen runs out, so in the worst case, it's sitting in the dark for a few hours before heading back up.
Or, let's look at the U.S. Navy submarine program. I was a propulsion plant operator (reactor operator + throttleman) on a Virginia-class sub. Though I can't go into specifics, "redundant" doesn't begin to describe it. FFS, the San Francisco (688-class sub) ran into an underwater mountain at flank [2] and survived. The SUBSAFE program [3] was a direct result of the loss of the Thresher [4], and to date, no SUBSAFE-certified submarine has been lost.
> Then look at software. When is the last time you encountered a bug? Have you ever heard of bug free software?
You're conflating "free of defects" with "capable of gracefully handling defects." NASA writes as close to bug-free as I think you'll find, but even theirs isn't perfect [5]. The difference is the ability for the software to work through or around those problems. Submarine / submersible design and construction is the same. Are the engineers, welders, machinists, electricians, etc. attempting to do perfect work? Of course. They also are aware that perfection is impossible, and so the design accounts for that.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(submersible)
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepsea_Challenger
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_San_Francisco_(SSN-711)#Gr...
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUBSAFE
4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_(SSN-593)#Disaste...
then let me root and customize the software to my liking
This is what gets me. Think about only bugs, not a single wishlist feature, just bugs. Limit to obvious-to-normies defects: so, UI bugs (ultra-low contrast oddity with certain backgrounds while scrolling lock screen notification center) or popular-feature bugs (AirDrop demands “everyone“ to receive from people in contacts, apparently in at least a couple cases).
At least in the case of UI bugs, no secret sauce seems to be required to resolve them. No particularly special feats of engineering. It seems simply dollars can fix them: QA & engineering. When I discover these obvious defects, update iOS multiple times over the course of months, and continue to experience them, I can only assume Apple prioritized having cash on hand over investing in my (our) experience.
Just one more thing that sours me on their stuff when I'm otherwise inclined to like it.
A known bug for years now.
Then good luck getting the time limits to work. It’ll tell the kids “5 minutes left!” then just let them keep going.
Parental controls are far superior to Microsoft and epic.
The SE and desktop felt like modern machines, clicks and key presses had predictable results, applications did what you told them too. On par with the Win95 and Win 7/8 I was used to at the time.
Jesus Christ, that iPad on the other hand, feels like janky Windows Vista tech rammed together by an intern. Weird UI artifacts, making the same gesture can have unpredictable results, the only function that everyone in the shop found without failure was 'undo' because it is triggered by violent shaking.
Even simple tasks like sharing a photo saved from a website is bizarrely broken. Depending on whether you saved it as a file or 'to your photos' dictates which applications can then open/share the image. And I know Android is full of it's own foibles but they took a few months to internalize. I'm going on 2 years of 'features' breaking workflow, and pixel perfect taps to activate input elements that are 5% of the screen width.
/rant
I am personally not always happy with the gestures, but some can be disabled. I don't have much use for my iPad apart from watching some videos, for everything that requires concentration, I will fallback to my laptop. I still think it is a marvelous machine how the hardware and iPadOS play together.
No one, probably not even Facebook, intentionally ships crappy software to farm engagement numbers with kids at this point. That's a good way to get hauled up in front of congress and yelled at in a bipartisan fashion, which no company wants.
Turns out "forgot to ask for local network access and since the prompt was never allowed, default to denied" is a known bug, and since it never asked, there is no way to toggle either. It was just a bullet point in the reddit thread of networking things that broke in macos 27. It had a solution. Somehow my terminal had known to ask for permission, so it got it, but all my UI apps didn't.
I had to sudo a change to remove my local network from the local network list, and then it worked.
I would think that "suddenly all my local services stopped working" is a noticeable to normies bug. Most normies won't have a ton of local services, but normies that live with techies probably will have a few.
The tinfoil hat explanation for this is that everyone at Apple is using iCloud for everything, and thus would never encounter a bug with locally-hosted services.
I’m hopeful Ternus can turn this around. They can be top notch in both being all vertically integrated and demanding the best in both. Let’s see.
I am a physical engineer by background but have also spent much of my career in high-reliability software systems. The problems of reliability in software systems make physical systems look like child’s play. The levels of effort are on different scales.
An important difference is that software correctness is mostly binary. In physical engineering you can usually spend a bit more money to over-engineer a component if you have any doubts or are lazy, and that works. Effort does not scale nearly as well when it comes to reliable software.
You have a committed spec of one component, connected to the committed spec of another component, with committed maximum deviations.
All that is fixed, so you engineer for possible permutations and mass-production. (it's still a massive feat, I'm not downplaying it. But it has a defined completed controlled state)
In software this is much more fluent. You may have a spec of a library and the APIs you use, and your app might otherwise be static.
But you're handing alot of what you do to an OS, which juggles everything and continues to change over time. That API you're calling may not even have full control over the modules its interacting with.
Apple is ultimately a hardware company that's so good they can monetize software and services. But they are not really a software company, or a services company. I think Ternus' promotion recognizes that: software and services are worth a lot of money, but they're value adds to hardware.
With hardware you pretty much get to restart on every product you make. Sure, you have many of the same (types) of components, but with every iteration, you move them around and pretty much have to rethink how every part fits together and interacts. And it has to work when devices get to consumers, because you can't visit everyone to solder on a wire you forgot. (You can always tell people they're holding the phone wrong though.)
With software you have this continuous blob that you keep adding features to. You never really get to rethink how it all goes together from the ground up when the design changes, you just slap a transparent UI on top of you existing code and call it a day. If it turns out there are bugs, not a problem, you just push an update and hope that fixes more than it breaks.
I think we need to keep in mind a couple of things:
1. It’s software designed for the masses. It’s not intended to be a power user’s playground.
2. There’s no such thing as perfect software. If you really look hard for alternatives to the Music or Photos app (to use your examples), it’s actually extremely difficult to find anything that is without compromise, bugs, or other downsides.
As someone who has moved off of many of Apple’s apps, like my move from iCloud Photos to Ente, I’m really still accepting a decent amount of compromises. It’s better in some ways, worse in others.
And then there’s some other apps where I just can’t find a good alternative. I’d love something like Apple Notes but is cross-platform with a Linux app specifically. There’s just basically nothing like that out there, certainly not at a good price, and most of them end up over-complicated or with a strange UI.[1]
And when we step back and look at how many apps Apple makes it’s mind-boggling, and really, most of them are at least a mild “good.”
[1] Closest I’ve found are Craft and Zoho Notebook. Zoho gets the price right, it’s dirt cheap, and has a Linux app (though it’s basically a web app). Zoho bothers me for being ugly though. Craft is slick on iOS with a web app only on desktop, but it’s pricey if you leave the free tier. For my criteria it’s important that the apps support sharing, collaboration, and notifications when the other person updates a note. I’m honestly not sure if these two alternatives hit every requirement because I gave on both pretty quick and accepted being stuck in Apple Notes for now. Going to iCloud.com on my Linux system isn’t horrible.
I don’t think anyone is asking for the world I just want software that dosent crash and makes sense to use.
Just a couple weeks ago Apple Music was leaking GBs of memory.
For one thing, the power user crowd tends to babysit their activity monitor and get massively upset when an electron app dares to consume memory.
In my mind, the only thing that matters for non-server apps is whether or not the user experience is good. Memory consumption is just a number. Apple doesn’t even advertise how much memory many of their products have on them. They expect that their users don’t have to think about that, and as long as that remains true, I really don’t mind if Apple Music is eating up 2GB of RAM behind the scenes.
Now unfortunately apples stuff is usually a cut above other software I’ve used but in my opinion is nowhere near as good as it should be.
I don’t even really disagree with the negative experiences you’ve had, I’m just more saying that those experiences are inevitable in software. Being above average is about as good as Apple has ever been.
And I think that standard is also true with hardware. A lot of their hardware is supremely overrated. The MacBook Pro has a sharp edge that cuts into your wrist and has a gigantic notch on the screen.
2. I’ve had better luck with Apple software but I’d still categorize it as “bad” relative to the good software I’ve interacted with.
This is a form for software engineers. In the 90’s users accepted things like applications crashing due to lack of memory protection in the OS. We know to expect better.
Again I’m not asking for some alternate reality version of software. I’m asking them to fix clear issues that they do not seem to care about.
Not to mention Apple is a large engineering organization with plenty of talent. The software dosent need to be bug free but I shouldn’t run into as many issues as I do.
Some other fun ones: Finder locking up and refusing to minimize
FaceTime putting me in a call with “testing” when I switch devices
Safari’s extension icon flashing on and off on iOS
Stalling on the lock screen despite me looking directly at the phone to unlock it
To me these are issues that should not make it past the engineers and layers of testing.
I don’t think this is unreasonable do you?
- Apple's software is better than most
- Apple's software is still imperfect, often in dumb ways
- Apple should be able to be dramatically more perfect than anyone else in software has managed to be
Comparing against the median means you've already thoroughly missed the point.
This angel’s halo around Apple was always a marketing illusion. They make above average hardware and above average software. Nothing more, nothing less.
Stupid examples from recently:
- The iOS 27 Preview app’s search feature appears to be present while in markup mode but missing while not in markup mode (this is quite reproducible for me).
- Mobile Safari regularly gets into a state where the overlay showing the current website domain gets stuck obscuring an important part of the site.
- On MacOS if you accidentally switch desktops you cannot switch back until the animation from the first switch finishes.
- Spotlight is still hilariously bad.
- The MacOS Music app’s AirPlay controls are barely functional.
- If you have an excessive number of desktop apps open, finding the one you want is gratuitously difficult. Sure, the bottom dock widget is pretty, but that doesn’t make it efficient.
- While typing this message, multiple different glitchy UI elements have appeared and disappeared.
- On iOS, if the keyboard is showing and you don’t want it, tough luck.
Fwiw, Alfred is still being sold.
Apple has some amazing engineering in the basic OS layer and the UI kit, but everything on top of it is just bad. E.g. it now takes about 5 seconds to "Privacy & Security" in the system settings, and I can see a visible delay when switching between sections (e.g. to "Screen Time").
Network settings are just embarrassing at this point - you can't sort the WiFi networks by name when looking at the saved settings!
Time Machine has been a disaster zone for the last 20 years. The keyboard navigation experience in macOS is a disgrace, worse than Win3.11 The virtualization experience of macOS sucks, and there is no support for containers (even Windows has them!).
I can continue for a long time.
It's instant for me on a six year old base level Mini.
What point is there in paying the premium Apple luxury tax if it's as crap as the median?
They should absolutely cop the criticism. It’s not like they don’t have the resources to make their software better.
They blasted out a marketing video where they bragged about apps launching faster and the WiFi/cellular connection handing off more cleanly.
My feeling is that there’s just always a group of people who complains no matter what.
There is a religious zeal to some of the criticism.
I actually have felt this way for a fairly long time but Apple always baits me. Like the twelve or fifteen different times Apple OSes have finally supported some parts of WebM on certain devices sometimes when it works. Oh my god, I gotta update so I can have another couple WebMs load successfully only in Safari and not in any other app that doesn't decode it itself. Or back when I used an iPhone, third party keyboards - I use a lot of jailbreak tweaks but I gotta give that up so I can upgrade for third-party keyboard support that is so ass that nobody would ever use it. Heck, I wish I had updated my iPad even less. One fewer major version and I could've made use of the virtualization support that was dormant - but Apple fixed the glitch that let you use it on Apple Silicon iPads, so now you can't. Thanks! This is important to do because it helps... Uhh, security, probably? Something like that.
Since Snow Leopard or so, most of my Apple software upgrades have been bitter sweet at best, but usually just bitter, like I've been baited into having a worse experience.
Of course, it is probably apparent that I simply don't like Apple very much, especially not anymore. And I hate to have to justify myself by doing this, but we lack the maturity needed for me to avoid it, so... I am going to point out the obvious that this is hardly limited to Apple. GNOME 3 may be the single biggest downgrade any desktop system I've ever used has been. It has improved over time, but GNOME 3 has never been even close to as relatively good for its time as GNOME 2 was. Same for KDE 3 -> KDE 4 although I think as a rare standout KDE Plasma 6 is genuinely getting better continuously over time and remains one of the things I am excited to update. Windows 10 -> Windows 11 was so bad that it seemingly durably made several of my friends switch to Linux full time and just simply give up on things that absolutely can't be made to work on Linux - that is a powerful statement, and months later it seems they were indeed not fucking around. Android has been enshittifying at an alarming pace, too, although I don't feel like the Android experience from a software perspective is degrading or getting worse, but Google really knows how to blow their own leg off and by god they're going to do everything they can to make sure that all of the advantages they have over Apple are rendered meaningless so they can drag themselves kicking and screaming out of accidentally having succeeded at something.
I don't feel like it should be necessary for me to justify this, because Apple's recent growing incompetence in shipping working software and release engineering stands on its own regardless of industry trends. I'd SSH into my Mac Mini, but I can't. I have to go reset it, because it's been on for 60 days and can no longer open new network sockets. (I am not making this up. macOS genuinely has/had that bug and mine genuinely is in that state right now.) It's not that everyone else is doing great. When it comes to Linux systems it's easy to give them a lot of slack because they simply have no goddamned money, but still, things could be better. It's just that Apple is richer than ever and yet worse than ever at shipping software. I struggle to square the circle.
A friend on the App Store software team wasn't invited to a private iPhone Duo preview, because she wasn't in the hardware division. She felt so disrespected and is considering leaving.
My sister (on the hardware team) shared that its a constantly cycle of non-hardware folks getting shafted and then they complain loud enough until they get 'equal' treatment until the next unfair thing rolls out.
And friend, I didn't pay for an eight thousand dollar machine for software "designed for the masses" instead of serious professionals and computer enthusiasts. "The masses" are not spending eight thousand dollars on a premium laptop marketed towards professionals. This is an expensive machine and I should be in the driver's seat, not Apple. It should not take arcane, brittle incantations to turn off Siri and dozens of background "AI" services that melt my computer and literally burn my fingertips in exchange for recommending filenames in Pages.
And that's not even mentioning the multitudes of extremely serious system and driver bugs piling up over the last several major versions, nor the grotesque and inconsistent Liquid Glass malarkey.
And I’m not trying to defend Apple at all, I don’t even have a MacBook anymore. I’m more opposed to these extreme tech opinions that seem more emotional than objective.
What am I not believing? I'm responding to your comment which was dismissive about real, serious concerns that people have surfaced about the sliding quality of Apple software. You seem to be the one not believing things might not be how you perceive them.
I'd add 3), more pair-programming between senior engineers and junior engineers—to hopefully make junior engineers better engineers.
I have to say though, when I knew I was heading out of the company (Apple) within a year, I tried to be a "mentor" to the junior engineers at Apple. And they wouldn't have me. I suppose I was too old… To be sure, they knew Swift better than I did, ha ha.
(Oh well, I tried. I did push back very publicly against management during some of the team meetings—I was told by a few of the junior engineers as I was retiring that they appreciated that example.)
I agree that as a power user I might tend to notice bugs more often, but when there is no relevant error message for the normies, to even bother looking up; it takes a really deep breath for me to remind myself why android ain’t a thing I would want to go back to. I guess, I got into the ecosystem a bit later than its prime time where things apparently had better software quality in the walled swamp.
The one thing that’s still unanswered is if and how quickly they will fix all the UX and UI mistakes left from the Alan Dye / Jony Ive era. Yes, Jony Ive - and his decision to scrap all Skeuomorphism on iOS which then was adapted for MacOS.
I'm afraid that's exactly what Apple's software is. The market, much like my school teacher, rewards the best -- no matter how good or bad it is.
Maybe some of their software clunk is a commitment to backwards compatibleness. We can't have all the nice things, we must prioritise.
Music on Mac has been getting bad IF you're still using a local music library carried over from iTunes, mainly cause they keep trying to shove Apple Music into it. Even in the iTunes days they kept removing nice features after v7. Moving iPhone syncing to Finder made sense at a high level, but somehow it ended up becoming super glitchy and never gets fixed, seems like not a priority.
Photos- interesting, I haven't seen any AI stuff on it. I'm still on Tahoe though. Is it coming in Golden gate?
Music could be a lot worse. I learned what it's like playing local music on a Samsung phone recently. Had to use ADB to copy files in because Android File Transfer is deprecated. The phone has no Music equivalent, so I use VLC, which everyone swears is perfect for this but it's actually super clunky. Meanwhile I have a library on my Mac copied over from iTunes v3 with new songs being added and synced over (with issues lately). But yes it has issues with external drives.
I was in bed, a little away from my MacBook on the desk that was playing some music.
I opened Apple's official Remote app on my iPhone, that lets you control your Mac's Music app.
Both devices were on the same WiFi network and same Apple ID, but Remote was unable to find the Mac. When it did, it was unable to connect.
I opened the ChatGPT app on my iPhone. Went into Codex mode. Asked the ChatGPT running on my Mac to control the Music app to play a different playlist.
Worked within seconds.
Gosh these decrepit giants deserve the unprecedented disruption that's coming for their ass.
Also:
- When there's multiple Apple devices in the same room, your Siri command doesn't always get intercepted by your intended target. Have you even used Siri in these situations?
- Siri doesn't let you see all your playlists etc like the Remote app does.
- The official app meant for this exact purpose failed to work.
- Codex can remote control every fucking app, not just Music, even those without Siri "hooks"
Apple is no longer the "It just works" and hasn't been for years. Read the room and smell the discontent
Yeah, I’ve got all the Apple stuff. Works fine in this situation 99% of the time. But if you have an idea about how they could make something that ambiguous 100% reliable you should write it up.
https://www.androidpolice.com/qualcomm-snapdragon-8-elite-ge...
8 means high-end. Gen 6 means the 6th generation. Elite is a bit like Core or M in that it describes their latest chip process. Extreme means it's the high end chip of that generation's chip.
You cannot do it right. Intel had a sort-of-useful naming scheme with their "Core i7 3600" naming style, except you couldn't tell if the i7 4500 would outperform the i5 3700 or not. Also there was a k and a u after the CPU name. They stepped away from that scheme, now they have somehow invented an even less useful naming scheme. And, of course, the Celeron/Pentium line never followed any comparable naming scheme either.
Apple then tried; they came up with the A4/A5/A6 for phones and M1/M2/M3 for computers, simple enough. Well, until you got the Pro/Ultra/Max (Max, of course, being slower than the Ultra, because Max doesn't mean maximum performance). Then their A chip ended up in a laptop and their M chip ended up in a tablet and their weird headset got a new R chip that never got a newer version. Oh, and for laptops you need to pay attention to how many cores your M chip has, because there are multiple SKUs with the same name differentiated by core count.
AMD had a useful-ish naming scheme for Ryzen but then they had to fuck up their mobile chip names. Then they did their weird AI product line, which killed any serious attempt to track what chips are sold at what performance points.
If Qualcomm do everything right, their next generation will have a mid-tier chip that outperforms their current top model. None of these names and numbers are useful for comparing.
Mediatek is doing the Intel thing now with their Dimensity #### where the first number is the market segment, the other numbers indicate performance and generation within the market segment, and the suffix indicates what features were glued onto the SoC.
Every name makes sense if you know the formula.