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?