[HN Gopher] Apple's Software Quality Crisis
___________________________________________________________________
Apple's Software Quality Crisis
Author : ajdude
Score : 232 points
Date : 2025-03-03 16:04 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eliseomartelli.it)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eliseomartelli.it)
| mbrumlow wrote:
| 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.
| c_hastings wrote:
| 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?
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| diggan wrote:
| 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.
| rcarmo wrote:
| The CarPlay "limitation" is likely to be a road
| safety/liability issue.
| diggan wrote:
| 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.
| capl wrote:
| 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.
| legitster wrote:
| 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.
| philistine wrote:
| ... 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.
| legitster wrote:
| ...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.
| bitsailor wrote:
| Settings -> Trackpad and it's all right there.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Folding phones are great though. I love mine, absolutely
| worth the purchase price. It's like a portable mini tablet
| and great for reading.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Personal pet peeve: CarPlay not pausing what you are playing
| when you hit the infotainment power button is really dumb.
| eddieroger wrote:
| 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?
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Yeah both cars where I have had it treat it as mute. Maybe
| a setting I guess.
| garyrob wrote:
| It pauses for me when I hit the mute switch though. I pretty
| much never power it off.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 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.
| diggan wrote:
| 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.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| I'm not sure where you saw forced updates. I'm usually 2 to
| 3 major versions of macOS behind.
| diggan wrote:
| > 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".
| ndiddy wrote:
| 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".
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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.
| catlover76 wrote:
| > 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
| diggan wrote:
| 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?
| sunshowers wrote:
| 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!
| varenc wrote:
| What Linux CarPlay alternative do you use?
| diggan wrote:
| 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.
| ohgr wrote:
| 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.
| diggan wrote:
| 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.
| karmakaze wrote:
| 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.
| 827a wrote:
| 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.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| > Agreed; Apple's software quality is rapidly approaching
| unacceptability.
|
| But since sales go brrrrr and so does the stock, why should
| they care?
| nokeya wrote:
| When software is so bad that tactics "just throw more hardware
| inside" stops working.
| FredPret wrote:
| 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.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| What? iOS without new features? When? Every release since 1.0
| had a big splashy feature
| FredPret wrote:
| 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.
| bell-cot wrote:
| > 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!
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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
| skyyler wrote:
| 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!)
| vorpalhex wrote:
| This is basically Debian.
| dharmab wrote:
| 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.
| FredPret wrote:
| Amazing. The mental peace you've gained this way probably
| vastly outweighs the initial investment and missing out on
| the newest "features".
| csomar wrote:
| 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.
| dharmab wrote:
| Yup, my core applications are Kitty, Vim, coreutils,
| Firefox, and pcmanfm.
| freedomben wrote:
| 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.
| nextos wrote:
| 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.
| dsr_ wrote:
| You probably would, but that's the number one complaint about
| Debian: "Where is my fix of new shiny?"
| criddell wrote:
| 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.
| ryandvm wrote:
| 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.
| FredPret wrote:
| 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.
| billev2k wrote:
| 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.
| eviks wrote:
| Oh, there is a gazillion of bugs and broken fundamentals to
| justify the existence of those thousands for a long while!
| shagie wrote:
| 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}.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 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.
| taeric wrote:
| 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.
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| > 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
| :(
| tacker2000 wrote:
| 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.
| pndy wrote:
| 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.
| hbn wrote:
| 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.
| treve wrote:
| 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.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| Mojave made my Mac Mini mid-2015 without an SSD completely
| unusable.
| kccqzy wrote:
| 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.
| Krssst wrote:
| > 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)
| sbuk wrote:
| 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.
| treve wrote:
| I use Linux, Apple OS and Windows.
| packetlost wrote:
| 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.
| linguae wrote:
| 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.
| hanikesn wrote:
| 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.
| packetlost wrote:
| 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.
| legitster wrote:
| > 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.
| packetlost wrote:
| I am _not_ referring to hardware. Hardware quality has
| largely improved, software quality has largely gotten worse.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| 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.
| kome wrote:
| 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.
| realo wrote:
| 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.
| skyyler wrote:
| 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?
| asmor wrote:
| Wow, how dare you omit that Windows 11 24H2 IoT LTSC
| exists.
|
| /s
| joseda-hg wrote:
| 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/h
| e... Post marked as solution talks about installing W11 on
| a 10 Y/O Thinkpad
| skyyler wrote:
| 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.
| joseda-hg wrote:
| 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
| skyyler wrote:
| 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.
| joseda-hg wrote:
| 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)
| eviks wrote:
| 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
| judofyr wrote:
| 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
| formerly_proven wrote:
| 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.
| Y-bar wrote:
| 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.
| tempodox wrote:
| > 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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > 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.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > 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.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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?
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| ohgr wrote:
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Thanks, I'll give it try!
| lostlogin wrote:
| Do you need a blocker if you run PiHole?
|
| It seems to do the job for the house very nicely.
| ohgr wrote:
| 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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| 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.
| ohgr wrote:
| 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.
| drcongo wrote:
| 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?
| int_19h wrote:
| 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).
| legitster wrote:
| > 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.
| stavros wrote:
| 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.
| hbn wrote:
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| 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.
| skinkestek wrote:
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| Yep, things weren't great 7 years ago.
| yimby2001 wrote:
| Does he mean that the software worked for three months after the
| hardware swap?
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Antidotal rage bait with zero supporting facts. Jump on the
| bandwagon!
| tbeseda wrote:
| 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.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| I never liked iTunes. I always found it horrible and difficult
| to find my way around. Apple Music makes me miss those days.
| wrs wrote:
| 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!).
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| The podcast app is the same shoddy-ness. Re-arranging things in
| the queue is such a PIA.
| JoshTko wrote:
| podcast app is the worst, I can never find what I'm looking
| for
| lostlogin wrote:
| > I can never find what I'm looking for
|
| Overcast might be the app for you. No affiliation, I just
| like it.
| frereubu wrote:
| Another vote for Overcast.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Overcast is definitely the least worst of the iOS podcast
| apps but it does have its own set of UI/UX annoyances.
| draebek wrote:
| 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.
| 112233 wrote:
| 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?
| DrillShopper wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| 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.
| choilive wrote:
| If Spotify doesnt work they are dead in the water. If Apple
| Music doesnt work, thats a rounding error.
| ohgr wrote:
| 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.
| hbn wrote:
| 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.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| 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/
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| They've been doing that bullshit with the media keys since it
| was still itunes
| criddell wrote:
| 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.
| SSLy wrote:
| > _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...
| criddell wrote:
| 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.
| anentropic wrote:
| 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.
| kergonath wrote:
| > 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.
| EasyMark wrote:
| 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.
| chang1 wrote:
| 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.
| Marsymars wrote:
| 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.
| rafram wrote:
| 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.
| csomar wrote:
| 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.
| alberth wrote:
| 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?
| dijit wrote:
| 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.
| alberth wrote:
| 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.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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.
| john_alan wrote:
| Using macOS since Tiger as daily driven. Never been worse.
| Needs a "Snow Leopard" year.
| alberth wrote:
| > 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.
| written-beyond wrote:
| 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.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| 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).
| alpaca128 wrote:
| 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.
| nicce wrote:
| 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.
| ohgr wrote:
| 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...
| nicce wrote:
| But are they using mentioned pencils?
| Someone1234 wrote:
| iPad 10th Gen doesn't even support the Apple Pencil Pro. Are
| they using any Apple Pencils at all?
| ohgr wrote:
| 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)
| Someone1234 wrote:
| 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.
| miiiiiike wrote:
| 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.
| deegles wrote:
| 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.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| 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.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 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.
| freedomben wrote:
| 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.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| 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!
| DannyBee wrote:
| 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.
| skinkestek wrote:
| > 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.
| CoryAlexMartin wrote:
| 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
| raverbashing wrote:
| 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.
| eliseomartelli wrote:
| 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".
| raverbashing wrote:
| 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
| markus_zhang wrote:
| 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.
| ohgr wrote:
| Yeah annoys me too.
|
| You can turn them back on everywhere in Settings -> Appearance
| -> Show scroll bars always.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| 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.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| 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.
| hbn wrote:
| 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.
| Klonoar wrote:
| 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.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| 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.
| eviks wrote:
| 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)
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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!
| flohofwoe wrote:
| 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 :)
| BobAliceInATree wrote:
| 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)
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| 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.
| woleium wrote:
| 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."
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| 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.
| frizlab wrote:
| Snow leopard is fondly remembered but was buggy has hell
| when initially released. It _got good_ , with time...
| vardump wrote:
| > - 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.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| 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.
| jmuguy wrote:
| 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.
| LostMyLogin wrote:
| I am on 15.3.1 and when I attempt it, it stays in place on
| the color I selected without issue.
| drdo wrote:
| 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)
| flohofwoe wrote:
| 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.
| gloosx wrote:
| 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.
| LostMyLogin wrote:
| I don't see Custom Color anywhere. Does anyone have a SS
| of where I should be looking? I'm on 15.3.1.
| jredwards wrote:
| 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.
| philistine wrote:
| 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.
| rafram wrote:
| 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
| hbn wrote:
| 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.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Just checked this in 15.4 Beta (24E5206s) on this 2023 M3 Max
| and it doesn't happen for me.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| The entire settings app rewrite is the canary of how Apple's
| software development process is broken, especially for the mac.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I use an iPhone 13 mini, and I experience no delays within
| the settings app.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| I was talking about the settings app in macOS.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Oh, I see. There is a slight delay (closer to 1 second or
| less) switching menus inside of Settings on my M3 Air.
| il-b wrote:
| 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
| progmetaldev wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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.
| fnordlord wrote:
| 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.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| 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!
| karmakaze wrote:
| 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).
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| 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.
| newsclues wrote:
| Lack of focus.
|
| I want UNIX not emojis.
| devinprater wrote:
| 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.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| 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.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > 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.
| danans wrote:
| > 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
| inetknght wrote:
| > _" Increased reliability and stability" is not a good
| consumer sales pitch_
|
| It is when Apple is claimed to be a quality boutique shop.
| danans wrote:
| > 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.
| mdhb wrote:
| 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.
| czk wrote:
| 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."
| someonehere wrote:
| 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.
| garyrob wrote:
| 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!
| hbn wrote:
| 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.
| ttepasse wrote:
| 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.
| dkarl wrote:
| 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.
| hollandheese wrote:
| 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.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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.
| stego-tech wrote:
| 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.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| 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.
| Gys wrote:
| 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.
| qwertox wrote:
| 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.
| eviks wrote:
| > 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.
| AlanYx wrote:
| 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).
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| 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.
| bigyabai wrote:
| 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.
| dpierce9 wrote:
| Window placement with multiple monitors is broken beyond belief.
| I am hoping someone from Apple is reading this thread.
| mmis1000 wrote:
| 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.
| inasio wrote:
| 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).
| reader_1000 wrote:
| 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.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| 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.
| ltadeut wrote:
| 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.
| Sxubas wrote:
| 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.
| dnissley wrote:
| Never wanted anything more than an iphone that runs android
| legitster wrote:
| 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"
| gloosx wrote:
| Wait, wasn't AI supposed to beefmaxx all of their developers 5x??
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| 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.
| skinkestek wrote:
| 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.
| sunshowers wrote:
| When my Shield started showing ads I installed another launcher
| --wish Apple were nearly as open.
| casey2 wrote:
| 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.
| michelb wrote:
| 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.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| 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.
| swat535 wrote:
| 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..
| nicce wrote:
| All of that can be summarized with Electron, web developers and
| high availability of workworkforce with somewhat low salary...
| sccxy wrote:
| 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
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| 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.
| Thoreandan wrote:
| 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.
| sohrob wrote:
| 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.
| kurthr wrote:
| 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.
| cyberax wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-03-03 23:00 UTC)