Here's my personal canary in the coal mine that something must be fundamentally broken in Apple's software development process:
- on a recent macOS version, right click on the desktop, select 'change wallpaper' => the new settings panel opens
- click on 'Custom Color'
- now hold and drag around the 'color cursor' in the color selection circle for a few seconds
- stop dragging and notice how the color cursor continues jumping around erratically (it's impossible to actually select the exact color you want)
- same thing happens when using the linear slider below the color circle
This bug doesn't lurk deep in some obscure part of the settings panel, it's the only way to change the desktop background color. A QA specialist would stumble over this in 5 minutes of trying to break the app.
I made it a hobby to check this bug after each OS update, it's broken since the new settings panel was introduced in Ventura. As a good citizen I also wrote a Feedback Assistent ticket (FB13805690 - 21-May-2024) with attached screen recordings and all, but of course I could just as well have sent that report into a black hole :)
On the most recent episode of ATP podcast, an anonymous person wrote in to say that when they worked at Apple until ~2013, there was effectively no QA team on macOS.
Granted that was over a decade ago, and "no QA team" doesn't mean no testing, but given the numerous bugs in macOS today, and that they almost never get fixed, I'm not surprised.
(FWIW, I do not experience this bug you mentioned)
If you look at the macOS feature history, it's pretty clear that the bulk of the team got shifted to iPhone in 2007 and never really recovered. The widely acknowledged Snow Leopard high water mark happened shortly after.
To be fair, Apple can still pull off the occasional amazing feat of vertical integration -- HDR, APFS, keeping audio latency under control despite the relentless assault of apathy from all directions -- but they never had the same level of consistent drive forward, at least not until a year or two ago when the big push for AI integration started. Apple gets ragged on here, but I think their integration is actually some of the best. They were putting neural cores in chips back when that sort of thing got mocked, not lauded, and every step has been thoughtfully tied in rather than airdropped from a ChatGPT science fair project. But they never got good at building or deploying leading-edge models themselves; I hope they turn it around because this is important.
That may be unlikely. Mark Gurman reported recently for Bloomberg News that “people within Apple’s AI division now believe that a true modernized, conversational version of Siri won’t reach consumers until iOS 20 at best in 2027.”
That's a bummer to hear. They have the money to buy talent and they really ought to be able to pull this off inside of 2025. But if there's no will, there's no way.
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.
For what its worth, I can't reproduce this on 15.3 (24D60). I don't have a "Custom color" option. I see "Colors" and I click a Plus button to add a new color. Also I have my system connected to a caldigit dock and I'm using a mouse, not the trackpad.
I 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.
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).
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.
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.
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!
Interesting, yeah. It doesn't happen when adding a new color to the "Colours" row at the bottom even though this happens with the same color selection UI widget.
I see this Custom Colour thingie at the top-right corner of the Wallpaper section, above a "Show on all Spaces" checkbox and left of a fairly big representation of the current desktop background.
After a bit of tinkering: this Custom Colour element is replaced with something else depending on the current background mode. If you selected a wallpaper image, it shows the name of the wallpaper. If you select a predefined colour, it shows the name of the color. When adding a custom colour, it will show an interactive element which allows to change the color in place, and that shows the buggy behaviour for me.
Ok, this at least explains why other people don't stumble over this as an obvious bug, I assumed it would be obvious, because the first thing I always do on a new Mac is to customize the background color by right-clicking the desktop, and since that moment I have that buggy Custom Colour element sitting there.
Not a great UX either way though.
PS: ...and now after adding a new custom color via the to bottom row of predefined colors, the bug in the 'Custom Colour' widget is gone and nobody will believe me it was ever there. Great :D
PPS: nope, it's coming back after going through the 'desktop => right-click => change wallpaper...' route again, phew.
I tried it, and apparently if you click if from the "+" button, it works totally okay for this popup and subsequent opening of that custom color popup, BUT, if you close the settings, open them again and press the "Custom Colour" colour directly, you will enter the bugged one.
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.
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.
Nothing wrong with the "creating products that prioritize user experience over features" - or more accurately what Jobs said: create products that start with the user experience and the user’s needs first and then work your way to the tech (as far as I remember)
The opposite approach is starting with some tech and then trying to find a use for it, e.g. folding phones, second 1/2 screen on laptop, etc, instead of trying to actually create a usable, quality trackpad for instance.
The critique is still valid: Apple, for their software, seem to not have the same focus on quality as Jobs once insisted on. Their physical products are very much still top notch, and the products on the whole are still developed with this mindset as far as I’m concerned. It’s just the software quality that has taken a hit for some reason.
Can I ask what the fascination with the Apple trackpad is? My other daily driver is a Thinkpad and I actually vastly prefer using the smaller one on it. You're not flinging your wrist across the zipcode and the clicks are more tactile.
I went back to Linux because I can at least decide when I'm ready for updates that changes my workflow. Neither Windows nor macOS gives me that experience. I wouldn't put Linux on a pedestral when it comes to UX/UI/design, but at least it doesn't rugpull me once a year (or more often with Windows) with forced updates.
As someone who cares deeply about UX that doesn't get in the way and allows professionals to do their work effectively, I'd be a hardcore Apple fanboy if the UX was actually good for that.
> I’m not sure where you saw forced updates. I’m usually 2 to 3 major versions of macOS behind.
I remember being nagged about upgrading to the latest OS version at least once a day if not more often. Opening my wife's laptop just now, I saw another one of those notifications, begging to update where the only options were "Restart" or "Later".
This is one of my least favorite aspects of modern UI design practices, the user doesn't have any agency. Everything's a choice between "Yes" and "ask again later".
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.
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.
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.
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.
> around 2016 I had to move back to Linux because the software experience and the user experience is just too poor, outright buggy and changes all the time.
Honestly, I have difficulty believing someone could find these kinds of issues to be less of a problem on Linux than on Mac
If you haven't tried out the various Linux desktop environments for a long try, give it a try yourself. I'm having a way more stable experience with Gnome than I ever had with Windows or macOS the last decade or so, especially when I can chose when I want to upgrade, and I don't get nagged about it once a day.
But before that, I'd agree with you, it would have be stupid to prefer anything Linux over OSX or Windows, back when they were rock-solid. But today?
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.
Anecdotally, Apple Music has deteriorated exponentially for me. iTunes was such a stable, usable piece of software, but I can't get reliable use out of Apple Music for the life of me. It _feels_ like a shoddy Electron app. But that's not fair to the actual Electron (or similar) apps that actually work. For all its many design and product flaws, Spotify actually works.
I 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.
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!).
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.
> 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.
have you tried their "books"? you cannot search by almost anything! Extra-strangely, selecting book language is macos-only feature!
Does anyone even maintain it?
Apple Music, at least when I last used it, could not handle copying podcasts to my old iPod Video - this is now handled in Finder, as best as I can tell. It will copy the tracks, but it doesn't properly flag them as podcasts so if I switch to another track and then go back to the podcast it does not remember my location.
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.
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.
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.
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..
I think it has more to do with a gradual industry-wide race to the bottom in terms of quality. Reliability, attention to detail, correctness occupy a tiny fraction of the "budget" compared to security, slopping out features, and beating competition to market. I suspect that startup culture being the crucible where a large portion of engineers learned their chops and the massive amount of new blood in the industry who are primarily there for money are the biggest factors.
I concur. To add, I wonder how much of the “old guard” is still at Apple? Apple used to be perfectionistic when it came to software, even during the 1985-1996 interregnum when Steve Jobs was absent. Besides Steve Jobs, Apple also had people like Bruce Tognazzini and Don Norman who cared deeply about usability. When Apple purchased NeXT and built Mac OS X, Apple’s usability focus was married to reliable, stable infrastructure, culminating with Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which I believe was the pinnacle of the Mac experience. (Though I’m partial to the classic Mac OS from a UI point of view, Mac OS X had a better UX due to its stability.)
I suspect a lot of Apple’s decisions in the past decade regarding software is due to an increasing number of Apple employees who are not familiar with the philosophies of 1970s-era Xerox PARC, the classic Mac, NeXT, and Jobs-era Mac OS X. Granted, it’s possible to be too introspective, too focused on the past. Unfortunately Apple’s software is losing its perfectionistic qualities, which has long been the selling point of the Mac compared to Windows and Linux.
Linux seems like the opposite to me a slow marathon to achieve perfection. With pipewire, systemd and wayland there's less cruft than ever and you get the best out-of-the-box experience since it's inception.
Woah now, saying something positive about systemd will bring a bunch of crusty greybeards out of the woodwork who want their Linux to be as close to BSD4.4 as possible.
Jokes aside, I'm in agreement. Audio was still slightly buggy for me using a Elgato XLR USB interface, but it consistently worked with annoying workarounds. Linux is in a very good place for even normal consumers these days, I'm hoping Valve ends up making SteamOS a generalized gaming platform that will pull more market share away from Windows in that specific niche. I'm so ready.
> a gradual industry-wide race to the bottom in terms of quality
I'm going to disagree. This is a false nostalgia.
15 years ago the market for consumer laptops that were not MacBooks straight up sucked. If you walk into a Best Buy today, almost any laptop you buy is going to blow any laptop from back then out of the water in terms of build quality. And credit where it's due, in no small part it came from playing catch up with Apple.
I 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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}.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
It seems to me like the iPad in particular has the worst software quality. Not that iOS on the iPhone is perfect, but it really seems like their workflow is to build for the phone first, then hammer it in place to work on the iPad as an afterthought.
There's so much basic stuff that doesn't work, like if you pull out the keyboard into its split mode, it constantly covers the text input that you're typing in - even in Apple's own apps. The split keyboard may as well not exist for how impossible it is to use.
But there's also just been a lot of usability issues seeping into iOS over time in general. Like those text effects they added in the latest iOS update that constantly force their way onto my messages when I don't want them. And more recently, the "recent emojis" tab doesn't update to my recently used emojis. I think it's been stuck on whatever were my recent emojis were when I did the last iOS update.
I 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.
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.
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.
I mean as a user I haven’t thought about a scroll bar in years. The way the OS works with the hardware for touchpad usage means it’s just not a big deal.
Even when I used a mouse on a Mac desktop it still never bothered me. Looks cleaner, feels sleeker and doesn’t impact functionality.
I don't know, but missing scrollbars is very frustrating in some cases. I literally missed some configurations because of that when I first used a Mac. There was a configuration window that needed some scrolling to show all options, but I missed that because there is no scroll bars.
Yeah but I agree that everyone has their own flavors. I personally prefer the Windows 2000 ones...I'm old. Never liked the flat ones, looks soulless.
You missed an indication that you need to scroll, that's certainly bad design, though fixing it doesn't require the full fat bar (not that I'd object to a proper global setting for users who like that!).
(flatness is a universal cancer, though, even compared to the ugliness of the old Win)
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.
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.
> 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.
You can log into your Mac and your AppleTV and your iPhone and your iPad and all the services Apple has to offer with your Apple account. How is Microsoft offering the same thing any better?
You can't log into your Mac with your Apple account; you still need a local account created first, and it has its own login and password separate from the Apple ID associated with it (if any).
I would bet that the reason for the drop in quality is the focus on delivering features in order to secure promotions and ongoing positive performance reviews.
Yep. A lot of software companies are suffering from this short-term-ism that results in incentive structures that value things that move the stock price rather than make for a strong long term company.
It may eventually blow up in faces, but a lot of the people making money on it today won't be around to see it.
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.
Apple seems like the kind of company that would greatly benefit from having someone opinionated at the helm to keep the different teams oriented towards a unified vision and to intervene when a team produces something crappy
I mean, it's not always like that, at Google it always depended on the business unit.
To be honest, I think it's sort of simplistic to try to characterize a 185k person company and its culture with this sort of lack of nuance, whether it's Google, Apple, or anywhere else.
I got promoted 7 times (from SWE 3 all the way to VP of Engineering, so I ended up in the top 0.01% or something crazy by level) during my time there, and pretty much only made things better, did migrations, etc.
I did build some new stuff, but I don't believe they were ever a meaningful part of a promo packet. All my promo packets were about fixing things or making existing things better, and the impact of doing so on developer productivity, efficiency, etc.
> and pretty much only made things better, did migrations, etc.
Maybe you are right.
From the outside however, the situation looks very different:
- reader? destroyed
- Google+? Forced upon us and then destroyed as soon as communities started to form.
- Search? Hasn't been working correctly since around the time Google+ launched. At some point it became so bad I used DDG and Bing out if spite. The difference was that small.
(and before anyone says "it is impossible to create or run a working search engine in 2025": Marginalia and Kagi both work very much better than Google these days, although Marginalia admittedly only in certain niches.)
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”
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
MacOS has gone downhill like crazy indeed. On an M4, searching my safari history is super slow, searching for a password in the Passwords app is also really slow. I mean these are just lists. Apps steal focus all the time, Finder window column widths reset whenever they feel like, search in Mail sometimes just refuses to work. iCloud tab syncing? haha, not today, maybe next week again. You could probably write a dissertation on the new, new system preferences app.
I have 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.
In the current MacOS release, if I type Time Machine in the System Settings search box, it shows what I was looking for: "Show Time Machine status in the menu bar".
But if I click that, it shows the switch for the Keyboard Brightness menu bar control, and doesn't show anything about the Time Machine menu bar item!
Apple cannot figure out how to do a search in settings for the life of them. It's been broken on iOS basically since it was added. Do any googling about iOS settings search and you'll only find people talk about it to rant about how bad it is.
The 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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
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.
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.
After that, I bought a Nothing 2, and I love it. It's snappier than the iPhone, feels premium, and Android has stolen all of the good ideas iOS had and added more.
I 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.
I used Android for the better part of a decade, and once I switched to an iPhone I never really had any issues around not having a back button, considering the amount I hear complaining about it.
Basically every app lets you swipe from the left to go back. Occasionally you'll have a bottom sheet you can swipe back down to where it came from, but it's generally pretty intuitive. I can't think of many times I felt "stuck" and unable to go back.
It's not about getting stuck, as then that would be terrible. It's just about the thousand papercuts my experience was.
I forgot the biggest annoyance that ultimately made me abandon the experiment: the keyboard is ATROCIOUS. On Android, I just hit keys in the general vicinity of what I want, and it writes the right thing, every time. On iOS, with the exact same keyboard, it kept making mistake after mistake.
Both the stock keyboard and SwiftKey were terrible on iOS. I'd understand the stock keyboard being bad, whatever. I don't understand how SwiftKey can be great on one platform and horrible on the other.
Title should be something like “Apple Pencil Pro causes iPad to overheat and slow down”. This sounds really annoying, but the overly broad title is just clickbait.
iPad OS is largely dysfunctional in a myriad of other areas too. I like my iPad but the number of times Chrome or a simple app just freezes is getting out of hand. Also there is a bug where the iPad will freeze if I had a Bluetooth device connect while the device is locked. I think this got fixed in some recent update but it happened frequently for well over a year and it'll lock the iPad for 15-60 minutes at a time.
These issues are becoming more recurring. Meanwhile Apple is trying to sell me on some stupid intelligence that I do not need.
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).
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.
If you open the lid and connect screen in a short time. It sometimes end up showing every desktop in mission control as black square. And only way to fix it is disconnect and reconnect the screen again. The bug is there for so long and I already have the muscle memory to perform the sequence. How did they messed up such a basic function?
There is no way that apple employee did not hit the bug at all given the requirement to trigger the bug is so simple.
I 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...
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)
Software problems like we are seeing are not something that happen over night. They slowly appear until you can’t see them. It takes years of bad design and decisions to get what we have.
I see this throughout the industry and can’t help conclude the problem started about 5 years ago, and we thus we are now seeing the results of Covid and possibly WFO.
I don't think this has to do with Covid or WFH. It is more likely that Apple is focused on showing huge profit margins, at the expense of hiring qualified staff, due to a quarter by quarter focus, in a mature market. When one person leaves, they don't get backfilled. You can hide a lot of sins with the aggressive push from marketing and focusing on hardware performance. How do you measure software experience? How do you brag about it?
You are right that it has been a cumulative process, and the issues will continue to accumulate. But it has nothing to do with Covid or WFH. It started years before that.
I use Apple software and hardware all day every day. There was a patch ~13 years ago where things were really rough but I haven't noticed many issues over the past few years.
I 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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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
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.
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*
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.
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.
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.
Here's my personal canary in the coal mine that something must be fundamentally broken in Apple's software development process:
- on a recent macOS version, right click on the desktop, select 'change wallpaper' => the new settings panel opens
- click on 'Custom Color'
- now hold and drag around the 'color cursor' in the color selection circle for a few seconds
- stop dragging and notice how the color cursor continues jumping around erratically (it's impossible to actually select the exact color you want)
- same thing happens when using the linear slider below the color circle
This bug doesn't lurk deep in some obscure part of the settings panel, it's the only way to change the desktop background color. A QA specialist would stumble over this in 5 minutes of trying to break the app.
I made it a hobby to check this bug after each OS update, it's broken since the new settings panel was introduced in Ventura. As a good citizen I also wrote a Feedback Assistent ticket (FB13805690 - 21-May-2024) with attached screen recordings and all, but of course I could just as well have sent that report into a black hole :)
On the most recent episode of ATP podcast, an anonymous person wrote in to say that when they worked at Apple until ~2013, there was effectively no QA team on macOS.
Granted that was over a decade ago, and "no QA team" doesn't mean no testing, but given the numerous bugs in macOS today, and that they almost never get fixed, I'm not surprised.
(FWIW, I do not experience this bug you mentioned)
If you look at the macOS feature history, it's pretty clear that the bulk of the team got shifted to iPhone in 2007 and never really recovered. The widely acknowledged Snow Leopard high water mark happened shortly after.
To be fair, Apple can still pull off the occasional amazing feat of vertical integration -- HDR, APFS, keeping audio latency under control despite the relentless assault of apathy from all directions -- but they never had the same level of consistent drive forward, at least not until a year or two ago when the big push for AI integration started. Apple gets ragged on here, but I think their integration is actually some of the best. They were putting neural cores in chips back when that sort of thing got mocked, not lauded, and every step has been thoughtfully tied in rather than airdropped from a ChatGPT science fair project. But they never got good at building or deploying leading-edge models themselves; I hope they turn it around because this is important.
That may be unlikely. Mark Gurman reported recently for Bloomberg News that “people within Apple’s AI division now believe that a true modernized, conversational version of Siri won’t reach consumers until iOS 20 at best in 2027.”
That's a bummer to hear. They have the money to buy talent and they really ought to be able to pull this off inside of 2025. But if there's no will, there's no way.
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.
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.
The entire settings app rewrite is the canary of how Apple's software development process is broken, especially for the mac.
I mean ok, the old one was already a bit overloaded and unwieldy, so a redesign was probably overdue and Ill give them the benefit of the doubt here but WTF is with the 1-2 second delay when switching between the menus in there? Are they doing web requests upon opening every settings page or what? This is real amateur hour.
I use an iPhone 13 mini, and I experience no delays within the settings app.
I was talking about the settings app in macOS.
Oh, I see. There is a slight delay (closer to 1 second or less) switching menus inside of Settings on my M3 Air.
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).
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.
> - stop dragging and notice how the color cursor continues jumping around erratically (it's impossible to actually select the exact color you want)
Tried dragging color cursor for 30 seconds+, no issues at all. MacOS 15.3.1 (24D70) on 16" M2 Max.
Ah now it's getting interesting :) So far I could reproduce the issue across several machines, also on new demo machines at the Apple booth of electronic discounters - so I don't think it's something about my configuration, but maybe it has something todo with how I'm using the trackpad (but I'm just sliding around with the right-hand pointer finger).
PS: the mystery might be solved => that buggy 'Custom Colour' UI item only shows up under specific circumstances, which for my specific usage pattern is 'obvious' - see my sister comment for details.
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!
What is this "Custom Color"? I clicked the "+" icon to open the color picker and did as described and I cannot reproduce this.
Sequoia 15.3.1 (24D70)
Interesting, yeah. It doesn't happen when adding a new color to the "Colours" row at the bottom even though this happens with the same color selection UI widget.
I see this Custom Colour thingie at the top-right corner of the Wallpaper section, above a "Show on all Spaces" checkbox and left of a fairly big representation of the current desktop background.
After a bit of tinkering: this Custom Colour element is replaced with something else depending on the current background mode. If you selected a wallpaper image, it shows the name of the wallpaper. If you select a predefined colour, it shows the name of the color. When adding a custom colour, it will show an interactive element which allows to change the color in place, and that shows the buggy behaviour for me.
Ok, this at least explains why other people don't stumble over this as an obvious bug, I assumed it would be obvious, because the first thing I always do on a new Mac is to customize the background color by right-clicking the desktop, and since that moment I have that buggy Custom Colour element sitting there.
Not a great UX either way though.
PS: ...and now after adding a new custom color via the to bottom row of predefined colors, the bug in the 'Custom Colour' widget is gone and nobody will believe me it was ever there. Great :D
PPS: nope, it's coming back after going through the 'desktop => right-click => change wallpaper...' route again, phew.
I tried it, and apparently if you click if from the "+" button, it works totally okay for this popup and subsequent opening of that custom color popup, BUT, if you close the settings, open them again and press the "Custom Colour" colour directly, you will enter the bugged one.
Just checked this in 15.4 Beta (24E5206s) on this 2023 M3 Max and it doesn't happen for me.
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.
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.
Nothing wrong with the "creating products that prioritize user experience over features" - or more accurately what Jobs said: create products that start with the user experience and the user’s needs first and then work your way to the tech (as far as I remember)
The opposite approach is starting with some tech and then trying to find a use for it, e.g. folding phones, second 1/2 screen on laptop, etc, instead of trying to actually create a usable, quality trackpad for instance.
The critique is still valid: Apple, for their software, seem to not have the same focus on quality as Jobs once insisted on. Their physical products are very much still top notch, and the products on the whole are still developed with this mindset as far as I’m concerned. It’s just the software quality that has taken a hit for some reason.
Can I ask what the fascination with the Apple trackpad is? My other daily driver is a Thinkpad and I actually vastly prefer using the smaller one on it. You're not flinging your wrist across the zipcode and the clicks are more tactile.
I can assure you that if you "went back to linux" you are the furthest thing from the target audience you can be.
Not to downplay your experience, but it is almost certainly not what Apple uses for user feedback.
I went back to Linux because I can at least decide when I'm ready for updates that changes my workflow. Neither Windows nor macOS gives me that experience. I wouldn't put Linux on a pedestral when it comes to UX/UI/design, but at least it doesn't rugpull me once a year (or more often with Windows) with forced updates.
As someone who cares deeply about UX that doesn't get in the way and allows professionals to do their work effectively, I'd be a hardcore Apple fanboy if the UX was actually good for that.
I’m not sure where you saw forced updates. I’m usually 2 to 3 major versions of macOS behind.
> I’m not sure where you saw forced updates. I’m usually 2 to 3 major versions of macOS behind.
I remember being nagged about upgrading to the latest OS version at least once a day if not more often. Opening my wife's laptop just now, I saw another one of those notifications, begging to update where the only options were "Restart" or "Later".
This is one of my least favorite aspects of modern UI design practices, the user doesn't have any agency. Everything's a choice between "Yes" and "ask again later".
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.
Apple's behavior makes sense when you realize that Apple caters to potential customers more than current ones. Their products are made to demo well to prospective customers. Every Apple product owner/user is inadvertently doing sales demos to onlookers.
I've got a Polestar 2. The map is shown inside the dashboard. The calls appear on the centre display.
I think it's a limitation of the vehicle's implementation.
It is not, Android Auto still shows me the map while there is an incoming call, which CarPlay doesn't, on the same car. CarPlay's "incoming call" widget/popup blocks the entire view, I think Android Auto just displays something in a corner or something.
What Linux CarPlay alternative do you use?
I don't, I still use my horrible iPhone 12 Mini for CarPlay. Waiting for it to either get too old to get updates, or for it to break before I move back to Android, I guess.
Personal pet peeve: CarPlay not pausing what you are playing when you hit the infotainment power button is really dumb.
That's not been my experience. If I hit power off on my volume knob, it's effectively pause to CarPlay. Does your car treat it more like mute?
Yeah both cars where I have had it treat it as mute. Maybe a setting I guess.
It pauses for me when I hit the mute switch though. I pretty much never power it off.
> around 2016 I had to move back to Linux because the software experience and the user experience is just too poor, outright buggy and changes all the time.
Honestly, I have difficulty believing someone could find these kinds of issues to be less of a problem on Linux than on Mac
If you haven't tried out the various Linux desktop environments for a long try, give it a try yourself. I'm having a way more stable experience with Gnome than I ever had with Windows or macOS the last decade or so, especially when I can chose when I want to upgrade, and I don't get nagged about it once a day.
But before that, I'd agree with you, it would have be stupid to prefer anything Linux over OSX or Windows, back when they were rock-solid. But today?
The CarPlay "limitation" is likely to be a road safety/liability issue.
Yes, I agree. If I'm navigating, then an incoming call shouldn't block the entire screen with the avatar of who is calling, the map has to remain visible at all times. If even one person from Apple would have tested the scenario of "I'm navigating with a map and someone calls me", they'd see how dangerous their current implementation is.
I have had to reject/hang up so many calls because someone calls exactly when I'm trying to figure out where to go by looking at the map. In my mind, what Apple is currently doing should be outright illegal.
Anecdotally, Apple Music has deteriorated exponentially for me. iTunes was such a stable, usable piece of software, but I can't get reliable use out of Apple Music for the life of me. It _feels_ like a shoddy Electron app. But that's not fair to the actual Electron (or similar) apps that actually work. For all its many design and product flaws, Spotify actually works.
I love that I had to install a shim service [0] with the same ID as Apple Music's since it can't otherwise be turned off, which was causing Apple Music to appear every time I pressed a media key but had no media playing.
That's the kind of shiesty KPI-boosting tactic I'd expect from Windows, not a machine I paid almost $4000 for. Apple comes installed with a ton of irremovable bloatware and somehow gets a pass.
[0] https://lowtechguys.com/musicdecoy/
They’ve been doing that bullshit with the media keys since it was still itunes
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!).
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.
> 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.
If Spotify doesnt work they are dead in the water. If Apple Music doesnt work, thats a rounding error.
The podcast app is the same shoddy-ness. Re-arranging things in the queue is such a PIA.
podcast app is the worst, I can never find what I'm looking for
> I can never find what I'm looking for
Overcast might be the app for you. No affiliation, I just like it.
Overcast is definitely the least worst of the iOS podcast apps but it does have its own set of UI/UX annoyances.
Another vote for Overcast.
have you tried their "books"? you cannot search by almost anything! Extra-strangely, selecting book language is macos-only feature! Does anyone even maintain it?
Apple Music, at least when I last used it, could not handle copying podcasts to my old iPod Video - this is now handled in Finder, as best as I can tell. It will copy the tracks, but it doesn't properly flag them as podcasts so if I switch to another track and then go back to the podcast it does not remember my location.
Never had that problem with iTunes.
If you set your podcasts as AudioBooks and copy them in THAT area, it remembers where you were, at least. But you have to play them through Books.
I never liked iTunes. I always found it horrible and difficult to find my way around. Apple Music makes me miss those days.
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.
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.
I use Apple Music on my Windows work computer and it's pretty good. I still have iTunes on my home Windows PC (I use it for ripping CDs) and it takes much longer to start.
> I use it for ripping CDs
may I introduce you to cyanrip or EAC? https://github.com/cyanreg/cyanrip https://www.exactaudiocopy.de/en/index.php/resources/downloa...
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..
I think it has more to do with a gradual industry-wide race to the bottom in terms of quality. Reliability, attention to detail, correctness occupy a tiny fraction of the "budget" compared to security, slopping out features, and beating competition to market. I suspect that startup culture being the crucible where a large portion of engineers learned their chops and the massive amount of new blood in the industry who are primarily there for money are the biggest factors.
I concur. To add, I wonder how much of the “old guard” is still at Apple? Apple used to be perfectionistic when it came to software, even during the 1985-1996 interregnum when Steve Jobs was absent. Besides Steve Jobs, Apple also had people like Bruce Tognazzini and Don Norman who cared deeply about usability. When Apple purchased NeXT and built Mac OS X, Apple’s usability focus was married to reliable, stable infrastructure, culminating with Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which I believe was the pinnacle of the Mac experience. (Though I’m partial to the classic Mac OS from a UI point of view, Mac OS X had a better UX due to its stability.)
I suspect a lot of Apple’s decisions in the past decade regarding software is due to an increasing number of Apple employees who are not familiar with the philosophies of 1970s-era Xerox PARC, the classic Mac, NeXT, and Jobs-era Mac OS X. Granted, it’s possible to be too introspective, too focused on the past. Unfortunately Apple’s software is losing its perfectionistic qualities, which has long been the selling point of the Mac compared to Windows and Linux.
Linux seems like the opposite to me a slow marathon to achieve perfection. With pipewire, systemd and wayland there's less cruft than ever and you get the best out-of-the-box experience since it's inception.
Woah now, saying something positive about systemd will bring a bunch of crusty greybeards out of the woodwork who want their Linux to be as close to BSD4.4 as possible.
Jokes aside, I'm in agreement. Audio was still slightly buggy for me using a Elgato XLR USB interface, but it consistently worked with annoying workarounds. Linux is in a very good place for even normal consumers these days, I'm hoping Valve ends up making SteamOS a generalized gaming platform that will pull more market share away from Windows in that specific niche. I'm so ready.
> a gradual industry-wide race to the bottom in terms of quality
I'm going to disagree. This is a false nostalgia.
15 years ago the market for consumer laptops that were not MacBooks straight up sucked. If you walk into a Best Buy today, almost any laptop you buy is going to blow any laptop from back then out of the water in terms of build quality. And credit where it's due, in no small part it came from playing catch up with Apple.
I am not referring to hardware. Hardware quality has largely improved, software quality has largely gotten worse.
I 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.
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.
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.
Amazing. The mental peace you've gained this way probably vastly outweighs the initial investment and missing out on the newest "features".
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.
My archlinux has moved from a bunch of scripts to just a window manager with Chrome. At the end of the day, you realize you don't really need all these gadgets and notifications but just a terminal and a browser.
Yup, my core applications are Kitty, Vim, coreutils, Firefox, and pcmanfm.
It's ironic you would pay a premium when the biggest reason for continued "new features" is to justify an SaaS sales model.
Excel '98 probably covers 95% of users use cases. But here we are.
This has to be related to the curse of "can it scale?" that our industry is in love with. I think it is safe to say that MS Access and related programs were probably already covering a large majority of use cases back when they existed. On modern machines, they could probably cover larger companies better than folks want to admit.
Will they work for the largest companies out there? Of course not. This despite the fact that they probably did help get those companies off the ground.
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.
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.
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}.
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.
That, and the effects of allowing "new feature demos" at WWDC. The various groups MUST come up with something that demos well. "See how easily I can...", and now the slightest breath does something dramatic, and usually wrong.
Oh, there is a gazillion of bugs and broken fundamentals to justify the existence of those thousands for a long while!
for a long time, iDevices could not copy&paste. locking to one of those versions with no new features would be horrendous. not all new features are bad or trivial.
Edit: pedant patrol
Copy paste was added to like, iPhone OS 3.
It is technically incorrect to say that iOS could not copy paste at any point, as the copy paste feature was present in the first version of the software called "iOS".
To use a version of iPhone OS that can't copy or paste, you'd have to use the original iPhone or the 3G (not 3GS!)
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.
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.
This is basically Debian.
You probably would, but that's the number one complaint about Debian: "Where is my fix of new shiny?"
My complaint isn't about new shiny, but new safe. Sandboxing apps on Linux is getting better but it still has a ways to go to catch up to macOS.
I'm talking about things like how a weather app shouldn't have access to the filesystem, or camera, or microphone, etc... A calculator shouldn't be able to see my location or even what networks I'm connected to.
> 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!
What? iOS without new features? When? Every release since 1.0 had a big splashy feature
Initially it was building out the basic feature set. Now it seems every time they add a new swipe or icon it breaks my mental model of how my phone works without adding something that I needed.
Apple is caught by their own success: the iPhone is mammoth hit but they've reached the end of its growth. So they've got a whole organization built around making it more compelling to grow the sales, but they should really switch gears: put the iPhone into maintenance mode and invent something completely new. Easy to say, hard to do, trillions on the table if they pull it off.
It seems to me like the iPad in particular has the worst software quality. Not that iOS on the iPhone is perfect, but it really seems like their workflow is to build for the phone first, then hammer it in place to work on the iPad as an afterthought.
There's so much basic stuff that doesn't work, like if you pull out the keyboard into its split mode, it constantly covers the text input that you're typing in - even in Apple's own apps. The split keyboard may as well not exist for how impossible it is to use.
But there's also just been a lot of usability issues seeping into iOS over time in general. Like those text effects they added in the latest iOS update that constantly force their way onto my messages when I don't want them. And more recently, the "recent emojis" tab doesn't update to my recently used emojis. I think it's been stuck on whatever were my recent emojis were when I did the last iOS update.
I just don't understand why Apple UI designers hate scroll bars with such a passion.
It's probably just me, but I feel that many apps on Apple follows the same pattern. For example checkout and compare the scroll bar experience on ChatGPT website (Chrome) between a Mac-book and a Windows laptop.
Yeah annoys me too.
You can turn them back on everywhere in Settings -> Appearance -> Show scroll bars always.
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.
Yeah that was already done. But it doesn't help too much. They kinda still fade in and out sometimes -- but I can't get a proof right now. In addition, they are still too narrow.
OK at least VSCode still does this ->
- Turned on "Always show Scrollbar" in MacOS setting
- Turned on "visible" in VSCode for vertical scrollbars
Check the explorer window -> scrollbar doesn't show up unless your mouse somehow touches the area.
But this is probably a VSCode thing though.
I mean as a user I haven’t thought about a scroll bar in years. The way the OS works with the hardware for touchpad usage means it’s just not a big deal.
Even when I used a mouse on a Mac desktop it still never bothered me. Looks cleaner, feels sleeker and doesn’t impact functionality.
I don't know, but missing scrollbars is very frustrating in some cases. I literally missed some configurations because of that when I first used a Mac. There was a configuration window that needed some scrolling to show all options, but I missed that because there is no scroll bars.
Yeah but I agree that everyone has their own flavors. I personally prefer the Windows 2000 ones...I'm old. Never liked the flat ones, looks soulless.
You missed an indication that you need to scroll, that's certainly bad design, though fixing it doesn't require the full fat bar (not that I'd object to a proper global setting for users who like that!).
(flatness is a universal cancer, though, even compared to the ugliness of the old Win)
I recently got an M4 Mac Mini which is an amazing piece of hardware. (When it came in the mail I couldn't believe it could fit in the small box it was in!)
My wife was angry about the large volume of advertising, both on web sites and on the desktop, on the machine out of the box. Part of it was needing an adblocker, which meant switching to Firefox, because installing an adblocker on Safari requires an Apple account which my wife doesn't have and wouldn't want to make.
I was amused that, by default, I got numerous nags in the form of 1999 retreads of the confirm dialog from the 1984 original mac. I'd contrast that to Microsoft's nags which look like a modern HTML-inspired interface [1].
Apple's model of "local account but you get nagged into attaching an Apple account so you can use the store and other services" is inferior, in my mind, to Microsoft's model where you can use use your Microsoft account to log into the desktop and your XBOX and all the services that Microsoft has to offer. I know a lot of people don't like it, but since Microsoft introduced it I've had no trouble authenticating into SMB shares in home and SMB environments.
[1] I won't apologize for thinking that's an advance, particularly since HTML/CSS has been adding things like Flexbox and Grid which are exactly what the doctor ordered for application development.
You don't need an Apple account to install an adblocker. You just install it from here https://adguard.com/en/adguard-mac/overview.html
And you don't have to pay for it, just close the ask.
Do you need a blocker if you run PiHole?
It seems to do the job for the house very nicely.
Probably not. I don't own one as I'm lazy. I actually paid for AdGuard and use it on my iPhone and iPad. It comes with a mini PiHole implementation built in.
Oh wow. Thanks for this.
I just run Pihole in a container, and a spare one is on a NAS. I’ve learned the hard way, losing DNS is a shit show and a spare server saves you.
Added complexity has its downsides.
Thanks, I'll give it try!
> 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.
You can log into your Mac and your AppleTV and your iPhone and your iPad and all the services Apple has to offer with your Apple account. How is Microsoft offering the same thing any better?
You can't log into your Mac with your Apple account; you still need a local account created first, and it has its own login and password separate from the Apple ID associated with it (if any).
I would bet that the reason for the drop in quality is the focus on delivering features in order to secure promotions and ongoing positive performance reviews.
Yep. A lot of software companies are suffering from this short-term-ism that results in incentive structures that value things that move the stock price rather than make for a strong long term company.
It may eventually blow up in faces, but a lot of the people making money on it today won't be around to see it.
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.
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.
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
Yep... same with google...
Make old chat system better (or just maintain it?)... meh boring...
Make new google chat.. talk.. alo.. i mean hangouts? Yep, promotions, bonuses!
I mean, it's not always like that, at Google it always depended on the business unit.
To be honest, I think it's sort of simplistic to try to characterize a 185k person company and its culture with this sort of lack of nuance, whether it's Google, Apple, or anywhere else.
I got promoted 7 times (from SWE 3 all the way to VP of Engineering, so I ended up in the top 0.01% or something crazy by level) during my time there, and pretty much only made things better, did migrations, etc.
I did build some new stuff, but I don't believe they were ever a meaningful part of a promo packet. All my promo packets were about fixing things or making existing things better, and the impact of doing so on developer productivity, efficiency, etc.
> and pretty much only made things better, did migrations, etc.
Maybe you are right.
From the outside however, the situation looks very different:
- reader? destroyed
- Google+? Forced upon us and then destroyed as soon as communities started to form.
- Search? Hasn't been working correctly since around the time Google+ launched. At some point it became so bad I used DDG and Bing out if spite. The difference was that small.
(and before anyone says "it is impossible to create or run a working search engine in 2025": Marginalia and Kagi both work very much better than Google these days, although Marginalia admittedly only in certain niches.)
Picasa? Replaced with a w3b service.
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”
> For years, many of us have willingly paid the "Apple tax", the premium price for Apple products justified by superior user experience, design, and ecosystem integration. But if software quality continues to decline, this value proposition becomes increasingly difficult to defend.
Just today I was thinking how the best hardware gets crippled by software that has become as shitty as Microsoft's.
By now it has become incredible that “Doesn't Suck” was once motto and slogan for the user experience on Apple devices.
> as shitty as Microsoft's.
If I ever feel down on the Mac, I can go to a PC and try make a pdf or view one. Clunky AF.
Mac software might be at a low-point, but it hasn’t burnt down yet.
> If I ever feel down on the Mac, I can go to a PC and try make a pdf or view one.
After a restart (which happens a lot because the machine crashes a lot[0]), my Windows 10 box won't be "ready for use" for a good 10 minutes. I've seen it take 30 minutes. I've done macOS updates that have taken less time.
Oh and macOS doesn't randomly reboot to apply updates. Still haven't found a way to prevent Windows from doing that.
[0] I suspect the 3080 but it frequently crashes when idle on the desktop which shouldn't be stressing anything GPU-wise.
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.
Is this a real problem, or a perceived problem?
I know people like to complain about Apple's software quality - but is this actually an issue - or just the popular thing to say?
It’s not worse than Microsoft.
But somehow, Microsoft and Apple are inferior to their previous selves.
New features and bug fixes, yes. But we seem to lose a lot. In terms of quality, performance and unfeatures.
I'm aware of UI inconsistencies, like this dated article below.
https://www.corbinstreehouse.com/blog/2021/10/macos-12-monte...
But was curious is are people having stability & reliability type of software quality problems.
I am. Many of my old launchd services don’t work anymore. Well they run, the job begins, but then it can’t write to its files. I have no clue how they borked the permissions but something is up. The script works when I run it myself. As far as I can tell the launchd process should run the script as me the user in terms of permissions. It manages to run the script but doesn’t write to file. I am at a loss and gave up on debugging those services for now.
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).
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.
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.
Using macOS since Tiger as daily driven. Never been worse. Needs a “Snow Leopard” year.
> Never been worse.
How so? Would you mind giving examples.
Note: I'm not disagreeing. Just curious what software quality issues you're having exactly.
> 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.
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.
MacOS has gone downhill like crazy indeed. On an M4, searching my safari history is super slow, searching for a password in the Passwords app is also really slow. I mean these are just lists. Apps steal focus all the time, Finder window column widths reset whenever they feel like, search in Mail sometimes just refuses to work. iCloud tab syncing? haha, not today, maybe next week again. You could probably write a dissertation on the new, new system preferences app.
I have 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.
In the current MacOS release, if I type Time Machine in the System Settings search box, it shows what I was looking for: "Show Time Machine status in the menu bar".
But if I click that, it shows the switch for the Keyboard Brightness menu bar control, and doesn't show anything about the Time Machine menu bar item!
Apple cannot figure out how to do a search in settings for the life of them. It's been broken on iOS basically since it was added. Do any googling about iOS settings search and you'll only find people talk about it to rant about how bad it is.
The 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.
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.
Rubbish. You Linux-only guys post this nonsense on any thread criticising competing OSs thinking the rest of us have no experience using them. I daily-drive older hardware (Xeon E5 with 16GB RAM and GTX 1080 ti), which is essentially all midtier is, and GNOME is a stuttery mess. It struggles to drive 4K. It's slow to load software, and what is available is often a UX mess (what have they got against menus?!). Discoverability is low. Disk access is slow. Tried BTRFS, ZFS and Ext4 - none of them make a difference. KDE is no better - how many modals or check boxes are needed for one option?
See, we can all pour scorn on other operating systems. The real problem lies in the expectations that people place upon these platforms. Despite my complaints, I actually enjoy using Linux on a desktop (laptops are another story). If I listened to a lot of you, my expectations would definitely not be met.
I use Linux, Apple OS and Windows.
A recent blog post in the Apple fanboy world posited that Apple has slow, non-user-adjustable animations that make the OS feel slow. That's basically why a user thinks KDE or Gnome is snappier. It has nothing to do with CPU architecture.
I still have an Intel Mac and it doesn't feel significantly slower than one with Apple silicon.
> KDE or Gnome is snappier.
Last time I installed Gnome I had to install an extension to remove the 150ms delay on alt-tabbing that is present even when animations are disabled. It became snappy after that.
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2741/remove-alttab-de...
As for KDE I did not find how to disable animations when using Wayland. I would be happy to know (while keeping Wayland).
(I still prefer using customizable OSS software over "we know better than you" closed source software)
Mojave made my Mac Mini mid-2015 without an SSD completely unusable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> Feature prioritization over optimization: Engineering resources appear focused on new capabilities rather than fixing existing performance problems;
People are keeping their phones longer they used to, which is obviously a problem for device makers. Therefore they must lean on new feature development too sell new phones. "Increased reliability and stability" is not a good consumer sales pitch
> "Increased reliability and stability" is not a good consumer sales pitch
It is when Apple is claimed to be a quality boutique shop.
I wouldn't call Apple's hardware as premium quality. Premium price yes, quality no - not since PowerPC times.
I was an owner of the original crackbook, have had a magic keyboard, magic mouse both fail shortly after warranty period, I can't count the number of power leads that have started fraying (thank goodness for USB C!).
Ass for iPhone screens - seem to be very breakable compared to other manufacturers.
> Ass for iPhone screens - seem to be very breakable compared to other manufacturers.
That one always seemed weird to me, some people break their screen, iPhone or otherwise, regularly, but I've never even scratched one.
I tried an iPhone for three months or so, ending a month ago, and I was really disappointed by the experience. I thought Apple was still a company that focused on UX, but it was eye-opening to see that they had lost their way.
There are four distinct ways to go back (swipe from the left/right side, press the X, press the left arrow, swipe down), whereas Android has one way that always goes back to the previous screen. The inability to set volumes separately, the fact that folders hold exactly 9 icons and leave the other 60% of the screen empty, the fact that a very commonly-used button (the back arrow) is at the hardest-to-reach part of the screen, all of that just made for a really frustrating experience.
Linus basically echoes all my gripes in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhew95wMmP8
After that, I bought a Nothing 2, and I love it. It's snappier than the iPhone, feels premium, and Android has stolen all of the good ideas iOS had and added more.
I went from using a series of Android phones, including a number of flagship phones and finally tried iPhone in 2018 after custom keyboards became available (no way I'd accept the built in back then).
At that point the cheapest iPhone option available outperformed every android phone I'd used at that point and I was sold.
Still think the software could need some love but at least it does not feel like my phone has to do a call to a lagging wev service to open the camera.
Yep, things weren't great 7 years ago.
I used Android for the better part of a decade, and once I switched to an iPhone I never really had any issues around not having a back button, considering the amount I hear complaining about it.
Basically every app lets you swipe from the left to go back. Occasionally you'll have a bottom sheet you can swipe back down to where it came from, but it's generally pretty intuitive. I can't think of many times I felt "stuck" and unable to go back.
It's not about getting stuck, as then that would be terrible. It's just about the thousand papercuts my experience was.
I forgot the biggest annoyance that ultimately made me abandon the experiment: the keyboard is ATROCIOUS. On Android, I just hit keys in the general vicinity of what I want, and it writes the right thing, every time. On iOS, with the exact same keyboard, it kept making mistake after mistake.
Both the stock keyboard and SwiftKey were terrible on iOS. I'd understand the stock keyboard being bad, whatever. I don't understand how SwiftKey can be great on one platform and horrible on the other.
Title should be something like “Apple Pencil Pro causes iPad to overheat and slow down”. This sounds really annoying, but the overly broad title is just clickbait.
iPad OS is largely dysfunctional in a myriad of other areas too. I like my iPad but the number of times Chrome or a simple app just freezes is getting out of hand. Also there is a bug where the iPad will freeze if I had a Bluetooth device connect while the device is locked. I think this got fixed in some recent update but it happened frequently for well over a year and it'll lock the iPad for 15-60 minutes at a time.
These issues are becoming more recurring. Meanwhile Apple is trying to sell me on some stupid intelligence that I do not need.
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).
When software is so bad that tactics “just throw more hardware inside” stops working.
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.
Window placement with multiple monitors is broken beyond belief. I am hoping someone from Apple is reading this thread.
If you open the lid and connect screen in a short time. It sometimes end up showing every desktop in mission control as black square. And only way to fix it is disconnect and reconnect the screen again. The bug is there for so long and I already have the muscle memory to perform the sequence. How did they messed up such a basic function?
There is no way that apple employee did not hit the bug at all given the requirement to trigger the bug is so simple.
Wait, wasn't AI supposed to beefmaxx all of their developers 5x??
Never wanted anything more than an iphone that runs android
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...
iPad 10th Gen doesn't even support the Apple Pencil Pro. Are they using any Apple Pencils at all?
Correct. Which is the point. The user complains that the problem is a software crisis when the software is fine on completely different hardware. That would suggest by elimination it's not a software problem, or is a software problem tied to particular hardware.
(incidentally they mostly use USB-C apple pencils and some clone ones when they lose them and the parents don't want to buy a genuine replacement one)
But are they using mentioned pencils?
Software problems like we are seeing are not something that happen over night. They slowly appear until you can’t see them. It takes years of bad design and decisions to get what we have.
I see this throughout the industry and can’t help conclude the problem started about 5 years ago, and we thus we are now seeing the results of Covid and possibly WFO.
I don't think this has to do with Covid or WFH. It is more likely that Apple is focused on showing huge profit margins, at the expense of hiring qualified staff, due to a quarter by quarter focus, in a mature market. When one person leaves, they don't get backfilled. You can hide a lot of sins with the aggressive push from marketing and focusing on hardware performance. How do you measure software experience? How do you brag about it?
You are right that it has been a cumulative process, and the issues will continue to accumulate. But it has nothing to do with Covid or WFH. It started years before that.
Does he mean that the software worked for three months after the hardware swap?
I use Apple software and hardware all day every day. There was a patch ~13 years ago where things were really rough but I haven't noticed many issues over the past few years.
I 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.
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.
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.
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."
Antidotal rage bait with zero supporting facts. Jump on the bandwagon!
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.
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.
Huh let me guess: it is Apple Intelligence causing it
Now while it is true that some aspect of the Apple experience suck, my experience is that Windows and Linux are also sucking more (Linux less than MS, but still, not helpful)
I definitely would want more transparency for Apple but this is one of the things they "no can do", they just fix it one day (usually) and off you go.
OP here, Apple Intelligence is not yet available in Italy. I don’t even want to imagine how my iPad will overheat with Apple “Intelligence”.
Ah I guess I misread, it is only available on Macs so far in the EU https://support.apple.com/en-bw/121115
Still, I think maybe it could be some related service running on the background
Mail on iOS doesn’t even have push any more, the new Photos app is garbage, Music randomly spews “content not available” errors and works remarkably poorly with mobile data for a mobile app, watchOS is so chock-full of bugs and glitches that just go unfixed major version after major version etc.
It’s pretty bad. Somehow most other software is even worse. Genuinely impressive at this point.
I would trade push in iOS Mail for the standard rules (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mail/mlhlp1017/mac) available in the desktop client since the past 20 years. Can't believe it is still not implemented.
but the hardware premium is kinda real... i have been using my macbook air 11 daily for 10 years (I am writing this comment on it), and it works flawlessly. somehow i don't think other brands are so well made, or they weren't so well made 10 years ago.
Yes but... but... Did you update it to the latest version of Mac OS (Sequoia) with all the security patches via official Apple channels ?
No you did not.
I don't think you can update any 10-year-old windows computer to the latest version of windows (11) with all security patches via official microsoft channels.
(Also, lol @ "via official Apple channels", you're aware Open Core Legacy Patcher is a thing and have hedged against people mentioning it.)
What are you comparing to?
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
I mean, there's an official way of installing without TPM, I'm pretty sure I can get Windows 11 on some pretty old hardware
https://time.com/3264528/best-laptop-under-500/ This is a 2014 article, for a Budget/Mid Laptop, with a compatible processor and double the minimum RAM
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/discussions/windows11/he... Post marked as solution talks about installing W11 on a 10 Y/O Thinkpad
I consider the WinBootMate thing suggested in your second link to be similar to OCLP. Third party solutions to enable installing on hardware the vendor doesn't want you installing it on.
Did you even notice that the link marked as solution is a third party software vendor?????? They charge money for that solution.
I actually didn't, but I still think the point stands
https://www.techpowerup.com/329691/microsoft-loosens-windows...
Microsoft does let's you bypass it (Regardless of them putting up a disclaimer) so the example stands, you can do it hardware and software wise without losing updates or security*
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-on-de...
* I think you only really lose some performance on cryptographic operations and tranparent encryption
The Microsoft support page you linked says that it's unsupported.
I don't know what point you're trying to make here, but it's falling flat.
Wow, how dare you omit that Windows 11 24H2 IoT LTSC exists.
/s
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
Lack of focus.
I want UNIX not emojis.
Agreed; Apple's software quality is rapidly approaching unacceptability.
I'm in a regular video call friend group, every day we call and chat for a bit. A few days ago we "officially" decided to just call in Discord instead of Facetime. Discord's mobile app has its own set of issues, for sure, but we would regularly hit an issue with Facetime where especially as people join and leave the call, other peoples' microphones would become shadow muted; it would look like its sending audio from their end, but no one else could hear them. For non-video participants, this could mean minutes of not being heard before realizing the issue, leaving the call, and re-joining, which fixes things.
Also Facetime related: If you use your iPhone as a continuity camera for your Mac, if you get a Facetime call while your iPhone and Mac are close to each other, you cannot answer the call on your iPhone. If you think about the implications of that, it sounds crazy; like "there's no way that got through testing", but its true. Your iPhone displays an ungrokable error message that took me, a tech guy, several Googles to understand what was going on. The only option in this error message is "Disconnect". You click that, and you're taken back to the home screen. If the other person has not disconnected from the Facetime call, you can manually launch the Facetime app and join the call from there. But if they've left it, you just missed the call, and it does this Every Single Time. I had to turn off Continuity Camera. Its crazy!
That's just the latest ones; the list of issues is really quite endless, and it only gets longer the more of Apple's services you decide to inflict upon yourself.
> Agreed; Apple's software quality is rapidly approaching unacceptability.
But since sales go brrrrr and so does the stock, why should they care?
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.
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.
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