- 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 :)
BTW I have found a workaround using BetterDisplay and an EDID override (to more closely match what the monitor is actually telling macOS).
Related bug: macOS defaults to variable refresh rate when available instead of remembering my choice of 144hz. This is confounded by my hub (Caldigit TS3 Plus), which has trouble with variable refresh rates that result in a black screen.
The cherry on top: either I use a HDMI cable and deal with BetterDisplay forcing RGB to fix YCbCr, or a black screen when using DP through my hub due to the above bug.
Sometimes I wish Apple would get broken up just so macOS could have a chance at getting more love.
Example: iCloud Photos syncing is complete crap on macOS. If it has synced recently it’s not going to do it again. So you sit there like an idiot waiting 10 minutes for a photo you just took on your phone e to show up. When a pull to refresh or refresh button would have fixed it.
https://www.anker.com/products/a8317?variant=42329259475094&...
Does your adapter work at 120Hz without updating the firmware? If it does, does it support HDCP?
Yeah I had to flash the firmware on the Anker dongle, following this guide: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/dp-usb-c-thunderbolt-to...
I just tried streaming 4K through the Apple TV app on my M1 Macbook Pro and no issues, so I'm assuming HDCP works.
As much as I like the integration between the phone and macOS I like the idea of desktop Mac getting more love.
I cannot get osx to actually output at 1080p, all it does is output at 4k and scale the result.
The downscaling in the projector adds input lag and just drives me crazy. I really wish they'd just let you control these things rather than poorly guessing.
I didn't know about better display, I guess I should try it and see if it can fix this problem.
FWIW, here's the hacked script[0] which only keeps the EDID data patching part. Be warned it's very hacky with the base64 EDID to be patched hard-coded in line 8 of the script. It prints out the patched EDID base64 which should be entered back into BetterDisplay (which is also where you can get the unpatched base64 EDID).
[0] https://gist.github.com/karmakaze/f795171a6a795491e754c3d092...
BetterDisplay provided a workaround, but it needs to be selected every time the monitor is hooked up.
(I guess that's normal for Apple stuff nowadays - when I hook up my ipad to my projector, I need to tell it every single time not to use the audio output of the projector, but keep using the bluetooth speaker.)
Also extra fun is guaranteed if one end of the video cable is encoding with e.g. BT.601 primaries, while the other end is decoding as e.g. BT.709, or vice versa.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
It was the poor non-crisp pixels that led me to even knowing there were even RGB/YPbPr modes.
Either way macOS has no trouble with my 27” 2560x1440 Asus and Alienware monitors. Both connect with 10bit RGB no problem, at least over USB-C and DisplayPort (haven’t tried HDMI).
2560x1440 is a strong indicator of a monitor, but 4k over HDMI tends to get detected as a TV
also - it's such a bummer that they have decided to shit the bed so hard on software at a moment when their hardware lineup is arguably at its pinnacle. like, the hardware has been firing on all cylinders since M1 but the software degradation is making it less and less pleasant to use.
I'm not saying this is what happens. But it's scarily plausible and it really shouldn't be.
I’m sure the new UI piled on top doesn’t help, but as a consolation, the core software is shit too.
Chrome removed ublock origin for me today and I thought to myself why am I even on this OS anymore? What’s keeping me here? Decided to use the outrage over that to just make a clean break from Windows too.
I installed Ubuntu tonight, but this time I’m sticking with it. It already feels so good to have the software behave in a way that makes sense and isn’t some dark pattern meant to harm me and extract value somehow from me.
All non-core software is provided by Flathub (through the Discover app) and Brew (for cli apps). Both have worked flawlessly for me as well.
Ubuntu pushing snaps like MS was the last straw.
Dude... Mint, Arch / Manjaro, Void, even Alpine is better. Plenty of good and very lean+mean options out there.
Ubuntu is the Windows of the Linux world. Has been for several years now.
Try looking up what Canonical did and still does with the Snap store.
An example: new PowerToys https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/
The FancyZones "window snap" UI takes upwards of half a second to activate when dragging a window and the Zone Editor is at around 5s. All in all it is only very slightly less buggy than 3rd party tiling WMs like komorebic.
The PowerToysRun utility input is extremely variable, takes between 1 and 20(!) seconds. A lot of the plugins shipped with it simply don't work or have no suggestions/hints once you enter their prefix. The search relies on WindowsSearch, which is about 500x slower than https://github.com/sharkdp/fd and has not improved since Win7. Who cares, nobody ever searches for files, right? As a whole, PTRun is simply worse than https://github.com/Flow-Launcher/Flow.Launcher which uses the same UI kit as far as I can see. WTF?
There's another app that does this in the registry I think, but I keep forgetting the name of it.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/ctr...
It's the first thing I download whenever I'm setting up a new Windows machine.
Go have a tour on Github for the endless collection of issues, some of them 5 years old, when Project Reunion was announced.
Unfortunately, to stay on top Apple doesn't have to do well for the customer. They only have to do better than wintel/android machines.
So far, I am not willing to ship anything in SwiftUI. I don't think it's up to the task.
I know that SwiftUI has some native wrappers, like maps, but the way that SwiftUI works, is so radically different from UIKit, that I think mixing them is problematic.
Open Activity Monitor, and type in System Settings into the search. Then open the Settings app and press the down arrow key through all of the menus. You'll notice that each one of them appears as their own line item in Activity Monitor until you quit Settings, and if you keep going up and down through the menus, it'll (probably) get slower and slower; it seems like there's a memory leak or something going on there, and my hunch is that each old settings menu was thinly wrapped in a SwiftUI view and gets launched as soon as you click its nav item.
So is Swift just too crappy for this kind of UI, that accesses low level system stuff? or are the devs just incompetent? Who knows…
I think Apple has decent QA for low level stuff (remember how they quietly converted every iphone to APFS and back just to test that it will work later) but bad QA for final GUI.
Most of cocoa/objc stuff was written long ago and back when QA was better. If this was cocoa and objective c today it would be equally buggy.
True, imo.
> But even that doesn't matter > Most of cocoa/objc stuff was written long ago and back when QA was better. If this was cocoa and objective c today it would be equally buggy.
I don't think I agree about this entirely. Although you can write unperformant code in any language and framework, SwiftUI is a different world of heavy abstraction. Writing a list view in AppKit using the documentation available allows for and encourages much more deliberate implementation in such a way that it'll be an almost night and day difference compared to the likely NavigationSplitView they're using in Settings. It's an inverse relationship with performance that SwiftUI takes; efficiency of piecing together the high level details first, and little to no control or clarity on how you'd optimize for performance.
My hunch is that with Settings, they're using a NavigationView or NavigationSplitView and not letting each view be recreated on selection, so they're sticking around in memory. However, if they were recreating each pane on selection, it seems like the render of the view waits for some kind of I/O, maybe reading their .plist or interacting directly with a system level CLI, which is why there's a delay before the UI renders.
Another possibility is a combo of both, they're retaining the views in memory AND triggering I/O immediately on selection, so the reads and threads accumulate quickly without being released
At least some of them are actually web pages:
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-ma...
Just one anecdote, but some reports definitely get looked at.
I assume this would have landed them in hot waters with EU privacy regulators, so they were very keen to replicate the bug and then have me check if it no longer happened.
On the other hand, the "first screenshot fails to display screenshot preview and doesn't flash the screen" has been in iOS for 3 versions now. I've reported it thrice, and no one has given the tickets a second look, marked it DUPLICATE, or anything. And every time I mention it, at least 3-4 other people comment on also experiencing the bug, so I assume Apple must be pretty aware.
My suspicion is that there's a really gnarly race condition as the root cause, and they haven't been able to find it.
You will never get a response to tickets unless it is affecting a lot of people and they need more information e.g. crash reports.
They are all read/triaged though.
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)
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.
See my longer comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43249634
You felt a real sense of ownership to the thing that you worked on. You worked hard and fixed bugs because it felt like it mattered, because you thought about how e.g. your mom would end up using the product, and also Steve Jobs would see it, so it had to be great. Also, teams were small. Something would involve only 1-2 people, and then we would look over at Redmond and they'd have dozens of people working on the same thing. The need-to-know secrecy was not just for PR value; it helped keep circles of communication tight, cutting out a lot of noise, so you could just focus. The organization was stable (and relatively flat, around 5 levels from junior engineer to SJ). I think in my 9 years or so there, there were no major reorgs. Avie phased himself out and retired, and Bertrand moved up. The only major disruption was when the iPhone project happened.
Release cycles were annual. Throughout most of the release cycle, it was pretty free up to each team and engineer to decide what to work on and how to prioritize it. Near the end of a release, it would get more and more strict on what you were allowed to change, up to the point where Bertrand sometimes would even ask to see code diffs.
I don't really know what is going on over there now. They have moved to a more agile approach, with more frequent integration checkpoints. In theory this should be better, but I suspect there's less sense of ownership and more of a feeling of a software factory. But it's probably mostly to do with the fact that the systems are way more complex, both the tech and the org, with way more moving parts. Even the programming language itself (Swift) is a moving target. I know (from talking to friends) there's a lot more politics and career-building going on, the kind of corporate douchebaggery that would not have been tolerated under Steve Jobs. People are thinking about RSUs and their promotions, rather than the products.
Ultimately, I think it boils down to this observation by jwz at Netscape, that there's "two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company." Post-iPhone, Apple has filled up with the latter. A majority of the people at Apple now didn't work there under SJ, and the senior management who did experience that is now aging and retiring. At least from the outside, as a customer and end-user, it feels obvious that the founder-led product-obsessed culture is gone.
Edit: Repro-ed using the additional steps you mentioned below. As someone who handles external bug reports and writes them, it's so often the case that there are additional steps or a specific start state required, which both prevents reproducing the bug and narrows the affected user base.
* in safari private mode, open image picker
* switch to different app (e.g. go to WhatsApp to save a new image)
* go back to safari
the image picker can now no longer be spawned from that safari private tab, you'll have to open a new tab to re enable the image picker.
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.
If you try moving one of the icons anywhere, it snaps back to the top right corner right away.
I haven't found a fix. The only fix is moving the icons away from the Desktop into another folder using a Finder window.
Look at the state of Xcode, a tool that's fundamental to the iPhone's appeal. Every developer knows that this thing needs a massive rewrite. The word is that nobody within Apple even understands it thoroughly anymore, so it's way past time to strap it on and build a modern tool from the ground up that's maintainable, instead of slapping band-aids on Project Builder indefinitely. Come on, Apple, you can afford to throw resources at this for a year and just get it DONE.
Meanwhile, Apple is letting open, "urgent" QA personnel requisitions sit unfilled for YEARS. We can all see the results.
Data-point of one, but: the new Settings panel is very much appreciated by the non-technical users I support, because it approximates the iPhone settings panel they're accustomed to. Personally, I hate it, but I also like that my colleagues are better able to discover and make changes for themselves. I figure learning new tech is a core part of my job description (but not theirs), so my frustration counts for less than their comfort, so I suck it up.
Xcode, however? I completely agree with you there.
Sequoia 15.3.1 (24D70)
It seems the difference is that with the "custom color" button, Settings applies the colour directly to the background, whereas the plus button at the bottom only applies it when you're done. Applying it directly seems to be computationally expensive (ass various elements of the UI need to figure out whether to render their text in black or white, depending on the colour - would be my guess at least).
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.
In a way it's a perfect little example of how a bug can seem obscure to some (most) users/developers but seem glaring and unacceptable to a few (the few who happen to use the relevant feature a lot).
[1]: http://euclid.psych.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/colorpick.html
Yes, but code reviewers signed off on it, our unit tests have 100% code coverage and they all passed. It must be okay.
now reopen the wallpaper setting again, click on top right custom color and do this, somehow the behavior is different. Now it change the wallpaper color as you drag over the colors rather than mouseup. My guess is clicking on + button at the bottom is triggering the popup config to update on mouseup, while opening it fresh will configure it to trigger on update, until the + button is clicked.
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!
I feel like a lot of the Apple issues come from the fact they keep building on top of iCloud. It’s only very recently that people started trusting the sync.
It’s like MS, where anything built on top of sharepoint is going to be garbage.
The other big time sucks are C++ interop and dozens of micro-dependencies (react-native).
https://gally.net/temp/20250304macoswindowopeningposition.jp...
I understand your point, once you have absorbed the Apple logic it is reinforced continually and makes sense. But opening a dialog near the use interaction point is a very reasonable expectation.
For me, I’ve never noticed any logic to it, I just know I need to hunt for it.
I honestly have some work to do this month.
"Hey, let's rewrite the framework again and not do any regression testing or test against old implementations or see what happens with any codec that is not exactly what we are expecting for any reason." - Airplay devs, every year.
EDIT: can repro. But it's very important to note: you need to have a color selected already. So select a color with the + sign, close the app, open it, top right click custom color, and then the bug appears, although not like you describe: the color selection is easy, it jumps around for 20ms during dragging. If this is what we call "low quality" I'm happy to stay on Mac.
Might be a reason why it wasn't fixed if you didn't include that vital step in your repro.
After initial custom color selection by clicking on the "+" (which works fine) and then reopening the Window to click "Custom Color" and then selecting the color again... it doesn't just jump for 20ms - it goes into full on psychotic flash jump behavior and basically continues to do so hands-off for 5 entire seconds before it stops at a random color.
There is 2 options now:
1) nobody has ever tested this workflow at Apple, automated or not.
2) it was tested and discovered but then pushed into the backlog as non-priority. Here the question arises - for how long?
The bug probably generates zero lost dollars so nobody at Apple cares anymore. THIS is what used to be different.
Tried dragging color cursor for 30 seconds+, no issues at all. MacOS 15.3.1 (24D70) on 16" M2 Max.
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.
Reminds me of the butterfly keyboard issue of the 2016-2019” model year MBs.
If your warranty is still active could try to get the trackpad replaced.
Take basic functionality - a phone app (calling). After certain audio sessions use (calling via WhatsApp) I can’t make regular calls over cellular - the UI app immediately cancels the call. Only reboot helps.
Or notes - for many years/iOS versions, they lived with a bug where a text note may just become blank - and only restarting Notes app makes it visible again.
Or AppStore - if an app has to be updated (I have auto updates off) - and I press Update - it gets downloaded, installed - and then AppStore is back to showing “Update” button! If you just go to the app, it’s a new version. But if you press that “Update”, it will redo update from scratch.
Sometimes I’m so frustrated, and thinking of my options - it’s either move to Android, or go get hired at Apple with a mandate to fix bugs in various products… but knowing Apple secrecy culture/silos, it’s not going to work, and requires change in their hiring process/perf review/QA.
That's extremely serious because the call you're trying to make could be an emergency call. A bug like that would have top priority in the org I used to work in. If I'd had to guess it cancels the call because there's a crash in a process somewhere. Possibly because of audio handover between apps.
I'm triggered. How many times have you reached for the 'end call' button, but the other person ended the call a moment earlier than you, and as you press down the screen immediately flips to your "recent calls" screen and you call a random person straight away?
This is such a common and terrifying experience for me, and yet it's been the default UX on the Phone app since probably day 1.
and this is such an easy fix, just don't make components touchable for X milliseconds after they are visible, some value below average human reaction time.
this could of course get in the way of people quickly navigating via muscle memory, but there's a probably a threshold where it can prevent one without affecting the other.
https://medium.com/p/31773fe6bbd5
I consider it by far the most annoying bug in touch UI's today.
Solution: There must be a small interaction-ignoring delay instituted when any control has just moved to its final rendered location.
I’ve only ever noticed maybe like a few actually bothersome bugs in the however many years I’ve been using iPhones which is pretty impressive.
Anyway, hope they get it together. Performance and optimization are a very difficult and very thankless job that might not get you promoted the same way cool sexy feature work does. Such is corporate life I guess.
I face none of the issues on my Samsung S23 phone, which the parent commentator describes - no issues in phones calls (I make 4-5 calls daily, mix of WhatsApp & regular calls), no major issues in Google Keep (which I use 2-3 times daily, specially never of a note becoming "blank"), and again no major issues in the Google App Store or updates (which I use on an average once a week).
So maybe, the software quality varies by user experience rather than one platform being universally better.
As for all Apple software, I might use Preview or Numbers (spreadsheets) on occasion, and I'm forced to use Finder, which I hate. And Terminal works well. I avoid Safari.
Apple "PC" hardware is solid. I use third party apps though, little Apple software, there are better alternatives. I've used Android since the HTC Dream (I think it was the first Android phone in the USA) and have stuck with Android since, with few problems.
Edit: I thought the Apple Vision Pro would be interesting (I couldn't justify the expense) but I saw the value supposedly would be greatest for those fully bought into the integrated Apple app ecosystem and iCloud. I'm not the target user.
Same. I have two "deal-brakers" when it comes to notebooks: 1) it's got to sleep consistently and without problems when I close the lid. 2) it should be silent when I'm doing simple things or nothing at all.
I have never seen a Linux or Windows laptop that does these things well. Even Intel MacBooks would spin up the fans seemingly at random. I don't think I've ever heard the fan in my M1 MBP. I'm looking forward to the new M4 MBA to replace an older Windows 10 laptop, which spins up its fans all the time, and sometimes doesn't sleep, sucking the battery dry in the process.
AND I can use Linux, which is a dealbreaker for me as my favorite operating system.
Yes, arm and riscv are interesting. I will definitely test them in the next ten years if they still get better. For now, x86 is still the best platform for me.
Had to swap the WiFi module to get the power management to work properly.
Reminders too. For at least 5 years, creating multiple reminders in a certain order will not create multiple reminders, and will just append the text to the end of the first one. Surprise — hope you didn’t set any important reminders in that batch!
And the great thing about their standardization between iOS and macOS code means the exact same bugs exist in both versions. Yay.
Sometimes 3s will pass before I even see anything after I've already typed in my search term (I'm always searching for a local app btw - it's how I open apps).
It's like it waits on an http request for every keystroke.
Also, you used to be able to search for an app in any of the secondary languages you have in your settings. Which is great because apps have different names in different languages (Settings vs Configuración vs Réglages), so it would be annoying to have to remember which word to search based on which language is primary. For years it would show you multilingual results (e.g. you can search for "Settings" as long as English is one of your secondary iPhone languages yet "Configuración" or "Réglages" would still show up).
It was the sort of polish I came to expect from Apple. Well, that stopped working a couple years ago.
Those aren’t options, they’re fantasies. Like dreaming of suing out of existence a company that wronged you, or fixing the world by ruling it, or winning the lottery without playing.
Android isn’t perfect either, it’s a different set of frustrations. And why would Apple ever need to hire you for that specific task, do you really believe there aren’t engineers inside just as frustrated as we are?
The way I see it, the yearly release cycle is to blame. No one inside the company has time to do anything properly anymore. Features are announced and rushed every year, and we’re reaching the point where by the time something which was announced at a WWDC is out of beta, we’re preparing for the next one.
What these companies need to do is slow down and stop chasing every shiny thing. You know, like Apple used to do with macOS. Tim Cook needs to go.
I'm not saying nobody can be like Steve Jobs, but Steve Jobs was an anomaly when it comes to C-Levels, and even when it comes to management in general, at least from reading things like www.folkore.org and interviews with people who worked with him.
And I'm not even talking about talent or vision or whatever, it's just about saying no to pointless features that are there for someone's ego or so that someone can get a promotion.
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/02/26/testimony-on-external-pur...
I’m not saying anyone will be better than Tim Cook, I’m saying he’s actively bad. Will his successor be actively bad too? Maybe, but the sooner we find out, the better.
The general publics opinion of Apple is that they are golden and untouchable, the best tech company out there. The reality is much different.
So why isn't that happening?
- Because a lot of journalists are Apple fanbois
- The press publishers don't want to sour relationships with Apple (because of advertising deals)
- Publishing bad things about Apple would infuriate the many Apple fanbois among the readers, causing a shitstorm against the medium
The advertising deals with apple are not that lucrative, iirc.
So bad reviews are avoided to ensure the media gets the early review clicks.
Not "never", but it is indeed my observation that the press is much "nicer" in their reporting and much more "forgiving" to Apple than to other similar companies.
In some circles, this observation already has become a running gag when the pen pusher is again too impressed of some Apple marketing.
There is even a joke amongst Apple developers who all know that Apple’s claim of “don’t go to the press, it never helps” is a blatant lie as it’s the one thing that works.
Yes, you may implement a solution more efficiently by not overengineering it. But at some point constant seek to reduce "complexity" so that more features fit into sprint (funny how story point measure complexity, not time, but sprint is sized in both time and SP capacity) is bound to hit feature completeness. Once you cross over that metaphorical Rubicon it's game over - quality starts to slowly go downhill.
You will not notice it immediately. That edge case that was ignored may not surface for months or years. It may take several idiosyncrasies to line up for a feature to be declared FUBAR. At some point that technical debt does bite you back, but at that point the process (tm) has already optimized away most if not all opportunities for deep refactorings fixing previous rushes to deliver.
Furthermore, Sprint Planning/Refinement are just innocuous ceremonies whose only aim is to facilitate productive discussion between a Product Owner/Manager and an Implementation team as regards delivery timelines and priority ordering thereof. Done properly, it allows a pragmatic approach to achieving a predictable software delivery cadence via mutual compromise.
If the process turns into 'fit as many features into the sprint as possible' at the expense of Performance/Stability/Functionality or Technical Debt accumulation, you're really just doing the 'fast' version of Cheap/Fast/Good Waterfall Project Management.
I never buy products when they are first released. I prefer to wait at least 3-4 months so that production has had time to tweak all the settings and weed out the funky first component deliveries. Also the software devs will have fixed the worst bugs by then.
At many places where I've worked, the mentality is: "If that bug didn't block last year's release, then why would it block this year's release?" So it survives one release, it never gets fixed.
I don't see a connection between yearly release cycles and a broken notes application. They shouldn't be doing anything that is particularly affected by such changes and the problem they are trying to solve has been mostly solved for 40+ years now.
While it certainly applies to some things, there's a different, bigger issue happening as well.
My understanding is that Apple outsources loads of software not seen as "critical". I think that's the first place for them to look.
Some of this could be resolved by open sourcing their less important apps like Files, Notes or Home which barely ever get touched, yet are full of quirks and bugs. Those apps should be public examples of good SwiftUI coding.
Who is dealing in fantasies now, friend? :)
Apple's software really isn't in crisis. It's just very low quality relative to what people who've written software for a living know to be possible.
But it doesn't matter - Apple is a prestigious jobs guarantee program for rich kids first, entity that delivers value to consumers second.
It's not that they're chasing shiny things. They're cosplaying competence and they genuinely don't know it. They think they're actually competent, elite really, because they attend 'elite' schools, get good grades and go work at the 'best' places.
They have it ingrained in them that anything a poor person says can be disregarded because poor people are losers, because they're poor. They're an unintentional suicide cult. They genuinely don't know it. You can't convince them of anything because they are rich. If you complain - go see a therapist, there's something wrong with you.
You can youtube search Garys Economics. It's a poor kid who slipped into the rich kids club and defected. It's quite eye opening.
I said they need to, not that I think they will. But they have in the past. There is a reason Snow Leopard is still lauded today.
> It's just very low quality relative to what people who've written software for a living know to be possible.
No, it’s low quality relative to what Apple users came to expect. There was a time when “it just works” was an aspirational goal which permeated their decisions and you could see the results.
> Apple is a prestigious jobs guarantee program for rich kids first, entity that delivers value to consumers second.
What a bizarre conspiracy theory. No company gets to that stratospheric level of success by making hiring incompetent rich kids their primary goal.
By the way, I did catch the rant you posted before. I tried to reply to it but after writing it up and hitting reply, you had already deleted it.
You've gone ahead and made it the first goal in the context of all goals a company has (thus making it 'primary').
That's not a legal move - switching contexts and claiming that the sentence plucked out of its original context and inserted into your context becomes a 'conspiracy theory'.
That's on you, not me :)
And yes, I edit my posts plenty. Including this one.
In Calendar (macOS) create a new event.
In the start or end time, type in the Minutes field, but type slowly.
For example, type "2" pause a bit, then type "1"
If there's more than ~300msec pause between the two keypresses, the 2 changes into "02" and then the 1 overrides it, so you end up with "01" instead of 21.
Works with any two kepresses. Same problem in the date fields.
Completely wrong, and super bad for accessibility.
It goes back to 2019 - certainly more than 100 calls
From a developer perspective many of these inconsistencies are rooting from inconsistent access patterns - operating system (ABI?), applications (ICP?), remote (TCP, HTTP, LDAP, FTP, ...?). All of these are "execution" or "information" but have to be programmed against differently.
1. If you copy some text
2. Select other text
3. Paste the text you copied to replace the selected text
Notes will crash. This has been known for years.
Also if you turn off all suggestions in Spotlight on iOS and just use it as an app launcher, it will still take seconds for Spotlight to show you the results. For something that's supposed to be an indexed look up.
I don’t mean to be rude, but that’s how an iOS intern would implement it.
A bad one maybe
I wish they implemented backspace like they do with fine scrubbing on seekbars. i.e. you could move your finger up & down while holding the backspace key to select the granularity of deletion between letters, words and paragraphs.
Not sure about iOS, but Android has sort of magnifier when users start to select so they can clearly see what characters they are selecting. It definitely helps. However, what I should want is some sort of arrow keys that I can press to select characters instead of relying on my fingers.
No, Ellie isn't a typo and I didn't actually mean Emma.
Cannot get notifications for new mail on iOS.
On Languages:
Cannot swipe-to-type and dictate in less spoken languages even though this has been possible on Android for over a decade.
Can't think of any more at the top of my head ... it feels a lot like Windows, where there are a bunch of eternal bugs one just sort of knows and works around, even though it's a kind of shitty and occasionally very frustrating experience.
Maybe Apple is doing this in an automated way to prevent people using several accounts for storage.
On Google Drive, if you run out of space, you can create a new account, and switch when needed.
And Apple's attempt to stop people from "stealing" a few dollars a month in storage somehow justifies bricking a $1000 piece of hardware?
Google doesn't care, because Google has WAY better anti-abuse features which cost money and so has weighed the risk of the "Google carelessly wrecks someone's online identity" headline against "someone might squeeze us for an extra 5GB of space."
You are not prompted or asked to enable.
After disabling Apple Intelligence when you do the next mini update to 15.3.1 Apple intelligence is enabled. Again no prompt and your previous choice to disable is ignored.
This IMO is a bad sign for Apple software quality. Looks like they are moving to more dark user methods seen in Windows 11.
By "volunteering" your data for third party advertising (...remember, you agreed to Apple's ToS), they get to sell referrals and you get nothing.
Sounds fair?
My main Apple computers predate modern LLMs, and will forever be stuck on Ventura & 10.14. The M4 Mini I just purchased (to replace MacPro5,1) will never go online, and I have physically removed all wireless "features" [why does bluetooth constantly turn itself back on?!] — love the OS (particularly the fluidity of screensavers) but the OS is so enmeshed in wanting to "be helpful" (== I don't want your AI schizo ==) that I won't plan to update any online machines any further than 2023 operating systems (== "pre-AI" ==).
The best news in all this is it may finally push me into running Linux as my main online machine, which I've been putting off for only three decades now (68k->PPC->Intel->Silicone).
Lemme list some of my recent nitpicks:
I never used Bluetooth that much because I had no devices either for the phone or tablet, so I kept it disabled. But every major or minor iOS update was turning it on - I ofc understand that some devices may want to reconnect after update. But that doesn't explain why since v18.2.1 it suddenly stays disabled in my case on both devices after update's done.
Then there's iOS ongoing conversation screen that never ever allows me to access springboard when I want e.g. check the notifications. It just constantly pops up like on rubber-band and after few angry swipes, pressing the lock button back and forth finally lets me in. Do I by any chance "hold it wrong"? No idea but widget shouldn't block me from accessing phone - it should allow to swipe up and hide into status bar area.
And the control center changes in the latest iOS: these little widgets are stubborn, reorder themselves, can't change the size and tend to bug out to the point of flying "outside" the grid. It is baffling they managed to finally add icons custom positions on springboard but control center is like beta of the feature that should be here years ago.
Yesterday I've got a homepod mini for all the plugs, switchers and so on. Because for few years iPad cannot be the hub. During initial device asks for few things, like enabling voice recognition, location and then there's Apple Music offer for free for 3 months. I'm not using it and it will rather stay that way but now the offer is permanently presented in both tablet and phone settings right under my account and "family" represented by me and my partner.
After seeing the predatory tactics, dark patterns in last 2 Windows releases (I'll skip Google - because that's their default behavior for years) it seems that Apple too caught the trend. But also quality of the software overall isn't there anymore - no matter which company. Instead we're getting visual changes, or doubtful features that are being forced upon us like this Apple Intelligence or photos scanning.
I recently updated a very carefully managed (over many years) local Apple Music library to sync with cloud Apple Music. One funny (captive laughter) side effect was performance issues I had long since learned to live with just disappeared. For some insane reason running a completely local library is much, much laggier than one that is constantly syncing with the cloud.
The real fun, however, was when I recently created a smart playlist and noticed it was missing tracks that obviously should have been matched. I luckily found an older smart playlist with the same rule and lo and behold this one contained the tracks that were missing. So two smart playlists, exact same single rule (equating to "not Favourited"), with > 1000 difference in total tracks.
This is stressing me out. How can I trust any of my smart playlists anymore? Is my library corrupt, or is it just a bug? Who knows, and who knows when or if it will ever be fixed. I can list numerous other bugs with playlists in the macOS Apple Music app that have existed across 2 or more previous major releases.
Problem solved B-).
That feature is so misunderstood, it feels like no one read the help text or tried it and is just going off the misplaced outrage of everyone else.
That setting is not about sending information to Apple, it is a personal private report for yourself.
There are enough legitimate reasons to criticise Apple, we don’t need to make up a problem which isn’t there and distract from the ones that exist.
This is the stupidest feature to be mad about. Why go through all the trouble of creating Private Cloud Compute and ensuring every request is private, to then add a separate visible feature to get a report of your activity? It would be significantly cheaper and easier to simply not having gone through the effort and log everything like every other provider does. The reporting feature is for you. It is so you know what was sent and can make informed decisions. It is a feature that adds transparency. It gives you more control over your data than if it didn’t exist.
Clearly Apple did a poor job of communicating what the feature does. But rallying about it will only make them less likely to add other transparency features in the future. Save your breath and complain about the things they do do wrong. There are plenty of those to pick from.
This is particularly annoying when you calibrate your screen for some modicum of colour accuracy.
When a new major version of macOS is released macOS developers seem obsessed with quickly releasing a new version of their apps that will only run on the newest operating system.
From then on any updates and bug fixes are only available on the latest macOS
If you don't upgrade to the latest and greatest macOS you are out of luck.
I fear the day when all new apps must target the M* chip and everyone on the x64 side has a paperweight
This made even worse when Apple dictates when your computer is no longer allowed to run the latest and greatest OS¹.
On the Windows side, a majority of applications tend to work on a wider range of operating systems.
¹ There are various ways of bypassing this and installing the latest OS in a most unsupported manner.
This is encouraged by Apple to help with their planned obsolescence of old OS versions. With new macOS versions there is often a requirement to rebuild your apps with the latest version of Xcode which ships alongside it. This is because Apple changes lots of its internal APIs etc between OS versions, and only the latest version of Xcode supports those changes.
Also the App stores only allow new and update submissions for apps built with the latest SDK, which in turn must be coded on the latest version of Xcode, which itself cannot be run on older versions of macOS.
Is this all a conspiracy to keep people buying new computers and phones? I cannot say, but if I wanted to keep people bying more of my product this is how I would do it.
All because they are constantly deprecating API/framework when in general they are just moving things around and nothing really changes. You have to be a hardcore believer to not find issue with the behavior, it's so convenient for their business model.
Meanwhile on the Windows side you can find obscure software from the Vista era and chances are it will work without issues.
I'm intrigued by Apple products because my working laptop is a MacBook Pro. I'm thinking about buying one for studying MacOS internals and app development, so as long as I'm not forced to update XCode, homebrew, caffeine, sublime text and a few other tools, I think it's fine.
But at least since 15.3.0, for me, it’s no longer an issue.
This should be criminal. And I believe it might actually be criminal in EU.
Even basic UX like "Can still see navigation map on CarPlay when someone calls you" seems to be just not thought of at all, or not being able to move the cursor left/right because the current iPhone keyboard mode only allows number. There are a thousands of these tiny cuts that just makes it such a pain to use daily.
Which is a darn shame, because the hardware is truly amazing, from everything from the displays, to keyboard and trackpads, to the general feeling and the CPU. But the software experience been so shit for the last decade that it's hard to justify going back.
The 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.
The trackpad on my Thinkpad E495 is hanging and has lost the ability to register clicks, and had been like that after only two years of use. I think the reason is that the whole construction with lots of space is collecting dust. You can use the physical buttons above the pad, and some people like this retro design even, but IMO it's just reducing space and adds a border and height distance for your finger to travel, so arguably outdated and objectively worse.
The Elan trackpad on my Thinkpad x13 gen 2 has been defective from the start and registers palm contact where there is none, with the effect that the touchpad stops responding like every 30s; this is a known defect.
But none of that properly transfers to windows, and most of its hardware tweaks become irrelevant. I also didn't mind the Surface laptop trackpads, but vastly prefer a mouse with extra buttons for windows machines TBH (there are a ton of great mice too, so all things considered it's fine that way)
Anyway, Apple's trackpad is good because it perfectly captures intent, whatever the situation and the number of fingers. It's flawless. You got half your palm on the side of the trackpad while writing? Nope, not picked up. You quickly flick with half your palm on there? Boom, got it. Five finger gesture? No prob fam.
I'm not familiar with all of the trackpad gestures, but that's part of my big frustration with macOS in general - discoverability absolutely sucks. Half of the stuff I need to do is hidden behind a set of arcane keystrokes that I am apparently supposed to memorize.
I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't disbelieve you, I just don't even know what you're trying to do. It must be a feature I've never attempted to use.
I just click with two fingers, anywhere. Boom, right click. Didn't even know there was another way.
I never use the two finger click. I am particularly uncoordinated always end up moving the cursor and miss the target. Maybe it's just not for me.
Right-clicking also has a history. Because Mac trackpads only had one button (unlike PC touchpads), the way to right-click was to point with either your index or middle finger (high precision), then put down the other of these two fingers on the trackpad while doing the thumb-click. It will not move the cursor, so there is no loss of precision. At least that's what I did for a long time. (Although I don't lose precision if I hold down two fingers and press with one of them either.)
And it gets more confusing when Apple changes the defaults. They've flip-flopped between touch-to-click and press-to-click at least once. I'm not sure if using the bottom right corner was ever the default for right-clicks? And then they also removed the video clips that taught you some gestures in the system settings. And I think the whole "deep press" gesture is an anti-feature that only confuses people, the dictionary lookup used to be a three-finger tap and that was fine. But the Magic Trackpad 2 needed a headline feature, sigh.
It is a rather obscure feature, and yet it has such a dedicated following (me included) that a re-implementation of it was recently merged into libinput. The downside is that tap-and-drag is disabled when three-finger dragging is enabled, which makes it a bit harder to go back and forth across operating systems.
Is that just because you get a little more space due to folding? Personally I just loathe how much time my phone steals from me, and value the ebook reader on the basis that it has its specific purpose; no colour, barely does anything, I can't be messaged on it or watch videos, it's not as viable to use as anything but a reading device. But now that I think of it, I don't necessarily value those features in a way that makes me want to spent more than I did on it.
The way I think of the value I can derive from my phone is similar to how I assess how much value I could hypothetically get from an iPad Pro. Although it's nicer, faster, etc.. than my old as hell iPad, it doesn't do anything substantially different or that much better in terms of what I'd likely do with the device, and it seems like I only ever need one of them, since it's kind of just consumption technology, but if I was marking up A4 PDFs regularly, it might offer more utility.
Not to downplay your experience, but it is almost certainly not what Apple uses for user feedback.
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 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".
It'll ask me again later (a few days? a week?), but it won't make any changes immediately, nor will it schedule any changes.
I think it's a limitation of the vehicle's implementation.
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.
Honestly, I have difficulty believing someone could find these kinds of issues to be less of a problem on Linux than on Mac
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?
KDE actually has working focus stealing prevention!
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.
Half the OS was still running under emulatiom
I think that is what was said:
> (Though I’m partial to the classic Mac OS from a UI point of view, Mac OS X had a better UX due to its stability.)
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.
But like, I don't manage linux servers and stuff so I am sure it sucks in certain very specific ways for people who need to deal with it day in and out.
I remember my young days of using Slackware with init.d. That was hell.
In my professional experience, I've come to understand that the systemd project has an assload of accidental complexity that the systemd folks are unwilling to reduce. At least once a year, we'll have a production-down page from a customer whose root cause turns out to be systemd failing in some bizarre and entirely inscrutable way. After a ton of digging, we'll eventually find someone who has run into something similar, and either got no response, or a "Wow, that's weird. Well, there's nothing WE can or should do." response from the systemd people.
"Solving" these issues is very frustrating, because we usually end up changing things from one way that the docs indicated would work just fine, to a different way the docs indicate would work just fine... which doesn't give us any confidence that what we did won't suddenly stop working next year. A project that is as fundamental as systemd wants to be really should be aggressively reducing complexity to the minimum required to get the job done and regularly documenting caveats and quirks as they're discovered and deemed "E_WONTFIX".
Also, (FWIW) I've a fine time with JACK2, openrc, and xorg. I had to do some manual work to tell JACK which sound card to use and to set up the pulseaudio backfill for software that doesn't know how to speak to JACK, [0] but everything else just works.
[0] The "tricky" part was disabling all pulseaudio backend modules but the JACK backend. This was -of course- not tricky at all.
Thanks much for the link to the FAQ.
Other than that, though, Ubuntu on any old laptop (expensive thinkpads are my favorite) is my go-to daily driver. Except at work where I'm learning to deal with a (new, shiny, powerful) Macbook that I will use to... connect to a Linux VM because that's the only way to work on our software. Seriously, a whole fleet of zillion dollar macbooks so we can all ssh into beefy VMs to build/test/deploy on Linux.
IT onboarding made a point that if you want to get a Windows laptop and wipe it for Linux, you need permission and a "good reason." How about "this is stupid just let me work on stuff." Of course it's about tech support and security, which is fair enough but I feel like they have it backwards. Support Linux and then require special permission for the $4000 ssh client...
After spending a couple of days with homebrew and building some things natively on aarch64, though, I might make a hobby out of moving stuff local. It really is a beautiful machine.
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.
On the Windows side of things, this was when Microsoft got serious about security, with plagued earlier versions of Windows XP (worms were so rampant around 2005) until later service packs helped fix things. Windows 7 was solid and performant. While my favorite version of Windows is 2000, 7 was another high mark for Windows.
Much has been said about Snow Leopard, but it was the pinnacle of Mac OS X, the refinement of an already great OS, Leopard. I would gladly used Snow Leopard today if it weren’t for needing current web browsers and up-to-date security patches.
Even the Web was better back then. By 2008 many mainstays of modern Web life, such as social media and YouTube, were already in existence. Google was excellent. Internet Explorer’s dominance was successfully challenged, and there was an ecosystem of standards-compliant browsers (later IE versions, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera). Web developers were coding to standards instead of only writing for one browser. Yes, ads existed, and there was also malware, but ads were less intrusive, and malware can be avoidable with more careful browsing.
I miss 2009- and 2010-era computing, when Windows and Mac OS X were at their peaks, when the browser ecosystem was diverse, and when many commercial websites like Facebook were still pleasant to use.
Perhaps there were peaks and troughs in individual technologies. Late 2000s / early 2010s felt like a good time for operating systems, for instance.
But is everyone forgetting having to navigate through Flash websites and Java Applets using Internet Explorer, for instance?
Also, people are just forgetting. There’s nostalgia in this thread about the iTunes desktop app, for instance. That program has been a pile of trash for as long as I can remember back in the 2000s.
It only became "problematic" when they tried to overload it too much to be able to "support" Windows for the iPod/iPhone without having to develop dedicated software.
They largely killed it and the replacement is lackluster. The best version was around version 10-11 with the colorized album view.
To this day there are no audio library management software that come close to what iTunes was. Apple Music, being a fork, is the closest thing, but it's not really the same thing at all.
Tell that to Dell and their shit trackpads and prone to death battery charging circuits. And the joy of soldered RAM so you cannot upgrade can't be overstated enough.
• I ask Homepods to play some music, and music starts playing in another room.
• I ask a room to play something, it says that is not in my library. I ask again. Same response. The problem comes in two flavors: One, I have to power cycle the Homepod to get things to reconnect. Or two, there is a halflife of disconnect where each time I ask there is an independent 1/2 chance of resolving the problem.
• I ask the Homepod to play something in multiple rooms. Some rooms play others don't. Sometimes, one room will start and stop playing randomly. Sometimes all the rooms will start and stop playing randomly.
• I ask a Homepod to play in a Zone. Same issues as asking for multiple rooms explicitly.
• Sometimes paired Homepods will both play, sometimes only one.
• Sometimes Homepods in a pair respond differently. If I carefully ensure only one hears me, it might be the one that starts the music that the other one refuses to do.
I can go on, but my experience is Homepods don't scale. A single pod or pair are much more reliable. Obviously, the more components a system has the greater chance of a problem, but it shouldn't be every day, or multiple times a day, for an integer we normally think of as "small N".
To say my Homepod use has been shaped by these failures is an understatement.
Apple has completely dropped the ball on Homekit. The app interfaces are completely ridiculous. Bad parody of bad app interfaces ridiculous.
I will say though I rarely ask the HomePods themselves to play music and almost always use a phone to start the music. I have ~7 connected around the house. I used a few different voices though so I know which one responded so I know which one to go after if I set a timer, since 3 share an open loft area and for that it can be a bit weird which one gets the request.
I have mostly HomePod Mini pairs, and a couple individual Homepods. I do have quite a few rooms, but my network is solid. Perhaps having a series of wired WiFi repeaters gives Homekit trouble, but nothing else has issues.
> almost always use a phone to start the music
This works better for me too. I still have (much less frequent) trouble casting to some random room's speakers.
But that is cumbersome compared to just asking, especially for multiple rooms. Since "Zones" don't show up in the iOS and macOS volume/speaker-group interfaces at all, as far as I can tell.
And then there is Apple's design choice to only let each room appear in one "Zone". No idea why each zone can't simply be its own set. Leave it up to users to care if two people are fighting over what plays in some joint room - it would be a problem that reflected editable zone definitions, not a bug.
The whole system is inexplicably janky: by design, lack of original effort, subsequent inattention, and bug.
It's stupid that you have to stream for a phone in the first place when you could have something connected to power act as a local server and not deplete the battery from your phone (and enjoy the unreliability of wifi on top).
Apple has just made a poor decision for the "wow" factor that never makes for a great working product in the end. The hardest part is saying no to stuff that don't make sense and the way they have implemented Homepods/Homekit is just a testament of that.
Are there any modern home audio setups that connect to streaming services and actually work reliably? At this point I’m thinking of just going back to an iPod and dock like it’s 2006.
As I said, not a direct comparison, but starting to think consumer level stuff like Sonos and HonePods just doesn’t have the right incentive structure anymore to deliver the level of quality we all seem to be asking for.
Siri is not smart, but plays music, sets timers and turns off lights just fine, and that’s all I want.
Setting timers has got worse it now on a significant proportion of timer requests replies I can't find that in your Library.
Alexa is much more reliable.
For a while I was surprised by Mircrosoft's signs of life around generative AI by the time OpenAI came about, but it seemed to relapse into complacency too.
I honestly believe there is some unstated law of success, I think there is a "ceiling" to success, at which point it becomes impossible to expand. It has something to do with the correlation between success in complexity. As a business grows more successful, it becomes more tied down to various commitments, constraining its ability to innovate without assumptions. There's a limit to what any given entity can handle.
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.
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.
Considering the state of every recently made/"remade" first party Apple app I cannot imagine how horrible the Music app would be after they got done with it.
At some point when migrating from one Mac to another, it "forgot" which songs were actually mine. It's all Apple Music now. I have songs that the application _knows_ were added to my library in 2003, but for which it steadfastly maintains they're Apple Music downloads. Worse: some songs have been replaced with other recordings. Other are "unavailable" for unexplained reasons.
I kind of think they made it shitty on purpose to push everyone towards a subscription. Many of these issues apply to locally stored songs and playlists, which is how I use it.
In fact, I was never able to use Apple Music because it handled bad internet atrociously. And last time I checked (2022?) it was still not fixed.
iTunes was a great software, even people using it on Windows liked it a lot.
- After waking from sleep, the current song plays silent audio (skipping forward and back again kickstarts it to start playing again) - When streaming with lossless audio, somewhere in the first ten seconds of the song, it'll skip - Mouseover events don't trigger when scrolling moves an item behind the mouse — you have to get the cursor to leave and reenter the object in question - Radio stations randomly stop playing sometimes - And I haven't seen this one in a while, but for a long time, albums in my library would randomly have a song or two split out into its own separate album. So I'd have two of the same album, one with (say) track 5 and the other with tracks 1-4 and 6-10. Deleting and re-adding the albums would at least temporarily fix this.
The only thing missing is lossless audio. But I have been listening to 256kpbs AAC since basically the first iPod so I'm not going to care that much at this point...
News, Books, and TV are all similar.
It's like buying a car because it looks very nice and has a great engine but the driving experience is absolutely terrible.
So is the App store on all platforms AFAICT.
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.
Never had that problem with iTunes.
Overcast might be the app for you. No affiliation, I just like it.
However any maintainance or search for podcasts is crap with Apple and better elsewhere.
I always have selected on the sidebar Library -> Songs with View -> Column Browser enabled. And I search only using the "Filter" text input on this view. It's as close to how iTunes used to be in the early days of OS X (sans brushed metal).
What I see on the screen is just mostly dense text except the small thumbnail at the top for whatever is currently playing. There is no other related artwork or graphics loaded. I fear once a re-write of this app happens, this view is gone... replaced with lots of fancy graphics and loads of whitespace padding everywhere.
may I introduce you to cyanrip or EAC? https://github.com/cyanreg/cyanrip https://www.exactaudiocopy.de/en/index.php/resources/downloa...
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.
Excuse me?
iTunes was IMO always bad. I will grant that the Mac desktop version of Apple Music is possibly even worse than iTunes ever was, though.
(This is slightly off topic, but I find it both amusing and rather infuriating that the iCloud payment system doesn’t accept Apple Pay. Oddly, it seems to accept PayPay. Really, just about everything involving the account and payment system in iCloud and Apple Music is awful.)
This sums it up well. The hardware is great, the software isn't.
I recently programmed the same app for iOS and Android. iOS took twice as long, simply because Apple's APIs suck. Case in point: The background task APIs (plural, yes, unfortunately) are so bad that Apple felt compelled to publish a video "Background execution demystified" [1]. If a dev creates an API and then has to publish docs "[my API] demystified", then the API sucks. Period.
I value stability and the freedom to configure the OS to my liking. macOS is stable but forces countless things on me that I do not want. Windows offers freedom but comes with many glitches. Linux is extremely stable and puts me first by letting me configure it. I love it.
[1]: https://wwdcnotes.com/documentation/wwdcnotes/wwdc20-10063-b...
Context is important.
This was a WWDC session and Apple records & publishes all WWDC sessions.
Also WWDC videos are infamously used as reference because often documentation suck. And it shows.
To give a concrete example: At WWDC20 Apple showed off a new Core Data feature called "derived attributes" [1]. Only many months later did they add the bare minimum of written documentation covering a fraction of what was shown off at WWDC [2].
1: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/230/ 2: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/120159
Microsoft may produce some half-assed software but at least their documentation is generally pretty solid (and easy to find).
But that’s not the title of the session.
The title of the session was “Background execution demystified”
Background execution is a computer science topic that many don’t understand well. Much like font antialiasing or other computer science topics that people don’t have to deal with daily.
Note: I’m not saying Apple APIs are great. I was just originally pointing out the context of your post.
It's not exactly this: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/458099/macos-lock-...
The system is not lagging at all.
It's not this:
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/08/29/mac-wont-accept-correct-l...
It's a bit like this, but only for the system password dialog and nowhere else:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1azl16n/macos_skippi...
My password is long enough that it’s not clear whether a new dot has appeared, but I get frequent rejections.
Made me consider that my magic keyboard was getting old or having bluetooth issues, but it does not happen on ANY other inputs.
My initial guess is that the text edit control has "select all content" set initially, so when you enter the 1st character, it's selected, and when you enter the following characters they overwrite that, essentially chopping off the 1st letter of the password (which is then incorrect, obviously). Unbelievable that this was never fixed (especially with IT-managed laptops that lock themselves very quickly).
I know that it's difficult to triage and process bug reports at scale, but I guess that's where some of those hundreds of billions of dollars could be put to good use.
Triaging and categorising bug reports at scale really feels like something LLMs should be able to assist with significantly.
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.
Messages on Mac is one of my biggest annoyances. How do you make one of the most used messaging tools and have the keyboard lag so badly while typing - sometimes even skipping typed letters? It's a complete mystery to me.
And this is exactly how macOS and iOS feel nowadays: the hardware is supposed to be great but it doesn't feel that good because the software sucks.
In my country the mainline iPhone start around 1k€ and even the "e" is over 700€. If I had paid 2-300€ like a low-end android device I would find it acceptable but Apple only sells stuff that is the high end of pricing, therefore it is not acceptable.
[citation needed]
And then they keep adding iOS UIs into MacOS, produce horrible laggy iOS-optimised software for it, and call it a day.
Actions speak louder than words.
And yes. Merging codebases is a bad thing when it's done without any care for one of the paradigms. The one that they don't like, don't understand, and want to go away.
You don't outsource to India because you want to get better quality products. You do it so you can pay a terrible Indian programmer $30,000/yr instead of hiring a great Indian programmer for $300,000/yr in Cupertino.
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 have no solutions to offer for smartphones sadly.
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.
Excel '98 probably covers 95% of users use cases. But here we are.
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.
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.
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}.
TBH I don't even care about security anymore, like our data has been sold left and right already. As long as I don't get phished, I avoid 80% of the bad actors out there.
I already removed some update software from Ubuntu, those update notifications are very frustrating.
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.
Reminds me of the old days working at Motorola. Your feature branches were merged into a biweekly dev branch, which needed to be “sanity tested” before it could get merged into the branch that the QA folks validated. Every software engineer was on a lab rotation: when it was your turn, you and a couple others that made up your team went to a different building and descended into the hardware lab where you didn’t come out until you had created a working mobile phone network from scratch and tested it with a wide variety of phones -basically anything that could work. They had shelves with bins of everything: early unreleased smartphones (this was way before the iPhone), junky flip phones, RAZRs, StarTacs, bag phones, etc.
It was honestly a lot of fun to see the hardware side of what you were working on, and to ensure that documentation and checklists were always sufficient.
Apple is probably way too secretive to do anything like that :(
BTW debugging still takes a lot of effort to setup in VSCode / or have to write init scripts for GDB which I suck at. I think Visual Studio debugger beats everything on Linux for that purpose.
Maybe I really need to try out Windows LTSC?
Edit: pedant patrol
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!)
I still have a 16” Intel Macbook pro and looking for my next machine and am seriously considering a Linux notebook for the first time. Im mostly coding and doing docker stuff. No excel and photoshop is a bit of an issue though.
I'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.
[thousands of Enterprise Sales employees suddenly start listening]
Sorry, it's Apple software. Nevermind!
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.
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.
And you don't have to pay for it, just close the ask.
It seems to do the job for the house very nicely.
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.
Works well. Even the crappiest nasty sites won't get through it.
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.
They are a lot less idealistic and have an approach of working on it slowly but surely in the open. Apple on the other hand tries to maintain an unrealistic image of perfection and thus is always playing some sort of binary game, which is why things get stuck and never evolve beyond a certain point.
I use to like Apple approach to things; with age I understand that Microsoft approach actually makes a lot more sense, especially if you need to maintain things over time.
We should be glad that Microsoft "won" the desktop PC war because if Apple software had been used for critical software we would be in a lot of trouble as a society; I'm joking but barely...
Maybe because it's Pro version? I don't remember doing any incantation but it's possible that I didn't connect internet during installation.
Otherwise I would use something like Xubuntu.
So it's sad to know that my next Windows machine will require a Microsoft cloud account.
One thing I didn't expect is that my family ends up using the TV quite a lot for planning stuff, like doing google sheets, planning trips on google maps, booking planes/restaurants/concerts/etc. We have a small normal wireless mouse and keyboard for such occasions.
No regrets, open platform > closed junk. Can also play steam games on TV. Can't wait until Steam OS works well on desktop so I can ditch windows too. If you only care about media and not gaming you can get a case small enough that can fit hidden away in a cabinet.
It seems support for nvidia is rudimentary (my living room PC has a GTX 1070), but will keep an eye out. Might try the beta during my vacation.
Do try a fly mouse, those are great for normal web browsing.
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..
It did not happen often though to be sure.
Not so after the iPhone.
Vastly different circumstances (shitty state school x print design gig => 2008 philosophy dropout waiting tables => build a point of sale app startup, iPhone OS 2 => sold it => 2016 Google).
I had at nigh-religious appreciation for the things I learned from the culture of roughly that era. folklore.org type stuff. Grew up on Gruber. And learning so many of your cohort on Twitter. Took me from a waiter to an engineer.
I ended up being ashamed to mention stuff I learned from it, people rarely were in touch with the culture as I understood it. Many soulless vampires afoot once the money comes in.
I'll never forget asking a (wonderful!) colleague why they wanted to work on Team X, expecting "I'm really passionate about [form factor] because [use case]" or "Well, given $LOCATION, my options were [Google Cloud | this team | Google Play Books]"...instead it was "well, coming out of $IVY_LEAGUE with $STEM_MAJOR, my best options were finance or programming, and finance seemed worse"
I had far too many out-of-left-field interactions like that. And it poisons the place in many ways that, to me, ultimately damn it to mediocrity.
Just want to say thank you for your work.
BTW I never used any 90s Apple product back in the day, but I always appreciated the products, the manuals, the designs.
No one gets promoted doing it
I think it's the fact that software is 100x, or maybe even 1,000x, more complex that it was just 25 years ago.
Apps are built on so many libraries and frameworks and packages that an average application will have 100x the amount of code. And they're all necessary. A typical phone app is 200 MB, when Word 4.0 was less than 1 MB.
But it's not just the sheer number of lines of code that can have bugs. It's the conceptual complexity of modern software. An app has to have an interface that works with the mouse and with touch, large screens and small screens, regular resolution and retina, light mode and dark mode, it works offline and online with sync functionality, it works in 20 different languages, it works with accessibility, it works with a physical keyboard and an on-screen keyboard, over mobile data and over WiFi, it works with cloud storage and local storage, it goes on and on.
There are so many combinations of states to reason about. When I was building software for Win32 back in 1995, you worried about screen sizes and color depths. That was about it.
Software's just gotten incredibly complex and there's more to reason about and software quality is just going to suffer. Like, I love Dark Mode at night, but at the same time I can't help but wonder what bugs would have gotten fixed if engineering resources hadn't gone into, and continue to go into, Dark Mode for each app.
On native platforms, no it’s not.
I know this for a fact because I maintain moderately complex, functional phone apps that have binary sizes that sit below the 30MB mark. I use multiple desktop and mobile apps from other developers that also match this description.
The cause of the bloat there can be attributed to the following things, mostly:
- Apps including gobs of poorly optimized analytics/marketing garbage
- Third party libraries unnecessarily including their own gobs of poorly optimized analytics/marketing garbage
- Apps being wrappers of a web tech stack project built by devs who have zero dependency discipline, resulting in a spiral fractal tree of dependencies that takes up way more space than it needs to
Raw stability of software is much higher -- there are just more minor annoyances because there is also much more software.
I would call it a culture issue, where we are not able to seperate out places where this is fine, new interesting apps are great, I want as many as possible.
From places where it's destructive, I would be happy if none of the ways I interact with an os had changed since windows 7, but it had gotten faster, more secure, and resilient.
None of these really explain the sloppiness and unfocused nature of Apple software, which has been best-in-class until recently.
Update cycles were on the order of a year, not a week (which also means all new features need to be ported to all the platforms above in that timeframe). Not even mentioning the backend infrastructure and maintenance to run and sync all of these when 25 years ago everything was on your local hard drive and maybe a floppy disk or CD-R.
I imagine putting AirPlay in the software stack, just as an example, caused code perturbations all over the place. Sidecar feels like another disruptive feature. Never mind Catalyst, juggling Swift and C binaries, Swift UI....
This stuff Apple brought upon themselves. I'm sure there will be plenty of opinions though as to whether some of these were worth the cost of disruption, on-going maintenance.
I see these trends as negatively impacting app quality.
"User pain" as a euphemism for "lowest common denominator" apathetic / fear driven development.
Like, playing the Vulcan game of Kal Toh where you remove rods unintelligentlly and still believe your constructed structure (the app) is fully coherent, and instead it dissolves into uselessness.
I’d like to hear from the HN comments. Does anyone here work for a modern and popular software company (something I might have used recently) and think that the software they make is really and truly bulletproof? Like no backlog of hundreds of unfixed bugs and polish items that won’t stop growing?
I don’t think I have met anyone who works at one of those places yet. I’d like to.
Apple software is still top tier when you start comparing to Slack, Teams, and all the non-native friends. Apple Music does not take close to 1GB of RAM. There are very few native applications these days because of the cost. And lower cost availability is based on the web stack and lower entry level of skills.
MacOS may have bugs but in general they are well engineered. Starting from secure enclave that none of the competitors have, or just raw performance and battery life that is not just hardware. I haven’t seen a single bug in my Watch for over a year. I guess it depends what you use.
The most bugs that we see these days are originating from the choices behind the tech stacks. Python and pure JavaScript are still too popular. Every post here with Rust name on it gets attention because of its promise of some level stability reduced resource footprint.
The whole marketing cycle is based on a endless stream of $new_things that give Tim Cook something to talk about during those slick presentations - presumably so he doesn't spend all his time making prayer gestures and talking slowly.
There doesn't seem to be anyone in charge of overall user experience who can say "Why does Facetime get so confused by different numbers and devices owned by one person? Why does the shared clipboard only work some of the time? Did the Settings app really need a new UI? Why hasn't Finder been updated since forever?"
And so on.
These are like smallest of the small annoyances.
Compare Facetime and Zoom, for example. Issues are on completely new universum. Zoom has new RCE about almost every month. They just don’t give CVEs for them because they can be mitigated on server update.
It is much harder to quantify how many bugs or delays one encounters in a single day of macOS/iOS compared to earlier versions, or in native apps vs web apps, and so it never happens.
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.
All of that money spent on hyper expensive laptops, and people still end up with terribly ugly websites!
But I can tell you how/why (I think) it happened.
They dropped them in iOS when the iPhone rolled out. It made sense given the small display area where even a 10 to 12 pixel column makes a difference.
And then, sadly, there came the slow roll to make both MacOS and iOS look the same and so they started auto-hiding on the Mac as well.
It's the form-before-function that I loathe ever since Jony started making round mice or USB connectors impossible to find.
- designers who come from an advertising/visual design/motion design/packaging/print (although those are a dying breed)/etc background.
Those people care more about how things look in a video commercial or on a giant billboard, and they care about visual aesthetics and making something that catches your eye because it looks really good.
- designers who come from an interaction/HCI/usability/accessibility/etc background
Those people care about things more from a systems point of view, how features will behave across a variety of contexts/modalities, how users come to understand them over time, etc. They had more of a voice in the 80s/90s (Don Norman, Bruce Tognazzini, etc are in that category) but have been increasingly in the minority ever since.
(Designers who come from an industrial design background are a bit of a wildcard - some will put superficial fit & finish above all else, while others really get how good ergonomics, tactility, etc can translate to software).
Honestly, there's value in both. Users will judge a book by its cover, and you want interfaces to look attractive and be compelling - designers from the latter group will be content with designing interfaces that just look like black and white wireframes.
But at the same time, you don't want pure aesthetics to run completely orthogonal to core usability. So it's a balance, and software interfaces are usually worse off when that balance is out of whack.
Anyways, I'll let you guess what category of designers are overrepresented in Apple's ranks. Hint: their current head of interface design comes from a magazine design background.
You can turn them back on everywhere in Settings -> Appearance -> Show scroll bars always.
- 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.
Even when I used a mouse on a Mac desktop it still never bothered me. Looks cleaner, feels sleeker and doesn’t impact functionality.
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.
(flatness is a universal cancer, though, even compared to the ugliness of the old Win)
Siri/intelligence is disabled through company managed profile.
When there is some noise in the room a popup appears saying "You do not have permissions to use siri".
There is nothing you can do, siri is disabled (can't enable or disable it myself, it's managed) but this stupid popup appears all the time so many times per day.
There is nothing in settings to make it go away.
Meaning _every_ _single_ _time_ I step out of my workstation all my windows would reset back to my laptop screen instead of my external monitor.
My solution? Install 3rd party tool to prevent my computer from locking automatically. Congrats IT you played yourself.
Like I get the lock-computer settings, but why also turn off the screen? It annoyed me enough I opened an IT support, but like always IT people don't care about the workers worflow.
They also didn't let me change my wallpaper forcing me to use company-brand wallpaper. That is just petty.
So IT not only reduced the security (because I couldn't use a sane setting like 15 minutes of inactivity), but also had 3rd party software running in my user account...
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”
Working on Windows makes me appreciate the Mac ecosystem so, so, so very much.
I’m proficient with more or less every modern desktop and can get by on any of any of them if I have to, but being happy doing so is another matter.
Have you seen https://hyprland.org?
Having used KDE plasma, I am convinced that there is no other DE that has more knobs to make things exactly how you want it. Though I never liked the global constantly changing bar on the top in Macs anyway so can't comment on whether KDE can be made to do that.
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread the issue with its global menu bar is the sheer number of apps that don’t populate it. Even the same exact Electron apps that populate the menubar on macOS don’t bother under Linux. Over half the time it sits up there empty.
Why is there no macOS clone for Linux? Since there is not, maybe now would be a good time for a project to start.
For me, Toshy's out of the box config make it pretty painless to switch between MacOS and Asahi on the same machine.
Probably better to select and contribute to one rather than starting your own
The global menubar is the biggest difference, but there’s also a pervasive difference in philosophy throughout the desktop; where macOS will have power user functionality tucked away in a menu or hidden behind a modifier key (progressive disclosure), GNOME will just remove the function altogether.
Pantheon is very similar, except dressed up in an (admittedly pretty) skeumorphic theme that reminds me of OS X 10.9 Mavericks.
That’s not to say it doesn’t have its charms, I use it after all, but it’s not a Mac OS analogue in any way.
I used Gnome daily for a really long time. Gnome 3 is actually pretty good these days but it took a while to get there.
Aqua is still pretty solid but some of the shine is starting to fade.
I have all the Apple Intelligence stuff turned off yet I got a pop up ad in the OS for “Image Playground”
Apple’s solution? Turn off Image Playground in Screen Time settings. Ridiculous.
Not really; I have it set up on my box so that I can press Alt + U as a shortcut for home and Alt + O as a shortcut for End (and many other such shortcuts; it's fully customizable), and this works system-wide in every application and even on the raw Linux console without X11/Wayland running.
1. I have the same desktop layout every time, from left to right: slack desktop app, a two column wide emacs window, a 90col wide terminal. I also have two chrome windows--1 which is the same width as the slack window and overlays it, and another the same width as the emacs window which overlays that one. The problem is every single time I wake my laptop from sleep the terminal window has shrunk to fewer columns and I have to drag it back to full width.
2. Sometimes the external monitor support bugs out. I don't know if that's my hub ("pluggable" something or other) or the OS or both.
Then of course there's all the warts of homebrew, and the fact that it's not easy to build some software..
However, the performance of the Apple silicon is nothing short of astonishing. I'm curious about the AMD chips that ship in the new Framework as I look towards an upgrade to my personal laptop, but it's basically between that and a new M4 Max Macbook. Never thought I'd see the day.. will probably wait a year or so before deciding but it's interesting that Apple is even a contender.
I run IntelliJ and a browser, and mostly call it a day.
Personal code: Vim (more recently, zed) and a browser.
Nix is also availible for Mac, but I'll warn you that it may ruin Macports and brew for you forever.
it’s not flawless, but its strengths outweigh the weaknesses.
i still need homebrew for casks, but that’s fine.
When you start wanting to replicate experiments, or run software you find on github, then you will learn the pain of ubuntu 20.04. or 22.04. Otherwise you can have the fun experience of most linuxes in the mid to late 90s where you are compiling arbitrary libraries to bootstrap some other library so you can find out where the package you actually want to compile's make file fails at.
Give me a rolling release distro or a source based distro any day.
ninja: all of this should be read as me saying:
"Why yes, i do in fact have several machines and VMs of ubuntu server installs, ranging all the way from 16.04 to 24.04; because that's the only way i can guarantee i can run any software posted on the internet."
Have not had that "problem" to this extent on any other generation of machine. Albeit, my current work is not particularly CPU limited.
Mine has 64GB. I usually max RAM, and get about double the SSD I think I need. Knowing that at a minimum, I will use my latest laptop, and 2-3 older models around the house and my quick-carry bag for convenience, at any given time.
Beyond convenience, the old laptops are continually synced, as multiple onsite backups. So I get great long term value from consistently choosing higher end RAM/SSD specs.
But in this case good specs for the M1 has saved me money via an unprecedentedly long upgrade schedule.
I am feeling more pressure to update two old x86 laptops to M1, than any pressure to upgrade my M1. Never had this upside-down problem before. Apple did just a great job with that M1.
Last week I spent a whole day trying to resurrect a Windows 10 IoT LTSC because of a corrupt WMI repository. It crashed out software and to the client it looks like our software is bad where it is the OS that is bad. Client's automation was down until a replacement was sent out and installed.
I've had to implement number of software changes because of buggy Windows drivers. From Intel NICs to touch screen HID messaging. Microsoft talks about backwards capability but it is subjective and only truly bound to the most used applications. Enabling tablet mode on Windows will break their API.
There has never been a Linux system I couldn't resurrect and keep working. With Windows, it is always re-install the OS and all applications. Even the laptop I'm writing this on is the same OS installation that has passed between 4 different computers. You cannot get that quality of OS installation from Microsoft.
Took me a month to convince IT to reinstall Windows on my work laptop. Microsoft's update broke the QA VM environment and would freeze with an infinite loop. Uninstalling the update nor repairing the OS did anything to fix their issues.
Even today I experienced Ctrl+X is broken and does not work in Visual Studio for the git comment text box entry.
If we were talking about a networked DOS machine, Windows XP, or even classic MacOS this lack of updates would be more serious… but niche UNIX workstations? Not as certain they’re still targets.
That said, my favorite Unix.
even windows is better due to wsl.
Additionally, in certain industries Linux support is non-existent, with many applications developed exclusively for Windows and no viable alternatives available. Running a VM is another PITA due to driver issues. Wine ditto.
In the end, I found that running WSL2 provided a more manageable experience. I feel that Microsoft really hit the nail with WSL for productivity. Apparently, you can even run graphical applications from WSL although I don't have a lot of experience with that.
I still prefer it to Windows but (at least for me) it is inferior to a properly setup Linux box with stuff like a titling WM. But if I would to recommend someone a computer just for browsing, email, etc. then a Mac would be my top choice.
1. I can manage them in Git 2. GUIs change all the time. With configs you have a much higher probability that some solution you googled will still work even when it is a couple of years old.
They have just invested too much of their ego into knowing the arcane commands (and typing them well and fast) when it doesn't have much value, so they try to get dividends on that poor investment any way they can.
There is no reason to not make a proper GUI for pretty much everything, unless the devs are lazy or trying to save time/money.
I mean, you can probably find _a_ Linux that's like what you say, but top Linux distros are nowhere like that.
Namely: How good is this platform after Corporate IT cheaps out on hardware, and loads as much 'security' crapware as possible?
On Windows, there are incredibly cheap laptops available, and corporate IT has loads of crapware like antivirus and crowdstrike and profiles and enterprise endpoint management to slow it down.
On Mac, there aren't any cheap hardware options, and there's a medium amount of "security" crapware.
On Linux, corporate IT let you manage it yourself, because they don't know how to. They can't develop the skills either, because anyone who can manage Linux gets promoted out the set-up-new-users-laptops department.
Which is about 90% of the comments here. Not a joke. I have counted 18 and see only 2 with specific gripes. Worthless comment section. (Sorry, but I did include yours too)
I was 16 when I first met the first big "Mac is better than Windows" argument in person. I asked why, and they mentioned a number of things that didn't feel relevant to the people at the table, but the one that stood out was a particular feature that was indeed quite useful. Well, I didn't know how to respond at the time, but as soon as I got home, I checked with windows and the feature was right there.
I don't think they were wrong for their preference. In fact, back then there was a lot of major differences in the workflow for these OS that isn't as big nowadays, specially if you're someone who can actually use google for more than 20 seconds. But the interaction proved to me the importance of being able to back your stance, because, if you don't, you may as well be just another 16 year old idiot with 0 technical or practical knowledge of the stuff that dictated your preference. They don't learn how to resolve their problems with them either, if they hide the reasons from others. So, again, worthless - take up screen space that could have better comments, while informing nothing and helping no one.
I think that when people talk about how shitty windows is compared to Mac/apple they are talking about stuff that was probably true at some point
For many, memories of using windows include blue screens of death, programs crashing often and windows itself crashing often. On top of that, windows was a cesspool for a hot minute while Microsoft got its act together and put better security in place to address malware as the internet got popular.
These are obviously not the same, not nearly as bad as they were back then
I mostly enjoyed windows, and to a lesser degree Linux until a few years ago when an employer made me switch to Mac - which for the sake of my brain’s plasticity I readily embraced
The main differences I noticed at the time were: a much better window manager, a much saner way of installing applications, an overall hard to explain smoothness along with the ability to bring over some of my favorite little Linux tools
Fast forward to today and it’s really just a matter of preference. Mac helped Linux a ton, but nowadays they are all so customizable that you can more or less achieve what you’re trying to do most of the time on any of them
Today, I use all three out of necessity - Mac and Linux for work, windows for gaming, but I can surely tell you that overall my best decision was to just not get involved in holy wars lol
- gaming - watching movies - presentations - anything where you want to let some calculation run unattended for a few hours - anything where you really don't want your PC to shut down unexpectedly while you’re working…
Well that covers pretty much everything I guess.
And to add insult to injury, Windows 10 for a while took away the ability to Update & shut down. It’d go into some sort of hybrid sleep so you’d keep getting a reboot prompt right after starting up again.
Because why wouldn't it work poorly?
Macs come working. When something breaks, it is impossible to fix, because they didn’t include a button to fix it. But it comes working!
Windows PCs come broken out of the box, but the user adapts and eventually gains a pile of workarounds, which is sort of like the windows equivalent of a UX.
literally everything you said was false, but i can only disprove a majority of it with a single screenshot
https://i.imgur.com/XR1aj5b.png
not only no ads in start, no ads anywhere, ffs
Regarding local accounts, it is supported by Windows, but the installer will straight up refuse to let you create such an account now (so you have to install using a cloud account and log into it at least once to create a local account). Previously, there used to be workarounds like installing without Internet, or certain incantations you could do in the "recovery" terminal during installation, but they have been killed off one by one. If you haven't seen this yourself, it just means that you haven't installed Windows 11 recently.
looks like this is correct. I didn't have to do this before, so there's some software switch in the iso i have that triggered a "must update" - which makes sense.
Not to shift the goalposts, but you can disable the microsoft login after you set it up. I'm 99% sure that apple and google both require you to give them a username and password, as well.
I am getting the 24H2 disk image now. The one i was using is `Win11_22H2_English_x64v2.iso` - which is real old. It makes sense to me that microsoft wouldn't want you to use an old installer without being connected to the internet.
The download is probably going to take longer than my edit timeout, if so and anything changes about my comment i'll make a reply
found this https://github.com/memstechtips/UnattendedWinstall while i'm waiting. Says it bypasses the microsoft login.
I have no idea about Google, but with Apple, they require you to create a local account when installing. After that, the Settings app will pester you to link it to your Apple ID, but this can be ignored, and only shows up when you are in Settings on your user account page.
specifically https://youtu.be/b1OGTumhFEA?t=2091
i installed windows 11 without a cloud login. Without a CD key. I actually ran the windows installer 3 times since you commented and i first replied. So i kinda lost track of what it was doing this time - i didn't notice it said it was going to reboot before the screen went black, i missed that it was waiting for input with the language selection. But i didn't edit the video at all, so you can scrub around and make sure. Ignore my dig at the end, like i said, i installed windows 3 times.
https://github.com/memstechtips/UnattendedWinstall you put the XML file in the iso. well, that's what i did. they have an automated thing that makes a bootable USB stick but i don't need that. I actually have a microsoft account because i use the xbox for windows and copilot. I don't use it to log in to windows - and even if i reinstalled i'd use the regular ISO and log in and then dis-associate my account with my windows install after it finished installing, as microsoft says you can do inside the installer
screenshot https://i.imgur.com/DGJgf87.png
So this "drop an xml file on the iso" is proof positive that i take full responsibility for the data on this operating system - if i forget my password and my security questions, i'm locked out. period. Microsoft can't help because i told them i was smarter than the average user.
But, more importantly, it's not a given that this will continue working onwards. As things are, there have already been three different ways to force the installer into letting you use a local account, the most recent one of which involved using the recovery terminal when booted from ISO - that's already way past most users. And yet Microsoft methodically killed each and every method every time, so I fully expect your suggested workaround to stop working. They seem to be very determined to ensure that no "non-enterprise" version of Windows lets people do that.
If the only option is to modify the installer the only people who are going to opt out are the sort of people that understand that microsoft has no responsibility to our data, and pretending they do is silly. It's pure CYA from Microsoft.
If you personally don't like it, then use their automated thumb-drive creation tool (at that same link) to make a new bootable USB stick that installs with the "opt out". I modified the ISO because i was installing on a Virtual Machine. If i was gunna do it on metal i'd use a USB stick because all my optical drives are USB and not that fast.
I don't think we disagree, i think we're coming at this from different sides. I don't expect microsoft to spend more money than they have to.
I would believe that it was purely about costs if they simply removed the checkbox from the installer but still left the command line workaround - that is plenty sufficient to ensure that the user "understands that Microsoft has no responsibility", and generally to prevent the clueless from shooting themselves in the foot. But given that even such advanced techniques were removed shortly after they were discovered, I'm certain at this point that it is a concerted effort to drive all non-enterprise users towards cloud accounts. And given that Microsoft is heavily investing into ads, and generally has a Google envy for a very long time now, I think that it any product decision that clearly correlates with more ability to track users and collect their data is likely to be at least partially motivated by that, just as it is in case of Google.
Then the ads come in, and any of my doubts evaporate instantly. The home PC runs NixOS, it's been that way for 6 years now and it will probably remain that way until the advertising glut is satiated. Even then, it won't be easy getting me to switch away from desktop Linux.
For me, Mac is 99% of what I liked about Linux, and there is ALWAYS an existing QoL solution—usually reasonably polished—for everything it lacks.
Windows has none of the benefits ofLinux, none of Homebrew or even the AUR, a tiny fraction of the QoL third party features from Mac (usually unpolished)—to say nothing of the first party QoL features—plus the hardware is comically bad. Diving board trackpads are normal on $3k windows machines in 2025, 500nits displays, whistling fans on about 17 high-end laptops I tried in the past 6 months. Truly the worst experience imaginable. Abominable, even.
I don't really butt heads with people that demand good defaults. I just hate on-device advertising with such a passion that I could never personally support Apple or Microsoft. Not having to deal with first-party services, nag notifications and constant advertising is well worth the week or two it takes to set up NixOS.
I tried using a Windows laptop for my first two months.
I couldn't do it.
I was blown away by how difficult and opaque everything was. I’m sure a lot of it was just unfamiliarity, but a lot of it definitely was not. I actually could not believe how hard of a time I had
Beyond that, Windows' architecture is a mess, I hate it (There's a reason Microsoft has to ship WSL2). macOS runs all of my tools fine, just like Linux does.
Windows architecture is great. the WinAPI is better documented and more comprehensive than anything on Linux or Mac.
There are so many other issues. - The file explorer gets slower and more broken with each update. context menus randomly don't show, or take literally 30 seconds to load. - The renderer crashes randomly once a week (it's not a huge issue, but the screen goes black for 10 seconds or so) - the settings dialog is bad. goes through like 5 different layers of Windows generations and recently makes the old dialogs hard to find but doesn't offer adequate replacements (looking at network and sound) - and much more...
I have a huge problem with windows - some api uses "@" for something, so all my folders with @ in the name(it sorts alphabetically before everything and is easy to type - on macos it's option-8 for similar, Linux I use @ as well) and because of that Windows API most applications crasb if you last saved into a path with @ in it and do file->open. Notepad++, notepad.exe, handbrake, VLC, mplayer, and so on.
Its a frustration, but it is my fault for developing a stupid habit back before metadata or changing colors of folers or what ever exists now to force an arbitrary sort order.
Not too long ago I booted up an old laptop and put a fresh install of Windows 7 on it for kicks. Amazing how much of a breath of fresh air that was.
The others just failed with random hexadecimal error codes, again I had to Google to try and work out what was going on.
With one of them I had to use the command line and diskpart etc. to expand the recovery partition because apparently the default size when I'd made that Windows 10 install was no longer big enough, and Windows Update couldn't work this out (the error code from the failure was nondescript, took ages to find out what was actually wrong) and couldn't fix it. Had to do it manually in Powershell.
Another one I think might have fixed by running sfc and dism recovery commands in the command line, again it would be nice if Windows could work this out itself!
For some reason, a game I play called DCS can be buggy and I've been told by the support to sfc /scannow and dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth. For some reason on every install of Windows 11 I've ever done, it always picks up tons of broken files. This is installing using the latest at the time Microsoft ISO. I've had this issue on multiple different systems, a modern gaming pc, a Mac with bootcamp, an older Lenovo M93p and when installing inside VMWare or KVM.
I do get less application and operating system crashes on a Mac though.
Hardware support also varies from laptop to laptop. If you want one to run Linux without a hassle, you have to shop around for that specifically.
But I will admit that SteamDeck is great. It’s deeply ironic that the best API for Linux gaming is Win32.
Not to actually run windows.
Because for developing, say, financial apps in C++, Linux is much, much better IMO.
Linux package managers are an abomination and a failed model. As evidenced by Docker being required both to reliable build and reliably run modern software.
glibc is an abomination of bad design ideas from the 80s. Compilers relying on whatever random ass version of a .so you have is broken AF. The fact that you can’t target an arbitrarily version of glibc or runtime environment is an embarrassment.
Once upon a time I shipped a popular-ish game with Linux support. 1% of Linux users represented 50% of bug reports. And no it’s not because Linux players were more reliable at reporting Linux issues. It has been a few years, but supporting more than SteamDeck is likely similar. At least for non-proton builds.
I'm not sure if you can "alternatives" glibc in Gentoo, but the "whatever .so you have" isn't a thing there, you can slot different versions if you need to.
If I want to test some software I'll use Ubuntu with docker or whatever, but to deploy to production I will make it run on Gentoo. Hell or high water.
Windows software still ships every .dll it needs, unless it is a Microsoft one. Do a search for msvc.dll or whatever sometime and marvel at the pagination.
This is the correct thing to do
That's not a platform issue, that's a "these companies simply don't ship Linux versions".
> Linux package managers are an abomination and a failed model.
Ironic then that some Windows tools (Chocolatey) model them and Windows has WSL because tons of devs find that model easier.
> As evidenced by Docker being required both to reliable build and reliably run modern software.
Docker doesn't do away with that model, it just allows you to isolate specific versions of libraries and tools you need in a namespace/container.
The standard model for shipping Windows software is to ship all the libraries needed with the software. Which isn't much different than what Docker is doing.
> glibc is an abomination of bad design ideas from the 80s. Compilers relying on whatever random ass version of a .so you have is broken AF. The fact that you can’t target an arbitrarily version of glibc or runtime environment is an embarrassment.
Maybe it's a bad model, can't speak to that. But you can statically link a C/C++ runtime with your software if you want, or ship alternative glibc versions.
Also, if we're talking about shipping games on Steam, you can simply target the Steam runtime. It'll work on Steam deck + any Linux system.
Package managers have so many fundamental problems it's hard to even get started. But they appeal to the Linux type of person because it's a very communist type approach to things, authoritarian and panopticon like way.
At least nowadays they are trying to allow installing software in some more convenient way but I'm not holding my breath considering there are competing implementations.
No?
Well, then, it might be "perfectly fine", but it's not "great."
Conway's Law applies ("A product reflects its producer's org chart"), as does Gresham's Law ("The bad drives out the good.") A pressing question for Apple users is whether the same corrosion is at work at their own vendor of choice.
The complaints are more philosophical than practical imho.
> A product reflects its producer's org chart
Facts.
I think everyone who comments on an OS war thread should see this banner in big red letters underneath the comment box
For many years, Windows has had WSL and now it's the second generation WSL2 and you can run graphical Linux even without a VM. It has a decent package manager out of the box, a great open-source terminal. Containers and VMs are also available out of the box. Windows also has a developers' hub, which allows you to install toolchains easily, including IDEs such as VS Code.
Meanwhile, macOS comes with its own version of CLI tools such as find, which have quite different parameters than Linux, it doesn't have a package manager, when I install an app on my iPhone, it somehow decides that I want to install it on my macOS, too, etc. And I won't even mention how poor the menubar is! I have at least 10 apps I need to install to make macOS usable - PopClip, Moom, Bartender, etc., while the Windows equivalent for things like Dock and menubar are working pretty well, including notifications - I've accidentally have clicked so many times on notification banners, covering my scroll bar or window controls. Not to mention that so many times I'm typing something in window, which has my input focus, then another window pops up, steals my input focus, and I end up trying parts of my password in the wrong window due to that!
There are so many things wrong with macOS, Apple doesn't really care to improve it, and the System Settings is growing out of control! Windows' settings are much better organized!
And, yes, macOS freezes and crashes not less frequently than Windows. In fact, I haven't had any such issues with a heavily constrained Windows 11, running in VMware Fusion!
Also, Windows now has a free equivalent of the paid CleanMyMac app, and it works pretty well. Not to mention the free security software. But even with CleanMyMac, uninstalling software leads to tons of junk all over the place.
A lot of comments are either using home or edu or whatever, or are running in restrictive environments like on a corporate network where your IT department controls everything.
I like Linux. I use mostly Gentoo. I also like BSD but I can never think of anything to use it for. It's so good it's boring, which is great for production, not my favorite to mess around on.
I never really liked Mac OS X. I liked OS7-9, though, even though there was no real multitasking no multi-user.
But my main desktop is Windows on the metal. I ran Windows in a GPU accelerated VM for four years or so, and that was fine too.
But even with all that being said, there's other ways to get Pro versions, if the home user experience is that frustrating. and it is, i know!
if you ever do buy a license key on ebay, do a web search for the key you get. If it comes back with any results, immediately email the seller and say "it didn't work, says it's in use" or whatever. Keep doing this till they give you one that doesn't come up on a search. Usually they'll just refund your money after 2 keys, sometimes with a nasty message. What they're doing is unethical, IMO; so if all you want is a potentially valid key, you might get it for free.
anyone remember FCKGW?
ive tried every single fix i can find, from turning off AI to predictive text. nothing fixes it. so many other people have this issue... it is absolutely insane a messaging app cannot message
Also annoyingly, I don’t consistently get messages on my Mac. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t, with no way of knowing what I’m missing without looking at my phone.
- Music (the app, not the service): almost unusable UI/UX, sync problems, two search fields, etc.
- Calendar is confusing, glitchy UI.
- Mail is a disaster… even the simple search filter doesn’t deliver as expected.
- Safari “Inspector”: will swallow async errors, unusable for development.
- Control panel: messy, ugly and slow.
- Spotlight: was good, doesn’t work so well anymore (web results, why?).
- Finder: visual glitches, extremely slow in some contexts (file list doesn't update).
- (pre installed) tools and commands slowly disappearing from Terminal/Shell
In general all the nice little touches and the refined experience are gone…
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.
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.
Google is by far the worst of this. It seems 75% of their products are pet-projects turned abandonware.
Make old chat system better (or just maintain it?)... meh boring...
Make new google chat.. talk.. alo.. i mean hangouts? Yep, promotions, bonuses!
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.
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.
After 18 years of living, i'll give you the best view I got:
While I do think Google kills products it shouldn't, my view there tends more towards when things are killed that cost basically nothing to support (IE have 1-2 people working on them, have not large prod costs, and not significant privacy/etc issues over time that require serious engineering rewrites/cost), have lots of happy users, don't meaningfully conflict with some other product strategy, and don't need lots of new features.
When those are killed, I think it's dumb.
Reader falls into this category.
Picasa would not.
lots of things on killedbygoogle do not - i think they were fine to kill, whether the process by which they were killed was a good one or not.
Google+ - eh, there's a lot to hate there but it was also Google experimenting with a more top-down approach to product building. I tend to be a fan of cultural and process experimentation - you have to be able to adapt your culture and processes as a company grows, or you will end up in a really bad place. You will never get this right 100% of the time, and it is worth doing it on important things sometimes, so that the results actually matter.
In this case, G+ also got caught up in the existential crises of the day (social) in a way that was unhelpful overall, and had leadership (Vic) that I think were just not good. He had good folks working for him (Bradley, et al) but I think it would have gone a lot better with someone else in his seat.
I say this as someone who was working on a small product at the time that was slated to become the backend/etc for youtube comments, and got crushed by G+-in-youtube mandates. The Youtube folks were wonderful - happy to figure out what the best thing was, decided to ditch their own thing for ours even though we were a little team (3 people) in a different org, and they were a big team who had spent a bunch of work on comments. They didn't like the top-down G+ mandate anymore than we did. In the end, it wasn't the fact that there was a top-down mandate that was bad. It's that it was not a well thought out strategic mandate.
I do also think Google often doesn't know how to start small and grow a user base over time.
But the rest, i think there is tons of hyperbole around. I think it was fine to kill Picasa - just because some percent doesn't like the replacement doesn't mean it wasn't okay to kill. Part of development and product life cycles is that you are not going to get it right all the time for all people. That's normal.
In the end, they've created products lots of people loved, and have enough users of roughly any product that you can't kill anything without have a large group of unhappy people. The answer to that is not to avoid killing anything. At most, it's "be thoughtful in how you support its death". Sometimes Google learned from its mistakes here, and sometimes it didn't. I had a hand in a number of divestitures and such because of my background and sometimes weird roles, and tried to make sure we did the right thing when I could - previous mistakes were helpful in pushing things for the better.
For example: Sketchup was divested rather than killed, which went really well.
Niantic was also spun off rather than killed, and I think that turned out really well as well.
etc.
For Google+ I cannot say, but what I know is that even if the launch, the initial iterations and the leadership was bad, destroying the thing just as people starting to settle in might make sense in a short sighted way but it destroyed any chance google had to be trusted in the next decade. Just watch how people openly discussed here and elsewhere from time to time if GCP will continue to exist.
It also probably destroyed any chance google had to capture a significant chunk of social media and as time passes I think this is a good thing.
Same goes for search. People have complained for years, but the quality keeps declining. And I am starting to think this is a great thing since we now see more promising search engines that wouldn't have had a chance against 2012 Google Search.
Depends what you mean. if you mean should have been spun out - it was a day and age that Google was still too young and immature to do that sort of thing, so yeah, no idea what would have happened.
If you mean it would have won or stayed viable - I dunno. Personally - i doubt it. Desktop apps were dying, and things like photo features were being moved into the basic OS distribution. Maybe it would have survived long enough to be killed by Apple Photos, or some halfway-lightroom product Adobe would have launched if Picasa stayed popular, but I doubt it - i think it would have died before then. But the vast majority of photos aren't on desktop anymore, and it's hard to see how picasa would have survived, even with picasa web.
But right or wrong, I also think killing it was within the range of reasonable product decisions to make.
As for G+, I don't actually disagree with that view. Google, like lots of tech companies, had (and still has, though they are better than they used to be!) a lot of trouble understanding the social aspects of products and trust. They want things to win becuase they are technically good, or because they are cool, or ...
Even when Larry spent time pushing on trying to improve user trust, by being careful about what and how things were shut down, it was pretty clear they overall didn't get how humans work.
The bad news, though, is i think this is pretty common in tech companies - while some do in fact get it, i think they are pretty few and far between :(
Putting a logistics guy like Tim in charge was great for ensuring Apple kept shipping existing hardware products and growing revenue, but almost guaranteed that quality across the board would falter. For all of his faults, the one thing that Steve Jobs did that's impossible to replicate by force is care.
One thing which bugs me since the last redesign of the horrible apple photos app, is that they changed its order of showing picture?!
After going on a trip, i like creating a album and sharing it with my family, I also put there some comments, and try to turn it into a story. I believe this is what an album is supposed to do, tell a story.
Therefore rendering the pictures by default from oldest picture to the newest one is very important.
This however did not fit properly into the new design of the Photos app, as they changed it to `Date added`.
Whatever that means, at the end of the day, it starts showing pictures from the newest one, to the oldest one. Which means it’s the opposite way. Think about watching a movie backwards…
1. Open shared album
2. Tap "Sort" button in the bottom left corner
3. Select "Sort by oldest first"
I don't know if they could have done it any simpler than this.
The reality is that the new default order does make sense for albums you keep adding to.
- I added photos to the album
- Where? I don't see them
- idk, scroll somewhere in the middle, they're from 2019 and 2023
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.
The thing is slowly I am moving to so much non-Apple things that at one might I might go back to a much cheaper Android. Because anyway normal sized phones are not coming from Apple either.
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. Clunky AF.
Mac software might be at a low-point, but it hasn’t burnt down yet.
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.
You can save anything you can print as a PDF since what, Windows 7? And the OS comes with a PDF reader since what, Windows 8?
> And the OS comes with a PDF reader since what, Windows 8?
Which one, the Edge browser? Don't you have to install Sumatra PDF or Acrobat?
PDF readers haven't been required for over 10 years? Chrome shipped with a PDF viewer eons ago and of course the old version of Edge and current Chromium Edge (and now Firefox, as of a week or two ago) have PDF viewers.
macOS Preview is limited to PDF 1.4. That kind of sucks. Not a deal breaker for most PDFs, but I've come across one or two that won't render and I had to figure out why.
That said, the Edge PDF viewer also lets you read, edit, and share nearly all PDFs.
I’m surprised you find it fine. It’s more clicks and slower at each step than on a Mac.
Yes. When you type "word" in the search bar, you get directed to MS Word Online, a free version of MS Word.
For all the other programs, and browsers as well, hit "print" and select "print to PDF".
> Which one, the Edge browser
Yes. I hate Edge and have disabled it, but I have to give it to them that their PDF reader is much better than the one built into other operating systems. It's optimised for simplicity and common PDF interactions (highlighting, filling out forms, etc.). Plus, unlike all the other PDF readers, Edge has some excellent security features that have been implemented because of its browser nature.
The way Edge has turned into a shitty shell of its former self is a true software tragedy. It was well on the way to become the best browser available until Microsoft decided to Microsoft all over it. Still, works fine for opening PDF files.
Apple software has always been crap. People put up with it because the hardware was nice and shiny and distracted from the many bugs and severe UI issues.
That’s just one experience. Another: Look at Photos app. Apple recently changed it. Total chaos. No lists anymore but tiles. I have to scroll up and down to find out where my lists of photos are. Germans call it „verschlimmbessern“, making it worse by trying to improve.
Or look at Finder app. And compare it to any competing product.
No app created by Apple really convinces me. None of them. Every product by an indy dev is magnitudes better.
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.
But most of all it seems like it was designed by people who don’t even know what it is for. That combined with the superficial “implement my Figma masterpiece in code” development approach that includes little to no user testing. Tog weeps. Don Norman weeps. Observe how much breaks when you do something as trivial as bump the default font size by one notch. I am sure it is pixel perfect at default size though.
Enter a birth date in a contact entry without a year. Watch as it jumps to the next day when you save because you are editing the date after 0000 of the next day in utc time. That bug has now been in MacOS/iOS for at least 17 years.
Sorry, got in to rant mode. I really want “less but better” from things in my life. We as consumers aren’t rewarding companies that take this approach apparently.
Unfortunately there don't seem to be any good alternatives to Apple. Windows is even worse.
The DSL could've been better (while still syncing between code and direct-manipulation GUI painter). And the interaction model seemed like it wasn't to be trusted, and was probably buggy (and others confirmed bugs). The lack of documentation on some entitlements APIs being demoed as launched left me shouting very bad words on multiple days (which is not something I normally do) before I made everything work.
I could feel this, and ended up wrapping all my UI with a carefully hand-implemented hierarchical statechart, so that the app would work in the field for our needs, the first time, and every time. Normally, for consumer-grade work, I would just use the abstractions of the interface toolkit, and not have to formally model it separately.
Don't get me started on what a transparently incompetent load of poo some of the Apple developer Web sites were, for complying with the additional burdens that Apple places on developers, just because it can. Obvious rampant data consistency problems, poor HCI design, and just plain unreliable behavior. I think I heard that at least some of that had been outsourced, to one of those consulting firms that everyone knows isn't up to doing anything competently, but that somehow gets contracts anyway.
And SwiftUI is just being too smart sometimes: https://tonsky.me/blog/swiftui/
Not sure about other people, but for me, my UI framework making its own heuristic decisions about how to lay out and style my views is the last thing I want. It robs me of the certainty that my UI will look and work the way I intend. And this is why, as an Android developer, I still build my apps with decade-old tried and true technologies.
That this is shipping in the native UI framework for a trillion dollar tech company is astonishing.
> Except those technologies are now deprecated and you don't know when they might be removed.
Views and activities and XML layout will never be removed, of that I'm certain. After all, Compose does use views in the end. That's the only way to build UIs that the system itself understands. And, unlike SwiftUI, Compose itself isn't even part of the system, it's a thing you put inside your app.
I don't care about deprecations. Google has discredited itself for me and its abuse of the @Deprecated annotation is one of the reasons. The one thing that's very unfortunate is that all tools unquestionably trust that the person who puts @Deprecated in the code they maintain knows what they're doing, and nothing allows you to selectively un-deprecate specific classes or packages; you can only ignore all deprecations in your class/method/statement.
And, by the way, I also ignore the existence of Kotlin. I still write Java, albeit it's Java 17. The one time I had to deal with Kotlin code (on a hackathon) it felt like I'm coding through molasses.
Apple is really losing the plot because they really need their software to be good to sell their hardware. Microsoft doesn't even have to care that much because there is not a relevant alternative coming out any time soon (as the various Linux failures have shown), but at least you don't have to give them a lot of money (in fact as close to zero as possible if you really want to).
What a time to be alive.
Internally the prioritized output becomes the meta work, not what reaches customers. What reaches customers is almost some kind of accidental byproduct of what the vast majority of people in the org spend their time on day-to-day.
My past experience is dominated by startups. The fake work I'm incentivized to spend time on would have been fire-able levels of misplaced priorities / waste everywhere else I've worked as an IC developer.
I've never worked for Apple, I'm assuming this pattern plays out everywhere at this scale.
Well compensated hoop jumping at least!
Once you get big enough, upper management has tough time figure out who is meta optimizing over work-optimizing. Not to mention there might be multiple meta optimizing employees.
IME, it's around 100-150 employees which lines up with Dunbar's Number. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
TAs the company kept growing, and hired middle managers from bigger tech, they that Jira was the way to go, as it allowed for nice reports aggregating "insights"across the organization. In under a year, point-centered management arrived, and with it an exodus of top talent, all of which had massive amounts of equity anyway. Execs then wondered what happened, and why ability to ship features kept declining. I think they still don't know.
Meta-work (lots of "cross functional" documents, alignment meetings, sync ups with senior tech leads to brown nose, deliberately creating low quality output to justify hiring more people/growing one's "scope") is 90% of it.
Any actual output is largely accidental, coming from the 20% still naive, or idealistic enough to actually care about what they produce.
This rings especially true with Windows.
There was a not-so-serious rumor that the whole MS design department uses Macs.
This may or may not be true, but recent UX changes make it clear that the designers don’t really use Windows beyond a superficial level. Many common interactions have become increasingly tedious and visually sluggish, both due to excessive animations and performance issues. Explorer in particular has become barely usable for anyone who frequently manages files.
There's no up button, no split screen, you can't copy a path easily, you can't show hidden files easily, you can't customize the columns in list mode, the column mode won't let you go up, there's no cut and paste.
Windows Explorer sucks, but not nearly as bad as finder. Dolphin, thunar, and Nautilus on Linux have all those features and more. I have to drop to terminal or install mucommander just to do basic things in the macOS filesystem.
Luckily there are Norton commander clones available for osx.
Display the path bar at the bottom and you can get to any level of parent in 1 click. Without the path bar you can also right-click on the current folder name at the top of the window to also navigate to any level of parent.
> no split screen
This is not something I've ever found a use for in any OS, I always just open 2 windows. It does have tabs, and you can drags stuff between tabs, albeit with some delay. This seems minor, unless for very specific workflows.
> you can't copy a path easily
Right-click file or folder, when you then press Option, Copy changes to copy path.
> you can't show hidden files easily
Command+Shift+. toggles hidden files on and off. I find this pretty easy to remember, since dots prefix hidden files.
> you can't customize the columns in list mode
Right-click the headings and you can add/remove the ones you want? Is that what you're talking about?
> there's no cut and paste
Instead of an option when copying, it's an option when pasting. Command+C to copy, then add Option while pasting... Command+Option+V. I almost never use Cut, even on Windows of Linux, I don't want to cut something, get interrupted, do something else, and lose my file. Having it move, then delete the source with the paste action, is safer.
It sounds like you haven't used Finder that much, or weren't willing to learn or adapt your behaviors.
There are some things about other file explorers I like, but I don't find myself struggling to use Finder at all. I mostly miss column view when I'm on anything that isn't Finder.
Granted, I haven’t even tried to use it in years. So maybe it’s not so bad these days?
I assume they didn't expect users to use directory hierarchies much and thought everybody would dump their files into flat dirs and search them with spotlight.
The dev community might be an outlier, but people choosing a windows machine to get WSL on a mainstream and well-supported hardware is not uncommon.
Same for those with a macos work laptop but a windows gaming machine, or artists using a mac for personal stuff and windows for 3D/2D creation.
Having Windows designers making platform transitions easier kinda makes sense, though I agree it shouldn't penalize existing users as much as it does now.
> This rings especially true with Windows.
Just take a look at the Windows 11 "Control Panel" or whatever is called and how that looks like just another UI on top of the main system, that does not make sense
Now they are using Figma, but as far I know, yeah, they all use macs lol
Open a folder isn't much faster either, there is visible delay. with the current-day hardware there is no reason why this isn't instant.
Compare it with Windows XP or Windows 7, the difference is night and day.
Interaction with OneDrive is horrible too, this is particularly bad because it was fine on Win10. When a folder is syncing it constantly "refreshes" itself which causes you to lose the focus if you're renaming files. This is the single most annoying thing because I do close a doc -> immediately rename it all the time.
I still had spinning rust when I upgraded. Win7 was fine. UI wasn't quite as snappy as XP, but it still felt pretty responsive.
After upgrading? EVERYTHING took forever. The friggin' start menu lagged noticeably on almost every interaction.
Upgrading to a solid state disk mostly fixed it, so they had clearly done something foundational that'd radically increased disk IO system wide. Solid state's fast, but it's not fast enough, if they'd kept going down that road. Eventually it'd start to show up there, too.
Vista was the worst windows, other than 8 and ME.
Suffice to say if windows was actually slow when i used it, i would not use it. I didn't use ME, XP, Vista, or 8. There's a pattern here. I did use Xp x64 edition, but that came out ~2 years after XP, and did not have the pre-service-pack issues XP did.
If we're talking about a transactional file sync service preventing you from editing a file while it's synchronizing; then i am not sure what to tell you. Both you and the person you replied to seem to merely like complaining.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx_t8SUwrEk
you'll note that, apparently, everything you said prior to your last paragraph is shown incorrect.
Are you serious? who cares about the context menu, it's such a non-issue it took me like 15 seconds to figure out how to get the "archive" and rename commands back. The rest of the stuff in there is all software that added context menu items.
I get the feeling you haven't really used windows since win95 or something. like, you have a windows machine at work that you don't like because it's slow for whatever reason. Three people made specific complaints, i responded with a video and a screenshot disproving what they said, and... yeah i don't get it.
but more to the point you have to enable indexing and let the indexing service run. Microsoft caught flak for "SearchIndexer.exe" using 25% of a CPU 24/7 that i think it's much less aggressive now. But i don't use that search because windows searches CIFS shares slowly, too. Everything.exe indexes and the searches are near enough instant that it's not even worth splitting hairs or stopwatch timers.
I’m glad I’m not the only one. It’s mind boggling. I’ve had to start putting in my best guess just to have it save…
I feel like every time I swap to the Mac ecosystem it's a litany of "Hunh, that weird tiny thing doesn't work" issues.
PS: USB-C DisplayPort MST (display daisy-chaining) support that's been missing for... a decade and counting?
Pretty much. It's not like the other operating systems are better in this regard. In general there's a lot more software that's buggy like this than software that's reliable
This bug I can’t even replicate so :shrug:
That said, it's not like everything is perfect, just 100% better than my drive-by experiences trying to have a gaming PC (dead, again), and an Android phone for testing purposes.
My experience with apple is something's either a 2 minute fix or unfixable which to be fair is a reasonable way to do things though much less appealing to me (though less relevant for many users as stock android/windows continue to give users less and less control).
This is easy to repro by spinning an alarm's minutes and hitting save before it's completely and utterly stopped.
This UI bug (?) has existed for as long as I can remember.
Screen recording of me trying to reproduce that: https://streamable.com/n97j9m
I saw poor management (lots of ex Amazon) running new grads/jr engineers into the ground (features features)
It’s all about new features. If anyone with experience expresses an idea to address technical debt they are literally put on PIP
If there was a way to combine Apples magic marketing brainwashing with Google’s engineering it would be an amazing thing to watch
I hope they are able to course correct with the right leadership. A culture that cares deeply about the little things is hard to build and has to be supported at the highest levels.
If *becoming the most valuable company in the world* isn't being "rewarded", then what possibly is?
No, it's the hypercapitalist endless drive for ultra short-term, next quarter profits at the cost of anything else that causes this. Obvious irony being that Apple would've never become this big if Jobs had followed this approach.
This of course is the #1 reason of the downfall of the West, above all else - pure short-termism.
Well, turned out that although the Focus -> Do Not Disturb settings had been disabled, the settings were behaving as though they were enabled anyway! It was set to only allow certain apps to show banners. Only when I changed this setting (a few months later nevertheless) did notification banners finally start working properly as before. Perhaps I ran into an extreme edge case that the Apple engineers overlooked somehow, but it does make me wonder whether they are doing anything at all to identify and cover such edge cases.
----
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.
On the one hand things are moving faster, doing more with less, being more responsive etc. But this comes at the expense of quality and long-term reliability / support. Applies to hardware too.
The frustrating thing is it locks the IO system, but the kernel thinks everything is fine. One by one each thread that does IO never returns. So you frantically click around wondering why your computer isn't doing anything.
This point really cuts to the heart of my frustration with Apple lately. I switched from Windows XP Pro to OS X 10.2 in order to have a dead simple, bulletproof desktop experience without all the nonsense. I recently booted my old macbook to grab some files and was shocked at how lovely and simple 10.2 was.
I just went with chrome. I used to really like Safari, I really wanted to use it, but Apple is just not competent enough anymore, no matter how good looking it is, no matter how many interesting features it has, if it doesn't work all is irrelevant.
There are pockets of competence, but it's not a company priority (even the audio/video apps suffer). That such mediocrity has crept into the OS is even worse.
It sends as if nobody at Apple is either a power user or an “abuser” (like many old people who have 50+ email windows open on their iPad because the ui is not very good for them anymore)
I’d love to work at some for a year and only fix bugs and performance issues. It’s very rewarding work imo.
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.
Why did Apple engineering culture decline then? It became top-down, no longer bottom-up.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Premium hardware my foot! They are lucky to be in a convenient duopoly.
I know people like to complain about Apple's software quality - but is this actually an issue - or just the popular thing to say?
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.
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've been debugging it on and off for a couple of months because I assumed I messed something up.
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).
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.
How so? Would you mind giving examples.
Note: I'm not disagreeing. Just curious what software quality issues you're having exactly.
- Why when I drag the Safari window up to go full screen with the tiling manager does it leave a large gap around the window? When I double click the top bar it aligns the top and bottom with the edges but still leaves a gap on the sides.
- Why does the settings dialog have so much lag? It takes a couple of seconds to launch and then when navigating around there is a roughly one second lag between panels.
- Why can't I uninstall default Mac apps that I have never opened?
- If I open up task view using F3, why is there no option to exit the window or program?
- If I have a Safari window open in a smaller window and double click the task bar, why does it maximize the way it does? Leaving a large section open.
It's a feature. System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Tiled windows have margins.
> - Why does the settings dialog have so much lag? It takes a couple of seconds to launch and then when navigating around there is a roughly one second lag between panels.
Each 'panel' is actually an app extension that runs its own process. Similar to extensions and control panels in classic MacOS.
> - Why can't I uninstall default Mac apps that I have never opened?
This is annoying.
> - If I open up task view using F3, why is there no option to exit the window or program?
You mean 'Misson Control'? Dunno, but there is an inexpensive addon that addresses this. https://www.fadel.io/missioncontrolplus
> - If I have a Safari window open in a smaller window and double click the task bar, why does it maximize the way it does? Leaving a large section open.
The modern macOS UX is an amalgamation of Classic MacOS and NeXTSTEP, neither of which really has the concept of "maximised" in the same sense as Windows does. The action you describe "zooms" the window to best fit the content. The parallel to "maximised" is full screen.
That corrected it, thank you.
> You mean 'Misson Control'? Dunno, but there is an inexpensive addon that addresses this
Having to pay $9 to solve an issue that every other OS has implemented is wild.
Certainly with "crashers" there are crash reports from the field (you and I) that are sent back home and filtered into various databases. Internal tool allow Apple to see the "top crashers" (and you can filter to specific OS, hardware, etc.). There will be Radars filed for these and they will be sent to the appropriate teams.
The issue of course is the degree to which these take priority over feature work, etc. If Apple decided to do nothing but address these for a year or two we could have nice things again.
The icons in the top bar getting extreme spacing
Spotlight search is a complete mess
Update nagging every time i wake my mac from sleep
Basically the whole iOSification of macOS
Not an exhaustive list but some simple recent examples:
in Messages on macOS across 3 Macs I own, turning on and off the global 'read receipts' setting has no effect, not even from the perspective of iOS. The iOS setting does seem to work though.
Bugs in iOS mail where notifications just freeze the app.
Layout issues in macOS settings.
Memory leaks in WindowServer.
Many iCloud services inconsistent and non-reliable.
Apple Pay not showing correctly in Apple Account settings.
Lots of little hiccups...
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!
In all my years of using iOS, i never had long pauses, but switching between safari and other apps i sometimes had pauses around 10 seconds. Maybe it is the SwiftUI change; i'm not sure.
I did upgrade to the SE v3 and haven't really seen many pauses. But i am not a power user by any means and was seeing the problem often, along with some other glitches.
Just to be clear: it wasn't like the applications were lagging, it was as if the entire OS was crawling.
On iOS, I use the notes app to keep track of my workout routine. Just a simple table with columns for exercises and rows for workout sessions. For a while now, there's a bug where the text gets confused about which row it should display on. Only in some columns though. So in one or a few columns, the entry for the last workout will be a few rows above where it should be – sometimes it's between rows. When I press the cell in the bottom row to input a new entry, the text marker will end up somewhere above. This bug is quite inconsistent, but often persists between reboots of the app. It seems to have something to do with there being empty cells in a column
Anyone else experience this?
Good times.
The biggest issue for me though was Darwin's weird psuedo-complete unix environment. All of my production servers are Linux, and it's a real pain to have to torture software that works great on Linux over to Apple's OS. Homebrew is nice, but even that would fail sometimes, and if the software wasn't available I would have to wait for someone smarter than me to port it. Also, it's weird that the community has to maintain this despite Apple having a gajillion dollars because they simply do not care about OSS.
More of a personal ancedote, but in the end all I'm really using a computer for is a web browser, code editing, and running linux production software locally. Just made more sense to stay on Linux, which I run on an excellent Framework laptop. It feels nice to be out of the software bloat treadmill.
I wish there was a perfect solution, but man. Comparing a framework laptop with ubuntu to an MBP with MacOS is crazy from anything but a cost perspective.
If I was to nit-pick, I would say that having competing package managers apt and snap is annoying and I've considered switching to Debian over that.
The real surprise to me was that I liked the Framework trackpad more than the Macbook one. I assumed that would be the best thing about the Macbook and was surprised when it wasn't.
I sold it to a friend and she loved it. To each their own I guess.
Every tuple of
(engineers, organizational structure, choice of language, ...)
The asymptotic behavior of this function determines the most complex problems you can solve before the complexity of your solution (the software) blows up and becomes unmanageable.
Apple's function currently has subpar asymptotics on the software side, so they've hit the bounds of complexity that they can properly handle.
There are a lot of things you can do to improve your asymptotics: engineering org structure improvements, switch to programming languages with better complexity function asymptotics, etc. etc., but any of these changes require an organization with the executive function and insight to actually make the jump, which is by no means a given.
1. Maps crashes almost every ride on Car Play (this used to happen a lot back in 2023 and was fixed for majority of 2024. Seems like it regressed again)
2. Trying to expand reviews on Google Maps expands the wrong review (100% reproducible, not an edge case)
3. Firebase Auth has terrible reliability when it comes to SMS delivery and fail rate of like 5-10%.
4. Gmail keeps opening links with the wrong account (Click on Google meet link from an email in account number 2, as in .../u/2/... . Link opens with account 0 and now you gotta switch accounts again).
5. Gemini is famously unreliable and produces wrong results for seemingly simple queries.
And many more I can't recall on top of my head but surely exist.
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.
They should also setup a public bug tracker so people can follow issues they care about.
Over time, a community/network of people inside and outside of Apple would evolve that fix issues and improve areas of the operating system they care about. Some sort of reputation system would emerge where people who write quality bug reports or create quality patches would get more attention from Apple.
It wouldn’t be open source, but it would at least be better than the way it works today.
Also, don't get me started on the current state of "documentation." At one time, Apple had a huge team of ridiculously overqualified documentation people. They often had better chops than the engineers.
It was amazing, and spoiled me. There was a similar set of books about BSD UNIX, as well. Don't remember the exact title, but it was pretty awesome.
Right now, it looks like they are relying completely on, on headerdoc comments.
It can work, but someone needs to spend a lot of time on these comments, and they need to do so, at a “holistic” level, coordinating all the various systems.
They have done a fairly good job, so far, but it’s really starting to fray; especially in the newer systems.
But yes. The overall decline in Apple’s software quality is evident and sad.
* Around iOS 8, the back button in Safari would crash voiceover. Bug was fixed with next OS update, so I had to deal with it for at least 8 months. * Since roughly iOS 11, VoiceOver cursor will randmly jump away from the currently selected item. So you actually never know what you will invoke when double-tapping. * My Apple Watch requires a different way of tapping for the first time I enter my passcode after battery was empty. This bug persists even after completely unpairing and re-setting up. * With previous Watch OS, I accidentally tried to download the premium voice from within the Apple Watch App. Apparently, thats not how this is supposed to be done. However, the single attempt to use the watch app to do this, I coulld never successfully download the premium voice from the watch directly again. Something whent stuck, and the menu item doesn't even appear on the watch.
And these are just a small selection of things I could explain in a single paragraph. I could actually write a book about small to medium bugs I experienced with Apple Software in the last 12 years. For instance, sometimes you need to tap a boolean setting three times for it to toggle. If you have an eye for bugs, you see one per day on Apple devices...
This is an important issue IMO. After having worked on accessibility for mobile and web applications for several years, I gained a lot of empathy for assistive technology users. Apple should know better.
Like they couldn't implement some heuristic that could be enabled in settings, to ignore touches that occur close to simultaneously with textual keystrokes.
Several times a day, I'm typing, and suddenly, the cursor jumps in the middle of earlier text where a fragment of the tail end of my typing goes before I notice and stop. I then have to undo that, and retype it at the end.
In theory, there should be some sort of paid app that uses all the incredible hardware for an actual good experience.
Apple Intelligence is chronically late, and systematically underwhelming and mostly useless.
Everyone is part of the problem: I see many developers stopping when it’s good enough, managers firing QA because it works well enough, users having not much choice, and finally, users being used to software of dubious quality everywhere accepting it as normal (so they will pay anyways).
apple ebbs and flows in terms of how on the ball they are in any given area, but it feels we're at a strange inflection point where their hardware is the best it's ever been and the software is inexplicably in a death spiral
i've been a heavy safari user for a while, mainly because i do make extensive use of the tab and history syncing across all my devices, and safari is the only actual browser you get on iOS - might as well use the native version.
lately safari has this habit of, on some websites, entirely locking up my device while loading web pages. like full on hard lock can't switch windows, nothing can be done, sometimes for upwards of 30 seconds. to go to my electric company's website, i have to use chrome. otherwise my computer becomes unusable.
i am not suggesting that their website isn't awful (it is) but it is inexcusable that on an M2 max laptop with 64 GB of ram that loading a slow or bulky website should make my computer completely unusable. i do not understand how this hasn't been addressed. it was intermittent before but it's a daily occurrence now.
this along with all the weird visual glitches, notifications snapping between sharp-edged boxes and rounded boxes repeatedly, sudden drops in frame rate on my iPhone display that seem to start and end for no reason, and it's starting to feel like everyone at apple uses their devices as beautiful paperweights primarily and doesn't actually interact with the software at all...
the thing that frustrates me deeply is i've explored the android ecosystem extensively (i've owned several samsung and pixel devices, even very recent ones as second phones) and find that whole space even worse and more unpleasant, with the shovelware play store and a general unpleasant and janky UI that has never felt right to me. so it's like... what's the GOOD option now?
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.
But since sales go brrrrr and so does the stock, why should they care?
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.
I had entries disappearing from my Contacts (iCloud). The customer support asked for me to get back when I notice the issue so they could get logs to debug. My best friend contact entry disappeared overnight. I called the representative the day of and told him that the contact disappeared between yesterday night and today morning. His answer was that I needed to pinpoint more accurately when the contact disappeared, because iPhone generates a lot of logs and and engineers don’t have time to go through them. Ah!
Needless to say I stopped storing my contacts with iCloud and my trust eroded. “Funny enough” I also had issues with my Health data, years of it disappeared. Support could not do anything. The data magically came back a month later or so.
In contrast, the iPad does not overheat when painting for extended periods in procreate.
By the looks of it, it's a widespread issue.
If apple can't even guarantee the users documents, I wonder what else might be wrong.
[1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255156283?sortBy=rank
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ipad/comments/19evmb8/files_disappe...
iPhone is a trap. We see already in GB with removal of encryption. It is not the time for drooling over some UI animation. It is time to protect your data and learn to live in a surveillance state. All the people which are pretending to be a techie and use those types of devices called "smartphones" are plain stupid.
Every stroke on your Mac is collected. Just install Little Snitch and watch it real-time. Same with Windows. Simplewall app is showing it clearly.
This is not only a hostile computing and dark patterns' bonanza. They want AI governance over there in the headquarters of a global capital.
It is time to stop filling their baskets with cash. Use your old devices as long as possible. Do not update prematurelly. Educate yourselves. Protect your data.
Degoogled phone is a nice start for this UX.
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.
I’ve been experiencing issues like home screen widgets not updating or showing incorrect data (like wrong date/times).
Notifications are another frustration, especially with Signal Messenger, where they just don’t come through reliably.
The camera app also seems to have a bug where the screen goes black, making you think the camera is broken, but force closing and reopening the app fixes it.
Finally, sharing content from Safari to Gmail often causes the entire UI to freeze until I force close Safari.
These are small but annoying issues that seem to be affecting the overall experience, and it’s disappointing for a platform that once prided itself on stability and polish.
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.
I was so happy to finally have replacement delivered. But wait, exactly same scrolling issue doesn’t stop following me. After a little bit research on the internet, I realized it’s known issue to Apple already, which Apple still refuses to fix. Long story short - one needs to update macOS to 15.1 to fix that.
Smaller teams with fewer managers and clearer direction on what improves user experiences would be a good plan. Sites like this end up with so many features that aren’t needed.
Another wild one is syncing photos between iphone and mac meant ‘this photo will sync at random point in the next 5 days’ - it’s just recently been fixed after like 8 years of not working.
And don’t even try to use their stupidly simple proprietary apps like Numbers where basic spreadsheet functionality is bizarre or missing.
Mac is still my favourite but i don’t get why a trillion dollar company can’t fix their software for what’s ‘pennies’ for them.
I always really liked a lot of apple software, like Preview.app. It's a viewer for almost everything, images, documents, 3d models, but it doesn't feel bloat at all, I'm glad Apple doesn't seem to change the app much. Also shocked the first time I found out TextEdit.app is also a WYSIWYG HTML editor.
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.
As a random example: It is impossible to use any non-Mac device to produce a HDR image that an Apple device can handle correctly:
JPEG XL is "supported". Narrator: No it isn't. The point of this file format is proper HDR support, but Apple loads it as an 8-bit SDR image no matter what.
AVIF is "supported" and even loads as HDR... on one device only. You can't forward such an image via any iOS or MacOS app. It becomes a non-picture file attachment.
My Nikon Z8 can generate glorious HDR HEIF files -- the native Apple image format -- which doesn't work either. Why? Because Apple software can't handle "HEIF", they can only handle the incredibly specific tiny subset of it that very specifically the iOS Camera app produces. Nothing else works properly, or even at all.
You can spend thousands on a camera, thousands on an iPhone or iPad, thousands on a Macbook and... they can't handle pictures. PICTURES!
Meanwhile a $500 TV from ALDI will happily show me HDR images in a dozen formats because they use Chrome OS or Google TV.
1. Press Fn key twice to open Emoji picker
2. Type to search
3. Hover an emoji
4. Press Esc to empty search for box and start a new search
5. Type
You can't type. Focus is lost somewhere, impossible to search again for an emoji without closing the panel and open it again. My coworkers have all installed a third-party emoji picker to work around this issue, which is absurd from Apple's standpoint.
How can Apple engineers not be aware of such issues? Did they ever inserted an emoji from macOS?
Have you tried using Shortcuts on ANY Apple device? It's a fucking mess.
It is impossible to write Shortcuts with code. Consequently, this means that you're stuck with the no-code workflow builder.
Unfortunately, the no-code builder is a hog! Moving actions around within the panel will cause Shortcuts to lock up. Sometimes, Shortcuts will just refuse to reorder actions when you move them. Exiting and re-opening is the only fix.
Then there's running Shortcuts. Shortcuts appear like they can run anywhere on first glance. Try running a Shortcut to append text to a note on Apple Watch. You can't. But Shortcuts will gladly spin lock for two minutes doing whatever the fuck before yielding a "Remote Message Execution timeoit" that is Apple speak for "watchOS doesn't support appending to notes," or "you're saving a file into an iCloud directory that doesn't exist, and I'm not going to create it for you because no" or "your phone's off and I could connect to iCloud, but I'd rather not and piss you off instead."
But say you go through ALL of that and build your perfect complex shortcut that makes your life much easier. You'll find out later that year when the new iOS drops that a few of the actions in your Shortcut were silently changed and now the entire thing doesn't work!
You'll spend hours fixing it, wishing you were on Android the entire time but remembering that your Apple Watch actually is useful sometimes and everything on that side is SO MUCH WORSE because Apple has insane economies of scale and patents the shit out of everything.
This is just the tip of my iceberg of grievances with Apple software.
AirPods whose case dies every three days and often fails to switch between devices despite it being a flagship feature. Accidentally changing tracks when you raise-wake your phone. LITERALLY EVERYTHING about the keyboard. I could easily go on.
But, hey, at least Apple Intelligence can summarize my emails so I can think even less.
I miss the Apple that made Apple Mail, Calendars, Reminders and Notes. Those apps were made _before laptops were mainstream_ but are STILL the best at what they do while being mostly private and on-device.
- high resolution high refresh rate display (max res and refresh rate are higher than DP1.2 bandwidth)
- attached to dock through DP
- macbook lid is closed and plugged into dock
the attached display defaults to the highest resolution, even though it's unsupported by TB3. This leads to a black screen. Changing the resolution by opening the lid doesn't fix this because closing the lid will return the external display to the default resolution.
I feel this would be unthinkable in the time before Tim Cook’s Apple.
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).
-- On Monterey no disk images will mount and no external drives or SD card. Everything is fine on older versions of OS, some forum posts suggest others with the same issue, but without any resolution. The only way to get DMG images to mount is to use a third party mounter like FastDMG, upgrading to Ventura fixes the issue with Disk images and my SD card, however this is not an officially supported OS for my model, so I have to use OpenCore Legacy patcher to achieve this. External drives still do not mount, the OS just doesn't see them at all, even in the recovery mode for these OS versions However running another MacOS inside Parallels I can access them, so they must be accessible somehow.
-- This is all perhaps caused by my firmware being out of date, i'm running 173.0.0.0 and it should be something like 530.0.0.0, this is updated with the operating system, however it has been found that on custom order macs with SDD's rather than the standard fusion drive, such as mine, the firmware update fails due to it incorrectly looking for a drive via the sata port. Apparently this is fixed on 195.x but you have to open up the iMac and plug in a drive into the Sata port just to get it to do this.
Extremely frustrating considering I paid a lot extra to spec this model up but due to Apple's mistake with the firmware updates (Or other unknown issue) I'm left with these problems. Since the machine is no longer in support, Apple aren't interested in helping.
I also do agree that their modern software is shockingly bad, and it is strange because, as others note, what they offer to third parties is generally quite good so third party applications are often quite amazing. It seems like Apple are unable to develop for themselves
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.
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.
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.
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.
Open a link from an email on an iPhone or iPad, then go back to Mail by tapping on the top left corner. If you now delete an email, this email gets deleted but the view does not update to move to the next email. If you now hit delete again, you are deleting the next email without noticing it.
For displaying the bugs, I'm thinking of something like what invision was - showing the interface of for example the desktop and showing the number of bugs associated with different elements of the desktop.
By displaying bugs as posts on a forum, I feel that we lose track of how degraded the performance of the system actually is.
These issues are becoming more recurring. Meanwhile Apple is trying to sell me on some stupid intelligence that I do not need.
In any case, HN's guidelines ask to use the original title of an article, unless it is misleading or linkbait. I'd agree that Apple's software quality has been going down.
I'm not sure how this is possible, but it's trivial to replicate and is only resolved by rebooting the device.
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.
1. Revamp TestFlight - 10k users is very little when user base is 100m+ users. 2. Improve phased roll out capabilities 3. Introduce a/b testing at release level to test old/new binaries at binary level (vs at feature, which is also a must have).
These 3 can catch 99% of release bound issues, no problem.
With all the bugs, idk how little this task force would have to be, though.
I am using Notion now, and even though that is kinda janky on an iPhone, it is still better than Apple's own notes, and of course, their web-version is much much much better than Apple's.
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
It is when Apple is claimed to be a quality boutique shop.
Have they made that claim anytime in the last few decades?
Perhaps that's the vibe behind their marketing, but you'd have to be blind to their size, sales, and market value to believe it.
I'm not sure that Apple themselves ever really did.
So it becomes even more important when people stop associating Apple's software with quality when it was people who started to associate it as such in the first place.
Escalated all the way to developers. Their 'analysis'. Whatsapp is supposedly blocking 4TeB on my iCloud account which is not available.
I asked whether they might have misread that as WhatsApp says 4GiB and even if , that would still be an iOS bug (why allow that?).
No reaction anymore.
It’s pretty bad. Somehow most other software is even worse. Genuinely impressive at this point.
If the computer industry endgame is for users to consume media via simple voice interfaces and AI, what is the business model for serving the smaller market of professional users who need powerful, classic HCI interfaces for creating new artifacts?
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.
Still, I think maybe it could be some related service running on the background
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 guess the fixes have to start there first.
There is no way that apple employee did not hit the bug at all given the requirement to trigger the bug is so simple.
They treat us as dump users.
Even when the device is for PRO users, they don't want our feedback as they think the software is perfect.
It doesn't happen often, maybe once every one or 2 months. But it requires a full reboot.
I suspect some quadratic or worse algorithm in the handwriting curve rendering.
One example where it is almost 2 years since they "made" a fix, but have not yet released it.
Battery life is short, but you can buy like 6 of them instead of an ipad. Also I like to hack.
I'm a former employee from the SWE org of ~13 years, left around a year ago.
This is a huge problem that the company needs to address ASAP. If you're in the Apple SWE org and reading this, please go up the chain as far as you're able to make things like this understood: Apple needs a bugfix release. They need all hands on deck going through radars and fixing things. No new features until these things get settled.
Care about error logs. Look at the number of Error logs happening per second on a customer build. Every one of those was considered by someone to be important enough to notice that it likely needs fixing. There are showstopping bugs buried in there.
Figure out your concurrency bugs. The whole company seems to be using the swift Concurrency framework wrong (at least a year ago, I doubt things have changed since then.) Stop abusing semaphores and DispatchGroups to work around async/sync barriers. It makes the compiler shut up but causes deadlocks later. Every "Just a sec" on Siri on HomePod is very likely caused by this. Stop putting off the important refactors needed to make this work.
Start caring about compiler warnings. Get the swift team to allow warnings to be disabled on a line-by-line basis so you can work from a zero-warning baseline and attack it from there.
Fix the build system. It's horrific that coordinated changes to multiple frameworks are so god damned impossible to do, and result in broken builds so often. You probably don't need to go full monorepo, but if you're going to continue with thousands of individual projects, make it so coordinated submissions is possible.
Fix Xcode. Or at least just jettison it. Pay a boatload of money to JetBrains or something and get an IDE that works internally, bless it as the way to go, and announce publically that Xcode is deprecated. You don't have the resources to fix it any more, it's time to take it out to pasture.
Fix the development milestones. The current system is designed for tentpole features to reach a certain maturity level before a certain date before a punt decision: But it just encourages punting (slipping to the B or C or E release) to a milestone with less scrutiny. Allow for bolder changes later in the process if they're in the name of improving stability. Allow for groups which are not part of a tentpole feature, to fix things at any time without having to deal with bug deadlines. Zero bugs is a joke, it's just denial, encoded into process.
The milestone system also lacks the mere vocabulary necessary to describe "time dedicated to fixing bugs in shipping code". Like it doesn't even exist as a concept. "Escape" makes it seem like it's a rarity, it's not. Nobody seems to follow the pact any more. Probably because the pact pretends that escapes are rare. They're everywhere. The development process needs dedicated time spent not doing feature work so that old bugs can be addressed.
There are a lot more things I could go on about, but people already know this. The problem is that senior leadership doesn't care enough. They don't foster a culture of excellence where they actually sweat these small details. They only care about features, and it's a disease. Get somebody up there who gives a shit.
Any recommendations for an alternative?
Since now their hardware is a bit better than others, maybe they care less of software quality.
It reached ProcessInfo.ThermalState "serious" when writing notes with the pencil.
Use Notes and enable pop-up from the corner of the screen.
I've been unable to select the Note that pops up from the corner, without creating a New note. Then only that new one pops up.
So, if the update is 20GB, 40GB of data get used.
A year on and my main take away is that ios is slow, buggy and has frustrating ux. The over use of modals and no consistent pattern for going back are frustrating. The UI lagging and glitching out and application crashes are so much worse and more frequent than I had on an old pixel.
I dont think ill stick with ios for my next phone but i dont plan on replacing it for 3 years so it's going to be a frustrating 4 years with a supposedly premium device that is objectively an inferior product.
<Warning: long and extremely critical rant incoming>
TL;DR Apple just does not have a qualified team (from the top) or the right team size (the one in the company is far too small).
I test beta releases of Apple’s OSes and report issues. I’ve seen a few factors over several years:
* There is not enough QA (or probably no QA at all) at Apple. So many bugs just creep through to release even after having been reported with tons of information and system logs provided. There is no attention paid to any bug report unless it is known and believed (by someone at Apple) to affect hundreds of users. Even then there’s little chance of attention to it.
* There is no feedback loop from Apple back to the bug reporter — you toss your bug report and assume it goes into some black hole.
* The direction of software development in Apple has moved to taking whatever is done on iOS — with a mediocre approach and plan — everywhere else. This includes things like Catalyst (the main reason you’d hate a macOS app from Apple). Try navigating Reminders or Music or any other Catalyst app on macOS with the keyboard — it’s as if the developers have never ever heard of tab order or have never used a keyboard that has non-alphabetical and non-numeric keys.
* Continuing on the previous point, Apple’s own app developers know something about how to create a mediocre iOS app, but over time the developer base has changed such that it has no knowledge of or history with desktop operating systems. I have no idea what top executives like Craig Federighi are even doing and why (I’m sounding generous here) they’re seemingly held hostage to such poor quality.
* When you look at the issues across device platforms and OSes, Apple seems to have one tiny team of software developers who work part time on all of those. Monday is iOS OS day, Tuesday is iPadOS day, Wednesday is macOS day, Thursday is iOS app day, Friday is iOS app day, Saturday is Apple Intelligence day and Sunday is a tvOS, homeOS and AirPods day. Apple’s services get a few hours here and there every few months.
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.
Been running GNOME for about 2 years now and the experience is really smooth. If you've got a Magic Trackpad, it works wonders on modern Linux. I also recommend GSConnect or Valent for a handoff-like experience with your phone:
macOS is another example. The System Settings menu is a hot garbage now, its search is literally unusable. For example, try to look for "shortcuts".
Then there are constant popup windows asking me to approve file access or some other BS. I can't do that permanently anymore, it's just for up to 30 days.
Another annoyance: it's impossible to speed up animations after the switch from Intel to ARM. This makes spaces literally unusable for me. I gave up and got a second monitor as a result.
I 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.
That one always seemed weird to me, some people break their screen, iPhone or otherwise, regularly, but I've never even scratched one.
- lack of repair support (either you pay through your nose for the screen replacement or you'll get a nasty stripe on second-hand screen that has been fitted into your machine)
- unrepairable devices (e.g. split Hard Disk chips to not be removable)
- artifically non-inclusive ecosystem that refuses e.g. Bluetooth file transfers from Android device
- idiotic policy of waiting on forgot password
This is the good, old enshittification, which started with Google and Windows, https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/. I wouldn't expect that Apple listens to this.
No you did not.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/11/psa-apple-isnt-actua...
(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?
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
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
Did you even notice that the link marked as solution is a third party software vendor?????? They charge money for that solution.
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
I don't know what point you're trying to make here, but it's falling flat.
So you can install Vanilla Windows 11, no third party, on decade old hardware without losing anything other than performance (And an annoying disclaimer)
I’ve yet to find a better phone+computer setup if what you’re looking for are good quality native apps, integration between pc and handset, and a usable Unix environment for programming and other work.
My iphone starts playing spotify after connecting to car's bluetooth? Screw it, I just removed spotify. Macos opens itunes every time when I connect to bluetooth headphones? – Can't remove itunes but here's a script that monitors and kills it. Macbook constantly overheating? – cooling pad is a solution (kind of). Airdrop almost never works? Okay, there's no airdrop, we send everything via IM. Management of photos is complete dumpster fire – that's ok, Photosync and locally hosted photobank is a solution.
If software quality keeps declining, this proposition isn’t just difficult to defend — it’s indefensible and an insult to consumers. Apple has lagged behind Android for a decade, and its software now fails at tasks Symbian OS handled effortlessly.
I've dealt with clunky software all my life, but Apple is the first ecosystem where things are outright unfixable. "It just works" — until it doesn’t, and then you’re out of options.
A few examples of Apple's atrocious software design:
- Rather than universal "open with" controls, iOS forces you to open files with a random selection of apps. Want to edit an image in Snapseed? Too bad, Photos won’t let you. But it will let you use it to "find products on Amazon". I get that this is up to the app developers - but a simpler solution would've been global "Open With" functionality.
- Call recordings over 20 minutes freeze the Notes app, making them impossible to move. No fix for months.
- Changing a wallpaper takes nearly six steps.
- The Home Screen follows non-Euclidean geometry whenever you try to move an icon
- The Settings app search is useless: searching "Camera" shows privacy settings, not the Camera app settings (which aren’t in the Camera app, because of course they aren’t).
- Probably a dozen other niggles you just learn to "live with" on a $1000 phone (and which people with a $200 Android don't even have to think about)
No company has as much contempt for its users as Apple, both from their design philosophy of keeping as much control away from users as possible, and the pricing strategy that pretends like this shitfest is a premium experience. But the users are also to blame - they create the cult that enables this.
On most forums, complaining about Apple just gets you a "why did you buy it then lol" response from users - and absolute silence from Apple.
In a better world, this company would be boycotted by consumers. This forces it to reset and try harder.
On the other hand the iPhone batteries seems to go to trash way faster than Android. I think Android has better battery management systems (and also just bigger batteries). Every single person I know who uses iPhones older than 3-4 years can't get through a single charge per day.
On the software side Android got a bad rep from the early days when it was much worse than iOS, but these days it is pretty much just as slick and much more customizable.
On the software side at least on Android you have the power to do something about it. You can flash custom firmware or launchers, hell you can even code your own to completely replace the android interface if you want.
I don't think it's changed in any notable way since its initial release in 2019 and it's still beta quality at best. Do they even have people working on it?
What's worse is that this is a regression, so they actively made life a little more difficult for everyone in the new release.
I bet that they A/B tested this on users and this is not just a random change.
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."
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.
> Apple's kit is still lightyears better than an equivalent Windows 11/Android setup
That's sadly true, but I think as users/power users we shouldn't settle for the "best of the worst", when it's clear that the direction of Apple software quality took a dramatic shift.
That, right there, is general life advice more people need to hear.
But hey Apple would never hire me anyway...
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...
The issue is, that each new line you draw, gets added to a group. This will start causing lagging at some point of time.
If I highlight my whole screen in Notes or Freeform and use the `separate` tool to remove all things from the group. The lagging immediately stops. You can read more about this here [1].
Apple has many issues with “scalability” like this. Another one for instance is the imessage and its replies. If you use them too much (50 replies to message or more) it start not rendering some of the messages.
This suggests a type of culture, where things are important to look nice in demos, but are not actually usable daily.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/ipad/comments/zqh5rt/ipad_glitching...
(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)
I don't understand why you thought it was constructive to point out the difference between a "software problem Vs. a software problem only when the pen is used." The article was very clear on that point already, it isn't adding to the conversation.