Here's my personal canary in the coal mine that something must be fundamentally broken in Apple's software development process:
- on a recent macOS version, right click on the desktop, select 'change wallpaper' => the new settings panel opens
- click on 'Custom Color'
- now hold and drag around the 'color cursor' in the color selection circle for a few seconds
- stop dragging and notice how the color cursor continues jumping around erratically (it's impossible to actually select the exact color you want)
- same thing happens when using the linear slider below the color circle
This bug doesn't lurk deep in some obscure part of the settings panel, it's the only way to change the desktop background color. A QA specialist would stumble over this in 5 minutes of trying to break the app.
I made it a hobby to check this bug after each OS update, it's broken since the new settings panel was introduced in Ventura. As a good citizen I also wrote a Feedback Assistent ticket (FB13805690 - 21-May-2024) with attached screen recordings and all, but of course I could just as well have sent that report into a black hole :)
My indicator for if Apple is for the customer vs for Apple is how macOS 'negotiates' YPbPr instead of RGB for non-Apple branded monitors (some LG monitors also get a pass) which results in worse color quality. I believe this to be carefully engineered to be a plausible bug rather than a real one.
BTW I have found a workaround using BetterDisplay and an EDID override (to more closely match what the monitor is actually telling macOS).
Seconding this. Feels actively anti-user even if this is just a bunch of heuristics that end up choosing the wrong thing. Honestly, why is this not a dropdown?
Related bug: macOS defaults to variable refresh rate when available instead of remembering my choice of 144hz. This is confounded by my hub (Caldigit TS3 Plus), which has trouble with variable refresh rates that result in a black screen.
The cherry on top: either I use a HDMI cable and deal with BetterDisplay forcing RGB to fix YCbCr, or a black screen when using DP through my hub due to the above bug.
Sometimes I wish Apple would get broken up just so macOS could have a chance at getting more love.
I JUST BOUGHT A NEW MONITOR AND WENT DOWN THIS RABBIT HOLE AHHHH Almost returned this perfectly fine monitor thanks to Apple, thank god for BetterDisplay though, actual gem of an app
The entire apple monitor settings are just awful. I have a small portable projector which accepts 4k input but just downscales it to 1080p.
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.
I ran into this issue with the Sonoma update. My display (4k LG) was negotiating RGB just fine before, but not anymore. The BetterDisplay workaround hasn't worked for me. The poor colors and fuzzy edges around all the text is causing eye strain too. I'm beyond furious.
The same thing happens under Linux with some monitors and AMD graphics drivers. A lot of monitors have poor standards compliance (and the standards aren't great either).
I once spent hours trying to find out why apple's font rendering is so atrocious for a 1440p monitor on a m3 macbook air (reddit just keeps telling everyone to get higher resolution screens). Turns out it's related to the color scheme - the colors were fine, but the pixels are somehow located wrong, making everything look super pixelated.
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.)
I think that Apple, perhaps naively, expects display manufacturers to adhere to spec when in reality they often don’t.
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).
it's comically bad. the UI is a mess, the search functionality is broken, you can't resize the window horizontally. it's feels like a hello world first project in a new language type of app.
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.
To be fair, Windows really had the same type of issues going from the old Control Panel to Settings. I still get large delays for some of the screens in Windows Settings.
I mean ok, the old one was already a bit overloaded and unwieldy, so a redesign was probably overdue and Ill give them the benefit of the doubt here but WTF is with the 1-2 second delay when switching between the menus in there?
Are they doing web requests upon opening every settings page or what? This is real amateur hour.
The Feedback Assistant issue you mentioned is probably one of the worst aspects of their software ecosystem. I haven't had a response on a single ticket that I've filed in there. It feels like an abandoned program, which is terrible UX considering its purpose.
A few years ago, I filed a Feedback Assistant bug report regarding an issue I was experiencing in Final Cut. In response, I was contacted by Final Cut developers who worked with me to replicate the issue and then shipped a fix.
Just one anecdote, but some reports definitely get looked at.
On the most recent episode of ATP podcast, an anonymous person wrote in to say that when they worked at Apple until ~2013, there was effectively no QA team on macOS.
Granted that was over a decade ago, and "no QA team" doesn't mean no testing, but given the numerous bugs in macOS today, and that they almost never get fixed, I'm not surprised.
(FWIW, I do not experience this bug you mentioned)
If you look at the macOS feature history, it's pretty clear that the bulk of the team got shifted to iPhone in 2007 and never really recovered. The widely acknowledged Snow Leopard high water mark happened shortly after.
To be fair, Apple can still pull off the occasional amazing feat of vertical integration -- HDR, APFS, keeping audio latency under control despite the relentless assault of apathy from all directions -- but they never had the same level of consistent drive forward, at least not until a year or two ago when the big push for AI integration started. Apple gets ragged on here, but I think their integration is actually some of the best. They were putting neural cores in chips back when that sort of thing got mocked, not lauded, and every step has been thoughtfully tied in rather than airdropped from a ChatGPT science fair project. But they never got good at building or deploying leading-edge models themselves; I hope they turn it around because this is important.
I worked at Apple on Mac OS X until 2008. For QA, Bertrand believed in a lightweight touch, with dedicated QA staffing only at the top of the stack (plus a few key places like the filesystem), with the idea that any bugs will bubble up and be found through real-world usage. Most QA was informal, through heavy dogfooding.
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.
I can't repro this on macOS 15.3.1 with an Apple Studio Display. What display are you using? It's likely something related to color space translation.
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.
Desktop icons snapping to the grid has been broken forever too. Every once in a while I'll have a space in the "grid" that just won't accept anything to be placed in it.
And god, don't even get me started on how the icons rearrange themselves when you're organizing your home screen / control center. I can't believe they actually shipped it like that and still haven't made it any better.
For what its worth, I can't reproduce this on 15.3 (24D60). I don't have a "Custom color" option. I see "Colors" and I click a Plus button to add a new color. Also I have my system connected to a caldigit dock and I'm using a mouse, not the trackpad.
Mine was horrendous scroll jank in response to a moderate amount of highlighting in Notes. Mfs trying to harness AI and they can’t even render text properly… in 2025.
Successfully reproduced. Rough. Maybe they counted on people bailing out after attempting to trudge through the sloppy mess that is the newish Settings app before they even got to the Change wallpaper section, forgetting that there was another path.
And that also raises a huge issue: The problem isn't just functional defects, but also design defects and regressions. The new Settings panel is pretty much universally hated, from all the feedback I've seen. Apple is spending time dicking around with things that already worked and that will not drive sales through changes... so WTF? This faffing points to a major priority-setting problem within the firm.
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.
Interesting, yeah. It doesn't happen when adding a new color to the "Colours" row at the bottom even though this happens with the same color selection UI widget.
I see this Custom Colour thingie at the top-right corner of the Wallpaper section, above a "Show on all Spaces" checkbox and left of a fairly big representation of the current desktop background.
After a bit of tinkering: this Custom Colour element is replaced with something else depending on the current background mode. If you selected a wallpaper image, it shows the name of the wallpaper. If you select a predefined colour, it shows the name of the color. When adding a custom colour, it will show an interactive element which allows to change the color in place, and that shows the buggy behaviour for me.
Ok, this at least explains why other people don't stumble over this as an obvious bug, I assumed it would be obvious, because the first thing I always do on a new Mac is to customize the background color by right-clicking the desktop, and since that moment I have that buggy Custom Colour element sitting there.
Not a great UX either way though.
PS: ...and now after adding a new custom color via the to bottom row of predefined colors, the bug in the 'Custom Colour' widget is gone and nobody will believe me it was ever there. Great :D
PPS: nope, it's coming back after going through the 'desktop => right-click => change wallpaper...' route again, phew.
Arguably a worse bug in that same panel is how their hyped up live photo desktops don’t work at all and its been that way for years. They all need to be pulled from apples servers that silently time out your download. If you are lucky you can get maybe one or two downloaded.
initially also cannot, but now can.
open wallpaper setting > choose + in color section, choose any color, close popup, (IMPORTANT) close setting panel.
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, and many others in our personal capacity, have been shouting from hn-rooftops how Apple’s software capacity has been in a state of, since a decade or so (or more really) that calling it bad would be an understatement. It’s downright pathetic. It’s disgustingly incompetent. And I haven’t not even started on its services like iCloud. Because those go beyond pathetic.
I mean for god’s sake these morons (yes, “morons”) have not yet figured out how yo sync browser tabs which is something new browsers get right in a few days to few weeks time, and sometimes on top of their incompetently done iCloud and related SDKs.
Apple sometimes comes across as a glasshouse built as marketing, too much money, (sadly) a huge army of fans and loyalist apologists (and not demanding customers), and an absolute lack of decent competition; and the biggest of it — a deliberate attitude of non-openness!
I mean everything Apple is closed! So how can anyone even quantify how bad their iOS is, how smelly their cloud suites are, how ridiculous their security is!! If you can’t see what happens behind a wall and the entity behind that wall has money more than most nations and a PR and tech propaganda machinery rivaling some of “those” nation states, how can you even be sure!
> And I haven’t not even started on its services like iCloud.
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.
I wasn’t able to replicate that bug on my Mac, but when I tried to do so I ran into an instance of another bug that has been annoying me for many years: windows that open far away on the screen from where I clicked. Here is where the color picker appeared on my screen after I clicked on the custom color button in the change wallpaper window:
My deep-seated guess is that the switch from a simple language like Objective-C to the complex Swift language with its humongous compile times has caused developer productivity to be broken. No time to fix bugs, no time to refactor, no time to re-iterate on improving features because time is all taken up by compilation and grokking complexity.
Compile time issues are almost always type inference issues. Reducing chained functions and multiple levels of protocol witness indirection usually speeds this up dramatically.
The other big time sucks are C++ interop and dozens of micro-dependencies (react-native).
Oh god please don't get me started on Airplay bugs.
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.
Ah now it's getting interesting :) So far I could reproduce the issue across several machines, also on new demo machines at the Apple booth of electronic discounters - so I don't think it's something about my configuration, but maybe it has something todo with how I'm using the trackpad (but I'm just sliding around with the right-hand pointer finger).
PS: the mystery might be solved => that buggy 'Custom Colour' UI item only shows up under specific circumstances, which for my specific usage pattern is 'obvious' - see my sister comment for details.
Can't reproduce. Second one this thread where someone had this error "for years" but I can't reproduce. Smells of a setting that's been migrated for years from an old version, as where I'm writing from is a clean macbook with a clean account (M3, about a year old now).
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.
Just tested on M1 Pro, 15.0 (Settings version) on Sonoma.
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.
This has been going on for years. I used to do a lot of iOS development, and have an eye for bugs. Almost every Apple app/service has been regressing in quality.
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 did a MS in Telecoms Engineering. Our Telephony teacher Claude Rigault drummed it into us that when people can't make emergency calls, pople die, thus the importance of reliability.
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.
the ipad skype apps puts the call button where the hangup button is, so if someone hangs up right when you are going to click it, you call them again.
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.
This happened so often for me. But lo and behold, they fixed it. I recently installed iOS 18, and the phone app now prevents accidental touch input after the other person has ended the call. This took almost 18 years!
This is a symptom of a more general problem that I named (clumsily... "Rerender/Reflow/Repopulation Delayed Interaction Timeout Missing") in a 2017 blog post!
The article makes some great points about how iOS software is regressing, but it still feels so much better than almost any other software I use on a daily basis.
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.
> The article makes some great points about how iOS software is regressing, but it still feels so much better than almost any other software I use on a daily basis.
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.
Hmm every day i notice that the button to open photos and send them via iMessage doesn’t load the photos half the time. I close the widget, open it again, boom it works. This bug was introduced 5 or more years ago and no one has fixed it. It drives me crazy.
Notes is so bad. Often copy and paste just breaks. It will copy some string of characters from a different part of the note than you selected, until you restart.
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.
One of the weirdest regressions is basic search on iOS. Just clicking into the search screen takes 1s before I see anything (it's probably booting up internally). And each keypress sometimes seems to take another 1s before it updates the results.
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.
> 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…
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.
While I agree that it's Tim Cook's responsibility to set the course and influence the culture, I doubt a new CEO will be able to so.
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.
I have been saying this for years: consistent deterioration of ACs/DoDs. There is no limit to scrum and especially the constant refinement to ACs/DoDs.
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.
Most consumer electronics companies are like this.
It's not only a yearly release cycle but a Christmas release cycle.
New Shiny Thing has to be in the stores by late November so all development has to be done in August so the factories can start producing the first trial batches.
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.
> 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.
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.
> The way I see it, the yearly release cycle is to blame.
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.
> What these companies need to do is slow down and stop chasing every shiny thing
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.
Here's my favorite UI/UX bug which has been there for years:
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.
I moved out of iPhone because of one such thing: the call log can only be 100 items long, like what? The most powerful processor ever, hundreds of GB and i can't see who I called last month?? I was done at that moment.
I have run into these same issues, it's particularly frustrating once you see a Reddit thread from a couple years ago outlining the exact issue. For a large consumer-focused company like Apple this can only be explained by ignorance.
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.
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 keep annual journals in Notes and I’ve noticed (on iOS) that the keyboard becomes increasingly laggy as the year drags on / as the note length increases. I can only assume they are synchronously flushing the file to disk on the main thread during the keyboard callback handler.
I don’t mean to be rude, but that’s how an iOS intern would implement it.
Select/Copy/Paste has been bad from the start on iOS, another I can’t get over is how the backspace behavior has the absolute worst timings for jumping to words and paragraphs.
I wonder why they don't bother fixing it. Clearly it hasnt hurt their bottom line much, but you'd think they'd sell more phones if they were still the kings of "it just works" (and they aren't).
Current head of Apple hardware is in the line of CEO succession. If he becomes CEO at some point in the future, could he have a positive influence on software culture within Apple?
In my experience, hardware people in the top decision making roles are the cause of degradation of software quality, not the solution. They often don't understand the nature of software and software product management.
Same feeling about Mac OS. What am I going to do? Move to Windows? I suppose I could install Gentoo or read the entire Arch wiki. However, I am no longer an unemployed 23-year-old. Don't have the time or care to bother with recreational sysadminning.
There are also a bunch little of usability bugs related to selecting, copying and pasting text. The auto-complete has become more adversarial then helpful. There are bugs related to search in pdf documents in safari. There are (or at least were until recently) bugs when searching for settings in the settings app.
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.
I had an iPhone I was fixing up. I backed up what was necessary, disconnected the old iCloud account, and created a new one to use when updating the OS. I created a spam-blocking address (mailgw) for this account. It created fine and I logged in from the phone without problem. I did the OS update, but then I got a dreaded error that it couldn't log in. I tried to log in with the account on the PC and it has been deleted. Apple deleted the account out from under the phone and now it's iCloud locked, all within less than half an hour. I called but they said I'd have to go to an Apple store and produce the original receipt. If this was really about theft, why couldn't I just regain control from the AppleID that had been logged in for years from the phone? I checked from that account but it had no option to report that the phone was fine. This was a many-year-old phone and the receipt was long gone. So Apple basically bricked the phone, with no recourse. I will never buy an Apple device again.
> Maybe Apple is doing this in an automated way to prevent people using several accounts for storage.
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."
When you upgrade MacOS 15.3.0 apple automatically enables Apple intelligence and then turns on Apple intelligence reporting (15 min intervals) by default.
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).
I thought only MS was doing that. I have over 25 admin on/off switches for copilot in the M365 ecosystem that were forced ON in the last year. On the power platform- The authorized consent to move data between regions for ai was AUTOMATICALLY set to YES also and it was sending prod data around to read it and give advice. I guess they sneak it in with some EULA update.. When I open tickets I always get sent to the wrong copilot team because they cant keep track of it and I have to go through a forced AI agent before opening tickets also now. The rushed updates broke a lot of their own JS and its been a bad bad year with over 200 hours wasted on this since last year where I normally spend less than 40 hours a year with such nonsense.
> After disabling Apple Intelligence when you do the next mini update to 15.3.1 Apple intelligence is enabled
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'll just hop on this chain since you commented recently.
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.
Set your Mac to English (UK) and Siri to English (US), or the other way around. Then it will complain that Apple Intelligence only works if Siri and your Mac have the same language.
Bluetooth is also turned on after every OS update. I don't understand why macOS does these. They can't be bugs because they have been around for years.
My current plan is to basically never move on from macOS 14 and perhaps move away from macOS entirely when the time arrives that I’d be forced to upgrade (new hardware needed, etc)
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.
Apple intelligence cannot be enabled in my country, yet sometimes when I do an action in Mail (desktop), I get a popup with a summary of my email asking me something about it.
I drank the "creating products that prioritize user experience over feature checklists" kool-aid back in ~2013 sometime, and got myself a first Macbook when I worked at a software startup the first time. While it certainly gave a more "premium" impression in terms of hardware/UI/UX for the first few years, around 2016 I had to move back to Linux because the software experience and the user experience is just too poor, outright buggy and changes all the time.
Even basic UX like "Can still see navigation map on CarPlay when someone calls you" seems to be just not thought of at all, or not being able to move the cursor left/right because the current iPhone keyboard mode only allows number. There are a thousands of these tiny cuts that just makes it such a pain to use daily.
Which is a darn shame, because the hardware is truly amazing, from everything from the displays, to keyboard and trackpads, to the general feeling and the CPU. But the software experience been so shit for the last decade that it's hard to justify going back.
Nothing wrong with the "creating products that prioritize user experience over features" - or more accurately what Jobs said: create products that start with the user experience and the user’s needs first and then work your way to the tech (as far as I remember)
The opposite approach is starting with some tech and then trying to find a use for it, e.g. folding phones, second 1/2 screen on laptop, etc, instead of trying to actually create a usable, quality trackpad for instance.
The critique is still valid: Apple, for their software, seem to not have the same focus on quality as Jobs once insisted on. Their physical products are very much still top notch, and the products on the whole are still developed with this mindset as far as I’m concerned. It’s just the software quality that has taken a hit for some reason.
Can I ask what the fascination with the Apple trackpad is? My other daily driver is a Thinkpad and I actually vastly prefer using the smaller one on it. You're not flinging your wrist across the zipcode and the clicks are more tactile.
I went back to Linux because I can at least decide when I'm ready for updates that changes my workflow. Neither Windows nor macOS gives me that experience. I wouldn't put Linux on a pedestral when it comes to UX/UI/design, but at least it doesn't rugpull me once a year (or more often with Windows) with forced updates.
As someone who cares deeply about UX that doesn't get in the way and allows professionals to do their work effectively, I'd be a hardcore Apple fanboy if the UX was actually good for that.
Apple's behavior makes sense when you realize that Apple caters to potential customers more than current ones. Their products are made to demo well to prospective customers. Every Apple product owner/user is inadvertently doing sales demos to onlookers.
I don't, I still use my horrible iPhone 12 Mini for CarPlay. Waiting for it to either get too old to get updates, or for it to break before I move back to Android, I guess.
It is not, Android Auto still shows me the map while there is an incoming call, which CarPlay doesn't, on the same car. CarPlay's "incoming call" widget/popup blocks the entire view, I think Android Auto just displays something in a corner or something.
Yes, I agree. If I'm navigating, then an incoming call shouldn't block the entire screen with the avatar of who is calling, the map has to remain visible at all times. If even one person from Apple would have tested the scenario of "I'm navigating with a map and someone calls me", they'd see how dangerous their current implementation is.
I have had to reject/hang up so many calls because someone calls exactly when I'm trying to figure out where to go by looking at the map. In my mind, what Apple is currently doing should be outright illegal.
> around 2016 I had to move back to Linux because the software experience and the user experience is just too poor, outright buggy and changes all the time.
Honestly, I have difficulty believing someone could find these kinds of issues to be less of a problem on Linux than on Mac
If you haven't tried out the various Linux desktop environments for a long try, give it a try yourself. I'm having a way more stable experience with Gnome than I ever had with Windows or macOS the last decade or so, especially when I can chose when I want to upgrade, and I don't get nagged about it once a day.
But before that, I'd agree with you, it would have be stupid to prefer anything Linux over OSX or Windows, back when they were rock-solid. But today?
I've been using KDE for around a year. It has a few bugs but overall it's much better in my experience than either Windows or macOS. KDE 6.2 and above have been really marvelous — I actually donated $100 (I think) to them because I was really happy with the work they were doing.
KDE actually has working focus stealing prevention!
I've encountered fewer show-stopping bugs in Linux than macOS lately. And of the software that I use on both, the macOS versions have more problems. Honestly, the main thing holding me back from replacing my M1 MBA with a linux laptop is the wonderful speed and battery life. If the software problems get bad enough to negate those I'm switching.
I think it has more to do with a gradual industry-wide race to the bottom in terms of quality. Reliability, attention to detail, correctness occupy a tiny fraction of the "budget" compared to security, slopping out features, and beating competition to market. I suspect that startup culture being the crucible where a large portion of engineers learned their chops and the massive amount of new blood in the industry who are primarily there for money are the biggest factors.
I concur. To add, I wonder how much of the “old guard” is still at Apple? Apple used to be perfectionistic when it came to software, even during the 1985-1996 interregnum when Steve Jobs was absent. Besides Steve Jobs, Apple also had people like Bruce Tognazzini and Don Norman who cared deeply about usability. When Apple purchased NeXT and built Mac OS X, Apple’s usability focus was married to reliable, stable infrastructure, culminating with Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which I believe was the pinnacle of the Mac experience. (Though I’m partial to the classic Mac OS from a UI point of view, Mac OS X had a better UX due to its stability.)
I suspect a lot of Apple’s decisions in the past decade regarding software is due to an increasing number of Apple employees who are not familiar with the philosophies of 1970s-era Xerox PARC, the classic Mac, NeXT, and Jobs-era Mac OS X. Granted, it’s possible to be too introspective, too focused on the past. Unfortunately Apple’s software is losing its perfectionistic qualities, which has long been the selling point of the Mac compared to Windows and Linux.
I think you have rose colored glasses on. System 7-8 at least were crash proned disasters and the 68K emulator was so bad on the first gen PPC computers you basically had to use SpeedDoubler - a much better third party emulator.
Linux seems like the opposite to me a slow marathon to achieve perfection. With pipewire, systemd and wayland there's less cruft than ever and you get the best out-of-the-box experience since it's inception.
Woah now, saying something positive about systemd will bring a bunch of crusty greybeards out of the woodwork who want their Linux to be as close to BSD4.4 as possible.
Jokes aside, I'm in agreement. Audio was still slightly buggy for me using a Elgato XLR USB interface, but it consistently worked with annoying workarounds. Linux is in a very good place for even normal consumers these days, I'm hoping Valve ends up making SteamOS a generalized gaming platform that will pull more market share away from Windows in that specific niche. I'm so ready.
Did pipewire actually build in their pulseaudio and JACK emulation, or is it still acting as a shim between already-running pulseaudio and JACK daemons?
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.
I have the occasional annoyance like "VLC has choppy audio for a few seconds after I seek," and "Gnome has gone full douchebag with notifications for everything and removing all the settings."
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.
> a gradual industry-wide race to the bottom in terms of quality
I'm going to disagree. This is a false nostalgia.
15 years ago the market for consumer laptops that were not MacBooks straight up sucked. If you walk into a Best Buy today, almost any laptop you buy is going to blow any laptop from back then out of the water in terms of build quality. And credit where it's due, in no small part it came from playing catch up with Apple.
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.
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 got Homepods for all my rooms. Woops. The unpredictable bad behavior is maddening. All intermittent but frequent problems:
• 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.
That’s really weird, I have HomePods gen 1 & 2 (and a few mini’s) and they’ve worked fine so far. More often than not my room mates are more of a problem than the HomePods. Usually someone will connect their call to a random HomePod, which is usually pretty disconcerting.
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.
And it’s not just through siri - everything home seems to have a life of its own. It works most of the time, but that, especially at home is not enough.
This is disappointing to hear. I was thinking of getting some HomePods to replace my Sonos system which has got progressively less reliable over the years to the point of being virtually useless now.
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.
It’s not a simple plug in and stream product, but ever since replacing Sonos with Control4 we’ve been incredibly happy. Josh on top of it for voice and it “just works”.
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.
I have Sonos and they work perfectly, I love them. If you think Sonos is bad (recent app update included) go look at the HomePod subreddit, it is basically non stop issues. Having said that, I use Airplay a bunch and it is fine for me. I have had problems with Airplay in the past that were 100% solved by checking and improving wifi signal strength.
I'm testing out Wiim in a couple rooms as a replacement for Sonos and the initial results have been positive, though I haven't been using them long. So far my biggest complaints are that every model in their lineup has a different protocol compatibility list and that the Spotify integration isn't as well-polished.
If your Sonos speakers are old enough, take a day out and downgrade them all to S1. Just like magic it will all start working like it did the day you got it.
My take: over success breeds complacency. Apple knows where its money is coming from. It has carved out an extremely hard to establish hardware production chain via iphone and macbooks, and is able to provide a certain consistent level of quality for it. Software is an afterthought, especially for software that is not in service of this primary hardware revenue source. From a business point of view it literally does not make sense for them to do anything differently.
Of course, disruption is always a possibility. Google was the undisputed AI leader for years, but their reputation as a House of Knowledge was overshadowed by their comfort as a search, cloud, and advertisement business. These are steady services that just need to be reliable to remain profitable, no invention required.
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.
I like this take.
To add to that, it feels that for a company to maintain their software effectively, there needs to be a certain level of cross-departement knowledge, people who can connect the dots between frontend and backend for example, because usually it is in these transitions between two layers that bugs start to form. I feel like this becomes increasingly more difficult in large, complex company's where every departement is self-contained and there is not much vertical movement amongst colleagues, only horizontal. Which makes it really hard to solve issues that are not solely linked to one part of the process. So success doesn't only breed complacency, it decreases the possibility to do cross-departmental work because all the departments become to big to effectively facilitate this.
Readit News
- 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.
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.
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.)
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).
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.
So far, I am not willing to ship anything in SwiftUI. I don't think it's up to the task.
Just one anecdote, but some reports definitely get looked at.
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.
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.
Dead Comment
* 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.
Sequoia 15.3.1 (24D70)
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.
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.
https://gally.net/temp/20250304macoswindowopeningposition.jp...
The other big time sucks are C++ interop and dozens of micro-dependencies (react-native).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dead Comment
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.
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
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
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.
s/ignorance/apathy
Dead Comment
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
Deleted Comment
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."
Dead Comment
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 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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
• 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.
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.
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.
Deleted Comment