One doesn’t need to wonder why Apple couldn’t get something done. Apple seems to be in dire need of a shakeup at the top level, but seems to be incapable of seeing the need for that or being able to do that.
From the outside, it looks like there are just power struggles and fiefdoms held by the old guard that have resulted in the stagnation and the worsening quality across its operating systems. Even today you cannot search and find all the things in the Settings app on iOS, which has been a longstanding issue. ScreenTime is totally broken since iOS 18 and shows tons of minutes of apps that I open for just one minute everyday. There are many more irritating old bugs as well as new bugs being added regularly.
The recently rumored to be forthcoming “26” numbering of all its operating systems and the cementing of annual releases with new feature addition doesn’t bode well for improving quality. The way Apple’s software teams have been working, a tick-tock cycle of improvements followed by stabilizing every other year is the only way things can get a little better. That’s a pipe dream for me anyway.
I’ve seen arguments that it largely comes down to the lack of a Jobs-like figure at the top maintaining a coherent, user-driven vision across the company and won’t hesitate to take a hatchet to projects and initiatives that aren’t furthering that vision.
Cook is excellent in terms of managing supply chains and has been good for the company’s bottom line, but he doesn’t have Jobs’ capability to discern what users want/need and what makes a good product, and I doubt he has anywhere near the level of direct involvement that Jobs had.
That’s not to glaze Jobs, he was anything but perfect but he was undoubtedly among the driving forces behind Apple’s quality and knack for building things that people want.
I am a bit late to the (upgrade) party, but ios 18… what happened?! If you scroll through dates in the Calendar app, random date numbers vanish. Huh. Search in Notes is super weird (shows old, fuzzy matches first). Photos app is just.. wow where am I? How is there no jailbreak yet? (Is there?). I have read here the main issue is fragmentation, but I am not sure how that (not) works. If one team builds, let say Notes.app why is it so broken? Because it recycles search libs from (broken) Photos.app? Sorry for the rant.
Thanks for mentioning this. I didn’t connect my general confusion in the Photos app with an upgrade but it makes sense.
The navigation is so unintuitive to me that I’ve killed the app just to try and get back to the most recent photos I’ve taken.
Apple products have mostly been very good. Even when I didn’t love the UX I could figure it out.
So many recent features just feel half baked (like replies in iMessage). I’m starting to wonder if they’re better off leaving good enough alone (not that that is a remote possibility).
I think Apple will have trouble course-correcting because there currently isn’t a good OS for sale. Why improve in terms of quality, if there isn’t any competition?
Weirdly, I think they might be smarter than us. Despite being superficially uninterested in hardware, the general public seems to buy hardware, and then just use whatever OS comes on it. Apple seems to have aligned with this by easing up on software quality a bit and obtaining a reasonable (although not incontestable) claim at being the best hardware company with their M-series chips.
Oh wow, clicking on their "Join Team" button is absolutely amazing. Credit to them.. almost makes me wish I was a Mac developer to apply for a job. Almost.
For those who want a better explanation of Sky's capabilities, I recommend Federico Viticci's article (linked from the Tao of Mac article but the links are not distinctive): https://www.macstories.net/stories/sky-for-mac-preview
People complained about the links being too visible, so they are only visible once per article now, and I make sure to highlight them on hover over a paragraph. I guess I will never please everyone :)
Oh, weird, I was just thinking of Memory Shift[1] earlier this morning, hadn't thought of it in probably 30 years, and now that switcher article mentions it.
Shameless plug here - we are working in a similar space, and have started at the copy & paste layer. We are calling it TabTabTab[0]; while we have a waitlist as we are working on our onboarding, you can already give it a go on[1]
The main actions are option+c to copy, option+v to paste. Take the front page of hackernews and capture it with option+c (use cmd+a to select all, if text is selected we pickup text, otherwise we pickup an image); and then go to sheets.new or numbers and hit option+v, see your Spreadsheet getting built. It works everywhere.
There's spells option+s (custom GPT per app / URL) and agent mode (option+I) but give magic copy/paste a shot. More examples here[2]
It’s really obvious that AI is something that is very rough around the edges and companies known for delivering polished projects are having a lot of trouble delivering. For example, Google should have been the leader in AI, but I think OpenAI got first mover advantage, because they didn’t want to ship a product that hallucinates. If you look at the pre-ChatGPT days, all the news stories were what happens when AI goes wrong not forgiving the failures and accepting that in some areas it can get things really right in a more efficient way.
Readit News
From the outside, it looks like there are just power struggles and fiefdoms held by the old guard that have resulted in the stagnation and the worsening quality across its operating systems. Even today you cannot search and find all the things in the Settings app on iOS, which has been a longstanding issue. ScreenTime is totally broken since iOS 18 and shows tons of minutes of apps that I open for just one minute everyday. There are many more irritating old bugs as well as new bugs being added regularly.
The recently rumored to be forthcoming “26” numbering of all its operating systems and the cementing of annual releases with new feature addition doesn’t bode well for improving quality. The way Apple’s software teams have been working, a tick-tock cycle of improvements followed by stabilizing every other year is the only way things can get a little better. That’s a pipe dream for me anyway.
Cook is excellent in terms of managing supply chains and has been good for the company’s bottom line, but he doesn’t have Jobs’ capability to discern what users want/need and what makes a good product, and I doubt he has anywhere near the level of direct involvement that Jobs had.
That’s not to glaze Jobs, he was anything but perfect but he was undoubtedly among the driving forces behind Apple’s quality and knack for building things that people want.
Edit: is this to upsell the AI?
The navigation is so unintuitive to me that I’ve killed the app just to try and get back to the most recent photos I’ve taken.
Apple products have mostly been very good. Even when I didn’t love the UX I could figure it out.
So many recent features just feel half baked (like replies in iMessage). I’m starting to wonder if they’re better off leaving good enough alone (not that that is a remote possibility).
Weirdly, I think they might be smarter than us. Despite being superficially uninterested in hardware, the general public seems to buy hardware, and then just use whatever OS comes on it. Apple seems to have aligned with this by easing up on software quality a bit and obtaining a reasonable (although not incontestable) claim at being the best hardware company with their M-series chips.
https://software.inc/jobs
Edit: working now
He goes fairly deep based on two weeks of usage.
Now that Apple knows what to build, they’ll build it.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksilver_(software)
2. https://www.folklore.org/Switcher.html
3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Accusati...
[1]https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v9n12/82_MemoryShift...
The main actions are option+c to copy, option+v to paste. Take the front page of hackernews and capture it with option+c (use cmd+a to select all, if text is selected we pickup text, otherwise we pickup an image); and then go to sheets.new or numbers and hit option+v, see your Spreadsheet getting built. It works everywhere.
There's spells option+s (custom GPT per app / URL) and agent mode (option+I) but give magic copy/paste a shot. More examples here[2]
[0] https://tabtabtab.ai/
[1] https://tabtabtab.ai/TabTabTab.dmg
[2] https://tabtabtab.notion.site/tabtabtab-user-notes?pvs=4
Apple has a target on its back. Anything they do absolutely will be hacked. There are unsolved problems securing tool-using LLM’s.
I wonder what Sky does for security?