I wonder if anyone else here is old enough to remember the "I'm a Mac", "And I'm a PC" ads.
There was one that was about all the annoying security pop-ups Windows (used to?) have. (FWIW, it starts here: https://youtu.be/qfv6Ah_MVJU?t=230 .)
Lately I've gotten so many of these popups on Mac that it both annoys and amuses the hell out of me. "Die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain", I guess.
But, man, Apple hardware still rocks. Can't deny that.
Oh, that smell of molten keyboard plastic, those yellow spots burned into a display with its own heat exhaust, those laser-machined loudspeaker holes next to keyboard, all filled with grime! How I miss that time on a Macbook, with all the chords you have to press whenever you need a Home or End button to edit the line! Not to mention the power button right next to backspace.
It's so rewarding when its charger dies in a month, and you feel superior to your colleague, whose vintage 6 months old charging cable with none of that extraneous rubber next to the connector catches fire along with your office. What a time to be alive!
The best part is the motherboard produced in a way to fail due to moisture in a couple of years, with all the uncoated copper, with 0.1mm pitch debugging ports that short-circuit due to a single hair, and the whole Louis Rossmann's youtube worth of other hardware features meant to remind you to buy a new Apple laptop every couple of years. How would you otherwise be able to change the whole laptop without all the walls around repair manuals and parts? You just absolutely have to love the fact even transplanting chips from other laptops won't help due to all the overlapping hardware DRMs.
I'll go plug the cable into the bottom of my wireless Apple mouse, and remind myself of all the best times I had with Apple's hardware. It really rocks.
> the whole Louis Rossmann's youtube worth of other hardware features meant to remind you to buy a new Apple laptop every couple of years
Apple have a couple of extra mechanisms in place to remind us to buy a new device:
- On iOS the updates are so large it doesn't fit on the device. This is because they purposely put a small hard drive i. It serves a second purpose - people will buy Apple cloud storage because nothing fits locally.
- No longer providing updates to the device after just a few years when it's still perfectly fine. Then forcing the app developer ecosystem to target the newer iOS version and not support the older versions. But it's not planned obsolescence when it's Apple, because they're the good guys, right? They did that 1984 ad. Right guys?
> No longer providing updates to the device after just a few years when it's still perfectly fine.
This is a weird one to complain about because Apple leads the industry in supporting older devices with software updates. iOS 26 supports devices back to 2019. And they just released a security update for the iPhone 6S, a model released a full decade ago, last month.
The oldest Samsung flagship you can get Android 16 for is their 2023 model (Galaxy S23), and for Google the oldest is the 2021 model (Pixel 6).
We’re moving away from hardware and into software and longevity in this discussion but wrt “apple leads the industry in supporting older devices with software updates” i would point out that Red Hat is probably more of a beacon / industry leader here as the main promise of RHEL is 10 years of support and updates. But again we don’t ship hardware so I see the narrower sense that you’re making but still would like to push back on the idea that giant companies cannot continue to keep complicated legacy code bases secure and functional about 2x longer in most cases than what Apple has done
Main problem, not just from Apple, is that as phone tech gets standardized and more long-lasting the software support cycles have not gotten longer.
It is abysmal that Android phone makers still need to customize the OS so much for their hardware. Apple has no incentive for longer support cycles if Android does even worse on it.
It has always been like that since CP/M and commercial UNIX days.
Vertical integrations like everyone sell a product, a brand, a whole ecosystem experience.
If all OEMs sold the same CP/M, UNIX, MSX, MS-DOS, Windows software stack, on the what is basically the same hardware with a different name glued on the case, they wouldn't get any brand recognition, aka product differentiation.
Thus OEMs specific customisations get added, back in the day bundled software packages are part of the deal, nowadays preinstalled on the OS image, and so on.
I tend to look at technology prices in terms of cost per unit time of useful life.
If Apple continues to supply updates for six-year-old phones, iPhone 17 prices range from $11/month (base model iPhone 17) to $28/month (iPhone 17 Pro Max w/2TB storage), meaning it's only about 20% more expensive to store data on a RAID 10 array of iPhone 17 Pro Maxes running current iOS versions than on standard-tier S3 (not a relevant comparison, obviously, but it amuses me).
So I don't know what's reasonable, but Apple's policies certainly appear to be.
I'm still salty that Apple no longer offer battery service on my OG Apple Watch, however, so reason has its limits.
Suppose you always want to be running the latest iOS release, but you want to replace your phone as infrequently as possible. You would "only" have to have purchased 4 iPhones since 2007:
| Model | Launch date | Obsoleted by | Price
|-----------|--------------------|--------------|------
| iPhone | June 29, 2007 | iOS 4 | $399 (*price cut)
| iPhone 4 | June 24, 2010 | iOS 8 | $599
| iPhone 6 | September 19, 2014 | iOS 13 | $649
| iPhone 11 | September 13, 2019 | - | $699
Adjusted for inflation, the total for these phones is $3,287 excluding carrier contracts. Assuming the iPhone 11 will be obsoleted by iOS 27 in September 2026, this costs you about $14.29/mo.
I was a long time Android user - but I realised I was getting through 2 or more phones in the time my wife had one. They'd either become obsolete or just die. I reluctantly bought an iPhone on this basis - it's actually going to work out cheaper if I get 5 or 6 years out of it.
However, I find the iPhone keyboard so bad and the settings concept so muddled that I'm going to return to Android when this experiment is over. Probably not for another 4 years though!
You know you can sell and replace your phone if you don't like it. Recent Pixels have 7 years of support and they don't die. That's what I'd recommend you get instead. You can even trade in your iPhone for up to $700 when you buy a Pixel. You really don't need to force yourself to use a phone you don't like, leave alone for that long.
If we're talking anecdotes, my wife changes her iPhone every 4 years because it gets worse and worse. Daughter does the same. I change my Galaxy every 4 years because it gets worse and worse as well. Not sure how some people can say their <insert beloved brand> holds forever, unless they don't really use it of course. No brand really keeps up with the requirements, unless all you do is make phone calls - which is why my dad still has a Sony Ericsson.
The part that really gets me is that the price per GB to go from a 256 to a 512 GB iPhone is $2.54 (since the next storage option up costs $200 total). Two and a half dollars!!! A 512 GB micro SD would run you $0.10/GB. They have been charging 25x the market rate for storage on a device with no expandable storage at all for years. Baffling that they aren't called on it more. It should be criminal.
I had the 2019 cheesegrater Mac Pro. 7TB (going from 1 to 8) would cost me $3,000.
So I bought a 4xM2 PCI card, 4 2TB Samsung Pro SSDs for $1,100. And as a result got 6.5GBps versus the onboard 1TB's 5GBps.
Same with memory. 160GB (32 to 192GB) from Apple was also around $3K. OWC sold the exact same memory chips, manufacturer, spec, speed, for $1,000 for 192GB.
I recently found my ipad mini 2 (released in 2013) that had been boxed up when I moved a few years ago. After charging up the battery and booting it up, I checked for system updates. The latest system available for it was ios 12.5.7, released in 2023. It loaded fine, and I’ve been using the mini as an ereader ever since – the screen is fine, and wifi works.
A Macbook is the only Apple device I have in my entire array of computers and computer-related stuff, so I've got plenty of points of comparison. While Apple's hardware design isn't perfect, all of what you bring up seems wildly blown out of proportion to me. I can say I've never seen anyone with molten keyboards and displays. I've used the charger cable on my main charging brick for about five years now, and it's still going strong, despite being used for charging everything everywhere. And while Apple has committed many sins in terms of doing their absolute best at preventing anyone from touching their sacred hardware (we just need DRMed cables and enclosures to complete the set), this only affects repair. In terms of planned obsolescence, Macbooks statistically don't seem much less reliable than any other laptops on the market. They make up a majority of the used laptop market where I am.
And of course, just had to bring up the whole mouse charger thing. Back when Apple updated their mouse once and replaced the AA compartment with a battery+port block in the same spot to reuse the old housing, and a decade later people still go on about the evil Apple designers personally spitting in your face for whatever reason sounds the most outrageous.
Apple produced at least three mice that were very different and terrible in different ways. Their laptops are good, but don't waste your time defending their other peripherals.
Apple's unwillingness to admit that one button isn't enough is legendary. They added a fucking multi-touch area to the fucking mouse because that's apparently easier to use and more efficient. It's funny as hell.
I've barely ever tried them, but I've never liked the shaping of any that I have held, and I don't think that the touchpad addition justified the discomfort that it causes in all other use cases. That being said, the whole "Apple added the charging port on the bottom to be evil and prevent you from using the mouse" thing had become such an entrenched internet fable over the last decade that it's impossible for me to come by it and not comment on it. I'll clarify that no one but the designers themselves knows the original intention, but since it's the exact same design as the AA model, just with internal changes, it seems like an open-and-shut case.
The charging port location is weird and stupid, but I have never needed to charge it while I am using it. When it hits about 15%, I plug it in at the EOD and don’t have to charge it again for maybe a month. I am a neat freak and you have to look hard to see any cable on my desk rig.
The multi touch stuff works fine for me, but perhaps I am just used to it.
The only complaint I have is the shape, it’s not “comfortable” to use. Easily addressed by a stupid 3D printed humpback add on that changes the aesthetic but makes it comfortable for me to use. I shouldn’t have to buy a mouse accessory…but I did.
Here is the thing though…it’s just a mouse. I point, I click, then I move my hand back to the keyboard. It’s fine. While I’m sure there is a better designed one out there, is any mouse truly revolutionary?
We do know the intention though. Apple thinks a mouse with a cable looks messy and ugly, so they made the mouse charge fast and put the port on the bottom. Made it impossible to use it whilst charging but you could get 2 hours of use out of like 10 minutes or charging. The end result Apple hoped for was people always seeing the mouse on the desk, cableless, charged.
I'm surprised it came out during the Jobs era because he strongly believed in "form follows function".
Again, this is something that's often repeated all over the internet, but there is no source for this, it's just speculation - and fairly unconvincing speculation at that, since it has to go so far in assigning the designers these strong opinions and unwillingness to compromise just for it all to make sense. I feel like what I proposed is a far simpler and more straightforward explanation. Occam's razor and all. Just look at what the mouse looked like through its generations[1]. When redesigning it, they obviously just took out the single-use battery compartment and replaced it with a section containing the rechargeable battery and the charging port. In fact, they really couldn't have done it any other way, because the mouse is so flat that its top and bottom sides taper all the way to the desk, with no space for a charging port. So, when making the gen 2 model, just putting the port where it is was probably a far simpler drop-in solution that saved them from having to redesign the rest of the mouse.
> I'm surprised it came out during the Jobs era because he strongly believed in "form follows function".
The Jobs era of Apple had a ton of pretty but less functional designs. Jobs is quoted as saying that, but he was full of it. He didn't actually practice that philosophy at all.
>Apple added the charging port on the bottom to be evil
I don't think anyone does anything "to be evil".
But clearly they had a choice between what was good for the user (being able to use the mouse while charging) and what suited their aesthetic, and they chose the latter. Open-and-shut case, indeed.
“I'll clarify that no one but the designers themselves knows the original intention, but since it's the exact same design as the AA model, just with internal changes, it seems like an open-and-shut case.”
which is really funny, since the Microsoft mice (only a few are left) and keyboards (discontinued) are by far some of my favorite peripherals.
On the apple mouse side, I got a white corded mouse with the tiny eraser looking mousewheel back in around 2003 or so, it's still in use today with a M4 mac mini. Works like a champ, Keyboard from that era is also still in use and used daily in our family.
I daily drive the Microsoft Touch Mouse, have for 10+ years. It is by far my favorite piece of hardware. I've never seen another one used in the wild, which might explain why they discontinued it.
The remote controls for Apple TV are among the all time worst peripherals I have ever used. Remotes aren’t hard. They reinvented the wheel by making it rectangular.
There was a third-party battery module[1] for the original AA Magic Mouse that would allow it to charge wirelessly, a feature that Apple somehow still has not managed to steal!
> How I miss that time on a Macbook, with all the chords you have to press whenever you need a Home or End button to edit the line!
???? ctrl+a and ctrl+e? That works on most Linux setups, too. Only Microsoft screws that up. I love how in Mac Office apps, Microsoft also makes ctrl+a and ctrl+e do what they do in windows lol.
Can you be specific about your bad experiences with Apple hardware? I've gone through 5 MacBook Pros since 2008 and my only complaint was the old Intel models always got too hot. Nothing ever broke on them and I guess I kept them relatively clean?
I also have all of the adapters that came with the MBPs too, all perfectly functioning, the oldest still attached and powering my 2013 model with the dead battery (2008 model was sold, still working). The magsafe cable is pretty yellow now, and maybe a little wonky from the constant travelling, but no fraying/fire hazard yet.
>Oh, that smell of molten keyboard plastic, those yellow spots burned into a display with its own heat exhaust, those laser-machined loudspeaker holes next to keyboard, all filled with grime! How I miss that time on a Macbook, with all the chords you have to press whenever you need a Home or End button to edit the line! Not to mention the power button right next to backspace.
It's so rewarding when its charger dies in a month, and you feel superior to your colleague, whose vintage 6 months old charging cable with none of that extraneous rubber next to the connector catches fire along with your office. What a time to be alive!
None of the above sound like anybody's actual experience. Which is also they have the biggest resale value retention among PC laptops, and biggest reported user satisfaction.
Now, if you were about the lack of ports (at least for a period) or the crappy "butterfly" keyboard (for a period), you'd have an actual point.
Home/End is just Control-A/E.
Never seen "molten keyboard plastic". I'm sure you can find some person who has that somewhere on the internet. I doubt it's a problem beyond some 0.0001% rare battery failures or something like that.
"yellow spots burned into a display with its own heat exhaust". Not sure what this even means. Especially AS Macs don't even get hot. I haven't heard the fan ever, and I use a M1 MBP of 5+ years with vms and heavy audio/video apps.
While I was in law school, every student who had an Apple laptop had to get their laptop replaced at least once (some multiple times) over the course of our program. The biggest problem was the bulging keyboard, due to the bulging battery, but their were also numerous issues with displays and with chargers not lasting very long. Most chargers lasted at least a semester, but few of the Apple chargers lasted an entire school year. They simply weren't designed with durability in mind. Quite humorously, after one student's laptop keyboard began bulging during torts, the professor began an impromptu lecture on product liability laws.
The only PC laptops that were replaced were the ones that got damaged in accidents (car accidents, dropped off a balcony, used as a shield in self defense during a robbery, etc.). Dell Latitudes of that era were sturdy, and not noticeably heavier than their fragile Apple counterparts.
I had a GPU issue (that was the subject of a recall that matched my symptoms precisely (and I could make the MBP core dump on demand in the Genius Bar) but "recall declined, does not fail diagnostics".
Damaged charging circuit on an MBA. Laptop worked perfectly. Battery health check fine. Just could not charge it. "That will be a $900 repair. Maybe we can look at getting you into a new Mac?" (for one brief moment I thought they were going to exchange mine... no, they wanted me to buy one. And of course, my MBA couldn't be traded in because it was damaged...).
I've also had multiple Magsafe connectors fray to the point of becoming like a paper lantern with all the bare wire visible, despite the cable being attached to a desk with cable connectors so there was near zero cable stress (and often only plugged/unplugged once a week).
Any properly grounded device will do that with specifically incorrect electrical wiring and/or a shoddy charger. Did this happen with a properly wired outlet, and an undamaged Apple charger?
I have doubts that it did, as that would warrant a safety recall.
Can confirm it does happen. UK, both on my ThinkPad and a friend's MacBook when plugged in. It's a somewhat unavoidable side effect of the switching AC adapter designs - the output is isolated from the mains, but there is a tiny leakage current that can sometimes be felt as a "vibration". This is completely safe (far below the currents needed to cause harm) and no recall is needed.
If you replace the two prong plug on the AC adapter for a three prong cable, your MacBook case will be properly grounded and you won’t feel any vibration.
Cast aside your doubts, I've been to different parts of Europe a few times with different, healthy MBPs (I buy a new one every 4-5 years) with healthy adapters.
Plugging into the wide EU outlet with the Apple-manufactured plug, from the "World Travel Adapter Kit", can lead to uncomfortable "vibration" that you feel when you touch the top case, depending on the the hotel/airbnb. Whenever I visit I expect I should charge while I'm not using the device.
In researching why it was happening to me, I found sufficient forum posts complaining about it that it seems to be commonplace.
I have my doubts that Apple would admit enough to perform a safety recall given the issues they've had with their garbage chargers in the past. Other companies have no problems with building hardware that lasts. Apple seem to prefer their customers pay for replacements.
n=4 but my niece spilled a whole cup of milk and a whole cup of matcha on my M2 (twice on 1 device). I just flipped it up, dried it out with a hair dryer (apparently shouldn't do that) and it still works 2 years later.
Can't relate to what you're saying, had 4 MacBooks, and many PCs too.
I teach C++ programming classes as part of my job as a professor. I have a work-issued MacBook Pro, and I make heavy use of Terminal.app. One of the things that annoy me is always having to click on a dialog box whenever I recompile my code and use lldb for debugging. Why should I need to click on a dialog to grant permission to lldb to debug my own program?
It wasn't always like this on the Mac. I had a Core Duo MacBook that ran Tiger (later Leopard and Snow Leopard) that I completed my undergraduate computer science assignments on, including a Unix systems programming course where I wrote a small multi-threaded web server in C. Mac OS X used to respect the user and get out of the way. It was Windows that bothered me with nagging.
Sadly, over the years the Mac has become more annoying. Notarization, notifications to upgrade, the annoying dialog whenever I run a program under lldb....
Worst part about this is that these days the error message simply lies to the user. "Whatever.App is damaged and can't be opened. You should move it to the trash."
If you remove the 'quarantine' attribute that gets added to downloaded files it runs great.
Years and years ago, I fought the good fight, full desktop Linux fulltime.
I see and hear from a lot of people it's pretty great these days though, and you can do whatever the new cool fork of WINE is or a VM for games / software compatibility.
Definitely not moving to 11. When 10 gets painful enough I'll probably try Devuan or Arch or something for desktop use.
I used Linux exclusively from 1999 to 2012. I gave up in 2012 and switch to Mac.
I’ve just switched back to Linux, and I can confirm. It’s different, it’s very different. And it’s very good. I realised how much I’ve just been fighting Apple everyday in newer versions of Mac.
I was going to ask my boss for a new MacBook Pro soon but now I’m having second thoughts.
> I was going to ask my boss for a new MacBook Pro soon but now I’m having second thoughts.
If you're looking for laptop recs, I've been happy with my Framework 16 except for one issue: when you close the lid, it can subtly flex in your backpack, press keys, and wake itself up. I work around it, but it's annoying.
But they recently announced a second build of the Framework 16 where one of the selling points is that the lid won't flex. Can't personally verify that they got it right, but given the build quality of the rest of the machine, I suspect they did.
I gave up in 2010, but on my case went to Windows 7, plus VMWare.
While I appreciate NeXTSTEP heritage on macOS, I rather have something that costs 1000 euros less with more RAM, SSD, and a GPU capable of doing CUDA and Vulkan without translation layers.
Now if my employeer or customer is willing to assign a MacBook Pro with the same RAM and storage for project activities, great more on them, I would not say no.
I'd suggest Linux Mint if you want Ubuntu with a GUI that doesn't suck, though Kubuntu is probably a decent choice (KDE isn't to my taste visually so I don't use it, but it absolutely doesn't suck and many people like it). If you want a rolling release instead because you want to live on the bleeding edge, Arch is hard to beat.
I can second Mint for a good GUI, but if you want Wayland I would probably either go for Pop!OS with the new Cosmic desktop beta or Fedora with KDE over any version of Ubuntu. Snap packages suck still IMO
I should probably mention that Linux Mint disables Snap packages by default (for reasons of principle that boil down to "Snap packages suck"), though you can reenable them with a single command if you actually want Snap. That's another point in Mint's favor for me.
> But, man, Apple hardware still rocks. Can't deny that.
This makes me extra sad. The HW is very good and very expensive, but the SW is mediocre. I bought an iPhone 16 a few months ago and I swear that is the first and last iPhone I'd purchase. I'd happy sell it at half of the price if someone local wants it.
Edit: Since people asked for points, here is a list of things that I believe iOS does not do well:
- In Android Chrome, I can set YouTube website to desktop mode, and loop the video. I can also turn off the screen without breaking the play. I can't do this in Safari however I tried.
- In Safari, I need to long-press a button to bring up the list of closed tabs. How can anyone figure it out without asking around online?
- In Stock app, a few News pieces are automatically brought up and occupy the lower half of the screen when it starts up. This is very annoying as I don't need it and cannot turn it off.
- (This is really the level of ridiculous) In Clock, I fucking cannot set an one time alarm for a future date (Repeat = Never means just today), so I had to stupidly set up weekly alerts and change it whenever I need a new one-time. I hope I'm too stupid to find the magic option.
- Again, in Clock, if I want to setup alarm for sleep, I have to turn on...sleep. This is OK-ish as I can just setup a weekly alarm and click every weekday.
So far, I think Mail and Maps are user friendly. Maps actually show more stuffs than Google Map, which is especially useful for pedestrians. Weather is also good and I have little complain about it.
The YouTube thing is Google's choice, not Apple's, as those are "premium" features. Install Vinegar (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...) to get a standard HTML5 player in YouTube, which will let you make it full screen, PiP it, background it, whatever.
> The YouTube thing is Google's choice, not Apple's, as those are "premium" features. Install Vinegar (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...) to get a standard HTML5 player in YouTube, which will let you make it full screen, PiP it, background it, whatever.
But it IS Apple's choice. The problem is they have a mixed up conflict of interest, and it's even worse when Apple themselves is trying to sell you their own services.
IMHO the company making the hardware, the company making the software, and the company selling the cloud services shouldn't be allowed to all be the same company. There's too much conflict of interest.
Google sells PiP, background playing etc. as part of YouTube Premium (not Apple!). Google serves browser clients a player that can't do those things, because they want you to pay for them. Vinegar is a browser extension that replaces Google's player with Apple's plain HTML5 player. Apple's plain HTML5 player does all that stuff for free.
With Apple's default apps, i kind of feel like the apps themselves are strategically designed to not be the best place to look for lesser trafficked use cases.
Visual customizations get upstreamed into the system accessibility settings. Extra functions are exposed exclusively in Shortcuts for you to hack together an automation feature yourself. For a fully feature supported app Apple would probably say go pay for an app (and them through fee) on the App Store.
For example with your future alarm.. you could get another app or you could create a 'Time of Day' Shortcut automation which checks everyday to see if the date is the date you want the alarm on; if it is the day create the alarm. Delete the alarm on the next day. A (not so) fun fact about automating Alarms before iOS 17: you could only delete alarms through Siri and not Shortcuts lol...
> I fucking cannot set an one time alarm for a future date (Repeat = Never means just today), so I had to stupidly set up weekly alerts and change it whenever I need a new one-time. I hope I'm too stupid to find the magic option.
I think you're supposed to use the calendar for that.
Which is broken, because I want to be able to say “set an alarm at for next Wednesday at 4:30 AM“ the second I find out I have to give someone a ride to the airport.
If I have to make it a calendar entry, I may not notice it in time.
The alarm and the calendar can both alert you on a specific date and time. But like a bedside alarm clock, the iOS alarm is limited to a time in the next 24 hours.
On Android, why would you not use the calendar when you want to be alerted days from now?
Wat? Because a century old device can only set a repeating alarm, the 2025 $1k smartphone should, too?! I set so many one of alarms on my android weekly, I would be infuriated if I had to use the calendar for that.
You can set as many non-repeating alarms as you like, as long as they're within the next 24 hours.
What kind of event are you creating an alarm for that's more than a day away? On Friday, do you create your alarm to wake up on Monday? Does Android have a calendar-like view of your upcoming alarms?
(Sorry for the barrage of questions, but this is interesting to me.)
I frequently use one-time alarms for early morning travel a few days away. What makes them great is that the alarms in general are much more robust in their requirements to turn them off; I can accidentally dismiss a calendar alert, but I have a much harder time accidentally deactivating the clock alarm in a sleep induced stupor at odd hours.
More importantly, alarms don't get silenced by my nightly do not disturb schedule.
I'm with you. I got an iPhone 15 a couple of years ago after only ever using Android. I was expecting great things and it's just.. confused!
I never have any confidence it will notify me of things. Often I just miss stuff. I actually have no idea how all the different "Focus" modes work. Notifications pile up and then seem to disappear without any action, and then reappear a week later.
The keyboard is really awful. I recently pulled an ancient Galaxy phone out of a drawer to test something and was reminded of just how much better the Android keyboard is. It just always guesses the wrong things!
And the settings are equally jumbled. Sometimes they're in the Settings app, sometimes they're in the app I'm using. It's just confusing.
It was honestly eye opening because I'd spent so many years assuming iPhones were better. I moved across because my Android phones kept having hardware issues. I think I'll probably go back to Android after this experiment.
I recently bought an original iPhone SE in hopes of using a smaller device. But I can't use it for anything worthwhile because I can't sign into an Apple ID due to having encrypted backups on my account, which was introduced in iOS 16.2. The SE only supports 15.8.5.
So I'd have to disable encrypted backups for all of my other devices in order to sign into my account.
Why am I unable to use Apple Music on my device while I can use it from a web browser or from an android phone that don't have encrypted iCloud backups enabled?
Unfortunately this also prevents me from jailbreaking the device because I have to sign into an Apple account in order to trust a developer certificate on the device required for the jailbreaking tool. It's my device! Let me approve of the certificate without an Apple ID!
Oh, that sounds annoying. I also bought an SE 2016 128GB as "Offline-First" / de-Appled device. I think what I did was just signing in to App Store, not fully adding my Apple ID to the device. It now serves as a time capsule, has all the classic apps like Doodle Jump, Fruit Ninja, MiniMetro etc and some resource-light open source apps like CoMaps, fileexplorer with connection / offline sync to Nextcloud. Jailbroken via Palera1n (Think I didn't have to approve install any certificate)
I switched to Android in 2021 after almost a decade using iPhone and I was surprised to find modern Android is actually very good. I remember the early days of Android being a trash fire but since around ~2020 it seems to have gotten a lot better. For various reasons im looking to switch back to the iPhone but I know it'll be a case of giving up some good things on Android in exchange for other things being better on the iPhone.
> But, man, Apple hardware still rocks. Can't deny that.
They really dodged a bullet there. 2016-2020 Apple laptop hardware definitely didn't rock. It's good they did an about-face on some of those bad ideas.
The fact they were able to turn around their hardware division after all that is the only thing which gives me hope they might be capable of doing an about-face on software.
They didn't rock but... modern MacBook Pro models are bigger and heavier and have a notch (and yes, I know technically the notch is more screen rather than less, and that one can simply use the space below, but I still don't like it). I also liked how you could charge the older models from either side and still have 3 free Thunderbolt ports.
Debatable since the nub is still around on all their devices. My M3 work laptop definitely feels like a playskool toy.
You can’t get more brain dead that taking away important screen real estate then making the argument that you get more real estate because it’s now all tucked into a corner.
God forbid there be a black strip on the sides of the screen. How did we ever live?!??
I really like my macbook with the notch. The bezels are smaller and you can fit a larger screen in a similar footprint to previous macbooks without the notch.
Except Apple increased the height of the screen by exactly as many pixels as the notch is tall, so yes, your windows actually do get more real estate compared with the pre-notch models. I’m not going to argue that it’s free of problems, but it doesn’t come at the cost of usable desktop space.
Also worth pointing out that this design allows a substantial footprint reduction, which for example puts the 13.6” Macbook Air within striking distance of traditional bezel 12” laptops in terms of physical size. Some people care about that.
It does come at the cost of useable desktop space because if you don’t use a separate monitor with your portable device, you can’t see or use icons in the task bar.
And peoples suggestions is to install 3rd party software or just deal with it. It doesn’t help that fanatics feel the need to tell you which parts of the screen are and aren’t important real estate. Like fuck me and my opinions right?
“Well actually mathematically there’s more real estate in less convenient places so it’s fine.” Is so…depressing to watch people just give in to any little idea that comes out of this company’s PR department, like their logic is The Only truth.
It’s a legitimate issue in one sense, but another way of seeing it is that outside of a select few programs that actually need to be that way, Windows-tray-style apps are something of an anti-pattern. Most apps would be better as plain old dock apps or maybe headless daemons with HUD style UI summoned by a keystroke and thus not need menubar icons. It’s genuinely weird that we’ve ended up in a place where more than a fractional number of users have a bajillion menubar icons to contend with.
My suggestion would be to buy a laptop you like, then.
Or if your work is forcing it on you, I'm sorry but that's not the fault of people who happen to enjoy it. Maybe ask if you can get a different machine?
I’ve tried all those options. I only use my Apple laptop for work and for everything else I use a well designed piece of hardware, a Framework laptop. I’m a hardware prude and only work on professional hardware with fantastic design that doesn’t obfuscate my screen for an argument about pixel space and a desire to standout at the cost of sensibility.
Fuck man, I worked on the original Mac OS back in '83, when all the work was in assembly. Know what happened? Apple happened. That company is fucked up something supreme. The entire premise behind that original graphical UI was never user experience, it was 'the users are idiots, we have to control them'.
I was a teen game developer with my own games in Sears & K Mart nationwide for the US, for the Vic-20 and the C-64, and was invited as a representative of the independent games industry. When my involvement was ending, Apple then told me they changed their mind and was not going to support independent games for the Mac at all. But offered to waive that restriction if I paid them $30K and gave them full editorial control over what I published. Nope.
It's wild how fast Apple pivoted from Woz just wanting to make a PC anyone could write and play their own video games on to "Nah we want full control of every last bit, fuck your indie games".
I think Apple marketing understands human motivation and the rarely acknowledged super strength of prestige marketing. Apple's marketing very much leans into every one of their products must be perceived as a high prestige item to own, or they will not release it. When the Mac was brand new, they cultivated and guarded that prestige like a hawk.
I'd wonder if especially at that point in history, trying to appear as a gaming platform would be a liability.
An early Mac was not a great gaming computer even by 1980s standards, and the last thing you want is Commodore or Atari running an ad saying "Apple's $2500 black-and-white prestige piece doesn't play games as well as a $299 C64/800XL". Not to mention the stink of the US video game market crash hovering around anything game-related.
If they pivot directly towards more professional workstation/publication/art department positions, nobody's making that point. (Now I'm thinking of the time "Boot", or maybe it was already "Maximum PC" by then, reviewed a SGI O2 and said it was impressive, but had limited game selections.)
Quickdraw was revolutionary, it had all the optimizations, and then all the code was in assembly. Things like classic arcade games were very much possible. I had a lunar lander game with side scrolling landscape, a dig dug clone, a variation on donkey kong, and a variant of Robotron. Apple thought that would attract the wrong impression, they wanted the design and typography crowd. Can't say they were wrong, to be honest.
I recently installed Ubuntu on my gaming machine. It was a bit of a learning curve, but I am still able to game, and I can play around with software without being treated like a criminal. It's great.
I still use Mac for dev, but only because I don't really feel like messing around with Linux on a work computer.
Not far from my philosophy. If I'm being paid, I'll use whatever I'm getting paid to use. But on my own, I'll choose to learn tools that will be around for a long time, and won't get taken away by some rent-seeking company (i.e. open-source).
I do not understand this rhetoric of Apple hardware being so amazing. The only moderately impressive thing they've done for years is the M chips. Beyond that, it's just crippled, overpriced, and unrepairable.
They have shiny cases, yay. I'll take my ugly Thinkpad and actually get shit done over a shiny case and glossy screen.
I think it's a bit more than that. I like that I can easily swap the SSD and DRAM in my Thinkpad. But Apple has definitely done some interesting things including:
- good thermals (especially vs. Thinkpad P series), even supporting fanless operation on the MacBook Air
- excellent microphone and speaker array (makes people much more intelligible on both sides during Zoom calls)
- excellent multitouch trackpad with good palm rejection (though for a trackpoint device Thinkpad is your best bet)
- unified GPU and CPU memory with up to 135 GB/s bandwidth (downside: DRAM is not upgradable)
- host-managed flash storage (downside: SSD is not upgradable)
And of course the 10-20 hour battery life is hard to beat. Only downside is I'll forget to plug in at all.
Historically, Apple has innovated quite a bit in the laptop space, including: moving the keyboard back for the modern palm rest design (PowerBook, 1991); active-matrix color display (PowerBook 180c, 1993); integrated wi-fi and handle antenna (iBook, 1999); Unix-based OS that could still run MS Office and Photoshop (Mac OS X, 2000 onward); full-featured thin metal laptop with gigabit ethernet (PowerBook G4 Titanium, 2001); pre-ultrabook thin laptop that fits in a manila envelope (MacBook Air, 2008); high-resolution display and all-flash storage in an ever-thinner design ("Retina" MacBook Pro, 2012); going all-in on USB-C/Thunderbolt and 5K external "retina" display (MacBook Pro, 2016); unprecedented performance, and a tandem OLED display with <10ms touch-to-pixel latency, in an absurdly thin iPad, which can also be used as a "laptop" (iPad M4 + magic keyboard, 2024); etc. Some of the innovations also failed, such as the touchbar, dual-controller trackpad, and "butterfly" keyboard which plagued the 2016 models.
Mac is great hardware to be sure. I have to say though, I much prefer an S25 Ultra with Samsung's version of "nanotexture" — even with iPhone 17's improved (?) anti-reflective screen.
I've been very patient with iOS 26. I tell myself - so long as its foundation is right, they'll iron out these details. But it is properly bad often and at times extremely frustrating.
The funny thing is the annoying popups on Windows look like advertising copy from the web post Microsoft getting grid and flexbox into HTML to support HTML-based applications. They at least try to be visually enticing.
Annoying popups on MacOS look like the 1999 remake of the modal dialogs from the 1984 Mac, I guess with some concessions to liquid glass.
Funny that a lot of people seem to have different Liquid Glass experiences, are we being feature flagged? I don't see the massive disruption to icons that the author seems but it does seem to me that certain icons have been drained of all their contrast and just look bleh now, particularly the settings icon on my iPhone. I don't see a bold design based on transparency, I just see the edges of things look like they've been anti-antialiased now. It's like somebody just did some random vandalization of the UI without any rhyme or reason. It's not catastrophic but it's no improvement.
I have flipped every imaginable switch and even set up a work profile, and I have not yet been able to turn off desktop notifications on my new work Mac. Every time I log in there's a persistent notification about... something stuck in the corner. The notification does not explain itself, clicking it just drops me into a system menu. Usually there's three or four such notifications queued up.
So it just lives there permanently on the desktop and I avoid using the thing as much as possible. I do all of my work functions through SSH and leave the Mac in a corner of my desk with the screen closed.
I swear, MacOS actively tries to be as annoying and intrusive as possible. Every time I touch the damn thing some new behavior reveals itself. Like there are two sets of hotkeys for copy/paste and which one you need to use appears to be entirely random per-window.
Thankfully work lets me use linux on my main machine and I almost never have to deal with goddamn MacOS. I would rather daily drive Windows 11 with copilot and cortana and piles of bossware than plain MacOS.
I am, better, I am old enough to have seen Apple in the good and bad times, and tell that Apple's major attention to detail, and catering to developers, was a side effect from being really close to shutdown the whole business.
Now they have plenty of money, the attitude during early Apple years is back.
Unsurprising that they'd end up there, at the time Mac was allowed to get away with fewer security pop-ups by (relative) obscurity. Fortunately Windows still manages to run ahead as the even worse villain, as I wouldn't even let a Windows 11 PC in my house these days.
I often get third party popups from software vendors which asks me for my MacOS password. I have checked several times and these are "legit" (as in, the popup comes from a who it says it does and it's a reputable company). It's wild to me that Apple have painted themselves into a world where it's expected that users give their OS password to third party apps.
MacOS and iOS both seem to have an insatiable hunger for passwords. The most aggravating scenario for me by far is when the App Store on iOS, with no consistent pattern I have been able to identify, makes me reenter my entire massive Apple ID password instead of the usual Face ID prompt to download ... a free app.
I can’t get it to use my password manager on that screen either, and navigating to another app closes the modal so you have to copy your password and then start over.
Wait, that's actually never legit. If the password popup comes from the OS on behalf of the vendor, that's OK; the third-party party never has access to your password, just a time-limited auth token to allow it to do something privileged.
Ok? I don't know if it's the OS on behalf of the app or not. It's a password prompt that doesn't even have an affordance for biometrics, unlike other MacOS admin prompts. It's commonplace in MacOS applications.
This is good for security becuase you're giving temporary access for a helper binary to do privileged stuff in a limited scope.
From the UX perspective, yes, it is triggered from the app.
It's been a long time since I used the Core Foundation API but you trigger a request, and then get back a token from the OS that grants you permission to do stuff.
> But, man, Apple hardware still rocks. Can't deny that.
Ah yes, the Johnny Ive era of "no ports on Macbooks except USB-C, and hope you like touchbars!" was fantastic. Not to mention how heavy the damn things are. Oh and the sharp edges of the case where my palms rest. And the chiclet keyboards with .0001 mm of key travel. I'll take a carbon fiber Thinkpad with an OLED display any day of the week, thank you. Macbooks feel like user hostile devices and are the epitome of form over function.
I don't mind that the Macbooks only have USB-C ports. Unlike many PCs, where the USB-C ports can't be used for charging, or can't be used for high-speed data transfer, or can't be used for external displays, or can't be used by certain software that only speaks USB 2.0, etc., the Macbooks let any USB-C port do anything. It's a forward-thinking decision, even if it was primarily made for aesthetic reasons.
The transition era was certainly annoying, but now that it's over I think the Mac experience is objectively worse. My PC laptop has 2 USB-C ports that can be used for charging, display, 40 Gbps transfer, etc., just like my Macbook Air. The difference is that the PC also has 2 USB-A ports and an HDMI port. This means that I'm able to plug in a flash drive or connect an external display without having to remember to bring a dongle with me.
I largely agree that PCs have caught up feature-wise, but because they took longer to get there, I still have a couple crappy USB-C ports on PCs that are otherwise fine.
The problem with the 2 USB-C ports on modern PC laptops is that one of them pretty much has to be reserved for the charger, whereas the MBP has a MagSafe port that you can charge with instead. So it really only feels like you have one USB-C port and the other ports are just there as a consolation. That might work out to roughly equal, but I don't think it leaves the Mac off worse. I don't hate the dongles so much though.
It wouldn't have hurt to have some USB-A and HDMI on the MBP--the Minis can pull it off, so clearly the hardware is capable--but more (Thunderbolt) USB-C would still be the best option IMO. USB-A (definitely) and HDMI (probably) will eventually be relics someday, even if they are here for a little while longer.
There are some models of MacBook Pro where one side has more 'thermal headroom' than the other side. I have one of those models, and I can't remember which side it is.
USB-C connectors are much less reliable than their predecessors due to their design though. I have several connectors that failed, either they no longer grip the cable securely or they just lose contact randomly.
I'm sure it's handy for mobile devices where size and versatility trumps everything, but on laptop/desktop machines where longer-term usage is expected I would prefer something more reliable.
Are you comparing USB-C to its direct predecessors, things like (micro-)USB-A/B, (mini-)HDMI, and (mini-)DP, or to more distant ancestors like PS/2 and D-sub/VGA/DVI?
Interesting. I can see how USB-A has better friction/grip in the port (when made properly anyway), but I can't say it has better longevity; I've broken plenty of USB-A connectors and even ports. I am also glad to be rid of the "which way is up" dance, and I don't think anyone has shed any tears for the loss of USB-B.
USB-A has much larger pins, meaning it will continue to work even if slightly damaged. USB-C has much higher pin density so the slightest misalignment (due to damage or just bad manufacturing tolerances) causes dropouts.
I'm just salty because I will have to replace either the ports on my Macbook or my USB-C wireless headphone receiver (both are a pricey endeavor, not to mention the downtime of having the laptop shipped for repair) just for the same issue to most likely reoccur a year down the line since it wasn't a result of any kind of misuse (both devices are exclusively used in an office environment and otherwise in brand new condition).
I forgot where I read it, but there's apparently a Jobs policy of "one standard and two proprietary ports" or something, so to allow data to be ingested easily and freely shared inside Apple ecosystem, but not exported back out to the outside world with same ease.
Which is like, a great way to subsidize junk USB hubs...? But for sure they love following through with policies.
That is complete BS, Macs have never had any proprietary data ports on them. Serial, SCSI, Ethernet, USB, FireWire, Thunderbolt, USB-C have all been standards.
What I see here is an evolution away from proprietary connectors (but I definitely agree that they strongly favored such connectors in the past). By the time of mini-DP and Thunderbolt, Apple and Intel were working jointly and the technology came to both PCs and Macs. By the time of USB-C, it was basically the entire electronics industry working together with Apple, and the end result has come to just about every kind of electronic device made by nearly every vendor. It doesn't get any less proprietary than that.
The bizarre part of the USB-C story is not Apple's involvement or early adoption of it, but rather that the mobile hardware side of Apple refused to support it. That they clung to the Lightning connector until the EU forced them to drop it, while their computer division had long since and enthusiastically adopted USB-C, is much more damning.
Your argument was they had a rule of "one standard and two proprietary ports" as a means to "allow data to be ingested easily and freely shared inside Apple ecosystem, but not exported back out to the outside world with same ease".
For serial they used mini-DIN to save space on the back of the machine instead of a random mix of DB-25 and DE-9 on the PC side. My family and everyone I knew used a dime-a-dozen cable to use a typical PC modem, data was shared feely. There was no "one standard" port at this time to get data "ingested", serial went both ways.
Even on PCs, to do anything serial you needed hardware and driver support anyway, that was the blocker, not the shape of the port. If Apple adopted DB-26 for serial, how would that let data share more freely?
For SCSI, the DB-25 Apple used was not proprietary. And even in the System 6 days they had Apple File Exchange to access FAT-formatted disks to write data out for PC users.
For Ethernet, Apple started building in Ethernet as standard before PC makers. They sold a laptop with Ethernet built-in in 1994, this was unheard of on PC laptops.
As for AppleTalk, they pushed LocalTalk at a time before PCs had any built-in networking whatsoever, a PC network card cost a hundred bux and were only used by corporations whereas in the home if you had a Mac you could make a network with a printer cable between two machines, Apple got it for cheap by spending an extra 10 bucks on RS-422 for their serial ports, why wouldn't you advertise that?
If you're talking about AppleTalk the network protocol rather than LocalTalk the physical protocol, Apple bundled TCP/IP with MacOS before Windows did ("Trumpet WinSock" was third party software), back when Microsoft thought they could stop people from adopting the internet since "The Microsoft Network" was so going to be so much better.
Arguing that adopting the Apple making PowerPC machines adopting the Intel-defined USB which was already on PCs for years before was a means to keep people from moving data out from the "internet Mac" (which was advertised as letting you share information with the world with "there is no step 3") is just... it makes no sense.
iOS on the other hand... Completely different thing.
And technically (the best way, right?) there's a whole thing to suss out between AppleTalk, 422, and LocalTalk, hahahahahah, but it's effectively as proprietary as PS/2 ports were, until they weren't. And ADB was 100% proprietary iirc, but I'm not going to look it up for you.
TBF, Apple did publish public standards for LocalTalk and AppleTalk and there was third-party hardware that implemented it (including stuff like switches that Apple never implemented themselves)
ADB was definitely proprietary, but arguably it wasn't a data port, nobody used ADB to output data.
On all but the top tier MBPs, USB C ports on Macs have different specs for data transfer (often the ones on the right of the machine will have half the transfer speed).
I haven't encountered this, but I've also only used the Apple Silicon devices. This might explain why there are so few ports, though: Thunderbolt is basically PCIe and has AFAIK direct lanes to the CPU; more full-featured ports = more PCIe lanes = much more complexity/expense.
Damn, you're right. I have an M1 Mac Mini and both ports are Thunderbolt. I recall, and Wikipedia corroborates, that the M2 Mac Mini could come with either two or four ports, but all were Thunderbolt. Now though, the M4 ones, besides getting an awful facelift, also seem to have sacrificed one Thunderbolt port (and both USB-A ports?!) to "gain" two non-Thunderbolt USB-C ports. What a terrible trade IMO.
Those are all legit criticisms but also be fair. They eventually did get rid of the touchbar. USB-C-only was merely ahead of its time. They improved the keyboards.
And even at their worst they were still much better than any Windows laptops, if only for the touchpad. I have yet to use a Windows laptop with a touchpad even close to the trackpad's that Apple had 15 years ago. And the build quality and styling is still unbeaten. Do Windows laptop makers still put shitty stickers all over them?
USB-C only is still a nuisance to this very day and remains the thing I hate most about my Macbook. Without fail there is never an adapter to be found when I need it.
I owned multiple Macbooks that built a positive static charge when they were on, instilling a Pavlovian fear of being shocked into anyone that used it. Those were fun.
If you use the 3-prong version of the power adapter to connect to a grounded outlet, this problem goes away. Of course, Apple doesn't actually sell a 3-prong plug for their charger in Europe... so us lucky folks in the EU have to get a 3rd party one off the internet
I suspect what they meant is that there isn't an official Schuko nub that slides onto the brick and lets you hang it directly from the socket rather than carrying an extra meter of cable around. There is a BS1363 one, and those are only legit feasible in a grounded configuration (although I guess you could use a plastic ground spade to lift the child protection slider inside the socket if you were a particularly unpleasant engineer). Nice for those of us in British-adjacent countries.
YMMV. I throw away the non-corded variants because they rarely fit in the spaces that people think to put outlets, especially as the chargers have grown and (particularly) train operators love putting outlets attached to tables with about 5mm of clearance.
That’s nothing to do with static electricity, it’s capacitive coupling through the safety capacitors in the power supply. The chassis sits at 90vac or so as a result, it’s not a safety issue it’s FCC compliance for emitted noise.
I've often wondered why I can tell by touch whether a device is charging or not from the slight "vibration" sensation I get when gently touching the case.
It's often noticeable if you have a point contact of metal against your skin; sharp edge / screw / speaker grill, etc. Once you have decent coupling between your body and the laptop, you won't feel the tingle / zap.
They're called Y-caps if you want to delve deeper into them and their use in power supplies.
They still do. My m1, m1max and m4max Macbook Pros all build a positive static charge. It isn't even something that renders it "returnable" because I observed it on every single Macbook in the last 4-5 years so I just assume that's just how Macbook Pros are now.
This hasn't changed in at least 2 decades: I was getting zapped by Apple metal laptops circa 2004. But I have never encountered this problem when using a grounded plug.
It was also a lot worse for me when plugged into outlets in an old house in Mexico, especially when my bare feet were touching the terracotta floor tiles; it's not really an issue in a recently re-wired house in California with a wood floor, using the same laptops, power strips, etc.
If you are having this issue and you currently plug a 2-pronged plug into a grounded outlet, try using Apple's 3-pronged plug instead, and I expect it would go away. If you don't have grounded outlets, then that's a bit more complicated to solve.
That's what confuses me, I am using the cable with three prongs, it is grounded. I am beginning to suspect some other appliance I am plugging into it that is responsible of the build-up of charge, but then why is it not finding its way to the ground... something doesn't add up but has been my experience consistently.
Is there any laptop with a metal body out there that does not have this issue? I've had two RedmiBook by Xiaomi and both has that vibrating electric feeling to them when plugged in.
That era sucked for sure, but since (I think) 2021, macbook pros have magsafe, 3x USB-C, an HDMI port, and an SD card. I had a 2014 MBP I was waiting to upgrade once they came up with a sensible redesign, and I'd say they did!
I still have my 2014, along with a 2021 MBP for work, and still love them as machines for my usage profile - writing software/firmware, and occasional PCB design. The battery life is good, M-series performance is great, screen is decent-to-good, trackpad is still best in class, and macos is _okay_ in my book. The keyboard isn't amazing as I prefer mechanical for sure, but I still type faster on a macbook keyboard than anything else. That being said, I designed a mechanical keyboard that sits on top of the macbook keyboard so I can enjoy that better typing experience.
> I wonder if anyone else here is old enough to remember the "I'm a Mac", "And I'm a PC" ads.
Those ads ran from 2006 to 2009. That’s between 16 and 19 years ago. How young do you imagine the typical HN commenter is?
> There was one that was about all the annoying security pop-ups Windows (used to?) have.
Those have been relentlessly mocked on the Mac for years. I remember a point where several articles were written making that exact comparison. People have been calling it “macOS Vista” since before Apple Silicon was a thing.
> Those ads ran from 2006 to 2009. That’s between 16 and 19 years ago. How young do you imagine the typical HN commenter is?
Part of getting old is accepting that 20 years was a long time ago and not everyone is going to remember the same commercials we saw two decades ago, including people who were children during the ad campaign.
I've been a Mac user on and off since the 80s and I think one of the biggest changes is how separate the Mac ecosystem once was.
It reminds me of stories I've heard about the Cold War and how Soviet scientists and engineers had very little exchange or trade with the West, but made wristwatches and cameras and manned rockets, almost in a parallel universe. These things coexisted in time with the Western stuff, but little to nothing in the supply chain was shared; these artifacts were essentially from a separate world.
That's how it felt as a Mac user in the 80s and 90s. In the early days you couldn't swap a mouse between a Mac and an IBM PC, much less a hard drive or printer. And most software was written pretty much from the ground up for a single platform as well.
And I remember often thinking how much that sucked. My sister had that cool game that ran on her DOS machine at college, or heck, she just had a file on a floppy disk but I couldn't read it on my Mac.
Now so much has been standardized - everything is USB or Wifi or Bluetooth or HTML or REST. Chrom(ium|e) or Firefox render pages the same on Mac or Windows or Linux. Connect any keyboard or webcam or whatever via USB. Share files between platforms with no issues. Electron apps run anywhere.
These days it feels like Mac developers (even inside of Apple) are no longer a continent away from other developers. Coding skills are probably more transferable these days, so there's probably more turnover in the Apple development ranks. There's certainly more influence from web design and mobile design rather than a small number of very opinionated people saying "this is how a Macintosh application should work".
And I guess that's ok. As a positive I don't have the cross-platform woes anymore. And perhaps the price to be paid is that the Mac platform is less cohesive and more cosmopolitan (in the sense that it draws influence, sometimes messily, from all over).
> It reminds me of stories I've heard about the Cold War and how Soviet scientists and engineers had very little exchange or trade with the West, but made wristwatches and cameras and manned rockets, almost in a parallel universe
They also had an extensive industrial espionage program. In particular, most of the integrated circuits made in the Soviet Union were not original designs. They were verbatim copies of Western op-amps, logic gates, and CPUs. They had pin- and instruction-compatible knock-offs of 8086, Z80, etc. Rest assured, that wasn't because they loved the instruction set and recreated it from scratch.
Soviet scientists were on the forefront of certain disciplines, but tales of technological ingenuity are mostly just an attempt to invent some romantic lore around stolen designs.
> tales of technological ingenuity are mostly just an attempt to invent some romantic lore around stolen designs.
This is a biased take. One can make a similar and likely more factual claim about the US , where largely every innovation in many different disciplines is dictated and targeted for use by the war industry.
And while there were many low quality knockoff electronics, pre-collapse USSR achieved remarkable feats in many different disciplines the US was falling behind at.
> One can make a similar and likely more factual claim about the US , where largely every innovation in many different disciplines is dictated and targeted for use by the war industry.
I don't know if you deliberately skipped the 90% of other inventions that had nothing to do with -mind you- defense from American imperialism or you're being dense on purpose. Probably both?
Anyway just glancing the respective page for US "innovations" one can easily tell which country had the most obsessive offensive war industry.
There was a Star Talk recently where they talked about how when they divided up the German aerospace scientists after WWII, Russia ended up with majority KISS scientists and we got the perfectionist, superior engineering ones. I always figured that was just a US vs Russia ethos difference. And maybe that’s why they picked who they did but maybe I have it backward.
That seems completely unbelievable to me, of the thousands (tens of thousands?) of scientists captured and recruited by the allies they just happened to split along philosophical lines? And then they had some huge cultural impact? As opposed to just being Shanghai'd by whatever nation got to them first then absorbed into the greater social and economic fabric of that nation.
Seems analogous to Apple and Microsoft in the 80s and 90s. Though I'm not sure which country Xerox would be. Maybe Germany in terms of the technology lifted by the later powers, but it seems a like a bit of a rude comparison!
I think apple had a trajectory, and the best time was at the end of the steve jobs era. After he left, they have plummeted.
I think they were in their own little world, and when they got past that with unix-based OSX and moved from powerpc to intel, they entered the best time.
The PC-based macs were very interoperable and could dual-boot windows. They had PCIe and could work with PC graphics cards, they used usb bt and more. Macs intereoperated and cooperated with the rest of the computing world. The OS worked well enough that other unix programs with a little tweaking could be compiled and run on macs. Engineers, tech types and scientists would buy and use mac laptops.
But around the time steve jobs passed away they've lost a lot of that. They grabbed control of the ecosystem and didn't interoperate anymore. The arm chips are impressive but apple is not interoperating any more. They have pcie slots in the mac pro, but they aren't good for much except maybe nvme storage. without strong leadership at the top, they are more of a faceless turn-the-crank iterator.
(not that I like what microsoft has morphed into either)
True, also before, during, and after the Intel transition the ecosystem of indie and boutique apps for Macs was great. Panic and The Omni Group, just to name two boutique development companies, were probably at their peak in terms of desktop software. Besides, Mac OS X Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard were polished and the UI was usable and cohesive.
Right now, the quality and attention to detail have plummeted. There is also a lot of iOS-ification going on. I wish they focused less on adding random features, and more on correctness, efficiency, and user experience. The attention to detail of UI elements in e.g. Snow Leopard, with a touch of skeuomorphism and reminiscent of classic Mac OS, is long gone.
Man, I love OmniGraffle. I guess design tools have generally improved over the years, but a couple of decades ago colleagues thought I was some kind of wizard for being able to easily whip up nice finite state machine diagrams in OmniGraffle.
Those of us that are old enough to remember, Apple is back in a John Sculley phase, however this time around there are no founders to rescue the company a second time.
Not that it needs to, as it isn't bleeding money like on the A/UX, Copland and Taligent/OpenDoc days, however they risk to become only the iDevices company.
Yeah, Microsoft apparently is also back on their former self.
> Mac platform is less cohesive and more cosmopolitan
Counter example: Blender
It used to have a extremely idiosyncratic UI. I will only say right click select.
A big part of the UI redesign was making it behave more like other 3d applications. And it succeeded in doing so in a way that older users actually liked and that made it more productive and coherent to use.
What I am saying is, those are different dimensions. You can have a more cohesive UI while adhere more to standards.
There is still lot of weird sacred cows that Macs would do very well to slaughter like the inverted mouse wheel thing or refusing to implement proper alt tab behavior.
You can have both, follow established standards and norms and be more cohesive.
The problem is simply that the quality isn't what it used to be on the software side. Which is following industry trends but still.
See, it's things like saying proper alt-tab behaviour that means we'll never solve it. While Windows invented alt-tab, the way macOS does it is the macOS way, so if it changed I would be far less productive.
This situation persists: for instance, try to write to an external disk formatted with NTFS using the GUI tools alone. Baffling why Apple doesn't simply obtain a license in order to gain this capability. Big unnecessary inconvenience, primarily for their own users.
Unfortunately, if the Mac isn't distinct from Windows and desktop Linux in some way, then what's the point?
Yes, as a long-time Mac user who now uses PCs at home but still uses a work-issued MacBook Pro, I greatly appreciate how Macs since the late 1990s-early 2000s are compatible with the PC ecosystem when it comes to peripherals, networking, and file systems.
However, what has been lost is "The Macintosh Way"; a distinctly Macintosh approach to computing. There's something about using the classic Mac OS or Jobs-era Mac OS X: it's well-designed across the entire ecosystem. I wish Apple stayed the course with defending "The Macintosh Way"; I am not a fan of the Web and mobile influences that have crept into macOS, and I am also not a fan of the nagging that later versions of macOS have in the name of "security" and promoting Apple products.
What the Mac has going for it today is mind-blowing ARM chips that are very fast and energy efficient. My work-issued MacBook Pro has absolutely amazing battery life, whereas my personal Framework 13's battery life is abysmal by comparison.
What's going to happen, though, if it's possible to buy a PC that's just as good as an ARM Mac in terms of both performance and battery life?
> What's going to happen, though, if it's possible to buy a PC that's just as good as an ARM Mac in terms of both performance and battery life?
Their advantage against Microsoft is that the Mac UX may be degrading, but the Windows UX is degrading much more quickly. Sure modern Mac OS is worse to use than either Snow Leopard or Windows 7, but at least you don't get the "sorry, all your programs are closed and your battery's at 10% because we rebooted your computer in the middle of the night to install ads for Draft Kings in the start menu" experience of modern Windows.
Their advantage against Linux is that while there are Linux-friendly OEMs, you can't just walk into a store and buy a Linux computer. The vast majority of PCs ship with Windows, and most users will stick with what comes with the computer. It definitely is possible to buy a computer preloaded with Linux, but you have to already know you want Linux and be willing to special order it online instead of buying from a store.
That advantage only works in countries where general population can afford to buy Mac hardware, and since Apple will never make hardware at lower prices, Windows will keep having 70% of desktop market share at global scale.
> since Apple will never make hardware at lower prices
Apple has a deal with Walmart to sell the M1 Macbook Air for $600, so that's their current low-cost option. For the future, data-miners have found evidence that Apple will be making a new low-cost Macbook with the A18 Pro (chip from the iPhone 16 Pro), set to launch in 2026. https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/30/new-macbook-with-a18-ch...
> However, what has been lost is "The Macintosh Way"; a distinctly Macintosh approach to computing. There's something about using the classic Mac OS or Jobs-era Mac OS X: it's well-designed across the entire ecosystem.
As someone who has never really enjoyed using macs, I do agree with this. It's probably why I don't mind them as much these days - Using MacOS in 2025 just kind of feels like a more annoying version of a Linux DE with less intent behind it. The way macs used to work did not jive with me well, but everything felt like it was built carefully to make sense to someone.
> As a positive I don't have the cross-platform woes anymore
It's certainly better than it was, that said Apple really try to isolate themselves by intentionally nerfing/restricting MacOS software to Apple APIs and not playing ball with standards.
> My sister had that cool game that ran on her DOS machine at college, or heck, she just had a file on a floppy disk but I couldn't read it on my Mac.
My MacBook Pro has an integrated GPU that supposedly rivals that of desktop GPUs. However, I have to use a second computer to play games on... which really sucks when travelling.
Apple doesn't even have passthrough e-GPU support in virtual machines (or otherwise), so I can't even run a Linux/Windows VM and attach a portable e-gpu to game with.
The M5 was released and has a 25% faster GPU than M4. Great, that has no effect on reading HN or watching YouTube videos and VSCode doesn't use the GPU so... good for you Apple, I'll stick to my M1 + second PC set up
One thing that has changed though, and this is a big pet peeve of mine.
Bluetooth fucking file sharing. You used to be able to send files using bluetooth between devices. I had some old ass Nokia from 2005 and I could send files to my Linux computer over bluetooth.
This standard function doesn't exist on iOS but has been replaced with AirDrop.
It's a big fuck you from Apple to everyone who prefers open standards.
Ahhh, Bluetooth share ... I remember messing around with it in 2017 on some old Nokias and an Android phone. That was the last time it ever worked for me. It's been quietly supplanted or removed from my newer devices, and the pairing is quite finicky. Also, the transfer speeds (back then) were awful - Kb/s.
Now my go-to is Dropbox/cloud/Sharik for small files and rsync for bulk backups.
Sharik looks great! They need a canonical domain receivers can visit without entering IPs like https://pairdrop.net/
It even has a shortcut for the share menu!
This isn't true - my shining moment as a 10 year old kid (~1998) was when the HD on our Macintosh went out and we went down to compusa and I picked a random IDE drive instead of the Mac branded drives (because it was much cheaper) and it just worked after reinstalling macos.
You were lucky to have a Mac with IDE drives in 1998. AFAIK that was only the G3s and some lower-end Performa. I had a 9600 and there was no avoiding SCSI (well, I say that but I did put an IDE card in it at some point).
The true revelation was the B&W G3s. Those machines came from another universe.
Yeah, looks like Apple's switch from SCSI to IDE started in '94. But the first couple of Macs my family had (SE, Quadra 605) would not have accepted an IDE drive.
The SCSI would probably be meant for a CD-ROM drive. I recall my Sound Blaster Pro had a proprietary Panasonic CD-ROM interface, and at the time, soundcards often came bundled with a CD-ROM drive ( or is that vice-versa?).
I once read that Steve Jobs decided the default order of icons in the Dock on new Macs. This could have been delegated to any number of subordinates, but he considered it so important for the new-user experience that he chose to do it himself.
Culture flows top-down. Cook is about growth, progressively flowing toward growth at any cost. It’s not a mystery why things are as they are at Apple.
I'm not sure I'd praise Jobs in that regard. I kind of think Apple UI went down beginning with putting a "progress bar" in the URL text field of Safari.
That was when the design team began what I call the "one-off UI design" rather than use the same language across all apps.
Never mind the round mouse before that and the blind USB ports on the back of the newer iMacs (hate that scritchity sound of stainless steel on anodized aluminum as I try to fumble around with the USB connector trying to find the opening).
That wasn't a smart move by jobs. He should have delegated it to someone trusted. This micromanaging is how you make the company more brittle. Obviously Apple is wildly successful as for this not to matter much. They could sell iIce to Penguins.
Micromanaging is how you run a successful company. You don't have to manage everything but you got to get involved in low level things.
Manager who can't do anything but delegate are fast and efficient for themselves, just not for the company.
I'd argue that apple is successful because of jobs attention to detail. Tim cook isn't the one who built apple foundation, he's merely trying to expand it but it's not the same difficulty.
The thing I got from Jobs (watching his various interviews and reading his bio), he wouldn't have delegated because he wanted to do these things. It mattered so much to him that delegating something like this wouldn't have even crossed his mind, regardless what his title was in the company.
Apple added too many features too fast, so they fell into the Feature Whirlpool. They're going to try and get out of it by adding more Features, Faster (I hope I'm wrong!).
Instead, they should have stayed on the Straigth and Narrow of Quality - where they were for many years - where you move up to computing paradise by having fewer features but more time spent perfecting them.
If they don't add big features every year, the tech press crucifies them as "just putting out another version of the same thing". IMO they trapped themselves into this yearly release cycle with the OS naming, and this puts pressure on them to deliver something big and new every time. Quality? Ain't nobody got time for that!
> If they don't add big features every year, the tech press crucifies them as "just putting out another version of the same thing".
That's the bed they made themselves and lay in it willingly.
No one is forcing them to do huge yearly releases. No one is forcing them to do yearly releases. No one is forcing them to tie new features which are all software anyway to yearly releases (and in recent years actual features are shipping later and later after the announcement, so they are not really tied to releases either anymore).
I would argue the stock market is forcing them to do all that. Line must go up, but it's not sustainable. Like you said, they ship later and later after the announcement. At some point they're going to have to disappoint or move the goalposts.
Lack of technical leadership?! I guess I must be missing something, because from the outside, they've got best CPU, the best battery life, the best VR system, the best privacy, and they seem to have gotten Intel's WiFi chips to work (which Intel couldn't). Probably the watch has some top-notch features, but I am not at all familiar with it. They also have a bunch of features that are unmatched by competitors due to their vertical integration (e.g. handoff, iOS apps on macOS, etc.). Maybe leadership are just a bunch of putzes who are only being saved by great engineers, but it seems unlikely.
Note how most of the things you listed are hardware. No one disputes that Apples hardware team is insanely good.
Their software side however is riddled with issues, delayed or cancelled projects, meandering focus, unclear priorities. They are increasingly overpromising and underdelivering.
Their product side is neither here nor there. Vision Pro is a technically marvelous bust. iPhones rely on gimmicks because there's really nothing to differentiate them anymore. Peripherals (Homepod, AppleTV) are stagnant. iPad suddenly saw signs of life this year with good functionality updates after a decade of "we have no idea what to do with it, here are meaningless and confusing hardware updates". Macbooks have been completed as a product years ago (not that it's a bad thing), so, again, they are just randomly slapping non-sensical names on upgrades and chase thinness.
Oh. Thinness. That is literally the only feature that Apple is obsessed with. You can't build a product strategy on thinness alone.
Stock value has no meaning at all. What matters is revenue and profit. If Apple doesn't release new devices every year, then they will still sell last year's model. What are customers supposed to purchase instead? A PC? Nobody is going to turn down a new Mac just because the model is 1,2, 3 or 5 years old.
Stock market is responding to Apple behavior. Stock market was perfectly okay with Apple not doing yearly releases before the iPhone. The stock market was perfectly okay with Apple not doing yearly releases of MacOS during the iPhone era. The stock market was totally okay with Apple not doing yearly (or predictable) hardware upgrades on anything but iPhone.
The stock market can easily be taught anything. And Jobs didn't even care about stock market, or stock holders (Apple famously didn't even pay dividends for a very long time), or investors (regularly ignoring any and all calls and advice from the largest investors).
You need political will and taste to say a thousand nos to every yes. None of the senior citizens in charge of Apple have that.
They could do a kind of tick-tock, with one feature release being followed by a polish and refinement one. Kind of like they did with the regular and S iPhone models. I would welcome that; I don’t know about the marketing department.
Zero percent of consumers care what the tech press writes, and Apple makes their money by selling their devices to consumers.
They could easily wait longer between releasing devices. An M1 Macbook is still in 2025 a massive upgrade for anybody switching from PC - five years after release.
If Apple included fully fledged apps for photo editing and video editing, and maybe small business tools like invoicing, there would be no reason for any consumer in any segment to purchase anything other than a Mac.
New releases do not drive increased sales as much as people think. Especially if the new releases are lacking in quality.
Not many consumers go out to buy an Apple device because the new one has been released. They go out to buy a new phone or new computer because their old one gave out and will just take the Apple device that is for sale.
The yearly cadence ensures that there's always a "this year's model" to upgrade corporations+institutions to in volume through the Apple Business Leasing program.
That's also why Apple bothers to do the silent little spec-bump releases: it gives Business Leasing corporate buyers a new SKU to use to justify staying on the upgrade treadmill for their 10k devices for another cycle (rather than holding off for even a single cycle because "it's the same SKU.")
Nobody really cares if they add a lot of OS features as long as they don't make grandiose statements.
I generally see complaints about advancement aimed at the hardware. Some are unreasonable standards, some are backlash to the idea of continuing to buy a new iphone every year or two as the differences shrink, but either way software feature spam is a bad response.
This is the entirety of the explanation, really. Apple has always started small and then iterated toward greatness. They've made two mistakes recently:
1. They've stopped starting small and instead started unrealistically large. Apple Intelligence is a great recent example.
2. They've stopped iterating with small improvements and features, and instead decided that "iterating" just means "pile on more features and change things".
Some of these issues are excusable by saying they "added too many features too fast" (especially the inconsistencies which the article begins with), but lots of the issues are just caused by Liquid Glass becoming a thing and some "less important" apps didn't get a proper UX test after switching to Liquid Glass design (the whole latter half of the article)...
And that's not excusable - every feature should have its maintainer who should know that a large framework update like Liquid Glass can break basically anything and should re-test the app under every scenario they could think of (and as "the maintainer" they should know all the scenarios) and push to fix any found bugs...
Also a company as big as Apple should eat its own dogfood and force their employees to use the beta versions to find as many bugs as they could... If every Apple employee used the beta version on their own personal computer before release I can't realistically imagine how the "Electron app slowing down Tahoe" issue wouldn't be discovered before global release...
The only path to staying on the SaNoQ is having a CEO who prioritizes quality, to the extent that they'll spend time dogfooding product and gripe at developers / engineers / designers / leaders who fall short.
Either everyone is worried about the consequences of failing to produce high quality work (including at the VP level, given they can allocate additional time/resources for feature baking) or optimizing whatever OKR/KPI the CEO is on about this quarter becomes a more reliable career move.
And once that happens (spiced with scale), the company is lost in the Forest of Trying to Design Effective OKRs.
>Apple added too many features too fast, so they fell into the Feature Whirlpool. They're going to try and get out of it by adding more Features, Faster (I hope I'm wrong!).
yep. The attention to details is still there, it is just changed from polishing and curating details to creating a lot of small unpolished and uncalled for and thus very annoying details. From MBA POV there isn't much difference, and the latter even produces better KPIs.
Not entirely, though; there is joy and playfulness at the core of Liquid Glass. But delight is not that common, and refinement and focus are definitely lacking. They could have used more nos and fewer yeses.
Glad to see someone documenting this. I use the screentime feature to restrict my kid's iPad's and it is so painful. Here are my notes:
- When an iPad is presented to you to enter your parent code to unlock an app, the name of the app isn't shown as the pin prompt is over the top of the app/time to unlock details.
- It's not possible to set screen time restrictions for Safari.
- If apps are not allowed to be installed, app updates stop. I have to allow app installations, install updates, then block app installations again.
- Setting downtime hours just doesn't seem to work. Block apps from 6pm - 11.59pm? Kid gets locked out of their iPad at school for the whole day.
- Most of the syncing between settings on a computer to the target iPads appear to be broken completely. If an iPad is in downtime, and the scheduled downtime time changes, it does not take the iPad out of downtime.
- Downtime doesn't allow multi-day hour settings. For instance, try setting downtime from 8pm - 8am.
- Popups in the screen time settings of MacOS have no visual indication that there is more beneath what can be seen. There is no scrollbar. You have to swipe/scroll on every popup to see if there are more settings hidden out of view.
- No granular downtime controls for websites. You can block Safari, or you can not block Safari.
Screentime randomly shows you a warning about being an administrator... no probs you just need to select another account and then re-select the one you want and it'll go away.
> - It's not possible to set screen time restrictions for Safari.
I thought this too. I discovered it actually is possible though, just doesn't appear in the list. Go "Screen Time" -> "App Limits" -> "Add Limit". In the "Choose Apps" dialog, you won't see Safari in the list. But you can type "Safari" in the search bar and it'll appear.
But I agree with the overall sentiment on this thread. iOS Parental Controls aren't where they need to be.
> If apps are not allowed to be installed, app updates stop. I have to allow app installations, install updates, then block app installations again.
Presumably this is because apps could add individual features parents don't approve of between updates.
If you're locking down what apps you want your kids to use (to an individual whitelist of apps, not just by maturity rating), you're essentially stepping into the role of an enterprise MDM IT department, auditing software updates for stability before letting them go out.
What would you propose instead here?
I presume you'd personally just be willing to trust certain apps/developers to update their apps without changing anything fundamental about them. But I think that most people who are app-whitelisting don't feel that level of trust torward apps/developers, and would want updates to be stopped if-and-only-if the update would introduce a new feature.
So now, from the dev's perspective, you're, what, tying automatic update rollout to whether they bump the SemVer minor version or not? Forcing the dev to outline feature changes in a way that can be summarized in a "trust this update" prompt notification that gets pushed to a parent's device?
"you're essentially stepping into the role of an enterprise MDM IT department, auditing software updates for stability before letting them go out."
If my daughter's Spotify app breaks after an update she knows to immediately contact my on-call pager and alert our family CEO and legal department.
Just give me a checkbox that allows updates.
If an app developer changes something fundamental about the app, then the changes will be subject to the app store age guidelines. If the app is recategorised to 18+ it won't be able to install anyway. Billions of devices around the world have auto app updates turned on. The risk of a rogue update is outweighed by the benefit of getting instant access to security updates. I'm managing a kids iPad with a couple of mainstream games and school apps installed, not running a fortune 500.
They present as bugs. I suspect they don't have the A team working on mechanisms that help reduce the amount of time kids spend on their devices. Do the bare minimum to show they "care" but no more as it hurts the profits.
As a relatively young person with good eyesight, I can’t really say that Liquid Glass has caused any real visibility issues for me. I think it looks pretty sleek 95% of the time. The app search when pulling down from the home screen is much faster, it has a delay of almost 1 second before which feels more like 0.1s now.
But nonetheless, there’s so many more bugs and visual glitches. Battery life is still unstable and feels markedly worse than before. Safari looks cool, but UI buttons being on top of content is foolish for the reasons highlighted in this article. Overall, it’s just much more visually inconsistent than before. And the glass effect on app icons looks blurry until you get 5cm away from the screen and really pay attention to the icons. I definitely won’t be upgrading my Mac any time soon.
I just wish we would get away from this annual upgrade cycle and just polish the OS for a while. We don’t need 1 trillion “features”, especially when they increase the complexity of the user experience. MacOS in general did this very well, ever since I switched I’ve been very impressed at how much you can accomplish with the default app in macOS, all while looking cleaner and leaner than windows software. No new feature is even close to that balance of power and UI simplicity anymore.
I'm 58, and have needed reading glasses for the last 10 years. Want to try something fun? Increase your default text size on your iPhone, and then just watch how many apps — native Apple apps, mind you — have their UI screwed up to the point where they become unusable!
I don't use a cellphone anymore, but back when I did (circa iOS 12) it was not possible to have the text large enough for me to read while still displaying all ten digits of a phone number.
Example: `212-555-1234` would display as `212-555-12...` in my call list.
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I have owned and primarily used Apple products since 1992; their accessibility options seem to be going backwards. An iPhone screen would still have more than enough space to display information if the UI weren't completely crammed full of junk.
It is so frustrating when I help older clients and (unbeknownst to them) some stupid notification re-focuses attention. Often they'll keep [-s-l-o-w-l-y-] typing and then get frustrated that "the computer did something I didn't tell it to, without even warning me it wasn't listening to my keystrokes anymore..." [e.g.] — this used to be eye-rolling user error, now it's just expected operating system behavior.
----
Pro-tip: You can essentially disable Apple notifications by setting `Do Not Disturb` from 3:01am - 3:00am
The change removing Launchpad and fusing with Spotlight has a mildly annoying effect. If I do the five finger gesture on my M1 Max Macbook Pro, and start typing, the first few keystrokes will give me the "you're trying to type where you can't" sound and they won't register into the search box.
Launchpad didn't have this problem. Any text you type while the view is rendering goes into the search bar.
While the OP seems very unhappy and should just switch platforms considering it's a "shitty $1000 phone" to him, I'm just mildly annoyed by these UX regressions to what was otherwise a very good platform.
'Don't get me wrong, I do like trillion dollar tech companies to be transparent, but this right here is certainly not what I meant when I said: "Apple needs to be more transparent".'
lol
Apple is burning their remaining goodwill among longtime customers, myself included. It's sad to see. Next WWDC, they need to be incredibly transparent about how they plan to fix these issues and get their house in order. If they aren't capable of accepting feedback after this public excoriation, I don't have high hopes for their future.
They listened when people said they wanted transparency. That's why we got Liquid Glass. It seems the actual context of the word got lost somewhere along the way.
With this iOS 26 update, they set dynamite to my bridge.
I’m switching to android because why not? I mean, I have to install Google maps anyway because Apple Maps is horrible. But the UI on 26 is way worse than a pixel experience in my opinion. Plus, I could just do so much more with the pixel phone but then again I’m sort of a power user.
I was working on Apple since 1996 and started off as a computer support person. Now it pains me to help people with their computers because everything is siloed and proprietary and just makes no sense.
And I mean, I’m also annoyed that their voice to text is just horrible. I can’t even tell you how many mistakes I’ve had to correct in this comment alone.
The great thing about Android is that you don't have to use Google's awful software. Google Maps is not good, I avoid it whenever at all possible, the same goes for basically all other Google software.
The one reason to use Android is so that you can actually switch out the awful stuff that ships with your device. Leaving Apple to join the "Google Ecosystem" seems absolutely insane. Google is so terrible at software, so terrible at UI and so terrible at having products.
I get that visual design is a complete preference, but the great thing about Android, to me at least, is that you can get away from Google totally goofy design and make your own choices.
>Plus, I could just do so much more with the pixel phone but then again I’m sort of a power user.
Google is starting to make that less and less feasible though, with it's start in restricting app installations.
osmAnd allows you to use a number of different sources, though their business listings are inferior (in Los Angeles/San Diego) no matter what source you use (admittedly this might be partly due to new businesses opening, I've never tried searching for a long-established business as I already know where to find these). Recommend installing from fdroid, the play store version is limited (may not make a difference to you)
There's a number of other map apps around as well (Mapfactor, MapQuest, maps.me), including some for specific purposes (transit, Waze, Polaris, backcountry, sygic)
Right? All these "features", but they don't get the very basic stuff right a lot of times. User input is very very important for the user.
On iPhone swipe keyboard something that feels like a random generator replaces not only the word you swipe, but the word before, and in 2/3rds of cases with random nonsense pairs.
And you can't turn it off without turning off the similar word proposals you definitely want.
It's a strange design decision and I think the implementation is not up to the task.
I'm not staying cause I like it, but because I dislike the other options more.
There's tons of posts on reddit documenting the fact that everyone is making mistakes constantly with their keyboards for a few years, especially the.constant.dots.everyone.makes - they worked ok before, it's honestly almost comical how bad it is now.
The only thing I'd add is that if you can opt to say "yes" later, it should be obvious where to find it (eg. make a logical settings menu) or they point you to where you can find it. If they really want to make you feel comfortable using their app/site/service there shouldn't be any loss aversion instinct stirred up by hitting "no" as though it's your only chance to accept what they're offering.
Playing devil's advocate here: Isn't one advantage of "not now" that it conveys "I don't want to worry about this now, don't change anything and get out of my way" whereas "no" burdens the user with a conscious choice?
Are you perhaps more concerned about software that keeps nagging you about the same thing over and over again than about the wording in particular? Because badly designed software will do that whether you told it "not yet" or "no".
While I can see the frustration by repeatedly using such software, it seems fair that a well-intentioned UX designer would use "not yet" if they found it works better for a majority of people. What then matters is that they respect the intent of everyone by not bringing the choice up again.
I think 'well intentioned UX designers' who do this are in the minority, honestly. Or naïve. Per derefr and latexr's comments, it's a dark pattern with an ulterior motive.
To your question, I'd say it's a false dichotomy.
The repeating behaviour and the 'not now' are two sides of the same coin. Per the original post, and my experience, those 'not now' buttons keep coming back.
And, for the sake of argument, how should respectful software behave? If I clicked 'not now', are you _ever_ going to ask me again? If so, how do you decide on the time-period? If not, why make 'no' more complicated than 'yes'?
> The repeating behaviour and the 'not now' are two sides of the same coin. Per the original post, and my experience, those 'not now' buttons keep coming back.
So you're using "not now" as a shortcut to identify malicious design. That's fine but personally I'm not. I would go as far as claiming as most people don't feel this way about such a tiny wording detail, but I obviously haven't ran any A/B testing to confirm either interpretation.
> And, for the sake of argument, how should respectful software behave? If I clicked 'not now', are you _ever_ going to ask me again? If so, how do you decide on the time-period?
Honestly this question seems bizarrely focused on making the software give you a definite promise on what it will or will not do. It's a valid design question how to respectfully prompt the user for choices, but if that's your concern then this specific wording choice is an unimportant detail to get stuck on.
> If not, why make 'no' more complicated than 'yes'?
The reason was given my my opening argument: "no/yes" demands a conscious choice whereas "not now" doesn't. "not now" is plausibly less complicated than "yes" for a majority of users, and cognitive overhead generally matters more to people than imaginary contracts about future choice prompts.
You did say "playing devil's advocate", and you asked which of the two I was more concerned about. So I think it's OK to explore the arguments either way!
I'm going by gut feeling here, so I'm not pretending to bring any data to the discussion. My original post was "commonplace UX pattern A gives me this feeling B".
Modern UI trends which seem to prioritise the wishes of the product designer over good UX. And I feel that _that_ is driven by metrics that don't have my best interests at heart.
> "no/yes" demands a conscious choice whereas "not now" doesn't
These messages are often displayed in modal popups (e.g. the original post), or otherwise intrusive fashion (e.g. sign into BBC News website). So if you're asking this question you're _already_ forcing the user to read a message and make a choice. If the user isn't ready for a conscious choice, maybe you shouldn't be asking them to make any choice.
Going back a few years, a piece of software with options would put them in a preference panel. If the user wanted these features, they would intentionally seek out how to set them. They would be in control. And they would be both sufficiently contextualised and intent-driven to make that yes/no choice.
Maybe these days with rolling or frequent deployments it's a challenge to communicate new options. But I don't think that applies in many of the manifestations of 'not yet'.
Even semantically, "Not now" should function as "Dismiss forever" because you can always go to Settings and give the app that permission, not now but later.
"Not now" can be validly interpreted to mean "not in this context" or "not here". It's not necessarily temporal.
Just was adding "Not now" to a notification dialog in my app today simply because it feels softer. But it's a definite "no", the prompt won't appear again unless you enable notifications yourself later from the settings (hence the "now").
That behavior wouldn't be clear to me as a user unless it were spelled out like you just did. My expectation when I see "Not Now" is that there will be a "Sometime Later". I would recommend changing your language here.
They know. When a designer makes one of those prompts with only a "not now", they tend to mean a very specific thing, that is at the same time a subtle message to the user and a passive-aggressive stab at the company they work for.
What they mean: "the code path that handles what happens when you say 'no' here has been deprecated, because support for this feature was not part of the planning of a recent major-version rewrite of this app's core logic. When that rewrite is complete/passes through this part of the code, the option to say no will go away, because the code for that decision to call will be gone. So, in a literal sense, we think it's helpful to keep bugging you to switch, so that you can get used to the change in your own time before we're forced to spring it on you. But in a connotational sense, we also think it's helpful to keep bugging you to switch, as a way of protesting the dropping of this feature, because every time users see this kind of prompt, they make noise about it — and maybe this time that'll be enough to get management's attention and get the feature included in the rewrite. Make your angry comments now, before it's too late!"
I wonder how that works when they are asking to grant permission for an integration with a resource gated by OS or browser, e.g. in this case location data for the Reminders app, or showing browser notifications.
Is the deprecated path that they just don't work without enabling those settings?
And I'm sure every UX person is different. The ones who know it's a dark pattern must have some pretty strong cognitive dissonance with a company that historically sold itself as 'the good guys'.
But there's a whole generation that probably grew up with software that fundamentally doesn't respect you, and this is just normal.
1) My Bluetooth audio on my recent-model iPhone (15 Pro Max) is still flaky AF, across all Bluetooth speaker devices or my car. Even my 4 year old kid noticed and commented on it! It's been like this since the iOS beta, for months. And I can tell that it's one of those hideous, nondeterministic bugs, too. Apple, hire me as a contractor to help fix it, if you want! I love hard problems.
3) I had to buy Superwhisper (which is a nice product, but works a little janky due to how iOS handles keyboard extensions) because Siri's voice dictation is so abysmally worse than literally every other option right now, and has been for years. WTF, Apple?
Hey Tim, I love the Vision Pro too (I own one) but maybe get your head out of that for a bit and polish up the engineering on the rest of your lines!
I'm no fan of Apple's, but Bluetooth is one of the shittiest human inventions of all time, has always been bad and will likely always be bad. A million bandaids ain't gonna make a bone-healing cast.
I've never, and I mean never, had problems with Bluetooth audio in the car. I dispute the assertion that it's always been bad, because my experience has been uniformly positive.
But only until the one day you really need Bluetooth to work and it just doesn't. We many Bluetooth sufferers will happily accept you into our ranks when (not if) that day comes. :)
> I had to buy Superwhisper (which is a nice product
It's literally a paid wrapper around a completely free program you would also be using for free if Apple wasn't actively hostile to Open Source software distribution.
LOL. Whisper may be free (I use it in at least 1 project), but it doesn't come with a GUI, hooks into mic audio and keyboard trigger, and other things necessary for something to work well on macOS.
I am willing to pay for things that work well (and don't forget support afterwards) because I know from experience that simply having an "open-source core" just gets you halfway there, if that; the last 5% of polish to a finished, reliable, supportable product is at least 50% more work.
And, to put it bluntly, since we don't live in a communist society, eventually SOMEone has to put food on the table from their efforts. I'm 100% fine with paying for that.
Lastly, I have a kid, which means that I have 0% time to spend on troubleshooting non-working open-source stuff (which I actually enjoyed doing before the kid); I am ALL about reliability now, which is why I paid for Eero home mesh networking (despite cheaper or free options), a NAS from iXSystems (despite me being quite capable of installing TrueNAS on my own hardware), pay for Apple products (despite loving my NixOS Framework laptop as well), and don't upgrade my 10 year old Tesla (because it still runs like a top, and that's my highest priority right now- reliability)
Once you get a kid, trust me, your views are gonna change, because you clearly do NOT have one.
This is what happens to your tinkering-around-with-open-source time after it:
tinker time before kid: [--------------------]
tinker time after kid: [-]
Now if you're lucky, you will end up in a position where you get paid to tinker around, and where they won't get upset if you use some work time to work on "aligned" tech.
You're the same guy who's wondering why software quality is so low on iOS?
You refuse to vote with your dollar. You buy Apple's failed products like Vision Pro, and reinforce their insular self-destructive business model. You tacitly defend their right to commercialize free software and victimize yourself when alternatives are identified. There is zero feedback loop between you and Apple, just a wallet that keeps vomiting cash. The only outlet of communication that you can use to tell them to focus on the Mac or iPhone (eg. buying more Macs and iPhones) is being eschewed to support "the ecosystem" and replacement apps.
Therefore, you reserve no right to tell Tim Cook to stop focusing on the Vision Pro. You own one. You are one of the (sole) customers begging Tim to divert his attention away from the Mac, so he can focus on his visionary iPhone replacement. You wanted it bad enough to spend $3,500 that could have gone towards a college fund, three iPhones, six Macs, or an entire 16th birthday "come to the garage" surprise.
"WTF Apple" my ass, either take your lumps or buy a new product. We only hear this sort of moral floundering when monopolies form and people have to make themselves look helpless rather than an accomplice. Clearly Apple has no incentive to compete, but you also lack the balls to indict them despite rearing an entire family. Instead of commiserating with your faux helplessness, I will tell you to participate in a market economy to enforce the product of free market competition. You cannot make demands from a position of captivity.
Changing buttons or live results are annoying, indeed.
Something I find worse: being unable to click a target while the animation is running!
Because the target only gets focus after the animation is done: you start spending you time waiting for the animations in the end.
I like my just-works stuff, so I was happy to pay a premium for it. Too bad wireless CarPlay is now buggy like a 1.0 release after years of almost no issues [1].
There's little problems that keep accumulating, like the camera app opening up and only showing black until restarting it, at which point I've missed the candid opportunity.
I'm not going anywhere, it's still the right mix of just-works across their ecosystem for me, but dang, the focus does feel different, and it's not about our experience using Apple.
I'd have so many of these weird issues on Android (pixel), is why I switched to iPhone a few years back, it's been a much smoother ride ever since.
iPhone isn't perfect, but it's way more "just works" then android was for me.
Also, I have the iPhone 15 Pro (iOS 26.0.1), never had the black screen on camera open yet. That's the kinda thing I'd get on Android.
What happened is the same thing that tends to happen to almost all successful organisation. The uber exceptional people who initially built it, defined the culture, and enforced it with an iron fist are gone. Now a bunch of people are in charge who trained under the first generation, but who themselves just don't quite have that kind of singular personality. So things start slipping over time.
This is why gatekeeping is important and shouldn't be labeled as toxic. There's been a shift where everyone wants to welcome everyone, but the problem is it erodes your company culture and lowers the average quality.
I've lately become a pretty big proponent of gatekeeping. On Reddit I saw a comment that security flaws are simply unavoidable, that they're inevitable because as a web developer they must have 1000 dependencies and cannot verify the security of them all, and that if something goes wrong, there's no way it would be fair to hold them accountable for it. When that kind of mindset has taken root, and it has deeply taken root in the entire Javascript ecosystem, it becomes a real-world security issue that affects millions of people detrimentally. Maybe software development doesn't actually need to be accessible to people who can't write their own IsOdd function.
Another example is that a hobby I loved is now dead to me for lack of gatekeeping; Magic the Gathering. Wizards of the Coast started putting out products that were not for their core playerbase, and when players complained, were told "these products are not for you; but you should accept that because there's no harm in making products for different groups of people". That seems fair enough on its face. Fast forward a couple of years, and Magic's core playerbase has been completely discarded. Now Magic simply whores itself out to third party IPs; this year we'll get or have gotten Final Fantasy, Spiderman, Spongebob Squarepants, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles card sets. They've found it more lucrative in the short-term to tap into the millions of fans of other media franchises while ditching the fanbase that had played Magic for 30 years. "This product is not for you" very rapidly became "this game is not for you", which is pretty unpleasant for people who've been playing it for most or all of their lives.
I played MTG on and off for decades, and the Final Fantasy pre-release was one of the best experiences I’ve had in the community. I met several people who had played MTG and stopped but went back for that set because they loved FF. Plus, it fits. For fans of both franchises, seeing how they ported mechanics was itself part of the fun. Sure, maybe a Spongebob set is weird, but FF felt like a labor of love in many areas.
Also, it became the best selling set of all time even before it was out. Which isn’t an indicator of quality, for sure, but it does show Wizards understands something about their market.
If it were simply that, it would have been fine, sure. I didn't especially hate the LOTR crossover either. There was absolutely room for Magic to have, say, one crossover set a year with a fitting fantasy franchise. I'm not saying a crossover is inherently poison that instantly kills a game. What many established players do hate, and what made me understand the game is not for me anymore, is that they broke their promise for these cards to be segregated from regular play, that they started printing more advertisement crossovers than real cards, that these crossovers became less and less appropriate to a fantasy game setting to the point that said setting is completely gone now, and that they started bastardizing even the regular sets (Edge of Eternities is technically not a crossover, but it does not feel like a real Magic set either and clearly only exists to lay down a gameplay framework for the upcoming Star Trek set).
I'm not sure Wizards does understand their market. As you noted, a set doing numbers pre-release has absolutely nothing to do with its quality; it just means there are a lot of Final Fantasy fans interested in collecting cards. But this is not necessarily sustainable for another 30 years, because those Final Fantasy fans are not necessarily going to stick around for Spiderman, and Spiderman fans are not necessarily going to stick around for Spongebob. The Spiderman set was already such a massive flop that they were trying to identify and blame which content creators/streamers were responsible for negatively influencing public opinion, as though that couldn't have happened organically.
WotC is also just about the most incompetent company in the world when it comes to maintaining customer goodwill lately. D&D 5e still, 10 years on, has no real mechanical depth to character building. There's all the identity politics stuff which is needlessly divisive (such as trying to remove "races" and racial bonuses from new D&D rules because it's not PC). They tried to pull that stunt with the OGL where they tried to alter the deal after the fact because the terms weren't to some bean counter's liking. They sent the fucking Pinkertons to raid a guy's house because he got his hands on a prerelease MTG thing through no shenanigans of his own.
At this point, I'm done with WotC. The Pinkerton thing was by far the worst and what made me turn my back forever. Bad rulesets or design designs with which I disagree are one thing, but I refuse to do business with a company that thinks it's acceptable to use force to try to bully people into sticking to their release schedules. They can pound sand forever.
I'm personally failing to see how "welcoming everyone" directly correlates to a company neglecting polish and detail. A cynical read of your comment is that DEI-style programs are lowering standards when, in actuality, the issue most likely lies in poor management and a corporate structure that rewards buzzy work over polished work. I'm not saying that was your implication, by the way; just that "everything's bad because we allowed other people to join" is a slippery slope.
To further your point. In our bodies we have organs which are made up of specific kinds of cells. In some cases diversity of cells seems to come with health benefits (e.g. our guts), but in most cases cause significant health issues. (If you have a bunch of liver cells in your lungs it's probably going to be a problem). Also across the whole body there is an incredible diversity of cells, and they cooperate with mind boggling harmony.
My take away is that diversity at a global level, and in some specific contexts, is a great thing. But diversity in some other specific contexts is entirely destructive and analogous to rot or decomposition.
When we rely on a core societal function (firefighting, accounting, waterworks maintenance, property rights, etc.) the people responsible for maintaining these functions need to maintain in themselves a set of core characteristics (values as patterns of action), and there is room to play outside of those cores, but those cores shouldn't be jeopardized as a tradeoff for diversity and inclusion.
For example, if constructive core values of a railroad system is consistency and reliability, then these shouldnt be diminished in the name of diversity and inclusion, but if diversity and inclusion can be achieved secondarily without a tradeoff (or even to somehow further amplify the core values) then it is constructive. One has to thoughtfully weigh the tradeoffs in each context, and ensure that the most important values in that context to maintain the relevant function are treated as most important. The universe seems to favor pragmatism over ideology, at least in the long run.
So in a company if the core values that make it successful are diluted in exchange for diversity, it's no longer what it was, and it might not be able to do keep doing what it did. That said, it also might have gained something else. One thing diversity tends to offer huge complex systems is stability, especially when its incorporated into other values and not held up singularily.
In other words, my take on diversity (and by extension, inclusion) is that we need a diversity of diversity. Sometimes a lot of diversity is best, and sometimes very little diversity is best.
Your logic could be sound if the lowest rung of the skill ladder was simply inevitable for everyone who is currently there. But that is wrong and, really, makes no sense. Many people are just young and need to be trained. Others were taught bad practices and need to be re-trained. Still others have their priorities wrong, but could do good work if they were given a reason to care about the right things. It also takes time for people to grow and to change and to learn from their mistakes.
If you take a hardline attitude on keeping the gates up, you're just going to end up with a monoculture that stagnates.
Obviously you should set standards for your company. I’m not saying just hire anyone and be done with it. But I am saying that hiring is a long-term project. And I am saying that many people could meet your standards if you meet them half-way by giving them all of the information they need, holding their hand a bit at the beginning, and giving them time to figure everything out.
I’ve worked at places that have the opposite philosophy - hire quickly and fire quickly. That works in terms of hiring people who already happen to be what you want them to be. It just leaves no room for anyone who could be, but isn’t yet, what you want them to be. It also leaves no room for anyone who is different from what you are looking for but who could still bring a lot to the table if you just take the time to figure out what that is, which I think describes a lot of people. You might have hired a mediocre programmer who would be a rockstar at documentation, for example. That kind of thing happens all the time, yet workplace culture and practices tend not to accommodate that. By all means have standards, but put in some effort to help your people reach them in their own way.
Monocultures can avoid stagnating if they occasionally accept fresh blood from the outside. But hardline stances don’t allow for that. My point is, even if you only want to work with the best of the best, and you’re willing to ignore underprivileged groups with tons of potential, you still need an on-ramp if you want it to be sustainable.
The great engineers don’t graduate from college knowing everything they need to know, nor are they born with that knowledge. It takes time and help from other people to get them there. Even if they were already a top performing engineer at Netflix, that doesn’t mean they can smoothly transition into a role at your company and perform well with zero assistance. The on-ramp matters and has a huge impact on how they will perform. Some people will require more investment than others, but that’s true regardless of whether you stubbornly try to maintain your existing monoculture. And I firmly believe that everyone brings something different to the table. It’s mostly a matter of figuring out what that is for each person.
Hard agree. Gatekeeping is a good thing. It is how you ensure that people who join a group are actually a good fit for the group. For example, if someone wants to join a D&D group but doesn't like that the game is a dungeon crawl where you just go kick monster ass without a pretense of story, nobody will be served by the group deciding to try to adjust to welcome the new person despite that bad fit. Not only the existing group, but the prospective new member, will be better off if they each go their separate ways and play the type of game each enjoys.
It's good to not exclude people for arbitrary reasons (though even this requires the caveat that one man's "arbitrary" is another man's "important part of our identity"). But we also need to recognize that it's ok for something to not be everyone's cup of tea. There isn't some kind of moral mandate that everything must be maximally welcoming to all. Unfortunately, we don't recognize that in our current culture, and in fact we stigmatize it as "gatekeeping" which is deemed to be toxic. But the culture is wrong about this.
>This is why gatekeeping is important and shouldn't be labeled as toxic.
I do not for the life of me understand your point. Gatekeeping, as its most commonly used, means controlling access to something (be it a resource, information etc) to deliberately and negatively affect others that are not part of a "blessed" group. Its not objective, and certainly is not a practice reliant on merit. Its an artificial constraint applied selectively at the whim of the gatekeeper(s).
>There's been a shift where everyone wants to welcome everyone, but the problem is it erodes your company culture and lowers the average quality.
The first assertion and the second one are not related. Being welcoming to everyone is not the same thing as holding people to different standards. Company culture sets company inertia and how employees are incentivized to behave and what they care about. You can have the most brilliant engineers in the world, like Google most certainly does have its fair share, and as we have seen, with the wrong incentives it doesn't matter. Look at Google's chat offerings, the Google Graveyard, many of their policies becoming hostile to users as time goes on etc.
Yet you can have a company with what you may deem "average quality" but exceeds in its business goals because its oriented its culture to do so. I don't think Mailchimp was ever lauded for its engineering talent like Google has been, for example, but they dominated their marketplace and built a really successful company culture, at least before the Intuit acquisition.
I was in a (tech) meetup last week. We meet regularly, we are somewhere between acquaintances and friends. One thing that came up was a very candid comment about how "we should be able to tell someone 'that is just stupid' whenever the situation warrants it".
I believe that does more good than harm, even to the person it is being directed to. It is a nice covenant to have, "we'll call you on your bs whenever you bring it in", that's what a good friend would do. Embracing high standards in a community makes everyone in it better.
The Linux kernel would be absolutely trash if Linus were not allowed to be Linus. Some contexts do and must require a high level of expertise before you can collaborate properly in them.
If you are a highly accomplished, highly respected individual (like Linus Torvalds) telling someone 'that is just stupid' can be effective, because most people will instinctively trust that you have a good reason to say this and are probably correct.
But that's a special case, not a usual one. Unfortunately, quite a lot of people say things are stupid when they don't understand them (often because of an inflated sense of their own expertise). If they can politely explain why they think an idea is bad, they are more likely to be listened to, and they can save face if the other person successfully counters their argument.
Bottom line is, if you go around calling ideas stupid you better make damn sure you're never wrong, otherwise, well... that's just stupid :)
One thing is Linus held out against the C++ crap all the way until Rust became a viable alternative.
I wish he'd bless a certain Linux distro for PCs so we can have some default. Current default is kinda Ubuntu, but they've made some weird decisions in the past. Seems like he'd make reasonable choices and not freak out over pointless differences like systemd.
>One thing that came up was a very candid comment about how "we should be able to tell someone 'that is just stupid'
You can tell someone their idea is substandard without inferring their stupid, which is generally taken to be an insult. Tact in communication does matter. I don't think anyone needs to say "that is just stupid" to get a point across.
I've had plenty of tough conversations with colleagues where it was paramount to filter through ideas, and determining viable ones was really important. Not once did anyone have to punch at someone's intelligence to make the point. Even the simple "Thats a bad idea" is better than that.
>whenever the situation warrants it
Which will of course be up to interpretation by just about everyone. Thats the problem with so called "honest"[0] conversation. By using better language you can avoid this problem entirely without demeaning someone. Communication is a skill that be learned.
>The Linux kernel would be absolutely trash if Linus were not allowed to be Linus. Some contexts do and must require a high level of expertise before you can collaborate properly in them.
Linus took a sabbatical in 2018 to work on his communication and lack of emotional empathy. He's had to make changes or he absolutely risked losing the respect of his peers and others he respected. He has worked on improving his communication.
To follow Linus as an example, would be to work on communication and emotional empathy. Not disregard your peers.
[0]: Most often, I find people who are adamant about this line of thinking tend to want an excuse to be rude without accountability.
Sometimes, people do need a metaphorical kick in the butt though. Of course, that doesn't mean behaving like a jerk, and certainly not on a regular basis, but if you value politeness and conflict avoidance over avoiding actual problems, the culture in your environment will quickly deteroriate towards no one taking responsibility for anything. Why would anyone do that if they can't even be called out for messing something up, yet alone being held accountable?
In all of those projects and organsiations which value respectful language and inclusivity and all sorts of non-results-oriented crap, not much usually gets done. This is how you get design-by-committee lowest common denominator slop.
And even if you don't agree with what I'm saying here, "avoid criticising people" quickly turns into "avoid criticising their ideas because they might feel offended". There was a recent HN thread about AI-written pull requests and how people have problems with them, because tactfully rejecting 10k lines of pure bullshit is very hard without making the submitter upset. Guess what, if they were allowed to say "no, you aren't going to be merging slop you can't even explain" the average code quality would skyrocket and the product would be greatly improved.
>politeness and conflict avoidance over avoiding actual problems
Those two things are not coupled. You can maintain a sense of politeness in face of conflict. This is the entire basis of Nonviolent Communication, a great book about handling and resolving conflict in such a manner.
It’s extremely effective in my experience and results in overall better clarity and less conversational churn.
>Why would anyone do that if they can't even be called out for messing something up, yet alone being held accountable
You can be, that is in part a definition of accountability and you’re conflating a lack of accountability with some idea that it requires behaving in a manner that may be construed as rude, and that’s simply not true.
So like anything, you hold them accountable. You can do that without being rude.
>In all of those projects and organsiations which value respectful language and inclusivity and all sorts of non-results-oriented crap
I’m getting a sense you have a predisposition to disliking these things. They’re really important because they are, when correctly understood, results oriented. It frees up people to feel comfortable saying things they may not have been otherwise. That is very productive.
Abusive and abrasion language does not do that.
>This is how you get design-by-committee lowest common denominator slop
No, in my experience and many reports from others you get this for a myriad of reasons, but consistent theme is lack of ownership or organizational politics, not because people level up their communication skills
>avoid criticising their ideas because they might feel offended". There was a recent HN thread about AI-written pull requests and how people have problems with them, because tactfully rejecting 10k lines of pure bullshit is very hard without making the submitter upset. Guess what, if they were allowed to say "no, you aren't going to be merging slop you can't even explain" the average code quality would skyrocket
I don’t disagree with you because I don’t believe in proper criticism, I do. I disagree with you because the implicit messaging I’m getting here is the following
- you sometimes have to be a jerk
- therefore it’s okay to be a jerk sometimes
- somehow having an expectation of treating others with respect somehow equates to poor accountability
I’ve spent a good chunk of my years learning a lot about effective communication and none of it is about avoiding accountability, of yourself or others. It’s about respecting each other and creating an environment where you can talk about tough things and people are willing to do it again because they were treated respectfully
>you’re conflating a lack of accountability with some idea that it requires behaving in a manner that may be construed as rude, and that’s simply not true.
Yes, I'm conflating that. Maybe the two aren't intrinstically coupled, but from what I have seen, that seems to happen. When you forbid surface-level aggression, people don't stop being aggressive or frustrated. They just turn to more underhanded ways of aggression, like bullying or gaslighting.
>I’m getting a sense you have a predisposition to disliking these things. They’re really important because they are, when correctly understood, results oriented. It frees up people to feel comfortable saying things they may not have been otherwise. That is very productive.
I see what you're saying, but I do not think this plays out in practice like that. It's not results-oriented thinking when you prioritise how the other person feels above all. Not to say you should never prioritise it (that's called sociopathy), but if you prioritise it too much, you can say less things, not more, because disagreeing with someone always carries the risk of offence, especially if you are going to say that their idea isn't the best. If you nurture a culture of honesty - and that does not include being abusive - then people will feel free to push back on bad ideas, and that is results-oriented thinking.
>I disagree with you because the implicit messaging I’m getting here is the following
The first two points absolutely, but I would like to push back on the third point. Not every idea deserves respect and hell, not everyone deserves respect either! It is the hollowing out of what the word originally meant. Ideally, you only respect people who deserve respect, who return it to you in turn. To be respected is a honour, not a right, because it carries implicit trust in your words. If you consistently have a negative impact on the environment, I do not think it is a reasonable expectation to continue to treat you with respect, because that wastes everyone's time.
If something needs to be said then it must be said, but you have a higher likelihood of the other person receiving the message if you drop the aggressive tone. You're also investing in them listening to you in the future, as opposed to avoiding you because you have a tendency to shame them for being wrong on something.
And if someone "consistently has a negative impact on the environment" you can still confront them without being abrasive. They can still be fired without calling them stupid. Adding that kind of tone adds no information except that you lost your cool. You're making it sound like every instance that warrants confrontation is about an intentional and repeated offence.
I've been in social circles where one can just say "that is just stupid" without that being a big deal, as well as others where people tend to write essays like yours to get a simple argument across.
I prefer the former by a lot, but of course you're free to spend your time in the latter.
> You can tell someone their idea is substandard without inferring their stupid, which is generally taken to be an insult. Tact in communication does matter. I don't think anyone needs to say "that is just stupid" to get a point across.
What's wrong with calling an idea stupid? A smart person can have stupid ideas. (Or, more trivially, the person delivering a stupid idea might just be a messenger, rather than the person who originally thought of the idea.)
Though, to be clear, saying that an idea is stupid does carry the implication that someone who often thinks of such ideas is, themselves, likely to be stupid. An idea is not itself a mind that can have (a lack of) intelligence; so "that's stupid" does stand for a longer thought — something like "that is the sort of idea that only a stupid person would think of."
But saying that an idea is stupid does not carry the implication that someone is stupid just for providing that one idea. Any more than calling something you do "rude" when you fail to observe some kind of common etiquette of the society you grew up in, implies that you are yourself a "rude person". One is a one-time judgement of an action; the other is a judgement of a persistent trait. The action-judgements can add up as inductive evidence of the persistent trait; but a single action-judgement does not a trait-judgement make.
---
A philosophical tangent:
But what both of those things do — calling an idea stupid, or an action rude — is to attach a certain amount of social approbation or shame to the action/idea, beyond just the amount you'd feel when you hear all the objective reasons the action/idea is bad. Where the intended response to that "communication of shame" is for the shame to be internalized, and to backpropagate and downweight whatever thinking process produced the action/idea within the person. It's intended as a lever for social operant conditioning.
Now, that being said, some people externalize blame — i.e. they experience "shaming messaging" not by feeling shame, but by feeling enraged that someone would attempt to shame them. The social-operant-conditioning lever of shame does not work on these people. Insofar as such people exist in a group, this destabilizes the usefulness of shame as a tool in such a group.
(A personal hypothesis I have is that internalization of blame is something that largely correlates with a belief in an objective morality — and especially, an objective morality that can potentially be better-known/understood by others than oneself. And therefore, as Western society has become decreasingly religious, shame as a social tool has "burned out" in how reliably it can be employed in Western society in arbitrary social contexts. Yet Western society has not adapted fully to this shift yet; which is why so many institutions that expect shame to "work" as a tool — e.g. the democratic system, re: motivating people to vote; or e.g. the school system, re: bullying — are crashing and burning.)
In addition to what you and the person you replied to already said, simply calling something stupid conveys very little information. "Stupid" provides no context, no rationale, and no direction towards improvement. If your goal is simply to push someone away, stop them from communicating entirely, or shame them, then yeah, dismissing a person's contributions as stupid is the tool for the job. But if you want better contributions and are trying to improve a project, you have to put in more effort than that.
> "we should be able to tell someone 'that is just stupid' whenever the situation warrants it".
The likeliest outcome from that is the other person gets defensive and everything stays the same or gets worse. It’s not difficult to learn to be tactful in communication in a way which allows you to get your point across in the same number of words and makes the other person thankful for the correction.
Plus, it saves face. It’s not that rare for someone who blatantly say something is stupid to then be proven wrong. If you’re polite and reasonable about it, when you are wrong it won’t be a big deal.
One thing I noticed about people who pride themselves in being “brutally honest” is that more often than not they get more satisfaction from being brutal than from being honest, and are incredibly thin-skinned when the “honest brutality” is directed at them.
> The Linux kernel would be absolutely trash if Linus were not allowed to be Linus.
I don’t understand why people keep using Torvalds as an example/excuse to be rude. Linus realised he had been a jerk all those years and that that was the wrong attitude. He apologised and vowed to do better, and the sky hasn’t fallen nor has Linux turned to garbage.
So the problem is actually diversity and not grotesque shareholder and marketing driven development?
Im sceptical. I've never seen what you describe outside of toxic "culture war clickbait videos", what i have seen is nepotism, class privileges and sprint culture pushed by investors - you know the exact opposite of what you describe.
Idk how to fix this, but the problem with interviews by rank and file employees is they have to prioritize standardization and objectivity over finding brilliant applicants. It only makes sure the applicant knows how to code rather than lying on his/her resume. I think Jobs said something like, B players will hire B and C players.
When I interviewed at a smaller company, someone high up interviewed me last. I passed everything on paper afaik, but he didn't think I was the right person for some reason. Which is fine for a small company.
I don't know, Linus Torvalds was kind of notorious before 2010 for gatekeeping in not-so-constructive ways.
I'm pretty sure this would also render the dot-com bubble the nerds fault?
Let's not go back to how nerd culture used to be regarding diversity... or lack thereof.
I remember when Bill Gates was on magazine covers, viewed as a genius, a wonderful philanthropist, even spoofed in Animaniacs as "Bill Greats."
I guess my point is, "It used to be hard and a liability to be a nerd" was never true, and is nothing but industry cope. The good old days were just smaller, more homogenous, had more mutually-shared good old toxicity and misogyny (to levels that would probably get permabans here within minutes; there's been a lot of collective memory-holing on that), combined with greater idolization of tech billionaires.
Successful publicly traded companies have a responsibility to generate more revenue and increase the stock price every year. Year after year.
Once their product is mature after so many years, there aren't new variations to release or new markets to enter into.
Sales stagnate and costs stagnate; investors get upset.
Only way to get that continual growth is to increase prices and slash costs.
When done responsibly, it's just good business.
The problem comes in next year when you have to do it again. And again.
Then the year after you have to do it again. And again.
Such as all things in life, all companies eventually die.
+1 - think it’s a variant of Gervais principle with effects at a different scale. I guess you are always at the interplay of organizational culture and specific individuals with peak performance reached when both are peaking.
I upgraded to iOS 26 when the beta first came out. It’s remarkable how they have just kept changing the transparency of things back and forth, while the critical bugs have remained untouched.
There’s no way I’m (ever) upgrading to Tahoe, I’m just going to hold out as long as possible and hope Omarchy gets as stable and feature rich as possible in the time being.
No idea what to do about the mobile situation - I can’t see myself realistically ever using android. Switching off of iCloud and Apple Music would also be pretty tough, although I’ve seen some private clouds lately that were compelling.
I just wish there was a more Linux-minded less-Google oriented mobile operating system
fwiw - I always just run prior year's iOS on mobile until Sept each year at which I update the one with a year of fixes - so I'm always running the most stable iOS but it indeed has fewer features but stability is more important than new features to me...
Yes. It’s also built on arch which will always be rolling release, so it’s not the end all for stability. I doubt omarchy is doing any real fixes for stability beyond config files.
26 series operating systems are all just dumpster fires that are lit up for attention.
Since there are a lot of die hard Apple fans and engineers on hacker news this is going to get downvoted to hell, but I’m going to say it again.
It looks like Apple doesn’t care about user experience anymore, and the 26 series updates all look like they’ve been developed by amateurs online, not tested at all, and Apple engineers just took long vacations while they’re on the clock. It’s a complete and utter disaster of an operating system.
Got a ton of pushback for talking about how buggy the OS has been. "it doesn't happen to me" all right bully for you now I have to helplessly send a bug report and live with a machine that just crashes and restarts if I dare to open the lid seconds after I closed it
It's kinda funny reading about attention to detail on a website with CSS set to:
font-weight:300
This means that author never considered checking how it looks on any other non-Apple OS. Meanwhile Apple has a setting, which is enabled by default, to artificially make a pseudo-bold font out of normal font:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553486
I think it's a little more complicated than that. He wasn't at Apple from mid-1985 through the end of 1996, yet Apple's culture was still profoundly influenced by him in many ways. Many influential people who were hired pre-1985 were present at Apple during the Sculley, Spindler, and Amelio years. Even in the mid-1990s when Apple was spiraling down the drain, the Mac was still focused on usability and consistency.
However, it seems that under Tim Cook, Apple has gradually lost many of its traditional values when it comes to usability and UI/UX perfectionism. I suspect that the company has not passed on "The Apple Way" to people who joined the company after Steve Jobs' passing. Not only that, there doesn't seem to be an "Apple Way" anymore.
Come to think of it, the old Apple had figures like Bruce Tognazzini who wrote about "The Apple Way"; I have a copy of Tog on Interface that distills many of the UI/UX principles of the classic Mac. I can't think of any figures like Tog in the modern era.
Gradually the Apple software ecosystem is losing its distinctiveness in a world filled with janky software. It's still better than Windows to me, but I'd be happier with Snow Leopard with a modern Web browser and security updates.
It's sad; the classic Mac and Jobs-era Mac OS X were wonderful platforms with rich ecosystems of software that conformed to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines of those eras. I wish a new company or a community open-source project would pick up from where Apple left off when Jobs passed away.
It's surprising how many C* level people don't use the software their company creates. I don't doubt that Cook uses an iPhone, but does he actually _use_ it, as in go off the happy path? And what about macOS? Based on past emails and stuff, Jobs was a decent "power user" of osx and a lot of bugs were fixed because he noticed it.
More disturbing is the author doesn't mention it at all. The legendary CEO is never mentioned, but somehow big conclusions are still drawn? Go ahead and skip this article.
90% of the times when I pay with Apple Pay, and want to switch the credit card I do too many unnecessary taps.
First, I quickly tap on the first button that has the picture of the credit card and its name. As a result I find myself in a menu that shows me the billing address (go figure)! So, I have to click back, and use the button below that simply states “Change the credit card” or something to that effect.
Why, for the love of god, for the info about the billing address Apple uses picture of CC? Why the billing address is even the first option!?
So, multiple clicks when it can be avoided by a proper design (I think in the past the picture button was the one that changed credit cards, but I don’t know if I am misremembering).
Are you me? I always go back and get it on a next try, and maybe also like tried to bail when I saw it was the wrong card after double side buttoning, which maybe means I need to reset the state of the payment screen, but then need to wait, double click again, change it the right way, wait for the glorious beep…
I believe it was always more myth than fact. There's always been rough edges in Apple products line. If anything its more an indication of where the real focus is now. And it's not iOS.
Despite Apple's walled garden, its anti-consumer practices of trying to keep you in the ecosystem, and other behaviors (like the green/blue bubbles fiasco) that are absolutely reprehensible and inexcusable, I still used iPhones because it seemed far superior to the other offerings on the market. Fortunately, Apple is doing its best to make me see the light.
I don't use a Mac anymore, but I do use an iPhone. This is the worst version of iOS I can recall. Everything is low contrast and more difficult to see. The colors look washed out. The icons look blurry. In my opinion, Liquid Glass is a total bust. I don't know what these people are thinking. Times have certainly changed.
Steve Wozniak left Apple in 1985 because he felt the company was no longer an engineering-led one and missed the fun of creating things rather than dealing with management.
That was 40 years ago. Jobs cared immensely, but the snowball has been rolling for a long while. Decisions used to be made by people that actually cared, but now they're made mostly by poseurs.
I'm so glad the chorus seems to be getting louder over just how bad things have gotten with Apple's software stack. This piece has been mainly centered on UI/UX but it's also really bad when it comes to functionality as so many bugs have seem to come up in both iOS and macOS. I will never understand how a company that has so much riding on the way their products are perceived by their users has fumbled the ball so badly--especially with how much money they have in the bank.
Attention to detail is at odds with the pursuit of infinite, quarterly growth. Why take time to get it right when you can get something out the door for your next review? The quality of which doesn't matter because it's in the past, a quarter that's already closed.
I personally think Apple is a victim of being a publicly listed company. Once you're publicly listed, the only thing shareholders want (and the only thing the CEO is measured on) is, ultimately, the share price.
Don't get me wrong, I also enjoy and benefit from returns from the sharemarket. But I think there are downsides to it, and you can clearly see it here, with Apple. A company that was an underdog, and didn't really need to worry too much about the share price because anything they did at that time was attracting customers at a smaller scale, but it was still growth. Now at the size that they are, they have to lose their soul to keep the growth happening.
It's sad, but it's also the reality. Netflix for example - once tweeting "Love is sharing a password" now resorting to stopping this.
On multiple devices when doing system update on ios 26, pin entry displays full keyboard instead of standard pin input. It's been like that for like 5 versions (of iOS 26) already.
It's fascinating to me because that's the single thing which every user goes through. It's the main branch and not some obscure some edge case. How do you do testing that you miss that?
You can also use an alphanumeric passcode, in which case you need the full keyboard. Maybe they just unified this, so that it always displays the keyboard instead of switching between keyboard and PIN input?
Steve Jobs is gone, so is the unique quality obsessed Apple we knew. Even on the hardware side, the AirPods reecks of poor quality since they break so easily
Nice touch having U2's song "Every Breaking Wave" playing in one of the screen grabs ... that being the second track on the (in)famous "free" 2014 iTunes release of their album "Songs of Innocence".
About $1B (billion) in stock incentives for top-level execs in 2025 (Tim alone is $76m I believe). Apple stock is up. They are happy imho. Very, very few humans would care about "detail" vs. this outcome. Satya is close to $100M I believe, and we are shocked the M$FT is trading-in on ads/telemtry in Win11. These guys are just human.
Honestly the M$FT thing might be the greatest thing to happen to the Linux community, so much fresh blood and hopefully far more curious tinkers will continue to make the ecosystem better.
I believe 2026 will finally be the year of Linux desktop.
> I believe 2026 will finally be the year of Linux desktop.
I’ve been hearing this substituting in YYYY+1 every YYYY for the last quarter century.
The year of Linux desktop will never come. Why?
- Money. Hardware manufacturers make more money selling computers that are optimized for Windows and there is nothing on the horizon that will change that meaning that the Linux desktop experience is always the worst of the three main options for hardware compatibility.
- Microsoft. Call me when Office runs natively in Linux. You might be happy with LibreOffice or Google Docs, but MS Office still dominates the space (and as someone who does a lot of writing and has a number of options, I find Word to be better than any of the alternatives, something that 30 years ago I would have scoffed at).
- Fidgetiness. All the tweaking and customizing that Linux fans like is an annoyance for most people. Every customization I have on my computer is one more thing I need to keep track of if I get a new computer and frankly it’s more than a little bit of a pain.
> In my mind, "Apple" as a brand used to be synonymous with "attention to detail" but sadly, over the course of the last 8 - 10 years
You outgrew this myth, congratulations!
> Look, I've got nothing but respect for the perfectly lovely humans who work at Apple. Several are classmates from university, or people I had the pleasure of working with before at different companies. But I rather suspect what's happened here is that some project manager ... convince Tim
But haven't outgrown this one yet, well, maybe in another 8 years...
I just noticed a meaningless feature of iOS:
The cursor moves (since iOS 15?) in steps of one pixel.
Probably just to make it slick looking (fluent)…
- BUT that’s completely non-effective as it allows for the cursor to be positioned on top of a single letter in >10 different positions.
So when you’re editing you are having a much more difficult time placing the cursor just between the two letters you want.
I noticed it when using some app the had disabled this stupid feature and it was just so much more effective to do mybediting as the cursor jumped to the position BETWEEN the letters in stead of FLOATING ALL OVER.
It’s nice on slides when presenting a new fancy feature, but completely useless for s ‘professional’ (focused) user.
PS yes I recall those old Apple adds - saw them when they were brand new and Apple was a better details oriented company (I miss those days….)
Apples attention to detail has always been skin deep. I remember reading blog posts 20 years ago about how some apps followed Apples standards design and others didn’t follow their design standards at all.
In the 90s Apple was in worse shape. They couldn’t even compete with Windows 9x for stability. There were memes about how MacOS needed just as many reformats as Windows 98.
The problem isn’t Apples attention to detail, it’s that people hold Apple to a higher standard. But in reality they’re just as fallible as every other software company.
Normal Mac/PC user priorities: Web browsing, run my app instead of telling me the last update broke it, battery life, plug laptop into monitor/TV/projector, copy photos off my phone without deleting them, games maybe
Apple priorities: Emoji and emoji accessories, realistic glass physics, battery life, new kinds of ports, iCloud subscriptions, rearrange system preferences, iTunes delenda est
I'm just glad as a SWE the Mac still covers my workload
And those are some very low hanging fruit. If you look at the bigger picture, Apple does not know how to balance ease of use on the one hand and control over details by power users/geeks on the other hand. They simply do not let you configure things, because coming up with good UI for that is hard. But on macOS, power users probably make up a large share of their users. They should figure this out.
It's like they all vibe-coded all the new 26.XX OSs across devices.
I tend to ignore these kinds of things, but sometimes applications are unresponsive, lose focus, and iOS apps don't show the keyboard, etc. so I cannot take it anymore.
I wanted to open a file from the Files app on iPad, a PDF. It opened the Preview app, but it couldn't allow me to scroll through the file. I tried to close it, but, back button goes to the Preview app, not to the Files. Then closed the app, and from the Files, but again it kept opening this separate app, instead of the in-app PDF viewer, and I guess I have never seen a malfunctioning state or application flows in default iOS apps ever.
The new reminders app is a joke. It has weird things that randomly jump from date selection to time selection, and sometimes select random dates.
It's like, they did, `claude new-reminder-app.md --dangerously-skip-permissions`, and "is it working? working! release it!"
I know (hope) it's not the case, but, since the last few weeks, it feels it's like that.
I do not believe in this whitewashing of Apples history, throughout their history they always had problems, either with their hardware or their software.
The one thing that really changed is that every single company looked at Apple and saw something worth copying. Now there are dozens of phone makers, all seeking to emulate Apples success, putting effort into UI, polishing and design. This wasn't the case a decade ago. Just compare the circus bizarre design choice of Android Lollipop (either Stock or with manufacturer/user added layers on top) to iOS 7.
Now Apple is no longer particularly unique, in many regards. And I believe that they were absolutely aware of that and desired to continue being a defining force, instead of being "one of many". It's not that Apple has changed, it is that it hasn't and now desires to force through change.
Looks exceptionally bad, but OSX Lion and iOS 7 were worse releases. It's also been a long time since I've actually wanted an update, at this point more something that's semi forced.
On the bright side, Apple Silicon is amazing, and it seems like Apple decided in 2021 to make the MBP good again like it was in 2015.
Snow Leopard was peak OSX. Lion, Mountain Lion and everything since then has driven me away from OSX. I’m also stuck on an older iOS version 18). There may be certain fixes I would appretiate, but way more annoyances. I miss iOS 6 and that ecosystem …
<edit> spelling, since iOS 18 isnt as forgiving as iOS 6
Yeah I would totally use Snow Leopard if it ran on modern hardware and had all the new security updates. The new Mac OSes are ok too since I ignore the random new crap, but a lot of that is just new hardware being faster.
They have a boring CEO who was a fantastic COO. Apple needs a new Steve Jobs at the helm. As much as I like Tim he does not impress me. His demos aren't anywhere as iconic. He's the safe pick for CEO but he is not the future of Apple by any means. I hope they make a sound pick for a successor.
I feel like I am one of the only people that actually really likes iOS 26, iPad 26, and macOS 26.
I really haven't had many problems, and I actually like some of the features. Sure, the UI/UX is not perfect from the start, but there hasn't been anything I have been unable to accomplish because of the new OS. The liquid glass can even be nice with certain backgrounds too.
This is just my hypothesis, but I have noticed that a lot of the people that have been complaining about macOS have been using 3rd party applications for a in their workflow. If I am not mistaken, there were issues with many Electron apps in the beginning. On macOS, I mainly Apple's apps or I'm deep in the command line. So, perhaps I have been fortunate to avoid many of the UI/UX features that many have faced?
Apple still acts frivolously extreme about certain visual details on the interface. What feels different is that once we get away from the marketable still of an interface, the motivation just doesn't feel there to meet a higher quality vision, if there is one at all.
A lot of people will disagree that Apple had great attention to detail before because of the things they choose not to focus on. But I think what was counter arguable before is that they were meeting their own internal vision with a high expectation for quality, and that that vision covered every part of the experience. The counter argument doesn't feel as valid today.
Many complain about sw bugs as a sign of decline. I think it’s not correct — every software has bugs. Hell, even hardware and device may have bugs. Remember antennagate? I think poor interface design is a sign of poor product engineering. And this is a sign of decline.
Early Apples were pretty lousy from a quality standpoint (I was a certified warranty tech when the original iMac came out and it was HORRIBLE.. it was made in Mexico).
When they moved production to Foxconn, Quanta, and Pegatron then the quality went up...
Apple stuff is full of bugs now. The times of "it just works" are a very distant memory. The OS crashes more often then Windows 10 did, with the operating system becoming basically completely unresponsive. Apple also now has eternal bugs that have been around for years (like ios hot spot disabling quickly when tethering non-Apple devices). Together with a bunch of annoying decisions for how the OS works, which can not be configured, it feels a lot like windows -- eternally broken, fighting with the users, having to work around bugs.
Kind of bizarre that they are destroyed their reputation for software perfection.
Apple software has gone so bad in the last decade or so. UI problems abound - the lack of default buttons that fire when you hit enter makes me ill. THIS USED TO BE IN THE APPLE USER INTERFACE GUIDELINES. Does anybody remember that big binder that was ultra-important for Mac developers? Well if anyone still has a copy they probably have it on a bookshelf where it looks nice on Zoom.
And then there's the bugs. What software is more consistently buggy than Apple software?
Everything that went out the door used to have to live up to Steve Jobs' standards. I'd imagine those under him had a similar obsession, considering Scott Forestall talked about going over the iPhone UI with a jeweler's loupe.
These days it feels like various teams are responsible for their part and they are managing toward a delivery date. As long as they check the box that the feature is there... ship it. There is likely not anyone around to throw the product in a fish tank if it isn't up to par.
If I had to guess, having worked in Cupertino, there is just not enough cohesion across the software teams. Everyone is building in their own little bubbles, and when one team goes down a bad path, your team tries to be overly diplomatic, or can say it's not my problem and now we're stuck with this mess.
Sometimes you need the Jobs at the top of it all telling people it's not working well and they need to get their shit together.
Anyone who’s had the misfortune of trying to use the iPhone “Files” program to do anything at all, or seen all the little curser placement glitches in Notes or Safari (especially when resizing), or had to look up the arbitrary and ever changing path to a system setting, or started typing to be greeted by a loud popping from glitched out audio feedback, knows that legend was always just a myth.
These are all things which have been broken for years.
A lot of these "attention to detail" bugs are so hard to ignore once I see them. For example, on iOS 26, the Home Screen icons have those borders (I hate them but whatever). Those borders are however not there when you swipe up from bottom of screen to return to Home Screen. During the animation, the borders are not present at all on that specific app's icon. Only once animation completes, the border shows up suddenly.
"If you were a ‘product person’ at IBM or Xerox: so you make a better copier or better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market-share, the company’s not any more successful. So the people who make the company more successful are the sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the ‘product people’ get run out of the decision-making forums.
The companies forget how to make great products. The product sensibility and product genius that brought them to this monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts about wanting to help the costumers.”
I've always taken this to heart in looking at how organizations operate, and in broad strokes, not only is was Jobs right, keeping this in the back of my mind has always allowed me to evaluate organizational inertia very quickly.
That said, I wonder, Jobs lived through Apple's transformation, but not its peak phase where Apple was simply printing money year after year after year. I do wonder if Jobs in 2016 would have been able to keep the organization performing at such a high caliber.
Even he seemed like he was making unforced errors at times too, like the "you're holding it wrong" fiasco, but its hard to say since he didn't live through Apple 2013-2019 where it became an ever increasing money printing machine.
In the age of AI, COVID-19 etc. I wonder how jobs post 2020 would treat things.
> In my mind, "Apple" as a brand used to be synonymous with "attention to detail" but sadly, over the course of the last 8 - 10 years, their choices have become anything but detail oriented.
In my mind it is synonymous with style over substance. Bad software packaged in a user hostile interface, sitting atop shitty hardware that looks sleek and fashionable.
It doesn't matter anyway. It's fashionable enough that it will keep selling.
I'm surprised the author didn't mention my personal biggest frustration I've had since I made the mistake of upgrading.
Everything seems to be lazily done now - by that I mean, a modal pops-up and then it resizes to fit the content. Never seen this before.
Or, you open settings (settings!) and it's not ready to use until a full second later because things need to pop in and shift.
And it's animated- with animation time, so you just have to wait for the transitions to finish.
And "reduce motion" removes visual feedback of moving things (e.g. closing apps) so I find it entirely unusable.
And as others have noted the performance is completely unacceptable. I have a 16 pro and things are slow... And forget "low battery mode" - it's now awful.
I'm not doing anything weird and keep like all apps closed and things off when I don't use them and battery life is significantly worse. (Noticed the same on M4 + Tahoe, upgraded at the same time)
Very disappointed and I very much regret upgrading.
For me it's the notch... I'm still on a 2nd gen se (no notch) but I hate the notch on my laptop.
I think we're stuck with the notch forever on iPhones. Even if apple uses an on-screen fingerprint reader in the future like a billion phones already do they're not going to go back from the face scanner. The only thing that will work is if the face scanner can read from behind the display.
Wait, how do you see the notch? It seems that only the menu bar can go there and fullscreen and windowed apps and video can't. Why circumstances do you see it?
Maybe it's because I use dark mode? I can only tell it's there if I move my mouse under it.
I'll take the opportunity to air my personal bug grievance --
For several years, there's been an issue with audio message recording in iMessage. Prior to iOS 26, it would silently fail; the recording would "begin" but no audio would be captured. This would happen 3, 4, even 5 times in a row before it would actually record audio.
Apple is clearly aware of the issue, because in iOS 26 the failure is no longer silent. Now, you'll get feedback that "Recording isn't available right now". Yet the incidence is...exactly the same. You might have to try 5 times before you're actually able to record a message.
It's simply infuriating, and it makes no sense to a user why this would be happening. Apple owns the entire stack, down to the hardware. Just fix the fucking bug!
my partner and I have a long running joke that I as the techy person who pretty much just uses the camera, WhatsApp and Safari on my phone has so many bugs and issues while my partner who bought the same phone on the same day as me has none of these issues but has and uses every app plugin etc under the sun. and let's face it iOS isn't really that 'customisable'
I just want Safari to work again. The rest I'll wait. I'm checking for software updates daily. it's gotten so bad that I looked up how to report bugs to Apple but I can't submit screenshots!?
I'll settle for just being able to enter data into a form in Safari without needing to reload the whole page.
just to add I had to cut this comment, reload the page, paste it in in order to be able to submit it
This idea is a whole genre of tech journalism. Its a honeypot for people with some specific bone to pick or ideology to evangelize.
I buy more stock every time one of these articles comes out, because the quiet part is 'Apple is still the best, and I can elevate my brand by criticizing it'
he lists "publicly confronted Apple at the European Commission's televised DMA hearing in Brussels on browser competition." as a highlight. lolol. Time to buy even more stock.
I'm starting to believe that customer satisfaction signals an inefficiency to be found and optimized away. The most financially successful companies have customers who are unhappy but not as unhappy that they leave.
In this case the inefficiency was attention to detail but in other companies it might be something else.
I really hope apple reverses course and brings back flat design with frost like how they did with the butterfly keyboard macbooks, but I get the feeling this is the new Apple under Tim Cook. Damn, it's a shame, the hardware is so impressive.
iPad OS 26 is just as bad, if not worse. It's the Windows ME of tablet OS's: ugly, near-unusable, and riddled with bugs.
Just one example: I was excited by the idea of having two apps on screen at the same time: there are two I like to look at side-by-side all the time. But one of them (an iPhone app) randomly decides to switch to landscape mode, making the layout unusable. More generally, the window controls keep getting activated unexpectedly by taps when I use full-screen apps like games, resulting in the window reverting to not-full-screen. So I guess I'll just have to turn that feature off until it's actually usable.
Unless it has a huge memory leak that isn't fixed for years and causes it to be virtually unusable for anyone it's probably not the Windows ME of Tablet OS's.
My understanding is that they became more of a hardware company than a software company over the past few years and they just don't care about shipping with the same level of polish anymore.
I have a theory that the only purpose of the liquid glass update is to create an UI that uses more system resources, so it can be justified to upgrade to a newer device.
It is terrible, does not anything visually or funcionally to the Apple experience.
Not sure if anyone else has experienced issues with the keyboard. Sometimes keyboard is blocking the screen and I can't get it to go away or the opposite where I can't get the keyboard to come up when I need to use it.
Not sure if the same issue but since iOS 18 and now 26, if the keyboard/text field detects a grammatical error or typo (even when you don't care) it'll almost do this UI thread block type thing where it refuses to let you move the cursor or close the keyboard until you act like you're fixing the error.
The attention of humans got ruined with later generations. The generation before us were a different level of skilled, and it's hard as a millenial (me) and gen z to get close to them.
iPhone screenshot and cropping doesn't work. I take a lot of full page screenshots and need to crop them, but sometimes the button is visible and sometimes it isn't. Saving the page as PDF or photo is not intuitive either, you have to click a button that only has a checkmark with no writing on it, and then it says whether to save as photo or PDF. Cropping and saving has become a chore.
People just forget stuff. All this was said about Tiger. Snow Leopard was an entire paid OS upgrade the only selling point of which was that it made Leopard less crap. Your battery used to expand, your GPU used to overheat, you used to stare at a beachball helplessly every few seconds. You remember the good times, just like in ten years I'm going to remember fitting giant models in shared RAM on a monster GPU while the fans were completely silent, not this nitpicky stuff that has been par for the course for all operating systems forever.
Yeah, agree with this too. Apple tends to create products that are more fully realized than Samsung or even Microsoft (especially in how it looks), but it's been pretty well know that Apple software tends to be buggy, as they aren't an engineering-focused company like let's say Google. They are a consumer products company.
IMHO, people are thinking about how well thought-out and usable the products and software tends to be - Yeah, Apple makes it so anyone can use it - But their software has always been buggy.
i recently worked with a mac and was pretty unimpressed with all the visual clutter in the upper left corner of the screen. it was just kinda cluttered up with a junkyard of wasted space and needless controls. it didn't feel good, magical or delightful. just kind of like jumbled hodgepodge of dated nonsense.
oddly, kde plasma is more pleasing and consistent.
unfortunately just an inherent consequence of treating software as needing continuous improvements and having yearly release targets, you can't just say that this settings menu is already perfect as is, you have to change it, therefore everyone perpetually shuffles around ui and adds features that nobody wants
Not to mention external monitors are broken on my M1 Pro MacBook since some Sequoia 15.x update. Upgrading to Tahoe now to see if it will fix it but I'm not optimistic.
Fucking inexcusable that MacOS metal support for external monitors has been finicky and unstable since the very beginning, and they never resolved that (but at least external monitors were DETECTED, then somewhere in Sequoia things went completely south)-- and now it just seems to be completely broken. There are countless Reddit threads. Why can't the Apple engineering braintrust figure this out??
1) In the EU, if you uninstall Apple Maps and set another app as your navigation default, many (most?) addresses won't work anymore. Clicking an address will show you an alert that you haven't installed a navigation app, or sometimes just open the Maps website in Safari.
2) With the new dual-language keyboards, text prediction is doubly messy. My Dutch-French keyboard suggests English words and almost never understands which language I'm actually typing in.
2b) Fine, but then at least my English keyboard will be okay? Nope. The other keyboards still get polluted with suggestions and auto-correct from the other language keyboards you have. For example, it's now impossible to write “as a” without iOS correcting it to “às à”, even though my Portuguese keyboard is separate and I'm clearly typing in English.
3) Search on iOS always searches for files, even if you remove the Files app contents from search results. (‘App’ just got corrected into ’all’.)
4) In iOS, HealthKit occasionally locks down and the apps that need it to function become unresponsive (AutoSleep, WaterNow, Cronometer). This can only be fixed with a restart.
5) In macOS's Mail, if you Command-Z to undo deleting an email, 90% of the time it goes in a Recovered Emails folder instead of where it was. 10% of the time it's not undeleted at all and is instead completely gone (also from the trash).
6) Calendar.app on macOS can become unusable if you have attachments in events. The solution is to open the event on iOS and delete the attachment.
7) Screen Time asks me twice if I want to unlock an app or website. Sometimes the animation plays and nothing happens, so I have to do it thrice.
8) The Game Mode notification can't be disabled, because no one at Apple has ever alt-tabbed away from a game.
9) If you search for a setting in iOS or the redesigned macOS System Preferences, I think 3/4 of the time it will take you to a nearby screen but not the actual setting. This is because Apple designers don't know that they can scroll you or link you to the right place.
I've reported all these bugs to Apple with screenshots or videos. None of them were ever fixed.
No one gives a shit about anything anymore- Everything is just a job- either due to overmanagement or overwork. Look at how they recently butchered the new park hyatt tokyo redesign, one of the most iconic and enigmatic hotels in the world, reduced to "just another hotel". We're in a world where people have given up on going above and beyond, maybe because we're living in a society where intelligence and perceptiveness aren't rewarded and can't survive.
Try Omarchy.org variant of Linux if you are tired of Apple's years of user-hostile changes and UI disasters. Many people seem to be drawn to it as it's a simple, clean productive system that "just work" (it was build by a previous apple fan that also became disillusioned by the greedy company)
I think Fedora would be a better option here. At least for me.
Judging by the Omarchy presentation video it feels too keyboard oriented. Hotkeys for everything. And hotkeys for AI agents? Is is opinionated indeed. Not my cup of tea.
I pulled up a video on Omarchy 2.0 from DHH. The first thing he says is it's based on a tiling window manager that takes time to learn and setup, most things are done in the terminal and with the keyboard.
I feel like that loses a majority of people right there. I like the option to do common things with the keyboard, or to configure things with a file. But for things I don't do often, holding a bunch of keyboard shortcuts in my head feels like a waste for those rare things.
I'm not sure about anyone else, but I can't run whatever Linux distro I want at work. When an OS relies on muscle memory to get smooth and fluid operation, it seems like that would make it extra hard to jump between for work vs home. I spent years jumping between OS X and Windows, and I found it's much nicer now that I'm on the same OS for work and home. Even the little things, like using a different notes app at home vs work do trip me up a little, where I'll get shortcuts wrong, or simply not invest in them, because of the switching issue. Omarchy feels like it would be that situation on steroids.
Really wanted to give this a try until i saw a huge "Grok" ad on their frontpage. As a european Grok has the reputation of being the "fascist and openly racist AI", which i think there's actually hard evidence for with their leaked prompts. Why the hell are they promoting that?
with all respect, they are old people now, yes people working in Apple. They are retiring or retired inside the company. nothing wrong with that but design and all shows it. lol
Oh, come on, having your brand-new AirPod Pro 3s listed in the Bluetooth summary of your also-pretty-recent iPhone as ACCESSORY_MODEL_NAME is a small price to pay for the 3 months of free Apple Music that take up so much more space in the UI anyway...
I mean, some people are just impossible to please!
I thought that all non-native apps will feel even more out of place with Liquid Glass and developers go back to writing more native apps. After experiencing iOS 26, I’m pretty confident that people will actually actively try to get away from the default iOS UI language and will use more cross-platform tech that makes it easier to implement their own designs. Liquid Glass is just annoyingly bad.
It’s like the entire release management was left to a couple of product and UI types . You can tell because they seem to have focused on UI eye-candy instead of UX / interaction or any meaningful QE. Like there is a glaring evidence if attention to detail in the most useless of places.
This thing is laggy…on my brand new 17 Pro. Why not just make the entire OS an electron app at this point?
I've always been a big fan of apple and have defended them in the past, but iOS 26 is a dumpster fire. There are visual corruptions and glitches all over the place and transparent text floating over transparent text. It's not even whether I like the style or not, it's just broken. Who signed off on this? No product in this state would ever leave one of my teams, I'd resign first.
A significant fraction of the bugs in this article are because the author has deliberately chosen settings that cause problems (disabling all location access) or are just bugs, some of which I can't reproduce myself. He throws in random comments like "goodbye accessibility" with no attempt to justify them, when in fact iOS and macOS are famous for their unusually strong accessibility features.
I'm not trying to excuse Apple, but this article attempts to paint the impression that every issue is connected in some kind of serial incompetence, but that simply isn't the case.
There isn’t a single screen I use day to day in iOS 26 that doesn’t have a major or minor defect.
iOS and Mac used to do a good job with things like animations, now they are horrible. Pre-beta quality.
And dark mode and accessibility settings need to just work. That is a core part of the job of every front end iOS developer, including the ones at Apple.
It absolutely is serial incompetence and the Apple engineering leadership that signed off on it should be ashamed.
Every article I read about iOS 26 and Tahoe, is just another reminder that I should never ever update my devices.
I don’t think that there is going back for Apple, the company is already too enshittified to get back to a company with a vision. They got drowned by AI, the releases and features are subpar to competition. I do care about detail when I’m buying premium products and Apple just doesn’t cut it any more.
Apple built a phone that would bend in pockets because they used flimsy aluminum without enough internal structure, something they should have had ample experience to avoid from the exact same thing happening to tons of iPods.
Apple insisted on developing a moronic keyboard implementation to save less than a mm of "thickness" that was prone to stupid failure modes and the only possible repair was to replace the entire top half of the laptop. They also refused to acknowledge this design failure for years.
Apple built a cell phone that would disrupt normal antenna function when you hold it like a cell phone.
Apple has multiple generations of laptops that couldn't manage their heat to the point that buying the more expensive CPU option would decrease your performance.
Adding to the above, Apple has a long long history of this, from various generations of macbook that would cook themselves from GPU heat that they again, refused to acknowledge, all the way to the Apple 3 computer which had no heat management at all.
Apple outright lies in marketing graphics about M series chip performance which is just childish when those chips are genuinely performant, and unmatchable (especially at release) in terms of performance per watt, they just aren't the fastest possible chips on the market for general computing.
Apple makes repair impossible. Even their own stores can only "repair" by replacing most of the machine.
Apple spent a significant amount of time grounding their laptops through the user, despite a grounding lug existing on charging brick. This is just weird
Apple WiFi for a while was weirdly incompatible, and my previous 2015 macbook would inexplicably not connect to the same wireless router that any other product could connect to, or would fail to maintain it's connection. I had to build a stupid little script to run occasionally to refresh DHCP
Apple had a constant issue with their sound software that inexplicably adds pops to your sound output at high CPU load or other stupid reasons, that they basically don't acknowledge and therefore do not provide troubleshooting or remedies.
Apple was so obsessed with "thinness" that they built smartphones with so poorly specced batteries that after a couple years of normal use, those batteries, despite reporting acceptable capacity, could not keep up with current demands and the phones would be unusable. Apple's response to this was not to let people know what was going on and direct them to a cheap battery replacement, but to silently update software to bottleneck the CPU so hard that it could not draw too much current to hurt the battery. The underpowered batteries were a design flaw.
Apple software quality is abysmal. From things like "just hit enter a bunch to log in as root" to "we put a web request to our servers in the hot path of launching an app so bad internet slows your entire machine down"
Apple prevents you from using your "Pro" iPad that costs like a thousand bucks and includes their premier chip for anything other than app store garbage and some specialty versions of productivity apps.
Apple has plenty of failures, bungles, poor choices, missteps, etc. Apple has plenty of history building trash and bad products.
The only "detail" apple paid "attention" to was that if you set yourself up as a lifestyle brand, there's an entire segment of the market that will just pretend you are magically superior and never fail and downplay objective history and defend a 50% profit premium on commodity hardware and just keep buying no matter what.
And let's not forget the original Macintosh, which Steve Jobs insisted shouldnt have a fan and likewise tended to overheat. Of course, that was only after learning the lessons of the Apple ///, where
> Jobs insisted on the idea of having no fan or air vents, in order to make the computer run quietly.
...
> Many Apple IIIs were thought to have failed due to their inability to properly dissipate heat. inCider stated in 1986 that "Heat has always been a formidable enemy of the Apple ///",[15] and some users reported that their Apple IIIs became so hot that the chips started dislodging from the board, causing the screen to display garbled data or their disk to come out of the slot "melted".
Reality-Distortion-Visionary type CEO's can push-back against the holy "Fiduciary Duty to Shareholders" commandment that is used to justify all crap, but the Operating-Profit-Efficiency type CEO's like Tim Cook cannot - nor do they wish do.
Shareholders didn't know this level of profit was possible and were scared of going back to the ousted Jobs era. It helped that Jobs delivered good growth and profits, though nothing on the scale Cook has with the destruction of Apple's design capital. Some of what Cook has done wouldn't have been possible in the Jobs era due to market and technology differences but in general, Cook has been all about smoothing costs out of processes, with little regard for the things Jobs considered essential.
Apple supports a ton of platforms (iOS, MacOS, iPadOS, WatchOS, Web, Windows etc).
When they release a new feature it needs to be everywhere. That happens every September. The cadence has not changed, but the scope since Apple was just making MacOS has been multiplied.
You can 10X your staff, but the coordination under 10X velocity will suffer.
I wonder if anyone else here is old enough to remember the "I'm a Mac", "And I'm a PC" ads.
There was one that was about all the annoying security pop-ups Windows (used to?) have. (FWIW, it starts here: https://youtu.be/qfv6Ah_MVJU?t=230 .)
Lately I've gotten so many of these popups on Mac that it both annoys and amuses the hell out of me. "Die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain", I guess.
But, man, Apple hardware still rocks. Can't deny that.
Oh, that smell of molten keyboard plastic, those yellow spots burned into a display with its own heat exhaust, those laser-machined loudspeaker holes next to keyboard, all filled with grime! How I miss that time on a Macbook, with all the chords you have to press whenever you need a Home or End button to edit the line! Not to mention the power button right next to backspace.
It's so rewarding when its charger dies in a month, and you feel superior to your colleague, whose vintage 6 months old charging cable with none of that extraneous rubber next to the connector catches fire along with your office. What a time to be alive!
The best part is the motherboard produced in a way to fail due to moisture in a couple of years, with all the uncoated copper, with 0.1mm pitch debugging ports that short-circuit due to a single hair, and the whole Louis Rossmann's youtube worth of other hardware features meant to remind you to buy a new Apple laptop every couple of years. How would you otherwise be able to change the whole laptop without all the walls around repair manuals and parts? You just absolutely have to love the fact even transplanting chips from other laptops won't help due to all the overlapping hardware DRMs.
I'll go plug the cable into the bottom of my wireless Apple mouse, and remind myself of all the best times I had with Apple's hardware. It really rocks.
> the whole Louis Rossmann's youtube worth of other hardware features meant to remind you to buy a new Apple laptop every couple of years
Apple have a couple of extra mechanisms in place to remind us to buy a new device:
- On iOS the updates are so large it doesn't fit on the device. This is because they purposely put a small hard drive i. It serves a second purpose - people will buy Apple cloud storage because nothing fits locally.
- No longer providing updates to the device after just a few years when it's still perfectly fine. Then forcing the app developer ecosystem to target the newer iOS version and not support the older versions. But it's not planned obsolescence when it's Apple, because they're the good guys, right? They did that 1984 ad. Right guys?
> No longer providing updates to the device after just a few years when it's still perfectly fine.
This is a weird one to complain about because Apple leads the industry in supporting older devices with software updates. iOS 26 supports devices back to 2019. And they just released a security update for the iPhone 6S, a model released a full decade ago, last month.
The oldest Samsung flagship you can get Android 16 for is their 2023 model (Galaxy S23), and for Google the oldest is the 2021 model (Pixel 6).
We’re moving away from hardware and into software and longevity in this discussion but wrt “apple leads the industry in supporting older devices with software updates” i would point out that Red Hat is probably more of a beacon / industry leader here as the main promise of RHEL is 10 years of support and updates. But again we don’t ship hardware so I see the narrower sense that you’re making but still would like to push back on the idea that giant companies cannot continue to keep complicated legacy code bases secure and functional about 2x longer in most cases than what Apple has done
Main problem, not just from Apple, is that as phone tech gets standardized and more long-lasting the software support cycles have not gotten longer.
It is abysmal that Android phone makers still need to customize the OS so much for their hardware. Apple has no incentive for longer support cycles if Android does even worse on it.
It has always been like that since CP/M and commercial UNIX days.
Vertical integrations like everyone sell a product, a brand, a whole ecosystem experience.
If all OEMs sold the same CP/M, UNIX, MSX, MS-DOS, Windows software stack, on the what is basically the same hardware with a different name glued on the case, they wouldn't get any brand recognition, aka product differentiation.
Thus OEMs specific customisations get added, back in the day bundled software packages are part of the deal, nowadays preinstalled on the OS image, and so on.
"You cheated on me last night!"
"This is a weird one to complain about, look at Donnie, he cheated on his girlfriend 3 times last month!"
i don't get it, how long do you think is reasonable?
I tend to look at technology prices in terms of cost per unit time of useful life.
If Apple continues to supply updates for six-year-old phones, iPhone 17 prices range from $11/month (base model iPhone 17) to $28/month (iPhone 17 Pro Max w/2TB storage), meaning it's only about 20% more expensive to store data on a RAID 10 array of iPhone 17 Pro Maxes running current iOS versions than on standard-tier S3 (not a relevant comparison, obviously, but it amuses me).
So I don't know what's reasonable, but Apple's policies certainly appear to be.
I'm still salty that Apple no longer offer battery service on my OG Apple Watch, however, so reason has its limits.
Suppose you always want to be running the latest iOS release, but you want to replace your phone as infrequently as possible. You would "only" have to have purchased 4 iPhones since 2007:
Adjusted for inflation, the total for these phones is $3,287 excluding carrier contracts. Assuming the iPhone 11 will be obsoleted by iOS 27 in September 2026, this costs you about $14.29/mo.I was a long time Android user - but I realised I was getting through 2 or more phones in the time my wife had one. They'd either become obsolete or just die. I reluctantly bought an iPhone on this basis - it's actually going to work out cheaper if I get 5 or 6 years out of it.
However, I find the iPhone keyboard so bad and the settings concept so muddled that I'm going to return to Android when this experiment is over. Probably not for another 4 years though!
You know you can sell and replace your phone if you don't like it. Recent Pixels have 7 years of support and they don't die. That's what I'd recommend you get instead. You can even trade in your iPhone for up to $700 when you buy a Pixel. You really don't need to force yourself to use a phone you don't like, leave alone for that long.
If we're talking anecdotes, my wife changes her iPhone every 4 years because it gets worse and worse. Daughter does the same. I change my Galaxy every 4 years because it gets worse and worse as well. Not sure how some people can say their <insert beloved brand> holds forever, unless they don't really use it of course. No brand really keeps up with the requirements, unless all you do is make phone calls - which is why my dad still has a Sony Ericsson.
Technically not updates but if you hook up a PowerPC mac with 10.4 Tiger on it you can still get it updated to the latest version released, 10.4.11
I demoed that exact feature (though on 10.5) not so long ago and people didn’t believe me…!
The part that really gets me is that the price per GB to go from a 256 to a 512 GB iPhone is $2.54 (since the next storage option up costs $200 total). Two and a half dollars!!! A 512 GB micro SD would run you $0.10/GB. They have been charging 25x the market rate for storage on a device with no expandable storage at all for years. Baffling that they aren't called on it more. It should be criminal.
I had the 2019 cheesegrater Mac Pro. 7TB (going from 1 to 8) would cost me $3,000.
So I bought a 4xM2 PCI card, 4 2TB Samsung Pro SSDs for $1,100. And as a result got 6.5GBps versus the onboard 1TB's 5GBps.
Same with memory. 160GB (32 to 192GB) from Apple was also around $3K. OWC sold the exact same memory chips, manufacturer, spec, speed, for $1,000 for 192GB.
I recently found my ipad mini 2 (released in 2013) that had been boxed up when I moved a few years ago. After charging up the battery and booting it up, I checked for system updates. The latest system available for it was ios 12.5.7, released in 2023. It loaded fine, and I’ve been using the mini as an ereader ever since – the screen is fine, and wifi works.
A Macbook is the only Apple device I have in my entire array of computers and computer-related stuff, so I've got plenty of points of comparison. While Apple's hardware design isn't perfect, all of what you bring up seems wildly blown out of proportion to me. I can say I've never seen anyone with molten keyboards and displays. I've used the charger cable on my main charging brick for about five years now, and it's still going strong, despite being used for charging everything everywhere. And while Apple has committed many sins in terms of doing their absolute best at preventing anyone from touching their sacred hardware (we just need DRMed cables and enclosures to complete the set), this only affects repair. In terms of planned obsolescence, Macbooks statistically don't seem much less reliable than any other laptops on the market. They make up a majority of the used laptop market where I am.
And of course, just had to bring up the whole mouse charger thing. Back when Apple updated their mouse once and replaced the AA compartment with a battery+port block in the same spot to reuse the old housing, and a decade later people still go on about the evil Apple designers personally spitting in your face for whatever reason sounds the most outrageous.
Apple produced at least three mice that were very different and terrible in different ways. Their laptops are good, but don't waste your time defending their other peripherals.
Apple's unwillingness to admit that one button isn't enough is legendary. They added a fucking multi-touch area to the fucking mouse because that's apparently easier to use and more efficient. It's funny as hell.
I've barely ever tried them, but I've never liked the shaping of any that I have held, and I don't think that the touchpad addition justified the discomfort that it causes in all other use cases. That being said, the whole "Apple added the charging port on the bottom to be evil and prevent you from using the mouse" thing had become such an entrenched internet fable over the last decade that it's impossible for me to come by it and not comment on it. I'll clarify that no one but the designers themselves knows the original intention, but since it's the exact same design as the AA model, just with internal changes, it seems like an open-and-shut case.
I’ll admit to owning one and I use it.
The charging port location is weird and stupid, but I have never needed to charge it while I am using it. When it hits about 15%, I plug it in at the EOD and don’t have to charge it again for maybe a month. I am a neat freak and you have to look hard to see any cable on my desk rig.
The multi touch stuff works fine for me, but perhaps I am just used to it.
The only complaint I have is the shape, it’s not “comfortable” to use. Easily addressed by a stupid 3D printed humpback add on that changes the aesthetic but makes it comfortable for me to use. I shouldn’t have to buy a mouse accessory…but I did.
Here is the thing though…it’s just a mouse. I point, I click, then I move my hand back to the keyboard. It’s fine. While I’m sure there is a better designed one out there, is any mouse truly revolutionary?
We do know the intention though. Apple thinks a mouse with a cable looks messy and ugly, so they made the mouse charge fast and put the port on the bottom. Made it impossible to use it whilst charging but you could get 2 hours of use out of like 10 minutes or charging. The end result Apple hoped for was people always seeing the mouse on the desk, cableless, charged.
I'm surprised it came out during the Jobs era because he strongly believed in "form follows function".
Again, this is something that's often repeated all over the internet, but there is no source for this, it's just speculation - and fairly unconvincing speculation at that, since it has to go so far in assigning the designers these strong opinions and unwillingness to compromise just for it all to make sense. I feel like what I proposed is a far simpler and more straightforward explanation. Occam's razor and all. Just look at what the mouse looked like through its generations[1]. When redesigning it, they obviously just took out the single-use battery compartment and replaced it with a section containing the rechargeable battery and the charging port. In fact, they really couldn't have done it any other way, because the mouse is so flat that its top and bottom sides taper all the way to the desk, with no space for a charging port. So, when making the gen 2 model, just putting the port where it is was probably a far simpler drop-in solution that saved them from having to redesign the rest of the mouse.
[1] https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0572/5788/5832/files/magic...
> I'm surprised it came out during the Jobs era because he strongly believed in "form follows function".
The Jobs era of Apple had a ton of pretty but less functional designs. Jobs is quoted as saying that, but he was full of it. He didn't actually practice that philosophy at all.
>Apple added the charging port on the bottom to be evil
I don't think anyone does anything "to be evil".
But clearly they had a choice between what was good for the user (being able to use the mouse while charging) and what suited their aesthetic, and they chose the latter. Open-and-shut case, indeed.
That's Apple for you. Any time there's a conflict between aesthetics and user friendliness, aesthetics will always win out.
“I'll clarify that no one but the designers themselves knows the original intention, but since it's the exact same design as the AA model, just with internal changes, it seems like an open-and-shut case.”
“Legendary attention to detail”
Indeed, it is pretty open-and-shut.
which is really funny, since the Microsoft mice (only a few are left) and keyboards (discontinued) are by far some of my favorite peripherals.
On the apple mouse side, I got a white corded mouse with the tiny eraser looking mousewheel back in around 2003 or so, it's still in use today with a M4 mac mini. Works like a champ, Keyboard from that era is also still in use and used daily in our family.
I daily drive the Microsoft Touch Mouse, have for 10+ years. It is by far my favorite piece of hardware. I've never seen another one used in the wild, which might explain why they discontinued it.
The remote controls for Apple TV are among the all time worst peripherals I have ever used. Remotes aren’t hard. They reinvented the wheel by making it rectangular.
To be fair, since the Logitech Harmony One went EOL there hasn't been a decent remote available from anyone.
There was a third-party battery module[1] for the original AA Magic Mouse that would allow it to charge wirelessly, a feature that Apple somehow still has not managed to steal!
[1] https://techpp.com/2011/04/19/mobee-magic-charger-for-magic-...
> How I miss that time on a Macbook, with all the chords you have to press whenever you need a Home or End button to edit the line!
???? ctrl+a and ctrl+e? That works on most Linux setups, too. Only Microsoft screws that up. I love how in Mac Office apps, Microsoft also makes ctrl+a and ctrl+e do what they do in windows lol.
Was there a Gateway that did better?
Can you be specific about your bad experiences with Apple hardware? I've gone through 5 MacBook Pros since 2008 and my only complaint was the old Intel models always got too hot. Nothing ever broke on them and I guess I kept them relatively clean?
I also have all of the adapters that came with the MBPs too, all perfectly functioning, the oldest still attached and powering my 2013 model with the dead battery (2008 model was sold, still working). The magsafe cable is pretty yellow now, and maybe a little wonky from the constant travelling, but no fraying/fire hazard yet.
>Oh, that smell of molten keyboard plastic, those yellow spots burned into a display with its own heat exhaust, those laser-machined loudspeaker holes next to keyboard, all filled with grime! How I miss that time on a Macbook, with all the chords you have to press whenever you need a Home or End button to edit the line! Not to mention the power button right next to backspace. It's so rewarding when its charger dies in a month, and you feel superior to your colleague, whose vintage 6 months old charging cable with none of that extraneous rubber next to the connector catches fire along with your office. What a time to be alive!
None of the above sound like anybody's actual experience. Which is also they have the biggest resale value retention among PC laptops, and biggest reported user satisfaction.
Now, if you were about the lack of ports (at least for a period) or the crappy "butterfly" keyboard (for a period), you'd have an actual point.
Home/End is just Control-A/E.
Never seen "molten keyboard plastic". I'm sure you can find some person who has that somewhere on the internet. I doubt it's a problem beyond some 0.0001% rare battery failures or something like that.
"yellow spots burned into a display with its own heat exhaust". Not sure what this even means. Especially AS Macs don't even get hot. I haven't heard the fan ever, and I use a M1 MBP of 5+ years with vms and heavy audio/video apps.
"when its charger dies in a month" is just bs.
While I was in law school, every student who had an Apple laptop had to get their laptop replaced at least once (some multiple times) over the course of our program. The biggest problem was the bulging keyboard, due to the bulging battery, but their were also numerous issues with displays and with chargers not lasting very long. Most chargers lasted at least a semester, but few of the Apple chargers lasted an entire school year. They simply weren't designed with durability in mind. Quite humorously, after one student's laptop keyboard began bulging during torts, the professor began an impromptu lecture on product liability laws.
The only PC laptops that were replaced were the ones that got damaged in accidents (car accidents, dropped off a balcony, used as a shield in self defense during a robbery, etc.). Dell Latitudes of that era were sturdy, and not noticeably heavier than their fragile Apple counterparts.
Staingate?
I had a GPU issue (that was the subject of a recall that matched my symptoms precisely (and I could make the MBP core dump on demand in the Genius Bar) but "recall declined, does not fail diagnostics".
Damaged charging circuit on an MBA. Laptop worked perfectly. Battery health check fine. Just could not charge it. "That will be a $900 repair. Maybe we can look at getting you into a new Mac?" (for one brief moment I thought they were going to exchange mine... no, they wanted me to buy one. And of course, my MBA couldn't be traded in because it was damaged...).
I've also had multiple Magsafe connectors fray to the point of becoming like a paper lantern with all the bare wire visible, despite the cable being attached to a desk with cable connectors so there was near zero cable stress (and often only plugged/unplugged once a week).
Also they leak charge onto the case.
Any properly grounded device will do that with specifically incorrect electrical wiring and/or a shoddy charger. Did this happen with a properly wired outlet, and an undamaged Apple charger?
I have doubts that it did, as that would warrant a safety recall.
Can confirm it does happen. UK, both on my ThinkPad and a friend's MacBook when plugged in. It's a somewhat unavoidable side effect of the switching AC adapter designs - the output is isolated from the mains, but there is a tiny leakage current that can sometimes be felt as a "vibration". This is completely safe (far below the currents needed to cause harm) and no recall is needed.
Thank you. I always felt this vibration and wondered what it was.
If you replace the two prong plug on the AC adapter for a three prong cable, your MacBook case will be properly grounded and you won’t feel any vibration.
Cast aside your doubts, I've been to different parts of Europe a few times with different, healthy MBPs (I buy a new one every 4-5 years) with healthy adapters.
Plugging into the wide EU outlet with the Apple-manufactured plug, from the "World Travel Adapter Kit", can lead to uncomfortable "vibration" that you feel when you touch the top case, depending on the the hotel/airbnb. Whenever I visit I expect I should charge while I'm not using the device.
In researching why it was happening to me, I found sufficient forum posts complaining about it that it seems to be commonplace.
I have my doubts that Apple would admit enough to perform a safety recall given the issues they've had with their garbage chargers in the past. Other companies have no problems with building hardware that lasts. Apple seem to prefer their customers pay for replacements.
Found this out one time when I went to touch my MBA and it was like I stuck my finger in a light socket.
n=4 but my niece spilled a whole cup of milk and a whole cup of matcha on my M2 (twice on 1 device). I just flipped it up, dried it out with a hair dryer (apparently shouldn't do that) and it still works 2 years later.
Can't relate to what you're saying, had 4 MacBooks, and many PCs too.
Yes! I wholeheartedly agree!
I teach C++ programming classes as part of my job as a professor. I have a work-issued MacBook Pro, and I make heavy use of Terminal.app. One of the things that annoy me is always having to click on a dialog box whenever I recompile my code and use lldb for debugging. Why should I need to click on a dialog to grant permission to lldb to debug my own program?
It wasn't always like this on the Mac. I had a Core Duo MacBook that ran Tiger (later Leopard and Snow Leopard) that I completed my undergraduate computer science assignments on, including a Unix systems programming course where I wrote a small multi-threaded web server in C. Mac OS X used to respect the user and get out of the way. It was Windows that bothered me with nagging.
Sadly, over the years the Mac has become more annoying. Notarization, notifications to upgrade, the annoying dialog whenever I run a program under lldb....
> Why should I need to click on a dialog to grant permission to lldb to debug my own program?
Because apps and web browser tabs run as your user and otherwise they would be able to run lldb without authorization. So, this is the authorization.
Tried iTerm?
Terminal app is terrible, use iTerm if you possibly can.
*ghostty
Ghostty is very janky (though less on Mac than on Linux). It’s promising but needs a lot of polish. So in the meantime I reverted to iTerm.
That has nothing to do with developer prompts.
I can't stand the stupid dance required to run a third party app every single time.
Get the fuck out of my way and let me use what is supposedly my computer.
They become more shitware and Microsoft like with every update.
Worst part about this is that these days the error message simply lies to the user. "Whatever.App is damaged and can't be opened. You should move it to the trash."
If you remove the 'quarantine' attribute that gets added to downloaded files it runs great.
This doesn't really address your concern, but I feel obligated to share the Gatekeeper bypasses I know about:
Homebrew has an option which bypasses Gatekeeper when installing apps:
And apparently you can have this on by default: And I have this alias for everything else:The Apple gods know what's best for you. They're just trying to protect you from yourself.
That's true, but macOS is still further from the current equivalent of Windows than it ever was.
Yes, Windows 11 is horrendous.
Years and years ago, I fought the good fight, full desktop Linux fulltime.
I see and hear from a lot of people it's pretty great these days though, and you can do whatever the new cool fork of WINE is or a VM for games / software compatibility.
Definitely not moving to 11. When 10 gets painful enough I'll probably try Devuan or Arch or something for desktop use.
I used Linux exclusively from 1999 to 2012. I gave up in 2012 and switch to Mac.
I’ve just switched back to Linux, and I can confirm. It’s different, it’s very different. And it’s very good. I realised how much I’ve just been fighting Apple everyday in newer versions of Mac.
I was going to ask my boss for a new MacBook Pro soon but now I’m having second thoughts.
> I was going to ask my boss for a new MacBook Pro soon but now I’m having second thoughts.
If you're looking for laptop recs, I've been happy with my Framework 16 except for one issue: when you close the lid, it can subtly flex in your backpack, press keys, and wake itself up. I work around it, but it's annoying.
But they recently announced a second build of the Framework 16 where one of the selling points is that the lid won't flex. Can't personally verify that they got it right, but given the build quality of the rest of the machine, I suspect they did.
I gave up in 2010, but on my case went to Windows 7, plus VMWare.
While I appreciate NeXTSTEP heritage on macOS, I rather have something that costs 1000 euros less with more RAM, SSD, and a GPU capable of doing CUDA and Vulkan without translation layers.
Now if my employeer or customer is willing to assign a MacBook Pro with the same RAM and storage for project activities, great more on them, I would not say no.
Similar timeframes! Any distro recs?
I'd suggest Linux Mint if you want Ubuntu with a GUI that doesn't suck, though Kubuntu is probably a decent choice (KDE isn't to my taste visually so I don't use it, but it absolutely doesn't suck and many people like it). If you want a rolling release instead because you want to live on the bleeding edge, Arch is hard to beat.
I can second Mint for a good GUI, but if you want Wayland I would probably either go for Pop!OS with the new Cosmic desktop beta or Fedora with KDE over any version of Ubuntu. Snap packages suck still IMO
I should probably mention that Linux Mint disables Snap packages by default (for reasons of principle that boil down to "Snap packages suck"), though you can reenable them with a single command if you actually want Snap. That's another point in Mint's favor for me.
You can disable SIP if you don't like it.
I'm the first to tell people they can disable SIP, but it's not something that everyone should do.
i.e, blanket disabling of SIP will interfere with conveniences like Apple Pay, etc. People want those conveniences. Disabling SIP is a trade-off.
I had no idea Apple Pay was a thing on MacOS.
> But, man, Apple hardware still rocks. Can't deny that.
This makes me extra sad. The HW is very good and very expensive, but the SW is mediocre. I bought an iPhone 16 a few months ago and I swear that is the first and last iPhone I'd purchase. I'd happy sell it at half of the price if someone local wants it.
Edit: Since people asked for points, here is a list of things that I believe iOS does not do well:
- In Android Chrome, I can set YouTube website to desktop mode, and loop the video. I can also turn off the screen without breaking the play. I can't do this in Safari however I tried.
- In Safari, I need to long-press a button to bring up the list of closed tabs. How can anyone figure it out without asking around online?
- In Stock app, a few News pieces are automatically brought up and occupy the lower half of the screen when it starts up. This is very annoying as I don't need it and cannot turn it off.
- (This is really the level of ridiculous) In Clock, I fucking cannot set an one time alarm for a future date (Repeat = Never means just today), so I had to stupidly set up weekly alerts and change it whenever I need a new one-time. I hope I'm too stupid to find the magic option.
- Again, in Clock, if I want to setup alarm for sleep, I have to turn on...sleep. This is OK-ish as I can just setup a weekly alarm and click every weekday.
So far, I think Mail and Maps are user friendly. Maps actually show more stuffs than Google Map, which is especially useful for pedestrians. Weather is also good and I have little complain about it.
The YouTube thing is Google's choice, not Apple's, as those are "premium" features. Install Vinegar (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...) to get a standard HTML5 player in YouTube, which will let you make it full screen, PiP it, background it, whatever.
I dislike the new Safari layout in iOS 26 too. https://support.apple.com/en-nz/guide/iphone/ipha9ffea1a3/io... -- change it from "compact" to "bottom". I assume this choice will disappear in the future, but for now, you can make it more familiar.
Unfortunately, I don't have any advice for the Clock/Alarm; I don't typically schedule one-off future alarms. That would be a useful feature.
> The YouTube thing is Google's choice, not Apple's, as those are "premium" features. Install Vinegar (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...) to get a standard HTML5 player in YouTube, which will let you make it full screen, PiP it, background it, whatever.
But it IS Apple's choice. The problem is they have a mixed up conflict of interest, and it's even worse when Apple themselves is trying to sell you their own services.
IMHO the company making the hardware, the company making the software, and the company selling the cloud services shouldn't be allowed to all be the same company. There's too much conflict of interest.
I don't see how it's Apple's choice?
Google sells PiP, background playing etc. as part of YouTube Premium (not Apple!). Google serves browser clients a player that can't do those things, because they want you to pay for them. Vinegar is a browser extension that replaces Google's player with Apple's plain HTML5 player. Apple's plain HTML5 player does all that stuff for free.
With Apple's default apps, i kind of feel like the apps themselves are strategically designed to not be the best place to look for lesser trafficked use cases.
Visual customizations get upstreamed into the system accessibility settings. Extra functions are exposed exclusively in Shortcuts for you to hack together an automation feature yourself. For a fully feature supported app Apple would probably say go pay for an app (and them through fee) on the App Store.
For example with your future alarm.. you could get another app or you could create a 'Time of Day' Shortcut automation which checks everyday to see if the date is the date you want the alarm on; if it is the day create the alarm. Delete the alarm on the next day. A (not so) fun fact about automating Alarms before iOS 17: you could only delete alarms through Siri and not Shortcuts lol...
> I fucking cannot set an one time alarm for a future date (Repeat = Never means just today), so I had to stupidly set up weekly alerts and change it whenever I need a new one-time. I hope I'm too stupid to find the magic option.
I think you're supposed to use the calendar for that.
Which is broken, because I want to be able to say “set an alarm at for next Wednesday at 4:30 AM“ the second I find out I have to give someone a ride to the airport.
If I have to make it a calendar entry, I may not notice it in time.
why do you have to go to calendar to set alarm ?
The alarm and the calendar can both alert you on a specific date and time. But like a bedside alarm clock, the iOS alarm is limited to a time in the next 24 hours.
On Android, why would you not use the calendar when you want to be alerted days from now?
Because on my Android phone, the alarm accepts a date and rings only on that date
Wat? Because a century old device can only set a repeating alarm, the 2025 $1k smartphone should, too?! I set so many one of alarms on my android weekly, I would be infuriated if I had to use the calendar for that.
You can set as many non-repeating alarms as you like, as long as they're within the next 24 hours.
What kind of event are you creating an alarm for that's more than a day away? On Friday, do you create your alarm to wake up on Monday? Does Android have a calendar-like view of your upcoming alarms?
(Sorry for the barrage of questions, but this is interesting to me.)
I frequently use one-time alarms for early morning travel a few days away. What makes them great is that the alarms in general are much more robust in their requirements to turn them off; I can accidentally dismiss a calendar alert, but I have a much harder time accidentally deactivating the clock alarm in a sleep induced stupor at odd hours.
More importantly, alarms don't get silenced by my nightly do not disturb schedule.
>You can set as many non-repeating alarms as you like, as long as they're within the next 24 hours.
Any color as long as it's black, eh?
I'm with you. I got an iPhone 15 a couple of years ago after only ever using Android. I was expecting great things and it's just.. confused!
I never have any confidence it will notify me of things. Often I just miss stuff. I actually have no idea how all the different "Focus" modes work. Notifications pile up and then seem to disappear without any action, and then reappear a week later.
The keyboard is really awful. I recently pulled an ancient Galaxy phone out of a drawer to test something and was reminded of just how much better the Android keyboard is. It just always guesses the wrong things!
And the settings are equally jumbled. Sometimes they're in the Settings app, sometimes they're in the app I'm using. It's just confusing.
It was honestly eye opening because I'd spent so many years assuming iPhones were better. I moved across because my Android phones kept having hardware issues. I think I'll probably go back to Android after this experiment.
I recently bought an original iPhone SE in hopes of using a smaller device. But I can't use it for anything worthwhile because I can't sign into an Apple ID due to having encrypted backups on my account, which was introduced in iOS 16.2. The SE only supports 15.8.5. So I'd have to disable encrypted backups for all of my other devices in order to sign into my account.
Why am I unable to use Apple Music on my device while I can use it from a web browser or from an android phone that don't have encrypted iCloud backups enabled?
Unfortunately this also prevents me from jailbreaking the device because I have to sign into an Apple account in order to trust a developer certificate on the device required for the jailbreaking tool. It's my device! Let me approve of the certificate without an Apple ID!
Oh, that sounds annoying. I also bought an SE 2016 128GB as "Offline-First" / de-Appled device. I think what I did was just signing in to App Store, not fully adding my Apple ID to the device. It now serves as a time capsule, has all the classic apps like Doodle Jump, Fruit Ninja, MiniMetro etc and some resource-light open source apps like CoMaps, fileexplorer with connection / offline sync to Nextcloud. Jailbroken via Palera1n (Think I didn't have to approve install any certificate)
Where are you located at?
What are your actual complaints? And have you tried the trash fire that is Android?
Do you think they just got a smartphone for the first time a few months ago?
I switched to Android in 2021 after almost a decade using iPhone and I was surprised to find modern Android is actually very good. I remember the early days of Android being a trash fire but since around ~2020 it seems to have gotten a lot better. For various reasons im looking to switch back to the iPhone but I know it'll be a case of giving up some good things on Android in exchange for other things being better on the iPhone.
I updated my reply ^
> But, man, Apple hardware still rocks. Can't deny that.
They really dodged a bullet there. 2016-2020 Apple laptop hardware definitely didn't rock. It's good they did an about-face on some of those bad ideas.
The fact they were able to turn around their hardware division after all that is the only thing which gives me hope they might be capable of doing an about-face on software.
Are you referring to the butterfly keyboard and TouchBar?
FWIW, I think the Touchbar was close to being a good idea, it was just missing haptics.
They didn't rock but... modern MacBook Pro models are bigger and heavier and have a notch (and yes, I know technically the notch is more screen rather than less, and that one can simply use the space below, but I still don't like it). I also liked how you could charge the older models from either side and still have 3 free Thunderbolt ports.
Debatable since the nub is still around on all their devices. My M3 work laptop definitely feels like a playskool toy.
You can’t get more brain dead that taking away important screen real estate then making the argument that you get more real estate because it’s now all tucked into a corner.
God forbid there be a black strip on the sides of the screen. How did we ever live?!??
I really like my macbook with the notch. The bezels are smaller and you can fit a larger screen in a similar footprint to previous macbooks without the notch.
Except Apple increased the height of the screen by exactly as many pixels as the notch is tall, so yes, your windows actually do get more real estate compared with the pre-notch models. I’m not going to argue that it’s free of problems, but it doesn’t come at the cost of usable desktop space.
Also worth pointing out that this design allows a substantial footprint reduction, which for example puts the 13.6” Macbook Air within striking distance of traditional bezel 12” laptops in terms of physical size. Some people care about that.
It does come at the cost of useable desktop space because if you don’t use a separate monitor with your portable device, you can’t see or use icons in the task bar.
And peoples suggestions is to install 3rd party software or just deal with it. It doesn’t help that fanatics feel the need to tell you which parts of the screen are and aren’t important real estate. Like fuck me and my opinions right?
“Well actually mathematically there’s more real estate in less convenient places so it’s fine.” Is so…depressing to watch people just give in to any little idea that comes out of this company’s PR department, like their logic is The Only truth.
It’s a legitimate issue in one sense, but another way of seeing it is that outside of a select few programs that actually need to be that way, Windows-tray-style apps are something of an anti-pattern. Most apps would be better as plain old dock apps or maybe headless daemons with HUD style UI summoned by a keystroke and thus not need menubar icons. It’s genuinely weird that we’ve ended up in a place where more than a fractional number of users have a bajillion menubar icons to contend with.
My suggestion would be to buy a laptop you like, then.
Or if your work is forcing it on you, I'm sorry but that's not the fault of people who happen to enjoy it. Maybe ask if you can get a different machine?
I’ve tried all those options. I only use my Apple laptop for work and for everything else I use a well designed piece of hardware, a Framework laptop. I’m a hardware prude and only work on professional hardware with fantastic design that doesn’t obfuscate my screen for an argument about pixel space and a desire to standout at the cost of sensibility.
Putting aside the keyboard debacle a lot of the blame for that can be directed at Intel's door. They consistently over promised and underdelivered.
Fuck man, I worked on the original Mac OS back in '83, when all the work was in assembly. Know what happened? Apple happened. That company is fucked up something supreme. The entire premise behind that original graphical UI was never user experience, it was 'the users are idiots, we have to control them'.
We know each and every person who worked on the Mac because of projects like folklore.org. Which one are you?
Besides the sibling comments, if you read books like "Steve Jobs & the Next Big Thing", this point of view is quite detailed there.
Younger readers will find out that modern Apple attitude is quite similar to the early years of the Macintosh being sold to universities.
The be nice and think different phase was only during the time they were about to close doors.
as his user profile indicates: Blake Senftner. I don't see him mentioned on folklore.org, but that doesn't mean he didn't participate in some way.
https://www.quora.com/profile/Blake-Senftner
> Original Macintosh Beta Tester and Mac 3rd Party Developer (‘83-’85)
I was a teen game developer with my own games in Sears & K Mart nationwide for the US, for the Vic-20 and the C-64, and was invited as a representative of the independent games industry. When my involvement was ending, Apple then told me they changed their mind and was not going to support independent games for the Mac at all. But offered to waive that restriction if I paid them $30K and gave them full editorial control over what I published. Nope.
It's wild how fast Apple pivoted from Woz just wanting to make a PC anyone could write and play their own video games on to "Nah we want full control of every last bit, fuck your indie games".
I think Apple marketing understands human motivation and the rarely acknowledged super strength of prestige marketing. Apple's marketing very much leans into every one of their products must be perceived as a high prestige item to own, or they will not release it. When the Mac was brand new, they cultivated and guarded that prestige like a hawk.
I'd wonder if especially at that point in history, trying to appear as a gaming platform would be a liability.
An early Mac was not a great gaming computer even by 1980s standards, and the last thing you want is Commodore or Atari running an ad saying "Apple's $2500 black-and-white prestige piece doesn't play games as well as a $299 C64/800XL". Not to mention the stink of the US video game market crash hovering around anything game-related.
If they pivot directly towards more professional workstation/publication/art department positions, nobody's making that point. (Now I'm thinking of the time "Boot", or maybe it was already "Maximum PC" by then, reviewed a SGI O2 and said it was impressive, but had limited game selections.)
Quickdraw was revolutionary, it had all the optimizations, and then all the code was in assembly. Things like classic arcade games were very much possible. I had a lunar lander game with side scrolling landscape, a dig dug clone, a variation on donkey kong, and a variant of Robotron. Apple thought that would attract the wrong impression, they wanted the design and typography crowd. Can't say they were wrong, to be honest.
He worked on a beta as part of the Apple Professional Developer's Program at Harvard.
I recently installed Ubuntu on my gaming machine. It was a bit of a learning curve, but I am still able to game, and I can play around with software without being treated like a criminal. It's great.
I still use Mac for dev, but only because I don't really feel like messing around with Linux on a work computer.
Not far from my philosophy. If I'm being paid, I'll use whatever I'm getting paid to use. But on my own, I'll choose to learn tools that will be around for a long time, and won't get taken away by some rent-seeking company (i.e. open-source).
Ubuntu is great once you remove the motd advertisements.
Maybe I'm just too used to advertising blatantly in my windows env that I'm not noticing ads on Ubuntu. Which MOTD ads are you talking about?
The ones you remove by
https://canonical.com/legal/motdhttps://support.tools/remove-ubuntu-pro-advertisement-apt-up...
I do not understand this rhetoric of Apple hardware being so amazing. The only moderately impressive thing they've done for years is the M chips. Beyond that, it's just crippled, overpriced, and unrepairable.
They have shiny cases, yay. I'll take my ugly Thinkpad and actually get shit done over a shiny case and glossy screen.
I think it's a bit more than that. I like that I can easily swap the SSD and DRAM in my Thinkpad. But Apple has definitely done some interesting things including:
- good thermals (especially vs. Thinkpad P series), even supporting fanless operation on the MacBook Air
- excellent microphone and speaker array (makes people much more intelligible on both sides during Zoom calls)
- excellent multitouch trackpad with good palm rejection (though for a trackpoint device Thinkpad is your best bet)
- unified GPU and CPU memory with up to 135 GB/s bandwidth (downside: DRAM is not upgradable)
- host-managed flash storage (downside: SSD is not upgradable)
And of course the 10-20 hour battery life is hard to beat. Only downside is I'll forget to plug in at all.
Historically, Apple has innovated quite a bit in the laptop space, including: moving the keyboard back for the modern palm rest design (PowerBook, 1991); active-matrix color display (PowerBook 180c, 1993); integrated wi-fi and handle antenna (iBook, 1999); Unix-based OS that could still run MS Office and Photoshop (Mac OS X, 2000 onward); full-featured thin metal laptop with gigabit ethernet (PowerBook G4 Titanium, 2001); pre-ultrabook thin laptop that fits in a manila envelope (MacBook Air, 2008); high-resolution display and all-flash storage in an ever-thinner design ("Retina" MacBook Pro, 2012); going all-in on USB-C/Thunderbolt and 5K external "retina" display (MacBook Pro, 2016); unprecedented performance, and a tandem OLED display with <10ms touch-to-pixel latency, in an absurdly thin iPad, which can also be used as a "laptop" (iPad M4 + magic keyboard, 2024); etc. Some of the innovations also failed, such as the touchbar, dual-controller trackpad, and "butterfly" keyboard which plagued the 2016 models.
I mean, having 2 hours of active use vs 10 hours is quite a bit of difference, quite a bit more meaningful than "shiny case".
Mac is great hardware to be sure. I have to say though, I much prefer an S25 Ultra with Samsung's version of "nanotexture" — even with iPhone 17's improved (?) anti-reflective screen.
I've been very patient with iOS 26. I tell myself - so long as its foundation is right, they'll iron out these details. But it is properly bad often and at times extremely frustrating.
The funny thing is the annoying popups on Windows look like advertising copy from the web post Microsoft getting grid and flexbox into HTML to support HTML-based applications. They at least try to be visually enticing.
Annoying popups on MacOS look like the 1999 remake of the modal dialogs from the 1984 Mac, I guess with some concessions to liquid glass.
Funny that a lot of people seem to have different Liquid Glass experiences, are we being feature flagged? I don't see the massive disruption to icons that the author seems but it does seem to me that certain icons have been drained of all their contrast and just look bleh now, particularly the settings icon on my iPhone. I don't see a bold design based on transparency, I just see the edges of things look like they've been anti-antialiased now. It's like somebody just did some random vandalization of the UI without any rhyme or reason. It's not catastrophic but it's no improvement.
It is catastrophic if you have older devices.
All this wank to waste the power of faster and faster chips.
I have flipped every imaginable switch and even set up a work profile, and I have not yet been able to turn off desktop notifications on my new work Mac. Every time I log in there's a persistent notification about... something stuck in the corner. The notification does not explain itself, clicking it just drops me into a system menu. Usually there's three or four such notifications queued up.
So it just lives there permanently on the desktop and I avoid using the thing as much as possible. I do all of my work functions through SSH and leave the Mac in a corner of my desk with the screen closed.
I swear, MacOS actively tries to be as annoying and intrusive as possible. Every time I touch the damn thing some new behavior reveals itself. Like there are two sets of hotkeys for copy/paste and which one you need to use appears to be entirely random per-window.
Thankfully work lets me use linux on my main machine and I almost never have to deal with goddamn MacOS. I would rather daily drive Windows 11 with copilot and cortana and piles of bossware than plain MacOS.
I am, better, I am old enough to have seen Apple in the good and bad times, and tell that Apple's major attention to detail, and catering to developers, was a side effect from being really close to shutdown the whole business.
Now they have plenty of money, the attitude during early Apple years is back.
Unsurprising that they'd end up there, at the time Mac was allowed to get away with fewer security pop-ups by (relative) obscurity. Fortunately Windows still manages to run ahead as the even worse villain, as I wouldn't even let a Windows 11 PC in my house these days.
I often get third party popups from software vendors which asks me for my MacOS password. I have checked several times and these are "legit" (as in, the popup comes from a who it says it does and it's a reputable company). It's wild to me that Apple have painted themselves into a world where it's expected that users give their OS password to third party apps.
MacOS and iOS both seem to have an insatiable hunger for passwords. The most aggravating scenario for me by far is when the App Store on iOS, with no consistent pattern I have been able to identify, makes me reenter my entire massive Apple ID password instead of the usual Face ID prompt to download ... a free app.
I can’t get it to use my password manager on that screen either, and navigating to another app closes the modal so you have to copy your password and then start over.
Wait, that's actually never legit. If the password popup comes from the OS on behalf of the vendor, that's OK; the third-party party never has access to your password, just a time-limited auth token to allow it to do something privileged.
Ok? I don't know if it's the OS on behalf of the app or not. It's a password prompt that doesn't even have an affordance for biometrics, unlike other MacOS admin prompts. It's commonplace in MacOS applications.
This is an example of what I'm talking about https://www.reddit.com/r/Slack/comments/1geva4f/how_do_i_sto...
This is good for security becuase you're giving temporary access for a helper binary to do privileged stuff in a limited scope.
From the UX perspective, yes, it is triggered from the app.
It's been a long time since I used the Core Foundation API but you trigger a request, and then get back a token from the OS that grants you permission to do stuff.
I don't know if this is current or not:
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Se...
You're not sure if anyone on HN is more than 14 years old? I mean, I feel you, but the odds are...
I watched the whole video and laughed so hard! Thanks for sharing this!
> But, man, Apple hardware still rocks. Can't deny that.
Ah yes, the Johnny Ive era of "no ports on Macbooks except USB-C, and hope you like touchbars!" was fantastic. Not to mention how heavy the damn things are. Oh and the sharp edges of the case where my palms rest. And the chiclet keyboards with .0001 mm of key travel. I'll take a carbon fiber Thinkpad with an OLED display any day of the week, thank you. Macbooks feel like user hostile devices and are the epitome of form over function.
I don't mind that the Macbooks only have USB-C ports. Unlike many PCs, where the USB-C ports can't be used for charging, or can't be used for high-speed data transfer, or can't be used for external displays, or can't be used by certain software that only speaks USB 2.0, etc., the Macbooks let any USB-C port do anything. It's a forward-thinking decision, even if it was primarily made for aesthetic reasons.
What I do mind is that there's only 3 of them.
The transition era was certainly annoying, but now that it's over I think the Mac experience is objectively worse. My PC laptop has 2 USB-C ports that can be used for charging, display, 40 Gbps transfer, etc., just like my Macbook Air. The difference is that the PC also has 2 USB-A ports and an HDMI port. This means that I'm able to plug in a flash drive or connect an external display without having to remember to bring a dongle with me.
I largely agree that PCs have caught up feature-wise, but because they took longer to get there, I still have a couple crappy USB-C ports on PCs that are otherwise fine.
The problem with the 2 USB-C ports on modern PC laptops is that one of them pretty much has to be reserved for the charger, whereas the MBP has a MagSafe port that you can charge with instead. So it really only feels like you have one USB-C port and the other ports are just there as a consolation. That might work out to roughly equal, but I don't think it leaves the Mac off worse. I don't hate the dongles so much though.
It wouldn't have hurt to have some USB-A and HDMI on the MBP--the Minis can pull it off, so clearly the hardware is capable--but more (Thunderbolt) USB-C would still be the best option IMO. USB-A (definitely) and HDMI (probably) will eventually be relics someday, even if they are here for a little while longer.
The current Macbook Pro design also includes an HDMI port.
Can those USB-C ports charge your battery if it is completely empty?
Yes, they're the only charging ports on the laptop.
Didn't they have some issues when you tried charging from the left side ports? Eg overheating and throttling etc.
There are some models of MacBook Pro where one side has more 'thermal headroom' than the other side. I have one of those models, and I can't remember which side it is.
USB-C connectors are much less reliable than their predecessors due to their design though. I have several connectors that failed, either they no longer grip the cable securely or they just lose contact randomly.
I'm sure it's handy for mobile devices where size and versatility trumps everything, but on laptop/desktop machines where longer-term usage is expected I would prefer something more reliable.
Are you comparing USB-C to its direct predecessors, things like (micro-)USB-A/B, (mini-)HDMI, and (mini-)DP, or to more distant ancestors like PS/2 and D-sub/VGA/DVI?
Comparing to USB-A specifically.
C is absolutely better than the micro/mini variants, but not the full-size ports.
Interesting. I can see how USB-A has better friction/grip in the port (when made properly anyway), but I can't say it has better longevity; I've broken plenty of USB-A connectors and even ports. I am also glad to be rid of the "which way is up" dance, and I don't think anyone has shed any tears for the loss of USB-B.
USB-A has much larger pins, meaning it will continue to work even if slightly damaged. USB-C has much higher pin density so the slightest misalignment (due to damage or just bad manufacturing tolerances) causes dropouts.
I'm just salty because I will have to replace either the ports on my Macbook or my USB-C wireless headphone receiver (both are a pricey endeavor, not to mention the downtime of having the laptop shipped for repair) just for the same issue to most likely reoccur a year down the line since it wasn't a result of any kind of misuse (both devices are exclusively used in an office environment and otherwise in brand new condition).
I forgot where I read it, but there's apparently a Jobs policy of "one standard and two proprietary ports" or something, so to allow data to be ingested easily and freely shared inside Apple ecosystem, but not exported back out to the outside world with same ease.
Which is like, a great way to subsidize junk USB hubs...? But for sure they love following through with policies.
That is complete BS, Macs have never had any proprietary data ports on them. Serial, SCSI, Ethernet, USB, FireWire, Thunderbolt, USB-C have all been standards.
Well there was a proprietary Ethernet port for a while.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Attachment_Unit_Interfac...
Apple serial port used proprietary Apple connectors.
Apple SCSI ports used nonstandard Apple connectors.
Apple Ethernet port was just Ethernet, except Macs preferred AppleTalk for networking, which was a purported competitor to Ethernet.
Apple USB port was just USB, except they were among the firsts, so it was kind of ex-proprietary.
Apple FireWire was just IEEE1394, except(combine Ethernet and USB)
Apple Thunderbolt was(combine all above)
Apple USB-C is(combine all above)
What I see here is an evolution away from proprietary connectors (but I definitely agree that they strongly favored such connectors in the past). By the time of mini-DP and Thunderbolt, Apple and Intel were working jointly and the technology came to both PCs and Macs. By the time of USB-C, it was basically the entire electronics industry working together with Apple, and the end result has come to just about every kind of electronic device made by nearly every vendor. It doesn't get any less proprietary than that.
The bizarre part of the USB-C story is not Apple's involvement or early adoption of it, but rather that the mobile hardware side of Apple refused to support it. That they clung to the Lightning connector until the EU forced them to drop it, while their computer division had long since and enthusiastically adopted USB-C, is much more damning.
I still don't see your point.
Your argument was they had a rule of "one standard and two proprietary ports" as a means to "allow data to be ingested easily and freely shared inside Apple ecosystem, but not exported back out to the outside world with same ease".
For serial they used mini-DIN to save space on the back of the machine instead of a random mix of DB-25 and DE-9 on the PC side. My family and everyone I knew used a dime-a-dozen cable to use a typical PC modem, data was shared feely. There was no "one standard" port at this time to get data "ingested", serial went both ways.
Even on PCs, to do anything serial you needed hardware and driver support anyway, that was the blocker, not the shape of the port. If Apple adopted DB-26 for serial, how would that let data share more freely?
For SCSI, the DB-25 Apple used was not proprietary. And even in the System 6 days they had Apple File Exchange to access FAT-formatted disks to write data out for PC users.
For Ethernet, Apple started building in Ethernet as standard before PC makers. They sold a laptop with Ethernet built-in in 1994, this was unheard of on PC laptops.
As for AppleTalk, they pushed LocalTalk at a time before PCs had any built-in networking whatsoever, a PC network card cost a hundred bux and were only used by corporations whereas in the home if you had a Mac you could make a network with a printer cable between two machines, Apple got it for cheap by spending an extra 10 bucks on RS-422 for their serial ports, why wouldn't you advertise that?
If you're talking about AppleTalk the network protocol rather than LocalTalk the physical protocol, Apple bundled TCP/IP with MacOS before Windows did ("Trumpet WinSock" was third party software), back when Microsoft thought they could stop people from adopting the internet since "The Microsoft Network" was so going to be so much better.
Arguing that adopting the Apple making PowerPC machines adopting the Intel-defined USB which was already on PCs for years before was a means to keep people from moving data out from the "internet Mac" (which was advertised as letting you share information with the world with "there is no step 3") is just... it makes no sense.
iOS on the other hand... Completely different thing.
And technically (the best way, right?) there's a whole thing to suss out between AppleTalk, 422, and LocalTalk, hahahahahah, but it's effectively as proprietary as PS/2 ports were, until they weren't. And ADB was 100% proprietary iirc, but I'm not going to look it up for you.
TBF, Apple did publish public standards for LocalTalk and AppleTalk and there was third-party hardware that implemented it (including stuff like switches that Apple never implemented themselves)
ADB was definitely proprietary, but arguably it wasn't a data port, nobody used ADB to output data.
Wuh?
On all but the top tier MBPs, USB C ports on Macs have different specs for data transfer (often the ones on the right of the machine will have half the transfer speed).
Without trying to be pedantic, not all USB-C ports on Apple computers support Thunderbolt.
I haven't encountered this, but I've also only used the Apple Silicon devices. This might explain why there are so few ports, though: Thunderbolt is basically PCIe and has AFAIK direct lanes to the CPU; more full-featured ports = more PCIe lanes = much more complexity/expense.
The difference is in the desktop systems. That's where there are USB-C ports without Thunderbolt (e.g. Mac Mini).
Damn, you're right. I have an M1 Mac Mini and both ports are Thunderbolt. I recall, and Wikipedia corroborates, that the M2 Mac Mini could come with either two or four ports, but all were Thunderbolt. Now though, the M4 ones, besides getting an awful facelift, also seem to have sacrificed one Thunderbolt port (and both USB-A ports?!) to "gain" two non-Thunderbolt USB-C ports. What a terrible trade IMO.
I only have 2 USB-C ports, and most of the time I have nothing plugged in (but power). Sometimes ethernet USB-C when moving large files.
I find the keyboards terrible, even the modern ones. I much preferred the 2006-2007 MacBook Pro keyboards.
Those are all legit criticisms but also be fair. They eventually did get rid of the touchbar. USB-C-only was merely ahead of its time. They improved the keyboards.
And even at their worst they were still much better than any Windows laptops, if only for the touchpad. I have yet to use a Windows laptop with a touchpad even close to the trackpad's that Apple had 15 years ago. And the build quality and styling is still unbeaten. Do Windows laptop makers still put shitty stickers all over them?
USB-C only is still a nuisance to this very day and remains the thing I hate most about my Macbook. Without fail there is never an adapter to be found when I need it.
I'm kinda bewildered to see people defend it. Even Apple knew they were wrong, they didn't put an HDMI port on the new Mac chassis by mistake.
Case in point that people will never admit that Apple messes up, even if Apple themselves will.
I owned multiple Macbooks that built a positive static charge when they were on, instilling a Pavlovian fear of being shocked into anyone that used it. Those were fun.
If you use the 3-prong version of the power adapter to connect to a grounded outlet, this problem goes away. Of course, Apple doesn't actually sell a 3-prong plug for their charger in Europe... so us lucky folks in the EU have to get a 3rd party one off the internet
Yes, they do. [1] for Italian outlets, [2] for many of the others. I'm sure I don't need to continue.
[1]: https://www.apple.com/it/shop/product/mw2n3ci/a/prolunga-per...
[2]: https://www.apple.com/fr/shop/product/mw2n3z/a/câble-d’exten...
I suspect what they meant is that there isn't an official Schuko nub that slides onto the brick and lets you hang it directly from the socket rather than carrying an extra meter of cable around. There is a BS1363 one, and those are only legit feasible in a grounded configuration (although I guess you could use a plastic ground spade to lift the child protection slider inside the socket if you were a particularly unpleasant engineer). Nice for those of us in British-adjacent countries.
I'm talking about the non-corded variants. Carrying an extra metre of cable around just to get the grounding prong is not great.
As another poster mentioned, it's particularly annoying because Apple does ship the UK adapter in 3-pin grounded form
YMMV. I throw away the non-corded variants because they rarely fit in the spaces that people think to put outlets, especially as the chargers have grown and (particularly) train operators love putting outlets attached to tables with about 5mm of clearance.
That’s nothing to do with static electricity, it’s capacitive coupling through the safety capacitors in the power supply. The chassis sits at 90vac or so as a result, it’s not a safety issue it’s FCC compliance for emitted noise.
Is this generally true for laptops / phones?
I've often wondered why I can tell by touch whether a device is charging or not from the slight "vibration" sensation I get when gently touching the case.
For ungrounded / 2-prong outlet devices, yeah.
It's often noticeable if you have a point contact of metal against your skin; sharp edge / screw / speaker grill, etc. Once you have decent coupling between your body and the laptop, you won't feel the tingle / zap.
They're called Y-caps if you want to delve deeper into them and their use in power supplies.
I get that too. I was wondering if it was just me.
They still do. My m1, m1max and m4max Macbook Pros all build a positive static charge. It isn't even something that renders it "returnable" because I observed it on every single Macbook in the last 4-5 years so I just assume that's just how Macbook Pros are now.
This hasn't changed in at least 2 decades: I was getting zapped by Apple metal laptops circa 2004. But I have never encountered this problem when using a grounded plug.
It was also a lot worse for me when plugged into outlets in an old house in Mexico, especially when my bare feet were touching the terracotta floor tiles; it's not really an issue in a recently re-wired house in California with a wood floor, using the same laptops, power strips, etc.
If you are having this issue and you currently plug a 2-pronged plug into a grounded outlet, try using Apple's 3-pronged plug instead, and I expect it would go away. If you don't have grounded outlets, then that's a bit more complicated to solve.
That's what confuses me, I am using the cable with three prongs, it is grounded. I am beginning to suspect some other appliance I am plugging into it that is responsible of the build-up of charge, but then why is it not finding its way to the ground... something doesn't add up but has been my experience consistently.
Perhaps the outlet isn't properly grounded?
Is there any laptop with a metal body out there that does not have this issue? I've had two RedmiBook by Xiaomi and both has that vibrating electric feeling to them when plugged in.
It's an artifact of the charger.
This comment explains it well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45686427
That era sucked for sure, but since (I think) 2021, macbook pros have magsafe, 3x USB-C, an HDMI port, and an SD card. I had a 2014 MBP I was waiting to upgrade once they came up with a sensible redesign, and I'd say they did!
I still have my 2014, along with a 2021 MBP for work, and still love them as machines for my usage profile - writing software/firmware, and occasional PCB design. The battery life is good, M-series performance is great, screen is decent-to-good, trackpad is still best in class, and macos is _okay_ in my book. The keyboard isn't amazing as I prefer mechanical for sure, but I still type faster on a macbook keyboard than anything else. That being said, I designed a mechanical keyboard that sits on top of the macbook keyboard so I can enjoy that better typing experience.
Pretty dang happy with my setup.
Most of what you're talking about is from MacBooks of 5+ years ago on a completely different processor architecture.
I miss the Powerbook G3 series. That was some fantastically modular design.
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> I wonder if anyone else here is old enough to remember the "I'm a Mac", "And I'm a PC" ads.
Those ads ran from 2006 to 2009. That’s between 16 and 19 years ago. How young do you imagine the typical HN commenter is?
> There was one that was about all the annoying security pop-ups Windows (used to?) have.
Those have been relentlessly mocked on the Mac for years. I remember a point where several articles were written making that exact comparison. People have been calling it “macOS Vista” since before Apple Silicon was a thing.
> WIW, it starts here: https://youtu.be/qfv6Ah_MVJU?t=230
A bit better quality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuqZ8AqmLPY
> Those ads ran from 2006 to 2009. That’s between 16 and 19 years ago. How young do you imagine the typical HN commenter is?
Part of getting old is accepting that 20 years was a long time ago and not everyone is going to remember the same commercials we saw two decades ago, including people who were children during the ad campaign.
I've been a Mac user on and off since the 80s and I think one of the biggest changes is how separate the Mac ecosystem once was.
It reminds me of stories I've heard about the Cold War and how Soviet scientists and engineers had very little exchange or trade with the West, but made wristwatches and cameras and manned rockets, almost in a parallel universe. These things coexisted in time with the Western stuff, but little to nothing in the supply chain was shared; these artifacts were essentially from a separate world.
That's how it felt as a Mac user in the 80s and 90s. In the early days you couldn't swap a mouse between a Mac and an IBM PC, much less a hard drive or printer. And most software was written pretty much from the ground up for a single platform as well.
And I remember often thinking how much that sucked. My sister had that cool game that ran on her DOS machine at college, or heck, she just had a file on a floppy disk but I couldn't read it on my Mac.
Now so much has been standardized - everything is USB or Wifi or Bluetooth or HTML or REST. Chrom(ium|e) or Firefox render pages the same on Mac or Windows or Linux. Connect any keyboard or webcam or whatever via USB. Share files between platforms with no issues. Electron apps run anywhere.
These days it feels like Mac developers (even inside of Apple) are no longer a continent away from other developers. Coding skills are probably more transferable these days, so there's probably more turnover in the Apple development ranks. There's certainly more influence from web design and mobile design rather than a small number of very opinionated people saying "this is how a Macintosh application should work".
And I guess that's ok. As a positive I don't have the cross-platform woes anymore. And perhaps the price to be paid is that the Mac platform is less cohesive and more cosmopolitan (in the sense that it draws influence, sometimes messily, from all over).
> It reminds me of stories I've heard about the Cold War and how Soviet scientists and engineers had very little exchange or trade with the West, but made wristwatches and cameras and manned rockets, almost in a parallel universe
They also had an extensive industrial espionage program. In particular, most of the integrated circuits made in the Soviet Union were not original designs. They were verbatim copies of Western op-amps, logic gates, and CPUs. They had pin- and instruction-compatible knock-offs of 8086, Z80, etc. Rest assured, that wasn't because they loved the instruction set and recreated it from scratch.
Soviet scientists were on the forefront of certain disciplines, but tales of technological ingenuity are mostly just an attempt to invent some romantic lore around stolen designs.
> They were verbatim copies of Western op-amps, logic gates, and CPUs.
DEC etched a great Easter egg on to the die of the MicroVAX CPU because of this: "VAX - when you care enough to steal the very best".
https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html
> tales of technological ingenuity are mostly just an attempt to invent some romantic lore around stolen designs.
This is a biased take. One can make a similar and likely more factual claim about the US , where largely every innovation in many different disciplines is dictated and targeted for use by the war industry.
And while there were many low quality knockoff electronics, pre-collapse USSR achieved remarkable feats in many different disciplines the US was falling behind at.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Russian_innovation...
> One can make a similar and likely more factual claim about the US , where largely every innovation in many different disciplines is dictated and targeted for use by the war industry.
That's a complete non-sequitur.
>where largely every innovation in many different disciplines is dictated and targeted for use by the war industry.
As opposed to the USSR who's wikipedia page for innovations proudly features, lets see;
Aerial Refueling
Military robot Paratrooping
Flame tank
Self-propelled multiple rocket launcher
Thermonuclear fusion (bomb)
AK-47
ICBMs
Tsar Bomb
to name a very small selection
It's almost as if you have it completely backwards and it was the USSR who was centrally planning to innovate in the art of killing.
I don't know if you deliberately skipped the 90% of other inventions that had nothing to do with -mind you- defense from American imperialism or you're being dense on purpose. Probably both?
Anyway just glancing the respective page for US "innovations" one can easily tell which country had the most obsessive offensive war industry.
There was a Star Talk recently where they talked about how when they divided up the German aerospace scientists after WWII, Russia ended up with majority KISS scientists and we got the perfectionist, superior engineering ones. I always figured that was just a US vs Russia ethos difference. And maybe that’s why they picked who they did but maybe I have it backward.
That seems completely unbelievable to me, of the thousands (tens of thousands?) of scientists captured and recruited by the allies they just happened to split along philosophical lines? And then they had some huge cultural impact? As opposed to just being Shanghai'd by whatever nation got to them first then absorbed into the greater social and economic fabric of that nation.
I always assumed it was just which army captured them.
Yes, and many German scientists went to great lengths to surrender to Western forces. I think von Braun was one of them.
“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun
Seems analogous to Apple and Microsoft in the 80s and 90s. Though I'm not sure which country Xerox would be. Maybe Germany in terms of the technology lifted by the later powers, but it seems a like a bit of a rude comparison!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_of_Silicon_Valley
I think apple had a trajectory, and the best time was at the end of the steve jobs era. After he left, they have plummeted.
I think they were in their own little world, and when they got past that with unix-based OSX and moved from powerpc to intel, they entered the best time.
The PC-based macs were very interoperable and could dual-boot windows. They had PCIe and could work with PC graphics cards, they used usb bt and more. Macs intereoperated and cooperated with the rest of the computing world. The OS worked well enough that other unix programs with a little tweaking could be compiled and run on macs. Engineers, tech types and scientists would buy and use mac laptops.
But around the time steve jobs passed away they've lost a lot of that. They grabbed control of the ecosystem and didn't interoperate anymore. The arm chips are impressive but apple is not interoperating any more. They have pcie slots in the mac pro, but they aren't good for much except maybe nvme storage. without strong leadership at the top, they are more of a faceless turn-the-crank iterator.
(not that I like what microsoft has morphed into either)
True, also before, during, and after the Intel transition the ecosystem of indie and boutique apps for Macs was great. Panic and The Omni Group, just to name two boutique development companies, were probably at their peak in terms of desktop software. Besides, Mac OS X Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard were polished and the UI was usable and cohesive.
Right now, the quality and attention to detail have plummeted. There is also a lot of iOS-ification going on. I wish they focused less on adding random features, and more on correctness, efficiency, and user experience. The attention to detail of UI elements in e.g. Snow Leopard, with a touch of skeuomorphism and reminiscent of classic Mac OS, is long gone.
Man, I love OmniGraffle. I guess design tools have generally improved over the years, but a couple of decades ago colleagues thought I was some kind of wizard for being able to easily whip up nice finite state machine diagrams in OmniGraffle.
Those of us that are old enough to remember, Apple is back in a John Sculley phase, however this time around there are no founders to rescue the company a second time.
Not that it needs to, as it isn't bleeding money like on the A/UX, Copland and Taligent/OpenDoc days, however they risk to become only the iDevices company.
Yeah, Microsoft apparently is also back on their former self.
> Mac platform is less cohesive and more cosmopolitan
Counter example: Blender
It used to have a extremely idiosyncratic UI. I will only say right click select.
A big part of the UI redesign was making it behave more like other 3d applications. And it succeeded in doing so in a way that older users actually liked and that made it more productive and coherent to use.
What I am saying is, those are different dimensions. You can have a more cohesive UI while adhere more to standards.
There is still lot of weird sacred cows that Macs would do very well to slaughter like the inverted mouse wheel thing or refusing to implement proper alt tab behavior.
You can have both, follow established standards and norms and be more cohesive.
The problem is simply that the quality isn't what it used to be on the software side. Which is following industry trends but still.
See, it's things like saying proper alt-tab behaviour that means we'll never solve it. While Windows invented alt-tab, the way macOS does it is the macOS way, so if it changed I would be far less productive.
I mean right click select is also objectively better than left click select and the blender way but we still solved it.
Didn't that stuff start around 1998 though? That's when they started pushing USB and networking by default.
And then OS X came along, with bash and Unix and all, and there was a lot of shared developer knowledge.
But they still managed to keep a very distinctive and excellent OS, for 20 years after that.
The quality has dropped only recently.
This situation persists: for instance, try to write to an external disk formatted with NTFS using the GUI tools alone. Baffling why Apple doesn't simply obtain a license in order to gain this capability. Big unnecessary inconvenience, primarily for their own users.
exFAT to the rescue
Unfortunately, if the Mac isn't distinct from Windows and desktop Linux in some way, then what's the point?
Yes, as a long-time Mac user who now uses PCs at home but still uses a work-issued MacBook Pro, I greatly appreciate how Macs since the late 1990s-early 2000s are compatible with the PC ecosystem when it comes to peripherals, networking, and file systems.
However, what has been lost is "The Macintosh Way"; a distinctly Macintosh approach to computing. There's something about using the classic Mac OS or Jobs-era Mac OS X: it's well-designed across the entire ecosystem. I wish Apple stayed the course with defending "The Macintosh Way"; I am not a fan of the Web and mobile influences that have crept into macOS, and I am also not a fan of the nagging that later versions of macOS have in the name of "security" and promoting Apple products.
What the Mac has going for it today is mind-blowing ARM chips that are very fast and energy efficient. My work-issued MacBook Pro has absolutely amazing battery life, whereas my personal Framework 13's battery life is abysmal by comparison.
What's going to happen, though, if it's possible to buy a PC that's just as good as an ARM Mac in terms of both performance and battery life?
> What's going to happen, though, if it's possible to buy a PC that's just as good as an ARM Mac in terms of both performance and battery life?
Their advantage against Microsoft is that the Mac UX may be degrading, but the Windows UX is degrading much more quickly. Sure modern Mac OS is worse to use than either Snow Leopard or Windows 7, but at least you don't get the "sorry, all your programs are closed and your battery's at 10% because we rebooted your computer in the middle of the night to install ads for Draft Kings in the start menu" experience of modern Windows.
Their advantage against Linux is that while there are Linux-friendly OEMs, you can't just walk into a store and buy a Linux computer. The vast majority of PCs ship with Windows, and most users will stick with what comes with the computer. It definitely is possible to buy a computer preloaded with Linux, but you have to already know you want Linux and be willing to special order it online instead of buying from a store.
That advantage only works in countries where general population can afford to buy Mac hardware, and since Apple will never make hardware at lower prices, Windows will keep having 70% of desktop market share at global scale.
> since Apple will never make hardware at lower prices
Apple has a deal with Walmart to sell the M1 Macbook Air for $600, so that's their current low-cost option. For the future, data-miners have found evidence that Apple will be making a new low-cost Macbook with the A18 Pro (chip from the iPhone 16 Pro), set to launch in 2026. https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/30/new-macbook-with-a18-ch...
That is more than one month salary in many countries.
Don't compare prices from wealthy countries like US with the rest of the world.
How many M1 do you think Apple is selling in African countries?
As an example.
> However, what has been lost is "The Macintosh Way"; a distinctly Macintosh approach to computing. There's something about using the classic Mac OS or Jobs-era Mac OS X: it's well-designed across the entire ecosystem.
As someone who has never really enjoyed using macs, I do agree with this. It's probably why I don't mind them as much these days - Using MacOS in 2025 just kind of feels like a more annoying version of a Linux DE with less intent behind it. The way macs used to work did not jive with me well, but everything felt like it was built carefully to make sense to someone.
> As a positive I don't have the cross-platform woes anymore
It's certainly better than it was, that said Apple really try to isolate themselves by intentionally nerfing/restricting MacOS software to Apple APIs and not playing ball with standards.
> My sister had that cool game that ran on her DOS machine at college, or heck, she just had a file on a floppy disk but I couldn't read it on my Mac.
My MacBook Pro has an integrated GPU that supposedly rivals that of desktop GPUs. However, I have to use a second computer to play games on... which really sucks when travelling.
Apple doesn't even have passthrough e-GPU support in virtual machines (or otherwise), so I can't even run a Linux/Windows VM and attach a portable e-gpu to game with.
The M5 was released and has a 25% faster GPU than M4. Great, that has no effect on reading HN or watching YouTube videos and VSCode doesn't use the GPU so... good for you Apple, I'll stick to my M1 + second PC set up
VSCode certainly does use the GPU, that's how you get 120fps scrolling.
You're right, but it's immaterial. You don't upgrade your GPU to run VSCode better
I actually did this because I use my TV as a monitor, and I had to upgrade the GPU to get better framerates over HDMI.
One thing that has changed though, and this is a big pet peeve of mine. Bluetooth fucking file sharing. You used to be able to send files using bluetooth between devices. I had some old ass Nokia from 2005 and I could send files to my Linux computer over bluetooth.
This standard function doesn't exist on iOS but has been replaced with AirDrop. It's a big fuck you from Apple to everyone who prefers open standards.
Ahhh, Bluetooth share ... I remember messing around with it in 2017 on some old Nokias and an Android phone. That was the last time it ever worked for me. It's been quietly supplanted or removed from my newer devices, and the pairing is quite finicky. Also, the transfer speeds (back then) were awful - Kb/s.
Now my go-to is Dropbox/cloud/Sharik for small files and rsync for bulk backups.
Sharik looks great! They need a canonical domain receivers can visit without entering IPs like https://pairdrop.net/ It even has a shortcut for the share menu!
https://github.com/schlagmichdoch/PairDrop/blob/master/docs/...
I was getting megabit speeds 20 years ago.
Maybe try localsend it‘s a great piece of software replicating airdrop but cross platform and open source.
https://localsend.org/
Until you try to send a file with an extension it’s not allowed to send on iOS like mkv. Apart from that’s great.
> much less a hard drive
This isn't true - my shining moment as a 10 year old kid (~1998) was when the HD on our Macintosh went out and we went down to compusa and I picked a random IDE drive instead of the Mac branded drives (because it was much cheaper) and it just worked after reinstalling macos.
You were lucky to have a Mac with IDE drives in 1998. AFAIK that was only the G3s and some lower-end Performa. I had a 9600 and there was no avoiding SCSI (well, I say that but I did put an IDE card in it at some point).
The true revelation was the B&W G3s. Those machines came from another universe.
we did not have a G3 (we definitely could not afford that). IIRC we had a 6400 or something of that vintage.
Yeah, looks like Apple's switch from SCSI to IDE started in '94. But the first couple of Macs my family had (SE, Quadra 605) would not have accepted an IDE drive.
"In the early days you couldn't swap a mouse between a Mac and an IBM PC, much less a hard drive or printer."
I mounted a 20MB external Apple hard drive:
https://retrorepairsandrefurbs.com/2023/01/25/1988-apple-20s...
... on my MSDOS system, in 1994, by attaching it to my sound card.
The Pro Audio Spectrum 16, weirdly, had a SCSI connector on it.
The SCSI would probably be meant for a CD-ROM drive. I recall my Sound Blaster Pro had a proprietary Panasonic CD-ROM interface, and at the time, soundcards often came bundled with a CD-ROM drive ( or is that vice-versa?).
It's not okay, because the experience is not good, and it can be.
I once read that Steve Jobs decided the default order of icons in the Dock on new Macs. This could have been delegated to any number of subordinates, but he considered it so important for the new-user experience that he chose to do it himself.
Culture flows top-down. Cook is about growth, progressively flowing toward growth at any cost. It’s not a mystery why things are as they are at Apple.
Or the story about the BillG review and Excel date math.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
Which, incidentally, is a great primer for younger developers on both what obsessive software quality looks like and why datetimes are a hard problem.
I remember how date math is special there. A simple question: 30-01-2024 plus one month - what is the result date?
Well I had to try this in Excel and (after fighting the input format), it gave me
Fun. There is so much ambiguity in what “one month” means.Polars has an offset-by function which is a bit more explicit about how you want to handle date math. “Calendar date” vs number of days.
Edit: just ran polars and I’m not in love with its answer either.
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I'm not sure I'd praise Jobs in that regard. I kind of think Apple UI went down beginning with putting a "progress bar" in the URL text field of Safari.
That was when the design team began what I call the "one-off UI design" rather than use the same language across all apps.
Never mind the round mouse before that and the blind USB ports on the back of the newer iMacs (hate that scritchity sound of stainless steel on anodized aluminum as I try to fumble around with the USB connector trying to find the opening).
That wasn't a smart move by jobs. He should have delegated it to someone trusted. This micromanaging is how you make the company more brittle. Obviously Apple is wildly successful as for this not to matter much. They could sell iIce to Penguins.
Micromanaging is how you run a successful company. You don't have to manage everything but you got to get involved in low level things.
Manager who can't do anything but delegate are fast and efficient for themselves, just not for the company.
I'd argue that apple is successful because of jobs attention to detail. Tim cook isn't the one who built apple foundation, he's merely trying to expand it but it's not the same difficulty.
The thing I got from Jobs (watching his various interviews and reading his bio), he wouldn't have delegated because he wanted to do these things. It mattered so much to him that delegating something like this wouldn't have even crossed his mind, regardless what his title was in the company.
Apple added too many features too fast, so they fell into the Feature Whirlpool. They're going to try and get out of it by adding more Features, Faster (I hope I'm wrong!).
Instead, they should have stayed on the Straigth and Narrow of Quality - where they were for many years - where you move up to computing paradise by having fewer features but more time spent perfecting them.
If they don't add big features every year, the tech press crucifies them as "just putting out another version of the same thing". IMO they trapped themselves into this yearly release cycle with the OS naming, and this puts pressure on them to deliver something big and new every time. Quality? Ain't nobody got time for that!
> If they don't add big features every year, the tech press crucifies them as "just putting out another version of the same thing".
That's the bed they made themselves and lay in it willingly.
No one is forcing them to do huge yearly releases. No one is forcing them to do yearly releases. No one is forcing them to tie new features which are all software anyway to yearly releases (and in recent years actual features are shipping later and later after the announcement, so they are not really tied to releases either anymore).
I would argue the stock market is forcing them to do all that. Line must go up, but it's not sustainable. Like you said, they ship later and later after the announcement. At some point they're going to have to disappoint or move the goalposts.
I owned the tiniest sliver of a fraction of a percent of Apple, but I sold my shares due to a lack of technical leadership.
Lack of technical leadership?! I guess I must be missing something, because from the outside, they've got best CPU, the best battery life, the best VR system, the best privacy, and they seem to have gotten Intel's WiFi chips to work (which Intel couldn't). Probably the watch has some top-notch features, but I am not at all familiar with it. They also have a bunch of features that are unmatched by competitors due to their vertical integration (e.g. handoff, iOS apps on macOS, etc.). Maybe leadership are just a bunch of putzes who are only being saved by great engineers, but it seems unlikely.
Note how most of the things you listed are hardware. No one disputes that Apples hardware team is insanely good.
Their software side however is riddled with issues, delayed or cancelled projects, meandering focus, unclear priorities. They are increasingly overpromising and underdelivering.
Their product side is neither here nor there. Vision Pro is a technically marvelous bust. iPhones rely on gimmicks because there's really nothing to differentiate them anymore. Peripherals (Homepod, AppleTV) are stagnant. iPad suddenly saw signs of life this year with good functionality updates after a decade of "we have no idea what to do with it, here are meaningless and confusing hardware updates". Macbooks have been completed as a product years ago (not that it's a bad thing), so, again, they are just randomly slapping non-sensical names on upgrades and chase thinness.
Oh. Thinness. That is literally the only feature that Apple is obsessed with. You can't build a product strategy on thinness alone.
Stock value has no meaning at all. What matters is revenue and profit. If Apple doesn't release new devices every year, then they will still sell last year's model. What are customers supposed to purchase instead? A PC? Nobody is going to turn down a new Mac just because the model is 1,2, 3 or 5 years old.
you might want to look into how executives get compensated. it's equity (aka stock).
Good point!
Stock market is responding to Apple behavior. Stock market was perfectly okay with Apple not doing yearly releases before the iPhone. The stock market was perfectly okay with Apple not doing yearly releases of MacOS during the iPhone era. The stock market was totally okay with Apple not doing yearly (or predictable) hardware upgrades on anything but iPhone.
The stock market can easily be taught anything. And Jobs didn't even care about stock market, or stock holders (Apple famously didn't even pay dividends for a very long time), or investors (regularly ignoring any and all calls and advice from the largest investors).
You need political will and taste to say a thousand nos to every yes. None of the senior citizens in charge of Apple have that.
I would be totally fine with bi-yearly releases.
They could do a kind of tick-tock, with one feature release being followed by a polish and refinement one. Kind of like they did with the regular and S iPhone models. I would welcome that; I don’t know about the marketing department.
Now what they did with iPhone is Tick-tock-tock-tock-tock-tock
> If they don't add big features every year, the tech press crucifies them as "just putting out another version of the same thing".
And then what? Mac users would buy some janky Acer with Windows 11 and bunch of preinstalled malware instead?
Zero percent of consumers care what the tech press writes, and Apple makes their money by selling their devices to consumers.
They could easily wait longer between releasing devices. An M1 Macbook is still in 2025 a massive upgrade for anybody switching from PC - five years after release.
If Apple included fully fledged apps for photo editing and video editing, and maybe small business tools like invoicing, there would be no reason for any consumer in any segment to purchase anything other than a Mac.
> They could easily wait longer between releasing devices.
They could, but then they wouldn't be a trillion dollar company. They'd be a mere $800bn company, at best. ;)
New releases do not drive increased sales as much as people think. Especially if the new releases are lacking in quality.
Not many consumers go out to buy an Apple device because the new one has been released. They go out to buy a new phone or new computer because their old one gave out and will just take the Apple device that is for sale.
The yearly cadence ensures that there's always a "this year's model" to upgrade corporations+institutions to in volume through the Apple Business Leasing program.
That's also why Apple bothers to do the silent little spec-bump releases: it gives Business Leasing corporate buyers a new SKU to use to justify staying on the upgrade treadmill for their 10k devices for another cycle (rather than holding off for even a single cycle because "it's the same SKU.")
Nobody really cares if they add a lot of OS features as long as they don't make grandiose statements.
I generally see complaints about advancement aimed at the hardware. Some are unreasonable standards, some are backlash to the idea of continuing to buy a new iphone every year or two as the differences shrink, but either way software feature spam is a bad response.
This is the entirety of the explanation, really. Apple has always started small and then iterated toward greatness. They've made two mistakes recently:
1. They've stopped starting small and instead started unrealistically large. Apple Intelligence is a great recent example.
2. They've stopped iterating with small improvements and features, and instead decided that "iterating" just means "pile on more features and change things".
Some of these issues are excusable by saying they "added too many features too fast" (especially the inconsistencies which the article begins with), but lots of the issues are just caused by Liquid Glass becoming a thing and some "less important" apps didn't get a proper UX test after switching to Liquid Glass design (the whole latter half of the article)...
And that's not excusable - every feature should have its maintainer who should know that a large framework update like Liquid Glass can break basically anything and should re-test the app under every scenario they could think of (and as "the maintainer" they should know all the scenarios) and push to fix any found bugs...
Also a company as big as Apple should eat its own dogfood and force their employees to use the beta versions to find as many bugs as they could... If every Apple employee used the beta version on their own personal computer before release I can't realistically imagine how the "Electron app slowing down Tahoe" issue wouldn't be discovered before global release...
naw dude we gotta get these quarters numbers up by degrading quality on windows/chromecast. It just reeks of incompetence and insincerity
The only path to staying on the SaNoQ is having a CEO who prioritizes quality, to the extent that they'll spend time dogfooding product and gripe at developers / engineers / designers / leaders who fall short.
Either everyone is worried about the consequences of failing to produce high quality work (including at the VP level, given they can allocate additional time/resources for feature baking) or optimizing whatever OKR/KPI the CEO is on about this quarter becomes a more reliable career move.
And once that happens (spiced with scale), the company is lost in the Forest of Trying to Design Effective OKRs.
>Apple added too many features too fast, so they fell into the Feature Whirlpool. They're going to try and get out of it by adding more Features, Faster (I hope I'm wrong!).
yep. The attention to details is still there, it is just changed from polishing and curating details to creating a lot of small unpolished and uncalled for and thus very annoying details. From MBA POV there isn't much difference, and the latter even produces better KPIs.
They strayed from this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAEPqUtra6E
Not entirely, though; there is joy and playfulness at the core of Liquid Glass. But delight is not that common, and refinement and focus are definitely lacking. They could have used more nos and fewer yeses.
"Straigth and Narrow of Quality"
We see what you did there!
I should've typed fewer but better words!
Glad to see someone documenting this. I use the screentime feature to restrict my kid's iPad's and it is so painful. Here are my notes:
- When an iPad is presented to you to enter your parent code to unlock an app, the name of the app isn't shown as the pin prompt is over the top of the app/time to unlock details.
- It's not possible to set screen time restrictions for Safari.
- If apps are not allowed to be installed, app updates stop. I have to allow app installations, install updates, then block app installations again.
- Setting downtime hours just doesn't seem to work. Block apps from 6pm - 11.59pm? Kid gets locked out of their iPad at school for the whole day.
- Most of the syncing between settings on a computer to the target iPads appear to be broken completely. If an iPad is in downtime, and the scheduled downtime time changes, it does not take the iPad out of downtime.
- Downtime doesn't allow multi-day hour settings. For instance, try setting downtime from 8pm - 8am.
- Popups in the screen time settings of MacOS have no visual indication that there is more beneath what can be seen. There is no scrollbar. You have to swipe/scroll on every popup to see if there are more settings hidden out of view.
- No granular downtime controls for websites. You can block Safari, or you can not block Safari.
Edit: Oh I almost forgot this nifty little bug reported back in 2023: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255049918?sortBy=rank
Screentime randomly shows you a warning about being an administrator... no probs you just need to select another account and then re-select the one you want and it'll go away.
> - It's not possible to set screen time restrictions for Safari.
I thought this too. I discovered it actually is possible though, just doesn't appear in the list. Go "Screen Time" -> "App Limits" -> "Add Limit". In the "Choose Apps" dialog, you won't see Safari in the list. But you can type "Safari" in the search bar and it'll appear.
But I agree with the overall sentiment on this thread. iOS Parental Controls aren't where they need to be.
> If apps are not allowed to be installed, app updates stop. I have to allow app installations, install updates, then block app installations again.
Presumably this is because apps could add individual features parents don't approve of between updates.
If you're locking down what apps you want your kids to use (to an individual whitelist of apps, not just by maturity rating), you're essentially stepping into the role of an enterprise MDM IT department, auditing software updates for stability before letting them go out.
What would you propose instead here?
I presume you'd personally just be willing to trust certain apps/developers to update their apps without changing anything fundamental about them. But I think that most people who are app-whitelisting don't feel that level of trust torward apps/developers, and would want updates to be stopped if-and-only-if the update would introduce a new feature.
So now, from the dev's perspective, you're, what, tying automatic update rollout to whether they bump the SemVer minor version or not? Forcing the dev to outline feature changes in a way that can be summarized in a "trust this update" prompt notification that gets pushed to a parent's device?
"you're essentially stepping into the role of an enterprise MDM IT department, auditing software updates for stability before letting them go out."
If my daughter's Spotify app breaks after an update she knows to immediately contact my on-call pager and alert our family CEO and legal department.
Just give me a checkbox that allows updates.
If an app developer changes something fundamental about the app, then the changes will be subject to the app store age guidelines. If the app is recategorised to 18+ it won't be able to install anyway. Billions of devices around the world have auto app updates turned on. The risk of a rogue update is outweighed by the benefit of getting instant access to security updates. I'm managing a kids iPad with a couple of mainstream games and school apps installed, not running a fortune 500.
> Downtime doesn't allow multi-day hour settings. For instance, try setting downtime from 8pm - 8am.
I’m running iOS 18.7.1 and I can do that just fine. Maybe it wasn’t possible before, but it certainly is now.
Wow that's...a lot. Are they bugs...or malicious compliance/checkbox implementation?
They present as bugs. I suspect they don't have the A team working on mechanisms that help reduce the amount of time kids spend on their devices. Do the bare minimum to show they "care" but no more as it hurts the profits.
As a relatively young person with good eyesight, I can’t really say that Liquid Glass has caused any real visibility issues for me. I think it looks pretty sleek 95% of the time. The app search when pulling down from the home screen is much faster, it has a delay of almost 1 second before which feels more like 0.1s now.
But nonetheless, there’s so many more bugs and visual glitches. Battery life is still unstable and feels markedly worse than before. Safari looks cool, but UI buttons being on top of content is foolish for the reasons highlighted in this article. Overall, it’s just much more visually inconsistent than before. And the glass effect on app icons looks blurry until you get 5cm away from the screen and really pay attention to the icons. I definitely won’t be upgrading my Mac any time soon.
I just wish we would get away from this annual upgrade cycle and just polish the OS for a while. We don’t need 1 trillion “features”, especially when they increase the complexity of the user experience. MacOS in general did this very well, ever since I switched I’ve been very impressed at how much you can accomplish with the default app in macOS, all while looking cleaner and leaner than windows software. No new feature is even close to that balance of power and UI simplicity anymore.
I'm 58, and have needed reading glasses for the last 10 years. Want to try something fun? Increase your default text size on your iPhone, and then just watch how many apps — native Apple apps, mind you — have their UI screwed up to the point where they become unusable!
>Increase default text size
I don't use a cellphone anymore, but back when I did (circa iOS 12) it was not possible to have the text large enough for me to read while still displaying all ten digits of a phone number.
Example: `212-555-1234` would display as `212-555-12...` in my call list.
----
I have owned and primarily used Apple products since 1992; their accessibility options seem to be going backwards. An iPhone screen would still have more than enough space to display information if the UI weren't completely crammed full of junk.
It is so frustrating when I help older clients and (unbeknownst to them) some stupid notification re-focuses attention. Often they'll keep [-s-l-o-w-l-y-] typing and then get frustrated that "the computer did something I didn't tell it to, without even warning me it wasn't listening to my keystrokes anymore..." [e.g.] — this used to be eye-rolling user error, now it's just expected operating system behavior.
----
Pro-tip: You can essentially disable Apple notifications by setting `Do Not Disturb` from 3:01am - 3:00am
The change removing Launchpad and fusing with Spotlight has a mildly annoying effect. If I do the five finger gesture on my M1 Max Macbook Pro, and start typing, the first few keystrokes will give me the "you're trying to type where you can't" sound and they won't register into the search box.
Launchpad didn't have this problem. Any text you type while the view is rendering goes into the search bar.
While the OP seems very unhappy and should just switch platforms considering it's a "shitty $1000 phone" to him, I'm just mildly annoyed by these UX regressions to what was otherwise a very good platform.
'Don't get me wrong, I do like trillion dollar tech companies to be transparent, but this right here is certainly not what I meant when I said: "Apple needs to be more transparent".'
lol
Apple is burning their remaining goodwill among longtime customers, myself included. It's sad to see. Next WWDC, they need to be incredibly transparent about how they plan to fix these issues and get their house in order. If they aren't capable of accepting feedback after this public excoriation, I don't have high hopes for their future.
They listened when people said they wanted transparency. That's why we got Liquid Glass. It seems the actual context of the word got lost somewhere along the way.
With this iOS 26 update, they set dynamite to my bridge.
I’m switching to android because why not? I mean, I have to install Google maps anyway because Apple Maps is horrible. But the UI on 26 is way worse than a pixel experience in my opinion. Plus, I could just do so much more with the pixel phone but then again I’m sort of a power user.
I was working on Apple since 1996 and started off as a computer support person. Now it pains me to help people with their computers because everything is siloed and proprietary and just makes no sense.
And I mean, I’m also annoyed that their voice to text is just horrible. I can’t even tell you how many mistakes I’ve had to correct in this comment alone.
The great thing about Android is that you don't have to use Google's awful software. Google Maps is not good, I avoid it whenever at all possible, the same goes for basically all other Google software.
The one reason to use Android is so that you can actually switch out the awful stuff that ships with your device. Leaving Apple to join the "Google Ecosystem" seems absolutely insane. Google is so terrible at software, so terrible at UI and so terrible at having products.
I get that visual design is a complete preference, but the great thing about Android, to me at least, is that you can get away from Google totally goofy design and make your own choices.
>Plus, I could just do so much more with the pixel phone but then again I’m sort of a power user.
Google is starting to make that less and less feasible though, with it's start in restricting app installations.
What maps app do you use on Android instead of Google Maps?
osmAnd allows you to use a number of different sources, though their business listings are inferior (in Los Angeles/San Diego) no matter what source you use (admittedly this might be partly due to new businesses opening, I've never tried searching for a long-established business as I already know where to find these). Recommend installing from fdroid, the play store version is limited (may not make a difference to you)
There's a number of other map apps around as well (Mapfactor, MapQuest, maps.me), including some for specific purposes (transit, Waze, Polaris, backcountry, sygic)
osmAnd is great but it is lacking many locations.
OsmAnd has nothing to do with this, it is just a viewer for OSM data.
Also in my experience, and maybe this is region dependent, OSM has very detailed location information.
OsmAnd and also the apps of regional/national public transportation organizations.
Right? All these "features", but they don't get the very basic stuff right a lot of times. User input is very very important for the user.
On iPhone swipe keyboard something that feels like a random generator replaces not only the word you swipe, but the word before, and in 2/3rds of cases with random nonsense pairs.
And you can't turn it off without turning off the similar word proposals you definitely want.
It's a strange design decision and I think the implementation is not up to the task.
I'm not staying cause I like it, but because I dislike the other options more.
There's tons of posts on reddit documenting the fact that everyone is making mistakes constantly with their keyboards for a few years, especially the.constant.dots.everyone.makes - they worked ok before, it's honestly almost comical how bad it is now.
I’m pretty close. If Android’s version of HealthKit was mature, and if focus modes were baked in, I’d probably have switched already.
But where would dissatisfied customers go?
I've only recently (3 years ago) bought my first MacBook, and it's because everything else is also getting worse.
Install Gentoo. Or, if the compile times are too much, Arch.
I've been asking myself the same question.
Hey UX people. "Not now" says "I won't take no for an answer". It comes across as _really_ creepy. Let me say "no".
And no, you don't know better than me about this cool feature.
The only thing I'd add is that if you can opt to say "yes" later, it should be obvious where to find it (eg. make a logical settings menu) or they point you to where you can find it. If they really want to make you feel comfortable using their app/site/service there shouldn't be any loss aversion instinct stirred up by hitting "no" as though it's your only chance to accept what they're offering.
Agreed. But the same should be true of selecting 'yes'.
Playing devil's advocate here: Isn't one advantage of "not now" that it conveys "I don't want to worry about this now, don't change anything and get out of my way" whereas "no" burdens the user with a conscious choice?
I see your point, but I'd argue the opposite.
If I say no, that's an optional feature that I didn't ask for, and no longer need to think about it.
If I say 'not yet', it's one more thing I know I'm going to be reminded about, one piece of software that has no respect for me or consent.
Are you perhaps more concerned about software that keeps nagging you about the same thing over and over again than about the wording in particular? Because badly designed software will do that whether you told it "not yet" or "no".
While I can see the frustration by repeatedly using such software, it seems fair that a well-intentioned UX designer would use "not yet" if they found it works better for a majority of people. What then matters is that they respect the intent of everyone by not bringing the choice up again.
I think 'well intentioned UX designers' who do this are in the minority, honestly. Or naïve. Per derefr and latexr's comments, it's a dark pattern with an ulterior motive.
To your question, I'd say it's a false dichotomy.
The repeating behaviour and the 'not now' are two sides of the same coin. Per the original post, and my experience, those 'not now' buttons keep coming back.
And, for the sake of argument, how should respectful software behave? If I clicked 'not now', are you _ever_ going to ask me again? If so, how do you decide on the time-period? If not, why make 'no' more complicated than 'yes'?
> The repeating behaviour and the 'not now' are two sides of the same coin. Per the original post, and my experience, those 'not now' buttons keep coming back.
So you're using "not now" as a shortcut to identify malicious design. That's fine but personally I'm not. I would go as far as claiming as most people don't feel this way about such a tiny wording detail, but I obviously haven't ran any A/B testing to confirm either interpretation.
> And, for the sake of argument, how should respectful software behave? If I clicked 'not now', are you _ever_ going to ask me again? If so, how do you decide on the time-period?
Honestly this question seems bizarrely focused on making the software give you a definite promise on what it will or will not do. It's a valid design question how to respectfully prompt the user for choices, but if that's your concern then this specific wording choice is an unimportant detail to get stuck on.
> If not, why make 'no' more complicated than 'yes'?
The reason was given my my opening argument: "no/yes" demands a conscious choice whereas "not now" doesn't. "not now" is plausibly less complicated than "yes" for a majority of users, and cognitive overhead generally matters more to people than imaginary contracts about future choice prompts.
> this question seems bizarrely focused
You did say "playing devil's advocate", and you asked which of the two I was more concerned about. So I think it's OK to explore the arguments either way!
I'm going by gut feeling here, so I'm not pretending to bring any data to the discussion. My original post was "commonplace UX pattern A gives me this feeling B".
Modern UI trends which seem to prioritise the wishes of the product designer over good UX. And I feel that _that_ is driven by metrics that don't have my best interests at heart.
> "no/yes" demands a conscious choice whereas "not now" doesn't
These messages are often displayed in modal popups (e.g. the original post), or otherwise intrusive fashion (e.g. sign into BBC News website). So if you're asking this question you're _already_ forcing the user to read a message and make a choice. If the user isn't ready for a conscious choice, maybe you shouldn't be asking them to make any choice.
Going back a few years, a piece of software with options would put them in a preference panel. If the user wanted these features, they would intentionally seek out how to set them. They would be in control. And they would be both sufficiently contextualised and intent-driven to make that yes/no choice.
Maybe these days with rolling or frequent deployments it's a challenge to communicate new options. But I don't think that applies in many of the manifestations of 'not yet'.
I don’t think any UX professional is confused about that. It’s simply a dark pattern.
Even semantically, "Not now" should function as "Dismiss forever" because you can always go to Settings and give the app that permission, not now but later.
"Not now" can be validly interpreted to mean "not in this context" or "not here". It's not necessarily temporal.
Just was adding "Not now" to a notification dialog in my app today simply because it feels softer. But it's a definite "no", the prompt won't appear again unless you enable notifications yourself later from the settings (hence the "now").
That behavior wouldn't be clear to me as a user unless it were spelled out like you just did. My expectation when I see "Not Now" is that there will be a "Sometime Later". I would recommend changing your language here.
Is there something wrong with "No thanks" ?
Nope, I ended up changing it to that one to avoid the association with nagging prompts.
You could A/B test it. Add a 'not now' and a 'no' button.
I could, but I don't use trackng in my apps aside from some platform/error stats
> "Not now" says "I won't take no for an answer".
They know. When a designer makes one of those prompts with only a "not now", they tend to mean a very specific thing, that is at the same time a subtle message to the user and a passive-aggressive stab at the company they work for.
What they mean: "the code path that handles what happens when you say 'no' here has been deprecated, because support for this feature was not part of the planning of a recent major-version rewrite of this app's core logic. When that rewrite is complete/passes through this part of the code, the option to say no will go away, because the code for that decision to call will be gone. So, in a literal sense, we think it's helpful to keep bugging you to switch, so that you can get used to the change in your own time before we're forced to spring it on you. But in a connotational sense, we also think it's helpful to keep bugging you to switch, as a way of protesting the dropping of this feature, because every time users see this kind of prompt, they make noise about it — and maybe this time that'll be enough to get management's attention and get the feature included in the rewrite. Make your angry comments now, before it's too late!"
I wonder how that works when they are asking to grant permission for an integration with a resource gated by OS or browser, e.g. in this case location data for the Reminders app, or showing browser notifications.
Is the deprecated path that they just don't work without enabling those settings?
And I'm sure every UX person is different. The ones who know it's a dark pattern must have some pretty strong cognitive dissonance with a company that historically sold itself as 'the good guys'.
But there's a whole generation that probably grew up with software that fundamentally doesn't respect you, and this is just normal.
1) My Bluetooth audio on my recent-model iPhone (15 Pro Max) is still flaky AF, across all Bluetooth speaker devices or my car. Even my 4 year old kid noticed and commented on it! It's been like this since the iOS beta, for months. And I can tell that it's one of those hideous, nondeterministic bugs, too. Apple, hire me as a contractor to help fix it, if you want! I love hard problems.
2) There is still no solution for this annoying-as-hell UI problem that I documented years ago on Medium: https://medium.com/@pmarreck/the-most-annoying-ui-problem-r3...
3) I had to buy Superwhisper (which is a nice product, but works a little janky due to how iOS handles keyboard extensions) because Siri's voice dictation is so abysmally worse than literally every other option right now, and has been for years. WTF, Apple?
Hey Tim, I love the Vision Pro too (I own one) but maybe get your head out of that for a bit and polish up the engineering on the rest of your lines!
I'm no fan of Apple's, but Bluetooth is one of the shittiest human inventions of all time, has always been bad and will likely always be bad. A million bandaids ain't gonna make a bone-healing cast.
I've never, and I mean never, had problems with Bluetooth audio in the car. I dispute the assertion that it's always been bad, because my experience has been uniformly positive.
Part of the lucky 1% maybe.
But only until the one day you really need Bluetooth to work and it just doesn't. We many Bluetooth sufferers will happily accept you into our ranks when (not if) that day comes. :)
I never had an issue connecting Bluetooth to the car. Android auto, apple car play on the other side is quite unreliable.
> 1) My Bluetooth audio on my recent-model iPhone (15 Pro Max) is still flaky AF, across all Bluetooth speaker devices or my car.
Haha so it's not just my wife's iPhone 15 Pro Max that keeps stuttering in any CarPlay
Yeah, but it’s probably not Bluetooth’s fault, as wireless CarPlay uses WiFi (at least in every case I know of).
I don't use CarPlay (I have a Tesla; they opted out a long time ago and stuck with that) so it has nothing to do with wifi or other interference.
The only thing that's changed was upgrading to the new iOS.
I was replying to user hu3, who claims to use CarPlay (or their spouse).
figured that much. my android runs fine in the same vehicle. no song stutters
> I had to buy Superwhisper (which is a nice product
It's literally a paid wrapper around a completely free program you would also be using for free if Apple wasn't actively hostile to Open Source software distribution.
LOL. Whisper may be free (I use it in at least 1 project), but it doesn't come with a GUI, hooks into mic audio and keyboard trigger, and other things necessary for something to work well on macOS.
I am willing to pay for things that work well (and don't forget support afterwards) because I know from experience that simply having an "open-source core" just gets you halfway there, if that; the last 5% of polish to a finished, reliable, supportable product is at least 50% more work.
And, to put it bluntly, since we don't live in a communist society, eventually SOMEone has to put food on the table from their efforts. I'm 100% fine with paying for that.
Lastly, I have a kid, which means that I have 0% time to spend on troubleshooting non-working open-source stuff (which I actually enjoyed doing before the kid); I am ALL about reliability now, which is why I paid for Eero home mesh networking (despite cheaper or free options), a NAS from iXSystems (despite me being quite capable of installing TrueNAS on my own hardware), pay for Apple products (despite loving my NixOS Framework laptop as well), and don't upgrade my 10 year old Tesla (because it still runs like a top, and that's my highest priority right now- reliability)
Once you get a kid, trust me, your views are gonna change, because you clearly do NOT have one.
This is what happens to your tinkering-around-with-open-source time after it:
Now if you're lucky, you will end up in a position where you get paid to tinker around, and where they won't get upset if you use some work time to work on "aligned" tech.You're the same guy who's wondering why software quality is so low on iOS?
You refuse to vote with your dollar. You buy Apple's failed products like Vision Pro, and reinforce their insular self-destructive business model. You tacitly defend their right to commercialize free software and victimize yourself when alternatives are identified. There is zero feedback loop between you and Apple, just a wallet that keeps vomiting cash. The only outlet of communication that you can use to tell them to focus on the Mac or iPhone (eg. buying more Macs and iPhones) is being eschewed to support "the ecosystem" and replacement apps.
Therefore, you reserve no right to tell Tim Cook to stop focusing on the Vision Pro. You own one. You are one of the (sole) customers begging Tim to divert his attention away from the Mac, so he can focus on his visionary iPhone replacement. You wanted it bad enough to spend $3,500 that could have gone towards a college fund, three iPhones, six Macs, or an entire 16th birthday "come to the garage" surprise.
"WTF Apple" my ass, either take your lumps or buy a new product. We only hear this sort of moral floundering when monopolies form and people have to make themselves look helpless rather than an accomplice. Clearly Apple has no incentive to compete, but you also lack the balls to indict them despite rearing an entire family. Instead of commiserating with your faux helplessness, I will tell you to participate in a market economy to enforce the product of free market competition. You cannot make demands from a position of captivity.
Fair enough
Changing buttons or live results are annoying, indeed.
Something I find worse: being unable to click a target while the animation is running! Because the target only gets focus after the animation is done: you start spending you time waiting for the animations in the end.
Ironically, the Google link there suffers from delayed loading of the toc at top: I tapped to play the video as it moved down.
Google link? What? I only put in a Medium link, and there's no video.
or do you mean Cumulative Layout Shift, Google's term for it which I linked from there? https://web.dev/articles/cls
I like my just-works stuff, so I was happy to pay a premium for it. Too bad wireless CarPlay is now buggy like a 1.0 release after years of almost no issues [1].
There's little problems that keep accumulating, like the camera app opening up and only showing black until restarting it, at which point I've missed the candid opportunity.
I'm not going anywhere, it's still the right mix of just-works across their ecosystem for me, but dang, the focus does feel different, and it's not about our experience using Apple.
[1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256140468?sortBy=rank
I'd have so many of these weird issues on Android (pixel), is why I switched to iPhone a few years back, it's been a much smoother ride ever since. iPhone isn't perfect, but it's way more "just works" then android was for me.
Also, I have the iPhone 15 Pro (iOS 26.0.1), never had the black screen on camera open yet. That's the kinda thing I'd get on Android.
What happened is the same thing that tends to happen to almost all successful organisation. The uber exceptional people who initially built it, defined the culture, and enforced it with an iron fist are gone. Now a bunch of people are in charge who trained under the first generation, but who themselves just don't quite have that kind of singular personality. So things start slipping over time.
This is why gatekeeping is important and shouldn't be labeled as toxic. There's been a shift where everyone wants to welcome everyone, but the problem is it erodes your company culture and lowers the average quality.
I've lately become a pretty big proponent of gatekeeping. On Reddit I saw a comment that security flaws are simply unavoidable, that they're inevitable because as a web developer they must have 1000 dependencies and cannot verify the security of them all, and that if something goes wrong, there's no way it would be fair to hold them accountable for it. When that kind of mindset has taken root, and it has deeply taken root in the entire Javascript ecosystem, it becomes a real-world security issue that affects millions of people detrimentally. Maybe software development doesn't actually need to be accessible to people who can't write their own IsOdd function.
Another example is that a hobby I loved is now dead to me for lack of gatekeeping; Magic the Gathering. Wizards of the Coast started putting out products that were not for their core playerbase, and when players complained, were told "these products are not for you; but you should accept that because there's no harm in making products for different groups of people". That seems fair enough on its face. Fast forward a couple of years, and Magic's core playerbase has been completely discarded. Now Magic simply whores itself out to third party IPs; this year we'll get or have gotten Final Fantasy, Spiderman, Spongebob Squarepants, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles card sets. They've found it more lucrative in the short-term to tap into the millions of fans of other media franchises while ditching the fanbase that had played Magic for 30 years. "This product is not for you" very rapidly became "this game is not for you", which is pretty unpleasant for people who've been playing it for most or all of their lives.
I played MTG on and off for decades, and the Final Fantasy pre-release was one of the best experiences I’ve had in the community. I met several people who had played MTG and stopped but went back for that set because they loved FF. Plus, it fits. For fans of both franchises, seeing how they ported mechanics was itself part of the fun. Sure, maybe a Spongebob set is weird, but FF felt like a labor of love in many areas.
Also, it became the best selling set of all time even before it was out. Which isn’t an indicator of quality, for sure, but it does show Wizards understands something about their market.
If it were simply that, it would have been fine, sure. I didn't especially hate the LOTR crossover either. There was absolutely room for Magic to have, say, one crossover set a year with a fitting fantasy franchise. I'm not saying a crossover is inherently poison that instantly kills a game. What many established players do hate, and what made me understand the game is not for me anymore, is that they broke their promise for these cards to be segregated from regular play, that they started printing more advertisement crossovers than real cards, that these crossovers became less and less appropriate to a fantasy game setting to the point that said setting is completely gone now, and that they started bastardizing even the regular sets (Edge of Eternities is technically not a crossover, but it does not feel like a real Magic set either and clearly only exists to lay down a gameplay framework for the upcoming Star Trek set).
I'm not sure Wizards does understand their market. As you noted, a set doing numbers pre-release has absolutely nothing to do with its quality; it just means there are a lot of Final Fantasy fans interested in collecting cards. But this is not necessarily sustainable for another 30 years, because those Final Fantasy fans are not necessarily going to stick around for Spiderman, and Spiderman fans are not necessarily going to stick around for Spongebob. The Spiderman set was already such a massive flop that they were trying to identify and blame which content creators/streamers were responsible for negatively influencing public opinion, as though that couldn't have happened organically.
WotC is also just about the most incompetent company in the world when it comes to maintaining customer goodwill lately. D&D 5e still, 10 years on, has no real mechanical depth to character building. There's all the identity politics stuff which is needlessly divisive (such as trying to remove "races" and racial bonuses from new D&D rules because it's not PC). They tried to pull that stunt with the OGL where they tried to alter the deal after the fact because the terms weren't to some bean counter's liking. They sent the fucking Pinkertons to raid a guy's house because he got his hands on a prerelease MTG thing through no shenanigans of his own.
At this point, I'm done with WotC. The Pinkerton thing was by far the worst and what made me turn my back forever. Bad rulesets or design designs with which I disagree are one thing, but I refuse to do business with a company that thinks it's acceptable to use force to try to bully people into sticking to their release schedules. They can pound sand forever.
I'm personally failing to see how "welcoming everyone" directly correlates to a company neglecting polish and detail. A cynical read of your comment is that DEI-style programs are lowering standards when, in actuality, the issue most likely lies in poor management and a corporate structure that rewards buzzy work over polished work. I'm not saying that was your implication, by the way; just that "everything's bad because we allowed other people to join" is a slippery slope.
To further your point. In our bodies we have organs which are made up of specific kinds of cells. In some cases diversity of cells seems to come with health benefits (e.g. our guts), but in most cases cause significant health issues. (If you have a bunch of liver cells in your lungs it's probably going to be a problem). Also across the whole body there is an incredible diversity of cells, and they cooperate with mind boggling harmony.
My take away is that diversity at a global level, and in some specific contexts, is a great thing. But diversity in some other specific contexts is entirely destructive and analogous to rot or decomposition.
When we rely on a core societal function (firefighting, accounting, waterworks maintenance, property rights, etc.) the people responsible for maintaining these functions need to maintain in themselves a set of core characteristics (values as patterns of action), and there is room to play outside of those cores, but those cores shouldn't be jeopardized as a tradeoff for diversity and inclusion.
For example, if constructive core values of a railroad system is consistency and reliability, then these shouldnt be diminished in the name of diversity and inclusion, but if diversity and inclusion can be achieved secondarily without a tradeoff (or even to somehow further amplify the core values) then it is constructive. One has to thoughtfully weigh the tradeoffs in each context, and ensure that the most important values in that context to maintain the relevant function are treated as most important. The universe seems to favor pragmatism over ideology, at least in the long run.
So in a company if the core values that make it successful are diluted in exchange for diversity, it's no longer what it was, and it might not be able to do keep doing what it did. That said, it also might have gained something else. One thing diversity tends to offer huge complex systems is stability, especially when its incorporated into other values and not held up singularily.
In other words, my take on diversity (and by extension, inclusion) is that we need a diversity of diversity. Sometimes a lot of diversity is best, and sometimes very little diversity is best.
Your logic could be sound if the lowest rung of the skill ladder was simply inevitable for everyone who is currently there. But that is wrong and, really, makes no sense. Many people are just young and need to be trained. Others were taught bad practices and need to be re-trained. Still others have their priorities wrong, but could do good work if they were given a reason to care about the right things. It also takes time for people to grow and to change and to learn from their mistakes.
If you take a hardline attitude on keeping the gates up, you're just going to end up with a monoculture that stagnates.
This implies that no young people can get past the gate.
Sure, they lack wisdom, but that doesn't mean they aren't smart, it just means they're young.
Gatekeeping doesn't have to mean "Don't hire anyone under 35" it means "Don't hire people who are bozos" and "don't hire people who don't give a shit"
Obviously you should set standards for your company. I’m not saying just hire anyone and be done with it. But I am saying that hiring is a long-term project. And I am saying that many people could meet your standards if you meet them half-way by giving them all of the information they need, holding their hand a bit at the beginning, and giving them time to figure everything out.
I’ve worked at places that have the opposite philosophy - hire quickly and fire quickly. That works in terms of hiring people who already happen to be what you want them to be. It just leaves no room for anyone who could be, but isn’t yet, what you want them to be. It also leaves no room for anyone who is different from what you are looking for but who could still bring a lot to the table if you just take the time to figure out what that is, which I think describes a lot of people. You might have hired a mediocre programmer who would be a rockstar at documentation, for example. That kind of thing happens all the time, yet workplace culture and practices tend not to accommodate that. By all means have standards, but put in some effort to help your people reach them in their own way.
But do monocultures always stagnate?
If Apple was made up of only top-end engineers led by a quality-obsessed maniac, would they put out better or worse products?
Of course, not everyone can follow this philosophy, but they don't have to, and most don't want to anyway.
Monocultures can avoid stagnating if they occasionally accept fresh blood from the outside. But hardline stances don’t allow for that. My point is, even if you only want to work with the best of the best, and you’re willing to ignore underprivileged groups with tons of potential, you still need an on-ramp if you want it to be sustainable.
The great engineers don’t graduate from college knowing everything they need to know, nor are they born with that knowledge. It takes time and help from other people to get them there. Even if they were already a top performing engineer at Netflix, that doesn’t mean they can smoothly transition into a role at your company and perform well with zero assistance. The on-ramp matters and has a huge impact on how they will perform. Some people will require more investment than others, but that’s true regardless of whether you stubbornly try to maintain your existing monoculture. And I firmly believe that everyone brings something different to the table. It’s mostly a matter of figuring out what that is for each person.
Hard agree. Gatekeeping is a good thing. It is how you ensure that people who join a group are actually a good fit for the group. For example, if someone wants to join a D&D group but doesn't like that the game is a dungeon crawl where you just go kick monster ass without a pretense of story, nobody will be served by the group deciding to try to adjust to welcome the new person despite that bad fit. Not only the existing group, but the prospective new member, will be better off if they each go their separate ways and play the type of game each enjoys.
It's good to not exclude people for arbitrary reasons (though even this requires the caveat that one man's "arbitrary" is another man's "important part of our identity"). But we also need to recognize that it's ok for something to not be everyone's cup of tea. There isn't some kind of moral mandate that everything must be maximally welcoming to all. Unfortunately, we don't recognize that in our current culture, and in fact we stigmatize it as "gatekeeping" which is deemed to be toxic. But the culture is wrong about this.
Virtually no one is pushing to welcome people who are not qualified.
This is a huge misunderstanding at best and a malicious re-framing of serious issues within portions of the tech industry at worst.
Virtually everyone is pushing to welcome people who are demonstrably not qualified.
This is so off from my experience in the world I think we may be talking about entirely different situations.
In what context is virtually everyone pushing to hire demonstrably unqualified people?
Literally every single one. This country has been tearing itself apart with how divisive DEI and "targets" for hiring are.
> Virtually no one is pushing to welcome people who are not qualified
Any time anyone is celebrated for being an X in this role rather than being good at the role, this is being pushed for.
>This is why gatekeeping is important and shouldn't be labeled as toxic.
I do not for the life of me understand your point. Gatekeeping, as its most commonly used, means controlling access to something (be it a resource, information etc) to deliberately and negatively affect others that are not part of a "blessed" group. Its not objective, and certainly is not a practice reliant on merit. Its an artificial constraint applied selectively at the whim of the gatekeeper(s).
>There's been a shift where everyone wants to welcome everyone, but the problem is it erodes your company culture and lowers the average quality.
The first assertion and the second one are not related. Being welcoming to everyone is not the same thing as holding people to different standards. Company culture sets company inertia and how employees are incentivized to behave and what they care about. You can have the most brilliant engineers in the world, like Google most certainly does have its fair share, and as we have seen, with the wrong incentives it doesn't matter. Look at Google's chat offerings, the Google Graveyard, many of their policies becoming hostile to users as time goes on etc.
Yet you can have a company with what you may deem "average quality" but exceeds in its business goals because its oriented its culture to do so. I don't think Mailchimp was ever lauded for its engineering talent like Google has been, for example, but they dominated their marketplace and built a really successful company culture, at least before the Intuit acquisition.
Agree.
I was in a (tech) meetup last week. We meet regularly, we are somewhere between acquaintances and friends. One thing that came up was a very candid comment about how "we should be able to tell someone 'that is just stupid' whenever the situation warrants it".
I believe that does more good than harm, even to the person it is being directed to. It is a nice covenant to have, "we'll call you on your bs whenever you bring it in", that's what a good friend would do. Embracing high standards in a community makes everyone in it better.
The Linux kernel would be absolutely trash if Linus were not allowed to be Linus. Some contexts do and must require a high level of expertise before you can collaborate properly in them.
If you are a highly accomplished, highly respected individual (like Linus Torvalds) telling someone 'that is just stupid' can be effective, because most people will instinctively trust that you have a good reason to say this and are probably correct.
But that's a special case, not a usual one. Unfortunately, quite a lot of people say things are stupid when they don't understand them (often because of an inflated sense of their own expertise). If they can politely explain why they think an idea is bad, they are more likely to be listened to, and they can save face if the other person successfully counters their argument.
Bottom line is, if you go around calling ideas stupid you better make damn sure you're never wrong, otherwise, well... that's just stupid :)
One thing is Linus held out against the C++ crap all the way until Rust became a viable alternative.
I wish he'd bless a certain Linux distro for PCs so we can have some default. Current default is kinda Ubuntu, but they've made some weird decisions in the past. Seems like he'd make reasonable choices and not freak out over pointless differences like systemd.
(Like, the default distro shouldn't randomly change its entire GUI twice)
>One thing that came up was a very candid comment about how "we should be able to tell someone 'that is just stupid'
You can tell someone their idea is substandard without inferring their stupid, which is generally taken to be an insult. Tact in communication does matter. I don't think anyone needs to say "that is just stupid" to get a point across.
I've had plenty of tough conversations with colleagues where it was paramount to filter through ideas, and determining viable ones was really important. Not once did anyone have to punch at someone's intelligence to make the point. Even the simple "Thats a bad idea" is better than that.
>whenever the situation warrants it
Which will of course be up to interpretation by just about everyone. Thats the problem with so called "honest"[0] conversation. By using better language you can avoid this problem entirely without demeaning someone. Communication is a skill that be learned.
>The Linux kernel would be absolutely trash if Linus were not allowed to be Linus. Some contexts do and must require a high level of expertise before you can collaborate properly in them.
Linus took a sabbatical in 2018 to work on his communication and lack of emotional empathy. He's had to make changes or he absolutely risked losing the respect of his peers and others he respected. He has worked on improving his communication.
To follow Linus as an example, would be to work on communication and emotional empathy. Not disregard your peers.
[0]: Most often, I find people who are adamant about this line of thinking tend to want an excuse to be rude without accountability.
Sometimes, people do need a metaphorical kick in the butt though. Of course, that doesn't mean behaving like a jerk, and certainly not on a regular basis, but if you value politeness and conflict avoidance over avoiding actual problems, the culture in your environment will quickly deteroriate towards no one taking responsibility for anything. Why would anyone do that if they can't even be called out for messing something up, yet alone being held accountable?
In all of those projects and organsiations which value respectful language and inclusivity and all sorts of non-results-oriented crap, not much usually gets done. This is how you get design-by-committee lowest common denominator slop.
And even if you don't agree with what I'm saying here, "avoid criticising people" quickly turns into "avoid criticising their ideas because they might feel offended". There was a recent HN thread about AI-written pull requests and how people have problems with them, because tactfully rejecting 10k lines of pure bullshit is very hard without making the submitter upset. Guess what, if they were allowed to say "no, you aren't going to be merging slop you can't even explain" the average code quality would skyrocket and the product would be greatly improved.
>politeness and conflict avoidance over avoiding actual problems
Those two things are not coupled. You can maintain a sense of politeness in face of conflict. This is the entire basis of Nonviolent Communication, a great book about handling and resolving conflict in such a manner.
It’s extremely effective in my experience and results in overall better clarity and less conversational churn.
>Why would anyone do that if they can't even be called out for messing something up, yet alone being held accountable
You can be, that is in part a definition of accountability and you’re conflating a lack of accountability with some idea that it requires behaving in a manner that may be construed as rude, and that’s simply not true.
So like anything, you hold them accountable. You can do that without being rude.
>In all of those projects and organsiations which value respectful language and inclusivity and all sorts of non-results-oriented crap
I’m getting a sense you have a predisposition to disliking these things. They’re really important because they are, when correctly understood, results oriented. It frees up people to feel comfortable saying things they may not have been otherwise. That is very productive.
Abusive and abrasion language does not do that.
>This is how you get design-by-committee lowest common denominator slop
No, in my experience and many reports from others you get this for a myriad of reasons, but consistent theme is lack of ownership or organizational politics, not because people level up their communication skills
>avoid criticising their ideas because they might feel offended". There was a recent HN thread about AI-written pull requests and how people have problems with them, because tactfully rejecting 10k lines of pure bullshit is very hard without making the submitter upset. Guess what, if they were allowed to say "no, you aren't going to be merging slop you can't even explain" the average code quality would skyrocket
I don’t disagree with you because I don’t believe in proper criticism, I do. I disagree with you because the implicit messaging I’m getting here is the following
- you sometimes have to be a jerk
- therefore it’s okay to be a jerk sometimes
- somehow having an expectation of treating others with respect somehow equates to poor accountability
I’ve spent a good chunk of my years learning a lot about effective communication and none of it is about avoiding accountability, of yourself or others. It’s about respecting each other and creating an environment where you can talk about tough things and people are willing to do it again because they were treated respectfully
>you’re conflating a lack of accountability with some idea that it requires behaving in a manner that may be construed as rude, and that’s simply not true.
Yes, I'm conflating that. Maybe the two aren't intrinstically coupled, but from what I have seen, that seems to happen. When you forbid surface-level aggression, people don't stop being aggressive or frustrated. They just turn to more underhanded ways of aggression, like bullying or gaslighting.
>I’m getting a sense you have a predisposition to disliking these things. They’re really important because they are, when correctly understood, results oriented. It frees up people to feel comfortable saying things they may not have been otherwise. That is very productive.
I see what you're saying, but I do not think this plays out in practice like that. It's not results-oriented thinking when you prioritise how the other person feels above all. Not to say you should never prioritise it (that's called sociopathy), but if you prioritise it too much, you can say less things, not more, because disagreeing with someone always carries the risk of offence, especially if you are going to say that their idea isn't the best. If you nurture a culture of honesty - and that does not include being abusive - then people will feel free to push back on bad ideas, and that is results-oriented thinking.
>I disagree with you because the implicit messaging I’m getting here is the following
The first two points absolutely, but I would like to push back on the third point. Not every idea deserves respect and hell, not everyone deserves respect either! It is the hollowing out of what the word originally meant. Ideally, you only respect people who deserve respect, who return it to you in turn. To be respected is a honour, not a right, because it carries implicit trust in your words. If you consistently have a negative impact on the environment, I do not think it is a reasonable expectation to continue to treat you with respect, because that wastes everyone's time.
If something needs to be said then it must be said, but you have a higher likelihood of the other person receiving the message if you drop the aggressive tone. You're also investing in them listening to you in the future, as opposed to avoiding you because you have a tendency to shame them for being wrong on something.
And if someone "consistently has a negative impact on the environment" you can still confront them without being abrasive. They can still be fired without calling them stupid. Adding that kind of tone adds no information except that you lost your cool. You're making it sound like every instance that warrants confrontation is about an intentional and repeated offence.
I've been in social circles where one can just say "that is just stupid" without that being a big deal, as well as others where people tend to write essays like yours to get a simple argument across.
I prefer the former by a lot, but of course you're free to spend your time in the latter.
> You can tell someone their idea is substandard without inferring their stupid, which is generally taken to be an insult. Tact in communication does matter. I don't think anyone needs to say "that is just stupid" to get a point across.
What's wrong with calling an idea stupid? A smart person can have stupid ideas. (Or, more trivially, the person delivering a stupid idea might just be a messenger, rather than the person who originally thought of the idea.)
Though, to be clear, saying that an idea is stupid does carry the implication that someone who often thinks of such ideas is, themselves, likely to be stupid. An idea is not itself a mind that can have (a lack of) intelligence; so "that's stupid" does stand for a longer thought — something like "that is the sort of idea that only a stupid person would think of."
But saying that an idea is stupid does not carry the implication that someone is stupid just for providing that one idea. Any more than calling something you do "rude" when you fail to observe some kind of common etiquette of the society you grew up in, implies that you are yourself a "rude person". One is a one-time judgement of an action; the other is a judgement of a persistent trait. The action-judgements can add up as inductive evidence of the persistent trait; but a single action-judgement does not a trait-judgement make.
---
A philosophical tangent:
But what both of those things do — calling an idea stupid, or an action rude — is to attach a certain amount of social approbation or shame to the action/idea, beyond just the amount you'd feel when you hear all the objective reasons the action/idea is bad. Where the intended response to that "communication of shame" is for the shame to be internalized, and to backpropagate and downweight whatever thinking process produced the action/idea within the person. It's intended as a lever for social operant conditioning.
Now, that being said, some people externalize blame — i.e. they experience "shaming messaging" not by feeling shame, but by feeling enraged that someone would attempt to shame them. The social-operant-conditioning lever of shame does not work on these people. Insofar as such people exist in a group, this destabilizes the usefulness of shame as a tool in such a group.
(A personal hypothesis I have is that internalization of blame is something that largely correlates with a belief in an objective morality — and especially, an objective morality that can potentially be better-known/understood by others than oneself. And therefore, as Western society has become decreasingly religious, shame as a social tool has "burned out" in how reliably it can be employed in Western society in arbitrary social contexts. Yet Western society has not adapted fully to this shift yet; which is why so many institutions that expect shame to "work" as a tool — e.g. the democratic system, re: motivating people to vote; or e.g. the school system, re: bullying — are crashing and burning.)
In addition to what you and the person you replied to already said, simply calling something stupid conveys very little information. "Stupid" provides no context, no rationale, and no direction towards improvement. If your goal is simply to push someone away, stop them from communicating entirely, or shame them, then yeah, dismissing a person's contributions as stupid is the tool for the job. But if you want better contributions and are trying to improve a project, you have to put in more effort than that.
> "we should be able to tell someone 'that is just stupid' whenever the situation warrants it".
The likeliest outcome from that is the other person gets defensive and everything stays the same or gets worse. It’s not difficult to learn to be tactful in communication in a way which allows you to get your point across in the same number of words and makes the other person thankful for the correction.
Plus, it saves face. It’s not that rare for someone who blatantly say something is stupid to then be proven wrong. If you’re polite and reasonable about it, when you are wrong it won’t be a big deal.
One thing I noticed about people who pride themselves in being “brutally honest” is that more often than not they get more satisfaction from being brutal than from being honest, and are incredibly thin-skinned when the “honest brutality” is directed at them.
> The Linux kernel would be absolutely trash if Linus were not allowed to be Linus.
I don’t understand why people keep using Torvalds as an example/excuse to be rude. Linus realised he had been a jerk all those years and that that was the wrong attitude. He apologised and vowed to do better, and the sky hasn’t fallen nor has Linux turned to garbage.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/linus-torvalds-apolo...
So the problem is actually diversity and not grotesque shareholder and marketing driven development?
Im sceptical. I've never seen what you describe outside of toxic "culture war clickbait videos", what i have seen is nepotism, class privileges and sprint culture pushed by investors - you know the exact opposite of what you describe.
Toxic gatekeeping means sitting on IRC all day just to tell people to read the manual. What you're describing is an, "intervew process."
Idk how to fix this, but the problem with interviews by rank and file employees is they have to prioritize standardization and objectivity over finding brilliant applicants. It only makes sure the applicant knows how to code rather than lying on his/her resume. I think Jobs said something like, B players will hire B and C players.
When I interviewed at a smaller company, someone high up interviewed me last. I passed everything on paper afaik, but he didn't think I was the right person for some reason. Which is fine for a small company.
You’re right. I’ll start: get off hacker news you noob. Nobody wants to hear your Eternal September rants about what you think DEI means.
Also, that reputation was earned before 2010 when every asshole jumped into "technology" for the fat paycheck.
It used to be hard and a liability to be a nerd
I don't know, Linus Torvalds was kind of notorious before 2010 for gatekeeping in not-so-constructive ways.
I'm pretty sure this would also render the dot-com bubble the nerds fault?
Let's not go back to how nerd culture used to be regarding diversity... or lack thereof.
I remember when Bill Gates was on magazine covers, viewed as a genius, a wonderful philanthropist, even spoofed in Animaniacs as "Bill Greats."
I guess my point is, "It used to be hard and a liability to be a nerd" was never true, and is nothing but industry cope. The good old days were just smaller, more homogenous, had more mutually-shared good old toxicity and misogyny (to levels that would probably get permabans here within minutes; there's been a lot of collective memory-holing on that), combined with greater idolization of tech billionaires.
> I don't know, Linus Torvalds was kind of notorious before 2010 for gatekeeping in not-so-constructive ways.
What changed in 2010?
Nothing. He was toxic for almost a decade after that.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/linus-torvalds-apolo...
Everybody jumped into technology for fat paychecks long before 2010
this_user gets it.
Successful publicly traded companies have a responsibility to generate more revenue and increase the stock price every year. Year after year. Once their product is mature after so many years, there aren't new variations to release or new markets to enter into.
Sales stagnate and costs stagnate; investors get upset. Only way to get that continual growth is to increase prices and slash costs.
When done responsibly, it's just good business.
The problem comes in next year when you have to do it again. And again. Then the year after you have to do it again. And again.
Such as all things in life, all companies eventually die.
Sounds like public trading is the problem from your description
"The neatest thing that happens is, when you get a core croup of ten people, it becomes self policing, as to who they let into that group."
—Steve Jobs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQKis2Cfpeo
+1 - think it’s a variant of Gervais principle with effects at a different scale. I guess you are always at the interplay of organizational culture and specific individuals with peak performance reached when both are peaking.
Legends are always part fiction. And corporations are not meritocracies.
I upgraded to iOS 26 when the beta first came out. It’s remarkable how they have just kept changing the transparency of things back and forth, while the critical bugs have remained untouched.
There’s no way I’m (ever) upgrading to Tahoe, I’m just going to hold out as long as possible and hope Omarchy gets as stable and feature rich as possible in the time being.
No idea what to do about the mobile situation - I can’t see myself realistically ever using android. Switching off of iCloud and Apple Music would also be pretty tough, although I’ve seen some private clouds lately that were compelling.
I just wish there was a more Linux-minded less-Google oriented mobile operating system
fwiw - I always just run prior year's iOS on mobile until Sept each year at which I update the one with a year of fixes - so I'm always running the most stable iOS but it indeed has fewer features but stability is more important than new features to me...
>I’m just going to hold out as long as possible and hope Omarchy gets as stable and feature rich as possible in the time being.
Isn't Omarchy just config files for a bunch of existing, stable programs? Why wait?
Yes. It’s also built on arch which will always be rolling release, so it’s not the end all for stability. I doubt omarchy is doing any real fixes for stability beyond config files.
26 series operating systems are all just dumpster fires that are lit up for attention.
Since there are a lot of die hard Apple fans and engineers on hacker news this is going to get downvoted to hell, but I’m going to say it again.
It looks like Apple doesn’t care about user experience anymore, and the 26 series updates all look like they’ve been developed by amateurs online, not tested at all, and Apple engineers just took long vacations while they’re on the clock. It’s a complete and utter disaster of an operating system.
Got a ton of pushback for talking about how buggy the OS has been. "it doesn't happen to me" all right bully for you now I have to helplessly send a bug report and live with a machine that just crashes and restarts if I dare to open the lid seconds after I closed it
It's kinda funny reading about attention to detail on a website with CSS set to: font-weight:300
This means that author never considered checking how it looks on any other non-Apple OS. Meanwhile Apple has a setting, which is enabled by default, to artificially make a pseudo-bold font out of normal font: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553486
He died in 2011.
I think it's a little more complicated than that. He wasn't at Apple from mid-1985 through the end of 1996, yet Apple's culture was still profoundly influenced by him in many ways. Many influential people who were hired pre-1985 were present at Apple during the Sculley, Spindler, and Amelio years. Even in the mid-1990s when Apple was spiraling down the drain, the Mac was still focused on usability and consistency.
However, it seems that under Tim Cook, Apple has gradually lost many of its traditional values when it comes to usability and UI/UX perfectionism. I suspect that the company has not passed on "The Apple Way" to people who joined the company after Steve Jobs' passing. Not only that, there doesn't seem to be an "Apple Way" anymore.
Come to think of it, the old Apple had figures like Bruce Tognazzini who wrote about "The Apple Way"; I have a copy of Tog on Interface that distills many of the UI/UX principles of the classic Mac. I can't think of any figures like Tog in the modern era.
Gradually the Apple software ecosystem is losing its distinctiveness in a world filled with janky software. It's still better than Windows to me, but I'd be happier with Snow Leopard with a modern Web browser and security updates.
It's sad; the classic Mac and Jobs-era Mac OS X were wonderful platforms with rich ecosystems of software that conformed to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines of those eras. I wish a new company or a community open-source project would pick up from where Apple left off when Jobs passed away.
>...I wish a new company or a community open-source project would pick up from where Apple left off...
There's the Hello System[0]... not sure if it counts.
[0] https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/
It's a start, for sure
It's surprising how many C* level people don't use the software their company creates. I don't doubt that Cook uses an iPhone, but does he actually _use_ it, as in go off the happy path? And what about macOS? Based on past emails and stuff, Jobs was a decent "power user" of osx and a lot of bugs were fixed because he noticed it.
After seeing how Cook takes an iPhone out of his pocket, I'm not convinced he even uses an iPhone, or any smartphone for that matter.
If a company needs to rely on the CEO to file bug reports, it really shows their absolute lack of QA and testing along the way.
I don't think that's really the point of the CEO being a power user. Although Apple's software QA is definitely in question too.
More disturbing is the author doesn't mention it at all. The legendary CEO is never mentioned, but somehow big conclusions are still drawn? Go ahead and skip this article.
90% of the times when I pay with Apple Pay, and want to switch the credit card I do too many unnecessary taps.
First, I quickly tap on the first button that has the picture of the credit card and its name. As a result I find myself in a menu that shows me the billing address (go figure)! So, I have to click back, and use the button below that simply states “Change the credit card” or something to that effect.
Why, for the love of god, for the info about the billing address Apple uses picture of CC? Why the billing address is even the first option!?
So, multiple clicks when it can be avoided by a proper design (I think in the past the picture button was the one that changed credit cards, but I don’t know if I am misremembering).
Every time it happens I think about Steve Jobs.
Are you me? I always go back and get it on a next try, and maybe also like tried to bail when I saw it was the wrong card after double side buttoning, which maybe means I need to reset the state of the payment screen, but then need to wait, double click again, change it the right way, wait for the glorious beep…
In order to say no you have to have a burning yes.
The people in power don't have a burning yes.
What’s a burning yes?
I believe it was always more myth than fact. There's always been rough edges in Apple products line. If anything its more an indication of where the real focus is now. And it's not iOS.
Yep, lots of inconsistencies even in their own iOS apps. I think they have been coasting on that reputation for quite some time.
Despite Apple's walled garden, its anti-consumer practices of trying to keep you in the ecosystem, and other behaviors (like the green/blue bubbles fiasco) that are absolutely reprehensible and inexcusable, I still used iPhones because it seemed far superior to the other offerings on the market. Fortunately, Apple is doing its best to make me see the light.
That iMessage screenshot looks like MySpace.
I don't use a Mac anymore, but I do use an iPhone. This is the worst version of iOS I can recall. Everything is low contrast and more difficult to see. The colors look washed out. The icons look blurry. In my opinion, Liquid Glass is a total bust. I don't know what these people are thinking. Times have certainly changed.
Embrace Android
Things don't seem much better over there, esp. with Google removing the ability to sideload apps.
As opposed to iPhones were you can .. sideload apps? Your criticism is fair, but not really relevant to the conversation here.
OP was talking about design languages
I'm so glad the chorus seems to be getting louder over just how bad things have gotten with Apple's software stack. This piece has been mainly centered on UI/UX but it's also really bad when it comes to functionality as so many bugs have seem to come up in both iOS and macOS. I will never understand how a company that has so much riding on the way their products are perceived by their users has fumbled the ball so badly--especially with how much money they have in the bank.
Attention to detail is at odds with the pursuit of infinite, quarterly growth. Why take time to get it right when you can get something out the door for your next review? The quality of which doesn't matter because it's in the past, a quarter that's already closed.
Apple's attention to detail went into implementing every dark pattern imaginable to get you on iCloud and related services.
macOS is essentially an iCloud client and sales funnel these days, it's clear that's all that Apple sees it as.
I personally think Apple is a victim of being a publicly listed company. Once you're publicly listed, the only thing shareholders want (and the only thing the CEO is measured on) is, ultimately, the share price.
Don't get me wrong, I also enjoy and benefit from returns from the sharemarket. But I think there are downsides to it, and you can clearly see it here, with Apple. A company that was an underdog, and didn't really need to worry too much about the share price because anything they did at that time was attracting customers at a smaller scale, but it was still growth. Now at the size that they are, they have to lose their soul to keep the growth happening.
It's sad, but it's also the reality. Netflix for example - once tweeting "Love is sharing a password" now resorting to stopping this.
There's just no contentment in the sharemarket.
Growth can be done sustainably. Still the only FAANG that is not corrupt yet.
On multiple devices when doing system update on ios 26, pin entry displays full keyboard instead of standard pin input. It's been like that for like 5 versions (of iOS 26) already.
It's fascinating to me because that's the single thing which every user goes through. It's the main branch and not some obscure some edge case. How do you do testing that you miss that?
You can also use an alphanumeric passcode, in which case you need the full keyboard. Maybe they just unified this, so that it always displays the keyboard instead of switching between keyboard and PIN input?
I mean it should be unified, the pin entry should look the same in every place, this has security implications also. It doesn't.
Steve Jobs is gone, so is the unique quality obsessed Apple we knew. Even on the hardware side, the AirPods reecks of poor quality since they break so easily
Yesterday I had annoying bugs on my iPhone, my Apple Watch, and on the apple store website. Incredible.
Nice touch having U2's song "Every Breaking Wave" playing in one of the screen grabs ... that being the second track on the (in)famous "free" 2014 iTunes release of their album "Songs of Innocence".
About $1B (billion) in stock incentives for top-level execs in 2025 (Tim alone is $76m I believe). Apple stock is up. They are happy imho. Very, very few humans would care about "detail" vs. this outcome. Satya is close to $100M I believe, and we are shocked the M$FT is trading-in on ads/telemtry in Win11. These guys are just human.
Why not become a bank at that point and be honest about things.
Honestly the M$FT thing might be the greatest thing to happen to the Linux community, so much fresh blood and hopefully far more curious tinkers will continue to make the ecosystem better.
I believe 2026 will finally be the year of Linux desktop.
> I believe 2026 will finally be the year of Linux desktop.
I’ve been hearing this substituting in YYYY+1 every YYYY for the last quarter century.
The year of Linux desktop will never come. Why?
- Money. Hardware manufacturers make more money selling computers that are optimized for Windows and there is nothing on the horizon that will change that meaning that the Linux desktop experience is always the worst of the three main options for hardware compatibility.
- Microsoft. Call me when Office runs natively in Linux. You might be happy with LibreOffice or Google Docs, but MS Office still dominates the space (and as someone who does a lot of writing and has a number of options, I find Word to be better than any of the alternatives, something that 30 years ago I would have scoffed at).
- Fidgetiness. All the tweaking and customizing that Linux fans like is an annoyance for most people. Every customization I have on my computer is one more thing I need to keep track of if I get a new computer and frankly it’s more than a little bit of a pain.
> In my mind, "Apple" as a brand used to be synonymous with "attention to detail" but sadly, over the course of the last 8 - 10 years
You outgrew this myth, congratulations!
> Look, I've got nothing but respect for the perfectly lovely humans who work at Apple. Several are classmates from university, or people I had the pleasure of working with before at different companies. But I rather suspect what's happened here is that some project manager ... convince Tim
But haven't outgrown this one yet, well, maybe in another 8 years...
I just noticed a meaningless feature of iOS: The cursor moves (since iOS 15?) in steps of one pixel.
Probably just to make it slick looking (fluent)…
- BUT that’s completely non-effective as it allows for the cursor to be positioned on top of a single letter in >10 different positions.
So when you’re editing you are having a much more difficult time placing the cursor just between the two letters you want.
I noticed it when using some app the had disabled this stupid feature and it was just so much more effective to do mybediting as the cursor jumped to the position BETWEEN the letters in stead of FLOATING ALL OVER.
It’s nice on slides when presenting a new fancy feature, but completely useless for s ‘professional’ (focused) user.
PS yes I recall those old Apple adds - saw them when they were brand new and Apple was a better details oriented company (I miss those days….)
Apples attention to detail has always been skin deep. I remember reading blog posts 20 years ago about how some apps followed Apples standards design and others didn’t follow their design standards at all.
In the 90s Apple was in worse shape. They couldn’t even compete with Windows 9x for stability. There were memes about how MacOS needed just as many reformats as Windows 98.
The problem isn’t Apples attention to detail, it’s that people hold Apple to a higher standard. But in reality they’re just as fallible as every other software company.
Normal Mac/PC user priorities: Web browsing, run my app instead of telling me the last update broke it, battery life, plug laptop into monitor/TV/projector, copy photos off my phone without deleting them, games maybe
Apple priorities: Emoji and emoji accessories, realistic glass physics, battery life, new kinds of ports, iCloud subscriptions, rearrange system preferences, iTunes delenda est
I'm just glad as a SWE the Mac still covers my workload
And those are some very low hanging fruit. If you look at the bigger picture, Apple does not know how to balance ease of use on the one hand and control over details by power users/geeks on the other hand. They simply do not let you configure things, because coming up with good UI for that is hard. But on macOS, power users probably make up a large share of their users. They should figure this out.
It's like they all vibe-coded all the new 26.XX OSs across devices.
I tend to ignore these kinds of things, but sometimes applications are unresponsive, lose focus, and iOS apps don't show the keyboard, etc. so I cannot take it anymore.
I wanted to open a file from the Files app on iPad, a PDF. It opened the Preview app, but it couldn't allow me to scroll through the file. I tried to close it, but, back button goes to the Preview app, not to the Files. Then closed the app, and from the Files, but again it kept opening this separate app, instead of the in-app PDF viewer, and I guess I have never seen a malfunctioning state or application flows in default iOS apps ever.
The new reminders app is a joke. It has weird things that randomly jump from date selection to time selection, and sometimes select random dates.
It's like, they did, `claude new-reminder-app.md --dangerously-skip-permissions`, and "is it working? working! release it!" I know (hope) it's not the case, but, since the last few weeks, it feels it's like that.
I do not believe in this whitewashing of Apples history, throughout their history they always had problems, either with their hardware or their software.
The one thing that really changed is that every single company looked at Apple and saw something worth copying. Now there are dozens of phone makers, all seeking to emulate Apples success, putting effort into UI, polishing and design. This wasn't the case a decade ago. Just compare the circus bizarre design choice of Android Lollipop (either Stock or with manufacturer/user added layers on top) to iOS 7.
Now Apple is no longer particularly unique, in many regards. And I believe that they were absolutely aware of that and desired to continue being a defining force, instead of being "one of many". It's not that Apple has changed, it is that it hasn't and now desires to force through change.
Looks exceptionally bad, but OSX Lion and iOS 7 were worse releases. It's also been a long time since I've actually wanted an update, at this point more something that's semi forced.
On the bright side, Apple Silicon is amazing, and it seems like Apple decided in 2021 to make the MBP good again like it was in 2015.
Snow Leopard was peak OSX. Lion, Mountain Lion and everything since then has driven me away from OSX. I’m also stuck on an older iOS version 18). There may be certain fixes I would appretiate, but way more annoyances. I miss iOS 6 and that ecosystem …
<edit> spelling, since iOS 18 isnt as forgiving as iOS 6
Yeah I would totally use Snow Leopard if it ran on modern hardware and had all the new security updates. The new Mac OSes are ok too since I ignore the random new crap, but a lot of that is just new hardware being faster.
They have a boring CEO who was a fantastic COO. Apple needs a new Steve Jobs at the helm. As much as I like Tim he does not impress me. His demos aren't anywhere as iconic. He's the safe pick for CEO but he is not the future of Apple by any means. I hope they make a sound pick for a successor.
Nah, the game's up. There's too much money involved now for them to really do anything 'bold' anymore.
I mean fuck, even their failures don't seem to matter much (Vision Pro, Siri) to their stock price.
We'll get a foldable phone, and some new emoticons. Some font tweaks..
They think we're going to love it.
iOS 26 is so bad so bad so bad
ironically I don't really mind the new design language, whatever, if the damned thing worked.
I feel like I am one of the only people that actually really likes iOS 26, iPad 26, and macOS 26.
I really haven't had many problems, and I actually like some of the features. Sure, the UI/UX is not perfect from the start, but there hasn't been anything I have been unable to accomplish because of the new OS. The liquid glass can even be nice with certain backgrounds too.
This is just my hypothesis, but I have noticed that a lot of the people that have been complaining about macOS have been using 3rd party applications for a in their workflow. If I am not mistaken, there were issues with many Electron apps in the beginning. On macOS, I mainly Apple's apps or I'm deep in the command line. So, perhaps I have been fortunate to avoid many of the UI/UX features that many have faced?
Apple still acts frivolously extreme about certain visual details on the interface. What feels different is that once we get away from the marketable still of an interface, the motivation just doesn't feel there to meet a higher quality vision, if there is one at all.
A lot of people will disagree that Apple had great attention to detail before because of the things they choose not to focus on. But I think what was counter arguable before is that they were meeting their own internal vision with a high expectation for quality, and that that vision covered every part of the experience. The counter argument doesn't feel as valid today.
Many complain about sw bugs as a sign of decline. I think it’s not correct — every software has bugs. Hell, even hardware and device may have bugs. Remember antennagate? I think poor interface design is a sign of poor product engineering. And this is a sign of decline.
Early Apples were pretty lousy from a quality standpoint (I was a certified warranty tech when the original iMac came out and it was HORRIBLE.. it was made in Mexico).
When they moved production to Foxconn, Quanta, and Pegatron then the quality went up...
Apple stuff is full of bugs now. The times of "it just works" are a very distant memory. The OS crashes more often then Windows 10 did, with the operating system becoming basically completely unresponsive. Apple also now has eternal bugs that have been around for years (like ios hot spot disabling quickly when tethering non-Apple devices). Together with a bunch of annoying decisions for how the OS works, which can not be configured, it feels a lot like windows -- eternally broken, fighting with the users, having to work around bugs.
Kind of bizarre that they are destroyed their reputation for software perfection.
https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting/
Yes.. Too bad we ended up here :(, It's Apple's Software Quality Crisis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075
> What happened to Apple's legendary attention to detail?
It was pancreatic cancer IIRC.
Apple died somehow with Steve
Apple software has gone so bad in the last decade or so. UI problems abound - the lack of default buttons that fire when you hit enter makes me ill. THIS USED TO BE IN THE APPLE USER INTERFACE GUIDELINES. Does anybody remember that big binder that was ultra-important for Mac developers? Well if anyone still has a copy they probably have it on a bookshelf where it looks nice on Zoom.
And then there's the bugs. What software is more consistently buggy than Apple software?
Everything that went out the door used to have to live up to Steve Jobs' standards. I'd imagine those under him had a similar obsession, considering Scott Forestall talked about going over the iPhone UI with a jeweler's loupe.
These days it feels like various teams are responsible for their part and they are managing toward a delivery date. As long as they check the box that the feature is there... ship it. There is likely not anyone around to throw the product in a fish tank if it isn't up to par.
Steve died.
He already covered this: https://youtu.be/K1WrHH-WtaA?si=tHrGBNmLlIfp4NSv
Sometimes these articles confuse me. I think because I came from Windows to the Apple land (at least full time) only in the past few years.
These articles sometimes confused me until someone on HN had a quote:
"MacOS has never been worse, but the distance between MacOS and Windows has never been greater."
So I see these articles and I ... I'm really happy in MacOS land.
If I had to guess, having worked in Cupertino, there is just not enough cohesion across the software teams. Everyone is building in their own little bubbles, and when one team goes down a bad path, your team tries to be overly diplomatic, or can say it's not my problem and now we're stuck with this mess.
Sometimes you need the Jobs at the top of it all telling people it's not working well and they need to get their shit together.
And let us not forget about the non-resizable widget for the "Keyboard Brig..." [1] (which is where we store our insubordinate keyboards, I guess)
Steve truly is dead.
[1] https://cdn.social.linux.pizza/system/media_attachments/file...
Anyone who’s had the misfortune of trying to use the iPhone “Files” program to do anything at all, or seen all the little curser placement glitches in Notes or Safari (especially when resizing), or had to look up the arbitrary and ever changing path to a system setting, or started typing to be greeted by a loud popping from glitched out audio feedback, knows that legend was always just a myth.
These are all things which have been broken for years.
A lot of these "attention to detail" bugs are so hard to ignore once I see them. For example, on iOS 26, the Home Screen icons have those borders (I hate them but whatever). Those borders are however not there when you swipe up from bottom of screen to return to Home Screen. During the animation, the borders are not present at all on that specific app's icon. Only once animation completes, the border shows up suddenly.
"If you were a ‘product person’ at IBM or Xerox: so you make a better copier or better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market-share, the company’s not any more successful. So the people who make the company more successful are the sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the ‘product people’ get run out of the decision-making forums.
The companies forget how to make great products. The product sensibility and product genius that brought them to this monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts about wanting to help the costumers.”
- Steve Jobs - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs:_The_Lost_Interview
Or as Parkinson wrote many decades before, injelitance
I've always taken this to heart in looking at how organizations operate, and in broad strokes, not only is was Jobs right, keeping this in the back of my mind has always allowed me to evaluate organizational inertia very quickly.
That said, I wonder, Jobs lived through Apple's transformation, but not its peak phase where Apple was simply printing money year after year after year. I do wonder if Jobs in 2016 would have been able to keep the organization performing at such a high caliber.
Even he seemed like he was making unforced errors at times too, like the "you're holding it wrong" fiasco, but its hard to say since he didn't live through Apple 2013-2019 where it became an ever increasing money printing machine.
In the age of AI, COVID-19 etc. I wonder how jobs post 2020 would treat things.
Jobs would’ve went all-in on Siri. He acquired it and loved it.
I think Jobs would have gotten bored of sitting back, printing money, and manufacturing the same boring rectangles over and over for a decade.
> In my mind, "Apple" as a brand used to be synonymous with "attention to detail" but sadly, over the course of the last 8 - 10 years, their choices have become anything but detail oriented.
In my mind it is synonymous with style over substance. Bad software packaged in a user hostile interface, sitting atop shitty hardware that looks sleek and fashionable.
It doesn't matter anyway. It's fashionable enough that it will keep selling.
To be fair if you work in a glass palace you might think the world needs glass everywhere lol... : https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e949a92e17d55230cd1d...
I'm surprised the author didn't mention my personal biggest frustration I've had since I made the mistake of upgrading.
Everything seems to be lazily done now - by that I mean, a modal pops-up and then it resizes to fit the content. Never seen this before.
Or, you open settings (settings!) and it's not ready to use until a full second later because things need to pop in and shift.
And it's animated- with animation time, so you just have to wait for the transitions to finish.
And "reduce motion" removes visual feedback of moving things (e.g. closing apps) so I find it entirely unusable.
And as others have noted the performance is completely unacceptable. I have a 16 pro and things are slow... And forget "low battery mode" - it's now awful.
I'm not doing anything weird and keep like all apps closed and things off when I don't use them and battery life is significantly worse. (Noticed the same on M4 + Tahoe, upgraded at the same time)
Very disappointed and I very much regret upgrading.
File a bug in Feedback Assistant. There shouldn't be any performance issues.
They don’t have automated tests for this? Very weird
For me it's the notch... I'm still on a 2nd gen se (no notch) but I hate the notch on my laptop.
I think we're stuck with the notch forever on iPhones. Even if apple uses an on-screen fingerprint reader in the future like a billion phones already do they're not going to go back from the face scanner. The only thing that will work is if the face scanner can read from behind the display.
On the laptop it doesn't cut into the normal screen ratio. So it's basically free pixels minus the notch.
But stuff did get hidden behind the notch sometimes. Not sure if that is still the case.
I'm still keeping my iPhone 8 Plus and MacBook Air M1 for the exact same reason. I'm not buying any more Apple products until the notch goes away.
Wait, how do you see the notch? It seems that only the menu bar can go there and fullscreen and windowed apps and video can't. Why circumstances do you see it?
Maybe it's because I use dark mode? I can only tell it's there if I move my mouse under it.
When menu items no longer show up because they're where the notch is. Happens every time I'm on just my laptop and not on an external monitor.
I have my display scaled a bit smaller than default, which is probably why I never see that. That's....so stupid.
Here's a "workaround" that might help [1]. It entirely excludes the notch area from use.
[1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/460903/601283
you can “remove” the notch on the Macbook by setting the resolution to one of the 16x10 aspect ratio resolutions.
Go to Settings > Displays. In the list of resolutions you need to enable “Show all resolutions” then you can select one that will hide the notch
On my laptop, I edit the wallpapers to include a black bar at the top, so I rarely notice the notch. Eg: https://celsoazevedo.com/files/2025/macos-bar.png
Got the idea from the Top Notch app, which no longer seems to work: https://topnotch.app/
Apple was never very good at design. It was only good at aesthetics, and those are not quite the same thing.
It was overwhelmed by Tim Cook's greed, like everything else Apple used to be good at.
I'll take the opportunity to air my personal bug grievance --
For several years, there's been an issue with audio message recording in iMessage. Prior to iOS 26, it would silently fail; the recording would "begin" but no audio would be captured. This would happen 3, 4, even 5 times in a row before it would actually record audio.
Apple is clearly aware of the issue, because in iOS 26 the failure is no longer silent. Now, you'll get feedback that "Recording isn't available right now". Yet the incidence is...exactly the same. You might have to try 5 times before you're actually able to record a message.
It's simply infuriating, and it makes no sense to a user why this would be happening. Apple owns the entire stack, down to the hardware. Just fix the fucking bug!
my partner and I have a long running joke that I as the techy person who pretty much just uses the camera, WhatsApp and Safari on my phone has so many bugs and issues while my partner who bought the same phone on the same day as me has none of these issues but has and uses every app plugin etc under the sun. and let's face it iOS isn't really that 'customisable'
I just want Safari to work again. The rest I'll wait. I'm checking for software updates daily. it's gotten so bad that I looked up how to report bugs to Apple but I can't submit screenshots!?
I'll settle for just being able to enter data into a form in Safari without needing to reload the whole page.
just to add I had to cut this comment, reload the page, paste it in in order to be able to submit it
That sounds like your device is running out of memory. Try disabling any extensions.
The current CEO doesn't care like the previous one did. Culture of excellence was replaced with financialization.
This idea is a whole genre of tech journalism. Its a honeypot for people with some specific bone to pick or ideology to evangelize.
I buy more stock every time one of these articles comes out, because the quiet part is 'Apple is still the best, and I can elevate my brand by criticizing it'
...then I read his bio
https://johnozbay.com/bio
he lists "publicly confronted Apple at the European Commission's televised DMA hearing in Brussels on browser competition." as a highlight. lolol. Time to buy even more stock.
I'm starting to believe that customer satisfaction signals an inefficiency to be found and optimized away. The most financially successful companies have customers who are unhappy but not as unhappy that they leave.
In this case the inefficiency was attention to detail but in other companies it might be something else.
I really hope apple reverses course and brings back flat design with frost like how they did with the butterfly keyboard macbooks, but I get the feeling this is the new Apple under Tim Cook. Damn, it's a shame, the hardware is so impressive.
iPad OS 26 is just as bad, if not worse. It's the Windows ME of tablet OS's: ugly, near-unusable, and riddled with bugs.
Just one example: I was excited by the idea of having two apps on screen at the same time: there are two I like to look at side-by-side all the time. But one of them (an iPhone app) randomly decides to switch to landscape mode, making the layout unusable. More generally, the window controls keep getting activated unexpectedly by taps when I use full-screen apps like games, resulting in the window reverting to not-full-screen. So I guess I'll just have to turn that feature off until it's actually usable.
Unless it has a huge memory leak that isn't fixed for years and causes it to be virtually unusable for anyone it's probably not the Windows ME of Tablet OS's.
Maybe the Windows Vista of Tablet OSs though.
My understanding is that they became more of a hardware company than a software company over the past few years and they just don't care about shipping with the same level of polish anymore.
I have a theory that the only purpose of the liquid glass update is to create an UI that uses more system resources, so it can be justified to upgrade to a newer device.
It is terrible, does not anything visually or funcionally to the Apple experience.
They've been doing that for years now
Lazy baby duck take for one. Apple's "legendary attention to detail" was never about reminders working the way you want.
And to be honest, it never really existed. It was more that everything else was cheaply manufactured garbage.
Not sure if anyone else has experienced issues with the keyboard. Sometimes keyboard is blocking the screen and I can't get it to go away or the opposite where I can't get the keyboard to come up when I need to use it.
Not sure if the same issue but since iOS 18 and now 26, if the keyboard/text field detects a grammatical error or typo (even when you don't care) it'll almost do this UI thread block type thing where it refuses to let you move the cursor or close the keyboard until you act like you're fixing the error.
https://www.lovefrom.com/
https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/
Apple used to know what's best for me whether I liked it or not. Now, they have no idea what's best for me and no idea if I like it or not.
My current top 3 apple software flaws:
1) battery warning above tabs in browser with no x to close it
2) WebKit bugs that make inputs and visual diverge so you have to click under the input to hit it
3) flickering email app when it’s opened
I actually love a ton of iOS 26's new features, but wow is it buggy.
The attention of humans got ruined with later generations. The generation before us were a different level of skilled, and it's hard as a millenial (me) and gen z to get close to them.
iPhone screenshot and cropping doesn't work. I take a lot of full page screenshots and need to crop them, but sometimes the button is visible and sometimes it isn't. Saving the page as PDF or photo is not intuitive either, you have to click a button that only has a checkmark with no writing on it, and then it says whether to save as photo or PDF. Cropping and saving has become a chore.
Is this a rhetorical question? Obviously Steve Jobs died.
People just forget stuff. All this was said about Tiger. Snow Leopard was an entire paid OS upgrade the only selling point of which was that it made Leopard less crap. Your battery used to expand, your GPU used to overheat, you used to stare at a beachball helplessly every few seconds. You remember the good times, just like in ten years I'm going to remember fitting giant models in shared RAM on a monster GPU while the fans were completely silent, not this nitpicky stuff that has been par for the course for all operating systems forever.
Yeah, agree with this too. Apple tends to create products that are more fully realized than Samsung or even Microsoft (especially in how it looks), but it's been pretty well know that Apple software tends to be buggy, as they aren't an engineering-focused company like let's say Google. They are a consumer products company.
IMHO, people are thinking about how well thought-out and usable the products and software tends to be - Yeah, Apple makes it so anyone can use it - But their software has always been buggy.
The 'Unknown Knowns' quadrant (i.e. bugs) that they'll get around to fixing any day now.
It's not just attention to detail. They seem to have abandoned some core design principles like visibility/discoverability.
i recently worked with a mac and was pretty unimpressed with all the visual clutter in the upper left corner of the screen. it was just kinda cluttered up with a junkyard of wasted space and needless controls. it didn't feel good, magical or delightful. just kind of like jumbled hodgepodge of dated nonsense.
oddly, kde plasma is more pleasing and consistent.
unfortunately just an inherent consequence of treating software as needing continuous improvements and having yearly release targets, you can't just say that this settings menu is already perfect as is, you have to change it, therefore everyone perpetually shuffles around ui and adds features that nobody wants
Does anyone remember Jony Ive's first flat redesign of iOS? It was also criticized and had growing pains.
Not to mention external monitors are broken on my M1 Pro MacBook since some Sequoia 15.x update. Upgrading to Tahoe now to see if it will fix it but I'm not optimistic.
Fucking inexcusable that MacOS metal support for external monitors has been finicky and unstable since the very beginning, and they never resolved that (but at least external monitors were DETECTED, then somewhere in Sequoia things went completely south)-- and now it just seems to be completely broken. There are countless Reddit threads. Why can't the Apple engineering braintrust figure this out??
1) In the EU, if you uninstall Apple Maps and set another app as your navigation default, many (most?) addresses won't work anymore. Clicking an address will show you an alert that you haven't installed a navigation app, or sometimes just open the Maps website in Safari.
2) With the new dual-language keyboards, text prediction is doubly messy. My Dutch-French keyboard suggests English words and almost never understands which language I'm actually typing in.
2b) Fine, but then at least my English keyboard will be okay? Nope. The other keyboards still get polluted with suggestions and auto-correct from the other language keyboards you have. For example, it's now impossible to write “as a” without iOS correcting it to “às à”, even though my Portuguese keyboard is separate and I'm clearly typing in English.
3) Search on iOS always searches for files, even if you remove the Files app contents from search results. (‘App’ just got corrected into ’all’.)
4) In iOS, HealthKit occasionally locks down and the apps that need it to function become unresponsive (AutoSleep, WaterNow, Cronometer). This can only be fixed with a restart.
5) In macOS's Mail, if you Command-Z to undo deleting an email, 90% of the time it goes in a Recovered Emails folder instead of where it was. 10% of the time it's not undeleted at all and is instead completely gone (also from the trash).
6) Calendar.app on macOS can become unusable if you have attachments in events. The solution is to open the event on iOS and delete the attachment.
7) Screen Time asks me twice if I want to unlock an app or website. Sometimes the animation plays and nothing happens, so I have to do it thrice.
8) The Game Mode notification can't be disabled, because no one at Apple has ever alt-tabbed away from a game.
9) If you search for a setting in iOS or the redesigned macOS System Preferences, I think 3/4 of the time it will take you to a nearby screen but not the actual setting. This is because Apple designers don't know that they can scroll you or link you to the right place.
I've reported all these bugs to Apple with screenshots or videos. None of them were ever fixed.
No one gives a shit about anything anymore- Everything is just a job- either due to overmanagement or overwork. Look at how they recently butchered the new park hyatt tokyo redesign, one of the most iconic and enigmatic hotels in the world, reduced to "just another hotel". We're in a world where people have given up on going above and beyond, maybe because we're living in a society where intelligence and perceptiveness aren't rewarded and can't survive.
Try Omarchy.org variant of Linux if you are tired of Apple's years of user-hostile changes and UI disasters. Many people seem to be drawn to it as it's a simple, clean productive system that "just work" (it was build by a previous apple fan that also became disillusioned by the greedy company)
I think Fedora would be a better option here. At least for me.
Judging by the Omarchy presentation video it feels too keyboard oriented. Hotkeys for everything. And hotkeys for AI agents? Is is opinionated indeed. Not my cup of tea.
He also became disillusioned by people with a different skin colour to him, so no thanks.
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I pulled up a video on Omarchy 2.0 from DHH. The first thing he says is it's based on a tiling window manager that takes time to learn and setup, most things are done in the terminal and with the keyboard.
I feel like that loses a majority of people right there. I like the option to do common things with the keyboard, or to configure things with a file. But for things I don't do often, holding a bunch of keyboard shortcuts in my head feels like a waste for those rare things.
I'm not sure about anyone else, but I can't run whatever Linux distro I want at work. When an OS relies on muscle memory to get smooth and fluid operation, it seems like that would make it extra hard to jump between for work vs home. I spent years jumping between OS X and Windows, and I found it's much nicer now that I'm on the same OS for work and home. Even the little things, like using a different notes app at home vs work do trip me up a little, where I'll get shortcuts wrong, or simply not invest in them, because of the switching issue. Omarchy feels like it would be that situation on steroids.
Really wanted to give this a try until i saw a huge "Grok" ad on their frontpage. As a european Grok has the reputation of being the "fascist and openly racist AI", which i think there's actually hard evidence for with their leaked prompts. Why the hell are they promoting that?
Because Omarchy is a Linux distro by DHH and therefore you can also call it a "fascist and openly racist" Linux distro.
DHH was someone I kinda read him online, but he's been going full-in on these racist talking points, e.g., https://paulbjensen.co.uk/2025/09/17/on-dhhs-as-i-remember-l... :(
Modern day witch trial.
I didn't see the Grok, but the Omarchy creator is quite openly problematic anyway: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
Many of the images/screenshots on this web page do not show up for me.
We need a new Snow Leopard.
"The myth and reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard"
https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2023/11/5.html
I don't really agree with the article in the sense that from a user POV, it wasn't very feature filled and it was much more stable than Leopard.
with all respect, they are old people now, yes people working in Apple. They are retiring or retired inside the company. nothing wrong with that but design and all shows it. lol
They fired most of the UI/UX team soon after Steve Jobs died.
It's buried at Alta Mesa Memorial Park, Palo Alto.
the perils of being such a giant. desktop/laptop sales only account for around 8% of revenue for them
He's dead, Jim.
That attention to detail was never really that great.
My Apple monitor has USB ports on the back side. Sigh.
My mouse had a charger cable on the bottom. Sigh.
My keyboard has no dedicated copy and paste keys. Sigh.
My keyboard has no dedicated undo and redo keys. Sigh.
At one point I had to start iTunes to update my OS. Sigh.
Really, the next time someone says Apple nails UX I am just going to cry.
Oh, come on, having your brand-new AirPod Pro 3s listed in the Bluetooth summary of your also-pretty-recent iPhone as ACCESSORY_MODEL_NAME is a small price to pay for the 3 months of free Apple Music that take up so much more space in the UI anyway...
I mean, some people are just impossible to please!
That fucking iMesssage screenshot lmao, this is insane
https://media.nngroup.com/media/editor/2025/10/06/1-messages...
I installed iOS 26 the other day and it seems like a practical joke with how visually terrible it is.
I thought that all non-native apps will feel even more out of place with Liquid Glass and developers go back to writing more native apps. After experiencing iOS 26, I’m pretty confident that people will actually actively try to get away from the default iOS UI language and will use more cross-platform tech that makes it easier to implement their own designs. Liquid Glass is just annoyingly bad.
I like it
It’s like the entire release management was left to a couple of product and UI types . You can tell because they seem to have focused on UI eye-candy instead of UX / interaction or any meaningful QE. Like there is a glaring evidence if attention to detail in the most useless of places.
This thing is laggy…on my brand new 17 Pro. Why not just make the entire OS an electron app at this point?
Apple's attention to detail quit when they tried to force them to RTO back to California.
I've always been a big fan of apple and have defended them in the past, but iOS 26 is a dumpster fire. There are visual corruptions and glitches all over the place and transparent text floating over transparent text. It's not even whether I like the style or not, it's just broken. Who signed off on this? No product in this state would ever leave one of my teams, I'd resign first.
Absolutely despise this "Josefin Sans" font face. Illegible.
Glad it isn't just me. It's like Jony Ive created a font 'for authors who don't want their text read'
Luckily Safari's Reader Mode didn't bug out
Kinda ironic that a post about attention to detail was so hard to read. Why is the font size so small?
He died :(
A very important but much-neglected part of a CEO's tasks is succession planning.
(Perhaps charismatic leaders neglect it a bit on purpose because they enjoy being portrayed as irreplaceable.)
A significant fraction of the bugs in this article are because the author has deliberately chosen settings that cause problems (disabling all location access) or are just bugs, some of which I can't reproduce myself. He throws in random comments like "goodbye accessibility" with no attempt to justify them, when in fact iOS and macOS are famous for their unusually strong accessibility features.
I'm not trying to excuse Apple, but this article attempts to paint the impression that every issue is connected in some kind of serial incompetence, but that simply isn't the case.
> chosen settings that cause problems (disabling all location access)
I thought Apple was all about privacy. But their software needs location access to function properly?
The Reminders app has significant location-based functionality, which obviously won't work if it can't access your location.
It remains private because this runs locally. It's not sent up to the cloud.
There isn’t a single screen I use day to day in iOS 26 that doesn’t have a major or minor defect.
iOS and Mac used to do a good job with things like animations, now they are horrible. Pre-beta quality.
And dark mode and accessibility settings need to just work. That is a core part of the job of every front end iOS developer, including the ones at Apple.
It absolutely is serial incompetence and the Apple engineering leadership that signed off on it should be ashamed.
Dad is gone. Tim Cook is a logistics guy, not a visionary. Simple as. If there isn't anybody around to care, nobody cares—even at Apple.
Every article I read about iOS 26 and Tahoe, is just another reminder that I should never ever update my devices.
I don’t think that there is going back for Apple, the company is already too enshittified to get back to a company with a vision. They got drowned by AI, the releases and features are subpar to competition. I do care about detail when I’m buying premium products and Apple just doesn’t cut it any more.
It now takes four clicks to delete an app on an iPhone, and four clicks and a swipe on an iPad.
I just hope they don’t port the glass interface to macOS. It’s just terrible
Attention to detail?
Apple built a phone that would bend in pockets because they used flimsy aluminum without enough internal structure, something they should have had ample experience to avoid from the exact same thing happening to tons of iPods.
Apple insisted on developing a moronic keyboard implementation to save less than a mm of "thickness" that was prone to stupid failure modes and the only possible repair was to replace the entire top half of the laptop. They also refused to acknowledge this design failure for years.
Apple built a cell phone that would disrupt normal antenna function when you hold it like a cell phone.
Apple has multiple generations of laptops that couldn't manage their heat to the point that buying the more expensive CPU option would decrease your performance.
Adding to the above, Apple has a long long history of this, from various generations of macbook that would cook themselves from GPU heat that they again, refused to acknowledge, all the way to the Apple 3 computer which had no heat management at all.
Apple outright lies in marketing graphics about M series chip performance which is just childish when those chips are genuinely performant, and unmatchable (especially at release) in terms of performance per watt, they just aren't the fastest possible chips on the market for general computing.
Apple makes repair impossible. Even their own stores can only "repair" by replacing most of the machine.
Apple spent a significant amount of time grounding their laptops through the user, despite a grounding lug existing on charging brick. This is just weird
Apple WiFi for a while was weirdly incompatible, and my previous 2015 macbook would inexplicably not connect to the same wireless router that any other product could connect to, or would fail to maintain it's connection. I had to build a stupid little script to run occasionally to refresh DHCP
Apple had a constant issue with their sound software that inexplicably adds pops to your sound output at high CPU load or other stupid reasons, that they basically don't acknowledge and therefore do not provide troubleshooting or remedies.
Apple was so obsessed with "thinness" that they built smartphones with so poorly specced batteries that after a couple years of normal use, those batteries, despite reporting acceptable capacity, could not keep up with current demands and the phones would be unusable. Apple's response to this was not to let people know what was going on and direct them to a cheap battery replacement, but to silently update software to bottleneck the CPU so hard that it could not draw too much current to hurt the battery. The underpowered batteries were a design flaw.
Apple software quality is abysmal. From things like "just hit enter a bunch to log in as root" to "we put a web request to our servers in the hot path of launching an app so bad internet slows your entire machine down"
Apple prevents you from using your "Pro" iPad that costs like a thousand bucks and includes their premier chip for anything other than app store garbage and some specialty versions of productivity apps.
Apple has plenty of failures, bungles, poor choices, missteps, etc. Apple has plenty of history building trash and bad products.
The only "detail" apple paid "attention" to was that if you set yourself up as a lifestyle brand, there's an entire segment of the market that will just pretend you are magically superior and never fail and downplay objective history and defend a 50% profit premium on commodity hardware and just keep buying no matter what.
And let's not forget the original Macintosh, which Steve Jobs insisted shouldnt have a fan and likewise tended to overheat. Of course, that was only after learning the lessons of the Apple ///, where
> Jobs insisted on the idea of having no fan or air vents, in order to make the computer run quietly. ...
> Many Apple IIIs were thought to have failed due to their inability to properly dissipate heat. inCider stated in 1986 that "Heat has always been a formidable enemy of the Apple ///",[15] and some users reported that their Apple IIIs became so hot that the chips started dislodging from the board, causing the screen to display garbled data or their disk to come out of the slot "melted".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_III
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Got eaten by the shareholders and PROFIT
Apple didn't have shareholders and profit before?
Reality-Distortion-Visionary type CEO's can push-back against the holy "Fiduciary Duty to Shareholders" commandment that is used to justify all crap, but the Operating-Profit-Efficiency type CEO's like Tim Cook cannot - nor do they wish do.
But Apple's margin has basically been flat for the past decade, and rose to that level under Jobs?
https://media.ycharts.com/charts/441687ba735392d10a1a8058120...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/03/07/why-tim...
Shareholders didn't know this level of profit was possible and were scared of going back to the ousted Jobs era. It helped that Jobs delivered good growth and profits, though nothing on the scale Cook has with the destruction of Apple's design capital. Some of what Cook has done wouldn't have been possible in the Jobs era due to market and technology differences but in general, Cook has been all about smoothing costs out of processes, with little regard for the things Jobs considered essential.
Apple supports a ton of platforms (iOS, MacOS, iPadOS, WatchOS, Web, Windows etc).
When they release a new feature it needs to be everywhere. That happens every September. The cadence has not changed, but the scope since Apple was just making MacOS has been multiplied.
You can 10X your staff, but the coordination under 10X velocity will suffer.