by ajdude on 3/3/25, 4:04 PM with 1198 comments
by flohofwoe on 3/3/25, 5:01 PM
- on a recent macOS version, right click on the desktop, select 'change wallpaper' => the new settings panel opens
- click on 'Custom Color'
- now hold and drag around the 'color cursor' in the color selection circle for a few seconds
- stop dragging and notice how the color cursor continues jumping around erratically (it's impossible to actually select the exact color you want)
- same thing happens when using the linear slider below the color circle
This bug doesn't lurk deep in some obscure part of the settings panel, it's the only way to change the desktop background color. A QA specialist would stumble over this in 5 minutes of trying to break the app.
I made it a hobby to check this bug after each OS update, it's broken since the new settings panel was introduced in Ventura. As a good citizen I also wrote a Feedback Assistent ticket (FB13805690 - 21-May-2024) with attached screen recordings and all, but of course I could just as well have sent that report into a black hole :)
by yalok on 3/4/25, 8:41 AM
Take basic functionality - a phone app (calling). After certain audio sessions use (calling via WhatsApp) I can’t make regular calls over cellular - the UI app immediately cancels the call. Only reboot helps.
Or notes - for many years/iOS versions, they lived with a bug where a text note may just become blank - and only restarting Notes app makes it visible again.
Or AppStore - if an app has to be updated (I have auto updates off) - and I press Update - it gets downloaded, installed - and then AppStore is back to showing “Update” button! If you just go to the app, it’s a new version. But if you press that “Update”, it will redo update from scratch.
Sometimes I’m so frustrated, and thinking of my options - it’s either move to Android, or go get hired at Apple with a mandate to fix bugs in various products… but knowing Apple secrecy culture/silos, it’s not going to work, and requires change in their hiring process/perf review/QA.
by gblargg on 3/4/25, 6:01 AM
by roody15 on 3/3/25, 11:23 PM
You are not prompted or asked to enable.
After disabling Apple Intelligence when you do the next mini update to 15.3.1 Apple intelligence is enabled. Again no prompt and your previous choice to disable is ignored.
This IMO is a bad sign for Apple software quality. Looks like they are moving to more dark user methods seen in Windows 11.
by diggan on 3/3/25, 4:36 PM
Even basic UX like "Can still see navigation map on CarPlay when someone calls you" seems to be just not thought of at all, or not being able to move the cursor left/right because the current iPhone keyboard mode only allows number. There are a thousands of these tiny cuts that just makes it such a pain to use daily.
Which is a darn shame, because the hardware is truly amazing, from everything from the displays, to keyboard and trackpads, to the general feeling and the CPU. But the software experience been so shit for the last decade that it's hard to justify going back.
by packetlost on 3/3/25, 4:40 PM
by Nevermark on 3/4/25, 5:56 AM
• I ask Homepods to play some music, and music starts playing in another room.
• I ask a room to play something, it says that is not in my library. I ask again. Same response. The problem comes in two flavors: One, I have to power cycle the Homepod to get things to reconnect. Or two, there is a halflife of disconnect where each time I ask there is an independent 1/2 chance of resolving the problem.
• I ask the Homepod to play something in multiple rooms. Some rooms play others don't. Sometimes, one room will start and stop playing randomly. Sometimes all the rooms will start and stop playing randomly.
• I ask a Homepod to play in a Zone. Same issues as asking for multiple rooms explicitly.
• Sometimes paired Homepods will both play, sometimes only one.
• Sometimes Homepods in a pair respond differently. If I carefully ensure only one hears me, it might be the one that starts the music that the other one refuses to do.
I can go on, but my experience is Homepods don't scale. A single pod or pair are much more reliable. Obviously, the more components a system has the greater chance of a problem, but it shouldn't be every day, or multiple times a day, for an integer we normally think of as "small N".
To say my Homepod use has been shaped by these failures is an understatement.
Apple has completely dropped the ball on Homekit. The app interfaces are completely ridiculous. Bad parody of bad app interfaces ridiculous.
by EigenLord on 3/4/25, 5:34 AM
For a while I was surprised by Mircrosoft's signs of life around generative AI by the time OpenAI came about, but it seemed to relapse into complacency too.
I honestly believe there is some unstated law of success, I think there is a "ceiling" to success, at which point it becomes impossible to expand. It has something to do with the correlation between success in complexity. As a business grows more successful, it becomes more tied down to various commitments, constraining its ability to innovate without assumptions. There's a limit to what any given entity can handle.
by tbeseda on 3/3/25, 4:48 PM
by mherrmann on 3/4/25, 12:48 PM
This sums it up well. The hardware is great, the software isn't.
I recently programmed the same app for iOS and Android. iOS took twice as long, simply because Apple's APIs suck. Case in point: The background task APIs (plural, yes, unfortunately) are so bad that Apple felt compelled to publish a video "Background execution demystified" [1]. If a dev creates an API and then has to publish docs "[my API] demystified", then the API sucks. Period.
I value stability and the freedom to configure the OS to my liking. macOS is stable but forces countless things on me that I do not want. Windows offers freedom but comes with many glitches. Linux is extremely stable and puts me first by letting me configure it. I love it.
[1]: https://wwdcnotes.com/documentation/wwdcnotes/wwdc20-10063-b...
by kazinator on 3/4/25, 1:39 AM
It's not exactly this: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/458099/macos-lock-...
The system is not lagging at all.
It's not this:
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/08/29/mac-wont-accept-correct-l...
It's a bit like this, but only for the system password dialog and nowhere else:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1azl16n/macos_skippi...
by jwr on 3/4/25, 12:47 AM
I know that it's difficult to triage and process bug reports at scale, but I guess that's where some of those hundreds of billions of dollars could be put to good use.
by hbn on 3/3/25, 4:40 PM
There's so much basic stuff that doesn't work, like if you pull out the keyboard into its split mode, it constantly covers the text input that you're typing in - even in Apple's own apps. The split keyboard may as well not exist for how impossible it is to use.
But there's also just been a lot of usability issues seeping into iOS over time in general. Like those text effects they added in the latest iOS update that constantly force their way onto my messages when I don't want them. And more recently, the "recent emojis" tab doesn't update to my recently used emojis. I think it's been stuck on whatever were my recent emojis were when I did the last iOS update.
by FredPret on 3/3/25, 4:38 PM
In fact, that's more or less what iOS was for a long time, and I loved every second of it.
Once you have a good feature set, you can spend years and years ironing out 100% of the bugs and vulnerabilities and you'd build a rabid fanbase of crotchety tech-saturated users like me. I want something that Just Works.
by PaulHoule on 3/3/25, 4:46 PM
My wife was angry about the large volume of advertising, both on web sites and on the desktop, on the machine out of the box. Part of it was needing an adblocker, which meant switching to Firefox, because installing an adblocker on Safari requires an Apple account which my wife doesn't have and wouldn't want to make.
I was amused that, by default, I got numerous nags in the form of 1999 retreads of the confirm dialog from the 1984 original mac. I'd contrast that to Microsoft's nags which look like a modern HTML-inspired interface [1].
Apple's model of "local account but you get nagged into attaching an Apple account so you can use the store and other services" is inferior, in my mind, to Microsoft's model where you can use use your Microsoft account to log into the desktop and your XBOX and all the services that Microsoft has to offer. I know a lot of people don't like it, but since Microsoft introduced it I've had no trouble authenticating into SMB shares in home and SMB environments.
[1] I won't apologize for thinking that's an advance, particularly since HTML/CSS has been adding things like Flexbox and Grid which are exactly what the doctor ordered for application development.
by epaga on 3/4/25, 7:37 AM
Messages on Mac is one of my biggest annoyances. How do you make one of the most used messaging tools and have the keyboard lag so badly while typing - sometimes even skipping typed letters? It's a complete mystery to me.
by jFriedensreich on 3/4/25, 10:47 AM
by swat535 on 3/3/25, 6:49 PM
Software quality has seriously declined across the board, from Spotify to Slack to core operating systems like Windows and macOS. I think a major factor is corporate culture, which largely ignores software quality. Another issue is that many engineers lack a solid understanding of CS fundamentals like performance, security, and reliability (perhaps this is why many are not able to solve basic algorithmic questions like linked lists or binary trees during interviews)..
I've seen code written by so-called "senior" engineers that should never have made it past review; had they simply paid attention in their CS 101 courses, it wouldn't exist.
On top of that, as long as poor software quality doesn’t hurt a company's bottom line, why would executives care if their app takes 20 seconds to load?
Consumers have become desensitized to bloat, and regulators remain asleep at the wheel..
by markus_zhang on 3/3/25, 5:00 PM
It's probably just me, but I feel that many apps on Apple follows the same pattern. For example checkout and compare the scroll bar experience on ChatGPT website (Chrome) between a Mac-book and a Windows laptop.
by mirekrusin on 3/4/25, 11:11 AM
Siri/intelligence is disabled through company managed profile.
When there is some noise in the room a popup appears saying "You do not have permissions to use siri".
There is nothing you can do, siri is disabled (can't enable or disable it myself, it's managed) but this stupid popup appears all the time so many times per day.
There is nothing in settings to make it go away.
by legitster on 3/3/25, 5:46 PM
But this tracks with a lot of other explanations they have put out over the years about why they can't put out basic features or fix UI flaws.
For interpreting Apple PR, I have re-appropriated Hanlon's Razor: “Never attribute to User Experience that which is adequately explained by incompetence or indifference”
by pico303 on 3/4/25, 12:17 AM
Working on Windows makes me appreciate the Mac ecosystem so, so, so very much.
by agys on 3/4/25, 10:54 AM
- Music (the app, not the service): almost unusable UI/UX, sync problems, two search fields, etc.
- Calendar is confusing, glitchy UI.
- Mail is a disaster… even the simple search filter doesn’t deliver as expected.
- Safari “Inspector”: will swallow async errors, unusable for development.
- Control panel: messy, ugly and slow.
- Spotlight: was good, doesn’t work so well anymore (web results, why?).
- Finder: visual glitches, extremely slow in some contexts (file list doesn't update).
- (pre installed) tools and commands slowly disappearing from Terminal/Shell
In general all the nice little touches and the refined experience are gone…
by Exuma on 3/4/25, 12:28 AM
ive tried every single fix i can find, from turning off AI to predictive text. nothing fixes it. so many other people have this issue... it is absolutely insane a messaging app cannot message
by Towaway69 on 3/3/25, 5:12 PM
It has a screen recording feature that when you use it the first time it asks you whether it can use the microphone. It claims that this can be reset somewhere in the settings. So the first time I used the feature, I disabled the mic.
A couple days later I wanted to record with mic and searched through the settings but found nothing. Googled it and discovered little. Many posts and answers pointing out that other feature settings require a factory reset to be able to alter initial settings made.
I searched again in the settings, fiddling here and there but found nothing in the settings nor anything that fixed the setting.
In the end, I had to do a factory reset. Then I was able to enable the mic for screen recording.
The device is good enough but the UI is a nightmare. Bulk deletion of notifications? Not possible. Getting out MetaHorizion? Three to four menus until a pause button can be used.
Much prefer my Apple devices - no BS, no factory reset.
by rglover on 3/4/25, 12:16 AM
Putting a logistics guy like Tim in charge was great for ensuring Apple kept shipping existing hardware products and growing revenue, but almost guaranteed that quality across the board would falter. For all of his faults, the one thing that Steve Jobs did that's impossible to replicate by force is care.
by deegles on 3/3/25, 4:54 PM
by Cupprum on 3/4/25, 8:37 AM
One thing which bugs me since the last redesign of the horrible apple photos app, is that they changed its order of showing picture?!
After going on a trip, i like creating a album and sharing it with my family, I also put there some comments, and try to turn it into a story. I believe this is what an album is supposed to do, tell a story.
Therefore rendering the pictures by default from oldest picture to the newest one is very important.
This however did not fit properly into the new design of the Photos app, as they changed it to `Date added`.
Whatever that means, at the end of the day, it starts showing pictures from the newest one, to the oldest one. Which means it’s the opposite way. Think about watching a movie backwards…
by reader_1000 on 3/3/25, 5:27 PM
Also my father used to use the feature of announcing outgoing calls when call is made by Siri, they removed it and I saw that many blind people also used to use this feature. I don't know what they thought while removing this feature.
by tempodox on 3/3/25, 4:44 PM
Just today I was thinking how the best hardware gets crippled by software that has become as shitty as Microsoft's.
By now it has become incredible that “Doesn't Suck” was once motto and slogan for the user experience on Apple devices.
by mdhb on 3/3/25, 5:07 PM
https://wccftech.com/macs-running-apples-m1-m2-and-m3-chips-...
So essentially they might be fast but they all have genuinely fatal flaws in them.
But it’s not just the software that stinks.
by submeta on 3/4/25, 4:58 AM
That’s just one experience. Another: Look at Photos app. Apple recently changed it. Total chaos. No lists anymore but tiles. I have to scroll up and down to find out where my lists of photos are. Germans call it „verschlimmbessern“, making it worse by trying to improve.
Or look at Finder app. And compare it to any competing product.
No app created by Apple really convinces me. None of them. Every product by an indy dev is magnitudes better.
by bondolo on 3/4/25, 1:16 AM
But most of all it seems like it was designed by people who don’t even know what it is for. That combined with the superficial “implement my Figma masterpiece in code” development approach that includes little to no user testing. Tog weeps. Don Norman weeps. Observe how much breaks when you do something as trivial as bump the default font size by one notch. I am sure it is pixel perfect at default size though.
Enter a birth date in a contact entry without a year. Watch as it jumps to the next day when you save because you are editing the date after 0000 of the next day in utc time. That bug has now been in MacOS/iOS for at least 17 years.
Sorry, got in to rant mode. I really want “less but better” from things in my life. We as consumers aren’t rewarding companies that take this approach apparently.
by pcdandy on 3/4/25, 1:44 PM
Well, turned out that although the Focus -> Do Not Disturb settings had been disabled, the settings were behaving as though they were enabled anyway! It was set to only allow certain apps to show banners. Only when I changed this setting (a few months later nevertheless) did notification banners finally start working properly as before. Perhaps I ran into an extreme edge case that the Apple engineers overlooked somehow, but it does make me wonder whether they are doing anything at all to identify and cover such edge cases.
by sohrob on 3/3/25, 8:05 PM
by skinkestek on 3/3/25, 5:52 PM
----
I am also using a Macbook for work and in addition to the fantastic battery life and the fact that it mostly "just works" I feel parts of the experience has significantly improved since last I used Mac, for example I can now remap ctrl and fn!
On the other hand I still miss the consistency and ease of use of Windows XP, Gnome 2 or KDE Plasma.
Then again, Windows manages to get a little bit worse every release, Gnome 2 was replaced with Unity (on Ubuntu) and later Gnome 3 which I understand still breaks extensions and which I still don't like despite trying hard.
by HPsquared on 3/4/25, 11:19 AM
On the one hand things are moving faster, doing more with less, being more responsive etc. But this comes at the expense of quality and long-term reliability / support. Applies to hardware too.
by anacrolix on 3/4/25, 7:10 AM
The frustrating thing is it locks the IO system, but the kernel thinks everything is fine. One by one each thread that does IO never returns. So you frantically click around wondering why your computer isn't doing anything.
by michelb on 3/3/25, 5:56 PM
by crmd on 3/4/25, 1:24 AM
This point really cuts to the heart of my frustration with Apple lately. I switched from Windows XP Pro to OS X 10.2 in order to have a dead simple, bulletproof desktop experience without all the nonsense. I recently booted my old macbook to grab some files and was shocked at how lovely and simple 10.2 was.
by eviks on 3/3/25, 5:15 PM
But this is a mythic past, not the real one, embarrassing software bugs have always been present! Moreover, it's never been limited to just software, remember premium laptop keyboard design fiasco, for example.
by treve on 3/3/25, 4:40 PM
The absolute worst was the transition to SSDs if you were stuck on a hard to upgrade HDD-based Mac. It became super clear that Apple devs stopped caring in the span of a year.
by Thoreandan on 3/3/25, 8:00 PM
by crossroadsguy on 3/3/25, 7:25 PM
Premium hardware my foot! They are lucky to be in a convenient duopoly.
by alberth on 3/3/25, 4:48 PM
I know people like to complain about Apple's software quality - but is this actually an issue - or just the popular thing to say?
by garyrob on 3/3/25, 5:11 PM
But if I click that, it shows the switch for the Keyboard Brightness menu bar control, and doesn't show anything about the Time Machine menu bar item!
by lynx97 on 3/4/25, 9:42 AM
* Around iOS 8, the back button in Safari would crash voiceover. Bug was fixed with next OS update, so I had to deal with it for at least 8 months. * Since roughly iOS 11, VoiceOver cursor will randmly jump away from the currently selected item. So you actually never know what you will invoke when double-tapping. * My Apple Watch requires a different way of tapping for the first time I enter my passcode after battery was empty. This bug persists even after completely unpairing and re-setting up. * With previous Watch OS, I accidentally tried to download the premium voice from within the Apple Watch App. Apparently, thats not how this is supposed to be done. However, the single attempt to use the watch app to do this, I coulld never successfully download the premium voice from the watch directly again. Something whent stuck, and the menu item doesn't even appear on the watch.
And these are just a small selection of things I could explain in a single paragraph. I could actually write a book about small to medium bugs I experienced with Apple Software in the last 12 years. For instance, sometimes you need to tap a boolean setting three times for it to toggle. If you have an eye for bugs, you see one per day on Apple devices...
by mrobot on 3/3/25, 11:48 PM
In all my years of using iOS, i never had long pauses, but switching between safari and other apps i sometimes had pauses around 10 seconds. Maybe it is the SwiftUI change; i'm not sure.
I did upgrade to the SE v3 and haven't really seen many pauses. But i am not a power user by any means and was seeing the problem often, along with some other glitches.
Just to be clear: it wasn't like the applications were lagging, it was as if the entire OS was crawling.
by par on 3/4/25, 1:44 PM
by kyledrake on 3/4/25, 2:04 AM
The biggest issue for me though was Darwin's weird psuedo-complete unix environment. All of my production servers are Linux, and it's a real pain to have to torture software that works great on Linux over to Apple's OS. Homebrew is nice, but even that would fail sometimes, and if the software wasn't available I would have to wait for someone smarter than me to port it. Also, it's weird that the community has to maintain this despite Apple having a gajillion dollars because they simply do not care about OSS.
More of a personal ancedote, but in the end all I'm really using a computer for is a web browser, code editing, and running linux production software locally. Just made more sense to stay on Linux, which I run on an excellent Framework laptop. It feels nice to be out of the software bloat treadmill.
by bangaroo on 3/4/25, 2:27 PM
apple ebbs and flows in terms of how on the ball they are in any given area, but it feels we're at a strange inflection point where their hardware is the best it's ever been and the software is inexplicably in a death spiral
i've been a heavy safari user for a while, mainly because i do make extensive use of the tab and history syncing across all my devices, and safari is the only actual browser you get on iOS - might as well use the native version.
lately safari has this habit of, on some websites, entirely locking up my device while loading web pages. like full on hard lock can't switch windows, nothing can be done, sometimes for upwards of 30 seconds. to go to my electric company's website, i have to use chrome. otherwise my computer becomes unusable.
i am not suggesting that their website isn't awful (it is) but it is inexcusable that on an M2 max laptop with 64 GB of ram that loading a slow or bulky website should make my computer completely unusable. i do not understand how this hasn't been addressed. it was intermittent before but it's a daily occurrence now.
this along with all the weird visual glitches, notifications snapping between sharp-edged boxes and rounded boxes repeatedly, sudden drops in frame rate on my iPhone display that seem to start and end for no reason, and it's starting to feel like everyone at apple uses their devices as beautiful paperweights primarily and doesn't actually interact with the software at all...
the thing that frustrates me deeply is i've explored the android ecosystem extensively (i've owned several samsung and pixel devices, even very recent ones as second phones) and find that whole space even worse and more unpleasant, with the shovelware play store and a general unpleasant and janky UI that has never felt right to me. so it's like... what's the GOOD option now?
by bnastic on 3/4/25, 9:35 AM
Good times.
by Henk0 on 3/4/25, 1:42 PM
On iOS, I use the notes app to keep track of my workout routine. Just a simple table with columns for exercises and rows for workout sessions. For a while now, there's a bug where the text gets confused about which row it should display on. Only in some columns though. So in one or a few columns, the entry for the last workout will be a few rows above where it should be – sometimes it's between rows. When I press the cell in the bottom row to input a new entry, the text marker will end up somewhere above. This bug is quite inconsistent, but often persists between reboots of the app. It seems to have something to do with there being empty cells in a column
Anyone else experience this?
by Zanfa on 3/4/25, 9:31 AM
by zer0x4d on 3/4/25, 1:58 AM
1. Maps crashes almost every ride on Car Play (this used to happen a lot back in 2023 and was fixed for majority of 2024. Seems like it regressed again)
2. Trying to expand reviews on Google Maps expands the wrong review (100% reproducible, not an edge case)
3. Firebase Auth has terrible reliability when it comes to SMS delivery and fail rate of like 5-10%.
4. Gmail keeps opening links with the wrong account (Click on Google meet link from an email in account number 2, as in .../u/2/... . Link opens with account 0 and now you gotta switch accounts again).
5. Gemini is famously unreliable and produces wrong results for seemingly simple queries.
And many more I can't recall on top of my head but surely exist.
by wyager on 3/4/25, 4:29 AM
Every tuple of
(engineers, organizational structure, choice of language, ...)
The asymptotic behavior of this function determines the most complex problems you can solve before the complexity of your solution (the software) blows up and becomes unmanageable.
Apple's function currently has subpar asymptotics on the software side, so they've hit the bounds of complexity that they can properly handle.
There are a lot of things you can do to improve your asymptotics: engineering org structure improvements, switch to programming languages with better complexity function asymptotics, etc. etc., but any of these changes require an organization with the executive function and insight to actually make the jump, which is by no means a given.
by cadamsdotcom on 3/3/25, 5:49 PM
Of course that’s balanced by larger teams working on said software.
This suggests Apple is under-invested in QA, which is a pretty easy fix for a sufficiently senior manager.
Apple’s senior management hopefully read HN. Maybe these posts are being read by the right people.
by ChrisMarshallNY on 3/3/25, 10:53 PM
Also, don't get me started on the current state of "documentation." At one time, Apple had a huge team of ridiculously overqualified documentation people. They often had better chops than the engineers.
by bradgessler on 3/4/25, 6:56 AM
They should also setup a public bug tracker so people can follow issues they care about.
Over time, a community/network of people inside and outside of Apple would evolve that fix issues and improve areas of the operating system they care about. Some sort of reputation system would emerge where people who write quality bug reports or create quality patches would get more attention from Apple.
It wouldn’t be open source, but it would at least be better than the way it works today.
by kbd on 3/4/25, 8:37 AM
by bartekpacia on 3/4/25, 8:31 AM
But yes. The overall decline in Apple’s software quality is evident and sad.
by kazinator on 3/4/25, 1:42 AM
Like they couldn't implement some heuristic that could be enabled in settings, to ignore touches that occur close to simultaneously with textual keystrokes.
Several times a day, I'm typing, and suddenly, the cursor jumps in the middle of earlier text where a fragment of the tail end of my typing goes before I notice and stop. I then have to undo that, and retype it at the end.
by lasergyro on 3/4/25, 9:30 AM
In theory, there should be some sort of paid app that uses all the incredible hardware for an actual good experience.
by jiehong on 3/4/25, 3:05 PM
Apple Intelligence is chronically late, and systematically underwhelming and mostly useless.
Everyone is part of the problem: I see many developers stopping when it’s good enough, managers firing QA because it works well enough, users having not much choice, and finally, users being used to software of dubious quality everywhere accepting it as normal (so they will pay anyways).
by kwakubiney on 3/4/25, 10:45 AM
by 827a on 3/3/25, 4:36 PM
I'm in a regular video call friend group, every day we call and chat for a bit. A few days ago we "officially" decided to just call in Discord instead of Facetime. Discord's mobile app has its own set of issues, for sure, but we would regularly hit an issue with Facetime where especially as people join and leave the call, other peoples' microphones would become shadow muted; it would look like its sending audio from their end, but no one else could hear them. For non-video participants, this could mean minutes of not being heard before realizing the issue, leaving the call, and re-joining, which fixes things.
Also Facetime related: If you use your iPhone as a continuity camera for your Mac, if you get a Facetime call while your iPhone and Mac are close to each other, you cannot answer the call on your iPhone. If you think about the implications of that, it sounds crazy; like "there's no way that got through testing", but its true. Your iPhone displays an ungrokable error message that took me, a tech guy, several Googles to understand what was going on. The only option in this error message is "Disconnect". You click that, and you're taken back to the home screen. If the other person has not disconnected from the Facetime call, you can manually launch the Facetime app and join the call from there. But if they've left it, you just missed the call, and it does this Every Single Time. I had to turn off Continuity Camera. Its crazy!
That's just the latest ones; the list of issues is really quite endless, and it only gets longer the more of Apple's services you decide to inflict upon yourself.
by Shinchy on 3/4/25, 10:06 AM
by ltadeut on 3/3/25, 5:30 PM
Very often, when I switch input keyboards between English/Mandarin, the popup that appears to indicate the selected language just won't go away automatically. I have to manually go and click somewhere to get rid of it. Also had loads of issues with notifications not rendering correctly.
by golly_ned on 3/4/25, 6:02 AM
by joemanaco on 3/4/25, 8:51 AM
by mrkpdl on 3/4/25, 6:36 AM
In contrast, the iPad does not overheat when painting for extended periods in procreate.
by sylvainkalache on 3/4/25, 1:19 PM
I had entries disappearing from my Contacts (iCloud). The customer support asked for me to get back when I notice the issue so they could get logs to debug. My best friend contact entry disappeared overnight. I called the representative the day of and told him that the contact disappeared between yesterday night and today morning. His answer was that I needed to pinpoint more accurately when the contact disappeared, because iPhone generates a lot of logs and and engineers don’t have time to go through them. Ah!
Needless to say I stopped storing my contacts with iCloud and my trust eroded. “Funny enough” I also had issues with my Health data, years of it disappeared. Support could not do anything. The data magically came back a month later or so.
by dkarl on 3/3/25, 5:11 PM
I'm still on Sonoma, so the next thing I could try is updating to Sequoia, but that feels foolish. Only one thing is wrong. It could be worse. How often does updating software actually make it better? Apple should feel like the exception to that cynicism, but it doesn't, which is bad news for them, since their entire business is predicated on being the exception.
A premium product that's worth the money. That's such an easy thing for people to stop believing in if the reality doesn't live up to it.
by kjkjadksj on 3/3/25, 5:12 PM
by growt on 3/4/25, 12:11 PM
If apple can't even guarantee the users documents, I wonder what else might be wrong.
[1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255156283?sortBy=rank
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ipad/comments/19evmb8/files_disappe...
by lulznews on 3/4/25, 5:26 AM
by nbzso on 3/4/25, 12:34 PM
iPhone is a trap. We see already in GB with removal of encryption. It is not the time for drooling over some UI animation. It is time to protect your data and learn to live in a surveillance state. All the people which are pretending to be a techie and use those types of devices called "smartphones" are plain stupid.
Every stroke on your Mac is collected. Just install Little Snitch and watch it real-time. Same with Windows. Simplewall app is showing it clearly.
This is not only a hostile computing and dark patterns' bonanza. They want AI governance over there in the headquarters of a global capital.
It is time to stop filling their baskets with cash. Use your old devices as long as possible. Do not update prematurelly. Educate yourselves. Protect your data.
Degoogled phone is a nice start for this UX.
by tannhaeuser on 3/3/25, 6:07 PM
by casey2 on 3/3/25, 5:54 PM
Who the hell I'm I kidding, they can't even make sure that the apple logo isn't cut off the top of the screen.
Alot of people in this thread are claiming that it's a race to the bottom to deliver features the fastest, aside from hardware, and the admittible many features needed to create a seemless ad, what software new gamechanging software features have Apple (or any company) made in the last 5 years? AI? The Camera App? Continuity? Messaging? LOL sorry but none of that is interesting in the slightest.
by jrcplus on 3/4/25, 12:43 PM
by ustad on 3/4/25, 1:59 PM
I’ve been experiencing issues like home screen widgets not updating or showing incorrect data (like wrong date/times).
Notifications are another frustration, especially with Signal Messenger, where they just don’t come through reliably.
The camera app also seems to have a bug where the screen goes black, making you think the camera is broken, but force closing and reopening the app fixes it.
Finally, sharing content from Safari to Gmail often causes the entire UI to freeze until I force close Safari.
These are small but annoying issues that seem to be affecting the overall experience, and it’s disappointing for a platform that once prided itself on stability and polish.
by nalekberov on 3/4/25, 8:10 AM
I was so happy to finally have replacement delivered. But wait, exactly same scrolling issue doesn’t stop following me. After a little bit research on the internet, I realized it’s known issue to Apple already, which Apple still refuses to fix. Long story short - one needs to update macOS to 15.1 to fix that.
by slmjkdbtl on 3/4/25, 4:51 AM
I always really liked a lot of apple software, like Preview.app. It's a viewer for almost everything, images, documents, 3d models, but it doesn't feel bloat at all, I'm glad Apple doesn't seem to change the app much. Also shocked the first time I found out TextEdit.app is also a WYSIWYG HTML editor.
by andy_ppp on 3/4/25, 2:02 PM
Smaller teams with fewer managers and clearer direction on what improves user experiences would be a good plan. Sites like this end up with so many features that aren’t needed.
by someonehere on 3/3/25, 5:09 PM
by Gys on 3/3/25, 5:13 PM
Supplied apps are free and therefore paid for otherwise. Normally full of ads and only sporadically receive updates to repair bugs or add new features.
The goal is often only to keep my tight to their platform, be it Samsung, Apple, etc. Those apps are an investment in the future which probably do not do well in a companies one quarter horizon.
by kossTKR on 3/4/25, 2:37 PM
Another wild one is syncing photos between iphone and mac meant ‘this photo will sync at random point in the next 5 days’ - it’s just recently been fixed after like 8 years of not working.
And don’t even try to use their stupidly simple proprietary apps like Numbers where basic spreadsheet functionality is bizarre or missing.
Mac is still my favourite but i don’t get why a trillion dollar company can’t fix their software for what’s ‘pennies’ for them.
by zombiwoof on 3/4/25, 1:11 AM
by Khaine on 3/4/25, 8:34 AM
by jiggawatts on 3/4/25, 2:40 AM
As a random example: It is impossible to use any non-Mac device to produce a HDR image that an Apple device can handle correctly:
JPEG XL is "supported". Narrator: No it isn't. The point of this file format is proper HDR support, but Apple loads it as an 8-bit SDR image no matter what.
AVIF is "supported" and even loads as HDR... on one device only. You can't forward such an image via any iOS or MacOS app. It becomes a non-picture file attachment.
My Nikon Z8 can generate glorious HDR HEIF files -- the native Apple image format -- which doesn't work either. Why? Because Apple software can't handle "HEIF", they can only handle the incredibly specific tiny subset of it that very specifically the iOS Camera app produces. Nothing else works properly, or even at all.
You can spend thousands on a camera, thousands on an iPhone or iPad, thousands on a Macbook and... they can't handle pictures. PICTURES!
Meanwhile a $500 TV from ALDI will happily show me HDR images in a dozen formats because they use Chrome OS or Google TV.
by AlanYx on 3/3/25, 5:15 PM
There's probably an alternate history where they would have stuck with AppKit for a few more years until LLMs got to the point they are now, and then dove in to leveraging LLMs to make AppKit development easier (essentially leaning into human language "declarative" programming rather than conventional declarative programming).
by nunez on 3/4/25, 5:13 AM
Have you tried using Shortcuts on ANY Apple device? It's a fucking mess.
It is impossible to write Shortcuts with code. Consequently, this means that you're stuck with the no-code workflow builder.
Unfortunately, the no-code builder is a hog! Moving actions around within the panel will cause Shortcuts to lock up. Sometimes, Shortcuts will just refuse to reorder actions when you move them. Exiting and re-opening is the only fix.
Then there's running Shortcuts. Shortcuts appear like they can run anywhere on first glance. Try running a Shortcut to append text to a note on Apple Watch. You can't. But Shortcuts will gladly spin lock for two minutes doing whatever the fuck before yielding a "Remote Message Execution timeoit" that is Apple speak for "watchOS doesn't support appending to notes," or "you're saving a file into an iCloud directory that doesn't exist, and I'm not going to create it for you because no" or "your phone's off and I could connect to iCloud, but I'd rather not and piss you off instead."
But say you go through ALL of that and build your perfect complex shortcut that makes your life much easier. You'll find out later that year when the new iOS drops that a few of the actions in your Shortcut were silently changed and now the entire thing doesn't work!
You'll spend hours fixing it, wishing you were on Android the entire time but remembering that your Apple Watch actually is useful sometimes and everything on that side is SO MUCH WORSE because Apple has insane economies of scale and patents the shit out of everything.
This is just the tip of my iceberg of grievances with Apple software.
AirPods whose case dies every three days and often fails to switch between devices despite it being a flagship feature. Accidentally changing tracks when you raise-wake your phone. LITERALLY EVERYTHING about the keyboard. I could easily go on.
But, hey, at least Apple Intelligence can summarize my emails so I can think even less.
I miss the Apple that made Apple Mail, Calendars, Reminders and Notes. Those apps were made _before laptops were mainstream_ but are STILL the best at what they do while being mostly private and on-device.
by rcMgD2BwE72F on 3/4/25, 9:07 AM
1. Press Fn key twice to open Emoji picker
2. Type to search
3. Hover an emoji
4. Press Esc to empty search for box and start a new search
5. Type
You can't type. Focus is lost somewhere, impossible to search again for an emoji without closing the panel and open it again. My coworkers have all installed a third-party emoji picker to work around this issue, which is absurd from Apple's standpoint.
How can Apple engineers not be aware of such issues? Did they ever inserted an emoji from macOS?
by rangestransform on 3/4/25, 3:58 AM
- high resolution high refresh rate display (max res and refresh rate are higher than DP1.2 bandwidth)
- attached to dock through DP
- macbook lid is closed and plugged into dock
the attached display defaults to the highest resolution, even though it's unsupported by TB3. This leads to a black screen. Changing the resolution by opening the lid doesn't fix this because closing the lid will return the external display to the default resolution.
by danjl on 3/4/25, 12:04 AM
by yobid20 on 3/4/25, 1:11 PM
by whywhywhywhy on 3/4/25, 9:43 AM
I feel this would be unthinkable in the time before Tim Cook’s Apple.
by stavros on 3/3/25, 4:46 PM
There are four distinct ways to go back (swipe from the left/right side, press the X, press the left arrow, swipe down), whereas Android has one way that always goes back to the previous screen. The inability to set volumes separately, the fact that folders hold exactly 9 icons and leave the other 60% of the screen empty, the fact that a very commonly-used button (the back arrow) is at the hardest-to-reach part of the screen, all of that just made for a really frustrating experience.
Linus basically echoes all my gripes in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhew95wMmP8
After that, I bought a Nothing 2, and I love it. It's snappier than the iPhone, feels premium, and Android has stolen all of the good ideas iOS had and added more.
by ChildOfChaos on 3/4/25, 12:15 PM
-- On Monterey no disk images will mount and no external drives or SD card. Everything is fine on older versions of OS, some forum posts suggest others with the same issue, but without any resolution. The only way to get DMG images to mount is to use a third party mounter like FastDMG, upgrading to Ventura fixes the issue with Disk images and my SD card, however this is not an officially supported OS for my model, so I have to use OpenCore Legacy patcher to achieve this. External drives still do not mount, the OS just doesn't see them at all, even in the recovery mode for these OS versions However running another MacOS inside Parallels I can access them, so they must be accessible somehow.
-- This is all perhaps caused by my firmware being out of date, i'm running 173.0.0.0 and it should be something like 530.0.0.0, this is updated with the operating system, however it has been found that on custom order macs with SDD's rather than the standard fusion drive, such as mine, the firmware update fails due to it incorrectly looking for a drive via the sata port. Apparently this is fixed on 195.x but you have to open up the iMac and plug in a drive into the Sata port just to get it to do this.
Extremely frustrating considering I paid a lot extra to spec this model up but due to Apple's mistake with the firmware updates (Or other unknown issue) I'm left with these problems. Since the machine is no longer in support, Apple aren't interested in helping.
by theentropyman10 on 3/7/25, 1:41 AM
by rafram on 3/3/25, 4:48 PM
by Sxubas on 3/3/25, 5:31 PM
At this point I think I've spent more time tweaking macOS settings, downloading and testing stuff than I did when I had Ubuntu as my work OS. Ridiculous.
by bowsamic on 3/4/25, 7:44 AM
I also do agree that their modern software is shockingly bad, and it is strange because, as others note, what they offer to third parties is generally quite good so third party applications are often quite amazing. It seems like Apple are unable to develop for themselves
by nyarlathotep_ on 3/4/25, 1:53 AM
I'm not sure how this is possible, but it's trivial to replicate and is only resolved by rebooting the device.
by tehlike on 3/4/25, 12:40 AM
1. Revamp TestFlight - 10k users is very little when user base is 100m+ users. 2. Improve phased roll out capabilities 3. Introduce a/b testing at release level to test old/new binaries at binary level (vs at feature, which is also a must have).
These 3 can catch 99% of release bound issues, no problem.
by danans on 3/3/25, 5:07 PM
People are keeping their phones longer they used to, which is obviously a problem for device makers. Therefore they must lean on new feature development too sell new phones. "Increased reliability and stability" is not a good consumer sales pitch
by sycren on 3/4/25, 10:42 AM
For displaying the bugs, I'm thinking of something like what invision was - showing the interface of for example the desktop and showing the number of bugs associated with different elements of the desktop.
By displaying bugs as posts on a forum, I feel that we lose track of how degraded the performance of the system actually is.
by txr on 3/4/25, 12:57 PM
Open a link from an email on an iPhone or iPad, then go back to Mail by tapping on the top left corner. If you now delete an email, this email gets deleted but the view does not update to move to the next email. If you now hit delete again, you are deleting the next email without noticing it.
by dwedge on 3/4/25, 7:54 AM
by Zufriedenheit on 3/4/25, 7:21 AM
by formerly_proven on 3/3/25, 4:44 PM
It’s pretty bad. Somehow most other software is even worse. Genuinely impressive at this point.
by abhaynayar on 3/4/25, 5:23 AM
I am using Notion now, and even though that is kinda janky on an iPhone, it is still better than Apple's own notes, and of course, their web-version is much much much better than Apple's.
by rottenapple25 on 3/4/25, 9:51 PM
by curvaturearth on 3/4/25, 9:12 AM
by raverbashing on 3/3/25, 5:00 PM
Now while it is true that some aspect of the Apple experience suck, my experience is that Windows and Linux are also sucking more (Linux less than MS, but still, not helpful)
I definitely would want more transparency for Apple but this is one of the things they "no can do", they just fix it one day (usually) and off you go.
by mgoetzke on 3/4/25, 8:28 AM
Escalated all the way to developers. Their 'analysis'. Whatsapp is supposedly blocking 4TeB on my iCloud account which is not available.
I asked whether they might have misread that as WhatsApp says 4GiB and even if , that would still be an iOS bug (why allow that?).
No reaction anymore.
by jaffa2 on 3/4/25, 4:04 AM
by mbrumlow on 3/3/25, 4:35 PM
I see this throughout the industry and can’t help conclude the problem started about 5 years ago, and we thus we are now seeing the results of Covid and possibly WFO.
by walterbell on 3/4/25, 8:42 AM
If the computer industry endgame is for users to consume media via simple voice interfaces and AI, what is the business model for serving the smaller market of professional users who need powerful, classic HCI interfaces for creating new artifacts?
by SkiFire13 on 3/4/25, 5:09 PM
by dpierce9 on 3/3/25, 5:17 PM
by smnscu on 3/4/25, 9:57 AM
by punnerud on 3/4/25, 7:41 AM
I guess the fixes have to start there first.
by TanYuho on 3/4/25, 8:22 AM
by riversandroads on 3/4/25, 5:19 AM
by sccxy on 3/3/25, 7:12 PM
One example where it is almost 2 years since they "made" a fix, but have not yet released it.
by Brosper on 3/4/25, 11:34 AM
They treat us as dump users.
Even when the device is for PRO users, they don't want our feedback as they think the software is perfect.
by inasio on 3/3/25, 5:21 PM
by lunar_rover on 3/4/25, 9:10 AM
by hoseja on 3/4/25, 8:22 AM
I suspect some quadratic or worse algorithm in the handwriting curve rendering.
by beastman82 on 3/4/25, 1:43 PM
It doesn't happen often, maybe once every one or 2 months. But it requires a full reboot.
by bergfest on 3/4/25, 9:55 AM
by guappa on 3/4/25, 1:21 PM
Battery life is short, but you can buy like 6 of them instead of an ipad. Also I like to hack.
by blackeyeblitzar on 3/3/25, 5:16 PM
by nokeya on 3/3/25, 4:37 PM
by chintan on 3/4/25, 3:43 AM
Any recommendations for an alternative?
by deskr on 3/3/25, 11:36 PM
by kziojzwsndppqgg on 3/4/25, 1:35 PM
I'm a former employee from the SWE org of ~13 years, left around a year ago.
This is a huge problem that the company needs to address ASAP. If you're in the Apple SWE org and reading this, please go up the chain as far as you're able to make things like this understood: Apple needs a bugfix release. They need all hands on deck going through radars and fixing things. No new features until these things get settled.
Care about error logs. Look at the number of Error logs happening per second on a customer build. Every one of those was considered by someone to be important enough to notice that it likely needs fixing. There are showstopping bugs buried in there.
Figure out your concurrency bugs. The whole company seems to be using the swift Concurrency framework wrong (at least a year ago, I doubt things have changed since then.) Stop abusing semaphores and DispatchGroups to work around async/sync barriers. It makes the compiler shut up but causes deadlocks later. Every "Just a sec" on Siri on HomePod is very likely caused by this. Stop putting off the important refactors needed to make this work.
Start caring about compiler warnings. Get the swift team to allow warnings to be disabled on a line-by-line basis so you can work from a zero-warning baseline and attack it from there.
Fix the build system. It's horrific that coordinated changes to multiple frameworks are so god damned impossible to do, and result in broken builds so often. You probably don't need to go full monorepo, but if you're going to continue with thousands of individual projects, make it so coordinated submissions is possible.
Fix Xcode. Or at least just jettison it. Pay a boatload of money to JetBrains or something and get an IDE that works internally, bless it as the way to go, and announce publically that Xcode is deprecated. You don't have the resources to fix it any more, it's time to take it out to pasture.
Fix the development milestones. The current system is designed for tentpole features to reach a certain maturity level before a certain date before a punt decision: But it just encourages punting (slipping to the B or C or E release) to a milestone with less scrutiny. Allow for bolder changes later in the process if they're in the name of improving stability. Allow for groups which are not part of a tentpole feature, to fix things at any time without having to deal with bug deadlines. Zero bugs is a joke, it's just denial, encoded into process.
The milestone system also lacks the mere vocabulary necessary to describe "time dedicated to fixing bugs in shipping code". Like it doesn't even exist as a concept. "Escape" makes it seem like it's a rarity, it's not. Nobody seems to follow the pact any more. Probably because the pact pretends that escapes are rare. They're everywhere. The development process needs dedicated time spent not doing feature work so that old bugs can be addressed.
There are a lot more things I could go on about, but people already know this. The problem is that senior leadership doesn't care enough. They don't foster a culture of excellence where they actually sweat these small details. They only care about features, and it's a disease. Get somebody up there who gives a shit.
by DeathArrow on 3/4/25, 6:00 AM
Since now their hardware is a bit better than others, maybe they care less of software quality.
by doug_durham on 3/4/25, 2:06 AM
by MrResearcher on 3/4/25, 7:29 PM
by daniel_grady on 3/8/25, 6:03 AM
by jshaqaw on 3/4/25, 2:41 PM
by ncr100 on 3/4/25, 5:05 AM
Use Notes and enable pop-up from the corner of the screen.
I've been unable to select the Note that pops up from the corner, without creating a New note. Then only that new one pops up.
by miiiiiike on 3/3/25, 4:53 PM
by miyuru on 3/4/25, 1:49 PM
So, if the update is 20GB, 40GB of data get used.
by ios-sux on 3/4/25, 10:12 AM
A year on and my main take away is that ios is slow, buggy and has frustrating ux. The over use of modals and no consistent pattern for going back are frustrating. The UI lagging and glitching out and application crashes are so much worse and more frequent than I had on an old pixel.
I dont think ill stick with ios for my next phone but i dont plan on replacing it for 3 years so it's going to be a frustrating 4 years with a supposedly premium device that is objectively an inferior product.
by the-mitr on 3/4/25, 11:33 AM
by dnissley on 3/3/25, 5:35 PM
by AnonC on 3/4/25, 4:52 AM
<Warning: long and extremely critical rant incoming>
TL;DR Apple just does not have a qualified team (from the top) or the right team size (the one in the company is far too small).
I test beta releases of Apple’s OSes and report issues. I’ve seen a few factors over several years:
* There is not enough QA (or probably no QA at all) at Apple. So many bugs just creep through to release even after having been reported with tons of information and system logs provided. There is no attention paid to any bug report unless it is known and believed (by someone at Apple) to affect hundreds of users. Even then there’s little chance of attention to it.
* There is no feedback loop from Apple back to the bug reporter — you toss your bug report and assume it goes into some black hole.
* The direction of software development in Apple has moved to taking whatever is done on iOS — with a mediocre approach and plan — everywhere else. This includes things like Catalyst (the main reason you’d hate a macOS app from Apple). Try navigating Reminders or Music or any other Catalyst app on macOS with the keyboard — it’s as if the developers have never ever heard of tab order or have never used a keyboard that has non-alphabetical and non-numeric keys.
* Continuing on the previous point, Apple’s own app developers know something about how to create a mediocre iOS app, but over time the developer base has changed such that it has no knowledge of or history with desktop operating systems. I have no idea what top executives like Craig Federighi are even doing and why (I’m sounding generous here) they’re seemingly held hostage to such poor quality.
* When you look at the issues across device platforms and OSes, Apple seems to have one tiny team of software developers who work part time on all of those. Monday is iOS OS day, Tuesday is iPadOS day, Wednesday is macOS day, Thursday is iOS app day, Friday is iOS app day, Saturday is Apple Intelligence day and Sunday is a tvOS, homeOS and AirPods day. Apple’s services get a few hours here and there every few months.
by qwertox on 3/3/25, 5:14 PM
It was hard to use. It was all full of inconsistencies and some things that were simply illogical, which left me wondering for a while. Maybe I just was forced to deal with the wrong apps and it might have been a similar experience in Android, but Apple's marketing department really does a superb job at selling those devices.
by nmca on 3/4/25, 7:03 AM
by cyberax on 3/3/25, 8:16 PM
macOS is another example. The System Settings menu is a hot garbage now, its search is literally unusable. For example, try to look for "shortcuts".
Then there are constant popup windows asking me to approve file access or some other BS. I can't do that permanently anymore, it's just for up to 30 days.
Another annoyance: it's impossible to speed up animations after the switch from Intel to ARM. This makes spaces literally unusable for me. I gave up and got a second monitor as a result.
by adamddev1 on 3/4/25, 5:39 AM
by WorldPeas on 3/4/25, 4:42 AM
by 4ndrewl on 3/3/25, 5:05 PM
I was an owner of the original crackbook, have had a magic keyboard, magic mouse both fail shortly after warranty period, I can't count the number of power leads that have started fraying (thank goodness for USB C!).
Ass for iPhone screens - seem to be very breakable compared to other manufacturers.
by devinprater on 3/3/25, 5:04 PM
by kome on 3/3/25, 4:43 PM
by holdodd on 3/4/25, 5:47 AM
by p0w3n3d on 3/4/25, 12:23 PM
- lack of repair support (either you pay through your nose for the screen replacement or you'll get a nasty stripe on second-hand screen that has been fitted into your machine)
- unrepairable devices (e.g. split Hard Disk chips to not be removable)
- artifically non-inclusive ecosystem that refuses e.g. Bluetooth file transfers from Android device
- idiotic policy of waiting on forgot password
by fsflover on 3/4/25, 2:37 PM
This is the good, old enshittification, which started with Google and Windows, https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/. I wouldn't expect that Apple listens to this.
by yimby2001 on 3/3/25, 4:47 PM
by zer0zzz on 3/4/25, 5:59 AM
I’ve yet to find a better phone+computer setup if what you’re looking for are good quality native apps, integration between pc and handset, and a usable Unix environment for programming and other work.
by bfrog on 3/4/25, 2:29 PM
by Animats on 3/4/25, 5:55 AM
by askonomm on 3/4/25, 8:03 AM
by robaye on 3/4/25, 10:52 AM
by newsclues on 3/3/25, 5:03 PM
I want UNIX not emojis.
by jacobp100 on 3/4/25, 8:29 AM
by stackedinserter on 3/4/25, 12:51 PM
My iphone starts playing spotify after connecting to car's bluetooth? Screw it, I just removed spotify. Macos opens itunes every time when I connect to bluetooth headphones? – Can't remove itunes but here's a script that monitors and kills it. Macbook constantly overheating? – cooling pad is a solution (kind of). Airdrop almost never works? Okay, there's no airdrop, we send everything via IM. Management of photos is complete dumpster fire – that's ok, Photosync and locally hosted photobank is a solution.
by earth23 on 3/4/25, 2:00 AM
by instagraham on 3/4/25, 7:37 AM
If software quality keeps declining, this proposition isn’t just difficult to defend — it’s indefensible and an insult to consumers. Apple has lagged behind Android for a decade, and its software now fails at tasks Symbian OS handled effortlessly.
I've dealt with clunky software all my life, but Apple is the first ecosystem where things are outright unfixable. "It just works" — until it doesn’t, and then you’re out of options.
A few examples of Apple's atrocious software design:
- Rather than universal "open with" controls, iOS forces you to open files with a random selection of apps. Want to edit an image in Snapseed? Too bad, Photos won’t let you. But it will let you use it to "find products on Amazon". I get that this is up to the app developers - but a simpler solution would've been global "Open With" functionality.
- Call recordings over 20 minutes freeze the Notes app, making them impossible to move. No fix for months.
- Changing a wallpaper takes nearly six steps.
- The Home Screen follows non-Euclidean geometry whenever you try to move an icon
- The Settings app search is useless: searching "Camera" shows privacy settings, not the Camera app settings (which aren’t in the Camera app, because of course they aren’t).
- Probably a dozen other niggles you just learn to "live with" on a $1000 phone (and which people with a $200 Android don't even have to think about)
No company has as much contempt for its users as Apple, both from their design philosophy of keeping as much control away from users as possible, and the pricing strategy that pretends like this shitfest is a premium experience. But the users are also to blame - they create the cult that enables this.
On most forums, complaining about Apple just gets you a "why did you buy it then lol" response from users - and absolute silence from Apple.
In a better world, this company would be boycotted by consumers. This forces it to reset and try harder.
by drc37 on 3/3/25, 4:41 PM
by WesolyKubeczek on 3/3/25, 4:41 PM
by soygem on 3/4/25, 10:35 AM
by gunian on 3/4/25, 6:48 AM
by theconstantium on 3/4/25, 9:03 AM
by stuaxo on 3/4/25, 8:54 AM
Feels like we have been here before.
by ios-sux on 3/4/25, 10:09 AM
by donatj on 3/4/25, 1:03 PM
I don't think it's changed in any notable way since its initial release in 2019 and it's still beta quality at best. Do they even have people working on it?
by gloosx on 3/3/25, 5:47 PM
by bastardoperator on 3/3/25, 4:47 PM
by youssefarizk on 3/3/25, 11:47 PM
What's worse is that this is a regression, so they actively made life a little more difficult for everyone in the new release.
by czk on 3/3/25, 5:09 PM
i often think back to ryan dahls infamous nodejs rant:
"There will come a point where the accumulated complexity of our existing systems is greater than the complexity of creating a new one. When that happens all of this shit will be trashed."
by soygem on 3/4/25, 10:36 AM
by stego-tech on 3/3/25, 5:12 PM
Funny enough, I had the exact issue the OP had with my M1 iPad and Notes, writing down Kubernetes coursework and notes by hand to try and make it "stick" better mentally (an entirely different post, someday) only for Notes to crash, losing most of my work since the last time I opened the app. It got so bad that I was regularly synchronizing and duplicating notes to preserve my work ahead of the next crash, and splitting notes up into quarter-chapters to reduce the likelihood of app crashes and iPad overheating.
Apple has been so feature-focused to keep up with shareholder demands and industry fads, that they've neglected the core user experience. iTunes used to be the best way to organize and consume music, and nobody has really taken up that mantle since Apple abandoned it in favor of their streaming service. Same with local media and shared libraries, now tucked away into obscure apps in favor of more streaming platform priority.
That feature-focus extends to general OS stability as well. Safari gulping down battery life on my iPhone because it's not properly suspending tabs anymore. iPad suddenly no longer charging without any error message or warning until a reboot is triggered or the battery completely dies. Siri responding as far away as physically possible from the actual speaker, including on devices I don't even own, bypassing multiple other devices that stand between the speaker and the responding device. The AppleTV needs weekly reboots because apps don't load video streams properly, giving a black screen with audio or an HDCP error message despite every other device in the chain showing it's the AppleTV not engaging HDCP. HomePods suddenly ceasing music playback without any command to do so, often mid-song.
It's just getting worse and worse, to the point (pre-RIF) I was seriously looking into an honest-to-god HiFi to replace stereo homepods in my bedroom. I've already ditched the Music app in favor of Plex's Music App (don't even get me started on how awful it is, but it's still better than Apple Music), I've all but given up engaging in music discovery via CarPlay, and I've long since moved local media onto a Plex Server in lieu of a single, simple, efficient iTunes library. That's just the media side of things, too.
Don't get me wrong, Apple's kit is still lightyears better than an equivalent Windows 11/Android setup, especially for my family members who don't want to wrangle with confusing UX and have largely moved into a streaming-only lifestyle - though even they're increasingly frustrated with Apple's updates breaking things or forcing them to rework their processes.
But that only works for so long before users get so sick and tired of it, that they'll take a chance on an upstart competitor.
by UltraSane on 3/3/25, 11:30 PM
by ohgr on 3/3/25, 4:49 PM
My partner is the IT manager at a school where they have over 1000 iPads (10th gen) deployed with iOS 18 and there are no reported issues like this. We ourselves have iPad Pro M2's without these issues which we both use all day every day. Our kids have 3x 10th gen iPads too. No issues.
YMMV but they just work for us and the software, which not perfect, is probably the least shit out there.
I mean the trash heap in my office is mostly Surface machines as a comparison...
by meindnoch on 3/4/25, 8:39 AM