This has been going on for years. I used to do a lot of iOS development, and have an eye for bugs. Almost every Apple app/service has been regressing in quality.

Take basic functionality - a phone app (calling). After certain audio sessions use (calling via WhatsApp) I can’t make regular calls over cellular - the UI app immediately cancels the call. Only reboot helps.

Or notes - for many years/iOS versions, they lived with a bug where a text note may just become blank - and only restarting Notes app makes it visible again.

Or AppStore - if an app has to be updated (I have auto updates off) - and I press Update - it gets downloaded, installed - and then AppStore is back to showing “Update” button! If you just go to the app, it’s a new version. But if you press that “Update”, it will redo update from scratch.

Sometimes I’m so frustrated, and thinking of my options - it’s either move to Android, or go get hired at Apple with a mandate to fix bugs in various products… but knowing Apple secrecy culture/silos, it’s not going to work, and requires change in their hiring process/perf review/QA.

I had an iPhone I was fixing up. I backed up what was necessary, disconnected the old iCloud account, and created a new one to use when updating the OS. I created a spam-blocking address (mailgw) for this account. It created fine and I logged in from the phone without problem. I did the OS update, but then I got a dreaded error that it couldn't log in. I tried to log in with the account on the PC and it has been deleted. Apple deleted the account out from under the phone and now it's iCloud locked, all within less than half an hour. I called but they said I'd have to go to an Apple store and produce the original receipt. If this was really about theft, why couldn't I just regain control from the AppleID that had been logged in for years from the phone? I checked from that account but it had no option to report that the phone was fine. This was a many-year-old phone and the receipt was long gone. So Apple basically bricked the phone, with no recourse. I will never buy an Apple device again.

Here's my personal canary in the coal mine that something must be fundamentally broken in Apple's software development process:

- on a recent macOS version, right click on the desktop, select 'change wallpaper' => the new settings panel opens

- click on 'Custom Color'

- now hold and drag around the 'color cursor' in the color selection circle for a few seconds

- stop dragging and notice how the color cursor continues jumping around erratically (it's impossible to actually select the exact color you want)

- same thing happens when using the linear slider below the color circle

This bug doesn't lurk deep in some obscure part of the settings panel, it's the only way to change the desktop background color. A QA specialist would stumble over this in 5 minutes of trying to break the app.

I made it a hobby to check this bug after each OS update, it's broken since the new settings panel was introduced in Ventura. As a good citizen I also wrote a Feedback Assistent ticket (FB13805690 - 21-May-2024) with attached screen recordings and all, but of course I could just as well have sent that report into a black hole :)

When you upgrade MacOS 15.3.0 apple automatically enables Apple intelligence and then turns on Apple intelligence reporting (15 min intervals) by default.

You are not prompted or asked to enable.

After disabling Apple Intelligence when you do the next mini update to 15.3.1 Apple intelligence is enabled. Again no prompt and your previous choice to disable is ignored.

This IMO is a bad sign for Apple software quality. Looks like they are moving to more dark user methods seen in Windows 11.

I got Homepods for all my rooms. Woops. The unpredictable bad behavior is maddening. All intermittent but frequent problems:

• I ask Homepods to play some music, and music starts playing in another room.

• I ask a room to play something, it says that is not in my library. I ask again. Same response. The problem comes in two flavors: One, I have to power cycle the Homepod to get things to reconnect. Or two, there is a halflife of disconnect where each time I ask there is an independent 1/2 chance of resolving the problem.

• I ask the Homepod to play something in multiple rooms. Some rooms play others don't. Sometimes, one room will start and stop playing randomly. Sometimes all the rooms will start and stop playing randomly.

• I ask a Homepod to play in a Zone. Same issues as asking for multiple rooms explicitly.

• Sometimes paired Homepods will both play, sometimes only one.

• Sometimes Homepods in a pair respond differently. If I carefully ensure only one hears me, it might be the one that starts the music that the other one refuses to do.

I can go on, but my experience is Homepods don't scale. A single pod or pair are much more reliable. Obviously, the more components a system has the greater chance of a problem, but it shouldn't be every day, or multiple times a day, for an integer we normally think of as "small N".

To say my Homepod use has been shaped by these failures is an understatement.

Apple has completely dropped the ball on Homekit. The app interfaces are completely ridiculous. Bad parody of bad app interfaces ridiculous.

I have work provided macbook pro.

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.

Here's what I find most puzzling about these things: Apple does amazingly helpful WWDC sessions on how to profile and improve your code, how to prioritize performance...but when it comes to their own apps, it's like they forget everything they know?

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.

I drank the "creating products that prioritize user experience over feature checklists" kool-aid back in ~2013 sometime, and got myself a first Macbook when I worked at a software startup the first time. While it certainly gave a more "premium" impression in terms of hardware/UI/UX for the first few years, around 2016 I had to move back to Linux because the software experience and the user experience is just too poor, outright buggy and changes all the time.

Even basic UX like "Can still see navigation map on CarPlay when someone calls you" seems to be just not thought of at all, or not being able to move the cursor left/right because the current iPhone keyboard mode only allows number. There are a thousands of these tiny cuts that just makes it such a pain to use daily.

Which is a darn shame, because the hardware is truly amazing, from everything from the displays, to keyboard and trackpads, to the general feeling and the CPU. But the software experience been so shit for the last decade that it's hard to justify going back.

I used to think these reports were exaggeration until i had to use the apple tv app to watch severance. I am beyond shocked how bad this app is and how every interaction feels like a downer. Buttons miss hover effects, icons are off center by a few pixels. Whole interaction workflows were obviously never tested and just don't work. I hope the explanation is just that the app was outsourced but if this is the level of quality apple works at now, users are doomed. The other issues i see daily are more signs of just stopping to invest any resources whatsoever into base components. I don't understand how google image search can show me faster image results than quicklook from an image that is sitting in my dock on my local hard drive. Or how the finder is unable to browse network drives without freezing, giving up or taking 30 seconds to show thumbnails or even file names.

Yeah, it’s been a while:

- 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…

Yes, my wife recently lost a bunch of files on her iPad. The files just dissapeared and are nowhere to be found. Of course I thought that it must have been a "user error", but some research showed that this a bug that affects a bunch of people [1][2] (might only affect files that you've written into with an apple pencil).

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...

My work Macbook sometimes drops random characters from the lock screen password input. You hit a key and a black dot does not appear; the password is consequently rejected.

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...

i've got some issues with my older iMac from 2015 after my internal SSD failed and i'm booting from an external that all appear to be software related with little I can do about it as my Mac is out of support, even though these issues must have existed previously, it's so frustrating.

-- On Monterey no disk images will mount and no external drives or SD card. Everything is fine on older versions of OS, some forum posts suggest others with the same issue, but without any resolution. The only way to get DMG images to mount is to use a third party mounter like FastDMG, upgrading to Ventura fixes the issue with Disk images and my SD card, however this is not an officially supported OS for my model, so I have to use OpenCore Legacy patcher to achieve this. External drives still do not mount, the OS just doesn't see them at all, even in the recovery mode for these OS versions However running another MacOS inside Parallels I can access them, so they must be accessible somehow.

-- This is all perhaps caused by my firmware being out of date, i'm running 173.0.0.0 and it should be something like 530.0.0.0, this is updated with the operating system, however it has been found that on custom order macs with SDD's rather than the standard fusion drive, such as mine, the firmware update fails due to it incorrectly looking for a drive via the sata port. Apparently this is fixed on 195.x but you have to open up the iMac and plug in a drive into the Sata port just to get it to do this.

Extremely frustrating considering I paid a lot extra to spec this model up but due to Apple's mistake with the firmware updates (Or other unknown issue) I'm left with these problems. Since the machine is no longer in support, Apple aren't interested in helping.

I think it has more to do with a gradual industry-wide race to the bottom in terms of quality. Reliability, attention to detail, correctness occupy a tiny fraction of the "budget" compared to security, slopping out features, and beating competition to market. I suspect that startup culture being the crucible where a large portion of engineers learned their chops and the massive amount of new blood in the industry who are primarily there for money are the biggest factors.

My take: over success breeds complacency. Apple knows where its money is coming from. It has carved out an extremely hard to establish hardware production chain via iphone and macbooks, and is able to provide a certain consistent level of quality for it. Software is an afterthought, especially for software that is not in service of this primary hardware revenue source. From a business point of view it literally does not make sense for them to do anything differently. Of course, disruption is always a possibility. Google was the undisputed AI leader for years, but their reputation as a House of Knowledge was overshadowed by their comfort as a search, cloud, and advertisement business. These are steady services that just need to be reliable to remain profitable, no invention required.

For a while I was surprised by Mircrosoft's signs of life around generative AI by the time OpenAI came about, but it seemed to relapse into complacency too.

I honestly believe there is some unstated law of success, I think there is a "ceiling" to success, at which point it becomes impossible to expand. It has something to do with the correlation between success in complexity. As a business grows more successful, it becomes more tied down to various commitments, constraining its ability to innovate without assumptions. There's a limit to what any given entity can handle.

Anecdotally, Apple Music has deteriorated exponentially for me. iTunes was such a stable, usable piece of software, but I can't get reliable use out of Apple Music for the life of me. It _feels_ like a shoddy Electron app. But that's not fair to the actual Electron (or similar) apps that actually work. For all its many design and product flaws, Spotify actually works.

I have a feeling that user testing just gets completely avoided.

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…

I use Apple M1 in my work, and comparing to a PC, it has really good performance. I would blame Apple for a lot, but not for the performance. Namely, for:

- 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

I think a major part of the problem is Apple's attitude towards bug reports: they basically DO NOT WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU. Which means that rare bugs go unnoticed and get swept under the rug.

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.

The quality crisis is systemic throughout the whole economy. So many fields are getting more disorganised, messy and chaotic.

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.

It seems to me like the iPad in particular has the worst software quality. Not that iOS on the iPhone is perfect, but it really seems like their workflow is to build for the phone first, then hammer it in place to work on the iPad as an afterthought.

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.

I recently got an M4 Mac Mini which is an amazing piece of hardware. (When it came in the mail I couldn't believe it could fit in the small box it was in!)

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.

As someone forced to use a Windows laptop for work with the new job, I've stopped complaining about my Mac. It's so much worse on the other side of the fence...

Working on Windows makes me appreciate the Mac ecosystem so, so, so very much.

I would pay a premium for a system that never gets any new features except for bug & security patches.

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.

When i type on iMessages, any time the message gets longer than ~8 sentences, ie... a mildly long message, it starts to lag extremely bad, where 1 keystroke has like a 250ms delay. it gets worse the more characters get added on

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

It's not just Apple guys, it's everywhere.

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..

I just don't understand why Apple UI designers hate scroll bars with such a passion.

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.

Apple creates excellent hardware but mediocre apps. Look at Reminders app for instance. Try to create a task. And then drag it to another list. Absolutely not a smooth experience. Feels like it‘s not a finished product. Now compare that to another app: Things3, where the drag and drop of list items is rasor sharp: You have the feeling you have full control over the item.

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.

Quality is a synonym for care. And if the leadership doesn't care, the teams building the software won't care (at least, not as much).

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.

Mark Zuckerberg on a podcast with Joe Rogan (massive grain of salt, please) talked about the protocol that Airpods use to connect. Apple is reluctant to share the protocol under the guise of "security" and "privacy". But when Meta finally had a chance to review it, it was apparently all unencrypted and all the keys were stored in plaintext.

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”

Another issue I have is with the Messages app. My girl sometimes sends me voice messages from her iPad, and sometimes the voice messages come as .caf files. These files are pretty much unplayable from the iPhone in the Messages app. It happens intermittently because we send a lot of voice messages between each other. I use an iPhone 15, not sure what her iPad model is. It also happens sometimes when I record voice messages on my Mac (Sequoia 15.3.1) and it shows up as .caf files on her iPhone and it renders it unplayable. I then have to record the message with my phone before she can play it. There was another case that happened (haven't been able to reproduce it yet), but I sent a voicenote with my Mac via Messages and we literally could not open the conversation again. It became so laggy typing a message in the conversation (even after waiting for a lot of time for the conversation to open). The way I resolved it is by deleting the conversation, that fixed it. But obviously I recovered the conversation, and the issue still persisted. I updated my iPhone to 18.3.1 and that was how the issue got resolved.

My personal annoyance is Apple abandoning AppKit in favor of SwiftUI, which breaks down immediately once you do more complex interactions than basic demo apps. NSScrollView and NSCollectionView must be among the most buggy UI components, but SwiftUI ScrollView is so barebones (and also buggy), it's basically useless.

In comparison, my experience with a Quest 3s with MetaHorizonOS.

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.

I would bet that the reason for the drop in quality is the focus on delivering features in order to secure promotions and ongoing positive performance reviews.

I reported a bug in their mmap syscall on Apple Silicon. You can hard freeze the computer in about 4 syscalls (basically system C functions). It's still there and they won't fix it, or acknowledge that it's a vulnerability.

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.

I was literally just talking about this the other day—every app on my Mac that gives me trouble is from Apple (Music, Podcasts, Keynote). And don’t even get me started on the declining UX quality in iOS. It feels like the cracks are really starting to show now. I know Apple’s developer quality has been on a downward trend for a while, but at this point, it’s impossible to ignore.

True! I experience many iOS bugs every day. I try to report them, but I feel I always get a response - "have you tried to turn off and on?"

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.

The poster mentions issues with Notes and Freeform. I use these apps with an Ipad Mini 6, and suffer from freezes, latency, high power draw and crashes. I was previously considering getting a more powerful device like an Ipad Pro, but according to OP this won't fix it at all. Paraphrasing a redditor, the Freeform app seems to have been developed as a demo tool to use in Apple Stores.

In theory, there should be some sort of paid app that uses all the incredible hardware for an actual good experience.

While I worked at Apple in 2021-22 their issues seemed about the same as nearly every other company producing consumer apps and devices; bloated slow garbage with very mediocre quality. Their engineering culture is terrible, especially as it relates to transfer of the “Apple ethos” to the next generation of devs. Apple is going to be indistinguishable from the rest of the pack within the next decade.

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.

Freeform also works incredibly bad on my iPad (sluggish, unstable, crashing). It’s definitely a software issue. I never had such performance issues with Notability.

But yes. The overall decline in Apple’s software quality is evident and sad.

Remember when OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 was released with 'zero new features' and with focus on fixing bugs and improving things?

Good times.

> For years, many of us have willingly paid the "Apple tax", the premium price for Apple products justified by superior user experience, design, and ecosystem integration. But if software quality continues to decline, this value proposition becomes increasingly difficult to defend.

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.

> Feature prioritization over optimization: Engineering resources appear focused on new capabilities rather than fixing existing performance problems;

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.

Till very recently there was a bug where PDFs from the internet archive would show in inverted colours in mac os Preview. It was there for some time.

As an iPhone user, I can only agree that Apple's software quality is just going backwards. Keyboard is terrible, it suggests words that are completely unrelated. Control center is becoming worse at every update. You can't still select text in the messages. Wifi is always unstable. You can't turn off wifi, etc.

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.

Should there be a better way of reporting and displaying bugs?

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.

I wish Apple would put more of their operating systems on a public git repository, make people sign CLA’s who make contributions, and vigorously defend their IP if people try using it in a manner that violates their terms of service.

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.

Did anyone mention that on AppleTV I now get ads on my home screen?

----

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.

Apple Music sends ads to my Lock Screen, every time I search it’s automatically set to “Apple music” despite being turned off and no subscription so gives me no results, I have to change the option every time, every few months I get an ad I have to dismiss opening my music collection. The listening queue doesn’t seem to work anymore I can’t add things to it and repeat no longer works in a sane way.

I feel this would be unthinkable in the time before Tim Cook’s Apple.

My canary was the iOS 18 update on my iPhone SE 2nd generation.

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.

I tried a Macbook again when the M1 chips came out, and wasn't impressed with the performance. Despite incredible benchmarks, the interface just felt bloated and sluggish.

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.

Figure I’ll add my own obscure bug that’s never fixed. Apple finally released a Dvorak keyboard for iOS. Except a lot of times it bugs out and stays in QWERTY mode just for swipe typing even when you’re in the Dvorak layout.

I believe emojis are pretty popular this days, yet searching for one on macOS has been broken for years

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?

I'd consider the tools in the iPhone's Photos app to be amongst the most "core" features - yet there've been glitches in it for the past year where if you annotate a picture (say, by adding text), the position of everything you've added is screwed up when you hit 'Done'. I'm sure that's the tip of the iceberg.

Techrot is real and it's there in almost every major big tech product. Google does definitely take the gold medal in this category though as I have never seen so many bugs in production software by a trillion dollar company as I have seen in Google's.

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.

They design AirPods and its cases to break on impact. They make it so slippery that it would be a stretch not to say that they designed it felicitate fatal falls. And after all this, they used glue to glue it in such a way that it comes off if it didn’t fall. Then they just ask you to buy a new case — yes, they don’t glue or do such lowly repairs. They have the gall to explicitly say that it would be repairable by glue but they won’t do that. Not to mention batteries which are designed for obsoletion. Cases and parts are made perfectly irreparable. And that’s just AirPods case!!!!

Premium hardware my foot! They are lucky to be in a convenient duopoly.

> I call on Apple to return to its roots - creating products that prioritize user experience over feature checklists. The company that once proudly created products that "just work" needs to reclaim that ethos.

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.

I used to do thousands of interviews across the industry and I vividly remember Apple backend devs being almost always unmitigated disasters. They would always pick Java and could barely use it - to the point where a for loop would be challenging. Their Swift guys were fairly decent though IIRC.

Apple had to switch CPU architectures and build their just to make their OS feel as snappy as KDE and Gnome does on mid-tier hardware. I wonder how long it will take until enough technical debt accumulates to a point where Mac OS feels like it drags again.

The absolute worst was the transition to SSDs if you were stuck on a hard to upgrade HDD-based Mac. It became super clear that Apple devs stopped caring in the span of a year.

I really hope someone high up the chain at Apple reads this post because it's only the tip of the iceberg in describing the myriad of things wrong with Apple's software experience lately. For a company so flush with cash and resources, it boggles the mind how they could let things get this bad.

Just a note to say that I have the exact same issue as the author in Freeform on my 13 inch iPad Air. It heats up to the point that the screen dims, and then dims again and the iPad is uncomfortable to hold. It doesn’t take long for this to happen either.

In contrast, the iPad does not overheat when painting for extended periods in procreate.

Was this run through ChatGPT? It’s formatting with numbered lists and bullet points with bold titles followed by colons is identical.

In the current MacOS release, if I type Time Machine in the System Settings search box, it shows what I was looking for: "Show Time Machine status in the menu bar".

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!

Is this a real problem, or a perceived problem?

I know people like to complain about Apple's software quality - but is this actually an issue - or just the popular thing to say?

Aside from security fixes and improvements I rarely use anything in OS X that wasn't there many versions ago. I wish they'd try a "long term support" model instead of annually releasing bug ridden OS versions that don't provide me any benefit. The main benefit seems to be to Apple, planned obsolescence etc

Apple really should slow down their release cycles and focus on quality for a while. Apple Music on macOS is such an embarrassment. The UI is a mess. Airplay is broken. I just want my old fashioned but decent Mac applications back.

MacOS has gone downhill like crazy indeed. On an M4, searching my safari history is super slow, searching for a password in the Passwords app is also really slow. I mean these are just lists. Apps steal focus all the time, Finder window column widths reset whenever they feel like, search in Mail sometimes just refuses to work. iCloud tab syncing? haha, not today, maybe next week again. You could probably write a dissertation on the new, new system preferences app.

This is not only an Apple problem. Most software developed today is in a terrible state. What boggles me the most is that how users are immune against it - it's so normal that software doesn't work or has bugs that most users don't even get upset - it's just the way it is. It's software - what can you do? :(

Apple has no decent solution for the issue of the cursor moving if you accidentally touch the touchpad while you're typing text (other than disabling the touchpad and using a mouse).

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.

Using the backend services (iTunes Connect, etc.) is painful.

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.

If there was a competitive market, this thread would be a marketing gold mine.

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?

Tell me about it. My iPhone cannot backup up, neither could me predecessor phone.

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.

This seems like the natural progression of agile and promoting frequent releases - more shallow features and bugs, less optimisation

long term consequences of running an H1B gulag and underpaying relative to industry

After updating to iOS 18.3.1, my iPhone 14 Pro Max has encountered many strange bugs. For example, the camera's balance indicator randomly disappears. Additionally, the battery drains significantly faster. I hope Apple can fix these weird bugs as soon as possible.

I feel there's a cliff drop of quality in both hardware and software with the release of Big Sur, the version where I believe they rewrote a lot of the softwares. It's very obvious when I replaced my 2015 MacBook Pro with a 2020 MacBook Pro M1, everything downgraded, but now I'm getting used to software being clunky and buggy.

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.

In Apples position I would set up a little task force that goes through everything single bug mentioned in this thread and fixes it.

I have been reporting several bugs through the Feedback app you get access to when you are part of the beta program. There is to many menus and no search option to find the right “department” to report to, so I have almost stopped giving feedback on bugs.

I guess the fixes have to start there first.

Shortcuts.

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.

Mine is that running multiple network extensions (like Tailscale, Little Snitch, a VPN) causes networking to randomly stop working. The only solution is to not use more than one network extension at a time.

Software quality across the board is in decline IMO.

I'm not sure if anyone else experiences this but there's a bug in the display settings where:

- 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.

Yea, I used to use Apple Notes for everything until their recent big update where it became very jittery. (even on an iPhone). The web-version of Apple Notes always sucked.

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.

The World needs more Snow Leopards.

Here's a weird bug. If you have on your iphone, photo slide show (i had it set to cities and nature), and then with a charger wire in then just try to use your phone, the touch digitizer goes crazy, as if there's some weird interference. Switch back to a standard wallpaper mode, and the problem goes away. iphone 14pro

I have two AppleTVs (2021 models), and they cannot play video on other streaming services after watching something on Apple TV+. Typically the view loads for the video, shows the first frame, and overlays the loading circle element until reboot. Killing apps and reloading doesn't fix it.

I'm not sure how this is possible, but it's trivial to replicate and is only resolved by rebooting the device.

I have an issue with Messenger notifications on one device, a laptop. The messages get delivered just as quickly on this laptop as on other devices, but the notifications can take minutes to come up. Also, the number of unread messages sometimes gets stuck out of sync, for example showing 1 when I have no unread messages. I've tried rebooting, and I've tried disabling and re-enabling notifications.

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.

Apple should Open Source its OSes and internal apps. Of course this is very NOT-Apple, but it would allow folks to fix their apps. There's really no advantage to keeping it all proprietary. Apple's software teams are completely under water whereas Apple customers are diehards and would gleefully help fix issues. It would avoid the need to reproduce problems internally prior to ranking their importance for the internal team to fix. Besides, MacOS roots are in Open Source.

Apple is in the hardware business. At some point, they used software to lure people in buying expensive hardware.

Since now their hardware is a bit better than others, maybe they care less of software quality.

The phenomenon of software quality/usability going down aka the second system effect isn't specific to Mac OS, to say the least. I actually left Linux behind on the desktop which has gross regressions since 2016 yet unlike Mac OS hasn't gained a single app or end user feature to make up for it.

There’s a far larger surface area of software for bugs to occur in these days.

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.

We have a good set of feature requests from app store that would make catching issues like this infinitely easy.

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.

I’ve had three show-stopping bugs across core apple software in the last month — I wish the competition was better!

My issue, macOS:

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.

The iOS Mail app has gotten so bad. It shows errors for no reason whatosover. The other day I typed a message and hit sent (and status showed all synced) but it was not sent and not even in draft.

Any recommendations for an alternative?

I still remember the story of an IMAP bug Apple mail had for years and years. I forgot exactly what the bug was that was open with Apple, but Apple’s way of addressing the bug was turning off the feature in an update and closing out the ticket.

In general if I buy some hardware and the OS is ok, but any supplier apps are just an afterthought. If that be from Huawei, Samsung, Microsoft, Apple, etc, a TV, a phone, a computer. On my iphone I have a folder with all the Apple apps, just in case) but otherwise I use other apps. I also have an extra Samsung phone, same thing.

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.

I've started to wonder whether there might be any internal resistance at Apple to the move to SwiftUI, which has brought some benefits but also a whole host of odd behaviors in all kinds of places.

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).

This is not the only instance of the software quality crisis in Apple.

<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.

"Feels too hot" is hardly an objective measurement. Why worry about something that "may" occur. Use your device. If it fails take it in a get it replaced under warranty.

I want a MacBook Air with Linux running on it perfectly, audio, microphones everything. Would be so nice.

I tried an iPhone for three months or so, ending a month ago, and I was really disappointed by the experience. I thought Apple was still a company that focused on UX, but it was eye-opening to see that they had lost their way.

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.

I hate many details from Apple's software, but most stuff people are complaining about is solved by downloading an app/plugin that does it. However, this should not be the case when you're paying for a 'premium' OS. It's highly frustrating and time consuming.

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.

It may not be perfect, but the alternatives I've tried have so far been even worse. I have a Windows 11 gaming PC, and oh boy that is an OS that deliberately tries to give you a bad day, and Linux ... well, if you don't want config tinkering to replace your day job then it's simply not something usable for most modern hardware as it doesn't even have a display server that actually works well (Wayland breaks almost all Electron apps, which is like, most apps these days, and makes X11 apps look tiny and horrible due to the clusterfuck that is fractional scaling on Linux) and for some reason every now and again my vanilla Linux install simply just crashes. It has also borked itself mid video call for reasons unclear. Definitely not an OS I'd like to use for any professional work since it seems to have the stability of Win 2000.

Title should be something like “Apple Pencil Pro causes iPad to overheat and slow down”. This sounds really annoying, but the overly broad title is just clickbait.

Stuff went downhill since iOS 13 and macOS 11

Glad it's not just me thinking that. The amount of UI bugs I encountered in the last few macOS versions is fairly annoying.

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.

iOS 18.3.1 bricked my wifi and bluetooth. Can't connect to anything. MacBook Pro cannot open discord, slack, mail due to an os issue. Apple has such great hardware but the software has so many bugs, you start looking around for alternatives.

I recently switched from an Android to an iphone and the writing experience (keyboard, text selection, scrolling) are so frustrating. I initially thought I must not be used to it but then found so many people had the same problem. I didn't expect this from Apple.

> Feature prioritization over optimization: Engineering resources appear focused on new capabilities rather than fixing existing performance problems;

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

A few yeas ago my friend had his iphone replaced three times under warranty. Every single time the mic failed and it came up with a message after boot that an audio device had failed. His next phone was an Android one.

question for all the linux users out there, which DE most closely follows the windowing style on a mac(preferably out of the box/with a script)? I've enjoyed the multi-virtual-desktop windowing style during my stay here but as noted, the experience isn't keeping pace

This is eating almost every Apple device and not to mention the entire Apple' devices ecosystem as well.

Window placement with multiple monitors is broken beyond belief. I am hoping someone from Apple is reading this thread.

Software problems like we are seeing are not something that happen over night. They slowly appear until you can’t see them. It takes years of bad design and decisions to get what we have.

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.

Apple is known for their refusal to fix bugs.

One example where it is almost 2 years since they "made" a fix, but have not yet released it.

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=254545#c32

Again ?

Feels like we have been here before.

My daughter uses one of my old 2017 Macbook pros (nice hardware, everything works fine). I learned yesterday that she cannot use Pages because OSX cannot be upgraded to 10.14, which is a requirement for Pages (I suspect the same thing will happen with other Apple software).

Why is device overheating considered a software problem?

>But if software quality continues to decline, this value proposition becomes increasingly difficult to defend.

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.

>Memory Management Problems

I suspect some quadratic or worse algorithm in the handwriting curve rendering.

When software is so bad that tactics “just throw more hardware inside” stops working.

I know people tend to get very upset by this but if I’m not mistaken the M1, M2 and I think the M3 processors all now have “unfixable” hardware level security bugs on par with SPECTRE that destroy the concept of a Secure Enclave AFAIK.

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.

recently switched from android to ios and it's buggy as hell

airdropping from phone to computer doesn't even work anymore idk what to think

I use Apple software and hardware all day every day. There was a patch ~13 years ago where things were really rough but I haven't noticed many issues over the past few years.

Never wanted anything more than an iphone that runs android

A couple of months ago I had an iPhone in my hands for half an hour, for the first time. I was helping to debug some WiFi and also a minor printer issues, and all there was was this iPhone.

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.

I wouldn't call Apple's hardware as premium quality. Premium price yes, quality no - not since PowerPC times.

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.

iCucks in shambles, many such cases

I moved to Android this year. iOS accessibility just doesn't make the iPhone worth it anymore. Braille becomes more and more unstable in VoiceOver every year, and Android works way better with Windows and Linux than iOS does, and Mac accessibility, frankly, sucks.

All software development is ultimately dominated by complexity management asymptotics.

Every tuple of

    (engineers, organizational structure, choice of language, ...)

Generates a function mapping from <complexity of problem> to <complexity of solution>

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.

Anyone remember OS 8 or 9? Not great.

A couple of months ago I bought new Magic Mouse with USB-C charging port, at first I was excited, finally Apple released new revision with USB-C port. Next thing I know scroll doesn’t work at all. And the mouse doesn’t stand stably on my desk. After hours of talking to Apple representatives at the phone call, they decided they will ship a replacement part.

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.

Does he mean that the software worked for three months after the hardware swap?

The Apple experience seems very luck based. Sometimes it goes great but if you hit the perfect storm of issues you're just totally out of luck

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

>"Apple tax" It's not what you think. Apple siphons all data they can and sells it, that's the real tax.

I fail to see the quality crisis if you’re just sticking with iPhone and Mac.

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.

I can't help but think Apple should have focused more on hiring the top engineers/designers than on the diversity of their workforce.

Nothing infuriates me more than the fact that when you get a missed call, tapping on the call notification doesn't call them back, instead it takes you to their contact!!!

What's worse is that this is a regression, so they actively made life a little more difficult for everyone in the new release.

Lack of focus.

I want UNIX not emojis.

Welcome to the brave new world of SwiftUI!

I worked at Apple. I was literally driven out of town due to my constructive criticism of how terrible our software and processes were. There was zero focus on quality and maintainability. ( I worked at Google and Netflix).

Wait, wasn't AI supposed to beefmaxx all of their developers 5x??

Antidotal rage bait with zero supporting facts. Jump on the bandwagon!

could this complaint be generalized to the software quality of anything that's been built upon for many years? as the churn in the workforce happens you lose nuance and expertise and systems become more and more complex to maintain and understand. management demands new features be slapped atop legacy systems. they want software to ship faster (look at how AAA game developers use nvidia AI features as a crutch to ship unoptimized games).

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."

A company like apple can look at all their code, pull out the LCD, and build that directly into their hardware, or at least allow user programmable microcode, no need to keep doing these general branch prediction strategies that are complex and a security nightmare.

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.

The big sign of Apple’s deterioration has been iOS 18. It is a disastrous launch with a terrible photos app, worse autocorrect, bugs, … on their flagship product. Hard to trust where they go from here. At some point it’ll affect security.

I was just thinking the other day how there is a ton of friction now after they moved on from skewmorphic. Say what you will but I always knew exactly where my specific home directory folders were because they looked so distinct in the finder sidebar. Now I have to actually read the damn folder names because everything looks the same.

Huh let me guess: it is Apple Intelligence causing it

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.

Mail on iOS doesn’t even have push any more, the new Photos app is garbage, Music randomly spews “content not available” errors and works remarkably poorly with mobile data for a mobile app, watchOS is so chock-full of bugs and glitches that just go unfixed major version after major version etc.

It’s pretty bad. Somehow most other software is even worse. Genuinely impressive at this point.

Agreed; Apple's software quality is rapidly approaching unacceptability.

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.

I would disagree with the conclusion. It sounds like a faulty line of hardware on the M2 Air then.

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...

A good writeup of just a smaller subsection of my grievances with Apple under Cook's recent leadership: stellar hardware increasingly hobbled by bungled software.

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.

iPad OS is just terrible.

My personal pet peeve is how Apple used to be the Best of the Best in photography, including Dolby Vision HDR support for both video and still images, but now their software has failed to catch up to Chrome and fails at the most trivial operations.

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.

but the hardware premium is kinda real... i have been using my macbook air 11 daily for 10 years (I am writing this comment on it), and it works flawlessly. somehow i don't think other brands are so well made, or they weren't so well made 10 years ago.

Apple is just milking the market at this point. They are the Phone Company from the sketch ( https://vimeo.com/355556831 ). Literally.

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.

The sad thing about this is that in the Android ecosystem, you are likely to get just as shitty software on a much, much shittier hardware. You cannot have nice things. Oh, and just buy a new one while we're at it, lmao.

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About a year ago I changed from android to ios, thinking id have better integration with my laptop.

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.