What happened to Apple's legendary attention to detail?

https://blog.johnozbay.com/what-happened-to-apples-attention-to-detail.html

by Bogdanp • 9 months ago

772 575 9 months ago

blog.johnozbay.com

x3n0ph3n3• 9 months ago

The current CEO doesn't care like the previous one did. Culture of excellence was replaced with financialization.

malux85• 9 months ago

He died :(

jll29• 9 months ago

A very important but much-neglected part of a CEO's tasks is succession planning.

(Perhaps charismatic leaders neglect it a bit on purpose because they enjoy being portrayed as irreplaceable.)

maz29• 9 months ago

I installed iOS 26 the other day and it seems like a practical joke with how visually terrible it is.

WA• 9 months ago

I thought that all non-native apps will feel even more out of place with Liquid Glass and developers go back to writing more native apps. After experiencing iOS 26, I’m pretty confident that people will actually actively try to get away from the default iOS UI language and will use more cross-platform tech that makes it easier to implement their own designs. Liquid Glass is just annoyingly bad.

dionian• 9 months ago

I like it

rwmj• 9 months ago

He died in 2011.

abirch• 9 months ago

In order to say no you have to have a burning yes.

The people in power don't have a burning yes.

layer8• 9 months ago

What’s a burning yes?

reliabilityguy2• 9 months ago

90% of the times when I pay with Apple Pay, and want to switch the credit card I do too many unnecessary taps.

First, I quickly tap on the first button that has the picture of the credit card and its name. As a result I find myself in a menu that shows me the billing address (go figure)! So, I have to click back, and use the button below that simply states “Change the credit card” or something to that effect.

Why, for the love of god, for the info about the billing address Apple uses picture of CC? Why the billing address is even the first option!?

So, multiple clicks when it can be avoided by a proper design (I think in the past the picture button was the one that changed credit cards, but I don’t know if I am misremembering).

Every time it happens I think about Steve Jobs.

floam• 9 months ago

Are you me? I always go back and get it on a next try, and maybe also like tried to bail when I saw it was the wrong card after double side buttoning, which maybe means I need to reset the state of the payment screen, but then need to wait, double click again, change it the right way, wait for the glorious beep…

1970-01-012• 9 months ago

More disturbing is the author doesn't mention it at all. The legendary CEO is never mentioned, but somehow big conclusions are still drawn? Go ahead and skip this article.

krackers• 9 months ago

It's surprising how many C* level people don't use the software their company creates. I don't doubt that Cook uses an iPhone, but does he actually _use_ it, as in go off the happy path? And what about macOS? Based on past emails and stuff, Jobs was a decent "power user" of osx and a lot of bugs were fixed because he noticed it.

throitallaway2• 9 months ago

If a company needs to rely on the CEO to file bug reports, it really shows their absolute lack of QA and testing along the way.

al_borland4• 9 months ago

After seeing how Cook takes an iPhone out of his pocket, I'm not convinced he even uses an iPhone, or any smartphone for that matter.

linguae3• 9 months ago

I think it's a little more complicated than that. He wasn't at Apple from mid-1985 through the end of 1996, yet Apple's culture was still profoundly influenced by him in many ways. Many influential people who were hired pre-1985 were present at Apple during the Sculley, Spindler, and Amelio years. Even in the mid-1990s when Apple was spiraling down the drain, the Mac was still focused on usability and consistency.

However, it seems that under Tim Cook, Apple has gradually lost many of its traditional values when it comes to usability and UI/UX perfectionism. I suspect that the company has not passed on "The Apple Way" to people who joined the company after Steve Jobs' passing. Not only that, there doesn't seem to be an "Apple Way" anymore.

Come to think of it, the old Apple had figures like Bruce Tognazzini who wrote about "The Apple Way"; I have a copy of Tog on Interface that distills many of the UI/UX principles of the classic Mac. I can't think of any figures like Tog in the modern era.

Gradually the Apple software ecosystem is losing its distinctiveness in a world filled with janky software. It's still better than Windows to me, but I'd be happier with Snow Leopard with a modern Web browser and security updates.

It's sad; the classic Mac and Jobs-era Mac OS X were wonderful platforms with rich ecosystems of software that conformed to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines of those eras. I wish a new company or a community open-source project would pick up from where Apple left off when Jobs passed away.

NexRebular2• 9 months ago

...I wish a new company or a community open-source project would pick up from where Apple left off...

There's the Hello System[0]... not sure if it counts.

[0] https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/

Rover222• 9 months ago

Yesterday I had annoying bugs on my iPhone, my Apple Watch, and on the apple store website. Incredible.

FredPret4• 9 months ago

Apple added too many features too fast, so they fell into the Feature Whirlpool. They're going to try and get out of it by adding more Features, Faster (I hope I'm wrong!).

Instead, they should have stayed on the Straigth and Narrow of Quality - where they were for many years - where you move up to computing paradise by having fewer features but more time spent perfecting them.

readthenotes12• 9 months ago

"Straigth and Narrow of Quality"

We see what you did there!

FredPret4• 9 months ago

I should've typed fewer but better words!

otterdude2• 9 months ago

naw dude we gotta get these quarters numbers up by degrading quality on windows/chromecast. It just reeks of incompetence and insincerity

trhway• 9 months ago

Apple added too many features too fast, so they fell into the Feature Whirlpool. They're going to try and get out of it by adding more Features, Faster (I hope I'm wrong!).

yep. The attention to details is still there, it is just changed from polishing and curating details to creating a lot of small unpolished and uncalled for and thus very annoying details. From MBA POV there isn't much difference, and the latter even produces better KPIs.

kergonath5• 9 months ago

They strayed from this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAEPqUtra6E

Not entirely, though; there is joy and playfulness at the core of Liquid Glass. But delight is not that common, and refinement and focus are definitely lacking. They could have used more nos and fewer yeses.

ethbr12• 9 months ago

The only path to staying on the SaNoQ is having a CEO who prioritizes quality, to the extent that they'll spend time dogfooding product and gripe at developers / engineers / designers / leaders who fall short.

Either everyone is worried about the consequences of failing to produce high quality work (including at the VP level, given they can allocate additional time/resources for feature baking) or optimizing whatever OKR/KPI the CEO is on about this quarter becomes a more reliable career move.

And once that happens (spiced with scale), the company is lost in the Forest of Trying to Design Effective OKRs.

baggachipz2• 9 months ago

If they don't add big features every year, the tech press crucifies them as "just putting out another version of the same thing". IMO they trapped themselves into this yearly release cycle with the OS naming, and this puts pressure on them to deliver something big and new every time. Quality? Ain't nobody got time for that!

Dylan16807• 9 months ago

Nobody really cares if they add a lot of OS features as long as they don't make grandiose statements.

I generally see complaints about advancement aimed at the hardware. Some are unreasonable standards, some are backlash to the idea of continuing to buy a new iphone every year or two as the differences shrink, but either way software feature spam is a bad response.

seaghost• 9 months ago

I would be totally fine with bi-yearly releases.

troupo3• 9 months ago

If they don't add big features every year, the tech press crucifies them as "just putting out another version of the same thing".

That's the bed they made themselves and lay in it willingly.

No one is forcing them to do huge yearly releases. No one is forcing them to do yearly releases. No one is forcing them to tie new features which are all software anyway to yearly releases (and in recent years actual features are shipping later and later after the announcement, so they are not really tied to releases either anymore).

carlosjobim4• 9 months ago

Zero percent of consumers care what the tech press writes, and Apple makes their money by selling their devices to consumers.

They could easily wait longer between releasing devices. An M1 Macbook is still in 2025 a massive upgrade for anybody switching from PC - five years after release.

If Apple included fully fledged apps for photo editing and video editing, and maybe small business tools like invoicing, there would be no reason for any consumer in any segment to purchase anything other than a Mac.

lII1lIlI11ll• 9 months ago

If they don't add big features every year, the tech press crucifies them as "just putting out another version of the same thing".

And then what? Mac users would buy some janky Acer with Windows 11 and bunch of preinstalled malware instead?

kyralis• 9 months ago

This is the entirety of the explanation, really. Apple has always started small and then iterated toward greatness. They've made two mistakes recently:

1. They've stopped starting small and instead started unrealistically large. Apple Intelligence is a great recent example.

2. They've stopped iterating with small improvements and features, and instead decided that "iterating" just means "pile on more features and change things".

black3r• 9 months ago

Some of these issues are excusable by saying they "added too many features too fast" (especially the inconsistencies which the article begins with), but lots of the issues are just caused by Liquid Glass becoming a thing and some "less important" apps didn't get a proper UX test after switching to Liquid Glass design (the whole latter half of the article)...

And that's not excusable - every feature should have its maintainer who should know that a large framework update like Liquid Glass can break basically anything and should re-test the app under every scenario they could think of (and as "the maintainer" they should know all the scenarios) and push to fix any found bugs...

Also a company as big as Apple should eat its own dogfood and force their employees to use the beta versions to find as many bugs as they could... If every Apple employee used the beta version on their own personal computer before release I can't realistically imagine how the "Electron app slowing down Tahoe" issue wouldn't be discovered before global release...

ZeroConcerns• 9 months ago

Oh, come on, having your brand-new AirPod Pro 3s listed in the Bluetooth summary of your also-pretty-recent iPhone as ACCESSORY_MODEL_NAME is a small price to pay for the 3 months of free Apple Music that take up so much more space in the UI anyway...

I mean, some people are just impossible to please!

aquir• 9 months ago

Got eaten by the shareholders and PROFIT

gruez2• 9 months ago

Apple didn't have shareholders and profit before?

Mountain_Skies• 9 months ago

Shareholders didn't know this level of profit was possible and were scared of going back to the ousted Jobs era. It helped that Jobs delivered good growth and profits, though nothing on the scale Cook has with the destruction of Apple's design capital. Some of what Cook has done wouldn't have been possible in the Jobs era due to market and technology differences but in general, Cook has been all about smoothing costs out of processes, with little regard for the things Jobs considered essential.

lenkite• 9 months ago

Reality-Distortion-Visionary type CEO's can push-back against the holy "Fiduciary Duty to Shareholders" commandment that is used to justify all crap, but the Operating-Profit-Efficiency type CEO's like Tim Cook cannot - nor do they wish do.

ortusdux• 9 months ago

"If you were a ‘product person’ at IBM or Xerox: so you make a better copier or better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market-share, the company’s not any more successful. So the people who make the company more successful are the sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the ‘product people’ get run out of the decision-making forums.

The companies forget how to make great products. The product sensibility and product genius that brought them to this monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts about wanting to help the costumers.”

- Steve Jobs - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs:_The_Lost_Interview

readthenotes12• 9 months ago

Or as Parkinson wrote many decades before, injelitance

no_wizard4• 9 months ago

I've always taken this to heart in looking at how organizations operate, and in broad strokes, not only is was Jobs right, keeping this in the back of my mind has always allowed me to evaluate organizational inertia very quickly.

That said, I wonder, Jobs lived through Apple's transformation, but not its peak phase where Apple was simply printing money year after year after year. I do wonder if Jobs in 2016 would have been able to keep the organization performing at such a high caliber.

Even he seemed like he was making unforced errors at times too, like the "you're holding it wrong" fiasco, but its hard to say since he didn't live through Apple 2013-2019 where it became an ever increasing money printing machine.

In the age of AI, COVID-19 etc. I wonder how jobs post 2020 would treat things.

ryandrake• 9 months ago

I think Jobs would have gotten bored of sitting back, printing money, and manufacturing the same boring rectangles over and over for a decade.

gkiely• 9 months ago

Jobs would’ve went all-in on Siri. He acquired it and loved it.

this_user• 9 months ago

What happened is the same thing that tends to happen to almost all successful organisation. The uber exceptional people who initially built it, defined the culture, and enforced it with an iron fist are gone. Now a bunch of people are in charge who trained under the first generation, but who themselves just don't quite have that kind of singular personality. So things start slipping over time.

AddLightness• 9 months ago

This is why gatekeeping is important and shouldn't be labeled as toxic. There's been a shift where everyone wants to welcome everyone, but the problem is it erodes your company culture and lowers the average quality.

whatshisface• 9 months ago

Toxic gatekeeping means sitting on IRC all day just to tell people to read the manual. What you're describing is an, "intervew process."

tobyantes• 9 months ago

You’re right. I’ll start: get off hacker news you noob. Nobody wants to hear your Eternal September rants about what you think DEI means.

moralestapia2• 9 months ago

Agree.

I was in a (tech) meetup last week. We meet regularly, we are somewhere between acquaintances and friends. One thing that came up was a very candid comment about how "we should be able to tell someone 'that is just stupid' whenever the situation warrants it".

I believe that does more good than harm, even to the person it is being directed to. It is a nice covenant to have, "we'll call you on your bs whenever you bring it in", that's what a good friend would do. Embracing high standards in a community makes everyone in it better.

The Linux kernel would be absolutely trash if Linus were not allowed to be Linus. Some contexts do and must require a high level of expertise before you can collaborate properly in them.

MeetingsBrowser2• 9 months ago

Virtually no one is pushing to welcome people who are not qualified.

This is a huge misunderstanding at best and a malicious re-framing of serious issues within portions of the tech industry at worst.

kossTKR3• 9 months ago

So the problem is actually diversity and not grotesque shareholder and marketing driven development?

Im sceptical. I've never seen what you describe outside of toxic "culture war clickbait videos", what i have seen is nepotism, class privileges and sprint culture pushed by investors - you know the exact opposite of what you describe.

sholladay3• 9 months ago

Your logic could be sound if the lowest rung of the skill ladder was simply inevitable for everyone who is currently there. But that is wrong and, really, makes no sense. Many people are just young and need to be trained. Others were taught bad practices and need to be re-trained. Still others have their priorities wrong, but could do good work if they were given a reason to care about the right things. It also takes time for people to grow and to change and to learn from their mistakes.

If you take a hardline attitude on keeping the gates up, you're just going to end up with a monoculture that stagnates.

smith7018• 9 months ago

I'm personally failing to see how "welcoming everyone" directly correlates to a company neglecting polish and detail. A cynical read of your comment is that DEI-style programs are lowering standards when, in actuality, the issue most likely lies in poor management and a corporate structure that rewards buzzy work over polished work. I'm not saying that was your implication, by the way; just that "everything's bad because we allowed other people to join" is a slippery slope.

FloorEgg• 9 months ago

To further your point. In our bodies we have organs which are made up of specific kinds of cells. In some cases diversity of cells seems to come with health benefits (e.g. our guts), but in most cases cause significant health issues. (If you have a bunch of liver cells in your lungs it's probably going to be a problem). Also across the whole body there is an incredible diversity of cells, and they cooperate with mind boggling harmony.

My take away is that diversity at a global level, and in some specific contexts, is a great thing. But diversity in some other specific contexts is entirely destructive and analogous to rot or decomposition.

When we rely on a core societal function (firefighting, accounting, waterworks maintenance, property rights, etc.) the people responsible for maintaining these functions need to maintain in themselves a set of core characteristics (values as patterns of action), and there is room to play outside of those cores, but those cores shouldn't be jeopardized as a tradeoff for diversity and inclusion.

For example, if constructive core values of a railroad system is consistency and reliability, then these shouldnt be diminished in the name of diversity and inclusion, but if diversity and inclusion can be achieved secondarily without a tradeoff (or even to somehow further amplify the core values) then it is constructive. One has to thoughtfully weigh the tradeoffs in each context, and ensure that the most important values in that context to maintain the relevant function are treated as most important. The universe seems to favor pragmatism over ideology, at least in the long run.

So in a company if the core values that make it successful are diluted in exchange for diversity, it's no longer what it was, and it might not be able to do keep doing what it did. That said, it also might have gained something else. One thing diversity tends to offer huge complex systems is stability, especially when its incorporated into other values and not held up singularily.

In other words, my take on diversity (and by extension, inclusion) is that we need a diversity of diversity. Sometimes a lot of diversity is best, and sometimes very little diversity is best.

no_wizard4• 9 months ago

This is why gatekeeping is important and shouldn't be labeled as toxic.

I do not for the life of me understand your point. Gatekeeping, as its most commonly used, means controlling access to something (be it a resource, information etc) to deliberately and negatively affect others that are not part of a "blessed" group. Its not objective, and certainly is not a practice reliant on merit. Its an artificial constraint applied selectively at the whim of the gatekeeper(s).

There's been a shift where everyone wants to welcome everyone, but the problem is it erodes your company culture and lowers the average quality.

The first assertion and the second one are not related. Being welcoming to everyone is not the same thing as holding people to different standards. Company culture sets company inertia and how employees are incentivized to behave and what they care about. You can have the most brilliant engineers in the world, like Google most certainly does have its fair share, and as we have seen, with the wrong incentives it doesn't matter. Look at Google's chat offerings, the Google Graveyard, many of their policies becoming hostile to users as time goes on etc.

Yet you can have a company with what you may deem "average quality" but exceeds in its business goals because its oriented its culture to do so. I don't think Mailchimp was ever lauded for its engineering talent like Google has been, for example, but they dominated their marketplace and built a really successful company culture, at least before the Intuit acquisition.

anonymous9082132• 9 months ago

I've lately become a pretty big proponent of gatekeeping. On Reddit I saw a comment that security flaws are simply unavoidable, that they're inevitable because as a web developer they must have 1000 dependencies and cannot verify the security of them all, and that if something goes wrong, there's no way it would be fair to hold them accountable for it. When that kind of mindset has taken root, and it has deeply taken root in the entire Javascript ecosystem, it becomes a real-world security issue that affects millions of people detrimentally. Maybe software development doesn't actually need to be accessible to people who can't write their own IsOdd function.

Another example is that a hobby I loved is now dead to me for lack of gatekeeping; Magic the Gathering. Wizards of the Coast started putting out products that were not for their core playerbase, and when players complained, were told "these products are not for you; but you should accept that because there's no harm in making products for different groups of people". That seems fair enough on its face. Fast forward a couple of years, and Magic's core playerbase has been completely discarded. Now Magic simply whores itself out to third party IPs; this year we'll get or have gotten Final Fantasy, Spiderman, Spongebob Squarepants, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles card sets. They've found it more lucrative in the short-term to tap into the millions of fans of other media franchises while ditching the fanbase that had played Magic for 30 years. "This product is not for you" very rapidly became "this game is not for you", which is pretty unpleasant for people who've been playing it for most or all of their lives.

bigstrat20035• 9 months ago

Hard agree. Gatekeeping is a good thing. It is how you ensure that people who join a group are actually a good fit for the group. For example, if someone wants to join a D&D group but doesn't like that the game is a dungeon crawl where you just go kick monster ass without a pretense of story, nobody will be served by the group deciding to try to adjust to welcome the new person despite that bad fit. Not only the existing group, but the prospective new member, will be better off if they each go their separate ways and play the type of game each enjoys.

It's good to not exclude people for arbitrary reasons (though even this requires the caveat that one man's "arbitrary" is another man's "important part of our identity"). But we also need to recognize that it's ok for something to not be everyone's cup of tea. There isn't some kind of moral mandate that everything must be maximally welcoming to all. Unfortunately, we don't recognize that in our current culture, and in fact we stigmatize it as "gatekeeping" which is deemed to be toxic. But the culture is wrong about this.

otterdude2• 9 months ago

Also, that reputation was earned before 2010 when every asshole jumped into "technology" for the fat paycheck.

It used to be hard and a liability to be a nerd

gjsman-10002• 9 months ago

I don't know, Linus Torvalds was kind of notorious before 2010 for gatekeeping in not-so-constructive ways.

I'm pretty sure this would also render the dot-com bubble the nerds fault?

Let's not go back to how nerd culture used to be regarding diversity... or lack thereof.

I remember when Bill Gates was on magazine covers, viewed as a genius, a wonderful philanthropist, even spoofed in Animaniacs as "Bill Greats."

I guess my point is, "It used to be hard and a liability to be a nerd" was never true, and is nothing but industry cope. The good old days were just smaller, more homogenous, had more mutually-shared good old toxicity and misogyny (to levels that would probably get permabans here within minutes; there's been a lot of collective memory-holing on that), combined with greater idolization of tech billionaires.

gwbas1c• 9 months ago

Everybody jumped into technology for fat paychecks long before 2010

heresie-dabord• 9 months ago

Legends are always part fiction. And corporations are not meritocracies.

random3• 9 months ago

+1 - think it’s a variant of Gervais principle with effects at a different scale. I guess you are always at the interplay of organizational culture and specific individuals with peak performance reached when both are peaking.

andai• 9 months ago

"The neatest thing that happens is, when you get a core croup of ten people, it becomes self policing, as to who they let into that group."

—Steve Jobs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQKis2Cfpeo

d3rockk• 9 months ago

this_user gets it.

Successful publicly traded companies have a responsibility to generate more revenue and increase the stock price every year. Year after year. Once their product is mature after so many years, there aren't new variations to release or new markets to enter into.

Sales stagnate and costs stagnate; investors get upset. Only way to get that continual growth is to increase prices and slash costs.

When done responsibly, it's just good business.

The problem comes in next year when you have to do it again. And again. Then the year after you have to do it again. And again.

Such as all things in life, all companies eventually die.

pacifika4• 9 months ago

Sounds like public trading is the problem from your description

ahmeneeroe-v2• 9 months ago

I actually love a ton of iOS 26's new features, but wow is it buggy.

rcarmo• 9 months ago

He's dead, Jim.

jm4• 9 months ago

That iMessage screenshot looks like MySpace.

I don't use a Mac anymore, but I do use an iPhone. This is the worst version of iOS I can recall. Everything is low contrast and more difficult to see. The colors look washed out. The icons look blurry. In my opinion, Liquid Glass is a total bust. I don't know what these people are thinking. Times have certainly changed.

methuselah_in2• 9 months ago

Embrace Android

dlivingston2• 9 months ago

Things don't seem much better over there, esp. with Google removing the ability to sideload apps.

comrade12342• 9 months ago

For me it's the notch... I'm still on a 2nd gen se (no notch) but I hate the notch on my laptop.

I think we're stuck with the notch forever on iPhones. Even if apple uses an on-screen fingerprint reader in the future like a billion phones already do they're not going to go back from the face scanner. The only thing that will work is if the face scanner can read from behind the display.

nomel2• 9 months ago

Wait, how do you see the notch? It seems that only the menu bar can go there and fullscreen and windowed apps and video can't. Why circumstances do you see it?

Maybe it's because I use dark mode? I can only tell it's there if I move my mouse under it.

comrade12342• 9 months ago

When menu items no longer show up because they're where the notch is. Happens every time I'm on just my laptop and not on an external monitor.

achandlerwhite• 9 months ago

On the laptop it doesn't cut into the normal screen ratio. So it's basically free pixels minus the notch.

poolnoodle• 9 months ago

But stuff did get hidden behind the notch sometimes. Not sure if that is still the case.

stevenkkim• 9 months ago

I'm still keeping my iPhone 8 Plus and MacBook Air M1 for the exact same reason. I'm not buying any more Apple products until the notch goes away.

celsoazevedo• 9 months ago

On my laptop, I edit the wallpapers to include a black bar at the top, so I rarely notice the notch. Eg: https://celsoazevedo.com/files/2025/macos-bar.png

Got the idea from the Top Notch app, which no longer seems to work: https://topnotch.app/

jedbrooke• 9 months ago

you can “remove” the notch on the Macbook by setting the resolution to one of the 16x10 aspect ratio resolutions.

Go to Settings > Displays. In the list of resolutions you need to enable “Show all resolutions” then you can select one that will hide the notch

MikeRichardson• 9 months ago

You can change the screen resolution and make the notch go away (along with all of the other pixels to the left and right of the notch).

makerofthings• 9 months ago

I've always been a big fan of apple and have defended them in the past, but iOS 26 is a dumpster fire. There are visual corruptions and glitches all over the place and transparent text floating over transparent text. It's not even whether I like the style or not, it's just broken. Who signed off on this? No product in this state would ever leave one of my teams, I'd resign first.

karel-3d• 9 months ago

iOS 26 is so bad so bad so bad

ironically I don't really mind the new design language, whatever, if the damned thing worked.

ruralfam• 9 months ago

About $1B (billion) in stock incentives for top-level execs in 2025 (Tim alone is $76m I believe). Apple stock is up. They are happy imho. Very, very few humans would care about "detail" vs. this outcome. Satya is close to $100M I believe, and we are shocked the M$FT is trading-in on ads/telemtry in Win11. These guys are just human.

alunchbox• 9 months ago

Honestly the M$FT thing might be the greatest thing to happen to the Linux community, so much fresh blood and hopefully far more curious tinkers will continue to make the ecosystem better.

I believe 2026 will finally be the year of Linux desktop.

dhosek• 9 months ago

I believe 2026 will finally be the year of Linux desktop.

I’ve been hearing this substituting in YYYY+1 every YYYY for the last quarter century.

The year of Linux desktop will never come. Why?

- Money. Hardware manufacturers make more money selling computers that are optimized for Windows and there is nothing on the horizon that will change that meaning that the Linux desktop experience is always the worst of the three main options for hardware compatibility.

- Microsoft. Call me when Office runs natively in Linux. You might be happy with LibreOffice or Google Docs, but MS Office still dominates the space (and as someone who does a lot of writing and has a number of options, I find Word to be better than any of the alternatives, something that 30 years ago I would have scoffed at).

- Fidgetiness. All the tweaking and customizing that Linux fans like is an annoyance for most people. Every customization I have on my computer is one more thing I need to keep track of if I get a new computer and frankly it’s more than a little bit of a pain.

pacifika4• 9 months ago

Why not become a bank at that point and be honest about things.

jasonjmcghee• 9 months ago

I'm surprised the author didn't mention my personal biggest frustration I've had since I made the mistake of upgrading.

Everything seems to be lazily done now - by that I mean, a modal pops-up and then it resizes to fit the content. Never seen this before.

Or, you open settings (settings!) and it's not ready to use until a full second later because things need to pop in and shift.

And it's animated- with animation time, so you just have to wait for the transitions to finish.

And "reduce motion" removes visual feedback of moving things (e.g. closing apps) so I find it entirely unusable.

And as others have noted the performance is completely unacceptable. I have a 16 pro and things are slow... And forget "low battery mode" - it's now awful.

I'm not doing anything weird and keep like all apps closed and things off when I don't use them and battery life is significantly worse. (Noticed the same on M4 + Tahoe, upgraded at the same time)

Very disappointed and I very much regret upgrading.

arresin2• 9 months ago

They don’t have automated tests for this? Very weird

astrange8• 9 months ago

File a bug in Feedback Assistant. There shouldn't be any performance issues.

methuselah_in2• 9 months ago

Apple died somehow with Steve

praptak• 9 months ago

I'm starting to believe that customer satisfaction signals an inefficiency to be found and optimized away. The most financially successful companies have customers who are unhappy but not as unhappy that they leave.

In this case the inefficiency was attention to detail but in other companies it might be something else.

reliabilityguy2• 9 months ago

Many complain about sw bugs as a sign of decline. I think it’s not correct — every software has bugs. Hell, even hardware and device may have bugs. Remember antennagate? I think poor interface design is a sign of poor product engineering. And this is a sign of decline.

madmountaingoat• 9 months ago

I believe it was always more myth than fact. There's always been rough edges in Apple products line. If anything its more an indication of where the real focus is now. And it's not iOS.

SoftTalker2• 9 months ago

Yep, lots of inconsistencies even in their own iOS apps. I think they have been coasting on that reputation for quite some time.

mathgradthrow• 9 months ago

Is this a rhetorical question? Obviously Steve Jobs died.

cmckn• 9 months ago

I'll take the opportunity to air my personal bug grievance --

For several years, there's been an issue with audio message recording in iMessage. Prior to iOS 26, it would silently fail; the recording would "begin" but no audio would be captured. This would happen 3, 4, even 5 times in a row before it would actually record audio.

Apple is clearly aware of the issue, because in iOS 26 the failure is no longer silent. Now, you'll get feedback that "Recording isn't available right now". Yet the incidence is...exactly the same. You might have to try 5 times before you're actually able to record a message.

It's simply infuriating, and it makes no sense to a user why this would be happening. Apple owns the entire stack, down to the hardware. Just fix the fucking bug!

taminka• 9 months ago

unfortunately just an inherent consequence of treating software as needing continuous improvements and having yearly release targets, you can't just say that this settings menu is already perfect as is, you have to change it, therefore everyone perpetually shuffles around ui and adds features that nobody wants

9x39• 9 months ago

I like my just-works stuff, so I was happy to pay a premium for it. Too bad wireless CarPlay is now buggy like a 1.0 release after years of almost no issues [1].

There's little problems that keep accumulating, like the camera app opening up and only showing black until restarting it, at which point I've missed the candid opportunity.

I'm not going anywhere, it's still the right mix of just-works across their ecosystem for me, but dang, the focus does feel different, and it's not about our experience using Apple.

[1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256140468?sortBy=rank

wingworks2• 9 months ago

I'd have so many of these weird issues on Android (pixel), is why I switched to iPhone a few years back, it's been a much smoother ride ever since. iPhone isn't perfect, but it's way more "just works" then android was for me.

Also, I have the iPhone 15 Pro (iOS 26.0.1), never had the black screen on camera open yet. That's the kinda thing I'd get on Android.

qoez• 9 months ago

The attention of humans got ruined with later generations. The generation before us were a different level of skilled, and it's hard as a millenial (me) and gen z to get close to them.

mentalgear• 9 months ago

Try Omarchy.org variant of Linux if you are tired of Apple's years of user-hostile changes and UI disasters. Many people seem to be drawn to it as it's a simple, clean productive system that "just work" (it was build by a previous apple fan that also became disillusioned by the greedy company)

kossTKR3• 9 months ago

Really wanted to give this a try until i saw a huge "Grok" ad on their frontpage. As a european Grok has the reputation of being the "fascist and openly racist AI", which i think there's actually hard evidence for with their leaked prompts. Why the hell are they promoting that?

mrkeen• 9 months ago

I didn't see the Grok, but the Omarchy creator is quite openly problematic anyway: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64

sparqlittlestar• 9 months ago

Because Omarchy is a Linux distro by DHH and therefore you can also call it a "fascist and openly racist" Linux distro.

DHH was someone I kinda read him online, but he's been going full-in on these racist talking points, e.g., https://paulbjensen.co.uk/2025/09/17/on-dhhs-as-i-remember-l... :(

rckt• 9 months ago

I think Fedora would be a better option here. At least for me.

Judging by the Omarchy presentation video it feels too keyboard oriented. Hotkeys for everything. And hotkeys for AI agents? Is is opinionated indeed. Not my cup of tea.

robin_reala• 9 months ago

He also became disillusioned by people with a different skin colour to him, so no thanks.

al_borland4• 9 months ago

I pulled up a video on Omarchy 2.0 from DHH. The first thing he says is it's based on a tiling window manager that takes time to learn and setup, most things are done in the terminal and with the keyboard.

I feel like that loses a majority of people right there. I like the option to do common things with the keyboard, or to configure things with a file. But for things I don't do often, holding a bunch of keyboard shortcuts in my head feels like a waste for those rare things.

I'm not sure about anyone else, but I can't run whatever Linux distro I want at work. When an OS relies on muscle memory to get smooth and fluid operation, it seems like that would make it extra hard to jump between for work vs home. I spent years jumping between OS X and Windows, and I found it's much nicer now that I'm on the same OS for work and home. Even the little things, like using a different notes app at home vs work do trip me up a little, where I'll get shortcuts wrong, or simply not invest in them, because of the switching issue. Omarchy feels like it would be that situation on steroids.

eviks• 9 months ago

In my mind, "Apple" as a brand used to be synonymous with "attention to detail" but sadly, over the course of the last 8 - 10 years

You outgrew this myth, congratulations!

Look, I've got nothing but respect for the perfectly lovely humans who work at Apple. Several are classmates from university, or people I had the pleasure of working with before at different companies. But I rather suspect what's happened here is that some project manager ... convince Tim

But haven't outgrown this one yet, well, maybe in another 8 years...

anechouapechou• 9 months ago

Despite Apple's walled garden, its anti-consumer practices of trying to keep you in the ecosystem, and other behaviors (like the green/blue bubbles fiasco) that are absolutely reprehensible and inexcusable, I still used iPhones because it seemed far superior to the other offerings on the market. Fortunately, Apple is doing its best to make me see the light.

tantalor• 9 months ago

Absolutely despise this "Josefin Sans" font face. Illegible.

pastureofplenty• 9 months ago

Kinda ironic that a post about attention to detail was so hard to read. Why is the font size so small?

hexbin0103• 9 months ago

Glad it isn't just me. It's like Jony Ive created a font 'for authors who don't want their text read'

Luckily Safari's Reader Mode didn't bug out

haunter• 9 months ago

That fucking iMesssage screenshot lmao, this is insane

https://media.nngroup.com/media/editor/2025/10/06/1-messages...

comboy2• 9 months ago

On multiple devices when doing system update on ios 26, pin entry displays full keyboard instead of standard pin input. It's been like that for like 5 versions (of iOS 26) already.

It's fascinating to me because that's the single thing which every user goes through. It's the main branch and not some obscure some edge case. How do you do testing that you miss that?

watermelon0• 9 months ago

You can also use an alphanumeric passcode, in which case you need the full keyboard. Maybe they just unified this, so that it always displays the keyboard instead of switching between keyboard and PIN input?

comboy2• 9 months ago

I mean it should be unified, the pin entry should look the same in every place, this has security implications also. It doesn't.

timmg• 9 months ago

I wonder if anyone else here is old enough to remember the "I'm a Mac", "And I'm a PC" ads.

There was one that was about all the annoying security pop-ups Windows (used to?) have. (FWIW, it starts here: https://youtu.be/qfv6Ah_MVJU?t=230 .)

Lately I've gotten so many of these popups on Mac that it both annoys and amuses the hell out of me. "Die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain", I guess.

But, man, Apple hardware still rocks. Can't deny that.

throitallaway2• 9 months ago

But, man, Apple hardware still rocks. Can't deny that.

Ah yes, the Johnny Ive era of "no ports on Macbooks except USB-C, and hope you like touchbars!" was fantastic. Not to mention how heavy the damn things are. Oh and the sharp edges of the case where my palms rest. And the chiclet keyboards with .0001 mm of key travel. I'll take a carbon fiber Thinkpad with an OLED display any day of the week, thank you. Macbooks feel like user hostile devices and are the epitome of form over function.

bigyabai4• 9 months ago

I owned multiple Macbooks that built a positive static charge when they were on, instilling a Pavlovian fear of being shocked into anyone that used it. Those were fun.

NexRebular2• 9 months ago

I miss the Powerbook G3 series. That was some fantastically modular design.

kbolino10• 9 months ago

I don't mind that the Macbooks only have USB-C ports. Unlike many PCs, where the USB-C ports can't be used for charging, or can't be used for high-speed data transfer, or can't be used for external displays, or can't be used by certain software that only speaks USB 2.0, etc., the Macbooks let any USB-C port do anything. It's a forward-thinking decision, even if it was primarily made for aesthetic reasons.

What I do mind is that there's only 3 of them.

stetrain2• 9 months ago

Most of what you're talking about is from MacBooks of 5+ years ago on a completely different processor architecture.

icedchai• 9 months ago

I find the keyboards terrible, even the modern ones. I much preferred the 2006-2007 MacBook Pro keyboards.

IshKebab• 9 months ago

Those are all legit criticisms but also be fair. They eventually did get rid of the touchbar. USB-C-only was merely ahead of its time. They improved the keyboards.

And even at their worst they were still much better than any Windows laptops, if only for the touchpad. I have yet to use a Windows laptop with a touchpad even close to the trackpad's that Apple had 15 years ago. And the build quality and styling is still unbeaten. Do Windows laptop makers still put shitty stickers all over them?

bschwindHN3• 9 months ago

That era sucked for sure, but since (I think) 2021, macbook pros have magsafe, 3x USB-C, an HDMI port, and an SD card. I had a 2014 MBP I was waiting to upgrade once they came up with a sensible redesign, and I'd say they did!

I still have my 2014, along with a 2021 MBP for work, and still love them as machines for my usage profile - writing software/firmware, and occasional PCB design. The battery life is good, M-series performance is great, screen is decent-to-good, trackpad is still best in class, and macos is _okay_ in my book. The keyboard isn't amazing as I prefer mechanical for sure, but I still type faster on a macbook keyboard than anything else. That being said, I designed a mechanical keyboard that sits on top of the macbook keyboard so I can enjoy that better typing experience.

Pretty dang happy with my setup.

AlexandrB2• 9 months ago

But, man, Apple hardware still rocks. Can't deny that.

They really dodged a bullet there. 2016-2020 Apple laptop hardware definitely didn't rock. It's good they did an about-face on some of those bad ideas.

ayaros3• 9 months ago

The fact they were able to turn around their hardware division after all that is the only thing which gives me hope they might be capable of doing an about-face on software.

righthand3• 9 months ago

Debatable since the nub is still around on all their devices. My M3 work laptop definitely feels like a playskool toy.

You can’t get more brain dead that taking away important screen real estate then making the argument that you get more real estate because it’s now all tucked into a corner.

God forbid there be a black strip on the sides of the screen. How did we ever live?!??

AceJohnny22• 9 months ago

Are you referring to the butterfly keyboard and TouchBar?

FWIW, I think the Touchbar was close to being a good idea, it was just missing haptics.

musicale4• 9 months ago

They didn't rock but... modern MacBook Pro models are bigger and heavier and have a notch (and yes, I know technically the notch is more screen rather than less, and that one can simply use the space below, but I still don't like it). I also liked how you could charge the older models from either side and still have 3 free Thunderbolt ports.

tonyedgecombe• 9 months ago

Putting aside the keyboard debacle a lot of the blame for that can be directed at Intel's door. They consistently over promised and underdelivered.

gettingoverit• 9 months ago

Oh, that smell of molten keyboard plastic, those yellow spots burned into a display with its own heat exhaust, those laser-machined loudspeaker holes next to keyboard, all filled with grime! How I miss that time on a Macbook, with all the chords you have to press whenever you need a Home or End button to edit the line! Not to mention the power button right next to backspace.

It's so rewarding when its charger dies in a month, and you feel superior to your colleague, whose vintage 6 months old charging cable with none of that extraneous rubber next to the connector catches fire along with your office. What a time to be alive!

The best part is the motherboard produced in a way to fail due to moisture in a couple of years, with all the uncoated copper, with 0.1mm pitch debugging ports that short-circuit due to a single hair, and the whole Louis Rossmann's youtube worth of other hardware features meant to remind you to buy a new Apple laptop every couple of years. How would you otherwise be able to change the whole laptop without all the walls around repair manuals and parts? You just absolutely have to love the fact even transplanting chips from other laptops won't help due to all the overlapping hardware DRMs.

I'll go plug the cable into the bottom of my wireless Apple mouse, and remind myself of all the best times I had with Apple's hardware. It really rocks.

nativeit• 9 months ago

Was there a Gateway that did better?

tavavex3• 9 months ago

A Macbook is the only Apple device I have in my entire array of computers and computer-related stuff, so I've got plenty of points of comparison. While Apple's hardware design isn't perfect, all of what you bring up seems wildly blown out of proportion to me. I can say I've never seen anyone with molten keyboards and displays. I've used the charger cable on my main charging brick for about five years now, and it's still going strong, despite being used for charging everything everywhere. And while Apple has committed many sins in terms of doing their absolute best at preventing anyone from touching their sacred hardware (we just need DRMed cables and enclosures to complete the set), this only affects repair. In terms of planned obsolescence, Macbooks statistically don't seem much less reliable than any other laptops on the market. They make up a majority of the used laptop market where I am.

And of course, just had to bring up the whole mouse charger thing. Back when Apple updated their mouse once and replaced the AA compartment with a battery+port block in the same spot to reuse the old housing, and a decade later people still go on about the evil Apple designers personally spitting in your face for whatever reason sounds the most outrageous.

anothernewdude2• 9 months ago

Also they leak charge onto the case.

combyn8tor5• 9 months ago

the whole Louis Rossmann's youtube worth of other hardware features meant to remind you to buy a new Apple laptop every couple of years

Apple have a couple of extra mechanisms in place to remind us to buy a new device:

- On iOS the updates are so large it doesn't fit on the device. This is because they purposely put a small hard drive i. It serves a second purpose - people will buy Apple cloud storage because nothing fits locally.

- No longer providing updates to the device after just a few years when it's still perfectly fine. Then forcing the app developer ecosystem to target the newer iOS version and not support the older versions. But it's not planned obsolescence when it's Apple, because they're the good guys, right? They did that 1984 ad. Right guys?

NaomiLehman2• 9 months ago

n=4 but my niece spilled a whole cup of milk and a whole cup of matcha on my M2 (twice on 1 device). I just flipped it up, dried it out with a hair dryer (apparently shouldn't do that) and it still works 2 years later.

Can't relate to what you're saying, had 4 MacBooks, and many PCs too.

WWLink2• 9 months ago

How I miss that time on a Macbook, with all the chords you have to press whenever you need a Home or End button to edit the line!

???? ctrl+a and ctrl+e? That works on most Linux setups, too. Only Microsoft screws that up. I love how in Mac Office apps, Microsoft also makes ctrl+a and ctrl+e do what they do in windows lol.

raydev2• 9 months ago

Can you be specific about your bad experiences with Apple hardware? I've gone through 5 MacBook Pros since 2008 and my only complaint was the old Intel models always got too hot. Nothing ever broke on them and I guess I kept them relatively clean?

I also have all of the adapters that came with the MBPs too, all perfectly functioning, the oldest still attached and powering my 2013 model with the dead battery (2008 model was sold, still working). The magsafe cable is pretty yellow now, and maybe a little wonky from the constant travelling, but no fraying/fire hazard yet.

coldtea• 9 months ago

Oh, that smell of molten keyboard plastic, those yellow spots burned into a display with its own heat exhaust, those laser-machined loudspeaker holes next to keyboard, all filled with grime! How I miss that time on a Macbook, with all the chords you have to press whenever you need a Home or End button to edit the line! Not to mention the power button right next to backspace. It's so rewarding when its charger dies in a month, and you feel superior to your colleague, whose vintage 6 months old charging cable with none of that extraneous rubber next to the connector catches fire along with your office. What a time to be alive!

None of the above sound like anybody's actual experience. Which is also they have the biggest resale value retention among PC laptops, and biggest reported user satisfaction.

Now, if you were about the lack of ports (at least for a period) or the crappy "butterfly" keyboard (for a period), you'd have an actual point.

Home/End is just Control-A/E.

Never seen "molten keyboard plastic". I'm sure you can find some person who has that somewhere on the internet. I doubt it's a problem beyond some 0.0001% rare battery failures or something like that.

"yellow spots burned into a display with its own heat exhaust". Not sure what this even means. Especially AS Macs don't even get hot. I haven't heard the fan ever, and I use a M1 MBP of 5+ years with vms and heavy audio/video apps.

"when its charger dies in a month" is just bs.

PaulHoule• 9 months ago

The funny thing is the annoying popups on Windows look like advertising copy from the web post Microsoft getting grid and flexbox into HTML to support HTML-based applications. They at least try to be visually enticing.

Annoying popups on MacOS look like the 1999 remake of the modal dialogs from the 1984 Mac, I guess with some concessions to liquid glass.

Funny that a lot of people seem to have different Liquid Glass experiences, are we being feature flagged? I don't see the massive disruption to icons that the author seems but it does seem to me that certain icons have been drained of all their contrast and just look bleh now, particularly the settings icon on my iPhone. I don't see a bold design based on transparency, I just see the edges of things look like they've been anti-antialiased now. It's like somebody just did some random vandalization of the UI without any rhyme or reason. It's not catastrophic but it's no improvement.

qmr6• 9 months ago

It is catastrophic if you have older devices.

All this wank to waste the power of faster and faster chips.

linguae3• 9 months ago

Yes! I wholeheartedly agree!

I teach C++ programming classes as part of my job as a professor. I have a work-issued MacBook Pro, and I make heavy use of Terminal.app. One of the things that annoy me is always having to click on a dialog box whenever I recompile my code and use lldb for debugging. Why should I need to click on a dialog to grant permission to lldb to debug my own program?

It wasn't always like this on the Mac. I had a Core Duo MacBook that ran Tiger (later Leopard and Snow Leopard) that I completed my undergraduate computer science assignments on, including a Unix systems programming course where I wrote a small multi-threaded web server in C. Mac OS X used to respect the user and get out of the way. It was Windows that bothered me with nagging.

Sadly, over the years the Mac has become more annoying. Notarization, notifications to upgrade, the annoying dialog whenever I run a program under lldb....

qmr6• 9 months ago

Tried iTerm?

stevage3• 9 months ago

Terminal app is terrible, use iTerm if you possibly can.

astrange8• 9 months ago

Why should I need to click on a dialog to grant permission to lldb to debug my own program?

Because apps and web browser tabs run as your user and otherwise they would be able to run lldb without authorization. So, this is the authorization.

threetonesun• 9 months ago

Unsurprising that they'd end up there, at the time Mac was allowed to get away with fewer security pop-ups by (relative) obscurity. Fortunately Windows still manages to run ahead as the even worse villain, as I wouldn't even let a Windows 11 PC in my house these days.

qmr6• 9 months ago

I can't stand the stupid dance required to run a third party app every single time.

Get the fuck out of my way and let me use what is supposedly my computer.

They become more shitware and Microsoft like with every update.

NaomiLehman2• 9 months ago

That's true, but macOS is still further from the current equivalent of Windows than it ever was.

combyn8tor5• 9 months ago

The Apple gods know what's best for you. They're just trying to protect you from yourself.

badc0ffee4• 9 months ago

You can disable SIP if you don't like it.

jwitthuhn• 9 months ago

Worst part about this is that these days the error message simply lies to the user. "Whatever.App is damaged and can't be opened. You should move it to the trash."

If you remove the 'quarantine' attribute that gets added to downloaded files it runs great.

jrmann100• 9 months ago

This doesn't really address your concern, but I feel obligated to share the Gatekeeper bypasses I know about:

Homebrew has an option which bypasses Gatekeeper when installing apps:

  brew install --cask app --no-quarantine

And apparently you can have this on by default:

  export HOMEBREW_CASK_OPTS="--no-quarantine"

And I have this alias for everything else:

  alias unq="xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine"

latexr4• 9 months ago

I wonder if anyone else here is old enough to remember the "I'm a Mac", "And I'm a PC" ads.

Those ads ran from 2006 to 2009. That’s between 16 and 19 years ago. How young do you imagine the typical HN commenter is?

There was one that was about all the annoying security pop-ups Windows (used to?) have.

Those have been relentlessly mocked on the Mac for years. I remember a point where several articles were written making that exact comparison. People have been calling it “macOS Vista” since before Apple Silicon was a thing.

WIW, it starts here: https://youtu.be/qfv6Ah_MVJU?t=230

A bit better quality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuqZ8AqmLPY

heavyset_go3• 9 months ago

Those ads ran from 2006 to 2009. That’s between 16 and 19 years ago. How young do you imagine the typical HN commenter is?

Part of getting old is accepting that 20 years was a long time ago and not everyone is going to remember the same commercials we saw two decades ago, including people who were children during the ad campaign.

mvdtnz2• 9 months ago

I often get third party popups from software vendors which asks me for my MacOS password. I have checked several times and these are "legit" (as in, the popup comes from a who it says it does and it's a reputable company). It's wild to me that Apple have painted themselves into a world where it's expected that users give their OS password to third party apps.

KerrAvon2• 9 months ago

Wait, that's actually never legit. If the password popup comes from the OS on behalf of the vendor, that's OK; the third-party party never has access to your password, just a time-limited auth token to allow it to do something privileged.

ewoodrich• 9 months ago

MacOS and iOS both seem to have an insatiable hunger for passwords. The most aggravating scenario for me by far is when the App Store on iOS, with no consistent pattern I have been able to identify, makes me reenter my entire massive Apple ID password instead of the usual Face ID prompt to download ... a free app.

bsenftner4• 9 months ago

Fuck man, I worked on the original Mac OS back in '83, when all the work was in assembly. Know what happened? Apple happened. That company is fucked up something supreme. The entire premise behind that original graphical UI was never user experience, it was 'the users are idiots, we have to control them'.

philistine3• 9 months ago

We know each and every person who worked on the Mac because of projects like folklore.org. Which one are you?

mrcwinn• 9 months ago

Mac is great hardware to be sure. I have to say though, I much prefer an S25 Ultra with Samsung's version of "nanotexture" — even with iPhone 17's improved (?) anti-reflective screen.

I've been very patient with iOS 26. I tell myself - so long as its foundation is right, they'll iron out these details. But it is properly bad often and at times extremely frustrating.

markus_zhang2• 9 months ago

But, man, Apple hardware still rocks. Can't deny that.

This makes me extra sad. The HW is very good and very expensive, but the SW is mediocre. I bought an iPhone 16 a few months ago and I swear that is the first and last iPhone I'd purchase. I'd happy sell it at half of the price if someone local wants it.

Edit: Since people asked for points, here is a list of things that I believe iOS does not do well:

- In Android Chrome, I can set YouTube website to desktop mode, and loop the video. I can also turn off the screen without breaking the play. I can't do this in Safari however I tried.

- In Safari, I need to long-press a button to bring up the list of closed tabs. How can anyone figure it out without asking around online?

- In Stock app, a few News pieces are automatically brought up and occupy the lower half of the screen when it starts up. This is very annoying as I don't need it and cannot turn it off.

- (This is really the level of ridiculous) In Clock, I fucking cannot set an one time alarm for a future date (Repeat = Never means just today), so I had to stupidly set up weekly alerts and change it whenever I need a new one-time. I hope I'm too stupid to find the magic option.

- Again, in Clock, if I want to setup alarm for sleep, I have to turn on...sleep. This is OK-ish as I can just setup a weekly alarm and click every weekday.

So far, I think Mail and Maps are user friendly. Maps actually show more stuffs than Google Map, which is especially useful for pedestrians. Weather is also good and I have little complain about it.

KerrAvon2• 9 months ago

What are your actual complaints? And have you tried the trash fire that is Android?

alejo• 9 months ago

Where are you located at?

badc0ffee4• 9 months ago

I fucking cannot set an one time alarm for a future date (Repeat = Never means just today), so I had to stupidly set up weekly alerts and change it whenever I need a new one-time. I hope I'm too stupid to find the magic option.

I think you're supposed to use the calendar for that.

frio2• 9 months ago

The YouTube thing is Google's choice, not Apple's, as those are "premium" features. Install Vinegar (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...) to get a standard HTML5 player in YouTube, which will let you make it full screen, PiP it, background it, whatever.

I dislike the new Safari layout in iOS 26 too. https://support.apple.com/en-nz/guide/iphone/ipha9ffea1a3/io... -- change it from "compact" to "bottom". I assume this choice will disappear in the future, but for now, you can make it more familiar.

Unfortunately, I don't have any advice for the Clock/Alarm; I don't typically schedule one-off future alarms. That would be a useful feature.

rifty2• 9 months ago

With Apple's default apps, i kind of feel like the apps themselves are strategically designed to not be the best place to look for lesser trafficked use cases.

Visual customizations get upstreamed into the system accessibility settings. Extra functions are exposed exclusively in Shortcuts for you to hack together an automation feature yourself. For a fully feature supported app Apple would probably say go pay for an app (and them through fee) on the App Store.

For example with your future alarm.. you could get another app or you could create a 'Time of Day' Shortcut automation which checks everyday to see if the date is the date you want the alarm on; if it is the day create the alarm. Delete the alarm on the next day. A (not so) fun fact about automating Alarms before iOS 17: you could only delete alarms through Siri and not Shortcuts lol...

leoedin2• 9 months ago

I'm with you. I got an iPhone 15 a couple of years ago after only ever using Android. I was expecting great things and it's just.. confused!

I never have any confidence it will notify me of things. Often I just miss stuff. I actually have no idea how all the different "Focus" modes work. Notifications pile up and then seem to disappear without any action, and then reappear a week later.

The keyboard is really awful. I recently pulled an ancient Galaxy phone out of a drawer to test something and was reminded of just how much better the Android keyboard is. It just always guesses the wrong things!

And the settings are equally jumbled. Sometimes they're in the Settings app, sometimes they're in the app I'm using. It's just confusing.

It was honestly eye opening because I'd spent so many years assuming iPhones were better. I moved across because my Android phones kept having hardware issues. I think I'll probably go back to Android after this experiment.

sotix• 9 months ago

I recently bought an original iPhone SE in hopes of using a smaller device. But I can't use it for anything worthwhile because I can't sign into an Apple ID due to having encrypted backups on my account, which was introduced in iOS 16.2. The SE only supports 15.8.5. So I'd have to disable encrypted backups for all of my other devices in order to sign into my account.

Why am I unable to use Apple Music on my device while I can use it from a web browser or from an android phone that don't have encrypted iCloud backups enabled?

Unfortunately this also prevents me from jailbreaking the device because I have to sign into an Apple account in order to trust a developer certificate on the device required for the jailbreaking tool. It's my device! Let me approve of the certificate without an Apple ID!

jeffbee• 9 months ago

You're not sure if anyone on HN is more than 14 years old? I mean, I feel you, but the odds are...

abustamam2• 9 months ago

I recently installed Ubuntu on my gaming machine. It was a bit of a learning curve, but I am still able to game, and I can play around with software without being treated like a criminal. It's great.

I still use Mac for dev, but only because I don't really feel like messing around with Linux on a work computer.

Liftyee4• 9 months ago

Not far from my philosophy. If I'm being paid, I'll use whatever I'm getting paid to use. But on my own, I'll choose to learn tools that will be around for a long time, and won't get taken away by some rent-seeking company (i.e. open-source).

musicale4• 9 months ago

Ubuntu is great once you remove the motd advertisements.

a022311• 9 months ago

I watched the whole video and laughed so hard! Thanks for sharing this!

fukawi2• 9 months ago

I do not understand this rhetoric of Apple hardware being so amazing. The only moderately impressive thing they've done for years is the M chips. Beyond that, it's just crippled, overpriced, and unrepairable.

They have shiny cases, yay. I'll take my ugly Thinkpad and actually get shit done over a shiny case and glossy screen.

gf000• 9 months ago

I mean, having 2 hours of active use vs 10 hours is quite a bit of difference, quite a bit more meaningful than "shiny case".

musicale4• 9 months ago

I think it's a bit more than that. I like that I can easily swap the SSD and DRAM in my Thinkpad. But Apple has definitely done some interesting things including:

- good thermals (especially vs. Thinkpad P series), even supporting fanless operation on the MacBook Air

- excellent microphone and speaker array (makes people much more intelligible on both sides during Zoom calls)

- excellent multitouch trackpad with good palm rejection (though for a trackpoint device Thinkpad is your best bet)

- unified GPU and CPU memory with up to 135 GB/s bandwidth (downside: DRAM is not upgradable)

- host-managed flash storage (downside: SSD is not upgradable)

And of course the 10-20 hour battery life is hard to beat. Only downside is I'll forget to plug in at all.

Historically, Apple has innovated quite a bit in the laptop space, including: moving the keyboard back for the modern palm rest design (PowerBook, 1991); active-matrix color display (PowerBook 180c, 1993); integrated wi-fi and handle antenna (iBook, 1999); Unix-based OS that could still run MS Office and Photoshop (Mac OS X, 2000 onward); full-featured thin metal laptop with gigabit ethernet (PowerBook G4 Titanium, 2001); pre-ultrabook thin laptop that fits in a manila envelope (MacBook Air, 2008); high-resolution display and all-flash storage in an ever-thinner design ("Retina" MacBook Pro, 2012); going all-in on USB-C/Thunderbolt and 5K external "retina" display (MacBook Pro, 2016); unprecedented performance, and a tandem OLED display with <10ms touch-to-pixel latency, in an absurdly thin iPad, which can also be used as a "laptop" (iPad M4 + magic keyboard, 2024); etc. Some of the innovations also failed, such as the touchbar, dual-controller trackpad, and "butterfly" keyboard which plagued the 2016 models.

pjmlp7• 9 months ago

I am, better, I am old enough to have seen Apple in the good and bad times, and tell that Apple's major attention to detail, and catering to developers, was a side effect from being really close to shutdown the whole business.

Now they have plenty of money, the attitude during early Apple years is back.

estimator7292• 9 months ago

I have flipped every imaginable switch and even set up a work profile, and I have not yet been able to turn off desktop notifications on my new work Mac. Every time I log in there's a persistent notification about... something stuck in the corner. The notification does not explain itself, clicking it just drops me into a system menu. Usually there's three or four such notifications queued up.

So it just lives there permanently on the desktop and I avoid using the thing as much as possible. I do all of my work functions through SSH and leave the Mac in a corner of my desk with the screen closed.

I swear, MacOS actively tries to be as annoying and intrusive as possible. Every time I touch the damn thing some new behavior reveals itself. Like there are two sets of hotkeys for copy/paste and which one you need to use appears to be entirely random per-window.

Thankfully work lets me use linux on my main machine and I almost never have to deal with goddamn MacOS. I would rather daily drive Windows 11 with copilot and cortana and piles of bossware than plain MacOS.

iamdamian2• 9 months ago

We need a new Snow Leopard.

sillywalk2• 9 months ago

"The myth and reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard"

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2023/11/5.html

iamdamian2• 9 months ago

I don't really agree with the article in the sense that from a user POV, it wasn't very feature filled and it was much more stable than Leopard.

ayaros3• 9 months ago

'Don't get me wrong, I do like trillion dollar tech companies to be transparent, but this right here is certainly not what I meant when I said: "Apple needs to be more transparent".'

lol

Apple is burning their remaining goodwill among longtime customers, myself included. It's sad to see. Next WWDC, they need to be incredibly transparent about how they plan to fix these issues and get their house in order. If they aren't capable of accepting feedback after this public excoriation, I don't have high hopes for their future.

Noaidi2• 9 months ago

With this iOS 26 update, they set dynamite to my bridge.

I’m switching to android because why not? I mean, I have to install Google maps anyway because Apple Maps is horrible. But the UI on 26 is way worse than a pixel experience in my opinion. Plus, I could just do so much more with the pixel phone but then again I’m sort of a power user.

I was working on Apple since 1996 and started off as a computer support person. Now it pains me to help people with their computers because everything is siloed and proprietary and just makes no sense.

And I mean, I’m also annoyed that their voice to text is just horrible. I can’t even tell you how many mistakes I’ve had to correct in this comment alone.

kbrkbr• 9 months ago

Right? All these "features", but they don't get the very basic stuff right a lot of times. User input is very very important for the user.

On iPhone swipe keyboard something that feels like a random generator replaces not only the word you swipe, but the word before, and in 2/3rds of cases with random nonsense pairs.

And you can't turn it off without turning off the similar word proposals you definitely want.

It's a strange design decision and I think the implementation is not up to the task.

I'm not staying cause I like it, but because I dislike the other options more.

constantcrying4• 9 months ago

The great thing about Android is that you don't have to use Google's awful software. Google Maps is not good, I avoid it whenever at all possible, the same goes for basically all other Google software.

The one reason to use Android is so that you can actually switch out the awful stuff that ships with your device. Leaving Apple to join the "Google Ecosystem" seems absolutely insane. Google is so terrible at software, so terrible at UI and so terrible at having products.

I get that visual design is a complete preference, but the great thing about Android, to me at least, is that you can get away from Google totally goofy design and make your own choices.

Plus, I could just do so much more with the pixel phone but then again I’m sort of a power user.

Google is starting to make that less and less feasible though, with it's start in restricting app installations.

n8cpdx2• 9 months ago

I’m pretty close. If Android’s version of HealthKit was mature, and if focus modes were baked in, I’d probably have switched already.

al_borland4• 9 months ago

They listened when people said they wanted transparency. That's why we got Liquid Glass. It seems the actual context of the word got lost somewhere along the way.

fhennig• 9 months ago

But where would dissatisfied customers go?

I've only recently (3 years ago) bought my first MacBook, and it's because everything else is also getting worse.

ayaros3• 9 months ago

I've been asking myself the same question.

nbngeorcjhe• 9 months ago

Install Gentoo. Or, if the compile times are too much, Arch.

morshu90016• 9 months ago

Looks exceptionally bad, but OSX Lion and iOS 7 were worse releases. It's also been a long time since I've actually wanted an update, at this point more something that's semi forced.

On the bright side, Apple Silicon is amazing, and it seems like Apple decided in 2021 to make the MBP good again like it was in 2015.

smallstepforman• 9 months ago

Snow Leopard was peak OSX. Lion, Mountain Lion and everything since then has driven me away from OSX. I’m also stuck on an older iOS version 18). There may be certain fixes I would appretiate, but way more annoyances. I miss iOS 6 and that ecosystem …

<edit> spelling, since iOS 18 isnt as forgiving as iOS 6

morshu90016• 9 months ago

Yeah I would totally use Snow Leopard if it ran on modern hardware and had all the new security updates. The new Mac OSes are ok too since I ignore the random new crap, but a lot of that is just new hardware being faster.

whatever1• 9 months ago

Apple supports a ton of platforms (iOS, MacOS, iPadOS, WatchOS, Web, Windows etc).

When they release a new feature it needs to be everywhere. That happens every September. The cadence has not changed, but the scope since Apple was just making MacOS has been multiplied.

You can 10X your staff, but the coordination under 10X velocity will suffer.

whirlwin• 9 months ago

Steve Jobs is gone, so is the unique quality obsessed Apple we knew. Even on the hardware side, the AirPods reecks of poor quality since they break so easily

LeoPanthera2• 9 months ago

A significant fraction of the bugs in this article are because the author has deliberately chosen settings that cause problems (disabling all location access) or are just bugs, some of which I can't reproduce myself. He throws in random comments like "goodbye accessibility" with no attempt to justify them, when in fact iOS and macOS are famous for their unusually strong accessibility features.

I'm not trying to excuse Apple, but this article attempts to paint the impression that every issue is connected in some kind of serial incompetence, but that simply isn't the case.

AlexandrB2• 9 months ago

chosen settings that cause problems (disabling all location access)

I thought Apple was all about privacy. But their software needs location access to function properly?

LeoPanthera2• 9 months ago

The Reminders app has significant location-based functionality, which obviously won't work if it can't access your location.

It remains private because this runs locally. It's not sent up to the cloud.

n8cpdx2• 9 months ago

There isn’t a single screen I use day to day in iOS 26 that doesn’t have a major or minor defect.

iOS and Mac used to do a good job with things like animations, now they are horrible. Pre-beta quality.

And dark mode and accessibility settings need to just work. That is a core part of the job of every front end iOS developer, including the ones at Apple.

It absolutely is serial incompetence and the Apple engineering leadership that signed off on it should be ashamed.

emchammer• 9 months ago

Many of the images/screenshots on this web page do not show up for me.

constantcrying4• 9 months ago

I do not believe in this whitewashing of Apples history, throughout their history they always had problems, either with their hardware or their software.

The one thing that really changed is that every single company looked at Apple and saw something worth copying. Now there are dozens of phone makers, all seeking to emulate Apples success, putting effort into UI, polishing and design. This wasn't the case a decade ago. Just compare the circus bizarre design choice of Android Lollipop (either Stock or with manufacturer/user added layers on top) to iOS 7.

Now Apple is no longer particularly unique, in many regards. And I believe that they were absolutely aware of that and desired to continue being a defining force, instead of being "one of many". It's not that Apple has changed, it is that it hasn't and now desires to force through change.

thom• 9 months ago

People just forget stuff. All this was said about Tiger. Snow Leopard was an entire paid OS upgrade the only selling point of which was that it made Leopard less crap. Your battery used to expand, your GPU used to overheat, you used to stare at a beachball helplessly every few seconds. You remember the good times, just like in ten years I'm going to remember fitting giant models in shared RAM on a monster GPU while the fans were completely silent, not this nitpicky stuff that has been par for the course for all operating systems forever.

1970-01-012• 9 months ago

The 'Unknown Knowns' quadrant (i.e. bugs) that they'll get around to fixing any day now.

computerdork• 9 months ago

Yeah, agree with this too. Apple tends to create products that are more fully realized than Samsung or even Microsoft (especially in how it looks), but it's been pretty well know that Apple software tends to be buggy, as they aren't an engineering-focused company like let's say Google. They are a consumer products company.

IMHO, people are thinking about how well thought-out and usable the products and software tends to be - Yeah, Apple makes it so anyone can use it - But their software has always been buggy.

surgical_fire• 9 months ago

In my mind, "Apple" as a brand used to be synonymous with "attention to detail" but sadly, over the course of the last 8 - 10 years, their choices have become anything but detail oriented.

In my mind it is synonymous with style over substance. Bad software packaged in a user hostile interface, sitting atop shitty hardware that looks sleek and fashionable.

It doesn't matter anyway. It's fashionable enough that it will keep selling.

dgfl• 9 months ago

As a relatively young person with good eyesight, I can’t really say that Liquid Glass has caused any real visibility issues for me. I think it looks pretty sleek 95% of the time. The app search when pulling down from the home screen is much faster, it has a delay of almost 1 second before which feels more like 0.1s now.

But nonetheless, there’s so many more bugs and visual glitches. Battery life is still unstable and feels markedly worse than before. Safari looks cool, but UI buttons being on top of content is foolish for the reasons highlighted in this article. Overall, it’s just much more visually inconsistent than before. And the glass effect on app icons looks blurry until you get 5cm away from the screen and really pay attention to the icons. I definitely won’t be upgrading my Mac any time soon.

I just wish we would get away from this annual upgrade cycle and just polish the OS for a while. We don’t need 1 trillion “features”, especially when they increase the complexity of the user experience. MacOS in general did this very well, ever since I switched I’ve been very impressed at how much you can accomplish with the default app in macOS, all while looking cleaner and leaner than windows software. No new feature is even close to that balance of power and UI simplicity anymore.

mariodiana• 9 months ago

I'm 58, and have needed reading glasses for the last 10 years. Want to try something fun? Increase your default text size on your iPhone, and then just watch how many apps — native Apple apps, mind you — have their UI screwed up to the point where they become unusable!

ProllyInfamous• 9 months ago

Increase default text size

I don't use a cellphone anymore, but back when I did (circa iOS 12) it was not possible to have the text large enough for me to read while still displaying all ten digits of a phone number.

Example: `212-555-1234` would display as `212-555-12...` in my call list.

----

I have owned and primarily used Apple products since 1992; their accessibility options seem to be going backwards. An iPhone screen would still have more than enough space to display information if the UI weren't completely crammed full of junk.

It is so frustrating when I help older clients and (unbeknownst to them) some stupid notification re-focuses attention. Often they'll keep [-s-l-o-w-l-y-] typing and then get frustrated that "the computer did something I didn't tell it to, without even warning me it wasn't listening to my keystrokes anymore..." [e.g.] — this used to be eye-rolling user error, now it's just expected operating system behavior.

----

Pro-tip: You can essentially disable Apple notifications by setting `Do Not Disturb` from 3:01am - 3:00am

arjie• 9 months ago

The change removing Launchpad and fusing with Spotlight has a mildly annoying effect. If I do the five finger gesture on my M1 Max Macbook Pro, and start typing, the first few keystrokes will give me the "you're trying to type where you can't" sound and they won't register into the search box.

Launchpad didn't have this problem. Any text you type while the view is rendering goes into the search bar.

While the OP seems very unhappy and should just switch platforms considering it's a "shitty $1000 phone" to him, I'm just mildly annoyed by these UX regressions to what was otherwise a very good platform.

ChrisArchitect• 9 months ago

https://www.lovefrom.com/

https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/

indigodaddy• 9 months ago

Not to mention external monitors are broken on my M1 Pro MacBook since some Sequoia 15.x update. Upgrading to Tahoe now to see if it will fix it but I'm not optimistic.

Fucking inexcusable that MacOS metal support for external monitors has been finicky and unstable since the very beginning, and they never resolved that (but at least external monitors were DETECTED, then somewhere in Sequoia things went completely south)-- and now it just seems to be completely broken. There are countless Reddit threads. Why can't the Apple engineering braintrust figure this out??

pmarreck5• 9 months ago

1) My Bluetooth audio on my recent-model iPhone (15 Pro Max) is still flaky AF, across all Bluetooth speaker devices or my car. Even my 4 year old kid noticed and commented on it! It's been like this since the iOS beta, for months. And I can tell that it's one of those hideous, nondeterministic bugs, too. Apple, hire me as a contractor to help fix it, if you want! I love hard problems.

2) There is still no solution for this annoying-as-hell UI problem that I documented years ago on Medium: https://medium.com/@pmarreck/the-most-annoying-ui-problem-r3...

3) I had to buy Superwhisper (which is a nice product, but works a little janky due to how iOS handles keyboard extensions) because Siri's voice dictation is so abysmally worse than literally every other option right now, and has been for years. WTF, Apple?

Hey Tim, I love the Vision Pro too (I own one) but maybe get your head out of that for a bit and polish up the engineering on the rest of your lines!

bigyabai4• 9 months ago

I had to buy Superwhisper (which is a nice product

It's literally a paid wrapper around a completely free program you would also be using for free if Apple wasn't actively hostile to Open Source software distribution.

pmarreck5• 9 months ago

LOL. Whisper may be free (I use it in at least 1 project), but it doesn't come with a GUI, hooks into mic audio and keyboard trigger, and other things necessary for something to work well on macOS.

I am willing to pay for things that work well (and don't forget support afterwards) because I know from experience that simply having an "open-source core" just gets you halfway there, if that; the last 5% of polish to a finished, reliable, supportable product is at least 50% more work.

And, to put it bluntly, since we don't live in a communist society, eventually SOMEone has to put food on the table from their efforts. I'm 100% fine with paying for that.

Lastly, I have a kid, which means that I have 0% time to spend on troubleshooting non-working open-source stuff (which I actually enjoyed doing before the kid); I am ALL about reliability now, which is why I paid for Eero home mesh networking (despite cheaper or free options), a NAS from iXSystems (despite me being quite capable of installing TrueNAS on my own hardware), pay for Apple products (despite loving my NixOS Framework laptop as well), and don't upgrade my 10 year old Tesla (because it still runs like a top, and that's my highest priority right now- reliability)

Once you get a kid, trust me, your views are gonna change, because you clearly do NOT have one.

This is what happens to your tinkering-around-with-open-source time after it:

    tinker time before kid: [--------------------]
    tinker time after kid:  [-]

Now if you're lucky, you will end up in a position where you get paid to tinker around, and where they won't get upset if you use some work time to work on "aligned" tech.

jiehong• 9 months ago

Changing buttons or live results are annoying, indeed.

Something I find worse: being unable to click a target while the animation is running! Because the target only gets focus after the animation is done: you start spending you time waiting for the animations in the end.

Andrex2• 9 months ago

I'm no fan of Apple's, but Bluetooth is one of the shittiest human inventions of all time, has always been bad and will likely always be bad. A million bandaids ain't gonna make a bone-healing cast.

ponector2• 9 months ago

I never had an issue connecting Bluetooth to the car. Android auto, apple car play on the other side is quite unreliable.

bigstrat20035• 9 months ago

I've never, and I mean never, had problems with Bluetooth audio in the car. I dispute the assertion that it's always been bad, because my experience has been uniformly positive.

efreak2• 9 months ago

Ironically, the Google link there suffers from delayed loading of the toc at top: I tapped to play the video as it moved down.

pmarreck5• 9 months ago

Google link? What? I only put in a Medium link, and there's no video.

or do you mean Cumulative Layout Shift, Google's term for it which I linked from there? https://web.dev/articles/cls

hu32• 9 months ago

1) My Bluetooth audio on my recent-model iPhone (15 Pro Max) is still flaky AF, across all Bluetooth speaker devices or my car.

Haha so it's not just my wife's iPhone 15 Pro Max that keeps stuttering in any CarPlay

mikestew2• 9 months ago

Yeah, but it’s probably not Bluetooth’s fault, as wireless CarPlay uses WiFi (at least in every case I know of).

barrell• 9 months ago

I upgraded to iOS 26 when the beta first came out. It’s remarkable how they have just kept changing the transparency of things back and forth, while the critical bugs have remained untouched.

There’s no way I’m (ever) upgrading to Tahoe, I’m just going to hold out as long as possible and hope Omarchy gets as stable and feature rich as possible in the time being.

No idea what to do about the mobile situation - I can’t see myself realistically ever using android. Switching off of iCloud and Apple Music would also be pretty tough, although I’ve seen some private clouds lately that were compelling.

I just wish there was a more Linux-minded less-Google oriented mobile operating system

emeril• 9 months ago

fwiw - I always just run prior year's iOS on mobile until Sept each year at which I update the one with a year of fixes - so I'm always running the most stable iOS but it indeed has fewer features but stability is more important than new features to me...

itopaloglu83• 9 months ago

26 series operating systems are all just dumpster fires that are lit up for attention.

Since there are a lot of die hard Apple fans and engineers on hacker news this is going to get downvoted to hell, but I’m going to say it again.

It looks like Apple doesn’t care about user experience anymore, and the 26 series updates all look like they’ve been developed by amateurs online, not tested at all, and Apple engineers just took long vacations while they’re on the clock. It’s a complete and utter disaster of an operating system.

aniforprez2• 9 months ago

Got a ton of pushback for talking about how buggy the OS has been. "it doesn't happen to me" all right bully for you now I have to helplessly send a bug report and live with a machine that just crashes and restarts if I dare to open the lid seconds after I closed it

lbhdc• 9 months ago

I’m just going to hold out as long as possible and hope Omarchy gets as stable and feature rich as possible in the time being.

Isn't Omarchy just config files for a bunch of existing, stable programs? Why wait?

rick_dalton• 9 months ago

Yes. It’s also built on arch which will always be rolling release, so it’s not the end all for stability. I doubt omarchy is doing any real fixes for stability beyond config files.

8200_unit• 9 months ago

Not sure if anyone else has experienced issues with the keyboard. Sometimes keyboard is blocking the screen and I can't get it to go away or the opposite where I can't get the keyboard to come up when I need to use it.

spike021• 9 months ago

Not sure if the same issue but since iOS 18 and now 26, if the keyboard/text field detects a grammatical error or typo (even when you don't care) it'll almost do this UI thread block type thing where it refuses to let you move the cursor or close the keyboard until you act like you're fixing the error.

lastofthemojito3• 9 months ago

I've been a Mac user on and off since the 80s and I think one of the biggest changes is how separate the Mac ecosystem once was.

It reminds me of stories I've heard about the Cold War and how Soviet scientists and engineers had very little exchange or trade with the West, but made wristwatches and cameras and manned rockets, almost in a parallel universe. These things coexisted in time with the Western stuff, but little to nothing in the supply chain was shared; these artifacts were essentially from a separate world.

That's how it felt as a Mac user in the 80s and 90s. In the early days you couldn't swap a mouse between a Mac and an IBM PC, much less a hard drive or printer. And most software was written pretty much from the ground up for a single platform as well.

And I remember often thinking how much that sucked. My sister had that cool game that ran on her DOS machine at college, or heck, she just had a file on a floppy disk but I couldn't read it on my Mac.

Now so much has been standardized - everything is USB or Wifi or Bluetooth or HTML or REST. Chrom(ium|e) or Firefox render pages the same on Mac or Windows or Linux. Connect any keyboard or webcam or whatever via USB. Share files between platforms with no issues. Electron apps run anywhere.

These days it feels like Mac developers (even inside of Apple) are no longer a continent away from other developers. Coding skills are probably more transferable these days, so there's probably more turnover in the Apple development ranks. There's certainly more influence from web design and mobile design rather than a small number of very opinionated people saying "this is how a Macintosh application should work".

And I guess that's ok. As a positive I don't have the cross-platform woes anymore. And perhaps the price to be paid is that the Mac platform is less cohesive and more cosmopolitan (in the sense that it draws influence, sometimes messily, from all over).

linguae3• 9 months ago

Unfortunately, if the Mac isn't distinct from Windows and desktop Linux in some way, then what's the point?

Yes, as a long-time Mac user who now uses PCs at home but still uses a work-issued MacBook Pro, I greatly appreciate how Macs since the late 1990s-early 2000s are compatible with the PC ecosystem when it comes to peripherals, networking, and file systems.

However, what has been lost is "The Macintosh Way"; a distinctly Macintosh approach to computing. There's something about using the classic Mac OS or Jobs-era Mac OS X: it's well-designed across the entire ecosystem. I wish Apple stayed the course with defending "The Macintosh Way"; I am not a fan of the Web and mobile influences that have crept into macOS, and I am also not a fan of the nagging that later versions of macOS have in the name of "security" and promoting Apple products.

What the Mac has going for it today is mind-blowing ARM chips that are very fast and energy efficient. My work-issued MacBook Pro has absolutely amazing battery life, whereas my personal Framework 13's battery life is abysmal by comparison.

What's going to happen, though, if it's possible to buy a PC that's just as good as an ARM Mac in terms of both performance and battery life?

devmor• 9 months ago

However, what has been lost is "The Macintosh Way"; a distinctly Macintosh approach to computing. There's something about using the classic Mac OS or Jobs-era Mac OS X: it's well-designed across the entire ecosystem.

As someone who has never really enjoyed using macs, I do agree with this. It's probably why I don't mind them as much these days - Using MacOS in 2025 just kind of feels like a more annoying version of a Linux DE with less intent behind it. The way macs used to work did not jive with me well, but everything felt like it was built carefully to make sense to someone.

ndiddy4• 9 months ago

What's going to happen, though, if it's possible to buy a PC that's just as good as an ARM Mac in terms of both performance and battery life?

Their advantage against Microsoft is that the Mac UX may be degrading, but the Windows UX is degrading much more quickly. Sure modern Mac OS is worse to use than either Snow Leopard or Windows 7, but at least you don't get the "sorry, all your programs are closed and your battery's at 10% because we rebooted your computer in the middle of the night to install ads for Draft Kings in the start menu" experience of modern Windows.

Their advantage against Linux is that while there are Linux-friendly OEMs, you can't just walk into a store and buy a Linux computer. The vast majority of PCs ship with Windows, and most users will stick with what comes with the computer. It definitely is possible to buy a computer preloaded with Linux, but you have to already know you want Linux and be willing to special order it online instead of buying from a store.

prvc• 9 months ago

This situation persists: for instance, try to write to an external disk formatted with NTFS using the GUI tools alone. Baffling why Apple doesn't simply obtain a license in order to gain this capability. Big unnecessary inconvenience, primarily for their own users.

cachius3• 9 months ago

exFAT to the rescue

MountDoom3• 9 months ago

It reminds me of stories I've heard about the Cold War and how Soviet scientists and engineers had very little exchange or trade with the West, but made wristwatches and cameras and manned rockets, almost in a parallel universe

They also had an extensive industrial espionage program. In particular, most of the integrated circuits made in the Soviet Union were not original designs. They were verbatim copies of Western op-amps, logic gates, and CPUs. They had pin- and instruction-compatible knock-offs of 8086, Z80, etc. Rest assured, that wasn't because they loved the instruction set and recreated it from scratch.

Soviet scientists were on the forefront of certain disciplines, but tales of technological ingenuity are mostly just an attempt to invent some romantic lore around stolen designs.

Rendello• 9 months ago

Seems analogous to Apple and Microsoft in the 80s and 90s. Though I'm not sure which country Xerox would be. Maybe Germany in terms of the technology lifted by the later powers, but it seems a like a bit of a rude comparison!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_of_Silicon_Valley

hinkley2• 9 months ago

There was a Star Talk recently where they talked about how when they divided up the German aerospace scientists after WWII, Russia ended up with majority KISS scientists and we got the perfectionist, superior engineering ones. I always figured that was just a US vs Russia ethos difference. And maybe that’s why they picked who they did but maybe I have it backward.

scrlk• 9 months ago

They were verbatim copies of Western op-amps, logic gates, and CPUs.

DEC etched a great Easter egg on to the die of the MicroVAX CPU because of this: "VAX - when you care enough to steal the very best".

https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html

antegamisou2• 9 months ago

tales of technological ingenuity are mostly just an attempt to invent some romantic lore around stolen designs.

This is a biased take. One can make a similar and likely more factual claim about the US , where largely every innovation in many different disciplines is dictated and targeted for use by the war industry.

And while there were many low quality knockoff electronics, pre-collapse USSR achieved remarkable feats in many different disciplines the US was falling behind at.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Russian_innovation...

m463• 9 months ago

I think apple had a trajectory, and the best time was at the end of the steve jobs era. After he left, they have plummeted.

I think they were in their own little world, and when they got past that with unix-based OSX and moved from powerpc to intel, they entered the best time.

The PC-based macs were very interoperable and could dual-boot windows. They had PCIe and could work with PC graphics cards, they used usb bt and more. Macs intereoperated and cooperated with the rest of the computing world. The OS worked well enough that other unix programs with a little tweaking could be compiled and run on macs. Engineers, tech types and scientists would buy and use mac laptops.

But around the time steve jobs passed away they've lost a lot of that. They grabbed control of the ecosystem and didn't interoperate anymore. The arm chips are impressive but apple is not interoperating any more. They have pcie slots in the mac pro, but they aren't good for much except maybe nvme storage. without strong leadership at the top, they are more of a faceless turn-the-crank iterator.

(not that I like what microsoft has morphed into either)

nextos• 9 months ago

True, also before, during, and after the Intel transition the ecosystem of indie and boutique apps for Macs was great. Panic and The Omni Group, just to name two boutique development companies, were probably at their peak in terms of desktop software. Besides, Mac OS X Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard were polished and the UI was usable and cohesive.

Right now, the quality and attention to detail have plummeted. There is also a lot of iOS-ification going on. I wish they focused less on adding random features, and more on correctness, efficiency, and user experience. The attention to detail of UI elements in e.g. Snow Leopard, with a touch of skeuomorphism and reminiscent of classic Mac OS, is long gone.

pjmlp7• 9 months ago

Those of us that are old enough to remember, Apple is back in a John Sculley phase, however this time around there are no founders to rescue the company a second time.

Not that it needs to, as it isn't bleeding money like on the A/UX, Copland and Taligent/OpenDoc days, however they risk to become only the iDevices company.

Yeah, Microsoft apparently is also back on their former self.

afandian9• 9 months ago

Didn't that stuff start around 1998 though? That's when they started pushing USB and networking by default.

And then OS X came along, with bash and Unix and all, and there was a lot of shared developer knowledge.

But they still managed to keep a very distinctive and excellent OS, for 20 years after that.

The quality has dropped only recently.

Gud2• 9 months ago

One thing that has changed though, and this is a big pet peeve of mine. Bluetooth fucking file sharing. You used to be able to send files using bluetooth between devices. I had some old ass Nokia from 2005 and I could send files to my Linux computer over bluetooth.

This standard function doesn't exist on iOS but has been replaced with AirDrop. It's a big fuck you from Apple to everyone who prefers open standards.

Liftyee4• 9 months ago

Ahhh, Bluetooth share ... I remember messing around with it in 2017 on some old Nokias and an Android phone. That was the last time it ever worked for me. It's been quietly supplanted or removed from my newer devices, and the pairing is quite finicky. Also, the transfer speeds (back then) were awful - Kb/s.

Now my go-to is Dropbox/cloud/Sharik for small files and rsync for bulk backups.

itsn0tm3• 9 months ago

Maybe try localsend it‘s a great piece of software replicating airdrop but cross platform and open source.

https://localsend.org/

almostgotcaught2• 9 months ago

much less a hard drive

This isn't true - my shining moment as a 10 year old kid (~1998) was when the HD on our Macintosh went out and we went down to compusa and I picked a random IDE drive instead of the Mac branded drives (because it was much cheaper) and it just worked after reinstalling macos.

lastofthemojito3• 9 months ago

Yeah, looks like Apple's switch from SCSI to IDE started in '94. But the first couple of Macs my family had (SE, Quadra 605) would not have accepted an IDE drive.

kergonath5• 9 months ago

You were lucky to have a Mac with IDE drives in 1998. AFAIK that was only the G3s and some lower-end Performa. I had a 9600 and there was no avoiding SCSI (well, I say that but I did put an IDE card in it at some point).

The true revelation was the B&W G3s. Those machines came from another universe.

apatheticonion3• 9 months ago

As a positive I don't have the cross-platform woes anymore

It's certainly better than it was, that said Apple really try to isolate themselves by intentionally nerfing/restricting MacOS software to Apple APIs and not playing ball with standards.

My sister had that cool game that ran on her DOS machine at college, or heck, she just had a file on a floppy disk but I couldn't read it on my Mac.

My MacBook Pro has an integrated GPU that supposedly rivals that of desktop GPUs. However, I have to use a second computer to play games on... which really sucks when travelling.

Apple doesn't even have passthrough e-GPU support in virtual machines (or otherwise), so I can't even run a Linux/Windows VM and attach a portable e-gpu to game with.

The M5 was released and has a 25% faster GPU than M4. Great, that has no effect on reading HN or watching YouTube videos and VSCode doesn't use the GPU so... good for you Apple, I'll stick to my M1 + second PC set up

astrange8• 9 months ago

VSCode certainly does use the GPU, that's how you get 120fps scrolling.

underdeserver• 9 months ago

It's not okay, because the experience is not good, and it can be.

cardanome2• 9 months ago

Mac platform is less cohesive and more cosmopolitan

Counter example: Blender

It used to have a extremely idiosyncratic UI. I will only say right click select.

A big part of the UI redesign was making it behave more like other 3d applications. And it succeeded in doing so in a way that older users actually liked and that made it more productive and coherent to use.

What I am saying is, those are different dimensions. You can have a more cohesive UI while adhere more to standards.

There is still lot of weird sacred cows that Macs would do very well to slaughter like the inverted mouse wheel thing or refusing to implement proper alt tab behavior.

You can have both, follow established standards and norms and be more cohesive.

The problem is simply that the quality isn't what it used to be on the software side. Which is following industry trends but still.

philistine3• 9 months ago

See, it's things like saying proper alt-tab behaviour that means we'll never solve it. While Windows invented alt-tab, the way macOS does it is the macOS way, so if it changed I would be far less productive.

rsync• 9 months ago

"In the early days you couldn't swap a mouse between a Mac and an IBM PC, much less a hard drive or printer."

I mounted a 20MB external Apple hard drive:

https://retrorepairsandrefurbs.com/2023/01/25/1988-apple-20s...

... on my MSDOS system, in 1994, by attaching it to my sound card.

The Pro Audio Spectrum 16, weirdly, had a SCSI connector on it.

sillywalk2• 9 months ago

The SCSI would probably be meant for a CD-ROM drive. I recall my Sound Blaster Pro had a proprietary Panasonic CD-ROM interface, and at the time, soundcards often came bundled with a CD-ROM drive ( or is that vice-versa?).

redbell• 9 months ago

Yes.. Too bad we ended up here :(, It's Apple's Software Quality Crisis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075

mnls• 9 months ago

Every article I read about iOS 26 and Tahoe, is just another reminder that I should never ever update my devices.

I don’t think that there is going back for Apple, the company is already too enshittified to get back to a company with a vision. They got drowned by AI, the releases and features are subpar to competition. I do care about detail when I’m buying premium products and Apple just doesn’t cut it any more.

mrguyorama• 9 months ago

Attention to detail?

Apple built a phone that would bend in pockets because they used flimsy aluminum without enough internal structure, something they should have had ample experience to avoid from the exact same thing happening to tons of iPods.

Apple insisted on developing a moronic keyboard implementation to save less than a mm of "thickness" that was prone to stupid failure modes and the only possible repair was to replace the entire top half of the laptop. They also refused to acknowledge this design failure for years.

Apple built a cell phone that would disrupt normal antenna function when you hold it like a cell phone.

Apple has multiple generations of laptops that couldn't manage their heat to the point that buying the more expensive CPU option would decrease your performance.

Adding to the above, Apple has a long long history of this, from various generations of macbook that would cook themselves from GPU heat that they again, refused to acknowledge, all the way to the Apple 3 computer which had no heat management at all.

Apple outright lies in marketing graphics about M series chip performance which is just childish when those chips are genuinely performant, and unmatchable (especially at release) in terms of performance per watt, they just aren't the fastest possible chips on the market for general computing.

Apple makes repair impossible. Even their own stores can only "repair" by replacing most of the machine.

Apple spent a significant amount of time grounding their laptops through the user, despite a grounding lug existing on charging brick. This is just weird

Apple WiFi for a while was weirdly incompatible, and my previous 2015 macbook would inexplicably not connect to the same wireless router that any other product could connect to, or would fail to maintain it's connection. I had to build a stupid little script to run occasionally to refresh DHCP

Apple had a constant issue with their sound software that inexplicably adds pops to your sound output at high CPU load or other stupid reasons, that they basically don't acknowledge and therefore do not provide troubleshooting or remedies.

Apple was so obsessed with "thinness" that they built smartphones with so poorly specced batteries that after a couple years of normal use, those batteries, despite reporting acceptable capacity, could not keep up with current demands and the phones would be unusable. Apple's response to this was not to let people know what was going on and direct them to a cheap battery replacement, but to silently update software to bottleneck the CPU so hard that it could not draw too much current to hurt the battery. The underpowered batteries were a design flaw.

Apple software quality is abysmal. From things like "just hit enter a bunch to log in as root" to "we put a web request to our servers in the hot path of launching an app so bad internet slows your entire machine down"

Apple prevents you from using your "Pro" iPad that costs like a thousand bucks and includes their premier chip for anything other than app store garbage and some specialty versions of productivity apps.

Apple has plenty of failures, bungles, poor choices, missteps, etc. Apple has plenty of history building trash and bad products.

The only "detail" apple paid "attention" to was that if you set yourself up as a lifestyle brand, there's an entire segment of the market that will just pretend you are magically superior and never fail and downplay objective history and defend a 50% profit premium on commodity hardware and just keep buying no matter what.

tdeck• 9 months ago

And let's not forget the original Macintosh, which Steve Jobs insisted shouldnt have a fan and likewise tended to overheat. Of course, that was only after learning the lessons of the Apple ///, where

Jobs insisted on the idea of having no fan or air vents, in order to make the computer run quietly. ...
Many Apple IIIs were thought to have failed due to their inability to properly dissipate heat. inCider stated in 1986 that "Heat has always been a formidable enemy of the Apple ///",[15] and some users reported that their Apple IIIs became so hot that the chips started dislodging from the board, causing the screen to display garbled data or their disk to come out of the slot "melted".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_III

alsetmusic• 9 months ago

I once read that Steve Jobs decided the default order of icons in the Dock on new Macs. This could have been delegated to any number of subordinates, but he considered it so important for the new-user experience that he chose to do it himself.

Culture flows top-down. Cook is about growth, progressively flowing toward growth at any cost. It’s not a mystery why things are as they are at Apple.

ethbr12• 9 months ago

Or the story about the BillG review and Excel date math.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

Which, incidentally, is a great primer for younger developers on both what obsessive software quality looks like and why datetimes are a hard problem.

ponector2• 9 months ago

I remember how date math is special there. A simple question: 30-01-2024 plus one month - what is the result date?

hshdhdhehd• 9 months ago

That wasn't a smart move by jobs. He should have delegated it to someone trusted. This micromanaging is how you make the company more brittle. Obviously Apple is wildly successful as for this not to matter much. They could sell iIce to Penguins.

aucisson_masque• 9 months ago

Micromanaging is how you run a successful company. You don't have to manage everything but you got to get involved in low level things.

Manager who can't do anything but delegate are fast and efficient for themselves, just not for the company.

I'd argue that apple is successful because of jobs attention to detail. Tim cook isn't the one who built apple foundation, he's merely trying to expand it but it's not the same difficulty.

ebbi2• 9 months ago

The thing I got from Jobs (watching his various interviews and reading his bio), he wouldn't have delegated because he wanted to do these things. It mattered so much to him that delegating something like this wouldn't have even crossed his mind, regardless what his title was in the company.

JKCalhoun• 9 months ago

I'm not sure I'd praise Jobs in that regard. I kind of think Apple UI went down beginning with putting a "progress bar" in the URL text field of Safari.

That was when the design team began what I call the "one-off UI design" rather than use the same language across all apps.

Never mind the round mouse before that and the blind USB ports on the back of the newer iMacs (hate that scritchity sound of stainless steel on anodized aluminum as I try to fumble around with the USB connector trying to find the opening).

martinclayton• 9 months ago

Nice touch having U2's song "Every Breaking Wave" playing in one of the screen grabs ... that being the second track on the (in)famous "free" 2014 iTunes release of their album "Songs of Innocence".

giancarlostoro• 9 months ago

They have a boring CEO who was a fantastic COO. Apple needs a new Steve Jobs at the helm. As much as I like Tim he does not impress me. His demos aren't anywhere as iconic. He's the safe pick for CEO but he is not the future of Apple by any means. I hope they make a sound pick for a successor.

cyberpunk• 9 months ago

Nah, the game's up. There's too much money involved now for them to really do anything 'bold' anymore.

I mean fuck, even their failures don't seem to matter much (Vision Pro, Siri) to their stock price.

We'll get a foldable phone, and some new emoticons. Some font tweaks..

They think we're going to love it.

hnlmorg• 9 months ago

Apples attention to detail has always been skin deep. I remember reading blog posts 20 years ago about how some apps followed Apples standards design and others didn’t follow their design standards at all.

In the 90s Apple was in worse shape. They couldn’t even compete with Windows 9x for stability. There were memes about how MacOS needed just as many reformats as Windows 98.

The problem isn’t Apples attention to detail, it’s that people hold Apple to a higher standard. But in reality they’re just as fallible as every other software company.

Yizahi• 9 months ago

It's kinda funny reading about attention to detail on a website with CSS set to: font-weight:300

This means that author never considered checking how it looks on any other non-Apple OS. Meanwhile Apple has a setting, which is enabled by default, to artificially make a pseudo-bold font out of normal font: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553486

afandian9• 9 months ago

Hey UX people. "Not now" says "I won't take no for an answer". It comes across as _really_ creepy. Let me say "no".

And no, you don't know better than me about this cool feature.

latexr4• 9 months ago

I don’t think any UX professional is confused about that. It’s simply a dark pattern.

derefr6• 9 months ago

"Not now" says "I won't take no for an answer".

They know. When a designer makes one of those prompts with only a "not now", they tend to mean a very specific thing, that is at the same time a subtle message to the user and a passive-aggressive stab at the company they work for.

What they mean: "the code path that handles what happens when you say 'no' here has been deprecated, because support for this feature was not part of the planning of a recent major-version rewrite of this app's core logic. When that rewrite is complete/passes through this part of the code, the option to say no will go away, because the code for that decision to call will be gone. So, in a literal sense, we think it's helpful to keep bugging you to switch, so that you can get used to the change in your own time before we're forced to spring it on you. But in a connotational sense, we also think it's helpful to keep bugging you to switch, as a way of protesting the dropping of this feature, because every time users see this kind of prompt, they make noise about it — and maybe this time that'll be enough to get management's attention and get the feature included in the rewrite. Make your angry comments now, before it's too late!"

afandian9• 9 months ago

I wonder how that works when they are asking to grant permission for an integration with a resource gated by OS or browser, e.g. in this case location data for the Reminders app, or showing browser notifications.

Is the deprecated path that they just don't work without enabling those settings?

And I'm sure every UX person is different. The ones who know it's a dark pattern must have some pretty strong cognitive dissonance with a company that historically sold itself as 'the good guys'.

But there's a whole generation that probably grew up with software that fundamentally doesn't respect you, and this is just normal.

keyringlight• 9 months ago

The only thing I'd add is that if you can opt to say "yes" later, it should be obvious where to find it (eg. make a logical settings menu) or they point you to where you can find it. If they really want to make you feel comfortable using their app/site/service there shouldn't be any loss aversion instinct stirred up by hitting "no" as though it's your only chance to accept what they're offering.

afandian9• 9 months ago

Agreed. But the same should be true of selecting 'yes'.

ivm3• 9 months ago

Just was adding "Not now" to a notification dialog in my app today simply because it feels softer. But it's a definite "no", the prompt won't appear again unless you enable notifications yourself later from the settings (hence the "now").

dlivingston2• 9 months ago

That behavior wouldn't be clear to me as a user unless it were spelled out like you just did. My expectation when I see "Not Now" is that there will be a "Sometime Later". I would recommend changing your language here.

afandian9• 9 months ago

You could A/B test it. Add a 'not now' and a 'no' button.

saratogacx• 9 months ago

Is there something wrong with "No thanks" ?

neobrain3• 9 months ago

Playing devil's advocate here: Isn't one advantage of "not now" that it conveys "I don't want to worry about this now, don't change anything and get out of my way" whereas "no" burdens the user with a conscious choice?

afandian9• 9 months ago

I see your point, but I'd argue the opposite.

If I say no, that's an optional feature that I didn't ask for, and no longer need to think about it.

If I say 'not yet', it's one more thing I know I'm going to be reminded about, one piece of software that has no respect for me or consent.

roncesvalles2• 9 months ago

Even semantically, "Not now" should function as "Dismiss forever" because you can always go to Settings and give the app that permission, not now but later.

"Not now" can be validly interpreted to mean "not in this context" or "not here". It's not necessarily temporal.

prometheus76• 9 months ago

They fired most of the UI/UX team soon after Steve Jobs died.

yilugurlu• 9 months ago

It's like they all vibe-coded all the new 26.XX OSs across devices.

I tend to ignore these kinds of things, but sometimes applications are unresponsive, lose focus, and iOS apps don't show the keyboard, etc. so I cannot take it anymore.

I wanted to open a file from the Files app on iPad, a PDF. It opened the Preview app, but it couldn't allow me to scroll through the file. I tried to close it, but, back button goes to the Preview app, not to the Files. Then closed the app, and from the Files, but again it kept opening this separate app, instead of the in-app PDF viewer, and I guess I have never seen a malfunctioning state or application flows in default iOS apps ever.

The new reminders app is a joke. It has weird things that randomly jump from date selection to time selection, and sometimes select random dates.

It's like, they did, `claude new-reminder-app.md --dangerously-skip-permissions`, and "is it working? working! release it!" I know (hope) it's not the case, but, since the last few weeks, it feels it's like that.

snitzr• 9 months ago

Does anyone remember Jony Ive's first flat redesign of iOS? It was also criticized and had growing pains.

garbagecoder• 9 months ago

Lazy baby duck take for one. Apple's "legendary attention to detail" was never about reminders working the way you want.

And to be honest, it never really existed. It was more that everything else was cheaply manufactured garbage.

Philadelphia• 9 months ago

It now takes four clicks to delete an app on an iPhone, and four clicks and a swipe on an iPad.

al_borland4• 9 months ago

Everything that went out the door used to have to live up to Steve Jobs' standards. I'd imagine those under him had a similar obsession, considering Scott Forestall talked about going over the iPhone UI with a jeweler's loupe.

These days it feels like various teams are responsible for their part and they are managing toward a delivery date. As long as they check the box that the feature is there... ship it. There is likely not anyone around to throw the product in a fish tank if it isn't up to par.

combyn8tor5• 9 months ago

Glad to see someone documenting this. I use the screentime feature to restrict my kid's iPad's and it is so painful. Here are my notes:

- When an iPad is presented to you to enter your parent code to unlock an app, the name of the app isn't shown as the pin prompt is over the top of the app/time to unlock details.

- It's not possible to set screen time restrictions for Safari.

- If apps are not allowed to be installed, app updates stop. I have to allow app installations, install updates, then block app installations again.

- Setting downtime hours just doesn't seem to work. Block apps from 6pm - 11.59pm? Kid gets locked out of their iPad at school for the whole day.

- Most of the syncing between settings on a computer to the target iPads appear to be broken completely. If an iPad is in downtime, and the scheduled downtime time changes, it does not take the iPad out of downtime.

- Downtime doesn't allow multi-day hour settings. For instance, try setting downtime from 8pm - 8am.

- Popups in the screen time settings of MacOS have no visual indication that there is more beneath what can be seen. There is no scrollbar. You have to swipe/scroll on every popup to see if there are more settings hidden out of view.

- No granular downtime controls for websites. You can block Safari, or you can not block Safari.

Edit: Oh I almost forgot this nifty little bug reported back in 2023: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255049918?sortBy=rank

Screentime randomly shows you a warning about being an administrator... no probs you just need to select another account and then re-select the one you want and it'll go away.

hexbin0103• 9 months ago

Wow that's...a lot. Are they bugs...or malicious compliance/checkbox implementation?

combyn8tor5• 9 months ago

They present as bugs. I suspect they don't have the A team working on mechanisms that help reduce the amount of time kids spend on their devices. Do the bare minimum to show they "care" but no more as it hurts the profits.

derefr6• 9 months ago

If apps are not allowed to be installed, app updates stop. I have to allow app installations, install updates, then block app installations again.

Presumably this is because apps could add individual features parents don't approve of between updates.

If you're locking down what apps you want your kids to use (to an individual whitelist of apps, not just by maturity rating), you're essentially stepping into the role of an enterprise MDM IT department, auditing software updates for stability before letting them go out.

What would you propose instead here?

I presume you'd personally just be willing to trust certain apps/developers to update their apps without changing anything fundamental about them. But I think that most people who are app-whitelisting don't feel that level of trust torward apps/developers, and would want updates to be stopped if-and-only-if the update would introduce a new feature.

So now, from the dev's perspective, you're, what, tying automatic update rollout to whether they bump the SemVer minor version or not? Forcing the dev to outline feature changes in a way that can be summarized in a "trust this update" prompt notification that gets pushed to a parent's device?

combyn8tor5• 9 months ago

"you're essentially stepping into the role of an enterprise MDM IT department, auditing software updates for stability before letting them go out."

If my daughter's Spotify app breaks after an update she knows to immediately contact my on-call pager and alert our family CEO and legal department.

Just give me a checkbox that allows updates.

If an app developer changes something fundamental about the app, then the changes will be subject to the app store age guidelines. If the app is recategorised to 18+ it won't be able to install anyway. Billions of devices around the world have auto app updates turned on. The risk of a rogue update is outweighed by the benefit of getting instant access to security updates. I'm managing a kids iPad with a couple of mainstream games and school apps installed, not running a fortune 500.

thimabi• 9 months ago

Downtime doesn't allow multi-day hour settings. For instance, try setting downtime from 8pm - 8am.

I’m running iOS 18.7.1 and I can do that just fine. Maybe it wasn’t possible before, but it certainly is now.

benchess• 9 months ago

- It's not possible to set screen time restrictions for Safari.

I thought this too. I discovered it actually is possible though, just doesn't appear in the list. Go "Screen Time" -> "App Limits" -> "Add Limit". In the "Choose Apps" dialog, you won't see Safari in the list. But you can type "Safari" in the search bar and it'll appear.

But I agree with the overall sentiment on this thread. iOS Parental Controls aren't where they need to be.

Pfhortune• 9 months ago

Attention to detail is at odds with the pursuit of infinite, quarterly growth. Why take time to get it right when you can get something out the door for your next review? The quality of which doesn't matter because it's in the past, a quarter that's already closed.

hirvi74• 9 months ago

I feel like I am one of the only people that actually really likes iOS 26, iPad 26, and macOS 26.

I really haven't had many problems, and I actually like some of the features. Sure, the UI/UX is not perfect from the start, but there hasn't been anything I have been unable to accomplish because of the new OS. The liquid glass can even be nice with certain backgrounds too.

This is just my hypothesis, but I have noticed that a lot of the people that have been complaining about macOS have been using 3rd party applications for a in their workflow. If I am not mistaken, there were issues with many Electron apps in the beginning. On macOS, I mainly Apple's apps or I'm deep in the command line. So, perhaps I have been fortunate to avoid many of the UI/UX features that many have faced?

heavyset_go3• 9 months ago

Apple's attention to detail went into implementing every dark pattern imaginable to get you on iCloud and related services.

macOS is essentially an iCloud client and sales funnel these days, it's clear that's all that Apple sees it as.

cestith• 9 months ago

What happened to Apple's legendary attention to detail?

It was pancreatic cancer IIRC.

busymom0• 9 months ago

A lot of these "attention to detail" bugs are so hard to ignore once I see them. For example, on iOS 26, the Home Screen icons have those borders (I hate them but whatever). Those borders are however not there when you swipe up from bottom of screen to return to Home Screen. During the animation, the borders are not present at all on that specific app's icon. Only once animation completes, the border shows up suddenly.

anon191928• 9 months ago

with all respect, they are old people now, yes people working in Apple. They are retiring or retired inside the company. nothing wrong with that but design and all shows it. lol

nonfamous• 9 months ago

iPad OS 26 is just as bad, if not worse. It's the Windows ME of tablet OS's: ugly, near-unusable, and riddled with bugs.

Just one example: I was excited by the idea of having two apps on screen at the same time: there are two I like to look at side-by-side all the time. But one of them (an iPhone app) randomly decides to switch to landscape mode, making the layout unusable. More generally, the window controls keep getting activated unexpectedly by taps when I use full-screen apps like games, resulting in the window reverting to not-full-screen. So I guess I'll just have to turn that feature off until it's actually usable.

Illniyar• 9 months ago

Unless it has a huge memory leak that isn't fixed for years and causes it to be virtually unusable for anyone it's probably not the Windows ME of Tablet OS's.

Maybe the Windows Vista of Tablet OSs though.

bhk• 9 months ago

It's not just attention to detail. They seem to have abandoned some core design principles like visibility/discoverability.

zsoltkacsandi• 9 months ago

I have a theory that the only purpose of the liquid glass update is to create an UI that uses more system resources, so it can be justified to upgrade to a newer device.

It is terrible, does not anything visually or funcionally to the Apple experience.

hexbin0103• 9 months ago

They've been doing that for years now

a-dub• 9 months ago

i recently worked with a mac and was pretty unimpressed with all the visual clutter in the upper left corner of the screen. it was just kinda cluttered up with a junkyard of wasted space and needless controls. it didn't feel good, magical or delightful. just kind of like jumbled hodgepodge of dated nonsense.

oddly, kde plasma is more pleasing and consistent.

ant6n• 9 months ago

Apple stuff is full of bugs now. The times of "it just works" are a very distant memory. The OS crashes more often then Windows 10 did, with the operating system becoming basically completely unresponsive. Apple also now has eternal bugs that have been around for years (like ios hot spot disabling quickly when tethering non-Apple devices). Together with a bunch of annoying decisions for how the OS works, which can not be configured, it feels a lot like windows -- eternally broken, fighting with the users, having to work around bugs.

Kind of bizarre that they are destroyed their reputation for software perfection.

astrange8• 9 months ago

https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting/

Modified3019• 9 months ago

Anyone who’s had the misfortune of trying to use the iPhone “Files” program to do anything at all, or seen all the little curser placement glitches in Notes or Safari (especially when resizing), or had to look up the arbitrary and ever changing path to a system setting, or started typing to be greeted by a loud popping from glitched out audio feedback, knows that legend was always just a myth.

These are all things which have been broken for years.

ergonaught• 9 months ago

Steve died.

He already covered this: https://youtu.be/K1WrHH-WtaA?si=tHrGBNmLlIfp4NSv

theodric3• 9 months ago

And let us not forget about the non-resizable widget for the "Keyboard Brig..." [1] (which is where we store our insubordinate keyboards, I guess)

Steve truly is dead.

[1] https://cdn.social.linux.pizza/system/media_attachments/file...

JanSt• 9 months ago

My current top 3 apple software flaws:

1) battery warning above tabs in browser with no x to close it

2) WebKit bugs that make inputs and visual diverge so you have to click under the input to hit it

3) flickering email app when it’s opened

amelius• 9 months ago

That attention to detail was never really that great.

My Apple monitor has USB ports on the back side. Sigh.

My mouse had a charger cable on the bottom. Sigh.

My keyboard has no dedicated copy and paste keys. Sigh.

My keyboard has no dedicated undo and redo keys. Sigh.

At one point I had to start iTunes to update my OS. Sigh.

Really, the next time someone says Apple nails UX I am just going to cry.

t0lo• 9 months ago

No one gives a shit about anything anymore- Everything is just a job- either due to overmanagement or overwork. Look at how they recently butchered the new park hyatt tokyo redesign, one of the most iconic and enigmatic hotels in the world, reduced to "just another hotel". We're in a world where people have given up on going above and beyond, maybe because we're living in a society where intelligence and perceptiveness aren't rewarded and can't survive.

dinkelberg• 9 months ago

And those are some very low hanging fruit. If you look at the bigger picture, Apple does not know how to balance ease of use on the one hand and control over details by power users/geeks on the other hand. They simply do not let you configure things, because coming up with good UI for that is hard. But on macOS, power users probably make up a large share of their users. They should figure this out.

FuriouslyAdrift2• 9 months ago

Early Apples were pretty lousy from a quality standpoint (I was a certified warranty tech when the original iMac came out and it was HORRIBLE.. it was made in Mexico).

When they moved production to Foxconn, Quanta, and Pegatron then the quality went up...

game_the0ry• 9 months ago

I really hope apple reverses course and brings back flat design with frost like how they did with the butterfly keyboard macbooks, but I get the feeling this is the new Apple under Tim Cook. Damn, it's a shame, the hardware is so impressive.

iamshs• 9 months ago

iPhone screenshot and cropping doesn't work. I take a lot of full page screenshots and need to crop them, but sometimes the button is visible and sometimes it isn't. Saving the page as PDF or photo is not intuitive either, you have to click a button that only has a checkmark with no writing on it, and then it says whether to save as photo or PDF. Cropping and saving has become a chore.

morshu90016• 9 months ago

Normal Mac/PC user priorities: Web browsing, run my app instead of telling me the last update broke it, battery life, plug laptop into monitor/TV/projector, copy photos off my phone without deleting them, games maybe

Apple priorities: Emoji and emoji accessories, realistic glass physics, battery life, new kinds of ports, iCloud subscriptions, rearrange system preferences, iTunes delenda est

I'm just glad as a SWE the Mac still covers my workload

sohrob• 9 months ago

I'm so glad the chorus seems to be getting louder over just how bad things have gotten with Apple's software stack. This piece has been mainly centered on UI/UX but it's also really bad when it comes to functionality as so many bugs have seem to come up in both iOS and macOS. I will never understand how a company that has so much riding on the way their products are perceived by their users has fumbled the ball so badly--especially with how much money they have in the bank.

nixpulvis• 9 months ago

If I had to guess, having worked in Cupertino, there is just not enough cohesion across the software teams. Everyone is building in their own little bubbles, and when one team goes down a bad path, your team tries to be overly diplomatic, or can say it's not my problem and now we're stuck with this mess.

Sometimes you need the Jobs at the top of it all telling people it's not working well and they need to get their shit together.

just-the-wrk2• 9 months ago

This idea is a whole genre of tech journalism. Its a honeypot for people with some specific bone to pick or ideology to evangelize.

I buy more stock every time one of these articles comes out, because the quiet part is 'Apple is still the best, and I can elevate my brand by criticizing it'

just-the-wrk2• 9 months ago

...then I read his bio

https://johnozbay.com/bio

he lists "publicly confronted Apple at the European Commission's televised DMA hearing in Brussels on browser competition." as a highlight. lolol. Time to buy even more stock.

yalogin• 9 months ago

I just hope they don’t port the glass interface to macOS. It’s just terrible

rglover• 9 months ago

Dad is gone. Tim Cook is a logistics guy, not a visionary. Simple as. If there isn't anybody around to care, nobody cares—even at Apple.

apricot13• 9 months ago

my partner and I have a long running joke that I as the techy person who pretty much just uses the camera, WhatsApp and Safari on my phone has so many bugs and issues while my partner who bought the same phone on the same day as me has none of these issues but has and uses every app plugin etc under the sun. and let's face it iOS isn't really that 'customisable'

I just want Safari to work again. The rest I'll wait. I'm checking for software updates daily. it's gotten so bad that I looked up how to report bugs to Apple but I can't submit screenshots!?

I'll settle for just being able to enter data into a form in Safari without needing to reload the whole page.

just to add I had to cut this comment, reload the page, paste it in in order to be able to submit it

pacifika4• 9 months ago

That sounds like your device is running out of memory. Try disabling any extensions.

ribs• 9 months ago

Apple software has gone so bad in the last decade or so. UI problems abound - the lack of default buttons that fire when you hit enter makes me ill. THIS USED TO BE IN THE APPLE USER INTERFACE GUIDELINES. Does anybody remember that big binder that was ultra-important for Mac developers? Well if anyone still has a copy they probably have it on a bookshelf where it looks nice on Zoom.

And then there's the bugs. What software is more consistently buggy than Apple software?

oogabooga13• 9 months ago

To be fair if you work in a glass palace you might think the world needs glass everywhere lol... : https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e949a92e17d55230cd1d...

thomassmith65• 9 months ago

It's buried at Alta Mesa Memorial Park, Palo Alto.

rifty2• 9 months ago

Apple still acts frivolously extreme about certain visual details on the interface. What feels different is that once we get away from the marketable still of an interface, the motivation just doesn't feel there to meet a higher quality vision, if there is one at all.

A lot of people will disagree that Apple had great attention to detail before because of the things they choose not to focus on. But I think what was counter arguable before is that they were meeting their own internal vision with a high expectation for quality, and that that vision covered every part of the experience. The counter argument doesn't feel as valid today.

roncesvalles2• 9 months ago

Apple was never very good at design. It was only good at aesthetics, and those are not quite the same thing.

ebbi2• 9 months ago

I personally think Apple is a victim of being a publicly listed company. Once you're publicly listed, the only thing shareholders want (and the only thing the CEO is measured on) is, ultimately, the share price.

Don't get me wrong, I also enjoy and benefit from returns from the sharemarket. But I think there are downsides to it, and you can clearly see it here, with Apple. A company that was an underdog, and didn't really need to worry too much about the share price because anything they did at that time was attracting customers at a smaller scale, but it was still growth. Now at the size that they are, they have to lose their soul to keep the growth happening.

It's sad, but it's also the reality. Netflix for example - once tweeting "Love is sharing a password" now resorting to stopping this.

There's just no contentment in the sharemarket.

mgh2• 9 months ago

Growth can be done sustainably. Still the only FAANG that is not corrupt yet.

skeptrune• 9 months ago

My understanding is that they became more of a hardware company than a software company over the past few years and they just don't care about shipping with the same level of polish anymore.

gitt67887yt7bg• 9 months ago

Apple's attention to detail quit when they tried to force them to RTO back to California.

sharts• 9 months ago

It’s like the entire release management was left to a couple of product and UI types . You can tell because they seem to have focused on UI eye-candy instead of UX / interaction or any meaningful QE. Like there is a glaring evidence if attention to detail in the most useless of places.

This thing is laggy…on my brand new 17 Pro. Why not just make the entire OS an electron app at this point?

Beestie• 9 months ago

Apple used to know what's best for me whether I liked it or not. Now, they have no idea what's best for me and no idea if I like it or not.

duxup• 9 months ago

Sometimes these articles confuse me. I think because I came from Windows to the Apple land (at least full time) only in the past few years.

These articles sometimes confused me until someone on HN had a quote:

"MacOS has never been worse, but the distance between MacOS and Windows has never been greater."

So I see these articles and I ... I'm really happy in MacOS land.

HardwareLust• 9 months ago

It was overwhelmed by Tim Cook's greed, like everything else Apple used to be good at.

mandrade2• 9 months ago

the perils of being such a giant. desktop/laptop sales only account for around 8% of revenue for them

lunias• 9 months ago

    Steve Wozniak left Apple in 1985 because he felt the company was no longer an engineering-led one and missed the fun of creating things rather than dealing with management.

That was 40 years ago. Jobs cared immensely, but the snowball has been rolling for a long while. Decisions used to be made by people that actually cared, but now they're made mostly by poseurs.

tveyben2• 9 months ago

I just noticed a meaningless feature of iOS: The cursor moves (since iOS 15?) in steps of one pixel.

Probably just to make it slick looking (fluent)…

- BUT that’s completely non-effective as it allows for the cursor to be positioned on top of a single letter in >10 different positions.

So when you’re editing you are having a much more difficult time placing the cursor just between the two letters you want.

I noticed it when using some app the had disabled this stupid feature and it was just so much more effective to do mybediting as the cursor jumped to the position BETWEEN the letters in stead of FLOATING ALL OVER.

It’s nice on slides when presenting a new fancy feature, but completely useless for s ‘professional’ (focused) user.

PS yes I recall those old Apple adds - saw them when they were brand new and Apple was a better details oriented company (I miss those days….)

port11• 9 months ago

1) In the EU, if you uninstall Apple Maps and set another app as your navigation default, many (most?) addresses won't work anymore. Clicking an address will show you an alert that you haven't installed a navigation app, or sometimes just open the Maps website in Safari.

2) With the new dual-language keyboards, text prediction is doubly messy. My Dutch-French keyboard suggests English words and almost never understands which language I'm actually typing in.

2b) Fine, but then at least my English keyboard will be okay? Nope. The other keyboards still get polluted with suggestions and auto-correct from the other language keyboards you have. For example, it's now impossible to write “as a” without iOS correcting it to “às à”, even though my Portuguese keyboard is separate and I'm clearly typing in English.

3) Search on iOS always searches for files, even if you remove the Files app contents from search results. (‘App’ just got corrected into ’all’.)

4) In iOS, HealthKit occasionally locks down and the apps that need it to function become unresponsive (AutoSleep, WaterNow, Cronometer). This can only be fixed with a restart.

5) In macOS's Mail, if you Command-Z to undo deleting an email, 90% of the time it goes in a Recovered Emails folder instead of where it was. 10% of the time it's not undeleted at all and is instead completely gone (also from the trash).

6) Calendar.app on macOS can become unusable if you have attachments in events. The solution is to open the event on iOS and delete the attachment.

7) Screen Time asks me twice if I want to unlock an app or website. Sometimes the animation plays and nothing happens, so I have to do it thrice.

8) The Game Mode notification can't be disabled, because no one at Apple has ever alt-tabbed away from a game.

9) If you search for a setting in iOS or the redesigned macOS System Preferences, I think 3/4 of the time it will take you to a nearby screen but not the actual setting. This is because Apple designers don't know that they can scroll you or link you to the right place.

I've reported all these bugs to Apple with screenshots or videos. None of them were ever fixed.

thesnide• 9 months ago

it unfortunately died with Steve.

drbroom• 9 months ago

ok... to start off, i'll date myself: first computer 1977 Apple 1, build (and owned) by best friend and myself in 10th grade. so mac/pc commercials :-) but i also remember "i bleed in 6 colors" & our beloved "Clarus the dogcow" i'm old!

so to answer your question... HELL YES!!! unless you are talking about detail of the bottom line.

To my view Apple care little about quality of product these days mostly because they Cook cares more about deliverables then usability. 1st piece of evidence developers no longer need to adhere to anything like "The Human Interface Guidelines" so there is no consistent UI. Developers all think they are designers, they are not!

Steve was and ASSHOLE but he was also a humanitarian; among his many skills was that he understood that humans crave at least the appearance of control over our environment, he looked for how we did things in the real world and worked with great developers, designers & END USERS to build them. AND LEGACY was at least considered carefully before replaced.

This was the Apple we loved and "evangelized" The Macintosh Way

So at this point i'm not buying new Apple hardware or staying in their ethos. I'm looking for a couple of guys in a garage... Maybe Ive's 'little' project?

lucabenazzi• 9 months ago

It's never been a thing, to be honest. They sell great hardware, and that's it.

What happened to Apple's legendary attention to detail?

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