> Your AirPods just connected to the wrong device. Again.
> iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart. HomeKit forgot the kitchen lightbulb exists, and will remember it again in three hours like nothing happened.
I've literally seen nothing of this happen (or to my family all on Apple devices). While I don't doubt they do happen to some unfortunate users, it's important that they report it so that Apple can troubleshoot. It could very well be that, much like myself, nobody at Apple is seeing this, and therefore it's not investigated.
Every time I do report these kinds of bugs it's clear to me they clearly do not look at them lol.
The Feedback site still thinks windows 10 is the latest windows version and doesn't even display the latest ios version.
I reported a bug in Apple Music on windows where it wouldn't update the audio output until you restarted it. They did a change in a few weeks where they made it update the audio output. Probably team dependent, but I was really amazed by how quick they changed it.
It's unknowable if they look or not consistently across all groups and departments because of their habit of zero feedback/response. I assume they don't look anymore because of assumed overwhelming backlog and lower standards than the past.
Perhaps on their side, AI might be able to consolidate, triage, and perhaps even propose fixes far more scalably than even a huge department of customer support-oriented coders.
Every damn time anybody has trouble with an Apple product, we get this "Well that hasn't happened to me." Great for you, go get yourself a cookie and cram it up your ass.
> While I don't doubt they do happen to some unfortunate users, it's important that they report it so that Apple can troubleshoot. It could very well be that, much like myself, nobody at Apple is seeing this, and therefore it's not investigated.
I report a lot of nagging issues to Apple through Feedback Assistant. I keep updating the same issues and provide instructions as well as the device diagnostics and any photos/videos. But almost all of them don’t see any kind of action at Apple. They just linger on for years. Only if it’s an OS crash or an important Apple app crashing, it may get some attention.
There are many instances when “things just work” and it seems magical, but in those same areas, there are often too many bugs and issues where one has to do this whole dance of restart, re-pair devices and so on. It used to be that Windows was the butt of frequent jokes on restarting, but Apple’s software has gotten closer to that in many aspects.
I personally suspect that Apple doesn’t have a dedicated and good QA in place. There doesn’t seem to be a push from the top down for software quality. That attention to detail that Apple was famous for is missing on software quality.
I'm 1 for 1 on Feedback Assistant. I reported a flaky 10 year old thunderbolt display to them a few years ago, thinking I was probably just shouting into a black hole. It took them six months, but they actually responded to it with a diagnosis (bad hardware) and a workaround so I didn't have to trash the display.
Bingo. I have a bunch of Sony WF-Xm4s and Xm3s and an Airpod pro. If I have to take a call, it's always the Airpod for me because it's so reliable. I just snap it into my ears and it literally just works. The Sony - while having a flatter frequency response and a snugger fit, goes for my daily workouts which Airpods sucks for as it keeps falling off. I have never had any connection issues with the Airpods till date. Despite it being connected to 3 devices. The Sony's (rarely) do have connection issues but never the Airpods.
I was excited about Beats because they have the same hardware/software stack as iPods and they fit really well on runs! Give them a try if yoi haven't!
Both can be right, unfortunately. People do not report stuff, but when they do, it tends to get ignored. I have personally stopped reporting feedback to Apple because my tens of bug reports with detailed reproduction steps were simply ignored. This was both on beta and stable releases. One of them was especially egregious — I had an M1 Macbook Air at work and 11.2 update made charging with any dock, USB-C or Thunderbolt, not work, i.e. everything was working, but the laptop was not charging. I had to plug in a separate charger for 3 months until they fixed it in either 11.3 or 11.4. Rolling back did not work because the update updated the controller firmware. There was no mention of this in the release notes.
Apple's "It just works." sometimes gets in the way by obscuring details. Simple example, Airdrop. You share a file, select the person, and it gets stuck displaying sending on the bubble. What is happening? No one knows, because it should "just work". But when it doesn't, you usually have literally no recourse and you are told to wipe your device and try again. From GP's example, the synchronisation. I don't know about iMessage, but synchronising Photos is a nightmare because there is no button to force a sync. You have to connect your phone to power and pray that it will sync. If it doesn't, you have no way to force it. Same thing with AirPods firmware, how do you update it? You don't, it should happen automagically. It didn't? Sucks to suck. You hopefully get the idea by this point :)
If I remember right, that was Apple finally switching to the standards based approach for PD, and a lot of docks having used a hack instead of the standard for years before. It worked with your regular charger because your regular charger properly supported the PD standard.
It's true that there are few obvious bugs, but there are many subtle bugs now, usually outside the main interaction flows. 5 years ago, apple's software felt bugfree, essentially.
examples:
- if I change a note on my iphone and wake up my mac, I need to restart the notes-app before it syncs the change.
- if somebody leaves me a FaceTime video-message, I get an "unread"-badge that doesn't get away after I watch the video. There are multiple ways to get to that video and only one of them clears the "unread" badge.
- if I add a pronounciation field to a contact in my iphone, SIRI stops working and I need to restart my iphone to get it back.
Son you can't even upload HEIC photos to apple support, which is an iphone native file format all of your photos are in by default. Apples support website doesn't support apples file formats
AirPods and iMessage, agreed, never had a problem. The Home app though remains Apple's unloved ginger stepchild - every major OS release I'm hopeful that they've done something about it, but they never do. I'm starting to think Apple's internal view of Home / HomeKit is that they wish they'd never built it in the first place.
This is tough. Most home devices are built to be absolute bottom of the barrel. Notice that almost every HomeKit device says it only uses 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi?
Apple tried to do certification for a while in 2018ish, but nobody could get through it, so I think they stopped.
Apple is starting to build their own home devices and I expect them to eat the market and cause improvement via competition.
HomeKit certification is still a thing if that's what you're referring to. You're very much right about the bottom of the barrel nature of home automation devices though. Most of mine are about as good as you can get though (Philips Hue etc.) and the Home app is still appalling. Even if all the devices I have attached worked properly and did what they're told when the automations run, there's still some absolutely basic functionality that people have been waiting years for, like being able to switch cameras from stream only to stream and record via an automation - think "when I go to bed, I want the alarm on and the cameras recording".
I hope they do. I use only the basics of HomeKit, a couple switches and CCTV. I'd like to expand and use it for more stuff. So it's important Home is stable.
If you have a lot of Apple devices, and kids that are constantly borrowing them, you'll notice the "AirPods connected to wrong device" problem a lot. All I want is a feature that allows me to say "lock my AirPods to this exact device until further notice."
> iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart.
The iMessage one is super common, and is Apple's fault. Easiest way to reproduce it is to have two Macs. (got a desktop and a laptop and use them both? Chances are high you'll encounter it).
The HomeKit (via HomePod mini) is also super common. (HomePod Minis just have bad wifi and unreliable connections, there's something about their WiFi setup that's different from all other Apple products). It doesn't help that Apple spent years prioritizing HomePods as the HomeKit base (though they eventually fixed that, and let you assign an Apple TV to do it).
The others are also common, but not necessarily always Apples fault, as far as I can tell.
(the AirPods, for example, tend to go wherever 'most recent' sounds happen, but a lot of developers are unintentionally triggering conflicting behavior around this. Have Outlook open? An email notification will sound an alarm, stealing AirPod focus away from your other device, but the sound effect will already be done playing by the time your AirPods connect, so to the user, it just seems like the AirPods switched devices for "no reason".)
(HomeKit, for example, is supposed to support Eufy cameras. But Eufy cameras are garbage, despite having a large dedicated base station dock running 24/7, they can support only one small video stream to one single device, ever. So if you have two Eufy cameras installed, HomeKit will fail on the cameras constantly, but it's because of Eufy's basestation limitations, so it's not clear to me how Apple could 'fix' that)
---
The more Apple moves outside of it's own internal ecosystem, the more complex the interactions get, and the less control Apple can feasibly exert over the product lifecycle, so the more it starts "Microsoft-ing" it's work. (We joke about Microsoft Copilot, but Apple has five different products all named Apple TV, the Apple TV (hardware device), Apple TV (the TV software app, which runs on Apple TV, and iOS, but also on Roku and other SmartTVs), Apple TV (the storefront for buying movies and TV shows), and Apple TV (the subscription service) for watching Apple TV (the studio creating original content shows and movies, one show of which is actually called "The Studio")
AirPod Pro v1 seems to always work, but they favor connecting to Apple branded devices and move seamlessly between them. What doesn't work so well is that iPad Pro M4 doesn't play nice with Bose QC35 multi-point connections because it appears to "play silence" to the headphones even when there is no audio, preventing the other connected device from switching over to play audio.
When I turn my iPhone on and open iMessage, it will sit at a black screen and won't open for several minutes and usually crashes. I want sync to happen on a background thread and be able to access existing content immediately. Sometimes it happens with the phone app too. There really ought to be a universal gesture or trick (that's not pull to refresh) to force iCloud sync in any app that has iCloud sync functionality.
Also, Universal Clipboard works half of the time.
Learn Spelling was removed from most/all non-Pages apps, which is extremely inconvenient because the Apple US English dictionary has tons of missing adverb forms.
iOS/iPadOS selection of text in a web browser (Brave or Mobile Safari) doesn't work as reliably as it did in earlier OS versions. Often, text is selected but refuses to show the text selection popup.
And I refuse to use iOS and macOS 26 because liquid glass is slow and unusable.
I think the criticisms of the current software stack are well founded. There is friction there, stuff doesnt work that should. OP even neglected to mention the glaring Finder column view bugs or the Taboe corner radius window selection issues.
But as a user since System 6.x, including A/UX and MacOS X since public beta - it was ever thus.
Macintosh pre OSX was well known as an acronym for Most Applications Crash, If Not, The Operating System Hangs.
After OSX, Snow Leopard was needed to clear cruft.
The hardware is in sparkling form. Perhaps the software is closer to average. Where would you pick the next leader from - the hw side or the sw side?!
Working on Snow Leopard was one of my most rewarding experiences at Apple. Loved the ethos behind that update. No new fluff, just make everything work better.
Why oh why for example can't you resize the System Settings window?
If you are in the wallpaper view - there is content off the screen to the right, but no visible scroll bar, nor ability to resize. The only way to scroll appears to use the keyboard to navigate the wallpapers ( which has the side effect of setting them ).
On the other hand - the transition from Intel to ARM, which has totally transformed their hardware offering, was pretty seamless and is down to large part good software.
Is it really so hard to write your articles by yourself? The blandest tone imaginable, all the usual LLM tells in the sentence structure. You are polluting HN and the broader internet by posting this publicly.
I don’t think there are AI slop tells anymore. Humans have been reading AI slop for a couple years now, so it plausible enough that any one person will have picked up a couple AI-like phrases.
Honestly... I think I've been reading too much AI content, because I 100% wrote that. I do use AI to help make outlines and gather thoughts. But the Article was written by me.
Did you do any kind of AI assisted proofreading or grammar? So much of the structure of the article screams AI.
Stuff like this:
> Each one of these, on its own, is just a bug. Together, they’re a culture.
And the headings starting with "The"
AI seems to have adopted a style reminiscent of startup marketers circa 2020 - really simple, lots of one liner quips and far too much incredulity about minor things. Now we've come full circle!
I do usually do a pass through Grammarly, and there are some times when I ask AI for help getting my point across. But I always try to change what they write into something I feel I would say.
If you're being honest, I apologize. I find it a bit difficult to believe but maybe it's really that the style is everywhere now. Partially it's sentence pattern cliches:
>Not just sell. Not just ship. Use.
>The honest read ... The hopeful read ...
>The grumbling isn’t about features. It’s about the texture of using the products.
>Yes, Apple Silicon is incredible. Yes, the Watch saved lives. Yes, the iPhone got better cameras
There's also bizarre not-quite-landing uncanny metaphors that LLMs love to do:
>Today's Apple ships friction and treats it like background radiation.
>The texture changed.
>And the rot follows that exact line.
If you're surrounded by this kind of writing, it may be good to get other inspirations. It's bad!
English is not my first language, although I am ok with it, whenever I write I always pump it through an AI first with a prompt of "Make it better English", especially if its a business email with English speaking clients.
I enjoyed your article and shared it on my family-geek-whatsapp group
This moaning is so fucking boring. Yeah, so what. For what we know this moan can be just some random openclaw instance digging for karma. I come here for discussion, not to read 50% “AI slop” comments.
The good old "this clearly photoshopped" of the 2020's era.
LLM's got their inspiration from popular sources written by humans. Now humans are exposed to LLM on repeat basis every day. It looks only normal that writing done with or without LLMs tend to converge to the same style.
It is so easy to sit on and critique from the sidelines. Steve Jobs had a passion for product, and it showed - he pushed the teams to make things he approved of, and that was the measure. Tim Cook had a passion for growth, and as the article states, Apple's income now rival some GDPs. They're different people with different drives. In fact, Jobs told Cook not to do what he would do, but do the right thing, and to Cook that was grow the company. I'd love to see the critics do better.
Right, and without that open bribery they would have had 100% tarrifs on all of their iphones, macbooks and semiconductors, which is an overwhelming portion of their revenue.
Now obviously, this only covers a small portion of Tim's reign over apple, but is it not fair to say you'd have a different overall view of his tenure if he was an honest businessman and ate the tarrifs like he was supposed to, probably tanking the stock in the process?
I would probably have a stronger gripe with the ridiculousness of the tariffs than Tim Cook's refusal to bribe the president. Also, to say that not bribing would make him an "honest businessman" is slightly unfair. He has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders, and if he is aware that lobbying to the president personally to avoid tariffs is what it takes to avoid tanking Apple's profit and share price, he is required to do that.
I'm not going to argue your wants with you because they are your own. Don't buy Apple products if you don't like the way they operate as a company. I don't particularly care for appeasing the administration, either, but it's not like Cook broke the system, so I'm not going to dance on his retirement over it.
And Steve Job's Apple was an ethical company because... he pushed people to produce sleek devices? Which is fine, but then I'd propose that growing the company was ethical because it helped retirement portfolios and employed lots of people. The only Apple product I own is a prime-day deal Beats Pill, but I'm not going to claim that Apple grew because of bribes. People do seem to love their products, in ways I find irrational sometimes.
Sounds to me like Tim Cook was the wrong choice from the beginning then? Or should all the people who came to love the company because of great products just adapt to the company shifting the core focus to "basically a country's GDP" and be fine with that?
I guess many of the people who share their critiques are people who never really liked where Cook was gonna take Apple (and took) to in the first place.
Sadly, too many of us continue to go back for more after our expectations aren't met. This makes it an obvious decision to reduce quality below premium.
There's nowhere to run, unfortunately. Windows and Linux are orders of magnitude worse than even macOS 26. To say that the whole software industry is a dumpster fire would be an understatement.
the very fact that we're comparing apple, a (mainly) hardware company, to a bunch of software companies is in itself a measure of incredible success for Apple.
If you look at Apple's profits - it's about evenly split between 'Services' ( like music and app sales etc ) and hardware.
Now hardware gross revenue is about 3x the services - but the profit margin is much higher on services.
Apple don't break out the numbers so it's difficult to know how much of that service revenue is tied to people owning Apple hardware and how much is independent ( like Apple Music or Apple TV ).
yeah I think the key point is in your last sentence - maybe some people would buy Apple Music/TV without an iphone or an AppleTV? I don't think anyone would buy icloud without the hardware though. And presumably they're bundling applecare in the "services" as well :)
Aside from a false start with Apple Intelligence, Apple did not try to repeatedly and shamelessly shove AI down everyone's throats in all their products and services, which is why their "growth" hasn't been as pronounced as those of the others. And, frankly, I'm OK with that.
> Apple's market capitalization in 2011 was approximately $350 billion to $377 billion by year-end 2011
> Microsoft's market capitalization in 2011 was approximately $220 Billion
Those are post iPhone numbers being multiplied.
Also, arguably, iPhones made everyone else on that list stupid rich and drove insane demands for their products. Instagram and Snapchats fortunes need more than Windows Mobile phones ever gave. Apples rising tide helped the web giants.
Market valuation alone is not sufficient, percentage of market-share matters too. Under Cook, iPhone market-share grew from 15-18% to 25% in US and an insignificant amount to ~20% globally. As an example for why market-share matters, TSMC's market-share is ~$2T, while Apple's market cap is $3.93T (as of today). Yet TSMC has a market-share of close to 90% for ICs in circulation today.
I'm not a fanboy by any means, just looking at the numbers.
"There are five companies that we selected because they have absolutely massive growth, far beyond anything else in the market. Should we really say Apple did well just because they're a member of that group?"
Apple's current products make everything Jobs released at the end look like primitive tech demos. A couple annoying macOS quirks or controversial UI design decisions don't equal a decline in my view.
They made some of my favorite products. Their having GDP-level revenue doesn’t benefit me… at all. Their putting less effort into those products negatively affects me. There are more losers than beneficiaries, here. I couldn’t care less how many billions investors got. Monetarily, it’s a net gain. Societally, it’s a net loss.
Crappy? I use MacOS everyday, and it's a goddamn delight compared to the (perfectly reasonable) experience of Windows 11 + WSL. Anything that doesn't "just work" was replaced by very thoughtfully written third party software a long time ago.
Yeah, like you I lived in Linux for years and delighted in the freedom to recompile my video driver with every upgrade, but then I had kids, and a life to live, and found that accepting some limitations of the excellent OSX was a worthwhile tradeoff. Today I couldn't tell you what I'm missing that can't be fixed with a 30s Google + `brew install`.
And complaints about default choices, or limitations with easy work arounds, on Hacker News are just weird. No one typing on this message board runs default anything.
Please share specific (legitimate) gripes and win my sympathy.
Saying that it sucks less than the execrable mess that is Windows doesn't prove anything.
Apple appears to be chasing Microsoft down the toilet. Its exhumation of the circa-2002 "transparent" UI fad is one example, coupled with other baffling UI regressions.
Mac OS examples: Apple removed the "get new mail" button from the Mail toolbar. So all those millions of people who log into their bank accounts and are told to check their mail for 2FA are left hunting for it or simply waiting for Mail's next poll. There's no excuse for removing one of the most-used buttons from a sparsely-populated toolbar. What is driving this attack on usefulness? It used to be Jony Ive.
Then take a look at Music. Apple moved the playback controls from the empty area at the top of the screen to the bottom of the content browser, and made them "transparent." Now they overlap and blend with the thumbnails and text in the content browser.
Garbage like this is scattered all over the UI now. I needn't beat the dead horse of the hated System Preferences panel here.
Meanwhile, Spotlight still doesn't show you WHERE it found stuff, and neither does the inappropriately-named Finder. "Location" or "path" isn't even an OPTION in the column headers you can add to the results list. So you can't discriminate between identically-named files or irrelevant volumes or backups as you scan the list to find what you're looking for, or sort by location.
The removal of Launchpad is another blunder. Apple didn't even replace it with anything. So now you have no comparable way to group your applications.
"Center Stage" is a profoundly defective POS that ruins my family's weekly Zooms by randomly swooping the camera view around and cropping one of my parents out, when they're sitting side by side. Utter trash that there's no universal way to disable, shoved on all users by default without permission. That's Apple today.
> Apple appears to be chasing Microsoft down the toilet. Its exhumation of the circa-2002 "transparent" UI fad is one example, coupled with other baffling UI regressions.
Windows 11 is perfectly cromulent. I don't prefer it, but with WSL, it's like a slow almost-MacOS. The anger over the transparency is I guess personal, I genuinely don't notice it. I certainly haven't stumbled over it. (I might have changed a setting?)
> Then take a look at Music. Apple moved the playback controls from the empty area at the top of the screen to the bottom of the content browser, and made them "transparent." Now they overlap and blend with the thumbnails and text in the content browser.
I just hit Play and the music comes on. I'm not crazy about their search, but it's not that big a deal. The Podcasts app now... THAT is a complaint I can get behind. I would use something else but for the integration with the car.
> Spotlight and Launchpad
Spotlight seems good enough to me. I tried Alfred and Raycast, but never used any of the helper functionalities. Just used it to open apps and files.
I never used Launchpad. I do forget the names of apps, but I just open Applications.
I am a long time mac user and I agree with all of their points. I guess you disagree, but I am not sure why you are being dismissive. Each point is a legitimate criticism from many peoples' points of view.
I acknowledge the complaints, I love a good complaint! My issue is that these superficial, and in many cases, easily remediable annoyances add up to a "crappy OS". MacOS has to satisfy a very diverse userbase from Paris Hilton-types to grumpy Hacker News readers (but thankfully not Bank of America), and I think they do a better than decent job at it.
Take a photo on your iPhone and wait for it to sync on your Mac. You might get lucky and it syncs nearly immediately (which is still typically a minute or so, even if your phone and Mac are on the same network and have gigabit internet). But you won't know when. And it might not be immediate.
Both sides will tell you they're up to date. You can't force a sync. They'll be synced when Photos is ready, not you. And if that's ten minutes or more later? So be it. You'll just deal with it.
> iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart. HomeKit forgot the kitchen lightbulb exists, and will remember it again in three hours like nothing happened.
I've literally seen nothing of this happen (or to my family all on Apple devices). While I don't doubt they do happen to some unfortunate users, it's important that they report it so that Apple can troubleshoot. It could very well be that, much like myself, nobody at Apple is seeing this, and therefore it's not investigated.
Source: I work for Apple.
Perhaps on their side, AI might be able to consolidate, triage, and perhaps even propose fixes far more scalably than even a huge department of customer support-oriented coders.
https://imgur.com/a/bVznT02
It seems to be adding it to TextEdit but it disappears when exporting to PDF. Is this a TextEdit.app bug?
I report a lot of nagging issues to Apple through Feedback Assistant. I keep updating the same issues and provide instructions as well as the device diagnostics and any photos/videos. But almost all of them don’t see any kind of action at Apple. They just linger on for years. Only if it’s an OS crash or an important Apple app crashing, it may get some attention.
There are many instances when “things just work” and it seems magical, but in those same areas, there are often too many bugs and issues where one has to do this whole dance of restart, re-pair devices and so on. It used to be that Windows was the butt of frequent jokes on restarting, but Apple’s software has gotten closer to that in many aspects.
I personally suspect that Apple doesn’t have a dedicated and good QA in place. There doesn’t seem to be a push from the top down for software quality. That attention to detail that Apple was famous for is missing on software quality.
Apple's "It just works." sometimes gets in the way by obscuring details. Simple example, Airdrop. You share a file, select the person, and it gets stuck displaying sending on the bubble. What is happening? No one knows, because it should "just work". But when it doesn't, you usually have literally no recourse and you are told to wipe your device and try again. From GP's example, the synchronisation. I don't know about iMessage, but synchronising Photos is a nightmare because there is no button to force a sync. You have to connect your phone to power and pray that it will sync. If it doesn't, you have no way to force it. Same thing with AirPods firmware, how do you update it? You don't, it should happen automagically. It didn't? Sucks to suck. You hopefully get the idea by this point :)
examples:
- if I change a note on my iphone and wake up my mac, I need to restart the notes-app before it syncs the change.
- if somebody leaves me a FaceTime video-message, I get an "unread"-badge that doesn't get away after I watch the video. There are multiple ways to get to that video and only one of them clears the "unread" badge.
- if I add a pronounciation field to a contact in my iphone, SIRI stops working and I need to restart my iphone to get it back.
Apple tried to do certification for a while in 2018ish, but nobody could get through it, so I think they stopped.
Apple is starting to build their own home devices and I expect them to eat the market and cause improvement via competition.
The iMessage one is super common, and is Apple's fault. Easiest way to reproduce it is to have two Macs. (got a desktop and a laptop and use them both? Chances are high you'll encounter it).
The HomeKit (via HomePod mini) is also super common. (HomePod Minis just have bad wifi and unreliable connections, there's something about their WiFi setup that's different from all other Apple products). It doesn't help that Apple spent years prioritizing HomePods as the HomeKit base (though they eventually fixed that, and let you assign an Apple TV to do it).
The others are also common, but not necessarily always Apples fault, as far as I can tell.
(the AirPods, for example, tend to go wherever 'most recent' sounds happen, but a lot of developers are unintentionally triggering conflicting behavior around this. Have Outlook open? An email notification will sound an alarm, stealing AirPod focus away from your other device, but the sound effect will already be done playing by the time your AirPods connect, so to the user, it just seems like the AirPods switched devices for "no reason".)
(HomeKit, for example, is supposed to support Eufy cameras. But Eufy cameras are garbage, despite having a large dedicated base station dock running 24/7, they can support only one small video stream to one single device, ever. So if you have two Eufy cameras installed, HomeKit will fail on the cameras constantly, but it's because of Eufy's basestation limitations, so it's not clear to me how Apple could 'fix' that)
---
The more Apple moves outside of it's own internal ecosystem, the more complex the interactions get, and the less control Apple can feasibly exert over the product lifecycle, so the more it starts "Microsoft-ing" it's work. (We joke about Microsoft Copilot, but Apple has five different products all named Apple TV, the Apple TV (hardware device), Apple TV (the TV software app, which runs on Apple TV, and iOS, but also on Roku and other SmartTVs), Apple TV (the storefront for buying movies and TV shows), and Apple TV (the subscription service) for watching Apple TV (the studio creating original content shows and movies, one show of which is actually called "The Studio")
When I turn my iPhone on and open iMessage, it will sit at a black screen and won't open for several minutes and usually crashes. I want sync to happen on a background thread and be able to access existing content immediately. Sometimes it happens with the phone app too. There really ought to be a universal gesture or trick (that's not pull to refresh) to force iCloud sync in any app that has iCloud sync functionality.
Also, Universal Clipboard works half of the time.
Learn Spelling was removed from most/all non-Pages apps, which is extremely inconvenient because the Apple US English dictionary has tons of missing adverb forms.
iOS/iPadOS selection of text in a web browser (Brave or Mobile Safari) doesn't work as reliably as it did in earlier OS versions. Often, text is selected but refuses to show the text selection popup.
And I refuse to use iOS and macOS 26 because liquid glass is slow and unusable.
The hardware is in sparkling form. Perhaps the software is closer to average. Where would you pick the next leader from - the hw side or the sw side?!
If you are in the wallpaper view - there is content off the screen to the right, but no visible scroll bar, nor ability to resize. The only way to scroll appears to use the keyboard to navigate the wallpapers ( which has the side effect of setting them ).
I don't expect these kind of UI issues on MacOS.
Is it really so hard to write your articles by yourself? The blandest tone imaginable, all the usual LLM tells in the sentence structure. You are polluting HN and the broader internet by posting this publicly.
I wonder if AI is going to drive certain idioms into extinction (aside from being used by AI).
Stuff like this:
> Each one of these, on its own, is just a bug. Together, they’re a culture.
And the headings starting with "The"
AI seems to have adopted a style reminiscent of startup marketers circa 2020 - really simple, lots of one liner quips and far too much incredulity about minor things. Now we've come full circle!
I'm the first to say I'm not the best writer...
Or is this also true: "I don't change what a LLM writes so long as it doesn't seem like something I would write"
It's just like vibe coding it's the new normal. We don't notice our own unique voices when writing. But as a collective we do notice LLM voices.
Submissions are different than comments in HN rules - don't worry about it.
>Not just sell. Not just ship. Use.
>The honest read ... The hopeful read ...
>The grumbling isn’t about features. It’s about the texture of using the products.
>Yes, Apple Silicon is incredible. Yes, the Watch saved lives. Yes, the iPhone got better cameras
There's also bizarre not-quite-landing uncanny metaphors that LLMs love to do:
>Today's Apple ships friction and treats it like background radiation.
>The texture changed.
>And the rot follows that exact line.
If you're surrounded by this kind of writing, it may be good to get other inspirations. It's bad!
This article on the other hand has 1: https://routerjockey.com/introducing-graphiant-the-future-of...
I don't mind either way, but reading through the Tim Cook one without opening the comments on HN, I was 99.9% sure I'm reading AI.
I enjoyed your article and shared it on my family-geek-whatsapp group
LLM's got their inspiration from popular sources written by humans. Now humans are exposed to LLM on repeat basis every day. It looks only normal that writing done with or without LLMs tend to converge to the same style.
Screen time is totally broken. Produces numbers hilariously wrong. Again a problem for people with kids.
Spotlight searching on macOS just breaks and forcing a rescan can fix it for a while, but it can break pretty faster after randomly.
If you do not see this as teh problem with Tim Cook then I have a gold bar to give you.
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/07/tim-cook-gift-to-trump/
I want ethical companies that grow because of good products, not because of market capture and bribes.
Then avoid becoming a customer/user of companies that grew because of market capture or bribes.
Now obviously, this only covers a small portion of Tim's reign over apple, but is it not fair to say you'd have a different overall view of his tenure if he was an honest businessman and ate the tarrifs like he was supposed to, probably tanking the stock in the process?
Where can I get my gold bar, please?
I was doing Apple support since 1995, I saw how they changed.
I mean, they certainly would never have given Trump a gold bar to forgive this case now, would they?
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/21/tech/apple-sued-antitrust-doj...
This will never exist.
We should want regulated and lawful companies, which we don't have right now.
Did I say that?
I guess many of the people who share their critiques are people who never really liked where Cook was gonna take Apple (and took) to in the first place.
I want to buy from a company whose goal is to make the best products, not make the most money.
You optimize differently for each.
But so has the rest of FAANG. Did Tim Cook really overperform?
Growth compared to 2011:
Apple ~8×
Microsoft ~13–14×
Google ~10×
Facebook* ~10–15×
Now hardware gross revenue is about 3x the services - but the profit margin is much higher on services.
Apple don't break out the numbers so it's difficult to know how much of that service revenue is tied to people owning Apple hardware and how much is independent ( like Apple Music or Apple TV ).
> Microsoft's market capitalization in 2011 was approximately $220 Billion
Those are post iPhone numbers being multiplied.
Also, arguably, iPhones made everyone else on that list stupid rich and drove insane demands for their products. Instagram and Snapchats fortunes need more than Windows Mobile phones ever gave. Apples rising tide helped the web giants.
I'm not a fanboy by any means, just looking at the numbers.
> All that matters seems to be "did the line go up?"
Exactly.
You can't repair your device.
They're intently focused on locking you in as much as possible, making it hard to leave, and not by making such a good product.
They try their best to force app developers to pay them their 30% tax, even when the devs brought the customers in from elsewhere.
They, for so long, refused to support RCS and downgraded the messaging experience with android.
They were trying to intentionally downgrade SPAs so people again need to go through their app store.
Anything I missed?
They make good hardware, yes, but I can't support them as a company.
The constantly sinking level of software quality. They make excellent hardware ruined by crappy software.
Yeah, like you I lived in Linux for years and delighted in the freedom to recompile my video driver with every upgrade, but then I had kids, and a life to live, and found that accepting some limitations of the excellent OSX was a worthwhile tradeoff. Today I couldn't tell you what I'm missing that can't be fixed with a 30s Google + `brew install`.
And complaints about default choices, or limitations with easy work arounds, on Hacker News are just weird. No one typing on this message board runs default anything.
Please share specific (legitimate) gripes and win my sympathy.
Apple appears to be chasing Microsoft down the toilet. Its exhumation of the circa-2002 "transparent" UI fad is one example, coupled with other baffling UI regressions.
Mac OS examples: Apple removed the "get new mail" button from the Mail toolbar. So all those millions of people who log into their bank accounts and are told to check their mail for 2FA are left hunting for it or simply waiting for Mail's next poll. There's no excuse for removing one of the most-used buttons from a sparsely-populated toolbar. What is driving this attack on usefulness? It used to be Jony Ive.
Then take a look at Music. Apple moved the playback controls from the empty area at the top of the screen to the bottom of the content browser, and made them "transparent." Now they overlap and blend with the thumbnails and text in the content browser.
Garbage like this is scattered all over the UI now. I needn't beat the dead horse of the hated System Preferences panel here.
Meanwhile, Spotlight still doesn't show you WHERE it found stuff, and neither does the inappropriately-named Finder. "Location" or "path" isn't even an OPTION in the column headers you can add to the results list. So you can't discriminate between identically-named files or irrelevant volumes or backups as you scan the list to find what you're looking for, or sort by location.
The removal of Launchpad is another blunder. Apple didn't even replace it with anything. So now you have no comparable way to group your applications.
"Center Stage" is a profoundly defective POS that ruins my family's weekly Zooms by randomly swooping the camera view around and cropping one of my parents out, when they're sitting side by side. Utter trash that there's no universal way to disable, shoved on all users by default without permission. That's Apple today.
Windows 11 is perfectly cromulent. I don't prefer it, but with WSL, it's like a slow almost-MacOS. The anger over the transparency is I guess personal, I genuinely don't notice it. I certainly haven't stumbled over it. (I might have changed a setting?)
> Then take a look at Music. Apple moved the playback controls from the empty area at the top of the screen to the bottom of the content browser, and made them "transparent." Now they overlap and blend with the thumbnails and text in the content browser.
I just hit Play and the music comes on. I'm not crazy about their search, but it's not that big a deal. The Podcasts app now... THAT is a complaint I can get behind. I would use something else but for the integration with the car.
> Spotlight and Launchpad
Spotlight seems good enough to me. I tried Alfred and Raycast, but never used any of the helper functionalities. Just used it to open apps and files.
I never used Launchpad. I do forget the names of apps, but I just open Applications.
>"Center Stage" is a profoundly defective POS
https://www.reddit.com/r/Zoom/comments/1i0j9db/how_do_i_disa...
I do appreciate that your list is specific, but I think these complaints fall well short of "crappy" :).
Also: I don't use Mail.app.
Take a photo on your iPhone and wait for it to sync on your Mac. You might get lucky and it syncs nearly immediately (which is still typically a minute or so, even if your phone and Mac are on the same network and have gigabit internet). But you won't know when. And it might not be immediate.
Both sides will tell you they're up to date. You can't force a sync. They'll be synced when Photos is ready, not you. And if that's ten minutes or more later? So be it. You'll just deal with it.