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Record $38B Debt Sale Nears for Oracle-Tied Data Centers

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-23/record-38-billion-debt-sale-nears-for-oracle-t...
1•zerosizedweasle•1m ago•0 comments

Populism Fast and Slow

https://josephheath.substack.com/p/populism-fast-and-slow
1•colonCapitalDee•2m ago•0 comments

AI discovers a 5x faster MoE load balancing algorithm than human experts

https://adrs-ucb.notion.site/moe-load-balancing
2•melissapan•10m ago•0 comments

How to get the best night's sleep: what the science says

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03148-8
3•wjb3•14m ago•1 comments

Design Driven development in open source software

https://blog.discourse.org/2025/10/how-we-built-horizon-with-design-driven-development/
2•jbv9901•18m ago•0 comments

OpenEvidence Raises $200M for a ChatGPT for Medicine

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/business/dealbook/openevidence-fundraising-chatgpt-medicine.html
2•bookofjoe•21m ago•1 comments

Optimization by Decoded Quantum Interferometry

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09527-5
1•westurner•23m ago•1 comments

Epic to end startup program that took position in ambient scribe

https://www.axios.com/pro/health-tech-deals/2025/10/23/epic-ending-workshop-health-startups-abridge
2•brandonb•27m ago•0 comments

If your random seed is 42 I will come to your office

https://blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/if-your-random-seed-is-42-i-will
2•sebg•32m ago•0 comments

Apple loses UK App Store monopoly case, penalty might near $2B

https://9to5mac.com/2025/10/23/apple-loses-uk-app-store-monopoly-case-penalty-might-near-2-billion/
15•thelastgallon•33m ago•0 comments

Built-In Batteries: A Daft Idea with an Uncertain Future

https://hackaday.com/2025/10/23/built-in-batteries-a-daft-idea-with-an-uncertain-future/
2•WaluigiBSOD•35m ago•0 comments

The new AI EAs: Smarter, faster, still not as good as the real thing

https://www.geekwire.com/2025/the-new-ai-executive-assistants-smarter-faster-still-not-as-good-as...
2•awwstn•35m ago•0 comments

Can you predict when Lou Bega's greatest hit, Mambo No. 5, was released?

https://yawpr.substack.com/p/project-a-little-bit-of-reverend
2•sebg•36m ago•0 comments

Fleshmap (2008)

https://www.bewitched.com/fleshmap.html
1•stared•37m ago•0 comments

Media Station X – create own streaming service

https://msx.benzac.de/info/
1•bfoks•37m ago•0 comments

The next biggest European startup will be Urban Pulse

2•Afonso-Peralta•38m ago•0 comments

Dots and Boxes

https://www.math.ucla.edu/~tom/Games/dots&boxes.html
2•gregsadetsky•39m ago•1 comments

Ask HN: Would you use daily check-ins to build your dev brand?

https://devcue.io
1•dlukdsza•40m ago•1 comments

100 Lost Species, a journey through extinction

https://www.100lostspecies.com/
3•ChrisArchitect•42m ago•0 comments

MemMachine

https://memmachine.ai
1•rbartelme•42m ago•1 comments

The Victorian Web

https://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/index.html
3•lr0•42m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Efficient LLM fine-tuning with 65% less VRAM without quantization

https://github.com/Mega4alik/peftee
2•anuarsh•43m ago•0 comments

Silicon-Optimized Inference Snaps

https://canonical.com/blog/canonical-releases-inference-snaps
1•radeeyate•44m ago•0 comments

Federal Agents Plan a Crackdown in the San Francisco Bay Area

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/22/us/border-patrol-san-francisco-bay-area.html
2•untangle•45m ago•3 comments

AuditCodex – Your AI-Powered Code and Security Auditor

https://github.com/kg6-oss/kg6-codex
1•eisax•46m ago•1 comments

Best practices for text-focused websites (2020)

https://seirdy.one/posts/2020/11/23/website-best-practices/
3•MinimalAction•48m ago•0 comments

Memory Maps (MMAP) Deliver 25x Faster File Access in Go

https://info.varnish-software.com/blog/how-memory-maps-mmap-deliver-25x-faster-file-access-in-go
7•ingve•49m ago•0 comments

Two days after OpenAI's Atlas, Microsoft launches a nearly identical AI browser

https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/23/two-days-after-openais-atlas-microsoft-launches-a-nearly-identi...
6•skx001•53m ago•1 comments

HIV infection reprogrammes CD4T cells for quiescence and entry into latency

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-025-02128-y
2•PaulHoule•55m ago•0 comments

Tente, a Spanish Lego Competitor in the 70s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tente_(toy)
3•wslh•55m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

What happened to Apple's legendary attention to detail?

https://blog.johnozbay.com/what-happened-to-apples-attention-to-detail.html
500•Bogdanp•3h ago

Comments

x3n0ph3n3•3h ago
The current CEO doesn't care like the previous one did. Culture of excellence was replaced with financialization.
malux85•3h ago
He died :(
jll29•3h 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•3h ago
I installed iOS 26 the other day and it seems like a practical joke with how visually terrible it is.
WA•3h 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•3h ago
I like it
rwmj•3h ago
He died in 2011.
abirch•3h ago
In order to say no you have to have a burning yes.

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

layer8•2h ago
What’s a burning yes?
reliabilityguy•3h 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•1h 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…
1970-01-01•3h 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•2h 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.
throitallaway•2h 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.
recursive•2h ago
I don't think that's really the point of the CEO being a power user. Although Apple's software QA is definitely in question too.
al_borland•1h 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.
linguae•2h 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.

NexRebular•2h 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/

swiftcoder•2h ago
It's a start, for sure
Rover222•3h ago
Yesterday I had annoying bugs on my iPhone, my Apple Watch, and on the apple store website. Incredible.
FredPret•3h 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.

readthenotes1•3h ago
"Straigth and Narrow of Quality"

We see what you did there!

FredPret•3h ago
I should've typed fewer but better words!
otterdude•3h ago
naw dude we gotta get these quarters numbers up by degrading quality on windows/chromecast. It just reeks of incompetence and insincerity
trhway•2h 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.

ethbr1•2h 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.

baggachipz•2h 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•2h 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•2h ago
I would be totally fine with bi-yearly releases.
troupo•2h 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).

baggachipz•1h ago
I would argue the stock market is forcing them to do all that. Line must go up, but it's not sustainable. Like you said, they ship later and later after the announcement. At some point they're going to have to disappoint or move the goalposts.
troupo•1h ago
Stock market is responding to Apple behavior. Stock market was perfectly okay with Apple not doing yearly releases before the iPhone. The stock market was perfectly okay with Apple not doing yearly releases of MacOS during the iPhone era. The stock market was totally okay with Apple not doing yearly (or predictable) hardware upgrades on anything but iPhone.

The stock market can easily be taught anything. And Jobs didn't even care about stock market, or stock holders (Apple famously didn't even pay dividends for a very long time), or investors (regularly ignoring any and all calls and advice from the largest investors).

You need political will and taste to say a thousand nos to every yes. None of the senior citizens in charge of Apple have that.

FredPret•1h ago
I owned the tiniest sliver of a fraction of a percent of Apple, but I sold my shares due to a lack of technical leadership.
prewett•49m ago
Lack of technical leadership?! I guess I must be missing something, because from the outside, they've got best CPU, the best battery life, the best VR system, the best privacy, and they seem to have gotten Intel's WiFi chips to work (which Intel couldn't). Probably the watch has some top-notch features, but I am not at all familiar with it. They also have a bunch of features that are unmatched by competitors due to their vertical integration (e.g. handoff, iOS apps on macOS, etc.). Maybe leadership are just a bunch of putzes who are only being saved by great engineers, but it seems unlikely.
carlosjobim•1h ago
Stock value has no meaning at all. What matters is revenue and profit. If Apple doesn't release new devices every year, then they will still sell last year's model. What are customers supposed to purchase instead? A PC? Nobody is going to turn down a new Mac just because the model is 1,2, 3 or 5 years old.
carlosjobim•1h 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.

derefr•1h ago
> They could easily wait longer between releasing devices.

They could, but then they wouldn't be a trillion dollar company. They'd be a mere $800bn company, at best. ;)

carlosjobim•1h ago
New releases do not drive increased sales as much as people think. Especially if the new releases are lacking in quality.

Not many consumers go out to buy an Apple device because the new one has been released. They go out to buy a new phone or new computer because their old one gave out and will just take the Apple device that is for sale.

derefr•19m ago
The yearly cadence ensures that there's always a "this year's model" to upgrade corporations+institutions to in volume through the Apple Business Leasing program.

That's also why Apple bothers to do the silent little spec-bump releases: it gives Business Leasing corporate buyers a new SKU to use to justify staying on the upgrade treadmill for their 10k devices for another cycle (rather than holding off for even a single cycle because "it's the same SKU.")

kyralis•2h 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".

ZeroConcerns•3h 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•3h ago
Got eaten by the shareholders and PROFIT
gruez•3h ago
Apple didn't have shareholders and profit before?
Mountain_Skies•3h 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•3h 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.
gruez•2h ago
But Apple's margin has basically been flat for the past decade, and rose to that level under Jobs?

https://media.ycharts.com/charts/441687ba735392d10a1a8058120...

ortusdux•3h 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

readthenotes1•3h ago
Or as Parkinson wrote many decades before, injelitance
no_wizard•3h 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•2h 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.
this_user•3h 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•3h 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•3h 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."
morshu9001•2h ago
Idk how to fix this, but the problem with interviews by rank and file employees is they have to prioritize standardization and objectivity over finding brilliant applicants. It only makes sure the applicant knows how to code rather than lying on his/her resume. I think Jobs said something like, B players will hire B and C players.

When I interviewed at a smaller company, someone high up interviewed me last. I passed everything on paper afaik, but he didn't think I was the right person for some reason. Which is fine for a small company.

tobyantes•3h 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.
moralestapia•3h 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.

morshu9001•2h ago
One thing is Linus held out against the C++ crap all the way until Rust became a viable alternative.

I wish he'd bless a certain Linux distro for PCs so we can have some default. Current default is kinda Ubuntu, but they've made some weird decisions in the past. Seems like he'd make reasonable choices and not freak out over pointless differences like systemd.

no_wizard•2h ago
>One thing that came up was a very candid comment about how "we should be able to tell someone 'that is just stupid'

You can tell someone their idea is substandard without inferring their stupid, which is generally taken to be an insult. Tact in communication does matter. I don't think anyone needs to say "that is just stupid" to get a point across.

I've had plenty of tough conversations with colleagues where it was paramount to filter through ideas, and determining viable ones was really important. Not once did anyone have to punch at someone's intelligence to make the point. Even the simple "Thats a bad idea" is better than that.

>whenever the situation warrants it

Which will of course be up to interpretation by just about everyone. Thats the problem with so called "honest"[0] conversation. By using better language you can avoid this problem entirely without demeaning someone. Communication is a skill that be learned.

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

Linus took a sabbatical in 2018 to work on his communication and lack of emotional empathy. He's had to make changes or he absolutely risked losing the respect of his peers and others he respected. He has worked on improving his communication.

To follow Linus as an example, would be to work on communication and emotional empathy. Not disregard your peers.

[0]: Most often, I find people who are adamant about this line of thinking tend to want an excuse to be rude without accountability.

Pannoniae•2h ago
Sometimes, people do need a metaphorical kick in the butt though. Of course, that doesn't mean behaving like a jerk, and certainly not on a regular basis, but if you value politeness and conflict avoidance over avoiding actual problems, the culture in your environment will quickly deteroriate towards no one taking responsibility for anything. Why would anyone do that if they can't even be called out for messing something up, yet alone being held accountable?

In all of those projects and organsiations which value respectful language and inclusivity and all sorts of non-results-oriented crap, not much usually gets done. This is how you get design-by-committee lowest common denominator slop.

And even if you don't agree with what I'm saying here, "avoid criticising people" quickly turns into "avoid criticising their ideas because they might feel offended". There was a recent HN thread about AI-written pull requests and how people have problems with them, because tactfully rejecting 10k lines of pure bullshit is very hard without making the submitter upset. Guess what, if they were allowed to say "no, you aren't going to be merging slop you can't even explain" the average code quality would skyrocket and the product would be greatly improved.

moralestapia•2h ago
I've been in social circles where one can just say "that is just stupid" without that being a big deal, as well as others where people tend to write essays like yours to get a simple argument across.

I prefer the former by a lot, but of course you're free to spend your time in the latter.

derefr•25m ago
> You can tell someone their idea is substandard without inferring their stupid, which is generally taken to be an insult. Tact in communication does matter. I don't think anyone needs to say "that is just stupid" to get a point across.

What's wrong with calling an idea stupid? A smart person can have stupid ideas. (Or, more trivially, the person delivering a stupid idea might just be a messenger, rather than the person who originally thought of the idea.)

Though, to be clear, saying that an idea is stupid does carry the implication that someone who often thinks of such ideas is, themselves, likely to be stupid. An idea is not itself a mind that can have (a lack of) intelligence; so "that's stupid" does stand for a longer thought — something like "that is the sort of idea that only a stupid person would think of."

But saying that an idea is stupid does not carry the implication that someone is stupid just for providing that one idea. Any more than calling something you do "rude" when you fail to observe some kind of common etiquette of the society you grew up in, implies that you are yourself a "rude person". One is a one-time judgement of an action; the other is a judgement of a persistent trait. The action-judgements can add up as inductive evidence of the persistent trait; but a single action-judgement does not a trait-judgement make.

---

A philosophical tangent:

But what both of those things do — calling an idea stupid, or an action rude — is to attach a certain amount of social approbation or shame to the action/idea, beyond just the amount you'd feel when you hear all the objective reasons the action/idea is bad. Where the intended response to that "communication of shame" is for the shame to be internalized, and to backpropagate and downweight whatever thinking process produced the action/idea within the person. It's intended as a lever for social operant conditioning.

Now, that being said, some people externalize blame — i.e. they experience "shaming messaging" not by feeling shame, but by feeling enraged that someone would attempt to shame them. The social-operant-conditioning lever of shame does not work on these people. Insofar as such people exist in a group, this destabilizes the usefulness of shame as a tool in such a group.

(A personal hypothesis I have is that internalization of blame is something that largely correlates with a belief in an objective morality — and especially, an objective morality that can potentially be better-known/understood by others than oneself. And therefore, as Western society has become decreasingly religious, shame as a social tool has "burned out" in how reliably it can be employed in Western society in arbitrary social contexts. Yet Western society has not adapted fully to this shift yet; which is why so many institutions that expect shame to "work" as a tool — e.g. the democratic system, re: motivating people to vote; or e.g. the school system, re: bullying — are crashing and burning.)

latexr•29m ago
> "we should be able to tell someone 'that is just stupid' whenever the situation warrants it".

That’s a great way to make the other person defensive and ensure everything stays the same or worse. It’s not that difficult to be tactful in communication in a way which allows you to get your point across in the same number of words and makes the other person thankful for the correction.

Plus, it saves face. It’s not that rare for someone who blatantly say something is stupid to then be proven wrong. If you’re polite and reasonable about it, when you are wrong it won’t be a big deal.

One thing I noticed about people who pride themselves in being “brutally honest” is that more often than not they get more satisfaction from being brutal than from being honest, and are incredibly thin-skinned when the “honest brutality” is directed at them.

> The Linux kernel would be absolutely trash if Linus were not allowed to be Linus.

I don’t understand why people keep using Torvalds as an example/excuse to be rude. Linus realised he had been a jerk all those years and that that was the wrong attitude. He apologised and vowed to do better, and the sky hasn’t fallen nor has Linux turned to garbage.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/linus-torvalds-apolo...

MeetingsBrowser•3h 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.

torstenvl•2h ago
Virtually everyone is pushing to welcome people who are demonstrably not qualified.
MeetingsBrowser•2h ago
This is so off from my experience in the world I think we may be talking about entirely different situations.

In what context is virtually everyone pushing to hire demonstrably unqualified people?

tick_tock_tick•45m ago
Literally every single one. This country has been tearing itself apart with how divisive DEI and "targets" for hiring are.
kossTKR•3h 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.

sholladay•2h 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.

wpm•1h ago
This implies that no young people can get past the gate.

Sure, they lack wisdom, but that doesn't mean they aren't smart, it just means they're young.

Gatekeeping doesn't have to mean "Don't hire anyone under 35" it means "Don't hire people who are bozos" and "don't hire people who don't give a shit"

FredPret•1h ago
But do monocultures always stagnate?

If Apple was made up of only top-end engineers led by a quality-obsessed maniac, would they put out better or worse products?

Of course, not everyone can follow this philosophy, but they don't have to, and most don't want to anyway.

smith7018•2h 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•2h 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_wizard•2h 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.

anonymous908213•2h 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.

latexr•40m ago
I played MTG on and off for decades, and the Final Fantasy pre-release was one of the best experiences I’ve had in the community. I met several people who had played MTG and stopped but went back for that set because they loved FF. Plus, it fits. For fans of both franchises, seeing how they ported mechanics was itself part of the fun. Sure, maybe a Spongebob set is weird, but FF felt like a labor of love in many areas.

Also, it became the best selling set of all time even before it was out. Which isn’t an indicator of quality, for sure, but it does show Wizards understands something about their market.

otterdude•3h 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-1000•3h 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.

joecool1029•3h ago
> I don't know, Linus Torvalds was kind of notorious before 2010 for gatekeeping in not-so-constructive ways.

What changed in 2010?

gjsman-1000•3h ago
Nothing. He was toxic for almost a decade after that.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/linus-torvalds-apolo...

gwbas1c•3h ago
Everybody jumped into technology for fat paychecks long before 2010
heresie-dabord•3h ago
Legends are always part fiction. And corporations are not meritocracies.
random3•3h 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•2h 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•2h 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.

ahmeneeroe-v2•3h ago
I actually love a ton of iOS 26's new features, but wow is it buggy.
rcarmo•3h ago
He's dead, Jim.
jm4•3h 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_in•3h ago
Embrace Android
dlivingston•2h ago
Things don't seem much better over there, esp. with Google removing the ability to sideload apps.
bitpush•1h ago
As opposed to iPhones were you can .. sideload apps? Your criticism is fair, but not really relevant to the conversation here.

OP was talking about design languages

comrade1234•3h 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.

nomel•3h 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.

comrade1234•3h 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.
nomel•1h ago
I have my display scaled a bit smaller than default, which is probably why I never see that. That's....so stupid.

Here's a "workaround" that might help [1]. It entirely excludes the notch area from use.

[1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/460903/601283

achandlerwhite•3h ago
On the laptop it doesn't cut into the normal screen ratio. So it's basically free pixels minus the notch.
stevenkkim•3h 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•2h 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•1h 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

makerofthings•3h 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•3h 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•3h 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•3h 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.

jasonjmcghee•3h 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.

bn-l•59m ago
They don’t have automated tests for this? Very weird
methuselah_in•3h ago
Apple died somehow with Steve
praptak•3h 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.

reliabilityguy•3h 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•3h 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.
SoftTalker•3h 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•3h ago
Is this a rhetorical question? Obviously Steve Jobs died.
cmckn•3h 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•3h 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•3h 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

wingworks•1h 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•3h 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•3h 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)
kossTKR•2h 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•2h 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•2h 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... :(

bn-l•55m ago
Modern day witch trial.
rckt•2h 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•2h ago
He also became disillusioned by people with a different skin colour to him, so no thanks.
92582028072553•1h ago
I'm already sold on it, no need to advertise it further.
al_borland•1h 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•3h 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•3h 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•3h ago
Absolutely despise this "Josefin Sans" font face. Illegible.
pastureofplenty•59m ago
Kinda ironic that a post about attention to detail was so hard to read. Why is the font size so small?
hexbin010•55m 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•3h ago
That fucking iMesssage screenshot lmao, this is insane

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

comboy•3h 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•2h 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?
comboy•55m 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•3h 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.

throitallaway•2h 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.

bigyabai•2h 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.
therein•2h ago
They still do. My m1, m1max and m4max Macbook Pros all build a positive static charge. It isn't even something that renders it "returnable" because I observed it on every single Macbook in the last 4-5 years so I just assume that's just how Macbook Pros are now.
jacobolus•2h ago
This hasn't changed in at least 2 decades: I was getting zapped by Apple metal laptops circa 2004. But I have never encountered this problem when using a grounded plug.

It was also a lot worse for me when plugged into outlets in an old house in Mexico, especially when my bare feet were touching the terracotta floor tiles; it's not really an issue in a recently re-wired house in California with a wood floor, using the same laptops, power strips, etc.

If you are having this issue and you currently plug a 2-pronged plug into a grounded outlet, try using Apple's 3-pronged plug instead, and I expect it would go away. If you don't have grounded outlets, then that's a bit more complicated to solve.

trallnag•42m ago
Is there any laptop with a metal body out there that does not have this issue? I've had two RedmiBook by Xiaomi and both has that vibrating electric feeling to them when plugged in.
drum55•2h ago
That’s nothing to do with static electricity, it’s capacitive coupling through the safety capacitors in the power supply. The chassis sits at 90vac or so as a result, it’s not a safety issue it’s FCC compliance for emitted noise.
ash_091•1h ago
Is this generally true for laptops / phones?

I've often wondered why I can tell by touch whether a device is charging or not from the slight "vibration" sensation I get when gently touching the case.

hex4def6•39m ago
For ungrounded / 2-prong outlet devices, yeah.

It's often noticeable if you have a point contact of metal against your skin; sharp edge / screw / speaker grill, etc. Once you have decent coupling between your body and the laptop, you won't feel the tingle / zap.

They're called Y-caps if you want to delve deeper into them and their use in power supplies.

swiftcoder•2h ago
If you use the 3-prong version of the power adapter to connect to a grounded outlet, this problem goes away. Of course, Apple doesn't actually sell a 3-prong plug for their charger in Europe... so us lucky folks in the EU have to get a 3rd party one off the internet
jen20•1h ago
Yes, they do. [1] for Italian outlets, [2] for many of the others. I'm sure I don't need to continue.

[1]: https://www.apple.com/it/shop/product/mw2n3ci/a/prolunga-per...

[2]: https://www.apple.com/fr/shop/product/mw2n3z/a/câble-d’exten...

theodric•6m ago
I suspect what they meant is that there isn't an official Schuko nub that slides onto the brick and lets you hang it directly from the socket rather than carrying an extra meter of cable around. There is a BS1363 one, and those are only legit feasible in a grounded configuration (although I guess you could use a plastic ground spade to lift the child protection slider inside the socket if you were a particularly unpleasant engineer). Nice for those of us in British-adjacent countries.
NexRebular•2h ago
I miss the Powerbook G3 series. That was some fantastically modular design.
kbolino•2h 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.

wingworks•1h ago
I only have 2 USB-C ports, and most of the time I have nothing plugged in (but power). Sometimes ethernet USB-C when moving large files.
ndiddy•1h ago
The transition era was certainly annoying, but now that it's over I think the Mac experience is objectively worse. My PC laptop has 2 USB-C ports that can be used for charging, display, 40 Gbps transfer, etc., just like my Macbook Air. The difference is that the PC also has 2 USB-A ports and an HDMI port. This means that I'm able to plug in a flash drive or connect an external display without having to remember to bring a dongle with me.
kbolino•42m ago
I largely agree that PCs have caught up feature-wise, but because they took longer to get there, I still have a couple crappy USB-C ports on PCs that are otherwise fine.

The problem with the 2 USB-C ports on modern PC laptops is that one of them pretty much has to be reserved for the charger, whereas the MBP has a MagSafe port that you can charge with instead. So it really only feels like you have one USB-C port and the other ports are just there as a consolation. That might work out to roughly equal, but I don't think it leaves the Mac off worse. I don't hate the dongles so much though.

It wouldn't have hurt to have some USB-A and HDMI on the MBP--the Minis can pull it off, so clearly the hardware is capable--but more (Thunderbolt) USB-C would still be the best option IMO. USB-A (definitely) and HDMI (probably) will eventually be relics someday, even if they are here for a little while longer.

philistine•41m ago
Can those USB-C ports charge your battery if it is completely empty?
ndiddy•28m ago
Yes, they're the only charging ports on the laptop.
wslh•1h ago
Without trying to be pedantic, not all USB-C ports on Apple computers support Thunderbolt.
kbolino•57m ago
I haven't encountered this, but I've also only used the Apple Silicon devices. This might explain why there are so few ports, though: Thunderbolt is basically PCIe and has AFAIK direct lanes to the CPU; more full-featured ports = more PCIe lanes = much more complexity/expense.
wslh•47m ago
The difference is in the desktop systems. That's where there are USB-C ports without Thunderbolt (e.g. Mac Mini).
kbolino•38m ago
Damn, you're right. I have an M1 Mac Mini and both ports are Thunderbolt. I recall, and Wikipedia corroborates, that the M2 Mac Mini could come with either two or four ports, but all were Thunderbolt. Now though, the M4 ones, besides getting an awful facelift, also seem to have sacrificed one Thunderbolt port (and both USB-A ports?!) to "gain" two non-Thunderbolt USB-C ports. What a terrible trade IMO.
antod•1h ago
Didn't they have some issues when you tried charging from the left side ports? Eg overheating and throttling etc.
PlunderBunny•1h ago
There are some models of MacBook Pro where one side has more 'thermal headroom' than the other side. I have one of those models, and I can't remember which side it is.
stetrain•2h ago
Most of what you're talking about is from MacBooks of 5+ years ago on a completely different processor architecture.
icedchai•2h ago
I find the keyboards terrible, even the modern ones. I much preferred the 2006-2007 MacBook Pro keyboards.
IshKebab•2h 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?

SkyeCA•44m ago
USB-C only is still a nuisance to this very day and remains the thing I hate most about my Macbook. Without fail there is never an adapter to be found when I need it.
AlexandrB•2h 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.

ayaros•2h 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.
righthand•48m 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?!??

AceJohnny2•36m 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.

gettingoverit•2h 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•1h ago
Was there a Gateway that did better?
tavavex•57m 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.

stevage•51m ago
Apple produced at least three mice that were very different and terrible in different ways. Their laptops are good, but don't waste your time defending their other peripherals.
tavavex•44m ago
I've barely ever tried them, but I've never liked the shaping of any that I have held, and I don't think that the touchpad addition justified the discomfort that it causes in all other use cases. That being said, the whole "Apple added the charging port on the bottom to be evil and prevent you from using the mouse" thing had become such an entrenched internet fable over the last decade that it's impossible for me to come by it and not comment on it. I'll clarify that no one but the designers themselves knows the original intention, but since it's the exact same design as the AA model, just with internal changes, it seems like an open-and-shut case.
cwillu•20m ago
“I'll clarify that no one but the designers themselves knows the original intention, but since it's the exact same design as the AA model, just with internal changes, it seems like an open-and-shut case.”

“Legendary attention to detail”

Indeed, it is pretty open-and-shut.

ahartmetz•24m ago
Apple's unwillingness to admit that one button isn't enough is legendary. They added a fucking multi-touch area to the fucking mouse because that's apparently easier to use and more efficient. It's funny as hell.
theodric•23m ago
There was a third-party battery module[1] for the original AA Magic Mouse that would allow it to charge wirelessly, a feature that Apple somehow still has not managed to steal!

[1] https://techpp.com/2011/04/19/mobee-magic-charger-for-magic-...

anothernewdude•52m ago
Also they leak charge onto the case.
combyn8tor•22m 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?

rgovostes•6m ago
> No longer providing updates to the device after just a few years when it's still perfectly fine.

This is a weird one to complain about because Apple leads the industry in providing software updates. iOS 26 supports devices back to 2019. And they just released a security update for the iPhone 6S, a model released a full decade ago, last month.

The oldest Samsung flagship you can get Android 16 for is their 2023 model (Galaxy S23), and for Google the oldest is the 2021 model (Pixel 6).

PaulHoule•2h 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.

qmr•1h ago
It is catastrophic if you have older devices.

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

linguae•2h 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....

qmr•1h ago
Tried iTerm?
stevage•50m ago
Terminal app is terrible, use iTerm if you possibly can.
coolsunglasses•20m ago
*ghostty
threetonesun•1h 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.
qmr•1h 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.

NaomiLehman•1h ago
That's true, but macOS is still further from the current equivalent of Windows than it ever was.
combyn8tor•18m ago
The Apple gods know what's best for you. They're just trying to protect you from yourself.
latexr•1h 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

mvdtnz•1h 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.
KerrAvon•40m 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•33m 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.
bsenftner•1h 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'.
philistine•43m ago
We know each and every person who worked on the Mac because of projects like folklore.org. Which one are you?
AceJohnny2•38m ago
as his user profile indicates: Blake Senftner. I don't see him mentioned on folklore.org, but that doesn't mean he didn't participate in some way.
mrcwinn•59m 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_zhang•45m 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.

KerrAvon•44m ago
What are your actual complaints? And have you tried the trash fire that is Android?
rezonant•32m ago
Do you think they just got a smartphone for the first time a few months ago?
alejo•42m ago
Where are you located at?
jeffbee•19m ago
You're not sure if anyone on HN is more than 14 years old? I mean, I feel you, but the odds are...
iamdamian•3h ago
We need a new Snow Leopard.
sillywalk•2h ago
"The myth and reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard"

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

iamdamian•43m 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.
ayaros•3h 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.

Noaidi•2h 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•1h 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.

kossTKR•1h ago
There's tons of posts on reddit documenting the fact that everyone is making mistakes constantly with their keyboards for a few years, especially the.constant.dots.everyone.makes - they worked ok before, it's honestly almost comical how bad it is now.
constantcrying•1h 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.

derefr•55m ago
What maps app do you use on Android instead of Google Maps?
n8cpdx•1h 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_borland•2h 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.
morshu9001•3h 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•2h 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

morshu9001•2h 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•3h 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•3h 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
LeoPanthera•3h 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.

AlexandrB•2h 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?

LeoPanthera•1h 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.

n8cpdx•1h 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•3h ago
Many of the images/screenshots on this web page do not show up for me.
constantcrying•3h 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•3h 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.
1970-01-01•2h ago
The 'Unknown Knowns' quadrant (i.e. bugs) that they'll get around to fixing any day now.
computerdork•2h 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•3h 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•3h 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.

ChrisArchitect•3h ago
https://www.lovefrom.com/

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

indigodaddy•2h 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??

pmarreck•2h 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!

bigyabai•2h 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.

jiehong•2h 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.

Andrex•2h 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.
ponector•1h ago
I never had an issue connecting Bluetooth to the car. Android auto, apple car play on the other side is quite unreliable.
barrell•2h 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•2h 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•2h 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.

lbhdc•1h 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?

8200_unit•2h 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•2h 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.
lastofthemojito•2h 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).

linguae•2h 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•2h 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.

ndiddy•1h 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•2h 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.
MountDoom•2h 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•2h 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

hinkley•1h 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.
SoftTalker•1h ago
I always assumed it was just which army captured them.
scrlk•1h 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

antegamisou•1h 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•2h 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•1h 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.

lastofthemojito•1h ago
Man, I love OmniGraffle. I guess design tools have generally improved over the years, but a couple of decades ago colleagues thought I was some kind of wizard for being able to easily whip up nice finite state machine diagrams in OmniGraffle.
afandian•2h 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.

Gud•2h 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.

almostgotcaught•1h 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.

lastofthemojito•1h 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.
apatheticonion•1h 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

underdeserver•1h ago
It's not okay, because the experience is not good, and it can be.
cardanome•1h 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.

philistine•36m 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•1h 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.

redbell•2h ago
Yes.. Too bad we ended up here :(, It's Apple's Software Quality Crisis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075
mnls•2h 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•2h 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.

alsetmusic•2h 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.

ethbr1•2h 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.

ponector•1h ago
I remember how date math is special there. A simple question: 30-01-2024 plus one month - what is the result date?
hshdhdhehd•55m 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.
JKCalhoun•41m 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•2h 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•2h 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•53m 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•2h 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•2h 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

afandian•2h 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.

latexr•49m ago
I don’t think any UX professional is confused about that. It’s simply a dark pattern.
derefr•49m 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!"

keyringlight•17m 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.
prometheus76•2h ago
They fired most of the UI/UX team soon after Steve Jobs died.
yilugurlu•2h 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•2h ago
Does anyone remember Jony Ive's first flat redesign of iOS? It was also criticized and had growing pains.
garbagecoder•2h 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•2h ago
It now takes four clicks to delete an app on an iPhone, and four clicks and a swipe on an iPad.
al_borland•2h 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.

combyn8tor•2h 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.

hexbin010•1h ago
Wow that's...a lot. Are they bugs...or malicious compliance/checkbox implementation?
derefr•57m 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?

Pfhortune•2h 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•1h 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_go•1h 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•1h ago
> What happened to Apple's legendary attention to detail?

It was pancreatic cancer IIRC.

busymom0•1h 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•1h 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•1h 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•1h 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•1h ago
It's not just attention to detail. They seem to have abandoned some core design principles like visibility/discoverability.
zsoltkacsandi•58m 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.

a-dub•48m 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•46m 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.

Modified3019•43m 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•42m ago
Steve died.

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

theodric•29m 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•11m 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•9m 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•5m 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.