Large tech companies have plenty of engineers to fix bugs, but most of them are on projects trying to 10X things instead of paying down debt.
Apple used to be unique in it's immunity to it, they even shipped an OS update claiming it was only big fixes and not features which is unthinkable these days. Over time there's much less focus on polish from them though.
Given Apple's recent software quality, this would likely just let them ship more bugs.
Why? Who knows. Still remember my first experience after buying an iPad.
And talking about why I wanted a new Apple account... My old account was created with stupid security questions (like, What is your favorite dish) as a second factor, which I believe Apple has long deprecated. I forgot my answers and that blocked certain functionalities. Resetting the security questions requires answering the questions...
There's a strange logic (that I understand is not just at Apple) where if you ship a known bug, it becomes harder next release to fix it… because we already shipped the bug once (twice, etc.).
Apple engineers care though. If they were allowed to (given time, priority), they would love to knock out some of their oldest and most annoying bugs. And I understand that from time to time a bug-fix-only OS release is planned… but things always come up. New hardware, "AI"… who knows.
Maybe someday we'll get another Snow Leopard (bug-fix-only OS release).
Then the planning is made for next years release and they plan for X features, which require Y time and Z engineers, and some mild hand-waving later a schedule is made, and gee would you look at that, there’s no time anywhere for fixing existing bugs. But that’s ok because big rewrite of subsystem is gonna ship next release and it’ll probably make all the bugs invalid, right? Right? Well, it certainly won’t have more bugs, right? Right? Oops…
- All: Contact syncing with Office 365 results in stored birthdays getting moved forward by one day. - macOS: Bluetooth audio stuttering when going in and out of full screen view in a given app such as PowerPoint. - macOS: Unlock using Apple Watch will randomly stop working - macOS: Safari suddenly going out to lunch and taking 30+ seconds to load a page (fixed by force quitting the entire browser).
I did not intentionally look it up. I have an extension installed that tells me domain age whenever I visit a site.
I can report it works fine, needed it to pull up 13 year old emails for me a couple months ago.
I absolutely abhor Apple’s software QC since 2010 but I don’t think a vibe-coded, vibes-based, fantasy, written by AI, with the sheen of numbers and reality is the way to do it, or a net-positive outlet for my frustration. At least on HN.
Why can't we adjust the order of photos in a Shared Photos album?
Text selection is cute, with the magnifying lens. It seems like this should work. Though the rest of the process is unpredictable and The Bad Kind Of Magic: Nick turns self into toad, poof!
REFERENCE - from the site:
* "iOS Text Selection is Pure Chaos"
* You just wanted to move the cursor. Now everything is selected.
* You want to position the cursor at the end of a line. You tap. It selects the last word. You try to grab the handle — it doesn't respond and deselects. You tap again, now it selects the whole sentence. You tap blank space to deselect — nothing. You tap five more times. On the fifth, it selects all. You switch apps hoping the selection disappears. You tap and hold — sometimes text selects, sometimes a menu appears, sometimes nothing. Got a Magic Keyboard? Good luck — trackpad selection just doesn't work half the time, but touching the screen does. Eventually you select all, delete everything, and retype from scratch. Apple has had 17 years to figure out touch text selection. This is where they landed.
The Apple Pay Card icon that changes addresses always gets me. It's not what I would expect it to do.
This has been driving me nuts. The old design was perfect. Who could possibly think this made sense?
https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1mb4lod/is_anyone_else...
Pressing the card should use that card and start the payment. The change payment method should let you choose a different card. This is the objective logical UX.
The fact that it doesn't pay with that card and instead you have to magically click an invisible button is the worst part about that UX. The way you want it is just as bad if not worse.
However, for phones, this just doesn't shake out. The Pixel 10 Pro for instance, has:
* A battery that outlasts the iPhone 16 Pro by an hour
* A slightly better display (higher brightness for outdoor use, higher PPI, higher color accuracy, same refresh rate)
* A better camera for still photography, especially HDR and low-light (although admittedly worse for video)
I think "Airpods" and "iCloud" for Photo Storage are the only parts of the Apple ecosystem I use, so those will be missed.
Maybe Apple didn’t fix them because the bugs never existed in the first place.
This already happened in other markets and lots of people have warned this would happened again but nobody cared.
Now it doesn't matter anymore because Apple is so big that no matter what kind of s#it they do, nothing will hurt their sales, because people are trapped, depend on their stuff and don't have any other options.
Sometimes the picker just refuses to be summoned.
Bluetooth is a mess. File transfers will fail, who knows why? Certainly not macOS. Often I'll just punt to GoogleDrive-TP.
Really random screen wakes.
Left macOS alone for 5s? All your windows have decided to start playing a game of musical desktop, and need 10s to re-arrange themselves back into place, also while sometimes displaying their contents at 2x.
Slack has any number of these; e.g., emoji inside codeblocks are simply corrupted. A number of odd corner cases in URLs will corrupt, and each edit of the message will further corrupt it.
So much of the web is plagued by some framework that, upon any JS exception, will destroy the entire DOM (idk maybe defunct page > no page at all?) and leave you only with "ApplicationError: …".
At this point I'd add "is a motorcycle a car? Is a pedestrian signal a stop light?!" CAPTCHAKCAS to this list, but those are a "feature".
The Mac is funniest of all. I can’t imagine Tahoe drives an upgrade cycle. I buy a Mac for the hardware. Why not refine it? I would love to have a Mac with a better OS. (Don’t troll me about Linux. It’s worse.)
Hm, what’s worse? To be incapable or simply not to care enough?
The AirDrop and Hotspot issues described are spot on. The success rate for these is like 40% to 65% (the latter if you’re lucky). These features require doing a dance of airplane mode, disconnect from WiFi, go to Settings and fiddle with the toggles, etc. When it works, it’s like magic. At other times, it’s a big joke on “it just works”.
Text selection and the trials to just move the cursor quickly and accurately: it’s like Apple has no senior management that cares enough (looking at you, Craig Federighi), no QA (this is obvious truth to every user) and no money to spend on making things better (don’t let the stock prices fool you). FWIW, I know of slower and fiddly ways to move the cursor somewhat (press space, hold and move or place finger on the text, hold and move).
All these issues persist for years or decades because senior management does not care. I can’t think of any other rational explanation.
This one is one of my pet peeves even outside of Apple Pay. My personal opinion is that almost all iconography is just reinventing the wheel. We already have a widely-accepted iconographic vocabulary already understood by a billion people: Chinese characters. The fact that English speakers can't read it is immaterial, because English speakers already can't read the icons we're already using. Using Chinese iconography in all languages will dramatically increase the legibility of the icons we use in apps.
(Or, we could just put regular text under the icon...)
That "Human Hours Wasted" is not just sitting there because engineers don't care about it, it's because there are many many other opportunities to save similar amounts of time. Crashes waste time, perf bugs waste time -- and security bugs are much worse.
A couple of times a year it will just nuke all my open tabs (450-500) and present me with a delightful blank screen. Before that it will mislabel the active tab group on and off before giving up entirely.
Quick action on my part stops the destruction syncing & I usually end up recovering them on my Mac & then save them as a tab group.
But literally just an hour ago, iOS Safari looked like it nuked ALL MY TAB GROUPS. Ugh. They were gone; swiping right led to the "New tab group" screen. Frantic backing up and a restart later, and the tab groups are back, as though the phone was like "just kidding!". FML. So much for that backup plan.
UI bugs are one thing, but how is that level of data loss acceptable in a modern operating system? Boggles the mind.
(And don't get me started on the UI track wreck that is the iOS-inspired/inflicted bookmark management on macOS Safari, where all Mac UI conventions went out the window for some reason.)
OGEnthusiast•1h ago
zapzupnz•1h ago
tptacek•1h ago
Retr0id•1h ago
nhod•1h ago
refulgentis•1h ago
Speaking of AI-induced delusions, why did you submit this to HN?
It made me cringe to see its AI prose in AI code with completely made up bugs (really, the Mail search bar doesn’t work?), with made up numbers based on made up things as the spine of the content.
tempaccsoz5•1h ago
refulgentis•4m ago
throwerxyz•22m ago