6 ms·

I dunno, even in the ideal Universe of Apple devices talking to each other I have headaches. AirDrop is my main bugbear - sending files (pictures) from my iPhon

by smcl 10y ago

I dunno, even in the ideal Universe of Apple devices talking to each other I have headaches. AirDrop is my main bugbear - sending files (pictures) from my iPhone to my MacBook Air should be as easy as it gets but Airdrop has failed to discover the MBA for the last month or so, there's no direct Bluetooth file transfer as I can see, Mail kinda works as a bit of a kludge, but warns if the filesize is over a certain size. And iCloud is something I'd rather not touch (Apples cloud services can go take a hike, after Apple Music decided that a huge chunk of my music should be deleted forever). I had phone->computer file transfer working via Bluetooth back on a sketchy old pre-Android Motorola, if such a simple workflow fails then what hope is there for anything more complicated. </rant> edit: sorry this is slightly OT, it's irritated me for a while and this felt at the time like a good time to share/vent!

unscaled 10y ago
AirDrop was always a hit or miss for. I think it's even worse than file shares on Windows which worked me 80% on the time at best. It seems that the main issue here is peer discovery, but I'm still somewhat astounded nobody has managed to produce an easy-to-use service discovery that works.
- smcl 10y ago
  That's the funny thing when specific issue started the discovery worked exactly _one_ way - the MBA would see the iPhone but not the iPhone would refuse to see the MBA. Puzzling at best!
- tinus_hn 10y ago
  Unfortunately AirDrop is two things: a file sharing service over Bluetooth and a file sharing service over wifi. It only recently got somewhat unified which allowed you to use it to transfer files between a Mac and an iPhone but it doesn't seem to be quite ready yet. Bluetooth is not fast and reliable enough for sharing modern file sizes but there is also no guarantee two phones that are near each other will share a wifi network. And then there are the security requirements.
  - vibrato 10y ago
    It's not enough to share the same wifi network either, at least in the recent past the devices had to be on the same access point for aiplay to work.
- tinus_hn 10y ago
  Unfortunately AirDrop is two things: a file sharing service over Bluetooth and a file sharing service over wifi. It only recently got somewhat unified which allowed you to use it to transfer files between a Mac and an iPhone but it doesn't seem to be quite ready yet. Bluetooth is not fast and reliable enough for sharing modern file sizes but there is also no guarantee two phones that are near each other will share a wifi network. And then there are the security requirements.
mikeash 10y ago
I think Apple's problem with this stuff is that they want it to be so seamless that they refuse to acknowledge the possibility of failure. If you're lucky they'll tell you that something went wrong, but they almost never say what. In many cases they just swallow the error silently. I run into this with AirPlay a lot. When it works, it's easy, but when it fails it's a total mystery as to why. Fixing it involves either retrying until it works, or rebooting whatever is handy in the hope that you'll stumble across whatever's responsible.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  This pattern seems to be ingrained in Apple at a deep, genetic level. Their product integration is the most obvious example, but it's far from the only one. Everyone knows that Apple computers "just work", and that when they don't you throw them in the bin because everything is too connected for easy repair. Even bureaucratically, I once spent two months trying convince Apple that my MBP existed. They swore no machine with that serial number had been made, and flatly refused to service it until I gave them the 'real' number. None of these things get resolved without forcing a real human to acknowledge the issue you're facing. The one thing I'd say in Apple's defense is that it's mere hubris, which I find far more pleasant than Google's support outlook of "yeah, it's broke, now go to hell."
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- veidr 10y ago
  That is deeply true, and has been for decades. In the old days (90s) the Mac world often smirked at the ubiquitous "Abort Retry Fail?" refrain that Windows users often encountered. But even then, I noticed that the Apple equivalent tended to be, "...". Not much different today.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    I remember there at least being error codes you could potentially look up, back in the old days. Might just be nostalgia coloring my memories.

by smcl 10y ago

unscaled 10y ago

AirDrop was always a hit or miss for. I think it's even worse than file shares on Windows which worked me 80% on the time at best. It seems that the main issue here is peer discovery, but I'm still somewhat astounded nobody has managed to produce an easy-to-use service discovery that works.

smcl 10y ago
That's the funny thing when specific issue started the discovery worked exactly _one_ way - the MBA would see the iPhone but not the iPhone would refuse to see the MBA. Puzzling at best!
tinus_hn 10y ago
Unfortunately AirDrop is two things: a file sharing service over Bluetooth and a file sharing service over wifi. It only recently got somewhat unified which allowed you to use it to transfer files between a Mac and an iPhone but it doesn't seem to be quite ready yet. Bluetooth is not fast and reliable enough for sharing modern file sizes but there is also no guarantee two phones that are near each other will share a wifi network. And then there are the security requirements.
- vibrato 10y ago
  It's not enough to share the same wifi network either, at least in the recent past the devices had to be on the same access point for aiplay to work.
tinus_hn 10y ago
Unfortunately AirDrop is two things: a file sharing service over Bluetooth and a file sharing service over wifi. It only recently got somewhat unified which allowed you to use it to transfer files between a Mac and an iPhone but it doesn't seem to be quite ready yet. Bluetooth is not fast and reliable enough for sharing modern file sizes but there is also no guarantee two phones that are near each other will share a wifi network. And then there are the security requirements.

mikeash 10y ago

I think Apple's problem with this stuff is that they want it to be so seamless that they refuse to acknowledge the possibility of failure. If you're lucky they'll tell you that something went wrong, but they almost never say what. In many cases they just swallow the error silently. I run into this with AirPlay a lot. When it works, it's easy, but when it fails it's a total mystery as to why. Fixing it involves either retrying until it works, or rebooting whatever is handy in the hope that you'll stumble across whatever's responsible.

Bartweiss 10y ago
This pattern seems to be ingrained in Apple at a deep, genetic level. Their product integration is the most obvious example, but it's far from the only one. Everyone knows that Apple computers "just work", and that when they don't you throw them in the bin because everything is too connected for easy repair. Even bureaucratically, I once spent two months trying convince Apple that my MBP existed. They swore no machine with that serial number had been made, and flatly refused to service it until I gave them the 'real' number. None of these things get resolved without forcing a real human to acknowledge the issue you're facing. The one thing I'd say in Apple's defense is that it's mere hubris, which I find far more pleasant than Google's support outlook of "yeah, it's broke, now go to hell."
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
veidr 10y ago
That is deeply true, and has been for decades. In the old days (90s) the Mac world often smirked at the ubiquitous "Abort Retry Fail?" refrain that Windows users often encountered. But even then, I noticed that the Apple equivalent tended to be, "...". Not much different today.
- mikeash 10y ago
  I remember there at least being error codes you could potentially look up, back in the old days. Might just be nostalgia coloring my memories.