5 ms·

Apple Launches All-in-One 'Manuals, Specs, and Downloads' Website

51 points by miles 3y ago

al_borland 3y ago
This is fantastic and long overdue. I’m definitely bookmarking this and sharing it with many people. What will David Pogue do now that the manual is no longer missing? /s
- musicale 3y ago
  For years Apple had (not entirely secret but not well publicized) PDF manuals that you could download. I found the iOS manuals to be fairly useful.
klabetron 3y ago
lol and I got a 404 on the manual for my iPhone 14 Pro (en-us)
chrsw 3y ago
This looks promising
musicale 3y ago
I wonder if they'll start maintaining decent developer documentation again someday.
musicale 3y ago
The macOS Sonoma manual seems poorly organized and incomplete. Why is it so hard to find comprehensive documentation for the Finder, for example? Why are basics like the clipboard (cut/copy/paste, standard data types, clippings, drag and drop, show clipboard, etc.) not explained properly? I am happy to see some documentation for included apps like Garageband, but it seems incomplete and the web reading experience is also clunky. Important low-level details seem to be omitted, and at the same time the high-level vision and rationale (if any) are also omitted. Perhaps these things are all included somewhere in the macOS manual, but if so they seem to be hard to find.
mdaniel 3y ago
I think this is aspirational given the paltry https://support.apple.com/en-us/docs/software https://support.apple.com/en-us/docs/software
- pcdoodle 3y ago
  Every time I have to troubleshoot a MacOS problem for a customer, I have to filter out the results from support.apple because it's mostly leading you down the wrong path.
  - musicale 3y ago
    Apple, Microsoft, et al.: "OK, since we don't want to pay money for any form of useful online technical support for our products (and customers will never pay for any kind of support), let's create an 'official' web site where unqualified and unhelpful idiots from the internet are incentivized to post useless and patronizing non-answers to the problems customers encounter when they use our often poorly-designed and defective products."
  - ametrau 3y ago
    That has to be the most perfect collection of the most unhelpful people on the internet. Most answers are “I don’t know“ or “you’re not meant to do that”.

51 points by miles 3y ago

This is fantastic and long overdue. I’m definitely bookmarking this and sharing it with many people. What will David Pogue do now that the manual is no longer missing? /s

musicale 3y ago
For years Apple had (not entirely secret but not well publicized) PDF manuals that you could download. I found the iOS manuals to be fairly useful.

klabetron 3y ago

lol and I got a 404 on the manual for my iPhone 14 Pro (en-us)

chrsw 3y ago

This looks promising

musicale 3y ago

I wonder if they'll start maintaining decent developer documentation again someday.

musicale 3y ago

The macOS Sonoma manual seems poorly organized and incomplete. Why is it so hard to find comprehensive documentation for the Finder, for example? Why are basics like the clipboard (cut/copy/paste, standard data types, clippings, drag and drop, show clipboard, etc.) not explained properly? I am happy to see some documentation for included apps like Garageband, but it seems incomplete and the web reading experience is also clunky. Important low-level details seem to be omitted, and at the same time the high-level vision and rationale (if any) are also omitted. Perhaps these things are all included somewhere in the macOS manual, but if so they seem to be hard to find.

mdaniel 3y ago

I think this is aspirational given the paltry https://support.apple.com/en-us/docs/software https://support.apple.com/en-us/docs/software

pcdoodle 3y ago
Every time I have to troubleshoot a MacOS problem for a customer, I have to filter out the results from support.apple because it's mostly leading you down the wrong path.
- musicale 3y ago
  Apple, Microsoft, et al.: "OK, since we don't want to pay money for any form of useful online technical support for our products (and customers will never pay for any kind of support), let's create an 'official' web site where unqualified and unhelpful idiots from the internet are incentivized to post useless and patronizing non-answers to the problems customers encounter when they use our often poorly-designed and defective products."
- ametrau 3y ago
  That has to be the most perfect collection of the most unhelpful people on the internet. Most answers are “I don’t know“ or “you’re not meant to do that”.