11 ms·

Here's my personal canary in the coal mine that something must be fundamentally broken in Apple's software development process: - on a recent macOS version, ri

Here's my personal canary in the coal mine that something must be fundamentally broken in Apple's software development process: - on a recent macOS version, right click on the desktop, select 'change wallpaper' => the new settings panel opens - click on 'Custom Color' - now hold and drag around the 'color cursor' in the color selection circle for a few seconds - stop dragging and notice how the color cursor continues jumping around erratically (it's impossible to actually select the exact color you want) - same thing happens when using the linear slider below the color circle This bug doesn't lurk deep in some obscure part of the settings panel, it's the only way to change the desktop background color. A QA specialist would stumble over this in 5 minutes of trying to break the app. I made it a hobby to check this bug after each OS update, it's broken since the new settings panel was introduced in Ventura. As a good citizen I also wrote a Feedback Assistent ticket (FB13805690 - 21-May-2024) with attached screen recordings and all, but of course I could just as well have sent that report into a black hole :)

BobAliceInATree 2y ago
On the most recent episode of ATP podcast, an anonymous person wrote in to say that when they worked at Apple until ~2013, there was effectively no QA team on macOS. Granted that was over a decade ago, and "no QA team" doesn't mean no testing, but given the numerous bugs in macOS today, and that they almost never get fixed, I'm not surprised. (FWIW, I do not experience this bug you mentioned)
- schmidtleonard 2y ago
  If you look at the macOS feature history, it's pretty clear that the bulk of the team got shifted to iPhone in 2007 and never really recovered. The widely acknowledged Snow Leopard high water mark happened shortly after. To be fair, Apple can still pull off the occasional amazing feat of vertical integration -- HDR, APFS, keeping audio latency under control despite the relentless assault of apathy from all directions -- but they never had the same level of consistent drive forward, at least not until a year or two ago when the big push for AI integration started. Apple gets ragged on here, but I think their integration is actually some of the best. They were putting neural cores in chips back when that sort of thing got mocked, not lauded, and every step has been thoughtfully tied in rather than airdropped from a ChatGPT science fair project. But they never got good at building or deploying leading-edge models themselves; I hope they turn it around because this is important.
  - woleium 2y ago
    That may be unlikely. Mark Gurman reported recently for Bloomberg News that “people within Apple’s AI division now believe that a true modernized, conversational version of Siri won’t reach consumers until iOS 20 at best in 2027.”
    - schmidtleonard 2y ago
      That's a bummer to hear. They have the money to buy talent and they really ought to be able to pull this off inside of 2025. But if there's no will, there's no way.
      - woleium 2y ago
        Their modus operandi is usually to wade in late with a better solution. remember how awful bluetooth was until they applied it well?
    - jcgrillo 2y ago
      That sounds prudent. There's no reason for them to continue this embarrassment of cramming the product full of worse-than-useless "AI" features. Wait until you can separate the good from the bad from the ugly and choose to just do it good.
  - frizlab 2y ago
    Snow leopard is fondly remembered but was buggy has hell when initially released. It got good, with time…
    - walterbell 2y ago
      iOS becomes good a year after release, then Apple stops you from installing stable version, forcing install of unstable version with unwanted features.
      - layer8 2y ago
        What I tend to do is to only install/buy late in the yearly cycle, then stay on that for a year.
- kridsdale1 2y ago
  I was in a QA role on MacOS in 2010-2013. There isn’t a QA team, rather each group of developers and EM had a QA embedded with them.
  - DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
    I think they mean, having a whole bunch of people doing end-to-end user-scenario tests all-day - like videogame playtesters - whereas what you’re describing sounds more like SDET work.
  - JKCalhoun 2y ago
    You're correct ... but then various teams took various measures to try to get rid of QA. So it's spotty.
- jrcplus 2y ago
  I worked at Apple on Mac OS X until 2008. For QA, Bertrand believed in a lightweight touch, with dedicated QA staffing only at the top of the stack (plus a few key places like the filesystem), with the idea that any bugs will bubble up and be found through real-world usage. Most QA was informal, through heavy dogfooding. You felt a real sense of ownership to the thing that you worked on. You worked hard and fixed bugs because it felt like it mattered, because you thought about how e.g. your mom would end up using the product, and also Steve Jobs would see it, so it had to be great. Also, teams were small. Something would involve only 1-2 people, and then we would look over at Redmond and they'd have dozens of people working on the same thing. The need-to-know secrecy was not just for PR value; it helped keep circles of communication tight, cutting out a lot of noise, so you could just focus. The organization was stable (and relatively flat, around 5 levels from junior engineer to SJ). I think in my 9 years or so there, there were no major reorgs. Avie phased himself out and retired, and Bertrand moved up. The only major disruption was when the iPhone project happened. Release cycles were annual. Throughout most of the release cycle, it was pretty free up to each team and engineer to decide what to work on and how to prioritize it. Near the end of a release, it would get more and more strict on what you were allowed to change, up to the point where Bertrand sometimes would even ask to see code diffs. I don't really know what is going on over there now. They have moved to a more agile approach, with more frequent integration checkpoints. In theory this should be better, but I suspect there's less sense of ownership and more of a feeling of a software factory. But it's probably mostly to do with the fact that the systems are way more complex, both the tech and the org, with way more moving parts. Even the programming language itself (Swift) is a moving target. I know (from talking to friends) there's a lot more politics and career-building going on, the kind of corporate douchebaggery that would not have been tolerated under Steve Jobs. People are thinking about RSUs and their promotions, rather than the products. Ultimately, I think it boils down to this observation by jwz at Netscape, that there's "two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company." Post-iPhone, Apple has filled up with the latter. A majority of the people at Apple now didn't work there under SJ, and the senior management who did experience that is now aging and retiring. At least from the outside, as a customer and end-user, it feels obvious that the founder-led product-obsessed culture is gone.
vardump 2y ago
> - stop dragging and notice how the color cursor continues jumping around erratically (it's impossible to actually select the exact color you want) Tried dragging color cursor for 30 seconds+, no issues at all. MacOS 15.3.1 (24D70) on 16" M2 Max.
- flohofwoe 2y ago
  Ah now it's getting interesting :) So far I could reproduce the issue across several machines, also on new demo machines at the Apple booth of electronic discounters - so I don't think it's something about my configuration, but maybe it has something todo with how I'm using the trackpad (but I'm just sliding around with the right-hand pointer finger). PS: the mystery might be solved => that buggy 'Custom Colour' UI item only shows up under specific circumstances, which for my specific usage pattern is 'obvious' - see my sister comment for details.
  - jeffhuys 2y ago
    You need to have a color selected to begin with. This bug won't appear when switching from an image/dynamic to color. Only color selected -> close app -> reopen -> top right custom color. But even then, it's a MINOR thing, it doesn't stop me from selecting the right color at all...
jmuguy 2y ago
For what its worth, I can't reproduce this on 15.3 (24D60). I don't have a "Custom color" option. I see "Colors" and I click a Plus button to add a new color. Also I have my system connected to a caldigit dock and I'm using a mouse, not the trackpad.
- LostMyLogin 2y ago
  I am on 15.3.1 and when I attempt it, it stays in place on the color I selected without issue.
drdo 2y ago
What is this "Custom Color"? I clicked the "+" icon to open the color picker and did as described and I cannot reproduce this. Sequoia 15.3.1 (24D70)
- flohofwoe 2y ago
  Interesting, yeah. It doesn't happen when adding a new color to the "Colours" row at the bottom even though this happens with the same color selection UI widget. I see this Custom Colour thingie at the top-right corner of the Wallpaper section, above a "Show on all Spaces" checkbox and left of a fairly big representation of the current desktop background. After a bit of tinkering: this Custom Colour element is replaced with something else depending on the current background mode. If you selected a wallpaper image, it shows the name of the wallpaper. If you select a predefined colour, it shows the name of the color. When adding a custom colour, it will show an interactive element which allows to change the color in place, and that shows the buggy behaviour for me. Ok, this at least explains why other people don't stumble over this as an obvious bug, I assumed it would be obvious, because the first thing I always do on a new Mac is to customize the background color by right-clicking the desktop, and since that moment I have that buggy Custom Colour element sitting there. Not a great UX either way though. PS: ...and now after adding a new custom color via the to bottom row of predefined colors, the bug in the 'Custom Colour' widget is gone and nobody will believe me it was ever there. Great :D PPS: nope, it's coming back after going through the 'desktop => right-click => change wallpaper...' route again, phew.
  - gloosx 2y ago
    I tried it, and apparently if you click if from the "+" button, it works totally okay for this popup and subsequent opening of that custom color popup, BUT, if you close the settings, open them again and press the "Custom Colour" colour directly, you will enter the bugged one.
    - LostMyLogin 2y ago
      I don't see Custom Color anywhere. Does anyone have a SS of where I should be looking? I'm on 15.3.1.
hbn 2y ago
Desktop icons snapping to the grid has been broken forever too. Every once in a while I'll have a space in the "grid" that just won't accept anything to be placed in it. And god, don't even get me started on how the icons rearrange themselves when you're organizing your home screen / control center. I can't believe they actually shipped it like that and still haven't made it any better.
- reddalo 2y ago
  Oh, I envy you, I have the exact opposite problem. Sometimes new icons start stacking up one over the other on the top right corner. If you try moving one of the icons anywhere, it snaps back to the top right corner right away. I haven't found a fix. The only fix is moving the icons away from the Desktop into another folder using a Finder window.
  - mschnell 2y ago
    That is actually a feature called ‚Stacks‘. Open the context menu on your desktop and de-select ‚use stacks‘.
    - reddalo 2y ago
      No, I know stacks and they're not them. In my case, new icons (e.g. downloads, files that I save, etc.) appear on top of each other, as if the desktop lost track of their position. It's clearly a bug that hasn't been fixed in a long time.
zimpenfish 2y ago
Just checked this in 15.4 Beta (24E5206s) on this 2023 M3 Max and it doesn't happen for me.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  Reproduces for me. I'm on your build but there's a new beta out today fwiw
madeofpalk 2y ago
The entire settings app rewrite is the canary of how Apple's software development process is broken, especially for the mac.
- tacker2000 2y ago
  I mean ok, the old one was already a bit overloaded and unwieldy, so a redesign was probably overdue and Ill give them the benefit of the doubt here but WTF is with the 1-2 second delay when switching between the menus in there? Are they doing web requests upon opening every settings page or what? This is real amateur hour.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    I use an iPhone 13 mini, and I experience no delays within the settings app.
    - tacker2000 2y ago
      I was talking about the settings app in macOS.
      - lotsofpulp 2y ago
        Oh, I see. There is a slight delay (closer to 1 second or less) switching menus inside of Settings on my M3 Air.
        il-b 2y ago
        There is no reason for the delay to be more than 100ms. The 1 sec delay must be due to some extremely inefficient lazy init or a bunch of io happening when you switch between screens
        mananaysiempre 2y ago
        We’re (largely) not running OSes from spinning metal anymore, so even if there were some I/O that needs to happen (there shouldn’t be), a second would be an indication that the app was doing it badly. A modern SSD will read multiple gigabytes in a second, if the reads are sequential and you don’t wait for each one to complete before starting another. Unfortunately, we as a species have not figured out the programming tools necessary to make that natural.
kjkjadksj 2y ago
Arguably a worse bug in that same panel is how their hyped up live photo desktops don’t work at all and its been that way for years. They all need to be pulled from apples servers that silently time out your download. If you are lucky you can get maybe one or two downloaded.
fnordlord 2y ago
The Feedback Assistant issue you mentioned is probably one of the worst aspects of their software ecosystem. I haven't had a response on a single ticket that I've filed in there. It feels like an abandoned program, which is terrible UX considering its purpose.
- trogdor 2y ago
  A few years ago, I filed a Feedback Assistant bug report regarding an issue I was experiencing in Final Cut. In response, I was contacted by Final Cut developers who worked with me to replicate the issue and then shipped a fix. Just one anecdote, but some reports definitely get looked at.
  - kridsdale1 2y ago
    The Pro Apps team is more focused on customer happiness since it’s more niche and high-value-users.
    - ncr100 2y ago
      Ya they are competing hard. They are core Apple Value.
  - jorvi 2y ago
    I had the same happen for a bug that would toggle off "Do not create a new Apple Ad Identifier Code" (or whatever it was called). It meant that even if you explicitly opted out of Apple's Ad tracking, you would get opted back in with almost every iOS update. I assume this would have landed them in hot waters with EU privacy regulators, so they were very keen to replicate the bug and then have me check if it no longer happened. On the other hand, the "first screenshot fails to display screenshot preview and doesn't flash the screen" has been in iOS for 3 versions now. I've reported it thrice, and no one has given the tickets a second look, marked it DUPLICATE, or anything. And every time I mention it, at least 3-4 other people comment on also experiencing the bug, so I assume Apple must be pretty aware.
    - 2y ago
crossroadsguy 2y ago
I, and many others in our personal capacity, have been shouting from hn-rooftops how Apple’s software capacity has been in a state of, since a decade or so (or more really) that calling it bad would be an understatement. It’s downright pathetic. It’s disgustingly incompetent. And I haven’t not even started on its services like iCloud. Because those go beyond pathetic. I mean for god’s sake these morons (yes, “morons”) have not yet figured out how yo sync browser tabs which is something new browsers get right in a few days to few weeks time, and sometimes on top of their incompetently done iCloud and related SDKs. Apple sometimes comes across as a glasshouse built as marketing, too much money, (sadly) a huge army of fans and loyalist apologists (and not demanding customers), and an absolute lack of decent competition; and the biggest of it — a deliberate attitude of non-openness! I mean everything Apple is closed! So how can anyone even quantify how bad their iOS is, how smelly their cloud suites are, how ridiculous their security is!! If you can’t see what happens behind a wall and the entity behind that wall has money more than most nations and a PR and tech propaganda machinery rivaling some of “those” nation states, how can you even be sure!
- kridsdale1 2y ago
  Now tell us how you feel about windows.
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
    Don't get me started on Windows!
  - crossroadsguy 2y ago
    Your whataboutery could have been literal but shame you turned it into howaboutery. Close.
- matwood 2y ago
  > And I haven’t not even started on its services like iCloud. I feel like a lot of the Apple issues come from the fact they keep building on top of iCloud. It’s only very recently that people started trusting the sync. It’s like MS, where anything built on top of sharepoint is going to be garbage.
karmakaze 2y ago
My indicator for if Apple is for the customer vs for Apple is how macOS 'negotiates' YPbPr instead of RGB for non-Apple branded monitors (some LG monitors also get a pass) which results in worse color quality. I believe this to be carefully engineered to be a plausible bug rather than a real one. BTW I have found a workaround using BetterDisplay and an EDID override (to more closely match what the monitor is actually telling macOS).
- mattgreenrocks 2y ago
  Seconding this. Feels actively anti-user even if this is just a bunch of heuristics that end up choosing the wrong thing. Honestly, why is this not a dropdown? Related bug: macOS defaults to variable refresh rate when available instead of remembering my choice of 144hz. This is confounded by my hub (Caldigit TS3 Plus), which has trouble with variable refresh rates that result in a black screen. The cherry on top: either I use a HDMI cable and deal with BetterDisplay forcing RGB to fix YCbCr, or a black screen when using DP through my hub due to the above bug. Sometimes I wish Apple would get broken up just so macOS could have a chance at getting more love.
  - kridsdale1 2y ago
    I bought a custom HMDI dongle that forced 4k RGB HDR for my OLED LG from M1 Mac.
    - knifie_spoonie 2y ago
      Interesting. Could you post a link to the dongle?
      - MarcelOlsz 2y ago
        I'd go with a caldigit TS4 + their hdmi/dp active adapter.
      - aschla 2y ago
        Not sure what the other guy uses, but I use this Anker with my LG OLED to get RGB 4k@120 HDR with my M1 MacBook Pro: https://www.anker.com/products/a8317?variant=42329259475094&collections_usb-c-to-hdmi-adapter https://www.anker.com/products/a8317?variant=42329259475094&...
sp527 2y ago
Mine was horrendous scroll jank in response to a moderate amount of highlighting in Notes. Mfs trying to harness AI and they can’t even render text properly… in 2025.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
brailsafe 2y ago
Successfully reproduced. Rough. Maybe they counted on people bailing out after attempting to trudge through the sloppy mess that is the newish Settings app before they even got to the Change wallpaper section, forgetting that there was another path.
- DidYaWipe 2y ago
  And that also raises a huge issue: The problem isn't just functional defects, but also design defects and regressions. The new Settings panel is pretty much universally hated, from all the feedback I've seen. Apple is spending time dicking around with things that already worked and that will not drive sales through changes... so WTF? This faffing points to a major priority-setting problem within the firm. Look at the state of Xcode, a tool that's fundamental to the iPhone's appeal. Every developer knows that this thing needs a massive rewrite. The word is that nobody within Apple even understands it thoroughly anymore, so it's way past time to strap it on and build a modern tool from the ground up that's maintainable, instead of slapping band-aids on Project Builder indefinitely. Come on, Apple, you can afford to throw resources at this for a year and just get it DONE. Meanwhile, Apple is letting open, "urgent" QA personnel requisitions sit unfilled for YEARS. We can all see the results.
  - pasc1878 2y ago
    Go back to Project Builder :)
  - eszed 2y ago
    > The new Settings panel is pretty much universally hated Data-point of one, but: the new Settings panel is very much appreciated by the non-technical users I support, because it approximates the iPhone settings panel they're accustomed to. Personally, I hate it, but I also like that my colleagues are better able to discover and make changes for themselves. I figure learning new tech is a core part of my job description (but not theirs), so my frustration counts for less than their comfort, so I suck it up. Xcode, however? I completely agree with you there.
  - mung 2y ago
dmd 2y ago
Try as I might for the last 30 minutes, having read all the other comments in this thread so far, I can't reproduce this on 15.3.1.
- brailsafe 2y ago
  Did you try it with numerous pointing devices, or one in particular? It took only one try on a trackpad, M3 MBP
  - dmd 2y ago
    I only tried a trackpad.
    - brailsafe 2y ago
      Having now retried it, I wasn't able to reproduce it until re-launching the wallpaper selection screen, then it was chaotic again. Bizarre.
      - amelius 2y ago
        [flagged]
        jeffhuys 2y ago
        Sigh. Seems like Reddit is leaking again.
- fendy3002 2y ago
  initially also cannot, but now can. open wallpaper setting > choose + in color section, choose any color, close popup, (IMPORTANT) close setting panel. now reopen the wallpaper setting again, click on top right custom color and do this, somehow the behavior is different. Now it change the wallpaper color as you drag over the colors rather than mouseup. My guess is clicking on + button at the bottom is triggering the popup config to update on mouseup, while opening it fresh will configure it to trigger on update, until the + button is clicked.
xyst 2y ago
Works for me on latest macOS. Maybe your hardware is SOL? Can you share the video? Reminds me of the butterfly keyboard issue of the 2016-2019” model year MBs. If your warranty is still active could try to get the trackpad replaced.
webdever 2y ago
To pile on, though can't repo on demand, sometime in January, Airplay between Mac and AppleTV just started randomly disconnecting.
- Mindwipe 2y ago
  Oh god please don't get me started on Airplay bugs. I honestly have some work to do this month. "Hey, let's rewrite the framework again and not do any regression testing or test against old implementations or see what happens with any codec that is not exactly what we are expecting for any reason." - Airplay devs, every year.
mightysashiman 2y ago
Cannot reproduce (15.3.1 on me3max)
K7PJP 2y ago
I can't repro this on macOS 15.3.1 with an Apple Studio Display. What display are you using? It's likely something related to color space translation. Edit: Repro-ed using the additional steps you mentioned below. As someone who handles external bug reports and writes them, it's so often the case that there are additional steps or a specific start state required, which both prevents reproducing the bug and narrows the affected user base.
- visviva 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - JKCalhoun 2y ago
    repro'd works for me.
    - wussboy 2y ago
      I prefer r’d.
      - monkfish328 2y ago
        rrrrrrrrrr rawrrrrrrr
lobochrome 2y ago
Yeah - also can't reproduce. Maybe some helper is messing around with you?
JKCalhoun 2y ago
> A QA specialist would stumble over this in 5 minutes of trying to break the app. Yes, but code reviewers signed off on it, our unit tests have 100% code coverage and they all passed. It must be okay.
- ncr100 2y ago
  Fewer QA means more $100,000 bonuses to overworked Apple devs (2nd hand experience).
tkgally 2y ago
I wasn’t able to replicate that bug on my Mac, but when I tried to do so I ran into an instance of another bug that has been annoying me for many years: windows that open far away on the screen from where I clicked. Here is where the color picker appeared on my screen after I clicked on the custom color button in the change wallpaper window: https://gally.net/temp/20250304macoswindowopeningposition.jpg https://gally.net/temp/20250304macoswindowopeningposition.jp...
- zuhsetaqi 2y ago
  That’s not a bug. The color picker always opens at the bottom left no matter which app opens it. Has always been like that.
  - shermantanktop 2y ago
    Sounds a bit like “you’re holding it wrong” tbh. I understand your point, once you have absorbed the Apple logic it is reinforced continually and makes sense. But opening a dialog near the use interaction point is a very reasonable expectation. For me, I’ve never noticed any logic to it, I just know I need to hunt for it.
    - zuhsetaqi 2y ago
      Colors is not just a dialog! It's a standalone application opening in a new window which you can open just like all other applications on macOS and also remembers the last opened place.
winstonp 2y ago
Mine is, on iOS: * in safari private mode, open image picker * switch to different app (e.g. go to WhatsApp to save a new image) * go back to safari the image picker can now no longer be spawned from that safari private tab, you'll have to open a new tab to re enable the image picker.
jeffhuys 2y ago
Can't reproduce. Second one this thread where someone had this error "for years" but I can't reproduce. Smells of a setting that's been migrated for years from an old version, as where I'm writing from is a clean macbook with a clean account (M3, about a year old now). EDIT: can repro. But it's very important to note: you need to have a color selected already. So select a color with the + sign, close the app, open it, top right click custom color, and then the bug appears, although not like you describe: the color selection is easy, it jumps around for 20ms during dragging. If this is what we call "low quality" I'm happy to stay on Mac. Might be a reason why it wasn't fixed if you didn't include that vital step in your repro.
- neuronic 2y ago
  Just tested on M1 Pro, 15.0 (Settings version) on Sonoma. After initial custom color selection by clicking on the "+" (which works fine) and then reopening the Window to click "Custom Color" and then selecting the color again... it doesn't just jump for 20ms - it goes into full on psychotic flash jump behavior and basically continues to do so hands-off for 5 entire seconds before it stops at a random color. There is 2 options now: 1) nobody has ever tested this workflow at Apple, automated or not. 2) it was tested and discovered but then pushed into the backlog as non-priority. Here the question arises - for how long? The bug probably generates zero lost dollars so nobody at Apple cares anymore. THIS is what used to be different.
  - jeffhuys 2y ago
    It's interesting to me that there's such a big difference between our experiences, even though the bug we find is the same. I'm running an M3 Pro 15.3 Sonoma. If you don't believe me I can provide a screen recording but from here yes, it's buggy, but it's such a small issue (milliseconds vs your seconds) that I'd give Apple a pass on this. But I get that you wouldn't!
lenkite 2y ago
My deep-seated guess is that the switch from a simple language like Objective-C to the complex Swift language with its humongous compile times has caused developer productivity to be broken. No time to fix bugs, no time to refactor, no time to re-iterate on improving features because time is all taken up by compilation and grokking complexity.
- fingerlocks 2y ago
  Compile time issues are almost always type inference issues. Reducing chained functions and multiple levels of protocol witness indirection usually speeds this up dramatically. The other big time sucks are C++ interop and dozens of micro-dependencies (react-native).

BobAliceInATree 2y ago

On the most recent episode of ATP podcast, an anonymous person wrote in to say that when they worked at Apple until ~2013, there was effectively no QA team on macOS. Granted that was over a decade ago, and "no QA team" doesn't mean no testing, but given the numerous bugs in macOS today, and that they almost never get fixed, I'm not surprised. (FWIW, I do not experience this bug you mentioned)

schmidtleonard 2y ago
If you look at the macOS feature history, it's pretty clear that the bulk of the team got shifted to iPhone in 2007 and never really recovered. The widely acknowledged Snow Leopard high water mark happened shortly after. To be fair, Apple can still pull off the occasional amazing feat of vertical integration -- HDR, APFS, keeping audio latency under control despite the relentless assault of apathy from all directions -- but they never had the same level of consistent drive forward, at least not until a year or two ago when the big push for AI integration started. Apple gets ragged on here, but I think their integration is actually some of the best. They were putting neural cores in chips back when that sort of thing got mocked, not lauded, and every step has been thoughtfully tied in rather than airdropped from a ChatGPT science fair project. But they never got good at building or deploying leading-edge models themselves; I hope they turn it around because this is important.
- woleium 2y ago
  That may be unlikely. Mark Gurman reported recently for Bloomberg News that “people within Apple’s AI division now believe that a true modernized, conversational version of Siri won’t reach consumers until iOS 20 at best in 2027.”
  - schmidtleonard 2y ago
    That's a bummer to hear. They have the money to buy talent and they really ought to be able to pull this off inside of 2025. But if there's no will, there's no way.
    - woleium 2y ago
      Their modus operandi is usually to wade in late with a better solution. remember how awful bluetooth was until they applied it well?
  - jcgrillo 2y ago
    That sounds prudent. There's no reason for them to continue this embarrassment of cramming the product full of worse-than-useless "AI" features. Wait until you can separate the good from the bad from the ugly and choose to just do it good.
- frizlab 2y ago
  Snow leopard is fondly remembered but was buggy has hell when initially released. It got good, with time…
  - walterbell 2y ago
    iOS becomes good a year after release, then Apple stops you from installing stable version, forcing install of unstable version with unwanted features.
    - layer8 2y ago
      What I tend to do is to only install/buy late in the yearly cycle, then stay on that for a year.
kridsdale1 2y ago
I was in a QA role on MacOS in 2010-2013. There isn’t a QA team, rather each group of developers and EM had a QA embedded with them.
- DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
  I think they mean, having a whole bunch of people doing end-to-end user-scenario tests all-day - like videogame playtesters - whereas what you’re describing sounds more like SDET work.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  You're correct ... but then various teams took various measures to try to get rid of QA. So it's spotty.
jrcplus 2y ago
I worked at Apple on Mac OS X until 2008. For QA, Bertrand believed in a lightweight touch, with dedicated QA staffing only at the top of the stack (plus a few key places like the filesystem), with the idea that any bugs will bubble up and be found through real-world usage. Most QA was informal, through heavy dogfooding. You felt a real sense of ownership to the thing that you worked on. You worked hard and fixed bugs because it felt like it mattered, because you thought about how e.g. your mom would end up using the product, and also Steve Jobs would see it, so it had to be great. Also, teams were small. Something would involve only 1-2 people, and then we would look over at Redmond and they'd have dozens of people working on the same thing. The need-to-know secrecy was not just for PR value; it helped keep circles of communication tight, cutting out a lot of noise, so you could just focus. The organization was stable (and relatively flat, around 5 levels from junior engineer to SJ). I think in my 9 years or so there, there were no major reorgs. Avie phased himself out and retired, and Bertrand moved up. The only major disruption was when the iPhone project happened. Release cycles were annual. Throughout most of the release cycle, it was pretty free up to each team and engineer to decide what to work on and how to prioritize it. Near the end of a release, it would get more and more strict on what you were allowed to change, up to the point where Bertrand sometimes would even ask to see code diffs. I don't really know what is going on over there now. They have moved to a more agile approach, with more frequent integration checkpoints. In theory this should be better, but I suspect there's less sense of ownership and more of a feeling of a software factory. But it's probably mostly to do with the fact that the systems are way more complex, both the tech and the org, with way more moving parts. Even the programming language itself (Swift) is a moving target. I know (from talking to friends) there's a lot more politics and career-building going on, the kind of corporate douchebaggery that would not have been tolerated under Steve Jobs. People are thinking about RSUs and their promotions, rather than the products. Ultimately, I think it boils down to this observation by jwz at Netscape, that there's "two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company." Post-iPhone, Apple has filled up with the latter. A majority of the people at Apple now didn't work there under SJ, and the senior management who did experience that is now aging and retiring. At least from the outside, as a customer and end-user, it feels obvious that the founder-led product-obsessed culture is gone.

vardump 2y ago

> - stop dragging and notice how the color cursor continues jumping around erratically (it's impossible to actually select the exact color you want) Tried dragging color cursor for 30 seconds+, no issues at all. MacOS 15.3.1 (24D70) on 16" M2 Max.

flohofwoe 2y ago
Ah now it's getting interesting :) So far I could reproduce the issue across several machines, also on new demo machines at the Apple booth of electronic discounters - so I don't think it's something about my configuration, but maybe it has something todo with how I'm using the trackpad (but I'm just sliding around with the right-hand pointer finger). PS: the mystery might be solved => that buggy 'Custom Colour' UI item only shows up under specific circumstances, which for my specific usage pattern is 'obvious' - see my sister comment for details.
- jeffhuys 2y ago
  You need to have a color selected to begin with. This bug won't appear when switching from an image/dynamic to color. Only color selected -> close app -> reopen -> top right custom color. But even then, it's a MINOR thing, it doesn't stop me from selecting the right color at all...

jmuguy 2y ago

For what its worth, I can't reproduce this on 15.3 (24D60). I don't have a "Custom color" option. I see "Colors" and I click a Plus button to add a new color. Also I have my system connected to a caldigit dock and I'm using a mouse, not the trackpad.

LostMyLogin 2y ago
I am on 15.3.1 and when I attempt it, it stays in place on the color I selected without issue.

drdo 2y ago

What is this "Custom Color"? I clicked the "+" icon to open the color picker and did as described and I cannot reproduce this. Sequoia 15.3.1 (24D70)

flohofwoe 2y ago
Interesting, yeah. It doesn't happen when adding a new color to the "Colours" row at the bottom even though this happens with the same color selection UI widget. I see this Custom Colour thingie at the top-right corner of the Wallpaper section, above a "Show on all Spaces" checkbox and left of a fairly big representation of the current desktop background. After a bit of tinkering: this Custom Colour element is replaced with something else depending on the current background mode. If you selected a wallpaper image, it shows the name of the wallpaper. If you select a predefined colour, it shows the name of the color. When adding a custom colour, it will show an interactive element which allows to change the color in place, and that shows the buggy behaviour for me. Ok, this at least explains why other people don't stumble over this as an obvious bug, I assumed it would be obvious, because the first thing I always do on a new Mac is to customize the background color by right-clicking the desktop, and since that moment I have that buggy Custom Colour element sitting there. Not a great UX either way though. PS: ...and now after adding a new custom color via the to bottom row of predefined colors, the bug in the 'Custom Colour' widget is gone and nobody will believe me it was ever there. Great :D PPS: nope, it's coming back after going through the 'desktop => right-click => change wallpaper...' route again, phew.
- gloosx 2y ago
  I tried it, and apparently if you click if from the "+" button, it works totally okay for this popup and subsequent opening of that custom color popup, BUT, if you close the settings, open them again and press the "Custom Colour" colour directly, you will enter the bugged one.
  - LostMyLogin 2y ago
    I don't see Custom Color anywhere. Does anyone have a SS of where I should be looking? I'm on 15.3.1.

hbn 2y ago

Desktop icons snapping to the grid has been broken forever too. Every once in a while I'll have a space in the "grid" that just won't accept anything to be placed in it. And god, don't even get me started on how the icons rearrange themselves when you're organizing your home screen / control center. I can't believe they actually shipped it like that and still haven't made it any better.

reddalo 2y ago
Oh, I envy you, I have the exact opposite problem. Sometimes new icons start stacking up one over the other on the top right corner. If you try moving one of the icons anywhere, it snaps back to the top right corner right away. I haven't found a fix. The only fix is moving the icons away from the Desktop into another folder using a Finder window.
- mschnell 2y ago
  That is actually a feature called ‚Stacks‘. Open the context menu on your desktop and de-select ‚use stacks‘.
  - reddalo 2y ago
    No, I know stacks and they're not them. In my case, new icons (e.g. downloads, files that I save, etc.) appear on top of each other, as if the desktop lost track of their position. It's clearly a bug that hasn't been fixed in a long time.

zimpenfish 2y ago

Just checked this in 15.4 Beta (24E5206s) on this 2023 M3 Max and it doesn't happen for me.

saagarjha 2y ago
Reproduces for me. I'm on your build but there's a new beta out today fwiw

madeofpalk 2y ago

The entire settings app rewrite is the canary of how Apple's software development process is broken, especially for the mac.

tacker2000 2y ago
I mean ok, the old one was already a bit overloaded and unwieldy, so a redesign was probably overdue and Ill give them the benefit of the doubt here but WTF is with the 1-2 second delay when switching between the menus in there? Are they doing web requests upon opening every settings page or what? This is real amateur hour.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  I use an iPhone 13 mini, and I experience no delays within the settings app.
  - tacker2000 2y ago
    I was talking about the settings app in macOS.
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      Oh, I see. There is a slight delay (closer to 1 second or less) switching menus inside of Settings on my M3 Air.
      - il-b 2y ago
        There is no reason for the delay to be more than 100ms. The 1 sec delay must be due to some extremely inefficient lazy init or a bunch of io happening when you switch between screens
        mananaysiempre 2y ago
        We’re (largely) not running OSes from spinning metal anymore, so even if there were some I/O that needs to happen (there shouldn’t be), a second would be an indication that the app was doing it badly. A modern SSD will read multiple gigabytes in a second, if the reads are sequential and you don’t wait for each one to complete before starting another. Unfortunately, we as a species have not figured out the programming tools necessary to make that natural.

kjkjadksj 2y ago

Arguably a worse bug in that same panel is how their hyped up live photo desktops don’t work at all and its been that way for years. They all need to be pulled from apples servers that silently time out your download. If you are lucky you can get maybe one or two downloaded.

fnordlord 2y ago

The Feedback Assistant issue you mentioned is probably one of the worst aspects of their software ecosystem. I haven't had a response on a single ticket that I've filed in there. It feels like an abandoned program, which is terrible UX considering its purpose.

trogdor 2y ago
A few years ago, I filed a Feedback Assistant bug report regarding an issue I was experiencing in Final Cut. In response, I was contacted by Final Cut developers who worked with me to replicate the issue and then shipped a fix. Just one anecdote, but some reports definitely get looked at.
- kridsdale1 2y ago
  The Pro Apps team is more focused on customer happiness since it’s more niche and high-value-users.
  - ncr100 2y ago
    Ya they are competing hard. They are core Apple Value.
- jorvi 2y ago
  I had the same happen for a bug that would toggle off "Do not create a new Apple Ad Identifier Code" (or whatever it was called). It meant that even if you explicitly opted out of Apple's Ad tracking, you would get opted back in with almost every iOS update. I assume this would have landed them in hot waters with EU privacy regulators, so they were very keen to replicate the bug and then have me check if it no longer happened. On the other hand, the "first screenshot fails to display screenshot preview and doesn't flash the screen" has been in iOS for 3 versions now. I've reported it thrice, and no one has given the tickets a second look, marked it DUPLICATE, or anything. And every time I mention it, at least 3-4 other people comment on also experiencing the bug, so I assume Apple must be pretty aware.
  - 2y ago

crossroadsguy 2y ago

I, and many others in our personal capacity, have been shouting from hn-rooftops how Apple’s software capacity has been in a state of, since a decade or so (or more really) that calling it bad would be an understatement. It’s downright pathetic. It’s disgustingly incompetent. And I haven’t not even started on its services like iCloud. Because those go beyond pathetic. I mean for god’s sake these morons (yes, “morons”) have not yet figured out how yo sync browser tabs which is something new browsers get right in a few days to few weeks time, and sometimes on top of their incompetently done iCloud and related SDKs. Apple sometimes comes across as a glasshouse built as marketing, too much money, (sadly) a huge army of fans and loyalist apologists (and not demanding customers), and an absolute lack of decent competition; and the biggest of it — a deliberate attitude of non-openness! I mean everything Apple is closed! So how can anyone even quantify how bad their iOS is, how smelly their cloud suites are, how ridiculous their security is!! If you can’t see what happens behind a wall and the entity behind that wall has money more than most nations and a PR and tech propaganda machinery rivaling some of “those” nation states, how can you even be sure!

kridsdale1 2y ago
Now tell us how you feel about windows.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  Don't get me started on Windows!
- crossroadsguy 2y ago
  Your whataboutery could have been literal but shame you turned it into howaboutery. Close.
matwood 2y ago
> And I haven’t not even started on its services like iCloud. I feel like a lot of the Apple issues come from the fact they keep building on top of iCloud. It’s only very recently that people started trusting the sync. It’s like MS, where anything built on top of sharepoint is going to be garbage.

karmakaze 2y ago

My indicator for if Apple is for the customer vs for Apple is how macOS 'negotiates' YPbPr instead of RGB for non-Apple branded monitors (some LG monitors also get a pass) which results in worse color quality. I believe this to be carefully engineered to be a plausible bug rather than a real one. BTW I have found a workaround using BetterDisplay and an EDID override (to more closely match what the monitor is actually telling macOS).

mattgreenrocks 2y ago
Seconding this. Feels actively anti-user even if this is just a bunch of heuristics that end up choosing the wrong thing. Honestly, why is this not a dropdown? Related bug: macOS defaults to variable refresh rate when available instead of remembering my choice of 144hz. This is confounded by my hub (Caldigit TS3 Plus), which has trouble with variable refresh rates that result in a black screen. The cherry on top: either I use a HDMI cable and deal with BetterDisplay forcing RGB to fix YCbCr, or a black screen when using DP through my hub due to the above bug. Sometimes I wish Apple would get broken up just so macOS could have a chance at getting more love.
- kridsdale1 2y ago
  I bought a custom HMDI dongle that forced 4k RGB HDR for my OLED LG from M1 Mac.
  - knifie_spoonie 2y ago
    Interesting. Could you post a link to the dongle?
    - MarcelOlsz 2y ago
      I'd go with a caldigit TS4 + their hdmi/dp active adapter.
    - aschla 2y ago
      Not sure what the other guy uses, but I use this Anker with my LG OLED to get RGB 4k@120 HDR with my M1 MacBook Pro: https://www.anker.com/products/a8317?variant=42329259475094&collections_usb-c-to-hdmi-adapter https://www.anker.com/products/a8317?variant=42329259475094&...

sp527 2y ago

Mine was horrendous scroll jank in response to a moderate amount of highlighting in Notes. Mfs trying to harness AI and they can’t even render text properly… in 2025.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

brailsafe 2y ago

Successfully reproduced. Rough. Maybe they counted on people bailing out after attempting to trudge through the sloppy mess that is the newish Settings app before they even got to the Change wallpaper section, forgetting that there was another path.

DidYaWipe 2y ago
And that also raises a huge issue: The problem isn't just functional defects, but also design defects and regressions. The new Settings panel is pretty much universally hated, from all the feedback I've seen. Apple is spending time dicking around with things that already worked and that will not drive sales through changes... so WTF? This faffing points to a major priority-setting problem within the firm. Look at the state of Xcode, a tool that's fundamental to the iPhone's appeal. Every developer knows that this thing needs a massive rewrite. The word is that nobody within Apple even understands it thoroughly anymore, so it's way past time to strap it on and build a modern tool from the ground up that's maintainable, instead of slapping band-aids on Project Builder indefinitely. Come on, Apple, you can afford to throw resources at this for a year and just get it DONE. Meanwhile, Apple is letting open, "urgent" QA personnel requisitions sit unfilled for YEARS. We can all see the results.
- pasc1878 2y ago
  Go back to Project Builder :)
- eszed 2y ago
  > The new Settings panel is pretty much universally hated Data-point of one, but: the new Settings panel is very much appreciated by the non-technical users I support, because it approximates the iPhone settings panel they're accustomed to. Personally, I hate it, but I also like that my colleagues are better able to discover and make changes for themselves. I figure learning new tech is a core part of my job description (but not theirs), so my frustration counts for less than their comfort, so I suck it up. Xcode, however? I completely agree with you there.
- mung 2y ago

dmd 2y ago

Try as I might for the last 30 minutes, having read all the other comments in this thread so far, I can't reproduce this on 15.3.1.

brailsafe 2y ago
Did you try it with numerous pointing devices, or one in particular? It took only one try on a trackpad, M3 MBP
- dmd 2y ago
  I only tried a trackpad.
  - brailsafe 2y ago
    Having now retried it, I wasn't able to reproduce it until re-launching the wallpaper selection screen, then it was chaotic again. Bizarre.
    - amelius 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - jeffhuys 2y ago
        Sigh. Seems like Reddit is leaking again.
fendy3002 2y ago
initially also cannot, but now can. open wallpaper setting > choose + in color section, choose any color, close popup, (IMPORTANT) close setting panel. now reopen the wallpaper setting again, click on top right custom color and do this, somehow the behavior is different. Now it change the wallpaper color as you drag over the colors rather than mouseup. My guess is clicking on + button at the bottom is triggering the popup config to update on mouseup, while opening it fresh will configure it to trigger on update, until the + button is clicked.

xyst 2y ago

Works for me on latest macOS. Maybe your hardware is SOL? Can you share the video? Reminds me of the butterfly keyboard issue of the 2016-2019” model year MBs. If your warranty is still active could try to get the trackpad replaced.

webdever 2y ago

To pile on, though can't repo on demand, sometime in January, Airplay between Mac and AppleTV just started randomly disconnecting.

Mindwipe 2y ago
Oh god please don't get me started on Airplay bugs. I honestly have some work to do this month. "Hey, let's rewrite the framework again and not do any regression testing or test against old implementations or see what happens with any codec that is not exactly what we are expecting for any reason." - Airplay devs, every year.

mightysashiman 2y ago

Cannot reproduce (15.3.1 on me3max)

K7PJP 2y ago

I can't repro this on macOS 15.3.1 with an Apple Studio Display. What display are you using? It's likely something related to color space translation. Edit: Repro-ed using the additional steps you mentioned below. As someone who handles external bug reports and writes them, it's so often the case that there are additional steps or a specific start state required, which both prevents reproducing the bug and narrows the affected user base.

visviva 2y ago
[flagged]
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  repro'd works for me.
  - wussboy 2y ago
    I prefer r’d.
    - monkfish328 2y ago
      rrrrrrrrrr rawrrrrrrr

lobochrome 2y ago

Yeah - also can't reproduce. Maybe some helper is messing around with you?

JKCalhoun 2y ago

> A QA specialist would stumble over this in 5 minutes of trying to break the app. Yes, but code reviewers signed off on it, our unit tests have 100% code coverage and they all passed. It must be okay.

ncr100 2y ago
Fewer QA means more $100,000 bonuses to overworked Apple devs (2nd hand experience).

tkgally 2y ago

I wasn’t able to replicate that bug on my Mac, but when I tried to do so I ran into an instance of another bug that has been annoying me for many years: windows that open far away on the screen from where I clicked. Here is where the color picker appeared on my screen after I clicked on the custom color button in the change wallpaper window: https://gally.net/temp/20250304macoswindowopeningposition.jpg https://gally.net/temp/20250304macoswindowopeningposition.jp...

zuhsetaqi 2y ago
That’s not a bug. The color picker always opens at the bottom left no matter which app opens it. Has always been like that.
- shermantanktop 2y ago
  Sounds a bit like “you’re holding it wrong” tbh. I understand your point, once you have absorbed the Apple logic it is reinforced continually and makes sense. But opening a dialog near the use interaction point is a very reasonable expectation. For me, I’ve never noticed any logic to it, I just know I need to hunt for it.
  - zuhsetaqi 2y ago
    Colors is not just a dialog! It's a standalone application opening in a new window which you can open just like all other applications on macOS and also remembers the last opened place.

winstonp 2y ago

Mine is, on iOS: * in safari private mode, open image picker * switch to different app (e.g. go to WhatsApp to save a new image) * go back to safari the image picker can now no longer be spawned from that safari private tab, you'll have to open a new tab to re enable the image picker.

jeffhuys 2y ago

Can't reproduce. Second one this thread where someone had this error "for years" but I can't reproduce. Smells of a setting that's been migrated for years from an old version, as where I'm writing from is a clean macbook with a clean account (M3, about a year old now). EDIT: can repro. But it's very important to note: you need to have a color selected already. So select a color with the + sign, close the app, open it, top right click custom color, and then the bug appears, although not like you describe: the color selection is easy, it jumps around for 20ms during dragging. If this is what we call "low quality" I'm happy to stay on Mac. Might be a reason why it wasn't fixed if you didn't include that vital step in your repro.

neuronic 2y ago
Just tested on M1 Pro, 15.0 (Settings version) on Sonoma. After initial custom color selection by clicking on the "+" (which works fine) and then reopening the Window to click "Custom Color" and then selecting the color again... it doesn't just jump for 20ms - it goes into full on psychotic flash jump behavior and basically continues to do so hands-off for 5 entire seconds before it stops at a random color. There is 2 options now: 1) nobody has ever tested this workflow at Apple, automated or not. 2) it was tested and discovered but then pushed into the backlog as non-priority. Here the question arises - for how long? The bug probably generates zero lost dollars so nobody at Apple cares anymore. THIS is what used to be different.
- jeffhuys 2y ago
  It's interesting to me that there's such a big difference between our experiences, even though the bug we find is the same. I'm running an M3 Pro 15.3 Sonoma. If you don't believe me I can provide a screen recording but from here yes, it's buggy, but it's such a small issue (milliseconds vs your seconds) that I'd give Apple a pass on this. But I get that you wouldn't!

lenkite 2y ago

My deep-seated guess is that the switch from a simple language like Objective-C to the complex Swift language with its humongous compile times has caused developer productivity to be broken. No time to fix bugs, no time to refactor, no time to re-iterate on improving features because time is all taken up by compilation and grokking complexity.

fingerlocks 2y ago
Compile time issues are almost always type inference issues. Reducing chained functions and multiple levels of protocol witness indirection usually speeds this up dramatically. The other big time sucks are C++ interop and dozens of micro-dependencies (react-native).