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While I worked at Apple in 2021-22 their issues seemed about the same as nearly every other company producing consumer apps and devices; bloated slow garbage wi

While I worked at Apple in 2021-22 their issues seemed about the same as nearly every other company producing consumer apps and devices; bloated slow garbage with very mediocre quality. Their engineering culture is terrible, especially as it relates to transfer of the “Apple ethos” to the next generation of devs. Apple is going to be indistinguishable from the rest of the pack within the next decade. But most of all it seems like it was designed by people who don’t even know what it is for. That combined with the superficial “implement my Figma masterpiece in code” development approach that includes little to no user testing. Tog weeps. Don Norman weeps. Observe how much breaks when you do something as trivial as bump the default font size by one notch. I am sure it is pixel perfect at default size though. Enter a birth date in a contact entry without a year. Watch as it jumps to the next day when you save because you are editing the date after 0000 of the next day in utc time. That bug has now been in MacOS/iOS for at least 17 years. Sorry, got in to rant mode. I really want “less but better” from things in my life. We as consumers aren’t rewarding companies that take this approach apparently.

_aavaa_ 2y ago
> Enter a birth date in a contact entry without a year. I’m glad I’m not the only one. It’s mind boggling. I’ve had to start putting in my best guess just to have it save…
- ethbr1 2y ago
  For exclusively Apple ecosystem users, how do you handle these feature gaps? Just get used to working around them and ignore? I feel like every time I swap to the Mac ecosystem it's a litany of "Hunh, that weird tiny thing doesn't work" issues. PS: USB-C DisplayPort MST (display daisy-chaining) support that's been missing for... a decade and counting?
  - alanfalcon 2y ago
    I don't even understand this bug description. It's an edge case I guess I never ran into, so pretty easy to handle. That said, it's not like everything is perfect, just 100% better than my drive-by experiences trying to have a gaming PC (dead, again), and an Android phone for testing purposes.
    - greycol 2y ago
      To clarify their issue, you can celebrate someones birthday without knowing the year they are born, you only need to know the reocurring date. You can't enter a birthday in apple contacts without a year, if you attempt it it sets it as the date of tomorrow. My experience with apple is something's either a 2 minute fix or unfixable which to be fair is a reasonable way to do things though much less appealing to me (though less relevant for many users as stock android/windows continue to give users less and less control).
      - albedoa 2y ago
        Are we talking about the Contacts app on macOS? I just added the birthday "9/22" to a contact. On blur, the value changes to "September 22". On save, I see the value "September 22" reflected in the birthday field of the contact.
      - _aavaa_ 2y ago
        Ahh mine is worse. My contacts app will secretly delete the birthday from the contact after 0-10 minutes.
  - nicoburns 2y ago
    > Just get used to working around them and ignore? Pretty much. It's not like the other operating systems are better in this regard. In general there's a lot more software that's buggy like this than software that's reliable
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - theshackleford 2y ago
    I accept them as I do in windows and Linux because I have built workflows around the things I do want on each of them respectively. I’ve long since given up the dream of any one platform or technology choice meeting all my needs, for me at least, it’s a fools errand. This bug I can’t even replicate so :shrug:
- FabHK 2y ago
  FWIW, I've had the expiry month of credit cards stored in Safari increment on occasion (leading to failed online payments, trouble getting a flight, etc.) several times, to the extent that I now always include the expiry month in the card nickname. Mind boggling.
  - alpinisme 2y ago
    I thought I must have misentered it once and it’s always stuck on that but now you’ve got me thinking
    - mh- 2y ago
      If you hit save too fast while a numeric dial control - like the sort used in the iOS Clock app for alarms - is still (barely) spinning.. it will happily just silently keep its old value. This is easy to repro by spinning an alarm's minutes and hitting save before it's completely and utterly stopped. This UI bug (?) has existed for as long as I can remember.
ferguess_k 2y ago
Thanks for sharing. Which teams are better and which are worse? I guess all the system software teams are better?
pengaru 2y ago
Having joined a large established FAANG, it's become quite apparent that in any large established entity with so much management and meta work, with strong incentives driving more energy towards the meta work than where the rubber meets the road, it's inevitable for product quality to deteriorate. Internally the prioritized output becomes the meta work, not what reaches customers. What reaches customers is almost some kind of accidental byproduct of what the vast majority of people in the org spend their time on day-to-day. My past experience is dominated by startups. The fake work I'm incentivized to spend time on would have been fire-able levels of misplaced priorities / waste everywhere else I've worked as an IC developer. I've never worked for Apple, I'm assuming this pattern plays out everywhere at this scale.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  Interesting observation. I suppose most startups haven't existed for long enough for the meta-optimizing employees to be promoted over work-optimizing employees, yet.
  - stackskipton 2y ago
    Meta optimizing employees have issues hiding at smaller companies where one person has a vision of what needs to happen and quickly identify someone not pulling in one direction. Once you get big enough, upper management has tough time figure out who is meta optimizing over work-optimizing. Not to mention there might be multiple meta optimizing employees. IME, it's around 100-150 employees which lines up with Dunbar's Number. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
    - hibikir 2y ago
      I've seen high performance organizations at 600-800, thanks to execs that spent quite a bit of time talking across levels: When at that size, some ICs get CEO 1:1s, you have some chances of quality control. After all some execs had been coders. The problem is that none of them had ever been middle managers, which meant they had no idea of how to tell a good one from a bad one. TAs the company kept growing, and hired middle managers from bigger tech, they that Jira was the way to go, as it allowed for nice reports aggregating "insights"across the organization. In under a year, point-centered management arrived, and with it an exodus of top talent, all of which had massive amounts of equity anyway. Execs then wondered what happened, and why ability to ship features kept declining. I think they still don't know.
cageface 2y ago
You can really see this when trying to build apps with Swift & SwiftUI. The language and the framework seem to be optimized for nice terse WWDC demos but both fall apart pretty quickly when you start to do any heavy UI lifting with them. And I think that's starting to bleed into their own native UI now too. The lousy macOS settings app is a good example. Unfortunately there don't seem to be any good alternatives to Apple. Windows is even worse.
- iknowstuff 2y ago
  Their new wifi network selector is laggy as fuck. The old one was perfectly fine. This is just like windows reimplementing basic UIs in their UI-framework-of-the-year.
- neilv 2y ago
  Yes, I was a fairly early SwiftUI guinea pig, when I'd mistakenly assumed it was solid because of how Apple was pushing it, and your "WWDC demo" is spot-on. The DSL could've been better (while still syncing between code and direct-manipulation GUI painter). And the interaction model seemed like it wasn't to be trusted, and was probably buggy (and others confirmed bugs). The lack of documentation on some entitlements APIs being demoed as launched left me shouting very bad words on multiple days (which is not something I normally do) before I made everything work. I could feel this, and ended up wrapping all my UI with a carefully hand-implemented hierarchical statechart, so that the app would work in the field for our needs, the first time, and every time. Normally, for consumer-grade work, I would just use the abstractions of the interface toolkit, and not have to formally model it separately. Don't get me started on what a transparently incompetent load of poo some of the Apple developer Web sites were, for complying with the additional burdens that Apple places on developers, just because it can. Obvious rampant data consistency problems, poor HCI design, and just plain unreliable behavior. I think I heard that at least some of that had been outsourced, to one of those consulting firms that everyone knows isn't up to doing anything competently, but that somehow gets contracts anyway.
- a-dub 2y ago
  KDE 6.3 is pretty great these days.
zombiwoof 2y ago
Agreed I was there at that time. I was in two different “orgs” in my 5 years, SWE and AI/ML I saw poor management (lots of ex Amazon) running new grads/jr engineers into the ground (features features) It’s all about new features. If anyone with experience expresses an idea to address technical debt they are literally put on PIP
- zombiwoof 2y ago
  I will point out I was at Google for a similar length of time and saw nothing but amazing code, yet the problem was is building anything but the ads money maker. If there was a way to combine Apples magic marketing brainwashing with Google’s engineering it would be an amazing thing to watch
thrdbndndn 2y ago
> It was designed by people who don’t even know what it is for. This rings especially true with Windows. There was a not-so-serious rumor that the whole MS design department uses Macs. This may or may not be true, but recent UX changes make it clear that the designers don’t really use Windows beyond a superficial level. Many common interactions have become increasingly tedious and visually sluggish, both due to excessive animations and performance issues. Explorer in particular has become barely usable for anyone who frequently manages files.
- getnormality 2y ago
  Apple can stay far ahead simply by not falling even faster than Windows. Finder and Spotlight have gotten worse, but they remain light-years ahead of their Windows counterparts.
  - kiaulen 2y ago
    Ummmm, what? Spotlight I'll grant you, but Finder is hands down the worst file browser on any operating system. There's no up button, no split screen, you can't copy a path easily, you can't show hidden files easily, you can't customize the columns in list mode, the column mode won't let you go up, there's no cut and paste. Windows Explorer sucks, but not nearly as bad as finder. Dolphin, thunar, and Nautilus on Linux have all those features and more. I have to drop to terminal or install mucommander just to do basic things in the macOS filesystem.
    - metadat 2y ago
      Yes, Apple Finder is so freaking slow, browsing a moderately large folder is challenging, nevermind a network share.
    - zoelow 2y ago
      Try command + click on the folder in the top of the window to go up
    - chamomeal 2y ago
artimaeis 2y ago
For what it’s worth, I think the contact bug you mention is fixed, at least in latest iOS (18.3.1). Screen recording of me trying to reproduce that: https://streamable.com/n97j9m https://streamable.com/n97j9m
maeil 2y ago
> Sorry, got in to rant mode. I really want “less but better” from things in my life. We as consumers aren’t rewarding companies that take this approach apparently. If *becoming the most valuable company in the world* isn't being "rewarded", then what possibly is? No, it's the hypercapitalist endless drive for ultra short-term, next quarter profits at the cost of anything else that causes this. Obvious irony being that Apple would've never become this big if Jobs had followed this approach. This of course is the #1 reason of the downfall of the West, above all else - pure short-termism.
al_borland 2y ago
This saddens me, as I learned the lessons of less but better through Apple over 20 years ago through Steve and Jony, which ultimately led to Rams. It was a pretty transformative lesson in my life, and extended far beyond tech or products. I hope they are able to course correct with the right leadership. A culture that cares deeply about the little things is hard to build and has to be supported at the highest levels.

_aavaa_ 2y ago

> Enter a birth date in a contact entry without a year. I’m glad I’m not the only one. It’s mind boggling. I’ve had to start putting in my best guess just to have it save…

ethbr1 2y ago
For exclusively Apple ecosystem users, how do you handle these feature gaps? Just get used to working around them and ignore? I feel like every time I swap to the Mac ecosystem it's a litany of "Hunh, that weird tiny thing doesn't work" issues. PS: USB-C DisplayPort MST (display daisy-chaining) support that's been missing for... a decade and counting?
- alanfalcon 2y ago
  I don't even understand this bug description. It's an edge case I guess I never ran into, so pretty easy to handle. That said, it's not like everything is perfect, just 100% better than my drive-by experiences trying to have a gaming PC (dead, again), and an Android phone for testing purposes.
  - greycol 2y ago
    To clarify their issue, you can celebrate someones birthday without knowing the year they are born, you only need to know the reocurring date. You can't enter a birthday in apple contacts without a year, if you attempt it it sets it as the date of tomorrow. My experience with apple is something's either a 2 minute fix or unfixable which to be fair is a reasonable way to do things though much less appealing to me (though less relevant for many users as stock android/windows continue to give users less and less control).
    - albedoa 2y ago
      Are we talking about the Contacts app on macOS? I just added the birthday "9/22" to a contact. On blur, the value changes to "September 22". On save, I see the value "September 22" reflected in the birthday field of the contact.
    - _aavaa_ 2y ago
      Ahh mine is worse. My contacts app will secretly delete the birthday from the contact after 0-10 minutes.
- nicoburns 2y ago
  > Just get used to working around them and ignore? Pretty much. It's not like the other operating systems are better in this regard. In general there's a lot more software that's buggy like this than software that's reliable
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- theshackleford 2y ago
  I accept them as I do in windows and Linux because I have built workflows around the things I do want on each of them respectively. I’ve long since given up the dream of any one platform or technology choice meeting all my needs, for me at least, it’s a fools errand. This bug I can’t even replicate so :shrug:
FabHK 2y ago
FWIW, I've had the expiry month of credit cards stored in Safari increment on occasion (leading to failed online payments, trouble getting a flight, etc.) several times, to the extent that I now always include the expiry month in the card nickname. Mind boggling.
- alpinisme 2y ago
  I thought I must have misentered it once and it’s always stuck on that but now you’ve got me thinking
  - mh- 2y ago
    If you hit save too fast while a numeric dial control - like the sort used in the iOS Clock app for alarms - is still (barely) spinning.. it will happily just silently keep its old value. This is easy to repro by spinning an alarm's minutes and hitting save before it's completely and utterly stopped. This UI bug (?) has existed for as long as I can remember.

ferguess_k 2y ago

Thanks for sharing. Which teams are better and which are worse? I guess all the system software teams are better?

pengaru 2y ago

Having joined a large established FAANG, it's become quite apparent that in any large established entity with so much management and meta work, with strong incentives driving more energy towards the meta work than where the rubber meets the road, it's inevitable for product quality to deteriorate. Internally the prioritized output becomes the meta work, not what reaches customers. What reaches customers is almost some kind of accidental byproduct of what the vast majority of people in the org spend their time on day-to-day. My past experience is dominated by startups. The fake work I'm incentivized to spend time on would have been fire-able levels of misplaced priorities / waste everywhere else I've worked as an IC developer. I've never worked for Apple, I'm assuming this pattern plays out everywhere at this scale.

ethbr1 2y ago
Interesting observation. I suppose most startups haven't existed for long enough for the meta-optimizing employees to be promoted over work-optimizing employees, yet.
- stackskipton 2y ago
  Meta optimizing employees have issues hiding at smaller companies where one person has a vision of what needs to happen and quickly identify someone not pulling in one direction. Once you get big enough, upper management has tough time figure out who is meta optimizing over work-optimizing. Not to mention there might be multiple meta optimizing employees. IME, it's around 100-150 employees which lines up with Dunbar's Number. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
  - hibikir 2y ago
    I've seen high performance organizations at 600-800, thanks to execs that spent quite a bit of time talking across levels: When at that size, some ICs get CEO 1:1s, you have some chances of quality control. After all some execs had been coders. The problem is that none of them had ever been middle managers, which meant they had no idea of how to tell a good one from a bad one. TAs the company kept growing, and hired middle managers from bigger tech, they that Jira was the way to go, as it allowed for nice reports aggregating "insights"across the organization. In under a year, point-centered management arrived, and with it an exodus of top talent, all of which had massive amounts of equity anyway. Execs then wondered what happened, and why ability to ship features kept declining. I think they still don't know.

cageface 2y ago

You can really see this when trying to build apps with Swift & SwiftUI. The language and the framework seem to be optimized for nice terse WWDC demos but both fall apart pretty quickly when you start to do any heavy UI lifting with them. And I think that's starting to bleed into their own native UI now too. The lousy macOS settings app is a good example. Unfortunately there don't seem to be any good alternatives to Apple. Windows is even worse.

iknowstuff 2y ago
Their new wifi network selector is laggy as fuck. The old one was perfectly fine. This is just like windows reimplementing basic UIs in their UI-framework-of-the-year.
neilv 2y ago
Yes, I was a fairly early SwiftUI guinea pig, when I'd mistakenly assumed it was solid because of how Apple was pushing it, and your "WWDC demo" is spot-on. The DSL could've been better (while still syncing between code and direct-manipulation GUI painter). And the interaction model seemed like it wasn't to be trusted, and was probably buggy (and others confirmed bugs). The lack of documentation on some entitlements APIs being demoed as launched left me shouting very bad words on multiple days (which is not something I normally do) before I made everything work. I could feel this, and ended up wrapping all my UI with a carefully hand-implemented hierarchical statechart, so that the app would work in the field for our needs, the first time, and every time. Normally, for consumer-grade work, I would just use the abstractions of the interface toolkit, and not have to formally model it separately. Don't get me started on what a transparently incompetent load of poo some of the Apple developer Web sites were, for complying with the additional burdens that Apple places on developers, just because it can. Obvious rampant data consistency problems, poor HCI design, and just plain unreliable behavior. I think I heard that at least some of that had been outsourced, to one of those consulting firms that everyone knows isn't up to doing anything competently, but that somehow gets contracts anyway.
a-dub 2y ago
KDE 6.3 is pretty great these days.

zombiwoof 2y ago

Agreed I was there at that time. I was in two different “orgs” in my 5 years, SWE and AI/ML I saw poor management (lots of ex Amazon) running new grads/jr engineers into the ground (features features) It’s all about new features. If anyone with experience expresses an idea to address technical debt they are literally put on PIP

zombiwoof 2y ago
I will point out I was at Google for a similar length of time and saw nothing but amazing code, yet the problem was is building anything but the ads money maker. If there was a way to combine Apples magic marketing brainwashing with Google’s engineering it would be an amazing thing to watch

thrdbndndn 2y ago

> It was designed by people who don’t even know what it is for. This rings especially true with Windows. There was a not-so-serious rumor that the whole MS design department uses Macs. This may or may not be true, but recent UX changes make it clear that the designers don’t really use Windows beyond a superficial level. Many common interactions have become increasingly tedious and visually sluggish, both due to excessive animations and performance issues. Explorer in particular has become barely usable for anyone who frequently manages files.

getnormality 2y ago
Apple can stay far ahead simply by not falling even faster than Windows. Finder and Spotlight have gotten worse, but they remain light-years ahead of their Windows counterparts.
- kiaulen 2y ago
  Ummmm, what? Spotlight I'll grant you, but Finder is hands down the worst file browser on any operating system. There's no up button, no split screen, you can't copy a path easily, you can't show hidden files easily, you can't customize the columns in list mode, the column mode won't let you go up, there's no cut and paste. Windows Explorer sucks, but not nearly as bad as finder. Dolphin, thunar, and Nautilus on Linux have all those features and more. I have to drop to terminal or install mucommander just to do basic things in the macOS filesystem.
  - metadat 2y ago
    Yes, Apple Finder is so freaking slow, browsing a moderately large folder is challenging, nevermind a network share.
  - zoelow 2y ago
    Try command + click on the folder in the top of the window to go up
  - chamomeal 2y ago

artimaeis 2y ago

For what it’s worth, I think the contact bug you mention is fixed, at least in latest iOS (18.3.1). Screen recording of me trying to reproduce that: https://streamable.com/n97j9m https://streamable.com/n97j9m

maeil 2y ago

> Sorry, got in to rant mode. I really want “less but better” from things in my life. We as consumers aren’t rewarding companies that take this approach apparently. If *becoming the most valuable company in the world* isn't being "rewarded", then what possibly is? No, it's the hypercapitalist endless drive for ultra short-term, next quarter profits at the cost of anything else that causes this. Obvious irony being that Apple would've never become this big if Jobs had followed this approach. This of course is the #1 reason of the downfall of the West, above all else - pure short-termism.

al_borland 2y ago

This saddens me, as I learned the lessons of less but better through Apple over 20 years ago through Steve and Jony, which ultimately led to Rams. It was a pretty transformative lesson in my life, and extended far beyond tech or products. I hope they are able to course correct with the right leadership. A culture that cares deeply about the little things is hard to build and has to be supported at the highest levels.