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I’m a fan of the whole Apple ecosystem but I have to say that there’s a pattern here. Apple does a decent job of keeping my data safe from others but a terrible

• montebicyclelo 1y ago
  I stopped using apple's notes app with an ipad pen after it lost 20 minutes of my handwritten notes when trying to sync them. (Which fits the theme of apple losing people's stuff.)
  • eptcyka 1y ago
    You should’ve put an airtag on them first.
    • cwmoore 1y ago
      Yes, two or three to make sure.
  • big_toast 1y ago
    I don't really get the syncing situation with apple. And it's really hard to tell when they've resolved bugs in one app or introduced new ones elsewhere. The Safari reading list can't even sync properly between devices for me. Image Capture ("Keep Originals"??) or AirDrop is a little minimal for such a keystone part of the phone -> computer if you don't want to use Apple ecosystem after.. Let alone the other more complicated issues.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • skylurk 1y ago
    I'd love to know how they CRDT hand-written notes.
    • KPGv2 1y ago
      You presumably would process the pen inputs, not the resulting image produced by the handwriting. No different from how you handle conflicts in online gaming.
    • bobbylarrybobby 1y ago
      Sounds like they don't.
  • cozzyd 1y ago
    Deleting your data is next level privacy.
    • hulitu 1y ago
      > Deleting your data is next level privacy. Yes, but not before syncing it with (NSA)iCloud. /s
• soperj 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • ffsm8 1y ago
    They were also active participants in prism... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM What they actually do is a moderate effort to keep app developers from accessing user data. Which is definitely good! Though the reason for this likely more about keeping the customer relationship with apple then actually protecting the privacy of users, but it's a nicely marketable side effect - and that's definitely a good thing for the users, too!
    • jm4 1y ago
      Anybody who was anybody back then was an active participant in PRISM. There are no good guys and bad guys when it comes to that. There are businesses that get to keep doing business by doing what the government tells them to do, there are ones that shut down (Lavabit), and there are ones that don't have enough going on to be on the radar for a project like PRISM.
      • raincole 1y ago
        When China does that they're the bad guys. When the US does that there are no good guys or bad guys.
      • sylos 1y ago
        I think that just makes them all bad guys? Just because everybody was doing it doesn't make it ok, let alone when it's something as bad as prism.
      • viridian 1y ago
        This is like saying there are no good guys or bad guys in the mafia, because the good guys all got taken out early on. What you are then left with are bad guys.
      • fragmede 1y ago
• ajkjk 1y ago
  I think of Apple as blessed and cursed by hubris. The same arrogance that lets them assert a design into the world on the belief that people will adopt it allows them to incapable of changing at the things they are bad or deplorable at.
• potatoproduct 1y ago
  I got burned by Apple purposely corrupting my music library. I'm still salty about it.
  • JadeNB 1y ago
    Purposely? Could you elaborate?
    • llbbdd 1y ago
      Still can't get rid of that U2 album I'm guessing
      • Andrex 1y ago
        Oh that's easy, just download this extra piece of software which removes the album for you. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29208540 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29208540
    • Xss3 1y ago
      People, including me, had a lot of playlists of ripped cds and downloaded mp3s, all categorized, rated, and with years of play count history. Then apple fucked everyones libraries up completely in an auto update, destroying the metadata and making them unusable, except for songs bought via apple music that is...
      • JadeNB 1y ago
        "Purposely" seems strong, though. Is it believed that Apple intended this corruption?
        • Xss3 1y ago
          It is believed that the bug was ignored or deemed unimportant or worse because of apples preference for users purchasing music via their store, yes.
    • 1y ago
• TomaszZielinski 1y ago
  Well put! But I think there's an interesting exception—APFS seems to be very reliable. It's been quite a few years since the very successful silent auto migration and it’s pretty quiet about it, which is a good thing for filesystems.
• WD-42 1y ago
  This is a company that is trying to design away the concept of the file completely. Which leaves very little recourse in the way of workarounds or recovery when bad things happen.
• xmddmx 1y ago
  I am baffled by Apple's incompetence here. In the past years I've seen: * iTunes/Music app randomly reassign my Album artwork, with different (incorrect) art showing up on different devices! * Reminders app: shared reminder lists can end up with the name of a different list * Ghost photos that are deleted from my phone, and come back later. * Maps, when I say "navigate to $friend" set a route that ended in my own driveway. To me, these bugs suggest a fundamental design flaw, perhaps they are using a simple Integer as an index rather than a UUID? Or maybe the database schema are solid, but there's some sort of race condition in their synchronization frameworks and the data is getting scrambled in RAM? Whatever it is, it's absolutely insane that in 2025 these kinds of bugs are happening.
  • 1980phipsi 1y ago
    iTunes randomly changing album artwork happened to me too. Only thing that fixed it was wiping the iPhone and resyncing with computer.
  • ben_w 1y ago
    The clipboard is no longer reliable. Not sure when exactly that changed, but it was probably a few OS releases ago?
    • markild 1y ago
      Could be because of shared clipboard between devices?
    • giancarlostoro 1y ago
      Clipboard has been unstable on every OS (especially on Desktop - and I mean Linux, Windows and Mac), and I think part of the culprit is apps like Teams and Discord, if you Ctrl + C by mistake on an empty text box, IT COPIES THE EMPTY TEXT BOX effectively wiping your clipboard. It's the most irritating UX and it took me years to figure out. Always right click copy and right click paste, you'll notice it works 100% of the time as it used to.
      • 1y ago
• n0n0n4t0r 1y ago
  Funnily, "data security" encompass both protecting it from undesired access (and stealing) but also from loss/corruption. So they do a terrible job from a data security point of view;)
• giancarlostoro 1y ago
  I would love to know if they even invest enough into QA resources. For a company like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon etc... I guess anything that qualifies as FAANG, I would prefer their QA departments be slightly overstaffed and that they do redundant testing than messing up with completely avoidable software issues. Sometimes the production bugs are embarrassingly obvious so much so it screams no QA team was involved.
  • kridsdale1 1y ago
    I used to be in QA at Apple before I became a SWE. Used to be, these were full software engineers embedded with dev teams, with a mission to destroy, document, and harden the apps and frameworks. During the 2010s in all the FAANG that I’m aware of (have worked at 3), QA as a high paid American profession was completely offshored to India and responsibility for quality removed from developers concern. It’s a blocking item on the Launch Checklist. Automated testing was expected to fill the gap but has mostly been ignored.
    • com2kid 1y ago
      I was at Microsoft when it happened and it felt like a fear response to the newer agile tech companies like Facebook that wrote blog posts about releasing daily. Many teams at Microsoft had a weeks to months long QA process before software went out the door, and many developers had been arguing for years that "QA is the blocker". The complicated thing is, they were kind of right, and kind of wrong. QA in some orgs were staffed by engineers who weren't "quite as good" as the development teams, and it showed. Horrible QA tools that broke frequently, QA test passes that were fragile and took forever, and just low quality bug reports. Work that should have been automated just wasn't due to a lack of talent. Part of this is because any really good engineers who started off as an SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test) ended up moving to the SDE career track after a few promos, because the career trajectory for an SDE was much better (despite the company trying to resolve this repeatedly over the years). So basically the SDET teams had an ongoing brain drain problem. That said, the good SDET teams were just as good, if not better, than the development teams. The really high quality test software was incredibly good. And when debugging means going through assembly code in a debugger and figuring out what is wrong, the top engineers come off looking like magicians. But there was too much rot in the QA orgs for them to ever be agile enough for daily releases. Microsoft went with the cost cutting approach of just laying most of them off and allowing software quality to drop, as did the vast majority of other companies. Once Microsoft got rid of their SDET career track, it became career suicide to even bother going into QA and the entire field basically died. Microsoft SDETs were on the same pay scale (and same hiring requirements) as SDEs. When i was in college my goal was to be an SDET at Microsoft, I loved the idea of being the last line of defense against bad software, of being the one responsible for protecting users around the world. (Yes I played a lot of Paladins in D&D, how'd you guess?) I eventually achieved my goal, became an SDET on a compiler team, got to take over maintaining one of the most impressive test systems I've ever seen [1], and spent a lot of time wiping up my own drool as ARM assembly code scrolled while I tried to trace compiler bugs. SDETs died, I moved to be an SDE. I loved being an SDET, I loved having a job that could be summarized as "be angry for the sake of the customer". I loved that I worked in a company where the most junior of SDETs could stop an entire build from going out by saying they didn't think the build met the quality bar for a release from Microsoft (something I actually did once, emotionally it is a hard thing to do!). Unfortunately that love and passion for quality is gone from the industry. [1]https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/how-microsoft-tested-compilers-circa-2006 https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/how-microsoft-tested...
• landonxjames 1y ago
  This is infuriating to me. I manually manage my music library and have for years. I buy the iPhone with the most storage so I can keep my entire library with me locally. This used to work great, but has degraded over the last decade. Now when I drag new music to my phone in iTunes nothing happens for minutes, and then if I get lucky it finally starts transferring, but some times nothing happens at all and I have to retry. Recently when I load new music onto my phone I find that random unrelated album art has been mangled or switched with other albums from other artists. And some music, which exists on my phone's hard drive, is now greyed out and when clicked says "This item is not currently available in your country or region." I am considering switching back to a iPod with an upgraded drive and giving up on keeping music on my phone completely.
• gokhan 1y ago
  > Apple does a decent job of keeping my data safe... How do you know? Why do you believe that they're competent on writing security code but not competent enough to write a general purpose app? Is there a different company culture applied to the latter?
• fidotron 1y ago
  It's worth saying their magic ability to sync everything across devices has basically ceased to exist at this point as well, and now I wonder if it ever did. The software engineering standard at Apple has clearly tanked in the last decade, which is sad because the exact opposite appears to have happened to their hardware.
• brailsafe 1y ago
  > I’m a fan of the whole Apple ecosystem Is that a necessary qualifier? I used to get that impression, but on the outside it's gradually become a rarely believable pitch. Without having an iPhone and without having an Apple Watch, and without having already had them years ago, it just seems like I've sort of made the right choice with just mac over the years, and with the latest OS that's becoming just a tiny bit more questionable; their decision making with software seems sus. Like I've never had to qualify my setup of using a mac for work, Android phone for phone, and I guess Audio Technica for headphones. It's not super nerdy, it's not super integrated, but if I wanted it to be super integrated, "what value would I get out of steeping myself into the Apple ecosystem further" is the question that comes to mind. I also have an old iPad that I tried to make useful, and the iPod nano 3rd gen which was actually amazing, but ultimately was hampered by software limitations that they don't seem to have advanced on much in 10 years. I've always found their discrete hardware products to be amazing in terms of industrial design, but they've never really been compelling in terms of their utility.
• apt-apt-apt-apt 1y ago
  I think there was a time when my iCloud name somehow got mixed with people with the same name. My name turned into all uppercase, and IIRC (long time ago) I found someone using that style that had the same name.
  • Obscurity4340 1y ago
    Dont cloud storage companies also link multiple owners of the same file (same hash or checksum or file identity) to avoid duplication also?