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What happened to Apple's legendary attention to detail?

• Rover222 1y ago
  Yesterday I had annoying bugs on my iPhone, my Apple Watch, and on the apple store website. Incredible.
• x3n0ph3n3 1y ago
  The current CEO doesn't care like the previous one did. Culture of excellence was replaced with financialization.
• malux85 1y ago
  He died :(
  • jll29 1y ago
    A very important but much-neglected part of a CEO's tasks is succession planning. (Perhaps charismatic leaders neglect it a bit on purpose because they enjoy being portrayed as irreplaceable.)
• maz29 1y ago
  I installed iOS 26 the other day and it seems like a practical joke with how visually terrible it is.
  • WA 1y ago
    I thought that all non-native apps will feel even more out of place with Liquid Glass and developers go back to writing more native apps. After experiencing iOS 26, I’m pretty confident that people will actually actively try to get away from the default iOS UI language and will use more cross-platform tech that makes it easier to implement their own designs. Liquid Glass is just annoyingly bad.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • dionian 1y ago
    I like it
• rwmj 1y ago
  He died in 2011.
  • abirch 1y ago
    In order to say no you have to have a burning yes. The people in power don't have a burning yes.
    • layer8 1y ago
      What’s a burning yes?
  • reliabilityguy 1y ago
    90% of the times when I pay with Apple Pay, and want to switch the credit card I do too many unnecessary taps. First, I quickly tap on the first button that has the picture of the credit card and its name. As a result I find myself in a menu that shows me the billing address (go figure)! So, I have to click back, and use the button below that simply states “Change the credit card” or something to that effect. Why, for the love of god, for the info about the billing address Apple uses picture of CC? Why the billing address is even the first option!? So, multiple clicks when it can be avoided by a proper design (I think in the past the picture button was the one that changed credit cards, but I don’t know if I am misremembering). Every time it happens I think about Steve Jobs.
    • floam 1y ago
      Are you me? I always go back and get it on a next try, and maybe also like tried to bail when I saw it was the wrong card after double side buttoning, which maybe means I need to reset the state of the payment screen, but then need to wait, double click again, change it the right way, wait for the glorious beep…
  • 1970-01-01 1y ago
    More disturbing is the author doesn't mention it at all. The legendary CEO is never mentioned, but somehow big conclusions are still drawn? Go ahead and skip this article.
• FredPret 1y ago
  Apple added too many features too fast, so they fell into the Feature Whirlpool. They're going to try and get out of it by adding more Features, Faster (I hope I'm wrong!). Instead, they should have stayed on the Straigth and Narrow of Quality - where they were for many years - where you move up to computing paradise by having fewer features but more time spent perfecting them.
  • readthenotes1 1y ago
    "Straigth and Narrow of Quality" We see what you did there!
    • FredPret 1y ago
      I should've typed fewer but better words!
  • otterdude 1y ago
    naw dude we gotta get these quarters numbers up by degrading quality on windows/chromecast. It just reeks of incompetence and insincerity
  • trhway 1y ago
    >Apple added too many features too fast, so they fell into the Feature Whirlpool. They're going to try and get out of it by adding more Features, Faster (I hope I'm wrong!). yep. The attention to details is still there, it is just changed from polishing and curating details to creating a lot of small unpolished and uncalled for and thus very annoying details. From MBA POV there isn't much difference, and the latter even produces better KPIs.
    • kergonath 1y ago
      They strayed from this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAEPqUtra6E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAEPqUtra6E Not entirely, though; there is joy and playfulness at the core of Liquid Glass. But delight is not that common, and refinement and focus are definitely lacking. They could have used more nos and fewer yeses.
• ZeroConcerns 1y ago
  Oh, come on, having your brand-new AirPod Pro 3s listed in the Bluetooth summary of your also-pretty-recent iPhone as ACCESSORY_MODEL_NAME is a small price to pay for the 3 months of free Apple Music that take up so much more space in the UI anyway... I mean, some people are just impossible to please!
• aquir 1y ago
  Got eaten by the shareholders and PROFIT
  • gruez 1y ago
    Apple didn't have shareholders and profit before?
    • Mountain_Skies 1y ago
      Shareholders didn't know this level of profit was possible and were scared of going back to the ousted Jobs era. It helped that Jobs delivered good growth and profits, though nothing on the scale Cook has with the destruction of Apple's design capital. Some of what Cook has done wouldn't have been possible in the Jobs era due to market and technology differences but in general, Cook has been all about smoothing costs out of processes, with little regard for the things Jobs considered essential.
    • lenkite 1y ago
      Reality-Distortion-Visionary type CEO's can push-back against the holy "Fiduciary Duty to Shareholders" commandment that is used to justify all crap, but the Operating-Profit-Efficiency type CEO's like Tim Cook cannot - nor do they wish do.
      • gruez 1y ago
        But Apple's margin has basically been flat for the past decade, and rose to that level under Jobs? https://media.ycharts.com/charts/441687ba735392d10a1a8058120d0fcb.png https://media.ycharts.com/charts/441687ba735392d10a1a8058120...
      • astrange 1y ago
        https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/03/07/why-tim-cook-doesnt-care-about-the-bloody-roi/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/03/07/why-tim...
• ortusdux 1y ago
  "If you were a ‘product person’ at IBM or Xerox: so you make a better copier or better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market-share, the company’s not any more successful. So the people who make the company more successful are the sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the ‘product people’ get run out of the decision-making forums. The companies forget how to make great products. The product sensibility and product genius that brought them to this monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts about wanting to help the costumers.” - Steve Jobs - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs:_The_Lost_Interview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs:_The_Lost_Interview
  • readthenotes1 1y ago
    Or as Parkinson wrote many decades before, injelitance
  • no_wizard 1y ago
    I've always taken this to heart in looking at how organizations operate, and in broad strokes, not only is was Jobs right, keeping this in the back of my mind has always allowed me to evaluate organizational inertia very quickly. That said, I wonder, Jobs lived through Apple's transformation, but not its peak phase where Apple was simply printing money year after year after year. I do wonder if Jobs in 2016 would have been able to keep the organization performing at such a high caliber. Even he seemed like he was making unforced errors at times too, like the "you're holding it wrong" fiasco, but its hard to say since he didn't live through Apple 2013-2019 where it became an ever increasing money printing machine. In the age of AI, COVID-19 etc. I wonder how jobs post 2020 would treat things.
    • ryandrake 1y ago
      I think Jobs would have gotten bored of sitting back, printing money, and manufacturing the same boring rectangles over and over for a decade.
• this_user 1y ago
  What happened is the same thing that tends to happen to almost all successful organisation. The uber exceptional people who initially built it, defined the culture, and enforced it with an iron fist are gone. Now a bunch of people are in charge who trained under the first generation, but who themselves just don't quite have that kind of singular personality. So things start slipping over time.
  • AddLightness 1y ago
    This is why gatekeeping is important and shouldn't be labeled as toxic. There's been a shift where everyone wants to welcome everyone, but the problem is it erodes your company culture and lowers the average quality.
    • whatshisface 1y ago
      Toxic gatekeeping means sitting on IRC all day just to tell people to read the manual. What you're describing is an, "intervew process."
      • morshu9001 1y ago
        Idk how to fix this, but the problem with interviews by rank and file employees is they have to prioritize standardization and objectivity over finding brilliant applicants. It only makes sure the applicant knows how to code rather than lying on his/her resume. I think Jobs said something like, B players will hire B and C players. When I interviewed at a smaller company, someone high up interviewed me last. I passed everything on paper afaik, but he didn't think I was the right person for some reason. Which is fine for a small company.
    • tobyantes 1y ago
      You’re right. I’ll start: get off hacker news you noob. Nobody wants to hear your Eternal September rants about what you think DEI means.
    • moralestapia 1y ago
      Agree. I was in a (tech) meetup last week. We meet regularly, we are somewhere between acquaintances and friends. One thing that came up was a very candid comment about how "we should be able to tell someone 'that is just stupid' whenever the situation warrants it". I believe that does more good than harm, even to the person it is being directed to. It is a nice covenant to have, "we'll call you on your bs whenever you bring it in", that's what a good friend would do. Embracing high standards in a community makes everyone in it better. The Linux kernel would be absolutely trash if Linus were not allowed to be Linus. Some contexts do and must require a high level of expertise before you can collaborate properly in them.
• ahmeneeroe-v2 1y ago
  I actually love a ton of iOS 26's new features, but wow is it buggy.
• rcarmo 1y ago
  He's dead, Jim.
• jm4 1y ago
  That iMessage screenshot looks like MySpace. I don't use a Mac anymore, but I do use an iPhone. This is the worst version of iOS I can recall. Everything is low contrast and more difficult to see. The colors look washed out. The icons look blurry. In my opinion, Liquid Glass is a total bust. I don't know what these people are thinking. Times have certainly changed.
  • methuselah_in 1y ago
    Embrace Android
    • dlivingston 1y ago
      Things don't seem much better over there, esp. with Google removing the ability to sideload apps.
      • bitpush 1y ago
        As opposed to iPhones were you can .. sideload apps? Your criticism is fair, but not really relevant to the conversation here. OP was talking about design languages
• wetpaws 1y ago
  [dead]
• comrade1234 1y ago
  For me it's the notch... I'm still on a 2nd gen se (no notch) but I hate the notch on my laptop. I think we're stuck with the notch forever on iPhones. Even if apple uses an on-screen fingerprint reader in the future like a billion phones already do they're not going to go back from the face scanner. The only thing that will work is if the face scanner can read from behind the display.
  • nomel 1y ago
    Wait, how do you see the notch? It seems that only the menu bar can go there and fullscreen and windowed apps and video can't. Why circumstances do you see it? Maybe it's because I use dark mode? I can only tell it's there if I move my mouse under it.
    • comrade1234 1y ago
      When menu items no longer show up because they're where the notch is. Happens every time I'm on just my laptop and not on an external monitor.
      • nomel 1y ago
        I have my display scaled a bit smaller than default, which is probably why I never see that. That's....so stupid. Here's a "workaround" that might help [1]. It entirely excludes the notch area from use. [1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/460903/601283 https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/460903/601283
  • achandlerwhite 1y ago
    On the laptop it doesn't cut into the normal screen ratio. So it's basically free pixels minus the notch.
    • poolnoodle 1y ago
      But stuff did get hidden behind the notch sometimes. Not sure if that is still the case.
• black_13 1y ago
  [dead]
• makerofthings 1y ago
  I've always been a big fan of apple and have defended them in the past, but iOS 26 is a dumpster fire. There are visual corruptions and glitches all over the place and transparent text floating over transparent text. It's not even whether I like the style or not, it's just broken. Who signed off on this? No product in this state would ever leave one of my teams, I'd resign first.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• karel-3d 1y ago
  iOS 26 is so bad so bad so bad ironically I don't really mind the new design language, whatever, if the damned thing worked.
• ruralfam 1y ago
  About $1B (billion) in stock incentives for top-level execs in 2025 (Tim alone is $76m I believe). Apple stock is up. They are happy imho. Very, very few humans would care about "detail" vs. this outcome. Satya is close to $100M I believe, and we are shocked the M$FT is trading-in on ads/telemtry in Win11. These guys are just human.
  • alunchbox 1y ago
    Honestly the M$FT thing might be the greatest thing to happen to the Linux community, so much fresh blood and hopefully far more curious tinkers will continue to make the ecosystem better. I believe 2026 will finally be the year of Linux desktop.
    • dhosek 1y ago
      > I believe 2026 will finally be the year of Linux desktop. I’ve been hearing this substituting in YYYY+1 every YYYY for the last quarter century. The year of Linux desktop will never come. Why? - Money. Hardware manufacturers make more money selling computers that are optimized for Windows and there is nothing on the horizon that will change that meaning that the Linux desktop experience is always the worst of the three main options for hardware compatibility. - Microsoft. Call me when Office runs natively in Linux. You might be happy with LibreOffice or Google Docs, but MS Office still dominates the space (and as someone who does a lot of writing and has a number of options, I find Word to be better than any of the alternatives, something that 30 years ago I would have scoffed at). - Fidgetiness. All the tweaking and customizing that Linux fans like is an annoyance for most people. Every customization I have on my computer is one more thing I need to keep track of if I get a new computer and frankly it’s more than a little bit of a pain.
  • pacifika 1y ago
    Why not become a bank at that point and be honest about things.
• jasonjmcghee 1y ago
  I'm surprised the author didn't mention my personal biggest frustration I've had since I made the mistake of upgrading. Everything seems to be lazily done now - by that I mean, a modal pops-up and then it resizes to fit the content. Never seen this before. Or, you open settings (settings!) and it's not ready to use until a full second later because things need to pop in and shift. And it's animated- with animation time, so you just have to wait for the transitions to finish. And "reduce motion" removes visual feedback of moving things (e.g. closing apps) so I find it entirely unusable. And as others have noted the performance is completely unacceptable. I have a 16 pro and things are slow... And forget "low battery mode" - it's now awful. I'm not doing anything weird and keep like all apps closed and things off when I don't use them and battery life is significantly worse. (Noticed the same on M4 + Tahoe, upgraded at the same time) Very disappointed and I very much regret upgrading.
  • arresin 1y ago
    They don’t have automated tests for this? Very weird
  • astrange 1y ago
    File a bug in Feedback Assistant. There shouldn't be any performance issues.
• methuselah_in 1y ago
  Apple died somehow with Steve
• praptak 1y ago
  I'm starting to believe that customer satisfaction signals an inefficiency to be found and optimized away. The most financially successful companies have customers who are unhappy but not as unhappy that they leave. In this case the inefficiency was attention to detail but in other companies it might be something else.
• reliabilityguy 1y ago
  Many complain about sw bugs as a sign of decline. I think it’s not correct — every software has bugs. Hell, even hardware and device may have bugs. Remember antennagate? I think poor interface design is a sign of poor product engineering. And this is a sign of decline.
• madmountaingoat 1y ago
  I believe it was always more myth than fact. There's always been rough edges in Apple products line. If anything its more an indication of where the real focus is now. And it's not iOS.
  • SoftTalker 1y ago
    Yep, lots of inconsistencies even in their own iOS apps. I think they have been coasting on that reputation for quite some time.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• mathgradthrow 1y ago
  Is this a rhetorical question? Obviously Steve Jobs died.
• cmckn 1y ago
  I'll take the opportunity to air my personal bug grievance -- For several years, there's been an issue with audio message recording in iMessage. Prior to iOS 26, it would silently fail; the recording would "begin" but no audio would be captured. This would happen 3, 4, even 5 times in a row before it would actually record audio. Apple is clearly aware of the issue, because in iOS 26 the failure is no longer silent. Now, you'll get feedback that "Recording isn't available right now". Yet the incidence is...exactly the same. You might have to try 5 times before you're actually able to record a message. It's simply infuriating, and it makes no sense to a user why this would be happening. Apple owns the entire stack, down to the hardware. Just fix the fucking bug!
• taminka 1y ago
  unfortunately just an inherent consequence of treating software as needing continuous improvements and having yearly release targets, you can't just say that this settings menu is already perfect as is, you have to change it, therefore everyone perpetually shuffles around ui and adds features that nobody wants
• 9x39 1y ago
  I like my just-works stuff, so I was happy to pay a premium for it. Too bad wireless CarPlay is now buggy like a 1.0 release after years of almost no issues [1]. There's little problems that keep accumulating, like the camera app opening up and only showing black until restarting it, at which point I've missed the candid opportunity. I'm not going anywhere, it's still the right mix of just-works across their ecosystem for me, but dang, the focus does feel different, and it's not about our experience using Apple. [1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256140468?sortBy=rank https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256140468?sortBy=rank
  • wingworks 1y ago
    I'd have so many of these weird issues on Android (pixel), is why I switched to iPhone a few years back, it's been a much smoother ride ever since. iPhone isn't perfect, but it's way more "just works" then android was for me. Also, I have the iPhone 15 Pro (iOS 26.0.1), never had the black screen on camera open yet. That's the kinda thing I'd get on Android.
• qoez 1y ago
  The attention of humans got ruined with later generations. The generation before us were a different level of skilled, and it's hard as a millenial (me) and gen z to get close to them.
• mentalgear 1y ago
  Try Omarchy.org variant of Linux if you are tired of Apple's years of user-hostile changes and UI disasters. Many people seem to be drawn to it as it's a simple, clean productive system that "just work" (it was build by a previous apple fan that also became disillusioned by the greedy company)
  • kossTKR 1y ago
    Really wanted to give this a try until i saw a huge "Grok" ad on their frontpage. As a european Grok has the reputation of being the "fascist and openly racist AI", which i think there's actually hard evidence for with their leaked prompts. Why the hell are they promoting that?
    • mrkeen 1y ago
      I didn't see the Grok, but the Omarchy creator is quite openly problematic anyway: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64 https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
    • sparqlittlestar 1y ago
      Because Omarchy is a Linux distro by DHH and therefore you can also call it a "fascist and openly racist" Linux distro. DHH was someone I kinda read him online, but he's been going full-in on these racist talking points, e.g., https://paulbjensen.co.uk/2025/09/17/on-dhhs-as-i-remember-london.html https://paulbjensen.co.uk/2025/09/17/on-dhhs-as-i-remember-l... :(
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • arresin 1y ago
        Modern day witch trial.
  • rckt 1y ago
    I think Fedora would be a better option here. At least for me. Judging by the Omarchy presentation video it feels too keyboard oriented. Hotkeys for everything. And hotkeys for AI agents? Is is opinionated indeed. Not my cup of tea.
• eviks 1y ago
  > In my mind, "Apple" as a brand used to be synonymous with "attention to detail" but sadly, over the course of the last 8 - 10 years You outgrew this myth, congratulations! > Look, I've got nothing but respect for the perfectly lovely humans who work at Apple. Several are classmates from university, or people I had the pleasure of working with before at different companies. But I rather suspect what's happened here is that some project manager ... convince Tim But haven't outgrown this one yet, well, maybe in another 8 years...
• anechouapechou 1y ago
  Despite Apple's walled garden, its anti-consumer practices of trying to keep you in the ecosystem, and other behaviors (like the green/blue bubbles fiasco) that are absolutely reprehensible and inexcusable, I still used iPhones because it seemed far superior to the other offerings on the market. Fortunately, Apple is doing its best to make me see the light.
• tantalor 1y ago
  Absolutely despise this "Josefin Sans" font face. Illegible.
  • pastureofplenty 1y ago
    Kinda ironic that a post about attention to detail was so hard to read. Why is the font size so small?
  • hexbin010 1y ago
    Glad it isn't just me. It's like Jony Ive created a font 'for authors who don't want their text read' Luckily Safari's Reader Mode didn't bug out
• haunter 1y ago
  That fucking iMesssage screenshot lmao, this is insane https://media.nngroup.com/media/editor/2025/10/06/1-messages-img_2023.PNG https://media.nngroup.com/media/editor/2025/10/06/1-messages...
• comboy 1y ago
  On multiple devices when doing system update on ios 26, pin entry displays full keyboard instead of standard pin input. It's been like that for like 5 versions (of iOS 26) already. It's fascinating to me because that's the single thing which every user goes through. It's the main branch and not some obscure some edge case. How do you do testing that you miss that?
  • watermelon0 1y ago
    You can also use an alphanumeric passcode, in which case you need the full keyboard. Maybe they just unified this, so that it always displays the keyboard instead of switching between keyboard and PIN input?
    • comboy 1y ago
      I mean it should be unified, the pin entry should look the same in every place, this has security implications also. It doesn't.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• timmg 1y ago
  I wonder if anyone else here is old enough to remember the "I'm a Mac", "And I'm a PC" ads. There was one that was about all the annoying security pop-ups Windows (used to?) have. (FWIW, it starts here: https://youtu.be/qfv6Ah_MVJU?t=230 https://youtu.be/qfv6Ah_MVJU?t=230 .) Lately I've gotten so many of these popups on Mac that it both annoys and amuses the hell out of me. "Die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain", I guess. But, man, Apple hardware still rocks. Can't deny that.
  • throitallaway 1y ago
    > But, man, Apple hardware still rocks. Can't deny that. Ah yes, the Johnny Ive era of "no ports on Macbooks except USB-C, and hope you like touchbars!" was fantastic. Not to mention how heavy the damn things are. Oh and the sharp edges of the case where my palms rest. And the chiclet keyboards with .0001 mm of key travel. I'll take a carbon fiber Thinkpad with an OLED display any day of the week, thank you. Macbooks feel like user hostile devices and are the epitome of form over function.
    • bigyabai 1y ago
      I owned multiple Macbooks that built a positive static charge when they were on, instilling a Pavlovian fear of being shocked into anyone that used it. Those were fun.
      • therein 1y ago
        They still do. My m1, m1max and m4max Macbook Pros all build a positive static charge. It isn't even something that renders it "returnable" because I observed it on every single Macbook in the last 4-5 years so I just assume that's just how Macbook Pros are now.
        • jacobolus 1y ago
          This hasn't changed in at least 2 decades: I was getting zapped by Apple metal laptops circa 2004. But I have never encountered this problem when using a grounded plug. It was also a lot worse for me when plugged into outlets in an old house in Mexico, especially when my bare feet were touching the terracotta floor tiles; it's not really an issue in a recently re-wired house in California with a wood floor, using the same laptops, power strips, etc. If you are having this issue and you currently plug a 2-pronged plug into a grounded outlet, try using Apple's 3-pronged plug instead, and I expect it would go away. If you don't have grounded outlets, then that's a bit more complicated to solve.
• iamdamian 1y ago
  We need a new Snow Leopard.
  • sillywalk 1y ago
    "The myth and reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard" https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2023/11/5.html https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2023/11/5.html
    • iamdamian 1y ago
      I don't really agree with the article in the sense that from a user POV, it wasn't very feature filled and it was much more stable than Leopard.
• ayaros 1y ago
  'Don't get me wrong, I do like trillion dollar tech companies to be transparent, but this right here is certainly not what I meant when I said: "Apple needs to be more transparent".' lol Apple is burning their remaining goodwill among longtime customers, myself included. It's sad to see. Next WWDC, they need to be incredibly transparent about how they plan to fix these issues and get their house in order. If they aren't capable of accepting feedback after this public excoriation, I don't have high hopes for their future.
  • Noaidi 1y ago
    With this iOS 26 update, they set dynamite to my bridge. I’m switching to android because why not? I mean, I have to install Google maps anyway because Apple Maps is horrible. But the UI on 26 is way worse than a pixel experience in my opinion. Plus, I could just do so much more with the pixel phone but then again I’m sort of a power user. I was working on Apple since 1996 and started off as a computer support person. Now it pains me to help people with their computers because everything is siloed and proprietary and just makes no sense. And I mean, I’m also annoyed that their voice to text is just horrible. I can’t even tell you how many mistakes I’ve had to correct in this comment alone.
    • kbrkbr 1y ago
      Right? All these "features", but they don't get the very basic stuff right a lot of times. User input is very very important for the user. On iPhone swipe keyboard something that feels like a random generator replaces not only the word you swipe, but the word before, and in 2/3rds of cases with random nonsense pairs. And you can't turn it off without turning off the similar word proposals you definitely want. It's a strange design decision and I think the implementation is not up to the task. I'm not staying cause I like it, but because I dislike the other options more.
      • kossTKR 1y ago
        There's tons of posts on reddit documenting the fact that everyone is making mistakes constantly with their keyboards for a few years, especially the.constant.dots.everyone.makes - they worked ok before, it's honestly almost comical how bad it is now.
• morshu9001 1y ago
  Looks exceptionally bad, but OSX Lion and iOS 7 were worse releases. It's also been a long time since I've actually wanted an update, at this point more something that's semi forced. On the bright side, Apple Silicon is amazing, and it seems like Apple decided in 2021 to make the MBP good again like it was in 2015.
  • smallstepforman 1y ago
    Snow Leopard was peak OSX. Lion, Mountain Lion and everything since then has driven me away from OSX. I’m also stuck on an older iOS version 18). There may be certain fixes I would appretiate, but way more annoyances. I miss iOS 6 and that ecosystem … <edit> spelling, since iOS 18 isnt as forgiving as iOS 6
    • morshu9001 1y ago
      Yeah I would totally use Snow Leopard if it ran on modern hardware and had all the new security updates. The new Mac OSes are ok too since I ignore the random new crap, but a lot of that is just new hardware being faster.
• whatever1 1y ago
  Apple supports a ton of platforms (iOS, MacOS, iPadOS, WatchOS, Web, Windows etc). When they release a new feature it needs to be everywhere. That happens every September. The cadence has not changed, but the scope since Apple was just making MacOS has been multiplied. You can 10X your staff, but the coordination under 10X velocity will suffer.
• whirlwin 1y ago
  Steve Jobs is gone, so is the unique quality obsessed Apple we knew. Even on the hardware side, the AirPods reecks of poor quality since they break so easily
• LeoPanthera 1y ago
  A significant fraction of the bugs in this article are because the author has deliberately chosen settings that cause problems (disabling all location access) or are just bugs, some of which I can't reproduce myself. He throws in random comments like "goodbye accessibility" with no attempt to justify them, when in fact iOS and macOS are famous for their unusually strong accessibility features. I'm not trying to excuse Apple, but this article attempts to paint the impression that every issue is connected in some kind of serial incompetence, but that simply isn't the case.
  • AlexandrB 1y ago
    > chosen settings that cause problems (disabling all location access) I thought Apple was all about privacy. But their software needs location access to function properly?
    • LeoPanthera 1y ago
      The Reminders app has significant location-based functionality, which obviously won't work if it can't access your location. It remains private because this runs locally. It's not sent up to the cloud.
  • n8cpdx 1y ago
    There isn’t a single screen I use day to day in iOS 26 that doesn’t have a major or minor defect. iOS and Mac used to do a good job with things like animations, now they are horrible. Pre-beta quality. And dark mode and accessibility settings need to just work. That is a core part of the job of every front end iOS developer, including the ones at Apple. It absolutely is serial incompetence and the Apple engineering leadership that signed off on it should be ashamed.
• emchammer 1y ago
  Many of the images/screenshots on this web page do not show up for me.
• constantcrying 1y ago
  I do not believe in this whitewashing of Apples history, throughout their history they always had problems, either with their hardware or their software. The one thing that really changed is that every single company looked at Apple and saw something worth copying. Now there are dozens of phone makers, all seeking to emulate Apples success, putting effort into UI, polishing and design. This wasn't the case a decade ago. Just compare the circus bizarre design choice of Android Lollipop (either Stock or with manufacturer/user added layers on top) to iOS 7. Now Apple is no longer particularly unique, in many regards. And I believe that they were absolutely aware of that and desired to continue being a defining force, instead of being "one of many". It's not that Apple has changed, it is that it hasn't and now desires to force through change.
• thom 1y ago
  People just forget stuff. All this was said about Tiger. Snow Leopard was an entire paid OS upgrade the only selling point of which was that it made Leopard less crap. Your battery used to expand, your GPU used to overheat, you used to stare at a beachball helplessly every few seconds. You remember the good times, just like in ten years I'm going to remember fitting giant models in shared RAM on a monster GPU while the fans were completely silent, not this nitpicky stuff that has been par for the course for all operating systems forever.
  • 1970-01-01 1y ago
    The 'Unknown Knowns' quadrant (i.e. bugs) that they'll get around to fixing any day now.
  • computerdork 1y ago
    Yeah, agree with this too. Apple tends to create products that are more fully realized than Samsung or even Microsoft (especially in how it looks), but it's been pretty well know that Apple software tends to be buggy, as they aren't an engineering-focused company like let's say Google. They are a consumer products company. IMHO, people are thinking about how well thought-out and usable the products and software tends to be - Yeah, Apple makes it so anyone can use it - But their software has always been buggy.
• surgical_fire 1y ago
  > In my mind, "Apple" as a brand used to be synonymous with "attention to detail" but sadly, over the course of the last 8 - 10 years, their choices have become anything but detail oriented. In my mind it is synonymous with style over substance. Bad software packaged in a user hostile interface, sitting atop shitty hardware that looks sleek and fashionable. It doesn't matter anyway. It's fashionable enough that it will keep selling.
• dgfl 1y ago
  As a relatively young person with good eyesight, I can’t really say that Liquid Glass has caused any real visibility issues for me. I think it looks pretty sleek 95% of the time. The app search when pulling down from the home screen is much faster, it has a delay of almost 1 second before which feels more like 0.1s now. But nonetheless, there’s so many more bugs and visual glitches. Battery life is still unstable and feels markedly worse than before. Safari looks cool, but UI buttons being on top of content is foolish for the reasons highlighted in this article. Overall, it’s just much more visually inconsistent than before. And the glass effect on app icons looks blurry until you get 5cm away from the screen and really pay attention to the icons. I definitely won’t be upgrading my Mac any time soon. I just wish we would get away from this annual upgrade cycle and just polish the OS for a while. We don’t need 1 trillion “features”, especially when they increase the complexity of the user experience. MacOS in general did this very well, ever since I switched I’ve been very impressed at how much you can accomplish with the default app in macOS, all while looking cleaner and leaner than windows software. No new feature is even close to that balance of power and UI simplicity anymore.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • mariodiana 1y ago
    I'm 58, and have needed reading glasses for the last 10 years. Want to try something fun? Increase your default text size on your iPhone, and then just watch how many apps — native Apple apps, mind you — have their UI screwed up to the point where they become unusable!
    • ProllyInfamous 1y ago
      >Increase default text size I don't use a cellphone anymore, but back when I did (circa iOS 12) it was not possible to have the text large enough for me to read while still displaying all ten digits of a phone number. Example: `212-555-1234` would display as `212-555-12...` in my call list. ---- I have owned and primarily used Apple products since 1992; their accessibility options seem to be going backwards. An iPhone screen would still have more than enough space to display information if the UI weren't completely crammed full of junk. It is so frustrating when I help older clients and (unbeknownst to them) some stupid notification re-focuses attention. Often they'll keep [-s-l-o-w-l-y-] typing and then get frustrated that "the computer did something I didn't tell it to, without even warning me it wasn't listening to my keystrokes anymore..." [e.g.] — this used to be eye-rolling user error, now it's just expected operating system behavior. ---- Pro-tip: You can essentially disable Apple notifications by setting `Do Not Disturb` from 3:01am - 3:00am
• ChrisArchitect 1y ago
  https://www.lovefrom.com/ https://www.lovefrom.com/ https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/ https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/
• indigodaddy 1y ago
  Not to mention external monitors are broken on my M1 Pro MacBook since some Sequoia 15.x update. Upgrading to Tahoe now to see if it will fix it but I'm not optimistic. Fucking inexcusable that MacOS metal support for external monitors has been finicky and unstable since the very beginning, and they never resolved that (but at least external monitors were DETECTED, then somewhere in Sequoia things went completely south)-- and now it just seems to be completely broken. There are countless Reddit threads. Why can't the Apple engineering braintrust figure this out??
• pmarreck 1y ago
  1) My Bluetooth audio on my recent-model iPhone (15 Pro Max) is still flaky AF, across all Bluetooth speaker devices or my car. Even my 4 year old kid noticed and commented on it! It's been like this since the iOS beta, for months. And I can tell that it's one of those hideous, nondeterministic bugs, too. Apple, hire me as a contractor to help fix it, if you want! I love hard problems. 2) There is still no solution for this annoying-as-hell UI problem that I documented years ago on Medium: https://medium.com/@pmarreck/the-most-annoying-ui-problem-r3ditm-31773fe6bbd5 https://medium.com/@pmarreck/the-most-annoying-ui-problem-r3... 3) I had to buy Superwhisper (which is a nice product, but works a little janky due to how iOS handles keyboard extensions) because Siri's voice dictation is so abysmally worse than literally every other option right now, and has been for years. WTF, Apple? Hey Tim, I love the Vision Pro too (I own one) but maybe get your head out of that for a bit and polish up the engineering on the rest of your lines!
  • bigyabai 1y ago
    > I had to buy Superwhisper (which is a nice product It's literally a paid wrapper around a completely free program you would also be using for free if Apple wasn't actively hostile to Open Source software distribution.
    • pmarreck 1y ago
      LOL. Whisper may be free (I use it in at least 1 project), but it doesn't come with a GUI, hooks into mic audio and keyboard trigger, and other things necessary for something to work well on macOS. I am willing to pay for things that work well (and don't forget support afterwards) because I know from experience that simply having an "open-source core" just gets you halfway there, if that; the last 5% of polish to a finished, reliable, supportable product is at least 50% more work. And, to put it bluntly, since we don't live in a communist society, eventually SOMEone has to put food on the table from their efforts. I'm 100% fine with paying for that. Lastly, I have a kid, which means that I have 0% time to spend on troubleshooting non-working open-source stuff (which I actually enjoyed doing before the kid); I am ALL about reliability now, which is why I paid for Eero home mesh networking (despite cheaper or free options), a NAS from iXSystems (despite me being quite capable of installing TrueNAS on my own hardware), pay for Apple products (despite loving my NixOS Framework laptop as well), and don't upgrade my 10 year old Tesla (because it still runs like a top, and that's my highest priority right now- reliability) Once you get a kid, trust me, your views are gonna change, because you clearly do NOT have one. This is what happens to your tinkering-around-with-open-source time after it: tinker time before kid: [--------------------] tinker time after kid: [-] Now if you're lucky, you will end up in a position where you get paid to tinker around, and where they won't get upset if you use some work time to work on "aligned" tech.
• barrell 1y ago
  I upgraded to iOS 26 when the beta first came out. It’s remarkable how they have just kept changing the transparency of things back and forth, while the critical bugs have remained untouched. There’s no way I’m (ever) upgrading to Tahoe, I’m just going to hold out as long as possible and hope Omarchy gets as stable and feature rich as possible in the time being. No idea what to do about the mobile situation - I can’t see myself realistically ever using android. Switching off of iCloud and Apple Music would also be pretty tough, although I’ve seen some private clouds lately that were compelling. I just wish there was a more Linux-minded less-Google oriented mobile operating system
  • emeril 1y ago
    fwiw - I always just run prior year's iOS on mobile until Sept each year at which I update the one with a year of fixes - so I'm always running the most stable iOS but it indeed has fewer features but stability is more important than new features to me...
  • itopaloglu83 1y ago
    26 series operating systems are all just dumpster fires that are lit up for attention. Since there are a lot of die hard Apple fans and engineers on hacker news this is going to get downvoted to hell, but I’m going to say it again. It looks like Apple doesn’t care about user experience anymore, and the 26 series updates all look like they’ve been developed by amateurs online, not tested at all, and Apple engineers just took long vacations while they’re on the clock. It’s a complete and utter disaster of an operating system.
    • aniforprez 1y ago
      Got a ton of pushback for talking about how buggy the OS has been. "it doesn't happen to me" all right bully for you now I have to helplessly send a bug report and live with a machine that just crashes and restarts if I dare to open the lid seconds after I closed it
  • lbhdc 1y ago
    >I’m just going to hold out as long as possible and hope Omarchy gets as stable and feature rich as possible in the time being. Isn't Omarchy just config files for a bunch of existing, stable programs? Why wait?
• 8200_unit 1y ago
  Not sure if anyone else has experienced issues with the keyboard. Sometimes keyboard is blocking the screen and I can't get it to go away or the opposite where I can't get the keyboard to come up when I need to use it.
  • spike021 1y ago
    Not sure if the same issue but since iOS 18 and now 26, if the keyboard/text field detects a grammatical error or typo (even when you don't care) it'll almost do this UI thread block type thing where it refuses to let you move the cursor or close the keyboard until you act like you're fixing the error.
• lastofthemojito 1y ago
  I've been a Mac user on and off since the 80s and I think one of the biggest changes is how separate the Mac ecosystem once was. It reminds me of stories I've heard about the Cold War and how Soviet scientists and engineers had very little exchange or trade with the West, but made wristwatches and cameras and manned rockets, almost in a parallel universe. These things coexisted in time with the Western stuff, but little to nothing in the supply chain was shared; these artifacts were essentially from a separate world. That's how it felt as a Mac user in the 80s and 90s. In the early days you couldn't swap a mouse between a Mac and an IBM PC, much less a hard drive or printer. And most software was written pretty much from the ground up for a single platform as well. And I remember often thinking how much that sucked. My sister had that cool game that ran on her DOS machine at college, or heck, she just had a file on a floppy disk but I couldn't read it on my Mac. Now so much has been standardized - everything is USB or Wifi or Bluetooth or HTML or REST. Chrom(ium|e) or Firefox render pages the same on Mac or Windows or Linux. Connect any keyboard or webcam or whatever via USB. Share files between platforms with no issues. Electron apps run anywhere. These days it feels like Mac developers (even inside of Apple) are no longer a continent away from other developers. Coding skills are probably more transferable these days, so there's probably more turnover in the Apple development ranks. There's certainly more influence from web design and mobile design rather than a small number of very opinionated people saying "this is how a Macintosh application should work". And I guess that's ok. As a positive I don't have the cross-platform woes anymore. And perhaps the price to be paid is that the Mac platform is less cohesive and more cosmopolitan (in the sense that it draws influence, sometimes messily, from all over).
  • linguae 1y ago
    Unfortunately, if the Mac isn't distinct from Windows and desktop Linux in some way, then what's the point? Yes, as a long-time Mac user who now uses PCs at home but still uses a work-issued MacBook Pro, I greatly appreciate how Macs since the late 1990s-early 2000s are compatible with the PC ecosystem when it comes to peripherals, networking, and file systems. However, what has been lost is "The Macintosh Way"; a distinctly Macintosh approach to computing. There's something about using the classic Mac OS or Jobs-era Mac OS X: it's well-designed across the entire ecosystem. I wish Apple stayed the course with defending "The Macintosh Way"; I am not a fan of the Web and mobile influences that have crept into macOS, and I am also not a fan of the nagging that later versions of macOS have in the name of "security" and promoting Apple products. What the Mac has going for it today is mind-blowing ARM chips that are very fast and energy efficient. My work-issued MacBook Pro has absolutely amazing battery life, whereas my personal Framework 13's battery life is abysmal by comparison. What's going to happen, though, if it's possible to buy a PC that's just as good as an ARM Mac in terms of both performance and battery life?
• redbell 1y ago
  Yes.. Too bad we ended up here :(, It's Apple's Software Quality Crisis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075
• mnls 1y ago
  Every article I read about iOS 26 and Tahoe, is just another reminder that I should never ever update my devices. I don’t think that there is going back for Apple, the company is already too enshittified to get back to a company with a vision. They got drowned by AI, the releases and features are subpar to competition. I do care about detail when I’m buying premium products and Apple just doesn’t cut it any more.
• mrguyorama 1y ago
  Attention to detail? Apple built a phone that would bend in pockets because they used flimsy aluminum without enough internal structure, something they should have had ample experience to avoid from the exact same thing happening to tons of iPods. Apple insisted on developing a moronic keyboard implementation to save less than a mm of "thickness" that was prone to stupid failure modes and the only possible repair was to replace the entire top half of the laptop. They also refused to acknowledge this design failure for years. Apple built a cell phone that would disrupt normal antenna function when you hold it like a cell phone. Apple has multiple generations of laptops that couldn't manage their heat to the point that buying the more expensive CPU option would decrease your performance. Adding to the above, Apple has a long long history of this, from various generations of macbook that would cook themselves from GPU heat that they again, refused to acknowledge, all the way to the Apple 3 computer which had no heat management at all. Apple outright lies in marketing graphics about M series chip performance which is just childish when those chips are genuinely performant, and unmatchable (especially at release) in terms of performance per watt, they just aren't the fastest possible chips on the market for general computing. Apple makes repair impossible. Even their own stores can only "repair" by replacing most of the machine. Apple spent a significant amount of time grounding their laptops through the user, despite a grounding lug existing on charging brick. This is just weird Apple WiFi for a while was weirdly incompatible, and my previous 2015 macbook would inexplicably not connect to the same wireless router that any other product could connect to, or would fail to maintain it's connection. I had to build a stupid little script to run occasionally to refresh DHCP Apple had a constant issue with their sound software that inexplicably adds pops to your sound output at high CPU load or other stupid reasons, that they basically don't acknowledge and therefore do not provide troubleshooting or remedies. Apple was so obsessed with "thinness" that they built smartphones with so poorly specced batteries that after a couple years of normal use, those batteries, despite reporting acceptable capacity, could not keep up with current demands and the phones would be unusable. Apple's response to this was not to let people know what was going on and direct them to a cheap battery replacement, but to silently update software to bottleneck the CPU so hard that it could not draw too much current to hurt the battery. The underpowered batteries were a design flaw. Apple software quality is abysmal. From things like "just hit enter a bunch to log in as root" to "we put a web request to our servers in the hot path of launching an app so bad internet slows your entire machine down" Apple prevents you from using your "Pro" iPad that costs like a thousand bucks and includes their premier chip for anything other than app store garbage and some specialty versions of productivity apps. Apple has plenty of failures, bungles, poor choices, missteps, etc. Apple has plenty of history building trash and bad products. The only "detail" apple paid "attention" to was that if you set yourself up as a lifestyle brand, there's an entire segment of the market that will just pretend you are magically superior and never fail and downplay objective history and defend a 50% profit premium on commodity hardware and just keep buying no matter what.
• alsetmusic 1y ago
  I once read that Steve Jobs decided the default order of icons in the Dock on new Macs. This could have been delegated to any number of subordinates, but he considered it so important for the new-user experience that he chose to do it himself. Culture flows top-down. Cook is about growth, progressively flowing toward growth at any cost. It’s not a mystery why things are as they are at Apple.
  • ethbr1 1y ago
    Or the story about the BillG review and Excel date math. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev... Which, incidentally, is a great primer for younger developers on both what obsessive software quality looks like and why datetimes are a hard problem.
    • Starman_Jones 1y ago
      [dead]
    • ponector 1y ago
      I remember how date math is special there. A simple question: 30-01-2024 plus one month - what is the result date?
      • 0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
        Well I had to try this in Excel and (after fighting the input format), it gave me 2024-01-30 -> 2024-01-29 2025-01-30 -> 2025-01-28 Fun. There is so much ambiguity in what “one month” means. Polars has an offset-by function which is a bit more explicit about how you want to handle date math. “Calendar date” vs number of days. Edit: just ran polars and I’m not in love with its answer either.
  • hshdhdhehd 1y ago
    That wasn't a smart move by jobs. He should have delegated it to someone trusted. This micromanaging is how you make the company more brittle. Obviously Apple is wildly successful as for this not to matter much. They could sell iIce to Penguins.
• martinclayton 1y ago
  Nice touch having U2's song "Every Breaking Wave" playing in one of the screen grabs ... that being the second track on the (in)famous "free" 2014 iTunes release of their album "Songs of Innocence".
• giancarlostoro 1y ago
  They have a boring CEO who was a fantastic COO. Apple needs a new Steve Jobs at the helm. As much as I like Tim he does not impress me. His demos aren't anywhere as iconic. He's the safe pick for CEO but he is not the future of Apple by any means. I hope they make a sound pick for a successor.
  • cyberpunk 1y ago
    Nah, the game's up. There's too much money involved now for them to really do anything 'bold' anymore. I mean fuck, even their failures don't seem to matter much (Vision Pro, Siri) to their stock price. We'll get a foldable phone, and some new emoticons. Some font tweaks.. They think we're going to love it.
• hnlmorg 1y ago
  Apples attention to detail has always been skin deep. I remember reading blog posts 20 years ago about how some apps followed Apples standards design and others didn’t follow their design standards at all. In the 90s Apple was in worse shape. They couldn’t even compete with Windows 9x for stability. There were memes about how MacOS needed just as many reformats as Windows 98. The problem isn’t Apples attention to detail, it’s that people hold Apple to a higher standard. But in reality they’re just as fallible as every other software company.
• Yizahi 1y ago
  It's kinda funny reading about attention to detail on a website with CSS set to: font-weight:300 This means that author never considered checking how it looks on any other non-Apple OS. Meanwhile Apple has a setting, which is enabled by default, to artificially make a pseudo-bold font out of normal font: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553486
• afandian 1y ago
  Hey UX people. "Not now" says "I won't take no for an answer". It comes across as _really_ creepy. Let me say "no". And no, you don't know better than me about this cool feature.
  • latexr 1y ago
    I don’t think any UX professional is confused about that. It’s simply a dark pattern.
  • derefr 1y ago
    > "Not now" says "I won't take no for an answer". They know. When a designer makes one of those prompts with only a "not now", they tend to mean a very specific thing, that is at the same time a subtle message to the user and a passive-aggressive stab at the company they work for. What they mean: "the code path that handles what happens when you say 'no' here has been deprecated, because support for this feature was not part of the planning of a recent major-version rewrite of this app's core logic. When that rewrite is complete/passes through this part of the code, the option to say no will go away, because the code for that decision to call will be gone. So, in a literal sense, we think it's helpful to keep bugging you to switch, so that you can get used to the change in your own time before we're forced to spring it on you. But in a connotational sense, we also think it's helpful to keep bugging you to switch, as a way of protesting the dropping of this feature, because every time users see this kind of prompt, they make noise about it — and maybe this time that'll be enough to get management's attention and get the feature included in the rewrite. Make your angry comments now, before it's too late!"
    • afandian 1y ago
      I wonder how that works when they are asking to grant permission for an integration with a resource gated by OS or browser, e.g. in this case location data for the Reminders app, or showing browser notifications. Is the deprecated path that they just don't work without enabling those settings? And I'm sure every UX person is different. The ones who know it's a dark pattern must have some pretty strong cognitive dissonance with a company that historically sold itself as 'the good guys'. But there's a whole generation that probably grew up with software that fundamentally doesn't respect you, and this is just normal.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• prometheus76 1y ago
  They fired most of the UI/UX team soon after Steve Jobs died.
• Philadelphia 1y ago
  It now takes four clicks to delete an app on an iPhone, and four clicks and a swipe on an iPad.
• yilugurlu 1y ago
  It's like they all vibe-coded all the new 26.XX OSs across devices. I tend to ignore these kinds of things, but sometimes applications are unresponsive, lose focus, and iOS apps don't show the keyboard, etc. so I cannot take it anymore. I wanted to open a file from the Files app on iPad, a PDF. It opened the Preview app, but it couldn't allow me to scroll through the file. I tried to close it, but, back button goes to the Preview app, not to the Files. Then closed the app, and from the Files, but again it kept opening this separate app, instead of the in-app PDF viewer, and I guess I have never seen a malfunctioning state or application flows in default iOS apps ever. The new reminders app is a joke. It has weird things that randomly jump from date selection to time selection, and sometimes select random dates. It's like, they did, `claude new-reminder-app.md --dangerously-skip-permissions`, and "is it working? working! release it!" I know (hope) it's not the case, but, since the last few weeks, it feels it's like that.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• snitzr 1y ago
  Does anyone remember Jony Ive's first flat redesign of iOS? It was also criticized and had growing pains.
• garbagecoder 1y ago
  Lazy baby duck take for one. Apple's "legendary attention to detail" was never about reminders working the way you want. And to be honest, it never really existed. It was more that everything else was cheaply manufactured garbage.
• al_borland 1y ago
  Everything that went out the door used to have to live up to Steve Jobs' standards. I'd imagine those under him had a similar obsession, considering Scott Forestall talked about going over the iPhone UI with a jeweler's loupe. These days it feels like various teams are responsible for their part and they are managing toward a delivery date. As long as they check the box that the feature is there... ship it. There is likely not anyone around to throw the product in a fish tank if it isn't up to par.
• combyn8tor 1y ago
  Glad to see someone documenting this. I use the screentime feature to restrict my kid's iPad's and it is so painful. Here are my notes: - When an iPad is presented to you to enter your parent code to unlock an app, the name of the app isn't shown as the pin prompt is over the top of the app/time to unlock details. - It's not possible to set screen time restrictions for Safari. - If apps are not allowed to be installed, app updates stop. I have to allow app installations, install updates, then block app installations again. - Setting downtime hours just doesn't seem to work. Block apps from 6pm - 11.59pm? Kid gets locked out of their iPad at school for the whole day. - Most of the syncing between settings on a computer to the target iPads appear to be broken completely. If an iPad is in downtime, and the scheduled downtime time changes, it does not take the iPad out of downtime. - Downtime doesn't allow multi-day hour settings. For instance, try setting downtime from 8pm - 8am. - Popups in the screen time settings of MacOS have no visual indication that there is more beneath what can be seen. There is no scrollbar. You have to swipe/scroll on every popup to see if there are more settings hidden out of view. - No granular downtime controls for websites. You can block Safari, or you can not block Safari. Edit: Oh I almost forgot this nifty little bug reported back in 2023: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255049918?sortBy=rank https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255049918?sortBy=rank Screentime randomly shows you a warning about being an administrator... no probs you just need to select another account and then re-select the one you want and it'll go away.
  • hexbin010 1y ago
    Wow that's...a lot. Are they bugs...or malicious compliance/checkbox implementation?
    • combyn8tor 1y ago
      They present as bugs. I suspect they don't have the A team working on mechanisms that help reduce the amount of time kids spend on their devices. Do the bare minimum to show they "care" but no more as it hurts the profits.
  • derefr 1y ago
    > If apps are not allowed to be installed, app updates stop. I have to allow app installations, install updates, then block app installations again. Presumably this is because apps could add individual features parents don't approve of between updates. If you're locking down what apps you want your kids to use (to an individual whitelist of apps, not just by maturity rating), you're essentially stepping into the role of an enterprise MDM IT department, auditing software updates for stability before letting them go out. What would you propose instead here? I presume you'd personally just be willing to trust certain apps/developers to update their apps without changing anything fundamental about them. But I think that most people who are app-whitelisting don't feel that level of trust torward apps/developers, and would want updates to be stopped if-and-only-if the update would introduce a new feature. So now, from the dev's perspective, you're, what, tying automatic update rollout to whether they bump the SemVer minor version or not? Forcing the dev to outline feature changes in a way that can be summarized in a "trust this update" prompt notification that gets pushed to a parent's device?
• Pfhortune 1y ago
  Attention to detail is at odds with the pursuit of infinite, quarterly growth. Why take time to get it right when you can get something out the door for your next review? The quality of which doesn't matter because it's in the past, a quarter that's already closed.
• hirvi74 1y ago
  I feel like I am one of the only people that actually really likes iOS 26, iPad 26, and macOS 26. I really haven't had many problems, and I actually like some of the features. Sure, the UI/UX is not perfect from the start, but there hasn't been anything I have been unable to accomplish because of the new OS. The liquid glass can even be nice with certain backgrounds too. This is just my hypothesis, but I have noticed that a lot of the people that have been complaining about macOS have been using 3rd party applications for a in their workflow. If I am not mistaken, there were issues with many Electron apps in the beginning. On macOS, I mainly Apple's apps or I'm deep in the command line. So, perhaps I have been fortunate to avoid many of the UI/UX features that many have faced?
• heavyset_go 1y ago
  Apple's attention to detail went into implementing every dark pattern imaginable to get you on iCloud and related services. macOS is essentially an iCloud client and sales funnel these days, it's clear that's all that Apple sees it as.
• cestith 1y ago
  > What happened to Apple's legendary attention to detail? It was pancreatic cancer IIRC.
• busymom0 1y ago
  A lot of these "attention to detail" bugs are so hard to ignore once I see them. For example, on iOS 26, the Home Screen icons have those borders (I hate them but whatever). Those borders are however not there when you swipe up from bottom of screen to return to Home Screen. During the animation, the borders are not present at all on that specific app's icon. Only once animation completes, the border shows up suddenly.
• anon191928 1y ago
  with all respect, they are old people now, yes people working in Apple. They are retiring or retired inside the company. nothing wrong with that but design and all shows it. lol
• nonfamous 1y ago
  iPad OS 26 is just as bad, if not worse. It's the Windows ME of tablet OS's: ugly, near-unusable, and riddled with bugs. Just one example: I was excited by the idea of having two apps on screen at the same time: there are two I like to look at side-by-side all the time. But one of them (an iPhone app) randomly decides to switch to landscape mode, making the layout unusable. More generally, the window controls keep getting activated unexpectedly by taps when I use full-screen apps like games, resulting in the window reverting to not-full-screen. So I guess I'll just have to turn that feature off until it's actually usable.
  • Illniyar 1y ago
    Unless it has a huge memory leak that isn't fixed for years and causes it to be virtually unusable for anyone it's probably not the Windows ME of Tablet OS's. Maybe the Windows Vista of Tablet OSs though.
• bhk 1y ago
  It's not just attention to detail. They seem to have abandoned some core design principles like visibility/discoverability.
• zsoltkacsandi 1y ago
  I have a theory that the only purpose of the liquid glass update is to create an UI that uses more system resources, so it can be justified to upgrade to a newer device. It is terrible, does not anything visually or funcionally to the Apple experience.
  • hexbin010 1y ago
    They've been doing that for years now
• a-dub 1y ago
  i recently worked with a mac and was pretty unimpressed with all the visual clutter in the upper left corner of the screen. it was just kinda cluttered up with a junkyard of wasted space and needless controls. it didn't feel good, magical or delightful. just kind of like jumbled hodgepodge of dated nonsense. oddly, kde plasma is more pleasing and consistent.
• ant6n 1y ago
  Apple stuff is full of bugs now. The times of "it just works" are a very distant memory. The OS crashes more often then Windows 10 did, with the operating system becoming basically completely unresponsive. Apple also now has eternal bugs that have been around for years (like ios hot spot disabling quickly when tethering non-Apple devices). Together with a bunch of annoying decisions for how the OS works, which can not be configured, it feels a lot like windows -- eternally broken, fighting with the users, having to work around bugs. Kind of bizarre that they are destroyed their reputation for software perfection.
  • astrange 1y ago
    https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting/ https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting/
• Modified3019 1y ago
  Anyone who’s had the misfortune of trying to use the iPhone “Files” program to do anything at all, or seen all the little curser placement glitches in Notes or Safari (especially when resizing), or had to look up the arbitrary and ever changing path to a system setting, or started typing to be greeted by a loud popping from glitched out audio feedback, knows that legend was always just a myth. These are all things which have been broken for years.
• ergonaught 1y ago
  Steve died. He already covered this: https://youtu.be/K1WrHH-WtaA?si=tHrGBNmLlIfp4NSv https://youtu.be/K1WrHH-WtaA?si=tHrGBNmLlIfp4NSv
• theodric 1y ago
  And let us not forget about the non-resizable widget for the "Keyboard Brig..." [1] (which is where we store our insubordinate keyboards, I guess) Steve truly is dead. [1] https://cdn.social.linux.pizza/system/media_attachments/files/115/264/275/669/861/149/original/ce35349ecc2e7f98.png https://cdn.social.linux.pizza/system/media_attachments/file...
• JanSt 1y ago
  My current top 3 apple software flaws: 1) battery warning above tabs in browser with no x to close it 2) WebKit bugs that make inputs and visual diverge so you have to click under the input to hit it 3) flickering email app when it’s opened
• amelius 1y ago
  That attention to detail was never really that great. My Apple monitor has USB ports on the back side. Sigh. My mouse had a charger cable on the bottom. Sigh. My keyboard has no dedicated copy and paste keys. Sigh. My keyboard has no dedicated undo and redo keys. Sigh. At one point I had to start iTunes to update my OS. Sigh. Really, the next time someone says Apple nails UX I am just going to cry.
• OhioMan2943 1y ago
  No one gives a shit about anything anymore- Everything is just a job- either due to overmanagement or overwork. Look at how they recently butchered the new park hyatt tokyo redesign, one of the most iconic and enigmatic hotels in the world, reduced to "just another hotel". We're in a world where people have given up on going above and beyond, maybe because we're living in a society where intelligence and perceptiveness aren't rewarded and can't survive.
• dinkelberg 1y ago
  And those are some very low hanging fruit. If you look at the bigger picture, Apple does not know how to balance ease of use on the one hand and control over details by power users/geeks on the other hand. They simply do not let you configure things, because coming up with good UI for that is hard. But on macOS, power users probably make up a large share of their users. They should figure this out.
• FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
  Early Apples were pretty lousy from a quality standpoint (I was a certified warranty tech when the original iMac came out and it was HORRIBLE.. it was made in Mexico). When they moved production to Foxconn, Quanta, and Pegatron then the quality went up...
• game_the0ry 1y ago
  I really hope apple reverses course and brings back flat design with frost like how they did with the butterfly keyboard macbooks, but I get the feeling this is the new Apple under Tim Cook. Damn, it's a shame, the hardware is so impressive.
• iamshs 1y ago
  iPhone screenshot and cropping doesn't work. I take a lot of full page screenshots and need to crop them, but sometimes the button is visible and sometimes it isn't. Saving the page as PDF or photo is not intuitive either, you have to click a button that only has a checkmark with no writing on it, and then it says whether to save as photo or PDF. Cropping and saving has become a chore.
• morshu9001 1y ago
  Normal Mac/PC user priorities: Web browsing, run my app instead of telling me the last update broke it, battery life, plug laptop into monitor/TV/projector, copy photos off my phone without deleting them, games maybe Apple priorities: Emoji and emoji accessories, realistic glass physics, battery life, new kinds of ports, iCloud subscriptions, rearrange system preferences, iTunes delenda est I'm just glad as a SWE the Mac still covers my workload
• sohrob 1y ago
  I'm so glad the chorus seems to be getting louder over just how bad things have gotten with Apple's software stack. This piece has been mainly centered on UI/UX but it's also really bad when it comes to functionality as so many bugs have seem to come up in both iOS and macOS. I will never understand how a company that has so much riding on the way their products are perceived by their users has fumbled the ball so badly--especially with how much money they have in the bank.
• nixpulvis 1y ago
  If I had to guess, having worked in Cupertino, there is just not enough cohesion across the software teams. Everyone is building in their own little bubbles, and when one team goes down a bad path, your team tries to be overly diplomatic, or can say it's not my problem and now we're stuck with this mess. Sometimes you need the Jobs at the top of it all telling people it's not working well and they need to get their shit together.
• just-the-wrk 1y ago
  This idea is a whole genre of tech journalism. Its a honeypot for people with some specific bone to pick or ideology to evangelize. I buy more stock every time one of these articles comes out, because the quiet part is 'Apple is still the best, and I can elevate my brand by criticizing it'
  • just-the-wrk 1y ago
    ...then I read his bio https://johnozbay.com/bio https://johnozbay.com/bio he lists "publicly confronted Apple at the European Commission's televised DMA hearing in Brussels on browser competition." as a highlight. lolol. Time to buy even more stock.
• yalogin 1y ago
  I just hope they don’t port the glass interface to macOS. It’s just terrible
• rglover 1y ago
  Dad is gone. Tim Cook is a logistics guy, not a visionary. Simple as. If there isn't anybody around to care, nobody cares—even at Apple.
• apricot13 1y ago
  my partner and I have a long running joke that I as the techy person who pretty much just uses the camera, WhatsApp and Safari on my phone has so many bugs and issues while my partner who bought the same phone on the same day as me has none of these issues but has and uses every app plugin etc under the sun. and let's face it iOS isn't really that 'customisable' I just want Safari to work again. The rest I'll wait. I'm checking for software updates daily. it's gotten so bad that I looked up how to report bugs to Apple but I can't submit screenshots!? I'll settle for just being able to enter data into a form in Safari without needing to reload the whole page. just to add I had to cut this comment, reload the page, paste it in in order to be able to submit it
  • pacifika 1y ago
    That sounds like your device is running out of memory. Try disabling any extensions.
• ribs 1y ago
  Apple software has gone so bad in the last decade or so. UI problems abound - the lack of default buttons that fire when you hit enter makes me ill. THIS USED TO BE IN THE APPLE USER INTERFACE GUIDELINES. Does anybody remember that big binder that was ultra-important for Mac developers? Well if anyone still has a copy they probably have it on a bookshelf where it looks nice on Zoom. And then there's the bugs. What software is more consistently buggy than Apple software?
• oogabooga13 1y ago
  To be fair if you work in a glass palace you might think the world needs glass everywhere lol... : https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e949a92e17d55230cd1d44f/t/670adefa2e5e3a44dbca3a73/1728765707188/Lobby.heic https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e949a92e17d55230cd1d...
• thomassmith65 1y ago
  It's buried at Alta Mesa Memorial Park, Palo Alto.
• rifty 1y ago
  Apple still acts frivolously extreme about certain visual details on the interface. What feels different is that once we get away from the marketable still of an interface, the motivation just doesn't feel there to meet a higher quality vision, if there is one at all. A lot of people will disagree that Apple had great attention to detail before because of the things they choose not to focus on. But I think what was counter arguable before is that they were meeting their own internal vision with a high expectation for quality, and that that vision covered every part of the experience. The counter argument doesn't feel as valid today.
• roncesvalles 1y ago
  Apple was never very good at design. It was only good at aesthetics, and those are not quite the same thing.
• ebbi 1y ago
  I personally think Apple is a victim of being a publicly listed company. Once you're publicly listed, the only thing shareholders want (and the only thing the CEO is measured on) is, ultimately, the share price. Don't get me wrong, I also enjoy and benefit from returns from the sharemarket. But I think there are downsides to it, and you can clearly see it here, with Apple. A company that was an underdog, and didn't really need to worry too much about the share price because anything they did at that time was attracting customers at a smaller scale, but it was still growth. Now at the size that they are, they have to lose their soul to keep the growth happening. It's sad, but it's also the reality. Netflix for example - once tweeting "Love is sharing a password" now resorting to stopping this. There's just no contentment in the sharemarket.
  • mgh2 1y ago
    Growth can be done sustainably. Still the only FAANG that is not corrupt yet.
• skeptrune 1y ago
  My understanding is that they became more of a hardware company than a software company over the past few years and they just don't care about shipping with the same level of polish anymore.
• gitt67887yt7bg 1y ago
  Apple's attention to detail quit when they tried to force them to RTO back to California.
• sharts 1y ago
  It’s like the entire release management was left to a couple of product and UI types . You can tell because they seem to have focused on UI eye-candy instead of UX / interaction or any meaningful QE. Like there is a glaring evidence if attention to detail in the most useless of places. This thing is laggy…on my brand new 17 Pro. Why not just make the entire OS an electron app at this point?
• Beestie 1y ago
  Apple used to know what's best for me whether I liked it or not. Now, they have no idea what's best for me and no idea if I like it or not.
• duxup 1y ago
  Sometimes these articles confuse me. I think because I came from Windows to the Apple land (at least full time) only in the past few years. These articles sometimes confused me until someone on HN had a quote: "MacOS has never been worse, but the distance between MacOS and Windows has never been greater." So I see these articles and I ... I'm really happy in MacOS land.
• HardwareLust 1y ago
  It was overwhelmed by Tim Cook's greed, like everything else Apple used to be good at.
• mandrade2 1y ago
  the perils of being such a giant. desktop/laptop sales only account for around 8% of revenue for them
• lunias 1y ago
  Steve Wozniak left Apple in 1985 because he felt the company was no longer an engineering-led one and missed the fun of creating things rather than dealing with management. That was 40 years ago. Jobs cared immensely, but the snowball has been rolling for a long while. Decisions used to be made by people that actually cared, but now they're made mostly by poseurs.
• tveyben 1y ago
  I just noticed a meaningless feature of iOS: The cursor moves (since iOS 15?) in steps of one pixel. Probably just to make it slick looking (fluent)… - BUT that’s completely non-effective as it allows for the cursor to be positioned on top of a single letter in >10 different positions. So when you’re editing you are having a much more difficult time placing the cursor just between the two letters you want. I noticed it when using some app the had disabled this stupid feature and it was just so much more effective to do mybediting as the cursor jumped to the position BETWEEN the letters in stead of FLOATING ALL OVER. It’s nice on slides when presenting a new fancy feature, but completely useless for s ‘professional’ (focused) user. PS yes I recall those old Apple adds - saw them when they were brand new and Apple was a better details oriented company (I miss those days….)
• port11 1y ago
  1) In the EU, if you uninstall Apple Maps and set another app as your navigation default, many (most?) addresses won't work anymore. Clicking an address will show you an alert that you haven't installed a navigation app, or sometimes just open the Maps website in Safari. 2) With the new dual-language keyboards, text prediction is doubly messy. My Dutch-French keyboard suggests English words and almost never understands which language I'm actually typing in. 2b) Fine, but then at least my English keyboard will be okay? Nope. The other keyboards still get polluted with suggestions and auto-correct from the other language keyboards you have. For example, it's now impossible to write “as a” without iOS correcting it to “às à”, even though my Portuguese keyboard is separate and I'm clearly typing in English. 3) Search on iOS always searches for files, even if you remove the Files app contents from search results. (‘App’ just got corrected into ’all’.) 4) In iOS, HealthKit occasionally locks down and the apps that need it to function become unresponsive (AutoSleep, WaterNow, Cronometer). This can only be fixed with a restart. 5) In macOS's Mail, if you Command-Z to undo deleting an email, 90% of the time it goes in a Recovered Emails folder instead of where it was. 10% of the time it's not undeleted at all and is instead completely gone (also from the trash). 6) Calendar.app on macOS can become unusable if you have attachments in events. The solution is to open the event on iOS and delete the attachment. 7) Screen Time asks me twice if I want to unlock an app or website. Sometimes the animation plays and nothing happens, so I have to do it thrice. 8) The Game Mode notification can't be disabled, because no one at Apple has ever alt-tabbed away from a game. 9) If you search for a setting in iOS or the redesigned macOS System Preferences, I think 3/4 of the time it will take you to a nearby screen but not the actual setting. This is because Apple designers don't know that they can scroll you or link you to the right place. I've reported all these bugs to Apple with screenshots or videos. None of them were ever fixed.
• thesnide 1y ago
  it unfortunately died with Steve.
• drbroom 11mo ago
  ok... to start off, i'll date myself: first computer 1977 Apple 1, build (and owned) by best friend and myself in 10th grade. so mac/pc commercials :-) but i also remember "i bleed in 6 colors" & our beloved "Clarus the dogcow" i'm old! so to answer your question... HELL YES!!! unless you are talking about detail of the bottom line. To my view Apple care little about quality of product these days mostly because they Cook cares more about deliverables then usability. 1st piece of evidence developers no longer need to adhere to anything like "The Human Interface Guidelines" so there is no consistent UI. Developers all think they are designers, they are not! Steve was and ASSHOLE but he was also a humanitarian; among his many skills was that he understood that humans crave at least the appearance of control over our environment, he looked for how we did things in the real world and worked with great developers, designers & END USERS to build them. AND LEGACY was at least considered carefully before replaced. This was the Apple we loved and "evangelized" The Macintosh Way So at this point i'm not buying new Apple hardware or staying in their ethos. I'm looking for a couple of guys in a garage... Maybe Ive's 'little' project?
• lucabenazzi 11mo ago
  It's never been a thing, to be honest. They sell great hardware, and that's it.