10 ms·

Apple, What Have You Done?

146 points by todsacerdoti 9mo ago

Hard_Space 9mo ago
I am glad at least that Apple has not forced me to update my iPhone 13 and 2023 Macbook, as Windows would have by now. I am hoping to ride this out, and that a later bundled update will remedy the worst complaints. The most alarming thought in TFA, though, was that the iPhone update might have at least a secondary mission of nudging the user to buy a new phone - certainly not an unknown tactic in tech.
- nottorp 9mo ago
  > Apple has not forced me Not for lack of trying. Heard the wife scream that they updated her to 26 2 days ago. And she had been warned. Not by me, she may not trust the conservative geek, but by our daughter who is cursing at iOS 26 right and left. So far I've managed to protect all my iOS and MacOS devices, but who knows what they sneak in next... By the way, ages ago I had to pull over on a road and wait for an iOS upgrade because Apple deemed to display the "upgrade now" dialogue over my navigation app and of course i touched the screen in the wrong place to get rid of it because i was driving.
- chrisjj 9mo ago
  Windows would have forced you to update a 2023 machine? Really?
  - Hard_Space 9mo ago
    I don't think many would believe, based on what I wrote, that the machine had received no updates since 2023. Perhaps you forgot the closing /s
    - chrisjj 9mo ago
      Agreed. But only because you said updates forced, not received.
renewiltord 9mo ago
Specifically this System Data issue is big problem but I read online about it and tried stupid fix: set time to far future. Supposedly will expire this system data caches. Nonsense, I said. It is foolish to make cache so big it does not allow update to download. But I did it nonetheless and system data reduced! So crazy is real.
- nottorp 9mo ago
  DaisyDisk - the version you download from them, not the one from the app store which has to be sandboxed - helps with purging that crap. But then you have to buy an extra app to fix Apple's mess. Personally I don't mind because I use it to clear my personal crap and it's made its money back countless times already, but to get it just for the purge...
voidUpdate 9mo ago
> "My iPhone 14 Pro has 35Gb of "system data" which has basically filled up the entire storage I had left" I occasionally use a macbook pro at £WORK for a few apple specific processes, and it currently has 188.67gb of "system data" that I have no idea how to clean up or remove. It's marked separately from the 11.01gb of macOS in the storage settings, and it constantly complains about the disk almost being full. Updating and restarting don't clear it, I wish I could just rm -rf it all. Does anyone know how I can at least see what it is, and potentially even clean it up? EDIT: Thanks for the CleanMyMac recommendations, the 57.6gb of xcode caches that didn't show up in the "developer" section of the storage settings might have had something to do with it
- mhammerc 9mo ago
  Yes! You can go to the folder ~/Library and then delete what you want. To open the folder from a terminal: cd ~/Library open . In the Finder, you can enable "Calculate all sizes" from "View options," which will calculate folder sizes to understand what to clean first. This folder contains data from all apps; sometimes it is cache, sometimes persistent data. You will find all your previous apps taking gigabytes...
  - JSR_FDED 9mo ago
    ~/Library/Caches - you can probably delete stuff ~/Library - definitely not
    - mhammerc 9mo ago
      As an example, I have ~/Library/Android/sdk which takes 8 Go. If I know I do not need the Android SDK, I can safely delete it.
- murermader 9mo ago
  You can use tools like CleanMyMac to show folders and their sizes. All cache and library files are counted under System, e.g. files from vagrant, docker, vms, old jetbrains IDEs, caches from rarely used/uninstalled apps etc. You don‘t need to buy the full version, you can just use the info and delete it manually in Finder.
gampleman 9mo ago
At this point I’m going to hold out on updating MacOS for a year. If things don’t improve or the direction doesn’t change significantly I’m going to seriously consider paying the switching costs.
- getmoheb 9mo ago
  I'm in the same position - holding out for a year in the hope that things change direction. I've been in the apple ecosystem for 20 years at this point, because the ecosystem delivered real value for me. But that value has declined sharply - hardware is still good, but software quality has cratered while the drive for services revenue has become so relentless that I've now got one foot out the door.
  - gampleman 9mo ago
    Hm for me it's been a fairly steady state. The last 5 or so MacOS versions delivered features that got a solid meh from me: - Big Sur did a redesign which wasn't really needed, but it wasn't that much of a downgrade. Wish they focused on fixing bugs rather. - Monterey had live text, which has come in handy, otherwise I haven't used any of its headline features (such as shortcuts or universal control). - Ventura: haven't used any headline features (Stage manager, continuity camera, Freeform) - Sonoma: still nothing (Desktop widgets?, Game mode) - Sequoia: Passwords app is cool, but have been using 1Password for a decade by this point, so had little interest in switching. (Everything else: Apple Intelligence was a joke, iPhone mirroring seems too clunky to be practical). So nothing that exactly made me excited to upgrade, but at least things didn't get drastically worse. But Tahoe seems like a disaster I don't want to touch. For one, it looks ridiculous. But also there seems to be a number of objectively bad design decisions all over the place. This is Apple - good design is what they got famous for. If they don't maintain an edge in UI design, then it's not the same company anymore as far as I'm concerned.
- imafish 9mo ago
  Same, wrt iOS26. Hoping iOS27 ditches the glass crap. Otherwise, I guess I'll be buying an Android.
- 9mo ago
advael 9mo ago
My days of not believing people's gushing praise about "just works" about any proprietary technology are certainly coming to a middle
- coldpie 9mo ago
  It's so funny watching the proprietary OS folks despair as their software falls to pieces to make shareholders richer, meanwhile my Linux distro has "just worked" since 2007. You don't have to keep running on this treadmill, folks.
  - PedroBatista 9mo ago
    The delusion of the “Mac just works” crowd is only matched by the delusion of the Linux “year of the Desktop” crowd. They share the same trait of “it works on my machine, I like it, therefore it’s my identity and everything else is wrong” I use Linux regularly as a second OS for more than 15 years. Driver compatibility improved, software design and quality didn’t, in fact it suffers more or less the same problems of other mainstream OSs. Linux on the desktop has been winning because the others got bad at a faster pace, I’m not sure there is anything to be celebrated.
    - advael 9mo ago
      It's probably not worth it to say more than that my experience simply differs from yours. I've found it incredibly unproductive to quibble with people who have jumped to the conclusion that some difference of opinion must stem from some kind of identity-justification/confirmation bias delusion out the gate. This seems to be the most common mindless kneejerk criticism people jump to these days when they're engaging not with the person they're talking to, but a strawman or stereotype they believe that they conceptually represent, which in turn seems to be the most common failure mode of internet argumentation in general. It's interesting to see how the real phenomenon of confirmation bias and some relatively well-respected theories about opinion-as-identity have jumped from psychological literature to being basically pervasive thought-terminating cliches. But I like writing out my thoughts so... against my better judgment I'll write 'em out here. As a treat My experience with the linux ecosystem overall, which seems consistent with that of the person you're responding to from what little information that post gives, has been of consistent improvement over a long timescale with an increasingly capable stack of open-source software whose exact pieces have shifted with various community and maintainer dramas and the natural process of the birth of new projects and death of old ones over time. I've found that I have my preferences within that ecosystem, like I settled on archlinux as a distro about ten years ago and haven't really seen a strong reason to switch, despite periodically working with other popular ones in the course of a career as a software engineer and researcher. I have strong reasons to prefer a modular, composable operating system that I control, so I wouldn't consider using proprietary software if there's a working FOSS alternative. This is a bias for sure! But I find my frustration with these things has decreased in aggregate over time, even as I've changed tools and suffered switching costs for it numerous times, and dealt with the general hostility with which a lot of manufacturers seem to view open-source software running on their hardware, and their attempts to make this more difficult. However, the aggregate experience of proprietary software users seems to have significantly degraded over the same period. They generally insist that this is still worth it to them over doing what I do, and again I've been in enough dumb internet arguments to know that it's not worthwhile to do more than gently suggest that alternatives exist and may be worth trying unless I know them personally. I do get a window into proprietary ecosystems nonetheless, because I still don't feel I can replace the use cases required of me on mobile phones with an open-source alternative yet, and have seen my frustrations steadily increase over time with both these and SaaS products that I've been required to use for work. I also got frustrated enough with game consoles that I've entirely switched over to using PCs, running linux, for any games I want to play. At every turn, I have found that while computers are always error-prone in some way or another, and using them extensively will result in some frustration, this is significantly less when I have more control over the computer, and has become less rather than more frequent as open-source projects mature. I can not only observe that my own experience with proprietary products has followed the opposite pattern, but that more and more people talking about tech companies with scorn rather than effusive praise, yelling at their phones, and the public discourse adopting terms like "platform decay", "enshittification", "tech rot", etc all suggest that this is a general trend rather than my biases Again, your mileage may vary, but I do find it odd that you are so immediately dismissive of this perspective, accusing a pretty innocuous comment about it of reactionary identity-defense basically immediately without engaging at all. If you're inclined to listen to a zealot like me at all, I would only urge you to consider why you have assumed this so quickly, why you are so adamant that this is the only sort of person who could form such an opinion
dewey 9mo ago
I have 70GB of "Messages" on my Mac because iMessage "in the cloud" still stores all your attachments locally on every device. Yes, I can set the setting to delete attachments...but I want to keep them, just not on every device locally. Just deduct them from my iCloud store if you have to.
- AnonC 9mo ago
  The worst part is it can’t even show the attachments sorted by size so that one can browse and delete some large ones. Same with the Photos app on iOS. Can’t sort photos and videos by size from within the app. What’s the point of using application databases if the application cannot even query items by size and other attributes?!
  - dewey 9mo ago
    > What’s the point of using application databases if the application cannot even query items by size and other attributes?! I know that's not the solution that we want, but at least you should be able to look into the sqlite database it's using under the hood (https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos/wiki/Understanding-the-Photos-database https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos/wiki/Understanding-th...)
PunchTornado 9mo ago
The system data issue on iphone annoyed me since forever. It is The reason i switched to android.
mszmszmsz 9mo ago
We need a new "snow leopard" release. No new features. Cleaning up the mess. Ethically speaking, there's no excuses for Apple. They're sitting on a huge pile of resources. Don't have the team competent enough to handle stuff? Hire them. Yet I know that's not how capitalism works.
- valleyer 9mo ago
  As someone who witnessed a lot of the quality decline at Apple from the inside, hiring more people is decidedly not the answer. All that does is encourages management to engage in more churn, which is the source of these sorts of bugs. The answer, unfortunately, is that features need to be sunsetted/removed, the engineering org shrunk, and for a smaller group to concentrate on a reliable product core.
  - mszmszmsz 9mo ago
    It's not about the sheer numer of people, it's about their quality as managers, engineers, art directors and designers. Hire the best, pay them accordingly. Things can thrive without austerity, given enough good resources.
    - valleyer 9mo ago
      I disagree. A lot of the problems come down to part A of the system not coordinating well with part B. Take the brouhaha about the Tahoe window corners: obviously there wasn't enough communication between folks designing the window frame art and the folks implementing the window resize logic. You can hire the best, but coordination among a group of people scales quadratically.
- raincole 9mo ago
  I think it's an extremely recurring theme. User: I will be so happy if Foo doesn't keep changing its UI and focuses on fixing bugs for a few versions Foo's devs: Keep changing its UI and adding more bugs
- willtemperley 9mo ago
altern8 9mo ago
Steve Jobs was an extremely unusual CEO. He was hands on, talked to designers, developers, and users, and actually cared about making good products. Tim Cook is more of a regular CEO that wants to make money for the shareholders. He started doing stock buybacks and in general prioritizing making money. macOS is still the best OS I'd want to use IMO--if you can manage to avoid upgrading to Tahoe--but Apple seems to definitely be on its way down. Hopefully something changes.
- graemep 9mo ago
  Steve Jobs was a founder of the company. He expected to remain CEO for many years (until his illness). I do not know whether he still have a large stake but its likely he did, and he certainly formed his approach when he did. That motivated him to look at the long term as he expected to benefit from increases in the value of the business over the long term. A regular CEO looks more at the short term. The value when the next options vest or the next bonus or whatever.
  - altern8 9mo ago
    Yes, I agree. So, I guess our only hope is to get Woz back..?
    - zlies 9mo ago
      That would be awesome
    - graemep 9mo ago
      Maybe! Another thought. You said "macOS is still the best OS I'd want to use IMO". That is all they need. As long as you (and other users) feel that they do not switch it does not affect their sales or profits. It helps that Windows is getting worse.
      - altern8 9mo ago
        Well, I'm not upgrading to Tahoe though, so I'm not buying anything new they come out with...
titaniumrain 9mo ago
glad that the chief UI guy has left. see if the next iteration is any better :)
- embedding-shape 9mo ago
  If you think what's happening at Apple now is because of a single individual, you're wildly out of touch, it's an organization issue, pervasive in everything they put out today. Lack of proper QA I'd say is the reason.
techterrier 9mo ago
I've seen one of these posts for every single one of the ~15 years I've been using apple products, and yet still here we are, and for most it still the least worst OS going.
- mszmszmsz 9mo ago
  Talk about lock-in and enshittification.
- nottorp 9mo ago
  Yes, it's like in that joke about not having to run faster than the bear. As long as their competition is what it is, they don't have to put much effort in.
  - pmontra 9mo ago
    Yes. Maybe they saw Windows 11 and decided that now it's the right time to release Liquid Glass and fix it later. Anyway I've been on Linux since 2009 and it's getting better at each release (Ubuntus up to 20.04 and then Debian, Gnome.)
    - nottorp 9mo ago
      I've been on linux 1999-2013 but then I got tired of it "getting better" UI wise so I bought Macs. I should check out how KDE is doing, Gnome and whatever Ubuntu delivers these days don't look like fun. Command lines... I have them open on mac, linux and windows all the time.
      - pmontra 9mo ago
        That's pretty common: a lot of developers left Windows for a Mac in the 2000s because it was a more comfortable and realiable Unix than Linux. However I never liked the UI of Macs, so I never bought one. It was OK on the 9" screen of the original Mac in 1984, but weird on larger screens. Luckily I've been able to make my GNOME desktop look like exactly what I want since at least 2020, when the ecosystem of GNOME shell extensions got mature enough. My current desktop is close to mix of old Windows and GNOME 2, with virtual desktops and other stuff that did not exist back then. I like stuff to stay put on screen, so no animations and all those UI gimmicks. Maybe I should have started from KDE but I got burned by KDE in 2014 and I hesitate to invest time to look at it again.
q_p 9mo ago
I hit 355 GB of system data on iOS 26 last week on my 15 pro max. Factory reset and restore from backup and it accumulates 5GB a day. Will be there again soon. There is something seriously wrong with system data in iOS 26.
- AnonC 9mo ago
  I feel like this is leaking into macOS Sequoia updates as well. Disk space just keeps getting eaten up quickly and I’m scrambling to clear up some space on a MacBook Pro with a large disk and lots of RAM. I know I should reduce user data (like the documents, photos and videos I’ve stored), but something doesn’t seem right in how more and more disk space keeps getting used.
aa-jv 9mo ago
I've been with Apple since 1979, but these days I don't even use a small percentage of all the features of the iPhone, and in spite of having bought over 800+ apps I still only use 7 of them. However, I dare not even attempt to clean up my iPhone and understand how it all works these days - I just avoid any thing cloud-related, and try to do my own manual photo backups - which is replete with its own dangers, it has to be said. It really does seem like nobody at Apple is actually using any of the software they're releasing. Its just such shoddy quality control!
- embedding-shape 9mo ago
  Agree, been using Apple on-off for decades, seems to get worse every time. > try to do my own manual photo backups As a Linux desktop user but Apple phone user, I do the same thing, so I can save the photos to my NAS, using ipairdevice/libimobiledevice/ifuse et al. to do it. Best part? Apple still spams me that my photos aren't backed up, because I'm not using iCloud. Is there a way of disabling that? Nope, they'll forever bother me about this, thanks. > It really does seem like nobody at Apple is actually using any of the software they're releasing. Its just such shoddy quality control! I think this is the crux, there are no humans with brains doing QA anymore. Since I got my iPhone 12 Mini, up until yesterday when I last used it, CarPlay still feels like it's worth risking my life every time someone calls me while I use the navigation. Not a single person could have tried this at Apple, because who would think it's a great idea showing a large avatar across the screen, over the navigation, as soon as someone calls? Absolutely bananas the direction Apple went as soon as Jobs disappeared, shame really.
  - aa-jv 9mo ago
    I use Image Capture.app to manually retrieve my photo's - which normally works fine unless I forget to create a new folder for the task, and instead import into the older folders - which often means I overwrite prior photo's and lose data! Its so freakin' frustrating that, in the rush to get rid of files and folders from the users perception of their own personal filesystems, Apple has made it worse to maintain things manually.
losthobbies 9mo ago
It's a push to using their cloud services I suppose. I have had to pay for the icloud for a while now because my phone would fill up so quickly. I am eyeing a few tutorials on building my own cloud.
arianvanp 9mo ago
It takes 1.5 seconds to close a Tab in Safari. If you hold the close tab shortcut for long so that it closes all tabs the entire browser basically freezes. I run into this daily. I don't understand how this got through QA
- volemo 9mo ago
  Oh, I had the same (?) issue! Restarting the app fixed it temporarily. Closing (copying to a text file) all tab groups fixed it completely. Until I accumulated them again.
YetAnotherNick 9mo ago
While quality control isn't easy problem, it baffles my mind whenever I find a bug and it has been reported for years and still wasn't fixed in iphone/mac(or worse some user reported hack works). Those two are so big that spending a billion dollar for quality will make it back for sure.
deckiedan 9mo ago
I end up using https://derlien.com/ https://derlien.com/ "Disk Inventory X" regularly to find stuff to clean up.
- rpastuszak 9mo ago
  GrandPerspective is pretty good too (very similar).
arkj 9mo ago
Could this be because more code is coming in through vibe coding?
mopsi 9mo ago
Early this month, I was browsing the same sites I always do when Safari on my iPhone suddenly became very sluggish. I closed Safari and reopened it, and poof! Everything was gone: favorites, history, open tabs, everything. This kind of BS has become very common with Apple. There's a very pretty happy path, and a very ugly muddy trail if you fall off the scenic route.
retired 9mo ago
Apple needs a new CEO. Someone more visionary than Cook. The software needs more focus on making it "just work" and having significantly less bugs. The line-up needs to be cleaned up as well. Right now you have the MacBook Air 13" and 15" in 3 variants and 4 colours, that makes for a total of 24 models. M4 processors only. The MacBook Pro 14" can be purchased with the M5, M4 Pro, M4 Max in 2 colours for a total of 12 models. Then the 16" with the M4 Pro and M4 Max in 2 colours for a total of 8 models. That makes another 20 models. That is 56 different models to pick from! And that is before customisation. Why is there even a MacBook Pro without a Pro chip? And why are you selling M4 and M5 processors at the same time? Why release the M5 non-Pro in a Pro laptop and not put it in the Air, leaving it with an M4? The M5 is sometimes better than the M4 Pro, making it hard for the customer to decide to pick which one. Don't even get me started on the convoluted mess of the iPhone. Apple sells the iPhone 16 (5 models), iPhone 16 Plus (10 models), iPhone 16e (6 models), iPhone 17 (10 models), iPhone Air (12 models), iPhone 17 Pro (9 models), iPhone 17 Pro Max (12 models). 64 models to pick from! I remember Apple selling the iPhone 4. You would walk into the store, pick a Black or White model, 16 or 32 gigabyte. If you wanted colours, get a case.
- sschueller 9mo ago
  As long as stock profit is the only goal then Tim Cook is the correct CEO for Apple. Bribing the president publicly and doing what ever is required to keep the cash flowing in the short term is what share holders want.
  - FrustratedMonky 9mo ago
    That runs out of steam eventually. Hence need a leader with Vision that is filling the pipeline for next few years. Unfortunately. Once the money does run out, and they do get someone with Vision, then that Vision takes years to realize, so there would be a big slump in products/money where they could just collapse. Usually it is a competitor that comes up with the new vision. Maybe Apple is so big it just buys other people vision.
    - njb311 9mo ago
rukshn 9mo ago
My MacBook Air complains about being low on storage, and when I check the disk usage (I have a 256GB version of M1), 15GB is used for Apple Intelligence, which does nothing for me, and there is no way to remove that.
- volemo 9mo ago
  I think it’s possible to turn it off completely. Or have they ripped that out in Tahoe?
- skylurk 9mo ago
  You can remove Apple Intelligence offline models. Assuming you already have Apple Intelligence disabled: Enable Siri, change Siri's language to Chinese, wait an hour, disable Siri again. At least, it worked for me yesterday.
brador 9mo ago
Dude has no storage and no backups on phone. He is one icon refresh from losing it all. Endless restart loop. No recovery possible, even with a second iPhone and mac. It’s a known bug for years.
tymonPartyLate 9mo ago
The worst crime for me is liquid glass on the apple watch. All the menus are now lagging on the watch ultra gen2. Where previously it was smooth to interact with, the random lags now make it annoying and inconvenient to interact with. (I need to focus my attention on the Ui state instead of following an automatic procedure from muscle memory) The battery sometimes randomly drains within less than a day. There are absolutely no benefits of the new visual effects. The watch was my favorite apple device because it helps me to reduce screen time on the phone. Now it is a source of anger.
paprikanotfound 9mo ago
I turned-off automatic updates as soon as the new OSs were announced but my sister got a little surprise the other day when she woke up and her iphone had updated to iOS 26. A lot of changes for no reason. I hope that now that the design team is gone things might get bit better.
rado 9mo ago
Not sure the App Store field should autofocus. Mac menus draw the frame first, then after a delay we see the items. That is inexcusable
polyrand 9mo ago
I share the same feeling. I waited as much as possible to upgrade to iOS 26 / macOS Tahoe. Two days ago, I finally upgraded. Liquid Glass is one of the worst things I've ever seen in terms of design. It reminds me of when I personalized old cheap android phones or Linux distros just "to look cool". Cool-looking: yes. Unusable: also yes. Tasteful design: almost absent. Just the increase of the border-radius in all elements makes it hideous. Apps with a search bar on a scrollable list look like a CSS bug when the search bar is on top of the elements. Neither the search bar nor the element underneath are visible. Although this applies to most transparency effects on Liquid Glass. Neither the elements above nor below the "glass" are visible. And the extra value added is zero. The thing is, I can still adapt to it, or tweak transparency and contrast. But I've seen elderly relatives struggle just because WhatsApp decided to add the "Meta AI" floating button. I can't imagine what this "inaccessible" UI changes can do.
- freehorse 9mo ago
  It is the first time I am trying to skip a macos version. I really hope in macos27 they will fix things. I used to skip every second windows version, so back here we are.
  - inatreecrown2 9mo ago
    same here. using mac since OS9, and Tahoe is the first time i skipped a version (downgrade after 2 months)
OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
Yeah. I've been using Apple products off and on for 47 years and: a. Apple is not the same company it was 40 years ago. Or 20 years ago. Or 5 years ago. b. Apple quality varies greatly over time. I'm typing this on an 8 year old Dell XPS laptop. I've never had an Apple product I bought new last more than about 4 years. People tell me they've had Apple products last 6-8 years before dying. Clearly there's a distribution, but the central tendency of the apple curve is lower than the central tendency of Dell or Lenovo. c. Apple is filled with <insert epithet I can't repeat here>. Without exception, everyone I've met in the product group is actively trying to figure out how to get you to buy a new iProduct. And they seem to hire only sociopaths. Engineering doesn't seem to be overrun with sociopaths. I think because at the end of the day they have to build things that work for at least a few months after you unbox them. Apple is absolutely trying to make your experience of an older iProduct craptastic. But... so is everyone else in the industry. It's just that Apple, who once made very decent products, had much higher from which to fall.
- surgical_fire 9mo ago
  > Apple is absolutely trying to make your experience of an older iProduct craptastic. But... so is everyone else in the industry. It's just that Apple, who once made very decent products, had much higher from which to fall. My personal laptop is a 7 year old Dell G5 running Linux Mint. My experience using that on a daily basis is actually pretty decent. Very smooth sailing. It is good enough that I keep postponing my decision to get a new machine. So, no. This is an Apple problem, not "everyone else in the industry".
gizzlon 9mo ago
Apple have been drafting on past innovations and cashing in for a while now, yes? Very profitable, but it can't last forever. Also, here's Tim kissing fascist ass on the same day ICE shot an unarmed man: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/tim-cook-attended-melanias-movie-050006216.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/tim-cook-attended-melani...
FrustratedMonky 9mo ago
Taking a photo of home screen used to save automatically, now I have to click 2 extra times.
supernes 9mo ago
> Do Apple staff even use their products anymore, or are they all secretly harbouring Android devices? I've been asking myself the same for a couple of years now. Assuming Tim Apple uses an iPhone, does he just throw it in the garbage and pull out a fresh one every time the battery reaches 20%? Is no one at Apple irked by the low battery notification modal that blocks all interactions until you dismiss it, the same way it has for 19 freaking years now? It even covers the PIN entry form and makes the device unusable. I honestly think it's more reasonable to assume they're all on Android.
- OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
  Apple laid off everyone in their #a11y and user experience team back in... was it 96? It hasn't been the same company since.
budududuroiu 9mo ago
I downloaded all my photos from iCloud about a month ago. That was the last task on the monumental "leave the Apple walled garden" task list. Life on the outside is really nice. You can just... do things.
- lysium 9mo ago
  How did you do this? I once tried and it seemed impossible.
  - budududuroiu 9mo ago
    icloudpd - https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do... for the rest of the migration I had to take it piece by piece, luckily my iPhone had enough storage, I got iCloud to download everything to my iPhone, then syncthing-ed everything to another machine. I then backed up everything that I just downloaded from iCloud to a Hetzner Storage Box via restic.
    - lysium 9mo ago
      Thanks, man! Appreciated
willtemperley 9mo ago
They're making some historically terrible decisions. Now we're all going to have to pay for Gemini model storage, probably 2 to 4 GB. That means we're probably paying $10 per-device for the storage required to have Google's model on "our" devices. Which we never asked for. They could just make it an optional part of the install. Does anyone really care about the on-board "intelligence"? Gemini FFS.
- PedroBatista 9mo ago
  Ironically, Google is the safer bet and this might have been a correct decision from Tim Apple. AI is changing at a rapid pace ( still ) and OpenAI is no longer the only game in town at the top, plus their finances are.. something we’ll hear about the next year and Sam Altman is an incredible unscrupulous person with past actions and decisions catching up to him. Not exactly the situation you want to partner with. At this point you don’t need your AI on Apple devices to be revolutionary, it needs to work and be better than the current situation which is not difficult. Gemini 3 is quite good for the general public, Google has the money to keep playing the AÍ games and also played ball with Apple, OpenAI only has 1 or 2 of those going for them.
  - willtemperley 9mo ago
    > Ironically, Google is the safer bet Possibly. Until online features are added, marking a slow decline into the everything-as-a-subscription-service world (E-ASS). Look at Apple vs Google stock price for the carrot. Even if I turn it off, how to I remove it and reclaim the space I paid for?
KnuthIsGod 9mo ago
My Linux installation occupies 6 gigabytes. Just saying...
jl6 9mo ago
I've been successfully holding off on updating from iOS 18 by declining the prompt each time. Any tips for pinning the version more robustly? Because I feel the random upgrade prompts are going to catch me out eventually.
- trueno 9mo ago
  i switched to the ios 18 public beta channel, which currently has no beta available to dl and that stopped the damn update annoyances
- samfromnz 9mo ago
  My iPhone has so little free space (thanks to the ever increasing “system data”) that it can’t update to iOS 26. Point updates for iOS 18 are usually much smaller and can still be installed. I can’t believe I’m suggesting this, but… you could install a bunch of apps to get your phone storage to <10GB free, which should block it being able to update to iOS 26.
  - deltoidmaximus 9mo ago
    This was a trick to block Windows updates at one point, but then they started force reserving 7GB or something with a later update. It meant that some devices with small disks that supported Windows 10 no longer met the system requirements.
concinds 9mo ago
What blows my mind isn't the pervasive bugs throughout the system, which you could attribute to a poorly-run division or dysfunctional company. It's that the basic shit is now so broken. Safari is unusable with too many tabs because it won't suspend them. The Tahoe app launcher will randomly remove apps from the list, and you need to open Finder to get it. Apple Books is unusable; the book keeps blanking out, it displays random error messages, search is slow and cumbersome because you need to scroll the search results list each time. There's a collapse in basic functionality where it's obvious they don't use their own products.
- danhau 9mo ago
  Curiously, since the last update I have the problem where Safari tabs go completely white after a while. Refreshing doesn‘t help. I have to copy the URL and paste it into a fresh tab.
  - port11 9mo ago
    I’ve had this one for at least a year. Suspended tabs won’t come back 1/4 of the time, and the URL is gone too; the tab is effectively gone. I’m keeping important tabs in Brave.
    - concinds 9mo ago
      I was about to mention that too. A browser that loses tabs!
    - concinds 9mo ago
      I just found there's two separate bugs: sometimes the page goes blank but the URL stays, sometimes it loses the URL too and the back/forward button so everything's gone.
cynicalsecurity 9mo ago
The walled garden seems to be falling apart, with users trapped inside. Maybe the idea of a walled garden isn't so great after all.
OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
Maybe this is just a reminder to put your iProduct down, go outside and touch grass. (Oh man. That came out super smug. Imagine the non-smug version of that message. Maybe it should have been something like "I went on a project to reduce the amount of screen time over the last couple of years and generally feel healthier and happier. Pick your own level of engagement with tech, but I encourage you to think about if you're spending too much time on your phone (or commenting on threads at ycombinator.com) at least every couple of months.")
haritha-j 9mo ago
I've got the exact same storage issue on my iphone xr. Happened once before and it was fixed by doing a full reset and restore. That lasted about 6 months. I don't want to keep doing resets every 6 months. Has anyone found a simpler solution?
- padjo 9mo ago
  Yes, move to android.
TYPE_FASTER 9mo ago
I have an old Mac Pro that I have upgraded to High Sierra. I don't really want to upgrade it further.
galkk 9mo ago
When I switched from 10+ or something years of android (used since Galaxy S) to iphone 13, I felt that “everything just works”. But recently it’s getting worse. I don’t know what they did, but last year or so the typing on the keyboard became progressively worse. Constant typos, wrong letters. Idk what is happening.
neomantra 9mo ago
An elderly friend had some identity theft and we went to handle it at the three credit bureaus… She has an old MacBook and old iPhone (circa 2017?). Apple no longer updates these OS’ even the bundled Safari. One of the bureaus, Experian I think, has a TLS cert that is not compatible with the old OSs so all the “don’t trust this site” warnings come up. How many people have incomplete credit freezes because of this? Apple is of a size that this hurts society.
JKCalhoun 9mo ago
The article reads as a list of bug gripes. I agree, Apple needs a focus on quality. Plenty of Apple fans have been asking, for years, for a bug-fix release of all the OS's. I don't know where the buck stops. I would point to Craig Federighi, but no doubt if Tim Cook told him he had to pivot to quality over features, Craig would do as Tim asked. (I went to one Federighi feature meeting where engineers from the various teams show up with a demo ready to show and Craig goes round robin within the conference room watching each demo, asking questions, and then generally giving a thumbs up or not. It is done very rapid fire though—we were expected to show up "ultra-prepared". I watched him go from team to team before getting to us and my impression of his capabilities and understanding of the OS as a whole was in no way diminished by the experience. Craig is a capable guy. I want him and Apple to succeed.)
grsmvg 9mo ago
My number one bug for years that baffles me as to why Apple hasn’t fixed it: Zooming in on heavy websites or PDFs (with large images or WebGL) force closes the Safari tab. Over and over again.
joshstrange 9mo ago
We are all lucky that Alan Dye is off screwing up Meta now and that Tim Cook is not long for Apple. Even with just Dye gone I expect things to improve but I doubt a big change will happen until Tim Cook leaves (which cannot come soon enough).
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
SirMaster 9mo ago
I have a feeling things are only going to get worse with the more AI integration they are pushing next... They really need to do a year release that just focuses on fixing all the broken things and cleaning things up.
pzo 9mo ago
for me this latest macOS is buggy as well. AirDrop stopped working and I cannot airdrop from my phone to my macbook that is 20cm away, connected to same fast WiFi and sometimes even wired to my macbook via usb-c. I tried then to workaround and use apple Image Capture app to copy some files - always the latest picture is not available in the app. So now I have to do like cavemen to share some stuff to my email and download file in the email. And share button sometime fails as well...
- fragmede 9mo ago
  Try opening the share menu on your phone, then opening the full airdrop menu, and airdropping to your laptop. Works for me when airdropping directly to my laptop in the share menu does not.
netfortius 9mo ago
Apple has become a wanna be political participant, so priorities changed.

146 points by todsacerdoti 9mo ago

I am glad at least that Apple has not forced me to update my iPhone 13 and 2023 Macbook, as Windows would have by now. I am hoping to ride this out, and that a later bundled update will remedy the worst complaints. The most alarming thought in TFA, though, was that the iPhone update might have at least a secondary mission of nudging the user to buy a new phone - certainly not an unknown tactic in tech.

nottorp 9mo ago
> Apple has not forced me Not for lack of trying. Heard the wife scream that they updated her to 26 2 days ago. And she had been warned. Not by me, she may not trust the conservative geek, but by our daughter who is cursing at iOS 26 right and left. So far I've managed to protect all my iOS and MacOS devices, but who knows what they sneak in next... By the way, ages ago I had to pull over on a road and wait for an iOS upgrade because Apple deemed to display the "upgrade now" dialogue over my navigation app and of course i touched the screen in the wrong place to get rid of it because i was driving.
chrisjj 9mo ago
Windows would have forced you to update a 2023 machine? Really?
- Hard_Space 9mo ago
  I don't think many would believe, based on what I wrote, that the machine had received no updates since 2023. Perhaps you forgot the closing /s
  - chrisjj 9mo ago
    Agreed. But only because you said updates forced, not received.

renewiltord 9mo ago

Specifically this System Data issue is big problem but I read online about it and tried stupid fix: set time to far future. Supposedly will expire this system data caches. Nonsense, I said. It is foolish to make cache so big it does not allow update to download. But I did it nonetheless and system data reduced! So crazy is real.

nottorp 9mo ago
DaisyDisk - the version you download from them, not the one from the app store which has to be sandboxed - helps with purging that crap. But then you have to buy an extra app to fix Apple's mess. Personally I don't mind because I use it to clear my personal crap and it's made its money back countless times already, but to get it just for the purge...

voidUpdate 9mo ago

> "My iPhone 14 Pro has 35Gb of "system data" which has basically filled up the entire storage I had left" I occasionally use a macbook pro at £WORK for a few apple specific processes, and it currently has 188.67gb of "system data" that I have no idea how to clean up or remove. It's marked separately from the 11.01gb of macOS in the storage settings, and it constantly complains about the disk almost being full. Updating and restarting don't clear it, I wish I could just rm -rf it all. Does anyone know how I can at least see what it is, and potentially even clean it up? EDIT: Thanks for the CleanMyMac recommendations, the 57.6gb of xcode caches that didn't show up in the "developer" section of the storage settings might have had something to do with it

mhammerc 9mo ago
Yes! You can go to the folder ~/Library and then delete what you want. To open the folder from a terminal: cd ~/Library open . In the Finder, you can enable "Calculate all sizes" from "View options," which will calculate folder sizes to understand what to clean first. This folder contains data from all apps; sometimes it is cache, sometimes persistent data. You will find all your previous apps taking gigabytes...
- JSR_FDED 9mo ago
  ~/Library/Caches - you can probably delete stuff ~/Library - definitely not
  - mhammerc 9mo ago
    As an example, I have ~/Library/Android/sdk which takes 8 Go. If I know I do not need the Android SDK, I can safely delete it.
murermader 9mo ago
You can use tools like CleanMyMac to show folders and their sizes. All cache and library files are counted under System, e.g. files from vagrant, docker, vms, old jetbrains IDEs, caches from rarely used/uninstalled apps etc. You don‘t need to buy the full version, you can just use the info and delete it manually in Finder.

gampleman 9mo ago

At this point I’m going to hold out on updating MacOS for a year. If things don’t improve or the direction doesn’t change significantly I’m going to seriously consider paying the switching costs.

getmoheb 9mo ago
I'm in the same position - holding out for a year in the hope that things change direction. I've been in the apple ecosystem for 20 years at this point, because the ecosystem delivered real value for me. But that value has declined sharply - hardware is still good, but software quality has cratered while the drive for services revenue has become so relentless that I've now got one foot out the door.
- gampleman 9mo ago
  Hm for me it's been a fairly steady state. The last 5 or so MacOS versions delivered features that got a solid meh from me: - Big Sur did a redesign which wasn't really needed, but it wasn't that much of a downgrade. Wish they focused on fixing bugs rather. - Monterey had live text, which has come in handy, otherwise I haven't used any of its headline features (such as shortcuts or universal control). - Ventura: haven't used any headline features (Stage manager, continuity camera, Freeform) - Sonoma: still nothing (Desktop widgets?, Game mode) - Sequoia: Passwords app is cool, but have been using 1Password for a decade by this point, so had little interest in switching. (Everything else: Apple Intelligence was a joke, iPhone mirroring seems too clunky to be practical). So nothing that exactly made me excited to upgrade, but at least things didn't get drastically worse. But Tahoe seems like a disaster I don't want to touch. For one, it looks ridiculous. But also there seems to be a number of objectively bad design decisions all over the place. This is Apple - good design is what they got famous for. If they don't maintain an edge in UI design, then it's not the same company anymore as far as I'm concerned.
imafish 9mo ago
Same, wrt iOS26. Hoping iOS27 ditches the glass crap. Otherwise, I guess I'll be buying an Android.
9mo ago

advael 9mo ago

My days of not believing people's gushing praise about "just works" about any proprietary technology are certainly coming to a middle

coldpie 9mo ago
It's so funny watching the proprietary OS folks despair as their software falls to pieces to make shareholders richer, meanwhile my Linux distro has "just worked" since 2007. You don't have to keep running on this treadmill, folks.
- PedroBatista 9mo ago
  The delusion of the “Mac just works” crowd is only matched by the delusion of the Linux “year of the Desktop” crowd. They share the same trait of “it works on my machine, I like it, therefore it’s my identity and everything else is wrong” I use Linux regularly as a second OS for more than 15 years. Driver compatibility improved, software design and quality didn’t, in fact it suffers more or less the same problems of other mainstream OSs. Linux on the desktop has been winning because the others got bad at a faster pace, I’m not sure there is anything to be celebrated.
  - advael 9mo ago
    It's probably not worth it to say more than that my experience simply differs from yours. I've found it incredibly unproductive to quibble with people who have jumped to the conclusion that some difference of opinion must stem from some kind of identity-justification/confirmation bias delusion out the gate. This seems to be the most common mindless kneejerk criticism people jump to these days when they're engaging not with the person they're talking to, but a strawman or stereotype they believe that they conceptually represent, which in turn seems to be the most common failure mode of internet argumentation in general. It's interesting to see how the real phenomenon of confirmation bias and some relatively well-respected theories about opinion-as-identity have jumped from psychological literature to being basically pervasive thought-terminating cliches. But I like writing out my thoughts so... against my better judgment I'll write 'em out here. As a treat My experience with the linux ecosystem overall, which seems consistent with that of the person you're responding to from what little information that post gives, has been of consistent improvement over a long timescale with an increasingly capable stack of open-source software whose exact pieces have shifted with various community and maintainer dramas and the natural process of the birth of new projects and death of old ones over time. I've found that I have my preferences within that ecosystem, like I settled on archlinux as a distro about ten years ago and haven't really seen a strong reason to switch, despite periodically working with other popular ones in the course of a career as a software engineer and researcher. I have strong reasons to prefer a modular, composable operating system that I control, so I wouldn't consider using proprietary software if there's a working FOSS alternative. This is a bias for sure! But I find my frustration with these things has decreased in aggregate over time, even as I've changed tools and suffered switching costs for it numerous times, and dealt with the general hostility with which a lot of manufacturers seem to view open-source software running on their hardware, and their attempts to make this more difficult. However, the aggregate experience of proprietary software users seems to have significantly degraded over the same period. They generally insist that this is still worth it to them over doing what I do, and again I've been in enough dumb internet arguments to know that it's not worthwhile to do more than gently suggest that alternatives exist and may be worth trying unless I know them personally. I do get a window into proprietary ecosystems nonetheless, because I still don't feel I can replace the use cases required of me on mobile phones with an open-source alternative yet, and have seen my frustrations steadily increase over time with both these and SaaS products that I've been required to use for work. I also got frustrated enough with game consoles that I've entirely switched over to using PCs, running linux, for any games I want to play. At every turn, I have found that while computers are always error-prone in some way or another, and using them extensively will result in some frustration, this is significantly less when I have more control over the computer, and has become less rather than more frequent as open-source projects mature. I can not only observe that my own experience with proprietary products has followed the opposite pattern, but that more and more people talking about tech companies with scorn rather than effusive praise, yelling at their phones, and the public discourse adopting terms like "platform decay", "enshittification", "tech rot", etc all suggest that this is a general trend rather than my biases Again, your mileage may vary, but I do find it odd that you are so immediately dismissive of this perspective, accusing a pretty innocuous comment about it of reactionary identity-defense basically immediately without engaging at all. If you're inclined to listen to a zealot like me at all, I would only urge you to consider why you have assumed this so quickly, why you are so adamant that this is the only sort of person who could form such an opinion

dewey 9mo ago

I have 70GB of "Messages" on my Mac because iMessage "in the cloud" still stores all your attachments locally on every device. Yes, I can set the setting to delete attachments...but I want to keep them, just not on every device locally. Just deduct them from my iCloud store if you have to.

AnonC 9mo ago
The worst part is it can’t even show the attachments sorted by size so that one can browse and delete some large ones. Same with the Photos app on iOS. Can’t sort photos and videos by size from within the app. What’s the point of using application databases if the application cannot even query items by size and other attributes?!
- dewey 9mo ago
  > What’s the point of using application databases if the application cannot even query items by size and other attributes?! I know that's not the solution that we want, but at least you should be able to look into the sqlite database it's using under the hood (https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos/wiki/Understanding-the-Photos-database https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos/wiki/Understanding-th...)

PunchTornado 9mo ago

The system data issue on iphone annoyed me since forever. It is The reason i switched to android.

mszmszmsz 9mo ago

We need a new "snow leopard" release. No new features. Cleaning up the mess. Ethically speaking, there's no excuses for Apple. They're sitting on a huge pile of resources. Don't have the team competent enough to handle stuff? Hire them. Yet I know that's not how capitalism works.

valleyer 9mo ago
As someone who witnessed a lot of the quality decline at Apple from the inside, hiring more people is decidedly not the answer. All that does is encourages management to engage in more churn, which is the source of these sorts of bugs. The answer, unfortunately, is that features need to be sunsetted/removed, the engineering org shrunk, and for a smaller group to concentrate on a reliable product core.
- mszmszmsz 9mo ago
  It's not about the sheer numer of people, it's about their quality as managers, engineers, art directors and designers. Hire the best, pay them accordingly. Things can thrive without austerity, given enough good resources.
  - valleyer 9mo ago
    I disagree. A lot of the problems come down to part A of the system not coordinating well with part B. Take the brouhaha about the Tahoe window corners: obviously there wasn't enough communication between folks designing the window frame art and the folks implementing the window resize logic. You can hire the best, but coordination among a group of people scales quadratically.
raincole 9mo ago
I think it's an extremely recurring theme. User: I will be so happy if Foo doesn't keep changing its UI and focuses on fixing bugs for a few versions Foo's devs: Keep changing its UI and adding more bugs
willtemperley 9mo ago

altern8 9mo ago

Steve Jobs was an extremely unusual CEO. He was hands on, talked to designers, developers, and users, and actually cared about making good products. Tim Cook is more of a regular CEO that wants to make money for the shareholders. He started doing stock buybacks and in general prioritizing making money. macOS is still the best OS I'd want to use IMO--if you can manage to avoid upgrading to Tahoe--but Apple seems to definitely be on its way down. Hopefully something changes.

graemep 9mo ago
Steve Jobs was a founder of the company. He expected to remain CEO for many years (until his illness). I do not know whether he still have a large stake but its likely he did, and he certainly formed his approach when he did. That motivated him to look at the long term as he expected to benefit from increases in the value of the business over the long term. A regular CEO looks more at the short term. The value when the next options vest or the next bonus or whatever.
- altern8 9mo ago
  Yes, I agree. So, I guess our only hope is to get Woz back..?
  - zlies 9mo ago
    That would be awesome
  - graemep 9mo ago
    Maybe! Another thought. You said "macOS is still the best OS I'd want to use IMO". That is all they need. As long as you (and other users) feel that they do not switch it does not affect their sales or profits. It helps that Windows is getting worse.
    - altern8 9mo ago
      Well, I'm not upgrading to Tahoe though, so I'm not buying anything new they come out with...

titaniumrain 9mo ago

glad that the chief UI guy has left. see if the next iteration is any better :)

embedding-shape 9mo ago
If you think what's happening at Apple now is because of a single individual, you're wildly out of touch, it's an organization issue, pervasive in everything they put out today. Lack of proper QA I'd say is the reason.

techterrier 9mo ago

I've seen one of these posts for every single one of the ~15 years I've been using apple products, and yet still here we are, and for most it still the least worst OS going.

mszmszmsz 9mo ago
Talk about lock-in and enshittification.
nottorp 9mo ago
Yes, it's like in that joke about not having to run faster than the bear. As long as their competition is what it is, they don't have to put much effort in.
- pmontra 9mo ago
  Yes. Maybe they saw Windows 11 and decided that now it's the right time to release Liquid Glass and fix it later. Anyway I've been on Linux since 2009 and it's getting better at each release (Ubuntus up to 20.04 and then Debian, Gnome.)
  - nottorp 9mo ago
    I've been on linux 1999-2013 but then I got tired of it "getting better" UI wise so I bought Macs. I should check out how KDE is doing, Gnome and whatever Ubuntu delivers these days don't look like fun. Command lines... I have them open on mac, linux and windows all the time.
    - pmontra 9mo ago
      That's pretty common: a lot of developers left Windows for a Mac in the 2000s because it was a more comfortable and realiable Unix than Linux. However I never liked the UI of Macs, so I never bought one. It was OK on the 9" screen of the original Mac in 1984, but weird on larger screens. Luckily I've been able to make my GNOME desktop look like exactly what I want since at least 2020, when the ecosystem of GNOME shell extensions got mature enough. My current desktop is close to mix of old Windows and GNOME 2, with virtual desktops and other stuff that did not exist back then. I like stuff to stay put on screen, so no animations and all those UI gimmicks. Maybe I should have started from KDE but I got burned by KDE in 2014 and I hesitate to invest time to look at it again.

q_p 9mo ago

I hit 355 GB of system data on iOS 26 last week on my 15 pro max. Factory reset and restore from backup and it accumulates 5GB a day. Will be there again soon. There is something seriously wrong with system data in iOS 26.

AnonC 9mo ago
I feel like this is leaking into macOS Sequoia updates as well. Disk space just keeps getting eaten up quickly and I’m scrambling to clear up some space on a MacBook Pro with a large disk and lots of RAM. I know I should reduce user data (like the documents, photos and videos I’ve stored), but something doesn’t seem right in how more and more disk space keeps getting used.

aa-jv 9mo ago

I've been with Apple since 1979, but these days I don't even use a small percentage of all the features of the iPhone, and in spite of having bought over 800+ apps I still only use 7 of them. However, I dare not even attempt to clean up my iPhone and understand how it all works these days - I just avoid any thing cloud-related, and try to do my own manual photo backups - which is replete with its own dangers, it has to be said. It really does seem like nobody at Apple is actually using any of the software they're releasing. Its just such shoddy quality control!

embedding-shape 9mo ago
Agree, been using Apple on-off for decades, seems to get worse every time. > try to do my own manual photo backups As a Linux desktop user but Apple phone user, I do the same thing, so I can save the photos to my NAS, using ipairdevice/libimobiledevice/ifuse et al. to do it. Best part? Apple still spams me that my photos aren't backed up, because I'm not using iCloud. Is there a way of disabling that? Nope, they'll forever bother me about this, thanks. > It really does seem like nobody at Apple is actually using any of the software they're releasing. Its just such shoddy quality control! I think this is the crux, there are no humans with brains doing QA anymore. Since I got my iPhone 12 Mini, up until yesterday when I last used it, CarPlay still feels like it's worth risking my life every time someone calls me while I use the navigation. Not a single person could have tried this at Apple, because who would think it's a great idea showing a large avatar across the screen, over the navigation, as soon as someone calls? Absolutely bananas the direction Apple went as soon as Jobs disappeared, shame really.
- aa-jv 9mo ago
  I use Image Capture.app to manually retrieve my photo's - which normally works fine unless I forget to create a new folder for the task, and instead import into the older folders - which often means I overwrite prior photo's and lose data! Its so freakin' frustrating that, in the rush to get rid of files and folders from the users perception of their own personal filesystems, Apple has made it worse to maintain things manually.

losthobbies 9mo ago

It's a push to using their cloud services I suppose. I have had to pay for the icloud for a while now because my phone would fill up so quickly. I am eyeing a few tutorials on building my own cloud.

arianvanp 9mo ago

It takes 1.5 seconds to close a Tab in Safari. If you hold the close tab shortcut for long so that it closes all tabs the entire browser basically freezes. I run into this daily. I don't understand how this got through QA

volemo 9mo ago
Oh, I had the same (?) issue! Restarting the app fixed it temporarily. Closing (copying to a text file) all tab groups fixed it completely. Until I accumulated them again.

YetAnotherNick 9mo ago

While quality control isn't easy problem, it baffles my mind whenever I find a bug and it has been reported for years and still wasn't fixed in iphone/mac(or worse some user reported hack works). Those two are so big that spending a billion dollar for quality will make it back for sure.

deckiedan 9mo ago

I end up using https://derlien.com/ https://derlien.com/ "Disk Inventory X" regularly to find stuff to clean up.

rpastuszak 9mo ago
GrandPerspective is pretty good too (very similar).

arkj 9mo ago

Could this be because more code is coming in through vibe coding?

mopsi 9mo ago

Early this month, I was browsing the same sites I always do when Safari on my iPhone suddenly became very sluggish. I closed Safari and reopened it, and poof! Everything was gone: favorites, history, open tabs, everything. This kind of BS has become very common with Apple. There's a very pretty happy path, and a very ugly muddy trail if you fall off the scenic route.

retired 9mo ago

Apple needs a new CEO. Someone more visionary than Cook. The software needs more focus on making it "just work" and having significantly less bugs. The line-up needs to be cleaned up as well. Right now you have the MacBook Air 13" and 15" in 3 variants and 4 colours, that makes for a total of 24 models. M4 processors only. The MacBook Pro 14" can be purchased with the M5, M4 Pro, M4 Max in 2 colours for a total of 12 models. Then the 16" with the M4 Pro and M4 Max in 2 colours for a total of 8 models. That makes another 20 models. That is 56 different models to pick from! And that is before customisation. Why is there even a MacBook Pro without a Pro chip? And why are you selling M4 and M5 processors at the same time? Why release the M5 non-Pro in a Pro laptop and not put it in the Air, leaving it with an M4? The M5 is sometimes better than the M4 Pro, making it hard for the customer to decide to pick which one. Don't even get me started on the convoluted mess of the iPhone. Apple sells the iPhone 16 (5 models), iPhone 16 Plus (10 models), iPhone 16e (6 models), iPhone 17 (10 models), iPhone Air (12 models), iPhone 17 Pro (9 models), iPhone 17 Pro Max (12 models). 64 models to pick from! I remember Apple selling the iPhone 4. You would walk into the store, pick a Black or White model, 16 or 32 gigabyte. If you wanted colours, get a case.

sschueller 9mo ago
As long as stock profit is the only goal then Tim Cook is the correct CEO for Apple. Bribing the president publicly and doing what ever is required to keep the cash flowing in the short term is what share holders want.
- FrustratedMonky 9mo ago
  That runs out of steam eventually. Hence need a leader with Vision that is filling the pipeline for next few years. Unfortunately. Once the money does run out, and they do get someone with Vision, then that Vision takes years to realize, so there would be a big slump in products/money where they could just collapse. Usually it is a competitor that comes up with the new vision. Maybe Apple is so big it just buys other people vision.
  - njb311 9mo ago

rukshn 9mo ago

My MacBook Air complains about being low on storage, and when I check the disk usage (I have a 256GB version of M1), 15GB is used for Apple Intelligence, which does nothing for me, and there is no way to remove that.

volemo 9mo ago
I think it’s possible to turn it off completely. Or have they ripped that out in Tahoe?
skylurk 9mo ago
You can remove Apple Intelligence offline models. Assuming you already have Apple Intelligence disabled: Enable Siri, change Siri's language to Chinese, wait an hour, disable Siri again. At least, it worked for me yesterday.

brador 9mo ago

Dude has no storage and no backups on phone. He is one icon refresh from losing it all. Endless restart loop. No recovery possible, even with a second iPhone and mac. It’s a known bug for years.

tymonPartyLate 9mo ago

The worst crime for me is liquid glass on the apple watch. All the menus are now lagging on the watch ultra gen2. Where previously it was smooth to interact with, the random lags now make it annoying and inconvenient to interact with. (I need to focus my attention on the Ui state instead of following an automatic procedure from muscle memory) The battery sometimes randomly drains within less than a day. There are absolutely no benefits of the new visual effects. The watch was my favorite apple device because it helps me to reduce screen time on the phone. Now it is a source of anger.

paprikanotfound 9mo ago

I turned-off automatic updates as soon as the new OSs were announced but my sister got a little surprise the other day when she woke up and her iphone had updated to iOS 26. A lot of changes for no reason. I hope that now that the design team is gone things might get bit better.

rado 9mo ago

Not sure the App Store field should autofocus. Mac menus draw the frame first, then after a delay we see the items. That is inexcusable

polyrand 9mo ago

I share the same feeling. I waited as much as possible to upgrade to iOS 26 / macOS Tahoe. Two days ago, I finally upgraded. Liquid Glass is one of the worst things I've ever seen in terms of design. It reminds me of when I personalized old cheap android phones or Linux distros just "to look cool". Cool-looking: yes. Unusable: also yes. Tasteful design: almost absent. Just the increase of the border-radius in all elements makes it hideous. Apps with a search bar on a scrollable list look like a CSS bug when the search bar is on top of the elements. Neither the search bar nor the element underneath are visible. Although this applies to most transparency effects on Liquid Glass. Neither the elements above nor below the "glass" are visible. And the extra value added is zero. The thing is, I can still adapt to it, or tweak transparency and contrast. But I've seen elderly relatives struggle just because WhatsApp decided to add the "Meta AI" floating button. I can't imagine what this "inaccessible" UI changes can do.

freehorse 9mo ago
It is the first time I am trying to skip a macos version. I really hope in macos27 they will fix things. I used to skip every second windows version, so back here we are.
- inatreecrown2 9mo ago
  same here. using mac since OS9, and Tahoe is the first time i skipped a version (downgrade after 2 months)

OhMeadhbh 9mo ago

Yeah. I've been using Apple products off and on for 47 years and: a. Apple is not the same company it was 40 years ago. Or 20 years ago. Or 5 years ago. b. Apple quality varies greatly over time. I'm typing this on an 8 year old Dell XPS laptop. I've never had an Apple product I bought new last more than about 4 years. People tell me they've had Apple products last 6-8 years before dying. Clearly there's a distribution, but the central tendency of the apple curve is lower than the central tendency of Dell or Lenovo. c. Apple is filled with <insert epithet I can't repeat here>. Without exception, everyone I've met in the product group is actively trying to figure out how to get you to buy a new iProduct. And they seem to hire only sociopaths. Engineering doesn't seem to be overrun with sociopaths. I think because at the end of the day they have to build things that work for at least a few months after you unbox them. Apple is absolutely trying to make your experience of an older iProduct craptastic. But... so is everyone else in the industry. It's just that Apple, who once made very decent products, had much higher from which to fall.

surgical_fire 9mo ago
> Apple is absolutely trying to make your experience of an older iProduct craptastic. But... so is everyone else in the industry. It's just that Apple, who once made very decent products, had much higher from which to fall. My personal laptop is a 7 year old Dell G5 running Linux Mint. My experience using that on a daily basis is actually pretty decent. Very smooth sailing. It is good enough that I keep postponing my decision to get a new machine. So, no. This is an Apple problem, not "everyone else in the industry".

gizzlon 9mo ago

Apple have been drafting on past innovations and cashing in for a while now, yes? Very profitable, but it can't last forever. Also, here's Tim kissing fascist ass on the same day ICE shot an unarmed man: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/tim-cook-attended-melanias-movie-050006216.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/tim-cook-attended-melani...

FrustratedMonky 9mo ago

Taking a photo of home screen used to save automatically, now I have to click 2 extra times.

supernes 9mo ago

> Do Apple staff even use their products anymore, or are they all secretly harbouring Android devices? I've been asking myself the same for a couple of years now. Assuming Tim Apple uses an iPhone, does he just throw it in the garbage and pull out a fresh one every time the battery reaches 20%? Is no one at Apple irked by the low battery notification modal that blocks all interactions until you dismiss it, the same way it has for 19 freaking years now? It even covers the PIN entry form and makes the device unusable. I honestly think it's more reasonable to assume they're all on Android.

OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
Apple laid off everyone in their #a11y and user experience team back in... was it 96? It hasn't been the same company since.

budududuroiu 9mo ago

I downloaded all my photos from iCloud about a month ago. That was the last task on the monumental "leave the Apple walled garden" task list. Life on the outside is really nice. You can just... do things.

lysium 9mo ago
How did you do this? I once tried and it seemed impossible.
- budududuroiu 9mo ago
  icloudpd - https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do... for the rest of the migration I had to take it piece by piece, luckily my iPhone had enough storage, I got iCloud to download everything to my iPhone, then syncthing-ed everything to another machine. I then backed up everything that I just downloaded from iCloud to a Hetzner Storage Box via restic.
  - lysium 9mo ago
    Thanks, man! Appreciated

willtemperley 9mo ago

They're making some historically terrible decisions. Now we're all going to have to pay for Gemini model storage, probably 2 to 4 GB. That means we're probably paying $10 per-device for the storage required to have Google's model on "our" devices. Which we never asked for. They could just make it an optional part of the install. Does anyone really care about the on-board "intelligence"? Gemini FFS.

PedroBatista 9mo ago
Ironically, Google is the safer bet and this might have been a correct decision from Tim Apple. AI is changing at a rapid pace ( still ) and OpenAI is no longer the only game in town at the top, plus their finances are.. something we’ll hear about the next year and Sam Altman is an incredible unscrupulous person with past actions and decisions catching up to him. Not exactly the situation you want to partner with. At this point you don’t need your AI on Apple devices to be revolutionary, it needs to work and be better than the current situation which is not difficult. Gemini 3 is quite good for the general public, Google has the money to keep playing the AÍ games and also played ball with Apple, OpenAI only has 1 or 2 of those going for them.
- willtemperley 9mo ago
  > Ironically, Google is the safer bet Possibly. Until online features are added, marking a slow decline into the everything-as-a-subscription-service world (E-ASS). Look at Apple vs Google stock price for the carrot. Even if I turn it off, how to I remove it and reclaim the space I paid for?

KnuthIsGod 9mo ago

My Linux installation occupies 6 gigabytes. Just saying...

jl6 9mo ago

I've been successfully holding off on updating from iOS 18 by declining the prompt each time. Any tips for pinning the version more robustly? Because I feel the random upgrade prompts are going to catch me out eventually.

trueno 9mo ago
i switched to the ios 18 public beta channel, which currently has no beta available to dl and that stopped the damn update annoyances
samfromnz 9mo ago
My iPhone has so little free space (thanks to the ever increasing “system data”) that it can’t update to iOS 26. Point updates for iOS 18 are usually much smaller and can still be installed. I can’t believe I’m suggesting this, but… you could install a bunch of apps to get your phone storage to <10GB free, which should block it being able to update to iOS 26.
- deltoidmaximus 9mo ago
  This was a trick to block Windows updates at one point, but then they started force reserving 7GB or something with a later update. It meant that some devices with small disks that supported Windows 10 no longer met the system requirements.

concinds 9mo ago

What blows my mind isn't the pervasive bugs throughout the system, which you could attribute to a poorly-run division or dysfunctional company. It's that the basic shit is now so broken. Safari is unusable with too many tabs because it won't suspend them. The Tahoe app launcher will randomly remove apps from the list, and you need to open Finder to get it. Apple Books is unusable; the book keeps blanking out, it displays random error messages, search is slow and cumbersome because you need to scroll the search results list each time. There's a collapse in basic functionality where it's obvious they don't use their own products.

danhau 9mo ago
Curiously, since the last update I have the problem where Safari tabs go completely white after a while. Refreshing doesn‘t help. I have to copy the URL and paste it into a fresh tab.
- port11 9mo ago
  I’ve had this one for at least a year. Suspended tabs won’t come back 1/4 of the time, and the URL is gone too; the tab is effectively gone. I’m keeping important tabs in Brave.
  - concinds 9mo ago
    I was about to mention that too. A browser that loses tabs!
  - concinds 9mo ago
    I just found there's two separate bugs: sometimes the page goes blank but the URL stays, sometimes it loses the URL too and the back/forward button so everything's gone.

cynicalsecurity 9mo ago

The walled garden seems to be falling apart, with users trapped inside. Maybe the idea of a walled garden isn't so great after all.

OhMeadhbh 9mo ago

Maybe this is just a reminder to put your iProduct down, go outside and touch grass. (Oh man. That came out super smug. Imagine the non-smug version of that message. Maybe it should have been something like "I went on a project to reduce the amount of screen time over the last couple of years and generally feel healthier and happier. Pick your own level of engagement with tech, but I encourage you to think about if you're spending too much time on your phone (or commenting on threads at ycombinator.com) at least every couple of months.")

haritha-j 9mo ago

I've got the exact same storage issue on my iphone xr. Happened once before and it was fixed by doing a full reset and restore. That lasted about 6 months. I don't want to keep doing resets every 6 months. Has anyone found a simpler solution?

padjo 9mo ago
Yes, move to android.

TYPE_FASTER 9mo ago

I have an old Mac Pro that I have upgraded to High Sierra. I don't really want to upgrade it further.

galkk 9mo ago

When I switched from 10+ or something years of android (used since Galaxy S) to iphone 13, I felt that “everything just works”. But recently it’s getting worse. I don’t know what they did, but last year or so the typing on the keyboard became progressively worse. Constant typos, wrong letters. Idk what is happening.

neomantra 9mo ago

An elderly friend had some identity theft and we went to handle it at the three credit bureaus… She has an old MacBook and old iPhone (circa 2017?). Apple no longer updates these OS’ even the bundled Safari. One of the bureaus, Experian I think, has a TLS cert that is not compatible with the old OSs so all the “don’t trust this site” warnings come up. How many people have incomplete credit freezes because of this? Apple is of a size that this hurts society.

JKCalhoun 9mo ago

The article reads as a list of bug gripes. I agree, Apple needs a focus on quality. Plenty of Apple fans have been asking, for years, for a bug-fix release of all the OS's. I don't know where the buck stops. I would point to Craig Federighi, but no doubt if Tim Cook told him he had to pivot to quality over features, Craig would do as Tim asked. (I went to one Federighi feature meeting where engineers from the various teams show up with a demo ready to show and Craig goes round robin within the conference room watching each demo, asking questions, and then generally giving a thumbs up or not. It is done very rapid fire though—we were expected to show up "ultra-prepared". I watched him go from team to team before getting to us and my impression of his capabilities and understanding of the OS as a whole was in no way diminished by the experience. Craig is a capable guy. I want him and Apple to succeed.)

grsmvg 9mo ago

My number one bug for years that baffles me as to why Apple hasn’t fixed it: Zooming in on heavy websites or PDFs (with large images or WebGL) force closes the Safari tab. Over and over again.

joshstrange 9mo ago

We are all lucky that Alan Dye is off screwing up Meta now and that Tim Cook is not long for Apple. Even with just Dye gone I expect things to improve but I doubt a big change will happen until Tim Cook leaves (which cannot come soon enough).

deleted 9mo ago

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SirMaster 9mo ago

I have a feeling things are only going to get worse with the more AI integration they are pushing next... They really need to do a year release that just focuses on fixing all the broken things and cleaning things up.

pzo 9mo ago

for me this latest macOS is buggy as well. AirDrop stopped working and I cannot airdrop from my phone to my macbook that is 20cm away, connected to same fast WiFi and sometimes even wired to my macbook via usb-c. I tried then to workaround and use apple Image Capture app to copy some files - always the latest picture is not available in the app. So now I have to do like cavemen to share some stuff to my email and download file in the email. And share button sometime fails as well...

fragmede 9mo ago
Try opening the share menu on your phone, then opening the full airdrop menu, and airdropping to your laptop. Works for me when airdropping directly to my laptop in the share menu does not.

netfortius 9mo ago

Apple has become a wanna be political participant, so priorities changed.