7 ms·

This is such an insane bug to still have around all these years. Are apple engineers not using macOS?

amelius 6mo ago
I wouldn't be surprised. Their 3D solid modeling is done on Windows, so why not their electronics.
PaulHoule 6mo ago
I think Apple's self-image of being the epitome of design actually acts against them. Leads to monstrosities like Liquid Glass kinda vandalizing random parts of the UI in small ways that I intuitively read as "they are anti-anti-aliasing" not "they added cool refraction effects." It used to be you'd see something in a well-chosen color, now it is just a muddy kind of greyish brownish whatever. I'd like to see them make some costly signalling to indicate that they are going to turn it around like maybe buy two Superbowl ads in a row and let the CEO make a personal apology. Isn't going to happen because the competition is Microsoft and Intel and Dell who won't hold them accountable and it is just too easy to turn reject iPhone chips into netbooks in 2026.
- harrall 6mo ago
  My pet opinion is that Steve Jobs was an asshole but an asshole that used his own products and used his powers of complaining to steer the whole ship to fix major "this annoys me everyday" bugs. From my experience, "annoying but not blockers" bugs are often very neglected compared to (1) bugs that actually break things and (2) feature work. Neglecting quality of life issues leads to the "do you even use your product??" kinds of experiences.
  - hirvi74 6mo ago
    I have not been impressed with Cook in the slightest. He came from Compaq, if I am not mistaken, and in many ways, I feel like Apple has become more Compaq-like during his tenure.
  - jbverschoor 6mo ago
    This is exactly my thought as well. Soo many things either work buggy, laggy, inconsistent, or don’t work at all Filling bugs doesn’t help. And I don’t think anyone is inventive to fix bugs. Resolving sure. But closing WONTFIX or NEEDSINFO is also a resolution. Most of what I do is chrome +Linux terminals and vscode anyway And the only reason I’m on Mac is because of hardware, encryption, and ease of backup/restore/wipe, and the power struggle of Linux distros. freeBSD is not really an option
    - alsetmusic 6mo ago
      There's a windowing bug that was introduced in 2009 that I'm confident will persist until MacOS has another MacOSX-style transition to something entirely new. They need someone who cares about fit&finish more than features driving the ship. That's not what gets promoted to the top, unfortunately.
      - jbverschoor 6mo ago
        I’d be more than happy to spend a year polishing macOS and iOS for that matter
  - whstl 6mo ago
    Interesting. I have worked with a CEO that did exactly that. The product quality was just insane. I have also worked with people in power who believed they were doing the same, but actually just had weird taste in interfaces and ended up screwing up the product. So YMMV.
    - drob518 6mo ago
      I’ve learned over the years that most people have poor taste in UX. Even some UX designers and supposed “experts.”
  - drob518 6mo ago
    Steve Jobs knew what he wanted and was willing to put his foot down in order to get it. Yea, I’m sure he was difficult to work with and drove people insane, but he was the plumb line that kept Apple driving in (mostly) the right direction. Now, it seems like they have bored designers trying to make a name for themselves with a “new” and “revolutionary” interface in Liquid Glass, which nobody likes and is less usable than its predecessor. But nobody ever got promoted for maintaining the status quo, so they are going to push forward. Steve’s advantage was that he never needed to be promoted.
    - naikrovek 6mo ago
      Well, the UI leader behind Liquid Glass is no longer with the company, replaced by a long time Apple employee known for his eye for detail. I do t think Liquid Glass is going to go away soon, Apple doesn’t seem to reverse itself ever, but I do expect Liquid Glass to become better over time. We’ll see what WWDC brings on that front I guess.
      - PaulHoule 6mo ago
        My take on it is that in my own work I really like transparency effects but it is always a chore to tune up the foregrounds, backgrounds and alpha blending to keep everything legible. If you control all the content it is one thing, but for a general-purpose OS where the content is supplied by the user and applications you have to dial the intensity way back. When I first saw the prototype images I thought they were really cool and it was a bold idea though people on this site were complaining about it already for the predictable reasons. When it came out I was thinking that they dealt with the legibility of the content by dialing down the legibility of the design -- like it looks like "anti-anti-aliasing" more than it looks like "bold transparent vision" One reason I don't think I read it as "refraction" is that one of my tells for refraction is chromatic aberration and without that it doesn't seem real to me. I think it would triple the texture lookup rate (at least) and make content legibility worse and I think you would see a lot of people say it is was an ugly gimmick.
        drob518 6mo ago
  - Cthulhu_ 6mo ago
    The thing / issue at this point is though: how much is Jobs still responsible for Apple's ongoing success? He died 15 years ago, two years after Apple introduced "flat design" (to much criticism at the time but people got used to it). But after his passing, Apple's market value went from ~500 billion to ~4 trillion today, more than an 8-fold multiplication. I find it hard to believe that his influence was so strong that it had an inertia that lasted for 15 years. Ive left his mark on it for longer.
    - plufz 6mo ago
      I guess that depends on what you put into the word "success". I dont believe that great design work or great products and high market cap has ever been that related to each other. With that said I dont think Steve built Apple alone either. And i think they have done some great things after his death as well.
    - PaulHoule 6mo ago
      Apple had a few near death experiences and might not have survived. One of those early near death experiences might have been Jobs fault (going at the Apple /// and the Mac when, in retrospect, the Apple ][ could have been evolved more aggressively) but he helped bring it back from the brink later on. Android deserves a lot of credit for the success of iOS in that a zombie mobile OS that doesn't have to be profitable has displaced a competitive mobile OS. A similar kind of fragmentation has bedeviled the Windows (and Linux) PC as well as (from the viewpoint of Windows) distractions such as Azure (good business) and XBOX (bad business.) Intel deserves a lot of credit for the success of Apple too because for 15 years Intel has had no strategy to translate architectural improvements to experienced performance for client PCs. The way they've gone about SIMD is an absolute disaster, like by the time we can use AVX-512 in mainstream software everybody will have moved on to ARM. Charlie Demerjian would talk your ear off about how the tech press has been uncritical about their hyperscaler/HPC patter, never reminding you that client PCs are still the bread and butter of their business -- pander to the likes of Amazon and they will use any cost savings they get to invest in ARM. It's suicide.
  - apple4ever 6mo ago
    > My pet opinion is that Steve Jobs was an asshole but an asshole that used his own products and used his powers of complaining to steer the whole ship to fix major "this annoys me everyday" bugs. I think you are right. He was not perfect and not always nice, but man that dude CARED. Nobody at Apple cares any more.
- godelski 6mo ago
  > I think Apple's self-image of being the epitome of design actually acts against them. Leads to monstrosities like Liquid Glass kinda vandalizing random parts of the UI I'm pretty confident many Apple employees have eyes, and thus are aware of how absurd Liquid Glass is (wtf, my iPhone capitalizes that but not a standalone i?!?!) So assuming everyone at Apple isn't deaf (it's all over public discourse), blind (it looks bad), and dumb (no genius needed), then how does it get through? I can only see a few scenarios, none of which are good. Maybe Apple engineers are afraid to push back on management? Maybe management isn't receptive to their employees who voiced concerns? Maybe key decision makers have pushed themselves into an echo chamber where it's difficult to hear concerns. One of these has to be true, or some combination. But none of these are good, they are incredibly destructive to companies. Though also unfortunately common across monopolies. Iron Law of Bureaucracy hard at work... I often think of that scene in Pantheon where they basically say they don't know what to do after Steve died. You can only laptops so small... and they're so small that anyone that puts on lotion is going to have an imprint of their keyboard on their screens... Steve wouldn't have accepted that
  - mort96 6mo ago
    It gets through because Cook has no eye for design or usability (he's a supply chain guy) and Alan Dye, who Cook put in charge of software design, wanted it that way. I'm sure there are designers who hated it, but they don't have the final say.
  - alsetmusic 6mo ago
    > Maybe Apple engineers are afraid to push back on management? I can tell you with confidence that this isn't the issue. HIG (Human Interface Guidelines: a design spec that became a department / org) overrides them.
  - brantonb 6mo ago
    This isn’t unique to Apple. The Windows developers were very vocal about a full screen start menu in Windows 8 being a bad change. We were told that we weren’t allowed to talk about it anymore on the large mailing list about the product. The decision had been made and complaints would no longer be read or responded to.
- alsetmusic 6mo ago
  > too easy to turn reject iPhone chips into netbooks in 2026. You mean the flagship chip from their former pro phones? I was with you until you said this. Makes you sound out of touch or ideological. I think they've been on the worst design tear since they went to OSX for the past eight-ish years. At no point does their awful software design intrude on their awesome chip designs. My partner's first Mac is a MacBook Neo and she loves it. Pink. Looks pretty good. Does what she needs. Not right for me, probably not right for you, but what I'd tell my mother to buy if it existed when I told her to buy a regular MacBook Air.
  - PaulHoule 6mo ago
    It's not meant to be an insult, I have a phone in my pocket with one of those chips. back when I was using Android I was like "why do people get so excited about apps?" but the iPhone experience is all different. They are "rejects" because a lot of them have a busted core which can be fused off. If there's a problem w/ the Neo in it's current incarnation is that are going to run out of those chips and find something else. It takes an advantage of the opportunity and might be the beginning of a new market segment for Mac which will hold PC and Chromebooks accountable. (Funny a pink netbook served me really well back in the day! I remember using one to log ham radio contacts from a mountaintop near San Luis Obispo into a sqlite database and then using it as the best ever car computer in the passenger seat of a car with Microsoft Streets & Trips and a music player)
    - alsetmusic 6mo ago
      It'd be clearer had you said "binned" or something similar. I get what you mean. Apologies for my tone.
  - wlonkly 6mo ago
    No, it's the chips that could've been used in those flagship phones, but that were rejected. Rejection isn't ideological here, it's the QA process.
- lynguist 6mo ago
  I… think that actually Liquid Glass was put on the iPhones to make sure that older iPhones that still have relatively fast chips can show up finally slower than the brand new ones, and that with this stress there’s again a much larger slope in difference between an older iPhone and a newer one which causes enough nagging in users to upgrade = buy a new one.
ryanmcbride 6mo ago
I mean, their damn phone keyboards are so bad I'm 100% confident that Tim only does voice to text on his phone. There's no way that the CEO of a company could use a keyboard that horrible and not want to fix it.
- sen 6mo ago
  It’s SO bad. It makes me not want to use my phone anymore and physically go get my laptop if I’m chatting/messaging someone. It’s probably the worst typing experience I’ve had since resistive-touch screens on PDAs. At least with them you could still type what you intended to though, just slowly.
- fizwidget 6mo ago
  In my experience iOS 26.4 did largely fix it btw. Update if you haven’t already.
  - ryanmcbride 6mo ago
    I'm on 26.4 on a brand new 17 Pro Max, recently upgraded from a 13 Pro Max, and I have noticed absolutely no difference in the keyboard. It's still awful.
  - niij 6mo ago
    But then you'd have to upgrade past 18, meaning the liquid glass abomination.
    - Barbing 6mo ago
      was only dumb for a month or few, now that it's max blacked out as best it can be I can redirect my focus... and be annoyed by the STUPID hiding bottom menus like in Photos. Literally ZERO times did I complain I was missing seven pixels of "real estate", thanks Apple, love the extra tap to see what I need (to be clear, only sign on iOS 26, NOT macOS 26)
- JoeBOFH 6mo ago
  Most of my issues were fixed when I disabled swipe to type. Not all, but most.
mrguyorama 6mo ago
Even if they did, what are they going to do? File a bug report that will sit at the bottom of the priority pile forever? Devs don't set priorities. Software "Engineers" largely don't get to engineer at all.
fragmede 6mo ago
Stockholm syndrome. Moving between spaces is fine! What are you talking about? You get used to it and then it's not a big. Stop holding it wrong!!!
achierius 6mo ago
Essentially all Apple engineers use macOS ~exclusively (at least in the SWE org). That these bugs persist is in spite of that fact. Frankly there's just a lot going on, and between all the kinds of bugs that have higher priority -- crashers, panics, memory regressions (your app gets Jetsam'd), power bugs (your phone runs out of battery mid-day), perf regressions (could violate EU regulations against planned obsolescence), security bugs (people can lose their money, journalists can get killed) -- bugs like this often fall by the wayside for quite some time until they're fixed.
apple4ever 6mo ago
> Are apple engineers not using macOS? If they are, they aren't using anything but very basic parts of it. But I think the better question is "Are Apple Executives not using MacOS?" because if they were, none of these mad bugs would still be here.

I wouldn't be surprised. Their 3D solid modeling is done on Windows, so why not their electronics.

I think Apple's self-image of being the epitome of design actually acts against them. Leads to monstrosities like Liquid Glass kinda vandalizing random parts of the UI in small ways that I intuitively read as "they are anti-anti-aliasing" not "they added cool refraction effects." It used to be you'd see something in a well-chosen color, now it is just a muddy kind of greyish brownish whatever. I'd like to see them make some costly signalling to indicate that they are going to turn it around like maybe buy two Superbowl ads in a row and let the CEO make a personal apology. Isn't going to happen because the competition is Microsoft and Intel and Dell who won't hold them accountable and it is just too easy to turn reject iPhone chips into netbooks in 2026.

harrall 6mo ago
My pet opinion is that Steve Jobs was an asshole but an asshole that used his own products and used his powers of complaining to steer the whole ship to fix major "this annoys me everyday" bugs. From my experience, "annoying but not blockers" bugs are often very neglected compared to (1) bugs that actually break things and (2) feature work. Neglecting quality of life issues leads to the "do you even use your product??" kinds of experiences.
- hirvi74 6mo ago
  I have not been impressed with Cook in the slightest. He came from Compaq, if I am not mistaken, and in many ways, I feel like Apple has become more Compaq-like during his tenure.
- jbverschoor 6mo ago
  This is exactly my thought as well. Soo many things either work buggy, laggy, inconsistent, or don’t work at all Filling bugs doesn’t help. And I don’t think anyone is inventive to fix bugs. Resolving sure. But closing WONTFIX or NEEDSINFO is also a resolution. Most of what I do is chrome +Linux terminals and vscode anyway And the only reason I’m on Mac is because of hardware, encryption, and ease of backup/restore/wipe, and the power struggle of Linux distros. freeBSD is not really an option
  - alsetmusic 6mo ago
    There's a windowing bug that was introduced in 2009 that I'm confident will persist until MacOS has another MacOSX-style transition to something entirely new. They need someone who cares about fit&finish more than features driving the ship. That's not what gets promoted to the top, unfortunately.
    - jbverschoor 6mo ago
      I’d be more than happy to spend a year polishing macOS and iOS for that matter
- whstl 6mo ago
  Interesting. I have worked with a CEO that did exactly that. The product quality was just insane. I have also worked with people in power who believed they were doing the same, but actually just had weird taste in interfaces and ended up screwing up the product. So YMMV.
  - drob518 6mo ago
    I’ve learned over the years that most people have poor taste in UX. Even some UX designers and supposed “experts.”
- drob518 6mo ago
  Steve Jobs knew what he wanted and was willing to put his foot down in order to get it. Yea, I’m sure he was difficult to work with and drove people insane, but he was the plumb line that kept Apple driving in (mostly) the right direction. Now, it seems like they have bored designers trying to make a name for themselves with a “new” and “revolutionary” interface in Liquid Glass, which nobody likes and is less usable than its predecessor. But nobody ever got promoted for maintaining the status quo, so they are going to push forward. Steve’s advantage was that he never needed to be promoted.
  - naikrovek 6mo ago
    Well, the UI leader behind Liquid Glass is no longer with the company, replaced by a long time Apple employee known for his eye for detail. I do t think Liquid Glass is going to go away soon, Apple doesn’t seem to reverse itself ever, but I do expect Liquid Glass to become better over time. We’ll see what WWDC brings on that front I guess.
    - PaulHoule 6mo ago
      My take on it is that in my own work I really like transparency effects but it is always a chore to tune up the foregrounds, backgrounds and alpha blending to keep everything legible. If you control all the content it is one thing, but for a general-purpose OS where the content is supplied by the user and applications you have to dial the intensity way back. When I first saw the prototype images I thought they were really cool and it was a bold idea though people on this site were complaining about it already for the predictable reasons. When it came out I was thinking that they dealt with the legibility of the content by dialing down the legibility of the design -- like it looks like "anti-anti-aliasing" more than it looks like "bold transparent vision" One reason I don't think I read it as "refraction" is that one of my tells for refraction is chromatic aberration and without that it doesn't seem real to me. I think it would triple the texture lookup rate (at least) and make content legibility worse and I think you would see a lot of people say it is was an ugly gimmick.
      - drob518 6mo ago
- Cthulhu_ 6mo ago
  The thing / issue at this point is though: how much is Jobs still responsible for Apple's ongoing success? He died 15 years ago, two years after Apple introduced "flat design" (to much criticism at the time but people got used to it). But after his passing, Apple's market value went from ~500 billion to ~4 trillion today, more than an 8-fold multiplication. I find it hard to believe that his influence was so strong that it had an inertia that lasted for 15 years. Ive left his mark on it for longer.
  - plufz 6mo ago
    I guess that depends on what you put into the word "success". I dont believe that great design work or great products and high market cap has ever been that related to each other. With that said I dont think Steve built Apple alone either. And i think they have done some great things after his death as well.
  - PaulHoule 6mo ago
    Apple had a few near death experiences and might not have survived. One of those early near death experiences might have been Jobs fault (going at the Apple /// and the Mac when, in retrospect, the Apple ][ could have been evolved more aggressively) but he helped bring it back from the brink later on. Android deserves a lot of credit for the success of iOS in that a zombie mobile OS that doesn't have to be profitable has displaced a competitive mobile OS. A similar kind of fragmentation has bedeviled the Windows (and Linux) PC as well as (from the viewpoint of Windows) distractions such as Azure (good business) and XBOX (bad business.) Intel deserves a lot of credit for the success of Apple too because for 15 years Intel has had no strategy to translate architectural improvements to experienced performance for client PCs. The way they've gone about SIMD is an absolute disaster, like by the time we can use AVX-512 in mainstream software everybody will have moved on to ARM. Charlie Demerjian would talk your ear off about how the tech press has been uncritical about their hyperscaler/HPC patter, never reminding you that client PCs are still the bread and butter of their business -- pander to the likes of Amazon and they will use any cost savings they get to invest in ARM. It's suicide.
- apple4ever 6mo ago
  > My pet opinion is that Steve Jobs was an asshole but an asshole that used his own products and used his powers of complaining to steer the whole ship to fix major "this annoys me everyday" bugs. I think you are right. He was not perfect and not always nice, but man that dude CARED. Nobody at Apple cares any more.
godelski 6mo ago
> I think Apple's self-image of being the epitome of design actually acts against them. Leads to monstrosities like Liquid Glass kinda vandalizing random parts of the UI I'm pretty confident many Apple employees have eyes, and thus are aware of how absurd Liquid Glass is (wtf, my iPhone capitalizes that but not a standalone i?!?!) So assuming everyone at Apple isn't deaf (it's all over public discourse), blind (it looks bad), and dumb (no genius needed), then how does it get through? I can only see a few scenarios, none of which are good. Maybe Apple engineers are afraid to push back on management? Maybe management isn't receptive to their employees who voiced concerns? Maybe key decision makers have pushed themselves into an echo chamber where it's difficult to hear concerns. One of these has to be true, or some combination. But none of these are good, they are incredibly destructive to companies. Though also unfortunately common across monopolies. Iron Law of Bureaucracy hard at work... I often think of that scene in Pantheon where they basically say they don't know what to do after Steve died. You can only laptops so small... and they're so small that anyone that puts on lotion is going to have an imprint of their keyboard on their screens... Steve wouldn't have accepted that
- mort96 6mo ago
  It gets through because Cook has no eye for design or usability (he's a supply chain guy) and Alan Dye, who Cook put in charge of software design, wanted it that way. I'm sure there are designers who hated it, but they don't have the final say.
- alsetmusic 6mo ago
  > Maybe Apple engineers are afraid to push back on management? I can tell you with confidence that this isn't the issue. HIG (Human Interface Guidelines: a design spec that became a department / org) overrides them.
- brantonb 6mo ago
  This isn’t unique to Apple. The Windows developers were very vocal about a full screen start menu in Windows 8 being a bad change. We were told that we weren’t allowed to talk about it anymore on the large mailing list about the product. The decision had been made and complaints would no longer be read or responded to.
alsetmusic 6mo ago
> too easy to turn reject iPhone chips into netbooks in 2026. You mean the flagship chip from their former pro phones? I was with you until you said this. Makes you sound out of touch or ideological. I think they've been on the worst design tear since they went to OSX for the past eight-ish years. At no point does their awful software design intrude on their awesome chip designs. My partner's first Mac is a MacBook Neo and she loves it. Pink. Looks pretty good. Does what she needs. Not right for me, probably not right for you, but what I'd tell my mother to buy if it existed when I told her to buy a regular MacBook Air.
- PaulHoule 6mo ago
  It's not meant to be an insult, I have a phone in my pocket with one of those chips. back when I was using Android I was like "why do people get so excited about apps?" but the iPhone experience is all different. They are "rejects" because a lot of them have a busted core which can be fused off. If there's a problem w/ the Neo in it's current incarnation is that are going to run out of those chips and find something else. It takes an advantage of the opportunity and might be the beginning of a new market segment for Mac which will hold PC and Chromebooks accountable. (Funny a pink netbook served me really well back in the day! I remember using one to log ham radio contacts from a mountaintop near San Luis Obispo into a sqlite database and then using it as the best ever car computer in the passenger seat of a car with Microsoft Streets & Trips and a music player)
  - alsetmusic 6mo ago
    It'd be clearer had you said "binned" or something similar. I get what you mean. Apologies for my tone.
- wlonkly 6mo ago
  No, it's the chips that could've been used in those flagship phones, but that were rejected. Rejection isn't ideological here, it's the QA process.
lynguist 6mo ago
I… think that actually Liquid Glass was put on the iPhones to make sure that older iPhones that still have relatively fast chips can show up finally slower than the brand new ones, and that with this stress there’s again a much larger slope in difference between an older iPhone and a newer one which causes enough nagging in users to upgrade = buy a new one.

ryanmcbride 6mo ago

I mean, their damn phone keyboards are so bad I'm 100% confident that Tim only does voice to text on his phone. There's no way that the CEO of a company could use a keyboard that horrible and not want to fix it.

sen 6mo ago
It’s SO bad. It makes me not want to use my phone anymore and physically go get my laptop if I’m chatting/messaging someone. It’s probably the worst typing experience I’ve had since resistive-touch screens on PDAs. At least with them you could still type what you intended to though, just slowly.
fizwidget 6mo ago
In my experience iOS 26.4 did largely fix it btw. Update if you haven’t already.
- ryanmcbride 6mo ago
  I'm on 26.4 on a brand new 17 Pro Max, recently upgraded from a 13 Pro Max, and I have noticed absolutely no difference in the keyboard. It's still awful.
- niij 6mo ago
  But then you'd have to upgrade past 18, meaning the liquid glass abomination.
  - Barbing 6mo ago
    was only dumb for a month or few, now that it's max blacked out as best it can be I can redirect my focus... and be annoyed by the STUPID hiding bottom menus like in Photos. Literally ZERO times did I complain I was missing seven pixels of "real estate", thanks Apple, love the extra tap to see what I need (to be clear, only sign on iOS 26, NOT macOS 26)
JoeBOFH 6mo ago
Most of my issues were fixed when I disabled swipe to type. Not all, but most.

mrguyorama 6mo ago

Even if they did, what are they going to do? File a bug report that will sit at the bottom of the priority pile forever? Devs don't set priorities. Software "Engineers" largely don't get to engineer at all.

fragmede 6mo ago

Stockholm syndrome. Moving between spaces is fine! What are you talking about? You get used to it and then it's not a big. Stop holding it wrong!!!

achierius 6mo ago

Essentially all Apple engineers use macOS ~exclusively (at least in the SWE org). That these bugs persist is in spite of that fact. Frankly there's just a lot going on, and between all the kinds of bugs that have higher priority -- crashers, panics, memory regressions (your app gets Jetsam'd), power bugs (your phone runs out of battery mid-day), perf regressions (could violate EU regulations against planned obsolescence), security bugs (people can lose their money, journalists can get killed) -- bugs like this often fall by the wayside for quite some time until they're fixed.

apple4ever 6mo ago

> Are apple engineers not using macOS? If they are, they aren't using anything but very basic parts of it. But I think the better question is "Are Apple Executives not using MacOS?" because if they were, none of these mad bugs would still be here.