8 ms·

Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good

94 points by tonhe 6mo ago

paulglx 6mo ago
Hey ChatGPT, generate a controversed article for my blog. No worries if examples are made up and some information is objectively wrong.
sgt 6mo ago
> Your AirPods just connected to the wrong device. Again. > iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart. HomeKit forgot the kitchen lightbulb exists, and will remember it again in three hours like nothing happened. I've literally seen nothing of this happen (or to my family all on Apple devices). While I don't doubt they do happen to some unfortunate users, it's important that they report it so that Apple can troubleshoot. It could very well be that, much like myself, nobody at Apple is seeing this, and therefore it's not investigated.
- zeratax 6mo ago
  Every time I do report these kinds of bugs it's clear to me they clearly do not look at them lol. The Feedback site still thinks windows 10 is the latest windows version and doesn't even display the latest ios version.
  - maldev 6mo ago
    I reported a bug in Apple Music on windows where it wouldn't update the audio output until you restarted it. They did a change in a few weeks where they made it update the audio output. Probably team dependent, but I was really amazed by how quick they changed it.
  - azinman2 6mo ago
    They are looked at. Source: I work for Apple.
    - sgt 6mo ago
      Mind emailing me? gbeowbrea+nccyr (at) tznvy.pbz
  - burnt-resistor 6mo ago
    It's unknowable if they look or not consistently across all groups and departments because of their habit of zero feedback/response. I assume they don't look anymore because of assumed overwhelming backlog and lower standards than the past. Perhaps on their side, AI might be able to consolidate, triage, and perhaps even propose fixes far more scalably than even a huge department of customer support-oriented coders.
- redsocksfan45 6mo ago
  Every damn time anybody has trouble with an Apple product, we get this "Well that hasn't happened to me." Great for you, go get yourself a cookie and cram it up your ass.
- hyperhello 6mo ago
  Paste a screenshot into TextEdit doc and make a pdf.
  - fzeindl 6mo ago
    Tested this, works for me.
  - sgt 6mo ago
    Tested this now. Works like a bomb. https://imgur.com/a/t1ufCqr https://imgur.com/a/t1ufCqr
    - hyperhello 6mo ago
      You took a portion of the screen so it would be thinner than the window. Take a screen shot.
      - sgt 6mo ago
        Check out the new video. I did a full screen screenshot now. https://imgur.com/a/bVznT02 https://imgur.com/a/bVznT02 It seems to be adding it to TextEdit but it disappears when exporting to PDF. Is this a TextEdit.app bug?
        hyperhello 6mo ago
        The flip side of “it just works” is when it doesn’t.
        sgt 6mo ago
        Fair enough, but this is not a big bug. I don't think many people use TextEdit in 2026.
- watt 6mo ago
  HomeKit cooking your phone battery, period.
  - Schiendelman 6mo ago
    What devices specifically?
- AnonC 6mo ago
  > While I don't doubt they do happen to some unfortunate users, it's important that they report it so that Apple can troubleshoot. It could very well be that, much like myself, nobody at Apple is seeing this, and therefore it's not investigated. I report a lot of nagging issues to Apple through Feedback Assistant. I keep updating the same issues and provide instructions as well as the device diagnostics and any photos/videos. But almost all of them don’t see any kind of action at Apple. They just linger on for years. Only if it’s an OS crash or an important Apple app crashing, it may get some attention. There are many instances when “things just work” and it seems magical, but in those same areas, there are often too many bugs and issues where one has to do this whole dance of restart, re-pair devices and so on. It used to be that Windows was the butt of frequent jokes on restarting, but Apple’s software has gotten closer to that in many aspects. I personally suspect that Apple doesn’t have a dedicated and good QA in place. There doesn’t seem to be a push from the top down for software quality. That attention to detail that Apple was famous for is missing on software quality.
  - ryandrake 6mo ago
    I'm 1 for 1 on Feedback Assistant. I reported a flaky 10 year old thunderbolt display to them a few years ago, thinking I was probably just shouting into a black hole. It took them six months, but they actually responded to it with a diagnosis (bad hardware) and a workaround so I didn't have to trash the display.
- neya 6mo ago
  Bingo. I have a bunch of Sony WF-Xm4s and Xm3s and an Airpod pro. If I have to take a call, it's always the Airpod for me because it's so reliable. I just snap it into my ears and it literally just works. The Sony - while having a flatter frequency response and a snugger fit, goes for my daily workouts which Airpods sucks for as it keeps falling off. I have never had any connection issues with the Airpods till date. Despite it being connected to 3 devices. The Sony's (rarely) do have connection issues but never the Airpods.
  - Schiendelman 6mo ago
    I was excited about Beats because they have the same hardware/software stack as iPods and they fit really well on runs! Give them a try if yoi haven't!
    - neya 6mo ago
      Wow, didn't know that. Thanks for sharing.
- kubik369 6mo ago
  Both can be right, unfortunately. People do not report stuff, but when they do, it tends to get ignored. I have personally stopped reporting feedback to Apple because my tens of bug reports with detailed reproduction steps were simply ignored. This was both on beta and stable releases. One of them was especially egregious — I had an M1 Macbook Air at work and 11.2 update made charging with any dock, USB-C or Thunderbolt, not work, i.e. everything was working, but the laptop was not charging. I had to plug in a separate charger for 3 months until they fixed it in either 11.3 or 11.4. Rolling back did not work because the update updated the controller firmware. There was no mention of this in the release notes. Apple's "It just works." sometimes gets in the way by obscuring details. Simple example, Airdrop. You share a file, select the person, and it gets stuck displaying sending on the bubble. What is happening? No one knows, because it should "just work". But when it doesn't, you usually have literally no recourse and you are told to wipe your device and try again. From GP's example, the synchronisation. I don't know about iMessage, but synchronising Photos is a nightmare because there is no button to force a sync. You have to connect your phone to power and pray that it will sync. If it doesn't, you have no way to force it. Same thing with AirPods firmware, how do you update it? You don't, it should happen automagically. It didn't? Sucks to suck. You hopefully get the idea by this point :)
  - Schiendelman 6mo ago
    If I remember right, that was Apple finally switching to the standards based approach for PD, and a lot of docks having used a hack instead of the standard for years before. It worked with your regular charger because your regular charger properly supported the PD standard.
- fzeindl 6mo ago
  It's true that there are few obvious bugs, but there are many subtle bugs now, usually outside the main interaction flows. 5 years ago, apple's software felt bugfree, essentially. examples: - if I change a note on my iphone and wake up my mac, I need to restart the notes-app before it syncs the change. - if somebody leaves me a FaceTime video-message, I get an "unread"-badge that doesn't get away after I watch the video. There are multiple ways to get to that video and only one of them clears the "unread" badge. - if I add a pronounciation field to a contact in my iphone, SIRI stops working and I need to restart my iphone to get it back.
  - Schiendelman 6mo ago
    I found the first one of those to be fixed recently. I haven't had the Mac note sync problem in about a month.
    - rpgbr 6mo ago
      Yeap, it was a bug with iOS 24.6: https://9to5mac.com/2026/04/08/iphone-icloud-sync-bug-apple-passwords-fixed/ https://9to5mac.com/2026/04/08/iphone-icloud-sync-bug-apple-...
- Rekindle8090 6mo ago
  Son you can't even upload HEIC photos to apple support, which is an iphone native file format all of your photos are in by default. Apples support website doesn't support apples file formats
- drcongo 6mo ago
  AirPods and iMessage, agreed, never had a problem. The Home app though remains Apple's unloved ginger stepchild - every major OS release I'm hopeful that they've done something about it, but they never do. I'm starting to think Apple's internal view of Home / HomeKit is that they wish they'd never built it in the first place.
  - Schiendelman 6mo ago
    This is tough. Most home devices are built to be absolute bottom of the barrel. Notice that almost every HomeKit device says it only uses 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi? Apple tried to do certification for a while in 2018ish, but nobody could get through it, so I think they stopped. Apple is starting to build their own home devices and I expect them to eat the market and cause improvement via competition.
    - bombcar 6mo ago
      Matter (and thread) is supposed to fix this, but I'll believe it when I see it.
    - drcongo 6mo ago
      HomeKit certification is still a thing if that's what you're referring to. You're very much right about the bottom of the barrel nature of home automation devices though. Most of mine are about as good as you can get though (Philips Hue etc.) and the Home app is still appalling. Even if all the devices I have attached worked properly and did what they're told when the automations run, there's still some absolutely basic functionality that people have been waiting years for, like being able to switch cameras from stream only to stream and record via an automation - think "when I go to bed, I want the alarm on and the cameras recording".
      - Schiendelman 6mo ago
        I didn't realize they were still doing certification! And yeah... the app is bad.
  - sgt 6mo ago
- nsxwolf 6mo ago
  If you have a lot of Apple devices, and kids that are constantly borrowing them, you'll notice the "AirPods connected to wrong device" problem a lot. All I want is a feature that allows me to say "lock my AirPods to this exact device until further notice."
- maxsilver 6mo ago
  > iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart. The iMessage one is super common, and is Apple's fault. Easiest way to reproduce it is to have two Macs. (got a desktop and a laptop and use them both? Chances are high you'll encounter it). The HomeKit (via HomePod mini) is also super common. (HomePod Minis just have bad wifi and unreliable connections, there's something about their WiFi setup that's different from all other Apple products). It doesn't help that Apple spent years prioritizing HomePods as the HomeKit base (though they eventually fixed that, and let you assign an Apple TV to do it). The others are also common, but not necessarily always Apples fault, as far as I can tell. (the AirPods, for example, tend to go wherever 'most recent' sounds happen, but a lot of developers are unintentionally triggering conflicting behavior around this. Have Outlook open? An email notification will sound an alarm, stealing AirPod focus away from your other device, but the sound effect will already be done playing by the time your AirPods connect, so to the user, it just seems like the AirPods switched devices for "no reason".) (HomeKit, for example, is supposed to support Eufy cameras. But Eufy cameras are garbage, despite having a large dedicated base station dock running 24/7, they can support only one small video stream to one single device, ever. So if you have two Eufy cameras installed, HomeKit will fail on the cameras constantly, but it's because of Eufy's basestation limitations, so it's not clear to me how Apple could 'fix' that) --- The more Apple moves outside of it's own internal ecosystem, the more complex the interactions get, and the less control Apple can feasibly exert over the product lifecycle, so the more it starts "Microsoft-ing" it's work. (We joke about Microsoft Copilot, but Apple has five different products all named Apple TV, the Apple TV (hardware device), Apple TV (the TV software app, which runs on Apple TV, and iOS, but also on Roku and other SmartTVs), Apple TV (the storefront for buying movies and TV shows), and Apple TV (the subscription service) for watching Apple TV (the studio creating original content shows and movies, one show of which is actually called "The Studio")
- burnt-resistor 6mo ago
  AirPod Pro v1 seems to always work, but they favor connecting to Apple branded devices and move seamlessly between them. What doesn't work so well is that iPad Pro M4 doesn't play nice with Bose QC35 multi-point connections because it appears to "play silence" to the headphones even when there is no audio, preventing the other connected device from switching over to play audio. When I turn my iPhone on and open iMessage, it will sit at a black screen and won't open for several minutes and usually crashes. I want sync to happen on a background thread and be able to access existing content immediately. Sometimes it happens with the phone app too. There really ought to be a universal gesture or trick (that's not pull to refresh) to force iCloud sync in any app that has iCloud sync functionality. Also, Universal Clipboard works half of the time. Learn Spelling was removed from most/all non-Pages apps, which is extremely inconvenient because the Apple US English dictionary has tons of missing adverb forms. iOS/iPadOS selection of text in a web browser (Brave or Mobile Safari) doesn't work as reliably as it did in earlier OS versions. Often, text is selected but refuses to show the text selection popup. And I refuse to use iOS and macOS 26 because liquid glass is slow and unusable.
montgomery_r 6mo ago
I think the criticisms of the current software stack are well founded. There is friction there, stuff doesnt work that should. OP even neglected to mention the glaring Finder column view bugs or the Taboe corner radius window selection issues. But as a user since System 6.x, including A/UX and MacOS X since public beta - it was ever thus. Macintosh pre OSX was well known as an acronym for Most Applications Crash, If Not, The Operating System Hangs. After OSX, Snow Leopard was needed to clear cruft. The hardware is in sparkling form. Perhaps the software is closer to average. Where would you pick the next leader from - the hw side or the sw side?!
- jtfrench 6mo ago
  Working on Snow Leopard was one of my most rewarding experiences at Apple. Loved the ethos behind that update. No new fluff, just make everything work better.
  - montgomery_r 6mo ago
    Totally agreed! And I loved Snow Leopard. (And I still love Mac OS - just making the point, there have always been things to complain about :-) )
- DrScientist 6mo ago
  Why oh why for example can't you resize the System Settings window? If you are in the wallpaper view - there is content off the screen to the right, but no visible scroll bar, nor ability to resize. The only way to scroll appears to use the keyboard to navigate the wallpapers ( which has the side effect of setting them ). I don't expect these kind of UI issues on MacOS.
  - DrScientist 6mo ago
    On the other hand - the transition from Intel to ARM, which has totally transformed their hardware offering, was pretty seamless and is down to large part good software.
algoth1 6mo ago
Will we finally have a native way to ‘select all’ text in iPadOs?
danabramov 6mo ago
"But here's the thing" Is it really so hard to write your articles by yourself? The blandest tone imaginable, all the usual LLM tells in the sentence structure. You are polluting HN and the broader internet by posting this publicly.
- an0malous 6mo ago
  It’s futile, the Internet as we knew it is over. The Great Enshittification of the West is well past the halfway point.
  - poszlem 6mo ago
    of the West?
- pfdietz 6mo ago
  That's an AI slop tell, isn't it? I wonder if AI is going to drive certain idioms into extinction (aside from being used by AI).
  - bee_rider 6mo ago
    I don’t think there are AI slop tells anymore. Humans have been reading AI slop for a couple years now, so it plausible enough that any one person will have picked up a couple AI-like phrases.
- tonhe 6mo ago
  Honestly... I think I've been reading too much AI content, because I 100% wrote that. I do use AI to help make outlines and gather thoughts. But the Article was written by me.
  - leoedin 6mo ago
    Did you do any kind of AI assisted proofreading or grammar? So much of the structure of the article screams AI. Stuff like this: > Each one of these, on its own, is just a bug. Together, they’re a culture. And the headings starting with "The" AI seems to have adopted a style reminiscent of startup marketers circa 2020 - really simple, lots of one liner quips and far too much incredulity about minor things. Now we've come full circle!
boxed 6mo ago
Parental controls are just absolutely broken. I hope Ternus has some kids and is upset about this too. Screen time is totally broken. Produces numbers hilariously wrong. Again a problem for people with kids. Spotlight searching on macOS just breaks and forcing a rescan can fix it for a while, but it can break pretty faster after randomly.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
amelius 6mo ago
Can we have someone like Woz at the helm please?
- stuartd 6mo ago
  much as I love and revere woz that is a terrible idea
- emo_engine 6mo ago
  woz is a hacker, not a product designer
eddieroger 6mo ago
It is so easy to sit on and critique from the sidelines. Steve Jobs had a passion for product, and it showed - he pushed the teams to make things he approved of, and that was the measure. Tim Cook had a passion for growth, and as the article states, Apple's income now rival some GDPs. They're different people with different drives. In fact, Jobs told Cook not to do what he would do, but do the right thing, and to Cook that was grow the company. I'd love to see the critics do better.
- pjmlp 6mo ago
  When we pay premium, we expect premium.
  - trimethylpurine 6mo ago
    Sadly, too many of us continue to go back for more after our expectations aren't met. This makes it an obvious decision to reduce quality below premium.
    - grishka 6mo ago
      There's nowhere to run, unfortunately. Windows and Linux are orders of magnitude worse than even macOS 26. To say that the whole software industry is a dumpster fire would be an understatement.
- Noaidi 6mo ago
  > and to Cook that was grow the company. If you do not see this as teh problem with Tim Cook then I have a gold bar to give you. https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/07/tim-cook-gift-to-trump/ https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/07/tim-cook-gift-to-trump/ I want ethical companies that grow because of good products, not because of market capture and bribes.
  - aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
    > I want ethical companies that grow because of good products, not because of market capture and bribes. Then avoid becoming a customer/user of companies that grew because of market capture or bribes.
foobartab 6mo ago
LLM slop
vlovich123 6mo ago
Oof. This article gets so much wrong… > The rot starts when the salespeople end up running the company. > Then, in 2011, Apple promoted its head of operations to CEO. Tim Cook is not and never has been a salesperson. Head of operations at a company like Apple is a deeply technical role. That’s why he has a degree in industrial engineering and an MBA. > Today’s Apple doesn’t pass that test. And the failures aren’t dramatic ones. They’re the small, persistent, daily-friction kind that the founder used to personally drive teams to fix. Today’s Apple struggles to ship software to more than 2 billion devices and get all the integrations working smoothly. The Apple of the past a) had lots of similar problems every once in a while even under jobs b) never had to deal with this scale. The correct benchmark isn’t Apple of the past but of similarly sized companies like Google and Microsoft. > and it visibly hated them. The bad release, the launch-day disaster, the public mea culpa, the engineering re-org. The whole company would visibly recoil and try to do better. Apple has had one badly received and widely panned software release (and honestly I haven’t really had the problems others complained about, but I waited until a few dot releases). > But here’s the thing about hardware. You can grow it through operational discipline. You can squeeze a process node, you can negotiate a better deal with TSMC, you can lean on a thousand suppliers until they bend. That’s exactly the kind of work Cook is good at, and it’s exactly the kind of work that doesn’t require a product person at the top. Sounds like the author doesn’t have hands on experience building hardware. Finally, I’ll note they promoted a hardware engineer to CEO. If the CEO role was so critical to good software then a software person would have been a better pick. A CEO role is different and good product taste is a fickle bitch - even Johnny Ives was struggling there.
- epolanski 6mo ago
  > Head of operations at a company like Apple is a deeply technical role. At that level and scale it's merely politics.
  - vlovich123 6mo ago
    It’s clearly both technical and political. But what you think Tim did nothing technical in his time at Apple and built up technical teams to make it into the powerhouse through luck? Tactics are fine but strategy is everything and Cook clearly is both tactically and strategically excellent. Source: worked at Apple and at Google and we struggled at Google to build supply chains and get the same cost effectiveness. People talk about how Apple is overpriced and then ignore that the feature set/cost tradeoff is matched by only Samsung on mobile and even then they make a fraction of the money that Apple does.
buttocks 6mo ago
This author misses the point because he is a geek. Ordinary users love Apple and do not care about these issues. Ordinary users throw money at Apple. Apple has some bugs to fix but overall the product is good, and that’s why they keep raking in cash. Saying good riddance to Tim Cook because of the system preference pane, among other trivial things (to most people), is simply misunderstanding business.
- stavros 6mo ago
  Let me guess, anyone who thinks Apple products are a buggy mess is a geek, and everyone else is ordinary, No True Scotsman style? Personally, I don't think the fact that the Apple keyboard is unusable is a "geek" thing.
  - prmoustache 6mo ago
    The thing is most people are: 1. used to mediocrity and enshittification everywhere 2. live in one ecosystem or another. Appart from developpers, I don't know many people who use Mac AND Windows, iPhones AND android. And resistance to change is there to limit moves between one to another. They wouldn't care if apple keyboard sucks if they never used a better one.
    - stavros 6mo ago
      Sure, but people might try different things. I switched to an iPhone for three months before the keyboard drove me mad enough to switch back to Android.
- SecretDreams 6mo ago
  Ordinary users love lamp, so to speak. Reality is the success of current products mostly hedges on the momentum their companies have built over the last decade, rather than the actual innovations of those current products. Guerilla advertising is also used super effectively.
- rglullis 6mo ago
  Or maybe you don't understand that for some people there are more important things than "how much money will I make from this?"...
kgwxd 6mo ago
It doesn't matter who's sitting in the chair, no one is reversing our decent toward the bottom of the barrel in tech, any time soon.
- prmoustache 6mo ago
  I think so too. I don't think Steve Jobs would have been kept as CEO had he survived cancer. Most Apple customers of today aren't necessarily the same customers as 15 years ago, the same way a Rolex, Porsche, Louis Vuitton customer in 2026 is not the same person as in the 80's. A lot of current customers are used to mediocrity in everything, from food, to entertainment or tech. I'll exclude Linux desktops because most people do not even know it is a thing, but look at the commercially available alternatives to iOS and MacOS? Android and Windows. That's it. While I appreciate the sadly dwindling additionnal freedom in android, I can hardly call these 2 a frictionless experience either. Are chromebooks still a thing nowadays? I haven't encountered one or a user in years.
Brendinooo 6mo ago
Honest question, from someone who doesn't own AirPods because I'm cheap: Is there a product in either of AirPods' categories that is generally recognized as either outright superior or a better value? Because both regular and Pro seem like amazing products, and reviews tend to classify them as such. And it's entirely a Cook-led project. Like, if I were to pick one product to prove that Cook cared about product and Apple could still do cool things, that's probably on the top of the list. Calling out one flaw and making that emblematic of his entire tenure feels extremely shortsighted.
- Schiendelman 6mo ago
  The Max are honestly magic too. I got rid of Bose and Sony headphones because these are worth every penny. They work perfectly, they switch between devices really well, the noise canceling is great, and they don't hurt to wear for long periods of time.
deleted 6mo ago
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tsunamifury 6mo ago
Tim was able to scale jobs and ives legacy for a decade exceptionally well, in large part with the help of Foxconn. And he did a great job of in housing major parts of the stack to reduce dependency. Once that had run out, he ran out and VR plus intelligence were there worst failures the company has ever seen. Completely inept ideas, one that very publicly failed to launch to a hugely damaging degree. Cook was great at growing others legacy, and completely inept at making his own.
anonthrownaway 6mo ago
Amazing HW. SW that is stunningly bad. My example that makes me want to divest myself from my all-in on Apple's ecosystem: Native save as dialog box with a filename text box that shows (at most) 32 characters on the screen at once. Even with the smallest dialog box width possible, there is room to make the filename more than 64 characters. Resizing the box does nothing. They can't be eating their own dogfood here right? Are they all using Linux? How do they sell this crap to the business segment?? This isn't even a bug - it is just terrible SW UI/UX design. I love my Macbook HW (except for the stupid sharp edge) and the only thing that keeps me from ditching it is that for most documents I work on, I am in LibreOffice, which lets me disable the native save as dialog box and use the works as expected LibreOffice one. To the article, I wonder if a HW person will have the mindset required to fix the glaring holes in their SW. Make the whole damn company eat their own dogfood!
- nsxwolf 6mo ago
  macOS may be stunningly bad, but Windows 11 and any flavor of Linux are far worse.
  - anonthrownaway 6mo ago
    I know :( I use all 3 for different reasons, but Macbooks are my daily driver because I want an ecosystem. Too bad there are so many ecosystem fails. I want to believe, but this $4T megacorp can't figure out table stakes.
  - xethos 6mo ago
    Parent's workaround was literally to use software frequently found on Linux desktop (and typically absent on MacOS and Windows) Whatever's going on in Cupertino, it's hard to arguethe people working on the Linux ecossytem don't eat their own dogfood
saberience 6mo ago
Reads like AI slop, no genuine insight, bland, clearly someone who has very little insight into Apple or Tim Cook. The job of a public-company CEO is to grow the company for the shareholders, they have a fiduciary duty to do this. Tim Cook took all the ingredients that Steve Jobs left him and maximised them, and I doubt there are many people in the world who given the same raw ingredients could have increased the market cap as much as Tim did... Tim is and was not ever a product or marketing genius as Jobs was, so why compare him to Jobs? Very, very few people in history have ever been as good at product and marketing as Jobs... BUT, Cook is an operations genius, and he led Apple using his particular strengths and he has left Apple as an incredibly healthy company. He was also insanely smart with some of his strategic moves, e.g. not overhiring during covid and leaving Apple in a superstrong post-covid position, also, not overspending on AI (like Meta), and realizing that all of the AI software providers would ultimately need to put their apps and software on iPhone. I.e. let Apple focus on what its best at (hardware), let others waste their money on AI, we will use the best when it becomes commoditized...
- tonyedgecombe 6mo ago
  Apple failed on AI. It may well work out for them but it certainly wasn’t planned like that. They announced vapourware then failed to deliver.
kibwen 6mo ago
Let's stop beating around the bush. Companies don't produce better products unless incentives are aligned to force them to produce better products. Are incentives aligned in a way to cause Apple to produce better software? If not, then it absolutely does not matter who the CEO is. IREAM.
k4rnaj1k 6mo ago
[dead]
AnonC 6mo ago
I can’t help but agree on the points made in this post. I don’t want the pain of Windows (or another non-Apple OS), but Apple isn’t making it easy to recommend its software on the quality front. If John Ternus puts more focus on what Craig Federighi and Eddy Cue aren’t doing, there is a chance for Apple to make its software better. As I said in another comment here, when things just work, it seems magical and awesome. But the same areas where deep integration creates the magic is often riddled with a lot of bugs. I report many issues to Apple and follow up those reports with updated information, but most of them don’t get any attention. I don’t have a mental model for where all the feedback and issues go to and who looks at them or takes ownership of them.
- TheOtherHobbes 6mo ago
  Federighi has been coasting for years. I hope Ternus fixes that. On the upside, at least Federighi didn't get the top job.
sschueller 6mo ago
Tim cook did his job well. He increase stock value over and over again for the delight of the shareholders. He also increased the moat as large as possible. If you want a better product you will not get it from a publicly traded company. Sure you may claim that a bad product is bad for a company in the long term and it is. However short term stock increases are far more desirable than long term stability and growth.
- anonthrownaway 6mo ago
  Exactly - they do not GAF because there is no worthy competitor. No one else has a (semi) functional ecosystem...
- TheOtherHobbes 6mo ago
  No one can say if it was "as large as possible." It's at least plausible he left money on the table with some missed opportunities. For example: handing over the semi-pro video creator space to YouTube. Apple already a thriving podcast ecosystem, but failed to capitalise on it. There was a real opportunity for vertical integration with Apple selling hardware, targeted content creation software (a CapCut-a-like version of FCP), and access to a distribution network. Also, home automation and security. Cameras, switches, maybe even routers with local backup. Not sold as devices, but as high quality services with obvious benefits that happen to run on specific hardware. AI: there was the opportunity to develop Siri into an agentic assistant well before anyone else got there. Cook's slant was more towards chasing high-end Veblen lifestyle status - cars, watches, premium computers and phones - and less towards social marketing and less shiny but useful consumer devices.
  - fartfeatures 6mo ago
    Also a couple of big investments that might have been better spent elsewhere e.g. Apple TV+ and the Apple Car. The vision pro and the audible gasp the audience let out when the price was revealed was a particular low point. Having owned that device for 14 days before returning it I wish they had left the screen off the front, reduced the weight by 25% and done something about the price. What good is a developer device that is hard to make, expensive and flashy.
deleted 6mo ago
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jmyeet 6mo ago
I will say that UI designers left to their own devices will tend to make change for the sake of change. And it's annoying. Safari on iOS is a prime example of this. I used to be able to switch from tabs to private browsing. Now I have to go through a tab groups abstraction that I didn't ask for, can't turn off and don't want. Want to open a new tab? Well, that too has gotten annoying. You have to tap near the bottom to bring up the address bar and then you can bring up the tabs screens (that used to be more accessible) or click on the new 3 dot menu on the bottom right. Who asked for this? I prefer my address at the top. It's like desktop. That's another unwelcome change. This change also infected Settings where the search is hovering near the bottom now for some reason. This seems to be part of some wider UI fad because Google Finance now does this too. Just. Stop. Oh I used to just tap the top of the screen to scroll to the top in Safari too. Now I accidentally hit the notch and go to some other unrealted app now. So thanks for that, Apple. I abhor Face ID. So many false negatives. so unreliable. So many more times I have to put my passcode in. Just give me Touch ID. Put it on the home button (like the iPad Air) or do what Samsung did a decade ago and put a sensor on the back. That works really well. Oh the Apple Watch isn't immune to annoying and pointless UI changes too. Even selecting an activity like Outdoor Walk now has a really weird scroll behavior where the "play" button doesn't come up until you stop scrolling. Why? WHY? The old interface was fine. Leadership is keeping these kinds of things in check. Otherwise people make changes to get promoted,, basically. Or it's just ego to reinvent something in their image. Steve Jobs kept Johnny Ive in check. Tim Cook allowed the 12" macbook to happen. As well as the Touch Bar and the butterly keyboard (allegedly to save 0.5mm in thickness). But at least those got corrected. And of course Siri is still terrible and almost seems like abandonware at this point.
blueTiger33 6mo ago
Tim Cook was the guy Steve choosed. Don't know him personally, but he is leaving a great company behind. The new CEO has a lot to prove. Design wise, have heard he has made some mistakes but Apple ability to improve, will not fall behind. Hope he is a fighter, a pirate ;)
dandare 6mo ago
>The Tenet Cook Forgot: make products you’d be proud to use yourself. You see, I don't think people like Cook (and the majority of corporate managers) can even tell the difference between good and bad products when they use them.
AlexandrB 6mo ago
Counterpoint: things can always get worse. Tim Cook was at least a steady hand at keeping the product tolerably usable. Just wait until a Satya Nadella style CEO takes charge at Apple - we'll be wishing for the halcyon days of Tahoe and Liquid Glass.
samth 6mo ago
HN should partner with Pangram to give an AI score to things that are submitted.
tejohnso 6mo ago
[flagged]
- simonw 6mo ago
  It's by far the strongest sign of AI writing. I counted 14 instances of the word "not" in this piece, and now I'm wondering if ratio-of-nots-to-length might be a really cheap way to spot text that came out of an LLM. I think the reason is grates so much is that it's such a cliché. Given their nature, it's not surprising that LLMs would turn to clichés so much.
shibaprasadb 6mo ago
>Your AirPods just connected to the wrong device. Again. >iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart. Have these ever happened to someone? I have been using an iPhone for 2 years but have never experienced this.
swader999 6mo ago
Did Steve Jobs have a passion for iMusic? He wasn't perfect either.
infecto 6mo ago
I think the criticisms are valid but I also still find that Apple has created one of the best ecosystems in the marketplace. It’s hard for me to pin any of the individual complaints on a broad failing of Tim Cook.
nalekberov 6mo ago
Agreed, System Settings was the worst redesign in entire Apple history in my humble opinion. Previously it was so simple that you didn’t have to scroll. At some point Apple should realize that, it’s okay to not touch core design principles.
jshaqaw 6mo ago
Can we add to the software failure list that Finder is an underpowered mess? Like the author said, fixing Finder won't have a correspondingly visible ROI. But haven't any of the Apple developers using these machines just said "ENOUGH" already. I used to like Pathfinder and was willing to just pay for that as an alternative but that software is just buggy enough that it's annoying to rely on for something as important as file management.
josefrichter 6mo ago
It’s overreacting. HW is fantastic. some SW less so. Some bugs feel ridiculous and they’ve been around for ages - true. But overall, try to fire up a windows machine once in a while. It will give you a very quick reminder that you’re just used to a very high bar.
kneel 6mo ago
You think this company would have gone bankrupt by now 2012 — [Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3227949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3227949) 2013 — [Frustrated with iCloud, Apple's developer community speaks up](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5454491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5454491) 2014 — [Is Apple experiencing a problematic decline in software quality?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8461546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8461546) 2015 — [Apple has lost the functional high ground](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8836734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8836734) 2016 — [Apple's declining software quality](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11034071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11034071) 2017 — [Apple's had a shockingly bad week of software problems](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15831914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15831914) 2018 — [Ask HN: Why has Apple's software quality steadily gone downhill?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16312664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16312664) 2019 — [Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21330678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21330678) 2020 — [Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24324639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24324639) 2021 — [Apple's software quality has certainly slipped](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29229881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29229881) 2022 — [The erosion of the Mac experience](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32497193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32497193) 2023 — [Mac OS Ventura Issues](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34199652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34199652) 2024 — [Ask HN: Has Apple lost its way?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39530215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39530215) 2025 — [Apple's Software Quality Crisis](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075)
- emo_engine 6mo ago
  it probably would've if not for the iPhone
woodydesign 6mo ago
John Ternus has been the core leader behind two of Apple’s most important post-Jobs achievements: AirPods, its best new product in that era from my pov, and the transition from Intel to Apple Silicon, one of its most ambitious and successful strategic bets. I’m very bullish on his innovation mindset and on Apple’s next chapter.
xbar 6mo ago
My model of Tim Cook's vision for Apple was "To sell more, we must be more simple. Configuration is complexity and complexity eats battery life which we must defend against user decisions and bad software. Permit software products to be as minimally configurable as necessary to support the features and battery life we advertise. Defects of insufficient configurability are therefore features. Mail and web cannot be defeated as open standards, all others can be. Close them and own them at 30% revenue cut." I will give Tim Cook credit for a category software improvement: reliability. While poor performance, memory bloat, and UI slop have been hallmarks of macOS native apps, they have stopped crashing. Xcode is usable. I miss OS X, but I do not miss the instability.
emo_engine 6mo ago
“John [Sculley] came from PepsiCo, and they, at most, would change their product once every 10 years. To them, a new product was, like, a new-size bottle, right? So if you were a product person, you couldn’t change the course of that company very much. So who influenced the success of PepsiCo? The sales and marketing people. Therefore, they were the ones that got promoted, and therefore, they were the ones that ran the company. Well, for PepsiCo, that might have been okay. But it turns out, the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies. Like, oh, IBM and Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox…So you make a better copier or a better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company is not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision-making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts usually about wanting to really help the customers.” Tim Cook has always been a John Sculley, not a Steve Jobs.
serhack_ 6mo ago
I'm very sad to see some bugs catch by my fuzzer that was coded in three minutes of cargo-fuzz, disrupting UX. I filled some apple feedbacks that were fortunately fixed by some engineers, but I wonder what's happening under Q&A testing.
burnt-resistor 6mo ago
s/salesperson/CFO/ This was such a poor, inapplicable word choice that weakened their argument. Regardless of former or current roles, actions and attitudes matter. The core problem is TC snatched failure from the jaws of victory by optimizing for the wrong priorities: extreme profiteering over cool (as cool as the past), durable, reliable, desirable products with "souls" and leading innovation into new or under-developed categories. TC was never able to confidently lead into new territory like SJ. That's what Apple is desperately missing.
maxglute 6mo ago
LLM slop aside, it would be nice to have a less rational Apple leader that launches riskier products. Get that car out.

94 points by tonhe 6mo ago

Hey ChatGPT, generate a controversed article for my blog. No worries if examples are made up and some information is objectively wrong.

sgt 6mo ago

> Your AirPods just connected to the wrong device. Again. > iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart. HomeKit forgot the kitchen lightbulb exists, and will remember it again in three hours like nothing happened. I've literally seen nothing of this happen (or to my family all on Apple devices). While I don't doubt they do happen to some unfortunate users, it's important that they report it so that Apple can troubleshoot. It could very well be that, much like myself, nobody at Apple is seeing this, and therefore it's not investigated.

zeratax 6mo ago
Every time I do report these kinds of bugs it's clear to me they clearly do not look at them lol. The Feedback site still thinks windows 10 is the latest windows version and doesn't even display the latest ios version.
- maldev 6mo ago
  I reported a bug in Apple Music on windows where it wouldn't update the audio output until you restarted it. They did a change in a few weeks where they made it update the audio output. Probably team dependent, but I was really amazed by how quick they changed it.
- azinman2 6mo ago
  They are looked at. Source: I work for Apple.
  - sgt 6mo ago
    Mind emailing me? gbeowbrea+nccyr (at) tznvy.pbz
- burnt-resistor 6mo ago
  It's unknowable if they look or not consistently across all groups and departments because of their habit of zero feedback/response. I assume they don't look anymore because of assumed overwhelming backlog and lower standards than the past. Perhaps on their side, AI might be able to consolidate, triage, and perhaps even propose fixes far more scalably than even a huge department of customer support-oriented coders.
redsocksfan45 6mo ago
Every damn time anybody has trouble with an Apple product, we get this "Well that hasn't happened to me." Great for you, go get yourself a cookie and cram it up your ass.
hyperhello 6mo ago
Paste a screenshot into TextEdit doc and make a pdf.
- fzeindl 6mo ago
  Tested this, works for me.
- sgt 6mo ago
  Tested this now. Works like a bomb. https://imgur.com/a/t1ufCqr https://imgur.com/a/t1ufCqr
  - hyperhello 6mo ago
    You took a portion of the screen so it would be thinner than the window. Take a screen shot.
    - sgt 6mo ago
      Check out the new video. I did a full screen screenshot now. https://imgur.com/a/bVznT02 https://imgur.com/a/bVznT02 It seems to be adding it to TextEdit but it disappears when exporting to PDF. Is this a TextEdit.app bug?
      - hyperhello 6mo ago
        The flip side of “it just works” is when it doesn’t.
        sgt 6mo ago
        Fair enough, but this is not a big bug. I don't think many people use TextEdit in 2026.
watt 6mo ago
HomeKit cooking your phone battery, period.
- Schiendelman 6mo ago
  What devices specifically?
AnonC 6mo ago
> While I don't doubt they do happen to some unfortunate users, it's important that they report it so that Apple can troubleshoot. It could very well be that, much like myself, nobody at Apple is seeing this, and therefore it's not investigated. I report a lot of nagging issues to Apple through Feedback Assistant. I keep updating the same issues and provide instructions as well as the device diagnostics and any photos/videos. But almost all of them don’t see any kind of action at Apple. They just linger on for years. Only if it’s an OS crash or an important Apple app crashing, it may get some attention. There are many instances when “things just work” and it seems magical, but in those same areas, there are often too many bugs and issues where one has to do this whole dance of restart, re-pair devices and so on. It used to be that Windows was the butt of frequent jokes on restarting, but Apple’s software has gotten closer to that in many aspects. I personally suspect that Apple doesn’t have a dedicated and good QA in place. There doesn’t seem to be a push from the top down for software quality. That attention to detail that Apple was famous for is missing on software quality.
- ryandrake 6mo ago
  I'm 1 for 1 on Feedback Assistant. I reported a flaky 10 year old thunderbolt display to them a few years ago, thinking I was probably just shouting into a black hole. It took them six months, but they actually responded to it with a diagnosis (bad hardware) and a workaround so I didn't have to trash the display.
neya 6mo ago
Bingo. I have a bunch of Sony WF-Xm4s and Xm3s and an Airpod pro. If I have to take a call, it's always the Airpod for me because it's so reliable. I just snap it into my ears and it literally just works. The Sony - while having a flatter frequency response and a snugger fit, goes for my daily workouts which Airpods sucks for as it keeps falling off. I have never had any connection issues with the Airpods till date. Despite it being connected to 3 devices. The Sony's (rarely) do have connection issues but never the Airpods.
- Schiendelman 6mo ago
  I was excited about Beats because they have the same hardware/software stack as iPods and they fit really well on runs! Give them a try if yoi haven't!
  - neya 6mo ago
    Wow, didn't know that. Thanks for sharing.
kubik369 6mo ago
Both can be right, unfortunately. People do not report stuff, but when they do, it tends to get ignored. I have personally stopped reporting feedback to Apple because my tens of bug reports with detailed reproduction steps were simply ignored. This was both on beta and stable releases. One of them was especially egregious — I had an M1 Macbook Air at work and 11.2 update made charging with any dock, USB-C or Thunderbolt, not work, i.e. everything was working, but the laptop was not charging. I had to plug in a separate charger for 3 months until they fixed it in either 11.3 or 11.4. Rolling back did not work because the update updated the controller firmware. There was no mention of this in the release notes. Apple's "It just works." sometimes gets in the way by obscuring details. Simple example, Airdrop. You share a file, select the person, and it gets stuck displaying sending on the bubble. What is happening? No one knows, because it should "just work". But when it doesn't, you usually have literally no recourse and you are told to wipe your device and try again. From GP's example, the synchronisation. I don't know about iMessage, but synchronising Photos is a nightmare because there is no button to force a sync. You have to connect your phone to power and pray that it will sync. If it doesn't, you have no way to force it. Same thing with AirPods firmware, how do you update it? You don't, it should happen automagically. It didn't? Sucks to suck. You hopefully get the idea by this point :)
- Schiendelman 6mo ago
  If I remember right, that was Apple finally switching to the standards based approach for PD, and a lot of docks having used a hack instead of the standard for years before. It worked with your regular charger because your regular charger properly supported the PD standard.
fzeindl 6mo ago
It's true that there are few obvious bugs, but there are many subtle bugs now, usually outside the main interaction flows. 5 years ago, apple's software felt bugfree, essentially. examples: - if I change a note on my iphone and wake up my mac, I need to restart the notes-app before it syncs the change. - if somebody leaves me a FaceTime video-message, I get an "unread"-badge that doesn't get away after I watch the video. There are multiple ways to get to that video and only one of them clears the "unread" badge. - if I add a pronounciation field to a contact in my iphone, SIRI stops working and I need to restart my iphone to get it back.
- Schiendelman 6mo ago
  I found the first one of those to be fixed recently. I haven't had the Mac note sync problem in about a month.
  - rpgbr 6mo ago
    Yeap, it was a bug with iOS 24.6: https://9to5mac.com/2026/04/08/iphone-icloud-sync-bug-apple-passwords-fixed/ https://9to5mac.com/2026/04/08/iphone-icloud-sync-bug-apple-...
Rekindle8090 6mo ago
Son you can't even upload HEIC photos to apple support, which is an iphone native file format all of your photos are in by default. Apples support website doesn't support apples file formats
drcongo 6mo ago
AirPods and iMessage, agreed, never had a problem. The Home app though remains Apple's unloved ginger stepchild - every major OS release I'm hopeful that they've done something about it, but they never do. I'm starting to think Apple's internal view of Home / HomeKit is that they wish they'd never built it in the first place.
- Schiendelman 6mo ago
  This is tough. Most home devices are built to be absolute bottom of the barrel. Notice that almost every HomeKit device says it only uses 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi? Apple tried to do certification for a while in 2018ish, but nobody could get through it, so I think they stopped. Apple is starting to build their own home devices and I expect them to eat the market and cause improvement via competition.
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    Matter (and thread) is supposed to fix this, but I'll believe it when I see it.
  - drcongo 6mo ago
    HomeKit certification is still a thing if that's what you're referring to. You're very much right about the bottom of the barrel nature of home automation devices though. Most of mine are about as good as you can get though (Philips Hue etc.) and the Home app is still appalling. Even if all the devices I have attached worked properly and did what they're told when the automations run, there's still some absolutely basic functionality that people have been waiting years for, like being able to switch cameras from stream only to stream and record via an automation - think "when I go to bed, I want the alarm on and the cameras recording".
    - Schiendelman 6mo ago
      I didn't realize they were still doing certification! And yeah... the app is bad.
- sgt 6mo ago
nsxwolf 6mo ago
If you have a lot of Apple devices, and kids that are constantly borrowing them, you'll notice the "AirPods connected to wrong device" problem a lot. All I want is a feature that allows me to say "lock my AirPods to this exact device until further notice."
maxsilver 6mo ago
> iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart. The iMessage one is super common, and is Apple's fault. Easiest way to reproduce it is to have two Macs. (got a desktop and a laptop and use them both? Chances are high you'll encounter it). The HomeKit (via HomePod mini) is also super common. (HomePod Minis just have bad wifi and unreliable connections, there's something about their WiFi setup that's different from all other Apple products). It doesn't help that Apple spent years prioritizing HomePods as the HomeKit base (though they eventually fixed that, and let you assign an Apple TV to do it). The others are also common, but not necessarily always Apples fault, as far as I can tell. (the AirPods, for example, tend to go wherever 'most recent' sounds happen, but a lot of developers are unintentionally triggering conflicting behavior around this. Have Outlook open? An email notification will sound an alarm, stealing AirPod focus away from your other device, but the sound effect will already be done playing by the time your AirPods connect, so to the user, it just seems like the AirPods switched devices for "no reason".) (HomeKit, for example, is supposed to support Eufy cameras. But Eufy cameras are garbage, despite having a large dedicated base station dock running 24/7, they can support only one small video stream to one single device, ever. So if you have two Eufy cameras installed, HomeKit will fail on the cameras constantly, but it's because of Eufy's basestation limitations, so it's not clear to me how Apple could 'fix' that) --- The more Apple moves outside of it's own internal ecosystem, the more complex the interactions get, and the less control Apple can feasibly exert over the product lifecycle, so the more it starts "Microsoft-ing" it's work. (We joke about Microsoft Copilot, but Apple has five different products all named Apple TV, the Apple TV (hardware device), Apple TV (the TV software app, which runs on Apple TV, and iOS, but also on Roku and other SmartTVs), Apple TV (the storefront for buying movies and TV shows), and Apple TV (the subscription service) for watching Apple TV (the studio creating original content shows and movies, one show of which is actually called "The Studio")
burnt-resistor 6mo ago
AirPod Pro v1 seems to always work, but they favor connecting to Apple branded devices and move seamlessly between them. What doesn't work so well is that iPad Pro M4 doesn't play nice with Bose QC35 multi-point connections because it appears to "play silence" to the headphones even when there is no audio, preventing the other connected device from switching over to play audio. When I turn my iPhone on and open iMessage, it will sit at a black screen and won't open for several minutes and usually crashes. I want sync to happen on a background thread and be able to access existing content immediately. Sometimes it happens with the phone app too. There really ought to be a universal gesture or trick (that's not pull to refresh) to force iCloud sync in any app that has iCloud sync functionality. Also, Universal Clipboard works half of the time. Learn Spelling was removed from most/all non-Pages apps, which is extremely inconvenient because the Apple US English dictionary has tons of missing adverb forms. iOS/iPadOS selection of text in a web browser (Brave or Mobile Safari) doesn't work as reliably as it did in earlier OS versions. Often, text is selected but refuses to show the text selection popup. And I refuse to use iOS and macOS 26 because liquid glass is slow and unusable.

montgomery_r 6mo ago

I think the criticisms of the current software stack are well founded. There is friction there, stuff doesnt work that should. OP even neglected to mention the glaring Finder column view bugs or the Taboe corner radius window selection issues. But as a user since System 6.x, including A/UX and MacOS X since public beta - it was ever thus. Macintosh pre OSX was well known as an acronym for Most Applications Crash, If Not, The Operating System Hangs. After OSX, Snow Leopard was needed to clear cruft. The hardware is in sparkling form. Perhaps the software is closer to average. Where would you pick the next leader from - the hw side or the sw side?!

jtfrench 6mo ago
Working on Snow Leopard was one of my most rewarding experiences at Apple. Loved the ethos behind that update. No new fluff, just make everything work better.
- montgomery_r 6mo ago
  Totally agreed! And I loved Snow Leopard. (And I still love Mac OS - just making the point, there have always been things to complain about :-) )
DrScientist 6mo ago
Why oh why for example can't you resize the System Settings window? If you are in the wallpaper view - there is content off the screen to the right, but no visible scroll bar, nor ability to resize. The only way to scroll appears to use the keyboard to navigate the wallpapers ( which has the side effect of setting them ). I don't expect these kind of UI issues on MacOS.
- DrScientist 6mo ago
  On the other hand - the transition from Intel to ARM, which has totally transformed their hardware offering, was pretty seamless and is down to large part good software.

algoth1 6mo ago

Will we finally have a native way to ‘select all’ text in iPadOs?

danabramov 6mo ago

"But here's the thing" Is it really so hard to write your articles by yourself? The blandest tone imaginable, all the usual LLM tells in the sentence structure. You are polluting HN and the broader internet by posting this publicly.

an0malous 6mo ago
It’s futile, the Internet as we knew it is over. The Great Enshittification of the West is well past the halfway point.
- poszlem 6mo ago
  of the West?
pfdietz 6mo ago
That's an AI slop tell, isn't it? I wonder if AI is going to drive certain idioms into extinction (aside from being used by AI).
- bee_rider 6mo ago
  I don’t think there are AI slop tells anymore. Humans have been reading AI slop for a couple years now, so it plausible enough that any one person will have picked up a couple AI-like phrases.
tonhe 6mo ago
Honestly... I think I've been reading too much AI content, because I 100% wrote that. I do use AI to help make outlines and gather thoughts. But the Article was written by me.
- leoedin 6mo ago
  Did you do any kind of AI assisted proofreading or grammar? So much of the structure of the article screams AI. Stuff like this: > Each one of these, on its own, is just a bug. Together, they’re a culture. And the headings starting with "The" AI seems to have adopted a style reminiscent of startup marketers circa 2020 - really simple, lots of one liner quips and far too much incredulity about minor things. Now we've come full circle!

boxed 6mo ago

Parental controls are just absolutely broken. I hope Ternus has some kids and is upset about this too. Screen time is totally broken. Produces numbers hilariously wrong. Again a problem for people with kids. Spotlight searching on macOS just breaks and forcing a rescan can fix it for a while, but it can break pretty faster after randomly.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

amelius 6mo ago

Can we have someone like Woz at the helm please?

stuartd 6mo ago
much as I love and revere woz that is a terrible idea
emo_engine 6mo ago
woz is a hacker, not a product designer

eddieroger 6mo ago

It is so easy to sit on and critique from the sidelines. Steve Jobs had a passion for product, and it showed - he pushed the teams to make things he approved of, and that was the measure. Tim Cook had a passion for growth, and as the article states, Apple's income now rival some GDPs. They're different people with different drives. In fact, Jobs told Cook not to do what he would do, but do the right thing, and to Cook that was grow the company. I'd love to see the critics do better.

pjmlp 6mo ago
When we pay premium, we expect premium.
- trimethylpurine 6mo ago
  Sadly, too many of us continue to go back for more after our expectations aren't met. This makes it an obvious decision to reduce quality below premium.
  - grishka 6mo ago
    There's nowhere to run, unfortunately. Windows and Linux are orders of magnitude worse than even macOS 26. To say that the whole software industry is a dumpster fire would be an understatement.
Noaidi 6mo ago
> and to Cook that was grow the company. If you do not see this as teh problem with Tim Cook then I have a gold bar to give you. https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/07/tim-cook-gift-to-trump/ https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/07/tim-cook-gift-to-trump/ I want ethical companies that grow because of good products, not because of market capture and bribes.
- aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
  > I want ethical companies that grow because of good products, not because of market capture and bribes. Then avoid becoming a customer/user of companies that grew because of market capture or bribes.

foobartab 6mo ago

LLM slop

vlovich123 6mo ago

Oof. This article gets so much wrong… > The rot starts when the salespeople end up running the company. > Then, in 2011, Apple promoted its head of operations to CEO. Tim Cook is not and never has been a salesperson. Head of operations at a company like Apple is a deeply technical role. That’s why he has a degree in industrial engineering and an MBA. > Today’s Apple doesn’t pass that test. And the failures aren’t dramatic ones. They’re the small, persistent, daily-friction kind that the founder used to personally drive teams to fix. Today’s Apple struggles to ship software to more than 2 billion devices and get all the integrations working smoothly. The Apple of the past a) had lots of similar problems every once in a while even under jobs b) never had to deal with this scale. The correct benchmark isn’t Apple of the past but of similarly sized companies like Google and Microsoft. > and it visibly hated them. The bad release, the launch-day disaster, the public mea culpa, the engineering re-org. The whole company would visibly recoil and try to do better. Apple has had one badly received and widely panned software release (and honestly I haven’t really had the problems others complained about, but I waited until a few dot releases). > But here’s the thing about hardware. You can grow it through operational discipline. You can squeeze a process node, you can negotiate a better deal with TSMC, you can lean on a thousand suppliers until they bend. That’s exactly the kind of work Cook is good at, and it’s exactly the kind of work that doesn’t require a product person at the top. Sounds like the author doesn’t have hands on experience building hardware. Finally, I’ll note they promoted a hardware engineer to CEO. If the CEO role was so critical to good software then a software person would have been a better pick. A CEO role is different and good product taste is a fickle bitch - even Johnny Ives was struggling there.

epolanski 6mo ago
> Head of operations at a company like Apple is a deeply technical role. At that level and scale it's merely politics.
- vlovich123 6mo ago
  It’s clearly both technical and political. But what you think Tim did nothing technical in his time at Apple and built up technical teams to make it into the powerhouse through luck? Tactics are fine but strategy is everything and Cook clearly is both tactically and strategically excellent. Source: worked at Apple and at Google and we struggled at Google to build supply chains and get the same cost effectiveness. People talk about how Apple is overpriced and then ignore that the feature set/cost tradeoff is matched by only Samsung on mobile and even then they make a fraction of the money that Apple does.

buttocks 6mo ago

This author misses the point because he is a geek. Ordinary users love Apple and do not care about these issues. Ordinary users throw money at Apple. Apple has some bugs to fix but overall the product is good, and that’s why they keep raking in cash. Saying good riddance to Tim Cook because of the system preference pane, among other trivial things (to most people), is simply misunderstanding business.

stavros 6mo ago
Let me guess, anyone who thinks Apple products are a buggy mess is a geek, and everyone else is ordinary, No True Scotsman style? Personally, I don't think the fact that the Apple keyboard is unusable is a "geek" thing.
- prmoustache 6mo ago
  The thing is most people are: 1. used to mediocrity and enshittification everywhere 2. live in one ecosystem or another. Appart from developpers, I don't know many people who use Mac AND Windows, iPhones AND android. And resistance to change is there to limit moves between one to another. They wouldn't care if apple keyboard sucks if they never used a better one.
  - stavros 6mo ago
    Sure, but people might try different things. I switched to an iPhone for three months before the keyboard drove me mad enough to switch back to Android.
SecretDreams 6mo ago
Ordinary users love lamp, so to speak. Reality is the success of current products mostly hedges on the momentum their companies have built over the last decade, rather than the actual innovations of those current products. Guerilla advertising is also used super effectively.
rglullis 6mo ago
Or maybe you don't understand that for some people there are more important things than "how much money will I make from this?"...

kgwxd 6mo ago

It doesn't matter who's sitting in the chair, no one is reversing our decent toward the bottom of the barrel in tech, any time soon.

prmoustache 6mo ago
I think so too. I don't think Steve Jobs would have been kept as CEO had he survived cancer. Most Apple customers of today aren't necessarily the same customers as 15 years ago, the same way a Rolex, Porsche, Louis Vuitton customer in 2026 is not the same person as in the 80's. A lot of current customers are used to mediocrity in everything, from food, to entertainment or tech. I'll exclude Linux desktops because most people do not even know it is a thing, but look at the commercially available alternatives to iOS and MacOS? Android and Windows. That's it. While I appreciate the sadly dwindling additionnal freedom in android, I can hardly call these 2 a frictionless experience either. Are chromebooks still a thing nowadays? I haven't encountered one or a user in years.

Brendinooo 6mo ago

Honest question, from someone who doesn't own AirPods because I'm cheap: Is there a product in either of AirPods' categories that is generally recognized as either outright superior or a better value? Because both regular and Pro seem like amazing products, and reviews tend to classify them as such. And it's entirely a Cook-led project. Like, if I were to pick one product to prove that Cook cared about product and Apple could still do cool things, that's probably on the top of the list. Calling out one flaw and making that emblematic of his entire tenure feels extremely shortsighted.

Schiendelman 6mo ago
The Max are honestly magic too. I got rid of Bose and Sony headphones because these are worth every penny. They work perfectly, they switch between devices really well, the noise canceling is great, and they don't hurt to wear for long periods of time.

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tsunamifury 6mo ago

Tim was able to scale jobs and ives legacy for a decade exceptionally well, in large part with the help of Foxconn. And he did a great job of in housing major parts of the stack to reduce dependency. Once that had run out, he ran out and VR plus intelligence were there worst failures the company has ever seen. Completely inept ideas, one that very publicly failed to launch to a hugely damaging degree. Cook was great at growing others legacy, and completely inept at making his own.

anonthrownaway 6mo ago

Amazing HW. SW that is stunningly bad. My example that makes me want to divest myself from my all-in on Apple's ecosystem: Native save as dialog box with a filename text box that shows (at most) 32 characters on the screen at once. Even with the smallest dialog box width possible, there is room to make the filename more than 64 characters. Resizing the box does nothing. They can't be eating their own dogfood here right? Are they all using Linux? How do they sell this crap to the business segment?? This isn't even a bug - it is just terrible SW UI/UX design. I love my Macbook HW (except for the stupid sharp edge) and the only thing that keeps me from ditching it is that for most documents I work on, I am in LibreOffice, which lets me disable the native save as dialog box and use the works as expected LibreOffice one. To the article, I wonder if a HW person will have the mindset required to fix the glaring holes in their SW. Make the whole damn company eat their own dogfood!

nsxwolf 6mo ago
macOS may be stunningly bad, but Windows 11 and any flavor of Linux are far worse.
- anonthrownaway 6mo ago
  I know :( I use all 3 for different reasons, but Macbooks are my daily driver because I want an ecosystem. Too bad there are so many ecosystem fails. I want to believe, but this $4T megacorp can't figure out table stakes.
- xethos 6mo ago
  Parent's workaround was literally to use software frequently found on Linux desktop (and typically absent on MacOS and Windows) Whatever's going on in Cupertino, it's hard to arguethe people working on the Linux ecossytem don't eat their own dogfood

saberience 6mo ago

Reads like AI slop, no genuine insight, bland, clearly someone who has very little insight into Apple or Tim Cook. The job of a public-company CEO is to grow the company for the shareholders, they have a fiduciary duty to do this. Tim Cook took all the ingredients that Steve Jobs left him and maximised them, and I doubt there are many people in the world who given the same raw ingredients could have increased the market cap as much as Tim did... Tim is and was not ever a product or marketing genius as Jobs was, so why compare him to Jobs? Very, very few people in history have ever been as good at product and marketing as Jobs... BUT, Cook is an operations genius, and he led Apple using his particular strengths and he has left Apple as an incredibly healthy company. He was also insanely smart with some of his strategic moves, e.g. not overhiring during covid and leaving Apple in a superstrong post-covid position, also, not overspending on AI (like Meta), and realizing that all of the AI software providers would ultimately need to put their apps and software on iPhone. I.e. let Apple focus on what its best at (hardware), let others waste their money on AI, we will use the best when it becomes commoditized...

tonyedgecombe 6mo ago
Apple failed on AI. It may well work out for them but it certainly wasn’t planned like that. They announced vapourware then failed to deliver.

kibwen 6mo ago

Let's stop beating around the bush. Companies don't produce better products unless incentives are aligned to force them to produce better products. Are incentives aligned in a way to cause Apple to produce better software? If not, then it absolutely does not matter who the CEO is. IREAM.

k4rnaj1k 6mo ago

[dead]

AnonC 6mo ago

I can’t help but agree on the points made in this post. I don’t want the pain of Windows (or another non-Apple OS), but Apple isn’t making it easy to recommend its software on the quality front. If John Ternus puts more focus on what Craig Federighi and Eddy Cue aren’t doing, there is a chance for Apple to make its software better. As I said in another comment here, when things just work, it seems magical and awesome. But the same areas where deep integration creates the magic is often riddled with a lot of bugs. I report many issues to Apple and follow up those reports with updated information, but most of them don’t get any attention. I don’t have a mental model for where all the feedback and issues go to and who looks at them or takes ownership of them.

TheOtherHobbes 6mo ago
Federighi has been coasting for years. I hope Ternus fixes that. On the upside, at least Federighi didn't get the top job.

sschueller 6mo ago

Tim cook did his job well. He increase stock value over and over again for the delight of the shareholders. He also increased the moat as large as possible. If you want a better product you will not get it from a publicly traded company. Sure you may claim that a bad product is bad for a company in the long term and it is. However short term stock increases are far more desirable than long term stability and growth.

anonthrownaway 6mo ago
Exactly - they do not GAF because there is no worthy competitor. No one else has a (semi) functional ecosystem...
TheOtherHobbes 6mo ago
No one can say if it was "as large as possible." It's at least plausible he left money on the table with some missed opportunities. For example: handing over the semi-pro video creator space to YouTube. Apple already a thriving podcast ecosystem, but failed to capitalise on it. There was a real opportunity for vertical integration with Apple selling hardware, targeted content creation software (a CapCut-a-like version of FCP), and access to a distribution network. Also, home automation and security. Cameras, switches, maybe even routers with local backup. Not sold as devices, but as high quality services with obvious benefits that happen to run on specific hardware. AI: there was the opportunity to develop Siri into an agentic assistant well before anyone else got there. Cook's slant was more towards chasing high-end Veblen lifestyle status - cars, watches, premium computers and phones - and less towards social marketing and less shiny but useful consumer devices.
- fartfeatures 6mo ago
  Also a couple of big investments that might have been better spent elsewhere e.g. Apple TV+ and the Apple Car. The vision pro and the audible gasp the audience let out when the price was revealed was a particular low point. Having owned that device for 14 days before returning it I wish they had left the screen off the front, reduced the weight by 25% and done something about the price. What good is a developer device that is hard to make, expensive and flashy.

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jmyeet 6mo ago

I will say that UI designers left to their own devices will tend to make change for the sake of change. And it's annoying. Safari on iOS is a prime example of this. I used to be able to switch from tabs to private browsing. Now I have to go through a tab groups abstraction that I didn't ask for, can't turn off and don't want. Want to open a new tab? Well, that too has gotten annoying. You have to tap near the bottom to bring up the address bar and then you can bring up the tabs screens (that used to be more accessible) or click on the new 3 dot menu on the bottom right. Who asked for this? I prefer my address at the top. It's like desktop. That's another unwelcome change. This change also infected Settings where the search is hovering near the bottom now for some reason. This seems to be part of some wider UI fad because Google Finance now does this too. Just. Stop. Oh I used to just tap the top of the screen to scroll to the top in Safari too. Now I accidentally hit the notch and go to some other unrealted app now. So thanks for that, Apple. I abhor Face ID. So many false negatives. so unreliable. So many more times I have to put my passcode in. Just give me Touch ID. Put it on the home button (like the iPad Air) or do what Samsung did a decade ago and put a sensor on the back. That works really well. Oh the Apple Watch isn't immune to annoying and pointless UI changes too. Even selecting an activity like Outdoor Walk now has a really weird scroll behavior where the "play" button doesn't come up until you stop scrolling. Why? WHY? The old interface was fine. Leadership is keeping these kinds of things in check. Otherwise people make changes to get promoted,, basically. Or it's just ego to reinvent something in their image. Steve Jobs kept Johnny Ive in check. Tim Cook allowed the 12" macbook to happen. As well as the Touch Bar and the butterly keyboard (allegedly to save 0.5mm in thickness). But at least those got corrected. And of course Siri is still terrible and almost seems like abandonware at this point.

blueTiger33 6mo ago

Tim Cook was the guy Steve choosed. Don't know him personally, but he is leaving a great company behind. The new CEO has a lot to prove. Design wise, have heard he has made some mistakes but Apple ability to improve, will not fall behind. Hope he is a fighter, a pirate ;)

dandare 6mo ago

>The Tenet Cook Forgot: make products you’d be proud to use yourself. You see, I don't think people like Cook (and the majority of corporate managers) can even tell the difference between good and bad products when they use them.

AlexandrB 6mo ago

Counterpoint: things can always get worse. Tim Cook was at least a steady hand at keeping the product tolerably usable. Just wait until a Satya Nadella style CEO takes charge at Apple - we'll be wishing for the halcyon days of Tahoe and Liquid Glass.

samth 6mo ago

HN should partner with Pangram to give an AI score to things that are submitted.

tejohnso 6mo ago

[flagged]

simonw 6mo ago
It's by far the strongest sign of AI writing. I counted 14 instances of the word "not" in this piece, and now I'm wondering if ratio-of-nots-to-length might be a really cheap way to spot text that came out of an LLM. I think the reason is grates so much is that it's such a cliché. Given their nature, it's not surprising that LLMs would turn to clichés so much.

shibaprasadb 6mo ago

>Your AirPods just connected to the wrong device. Again. >iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart. Have these ever happened to someone? I have been using an iPhone for 2 years but have never experienced this.

swader999 6mo ago

Did Steve Jobs have a passion for iMusic? He wasn't perfect either.

infecto 6mo ago

I think the criticisms are valid but I also still find that Apple has created one of the best ecosystems in the marketplace. It’s hard for me to pin any of the individual complaints on a broad failing of Tim Cook.

nalekberov 6mo ago

Agreed, System Settings was the worst redesign in entire Apple history in my humble opinion. Previously it was so simple that you didn’t have to scroll. At some point Apple should realize that, it’s okay to not touch core design principles.

jshaqaw 6mo ago

Can we add to the software failure list that Finder is an underpowered mess? Like the author said, fixing Finder won't have a correspondingly visible ROI. But haven't any of the Apple developers using these machines just said "ENOUGH" already. I used to like Pathfinder and was willing to just pay for that as an alternative but that software is just buggy enough that it's annoying to rely on for something as important as file management.

josefrichter 6mo ago

It’s overreacting. HW is fantastic. some SW less so. Some bugs feel ridiculous and they’ve been around for ages - true. But overall, try to fire up a windows machine once in a while. It will give you a very quick reminder that you’re just used to a very high bar.

kneel 6mo ago

You think this company would have gone bankrupt by now 2012 — [Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3227949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3227949) 2013 — [Frustrated with iCloud, Apple's developer community speaks up](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5454491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5454491) 2014 — [Is Apple experiencing a problematic decline in software quality?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8461546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8461546) 2015 — [Apple has lost the functional high ground](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8836734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8836734) 2016 — [Apple's declining software quality](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11034071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11034071) 2017 — [Apple's had a shockingly bad week of software problems](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15831914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15831914) 2018 — [Ask HN: Why has Apple's software quality steadily gone downhill?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16312664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16312664) 2019 — [Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21330678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21330678) 2020 — [Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24324639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24324639) 2021 — [Apple's software quality has certainly slipped](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29229881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29229881) 2022 — [The erosion of the Mac experience](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32497193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32497193) 2023 — [Mac OS Ventura Issues](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34199652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34199652) 2024 — [Ask HN: Has Apple lost its way?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39530215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39530215) 2025 — [Apple's Software Quality Crisis](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075)

emo_engine 6mo ago
it probably would've if not for the iPhone

woodydesign 6mo ago

John Ternus has been the core leader behind two of Apple’s most important post-Jobs achievements: AirPods, its best new product in that era from my pov, and the transition from Intel to Apple Silicon, one of its most ambitious and successful strategic bets. I’m very bullish on his innovation mindset and on Apple’s next chapter.

xbar 6mo ago

My model of Tim Cook's vision for Apple was "To sell more, we must be more simple. Configuration is complexity and complexity eats battery life which we must defend against user decisions and bad software. Permit software products to be as minimally configurable as necessary to support the features and battery life we advertise. Defects of insufficient configurability are therefore features. Mail and web cannot be defeated as open standards, all others can be. Close them and own them at 30% revenue cut." I will give Tim Cook credit for a category software improvement: reliability. While poor performance, memory bloat, and UI slop have been hallmarks of macOS native apps, they have stopped crashing. Xcode is usable. I miss OS X, but I do not miss the instability.

emo_engine 6mo ago

“John [Sculley] came from PepsiCo, and they, at most, would change their product once every 10 years. To them, a new product was, like, a new-size bottle, right? So if you were a product person, you couldn’t change the course of that company very much. So who influenced the success of PepsiCo? The sales and marketing people. Therefore, they were the ones that got promoted, and therefore, they were the ones that ran the company. Well, for PepsiCo, that might have been okay. But it turns out, the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies. Like, oh, IBM and Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox…So you make a better copier or a better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company is not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision-making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts usually about wanting to really help the customers.” Tim Cook has always been a John Sculley, not a Steve Jobs.

serhack_ 6mo ago

I'm very sad to see some bugs catch by my fuzzer that was coded in three minutes of cargo-fuzz, disrupting UX. I filled some apple feedbacks that were fortunately fixed by some engineers, but I wonder what's happening under Q&A testing.

burnt-resistor 6mo ago

s/salesperson/CFO/ This was such a poor, inapplicable word choice that weakened their argument. Regardless of former or current roles, actions and attitudes matter. The core problem is TC snatched failure from the jaws of victory by optimizing for the wrong priorities: extreme profiteering over cool (as cool as the past), durable, reliable, desirable products with "souls" and leading innovation into new or under-developed categories. TC was never able to confidently lead into new territory like SJ. That's what Apple is desperately missing.

maxglute 6mo ago

LLM slop aside, it would be nice to have a less rational Apple leader that launches riskier products. Get that car out.