Software problems like we are seeing are not something that happen over night. They slowly appear until you can’t see them. It takes years of bad design and decisions to get what we have.
I see this throughout the industry and can’t help conclude the problem started about 5 years ago, and we thus we are now seeing the results of Covid and possibly WFO.
I don't think this has to do with Covid or WFH. It is more likely that Apple is focused on showing huge profit margins, at the expense of hiring qualified staff, due to a quarter by quarter focus, in a mature market. When one person leaves, they don't get backfilled. You can hide a lot of sins with the aggressive push from marketing and focusing on hardware performance. How do you measure software experience? How do you brag about it?
You are right that it has been a cumulative process, and the issues will continue to accumulate. But it has nothing to do with Covid or WFH. It started years before that.
I drank the "creating products that prioritize user experience over feature checklists" kool-aid back in ~2013 sometime, and got myself a first Macbook when I worked at a software startup the first time. While it certainly gave a more "premium" impression in terms of hardware/UI/UX for the first few years, around 2016 I had to move back to Linux because the software experience and the user experience is just too poor, outright buggy and changes all the time.
Even basic UX like "Can still see navigation map on CarPlay when someone calls you" seems to be just not thought of at all, or not being able to move the cursor left/right because the current iPhone keyboard mode only allows number. There are a thousands of these tiny cuts that just makes it such a pain to use daily.
Which is a darn shame, because the hardware is truly amazing, from everything from the displays, to keyboard and trackpads, to the general feeling and the CPU. But the software experience been so shit for the last decade that it's hard to justify going back.
Yes, I agree. If I'm navigating, then an incoming call shouldn't block the entire screen with the avatar of who is calling, the map has to remain visible at all times. If even one person from Apple would have tested the scenario of "I'm navigating with a map and someone calls me", they'd see how dangerous their current implementation is.
I have had to reject/hang up so many calls because someone calls exactly when I'm trying to figure out where to go by looking at the map. In my mind, what Apple is currently doing should be outright illegal.
Nothing wrong with the "creating products that prioritize user experience over features" - or more accurately what Jobs said: create products that start with the user experience and the user’s needs first and then work your way to the tech (as far as I remember)
The opposite approach is starting with some tech and then trying to find a use for it, e.g. folding phones, second 1/2 screen on laptop, etc, instead of trying to actually create a usable, quality trackpad for instance.
The critique is still valid: Apple, for their software, seem to not have the same focus on quality as Jobs once insisted on. Their physical products are very much still top notch, and the products on the whole are still developed with this mindset as far as I’m concerned. It’s just the software quality that has taken a hit for some reason.
Can I ask what the fascination with the Apple trackpad is? My other daily driver is a Thinkpad and I actually vastly prefer using the smaller one on it. You're not flinging your wrist across the zipcode and the clicks are more tactile.
... I'm sorry but I think you're missing the forest for the trees. You might prefer a smaller trackpad, but then why? Just increase the sensitivity to reduce your finger movements.
Anyway, Apple's trackpad is good because it perfectly captures intent, whatever the situation and the number of fingers. It's flawless. You got half your palm on the side of the trackpad while writing? Nope, not picked up. You quickly flick with half your palm on there? Boom, got it. Five finger gesture? No prob fam.
...unless that intent is to right click something. In which case I have to move across the vast expanse of trackpad to find the secret magic area on where it lives.
I'm not familiar with all of the trackpad gestures, but that's part of my big frustration with macOS in general - discoverability absolutely sucks. Half of the stuff I need to do is hidden behind a set of arcane keystrokes that I am apparently supposed to memorize.
Exactly. They’re complaining about the defaults, yet you’re on Hacker News where most people on here probably have the most cursed settings you can think of.
> ...unless that intent is to right click something. In which case I have to move across the vast expanse of trackpad to find the secret magic area on where it lives.
I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't disbelieve you, I just don't even know what you're trying to do. It must be a feature I've never attempted to use.
I just click with two fingers, anywhere. Boom, right click. Didn't even know there was another way.
You can also enable tapping (for left and right clicks). If you’re not pushing the trackpad maybe you’ll have less issues with the cursor moving while you do it?
Everybody has different trackpad habits and they can be hard to put into words. For example, trackpads used to have buttons at the bottom, and you'd naturally use your fingers for pointing, and the thumb for clicking. Now the buttons are gone, and new users click with their index fingers, which can be tiring and inaccurate on some trackpads (especially older/cheaper mechanical ones).
Right-clicking also has a history. Because Mac trackpads only had one button (unlike PC touchpads), the way to right-click was to point with either your index or middle finger (high precision), then put down the other of these two fingers on the trackpad while doing the thumb-click. It will not move the cursor, so there is no loss of precision. At least that's what I did for a long time. (Although I don't lose precision if I hold down two fingers and press with one of them either.)
And it gets more confusing when Apple changes the defaults. They've flip-flopped between touch-to-click and press-to-click at least once. I'm not sure if using the bottom right corner was ever the default for right-clicks? And then they also removed the video clips that taught you some gestures in the system settings. And I think the whole "deep press" gesture is an anti-feature that only confuses people, the dictionary lookup used to be a three-finger tap and that was fine. But the Magic Trackpad 2 needed a headline feature, sigh.
I think people give up too easily when they have to unlearn old habits. I've been using the macbook trackpads for over a decade now and it's more comfortable than a mouse. Just the fact that I can zoom in and freely scroll left and right makes all the difference compared to a mouse, so even when I use an external mouse with the laptop on a stand I reach for the trackpad for the gestures. It's like an extension of my mind at this point. And one technique that is not immediately clear is that to drag things you can click with one finger and drag with another, eg click on the icon with the index finger and then move it with the middle finger, easier than pushing the index finger around while keeping it depressed.
Maybe I should try a Thinkpad but otherwise the Macbook trackpad is the only one that really works for me and doesn't feel awkward. The gestures are right and the feel is right. I agree about size. It could be smaller.
It was the first good trackpad that supported gestures that are now common, things like two finger swipe to scroll (inertial scrolling was huge), pinching, two-finger for right click. I still see people using windows laptops with a mouse plugged in because in general windows laptops have touchpads that suck, and it was way more common a decade ago. Innovation in the windows laptop space was adding unusable gimmicks like a scroll stripe or right-click by tapping in a corner. And then apple introduced a haptic trackpad so you can do a tactile click anywhere, none of that bullshit tap to click where you have to keep your hand lifted so you don't accidentally tap on something. And windows laptops are still lagging behind, at least they got rid of buttons and have hinged touchpads, now we wait for them to catch up and add haptics.
While still anecdotal, I'll give you two data points:
The trackpad on my Thinkpad E495 is hanging and has lost the ability to register clicks, and had been like that after only two years of use. I think the reason is that the whole construction with lots of space is collecting dust. You can use the physical buttons above the pad, and some people like this retro design even, but IMO it's just reducing space and adds a border and height distance for your finger to travel, so arguably outdated and objectively worse.
The Elan trackpad on my Thinkpad x13 gen 2 has been defective from the start and registers palm contact where there is none, with the effect that the touchpad stops responding like every 30s; this is a known defect.
The trackpad works extremely great with macos. The acceleration curve, smoothness of scrolling, multi-gesture support that closely matches the UI paradigms, click anywhere and it perfectly registers, etc. It truely is to me the primary pointing device for mac and I immediately bought the external trackpad when trying external keyboards.
But none of that properly transfers to windows, and most of its hardware tweaks become irrelevant. I also didn't mind the Surface laptop trackpads, but vastly prefer a mouse with extra buttons for windows machines TBH (there are a ton of great mice too, so all things considered it's fine that way)
Worth the purchase price seems wild to me, but I guess things are all relative, have never owned an iPhone either, partly due to price and partly due to inferiority of software. That said, despite flagship folding phones seeming insanely expensive for what they are, they do seem like good and potentially better physical products than the standard static rectangle.
Ya everyone derives different value from their stuff. Is that how you're judging value for price or just the quality of the folding bit? I do quite like the Galaxy Fold, but I think my needs from any kind of smartphone pretty much could top out at a Pixel 2, rocking a 7 atm.
Yeah I guess I don't really know how to translate the value of the folding feature into dollars, except that I don't feel any need for an ebook reader anymore, so I guess it's at least base phone price + price of a Kindle or similar.
> except that I don't feel any need for an ebook reader anymore
Is that just because you get a little more space due to folding? Personally I just loathe how much time my phone steals from me, and value the ebook reader on the basis that it has its specific purpose; no colour, barely does anything, I can't be messaged on it or watch videos, it's not as viable to use as anything but a reading device. But now that I think of it, I don't necessarily value those features in a way that makes me want to spent more than I did on it.
The way I think of the value I can derive from my phone is similar to how I assess how much value I could hypothetically get from an iPad Pro. Although it's nicer, faster, etc.. than my old as hell iPad, it doesn't do anything substantially different or that much better in terms of what I'd likely do with the device, and it seems like I only ever need one of them, since it's kind of just consumption technology, but if I was marking up A4 PDFs regularly, it might offer more utility.
Yeah it means I don't need to carry about two devices instead of one, and it fits in my pocket due to the folding. In practice I often want to read things when I'm on the move or in bed or otherwise not necessarily near my other device, so having one device that does it all is useful. A case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
I went back to Linux because I can at least decide when I'm ready for updates that changes my workflow. Neither Windows nor macOS gives me that experience. I wouldn't put Linux on a pedestral when it comes to UX/UI/design, but at least it doesn't rugpull me once a year (or more often with Windows) with forced updates.
As someone who cares deeply about UX that doesn't get in the way and allows professionals to do their work effectively, I'd be a hardcore Apple fanboy if the UX was actually good for that.
> I’m not sure where you saw forced updates. I’m usually 2 to 3 major versions of macOS behind.
I remember being nagged about upgrading to the latest OS version at least once a day if not more often. Opening my wife's laptop just now, I saw another one of those notifications, begging to update where the only options were "Restart" or "Later".
This is one of my least favorite aspects of modern UI design practices, the user doesn't have any agency. Everything's a choice between "Yes" and "ask again later".
I'm a chronic procrastinator when it comes to updating macOS, and I can confidently say that it asks me about updating _at most_ once a week (if even that), not every day and certainly not multiple times in the same day.
I basically stay on whatever macos version I have until they pull security updates for it. Seems to work alright so far. My last two OSs were mojave and now Sonoma (due to the new mac coming with it) having skipped all the rest including the latest sequoia.
> around 2016 I had to move back to Linux because the software experience and the user experience is just too poor, outright buggy and changes all the time.
Honestly, I have difficulty believing someone could find these kinds of issues to be less of a problem on Linux than on Mac
If you haven't tried out the various Linux desktop environments for a long try, give it a try yourself. I'm having a way more stable experience with Gnome than I ever had with Windows or macOS the last decade or so, especially when I can chose when I want to upgrade, and I don't get nagged about it once a day.
But before that, I'd agree with you, it would have be stupid to prefer anything Linux over OSX or Windows, back when they were rock-solid. But today?
I've been using KDE for around a year. It has a few bugs but overall it's much better in my experience than either Windows or macOS. KDE 6.2 and above have been really marvelous — I actually donated $100 (I think) to them because I was really happy with the work they were doing.
KDE actually has working focus stealing prevention!
I've encountered fewer show-stopping bugs in Linux than macOS lately. And of the software that I use on both, the macOS versions have more problems. Honestly, the main thing holding me back from replacing my M1 MBA with a linux laptop is the wonderful speed and battery life. If the software problems get bad enough to negate those I'm switching.
I don't, I still use my horrible iPhone 12 Mini for CarPlay. Waiting for it to either get too old to get updates, or for it to break before I move back to Android, I guess.
It is not, Android Auto still shows me the map while there is an incoming call, which CarPlay doesn't, on the same car. CarPlay's "incoming call" widget/popup blocks the entire view, I think Android Auto just displays something in a corner or something.
Apple's behavior makes sense when you realize that Apple caters to potential customers more than current ones. Their products are made to demo well to prospective customers. Every Apple product owner/user is inadvertently doing sales demos to onlookers.
Agreed; Apple's software quality is rapidly approaching unacceptability.
I'm in a regular video call friend group, every day we call and chat for a bit. A few days ago we "officially" decided to just call in Discord instead of Facetime. Discord's mobile app has its own set of issues, for sure, but we would regularly hit an issue with Facetime where especially as people join and leave the call, other peoples' microphones would become shadow muted; it would look like its sending audio from their end, but no one else could hear them. For non-video participants, this could mean minutes of not being heard before realizing the issue, leaving the call, and re-joining, which fixes things.
Also Facetime related: If you use your iPhone as a continuity camera for your Mac, if you get a Facetime call while your iPhone and Mac are close to each other, you cannot answer the call on your iPhone. If you think about the implications of that, it sounds crazy; like "there's no way that got through testing", but its true. Your iPhone displays an ungrokable error message that took me, a tech guy, several Googles to understand what was going on. The only option in this error message is "Disconnect". You click that, and you're taken back to the home screen. If the other person has not disconnected from the Facetime call, you can manually launch the Facetime app and join the call from there. But if they've left it, you just missed the call, and it does this Every Single Time. I had to turn off Continuity Camera. Its crazy!
That's just the latest ones; the list of issues is really quite endless, and it only gets longer the more of Apple's services you decide to inflict upon yourself.
I would pay a premium for a system that never gets any new features except for bug & security patches.
In fact, that's more or less what iOS was for a long time, and I loved every second of it.
Once you have a good feature set, you can spend years and years ironing out 100% of the bugs and vulnerabilities and you'd build a rabid fanbase of crotchety tech-saturated users like me. I want something that Just Works.
Initially it was building out the basic feature set. Now it seems every time they add a new swipe or icon it breaks my mental model of how my phone works without adding something that I needed.
Apple is caught by their own success: the iPhone is mammoth hit but they've reached the end of its growth. So they've got a whole organization built around making it more compelling to grow the sales, but they should really switch gears: put the iPhone into maintenance mode and invent something completely new. Easy to say, hard to do, trillions on the table if they pull it off.
for a long time, iDevices could not copy&paste. locking to one of those versions with no new features would be horrendous. not all new features are bad or trivial.
It is technically incorrect to say that iOS could not copy paste at any point, as the copy paste feature was present in the first version of the software called "iOS".
To use a version of iPhone OS that can't copy or paste, you'd have to use the original iPhone or the 3G (not 3GS!)
I've been using fundamentally the same Linux setup for over ten years now. I think the biggest change it went through was migrating the audio system to Pipewire, which took about an hour to figure out and hasn't need attention since.
I have no solutions to offer for smartphones sadly.
My archlinux has moved from a bunch of scripts to just a window manager with Chrome. At the end of the day, you realize you don't really need all these gadgets and notifications but just a terminal and a browser.
100%. I'm not OP but have had similar experience. My basic UX hasn't changed beyond trivialities in pretty well over 10 years. Contrast that with SaaS and many modern mobile apps that get completely redesigned every couple of years whether you want them to or not, and you have zero control on even the timing of the update. I've found a lot of refuge in open source as complete redesigns just for the hell of it (or to justify a full-time job) are nearly unheard of, but there are definitely tradeoffs. Usually (though not always!) the UX isn't great, but it will be functional. As a person who prefers function over form (though does harbor an intense appreciate for the latter), this is often a good trade.
Exactly. Fedora on the desktop is wonderful, and on laptop is really good assuming reasonably supported hardware. I have a framework 16 and 13 and both run fedora really well.
SailfishOS is pretty decent on mobile, as in a simple system that moves slowly. You can get support for Android apps with an emulation layer. Even banking apps tend to work well. Sadly, to get a license from the US you'd need a EU IP address.
My complaint isn't about new shiny, but new safe. Sandboxing apps on Linux is getting better but it still has a ways to go to catch up to macOS.
I'm talking about things like how a weather app shouldn't have access to the filesystem, or camera, or microphone, etc... A calculator shouldn't be able to see my location or even what networks I'm connected to.
A side effect of employing tens of thousands of full time people that do product development is that matter how good your product currently is, there is an entire organizational hierarchy that has to justify its existence. The result is that every great product keeps picking up parasitic features and functionality. Intended to add value, but paradoxically removing overall value.
There is a fine line between staying ahead of the competition and enshittification and most companies don't find it.
The most recent examples that come to mind are Spotify and Slack. Products that were, at one time, a pleasure to use, but have since been significantly degraded by a continual assault of minor features and re-working of UI.
Reworked UI's (and also renamed products) are the bane of my tech existence. I think I'm going to learn Emacs, build up the musculature of my C-C and C-X pressing fingers, and live out my days in the terminal.
That, and the effects of allowing "new feature demos" at WWDC. The various groups MUST come up with something that demos well. "See how easily I can...", and now the slightest breath does something dramatic, and usually wrong.
One doesn't get credit at a tech company for fixing a bug, but for introducing a Process that would prevent all such bugs forever. Or at least until the promotion goes through.
There's other economics to it at play which you hint at.
The "pay a premium for no new features" tends to imply a "I paid $99.99 for this once, all future updates for bug and security patches are free".
This in turn means that there's no money incoming (especially as the software goes further and further from feature parity with competition) to pay those developers who are doing the bug and security fixes.
While new features can be (often are) buggy, the new features and upgrades that are coupled with the software (and hardware) that have people buy ${new thing} in turn subsidizes the effort to fix ${still supported thing}.
This has to be related to the curse of "can it scale?" that our industry is in love with. I think it is safe to say that MS Access and related programs were probably already covering a large majority of use cases back when they existed. On modern machines, they could probably cover larger companies better than folks want to admit.
Will they work for the largest companies out there? Of course not. This despite the fact that they probably did help get those companies off the ground.
iOS doesn't even need more features, it needs way less. Sadly that isn't how the world work.
For my one use case I noticed that the newest iOS release doesn't appear to be tested on the iPhone SE 3. The "Press home to unlock" and "X new notification" texts are now laid on top of each other on the lock screen. You're looking right at it when picking up your phone, so you can't miss it, yet Apple QA did.
Reminds me of the old days working at Motorola. Your feature branches were merged into a biweekly dev branch, which needed to be “sanity tested” before it could get merged into the branch that the QA folks validated. Every software engineer was on a lab rotation: when it was your turn, you and a couple others that made up your team went to a different building and descended into the hardware lab where you didn’t come out until you had created a working mobile phone network from scratch and tested it with a wide variety of phones -basically anything that could work. They had shelves with bins of everything: early unreleased smartphones (this was way before the iPhone), junky flip phones, RAZRs, StarTacs, bag phones, etc.
It was honestly a lot of fun to see the hardware side of what you were working on, and to ensure that documentation and checklists were always sufficient.
Apple is probably way too secretive to do anything like that :(
Ah, I wish I could get a job like that -- both hardware and software. I need to take out the STM32 dev board I purchased a few years ago and started writing software for it.
Yeah that is very frustrating. I recently went to Ubuntu and picked the minimum installation. I then installed a bunch of development tools such as `build-essentials` and `git`. Other than Youtube crashing on Firefox, the whole experience, at least for the programmer part of me, is very satisfying.
BTW debugging still takes a lot of effort to setup in VSCode / or have to write init scripts for GDB which I suck at. I think Visual Studio debugger beats everything on Linux for that purpose.
Yea im also getting tired of the constant updates and featuritis.
I still have a 16” Intel Macbook pro and looking for my next machine and am seriously considering a Linux notebook for the first time. Im mostly coding and doing docker stuff.
No excel and photoshop is a bit of an issue though.
I have this conversation with my partner quite often. We'd like to use operating systems, software that stays "still" and doesn't break usage workflow every release with changes just for the sake of change. We both think that major commercial operating systems/software is largely feature complete. And everything done nowadays is just for keeping up the "freshness" appearance with all sort of meaningless GUI overhauls or features of doubtful usefulness that marketing branch everywhere pushes.
It really feels like the quality was replaced by... lipstick on a pig. And honestly, I am fed up with all this pandering of the changes as a breakthru, live changing technology.
That's what I think too. I prefer the same UI for 30 years. I don't care about any "UI new age" stuffs.
TBH I don't even care about security anymore, like our data has been sold left and right already. As long as I don't get phished, I avoid 80% of the bad actors out there.
I already removed some update software from Ubuntu, those update notifications are very frustrating.
Ironically, this is EXACTLY what Google Keep (their notes app) is. Just a simple, cloud based sticky notes app that has barenones to no formatting features except for a basic checklist. It's perfect for me and has been that way for at least a decade. Knock on wood tho
I think the pressure to keep adding new features on a yearly basis is more likely to please the investors/shareholders rather than the users. As an user, I know what I expected to get when I purchase the device, and just want it continue provide the same functionality. Occasionally adding new features without impacting existing functionality is nice, but I’m completely happy with the device just keep doing what it does.
On the other hand, the investors/shareholders are the ones who would expect the company to regularly come up with new products, new features, with the hope of driving business growth. With Apple’s stellar track record of growth (especially under Tim Cook), the pressure will only get more severe.
It seems to me like the iPad in particular has the worst software quality. Not that iOS on the iPhone is perfect, but it really seems like their workflow is to build for the phone first, then hammer it in place to work on the iPad as an afterthought.
There's so much basic stuff that doesn't work, like if you pull out the keyboard into its split mode, it constantly covers the text input that you're typing in - even in Apple's own apps. The split keyboard may as well not exist for how impossible it is to use.
But there's also just been a lot of usability issues seeping into iOS over time in general. Like those text effects they added in the latest iOS update that constantly force their way onto my messages when I don't want them. And more recently, the "recent emojis" tab doesn't update to my recently used emojis. I think it's been stuck on whatever were my recent emojis were when I did the last iOS update.
Apple had to switch CPU architectures and build their just to make their OS feel as snappy as KDE and Gnome does on mid-tier hardware. I wonder how long it will take until enough technical debt accumulates to a point where Mac OS feels like it drags again.
The absolute worst was the transition to SSDs if you were stuck on a hard to upgrade HDD-based Mac. It became super clear that Apple devs stopped caring in the span of a year.
A recent blog post in the Apple fanboy world posited that Apple has slow, non-user-adjustable animations that make the OS feel slow. That's basically why a user thinks KDE or Gnome is snappier. It has nothing to do with CPU architecture.
I still have an Intel Mac and it doesn't feel significantly slower than one with Apple silicon.
Last time I installed Gnome I had to install an extension to remove the 150ms delay on alt-tabbing that is present even when animations are disabled. It became snappy after that.
Rubbish. You Linux-only guys post this nonsense on any thread criticising competing OSs thinking the rest of us have no experience using them. I daily-drive older hardware (Xeon E5 with 16GB RAM and GTX 1080 ti), which is essentially all midtier is, and GNOME is a stuttery mess. It struggles to drive 4K. It's slow to load software, and what is available is often a UX mess (what have they got against menus?!). Discoverability is low. Disk access is slow. Tried BTRFS, ZFS and Ext4 - none of them make a difference. KDE is no better - how many modals or check boxes are needed for one option?
See, we can all pour scorn on other operating systems. The real problem lies in the expectations that people place upon these platforms. Despite my complaints, I actually enjoy using Linux on a desktop (laptops are another story). If I listened to a lot of you, my expectations would definitely not be met.
I think it has more to do with a gradual industry-wide race to the bottom in terms of quality. Reliability, attention to detail, correctness occupy a tiny fraction of the "budget" compared to security, slopping out features, and beating competition to market. I suspect that startup culture being the crucible where a large portion of engineers learned their chops and the massive amount of new blood in the industry who are primarily there for money are the biggest factors.
I concur. To add, I wonder how much of the “old guard” is still at Apple? Apple used to be perfectionistic when it came to software, even during the 1985-1996 interregnum when Steve Jobs was absent. Besides Steve Jobs, Apple also had people like Bruce Tognazzini and Don Norman who cared deeply about usability. When Apple purchased NeXT and built Mac OS X, Apple’s usability focus was married to reliable, stable infrastructure, culminating with Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which I believe was the pinnacle of the Mac experience. (Though I’m partial to the classic Mac OS from a UI point of view, Mac OS X had a better UX due to its stability.)
I suspect a lot of Apple’s decisions in the past decade regarding software is due to an increasing number of Apple employees who are not familiar with the philosophies of 1970s-era Xerox PARC, the classic Mac, NeXT, and Jobs-era Mac OS X. Granted, it’s possible to be too introspective, too focused on the past. Unfortunately Apple’s software is losing its perfectionistic qualities, which has long been the selling point of the Mac compared to Windows and Linux.
I think you have rose colored glasses on. System 7-8 at least were crash proned disasters and the 68K emulator was so bad on the first gen PPC computers you basically had to use SpeedDoubler - a much better third party emulator.
Linux seems like the opposite to me a slow marathon to achieve perfection. With pipewire, systemd and wayland there's less cruft than ever and you get the best out-of-the-box experience since it's inception.
Woah now, saying something positive about systemd will bring a bunch of crusty greybeards out of the woodwork who want their Linux to be as close to BSD4.4 as possible.
Jokes aside, I'm in agreement. Audio was still slightly buggy for me using a Elgato XLR USB interface, but it consistently worked with annoying workarounds. Linux is in a very good place for even normal consumers these days, I'm hoping Valve ends up making SteamOS a generalized gaming platform that will pull more market share away from Windows in that specific niche. I'm so ready.
I don't get the systemd hate, as a user I find it quite nice. Centralized place all services live and I can see all the stuff I use and need. Good CLI for inspecting services and getting logs.
But like, I don't manage linux servers and stuff so I am sure it sucks in certain very specific ways for people who need to deal with it day in and out.
I remember my young days of using Slackware with init.d. That was hell.
I've managed Linux systems of all sizes and don't really get it either. Systemd is largely a good thing, though there are occasionally bugs that make if frustrating to deal with.
It's those bugs and weird cases (and the fact that -IME- systemd provides zero diagnostic help when you hit them) that are the killer.
In my professional experience, I've come to understand that the systemd project has an assload of accidental complexity that the systemd folks are unwilling to reduce. At least once a year, we'll have a production-down page from a customer whose root cause turns out to be systemd failing in some bizarre and entirely inscrutable way. After a ton of digging, we'll eventually find someone who has run into something similar, and either got no response, or a "Wow, that's weird. Well, there's nothing WE can or should do." response from the systemd people.
"Solving" these issues is very frustrating, because we usually end up changing things from one way that the docs indicated would work just fine, to a different way the docs indicate would work just fine... which doesn't give us any confidence that what we did won't suddenly stop working next year. A project that is as fundamental as systemd wants to be really should be aggressively reducing complexity to the minimum required to get the job done and regularly documenting caveats and quirks as they're discovered and deemed "E_WONTFIX".
I have the occasional annoyance like "VLC has choppy audio for a few seconds after I seek," and "Gnome has gone full douchebag with notifications for everything and removing all the settings."
Other than that, though, Ubuntu on any old laptop (expensive thinkpads are my favorite) is my go-to daily driver. Except at work where I'm learning to deal with a (new, shiny, powerful) Macbook that I will use to... connect to a Linux VM because that's the only way to work on our software. Seriously, a whole fleet of zillion dollar macbooks so we can all ssh into beefy VMs to build/test/deploy on Linux.
IT onboarding made a point that if you want to get a Windows laptop and wipe it for Linux, you need permission and a "good reason." How about "this is stupid just let me work on stuff." Of course it's about tech support and security, which is fair enough but I feel like they have it backwards. Support Linux and then require special permission for the $4000 ssh client...
After spending a couple of days with homebrew and building some things natively on aarch64, though, I might make a hobby out of moving stuff local. It really is a beautiful machine.
IMO the main argument for devs to use linux is that Docker can run without a VM (and without Docker Desktop which is now payed) in linux. If you do docker stuff with any sort of frequency it will save years-worth of your time.
Did pipewire actually build in their pulseaudio and JACK emulation, or is it still acting as a shim between already-running pulseaudio and JACK daemons?
Also, (FWIW) I've a fine time with JACK2, openrc, and xorg. I had to do some manual work to tell JACK which sound card to use and to set up the pulseaudio backfill for software that doesn't know how to speak to JACK, [0] but everything else just works.
[0] The "tricky" part was disabling all pulseaudio backend modules but the JACK backend. This was -of course- not tricky at all.
Ah. Glad to hear that they finally got that done. Good for them! (I hope it's feature complete, and hope there aren't any subtle bugs in it! (And if there happen to be any bugs, I hope they're super committed to acknowledging them and fixing them.))
> a gradual industry-wide race to the bottom in terms of quality
I'm going to disagree. This is a false nostalgia.
15 years ago the market for consumer laptops that were not MacBooks straight up sucked. If you walk into a Best Buy today, almost any laptop you buy is going to blow any laptop from back then out of the water in terms of build quality. And credit where it's due, in no small part it came from playing catch up with Apple.
I think there was a sweet spot in the late 2000s and early 2010s, more specifically, the Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard eras.
On the Windows side of things, this was when Microsoft got serious about security, with plagued earlier versions of Windows XP (worms were so rampant around 2005) until later service packs helped fix things. Windows 7 was solid and performant. While my favorite version of Windows is 2000, 7 was another high mark for Windows.
Much has been said about Snow Leopard, but it was the pinnacle of Mac OS X, the refinement of an already great OS, Leopard. I would gladly used Snow Leopard today if it weren’t for needing current web browsers and up-to-date security patches.
Even the Web was better back then. By 2008 many mainstays of modern Web life, such as social media and YouTube, were already in existence. Google was excellent. Internet Explorer’s dominance was successfully challenged, and there was an ecosystem of standards-compliant browsers (later IE versions, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera). Web developers were coding to standards instead of only writing for one browser. Yes, ads existed, and there was also malware, but ads were less intrusive, and malware can be avoidable with more careful browsing.
I miss 2009- and 2010-era computing, when Windows and Mac OS X were at their peaks, when the browser ecosystem was diverse, and when many commercial websites like Facebook were still pleasant to use.
Perhaps there were peaks and troughs in individual technologies. Late 2000s / early 2010s felt like a good time for operating systems, for instance.
But is everyone forgetting having to navigate through Flash websites and Java Applets using Internet Explorer, for instance?
Also, people are just forgetting. There’s nostalgia in this thread about the iTunes desktop app, for instance. That program has been a pile of trash for as long as I can remember back in the 2000s.
iTunes is one of the best software of all times, you are crazy.
It existed before even OS X was a thing (under another name but still).
It only became "problematic" when they tried to overload it too much to be able to "support" Windows for the iPod/iPhone without having to develop dedicated software.
They largely killed it and the replacement is lackluster. The best version was around version 10-11 with the colorized album view.
To this day there are no audio library management software that come close to what iTunes was.
Apple Music, being a fork, is the closest thing, but it's not really the same thing at all.
Tell that to Dell and their shit trackpads and prone to death battery charging circuits. And the joy of soldered RAM so you cannot upgrade can't be overstated enough.
The sad thing about this is that in the Android ecosystem, you are likely to get just as shitty software on a much, much shittier hardware. You cannot have nice things. Oh, and just buy a new one while we're at it, lmao.
I dont agree with shittier hardware. The flagship phones of companies like Oppo and OnePlus are incredible, easily on par with the construction quality of the best iPhones, with often many more features.
On the software side at least on Android you have the power to do something about it. You can flash custom firmware or launchers, hell you can even code your own to completely replace the android interface if you want.
High end Android phones have pretty good hardware, in some cases feels better than the equivalent iphone. IMO the main problem of Android is that sofware updates are dropped way too fast. My in-laws have a Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 tablet (launched in 2015), stuck on Android 7.0 (released on 2016, also youtube app just dropped support for). Last security update in 2019.
On the other hand the iPhone batteries seems to go to trash way faster than Android. I think Android has better battery management systems (and also just bigger batteries). Every single person I know who uses iPhones older than 3-4 years can't get through a single charge per day.
On the software side Android got a bad rep from the early days when it was much worse than iOS, but these days it is pretty much just as slick and much more customizable.
but the hardware premium is kinda real... i have been using my macbook air 11 daily for 10 years (I am writing this comment on it), and it works flawlessly. somehow i don't think other brands are so well made, or they weren't so well made 10 years ago.
I don't think you can update any 10-year-old windows computer to the latest version of windows (11) with all security patches via official microsoft channels.
(Also, lol @ "via official Apple channels", you're aware Open Core Legacy Patcher is a thing and have hedged against people mentioning it.)
I consider the WinBootMate thing suggested in your second link to be similar to OCLP. Third party solutions to enable installing on hardware the vendor doesn't want you installing it on.
Did you even notice that the link marked as solution is a third party software vendor?????? They charge money for that solution.
Microsoft does let's you bypass it (Regardless of them putting up a disclaimer) so the example stands, you can do it hardware and software wise without losing updates or security*
Microsoft removed the mandatory requirement, so now instead of refusing to install it just gives a disclaimer that it's "unsupported" as per the linked page
So you can install Vanilla Windows 11, no third party, on decade old hardware without losing anything other than performance (And an annoying disclaimer)
You can easily patch a config file in Windows and install it on old hardware and get regular updates as usual.
OCLP is more complicated and limited as it's not a "some manifest config limitation", but actual support parts of OS being removed, so they have a big lag and a bunch of issues, and limit your updates
So yeah, no contest comparision between Mac and Win
Not 10 years old, but I have a 2017 laptop that updated to Windows 11 just fine. It's somewhat slow though and I enjoy the dual-booted Linux on it more.
Mail on iOS doesn’t even have push any more, the new Photos app is garbage, Music randomly spews “content not available” errors and works remarkably poorly with mobile data for a mobile app, watchOS is so chock-full of bugs and glitches that just go unfixed major version after major version etc.
It’s pretty bad. Somehow most other software is even worse. Genuinely impressive at this point.
> For years, many of us have willingly paid the "Apple tax", the premium price for Apple products justified by superior user experience, design, and ecosystem integration. But if software quality continues to decline, this value proposition becomes increasingly difficult to defend.
Just today I was thinking how the best hardware gets crippled by software that has become as shitty as Microsoft's.
By now it has become incredible that “Doesn't Suck” was once motto and slogan for the user experience on Apple devices.
> If I ever feel down on the Mac, I can go to a PC and try make a pdf or view one.
After a restart (which happens a lot because the machine crashes a lot[0]), my Windows 10 box won't be "ready for use" for a good 10 minutes. I've seen it take 30 minutes. I've done macOS updates that have taken less time.
Oh and macOS doesn't randomly reboot to apply updates. Still haven't found a way to prevent Windows from doing that.
[0] I suspect the 3080 but it frequently crashes when idle on the desktop which shouldn't be stressing anything GPU-wise.
Word isn't bundled by default but you can print anything to PDF. Windows ships with a PDF printer installed, so you could print from Notepad to PDF if you'd like.
PDF readers haven't been required for over 10 years? Chrome shipped with a PDF viewer eons ago and of course the old version of Edge and current Chromium Edge (and now Firefox, as of a week or two ago) have PDF viewers.
macOS Preview is limited to PDF 1.4. That kind of sucks. Not a deal breaker for most PDFs, but I've come across one or two that won't render and I had to figure out why.
Yes. When you type "word" in the search bar, you get directed to MS Word Online, a free version of MS Word.
For all the other programs, and browsers as well, hit "print" and select "print to PDF".
> Which one, the Edge browser
Yes. I hate Edge and have disabled it, but I have to give it to them that their PDF reader is much better than the one built into other operating systems. It's optimised for simplicity and common PDF interactions (highlighting, filling out forms, etc.). Plus, unlike all the other PDF readers, Edge has some excellent security features that have been implemented because of its browser nature.
The way Edge has turned into a shitty shell of its former self is a true software tragedy. It was well on the way to become the best browser available until Microsoft decided to Microsoft all over it. Still, works fine for opening PDF files.
Just today I was thinking how the best hardware gets crippled by software that has become as shitty as Microsoft's.
Apple software has always been crap. People put up with it because the hardware was nice and shiny and distracted from the many bugs and severe UI issues.
I recently got an M4 Mac Mini which is an amazing piece of hardware. (When it came in the mail I couldn't believe it could fit in the small box it was in!)
My wife was angry about the large volume of advertising, both on web sites and on the desktop, on the machine out of the box. Part of it was needing an adblocker, which meant switching to Firefox, because installing an adblocker on Safari requires an Apple account which my wife doesn't have and wouldn't want to make.
I was amused that, by default, I got numerous nags in the form of 1999 retreads of the confirm dialog from the 1984 original mac. I'd contrast that to Microsoft's nags which look like a modern HTML-inspired interface [1].
Apple's model of "local account but you get nagged into attaching an Apple account so you can use the store and other services" is inferior, in my mind, to Microsoft's model where you can use use your Microsoft account to log into the desktop and your XBOX and all the services that Microsoft has to offer. I know a lot of people don't like it, but since Microsoft introduced it I've had no trouble authenticating into SMB shares in home and SMB environments.
[1] I won't apologize for thinking that's an advance, particularly since HTML/CSS has been adding things like Flexbox and Grid which are exactly what the doctor ordered for application development.
Probably not. I don't own one as I'm lazy. I actually paid for AdGuard and use it on my iPhone and iPad. It comes with a mini PiHole implementation built in.
Yeah it's not perfect on iOS but better than maintaining your own stack. Basically it creates a VPN to localhost then proxies the DNS and traffic over that. It only modifies the DNS using a blocklist and passes your normal traffic straight through.
Works well. Even the crappiest nasty sites won't get through it.
Yes you still do. Sophisticated companies (Amazon, Google, Meta, many others) will serve ads from the same domains that serve the content you actually want. Pihole can't block the ads without blocking everything. Ad blockers are necessary to block specific pieces of content from amazon.com, youtube.com, etc., while still letting you use the service. It's a constant cat and mouse game, but ublock origin does a good job of staying updated.
You can log into your Mac and your AppleTV and your iPhone and your iPad and all the services Apple has to offer with your Apple account. How is Microsoft offering the same thing any better?
You can't log into your Mac with your Apple account; you still need a local account created first, and it has its own login and password separate from the Apple ID associated with it (if any).
It's not possible using the current install process, not even on Windows Pro (tested with a fresh install on a notebook that had a Windows 10 Pro OEM license registered/activated like is typical). The various hacks to trick the process don't work anymore.
Ouch. The only reason I use Windows is because as a consultant clients make me use a bazillion different VPNs which often works better/only in Windows.
Otherwise I would use something like Xubuntu.
So it's sad to know that my next Windows machine will require a Microsoft cloud account.
> I know a lot of people don't like it, but since Microsoft introduced it I've had no trouble authenticating into SMB shares in home and SMB environments.
Same. I get that people don't like having to "buy" into an ecosystem. But credit where it's due - Microsoft eliminated dozens of different logins over the last decade. If you jump between multiple machines all the time, it's legitimately a decent experience. You can even be simultaneously logged into your personal and work OneDrives at the same time under the same user and everything just pretty much works.
Microsoft takes its time and has a lot of inconsistencies but eventually gets to some sort of desirable convergence state.
They are a lot less idealistic and have an approach of working on it slowly but surely in the open. Apple on the other hand tries to maintain an unrealistic image of perfection and thus is always playing some sort of binary game, which is why things get stuck and never evolve beyond a certain point.
I use to like Apple approach to things; with age I understand that Microsoft approach actually makes a lot more sense, especially if you need to maintain things over time.
We should be glad that Microsoft "won" the desktop PC war because if Apple software had been used for critical software we would be in a lot of trouble as a society; I'm joking but barely...
I tried an iPhone for three months or so, ending a month ago, and I was really disappointed by the experience. I thought Apple was still a company that focused on UX, but it was eye-opening to see that they had lost their way.
There are four distinct ways to go back (swipe from the left/right side, press the X, press the left arrow, swipe down), whereas Android has one way that always goes back to the previous screen. The inability to set volumes separately, the fact that folders hold exactly 9 icons and leave the other 60% of the screen empty, the fact that a very commonly-used button (the back arrow) is at the hardest-to-reach part of the screen, all of that just made for a really frustrating experience.
After that, I bought a Nothing 2, and I love it. It's snappier than the iPhone, feels premium, and Android has stolen all of the good ideas iOS had and added more.
I used Android for the better part of a decade, and once I switched to an iPhone I never really had any issues around not having a back button, considering the amount I hear complaining about it.
Basically every app lets you swipe from the left to go back. Occasionally you'll have a bottom sheet you can swipe back down to where it came from, but it's generally pretty intuitive. I can't think of many times I felt "stuck" and unable to go back.
It's not about getting stuck, as then that would be terrible. It's just about the thousand papercuts my experience was.
I forgot the biggest annoyance that ultimately made me abandon the experiment: the keyboard is ATROCIOUS. On Android, I just hit keys in the general vicinity of what I want, and it writes the right thing, every time. On iOS, with the exact same keyboard, it kept making mistake after mistake.
Both the stock keyboard and SwiftKey were terrible on iOS. I'd understand the stock keyboard being bad, whatever. I don't understand how SwiftKey can be great on one platform and horrible on the other.
I went from using a series of Android phones, including a number of flagship phones and finally tried iPhone in 2018 after custom keyboards became available (no way I'd accept the built in back then).
At that point the cheapest iPhone option available outperformed every android phone I'd used at that point and I was sold.
Still think the software could need some love but at least it does not feel like my phone has to do a call to a lagging wev service to open the camera.
Anecdotally, Apple Music has deteriorated exponentially for me. iTunes was such a stable, usable piece of software, but I can't get reliable use out of Apple Music for the life of me. It _feels_ like a shoddy Electron app. But that's not fair to the actual Electron (or similar) apps that actually work. For all its many design and product flaws, Spotify actually works.
It really is bad. I mean, the navigation design is bad to start with (just back, no forward? Genres are under Search?), and it’s buggy. It hangs randomly and sometimes it just doesn’t make sound (you had one job!).
My main issue with podcast alternatives is that onbe feature I use is walk into a room and ask Siri to play a podcast. That works with Apple but not anything else. What is the latest podcast has to sync across devices.
However any maintainance or search for podcasts is crap with Apple and better elsewhere.
have you tried their "books"? you cannot search by almost anything! Extra-strangely, selecting book language is macos-only feature!
Does anyone even maintain it?
Apple Music, at least when I last used it, could not handle copying podcasts to my old iPod Video - this is now handled in Finder, as best as I can tell. It will copy the tracks, but it doesn't properly flag them as podcasts so if I switch to another track and then go back to the podcast it does not remember my location.
It's a bit hit and miss for sure. If you turn off the subscription and Apple Music portal stuff it works fine though. I use it with a cable to sync to my iPhone with offline files I ripped with XLD from CDs. It's all the network crap that breaks it.
Apple Music on Mac definitely needs a ground-up rewrite, though I worry it'll lose uncommonly used features, like the ability to upload and stream your own music. I think a lot of Apple Music weirdness is from the fact that it's been built up over the years upon iTunes, which was essentially a completely different product that offered different thing. No one is really buying digital music any more, but they still need to handle everyone's old libraries and purchases, so there's a weird disconnect between your local music library and your cloud Apple Music library. So there are completely separate screens for viewing e.g. an album in your local library versus "in the cloud" even though they're both views for the same content.
Incidentally the iOS Music app has generally been pretty good to me, but starting in the most recent iOS update has been having crashing issues. I'm not sure what exactly causes it, but it's typically when I rearranged the queue then minimize the player to get back to the home/library screen.
The upload-and-stream-your-own-music feature, as handled by the Mac desktop Apple Music app, seems to be 90% bug and 10% working. I can’t imagine a rewrite being worse than the status quo.
Funnily enough that's the one feature that works pretty well for me and is keeping me on Apple Music as opposed to Spotify.
Considering the state of every recently made/"remade" first party Apple app I cannot imagine how horrible the Music app would be after they got done with it.
That feature is the single worst thing Apple has done I have ever encountered: it stole my music library.
At some point when migrating from one Mac to another, it "forgot" which songs were actually mine. It's all Apple Music now. I have songs that the application _knows_ were added to my library in 2003, but for which it steadfastly maintains they're Apple Music downloads. Worse: some songs have been replaced with other recordings. Other are "unavailable" for unexplained reasons.
Oof, I would be livid if that happened to me, too. Maybe I just threaded the needle and got lucky or something, but I'm disappointed to hear mine isn't a universal experience.
I love that I had to install a shim service [0] with the same ID as Apple Music's since it can't otherwise be turned off, which was causing Apple Music to appear every time I pressed a media key but had no media playing.
That's the kind of shiesty KPI-boosting tactic I'd expect from Windows, not a machine I paid almost $4000 for. Apple comes installed with a ton of irremovable bloatware and somehow gets a pass.
I use Apple Music on my Windows work computer and it's pretty good. I still have iTunes on my home Windows PC (I use it for ripping CDs) and it takes much longer to start.
I own dbPoweramp which I believe uses EAC, but iTunes is just easier (I rip to ALAC) and is good enough. Apple will probably drop support soon, but until then I'll stick with it.
To be fair iTunes had become such a kitchen sync software. The Windows version is universally hated I think, I remember hearing jokes about iTunes on regular TV talk shows.
The experience of browsing the iTunes store is laughably bad...
The back button that goes back multiple steps while losing context of stuff you had clicked in between, the way the search box is in a whole other part of the UI and it has a three mode toggle. The way that clearing the search phrase does a new search for "".
The other day I bought an album on Bandcamp and imported it. Music app adds a "show complete album" link when I view the album in my library. Instead of doing anything useful this link clicks through to a whole different album in the iTunes store.
Or yesterday I browsed to "Joni Mitchell" and got some kind of curated homepage for the artist with background image art etc. The albums are grouped under a series of headings ("60s/70s" and "80s/90s") that don't include all her albums. There's no way to 'view all'.
You literally can't reach say "Blue" without going back out and searching for it explicitly.
Just idiotic and broken features left right and centre.
> iTunes was such a stable, usable piece of software
It used to be the case a long time ago. I think it was decent up to iTunes 5 or 6. They crammed into it iPod apps and stuff, which resulted in a terrible UX. Then came the UI lag.
what is Music doing to you? Other than being slow to launch I really don't have any issue. I have made multiple lists and use it daily to listen to music. I don't recall it crashing in recent memory or not doing what I expect? Tbf, I currate my own music and lists and don't use the streaming a lot. Occasionally I use the station feature I guess, and it's passable. I'm certainly no power user though.
I am not an Apple Music subscriber and don't stream much music besides SomaFM, so I may not be in the norm.
I always have selected on the sidebar Library -> Songs with View -> Column Browser enabled. And I search only using the "Filter" text input on this view. It's as close to how iTunes used to be in the early days of OS X (sans brushed metal).
What I see on the screen is just mostly dense text except the small thumbnail at the top for whatever is currently playing. There is no other related artwork or graphics loaded. I fear once a re-write of this app happens, this view is gone... replaced with lots of fancy graphics and loads of whitespace padding everywhere.
I have a consistently reproducible, if edge-case crash in Apple Music for at least a couple years now. I host a DAAP server (using the OwnTone software) to listen to my music with using Apple Music. It doesn't happen with a freshly-opened Music instance, but if it's been open for a while, then I pause, then restart the server instance, Apple Music crashes. I've reported every crash with a copy/paste of the repro steps in the comment.
It's not actually Electron; it's a bit of an unholy mishmash of webkit doing layout of things that are sometimes native views with interaction handling that's also a bit of both. It just has many of the same problems that that Electron apps have, which is also why the interactions are so janky.
So it’s like those late 90s ActiveX IE iframes in Windows programs all over again? That sucks. iTunes did seem to have some of it too in the Store section.
Yep and they all suck.
The hardware is nice but why do you pay so much to run shitty software that does not even focus on local stuff? If I want some cloud stuff, Google is cheaper...
It's like buying a car because it looks very nice and has a great engine but the driving experience is absolutely terrible.
Apple Music is basically the same as an Electron app. But it uses a native framework and
technology and Apple’s markup language for the views - Apple Markup Language
My last experience with iTunes was a long long time ago, in the iPod days, when you needed to use it to sync music, but it was a horrible piece of software back then.
It’s more horrible now. Syncing now opens a Finder window with an inconsistent look and feel, and sometimes fails to copy new songs in a synced playlist. The playlist view has the album art taking up half the screen, but there’s no way to shrink that section. And there’s no visual indication for whether shuffle is on - it has no grey box around it when enabled.
I kind of think they made it shitty on purpose to push everyone towards a subscription. Many of these issues apply to locally stored songs and playlists, which is how I use it.
Did you use it on Windows? I never understood the hate for iTunes. It was a dream for someone like me who'd spend hours customizing their library. A far cry from today's software from Apple.
In fact, I was never able to use Apple Music because it handled bad internet atrociously. And last time I checked (2022?) it was still not fixed.
It's a meme created by idiots who for some reason wanted to shit on Apple. Hilariously now the same memers will defend Apple tooth and nails even though Apple has never been so bad at software.
iTunes was a great software, even people using it on Windows liked it a lot.
> iTunes was such a stable, usable piece of software
Excuse me?
iTunes was IMO always bad. I will grant that the Mac desktop version of Apple Music is possibly even worse than iTunes ever was, though.
(This is slightly off topic, but I find it both amusing and rather infuriating that the iCloud payment system doesn’t accept Apple Pay. Oddly, it seems to accept PayPay. Really, just about everything involving the account and payment system in iCloud and Apple Music is awful.)
Ah, you know, now that I think of it, Apple Music has this pretty bad bug where after a couple of hours of playing music my playlist will stop playing and nothing I do will make the playlist usable again. This never happened in iTunes.
I canceled my Apple Music subscription a few years ago after leaving the app open for long times would heat up my computer and use 100% of the cpu. It no longer feels like they have the "it just works" feeling they used to in all of their software.
It really is sad how Apple can't keep such a simple app, that has been working more or less flawlessly for the modern history of the company, working correctly. Bugs I've seen include:
- After waking from sleep, the current song plays silent audio (skipping forward and back again kickstarts it to start playing again)
- When streaming with lossless audio, somewhere in the first ten seconds of the song, it'll skip
- Mouseover events don't trigger when scrolling moves an item behind the mouse — you have to get the cursor to leave and reenter the object in question
- Radio stations randomly stop playing sometimes
- And I haven't seen this one in a while, but for a long time, albums in my library would randomly have a song or two split out into its own separate album. So I'd have two of the same album, one with (say) track 5 and the other with tracks 1-4 and 6-10. Deleting and re-adding the albums would at least temporarily fix this.
iTunes was such a piece of garbage. It would literally get stuck in a login loop whenever you tried to open it and it was pretty unintuitive design. Apple Music is not perfect but 100x better than iTunes. However, I never bought Macs for Music. It has always just been the most ideal development machine.
iTunes used to be extremely buggy for me, and things got a bit better with the Apple Music app.
But, within the last week a bug which messes up all the album artwork on a synced iPhone struck my partner's device - I've not seen that one since iTunes.
I had to cancel Apple Music because, bewilderingly, sometimes I'd click a song to play and it just, wouldn't, play. Like, the most basic, simple thing I'd expect a music app to be able to handle. No error. Just nothing. This would happen two or three times a week. It feels utterly insane to say in 2025 that I chose my preferred music subscription service because I prefer a service where I give them money then they give me the ability to play music, but Apple physically cannot even manage that.
Yep. I have completely abandoned Apple Music (after 4 years with them and the destruction of my local library btw), it just sucks.
Both on the phone and the mac. Spotify just works, it's faster, more pleasant and has the relevant features in the right place.
The only thing missing is lossless audio. But I have been listening to 256kpbs AAC since basically the first iPod so I'm not going to care that much at this point...
Title should be something like “Apple Pencil Pro causes iPad to overheat and slow down”. This sounds really annoying, but the overly broad title is just clickbait.
iPad OS is largely dysfunctional in a myriad of other areas too. I like my iPad but the number of times Chrome or a simple app just freezes is getting out of hand. Also there is a bug where the iPad will freeze if I had a Bluetooth device connect while the device is locked. I think this got fixed in some recent update but it happened frequently for well over a year and it'll lock the iPad for 15-60 minutes at a time.
These issues are becoming more recurring. Meanwhile Apple is trying to sell me on some stupid intelligence that I do not need.
In my experience, this bug - lags and overheating when drawing with the Apple Pencil - exists since iPadOS 16. When searching for it on the web, I found lots of reports and no indication that it is solved, including by hardware replacements.
In any case, HN's guidelines ask to use the original title of an article, unless it is misleading or linkbait. I'd agree that Apple's software quality has been going down.
I am. Many of my old launchd services don’t work anymore. Well they run, the job begins, but then it can’t write to its files. I have no clue how they borked the permissions but something is up. The script works when I run it myself. As far as I can tell the launchd process should run the script as me the user in terms of permissions. It manages to run the script but doesn’t write to file. I am at a loss and gave up on debugging those services for now.
Is this a real bug? I recently got a MacOS device for the first time, and I have been frustrated that I couldn't get my custom service to work. Just like you, the script writes to files when I run it myself, but does nothing as a service.
I've been debugging it on and off for a couple of months because I assumed I messed something up.
It worked fine on mojave, that is how I know it wasn’t my doing. The only variable change is the os. Another bug: sound turns on after I’ve muted it if any media starts playing. Defeating the entire purpose of muting audio. I guess macos knows best and I ought to play any and all audio out of those generous speakers at an appreciable volume no matter my surrounding. God forbid it were the other way and my video plays for a half second on mute before I notice.
Not who you responded to but I've been looking now after reading this discussion and here are some things I've come up with in the last minute or so.
- Why when I drag the Safari window up to go full screen with the tiling manager does it leave a large gap around the window? When I double click the top bar it aligns the top and bottom with the edges but still leaves a gap on the sides.
- Why does the settings dialog have so much lag? It takes a couple of seconds to launch and then when navigating around there is a roughly one second lag between panels.
- Why can't I uninstall default Mac apps that I have never opened?
- If I open up task view using F3, why is there no option to exit the window or program?
- If I have a Safari window open in a smaller window and double click the task bar, why does it maximize the way it does? Leaving a large section open.
> - Why when I drag the Safari window up to go full screen with the tiling manager does it leave a large gap around the window? When I double click the top bar it aligns the top and bottom with the edges but still leaves a gap on the sides.
It's a feature. System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Tiled windows have margins.
> - Why does the settings dialog have so much lag? It takes a couple of seconds to launch and then when navigating around there is a roughly one second lag between panels.
Each 'panel' is actually an app extension that runs its own process. Similar to extensions and control panels in classic MacOS.
> - Why can't I uninstall default Mac apps that I have never opened?
This is annoying.
> - If I open up task view using F3, why is there no option to exit the window or program?
> - If I have a Safari window open in a smaller window and double click the task bar, why does it maximize the way it does? Leaving a large section open.
The modern macOS UX is an amalgamation of Classic MacOS and NeXTSTEP, neither of which really has the concept of "maximised" in the same sense as Windows does. The action you describe "zooms" the window to best fit the content. The parallel to "maximised" is full screen.
I see others have responded with specifics. That's cool and all but it seems a bit futile to me because Apple has all this data internally and could act upon it if they wished.
Certainly with "crashers" there are crash reports from the field (you and I) that are sent back home and filtered into various databases. Internal tool allow Apple to see the "top crashers" (and you can filter to specific OS, hardware, etc.). There will be Radars filed for these and they will be sent to the appropriate teams.
The issue of course is the degree to which these take priority over feature work, etc. If Apple decided to do nothing but address these for a year or two we could have nice things again.
Not an exhaustive list but some simple recent examples:
in Messages on macOS across 3 Macs I own, turning on and off the global 'read receipts' setting has no effect, not even from the perspective of iOS. The iOS setting does seem to work though.
Bugs in iOS mail where notifications just freeze the app.
Layout issues in macOS settings.
Memory leaks in WindowServer.
Many iCloud services inconsistent and non-reliable.
Apple Pay not showing correctly in Apple Account settings.
Idk but sometimes slack just takes over the screen and crashes the display drivers pretty regularly. You could put that to badly written software but I don't think display drivers should crash.
My own experience has been the opposite. Early versions of OS/X were dire, things like a kernel panic when removing an already ejected USB stick.
People like to point at Snow Leopard as being the peak of reliability but there are two things to consider about that. The first is that the previous versions were so bad that they had to stop creating new features and do a bug fix only release. The other is that it still needed countless updates through the following year.
If you want an example of something they have done exceptionally well take a look at the rollout of APFS on the iPhone. They replaced the filing system on millions of phones with barely a murmur from the community.
I think you are correct, people like to whinge (especially here).
When I bought my first Mac (M2) I could reliably freeze the screenshot app by clicking 2-3 buttons in the right order. It was fixed months later at least.
To this day the mouse hover zoom animation for the dock freezes regularly and it happens on two separate devices. "Coincidentally" this animation was disabled by default. The preinstalled image viewer cannot open more than about 50 images without randomly distributing them across multiple windows and/or spamming a series of error messages telling me that some of the files cannot be accessed. When I click on certain video files in the file open dialog, some thumbnail process allocates over 25GB memory within seconds and the system becomes near unusable for a minute or two.
I would say it’s roughly comparable to Windows 10/11, which fell off a cliff in terms of quality. But to be fair Mac OS can handle much longer uptimes, today my Macbook force rebooted after about 250 days and it ran perfectly fine up to that point.
I don’t have any issues, but I am that person who uses just web browser and terminal on Macbook. Almost all software comes from Nix package repository.
I would disagree with the conclusion. It sounds like a faulty line of hardware on the M2 Air then.
My partner is the IT manager at a school where they have over 1000 iPads (10th gen) deployed with iOS 18 and there are no reported issues like this. We ourselves have iPad Pro M2's without these issues which we both use all day every day. Our kids have 3x 10th gen iPads too. No issues.
YMMV but they just work for us and the software, which not perfect, is probably the least shit out there.
I mean the trash heap in my office is mostly Surface machines as a comparison...
Correct. Which is the point. The user complains that the problem is a software crisis when the software is fine on completely different hardware. That would suggest by elimination it's not a software problem, or is a software problem tied to particular hardware.
(incidentally they mostly use USB-C apple pencils and some clone ones when they lose them and the parents don't want to buy a genuine replacement one)
It is a software problem when a pen is used; you aren't using a pen so it doesn't impact you.
I don't understand why you thought it was constructive to point out the difference between a "software problem Vs. a software problem only when the pen is used." The article was very clear on that point already, it isn't adding to the conversation.
It is a software issue, I also have the same issue on my M2 pro.
The issue is, that each new line you draw, gets added to a group. This will start causing lagging at some point of time.
If I highlight my whole screen in Notes or Freeform and use the `separate` tool to remove all things from the group. The lagging immediately stops. You can read more about this here [1].
Apple has many issues with “scalability” like this. Another one for instance is the imessage and its replies. If you use them too much (50 replies to message or more) it start not rendering some of the messages.
This suggests a type of culture, where things are important to look nice in demos, but are not actually usable daily.
I use Apple software and hardware all day every day. There was a patch ~13 years ago where things were really rough but I haven't noticed many issues over the past few years.
I would bet that the reason for the drop in quality is the focus on delivering features in order to secure promotions and ongoing positive performance reviews.
Yep. A lot of software companies are suffering from this short-term-ism that results in incentive structures that value things that move the stock price rather than make for a strong long term company.
It may eventually blow up in faces, but a lot of the people making money on it today won't be around to see it.
Indeed. It's a Tragedy of the Commons type of issue with the way most corps are run nowadays. When you're just starting out it's understandable to be very short-term focused as next year doesn't really matter much if you go belly up next week. But once companies have some establishment, it's insane to me how little thought goes into long-term planning. That is, until you realize the incentive structure they've built essentially penalizes executives/management for sacrificing short-term opps for long-term health. For example, but slicing R&D to the bare minimum (and often below that level) and driving revenue high up and to the right by pumping up sales/marketing efforts, you can look like a business genius, and just as it starts to really hurt the company you're moving on to the next gig, and often with an exit bonus of some kind.
I mean, it's not always like that, at Google it always depended on the business unit.
To be honest, I think it's sort of simplistic to try to characterize a 185k person company and its culture with this sort of lack of nuance, whether it's Google, Apple, or anywhere else.
I got promoted 7 times (from SWE 3 all the way to VP of Engineering, so I ended up in the top 0.01% or something crazy by level) during my time there, and pretty much only made things better, did migrations, etc.
I did build some new stuff, but I don't believe they were ever a meaningful part of a promo packet. All my promo packets were about fixing things or making existing things better, and the impact of doing so on developer productivity, efficiency, etc.
> and pretty much only made things better, did migrations, etc.
Maybe you are right.
From the outside however, the situation looks very different:
- reader? destroyed
- Google+? Forced upon us and then destroyed as soon as communities started to form.
- Search? Hasn't been working correctly since around the time Google+ launched. At some point it became so bad I used DDG and Bing out if spite. The difference was that small.
(and before anyone says "it is impossible to create or run a working search engine in 2025": Marginalia and Kagi both work very much better than Google these days, although Marginalia admittedly only in certain niches.)
Sure, but they've also had tons of products that have run for decades.
After 18 years of living, i'll give you the best view I got:
While I do think Google kills products it shouldn't, my view there tends more towards when things are killed that cost basically nothing to support (IE have 1-2 people working on them, have not large prod costs, and not significant privacy/etc issues over time that require serious engineering rewrites/cost), have lots of happy users, don't meaningfully conflict with some other product strategy, and don't need lots of new features.
When those are killed, I think it's dumb.
Reader falls into this category.
Picasa would not.
lots of things on killedbygoogle do not - i think they were fine to kill, whether the process by which they were killed was a good one or not.
Google+ - eh, there's a lot to hate there but it was also Google experimenting with a more top-down approach to product building. I tend to be a fan of cultural and process experimentation - you have to be able to adapt your culture and processes as a company grows, or you will end up in a really bad place. You will never get this right 100% of the time, and it is worth doing it on important things sometimes, so that the results actually matter.
In this case, G+ also got caught up in the existential crises of the day (social) in a way that was unhelpful overall, and had leadership (Vic) that I think were just not good. He had good folks working for him (Bradley, et al) but I think it would have gone a lot better with someone else in his seat.
I say this as someone who was working on a small product at the time that was slated to become the backend/etc for youtube comments, and got crushed by G+-in-youtube mandates. The Youtube folks were wonderful - happy to figure out what the best thing was, decided to ditch their own thing for ours even though we were a little team (3 people) in a different org, and they were a big team who had spent a bunch of work on comments. They didn't like the top-down G+ mandate anymore than we did. In the end, it wasn't the fact that there was a top-down mandate that was bad. It's that it was not a well thought out strategic mandate.
I do also think Google often doesn't know how to start small and grow a user base over time.
But the rest, i think there is tons of hyperbole around. I think it was fine to kill Picasa - just because some percent doesn't like the replacement doesn't mean it wasn't okay to kill. Part of development and product life cycles is that you are not going to get it right all the time for all people. That's normal.
In the end, they've created products lots of people loved, and have enough users of roughly any product that you can't kill anything without have a large group of unhappy people. The answer to that is not to avoid killing anything. At most, it's "be thoughtful in how you support its death". Sometimes Google learned from its mistakes here, and sometimes it didn't. I had a hand in a number of divestitures and such because of my background and sometimes weird roles, and tried to make sure we did the right thing when I could - previous mistakes were helpful in pushing things for the better.
For example:
Sketchup was divested rather than killed, which went really well.
Niantic was also spun off rather than killed, and I think that turned out really well as well.
Picasa could have had the same promising future as Sketchup.
For Google+ I cannot say, but what I know is that even if the launch, the initial iterations and the leadership was bad, destroying the thing just as people starting to settle in might make sense in a short sighted way but it destroyed any chance google had to be trusted in the next decade. Just watch how people openly discussed here and elsewhere from time to time if GCP will continue to exist.
It also probably destroyed any chance google had to capture a significant chunk of social media and as time passes I think this is a good thing.
Same goes for search. People have complained for years, but the quality keeps declining. And I am starting to think this is a great thing since we now see more promising search engines that wouldn't have had a chance against 2012 Google Search.
"Picasa could have had the same promising future as Sketchup."
Depends what you mean. if you mean should have been spun out - it was a day and age that Google was still too young and immature to do that sort of thing, so yeah, no idea what would have happened.
If you mean it would have won or stayed viable - I dunno. Personally - i doubt it. Desktop apps were dying, and things like photo features were being moved into the basic OS distribution. Maybe it would have survived long enough to be killed by Apple Photos, or some halfway-lightroom product Adobe would have launched if Picasa stayed popular, but I doubt it - i think it would have died before then. But the vast majority of photos aren't on desktop anymore, and it's hard to see how picasa would have survived, even with picasa web.
But right or wrong, I also think killing it was within the range of reasonable product decisions to make.
As for G+, I don't actually disagree with that view. Google, like lots of tech companies, had (and still has, though they are better than they used to be!) a lot of trouble understanding the social aspects of products and trust. They want things to win becuase they are technically good, or because they are cool, or ...
Even when Larry spent time pushing on trying to improve user trust, by being careful about what and how things were shut down, it was pretty clear they overall didn't get how humans work.
The bad news, though, is i think this is pretty common in tech companies - while some do in fact get it, i think they are pretty few and far between :(
Apple seems like the kind of company that would greatly benefit from having someone opinionated at the helm to keep the different teams oriented towards a unified vision and to intervene when a team produces something crappy
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 472 ms ] threadI see this throughout the industry and can’t help conclude the problem started about 5 years ago, and we thus we are now seeing the results of Covid and possibly WFO.
Even basic UX like "Can still see navigation map on CarPlay when someone calls you" seems to be just not thought of at all, or not being able to move the cursor left/right because the current iPhone keyboard mode only allows number. There are a thousands of these tiny cuts that just makes it such a pain to use daily.
Which is a darn shame, because the hardware is truly amazing, from everything from the displays, to keyboard and trackpads, to the general feeling and the CPU. But the software experience been so shit for the last decade that it's hard to justify going back.
I have had to reject/hang up so many calls because someone calls exactly when I'm trying to figure out where to go by looking at the map. In my mind, what Apple is currently doing should be outright illegal.
The opposite approach is starting with some tech and then trying to find a use for it, e.g. folding phones, second 1/2 screen on laptop, etc, instead of trying to actually create a usable, quality trackpad for instance.
The critique is still valid: Apple, for their software, seem to not have the same focus on quality as Jobs once insisted on. Their physical products are very much still top notch, and the products on the whole are still developed with this mindset as far as I’m concerned. It’s just the software quality that has taken a hit for some reason.
Anyway, Apple's trackpad is good because it perfectly captures intent, whatever the situation and the number of fingers. It's flawless. You got half your palm on the side of the trackpad while writing? Nope, not picked up. You quickly flick with half your palm on there? Boom, got it. Five finger gesture? No prob fam.
I'm not familiar with all of the trackpad gestures, but that's part of my big frustration with macOS in general - discoverability absolutely sucks. Half of the stuff I need to do is hidden behind a set of arcane keystrokes that I am apparently supposed to memorize.
I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't disbelieve you, I just don't even know what you're trying to do. It must be a feature I've never attempted to use.
I just click with two fingers, anywhere. Boom, right click. Didn't even know there was another way.
I never use the two finger click. I am particularly uncoordinated always end up moving the cursor and miss the target. Maybe it's just not for me.
Right-clicking also has a history. Because Mac trackpads only had one button (unlike PC touchpads), the way to right-click was to point with either your index or middle finger (high precision), then put down the other of these two fingers on the trackpad while doing the thumb-click. It will not move the cursor, so there is no loss of precision. At least that's what I did for a long time. (Although I don't lose precision if I hold down two fingers and press with one of them either.)
And it gets more confusing when Apple changes the defaults. They've flip-flopped between touch-to-click and press-to-click at least once. I'm not sure if using the bottom right corner was ever the default for right-clicks? And then they also removed the video clips that taught you some gestures in the system settings. And I think the whole "deep press" gesture is an anti-feature that only confuses people, the dictionary lookup used to be a three-finger tap and that was fine. But the Magic Trackpad 2 needed a headline feature, sigh.
The trackpad on my Thinkpad E495 is hanging and has lost the ability to register clicks, and had been like that after only two years of use. I think the reason is that the whole construction with lots of space is collecting dust. You can use the physical buttons above the pad, and some people like this retro design even, but IMO it's just reducing space and adds a border and height distance for your finger to travel, so arguably outdated and objectively worse.
The Elan trackpad on my Thinkpad x13 gen 2 has been defective from the start and registers palm contact where there is none, with the effect that the touchpad stops responding like every 30s; this is a known defect.
But none of that properly transfers to windows, and most of its hardware tweaks become irrelevant. I also didn't mind the Surface laptop trackpads, but vastly prefer a mouse with extra buttons for windows machines TBH (there are a ton of great mice too, so all things considered it's fine that way)
Is that just because you get a little more space due to folding? Personally I just loathe how much time my phone steals from me, and value the ebook reader on the basis that it has its specific purpose; no colour, barely does anything, I can't be messaged on it or watch videos, it's not as viable to use as anything but a reading device. But now that I think of it, I don't necessarily value those features in a way that makes me want to spent more than I did on it.
The way I think of the value I can derive from my phone is similar to how I assess how much value I could hypothetically get from an iPad Pro. Although it's nicer, faster, etc.. than my old as hell iPad, it doesn't do anything substantially different or that much better in terms of what I'd likely do with the device, and it seems like I only ever need one of them, since it's kind of just consumption technology, but if I was marking up A4 PDFs regularly, it might offer more utility.
Not to downplay your experience, but it is almost certainly not what Apple uses for user feedback.
As someone who cares deeply about UX that doesn't get in the way and allows professionals to do their work effectively, I'd be a hardcore Apple fanboy if the UX was actually good for that.
I remember being nagged about upgrading to the latest OS version at least once a day if not more often. Opening my wife's laptop just now, I saw another one of those notifications, begging to update where the only options were "Restart" or "Later".
It'll ask me again later (a few days? a week?), but it won't make any changes immediately, nor will it schedule any changes.
Honestly, I have difficulty believing someone could find these kinds of issues to be less of a problem on Linux than on Mac
But before that, I'd agree with you, it would have be stupid to prefer anything Linux over OSX or Windows, back when they were rock-solid. But today?
KDE actually has working focus stealing prevention!
I think it's a limitation of the vehicle's implementation.
I'm in a regular video call friend group, every day we call and chat for a bit. A few days ago we "officially" decided to just call in Discord instead of Facetime. Discord's mobile app has its own set of issues, for sure, but we would regularly hit an issue with Facetime where especially as people join and leave the call, other peoples' microphones would become shadow muted; it would look like its sending audio from their end, but no one else could hear them. For non-video participants, this could mean minutes of not being heard before realizing the issue, leaving the call, and re-joining, which fixes things.
Also Facetime related: If you use your iPhone as a continuity camera for your Mac, if you get a Facetime call while your iPhone and Mac are close to each other, you cannot answer the call on your iPhone. If you think about the implications of that, it sounds crazy; like "there's no way that got through testing", but its true. Your iPhone displays an ungrokable error message that took me, a tech guy, several Googles to understand what was going on. The only option in this error message is "Disconnect". You click that, and you're taken back to the home screen. If the other person has not disconnected from the Facetime call, you can manually launch the Facetime app and join the call from there. But if they've left it, you just missed the call, and it does this Every Single Time. I had to turn off Continuity Camera. Its crazy!
That's just the latest ones; the list of issues is really quite endless, and it only gets longer the more of Apple's services you decide to inflict upon yourself.
But since sales go brrrrr and so does the stock, why should they care?
In fact, that's more or less what iOS was for a long time, and I loved every second of it.
Once you have a good feature set, you can spend years and years ironing out 100% of the bugs and vulnerabilities and you'd build a rabid fanbase of crotchety tech-saturated users like me. I want something that Just Works.
Apple is caught by their own success: the iPhone is mammoth hit but they've reached the end of its growth. So they've got a whole organization built around making it more compelling to grow the sales, but they should really switch gears: put the iPhone into maintenance mode and invent something completely new. Easy to say, hard to do, trillions on the table if they pull it off.
[thousands of Enterprise Sales employees suddenly start listening]
Sorry, it's Apple software. Nevermind!
Edit: pedant patrol
It is technically incorrect to say that iOS could not copy paste at any point, as the copy paste feature was present in the first version of the software called "iOS".
To use a version of iPhone OS that can't copy or paste, you'd have to use the original iPhone or the 3G (not 3GS!)
I have no solutions to offer for smartphones sadly.
I'm talking about things like how a weather app shouldn't have access to the filesystem, or camera, or microphone, etc... A calculator shouldn't be able to see my location or even what networks I'm connected to.
There is a fine line between staying ahead of the competition and enshittification and most companies don't find it.
The most recent examples that come to mind are Spotify and Slack. Products that were, at one time, a pleasure to use, but have since been significantly degraded by a continual assault of minor features and re-working of UI.
The "pay a premium for no new features" tends to imply a "I paid $99.99 for this once, all future updates for bug and security patches are free".
This in turn means that there's no money incoming (especially as the software goes further and further from feature parity with competition) to pay those developers who are doing the bug and security fixes.
While new features can be (often are) buggy, the new features and upgrades that are coupled with the software (and hardware) that have people buy ${new thing} in turn subsidizes the effort to fix ${still supported thing}.
Excel '98 probably covers 95% of users use cases. But here we are.
Will they work for the largest companies out there? Of course not. This despite the fact that they probably did help get those companies off the ground.
For my one use case I noticed that the newest iOS release doesn't appear to be tested on the iPhone SE 3. The "Press home to unlock" and "X new notification" texts are now laid on top of each other on the lock screen. You're looking right at it when picking up your phone, so you can't miss it, yet Apple QA did.
Reminds me of the old days working at Motorola. Your feature branches were merged into a biweekly dev branch, which needed to be “sanity tested” before it could get merged into the branch that the QA folks validated. Every software engineer was on a lab rotation: when it was your turn, you and a couple others that made up your team went to a different building and descended into the hardware lab where you didn’t come out until you had created a working mobile phone network from scratch and tested it with a wide variety of phones -basically anything that could work. They had shelves with bins of everything: early unreleased smartphones (this was way before the iPhone), junky flip phones, RAZRs, StarTacs, bag phones, etc.
It was honestly a lot of fun to see the hardware side of what you were working on, and to ensure that documentation and checklists were always sufficient.
Apple is probably way too secretive to do anything like that :(
BTW debugging still takes a lot of effort to setup in VSCode / or have to write init scripts for GDB which I suck at. I think Visual Studio debugger beats everything on Linux for that purpose.
Maybe I really need to try out Windows LTSC?
I still have a 16” Intel Macbook pro and looking for my next machine and am seriously considering a Linux notebook for the first time. Im mostly coding and doing docker stuff. No excel and photoshop is a bit of an issue though.
It really feels like the quality was replaced by... lipstick on a pig. And honestly, I am fed up with all this pandering of the changes as a breakthru, live changing technology.
TBH I don't even care about security anymore, like our data has been sold left and right already. As long as I don't get phished, I avoid 80% of the bad actors out there.
I already removed some update software from Ubuntu, those update notifications are very frustrating.
There's so much basic stuff that doesn't work, like if you pull out the keyboard into its split mode, it constantly covers the text input that you're typing in - even in Apple's own apps. The split keyboard may as well not exist for how impossible it is to use.
But there's also just been a lot of usability issues seeping into iOS over time in general. Like those text effects they added in the latest iOS update that constantly force their way onto my messages when I don't want them. And more recently, the "recent emojis" tab doesn't update to my recently used emojis. I think it's been stuck on whatever were my recent emojis were when I did the last iOS update.
The absolute worst was the transition to SSDs if you were stuck on a hard to upgrade HDD-based Mac. It became super clear that Apple devs stopped caring in the span of a year.
I still have an Intel Mac and it doesn't feel significantly slower than one with Apple silicon.
Last time I installed Gnome I had to install an extension to remove the 150ms delay on alt-tabbing that is present even when animations are disabled. It became snappy after that.
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2741/remove-alttab-de...
As for KDE I did not find how to disable animations when using Wayland. I would be happy to know (while keeping Wayland).
(I still prefer using customizable OSS software over "we know better than you" closed source software)
See, we can all pour scorn on other operating systems. The real problem lies in the expectations that people place upon these platforms. Despite my complaints, I actually enjoy using Linux on a desktop (laptops are another story). If I listened to a lot of you, my expectations would definitely not be met.
I suspect a lot of Apple’s decisions in the past decade regarding software is due to an increasing number of Apple employees who are not familiar with the philosophies of 1970s-era Xerox PARC, the classic Mac, NeXT, and Jobs-era Mac OS X. Granted, it’s possible to be too introspective, too focused on the past. Unfortunately Apple’s software is losing its perfectionistic qualities, which has long been the selling point of the Mac compared to Windows and Linux.
Half the OS was still running under emulatiom
I think that is what was said:
> (Though I’m partial to the classic Mac OS from a UI point of view, Mac OS X had a better UX due to its stability.)
Jokes aside, I'm in agreement. Audio was still slightly buggy for me using a Elgato XLR USB interface, but it consistently worked with annoying workarounds. Linux is in a very good place for even normal consumers these days, I'm hoping Valve ends up making SteamOS a generalized gaming platform that will pull more market share away from Windows in that specific niche. I'm so ready.
But like, I don't manage linux servers and stuff so I am sure it sucks in certain very specific ways for people who need to deal with it day in and out.
I remember my young days of using Slackware with init.d. That was hell.
In my professional experience, I've come to understand that the systemd project has an assload of accidental complexity that the systemd folks are unwilling to reduce. At least once a year, we'll have a production-down page from a customer whose root cause turns out to be systemd failing in some bizarre and entirely inscrutable way. After a ton of digging, we'll eventually find someone who has run into something similar, and either got no response, or a "Wow, that's weird. Well, there's nothing WE can or should do." response from the systemd people.
"Solving" these issues is very frustrating, because we usually end up changing things from one way that the docs indicated would work just fine, to a different way the docs indicate would work just fine... which doesn't give us any confidence that what we did won't suddenly stop working next year. A project that is as fundamental as systemd wants to be really should be aggressively reducing complexity to the minimum required to get the job done and regularly documenting caveats and quirks as they're discovered and deemed "E_WONTFIX".
Other than that, though, Ubuntu on any old laptop (expensive thinkpads are my favorite) is my go-to daily driver. Except at work where I'm learning to deal with a (new, shiny, powerful) Macbook that I will use to... connect to a Linux VM because that's the only way to work on our software. Seriously, a whole fleet of zillion dollar macbooks so we can all ssh into beefy VMs to build/test/deploy on Linux.
IT onboarding made a point that if you want to get a Windows laptop and wipe it for Linux, you need permission and a "good reason." How about "this is stupid just let me work on stuff." Of course it's about tech support and security, which is fair enough but I feel like they have it backwards. Support Linux and then require special permission for the $4000 ssh client...
After spending a couple of days with homebrew and building some things natively on aarch64, though, I might make a hobby out of moving stuff local. It really is a beautiful machine.
Also, (FWIW) I've a fine time with JACK2, openrc, and xorg. I had to do some manual work to tell JACK which sound card to use and to set up the pulseaudio backfill for software that doesn't know how to speak to JACK, [0] but everything else just works.
[0] The "tricky" part was disabling all pulseaudio backend modules but the JACK backend. This was -of course- not tricky at all.
Thanks much for the link to the FAQ.
I'm going to disagree. This is a false nostalgia.
15 years ago the market for consumer laptops that were not MacBooks straight up sucked. If you walk into a Best Buy today, almost any laptop you buy is going to blow any laptop from back then out of the water in terms of build quality. And credit where it's due, in no small part it came from playing catch up with Apple.
On the Windows side of things, this was when Microsoft got serious about security, with plagued earlier versions of Windows XP (worms were so rampant around 2005) until later service packs helped fix things. Windows 7 was solid and performant. While my favorite version of Windows is 2000, 7 was another high mark for Windows.
Much has been said about Snow Leopard, but it was the pinnacle of Mac OS X, the refinement of an already great OS, Leopard. I would gladly used Snow Leopard today if it weren’t for needing current web browsers and up-to-date security patches.
Even the Web was better back then. By 2008 many mainstays of modern Web life, such as social media and YouTube, were already in existence. Google was excellent. Internet Explorer’s dominance was successfully challenged, and there was an ecosystem of standards-compliant browsers (later IE versions, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera). Web developers were coding to standards instead of only writing for one browser. Yes, ads existed, and there was also malware, but ads were less intrusive, and malware can be avoidable with more careful browsing.
I miss 2009- and 2010-era computing, when Windows and Mac OS X were at their peaks, when the browser ecosystem was diverse, and when many commercial websites like Facebook were still pleasant to use.
Perhaps there were peaks and troughs in individual technologies. Late 2000s / early 2010s felt like a good time for operating systems, for instance.
But is everyone forgetting having to navigate through Flash websites and Java Applets using Internet Explorer, for instance?
Also, people are just forgetting. There’s nostalgia in this thread about the iTunes desktop app, for instance. That program has been a pile of trash for as long as I can remember back in the 2000s.
It only became "problematic" when they tried to overload it too much to be able to "support" Windows for the iPod/iPhone without having to develop dedicated software.
They largely killed it and the replacement is lackluster. The best version was around version 10-11 with the colorized album view.
To this day there are no audio library management software that come close to what iTunes was. Apple Music, being a fork, is the closest thing, but it's not really the same thing at all.
Tell that to Dell and their shit trackpads and prone to death battery charging circuits. And the joy of soldered RAM so you cannot upgrade can't be overstated enough.
On the software side at least on Android you have the power to do something about it. You can flash custom firmware or launchers, hell you can even code your own to completely replace the android interface if you want.
On the other hand the iPhone batteries seems to go to trash way faster than Android. I think Android has better battery management systems (and also just bigger batteries). Every single person I know who uses iPhones older than 3-4 years can't get through a single charge per day.
On the software side Android got a bad rep from the early days when it was much worse than iOS, but these days it is pretty much just as slick and much more customizable.
No you did not.
(Also, lol @ "via official Apple channels", you're aware Open Core Legacy Patcher is a thing and have hedged against people mentioning it.)
What are you comparing to?
/s
https://time.com/3264528/best-laptop-under-500/ This is a 2014 article, for a Budget/Mid Laptop, with a compatible processor and double the minimum RAM
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/discussions/windows11/he... Post marked as solution talks about installing W11 on a 10 Y/O Thinkpad
Did you even notice that the link marked as solution is a third party software vendor?????? They charge money for that solution.
https://www.techpowerup.com/329691/microsoft-loosens-windows...
Microsoft does let's you bypass it (Regardless of them putting up a disclaimer) so the example stands, you can do it hardware and software wise without losing updates or security*
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-on-de...
* I think you only really lose some performance on cryptographic operations and tranparent encryption
I don't know what point you're trying to make here, but it's falling flat.
So you can install Vanilla Windows 11, no third party, on decade old hardware without losing anything other than performance (And an annoying disclaimer)
OCLP is more complicated and limited as it's not a "some manifest config limitation", but actual support parts of OS being removed, so they have a big lag and a bunch of issues, and limit your updates
So yeah, no contest comparision between Mac and Win
[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/103260
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_Monterey
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/11/psa-apple-isnt-actua...
It’s pretty bad. Somehow most other software is even worse. Genuinely impressive at this point.
Just today I was thinking how the best hardware gets crippled by software that has become as shitty as Microsoft's.
By now it has become incredible that “Doesn't Suck” was once motto and slogan for the user experience on Apple devices.
If I ever feel down on the Mac, I can go to a PC and try make a pdf or view one. Clunky AF.
Mac software might be at a low-point, but it hasn’t burnt down yet.
After a restart (which happens a lot because the machine crashes a lot[0]), my Windows 10 box won't be "ready for use" for a good 10 minutes. I've seen it take 30 minutes. I've done macOS updates that have taken less time.
Oh and macOS doesn't randomly reboot to apply updates. Still haven't found a way to prevent Windows from doing that.
[0] I suspect the 3080 but it frequently crashes when idle on the desktop which shouldn't be stressing anything GPU-wise.
https://www.sordum.org/9470/windows-update-blocker-v1-8/
You can save anything you can print as a PDF since what, Windows 7? And the OS comes with a PDF reader since what, Windows 8?
> And the OS comes with a PDF reader since what, Windows 8?
Which one, the Edge browser? Don't you have to install Sumatra PDF or Acrobat?
PDF readers haven't been required for over 10 years? Chrome shipped with a PDF viewer eons ago and of course the old version of Edge and current Chromium Edge (and now Firefox, as of a week or two ago) have PDF viewers.
macOS Preview is limited to PDF 1.4. That kind of sucks. Not a deal breaker for most PDFs, but I've come across one or two that won't render and I had to figure out why.
That said, the Edge PDF viewer also lets you read, edit, and share nearly all PDFs.
I’m surprised you find it fine. It’s more clicks and slower at each step than on a Mac.
Yes. When you type "word" in the search bar, you get directed to MS Word Online, a free version of MS Word.
For all the other programs, and browsers as well, hit "print" and select "print to PDF".
> Which one, the Edge browser
Yes. I hate Edge and have disabled it, but I have to give it to them that their PDF reader is much better than the one built into other operating systems. It's optimised for simplicity and common PDF interactions (highlighting, filling out forms, etc.). Plus, unlike all the other PDF readers, Edge has some excellent security features that have been implemented because of its browser nature.
The way Edge has turned into a shitty shell of its former self is a true software tragedy. It was well on the way to become the best browser available until Microsoft decided to Microsoft all over it. Still, works fine for opening PDF files.
Apple software has always been crap. People put up with it because the hardware was nice and shiny and distracted from the many bugs and severe UI issues.
My wife was angry about the large volume of advertising, both on web sites and on the desktop, on the machine out of the box. Part of it was needing an adblocker, which meant switching to Firefox, because installing an adblocker on Safari requires an Apple account which my wife doesn't have and wouldn't want to make.
I was amused that, by default, I got numerous nags in the form of 1999 retreads of the confirm dialog from the 1984 original mac. I'd contrast that to Microsoft's nags which look like a modern HTML-inspired interface [1].
Apple's model of "local account but you get nagged into attaching an Apple account so you can use the store and other services" is inferior, in my mind, to Microsoft's model where you can use use your Microsoft account to log into the desktop and your XBOX and all the services that Microsoft has to offer. I know a lot of people don't like it, but since Microsoft introduced it I've had no trouble authenticating into SMB shares in home and SMB environments.
[1] I won't apologize for thinking that's an advance, particularly since HTML/CSS has been adding things like Flexbox and Grid which are exactly what the doctor ordered for application development.
And you don't have to pay for it, just close the ask.
It seems to do the job for the house very nicely.
I just run Pihole in a container, and a spare one is on a NAS. I’ve learned the hard way, losing DNS is a shit show and a spare server saves you.
Added complexity has its downsides.
Works well. Even the crappiest nasty sites won't get through it.
Maybe because it's Pro version? I don't remember doing any incantation but it's possible that I didn't connect internet during installation.
Otherwise I would use something like Xubuntu.
So it's sad to know that my next Windows machine will require a Microsoft cloud account.
Same. I get that people don't like having to "buy" into an ecosystem. But credit where it's due - Microsoft eliminated dozens of different logins over the last decade. If you jump between multiple machines all the time, it's legitimately a decent experience. You can even be simultaneously logged into your personal and work OneDrives at the same time under the same user and everything just pretty much works.
They are a lot less idealistic and have an approach of working on it slowly but surely in the open. Apple on the other hand tries to maintain an unrealistic image of perfection and thus is always playing some sort of binary game, which is why things get stuck and never evolve beyond a certain point.
I use to like Apple approach to things; with age I understand that Microsoft approach actually makes a lot more sense, especially if you need to maintain things over time.
We should be glad that Microsoft "won" the desktop PC war because if Apple software had been used for critical software we would be in a lot of trouble as a society; I'm joking but barely...
There are four distinct ways to go back (swipe from the left/right side, press the X, press the left arrow, swipe down), whereas Android has one way that always goes back to the previous screen. The inability to set volumes separately, the fact that folders hold exactly 9 icons and leave the other 60% of the screen empty, the fact that a very commonly-used button (the back arrow) is at the hardest-to-reach part of the screen, all of that just made for a really frustrating experience.
Linus basically echoes all my gripes in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhew95wMmP8
After that, I bought a Nothing 2, and I love it. It's snappier than the iPhone, feels premium, and Android has stolen all of the good ideas iOS had and added more.
Basically every app lets you swipe from the left to go back. Occasionally you'll have a bottom sheet you can swipe back down to where it came from, but it's generally pretty intuitive. I can't think of many times I felt "stuck" and unable to go back.
I forgot the biggest annoyance that ultimately made me abandon the experiment: the keyboard is ATROCIOUS. On Android, I just hit keys in the general vicinity of what I want, and it writes the right thing, every time. On iOS, with the exact same keyboard, it kept making mistake after mistake.
Both the stock keyboard and SwiftKey were terrible on iOS. I'd understand the stock keyboard being bad, whatever. I don't understand how SwiftKey can be great on one platform and horrible on the other.
At that point the cheapest iPhone option available outperformed every android phone I'd used at that point and I was sold.
Still think the software could need some love but at least it does not feel like my phone has to do a call to a lagging wev service to open the camera.
Overcast might be the app for you. No affiliation, I just like it.
However any maintainance or search for podcasts is crap with Apple and better elsewhere.
Never had that problem with iTunes.
Incidentally the iOS Music app has generally been pretty good to me, but starting in the most recent iOS update has been having crashing issues. I'm not sure what exactly causes it, but it's typically when I rearranged the queue then minimize the player to get back to the home/library screen.
Considering the state of every recently made/"remade" first party Apple app I cannot imagine how horrible the Music app would be after they got done with it.
At some point when migrating from one Mac to another, it "forgot" which songs were actually mine. It's all Apple Music now. I have songs that the application _knows_ were added to my library in 2003, but for which it steadfastly maintains they're Apple Music downloads. Worse: some songs have been replaced with other recordings. Other are "unavailable" for unexplained reasons.
That's the kind of shiesty KPI-boosting tactic I'd expect from Windows, not a machine I paid almost $4000 for. Apple comes installed with a ton of irremovable bloatware and somehow gets a pass.
[0] https://lowtechguys.com/musicdecoy/
may I introduce you to cyanrip or EAC? https://github.com/cyanreg/cyanrip https://www.exactaudiocopy.de/en/index.php/resources/downloa...
The back button that goes back multiple steps while losing context of stuff you had clicked in between, the way the search box is in a whole other part of the UI and it has a three mode toggle. The way that clearing the search phrase does a new search for "".
The other day I bought an album on Bandcamp and imported it. Music app adds a "show complete album" link when I view the album in my library. Instead of doing anything useful this link clicks through to a whole different album in the iTunes store.
Or yesterday I browsed to "Joni Mitchell" and got some kind of curated homepage for the artist with background image art etc. The albums are grouped under a series of headings ("60s/70s" and "80s/90s") that don't include all her albums. There's no way to 'view all'.
You literally can't reach say "Blue" without going back out and searching for it explicitly.
Just idiotic and broken features left right and centre.
It used to be the case a long time ago. I think it was decent up to iTunes 5 or 6. They crammed into it iPod apps and stuff, which resulted in a terrible UX. Then came the UI lag.
I always have selected on the sidebar Library -> Songs with View -> Column Browser enabled. And I search only using the "Filter" text input on this view. It's as close to how iTunes used to be in the early days of OS X (sans brushed metal).
What I see on the screen is just mostly dense text except the small thumbnail at the top for whatever is currently playing. There is no other related artwork or graphics loaded. I fear once a re-write of this app happens, this view is gone... replaced with lots of fancy graphics and loads of whitespace padding everywhere.
News, Books, and TV are all similar.
So is the App store on all platforms AFAICT.
It's like buying a car because it looks very nice and has a great engine but the driving experience is absolutely terrible.
I kind of think they made it shitty on purpose to push everyone towards a subscription. Many of these issues apply to locally stored songs and playlists, which is how I use it.
In fact, I was never able to use Apple Music because it handled bad internet atrociously. And last time I checked (2022?) it was still not fixed.
iTunes was a great software, even people using it on Windows liked it a lot.
Excuse me?
iTunes was IMO always bad. I will grant that the Mac desktop version of Apple Music is possibly even worse than iTunes ever was, though.
(This is slightly off topic, but I find it both amusing and rather infuriating that the iCloud payment system doesn’t accept Apple Pay. Oddly, it seems to accept PayPay. Really, just about everything involving the account and payment system in iCloud and Apple Music is awful.)
- After waking from sleep, the current song plays silent audio (skipping forward and back again kickstarts it to start playing again) - When streaming with lossless audio, somewhere in the first ten seconds of the song, it'll skip - Mouseover events don't trigger when scrolling moves an item behind the mouse — you have to get the cursor to leave and reenter the object in question - Radio stations randomly stop playing sometimes - And I haven't seen this one in a while, but for a long time, albums in my library would randomly have a song or two split out into its own separate album. So I'd have two of the same album, one with (say) track 5 and the other with tracks 1-4 and 6-10. Deleting and re-adding the albums would at least temporarily fix this.
The only thing missing is lossless audio. But I have been listening to 256kpbs AAC since basically the first iPod so I'm not going to care that much at this point...
These issues are becoming more recurring. Meanwhile Apple is trying to sell me on some stupid intelligence that I do not need.
In any case, HN's guidelines ask to use the original title of an article, unless it is misleading or linkbait. I'd agree that Apple's software quality has been going down.
I know people like to complain about Apple's software quality - but is this actually an issue - or just the popular thing to say?
But somehow, Microsoft and Apple are inferior to their previous selves.
New features and bug fixes, yes. But we seem to lose a lot. In terms of quality, performance and unfeatures.
https://www.corbinstreehouse.com/blog/2021/10/macos-12-monte...
But was curious is are people having stability & reliability type of software quality problems.
I've been debugging it on and off for a couple of months because I assumed I messed something up.
How so? Would you mind giving examples.
Note: I'm not disagreeing. Just curious what software quality issues you're having exactly.
- Why when I drag the Safari window up to go full screen with the tiling manager does it leave a large gap around the window? When I double click the top bar it aligns the top and bottom with the edges but still leaves a gap on the sides.
- Why does the settings dialog have so much lag? It takes a couple of seconds to launch and then when navigating around there is a roughly one second lag between panels.
- Why can't I uninstall default Mac apps that I have never opened?
- If I open up task view using F3, why is there no option to exit the window or program?
- If I have a Safari window open in a smaller window and double click the task bar, why does it maximize the way it does? Leaving a large section open.
It's a feature. System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Tiled windows have margins.
> - Why does the settings dialog have so much lag? It takes a couple of seconds to launch and then when navigating around there is a roughly one second lag between panels.
Each 'panel' is actually an app extension that runs its own process. Similar to extensions and control panels in classic MacOS.
> - Why can't I uninstall default Mac apps that I have never opened?
This is annoying.
> - If I open up task view using F3, why is there no option to exit the window or program?
You mean 'Misson Control'? Dunno, but there is an inexpensive addon that addresses this. https://www.fadel.io/missioncontrolplus
> - If I have a Safari window open in a smaller window and double click the task bar, why does it maximize the way it does? Leaving a large section open.
The modern macOS UX is an amalgamation of Classic MacOS and NeXTSTEP, neither of which really has the concept of "maximised" in the same sense as Windows does. The action you describe "zooms" the window to best fit the content. The parallel to "maximised" is full screen.
That corrected it, thank you.
> You mean 'Misson Control'? Dunno, but there is an inexpensive addon that addresses this
Having to pay $9 to solve an issue that every other OS has implemented is wild.
The icons in the top bar getting extreme spacing
Spotlight search is a complete mess
Update nagging every time i wake my mac from sleep
Basically the whole iOSification of macOS
Certainly with "crashers" there are crash reports from the field (you and I) that are sent back home and filtered into various databases. Internal tool allow Apple to see the "top crashers" (and you can filter to specific OS, hardware, etc.). There will be Radars filed for these and they will be sent to the appropriate teams.
The issue of course is the degree to which these take priority over feature work, etc. If Apple decided to do nothing but address these for a year or two we could have nice things again.
Not an exhaustive list but some simple recent examples:
in Messages on macOS across 3 Macs I own, turning on and off the global 'read receipts' setting has no effect, not even from the perspective of iOS. The iOS setting does seem to work though.
Bugs in iOS mail where notifications just freeze the app.
Layout issues in macOS settings.
Memory leaks in WindowServer.
Many iCloud services inconsistent and non-reliable.
Apple Pay not showing correctly in Apple Account settings.
Lots of little hiccups...
People like to point at Snow Leopard as being the peak of reliability but there are two things to consider about that. The first is that the previous versions were so bad that they had to stop creating new features and do a bug fix only release. The other is that it still needed countless updates through the following year.
If you want an example of something they have done exceptionally well take a look at the rollout of APFS on the iPhone. They replaced the filing system on millions of phones with barely a murmur from the community.
I think you are correct, people like to whinge (especially here).
I would say it’s roughly comparable to Windows 10/11, which fell off a cliff in terms of quality. But to be fair Mac OS can handle much longer uptimes, today my Macbook force rebooted after about 250 days and it ran perfectly fine up to that point.
My partner is the IT manager at a school where they have over 1000 iPads (10th gen) deployed with iOS 18 and there are no reported issues like this. We ourselves have iPad Pro M2's without these issues which we both use all day every day. Our kids have 3x 10th gen iPads too. No issues.
YMMV but they just work for us and the software, which not perfect, is probably the least shit out there.
I mean the trash heap in my office is mostly Surface machines as a comparison...
(incidentally they mostly use USB-C apple pencils and some clone ones when they lose them and the parents don't want to buy a genuine replacement one)
I don't understand why you thought it was constructive to point out the difference between a "software problem Vs. a software problem only when the pen is used." The article was very clear on that point already, it isn't adding to the conversation.
The issue is, that each new line you draw, gets added to a group. This will start causing lagging at some point of time.
If I highlight my whole screen in Notes or Freeform and use the `separate` tool to remove all things from the group. The lagging immediately stops. You can read more about this here [1].
Apple has many issues with “scalability” like this. Another one for instance is the imessage and its replies. If you use them too much (50 replies to message or more) it start not rendering some of the messages.
This suggests a type of culture, where things are important to look nice in demos, but are not actually usable daily.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/ipad/comments/zqh5rt/ipad_glitching...
It may eventually blow up in faces, but a lot of the people making money on it today won't be around to see it.
Google is by far the worst of this. It seems 75% of their products are pet-projects turned abandonware.
Make old chat system better (or just maintain it?)... meh boring...
Make new google chat.. talk.. alo.. i mean hangouts? Yep, promotions, bonuses!
To be honest, I think it's sort of simplistic to try to characterize a 185k person company and its culture with this sort of lack of nuance, whether it's Google, Apple, or anywhere else.
I got promoted 7 times (from SWE 3 all the way to VP of Engineering, so I ended up in the top 0.01% or something crazy by level) during my time there, and pretty much only made things better, did migrations, etc.
I did build some new stuff, but I don't believe they were ever a meaningful part of a promo packet. All my promo packets were about fixing things or making existing things better, and the impact of doing so on developer productivity, efficiency, etc.
Maybe you are right.
From the outside however, the situation looks very different:
- reader? destroyed
- Google+? Forced upon us and then destroyed as soon as communities started to form.
- Search? Hasn't been working correctly since around the time Google+ launched. At some point it became so bad I used DDG and Bing out if spite. The difference was that small.
(and before anyone says "it is impossible to create or run a working search engine in 2025": Marginalia and Kagi both work very much better than Google these days, although Marginalia admittedly only in certain niches.)
Picasa? Replaced with a w3b service.
After 18 years of living, i'll give you the best view I got:
While I do think Google kills products it shouldn't, my view there tends more towards when things are killed that cost basically nothing to support (IE have 1-2 people working on them, have not large prod costs, and not significant privacy/etc issues over time that require serious engineering rewrites/cost), have lots of happy users, don't meaningfully conflict with some other product strategy, and don't need lots of new features.
When those are killed, I think it's dumb.
Reader falls into this category.
Picasa would not.
lots of things on killedbygoogle do not - i think they were fine to kill, whether the process by which they were killed was a good one or not.
Google+ - eh, there's a lot to hate there but it was also Google experimenting with a more top-down approach to product building. I tend to be a fan of cultural and process experimentation - you have to be able to adapt your culture and processes as a company grows, or you will end up in a really bad place. You will never get this right 100% of the time, and it is worth doing it on important things sometimes, so that the results actually matter.
In this case, G+ also got caught up in the existential crises of the day (social) in a way that was unhelpful overall, and had leadership (Vic) that I think were just not good. He had good folks working for him (Bradley, et al) but I think it would have gone a lot better with someone else in his seat.
I say this as someone who was working on a small product at the time that was slated to become the backend/etc for youtube comments, and got crushed by G+-in-youtube mandates. The Youtube folks were wonderful - happy to figure out what the best thing was, decided to ditch their own thing for ours even though we were a little team (3 people) in a different org, and they were a big team who had spent a bunch of work on comments. They didn't like the top-down G+ mandate anymore than we did. In the end, it wasn't the fact that there was a top-down mandate that was bad. It's that it was not a well thought out strategic mandate.
I do also think Google often doesn't know how to start small and grow a user base over time.
But the rest, i think there is tons of hyperbole around. I think it was fine to kill Picasa - just because some percent doesn't like the replacement doesn't mean it wasn't okay to kill. Part of development and product life cycles is that you are not going to get it right all the time for all people. That's normal.
In the end, they've created products lots of people loved, and have enough users of roughly any product that you can't kill anything without have a large group of unhappy people. The answer to that is not to avoid killing anything. At most, it's "be thoughtful in how you support its death". Sometimes Google learned from its mistakes here, and sometimes it didn't. I had a hand in a number of divestitures and such because of my background and sometimes weird roles, and tried to make sure we did the right thing when I could - previous mistakes were helpful in pushing things for the better.
For example: Sketchup was divested rather than killed, which went really well.
Niantic was also spun off rather than killed, and I think that turned out really well as well.
etc.
For Google+ I cannot say, but what I know is that even if the launch, the initial iterations and the leadership was bad, destroying the thing just as people starting to settle in might make sense in a short sighted way but it destroyed any chance google had to be trusted in the next decade. Just watch how people openly discussed here and elsewhere from time to time if GCP will continue to exist.
It also probably destroyed any chance google had to capture a significant chunk of social media and as time passes I think this is a good thing.
Same goes for search. People have complained for years, but the quality keeps declining. And I am starting to think this is a great thing since we now see more promising search engines that wouldn't have had a chance against 2012 Google Search.
Depends what you mean. if you mean should have been spun out - it was a day and age that Google was still too young and immature to do that sort of thing, so yeah, no idea what would have happened.
If you mean it would have won or stayed viable - I dunno. Personally - i doubt it. Desktop apps were dying, and things like photo features were being moved into the basic OS distribution. Maybe it would have survived long enough to be killed by Apple Photos, or some halfway-lightroom product Adobe would have launched if Picasa stayed popular, but I doubt it - i think it would have died before then. But the vast majority of photos aren't on desktop anymore, and it's hard to see how picasa would have survived, even with picasa web.
But right or wrong, I also think killing it was within the range of reasonable product decisions to make.
As for G+, I don't actually disagree with that view. Google, like lots of tech companies, had (and still has, though they are better than they used to be!) a lot of trouble understanding the social aspects of products and trust. They want things to win becuase they are technically good, or because they are cool, or ...
Even when Larry spent time pushing on trying to improve user trust, by being careful about what and how things were shut down, it was pretty clear they overall didn't get how humans work.
The bad news, though, is i think this is pretty common in tech companies - while some do in fact get it, i think they are pretty few and far between :(