Why? I honestly don’t see much of a difference in a day to day basis between Tahoe and whatever the previous version was. Tahoe looks slicker to me, but nothing really impacts how I work
1) The "0 New Features" Mac OS X 10.6.0 came 22 months after 10.5.0, not 12 months
2) 10.6.0 included significant under-the-hood improvements but also brought some truly nasty new bugs and was significantly buggier than 10.5.8, released a few weeks prior
3) 10.6 received 23 months of subsequent minor bug fix updates, up to 10.6.8 v1.1
We'd need two Snow Leopards in a row just to match Snow Leopard purely in development time, but now there's a lot more preexisting technical debt built up after well over a decade of annual major releases.
Fix that freaking keyboard FFS. Seriously. How is it that almost 20 years later it's still one of the worst parts of the iOS experience.
Also, ditch liquid glass on MacOS. That sh t is so Windows 7. It wasn't cool then and it isn't cool now. What the hell are you guys doing? Copying Microsoft now? It so, outdated, slow and twitchy, makes it hard to read. There's literally no upside to it. None. Zip. Nada.
> Apple won’t quite launch ‘zero new features’ like they claimed with OS X Snow Leopard back in 2009, however. According to Gurman, Apple still plans to release a number of new AI features with iOS 27, so the company doesn’t continue to fall behind in the AI race.
Goddamit.
Zero new features is clean. It's communicable. It lets Cook, as he departs, harken back to quintessential Jobs. It will sell phones. It will sell Macs. And it implies perfection in a way only Apple, historically, has been able to nail and sell.
Nobody is buying an incremental iPhone or Mac because Siri recovered from lobotomy. The decision to water down zero new features with a douse of Giannandrea reeks of office politics.
The number one priority must surely be fixing the keyboard, besides the horrible UX?
Millions are having problems for years so it's not just me, honestly thought i was "getting old" but no incredible amount of threads and now this on YT with 1 mil views:
iOS repeated “learns” new words that I use that are misspellings of real words (because I mistype things in a predictable way). It becomes so convinced that it will autocorrect the real word into the typo. And knowing how the keyboard works, I wouldn’t be surprised if it enlarges the touch targets for the typo once it thinks I meant to use the typo.
The cause is obvious: Apple is training on what I type, not what I send. Apple does not consider that I actually care about the accuracy of what I send and will fix errors; perhaps they optimize for people who are careless enough to send typoed messages, yet niche enough to commonly use words not in the default dictionary.
It is infuriating that I have ~50 manual corrections telling Apple to leave words alone and correct certain typos to the real words.
I'm an outsider to the big tech companies so I don't know how it looks on the inside, but I have thoughts and maybe it will spur some discussion.
I've heard it said that there is manager culture, push to ship new features to pad resumes, etc. So you have these teams building new projects/products and some of it is a miss. There's an escalation path from outside and inside that allows for radars to be filed for major issues. I remember tracking one when I got the original iPhone SE they had a bug in the bluetooth stack that made handsfree calls sound all full of static for the first release or two after launch. We all know bluetooth is a pain and they handled fixing this well. I assume logically with most projects you expect to field lots of bugs early on at launch and then you take resources off once it's been live for a bit and the problem reports slow down. Then it's just debt or not important and how does it ever get handled?
With Apple, there are little ongoing bugs I would like to file, I have submitted on-device feedbacks before but it feels like sending into a black hole. Here is a simple bug, very easy to describe: Accessibility > Audio & Visual > Flash for Alerts (enable it). It flashes the camera light when you get a notification so you can visually see alerts while the phone is silent and not in a pocket. This works on its own, but if you are using the camera light as flashlight and people begin to message you, it will flash and turn the flashlight off. It should remember the state of the flashlight before it flashes but it doesn't and turns it off each time. This is not a new regression.
I guess I write this comment because we have these large companies lots of resources, some unique divisions like Google's Project Zero; but are there any non-project tied teams inside these companies that deal specifically with 'tech debt' and company internal interoperability issues and can pad resumes with that? We knew US gov had 18F, thinking of a division that fixes issues between the teams that might not usually talk.
The most dysfunctional large company at this time seems to be Microsoft and I could write a whole series on how the most basic things are broken (stuff like Share icon for photos only trying to share using Windows Mail and not Outlook). Or the fact that IMAP was broken on the Android Outlook client from August until the past week (it's almost fixed can delete mail again, just can't move it automatically to trash, has to be permanently deleted). And you just feel the different divisions across platforms don't talk to each other and the consumer slop is separate from the paying business stuff and that's split between the Outlook and chromium Outlook, and that's all a totally different thing than the Sharepoint/Teams stuff. But also the mandate of god says Copilot must be everywhere and if you are using classic outlook on monthly channel you must accept your lord and savior Copilot into your Outlook life and there's not a current way to turn it off (officially).
With Apple and quality: They do appear to still be doing 'the good stuff under the hood' most don't pay attention to. I look at their iPhone Air, people confused as to who it's made for, fashion item or whatever I heard in another thread. But I am laser focused on connectivity/modem stuff, before I had the RCS issue the last time I walked into an Apple store was to look at the 16e, not to buy it (I have a 15 pro) but because I'm happy to see another modem vendor on the market that might know what they are doing. The Air is an evolution of this, it will eventually go into flagships when it's ready. This is the good stuff under the hood, besides the increased margin for Apple at not having to pay Qualcomm... there is room for improvement. I guess sub-6 performance is looking much better. I know something that was noticed awhile back is Mediatek seems to have much better latency than Qualcomm modems, b...
my 83 year old mother was able to use (almost) all the features of iOS when she first got an iPhone, in 2012. It genuinely changed her life and meant she could participate in a world I dont think she ever expected to be comfortable in. She tried and failed to use a PC for years. Local library lessons, family time (and patience) etc, but she always needed support. the iPhone as different, it was simple to use with familiar user interactions with every app. Roll forwards to 2025, gradually bit by unnecessary bit bells, whistles and complexity has bled in from every angle. Last week I did a FaceTime call with her to help her log in to an app on her phone. She can do it fine on her iPad that hasn't been updated. this was like going back to her PC days - too complicated and giving her features she didn't ask for, or need.
what was it Steve Jobs said?
"If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or a better computer — so what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company is not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people. And they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision-making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. Sort of the product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."
I've worked at companies that don't really have to sell on features. The product people still come up with new ideas constantly and don't pay attention to the quality. Heck, engineers will gin up new systems to build if they're bored.
For marketing reasons (and App Store predatory capture) they decided to make the iPhone more like a computer. Yet I do not know a single "normal" iOS user who actually make use of all the stuff. They all ask me to do stuff on a "real" computer". Meanwhile I know how to use the "advanced" iOS bits but it is so convoluted and slow that I would rather not.
Special mention to "files management" with the most retarded counter-intuitive behavior one could think of. Even when you know how it will behave, it still feels like a mystery how you are going to find back your files. Especially since the "Files" app always open up to some random unexpected place.
They tried to "copy" Android more powerful features but failed because they want too much control and are insane with "security". Yet iOS lack the simplicity it once had. And iPadOS is still a joke as a real computer OS alternative.
Holy shit so I will have to put up with iOS 26’s abysmal performance for almost a year? Nooo… this thing visibly and painfully struggles to keep up even on a brand-new iPhone 17. I was hoping for iOS 26 point releases fixing most of the garbage… sigh
Why do they even need to release a major version every year? Whats the point?
For the hardware, i get it, but the OS doesnt really drive sales, and if you have the pressure of releasing new amazing features every year then maintenance and bugs get left behind, and you end up in the situation that we have now…
This is amazing. Once a company that built its reputation on quality and performance wants to focus on that. iOS became a parody of itself. 26 feels like a cheap knockoff of an iOS. Hundreds of people get paid to enshitify experience for millions of users. That’s incredible. And then they simply say that yeah you know it’s time to work on quality and performance. Isn’t it what always had to be there in the first place? Ridiculous.
I don’t usually complain about UX issues because I’m not bothered by small things. I can’t recall having a problem with ios before ios26, when the screenshot tool stopped showing the screenshot after you took one. Instead it would automatically save it to the gallery, which is not what I wanted.
The workaround for this bug was to lock and unlock the screen. Not the worst thing, but it indicated a shocking lack of give-a-fuck in Cupertino. This is one of the most basic flows, which they shipped in a broken state.
Apple hardware is great, but the software has become complete garbage.
On my Apple Watch I have regularly occurring hiccups where the whole UI freezes, especially when I go into training mode to pick an exercise. On my iPhone, after the liquid glass update, I get a noticeable slowdown and stuttering FPS when moving from the widgets screen to the first page and in other parts of UI. I'm afraid to upgrade my MacBook to the new OS, so I don't.
I wish they would rethink the Apple Watch altogether. The smart parts are useless and just not practical. The health tracking is good but it has poor battery life because of useless smarts. The sport stuff is just OK but viewing/using the data is completely terrible. I know I can use 3rd party apps (and I do) but I feel like Apple should be the one to do it considering the price.
On my iPhone, widget randomly don't refresh. Ah well, they can't be arsed to make them slightly interactive but now they just barely work.
Oh and recently, Apple Pay has decided to randomly bug out on my iPhone. It makes the POS bug out for some reason. Works with the watch. Rebooting did not fix.
I just don't comprehend how they can have so many regressions when things were just fine for a while.
Maybe it's just me, but if I was leading development of iOS, then a "Quality and Underlying Performance" focus would be the bedrock of anything that was modified or added to iOS.
Yesterday I had my "death by a thousand strikes" moment with the children's iPad.
1. It was showing 4% of battery for a while, but then showed a pop-up that the battery level has dropped below 10% and suggested turning on the battery saver.
2. I entered iMessage via a notification, and it was unresponsive, I couldn't select the thread on the left. And there are in total 3 of them, not hundreds. Had to tap it multiple times.
3. Then I wanted to switch to the previous app, and the drag-the-line-up-slowly-to-show-apps menu was polluted with 8 copies of iMessage.
All of these should've been not only caught by some kind of internal testing, they should've not happened at all due to proper architecture of the system. iOS more and more feels as a collection of hacks that try to mimic the real thing.
32 comments
[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 57.2 ms ] threadMac OS has become a richly productive bug farm, lately.
I wonder if they'll ever get around to actually reading their bug reports, though...
2) 10.6.0 included significant under-the-hood improvements but also brought some truly nasty new bugs and was significantly buggier than 10.5.8, released a few weeks prior
3) 10.6 received 23 months of subsequent minor bug fix updates, up to 10.6.8 v1.1
We'd need two Snow Leopards in a row just to match Snow Leopard purely in development time, but now there's a lot more preexisting technical debt built up after well over a decade of annual major releases.
Also, ditch liquid glass on MacOS. That sh t is so Windows 7. It wasn't cool then and it isn't cool now. What the hell are you guys doing? Copying Microsoft now? It so, outdated, slow and twitchy, makes it hard to read. There's literally no upside to it. None. Zip. Nada.
I’ll probably ditch Mac if this degradation continues.
Goddamit.
Zero new features is clean. It's communicable. It lets Cook, as he departs, harken back to quintessential Jobs. It will sell phones. It will sell Macs. And it implies perfection in a way only Apple, historically, has been able to nail and sell.
Nobody is buying an incremental iPhone or Mac because Siri recovered from lobotomy. The decision to water down zero new features with a douse of Giannandrea reeks of office politics.
Millions are having problems for years so it's not just me, honestly thought i was "getting old" but no incredible amount of threads and now this on YT with 1 mil views:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo
Wild typing on a 3210 was less stressful for me.
The cause is obvious: Apple is training on what I type, not what I send. Apple does not consider that I actually care about the accuracy of what I send and will fix errors; perhaps they optimize for people who are careless enough to send typoed messages, yet niche enough to commonly use words not in the default dictionary.
It is infuriating that I have ~50 manual corrections telling Apple to leave words alone and correct certain typos to the real words.
I've heard it said that there is manager culture, push to ship new features to pad resumes, etc. So you have these teams building new projects/products and some of it is a miss. There's an escalation path from outside and inside that allows for radars to be filed for major issues. I remember tracking one when I got the original iPhone SE they had a bug in the bluetooth stack that made handsfree calls sound all full of static for the first release or two after launch. We all know bluetooth is a pain and they handled fixing this well. I assume logically with most projects you expect to field lots of bugs early on at launch and then you take resources off once it's been live for a bit and the problem reports slow down. Then it's just debt or not important and how does it ever get handled?
With Apple, there are little ongoing bugs I would like to file, I have submitted on-device feedbacks before but it feels like sending into a black hole. Here is a simple bug, very easy to describe: Accessibility > Audio & Visual > Flash for Alerts (enable it). It flashes the camera light when you get a notification so you can visually see alerts while the phone is silent and not in a pocket. This works on its own, but if you are using the camera light as flashlight and people begin to message you, it will flash and turn the flashlight off. It should remember the state of the flashlight before it flashes but it doesn't and turns it off each time. This is not a new regression.
I guess I write this comment because we have these large companies lots of resources, some unique divisions like Google's Project Zero; but are there any non-project tied teams inside these companies that deal specifically with 'tech debt' and company internal interoperability issues and can pad resumes with that? We knew US gov had 18F, thinking of a division that fixes issues between the teams that might not usually talk.
The most dysfunctional large company at this time seems to be Microsoft and I could write a whole series on how the most basic things are broken (stuff like Share icon for photos only trying to share using Windows Mail and not Outlook). Or the fact that IMAP was broken on the Android Outlook client from August until the past week (it's almost fixed can delete mail again, just can't move it automatically to trash, has to be permanently deleted). And you just feel the different divisions across platforms don't talk to each other and the consumer slop is separate from the paying business stuff and that's split between the Outlook and chromium Outlook, and that's all a totally different thing than the Sharepoint/Teams stuff. But also the mandate of god says Copilot must be everywhere and if you are using classic outlook on monthly channel you must accept your lord and savior Copilot into your Outlook life and there's not a current way to turn it off (officially).
With Apple and quality: They do appear to still be doing 'the good stuff under the hood' most don't pay attention to. I look at their iPhone Air, people confused as to who it's made for, fashion item or whatever I heard in another thread. But I am laser focused on connectivity/modem stuff, before I had the RCS issue the last time I walked into an Apple store was to look at the 16e, not to buy it (I have a 15 pro) but because I'm happy to see another modem vendor on the market that might know what they are doing. The Air is an evolution of this, it will eventually go into flagships when it's ready. This is the good stuff under the hood, besides the increased margin for Apple at not having to pay Qualcomm... there is room for improvement. I guess sub-6 performance is looking much better. I know something that was noticed awhile back is Mediatek seems to have much better latency than Qualcomm modems, b...
what was it Steve Jobs said?
"If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or a better computer — so what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company is not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people. And they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision-making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. Sort of the product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."
Special mention to "files management" with the most retarded counter-intuitive behavior one could think of. Even when you know how it will behave, it still feels like a mystery how you are going to find back your files. Especially since the "Files" app always open up to some random unexpected place.
They tried to "copy" Android more powerful features but failed because they want too much control and are insane with "security". Yet iOS lack the simplicity it once had. And iPadOS is still a joke as a real computer OS alternative.
So what's the point of it all.
For the hardware, i get it, but the OS doesnt really drive sales, and if you have the pressure of releasing new amazing features every year then maintenance and bugs get left behind, and you end up in the situation that we have now…
The workaround for this bug was to lock and unlock the screen. Not the worst thing, but it indicated a shocking lack of give-a-fuck in Cupertino. This is one of the most basic flows, which they shipped in a broken state.
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/change-the-screen-cap...
On my Apple Watch I have regularly occurring hiccups where the whole UI freezes, especially when I go into training mode to pick an exercise. On my iPhone, after the liquid glass update, I get a noticeable slowdown and stuttering FPS when moving from the widgets screen to the first page and in other parts of UI. I'm afraid to upgrade my MacBook to the new OS, so I don't.
On my iPhone, widget randomly don't refresh. Ah well, they can't be arsed to make them slightly interactive but now they just barely work.
Oh and recently, Apple Pay has decided to randomly bug out on my iPhone. It makes the POS bug out for some reason. Works with the watch. Rebooting did not fix.
I just don't comprehend how they can have so many regressions when things were just fine for a while.
How is it not? :-/
I brought a Pro Max last year, after owning a perfectly fine 13 mini for years, and just my luck the latest iOS seems to make everything worse.
Face detection. Navigating photos. Unresponsive Apps. Confusing as f*ck UI.
No idea why I spent so much money on a Pro phone, should of stuck with the 13 mini and refused to upgrade the OS.
1. It was showing 4% of battery for a while, but then showed a pop-up that the battery level has dropped below 10% and suggested turning on the battery saver. 2. I entered iMessage via a notification, and it was unresponsive, I couldn't select the thread on the left. And there are in total 3 of them, not hundreds. Had to tap it multiple times. 3. Then I wanted to switch to the previous app, and the drag-the-line-up-slowly-to-show-apps menu was polluted with 8 copies of iMessage.
All of these should've been not only caught by some kind of internal testing, they should've not happened at all due to proper architecture of the system. iOS more and more feels as a collection of hacks that try to mimic the real thing.
Also, every menu with double rounded borders needs to be cleaned up. The worst offender is the left side of the Finder, it looks absolutely horrible.