Apple, What Have You Done? (onlinegoddess.net)

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

But I did it nonetheless and system data reduced! So crazy is real.

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

> "My iPhone 14 Pro has 35Gb of "system data" which has basically filled up the entire storage I had left"

I occasionally use a macbook pro at £WORK for a few apple specific processes, and it currently has 188.67gb of "system data" that I have no idea how to clean up or remove. It's marked separately from the 11.01gb of macOS in the storage settings, and it constantly complains about the disk almost being full. Updating and restarting don't clear it, I wish I could just rm -rf it all. Does anyone know how I can at least see what it is, and potentially even clean it up?

EDIT: Thanks for the CleanMyMac recommendations, the 57.6gb of xcode caches that didn't show up in the "developer" section of the storage settings might have had something to do with it

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

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

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

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

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

Steve Jobs was an extremely unusual CEO. He was hands on, talked to designers, developers, and users, and actually cared about making good products.

Tim Cook is more of a regular CEO that wants to make money for the shareholders. He started doing stock buybacks and in general prioritizing making money.

macOS is still the best OS I'd want to use IMO--if you can manage to avoid upgrading to Tahoe--but Apple seems to definitely be on its way down.

Hopefully something changes.

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

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

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

There is something seriously wrong with system data in iOS 26.

I've been with Apple since 1979, but these days I don't even use a small percentage of all the features of the iPhone, and in spite of having bought over 800+ apps I still only use 7 of them. However, I dare not even attempt to clean up my iPhone and understand how it all works these days - I just avoid any thing cloud-related, and try to do my own manual photo backups - which is replete with its own dangers, it has to be said.

It really does seem like nobody at Apple is actually using any of the software they're releasing. Its just such shoddy quality control!

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

I am eyeing a few tutorials on building my own cloud.

It takes 1.5 seconds to close a Tab in Safari. If you hold the close tab shortcut for long so that it closes all tabs the entire browser basically freezes.

I run into this daily. I don't understand how this got through QA

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

I end up using

https://derlien.com/ "Disk Inventory X"

regularly to find stuff to clean up.

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

Early this month, I was browsing the same sites I always do when Safari on my iPhone suddenly became very sluggish. I closed Safari and reopened it, and poof! Everything was gone: favorites, history, open tabs, everything.

This kind of BS has become very common with Apple. There's a very pretty happy path, and a very ugly muddy trail if you fall off the scenic route.

Apple needs a new CEO. Someone more visionary than Cook. The software needs more focus on making it "just work" and having significantly less bugs. The line-up needs to be cleaned up as well.

Right now you have the MacBook Air 13" and 15" in 3 variants and 4 colours, that makes for a total of 24 models. M4 processors only.

The MacBook Pro 14" can be purchased with the M5, M4 Pro, M4 Max in 2 colours for a total of 12 models. Then the 16" with the M4 Pro and M4 Max in 2 colours for a total of 8 models. That makes another 20 models.

That is 56 different models to pick from! And that is before customisation.

Why is there even a MacBook Pro without a Pro chip? And why are you selling M4 and M5 processors at the same time? Why release the M5 non-Pro in a Pro laptop and not put it in the Air, leaving it with an M4? The M5 is sometimes better than the M4 Pro, making it hard for the customer to decide to pick which one.

Don't even get me started on the convoluted mess of the iPhone. Apple sells the iPhone 16 (5 models), iPhone 16 Plus (10 models), iPhone 16e (6 models), iPhone 17 (10 models), iPhone Air (12 models), iPhone 17 Pro (9 models), iPhone 17 Pro Max (12 models). 64 models to pick from!

I remember Apple selling the iPhone 4. You would walk into the store, pick a Black or White model, 16 or 32 gigabyte. If you wanted colours, get a case.

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

Dude has no storage and no backups on phone. He is one icon refresh from losing it all.

Endless restart loop. No recovery possible, even with a second iPhone and mac. It’s a known bug for years.

The worst crime for me is liquid glass on the apple watch. All the menus are now lagging on the watch ultra gen2. Where previously it was smooth to interact with, the random lags now make it annoying and inconvenient to interact with. (I need to focus my attention on the Ui state instead of following an automatic procedure from muscle memory)

The battery sometimes randomly drains within less than a day. There are absolutely no benefits of the new visual effects.

The watch was my favorite apple device because it helps me to reduce screen time on the phone. Now it is a source of anger.

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

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