The High Yield YouTube channel has a good early look at die shots of the new A20 chip used in the iPhone Duo and discussion of the changes from the prior generations.
A guy I knew was a mechanical engineer for Apple, did some really innovative stuff. The level of care and detail and attention they give to every element is like nothing you've ever seen. A good dude and was one of the best engineers I ever met but the pressure and the corporate games made him a permanent emotional headcase!
Yes, Apple reliably lets other manufacturers discover the hard problems, and then Apple solves them. And then residents of HN and Reddit think this is a great zinger every time.
Possibly. It's complicated. It's not uncommon for Company A to produce a design based on Company B's proprietary R&D. Just because Samsung is making those displays for Apple doesn't mean that Apple didn't do major parts of the R&D. Nor does it mean that Samsung can make the same displays for Samsung, or for their other customers.
Just because something is possible doesn't mean we can deny ground truth. Apple did not invent folded screens by any stretch of the imagination, and is the latest one to the party, even for Apples standard of "freshness" it is late.
That puts me in mind of Google paying Apple billions per year to have Google as the default search engine and (maybe more importantly) discourage Apple from building their own search engine.
Knowing what we know today, probably a good choice as search engines themselves are quickly getting less usage due to AIs. (I for one would never have predicted there would be something that could replace search engines, but then I also thought Facebook was here to stay forever for everyone. Happy to be wrong)
There are plenty of excellent engineering products that Apple have engineered themselves. Starting with the iPhone itself which was an enormous cut above the competition.
Yes Apple has "copied" or brought out its own version of particular products before, usually in a much better state.
> Starting with the iPhone itself which was an enormous cut above the competition
I wouldn't say that at all. Correct me if I misremember, but the original iPhone didn't even have an ecosystem of apps outside a few Apple-sanctioned ones. I was thoroughly unimpressed when it came out, at the missed (in retrospect, deferred) opportunity.
My older Palm device felt superior in nearly every way I cared about.
Considering practically every smartphone to this day is derivative of the 2007 glass slab hardware design (and software UX), I'd say they were on to something even if it didn't launch with the App Store immediately.
> Considering practically every smartphone to this day is derivative of the 2007 glass slab hardware design (and software UX), I'd say they were on to something
Lowest cost of production is what that formfactor provides.
Palm's devices, by contrast, felt like a polished river stone in the pocket. I know which I prefer.
> Lowest cost of production is what that formfactor provides.
Maybe, but to compete with the iPhone everything else that goes into the production of a smartphone would have been way more expensive. More compute requirements, better screens, way more software engineering headcount.
Palm's Pre[1] supported multi-tasking, having multiple emails open at the same time to read and compose, unified instant messaging, copy/paste and myriad other features iPhone didn't have at the time.
Your older Palm device was almost certainly much worse at browsing the web both in fidelity and interactivity. Loading a full desktop website on a device that small and being able to pinch to zoom in to sections was pretty novel at the time.
Yeah arguably the biggest innovation the iPhone had was the capacitive touch screen - they weren't the first (that was the LG Prada) and the various interactions like pinch zooming and inertial scrolling were done before, but they did have a 2004 patent on capacitive multi-touch screens.
Yeah as I recall it, the iPhone was the first device where touch felt really natural and fun. They nailed that feeling that you’re actually interacting directly with what is under your finger. Previous touch devices I tried felt kind of disconnected because they hadn’t sweated the details in the same way.
but this discussion always has the tendency to go completely off teh rails because there are so many people unable to talk rationally about apple products.
innovation basically never happens in a vacuum, and especially apple products have historically "come second" into a product category -- and just nail the implementation so well that they just felt great to use.
(and yes, smartphones were well established by the time the iphone was released. thats what i'd call the product category there. dialing in to ever narrower definitions to make it into a "new" category is exactly the reason why this can never be settled - because you can call _every_ product a new product category like that)
So now we got endless discussions about "who was first" even though its completely meaningless to ask this question -- because that "previous product" also took inspiration from other products, and if you squinted enough, could also be called "just an iteration" vs a "innovation".
It’s not really a different narrative, though: They started with the idea that the phone should be nearly all screen (which was very controversial at the time) and designed the software around that. No one had a UI or UX that was as fully committed to this idea as the iPhone, although they certainly got inspiration from others.
You’re right that Apple isn’t usually a first mover within a product segment. But that have a tendency to nail what they consider to be a better execution of that product.
I'm so glad someone else remembers and values their contributions here.
That full package of capacitive touch, a UI and UX optimised for touch, inertial scrolling with pinch and zoom came together to form something much greater than the sum of the individual parts: an experience that could convince you to part with physical buttons
Also I think it took me almost a decade to find a touch keyboard (fleksy) I liked as much as the iOS keyboard. I think people also take for granted how far ahead their quiet innovations in the touch keyboard were without fanfare.
The ones in 2007 were unusable, the original android ones were terrible and I didn't much like swiftkey. Google Keyboard came much later but lacked some of the smoothing and tappiness of the Apple one
I went from a Palm Treo to the iPhone in 2007, these devices were not in the same league. Years apart in all aspects. I had an external box for tomtom gps on the treo and a janky mp3 player and some crappy apps on a resistive touch screen that looked like it had a permanent hazy film over it as all resistive ones do.
The apps part was rectified pretty quickly but even the kind of halfway decent web apps available after iPhone launch beat treo apps.
This is true, but I felt the same with the HTC Dream, although I guess Apple was first, they were more than a year apart. I don't miss typing 'reboot\n' in any app, or at any time, and the phone rebooting, because the first release had a left-open root session.
So the Android polish wasn't quite there on release either.
I'm not an apple fanboy but they were the first to really understand and solve touch screen phones - they went with capacitive tech when everyone was doing resistive and they went all-in on the UX and studied how touch should feel and how the UI should reflect it.
They were by no means the first smartphone nor were they the first touch phone but the "iphone moment" was coined because they figured out how to make frontier tech mainstream.
They also weren't the first to make an MP3 player but it sure felt that way with the ipod. I don't know how people have rewritten this history in their minds
Nokia was dominating the smartphone market when iPhone was released. There was no ecosystem there. All these "pocket PC" devices were very cool for their time, but they were really really far from mass market adoption.
There was the “sweet solution” :) When reading the stories about how the first iPhone came to be, had they tried to also have an sdk with the first release, it would not have shipped on time. And although Jobs was famously stubborn, this is something he changed his mind quite quickly on. In no small part due to the ecosystem that popped up despite him thanks to jailbreaking.
First, everyone copies. In computing space, let me give you a funny example. Apple iOS home screen is a copy and evolution of PalmOS user interface, down to four buttons, pages, graffiti area and so on.
Palm's phone (Android running one) copies Apple Watch's user interface as home screen like a revenge, with a iPhone X-esque camera bump. Funny, ironic, real.
Second, Apple is a slow moving company. They don't rush things. They are the last company to move OLEDs on their phone, because they want to implement without any apparent flaws and with a long life. i.e.: My parent's Samsung A9 2018 phones have screen burn-in, but my iPhone X doesn't. They are at a similar age.
Like them or not, their engineering is solid and novel. At least give them that. My 18 year old Mac still boots despite being dropped (I fell on top of it) and bent badly, and gone through three batteries.
My 12 year old MacBook Pro still runs like day one despite being hammered for years for high performance computing, and its disk still shows ~10% wear.
Like every company, Apple makes mistake (these keyboards were bad, yes), but they are sometimes misunderstood (you can only charge that upside down, but charging it for 2 minutes gives you 8 hours of use, so get a coffee and flex at least).
As a mechanical engineer working in software, I think both fields have completely different philosophies of product development. In hardware, you give a lot of thought to potential failure modes and contingencies before building something, which takes time. In software, I’ve rarely seen a product whose first version is completely free of bugs. Shipping with some bugs and fixing them through iterations is standard industry practice, whereas it’s less acceptable in hardware.
I think Apple is more of a hardware company than a software company these days. They invested enough time, resources, and patience in ARM for it to now compete with the once-mighty Intel x86 architecture. That kind of progress requires patience, so I don’t think we can simply call Apple a slow company or say it isn’t innovating.
Apple is always a hardware company first, they always have been. The software is supposed to be a reflection of their hardware perfection and passion (we can discuss this later).
I didn’t use slow in a negative way. On the contrary, my context behind that “slow” was “patient, detail obsessed and immaculate”. Also I didn’t mean that they are not innovating. Again, they innovate and bake well, then release things, which is how I like my hardware.
Thanks for your reply though. Seems like I missed the point I was trying to make by a mile.
> As a mechanical engineer working in software, I think both fields have completely different philosophies of product development.
A sloppy mechanical engineer can be sued for malpractice and lose their license to practice. If they do something unethical they can't blame it all on management and could end up being held personally responsible with fines and even jail time.
Sometimes I think it we might be better off if the same held for software engineers.
That is, if they're licensed. Most hardware engineers, at least in the US, are not licensed PEs; you only need a PE license if you're signing off on engineering work under government contract or public safety is a concern or its some otherwise regulated industry where the regulations require it.
Android as a whole is basically the store-brand version of iPhone. There were a lot of controversial decisions made on the first couple of iPhones that ended up being industry standard. (And yes I know Android is technically only the OS, but idc)
There is a reason the hinges on all their laptops have the perfect tension and weight. they put the work in. My laptop quality test is to hold it shut flat in the palm of one hand, and try to open the screen with out having to hold down the bottom half. All Apple laptops have passed this test. Not many other brands come close. my e590 thinkpad feels like you're prying it open.
I hear this a lot, but I have personally had terrible luck with Apple hardware. The most notable was the butterfly keyboard, but thermal issues were a fairly notable problem on several bits of kit as well.
Mind you, I've not owned any apple hardware in probably 5 or 7 years, but that's just been my luck when I did.
The two issues I have had in 20 years of Apple laptops is the butterfly keyboard and the GPU causing discoloration of the screen, both on the same MacBook Pro.
That said, I think over the years I have gotten three or four random checks in the mail from Apple over the keyboard, and they fixed it outside of warranty. With those MacBooks, you have replace the entire bottom assembly (keyboard, battery, speakers, etc.) and it isn't cheap.
The MBPs were a lot more reliable before and after the 2016-2018 model years. It was so bad that I deliberately bought the previous 2015 model in 2016.
I wish they put this level of care into their software. It's pretty shocking how nice their hardware has remained, while basic apps like Music/Photos etc. continue to decay.
Not who you are responding to, but common workflows like “show me the picture I just took” or “copy the damned image file elsewhere” are completely broken.
God help you if you own a camera and try to store its photos in apple photos.
The incredible engineering in the hardware is prized above software quality.
For most companies I'd say this is a natural tradeoff, but Apple has so much money that they can actually afford to be world class in both. Or at least, you'd expect they could. Maybe being world class in software would require delays to the hardware side of the business?
Regardless, it's definitely a weakness of the culture and I'd venture that weakness is why Apple has essentially failed at AI.
Having recently worked at Apple on the software side, my general experience was that it was fiefdom driven, there is no internal standardization on quality or process. Low level teams compete on ideas and careful politicking usually wins over quality or merit.
For AI, there were top down directives to find new ways to experiment with and incorporate into core products and processes, but as you went down the management chain, management became more conservative. First and second line managers were strongly incentivized to keep their products, roadmaps, and interfaces stable and predictable by similarly conservative stakeholders. And as such, they were generally unwilling to officially dedicate much effort to AI other than the minimum “look at how much we’re using Claude”.
In particular due to the lack of central tooling, any team trying to do much with AI essentially had to reinvent much of the stack themselves. So even small projects were largely untenable due to inevitable required scope creep.
> Having recently worked at Apple on the software side, my general experience was that it was fiefdom driven, there is no internal standardization on quality or process. Low level teams compete on ideas and careful politicking usually wins over quality or merit.
This 100% describes my experience working there in the core teams of iOS 10+ years ago.
IMO the barriers to entry are just much different, and it’s reflecting in the workforce. There’s cultural differences too, but I think the education differences is the biggest cause.
Nah. That’s not it. Software is just legitimately harder than most physical engineering (notice I didn’t say all).
How often do skyscrapers fall over, or bridges collapse, or your CPUs fail unexpectedly, or submarines implode. Rarely. In fact, I bet most people reading this thought of the same few examples.
Then look at software. When is the last time you encountered a bug? Have you ever heard of bug free software? Even at the elite, smartest, most educated levels of software, there are still bugs everywhere. Humans are essentially incapable of writing bug free software. And it isn’t because a bunch of uneducated dummies that didn’t get degrees are the ones writing it (as you arrogantly implied). It’s because it’s way fucking harder to do perfectly or near perfectly.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t incredibly hard physical engineering. Obviously there is insanely difficult engineering in nearly any variety. But if you ask a civil engineer to design you a perfect bridge, they probably will. Ask a software engineer with all the experience and education in the world to build you a perfect podcasting app, it simply isn’t happening.
How often do skyscrapers fall over, or bridges collapse
When skyscrapers fall or bridges collapse, the negligent engineers who knowingly signed off on them go to jail. When was the last time a software developer or manager went to jail over a known bug?
People going to jail for such failures are actually quite rarer than you imply. And generally software bugs rarely cause similar damage either in lives or money lost.
Civil Engineers (the ones building bridges and skyscrapers) have a culture of institutional accountability. They are certified members of a professional organization and when they sign off on a project, they do so by affixing their personal seal to it. This is their binding endorsement of the soundness of the architectural drawings. The presence of that seal can be used as evidence in court against them (criminal or civil).
It’s also possible for engineers to be stripped of their seal by the organization for failures far less severe than a bridge collapsing, such as conflicts of interest.
There isn’t anything like that in software, even though the stakes are much lower. Far more common is a total disclaimer of warranty whatsoever.
A better comparison to software bugs is, say, early fatigue cracking in a structure that requires retrofits to fix.
Regardless, the simple fact is that software just matters less in almost every case, so no one gets held accountable. It lets the culture of unaccountability breed within IT / software eng, and here we are.
lol no. This is just a sort of learned helplessness that is endemic in the industry. A way to protect your ego: nobody could have avoided shipping that critical bug to production, so it's not your incompetence that led you to do it!
You want a podcast app, I will give you a formally verified podcasting app with zero bugs. I will engineer the shit out of it. Just give me a year and $500,000. Oh, you don't want to? And that right there is why we have bugs. Not because it is hard, but because nobody gives a shit. Even though companies lose way, way more than what it would cost to prevent severe bugs from happening, some things you literally cannot prevent without government regulation, as engineering itself went through after a period of nobody giving a shit and a lot of people dying as a result.
The reason is people don't want to specify the full set of requirements to that podcast app ahead of time. You can spend your year and $500,000 and then the users will play around with it for ten minutes and then tell you it needs to do this and that as well. And one of those features requires you to go back and make fundamental changes to your architecture making you redo a lot of your subsequent work, including a lot of the formal verification.
So it is harder because there is so much freedom in terms of what features a program can have and what the set of requirements can be. And that's just for getting to version 1.0. Software is expected to change much more than hardware is and if the requirements for version 1.7 can only be met by a severe change to the architecture or an ugly hack, the ugly hack will look very tempting.
Having said all that, I'm not sure I disagree all that much with you. A lot of this could be improved with more big E Engineering in the software world.
One way could be with some kind of professional engineer certification. It should be reasonably easy to get the first time by passing a test on some hard and concrete software engineering principles. But if you are ever found to break them, you lose the license and will have to go through a lot to get it back. That of course only works if companies care about people having this certification.
Which leads (as you mention) to government regulation. As someone who works with medical device software I can see that it actually works. The regulations succeed in forcing us to figure out a reasonably complete set of requirements early, but it is an ordeal. For a recent project we had working prototypes for basically all functionality and still we spent four calendar months doing nothing but requirements before we started developing the actual product.
You're literally the first person I've ever seen suggesting this, I actually thought you were being sarcastic!
My POV (and most people's, I think) is that software is buggier because software people are wildly unserious compared to hardware people (and other engineering disciplines like civil engineering). Which is an alright trade-off in the very large majority of cases, as software is rarely very important and is easy to update, whereas hardware and bridges are very high-stake and extremely costly to update.
> if you ask a civil engineer to design you a perfect bridge, they probably will. Ask a software engineer with all the experience and education in the world to build you a perfect podcasting app, it simply isn’t happening
The civil engineer gets to rely on extremely high-quality very-serious civil engineering work, built over millenia. The software engineer relies on shaky (ie buggy) work from past nowhere-as-serious software engineering work, built over ~70y.
The fact that the software engineer can do anything at all on such small and buggy past work shows how easy it is compared to civil engineering.
In my mind, saying "software engineering is shown to be harder by the presence of bugs" is akin to saying "LEGO building is harder, people build stuff that collapses all the time"
I don't think it's whether one is harder than the other, it's about constraints or in software, lack of. Hardware is constrained by the physical world while software has much fewer constraints leading to a huge number of permutations.
Fantastic analogy, and I assume you already know where I'm going with this.
The Titan submersible [0] implosion was by all accounts due to studiously ignoring best practices and test results. They shipped fast.
In contrast, James Cameron's Deepsea Challenger [1] was a slow and methodical build, and has heavily redundant backup systems for everything. For example, the ballast release system operates by demagnetizing coils that hold the ballast; that way if they have a system failure or power loss, it fails open, and they ascent. If that somehow fails, the supports for the ballast will corrode from sea water before the oxygen runs out, so in the worst case, it's sitting in the dark for a few hours before heading back up.
Or, let's look at the U.S. Navy submarine program. I was a propulsion plant operator (reactor operator + throttleman) on a Virginia-class sub. Though I can't go into specifics, "redundant" doesn't begin to describe it. FFS, the San Francisco (688-class sub) ran into an underwater mountain at flank [2] and survived. The SUBSAFE program [3] was a direct result of the loss of the Thresher [4], and to date, no SUBSAFE-certified submarine has been lost.
> Then look at software. When is the last time you encountered a bug? Have you ever heard of bug free software?
You're conflating "free of defects" with "capable of gracefully handling defects." NASA writes as close to bug-free as I think you'll find, but even theirs isn't perfect [5]. The difference is the ability for the software to work through or around those problems. Submarine / submersible design and construction is the same. Are the engineers, welders, machinists, electricians, etc. attempting to do perfect work? Of course. They also are aware that perfection is impossible, and so the design accounts for that.
> Apple has so much money that they can actually afford to be world class in both
This is what gets me. Think about only bugs, not a single wishlist feature, just bugs. Limit to obvious-to-normies defects: so, UI bugs (ultra-low contrast oddity with certain backgrounds while scrolling lock screen notification center) or popular-feature bugs (AirDrop demands “everyone“ to receive from people in contacts, apparently in at least a couple cases).
At least in the case of UI bugs, no secret sauce seems to be required to resolve them. No particularly special feats of engineering. It seems simply dollars can fix them: QA & engineering. When I discover these obvious defects, update iOS multiple times over the course of months, and continue to experience them, I can only assume Apple prioritized having cash on hand over investing in my (our) experience.
The number of incredibly obvious bugs in Screen Time that make it frequently useless just boggles my mind. It has never worked for us at anything like 100%, it is hit or miss and frequently just does randomly stupid things. Settings reverting on their own, new app categories appearing out of thin air, etc.
Just one more thing that sours me on their stuff when I'm otherwise inclined to like it.
And then Google intentionally makes it hard to filter their stuff, too. I can ostensibly enforce YouTube limits on my Firewalla, but if I try to do that, it basically ends up blocking Google altogether. Because Google serves up some YouTube assets from google.com. I doubt very much this is by accident.
I've used 3 Apple products for more than chance interactions. A MacSE for 5 years in school, a 2015 Mac desktop for 6 months in a printshop, and an iPad for the past 2 years at work.
The SE and desktop felt like modern machines, clicks and key presses had predictable results, applications did what you told them too. On par with the Win95 and Win 7/8 I was used to at the time.
Jesus Christ, that iPad on the other hand, feels like janky Windows Vista tech rammed together by an intern. Weird UI artifacts, making the same gesture can have unpredictable results, the only function that everyone in the shop found without failure was 'undo' because it is triggered by violent shaking.
Even simple tasks like sharing a photo saved from a website is bizarrely broken. Depending on whether you saved it as a file or 'to your photos' dictates which applications can then open/share the image. And I know Android is full of it's own foibles but they took a few months to internalize. I'm going on 2 years of 'features' breaking workflow, and pixel perfect taps to activate input elements that are 5% of the screen width.
Maybe you are right, but Apple is selling hundreds of millions of iPads per year, so just maybe most people are content with the hard- and software and will just adapt to some quirks.
I am personally not always happy with the gestures, but some can be disabled. I don't have much use for my iPad apart from watching some videos, for everything that requires concentration, I will fallback to my laptop. I still think it is a marvelous machine how the hardware and iPadOS play together.
Yeah the iPad suffers from trying to live on the OS made for phones. I have an iPad but rarely use it any more, and then only for viewing content. It would be far more useful if I could use it with something closer to MacOS.
Our family has struggled with Screen Time a lot. I have come to the conclusion that it's actually beneficial for Apple to keep Screen Time as crappy as it is. That allows kids to use their iPhones more. That's good viral marketing in a very lucrative demographic and it drives up AppStore sales, micro transactions and engagement rate.
It's a dangerous game to play, though. The more it frustrates me, the more likely I am to consider alternatives when I want a new phone. They might well score a tactical win but a strategic failure.
Screen Time has had many improvements recently; I'd suggest giving it another shot with iOS 27.
No one, probably not even Facebook, intentionally ships crappy software to farm engagement numbers with kids at this point. That's a good way to get hauled up in front of congress and yelled at in a bipartisan fashion, which no company wants.
My macbook updated to Golden Gate, and upon reboot, a bunch of stuff was mysteriously not working. Couldn't access my NAS. couldn't reach my home assistant dashboard... I could still SSH into the devices, just couldn't reach them via firefox, or chrome, or a few other apps. So it wasn't my networking being out...
Turns out "forgot to ask for local network access and since the prompt was never allowed, default to denied" is a known bug, and since it never asked, there is no way to toggle either. It was just a bullet point in the reddit thread of networking things that broke in macos 27. It had a solution. Somehow my terminal had known to ask for permission, so it got it, but all my UI apps didn't.
I had to sudo a change to remove my local network from the local network list, and then it worked.
I would think that "suddenly all my local services stopped working" is a noticeable to normies bug. Most normies won't have a ton of local services, but normies that live with techies probably will have a few.
The tinfoil hat explanation for
this is that everyone at Apple is using iCloud for everything, and thus would never encounter a bug with locally-hosted services.
> Apple has so much money that they can actually afford to be world class in both
> This is what gets me. Think about only bugs, not a single wishlist feature, just bugs. Limit to obvious-to-normies defects: so, UI bugs (ultra-low contrast oddity with certain backgrounds while scrolling lock screen notification center) or popular-feature bugs (AirDrop demands “everyone“ to receive from people in contacts, apparently in at least a couple cases).
I’m hopeful Ternus can turn this around. They can be top notch in both being all vertically integrated and demanding the best in both. Let’s see.
Minimizing shipped defects is qualitatively simpler in physical engineering because the set of possible defects you have to account for is astronomically smaller.
I am a physical engineer by background but have also spent much of my career in high-reliability software systems. The problems of reliability in software systems make physical systems look like child’s play. The levels of effort are on different scales.
An important difference is that software correctness is mostly binary. In physical engineering you can usually spend a bit more money to over-engineer a component if you have any doubts or are lazy, and that works. Effort does not scale nearly as well when it comes to reliable software.
And there’s an enormous amount of good engineering effort Apple does put into both quality and crazy cool shit that gets done. People just don’t appreciate it because it’s invisible when it works and it’s not as cool as “ran a graphite heat pipe through the fold” which is probably one of the easier things they did for the fold.
There is also a much closer defined "completion" state in hardware, with responsibility also more distributed across suppliers.
You have a committed spec of one component, connected to the committed spec of another component, with committed maximum deviations.
All that is fixed, so you engineer for possible permutations and mass-production. (it's still a massive feat, I'm not downplaying it. But it has a defined completed controlled state)
In software this is much more fluent. You may have a spec of a library and the APIs you use, and your app might otherwise be static.
But you're handing alot of what you do to an OS, which juggles everything and continues to change over time. That API you're calling may not even have full control over the modules its interacting with.
Ask any giant company that's been disrupted by a startup: money does not buy taste, or quality, or core competence. It can help, if leaders understand those things.
Apple is ultimately a hardware company that's so good they can monetize software and services. But they are not really a software company, or a services company. I think Ternus' promotion recognizes that: software and services are worth a lot of money, but they're value adds to hardware.
I feel like this might be inherent to software and hardware development.
With hardware you pretty much get to restart on every product you make. Sure, you have many of the same (types) of components, but with every iteration, you move them around and pretty much have to rethink how every part fits together and interacts. And it has to work when devices get to consumers, because you can't visit everyone to solder on a wire you forgot. (You can always tell people they're holding the phone wrong though.)
With software you have this continuous blob that you keep adding features to. You never really get to rethink how it all goes together from the ground up when the design changes, you just slap a transparent UI on top of you existing code and call it a day. If it turns out there are bugs, not a problem, you just push an update and hope that fixes more than it breaks.
I really don’t understand the criticism of Apple’s software.
I think we need to keep in mind a couple of things:
1. It’s software designed for the masses. It’s not intended to be a power user’s playground.
2. There’s no such thing as perfect software. If you really look hard for alternatives to the Music or Photos app (to use your examples), it’s actually extremely difficult to find anything that is without compromise, bugs, or other downsides.
As someone who has moved off of many of Apple’s apps, like my move from iCloud Photos to Ente, I’m really still accepting a decent amount of compromises. It’s better in some ways, worse in others.
And then there’s some other apps where I just can’t find a good alternative. I’d love something like Apple Notes but is cross-platform with a Linux app specifically. There’s just basically nothing like that out there, certainly not at a good price, and most of them end up over-complicated or with a strange UI.[1]
And when we step back and look at how many apps Apple makes it’s mind-boggling, and really, most of them are at least a mild “good.”
[1] Closest I’ve found are Craft and Zoho Notebook. Zoho gets the price right, it’s dirt cheap, and has a Linux app (though it’s basically a web app). Zoho bothers me for being ugly though. Craft is slick on iOS with a web app only on desktop, but it’s pricey if you leave the free tier. For my criteria it’s important that the apps support sharing, collaboration, and notifications when the other person updates a note. I’m honestly not sure if these two alternatives hit every requirement because I gave on both pretty quick and accepted being stuck in Apple Notes for now. Going to iCloud.com on my Linux system isn’t horrible.
I just don’t really agree with the idea that Apple’s apps are crashing and memory leaking all over the place, and if they are, not more than the median application.
For one thing, the power user crowd tends to babysit their activity monitor and get massively upset when an electron app dares to consume memory.
In my mind, the only thing that matters for non-server apps is whether or not the user experience is good. Memory consumption is just a number. Apple doesn’t even advertise how much memory many of their products have on them. They expect that their users don’t have to think about that, and as long as that remains true, I really don’t mind if Apple Music is eating up 2GB of RAM behind the scenes.
I don’t really think it’s something to agree or not agree on. This is the experience I’ve had as an Apple user. I use their products extensively and like them quite a bit. The issues I’ve seen I deem unacceptable for a company of this caliber. I’m not talking about .6 seconds of load time or absolute customization. I’m talking about FaceTime actually switching when I click the button. Apple Music not leaking memory. Basic usability not niche items.
Now unfortunately apples stuff is usually a cut above other software I’ve used but in my opinion is nowhere near as good as it should be.
I guess I’m not understanding the standard here. You’re saying they’re usually a cut above other software but simultaneously their software quality is unacceptable.
I don’t even really disagree with the negative experiences you’ve had, I’m just more saying that those experiences are inevitable in software. Being above average is about as good as Apple has ever been.
And I think that standard is also true with hardware. A lot of their hardware is supremely overrated. The MacBook Pro has a sharp edge that cuts into your wrist and has a gigantic notch on the screen.
2. I’ve had better luck with Apple software but I’d still categorize it as “bad” relative to the good software I’ve interacted with.
This is a form for software engineers. In the 90’s users accepted things like applications crashing due to lack of memory protection in the OS. We know to expect better.
Again I’m not asking for some alternate reality version of software. I’m asking them to fix clear issues that they do not seem to care about.
Not to mention Apple is a large engineering organization with plenty of talent. The software dosent need to be bug free but I shouldn’t run into as many issues as I do.
Some other fun ones:
Finder locking up and refusing to minimize
FaceTime putting me in a call with “testing” when I switch devices
Safari’s extension icon flashing on and off on iOS
Stalling on the lock screen despite me looking directly at the phone to unlock it
To me these are issues that should not make it past the engineers and layers of testing.
not quite, you're missing some crucial points. "Apple should be able to be dramatically more perfect than anyone else in software has managed to be" is off by a lot
How much better is Apple hardware compared to the median? I don’t really think the iPhone is better than most Chinese brand phones. It charges slower and doesn’t have the latest battery technology. Most of what it makes it better than the competition is the software.
This angel’s halo around Apple was always a marketing illusion. They make above average hardware and above average software. Nothing more, nothing less.
The problem as I see it is
not crashes and leaks. It’s that basic features are barely functional and the UI is not very usable.
Stupid examples from recently:
- The iOS 27 Preview app’s search feature appears to be present while in markup mode but missing while not in markup mode (this is quite reproducible for me).
- Mobile Safari regularly gets into a state where the overlay showing the current website domain gets stuck obscuring an important part of the site.
- On MacOS if you accidentally switch desktops you cannot switch back until the animation from the first switch finishes.
- Spotlight is still hilariously bad.
- The MacOS Music app’s AirPlay controls are barely functional.
- If you have an excessive number of desktop apps open, finding the one you want is gratuitously difficult. Sure, the bottom dock widget is pretty, but that doesn’t make it efficient.
- While typing this message, multiple different glitchy UI elements have appeared and disappeared.
- On iOS, if the keyboard is showing and you don’t want it, tough luck.
> I just don’t really agree with the idea that Apple’s apps are crashing and memory leaking all over the place, and if they are, not more than the median application.
Apple has some amazing engineering in the basic OS layer and the UI kit, but everything on top of it is just bad. E.g. it now takes about 5 seconds to "Privacy & Security" in the system settings, and I can see a visible delay when switching between sections (e.g. to "Screen Time").
Network settings are just embarrassing at this point - you can't sort the WiFi networks by name when looking at the saved settings!
Time Machine has been a disaster zone for the last 20 years. The keyboard navigation experience in macOS is a disgrace, worse than Win3.11 The virtualization experience of macOS sucks, and there is no support for containers (even Windows has them!).
Apple used to be a company whose public image was intrinsically inseparable from the intergalactic ego of its chief executive. Now it's just your typical slop company run by slop executives looking to maximize next quarter's share price before they exit through the revolving door, on their way to the next company in line to harvest.
Those of us who used Macs in the late PPC and early Intel days know what Apple is capable of. This current trend where your only fix is to reboot/reformat/reset preferences, or suffer, is trash. People these days are just used to everything being trash, so Apples current software quality seems OK to them.
My main problem with modern Apple software is I feel the design has been on a near constant gradual decline trend overall (except for the huge dip with Liquid Ass of course) and it has gotten buggier too. I'm just never going to update my iPad because I updated my other Apple devices and I deeply regret it.
I actually have felt this way for a fairly long time but Apple always baits me. Like the twelve or fifteen different times Apple OSes have finally supported some parts of WebM on certain devices sometimes when it works. Oh my god, I gotta update so I can have another couple WebMs load successfully only in Safari and not in any other app that doesn't decode it itself. Or back when I used an iPhone, third party keyboards - I use a lot of jailbreak tweaks but I gotta give that up so I can upgrade for third-party keyboard support that is so ass that nobody would ever use it. Heck, I wish I had updated my iPad even less. One fewer major version and I could've made use of the virtualization support that was dormant - but Apple fixed the glitch that let you use it on Apple Silicon iPads, so now you can't. Thanks! This is important to do because it helps... Uhh, security, probably? Something like that.
Since Snow Leopard or so, most of my Apple software upgrades have been bitter sweet at best, but usually just bitter, like I've been baited into having a worse experience.
Of course, it is probably apparent that I simply don't like Apple very much, especially not anymore. And I hate to have to justify myself by doing this, but we lack the maturity needed for me to avoid it, so... I am going to point out the obvious that this is hardly limited to Apple. GNOME 3 may be the single biggest downgrade any desktop system I've ever used has been. It has improved over time, but GNOME 3 has never been even close to as relatively good for its time as GNOME 2 was. Same for KDE 3 -> KDE 4 although I think as a rare standout KDE Plasma 6 is genuinely getting better continuously over time and remains one of the things I am excited to update. Windows 10 -> Windows 11 was so bad that it seemingly durably made several of my friends switch to Linux full time and just simply give up on things that absolutely can't be made to work on Linux - that is a powerful statement, and months later it seems they were indeed not fucking around. Android has been enshittifying at an alarming pace, too, although I don't feel like the Android experience from a software perspective is degrading or getting worse, but Google really knows how to blow their own leg off and by god they're going to do everything they can to make sure that all of the advantages they have over Apple are rendered meaningless so they can drag themselves kicking and screaming out of accidentally having succeeded at something.
I don't feel like it should be necessary for me to justify this, because Apple's recent growing incompetence in shipping working software and release engineering stands on its own regardless of industry trends. I'd SSH into my Mac Mini, but I can't. I have to go reset it, because it's been on for 60 days and can no longer open new network sockets. (I am not making this up. macOS genuinely has/had that bug and mine genuinely is in that state right now.) It's not that everyone else is doing great. When it comes to Linux systems it's easy to give them a lot of slack because they simply have no goddamned money, but still, things could be better. It's just that Apple is richer than ever and yet worse than ever at shipping software. I struggle to square the circle.
From an Apple employee culture perspective, software team is second or third class to the hardware group.
A friend on the App Store software team wasn't invited to a private iPhone Duo preview, because she wasn't in the hardware division. She felt so disrespected and is considering leaving.
My sister (on the hardware team) shared that its a constantly cycle of non-hardware folks getting shafted and then they complain loud enough until they get 'equal' treatment until the next unfair thing rolls out.
Dude, my M5 MacBook Pro gets too hot to touch while idling, and it's all background system processes. You don't understand the criticism of their software because instead of listening to the criticism, you've dismissed it as power user fantasy without even understanding the problems.
And friend, I didn't pay for an eight thousand dollar machine for software "designed for the masses" instead of serious professionals and computer enthusiasts. "The masses" are not spending eight thousand dollars on a premium laptop marketed towards professionals. This is an expensive machine and I should be in the driver's seat, not Apple. It should not take arcane, brittle incantations to turn off Siri and dozens of background "AI" services that melt my computer and literally burn my fingertips in exchange for recommending filenames in Pages.
And that's not even mentioning the multitudes of extremely serious system and driver bugs piling up over the last several major versions, nor the grotesque and inconsistent Liquid Glass malarkey.
These kind of comments are just firmly in the “I don’t believe you territory.”
And I’m not trying to defend Apple at all, I don’t even have a MacBook anymore. I’m more opposed to these extreme tech opinions that seem more emotional than objective.
What is emotional about my comment? Everything I said was objective, including that extra premium hardware should at least come with software that doesn't give it a negative value. As in, given the choice, you could not pay me $8000 to use macOS over Linux... once Asahi/Gravity are up to par I won't look back.
What am I not believing? I'm responding to your comment which was dismissive about real, serious concerns that people have surfaced about the sliding quality of Apple software. You seem to be the one not believing things might not be how you perceive them.
They could go a long way if they 1) slowed down the major OS releases (I mean, like stop them altogether, actually?) and 2) give priority to all bugs and not keep kicking bugs down the road because: we-already-shipped-with-those-bugs-so-they-must-not-be-that-big-of-a-deal.
I'd add 3), more pair-programming between senior engineers and junior engineers—to hopefully make junior engineers better engineers.
I have to say though, when I knew I was heading out of the company (Apple) within a year, I tried to be a "mentor" to the junior engineers at Apple. And they wouldn't have me. I suppose I was too old… To be sure, they knew Swift better than I did, ha ha.
(Oh well, I tried. I did push back very publicly against management during some of the team meetings—I was told by a few of the junior engineers as I was retiring that they appreciated that example.)
If the last decade of Siri has taught us anything, they can literally ship the worst version of a thing and people will still buy an iphone. They’re just that good.
I agree that as a power user I might tend to notice bugs more often, but when there is no relevant error message for the normies, to even bother looking up; it takes a really deep breath for me to remind myself why android ain’t a thing I would want to go back to.
I guess, I got into the ecosystem a bit later than its prime time where things apparently had better software quality in the walled swamp.
I’d consider this fixed thanks to agentic coding. Not fixed right now, but I trust Apple to scrap all cost saving workarounds (like Electron and its ilk) and go back to native every little thing. “Mac-assed” apps as they say.
The one thing that’s still unanswered is if and how quickly they will fix all the UX and UI mistakes left from the Alan Dye / Jony Ive era. Yes, Jony Ive - and his decision to scrap all Skeuomorphism on iOS which then was adapted for MacOS.
You mean Music/Photos on iOS or macOS? I mostly use Music on macOS. I use Photos a lot on iOS. Both work very well for me, and I've been through the iterations all the way since the early 2000s iTunes. What I don't like about Photos is that it's confusing to use sometimes (scroll up/down to find the buttons, the albums etc).
I have no idea what the Photos complaints are about. It's like iPhoto but with a few AI search features added lately.
Music on Mac has been getting bad IF you're still using a local music library carried over from iTunes, mainly cause they keep trying to shove Apple Music into it. Even in the iTunes days they kept removing nice features after v7. Moving iPhone syncing to Finder made sense at a high level, but somehow it ended up becoming super glitchy and never gets fixed, seems like not a priority.
I still use my local music library carried over from iTunes. And I often drop more MP3's and so on into it. My dad had some issues with the iTunes volume location on an external disk but I've been lucky.
Photos- interesting, I haven't seen any AI stuff on it. I'm still on Tahoe though. Is it coming in Golden gate?
It's older than Tahoe. You can search a word and it'll find pictures containing that object. Not LLM, just vision.
Music could be a lot worse. I learned what it's like playing local music on a Samsung phone recently. Had to use ADB to copy files in because Android File Transfer is deprecated. The phone has no Music equivalent, so I use VLC, which everyone swears is perfect for this but it's actually super clunky. Meanwhile I have a library on my Mac copied over from iTunes v3 with new songs being added and synced over (with issues lately). But yes it has issues with external drives.
I was in bed, a little away from my MacBook on the desk that was playing some music.
I opened Apple's official Remote app on my iPhone, that lets you control your Mac's Music app.
Both devices were on the same WiFi network and same Apple ID, but Remote was unable to find the Mac. When it did, it was unable to connect.
I opened the ChatGPT app on my iPhone. Went into Codex mode. Asked the ChatGPT running on my Mac to control the Music app to play a different playlist.
Worked within seconds.
Gosh these decrepit giants deserve the unprecedented disruption that's coming for their ass.
You must have missed the news about how Siri is so shit now that it can't even set a timer on the Apple Watch because it can't find a "Clock app"
Also:
- When there's multiple Apple devices in the same room, your Siri command doesn't always get intercepted by your intended target. Have you even used Siri in these situations?
- Siri doesn't let you see all your playlists etc like the Remote app does.
- The official app meant for this exact purpose failed to work.
- Codex can remote control every fucking app, not just Music, even those without Siri "hooks"
Apple is no longer the "It just works" and hasn't been for years. Read the room and smell the discontent
Yeah, I’ve got all the Apple stuff. Works fine in this situation 99% of the time. But if you have an idea about how they could make something that ambiguous 100% reliable you should write it up.
Notice how this comment has no counter examples of a quality OS + software stack? It’s because it doesn’t exist. Any example they could give there would be 20 nay sayers who disagree in the replies. Your favorite software is dog shit to someone else.
Naming is hard. Especially for chips. There are multiple product lines that perform in different ways with multiple price/performance optimizations.
8 means high-end. Gen 6 means the 6th generation. Elite is a bit like Core or M in that it describes their latest chip process. Extreme means it's the high end chip of that generation's chip.
You cannot do it right. Intel had a sort-of-useful naming scheme with their "Core i7 3600" naming style, except you couldn't tell if the i7 4500 would outperform the i5 3700 or not. Also there was a k and a u after the CPU name. They stepped away from that scheme, now they have somehow invented an even less useful naming scheme. And, of course, the Celeron/Pentium line never followed any comparable naming scheme either.
Apple then tried; they came up with the A4/A5/A6 for phones and M1/M2/M3 for computers, simple enough. Well, until you got the Pro/Ultra/Max (Max, of course, being slower than the Ultra, because Max doesn't mean maximum performance). Then their A chip ended up in a laptop and their M chip ended up in a tablet and their weird headset got a new R chip that never got a newer version. Oh, and for laptops you need to pay attention to how many cores your M chip has, because there are multiple SKUs with the same name differentiated by core count.
AMD had a useful-ish naming scheme for Ryzen but then they had to fuck up their mobile chip names. Then they did their weird AI product line, which killed any serious attempt to track what chips are sold at what performance points.
If Qualcomm do everything right, their next generation will have a mid-tier chip that outperforms their current top model. None of these names and numbers are useful for comparing.
Mediatek is doing the Intel thing now with their Dimensity #### where the first number is the market segment, the other numbers indicate performance and generation within the market segment, and the suffix indicates what features were glued onto the SoC.
The High Yield YouTube channel has a good early look at die shots of the new A20 chip used in the iPhone Duo and discussion of the changes from the prior generations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8bxkCKNiuA
They have a similar video comparing the M6 to the M5.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uA7WLmlg1kM
A guy I knew was a mechanical engineer for Apple, did some really innovative stuff. The level of care and detail and attention they give to every element is like nothing you've ever seen. A good dude and was one of the best engineers I ever met but the pressure and the corporate games made him a permanent emotional headcase!
Wait until you see how non-Apple hardware innovates... that Apple then copies.
Like what?
foldable screens
Yes, Apple reliably lets other manufacturers discover the hard problems, and then Apple solves them. And then residents of HN and Reddit think this is a great zinger every time.
Apple buys them. Paying Sammy $330 bucks for every one of those handsets they sell: https://www.gadgetreview.com/apple-is-reportedly-paying-sams...
Apple pays Samsung for making the things Apple designed.
Like folding screens in question?
Possibly. It's complicated. It's not uncommon for Company A to produce a design based on Company B's proprietary R&D. Just because Samsung is making those displays for Apple doesn't mean that Apple didn't do major parts of the R&D. Nor does it mean that Samsung can make the same displays for Samsung, or for their other customers.
Just because something is possible doesn't mean we can deny ground truth. Apple did not invent folded screens by any stretch of the imagination, and is the latest one to the party, even for Apples standard of "freshness" it is late.
That's good, we saw how the early ones were. Nobody said Apple invented the concept of folding screens.
They could have. It's sad to see a trillion-dollar smartphone company with such shallow ambitions.
That puts me in mind of Google paying Apple billions per year to have Google as the default search engine and (maybe more importantly) discourage Apple from building their own search engine.
Knowing what we know today, probably a good choice as search engines themselves are quickly getting less usage due to AIs. (I for one would never have predicted there would be something that could replace search engines, but then I also thought Facebook was here to stay forever for everyone. Happy to be wrong)
There are plenty of excellent engineering products that Apple have engineered themselves. Starting with the iPhone itself which was an enormous cut above the competition.
Yes Apple has "copied" or brought out its own version of particular products before, usually in a much better state.
> Starting with the iPhone itself which was an enormous cut above the competition
I wouldn't say that at all. Correct me if I misremember, but the original iPhone didn't even have an ecosystem of apps outside a few Apple-sanctioned ones. I was thoroughly unimpressed when it came out, at the missed (in retrospect, deferred) opportunity.
My older Palm device felt superior in nearly every way I cared about.
Considering practically every smartphone to this day is derivative of the 2007 glass slab hardware design (and software UX), I'd say they were on to something even if it didn't launch with the App Store immediately.
> Considering practically every smartphone to this day is derivative of the 2007 glass slab hardware design (and software UX), I'd say they were on to something
Lowest cost of production is what that formfactor provides.
Palm's devices, by contrast, felt like a polished river stone in the pocket. I know which I prefer.
> Lowest cost of production is what that formfactor provides.
Maybe, but to compete with the iPhone everything else that goes into the production of a smartphone would have been way more expensive. More compute requirements, better screens, way more software engineering headcount.
Palm's Pre[1] supported multi-tasking, having multiple emails open at the same time to read and compose, unified instant messaging, copy/paste and myriad other features iPhone didn't have at the time.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Pre
Your older Palm device was almost certainly much worse at browsing the web both in fidelity and interactivity. Loading a full desktop website on a device that small and being able to pinch to zoom in to sections was pretty novel at the time.
Yeah arguably the biggest innovation the iPhone had was the capacitive touch screen - they weren't the first (that was the LG Prada) and the various interactions like pinch zooming and inertial scrolling were done before, but they did have a 2004 patent on capacitive multi-touch screens.
Yeah as I recall it, the iPhone was the first device where touch felt really natural and fun. They nailed that feeling that you’re actually interacting directly with what is under your finger. Previous touch devices I tried felt kind of disconnected because they hadn’t sweated the details in the same way.
thats a very different narrative though.
but this discussion always has the tendency to go completely off teh rails because there are so many people unable to talk rationally about apple products.
innovation basically never happens in a vacuum, and especially apple products have historically "come second" into a product category -- and just nail the implementation so well that they just felt great to use. (and yes, smartphones were well established by the time the iphone was released. thats what i'd call the product category there. dialing in to ever narrower definitions to make it into a "new" category is exactly the reason why this can never be settled - because you can call _every_ product a new product category like that)
So now we got endless discussions about "who was first" even though its completely meaningless to ask this question -- because that "previous product" also took inspiration from other products, and if you squinted enough, could also be called "just an iteration" vs a "innovation".
It’s not really a different narrative, though: They started with the idea that the phone should be nearly all screen (which was very controversial at the time) and designed the software around that. No one had a UI or UX that was as fully committed to this idea as the iPhone, although they certainly got inspiration from others.
You’re right that Apple isn’t usually a first mover within a product segment. But that have a tendency to nail what they consider to be a better execution of that product.
I'm so glad someone else remembers and values their contributions here.
That full package of capacitive touch, a UI and UX optimised for touch, inertial scrolling with pinch and zoom came together to form something much greater than the sum of the individual parts: an experience that could convince you to part with physical buttons
Also I think it took me almost a decade to find a touch keyboard (fleksy) I liked as much as the iOS keyboard. I think people also take for granted how far ahead their quiet innovations in the touch keyboard were without fanfare.
The ones in 2007 were unusable, the original android ones were terrible and I didn't much like swiftkey. Google Keyboard came much later but lacked some of the smoothing and tappiness of the Apple one
I went from a Palm Treo to the iPhone in 2007, these devices were not in the same league. Years apart in all aspects. I had an external box for tomtom gps on the treo and a janky mp3 player and some crappy apps on a resistive touch screen that looked like it had a permanent hazy film over it as all resistive ones do.
The apps part was rectified pretty quickly but even the kind of halfway decent web apps available after iPhone launch beat treo apps.
This is true, but I felt the same with the HTC Dream, although I guess Apple was first, they were more than a year apart. I don't miss typing 'reboot\n' in any app, or at any time, and the phone rebooting, because the first release had a left-open root session.
So the Android polish wasn't quite there on release either.
I'm not an apple fanboy but they were the first to really understand and solve touch screen phones - they went with capacitive tech when everyone was doing resistive and they went all-in on the UX and studied how touch should feel and how the UI should reflect it.
They were by no means the first smartphone nor were they the first touch phone but the "iphone moment" was coined because they figured out how to make frontier tech mainstream.
They also weren't the first to make an MP3 player but it sure felt that way with the ipod. I don't know how people have rewritten this history in their minds
Nokia was dominating the smartphone market when iPhone was released. There was no ecosystem there. All these "pocket PC" devices were very cool for their time, but they were really really far from mass market adoption.
an ecosystem of apps
To be fair here, you're replying to a thread where people were discussing mechanical engineering, and hardware. Not software.
Held to that metric, the software layer isn't part of the original discussion.
Not saying that discussing other things is wrong, but the comment you replied to seems to be "The hardware was an enormous cut above".
There was the “sweet solution” :) When reading the stories about how the first iPhone came to be, had they tried to also have an sdk with the first release, it would not have shipped on time. And although Jobs was famously stubborn, this is something he changed his mind quite quickly on. In no small part due to the ecosystem that popped up despite him thanks to jailbreaking.
And on the other side of that argument are people lamenting that it didn’t stay web app centric with PWAs and whatnot
That is a problem with their software mostly.
This is wrong for two main reasons.
First, everyone copies. In computing space, let me give you a funny example. Apple iOS home screen is a copy and evolution of PalmOS user interface, down to four buttons, pages, graffiti area and so on.
Palm's phone (Android running one) copies Apple Watch's user interface as home screen like a revenge, with a iPhone X-esque camera bump. Funny, ironic, real.
Second, Apple is a slow moving company. They don't rush things. They are the last company to move OLEDs on their phone, because they want to implement without any apparent flaws and with a long life. i.e.: My parent's Samsung A9 2018 phones have screen burn-in, but my iPhone X doesn't. They are at a similar age.
Like them or not, their engineering is solid and novel. At least give them that. My 18 year old Mac still boots despite being dropped (I fell on top of it) and bent badly, and gone through three batteries.
My 12 year old MacBook Pro still runs like day one despite being hammered for years for high performance computing, and its disk still shows ~10% wear.
Like every company, Apple makes mistake (these keyboards were bad, yes), but they are sometimes misunderstood (you can only charge that upside down, but charging it for 2 minutes gives you 8 hours of use, so get a coffee and flex at least).
As a mechanical engineer working in software, I think both fields have completely different philosophies of product development. In hardware, you give a lot of thought to potential failure modes and contingencies before building something, which takes time. In software, I’ve rarely seen a product whose first version is completely free of bugs. Shipping with some bugs and fixing them through iterations is standard industry practice, whereas it’s less acceptable in hardware.
I think Apple is more of a hardware company than a software company these days. They invested enough time, resources, and patience in ARM for it to now compete with the once-mighty Intel x86 architecture. That kind of progress requires patience, so I don’t think we can simply call Apple a slow company or say it isn’t innovating.
Apple is always a hardware company first, they always have been. The software is supposed to be a reflection of their hardware perfection and passion (we can discuss this later).
I didn’t use slow in a negative way. On the contrary, my context behind that “slow” was “patient, detail obsessed and immaculate”. Also I didn’t mean that they are not innovating. Again, they innovate and bake well, then release things, which is how I like my hardware.
Thanks for your reply though. Seems like I missed the point I was trying to make by a mile.
> As a mechanical engineer working in software, I think both fields have completely different philosophies of product development.
A sloppy mechanical engineer can be sued for malpractice and lose their license to practice. If they do something unethical they can't blame it all on management and could end up being held personally responsible with fines and even jail time.
Sometimes I think it we might be better off if the same held for software engineers.
That is, if they're licensed. Most hardware engineers, at least in the US, are not licensed PEs; you only need a PE license if you're signing off on engineering work under government contract or public safety is a concern or its some otherwise regulated industry where the regulations require it.
Android as a whole is basically the store-brand version of iPhone. There were a lot of controversial decisions made on the first couple of iPhones that ended up being industry standard. (And yes I know Android is technically only the OS, but idc)
He left to OpenAI, didn't he?
Famously a much more laidback working environment
All that attention to detail only to load these devices with buggy software, ads and "always on listening" creepy Siri "AI".
There is a reason the hinges on all their laptops have the perfect tension and weight. they put the work in. My laptop quality test is to hold it shut flat in the palm of one hand, and try to open the screen with out having to hold down the bottom half. All Apple laptops have passed this test. Not many other brands come close. my e590 thinkpad feels like you're prying it open.
I hear this a lot, but I have personally had terrible luck with Apple hardware. The most notable was the butterfly keyboard, but thermal issues were a fairly notable problem on several bits of kit as well.
Mind you, I've not owned any apple hardware in probably 5 or 7 years, but that's just been my luck when I did.
The two issues I have had in 20 years of Apple laptops is the butterfly keyboard and the GPU causing discoloration of the screen, both on the same MacBook Pro.
That said, I think over the years I have gotten three or four random checks in the mail from Apple over the keyboard, and they fixed it outside of warranty. With those MacBooks, you have replace the entire bottom assembly (keyboard, battery, speakers, etc.) and it isn't cheap.
The MBPs were a lot more reliable before and after the 2016-2018 model years. It was so bad that I deliberately bought the previous 2015 model in 2016.
Can we encourage Apple somehow to put this guy in charge of their on-screen keyboard?
I wish they put this level of care into their software. It's pretty shocking how nice their hardware has remained, while basic apps like Music/Photos etc. continue to decay.
Out of curiosity, what’s wrong with photos? Do you mean the one on the Mac or the iOS version?
Not who you are responding to, but common workflows like “show me the picture I just took” or “copy the damned image file elsewhere” are completely broken.
God help you if you own a camera and try to store its photos in apple photos.
what’s the problem? i keep thousands of photos from my camera on icloud and it works fine
Very confused, both these functions work fine for me. The share sheet is right there.
I find manually tagging people in photos and especially videos to be an incredibly frustrating experience on macOS (and impossible on iOS).
For as much as Apple is pushing memories in Photos it is surprising to me that the ability to specify who is in a photo/video is so overlooked.
The incredible engineering in the hardware is prized above software quality.
For most companies I'd say this is a natural tradeoff, but Apple has so much money that they can actually afford to be world class in both. Or at least, you'd expect they could. Maybe being world class in software would require delays to the hardware side of the business?
Regardless, it's definitely a weakness of the culture and I'd venture that weakness is why Apple has essentially failed at AI.
Having recently worked at Apple on the software side, my general experience was that it was fiefdom driven, there is no internal standardization on quality or process. Low level teams compete on ideas and careful politicking usually wins over quality or merit.
For AI, there were top down directives to find new ways to experiment with and incorporate into core products and processes, but as you went down the management chain, management became more conservative. First and second line managers were strongly incentivized to keep their products, roadmaps, and interfaces stable and predictable by similarly conservative stakeholders. And as such, they were generally unwilling to officially dedicate much effort to AI other than the minimum “look at how much we’re using Claude”.
In particular due to the lack of central tooling, any team trying to do much with AI essentially had to reinvent much of the stack themselves. So even small projects were largely untenable due to inevitable required scope creep.
> Having recently worked at Apple on the software side, my general experience was that it was fiefdom driven, there is no internal standardization on quality or process. Low level teams compete on ideas and careful politicking usually wins over quality or merit.
This 100% describes my experience working there in the core teams of iOS 10+ years ago.
Big E Engineering vs little e engineering.
IMO the barriers to entry are just much different, and it’s reflecting in the workforce. There’s cultural differences too, but I think the education differences is the biggest cause.
Nah. That’s not it. Software is just legitimately harder than most physical engineering (notice I didn’t say all).
How often do skyscrapers fall over, or bridges collapse, or your CPUs fail unexpectedly, or submarines implode. Rarely. In fact, I bet most people reading this thought of the same few examples.
Then look at software. When is the last time you encountered a bug? Have you ever heard of bug free software? Even at the elite, smartest, most educated levels of software, there are still bugs everywhere. Humans are essentially incapable of writing bug free software. And it isn’t because a bunch of uneducated dummies that didn’t get degrees are the ones writing it (as you arrogantly implied). It’s because it’s way fucking harder to do perfectly or near perfectly.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t incredibly hard physical engineering. Obviously there is insanely difficult engineering in nearly any variety. But if you ask a civil engineer to design you a perfect bridge, they probably will. Ask a software engineer with all the experience and education in the world to build you a perfect podcasting app, it simply isn’t happening.
How often do skyscrapers fall over, or bridges collapse
When skyscrapers fall or bridges collapse, the negligent engineers who knowingly signed off on them go to jail. When was the last time a software developer or manager went to jail over a known bug?
People going to jail for such failures are actually quite rarer than you imply. And generally software bugs rarely cause similar damage either in lives or money lost.
None of that invalidates my point.
Civil Engineers (the ones building bridges and skyscrapers) have a culture of institutional accountability. They are certified members of a professional organization and when they sign off on a project, they do so by affixing their personal seal to it. This is their binding endorsement of the soundness of the architectural drawings. The presence of that seal can be used as evidence in court against them (criminal or civil).
It’s also possible for engineers to be stripped of their seal by the organization for failures far less severe than a bridge collapsing, such as conflicts of interest.
There isn’t anything like that in software, even though the stakes are much lower. Far more common is a total disclaimer of warranty whatsoever.
A better comparison to software bugs is, say, early fatigue cracking in a structure that requires retrofits to fix.
Regardless, the simple fact is that software just matters less in almost every case, so no one gets held accountable. It lets the culture of unaccountability breed within IT / software eng, and here we are.
lol no. This is just a sort of learned helplessness that is endemic in the industry. A way to protect your ego: nobody could have avoided shipping that critical bug to production, so it's not your incompetence that led you to do it!
You want a podcast app, I will give you a formally verified podcasting app with zero bugs. I will engineer the shit out of it. Just give me a year and $500,000. Oh, you don't want to? And that right there is why we have bugs. Not because it is hard, but because nobody gives a shit. Even though companies lose way, way more than what it would cost to prevent severe bugs from happening, some things you literally cannot prevent without government regulation, as engineering itself went through after a period of nobody giving a shit and a lot of people dying as a result.
The reason is people don't want to specify the full set of requirements to that podcast app ahead of time. You can spend your year and $500,000 and then the users will play around with it for ten minutes and then tell you it needs to do this and that as well. And one of those features requires you to go back and make fundamental changes to your architecture making you redo a lot of your subsequent work, including a lot of the formal verification.
So it is harder because there is so much freedom in terms of what features a program can have and what the set of requirements can be. And that's just for getting to version 1.0. Software is expected to change much more than hardware is and if the requirements for version 1.7 can only be met by a severe change to the architecture or an ugly hack, the ugly hack will look very tempting.
Having said all that, I'm not sure I disagree all that much with you. A lot of this could be improved with more big E Engineering in the software world.
One way could be with some kind of professional engineer certification. It should be reasonably easy to get the first time by passing a test on some hard and concrete software engineering principles. But if you are ever found to break them, you lose the license and will have to go through a lot to get it back. That of course only works if companies care about people having this certification.
Which leads (as you mention) to government regulation. As someone who works with medical device software I can see that it actually works. The regulations succeed in forcing us to figure out a reasonably complete set of requirements early, but it is an ordeal. For a recent project we had working prototypes for basically all functionality and still we spent four calendar months doing nothing but requirements before we started developing the actual product.
And yet medical devices still have software bugs. There are 24 software related recalls in the FDA medical device recall database just this year so far: https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfRes/res...
You're literally the first person I've ever seen suggesting this, I actually thought you were being sarcastic!
My POV (and most people's, I think) is that software is buggier because software people are wildly unserious compared to hardware people (and other engineering disciplines like civil engineering). Which is an alright trade-off in the very large majority of cases, as software is rarely very important and is easy to update, whereas hardware and bridges are very high-stake and extremely costly to update.
> if you ask a civil engineer to design you a perfect bridge, they probably will. Ask a software engineer with all the experience and education in the world to build you a perfect podcasting app, it simply isn’t happening
The civil engineer gets to rely on extremely high-quality very-serious civil engineering work, built over millenia. The software engineer relies on shaky (ie buggy) work from past nowhere-as-serious software engineering work, built over ~70y.
The fact that the software engineer can do anything at all on such small and buggy past work shows how easy it is compared to civil engineering.
In my mind, saying "software engineering is shown to be harder by the presence of bugs" is akin to saying "LEGO building is harder, people build stuff that collapses all the time"
I think the essence of what OP is saying is that software has a much broader search space of possible behaviors than physical engineering does.
I don't think it's whether one is harder than the other, it's about constraints or in software, lack of. Hardware is constrained by the physical world while software has much fewer constraints leading to a huge number of permutations.
> submarines implode
Fantastic analogy, and I assume you already know where I'm going with this.
The Titan submersible [0] implosion was by all accounts due to studiously ignoring best practices and test results. They shipped fast.
In contrast, James Cameron's Deepsea Challenger [1] was a slow and methodical build, and has heavily redundant backup systems for everything. For example, the ballast release system operates by demagnetizing coils that hold the ballast; that way if they have a system failure or power loss, it fails open, and they ascent. If that somehow fails, the supports for the ballast will corrode from sea water before the oxygen runs out, so in the worst case, it's sitting in the dark for a few hours before heading back up.
Or, let's look at the U.S. Navy submarine program. I was a propulsion plant operator (reactor operator + throttleman) on a Virginia-class sub. Though I can't go into specifics, "redundant" doesn't begin to describe it. FFS, the San Francisco (688-class sub) ran into an underwater mountain at flank [2] and survived. The SUBSAFE program [3] was a direct result of the loss of the Thresher [4], and to date, no SUBSAFE-certified submarine has been lost.
> Then look at software. When is the last time you encountered a bug? Have you ever heard of bug free software?
You're conflating "free of defects" with "capable of gracefully handling defects." NASA writes as close to bug-free as I think you'll find, but even theirs isn't perfect [5]. The difference is the ability for the software to work through or around those problems. Submarine / submersible design and construction is the same. Are the engineers, welders, machinists, electricians, etc. attempting to do perfect work? Of course. They also are aware that perfection is impossible, and so the design accounts for that.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(submersible)
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepsea_Challenger
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_San_Francisco_(SSN-711)#Gr...
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUBSAFE
4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_(SSN-593)#Disaste...
5: https://space.stackexchange.com/a/37694
> The incredible engineering in the hardware is prized above software quality.
then let me root and customize the software to my liking
> Apple has so much money that they can actually afford to be world class in both
This is what gets me. Think about only bugs, not a single wishlist feature, just bugs. Limit to obvious-to-normies defects: so, UI bugs (ultra-low contrast oddity with certain backgrounds while scrolling lock screen notification center) or popular-feature bugs (AirDrop demands “everyone“ to receive from people in contacts, apparently in at least a couple cases).
At least in the case of UI bugs, no secret sauce seems to be required to resolve them. No particularly special feats of engineering. It seems simply dollars can fix them: QA & engineering. When I discover these obvious defects, update iOS multiple times over the course of months, and continue to experience them, I can only assume Apple prioritized having cash on hand over investing in my (our) experience.
And now they only need to take their backlog tickets and throw tokens at them.
The number of incredibly obvious bugs in Screen Time that make it frequently useless just boggles my mind. It has never worked for us at anything like 100%, it is hit or miss and frequently just does randomly stupid things. Settings reverting on their own, new app categories appearing out of thin air, etc.
Just one more thing that sours me on their stuff when I'm otherwise inclined to like it.
You can’t even block YouTube on your kids devices because Screen Time doesn’t see that YT is installed.
A known bug for years now.
Then good luck getting the time limits to work. It’ll tell the kids “5 minutes left!” then just let them keep going.
That’s odd as I do that quite successfully with my kids.
Parental controls are far superior to Microsoft and epic.
And then Google intentionally makes it hard to filter their stuff, too. I can ostensibly enforce YouTube limits on my Firewalla, but if I try to do that, it basically ends up blocking Google altogether. Because Google serves up some YouTube assets from google.com. I doubt very much this is by accident.
I've used 3 Apple products for more than chance interactions. A MacSE for 5 years in school, a 2015 Mac desktop for 6 months in a printshop, and an iPad for the past 2 years at work.
The SE and desktop felt like modern machines, clicks and key presses had predictable results, applications did what you told them too. On par with the Win95 and Win 7/8 I was used to at the time.
Jesus Christ, that iPad on the other hand, feels like janky Windows Vista tech rammed together by an intern. Weird UI artifacts, making the same gesture can have unpredictable results, the only function that everyone in the shop found without failure was 'undo' because it is triggered by violent shaking.
Even simple tasks like sharing a photo saved from a website is bizarrely broken. Depending on whether you saved it as a file or 'to your photos' dictates which applications can then open/share the image. And I know Android is full of it's own foibles but they took a few months to internalize. I'm going on 2 years of 'features' breaking workflow, and pixel perfect taps to activate input elements that are 5% of the screen width.
/rant
Maybe you are right, but Apple is selling hundreds of millions of iPads per year, so just maybe most people are content with the hard- and software and will just adapt to some quirks.
I am personally not always happy with the gestures, but some can be disabled. I don't have much use for my iPad apart from watching some videos, for everything that requires concentration, I will fallback to my laptop. I still think it is a marvelous machine how the hardware and iPadOS play together.
Yes. People have gotten used to rebooting every device in their house, and anything with a screen running like a piece of shit.
Yeah the iPad suffers from trying to live on the OS made for phones. I have an iPad but rarely use it any more, and then only for viewing content. It would be far more useful if I could use it with something closer to MacOS.
Our family has struggled with Screen Time a lot. I have come to the conclusion that it's actually beneficial for Apple to keep Screen Time as crappy as it is. That allows kids to use their iPhones more. That's good viral marketing in a very lucrative demographic and it drives up AppStore sales, micro transactions and engagement rate.
It's a dangerous game to play, though. The more it frustrates me, the more likely I am to consider alternatives when I want a new phone. They might well score a tactical win but a strategic failure.
Screen Time has had many improvements recently; I'd suggest giving it another shot with iOS 27.
No one, probably not even Facebook, intentionally ships crappy software to farm engagement numbers with kids at this point. That's a good way to get hauled up in front of congress and yelled at in a bipartisan fashion, which no company wants.
My macbook updated to Golden Gate, and upon reboot, a bunch of stuff was mysteriously not working. Couldn't access my NAS. couldn't reach my home assistant dashboard... I could still SSH into the devices, just couldn't reach them via firefox, or chrome, or a few other apps. So it wasn't my networking being out...
Turns out "forgot to ask for local network access and since the prompt was never allowed, default to denied" is a known bug, and since it never asked, there is no way to toggle either. It was just a bullet point in the reddit thread of networking things that broke in macos 27. It had a solution. Somehow my terminal had known to ask for permission, so it got it, but all my UI apps didn't.
I had to sudo a change to remove my local network from the local network list, and then it worked.
I would think that "suddenly all my local services stopped working" is a noticeable to normies bug. Most normies won't have a ton of local services, but normies that live with techies probably will have a few.
> normies
The tinfoil hat explanation for this is that everyone at Apple is using iCloud for everything, and thus would never encounter a bug with locally-hosted services.
> Apple has so much money that they can actually afford to be world class in both > This is what gets me. Think about only bugs, not a single wishlist feature, just bugs. Limit to obvious-to-normies defects: so, UI bugs (ultra-low contrast oddity with certain backgrounds while scrolling lock screen notification center) or popular-feature bugs (AirDrop demands “everyone“ to receive from people in contacts, apparently in at least a couple cases).
I’m hopeful Ternus can turn this around. They can be top notch in both being all vertically integrated and demanding the best in both. Let’s see.
And the worst part is how you eventually just get used to these things
Minimizing shipped defects is qualitatively simpler in physical engineering because the set of possible defects you have to account for is astronomically smaller.
I am a physical engineer by background but have also spent much of my career in high-reliability software systems. The problems of reliability in software systems make physical systems look like child’s play. The levels of effort are on different scales.
An important difference is that software correctness is mostly binary. In physical engineering you can usually spend a bit more money to over-engineer a component if you have any doubts or are lazy, and that works. Effort does not scale nearly as well when it comes to reliable software.
And there’s an enormous amount of good engineering effort Apple does put into both quality and crazy cool shit that gets done. People just don’t appreciate it because it’s invisible when it works and it’s not as cool as “ran a graphite heat pipe through the fold” which is probably one of the easier things they did for the fold.
There is also a much closer defined "completion" state in hardware, with responsibility also more distributed across suppliers.
You have a committed spec of one component, connected to the committed spec of another component, with committed maximum deviations.
All that is fixed, so you engineer for possible permutations and mass-production. (it's still a massive feat, I'm not downplaying it. But it has a defined completed controlled state)
In software this is much more fluent. You may have a spec of a library and the APIs you use, and your app might otherwise be static.
But you're handing alot of what you do to an OS, which juggles everything and continues to change over time. That API you're calling may not even have full control over the modules its interacting with.
Ask any giant company that's been disrupted by a startup: money does not buy taste, or quality, or core competence. It can help, if leaders understand those things.
Apple is ultimately a hardware company that's so good they can monetize software and services. But they are not really a software company, or a services company. I think Ternus' promotion recognizes that: software and services are worth a lot of money, but they're value adds to hardware.
The Face ID bug that caused a reboot on iPhone 18 pros was a clear example that they put little quality control into software.
World class in comparison to their present competition in hardware and software? Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Meta, Intel, AMD, Nvidia...
I feel like this might be inherent to software and hardware development.
With hardware you pretty much get to restart on every product you make. Sure, you have many of the same (types) of components, but with every iteration, you move them around and pretty much have to rethink how every part fits together and interacts. And it has to work when devices get to consumers, because you can't visit everyone to solder on a wire you forgot. (You can always tell people they're holding the phone wrong though.)
With software you have this continuous blob that you keep adding features to. You never really get to rethink how it all goes together from the ground up when the design changes, you just slap a transparent UI on top of you existing code and call it a day. If it turns out there are bugs, not a problem, you just push an update and hope that fixes more than it breaks.
I really don’t understand the criticism of Apple’s software.
I think we need to keep in mind a couple of things:
1. It’s software designed for the masses. It’s not intended to be a power user’s playground.
2. There’s no such thing as perfect software. If you really look hard for alternatives to the Music or Photos app (to use your examples), it’s actually extremely difficult to find anything that is without compromise, bugs, or other downsides.
As someone who has moved off of many of Apple’s apps, like my move from iCloud Photos to Ente, I’m really still accepting a decent amount of compromises. It’s better in some ways, worse in others.
And then there’s some other apps where I just can’t find a good alternative. I’d love something like Apple Notes but is cross-platform with a Linux app specifically. There’s just basically nothing like that out there, certainly not at a good price, and most of them end up over-complicated or with a strange UI.[1]
And when we step back and look at how many apps Apple makes it’s mind-boggling, and really, most of them are at least a mild “good.”
[1] Closest I’ve found are Craft and Zoho Notebook. Zoho gets the price right, it’s dirt cheap, and has a Linux app (though it’s basically a web app). Zoho bothers me for being ugly though. Craft is slick on iOS with a web app only on desktop, but it’s pricey if you leave the free tier. For my criteria it’s important that the apps support sharing, collaboration, and notifications when the other person updates a note. I’m honestly not sure if these two alternatives hit every requirement because I gave on both pretty quick and accepted being stuck in Apple Notes for now. Going to iCloud.com on my Linux system isn’t horrible.
I disagree. They deserve the criticism. Among things software is one of the few things we should get correct.
I don’t think anyone is asking for the world I just want software that dosent crash and makes sense to use.
Just a couple weeks ago Apple Music was leaking GBs of memory.
I just don’t really agree with the idea that Apple’s apps are crashing and memory leaking all over the place, and if they are, not more than the median application.
For one thing, the power user crowd tends to babysit their activity monitor and get massively upset when an electron app dares to consume memory.
In my mind, the only thing that matters for non-server apps is whether or not the user experience is good. Memory consumption is just a number. Apple doesn’t even advertise how much memory many of their products have on them. They expect that their users don’t have to think about that, and as long as that remains true, I really don’t mind if Apple Music is eating up 2GB of RAM behind the scenes.
I don’t really think it’s something to agree or not agree on. This is the experience I’ve had as an Apple user. I use their products extensively and like them quite a bit. The issues I’ve seen I deem unacceptable for a company of this caliber. I’m not talking about .6 seconds of load time or absolute customization. I’m talking about FaceTime actually switching when I click the button. Apple Music not leaking memory. Basic usability not niche items.
Now unfortunately apples stuff is usually a cut above other software I’ve used but in my opinion is nowhere near as good as it should be.
I guess I’m not understanding the standard here. You’re saying they’re usually a cut above other software but simultaneously their software quality is unacceptable.
I don’t even really disagree with the negative experiences you’ve had, I’m just more saying that those experiences are inevitable in software. Being above average is about as good as Apple has ever been.
And I think that standard is also true with hardware. A lot of their hardware is supremely overrated. The MacBook Pro has a sharp edge that cuts into your wrist and has a gigantic notch on the screen.
1. Much of the software I interact with is bad.
2. I’ve had better luck with Apple software but I’d still categorize it as “bad” relative to the good software I’ve interacted with.
This is a form for software engineers. In the 90’s users accepted things like applications crashing due to lack of memory protection in the OS. We know to expect better.
Again I’m not asking for some alternate reality version of software. I’m asking them to fix clear issues that they do not seem to care about.
Not to mention Apple is a large engineering organization with plenty of talent. The software dosent need to be bug free but I shouldn’t run into as many issues as I do.
Some other fun ones: Finder locking up and refusing to minimize
FaceTime putting me in a call with “testing” when I switch devices
Safari’s extension icon flashing on and off on iOS
Stalling on the lock screen despite me looking directly at the phone to unlock it
To me these are issues that should not make it past the engineers and layers of testing.
I don’t think this is unreasonable do you?
If I'm understanding you:
- Apple's software is better than most
- Apple's software is still imperfect, often in dumb ways
- Apple should be able to be dramatically more perfect than anyone else in software has managed to be
not quite, you're missing some crucial points. "Apple should be able to be dramatically more perfect than anyone else in software has managed to be" is off by a lot
Sounds like you need to switch/try the Microsoft ecosystem or maybe the Linux ecosystem good luck.
> "and if they are, not more than the median application."
Comparing against the median means you've already thoroughly missed the point.
How much better is Apple hardware compared to the median? I don’t really think the iPhone is better than most Chinese brand phones. It charges slower and doesn’t have the latest battery technology. Most of what it makes it better than the competition is the software.
This angel’s halo around Apple was always a marketing illusion. They make above average hardware and above average software. Nothing more, nothing less.
Is that why the Chinese phones have a 7000ah-9000ah battery? and most of Apple’s phones have a 4900ah-5400ah battery?
The problem as I see it is not crashes and leaks. It’s that basic features are barely functional and the UI is not very usable.
Stupid examples from recently:
- The iOS 27 Preview app’s search feature appears to be present while in markup mode but missing while not in markup mode (this is quite reproducible for me).
- Mobile Safari regularly gets into a state where the overlay showing the current website domain gets stuck obscuring an important part of the site.
- On MacOS if you accidentally switch desktops you cannot switch back until the animation from the first switch finishes.
- Spotlight is still hilariously bad.
- The MacOS Music app’s AirPlay controls are barely functional.
- If you have an excessive number of desktop apps open, finding the one you want is gratuitously difficult. Sure, the bottom dock widget is pretty, but that doesn’t make it efficient.
- While typing this message, multiple different glitchy UI elements have appeared and disappeared.
- On iOS, if the keyboard is showing and you don’t want it, tough luck.
> Spotlight is still hilariously bad.
Fwiw, Alfred is still being sold.
> I just don’t really agree with the idea that Apple’s apps are crashing and memory leaking all over the place, and if they are, not more than the median application.
Apple has some amazing engineering in the basic OS layer and the UI kit, but everything on top of it is just bad. E.g. it now takes about 5 seconds to "Privacy & Security" in the system settings, and I can see a visible delay when switching between sections (e.g. to "Screen Time").
Network settings are just embarrassing at this point - you can't sort the WiFi networks by name when looking at the saved settings!
Time Machine has been a disaster zone for the last 20 years. The keyboard navigation experience in macOS is a disgrace, worse than Win3.11 The virtualization experience of macOS sucks, and there is no support for containers (even Windows has them!).
I can continue for a long time.
>E.g. it now takes about 5 seconds to "Privacy & Security" in the system settings
It's instant for me on a six year old base level Mini.
Just upgrade to macOS 27.
> and if they are, not more than the median application
What point is there in paying the premium Apple luxury tax if it's as crap as the median?
imovie is one software that does not work for the common man. you need to be a pro to even make a basic video.
Apple used to have maintenance releases. They used to be known for their taste.
They should absolutely cop the criticism. It’s not like they don’t have the resources to make their software better.
Apple used to be a company whose public image was intrinsically inseparable from the intergalactic ego of its chief executive. Now it's just your typical slop company run by slop executives looking to maximize next quarter's share price before they exit through the revolving door, on their way to the next company in line to harvest.
iOS 27 was a maintenance release that focused on performance and improved it significantly, particularly on older phones.
They blasted out a marketing video where they bragged about apps launching faster and the WiFi/cellular connection handing off more cleanly.
My feeling is that there’s just always a group of people who complains no matter what.
>My feeling is that there’s just always a group of people who complains no matter what.
There is a religious zeal to some of the criticism.
Those of us who used Macs in the late PPC and early Intel days know what Apple is capable of. This current trend where your only fix is to reboot/reformat/reset preferences, or suffer, is trash. People these days are just used to everything being trash, so Apples current software quality seems OK to them.
My main problem with modern Apple software is I feel the design has been on a near constant gradual decline trend overall (except for the huge dip with Liquid Ass of course) and it has gotten buggier too. I'm just never going to update my iPad because I updated my other Apple devices and I deeply regret it.
I actually have felt this way for a fairly long time but Apple always baits me. Like the twelve or fifteen different times Apple OSes have finally supported some parts of WebM on certain devices sometimes when it works. Oh my god, I gotta update so I can have another couple WebMs load successfully only in Safari and not in any other app that doesn't decode it itself. Or back when I used an iPhone, third party keyboards - I use a lot of jailbreak tweaks but I gotta give that up so I can upgrade for third-party keyboard support that is so ass that nobody would ever use it. Heck, I wish I had updated my iPad even less. One fewer major version and I could've made use of the virtualization support that was dormant - but Apple fixed the glitch that let you use it on Apple Silicon iPads, so now you can't. Thanks! This is important to do because it helps... Uhh, security, probably? Something like that.
Since Snow Leopard or so, most of my Apple software upgrades have been bitter sweet at best, but usually just bitter, like I've been baited into having a worse experience.
Of course, it is probably apparent that I simply don't like Apple very much, especially not anymore. And I hate to have to justify myself by doing this, but we lack the maturity needed for me to avoid it, so... I am going to point out the obvious that this is hardly limited to Apple. GNOME 3 may be the single biggest downgrade any desktop system I've ever used has been. It has improved over time, but GNOME 3 has never been even close to as relatively good for its time as GNOME 2 was. Same for KDE 3 -> KDE 4 although I think as a rare standout KDE Plasma 6 is genuinely getting better continuously over time and remains one of the things I am excited to update. Windows 10 -> Windows 11 was so bad that it seemingly durably made several of my friends switch to Linux full time and just simply give up on things that absolutely can't be made to work on Linux - that is a powerful statement, and months later it seems they were indeed not fucking around. Android has been enshittifying at an alarming pace, too, although I don't feel like the Android experience from a software perspective is degrading or getting worse, but Google really knows how to blow their own leg off and by god they're going to do everything they can to make sure that all of the advantages they have over Apple are rendered meaningless so they can drag themselves kicking and screaming out of accidentally having succeeded at something.
I don't feel like it should be necessary for me to justify this, because Apple's recent growing incompetence in shipping working software and release engineering stands on its own regardless of industry trends. I'd SSH into my Mac Mini, but I can't. I have to go reset it, because it's been on for 60 days and can no longer open new network sockets. (I am not making this up. macOS genuinely has/had that bug and mine genuinely is in that state right now.) It's not that everyone else is doing great. When it comes to Linux systems it's easy to give them a lot of slack because they simply have no goddamned money, but still, things could be better. It's just that Apple is richer than ever and yet worse than ever at shipping software. I struggle to square the circle.
From an Apple employee culture perspective, software team is second or third class to the hardware group.
A friend on the App Store software team wasn't invited to a private iPhone Duo preview, because she wasn't in the hardware division. She felt so disrespected and is considering leaving.
My sister (on the hardware team) shared that its a constantly cycle of non-hardware folks getting shafted and then they complain loud enough until they get 'equal' treatment until the next unfair thing rolls out.
Dude, my M5 MacBook Pro gets too hot to touch while idling, and it's all background system processes. You don't understand the criticism of their software because instead of listening to the criticism, you've dismissed it as power user fantasy without even understanding the problems.
And friend, I didn't pay for an eight thousand dollar machine for software "designed for the masses" instead of serious professionals and computer enthusiasts. "The masses" are not spending eight thousand dollars on a premium laptop marketed towards professionals. This is an expensive machine and I should be in the driver's seat, not Apple. It should not take arcane, brittle incantations to turn off Siri and dozens of background "AI" services that melt my computer and literally burn my fingertips in exchange for recommending filenames in Pages.
And that's not even mentioning the multitudes of extremely serious system and driver bugs piling up over the last several major versions, nor the grotesque and inconsistent Liquid Glass malarkey.
These kind of comments are just firmly in the “I don’t believe you territory.”
And I’m not trying to defend Apple at all, I don’t even have a MacBook anymore. I’m more opposed to these extreme tech opinions that seem more emotional than objective.
What is emotional about my comment? Everything I said was objective, including that extra premium hardware should at least come with software that doesn't give it a negative value. As in, given the choice, you could not pay me $8000 to use macOS over Linux... once Asahi/Gravity are up to par I won't look back.
What am I not believing? I'm responding to your comment which was dismissive about real, serious concerns that people have surfaced about the sliding quality of Apple software. You seem to be the one not believing things might not be how you perceive them.
They could go a long way if they 1) slowed down the major OS releases (I mean, like stop them altogether, actually?) and 2) give priority to all bugs and not keep kicking bugs down the road because: we-already-shipped-with-those-bugs-so-they-must-not-be-that-big-of-a-deal.
I'd add 3), more pair-programming between senior engineers and junior engineers—to hopefully make junior engineers better engineers.
I have to say though, when I knew I was heading out of the company (Apple) within a year, I tried to be a "mentor" to the junior engineers at Apple. And they wouldn't have me. I suppose I was too old… To be sure, they knew Swift better than I did, ha ha.
(Oh well, I tried. I did push back very publicly against management during some of the team meetings—I was told by a few of the junior engineers as I was retiring that they appreciated that example.)
As a user, I'm much closer to 'the masses' than to the power users and still I have to say that Apple's software keeps getting worse.
The common complaint is that Apple made better versions of their software and then downgraded them. Especially iTunes.
If the last decade of Siri has taught us anything, they can literally ship the worst version of a thing and people will still buy an iphone. They’re just that good.
even books has somehow gotten worse. How do you regress fucking books, bro?? It's a damn shame.
‘just works’, my ass.
I agree that as a power user I might tend to notice bugs more often, but when there is no relevant error message for the normies, to even bother looking up; it takes a really deep breath for me to remind myself why android ain’t a thing I would want to go back to. I guess, I got into the ecosystem a bit later than its prime time where things apparently had better software quality in the walled swamp.
Maybe someone could use AI to better jailbreak iPhones/iPads etc and install custom operating systems
I’d consider this fixed thanks to agentic coding. Not fixed right now, but I trust Apple to scrap all cost saving workarounds (like Electron and its ilk) and go back to native every little thing. “Mac-assed” apps as they say.
The one thing that’s still unanswered is if and how quickly they will fix all the UX and UI mistakes left from the Alan Dye / Jony Ive era. Yes, Jony Ive - and his decision to scrap all Skeuomorphism on iOS which then was adapted for MacOS.
When I was very young, a wise adult once advised me about a class project: "it doesn't have to be good, it just has to be the best".
I'm afraid that's exactly what Apple's software is. The market, much like my school teacher, rewards the best -- no matter how good or bad it is.
That's an amazing phrase.
Yeah my brain went 'oh...' then some pausing
I plugged my old iPad into iTunes, and yeah it was clunky as hell to transfer files into an app, but it did work.
Maybe some of their software clunk is a commitment to backwards compatibleness. We can't have all the nice things, we must prioritise.
You mean Music/Photos on iOS or macOS? I mostly use Music on macOS. I use Photos a lot on iOS. Both work very well for me, and I've been through the iterations all the way since the early 2000s iTunes. What I don't like about Photos is that it's confusing to use sometimes (scroll up/down to find the buttons, the albums etc).
I have no idea what the Photos complaints are about. It's like iPhoto but with a few AI search features added lately.
Music on Mac has been getting bad IF you're still using a local music library carried over from iTunes, mainly cause they keep trying to shove Apple Music into it. Even in the iTunes days they kept removing nice features after v7. Moving iPhone syncing to Finder made sense at a high level, but somehow it ended up becoming super glitchy and never gets fixed, seems like not a priority.
I still use my local music library carried over from iTunes. And I often drop more MP3's and so on into it. My dad had some issues with the iTunes volume location on an external disk but I've been lucky.
Photos- interesting, I haven't seen any AI stuff on it. I'm still on Tahoe though. Is it coming in Golden gate?
It's older than Tahoe. You can search a word and it'll find pictures containing that object. Not LLM, just vision.
Music could be a lot worse. I learned what it's like playing local music on a Samsung phone recently. Had to use ADB to copy files in because Android File Transfer is deprecated. The phone has no Music equivalent, so I use VLC, which everyone swears is perfect for this but it's actually super clunky. Meanwhile I have a library on my Mac copied over from iTunes v3 with new songs being added and synced over (with issues lately). But yes it has issues with external drives.
Photos is fine, and it is still improving. The same cannot be said about Music, which is just garbage.
Just now, I kid you not:
I was in bed, a little away from my MacBook on the desk that was playing some music.
I opened Apple's official Remote app on my iPhone, that lets you control your Mac's Music app.
Both devices were on the same WiFi network and same Apple ID, but Remote was unable to find the Mac. When it did, it was unable to connect.
I opened the ChatGPT app on my iPhone. Went into Codex mode. Asked the ChatGPT running on my Mac to control the Music app to play a different playlist.
Worked within seconds.
Gosh these decrepit giants deserve the unprecedented disruption that's coming for their ass.
Unprecedented disruption of something you could have asked Siri to do a decade ago?
You must have missed the news about how Siri is so shit now that it can't even set a timer on the Apple Watch because it can't find a "Clock app"
Also:
- When there's multiple Apple devices in the same room, your Siri command doesn't always get intercepted by your intended target. Have you even used Siri in these situations?
- Siri doesn't let you see all your playlists etc like the Remote app does.
- The official app meant for this exact purpose failed to work.
- Codex can remote control every fucking app, not just Music, even those without Siri "hooks"
Apple is no longer the "It just works" and hasn't been for years. Read the room and smell the discontent
> Have you even used Siri in these situations?
Yeah, I’ve got all the Apple stuff. Works fine in this situation 99% of the time. But if you have an idea about how they could make something that ambiguous 100% reliable you should write it up.
Notice how this comment has no counter examples of a quality OS + software stack? It’s because it doesn’t exist. Any example they could give there would be 20 nay sayers who disagree in the replies. Your favorite software is dog shit to someone else.
TIL product naming is still terrible. "Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6". Elite Extreme. 8 Gen 6. Who comes up with this nonsense?
Someone at Qualcomm.
https://www.androidpolice.com/qualcomm-snapdragon-8-elite-ge...
Naming is hard
Naming is hard. Especially for chips. There are multiple product lines that perform in different ways with multiple price/performance optimizations.
8 means high-end. Gen 6 means the 6th generation. Elite is a bit like Core or M in that it describes their latest chip process. Extreme means it's the high end chip of that generation's chip.
You cannot do it right. Intel had a sort-of-useful naming scheme with their "Core i7 3600" naming style, except you couldn't tell if the i7 4500 would outperform the i5 3700 or not. Also there was a k and a u after the CPU name. They stepped away from that scheme, now they have somehow invented an even less useful naming scheme. And, of course, the Celeron/Pentium line never followed any comparable naming scheme either.
Apple then tried; they came up with the A4/A5/A6 for phones and M1/M2/M3 for computers, simple enough. Well, until you got the Pro/Ultra/Max (Max, of course, being slower than the Ultra, because Max doesn't mean maximum performance). Then their A chip ended up in a laptop and their M chip ended up in a tablet and their weird headset got a new R chip that never got a newer version. Oh, and for laptops you need to pay attention to how many cores your M chip has, because there are multiple SKUs with the same name differentiated by core count.
AMD had a useful-ish naming scheme for Ryzen but then they had to fuck up their mobile chip names. Then they did their weird AI product line, which killed any serious attempt to track what chips are sold at what performance points.
If Qualcomm do everything right, their next generation will have a mid-tier chip that outperforms their current top model. None of these names and numbers are useful for comparing.
Mediatek is doing the Intel thing now with their Dimensity #### where the first number is the market segment, the other numbers indicate performance and generation within the market segment, and the suffix indicates what features were glued onto the SoC.
Every name makes sense if you know the formula.
Is there a naming scheme dumber than Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495?
I have very bad experience with graphite heat pipes that are moved and bent. I hope they found a good way of ensuring elasticity over a long time
Apple is sherlocking the "iphone xxxx teardown" websites
As you said, that is indeed the case.