Apple's Software Quality Crisis

Seconding this. Feels actively anti-user even if this is just a bunch of heuristics that end up choosing the wrong thing. Honestly, why is this not a dropdown?

Related bug: macOS defaults to variable refresh rate when available instead of remembering my choice of 144hz. This is confounded by my hub (Caldigit TS3 Plus), which has trouble with variable refresh rates that result in a black screen.

The cherry on top: either I use a HDMI cable and deal with BetterDisplay forcing RGB to fix YCbCr, or a black screen when using DP through my hub due to the above bug.

Sometimes I wish Apple would get broken up just so macOS could have a chance at getting more love.

I JUST BOUGHT A NEW MONITOR AND WENT DOWN THIS RABBIT HOLE AHHHH Almost returned this perfectly fine monitor thanks to Apple, thank god for BetterDisplay though, actual gem of an app

The entire apple monitor settings are just awful. I have a small portable projector which accepts 4k input but just downscales it to 1080p.

I cannot get osx to actually output at 1080p, all it does is output at 4k and scale the result.

The downscaling in the projector adds input lag and just drives me crazy. I really wish they'd just let you control these things rather than poorly guessing.

I didn't know about better display, I guess I should try it and see if it can fix this problem.

I ran into this issue with the Sonoma update. My display (4k LG) was negotiating RGB just fine before, but not anymore. The BetterDisplay workaround hasn't worked for me. The poor colors and fuzzy edges around all the text is causing eye strain too. I'm beyond furious.

The same thing happens under Linux with some monitors and AMD graphics drivers. A lot of monitors have poor standards compliance (and the standards aren't great either).

I once spent hours trying to find out why apple's font rendering is so atrocious for a 1440p monitor on a m3 macbook air (reddit just keeps telling everyone to get higher resolution screens). Turns out it's related to the color scheme - the colors were fine, but the pixels are somehow located wrong, making everything look super pixelated.

BetterDisplay provided a workaround, but it needs to be selected every time the monitor is hooked up.

(I guess that's normal for Apple stuff nowadays - when I hook up my ipad to my projector, I need to tell it every single time not to use the audio output of the projector, but keep using the bluetooth speaker.)

There is no reason why YCbCr should be visually worse than RGB if the conversion is accurate

I think that Apple, perhaps naively, expects display manufacturers to adhere to spec when in reality they often don’t.

Either way macOS has no trouble with my 27” 2560x1440 Asus and Alienware monitors. Both connect with 10bit RGB no problem, at least over USB-C and DisplayPort (haven’t tried HDMI).

it's comically bad. the UI is a mess, the search functionality is broken, you can't resize the window horizontally. it's feels like a hello world first project in a new language type of app.

also - it's such a bummer that they have decided to shit the bed so hard on software at a moment when their hardware lineup is arguably at its pinnacle. like, the hardware has been firing on all cylinders since M1 but the software degradation is making it less and less pleasant to use.

To be fair, Windows really had the same type of issues going from the old Control Panel to Settings. I still get large delays for some of the screens in Windows Settings.

They rewrote many of their tools in SwiftUI.

So far, I am not willing to ship anything in SwiftUI. I don't think it's up to the task.

I mean ok, the old one was already a bit overloaded and unwieldy, so a redesign was probably overdue and Ill give them the benefit of the doubt here but WTF is with the 1-2 second delay when switching between the menus in there? Are they doing web requests upon opening every settings page or what? This is real amateur hour.

A few years ago, I filed a Feedback Assistant bug report regarding an issue I was experiencing in Final Cut. In response, I was contacted by Final Cut developers who worked with me to replicate the issue and then shipped a fix.

Just one anecdote, but some reports definitely get looked at.

Feedback Assistant is a UI for Radar.

You will never get a response to tickets unless it is affecting a lot of people and they need more information e.g. crash reports.

They are all read/triaged though.

If you look at the macOS feature history, it's pretty clear that the bulk of the team got shifted to iPhone in 2007 and never really recovered. The widely acknowledged Snow Leopard high water mark happened shortly after.

To be fair, Apple can still pull off the occasional amazing feat of vertical integration -- HDR, APFS, keeping audio latency under control despite the relentless assault of apathy from all directions -- but they never had the same level of consistent drive forward, at least not until a year or two ago when the big push for AI integration started. Apple gets ragged on here, but I think their integration is actually some of the best. They were putting neural cores in chips back when that sort of thing got mocked, not lauded, and every step has been thoughtfully tied in rather than airdropped from a ChatGPT science fair project. But they never got good at building or deploying leading-edge models themselves; I hope they turn it around because this is important.

I was in a QA role on MacOS in 2010-2013. There isn’t a QA team, rather each group of developers and EM had a QA embedded with them.

I worked at Apple on Mac OS X until 2008. For QA, Bertrand believed in a lightweight touch, with dedicated QA staffing only at the top of the stack (plus a few key places like the filesystem), with the idea that any bugs will bubble up and be found through real-world usage. Most QA was informal, through heavy dogfooding.

You felt a real sense of ownership to the thing that you worked on. You worked hard and fixed bugs because it felt like it mattered, because you thought about how e.g. your mom would end up using the product, and also Steve Jobs would see it, so it had to be great. Also, teams were small. Something would involve only 1-2 people, and then we would look over at Redmond and they'd have dozens of people working on the same thing. The need-to-know secrecy was not just for PR value; it helped keep circles of communication tight, cutting out a lot of noise, so you could just focus. The organization was stable (and relatively flat, around 5 levels from junior engineer to SJ). I think in my 9 years or so there, there were no major reorgs. Avie phased himself out and retired, and Bertrand moved up. The only major disruption was when the iPhone project happened.

Release cycles were annual. Throughout most of the release cycle, it was pretty free up to each team and engineer to decide what to work on and how to prioritize it. Near the end of a release, it would get more and more strict on what you were allowed to change, up to the point where Bertrand sometimes would even ask to see code diffs.

I don't really know what is going on over there now. They have moved to a more agile approach, with more frequent integration checkpoints. In theory this should be better, but I suspect there's less sense of ownership and more of a feeling of a software factory. But it's probably mostly to do with the fact that the systems are way more complex, both the tech and the org, with way more moving parts. Even the programming language itself (Swift) is a moving target. I know (from talking to friends) there's a lot more politics and career-building going on, the kind of corporate douchebaggery that would not have been tolerated under Steve Jobs. People are thinking about RSUs and their promotions, rather than the products.

Ultimately, I think it boils down to this observation by jwz at Netscape, that there's "two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company." Post-iPhone, Apple has filled up with the latter. A majority of the people at Apple now didn't work there under SJ, and the senior management who did experience that is now aging and retiring. At least from the outside, as a customer and end-user, it feels obvious that the founder-led product-obsessed culture is gone.

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Oh, I envy you, I have the exact opposite problem. Sometimes new icons start stacking up one over the other on the top right corner.

If you try moving one of the icons anywhere, it snaps back to the top right corner right away.

I haven't found a fix. The only fix is moving the icons away from the Desktop into another folder using a Finder window.

I am on 15.3.1 and when I attempt it, it stays in place on the color I selected without issue.

I did a MS in Telecoms Engineering. Our Telephony teacher Claude Rigault drummed it into us that when people can't make emergency calls, pople die, thus the importance of reliability.

the ipad skype apps puts the call button where the hangup button is, so if someone hangs up right when you are going to click it, you call them again.

and this is such an easy fix, just don't make components touchable for X milliseconds after they are visible, some value below average human reaction time.

this could of course get in the way of people quickly navigating via muscle memory, but there's a probably a threshold where it can prevent one without affecting the other.

This happened so often for me. But lo and behold, they fixed it. I recently installed iOS 18, and the phone app now prevents accidental touch input after the other person has ended the call. This took almost 18 years!

This is a symptom of a more general problem that I named (clumsily... "Rerender/Reflow/Repopulation Delayed Interaction Timeout Missing") in a 2017 blog post!

https://medium.com/p/31773fe6bbd5

I consider it by far the most annoying bug in touch UI's today.

Solution: There must be a small interaction-ignoring delay instituted when any control has just moved to its final rendered location.

> The article makes some great points about how iOS software is regressing, but it still feels so much better than almost any other software I use on a daily basis.

I face none of the issues on my Samsung S23 phone, which the parent commentator describes - no issues in phones calls (I make 4-5 calls daily, mix of WhatsApp & regular calls), no major issues in Google Keep (which I use 2-3 times daily, specially never of a note becoming "blank"), and again no major issues in the Google App Store or updates (which I use on an average once a week).

So maybe, the software quality varies by user experience rather than one platform being universally better.

Hmm every day i notice that the button to open photos and send them via iMessage doesn’t load the photos half the time. I close the widget, open it again, boom it works. This bug was introduced 5 or more years ago and no one has fixed it. It drives me crazy.

One of the weirdest regressions is basic search on iOS. Just clicking into the search screen takes 1s before I see anything (it's probably booting up internally). And each keypress sometimes seems to take another 1s before it updates the results.

Sometimes 3s will pass before I even see anything after I've already typed in my search term (I'm always searching for a local app btw - it's how I open apps).

It's like it waits on an http request for every keystroke.

Also, you used to be able to search for an app in any of the secondary languages you have in your settings. Which is great because apps have different names in different languages (Settings vs Configuración vs Réglages), so it would be annoying to have to remember which word to search based on which language is primary. For years it would show you multilingual results (e.g. you can search for "Settings" as long as English is one of your secondary iPhone languages yet "Configuración" or "Réglages" would still show up).

It was the sort of polish I came to expect from Apple. Well, that stopped working a couple years ago.

While I agree that it's Tim Cook's responsibility to set the course and influence the culture, I doubt a new CEO will be able to so.

I'm not saying nobody can be like Steve Jobs, but Steve Jobs was an anomaly when it comes to C-Levels, and even when it comes to management in general, at least from reading things like www.folkore.org and interviews with people who worked with him.

And I'm not even talking about talent or vision or whatever, it's just about saying no to pointless features that are there for someone's ego or so that someone can get a promotion.

I have been saying this for years: consistent deterioration of ACs/DoDs. There is no limit to scrum and especially the constant refinement to ACs/DoDs.

Yes, you may implement a solution more efficiently by not overengineering it. But at some point constant seek to reduce "complexity" so that more features fit into sprint (funny how story point measure complexity, not time, but sprint is sized in both time and SP capacity) is bound to hit feature completeness. Once you cross over that metaphorical Rubicon it's game over - quality starts to slowly go downhill.

You will not notice it immediately. That edge case that was ignored may not surface for months or years. It may take several idiosyncrasies to line up for a feature to be declared FUBAR. At some point that technical debt does bite you back, but at that point the process (tm) has already optimized away most if not all opportunities for deep refactorings fixing previous rushes to deliver.

Most consumer electronics companies are like this. It's not only a yearly release cycle but a Christmas release cycle. New Shiny Thing has to be in the stores by late November so all development has to be done in August so the factories can start producing the first trial batches.

I never buy products when they are first released. I prefer to wait at least 3-4 months so that production has had time to tweak all the settings and weed out the funky first component deliveries. Also the software devs will have fixed the worst bugs by then.

> The way I see it, the yearly release cycle is to blame. No one inside the company has time to do anything properly anymore. Features are announced and rushed every year, and we’re reaching the point where by the time something which was announced at a WWDC is out of beta, we’re preparing for the next one.

At many places where I've worked, the mentality is: "If that bug didn't block last year's release, then why would it block this year's release?" So it survives one release, it never gets fixed.

> The way I see it, the yearly release cycle is to blame.

I don't see a connection between yearly release cycles and a broken notes application. They shouldn't be doing anything that is particularly affected by such changes and the problem they are trying to solve has been mostly solved for 40+ years now.

While it certainly applies to some things, there's a different, bigger issue happening as well.

My understanding is that Apple outsources loads of software not seen as "critical". I think that's the first place for them to look.

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> What these companies need to do is slow down and stop chasing every shiny thing

Who is dealing in fantasies now, friend? :)

Apple's software really isn't in crisis. It's just very low quality relative to what people who've written software for a living know to be possible.

But it doesn't matter - Apple is a prestigious jobs guarantee program for rich kids first, entity that delivers value to consumers second.

It's not that they're chasing shiny things. They're cosplaying competence and they genuinely don't know it. They think they're actually competent, elite really, because they attend 'elite' schools, get good grades and go work at the 'best' places.

They have it ingrained in them that anything a poor person says can be disregarded because poor people are losers, because they're poor. They're an unintentional suicide cult. They genuinely don't know it. You can't convince them of anything because they are rich. If you complain - go see a therapist, there's something wrong with you.

You can youtube search Garys Economics. It's a poor kid who slipped into the rich kids club and defected. It's quite eye opening.

That doesn’t seem to be correct (any more?) I just spent a while scrolling back through the call log.

It goes back to 2019 - certainly more than 100 calls

> this can only be explained by ignorance.

s/ignorance/apathy

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> Maybe Apple is doing this in an automated way to prevent people using several accounts for storage.

And Apple's attempt to stop people from "stealing" a few dollars a month in storage somehow justifies bricking a $1000 piece of hardware?

Google doesn't care, because Google has WAY better anti-abuse features which cost money and so has weighed the risk of the "Google carelessly wrecks someone's online identity" headline against "someone might squeeze us for an extra 5GB of space."

This is true, but still smacks of victim-blaming.

That seems completely illegal.

I'll just hop on this chain since you commented recently.

I recently updated a very carefully managed (over many years) local Apple Music library to sync with cloud Apple Music. One funny (captive laughter) side effect was performance issues I had long since learned to live with just disappeared. For some insane reason running a completely local library is much, much laggier than one that is constantly syncing with the cloud.

The real fun, however, was when I recently created a smart playlist and noticed it was missing tracks that obviously should have been matched. I luckily found an older smart playlist with the same rule and lo and behold this one contained the tracks that were missing. So two smart playlists, exact same single rule (equating to "not Favourited"), with > 1000 difference in total tracks.

This is stressing me out. How can I trust any of my smart playlists anymore? Is my library corrupt, or is it just a bug? Who knows, and who knows when or if it will ever be fixed. I can list numerous other bugs with playlists in the macOS Apple Music app that have existed across 2 or more previous major releases.

I don't want any goddamn reports!

Bluetooth is also turned on after every OS update. I don't understand why macOS does these. They can't be bugs because they have been around for years.

For reasons I am not sure about,

When a new major version of macOS is released macOS developers seem obsessed with quickly releasing a new version of their apps that will only run on the newest operating system.

From then on any updates and bug fixes are only available on the latest macOS

If you don't upgrade to the latest and greatest macOS you are out of luck.

I fear the day when all new apps must target the M* chip and everyone on the x64 side has a paperweight

This made even worse when Apple dictates when your computer is no longer allowed to run the latest and greatest OS¹.

On the Windows side, a majority of applications tend to work on a wider range of operating systems.

¹ There are various ways of bypassing this and installing the latest OS in a most unsupported manner.

Can I ask what the fascination with the Apple trackpad is? My other daily driver is a Thinkpad and I actually vastly prefer using the smaller one on it. You're not flinging your wrist across the zipcode and the clicks are more tactile.

Folding phones are great though. I love mine, absolutely worth the purchase price. It's like a portable mini tablet and great for reading.

"top notch" indeed. Oh wait, it's a 'dynamic island' now.

I went back to Linux because I can at least decide when I'm ready for updates that changes my workflow. Neither Windows nor macOS gives me that experience. I wouldn't put Linux on a pedestral when it comes to UX/UI/design, but at least it doesn't rugpull me once a year (or more often with Windows) with forced updates.

As someone who cares deeply about UX that doesn't get in the way and allows professionals to do their work effectively, I'd be a hardcore Apple fanboy if the UX was actually good for that.

I don't, I still use my horrible iPhone 12 Mini for CarPlay. Waiting for it to either get too old to get updates, or for it to break before I move back to Android, I guess.

It is not, Android Auto still shows me the map while there is an incoming call, which CarPlay doesn't, on the same car. CarPlay's "incoming call" widget/popup blocks the entire view, I think Android Auto just displays something in a corner or something.

Yes, I agree. If I'm navigating, then an incoming call shouldn't block the entire screen with the avatar of who is calling, the map has to remain visible at all times. If even one person from Apple would have tested the scenario of "I'm navigating with a map and someone calls me", they'd see how dangerous their current implementation is.

I have had to reject/hang up so many calls because someone calls exactly when I'm trying to figure out where to go by looking at the map. In my mind, what Apple is currently doing should be outright illegal.

That's not been my experience. If I hit power off on my volume knob, it's effectively pause to CarPlay. Does your car treat it more like mute?

It pauses for me when I hit the mute switch though. I pretty much never power it off.

If you haven't tried out the various Linux desktop environments for a long try, give it a try yourself. I'm having a way more stable experience with Gnome than I ever had with Windows or macOS the last decade or so, especially when I can chose when I want to upgrade, and I don't get nagged about it once a day.

But before that, I'd agree with you, it would have be stupid to prefer anything Linux over OSX or Windows, back when they were rock-solid. But today?

I've been using KDE for around a year. It has a few bugs but overall it's much better in my experience than either Windows or macOS. KDE 6.2 and above have been really marvelous — I actually donated $100 (I think) to them because I was really happy with the work they were doing.

KDE actually has working focus stealing prevention!

I've encountered fewer show-stopping bugs in Linux than macOS lately. And of the software that I use on both, the macOS versions have more problems. Honestly, the main thing holding me back from replacing my M1 MBA with a linux laptop is the wonderful speed and battery life. If the software problems get bad enough to negate those I'm switching.

I think you have rose colored glasses on. System 7-8 at least were crash proned disasters and the 68K emulator was so bad on the first gen PPC computers you basically had to use SpeedDoubler - a much better third party emulator.

Half the OS was still running under emulatiom

Woah now, saying something positive about systemd will bring a bunch of crusty greybeards out of the woodwork who want their Linux to be as close to BSD4.4 as possible.

Jokes aside, I'm in agreement. Audio was still slightly buggy for me using a Elgato XLR USB interface, but it consistently worked with annoying workarounds. Linux is in a very good place for even normal consumers these days, I'm hoping Valve ends up making SteamOS a generalized gaming platform that will pull more market share away from Windows in that specific niche. I'm so ready.

Did pipewire actually build in their pulseaudio and JACK emulation, or is it still acting as a shim between already-running pulseaudio and JACK daemons?

Also, (FWIW) I've a fine time with JACK2, openrc, and xorg. I had to do some manual work to tell JACK which sound card to use and to set up the pulseaudio backfill for software that doesn't know how to speak to JACK, [0] but everything else just works.

[0] The "tricky" part was disabling all pulseaudio backend modules but the JACK backend. This was -of course- not tricky at all.

I have the occasional annoyance like "VLC has choppy audio for a few seconds after I seek," and "Gnome has gone full douchebag with notifications for everything and removing all the settings."

Other than that, though, Ubuntu on any old laptop (expensive thinkpads are my favorite) is my go-to daily driver. Except at work where I'm learning to deal with a (new, shiny, powerful) Macbook that I will use to... connect to a Linux VM because that's the only way to work on our software. Seriously, a whole fleet of zillion dollar macbooks so we can all ssh into beefy VMs to build/test/deploy on Linux.

IT onboarding made a point that if you want to get a Windows laptop and wipe it for Linux, you need permission and a "good reason." How about "this is stupid just let me work on stuff." Of course it's about tech support and security, which is fair enough but I feel like they have it backwards. Support Linux and then require special permission for the $4000 ssh client...

After spending a couple of days with homebrew and building some things natively on aarch64, though, I might make a hobby out of moving stuff local. It really is a beautiful machine.

I am not referring to hardware. Hardware quality has largely improved, software quality has largely gotten worse.

Yea I totally agree. This is selective memory.

Perhaps there were peaks and troughs in individual technologies. Late 2000s / early 2010s felt like a good time for operating systems, for instance.

But is everyone forgetting having to navigate through Flash websites and Java Applets using Internet Explorer, for instance?

Also, people are just forgetting. There’s nostalgia in this thread about the iTunes desktop app, for instance. That program has been a pile of trash for as long as I can remember back in the 2000s.

As someone who recently walked into a Best Buy with a family member and bought a laptop, I respectfully disagree.

> build quality

Tell that to Dell and their shit trackpads and prone to death battery charging circuits. And the joy of soldered RAM so you cannot upgrade can't be overstated enough.

I think regarding the combination of usability and stability the Win XP/7 era was still unbeatable.

> I have HomePods gen 1 & 2 (and a few mini’s)

I have mostly HomePod Mini pairs, and a couple individual Homepods. I do have quite a few rooms, but my network is solid. Perhaps having a series of wired WiFi repeaters gives Homekit trouble, but nothing else has issues.

> almost always use a phone to start the music

This works better for me too. I still have (much less frequent) trouble casting to some random room's speakers.

But that is cumbersome compared to just asking, especially for multiple rooms. Since "Zones" don't show up in the iOS and macOS volume/speaker-group interfaces at all, as far as I can tell.

And then there is Apple's design choice to only let each room appear in one "Zone". No idea why each zone can't simply be its own set. Leave it up to users to care if two people are fighting over what plays in some joint room - it would be a problem that reflected editable zone definitions, not a bug.

The whole system is inexplicably janky: by design, lack of original effort, subsequent inattention, and bug.

It’s not a simple plug in and stream product, but ever since replacing Sonos with Control4 we’ve been incredibly happy. Josh on top of it for voice and it “just works”.

As I said, not a direct comparison, but starting to think consumer level stuff like Sonos and HonePods just doesn’t have the right incentive structure anymore to deliver the level of quality we all seem to be asking for.

I have Sonos and they work perfectly, I love them. If you think Sonos is bad (recent app update included) go look at the HomePod subreddit, it is basically non stop issues. Having said that, I use Airplay a bunch and it is fine for me. I have had problems with Airplay in the past that were 100% solved by checking and improving wifi signal strength.

I'm testing out Wiim in a couple rooms as a replacement for Sonos and the initial results have been positive, though I haven't been using them long. So far my biggest complaints are that every model in their lineup has a different protocol compatibility list and that the Spotify integration isn't as well-polished.

If your Sonos speakers are old enough, take a day out and downgrade them all to S1. Just like magic it will all start working like it did the day you got it.

I really like my HomePods and have had zero issues.

Siri is not smart, but plays music, sets timers and turns off lights just fine, and that’s all I want.

They’ve been doing that bullshit with the media keys since it was still itunes

The upload-and-stream-your-own-music feature, as handled by the Mac desktop Apple Music app, seems to be 90% bug and 10% working. I can’t imagine a rewrite being worse than the status quo.

It’s more horrible now. Syncing now opens a Finder window with an inconsistent look and feel, and sometimes fails to copy new songs in a synced playlist. The playlist view has the album art taking up half the screen, but there’s no way to shrink that section. And there’s no visual indication for whether shuffle is on - it has no grey box around it when enabled.

I kind of think they made it shitty on purpose to push everyone towards a subscription. Many of these issues apply to locally stored songs and playlists, which is how I use it.

Did you use it on Windows? I never understood the hate for iTunes. It was a dream for someone like me who'd spend hours customizing their library. A far cry from today's software from Apple.

In fact, I was never able to use Apple Music because it handled bad internet atrociously. And last time I checked (2022?) it was still not fixed.

Yep and they all suck. The hardware is nice but why do you pay so much to run shitty software that does not even focus on local stuff? If I want some cloud stuff, Google is cheaper...

It's like buying a car because it looks very nice and has a great engine but the driving experience is absolutely terrible.

Just curious, why did they decide to use Electron instead of native? After all those are Apple MacOS software.

If the API didn't suck, there wouldn't be such video there.

Also WWDC videos are infamously used as reference because often documentation suck. And it shows.

I don't really see how that makes a difference. A talk with the title "my API demystified" is an equally bad sign.

You can get a thinkpad and it will in fact just work :D

To be clear, I diagnosed the missing dot issue by typing very slowly and carefully. The issue appears in repeatable streaks for me. For instance, the second character of the password might be dropped. If I repeat this several times, typing very deliberately and slowly, I can see the behavior repeat: no response for second character. Two workarounds are to just backspace and try again until the behavior goes away, or just notice that a character was dropped and type it again.

Same here. I have never unlocked the macbook successfully the 1st time around (for a good 10 years), I always get a "wrong password" and have to re-enter.

My initial guess is that the text edit control has "select all content" set initially, so when you enter the 1st character, it's selected, and when you enter the following characters they overwrite that, essentially chopping off the 1st letter of the password (which is then incorrect, obviously). Unbelievable that this was never fixed (especially with IT-managed laptops that lock themselves very quickly).