[brimble]

The cure is using other software. It's almost all so fucking terrible—yes, even from FAANG—that before long you'll stop feeling bad about your own bugs.

That's not an excuse to get lazy about bugs, but it ought to help you not feel so bad about it.

Apple's way better about software quality in general, than most. Yet every day I use their alarmingly-janky multi-user login/switching screen. If I my M1 Air falls asleep while not connected to power, I'll have to juggle wifi networks to get it re-connected (if I don't want to wait the several minutes it takes it to sort things back out without that intervention). Last I checked opening a link in a new tab in the background while in a "tab group" in Safari still caused a flash of the real content before loading the blank-tab screen and losing the original URL, when you eventually switch to the backgrounded tab, basically making tab groups unusable. Even they ship bugs in big, user-facing ways, and leave them there for months or years.

[guhidalg]

Apple also ships less code than other companies, relies on 3rd-party apps to do the marketing research of what users want, has horrendous documentation, and tries as hard they can to block users from doing unsanctioned things with their machines. If it seems like they have less bugs, it's because they do as little as possible with their software as they can get away with.

Their hardware is great.

[caseyohara]

> If it seems like they have less bugs, it's because they do as little as possible with their software as they can get away with

This is tautological; the obvious way to ship fewer bugs is for your software to simply do less so there's a smaller surface area for bugs to happen in the first place. I see this as a good thing and I wish more software companies would take Apple's approach in this regard.

[brimble]

> If it seems like they have less bugs, it's because they do as little as possible with their software as they can get away with.

This does not square with my experience of their bundled software being very capable, very respectful of system resources, plenty featureful, quite stable, and usually sitting somewhere between "quite good" and "best there is".

[dolni]

That's a psychological trick. I got my first iPhone ever this week, so let me tell you about my experience.

One of the first text messages I ever sent via iMessage, it defaulted to texting the user's "home" phone number in the contact card, even though they had another number listed under "mobile" (and they have an iPhone themselves)!

The only reason I noticed was because the text message in iMessage was a green bubble, not blue. Then, I figured out that in iMessage you can't long-press on a message to see metadata about it (i.e. exact date/time sent, and to/from what number, like you can on Android).

The message silently failed in a stupid way, and I had basically no way of knowing anything save for the fact that I happened to be aware of green/blue bubble and knew what type of phone this person had.

Aside from that, I have noticed the little app bar on the iMessage keyboard will just disappear from time to time, inexplicably. The only way to get it back is to reopen iMessage.

I didn't want to enable Face ID, but I caved and did it because it's the only way to install free apps from the app store without requiring your Apple ID password every 15 minutes (my password is long, for security reasons... I figured I'd at least be able to just enter the phone PIN, but no!) Now I'm stuck with Face ID as a mechanism of authentication that I frankly don't want. Face ID isn't continuous, so if someone snatches your phone, points your camera at you, and runs, your phone is now unlocked for them to do whatever they will.

I don't think their software is actually that good, unless you stay precisely in the box they want you to stay in. The second you deviate from that, the experience is utter garbage. And if something DOES go wrong in their walled garden, good luck figuring it out. You literally have no ability to.

Your experience is a consequence of software that is largely inflexible and when stuff goes wrong, Apple just pretends it never happened.

[brimble]

I started my journey on DOS. I'd put more hours into probably five or six other desktop operating systems, plus Android on mobile, than I had anything from Apple, before I finally gave OS X a real shot (around 2011) and, a couple years later, after developing for both Android and iOS but being and Android user, switched to iOS for my personal devices.

I assure you, I'm not being "tricked", and I could name a bunch of shitty things about Apple software off the top of my head. They're not the best because they're perfect, it's just that everyone else is extremely bad so they look great by comparison.