[mulletbum]

Apple has had a Bluetooth software issues in ios 17 and 18 that makes both 15 Pro Max and 16 Pro Max randomly disconnect Bluetooth and all sorts of weird issues. They waited over a year to finally address it in 18.3, then proceeded to break Bluetooth now where it just all together disconnects over and over.

Apple has gone WAY down hill.

[godelski]

  > Apple has gone WAY down hill.

There's just so much low hanging fruit and I don't get it. Worse, it seems to be not just limited to Apple. There's just so many infurating things that I do not understand how they exist. How are you an Apple dev and not pissed off by this stuff? As just a simple example, why is my iPhone, iPad, and Macbook constantly telling me that my airpods have connected? I'm actively listening to music on my phone and have been doing so for the last 30 minutes! Fucking hire me, because I will do the meme. Problem is, I'm not sure when I'd quit because there's so many. Will there ever be the sigh of relief?

I know you guys are lurking. There's similar low hanging bullshit annoyances on so much software, so someone that is working on one of these things, please let me know. Google Maps? Search? Calendars? Email? Browsers? iPhones? Androids? AirPods? Pixel Buds? Name your team, and I'm sure I got a complaint for you. If not, I'm sure someone can. You all are killing my productivity.

[latexr]

I believe a major source of Apple’s software decline to be the self-imposed yearly deadlines which started after Steve Jobs. Prior to that, new macOS releases came out whenever they were ready. Maybe they were buggy, but by the end of each cycle they were fairly solid.

Compare to now, where they announce major features (Apple Intelligence), keep them in beta for over half a year, then have even less time than that before the next WWDC where they are expected to announce new stuff.

It’s bananas and unsustainable. There’s no time to do anything properly. No wonder everything is falling apart.

[godelski]

I think you're right. It seems all Apple is trying to innovate by is making things thinner. No real risk taking or seeking to make game changes. No iPod, no iPhone, nothing. I mean the god damn iPad doesn't even have a good native note taking App. I can just imagine Jobs going "founders mode" on someone because you can't zoom in.

But I really have to be clear, this isn't just an Apple issue. Windows is getting worse too. Google too.

I believe a big part of this is that all these systems are becoming more closed off. They make it harder for people to play around with and "hack". Taking power away from the user. I think the truth is that things are so complicated, that if you don't let the end user make fixes, debug, and write new things, then your product can only decline. Besides, you cannot know what people are going to use the thing for. The goal is to build an environment, not a product.

[manmal]

AFAIK the engineers are aware of all this, they just aren’t allowed to work on things that haven’t been prioritized and blessed. Since there is no bug database that can be read outside Apple, we can‘t +1 the most annoying ones. Instead, they rely on manual (semi-automated?) deduplication of the bug reports. Bugs also need to somewhat fit into the „theme of the year“ to get prioritized.

[godelski]

  > the engineers are aware of all this, they just aren’t allowed to work on things that haven’t been prioritized and blessed

I accept this answer, but this is honestly a more concerning problem. And I ask, at what point should engineers rebel and be "radical fixers"?

[finnthehuman]

Gumption was branded "cowboy coding," then dragged out back and shot.

I like where you're coming from, but micromanagement is still the flavor of the times.

[godelski]

Then I hereby submit my vote in favor of revolt. I mean hey, they think they can replace us with AI coders and want to get rid of us anyways. But if we are just yes men and don't take pride in our work, then are we that different?

[manmal]

I guess they‘d rather get promoted or at least not fired :/

[godelski]

This appears to represent a failure within the company. It means the employees are more loyal to managers than they are to the product. Which means your management is failing at their jobs. I suspect for similar reasons, turtles all the way up. But I'm not sure it's surprising as C Suite execs value quarterly earnings over product. But the latter is supposed to drive the former

[walterbell]

> Since there is no bug database that can be read outside Apple, we can‘t +1 the most annoying ones.

Some Apple Radar bugs are tracked publicly on OpenRadar, but there's no (yet?) voting mechanism:

https://openradar.appspot.com/

https://github.com/timburks/openradar/issues

> Bugs also need to somewhat fit into the „theme of the year“ to get prioritized.

User-defined themes for Apple bug annotation could be ranked by annoyance and compared to annual themes.

[engcoach]

This is true, and all downstream from ex-MS narcs and assholes taking over. They don't know or care what makes a good product, and are only skilled at looking good to other midwits.

[harrall]

Don’t work for Apple but some bugs just take a lot of work to identify.

I work on a well trafficked consumer product and even though I have a full latitude to fix bugs at my job, I will wait weeks for the right report to come in to make it easily reproducible. I will pull the ticket out of backlog and it will take only an hour to fix it rather than frustrating me and wasting an entire day tracing a bug only to fail at reproducing it anyway. It’s constant triage.

[godelski]

  > to make it easily reproducible

What I'm calling "low hanging fruit" I mean "impossible to miss if you use the product." Of course, tracing a bug is much trickier and often hard to actually predict the difficulty of solving. But it's also worth noting that the harder it is to trace a very noticeable bug often correlates with larger issues in the programming, i.e. tech debt.

[achierius]

Tbf a lot of things "just work" on some devices, for some people's workflows -- even if it's happening every day for you, it might not be happening on the machines the engineers are living on. This can be because of different workflows, or habits, or particular combinations of versions/configurations (e.g. iPhone sku <A> with OS version <B>, laptop with SKU <C>, carplay with software version <D>, ...).

[godelski]

The big benefit of Apple is that they control the full stack. So you're suggesting I what, reformat my machine? Are we really at a place where the suggestions are akin to what we'd suggest noobs do on linux 10 years ago?

Give me power to debug. Give me power to write my own solutions.

And we're talking about a notification... We're also talking about a pair of headphones that can't be connected to multiple devices at the same time for some reason. I can't see this as anything but a self-imposed problem. You could connect up to 7 devices at the same time and that would be a great way to provide the seamless experience. It is the same ecosystem, the phone and laptop can easily communicate and be aware that I have spotify open on both and that I'm writing on my laptop. But no, the problem gets harder because of the issues. I play music from my phone because if I walk away from my computer, I can keep playing music through my headphones. Where's the magic? And the only reason I have spotify open on my laptop is so that if I press the god damn play button I don't end up opening Apple Music (a product I have never intentionally used nor even passed the first time use screen), jumping from my workspace.

Users shouldn't need these defensive patterns when you have the capacity for such integration.

[achierius]

I'm not suggesting that, I'm just explaining why these bugs happen despite all the testing that goes into it, on top of everyone at Apple living on Apple devices by default. I don't really have a solution, I work in the browser, not the part of the OS that handles HID &c. What I do wouldn't work for you: I do just reformat my device quite often, but that's because I work with new hardware / custom OS builds & thus often get in a borked state that would never show up on a customer's device -- and it's only possible because I have access to internal development tools and all that.

Is the particular problem what you were saying about headphones not connecting to multiple devices at once? If so, I admit that's a different kind of issue -- rather than the lack of functionality slipping through testing, it was probably just never included as part of the PoR in the first place. I.e. at some point the designers, or the engineers, or whomever, decided that it wasn't worth building. Despite the level of integration that is indeed possible, you still have to make tradeoffs -- security, performance, timelines, etc.

[emchammer]

It's funny that this thread comes up now. I just lost a ton of work in Logic Pro, years of recordings on one particular track, because of what seems to be an interface issue. I thought that it was crystal clear that I was deleting something in the window that was in the foreground with a highlight around it. It turns out that it's something in the background that got deleted because of reasons. There's no file rollback in iCloud.

These kind of things are really frustrating when it seems like they should be caught with human usability tests. It's easy to throw blame around, and I think Apple does a lot of good work, it just seems like for value of the company they could slow down the pace of iPhone and macOS releases and make them more substantive.

[latexr]

> Don’t work for Apple but some bugs just take a lot of work to identify.

On the other hand, I have reported to them security issues which would take literally one line to fix and literal typos and errors/omissions in the documentation which are all still present after years.

[mpalfrey]

I always say if I can reproduce a bug, I can fix it.

Hardest thing is reproducing a bug reliably.

[achierius]

What've you got for the browser?

I personally probably won't be very helpful for whatever it is -- I work with the compiler team, so nothing visible -- but I'm happy to +1 your issue during the next feature review cycle or &c

[mostlysimilar]

Please tell someone I'm tired of my wallpaper reverting to the default animated one when I disconnect my external monitor with the lid closed. Further data point: I use the solid color background feature.

[godelski]

Firefox. I'm pretty disappointed that I can't have a real Firefox on my phone. This is my first iPhone and I forgot what it was like to be assaulted by ads lol

But you got me, I don't have any complaints about the compiler. I haven't been writing much C these days so you're safe ;) Tbh I think the thing I'm most frustrated about is that it becomes harder for me to fix things myself. Taking power away from the user is not a security feature.

Can I also make a feature request? Can we get someone to add regex to the calendar to de-dupe events? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42708707

Edit:

I have a more important feature request. Fix the god damn iPhone keyboard settings. Auto capitalization should capitalize a stand alone i, but we can all recognize an iPhone user because of this. And I cannot for the life of me figure out how to use swipe but also not randomly have it modify the previous word I typed (autocorrect is off). Pressing back space then deletes two words. Not once has this feature been helpful, it's a hindrance that happens at least once an hour. And if I move my cursor back to a misspelled word, click the accepted correction, please don't split the word at my cursor, just correct the whole word...

I know I might be "holding it wrong" but man has this been unintuitive.

[yuters]

It's really incredible that I have such a better experience pairing my new airpods to an old machine running ubuntu than a recent macbook. When using my macbook, the airpods just randomly disconnect and start glitching with static noise and I have to pair them again. On linux, there is no random disconnect and the sound clarity feels way better.

[cookiengineer]

Did I hear someone is ready to switch to Linux?

Come to the dark side, we got lots of freedom here.

[godelski]

I'm predominately a linux user. My main machine is and I have quite a few. I'm not quite sure why you're down voted, because it is mostly as usable these days as anything else. Arguably it is more easier. Though I find the rough points are more due to hostility from Microsoft. But hey, at least on Linux I can find a way to do whatever I want, and that's how computers should be.

[cookiengineer]

I switched to Linux as my main environment because both Windows and MacOSX were getting ridiculously cluttery. So many notifications that were unblockable, demanded my immediate attention, and distracted me from what I was actually doing. Be it some weird blocking popups of shitty background services or constant repetitive notifications that should not be notifications when they were the expected behavior.

In the last years this aspect has gotten much worse in my opinion. I know Linux has its rough edges, but once configured for your own workflow, it will keep working the same way without any distractions. And the LTS variants of distributions are almost maintenance free these days, if that's your concern.

I see operating systems usage as an investment and commitment. And I'd rather commit to an open source distro where I can in the worst case fix my own problems with it rather than betting on a platform that eventually has to be enshittified with ads because no amount of money will be enough for its investors.

People complain mostly about Windows 11 right now, but guess what will happen once MacOS reaches market dominance? Microsoft is just a couple years ahead in the shareholder cycle, and they were at their peek arguably the best software providers before the enshittification process started.

[GeekyBear]

Bluetooth in general is (and has been) broken forever.

Look at the comments on Google rewriting their Android Bluetooth stack for the fourth time.

> I know the guy that heads up the team that did this work -- he and I spent 2+ years fighting Broadcom's old, god-awful bluetooth code. Our whole team used to play what-if games about replacing the thing while massive code dumps came in from vendors, making the task ever larger.

> I had to write a service on the RPI and the only way to reliably connect was to restart bluetooth before every attempt.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26647981

Apple has finally gotten fed up enough to roll their own Bluetooth/WiFi hardware implementation, which is a huge undertaking.

It is said to start shipping this spring.

> Apple is switching over to a new Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chip that it designed in-house starting in 2025, reports Bloomberg. The combined Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chip will replace components from Broadcom

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/12/12/apple-custom-bluetooth-...

[Reason077]

> "Apple has finally gotten fed up enough to roll their own Bluetooth/WiFi hardware implementation, which is a huge undertaking."

This has more to do with do with Apple wishing to pay less for WiFi/Bluetooth chips than wanting to fix bugs. They've gradually been replacing more and more silicon with their own designs for years, and tomorrow we'll likely see the next step: the debut of Apple's 5G radio chip.

Personally I have no issues at all with Bluetooth on my iPhone 13. It seems rock solid to me and never disconnects unexpectedly. (I do have some long-standing, annoying but relatively minor, issues with Bluetooth audio on macOS though).

[GeekyBear]

The 2025 iPhone SE is said to be the first shipping device for both the new Bluetooth/WiFi chip and the 5G modem.

Cost is certainly a factor, but it doesn't take a lot of searching to find people designing and building devices saying that the existing third party hardware and firmware implementations for Bluetooth are problematic.

I don't think the Android/Pixel guys were daydreaming about ditching Broadcom for no reason.

I seem to remember discussions the Google Glass people posted here about their own issues with keeping a stable Bluetooth connection with the available third party Bluetooth chipsets.

[walterbell]

We'll know soon whether 2025 iPhone SE 4 basebands get pwned as routinely as existing iPhones.

[iwontberude]

Adjacent: didn’t the founder of Ubiquity pitch this concept to Apple and failed which is why he left to found his own business?

[liveoneggs]

> Apple has gone WAY down hill.

I need a place to rant about my recent apple frustrations. :)

I recently got a new laptop - I can airdrop to it once or twice before the notification to accept the airdrop stops showing up until reboot. Just that flow is broken, other notifications continue to work.

I got an apple watch for my kid as an "upgrade" - software is a complete mess, connectivity issues abound, it's less reliable than the gizmo watch it replaced.

The iPad just got a calculator last year.

I am randomly not allowed to delete some photos from my phone. I have no idea what this is about.

[Argonaut998]

I switched to an iPhone for the first time in 2022 with the 14 Pro. I got it on the release day and immediately there was a glaring visual bug when running a timer on their “Dynamic Island” (a huge flop). Ever since then I’ve encountered so many bugs that I can’t believe that this is the famed Apple. It’s the buggiest phone I’ve ever owned. Even now there is a bug on timers when the screen freezes and I can’t scroll through the timers, or start a new one. Constant bugs on their default apps that are SIMPLISTIC (or should be). How is there a bug on timers when it’s existed for 15 years? It also deleted all my of my locally saved notes when I bought a Mac and signed into iCloud. Completely unacceptable.

The mail app is so bad that even their anti-competitive design policies can’t salvage it (reading an email on one device will show the email as unread until the app is opened). It’s just embarrassing for the so-called “premium” company.

[bigfatkitten]

Even if Apple does everything right, there will be problems.

One major problem with Bluetooth is that the spec is so complex that it is unlikely that any device you try to interoperate with implements the relevant parts correctly.

To compound that, most implementations in use came from half arsed SDKs that silicon vendors rushed out the door 5 or 10 years ago, and the devices have no update capability so they are never getting fixed.

[stevenwoo]

I have that problem with SE and sometimes use apple wired headphones with my SE and lately there’s a cycle of use phone with headphones, put down phone, do something else, come back and unlock phone and somehow it does not think there are headphones connected, I can’t push them in any more either when this happens.

[pjmlp]

Those of us old enough to remeber Mac OS classic, know Apple hasn't always been top quality, regardless of the quality expectations of their price points.

[r00fus]

Neither I nor my family have this issue. We're all on iOS18.3 - what kind of issues are you seeing?

[LeoPanthera]

> Apple has had a Bluetooth software issues in ios 17 and 18

Can you link to some documentation about this bug?

[nothercastle]

Idk about docs but my home pod has had terrible static since iOS 18

[LeoPanthera]

As far as I know the HomePod static problem is caused by failing capacitors. It's a hardware problem, not software.

[SoftTalker]

Bluetooth has sucked since it was introduced. I've never had a Bluetooth anything that worked well and reliably.

We need a total rethink on close-range wireless communication for accessory devices. Preferably something patented with an expensive license so fly-by-night chinese hardware shops can't dump their garbage on the market using that protocol.

[jwr]

That kind of generalizing isn't helpful and isn't true, either. I am sorry you didn't have a "Bluetooth anything" that worked reliably. I did. In fact, everything that I own that uses Bluetooth works very well.

There are two important things about Bluetooth.

1. There are actually two kinds of Bluetooth. The "traditional" mostly connection-oriented Bluetooth and BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy). They share very little with each other, except for the marketing name. BLE works way better in practice. Many people still remember their old headsets that used Bluetooth and that took ages to connect to their phones and associate those with the "Bluetooth experience".

2. Bluetooth is complex. Many manufacturers get it wrong. But the problem is not with Bluetooth. You could invent a different set of protocols, and if they were to do everything that Bluetooth does, they would get very complex as well, and we would have the same problem, except in a less popular and less broadly adopted protocol.

[ryandrake]

> Many manufacturers get it wrong. But the problem is not with Bluetooth.

To the end user, this is kind of a distinction without a difference. The end user doesn't care whether it's Bluetooth, The Standard that's bad or Bluetooth, the Implementation. He just knows that when he has to use Bluetooth, he's probably going to have problems.

I've worked with BLE implementation developers and I've heard the stack described as a "Layer cake of sorrow." There are major problems with it, and by "It" I mean the entire bag containing the specification, all the various implementations, and the hardware ecosystem. All of these things combined define Bluetooth in people's minds.

[darkerside]

HN is traditionally the kind of place where unpacking that nuance is rewarded, not dismissed

[thfuran]

But saying that Bluetooth is fine, it's just that every implementation is broken is a bit ridiculous. Sure, there's some value in distinguishing between irreconcilable issues with the standard and implementation bugs, but if those bugs are ubiquitous, the protocol as a whole is broken.

[ryandrake]

Yes, it's useful for technical folks to understand the real difference, but I'm saying the end user doesn't care.

[hedora]

But if the spec as a whole is bad, all layers of the spec are bad, the implementations are all bad, and the user experience is bad, then in what way can Bluetooth be described as anything but bad?

[scarfaceneo]

Yes, but if we’re discussing solutions, maybe it would be relevant to understand where the problem stems from

[Dalewyn]

The moral is: If everyone hates Bluetooth, the problem aren't the haters.

Personally, my experience with Bluetooth has been mixed. It certainly works, but audio quality is bad for headphones, latency is bad for mice and keyboards, sometimes the connection requires an intervention from the Norse pantheon, and so on.

[thenthenthen]

Mac and bluetooth… surely a mixed experience. Most issues seem to boil down to my devices connecting to my Macbook while it is “ASLEEP” (aka lid closed). Somehow the Macbook is very eager to take over/overpower any other device (phone, other computer) to claim my BT headphones. This can be fixed in the terminal or with the Bluesnooze app [0]

[0] https://github.com/odlp/bluesnooze

[thaumasiotes]

> It certainly works

That's going a little too far. If you're using bluetooth headphones, and you enable a microphone anywhere, you'll stop receiving sound from everything else on your computer.

[Boldened15]

All Bluetooth technology is licensed, no? Then it's still the fault of Bluetooth if not only is their protocol so difficult for many or most manufacturers to get right, and their qualification process doesn't enforce correctness.

But yeah I mean Bluetooth sucks, everyone has had the experience of trying to connect to a device repeatedly that keeps trying to autoconnect to some other random device that was used before. My usual interaction with Bluetooth is to always enter pairing mode and just be done with it, but hardly feels futuristic to manually hold down a button press every time you want to use a device.

> except in a less popular and less broadly adopted protocol

Isn't the usual way this problem is solved that the big players (Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.) come together and create a consortium for a new technology? So you get widespread support in all new devices and within 5-10 years most people are using it over the old one. If a better protocol is possible I don't think this would be the bottleneck.

[6SixTy]

There is an alternative protocol for wireless communications, only problem is that it's Chinese. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42443750

[lesuorac]

Aren't like all of the Bluetooths alternative wireless protocols to themselves?

It's not like you can use a Bluetooth classic device to connect to Bluetooth low energy.

Then there's also like Zigbee and etc; I don't think the world is hurting for wireless protocols. Everybody has their own new standard that'll be able to replace the rest lol.

[6SixTy]

Difference is that Zigbee etc aren't vying for the same place that StarFlash/Nearlink,etc is for Bluetooth

[CharlesW]

> Apple has had a Bluetooth software issues in ios 17 and 18 that makes both 15 Pro Max and 16 Pro Max randomly disconnect Bluetooth and all sorts of weird issues.

My iPhone 16 Pro Max Bluetooth has been rock solid with everything I've used it with. Your comment is a good reminder that (1) it's impossible for vendors to test with all possible devices, and (2) at Apple scale there will never not be some customers who experience problems. I recommend reporting it if you haven't — I had glitchy audio with an earlier phone and an older Honda Odyssey's Bluetooth connection, and a few months after my report a subsequent OS update fixed it. (Correlation, not causation, I understand.)

[judge2020]

Also note their hardware isn’t 100% good. They tested an old iPhone 16 I had and the NFC sensor out of all thing was broken (I had massive issues with wallet not adding cards). It’s worth going into an Apple Store to have them diagnose it.

[wrboyce]

I’m pretty sure they can run the diagnostics remotely, much more convenient than going into a store!