[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.