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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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!).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes Apple has "copied" or brought out its own version of particular products before, usually in a much better state.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Just one more thing that sours me on their stuff when I'm otherwise inclined to like it.
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.
Parental controls are far superior to Microsoft and epic.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
then let me root and customize the software to my liking
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 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.
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.
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 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.
I don’t think this is unreasonable do 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
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.
Fwiw, Alfred is still being sold.
Comparing against the median means you've already thoroughly missed the point.
This angel’s halo around Apple was always a marketing illusion. They make above average hardware and above average software. Nothing more, nothing less.
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.
What point is there in paying the premium Apple luxury tax if it's as crap as the median?
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.
They should absolutely cop the criticism. It’s not like they don’t have the resources to make their software better.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe some of their software clunk is a commitment to backwards compatibleness. We can't have all the nice things, we must prioritise.
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.
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.
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.
God help you if you own a camera and try to store its photos in apple photos.
https://www.androidpolice.com/qualcomm-snapdragon-8-elite-ge...