Clicking on folders that you have put in Finders sidebar - It will not display the folder with the view settings set for that folder, but instead the last folder you clicked in the sidebar. It seems to happen clicking from top to bottom vs bottom to top. You just cant make this sh*t up it's so bad.
Example sidebar:
Applications - Always shows as icons
Documents - Shows as icons if you last clicked on applications. Shows as details if last you clicked on Downloads
Downloads - Always shows as details
Finder is the absolute worst we could write a book about it. Once a year or so all my sidebar folders randomly vanish and I have to re-add them.
I really wish Apple would allow us to swap out the Finder with something else, so files open in that other app instead of the Finder. This works reasonable well on Windows, where I "replaced" the Explorer with Directory Opus.
Had the pleasure of making an Apple account to join our company's developer team. I filled out the form on the website 7 times: Edge on Windows, Edge on macOS, Safari on macOS, using 2 different phone numbers. No matter what, Apple just refused to send the verification code to me. It only worked after I remember Apple is a dick to the web platform, then I managed to create one from the popup in the App Store.
Apple also makes it a biznatch to make a developer account separate from your personal account. In Apple's ideal world, multiple accounts should in no circumstance ever exist. I, in an ideal world, would agree with this. But we live in this world, where Apple bans accounts for redeeming legitimate gift cards.
For Apple Business Manager, Apple forces you to create a separate new account.
Yes - all ABM accounts are Managed Apple Accounts, not Personal ones. You can’t mix and match (they each have different features).
And yet Apple CREATED the multiple-accounts problem for millions of people by implementing their idiotic "Apple ID must be an E-mail address" policy.
So of course people thought that when they changed jobs, cable companies, or whatever... they needed to create a new Apple ID with their new E-mail address. This was reinforced when Apple further stupidified their policy by requiring your ID to be a WORKING E-mail address (originally it didn't actually have to work).
After the outcry over people's App Store and other purchases being scattered across multiple IDs, Apple finally publicly and huffily declared that they weren't going to fix the problem they created by letting people consolidate accounts.
The moral: Don't force people to use E-mail addresses as user IDs. It's stupid on several levels.
> Apple finally publicly and huffily declared that they weren't going to fix the problem they created by letting people consolidate accounts.
They somewhat changed that. It now is possible to move purchases between accounts. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/117294. Looks quite cumbersome to do, and will not apply to everybody (“If an Apple Account is only used for making purchases, those purchases can be migrated to a primary Apple Account to consolidate them.”, “This feature isn’t available to users in India.”)
What's weird, and I'm not sure if it's a documented or undocumented feature, but the account I am logged into on the App Store differs from the one logged into on the system. The system Apple ID is setup with Family Sharing, and the users are able to use apps purchased with the secondary Apple ID.
I haven't transferred the purchases or anything either. The two Apple IDs have different purchases on them, and those on Family Sharing are able to access both.
Interesting. But WTF is a "primary" Apple account? My original Apple ID isn't an E-mail address, so they forced me (and others in that situation) to create another one for iCloud because that one inexplicably has to be an E-mail address.
I use both for quite a few things. Which one is "primary?"
>where Apple bans accounts for redeeming legitimate gift cards.
Is there any evidence of this happening with an actual legitimate gift card and bot one which was stolen or originally purchased via credit card fund.
Slightly off-topic, but stuff like this does not just happen at Apple.
When Cyberpunk 2077 came out, my wife bought it with her credit card and gifted the game to me. It was fine at first. I even managed to play through the game. However when coming back to the game a few months later (to see all the bugfixes), it was gone. I contacted the (gog) and they said it was removed due to automatic fraud detection and that the balance had been paid back to the original credit card (my wife's card, she had obviously not noticed this in her bank statement).
Point being automatic fraud detection systems can wipe out stuff you purchased even months after the fact (or in some cases lock your account)... It feels kafkaesque.
this kind of stuff happens all the time across major companies with minimised support. sure your google account is likely to be there tomorrow but it's only a very good chance that it's not locked forever.
i would be surprised if there's any company with millions of users where .01 or .001 (still a LOT of users) just get screwed with zero recourse
https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/
> The card was purchased from a major brick-and-mortar retailer (Australians, think Woolworths scale; Americans, think Walmart scale)
>was already redeemed in some way
This is the important quote showing that the gift card was not legitimate.
do you think that makes it ok? they walked into a store, tried to pay money to apple and as a result they had their stuff locked forever
apple recommended they only buy gift cards from apple, but they still sell them in stores...
obviously money is more important to them than the consumers but pretending apple have zero responsibility is silly
I am facing this issue right now. I need to create a separate developer account because I am risk averse. Do I need a new phone number for this? Online some people say yes, others say no. I tried creating the account several times but it just doesn't work. At this point I am planning to just get a prepaid SIM card from US Mobile for the phone number.
I set up a couple developer accounts recently for my clients. Just use a new Google Voice number for 2FA. I had to live chat with Apple support to get past initial verification both times and after that setup went fine.
If you create your developer account in another country (or with a card from another country, who knows), the whole thing just crashes and the sign-in on the instance loops.
When encountering this, I updated the device which bricked the appstore, the device has to be fully reset if that happens.
I had a similar issue trying to create an Apple TV account. I already had an Apple account that I was using on my work laptop (first mistake - I should have created a work account there instead), and for 2FA, I needed to wait for a code to pop up on that laptop. It never came. There was an email alternative, but that also didn't work properly (maybe only on certain devices, IIRC?). Apparently in the settings you can request a 2FA code, though, so I did that... but that only had five digits, whereas I needed to give six for the code to work. Eventually I figured out that Apple had just forgotten to zero-pad the 2FA code out to six digits, so I needed to add a leading zero to make things work.
The worst part of this is that now my Apple TV account is linked to a laptop that I don't always have on me. And even if I did have it on me, I don't want to get a laptop out and turn it on just to do 2FA. I already have a TOTP app on my phone, just let me put everything in there and leave me be.
My experience with MacOS is generally that it's about as buggy as my home Linux setup. That's partly a testament to how solid Linux can be these days, but at the same time, it feels pretty damning considering only one of these operating systems is free (in any sense of the word). And that's not including stuff like the configurability of the whole thing.
I had a similar issue when I first brought my iPad. Turns out, Apple doesn't like custom domains for emails. So, I had to make an Apple account with a Gmail account, then remove the Gmail account and add my email address with the custom domain.
Why? Who knows. Still remember my first experience after buying an iPad.
Might've had something to do with the state of the various email security measures on the domain. I have an Apple account on a custom domain with Fastmail and it's never been a problem.
Mine was also managed by Fastmail. And no one else has ever had a problem with it (including Apple when I added it after signing up).
You have to reach a human to make a Flickr account in 2025 if you use a custom domain. It wasn't too difficult, they gave me some reason about abuse. Whatever.
What does custom domain mean? Just an email provider other than the mainstream ones?
The opposite happened to me: I got a new Mac and had to fill out my Apple account billing details to download apps from the App Store, but somehow the form on both the App Store and the web page didn't work. In the end I managed to do it through the Apple Music app on my Android (!) phone.
I and a friend (both are not Apple users) had the same issue about 2 years ago. I gave up after trying different (non-Apple) platforms, IPs and phone numbers. He was applying to Apple internship and ended up borrowing a Macbook to set up his account.
And talking about why I wanted a new Apple account... My old account was created with stupid security questions (like, What is your favorite dish) as a second factor, which I believe Apple has long deprecated. I forgot my answers and that blocked certain functionalities. Resetting the security questions requires answering the questions...
I have a typo in my iCloud phone number.
I can't access anything without knowing exactly what I did wrong, presumably Apple never verified it when I created the account decades ago, but it's now part of the critical flow to log in.
I seem to remember this happening to me, and I finally called them and they said something about a waiting period for new accounts? It might help to try calling their tech support for this as painful as that is.
Yep same thing happened to me
BY FAR #3 is the most annoying UX on iOS 26 - I fall for it every single time when trying to change payment method. Not only does it undo years of muscle memory, it's so unbelievably unintuitive to have the first button change address instead of payment method
https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1mb4lod/is_anyone_else...
I don't get it. The screenshot on reddit appears to show that tapping on the card changes the billing info, and under that there's a separate button to change the card. So far as I can tell that's the same on iOS 18? The only difference is that tapping on the card doesn't do anything. What's the "muscle memory"?
iOS 18 is what introduced this. In iOS 17 you could tap the button with the card to change the payment method.
You're right my bad, iOS 18 introduced it and I'm still mistapping 2 years later.
Why would you need to change your address at all? That's part of the card details. No other payment system does that!
Not the address, but the phone number has a bug I run into it occasionally. Some merchants support the +1 country code, some are local US only and don’t expect it. Safari’s auto-fill figures this out when filling the form. But then I go to Apple Pay, an it replaces the phone number with a 1 at the beginning and drops the last number, then I get an error that something is wrong. Initially took me a while to realize what was happening and that you can edit the number in the Apple Pay overlay before it applies it to the order. Just a bit annoying
It changes the shipping address, not the billing address.
And yeah, I do tap it to change what card to use. "Every single time."
I didn’t even know this is an issue. It’s written right there, “Change Payment Method”.
Not an iOS user but I can totally see why this is an issue: Users read from top to bottom and once they think they found what they search they click it without analyzing the remainder of the screen.
So in this case you find a button that looks like it changes the payment method (because in earlier versions it did and it's a common UI pattern) and don't even see the button below that acually does this.
Trying to type this comment on an iPhone and that very last issue, text selection, is so so real. It’s probably the single biggest thing I hate about this phone that makes me consider switching back to Android (I was on Android for 12 years before trying out an iPhone for 3 years atm, and in general, on average, I can’t tell the difference… they both have strengths and flaws. Text selection is a pretty massive flaw on iPhone.)
Android isn't any better, every new version every year, it's becoming a buggier and buggier Tamagotchi that demands attention every half an hour, and has a gazillion contradictory settings that never work. My phone, model 2023, has night mode that turns on automatically. You can turn it off for 30 minutes, or permanently. There are clocks that work independently. I wanted a better one, because this one would reset all its widgets every minute, and no app could play music or radio in the background.
So I got a newer one, from 2025. Fortunately, radio & media do work. But product managers wouldn't have been product managers without spoiling something. Somebody decided the alarm and night mode must work together in unison, and also they dropped the turn-off-for-30-min feature, and they decided to make night mode smart, that it doesn't turn on if the phone was active at the time. So, now you can get spam calls or sms make it ring loudly at night, because night mode didn't turn on, because you used the phone. Next time when you notice night mode should be on, but isn't, you turn it on. But now it's permanent -- till the end of the universe, unless you turn it off. And alarm clock won't ring, because deep in there, a "waking up alarm" box is unchecked, that should have made it work despite the night mode. Did any human actually test it work on themselves?
And they had it solved! 3D Touch worked perfectly – you pushed the screen hard to get a cursor, moved it to the start of the selection, and pushed hard again to drag to the end. They killed it because "not all iPhones had the hardware to support it" or something.
You can still get a cursor by holding down space bar.
you can still make selections using the keyboard without 3d touch.
How? I know you can move the cursor by holding space and dragging but how do you start the selection?
touch the keyboard area with another finger :)
Thanks for that tip!
Unfortunately, it's still bad. It's a bit better than dragging the handles of the selected area, but if I go to far and want to reduce the selected area, it doesn't work anymore.
I have an Apple hand, with only one finger.
“Intuitive!”
I do it by double-tapping a word and then dragging the handles… does that work for you?
> iOS Text Selection is Pure Chaos
> You just wanted to move the cursor. Now everything is selected.
> You want to position the cursor at the end of a line. You tap. It selects the last word. You try to grab the handle — it doesn't respond and deselects. You tap again, now it selects the whole sentence. You tap blank space to deselect — nothing. You tap five more times. On the fifth, it selects all. You switch apps hoping the selection disappears. You tap and hold — sometimes text selects, sometimes a menu appears, sometimes nothing. Got a Magic Keyboard? Good luck — trackpad selection just doesn't work half the time, but touching the screen does. Eventually you select all, delete everything, and retype from scratch. Apple has had 17 years to figure out touch text selection. This is where they landed.
I submitted this YouTube video (not mine) a while ago here that demonstrates typing issues that I also encountered on several iPhones:
[It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken](https://youtu.be/hksVvXONrIo)
YES Typing is a horror show (perhaps only for me as I don't daily-drive and iphone but only have an ipad for home usage which may "under-train" me to The Way).
Text selection is cute, with the magnifying lens. It seems like this should work. Though the rest of the process is unpredictable and The Bad Kind Of Magic: Nick turns self into toad, poof!
REFERENCE - from the site:
* "iOS Text Selection is Pure Chaos"
* You just wanted to move the cursor. Now everything is selected.
* You want to position the cursor at the end of a line. You tap. It selects the last word. You try to grab the handle — it doesn't respond and deselects. You tap again, now it selects the whole sentence. You tap blank space to deselect — nothing. You tap five more times. On the fifth, it selects all. You switch apps hoping the selection disappears. You tap and hold — sometimes text selects, sometimes a menu appears, sometimes nothing. Got a Magic Keyboard? Good luck — trackpad selection just doesn't work half the time, but touching the screen does. Eventually you select all, delete everything, and retype from scratch. Apple has had 17 years to figure out touch text selection. This is where they landed.
Every single time I have to do some text editing in iOS, I end up shouting loud: "a f*ing trillion values company cannot get this right, f* you Tim Cook"
I run into the other bugs, but text editing is such an absolutely basic feature... it should just work, and it doesn't!
you can enable cursor control by holding space, and then you can move to selection mode by touching anywhere else on the keyboard.
You have to be very precise with your finger drags because it loves snapping back to the original position. Gbroard doesn’t suffer from this. Part of the reason is it doesn’t do the “free-floating” cursor thing - which I’ve never understood the point of anyway. It’s fancy but useless in 99% of cases on a phone.
This is missing the most annoying one for me: when I type a search term into safari and it randomly interprets it as an address that it can’t resolve. E.g. “how to bake cookies” gets resolved to how%20to%20bake%20cookies (which safari tries to resolve via DNS or whatever instead of piping it to the search provider). Even better, it’s entirely nondeterministic, though it does seem to be due to some race condition with whatever determines whether it’s a search or a url, and is more likely to happen when typing quickly.
I’d say it happens about 10% of the time I type anything in the search bar. It’s incredibly annoying. Without getting into too much detail, but I confirmed they’re tracking it internally too for close to a decade and are intentionally choosing not to prioritize.
When you had gone to a site using a deep link, Safari insists on autocompleting any URL in the domain to that link you used even if you just want to go to the top-level URL/index of that site. You have to type out the entire URL and add a space at the end or something (and that still doesn't work sometimes) to stop iOS from doing that, which defeats the entire purpose of autocompletion. Btw switched off any autocorrection feature a long time ago. Still, I happen to mistype a lot compared to my old non-Apple phones (there was even an "it's not just you" article last year about it).
Apple needs to spend an entire release cycle to unfuck text entry and completion. However, with their qa lately (or lack thereof) they'd only manage to make it worse. The sad thing is they're still better than the alternatives, all things considered.
Maybe you have an ISP that captures DNS checks to return ad sites, and Safari interprets that as a real website?
But honestly it seems extremely weird that Safari would interpret something with spaces as a URL instead of a search
I personally reported that around time when Mac OS X 10.9 (first non-cat) came out and immediately saw it marked as duplicate. So at least 13 years and counting.
I used to love Apple because they were so far ahead of the game in terms of UX and hardware. They have dropped the ball so much recently with all these UX mishaps from Apple Glass to most of the bugs in the post that affect me. I am more than willing to switch to Android or some other device regardless of price, but haven't found one that is close to equivalent yet. I worry it'll be a few years before something comes close to the battery life + screen quality + camera quality + decent software/security of iOS.
In the context of laptops, I would agree (MBP's hardware just outclasses everything else, even if I prefer Fedora over macOS).
However, for phones, this just doesn't shake out. The Pixel 10 Pro for instance, has:
* A battery that outlasts the iPhone 16 Pro by an hour
* A slightly better display (higher brightness for outdoor use, higher PPI, higher color accuracy, same refresh rate)
* A better camera for still photography, especially HDR and low-light (although admittedly worse for video)
I loved my Pixel 10 Pro until it broke just a week after purchase (screen went unresponsive all of a sudden and I needed to learn to factory reset it).
Pixel Android doesn’t support disabling the control center when locked in lock screen, and widgets are also available.
I saw all of that reported just recently too, so obviously not a single issue. The screen issues are known across several Pixel generations. The screen lock since 2013.
I don’t know whether I’m going to touch anything Pixel in the next couple of years, it’s not mature enough yet.
How's the OS security of the Pixel 10 Pro?
I think "Airpods" and "iCloud" for Photo Storage are the only parts of the Apple ecosystem I use, so those will be missed.
Great if you install Graphene!
With Graphene, something financial won’t work anymore. I believe either banking apps or Google Wallet, a known issue. Graphene didn’t support Pixel 10 yet last time I checked. That said, I’ve been just too occupied with reading on how to fix the Pixel bugs that bit me that I couldn’t get to the point of reading on Graphene and I don’t exactly remember anymore what was wrong with it.
Google wallet doesn't work which is imho a very tiny issue with contactless payment working with cards but most banking apps do. There is a forum thread I believe that you can check if your bank's app work before commiting to migrate.
Admittedly the hardware of the pixel 10 pro is very nice, but it still runs android which is the main issue for me. Also I love magsafe
The hardware is far behind in terms of benchmark performance. That wasn’t important to me, but it’s noticeable when you edit videos.
Pixel 10 pro has "pixel snap" which works with most mag safe attachments.
You can actually buy MagSafe cases for pixels. And GrapheneOS makes it very nice
Why are you comparing the latest Google flagship phone with a previous generation iPhone? The iPhone 17 is better than a Pixel 10 on most if not all fronts.
There’s little hardware improvement in iPhone 17 over iPhone 16. Arguably only the move from titanium to aluminum in the casing is a tangible performance enhancement (better cooling).
The software is the same.
I've got one.
When iPhone alarm goes off, the screen doesn't wake up, so I press the power button. Which snoozes the alarm. Not only did I not want to snooze the alarm, I hoped that the alarm would wake the phone up so I can click 'stop'.
I assume that's a bug rather than a holding-it-wrong?
I’ll note that looking at the screen deadens the alarm.
I’ve had it a couple of times where I’ve looked at the alarm on my nightstand, the alarm quietens down to nearly nothing and I fall back to sleep.
My partner missed a flight due to this.
This one has always confused me as well. Tapping the screen, as the other commenter suggested, dismisses the whole thing too, so I have to fish for the stop button in the notifications every time.
Maybe there’s “the Apple way” that we’ve yet to discover.
The Apple way is to have an Apple watch and deal with the alarm there
If you have tap to wake turned on (it's on by default), you can tap the screen anywhere to wake it up. So long as the screen isn't already on and you don't mash the Snooze button, you should be able to hit stop.
I believe the power-button-to-snooze thing is meant as a usability boost for groggy people: the physical button may be easier to click than some random spot on the screen.
I will object that the point of the alarm is to make sure you're not groggy anymore by the time you deactivate it.
But not everyone lives alone. If you'd like to avoid waking everyone else up - you hit the power button (or indeed any button) while groggy. And if you drift off to sleep despite your best efforts - well, that's why the button snoozes the alarm rather than disabling it.
Text selection peaked with Force Touch, where holding the space button, moving to start point, pressing down even harder to start selection en lifting finger at the end was sooo ergonomic.
I still miss 3D Touch. For me, iPhone XS was the peak iPhone.
Yeah, these are funny.
There's a strange logic (that I understand is not just at Apple) where if you ship a known bug, it becomes harder next release to fix it… because we already shipped the bug once (twice, etc.).
Apple engineers care though. If they were allowed to (given time, priority), they would love to knock out some of their oldest and most annoying bugs. And I understand that from time to time a bug-fix-only OS release is planned… but things always come up. New hardware, "AI"… who knows.
Maybe someday we'll get another Snow Leopard (bug-fix-only OS release).
It feels like Apple lacks the institutional vocabulary to even think about fixing old bugs. The way the releases are structured, there’s a “zero bugs” day where all bugs are ceremonially kicked out of the current release, and the level of quality is deemed to be “what we’re shipping with”. On that day, it’s not like the bugs are fixed, they’re just bulk-modified to target “future os release” and that’s that.
Then the planning is made for next years release and they plan for X features, which require Y time and Z engineers, and some mild hand-waving later a schedule is made, and gee would you look at that, there’s no time anywhere for fixing existing bugs. But that’s ok because big rewrite of subsystem is gonna ship next release and it’ll probably make all the bugs invalid, right? Right? Well, it certainly won’t have more bugs, right? Right? Oops…
Ironically Apple’s annoying “select text in an image” feature made it hard to press-and-hold to get the alt text to show (on an iPhone…)
For xkcd the alt text is much easier to access on mobile at the m.xkcd.com variant of the URLs (even without the text selection shenanigans)
The emoji search box's search bar sometimes will just stop working, usually after a {input, erase input, new input} sequence. No idea why. Dismiss picker, try again.
Sometimes the picker just refuses to be summoned.
Bluetooth is a mess. File transfers will fail, who knows why? Certainly not macOS. Often I'll just punt to GoogleDrive-TP.
Really random screen wakes.
Left macOS alone for 5s? All your windows have decided to start playing a game of musical desktop, and need 10s to re-arrange themselves back into place, also while sometimes displaying their contents at 2x.
Slack has any number of these; e.g., emoji inside codeblocks are simply corrupted. A number of odd corner cases in URLs will corrupt, and each edit of the message will further corrupt it.
So much of the web is plagued by some framework that, upon any JS exception, will destroy the entire DOM (idk maybe defunct page > no page at all?) and leave you only with "ApplicationError: …".
At this point I'd add "is a motorcycle a car? Is a pedestrian signal a stop light?!" CAPTCHAKCAS to this list, but those are a "feature".
If we're doing "features": password fields with no option to view the plaintext value? I use long passwords, and if I'm in a safe place, I would much rather see what I'm typing and correct any typos I make along the way than have to retype the same password multiple times with long delays between each attempt.
Also, once a day my Touch ID stops working and I need to log in with my password again. That's fine, the passwordless access expires after 24 hours or so, fair enough. But I turn my laptop on fresh every morning and have to also put my password in then. If I do that, I at least expect to be and to use my fingerprint until the end of the day.
Ugh this is the worst. It’s topped by password fields that don’t work with a password manager.
The wombo combo is field that doesn't allow pasting (???) plus app that forgets where you are. So you can't paste, so you type the first few characters, dismiss the app to look at what the field should be, come back and boom - it's cleared out or, worse, you're on the home page. For some reason banks LOVE this.
Why can't I disable MacOS "start every app I can think of" when you restart the laptop?
No, I don't want to launch Word, Excel, Sheets, and System Monitor when I reboot. They weren't even running when I restarted, and I unticked the launch apps on restart. Every. Damn. Time.
The emoji picker refusing to be summoned drives me up the wall. There's a dedicated key for it! And yet...
It's really staggering how much impact one engineer can have when working on a product used by billions of people. Fixing just one of these issues would instantly be the most valuable thing that person ever does in their life by orders of magnitude. We have incredible leverage in the software world.
You'd be surprised how many Apple engineers are fixing many bugs, of this caliber, on a semi-regular basis.
That "Human Hours Wasted" is not just sitting there because engineers don't care about it, it's because there are many many other opportunities to save similar amounts of time. Crashes waste time, perf bugs waste time -- and security bugs are much worse.
I really doubt everyone or even a tiny fraction of people at Apple are working on opportunities to save more time than fixing the repeated autocorrect issue. It affects everyone and it's been a meme since forever.
Trouble is, at that kind of scale even your bugs have users.
It took me 4hrs or more to register an account for my child on ipad. It was spread across several days...
When got my work macbook I had to register an account on apple to download some app from the store, and it wouldn't send me sms to activate. I had to do it the next day.
I wonder what happens there, but it seems like a very unprofessional web development or a lousy A B testing
This list is frustrating to read because it reminds me of all the time I've spent dealing with these bugs. Not all of them thankfully but more than half steal my time at least once on a weekly basis. They're all bad but I think the auto correct actively fighting me and the ios cursor thing are perhaps the most annoying of the bunch for me. Trying to communicate well on a mobile platform is bad enough but when it's actively sabotaging you it's just so much worse.
I just turn auto correct off completely, as it's just plain worse than just typing it myself. Unfortunately there's nothing that can be done about the terrible text selection.
Its been a 4 years since I had to target a website for Safari, but last time I did it still had serious difficulties parsing 8061 compliant dates. If you Google safari/webkit iso date parse bug looks like its still on going lol.
I bought the latest Intel MacBook Air and after few months they released M1 MacBook Air. Then they release an update, I did as I should, and it broke my laptop! I lost all my data! They fixed it for me in a couple of weeks without providing me a substitute! And they were arrogant enough to behave like they did a favor to not charge me for the repair! It was 2020! My MacBook Air never became like before, and it died a couple of times in a year, which it recovered by itself. And some months ago it died, and it didn't recover! I lost lots of data I spent thousands of hours and I trusted that I can have them even if my laptop dies. Now, I have no way to recover my data!
This exact thing happened to me with the update to Catalina. Had to send to fix, they were pricky arses over the ordeal. Sent back, it was never the same. Actually started seeing rainbow loaders.
The most damning permanent damage was that the wifi card never worked properly again and I had to connect an adapter, then a usb to ethernet adapter and use that. Which meant I had to sit in a specific disk at work if I wanted to use that computer.
To me, Catalina is the Vista of the mac world.
that Contacts one hits hard, no idea how many hours I wasted trying to figure out what the hell it’s doing.
Just today was looking at Activity Monitor Disk tab, for an unrelated reason - sorted by Bytes Read, lo and behold ‘contactsd’ - the Contacts daemon, is in 2nd spot at ~400 _gigabytes_ read, right after mediaanalysisd. I don’t even remember last time I opened the Contacts app on my Mac. It felt like it’s gonna be another time sink with no solution, so I didn’t even bother to investigate more.
With the latest Google Gemini deal to be the backend for Apple’s AI, I wish Apple could also do a deal for search (even though Google seems to be struggling more as time passes). Apple’s search being broken in Settings on iOS, macOS and iPadOS seem intentional — it can’t search in a relatively small and fixed list of items! Is it any wonder that Mail search doesn’t work with external data?
The AirDrop and Hotspot issues described are spot on. The success rate for these is like 40% to 65% (the latter if you’re lucky). These features require doing a dance of airplane mode, disconnect from WiFi, go to Settings and fiddle with the toggles, etc. When it works, it’s like magic. At other times, it’s a big joke on “it just works”.
Text selection and the trials to just move the cursor quickly and accurately: it’s like Apple has no senior management that cares enough (looking at you, Craig Federighi), no QA (this is obvious truth to every user) and no money to spend on making things better (don’t let the stock prices fool you). FWIW, I know of slower and fiddly ways to move the cursor somewhat (press space, hold and move or place finger on the text, hold and move).
All these issues persist for years or decades because senior management does not care. I can’t think of any other rational explanation.
My god I cancelled my isp because I’m moving. Thought hot spot would be fine for a few months. Every single day I have to restart my MacBook Air for hot spot to work. Multiple times every day I have to turn hot spot off and on even though it’s in discoverable but won’t connect. Multiple times every day hot spot is just off and can’t be turned on in control center. And this is with iPhone 17 and m2 on most recent updates. I can’t imagine on older hardware.
With older hardware the trick is to not upgrade the OS.
Apple's strategy is actually to make people auto-upgrade to make their work of maintaining older OS/software cheaper and make people who don't have recent enough hardware suffer.
It's funny that one argument for Apple was that you got updates for free. But in practice, Android doesn't need to upgrade the OS to access recent apps and ship security updates for old versions of Android. You just lose access to new OS functionalities, but it has been a while since there was much to care about.
I agree having to work around this is ridiculous, but maybe consider a little MiFi router? Those are cool to have anyway.
I've had this experience too. One thing I've found that can sometimes help with laptops failing to connect is renaming your iPhone in the settings (which in turn renames the hotspot name)
Now do Google. A few that immediately come to mind:
* Accounts: Can't use a GSuite address for Youtube, Nest, or any other Alphabet offering. Never explained. 15 years of this.
* Sheets: Hide the sum option in the menu bar. After digging, you find the Summa character and click on it. Oh, it's a menu of functions, not sum.
* Search.
That you cant jump to the beginning or end of search results in gmail. You can only click page by page and only know the end is near when you know when the results get close to your account creation date. The only work around is to guess ahead with editing the results page number in the URL string. It's been this stupid annoying way since day 1 of gmail.
Also now seeing the stupidest copying of liquid glass in google's web interfaces. Like adding transperancy to some of their pop up info boxes just so ugly and pointless.
Particularly search on Google drive / gsuite docs. For a search company, it’s just embarrassing.
I have a fun one: my iPhone (12 Pro) refuses to acknowledge that it has eSIM functionality, even though the hardware exists.
I'm fairly sure I know what the problem is! It was restored from a backup taken on an iPhone X that had two physical SIM slots (Chinese version). The new phone now seems to think it has two physical SIM slots: it shows an IMEI2 in About, but any attempt to use the eSIM functionality just fails (scanning a code does "nothing"; no "add" button is visible, etc.).
If this was an Android phone, I'd root it and just fix the offending network configuration file. I believe it's possible to tamper with a backup of the phone to fix the issue, but this would mean a full backup+restore cycle and some specialized tooling to go mucking with the backup.
I filed a Radar on it ages ago, but I'm assuming nobody ever picked it up.
Spotlight search is infinitely more useful than the Windows 10+ start menu. 99% of the time I'm just using it to open an app or a recent document/download.
In Windows, if I hit [Win], type "fusion" (to open Fusion 360, an app in the "Start Menu" folder, for what that's worth nowadays), there's a 70% chance it will do a Bing search for "fusion".
Just because something else is worse drones mean the other thing is good
Your autocorrect just wasted a full minute of my life (2s for re-reading, 8s for thinking about it, and 50s for responding.)
It's more useful until it spontaneously stops working, at which point you're stuck until and unless it spontaneously decides to work again.
Spotlight works great for me but the index can occasionally become corrupted. There’s a set of commands you can run to force a rebuild if you’re having issues. I’ve had to do this a few times over the years. This is another place where it’d be nice if Apple had a GUI to manage things like this.
My favorite is how it’ll just forget which apps are installed. A list of like 30 items. If you had one job spotlight, it’s this
I forget what combination of settings does it but my Windows start menu now only searches the two start menu folders. It's perfect, completely deterministic, instant.
Trying to turn the app launcher into the magic "accio <anything>" bar was a huge mistake. You can have a second UI element for search, I promise it won't scare me.
Is anyone else annoyed by Finder's terrible search box? Everytime I try to search something, it seems to insert random results in the list that have nothing to do with the term. I have to always explicitly click Filename so it only searches for files with that name.
I thought about adding that bug but it seemed like “search doesn’t work in this other thing” was just going to get repetitive (despite being true and annoying AF) and I had already spent way more time on it than I should have. Put in a pull request, tho. Happy to add it!
Some of these bugs are more well known but for some like AirDrop not working or hotspot not connecting I always thought “well it’s probably because some power setting / DNS config / ad blocker / whatever” that I accidentally changed from the default years ago.
Nostalgia is real but I do remember a not so distant past (around iPhone 4S or so) where AirDrop worked, autocorrect worked, text selection was flawed but predictable, WiFi connected and stayed connected etc.
What happened?
[delayed]
Solid list. I’d like to add the following:
- All: Contact syncing with Office 365 results in stored birthdays getting moved forward by one day. - macOS: Bluetooth audio stuttering when going in and out of full screen view in a given app such as PowerPoint. - macOS: Unlock using Apple Watch will randomly stop working - macOS: Safari suddenly going out to lunch and taking 30+ seconds to load a page (fixed by force quitting the entire browser).
Something I’ve noticed recently is that I press notifications by accident a lot more frequently. They just always pop in right when I’m trying to do something else. I suspect it’s because of the smart widget UI at the top of the screen that shows now playing, sports scores, direction etc. We didn’t used to interact with anything up there!
But it’s extremely annoying to open a 300+ unread messages chat when I didn’t want to!
What about that text selection bug all OSes have had for 20+ years. I'm dragging to select text, and if I drag one pixel too far, it inverts the selection.
Please add to the list "Launching Apple Music without you wanting to, at the worst possible moment", which is every moment, really.
There is even an app called noTunes to automatically close it. I've seen it get into a loop where it opens every single time it's closed. Of course Apple music is selling a subscription service when the app opens so no surprise why they open it.
I was given an iPad at work and had to make an Apple account to use it. Every time, the form on the website errored out with "Your account can currently not be created" without any further information. By trial and error, I figured out that creating an account with the exact same information on the iPad worked. Not the best first impressions of the "it just works" company.
Ok, it's not just because I'm trying this from my Linux computer with fake phone numbers to jailbreak the stupid iPad 3 I found in a drawer (and on which the registration form of course doesn't work anymore). Thanks.
All this s#it was already expected, because this is what happened when companies get big enough without competition or any kind of regulation.
This already happened in other markets and lots of people have warned this would happened again but nobody cared.
Now it doesn't matter anymore because Apple is so big that no matter what kind of s#it they do, nothing will hurt their sales, because people are trapped, depend on their stuff and don't have any other options.
The time lost estimates here are comically implausible--if Apple bugs were wasting 32m person-years per year, with around 1.5b Apple product users total, this would imply that the average Apple product user loses 32m/1.5b ~= 2% of their life, or about 11 16-hour days, to Apple bugs. If that were happening to you you'd, uh, notice :)
“The bugs are real. The math is not. All estimates are made up. Your frustration, however, is valid.”
I’m pretty sure it’s way less than 2%, but I definitely notice running into the same bugs many times.
Syncing on Apple devices across the board is pretty bad. A great example is the Notes app. It took me a year to convince my wife to migrate our grocery list away from the Notes app. So many arguments about missed grocery items that never synced.
I own an Android phone. The first time I tried to send a text from my wife's iPhone, I sent the wrong text 3 times in a row because autocorrect was convinced that it knew the word I wanted and I swear that the word was corrected only after I had committed to pressing the send button. At the time the autocorrect on Android was very mild; it's gotten more aggressive since, but still nothing like Apple's
Yes, every time you send a message from an iPhone you MUST append a trailing space, just to be sure it won't fuck up the last word when it sends.
Wow, the first three "bugs" on this are so spot on.
The Apple Pay Card icon that changes addresses always gets me. It's not what I would expect it to do.
The AirDrop randomly not working one is really manifesting at the most inconvenient times.
Apple simply won't fix it.
I'm always dumbfounded by people constantly praising AirDrop. It hasn't worked properly more often than it did. And that's not talking about the times when you send something, it gets accepted, and it just ends up in a void, not to be found anywhere.
At the end of the day, in most cases, it would be preferable to just connect the damn thing with a cable and send things that way. If you send a large file, it takes a while, and having to redo the process because of some bug kills any benefit from the convenience of not having to use a cable.
Apple Screentime. 100 settings. If you crack the code it works. One wrong setting and the childs device is as open as a book.
I’ve encountered several of these, but (at least on iOS 26.2), I can’t reproduce the typo one.
> Autocorrect Won't Take No For An Answer. You fixed it. It unfixed it. You fixed it again. It unfixed it again.
My experience is after the system makes the first autocorrection, the word is underlined, allowing me to revert to the original spelling. Then subsequent instances of the word aren't autocorrected.
It’s true though that if I leave the context and enter the same unrecognized term elsewhere, it’s the same grind. The only fix for this is to spotlight search for “Text Replacement” settings page to essentially add it to the iPhone’s dictionary. Clunky, but personally only have had to do this twice.
This rightfully deserves its #1 spot on Hacker News. I've experienced most of these bugs for longer than I can remember (and my memory goes back to the Apple II days. Maybe this will help shame Apple into fixing these problems.
Several of these I don’t have any problems with myself, but the one that I get affected by all the time that I haven’t seen here, at least from as far down as I scrolled, is the bizarre typo that the voice dictation randomly inserts a capitalized word in middle of sentences. I’ve never understood that one. It’s like I can technically be hands-free most of the time except I have to go back and correct capitalized words for no reason.
> Apple Pay: Card Icon Changes Address
This has been driving me nuts. The old design was perfect. Who could possibly think this made sense?
The simple answer is that fixing any of these doesn't get those Software engineers promoted. And that has been the case for as long as Crag Federighi has been in charge of software. Yet he is extremely popular on HN and everywhere on the internet.
Yes it is the same in all other software company. But we expect better from Apple.
Last time I made a satirical site I was banned from the registrar (I was "convincing" people that aliens were real apparently)
To add to the list: on iOS, if your music library is mp3s transfered on the phone with itunes, iOS randomizes the artwork of the mp3s, so a song will show a completely different artwork. Have experienced that for years, on multiple devices and across versions of iOS.
Had a similar thought today while marking up pdfs with my iPad. Half of the time I'm fighting with Files' ability to persist my changes after it frequently crashes. Why market it as an iPad if marking up pdfs is so scuffed? this has been happening for years, it's like Apple's desire to add new features tops the desire to fix long lived bugs.
Sometimes the bugs are features, I.e, natural scrolling different and inconsistent between mouse and mousepad without third party extensions. Thanks Apple!
I recently discovered that for some reason, macOS doesn't want to work with a mouse with a traditional scroll wheel. It just jumps erratically all over the place.
I tried using it because I forgot to charge my dumb magic mouse. I'm sure it can be fixed in some ways, but I really shouldn't have to. The mouse works just fine when plugged into a Windows PC.
I'm (and millions other people) are using macOS with a classic scroll wheel mouse perfectly fine. Are you sure there is not something messing with the trackpad at the same time ? (this looking erratically random?)
A bug that’s persisted for 10 years at least is in the Music app. When you lose Wi-Fi the app will skip to the next song over and over and eventually freeze up.
On iOS, it’s not just Wifi but cellular too. I tried switching from Spotify (got tired of their constantly deteriorating UI/UX) but this was a dealbreaker. You can’t listen to albums in the car because if the phone loses coverage at the wrong time it just… skips songs? HOW does this get through testing and persist for so long?
So I cancelled Apple Music and reluctantly went back to Spotify. At least in Spotify, music playback is functional.
Haha, same. I actually prefer the layout and organization capacity of Music (I was an iTunes fan back in the iPod days), but there are so many things that don't work like you would expect them to or just plain bugs that it's too tiring.
Whenever I would enter a supermarket without network access, Music would just stop streaming after one song, no buffering. Spotify handled it just fine. Even the Spotify remote functionality is better and snappier than the godawful Music Remote. That is a separate app, because for some reason they can't integrate that functionality in the main app for their own hardware.
Apple is really in free fall; I don't think any of the top dogs actually use their stuff or care about it. It still looks good, and the base is strong, but now the cracks that started appearing a few years ago are becoming too big to ignore.
Checkout Museeks for a solid alternative on Macos.
How about a Screen Time Parental Controls literally do not work, at all, just completely unusable and broken?
How about I can’t connect my AirPods to my watch to play music because my watch insists on acting as a remote control for my phone Music app, and support hasn’t been able to fix it for 5 years, over several watches and AirPods?
If you answer a call on the watch and have AirPods on, it can figure out to switch the audio in/out to AirPods for the call; it just gets handled by the watch. Then you have to awkwardly lean into the watch and listen very carefully because if there is any noise, you won't understand much because of the tiny speaker. Completely defeat the ecosystem argument, and I think the speaker in the watch is largely useless.
The Apple Watch is popular but not very good at anything, really. All the apps are more cumbersome to use than they are worth; you can't properly make a real custom watch face, and sports tracking is extremely basic without additional software.
Site looks to be by https://github.com/polymath-ventures/
Not sure what you mean by "looks to be by"? Their GitHub is linked at the bottom of the page
All of those would be so much better if there was at least some way to get a proper error message or status message.
I have a lot of pet Apple bugs. Top of mind at the moment:
Why can't we adjust the order of photos in a Shared Photos album?
No one cares anymore.
Everyone sits on giant balls of mud and those who built those balls are long gone. Fixing any of this would mean wading through and fixing endless legacy code at the risk of introducing new bugs. Some of it has hardware and radio broadcasting quirks involved which probably narrows down the people capable to understand the problem to almost 0.
And of those 0 people, no one gets promoted for fixing the incredibly buggy AirDrop. No one even knows how to replicate those bugs. Some iPhones in the wild sometimes stop being able to be found by other iPhones in the wild. Yikes. How do you even begin? Who's gonna write some debug code for a debug app for an iPhone in a lab and then runs back and forth with 50 other iPhones that also need to run debug code to finally get one in the state where it's unable to find or be found and then check diagnostics the communications hardware returns only to find out you need more diagnostic code.
Sync issues? Yikes again. Who the fuck would want to touch a system where any new bug could mean the destruction of trillions of photos and the wrath of OVER A BILLION of users. Flaky connections, many clients, sync algorithms, space on device limits, quota in the cloud limit, offloading of images. Also, once again, how do you even reliably replicate this issue which sporadically happens and sporadically resolves?
At scale and beyond critical mass, love and care and quality software are not rewarded. They are extra costs, just like human support agents.
This is cute and I hate stubborn Apple bugs as much as anyone. But these $100 billion figures should be weighed against the hypothetical trillions that Apple has contributed to humanity.
A domain name registered one day ago. I think this is the first time I’ve seen a domain on its first/second day, other than my own domains.
I did not intentionally look it up. I have an extension installed that tells me domain age whenever I visit a site.
IIRC the animation that plays when you use ctrl+arrow keys to swap desktops is tied to the framerate so it's ridiculously slow on high refresh rate monitors.
also the passwords popup on MacOS only sometimes takes keyboard input, so if I want to insert a TOTP pin, I can't reliably use the tab key or worse the search bar to reach it.
Good list.
WTF happened to iOS text selection? It's a shitshow now. First Apple decided that the cursor shouldn't snap to the space between characters. WHY? Why would I want to start a selection in the middle of a character? Oh yeah: I never would, and can't anyway. So why does the cursor go there?
Then there's the fact that if you press and hold and release, the "select all" option (and others) doesn't appear anymore. Try again. Try again. And then after the fifth? Seventh? try, suddenly you get the floating menu.
And then there's the now-often-useless magnifying glass, which frequently appears offscreen or behind the stupid notch.
And the window resizing. Ugh. It wasn't until what, the mid-2000s that you could resize an Apple window by anything other than THE LOWER-RIGHT CORNER. No other corners, and no edges. The sheer stupidity of this was galling.
When Apple finally "fixed" that, they did so in typical Apple fashion: grudgingly. They refuse to put frames on windows, so there's no clear area in which the cursor should become the resizing cursor. Is it any wonder that the resizing behavior is flaky as hell? And now it's even worse.
> The credit card icon doesn't change the credit card
Ha. I thought I was the only one who's cursed this every single time I need to change payment (which is often)
> You just wanted to move the cursor. Now everything is selected.
Holding the space bar is your friend on this one. I recently learned, holding two fingers will move with selecting.
I’m not sure if it’s a bug, but I find it frustrating that there isn’t a more efficient way to organize the grid of apps on your iOS home screen.
I laughed at “autocorrect will die on this hill.”
I’m not sure it it’s a bug but I can’t believe more people aren’t talking about it: When you use apple maps and your phone is locked and you want to unlock your phone, for some reason it takes like 5 seconds or something to unlock the phone which feels like forever. The ui feeling insanely unresponsive and weird, you have to swipe further than usual and it takes way longer. It feels like the phone is fighting you! How dare I want to use my phone while navigating! (Even when walking)
I think what’s happening is that face ID doesn’t activate until you stop swiping, where usually it would start when you look at the phone or pick it up? Presumably because you’re going to be looking at the phone a lot when using maps.
God I hate it so much. I didn’t use apple maps for years because of it but then I switched to apple maps because of some egregious privacy violation by google maps that I can no longer remember.
Also applies to other apps that work when your phone is locked like phone calls.
Yeah this is a good one. I’ll add it. It really is so bizarre, it takes like three unlocks.
This is spot on! I have experienced all these issues at one point or other and my spotlight search is frozen as I type this on a Mac mini.
No podcast app bugs?
Are you even trying?
Podcast app in CarPlay: A episode of a show is playing. It has the episode name, the show name, and a date. None of them hint at being pressable (touchscreen). But one is. Guess which one? The date one. That’s the only one that’s interactive and the only one that takes you to the actual show with its library.
Podcast app on phone. 90% of the time the downloaded episode is not there even if you just downloaded it. Sometimes you have to have another “safe” downloaded episode from another podcast to FORCE downloaded episodes to appear. If you don’t have this safe reserve episode in your downloads, your downloads will be a black hole. Download a safe one, and suddenly the missing ones pop into the folder, or heck, generate the folder at all.
10% of the time the episodes will just fail while downloading without ever resuming.
Most of these are fully on Apple, but for the Gmail and Google Contacts bugs, I'd say Google is at least partly to blame for positioning the open standards versions of their APIs (IMAP and CardDAV in this case) as secondary to their own proprietary APIs and not implementing them particularly well.
Mail just sometimes refuses to issue a server-side search via IMAP. It insists that it wants to search its offline database of downloaded mails. When it cannot find anything, it will even tell you that “Mail downloads and organizes messages when iPhone is locked, charging, and connect to Wi-Fi.” And my response to that is, it has had eight hours to do exactly that every night.
That's fair then (though I haven't hit it because I have all my mail downloaded). There's other bits in Mail that are flaky with Gmail compared to standard IMAP mail providers, though.
Nobody ever gets promoted from fixing bugs, no matter how bad the bugs are. And this is true even in much smaller companies.
For the autocomplete one: on MacOS you can press ESC and get rid of the proposal.
You forgot when autocorrect fixes your word the second time, in 50% of cases you hit send too fast and have to send a follow up correction or edit the message
Idk what’s wrong with me but I’ve never run into any of these!
Bugs Apple loves? It must be all of them, because they hardly ever fix any. And they make more of them with each OS release.
I can't seem to reproduce the mail search bug.
That email bug is the worst.
how can we make sure Apple leadership sees this?
The most egregious bug/s I've encountered in recent years is the utterly cursed tab management in iOS Safari.
A couple of times a year it will just nuke all my open tabs (450-500) and present me with a delightful blank screen. Before that it will mislabel the active tab group on and off before giving up entirely.
Quick action on my part stops the destruction syncing & I usually end up recovering them on my Mac & then save them as a tab group.
But literally just an hour ago, iOS Safari looked like it nuked ALL MY TAB GROUPS. Ugh. They were gone; swiping right led to the "New tab group" screen. Frantic backing up and a restart later, and the tab groups are back, as though the phone was like "just kidding!". FML. So much for that backup plan.
UI bugs are one thing, but how is that level of data loss acceptable in a modern operating system? Boggles the mind.
(And don't get me started on the UI track wreck that is the iOS-inspired/inflicted bookmark management on macOS Safari, where all Mac UI conventions went out the window for some reason.)
Very often I'll close a tab, realize I need to open it again for some reason, long press on the + button and it just isn't there. I feel like re-opening a closed tab fails more than it works.
Also sometimes the back button will just freeze or not take you back. So I try hitting it again, it takes me 2 steps back in my history (this is fine), then I press forward and it takes me to the end of history, so I hit back again and it takes me 2 steps back. And the page I actually wanted to go back to is just gone from my history. I know there's a lot of whacky JS messing with history that happens on web apps, but it will often happen on HN when the article I clicked on is a plain text blog with minimal JS and definitely not altering the history state.
Edit: This literally just happened to me after writing this comment, with the post about turso database. I clicked the HN comments, clicked the post link (to github), read for a bit and clicked back. And the comments page is just not in my history.
macOS Safari also has fun tab bugs.
If you have a window with only one tab in it, and drag that tab to another window to merge them, the window disappears and they merge... right? Nope, if you look in your Windows menu, you now have a phantom window with no tabs in it that you have to reveal and close manually.
Randomly when I go to close a tab it will say "you have 2 tabs selected, do you want to close both". I didn't even know selecting multiple tabs was a feature, so OK maybe I had held down shift while switching tabs at some point? Nope, switching tabs (to deselect any tabs) doesn't change it, it still thinks I have some phantom tab selected somewhere.
These have both been there for years.
I actually keep the Gmail app installed on my iPhone specifically for searching my mail. It's infuriating.
The hotspot issue is my absolute pet peeve. It is so bad for me that I just had to accept that I have two options for hotspotting:
1. Go to settings and change my phones name then connect. Every. Damn. Time.
2. Use a cable and hope the MacBook Pro picks it up.
Honestly the quality of iPhones has deteriorated to a point where my next phone will just be something like an oppo or xiomi. I’m done paying £500+ for a phone that doesn’t do what it’s meant to while forcing a load of crap I don’t want down my neck
I'm still waiting for apple to fix ringtones on siri generated alarms
I stopped reading at the very first bug:
> Mail Search Doesn't Work
For me mail search works very very well. Ironically, it's one of the features that convinced me to use Mail as my primary and only email client.
I'm wondering if the author of the rant is using the search input of the single message/thread, instead of the global one, or if they are not aware that the global search is by selected account, so if you want to search in all accounts you have to first select the unified inbox. By the way, this is another awesome feature of Mail, while the search string is in the input, you can switch accounts and see the different results per account.
Before anyone asks: I have 5 email accounts, between them, I have way more than 100.000 messages (might be 5x, I don't have the Mac now to check) and they're all synced on my devices (it's ~24gb of messages)
Great, "Works on My Machine" award for you. Well done.
Tim Cook is "stepping down" soon. Do you think his replacement will fix these things? I stopped using Apple stuff shortly after Steve Jobs died. Linus is still alive, but I wonder where I'll move once he is gone.
Mine “favorite” bug is the auto-replace of I->O on iOs. O think that’s a real strange one, and really wonder whether anybody ever uses “O think” in English.
Are you sure it's the auto-replace and not the dynamic keyboard doing its dark magic?
The Apple Pay one drives me crazy
This is satire, but it is so real that it hurts. I have encountered all of those bugs and more.
The worst part is the delusional Apple fanboys who will pretend it always works for them because they have associated their ego with the ownership of Apple devices.
Google might be bad, but at least it works most of the time. And hilariously, Microsoft, well-known for bugs galore, actually manages to make softwares that are less infuriating in the long run.
This is another level of petty, I love it Maybe it will inspire them to hire more engineers and we can kill two birds with one stone.
This is never an issue with number of engineers, it's an issue of business priorities.
Large tech companies have plenty of engineers to fix bugs, but most of them are on projects trying to 10X things instead of paying down debt.
Apple used to be unique in it's immunity to it, they even shipped an OS update claiming it was only big fixes and not features which is unthinkable these days. Over time there's much less focus on polish from them though.
Will maintenance and bugfixes get them promoted? "Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome"
More engineers aren't the solution. Less engineers are.
> Maybe it will inspire them to hire more engineers
Given Apple's recent software quality, this would likely just let them ship more bugs.
> Apple Pay: Card Icon Changes Address
This one is one of my pet peeves even outside of Apple Pay. My personal opinion is that almost all iconography is just reinventing the wheel. We already have a widely-accepted iconographic vocabulary already understood by a billion people: Chinese characters. The fact that English speakers can't read it is immaterial, because English speakers already can't read the icons we're already using. Using Chinese iconography in all languages will dramatically increase the legibility of the icons we use in apps.
(Or, we could just put regular text under the icon...)
I guess it’s about priorities and not prowess, but it is shocking/fascinating the things Apple seems really bad at.
The Mac is funniest of all. I can’t imagine Tahoe drives an upgrade cycle. I buy a Mac for the hardware. Why not refine it? I would love to have a Mac with a better OS. (Don’t troll me about Linux. It’s worse.)
Hm, what’s worse? To be incapable or simply not to care enough?
This is obvious AI-generated web design style.
You're not wrong — but actually the prompt I gave it was "invert Apple's design style." I think it did a reasonable job?
It’s just Claude code house style, it’s as identifiable as Bootstrap. It didn’t invert Apple anything.
Speaking of AI-induced delusions, why did you submit this to HN?
It made me cringe to see its AI prose in AI code with completely made up bugs (really, the Mail search bar doesn’t work?), with made up numbers based on made up things as the spine of the content.
They're real bugs all right - have you ever tried to search a gmail account via apple mail?
I can report it works fine, needed it to pull up 13 year old emails for me a couple months ago.
I suspect the point was never to win awards for web design, just to put some content on a page.
Is it? Looks good to me.
At this point AI-generated doesn't really mean "bad", it's just a distinctive style.
I couldn't actually get past this websites terrible UI.
The terrible UI of a straight-forward document separated into distinct blocks, paragraphs and charts that are easily read, that scrolls from from top-to-bottom? Yeah, awful.
This is a Claude-coded website that invents metrics and data based on bald-faced lies, ex. the first example makes up that the search in Mail does not work 100% of the time and then calculates fantastical millions of hours wasted.
I can report it works fine, needed it to pull up 13 year old emails for me a couple months ago.
I absolutely abhor Apple’s software QC since 2010 but I don’t think a vibe-coded, vibes-based, fantasy, written by AI, with the sheen of numbers and reality is the way to do it, or a net-positive outlet for my frustration. At least on HN.
Huh. How else would you get a massive company that has let certain bugs sit for decades to address them? This method is probably just as ineffective as reporting another bug into the Black Hole of Bug Reports that is Apple, but this one is at least mildly funnier? YMMV of course.
But the bugs never existed in the first place? I hate HN is rife with inflammatory complain pieces like this.
I experience at least five of those bugs daily and it makes me so frustrated: Hotspot, airdrop, mail search, corner drag, text selection.
The search bugs in Mail are absolutely real. They might not affect every user but I've had major issues on both macOS and iOS mail, and eventually gave up and switched to Gmail.
Have you checked if it’s the fault of your mail providers? The search function queries the remote mail servers in addition to the local cache. If the mail servers return garbage you get garbage results.
As I used to ask field teams and PMs back when I was a SWE - provide the steps to reproduce the bug as I can't seem to recreate it.
If you want to be that pedantic it does state "This site is satire. Not affiliated with Apple Inc. The bugs are real. The math is not. All estimates are made up. Your frustration, however, is valid." at the bottom.
The bugs are not real (inter alia, Mail app search does, in fact, work). Your being pedantic is my being reality-based.
All of the things on this website have affected my experience of macOS and iOS for a long, long time.
I definitely go straight to the Gmail website when I need to search for anything on my work account. Yes, I've got it set up to cache all the emails locally indefinitely. Have done for years. Even did so when my workplace used Office 365 instead of Google.
On Hacker News, of all websites, giving yourself the "Works on My Machine" badge is not a worthy contribution. It's dismissive of any experience other than your own.
Genuinely curious how anyone can use iOS autocorrect and conclude that it's not totally shit.
Do you think you might be taking it too seriously?
No I think I don’t come here for 0 effort fiction. YMMV. I don’t mean that dismissively. People seem to love it. It’s not an AI thing, it’s a “this is Spam, in the original sense of the word”
I mean, it reports FOUR HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS in losses due to Apple Mail.app search not working. Give them credit for... something.
Ah, you can add to that list messages never showing you your attachments
Have a thread going with someone for years? Yeah good luck seeing more than 20% if anything you’ve ever sent each other
Imagine if life was this zero sum
All these are so infuriating. It's crazy what a nice metal case and good hardware can make people forgive.
The first one is pretty funny because Gmail search itself has a lot of issues.
iOS user here of a few years, never hit any of the bugs in this article.
Maybe Apple didn’t fix them because the bugs never existed in the first place.
Maybe you just aren't perceptive. There's always a % of users that won't notice the most egregious bugs or design mistakes, just like there's a % that's way too sensitive to the most minor issues.
The article lists very obvious functional regressions (that I use everyday), I would not have missed them.