The number one priority must surely be fixing the keyboard, besides the horrible UX?
Millions are having problems for years so it's not just me, honestly thought i was "getting old" but no incredible amount of threads and now this on YT with 1 mil views:
I through I’m just getting stupider and stupider with each day. I even started to reset my iOS keyboard autocorrect dictionary or whatever-magic-learning they do to fix this, but eventually will still mistype words.
Thank you for this video, it really made me feel that I’m not alone in this struggle of typing.
For some reason I have English&German, English&French keyboards and it always screws writing I just want a German or French keyboard when writing in that language. It's driving me crazy sometimes.
Installing the Google keyboard has been step #1 on every new iOS device of mine for the last decade. Sometimes I'll accidentally switch back to the default one while typing and immediately notice how broken the experience is. And yeah, I have definitely run into the exact issue shown in this video.
As a side note, I can't believe not a single device manufacturer has been able to make a blackberry-style keyboard work with a modern phone. Texting is by far the #1 activity on smartphones and yet when it comes to typing we have somehow gone backwards since the mid 2000s.
Per your last point, there's at least one. My updated Q20 (BlackBerry Classic) just shipped, with the same keyboard, trackpad, and body - but new cameras, battery, and mainboard, meaning a relatively up-to-date Android
The Q27 (a ground-up new design) with a similar keyboard is in the works as well, with the Q20 being used to raise funds for the newly designed Q27
iOS repeated “learns” new words that I use that are misspellings of real words (because I mistype things in a predictable way). It becomes so convinced that it will autocorrect the real word into the typo. And knowing how the keyboard works, I wouldn’t be surprised if it enlarges the touch targets for the typo once it thinks I meant to use the typo.
The cause is obvious: Apple is training on what I type, not what I send. Apple does not consider that I actually care about the accuracy of what I send and will fix errors; perhaps they optimize for people who are careless enough to send typoed messages, yet niche enough to commonly use words not in the default dictionary.
It is infuriating that I have ~50 manual corrections telling Apple to leave words alone and correct certain typos to the real words.
I thought it was just iOS not being responsive enough to my thumb-typing speed.
But this was very validating to watch.
I love my iPhone but hate the iOS typing experience. It's so bad that I bought an external foldable Bluetooth keyboard that I keep in my bag just so that I could type longer emails.
Finally, confirmation that I’m not going mad! I remember when I got my first iPhone, back in the day, and demoing to a friend how it was almost impossible to misspell something when typing fast. That is just not the case now. Typing performance has got worse and worse.
Just typing out this comment has been infuriating.
It is a gimmick, not anything users as a spectrum might find favorable. And the sad thing is, that Apple is the only one with such a laughing stock of UX/UI.
I am totally annoyed by the animations in Apple Notes. The icons have considerable increased in size and everything screams what a mess to me: the shadow as part of "the experience", partly rounded icons which talk more space than rectangles, hidden functions or multi function menus.
There is absolutely no spirit in this update. The animations show no variations, always the same most boring ones (the s curve in Apple Notes).
Lately I found die settings menu in Safari especially disastrous, the tab menu icons when pressed look so ridiculous, I lost words.
I walked through a tech store recently and I saw the new iPhones with the liquid gimmick. I opened the camera app on one of their pro phones and it was lagging. I was shocked, I found it mind-boggling. Brand new phone, up to date OS, marketing material BS and for it to lag just feels unprofessional. I’d understand it if it was a Pinephone or whatever but from Apple? My expectations are reaching lower and lower depths.
> The changes introduced by Windows Aero encompassed many elements of the Windows interface, with the introduction of a new visual style with an emphasis on animation, glass, and translucency; interface guidelines for phrasing and tone of instructions and other text in applications were available.
For those of us who want our mobile devices to just be there when we need it...thank god there are no new animations. I don't need a shot of dopamine every time I open the Mail app. I just want to know that I successfully pressed the icon. Which is what micro interactions (aka small animations) are for. Feedback.
I hope the phone get's even more boring and uninspired next go around. Apple can afford to go back to the 'it just works' motto.
My macOS display system is pushing megapixels and with some good exceptions it feels like many apps have not much more visible information or options than an 80x25 VGA display. This is not to trash VGA displays which were often very well-designed. Some web pages now only show a single paragraph at a time on screen because of cumulative pop-ups, borders, and rounded corners.
We thought the same thing, and they made pretty significant changes to it based on that pushback. Also the flat redesign didn't have basic problems like white text on an white background all while Apple is saying they spent obscene resources on it.
Tahoe is okay to use if you just use the Reduce Transparency accessibility option. The buttons in Finder still look ridiculous though. Fisher-Price tier design.
No it doesn’t. I’m genuinely sick of people saying Liquid Glass is unreadable just because some designer once said transparency makes things unreadable. This is not true in practice. Liquid Glass is so sparingly used (basically some navigation menus) that it literally doesn’t change a thing.
My Mac M1 is effectively permanently locked to Sonoma, and I have zero intention of upgrading beyond that. I was pretty happy with Monterey, but eventually some apps started requiring Sonoma as the min requirement. :(
Being a software dev dissuaded me from upgrading at all. I used to live on the cutting edge, now I don't update unless I am forced to. I stick to the version that works for me.
Why? I honestly don’t see much of a difference in a day to day basis between Tahoe and whatever the previous version was. Tahoe looks slicker to me, but nothing really impacts how I work
I'd bet you money within 5 years Apple will continue following Microsoft (after metro) and try "merging" macOS and iOS together into one OS, most likely iOS.
This defense feels so ridiculous every time I hear it (and it's almost always about Apple). People trot it out about Airpods too. If Apple is too big to care about this product line, we should be enraged, not shrugging or pointing out how successful they are.
Very shortsighted take considering Apple’s ecosystem advantage.
macOS is a major part of keeping iPhone users on iPhones, and in turn keeping Apple users buying subscriptions.
When you look at the most profitable demographics in the market (e.g. “computers over $1000”) Apple has a huge percentage of that market in both revenue and marketshare.
So you wouldn't mind taking an 8.5% pay cut? Apple stockholders wouldn't mind an 8.5% drop in the stock price?
If Apple dropped the Mac, how many of those former Mac users would also drop the iPhone? (I would.)
And of course, Mac is the platform for writing iPhone apps. Indeed, Mac is the platform that Apple engineers use to write the iPhone operating system, which was based on and shares a lot of code with the Mac operating system.
The Mac is the lynchpin that holds the entire ecosystem together. It also provides a lot cachet to Apple. Most of the wealthiest and/or influential Apple users are Mac users as well as iPhone users. If Apple can't make a desktop computer anymore, the company's founding product, that would be embarrassing to say the least.
> Apple won’t quite launch ‘zero new features’ like they claimed with OS X Snow Leopard back in 2009, however. According to Gurman, Apple still plans to release a number of new AI features with iOS 27, so the company doesn’t continue to fall behind in the AI race.
Goddamit.
Zero new features is clean. It's communicable. It lets Cook, as he departs, harken back to quintessential Jobs. It will sell phones. It will sell Macs. And it implies perfection in a way only Apple, historically, has been able to nail and sell.
Nobody is buying an incremental iPhone or Mac because Siri recovered from lobotomy. The decision to water down zero new features with a douse of Giannandrea reeks of office politics.
Snow Leopard wasn't 0 new features, it brought pretty sweeping kernel level changes. Although I suppose being able to focus on low-level developer facing things rather than flashy new consumer facing things is still in line with the philosophy.
I have used Thinkpads for over a decade and I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. I can't imagine any scenario where a MacBook M chip would be required to be productive, it feels like a weird hill to die on.
Battery life that needs to last all day is a first world computing problem. Most people leave their laptops plugged in and as long as you don’t run 10 chromium apps or other reasource hogs in the background, you will easily get 10-12 hours of battery.
I bought an expensive Dell and I regret the decision everyday. Just after 2 years, lots of things are breaking down and that's not counting the battery which barely last 2 hours now. Also finding components/parts if you are not US-based is hell; compared to Apple which has better support and an international presence.
I daily drive an M1 MacBook Air and a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 11 running Arch/Hyprland. Software-wise I absolutely adore the latter, but hardware-wise it falls short of the Mac on nearly every level.
Battery life is horrendous (despite extensive tuning). The speakers are complete crap (despite using Easy Effects). Fans get loud sometimes because, well, it's x86_64.
It's a shame, because even though the Apple Silicon CPU is faster on paper, the same task flies on the Thinkpad compared to the Mac. And of course the Thinkpad's keyboard is fantastic.
Honestly the one thing I simply can't look past are the speakers. I work from home so battery life isn't a massive issue for me. Fans I can look past. But I simply cannot stand listening to music or watch a YouTube video on it, they are SO bad.
ThinkPad T14s is silent, keyboard is known as one of the best across all laptops even if it has got thinner. Trackpoint is there for a reason. The display I will grant you, it is not as amazing as Apple's. But I'm using my laptop to code not watch movies.
Half of these can’t be real issues because macbooks had the same issues for decades and an aluminum body was enough to overcome that. What happened? Oh right the vanity shot through the roof.
Then please don’t make the leap. Because beyond your specific hardware design requirements that are “must be a macbook” there is a lot more trade offs you’re going to have to make. Letting go of your prudeness about what constitutes good and bad hardware should be the easiest barrier to cross.
Out of the box on CachyOS with KDE Plasma, I don't even have windows remembering their positions across a multi-monitor setup. That was shocking to experience with a current-day DE. And I believe it's not KDE's fault specifically but Wayland not having that feature yet, but that makes 0 difference to the user. If OP is hesitant to switch because of superficial hardware complaints, they're going to have a hell of a time actually using it as their main operating system for any significant amount of time.
To make my two screens work (one of them portait) I needed to learn how to modify text config. And for some reason my 23” display ran at 150% instead of 200% scaling.
Keymaps in komorebi on windows are alt+hjkl to focus windows and alt+shift+hjkl to move them. On omarchy it’s some accords with arrows. Arrows on system that touts vim and tui! I don’t have arrows on my uhk keyboard.
The font is too small. To make it at least 10 you don’t have one setting for that.
The list just goes on and on.
So, like I’ve said, I’m perfectly ok with windows and wsl for my C# stuff and my mac for everything else.
> Are you primary using electron-based apps, or true native macOS apps?
Maybe I’m lucky but I run macOS daily without any problems.
There’s an in-between abomination — Catalyst based apps from/by Apple (quickly migrated from iOS to macOS). Reminders, Notes and others are downright unnavigable and unusable with a keyboard and are so, so terrible in their UX. It’s a shame that Apple hasn’t spent any effort in fixing those and making them true native macOS apps.
For the last several years, there has been nobody at Apple who has good taste and a deep and committed interest in UX.
Try "killall -STOP photoanalysisd", this will pause the process instead of killing it (which would result in restarting it by launchd). You can unpause it by using "-CONT".
I use MacOS daily on different machines and don't have that experience. I also manage many Mac's and I don't hear people reporting this kind of instability to me.
Yesterday I had my "death by a thousand strikes" moment with the children's iPad.
1. It was showing 4% of battery for a while, but then showed a pop-up that the battery level has dropped below 10% and suggested turning on the battery saver.
2. I entered iMessage via a notification, and it was unresponsive, I couldn't select the thread on the left. And there are in total 3 of them, not hundreds. Had to tap it multiple times.
3. Then I wanted to switch to the previous app, and the drag-the-line-up-slowly-to-show-apps menu was polluted with 8 copies of iMessage.
All of these should've been not only caught by some kind of internal testing, they should've not happened at all due to proper architecture of the system. iOS more and more feels as a collection of hacks that try to mimic the real thing.
Yeah bro. For the first time I'm seriously considering adopting Linux as my personal desktop OS. I already use it at work for server stuff. So I'll get by. Maybe I'll miss some of the proprietary software, but that list of programs is quickly dwindling every year.
At first I held back because of the ecosystem (i.e. still really liked iOS. But now that iOS is kinda sucking ass too, it makes it a much easier proposition.)
FWIW, I've been daily driving Linux and an iPhone for almost 13 years now and I've never really had any issues with it. Maybe it's because I've not experienced some of the integration in the ecosystem and so I don't know what I'm missing.
I use Firefox as my browser across all devices so I can just share tabs via my account, and if I want to share text or files then LocalSend works just fine in lieu of Airdrop.
Maybe it's just me, but if I was leading development of iOS, then a "Quality and Underlying Performance" focus would be the bedrock of anything that was modified or added to iOS.
my 83 year old mother was able to use (almost) all the features of iOS when she first got an iPhone, in 2012. It genuinely changed her life and meant she could participate in a world I dont think she ever expected to be comfortable in. She tried and failed to use a PC for years. Local library lessons, family time (and patience) etc, but she always needed support. the iPhone as different, it was simple to use with familiar user interactions with every app. Roll forwards to 2025, gradually bit by unnecessary bit bells, whistles and complexity has bled in from every angle. Last week I did a FaceTime call with her to help her log in to an app on her phone. She can do it fine on her iPad that hasn't been updated. this was like going back to her PC days - too complicated and giving her features she didn't ask for, or need.
what was it Steve Jobs said?
"If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or a better computer — so what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company is not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people. And they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision-making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. Sort of the product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."
I've worked at companies that don't really have to sell on features. The product people still come up with new ideas constantly and don't pay attention to the quality. Heck, engineers will gin up new systems to build if they're bored.
1) The "0 New Features" Mac OS X 10.6.0 came 22 months after 10.5.0, not 12 months
2) 10.6.0 included significant under-the-hood improvements but also brought some truly nasty new bugs and was significantly buggier than 10.5.8, released a few weeks prior
3) 10.6 received 23 months of subsequent minor bug fix updates, up to 10.6.8 v1.1
We'd need two Snow Leopards in a row just to match Snow Leopard purely in development time, but now there's a lot more preexisting technical debt built up after well over a decade of annual major releases.
Why do they even need to release a major version every year? Whats the point?
For the hardware, i get it, but the OS doesnt really drive sales, and if you have the pressure of releasing new amazing features every year then maintenance and bugs get left behind, and you end up in the situation that we have now…
Holy shit so I will have to put up with iOS 26’s abysmal performance for almost a year? Nooo… this thing visibly and painfully struggles to keep up even on a brand-new iPhone 17. I was hoping for iOS 26 point releases fixing most of the garbage… sigh
Apple hardware is great, but the software has become complete garbage.
On my Apple Watch I have regularly occurring hiccups where the whole UI freezes, especially when I go into training mode to pick an exercise. On my iPhone, after the liquid glass update, I get a noticeable slowdown and stuttering FPS when moving from the widgets screen to the first page and in other parts of UI. I'm afraid to upgrade my MacBook to the new OS, so I don't.
This is amazing. Once a company that built its reputation on quality and performance wants to focus on that. iOS became a parody of itself. 26 feels like a cheap knockoff of an iOS. Hundreds of people get paid to enshitify experience for millions of users. That’s incredible. And then they simply say that yeah you know it’s time to work on quality and performance. Isn’t it what always had to be there in the first place? Ridiculous.
Fix that freaking keyboard FFS. Seriously. How is it that almost 20 years later it's still one of the worst parts of the iOS experience.
Also, ditch liquid glass on MacOS. That sh t is so Windows 7. It wasn't cool then and it isn't cool now. What the hell are you guys doing? Copying Microsoft now? It so, outdated, slow and twitchy, makes it hard to read. There's literally no upside to it. None. Zip. Nada.
I'm an outsider to the big tech companies so I don't know how it looks on the inside, but I have thoughts and maybe it will spur some discussion.
I've heard it said that there is manager culture, push to ship new features to pad resumes, etc. So you have these teams building new projects/products and some of it is a miss. There's an escalation path from outside and inside that allows for radars to be filed for major issues. I remember tracking one when I got the original iPhone SE they had a bug in the bluetooth stack that made handsfree calls sound all full of static for the first release or two after launch. We all know bluetooth is a pain and they handled fixing this well. I assume logically with most projects you expect to field lots of bugs early on at launch and then you take resources off once it's been live for a bit and the problem reports slow down. Then it's just debt or not important and how does it ever get handled?
With Apple, there are little ongoing bugs I would like to file, I have submitted on-device feedbacks before but it feels like sending into a black hole. Here is a simple bug, very easy to describe: Accessibility > Audio & Visual > Flash for Alerts (enable it). It flashes the camera light when you get a notification so you can visually see alerts while the phone is silent and not in a pocket. This works on its own, but if you are using the camera light as flashlight and people begin to message you, it will flash and turn the flashlight off. It should remember the state of the flashlight before it flashes but it doesn't and turns it off each time. This is not a new regression.
I guess I write this comment because we have these large companies lots of resources, some unique divisions like Google's Project Zero; but are there any non-project tied teams inside these companies that deal specifically with 'tech debt' and company internal interoperability issues and can pad resumes with that? We knew US gov had 18F, thinking of a division that fixes issues between the teams that might not usually talk.
The most dysfunctional large company at this time seems to be Microsoft and I could write a whole series on how the most basic things are broken (stuff like Share icon for photos only trying to share using Windows Mail and not Outlook). Or the fact that IMAP was broken on the Android Outlook client from August until the past week (it's almost fixed can delete mail again, just can't move it automatically to trash, has to be permanently deleted). And you just feel the different divisions across platforms don't talk to each other and the consumer slop is separate from the paying business stuff and that's split between the Outlook and chromium Outlook, and that's all a totally different thing than the Sharepoint/Teams stuff. But also the mandate of god says Copilot must be everywhere and if you are using classic outlook on monthly channel you must accept your lord and savior Copilot into your Outlook life and there's not a current way to turn it off (officially).
With Apple and quality: They do appear to still be doing 'the good stuff under the hood' most don't pay attention to. I look at their iPhone Air, people confused as to who it's made for, fashion item or whatever I heard in another thread. But I am laser focused on connectivity/modem stuff, before I had the RCS issue the last time I walked into an Apple store was to look at the 16e, not to buy it (I have a 15 pro) but because I'm happy to see another modem vendor on the market that might know what they are doing. The Air is an evolution of this, it will eventually go into flagships when it's ready. This is the good stuff under the hood, besides the increased margin for Apple at not having to pay Qualcomm... there is room for improvement. I guess sub-6 performance is looking much better. I know something that was noticed awhile back is Mediatek seems to have much better latency than Qualcomm modems, but they don't really have flagship modems in handsets in the US market, just in AP stuff like the T-Mobile Home Internet (where I've had units with both Qualcomm and Mediatek and can say the latter wins). Would really want to know how Apple compares to it.
I don’t usually complain about UX issues because I’m not bothered by small things. I can’t recall having a problem with ios before ios26, when the screenshot tool stopped showing the screenshot after you took one. Instead it would automatically save it to the gallery, which is not what I wanted.
The workaround for this bug was to lock and unlock the screen. Not the worst thing, but it indicated a shocking lack of give-a-fuck in Cupertino. This is one of the most basic flows, which they shipped in a broken state.
The number one priority must surely be fixing the keyboard, besides the horrible UX?
Millions are having problems for years so it's not just me, honestly thought i was "getting old" but no incredible amount of threads and now this on YT with 1 mil views:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo
Wild typing on a 3210 was less stressful for me.
Most text selection has also completely broken overt he last couple of iOS versions.
macOS too though
I through I’m just getting stupider and stupider with each day. I even started to reset my iOS keyboard autocorrect dictionary or whatever-magic-learning they do to fix this, but eventually will still mistype words.
Thank you for this video, it really made me feel that I’m not alone in this struggle of typing.
For some reason I have English&German, English&French keyboards and it always screws writing I just want a German or French keyboard when writing in that language. It's driving me crazy sometimes.
Installing the Google keyboard has been step #1 on every new iOS device of mine for the last decade. Sometimes I'll accidentally switch back to the default one while typing and immediately notice how broken the experience is. And yeah, I have definitely run into the exact issue shown in this video.
As a side note, I can't believe not a single device manufacturer has been able to make a blackberry-style keyboard work with a modern phone. Texting is by far the #1 activity on smartphones and yet when it comes to typing we have somehow gone backwards since the mid 2000s.
Per your last point, there's at least one. My updated Q20 (BlackBerry Classic) just shipped, with the same keyboard, trackpad, and body - but new cameras, battery, and mainboard, meaning a relatively up-to-date Android
The Q27 (a ground-up new design) with a similar keyboard is in the works as well, with the Q20 being used to raise funds for the newly designed Q27
I just downloaded Google Keyboard (Gboard) and tried typing "thumbs up". It still screws it up.
Not sure if it's better that the iOS keyboard.
Geez lord I can’t believe this ever made it out of testing.
Even all the text selection stuff stinks.
Honestly I’m about to disable Apple Intelligence. I don’t know what’s going on there.
What is everyone working on over at apple?
Anyone checked if this still happens (it typed that as “halles” which isn’t even a word!) even after disabling Apple Intelligence?
iOS repeated “learns” new words that I use that are misspellings of real words (because I mistype things in a predictable way). It becomes so convinced that it will autocorrect the real word into the typo. And knowing how the keyboard works, I wouldn’t be surprised if it enlarges the touch targets for the typo once it thinks I meant to use the typo.
The cause is obvious: Apple is training on what I type, not what I send. Apple does not consider that I actually care about the accuracy of what I send and will fix errors; perhaps they optimize for people who are careless enough to send typoed messages, yet niche enough to commonly use words not in the default dictionary.
It is infuriating that I have ~50 manual corrections telling Apple to leave words alone and correct certain typos to the real words.
I've been driving myself crazy over this. This video is a smoking gun proof that it's just broken.
I thought I was just incapable of learning. I find it so difficult to write on my ios keyboard.
I thought it was just iOS not being responsive enough to my thumb-typing speed.
But this was very validating to watch.
I love my iPhone but hate the iOS typing experience. It's so bad that I bought an external foldable Bluetooth keyboard that I keep in my bag just so that I could type longer emails.
I miss my BlackBerry keyboard.
Oh wow!
I thought it was just me!
Finally, confirmation that I’m not going mad! I remember when I got my first iPhone, back in the day, and demoing to a friend how it was almost impossible to misspell something when typing fast. That is just not the case now. Typing performance has got worse and worse.
Just typing out this comment has been infuriating.
This is what 400k salary, 12 rounds of leetcode, system design and circus dancing interviews gets you, apparently.
I hope they invest some time in macOS, gosh it's become a right mess over the last 3-5 major releases - Tahoe is the worst of the bunch.
I'm still calling it liquid ass. The glass theme just makes things difficult to read for the sake of fashion.
It is a gimmick, not anything users as a spectrum might find favorable. And the sad thing is, that Apple is the only one with such a laughing stock of UX/UI.
I am totally annoyed by the animations in Apple Notes. The icons have considerable increased in size and everything screams what a mess to me: the shadow as part of "the experience", partly rounded icons which talk more space than rectangles, hidden functions or multi function menus.
There is absolutely no spirit in this update. The animations show no variations, always the same most boring ones (the s curve in Apple Notes).
Lately I found die settings menu in Safari especially disastrous, the tab menu icons when pressed look so ridiculous, I lost words.
I walked through a tech store recently and I saw the new iPhones with the liquid gimmick. I opened the camera app on one of their pro phones and it was lagging. I was shocked, I found it mind-boggling. Brand new phone, up to date OS, marketing material BS and for it to lag just feels unprofessional. I’d understand it if it was a Pinephone or whatever but from Apple? My expectations are reaching lower and lower depths.
I've noticed the same thing- I thought it was just me. a 17 pro's animations felt less smooth than on my 15 pro with ios 18.
> And the sad thing is, that Apple is the only one with such a laughing stock of UX/UI.
I'm not defending Apple here, but have you seen how people feel about Windows 11?
I don't mind the Liquid Glass UI so much as what's happened to the macOS UX :-/
Don't forget Windows Vista had "Aero"!
> The changes introduced by Windows Aero encompassed many elements of the Windows interface, with the introduction of a new visual style with an emphasis on animation, glass, and translucency; interface guidelines for phrasing and tone of instructions and other text in applications were available.
For those of us who want our mobile devices to just be there when we need it...thank god there are no new animations. I don't need a shot of dopamine every time I open the Mail app. I just want to know that I successfully pressed the icon. Which is what micro interactions (aka small animations) are for. Feedback.
I hope the phone get's even more boring and uninspired next go around. Apple can afford to go back to the 'it just works' motto.
My macOS display system is pushing megapixels and with some good exceptions it feels like many apps have not much more visible information or options than an 80x25 VGA display. This is not to trash VGA displays which were often very well-designed. Some web pages now only show a single paragraph at a time on screen because of cumulative pop-ups, borders, and rounded corners.
> And the sad thing is, that Apple is the only one with such a laughing stock of UX/UI.
Oh, give it time. We thought the same when they went flat, too.
We thought the same thing, and they made pretty significant changes to it based on that pushback. Also the flat redesign didn't have basic problems like white text on an white background all while Apple is saying they spent obscene resources on it.
Tahoe is okay to use if you just use the Reduce Transparency accessibility option. The buttons in Finder still look ridiculous though. Fisher-Price tier design.
No it doesn’t. I’m genuinely sick of people saying Liquid Glass is unreadable just because some designer once said transparency makes things unreadable. This is not true in practice. Liquid Glass is so sparingly used (basically some navigation menus) that it literally doesn’t change a thing.
My Mac M1 is effectively permanently locked to Sonoma, and I have zero intention of upgrading beyond that. I was pretty happy with Monterey, but eventually some apps started requiring Sonoma as the min requirement. :(
What dissuaded you from upgrading to Sequoia?
Being a software dev dissuaded me from upgrading at all. I used to live on the cutting edge, now I don't update unless I am forced to. I stick to the version that works for me.
Why? I honestly don’t see much of a difference in a day to day basis between Tahoe and whatever the previous version was. Tahoe looks slicker to me, but nothing really impacts how I work
I'd bet you money within 5 years Apple will continue following Microsoft (after metro) and try "merging" macOS and iOS together into one OS, most likely iOS.
I'd bet you money they dont!
They are already merged really.
This is a good thing for the software ecosystem
> This is a good thing for the software ecosystem
That would be the case if they would expand iOS feature set to be closer to Mac, and not the other way around.
I'd love to hear how
Macs make up 8% of Apple's revenue. That entire product line is basically a hobby compared to iPhone and its ecosystem.
This defense feels so ridiculous every time I hear it (and it's almost always about Apple). People trot it out about Airpods too. If Apple is too big to care about this product line, we should be enraged, not shrugging or pointing out how successful they are.
So "just" $32 billion USD?
That's almost 9 billion.
Very shortsighted take considering Apple’s ecosystem advantage.
macOS is a major part of keeping iPhone users on iPhones, and in turn keeping Apple users buying subscriptions.
When you look at the most profitable demographics in the market (e.g. “computers over $1000”) Apple has a huge percentage of that market in both revenue and marketshare.
They’re also what everyone uses to build software for the iOS ecosystem.
So you wouldn't mind taking an 8.5% pay cut? Apple stockholders wouldn't mind an 8.5% drop in the stock price?
If Apple dropped the Mac, how many of those former Mac users would also drop the iPhone? (I would.)
And of course, Mac is the platform for writing iPhone apps. Indeed, Mac is the platform that Apple engineers use to write the iPhone operating system, which was based on and shares a lot of code with the Mac operating system.
The Mac is the lynchpin that holds the entire ecosystem together. It also provides a lot cachet to Apple. Most of the wealthiest and/or influential Apple users are Mac users as well as iPhone users. If Apple can't make a desktop computer anymore, the company's founding product, that would be embarrassing to say the least.
> If Apple dropped the Mac, how many of those former Mac users would also drop the iPhone? (I would.)
I would drop every device I have currently (myself and my family) which is too many to admit publicly
> Apple won’t quite launch ‘zero new features’ like they claimed with OS X Snow Leopard back in 2009, however. According to Gurman, Apple still plans to release a number of new AI features with iOS 27, so the company doesn’t continue to fall behind in the AI race.
Goddamit.
Zero new features is clean. It's communicable. It lets Cook, as he departs, harken back to quintessential Jobs. It will sell phones. It will sell Macs. And it implies perfection in a way only Apple, historically, has been able to nail and sell.
Nobody is buying an incremental iPhone or Mac because Siri recovered from lobotomy. The decision to water down zero new features with a douse of Giannandrea reeks of office politics.
Snow Leopard wasn't 0 new features, it brought pretty sweeping kernel level changes. Although I suppose being able to focus on low-level developer facing things rather than flashy new consumer facing things is still in line with the philosophy.
“Snow Leopard”, the original OSX release that focused under the hood, returns. I’m glad to hear it.
Yup. Many folks think Snow Leopard was the bestest release ever.
It certainly wasn't the worstest.
I'd like Touch ID to start working again on my MacBook. After updating to Tahoe, it has just stopped working entirely to wake up my computer.
Also, every menu with double rounded borders needs to be cleaned up. The worst offender is the left side of the Finder, it looks absolutely horrible.
Would like to switch to Linux but hardware/laptop options are horrible compared to MacBook M series machines.
I have used Thinkpads for over a decade and I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. I can't imagine any scenario where a MacBook M chip would be required to be productive, it feels like a weird hill to die on.
Battery life is not remotely competitive
I understand the battery life sucks, but 8 hours is enough for me.
That said I don't have high CPU processes running all the time. If I did I imagine the battery life difference would be more of a problem.
Battery life that needs to last all day is a first world computing problem. Most people leave their laptops plugged in and as long as you don’t run 10 chromium apps or other reasource hogs in the background, you will easily get 10-12 hours of battery.
I bought an expensive Dell and I regret the decision everyday. Just after 2 years, lots of things are breaking down and that's not counting the battery which barely last 2 hours now. Also finding components/parts if you are not US-based is hell; compared to Apple which has better support and an international presence.
I daily drive an M1 MacBook Air and a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 11 running Arch/Hyprland. Software-wise I absolutely adore the latter, but hardware-wise it falls short of the Mac on nearly every level.
Battery life is horrendous (despite extensive tuning). The speakers are complete crap (despite using Easy Effects). Fans get loud sometimes because, well, it's x86_64.
It's a shame, because even though the Apple Silicon CPU is faster on paper, the same task flies on the Thinkpad compared to the Mac. And of course the Thinkpad's keyboard is fantastic.
Honestly the one thing I simply can't look past are the speakers. I work from home so battery life isn't a massive issue for me. Fans I can look past. But I simply cannot stand listening to music or watch a YouTube video on it, they are SO bad.
Extremely noisy, flimsy keyboard, atrocious touchpad, rip-my-eyes out display.
ThinkPad T14s is silent, keyboard is known as one of the best across all laptops even if it has got thinner. Trackpoint is there for a reason. The display I will grant you, it is not as amazing as Apple's. But I'm using my laptop to code not watch movies.
Half of these can’t be real issues because macbooks had the same issues for decades and an aluminum body was enough to overcome that. What happened? Oh right the vanity shot through the roof.
Then please don’t make the leap. Because beyond your specific hardware design requirements that are “must be a macbook” there is a lot more trade offs you’re going to have to make. Letting go of your prudeness about what constitutes good and bad hardware should be the easiest barrier to cross.
Out of the box on CachyOS with KDE Plasma, I don't even have windows remembering their positions across a multi-monitor setup. That was shocking to experience with a current-day DE. And I believe it's not KDE's fault specifically but Wayland not having that feature yet, but that makes 0 difference to the user. If OP is hesitant to switch because of superficial hardware complaints, they're going to have a hell of a time actually using it as their main operating system for any significant amount of time.
Try M1 or M2 with Asahi Linux.
I installed omarchy, gave it couple of days.
Well, I will stay on windows with wsl and macos in the foreseeable future.
I will elaborate:
The first update after install failed.
To make my two screens work (one of them portait) I needed to learn how to modify text config. And for some reason my 23” display ran at 150% instead of 200% scaling.
Keymaps in komorebi on windows are alt+hjkl to focus windows and alt+shift+hjkl to move them. On omarchy it’s some accords with arrows. Arrows on system that touts vim and tui! I don’t have arrows on my uhk keyboard.
The font is too small. To make it at least 10 you don’t have one setting for that.
The list just goes on and on.
So, like I’ve said, I’m perfectly ok with windows and wsl for my C# stuff and my mac for everything else.
They need to fix Mac OS first. It’s one of the worst OS I have ever used - apps keep crashing, random UI/UX glitches and bad decisions overall.
I’ll probably ditch Mac if this degradation continues.
Are you primary using electron-based apps, or true native macOS apps?
Maybe I’m lucky but I run macOS daily without any problems.
(Yes, there’s annoying fit/finish issues in the UI - but no issues with stability)
> Are you primary using electron-based apps, or true native macOS apps? Maybe I’m lucky but I run macOS daily without any problems.
There’s an in-between abomination — Catalyst based apps from/by Apple (quickly migrated from iOS to macOS). Reminders, Notes and others are downright unnavigable and unusable with a keyboard and are so, so terrible in their UX. It’s a shame that Apple hasn’t spent any effort in fixing those and making them true native macOS apps.
For the last several years, there has been nobody at Apple who has good taste and a deep and committed interest in UX.
Same here. While Liquid Glass might be a bit distracting, I don't remember the last time I had an app crash. It's been quite a while.
26.1 fixed a lot of the buggy/laggy feeling too.
I don't think so. There might be some, but definitely not a majority.
My biggest complaint is with Firefox - it works fine on my older Mac, but crashes on Tahao and only works after a system restart.
Same here (except when switching branch in a repo with Xcode open…)
Yes. The impossible to disable system services (photoanalysisd and friends) are an abomination of software design.
Try "killall -STOP photoanalysisd", this will pause the process instead of killing it (which would result in restarting it by launchd). You can unpause it by using "-CONT".
I use MacOS daily on different machines and don't have that experience. I also manage many Mac's and I don't hear people reporting this kind of instability to me.
The article says this will apply to macOS as well.
Yesterday I had my "death by a thousand strikes" moment with the children's iPad.
1. It was showing 4% of battery for a while, but then showed a pop-up that the battery level has dropped below 10% and suggested turning on the battery saver. 2. I entered iMessage via a notification, and it was unresponsive, I couldn't select the thread on the left. And there are in total 3 of them, not hundreds. Had to tap it multiple times. 3. Then I wanted to switch to the previous app, and the drag-the-line-up-slowly-to-show-apps menu was polluted with 8 copies of iMessage.
All of these should've been not only caught by some kind of internal testing, they should've not happened at all due to proper architecture of the system. iOS more and more feels as a collection of hacks that try to mimic the real thing.
Good.
Mac OS has become a richly productive bug farm, lately.
I wonder if they'll ever get around to actually reading their bug reports, though...
This article is about iOS?
Yeah, but one of the reasons for using the same number for all OSes, was because they want to tie them together a lot more.
IOS is just as buggy as MacOS, but I don’t spend as much time in iOS, as I do, in MacOS.
Yeah bro. For the first time I'm seriously considering adopting Linux as my personal desktop OS. I already use it at work for server stuff. So I'll get by. Maybe I'll miss some of the proprietary software, but that list of programs is quickly dwindling every year.
At first I held back because of the ecosystem (i.e. still really liked iOS. But now that iOS is kinda sucking ass too, it makes it a much easier proposition.)
FWIW, I've been daily driving Linux and an iPhone for almost 13 years now and I've never really had any issues with it. Maybe it's because I've not experienced some of the integration in the ecosystem and so I don't know what I'm missing.
I use Firefox as my browser across all devices so I can just share tabs via my account, and if I want to share text or files then LocalSend works just fine in lieu of Airdrop.
Maybe it's just me, but if I was leading development of iOS, then a "Quality and Underlying Performance" focus would be the bedrock of anything that was modified or added to iOS.
How is it not? :-/
my 83 year old mother was able to use (almost) all the features of iOS when she first got an iPhone, in 2012. It genuinely changed her life and meant she could participate in a world I dont think she ever expected to be comfortable in. She tried and failed to use a PC for years. Local library lessons, family time (and patience) etc, but she always needed support. the iPhone as different, it was simple to use with familiar user interactions with every app. Roll forwards to 2025, gradually bit by unnecessary bit bells, whistles and complexity has bled in from every angle. Last week I did a FaceTime call with her to help her log in to an app on her phone. She can do it fine on her iPad that hasn't been updated. this was like going back to her PC days - too complicated and giving her features she didn't ask for, or need.
what was it Steve Jobs said?
"If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or a better computer — so what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company is not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people. And they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision-making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. Sort of the product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."
I've worked at companies that don't really have to sell on features. The product people still come up with new ideas constantly and don't pay attention to the quality. Heck, engineers will gin up new systems to build if they're bored.
Yeah that’s another gripe. When is a product finished ..
1) The "0 New Features" Mac OS X 10.6.0 came 22 months after 10.5.0, not 12 months
2) 10.6.0 included significant under-the-hood improvements but also brought some truly nasty new bugs and was significantly buggier than 10.5.8, released a few weeks prior
3) 10.6 received 23 months of subsequent minor bug fix updates, up to 10.6.8 v1.1
We'd need two Snow Leopards in a row just to match Snow Leopard purely in development time, but now there's a lot more preexisting technical debt built up after well over a decade of annual major releases.
Like every other OS with a billion parts, they fix some moving parts while breaking others.
I was on Ventura until I very recently upgraded to Sequoia. Three little undocumented changes I noticed:
1) My Thunderbolt 4 NVMe enclosure was unusable in Ventura and would cause Finder to hang. It's usable now.
2) I could finally connect to my 6Ghz access point with my M2 MacBook Pro.
3) I think the HDR brightness transition was also tweaked to be a bit less annoying.
I'm skipping Tahoe because it's hot garbage, but I look forward to macOS 27.
I'm skipping Tahoe for now as well, but is it safe to upgrade my iOS devices to iOS 26? No sync issues or anything with my MBP?
It's generally best to update both in tandem.
Start by kicking out Cook, MASSIVELY toning down Liquid Glass, fixing the Mac to look more Mac like, and stop shoving ads in my face.
side note, but have you guys tried using the AI feature in Xcode? its the biggest piece of trash i have ever used in my life. its unreal.
I sure hope that is true.
Why wait? Fix things now.
I brought a Pro Max last year, after owning a perfectly fine 13 mini for years, and just my luck the latest iOS seems to make everything worse.
Face detection. Navigating photos. Unresponsive Apps. Confusing as f*ck UI.
No idea why I spent so much money on a Pro phone, should of stuck with the 13 mini and refused to upgrade the OS.
Why do they even need to release a major version every year? Whats the point?
For the hardware, i get it, but the OS doesnt really drive sales, and if you have the pressure of releasing new amazing features every year then maintenance and bugs get left behind, and you end up in the situation that we have now…
Holy shit so I will have to put up with iOS 26’s abysmal performance for almost a year? Nooo… this thing visibly and painfully struggles to keep up even on a brand-new iPhone 17. I was hoping for iOS 26 point releases fixing most of the garbage… sigh
Apple hardware is great, but the software has become complete garbage.
On my Apple Watch I have regularly occurring hiccups where the whole UI freezes, especially when I go into training mode to pick an exercise. On my iPhone, after the liquid glass update, I get a noticeable slowdown and stuttering FPS when moving from the widgets screen to the first page and in other parts of UI. I'm afraid to upgrade my MacBook to the new OS, so I don't.
This is amazing. Once a company that built its reputation on quality and performance wants to focus on that. iOS became a parody of itself. 26 feels like a cheap knockoff of an iOS. Hundreds of people get paid to enshitify experience for millions of users. That’s incredible. And then they simply say that yeah you know it’s time to work on quality and performance. Isn’t it what always had to be there in the first place? Ridiculous.
How did it get to this point? Don’t the old folks at Apple use iPhones?
Fix that freaking keyboard FFS. Seriously. How is it that almost 20 years later it's still one of the worst parts of the iOS experience.
Also, ditch liquid glass on MacOS. That sh t is so Windows 7. It wasn't cool then and it isn't cool now. What the hell are you guys doing? Copying Microsoft now? It so, outdated, slow and twitchy, makes it hard to read. There's literally no upside to it. None. Zip. Nada.
Comparing that abomination to Windows 7 is an insult to Windows 7. Microsoft actually used to have good enough, usable/functional design back then.
I bet he meant Vista.
I wish we had Windows 7 today. Either from Microsoft or Apple, I would buy it.
Its a free download form internet achieve? just connect it to the internet with a NAT and enjoy the freedom and speed.
I should have said „supported Windows 7“ probably
I'm an outsider to the big tech companies so I don't know how it looks on the inside, but I have thoughts and maybe it will spur some discussion.
I've heard it said that there is manager culture, push to ship new features to pad resumes, etc. So you have these teams building new projects/products and some of it is a miss. There's an escalation path from outside and inside that allows for radars to be filed for major issues. I remember tracking one when I got the original iPhone SE they had a bug in the bluetooth stack that made handsfree calls sound all full of static for the first release or two after launch. We all know bluetooth is a pain and they handled fixing this well. I assume logically with most projects you expect to field lots of bugs early on at launch and then you take resources off once it's been live for a bit and the problem reports slow down. Then it's just debt or not important and how does it ever get handled?
With Apple, there are little ongoing bugs I would like to file, I have submitted on-device feedbacks before but it feels like sending into a black hole. Here is a simple bug, very easy to describe: Accessibility > Audio & Visual > Flash for Alerts (enable it). It flashes the camera light when you get a notification so you can visually see alerts while the phone is silent and not in a pocket. This works on its own, but if you are using the camera light as flashlight and people begin to message you, it will flash and turn the flashlight off. It should remember the state of the flashlight before it flashes but it doesn't and turns it off each time. This is not a new regression.
I guess I write this comment because we have these large companies lots of resources, some unique divisions like Google's Project Zero; but are there any non-project tied teams inside these companies that deal specifically with 'tech debt' and company internal interoperability issues and can pad resumes with that? We knew US gov had 18F, thinking of a division that fixes issues between the teams that might not usually talk.
The most dysfunctional large company at this time seems to be Microsoft and I could write a whole series on how the most basic things are broken (stuff like Share icon for photos only trying to share using Windows Mail and not Outlook). Or the fact that IMAP was broken on the Android Outlook client from August until the past week (it's almost fixed can delete mail again, just can't move it automatically to trash, has to be permanently deleted). And you just feel the different divisions across platforms don't talk to each other and the consumer slop is separate from the paying business stuff and that's split between the Outlook and chromium Outlook, and that's all a totally different thing than the Sharepoint/Teams stuff. But also the mandate of god says Copilot must be everywhere and if you are using classic outlook on monthly channel you must accept your lord and savior Copilot into your Outlook life and there's not a current way to turn it off (officially).
With Apple and quality: They do appear to still be doing 'the good stuff under the hood' most don't pay attention to. I look at their iPhone Air, people confused as to who it's made for, fashion item or whatever I heard in another thread. But I am laser focused on connectivity/modem stuff, before I had the RCS issue the last time I walked into an Apple store was to look at the 16e, not to buy it (I have a 15 pro) but because I'm happy to see another modem vendor on the market that might know what they are doing. The Air is an evolution of this, it will eventually go into flagships when it's ready. This is the good stuff under the hood, besides the increased margin for Apple at not having to pay Qualcomm... there is room for improvement. I guess sub-6 performance is looking much better. I know something that was noticed awhile back is Mediatek seems to have much better latency than Qualcomm modems, but they don't really have flagship modems in handsets in the US market, just in AP stuff like the T-Mobile Home Internet (where I've had units with both Qualcomm and Mediatek and can say the latter wins). Would really want to know how Apple compares to it.
I don’t usually complain about UX issues because I’m not bothered by small things. I can’t recall having a problem with ios before ios26, when the screenshot tool stopped showing the screenshot after you took one. Instead it would automatically save it to the gallery, which is not what I wanted.
The workaround for this bug was to lock and unlock the screen. Not the worst thing, but it indicated a shocking lack of give-a-fuck in Cupertino. This is one of the most basic flows, which they shipped in a broken state.
Settings > General > Screen Capture > Full-Screen Previews
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/change-the-screen-cap...
It does not show a preview of the screenshot anymore? Oh no, this function is a literal life saver for (to quickly translate things) :O
Fixed in iOS 26.1, for what it’s worth.