Apple needs a new CEO. Someone more visionary than Cook. The software needs more focus on making it "just work" and having significantly less bugs. The line-up needs to be cleaned up as well.
Right now you have the MacBook Air 13" and 15" in 3 variants and 4 colours, that makes for a total of 24 models. M4 processors only.
The MacBook Pro 14" can be purchased with the M5, M4 Pro, M4 Max in 2 colours for a total of 12 models. Then the 16" with the M4 Pro and M4 Max in 2 colours for a total of 8 models. That makes another 20 models.
That is 56 different models to pick from! And that is before customisation.
Why is there even a MacBook Pro without a Pro chip? And why are you selling M4 and M5 processors at the same time? Why release the M5 non-Pro in a Pro laptop and not put it in the Air, leaving it with an M4? The M5 is sometimes better than the M4 Pro, making it hard for the customer to decide to pick which one.
Don't even get me started on the convoluted mess of the iPhone. Apple sells the iPhone 16 (5 models), iPhone 16 Plus (10 models), iPhone 16e (6 models), iPhone 17 (10 models), iPhone Air (12 models), iPhone 17 Pro (9 models), iPhone 17 Pro Max (12 models). 64 models to pick from!
I remember Apple selling the iPhone 4. You would walk into the store, pick a Black or White model, 16 or 32 gigabyte. If you wanted colours, get a case.
Why do you consider a color to be an entirely different model? Storage size would be a better differentiator, but even then it’s just an option.
Do you feel the same way about cars? Have you been this fired up looking at a dealership all these years? So many paint options and wheel choices!
Idk, my phone gets hours of use each day, in my hands. Very personal device. I appreciate the options.
I agree with you about the cpu confusion, but I think most consumers largely act on price and many biased towards the lowest or highest ends every cycle. Largely any modern CPU will be enough for regular users.
I don't think it's about colors per-se. Sure if everything was 100% customizable and nothing else was different, whatever. But they're obviously focusing on these features and pretending they're innovating when they're just slapping some new paint on it and a slight camera bump spec and expecting you to fork over $1,500 every two years.
As long as stock profit is the only goal then Tim Cook is the correct CEO for Apple. Bribing the president publicly and doing what ever is required to keep the cash flowing in the short term is what share holders want.
Yes and no. I agree with the general sentiment, but the market may be changing in a way that Cook, et al. aren't suited to understand. So... maybe. Even probably. But eventually there'll come a point where not having a product person high up on the org chart is going to come back and bite them in the rear end. But I have no idea of when that time will be.
That runs out of steam eventually. Hence need a leader with Vision that is filling the pipeline for next few years.
Unfortunately. Once the money does run out, and they do get someone with Vision, then that Vision takes years to realize, so there would be a big slump in products/money where they could just collapse.
Usually it is a competitor that comes up with the new vision.
Maybe Apple is so big it just buys other people vision.
> Why is there even a MacBook Pro without a Pro chip?
I like MB Pro with a regular chip: my tasks aren’t hugely parallelisable, the plain chip is plenty fast, but I want the nicer display, sound, and ports, and additional battery life is nice to have.
This reminds me of when Steve Balmer became the CEO of Microsoft.
He sold Windows in so many versions that even a developer like me had no idea of what the difference was between them. I could not figure out from the packaging which version I needed.
Windows Vista was available in Starter (32-bit only, Retail and OEM), Home Basic (32-bit and 64-bit, Retail, OEM, and Volume License, plus Home Basic N 32/64-bit, Retail/OEM/Volume, in multiple languages), Home Premium (32/64-bit, Retail/OEM/Volume, Home Premium N 32/64-bit, Retail/OEM/Volume, in multiple languages), Business (32/64-bit, Retail/OEM/Volume, Business N 32/64-bit, Retail/OEM/Volume, in multiple languages), Enterprise (32/64-bit, Volume License only, Enterprise N 32/64-bit, in multiple languages), Ultimate (32/64-bit, Retail/OEM, Ultimate N 32/64-bit, Retail/OEM, in multiple languages), and the Korean-market versions Home Basic K, Home Premium K, Business K, Enterprise K, Ultimate K (all 32/64-bit, Retail/OEM/Volume, in multiple languages), plus Tablet PC editions, Media Center pre-bundled versions, and Embedded/IoT variants, each with additional 32/64-bit and N/K distinctions, creating a combinatorial explosion of literally hundreds of distinct SKUs when factoring in architecture, licensing type, language packs, and region-specific requirements.
I should not have gone down that rabbit hole. Why is Apple selling three variants of the Apple Pencil and then the Apple Pencil Pro as well.
The first generation comes with a Lightning adapter and a USB-C to Apple Pencil Adapter (required to pair and charge with iPad (A16) and iPad (10th generation). What are those adapters doing?
It is compatible with the "iPad Pro 9.7-inch" which I presume is the first generation iPad Pro but why does it not state the generation like they do with the iPad Pro 12.9-inch? Why state "iPad (A16)" but not use the 11th generation?
Thanks for raising my blood pressure! But I had fun doing so.
Yes and no. They've made some great hardware, but the OS is old and slow, they fired most of the people on the #a11y team that knew what they were doing and the only reason they make Macs is so devs have a machine to write iPhone apps on.
I've got the exact same storage issue on my iphone xr. Happened once before and it was fixed by doing a full reset and restore. That lasted about 6 months. I don't want to keep doing resets every 6 months. Has anyone found a simpler solution?
Steve Jobs was an extremely unusual CEO. He was hands on, talked to designers, developers, and users, and actually cared about making good products.
Tim Cook is more of a regular CEO that wants to make money for the shareholders. He started doing stock buybacks and in general prioritizing making money.
macOS is still the best OS I'd want to use IMO--if you can manage to avoid upgrading to Tahoe--but Apple seems to definitely be on its way down.
Linux has low-key become a very valid choice for a desktop OS. You can thank a lot of people for that.
Apple and Microsoft for sandbagging.
NixOS for pioneering the immutable Linux concept.
Valve for heavily investing into making games run well.
GitHub for inventing Electron, the eater of RAM and the great equalizer of UX.
Lots and lots of Linux and distro maintainers and contributors, achieving the opposite of the death of a thousand cuts.
There are some still unsolved problems, like power management and device drivers, but I feel like we're over the hump. There's a critical mass of regular people using Linux as their primary desktop OS on modern hardware, so trying to make Linux work on a 2025 laptop no longer feels like empty struggle.
If I had a compact Linux laptop for work rather than a MacBook I'd be raw dogging NixOS already rather than using nix-darwin. There isn't really much about MacOS that sets itself apart these days.
The only other thing keeping me hooked in is that I use an iPhone and have an iPad and need a bit more time for that to feel like a sunk cost before I pull the plug on it all.
Same with Windows on my gaming PC but I haven't looked into whether I'd encounter any friction with Nix there.
All that would remain after that is getting off of iCloud for storage and email.
Yeah. My last corp engagement forced Win10 on me. At least I can install WSL2 and have a sane dev environment. You can run Leenucks on a MBP in a VM, but why? If I want a machine that randomly can't recognize it's boot drive, I'll get an HP.
> There isn't really much about MacOS that sets itself apart these days.
Unless you’re using an iPhone and/or iPad. The Continuity feature, seamless copy&paste between devices, notification mirroring, iPhone mirroring, and being able to move my mouse cursor from my macOS onto the iPad are things I’d really miss when switching to a Linux desktop.
I've never had any WiFi issues, and I think most people who started using Linux in the mid 2010s have the same experience.
Graphic though, yes (I had as much sleep issues on windows than on Linux). Especially the dual graphics intel/Nvidia. I still have to force environment variables to launch my games with the correct GC
Lol. Yes. I would like to say that's not true... and for quite a while my Dell XPS would do all three, but it wasn't a cheap device. I think their driver team isn't supporting my 8 year old XPS anymore as sleeping is... problematic. And power management on linux laptops has always been worse than windows.
But... I will gnaw my left arm off before I go back to Mach or WinNT. (Maybe I'll try using HaikuOS as my daily driver...)
Though... fwiw... I've been running a non-x version of leenucks and then booting into a X and experimental Wayland FreeBSD VM via KVM and it seems to work well. I can halt the machine and save state in about a minute and then turn off the hardware. I come back later and restore. It's not a seamless operation, but I'm happy to live with it. It's also pretty easy to checkpoint the virtual disk before installing the bazillion packages I sometimes have to install to test out various python extensions. So all I have to do is revert to a checkpoint and all that crap is gone. I don't have to worry about remembering which packages I have to manually uninstall.
Dell XPS? They were pretty good there for modern-ish devices. Not so much for random Inspirons. Lenovo had fairly decent support for their midrange on up models. HP makes crap, so it's unlikely I'll every touch another HP laptop in my lifetime.
But... I think the poster above should have said something like "pick any two (for a depressingly large number of laptop models.)" Also see my post above about what seems to be XPS models falling out of support after eight years or so.
Steve Jobs was a founder of the company. He expected to remain CEO for many years (until his illness). I do not know whether he still have a large stake but its likely he did, and he certainly formed his approach when he did.
That motivated him to look at the long term as he expected to benefit from increases in the value of the business over the long term.
A regular CEO looks more at the short term. The value when the next options vest or the next bonus or whatever.
I'd say that it was not so much that he was a founder, but that he was the kind of business person that was happy talking to Steve Wozniak, Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, and similar nerds.
He was able to make friends with them instead of treating them like cattle.
I've met so many business people that think talking to nerds is a total let down, a degradation of social status.
Steve Jobs famously did not make friends with his engineers. I do not know where you get this info. Or rather... he was the type of friend who probably made you prefer your enemies. a. He dicked Woz on the Breakout design, telling him he would split the proceeds 50/50 - turns out it was more 25/75. b. He dicked Dan Kottke (very early Apple employee and friend from Reid College with whom he backpacked in India) by cancelling his stock options when apple IPOed - Woz stepped in and gave Dan some of his share allocation. c. The last time I saw Burell Smith, he was homeless living on the streets in Palo Alto - very friendly of Steve to not do anything for him. d. Steve dicked Jef Raskin (who kicked off the original Macintosh project, thought Jef's idea was WAAAAY different than the Mac that eventually emerged)
What I learned working with (not for) NeXT in the early 90s was "Steve is not your friend."
Having had to deal with Jobs, I would like to say the man was a bit of a mercurial douche trading off his reputation. That being said... he had a great ability to see what computers could be for "normal people." Instead of stealing ideas from IBM or DEC, he "stole" ideas and staff from PARC (who stole some of the staff away from SRI.) Dude was a dick, but he used his dickishness to "encourage" people in the Apple org to make products that were better than they really had to be. [1]
Tim Cook is an amazing operations guy and only sorta gets the product vision thing. Maybe 650 milli-jobs. [2] But the people in the Apple org who have a gut feeling for what makes a decent product from a customer perspective are lower on the org chart. I'm sure they're doing daily battle with the accountants who know the price of everything but the cost of nothing.
[1] Someday I am going to write a memoir about what it was like to partner with NeXT in the early 90s.
[2] A milli-jobs is a unit of product vision. 1000 mJobs is Steve Jobs. 650 mJobs is Tim Cook. 100 mJobs is Gil Amelio.
Woz comes to the West Coast VCF (Vintage Computer Festival) from time to time. For geeks of a certain age, he's a very engaging speaker and it's clear he loved the tech as much as the other older engineers who typically come to such events.
The vibe I got from him was he was very happy doing what he's doing and was happy to let Apple be the company it evolved into rather than the company it was in 1977.
Another thought. You said "macOS is still the best OS I'd want to use IMO". That is all they need. As long as you (and other users) feel that they do not switch it does not affect their sales or profits. It helps that Windows is getting worse.
> "My iPhone 14 Pro has 35Gb of "system data" which has basically filled up the entire storage I had left"
I occasionally use a macbook pro at £WORK for a few apple specific processes, and it currently has 188.67gb of "system data" that I have no idea how to clean up or remove. It's marked separately from the 11.01gb of macOS in the storage settings, and it constantly complains about the disk almost being full. Updating and restarting don't clear it, I wish I could just rm -rf it all. Does anyone know how I can at least see what it is, and potentially even clean it up?
EDIT: Thanks for the CleanMyMac recommendations, the 57.6gb of xcode caches that didn't show up in the "developer" section of the storage settings might have had something to do with it
The lowest hanging fruit is to clear caches from whatever package manager you're using.
I highly recommend Daisy Disk[0], which shows a folder level breakdown of your disk space usage. Hyperspace[1] is pretty nice as well. It works well if you have a lot of duplicate files. It uses APFS clones to reclaim the disk space.
I have the exact same problem. plus, I have usually surprised system processes eating up CPU like ‘suggestd’ and it’s hard to get information about what it does. I guess one could find out by reverse engineering, but that’s not the point. they could easily make it transparent and documented and the feeling of my own computer being a black box is constantly pissing me off. I regret all my investment in the Apple ecosystem and I wish I hadn’t locked me in as much.
Everytime I upload a package with altool, it makes a copy of the package somewhere in /var/folders. Luckily rebooting the computer cleans this up so it's not the issue you are running into, but if I'm not careful about rebooting the systems, our CI/CD stops working until I get physical access to the machines for a reboot.
Dot folders contribute to the „System Data” section. Maven/Gradle caches can take a lot of space. Take a look at your home folder first and press CMD + SHIFT + . to reveal hidden folders. You might not need 3rd party software.
You can use tools like CleanMyMac to show folders and their sizes. All cache and library files are counted under System, e.g. files from vagrant, docker, vms, old jetbrains IDEs, caches from rarely used/uninstalled apps etc.
You don‘t need to buy the full version, you can just use the info and delete it manually in Finder.
Download and open OmniDiskSweeper. THEN (important) go to Settings/Preferences > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access, and enable it for OmniDiskSweeper. Then reopen OmniDiskSweeper and it should reveal the missing data.
Backing up the device and restoring should clean it. Also there is some "folk remedy" of setting the system clock in the future then force restarting the device.
The cleanmymac app let me do it, using the trial period. In my case it was due leftovers from music production software and an overblown docker image though, so YMMV.
Do you happen to be using Rosetta? The aot cache of that slowly fills up and its not easy to clean up. I remember i had to google some magic command to do it
The worst crime for me is liquid glass on the apple watch.
All the menus are now lagging on the watch ultra gen2. Where previously it was smooth to interact with, the random lags now make it annoying and inconvenient to interact with. (I need to focus my attention on the Ui state instead of following an automatic procedure from muscle memory)
The battery sometimes randomly drains within less than a day.
There are absolutely no benefits of the new visual effects.
The watch was my favorite apple device because it helps me to reduce screen time on the phone. Now it is a source of anger.
I hit 355 GB of system data on iOS 26 last week on my 15 pro max.
Factory reset and restore from backup and it accumulates 5GB a day. Will be there again soon.
There is something seriously wrong with system data in iOS 26.
What blows my mind isn't the pervasive bugs throughout the system, which you could attribute to a poorly-run division or dysfunctional company.
It's that the basic shit is now so broken. Safari is unusable with too many tabs because it won't suspend them. The Tahoe app launcher will randomly remove apps from the list, and you need to open Finder to get it. Apple Books is unusable; the book keeps blanking out, it displays random error messages, search is slow and cumbersome because you need to scroll the search results list each time.
There's a collapse in basic functionality where it's obvious they don't use their own products.
I share the same feeling. I waited as much as possible to upgrade to iOS 26 / macOS Tahoe.
Two days ago, I finally upgraded. Liquid Glass is one of the worst things I've ever seen in terms of design. It reminds me of when I personalized old cheap android phones or Linux distros just "to look cool". Cool-looking: yes. Unusable: also yes. Tasteful design: almost absent.
Just the increase of the border-radius in all elements makes it hideous. Apps with a search bar on a scrollable list look like a CSS bug when the search bar is on top of the elements. Neither the search bar nor the element underneath are visible. Although this applies to most transparency effects on Liquid Glass. Neither the elements above nor below the "glass" are visible. And the extra value added is zero.
The thing is, I can still adapt to it, or tweak transparency and contrast. But I've seen elderly relatives struggle just because WhatsApp decided to add the "Meta AI" floating button. I can't imagine what this "inaccessible" UI changes can do.
It is the first time I am trying to skip a macos version. I really hope in macos27 they will fix things. I used to skip every second windows version, so back here we are.
I have 70GB of "Messages" on my Mac because iMessage "in the cloud" still stores all your attachments locally on every device. Yes, I can set the setting to delete attachments...but I want to keep them, just not on every device locally. Just deduct them from my iCloud store if you have to.
I've seen one of these posts for every single one of the ~15 years I've been using apple products, and yet still here we are, and for most it still the least worst OS going.
Yes. Maybe they saw Windows 11 and decided that now it's the right time to release Liquid Glass and fix it later. Anyway I've been on Linux since 2009 and it's getting better at each release (Ubuntus up to 20.04 and then Debian, Gnome.)
I've been successfully holding off on updating from iOS 18 by declining the prompt each time. Any tips for pinning the version more robustly? Because I feel the random upgrade prompts are going to catch me out eventually.
At this point I’m going to hold out on updating MacOS for a year. If things don’t improve or the direction doesn’t change significantly I’m going to seriously consider paying the switching costs.
I switched after Apple dicked me on the G5 iMac about 20 years ago and haven't looked back. To be fair... all OSes have their plusses and minuses. Immediately after switching to FreeBSD as my daily driver (and then to Leenucks) I was very happy because the things that annoyed me about Apple products weren't problems in the PC world. But over time I noticed other irritants that definitely never came up with iProducts. FreeBSD and Linux give me more control over my daily experience, but at the cost of way more time debugging and administration.
Your plan seems like a good one, but remember, your mileage may always vary.
And there are days I keep thinking I want to go back to my Commodore 64. It didn't really do much, but at least it didn't bug me every 15 minutes to upgrade.
I'm in the same position - holding out for a year in the hope that things change direction.
I've been in the apple ecosystem for 20 years at this point, because the ecosystem delivered real value for me. But that value has declined sharply - hardware is still good, but software quality has cratered while the drive for services revenue has become so relentless that I've now got one foot out the door.
Hm for me it's been a fairly steady state. The last 5 or so MacOS versions delivered features that got a solid meh from me:
- Big Sur did a redesign which wasn't really needed, but it wasn't that much of a downgrade. Wish they focused on fixing bugs rather.
- Monterey had live text, which has come in handy, otherwise I haven't used any of its headline features (such as shortcuts or universal control).
- Ventura: haven't used any headline features (Stage manager, continuity camera, Freeform)
- Sonoma: still nothing (Desktop widgets?, Game mode)
- Sequoia: Passwords app is cool, but have been using 1Password for a decade by this point, so had little interest in switching. (Everything else: Apple Intelligence was a joke, iPhone mirroring seems too clunky to be practical).
So nothing that exactly made me excited to upgrade, but at least things didn't get drastically worse.
But Tahoe seems like a disaster I don't want to touch. For one, it looks ridiculous. But also there seems to be a number of objectively bad design decisions all over the place. This is Apple - good design is what they got famous for. If they don't maintain an edge in UI design, then it's not the same company anymore as far as I'm concerned.
> Do Apple staff even use their products anymore, or are they all secretly harbouring Android devices?
I've been asking myself the same for a couple of years now.
Assuming Tim Apple uses an iPhone, does he just throw it in the garbage and pull out a fresh one every time the battery reaches 20%? Is no one at Apple irked by the low battery notification modal that blocks all interactions until you dismiss it, the same way it has for 19 freaking years now? It even covers the PIN entry form and makes the device unusable. I honestly think it's more reasonable to assume they're all on Android.
I am glad at least that Apple has not forced me to update my iPhone 13 and 2023 Macbook, as Windows would have by now. I am hoping to ride this out, and that a later bundled update will remedy the worst complaints. The most alarming thought in TFA, though, was that the iPhone update might have at least a secondary mission of nudging the user to buy a new phone - certainly not an unknown tactic in tech.
Not for lack of trying. Heard the wife scream that they updated her to 26 2 days ago. And she had been warned. Not by me, she may not trust the conservative geek, but by our daughter who is cursing at iOS 26 right and left.
So far I've managed to protect all my iOS and MacOS devices, but who knows what they sneak in next...
By the way, ages ago I had to pull over on a road and wait for an iOS upgrade because Apple deemed to display the "upgrade now" dialogue over my navigation app and of course i touched the screen in the wrong place to get rid of it because i was driving.
It's so funny watching the proprietary OS folks despair as their software falls to pieces to make shareholders richer, meanwhile my Linux distro has "just worked" since 2007. You don't have to keep running on this treadmill, folks.
The delusion of the “Mac just works” crowd is only matched by the delusion of the Linux “year of the Desktop” crowd.
They share the same trait of “it works on my machine, I like it, therefore it’s my identity and everything else is wrong”
I use Linux regularly as a second OS for more than 15 years. Driver compatibility improved, software design and quality didn’t, in fact it suffers more or less the same problems of other mainstream OSs.
Linux on the desktop has been winning because the others got bad at a faster pace, I’m not sure there is anything to be celebrated.
Maybe this is just a reminder to put your iProduct down, go outside and touch grass.
(Oh man. That came out super smug. Imagine the non-smug version of that message. Maybe it should have been something like "I went on a project to reduce the amount of screen time over the last couple of years and generally feel healthier and happier. Pick your own level of engagement with tech, but I encourage you to think about if you're spending too much time on your phone (or commenting on threads at ycombinator.com) at least every couple of months.")
I turned-off automatic updates as soon as the new OSs were announced but my sister got a little surprise the other day when she woke up and her iphone had updated to iOS 26. A lot of changes for no reason. I hope that now that the design team is gone things might get bit better.
My MacBook Air complains about being low on storage, and when I check the disk usage (I have a 256GB version of M1), 15GB is used for Apple Intelligence, which does nothing for me, and there is no way to remove that.
It takes 1.5 seconds to close a Tab in Safari. If you hold the close tab shortcut for long so that it closes all tabs the entire browser basically freezes.
I run into this daily. I don't understand how this got through QA
We need a new "snow leopard" release. No new features. Cleaning up the mess. Ethically speaking, there's no excuses for Apple. They're sitting on a huge pile of resources. Don't have the team competent enough to handle stuff? Hire them. Yet I know that's not how capitalism works.
As someone who witnessed a lot of the quality decline at Apple from the inside, hiring more people is decidedly not the answer. All that does is encourages management to engage in more churn, which is the source of these sorts of bugs.
The answer, unfortunately, is that features need to be sunsetted/removed, the engineering org shrunk, and for a smaller group to concentrate on a reliable product core.
It's not about the sheer numer of people, it's about their quality as managers, engineers, art directors and designers. Hire the best, pay them accordingly. Things can thrive without austerity, given enough good resources.
I disagree. A lot of the problems come down to part A of the system not coordinating well with part B. Take the brouhaha about the Tahoe window corners: obviously there wasn't enough communication between folks designing the window frame art and the folks implementing the window resize logic.
You can hire the best, but coordination among a group of people scales quadratically.
Ironically, Google is the safer bet and this might have been a correct decision from Tim Apple.
AI is changing at a rapid pace ( still ) and OpenAI is no longer the only game in town at the top, plus their finances are.. something we’ll hear about the next year and Sam Altman is an incredible unscrupulous person with past actions and decisions catching up to him. Not exactly the situation you want to partner with.
At this point you don’t need your AI on Apple devices to be revolutionary, it needs to work and be better than the current situation which is not difficult.
Gemini 3 is quite good for the general public, Google has the money to keep playing the AÍ games and also played ball with Apple, OpenAI only has 1 or 2 of those going for them.
If you think what's happening at Apple now is because of a single individual, you're wildly out of touch, it's an organization issue, pervasive in everything they put out today. Lack of proper QA I'd say is the reason.
While quality control isn't easy problem, it baffles my mind whenever I find a bug and it has been reported for years and still wasn't fixed in iphone/mac(or worse some user reported hack works). Those two are so big that spending a billion dollar for quality will make it back for sure.
I've been with Apple since 1979, but these days I don't even use a small percentage of all the features of the iPhone, and in spite of having bought over 800+ apps I still only use 7 of them. However, I dare not even attempt to clean up my iPhone and understand how it all works these days - I just avoid any thing cloud-related, and try to do my own manual photo backups - which is replete with its own dangers, it has to be said.
It really does seem like nobody at Apple is actually using any of the software they're releasing. Its just such shoddy quality control!
Agree, been using Apple on-off for decades, seems to get worse every time.
> try to do my own manual photo backups
As a Linux desktop user but Apple phone user, I do the same thing, so I can save the photos to my NAS, using ipairdevice/libimobiledevice/ifuse et al. to do it. Best part? Apple still spams me that my photos aren't backed up, because I'm not using iCloud. Is there a way of disabling that? Nope, they'll forever bother me about this, thanks.
> It really does seem like nobody at Apple is actually using any of the software they're releasing. Its just such shoddy quality control!
I think this is the crux, there are no humans with brains doing QA anymore. Since I got my iPhone 12 Mini, up until yesterday when I last used it, CarPlay still feels like it's worth risking my life every time someone calls me while I use the navigation. Not a single person could have tried this at Apple, because who would think it's a great idea showing a large avatar across the screen, over the navigation, as soon as someone calls? Absolutely bananas the direction Apple went as soon as Jobs disappeared, shame really.
I use Image Capture.app to manually retrieve my photo's - which normally works fine unless I forget to create a new folder for the task, and instead import into the older folders - which often means I overwrite prior photo's and lose data! Its so freakin' frustrating that, in the rush to get rid of files and folders from the users perception of their own personal filesystems, Apple has made it worse to maintain things manually.
Specifically this System Data issue is big problem but I read online about it and tried stupid fix: set time to far future. Supposedly will expire this system data caches. Nonsense, I said. It is foolish to make cache so big it does not allow update to download.
But I did it nonetheless and system data reduced! So crazy is real.
DaisyDisk - the version you download from them, not the one from the app store which has to be sandboxed - helps with purging that crap.
But then you have to buy an extra app to fix Apple's mess.
Personally I don't mind because I use it to clear my personal crap and it's made its money back countless times already, but to get it just for the purge...
Early this month, I was browsing the same sites I always do when Safari on my iPhone suddenly became very sluggish. I closed Safari and reopened it, and poof! Everything was gone: favorites, history, open tabs, everything.
This kind of BS has become very common with Apple. There's a very pretty happy path, and a very ugly muddy trail if you fall off the scenic route.
Yeah. I've been using Apple products off and on for 47 years and:
a. Apple is not the same company it was 40 years ago. Or 20 years ago. Or 5 years ago.
b. Apple quality varies greatly over time. I'm typing this on an 8 year old Dell XPS laptop. I've never had an Apple product I bought new last more than about 4 years. People tell me they've had Apple products last 6-8 years before dying. Clearly there's a distribution, but the central tendency of the apple curve is lower than the central tendency of Dell or Lenovo.
c. Apple is filled with <insert epithet I can't repeat here>. Without exception, everyone I've met in the product group is actively trying to figure out how to get you to buy a new iProduct. And they seem to hire only sociopaths. Engineering doesn't seem to be overrun with sociopaths. I think because at the end of the day they have to build things that work for at least a few months after you unbox them.
Apple is absolutely trying to make your experience of an older iProduct craptastic. But... so is everyone else in the industry. It's just that Apple, who once made very decent products, had much higher from which to fall.
Apple needs a new CEO. Someone more visionary than Cook. The software needs more focus on making it "just work" and having significantly less bugs. The line-up needs to be cleaned up as well.
Right now you have the MacBook Air 13" and 15" in 3 variants and 4 colours, that makes for a total of 24 models. M4 processors only.
The MacBook Pro 14" can be purchased with the M5, M4 Pro, M4 Max in 2 colours for a total of 12 models. Then the 16" with the M4 Pro and M4 Max in 2 colours for a total of 8 models. That makes another 20 models.
That is 56 different models to pick from! And that is before customisation.
Why is there even a MacBook Pro without a Pro chip? And why are you selling M4 and M5 processors at the same time? Why release the M5 non-Pro in a Pro laptop and not put it in the Air, leaving it with an M4? The M5 is sometimes better than the M4 Pro, making it hard for the customer to decide to pick which one.
Don't even get me started on the convoluted mess of the iPhone. Apple sells the iPhone 16 (5 models), iPhone 16 Plus (10 models), iPhone 16e (6 models), iPhone 17 (10 models), iPhone Air (12 models), iPhone 17 Pro (9 models), iPhone 17 Pro Max (12 models). 64 models to pick from!
I remember Apple selling the iPhone 4. You would walk into the store, pick a Black or White model, 16 or 32 gigabyte. If you wanted colours, get a case.
Why do you consider a color to be an entirely different model? Storage size would be a better differentiator, but even then it’s just an option.
Do you feel the same way about cars? Have you been this fired up looking at a dealership all these years? So many paint options and wheel choices!
Idk, my phone gets hours of use each day, in my hands. Very personal device. I appreciate the options.
I agree with you about the cpu confusion, but I think most consumers largely act on price and many biased towards the lowest or highest ends every cycle. Largely any modern CPU will be enough for regular users.
I don't think it's about colors per-se. Sure if everything was 100% customizable and nothing else was different, whatever. But they're obviously focusing on these features and pretending they're innovating when they're just slapping some new paint on it and a slight camera bump spec and expecting you to fork over $1,500 every two years.
As long as stock profit is the only goal then Tim Cook is the correct CEO for Apple. Bribing the president publicly and doing what ever is required to keep the cash flowing in the short term is what share holders want.
Yes and no. I agree with the general sentiment, but the market may be changing in a way that Cook, et al. aren't suited to understand. So... maybe. Even probably. But eventually there'll come a point where not having a product person high up on the org chart is going to come back and bite them in the rear end. But I have no idea of when that time will be.
That runs out of steam eventually. Hence need a leader with Vision that is filling the pipeline for next few years.
Unfortunately. Once the money does run out, and they do get someone with Vision, then that Vision takes years to realize, so there would be a big slump in products/money where they could just collapse.
Usually it is a competitor that comes up with the new vision.
Maybe Apple is so big it just buys other people vision.
But hang on, Cook has Vision _Pro_!
> Why is there even a MacBook Pro without a Pro chip?
I like MB Pro with a regular chip: my tasks aren’t hugely parallelisable, the plain chip is plenty fast, but I want the nicer display, sound, and ports, and additional battery life is nice to have.
This reminds me of when Steve Balmer became the CEO of Microsoft.
He sold Windows in so many versions that even a developer like me had no idea of what the difference was between them. I could not figure out from the packaging which version I needed.
Had to use an LLM to generate this list:
Windows Vista was available in Starter (32-bit only, Retail and OEM), Home Basic (32-bit and 64-bit, Retail, OEM, and Volume License, plus Home Basic N 32/64-bit, Retail/OEM/Volume, in multiple languages), Home Premium (32/64-bit, Retail/OEM/Volume, Home Premium N 32/64-bit, Retail/OEM/Volume, in multiple languages), Business (32/64-bit, Retail/OEM/Volume, Business N 32/64-bit, Retail/OEM/Volume, in multiple languages), Enterprise (32/64-bit, Volume License only, Enterprise N 32/64-bit, in multiple languages), Ultimate (32/64-bit, Retail/OEM, Ultimate N 32/64-bit, Retail/OEM, in multiple languages), and the Korean-market versions Home Basic K, Home Premium K, Business K, Enterprise K, Ultimate K (all 32/64-bit, Retail/OEM/Volume, in multiple languages), plus Tablet PC editions, Media Center pre-bundled versions, and Embedded/IoT variants, each with additional 32/64-bit and N/K distinctions, creating a combinatorial explosion of literally hundreds of distinct SKUs when factoring in architecture, licensing type, language packs, and region-specific requirements.
preach your truth, brother.
Guess I’m not in a position in telling Apple how to structure their product offering and choice isn’t a bad thing IMHO.
But I’d highly encourage you to have a look into which Apple pencil is compatible to which iPad.
Choice, yes, a mess - no.
I should not have gone down that rabbit hole. Why is Apple selling three variants of the Apple Pencil and then the Apple Pencil Pro as well.
The first generation comes with a Lightning adapter and a USB-C to Apple Pencil Adapter (required to pair and charge with iPad (A16) and iPad (10th generation). What are those adapters doing?
It is compatible with the "iPad Pro 9.7-inch" which I presume is the first generation iPad Pro but why does it not state the generation like they do with the iPad Pro 12.9-inch? Why state "iPad (A16)" but not use the 11th generation?
Thanks for raising my blood pressure! But I had fun doing so.
And try getting Apple Care for them without buying an iPad at the same time.
Apple's hardware lineup has never been stronger. They need a new software guy, and it looks like they've recently gotten one.
Yes and no. They've made some great hardware, but the OS is old and slow, they fired most of the people on the #a11y team that knew what they were doing and the only reason they make Macs is so devs have a machine to write iPhone apps on.
I've got the exact same storage issue on my iphone xr. Happened once before and it was fixed by doing a full reset and restore. That lasted about 6 months. I don't want to keep doing resets every 6 months. Has anyone found a simpler solution?
Steve Jobs was an extremely unusual CEO. He was hands on, talked to designers, developers, and users, and actually cared about making good products.
Tim Cook is more of a regular CEO that wants to make money for the shareholders. He started doing stock buybacks and in general prioritizing making money.
macOS is still the best OS I'd want to use IMO--if you can manage to avoid upgrading to Tahoe--but Apple seems to definitely be on its way down.
Hopefully something changes.
> macOS is still the best OS I'd want to use IMO
Linux has low-key become a very valid choice for a desktop OS. You can thank a lot of people for that.
Apple and Microsoft for sandbagging.
NixOS for pioneering the immutable Linux concept.
Valve for heavily investing into making games run well.
GitHub for inventing Electron, the eater of RAM and the great equalizer of UX.
Lots and lots of Linux and distro maintainers and contributors, achieving the opposite of the death of a thousand cuts.
There are some still unsolved problems, like power management and device drivers, but I feel like we're over the hump. There's a critical mass of regular people using Linux as their primary desktop OS on modern hardware, so trying to make Linux work on a 2025 laptop no longer feels like empty struggle.
If I had a compact Linux laptop for work rather than a MacBook I'd be raw dogging NixOS already rather than using nix-darwin. There isn't really much about MacOS that sets itself apart these days.
The only other thing keeping me hooked in is that I use an iPhone and have an iPad and need a bit more time for that to feel like a sunk cost before I pull the plug on it all.
Same with Windows on my gaming PC but I haven't looked into whether I'd encounter any friction with Nix there.
All that would remain after that is getting off of iCloud for storage and email.
Yeah. My last corp engagement forced Win10 on me. At least I can install WSL2 and have a sane dev environment. You can run Leenucks on a MBP in a VM, but why? If I want a machine that randomly can't recognize it's boot drive, I'll get an HP.
> There isn't really much about MacOS that sets itself apart these days.
Unless you’re using an iPhone and/or iPad. The Continuity feature, seamless copy&paste between devices, notification mirroring, iPhone mirroring, and being able to move my mouse cursor from my macOS onto the iPad are things I’d really miss when switching to a Linux desktop.
Ah yes, Linux on a laptop: wifi, sleep, graphics - pick any two
I've never had any WiFi issues, and I think most people who started using Linux in the mid 2010s have the same experience.
Graphic though, yes (I had as much sleep issues on windows than on Linux). Especially the dual graphics intel/Nvidia. I still have to force environment variables to launch my games with the correct GC
It's not 2005 anymore, most distros work 100% on install
Maybe. And then what’s battery life like - half, one 3rd?
Mostly similar - sometimes better, sometimes worse. It's not 2005 anymore.
Lol. Yes. I would like to say that's not true... and for quite a while my Dell XPS would do all three, but it wasn't a cheap device. I think their driver team isn't supporting my 8 year old XPS anymore as sleeping is... problematic. And power management on linux laptops has always been worse than windows.
But... I will gnaw my left arm off before I go back to Mach or WinNT. (Maybe I'll try using HaikuOS as my daily driver...)
Though... fwiw... I've been running a non-x version of leenucks and then booting into a X and experimental Wayland FreeBSD VM via KVM and it seems to work well. I can halt the machine and save state in about a minute and then turn off the hardware. I come back later and restore. It's not a seamless operation, but I'm happy to live with it. It's also pretty easy to checkpoint the virtual disk before installing the bazillion packages I sometimes have to install to test out various python extensions. So all I have to do is revert to a checkpoint and all that crap is gone. I don't have to worry about remembering which packages I have to manually uninstall.
Hm i have all three
Dell XPS? They were pretty good there for modern-ish devices. Not so much for random Inspirons. Lenovo had fairly decent support for their midrange on up models. HP makes crap, so it's unlikely I'll every touch another HP laptop in my lifetime.
But... I think the poster above should have said something like "pick any two (for a depressingly large number of laptop models.)" Also see my post above about what seems to be XPS models falling out of support after eight years or so.
Steve Jobs was a founder of the company. He expected to remain CEO for many years (until his illness). I do not know whether he still have a large stake but its likely he did, and he certainly formed his approach when he did.
That motivated him to look at the long term as he expected to benefit from increases in the value of the business over the long term.
A regular CEO looks more at the short term. The value when the next options vest or the next bonus or whatever.
I'd say that it was not so much that he was a founder, but that he was the kind of business person that was happy talking to Steve Wozniak, Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, and similar nerds.
He was able to make friends with them instead of treating them like cattle.
I've met so many business people that think talking to nerds is a total let down, a degradation of social status.
Steve Jobs famously did not make friends with his engineers. I do not know where you get this info. Or rather... he was the type of friend who probably made you prefer your enemies. a. He dicked Woz on the Breakout design, telling him he would split the proceeds 50/50 - turns out it was more 25/75. b. He dicked Dan Kottke (very early Apple employee and friend from Reid College with whom he backpacked in India) by cancelling his stock options when apple IPOed - Woz stepped in and gave Dan some of his share allocation. c. The last time I saw Burell Smith, he was homeless living on the streets in Palo Alto - very friendly of Steve to not do anything for him. d. Steve dicked Jef Raskin (who kicked off the original Macintosh project, thought Jef's idea was WAAAAY different than the Mac that eventually emerged)
What I learned working with (not for) NeXT in the early 90s was "Steve is not your friend."
Having had to deal with Jobs, I would like to say the man was a bit of a mercurial douche trading off his reputation. That being said... he had a great ability to see what computers could be for "normal people." Instead of stealing ideas from IBM or DEC, he "stole" ideas and staff from PARC (who stole some of the staff away from SRI.) Dude was a dick, but he used his dickishness to "encourage" people in the Apple org to make products that were better than they really had to be. [1]
Tim Cook is an amazing operations guy and only sorta gets the product vision thing. Maybe 650 milli-jobs. [2] But the people in the Apple org who have a gut feeling for what makes a decent product from a customer perspective are lower on the org chart. I'm sure they're doing daily battle with the accountants who know the price of everything but the cost of nothing.
[1] Someday I am going to write a memoir about what it was like to partner with NeXT in the early 90s.
[2] A milli-jobs is a unit of product vision. 1000 mJobs is Steve Jobs. 650 mJobs is Tim Cook. 100 mJobs is Gil Amelio.
Yes, I agree.
So, I guess our only hope is to get Woz back..?
Woz comes to the West Coast VCF (Vintage Computer Festival) from time to time. For geeks of a certain age, he's a very engaging speaker and it's clear he loved the tech as much as the other older engineers who typically come to such events.
The vibe I got from him was he was very happy doing what he's doing and was happy to let Apple be the company it evolved into rather than the company it was in 1977.
Maybe!
Another thought. You said "macOS is still the best OS I'd want to use IMO". That is all they need. As long as you (and other users) feel that they do not switch it does not affect their sales or profits. It helps that Windows is getting worse.
That would be awesome
I believe you never worked with Steve Jobs. This is not my memory of working with him.
> "My iPhone 14 Pro has 35Gb of "system data" which has basically filled up the entire storage I had left"
I occasionally use a macbook pro at £WORK for a few apple specific processes, and it currently has 188.67gb of "system data" that I have no idea how to clean up or remove. It's marked separately from the 11.01gb of macOS in the storage settings, and it constantly complains about the disk almost being full. Updating and restarting don't clear it, I wish I could just rm -rf it all. Does anyone know how I can at least see what it is, and potentially even clean it up?
EDIT: Thanks for the CleanMyMac recommendations, the 57.6gb of xcode caches that didn't show up in the "developer" section of the storage settings might have had something to do with it
The lowest hanging fruit is to clear caches from whatever package manager you're using.
I highly recommend Daisy Disk[0], which shows a folder level breakdown of your disk space usage. Hyperspace[1] is pretty nice as well. It works well if you have a lot of duplicate files. It uses APFS clones to reclaim the disk space.
0: https://daisydiskapp.com
1: http://hypercritical.co/2025/02/25/hyperspace
I have the exact same problem. plus, I have usually surprised system processes eating up CPU like ‘suggestd’ and it’s hard to get information about what it does. I guess one could find out by reverse engineering, but that’s not the point. they could easily make it transparent and documented and the feeling of my own computer being a black box is constantly pissing me off. I regret all my investment in the Apple ecosystem and I wish I hadn’t locked me in as much.
Everytime I upload a package with altool, it makes a copy of the package somewhere in /var/folders. Luckily rebooting the computer cleans this up so it's not the issue you are running into, but if I'm not careful about rebooting the systems, our CI/CD stops working until I get physical access to the machines for a reboot.
I am pretty sure its this
/System/Volumes/Data/Users/<your_user>/Library/Containers/com.apple.Safari/Data/Library/Caches/CloudKit/
I need to `rm` it at least once a month, I ran `du -sh` and it takes 153gb on my machine
Yes!
You can go to the folder ~/Library and then delete what you want.
To open the folder from a terminal: cd ~/Library open .
In the Finder, you can enable "Calculate all sizes" from "View options," which will calculate folder sizes to understand what to clean first.
This folder contains data from all apps; sometimes it is cache, sometimes persistent data. You will find all your previous apps taking gigabytes...
Dot folders contribute to the „System Data” section. Maven/Gradle caches can take a lot of space. Take a look at your home folder first and press CMD + SHIFT + . to reveal hidden folders. You might not need 3rd party software.
You can use tools like CleanMyMac to show folders and their sizes. All cache and library files are counted under System, e.g. files from vagrant, docker, vms, old jetbrains IDEs, caches from rarely used/uninstalled apps etc.
You don‘t need to buy the full version, you can just use the info and delete it manually in Finder.
https://github.com/tw93/Mole
Download and open OmniDiskSweeper. THEN (important) go to Settings/Preferences > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access, and enable it for OmniDiskSweeper. Then reopen OmniDiskSweeper and it should reveal the missing data.
Often lots of this "system data" is in ~/Library/Caches:
This will show you the cache size for each application.Backing up the device and restoring should clean it. Also there is some "folk remedy" of setting the system clock in the future then force restarting the device.
The cleanmymac app let me do it, using the trial period. In my case it was due leftovers from music production software and an overblown docker image though, so YMMV.
Do you happen to be using Rosetta? The aot cache of that slowly fills up and its not easy to clean up. I remember i had to google some magic command to do it
Are you Java developer? For example Gradle tends to download half of the Internet and the store it etc
The worst crime for me is liquid glass on the apple watch. All the menus are now lagging on the watch ultra gen2. Where previously it was smooth to interact with, the random lags now make it annoying and inconvenient to interact with. (I need to focus my attention on the Ui state instead of following an automatic procedure from muscle memory)
The battery sometimes randomly drains within less than a day. There are absolutely no benefits of the new visual effects.
The watch was my favorite apple device because it helps me to reduce screen time on the phone. Now it is a source of anger.
I hit 355 GB of system data on iOS 26 last week on my 15 pro max. Factory reset and restore from backup and it accumulates 5GB a day. Will be there again soon.
There is something seriously wrong with system data in iOS 26.
What blows my mind isn't the pervasive bugs throughout the system, which you could attribute to a poorly-run division or dysfunctional company.
It's that the basic shit is now so broken. Safari is unusable with too many tabs because it won't suspend them. The Tahoe app launcher will randomly remove apps from the list, and you need to open Finder to get it. Apple Books is unusable; the book keeps blanking out, it displays random error messages, search is slow and cumbersome because you need to scroll the search results list each time.
There's a collapse in basic functionality where it's obvious they don't use their own products.
I share the same feeling. I waited as much as possible to upgrade to iOS 26 / macOS Tahoe.
Two days ago, I finally upgraded. Liquid Glass is one of the worst things I've ever seen in terms of design. It reminds me of when I personalized old cheap android phones or Linux distros just "to look cool". Cool-looking: yes. Unusable: also yes. Tasteful design: almost absent.
Just the increase of the border-radius in all elements makes it hideous. Apps with a search bar on a scrollable list look like a CSS bug when the search bar is on top of the elements. Neither the search bar nor the element underneath are visible. Although this applies to most transparency effects on Liquid Glass. Neither the elements above nor below the "glass" are visible. And the extra value added is zero.
The thing is, I can still adapt to it, or tweak transparency and contrast. But I've seen elderly relatives struggle just because WhatsApp decided to add the "Meta AI" floating button. I can't imagine what this "inaccessible" UI changes can do.
It is the first time I am trying to skip a macos version. I really hope in macos27 they will fix things. I used to skip every second windows version, so back here we are.
I have 70GB of "Messages" on my Mac because iMessage "in the cloud" still stores all your attachments locally on every device. Yes, I can set the setting to delete attachments...but I want to keep them, just not on every device locally. Just deduct them from my iCloud store if you have to.
I've seen one of these posts for every single one of the ~15 years I've been using apple products, and yet still here we are, and for most it still the least worst OS going.
> I've seen one of these posts for every single one of the ~15 years I've been using apple products
Yes, one. On Tahoe there’s thirty. The scale of complaints is definitely higher this time around.
And also you are seeing serious criticism from the traditional Apple fan crowd, e.g. John Gruber has been panning it mercilessly.
Yes, it's like in that joke about not having to run faster than the bear.
As long as their competition is what it is, they don't have to put much effort in.
Yes. Maybe they saw Windows 11 and decided that now it's the right time to release Liquid Glass and fix it later. Anyway I've been on Linux since 2009 and it's getting better at each release (Ubuntus up to 20.04 and then Debian, Gnome.)
Talk about lock-in and enshittification.
I've been successfully holding off on updating from iOS 18 by declining the prompt each time. Any tips for pinning the version more robustly? Because I feel the random upgrade prompts are going to catch me out eventually.
At this point I’m going to hold out on updating MacOS for a year. If things don’t improve or the direction doesn’t change significantly I’m going to seriously consider paying the switching costs.
I switched after Apple dicked me on the G5 iMac about 20 years ago and haven't looked back. To be fair... all OSes have their plusses and minuses. Immediately after switching to FreeBSD as my daily driver (and then to Leenucks) I was very happy because the things that annoyed me about Apple products weren't problems in the PC world. But over time I noticed other irritants that definitely never came up with iProducts. FreeBSD and Linux give me more control over my daily experience, but at the cost of way more time debugging and administration.
Your plan seems like a good one, but remember, your mileage may always vary.
And there are days I keep thinking I want to go back to my Commodore 64. It didn't really do much, but at least it didn't bug me every 15 minutes to upgrade.
I'm in the same position - holding out for a year in the hope that things change direction.
I've been in the apple ecosystem for 20 years at this point, because the ecosystem delivered real value for me. But that value has declined sharply - hardware is still good, but software quality has cratered while the drive for services revenue has become so relentless that I've now got one foot out the door.
Hm for me it's been a fairly steady state. The last 5 or so MacOS versions delivered features that got a solid meh from me:
- Big Sur did a redesign which wasn't really needed, but it wasn't that much of a downgrade. Wish they focused on fixing bugs rather.
- Monterey had live text, which has come in handy, otherwise I haven't used any of its headline features (such as shortcuts or universal control).
- Ventura: haven't used any headline features (Stage manager, continuity camera, Freeform)
- Sonoma: still nothing (Desktop widgets?, Game mode)
- Sequoia: Passwords app is cool, but have been using 1Password for a decade by this point, so had little interest in switching. (Everything else: Apple Intelligence was a joke, iPhone mirroring seems too clunky to be practical).
So nothing that exactly made me excited to upgrade, but at least things didn't get drastically worse.
But Tahoe seems like a disaster I don't want to touch. For one, it looks ridiculous. But also there seems to be a number of objectively bad design decisions all over the place. This is Apple - good design is what they got famous for. If they don't maintain an edge in UI design, then it's not the same company anymore as far as I'm concerned.
Same, wrt iOS26. Hoping iOS27 ditches the glass crap.
Otherwise, I guess I'll be buying an Android.
> Do Apple staff even use their products anymore, or are they all secretly harbouring Android devices?
I've been asking myself the same for a couple of years now.
Assuming Tim Apple uses an iPhone, does he just throw it in the garbage and pull out a fresh one every time the battery reaches 20%? Is no one at Apple irked by the low battery notification modal that blocks all interactions until you dismiss it, the same way it has for 19 freaking years now? It even covers the PIN entry form and makes the device unusable. I honestly think it's more reasonable to assume they're all on Android.
Apple laid off everyone in their #a11y and user experience team back in... was it 96? It hasn't been the same company since.
I downloaded all my photos from iCloud about a month ago. That was the last task on the monumental "leave the Apple walled garden" task list.
Life on the outside is really nice. You can just... do things.
How did you do this? I once tried and it seemed impossible.
I am glad at least that Apple has not forced me to update my iPhone 13 and 2023 Macbook, as Windows would have by now. I am hoping to ride this out, and that a later bundled update will remedy the worst complaints. The most alarming thought in TFA, though, was that the iPhone update might have at least a secondary mission of nudging the user to buy a new phone - certainly not an unknown tactic in tech.
> Apple has not forced me
Not for lack of trying. Heard the wife scream that they updated her to 26 2 days ago. And she had been warned. Not by me, she may not trust the conservative geek, but by our daughter who is cursing at iOS 26 right and left.
So far I've managed to protect all my iOS and MacOS devices, but who knows what they sneak in next...
By the way, ages ago I had to pull over on a road and wait for an iOS upgrade because Apple deemed to display the "upgrade now" dialogue over my navigation app and of course i touched the screen in the wrong place to get rid of it because i was driving.
Windows would have forced you to update a 2023 machine? Really?
My days of not believing people's gushing praise about "just works" about any proprietary technology are certainly coming to a middle
It's so funny watching the proprietary OS folks despair as their software falls to pieces to make shareholders richer, meanwhile my Linux distro has "just worked" since 2007. You don't have to keep running on this treadmill, folks.
The delusion of the “Mac just works” crowd is only matched by the delusion of the Linux “year of the Desktop” crowd.
They share the same trait of “it works on my machine, I like it, therefore it’s my identity and everything else is wrong”
I use Linux regularly as a second OS for more than 15 years. Driver compatibility improved, software design and quality didn’t, in fact it suffers more or less the same problems of other mainstream OSs.
Linux on the desktop has been winning because the others got bad at a faster pace, I’m not sure there is anything to be celebrated.
Maybe this is just a reminder to put your iProduct down, go outside and touch grass.
(Oh man. That came out super smug. Imagine the non-smug version of that message. Maybe it should have been something like "I went on a project to reduce the amount of screen time over the last couple of years and generally feel healthier and happier. Pick your own level of engagement with tech, but I encourage you to think about if you're spending too much time on your phone (or commenting on threads at ycombinator.com) at least every couple of months.")
I turned-off automatic updates as soon as the new OSs were announced but my sister got a little surprise the other day when she woke up and her iphone had updated to iOS 26. A lot of changes for no reason. I hope that now that the design team is gone things might get bit better.
My MacBook Air complains about being low on storage, and when I check the disk usage (I have a 256GB version of M1), 15GB is used for Apple Intelligence, which does nothing for me, and there is no way to remove that.
It takes 1.5 seconds to close a Tab in Safari. If you hold the close tab shortcut for long so that it closes all tabs the entire browser basically freezes.
I run into this daily. I don't understand how this got through QA
It's a push to using their cloud services I suppose. I have had to pay for the icloud for a while now because my phone would fill up so quickly.
I am eyeing a few tutorials on building my own cloud.
I end up using
https://derlien.com/ "Disk Inventory X"
regularly to find stuff to clean up.
GrandPerspective is pretty good too (very similar).
We need a new "snow leopard" release. No new features. Cleaning up the mess. Ethically speaking, there's no excuses for Apple. They're sitting on a huge pile of resources. Don't have the team competent enough to handle stuff? Hire them. Yet I know that's not how capitalism works.
As someone who witnessed a lot of the quality decline at Apple from the inside, hiring more people is decidedly not the answer. All that does is encourages management to engage in more churn, which is the source of these sorts of bugs.
The answer, unfortunately, is that features need to be sunsetted/removed, the engineering org shrunk, and for a smaller group to concentrate on a reliable product core.
It's not about the sheer numer of people, it's about their quality as managers, engineers, art directors and designers. Hire the best, pay them accordingly. Things can thrive without austerity, given enough good resources.
I disagree. A lot of the problems come down to part A of the system not coordinating well with part B. Take the brouhaha about the Tahoe window corners: obviously there wasn't enough communication between folks designing the window frame art and the folks implementing the window resize logic.
You can hire the best, but coordination among a group of people scales quadratically.
I think it's an extremely recurring theme.
User: I will be so happy if Foo doesn't keep changing its UI and focuses on fixing bugs for a few versions
Foo's devs: Keep changing its UI and adding more bugs
They're making some historically terrible decisions.
Now we're all going to have to pay for Gemini model storage, probably 2 to 4 GB.
That means we're probably paying $10 per-device for the storage required to have Google's model on "our" devices. Which we never asked for.
They could just make it an optional part of the install. Does anyone really care about the on-board "intelligence"?
Gemini FFS.
Ironically, Google is the safer bet and this might have been a correct decision from Tim Apple.
AI is changing at a rapid pace ( still ) and OpenAI is no longer the only game in town at the top, plus their finances are.. something we’ll hear about the next year and Sam Altman is an incredible unscrupulous person with past actions and decisions catching up to him. Not exactly the situation you want to partner with.
At this point you don’t need your AI on Apple devices to be revolutionary, it needs to work and be better than the current situation which is not difficult.
Gemini 3 is quite good for the general public, Google has the money to keep playing the AÍ games and also played ball with Apple, OpenAI only has 1 or 2 of those going for them.
The walled garden seems to be falling apart, with users trapped inside. Maybe the idea of a walled garden isn't so great after all.
Apple have been drafting on past innovations and cashing in for a while now, yes? Very profitable, but it can't last forever.
Also, here's Tim kissing fascist ass on the same day ICE shot an unarmed man: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/tim-cook-attended-melani...
glad that the chief UI guy has left. see if the next iteration is any better :)
If you think what's happening at Apple now is because of a single individual, you're wildly out of touch, it's an organization issue, pervasive in everything they put out today. Lack of proper QA I'd say is the reason.
While quality control isn't easy problem, it baffles my mind whenever I find a bug and it has been reported for years and still wasn't fixed in iphone/mac(or worse some user reported hack works). Those two are so big that spending a billion dollar for quality will make it back for sure.
I've been with Apple since 1979, but these days I don't even use a small percentage of all the features of the iPhone, and in spite of having bought over 800+ apps I still only use 7 of them. However, I dare not even attempt to clean up my iPhone and understand how it all works these days - I just avoid any thing cloud-related, and try to do my own manual photo backups - which is replete with its own dangers, it has to be said.
It really does seem like nobody at Apple is actually using any of the software they're releasing. Its just such shoddy quality control!
Agree, been using Apple on-off for decades, seems to get worse every time.
> try to do my own manual photo backups
As a Linux desktop user but Apple phone user, I do the same thing, so I can save the photos to my NAS, using ipairdevice/libimobiledevice/ifuse et al. to do it. Best part? Apple still spams me that my photos aren't backed up, because I'm not using iCloud. Is there a way of disabling that? Nope, they'll forever bother me about this, thanks.
> It really does seem like nobody at Apple is actually using any of the software they're releasing. Its just such shoddy quality control!
I think this is the crux, there are no humans with brains doing QA anymore. Since I got my iPhone 12 Mini, up until yesterday when I last used it, CarPlay still feels like it's worth risking my life every time someone calls me while I use the navigation. Not a single person could have tried this at Apple, because who would think it's a great idea showing a large avatar across the screen, over the navigation, as soon as someone calls? Absolutely bananas the direction Apple went as soon as Jobs disappeared, shame really.
I use Image Capture.app to manually retrieve my photo's - which normally works fine unless I forget to create a new folder for the task, and instead import into the older folders - which often means I overwrite prior photo's and lose data! Its so freakin' frustrating that, in the rush to get rid of files and folders from the users perception of their own personal filesystems, Apple has made it worse to maintain things manually.
The system data issue on iphone annoyed me since forever. It is The reason i switched to android.
Specifically this System Data issue is big problem but I read online about it and tried stupid fix: set time to far future. Supposedly will expire this system data caches. Nonsense, I said. It is foolish to make cache so big it does not allow update to download.
But I did it nonetheless and system data reduced! So crazy is real.
DaisyDisk - the version you download from them, not the one from the app store which has to be sandboxed - helps with purging that crap.
But then you have to buy an extra app to fix Apple's mess.
Personally I don't mind because I use it to clear my personal crap and it's made its money back countless times already, but to get it just for the purge...
Taking a photo of home screen used to save automatically, now I have to click 2 extra times.
Not sure the App Store field should autofocus. Mac menus draw the frame first, then after a delay we see the items. That is inexcusable
My Linux installation occupies 6 gigabytes.
Just saying...
Early this month, I was browsing the same sites I always do when Safari on my iPhone suddenly became very sluggish. I closed Safari and reopened it, and poof! Everything was gone: favorites, history, open tabs, everything.
This kind of BS has become very common with Apple. There's a very pretty happy path, and a very ugly muddy trail if you fall off the scenic route.
Dude has no storage and no backups on phone. He is one icon refresh from losing it all.
Endless restart loop. No recovery possible, even with a second iPhone and mac. It’s a known bug for years.
Yeah. I've been using Apple products off and on for 47 years and:
Apple is absolutely trying to make your experience of an older iProduct craptastic. But... so is everyone else in the industry. It's just that Apple, who once made very decent products, had much higher from which to fall.Could this be because more code is coming in through vibe coding?