Comment by avalys

I have a couple of older relatives with Macs, and every time you fire them up for the first time in a while (these people might go several months without using their computer) the Apple ID sign-in nagging is insane. It'll pop up the same sign-in notification a dozen times and seems to lock up the settings app until you deal with it. I usually think of myself as quite patient but when I see that little window it inspires strong feelings.

I’ve been a Mac user for >20 years, Linux before that, and lots of FreeBSD on the side. The rewrite from System Preferences to System Settings was one of the worst changes I’ve seen.

Preference panes used to be customized for each function to do what was necessary. Often there were hidden sheets with additional features for power users.

Now everything is just lists. Lists of identical looking, but actually very different settings. List of permissions that drill down into more lists which may or may not be what you want. The lists are unsortable and the order seems arbitrary.

I’m sure there was some push to SwiftUI preferences, but in my opinion, Scott Forstall’s Maps decision pales in comparison to the mess that Settings continues to be.

I've been a software engineer for quite a number of years now. I bought a mac and iphone a few months back because I wanted to look into iphone development and there was a lot of cursing involved.

First the forms were incredibly bad for a new Swedish user. Then there turned out to be some kind of sync issue between account creation and when it can be used, but the error message did not reflect that in any way whatsoever. The next day the same thing worked.

On the one hand they have a support chat to contact and it's great, just being able to contact an actual person was a shock. On the other hand support couldn't help with my problem and I would not recommend the onboarding experience to anyone.

I'm never buying a mac again if I can avoid it.

Took 3 tech savvy family members to figure out why mom couldn’t sign back into an app she was paying for: every time she “signed in with Apple” she also hit “hide my email” (first option) and so registered with a new random email address every time she signed in

It was also illuminating how complex sharing app purchases can be. Some apps allow it, some apps it’s a different payment tier to enable it. It was unclear who had paid for what app and why they didn’t show up on some devices.

Dunno man, I have used Android phones and they are way worse than my iPhone in my opinion - I assume you have an Android phone, so it’s fun we both consider the other ecosystem more aggressively demanding of attention and naggy.

Ultimately I think they both suck and we’ve all gotten used to the one evil we’ve chosen.

I got stuck in a fullscreen YouTube video the first time I tried an iPhone. Simplicity is relative. For years, the lack of a back button resulted in this weird behavior of having to learn how each app wants you to navigate it. Even now that everyone has settled into the same list of 5ish methodologies, it can be cumbersome to figure out.

I recently tried helping out my parents setup the latest Windows. I don’t wish that on my worst enemies. What a pile of garbage that OS has become. Xbox? Copilot? OneDrive? Why am I seeing ads? Bro leave me the fuck alone I just want a browser.

It’s so bad that at one point I considered having them try another OS, even though all they know is Windows.

Unfortunately everything is crap now. Chrome OS would have been a great option because they only need a browser, but just navigating the site is a mess. What the fuck Google, why do you always have to work against your potential customers.

And don’t get me started on Linux distros, I don’t see my parents fixing the inevitable issues in the terminal.

Can we just go back to Windows 98 or something?

Assistive access mode for an iPhone is fantastic for the elderly. It's the only way my 85-year-old father can even use a phone. One of the best features is that it can be set to allow incoming calls only from people in his contacts. It's such a lifesaver.

They turned macOS into an iCloud client and subscription sales funnel.

I guess this is what happens without a dictator to tell people they’re fired for shipping garbage, and when a company worries about meeting quarterly KPIs rather than doing something great.

Instead, the whole company has become a dictator of its "users".

> used to be a paragon of simplicity.

Yes, this is because in the beginning, like all systems, there was not much functionality.

The first iPhone lacked important functions.

But of course, this being Apple, users translate "this device is simple" into "this device is simple to use".

I've been really disappointed in iOS 26 for this reason. I thought it was going in the completely wrong direction, but maybe that was just me being grumpy. Then I noticed that the less computer savvy were having an absolutely abysmal time with it. We're back to computers being really hard for the normies, with apparently no mainstream option that's simple and easy for Grandma.

Unless you want to ship her over to Linux Mint or something similarly not mainstream, but actually user friendly.

I doubt Jobs would have let things get this bad. He would have been ruthless if he had noticed the setup and nagging being this bad.

I had to setup one from scratch recently for the first time in years. The experience was terrible.

However, I can see why it might not be a concern for device manufacturers. We’ve had the iPhone for almost 20 years. The number of people setting up a phone from scratch who have never used a smartphone before must be minuscule at this point and will continue to dwindle. 80 year olds were still working when the iPhone was released. They will have experience using computers at the very least and more than likely have used smartphones for a long time.

Changing wallpapers alone on iPhones is super complex nowadays. Still have no idea why I can't just set a photo as the wallpaper only while not removing the existing widgets already set.

We miss you Steve.

And after all of that there are still red bubbles nagging you to sign up for various services and to enable features you already said no to.

I remember switching to Mac years ago to avoid this type of user-hostile crap in Windows.

this is the actual driver for AI

There was a joy of tech comic a long time ago, in which Johnny Ives was discussing with Steve Jobs all the complexity of a smartphone, so many apps, so many buttons, that he had made a brand new phone: No apps, mo screen, it just makes calls!

A couple of times I’ve been offered a backend contract position for Apple at $110/hr.

They couldn’t go any higher. lol.

No thanks.

Billions in the bank and they’re cheaping out on talent.

El cheapos.

Last week I spent hours debugging our application. Something was broken in the remote request layer, and I spent quite a bit of time debugging it with curl.

The culprit? Apple. I missed a notification hidden below all the windows that iTerm was requesting access to my local network. So curl installed via Homebrew and activated using direnv was not working because it was not getting the required entitlement.

But curl in the `/usr/bin` directory was working just fine because it has the necessary entitlement from Apple. So "/usr/bin/curl http://192.168.20.1" was working just fine, while "/opt/homebrew/bin/curl http://192.168.20.1" was silently failing.

Fun. Fun. Fun.

Can you disable this bullshit? Nope. Permission grants need to be renewed every 30 days. And they pop up at the most inopportune moments.

I switched to iOS about 4 years ago (want small phone, so iPhone 12 mini), from a OnePlus3 with Lineage.

I thought indeed that it was all going to be much better, simpler, more elegant (phone was 2x the price so), but I ran into a lot of issues that I wrote down at the time (some things have been fixed by now):

* Tried installing Signal 4 times, it failed on the apple account generation and no further clues that it didn't or did install Signal (it didn't)

* Can't put icons on the bottom of screen, where your thumb is... need to fill other icons to get important stuff on the bottom. (Fixed!)

* App store does not start with search... So one feels a bit lost, where are the apps? (Fixed! Now a beautiful bubble at the bottom, does require good eye-sight to notice). Still think app store is not really about apps? IDK, it's screaming, there are anime cat girls everywhere; feels cheap.

* Absolutely maddening that it keeps correcting my .nl email adres to .nul (android leaves non txt field alone as far as I'm aware)

* No intro at all into UI (although nowadays I see some hints in "sets")

* Top suggestion in app store is never what you are looking for. Pretty strange. Can we change that? -> Later found out the top suggestion with dark blue around it is always sponsored... And since has NEVER been what I was looking for, never, I instinctively ignore it now like a vibrating "100.000th visitor" badge on a 90s webpage.

* Spouse got stuck searching for app in the Apple store instead of the App store..

* Many controls are at the top (this was pre-swipe, man am I happy with swipe gestures, really fixed iOS for me). Although again: How do you find out?

* My wife, after 3 years still can't remember how to close badly behaving apps to restart them.

* (Old remark) Video pauzes when taking a quick look at notification tray -> In the new bubbly iOS this is much worse even, I often quickly pulled down the notification tray for quick peaks, then let go. But in bubbly iOS there is 0 contrast until you let your finger go, and then the screen will sleep soon.

* You can't dismiss all notifications, since iOS 16 or so there is a dismiss button but it is still, to this day, unclear to me what subset of notifications it allows me to dismiss.

* Screen often goes to sleep as I'm curating notifications.

* Can't drag to folder onder lower bar/icon area (Fixed!)

* Pull down in center of screen gives Siri/search, not notifications, I'd swap that, now notifications requires hand stretching even on iPhone mini.

* I set Firefox as the standard browser yet both telegram and Signal (so far) always open Safari (Fixed I think)

* No notification grouping. (Fixed, but still not as nice as Android, where I spent quite some time in the notification center triaging)

* auto correct does not un-correct on backspace, autocorrect corrects the last word AFTER hitting send (still drives me mad, I just end every message with a space now to avoid looking dumb). Language switching does seem to go very well.

* To close a picture, swipe down, that really took a while. Although not all apps implement it.

* Red dots are not synced with open notifications, when I dismiss a notification I want the red dot gone.

* Hotspot keeps shutting down (it just remains on on Android, usually that is what you want)

* A couple of days in I had 652 mb of data on iCloud, no idea what it was. Then at some limit it starts to nag and it is not obvious how to make it stop nagging. I don't even want anything on iCloud, nobody asked me if I did.

* Alarms are very confusing. Your morning alarm clock is set in the health section (and under alarm) and is linked to your sleep schedule... OK, this changed many times a week, and irregularly... Spouse still has way too loud alarm sometimes because she refuses the "Health based morning alarm", yeah I know how that sounds to a non iOS user. Please also offer a decoupled version of the morning alarm. It's different from messaging alarms.

* Switching "Focus" by holding the lock screen is just very annoying. First you have to swipe down your notifications, then you have to hold the screen. But just long enough until you feel that it didn't work and start to squeeze more. My father asked me some weeks back: "What is this, why does this happen?? That thing you just did!!" And I explained him I was "switching focusses". He does not understand, he does not want it. He turns his phone off if he does not want to be disturbed (yeah and complains when we send messages in the night, because the night is for sleeping and thus only for emergencies... life was simpler back in the days).

* It took me more than a year to find out why my notes app keeps saying: "Restore writing" when walking through the DIY store with the notes app open. Drove me mad! Turns out, shaking is a trigger for un-doing things.. Or something... :s

* Replying to an email and adding a couple of consecutive pictures is a nightmare -> Switched to much better Proton mail now. Apple mail, idk, it works until it doesn't.

* One gets a "Screen use" report every week, when you tap it, it takes you to the current week, where you havent used you phone yet :s. Still don't understand how to see previous weeks.

There were also a lot of nice things though, ie widgets are much better, feel more connected. Swiping feels much more integrated and still works when apps crash etc. Overal I got used to things pretty quickly, but many, many things are very much not obvious (anymore) indeed.

Yeah it's a lot, I once thought about making a blog post about the switch but never did, just kept the notes and adding to it as I pulled my hair out over my iPhone.

Is there an example of a platform that serves almost 2 billion users, across 40+ languages and many more geographic locales, countless possible hardware configurations etc., introducing dozens/hundreds of new features a year, without falling into all those traps?

Of course I wholeheartedly agree with your critiques. But the original iPhone - or even macOS circa 2005 - were very different products, much more limited in scope and capability.

It's already hard enough to make a product a paragon of simplicity when the number of things it needs to do are so limited (as evidenced by all the products out there that are even more confusing than Apple products, doing even less), but I'm not sure it's even possible to do it when you reach such planetary scale.

Seems to me that the only way to have a product that's a paragon of simplicity is to have a product that does much, much less. But you don't become a trillion dollar company with 2 billion active users by doing less.