Comment by Nevermark

Comment by Nevermark 2 days ago

18 replies

View on Hacker News

In my experience Apple's software has been accumulating small annoying bugs for a couple years.

For a couple years I have been noticing regular new glitches in the Apple TV interface accumulating faster than old ones disappear.

Lately the glitch accumulation syndrome seems to have hit macOS. Notes has started doing random bolding, unbolding, changing text size on only one line, etc. After a restart, a finder window with tabs springs to different screen spaces, depending on which tab is open when I try to drop a file on it. Message sometimes draws a few lines of a message with a few pixels vertical and horizontally offset, so there is actual overlap of message parts.

Then there are chronic ones. Safari's save or print to PDF are notorious for not saving pictures you can see, even from reading mode. How are basic functions in Safari not worth fixing, for years?

Apple's HomePods ... for many years. I could write a blog of interesting Pod behavior. I thought having one or a pair in each room would be nice. No, more of them is not nice. Constant bizarreness.

The noticeable acceleration isn't encouraging.

JimDabell 2 days ago

> In my experience Apple's software has been accumulating small annoying bugs for a couple years.

They’ve never not been like this. They don’t know how to write software sustainably and don’t seem interested to learn. They add features faster than they fix bugs. Early on, it was masked by less frequent releases, but switching to an annual cadence made it more obvious. They worked around the problem once by focusing Snow Leopard on bug fixing, but they are just letting the bugs accumulate again now.

Reply View 4 replies
  • hshdhdhj4444 a day ago

    > They’ve never not been like this.

    If you only look at their earlier 10.x.0 releases this is true.

    But it was well known that you don’t upgrade to a new macOS on any non experimental system until the 10.x.1 release.

    In the past (until the mid 2010s I think), if you upgraded to 10.x.1 you’d have a very smooth experience.

    Reply View 2 replies
    • jajuuka a day ago

      Seems like bad software design to make release versions an extension of betas. The "we'll fix it after release" attitude works in some cases, this is not one of them. At some point OS teams need to hold back releases to ensure stable releases and not just hope everyone will get the message to not update until a few versions later.

      Reply View 1 reply
      • pr3dr49 18 hours ago

        Outsourcing testing to customers feels like a pattern these days. Apple is not alone in this game.

        Reply View 0 replies
  • concinds a day ago

    You mean when they returned to annual releases. They only switched away from those for the span of a few years around the first iPhone release.

    Reply View 0 replies
phantasmish a day ago

There were a couple Apple OS releases in the ‘10s where they were like “hey, not many new features and no big redesign, we mostly increased performance and squashed bugs”

It feels like we’re waaaay over due for one or two of those.

Reply View 5 replies
  • xp84 a day ago

    What’s really out of touch is how they don’t seem to think users would be excited for that. Literally nobody is enthusiastic for more complexity. Literally everyone hates the buggy, flaky mess on iOS, iPadOS, macOS. Maybe a working magical Siri would make an impact but Apple has prove definitively that they can’t build that ever. So, rather than ruining all the OSs further, just fire all the PMs and designers and let the engineers fix the bugs for a couple of years.

    Reply View 4 replies
    • dijit a day ago

      Actually, I think it's you who's out of touch here.

      There's two awful colliding factors here.

      1) People absolutely buy features.

      I am in the Apple ecosystem, why? Because iMessage on my laptop, seamless copy/paste and the fact that it supports every bit of software I want to run.

      2) MBA thinkers value features, for the previous reason. They can show that features move the needle of units sold. It's easier to quantify.

      What you and I implicitly understand is that Apple has a captive audience, people will continue to buy MacOS (by virtue of Apple Hardware) for the coming few years at least.

      The higher quality the software, the more performant and less buggy: the more likely we stay in the ecosystem longer. This will sell units in the 4-7 year timeframe for sure.

      The more Apple focus on this, the larger their moat.

      MBA's barely understand how to build a moat, other than monopolising a market by M&A.

      Reply View 3 replies
      • int_19h a day ago

        > Because iMessage on my laptop, seamless copy/paste and the fact that it supports every bit of software I want to run.

        This is a good example of a feature that is actually useful. But it is also one that has been around for a long time. Can you think of something more recent?

        Reply View 2 replies
ben_w a day ago

Mm. Here's my list from earlier in the year: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2025/06/19-15.56.44.html

No idea if 26 fixed any of this, I've avoided updating because of how poorly received Glass is in all the UI discussions.

I could also add to this that occasionally the status bar gets two not-quite-aligned-with-each-other copies of the time, connectivity icons, and battery percentage.

Reply View 0 replies
0x1ch 2 days ago

> Apple's HomePods ... for many years. I could write a blog of interesting Pod behavior. I thought having one or a pair in each room would be nice. No, more of them is not nice. Constant bizarreness.

Yeah, these have quite the DIY / Jailbreak following I've noticed. They look like neat little devices for music and HA stuff, but I've read similar stuff to your comment.

Reply View 1 reply
  • tyre a day ago

    Interesting. I have one HomePod and four minis scattered about. I can’t remember having problems with the hardware or setup. Siri, on the other hand, is a pain in the ass.

    Reply View 0 replies
nixpulvis 2 days ago

My current "favorite" bug is how contacts get randomly merged on iOS. I've called the wrong friend multiple times and it's completely unacceptable for such a basic and core function of iOS.

Reply View 1 reply
  • fragmede a day ago

    I have the opposite problem. Apple's respect for user privacy is great and the iMessage integration between devices is also great, so when I change device mid-conversation, the recipient now has messages coming from two places. My phone number, and my icloud email address. Thankfully the icloud email address I used has my name in it, so people don't totally get confused when that happens, but figuring that out was definitely a "broke the magic" moment for me.

    Contact management is so painful still. Separate fields for first and last name? Also, I'm not really going to fill out each individual field for somebody's address on my phone! Let me just paste a blob into the card and the software should figure it out. But what's worse is that the contact sync between my mac laptop and my phone is all brokeney.

    Reply View 0 replies
lapcat 2 days ago

> In my experience Apple's software has been accumulating small annoying bugs for a couple years.

A couple? That's the understatement of the last couple years.

Reply View 0 replies
JumpCrisscross a day ago

> I could write a blog of interesting Pod behavior. I thought having one or a pair in each room would be nice. No, more of them is not nice. Constant bizarreness.

Oh my fucking god, thank you. I have one in my kitchen and one in the living room, and every few weeks they decide it would be the bees knees to have a 3AM conversation with one another.

Reply View 0 replies