Clicking on folders that you have put in Finders sidebar - It will not display the folder with the view settings set for that folder, but instead the last folder you clicked in the sidebar. It seems to happen clicking from top to bottom vs bottom to top. You just cant make this sh*t up it's so bad.
Example sidebar:
Applications - Always shows as icons
Documents - Shows as icons if you last clicked on Applications. Shows as details if last you clicked on Downloads
Downloads - Always shows as details
Finder is the absolute worst we could write a book about it. Once a year or so all my sidebar folders randomly vanish and I have to re-add them.
Also
The most annoying "it's a feature, not a bug" - That instant drop down of the title bar in full screen if the mouse cursor hits the top edge of the screen. So obnoxious with remote desktop sessions. No delay, no way to disable it, no way to change anything about it.
Finder has stopped being a spatial file manager for a long time, but still mistakenly tries to behave like one in too many places, probably because of lingering legacy code more than a particular intent.
IMHO they should simply rip the spatial bits out entirely and it would immediately become a better file manager purely from the restored consistency.
I was just today complaining that Finder seems to want to be a file browser, but it makes it nearly impossible to actually browse the file system. Ridiculous dropping down to ls in a terminal on a supposedly polished OS.
Each folder has a remembered display state. If in large icon mode, you can drag icons around into the positions you want and they'll stay that way the next time you visit the folder.
The idea is that it's not directories that are just bags of files, but files occupy spatial locations in folder windows.
Ah, this makes sense. Am I hallucinating that columns widths used to be remembered many years back? In other words, in column view, if you resized a column for a given folder, close Finder, and reopen to that folder—it would remain the same width.
Finder is mostly unusable for any directory containing long filenames since it doesn’t remember this. But I swear it used to. Am I misremembering?
I just tested and for me they seem to be remembered for my Downloads folder. Weirdly, at first it didn't seem to be remembered, but then I pressed ⌘+J to look at the view settings, and now when I change a column width it seems to be remembered...
I really wish Apple would allow us to swap out the Finder with something else, so files open in that other app instead of the Finder. This works reasonable well on Windows, where I "replaced" the Explorer with Directory Opus.
This used to be possible, I remember that I replaced Finder with some other app many years ago. I strongly assume that this doesn't work any more, though.
I recall you used to be able to flip some bit somewhere to allow you to Quit the Finder, but I assume that's disappeared inside the encrypted and signed partition where Apple keeps all the things us stupid users shouldn't be allowed to touch.
But even then, you'd want more than just that, as when you tell the OS to "Reveal" a file or open a folder, that's the association I'd want to be able to change.
Honestly I'd really prefer the Windows XP File Explorer to the pile of crap the Finder has turned into.
> But even then, you'd want more than just that, as when you tell the OS to "Reveal" a file or open a folder, that's the association I'd want to be able to change.
yep, that should just be a normal setting like default browser (one thing i like about linux nowadays)
Ah yes, thank you for reminding me - of course, it was Path Finder! You could even have it respond to "Reveal". Not sure any more if it was by renaming Path Finder to /Applications/Finder, or by changing its Bundle id to com.apple.finder, or some other trick.
"of course, it was Path Finder! You could even have it respond to 'Reveal'"
This still works. I have been using macs since 1985 and have always hated the Finder. In the days of classic Mac OS, my go to for file management was a desk accessory called DiskTop, which was great. Super fast and easy to operate from the keyboard.
When I switched to OSX, I needed something better than the Finder, chose Path Finder, and have been using it ever since. I have my complaints about it but have not been able to find anything I like better.
The confusing part is that it sometimes remembers things when you open a folder directly, like from an alias you open on your desktop, or typing `open ~/Documents`... But when Finder gets confused seems to be that when you shift between folders using the "browser-like" tools (back, forward, double-clicking a folder from the current folder), there's a disconnect: Should it act like a browser and use the current view, details columns, etc? or should it totally transform the view into what you had open at some point in the past?
I tend to try to hammer the Finder into always using "list view" with command-J, Always open in list view → Use as Defaults, but random folders can have their own settings attached, probably, so nothing works.
I cant quite figure it out exactly either. Seemingly random, then sometimes there's partial order. I honestly have to close my eyes and take deep breaths in thru the nose out the mouth while sitting at my desk while trying to get stuff done LOL. Im just so sick of decades of these stupid bugs.
Had the pleasure of making an Apple account to join our company's developer team. I filled out the form on the website 7 times: Edge on Windows, Edge on macOS, Safari on macOS, using 2 different phone numbers. No matter what, Apple just refused to send the verification code to me.
It only worked after I remember Apple is a dick to the web platform, then I managed to create one from the popup in the App Store.
Apple also makes it a biznatch to make a developer account separate from your personal account. In Apple's ideal world, multiple accounts should in no circumstance ever exist. I, in an ideal world, would agree with this. But we live in this world, where Apple bans accounts for redeeming legitimate gift cards.
And yet Apple CREATED the multiple-accounts problem for millions of people by implementing their idiotic "Apple ID must be an E-mail address" policy.
So of course people thought that when they changed jobs, cable companies, or whatever... they needed to create a new Apple ID with their new E-mail address. This was reinforced when Apple further stupidified their policy by requiring your ID to be a WORKING E-mail address (originally it didn't actually have to work).
After the outcry over people's App Store and other purchases being scattered across multiple IDs, Apple finally publicly and huffily declared that they weren't going to fix the problem they created by letting people consolidate accounts.
The moral: Don't force people to use E-mail addresses as user IDs. It's stupid on several levels.
> Apple finally publicly and huffily declared that they weren't going to fix the problem they created by letting people consolidate accounts.
They somewhat changed that. It now is possible to move purchases between accounts. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/117294. Looks quite cumbersome to do, and will not apply to everybody (“If an Apple Account is only used for making purchases, those purchases can be migrated to a primary Apple Account to consolidate them.”, “This feature isn’t available to users in India.”)
What's weird, and I'm not sure if it's a documented or undocumented feature, but the account I am logged into on the App Store differs from the one logged into on the system. The system Apple ID is setup with Family Sharing, and the users are able to use apps purchased with the secondary Apple ID.
I haven't transferred the purchases or anything either. The two Apple IDs have different purchases on them, and those on Family Sharing are able to access both.
Interesting. But WTF is a "primary" Apple account? My original Apple ID isn't an E-mail address, so they forced me (and others in that situation) to create another one for iCloud because that one inexplicably has to be an E-mail address.
I use both for quite a few things. Which one is "primary?"
That text is badly written. They define that after mentioning it:
“At the time of migration, the Apple Account signed in for use with iCloud and most features on your iPhone or iPad will be referred to as the primary Apple Account.
At the time of migration, the Apple Account signed in just for use with Media & Purchases will be referred to as the secondary Apple Account.”
⇒ apparently you can be signed into multiple accounts at the same time ¿but I guess with only one account per feature?
But as I said, that page is badly written. So, maybe I’m understanding it wrong.
It's not super difficult if you have an Apple ID from many years ago that you bought media with and then have a different Apple ID that you use for everything. Which isn't that uncommon for anyone who used iTunes and bought music or media and then forgot their ID and just made a new one when they got a iPhone or Macbook. Was able to transfer all my purchases to my main account pretty easily.
The real downside is if you have two fully active Apple IDs. Then things like calendars, photos, email, etc are still stuck on the other account until you export it. Which can be a pain since you have to sign out of your main account, sign into the old account and export, then sign back into the main account.
> of course people thought that when they changed jobs, cable companies, or whatever... they needed to create a new Apple ID with their new E-mail address.
This belief is rampant amongst 90% of the general public. I had to spend an hour helping a friend last week who had created a new Cash App account to do their taxes, because they didn't prefer the old email address that was on their longstanding Cash App account. So now they have to keep 2 Cash App accounts forever. And to make things more fun, they're obsessed with phone numbers there, so adding the phone to the second account pulls it off the other account.
Oh, and digression but I have to vent: their login process on the web is, in some order: an SMS to your phone, another numeric to your email, and your password. All in succession, on every login.
> And yet Apple CREATED the multiple-accounts problem for millions of people by implementing their idiotic "Apple ID must be an E-mail address" policy.
Ironically they then relented only for India and China because market share too sweet, so all auth developers now need to update the assumption that Apple auth users have an email address. Worst of both worlds :)
I am facing this issue right now. I need to create a separate developer account because I am risk averse. Do I need a new phone number for this? Online some people say yes, others say no. I tried creating the account several times but it just doesn't work. At this point I am planning to just get a prepaid SIM card from US Mobile for the phone number.
Apple will allow you to have multiple Apple IDs tied to the same phone number -- my kids' ones have my number on them. So for some purposes it seems fine to just reuse the phone number for a second account -- like for your kids, or for a "sandbox" account to use testing your app so that you don't have to use your real iCloud account.
However, for your purpose of avoiding Apple's capricious BS, I probably wouldn't go that route since if their braindead fraud systems or braindead employees decide you're a threat actor they could definitely default to "Ban account. Find all their evil backup accounts that have the same phone numbers or contact emails and ban them too."
I set up a couple developer accounts recently for my clients. Just use a new Google Voice number for 2FA. I had to live chat with Apple support to get past initial verification both times and after that setup went fine.
If you create your developer account in another country (or with a card from another country, who knows), the whole thing just crashes and the sign-in on the phone loops.
When encountering this, I updated the device which bricked the appstore, the device has to be fully reset if that happens.
Slightly off-topic, but stuff like this does not just happen at Apple.
When Cyberpunk 2077 came out, my wife bought it with her credit card and gifted the game to me. It was fine at first. I even managed to play through the game. However when coming back to the game a few months later (to see all the bugfixes), it was gone. I contacted the (gog) and they said it was removed due to automatic fraud detection and that the balance had been paid back to the original credit card (my wife's card, she had obviously not noticed this in her bank statement).
Point being automatic fraud detection systems can wipe out stuff you purchased even months after the fact (or in some cases lock your account)... It feels kafkaesque.
If you buy milk at a store and then walk out of the store and then the store refunds you 2 days later, that's the store's problem and you're still allowed to drink the milk. You didn't steal the milk. Subscription logic only applies to subscriptions, and GoG is a simple exchange of money for goods, not a subscription.
If the store tried to sue you claiming there was a contract for you not to drink the milk if refunded, it would be laughed out of court and banned from suing anyone ever again.
Incorrect, the milk does not disappear. You are contractually and legally obligated not to drink the milk, much in the same way I should not go around killing people, but I certainly have the ability to.
Now, if you sell the customer electrically locking milk bottles which won't open after the contract is over, then the customer "can't" drink the milk, they couldn't.
Let me guess, you think GOG was perfectly justified in unilaterally taking away nake89's copy of--excuse me, I meant unilaterally revoking nake89's license to play Cyberpunk 2077--when they judged the gift transaction to be fraudulent, just because it could have been a conspiracy between nake89 and their wife to defraud GOG of the princely sum of eighty United States dollars[0]?
I don't dispute that GOG has the right, from a strictly legal standpoint, to revoke a license for any reason their terms of service allow, and that someone continuing to play a game after their license was revoked would be in breach of contract. What I do dispute is that this is a correct, fair, or desirable state of affairs, especially when the license in question was received as a gift and believed in good faith by the recipient to have been acquired non-fraudulently.
And in particular, if GOG wants the absolute and irrevocable right to prevent consumers from using products for which GOG has decided to revoke the licenses, they shouldn't advertise themselves as a DRM-free platform, nor claim that "Here, you won't be locked out of titles you paid for, or constantly asked to prove you own them - this is DRM-free gaming." -- advertising copy may not have the force of law, but courts tend to take a dim view of ad claims that are provably false.
[0]: the list price of the Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition on GOG as of this writing (though it is currently on sale for 38% off)
GOG may have the right to revoke a sale, but since it lets you download the game without DRM, it doesn't have the ability. Unless you delete your copy of the game and then try to download it again.
If you buy milk from the supermarket and they reverse the transaction 2 days later claiming you used a fraudulent card, but you didn't use a fraudulent card, you have the right to keep the milk and the loss of money is the store's problem.
GOG has a Steam-like client application that you can use instead of downloading the installers (which, in the case of Cyberpunk 2077, would be more convenient because its installer is in 28 parts, with another 11 for the Phantom Liberty expansion). It may be that if you install games through that, GOG can remove them if they revoke a license for any reason. I don't know that for sure, though. Just pointing out that they may, in fact, have the ability, at least in principle. But to be clear in case there's any doubt, I think we're on the same side: I think if nake89 had downloaded and installed CP2077 manually instead of through GOG Galaxy, and had continued to play it even after GOG decided the license was fraudulently acquired, they would have been in the right in every way that matters, and at least from a moral perspective, GOG could go pound sand.
It wasn't a sketchy retailer though, it was one Apple has authorized through its handpicked affiliate (in the US, this is probably Blackhawk who basically owns the third-party-giftcard-sales business).
For Apple to say "Don't buy gift cards from our authorized retailers, or prepare to face incredibly harsh consequences due to fraud that you can't detect or predict" while continuing to sell them through those channels is morally bankrupt and completely unacceptable.
I have no doubt fraud is a big problem. It is for all gift cards. But this is a 3 trillion dollar company -- and they make minimum 30% of every gift card sold in pure profit. If they can't secure those channels without torpedoing innocent customers' entire digital lives, they need to drop that channel.
Your comment reminds me of this news story of a guy trapped in his work's elevator for the weekend. How was he supposed to know it'll be only for the weekend.
Hah, because it went viral. Good luck if you aren't able to reach a wide audience (99% of people aren't). Else it would've been locked for eternity. Stop defending atrocious behavior like this.
If somebody bought something from Walmart you wouldn’t insinuate he’s at fault because he bought it from a ‘sketchy retailer’. Just stop it lol. There is literally no way to defend Apple on that one.
What matters is that the purchaser had every reason to think that it was legitimate and they were not the malefactor in this scenario, but they still got banned.
If you buy stolen property without knowing you still get punished by having the stolen property taken away. Just because you don't know, it doesn't mean you have not done anything wrong.
Having your purchase taken away is not punishment. It's done because it's not actually yours, it still belongs to the person it was stolen from. It's a negative for the person who made the purchase, but that's just an unfortunate side effect. Unknowingly buying stolen property is not legally wrong. The typical law punishing receiving stolen property requires the receiver to know that it is stolen. Otherwise you're innocent of any wrongdoing, you just got ripped off.
If unknowingly using a stolen gift card just meant you lost your money, nobody would be complaining about Apple's behavior here. The issue is that they didn't just lose their money, they also got their account locked, which locks up a lot of stuff completely unrelated to gift cards.
Terrible analogy. The victim here bought the card from the retailer. Someone else had gained access to the secret contained on the card and stolen or attempted to steal the value on the card because Apple can't figure out how to sell a gift card securely.
Our victim was the victim of the only theft that involved the gift card. Then Apple stole the person's whole digital life with no recourse because they are ham-fisted and don't care.
this kind of stuff happens all the time across major companies with minimised support. sure your google account is likely to be there tomorrow but it's only a very good chance that it's not locked forever.
i would be surprised if there's any company with millions of users where .01 or .001 (still a LOT of users) just get screwed with zero recourse
Elsewhere in this thread, you assert that perhaps Apple simply reversed all this out of the kindness of their heart without regard for the social media blowup that this lucky victim was able to create.
This is cognitive dissonance. If Apple reversed it due to their conscience, it's because they are pretty convinced this user is honest and Apple PR isn't (or didn't need to be) involved.
If on the other hand, Apple has proof the user is not honest, then Apple PR took a huge hit for nothing by forcing Apple Support to unban them, when they could have said "Because we have documented proof the user couldn't have bought this from a legitimate reseller, we cannot unban them."
The two are related. Apple doesn't want you having multiple accounts, because it wants to ban you for redeeming legitimate gift cards, not just one of your personas.
I had a similar issue trying to create an Apple TV account. I already had an Apple account that I was using on my work laptop (first mistake - I should have created a work account there instead), and for 2FA, I needed to wait for a code to pop up on that laptop. It never came. There was an email alternative, but that also didn't work properly (maybe only on certain devices, IIRC?). Apparently in the settings you can request a 2FA code, though, so I did that... but that only had five digits, whereas I needed to give six for the code to work. Eventually I figured out that Apple had just forgotten to zero-pad the 2FA code out to six digits, so I needed to add a leading zero to make things work.
The worst part of this is that now my Apple TV account is linked to a laptop that I don't always have on me. And even if I did have it on me, I don't want to get a laptop out and turn it on just to do 2FA. I already have a TOTP app on my phone, just let me put everything in there and leave me be.
My experience with MacOS is generally that it's about as buggy as my home Linux setup. That's partly a testament to how solid Linux can be these days, but at the same time, it feels pretty damning considering only one of these operating systems is free (in any sense of the word). And that's not including stuff like the configurability of the whole thing.
I had a similar issue when I first brought my iPad. Turns out, Apple doesn't like custom domains for emails. So, I had to make an Apple account with a Gmail account, then remove the Gmail account and add my email address with the custom domain.
Why? Who knows. Still remember my first experience after buying an iPad.
Might've had something to do with the state of the various email security measures on the domain. I have an Apple account on a custom domain with Fastmail and it's never been a problem.
I couldn't make an account on the website Digikey outsourced all their 3d models to with my work email. signed up with my personal gmail account in less than 30 seconds.
This is not some Apple specific problem.
Also this was yesterday. Never did I get any of the 3 confirmation emails they claim they sent to my work mail.
You have to reach a human to make a Flickr account in 2025 if you use a custom domain. It wasn't too difficult, they gave me some reason about abuse. Whatever.
You purchase your own domain name and use that domain name as your email address. For instance, if I had an email address that was me@afandian.com; the afandian.com would be a custom domain. It's not routed to @gmail.com, it's routed to @afandian.com. Now in practice you can have a custom domain and still have it managed by Google's Mail servers; but it's the domain name itself that sends up the flags.
I and a friend (both are not Apple users) had the same issue about 2 years ago. I gave up after trying different (non-Apple) platforms, IPs and phone numbers. He was applying to Apple internship and ended up borrowing a Macbook to set up his account.
And talking about why I wanted a new Apple account... My old account was created with stupid security questions (like, What is your favorite dish) as a second factor, which I believe Apple has long deprecated. I forgot my answers and that blocked certain functionalities. Resetting the security questions requires answering the questions...
I can't access anything without knowing exactly what I did wrong, presumably Apple never verified it when I created the account decades ago, but it's now part of the critical flow to log in.
The opposite happened to me: I got a new Mac and had to fill out my Apple account billing details to download apps from the App Store, but somehow the form on both the App Store and the web page didn't work. In the end I managed to do it through the Apple Music app on my Android (!) phone.
Unfortunely Apple skills to write server software is inversely proportional to the fame they enjoyed thus far on client systems, as anyone using their Web APIs or backends can attest for.
I seem to remember this happening to me, and I finally called them and they said something about a waiting period for new accounts? It might help to try calling their tech support for this as painful as that is.
BY FAR #3 is the most annoying UX on iOS 26 - I fall for it every single time when trying to change payment method. Not only does it undo years of muscle memory, it's so unbelievably unintuitive to have the first button change address instead of payment method
Not the address, but the phone number has a bug I run into it occasionally. Some merchants support the +1 country code, some are local US only and don’t expect it. Safari’s auto-fill figures this out when filling the form. But then I go to Apple Pay, an it replaces the phone number with a 1 at the beginning and drops the last number, then I get an error that something is wrong. Initially took me a while to realize what was happening and that you can edit the number in the Apple Pay overlay before it applies it to the order. Just a bit annoying
I don't get it. The screenshot on reddit appears to show that tapping on the card changes the billing info, and under that there's a separate button to change the card. So far as I can tell that's the same on iOS 18? The only difference is that tapping on the card doesn't do anything. What's the "muscle memory"?
I'm so tired of looking like a boomer that doesn't know how to use their phone when I'm paying with Apple Pay irl and I need to change the card, now a classic iOS user humiliation ritual :,)
There is no such thing as "objective" in this arena. It's all subjective, the best you can hope is to find an approach that the majority of your users subjectively prefer.
It’s not a “which payment” window though, it’s a “confirm payment information” window.
In that type of window you’d expect clicking on any of the existing form fields would allow you to change that field. It would be wild if clicking on a credit card icon in the middle of a form submitted that form.
Not an iOS user but I can totally see why this is an issue: Users read from top to bottom and once they think they found what they search they click it without analyzing the remainder of the screen.
So in this case you find a button that looks like it changes the payment method (because in earlier versions it did and it's a common UI pattern) and don't even see the button below that acually does this.
Trying to type this comment on an iPhone and that very last issue, text selection, is so so real. It’s probably the single biggest thing I hate about this phone that makes me consider switching back to Android (I was on Android for 12 years before trying out an iPhone for 3 years atm, and in general, on average, I can’t tell the difference… they both have strengths and flaws. Text selection is a pretty massive flaw on iPhone.)
Android isn't any better, every new version every year, it's becoming a buggier and buggier Tamagotchi that demands attention every half an hour, and has a gazillion contradictory settings that never work. My phone, model 2023, has night mode that turns on automatically. You can turn it off for 30 minutes, or permanently. There are clocks that work independently. I wanted a better one, because this one would reset all its widgets every minute, and no app could play music or radio in the background.
So I got a newer one, from 2025. Fortunately, radio & media do work. But product managers wouldn't have been product managers without spoiling something. Somebody decided the alarm and night mode must work together in unison, and also they dropped the turn-off-for-30-min feature, and they decided to make night mode smart, that it doesn't turn on if the phone was active at the time. So, now you can get spam calls or sms make it ring loudly at night, because night mode didn't turn on, because you used the phone. Next time when you notice night mode should be on, but isn't, you turn it on. But now it's permanent -- till the end of the universe, unless you turn it off. And alarm clock won't ring, because deep in there, a "waking up alarm" box is unchecked, that should have made it work despite the night mode. Did any human actually test it work on themselves?
My pet peeve on Android (and also on iOS) with alarms is that alarms aren't clocks! They are totally separated concepts and bundling them all together makes no sense.
Nice thing about Android though is that you have more control to work around this kind of thing if you don't like the default behaviour. I rolled my own night mode with Tasker years ago, before it was built in, and have never looked back.
Oh my thanks for that, I thought I was going crazy.
The one that keeps getting to me is that iOS insists on putting periods instead of spaces when I only pressed the space bar once so.I.end.up.with.sentences.like.this. (when it starts doing it it can be extremely consistent); yes I know about the double space -> period shortcut but like in the video that's not it.
There was a time where the iOS keyboard just worked.
I have searched for a proper keyboard replacement. But there is not a single one that 1) works properly without major bugs, 2) adheres to privacy standards (because no way I am sending all keystrokes to Microslop) and 3) does not cost a fortune. Typewise came close, but seems abandoned now.
Text section is also extremely annoying when marking up PDF files in the Preview app (select -> highlight). Anything you select (whole words), deselects some trailing portion and you’re left with only part of your selection with a highlight pop-up prompt. You want to reselect, so you tap aside, and it deselects the entire fragment. You repeat, again a trifling piece gets unselected, but this time the partial selection remains in tact after the highlight popup prompt is dismissed, and you try to expand the selection, but it either doesn’t react or cancels the entire selection, just for fun.
It can take a few times to get the selection right, but by that time you forgot why you wanted to highlight that passage in the first place.
It totally breaks my flow of consciousness while reading and marking.
It happens on iPhones and iPads, with and without the Pencil.
And they had it solved! 3D Touch worked perfectly – you pushed the screen hard to get a cursor, moved it to the start of the selection, and pushed hard again to drag to the end. They killed it because "not all iPhones had the hardware to support it" or something.
Space bar which is at... the bottom of the screen, so if you want to move the caret down... 3D Touch worked _anywhere_, also had no delay, and hard press a second time was much more convenient for selection.
that deserves a whole separate opera. why does moving the cursor to start/end almost always place it one character off? same when trying to use touch on text for it.
This. I feel like this is due to small shifts when lifting the finger. For the life of me, I cannot get myself to lift it like the testers at Apple do, and so I wished the product itself could go through learning phase; studying intentions and what actual touches happen.
Apple devs are probably doing something with the touch returned by the touchUpInside callback. This is an extremely, extremely common bug in iOS apps, not just with Apple developed software.
Devs love the symmetry of their touch handling code and often have the finger-down, finger-moved, and finger-up callbacks from the system all call the same handleTouch function they wrote. As you can tell, however, the touch from the finger up callback is often better discarded or handled differently otherwise you get these sort of bugs
Unfortunately, it's still bad. It's a bit better than dragging the handles of the selected area, but if I go to far and want to reduce the selected area, it doesn't work anymore.
> You just wanted to move the cursor. Now everything is selected.
> You want to position the cursor at the end of a line. You tap. It selects the last word. You try to grab the handle — it doesn't respond and deselects. You tap again, now it selects the whole sentence. You tap blank space to deselect — nothing. You tap five more times. On the fifth, it selects all. You switch apps hoping the selection disappears. You tap and hold — sometimes text selects, sometimes a menu appears, sometimes nothing. Got a Magic Keyboard? Good luck — trackpad selection just doesn't work half the time, but touching the screen does. Eventually you select all, delete everything, and retype from scratch. Apple has had 17 years to figure out touch text selection. This is where they landed.
At least for editing text on the iPhone the key to moving the cursor is holding down the space bar: the keyboard transforms into a trackpad for cursor placement. This doesn’t really help for selecting text though, but it makes typing longer responses much more bearable.
Yes, it does. For passwords or any other field an app defines as sensitive, Apple keyboard takes over and you can't change from it, but other than that you share every keystroke with Google. Your only option is disabling location.
Years ago, someone demonstrated an improved mobile text editing system called "Eloquent" [1] and I wish this would be the default today.
However, my biggest issue with mobile text selection is accidental scrolling or scrolling too fast/far while dragging on the screen to select longer text parts. This is especially annoying in landscape mode when there is just a tiny gap between the visible text and the touch keyboard. I don’t know how to solve this, but it just makes the text editing process feel incredibly insecure/slippy and annoying for me.
That looks so much better. The hierarchical popup menu is soooo annoying. It's not even consistent about what gets relegated to the overflow!
In case it isn't clear to people, that research was actually done by Google. It's a shame the researchers didn't have the political clout to ship it.
I guess one issue with it might be the "press harder" bit. That isn't a thing anywhere else in the Android world at all and I expect hardware has pretty poor support for it.
YES Typing is a horror show (perhaps only for me as I don't daily-drive and iphone but only have an ipad for home usage which may "under-train" me to The Way).
Text selection is cute, with the magnifying lens. It seems like this should work. Though the rest of the process is unpredictable and The Bad Kind Of Magic: Nick turns self into toad, poof!
REFERENCE - from the site:
* "iOS Text Selection is Pure Chaos"
* You just wanted to move the cursor. Now everything is selected.
* You want to position the cursor at the end of a line. You tap. It selects the last word. You try to grab the handle — it doesn't respond and deselects. You tap again, now it selects the whole sentence. You tap blank space to deselect — nothing. You tap five more times. On the fifth, it selects all. You switch apps hoping the selection disappears. You tap and hold — sometimes text selects, sometimes a menu appears, sometimes nothing. Got a Magic Keyboard? Good luck — trackpad selection just doesn't work half the time, but touching the screen does. Eventually you select all, delete everything, and retype from scratch. Apple has had 17 years to figure out touch text selection. This is where they landed.
Every single time I have to do some text editing in iOS, I end up shouting loud: "a f*ing trillion values company cannot get this right, f* you Tim Cook"
I run into the other bugs, but text editing is such an absolutely basic feature... it should just work, and it doesn't!
Wait till you realize with Samsung Android phones, you can pretty much replace your laptop with a lapdock, or any TV + bluetooth mouse and keyboard.
Android stuff has been ahead of apple since like 2014. Apple is really good at optimizing the one thing that they use in advertising, while the rest of the stuff falls by the wayside. Was the exact same thing with Apple silicon and battery life. Sure, your laptop battery lasts a while when all you do is browse web and watch movies, specifically because of dedicated hardware for that. My phone with a similar capacity battery bank does the same. Once you start actually supersizing the cpu, the battery life drops significantly.
You have to be very precise with your finger drags because it loves snapping back to the original position. Gbroard doesn’t suffer from this. Part of the reason is it doesn’t do the “free-floating” cursor thing - which I’ve never understood the point of anyway. It’s fancy but useless in 99% of cases on a phone.
No quite. On iOS, I cannot place the cursor in the middle of a word by putting my finger there. It goes to the beginning or end of the word, and then I have to drag it like an ice cube to the precise spot. On Android you can tap exactly where you want the cursor to go, and it does with perfect precision.
This is missing the most annoying one for me: when I type a search term into safari and it randomly interprets it as an address that it can’t resolve. E.g. “how to bake cookies” gets resolved to how%20to%20bake%20cookies (which safari tries to resolve via DNS or whatever instead of piping it to the search provider). Even better, it’s entirely nondeterministic, though it does seem to be due to some race condition with whatever determines whether it’s a search or a url, and is more likely to happen when typing quickly.
I’d say it happens about 10% of the time I type anything in the search bar. It’s incredibly annoying. Without getting into too much detail, but I confirmed they’re tracking it internally too for close to a decade and are intentionally choosing not to prioritize.
When you had gone to a site using a deep link, Safari insists on autocompleting any URL in the domain to that link you used even if you just want to go to the top-level URL/index of that site. You have to type out the entire URL and add a space at the end or something (and that still doesn't work sometimes) to stop iOS from doing that, which defeats the entire purpose of autocompletion. Btw switched off any autocorrection feature a long time ago. Still, I happen to mistype a lot compared to my old non-Apple phones (there was even an "it's not just you" article last year about it).
Apple needs to spend an entire release cycle to unfuck text entry and completion. However, with their qa lately (or lack thereof) they'd only manage to make it worse. The sad thing is they're still better than the alternatives, all things considered.
Browsers never should have gotten rid of the separate and dedicated search bar. I don't want my browser guessing whether what I'm typing is a search or a URL. It should be easy to guess, but they frequently get it wrong for doubtless stupid reasons. If you can't even reliably classify a URL vs. a search, just have two separate text inputs, like the old days!
I personally reported that around time when Mac OS X 10.9 (first non-cat) came out and immediately saw it marked as duplicate. So at least 13 years and counting.
I've been seeing this from time to time since at least 2016. As others have noted, it's more likely to happen when you type quickly or immediately after pasting your search in the url bar.
I have a fun one: my iPhone (12 Pro) refuses to acknowledge that it has eSIM functionality, even though the hardware exists.
I'm fairly sure I know what the problem is! It was restored from a backup taken on an iPhone X that had two physical SIM slots (Chinese version). The new phone now seems to think it has two physical SIM slots: it shows an IMEI2 in About, but any attempt to use the eSIM functionality just fails (scanning a code does "nothing"; no "add" button is visible, etc.).
If this was an Android phone, I'd root it and just fix the offending network configuration file. I believe it's possible to tamper with a backup of the phone to fix the issue, but this would mean a full backup+restore cycle and some specialized tooling to go mucking with the backup.
I filed a Radar on it ages ago, but I'm assuming nobody ever picked it up.
Issues caused by restoring from backups were super common in the early iOS days. It makes me wonder how many weird bugs can be fixed these days by starting from scratch instead of migrating years of cruft through backup/restore.
Quite a lot probably. I wasn’t able to use the health app on two different iPhones - it would crash after tapping “get started” consistently - and apple told me to just start from scratch instead of restoring from backup and there was no other way to fix it. Not a very satisfying answer
I had eSIMs get screwed up on my iPhone a year or two ago when I deleted an expired eSIM. It asked me "Do you want to update contacts to use <the SIM I just deleted>?" and I knew I was in trouble.
I did successfully use a backup editor, iMazing, to exclude the telephony data from a backup in order to fix it, but it cost me $30 and hours (transferring my Signal data to a second device and back). For 99.999% of their customers this would require a total erase-install. All because Apple has an off-by-one error somewhere.
The emoji search box's search bar sometimes will just stop working, usually after a {input, erase input, new input} sequence. No idea why. Dismiss picker, try again.
Sometimes the picker just refuses to be summoned.
Bluetooth is a mess. File transfers will fail, who knows why? Certainly not macOS. Often I'll just punt to GoogleDrive-TP.
Really random screen wakes.
Left macOS alone for 5s? All your windows have decided to start playing a game of musical desktop, and need 10s to re-arrange themselves back into place, also while sometimes displaying their contents at 2x.
Slack has any number of these; e.g., emoji inside codeblocks are simply corrupted. A number of odd corner cases in URLs will corrupt, and each edit of the message will further corrupt it.
So much of the web is plagued by some framework that, upon any JS exception, will destroy the entire DOM (idk maybe defunct page > no page at all?) and leave you only with "ApplicationError: …".
At this point I'd add "is a motorcycle a car? Is a pedestrian signal a stop light?!" CAPTCHAKCAS to this list, but those are a "feature".
If we're doing "features": password fields with no option to view the plaintext value? I use long passwords, and if I'm in a safe place, I would much rather see what I'm typing and correct any typos I make along the way than have to retype the same password multiple times with long delays between each attempt.
Also, once a day my Touch ID stops working and I need to log in with my password again. That's fine, the passwordless access expires after 24 hours or so, fair enough. But I turn my laptop on fresh every morning and have to also put my password in then. If I do that, I at least expect to be and to use my fingerprint until the end of the day.
The wombo combo is field that doesn't allow pasting (???) plus app that forgets where you are. So you can't paste, so you type the first few characters, dismiss the app to look at what the field should be, come back and boom - it's cleared out or, worse, you're on the home page. For some reason banks LOVE this.
Why can't I disable MacOS "start every app I can think of" when you restart the laptop?
No, I don't want to launch Word, Excel, Sheets, and System Monitor when I reboot. They weren't even running when I restarted, and I unticked the launch apps on restart. Every. Damn. Time.
In the shutdown / restart confirmation dialog there’s a checkbox to reopen apps at login. If there’s a bug with it I haven’t noticed it.
You can also run
I do untick it. It's a bug that happens with every restart.
I'll have a go with setting the defaults, I'm wondering if there was a file it writes out open applications to (to trigger on restart) that has somehow become corrupted and therefore doesn't get cleared.
Do you know where MacOS stores the list to reopen?
I used to love Apple because they were so far ahead of the game in terms of UX and hardware. They have dropped the ball so much recently with all these UX mishaps from Apple Glass to most of the bugs in the post that affect me. I am more than willing to switch to Android or some other device regardless of price, but haven't found one that is close to equivalent yet. I worry it'll be a few years before something comes close to the battery life + screen quality + camera quality + decent software/security of iOS.
The problem (for me) isn't the hardware. The Pixel 10 Pro is arguably a great phone, and I had a 9 Pro Xl for a short time before going back to iOS and I enjoyed it while I had it.
But what I found was I was just trading Apple's quirks for even worse Android quirks, all while losing all the nice ecosystem integrations with my macbook and iPad.
App quality on Android is still hit and miss. Companies still don't put nearly as much effort into their Android apps as they do their iOS apps. Even my banking app was a laggy, buggy mess on Android compared to the iOS version. Heck, even Google's own apps are better on iOS.
Plus, until Google decides to offer E2EE for their cloud services like Apple with advanced data protection, it's a non-starter for me and I really don't feel like going full self-hosted just so I can run Android.
I want to like Android again, but there's just nothing there right now that definitively makes it a better experience for me despite Apple's flaws.
I loved my Pixel 10 Pro until it broke just a week after purchase (screen went unresponsive all of a sudden and I needed to learn to factory reset it).
Pixel Android doesn’t support disabling the control center when locked in lock screen, and widgets are also available.
I saw all of that reported just recently too, so obviously not a single issue. The screen issues are known across several Pixel generations. The screen lock since 2013.
I don’t know whether I’m going to touch anything Pixel in the next couple of years, it’s not mature enough yet.
No it doesn't. Battery life isn't that much greater when you use the laptop. Meanwhile, if all you are doing is browsing web or watching youtube, an android phone with the same size battery lasts longer.
With Graphene, something financial won’t work anymore. I believe either banking apps or Google Wallet, a known issue. Graphene didn’t support Pixel 10 yet last time I checked. That said, I’ve been just too occupied with reading on how to fix the Pixel bugs that bit me that I couldn’t get to the point of reading on Graphene and I don’t exactly remember anymore what was wrong with it.
Google wallet doesn't work which is imho a very tiny issue with contactless payment working with cards but most banking apps do. There is a forum thread I believe that you can check if your bank's app work before commiting to migrate.
It might be a very tiny issue for you, but for others it's huge.
As a single datapoint: it has been years since I used a physical card. both payment or public transport. Always use contactless payments using my phone.
I mean I used it in the past but the difference is minor in my experience.
It is a case of grabbing your card vs grabbing your smartphone and fiddling with it. That card could even be carried in one of those phones cases with a card holder.
The only major difference is in case of stolen phone vs stolen card. But every system has its drawback. It could be super annoying if you get your account suspended unexpectedly while you are away from home.
In my particular case I don't want a google account anymore and would hate relying on google to manage my payments so it is a no go for a start.
- I want to be able to install anything I want on it without relying on what is accepted by a "store"
- I don't want an Apple account
- I want to own and be able to have the shit I want running in the background (like syncthing)
- I want to be able to access my file the way I want, including using a shell
- I want to be able to run any linux app
- and more inportantly I want to be the owner of my phone, not merely the user of a license to use it following the term set by a company from an hostile nation
I’ve been down that road, was fun, but growingly felt to me like too much maintenance that wasn’t worth the effort, distracting from more important things. Like desktop Linux.
Now I’m at a point where Android itself, even Pixels feel that way. I really tried to make the Pixel my daily driver. In hindsight, it was just too naive of me.
same for me; its too bad though we cant have some kind of foss shell, and bank/contactless payment apps can run in some secure vm/box so we can have the best of both
I rooted my phone for years but the lack of contactless and trying to stay one step ahead of Google trying to stop you using it (frequent messing with shamiko, lsposed and all the rest, delicately doing updates, only for it to eventually fail randomly).
Being able to pay with your phone is just too useful.
Why are you comparing the latest Google flagship phone with a previous generation iPhone? The iPhone 17 is better than a Pixel 10 on most if not all fronts.
There’s little hardware improvement in iPhone 17 over iPhone 16. Arguably only the move from titanium to aluminum in the casing is a tangible performance enhancement (better cooling).
The iPhone 17 delivers significant display, battery, camera, and memory improvements. The aluminum switch does enhance thermal performance, but calling it the "only tangible" upgrade requires ignoring ProMotion displays, 36% longer battery life, 4x camera resolution boosts, and doubled storage.
The standard iPhone 17, in particular, received upgrades substantial enough that upgrading from an iPhone 15 or earlier makes strong practical sense. Hardly the profile of a phone with "little hardware improvement".
Thanks, you’re likely right, but significance is in the eye of the beholder. I don’t attribute much value to the marketing fluff and on-paper changes.
It’s great the battery improved but does it really matter? You still will charge every day.
The camera resolution, well, it’s still just a smartphone camera with some AI post-processing, which Xiaomi can do better with their Leica or Oppo with their Zeiss lenses. And either one is still bad compared to a proper camera.
ProMotion display, Pixel’s still better.
Your point about storage made me laugh, but let’s maybe leave it for another time.
That all is very minor and not noticeable to me. If you go from 10 to 15 it’s a 50% improvement, but if your competitors have been at 20 and won’t regress, you’re still behind.
So yes, to me, the aluminum case is the only tangible. My palms don’t burn anymore. And I’m grateful to Apple for letting me pay more again for this noticeable improvement.
There's a strange logic (that I understand is not just at Apple) where if you ship a known bug, it becomes harder next release to fix it… because we already shipped the bug once (twice, etc.).
Apple engineers care though. If they were allowed to (given time, priority), they would love to knock out some of their oldest and most annoying bugs. And I understand that from time to time a bug-fix-only OS release is planned… but things always come up. New hardware, "AI"… who knows.
Maybe someday we'll get another Snow Leopard (bug-fix-only OS release).
It feels like Apple lacks the institutional vocabulary to even think about fixing old bugs. The way the releases are structured, there’s a “zero bugs” day where all bugs are ceremonially kicked out of the current release, and the level of quality is deemed to be “what we’re shipping with”. On that day, it’s not like the bugs are fixed, they’re just bulk-modified to target “future os release” and that’s that.
Then the planning is made for next years release and they plan for X features, which require Y time and Z engineers, and some mild hand-waving later a schedule is made, and gee would you look at that, there’s no time anywhere for fixing existing bugs. But that’s ok because big rewrite of subsystem is gonna ship next release and it’ll probably make all the bugs invalid, right? Right? Well, it certainly won’t have more bugs, right? Right? Oops…
> But that’s ok because big rewrite of subsystem is gonna ship next release and it’ll probably make all the bugs invalid, right? Right? Well, it certainly won’t have more bugs, right? Right?
They keep doing them, but I wonder to what degree these rewrites are necessary, and whether your average Apple engineer is aware that they end up with more bugs and vulnerabilities than they started. Surely they've gotta know?
People look at the backlog of issues, see all the things they don't like about $subsystem, and think to themselves "we ought to rewrite this". The incentives are all aligned to make this common. Project managers get a nice chunk of work to manage, engineers get to write things their way, managers get a nice thing to add to their accomplishments, everyone feels like progress is happening. Heck, sometimes there may actually be real deficiencies in the existing code that are being addressed! And in the end, the bug count is lower! (Never mind that it's only lower because it hasn't had the time in production to actually find the bugs yet...)
Large-scale software is hard. So hard nobody's really managed to do it well. By large-scale I don't mean "a lot of users" or "a large deployment"... I mean "a lot of engineers". Once the number of engineers gets large enough, they start making decisions that make the product worse, more bloated, more buggy, and no human is capable of keeping it in check, because the sheer amount of activity in the code is so large you can't possibly keep up with it. And the worst part is that orgs try to solve this by... hiring more engineers to wrangle the complexity. By this point you're already sunk, there's no going back.
Why not have a "rewrite policy", criteria for when a rewrite makes sense or doesn't? Surely a random engineer can't decide to rewrite things on his own.
There’s too many people with incentives to rewrite. It keeps all the gears turning, keeps everyone employed. You certainly need to justify any rewrites, but… people are really good at justifying rewrites.
This seems like it would work if you build a system on solid bedrock, but how often does that really happen? CarPlay, for example, started as a disaster. Unsurprisingly, it has changed a lot but remains one.
Oh god. I don't use an iOS device regularly, so when I encountered this issue I had to control myself not to throw the device. Absolutely horrible experience. Worse part is that it autocorrects when pressing "send", not just when adding a space or a period. So the correct word gets corrected wrong and immediately sent.
I've owned iOS devices since around 2010 I think, and one of the first things I do when setting them up is disable autocorrect and most other typing assistances. For this reason! Also when typing in 2 or 3 languages, it is completely useless.
iOS 18 really fucked up the multiple languages setup. It used to automatically detect secondary languages when I had the English keyboard, but still prefer English. Now you have to create keyboard combos and can't reuse languages (can't "prefer Spanish but also support English" and viceversa)
This list is frustrating to read because it reminds me of all the time I've spent dealing with these bugs. Not all of them thankfully but more than half steal my time at least once on a weekly basis. They're all bad but I think the auto correct actively fighting me and the ios cursor thing are perhaps the most annoying of the bunch for me. Trying to communicate well on a mobile platform is bad enough but when it's actively sabotaging you it's just so much worse.
I just turn auto correct off completely, as it's just plain worse than just typing it myself. Unfortunately there's nothing that can be done about the terrible text selection.
It's really staggering how much impact one engineer can have when working on a product used by billions of people. Fixing just one of these issues would instantly be the most valuable thing that person ever does in their life by orders of magnitude. We have incredible leverage in the software world.
You'd be surprised how many Apple engineers are fixing many bugs, of this caliber, on a semi-regular basis.
That "Human Hours Wasted" is not just sitting there because engineers don't care about it, it's because there are many many other opportunities to save similar amounts of time. Crashes waste time, perf bugs waste time -- and security bugs are much worse.
I really doubt everyone or even a tiny fraction of people at Apple are working on opportunities to save more time than fixing the repeated autocorrect issue. It affects everyone and it's been a meme since forever.
At this scale, some bugs become features. I think fixing the bugs would need lots of conceptual work, due to the fact that there are millions of users of these apps.
The fact that a similar bug was left in GTA5 ON PURPOSE FOR YEARS (making load times for multiplayer like 10x what they should be) to get more people to see their shitty ads for currency is why I am somewhat sympathetic to people who think that we are all overpaid and deserve a solar flair to force us to actually do something useful.
"Autocorrect Won't Take No For An Answer" does have a workaround at Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement. If you add the word as both the phrase and shortcut it won't be autocorrected. Apple should still fix the learning behavior of autocorrect, but this workaround can prevent some frustration.
Two other bugs I haven't seen mentioned yet:
- The notes field in the Contacts app on iOS is completely broken. If you start typing a contact note the page jumps around randomly. And if you have a longer note it won't autoscroll to the cursor so you're typing blind. Became even worse in iOS 26...
- Stage Manager on macOS feels very buggy due to inconsistent behavior across apps and windows. Could be great in theory, but in practice frustrating to use.
This doesn't really work for things that are already words like it's/its. I type the one i want, iOS “corrects” it to the wrong one, and even after I tap the one I typed in the prediction bar? iOS still inserts its own suggestion again.
Also, for seemingly no reason, you can't choose to open an app/window on the current stage on macOS but you can on iPad OS. It makes stage manager unusable on macOS for me, which is unfortunate because I actually really like the feature
When iPhone alarm goes off, the screen doesn't wake up, so I press the power button. Which snoozes the alarm. Not only did I not want to snooze the alarm, I hoped that the alarm would wake the phone up so I can click 'stop'.
I assume that's a bug rather than a holding-it-wrong?
This one has always confused me as well. Tapping the screen, as the other commenter suggested, dismisses the whole thing too, so I have to fish for the stop button in the notifications every time.
Maybe there’s “the Apple way” that we’ve yet to discover.
The problem is there is only one little button on the screen that actually stops the alarm. Everything else you can tap or do to the phone while the alarm is sounding will "snooze" it. It's infuriating.
If you have tap to wake turned on (it's on by default), you can tap the screen anywhere to wake it up. So long as the screen isn't already on and you don't mash the Snooze button, you should be able to hit stop.
I believe the power-button-to-snooze thing is meant as a usability boost for groggy people: the physical button may be easier to click than some random spot on the screen.
But not everyone lives alone. If you'd like to avoid waking everyone else up - you hit the power button (or indeed any button) while groggy. And if you drift off to sleep despite your best efforts - well, that's why the button snoozes the alarm rather than disabling it.
With the latest Google Gemini deal to be the backend for Apple’s AI, I wish Apple could also do a deal for search (even though Google seems to be struggling more as time passes). Apple’s search being broken in Settings on iOS, macOS and iPadOS seem intentional — it can’t search in a relatively small and fixed list of items! Is it any wonder that Mail search doesn’t work with external data?
The AirDrop and Hotspot issues described are spot on. The success rate for these is like 40% to 65% (the latter if you’re lucky). These features require doing a dance of airplane mode, disconnect from WiFi, go to Settings and fiddle with the toggles, etc. When it works, it’s like magic. At other times, it’s a big joke on “it just works”.
Text selection and the trials to just move the cursor quickly and accurately: it’s like Apple has no senior management that cares enough (looking at you, Craig Federighi), no QA (this is obvious truth to every user) and no money to spend on making things better (don’t let the stock prices fool you). FWIW, I know of slower and fiddly ways to move the cursor somewhat (press space, hold and move or place finger on the text, hold and move).
All these issues persist for years or decades because senior management does not care. I can’t think of any other rational explanation.
My god I cancelled my isp because I’m moving. Thought hot spot would be fine for a few months. Every single day I have to restart my MacBook Air for hot spot to work. Multiple times every day I have to turn hot spot off and on even though it’s in discoverable but won’t connect. Multiple times every day hot spot is just off and can’t be turned on in control center. And this is with iPhone 17 and m2 on most recent updates. I can’t imagine on older hardware.
With older hardware the trick is to not upgrade the OS.
Apple's strategy is actually to make people auto-upgrade to make their work of maintaining older OS/software cheaper and make people who don't have recent enough hardware suffer.
It's funny that one argument for Apple was that you got updates for free. But in practice, Android doesn't need to upgrade the OS to access recent apps and ship security updates for old versions of Android. You just lose access to new OS functionalities, but it has been a while since there was much to care about.
iOS 26 has been really hard on my 13 mini. Most menus lag, you have to wait sometimes 5 seconds for the control center menu to pop up sometimes. I dug my old Samsung S20 FE out of the drawer, applied the last few security patches, and it still runs more smoothly than the newer iPhone.
I've had this experience too. One thing I've found that can sometimes help with laptops failing to connect is renaming your iPhone in the settings (which in turn renames the hotspot name)
- All: Contact syncing with Office 365 results in stored birthdays getting moved forward by one day.
- macOS: Bluetooth audio stuttering when going in and out of full screen view in a given app such as PowerPoint.
- macOS: Unlock using Apple Watch will randomly stop working
- macOS: Safari suddenly going out to lunch and taking 30+ seconds to load a page (fixed by force quitting the entire browser).
And if you use it long enough you'll get reminders to celebrate grandpa's 113th birthday because the only way to remove entries from that calendar is to delete useful data from your contacts.
Back in the day of when cordless phones started to have displays with integrated address books, about once a year while visiting my grandmother I would help her remove all the dead people from her phone.
yes! same bug with multiple friends who are celebrating their 143rd birdthday and i get hilarious reminders every few weeks (its charming in some strange way and part of me will be sad if the fix it)
This rightfully deserves its #1 spot on Hacker News. I've experienced most of these bugs for longer than I can remember (and my memory goes back to the Apple II days. Maybe this will help shame Apple into fixing these problems.
There is even an app called noTunes to automatically close it. I've seen it get into a loop where it opens every single time it's closed. Of course Apple music is selling a subscription service when the app opens so no surprise why they open it.
Is anyone else annoyed by Finder's terrible search box? Everytime I try to search something, it seems to insert random results in the list that have nothing to do with the term. I have to always explicitly click Filename so it only searches for files with that name.
I thought about adding that bug but it seemed like “search doesn’t work in this other thing” was just going to get repetitive (despite being true and annoying AF) and I had already spent way more time on it than I should have. Put in a pull request, tho. Happy to add it!
Spotlight search is infinitely more useful than the Windows 10+ start menu. 99% of the time I'm just using it to open an app or a recent document/download.
In Windows, if I hit [Win], type "fusion" (to open Fusion 360, an app in the "Start Menu" folder, for what that's worth nowadays), there's a 70% chance it will do a Bing search for "fusion".
Spotlight works great for me but the index can occasionally become corrupted. There’s a set of commands you can run to force a rebuild if you’re having issues. I’ve had to do this a few times over the years. This is another place where it’d be nice if Apple had a GUI to manage things like this.
You can thank Apple for that. I even have autocorrect turned off yet it still insists on doing it... Most annoyingly it will change the word previous to the one I'm typing...
I forget what combination of settings does it but my Windows start menu now only searches the two start menu folders. It's perfect, completely deterministic, instant.
Trying to turn the app launcher into the magic "accio <anything>" bar was a huge mistake. You can have a second UI element for search, I promise it won't scare me.
This is a Claude-coded website that invents metrics and data based on bald-faced lies, ex. the first example makes up that the search in Mail does not work 100% of the time and then calculates fantastical millions of hours wasted.
I can report it works fine, needed it to pull up 13 year old emails for me a couple months ago.
I absolutely abhor Apple’s software QC since 2010 but I don’t think a vibe-coded, vibes-based, fantasy, written by AI, with the sheen of numbers and reality is the way to do it, or a net-positive outlet for my frustration. At least on HN.
Huh. How else would you get a massive company that has let certain bugs sit for decades to address them? This method is probably just as ineffective as reporting another bug into the Black Hole of Bug Reports that is Apple, but this one is at least mildly funnier? YMMV of course.
The search bugs in Mail are absolutely real. They might not affect every user but I've had major issues on both macOS and iOS mail, and eventually gave up and switched to Gmail.
Have you checked if it’s the fault of your mail providers? The search function queries the remote mail servers in addition to the local cache. If the mail servers return garbage you get garbage results.
If you want to be that pedantic it does state "This site is satire. Not affiliated with Apple Inc. The bugs are real. The math is not. All estimates are made up. Your frustration, however, is valid." at the bottom.
All of the things on this website have affected my experience of macOS and iOS for a long, long time.
I definitely go straight to the Gmail website when I need to search for anything on my work account. Yes, I've got it set up to cache all the emails locally indefinitely. Have done for years. Even did so when my workplace used Office 365 instead of Google.
On Hacker News, of all websites, giving yourself the "Works on My Machine" badge is not a worthy contribution. It's dismissive of any experience other than your own.
He had it down as Mail search never works at the time of my comment. Never.
Don’t appreciate the drive by “that’s okay because it doesn’t work for me, btw, works for me is bad”. It’s fallacious. I’m not ignoring your lived experience. I’m calling out slop.
What arrogance?
Is hyperbole a literary device, or genre?
What’s the difference between hyperbole and making stuff up?
When is it okay to say it’s making stuff up, when it could just be hyperbole? How is “you said it works for you but I say doesn’t work for me, trumped!” calling out arrogance?
No I think I don’t come here for 0 effort fiction. YMMV. I don’t mean that dismissively. People seem to love it. It’s not an AI thing, it’s a “this is Spam, in the original sense of the word”
I bought the latest Intel MacBook Air and after few months they released M1 MacBook Air. Then they release an update, I did as I should, and it broke my laptop! I lost all my data! They fixed it for me in a couple of weeks without providing me a substitute! And they were arrogant enough to behave like they did a favor to not charge me for the repair! It was 2020! My MacBook Air never became like before, and it died a couple of times in a year, which it recovered by itself. And some months ago it died, and it didn't recover! I lost lots of data I spent thousands of hours and I trusted that I can have them even if my laptop dies. Now, I have no way to recover my data!
Speaking of data loss, it's fucked up that Apple doesn't give a shit about your data.
Ages ago I shipped my iMac to them and it came back with a new HD. Hello? Maybe include the old drive so I can attempt to recover the data? I lost a year's worth of photos and a bunch of personal documents. This is when I started doing backups.
That really sucks, but they absolutely do tell you to back up all your data before sending your machine in for service. Involuntary hard drive replacements aside, your package could get lost or damaged in the mail.
Kinda difficult to do when the Mac does not turn on. Actually a technician came over to attempt to fix it, then just took it with him to ship it to Apple.
This exact thing happened to me with the update to Catalina. Had to send to fix, they were pricky arses over the ordeal. Sent back, it was never the same. Actually started seeing rainbow loaders.
The most damning permanent damage was that the wifi card never worked properly again and I had to connect an adapter, then a usb to ethernet adapter and use that. Which meant I had to sit in a specific disk at work if I wanted to use that computer.
Text selection peaked with Force Touch, where holding the space button, moving to start point, pressing down even harder to start selection en lifting finger at the end was sooo ergonomic.
I am a diehard Apple fan. I stuck with Apple through the dreadful 90s and fought for their relevance as a needed computing alternative in education spaces. I extolled their virtues. I hung on until Steve Jobs took over and helped things improve... quite drastically, in fact. I could never have imagined the widespread celebration of the hardware with the m series of chips. Quite an achievement.
But even now, I acknowledge the latest macOS release is dreadful. Just absolutely dreadful.
And the fix is easy - hire new young talent. Hire kids out of college. Bring in fresh faces who are going to speak the truth, who are hungry to make it better. Listen to them and do what they say.
Renaming files from a window title bar broke some years ago and has never been fixed. I most often want to do this in Preview, but every other app with clickable filenames in the title bar has the same problem.
The filename in the title bar has a down-pointing chevron next to it, indicating you can click it. You click it. A small drop-down window appears with the filename, the tags, and the folder where it is located. You edit the filename and press Return, as you would when renaming the file in Finder, or as you would when completing any text field. Nothing happens. The file isn't renamed.
Only if you press Tab (?!) is the file renamed. Insanity.
I’m using native mail app of iOS/macos and search bar works for me. However, iOS has a persistent issue of not fetching new mails, even from iCloud, which has support for push updates. I inadvertently build a habit of opening mail app and refreshing.
I find it often won't even refresh when you click the little envelope "get mail" icon. That thing is like the "push button to walk" at crosswalks. A button connected to nothing, to make you feel like you have agency.
I'm always dumbfounded by people constantly praising AirDrop. It hasn't worked properly more often than it did. And that's not talking about the times when you send something, it gets accepted, and it just ends up in a void, not to be found anywhere.
At the end of the day, in most cases, it would be preferable to just connect the damn thing with a cable and send things that way. If you send a large file, it takes a while, and having to redo the process because of some bug kills any benefit from the convenience of not having to use a cable.
Maybe that's it. It is really dependent on the radio environment indeed. And it uses Wi-Fi Direct for large transfers.
Once I had weird dropouts streaming to a friend's Bluetooth speakers because it had weird interaction with my Apple Watch, my iPhone, and his iPhone. That was in a cabin basically in the middle of nowhere...
But that's basically my point. Wireless everything is cool and convenient at first sight, but then you often have to deal with all kinds of problems, making you wish you could just connect a cable, browse the file system, and exchange stuff that way.
I have a friend who connects his Android phone to his Macbook, and he drags and drops the photos in/out of storage. Simple, efficient, no need for any cloud, no need for internet/wireless connectivity, no need to wait for any syncing, it just works.
That's the problem with the "it just works" philosophy. When it doesn't... you have no idea what's wrong and no way to fix it. A bolted hood over the engine.
All this s#it was already expected, because this is what happened when companies get big enough without competition or any kind of regulation.
This already happened in other markets and lots of people have warned this would happened again but nobody cared.
Now it doesn't matter anymore because Apple is so big that no matter what kind of s#it they do, nothing will hurt their sales, because people are trapped, depend on their stuff and don't have any other options.
I was given an iPad at work and had to make an Apple account to use it. Every time, the form on the website errored out with "Your account can currently not be created" without any further information. By trial and error, I figured out that creating an account with the exact same information on the iPad worked. Not the best first impressions of the "it just works" company.
Ok, it's not just because I'm trying this from my Linux computer with fake phone numbers to jailbreak the stupid iPad 3 I found in a drawer (and on which the registration form of course doesn't work anymore). Thanks.
A bug that’s persisted for 10 years at least is in the Music app. When you lose Wi-Fi the app will skip to the next song over and over and eventually freeze up.
On iOS, it’s not just Wifi but cellular too. I tried switching from Spotify (got tired of their constantly deteriorating UI/UX) but this was a dealbreaker. You can’t listen to albums in the car because if the phone loses coverage at the wrong time it just… skips songs? HOW does this get through testing and persist for so long?
So I cancelled Apple Music and reluctantly went back to Spotify. At least in Spotify, music playback is functional.
Haha, same. I actually prefer the layout and organization capacity of Music (I was an iTunes fan back in the iPod days), but there are so many things that don't work like you would expect them to or just plain bugs that it's too tiring.
Whenever I would enter a supermarket without network access, Music would just stop streaming after one song, no buffering. Spotify handled it just fine.
Even the Spotify remote functionality is better and snappier than the godawful Music Remote. That is a separate app, because for some reason they can't integrate that functionality in the main app for their own hardware.
Apple is really in free fall; I don't think any of the top dogs actually use their stuff or care about it.
It still looks good, and the base is strong, but now the cracks that started appearing a few years ago are becoming too big to ignore.
I own an Android phone. The first time I tried to send a text from my wife's iPhone, I sent the wrong text 3 times in a row because autocorrect was convinced that it knew the word I wanted and I swear that the word was corrected only after I had committed to pressing the send button. At the time the autocorrect on Android was very mild; it's gotten more aggressive since, but still nothing like Apple's
Spotlight has really been bothering me lately, for months now, and it’s not even indexing all the time. I disabled all but applications and the calculator, because that’s all I use Spotlight for, and it still can’t find some apps that are in /Applications. Sometimes it’s some apps, sometimes it’s everything, and after rebooting it’ll sometimes reindex. No idea what’s going on, but today might be the day I install Quicksilver, if that’s still a thing.
I also had to type over reindex 3 times to get it to stick :)
Most (all?) Spotlight replacements depend on the same underlying index and system services that Spotlight provides and uses. High chance Quicksilver is just making 'mdfind' calls like everything else, especially since it doesn't look maintained anymore.
LaunchBar doesn't use Spotlight's data. And so, as a result, can't search for data inside files. That said, it provides a Search in Spotlight command – that you can assign a shortcut, if you wish – which returns its results in a new Finder window.
What about that text selection bug all OSes have had for 20+ years. I'm dragging to select text, and if I drag one pixel too far, it inverts the selection.
The time lost estimates here are comically implausible--if Apple bugs were wasting 32m person-years per year, with around 1.5b Apple product users total, this would imply that the average Apple product user loses 32m/1.5b ~= 2% of their life, or about 11 16-hour days, to Apple bugs. If that were happening to you you'd, uh, notice :)
Somebody somewhere told Jobs that Apple products had too much "surface area"- a modern desktop computer with huge number of tunable options, too many programmable APIs, too many products, etc. Every one of those areas is a source of customer complaints and engineering cost, and eliminating them- even if there are users- leads to higher profits and higher average satisfaction.
Taken to an extreme, I expect that Apple will evolve to have only one product, with minimal surface area. A button you press that gives money to apple, in response you receive some sort of lovely bauble with no actual functionality. The cost to apple to maintain this would be quite small (they could probably survive with 10 engineers focused mainly on site reliability) and given the historical pattern of Apple customers (I am one), would be highly profitable.
Save a file from any application into a directory, say an Affinity Designer file. Then, export another version (jpg) from the same file and same application right after that and it will show a totally different directory, presumably the last directory you've exported that file type. Can't only be me who is annoyed by the behaviour, can it?
Something I’ve noticed recently is that I press notifications by accident a lot more frequently. They just always pop in right when I’m trying to do something else. I suspect it’s because of the smart widget UI at the top of the screen that shows now playing, sports scores, direction etc. We didn’t used to interact with anything up there!
But it’s extremely annoying to open a 300+ unread messages chat when I didn’t want to!
The autocorrect is a real pain, especially when you are using a correct and grammatical word, but Apple decides, F&ck you, you will use this other word instead.
And the text select has been broken for years, as the site points out. I thought it was a mobile thing until I used an Android, and it just worked.
These are minor irritations, but they are adding up so much so I'm thinking about Android...
It took me 4hrs or more to register an account for my child on ipad. It was spread across several days...
When got my work macbook I had to register an account on apple to download some app from the store, and it wouldn't send me sms to activate. I had to do it the next day.
I wonder what happens there, but it seems like a very unprofessional web development or a lousy A B testing
On iOS 26 (and I think before that as well) if I enable the sleep focus and disable it later it usually stays in sleep focus despite showing no focus is selected. Therefore I don’t get notifications and the wall paper on the main screen is dimmed. Requires a reboot to fix it but it defeats the purpose of having a phone if no one can contact me until I notice
Most of these are fully on Apple, but for the Gmail and Google Contacts bugs, I'd say Google is at least partly to blame for positioning the open standards versions of their APIs (IMAP and CardDAV in this case) as secondary to their own proprietary APIs and not implementing them particularly well.
Mail just sometimes refuses to issue a server-side search via IMAP. It insists that it wants to search its offline database of downloaded mails. When it cannot find anything, it will even tell you that “Mail downloads and organizes messages when iPhone is locked, charging, and connect to Wi-Fi.” And my response to that is, it has had eight hours to do exactly that every night.
That's fair then (though I haven't hit it because I have all my mail downloaded). There's other bits in Mail that are flaky with Gmail compared to standard IMAP mail providers, though.
This is brilliant and about 50% of the top 10 bugs affect me regularly. Some (eg airdrop, mail search, spotlight search) are absolutely maddening. If this even slightly prods Apple into doing something about it, this would be a net win for humanity.
That is indeed maddening. Are you using that computer for professional work? That'd drive me bonkers if I was working on a project and had bugs in the OS bothering me "regularly". I myself drank the cool-aid back in 2012 and think it took me 2-3 years before I realized "Apple is the best at UX and stability" is so far away from reality it starts being funny, and finally migrated to a stable environment that works the same as when I began using it.
To add to the list: on iOS, if your music library is mp3s transfered on the phone with itunes, iOS randomizes the artwork of the mp3s, so a song will show a completely different artwork. Have experienced that for years, on multiple devices and across versions of iOS.
Getting HTML email signatures to work in iOS Mail is a trial and error nightmare, and it requires a second device.
Create an HTML email signature in TextEdit or some other rich text editor on macOS, copy it and paste it on iOS using Continuity Clipboard into the signature text field in iOS’ Settings -> Apps -> Mail -> Signature text field, and pray that it works.
When it does work, it ignores text size. Want your email signature to be in a smaller font size? Too bad.
The only workaround I’ve found is to copy an email signature from another email account that miraculously did copy over successfully, copy it on iOS and paste that in to another’s email signature field, and manually rewrite the whole thing.
Of course, the HTML links aren’t editable, and the Signature text fields don’t enable the “Add Link” item to the hover tools menu when selecting text.
Worst of all, even when the email signature is finally perfect, the Signature text field doesn’t preview it properly. If text is pasted in at a smaller text size, the preview still shows it at the default size. The only way to accurately preview an email signature is to draft a new email and hope the email signature displays like it did originally in TextEdit.
In short, never create a new HTML email signature on iOS. Create in on a Mac (source), copy it over the network with Continuity Clipboard, hope it works, and treat the iOS email signature fields (destination) as a never- or rarely-editable workspace.
Sometimes the bugs are features, I.e, natural scrolling different and inconsistent between mouse and mousepad without third party extensions. Thanks Apple!
I recently discovered that for some reason, macOS doesn't want to work with a mouse with a traditional scroll wheel. It just jumps erratically all over the place.
I tried using it because I forgot to charge my dumb magic mouse.
I'm sure it can be fixed in some ways, but I really shouldn't have to. The mouse works just fine when plugged into a Windows PC.
I'm (and millions other people) are using macOS with a classic scroll wheel mouse perfectly fine. Are you sure there is not something messing with the trackpad at the same time ? (this looking erratically random?)
There is no trackpad connected, just the Magic Mouse that was charging.
Maybe it is because of some setting stored inside the mouse (it's a Razer mini). I think it has something to do with the scroll speed that macOS cannot deal with.
As I said, I'm sure I can fix it, but the point is that it works just fine as is on Windows and Linux.
Logitech mice are appreciated on Macs because they generally make drivers to deal with macOS idiosyncracies. A generic mouse will probably work OK but will be painful to deal with.
macOS expects scrolling to work with inertia because of their focus on the trackpad or touch surface for the Magic Mouse.
Having used both extensively, it's not all bad, and I think they actually got some things right, but the problem is they make it hard for 3rd parties to make hardware because the APIs are lacking or inaccessible. For example, they just enabled linear mouse movement without relying on 3rd-party software; Windows has had that option since basically forever.
Apple does have some good things, but you can't argue with the fact that they make it very hard to integrate 3rd-party solutions (display are the same, notably for brightness control, etc).
Its been a 4 years since I had to target a website for Safari, but last time I did it still had serious difficulties parsing 8061 compliant dates. If you Google safari/webkit iso date parse bug looks like its still on going lol.
I switched from Spotify to Apple Music mainly for lossless audio. The Apple One Family subscription helped sell it. However, now I can't play non-downloaded tracks without waiting 5-30 minutes for the music to start playing.
My Nokia C2-01 purchased in 2013 worked for many years without a single (!) glitch. Of course it didn't pretend to do as many things as iPhone does, but for it was capable of it worked always with 100% quality.
I bought an iPhone13 mini looking forward for "quality", but after few years of usage I realized that the quality is exactly what I have lost:
• Time-to-time when I open a contact, the "Call" button is disabled without any explanation. Surprisingly turning wifi and/or bluetooth and/or mobile data ON and then OFF again results in the "Call" button becoming re-enabled. Is the call function not an essential functionality of the phone to be dependent on such nonsense? Imagine you have an emergency and need to call real quick.
• Every time I open the "Notes" app it greets me with "Mobile Data is Turned Off" pop-up. Mobile data just to type some notes? Who do you have to send it to?
• DND logic so complicated and buggy that I started using the flight mode to be "sure" that nobody calls through.
• "Settings" icon keeps displaying the "1" badge in revenge for my refusal to set up my Face ID.
Well, I thought, at least this thing is a very good camera (which it really is). As if reading my thoughts, it started recording my landscape videos as portrait which I didn't manage to fix, so now I have to rotate the recorded videos on my PC.
Yeah, it feels liberating. Every OS is full of UI annoyances and bugs, but on Linux you don't feel so powerless about it. You won't fix everything, but those few things that really bother you, you can fix.
that Contacts one hits hard, no idea how many hours I wasted trying to figure out what the hell it’s doing.
Just today was looking at Activity Monitor Disk tab, for an unrelated reason - sorted by Bytes Read, lo and behold ‘contactsd’ - the Contacts daemon, is in 2nd spot at ~400 _gigabytes_ read, right after mediaanalysisd. I don’t even remember last time I opened the Contacts app on my Mac.
It felt like it’s gonna be another time sink with no solution, so I didn’t even bother to investigate more.
When I connect my iPhone to my dock with an external screen, it mirror the phone screen to the display, which is nice.
But, the keyboard never activates in any field.
If you use that to charge your phone (so the external screen is off), you can’t talk to people since the phone really don’t want you to have a keyboard at all as long as your connected.
On MacOS I use multiple desktops, and I have Finder assigned to "All Desktops" since it is useful to interact with so many other apps. For several major OS releases now, this setup causes any open Finder windows to render on top of all other windows for ~1 second when switching desktops. It creates an annoying lag, and pollutes what would otherwise be a smooth, pleasant experience.
I think a lot of these are just hard to reproduce. Take the AirDrop one, it's been 5 years probably since I had an issue with it, and I use it quite a bit.
Auto correct? No idea, I switch that off by default anyway since I switch between languages.
Most of the others - I haven't seen that at all. With the exception of a couple, like the macOS 26 resizing. That happened to me once. But I keep trying to reproduce it and I simply can't.
I see now. But .. bottom line is, I don't want any auto correct. It'll force to capitalize and all kinds of stuff. And if you type in a language's dialect, you're basically stuck.
Several of these I don’t have any problems with myself, but the one that I get affected by all the time that I haven’t seen here, at least from as far down as I scrolled, is the bizarre typo that the voice dictation randomly inserts a capitalized word in middle of sentences. I’ve never understood that one. It’s like I can technically be hands-free most of the time except I have to go back and correct capitalized words for no reason.
Spotlight opens the wrong application so many times with some odd heuristic favoring a random vscode.ts file (labeled as an mpeg-2 stream?) when typing "code".
But the best one is typing "ghos" and pressing enter as it highlight "Ghostty", but as your finger presses the key, spotlight swaps ghostty for some other random application (generally mail).
Had a similar thought today while marking up pdfs with my iPad. Half of the time I'm fighting with Files' ability to persist my changes after it frequently crashes. Why market it as an iPad if marking up pdfs is so scuffed? this has been happening for years, it's like Apple's desire to add new features tops the desire to fix long lived bugs.
Connection-related bugs are the worst. Here I am, wishing that after 15 years of hotspot software and WiFi/BT enhancements I'd get painless hotspot, airdrop and general WiFi connectivity. My bad, still not possible.
But yeah Liquid Ass surely is lickable.
Apple software, especially Mac software, tanked ages ago.
IIRC the animation that plays when you use ctrl+arrow keys to swap desktops is tied to the framerate so it's ridiculously slow on high refresh rate monitors.
also the passwords popup on MacOS only sometimes takes keyboard input, so if I want to insert a TOTP pin, I can't reliably use the tab key or worse the search bar to reach it.
The simple answer is that fixing any of these doesn't get those Software engineers promoted. And that has been the case for as long as Crag Federighi has been in charge of software. Yet he is extremely popular on HN and everywhere on the internet.
Yes it is the same in all other software company. But we expect better from Apple.
How about a Screen Time Parental Controls literally do not work, at all, just completely unusable and broken?
How about I can’t connect my AirPods to my watch to play music because my watch insists on acting as a remote control for my phone Music app, and support hasn’t been able to fix it for 5 years, over several watches and AirPods?
If you answer a call on the watch and have AirPods on, it can figure out to switch the audio in/out to AirPods for the call; it just gets handled by the watch.
Then you have to awkwardly lean into the watch and listen very carefully because if there is any noise, you won't understand much because of the tiny speaker.
Completely defeat the ecosystem argument, and I think the speaker in the watch is largely useless.
The Apple Watch is popular but not very good at anything, really. All the apps are more cumbersome to use than they are worth; you can't properly make a real custom watch face, and sports tracking is extremely basic without additional software.
That you cant jump to the beginning or end of search results in gmail. You can only click page by page and only know the end is near when you know when the results get close to your account creation date. The only work around is to guess ahead with editing the results page number in the URL string. It's been this stupid annoying way since day 1 of gmail.
Also now seeing the stupidest copying of liquid glass in google's web interfaces. Like adding transperancy to some of their pop up info boxes just so ugly and pointless.
The same happens with their developer frameworks. I used to submit tickets (radars, as they call them) for framework bugs clearly reproducible in a few lines of code. They never got fixed over multiple OS releases, so I stopped bothering.
Syncing on Apple devices across the board is pretty bad. A great example is the Notes app. It took me a year to convince my wife to migrate our grocery list away from the Notes app. So many arguments about missed grocery items that never synced.
Out of these the text selection and the Apple Pay card button bring me the most daily pain.
Even writing this short sentence I’ve accidentally deleted words when I just wanted to move the cursor and it decides, no, you must want to select that whole word
> it decides, no, you must want to select that whole word
Yeah this arrogance where my tool decides what I want to do, and even if I put the cursor to where it will want, Apple will (un)helpfully move it. Because Apple thinks its users are retards and need help
The macOS login screen is broken since basically forever. Opening a macbook lid and choosing another user than the one already selected is a PITA. I can't even remember it working. And I have the issue on 3 macbooks.
Choosing another user on the current macOS is horrible beyond any corporate standards. Clicking a different user has a 2 second delay without any animation, and any interaction ("wait, have I clicked it?") in that time cancels it. Like no one has multiple users on their computers in the whole management chain? No one cares?
On the same note, airdrop doesn’t work when multiple users are logged in. It’s rocket science to switch airdrop advertisements to currently active user, I guess..
or, you wake from sleep, and start typing your password because the input is there and focused, but it swallows your first character because it wasn't ready for input after all.
1. Open a file using Preview, but it is behind all other windows.
2. If you connect to your own personal hotspot (iphone) on mac, you can't forget it and connect to someone else's hotspot.
This one is one of my pet peeves even outside of Apple Pay. My personal opinion is that almost all iconography is just reinventing the wheel. We already have a widely-accepted iconographic vocabulary already understood by a billion people: Chinese characters. The fact that English speakers can't read it is immaterial, because English speakers already can't read the icons we're already using. Using Chinese iconography in all languages will dramatically increase the legibility of the icons we use in apps.
(Or, we could just put regular text under the icon...)
I think most popular OS's these days have >5000 open bugs and some may get attention if they actually break something serious enough. Others may get plastered over in a new major OS update, which opens another 1000 bugs or so. I have no problem with a rolling number of bugs, but this is a tiny list of age-old bugs. I'd like to be in the room when Apple's people decide what to work on, but I bet I would get depressed instantly since they obviously don't use their products.
I have a lot of undeletable old photos on my iPhone. The photos are there, but no photo app shows the trash can icon. They aren't on iCloud or any other current device, so I'm thinking that at some time I must have done something like sync an iPhone I no longer have with a Mac I no longer have. I've usually just cloned one phone to the next, but I reckon that next time I may be in for a manual copying job.
This is a frustrating result of “syncing” an album of photos from a computer.
Apple decides that—despite you putting your album on your device—you are not allowed to alter the album in any way. You can’t edit photos or delete them…you must do those things on the computer instead.
Just yesterday, I encountered a classic frustration.
I wanted to forward an image from one Messages conversation, to another one.
The “target” conversation was one that I’ve been having for a couple of years, with a friend.
In the “Forward” sheet, I select that friend’s Contacts card, and it moves to the ongoing (blue bubble) conversation.
I hit the Send button.
Green bubbles.
I get a failure to send message, saying it’s a bogus number.
Messages used my friend’s work landline, even though we’ve been communicating for years, on his iPhone line, and it put the bogus send into the iPhone conversation.
WTF happened to iOS text selection? It's a shitshow now. First Apple decided that the cursor shouldn't snap to the space between characters. WHY? Why would I want to start a selection in the middle of a character? Oh yeah: I never would, and can't anyway. So why does the cursor go there?
Then there's the fact that if you press and hold and release, the "select all" option (and others) doesn't appear anymore. Try again. Try again. And then after the fifth? Seventh? try, suddenly you get the floating menu.
And then there's the now-often-useless magnifying glass, which frequently appears offscreen or behind the stupid notch.
And the window resizing. Ugh. It wasn't until what, the mid-2000s that you could resize an Apple window by anything other than THE LOWER-RIGHT CORNER. No other corners, and no edges. The sheer stupidity of this was galling.
When Apple finally "fixed" that, they did so in typical Apple fashion: grudgingly. They refuse to put frames on windows, so there's no clear area in which the cursor should become the resizing cursor. Is it any wonder that the resizing behavior is flaky as hell? And now it's even worse.
Some of these bugs are more well known but for some like AirDrop not working or hotspot not connecting I always thought “well it’s probably because some power setting / DNS config / ad blocker / whatever” that I accidentally changed from the default years ago.
Nostalgia is real but I do remember a not so distant past (around iPhone 4S or so) where AirDrop worked, autocorrect worked, text selection was flawed but predictable, WiFi connected and stayed connected etc.
> Nostalgia is real but I do remember a not so distant past (around iPhone 4S or so) where AirDrop worked, autocorrect worked, text selection was flawed but predictable, WiFi connected and stayed connected etc.
The funny thing is all of those features are fine for me.
My 2022 M1 macbook sound input will slowly have the volume lowered to where no-one can hear me, regardless of what the device I'm using as a microphone. I run a permanent applescript that keeps the input volume at 80%, updated every 5 seconds. Apple doesn't care since it's a rare issue, never seen anyone else with this problem and I don't see how taking it to Apple Support will help.
You forgot when autocorrect fixes your word the second time, in 50% of cases you hit send too fast and have to send a follow up correction or edit the message
Podcast app in CarPlay: A episode of a show is playing. It has the episode name, the show name, and a date. None of them hint at being pressable (touchscreen). But one is. Guess which one? The date one. That’s the only one that’s interactive and the only one that takes you to the actual show with its library.
Podcast app on phone. 90% of the time the downloaded episode is not there even if you just downloaded it. Sometimes you have to have another “safe” downloaded episode from another podcast to FORCE downloaded episodes to appear. If you don’t have this safe reserve episode in your downloads, your downloads will be a black hole. Download a safe one, and suddenly the missing ones pop into the folder, or heck, generate the folder at all.
10% of the time the episodes will just fail while downloading without ever resuming.
OMG, "Apple Pay: Card Icon Changes Address" bit me recently!
I selected a different credit card on Apple Pay and my skis were shipped to my ex-wife's house instead of mine, because it quietly changed the address!
When I switch between macOS users frequently, in 2-3 days I get pink garbage on the screen and/or the windows start literally falling apart and macOS at some point hangs with a rotating wheel. On a 128GB RAM M3 Max. This persisted across multiple macOS versions and two logic boards.
I guess it’s about priorities and not prowess, but it is shocking/fascinating the things Apple seems really bad at.
The Mac is funniest of all. I can’t imagine Tahoe drives an upgrade cycle. I buy a Mac for the hardware. Why not refine it? I would love to have a Mac with a better OS. (Don’t troll me about Linux. It’s worse.)
Hm, what’s worse? To be incapable or simply not to care enough?
The one about Spotlight not searching for files, I assume that's like Windows Explorer, which also famously has a terrible search.
Why do these large companies reliably struggle with file search but third party software does it instantaneously, including reading the NTFS partition table for speed?
Tim Cook is "stepping down" soon. Do you think his replacement will fix these things? I stopped using Apple stuff shortly after Steve Jobs died. Linus is still alive, but I wonder where I'll move once he is gone.
Total time value lost to text selection games sounds about right.
When I just selected that figure, I had to select twice because double tapping “trillion” then grabbing a text selection endpoint never works the first time.
I love this idea, and agree the bugs are important and embarrassing, but find the “it should only take Apple 320 hours to fix Mail search” to be so insulting that it ruins it for me.
Yeah, some of the estimates to fix are ridiculous. 40 hours to fix auto-correct?? On how many devices?
Yes, they acknowledged the numbers are completely made up. But, even with a 100x or more increase in those estimates the point would still stand. Why undermine the argument with such wildly silly (and, as you say, insulting) estimates?
The page should focus on the bugs, since there's no shortage of them. But clicking on "Change payment method" to change payment method is not a bug, is just bad UI.
This is cute and I hate stubborn Apple bugs as much as anyone. But these $100 billion figures should be weighed against the hypothetical trillions that Apple has contributed to humanity.
I’ve encountered several of these, but (at least on iOS 26.2), I can’t reproduce the typo one.
> Autocorrect Won't Take No For An Answer. You fixed it. It unfixed it. You fixed it again. It unfixed it again.
My experience is after the system makes the first autocorrection, the word is underlined, allowing me to revert to the original spelling. Then subsequent instances of the word aren't autocorrected.
It’s true though that if I leave the context and enter the same unrecognized term elsewhere, it’s the same grind. The only fix for this is to spotlight search for “Text Replacement” settings page to essentially add it to the iPhone’s dictionary. Clunky, but personally only have had to do this twice.
I’m not sure it it’s a bug but I can’t believe more people aren’t talking about it:
When you use apple maps and your phone is locked and you want to unlock your phone, for some reason it takes like 5 seconds or something to unlock the phone which feels like forever. The ui feeling insanely unresponsive and weird, you have to swipe further than usual and it takes way longer. It feels like the phone is fighting you! How dare I want to use my phone while navigating! (Even when walking)
I think what’s happening is that face ID doesn’t activate until you stop swiping, where usually it would start when you look at the phone or pick it up? Presumably because you’re going to be looking at the phone a lot when using maps.
God I hate it so much. I didn’t use apple maps for years because of it but then I switched to apple maps because of some egregious privacy violation by google maps that I can no longer remember.
Also applies to other apps that work when your phone is locked like phone calls.
As the list of bugs grows, it would be helpful to have some sort of floating table of contents / quick navigation component to quickly navigate between bugs - just an idea :)
The most egregious bug/s I've encountered in recent years is the utterly cursed tab management in iOS Safari.
A couple of times a year it will just nuke all my open tabs (450-500) and present me with a delightful blank screen. Before that it will mislabel the active tab group on and off before giving up entirely.
Quick action on my part stops the destruction syncing & I usually end up recovering them on my Mac & then save them as a tab group.
But literally just an hour ago, iOS Safari looked like it nuked ALL MY TAB GROUPS. Ugh. They were gone; swiping right led to the "New tab group" screen. Frantic backing up and a restart later, and the tab groups are back, as though the phone was like "just kidding!". FML. So much for that backup plan.
UI bugs are one thing, but how is that level of data loss acceptable in a modern operating system? Boggles the mind.
(And don't get me started on the UI track wreck that is the iOS-inspired/inflicted bookmark management on macOS Safari, where all Mac UI conventions went out the window for some reason.)
Very often I'll close a tab, realize I need to open it again for some reason, long press on the + button and it just isn't there. I feel like re-opening a closed tab fails more than it works.
Also sometimes the back button will just freeze or not take you back. So I try hitting it again, it takes me 2 steps back in my history (this is fine), then I press forward and it takes me to the end of history, so I hit back again and it takes me 2 steps back. And the page I actually wanted to go back to is just gone from my history. I know there's a lot of whacky JS messing with history that happens on web apps, but it will often happen on HN when the article I clicked on is a plain text blog with minimal JS and definitely not altering the history state.
Edit: This literally just happened to me after writing this comment, with the post about turso database. I clicked the HN comments, clicked the post link (to github), read for a bit and clicked back. And the comments page is just not in my history.
I also don’t understand the back button at all on Safari iOS, I think one version it just stopped doing its one task correctly. It’s messing with my mental model of how I arrived at each tab. Currently:
Safari iOS: Be on a page, tap hold a link, click Open in new tab, go to new tab. The Back button should be grayed out and isn’t, and clicking it closes the tab.
Chrome iOS: Be on a page, tap hold a link, click Open in new tab, go to new tab. Back button correctly grayed out as the tab has nowhere to go back to.
If you have a window with only one tab in it, and drag that tab to another window to merge them, the window disappears and they merge... right? Nope, if you look in your Windows menu, you now have a phantom window with no tabs in it that you have to reveal and close manually.
Randomly when I go to close a tab it will say "you have 2 tabs selected, do you want to close both". I didn't even know selecting multiple tabs was a feature, so OK maybe I had held down shift while switching tabs at some point? Nope, switching tabs (to deselect any tabs) doesn't change it, it still thinks I have some phantom tab selected somewhere.
And there are even more macOS Safari bugs. One is that history search won't work; you'll can type in the search bar but it won't filter the list. At least a few years old. Another bug I've been getting for a few years is that sometimes I'll launch Safari and some tabs will be blanked out, often pinned tabs. No URL in the bar, no back button, the site is just gone and only a blank tab remains.
Another one is text input. Type a long enough piece of text in a website's text box and eventually it'll get messed up, or your text will be partly duplicated, or the box will be half-broken and you need to copy your text, refresh the page and paste it back before continuing.
Bookmarks sync is still an unreliable train wreck. Sometimes they'll be moved out of folders and into the bookmarks menu. Sometimes they're gone and you've lost them, which has never happened in any other browser.
And of course, Safari is the only modern browser where I still get infrequent browser crashes (not tab crashes). Something rarer on Chrome and Firefox than a lottery win.
Mine “favorite” bug is the auto-replace of I->O on iOs. O think that’s a real strange one, and really wonder whether anybody ever uses “O think” in English.
I have a dozen regularly typed words that I have had to set up string replacements for (in General -> Keyboard -> Text Replacement) to work around recorrect the autocorrect.
It used to be possible to tell autocorrect to ignore certain words and add them to the system dictionary (by typing the word, having jt autocorrected, hutting backspace and fixing the autocorrected word, and repeating the process 2 or 3 times), but that inexplicably stopped working for me a few years ago.
For email app on Mac, I’ve been using MailMate for a few years now and quite like it. Once you sync the mailbox, search is basically instant.
And for even bigger search tasks, Foxtrot Pro is quite good too. Not cheap, but it is fast, and the tool I reach for when I need to find something and when Finder search don’t find it
Everyone sits on giant balls of mud and those who built those balls are long gone. Fixing any of this would mean wading through and fixing endless legacy code at the risk of introducing new bugs. Some of it has hardware and radio broadcasting quirks involved which probably narrows down the people capable to understand the problem to almost 0.
And of those 0 people, no one gets promoted for fixing the incredibly buggy AirDrop. No one even knows how to replicate those bugs. Some iPhones in the wild sometimes stop being able to be found by other iPhones in the wild. Yikes. How do you even begin? Who's gonna write some debug code for a debug app for an iPhone in a lab and then runs back and forth with 50 other iPhones that also need to run debug code to finally get one in the state where it's unable to find or be found and then check diagnostics the communications hardware returns only to find out you need more diagnostic code.
Sync issues? Yikes again. Who the fuck would want to touch a system where any new bug could mean the destruction of trillions of photos and the wrath of OVER A BILLION of users. Flaky connections, many clients, sync algorithms, space on device limits, quota in the cloud limit, offloading of images. Also, once again, how do you even reliably replicate this issue which sporadically happens and sporadically resolves?
At scale and beyond critical mass, love and care and quality software are not rewarded. They are extra costs, just like human support agents.
My favorite one is Calendar, where you just made a new calendar entry and if you hit Esc to make the window go away, it will delete the whole thing. It isn't a dialog box, there is no save. If you hit close, it will close, if you click away, it will close, but if you hit Esc it will delete silently.
I asked people that work at Apple, they hate these bugs as well, but they don't fix them!
The hotspot issue is my absolute pet peeve. It is so bad for me that I just had to accept that I have two options for hotspotting:
1. Go to settings and change my phones name then connect. Every. Damn. Time.
2. Use a cable and hope the MacBook Pro picks it up.
Honestly the quality of iPhones has deteriorated to a point where my next phone will just be something like an oppo or xiomi. I’m done paying £500+ for a phone that doesn’t do what it’s meant to while forcing a load of crap I don’t want down my neck
The hotspot errors drive me insane. You’re basically connecting two device from the same company that happens to make both software and hardware on those two devices. I can’t understand this.
Phone: I know you probably opened your phone for a reason, but would you mind signing in to iCloud? [OK] [Maybe Later]
Me: Maybe Later.
Phone: Ok, but would you mind signing in to iCloud? [OK] [Maybe Later]
Me: Maybe Later.
Phone: Ok, but would you mind signing in to iCloud? [OK] [Maybe Later]
... repeat infintely until...
Me: Ok. [Then find the little arrow in the top left corner to get back to phoning].
Extra points for immediately locking my AppleID every time I finally break down and type my password in, forcing an email => browser "unlock your appleID" journey.
Some days I go through this whole experience four times in a row before it finally settles down. Then I make the classic blunder of opening one of my iPads and the whole thing starts again on both devices.
I assume it's just their form of blackmail to force me to upgrade to their 2FA thing so that they can finally lock me out of my old devices for good.
this is a great showcase of how good Mac OS is compared to something like Windows when we bicker about tiny things like the address field in the apple pay app.
Meanwhile on Windows we could talk about unreliable updates causing major bugs (explorer crashes, audio failures, slow performance, taskbar issues), poor quality assurance leading to regressions, bloatware. not to mention the hardware is in a different league.
From hardware perspective MacOS is way worse, because you can't even use it on whatever hardware you wish it to run on. (While windows work on a lot of stuff and Linux can run even on microwave and a toaster if needed.)
Searching email in Mac Mail is truly horrendous. I honestly like the program and use it almost daily … but when needing to search I absolutely open a browser window and login / search. The search has been a disaster in Mac Mail well over a decade.
This is never an issue with number of engineers, it's an issue of business priorities.
Large tech companies have plenty of engineers to fix bugs, but most of them are on projects trying to 10X things instead of paying down debt.
Apple used to be unique in it's immunity to it, they even shipped an OS update claiming it was only big fixes and not features which is unthinkable these days. Over time there's much less focus on polish from them though.
For me mail search works very very well. Ironically, it's one of the features that convinced me to use Mail as my primary and only email client.
I'm wondering if the author of the rant is using the search input of the single message/thread, instead of the global one, or if they are not aware that the global search is by selected account, so if you want to search in all accounts you have to first select the unified inbox. By the way, this is another awesome feature of Mail, while the search string is in the input, you can switch accounts and see the different results per account.
Before anyone asks: I have 5 email accounts, between them, I have way more than 100.000 messages (might be 5x, I don't have the Mac now to check) and they're all synced on my devices (it's ~24gb of messages)
Another one I enjoy is the adventure of making a captive Wifi portal screen appear. Sometimes it will, sometimes it won't. Who knows why? Just reboot and try again.
Is the eternal delay bringing up the MacOS native colour picker in the list? Click on a colour to change it, wait about 10 seconds, eventually it appears. Every. Single. Time.
I think it's a bit of bullshit. the first bug (Mail search) with millions of people allegedly affected somehow never affected me on 5 Apple devices in 10+ years. what??
It’s just Claude code house style, it’s as identifiable as Bootstrap. It didn’t invert Apple anything.
Speaking of AI-induced delusions, why did you submit this to HN?
It made me cringe to see its AI prose in AI code with completely made up bugs (really, the Mail search bar doesn’t work?), with made up numbers based on made up things as the spine of the content.
The terrible UI of a straight-forward document separated into distinct blocks, paragraphs and charts that are easily read, that scrolls from from top-to-bottom? Yeah, awful.
This is satire, but it is so real that it hurts.
I have encountered all of those bugs and more.
The worst part is the delusional Apple fanboys who will pretend it always works for them because they have associated their ego with the ownership of Apple devices.
Google might be bad, but at least it works most of the time. And hilariously, Microsoft, well-known for bugs galore, actually manages to make softwares that are less infuriating in the long run.
Maybe you just aren't perceptive. There's always a % of users that won't notice the most egregious bugs or design mistakes, just like there's a % that's way too sensitive to the most minor issues.
I can't believe that anyone in the world has had Airdrop work for them perfectly, every time, every day. It has a less than 50% success rate with me, and that makes it sound better than it is.
It's funny that a trillion dollar company which which was originally built by Steve to be the front-runner of tech and innovation and was supposed to provide the best user experience to end users is actually turning out to be the most annoying or frustrating one in deliver what user ACTUALLY needs.
Clicking on folders that you have put in Finders sidebar - It will not display the folder with the view settings set for that folder, but instead the last folder you clicked in the sidebar. It seems to happen clicking from top to bottom vs bottom to top. You just cant make this sh*t up it's so bad.
Example sidebar:
Applications - Always shows as icons
Documents - Shows as icons if you last clicked on Applications. Shows as details if last you clicked on Downloads
Downloads - Always shows as details
Finder is the absolute worst we could write a book about it. Once a year or so all my sidebar folders randomly vanish and I have to re-add them.
Also The most annoying "it's a feature, not a bug" - That instant drop down of the title bar in full screen if the mouse cursor hits the top edge of the screen. So obnoxious with remote desktop sessions. No delay, no way to disable it, no way to change anything about it.
Finder has stopped being a spatial file manager for a long time, but still mistakenly tries to behave like one in too many places, probably because of lingering legacy code more than a particular intent.
IMHO they should simply rip the spatial bits out entirely and it would immediately become a better file manager purely from the restored consistency.
I was just today complaining that Finder seems to want to be a file browser, but it makes it nearly impossible to actually browse the file system. Ridiculous dropping down to ls in a terminal on a supposedly polished OS.
What the heck is a spatial file manager
Each folder has a remembered display state. If in large icon mode, you can drag icons around into the positions you want and they'll stay that way the next time you visit the folder.
The idea is that it's not directories that are just bags of files, but files occupy spatial locations in folder windows.
Ah, this makes sense. Am I hallucinating that columns widths used to be remembered many years back? In other words, in column view, if you resized a column for a given folder, close Finder, and reopen to that folder—it would remain the same width.
Finder is mostly unusable for any directory containing long filenames since it doesn’t remember this. But I swear it used to. Am I misremembering?
I just tested and for me they seem to be remembered for my Downloads folder. Weirdly, at first it didn't seem to be remembered, but then I pressed ⌘+J to look at the view settings, and now when I change a column width it seems to be remembered...
Weird! I’ll test this out, thanks
Besides the sibling comments, it is how Finder used to work in Mac OS Classic.
Essentially John Siracusa's preferred file browsing environment
I really wish Apple would allow us to swap out the Finder with something else, so files open in that other app instead of the Finder. This works reasonable well on Windows, where I "replaced" the Explorer with Directory Opus.
This used to be possible, I remember that I replaced Finder with some other app many years ago. I strongly assume that this doesn't work any more, though.
Yeah. Path Finder was a common power user tool.
I recall you used to be able to flip some bit somewhere to allow you to Quit the Finder, but I assume that's disappeared inside the encrypted and signed partition where Apple keeps all the things us stupid users shouldn't be allowed to touch.
But even then, you'd want more than just that, as when you tell the OS to "Reveal" a file or open a folder, that's the association I'd want to be able to change.
Honestly I'd really prefer the Windows XP File Explorer to the pile of crap the Finder has turned into.
TinkerTool is a nice GUI app for this setting and a few others, see https://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html
oh wow its been a long time; i forgot about that one, i'll have to download that again
Ah yes, thank you for reminding me - of course, it was Path Finder! You could even have it respond to "Reveal". Not sure any more if it was by renaming Path Finder to /Applications/Finder, or by changing its Bundle id to com.apple.finder, or some other trick.
"of course, it was Path Finder! You could even have it respond to 'Reveal'"
This still works. I have been using macs since 1985 and have always hated the Finder. In the days of classic Mac OS, my go to for file management was a desk accessory called DiskTop, which was great. Super fast and easy to operate from the keyboard.
When I switched to OSX, I needed something better than the Finder, chose Path Finder, and have been using it ever since. I have my complaints about it but have not been able to find anything I like better.
Ooooh, I always though it just doesn't remember any view settings at all
The confusing part is that it sometimes remembers things when you open a folder directly, like from an alias you open on your desktop, or typing `open ~/Documents`... But when Finder gets confused seems to be that when you shift between folders using the "browser-like" tools (back, forward, double-clicking a folder from the current folder), there's a disconnect: Should it act like a browser and use the current view, details columns, etc? or should it totally transform the view into what you had open at some point in the past?
I tend to try to hammer the Finder into always using "list view" with command-J, Always open in list view → Use as Defaults, but random folders can have their own settings attached, probably, so nothing works.
I cant quite figure it out exactly either. Seemingly random, then sometimes there's partial order. I honestly have to close my eyes and take deep breaths in thru the nose out the mouth while sitting at my desk while trying to get stuff done LOL. Im just so sick of decades of these stupid bugs.
Finder really is a museum of unresolved UX decisions layered over decades
Switched from Windows to Macos years ago after work gave me a macbook pro. As life long ThinkPad red nipple guy, I love it.
The finder is the one thing I think Windows does marginally better with Explorer.
If only Explorer had a better extension mechanism than dealing with inproc COM in C++.
It would be about time to have better IPC mechanisms out of process.
Trackpoint is also pretty nice once you get used to it. No hands off keyboard !
MacBooks do seem to have by far the best trackpads however
that's not how it works for me in MacOS Tahoe, the sidebar works as it should now.
Just tested on Tahoe 26.1 and it's still happening as he described.
Had the pleasure of making an Apple account to join our company's developer team. I filled out the form on the website 7 times: Edge on Windows, Edge on macOS, Safari on macOS, using 2 different phone numbers. No matter what, Apple just refused to send the verification code to me. It only worked after I remember Apple is a dick to the web platform, then I managed to create one from the popup in the App Store.
Apple also makes it a biznatch to make a developer account separate from your personal account. In Apple's ideal world, multiple accounts should in no circumstance ever exist. I, in an ideal world, would agree with this. But we live in this world, where Apple bans accounts for redeeming legitimate gift cards.
And yet Apple CREATED the multiple-accounts problem for millions of people by implementing their idiotic "Apple ID must be an E-mail address" policy.
So of course people thought that when they changed jobs, cable companies, or whatever... they needed to create a new Apple ID with their new E-mail address. This was reinforced when Apple further stupidified their policy by requiring your ID to be a WORKING E-mail address (originally it didn't actually have to work).
After the outcry over people's App Store and other purchases being scattered across multiple IDs, Apple finally publicly and huffily declared that they weren't going to fix the problem they created by letting people consolidate accounts.
The moral: Don't force people to use E-mail addresses as user IDs. It's stupid on several levels.
> Apple finally publicly and huffily declared that they weren't going to fix the problem they created by letting people consolidate accounts.
They somewhat changed that. It now is possible to move purchases between accounts. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/117294. Looks quite cumbersome to do, and will not apply to everybody (“If an Apple Account is only used for making purchases, those purchases can be migrated to a primary Apple Account to consolidate them.”, “This feature isn’t available to users in India.”)
What's weird, and I'm not sure if it's a documented or undocumented feature, but the account I am logged into on the App Store differs from the one logged into on the system. The system Apple ID is setup with Family Sharing, and the users are able to use apps purchased with the secondary Apple ID.
I haven't transferred the purchases or anything either. The two Apple IDs have different purchases on them, and those on Family Sharing are able to access both.
Interesting. But WTF is a "primary" Apple account? My original Apple ID isn't an E-mail address, so they forced me (and others in that situation) to create another one for iCloud because that one inexplicably has to be an E-mail address.
I use both for quite a few things. Which one is "primary?"
That text is badly written. They define that after mentioning it:
“At the time of migration, the Apple Account signed in for use with iCloud and most features on your iPhone or iPad will be referred to as the primary Apple Account.
At the time of migration, the Apple Account signed in just for use with Media & Purchases will be referred to as the secondary Apple Account.”
⇒ apparently you can be signed into multiple accounts at the same time ¿but I guess with only one account per feature?
But as I said, that page is badly written. So, maybe I’m understanding it wrong.
Thanks for the clarification.
Yes... because of the mess Apple made, I am always signed into two accounts. My non-E-mail one for all purchases, and the E-mail one for iCloud.
It's not super difficult if you have an Apple ID from many years ago that you bought media with and then have a different Apple ID that you use for everything. Which isn't that uncommon for anyone who used iTunes and bought music or media and then forgot their ID and just made a new one when they got a iPhone or Macbook. Was able to transfer all my purchases to my main account pretty easily.
The real downside is if you have two fully active Apple IDs. Then things like calendars, photos, email, etc are still stuck on the other account until you export it. Which can be a pain since you have to sign out of your main account, sign into the old account and export, then sign back into the main account.
> of course people thought that when they changed jobs, cable companies, or whatever... they needed to create a new Apple ID with their new E-mail address.
This belief is rampant amongst 90% of the general public. I had to spend an hour helping a friend last week who had created a new Cash App account to do their taxes, because they didn't prefer the old email address that was on their longstanding Cash App account. So now they have to keep 2 Cash App accounts forever. And to make things more fun, they're obsessed with phone numbers there, so adding the phone to the second account pulls it off the other account.
Oh, and digression but I have to vent: their login process on the web is, in some order: an SMS to your phone, another numeric to your email, and your password. All in succession, on every login.
It’s also a huge pain for those of us who might regularly visit or live part of the year in another country.
I basically need two Apple IDs because switching the region for your App Store is very inconvenient if you have any subscriptions.
In the end, I have separate Apple IDs for each country.
> And yet Apple CREATED the multiple-accounts problem for millions of people by implementing their idiotic "Apple ID must be an E-mail address" policy.
Ironically they then relented only for India and China because market share too sweet, so all auth developers now need to update the assumption that Apple auth users have an email address. Worst of both worlds :)
Maybe in the 90's before Gmail came about so everyone still used their university or ISP email accounts.
Hotmail came in the mid 90s, Yahoo Mail followed soon, I don't think Apple was cloudy at all back then.
I suppose those mail services were "cloud"...
Not sure what this is replying to...
I am facing this issue right now. I need to create a separate developer account because I am risk averse. Do I need a new phone number for this? Online some people say yes, others say no. I tried creating the account several times but it just doesn't work. At this point I am planning to just get a prepaid SIM card from US Mobile for the phone number.
Apple will allow you to have multiple Apple IDs tied to the same phone number -- my kids' ones have my number on them. So for some purposes it seems fine to just reuse the phone number for a second account -- like for your kids, or for a "sandbox" account to use testing your app so that you don't have to use your real iCloud account.
However, for your purpose of avoiding Apple's capricious BS, I probably wouldn't go that route since if their braindead fraud systems or braindead employees decide you're a threat actor they could definitely default to "Ban account. Find all their evil backup accounts that have the same phone numbers or contact emails and ban them too."
Thanks for highlighting this. I did not think about Apple/employee potentially linking phone numbers of different accounts and banning all of them.
I set up a couple developer accounts recently for my clients. Just use a new Google Voice number for 2FA. I had to live chat with Apple support to get past initial verification both times and after that setup went fine.
Thanks, that's great to know! I will take this route.
If you create your developer account in another country (or with a card from another country, who knows), the whole thing just crashes and the sign-in on the phone loops.
When encountering this, I updated the device which bricked the appstore, the device has to be fully reset if that happens.
>where Apple bans accounts for redeeming legitimate gift cards.
Is there any evidence of this happening with an actual legitimate gift card and bot one which was stolen or originally purchased via credit card fund.
Slightly off-topic, but stuff like this does not just happen at Apple.
When Cyberpunk 2077 came out, my wife bought it with her credit card and gifted the game to me. It was fine at first. I even managed to play through the game. However when coming back to the game a few months later (to see all the bugfixes), it was gone. I contacted the (gog) and they said it was removed due to automatic fraud detection and that the balance had been paid back to the original credit card (my wife's card, she had obviously not noticed this in her bank statement).
Point being automatic fraud detection systems can wipe out stuff you purchased even months after the fact (or in some cases lock your account)... It feels kafkaesque.
Since it's gog at least you could download the game and save it somewhere.
Using it would be copyright infringement since the license is revoked since it was refunded.
I, along with every AI company, give exactly zero fucks about copyright infringement.
Training an AI model is fair use. Playing a video game without paying for it isn't.
If you buy milk at a store and then walk out of the store and then the store refunds you 2 days later, that's the store's problem and you're still allowed to drink the milk. You didn't steal the milk. Subscription logic only applies to subscriptions, and GoG is a simple exchange of money for goods, not a subscription.
If it was a contract saying you were allowed to drink the milk and it was terminated with a refund. You would not be able to drink the milk.
If the store tried to sue you claiming there was a contract for you not to drink the milk if refunded, it would be laughed out of court and banned from suing anyone ever again.
>You would not be able to drink the milk.
Incorrect, the milk does not disappear. You are contractually and legally obligated not to drink the milk, much in the same way I should not go around killing people, but I certainly have the ability to.
Now, if you sell the customer electrically locking milk bottles which won't open after the contract is over, then the customer "can't" drink the milk, they couldn't.
Let me guess, you think GOG was perfectly justified in unilaterally taking away nake89's copy of--excuse me, I meant unilaterally revoking nake89's license to play Cyberpunk 2077--when they judged the gift transaction to be fraudulent, just because it could have been a conspiracy between nake89 and their wife to defraud GOG of the princely sum of eighty United States dollars[0]?
I don't dispute that GOG has the right, from a strictly legal standpoint, to revoke a license for any reason their terms of service allow, and that someone continuing to play a game after their license was revoked would be in breach of contract. What I do dispute is that this is a correct, fair, or desirable state of affairs, especially when the license in question was received as a gift and believed in good faith by the recipient to have been acquired non-fraudulently.
And in particular, if GOG wants the absolute and irrevocable right to prevent consumers from using products for which GOG has decided to revoke the licenses, they shouldn't advertise themselves as a DRM-free platform, nor claim that "Here, you won't be locked out of titles you paid for, or constantly asked to prove you own them - this is DRM-free gaming." -- advertising copy may not have the force of law, but courts tend to take a dim view of ad claims that are provably false.
[0]: the list price of the Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition on GOG as of this writing (though it is currently on sale for 38% off)
GOG may have the right to revoke a sale, but since it lets you download the game without DRM, it doesn't have the ability. Unless you delete your copy of the game and then try to download it again.
If you buy milk from the supermarket and they reverse the transaction 2 days later claiming you used a fraudulent card, but you didn't use a fraudulent card, you have the right to keep the milk and the loss of money is the store's problem.
GOG has a Steam-like client application that you can use instead of downloading the installers (which, in the case of Cyberpunk 2077, would be more convenient because its installer is in 28 parts, with another 11 for the Phantom Liberty expansion). It may be that if you install games through that, GOG can remove them if they revoke a license for any reason. I don't know that for sure, though. Just pointing out that they may, in fact, have the ability, at least in principle. But to be clear in case there's any doubt, I think we're on the same side: I think if nake89 had downloaded and installed CP2077 manually instead of through GOG Galaxy, and had continued to play it even after GOG decided the license was fraudulently acquired, they would have been in the right in every way that matters, and at least from a moral perspective, GOG could go pound sand.
True but if you never did then you're SOL
https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/
> The card was purchased from a major brick-and-mortar retailer (Australians, think Woolworths scale; Americans, think Walmart scale)
>was already redeemed in some way
This is the important quote showing that the gift card was not legitimate.
do you think that makes it ok? they walked into a store, tried to pay money to apple and as a result they had their stuff locked forever
apple recommended they only buy gift cards from apple, but they still sell them in stores...
obviously money is more important to them than the consumers but pretending apple have zero responsibility is silly
>they had their stuff locked forever
It was locked for less than a week.
>but they still sell them in stores
Unfortunately there are sketchy resellers that exist too.
It wasn't a sketchy retailer though, it was one Apple has authorized through its handpicked affiliate (in the US, this is probably Blackhawk who basically owns the third-party-giftcard-sales business).
For Apple to say "Don't buy gift cards from our authorized retailers, or prepare to face incredibly harsh consequences due to fraud that you can't detect or predict" while continuing to sell them through those channels is morally bankrupt and completely unacceptable.
I have no doubt fraud is a big problem. It is for all gift cards. But this is a 3 trillion dollar company -- and they make minimum 30% of every gift card sold in pure profit. If they can't secure those channels without torpedoing innocent customers' entire digital lives, they need to drop that channel.
It was locked for a week because of the social media fuss that not everyone can raise. Otherwise it'd be forever.
How do you know that? It's entirely possible that it just takes time to go through Tim Cook's email and social media didn't play a factor.
Your comment reminds me of this news story of a guy trapped in his work's elevator for the weekend. How was he supposed to know it'll be only for the weekend.
Hah, because it went viral. Good luck if you aren't able to reach a wide audience (99% of people aren't). Else it would've been locked for eternity. Stop defending atrocious behavior like this.
Weird hill to die on bud.
If somebody bought something from Walmart you wouldn’t insinuate he’s at fault because he bought it from a ‘sketchy retailer’. Just stop it lol. There is literally no way to defend Apple on that one.
What matters is that the purchaser had every reason to think that it was legitimate and they were not the malefactor in this scenario, but they still got banned.
If you buy stolen property without knowing you still get punished by having the stolen property taken away. Just because you don't know, it doesn't mean you have not done anything wrong.
Having your purchase taken away is not punishment. It's done because it's not actually yours, it still belongs to the person it was stolen from. It's a negative for the person who made the purchase, but that's just an unfortunate side effect. Unknowingly buying stolen property is not legally wrong. The typical law punishing receiving stolen property requires the receiver to know that it is stolen. Otherwise you're innocent of any wrongdoing, you just got ripped off.
If unknowingly using a stolen gift card just meant you lost your money, nobody would be complaining about Apple's behavior here. The issue is that they didn't just lose their money, they also got their account locked, which locks up a lot of stuff completely unrelated to gift cards.
You will have your stolen property taken away, you won't have your entire house lock with bars and get evicted from the property.
Terrible analogy. The victim here bought the card from the retailer. Someone else had gained access to the secret contained on the card and stolen or attempted to steal the value on the card because Apple can't figure out how to sell a gift card securely.
Our victim was the victim of the only theft that involved the gift card. Then Apple stole the person's whole digital life with no recourse because they are ham-fisted and don't care.
this kind of stuff happens all the time across major companies with minimised support. sure your google account is likely to be there tomorrow but it's only a very good chance that it's not locked forever.
i would be surprised if there's any company with millions of users where .01 or .001 (still a LOT of users) just get screwed with zero recourse
Yes.
https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/
That was already posted and it was not a legitimate gift card.
Yes it was. He purchased it from a legitimate reseller 100% legally and correctly.
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Elsewhere in this thread, you assert that perhaps Apple simply reversed all this out of the kindness of their heart without regard for the social media blowup that this lucky victim was able to create.
This is cognitive dissonance. If Apple reversed it due to their conscience, it's because they are pretty convinced this user is honest and Apple PR isn't (or didn't need to be) involved.
If on the other hand, Apple has proof the user is not honest, then Apple PR took a huge hit for nothing by forcing Apple Support to unban them, when they could have said "Because we have documented proof the user couldn't have bought this from a legitimate reseller, we cannot unban them."
For Apple Business Manager, Apple forces you to create a separate new account.
Yes - all ABM accounts are Managed Apple Accounts, not Personal ones. You can’t mix and match (they each have different features).
The two are related. Apple doesn't want you having multiple accounts, because it wants to ban you for redeeming legitimate gift cards, not just one of your personas.
I had a similar issue trying to create an Apple TV account. I already had an Apple account that I was using on my work laptop (first mistake - I should have created a work account there instead), and for 2FA, I needed to wait for a code to pop up on that laptop. It never came. There was an email alternative, but that also didn't work properly (maybe only on certain devices, IIRC?). Apparently in the settings you can request a 2FA code, though, so I did that... but that only had five digits, whereas I needed to give six for the code to work. Eventually I figured out that Apple had just forgotten to zero-pad the 2FA code out to six digits, so I needed to add a leading zero to make things work.
The worst part of this is that now my Apple TV account is linked to a laptop that I don't always have on me. And even if I did have it on me, I don't want to get a laptop out and turn it on just to do 2FA. I already have a TOTP app on my phone, just let me put everything in there and leave me be.
My experience with MacOS is generally that it's about as buggy as my home Linux setup. That's partly a testament to how solid Linux can be these days, but at the same time, it feels pretty damning considering only one of these operating systems is free (in any sense of the word). And that's not including stuff like the configurability of the whole thing.
I had a similar issue when I first brought my iPad. Turns out, Apple doesn't like custom domains for emails. So, I had to make an Apple account with a Gmail account, then remove the Gmail account and add my email address with the custom domain.
Why? Who knows. Still remember my first experience after buying an iPad.
Might've had something to do with the state of the various email security measures on the domain. I have an Apple account on a custom domain with Fastmail and it's never been a problem.
Mine was also managed by Fastmail. And no one else has ever had a problem with it (including Apple when I added it after signing up).
I couldn't make an account on the website Digikey outsourced all their 3d models to with my work email. signed up with my personal gmail account in less than 30 seconds.
This is not some Apple specific problem.
Also this was yesterday. Never did I get any of the 3 confirmation emails they claim they sent to my work mail.
You have to reach a human to make a Flickr account in 2025 if you use a custom domain. It wasn't too difficult, they gave me some reason about abuse. Whatever.
What does custom domain mean? Just an email provider other than the mainstream ones?
You purchase your own domain name and use that domain name as your email address. For instance, if I had an email address that was me@afandian.com; the afandian.com would be a custom domain. It's not routed to @gmail.com, it's routed to @afandian.com. Now in practice you can have a custom domain and still have it managed by Google's Mail servers; but it's the domain name itself that sends up the flags.
Yeah that's what I thought GP meant.
It just seems like it should be so commonplace. It just seems ridiculous that it means
> You have to reach a human
I and a friend (both are not Apple users) had the same issue about 2 years ago. I gave up after trying different (non-Apple) platforms, IPs and phone numbers. He was applying to Apple internship and ended up borrowing a Macbook to set up his account.
And talking about why I wanted a new Apple account... My old account was created with stupid security questions (like, What is your favorite dish) as a second factor, which I believe Apple has long deprecated. I forgot my answers and that blocked certain functionalities. Resetting the security questions requires answering the questions...
I have a typo in my iCloud phone number.
I can't access anything without knowing exactly what I did wrong, presumably Apple never verified it when I created the account decades ago, but it's now part of the critical flow to log in.
I kid you not, I was locked out of my apple account for 2 months because they kept not sending me verification emails.
Needless to say, I have not bought a single Apple device since 2020, the M3 max I have is from my employer and I only use it when out of home.
The opposite happened to me: I got a new Mac and had to fill out my Apple account billing details to download apps from the App Store, but somehow the form on both the App Store and the web page didn't work. In the end I managed to do it through the Apple Music app on my Android (!) phone.
The people Apple most wants inside their ecosystem are forced through a web experience that clearly isn't a priority
Unfortunely Apple skills to write server software is inversely proportional to the fame they enjoyed thus far on client systems, as anyone using their Web APIs or backends can attest for.
I seem to remember this happening to me, and I finally called them and they said something about a waiting period for new accounts? It might help to try calling their tech support for this as painful as that is.
Yep same thing happened to me
BY FAR #3 is the most annoying UX on iOS 26 - I fall for it every single time when trying to change payment method. Not only does it undo years of muscle memory, it's so unbelievably unintuitive to have the first button change address instead of payment method
https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1mb4lod/is_anyone_else...
Why would you need to change your address at all? That's part of the card details. No other payment system does that!
Not the address, but the phone number has a bug I run into it occasionally. Some merchants support the +1 country code, some are local US only and don’t expect it. Safari’s auto-fill figures this out when filling the form. But then I go to Apple Pay, an it replaces the phone number with a 1 at the beginning and drops the last number, then I get an error that something is wrong. Initially took me a while to realize what was happening and that you can edit the number in the Apple Pay overlay before it applies it to the order. Just a bit annoying
It changes the shipping address, not the billing address.
And yeah, I do tap it to change what card to use. "Every single time."
I don't get it. The screenshot on reddit appears to show that tapping on the card changes the billing info, and under that there's a separate button to change the card. So far as I can tell that's the same on iOS 18? The only difference is that tapping on the card doesn't do anything. What's the "muscle memory"?
iOS 18 is what introduced this. In iOS 17 you could tap the button with the card to change the payment method.
You're right my bad, iOS 18 introduced it and I'm still mistapping 2 years later.
I'm so tired of looking like a boomer that doesn't know how to use their phone when I'm paying with Apple Pay irl and I need to change the card, now a classic iOS user humiliation ritual :,)
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> This is the objective logical UX.
There is no such thing as "objective" in this arena. It's all subjective, the best you can hope is to find an approach that the majority of your users subjectively prefer.
No there is objective logical UX.
If you click a button that says "Change payment method" it'll change the payment method.
If you press the card on a "which payment" window, it'll use that card.
Unfortunately objective truths are very boring.
It’s not a “which payment” window though, it’s a “confirm payment information” window.
In that type of window you’d expect clicking on any of the existing form fields would allow you to change that field. It would be wild if clicking on a credit card icon in the middle of a form submitted that form.
Oh, look at that! Turns out this is subjective.
I don’t know how much more clearer the UI needs to be when the button literally says “Change Payment Method”.
I guess Apple should consider these user dissonances when designing UI (when users don’t read or ignore button labels)
I didn’t even know this is an issue. It’s written right there, “Change Payment Method”.
Not an iOS user but I can totally see why this is an issue: Users read from top to bottom and once they think they found what they search they click it without analyzing the remainder of the screen.
So in this case you find a button that looks like it changes the payment method (because in earlier versions it did and it's a common UI pattern) and don't even see the button below that acually does this.
Sounds like a luxury problem to me. You have an iPhone and a credit card, probably also a mobile data plan to make it work.
I guess taxing the rich is a pretty good way to get superrich.
Trying to type this comment on an iPhone and that very last issue, text selection, is so so real. It’s probably the single biggest thing I hate about this phone that makes me consider switching back to Android (I was on Android for 12 years before trying out an iPhone for 3 years atm, and in general, on average, I can’t tell the difference… they both have strengths and flaws. Text selection is a pretty massive flaw on iPhone.)
Android isn't any better, every new version every year, it's becoming a buggier and buggier Tamagotchi that demands attention every half an hour, and has a gazillion contradictory settings that never work. My phone, model 2023, has night mode that turns on automatically. You can turn it off for 30 minutes, or permanently. There are clocks that work independently. I wanted a better one, because this one would reset all its widgets every minute, and no app could play music or radio in the background.
So I got a newer one, from 2025. Fortunately, radio & media do work. But product managers wouldn't have been product managers without spoiling something. Somebody decided the alarm and night mode must work together in unison, and also they dropped the turn-off-for-30-min feature, and they decided to make night mode smart, that it doesn't turn on if the phone was active at the time. So, now you can get spam calls or sms make it ring loudly at night, because night mode didn't turn on, because you used the phone. Next time when you notice night mode should be on, but isn't, you turn it on. But now it's permanent -- till the end of the universe, unless you turn it off. And alarm clock won't ring, because deep in there, a "waking up alarm" box is unchecked, that should have made it work despite the night mode. Did any human actually test it work on themselves?
My pet peeve on Android (and also on iOS) with alarms is that alarms aren't clocks! They are totally separated concepts and bundling them all together makes no sense.
Nice thing about Android though is that you have more control to work around this kind of thing if you don't like the default behaviour. I rolled my own night mode with Tasker years ago, before it was built in, and have never looked back.
What specific phone did you actually buy?
I submitted this YouTube video (not mine) a while ago here that demonstrates typing issues that I also encountered on several iPhones:
[It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken](https://youtu.be/hksVvXONrIo)
Oh my thanks for that, I thought I was going crazy.
The one that keeps getting to me is that iOS insists on putting periods instead of spaces when I only pressed the space bar once so.I.end.up.with.sentences.like.this. (when it starts doing it it can be extremely consistent); yes I know about the double space -> period shortcut but like in the video that's not it.
There was a time where the iOS keyboard just worked.
I don't want my keyboard to insert a period unless I actually type a period.
Does the iOS keyboard not let you turn that off?
That’s what that is? I had no idea why that kept happening
I have searched for a proper keyboard replacement. But there is not a single one that 1) works properly without major bugs, 2) adheres to privacy standards (because no way I am sending all keystrokes to Microslop) and 3) does not cost a fortune. Typewise came close, but seems abandoned now.
If anyone has a recommendation, please reply.
Text section is also extremely annoying when marking up PDF files in the Preview app (select -> highlight). Anything you select (whole words), deselects some trailing portion and you’re left with only part of your selection with a highlight pop-up prompt. You want to reselect, so you tap aside, and it deselects the entire fragment. You repeat, again a trifling piece gets unselected, but this time the partial selection remains in tact after the highlight popup prompt is dismissed, and you try to expand the selection, but it either doesn’t react or cancels the entire selection, just for fun.
It can take a few times to get the selection right, but by that time you forgot why you wanted to highlight that passage in the first place.
It totally breaks my flow of consciousness while reading and marking.
It happens on iPhones and iPads, with and without the Pencil.
And they had it solved! 3D Touch worked perfectly – you pushed the screen hard to get a cursor, moved it to the start of the selection, and pushed hard again to drag to the end. They killed it because "not all iPhones had the hardware to support it" or something.
3D touch was amazing I'm still upset they canned it.
You can still get a cursor by holding down space bar.
Space bar which is at... the bottom of the screen, so if you want to move the caret down... 3D Touch worked _anywhere_, also had no delay, and hard press a second time was much more convenient for selection.
that deserves a whole separate opera. why does moving the cursor to start/end almost always place it one character off? same when trying to use touch on text for it.
This. I feel like this is due to small shifts when lifting the finger. For the life of me, I cannot get myself to lift it like the testers at Apple do, and so I wished the product itself could go through learning phase; studying intentions and what actual touches happen.
Apple devs are probably doing something with the touch returned by the touchUpInside callback. This is an extremely, extremely common bug in iOS apps, not just with Apple developed software.
Devs love the symmetry of their touch handling code and often have the finger-down, finger-moved, and finger-up callbacks from the system all call the same handleTouch function they wrote. As you can tell, however, the touch from the finger up callback is often better discarded or handled differently otherwise you get these sort of bugs
you can still make selections using the keyboard without 3d touch.
How? I know you can move the cursor by holding space and dragging but how do you start the selection?
touch the keyboard area with another finger :)
Thanks for that tip!
Unfortunately, it's still bad. It's a bit better than dragging the handles of the selected area, but if I go to far and want to reduce the selected area, it doesn't work anymore.
yes, this feature seems to be extend-only.
I have an Apple hand, with only one finger.
I found the Apple Table Saw user!
“Intuitive!”
I do it by double-tapping a word and then dragging the handles… does that work for you?
> iOS Text Selection is Pure Chaos
> You just wanted to move the cursor. Now everything is selected.
> You want to position the cursor at the end of a line. You tap. It selects the last word. You try to grab the handle — it doesn't respond and deselects. You tap again, now it selects the whole sentence. You tap blank space to deselect — nothing. You tap five more times. On the fifth, it selects all. You switch apps hoping the selection disappears. You tap and hold — sometimes text selects, sometimes a menu appears, sometimes nothing. Got a Magic Keyboard? Good luck — trackpad selection just doesn't work half the time, but touching the screen does. Eventually you select all, delete everything, and retype from scratch. Apple has had 17 years to figure out touch text selection. This is where they landed.
At least for editing text on the iPhone the key to moving the cursor is holding down the space bar: the keyboard transforms into a trackpad for cursor placement. This doesn’t really help for selecting text though, but it makes typing longer responses much more bearable.
I use Gboard (Google's keyboard) on iPhone and the space bar trackpad feature works way better than on native keyboard.
If Google ever discontinues the keyboard for iPhone I think I'll go back to dumb phones.
Does it send all your keystrokes to google though? That’s how most free keyboards work on android afaik so I’m wondering
Yes, it does. For passwords or any other field an app defines as sensitive, Apple keyboard takes over and you can't change from it, but other than that you share every keystroke with Google. Your only option is disabling location.
Good to know. I’m never using one of those then, as terrible as the stock iPhone keyboard is.
Years ago, someone demonstrated an improved mobile text editing system called "Eloquent" [1] and I wish this would be the default today.
However, my biggest issue with mobile text selection is accidental scrolling or scrolling too fast/far while dragging on the screen to select longer text parts. This is especially annoying in landscape mode when there is just a tiny gap between the visible text and the touch keyboard. I don’t know how to solve this, but it just makes the text editing process feel incredibly insecure/slippy and annoying for me.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9YPm0EghvU
That looks so much better. The hierarchical popup menu is soooo annoying. It's not even consistent about what gets relegated to the overflow!
In case it isn't clear to people, that research was actually done by Google. It's a shame the researchers didn't have the political clout to ship it.
I guess one issue with it might be the "press harder" bit. That isn't a thing anywhere else in the Android world at all and I expect hardware has pretty poor support for it.
YES Typing is a horror show (perhaps only for me as I don't daily-drive and iphone but only have an ipad for home usage which may "under-train" me to The Way).
Text selection is cute, with the magnifying lens. It seems like this should work. Though the rest of the process is unpredictable and The Bad Kind Of Magic: Nick turns self into toad, poof!
REFERENCE - from the site:
* "iOS Text Selection is Pure Chaos"
* You just wanted to move the cursor. Now everything is selected.
* You want to position the cursor at the end of a line. You tap. It selects the last word. You try to grab the handle — it doesn't respond and deselects. You tap again, now it selects the whole sentence. You tap blank space to deselect — nothing. You tap five more times. On the fifth, it selects all. You switch apps hoping the selection disappears. You tap and hold — sometimes text selects, sometimes a menu appears, sometimes nothing. Got a Magic Keyboard? Good luck — trackpad selection just doesn't work half the time, but touching the screen does. Eventually you select all, delete everything, and retype from scratch. Apple has had 17 years to figure out touch text selection. This is where they landed.
Every single time I have to do some text editing in iOS, I end up shouting loud: "a f*ing trillion values company cannot get this right, f* you Tim Cook"
I run into the other bugs, but text editing is such an absolutely basic feature... it should just work, and it doesn't!
I switched from Android a couple years ago and this is the things that still irritates me the most.
remember 3D Touch? It was amazing for text selection
On iOS it often feels like you're negotiating with a random number generator
Wait till you realize with Samsung Android phones, you can pretty much replace your laptop with a lapdock, or any TV + bluetooth mouse and keyboard.
Android stuff has been ahead of apple since like 2014. Apple is really good at optimizing the one thing that they use in advertising, while the rest of the stuff falls by the wayside. Was the exact same thing with Apple silicon and battery life. Sure, your laptop battery lasts a while when all you do is browse web and watch movies, specifically because of dedicated hardware for that. My phone with a similar capacity battery bank does the same. Once you start actually supersizing the cpu, the battery life drops significantly.
but don't buy a Google Pixel. such shitty phones.
battery will explode on you, they overheat - it will try store your photos in 5 different places
What if you install Graphene?
you can enable cursor control by holding space, and then you can move to selection mode by touching anywhere else on the keyboard.
You have to be very precise with your finger drags because it loves snapping back to the original position. Gbroard doesn’t suffer from this. Part of the reason is it doesn’t do the “free-floating” cursor thing - which I’ve never understood the point of anyway. It’s fancy but useless in 99% of cases on a phone.
Yet on Android you can simply tap exactly where you want the cursor to be placed. It's a much superior experience.
um, you do the same on ios.
No quite. On iOS, I cannot place the cursor in the middle of a word by putting my finger there. It goes to the beginning or end of the word, and then I have to drag it like an ice cube to the precise spot. On Android you can tap exactly where you want the cursor to go, and it does with perfect precision.
ah ok, yes, i see. did not notice the nuance in the parent.
it really doesn't work, the cursor will often snap right back especially when you're using a search or URL bar
yea, url substring selection is shit.
Doesn't work for me like it used to since update 26.1. Its now extremely hard to get that to work.
This is missing the most annoying one for me: when I type a search term into safari and it randomly interprets it as an address that it can’t resolve. E.g. “how to bake cookies” gets resolved to how%20to%20bake%20cookies (which safari tries to resolve via DNS or whatever instead of piping it to the search provider). Even better, it’s entirely nondeterministic, though it does seem to be due to some race condition with whatever determines whether it’s a search or a url, and is more likely to happen when typing quickly.
I’d say it happens about 10% of the time I type anything in the search bar. It’s incredibly annoying. Without getting into too much detail, but I confirmed they’re tracking it internally too for close to a decade and are intentionally choosing not to prioritize.
When you had gone to a site using a deep link, Safari insists on autocompleting any URL in the domain to that link you used even if you just want to go to the top-level URL/index of that site. You have to type out the entire URL and add a space at the end or something (and that still doesn't work sometimes) to stop iOS from doing that, which defeats the entire purpose of autocompletion. Btw switched off any autocorrection feature a long time ago. Still, I happen to mistype a lot compared to my old non-Apple phones (there was even an "it's not just you" article last year about it).
Apple needs to spend an entire release cycle to unfuck text entry and completion. However, with their qa lately (or lack thereof) they'd only manage to make it worse. The sad thing is they're still better than the alternatives, all things considered.
Browsers never should have gotten rid of the separate and dedicated search bar. I don't want my browser guessing whether what I'm typing is a search or a URL. It should be easy to guess, but they frequently get it wrong for doubtless stupid reasons. If you can't even reliably classify a URL vs. a search, just have two separate text inputs, like the old days!
Vivaldi still has it as an option. That said, I keep them combined and can't remember the last time it guessed wrong.
One of my favorite relics of this era was walking up to somebody's computer in the office and being able to see what they searched for last.
I personally reported that around time when Mac OS X 10.9 (first non-cat) came out and immediately saw it marked as duplicate. So at least 13 years and counting.
Not to mention not resolving local domains (and attempting to search instead) unless they specifically contain the `http://`.
Yep, this seems to be the case whenever one types a bit too fast.
Maybe you have an ISP that captures DNS checks to return ad sites, and Safari interprets that as a real website?
But honestly it seems extremely weird that Safari would interpret something with spaces as a URL instead of a search
You’re getting downvoted for some reason, but I’ve never experienced this bug, once, ever, in about 15 years of daily iPhone usage.
There surely must be some edge case/condition to discover (which is what you were trying to suggest)?
It’s more for safari on Mac OS
I've been using Safari on MacOS for at least 15 years and never run into this problem, either. I've never even heard of it before.
I've been seeing this from time to time since at least 2016. As others have noted, it's more likely to happen when you type quickly or immediately after pasting your search in the url bar.
Another perfect example of the article's thesis
I have a fun one: my iPhone (12 Pro) refuses to acknowledge that it has eSIM functionality, even though the hardware exists.
I'm fairly sure I know what the problem is! It was restored from a backup taken on an iPhone X that had two physical SIM slots (Chinese version). The new phone now seems to think it has two physical SIM slots: it shows an IMEI2 in About, but any attempt to use the eSIM functionality just fails (scanning a code does "nothing"; no "add" button is visible, etc.).
If this was an Android phone, I'd root it and just fix the offending network configuration file. I believe it's possible to tamper with a backup of the phone to fix the issue, but this would mean a full backup+restore cycle and some specialized tooling to go mucking with the backup.
I filed a Radar on it ages ago, but I'm assuming nobody ever picked it up.
Issues caused by restoring from backups were super common in the early iOS days. It makes me wonder how many weird bugs can be fixed these days by starting from scratch instead of migrating years of cruft through backup/restore.
Quite a lot probably. I wasn’t able to use the health app on two different iPhones - it would crash after tapping “get started” consistently - and apple told me to just start from scratch instead of restoring from backup and there was no other way to fix it. Not a very satisfying answer
I had eSIMs get screwed up on my iPhone a year or two ago when I deleted an expired eSIM. It asked me "Do you want to update contacts to use <the SIM I just deleted>?" and I knew I was in trouble.
I did successfully use a backup editor, iMazing, to exclude the telephony data from a backup in order to fix it, but it cost me $30 and hours (transferring my Signal data to a second device and back). For 99.999% of their customers this would require a total erase-install. All because Apple has an off-by-one error somewhere.
> I filed a Radar on it ages ago, but I'm assuming nobody ever picked it up.
I mean, based on all experience with Apple in the last 10 years, their bug trackers have presumably migrated to /dev/null for a backing db.
The emoji search box's search bar sometimes will just stop working, usually after a {input, erase input, new input} sequence. No idea why. Dismiss picker, try again.
Sometimes the picker just refuses to be summoned.
Bluetooth is a mess. File transfers will fail, who knows why? Certainly not macOS. Often I'll just punt to GoogleDrive-TP.
Really random screen wakes.
Left macOS alone for 5s? All your windows have decided to start playing a game of musical desktop, and need 10s to re-arrange themselves back into place, also while sometimes displaying their contents at 2x.
Slack has any number of these; e.g., emoji inside codeblocks are simply corrupted. A number of odd corner cases in URLs will corrupt, and each edit of the message will further corrupt it.
So much of the web is plagued by some framework that, upon any JS exception, will destroy the entire DOM (idk maybe defunct page > no page at all?) and leave you only with "ApplicationError: …".
At this point I'd add "is a motorcycle a car? Is a pedestrian signal a stop light?!" CAPTCHAKCAS to this list, but those are a "feature".
If we're doing "features": password fields with no option to view the plaintext value? I use long passwords, and if I'm in a safe place, I would much rather see what I'm typing and correct any typos I make along the way than have to retype the same password multiple times with long delays between each attempt.
Also, once a day my Touch ID stops working and I need to log in with my password again. That's fine, the passwordless access expires after 24 hours or so, fair enough. But I turn my laptop on fresh every morning and have to also put my password in then. If I do that, I at least expect to be and to use my fingerprint until the end of the day.
Ugh this is the worst. It’s topped by password fields that don’t work with a password manager.
The wombo combo is field that doesn't allow pasting (???) plus app that forgets where you are. So you can't paste, so you type the first few characters, dismiss the app to look at what the field should be, come back and boom - it's cleared out or, worse, you're on the home page. For some reason banks LOVE this.
The emoji picker refusing to be summoned drives me up the wall. There's a dedicated key for it! And yet...
> The emoji search box's search bar sometimes will just stop working,
No joke, this pissed me off so much. I made a silly emoji search to use instead!
https://emojistime.com
Why can't I disable MacOS "start every app I can think of" when you restart the laptop?
No, I don't want to launch Word, Excel, Sheets, and System Monitor when I reboot. They weren't even running when I restarted, and I unticked the launch apps on restart. Every. Damn. Time.
In the shutdown / restart confirmation dialog there’s a checkbox to reopen apps at login. If there’s a bug with it I haven’t noticed it. You can also run
defaults write com.apple.loginwindow LoginwindowLaunchesRelaunchApps -bool false
> and I unticked the launch apps on restart.
I do untick it. It's a bug that happens with every restart.
I'll have a go with setting the defaults, I'm wondering if there was a file it writes out open applications to (to trigger on restart) that has somehow become corrupted and therefore doesn't get cleared.
Do you know where MacOS stores the list to reopen?
I used to love Apple because they were so far ahead of the game in terms of UX and hardware. They have dropped the ball so much recently with all these UX mishaps from Apple Glass to most of the bugs in the post that affect me. I am more than willing to switch to Android or some other device regardless of price, but haven't found one that is close to equivalent yet. I worry it'll be a few years before something comes close to the battery life + screen quality + camera quality + decent software/security of iOS.
In the context of laptops, I would agree (MBP's hardware just outclasses everything else, even if I prefer Fedora over macOS).
However, for phones, this just doesn't shake out. The Pixel 10 Pro for instance, has:
* A battery that outlasts the iPhone 16 Pro by an hour
* A slightly better display (higher brightness for outdoor use, higher PPI, higher color accuracy, same refresh rate)
* A better camera for still photography, especially HDR and low-light (although admittedly worse for video)
The problem (for me) isn't the hardware. The Pixel 10 Pro is arguably a great phone, and I had a 9 Pro Xl for a short time before going back to iOS and I enjoyed it while I had it.
But what I found was I was just trading Apple's quirks for even worse Android quirks, all while losing all the nice ecosystem integrations with my macbook and iPad.
App quality on Android is still hit and miss. Companies still don't put nearly as much effort into their Android apps as they do their iOS apps. Even my banking app was a laggy, buggy mess on Android compared to the iOS version. Heck, even Google's own apps are better on iOS.
Plus, until Google decides to offer E2EE for their cloud services like Apple with advanced data protection, it's a non-starter for me and I really don't feel like going full self-hosted just so I can run Android.
I want to like Android again, but there's just nothing there right now that definitively makes it a better experience for me despite Apple's flaws.
I loved my Pixel 10 Pro until it broke just a week after purchase (screen went unresponsive all of a sudden and I needed to learn to factory reset it).
Pixel Android doesn’t support disabling the control center when locked in lock screen, and widgets are also available.
I saw all of that reported just recently too, so obviously not a single issue. The screen issues are known across several Pixel generations. The screen lock since 2013.
I don’t know whether I’m going to touch anything Pixel in the next couple of years, it’s not mature enough yet.
Admittedly the hardware of the pixel 10 pro is very nice, but it still runs android which is the main issue for me. Also I love magsafe
The hardware is far behind in terms of benchmark performance. That wasn’t important to me, but it’s noticeable when you edit videos.
That’s a good point
Pixel 10 pro has "pixel snap" which works with most mag safe attachments.
You can actually buy MagSafe cases for pixels. And GrapheneOS makes it very nice
>MBP's hardware just outclasses everything else
No it doesn't. Battery life isn't that much greater when you use the laptop. Meanwhile, if all you are doing is browsing web or watching youtube, an android phone with the same size battery lasts longer.
How's the OS security of the Pixel 10 Pro?
I think "Airpods" and "iCloud" for Photo Storage are the only parts of the Apple ecosystem I use, so those will be missed.
Great if you install Graphene!
With Graphene, something financial won’t work anymore. I believe either banking apps or Google Wallet, a known issue. Graphene didn’t support Pixel 10 yet last time I checked. That said, I’ve been just too occupied with reading on how to fix the Pixel bugs that bit me that I couldn’t get to the point of reading on Graphene and I don’t exactly remember anymore what was wrong with it.
Google wallet doesn't work which is imho a very tiny issue with contactless payment working with cards but most banking apps do. There is a forum thread I believe that you can check if your bank's app work before commiting to migrate.
It might be a very tiny issue for you, but for others it's huge.
As a single datapoint: it has been years since I used a physical card. both payment or public transport. Always use contactless payments using my phone.
I mean I used it in the past but the difference is minor in my experience.
It is a case of grabbing your card vs grabbing your smartphone and fiddling with it. That card could even be carried in one of those phones cases with a card holder.
The only major difference is in case of stolen phone vs stolen card. But every system has its drawback. It could be super annoying if you get your account suspended unexpectedly while you are away from home.
In my particular case I don't want a google account anymore and would hate relying on google to manage my payments so it is a no go for a start.
Why not just get an iPhone then?
Because:
- I prefer running FOSS apps on my smartphone
- I want to be able to install anything I want on it without relying on what is accepted by a "store"
- I don't want an Apple account
- I want to own and be able to have the shit I want running in the background (like syncthing)
- I want to be able to access my file the way I want, including using a shell
- I want to be able to run any linux app
- and more inportantly I want to be the owner of my phone, not merely the user of a license to use it following the term set by a company from an hostile nation
I’ve been down that road, was fun, but growingly felt to me like too much maintenance that wasn’t worth the effort, distracting from more important things. Like desktop Linux.
Now I’m at a point where Android itself, even Pixels feel that way. I really tried to make the Pixel my daily driver. In hindsight, it was just too naive of me.
same for me; its too bad though we cant have some kind of foss shell, and bank/contactless payment apps can run in some secure vm/box so we can have the best of both
I rooted my phone for years but the lack of contactless and trying to stay one step ahead of Google trying to stop you using it (frequent messing with shamiko, lsposed and all the rest, delicately doing updates, only for it to eventually fail randomly).
Being able to pay with your phone is just too useful.
Why are you comparing the latest Google flagship phone with a previous generation iPhone? The iPhone 17 is better than a Pixel 10 on most if not all fronts.
There’s little hardware improvement in iPhone 17 over iPhone 16. Arguably only the move from titanium to aluminum in the casing is a tangible performance enhancement (better cooling).
The software is the same.
The iPhone 17 delivers significant display, battery, camera, and memory improvements. The aluminum switch does enhance thermal performance, but calling it the "only tangible" upgrade requires ignoring ProMotion displays, 36% longer battery life, 4x camera resolution boosts, and doubled storage.
The standard iPhone 17, in particular, received upgrades substantial enough that upgrading from an iPhone 15 or earlier makes strong practical sense. Hardly the profile of a phone with "little hardware improvement".
Thanks, you’re likely right, but significance is in the eye of the beholder. I don’t attribute much value to the marketing fluff and on-paper changes.
It’s great the battery improved but does it really matter? You still will charge every day.
The camera resolution, well, it’s still just a smartphone camera with some AI post-processing, which Xiaomi can do better with their Leica or Oppo with their Zeiss lenses. And either one is still bad compared to a proper camera.
ProMotion display, Pixel’s still better.
Your point about storage made me laugh, but let’s maybe leave it for another time.
That all is very minor and not noticeable to me. If you go from 10 to 15 it’s a 50% improvement, but if your competitors have been at 20 and won’t regress, you’re still behind.
So yes, to me, the aluminum case is the only tangible. My palms don’t burn anymore. And I’m grateful to Apple for letting me pay more again for this noticeable improvement.
Yeah, these are funny.
There's a strange logic (that I understand is not just at Apple) where if you ship a known bug, it becomes harder next release to fix it… because we already shipped the bug once (twice, etc.).
Apple engineers care though. If they were allowed to (given time, priority), they would love to knock out some of their oldest and most annoying bugs. And I understand that from time to time a bug-fix-only OS release is planned… but things always come up. New hardware, "AI"… who knows.
Maybe someday we'll get another Snow Leopard (bug-fix-only OS release).
It feels like Apple lacks the institutional vocabulary to even think about fixing old bugs. The way the releases are structured, there’s a “zero bugs” day where all bugs are ceremonially kicked out of the current release, and the level of quality is deemed to be “what we’re shipping with”. On that day, it’s not like the bugs are fixed, they’re just bulk-modified to target “future os release” and that’s that.
Then the planning is made for next years release and they plan for X features, which require Y time and Z engineers, and some mild hand-waving later a schedule is made, and gee would you look at that, there’s no time anywhere for fixing existing bugs. But that’s ok because big rewrite of subsystem is gonna ship next release and it’ll probably make all the bugs invalid, right? Right? Well, it certainly won’t have more bugs, right? Right? Oops…
> But that’s ok because big rewrite of subsystem is gonna ship next release and it’ll probably make all the bugs invalid, right? Right? Well, it certainly won’t have more bugs, right? Right?
They keep doing them, but I wonder to what degree these rewrites are necessary, and whether your average Apple engineer is aware that they end up with more bugs and vulnerabilities than they started. Surely they've gotta know?
People look at the backlog of issues, see all the things they don't like about $subsystem, and think to themselves "we ought to rewrite this". The incentives are all aligned to make this common. Project managers get a nice chunk of work to manage, engineers get to write things their way, managers get a nice thing to add to their accomplishments, everyone feels like progress is happening. Heck, sometimes there may actually be real deficiencies in the existing code that are being addressed! And in the end, the bug count is lower! (Never mind that it's only lower because it hasn't had the time in production to actually find the bugs yet...)
Large-scale software is hard. So hard nobody's really managed to do it well. By large-scale I don't mean "a lot of users" or "a large deployment"... I mean "a lot of engineers". Once the number of engineers gets large enough, they start making decisions that make the product worse, more bloated, more buggy, and no human is capable of keeping it in check, because the sheer amount of activity in the code is so large you can't possibly keep up with it. And the worst part is that orgs try to solve this by... hiring more engineers to wrangle the complexity. By this point you're already sunk, there's no going back.
Why not have a "rewrite policy", criteria for when a rewrite makes sense or doesn't? Surely a random engineer can't decide to rewrite things on his own.
There’s too many people with incentives to rewrite. It keeps all the gears turning, keeps everyone employed. You certainly need to justify any rewrites, but… people are really good at justifying rewrites.
This seems like it would work if you build a system on solid bedrock, but how often does that really happen? CarPlay, for example, started as a disaster. Unsurprisingly, it has changed a lot but remains one.
ob https://xkcd.com/1172/
Ironically Apple’s annoying “select text in an image” feature made it hard to press-and-hold to get the alt text to show (on an iPhone…)
For xkcd the alt text is much easier to access on mobile at the m.xkcd.com variant of the URLs (even without the text selection shenanigans)
> Autocorrect Won't Take No For An Answer
Oh god. I don't use an iOS device regularly, so when I encountered this issue I had to control myself not to throw the device. Absolutely horrible experience. Worse part is that it autocorrects when pressing "send", not just when adding a space or a period. So the correct word gets corrected wrong and immediately sent.
I've owned iOS devices since around 2010 I think, and one of the first things I do when setting them up is disable autocorrect and most other typing assistances. For this reason! Also when typing in 2 or 3 languages, it is completely useless.
iOS 18 really fucked up the multiple languages setup. It used to automatically detect secondary languages when I had the English keyboard, but still prefer English. Now you have to create keyboard combos and can't reuse languages (can't "prefer Spanish but also support English" and viceversa)
This list is frustrating to read because it reminds me of all the time I've spent dealing with these bugs. Not all of them thankfully but more than half steal my time at least once on a weekly basis. They're all bad but I think the auto correct actively fighting me and the ios cursor thing are perhaps the most annoying of the bunch for me. Trying to communicate well on a mobile platform is bad enough but when it's actively sabotaging you it's just so much worse.
I just turn auto correct off completely, as it's just plain worse than just typing it myself. Unfortunately there's nothing that can be done about the terrible text selection.
It's really staggering how much impact one engineer can have when working on a product used by billions of people. Fixing just one of these issues would instantly be the most valuable thing that person ever does in their life by orders of magnitude. We have incredible leverage in the software world.
You'd be surprised how many Apple engineers are fixing many bugs, of this caliber, on a semi-regular basis.
That "Human Hours Wasted" is not just sitting there because engineers don't care about it, it's because there are many many other opportunities to save similar amounts of time. Crashes waste time, perf bugs waste time -- and security bugs are much worse.
I really doubt everyone or even a tiny fraction of people at Apple are working on opportunities to save more time than fixing the repeated autocorrect issue. It affects everyone and it's been a meme since forever.
I actually think most security bugs have very low impact unfortunately
At this scale, some bugs become features. I think fixing the bugs would need lots of conceptual work, due to the fact that there are millions of users of these apps.
Trouble is, at that kind of scale even your bugs have users.
The fact that a similar bug was left in GTA5 ON PURPOSE FOR YEARS (making load times for multiplayer like 10x what they should be) to get more people to see their shitty ads for currency is why I am somewhat sympathetic to people who think that we are all overpaid and deserve a solar flair to force us to actually do something useful.
"Autocorrect Won't Take No For An Answer" does have a workaround at Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement. If you add the word as both the phrase and shortcut it won't be autocorrected. Apple should still fix the learning behavior of autocorrect, but this workaround can prevent some frustration.
Two other bugs I haven't seen mentioned yet:
- The notes field in the Contacts app on iOS is completely broken. If you start typing a contact note the page jumps around randomly. And if you have a longer note it won't autoscroll to the cursor so you're typing blind. Became even worse in iOS 26...
- Stage Manager on macOS feels very buggy due to inconsistent behavior across apps and windows. Could be great in theory, but in practice frustrating to use.
This doesn't really work for things that are already words like it's/its. I type the one i want, iOS “corrects” it to the wrong one, and even after I tap the one I typed in the prediction bar? iOS still inserts its own suggestion again.
> Stage Manager
Also, for seemingly no reason, you can't choose to open an app/window on the current stage on macOS but you can on iPad OS. It makes stage manager unusable on macOS for me, which is unfortunate because I actually really like the feature
I've got one.
When iPhone alarm goes off, the screen doesn't wake up, so I press the power button. Which snoozes the alarm. Not only did I not want to snooze the alarm, I hoped that the alarm would wake the phone up so I can click 'stop'.
I assume that's a bug rather than a holding-it-wrong?
I’ll note that looking at the screen deadens the alarm.
I’ve had it a couple of times where I’ve looked at the alarm on my nightstand, the alarm quietens down to nearly nothing and I fall back to sleep.
My partner missed a flight due to this.
At least this one can be disabled: settings > accessibility > Face ID & attention > attention aware features.
There's a reason I have 3 alarms set ;P
This one has always confused me as well. Tapping the screen, as the other commenter suggested, dismisses the whole thing too, so I have to fish for the stop button in the notifications every time.
Maybe there’s “the Apple way” that we’ve yet to discover.
The Apple way is to have an Apple watch and deal with the alarm there
The problem is there is only one little button on the screen that actually stops the alarm. Everything else you can tap or do to the phone while the alarm is sounding will "snooze" it. It's infuriating.
Surely that’s by design? If stopping the alarm was “easy”, a half-awake person could accidentally stop it rather than snooze it.
If you have tap to wake turned on (it's on by default), you can tap the screen anywhere to wake it up. So long as the screen isn't already on and you don't mash the Snooze button, you should be able to hit stop.
I believe the power-button-to-snooze thing is meant as a usability boost for groggy people: the physical button may be easier to click than some random spot on the screen.
I will object that the point of the alarm is to make sure you're not groggy anymore by the time you deactivate it.
But not everyone lives alone. If you'd like to avoid waking everyone else up - you hit the power button (or indeed any button) while groggy. And if you drift off to sleep despite your best efforts - well, that's why the button snoozes the alarm rather than disabling it.
double tap the screen
[dead]
With the latest Google Gemini deal to be the backend for Apple’s AI, I wish Apple could also do a deal for search (even though Google seems to be struggling more as time passes). Apple’s search being broken in Settings on iOS, macOS and iPadOS seem intentional — it can’t search in a relatively small and fixed list of items! Is it any wonder that Mail search doesn’t work with external data?
The AirDrop and Hotspot issues described are spot on. The success rate for these is like 40% to 65% (the latter if you’re lucky). These features require doing a dance of airplane mode, disconnect from WiFi, go to Settings and fiddle with the toggles, etc. When it works, it’s like magic. At other times, it’s a big joke on “it just works”.
Text selection and the trials to just move the cursor quickly and accurately: it’s like Apple has no senior management that cares enough (looking at you, Craig Federighi), no QA (this is obvious truth to every user) and no money to spend on making things better (don’t let the stock prices fool you). FWIW, I know of slower and fiddly ways to move the cursor somewhat (press space, hold and move or place finger on the text, hold and move).
All these issues persist for years or decades because senior management does not care. I can’t think of any other rational explanation.
My god I cancelled my isp because I’m moving. Thought hot spot would be fine for a few months. Every single day I have to restart my MacBook Air for hot spot to work. Multiple times every day I have to turn hot spot off and on even though it’s in discoverable but won’t connect. Multiple times every day hot spot is just off and can’t be turned on in control center. And this is with iPhone 17 and m2 on most recent updates. I can’t imagine on older hardware.
With older hardware the trick is to not upgrade the OS.
Apple's strategy is actually to make people auto-upgrade to make their work of maintaining older OS/software cheaper and make people who don't have recent enough hardware suffer.
It's funny that one argument for Apple was that you got updates for free. But in practice, Android doesn't need to upgrade the OS to access recent apps and ship security updates for old versions of Android. You just lose access to new OS functionalities, but it has been a while since there was much to care about.
iOS 26 has been really hard on my 13 mini. Most menus lag, you have to wait sometimes 5 seconds for the control center menu to pop up sometimes. I dug my old Samsung S20 FE out of the drawer, applied the last few security patches, and it still runs more smoothly than the newer iPhone.
I agree having to work around this is ridiculous, but maybe consider a little MiFi router? Those are cool to have anyway.
I've had this experience too. One thing I've found that can sometimes help with laptops failing to connect is renaming your iPhone in the settings (which in turn renames the hotspot name)
Solid list. I’d like to add the following:
- All: Contact syncing with Office 365 results in stored birthdays getting moved forward by one day. - macOS: Bluetooth audio stuttering when going in and out of full screen view in a given app such as PowerPoint. - macOS: Unlock using Apple Watch will randomly stop working - macOS: Safari suddenly going out to lunch and taking 30+ seconds to load a page (fixed by force quitting the entire browser).
I gave up congratulation people with their birthday years ago because I don't trust the birthday calendar anymore.
And if you use it long enough you'll get reminders to celebrate grandpa's 113th birthday because the only way to remove entries from that calendar is to delete useful data from your contacts.
Back in the day of when cordless phones started to have displays with integrated address books, about once a year while visiting my grandmother I would help her remove all the dead people from her phone.
yes! same bug with multiple friends who are celebrating their 143rd birdthday and i get hilarious reminders every few weeks (its charming in some strange way and part of me will be sad if the fix it)
This rightfully deserves its #1 spot on Hacker News. I've experienced most of these bugs for longer than I can remember (and my memory goes back to the Apple II days. Maybe this will help shame Apple into fixing these problems.
Please add to the list "Launching Apple Music without you wanting to, at the worst possible moment", which is every moment, really.
There is even an app called noTunes to automatically close it. I've seen it get into a loop where it opens every single time it's closed. Of course Apple music is selling a subscription service when the app opens so no surprise why they open it.
So many of these cases on Mac where an entire app exists just to fix a bug Apple refuses to fix itself.
I have that app installed and for some reason it's started failing me recently...
Mail.app too
Is anyone else annoyed by Finder's terrible search box? Everytime I try to search something, it seems to insert random results in the list that have nothing to do with the term. I have to always explicitly click Filename so it only searches for files with that name.
I thought about adding that bug but it seemed like “search doesn’t work in this other thing” was just going to get repetitive (despite being true and annoying AF) and I had already spent way more time on it than I should have. Put in a pull request, tho. Happy to add it!
Spotlight search is infinitely more useful than the Windows 10+ start menu. 99% of the time I'm just using it to open an app or a recent document/download.
In Windows, if I hit [Win], type "fusion" (to open Fusion 360, an app in the "Start Menu" folder, for what that's worth nowadays), there's a 70% chance it will do a Bing search for "fusion".
It's more useful until it spontaneously stops working, at which point you're stuck until and unless it spontaneously decides to work again.
My favorite is how it’ll just forget which apps are installed. A list of like 30 items. If you had one job spotlight, it’s this
Spotlight works great for me but the index can occasionally become corrupted. There’s a set of commands you can run to force a rebuild if you’re having issues. I’ve had to do this a few times over the years. This is another place where it’d be nice if Apple had a GUI to manage things like this.
Just because something else is worse drones mean the other thing is good
Your autocorrect just wasted a full minute of my life (2s for re-reading, 8s for thinking about it, and 50s for responding.)
You can thank Apple for that. I even have autocorrect turned off yet it still insists on doing it... Most annoyingly it will change the word previous to the one I'm typing...
When I open Spotlight and type "fusion", it selects "Remove Autodesk Fusion.app".
I forget what combination of settings does it but my Windows start menu now only searches the two start menu folders. It's perfect, completely deterministic, instant.
Trying to turn the app launcher into the magic "accio <anything>" bar was a huge mistake. You can have a second UI element for search, I promise it won't scare me.
This is a Claude-coded website that invents metrics and data based on bald-faced lies, ex. the first example makes up that the search in Mail does not work 100% of the time and then calculates fantastical millions of hours wasted.
I can report it works fine, needed it to pull up 13 year old emails for me a couple months ago.
I absolutely abhor Apple’s software QC since 2010 but I don’t think a vibe-coded, vibes-based, fantasy, written by AI, with the sheen of numbers and reality is the way to do it, or a net-positive outlet for my frustration. At least on HN.
Huh. How else would you get a massive company that has let certain bugs sit for decades to address them? This method is probably just as ineffective as reporting another bug into the Black Hole of Bug Reports that is Apple, but this one is at least mildly funnier? YMMV of course.
But the bugs never existed in the first place? I hate HN is rife with inflammatory complain pieces like this.
The search bugs in Mail are absolutely real. They might not affect every user but I've had major issues on both macOS and iOS mail, and eventually gave up and switched to Gmail.
Have you checked if it’s the fault of your mail providers? The search function queries the remote mail servers in addition to the local cache. If the mail servers return garbage you get garbage results.
This was with an iCloud email address.
Maybe iCloud search is rubbish.
Mail search works flawlessly for me with Gmail and Outlook. It takes a sec but the results are always relevant.
As I used to ask field teams and PMs back when I was a SWE - provide the steps to reproduce the bug as I can't seem to recreate it.
I experience at least five of those bugs daily and it makes me so frustrated: Hotspot, airdrop, mail search, corner drag, text selection.
If you want to be that pedantic it does state "This site is satire. Not affiliated with Apple Inc. The bugs are real. The math is not. All estimates are made up. Your frustration, however, is valid." at the bottom.
The bugs are not real (inter alia, Mail app search does, in fact, work). Your being pedantic is my being reality-based.
All of the things on this website have affected my experience of macOS and iOS for a long, long time.
I definitely go straight to the Gmail website when I need to search for anything on my work account. Yes, I've got it set up to cache all the emails locally indefinitely. Have done for years. Even did so when my workplace used Office 365 instead of Google.
On Hacker News, of all websites, giving yourself the "Works on My Machine" badge is not a worthy contribution. It's dismissive of any experience other than your own.
He had it down as Mail search never works at the time of my comment. Never.
Don’t appreciate the drive by “that’s okay because it doesn’t work for me, btw, works for me is bad”. It’s fallacious. I’m not ignoring your lived experience. I’m calling out slop.
And I'm calling out the unearned arrogance of somebody who doesn't understand what hyperbole is, a fairly basic rhetorical device.
What arrogance? Is hyperbole a literary device, or genre? What’s the difference between hyperbole and making stuff up? When is it okay to say it’s making stuff up, when it could just be hyperbole? How is “you said it works for you but I say doesn’t work for me, trumped!” calling out arrogance?
Genuinely curious how anyone can use iOS autocorrect and conclude that it's not totally shit.
Do you think you might be taking it too seriously?
No I think I don’t come here for 0 effort fiction. YMMV. I don’t mean that dismissively. People seem to love it. It’s not an AI thing, it’s a “this is Spam, in the original sense of the word”
I mean, it reports FOUR HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS in losses due to Apple Mail.app search not working. Give them credit for... something.
I bought the latest Intel MacBook Air and after few months they released M1 MacBook Air. Then they release an update, I did as I should, and it broke my laptop! I lost all my data! They fixed it for me in a couple of weeks without providing me a substitute! And they were arrogant enough to behave like they did a favor to not charge me for the repair! It was 2020! My MacBook Air never became like before, and it died a couple of times in a year, which it recovered by itself. And some months ago it died, and it didn't recover! I lost lots of data I spent thousands of hours and I trusted that I can have them even if my laptop dies. Now, I have no way to recover my data!
Speaking of data loss, it's fucked up that Apple doesn't give a shit about your data.
Ages ago I shipped my iMac to them and it came back with a new HD. Hello? Maybe include the old drive so I can attempt to recover the data? I lost a year's worth of photos and a bunch of personal documents. This is when I started doing backups.
That really sucks, but they absolutely do tell you to back up all your data before sending your machine in for service. Involuntary hard drive replacements aside, your package could get lost or damaged in the mail.
Kinda difficult to do when the Mac does not turn on. Actually a technician came over to attempt to fix it, then just took it with him to ship it to Apple.
This exact thing happened to me with the update to Catalina. Had to send to fix, they were pricky arses over the ordeal. Sent back, it was never the same. Actually started seeing rainbow loaders.
The most damning permanent damage was that the wifi card never worked properly again and I had to connect an adapter, then a usb to ethernet adapter and use that. Which meant I had to sit in a specific disk at work if I wanted to use that computer.
To me, Catalina is the Vista of the mac world.
that’s horrible and i sympathize.
Unrelated, your comment is a little hard to read with all the !!!
Text selection peaked with Force Touch, where holding the space button, moving to start point, pressing down even harder to start selection en lifting finger at the end was sooo ergonomic.
I still miss 3D Touch. For me, iPhone XS was the peak iPhone.
Yeah, me too, that form factor was perfection. So pretty, so nice to hold!
I am a diehard Apple fan. I stuck with Apple through the dreadful 90s and fought for their relevance as a needed computing alternative in education spaces. I extolled their virtues. I hung on until Steve Jobs took over and helped things improve... quite drastically, in fact. I could never have imagined the widespread celebration of the hardware with the m series of chips. Quite an achievement.
But even now, I acknowledge the latest macOS release is dreadful. Just absolutely dreadful.
And the fix is easy - hire new young talent. Hire kids out of college. Bring in fresh faces who are going to speak the truth, who are hungry to make it better. Listen to them and do what they say.
Renaming files from a window title bar broke some years ago and has never been fixed. I most often want to do this in Preview, but every other app with clickable filenames in the title bar has the same problem.
The filename in the title bar has a down-pointing chevron next to it, indicating you can click it. You click it. A small drop-down window appears with the filename, the tags, and the folder where it is located. You edit the filename and press Return, as you would when renaming the file in Finder, or as you would when completing any text field. Nothing happens. The file isn't renamed.
Only if you press Tab (?!) is the file renamed. Insanity.
itle
> Apple Pay: Card Icon Changes Address
This has been driving me nuts. The old design was perfect. Who could possibly think this made sense?
It's even done the right way on Mac OS! Infuriating.
Done the right way?
Or they forgot to “fix” it?
I’m using native mail app of iOS/macos and search bar works for me. However, iOS has a persistent issue of not fetching new mails, even from iCloud, which has support for push updates. I inadvertently build a habit of opening mail app and refreshing.
I find it often won't even refresh when you click the little envelope "get mail" icon. That thing is like the "push button to walk" at crosswalks. A button connected to nothing, to make you feel like you have agency.
The AirDrop randomly not working one is really manifesting at the most inconvenient times.
Apple simply won't fix it.
I'm always dumbfounded by people constantly praising AirDrop. It hasn't worked properly more often than it did. And that's not talking about the times when you send something, it gets accepted, and it just ends up in a void, not to be found anywhere.
At the end of the day, in most cases, it would be preferable to just connect the damn thing with a cable and send things that way. If you send a large file, it takes a while, and having to redo the process because of some bug kills any benefit from the convenience of not having to use a cable.
It’s always been flawless for me.
It uses Bluetooth to establish a connection so I wonder if that is the source of some peoples problems.
Maybe that's it. It is really dependent on the radio environment indeed. And it uses Wi-Fi Direct for large transfers.
Once I had weird dropouts streaming to a friend's Bluetooth speakers because it had weird interaction with my Apple Watch, my iPhone, and his iPhone. That was in a cabin basically in the middle of nowhere...
But that's basically my point. Wireless everything is cool and convenient at first sight, but then you often have to deal with all kinds of problems, making you wish you could just connect a cable, browse the file system, and exchange stuff that way.
I have a friend who connects his Android phone to his Macbook, and he drags and drops the photos in/out of storage. Simple, efficient, no need for any cloud, no need for internet/wireless connectivity, no need to wait for any syncing, it just works.
That's the problem with the "it just works" philosophy. When it doesn't... you have no idea what's wrong and no way to fix it. A bolted hood over the engine.
All this s#it was already expected, because this is what happened when companies get big enough without competition or any kind of regulation.
This already happened in other markets and lots of people have warned this would happened again but nobody cared.
Now it doesn't matter anymore because Apple is so big that no matter what kind of s#it they do, nothing will hurt their sales, because people are trapped, depend on their stuff and don't have any other options.
I was given an iPad at work and had to make an Apple account to use it. Every time, the form on the website errored out with "Your account can currently not be created" without any further information. By trial and error, I figured out that creating an account with the exact same information on the iPad worked. Not the best first impressions of the "it just works" company.
Ok, it's not just because I'm trying this from my Linux computer with fake phone numbers to jailbreak the stupid iPad 3 I found in a drawer (and on which the registration form of course doesn't work anymore). Thanks.
A bug that’s persisted for 10 years at least is in the Music app. When you lose Wi-Fi the app will skip to the next song over and over and eventually freeze up.
On iOS, it’s not just Wifi but cellular too. I tried switching from Spotify (got tired of their constantly deteriorating UI/UX) but this was a dealbreaker. You can’t listen to albums in the car because if the phone loses coverage at the wrong time it just… skips songs? HOW does this get through testing and persist for so long?
So I cancelled Apple Music and reluctantly went back to Spotify. At least in Spotify, music playback is functional.
Haha, same. I actually prefer the layout and organization capacity of Music (I was an iTunes fan back in the iPod days), but there are so many things that don't work like you would expect them to or just plain bugs that it's too tiring.
Whenever I would enter a supermarket without network access, Music would just stop streaming after one song, no buffering. Spotify handled it just fine. Even the Spotify remote functionality is better and snappier than the godawful Music Remote. That is a separate app, because for some reason they can't integrate that functionality in the main app for their own hardware.
Apple is really in free fall; I don't think any of the top dogs actually use their stuff or care about it. It still looks good, and the base is strong, but now the cracks that started appearing a few years ago are becoming too big to ignore.
Checkout Museeks for a solid alternative on Macos.
I own an Android phone. The first time I tried to send a text from my wife's iPhone, I sent the wrong text 3 times in a row because autocorrect was convinced that it knew the word I wanted and I swear that the word was corrected only after I had committed to pressing the send button. At the time the autocorrect on Android was very mild; it's gotten more aggressive since, but still nothing like Apple's
Yes, every time you send a message from an iPhone you MUST append a trailing space, just to be sure it won't fuck up the last word when it sends.
Spotlight has really been bothering me lately, for months now, and it’s not even indexing all the time. I disabled all but applications and the calculator, because that’s all I use Spotlight for, and it still can’t find some apps that are in /Applications. Sometimes it’s some apps, sometimes it’s everything, and after rebooting it’ll sometimes reindex. No idea what’s going on, but today might be the day I install Quicksilver, if that’s still a thing.
I also had to type over reindex 3 times to get it to stick :)
Most (all?) Spotlight replacements depend on the same underlying index and system services that Spotlight provides and uses. High chance Quicksilver is just making 'mdfind' calls like everything else, especially since it doesn't look maintained anymore.
LaunchBar doesn't use Spotlight's data. And so, as a result, can't search for data inside files. That said, it provides a Search in Spotlight command – that you can assign a shortcut, if you wish – which returns its results in a new Finder window.
What about that text selection bug all OSes have had for 20+ years. I'm dragging to select text, and if I drag one pixel too far, it inverts the selection.
The time lost estimates here are comically implausible--if Apple bugs were wasting 32m person-years per year, with around 1.5b Apple product users total, this would imply that the average Apple product user loses 32m/1.5b ~= 2% of their life, or about 11 16-hour days, to Apple bugs. If that were happening to you you'd, uh, notice :)
“The bugs are real. The math is not. All estimates are made up. Your frustration, however, is valid.”
I’m pretty sure it’s way less than 2%, but I definitely notice running into the same bugs many times.
Wow, the first three "bugs" on this are so spot on.
The Apple Pay Card icon that changes addresses always gets me. It's not what I would expect it to do.
Somebody somewhere told Jobs that Apple products had too much "surface area"- a modern desktop computer with huge number of tunable options, too many programmable APIs, too many products, etc. Every one of those areas is a source of customer complaints and engineering cost, and eliminating them- even if there are users- leads to higher profits and higher average satisfaction.
Taken to an extreme, I expect that Apple will evolve to have only one product, with minimal surface area. A button you press that gives money to apple, in response you receive some sort of lovely bauble with no actual functionality. The cost to apple to maintain this would be quite small (they could probably survive with 10 engineers focused mainly on site reliability) and given the historical pattern of Apple customers (I am one), would be highly profitable.
Save a file from any application into a directory, say an Affinity Designer file. Then, export another version (jpg) from the same file and same application right after that and it will show a totally different directory, presumably the last directory you've exported that file type. Can't only be me who is annoyed by the behaviour, can it?
Something I’ve noticed recently is that I press notifications by accident a lot more frequently. They just always pop in right when I’m trying to do something else. I suspect it’s because of the smart widget UI at the top of the screen that shows now playing, sports scores, direction etc. We didn’t used to interact with anything up there!
But it’s extremely annoying to open a 300+ unread messages chat when I didn’t want to!
The autocorrect is a real pain, especially when you are using a correct and grammatical word, but Apple decides, F&ck you, you will use this other word instead.
And the text select has been broken for years, as the site points out. I thought it was a mobile thing until I used an Android, and it just worked.
These are minor irritations, but they are adding up so much so I'm thinking about Android...
It took me 4hrs or more to register an account for my child on ipad. It was spread across several days...
When got my work macbook I had to register an account on apple to download some app from the store, and it wouldn't send me sms to activate. I had to do it the next day.
I wonder what happens there, but it seems like a very unprofessional web development or a lousy A B testing
On iOS 26 (and I think before that as well) if I enable the sleep focus and disable it later it usually stays in sleep focus despite showing no focus is selected. Therefore I don’t get notifications and the wall paper on the main screen is dimmed. Requires a reboot to fix it but it defeats the purpose of having a phone if no one can contact me until I notice
Audio balance issues: for some reason on macOS the left right balance for audio will just change from being centered???
At least 6 years old.
https://superuser.com/questions/1516621/macbook-sound-balanc...
Still around as of 2025: https://www.techradar.com/computing/mac-os/its-2025-and-appl...
There’s a dedicated applet to fix this…
Most of these are fully on Apple, but for the Gmail and Google Contacts bugs, I'd say Google is at least partly to blame for positioning the open standards versions of their APIs (IMAP and CardDAV in this case) as secondary to their own proprietary APIs and not implementing them particularly well.
Mail just sometimes refuses to issue a server-side search via IMAP. It insists that it wants to search its offline database of downloaded mails. When it cannot find anything, it will even tell you that “Mail downloads and organizes messages when iPhone is locked, charging, and connect to Wi-Fi.” And my response to that is, it has had eight hours to do exactly that every night.
That's fair then (though I haven't hit it because I have all my mail downloaded). There's other bits in Mail that are flaky with Gmail compared to standard IMAP mail providers, though.
Yeah, Gmail's "implementation" of IMAP is essentially unusable. They basically force consumers to use their proprietary API.
We're building a cross-provider, cross-platform email client, and literally had to build special cases for all Gmail actions:
https://marcoapp.io
The upside is that it's fast... The downside is that it's NOT IMAP!
This is brilliant and about 50% of the top 10 bugs affect me regularly. Some (eg airdrop, mail search, spotlight search) are absolutely maddening. If this even slightly prods Apple into doing something about it, this would be a net win for humanity.
That is indeed maddening. Are you using that computer for professional work? That'd drive me bonkers if I was working on a project and had bugs in the OS bothering me "regularly". I myself drank the cool-aid back in 2012 and think it took me 2-3 years before I realized "Apple is the best at UX and stability" is so far away from reality it starts being funny, and finally migrated to a stable environment that works the same as when I began using it.
To add to the list: on iOS, if your music library is mp3s transfered on the phone with itunes, iOS randomizes the artwork of the mp3s, so a song will show a completely different artwork. Have experienced that for years, on multiple devices and across versions of iOS.
Ugh, this has happened many times for me, i curate my own music and very careful about it and sometimes after a sync this happens.
You have to delete the music app from the phone and then resync.
For me, this takes near a day with 100gb of music to retransmit
Getting HTML email signatures to work in iOS Mail is a trial and error nightmare, and it requires a second device.
Create an HTML email signature in TextEdit or some other rich text editor on macOS, copy it and paste it on iOS using Continuity Clipboard into the signature text field in iOS’ Settings -> Apps -> Mail -> Signature text field, and pray that it works.
When it does work, it ignores text size. Want your email signature to be in a smaller font size? Too bad.
The only workaround I’ve found is to copy an email signature from another email account that miraculously did copy over successfully, copy it on iOS and paste that in to another’s email signature field, and manually rewrite the whole thing.
Of course, the HTML links aren’t editable, and the Signature text fields don’t enable the “Add Link” item to the hover tools menu when selecting text.
Worst of all, even when the email signature is finally perfect, the Signature text field doesn’t preview it properly. If text is pasted in at a smaller text size, the preview still shows it at the default size. The only way to accurately preview an email signature is to draft a new email and hope the email signature displays like it did originally in TextEdit.
In short, never create a new HTML email signature on iOS. Create in on a Mac (source), copy it over the network with Continuity Clipboard, hope it works, and treat the iOS email signature fields (destination) as a never- or rarely-editable workspace.
Sometimes the bugs are features, I.e, natural scrolling different and inconsistent between mouse and mousepad without third party extensions. Thanks Apple!
I recently discovered that for some reason, macOS doesn't want to work with a mouse with a traditional scroll wheel. It just jumps erratically all over the place.
I tried using it because I forgot to charge my dumb magic mouse. I'm sure it can be fixed in some ways, but I really shouldn't have to. The mouse works just fine when plugged into a Windows PC.
I'm (and millions other people) are using macOS with a classic scroll wheel mouse perfectly fine. Are you sure there is not something messing with the trackpad at the same time ? (this looking erratically random?)
There is no trackpad connected, just the Magic Mouse that was charging. Maybe it is because of some setting stored inside the mouse (it's a Razer mini). I think it has something to do with the scroll speed that macOS cannot deal with.
As I said, I'm sure I can fix it, but the point is that it works just fine as is on Windows and Linux.
Logitech mice are appreciated on Macs because they generally make drivers to deal with macOS idiosyncracies. A generic mouse will probably work OK but will be painful to deal with. macOS expects scrolling to work with inertia because of their focus on the trackpad or touch surface for the Magic Mouse.
Having used both extensively, it's not all bad, and I think they actually got some things right, but the problem is they make it hard for 3rd parties to make hardware because the APIs are lacking or inaccessible. For example, they just enabled linear mouse movement without relying on 3rd-party software; Windows has had that option since basically forever.
Apple does have some good things, but you can't argue with the fact that they make it very hard to integrate 3rd-party solutions (display are the same, notably for brightness control, etc).
Its been a 4 years since I had to target a website for Safari, but last time I did it still had serious difficulties parsing 8061 compliant dates. If you Google safari/webkit iso date parse bug looks like its still on going lol.
Here's a fun one. Apple Music stops playing (lossless) tracks after 15 seconds.
You'll know it's going to happen before it happens as well, if the lossless icon doesn't appear within 1-2 seconds after playing a track.
I promise I'm not crazy, it's not just me. Just search for "15 seconds" in Apple Community: https://discussions.apple.com/search?q=15+seconds
I'm sure this is likely already fixed in the latest version of iOS and macOS, but I use Apple Music for Windows: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9pfhdd62mxs1
I switched from Spotify to Apple Music mainly for lossless audio. The Apple One Family subscription helped sell it. However, now I can't play non-downloaded tracks without waiting 5-30 minutes for the music to start playing.
My Nokia C2-01 purchased in 2013 worked for many years without a single (!) glitch. Of course it didn't pretend to do as many things as iPhone does, but for it was capable of it worked always with 100% quality.
I bought an iPhone13 mini looking forward for "quality", but after few years of usage I realized that the quality is exactly what I have lost:
• Time-to-time when I open a contact, the "Call" button is disabled without any explanation. Surprisingly turning wifi and/or bluetooth and/or mobile data ON and then OFF again results in the "Call" button becoming re-enabled. Is the call function not an essential functionality of the phone to be dependent on such nonsense? Imagine you have an emergency and need to call real quick. • Every time I open the "Notes" app it greets me with "Mobile Data is Turned Off" pop-up. Mobile data just to type some notes? Who do you have to send it to? • DND logic so complicated and buggy that I started using the flight mode to be "sure" that nobody calls through. • "Settings" icon keeps displaying the "1" badge in revenge for my refusal to set up my Face ID.
Well, I thought, at least this thing is a very good camera (which it really is). As if reading my thoughts, it started recording my landscape videos as portrait which I didn't manage to fix, so now I have to rotate the recorded videos on my PC.
Switch to Linux and take control over your hardware.
Yeah, it feels liberating. Every OS is full of UI annoyances and bugs, but on Linux you don't feel so powerless about it. You won't fix everything, but those few things that really bother you, you can fix.
that Contacts one hits hard, no idea how many hours I wasted trying to figure out what the hell it’s doing.
Just today was looking at Activity Monitor Disk tab, for an unrelated reason - sorted by Bytes Read, lo and behold ‘contactsd’ - the Contacts daemon, is in 2nd spot at ~400 _gigabytes_ read, right after mediaanalysisd. I don’t even remember last time I opened the Contacts app on my Mac. It felt like it’s gonna be another time sink with no solution, so I didn’t even bother to investigate more.
When I connect my iPhone to my dock with an external screen, it mirror the phone screen to the display, which is nice.
But, the keyboard never activates in any field.
If you use that to charge your phone (so the external screen is off), you can’t talk to people since the phone really don’t want you to have a keyboard at all as long as your connected.
On MacOS I use multiple desktops, and I have Finder assigned to "All Desktops" since it is useful to interact with so many other apps. For several major OS releases now, this setup causes any open Finder windows to render on top of all other windows for ~1 second when switching desktops. It creates an annoying lag, and pollutes what would otherwise be a smooth, pleasant experience.
I think a lot of these are just hard to reproduce. Take the AirDrop one, it's been 5 years probably since I had an issue with it, and I use it quite a bit.
Auto correct? No idea, I switch that off by default anyway since I switch between languages.
Most of the others - I haven't seen that at all. With the exception of a couple, like the macOS 26 resizing. That happened to me once. But I keep trying to reproduce it and I simply can't.
> …since I switch between languages.
You can easily switch between keyboard’s languages in the globe icon close to the spacebar.
Can't find it. I can see the keyboard layout per language but not actual languages. One layout is enough for all of my languages.
You need to enable more keyboards in System Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> Keyboards
I see now. But .. bottom line is, I don't want any auto correct. It'll force to capitalize and all kinds of stuff. And if you type in a language's dialect, you're basically stuck.
Several of these I don’t have any problems with myself, but the one that I get affected by all the time that I haven’t seen here, at least from as far down as I scrolled, is the bizarre typo that the voice dictation randomly inserts a capitalized word in middle of sentences. I’ve never understood that one. It’s like I can technically be hands-free most of the time except I have to go back and correct capitalized words for no reason.
Site looks to be by https://github.com/polymath-ventures/
Not sure what you mean by "looks to be by"? Their GitHub is linked at the bottom of the page
Spotlight opens the wrong application so many times with some odd heuristic favoring a random vscode.ts file (labeled as an mpeg-2 stream?) when typing "code".
But the best one is typing "ghos" and pressing enter as it highlight "Ghostty", but as your finger presses the key, spotlight swaps ghostty for some other random application (generally mail).
Had a similar thought today while marking up pdfs with my iPad. Half of the time I'm fighting with Files' ability to persist my changes after it frequently crashes. Why market it as an iPad if marking up pdfs is so scuffed? this has been happening for years, it's like Apple's desire to add new features tops the desire to fix long lived bugs.
This is spot on! I have experienced all these issues at one point or other and my spotlight search is frozen as I type this on a Mac mini.
Last time I made a satirical site I was banned from the registrar (I was "convincing" people that aliens were real apparently)
Connection-related bugs are the worst. Here I am, wishing that after 15 years of hotspot software and WiFi/BT enhancements I'd get painless hotspot, airdrop and general WiFi connectivity. My bad, still not possible.
But yeah Liquid Ass surely is lickable.
Apple software, especially Mac software, tanked ages ago.
And in the WiFi/BT department, they almost own all the stack. Guess Airdrop and hotspot would work all the time! Oops.
IIRC the animation that plays when you use ctrl+arrow keys to swap desktops is tied to the framerate so it's ridiculously slow on high refresh rate monitors.
also the passwords popup on MacOS only sometimes takes keyboard input, so if I want to insert a TOTP pin, I can't reliably use the tab key or worse the search bar to reach it.
The simple answer is that fixing any of these doesn't get those Software engineers promoted. And that has been the case for as long as Crag Federighi has been in charge of software. Yet he is extremely popular on HN and everywhere on the internet.
Yes it is the same in all other software company. But we expect better from Apple.
How about a Screen Time Parental Controls literally do not work, at all, just completely unusable and broken?
How about I can’t connect my AirPods to my watch to play music because my watch insists on acting as a remote control for my phone Music app, and support hasn’t been able to fix it for 5 years, over several watches and AirPods?
If you answer a call on the watch and have AirPods on, it can figure out to switch the audio in/out to AirPods for the call; it just gets handled by the watch. Then you have to awkwardly lean into the watch and listen very carefully because if there is any noise, you won't understand much because of the tiny speaker. Completely defeat the ecosystem argument, and I think the speaker in the watch is largely useless.
The Apple Watch is popular but not very good at anything, really. All the apps are more cumbersome to use than they are worth; you can't properly make a real custom watch face, and sports tracking is extremely basic without additional software.
Now do Google. A few that immediately come to mind:
* Accounts: Can't use a GSuite address for Youtube, Nest, or any other Alphabet offering. Never explained. 15 years of this.
* Sheets: Hide the sum option in the menu bar. After digging, you find the Summa character and click on it. Oh, it's a menu of functions, not sum.
* Search.
Particularly search on Google drive / gsuite docs. For a search company, it’s just embarrassing.
That you cant jump to the beginning or end of search results in gmail. You can only click page by page and only know the end is near when you know when the results get close to your account creation date. The only work around is to guess ahead with editing the results page number in the URL string. It's been this stupid annoying way since day 1 of gmail.
Also now seeing the stupidest copying of liquid glass in google's web interfaces. Like adding transperancy to some of their pop up info boxes just so ugly and pointless.
I have a lot of pet Apple bugs. Top of mind at the moment:
Why can't we adjust the order of photos in a Shared Photos album?
The same happens with their developer frameworks. I used to submit tickets (radars, as they call them) for framework bugs clearly reproducible in a few lines of code. They never got fixed over multiple OS releases, so I stopped bothering.
Syncing on Apple devices across the board is pretty bad. A great example is the Notes app. It took me a year to convince my wife to migrate our grocery list away from the Notes app. So many arguments about missed grocery items that never synced.
Out of these the text selection and the Apple Pay card button bring me the most daily pain.
Even writing this short sentence I’ve accidentally deleted words when I just wanted to move the cursor and it decides, no, you must want to select that whole word
> it decides, no, you must want to select that whole word
Yeah this arrogance where my tool decides what I want to do, and even if I put the cursor to where it will want, Apple will (un)helpfully move it. Because Apple thinks its users are retards and need help
Just typing on iOS randomly inserts the wrong characters: https://youtu.be/hksVvXONrIo
I thought it was just me until someone mentioned this on HN
The macOS login screen is broken since basically forever. Opening a macbook lid and choosing another user than the one already selected is a PITA. I can't even remember it working. And I have the issue on 3 macbooks.
Choosing another user on the current macOS is horrible beyond any corporate standards. Clicking a different user has a 2 second delay without any animation, and any interaction ("wait, have I clicked it?") in that time cancels it. Like no one has multiple users on their computers in the whole management chain? No one cares?
> Like no one has multiple users on their computers in the whole management chain? No one cares?
I frankly believe that those people are so rich that they obviously own at least one computer per family member.
On the same note, airdrop doesn’t work when multiple users are logged in. It’s rocket science to switch airdrop advertisements to currently active user, I guess..
Oooh so that's the reason !
or, you wake from sleep, and start typing your password because the input is there and focused, but it swallows your first character because it wasn't ready for input after all.
Press escape, select the other user, login?
Some other bugs:
1. Open a file using Preview, but it is behind all other windows. 2. If you connect to your own personal hotspot (iphone) on mac, you can't forget it and connect to someone else's hotspot.
I can't seem to reproduce the mail search bug.
A domain name registered one day ago. I think this is the first time I’ve seen a domain on its first/second day, other than my own domains.
I did not intentionally look it up. I have an extension installed that tells me domain age whenever I visit a site.
> Apple Pay: Card Icon Changes Address
This one is one of my pet peeves even outside of Apple Pay. My personal opinion is that almost all iconography is just reinventing the wheel. We already have a widely-accepted iconographic vocabulary already understood by a billion people: Chinese characters. The fact that English speakers can't read it is immaterial, because English speakers already can't read the icons we're already using. Using Chinese iconography in all languages will dramatically increase the legibility of the icons we use in apps.
(Or, we could just put regular text under the icon...)
It takes years of practice to memorise Chinese characters.
> (Or, we could just put regular text under the icon...)
I'll take that option.
I think most popular OS's these days have >5000 open bugs and some may get attention if they actually break something serious enough. Others may get plastered over in a new major OS update, which opens another 1000 bugs or so. I have no problem with a rolling number of bugs, but this is a tiny list of age-old bugs. I'd like to be in the room when Apple's people decide what to work on, but I bet I would get depressed instantly since they obviously don't use their products.
I have a lot of undeletable old photos on my iPhone. The photos are there, but no photo app shows the trash can icon. They aren't on iCloud or any other current device, so I'm thinking that at some time I must have done something like sync an iPhone I no longer have with a Mac I no longer have. I've usually just cloned one phone to the next, but I reckon that next time I may be in for a manual copying job.
This is a frustrating result of “syncing” an album of photos from a computer.
Apple decides that—despite you putting your album on your device—you are not allowed to alter the album in any way. You can’t edit photos or delete them…you must do those things on the computer instead.
It’s awful.
Just yesterday, I encountered a classic frustration.
I wanted to forward an image from one Messages conversation, to another one.
The “target” conversation was one that I’ve been having for a couple of years, with a friend.
In the “Forward” sheet, I select that friend’s Contacts card, and it moves to the ongoing (blue bubble) conversation.
I hit the Send button.
Green bubbles.
I get a failure to send message, saying it’s a bogus number.
Messages used my friend’s work landline, even though we’ve been communicating for years, on his iPhone line, and it put the bogus send into the iPhone conversation.
Good list.
WTF happened to iOS text selection? It's a shitshow now. First Apple decided that the cursor shouldn't snap to the space between characters. WHY? Why would I want to start a selection in the middle of a character? Oh yeah: I never would, and can't anyway. So why does the cursor go there?
Then there's the fact that if you press and hold and release, the "select all" option (and others) doesn't appear anymore. Try again. Try again. And then after the fifth? Seventh? try, suddenly you get the floating menu.
And then there's the now-often-useless magnifying glass, which frequently appears offscreen or behind the stupid notch.
And the window resizing. Ugh. It wasn't until what, the mid-2000s that you could resize an Apple window by anything other than THE LOWER-RIGHT CORNER. No other corners, and no edges. The sheer stupidity of this was galling.
When Apple finally "fixed" that, they did so in typical Apple fashion: grudgingly. They refuse to put frames on windows, so there's no clear area in which the cursor should become the resizing cursor. Is it any wonder that the resizing behavior is flaky as hell? And now it's even worse.
Some of these bugs are more well known but for some like AirDrop not working or hotspot not connecting I always thought “well it’s probably because some power setting / DNS config / ad blocker / whatever” that I accidentally changed from the default years ago.
Nostalgia is real but I do remember a not so distant past (around iPhone 4S or so) where AirDrop worked, autocorrect worked, text selection was flawed but predictable, WiFi connected and stayed connected etc.
What happened?
> Nostalgia is real but I do remember a not so distant past (around iPhone 4S or so) where AirDrop worked, autocorrect worked, text selection was flawed but predictable, WiFi connected and stayed connected etc.
The funny thing is all of those features are fine for me.
AirDrop and hotspot work 50% of the time for me. It’s a shame since they must own all of the stack for those technologies
My 2022 M1 macbook sound input will slowly have the volume lowered to where no-one can hear me, regardless of what the device I'm using as a microphone. I run a permanent applescript that keeps the input volume at 80%, updated every 5 seconds. Apple doesn't care since it's a rare issue, never seen anyone else with this problem and I don't see how taking it to Apple Support will help.
You forgot when autocorrect fixes your word the second time, in 50% of cases you hit send too fast and have to send a follow up correction or edit the message
I’m not sure if it’s a bug, but I find it frustrating that there isn’t a more efficient way to organize the grid of apps on your iOS home screen.
No podcast app bugs?
Are you even trying?
Podcast app in CarPlay: A episode of a show is playing. It has the episode name, the show name, and a date. None of them hint at being pressable (touchscreen). But one is. Guess which one? The date one. That’s the only one that’s interactive and the only one that takes you to the actual show with its library.
Podcast app on phone. 90% of the time the downloaded episode is not there even if you just downloaded it. Sometimes you have to have another “safe” downloaded episode from another podcast to FORCE downloaded episodes to appear. If you don’t have this safe reserve episode in your downloads, your downloads will be a black hole. Download a safe one, and suddenly the missing ones pop into the folder, or heck, generate the folder at all.
10% of the time the episodes will just fail while downloading without ever resuming.
OMG, "Apple Pay: Card Icon Changes Address" bit me recently!
I selected a different credit card on Apple Pay and my skis were shipped to my ex-wife's house instead of mine, because it quietly changed the address!
Good thing we're in the same town...
When I switch between macOS users frequently, in 2-3 days I get pink garbage on the screen and/or the windows start literally falling apart and macOS at some point hangs with a rotating wheel. On a 128GB RAM M3 Max. This persisted across multiple macOS versions and two logic boards.
I guess it’s about priorities and not prowess, but it is shocking/fascinating the things Apple seems really bad at.
The Mac is funniest of all. I can’t imagine Tahoe drives an upgrade cycle. I buy a Mac for the hardware. Why not refine it? I would love to have a Mac with a better OS. (Don’t troll me about Linux. It’s worse.)
Hm, what’s worse? To be incapable or simply not to care enough?
I laughed at “autocorrect will die on this hill.”
The one about Spotlight not searching for files, I assume that's like Windows Explorer, which also famously has a terrible search.
Why do these large companies reliably struggle with file search but third party software does it instantaneously, including reading the NTFS partition table for speed?
> The credit card icon doesn't change the credit card
Ha. I thought I was the only one who's cursed this every single time I need to change payment (which is often)
> You just wanted to move the cursor. Now everything is selected.
Holding the space bar is your friend on this one. I recently learned, holding two fingers will move with selecting.
Apple systematically underinvests in boring reliability work compared to shipping new features and hardware
Tim Cook is "stepping down" soon. Do you think his replacement will fix these things? I stopped using Apple stuff shortly after Steve Jobs died. Linus is still alive, but I wonder where I'll move once he is gone.
> $6.4 trillion
Total time value lost to text selection games sounds about right.
When I just selected that figure, I had to select twice because double tapping “trillion” then grabbing a text selection endpoint never works the first time.
I love this idea, and agree the bugs are important and embarrassing, but find the “it should only take Apple 320 hours to fix Mail search” to be so insulting that it ruins it for me.
Yeah, some of the estimates to fix are ridiculous. 40 hours to fix auto-correct?? On how many devices?
Yes, they acknowledged the numbers are completely made up. But, even with a 100x or more increase in those estimates the point would still stand. Why undermine the argument with such wildly silly (and, as you say, insulting) estimates?
The page should focus on the bugs, since there's no shortage of them. But clicking on "Change payment method" to change payment method is not a bug, is just bad UI.
This is cute and I hate stubborn Apple bugs as much as anyone. But these $100 billion figures should be weighed against the hypothetical trillions that Apple has contributed to humanity.
Air Drop .... just generally doesn't work, often.
I’ve encountered several of these, but (at least on iOS 26.2), I can’t reproduce the typo one.
> Autocorrect Won't Take No For An Answer. You fixed it. It unfixed it. You fixed it again. It unfixed it again.
My experience is after the system makes the first autocorrection, the word is underlined, allowing me to revert to the original spelling. Then subsequent instances of the word aren't autocorrected.
It’s true though that if I leave the context and enter the same unrecognized term elsewhere, it’s the same grind. The only fix for this is to spotlight search for “Text Replacement” settings page to essentially add it to the iPhone’s dictionary. Clunky, but personally only have had to do this twice.
I’m not sure it it’s a bug but I can’t believe more people aren’t talking about it: When you use apple maps and your phone is locked and you want to unlock your phone, for some reason it takes like 5 seconds or something to unlock the phone which feels like forever. The ui feeling insanely unresponsive and weird, you have to swipe further than usual and it takes way longer. It feels like the phone is fighting you! How dare I want to use my phone while navigating! (Even when walking)
I think what’s happening is that face ID doesn’t activate until you stop swiping, where usually it would start when you look at the phone or pick it up? Presumably because you’re going to be looking at the phone a lot when using maps.
God I hate it so much. I didn’t use apple maps for years because of it but then I switched to apple maps because of some egregious privacy violation by google maps that I can no longer remember.
Also applies to other apps that work when your phone is locked like phone calls.
Yeah this is a good one. I’ll add it. It really is so bizarre, it takes like three unlocks.
As the list of bugs grows, it would be helpful to have some sort of floating table of contents / quick navigation component to quickly navigate between bugs - just an idea :)
The most egregious bug/s I've encountered in recent years is the utterly cursed tab management in iOS Safari.
A couple of times a year it will just nuke all my open tabs (450-500) and present me with a delightful blank screen. Before that it will mislabel the active tab group on and off before giving up entirely.
Quick action on my part stops the destruction syncing & I usually end up recovering them on my Mac & then save them as a tab group.
But literally just an hour ago, iOS Safari looked like it nuked ALL MY TAB GROUPS. Ugh. They were gone; swiping right led to the "New tab group" screen. Frantic backing up and a restart later, and the tab groups are back, as though the phone was like "just kidding!". FML. So much for that backup plan.
UI bugs are one thing, but how is that level of data loss acceptable in a modern operating system? Boggles the mind.
(And don't get me started on the UI track wreck that is the iOS-inspired/inflicted bookmark management on macOS Safari, where all Mac UI conventions went out the window for some reason.)
Very often I'll close a tab, realize I need to open it again for some reason, long press on the + button and it just isn't there. I feel like re-opening a closed tab fails more than it works.
Also sometimes the back button will just freeze or not take you back. So I try hitting it again, it takes me 2 steps back in my history (this is fine), then I press forward and it takes me to the end of history, so I hit back again and it takes me 2 steps back. And the page I actually wanted to go back to is just gone from my history. I know there's a lot of whacky JS messing with history that happens on web apps, but it will often happen on HN when the article I clicked on is a plain text blog with minimal JS and definitely not altering the history state.
Edit: This literally just happened to me after writing this comment, with the post about turso database. I clicked the HN comments, clicked the post link (to github), read for a bit and clicked back. And the comments page is just not in my history.
I also don’t understand the back button at all on Safari iOS, I think one version it just stopped doing its one task correctly. It’s messing with my mental model of how I arrived at each tab. Currently:
Safari iOS: Be on a page, tap hold a link, click Open in new tab, go to new tab. The Back button should be grayed out and isn’t, and clicking it closes the tab.
Chrome iOS: Be on a page, tap hold a link, click Open in new tab, go to new tab. Back button correctly grayed out as the tab has nowhere to go back to.
macOS Safari also has fun tab bugs.
If you have a window with only one tab in it, and drag that tab to another window to merge them, the window disappears and they merge... right? Nope, if you look in your Windows menu, you now have a phantom window with no tabs in it that you have to reveal and close manually.
Randomly when I go to close a tab it will say "you have 2 tabs selected, do you want to close both". I didn't even know selecting multiple tabs was a feature, so OK maybe I had held down shift while switching tabs at some point? Nope, switching tabs (to deselect any tabs) doesn't change it, it still thinks I have some phantom tab selected somewhere.
These have both been there for years.
Yep.
And there are even more macOS Safari bugs. One is that history search won't work; you'll can type in the search bar but it won't filter the list. At least a few years old. Another bug I've been getting for a few years is that sometimes I'll launch Safari and some tabs will be blanked out, often pinned tabs. No URL in the bar, no back button, the site is just gone and only a blank tab remains.
Another one is text input. Type a long enough piece of text in a website's text box and eventually it'll get messed up, or your text will be partly duplicated, or the box will be half-broken and you need to copy your text, refresh the page and paste it back before continuing.
Bookmarks sync is still an unreliable train wreck. Sometimes they'll be moved out of folders and into the bookmarks menu. Sometimes they're gone and you've lost them, which has never happened in any other browser.
And of course, Safari is the only modern browser where I still get infrequent browser crashes (not tab crashes). Something rarer on Chrome and Firefox than a lottery win.
Mine “favorite” bug is the auto-replace of I->O on iOs. O think that’s a real strange one, and really wonder whether anybody ever uses “O think” in English.
Are you sure it's the auto-replace and not the dynamic keyboard doing its dark magic?
My iPhone always replaces « wow » by « WoW ». So annoying
That does sound annoying.
I have a dozen regularly typed words that I have had to set up string replacements for (in General -> Keyboard -> Text Replacement) to work around recorrect the autocorrect.
It used to be possible to tell autocorrect to ignore certain words and add them to the system dictionary (by typing the word, having jt autocorrected, hutting backspace and fixing the autocorrected word, and repeating the process 2 or 3 times), but that inexplicably stopped working for me a few years ago.
Seriously its time for a new OS. I mean a non-google, non-apple, non-linux, non-microsoft one.
I'm not sure four examples of failure, each developed under very different conditions, is the best argument for success with a 5th ;)
Apple Screentime. 100 settings. If you crack the code it works. One wrong setting and the childs device is as open as a book.
Nobody on the Screentime team can actually use this product, because it's been totally bugged for a decade.
Mail search is a joke. HoudahSpot was the best way to search your mail right up until Apple made that stop working.
For email app on Mac, I’ve been using MailMate for a few years now and quite like it. Once you sync the mailbox, search is basically instant.
And for even bigger search tasks, Foxtrot Pro is quite good too. Not cheap, but it is fast, and the tool I reach for when I need to find something and when Finder search don’t find it
Bugs Apple loves? It must be all of them, because they hardly ever fix any. And they make more of them with each OS release.
Nobody ever gets promoted from fixing bugs, no matter how bad the bugs are. And this is true even in much smaller companies.
Not sure if it is a bug, but not being able to uninstall Developer Tools or Rosetta when you are done with it.
All of those would be so much better if there was at least some way to get a proper error message or status message.
I feel heard. Auto-correct un-correcting what I corrected three times in a row is maddening.
I wish more people would upvote this. Ride to number 1 for a few days.
No one cares anymore.
Everyone sits on giant balls of mud and those who built those balls are long gone. Fixing any of this would mean wading through and fixing endless legacy code at the risk of introducing new bugs. Some of it has hardware and radio broadcasting quirks involved which probably narrows down the people capable to understand the problem to almost 0.
And of those 0 people, no one gets promoted for fixing the incredibly buggy AirDrop. No one even knows how to replicate those bugs. Some iPhones in the wild sometimes stop being able to be found by other iPhones in the wild. Yikes. How do you even begin? Who's gonna write some debug code for a debug app for an iPhone in a lab and then runs back and forth with 50 other iPhones that also need to run debug code to finally get one in the state where it's unable to find or be found and then check diagnostics the communications hardware returns only to find out you need more diagnostic code.
Sync issues? Yikes again. Who the fuck would want to touch a system where any new bug could mean the destruction of trillions of photos and the wrath of OVER A BILLION of users. Flaky connections, many clients, sync algorithms, space on device limits, quota in the cloud limit, offloading of images. Also, once again, how do you even reliably replicate this issue which sporadically happens and sporadically resolves?
At scale and beyond critical mass, love and care and quality software are not rewarded. They are extra costs, just like human support agents.
My favorite one is Calendar, where you just made a new calendar entry and if you hit Esc to make the window go away, it will delete the whole thing. It isn't a dialog box, there is no save. If you hit close, it will close, if you click away, it will close, but if you hit Esc it will delete silently.
I asked people that work at Apple, they hate these bugs as well, but they don't fix them!
I actually keep the Gmail app installed on my iPhone specifically for searching my mail. It's infuriating.
For the autocomplete one: on MacOS you can press ESC and get rid of the proposal.
esc is the dismiss-the-modal-and-lose-all-your-work key.
I simultaneously love this collection and hate that it exists
My iPhone and macOS stopped syncing my main iCloud calendar. Isn't that crazy? How is this even possible at company such as Apple?
I'm Ukrainian and my Apple Notes aren't searching case-insensitively. How could such large company not implement case insensitive search for Cyrillic?
The hotspot issue is my absolute pet peeve. It is so bad for me that I just had to accept that I have two options for hotspotting:
1. Go to settings and change my phones name then connect. Every. Damn. Time.
2. Use a cable and hope the MacBook Pro picks it up.
Honestly the quality of iPhones has deteriorated to a point where my next phone will just be something like an oppo or xiomi. I’m done paying £500+ for a phone that doesn’t do what it’s meant to while forcing a load of crap I don’t want down my neck
The hotspot errors drive me insane. You’re basically connecting two device from the same company that happens to make both software and hardware on those two devices. I can’t understand this.
That email bug is the worst.
I'm still waiting for apple to fix ringtones on siri generated alarms
Idk what’s wrong with me but I’ve never run into any of these!
What about the "Sign in to iCloud" one?
Phone: I know you probably opened your phone for a reason, but would you mind signing in to iCloud? [OK] [Maybe Later]
Me: Maybe Later.
Phone: Ok, but would you mind signing in to iCloud? [OK] [Maybe Later]
Me: Maybe Later.
Phone: Ok, but would you mind signing in to iCloud? [OK] [Maybe Later]
... repeat infintely until...
Me: Ok. [Then find the little arrow in the top left corner to get back to phoning].
Extra points for immediately locking my AppleID every time I finally break down and type my password in, forcing an email => browser "unlock your appleID" journey.
Some days I go through this whole experience four times in a row before it finally settles down. Then I make the classic blunder of opening one of my iPads and the whole thing starts again on both devices.
I assume it's just their form of blackmail to force me to upgrade to their 2FA thing so that they can finally lock me out of my old devices for good.
if AI reall worked for software engineering then all these bugs would've been fixed
this is a great showcase of how good Mac OS is compared to something like Windows when we bicker about tiny things like the address field in the apple pay app.
Meanwhile on Windows we could talk about unreliable updates causing major bugs (explorer crashes, audio failures, slow performance, taskbar issues), poor quality assurance leading to regressions, bloatware. not to mention the hardware is in a different league.
From hardware perspective MacOS is way worse, because you can't even use it on whatever hardware you wish it to run on. (While windows work on a lot of stuff and Linux can run even on microwave and a toaster if needed.)
:V
how can we make sure Apple leadership sees this?
A very niche one from me as a developer.
Apple frameworks for exif editing do strange thing, and exif is altered even if you never touch it.
In particular for me, the gps location cannot be written at the full accuracy allowed, and overwrites accurate data.
For the location, exif allows 3 rationals, for degrees, minutes and seconds, but apple ignores the seconds.
The Apple Pay one drives me crazy
Searching email in Mac Mail is truly horrendous. I honestly like the program and use it almost daily … but when needing to search I absolutely open a browser window and login / search. The search has been a disaster in Mac Mail well over a decade.
This is another level of petty, I love it Maybe it will inspire them to hire more engineers and we can kill two birds with one stone.
This is never an issue with number of engineers, it's an issue of business priorities.
Large tech companies have plenty of engineers to fix bugs, but most of them are on projects trying to 10X things instead of paying down debt.
Apple used to be unique in it's immunity to it, they even shipped an OS update claiming it was only big fixes and not features which is unthinkable these days. Over time there's much less focus on polish from them though.
Will maintenance and bugfixes get them promoted? "Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome"
More engineers aren't the solution. Less engineers are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law
> Maybe it will inspire them to hire more engineers
Given Apple's recent software quality, this would likely just let them ship more bugs.
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An issue that frequently annoys me is the keyboard not opening in apps that use a WebView, eg. progressive web apps.
https://kagi.com/search?q=webview+no+keyboard+ios
They have all the interests to keep PWA unsupported since they don't pay the app store tax.
I stopped reading at the very first bug:
> Mail Search Doesn't Work
For me mail search works very very well. Ironically, it's one of the features that convinced me to use Mail as my primary and only email client.
I'm wondering if the author of the rant is using the search input of the single message/thread, instead of the global one, or if they are not aware that the global search is by selected account, so if you want to search in all accounts you have to first select the unified inbox. By the way, this is another awesome feature of Mail, while the search string is in the input, you can switch accounts and see the different results per account.
Before anyone asks: I have 5 email accounts, between them, I have way more than 100.000 messages (might be 5x, I don't have the Mac now to check) and they're all synced on my devices (it's ~24gb of messages)
Great, "Works on My Machine" award for you. Well done.
Another one I enjoy is the adventure of making a captive Wifi portal screen appear. Sometimes it will, sometimes it won't. Who knows why? Just reboot and try again.
Is the eternal delay bringing up the MacOS native colour picker in the list? Click on a colour to change it, wait about 10 seconds, eventually it appears. Every. Single. Time.
I think it's a bit of bullshit. the first bug (Mail search) with millions of people allegedly affected somehow never affected me on 5 Apple devices in 10+ years. what??
Glad it doesn't happen to you, but it happens to me and others all the time. Mail.app's search is completely broken.
It makes me think people misconfigure their imap servers... for me and people i know it works better than gmail
This is obvious AI-generated web design style.
You're not wrong — but actually the prompt I gave it was "invert Apple's design style." I think it did a reasonable job?
It’s just Claude code house style, it’s as identifiable as Bootstrap. It didn’t invert Apple anything.
Speaking of AI-induced delusions, why did you submit this to HN?
It made me cringe to see its AI prose in AI code with completely made up bugs (really, the Mail search bar doesn’t work?), with made up numbers based on made up things as the spine of the content.
They're real bugs all right - have you ever tried to search a gmail account via apple mail?
I can report it works fine, needed it to pull up 13 year old emails for me a couple months ago.
I suspect the point was never to win awards for web design, just to put some content on a page.
Is it? Looks good to me.
At this point AI-generated doesn't really mean "bad", it's just a distinctive style.
I couldn't actually get past this websites terrible UI.
The terrible UI of a straight-forward document separated into distinct blocks, paragraphs and charts that are easily read, that scrolls from from top-to-bottom? Yeah, awful.
Ah, you can add to that list messages never showing you your attachments
Have a thread going with someone for years? Yeah good luck seeing more than 20% if anything you’ve ever sent each other
No no no, please don't try to shame them publicly, because they will rewrite it in SwiftUI and it's going to be even worse!
They really should start using better models for autocorrect and autocomplete. My autocomplete is total bs
All these are so infuriating. It's crazy what a nice metal case and good hardware can make people forgive.
This is satire, but it is so real that it hurts. I have encountered all of those bugs and more.
The worst part is the delusional Apple fanboys who will pretend it always works for them because they have associated their ego with the ownership of Apple devices.
Google might be bad, but at least it works most of the time. And hilariously, Microsoft, well-known for bugs galore, actually manages to make softwares that are less infuriating in the long run.
Imagine if life was this zero sum
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The first one is pretty funny because Gmail search itself has a lot of issues.
iOS user here of a few years, never hit any of the bugs in this article.
Maybe Apple didn’t fix them because the bugs never existed in the first place.
Maybe you just aren't perceptive. There's always a % of users that won't notice the most egregious bugs or design mistakes, just like there's a % that's way too sensitive to the most minor issues.
The article lists very obvious functional regressions (that I use everyday), I would not have missed them.
I can't believe that anyone in the world has had Airdrop work for them perfectly, every time, every day. It has a less than 50% success rate with me, and that makes it sound better than it is.
It has worked for me every time, at least on iOS 18. It used to conk out when storage is low.
It's funny that a trillion dollar company which which was originally built by Steve to be the front-runner of tech and innovation and was supposed to provide the best user experience to end users is actually turning out to be the most annoying or frustrating one in deliver what user ACTUALLY needs.