Apple in 2017: Report Card
sixcolors.com
sixcolors.com
I have been a faithful iOS user since the 3G, and yet the SE I just bought will probably be my last iPhone. Everything since iOS 8 has just been a travesty. Can anyone explain this?
I've had a generally rock solid experience with iOS11 so far (and I have a 6+ with a degraded battery to boot - things still operate fine, never needed to reinstall fresh or anything).
I _will_ say that Tinder has a huge issue in their app, where whatever the hell they're doing in the background balloons out of control and seems to cause some kind of memory pressure on the device. I don't use Snapchat so I can't comment if it's the same issue there, but on my phone it's Tinder-specific: literally no other app has this issue, but the simple act of opening Tinder and swiping through a few will cause the device to go crazy and silently kill other apps in the background for some reason.
I originally thought this was just my 6+ (i.e, maybe the degraded battery or something), but I've tried it on some development devices I have and it exhibits the same thing for me. My best guess is that the crowd that uses Tinder is willing to ignore that kind of issue because... well, it's Tinder, people are on there for a reason.
Re: wifi/bluetooth, I actually vastly prefer the way it is now. It took some getting used to but it just makes more sense.
Of course, your mileage and experiences may vary, so what do I know.
I am not loud about that because I don't care anymore because none of the devices on the market suit my needs, and I gave up on that ever changing.
I think my case is more common than any loud opinions out there.
I actually think this is a part of the problem. We watched essentially a completely new product category invented in front of our eyes and watched it mature. The lowest hanging fruit were picked years ago (by 2012, in fact![1]). Android caught up to iPhone in a very serious way. What's left to do?
I feel like both platforms are in a state where they're 'innovating' just for the sake of it, for marketing, because people still expect the giant leaps that we had in the earlier years. Everyone knows this (Apple made a whole ad about 'not much has changed'[2]).
[1]: https://daringfireball.net/2012/05/ios_low_hanging_fruit
Phones physically break a lot. There should be better ways than rubber cases or glued rings to help people not drop the gigantic phones we have now.
Wearable integration is limited and uninspired. Aside from bulky watches and bracelets nothing got attention.
Bluetooth connectivity still seems like a dumpster fire, things like airpod are coming, but it’s far from a solved problem in my opinion.
In the same vain communication among devices owned by the smae person is still primitive. We now have computers, phones, tablets, speaking cylinders, NAS and media serveds and short of buying every single one of them from the same company they won’t speak together.
I actually think this is a symptom of the same problem. 'Wearables' were/are an attempt at creating a next 'iPhone' - new device category to get big wows for every year. Unfortunately, the market need wasnt/isnt really there for it, apart from some fitness accessories.
Could talk at length about what macOS needs better... although I still don't think it's worse than Windows or Linux/BSD, like some might.
It runs great. (Still on 10.3.3) Rock solid.
It may be that the SE is an ignored and untested platform. A lot of native Apple software is just poorly designed for it. By which I mean super low density information display, that leaves touch controls squeezed down to unusable sizes. And some of the controls are just buggy. The audio controls in portrait mode from the slide up pane overlap in their hit targets, making it unreliable to play pause etc.
I suspect many of these issues go away on the bigger phones. I just really don't want a bigger phone. And seeing the low quality trend of all of Apple's software these days, Android is looking more and more appealing. If I'm going to have to buy a bigger phone, I'll probably just jump ship entirely to check it out, as I feel that i have nothing to lose on the software quality side anymore.
That makes a lot of sense to me. Swift is a great language, but it did a lot to turn iOS development into more like Javascript development. I fear that with the addition of garbage collection rather than reference counting, programmers have become lazy and forgotten they are still working within the constraints of what’s essentially an embedded device. In the Objective-C days, devs were more exposed to that side of things on a regular basis, and I think that experience deeply affects the way one thinks about resource usage and optimization. I have no doubt that a bulk of Apple’s application teams writing Swift today are former web devs, not systems or embedded developers as was the case when mobile software first came about from ‘07-‘12ish
Swift is nothing like JavaScript at all. It's not garbage-collected, it's reference counted with ARC – exactly like modern Objective-C.
Compare a UI framework that uses garbage collection on the hot path to one that uses ARC, it’s night and day when it comes to smooth animations and responsiveness.
One of the most acclaimed references about GC algorithms in Computer Science.
Reference counting is a GC implementation algorithm.
What you call GC, is a tracing GC algorithm.
Cycle collectors for reference counting GC algorithms are also described on the book.
I'm aware people call refcounting garbage collection. That doesn't make an equivalency, and (to use your terms) it doesn't make tracing GC and refcounting the same thing.
You're being needlessly pedantic, plenty of people have conversations about "refcounting vs GC", do you always come in with an "aaaactually, refcounting is a kind of GC" whenever you hear the discussions?
Putting two algorithms that belong to the same domain, automatic memory management, against each other, tends to lead to conclusions that aren't necessarily correct.
For example, any reference counting implementation that uses cycle collectors or hazardous pointers, has a partial tracing GC implementation as well.
Yes, refcounting is a kind of GC. Very nice, you’re very smart.
But colloquially nearly everyone knows what everyone else is talking about when they say “this uses refcounting” or “that uses GC”.
We all know what each other mean, you’re being incredibly tedious by correcting people’s use of a very common term.
Basically: shut up, we get it.
FWIW, I've had trouble with this in the past on an Android.
It seems both Snapchat and Tinder are terribly inefficient and highly problematic.
I'm willing to give Apple this one, those two apps are mainly at fault here.
For what it's worth, I have seen nothing of the short. So where that leaves us?
>* I literally cannot use Snapchat and Tinder at the same time - it causes them both to crash.*
So maybe that's in Tinder and Snapchat? Why would it be the iOS's fault? I use 100s of other apps (never used those 2), and don't have a problem.
>Turning off wifi and bluetooth no longer actually turns them off, and so I have lost all control over my own device's power usage.
That's an explicit decision from Apple, and is meant to make it easier to use their BT/WiFi based peripherals, not some software fault caused by a bug. Besides that's only true for the shortcut menu -- you can still switch off both totally from the Preferences.
When I do harder work I tend to drop into awesome, but not everyone can handle a tiling window manager.
I've moved all of my systems over to it and couldn't be happier.
I would like to use a tiling WM for development but Sway (understandably) still has a long way to go. Not really interested in awesome or i3 at this point with Wayland on the horizon.
Xfce4 is definitely very light on resources, though.
http://tidbits.com/article/17757
Increasingly the Google Photos iOS/desktop uploader apps offers a significantly more robust sync experience for me on my Apple devices.
The pricing is fine until you hit the 2TB cap (very easily done if you use Family Sharing especially), at which point you are hosed. Even offering the ability to pay $x per GB over this cap would be a lifeline. Again Google have much better options for this. That the default free amount of storage hasn't changed in years from 5GB for all your devices is arguably pretty mean in 2018.
Honestly, I don't understand iCloud for photos. I understand iCloud drive, it's a server. iPhoto's interaction with iCloud feels suspiciously like sync, so I actually have no confidence in it.
I don't know about Final Cut, but Logic has been getting constant and significant updates. Today we received 10.4 which included new plugins and features for free.
To be honest I'm starting to fall in love with the Mac again after a couple of years of frustration. Hopefully this is only the beginning.
No issues after a year.
Interesting. Apparently Dan has figured out how to recharge the woefully inadequate battery while the watch is on his wrist.
Wearing the watch for 23 hours a day is manageable if you are diligent about when you charge it [1] and when you use flight mode [2]. Personally I do not bother with this but if you were someone who valued sleep tracking via your Apple Watch then you can find ways to make it work.
[1] https://www.sleepwatchapp.com/charging-apple-watch-for-sleep...
[2] https://pillow.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/1197217-...
Vulnerabilities come and go on every system, but Apples is actually very good at mass deploying fixes to their whole product line very fast.
Apple's security problems recently may be obvious and occasionally severe, but they have been limited in scope and quickly fixed. I don't think they even come close to Intel's recent woes, Microsoft around the turn of the century, or Equifax, especially as Apple's security has had some very visible wins against the US government recently.