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Comment by hylaride | Hacker News Reader

There have been glaring bugs/issues lasting ages in both MacOS and iOS.

For years apple mail on iOS would always show 1 unread message in "all mail" for gmail.

On my iPhone 11 pro (and the 6S i had before it) the camera app will sometimes only show a black screen and a freaking reboot is needed to get it working again. I've missed out on many moments with my toddler because of that.

Multi-monitor support was so good on MacOS up until maybe 5 years ago. You could easily PIN apps to certain monitors and virtual desktops on specific monitors. If you started an app on a laptop and then connected to external monitors apps would automagically go where they were supposed to. Now it's a complete mess.

MacOS's UI seems more jerky in the last two major releases.

Time machine's performance has slowly gotten worse and worse, leaving me having to cancel backups just so I can go home.

I could go on. The worst part? These have all been ignored open issues that other people have submitted and for years they just sit there...open.

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I’ve always chosen Apple because there’s always been very little friction, thus very little frustration. However, the past year or two has been very frustrating.

Taps on my iPhone 11 Pro sometimes don’t register because it’s in the middle of an animation or it’s just unresponsive. Moving apps around has become the biggest pain. Apps are killed in the background after about 5 minutes. Typing has become a huge pain to deal with autocorrect and swiping. Sometimes holding the space bar doesn’t move the cursor and when it does there’s almost a full second until it returns to normal typing mode from “cursor mode”. Sometimes the lock screen is completely unresponsive to touch. Sometimes the screen doesn’t even come on until 30 seconds after hitting the power button leaving me to wonder why I’m staring at a disabled screen. Sometimes the phone will lock and require the pin instead of FaceID for no discernible reason. Some of the stock apps have become the buggiest apps I use.

Finally, I woke up this morning with my phone completely off despite it being on charger and with a full battery, which means my alarms didn’t go off and I was late for work. My guess is it tried to auto update in the middle of the night and wouldn’t turn itself back on. I’m basing that on the fact that I had a notification saying the update failed and I had to start the install again manually once I did finally get to work.

That’s just iOS. macOS is becoming equally frustrating. I’m seriously considering moving to Android, but I don’t know how much better (or worse) that would be considering I haven’t had an Android phone since a couple of years before the iPhone 4 released (had a Windows Phone in between Android and the iPhone 4).

I moved to Android a couple of years ago as I was so frustrated with all the issues I was having (after being an iPhone user since the first iPhone) only to realise Android is the same mess of bugs and issues. It made me come to the conclusion that tech in general has just lost its path now, and the constant push for higher specs and more features has led to devices that suck at their basic use cases (but look at those pixel-level photo comparison!1one!).

I ended up switching back to an iPhone 8 this year, as it’s the last iPhone I found to actually “just work”.

I wish I never broke my iPhone 8. The Xr is terrible.

Tech has always been terrible. What was unusual about the iPhone was it just worked.

I think this is the important takeaway for founders and product owners. People will eventually take "just works" for granted. If you make that your value prop (and you should) it is critical to continuously invest in ensuring your product always "just works". It doesn't matter if the alternatives don't. Your users will eventually turn on you.

I think it's an important take away for product owners - if people chose your product because it 'just works', they aren't going to be happy when you change it so it doesn't 'just work' -- i.e. introducing reliability bugs, changing useful features, etc.

They may not leave immediately, but at some point a competitor will come up with a 'just work', and it will be very hard to get them back.

Interestingly, with a few exceptions (looking at you, Xcode), stuff barely ever crashes anymore in my experience.

Instead the issues are a lot more frustrating: failure states where no indication of failure is provided (other than what you’re trying to accomplish isn’t happening), no reason is given, and no means to try again is available.

It’s become even worse now that most things have some sort of web sync aspect. You’re just left turning things off and on in different combinations, in the vague hope that you can reset some piece of state somewhere.

A hard crash would be preferable to the failure states encountered, mostly because it leads to quicker resolution.

For example, when the camera stops working, the first time I tried opening & closing the app numerous times. (Didn't fix the problem). Then I eventually restarted. It probably took me 10 minutes to figure it out. An immediate crash & reboot would take less time.

If their OKR's state to reduce number of hard crashes, congratulations, they did. Doesn't mean they delivered on product quality, however.

> I've missed out on many moments with my toddler because of that

You just missed taking pictures. You were still there to live them :)

So true. My parents didn’t miss out not having a camera phone and neither did my grandparents. It’s amazing how dependant we’ve become on capturing moments. Sometimes even to the detriment of actually experiencing them.

Might be related to the "Terror Management" theory. :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21298470

We probably feel the need to preserve/hoard everything in a subconscious desire for immortality.

It’s interesting that individuals have this desire- the goal should be survival of the species not of an individual

Like insects? No, thanks.

Could be, and maybe the motivation varies depending on the subject of the photo.

For example, I can go a whole vacation without taking any pictures. But with my kids I love to take their picture and get videos because they grow up so fast and it's fun now to go back and revisit a time when they were younger. They also love to see themselves when they were an age that they don't remember.

I think it's just a manifestation of FOMO. People fear they will one day regret not having more pictures, so they take more pictures than they might have otherwise "just incase."

This is just the 21st century version of old illiterate people whinging about younger, literate people writing things down or keeping reference materials instead of trying to memorize everything.

The human brain is way better at remembering where to find information than remembering information itself.

That’s really not what’s happening here. The only one moaning is the OP. Everyone else is just reminding the OP that their experience with the kids is still valuable even without a camera stuck in front of daddy’s face.

I get this sentiment. But whenever my wife and I swipe through old photos and videos of our kids, I am also overjoyed that I am a parent in the smartphone era.

Yes. The best camera is the one that’s with you. That’s what’s so great about the smartphone era—we have good cameras with us at all times.

Unless you were looking at your phone the whole time trying to take the photo, then you missed out on the live event and the photo

Reminded me of Miyazaki Hayao's request to visitors of his museum[0]:

「カメラを向けるのではなく、この空間をご自分の目で見て、体で感じてください。そして、思い出は心の中に大切にしまって持ち帰って欲しい、これが私達の願いです。」

Which translates fairly literally to:

"Rather than aiming your camera, please see this space with your own eyes and feel it with your body. We hope that you carefully store these memories in your heart and take them home with you."

[0] http://www.ghibli-museum.jp/info/

It’s a beautiful sentiment, but I take more of an approach of moderation.

Your brain can use pictures as triggers later in life to reconnect a lot of those memories that get fuzzier over time.

Taking a video of a whole concert? Obnoxious and rude to the other members.

But I’ll take around 5 photos here and there and later on I’m glad I can go back and see them.

So it’s like, hey, phone/camera doesn’t work? Put it down then. You’ll remember what your toddler looks like because you’ve got other pictures.

I don't remember any of the thousands of such moments I've had with my child (who is now a teen). Photos trigger such wonderful memories though.

While I appreciate the emotional sentiment here, it doesn't absolve Apple of their duty to ship a reliable product. To care about bugs. For what else are we spending upwards $1,000 on a phone for if the manufacturer can't provide us with a reliable operating system for it?

Because of how it makes you feel?

You don't know this person, you don't know what their experience was. Your comment borders on smarm.

Believe it or not, some people can both push a (virtual) button and look behind the camera at the same time. We preserve stuff for posterity. My own experience tells me that my daughter has a lot more fun looking at pictures and videos from when she was a toddler and hearing the stories behind them, than when I just tell random stories without any "immediate context" (location, other people, toys).

> the camera app will sometimes only show a black screen

I'm in the exact same position as you (now 11 Pro, previous 6S) and what I find is that apps that use the camera cause this. Snapchat is the main culprit for me. If that happens again, try closing out of Snapchat/FB/Instagram/anything that uses the camera from the multitasking window. That usually brings my camera back much more quickly than a reboot

Reminds me of Apple Remote Desktop. It used to be an amazing application for managing our fleet of signage machines, an indispensable tool. Then (I think after Sierra was released), we started getting occasional crashes. It wasn't very often, but it was annoying. Then High Sierra rolled around, and it became unusable. You'd be lucky to go 2 minutes without a crash. And there was no consistency to it. We submitted bug reports, and nothing ever happened...until October 7 of this year, when I noticed an update queued in the App Store for ARD.

We had to abandon ARD so I don't know if they actually fixed it, but the price is still $80, and at no point has Apple ever lowered that price, even when it was unusable.

For years I've described bugs in Apple's iPhone apps and have been told "it's just me" or to expect long delays between actions.

Or that constant updates and logging in are good things.

I'm no fanboy so it's easy to spot flaws. It blows my mind how quick people are to defend poor quality.

> Time machine's performance has slowly gotten worse and worse, leaving me having to cancel backups just so I can go home.

I'm administrating TimeMachine for my employer. It sucks so incredibly hard on a lot of points:

1) it requires the aged AFP protocol instead of Samba

2) No user-/machine-defineable quota, only one across the whole server

3) Extremely poor behavior in higher-than-10ms-latency scenarios

4) no way of scripting the configuration if one wants encryption of the backup image

5) Audits/reporting? Forget about it.

6) All backup images end up in one directory on the server, no way to specify e.g. the user's home directory

7) Restore takes ages

Samba on macos is also buggy itself. I have to relaunch finder manually every day if I don't unmount all volumes from my nas, because if the device sleeps with mounted volumes, they won't be working until you do so.

Which version are you on? I had that problem until High Sierra (10.13), and now I'm a bit reluctant to upgrade to Mojave (10.14) because it's working great.

I'm running catalina.

Versions of macOS 10.7 and up no longer use samba. Apple wrote their own smb client.[1]

[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/11/03/23/inside_mac_os_x_1...

I switched to borg on all my macs, it’s so easy. I think most of the recent backup software is doing better than timemachine, which is really really slow via WiFi nowadays

Time Machine (and macOS in general) isn’t really intended for large office setups, it’s a personal backup system.

Time machine hasn’t required AFP for years. SMB is in fact the preferred protocol.

The SMB server does require a few extensions not all servers have adopted, so perhaps that’s what you’re referring to?

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/releasenotes/Net...

I've found it works really well as a personal backup, it's one of the things that keeps me on Macos. I can't rely on Windows backup in the same way, I have to use 3rd party software.

You can use (encrypted) sparsebundle images with a given size limit as backup destination on the server.

Do you have a guide on how to do this?

Unfortunately, there is no up-to-date and comprehensive guide out there. I should write one i guess. I takes some tinkering. This is a good first start: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/turn-nas-windows-share-time-ma... If you’re using a USB drive, I recommend to make the first backup while directly attached to save some time. Also if the server is a Mac (and I believe there are ways to do that with other OSs too), you can simulate a time machine capsule. Now whenever I am in my home wifi my MacBook does automatic backups.

I’m a newer Mac user and was impressed with the multi monitor support and how, as you say, apps are “pinned” to specific areas and the os remembers when you plug in the other monitors. I’ve not noticed an issue with this yet, though, and I’ve been on Mojave and Catalina for my whole Mac career.

I stopped using MacOS years ago but there are a few on iOS that really grind my gears.

You have a setting to whitelist a Group from your Contacts from Do Not Disturb mode so that they can always ring through. But there's no way to manage your Groups from iOS. It doesn't exist. You must have a Mac with iTunes, or whatever is used to administer the iFoo stuff these days to do simple CRUD stuff with contact groups. This is total nonsense.

The Bluetooth toggle button in the quick menu on iOS now doesn't switch Bluetooth off, it just switches it off for one day. NO!!! I want it OFF when I want it OFF, and I can be trusted to turn it ON when I want it ON! Make UI design that respects my choices!

Whenever I plug my phone into my car, it starts playing the same song from my library every time. It doesn't care if something else is playing in SoundCloud, or FB2K or some other app. It will stop my music that's playing, so it can go and load up this other song and play it. Why?

My five and two year old daughters always say "awww, the annoying song again??" Even a two year old can see that this is hogwash!

Everyone makes mistakes, but when things like this appear and persist, it's a signal that the brain has separated from the body, long ago...

After the latest 10.14.x update, my macOS mouse cursor now disappears every single time I cmd-tab to another application. Before the update it only did that sporadically. I'm not the only one, eithe: the internet is full of complaints and weird workarounds to the problem. It's honestly a ridiculous bug.

> For years apple mail on iOS would always show 1 unread message in "all mail" for gmail.

Just in case you are still seeing this, I had a similar issue that turned out to be a bug in Gmail and how Google put old Hangouts (or perhaps Google Talk?) conversations in your mailbox. Some very, very old conversations of mine were for some reason marked as unread, and this was showing up on the iOS unread count, but not the one on macOS.

You can fix your time machine problem by changing its priority.

http://osxdaily.com/2016/04/17/speed-up-time-machine-by-remo...

Same with missed calls on an iPhone, the notification never wents away after checking. Only restarts helped me. Weirdly enough this issue seems to happen randomly, not all missed calls are being this persistent.

I get the same black screen on the camera occasionally. If you open another app, then go to the app switcher you can swipe away the camera app. It seems to work for me after that.

> I've missed out on many moments with my toddler because of that.

You were still there. You missed out because you reached for a camera.

There are moments where you keep the camera away and there are moments that you WANT on camera.

> Time machine's performance has slowly gotten worse and worse, leaving me having to cancel backups just so I can go home.

you could try to increase the backup service‘s priority with ‚sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0‘

That makes it suck slightly less, but TM can pretty much never be "fast" the way it works now, with the number of files we all have these days. In the best case, if a folder doesn't change, TM can hardlink to the previous backup of that folder. If even one file has changed, it has to copy the changed files and then hardlink every unchanged file in the folder, so TM chokes on any large folder where even a single file changes often. If you watch with `fs_usage -f pathname backupd`, you can see TM take dozens of minutes backing up the Mail/Messages/Calendars folders, or cache folders with ridiculous numbers of files like Slack's. Any folder with thousands or tens of thousands of files is putting TM into its worst-case performance corner.

Personally, I find TM bordering on unusable for backups these days. Maybe I'd feel differently if I still had a desktop Mac, but with a bunch of files on a laptop that moves around and sleeps, having to tether to a USB disk for several hours to do a backup is ridiculous. And network backups are even slower and frequently self-corrupt, especially over WiFi. The glimmer of hope is that APFS replication has some really cool new features in 10.15. It's clearly still very much a work in progress, and some big parts are missing, but the stuff that's released seems to clearly point toward a future where we can do block-based copies of filesystems or even deltas between snapshots. Which is much better for performance on spinning hard disks than the eternal disk seeking and grinding that file-based backup solutions all do.

> a laptop that sleeps

Isn't "Power Nap" (in System Preferences » Energy Saver) supposed to help MacBooks do backup and other maintenance while they're sleeping and on AC?

Not to mention the numerous times where TM casually asks to wipe your backup history because the integrity test didn't pass without errors. Usually this can be fixed with a few commands copied off a blogpost that must be getting thousands of hits every day.

It seems obvious to me that TM was intended to run on a snapshotting filesystem such as ZFS* and when this didn't materialize the engineers tried their best to make it work using the tools available to them. Unfortunately thsoe were sparsebundles and hardlinks. I would hope that TM will get updated to use APFS snapshots sooner rather than later, assuming the feature is proven and stable. iOS makes use of APFS snapshots for rolling back failed updates, so one would assume it is.

* http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/06/15/apple_and_zfs/ and https://arstechnica.com/staff/2006/08/4995/

A minor tweak you can do is to exclude specific folders from the stuff to backup, but it'd be nice if the programs creating the caches would mark them as "no need to backup" automatically (which I think is possible?).

Still, I've got three million files on my computer - that's a lot of stuff to walk through. Looking forward to the APFS based replacement!

Automagic is my new favourite word

You must be new here :)

_PDFs_ are BLURRY, on a Mac!

> I could go on. The worst part? These have all been ignored open issues that other people have submitted and for years they just sit there...open.

When you hire expensive developers, they don't want to work on years old bugs. They only want to work on new features.

I don't think it's always developers' call.

Well then they leave and you have no developers to fix the old bugs

I'm sure Apple Incorporated, the most profitable tech company in the world, market cap $1 trillion, can manage to hire a few competent developers that want to fix bugs.

Adding developers to a project by just "buying them" is unfortunately not as easy as you make it sound. (Note: I'm not saying Apple couldn't use more engineers. It's just not something they can throw money at and fix by next week.)

I'm an expensive developer. I love fixing bugs.

I also don't think my job is to be entertained, but to provide value for the company and its users.

Heck, I love fixing bugs and it gives me a certain kind of entertainment.

Making good quality software, or improving poor quality software, is something I enjoy for its own sake. The fact that it also benefits users and my employer is an additional reward.

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