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The overall software quality has dropped markedly at Apple and the hardware more uneven since he left.

Mostly on the Mac. The butterfly keyboard and how Apple handled it, were terrible. And macOS quality had gone down release after release. But I have never had any serious software or hardware quality issues with the iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods or any other products. It seems that they had just lost focus on the Mac.

However, the Mac seems to be rebounding. I have a M1 MacBook Air and it is stellar - probably their best new Mac in decades. Also, I haven't had many issues with macOS 11 so far.

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Mac development started stagnating under Jobs though, once the iPod and then iPhone really took off.

It's well known that Jobs was basically bored with the Mac and spent all of his time focusing on the iPhone.

This is where having a single visionary in charge of everything (including small decisions) breaks down. There are so many days in the week and you can't be everywhere at once.

Cook is the better CEO, and Jobs was the better founder / early CEO in my view. I'm thrilled with the M1, and I'm not sure that would ever be something Jobs would have developed.

I disagree about Cook being the better CEO. He's the better chief operating officer, which is the ideal combination with Jobs as CEO. A product person should always lead a company like Apple, if you can find one good enough to do the job. If you don't have that eventually you'll miss a critical inflection and the company will tip over. Cook will extract maximum profit from the product and ecosystem foundation that Jobs left him, which is exactly what he has been doing for a decade now. Jobs installed Cook in that role because he knew that operationally Cook wouldn't screw up the product map that was already primed. However Apple will need a product person after Cook.

I think that is exactly right. Tim Cook is the most amazing supply chain and operational leader – but he is not a product person. He doesn't have the knack for diving in and really refining how things work.

Without that centralized leadership Apple will still have components that excel, like processors, but the fundamental user experience will keep degrading.

It is not true that Steve Jobs was bored with the Mac. Steve Jobs loved the Mac and would have preferred for it to be at the center. The thing is that Apple nearly died only just a few years before by not selling people what they wanted and by that time what people really expressed desire for using their money was personal devices.

Apple had many problems dealing with processor suppliers over the years and probably would have looked for solutions beyond Intel when they floundered no matter who was at the top.

> This is where having a single visionary in charge of everything (including small decisions) breaks down. There are so many days in the week and you can't be everywhere at once.

I don’t agree with this. The Mac was his baby and yet it didn’t blind him to the future being in handheld and wearable computing. And it’s led to phenomenal success. He could have doubled down on Mac at the expense of the smartphone market.

Jobs started their own chip division to bring it in house shortly after his return despite knowing that bet wouldnt pay off for 5-10yrs and despite needing to resuscitate a dying company in the short term. He started the process that lead to the m1.

Have you used the new Podcasts app? It can’t even do the fundamental job of a podcast app - “show me the episodes I haven’t listened to yet”

What? There's a toggle to hide episodes you've already listened to. If you have that turned on, it only shows you episodes you haven't listened to yet.

Only on the Latest Episodes page, which doesn’t allow you to group by show. The Downloaded page lets you hide played episodes, but doesn’t hide them for 24 hours (why??). The Shows page … that’s all messed up. You can hide played episodes, but it randomly displays episodes from years past with no possible way to mark them played without first downloading it and then marking it played.

I don't understand. The Shows page lets me hide played episodes and mark individual episodes as played without downloading them. You can click the "..." or long press on any episode in the Shows page to mark it as played.

I thought Podcasts was derided even when it was first released within a year after Jobs' passing, so it being a bad app is continuity from that era if anything

Podcasts feels like one of those apps Steve wouldn't have used, so it wouldn't have seen as much polish. I suspect this is why Keynote is fantastic but Pages and Numbers were unusable (at least, the last time I attempted to use them regularly, about 10 years ago)

Podcasts app seriously has some big issues. I had an iPhone XR and it would heat the shit out of the phone, I thought maybe it's because I have an old phone but it's doing the same with my 13. I have subscribed to 50+ podcasts.

I generally agree, although there are all kinds of issues on iPhone as well. The one that bothers me most often is autocorrect sporadically changing correct English words to nonsense, or the complete inability to select certain bits of text properly (even in Apple apps).

I'm so mad at all the phone keyboards for not having some kind of priority for predictive. And ability to remove words.

There's some typos I get consistently and the correction is from a very normal word (probably, for instance) to a really seldom used word (poetically, in this example) and I'd prefer to remove poetically from my dictionary than to keep having it pop up.

Repeat this for a couple dozen very common words that consistently give me problems.

Sounds like the machine thinks you're writing too prosaically. I'd give in and indulge its flights of fancy.

GBoard allows you to remove words, and the gesture is very simple. For example, "pepsi" is corrected to "Pepsi" but who wants that. So, just type "pepsi", and "Pepsi"'ll appear in the bar above the keyboard. Drag it up, and it won't be corrected again. Easy. As usual with gestures, zero affordance...

> I'm so mad at all the phone keyboards for not having some kind of priority for predictive. And ability to remove words.

Now imagine how frustrating it is having to deal with an additional layer of invisible predictions, silently changing a word after you've typed it and moved on, consistenly only allowing you to say "1/4" instead of "one-fourth" with nowhere to change it ...

I have to deal with this every day because I use dictation do most of my typing. Due to a hand injury (RSI).

I am someone who cares very very deeply about precise and novel expression. It is very very difficult to do that when I have to fight multiple layers of tools that think they know better, with no way for me to provide feedback to the system, as you say"Priority for predictive."

For instance, just looked at how Mack OS voice dictation chose to punctuate and space the string

> say"Prio

Above. Or look at how it misspelled its own name, in the previous sentence!

I turned off autocorrect a year ago. It’s easier to correct typos by tapping them than have to proof read for whatever properly typed word Apple changed for no reason.

The original iPhone had a much nicer cursor behavior and placement was easier with a tap or a hold-and-drag than it is to this day. I forget when this changed, I think it was about a decade ago.

Tap and hold on the spacebar works pretty great for cursor placement.

Thanks, I didn't know that was a thing.

Thank you. This works so much better that tapping on the word to place the cursor.

I wish I could up vote this twice. Text handling on the iPhone is incredibly frustrating.

I'd add to the list of issues how hard it is to trigger the spell checker for underlined words and how poor its suggestions are when you finally do trigger it.

There are whole websites devoted to embarrassing errors caused iPhone text handling. I can't see why Apple don't bother to fix it. Even small iterative improvements would be OK.

Apple Maps directions now mispronounces the word "South" (who knew it had three syllables?). This word is so common in street names I'm shocked it made it out of testing.

Apple Maps is horrible for driving navigation. Relevant information like route number of the next turn is much smaller than it needs to be.

The directions are floating in space over the map which looks nice but wastes space on the margins. The directions themselves are in a box that also wastes tons of space.

If you reach a destination navigation is cancelled but you cant re-start navigation from there. So if you arrive but Apple Maps wants you to make a left turn across a median it cancels nav and you are in the dark for finding a route around.

I wish usability was a priority but modern UX doesn’t seem to consider it at all.

In New Orleans today Apple Maps a) directed me across a bridge closed to vehicular traffic since Katrina b) directed me down a flooded street -- all in the same trip!

My Siri can’t pronounce the letter ‘y’.

> Mostly on the Mac.

iOS 11 and 13 were both pretty crappy, not to mention weird misses like the Podcasts app. I can't see those releasing when Steve Jobs was at the helm, unless the situation was desperate. (An example of a desperate situation would be when you’re current products run Mac OS 9).

Counterexamples: iBooks and the iMovie rewrite that they just shipped with nowhere near feature parity.

iBooks wasn’t replacing a previous offering, and I don’t think it was abjectly terrible, just limited.

iMovie is a better example but I still think it was a decent update for the software’s target audience. And they offered everyone the older version for free! An even better example might be Final Cut X, which I actually think was a great product but for a very different audience for FCX.

The through-line is that these products were good products-they did something well and without bugs—but they weren’t targeted correctly, ignoring the needs of an existing customer base with (completely reasonable) expectations. That’s different in kind from something like iOS 13.

Have you used iOS 15?

Agreed. Even a little thing like Safari having the close button on the wrong side in iOS 15 would have gotten someone fired.

Multitasking in iPadOS is also a good example of non-Mac software being near unusable.

> Even a little thing like Safari having the close button on the wrong side in iOS 15 would have gotten someone fired.

In which case, it sounds like a good thing they have a more sustainable culture. But I'm not sure your comment is true anyway.

Of course, Apple made all sorts of mistakes under Steve Jobs. In such a creative company, only a culture of freedom to make mistakes could produce extreme success. But now, because of a nostaglic cult of personality, any mistake meets with howls of "this would never happened under Steve!". That hero worship is a bigger problem for Apple.

iPad in general screams of directionless product development.

I have an M1 iPad Pro. The thing is so fucking fast, just let me do a bit of coding on it.

... or let me rename file extensions.

You can code in Swift Playgrounds, including developing GUI apps using SwiftUI, and the next version will be able to release apps to the store directly from the iPad.

That's aside from the third party apps like Codea and Pythonista that have supported coding and app development on the iPad for about a decade. If you've not been coding on your iPad, you've been seriously missing out.

That's great if you're a swift programmer...

When I can build the compiler I work on, on an iPad then I will consider it a coding platform.

I am also waiting for the new 16" MacBook Pro (Apple Silicon) with great enthusiasm. I expect it to bring back Mac back to their glory days.

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