Hacker News Reader

Comment by kayodelycaon | Hacker News Reader

Apple stuff "just works" until it doesn't. As much as a fan I am of Apple, the lack of feedback when things stop working is absolutely infuriating.

View on HN

And sometimes it "just works", but only if everybody is within the Apple ecosystem. Otherwise, it's just a net exporter of problems. See, for example, SMS message of "Liked an image.", email attachments converted into icloud download links, .DS_STORE files scattered everywhere, and so on. Any time Apple comes up with a new feature that would require improving capabilities at a lower level, Apple instead makes a new layer of abstraction on top. And oh how conveniently, that new layer of abstraction is transparent only to Apple users.

I overheard someone the other day ranting about Android phones and their broken SMS support. They apparently didn't realize it's actually Apple that has the buggy code/design and will try to send proprietary data to a non-Apple device.

Can you elaborate more on this

See my comment here[0]. Apple added application-level support for non-standard features not supported by SMS. When Apple sends message through the Message application, it selects either iMessage or SMS, based on whether there exists an iMessage connection, and whether the recipient has an iMessage account. This includes for things that are not representable by SMS. Reactions in the Message application, sent to a non-Apple device, show up as nonsense replies, such as "Liked an image", or "Liked 'The full text of the thing you just sent them.'".

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30085322

> Liked "The full text of the thing you just sent them"

Thank you: I was wondering where those inane 'Liked' SMS messages were coming from. The poor iPhone user is unaware of how rude that comes across.

Had Music.app completely hose my entire data plan last month because it was downloading about 12 albums I had in “Downloaded Music” then deleting them then downloading them over and over last month.

Not to mention Apple Music keeps turning itself back on when I turn it off.

All impossible to diagnose why and the only advice is reset and delete everything and start over.

I was wondering why my phone battery kept running down some days faster than others. Seems it randomly turns on Apple Music even when the volume is down to 0% and I don’t really notice that until I see it is actually playing on the notifications centre. I never, ever want it to play without me touching the play button on my phone, but that is not an option I guess.

> Apple stuff "just works" until it doesn't.

"Just works" is absolutely a statement that should be considered on a time curve! Some products work incredibly in the most trivial use case you test during unboxing, but fall apart when deeply integrated. Others are a PITA to set up, but stop requiring any unproductive attention afterwards.

This was incredibly clear for anyone WITHOUT AirPods during 2019-2020. Everyone picked them up with their iPhone 11 upgrade and immediately started talking about how they "just work". Three months later, you'd see people fiddling with extra devices to keep them charged, or complaining about sending them through the laundry or into subway grates. Then the pandemic hit and they became an entire category of Zoom fatigue due to multiple bluetooth connections.

Aha, just experienced this yesterday when I couldn’t update or download any new app on my child’s iPad with the newest OS because it refused to ever finish accepting my iCloud password.

Through some obscure digging, I found that changing my region language on the ipad from English > UK English and back somehow fixed it…

I think a lot of this is down to the fact that all issues that the user could resolve have already been fixed and when you eventually hit an issue, its some low level problem you have no hope of fixing anyway. While on windows or linux you often run in to situations where its just "Oh don't press that button, thats the button that makes it blow up, press the one next to it" while apple removes the button that makes it blow up.

That isn't always the case, but it tends to be.

This has been my observation as well. They mostly just work, but when they don’t they are indefinitely more annoying to fix than „regular“ BT headphones.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com