Setting the bozo bit on Apple
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blog.metaobject.com
I would like to extend this concept. I do not, in fact, have the bozo bit set for my Linux desktop setup. I do, however, have the "fields of broken glass" bit set. On Linux, the entire system is made up of disparate packages maintained by unrelated groups that communicate sparsely, whose work is tied together by another party that actually takes the job of fielding this to the end user. And thus you get funny problems like "Oops, package A was generating a config file for package B and the syntax subtlety changed in a backwards incompatible way and now printing is broken but only on Thursday." (Example scenario, but it's based on a real one. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...)
I think that to be fair to everyone, all modern computing environments are extremely complicated and you are always going to have a lot of trade-offs. Still, if I had one complaint about Apple, it would be this: it genuinely feels needless sometimes. Sometimes I feel like Apple is it's own worst enemy, more of a threat to their business than any competitor.
But now, the ease-of-use "bicycle for the mind" vision has faded.
Today Apple seems to view computing devices through the lenses of "service kiosks", "media sales points", and "social portals".
Some specific complaints, where they used to do better:
1. Overly "Flat" interfaces, that translate to "poor visual affordances", instead of "uncluttered, clear, simple, obvious".
2. Seemingly arbitrary variations in interfaces between device-types, where the differences don't seem to result from useful adaptations to each device-type.
3. Consistent interfaces across device-types, when the result is overly simple and clumsy interfaces.
4. Features of inconsistent presence across devices. ("Open in Safari" in News, available on Mac but not iOS, because ... ?)
5. Lots of small but odd interface glitches, that suggest interfaces hacked onto an unreliable data-communication model. (Apple Music, Apple TV, ...)
6. Weak, unattractive template-style interfaces. (I.e. Home app)
When things go wrong, it is exactly as you say- weird and infuriating.
2^38 Bozo Bits = 2^30 Bozo Bytes = 1 Bozo Gig.
I think we're all Bozos on this bus!
Especially annoying is that they have hidden the previously free access to streaming terrestrial radio stations (not the same thing as the Apple Radio subscription). You can only access them now if you know the URL, and they’re impossible to search for in the Radio tab of the app.
The business drive to push people the paid subscriptions is taking over everything else.
I leave the apartment, enter the elevator, put headphones in my ears and literally cannot do anything in the Music App, because it thinks it is still connected to my WiFi. Why can’t the default views be offline first.
Also, why does it take five seconds to connect to the Airpods? Even Linux is quicker. Sometimes it seems to take even longer. These devices are mere nanoseconds apart!
It all just seems to be built on a "the network is very reliable" assumption - in a mobile device.
The necessity of an integrated stack of content and delivery has had corrupting influence on Apple products.
In Music, pushing content on For You and elimination of free radio as described to drive revenue at the clear expense of customer experience.
In Apple TV, the company has to compete in providing content that is at odds with Apple values. For example, the recent purchase of John Lasseter’s work and having to put punchy Mcpunchington Will Smith on the cover of Apple TV because the content was already bought.
They can be a consistently indulgent distributor, or a consistently selective content producer, but not consistent in both roles. I prefer the former.
(I found Boyle's movie brilliant, when interpreted as a serious comedic drug dream, subsequent to a marathon reading of Steve Jobs bios, articles and opinion pieces. Of varying questionability and authenticity. In random order. On a plane.)
.mp4 being associated with a video player seems reasonable, since it's almost always used for video. (I think the only difference between .mp4 and .m4a is the extension? It's just serving as a signal about which app should open it, really.)
> Create a new playlist, transfer some previous songs over, then try to drop the new m4a's onto the open playlist. No go. Play around for a while, figure out that the entity that accepts the drops is the TableView, not the surrounding view. So you can't drop the new files into the empty space below the songs, you have to drop them onto the existing songs.
Interestingly, this is the user winding up on the single most fiddly path because it's what felt intuitive to them. In pretty much any Music library view but the playlist view, dragging a file into the window is all you need to do. They unfortunately picked the single view where it's focused on letting you rearrange the tracks.
I'd suspect that the Music app's workflow is built around "I want to add this to my music library", whereas the author's mental model was more around "I need a list of files so they get transferred". Which are similar, but that falls apart in cases like this. Which is sort of Apple's fault for not smoothly supporting edge cases, to be sure.
The revenue stream from the iTunes Store started in 2003, well preceding the iPhone.
mp4 is a container format, all it does is wrap some codecs and add metadata. There's no requirement that it contain video. The smart thing to do would be to inspect the mp4 and open it in an audio player if it contains an audio stream but no video stream.
For tens of thousands or even millions of files, inspecting the header only loads about an extra page into RAM per file. Or, since Apple already has the Spotlight index with this track data in it, 0 extra pages.
Basically, only track information that's not already in the Spotlight DB needs to be loaded so the performance should be the same as walking the filesystem for filenames.
I think the bigger issue is just that users expect a .mp4 to open with their default .mp4 player, and in fact some people don't know about "open with" and change the extension as a way to pick the player.
But also this concern about loading the header of millions of files is such an edge case that I don't think it matters. A human tapping on a piece of glass to play a few files would notice no difference in performance.
https://eclecticlight.co/2022/12/24/how-does-macos-tell-the-...
However, the underlying complaint is that Music doesn't claim to be capable of handling mp4. Which is basically true; the "m4a" and "m4v" that Music does claim to support are restricted subsets of mp4.
Should Chrome handle files with a .heif extension if they contain AV1? That's pretty much the same question.
Also, I just did a quick check, if you rename an m4a to mp4, and add it to the magic "$APPLEMUSICFOLDER/Media/Automatically Add To Music" folder, Music will import it, but give it a Media Kind metadata field as "Music" and not "Music Video" (which you get with actual video files), so it obviously does deeper inspection than just the filename.
I have used iTunes off and on for around two decades and it has never been a great or even mediocre experience. It was always bad. The author is fondly remembering a time which might never have existed.
I think a lot of the Music.app issues stem from it being what looks like a SwiftUI/Catalyst app more than anything else.
Here was my train of thought on reading that:
Who voluntarily uses iTunes?
Who voluntarily uses iTunes on Windows?
Can you watch movies in iTunes on Windows?
Why would you ever want to do that?
Blacking out other monitors on full-screen? That's a pretty novel idea, I've never seen that before. Apple would never implement such a cool feature on a competing platform.
- You have purchased video/tv content on your Apple TV or other iOS device
- You want your podcasts sync'd across your devices
Why do you think it’s bad? I’ve heard others say the same but I’ve never heard a general (as opposed to esoteric) reason.
What won me over compared to Winamp was iTunes' smart playlists. I'm actually surprised they haven't borked, neutered, or removed that feature. It's still the same and it's still good.
It did a lot of other things right too. It was convenient to edit metadata for multiple files. CD ripping was painless and used a high quality mp3 encoder at a time when that was not a given. In general, it was one of those apps that just behaved logically to me and rarely if ever surprised me in a bad way.
When iTunes introduced "iTunes in the cloud" or whatever it was called -- the ability to have your files mirrored in the cloud -- I was more or less in heaven for a while. I had a few moans and niggles but nothing much.
I actively kind of hate it now though. Too many media types (with different paradigms) crammed into one app. The result is a mess. Not sure it could be any other way.
I haven't used it since. (Although it still starts automatically when I try to rip a CD using XLD.)
Now I use VLC for music on my phone and Vox on MacOS. Both are imperfect. FLAC isn't gapless in VLC, and Vox keeps trying to sell me things. But they work well enough to get some semblance of the job done.
The real problem is the conflict between utility and consumption. iTunes/Music were never there to conveniently manage and play audio (utility), but to lock users into a consumption silo. So importing and playing music from external sources has never been a design goal.
Vox has some similar issues, but isn't quite as bad. VLC is more of a utility app, which makes it more useful. (I suspect it has no problem playing an MP4 audio playlist.)
iTunes/Music has always been an unusual app, but there were work flows (play flows?) whose practicality has come and gone.
If you like listening to albums you can also keep them in your file system by artist, album, and song and have an easy time finding things.
That's what I'm thinking almost every day when working with Apple devices. There is so, so much basic stuff broken on both macOS and iOS. I truly miss the days where Apple devices were a reliable tool, even a source of inspiration.
As for software? Yeah, it's really, really bad. :( I think Apple has forgotten how to do software.
...and the old search is moved to Songs -> (upper right) "Show filter field". They even change the shortcut key, which is the worst part imo.
Another characterization I've made is that Apple is a primarily a hardware company, they don't have the software chops and are scrambling to try to backfill that skillset. They overly reward the bright and shiny but eventually the inability to tame complexity will be their downfall.
It's hard for me to figure anything out on the iPhone. Nothing seems obvious or discoverable beyond the basic "tap an app tile to open it." Some of that is just differences from Android but the various gestures and the way settings are scattered all over the place just seems almost arbitrary. Maybe there is a rhyme and reason but I feel that if I wanted to learn that I'd need to sit down through a tutorial.
I once worked with a product manager who said "if users need training, you've failed" this was in the context of a consumer-oriented website but it seems to be a lesson lost on Apple.
At this point there is so little difference in phones (particularly the flagships) for the average person, they should just pick what they like/are used to, and move on with their life.
With all due respect, whenever these days were, I suspect people were saying the same thing then because people have a tendency to romanticize the past no matter what year it is.
Further if you think of the complexity involved, streaming is a more “basic” task, than navigating file formats, transfer protocols, DRM, disc storage, library metadata, and more.
A more general point is that software should establish a clear conceptual model of the things it allows to manipulate (music files, tracks, playlists, …), and all basic operations on that (insert, move, remove, reorder, rename, syncing between two devices, …) should be straightforward, orthogonal, and just work. Only having specific workflows available/functioning requires the user to memorize those specific workflows, instead of being able to reason about what they can do based on the conceptual model.
The ecology just isn't built for actual owned media anymore. And so many people have only a phone now, so no reason to try to sync.
I think this is probably true on Android too.
I don't know about the Watch, or what the documented ways are to get media files on it.
But for iPhone, I think there are probably better ways than Apple Music, even for audio files. That's just not what Apple Music is about anymore, it's mostly about purchased music.
Eh - it's not really the same. Android certainly still mostly pushes you at cloud based services (ex: Youtube Music/Amazon Music/Spotify/ETC)
But there's not really a "Standard" music player for the ecosystem, so the expectation is that you pick a 3rd party app you like and use that. And for the vast majority of those - the simple "you have a filesystem - play files from it" approach works just fine (ex: I use VLC for local content, and JellyFin for self-hosted music).
Personally - having my library hosted on my own JellyFin server is basically miles better than anything else I've found (And using either the native app or a specific music client for jellyfin).
The downside is the cost of entry is much higher, and it takes more time and effort to get setup the first time.
Also - your results will vary a lot more depending on which app you pick, and what features that company supports.
So... the experience defaults to something that's more complicated and less featurefull but can be significantly better than that available via iMusic/iCloud at the end of the day.
Android was always focused on cloud stuff, which makes sense given that their biggest markets are places where most people don't have PCs, plus Google wants that halo effect from Android. I appreciated that iPhones were designed for my PC too. But iPhones were generally bad at copying any other data ad-hoc. They added AirDrop specifically for this, and... Like 90% of the time I don't see my other device, or the transfer fails. I don't even bother anymore.
Oh god! This bugs me so much. I don't understand why it's so hard to get this right. I'm sure it is, but why?
I know that if one of my devices switches from our 5GHz to our 2.4GHz network this can happen, but even when they're on the same network, it happens sometimes. (And why do my devices keep trying to force themselves off of the 5GHz network? WTF?)
And I get that it's called "Airdrop", but I'd really like it to work over ethernet, too, since that's a lot faster!
Check if BT is enabled on both your phones.
Wait until the AR glasses come out. I pretty much guarantee that media syncing will be a huge deal, and Apple had better get their iCloud act together by then.
iCloud is a shambles; and I say this as an Apple user for more than thirty years, and has pegged his career to Apple.
This is one of those things that will hopefully be opened up with more standardization. There's nobody to blame but ourselves for not enforcing this earlier, and hopefully in the future opening an MP3 file won't be harder than it was in 2005.
I have also had it do that thing, where my (non-DRMed) song, recorded from a CD, is replaced by the DRMed “radio edit” version of the song, from Apple Music.
That’s fun.
Whether or not the sync actually happens, or if the song stays on the original device, seems to be a crapshoot.
Safari bookmark syncing is … not good. It rearranges bookmarks, refuses to delete some, refuses to sync certain ones, according to some internal algorithm. Etc.
A few of the really bad ones are Radars I filed years ago that went nowhere and still annoy me to this day (top prize probably goes to FaceTime audio ducking).
Yes, but also all other types of progress tracking.
> why would Apple ignore radars like this?
The only Radars I've filed to other teams that actually got any traction are clear-cut bugs with a simple repro that don't require any UI/design changes to fix. Without a repro & sysdiagnose the engineers will likely never even read through the whole bug report before discarding it.
In general my view is that a lot of Apple engineers are stretched pretty thin and don't really have time to work on that kind of stuff with the pretty quick pace that a yearly OS release schedule imposes on them (supporting redesigns, new UIs, new hardware). If a bug is caught immediately it's considered a regression and there's a higher chance it'll get fixed, but issues that are around for >1 year without being flagged back to the engineers responsible are unlikely to ever be prioritized.
The most unlikely "bugs" to ever get fixed are design issues that aren't really considered bugs in the first place, like the FaceTime audio ducking issue I mentioned above. For reference, when you're on a FaceTime call the OS (both iOS and macOS) will heavily dampen all other audio to the point where it's pretty unintelligible even at 100% volume. There's no way to fix it because it's Working as Intended(TM) and the Apple designer knows what customers want more than you, the other engineers, or the customers themselves. It's been around for years and has had dozens of Radars filed internally and externally but no progress has been made.
- issue with being repeatedly slammed to reauthenticate
- bizarre iTunes integration
- won't play nice with sleep-locked Windows laptop
- random features ripped out of the PWA, like "Artist Radio" (presumably an attempt to protect their recommendations from adversarial scrapers)
The last straw was I "got auth booted, playback cutoff, buy a family plan" at midnight NYE, left an angry ticket. Next week, ticket closed, final cheeky de-auth. I immediately canceled, and can't say I've had any reason to consider returning.
I appreciate all the work they're doing now curating lists and writing bios of the artists in Apple Music, but I feel like they threw away useful stuff they had before.
Any sort of syncing between PCs/mobile devices is universally neglected in favour of the cloud now. Why invest in syncing when they could charge you for cloud storage instead?
Bingo. I started seeing this everywhere I looked and it made me furious. Everything, in small ways, seems to sabotage the user trying to control their things. Eventually, and at scale, they win. It's fatiguing to constantly be fighting these toys.
I mean, Apple could just add a better physical connection to the iPhone. Either the USB3-speed Lightning port they used twice on a few iPads, USB3.x over USB-C, or even the brilliant Thunderbolt standard they helped make nearly a decade ago. But... the iPhone's physical transfer speeds are still stuck in 2001. It's genuinely an unbelievably amount of negligence for a company that directly profits off of cloud customers.
So, let's end the farcical statement that the EU stood up to Big, Bad, Apple. The EU did nothing.
If Apple still wants to use a superior in-house technology, they can implement Thunderbolt on iPhone.
We need regulators to do this so Apple doesn't change their mind and make "Lightning 2". Even if Apple did have a full USB-C switch on their roadmap, every company in FAANG needs a healthy fear of regulators. Europe cracking down on the App Store and Apple's silly proprietary cables are the start of this, and a fantastic first turnout so far.
I had a different name for it, "The idiot engineer".
That for all the amazing premium quality products Sony releases, every product has at least one extremely poorly thought out area. It was like there was some designer/engineer who was the son of the CEO or something, and got to work on every project.
What I would do frequently is pair to another device, so it would be great if that one button could be used to unpair-and-enter-pairing-mode. Instead, I "repair" by connecting it to one device over bluetooth, and another device with a cable. It's a silly, awkward thing to do with my wireless headphones, but it's 100% reliable. Oh well.
It was a thing of beauty, just terribly pleasurable to use. The noise canceling and audio quality was great.
But - it only supported a proprietary audio format, and everything had to be transcoded instead of just copied over. Took forever, and it couldn't successfully transcode every format.
And that's how Sony stays in business. It was such a good music player once the music was on there, I am tempted to buy another one as long as it's cheap.
But it was 4K before there were movies in 4K. They came with laser projectors early. They were ready for high frame rate from the beginning and almost never needed replacement parts fitted unlike certain other manufacturers.
They buried it under the screen (why? who gave a shit?) so they can make it (generously) 70% reliable instead of the 99.99% reliable reader they had on the back.
But when everything is working, I find it to be super useful… so what are you going to do?
Don't even need to do that, just change the file name suffix from .mp4 to .m4a
And in the Finder, right-clicking on a file gives a submenu "Open with..." where you can choose the application that will open it.
What they really need is to go back to the focus on functionality and dependability that made the original mac such a success. But even a periodic "snow leopard" effort would be much better than what we have today.
(For those who didn't remember it, Snow leopard was a widely acclaimed Mac OS X release that supposedly focused on reliability and performance and not on new features)
There’s a famous quote from him about success and product focus, and it seems pretty obvious that first they tried using Ive as a product guy substitute (or put him forward as one), then they gave up entirely.
Steve used his own stuff and didn’t hesitate to demand it meet his quality expectations… but I genuinely can’t imagine Tim Cook deciding on a feature without a spreadsheet weighing pros and cons against surveys of user feedback statistics and the entire development time planned out Waterfall style… even if that’s just “these buttons suck and are confusing, use better ones”, he’d still in my little imagination scenario, be scrutinising the spreadsheet on an iPad and deciding that the fix isn’t valuable enough.
Jobs was a shitty boss, but by god he got what he wanted.
It's ridiculous but at these other apps are all broken as you've now experienced.
For example, the Home app and HomeKit situation is also unreliable. People's devices suddenly disappear from their Home app on bigger installations. You have to delete the entire thing and start over and go and find all the barcodes again. There's a well known workaround for setting up Home Assistant, moving all your devices to its control and having it export to your HomeKit. People hate doing this but it's been one of the reliable ways of stopping this from happening in larger setups.
Also in the HomeKit area, synchronization of voice recognition for personal requests in a multi-person house is extremely fragile. It works for many people, but sometimes it just doesn't. It is supposed to be transparent and automatic - if you teach your phone to recognize your voice, then all the HomePods in your house are supposed to as well. Except sometimes they just don't sync and you have to reset the homepods to factory defaults and reintroduce them just to get them to sync the voice recognition. Or worse, your phone won't let you turn on voice recognition for you in homekit even though your phone is doing recognition successfully.
Or even more maddening, the home app says you're signed in with a different apple ID on your phone and home app, but it's the exact same ID.
And that's assuming you can even join the home on your phone. My wife's phone is nearly impossible to invite to our "Home". The invites never arrive if using the appleID. Sometimes it'll work if the invite is done by phone number, but again, no invite message. Sometimes firing up the Home app on her phone will announce that there is a pending invite but it often takes 5-10 tries over a few days to get this far.
When searching on the support forums, it is easy to find other people who have had these exact same problems for years.
Or the AirTag situation. I put an airtag on a remote control that keeps getting lost in the room. But only one person in the house can locate it with the UWB direction finding system. I don't want to have to put two or three airtags on the same remote just because Apple won't let us share tags between family members. This is just silly.
Sadly, I find myself agreeing with the article. Apple has drifted from "it just works" to being surprised if it actually works.
It's reasons like this why I advocate for Apple to separate their hardware and software. It's fine if they want to integrate their first-party offerings, but gluing them to the OS makes me uncomfortable. I don't trust Apple to not degrade my user experience anymore, unfortunately.
They aren’t licensing technology to handset vendors, they just are keeping the numerically larger but profitability smaller sector of the smartphone business safe for advertising.
So, I'd say that Google is to Android what Canonical is to Ubuntu. Both are developing "open" products that technically qualify as Free software, but use their services to lock people into convenient but exploitative agreements. They're bad, but using Android without Google is much easier than using an iPhone without Apple.
I write a lot of music and like to be able to play it on different devices (phone, HomePods, in the car, etc.). It took me a while to figure the above out!
Of course, he could have just used Files.
If you drag songs into a new playlist they get added then removed and put into "recently added" or the general library where you have to drag them into the playlist again.
Occasionally viewing the newly added playlist will hang when doing the second step.
For the most recent time I tried, the music has been in this state for 2 months.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide/...
That's exactly where the problem lies.
Generally doing random old bugfixing is low impact, but also it's likely to break things worse instead of make them better. Especially when binary compatibility comes up.
There are many many plain simple bugs which are annoying. I'd be happy to work a year on ironing out various things in macos/ios.
1. Non apple music format, indeed one typically used for video
2. Non apple messenger service.
3. Tried to get those to work with the apple application primarily designed to support purchase and playback of corporate media.
Didn't have a great experience. We are all shocked.
I don't recall iTunes ever being high quality software.
What do you think are the intended use cases of the operating system's proprietary audio-file-playing application?
This is not basic functionality. The vast majority of iPhone users never plug their device into a computer.