Apple software update “bug” enables Apple Intelligence
lapcatsoftware.com
lapcatsoftware.com
Apple has gone WAY down hill.
We need a total rethink on close-range wireless communication for accessory devices. Preferably something patented with an expensive license so fly-by-night chinese hardware shops can't dump their garbage on the market using that protocol.
It's not like you can use a Bluetooth classic device to connect to Bluetooth low energy.
Then there's also like Zigbee and etc; I don't think the world is hurting for wireless protocols. Everybody has their own new standard that'll be able to replace the rest lol.
There are two important things about Bluetooth.
1. There are actually two kinds of Bluetooth. The "traditional" mostly connection-oriented Bluetooth and BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy). They share very little with each other, except for the marketing name. BLE works way better in practice. Many people still remember their old headsets that used Bluetooth and that took ages to connect to their phones and associate those with the "Bluetooth experience".
2. Bluetooth is complex. Many manufacturers get it wrong. But the problem is not with Bluetooth. You could invent a different set of protocols, and if they were to do everything that Bluetooth does, they would get very complex as well, and we would have the same problem, except in a less popular and less broadly adopted protocol.
To the end user, this is kind of a distinction without a difference. The end user doesn't care whether it's Bluetooth, The Standard that's bad or Bluetooth, the Implementation. He just knows that when he has to use Bluetooth, he's probably going to have problems.
I've worked with BLE implementation developers and I've heard the stack described as a "Layer cake of sorrow." There are major problems with it, and by "It" I mean the entire bag containing the specification, all the various implementations, and the hardware ecosystem. All of these things combined define Bluetooth in people's minds.
This discussion is intriguing. I wonder how many people commenting on "the spec" have actually read any part of "the spec" in question (I have).
And since we're posting anecdata: I can't think of a single problem I've had with a Bluetooth device in recent years, and I use a lot of Bluetooth devices. So this kind of generalizing doesn't help.
As a counterpoint, every embedded device that uses Wi-Fi promises a world of pain. The bizarre pairing procedures, connecting to temporary access points, entering passwords — it's all a combination of pain, timeouts, problems, and resets. But that doesn't lead me to state that "wifi is bad, the spec as a whole is bad, all layers of the spec are bad, the implementations are all bad".
Two xiaomi phone models with different BT issues: One couldn't connect to two chipolos, the other loses wifi stability when connected to A2DP (ping raises, connection stutters and as the BT devices get closer, connection is lost randomly) Samsung phone: no issues [detected so far]
Then I have some Sennheiser headphones that I can get stuck and need to be physically turned on / off when it loses connection due to distance and there are other phones nearby (I roam around the house without the phone. I know that's partially on me)
I remember the time there was for windows a "BlueSoleil" BT stack besides the "Broadcomm" stack. Blue soleil was more stable, supported more profiles (pan, a2dp, etc) on more devices.
And, all those BT security issues over time? It makes me feel BT protocol cockroaches always come back.
Apple has no excuse since they control both hardware and software. They are dropping the ball.
They don't control the Bluetooth hardware though - that's still Broadcom AFAIK (at least in this 2021 Macbook M1 Pro and my 2023 M3 Max.) They might be writing the driver (I don't know if they are or if they're just interfacing with a Broadcom shim) but that doesn't necessarily help if the hardware is shonky balls.
Personally, my experience with Bluetooth has been mixed. It certainly works, but audio quality is bad for headphones, latency is bad for mice and keyboards, sometimes the connection requires an intervention from the Norse pantheon, and so on.
That's going a little too far. If you're using bluetooth headphones, and you enable a microphone anywhere, you'll stop receiving sound from everything else on your computer.
But yeah I mean Bluetooth sucks, everyone has had the experience of trying to connect to a device repeatedly that keeps trying to autoconnect to some other random device that was used before. My usual interaction with Bluetooth is to always enter pairing mode and just be done with it, but hardly feels futuristic to manually hold down a button press every time you want to use a device.
> except in a less popular and less broadly adopted protocol
Isn't the usual way this problem is solved that the big players (Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.) come together and create a consortium for a new technology? So you get widespread support in all new devices and within 5-10 years most people are using it over the old one. If a better protocol is possible I don't think this would be the bottleneck.
Can you link to some documentation about this bug?
My iPhone 16 Pro Max Bluetooth has been rock solid with everything I've used it with. Your comment is a good reminder that (1) it's impossible for vendors to test with all possible devices, and (2) at Apple scale there will never not be some customers who experience problems. I recommend reporting it if you haven't — I had glitchy audio with an earlier phone and an older Honda Odyssey's Bluetooth connection, and a few months after my report a subsequent OS update fixed it. (Correlation, not causation, I understand.)
> Apple has gone WAY down hill.
I know you guys are lurking. There's similar low hanging bullshit annoyances on so much software, so someone that is working on one of these things, please let me know. Google Maps? Search? Calendars? Email? Browsers? iPhones? Androids? AirPods? Pixel Buds? Name your team, and I'm sure I got a complaint for you. If not, I'm sure someone can. You all are killing my productivity.
Some Apple Radar bugs are tracked publicly on OpenRadar, but there's no (yet?) voting mechanism:
https://openradar.appspot.com/
https://github.com/timburks/openradar/issues
> Bugs also need to somewhat fit into the „theme of the year“ to get prioritized.
User-defined themes for Apple bug annotation could be ranked by annoyance and compared to annual themes.
> the engineers are aware of all this, they just aren’t allowed to work on things that haven’t been prioritized and blessed
I like where you're coming from, but micromanagement is still the flavor of the times.
I work on a well trafficked consumer product and even though I have a full latitude to fix bugs at my job, I will wait weeks for the right report to come in to make it easily reproducible. I will pull the ticket out of backlog and it will take only an hour to fix it rather than frustrating me and wasting an entire day tracing a bug only to fail at reproducing it anyway. It’s constant triage.
> to make it easily reproducible
These kind of things are really frustrating when it seems like they should be caught with human usability tests. It's easy to throw blame around, and I think Apple does a lot of good work, it just seems like for value of the company they could slow down the pace of iPhone and macOS releases and make them more substantive.
Give me power to debug. Give me power to write my own solutions.
And we're talking about a notification... We're also talking about a pair of headphones that can't be connected to multiple devices at the same time for some reason. I can't see this as anything but a self-imposed problem. You could connect up to 7 devices at the same time and that would be a great way to provide the seamless experience. It is the same ecosystem, the phone and laptop can easily communicate and be aware that I have spotify open on both and that I'm writing on my laptop. But no, the problem gets harder because of the issues. I play music from my phone because if I walk away from my computer, I can keep playing music through my headphones. Where's the magic? And the only reason I have spotify open on my laptop is so that if I press the god damn play button I don't end up opening Apple Music (a product I have never intentionally used nor even passed the first time use screen), jumping from my workspace.
Users shouldn't need these defensive patterns when you have the capacity for such integration.
Is the particular problem what you were saying about headphones not connecting to multiple devices at once? If so, I admit that's a different kind of issue -- rather than the lack of functionality slipping through testing, it was probably just never included as part of the PoR in the first place. I.e. at some point the designers, or the engineers, or whomever, decided that it wasn't worth building. Despite the level of integration that is indeed possible, you still have to make tradeoffs -- security, performance, timelines, etc.
Hardest thing is reproducing a bug reliably.
On the other hand, I have reported to them security issues which would take literally one line to fix and literal typos and errors/omissions in the documentation which are all still present after years.
Come to the dark side, we got lots of freedom here.
In the last years this aspect has gotten much worse in my opinion. I know Linux has its rough edges, but once configured for your own workflow, it will keep working the same way without any distractions. And the LTS variants of distributions are almost maintenance free these days, if that's your concern.
I see operating systems usage as an investment and commitment. And I'd rather commit to an open source distro where I can in the worst case fix my own problems with it rather than betting on a platform that eventually has to be enshittified with ads because no amount of money will be enough for its investors.
People complain mostly about Windows 11 right now, but guess what will happen once MacOS reaches market dominance? Microsoft is just a couple years ahead in the shareholder cycle, and they were at their peek arguably the best software providers before the enshittification process started.
Compare to now, where they announce major features (Apple Intelligence), keep them in beta for over half a year, then have even less time than that before the next WWDC where they are expected to announce new stuff.
It’s bananas and unsustainable. There’s no time to do anything properly. No wonder everything is falling apart.
But I really have to be clear, this isn't just an Apple issue. Windows is getting worse too. Google too.
I believe a big part of this is that all these systems are becoming more closed off. They make it harder for people to play around with and "hack". Taking power away from the user. I think the truth is that things are so complicated, that if you don't let the end user make fixes, debug, and write new things, then your product can only decline. Besides, you cannot know what people are going to use the thing for. The goal is to build an environment, not a product.
I personally probably won't be very helpful for whatever it is -- I work with the compiler team, so nothing visible -- but I'm happy to +1 your issue during the next feature review cycle or &c
But you got me, I don't have any complaints about the compiler. I haven't been writing much C these days so you're safe ;) Tbh I think the thing I'm most frustrated about is that it becomes harder for me to fix things myself. Taking power away from the user is not a security feature.
Can I also make a feature request? Can we get someone to add regex to the calendar to de-dupe events? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42708707
Edit:
I have a more important feature request. Fix the god damn iPhone keyboard settings. Auto capitalization should capitalize a stand alone i, but we can all recognize an iPhone user because of this. And I cannot for the life of me figure out how to use swipe but also not randomly have it modify the previous word I typed (autocorrect is off). Pressing back space then deletes two words. Not once has this feature been helpful, it's a hindrance that happens at least once an hour. And if I move my cursor back to a misspelled word, click the accepted correction, please don't split the word at my cursor, just correct the whole word...
I know I might be "holding it wrong" but man has this been unintuitive.
Look at the comments on Google rewriting their Android Bluetooth stack for the fourth time.
> I know the guy that heads up the team that did this work -- he and I spent 2+ years fighting Broadcom's old, god-awful bluetooth code. Our whole team used to play what-if games about replacing the thing while massive code dumps came in from vendors, making the task ever larger.
> I had to write a service on the RPI and the only way to reliably connect was to restart bluetooth before every attempt.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26647981
Apple has finally gotten fed up enough to roll their own Bluetooth/WiFi hardware implementation, which is a huge undertaking.
It is said to start shipping this spring.
> Apple is switching over to a new Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chip that it designed in-house starting in 2025, reports Bloomberg. The combined Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chip will replace components from Broadcom
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/12/12/apple-custom-bluetooth-...
This has more to do with do with Apple wishing to pay less for WiFi/Bluetooth chips than wanting to fix bugs. They've gradually been replacing more and more silicon with their own designs for years, and tomorrow we'll likely see the next step: the debut of Apple's 5G radio chip.
Personally I have no issues at all with Bluetooth on my iPhone 13. It seems rock solid to me and never disconnects unexpectedly. (I do have some long-standing, annoying but relatively minor, issues with Bluetooth audio on macOS though).
Cost is certainly a factor, but it doesn't take a lot of searching to find people designing and building devices saying that the existing third party hardware and firmware implementations for Bluetooth are problematic.
I don't think the Android/Pixel guys were daydreaming about ditching Broadcom for no reason.
I seem to remember discussions the Google Glass people posted here about their own issues with keeping a stable Bluetooth connection with the available third party Bluetooth chipsets.
I need a place to rant about my recent apple frustrations. :)
I recently got a new laptop - I can airdrop to it once or twice before the notification to accept the airdrop stops showing up until reboot. Just that flow is broken, other notifications continue to work.
I got an apple watch for my kid as an "upgrade" - software is a complete mess, connectivity issues abound, it's less reliable than the gizmo watch it replaced.
The iPad just got a calculator last year.
I am randomly not allowed to delete some photos from my phone. I have no idea what this is about.
The mail app is so bad that even their anti-competitive design policies can’t salvage it (reading an email on one device will show the email as unread until the app is opened). It’s just embarrassing for the so-called “premium” company.
One major problem with Bluetooth is that the spec is so complex that it is unlikely that any device you try to interoperate with implements the relevant parts correctly.
To compound that, most implementations in use came from half arsed SDKs that silicon vendors rushed out the door 5 or 10 years ago, and the devices have no update capability so they are never getting fixed.
But I don't say that with any joy. I find the OS(es) to be getting buggier and buggier and I am saddened by that.
That certainly raises the bar.
The most notable one I saw was a recommendation to download the KFC widget on my iOS home screen. As someone who's never been to KFC, and never used either their website or app, this "suggestion" is indistinguishable from an ad.
Apparently this is triggered due to being "in close proximity" of a KFC (e.g.: due to walking through a mall).
You can disable these ads, but they're enabled by default.
Tangentially, I think Apple could gain a lot by employing Jeff Johnson (the author of this and other posts) for improving the user experience of its products and services. I’m not sure if Jeff would find it fulfilling though.
improving the user experience of its products and services
In theory, employee QA and customer bugs/radars serve the same function, minus transparency on the reasons for action or inaction.
If each annoying bug was a tradeable financial instrument, then annoyance could be quantified and fixes incentivized.
I'm not special, just loud. If Apple cared enough to hire me, they wouldn't need to hire me.
Take my upvote. Love it.
Ten years ago, Apple was proud about the caution with which they loaded up on features. Apple needs to remind itself why it said this.
I worked in an institutional IT Dept during this initial roll-out, and it bricked entire labs (wifi & printing, primarily).
Silver lining: greater opportunities after this "last job in tech."
I am knee-deep in LLMs all day, but I have disabled it on my devices. It just didn't seem useful. I tried the image generator once and the output was borderline offensive (I won't derail this thread by going into why).
Siri on the other hand is embarrassingly bad.
Really, they should have started with Siri, the moment LLMs became a thing. Not try to graft battery-draining AI assistants into existing apps in often-not-very-useful ways!
Always has been (c.2012)
You can no longer disable it without breaking CarPlay, and it’s started randomly activating when you press the power button on my phone when carplay is on.
My theory is that typing a GPS destination into my car dashboard at a stoplight is too dangerous, and typing it on a phone keyboard is also too dangerous, but unlocking the phone, frantically yelling “cancel” until you find the “STFU Siri” button on the steering wheel, dismissing random useless carplay displays and THEN typing the address into the phone is completely safe.
On a related note, they keep adding more distractions to the apple maps carplay screen. The other day, I was at an intersection, and the map rendered the sidewalks similarly to the road. It knew I was driving. Does it think using sidewalks as shortcuts is legal or something?
Siri on the other hand is embarrassingly bad.
Far from a popular opinion.
https://arstechnica.com/apple/2024/11/apple-intelligence-not...
Tech addicts, fr
Seems like an amazing tool for car trips.
Also, not sure where you are located but in the USA the cellular providers are god damn awful out in the sticks and certain segments of the highway.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the queries hang.
For those of us who enjoy some form of entertainment while driving, sometimes those things mentioned don't hit right or you getting bored of them or you run out of episodes, especially on long drives. Talking with ChatGPT's just another form of (audio) entertainment. I can ask it about whatever and have it interactively teach me about eg double entry accounting. I can interrupt with the dumbest questions and never feel judged.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I really appreciate any moment I can get where I'm not inundated with stimuli.
Using Siri and an iPhone for “hands free” driving, whether it’s ChatGPT or w/e, it’s not very user friendly.
Ask it for basic shit such as directions to some restaurant, and it takes seconds to load and sometimes even asks you to unlock your phone. Even worse experience with cellular connection.
No more hands free experience. Now it’s a very real distraction from what you _should_ be doing - driving the fucking vehicle and don’t kill anybody or maim a pedestrian.
Sick and tired of you distracted shit heads using your phone instead of paying attention to the god damn road.
Don’t even get me started on Cruise/Waymo or the god damn drive share shitheads.
laws? they only respect one thing.
Violence? Do you mean violence?
You're implicitly complaining about creeping oligarchism, and your solution is to introduce violence? Because that will magically manifest against the oligarchs? Versus the way it's gone every time in history, for the most obvious of obvious reasons, from the top down?
not because of violence but because of unity.
that's what totally broken...the lack of cohesion. divided and conquered.
your confrontational approach being another microscopic essentially invisible example.
as for apple. jobs died and apple died then too.
Humans are slowly learning how to respond to manufactured dissent and contagious division.
Boycotts don't work if there isn't a substitute [1].
Can’t wait for the next Apple lawsuit where I get $5 in compensation after 2-3 years of stalling it in courts.
This way, Apple Intelligence can not run, because the display and Siri language need to be the same.
A problem you are facing? You will be made to backup your entire data and then wipe your devices (yes, I was made to do it for a Safari issue on Mac; they made me wipe out the iPhone as well - why? Of course same iCloud) and then it was not fixed and you got a “we will look into it”!
In this entire period — you’d have received EXACTLY ZERO emails with updates! They would never reply to you on email ever!! Never!! And would not provide or entertain an email ever!! Never!
You wanna record an Apple custom care call? Tough luck. You do that without informing them otherwise they’d refuse to even speak to you. Well, Apple records it and they will provide you a copy so yeah trust them!
The user hostility is so extreme that sometimes I end up pulling up my hair “how the fuck can anyone become FAN of such a company??? How? I mean you can be a user of such a company, but fan? Ffs!
Then I look at the OS and device market and see Android and Windows (no, I am not counting Linux!) and I realise where we have arrived.