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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

I've read the article front to back twice. Carefully - and I'm still not 100% certain whether it's a troll, or for real.

The interesting thing is, many of this persons problems come from Apple trying to support multiple platforms, instead of locking the person into a single unified environment.

Others (like iPhoto starting to suck after 10,000 pictures) were an issue in the first couple releases - but it's not uncommon for people to have north of 100,000 photos, and get reasonable performance in recent releases.

The difficulty hitting the search magnifying glass was interesting - I wasn't even aware that magnifying glass existed. You normally just scroll to the top - now I can do it faster. But - it makes sense - what's just one above the letter "A" - the search icon.

All in all - I'm believing it's an article whose genesis was a user who got hit by an edgecase/bug on their iPhone, and then turned it into a generic rant about all things Apple.

But the problems this person are having do seem to make it clear to me why, if anything, the OS X platform / iPhone are too flexible. There are lots (lots!) of users out there who would trade some of that flexibility for more predictable performance/ease of use.

And thus, Sandboxing.

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Pretty sure it's not a troll. He's pretty well known for his writings on search engines. It's a sign of the times when longtime Mac users are complaining. That's how bad things have gotten.

I've watched people struggle like he's describing. Too many upgrades. Too many authorizations. Too many restrictions. They are jumping through hoop after hoop just to do basic stuff. If they are young they probably don't know any better. But for anyone who has been around, this has gotten to be a joke.

If you have stuck with Apple over the long haul, then you remember what it was like before OSX. When OSX was first introduced you had to upgrade your Mac hardware just to run it or it would be dog slow. Then it got better over time as we all upgraded but it has gradually become more and more annoying. How many people are staring at a spinning beachball at this very moment? Trying to appeal to PC users, all the Mac vs PC nonsense. Then trying to lock down people's music and other files and make them "subscribers", like they are some sort of media licensing company. Apple is no longer an alternative to the typical computer hassles. They have become a primary source of them!

But only if you have been using Macs for many years can you see this. Noobs and fanboys are not going to notice. They will wait minutes for their Mac to boot and stare endlessly at the beachball and accept that this is "fast, start-of-the-art computing".

While noobs suffer through iPhoto staring at beachballs, I will boot in seconds and process my photos, running in a background process, in half the time, using a more traditional UNIX without the Cocoa cruft. No hassles.

I supported the Macintosh Labs at SFU from 1991-1993. Those systems booted off of floppies (which I handed out at the front desk) - and one of my jobs at Harbor Center was, on a weekly basis, running anti-virus off the boot floppies to clean them off.

I also supported the Macintosh Platform at Netscape (HUGE Macintosh house) from 1996-1998. A good portion of the time we ran into a tough problem on the Macs there (by then we had hard drives), our Mac Lead (which I was not) - had us do a "Fresh Install" of the operating system. That pretty much always resolved the problem, but seems kind of invasive nowadays.

I sometimes think we view Mac History through rose colored glasses.

I will agree with you - that damn beachball is annoying. Though, I am happy to say, that as of 10.7.4, it probably only spins for about 5-10 minutes of my day now in aggregate, as compared to the 20-30 minutes a day back in the 10.7.1 era.

Tolerance. I guess I just have less of it. Machines are faster now than they were back then and I am not going to tolerate slow response time just for the sake of the latest version of an OS. Windows is the same game. Upgrade, again and agina and again. All the while, no speed gain. I once worked for a guy who said, "Software is like a gas. It expands to fill space." Nowadays I use UNIX exclusively, as much as I can. Whenever I have to use Windows or Mac it slows me down. With UNIX, I can keep the software expansion contained and enjoy the speed gains as hardware improves.

Everything with computers is a trade-off. I'm happy to make some trade-offs and forgo whatever Cupertino is hawking in order to have flexibility and speed like the "good ole days".

OS X is also a UNIX. You can say Linux or *BSD or whatever, it's OK, nobody's going to judge you.

Technically OSX is an 'official UNIX,' and Linux is not so far as I know. I'm not sure of any of the BSDs are stamped with the 'official UNIX' label.

Technically. If you consider The Open Group as some sort of authority. But Apple's OSX shows how meaningless it is to recieve the expensive POSIX "certification" from The Open Group. Alas, there is nothing in the spec about having to actually perform. Nothing that requires clean design or reliability, let alone transparency. I mean, if you want to use UNIX for a commercial product, by all means go ahead, but the least you could do is not ruin it.

"Certified UNIX". Pure marketing. Apple has the budget. There are vastly better UNIX implementations (from which Apple has borrowed copiously) that will never be certified. Go figure.

From where I sit, the most talented coders always seem to hold the POSIX specifications in spite. They do not like them. OSX is proof that they are not being unreasonable by taking that view.

To be clear, I'm not endorsing GNU/Linux. That is a whole 'nother story of UNIX gone bad.

There are vastly better UNIX implementations (from which Apple has borrowed copiously) that will never be certified.

Like who? And what has Apple copied from them?

You are computer science student? At NYU? Is this question for real?

http://netbsd.org http://freebsd.org http://openbsd.org http://dragonflybsd.org

They all borrow from each other. They even borrow from Apple sometimes.

As for what has been copied, you simply need to read the source code.

I'm sorry, I thought you were going to claim Apple clearly ripped some UI elements off from Unity or Gnome or something.

Instead, you're saying OSX, which is BSD-based, borrowed elements from...BSD-based projects?

Wow. What's next? Are you going to call out the Kubuntu team?

On my old Atari ST, which I still use, the busy bee comes on the screen only when the machine is doing useful work for me, that I have explicitly asked it to do. If it's not busy, the machine is always responsive. On OSX, the beach ball appears at random seemingly, when doing something as trivial as scrolling a document (or web page), or clicking on the menubar at the top of the screen! And the machine is useless until it finishes whatever it's doing.

The ST has 1 8Mhz processor and 1M RAM and a floppy drive. The Mac has 4x3Ghz cores and 8G of RAM, HD not SSD like that's an excuse. And remember we are talking about simple GUI updating tasks here. There is simply no getting around that the interactive parts of OSX are appallingly badly written. Processing a mouse click and drawing a menu, for crying out loud!

I am amazed at how these modern day machines just don't seem that powerful when you use them. I remember using my Pentium 166 with I think 4MB of RAM, and sometimes I feel it was more responsive than my current Windows box or Mac with tons of RAM. Maybe it's just nostalgia talkin'.

I definitely see this myself. When waiting for my Linux box to respond to a mouse movement or my Windows laptop to wake back up, I think back to my Apple ][ where it was never possible to enter data faster than the computer can handle it.

Right now there are 257 tasks running on my Ubuntu box. I don't recognize half of them.

It feels we are slipping backwards.

I'm not sure who "we" is anymore. Smart people like yourself would not do many of the things we're seeing done. I think it's within your power to control the slippage at least starting with you. Again, the word is "tolerance". When will you say "Enough. No mas."?

If you need one, I'm happy to send you a UNIX (or simple instructions on how to build one) that does not have the complexity of Ubuntu but runs just as fast and does all the same stuff, sans the gratuitous GUI's. You can always add GUI layers later if you want them. My guess is you won't once you see how much faster things are, and how few processes you need to be running at any given time.

I'm curious. Can you send me a UNIX?

I too wish you to "send me a UNIX". Actually the instructions would be better.

Send me a UNIX, too!

Do I have to prepay postage? Should I send you a self-addressed envelope?

It's not nostalgia. It's the software industry; and Apple. If they do not keep writing needless code and mindlessly adding features and then _forcing_ you to use their software (you are not given a choice; hello Apple), they become less important. The focus then (properly) becomes Moore's Law.

And your machine gets more and more powerful. That comes from the hardware. Software does not add more power. It drains power.

But you will not likely see much of the gains from Moore's Law as a home user; you only see "new" software. The software industry will be the ones who get the benefit of hardware advances. They will promptly usurp all the gains for themselves to make their bloated software capable of running. Writing power hungry programs is perfectly acceptable (I love writing code) BUT _forcing_ people to use it is not cool. Users are not often given a choice to keep using "yesterday's" software (even if it still works). Even if it would let them see the gains from Moore's Law. That is a travesty. Keep staring at the beachball. Life is good.

We've had decades to observe software development and it's clear that software does not have an equivalent to Moore's Law.

Let us buy the Apple hardware without the Apple software. Let us install our own software if we so choose. Now, behold as people try to argue against this. But they are only arguing against options and choice. What is the harm in giving people the option to install their own OS? If anything without the Apple brand is so terrible then surely no one would opt for it. So no harm done. You never know, they might actually be able to sell lots of hardware this way. "Average consumers" are not the only ones who spend lots of money on hardware.

Apple has taken a decent system (free UNIX) and ruined it. They have made it unusuable for anyone who has any idea of how fast computers SHOULD be.

Yes, the industry would like you to upgrade every year, if they could. They've managed to force most people into perhaps a 3 year cycle. But the truth is, for tasks like documents of a few pages, small spreadsheets, sending a receiving email, etc, etc, then a machine from 1990 could do all that.

Imagine if the car industry worked like this, if 3 years after you bought a car it wouldn't work quite right with the only fuel you could buy, and spare parts were impossible to obtain, and the engine compartment was welded shut!

Atari ST. A beautiful machine.

In Apple's failings, there is immense opportunity.

Follow the bouncing beach ball...

You've got to be kidding me. He may be the world's leading expert in search engines (I doubt it), but this post is ridiculous.

My favorite part is when he receives simple, straightforward advice from Apple on how to fix his iPhone issue, but he chooses to ignore it. Instead he scours the web for alternatives, and spots one suggestion that is applicable to jailbroken phones.

"Are you frickin’ kidding me? I have to jailbreak my phone to fix this problem?"

Uh, or you could just try any one of the four easy solutions you've been offered so far.

But that would make way too much sense, so he continues his search. He ends up at iphonefaq.org, a site that "looked pretty official." Are you freaking kidding me?

Finally, after hours of searching, he arrives at this gem:

"The only option that was relatively straightforward and seemed to work, according to many forums, was to restore the phone."

As in, the original solution provided by Apple's tech support. Apparently it's Apple's fault that he can't follow directions or readily accept simple solutions. I can't go on, I'm getting dumber just reading this.

    simple, straightforward advice from Apple on how to fix his iPhone issue, but he chooses to ignore it.

'Oh, your phone has 2/3 of the storage taken up by cruft because our OS doesn't work properly. Delete everything on the phone and start over. Have a nice day!' This is answer may be "simple and straightforward" but it is not "acceptable."

soon: "That model is 9mo old and Apple gave you a simple, straightforward answer: buy a new one. Why are you still complaining?"

I think you're missing the point. He didn't ignore the suggestions, he felt that particular suggestion to restore the entire phone was unacceptable. Just because Apple says to do it, doesn't mean it may be the absolute best solution so the author went about finding other possible alternatives among the community. Unfortunately, beyond jailbreaking it there was no other worthwhile solution. In the end, he did exactly what Apple told him to do... and it still failed.

Now what?

You're missing my point.

If a warning light on my car's dash turns on, I might look for a fix online. But if someone in a forum suggests I drive my troubled car off a cliff, I'm not going to write an angry rant accusing Ford of making me drive my car off a cliff.

I'm also not going to navigate to some amateurish-looking website that's obviously not affiliated with Ford, and claim that I can't tell it apart from Ford's website (and imply that Ford is somehow responsible for my confusion).

And if I can't fix it myself, I'll bring the car in for servicing, rather than writing a linkbait article speculating about what the repairman might tell me. (In fact, if the phone is a year old and it has a legitimate issue, Apple might just hand him a new phone... I find that scenario more in line with my own experiences, but we'll never know, since he couldn't be bothered).

> Unfortunately, beyond jailbreaking it there was no other worthwhile solution.

Really? Because he listed a bunch that all seemed more worthwhile.

Looks like he definitely hit the nail on the head when he assumed he'd get people blaming him for not blindly following the "Just wipe your phone!" advice.

I don't blame him for not blindly following the advice. I blame him for blindly ignoring it:

> I have to jailbreak my phone to fix this problem?

Clearly, that's not his only option.

My iPhoto Library grew rapidly over the years. As in: it doubled its size, even though I did not add many photos. Thus, after a few years, I ended up with an iPhoto Library of 60 gigs that contained 30 gigs worth of photos.

And apparently, I am not the only one with this problem. And there seems to be no way to fix this. At all.

Luckily, at some point I found some 3rd party software that can rebuild an iPhoto library by basically simulating the user dragging all his images there manually and re-applying all the tags and stuff by hand. Honestly, what they are doing is quite an achievement in the face of an utterly defective piece of software.

Edit:

For the record, I used this tool to salvage my library: http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/

If you run into something like that, look inside the bundle with OmniDiskSweeper and see what's using up space.

(For instance you might have switched your camera to RAW unintentionally, or told iPhoto to save pictures as 16-bit raw TIFF)

If you're feeling up for a safari (har), go to your iPhoto Library, right-click -> Show Package Contents, and check out the sizes of each folder inside of here.

(the terminal command 'du' or the freeware GrandPerspective.app works well)

Pay close attention to the "iPod Photo Cache". Any sync to an iOS device that requires a down-res means a huge volume of quasi-thumbnails get stuffed here, one set for each target resolution.

I think the reason why your photos are doubling is because I believe you are importing them into iPhoto and then back into the iPhone. You will get two copies of all your photos on your iPhone because they get imported into iPhoto and then back out. It's super annoying, so I shut iPhoto completely off.

I don't ever put photos on my iPhone and I didn't sync my iPhone in the last year or so. Besides, I don't take all that many pictures with the iPhone.

When you double-click a photo in iPhoto to look at it full screen, it makes a copy of it on the chance that you intend to edit it. It stores that in a shadow directory called "Modified". Even if you don't edit it, the copy is retained.

Right click on iPhoto Library, Show Package Contents, look at size of Modified vs Originals folders to see if this is the cause behind your library doubling. If it is the case, please report back, I'd like to know as I also do not care for the implementation of this functionality.

If you crop and such your photos then you can't just delete the Modified ones without trouble.

At the time, I did look into that stuff, but the Modified folders were not the problem. There was something else going on.

Are you serious? I double click pretty much every photo I find interesting in my collection. Is that not the natural way to view a photo full-size? Editing requires you to click "edit". Why would they needlessly allow this to bloat if no edits are made?

I currently have:

    1.2G Previews
    7.8G Masters

(BTW in my version at least, Modified/Originals are symlinks to Previews/Masters.)

Same here, as far as I understand it, when you rotate a pic, or make some other changes, it creates a new version.

So do you really think that Mac Mail, Calendar and Adress Book are good tools for poeple who have a lot of mails, appointments and contacts?

I'm not so much complaining about Apple's software as I am quietly accepting of the fact that Apple makes pretty consumer gadgets not tools for professionals.

Actually, I think it's a good thing that Apple's software is unsuitable for intensive use. It leaves space for actual software developers (us) to provide that.

I have 120,000 messages in Mail with 5 accounts going back about 6 years and about 20+ smart mailboxes.

Mail was one part of OSX I never actually had any problems with.

I am jealous. 10000 messages and it very often takes 5+ seconds to switch between smart mailboxes. Admittedly the smart mailbox filters I have set up are pretty crazy but still... It's not like email metadata changes. The results should be cached.

I also have large mail accounts with Mail and haven't had any problems either. iPhoto is the big one I have a beef with, but Mail was always good to me (except with Exchange integration, but DavMail fixed that up).

Those tools fall down when you connect them to external services - particularly exchange. Mail.App, in particular, was flawed in how it read from exchange servers from 10.7 through 10.7.3 - It's gotten somewhat better in 10.7.4, and I hear most of my remaining bugs have been resolved in ML. Calendar and Address book are fine as standalone tools, but never really (and still don't) cut it as "Enterprise workflow" tools. Microsoft Exchange + Outlook own the calendar work in the enterprise.

The point I was really trying to make was that Apple's recent failings have been their attempt to work with others - they don't understand how to design/deploy/develop internet services. And they don't play (very) well with others.

They succeed best when you stick to their walled garden, with perhaps the one exception that proves the rule being their web browser - which is pretty spiffy on both the mobile and OS X platform.

Microsoft doesn't play too well with others either but you can customize and hack their software. They want you to do that and they make it easy for power users who are not professional programmers. Apple doesn't want that. Apple wants you to use it in one particular way or not at all.

Both approaches have their benefits. At least with Apple products you always know where things are. If you open MS Office on a power user's machine you may find something completely unique to that user. It's very useful to them but totally unsupportable for anyone else. Office is the people's Unix shell in a way. Apple doesn't want to be that and it isn't.

I don't know which one I hate the most between Calendar and Mail.

Calendar~ I use it with an Exchange server and often accept appointments or meeting, but if I restart the application, it seems to forget about it and the event is marked as new. Problem: If I reply to the invitation once again, the creator of the event will receive another email, bad bad bad... I also hate when Calendar complains 10 times in a row that it cannot connect to the platform when I am actually offline, extremely frustrating to have to deal with all these modal dialogs.

Mail~ Not mentioning the poor user experience, the modal dialogs complaint apply as well, mails are not often sent, HTML signature is a pain to setup, often becomes unresponsive, or simply crashes.

All this to say that for a development environment, OSX is my OS of choice, but it is about emails, contacts, meetings and so on, the embedded applications are not good at best.

I had a laugh yesterday when the MacWorld editor said about Apple that they were not only doing good OSes, but excellent applications as well during the TechCrunch talk about the iPhone 5. In my experience, I have always found Apple applications average at best, even on the iPhone.

> Calendar~ I use it with an Exchange server ...

Ah, there's your problem.

> Mail~ Not mentioning the poor user experience, the modal dialogs complaint apply as well, mails are not often sent, HTML signature is a pain to setup, often becomes unresponsive, or simply crashes.

I haven't had this problem. Then again, you sound like you live in the MS world, in which case the problem really isn't Apple.

Because the company I work for uses an Exchange infrastructure, I live in the MS world and thus it's my fault (or Microsoft's).

My Android phone does a better job at handling Exchange accounts than my mac. All my work environments are Mac environment, I even coded on open source OSX projects for a while so I am not the kind of person to just dismiss OSX because it is not a MS platform.

Like it or not, it is a reality that the Mail & Calendar are broken, the simple fact that Apple tries to convince everyone at each release that the new version is finally a good one is enough for me to see that they have trouble developing a good email/calendar clients.

And again, Exchange is one of the most used corporate infrastructure, that's the state of the market, and Apple should support it the best they can.

> Like it or not, it is a reality that the Mail & Calendar are broken ...

They work just fine for me, when using servers that conform to standardized protocols.

> And again, Exchange is one of the most used corporate infrastructure, that's the state of the market, and Apple should support it the best they can.

You say this as if Exchange was some sort of common standard, instead of a proprietary walled garden that has been nearly impossible for 3rd-party clients to support completely and reliably for nearly a decade and a half.

Do you also expect 3rd-party office suites to interoperate perfectly with MS Office?

So you are saying that the right away to face the challenge of supporting multiple platforms is to outright not do it?

I can't respect a product/company whose future vision is less integration and not more.

I really dislike Apple as a brand, but I admit they bring a lot to the table and that means driving competing products to raise theirs standards, though if their answer to difficult problems is to throw in the towel, then their role may progressively decline in importance.

I do share his frustration with the contact list on the iPhone. I also have over 1000 contacts, which built up over the years of painstakingly migrating them between models of Nokia phones, often having to write scripts to do it with. Then I got a Macbook and it paired with my Nokia phone so easily and painlessly I was really impressed, and when I got an iPhone my contacts magically ended up on it and I was impressed even further.

However, with this number of contacts, finding one is quite difficult. Apart from the alphabetical sorting by surname, scrolling to the top is impractical, or even through one letter of the alphabet. So, I have to rely on the search, and the button is hard to get to.

A similar problem happens when you want to phone someone you've been messaging. If the message history is long, it's a long scroll to get to the top of it to get to the contacts options.

Tapping the bar which displays the time and battery life at the top of the screen will quickly scroll you top of most content on the iPhone, Contacts App and Safari included.

Thanks! See, I should complain more there is probably a solution for all these things, even though it's not that obvious to me.

Or you can tap anywhere on the alphabet bar and swipe up. You can scroll through the alphabet like that as well, no need to tap exactly the right letter.

Doesn't touching the top bat take you to the top any more? It used to but maybe the new notifications messed with it?

For contacts, I have been using a CardDAV server called Davical (OSS). This is supported on iOS and Macs since it implements the CardDAV standard. With 1000+ contacts, it is a more robust solution than scripts for every new phone.

On a similar vein, I also use CalDAV which does the same thing for calendars.

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