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Comment by refulgentis | Hacker News Reader

This is a Claude-coded website that invents metrics and data based on bald-faced lies, ex. the first example makes up that the search in Mail does not work 100% of the time and then calculates fantastical millions of hours wasted.

I can report it works fine, needed it to pull up 13 year old emails for me a couple months ago.

I absolutely abhor Apple’s software QC since 2010 but I don’t think a vibe-coded, vibes-based, fantasy, written by AI, with the sheen of numbers and reality is the way to do it, or a net-positive outlet for my frustration. At least on HN.

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Huh. How else would you get a massive company that has let certain bugs sit for decades to address them? This method is probably just as ineffective as reporting another bug into the Black Hole of Bug Reports that is Apple, but this one is at least mildly funnier? YMMV of course.

But the bugs never existed in the first place? I hate HN is rife with inflammatory complain pieces like this.

The search bugs in Mail are absolutely real. They might not affect every user but I've had major issues on both macOS and iOS mail, and eventually gave up and switched to Gmail.

Have you checked if it’s the fault of your mail providers? The search function queries the remote mail servers in addition to the local cache. If the mail servers return garbage you get garbage results.

This was with an iCloud email address.

Maybe iCloud search is rubbish.

Mail search works flawlessly for me with Gmail and Outlook. It takes a sec but the results are always relevant.

As I used to ask field teams and PMs back when I was a SWE - provide the steps to reproduce the bug as I can't seem to recreate it.

I experience at least five of those bugs daily and it makes me so frustrated: Hotspot, airdrop, mail search, corner drag, text selection.

If you want to be that pedantic it does state "This site is satire. Not affiliated with Apple Inc. The bugs are real. The math is not. All estimates are made up. Your frustration, however, is valid." at the bottom.

The bugs are not real (inter alia, Mail app search does, in fact, work). Your being pedantic is my being reality-based.

All of the things on this website have affected my experience of macOS and iOS for a long, long time.

I definitely go straight to the Gmail website when I need to search for anything on my work account. Yes, I've got it set up to cache all the emails locally indefinitely. Have done for years. Even did so when my workplace used Office 365 instead of Google.

On Hacker News, of all websites, giving yourself the "Works on My Machine" badge is not a worthy contribution. It's dismissive of any experience other than your own.

He had it down as Mail search never works at the time of my comment. Never.

Don’t appreciate the drive by “that’s okay because it doesn’t work for me, btw, works for me is bad”. It’s fallacious. I’m not ignoring your lived experience. I’m calling out slop.

And I'm calling out the unearned arrogance of somebody who doesn't understand what hyperbole is, a fairly basic rhetorical device.

What arrogance? Is hyperbole a literary device, or genre? What’s the difference between hyperbole and making stuff up? When is it okay to say it’s making stuff up, when it could just be hyperbole? How is “you said it works for you but I say doesn’t work for me, trumped!” calling out arrogance?

Genuinely curious how anyone can use iOS autocorrect and conclude that it's not totally shit.

Do you think you might be taking it too seriously?

No I think I don’t come here for 0 effort fiction. YMMV. I don’t mean that dismissively. People seem to love it. It’s not an AI thing, it’s a “this is Spam, in the original sense of the word”

I mean, it reports FOUR HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS in losses due to Apple Mail.app search not working. Give them credit for... something.

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