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Comment by bikelang | Hacker News Reader

Literally all I want from Apple is a year (or multiple) spent laser focused tackling tech debt and improving software performance.

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Yep; and all Apple fans ever say is "report feedback!!!" but what is the point when seemingly Apple never gets to their backlog of bugs/broken features? I mean, sure, some big stuff gets fixed, but there is a lot of stuff broken going on years they haven't even touched.

Feedback is more or less a black hole, for the most part. It's rarely paid attention to by a human, and is treated like telemetry. If you want something fixed, it needs to get into the press or go viral.

I’m sure there are countless examples to the contrary, but I recently submitted feedback regarding an issue that I was experiencing in Final Cut Pro. Within a week, a member of the Final Cut Pro team contacted me and asked for a copy of my video editing files so they could replicate the issue. I sent them the files, they confirmed the issue, and the issue was fixed in the next release.

I was very pleasantly surprised.

I just madly click on "I Have This Problem Too"

I’ve reported a few things, none of it got fixed or acknowledged. Providing video evidence too!

You don’t even know whether it goes somewhere because you don’t even get a proper ack.

> Yep; and all Apple fans ever say is "report feedback!!!"

I'm trying not fall into "No True Scotsman" but... It should be common knowledge at this point that Apple Feedback is a blackhole of despair. "Please attach a sample project" seems to be the go-to, even for things were that makes no sense. Same with attaching debug/diagnostic logs. I understand the value of all of those things but even people who have jumped through all the hoops get ghosted and/or their issue is never addressed.

Currently I would not waste my time on Feedback and it's sad because even if Apple reverses course it will take a lot to get the people who they should most want creating Feedbacks to create them.

I'm gonna be guilty of whataboutism but is there any remotely large company out there that isn't a black hole of despair when it comes to feedback?

Microsoft, kinda-sorta, does something when a feedback item gets enough votes on this:

https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/forum/ad198462...

LOL I'm amazed that's still up and running; I created the backend for this using Dynamics 365 in 2021.

Those are probably anonymous employee accounts not fans. I don't know if anyone would be enough of a power user fan to tell someone to file a bug report.

Honestly the best way to get stuff fixed is to work there, and report shit directly to PMs/BRB while living on the dailies.

Short of that yeah, everything is a black hole :/

I care more about numerous bugs than I do about performance, to be honest. I'm starting to to regret not switching to Android last time I was upgrading my phone. Even if it is the same bugfest, at least I wouldn't have paid premium for the priveledge of using a device that "just doesn't work"

I need three new phones in close future for the family and I think I will go with Google Pixels and GrapheneOS. There is foldable phone available! It’s cheaper, I can deduct phones in full in the same year since the phones are <800€ before taxes (relevant probably only in Germany). And imho Apple’s premium promise is gone with glass design. Too many small errors.

Graphene has been good to me, after I turned off the "Apps just updated" and "Apps are up to date already" notification spam

Yeah, the latest update has nearly crippled my phone. Half the time when I unlock it the app icons just don't appear.

100% this. I honestly can’t remember the last major feature of MacOS / iOS that didn’t feel like a solution searching for a problem, while I was bombarded by weird little bugs and semi-fail states in core functionality. At this point I experience daily at least once:

- iOS keyboard doesn’t appear when it should - iOS keyboard button press detection and autocorrect have degraded badly - UI Layers are missing, misaligned, or stacked in such a way that I can’t actually interact with the element I need to proceed - mystery Internet slowdowns that resolve only after a restart - security misbehavior such as refusing to allow a usb device I’ve already approved (MacOS resets approval of my main USB hub every update for some reason)

Software bloat is not a failure for Apple. It is a mechanism that drives the hardware upgrade cycle.

We need another Snow Leopard era.

Snow Leopard was incredibly buggy on release. Spending time on "tech debt and software performance" adds more bugs because all aggressive changes cause regressions.

The reason it worked is that it was a long release cycle with a lot of minor updates.

> Snow Leopard was incredibly buggy on release