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Setting the bozo bit on Apple

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Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#51

Post by CSSer »

kruuuder wrote: post #17

> How can such basic functionality be this incredibly broken? 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.

The hardware is still incredibly reliable and astoundingly performant. The rate at which they're capable of delivering them to the store and your doorstep is too. Per number of devices sold, it's crazy that they encounter as few issues as they do. Yeah, they've had some real 'Oops' moments, but on the whole it's crazy good.

As for software? Yeah, it's really, really bad. :( I think Apple has forgotten how to do software.

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#52

Post by RajT88 »

The bozo bit as described is how I thought about Sony for a long time.

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.

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#53

Post by DangerousPie »

I have my fair share of complaints about Apple Music, but I don't agree that this is in any way 'basic functionality'. I would expect that 99% of Apple Music users just want an easy way to stream music, not sync custom songs that they received as .mp4 files on WhatsApp across their devices. It would obviously be nice if this was better supported, but I can see how this may not be worth investing a lot of engineering hours in.

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#54

Post by RajT88 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

For about 10 years I’ve considered Windows iTunes to be malware. Music playback w/ apples own apps on MacOS has been bad ever since Apple got into the music business…. Sigh, if only the Beatles estate had won that lawsuit over the use of the ‘Apple’ brand for music…

I recall beyond the usability issues (who wants a big stupid MP3 player? Not me.), iTunes when you uninstalled it left a bunch of stuff behind on the system. I'm not talking just odd files here and there, I'm talking entire sets of running services you have to remove from ARP or otherwise nuke. Bonjour was one that comes to mind, but there was more I can't recall offhand.

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#55

Post by chongli »

eptcyka wrote: post #40
kemayo wrote: post #32

> These are sent via WhatsApp so the audio recordings are mp4 files, which for some bizarre reason won't open in Music and instead open in QuickTime Player, despite definitely being audio files. .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 op…

Apple never really wanted to have the concept of files seep into iOS.

Which in hindsight seems extremely naïve. Files are just too damn useful a concept. Their main rival, databases, have a bunch of peculiarities that limit their generality. When people want to share information any longer than a paragraph or two, they send a file. You can’t beat files!

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#56

Post by msluyter »

kruuuder wrote: post #17

> How can such basic functionality be this incredibly broken? 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.

IMHO, I think this is by design, with the goal of moving people to Apple Music. These days, it's all about rent extraction (aka, subscriptions).

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#57

Post by lapcat »

pflenker wrote: post #15

> iTunes used to be if not the, then certainly a flagship app for Apple. 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 have used iTunes — consistently — for around two decades, and while I agree that iTunes was mediocre, Music app is soooooo much worse. It's total crap. Embarrassingly bad. I would happily trade Music app to get iTunes back again.

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#58

Post by nikanj »

ergonaught wrote: post #38

We are (were) deeply/widely invested into the whole Apple ecosystem, and they are very rapidly losing that spot in our lives/homes. Nearly every interaction has become immediately frustrating. Moving away from all of it. There's zero possibility of help with any of it, and less than zero possibility of their fixing any of it. Major bummer.

Fortunately the competition is busy scoring an own goal with Windows 11

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#59

Post by ladberg »

gymbeaux wrote: post #13
ladberg wrote: post #6

I have a ~100 item Notes file of stuff like this that I experience regularly on iOS and macOS. It's optimistically a list of Radars I would file should I ever work at Apple again, but I'm fully aware that 95% of Radars like these go nowhere so it's more realistically just a space to vent. 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 goe…

What are radars? Is that the internal name Apple uses for bug reports? And more importantly, why would Apple ignore radars like this? It was clear (at least in the 10.8 days) that Apple cared about reliability and stability.

> Is that the internal name Apple uses for bug reports?

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.

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