I've set the Bozo bit on all software, except for my own, on which I set the Genius bit.
..and sometimes the Don't Care bit
Setting the bozo bit on Apple
111–120 of 185 posts
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#112> 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).
Which is why I'll never got there. Dark patterns don't attract me. But others might be better codependants than I am.
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#113I like this concept of a "bozo bit" and have to agree, the arbitrary difficulty of making Apple software do things slightly outside the happy path can border on insanity, like that "Malcom in the Middle" Fixing the Lightbulb clip/GIF that goes around from time to time. I would like to extend this concept. I do not, in fact, have the bozo bit set for my Linux desktop setup. I do, however, have the "fields of broken gl…
8 Bozo Bits = 1 Bozo Byte.
2^38 Bozo Bits = 2^30 Bozo Bytes = 1 Bozo Gig.
I think we're all Bozos on this bus!
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#114> 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.
Wait until he tries to search for this file. The main "Search" field use to just filter music based on the string. But since iTunes became Music, it now shows an auto-curated screen of crap you don't want. ...and the old search is moved to Songs -> (upper right) "Show filter field". They even change the shortcut key, which is the worst part imo.
Thank you SO much for posting this- I have been missing that feature very badly, and had _no_ idea that it was still there in any form. Having it back makes using Music.app about a thousand times more tolerable!
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to work on this part of CoreMedia. Opening the mp4 header is fast enough that spotlight does it in the background for every supported media file on your system. For tens of thousands or even millions of files, inspecting the header only loads about an extra page into RAM per file. Or, since Apple already has the Spotlight index with this track data in it, 0 extra pages. Basically, only track information that's…
But how fast is that? Cause Spotlight is running in the background, not blocking you from opening the file. I think the bigger issue is just that users expect a .mp4 to open with their default .mp4 player, and in fact some people don't know about "open with" and change the extension as a way to pick the player.
Unless it's changed since I was there, Spotlight is more or less a sqlite3 database so it has about the same complexity as navigating a filesystem tree but probably with better cache affinity.
But also this concern about loading the header of millions of files is such an edge case that I don't think it matters. A human tapping on a piece of glass to play a few files would notice no difference in performance.
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#116> 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…
Does iTunes not support music videos?
Yes. It isn't the default player for .mp4 as it isn't really a general video player.
Also, I just did a quick check, if you rename an m4a to mp4, and add it to the magic "$APPLEMUSICFOLDER/Media/Automatically Add To Music" folder, Music will import it, but give it a Media Kind metadata field as "Music" and not "Music Video" (which you get with actual video files), so it obviously does deeper inspection than just the filename.
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#117> 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 thought it was pretty great around roughly 2004-2015.
What won me over compared to Winamp was iTunes' smart playlists. I'm actually surprised they haven't borked, neutered, or removed that feature. It's still the same and it's still good.
It did a lot of other things right too. It was convenient to edit metadata for multiple files. CD ripping was painless and used a high quality mp3 encoder at a time when that was not a given. In general, it was one of those apps that just behaved logically to me and rarely if ever surprised me in a bad way.
When iTunes introduced "iTunes in the cloud" or whatever it was called -- the ability to have your files mirrored in the cloud -- I was more or less in heaven for a while. I had a few moans and niggles but nothing much.
I actively kind of hate it now though. Too many media types (with different paradigms) crammed into one app. The result is a mess. Not sure it could be any other way.
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> so many people have only a phone now, so no reason to try to sync. Wait until the AR glasses come out. I pretty much guarantee that media syncing will be a huge deal, and Apple had better get their iCloud act together by then. iCloud is a shambles; and I say this as an Apple user for more than thirty years, and has pegged his career to Apple.
What about iCloud is a shambles? In my experience it works fine, I save files on one device, and then I can access them on another.
It regularly deletes music without warning -especially if I import it from CDs (that’s still a thing, for us boomers. I have even recorded vinyl records), and also regularly restores music that I delete.
I have also had it do that thing, where my (non-DRMed) song, recorded from a CD, is replaced by the DRMed “radio edit” version of the song, from Apple Music.
That’s fun.
Whether or not the sync actually happens, or if the song stays on the original device, seems to be a crapshoot.
Safari bookmark syncing is … not good. It rearranges bookmarks, refuses to delete some, refuses to sync certain ones, according to some internal algorithm. Etc.
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#119> 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…
Does iTunes not support music videos?
Sure but if your default file handler for mp4 files is Quicktime (as is the default for anyone who hasn't changed it), why would you expect macOS to open mp4s in another app because of the just because it's a music video, or, in the author's case music only?
Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple
#120It seems to be increasingly widespread and is not just the Music/iTunes ecosystem.
For example, the Home app and HomeKit situation is also unreliable. People's devices suddenly disappear from their Home app on bigger installations. You have to delete the entire thing and start over and go and find all the barcodes again. There's a well known workaround for setting up Home Assistant, moving all your devices to its control and having it export to your HomeKit. People hate doing this but it's been one of the reliable ways of stopping this from happening in larger setups.
Also in the HomeKit area, synchronization of voice recognition for personal requests in a multi-person house is extremely fragile. It works for many people, but sometimes it just doesn't. It is supposed to be transparent and automatic - if you teach your phone to recognize your voice, then all the HomePods in your house are supposed to as well. Except sometimes they just don't sync and you have to reset the homepods to factory defaults and reintroduce them just to get them to sync the voice recognition. Or worse, your phone won't let you turn on voice recognition for you in homekit even though your phone is doing recognition successfully.
Or even more maddening, the home app says you're signed in with a different apple ID on your phone and home app, but it's the exact same ID.
And that's assuming you can even join the home on your phone. My wife's phone is nearly impossible to invite to our "Home". The invites never arrive if using the appleID. Sometimes it'll work if the invite is done by phone number, but again, no invite message. Sometimes firing up the Home app on her phone will announce that there is a pending invite but it often takes 5-10 tries over a few days to get this far.
When searching on the support forums, it is easy to find other people who have had these exact same problems for years.
Or the AirTag situation. I put an airtag on a remote control that keeps getting lost in the room. But only one person in the house can locate it with the UWB direction finding system. I don't want to have to put two or three airtags on the same remote just because Apple won't let us share tags between family members. This is just silly.
Sadly, I find myself agreeing with the article. Apple has drifted from "it just works" to being surprised if it actually works.