161–170 of 536 posts
Look at the mess that is Apple Home. They added it because Google and Amazon were doing it - and, that's about it. Hey, I can add some lights that I can change color to any color I want! Too bad if I want a thermostat, a doorbell, or... Okay, what about Apple Wallet? It'd be really nice to add my digital driver's license, health insurance cards, auto insurance card, frequent shopping cards - basically make it so I do…
Look at the mess that is Apple Home. They added it because Google and Amazon were doing it - and, that's about it. Hey, I can add some lights that I can change color to any color I want! Too bad if I want a thermostat, a doorbell, or... Okay, what about Apple Wallet? It'd be really nice to add my digital driver's license, health insurance cards, auto insurance card, frequent shopping cards - basically make it so I do…
And the worst part is that their software division used to be great. Aperture was really good when it came out, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro were great. Eveh talking about iwork suite, numbers and page used to be better than they are now. Even Quicktime regressed. It's frankly both puzzling and saddening how much Apple has lost in term of QA, user interface and vision in the last 10 years. I always feel that Tim Cook doe…
Well their shares have never been higher so as long as that's the metric by which a CEO's performance is judged then you can forget about Apple caring about SW QA and other such "nonsense".
Also, before Jobs passed away, Cook was Apple's supply chain mastermind so it makes sense his strengths are with the HW side of things, which, during the current silicon shortage, is an absolutely killer skillset to have, as proven by how little Apple was affected by it in comparison to other companies.
When it comes to quality SW, Cook might not be the ideal CEO for the job (like notifications on the new MBP can get hidden behind the notch; WTF, how did this pass QA?! Pretty sure Jobs would have sent them back to the drawing board) but Apple can always rely on the faithful developer base building great quality SW instead of them and then taking a 30% cut on their sales on the Apple store. Basically another win for Apple.
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I wish we had more options though. Between Windows and Apple there's no other real competition. Linux is cool and all... but not user friendly (not even Ubuntu)
I don't understand this attitude. I spend countless hours trying to keep my wife's work computers working. Getting windows to connect to a printer is a frequent ordeal and fixes seem to always be ephemeral, things soon breaking again. Her Macs are not as bad but still have lots of hiccups. Meanwhile I've been on Ubuntu for more than a decade and as far as I can remember, for example, printing consists of printer just…
Yesterday I prepared a few years old Windows laptop for my daughter to use in school. It took me a few hours just to install updates, remove bloatware (my oh my, the amount is staggering!) and fix privacy settings. And this was for Windows 10 which I hear is a mild version of a mess that Windows 11 is. I was instantly reminded why I appreciate Apple software more.
Look at the mess that is Apple Home. They added it because Google and Amazon were doing it - and, that's about it. Hey, I can add some lights that I can change color to any color I want! Too bad if I want a thermostat, a doorbell, or... Okay, what about Apple Wallet? It'd be really nice to add my digital driver's license, health insurance cards, auto insurance card, frequent shopping cards - basically make it so I do…
Your comments on Apple Home are factually incorrect. I have lights, cameras, smart blinds, thermostats, temperature/humidity/air quality sensors, my eero6 router and even my Roku added into Home. Apple Wallet also supports some forms of ID, transit cards and even vaccine certificates.
I think the main cause of this isn't so much Home, but the available third party hardware. I wish Apple would make a smart switch (I know that's fairly out of scope for them), but one high quality smart switch that actually worked reliably would resolve 90% of home tech issues.
Homepods are similarly bad with basic actions. I have five of them in multiple rooms. If you want to adjust the volume on all of them and say "make volume 50% everywhere" it fails. I have to whisper the command to my phone so the homepods don't hear me and then it can adjust volume on all of them.
Volume and playing on homepods generally from the phone is a shitty experience. Often the homepods lose the phone connection and then I can no longer control them from the device. Really it feels like nobody at Apple actually uses these things in their personal life.
I also have a gigabit network connection with a stupidly fast access point in a two bedroom apartment so it's not an issue of network speeds or signal.
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On a Mac, Safari is the best browser (as defined by being fast, battery efficient and native app) by a far margin compared to other mainstream choices, only matched by the Orion browser (but I may be biased).
It's interesting that your list defining the "best browser" doesn't actually include properly rendering web pages and the general issues that safari has as a web browser outside what you mentioned. "Fast" is interesting, as if something doesn't work, is it really fast? I routinely see how Safari fakes speed. Being able to read a web page before someone else doesn't make it faster if you can't also interact with that…
This is just a guy griping about his bugs. Apple’s software quality is by far the best among competitors (Facebook’s is better but not really an Apple competitor).
As an anecdotal example that may be relevant, I wanted to upgrade to Monterey and my Mac Mini said there wasn't enough room. Hooked up a Western Digital external drive that I had used on previous Macs and launched Time Machine. And that's when it started. Time Machine presented what seemed like a stack of Finder windows in the middle, a timeline with hash marks on the right-side and the only button highlighted was th…
Time Machine has been neglected for so long . The UI was never great for power users, but at least it worked. For a novice computer user it was a pretty good "set it and forget it" experience. In the last 3 years it has become so unreliable (every time it tries to backup it claims the backup is corrupted and needs to be re-created) that I've given up and switched to Carbon Copy Cloner.
At this point, my decision to use a particular piece of software or a specific feature within an OS/App/Website/etc based on perceived risk of that software being neglected.
Usually you can make this call based on features being added, but most of the time it's a gamble.
Yesterday I prepared a few years old Windows laptop for my daughter to use in school. It took me a few hours just to install updates, remove bloatware (my oh my, the amount is staggering!) and fix privacy settings. And this was for Windows 10 which I hear is a mild version of a mess that Windows 11 is. I was instantly reminded why I appreciate Apple software more.
I put the boy on an old Dell Vostro running Fedora. Installation and updates took about 30 minutes. Updating the machine is a `sudo dnf update` and done. Though I did get in trouble when I shelled into his machine did and update and rebooted without checking he was using it first - killing his call to his (not)girlfriend in the process. He's just start secondary (high) school and they are using Google Classroom so al…
Is it me or HN just upvotes any article critical of Apple without much thought? At times it feels like I'm on Reddit
FWIW, I really want Apple to fix this. I used to be a huge fan, yet now I use no Apple products at all. It's pretty damning when MacWorld says "It’s happened to pretty much any Apple device user: You go to use a feature and it just doesn’t work." So I personally like the negative exposure. I really hope it lights a fire under Apple.