Bugs Apple Loves
Nick Hodulik (via Hacker News):
You need to find an email. You type in the sender’s name. Nothing. You try the subject line. Nothing. You try a unique word you know was in the email. Nothing.
[…]
You type a word. Autocorrect changes it. You delete it and type what you meant. Autocorrect changes it again. You fix it AGAIN. It changes it AGAIN. You’ve now manually corrected this word twice, clearly signaling you want it this way. Autocorrect doesn’t care. It will die on this hill.
[…]
You’re checking out and need to change your card. You see a button with a credit card icon and your address. You tap it. It changes your address. Not the card. To change the card, you need the other button that says ‘Change Payment’. The one without the card icon.
[…]
AirDrop is on. They’re in your contacts. Nothing. You both toggle WiFi. Nothing. Toggle Bluetooth. Nothing. Turn AirDrop off and on. Sometimes it works. Usually you just text it instead.
[…]
You took some photos. iCloud says ‘Uploading 847 items’. You wait. Next day: ‘Uploading 847 items’. Week later: ‘Uploading 847 items’. Is it stuck? Is it working? Is there an error?
Previously:
Update (2026-01-26): Rui Carmo:
“Total time wasted by humanity because Apple won’t fix these” is a wonderfully blunt premise, and the math is… lovely: Base Impact is
Users Affected × Frequency × Time Per Incidentwas enough of a zinger, but the Power User Tax (Σ (Workaround Time × Participation Rate)) and the Shame Multiplier (Years Unfixed × Pressure Factor) just pile it on.
It’s not unlike Steve Jobs’ argument about saving seconds off the Mac’s boot time.
The externalities cost estimates might be a little tongue-in-cheek, but honestly, are they all that wrong? One small irritation at the wrong moment can ricochet my happy mood off into the doldrums, and Apple’s products produce a hundred “small” irritations every day – which compound in their irritation when you see them software update after software update, year after year, product after product. It’s hard not to take it personally. Like Apple is deliberately being cruel.
[…]
There is a point at which mere indifference or incompetence transitions into negligence, and it’s long before you become one of the wealthiest companies on the planet with a veritable army of engineers.
Having worked at Apple – among other big tech companies – I can say with confidence that there’s no valid reason why they cannot fix long-standing, infamous bugs.
This was my first thought as well. I get that there’s a huge backlog of bugs. I think that should be prioritized, but I can see why various layers within Apple would prefer to work on new features and redesigns instead. But why not knock off a handful of bugs each year that are longstanding and widespread? This would reliably garner applause at the keynote. Apple can’t or won’t do that, but it had no trouble assigning 2,000 employees to work on the car.
Becky (Hacker News):
I’m trying to get on with the new OS, but there’s so many little bugs that Apple software no longer feels like it just works. It seems less intuitive and like nobody has really tested it thoroughly. Do Apple staff even use their products anymore, or are they all secretly harbouring Android devices?
Here’s a few issues that annoy me regularly, this list is far from exhaustive[…]
People had hundreds or thousands of bugs assigned. But of course they didn’t actually look at them. The assignment didn’t mean anything. A „not assigned“ would at least have been honest and then you could have looked at all the unassigned bugs regularly.
[…]
There were radars assigned to people in a „Future“ Milestone with P1. Which basically says „hey, it’s really important you do this. Well, not now. But some unspecified time in the future.“
Even though there were two „Future“ milestones, a lot of radars simply got moved from the current milestone to the next, when the current milestone was over. Over multiple years!
People who joined Apple got really stressed because they got assigned a lot of radars on the current milestone by their managers and had no way to actually finish them in time. Until someone explained to them „no worries, we don’t actually expect you to finish those, we just need to assign them to someone“.
Update (2026-02-02): See also: Marcus Mendes and TidBITS-Talk.
18 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
How is it that this guy knows it, you know it, I know it, clearly everyone knows it.
But what CFed stands up on stage an announces is new ways to annoy your friends via Messages.
Truly we live in an age of wonders.
OMG! I thought it was just me not finding anything in Mail. I've used Mail Archiver just to find some emails because I know that the search there works. Wasn't autocorrect/predictive text supposed to learn? I always use diagnosis in Mail Archiver and always have. But predictive text always uses diagnostic.
Why is Messages so terribly bad? On the Air loading messages takes seconds.
My pet peeve: I do something like reading a book or some text on a website and suddenly the window doesn't have the focus anymore.
I hit every one of these, usually multiple times per day. The iOS keyboard in particular has only gotten worse at predictive text and in particularly lately swiping.
My muscle memory for changing cards in Apple Pay is always wrong the first time.
Also driven insane daily by them not letting you swap the watch buttons as the task switcher. Especially within workouts, but usually always, I constantly mistakenly scroll trying to double click the crown and end up in the wrong place.
Why they would make the common action the unstable button rather than the payment toggle or at least provide an accessibility option to configure them is so frustrating.
Very relatable. There’s also the dozens of other bugs you run into, but are so used to working around that you forget they exist at some point.
A big one for me currently is Fast User Switching (took me 6 tries for autocorrect to allow me type that word), where it doesn’t switch accounts when the finger print is read. Or, it just refuses to switch to an already logged in account because one account is hogging the light, for some reason.
I do absolutely love copy/paste continuity between devices, that one claims back some of the time lost on these bugs
@Jeff Yeah, I’m not sure what’s going on with the iOS keyboard, but it’s gotten even worse for me in iOS 26. It keeps changing correctly typed words to nonsensical combinations of uppercase and lowercase letters.
@CowMonkey: I used to love copy/paste continuity but it stopped working for me years ago. Several different combinations of MacBook Air and Pros/iPhones/Apple IDs. Tried everything I could find on the internet, no luck. Another loss for me is Air Drop. Works sometimes, fails most of the time. I guess I hate that even more because it keeps me trying. And so many more paper cuts.
This is why, even if Apple rolled back Liquid Glass or if the departure of Alan Dye really mattered, I don't see macOS or iOS getting any better in any significant way. The rot goes deep, and it's been building for many, many years.
I'm no joke seriously considering this:
https://mavericksforever.com/
@Bri I never did like Mavericks, what with its shitty and inaccessible Books shoebox app that replaced superior functionality in iTunes. But, yes, it's painful to see how much we've lost even since then, particularly in regards tweakability and extensibility. I can certainly empathise strongly with your desire to go back, though it would be too much work for me, and too big a sacrifice. It's very much like the retro Windows makeovers and debloatings, and credit to those who do it. Doing it in today's macOS is basically out of bounds if you expect to get updates due to the sealed system volume, because reducing tech support calls is more important than user empowerment.
> I'm no joke seriously considering this: https://mavericksforever.com/
Thanks for this Bri! It has fixes for most of the problems I ran into with Yosemite a couple years ago. I've pinned my 2013 MacBook Pro at Mojave because I don't want to lose 32-bit support forever (Igor Pro and QuickTime Pro), but Safari is nearly unusable, and the writing's on the wall for Chrome. TIL that Firefox Dynasty exists...and it's apparently gone, which figures, but that search led me to "chromium legacy."
Ironically, the major problem I still have is that MacPorts doesn't play well with older OS versions, as newer compilers end up being required, or libraries like Qt drop support. Three decades ago in college, compiling from source was a fun challenge, but I no longer care to spend half a day to get something working.
Back on topic, Bugs Apple Loves is fantastic, and it's good to know it's not just me. I recently resorted to finding email in the Finder with Spotlight, since Mail wouldn't turn it up. No idea why that worked, and don't care enough to try and figure it out, which is where I'm at with most Apple bugs.
iOS text selection is one of the most baffling ones. Surely someone senior at Apple has run into this and cursed at it? Every time I try to copy and modify a URL on iPhone, I end up fighting the selection, whereas it used to work well enough to be useful, as did autocorrect. Then again, I also thought someone would have noticed putting volume and power buttons as opposite pinch points of the iPhone was a bad idea by now...
@Adam Maxwell: There's also Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release), which I've used alongside Safari on a 2013 Mojave-running Air for when old Safari doesn't handle a site.
https://www.firefox.com/en-US/browsers/enterprise/?redirect_source=mozilla-org#download
"But why not knock off a handful of bugs each year that are longstanding and widespread?"
I wonder if it's even reasonably possible to fix many of these bugs. I could imagine somebody looking at the Mail search bug, realizing that it requires large-scale changes to how Mail stores and indexes messages, which will require automatic migration when Mail is updated, which means that there are 210 million opportunities for major data loss.
For an App that Apple clearly doesn't much care about.
This discussion reminded me of something I wrote on my personal blog back in 2015: "much of the software that I use is broken in a pebble-in-the-shoe, splinter-under-your-nail sort of way. It mostly works, except when it doesn’t" (https://bornsleepy.com/2015/08/30/dissonance.html).
Apple wasn't the only culprit, but they did get a special mention in that post, and they do still deserve it I think.
I was suggesting that having to use all this endlessly broken stuff has the potential to be a serious mental health issue. Perhaps that was hyperbolic, but 11 years later, I'm not so sure.
@Sebby You're probably right that trying to use Mavericks (or another out-of-support but non-shitty release of macOS) would be more work than it's worth. I'll probably jump ship to Linux.
But given that the 10.5-10.9 era of OS X is the operating system I *wish* I was running, I have to ask myself the question, which option will take more work and have more friction?
1. Setting up Linux to be as close as possible to a consistent and elegant experience like OS X 10.9
2. Just using OS X 10.9 and bending over backwards to get the software I need running in it
I'm not actually sure!
Or even better, on iOS if you search in Mail for an email you JUST SENT in the last day or two it finds nothing, but it does bring up a list of emails to that recipient you sent 6 months ago. thanks, Apple, thanks. iOS mail searching is basically totally useless, I foolishly out of desperation will try it sometimes but it NEVER finds what I'm looking for. Go to Desktop and within 1 second it has found exactly what I was looking for.
