“If You Can’t Stand By a Feature, You Shouldn’t Launch It.”
Jason Snell, on The Talk Show:
[… Apple] decides to do a big feature. The circus comes to town, they build the feature, they launch it, they leave town, and that feature sits there.
And the problem is, there’s bugs, things are broken, and in Year Two, you’re like, “You’re going to fix all the things that were broken in the thing you shipped last year, right?” And in the last decade, I would say, a lot of times what happens is they just don’t. And if you’re lucky, they’ll fix it Year Three or Year Four, […] give it a polish.
The thing that troubles me most about Apple software quality in general is the feeling like they don’t have the people to own the thing that they launch. They build the thing that they launch, and then those people go off and do something else, and nobody is maintaining and improving the thing that’s there.
Via Marcin Wichary:
I think this is spot on, and said really well. Are you honest with yourself about resourcing and focus for right after the launch and then later on? Have you really thought about worst case and best case scenarios vis-à-vis bug reports, latency, user feedback, and craft/quality however you define it? Have you actually started to make room for those outcomes ahead of time?
For me, an ongoing tension with Apple is Finder, so central to my (and I imagine many people’s?) use of a Mac, but rewritten at some point eons ago in a new framework that caused all sorts of problems, and then pretty much abandoned like a proverbial American city’s downtown.
Revealing files in the Finder and Mail’s table view sort indicators have been broken for me since Big Sur. Disk Utility still doesn’t work as well as before its El Capitan rewrite. But these aren’t even big new features.
This is what happens when you release major OS updates every year: you have to keep launching new features.
Previously:
- Glow Leopard
- Child Safety Features in appleOS 27
- Will Disk Utility Ever Work Properly?
- Remaining Issues in Big Sur
- Disk Utility in El Capitan
Update (2026-06-29): Jesper:
The issue really, that Jason pins down, is that it’s so easy to use incremental development, agile development, sprints, whatever, as a method to do the wrong thing. If you have a year-long schedule, it is easier to say “I will take care of the Finder”, and within the scope of that is a number of features that need be built, but there’s also room for ongoing maintenance. Within the confines of sprint planning, within a culture that sheepishly focuses on the wrong thing, or is obsessed by following the wrong number, or worries about the internal politics of appearing to not have it together, all of a sudden the same work, scheduled into 3 week long sprints, looks like poison.
I know of plenty of organizations that make this work. That have the maturity and discipline and culture to see bugs and defects for what they are, to allocate plenty of time to them and to focus extra time on them with regular intervals.
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I almost completely rely on command line tools fd-find and ripgrep now to find files on my Mac (Sequoia). Not sure about the Finder but Spotlight especially is a joke.
Small refinement of @JeffJohnson's point; this is what happens when you release major OS updates every year *and maintain exclusive privileges for your own apps*.
No one would care if Finder sucked because Apple was Great Gatsbying its way though life, if the user's choice of file browser for the system was enforced with the same regulatory framework as that of Web Browsers. There's any number of better apps you could use, if macOS was designed such that you could get rid of Finder *and never have to use it for anything*.
Same with Disk Utility, same with every piece of secondrate shovelware in the "sealed system volume".
Instead of major OS releases, I wish Apple would do year-based naming throughout a calendar year and just add OS features as they’re ready and as appropriate for new hardware. No one bought an M2 MacBook Pro and was bothered it came with macOS 12.4. Mid-OS-cycle hardware releases like that have gone on for ages.
No one will care if a just-released iPhone is running iOS 29.7 as long as the OS and hardware do things that appeal. Saying, "My new phone comes with iOS 30!" is not motivating people. This would also better corresponds to how Apple has taken to announcing many OS features that they are upfront in noting will not be included at the outset of an OS release.
For a company that has hardware as its economic driver and has been increasingly less attentive to its software, it’s ironic that they’re committed to annual software releases which have only complicated development and support. Hopefully, Termus will try a different approach.
@Someone
I wish all apps were user-changeable, but Apple is an awful platform owner. They're never going to provide open infrastructure or allow interchangeable apps like a good platform owner would.
The collapse in Apple software quality is a function of their anti-competitive behavior. A lot of what they provide becomes the /only/ way to do a thing which allows them to gatekeep. If that fails, they apply security theater or policy to box out competitors and innovators. They've dodged competing for so long they can't build or recognize good apps anymore.
I think detaching from Apple as much as possible is the way to go. They're shrinking the surface area we can build on every year, so we should shrink our commitment to them. I think my plan going forward is buying cheap, low-end laptops only. Run them for 5 years until Apple cuts off support or the SSDs die from swap. Apple treats computing like disposable fashion, so there's no point investing too deeply.
This seems like a good time to bring up third-party keyboard support on iOS, or rather the total lack thereof.
They announced it one year like it was a great new feature and never thought about it again. It was janky on day one and they never improved it at all.
All I *really* need to know is this: are Apple's leadership not bothered, even a little bit, by the fact that a basic survival strategy nowadays for Apple customers with real work to do is to simply run the earliest version of the software available that's still supported on their hardware? Or that, in having the need to do this, it is in fact better to maintain, or purchase, outdated models?
Pfft. Silly question—of course they aren't! Developers are stuck on the treadmill, so they'll keep buying. And discerning non-developers will always be drawn to the sexy hardware, so they're taken care of too. Everyone else doesn't notice, doesn't care, or blames themselves for this state of affairs.
(As I write this comment, Safari's web process has hung. Switching to Chrome. Running on Sonoma. Michael, if you have any ideas …)
> are Apple's leadership not bothered, even a little bit, by the fact that a basic survival strategy nowadays for Apple customers with real work to do is to simply run the earliest version of the software available that's still supported on their hardware?
I think you’re extrapolating from some clickbait takes in the Mac blogosphere to the general public.
“86% of all iPhones introduced in the last four years were running iOS 26.
79% of all iPhones were running iOS 26.”
That’s fairly high, and not at all “Apple customers with real work don’t upgrade”.
*Instead of major OS releases, I wish Apple would do year-based naming throughout a calendar year and just add OS features as they’re ready and as appropriate for new hardware.*
Android is kind of an interesting case study I guess. Google moved to quarterly releases (QPRs) for Android, the cycle is major -> QPR1 -> QPR2 -> QPR3 -> major (though AOSP only gets major and QPR2). If you look at the latest major release (Android 17) there isn't a large number of changes, presumably because things were already released to a QPR once they were ready. E.g. Android 16 QPR1 contained most Material 3 Expressive changes.
Besides that, they decoupled many of the features from OS releases, but push them out through Play Services, Play System, or app updates. So instead of doing big drops, they can roll out updates continuously when they feel they are ready and do staged rollouts.
Of course, such a cycle requires that you move away from a big keynote event where you announce everything for the year. But to be honest, Apple's keynotes have been pretty dysfunctional over the last few years, where things promised for the major release were pushed back and we had two keynotes (2026 and 2024) that were basically "AI AI AI". Even if customers care about AI, Apple's release cycles are stupid for AI anyway, why would you wait until the next WWDC/iPhone release to get the latest model if the competition are continuously rolling out new models.
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> [… Apple] decides to do a big feature. The circus comes to town, they build the feature, they launch it, they leave town, and that feature sits there.
As an aside, this also reminded me a lot of Stage Manager. Announced with huge fanfare, never to be heard of or improved after 2022. The only times I hear of Stage Manager is when a family member calls with "my Mac has been acting weird" and it turns out that they have somehow activated Stage Manager.
All these redesigns, half-finished tools, etc. have been such an epic waste of manpower. But I guess someone got a promotion.
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I have been running GrapheneOS for a few months now and it has been an absolute bliss. No AI, Cloud subscriptions, and whatnot shoved into your face. Just a clean mobile OS and you can stack on top what you need.
@Hammer
Agreed, *Apple* is never going to change, but that doesn't mean states won't force the company to change. We have alternate browsers on iOS, that was never part of Apple's plan.
@Hammer
Also, I think there's a lot of complaints from developers, who still won't actually take the step of nope-ing out of Apple's technologies. It kindof reduces my sympathy for "waah SwiftUI is so terrible", when "but I refuse to learn or use anything else" is part of it.
Developers need to detach from Apple tech, as much as consumers.
@Sebby Yes, I still get into situations where Safari stops being able to load pages and I have to restart the whole Mac. I’m using other browsers more these days.
My disk regularly fills with 200-300 gb of mysterious “System Data” that cannot be identified or removed. Sometimes there isn’t any local Time Machine snapshots to delete. Bug has been around for years and Apple doesn’t seem like it has any plans to fix
I think the most annoying bug for me is that sometimes the iOS camera opens with a sort of frozen, blurry display and won’t take photos. This has been happening for 5+ years across multiple phones. I’ve lost lots of good shots because by the time the camera was ready (after relaunching it) the moment had passed. This has also happened on two of my wife’s iPhones.
@MichaelTsai
For me with the camera, it's the rotation sensor not paying attention if I have the camera in landscape orientation, but have it tilted below the horizon. Long standing problem across multiple devices.
@Michael Sometimes, if I'm quick enough, I can get ActivityMonitor open and find the process in question, which will spike the CPU at 100%. If I kill that, then form data is all lost, of course, but the page reloads and things are responsive again. Just as soon as I can be arsed, I really should sample it and send it to Apple.
@Sören Real work, on an iPhone? You jest, surely?
But actually, I upgraded to iOS 26 before many of the iOS 18 holdouts did. They still held out, though, even if I'm predominantly talking about macOS.
@Michael @Sebby it’s worth trying to kill the child processes that might be causing those issues before rebooting the entire Mac. It’s “Safari Graphics & Media” when you get blank tabs and “Safari Networking” when things are stuck loading. Killing those seems to work for me almost all of the time.
There’s another bug that annoys me which is that Safari will forget my toolbar in other profiles every so often (never the main profile). I have to quit and reopen it to sometimes get it back to normal, but most times I have to customize the toolbar again (it crashes if I do it before restarting).
