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Eliseo Martelli (via Hacker News, Reddit):
As a long-time Apple user, I’ve always appreciated the integration of hardware and software, signature of the Apple ecosystem. However, recent experiences with my iPad Air 11" M2 has left me questioning whether Apple has lost sight of what once made their products great.
[…]
The performance issues don’t stop at sluggish response times. During these use cases, my iPad overheated, making it uncomfortable to hold or even rest the palm on, raising concerns about potential long-term hardware damage.
What made this particularly frustrating is that these aren’t third-party applications pushing the hardware to its limits. These are Apple’s own applications that should be theoretically optimized for their hardware.
[…]
Since my original complaint, I’ve discovered numerous forum threads and social media discussions from iPad users experiencing similar issues. This suggests a systemic problem rather than isolated incidents.
This is such a funny way of saying
“The Apple Store’s first and only troubleshooting step for Apple Notes being slow on my iPad was to give me a brand new iPad, but Notes just overheated that iPad too, so we realized that Notes is just crap.”
This has been going on for years. I used to do a lot of iOS development, and have an eye for bugs. Almost every Apple app/service has been regressing in quality.
Take basic functionality - a phone app (calling). After certain audio sessions use (calling via WhatsApp) I can’t make regular calls over cellular - the UI app immediately cancels the call. Only reboot helps.
Or notes - for many years/iOS versions, they lived with a bug where a text note may just become blank - and only restarting Notes app makes it visible again.
Or AppStore - if an app has to be updated (I have auto updates off) - and I press Update - it gets downloaded, installed - and then AppStore is back to showing “Update” button! If you just go to the app, it’s a new version. But if you press that “Update”, it will redo update from scratch.
Sometimes I’m so frustrated, and thinking of my options - it’s either move to Android, or go get hired at Apple with a mandate to fix bugs in various products… but knowing Apple secrecy culture/silos, it’s not going to work, and requires change in their hiring process/perf review/QA.
Chamath’s new iPhone bricks constantly and he has difficulty performing basic functions like calling his wife.
In 2024, the way to get bugs fixed on an iPhone is to be a billionaire and rant about it in a top podcast.
[…]
I disagree with Chamath about the problem. The problem is not due to a lack of testing, but a bloated culture infected with careerism and empire-building. And unfortunately, nobody climbs the ladder for shipping quality. You can’t point to quality like you can point to the useless new button they added, or the touchbar, etc.
Apple used to be a UX company. The entire foundation of the company was “How can man interact with machine to improve all our lives?” and that was done via intuitive software and clever hardware input mechanisms. Supply chain, marketing, and even engineering were all done in service of that goal.
Today, that has utterly flipped.
Design and UX feel like they’re just a department off to the side somewhere, while the crux of the company’s existence is “How can we build efficient supply chains and sell many SKUs via effective marketing?”
Previously:
- Linus Sebastian Switches to iPhone for 30 Days
- Our Changing Relationship With Apple
- 2024 Six Colors Apple Report Card
- Redesigned Photos App in iOS 18
- Problems With Promotion-Oriented Cultures
- Incentives in Product Design and Development
- Apple Software Quality in 2021
- The Need for Stable Foundations in Software Development
- Full Steam Ahead, But With Feature Flags
- Low-Hanging Fruit
- Organ Banked
- Apple’s Software Quality, Continued
- Apple’s Software Quality Decline
1 Comment RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
As Dave B notes, Apple doesn't really have Designers, or a Design department, or culture any more, from the "design is how it works" perspective.
What Apple has, is *decorators*. People whose primary concern is decorative appearance - the shallow decorative application of clean lines as ornament, rather than for a functional purpose. Take the notch on Macbooks - there's no Design logic to that, it cuts into the menubar - the most important, platform defining part of macOS, it is a pure functionality loss. So, why was it done? Decoration. It is there because an industrial decorator wanted equal side and top bezel widths. Those equal bezels perform no functional task, apart from looking"nice" when the screen is off. It doesn't even match the default height of the macOS menubar.
Notches and dynamic islands on cellphones as well have the same issue - they allow a dishonest claim to the phone having a larger screen size than it actually has, because of overly-rounded corners. If governments enforced a simple regulation in advertising standards that screen sizes must be expressed as the largest contiguous rectangle with 90 degree corners that fits within the display space, this stuff would go away, and sane industrial design, with narrow functional bezels and rectangular screens would return.
