{"id":49771,"date":"2025-10-24T15:10:33","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T19:10:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=49771"},"modified":"2026-01-22T15:26:42","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T20:26:42","slug":"what-happened-to-apples-legendary-attention-to-detail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/24\/what-happened-to-apples-legendary-attention-to-detail\/","title":{"rendered":"What Happened to Apple’s Legendary Attention to Detail?"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Ozbay<\/a> (Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

In my mind, “Apple” as a brand used to be synonymous with “attention to detail” but sadly, over the course of the last 8 - 10 years, their choices have become anything but detail oriented.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

If you are privacy conscious like me, and don’t give the Reminders app permission to access your location, it will ask you for location permissions every single damn time<\/em> you launch it.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

For some reason, Mac OS X doesn’t have a standard and consistent design for tabs.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

Here’s the iOS 26 Files app in dark mode, and light mode side by side. Notice anything missing? Like the folder name or the barely visible down arrow? It’s almost as if they haven’t tested iOS 26 in dark mode at all.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

I fired up Settings to disable transparency, and none of the icons showed up there at first. […] Feeling frustrated beyond measure, I enabled “reduced transparency” mode, which fixed the icons but broke other things even further.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

There are just a huge number of little problems, which really degrade the experience of Apple’s platforms. This morning, the “d” key on my keyboard stopped working. This has happened several times over the last few months. I know it’s a software issue because the problem also occurs with other keyboards (both Bluetooth and USB). Restarting the Mac always fixes it. When I tried that today, the Mac showed the login prompt on the wrong display and in the wrong resolution. After a few seconds it moved to the proper display. I started typing my password but, even though I use a USB keyboard, the first few characters were dropped, and I had to backspace and start again. There was a little glitch where nothing happened for a second or two after I pressed Delete. After booting finished, everything was extremely slow for no apparent reason. The cursor was jumpy. Moving between messages in Mail took several seconds even though it was otherwise idle. LaunchBar took a few minutes<\/em> to finish launching. I clicked on iStat Menus to see what was going on, and it took 30 seconds for the menu to pull down. Activity Monitor showed little CPU use and disk activity, and samples just seemed to show various apps spending lots of time waiting. Eventually, everything returned to normal speed.<\/p>\n\n

A few years ago, I started collecting links for a massive post about design paper cuts. I never found the time to write it all up, and many of the posts have since been deleted, but it seems worth including some of the relevant links here instead of letting them languish in a draft:<\/p>\n\n