I like this concept of a "bozo bit" and have to agree, the arbitrary difficulty of making Apple software do things slightly outside the happy path can border on insanity, like that "Malcom in the Middle" Fixing the Lightbulb clip/GIF that goes around from time to time.
I would like to extend this concept. I do not, in fact, have the bozo bit set for my Linux desktop setup. I do, however, have the "fields of broken glass" bit set. On Linux, the entire system is made up of disparate packages maintained by unrelated groups that communicate sparsely, whose work is tied together by another party that actually takes the job of fielding this to the end user. And thus you get funny problems like "Oops, package A was generating a config file for package B and the syntax subtlety changed in a backwards incompatible way and now printing is broken but only on Thursday." (Example scenario, but it's based on a real one. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...)
I think that to be fair to everyone, all modern computing environments are extremely complicated and you are always going to have a lot of trade-offs. Still, if I had one complaint about Apple, it would be this: it genuinely feels needless sometimes. Sometimes I feel like Apple is it's own worst enemy, more of a threat to their business than any competitor.
In the past Apple seemed to organize software design around minimizing the cognitive load that poor interfaces and poorly chosen features sets created for users.
But now, the ease-of-use "bicycle for the mind" vision has faded.
Today Apple seems to view computing devices through the lenses of "service kiosks", "media sales points", and "social portals".
Some specific complaints, where they used to do better:
1. Overly "Flat" interfaces, that translate to "poor visual affordances", instead of "uncluttered, clear, simple, obvious".
2. Seemingly arbitrary variations in interfaces between device-types, where the differences don't seem to result from useful adaptations to each device-type.
3. Consistent interfaces across device-types, when the result is overly simple and clumsy interfaces.
4. Features of inconsistent presence across devices. ("Open in Safari" in News, available on Mac but not iOS, because ... ?)
5. Lots of small but odd interface glitches, that suggest interfaces hacked onto an unreliable data-communication model. (Apple Music, Apple TV, ...)
6. Weak, unattractive template-style interfaces. (I.e. Home app)
I think contrasting with Linux is indeed interesting. Apple deserves also more flak for this because they so long were running with lines like "it just works" (old favorite of Jobs), and using "quality" as marketing point; throwing stones in glass houses I say. At least on Linux it feels more acknowledged that stuff is complicated and occasionally break, instead of living in some weird kafkaesque experience where you are not sure if you are just imagining things or is everything broken.
My brother was just complaining to me about Apple Notes. He finds it maddening when he takes a note on his iPad, switches to his phone, opens Notes and it's not there. No loading spinner, no indication that something went wrong, no message that it will be there, nothing.
When things go wrong, it is exactly as you say- weird and infuriating.
My biggest issue right now is that the iOS Music app has been almost completely hobbled by Apple Music (the service). I just want an app I can use to play my existing media files, but it’s always pushing you to subscribe to the service.
Especially annoying is that they have hidden the previously free access to streaming terrestrial radio stations (not the same thing as the Apple Radio subscription). You can only access them now if you know the URL, and they’re impossible to search for in the Radio tab of the app.
The business drive to push people the paid subscriptions is taking over everything else.
Most annoying for me: the need to be connected to the internet for a lot of views.
I leave the apartment, enter the elevator, put headphones in my ears and literally cannot do anything in the Music App, because it thinks it is still connected to my WiFi. Why can’t the default views be offline first.
I kinda like random/automatic autoplay but because Apple Music only seems to buffer the next 0.002 seconds of music any interruption of network service tends to just ... stop playback. And when you manually start it again, it switches to a "random autoplay, but from downloaded songs only" mode and you have to futz around to get back to the "random autoplay from all music" mode by clearing the queue with that one-song playlist hack. Same problem when leaving the house, have to remember to manually disconnect from wifi to avoid playback being interrupted.
Also, why does it take five seconds to connect to the Airpods? Even Linux is quicker. Sometimes it seems to take even longer. These devices are mere nanoseconds apart!
It all just seems to be built on a "the network is very reliable" assumption - in a mobile device.
Yes! I have Beats Flex with Apple's H1 chip, and I really really miss Steve Jobs calling in all bluetooth & mac HW and SW teams, showing them the unreliable 5s+ long switch (that 1/3 time ends up with my mac's speakers selected back, and music playing in the office), and threatening to fire them if this is not fixed in a week.
Interesting you say that about the Airpods. In my experience I've found that Airpods work extremely well so long as they're only paired with your Apple devices. Once I paired them to my PC I started having issues where they'd drop from my iPhone randomly in the middle of playback. After unpairing them from the PC altogether the problems went away.
That's because you didn't disconnect them (manually) from the PC, both Windows and Linux will grab the airpods when something tries to play audio, even if that "playing audio" is technically silent.
After years of just ... avoiding the issue of why I can't play my local mp3s and flacs with my iPhone, I finally broke down this year and searched for a decent app for this, and the answer is an app called Doppler. It's not free, but it's not very expensive, and the developer is very responsive. Recommended.
I suspect the entertainment industries, (film, tv and music), have fundamental differences from technology products in how they operate.
The necessity of an integrated stack of content and delivery has had corrupting influence on Apple products.
In Music, pushing content on For You and elimination of free radio as described to drive revenue at the clear expense of customer experience.
In Apple TV, the company has to compete in providing content that is at odds with Apple values. For example, the recent purchase of John Lasseter’s work and having to put punchy Mcpunchington Will Smith on the cover of Apple TV because the content was already bought.
The content-value mismatch is ok with me, given they distribute other studio's films that Apple's leadership has expressed issues with. I.e. Danny Boyle's "Steve Jobs".
They can be a consistently indulgent distributor, or a consistently selective content producer, but not consistent in both roles. I prefer the former.
(I found Boyle's movie brilliant, when interpreted as a serious comedic drug dream, subsequent to a marathon reading of Steve Jobs bios, articles and opinion pieces. Of varying questionability and authenticity. In random order. On a plane.)
If you're looking to manage and play local media, Swinsian (http://swinsian.com) is a nice native app that comes extremely close to the peak iTunes experience of yore.
I use Spotify for streaming and Castbox for podcasts. But I've never found a satisfactory solution for my own files— the sync piece is so hard to get right, and since I'm a Spotify subscriber anyway, it lets me cache playlists on my device for when I know I'll be offline, all with less friction and planning-ahead than if I had to connect it up somehow to another machine containing my own MP3s.
> These are sent via WhatsApp so the audio recordings are mp4 files, which for some bizarre reason won't open in Music and instead open in QuickTime Player, despite definitely being audio files.
.mp4 being associated with a video player seems reasonable, since it's almost always used for video. (I think the only difference between .mp4 and .m4a is the extension? It's just serving as a signal about which app should open it, really.)
> Create a new playlist, transfer some previous songs over, then try to drop the new m4a's onto the open playlist. No go. Play around for a while, figure out that the entity that accepts the drops is the TableView, not the surrounding view. So you can't drop the new files into the empty space below the songs, you have to drop them onto the existing songs.
Interestingly, this is the user winding up on the single most fiddly path because it's what felt intuitive to them. In pretty much any Music library view but the playlist view, dragging a file into the window is all you need to do. They unfortunately picked the single view where it's focused on letting you rearrange the tracks.
I'd suspect that the Music app's workflow is built around "I want to add this to my music library", whereas the author's mental model was more around "I need a list of files so they get transferred". Which are similar, but that falls apart in cases like this. Which is sort of Apple's fault for not smoothly supporting edge cases, to be sure.
Which in hindsight seems extremely naïve. Files are just too damn useful a concept. Their main rival, databases, have a bunch of peculiarities that limit their generality. When people want to share information any longer than a paragraph or two, they send a file. You can’t beat files!
Of course ultimately the distinction between files/filesystems and databases is not that clearcut; I'd argue that in many ways filesystems are just databases promoted at kernel level.
That's what cloud providers want. I think users don't care and prefer whatever is the simplest and most reliable method. Cloud resources disappear all the time which tends to make a lot of users upset.
Is it discussed somewhere the ideology behind this? Users are too dumb for files? Pay extra for App Store apps just to open your own files? Prevent privacy? Security?
I think layered on that, it was more the case Apple really really really never wanted to have the concept of single song music files seep into iOS, especially as it was "share with your friends" device.
The revenue stream from the iTunes Store started in 2003, well preceding the iPhone.
> .mp4 being associated with a video player seems reasonable, since it's almost always used for video. (I think the only difference between .mp4 and .m4a is the extension? It's just serving as a signal about which app should open it, really.)
mp4 is a container format, all it does is wrap some codecs and add metadata. There's no requirement that it contain video. The smart thing to do would be to inspect the mp4 and open it in an audio player if it contains an audio stream but no video stream.
I used to work on this part of CoreMedia. Opening the mp4 header is fast enough that spotlight does it in the background for every supported media file on your system.
For tens of thousands or even millions of files, inspecting the header only loads about an extra page into RAM per file. Or, since Apple already has the Spotlight index with this track data in it, 0 extra pages.
Basically, only track information that's not already in the Spotlight DB needs to be loaded so the performance should be the same as walking the filesystem for filenames.
But how fast is that? Cause Spotlight is running in the background, not blocking you from opening the file.
I think the bigger issue is just that users expect a .mp4 to open with their default .mp4 player, and in fact some people don't know about "open with" and change the extension as a way to pick the player.
Unless it's changed since I was there, Spotlight is more or less a sqlite3 database so it has about the same complexity as navigating a filesystem tree but probably with better cache affinity.
But also this concern about loading the header of millions of files is such an edge case that I don't think it matters. A human tapping on a piece of glass to play a few files would notice no difference in performance.
So if I understand correctly, if you have a file with an unknown type then change the extension to something still unknown, it'll preserve the first default editor you set for the file.
QuickTime Player is an audio player, why wouldn't it be?
However, the underlying complaint is that Music doesn't claim to be capable of handling mp4. Which is basically true; the "m4a" and "m4v" that Music does claim to support are restricted subsets of mp4.
Should Chrome handle files with a .heif extension if they contain AV1? That's pretty much the same question.
i've never seen mp4 containing anything else than video so it's reasonable assume they would contain video most of the time and thus have a video player as the default app.
Peertube can create audio-only mp4 files by setting the video resolution to 0 [1]. I use this to create audio-only versions of lecture videos for use on the road etc - which is why I made this feature and submitted the PR.
Yes. It isn't the default player for .mp4 as it isn't really a general video player.
Also, I just did a quick check, if you rename an m4a to mp4, and add it to the magic "$APPLEMUSICFOLDER/Media/Automatically Add To Music" folder, Music will import it, but give it a Media Kind metadata field as "Music" and not "Music Video" (which you get with actual video files), so it obviously does deeper inspection than just the filename.
Sure but if your default file handler for mp4 files is Quicktime (as is the default for anyone who hasn't changed it), why would you expect macOS to open mp4s in another app because of the just because it's a music video, or, in the author's case music only?
> iTunes used to be if not the, then certainly a flagship app for Apple.
I have used iTunes off and on for around two decades and it has never been a great or even mediocre experience. It was always bad. The author is fondly remembering a time which might never have existed.
I have used iTunes — consistently — for around two decades, and while I agree that iTunes was mediocre, Music app is soooooo much worse. It's total crap. Embarrassingly bad. I would happily trade Music app to get iTunes back again.
For me, iTunes was quite good on Mac. It's the Windows experience that has always been an afterthought, for example: why is there not an option to turn off "black out other monitors when going full-screen on a movie"?
I didn't even mind it on Windows, honestly. The installation process was convoluted and it was a bit resource-heavy to run, but I liked it more than Winamp and Windows Media Player at the time. It was a flawed port, but still nice to use.
> why is there not an option to turn off "black out other monitors when going full-screen on a movie"?
Here was my train of thought on reading that:
Who voluntarily uses iTunes?
Who voluntarily uses iTunes on Windows?
Can you watch movies in iTunes on Windows?
Why would you ever want to do that?
Blacking out other monitors on full-screen? That's a pretty novel idea, I've never seen that before. Apple would never implement such a cool feature on a competing platform.
I’ve been using Music (previously iTunes) since it was called SoundJam MP. It’s always been fine for me. It’s had some issues here and there but nothing that would ever get me to describe it as “bad.”
Why do you think it’s bad? I’ve heard others say the same but I’ve never heard a general (as opposed to esoteric) reason.
I thought it was pretty great around roughly 2004-2015.
What won me over compared to Winamp was iTunes' smart playlists. I'm actually surprised they haven't borked, neutered, or removed that feature. It's still the same and it's still good.
It did a lot of other things right too. It was convenient to edit metadata for multiple files. CD ripping was painless and used a high quality mp3 encoder at a time when that was not a given. In general, it was one of those apps that just behaved logically to me and rarely if ever surprised me in a bad way.
When iTunes introduced "iTunes in the cloud" or whatever it was called -- the ability to have your files mirrored in the cloud -- I was more or less in heaven for a while. I had a few moans and niggles but nothing much.
I actively kind of hate it now though. Too many media types (with different paradigms) crammed into one app. The result is a mess. Not sure it could be any other way.
I instantly gave up on iTunes around 2006 or so when I spent three weeks ripping music from CD into my own file system, imported it into iTunes (because let's see what happens...) and it utterly and spectacularly trashed everything.
I haven't used it since. (Although it still starts automatically when I try to rip a CD using XLD.)
Now I use VLC for music on my phone and Vox on MacOS. Both are imperfect. FLAC isn't gapless in VLC, and Vox keeps trying to sell me things. But they work well enough to get some semblance of the job done.
The real problem is the conflict between utility and consumption. iTunes/Music were never there to conveniently manage and play audio (utility), but to lock users into a consumption silo. So importing and playing music from external sources has never been a design goal.
Vox has some similar issues, but isn't quite as bad. VLC is more of a utility app, which makes it more useful. (I suspect it has no problem playing an MP4 audio playlist.)
iTunes was set up to organize and listen to a music collection instead of just showing a table of music files. That was a pretty good experience and I don’t know of any other app that does that even today.
for those that "deify" Steve Jobs, please recall the day that Jobs Apple CEO personally visited the tiny office of Audion developers, and told them "you have no chance" of marketing their fun and well-designed Mac native application.. as part of the iTunes rollout, backdrop anti-trust on MSFT over media tools.
He also promised to open source the tech behind Facetime, presumably because he could see it would create a rift in society. Now, Tim Cook dances on that rift.
> How can such basic functionality be this incredibly broken?
That's what I'm thinking almost every day when working with Apple devices. There is so, so much basic stuff broken on both macOS and iOS. I truly miss the days where Apple devices were a reliable tool, even a source of inspiration.
The hardware is still incredibly reliable and astoundingly performant. The rate at which they're capable of delivering them to the store and your doorstep is too. Per number of devices sold, it's crazy that they encounter as few issues as they do. Yeah, they've had some real 'Oops' moments, but on the whole it's crazy good.
As for software? Yeah, it's really, really bad. :( I think Apple has forgotten how to do software.
They know how to do software that makes money. They don’t know how to enable their users. They stopped building bicycles for the mind and started building dump trucks for cash.
Wait until he tries to search for this file. The main "Search" field use to just filter music based on the string. But since iTunes became Music, it now shows an auto-curated screen of crap you don't want.
...and the old search is moved to Songs -> (upper right) "Show filter field". They even change the shortcut key, which is the worst part imo.
Thank you SO much for posting this- I have been missing that feature very badly, and had _no_ idea that it was still there in any form. Having it back makes using Music.app about a thousand times more tolerable!
I'm glad to hear others experiences match my own. Sometimes when some bizarre behavior manifests I can never quite tell if I'm the bozo who did something silly and tickled some feature unbeknownst to me or if the device did something truly unexpected and buggy. You'll probably get a kick out of this characterization I made recently in another post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34157476.
Another characterization I've made is that Apple is a primarily a hardware company, they don't have the software chops and are scrambling to try to backfill that skillset. They overly reward the bright and shiny but eventually the inability to tame complexity will be their downfall.
Yeah I got an iPhone for Christmas. I never thought Android was great but it's what I've used since I first had a smartphone.
It's hard for me to figure anything out on the iPhone. Nothing seems obvious or discoverable beyond the basic "tap an app tile to open it." Some of that is just differences from Android but the various gestures and the way settings are scattered all over the place just seems almost arbitrary. Maybe there is a rhyme and reason but I feel that if I wanted to learn that I'd need to sit down through a tutorial.
I once worked with a product manager who said "if users need training, you've failed" this was in the context of a consumer-oriented website but it seems to be a lesson lost on Apple.
What you're used to matters unless you're willing to put in some effort to learn the differences. I used (and developed for both) iPhones for years, then Android, then back to iPhone. During my Android time I got my wife an Android phone to use, and she tried for a couple days then said basically what you said. She had no idea how anything worked, and if she did take the time to figure it out, what is she really gaining over her iPhone? I returned her Android phone.
At this point there is so little difference in phones (particularly the flagships) for the average person, they should just pick what they like/are used to, and move on with their life.
A large part of the problem is that most of the touch device UI is “discoverable.” There is no indication-or reason to believe—that a long press might do something different than a tap, or that a swipe might reveal an option (or that a swipe in the other direction will reveal a different option), etc etc. it is all extremely opaque, not entirely consistent between applications, and completely different between OSes.
> That's what I'm thinking almost every day when working with Apple devices. There is so, so much basic stuff broken on both macOS and iOS. I truly miss the days where Apple devices were a reliable tool, even a source of inspiration.
With all due respect, whenever these days were, I suspect people were saying the same thing then because people have a tendency to romanticize the past no matter what year it is.
I would say this is no longer basic functionality. Personal music collections were huge in the mp3 era, but today few people care about moving music between devices.
Further if you think of the complexity involved, streaming is a more “basic” task, than navigating file formats, transfer protocols, DRM, disc storage, library metadata, and more.
It’s basic in the sense that it’s conceptually trivial from the user’s point of view and therefore should just work, and not break in non-intelligible ways, given that the functionality has been made available at all. Users shouldn’t have to carefully navigate their use cases based on what the majority use cases might be.
A more general point is that software should establish a clear conceptual model of the things it allows to manipulate (music files, tracks, playlists, …), and all basic operations on that (insert, move, remove, reorder, rename, syncing between two devices, …) should be straightforward, orthogonal, and just work. Only having specific workflows available/functioning requires the user to memorize those specific workflows, instead of being able to reason about what they can do based on the conceptual model.
Ironic that the iPod was all about using that basic functionality they've since removed and now pretend never existed. Many people LOVED that basic functionality.
Sync'ing from laptop to devices, via anything but iCloud, has gotten so much worse than it used to be. It used to be pretty good -- for it's time anyway.
The ecology just isn't built for actual owned media anymore. And so many people have only a phone now, so no reason to try to sync.
I think this is probably true on Android too.
I don't know about the Watch, or what the documented ways are to get media files on it.
But for iPhone, I think there are probably better ways than Apple Music, even for audio files. That's just not what Apple Music is about anymore, it's mostly about purchased music.
Eh - it's not really the same. Android certainly still mostly pushes you at cloud based services (ex: Youtube Music/Amazon Music/Spotify/ETC)
But there's not really a "Standard" music player for the ecosystem, so the expectation is that you pick a 3rd party app you like and use that. And for the vast majority of those - the simple "you have a filesystem - play files from it" approach works just fine (ex: I use VLC for local content, and JellyFin for self-hosted music).
Personally - having my library hosted on my own JellyFin server is basically miles better than anything else I've found (And using either the native app or a specific music client for jellyfin).
The downside is the cost of entry is much higher, and it takes more time and effort to get setup the first time.
Also - your results will vary a lot more depending on which app you pick, and what features that company supports.
So... the experience defaults to something that's more complicated and less featurefull but can be significantly better than that available via iMusic/iCloud at the end of the day.
Android in the past was surprisingly terrible at copying data to/from PCs. Anyone saying it works great is using some third-party tool that requires extra setup, or they aren't syncing a lot of stuff (media libraries, and iTunes used to also sync email accounts and some other settings). Aside from the lack of a proper syncing tool like iTunes, the basic Android File Transfer was super unreliable, often failing randomly mid-transfer. In some cases, you even had to enable it with a secret combo like "go to settings and tap the model name exactly 7 times," which was seriously how you did it on some Galaxy phones.
Android was always focused on cloud stuff, which makes sense given that their biggest markets are places where most people don't have PCs, plus Google wants that halo effect from Android. I appreciated that iPhones were designed for my PC too. But iPhones were generally bad at copying any other data ad-hoc. They added AirDrop specifically for this, and... Like 90% of the time I don't see my other device, or the transfer fails. I don't even bother anymore.
> They added AirDrop specifically for this, and... Like 90% of the time I don't see my other device, or the transfer fails. I don't even bother anymore.
Oh god! This bugs me so much. I don't understand why it's so hard to get this right. I'm sure it is, but why?
I know that if one of my devices switches from our 5GHz to our 2.4GHz network this can happen, but even when they're on the same network, it happens sometimes. (And why do my devices keep trying to force themselves off of the 5GHz network? WTF?)
And I get that it's called "Airdrop", but I'd really like it to work over ethernet, too, since that's a lot faster!
I read that AirDrop uses Bluetooth to make machines handshake then transfers the actual data over a p2p wifi network. But I vaguely remember it also working over existing networks, even with ethernet, which may have been in an older version. Either way, it's complicated and thus unreliable. I'm guessing Bluetooth is the weakest link there, cause I have a hard time even pairing speakers with that crap.
I don't know, I can plug my android phone into my computer and tell it to pop up as a drive and drag and drop files from Nautilus... (or I can use Google Drive or SFTP...).
> so many people have only a phone now, so no reason to try to sync.
Wait until the AR glasses come out. I pretty much guarantee that media syncing will be a huge deal, and Apple had better get their iCloud act together by then.
iCloud is a shambles; and I say this as an Apple user for more than thirty years, and has pegged his career to Apple.
We've seen this before, it's a bit like the "no outside food or drink" policy at the movie theater. Apple (and Google, Microsoft, et. al) want to stop you from using your media so you're funneled into buying theirs. If people can easily play local files, it diminishes the value of a streaming/music management tool. Probably explains why Groove Music and Play Music failed, while Apple Music still has a surprisingly devout userbase.
This is one of those things that will hopefully be opened up with more standardization. There's nobody to blame but ourselves for not enforcing this earlier, and hopefully in the future opening an MP3 file won't be harder than it was in 2005.
I spent good money for a ScanDisk double-pronged device (and app) to get around this problem. It does and doesn't work - I have to have it plugged into the iphone to hear my music that I didn't buy on the itunes store. Now I'm paused, not buying more music until the govt steps in. All my digital purchases were from itunes over many years; but that was before I owned any Apple devices, and so everything could work smoothly together.
I don’t think it’s really so much the hardware and software vendors as it is the music industry — and their very powerful lobbyists and lawyers. The tech companies have to play along with what the music industry wants — if they don’t, then they don’t get to have the top artists on their platform — and THAT is why Zune/Groove Music failed, not anyting tech related.
It regularly deletes music without warning -especially if I import it from CDs (that’s still a thing, for us boomers. I have even recorded vinyl records), and also regularly restores music that I delete.
I have also had it do that thing, where my (non-DRMed) song, recorded from a CD, is replaced by the DRMed “radio edit” version of the song, from Apple Music.
That’s fun.
Whether or not the sync actually happens, or if the song stays on the original device, seems to be a crapshoot.
Safari bookmark syncing is … not good. It rearranges bookmarks, refuses to delete some, refuses to sync certain ones, according to some internal algorithm. Etc.
Unfortunately, it is also true for android. Especially with the google drive "audit" requirement for software to access your files in google drive, it's actually much worse than iOS.
re: Android, I have syncthing running on a windows, Linux and android phone. I make a change in from my desktop PC and it nearly immediately replicates the changes on my other devices whether I'm on my home network, at work or abroad. works really well.
+1 for this. Not exactly a setup for the average Joe, but if you know your network/filesystem topology and have compatible devices, Syncthing is nothing short of a godsend.
I have a ~100 item Notes file of stuff like this that I experience regularly on iOS and macOS. It's optimistically a list of Radars I would file should I ever work at Apple again, but I'm fully aware that 95% of Radars like these go nowhere so it's more realistically just a space to vent.
A few of the really bad ones are Radars I filed years ago that went nowhere and still annoy me to this day (top prize probably goes to FaceTime audio ducking).
What are radars? Is that the internal name Apple uses for bug reports? And more importantly, why would Apple ignore radars like this? It was clear (at least in the 10.8 days) that Apple cared about reliability and stability.
> Is that the internal name Apple uses for bug reports?
Yes, but also all other types of progress tracking.
> why would Apple ignore radars like this?
The only Radars I've filed to other teams that actually got any traction are clear-cut bugs with a simple repro that don't require any UI/design changes to fix. Without a repro & sysdiagnose the engineers will likely never even read through the whole bug report before discarding it.
In general my view is that a lot of Apple engineers are stretched pretty thin and don't really have time to work on that kind of stuff with the pretty quick pace that a yearly OS release schedule imposes on them (supporting redesigns, new UIs, new hardware). If a bug is caught immediately it's considered a regression and there's a higher chance it'll get fixed, but issues that are around for >1 year without being flagged back to the engineers responsible are unlikely to ever be prioritized.
The most unlikely "bugs" to ever get fixed are design issues that aren't really considered bugs in the first place, like the FaceTime audio ducking issue I mentioned above. For reference, when you're on a FaceTime call the OS (both iOS and macOS) will heavily dampen all other audio to the point where it's pretty unintelligible even at 100% volume. There's no way to fix it because it's Working as Intended(TM) and the Apple designer knows what customers want more than you, the other engineers, or the customers themselves. It's been around for years and has had dozens of Radars filed internally and externally but no progress has been made.
Apple Music got considerably worse from early 2020 to 2022. I was impressed by the features, search by lyrics, promise of personalized recommendation, things were pretty smooth, but cracks started to show.
- issue with being repeatedly slammed to reauthenticate
- bizarre iTunes integration
- won't play nice with sleep-locked Windows laptop
- random features ripped out of the PWA, like "Artist Radio" (presumably an attempt to protect their recommendations from adversarial scrapers)
The last straw was I "got auth booted, playback cutoff, buy a family plan" at midnight NYE, left an angry ticket. Next week, ticket closed, final cheeky de-auth. I immediately canceled, and can't say I've had any reason to consider returning.
I've always hated Music.app's and iTunes's concept of a "Library". I already have a library for my media--it's organized, hierarchal, consistently named, and fully-integrated with my computer's operating system. It's called "the filesystem". I don't need the app to re-invent the concept of a filesystem on top of my existing filesystem. This isn't really limited to Apple applications, either. For a lot of applications, whenever you want to do anything more advance than "playing" a file, you have to first "add it to your Library", where the application grafts its own idea of a filesystem onto your already perfectly-good filesystem. Yuck!
I agree with this. When I started using iTunes in 2002 it was a revoultion for me, before that I just had music files scattered around wherever the ADHD put them. iTunes would organize them, find out more metadata like names of artists and genres, and give me a tags-based database for viewing them. And, it stored them in a pretty rational way in the filesystem, so you could find the individual files pretty easily. It became as simple as inserting a CD and in a couple minutes it was ready to go. It was even able to insert a pause between some tracks and play 2 tracks attacca if they were supposed to be played together. And, the "Genius" feature put together really decent mixes, where it would play a few songs from the same artist and move on, and seem to move through the genres pretty nicely.
I appreciate all the work they're doing now curating lists and writing bios of the artists in Apple Music, but I feel like they threw away useful stuff they had before.
As annoying as some of this stuff is, i've found Android/Windows/Linux to be as broken in this regard. The last time I tried transferring photos/videos from my Android to a PC, it transferred at ~5-10MBps over a USB 3 connection because of limitations with MTP. So these phones can record in 4K@60FPS, have 256/512GB of storage but 5-10MBps transfer speeds.. and there is no easy way to get around this limit..
Any sort of syncing between PCs/mobile devices is universally neglected in favour of the cloud now. Why invest in syncing when they could charge you for cloud storage instead?
> Why invest in syncing when they could charge you for cloud storage instead?
Bingo. I started seeing this everywhere I looked and it made me furious. Everything, in small ways, seems to sabotage the user trying to control their things. Eventually, and at scale, they win. It's fatiguing to constantly be fighting these toys.
> and there is no easy way to get around this limit..
I mean, Apple could just add a better physical connection to the iPhone. Either the USB3-speed Lightning port they used twice on a few iPads, USB3.x over USB-C, or even the brilliant Thunderbolt standard they helped make nearly a decade ago. But... the iPhone's physical transfer speeds are still stuck in 2001. It's genuinely an unbelievably amount of negligence for a company that directly profits off of cloud customers.
The EU did nothing. When Apple moved away from the 30 pin connector to the lightning connector they promised they'd keep it for a minimum of 10 years since so many people were howling about the change. That was 2014. Guess what? It looks like Apple will be adopting USB-C in 2024, thus fulfilling their 10 year promise. Meanwhile, since 2014, Apple has been adopting USB-C across their entire product line - except the iPhone which they had promised they wouldn't do.
So, let's end the farcical statement that the EU stood up to Big, Bad, Apple. The EU did nothing.
The EU is telling Apple that the iPhone may no longer use connectors that they license themselves. Apple can do whatever they want in 2024, but if they want to sell phones in Europe then the iPhone will ship with a more agreed-upon connection standard.
If Apple still wants to use a superior in-house technology, they can implement Thunderbolt on iPhone.
In 2014 Apple said they would use the Lightning adapter for at least 10 years. Meanwhile they've adopted USB-C across their product line. Apple famously never announces future product plans but I think it's pretty easy to read the tea leaves with regards to what they were going to do.
Well, now there are no tea leaves to read. If Apple doesn't want to be transparent or work with their community, these are the kinds of laws we'll be forced to pass. They have to be responsible with their power, as the single largest private company in the world. We have to hold them accountable.
That ars article was published after the regulatory ball was rolling. The fact that iPads and Macbooks have already switched to USB-C is part of the mounting frustration surrounding Lightning - plus the fact that Lightning was redundant and licensed by Apple.
We need regulators to do this so Apple doesn't change their mind and make "Lightning 2". Even if Apple did have a full USB-C switch on their roadmap, every company in FAANG needs a healthy fear of regulators. Europe cracking down on the App Store and Apple's silly proprietary cables are the start of this, and a fantastic first turnout so far.
Using the USB-C connector doesn't guarantee high speed connectivity. Technically that connector can fall all the way back to USB 1 speeds. Hopefully we'll see higher speeds, but Apple never put their higher speed Lightning ports on the phone, so who knows.
Apple Music on MacOS is hands down the worst first-party app I've ever used. It legitimately was hard for me to believe that it could be as bad as it is when I first started using it. I had a moment where I believed, just for a second, that I was on a Windows machine, and the app was a shoe-horned third-party monstrosity like using Microsoft on Mac, or vice versa. It is gobsmackingly bad. Audio quality is great though!
We are (were) deeply/widely invested into the whole Apple ecosystem, and they are very rapidly losing that spot in our lives/homes. Nearly every interaction has become immediately frustrating. Moving away from all of it. There's zero possibility of help with any of it, and less than zero possibility of their fixing any of it. Major bummer.
The bozo bit as described is how I thought about Sony for a long time.
I had a different name for it, "The idiot engineer".
That for all the amazing premium quality products Sony releases, every product has at least one extremely poorly thought out area. It was like there was some designer/engineer who was the son of the CEO or something, and got to work on every project.
My favorite example of this with Sony: the WH-1000XM series noise cancelling headphones are absolutely great and they would be the only headphones I ever use if only there was a way to mute the microphone from the headphones themselves. There's even a touch-sensitive panel on the earpiece and several control options you can pick to have available through it, but mute is not one of the options.
IMO the whole physical interface on these makes no sense. The microphone seems to be garbage, so why even include it? The touch panel literally never does what I want it to do, I wish they'd just replace it with buttons. The ONE tactile button on the device (aside from power) can only be used to change the noise-canceling mode, which I never do.
What I would do frequently is pair to another device, so it would be great if that one button could be used to unpair-and-enter-pairing-mode. Instead, I "repair" by connecting it to one device over bluetooth, and another device with a cable. It's a silly, awkward thing to do with my wireless headphones, but it's 100% reliable. Oh well.
My example for a similar product is Sony NW-S703F, a noise-canceling MP3 player.
It was a thing of beauty, just terribly pleasurable to use. The noise canceling and audio quality was great.
But - it only supported a proprietary audio format, and everything had to be transcoded instead of just copied over. Took forever, and it couldn't successfully transcode every format.
And that's how Sony stays in business. It was such a good music player once the music was on there, I am tempted to buy another one as long as it's cheap.
This goes for their professional equipment as well. I worked with their cinema projectors a few years back. In theory they were better than most other solutions, but managing them were ... cumbersome. You could only access it using a special program that only ran on Windows. It was really picky with DCP's. And it was difficult to know what it was doing at all tiems. You had to say at least three hail mary's when attempting to upgrade them. At one point upgrade could only be done with a USB stick that you had to connect deep inside the projector.
But it was 4K before there were movies in 4K. They came with laser projectors early. They were ready for high frame rate from the beginning and almost never needed replacement parts fitted unlike certain other manufacturers.
I echo this - I bought an apple watch but ended up returning it because it was so hard to reliably do basic tasks like connecting your AirPods and listening to a podcast. It would work fine ~80% of the time but sometimes it just wouldn't work at all and there's no clear fix other than resetting everything which is super annoying. Apple support was also completely useless. The apple watch hardware is amazing but the software was such a letdown.
That's the new Pixel fingerprint reader experience.
They buried it under the screen (why? who gave a shit?) so they can make it (generously) 70% reliable instead of the 99.99% reliable reader they had on the back.
Yeah it was definitely cool when it was working, but having it not work 1 out of every 10 times was getting frustrating. I ended up returning it. The Apple Watch for me was always a nice-to-have, not a must-have, so returning it was an easy decision.
Funny enough, I had a similar issue last night. I daily drive a Windows machine and wanted to send some clips of me gaming to a buddy via iMessage. Apparently you can't simply drag and drop files onto an iPhone once it's plugged in. You must use iTunes or some other program. iTunes took 20 tries to finally see my iPhone, and once it did it froze trying to sync it. Finally, I was able to drag my clips into iTunes and sync them over to my phone (a transfer that should've taken 1/10 the time it did given I was using USB 3). Great, the files are now on my phone and I can send them to my buddy. Nope, they are only available in my "TV" app and cant be exported or shared.
Apple still sucks less, but years of internal disincentives of some sort have let the competition make progress. They need a come to $DIETY moment and to do a "snow leopard" across the board.
What they really need is to go back to the focus on functionality and dependability that made the original mac such a success. But even a periodic "snow leopard" effort would be much better than what we have today.
(For those who didn't remember it, Snow leopard was a widely acclaimed Mac OS X release that supposedly focused on reliability and performance and not on new features)
I claim that new feature work is actually less likely to annoy you than "reliability and performance" work, and is also less likely to introduce bugs. Performance work is perfectly capable of introducing bugs and going back and opening up old project is very likely to.
Apple does embrace your approach: they'd rather re-implement than fix. I think the example cited by the post (Apple Music) and more generally the experience of the last 15 years of Apple suggests that your this is wrong, at least for Apple.
I’m aware I’m invoking the cliche here, but it’s my genuine honest opinion that it’s been going downhill since a Steve Jobs died.
There’s a famous quote from him about success and product focus, and it seems pretty obvious that first they tried using Ive as a product guy substitute (or put him forward as one), then they gave up entirely.
Steve used his own stuff and didn’t hesitate to demand it meet his quality expectations… but I genuinely can’t imagine Tim Cook deciding on a feature without a spreadsheet weighing pros and cons against surveys of user feedback statistics and the entire development time planned out Waterfall style… even if that’s just “these buttons suck and are confusing, use better ones”, he’d still in my little imagination scenario, be scrutinising the spreadsheet on an iPad and deciding that the fix isn’t valuable enough.
IMO it’s because Tim Cook isn’t an asshole, and Steve Jobs was. If you brought something substandard to Jobs, you’d regret it with every fibre of your being. I simply can’t imagine Cook berating anyone so severely that they’re reduced to a crying puddle of shame and self-loathing.
Jobs was a shitty boss, but by god he got what he wanted.
I have my fair share of complaints about Apple Music, but I don't agree that this is in any way 'basic functionality'. I would expect that 99% of Apple Music users just want an easy way to stream music, not sync custom songs that they received as .mp4 files on WhatsApp across their devices. It would obviously be nice if this was better supported, but I can see how this may not be worth investing a lot of engineering hours in.
It seems to be increasingly widespread and is not just the Music/iTunes ecosystem.
For example, the Home app and HomeKit situation is also unreliable. People's devices suddenly disappear from their Home app on bigger installations. You have to delete the entire thing and start over and go and find all the barcodes again. There's a well known workaround for setting up Home Assistant, moving all your devices to its control and having it export to your HomeKit. People hate doing this but it's been one of the reliable ways of stopping this from happening in larger setups.
Also in the HomeKit area, synchronization of voice recognition for personal requests in a multi-person house is extremely fragile. It works for many people, but sometimes it just doesn't. It is supposed to be transparent and automatic - if you teach your phone to recognize your voice, then all the HomePods in your house are supposed to as well. Except sometimes they just don't sync and you have to reset the homepods to factory defaults and reintroduce them just to get them to sync the voice recognition. Or worse, your phone won't let you turn on voice recognition for you in homekit even though your phone is doing recognition successfully.
Or even more maddening, the home app says you're signed in with a different apple ID on your phone and home app, but it's the exact same ID.
And that's assuming you can even join the home on your phone. My wife's phone is nearly impossible to invite to our "Home". The invites never arrive if using the appleID. Sometimes it'll work if the invite is done by phone number, but again, no invite message. Sometimes firing up the Home app on her phone will announce that there is a pending invite but it often takes 5-10 tries over a few days to get this far.
When searching on the support forums, it is easy to find other people who have had these exact same problems for years.
Or the AirTag situation. I put an airtag on a remote control that keeps getting lost in the room. But only one person in the house can locate it with the UWB direction finding system. I don't want to have to put two or three airtags on the same remote just because Apple won't let us share tags between family members. This is just silly.
Sadly, I find myself agreeing with the article. Apple has drifted from "it just works" to being surprised if it actually works.
For about 10 years I’ve considered Windows iTunes to be malware. Music playback w/ apples own apps on MacOS has been bad ever since Apple got into the music business…. Sigh, if only the Beatles estate had won that lawsuit over the use of the ‘Apple’ brand for music…
Services and operating systems should just be separate things. They can (and should) be able to work together, but pre-installing AppleTV+ on my Macbook and Candy Crush on my Windows machine are both stepping over the line. iTunes/Apple Music is definitely the perfect example of this, going from "slick Winamp upgrade" to "Apple Music sales vector" over the course of 20 years.
It's reasons like this why I advocate for Apple to separate their hardware and software. It's fine if they want to integrate their first-party offerings, but gluing them to the OS makes me uncomfortable. I don't trust Apple to not degrade my user experience anymore, unfortunately.
Isn’t integrating services with the OS the whole point of Android for Google?
They aren’t licensing technology to handset vendors, they just are keeping the numerically larger but profitability smaller sector of the smartphone business safe for advertising.
Not necessarily. Google is certainly just as complicit as Apple in pushing their services, but you can still use Android and even Pixel hardware without Google (or with anti-Google mitigations). This mostly comes down to the openness of the AOSP and availability of unlocked hardware, which luckily for Google is not that attractive on either count.
So, I'd say that Google is to Android what Canonical is to Ubuntu. Both are developing "open" products that technically qualify as Free software, but use their services to lock people into convenient but exploitative agreements. They're bad, but using Android without Google is much easier than using an iPhone without Apple.
I recall beyond the usability issues (who wants a big stupid MP3 player? Not me.), iTunes when you uninstalled it left a bunch of stuff behind on the system. I'm not talking just odd files here and there, I'm talking entire sets of running services you have to remove from ARP or otherwise nuke. Bonjour was one that comes to mind, but there was more I can't recall offhand.
OK, I'll just say that the complaints are totally legitimate. But the author seems to be missing something that I only recently discovered myself. You can tell Music on macOS to sync to the cloud immediately by selecting File > Library > Update Cloud Library. It presents a spinner at the bottom of the window showing progress. (Well, showing that it's still working.) After that, if it doesn't immediately show up on your phone, you can force-quit the app and restart it and it should be there.
I write a lot of music and like to be able to play it on different devices (phone, HomePods, in the car, etc.). It took me a while to figure the above out!
You also can't uninstall Apple Music, nor can you get it to not respond to media controls from headphones. So a few times a week I accidentally open an app I never want to use because it wants to force itself on me. Lame.
Apple has always had conflicts between its business interests and the "bicycle for your life" ethos. We just used to not notice because they were bringing us such great shiny new things on a regular basis. It's been a long time since Apple has made any innovative software for your digital life. Despite the ability to steal and claim any good idea created for iOS for the last 15 years I can't think of how any Apple application or software-based utility has affected my life in any positive way for a number of years.
I've definitely noticed that since the release of Apple Music they have become increasing passive aggressive about local music collections. Losing cover images, somehow classifying songs from the same album/artist into many different artists or albums in lists, poorly syncing music playlists by creating new ones with a "1" appended to it leading my playlist of "workout" to duplicate to "workout 1" and then "workout 1 1" and then "workout 1 1 1" as I add or remove tracks.
The author needs iTunes Match. For some reason doesn't want anyone knowing about this service but it's the only way to sync your own music in Music.app.
But iTunes only runs on Windows or macOS so I think you're stuck to having one of those around with iTunes running on it. I was hopeful, Id love an iPhone but have SO much music and no way to get it onto the phone without buying another computer.
Yeah, Apple's Music app has been fucked up for years. You can drag songs into some views and not others.
If you drag songs into a new playlist they get added then removed and put into "recently added" or the general library where you have to drag them into the playlist again.
Occasionally viewing the newly added playlist will hang when doing the second step.
I have some personally owned music, as well as music I've recorded myself, and I have never been able to get it to sync to my devices since Music came out. It just perpetually has the cloud icon next to it, and Music says it's syncing (I think, been a while).
For the most recent time I tried, the music has been in this state for 2 months.
I believe the solution to these kinds of problems is deauthorizing Music, then signing out of ‘iTunes’, then signing in again, and then authorizing again. I'm sure there solution published somewhere on the internet.
I read/heard something last week like "you won't get recognized for making things work properly (aka bugfixes, etc, etc).. only for bigger things" (within apple/google).
Their performance review systems have nothing in common except that they exist, so that's kind of silly.
Generally doing random old bugfixing is low impact, but also it's likely to break things worse instead of make them better. Especially when binary compatibility comes up.
So true. iTunes was great back 10 years ago or so but today it’s just awful. Just like so much other Apple software. They’ve got huge issues, I’d guess with developer retention and culture.
If the author really believes this, I would only think so if he put money on the line and has PUTs on AAPL. This is just bitching for readership. Like I know Tesla is a shit company which is why I’ve been shorting it and making tons of money.
MP4 is definitely a video file extension, and I don't know what he's saying about adding songs to Music/iTunes, but yes in general syncing songs from Mac to iPhone has gotten pretty screwed up over the years.
I don’t think Music is really intended for this use case.
Maybe look at third party apps that let you play local files like Vox Music Player.
If you want to stick with Music you can always subscribe to iTunes Match that will sync your local files libraries seamlessly
I would like to extend this concept. I do not, in fact, have the bozo bit set for my Linux desktop setup. I do, however, have the "fields of broken glass" bit set. On Linux, the entire system is made up of disparate packages maintained by unrelated groups that communicate sparsely, whose work is tied together by another party that actually takes the job of fielding this to the end user. And thus you get funny problems like "Oops, package A was generating a config file for package B and the syntax subtlety changed in a backwards incompatible way and now printing is broken but only on Thursday." (Example scenario, but it's based on a real one. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...)
I think that to be fair to everyone, all modern computing environments are extremely complicated and you are always going to have a lot of trade-offs. Still, if I had one complaint about Apple, it would be this: it genuinely feels needless sometimes. Sometimes I feel like Apple is it's own worst enemy, more of a threat to their business than any competitor.