> 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.
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.