Or people who aren't parents are yet again sharing strong opinions that are not based in reality. Plenty of parental controls are deployed, how long they last against a determined child is the real question. Here's a concrete example for you. Spotify has a web browser built in so that you can watch music videos, kids have figured out a way to use that to watch any video on YouTube--a 12 year old told me this. If you search on this subject you'll quickly learn this is well known and is generally being ignored by Spotify. Why not allow parents to disable the in-app web browser / video function?
It's not as easy as you may believe to prevent that type of access.
The recent changes to the iOS keyboard and text editing in general have been very counter productive for me as well. Tap to select doesn't really work the same way anymore and the logic of it isn't clear to me which makes it unpredictable. Typing accurately itself has gotten really difficult. I used to be a pretty quick typist on the iOS keyboard but now I find myself looking for my Mac to send a message from there or using voice to text more.
Folks can thumb their noses at Reddit but the top comment in every post about iOS updates since 26.0 was released is some variation of "fix the keyboard." The problem seems very real for a lot of users.
Select all always appears if you have no text selected and never appears if you have some text selected. Insane UI decision by apple but that's how it is.
It honestly doesn't surprise me. Apple is not some bastion of good design. They are mediocre at best, always have been.
It was pretty hilarious to me that for so many years the keyboard on iOS only had CAPITAL letters. No matter the state of the shift key, the letters on the keyboard just stayed the same. After many years they finally figured it out, but it's one example of many about how Apple just doesn't have the great UX people claim they do.
I have some kind of mental block that prevents me from figuring out the state of touchscreen controls.
"Is that a Play button because it's currently playing, or because it is paused/stopped, and will play when I tap it?"
"Is Bluetooth on or off? That depends if Dark Mode on?"
I end up tapping the control 3 times or so. The latter dilemma could sometimes be worked out by surveying the state of every surrounding control, but tunnel vision and impatience keep winning.
I actually prefer the all caps keyboard and switch it on on iOS. It looks like a physical keyboard and the constant flicking between upper/lowercase is distracting and annoying
Apple has fantastic UX people. Also really bad ones. It’s a mistake to think a company that size is homogenuous.
In general, IMO they are better than most companies but far from perfect. Maybe 80th percentile. I’m hard pressed to think of a top 10 tech company that’s better. Lots of smaller companies are.
they are not bastion of good design. they are the bastion of intentional opinionated design. Meaning they don't listen to feedback. ("we don't have focus groups" - Steve Jobs).
Looking at every UI/UX implementation around be and on my devices... I'm not sure anyone does anymore. Not in a haha way, I actually see so many trivial issues all around, I don't understand how they passed any contact with testing and user feedback.
This was not poor design, but a decision to restrict the user from copy pasting entire articles and the like. Most unfair and this iPhone 3G to iPhone 17 Pro user is seriously considering ditching them over select all
Come on. OSX was a paradigm shift in desktop usability and intuitive design.
My 85 year old grandpa asked me about 20 years ago how he should go about learning how to use computers. We were a windows family at home but I was using Macs in school and OSX was relatively new and I thought it blew Windows out of the water as far as usability.
Didn’t take long for my grandpa to be sending me emails and news links, and becoming an overall competent and comfortable computer user, in his late 80s, and I credit that to Apple’s fantastic design.
I think maybe we forget how using Windows 98 and XP was day-to-day.
This is accurate. Apple’s been losing its soul ever since they spent a billion dollars making a headquarters that’s shaped like the “Home” button that they then immediately got rid of.
I understand your point and have a long list of bitter grievances against Apple, but OS X triggered a large influx of geeks to the Mac world. It was a Unix that just worked, and there were all kinds of important ways that appealed to key tech people.
>Come on. OSX was a paradigm shift in desktop usability and intuitive design.
OSX was born by moving from a real crap OS that couldn't even multitask property, to slapping the same UX paradigms on a Unix base.
The first release of OSX wasn't meaningfully different from OS9 in UX. They had the same goofy window gadgets for minimizing and maximizing a window, and still couldn't resize a window from any corner/side.
Finder is still just as much garbage as it ever was, nothing has really changed there. "About this software" is still the first thing on the first menu, because of course that's the most important thing a user could do with MacOS software is to look at what version they are using.
There's a reason MacOS has never gone above 15% market share - part of that is the extortionate cost of Apple hardware, as well as their shitty UX.
I will gladly take Windows XP over any version of MacOS.
old school apple design stubborness: I remember they insisted on putting the grooves on the "D" and "K" keys instead of the "F" and "J" keys. So you had to find home base on the keyboard with your middle fingers on an apple rather than index fingers like on everything else. No, that place has always been a design shop run amok.
It made sense because the numeric keypad had the dot on the 5. Early IBM keyboards (Model F) didn't have home markers, IIRC. But the PC world standardized on F and J, and eventually everyone else, too.
Did you ever notice that "About this software" is the first thing on the first menu of every application? Is that because people have to know what version of the software they are using every time they start it? It's still like that today, and it's very very stupid. Other OSs get it right and put the version information on the last menu, where it doesn't clutter up the most prominent area in the most used menus.
Finder was crap in the 1980s. Still is crap, but it used to be crap too.
The window system in the 80s and 90s was also crap. Could not resize a window from any side or corner of the window except the lower right. Windows has had resizing from any edge or corner since forever.
Apple "design" is just not as good as people seem to think it is.
They've also had plenty of weird and unloved hardware designs... the infamous trash can, the clamshell laptop, the weird anniversary macs, a mouse with a charging port on the bottom so that you can't use the mouse while it's charging, and the list goes on and on and on.
As someone who has switched from Windows to Apple recently, my God the Finder is terrible. I can't understand how people aren't flipping tables over how bad it is.
Finder has to be used with the Miller columns; otherwise, it doesn't make sense.
But since the switch to the new filesystem, it's kinda slow and annoying.
They have built some proprietary stuff around their filesystem to increase their walled garden height. Which is kind of stupid in the era of cloud computing, because you cannot use any of it if you share files/directories with other people who don't use Macs.
Because Mac OS X Finder has always been kinda terrible. There was a lot of talk about this in the early 2000s and it's just faded away since the people using macOS now probably never experienced the good old Mac OS 9 Finder.
And its Windows competition Windows Explorer has likewise gotten worse and worse each revision of Windows.
lol, directory opus? I was using that on the Amiga way back in the day. I tried it like a decade ago, but it didn't stick for me. It doesn't seem to run on Linux, and it costs $$$, so no chance I'll try it again.
I can't think of a better rationale for the ubiquitous worsening of local search than increasing ignorance of comp sci fundamentals.
There's no reason a senior at undergrad level shouldn't be able to write an efficient, fast, deterministic, precomputed search function.
... and yet, professional developers at major companies seem completely incapable.
Minimum acceptance criteria for any proposed shipping search feature should be "There is no file / object in the local system that fails to show up if you type its visible name" ffs.
The whole window management system is an exercise in contrarianism.
They basically chose to do things in the opposite manner of their competitor and mostly against what intuition would dictate for the sole reason of being different.
macOS is very frustrating to use without utility apps that provide the necessary improvements. But they are never as well integrated, cost money or are a hassle to set up.
Apple just wins because they make good-looking, well-built hardware, and sometimes they win on some performance metrics (in the Apple Silicon era, it's mostly about efficiency and single-core speed, which is not as useful as some like to believe).
Apple only "wins" by charging exorbitant prices that idiots are willing to pay to have a digital status symbol. What they have not "won" is market share. They have always been an "also-ran" in market share.
Android (70%) beats iOS (30%). Windows (68%) beats MacOS (13%).
Well, I agree with that if we are talking about the general population.
But Apple does have some niches it serves very well that make the prices worth it for some. But of course, this is a very tiny minority of their customers.
For example, they always have been focusing on video editing since the PPC days, starting with the iMac DV. And nowadays, Macs are still quite good for video editing; even when you factor in the price, it's not that bad of a deal.
Previously it was about DTP and desktop graphics generally.
But it's always the same playbook; they are first to offer the possibilities of a new usage, but that comes with their high price; over time they lose competitiveness, and they end up switching to something else.
The question is always if the asking price is going to be worth it for whatever you try to accomplish with a computer at the moment.
If you are doing work that doesn't require being on the bleeding edge, the answer is probably no.
However, in general, people buy Apple stuff for the status, very often as an ego trip (to prove they are better) and not infrequently out of ignorance/incompetence (it's crazy how much stupid shit Apple fans believe).
In editable text fields you can tap a word a few times and it'll select the whole paragraph, if that's any help.
What drives me insane though, is double tapping a word is supposed to select that word. But I think starting in iOS 18 it started selecting the word and a random amount of surrounding words, but only about half the time. I couldn't tell you what it could possibly be trying to do but it's maddening.
It’s using AI to try and determine if it’s a proper noun or other scenario where multiple words are really one semantic term. Except it’s really really bad at it and it’s almost never the behavior I want, but there’s no way to turn it off. (I vaguely remember there was a WWDC talk sometime a couple years ago where they went into how this works)
Word segmentation has been a longstanding problem in CJK languages too. Coupled with the terrible text selection in iOS it makes it really hard to select substrings.
It works surprisingly well on Android; expanding to grab a full address, for instance, or complete phone number. Sometimes it needs tweaking, but mostly it's directionally correct and helpful rather than harmful
Just keeping my finger on the word works for me every time to select it. Double tap works only works in the edit fields. Also works reliable for me here in the hacker news post editor, as long as I do it in the middle of the word.
It's still there, it's just difficult to know when it will appear. Sometimes it takes one more tap than expected, or sometimes one must deselect a word and tap again, or change focus away and back again. Very sloppy UI.
Especially because it was working fine and understandable in older iOS versions.
Also for some reason autocorrect seems to have gotten a lot worse. It has become nearly impossible to type a grocery list without all kinds of annoying wrong corrections.
My favorite ( /s) IOS hassle - aside from running around on 12% battery at all times, didn’t I buy a pro max for the extended capacity ? -
… is not being able to paste into an empty box unless I type a letter there and select it/clobber it/overwrite it
And I just LOOOOOVE not being able to tap a URL in safari and get to the end of it to add parameters or change a path anymore…
Just gave my MacBook that hasn’t been turned on in months away(i haaaaate Tahoe) and been using GrapheneOS on a pixel 7a.
so far I’m not in love with it but I’m getting used to it and starting to like downloading apps anonymously (if I name the app, I’ll probably get scolded) anyway this might be the end of the line for me and Apple.
Your statement isn't incorrect - but I think it needs a slight qualification of "And none of them are acceptable". Both Apple and Android have regressed in quality and it's only possible because of a duopoly.
I can't tell about windows - never used autocorrect there - but GBoard became laughable. I don't think I was able to use its suggestions since a few years. For instance, it will NEVER but really never put a uppercase I when I'm talking about myself. Never. I could select it from suggestions if I feel like, but I kinda gave up (this is written in Windows, that's why you see capital Is). Or my name, used quite often right, is also never spelled correctly - although it's there in the suggestions. I am using a yahoo email, GBoard knows the username, but it will ALWAYS suggest a gmail extension, which simply doesn't exist. I don't know any other keyboard which can properly handle multiple languages, so I'm stuck with GBoard, but it's nothing to be proud of.
I have the same email @yahoo.com and @gmail.com (one is mostly for online shops etc), and the amount of time GBoard thinks it needs to recommend @gmail.com, it's obnoxious...
But the correction offers are still okay for me, I can mash keys around my email username and one of the corrections offered will be my username...
No it cannot. SwiftKey has exactly two "languages": one is French, the other is German/English/Italian/Romanian. Yes it's a mash of all four, which makes the default swiped word and the suggestions exactly useless. Who the hell thought that was a good idea... only Samsung keyboard offers separate languages as well, but it's kinda worse in suggestions than GBoard.
It's not just the keyboard. My iPhone 15 is often so unresponsive I am tapping twice as much.
Example but the issue not limited to web browsing; Safari will do nothing, I tap again, it does the thing, then it does the thing again due to the second tap. I have to tap back to get to where I really wanted to go.
Sounds like the liquid glass animations are so heavy that if the system is busy with anything else for a second then everything simply breaks.
I remember seeing the videos about cpu usage spiking over 40% just to show the control center.
And similarly, even on a Mac I find myself clicking on links and button multiple times, just for things to work. It has a dedicated keyboard, how is it that they messed it up so much that a physical keyboard stops working. It's an interrupt based interface, it takes less than a millisecond to process things, how can someone mess things up so freaking stupidly.
Apple makes money selling hardware; they have a vested interest in making things slower/worse to incentivize people to buy newer hardware.
This is why you can never really trust Apple and also why no matter how bad Windows gets, it's still a better deal because at least you can count on the fact that PC businesses will compete on the hardware front to get your money.
Choosing Apple is a lot like being in an abusive relationship; you can't leave because the switching cost are quite high, so you tolerate a lot more abuse than you would be willing to otherwise.
And this is the reason people try to not rely on Apple software too much; if you do, they truly have you by the balls.
Shortcuts run but often do not trigger all the stages in a pipeline. No issues with same shortcuts prior to installing iOS26. These Shortcuts do not trigger UI transitions. They send data over network.
Sounds like Apple management enabled a quality assurance failure that is fostering so many distractions for users it's turning people against Apple.
Extremely common pitfall in UI engineering. If you treat all input as a queue that's divorced from output, you end up with situations like this.
It's kind of a paradox, but in many cases you need to actually discard touch inputs until your UI state has transitioned as a result of previous inputs. This gets extremely nuanced and it's hard to write straightforward rules about when you should and shouldn't do this. Some situations I can think of:
- Navigation: User taps a button that pushes a screen on your nav stack. You need to discard or prevent inputs while the transition animation is happening, otherwise you can push multiple copies of that screen.
- Async tasks: User taps a button that kicks off an HTTP request or similar, and you need to wait on the result before doing something else like navigation or entering some other state. Absolutely you will need to prevent inputs that would submit that request twice. You will also need some idempotency in your API design to handle failure/retries. A fun example from the 1990s is the "are you sure you want to make this POST request again" dialog that Web browsers still show by default.
- Typing: You should never discard keystrokes that insert/delete characters while a text input field is focused, but you may have to handle a state like the above if "Enter" (or whatever "done" button is displayed in the case of a software keyboard) does something like submit a form or do navigation.
Essentially we're all still riding on stuff that the original Mac OS codified in the 1980s (and some of it was stolen from Xerox, yes), so the actual interaction model of UIs is a mess of modal state that we hardly ever actually want to fully realize in code. UI is a hard problem!
This analysis ignores the fact that the user experience has regressed from a previous version which didn’t have these issues.
So it’s not like some longstanding industry-wide UI issues they’ve ignored forever, it’s that Apple has introduced new tradeoffs or lowered their quality standards to the point that some users feel their experience has worsened.
Okay, how long is the debounce window? Where in the input pipeline do you debounce (obviously not immediately on keystrokes)? Will debounce work for long-running requests, which are event-driven and not time-driven?
I have seen, far too many times, naive approaches like wrapping all click handlers in a "debounce" function cause additional issues and not actually solve the underlying problem.
To clarify - I am not stating that simple debouncing is the solution to all the issues you're identifying. I agree with you that handling some of them can be very complex. I just shared the article as a pointer to a broadly similar concept that can be used to help communicate the gist of what you're talking about.
Just to correct a common error, nothing was stolen from Xerox. Apple gave Xerox stock (which they later sold too early) for demos and access to the Parc work on Smalltalk and GUIs.
This fiasco stirs up a lot of different topics for me, none of which seem like they are likely to be resolved anytime soon.
First, with so much importance placed on an Apple/iCloud account in our current era it's not good that they can be shutdown so trivially. Someone can be shut out from using Messages, Apple Wallet, Digital Identification (depending on where they live) and all their subscriptions and media purchases without any recourse, in an instant. It's not hard to imagine someone being put into a pretty bad situation as a result of this with just a little bad luck and bad timing. It's easy to point out that you shouldn't be overly reliant on these technologies but I think it's more important that there be ways to safe guard people from this scenario. Apple should do more to handle these scenarios given the importance of an account now.
Second, there are other recent events that point out the failure modes and gaps that Apple (and Google?) need to address. There apparently is no way to cleanly divide purchases in a Divorce or separation, even if the person was fleeing an abusive situation. There's also no way to leave a "family" account even as an adult or how to assign children to multiple families. Again we can trot out the easy "Just don't use these things, use FOSS, Nextcloud, etc..." but I think Apple should do more to address these types of scenarios regardless of what people choose to use.
Absolutely. The current level of service these companies provide is functionally identical to what would have existed 25 years ago. Losing your Apple account would have been a minor annoyance - the relationship involved trivial amounts of money, and wasn’t deeply integrated into anyone’s lives. Even if you lost an email address, losing access to it wouldn’t have locked you out of hundreds of important accounts, and any important accounts would probably be easily updated to a new address with a phone call, and likewise for a few friends. If you got fully locked out forever, it really wasn’t important.
So, we now have the same “who cares, it’s just some dumb online account” level of service with much more critical accounts. Because big tech has scaled users to the 9-10 figure range, while not investing almost anything in customer service. Instead of having thousands of CSRs like the phone company, tech employs a few disempowered call center operators overseas, whose only job is to read FAQ answers at callers and ask them to try restarting their computers.
I shudder to think how vulnerable the current system would be to intentional denial of identity via other parties tripping fraud systems on an account.
> There apparently is no way to cleanly divide purchases in a Divorce or separation, even if the person was fleeing an abusive situation
Believe it or not, google is even more stunningly incompetent than that.
If you have someone in your contacts there literally is no way to (1) retain him/her, and (2) ensure they are never, ever, for any reason, suggested in any product. eg in google docs, I do not want "@" autocompletions to suggest the person. No sharing, no drive sharing, no email cc/bcc, etc.
In my case, there was a breakup with a cofounder / exit from a company and ongoing collaboration with a friend who shared the same first name. I actually had to delete the former cofounder's contact, which made me miss some calls from an unknown number.
Having someone that you need to occasionally maintain contact with that should never be prompted in any way (exes of all types, divorced, stalker) is a basic need in real-world systems.
1. It is objectively true that Apple and Google accounts are extremely important to many people.
2. It is also objectively true that most users will only need one of each, a few at most. Fraudsters have no such limitations, and may want to create thousands of them per day if the possibility arises.
3. Therefore, it's likely that a significant percentage of all accounts ever created are fraudulent, even if the actual number of fraudsters is much lower. This is the crucial observation many people miss in this debate.
4. Real users do not want constant iMessage spam and other problems resulting from fraudulent accounts remaining open. Therefore, normal users care deeply about fraudulent accounts being closed promptly (and so do money-laundering regulators, but that's another discussion).
5. Normal users also care about their accounts remaining open. Apple has to balance these two problems.
6. If we force Apple (by regulation, PR crisis or any other method) to be softer on closures, the only way to do that without exacerbating #4 is to make opening fraudulent accounts harder.
7. The only reliable way of preventing fraudsters from opening accounts is strict and invasive identity verification.
8. Therefore, if we're asking Apple / Google to keep more accounts open, we're also asking for more surveillance.
This may actually be the right tradeoff to make, but it is important to point out that there is a tradeoff here, and that no decision in this regard goes without consequences.
It is kind of astonishing to me that the entire chain of logic was put together without "The company could invest in better customer service to resolve disputed identity" as a third possibility.
It was certainly my first priority for an e-mail provider when I started to de-Google my life.
Why cant they give a task which is reasonable for a real customer, e.g. show up with ID in an apple store and lets us reserve $100 on your credit card to unlock an account which is under investigation immediately?
This is not more surveillance - Apple already knows the real name of their customer.
"On X, anyone can pay to obtain the ‘verified' status without the company meaningfully verifying who is behind the account, making it difficult for users to judge the authenticity of accounts and content they engage with."
As stated in you source the EU is (among other things) not happy about Twitter calling users 'verified' while the meaning of 'verified' switched from "we did sth. to make sure the account owner is indeed the thing/person they say they are" to "the account owner is paying a monthly fee".
I’m realizing maybe I should just use Amazon or iCloud AND Google Photos for backing up my images. My whole life is in Google Photos. I could lose it from something stupid and never even have a person to contact about that.
Shutterfly will upload all your photos and store them for free if you buy a few magnets on sale now and then. Works from iPhone well enough and it's my "third backup."
iCloud is overrated, it was not encrypted at rest for ages. I much prefer using Time Machine and keeping the passcodes in a PW manager, and maybe a safe deposit box as a backup.
iCloud is a whole lot of things. What you describe is a backup storage solution.
Time Machine does not handle:
- photo sync between devices and users
- shared storage between devices and users (no, not backup, but actual directories and files etc)
- private relay
- state sync for games and other apps
- etc etc
It's not as easy as you may believe to prevent that type of access.