https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8bxkCKNiuA

They have a similar video comparing the M6 to the M5.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uA7WLmlg1kM

First, everyone copies. In computing space, let me give you a funny example. Apple iOS home screen is a copy and evolution of PalmOS user interface, down to four buttons, pages, graffiti area and so on.

Palm's phone (Android running one) copies Apple Watch's user interface as home screen like a revenge, with a iPhone X-esque camera bump. Funny, ironic, real.

Second, Apple is a slow moving company. They don't rush things. They are the last company to move OLEDs on their phone, because they want to implement without any apparent flaws and with a long life. i.e.: My parent's Samsung A9 2018 phones have screen burn-in, but my iPhone X doesn't. They are at a similar age.

Like them or not, their engineering is solid and novel. At least give them that. My 18 year old Mac still boots despite being dropped (I fell on top of it) and bent badly, and gone through three batteries.

My 12 year old MacBook Pro still runs like day one despite being hammered for years for high performance computing, and its disk still shows ~10% wear.

Like every company, Apple makes mistake (these keyboards were bad, yes), but they are sometimes misunderstood (you can only charge that upside down, but charging it for 2 minutes gives you 8 hours of use, so get a coffee and flex at least).

Yes Apple has "copied" or brought out its own version of particular products before, usually in a much better state.

I wouldn't say that at all. Correct me if I misremember, but the original iPhone didn't even have an ecosystem of apps outside a few Apple-sanctioned ones. I was thoroughly unimpressed when it came out, at the missed (in retrospect, deferred) opportunity.

My older Palm device felt superior in nearly every way I cared about.

but this discussion always has the tendency to go completely off teh rails because there are so many people unable to talk rationally about apple products.

innovation basically never happens in a vacuum, and especially apple products have historically "come second" into a product category -- and just nail the implementation so well that they just felt great to use. (and yes, smartphones were well established by the time the iphone was released. thats what i'd call the product category there. dialing in to ever narrower definitions to make it into a "new" category is exactly the reason why this can never be settled - because you can call _every_ product a new product category like that)

So now we got endless discussions about "who was first" even though its completely meaningless to ask this question -- because that "previous product" also took inspiration from other products, and if you squinted enough, could also be called "just an iteration" vs a "innovation".

The apps part was rectified pretty quickly but even the kind of halfway decent web apps available after iPhone launch beat treo apps.

So the Android polish wasn't quite there on release either.

To be fair here, you're replying to a thread where people were discussing mechanical engineering, and hardware. Not software.

Held to that metric, the software layer isn't part of the original discussion.

Not saying that discussing other things is wrong, but the comment you replied to seems to be "The hardware was an enormous cut above".

Knowing what we know today, probably a good choice as search engines themselves are quickly getting less usage due to AIs. (I for one would never have predicted there would be something that could replace search engines, but then I also thought Facebook was here to stay forever for everyone. Happy to be wrong)

For most companies I'd say this is a natural tradeoff, but Apple has so much money that they can actually afford to be world class in both. Or at least, you'd expect they could. Maybe being world class in software would require delays to the hardware side of the business?

Regardless, it's definitely a weakness of the culture and I'd venture that weakness is why Apple has essentially failed at AI.

This is what gets me. Think about only bugs, not a single wishlist feature, just bugs. Limit to obvious-to-normies defects: so, UI bugs (ultra-low contrast oddity with certain backgrounds while scrolling lock screen notification center) or popular-feature bugs (AirDrop demands “everyone“ to receive from people in contacts, apparently in at least a couple cases).

At least in the case of UI bugs, no secret sauce seems to be required to resolve them. No particularly special feats of engineering. It seems simply dollars can fix them: QA & engineering. When I discover these obvious defects, update iOS multiple times over the course of months, and continue to experience them, I can only assume Apple prioritized having cash on hand over investing in my (our) experience.

Turns out "forgot to ask for local network access and since the prompt was never allowed, default to denied" is a known bug, and since it never asked, there is no way to toggle either. It was just a bullet point in the reddit thread of networking things that broke in macos 27. It had a solution. Somehow my terminal had known to ask for permission, so it got it, but all my UI apps didn't.

I had to sudo a change to remove my local network from the local network list, and then it worked.

I would think that "suddenly all my local services stopped working" is a noticeable to normies bug. Most normies won't have a ton of local services, but normies that live with techies probably will have a few.

The tinfoil hat explanation for this is that everyone at Apple is using iCloud for everything, and thus would never encounter a bug with locally-hosted services.

Just one more thing that sours me on their stuff when I'm otherwise inclined to like it.

A known bug for years now.

Then good luck getting the time limits to work. It’ll tell the kids “5 minutes left!” then just let them keep going.

Parental controls are far superior to Microsoft and epic.

The SE and desktop felt like modern machines, clicks and key presses had predictable results, applications did what you told them too. On par with the Win95 and Win 7/8 I was used to at the time.

Jesus Christ, that iPad on the other hand, feels like janky Windows Vista tech rammed together by an intern. Weird UI artifacts, making the same gesture can have unpredictable results, the only function that everyone in the shop found without failure was 'undo' because it is triggered by violent shaking.

Even simple tasks like sharing a photo saved from a website is bizarrely broken. Depending on whether you saved it as a file or 'to your photos' dictates which applications can then open/share the image. And I know Android is full of it's own foibles but they took a few months to internalize. I'm going on 2 years of 'features' breaking workflow, and pixel perfect taps to activate input elements that are 5% of the screen width.

/rant

I am personally not always happy with the gestures, but some can be disabled. I don't have much use for my iPad apart from watching some videos, for everything that requires concentration, I will fallback to my laptop. I still think it is a marvelous machine how the hardware and iPadOS play together.

I’m hopeful Ternus can turn this around. They can be top notch in both being all vertically integrated and demanding the best in both. Let’s see.

For AI, there were top down directives to find new ways to experiment with and incorporate into core products and processes, but as you went down the management chain, management became more conservative. First and second line managers were strongly incentivized to keep their products, roadmaps, and interfaces stable and predictable by similarly conservative stakeholders. And as such, they were generally unwilling to officially dedicate much effort to AI other than the minimum “look at how much we’re using Claude”.

In particular due to the lack of central tooling, any team trying to do much with AI essentially had to reinvent much of the stack themselves. So even small projects were largely untenable due to inevitable required scope creep.

I am a physical engineer by background but have also spent much of my career in high-reliability software systems. The problems of reliability in software systems make physical systems look like child’s play. The levels of effort are on different scales.

An important difference is that software correctness is mostly binary. In physical engineering you can usually spend a bit more money to over-engineer a component if you have any doubts or are lazy, and that works. Effort does not scale nearly as well when it comes to reliable software.

You have a committed spec of one component, connected to the committed spec of another component, with committed maximum deviations.

All that is fixed, so you engineer for possible permutations and mass-production. (it's still a massive feat, I'm not downplaying it. But it has a defined completed controlled state)

In software this is much more fluent. You may have a spec of a library and the APIs you use, and your app might otherwise be static.

But you're handing alot of what you do to an OS, which juggles everything and continues to change over time. That API you're calling may not even have full control over the modules its interacting with.

Apple is ultimately a hardware company that's so good they can monetize software and services. But they are not really a software company, or a services company. I think Ternus' promotion recognizes that: software and services are worth a lot of money, but they're value adds to hardware.

IMO the barriers to entry are just much different, and it’s reflecting in the workforce. There’s cultural differences too, but I think the education differences is the biggest cause.

How often do skyscrapers fall over, or bridges collapse, or your CPUs fail unexpectedly, or submarines implode. Rarely. In fact, I bet most people reading this thought of the same few examples.

Then look at software. When is the last time you encountered a bug? Have you ever heard of bug free software? Even at the elite, smartest, most educated levels of software, there are still bugs everywhere. Humans are essentially incapable of writing bug free software. And it isn’t because a bunch of uneducated dummies that didn’t get degrees are the ones writing it (as you arrogantly implied). It’s because it’s way fucking harder to do perfectly or near perfectly.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t incredibly hard physical engineering. Obviously there is insanely difficult engineering in nearly any variety. But if you ask a civil engineer to design you a perfect bridge, they probably will. Ask a software engineer with all the experience and education in the world to build you a perfect podcasting app, it simply isn’t happening.

My POV (and most people's, I think) is that software is buggier because software people are wildly unserious compared to hardware people (and other engineering disciplines like civil engineering). Which is an alright trade-off in the very large majority of cases, as software is rarely very important and is easy to update, whereas hardware and bridges are very high-stake and extremely costly to update.

> if you ask a civil engineer to design you a perfect bridge, they probably will. Ask a software engineer with all the experience and education in the world to build you a perfect podcasting app, it simply isn’t happening

The civil engineer gets to rely on extremely high-quality very-serious civil engineering work, built over millenia. The software engineer relies on shaky (ie buggy) work from past nowhere-as-serious software engineering work, built over ~70y.

The fact that the software engineer can do anything at all on such small and buggy past work shows how easy it is compared to civil engineering.

In my mind, saying "software engineering is shown to be harder by the presence of bugs" is akin to saying "LEGO building is harder, people build stuff that collapses all the time"

When skyscrapers fall or bridges collapse, the negligent engineers who knowingly signed off on them go to jail. When was the last time a software developer or manager went to jail over a known bug?

Civil Engineers (the ones building bridges and skyscrapers) have a culture of institutional accountability. They are certified members of a professional organization and when they sign off on a project, they do so by affixing their personal seal to it. This is their binding endorsement of the soundness of the architectural drawings. The presence of that seal can be used as evidence in court against them (criminal or civil).

It’s also possible for engineers to be stripped of their seal by the organization for failures far less severe than a bridge collapsing, such as conflicts of interest.

There isn’t anything like that in software, even though the stakes are much lower. Far more common is a total disclaimer of warranty whatsoever.

Regardless, the simple fact is that software just matters less in almost every case, so no one gets held accountable. It lets the culture of unaccountability breed within IT / software eng, and here we are.

You want a podcast app, I will give you a formally verified podcasting app with zero bugs. I will engineer the shit out of it. Just give me a year and $500,000. Oh, you don't want to? And that right there is why we have bugs. Not because it is hard, but because nobody gives a shit. Even though companies lose way, way more than what it would cost to prevent severe bugs from happening, some things you literally cannot prevent without government regulation, as engineering itself went through after a period of nobody giving a shit and a lot of people dying as a result.

With hardware you pretty much get to restart on every product you make. Sure, you have many of the same (types) of components, but with every iteration, you move them around and pretty much have to rethink how every part fits together and interacts. And it has to work when devices get to consumers, because you can't visit everyone to solder on a wire you forgot. (You can always tell people they're holding the phone wrong though.)

With software you have this continuous blob that you keep adding features to. You never really get to rethink how it all goes together from the ground up when the design changes, you just slap a transparent UI on top of you existing code and call it a day. If it turns out there are bugs, not a problem, you just push an update and hope that fixes more than it breaks.

then let me root and customize the software to my liking

I agree that as a power user I might tend to notice bugs more often, but when there is no relevant error message for the normies, to even bother looking up; it takes a really deep breath for me to remind myself why android ain’t a thing I would want to go back to. I guess, I got into the ecosystem a bit later than its prime time where things apparently had better software quality in the walled swamp.

I think we need to keep in mind a couple of things:

1. It’s software designed for the masses. It’s not intended to be a power user’s playground.

2. There’s no such thing as perfect software. If you really look hard for alternatives to the Music or Photos app (to use your examples), it’s actually extremely difficult to find anything that is without compromise, bugs, or other downsides.

As someone who has moved off of many of Apple’s apps, like my move from iCloud Photos to Ente, I’m really still accepting a decent amount of compromises. It’s better in some ways, worse in others.

And then there’s some other apps where I just can’t find a good alternative. I’d love something like Apple Notes but is cross-platform with a Linux app specifically. There’s just basically nothing like that out there, certainly not at a good price, and most of them end up over-complicated or with a strange UI.[1]

And when we step back and look at how many apps Apple makes it’s mind-boggling, and really, most of them are at least a mild “good.”

[1] Closest I’ve found are Craft and Zoho Notebook. Zoho gets the price right, it’s dirt cheap, and has a Linux app (though it’s basically a web app). Zoho bothers me for being ugly though. Craft is slick on iOS with a web app only on desktop, but it’s pricey if you leave the free tier. For my criteria it’s important that the apps support sharing, collaboration, and notifications when the other person updates a note. I’m honestly not sure if these two alternatives hit every requirement because I gave on both pretty quick and accepted being stuck in Apple Notes for now. Going to iCloud.com on my Linux system isn’t horrible.

I don’t think anyone is asking for the world I just want software that dosent crash and makes sense to use.

Just a couple weeks ago Apple Music was leaking GBs of memory.

For one thing, the power user crowd tends to babysit their activity monitor and get massively upset when an electron app dares to consume memory.

In my mind, the only thing that matters for non-server apps is whether or not the user experience is good. Memory consumption is just a number. Apple doesn’t even advertise how much memory many of their products have on them. They expect that their users don’t have to think about that, and as long as that remains true, I really don’t mind if Apple Music is eating up 2GB of RAM behind the scenes.

Now unfortunately apples stuff is usually a cut above other software I’ve used but in my opinion is nowhere near as good as it should be.

I don’t even really disagree with the negative experiences you’ve had, I’m just more saying that those experiences are inevitable in software. Being above average is about as good as Apple has ever been.

And I think that standard is also true with hardware. A lot of their hardware is supremely overrated. The MacBook Pro has a sharp edge that cuts into your wrist and has a gigantic notch on the screen.

2. I’ve had better luck with Apple software but I’d still categorize it as “bad” relative to the good software I’ve interacted with.

This is a form for software engineers. In the 90’s users accepted things like applications crashing due to lack of memory protection in the OS. We know to expect better.

Again I’m not asking for some alternate reality version of software. I’m asking them to fix clear issues that they do not seem to care about.

Not to mention Apple is a large engineering organization with plenty of talent. The software dosent need to be bug free but I shouldn’t run into as many issues as I do.

Some other fun ones: Finder locking up and refusing to minimize

FaceTime putting me in a call with “testing” when I switch devices

Safari’s extension icon flashing on and off on iOS

Stalling on the lock screen despite me looking directly at the phone to unlock it

To me these are issues that should not make it past the engineers and layers of testing.

I don’t think this is unreasonable do you?

- Apple's software is better than most

- Apple's software is still imperfect, often in dumb ways

- Apple should be able to be dramatically more perfect than anyone else in software has managed to be

Stupid examples from recently:

- The iOS 27 Preview app’s search feature appears to be present while in markup mode but missing while not in markup mode (this is quite reproducible for me).

- Mobile Safari regularly gets into a state where the overlay showing the current website domain gets stuck obscuring an important part of the site.

- On MacOS if you accidentally switch desktops you cannot switch back until the animation from the first switch finishes.

- Spotlight is still hilariously bad.

- The MacOS Music app’s AirPlay controls are barely functional.

- If you have an excessive number of desktop apps open, finding the one you want is gratuitously difficult. Sure, the bottom dock widget is pretty, but that doesn’t make it efficient.

- While typing this message, multiple different glitchy UI elements have appeared and disappeared.

- On iOS, if the keyboard is showing and you don’t want it, tough luck.

Fwiw, Alfred is still being sold.

Apple has some amazing engineering in the basic OS layer and the UI kit, but everything on top of it is just bad. E.g. it now takes about 5 seconds to "Privacy & Security" in the system settings, and I can see a visible delay when switching between sections (e.g. to "Screen Time").

Network settings are just embarrassing at this point - you can't sort the WiFi networks by name when looking at the saved settings!

Time Machine has been a disaster zone for the last 20 years. The keyboard navigation experience in macOS is a disgrace, worse than Win3.11 The virtualization experience of macOS sucks, and there is no support for containers (even Windows has them!).

I can continue for a long time.

It's instant for me on a six year old base level Mini.

Comparing against the median means you've already thoroughly missed the point.

This angel’s halo around Apple was always a marketing illusion. They make above average hardware and above average software. Nothing more, nothing less.

What point is there in paying the premium Apple luxury tax if it's as crap as the median?

I'd add 3), more pair-programming between senior engineers and junior engineers—to hopefully make junior engineers better engineers.

I have to say though, when I knew I was heading out of the company (Apple) within a year, I tried to be a "mentor" to the junior engineers at Apple. And they wouldn't have me. I suppose I was too old… To be sure, they knew Swift better than I did, ha ha.

(Oh well, I tried. I did push back very publicly against management during some of the team meetings—I was told by a few of the junior engineers as I was retiring that they appreciated that example.)

They should absolutely cop the criticism. It’s not like they don’t have the resources to make their software better.

They blasted out a marketing video where they bragged about apps launching faster and the WiFi/cellular connection handing off more cleanly.

My feeling is that there’s just always a group of people who complains no matter what.

There is a religious zeal to some of the criticism.

A friend on the App Store software team wasn't invited to a private iPhone Duo preview, because she wasn't in the hardware division. She felt so disrespected and is considering leaving.

My sister (on the hardware team) shared that its a constantly cycle of non-hardware folks getting shafted and then they complain loud enough until they get 'equal' treatment until the next unfair thing rolls out.

And friend, I didn't pay for an eight thousand dollar machine for software "designed for the masses" instead of serious professionals and computer enthusiasts. "The masses" are not spending eight thousand dollars on a premium laptop marketed towards professionals. This is an expensive machine and I should be in the driver's seat, not Apple. It should not take arcane, brittle incantations to turn off Siri and dozens of background "AI" services that melt my computer and literally burn my fingertips in exchange for recommending filenames in Pages.

And that's not even mentioning the multitudes of extremely serious system and driver bugs piling up over the last several major versions, nor the grotesque and inconsistent Liquid Glass malarkey.

I actually have felt this way for a fairly long time but Apple always baits me. Like the twelve or fifteen different times Apple OSes have finally supported some parts of WebM on certain devices sometimes when it works. Oh my god, I gotta update so I can have another couple WebMs load successfully only in Safari and not in any other app that doesn't decode it itself. Or back when I used an iPhone, third party keyboards - I use a lot of jailbreak tweaks but I gotta give that up so I can upgrade for third-party keyboard support that is so ass that nobody would ever use it. Heck, I wish I had updated my iPad even less. One fewer major version and I could've made use of the virtualization support that was dormant - but Apple fixed the glitch that let you use it on Apple Silicon iPads, so now you can't. Thanks! This is important to do because it helps... Uhh, security, probably? Something like that.

Since Snow Leopard or so, most of my Apple software upgrades have been bitter sweet at best, but usually just bitter, like I've been baited into having a worse experience.

Of course, it is probably apparent that I simply don't like Apple very much, especially not anymore. And I hate to have to justify myself by doing this, but we lack the maturity needed for me to avoid it, so... I am going to point out the obvious that this is hardly limited to Apple. GNOME 3 may be the single biggest downgrade any desktop system I've ever used has been. It has improved over time, but GNOME 3 has never been even close to as relatively good for its time as GNOME 2 was. Same for KDE 3 -> KDE 4 although I think as a rare standout KDE Plasma 6 is genuinely getting better continuously over time and remains one of the things I am excited to update. Windows 10 -> Windows 11 was so bad that it seemingly durably made several of my friends switch to Linux full time and just simply give up on things that absolutely can't be made to work on Linux - that is a powerful statement, and months later it seems they were indeed not fucking around. Android has been enshittifying at an alarming pace, too, although I don't feel like the Android experience from a software perspective is degrading or getting worse, but Google really knows how to blow their own leg off and by god they're going to do everything they can to make sure that all of the advantages they have over Apple are rendered meaningless so they can drag themselves kicking and screaming out of accidentally having succeeded at something.

I don't feel like it should be necessary for me to justify this, because Apple's recent growing incompetence in shipping working software and release engineering stands on its own regardless of industry trends. I'd SSH into my Mac Mini, but I can't. I have to go reset it, because it's been on for 60 days and can no longer open new network sockets. (I am not making this up. macOS genuinely has/had that bug and mine genuinely is in that state right now.) It's not that everyone else is doing great. When it comes to Linux systems it's easy to give them a lot of slack because they simply have no goddamned money, but still, things could be better. It's just that Apple is richer than ever and yet worse than ever at shipping software. I struggle to square the circle.

I'm afraid that's exactly what Apple's software is. The market, much like my school teacher, rewards the best -- no matter how good or bad it is.

The one thing that’s still unanswered is if and how quickly they will fix all the UX and UI mistakes left from the Alan Dye / Jony Ive era. Yes, Jony Ive - and his decision to scrap all Skeuomorphism on iOS which then was adapted for MacOS.

Maybe some of their software clunk is a commitment to backwards compatibleness. We can't have all the nice things, we must prioritise.

For as much as Apple is pushing memories in Photos it is surprising to me that the ability to specify who is in a photo/video is so overlooked.

God help you if you own a camera and try to store its photos in apple photos.

I was in bed, a little away from my MacBook on the desk that was playing some music.

I opened Apple's official Remote app on my iPhone, that lets you control your Mac's Music app.

Both devices were on the same WiFi network and same Apple ID, but Remote was unable to find the Mac. When it did, it was unable to connect.

I opened the ChatGPT app on my iPhone. Went into Codex mode. Asked the ChatGPT running on my Mac to control the Music app to play a different playlist.

Worked within seconds.

Gosh these decrepit giants deserve the unprecedented disruption that's coming for their ass.

Also:

- When there's multiple Apple devices in the same room, your Siri command doesn't always get received by your intended target. Have you even used Siri in these situations?

- Siri doesn't let you see the whole UI with all your playlists etc like the Remote app does.

- The official app meant for this exact purpose failed to work.

- Codex Remote controls every app.

8 means high-end. Gen 6 means the 6th generation. Elite is a bit like Core or M in that it describes their latest chip process. Extreme means it's the high end chip of that generation's chip.

You cannot do it right. Intel had a sort-of-useful naming scheme with their "Core i7 3600" naming style, except you couldn't tell if the i7 4500 would outperform the i5 3700 or not. Also there was a k and a u after the CPU name. They stepped away from that scheme, now they have somehow invented an even less useful naming scheme. And, of course, the Celeron/Pentium line never followed any comparable naming scheme either.

Apple then tried; they came up with the A4/A5/A6 for phones and M1/M2/M3 for computers, simple enough. Well, until you got the Pro/Ultra/Max (Max, of course, being slower than the Ultra, because Max doesn't mean maximum performance). Then their A chip ended up in a laptop and their M chip ended up in a tablet and their weird headset got a new R chip that never got a newer version. Oh, and for laptops you need to pay attention to how many cores your M chip has, because there are multiple SKUs with the same name differentiated by core count.

AMD had a useful-ish naming scheme for Ryzen but then they had to fuck up their mobile chip names. Then they did their weird AI product line, which killed any serious attempt to track what chips are sold at what performance points.

If Qualcomm do everything right, their next generation will have a mid-tier chip that outperforms their current top model. None of these names and numbers are useful for comparing.

Mediatek is doing the Intel thing now with their Dimensity #### where the first number is the market segment, the other numbers indicate performance and generation within the market segment, and the suffix indicates what features were glued onto the SoC.

Every name makes sense if you know the formula.

https://www.androidpolice.com/qualcomm-snapdragon-8-elite-ge...