> Your AirPods just connected to the wrong device. Again.
> iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart. HomeKit forgot the kitchen lightbulb exists, and will remember it again in three hours like nothing happened.
I've literally seen nothing of this happen (or to my family all on Apple devices). While I don't doubt they do happen to some unfortunate users, it's important that they report it so that Apple can troubleshoot. It could very well be that, much like myself, nobody at Apple is seeing this, and therefore it's not investigated.
Every time I do report these kinds of bugs it's clear to me they clearly do not look at them lol.
The Feedback site still thinks windows 10 is the latest windows version and doesn't even display the latest ios version.
I reported a bug in Apple Music on windows where it wouldn't update the audio output until you restarted it. They did a change in a few weeks where they made it update the audio output. Probably team dependent, but I was really amazed by how quick they changed it.
It's unknowable if they look or not consistently across all groups and departments because of their habit of zero feedback/response. I assume they don't look anymore because of assumed overwhelming backlog and lower standards than the past.
Perhaps on their side, AI might be able to consolidate, triage, and perhaps even propose fixes far more scalably than even a huge department of customer support-oriented coders.
> While I don't doubt they do happen to some unfortunate users, it's important that they report it so that Apple can troubleshoot. It could very well be that, much like myself, nobody at Apple is seeing this, and therefore it's not investigated.
I report a lot of nagging issues to Apple through Feedback Assistant. I keep updating the same issues and provide instructions as well as the device diagnostics and any photos/videos. But almost all of them don’t see any kind of action at Apple. They just linger on for years. Only if it’s an OS crash or an important Apple app crashing, it may get some attention.
There are many instances when “things just work” and it seems magical, but in those same areas, there are often too many bugs and issues where one has to do this whole dance of restart, re-pair devices and so on. It used to be that Windows was the butt of frequent jokes on restarting, but Apple’s software has gotten closer to that in many aspects.
I personally suspect that Apple doesn’t have a dedicated and good QA in place. There doesn’t seem to be a push from the top down for software quality. That attention to detail that Apple was famous for is missing on software quality.
I'm 1 for 1 on Feedback Assistant. I reported a flaky 10 year old thunderbolt display to them a few years ago, thinking I was probably just shouting into a black hole. It took them six months, but they actually responded to it with a diagnosis (bad hardware) and a workaround so I didn't have to trash the display.
It's true that there are few obvious bugs, but there are many subtle bugs now, usually outside the main interaction flows. 5 years ago, apple's software felt bugfree, essentially.
examples:
- if I change a note on my iphone and wake up my mac, I need to restart the notes-app before it syncs the change.
- if somebody leaves me a FaceTime video-message, I get an "unread"-badge that doesn't get away after I watch the video. There are multiple ways to get to that video and only one of them clears the "unread" badge.
- if I add a pronounciation field to a contact in my iphone, SIRI stops working and I need to restart my iphone to get it back.
> iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart.
The iMessage one is super common, and is Apple's fault. Easiest way to reproduce it is to have two Macs. (got a desktop and a laptop and use them both? Chances are high you'll encounter it).
The HomeKit (via HomePod mini) is also super common. (HomePod Minis just have bad wifi and unreliable connections, there's something about their WiFi setup that's different from all other Apple products). It doesn't help that Apple spent years prioritizing HomePods as the HomeKit base (though they eventually fixed that, and let you assign an Apple TV to do it).
The others are also common, but not necessarily always Apples fault, as far as I can tell.
(the AirPods, for example, tend to go wherever 'most recent' sounds happen, but a lot of developers are unintentionally triggering conflicting behavior around this. Have Outlook open? An email notification will sound an alarm, stealing AirPod focus away from your other device, but the sound effect will already be done playing by the time your AirPods connect, so to the user, it just seems like the AirPods switched devices for "no reason".)
(HomeKit, for example, is supposed to support Eufy cameras. But Eufy cameras are garbage, despite having a large dedicated base station dock running 24/7, they can support only one small video stream to one single device, ever. So if you have two Eufy cameras installed, HomeKit will fail on the cameras constantly, but it's because of Eufy's basestation limitations, so it's not clear to me how Apple could 'fix' that)
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The more Apple moves outside of it's own internal ecosystem, the more complex the interactions get, and the less control Apple can feasibly exert over the product lifecycle, so the more it starts "Microsoft-ing" it's work. (We joke about Microsoft Copilot, but Apple has five different products all named Apple TV, the Apple TV (hardware device), Apple TV (the TV software app, which runs on Apple TV, and iOS, but also on Roku and other SmartTVs), Apple TV (the storefront for buying movies and TV shows), and Apple TV (the subscription service) for watching Apple TV (the studio creating original content shows and movies, one show of which is actually called "The Studio")
Bingo. I have a bunch of Sony WF-Xm4s and Xm3s and an Airpod pro. If I have to take a call, it's always the Airpod for me because it's so reliable. I just snap it into my ears and it literally just works. The Sony - while having a flatter frequency response and a snugger fit, goes for my daily workouts which Airpods sucks for as it keeps falling off. I have never had any connection issues with the Airpods till date. Despite it being connected to 3 devices. The Sony's (rarely) do have connection issues but never the Airpods.
I was excited about Beats because they have the same hardware/software stack as iPods and they fit really well on runs! Give them a try if yoi haven't!
Both can be right, unfortunately. People do not report stuff, but when they do, it tends to get ignored. I have personally stopped reporting feedback to Apple because my tens of bug reports with detailed reproduction steps were simply ignored. This was both on beta and stable releases. One of them was especially egregious — I had an M1 Macbook Air at work and 11.2 update made charging with any dock, USB-C or Thunderbolt, not work, i.e. everything was working, but the laptop was not charging. I had to plug in a separate charger for 3 months until they fixed it in either 11.3 or 11.4. Rolling back did not work because the update updated the controller firmware. There was no mention of this in the release notes.
Apple's "It just works." sometimes gets in the way by obscuring details. Simple example, Airdrop. You share a file, select the person, and it gets stuck displaying sending on the bubble. What is happening? No one knows, because it should "just work". But when it doesn't, you usually have literally no recourse and you are told to wipe your device and try again. From GP's example, the synchronisation. I don't know about iMessage, but synchronising Photos is a nightmare because there is no button to force a sync. You have to connect your phone to power and pray that it will sync. If it doesn't, you have no way to force it. Same thing with AirPods firmware, how do you update it? You don't, it should happen automagically. It didn't? Sucks to suck. You hopefully get the idea by this point :)
If I remember right, that was Apple finally switching to the standards based approach for PD, and a lot of docks having used a hack instead of the standard for years before. It worked with your regular charger because your regular charger properly supported the PD standard.
If you have a lot of Apple devices, and kids that are constantly borrowing them, you'll notice the "AirPods connected to wrong device" problem a lot. All I want is a feature that allows me to say "lock my AirPods to this exact device until further notice."
AirPod Pro v1 seems to always work, but they favor connecting to Apple branded devices and move seamlessly between them. What doesn't work so well is that iPad Pro M4 doesn't play nice with Bose QC35 multi-point connections because it appears to "play silence" to the headphones even when there is no audio, preventing the other connected device from switching over to play audio.
When I turn my iPhone on and open iMessage, it will sit at a black screen and won't open for several minutes and usually crashes. I want sync to happen on a background thread and be able to access existing content immediately. Sometimes it happens with the phone app too. There really ought to be a universal gesture or trick (that's not pull to refresh) to force iCloud sync in any app that has iCloud sync functionality.
Also, Universal Clipboard works half of the time.
Learn Spelling was removed from most/all non-Pages apps, which is extremely inconvenient because the Apple US English dictionary has tons of missing adverb forms.
iOS/iPadOS selection of text in a web browser (Brave or Mobile Safari) doesn't work as reliably as it did in earlier OS versions. Often, text is selected but refuses to show the text selection popup.
And I refuse to use iOS and macOS 26 because liquid glass is slow and unusable.
AirPods and iMessage, agreed, never had a problem. The Home app though remains Apple's unloved ginger stepchild - every major OS release I'm hopeful that they've done something about it, but they never do. I'm starting to think Apple's internal view of Home / HomeKit is that they wish they'd never built it in the first place.
This is tough. Most home devices are built to be absolute bottom of the barrel. Notice that almost every HomeKit device says it only uses 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi?
Apple tried to do certification for a while in 2018ish, but nobody could get through it, so I think they stopped.
Apple is starting to build their own home devices and I expect them to eat the market and cause improvement via competition.
HomeKit certification is still a thing if that's what you're referring to. You're very much right about the bottom of the barrel nature of home automation devices though. Most of mine are about as good as you can get though (Philips Hue etc.) and the Home app is still appalling. Even if all the devices I have attached worked properly and did what they're told when the automations run, there's still some absolutely basic functionality that people have been waiting years for, like being able to switch cameras from stream only to stream and record via an automation - think "when I go to bed, I want the alarm on and the cameras recording".
I hope they do. I use only the basics of HomeKit, a couple switches and CCTV. I'd like to expand and use it for more stuff. So it's important Home is stable.
Every damn time anybody has trouble with an Apple product, we get this "Well that hasn't happened to me." Great for you, go get yourself a cookie and cram it up your ass.
Son you can't even upload HEIC photos to apple support, which is an iphone native file format all of your photos are in by default. Apples support website doesn't support apples file formats
> iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart. HomeKit forgot the kitchen lightbulb exists, and will remember it again in three hours like nothing happened.
I've literally seen nothing of this happen (or to my family all on Apple devices). While I don't doubt they do happen to some unfortunate users, it's important that they report it so that Apple can troubleshoot. It could very well be that, much like myself, nobody at Apple is seeing this, and therefore it's not investigated.