— 2 min read
I've been using an iPhone since 2007 and using MacBooks as my primary computer since 2010. I think Apple software reliability and quality is at an all time low point in my history with it. Pretty much every day I run into some new stupid issue that just makes me not trust things, and the introduction of the terrible AI "features" has made it worse because now the bugs will subtly change over time so you can't even reliably work around them! I'm not alone in thinking things are bad.
2026 may actually be the year of the Linux desktop, partly because great strides have been made to make Linux easier than ever to use and more functional but also because the alternatives (Mac & Windows) are both getting increasingly worse. I've bought a Lenovo laptop that I'm using for development work these days and have converted my gaming PC to CachyOS. It's happening!
The List
- HomePods: while playing music, if you ask Siri to raise the volume, it will raise its speaking voice volume, not the media volume.
- Apple Music: Siri will regularly play the wrong thing when asked, just completely get it wrong, and then even when it does understand what you asked for it will often play the song in a different language. Think Frozen in Turkish, or a K-Pop Demon Hunters song in Russian for some reason. I am in America and have my languages set to English for the record.
- Apple Home: I have my garage doors hooked up to Apple Home. There have been multiple occasions when I ask Siri to close the "Right Garage Door" and it will instead call a garage door opener company on the phone.
- While using your iPhone as an Apple TV remote, your iPhone will change its media destination to be the Apple TV as well. So you just put something on the TV for your kids, walk in to the other room and play a podcast with the Apple Podcasts app on your phone, and it will start playing it on the TV for some reason. Who thought this was a good idea? Is this actually something that someone has ever wanted to do?
- Mac: switching workspaces sometimes just does not work at all. You will swipe up for Exposé, swipe over to another workspace, click on a window, and it will briefly move to the other workspace and then immediately rubber band you back to your original workspace.
- Mac: Ejecting an external drive often doesn't work because the OS is holding on to many
._files it has created to track shadow attributes (I think?) on a somewhat incompatible file system. Ejecting should tell the OS to let them go and eject! It does not. - Apple has two interesting features for karaoke with your Apple TV - you can use Continuity Camera with an iPad or iPhone to show singers on screen with some fun effects, and you can also use another iPhone as a microphone to sign with. For the best experience you might want to do both of those at the same time! Apple thinks that is too much fun and you can only choose one or the other.