Comment by newsbinator
5 years ago
Whenever I go to AirDrop something from my Mac to my phone there's a 50/50 chance one of the devices shows up or doesn't show up.
I can't seem to figure out what factors influence the dice roll.
This has been true since the release of AirDrop, across multiple different Macs and iPhones, across multiple OS versions.
AirDrop seems to depend on the moon phase and the tides.
I often wonder how no exec at Apple has experienced this and told someone to just. solve. it.
I have the same problem, and also often people show up twice but only one bubble works (invariably the second one I try).
I tried to get stuff like that fixed, impossible when there’s 35 people who “share responsibility” and can point fingers instead of doing something. Imagine a code base and organization so complex that even fixing a bug takes political capital and months. Much less re-architecting to kill a whole class of bugs...
Steve Jobs woulda (metaphorically) broken their fingers off and fed ‘em to ‘em. Once the pointing can’t happen, useful stuff can happen!
Also, you’d be surprised how many SVPs and CEOs I’ve met in big tech that use IT support to setup and fix their devices. When I ran Dropcam, I insisted on using and operating our product only as a customer could. It’s a point of pride and a critical last-resort way to catch issues.
interesting to hear -- I had an airdrop failure like you describe the other day, and it was very surprising to me as I'd never seen it happen before. I use airdrop pretty much every single day and it's almost flawless for me.
I experience this almost every time I use airdrop. Last week I was helping my wife airdrop something from her phone to mac. I had to reset both Wifi and bluetooth on both phone and mac before the device showed up.