Comment by AnonC
13 hours ago
With the latest Google Gemini deal to be the backend for Apple’s AI, I wish Apple could also do a deal for search (even though Google seems to be struggling more as time passes). Apple’s search being broken in Settings on iOS, macOS and iPadOS seem intentional — it can’t search in a relatively small and fixed list of items! Is it any wonder that Mail search doesn’t work with external data?
The AirDrop and Hotspot issues described are spot on. The success rate for these is like 40% to 65% (the latter if you’re lucky). These features require doing a dance of airplane mode, disconnect from WiFi, go to Settings and fiddle with the toggles, etc. When it works, it’s like magic. At other times, it’s a big joke on “it just works”.
Text selection and the trials to just move the cursor quickly and accurately: it’s like Apple has no senior management that cares enough (looking at you, Craig Federighi), no QA (this is obvious truth to every user) and no money to spend on making things better (don’t let the stock prices fool you). FWIW, I know of slower and fiddly ways to move the cursor somewhat (press space, hold and move or place finger on the text, hold and move).
All these issues persist for years or decades because senior management does not care. I can’t think of any other rational explanation.
My god I cancelled my isp because I’m moving. Thought hot spot would be fine for a few months. Every single day I have to restart my MacBook Air for hot spot to work. Multiple times every day I have to turn hot spot off and on even though it’s in discoverable but won’t connect. Multiple times every day hot spot is just off and can’t be turned on in control center. And this is with iPhone 17 and m2 on most recent updates. I can’t imagine on older hardware.
With older hardware the trick is to not upgrade the OS.
Apple's strategy is actually to make people auto-upgrade to make their work of maintaining older OS/software cheaper and make people who don't have recent enough hardware suffer.
It's funny that one argument for Apple was that you got updates for free. But in practice, Android doesn't need to upgrade the OS to access recent apps and ship security updates for old versions of Android. You just lose access to new OS functionalities, but it has been a while since there was much to care about.
iOS 26 has been really hard on my 13 mini. Most menus lag, you have to wait sometimes 5 seconds for the control center menu to pop up sometimes. I dug my old Samsung S20 FE out of the drawer, applied the last few security patches, and it still runs more smoothly than the newer iPhone.
I've had this experience too. One thing I've found that can sometimes help with laptops failing to connect is renaming your iPhone in the settings (which in turn renames the hotspot name)
I agree having to work around this is ridiculous, but maybe consider a little MiFi router? Those are cool to have anyway.