Comment by oofbaroomf
15 hours ago
Wow. Hopefully, Ternus will bring what he brought to Apple's hardware to their software. The hardware is leaps and bounds ahead of anything else, but their software gets worse and worse every generation. I'm glad to hear this.
Ternus recently gave an interview where he said this about the initial flop of Apple Maps:
> “When we started out with maps, it was an ambitious undertaking. It was bumpy,” said Ternus. “But the team had just been over the years just pushing and pushing and pushing. And Apple Maps today is absolutely amazing. If you have the vision and you're persistent and you keep working at it, you can take something you know that has a rocky start and turn it into something great.”
Here's hoping he recognizes that Apple's current generation of software is in the "rocky start" phase, not the "pushing and pushing" phase and definitely not the "absolutely amazing" phase. Time will tell...
https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/apples-joz-and-ternus-on...
>And Apple Maps today is absolutely amazing.
Perhaps that is the case in the US, but in Poland, I haven't had a single app guide me into the literal bushes as many times as Apple Maps does. The straw that broke the camel's back was when, I shit you not, the navigation aspect literally expected me to drive through a lake.
Very regionally dependent.
Around here (Long Island, New York, USA), it’s better than Google Maps. I get to compare a lot, because I have a friend that uses GM, and constantly sends me Google Maps universal links.
I hear that it is a lot less effective in rural areas, though, and I think Google Street View is better than the Apple variant.
This may just be my bubble, but even among my iPhone-owning friends, I haven't seen a single person use Apple Maps in Europe, so I wouldn't be surprised if the efforts to improve the map data have been more focused on the US.
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The interface and the direction instructions on Apple Maps are way ahead of Google Maps. The app performance is also much smoother / snappier, it connects to the car instantly and reliably, where with Android Auto it’been always waiting and pain. But the accuracy of maps is indeed worse.
However my biggest gripe with Apple Maps in Poland is that Siri does not understand Polish and cannot be told to navigate to a Polish address. It just can’t understand the street and city names :(
Btw: I haven’t counted the times Google Maps wanted me to go through the worst possible traffic jam (where the traffic jam was not visible on the map) or a closed road. I guess it just happens with every navigation system that errors happen.
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I'm using almost exclusively Apple Maps in Poland and never had any issue (that I remember). Your mileage may vary and so on.
Anecdotal evidence, but I do use Apple Maps in Poland and they work just fine for me, I guess the mileage may vary.
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Personally I doubt they test the hardware outside an air conditioned and dust less office in California.
I made the mistake of trusting Google Maps with driving directions in Sicily, and it always sent me down tiny single lane (but two way) roads because they were "better" by the algorithm. That taught me to trust my gut and follow the highways/main roads rather than use any shortcuts that an algorithm can conjure up. (I'm sure this has relevance in the age of LLMs).
These reports seem unhelpful unless you specify the date at which you had this experience, as this thread is about continuous improvement over time.
Well, even generally much better Google maps sometimes tries to force me through unpaved field roads with unavoidable damage to normal cars. Or create absolutely ridiculous 'shortcuts' that save 5 metres but I should exit busy main road to join it again 100m later, spending few minutes trying to join back. Or lead me through forbidden/one way roads from wrong direction that are like that permanently since forever.
Generally they are fine, but not literally in every aspect in every place, Europe or not.
There's some irony there in that the whole maps fiasco lead to firing of Forstall which allowed Ive to become head of design, which basically led to the current state of macOS design.
I do wish that some day someone will tell the story of what happened during that time. Maps was bad at launch yes, but it also wouldn't get better without people contributing more data, and the fact that it took a decade to slowly improve implies that there's nothing anyone could have done to get it right "off the bat". It still feels to me Forstall was set up as the fall guy, especially considering no one was fired for antennagate.
Reportedly, Forstall wasn’t liked by the other senior execs but was kept “safe” as Jobs’ protégé, they thought alike and shared the love for skeuomorphism design. Ive in particular disliked Forstall, and Tim Cook made a choice.
https://www.businessinsider.com/apples-minimalist-ive-assume...
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> Maps was bad at launch yes, but it also wouldn't get better without people contributing more data, and the fact that it took a decade to slowly improve implies that there's nothing anyone could have done to get it right "off the bat".
Absolutely.
Was the choice to release way way way too early the right choice in the end? Needed telemetry, or even more time, to beat Google? Also taking the data from Google must have had significant ramifications.
Forstall fired an engineer I had worked with (and who I respected a lot) to take the fall for Apple Maps.
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I’m sure it’s amazing in California or the US. So often I think how much better products would be if the people responsible would have to use them for a week outside of the happy path.
Example: Taking the airport train instead of a private driver and realizing there’s no luggage racks, staying in a regular hotel room and realizing there’s no light in front of the mirror, only behind you. So many examples like that on a daily basis.
Another example: When taking HOV and the map asks you if you want HOV enabled, there are no options I can force the navigation to take me to the nearest HOV lane.
If it happens to be there, it will say to use it, but I can't say "Route me to the nearest HOV entrance" because I prefer it even if it's 1 minute slower.
Another huge exemple : in most big cities in Europe you have special parking lots around big public transit hubs outside of the city where you can park for free as long as you continue your journey by public transit.
In a lot of cities, that’s either the fastest or the most comfortable way to go somewhere in the city when you come from the outside.
Not any single navigation app support this (tbf, the few European ones don’t support it either)
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Staying in a holiday rental and there are no hooks on the walls!
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“When we started out with maps, it was an ambitious undertaking. It was bumpy…”
And I know many engineers within Apple that had been testing Maps before it shipped and they were filing bugs about it. It shipped anyway.
> It shipped anyway.
“Real artists ship”
No product worth using is bug free.
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I mean the problem was the Google contract, yeah?
Apple Maps is pretty fantastic
It’s gotten a lot better, but I still find the address database better in Google Maps, which helps when you have only a fragment of an address. I also find that the Apple Maps database has a lot of roads that read the same. For instance, in Texas where I live, we have a lot of “Ranch Roads” that are numbered. Think of them like state highways in other state (which we also have; don’t ask). For whatever reason, most of the Ranch Roads are spoken by Maps as “Ranch Road,” not with the number. So, if you have a spot where multiple Ranch Roads intersect, Maps will just say “turn left on Ranch Road” instead of “turn left on Ranch Road 123.” It’s tremendous annoying. In another state, imagine it saying “turn left on Interstate,” without a number. Anyway, Google Maps does better.
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On macOS there are so many basic things you’d want to do - share itineraries, annotate places, keep lists of things, but there’s not even a document concept. With the exception of guides, anything you do is ephemeral. It’s excellent at planning a route, but doing anything with that route, including getting back to it later is useless.
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Maybe elsewhere it is. Here, it's terrible.
In general, for all it benefits from globalization, Apple disappoints on global markets.
In the US. In many other countries it's borderline useless.
I haven't used google maps in years.
90% of my usage of it is because it actually displays the map on my Watch, whereas Google Maps & Citymapper only show directions.
If it weren't for that, I'd use Citymapper for practically everything.
It’s okay. It’s still subpar and barely keeping pace with Gmaps
it was far inferior to its competitor when it was released
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And they just added ads.
Apple Maps is definitely not amazing in India. All it's good for is "Find My." Only Google is accurate and has good traffic data.
That's worrying, because Apple Mpas is still a borderline useless hot mess.
What is he smoking?!? Apple Maps was fine a few years ago, but these days it routes me to the wrong place about as often as organic maps, and siri is completely broken. It renders a blue dot showing where I am, and responds “I do not know where you are”.
Also, the UI for it keeps getting more cluttered, and they announced that in-map ads are coming Q2-3 2026.
My only hope, however unlikely, is that Apple will recognise that power users, engineers and gamers would really really appreciate running Linux on Macs and they write some drivers for it.
There are literally no PC laptops with the quality or hardware offered by even the cheapest MacBook - the software, while fine for general consumers, creators, and some developer workloads, tragically holds back its potential something fierce.
Well, that certainly would be one way to wipe billions from their share price overnight.
The only way Linux on Mac will become a reality is if it's legislated.
Why would it? Shareholders of the major stocks are generally vibes-based, and I'm sure that if Apple undertook that, they would find a way to build hype around it.
> Linux on Mac will become a reality
Linux on Mac is absolutely a reality [1], and Apple specifically supported it by deliberately leaving a documented/supported mechanism for another OS kernel to be loaded.
[1] https://asahilinux.org/about/
Why would Apple writing some Linux drivers wipe billions from its share price? You can already install Linux on a Mac if you really want to. Back in the day, you used to be able to install Windows on an (Intel) Mac, and that didn’t seem to have any such effect.
it would likely do the opposite as linux users gravitate to the best hardware for their preferred OS => more hardware sales for Apple
> Apple will recognise that power users, engineers
They will not. Recognizing the value of power users and engineers looks deeply un-Apple to me.
As a power user, ThinkPad T (maybe P also) series is better for me (and it's not that close). I run Linux on it.
I think it's due not being interested to things like build quality, screen, track pad, etc.
I also have a Thinkpad, but an X1. I'd trade it and my first-born child to get to run Linux on a modern MacBook.
No offense to Lenovo, it's a great laptop. But Apples build quality is on another level, plus if I want to run local LLMs, AFAIK there is no better option.
There's no way I'm going back to macOS though, that shit was bad 5 years ago when I switched and it sounds like it's gotten way worse.
Hardware people, in my very direct experience, are terrible at software. But we can hope.
Software people, in my very direct experience, are terrible at hardware... While in jest, I do think most software engineer's understanding of hardware abstractions is pretty poor and does disservice to the hardware they run on.
I know between Moore's Law and Gate's Law which one I would prefer to be the industry standard... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
Generally speaking, I think both are true. Most people seem to have an affinity for either hardware or software, but rarely for both. Those who do are extremely unique. I don't mean that as an insult to anyone, just as an observatin having worked in both (and personally am much better at software than hardware, even though I enjoy both).
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I am deeply aware of software people being crap at hardware having worked in embedded for much of my career.
I've worked for 40+ years with a hardware guy and he's great at software, for one reason: attention to detail. In hardware, you have to test, test and test. There's no "fixed it later with a patch" (for the most part).
I don't have a lot of samples, just one. So, YMMV.
Bodge wires in shipped products beg to differ!
It's more the hope that he can bring the culture embedded in the hardware division over to software, which hopefully results in better software.
What they need is a culture of UX focus, and I don’t think it’s present in the hardware team either.
They’ve coasted too long on consistent visual identity, and even that’s been slipping. Time to focus on actual user needs.
Well, and aspect of hardware dev that lacks in software dev is testing. A mistake in hardware is much harder to correct once it leaves the factory vs a mistake in software. A large portion of hardware budget is ultimately spent on QA.
I have to think some of that attitude would be good for apple's software division.
It's not as if ternus will be writing code directly, he's managing managers. Hopefully that means he'll demand and budget more for QA.
The whole idea of (good times) Apple was hardware and software made coherently by the same people though.
“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware" —Alan Kay
In many cases, yes, but it really depends a lot on the person. I have a computer hardware degree but have led both software and UX teams. If you have a hardware background, you’re going to have to acquire a software background before you can lead software teams. What you can’t do is lead a software team like a hardware team (or vice versa).
This is actually one thing I think will be great as AI coding agents get better. Companies whose main expertise is hardware might start producing better software.
There are so many little bugs in consumer-facing apps that hit the ‘sweet’ spot of being incredible little annoyances that just aren’t worth putting an engineer on for a week to fix, but which are totally worth having an engineer throw an agent onto them.
How? Coding agents are trained on every copy of every tutorial that skips error checking and implements the least resistance path.
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Yeah, like fixing a annoyance while introducing one or two SEV-1 for sure is going to be great progress.
I really hope they fire whoever is in charge of Liquid Glass. Whoever is leading Apple software has run out of ideas. Of all the countless things they could be doing in software, we got the useless Liquid Glass refactor.
I hated liquid glass at first, but now i've come to appreciate it. It grows on you
So does fungus. I'd prefer to avoid both.
That guy left to join Meta I believe.
Regardless of your opinion of its present iteration, the whole push is for their AR/VR layered UI/UX shift - not just another random redesign they threw at the wall.
Yes, the idea seems to be to force app developers to support transparency so that any future iGlasses device has a good supply of apps from day one (contrary to what happened with Vision Pro).
Apple used to insist that different types of devices require different UI principles. This seems all the more true for a transparent device that you wear on your face while moving around trying not to bump into physical objects.
But we'll see. Perhaps the right level of transparency is situational. If you sit down with iGlasses using them as a screen you might want to reduce transparency while increasing it when you're moving around outdoors. Adjusting transparency could become as routine as adjusting audio volume.
VR/AR is a gimmick. Gimmicks have no place on a work tool (macOS). No one is gonna use VR/AR with a laptop. Liquid Glass is Apples Metro UI.
I'm still on 18.x thats insecure by now and switching to Asahi as soon as something breaks.
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When I bought a Macbook M1 years ago, then was forced to switch back to a PC and wanted to have something similar in quality - I realized there's NOTHING that compares at ANY price point, let alone $1000.
I've got the smallest version of the m1 macbook air when they came out. It's still my daily driver when I'm not on my corporate T14 gen 6 I7 with 32gb of ram, and while it no longer outperforms my corporate computer it keeps up well enough while being cold to the touch and noiseless. It's also significantly lighter and has better battery life despite being old, though corporate does kill a lot of that on the pc.
Not being able to feel that it's turned on is basically the primary feature of a laptop for me. I've wanted to switch my personal device to linux for a while, but there just... isn't... one. I know I could run linux on the macbook, but the point here is that there is nothing which compares, not even at higher prices.
I switched from M1 MBP to Asus Zenbook S16 with Ryzen HX370. A bit better performance, better screen, design, comparable battery, ok keyboard... I switched mostly because I was missing my previous Linux setup. But that was only possible several years afterwards, and if you try to compare it to the M5 Pro...
I'm hoping that they'll finally ditch the sleazy anti-consumer tactics, and just focus on providing real value through real quality. They're definitely in a position where they can do so.
Right to repair with aftermarket parts and app installs from any source without Apple's permission. Then I'll consider using an iPhone.
I also feel burned by that, but to be fair, is there any software in the world that's not getting worse and worse?
I think lots of backend stuff is getting better over time, but I fail to think of a single thing facing a regular consumer.
Typst
This. I just want Freeform usable on iPadOS again.
Since 26 upgrade it is unusable with 100+ notes. It looks like they merged iOS variant with Macos one. Constant freezes, random unsaves, device gets boiling hot. No fix with factory reset. I love the HW but SW needs more love.
What technological advance is there for high quality complex software?
The advances that made Apple Silicon possible were, fundamentally, TSMC and ARM. These were the material conditions that had to exist in order for a tech company to capitalize on a new generation of vertically integrated chip design. Now what's the conditions for next generation Mac OS? What research advances or software engineering paradigms that are mature enough for adoption? The state of Apple software isn't just due to mismanagement, it is, but the success of the hardware entails technology nodes as a confounding factor.
AI?
The Apple Vision Pro hardware is remarkable.
Short-term, I'm just hoping this means the AirPods Max (and Vision Pro too, I guess) get a redesign that ditches all the uncomfortably heavy metal shells.
Granted I have a big ol' head, but I like the metal frame in all its heft - they feel ultra durable and I don't worry about throwing them in a bag.
I tend to disagree to a point: their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!
But HW is at least improving (eg. they added anti-reflective screen option), and SW is very much not.
They are leaps and bounds above any other laptop on the market. Who wants a plastic chasis and nub in 2026 over a modern Macbook Air.
They are leaps and bounds ahead for people who want their specific formula or don't really care about computers.
Apple has always been a "our way or the highway" brand, we can at least keep in mind that 3 laptop formulas only differenciated by size and thickness won't cut it for everyone on the planet.
Thinkpads are mostly made out of magnesium alloy. And yes, I prefer Thinkpads over modern Macbook Airs. They let me run whatever OS I want.
They're way behind in the keyboard and touchpad area. Also the I/O ports.
> their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!
I don't know about Thinkpads, but the utterly pleasant glass trackpad is still one of the things I cannot find on most non-Mac laptops, despite every manufacturer being able to copy it for years.
The closest I've found are the Surface laptop/cover trackpads, but they have their own set of reliability and repairability issues.
As a MacBook user, I very rarely want to use a mouse except for gaming. THe trackpad is delightful enough for the bulk of my use cases.
You might be sleeping on trackpoint. I don't remember the last time I used a trackpad once I onboarded on trackpoint - all that hand waving is so tiring when you can achieve the same action even faster by just moving two fingers couple of milimeters. You just move your index from H to trackpoint and thumb from space to mouse buttons which is basically the smallest movement you can do on your keyboard.
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I haven't used a touchpad in recent years that wasn't "good enough", I really don't obsess about those (but I acknowledge that many do here), but I profoundly dislike MacBooks' keyboards. Anyhow, let's not pretend that it matters as much as the broken mess of a desktop environment/windows manager that the OS sitting on top is.
> I don't know about Thinkpads, but the utterly pleasant glass trackpad is still one of the things I cannot find on most non-Mac laptops, despite every manufacturer being able to copy it for years.
I was never a trackpad person until I finally got a Mac at work maybe 10 years ago. But since the trackpads stopped really clicking in favor of haptics, they're a lot worse than they used to be. I get false/double clicks and inconsistent feedback.
ThinkPads have nicer keyboards, but they stopped doing the more traditional IBM layout several years ago, which is really unfortunate. I'd be willing to pay for a more traditional keyboard layout with a slightly smaller trackpad and/or a sizeable bottom bezel (which is actually preferable for me because of my posture when I use a laptop most of the time).
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> I tend to disagree to a point: their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!
> But HW is at least improving (eg. they added anti-reflective screen option), and SW is very much not.
And I would disagree with the idea that I should be running Linux on my primary machine. As a developer, I've faced enough "death by a thousand cuts" situations from running Linux on my personal router and servers to let it anywhere close to my main computer.
Don't even get me started on the hardware quality of Mac laptop including their stellar trackpads, screens and the smallest details like the quality of the hinge. I can still open my 5 year old Mac with a single finger and the hinge is as solid as the day I bought it.
As someone who's also particular about user experience, Linux always fails at this. If you have good UX, that means you can critically think for what a user wants from a computer, and can determine what should and shouldn’t be prioritized. UX is never a first-class citizen on Linux, and for all the issues with Tahoe, macOS still has enough residual quality left in it to not feel like I'm constantly fighting the operating system.
Simple example: I want HDR on Linux. Should be easy right? Just switch to Plasma under Wayland? Then do a one time config so mpv can play HDR. Oh and no browsers support it so good luck. Games need gamescope and flags to be set.
I want my computer to work, not for me to work as an integration engineer. So I use my Mac and it just works™. So I just let Linux live where I feel it works best, in servers and headless environments.
With Linux, it is really multiple UX ecosystems: you can be in one (eg. Gtk+/Gnome and/or Qt/KDE) and consistency will be there. Not perfect, but MacOS is not much better.
OTOH, I want subpixel rendering on my big screens, and you can't have it with a Mac.
Out of curiosity, what are you developing? While regular usage stuff such as HDR is indeed lacking, and general UX leaves a lot to be desired, Linux was always best for me in any software development discipline that I took on, and macOS was a "death by a thousand cuts" instead.
did you tried nix home-manager for linux software setup? i never was able to use linux until nix.
hardware - afaik only lenovo(some say asus is worth to try - but no official linux support, framework is sturdy but feels cheap) is well know for quality hardware - others are questionable.
unfortunately AMD AI Max 390/2/5+ nor Qualcomm Elite 2 Lenovos are not here.
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I was sooo in your boat just a while ago. Recently (15 days) switched to an Asus NUC pro (mini pc) with intel 225h. I kid you not, I am running Almalinux 10, KDE on it, not even the latest/greatest. I have HDR, VRR, 120Hz, media acceleration, with dual monitors with different settings you name it. Everything works!!
How do you feel about their trackpad? I think they’re the best on the market.
I wish the trackpad on my macbook were smaller, because my thumbs constantly hit it and smite me into a different reality.
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They're pretty good, but you can find other good trackpads too. The main thing about Apple is that their trackpads are consistently pretty good, while with other brands it can be hard to figure out what you'll be getting until you try it yourself.
There's also software component. It has improved by now, but early libinput was giving some good trackpads bad rep.