Comment by abujazar
16 hours ago
Apple needs to get their software design on track again and do proper QA and testing on their software before making these kinds of changes. 27 was supposed to be a quality improvement snd bugfix release, but it's mostly been a cascade of bugs and UI failures.
Judging by what OP is describing this isn't a bug, it's a functionality change they thought was better. And they might even be right for the majority of users. But OP has a valid use case that's broken by the change.
Yea, the problem is Apple thought this was an UI improvement, but actually broke a common usage pattern. This kind of change should definitely be a setting, and considered thoroghly before changing the default. This is poor design and lack of QA, not a bug, per se. But the result is even worse because it means the previous functionality likely isn't coming back.
Definitely a failing of understanding how real people use the software here. Frustratingly, Apple has a tendency to dismiss users who have different intentions than the product manager thinks they “should” have. Even if most users would want a certain behavior, they are “courageous” enough to tell users they’re all wrong and they should use it a different way. Funnily enough, the infamous Apple discussions forum features volunteers who consistently have that same attitude. Fans who have internalized the Apple “we know best” principle.
So I also wouldn’t bet on the feature coming back.
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It's a trade-off. It could be a setting, but if one adds too many settings then the space of possible options gets huge and bloated leading to bugs and complexity for the users and I already barely know how to use iPadOS.
"If you ask a user what percentage of Word features they use, they will tell you 10%. But if you ask multiple users which 10% they use, they will all give you a different 10%."
How do you know this was common? How many people did you survey?
Apple may actually know this was uncommon.
There’s an XKCD for everything:
https://xkcd.com/1172/
Don’t go be being all reasonable, we’re trying to be Reddit here for a minute.
X.0 releases are always a mess at launch. Even everyone's beloved Snow Leopard had issues at launch, despite everyone remembering it as the perfect version of OSX.
https://www.rubenerd.au/the-myth-of-snow-leopard/
> This could be the first time I’ve ever downgraded an Apple OS.
> As we speak I’m downgrading the Snow Leopard partition on my trusty old Core Duo 2006 MacBook Pro back to Leopard (and while I’m at it, I’m finally getting around to upgrading the FreeBSD partition to 8.0!). I kept waiting for updates to fix the severe stability problems in the Finder, my FireWire 800 ExpressCard and my iMovie HD plugins, but I’ve decided to give up for now.
I know the OP was about iPadOS but same rules apply. Give the OS 27s a few minor version bumps and it'll stabilize. I'd argue OS 26's were worse at launch but they've gotten pretty stable in the last few updates (still ugly as sin on macOS though, Golden Gate is a huge improvement visually)
Gives me hope!
Apple marketing teams are brilliant and can figure out a “quality first” angle to help Ternus announce & defend a slowdown for Apple software teams.
In a paradigm of quality-focused releases every other year, what if they released the betas two years of their new-feature releases ahead of time? & superfunded QA & maybe even responded to every bug report (at least “acknowledged, thank you” & filling out the “Recent Similar Reports:” column). Could even the new-feature releases be just as low-defect as the quality-focused ones?
Slightly too extreme but… If they pretend software’s like their brand new iPhone hardware, that it needs a multi-billion-dollar recall if they make a big enough mistake, maybe that mindset would be a good balance (as I don’t feel hardware innovation’s been stifled by that reality, that it better be dang perfect).
Haha quality first.
There's been a macOS update that allowed anyone to log in just by pressing enter and another one that showed the actual password when you pressed the password hint button.
Granted these were a long time ago but their marketing was just as strong back then.
This was around the time they were making fun of Windows (I'm a Mac, I'm a PC)
What’s funny is that it’s not the public or even the board that is demanding that Apple release whiz-bang moonshot software features every year. Users do want shiny new hardware, but besides necessary hardware drivers, 90% of users LOVE it when the core OS and the UI stays stable for years. So they can get used to it. Instead of reshuffling the UI of every app every 12 months like iOS has been doing for 10 years. And evolving the visuals in big and small ways constantly. Both of these are not fooling anyone into overestimating Apple’s innovativeness.
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I remember 10.6.6 being the perfect version. At least, if you owned the 2010 MacPro. It was perfect as it was the last OS that was compatible with that hardware.
Ehhh, Even the .0 release of Snow Leopard was incredibly polished. I was there. It was still great.
It's not like now where they rush a yearly release and more than half the OS is nonfunctional until the .1 update several months later.
The point is to slow TF down on the OS updates. We never needed yearly releases. Going back to the pre-Lion model of OS upgrades is the way.
iOS 26 made clear that apple completely lost their UX advantage they had in the past. A lot of things were changed to "look better", while completely ignoring that it made UX worse. I think they just lost the people and the know-how to design good UX. Just making it look "pretty" is not good UX.
Exactly, they lost all the attention to detail, all the pursuit of clarity, all that was abandoned.
IMHO it's far less "pretty" than before too, in addition to just being an outright mess. And that's when it's working as intended.
There's still loads of obvious bugs in dark mode, where there's completely incompatible outlines and rounded rectangles with incompatible radii and overlapping elements that are clearly not intended.
That's on top of how the individual UX elements were mangled to fit into poor categorization schemes, with unnecessary complexity. Two things that bite me every single day are the completely overcomplicated screenshot interface that slows interaction by a great deal, and navigating to Safari history, which requires tapping a "Bookmarks" button.
And on macOS, the pointless visual noise of icons by menu items, that are each indecipherable, incoherent, and inconsistent between apps.. It's just unprofessional all around. I'm not surprised that the VP responsible left that same year, but there's been no fix, which is awful.
I was on the iPadOS 26 beta all summer (last year). Until early August I was convinced they would just cancel the release completely and roll back. Would've been the only good decision. But I guess the bad press they would've gotten for that was deemed more expensive than just releasing it.
They cleaned up a lot of things with the minor 26.x releases and even more with 27.0, but it's still years away from being done.
That's because back then, they weren't releasing major new versions every year.
Snow Leopard had time to mature. These days with their yearly release cycles, the OS doesn't have time to mature anymore. Right when they get done fixing most of the problems, the next version comes out and everything is broken all over again. And they repeat this cycle year after year. It makes no sense.
Why do you think they need to do proper QA? People are going to buy their products anyway.
> People are going to buy their products anyway.
My iPhone 14 Pro 1TB finally broke down too much to remain usable a couple of weeks ago.
The screen shattered when the phone hit the floor. White and green lines on one side, making reading things more difficult and also straining on the eyes to look at at night. Since then, cracks in the screen cut my fingers ever ever so slightly on each touch. Not enough to make wounds, but enough to be discomfortable. I tried to use it still but over the next couple of days I dropped the phone on accident multiple times and now the touchscreen is not reacting as it should either. Some parts of the screen do not respond to touch at all, other parts still work, and others yet misregister where the touch is.
I investigated replacing the screen at third party phone shops. But it doesn’t make sense to pay to repair the screen. I was already living with a battery that was due to be replaced. And beyond that some hardware issue is preventing NFC from working since a year ago, so I can’t scan my passport NFC to renew my national bank id on it anyway either. Apple Pay doesn’t work, probably also because of the broken NFC. Finally, for whatever reason whenever I try to update iOS it fails saying it can’t verify the update after having downloaded it. Paying ~$200+ to replace the screen and battery and still having these other issues (NFC broken, and stuck on an older iOS version than it should) just wouldn’t be worth it.
I’ve been thinking long and hard about what phone to buy next for quite a while. And now that the screen broke and I was forced to make a decision I decided to not buy the latest greatest iPhone 18 Pro.
Because I am not as happy with Apple the company and their actions as I used to be.
I don’t want Android either however.
I ended up buying an iPhone 15 Pro 1TB second hand with good battery health. It gets me USB-C so that’s a plus compared to the 14 Pro I had.
All that is to say, no it’s not a given that we will keep buying new hardware from Apple directly anymore even if we did in the past used to buy our stuff new from them when time came to replace our old Apple devices. Of course even buying second hand is still supporting Apple indirectly to some degree. Because the people that do buy new from them know that a couple years later the amount they can sell that device for second hand to someone else is still pretty ok, relatively speaking.
>I don’t want Android either however.
Doesn't this just prove his point ? People will buy Apple product anyway, direct or indirectly. You are still using Apple service and Apple still can extract data from you.
Does Apple even have QA anymore? Do they even do user testing? I know a lot of people who have left Apple testing and validation in the past few years and every new macos and ios release is buggier than before. Insanely basic stuff where anyone actually using the app for a few days would have caught glaring UI and usability problems. I haven't worked there, but what I can see with my own two eyes makes me assume they've automated the hell out of usability testing. Maybe software is only being tested by other software. Maybe developers are the only people testing their own features. Many of the bugs I'm seeing today are iphone4 bad. How did no one ever pick up the phone and hold it in their damn hand? And on top of that, it certainly seems like they're hyper-focused on new features and are utterly ignoring foundational systems that everything runs on. Preview, Mail, and Finder are going down the tubes fast. I intentionally don't update my personal macbook because I see so many bugs in each new release on my work macbook.
It could be that they're doing what Microsoft did 10 years ago, they fired all their QA teams and replaced them with automatic tests and telemetry. It's part of the reason Windows breaks so much these days.
I'm sure they saved a ton of money though.
> [iPhone 4] How did no one ever pick up the phone and hold it in their damn hand?
That's well documented, all their field testing models were disguised as iPhone 3Gs with a rubber case around them. Gizmodo got their hands on one from a drunk engineer who left it in a bar.
So they didn't actually touch it with their bare hands ever, outside of the office at least.
"Ain't gonna buy no more no more, ain't gonna buy no more. How in the heck can I spike my debt if I ain't gonna buy no more?"
Capital won't like what comes next.
... and there ain't no bugs on me. There ain't no bugs on me.
Except Apple can't even sing that verse.