I think it is concerning that every single Apple Intelligence feature they've shipped thus far has been not just mediocre; but bad. Being last to the party is a very normal Apple thing; quality and Doing The Right Thing takes time. Announcing something then taking months to ship it is very not-Apple, but it has happened a few times. That thing they finally ship being bad is, geeze, horribly un-Apple.
One of the few examples I can think of however is Apple Maps. And it did get better; a lot better, some say better than Google Maps nowadays. So I generally do have hope for Apple Intelligence. At the end of the day, there are some disparate competing utilities in this class on the Samsung and Google phones, but no one is shipping something that is obviously game-changing and in first place; they all kinda suck, they're all tech demos, and it'll inevitably take many years to get this technology honed in to something that is truly useful to consumers.
There is a lot in the Apple universe that is shoddy. iTunes, for instance.
iOS has a refinement that Android lacks but I am unimpressed with MacOS. Windows is stuffed full of terrible crapplets and Windows users largely recognize that these are terrible crapplets and don't use them. Apple users have a fixed belief that everything Apple does is brilliant and fashionable so they do use them which has a deadly effect on the market for third-party software. (No good music players for MacOS for instance)
Even Apple fans lately claim it's been getting worse in the last few years.
(That said, I love the innovation in the M-series chips from Apple just as much as I appreciate Microsoft's commitment to the long-term viability of Windows for all of us who invest in it. Occasionally at work we still use Access '98 to handle old files and it works great, the installer works great, in fact Office still tries to take the desktop over the way it did back in the day. Clippy still works. The borderless windows look just a little funny because the compositor changed. No way you could run Linux binaries or MacOS classic binaries from '98)
> Apple users have a fixed belief that everything Apple does is brilliant and fashionable so they do use them which has a deadly effect on the market for third-party software. (No good music players for MacOS for instance)
Many of the long term users of macOS/OS X/etc etc are highly critical of its downfalls, but still use it because of the available options they prefer it. Myself included. You can use something while also being aware of its shortcomings.
As a daily driver laptop, a MacBook Pro just sucks less than everything else.
> No way you could run Linux binaries or MacOS classic binaries from '98
The key problem for desktop Linux is that nobody knows exactly how to build binaries that will run on any reasonable Linux desktop system today, so it's hard to keep that non-existent reasonable subset of ABI stable for an extended period.
That said, you CAN do this. The kernel itself does present a mostly pretty stable ABI to userland applications, so you can grab a Debian chroot from 1998 and be on your way. Debian even still serves repositories for everything on archive.debian.org, and Dockerhub has OCI images you can `docker run` for Debian from 1999, under the debian/eol repo. You can `docker run` and `apt-get install` 25+ year old binaries on modern Linux!
What would be sweet is if we could build and ship compatibility tools that make these old binaries work mostly transparently. Today, double clicking a binary on Linux won't do anything particularly sophisticated, and there are no compatibility options. But actually, it would be totally doable to write a variety of useful compatibility shims without doing anything horribly grotesque. The DT_INTERP and DT_NEEDED fields of binaries would often give sufficient information for how you might get such a binary to run. It's not like it would be that useful, but I would personally be very pleased if you could just double click e.g. some old Kylix application and have it just run, perhaps after downloading some (shims for?) old libraries. You could extend this to transparently running CPU emulators too, not unlike the tricks people do with binfmt_misc, just possibly with more batteries included (and a bit less transparency.)
Another really great feature would be useful error messages when executing an application fails. Today if the DT_INTERP is missing, it looks like the binary itself can't be found since it returns the same errno, and you won't see linker errors if you execute a file in a GUI file explorer. What a great improvement it would be if all of that could be fixed, and there is no technical reason it can't be.
Of course, frustratingly, for more reasons than just this, the more likely thing to happen is that nobody bothers since containers are the future anyways, and Win32 instead becomes cemented as the true stable ABI of Linux. Which, in my opinion, is a bummer. We could always have two stable ABIs of Linux...
The real bummer is that as IBM discover with OS/2, when your ABI is the copy of someone else's, then everyone rather use the real thing.
Hence, the irony that WSL is the actual Year of Linux Desktop, followed by the macOS Virtualization framework.
OEMs rather ship crippled Chromebooks, or Android, than proper GNU/Linux (or BSDs), devices.
So Linux rules, where UNIX was originally designed for, headless computing and timesharing systems.
I'm happy for WSL2 users that are getting what they want, but I don't even particularly care about the things WSL2 brings to Windows, what keeps me from using Windows is just Microsoft.
I have been thinking about the parallels to OS/2, though, and I really do wonder if it's going to go that way. Much like debates about which economic systems are actually viable, there's no real reason to believe aping someone else's ABI can't work other than that it didn't in the 90s. But boy, the game sure has changed a lot, and I'm not so sure it will play out that way anymore. While Valve has been shipping the Windows ABI on Linux commercially, the way they've been doing so is definitely a bit different than how it was done in the past. So far it seems like they're actually succeeding, and the question is somewhat more of how much they can succeed with it.
Valve has been lucky that UWP did not caught among Windows and XBox (ERA runtime) developers, however Microsoft might still pull a move in Win32 that isn't so easy to reverse engineer in Proton, and somehow make it part of DirectX.
There is the whole ongoing discussion about a possible existence of XBox OS, that other OEMs selling handhelds would rather have than SteamOS.
And then there is the whole question, which will be beyond my lifetime, about what comes after Valve, when its founding members are no longer around.
> Valve has been lucky that UWP did not caught among Windows and XBox (ERA runtime) developers, however Microsoft might still pull a move in Win32 that isn't so easy to reverse engineer in Proton, and somehow make it part of DirectX.
I wouldn't necessarily call it luck. I mean, UWP didn't fail in a vacuum. They played a part in its failure, and frankly they did so in part because Microsoft doesn't care about what developers or gamers need or want anymore, they just care about getting the end game they most prefer.
They're definitely running out of time though: with Proton and Steam Deck, there is real life value in sticking to the subset that works on Steam Deck, and right now that value is increasing over time, with another handheld on the horizon.
> There is the whole ongoing discussion about a possible existence of XBox OS, that other OEMs selling handhelds would rather have than SteamOS.
Meanwhile, though, while people theorize about a potential licensable Xbox OS that might exist some day, SteamOS has been shipping on Steam Decks and will be shipping on Lenovo handhelds soon. The rumor mill on the Valve side of things suggests that they will open SteamOS up for users to run on ordinary computers soon, and there might be a return of Steam boxes and the Steam controller.
Do vendors want to ship Xbox OS more than Steam OS? That, IMO, remains to be seen and depends heavily on Microsoft's strategy. Valve almost definitely gives vendors much more free reign over what will ship on their devices and how. Xbox is a household name which would be attractive, but it could bomb if they fail to meaningfully deliver the "Xbox experience"; Microsoft has been running with the narrative that everything is an Xbox, which, sure, sounds great, but game streaming is not going to be competitive with handhelds that can actually play games locally for now.
> And then there is the whole question, which will be beyond my lifetime, about what comes after Valve, when its founding members are no longer around.
Well, someone will have to keep investing in Linux handhelds to keep it alive in some form, but it doesn't have to be Valve. The work they're putting in is largely there for anyone to take advantage of and continue later in their absence, even moreso than Android in many regards.
Still, Valve better foster a GNU/Linux ecosystem, than create castles on a foreign kingdom.
Proton will only work as long as Microsoft doesn't care it exists.
Yep. All of this considered, Valve should really care about a better native developer experience before the time window disappears. I'm not so sure their current approaches are good enough; they do have a "Steam runtime" but it doesn't provide much isolation from the host system which may stymie some of the benefits.
Still, they seem to be successfully shipping desktop Linux to users more or less successfully, which is extremely impressive and strange. A lot of Steam Deck users are learning to deal with Flatpaks and AppImages. My feelings on those modes of app distribution notwithstanding, no doubt continual improvement in those ecosystems will help ensure that not everything they do will only serve to benefit Steam and emulated Windows apps.
But I definitely understand what's going on here. They know well they can't stop investing in Windows emulation yet. A marketing point against SteamOS has been the fact that it can't play your whole Steam library, and while it can play a lot more than I ever expected, it's true. They need to keep working on answering the challenges for existing games and their anti-cheat solutions.
> (No good music players for MacOS for instance)
Have to strongly disagree on this point. Cog¹ is my music player of choice on macOS; not only does it have a clean GUI, but it supports almost every format² I’ve ever wanted to listen to audio in, including game music in formats like GBS (Game Boy Sound System) and 2SF (Nintendo DS Sound Format).
――――――
+1 for Cog, it's pretty awesome to be able to play N64 music files natively!
Vox is also pretty great for FLAC
Vox has a UI reminiscent of a Windows XP skin and gobs of macOS oddities. I feel like they're still trying to catch up to macOS UI changes from 5 years ago. Don't get me started on how inaccessible the entire interface is... They have tab bound not to focus changes but to switching the, yes, tab...
> Apple users have a fixed belief that everything Apple does is brilliant and fashionable so they do use them which has a deadly effect on the market for third-party software. (No good music players for MacOS for instance)
Nah, Apple users knew from the beginning that Siri sucked and still sucks. Almost no one I know uses Siri except for setting alarms and asking for weather forecast.
If I’m ever feeling too peaceful or content, I’ll ask Siri something. In the blink of an eye, I’m enraged and cursing.
To be fair, Google Assistant started out better but now has just been neglected and actively undermined and had features taken away. My understanding is the whole team was folded into Gemini and it's a classic "old thing deprecated new thing not ready yet"
I don't do the Amazon ecosystem so can't say about Alexa.
Alexa has dropped off. Every echo device I have was better in the past. My wife is lucky to trigger them half the time. They have always done better with male voices, but it’s worse than ever. And when Alexa does respond, it’s frequently an ad.
Of course, the division famously lost $10bn, and so they must be reducing compute. But the fall has been noticeable.
There was a period where Google Assistant was so useful. Could control phone functions, set events, reminders, alarms, change volume, reliabily message someone. It's wild to think through all the things it used to do well that it simply cannot do today.
Google Assistant is sad.
When I ask it to read me the last text message from Person X, it says that this feature is no longer available.
When I switch the Assistant to Gemini, and ask it to read me the last text message from Person X, it says it doesn't have access to my text messages. When pressed for an explanation, it gives me a long winded excuse that having access to my text messages would be a serious privacy violation. Absolute nonsense.
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I use Siri for dictation a lot. Don’t have to worry if I have an internet connection either.
But it fails in the car. No much noise. And that’s where it would be the most useful.
I thought I am alone here. But not.
iPadOS is truly terrible and wastes the amazing hardware of apple silicon iPads
Hot take.
Apple not allowing iPads to run MacOS is just artificial market segmentation.
Nah. It's a general purpose computer hat has to live as a giant phone.
> iTunes, for instance.
assuming you mean on macOS, given your comment after this. (there is no iOS app called iTunes anyway)
yes, on both iOS and macOS, Apple intentionally hobbled iTunes/Music, incrementally making it worse each update, after Apple Music gained an initial foothold.
not that it was ever "great" after 1.0 maybe 2.0, but it certainly used to be good. Now, if you're not an Apple Music subscriber, you're left with a pretty basic player. I get that they want to segment the market, but to remove features and actively make it worse? horrible.
I was unhappy with the state of music players on macOS too so I wrote my own:
There is a point where supporting legacy software stops being impressive and just starts to be counterproductive. I'm glad my Mac doesn't support Mac OS 8 software anymore, especially since it means I can use a much faster processor architecture.
These things are by no means mutually exclusive.
Apple could easily spend a few millions to support some old hackers keeping ancient software alive, they choose not to do it because they either don’t care, don’t know they can do it or don’t think it’s profitable.
They certainly have an effect on one-another. You can’t just say “old hackers!”. ALL codebases are tied down by legacy design decisions after a long enough period of time. Microsoft’s commitment to backwards-compatibility has inarguably resulted in Windows flaws hanging around for longer than they’d otherwise need to. The argument is around whether or not it’s worth it.
You can’t throw all your engineering knowhow out the window just because you’re discussing something politically charged. This is simply how code works.
I don’t understand your argument. There are (presumably) basement dwellers keeping ancient gaming console emulators working on modern platforms with little more resources than free food from their mothers.
There's nothing wrong with emulators. I can get a 1998-era MacOS emulator today that runs in a web browser at 10x the speed of my 1998-era Mac! [1] Why would I ever need that kind of legacy support built into my modern OS kernel when I can just download a full hypervisor and stick the entire 1998-era operating system inside of it? (I wouldn't be upset if Windows included a built-in emulator for Windows 95/98 applications.)
But emulators are self-contained things. The question is not "should Microsoft support Windows 98 software in a dedicated emulator." The question is whether it's worth the architectural cost of supporting 1998-era software running in your native OS without emulation. I think there's a huge cost to that and I've worked with software developers and Microsoft OS engineers who have long stories about how hard it's been to improve Windows over the past ~30 years, because any major kernel changes would inevitably break some piece of legacy software, and that ruled them all out.
Now obviously things aren't that simple. If all we needed to do was run ~1998 code in 2025, we would of course do it in an emulator. But Windows chose continuity, i.e., they wanted to run 1998-era code in 2000, 2002, 2005 etc. when emulating the whole OS wouldn't have been a good tradeoff at all. It's that continuity that locked them into a straightjacket. My view is that Microsoft's strategy may have served them well in the past, but that tradeoff is no longer worth it.
I just want to be able to use my legacy 32-bit applications and play the 32-bit games once available on macOS… I can understand the move to 64-bit, but couldn’t they have added a backwards compatibility layer?
> No way you could run Linux binaries or MacOS classic binaries from '98
Can you give me a few examples of linux binaries from 98? I would like to give this a go, I think I have a pretty reasonable way to go about achieving this.
I'd just use an old game (for a really hard test). Like Quake maybe: https://github.com/Jason2Brownlee/QuakeOfficialArchive Or the server for easy mode.
Let us know how it went. ;)
Games of that age are probably getting well into the era of "requires SVGAlib, must run as root". They haven't aged well.
No, most of them run in X-Windows, using protocols that are still supported even by xwayland, because they weren't originally written for Linux (or IBM-compatibles) at all. Some of them fail to cope with TrueColor visuals but most are fine. You can get old source code from http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/X11/games/. Binaries are maybe trickier; maybe start with http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/debian/dists/slink/...? Most of those are going to depend on old shared libraries for things like Xlib, though. (Notice that half the game names start with "x"!)
Debian Slink was formally released in 01999, but most of the packages in it are from 01998. I just installed xkobo from http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/debian/dists/slink/... with `sudo dpkg -i` but now it wants i386 versions of libc6, libstdc++2.9, and xlib6g. ldd says:
If anyone is adept enough with Debian to explain how I can do this without breaking my amd64 install, I'd be obliged. (Maybe I need to debootstrap in a chroot or something? It's probably still possible to download slink CD install images.)libXext.so.6 => not found libX11.so.6 => not found libstdc++-libc6.0-1.so.2 => not foundAh, most of what you've got there looks like small "desktop toy" games, like minesweeper games and whatnot. I was thinking more along the lines of full-screen, possibly 3D, games of the sort that got ported by companies like Loki back in the day. Those took a long time to become runnable under X11.
> Maybe I need to debootstrap in a chroot or something?
Probably. Even then you might run into some compatibility issues - IIRC, some of the really old code paths used for system calls (like the vsyscall DSO) have been removed in modern Linux kernels.
Which games ported by Loki didn't require X11? I remember playing Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, and Majesty on Linux in mid-00s, and they were all X11 ports.
xkobo in particular is a twitchy 2-D bullet-hell shooter, and the current version of it (kobodeluxe) is built with SDL and supports fullscreen mode. But I'm pretty sure xkobo did run in a window. Certainly the other games there I remember (xjewel, xgalaga, etc.) did.
I'm not familiar with Loki's work at all, though the name seems familiar.
I think the removed-code-paths thing is mostly an issue with libc5, isn't it?
I ran into a problem with really old code paths in August when I tried to compile PFE 0.9.14 (a Forth implementation, not a game) from 01995; it was trying to call `uselib`, which I think has never existed on amd64.
FWIW `ldd` reported that xkobo had successfully mapped "linux-gate.so.1 (0xf7f3c000)" (with no filename); as I understand it, this is the vDSO that replaced the vsyscall mechanism, so at least for stuff built for Debian Slink I don't think that problem in particular will occur.
> (No good music players for MacOS for instance)
What are the good music players off MacOS?
I figured the entire field had withered and died from lack of public interest.
foobar2000 (win only), elisa, amberol, exaile, tauon, sayonara...
I didn't mention Clementine cause its on macos too.
But Clementine is dead. Not only is Clementine dead, its predecessor Amarok and its successor Strawberry are both dead too.
Amarok is being resurrected. The QT5 version hit arch and QT6 is in progress.
foobar2000 is actually available for Mac.
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> No good music players for MacOS for instance
Slightly OT but Doppler is quite good in my opinion.
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Mentioning "iTunes is bad" is like a trigger word for me because it's so misinformed at this point.
For one thing, the iTunes name doesn't technically exist anymore except on Windows. And anyone complaining about it being bad on Windows...I mean, that's like complaining that Microsoft Remote Desktop (Now called the Windows app for some reason) sucks on Mac, right? Like, can we just put the Windows version aside please? Even then, I'm not really sure what specific thing iTunes for Windows sucks at besides not looking like a Windows app. People just say that because they were saying it in 2005.
On Mac, the Music app (not to be confused with the streaming service) is fantastic and has supported Apple's "classic" digital music workflow longer than anyone else has been willing to support their users. The Apple TV app (again, not to be confused with TV+ subsciption service) is now the home for the music/TV show store/rental place and the home of your TV/movie library, which is a big improvement from shoving that functionality in iTunes. in that sense, Apple has cleanly separated use cases and functionality in a way that iTunes didn't previously, which is one reason why a lot of people said "iTunes sucks."
I have a family member who recently switched to Android because of frustration with Apple as a whole. They are a big digital music collector, they don't believe in streaming or "renting" their content.
I tried to help them with their music collection on Android. Theoretically it should be easier right? No weird restrictions on sync direction, basically dump your stuff on an SD card/transfer over USB-C and you're off to the races.
But still, they switched back to Apple secondarily because it's the only place left that actually makes that "purchased digital music" experience user-friendly, or possible at all. (Primarily they switched back to iPhone because the modem in their Google Pixel sucks and/or is poorly tested with their major US carrier and would drop international calls every 15 minutes exactly for no reason)
Google Play's music store doesn't exist anymore. Every jukebox app on Android depends on 100% manual file management. None of them have the polish of the Music app (the app not the service). Almost none of them have decent jukebox companion apps available on desktop computers. A whole bunch of other digital music stores have closed entirely.
Apple's system for synchronizing content is actually pretty amazing for continuing to support an offline cloudless workflow. You still just hit one button/plug in your device to sync your music, movies, audiobooks, ebooks, and photos content. It also supports WiFi syncing, and it furthermore supports every iPod that ever existed so long as you have the right cable/adapter.
You can back up your iPhone's full image to your computer if you don't want to use iCloud backups just like it was an iPod. You can synchronize your Photos library and avoid iCloud storage fees, deleting synchronized photos from your phone to free up space to take new photos and videos. It works just like you were using a digital camera in 2005. Yep, you can still rip and burn CDs!
Furthermore, the way Apple moved device synchronization functions to Finder and split out Music from Podcasts and Audiobooks is helpful for organizing the whole process. It used to be that iTunes was the home for all this synchronizing of non-music-related content, but now it more sensibly exists in Finder.
I think a lot of people don't realize that Apple basically still allows you to send over personally owned non-DRMed or even pirated content to Apple's own modern apps very easily this way, you just have to be willing to synchronize using "the old way" like your iPhone is an iPod. They've even kept ancient hosted services like iTunes Match going just in case you still need that sort of thing (it essentially allows you to sync music to your iPhone that is either pirated or not part of a known label music catalog via a cloud service rather than having to do a local sync via cable or WiFi).
And this workflow is very simple for non-technical users who don't really know how to traverse complicated file management structures. Yes, I would really like if apps like Photos was more flexible on file management, but on the other hand if you follow the prescribed workflow the results are quite user friendly for someone who really doesn't want the cloud but also can't handle setting up a home NAS. In this use case you have a reasonable photo storage system by syncing your device and then backing up your computer in a relatively hands-off manner using Time Machine.
One final point here is that Apple Music the subscription service can be hidden entirely from the app. Apple will just give you a 100% owned music jukebox app. Google doesn't do that, and with Microsoft you're probably using a legacy app like Windows Media Player that looks like it belongs on Windows Vista.
Microsoft Remote Desktop is 100% great on iOS (if not MacOS) in my opinion. I never feel so stylish as when I show up at a hackathon with a tablet + $20 bluetooth mouse and $30 bluetooth keyboard (how did they convince people to spend a few hundred on a special keyboard or to buy a 'hybrid' computer that will leave the airline stewardess at a loss to know if you can stuff it in the pouch in front of you?) and the mac books and gaming laptops look clunky in comparison. And that's backed with a 16 core machine with 128GB of RAM and a 4080 if it's my home machine and I can rent something much larger for a few $ an hour in the cloud. My only beef is they want to call it the "Windows App" now.
(At the least the Apple AAC encoder is good. That plus a Python script can copy music files to a USB stick in the right order so they display properly in the music app for my car... And that's what a good music app is to me, not something that wants to push me to buy a $1000 phone and $100 a month plan so I can crash my car screwing around with my phone.)
That tablet is $500+. I bought a 2019 dell latitude for 140$. Not as nice, but I don’t have to remote for anything. And it’s fully supported by Linux.
> That tablet is $500+
$279 US at various retailers (discounted 2022 model which is likely to be replaced this year.)
The main compromise in the otherwise excellent entry-level iPad is a paltry 64GB of storage (sadly there is no 128GB model/pricing tier atm.)
> Every jukebox app on Android depends on 100% manual file management.
You've got some great points in there, but as for this one, file management is one of Apple Music's weaker points. I absolutely hate apps that graft their own "library" over top of my already-working filesystem. As someone who's meticulously laid out the directory structure for all of my movies and music, I'm paranoid that some opinionated software is going to just go run roughshod over it, moving things around the way they think files should be organized. I already have a "library". It's an NFS mount on my NAS.
Fortunately, Apple Music still allows you disable this misfeature, but to do it you have to go into Settings and uncheck a bunch of things. Easy to forget.
> that's like complaining that Microsoft Remote Desktop (Now called the Windows app for some reason) sucks on Mac, right
Well, not quite, since RDP on Mac still works better than the native (VNC-based) desktop sharing feature.
> On Mac, the Music app (not to be confused with the streaming service) is fantastic
Strong disagree. I find Apple Music (the app) on MacOS to be terrible.
A good 1/2 of the main screen is taken up by a view with a random mix of artwork from the playlist. I find it useless, and it can't be hidden. . Also, there is no way to set the default view to just show songs, instead of the crappy "playlist view".
Search. It's hidden on the sidebar of playlists/sources and you have to scroll to the top to get to it. And then, the choice of whether to search local/Apple Music is on a toggle button on the other side of the screen.
Lyrics - you can't change the font, or adjust the size in normal mode, and when played in fullscreen, the background colours often obscure the lyrics so they're unreadable.
And finally Apple can't seem to decide between a Heart or a Star for songs that you love.
yep. Music is bad on all fronts. It's designed to push you into an Apple Music subscription and that's it.
You can entirely turn off the subscription service being visible in the UI.
FWIW iTunes on Windows has finally been replaced by a true Apple Music app.
The iTunes functionality carried over to Apple Music is just as slow and confusing and non-portable as it ever was, now with added cloud sync that will mysteriously tell you that anything it doesn't recognize isn't available in your region.
The streaming bit may be good but the rest is not.
My favorite is that for ~8 years after they killed their theater movie showings service at movies.google.com, that subdomain still pointed to the deprecation notice. They finally must have noticed earlier this year, because it changed to a hacky redirect to https://www.google.com/search?q=movies and now much more sanely points to the Youtube movie storefront. (This drove me crazy for years because I'd always instinctively type in movies.google.com thinking it'd intuitively take me to the Play Store... I was so excited when it finally changed off the deprecation notice.)
There's something I must not understand about the Music app because when I drag & drop files on it (or let's get crazy, a folder), it does not read them or even add them to the current playlist?
Also, flac?
You have to drag them into your library.
> People just say that because they were saying it in 2005.
I can confirm that QuickTime works wonders on Windows !
Source : me being amazed by it on Windows 3.11
The severe bad-ness of itunes on windows halted any momentum I may have had in migration from a windows ecosystem towards apple.
It was just so horribly bad. Apple's disrespect for the dominant competing operating system made apple look incompetent. I liked the ipads until I had to work out how to transfer files on and off them to and from my existing infrastructure. It was goddamn painful, like going back to a previous era of esoteric computer usability.
> On Mac, the Music app (not to be confused with the streaming service) is fantastic
I’d love to live in your alternate reality, not in mine where Music.app is slow, doesn’t do filtering to find specific content very well, doesn’t let you view album covers in a reasonable size, and shortcuts and buttons are inconsistent with the rest of the OS.
Also, syncing (about 350GB of) content to my iPhone has been hit and miss for at least 9 years now, where consistently the same tracks just disappear from the phone and maybe - just maybe - eventually get synced again, taking a few hours in the process. This has been going on across at least three Macs and about six iPhones.
I understand that streaming via Apple Music is the thing now, and us users from the “Rip, Mix, Burn” era are considered legacy now. I’d love to switch to something better, but haven’t found anything yet.
I love the Apple Music app too but the trick is to mainly use the songs tab and playlists and enable the column browser. Also, of the current widely-used options, Apple Music is second to none at this point: old apps like Amarok were nicer but they practically don’t exist anymore. Spotify, Tidal, Qobuz, etc. are all much more annoying than Apple Music (in part because they are Electron Apps).
I do use Music.app like this already, and while it's definitely okay-ish due to lack of alternatives, it's still lacking a lot.
It has also been stagnating for at least 10 years without any changes - apart from making the UI less consistent with the rest of the OS (e.g. "Reveal in Finder" being ⇧⌘R instead of ⌘R everywhere else [0], or the dialog asking whether I really want to edit metadata for several files defaulting to "Cancel" on hitting "Enter", while "OK" is displayed as the default button).
I agree that it's better than the rest, but that's easy :) It's hard for any 3rd party app to compete, as us nerds with large, well curated libraries are a determined and dedicated bunch, but still a quite small market.
[0] I'm aware that this is a relic of the short-lived iTunes Ping network, where ⌘R did something there
Please don’t spoil this enjoyable nuanced conversation about Apple’s flaws with the usual laundry list of, frankly, unintelligent copy-pasted 2000s Mac vs PC online forum flame war talking points.
You’ve referred to iTunes in the present tense when it hasn’t existed for years, refer to ‘Apple fans’ as some sort of completely separate group of clearly defined people, and spend an unjustifiable amount of your comment talking about your quite niche professional Windows backwards compatibility use case.
We don’t need to rehash this whole thing. Please. Don’t take all the oxygen out of the room.
It still sort of exists on Windows. And you can't say with a straight face that Apple Music is a great player either.
> One of the few examples I can think of however is Apple Maps. And it did get better; a lot better, some say better than Google Maps nowadays.
This depends on where (which country) you live. For all the ways Apple has been vocal about the Indian market and local production, Apple Maps literally sucks even in major cities in India. Google Maps is decades ahead and gets updated very quickly. Apple Maps cannot even find regular addresses or places.
Apple has its share of incompetencies and willful blind spots, and that shows up in specific areas often related to its services (Apple Intelligence is also a service). The organization and its people are not built for handling these effectively or quickly.
That said, I have more hope in Apple Intelligence improving quicker (at least in English, while competitors are already ahead in other languages, including several Indian languages) than I have in Apple Maps improving in India.
Google maps also sucked in India until a couple of engineers flew there to figure out all the idiosyncrasies of mapping/routing and spent a bunch of time implementing regionalized fixes for them. Apple expresses some very clear preferences in what regions they support well in Apple maps, which exclude most "difficult" areas.
The common wisdom is that Apple Maps works significantly better in the Bay Area than anywhere else on Earth, because the engineers file bugs they encounter on their commute.
Yeah, so much of Google's moat in mapping is just the sheer amount of human time thrown at the problem of all the little regional idiosyncrasies all around the world. Getting that right is what makes it so hard.
While I do like Apple Maps, and I agree it has improved, it constantly get the speed limits very wrong in France (just 2 weeks ago).
The public transport part of Maps got much better in Germany, though.
It's the same in the UK. Also I have been trying to get them to list my address for two years now. Google were able to update it but any requests to Apple seem to go into a black hole.
I can't speak to Europe, but in the US in a very rural location, I never have speed limit issues to begin with. I believe I have also submitted a couple of changes for small things, and they've all been handled so far as I can tell as I have not run into them again.
Probably typical in that Apple's services in the US are generally better than elsewhere, but just wanted to add a positive with my experience and acknowledge that it's likely better here due to location within the US.
What I want is simple :
A smart assistant, that can understand and speak to me like Advanced Voice Mode, use a vast knowledge database, is tailored to my needs and can act on my behalf.
And it would be great if it’s able to run locally.
I would say Gemini Live is getting there. It's lacking integration with NotebookLM and Keep. It would be amazing if I started a project conceptually and wanted to move to code it could fire up VS Code and let me get to work.
Gemini's home automation works nicely and it can understand comments like it's too dark in here or it's cold inside and act appropriately. This is using the Android app as an assistant, not live mode.
OpenAI's implementation is apparently similar but I haven't tried the voice mode as a free user.
I haven't tried Apple Intelligence yet on my M1 and don't have an iPhone, so I can't compare.
I've been looking at offline capabilities with open weight models but they aren't there either. A full speech-to-speech model [1] working on an M1 Mac would be incredible.
Whisper is pretty good if you take the large model with gpu acceleration. But it's not instant like advanced voice mode.
How is a corporation going to profit off that?
If that is simple, start a company to build it and become a billionaire.
I don’t think any company has a smart assistant that’s reliable enough to act on your behalf except for some very constrained tasks (examples: dish washers, auto-parking cars)
Can't talk for all regions of Apple Maps, but here in Canada I still get many errors when using it - especially when using bikes, buses and so on. It remains impossible to confidently use compared to Google Maps. When it comes to Apple AI stuff - too much work was put on Apple Vision and this was a tragically bad strategic decision from Executives at Apple. I wouldn't be surprised it will be presented in the future as one of the greatest miss from Tim and his gang.
> too much work was put on Apple Vision and this was a tragically bad strategic decision from Executives at Apple.
I think it is more complicated than that. I think the Apple Vision is a kind of albatross. No one wanted this thing. I happen to think the executives didn't want it either. For all the years and effort put into it (and, well, there was project "Titan" before that) killing it might have hurt worse than their lackluster shipping of it.
Flush with cash (and I can't think of a phrase that really carries the weight of just how flush with cash they are — embarrassingly wealthy?) it was a rounding error for Apple to hire everyone they could in The Valley and keep them busy (and filing patent applications as they worked). It kept them from the competitors.
And I don't believe you could have instead put the engineering hires to "fixing Maps" or whatever pet peeve you and I have about the current Apple ecosystem. You're 1) likely not hiring the type of engineers for those tasks and 2) just throwing more people on the thing is not necessarily going to be the right answer (The Mythical Man-Month, too many cooks (ha ha) and all that).
On the whole I think Tim has steered the Apple ship to align with the times we have been living in.
I think the only reason the Vision Pro exists is for the OS. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple internally considers it the final OS, since it's the one that exists in the physical world. Their task for the next two decades will be to bring that OS to invisible devices like glasses.
In Metro Vancouver, Los Angeles and the state of Washington, my experience with Apple Maps has been far better than Google Maps; the latter seems to have stagnated completely.
Apple Maps provides me with more accessible info. e.g. "turn right at the next traffic light", "stay in the second lane from the left" vs. "In 200 metres, turn right onto 1st Avenue" (where it's always off by 50m) and nothing about lanes
MobileMe/iCloud sucked for half a decade at least, it was well known internally and was something Jobs supposedly bitched about a lot.
Jobs seemed very tolerant in this case, he was quite mad at Eddy Cue at times, but did not fire him.
Who can forget the time that Apple Maps took me down a road that had never been finished.. that became gravel in a field.. and I realized I had driven into a homeless camp. Ever seen a zombie movie where they swarm a car? It’s happened to me.
Maybe it was all the people who'd followed the same navigation.
It still really isn't that close to Google Maps, with public transit in particular Apple Maps is pretty much useless. GM is typically more complete with paths and building data outside of North America too.
Apple sent me to a rural cornfield once instead of a church where baptism was taking place. It was funny because we weren’t the only ones, everyone using Apple Maps was sent to the same cornfield.
These type of rare but common enough edge cases make me super hesitant to use it in the Midwest.
I was able to navigate the transit systems in Tokyo, Osaka, and Yokohama near-flawlessly with Apple Maps in 2018. I only recall encountering one correctness issue.
I have had a really good experience using Apple Maps for public transit. Earlier this year I went to NYC for the first time as an adult and it was super easy to use for finding which train to get on. Had a similar experience in Europe this fall as well.
Huh. Just used it fine for public transport in 8 European cities recently.
Google maps won’t even work properly when there’s no data.
Huh? Public transit has been better on Apple Maps. Does Google even have station entrances/exits yet?
depends on the city
> That thing they finally ship being bad is, geeze, horribly un-Apple.
It was actually quite common Apple during the days Steve Jobs was no longer at the helm, they weren't even able to create a new OS, had to buy another company to rescue them.
And had they gone with Be instead of NEXT, most probably we would be talking about Apple in the past tense nowadays.
Nowadays they might have more money than ever, but it won't last forever if they cannot do anything else than reboots of existing products.
> concerning that every single Apple Intelligence feature they've shipped thus far has been not just mediocre; but bad
The very initial success of Microsoft was that everything was reliably mediocre. Most things Microsoft delivered that were truely bad were fixed within a few major versions. It was a superpower.
The same model works for most purchases on a bad|average|best spectrum: we never want to buy bad, best is difficult to buy, so we settle for average quality.
Aside: I think MS has gone downhill and is now bad on multiple dimensions for me
Apple has a potentially interesting use case for generative AI in their professional creative apps: heavy integration in logic pro or in final cut. Perhaps even create simpler tools with similar functionality but aimed at non professional users.
The problem is that this risks antagonising the everyone in arts/humanities, and most other use cases are really unneeded - who needs text summarizing for something as simple as personal texts from friends? casual use is not really complex enough to warrant an assistance.
Author of the article here. I do video work occasionally and I use Davinci Resolve to do it. Davinci resolve uses generative AI as tools to help you. It makes all my subtitles and if I'm not going into domain specific terminology that often, it'll be 95% of the way there in about 15 minutes. This is massive, especially when combined with "edit by word" editing.
FWIW: Speech-to-text falls under "AI", but is not considered generative AI. (Note that systems with capabilities that go beyond STT with capabilities such as summaries or translation may incorporate generative AI.)
> The problem is that this risks antagonising the everyone in arts/humanities
I don’t anticipate this being a problem. Have you used generative fill in photoshop or lightroom? It’s a complete game changer. In Egyptian mythology they weigh your soul against a feather when you entered the afterlife, and with professional tools I think moral hangups about AI are going to get about the same weight. It’s just too good not to use.
I have this deep feeling that engineers have a fundamental misunderstanding of the arts, which is reinforced when there is a suggestion that "heavy integration" of generative AI into multimedia production apps is somehow desirable. It's not just contrary to the design and use of these applications, but contrary to art as an endeavor - and users find it revolting.
Apple already has simpler tools aimed at non professionals, they don't need generative AI either.
>It's not just contrary to the design and use of these applications, but contrary to art as an endeavor - and users find it revolting.
As far as speaking purely about art goes, I think there is a wide debate to be had there - a ruler helping a line be straight is help to an artist but not seen as contrary to his work, while pressing a button and getting a full painting is clearly not art creation. But where in the middle lies the spot where automation stops being ok? I think it's a spectrum and we'll see a shift in perception there, gradually.
But that debate completely sidesteps the elephant in the room - most artists nowadays don't make a living making art, just making art-adjacent content, where the artistic value is not really super appreciated by the buyer - photographers creating stock photos, graphic designers making app icons, background music for ads and the like.
Artists hate tools that automate this process because it significantly removes that source of income, but they're not the main target of these products. The target is the clients currently paying them and seeing an opportunity to get a product that, while lacking artistic quality, works for them just as well.
This is another place where I think technologists miss the forest for the trees. You're looking the outputs and results looking for a middle ground, but misunderstanding the problem of generative AI in art is the act of creation itself.
People don't generally take issue with tools that automate or make their jobs easier, even if it may reduce the value of the output. However if the tools limit what they can create themselves and make it difficult to fix or fine tune when something is not how they envision things in their mind before creating it, then they're not good tools. Even worse are the tools that take away their ability to create at all.
Really I think what technologists don't understand about art is that in engineering tools are a means to an end and only the outputs matter. If you can get a program to spit something out and say "look, isn't that good enough?" you have missed the entire point of art.
>However if the tools limit what they can create themselves and make it difficult to fix or fine tune when something is not how they envision things in their mind before creating it, then they're not good tools. Even worse are the tools that take away their ability to create at all.
I might be wrong, but I think you're picturing all-or-nothing use cases here. It's not all just 'draw me a picture'; Think smaller scope and maybe you see that middle ground. Take as an example, for a writer, clicking on a phrase like 'he raised his eyebrows' and being suggested alternative wordings so he can avoid repetition. Is that interfering with his act of creation any differently than checking a thesaurus?
Consider being able to have an interaction with an LLM to whom you can ask 'is the plot of my thriller so far leaving any plot hole?'. That does not seem so different with a back-and-forth with an editor or an early reader, in terms of affecting creative freedom.
>If you can get a program to spit something out and say "look, isn't that good enough?" you have missed the entire point of art.
Again, I get that but art is not what tech companies are trying to substitute. If a music generator can give you background music for studying there is no art creation involved, but neither the owner of the youtube channel making ad money nor the listeners give a shit.
I'm not defending that position necessarily, mind you, just pointing out that the business interests in 'not art, but just content, that happens to need artist's skills to create' far surpasses the interest in actual art.
As an analogy: Many musicians will scoff at mainstream pop artists and how every song is just the same four chords. But is the business in pop or in avant garde jazz?
Gemini is pretty good on Android nowadays. No real complaints
I agree that Apple Intelligence generally stinks, but I'm not seeing anything actually generally more useful from anyone else.
If no one is good enough, does it really matter who's the worst?
Google Assistant and Gemini have been great.
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Shrug. If I had to go back to desktop Linux, and I could pay to have Preview, Safari, Terminal(! yep, I like it better than my Linux options), Digital Color Meter, Apple's office-alike suite, Notes, and various other first-party Mac apps, on Linux, I'd absolutely click the "buy" button. And I spent 20 years on Windows and Linux before seriously giving Mac a shot, and still regularly use both for various reasons, so it's not that I don't know what else is out there—Apple's first-party apps are my favorites in their categories more often than not (big, glaring exception for Xcode, hahaha). They're mostly really good, stable, and don't eat my battery like it's free.
IMO, this happened because Tim needed to please in ~~morons~~ investors. It wasn't ready, but the stock market may push for regime change if Apple didn't have "a compelling AI story" or some similar garbage.
Is it actually that bad?
I've been really enjoying the AI notification summaries, they're a nice combination of time saving and comedy
I can have a whole human like conversation with chatGPT via their app on the same iPhone where Siri still is total horse-poo. I have iPhone 15 Pro and running 18.3 .... Siri is so pathetic.
I chat with GPT (especially in the car) to get things done; assistant and a knowledgebase. Siri makes me have nerd rage (lol) trying to use her the same.
If GPT came out with an AI Phone Apple would be out of my life. I want an AI Phone where on the lock screen I see a facetime like call with my AI Assistant (can skin how they look to be whoever). They do everything for me via voice, text, hand gestures, facial expressions and etc. It would be less icon focus and way more AI focused of a UX.
I think it's much easier for Apple to sort out their AI and add this to iPhone than it is for OpenAI to figure out an entire mobile ecosystem where Apple has a ~15 year headstart and use their AI in it.
I agree Siri isn't good, but adding good AI into the existing ecosystem is clearly where the market is headed, and I don't think it will be long before Apple gets there.
Cool but Im ready for something totally brand new (Apple is stale to me now) and Microsoft who owns 49% of OpenAI could make such a personal device as I mentioned for Open AI. Open AI would just brand it the GPT phone.
Further it should be web based not app based and Apple's money machine is way too tied to their app store to establish such a new personal device paradigm. Your assistant fetches everything from the web to show you, discuss with and or have you interact with.
With it web based AI helps the web thrive not kill it off as people are concerned with now.
MobileMe.
