[developer2]

Exactly this. Advanced tldr; I spent 2 years struggling with the inability to troubleshoot Apple's problems to help track down horrific bugs.

AirDrop from my iPhone XS to my Early 2019 iMac had always been hit-or-miss. It would usually take 3-5 times of tapping the iMac icon in the Share -> AirDrop menu before it would actually work and deliver the payload between devices. For the longest time I gave up on trying to use AirDrop… and this is only between my own devices sharing the same Apple account.

Another example was Universal Clipboard between the iMac and iPhone. It always worked in one direction (IIRC macOS -> iPhone), while the opposite direction (iPhone -> macOS) rarely worked. It made trying to copy/paste between devices such a chore that led to disappointment so often it wasn't worth trying anymore.

Finally, unlocking my iMac using my Apple Watch (Auto Unlock). It so frequently fell flat on its face that it simply became another frustrating pain point. It would unlock properly once or twice, then it would stop working. Unchecking/rechecking the option in macOS preferences did nothing, and in fact caused the System Preferences pane to glitch/hang/timeout.

I've always been on the same Wi-Fi network, with Bluetooth permanently enabled on both devices. Then… very recently–sometime in the last 1 or 2 months–I noticed that using AirDrop began to work the first time… every time; suddenly Auto Unlock stopped glitching and failing; and wouldn't you know it, Universal Clipboard also worked every time in either direction.

Note that all of the above features share something in common: they certainly all use the same underlying framework/library to communicate between Apple devices. AirDrop, Continuity, Handoff, Auto Unlock, Universal Clipboard. These all deal with passing payloads between devices; worse, they depend on Bluetooth, which has got to be the most unreliable wireless protocol ever invented. Bluetooth stacks have always been a goddamn nightmare; far too many different hardware, firmware, and operating system software/driver vendors implement their own versions of the specs, and they don't play well together.

I would put money down that Apple found and fixed a bug in either a) the framework/library that handles all of these features, or b) their Bluetooth firmware/software stack. Something was fixed quite recently that suddenly made all of these features go from being completely unreliable to working like Magic™. It took them a very long time to locate and fix this, likely because their users have absolutely no way to help troubleshoot these features. It either works, or it doesn't; and if it doesn't, you're out of luck.

I'm still sticking with the Apple ecosystem. There are some horrific bumps here and there along the way, but if I compare what I have now to what I'd have on a Windows 10 machine… not a chance in hell I'm going back. Hot damn, everything that's dropping this fall is going to be incredible. Well, at least once they iron out all the new bugs that will surely come with the amount of features they're introducing.

[chipotle_coyote]

> It either works, or it doesn't; and if it doesn't, you're out of luck.

In a lot of ways that's my biggest complaint with a lot of "Apple ecosystem magic". I just want them to design all these interesting features -- and even the more basic uninteresting ones -- with a recognition that no matter how seamless they try to be, sometimes they will fail, and that they should fail in ways that are neither invisible nor inscrutable. While I think this problem has been getting worse over the years, in no small part as the systems get more complex, "pretend things never fail" has been a long-standing problem with Apple's engineering culture.

[mustacheemperor]

Comments like this make me feel like core software quality is rotting across the board. On my Windows 10 computer the start key on my keyboard does not reliably open the start menu for the first 30m or so after a cold boot and will sometimes fail at other times. Sometimes when the menu launches it's missing the search pane, or missing the files pane, or missing the left pane. This is the start menu failing, a key component of windows since 9x. I have a cluttered desktop, and sometime in the last month or so I hit some unknown limit where now loading the desktop as a folder from explorer takes forever and hangs explorer. To load a list of files and folders.

But as of the update automatically installed today, there is a pointless weather widget added to my taskbar, and clicking on it opens the news? That's a core feature of the desktop OS?

Computers and software are getting more and more broadly capable but it feels like a high level of quality is not being maintained across that broad scope, even on the essentials.

[developer2]

> there is a pointless weather widget added to my taskbar, and clicking on it opens the news?

I reached the question mark at the end of that sentence… and I felt that single question mark so deep within my soul. Clicking the weather widget opens the news……… "?".

[Folcon]

Some of the most useful fundamental functionality doesn't work either, running windows 10, you can't filter in task manager. It irks me to no end that this isn't possible. Try finding a misbehaving program on windows, you need third party tools to get anywhere.

[artificialLimbs]

Sometimes moving icons around in the Windows start menu breaks the menu in strange ways with icons overlapping one another or disappearing altogether. This has happened across multiple completely heterogeneous machines.