I am baffled by Apple's incompetence here. In the past years I've seen:

* iTunes/Music app randomly reassign my Album artwork, with different (incorrect) art showing up on different devices!

* Reminders app: shared reminder lists can end up with the name of a different list

* Ghost photos that are deleted from my phone, and come back later.

* Maps, when I say "navigate to $friend" set a route that ended in my own driveway.

To me, these bugs suggest a fundamental design flaw, perhaps they are using a simple Integer as an index rather than a UUID?

Or maybe the database schema are solid, but there's some sort of race condition in their synchronization frameworks and the data is getting scrambled in RAM?

Whatever it is, it's absolutely insane that in 2025 these kinds of bugs are happening.

I have a few corrupted photos in iCloud that were taken with my iPhone. Maybe there's something larger going on here.

I wonder if it’s related to import sources, and maybe the speed of that hardware. They are still successfully importing the photos into the Photos app, just not from the camera.

As a photographer, I agree. Make multiple copies of the files onto the main editing computer, followed by then also backing up direct from SD to the NAS. Never format or delete your cards (the originals) before you are dead sure you have several backups visibly uncorrupted.

I may be paranoid because I used to handle footage for VFX pipelines and you just do not mess around with those kinds of files. If you lose footage, you are in big trouble.

> Apple does a decent job of keeping my data safe...

How do you know? Why do you believe that they're competent on writing security code but not competent enough to write a general purpose app? Is there a different company culture applied to the latter?

This is a company that is trying to design away the concept of the file completely. Which leaves very little recourse in the way of workarounds or recovery when bad things happen.

I think of Apple as blessed and cursed by hubris. The same arrogance that lets them assert a design into the world on the belief that people will adopt it allows them to incapable of changing at the things they are bad or deplorable at.

> I’m a fan of the whole Apple ecosystem

Is that a necessary qualifier? I used to get that impression, but on the outside it's gradually become a rarely believable pitch. Without having an iPhone and without having an Apple Watch, and without having already had them years ago, it just seems like I've sort of made the right choice with just mac over the years, and with the latest OS that's becoming just a tiny bit more questionable; their decision making with software seems sus.

Like I've never had to qualify my setup of using a mac for work, Android phone for phone, and I guess Audio Technica for headphones. It's not super nerdy, it's not super integrated, but if I wanted it to be super integrated, "what value would I get out of steeping myself into the Apple ecosystem further" is the question that comes to mind. I also have an old iPad that I tried to make useful, and the iPod nano 3rd gen which was actually amazing, but ultimately was hampered by software limitations that they don't seem to have advanced on much in 10 years. I've always found their discrete hardware products to be amazing in terms of industrial design, but they've never really been compelling in terms of their utility.

I feel like you are a type of person that self censors words such as "ass" or "pedophile" into "ahh" or "pdf file", respectively.

This is also my guess. It's really a bummer, and I'd report it to Apple but since it's nondeterministic I have no idea how to provide repro steps.

Interesting that he went from 30% failure to it taking a while to find a single failure after replacing everything.

Random is random, and random is clumpy, so maybe swapping parts is irrelevant, but... I wanted more detail how often the corruption happened throughout his replacement journey.

edit: also wth i just realized I went to "tenderlovemaking.com" at work. gross. lol.

What’s wild is that this kind of bug feels like something that should’ve been caught with even minimal end-to-end integrity checks

Maybe bad RAM flipping bits?

Edit: Nevermind, the contents are vastly changed. This is like a different stream of input got used, or a buffer was written over with contents from another image.

This. I work as a professional photographer. Nikon shooter. I only ever import directly from my camera in very rare cases. And when I have a problem importing directly from card to Lightroom, first step is to copy everything to the hard drive and import from there.

Sounds like an argument for Apple to provide a new high-level media import framework?

Yeah, after you've had this problem once it seems you'd uncheck delete after import before buying a literally entirely new photography system.

I stopped using apple's notes app with an ipad pen after it lost 20 minutes of my handwritten notes when trying to sync them. (Which fits the theme of apple losing people's stuff.)

I got burned by Apple purposely corrupting my music library. I'm still salty about it.

Well put! But I think there's an interesting exception—APFS seems to be very reliable. It's been quite a few years since the very successful silent auto migration and it’s pretty quiet about it, which is a good thing for filesystems.

It's worth saying their magic ability to sync everything across devices has basically ceased to exist at this point as well, and now I wonder if it ever did.

The software engineering standard at Apple has clearly tanked in the last decade, which is sad because the exact opposite appears to have happened to their hardware.

I think your best bet is to do what you did: write an extensive blog post about it and hope it goes "viral" and grabs the right people at Apple's attention.

I would think the diffs would be telling to the right people.

It's on the front page of HN, so that's a good start!

That's not everything that happened, a big non-replacement part

> I stopped checking the “delete after import” button

This bug has happened on multiple, perhaps all, iphones I ever owned, I clearly remember at least 3 where I spent hours on trying to save (extract) photos from my iphone with different tools.

”Glad” to see it was an actual bug.

Since it looks like a concurrency issue, most likely the new laptop made the issue less frequent through the simple virtue of being faster.

Tests can be flaky, and then ignored

Yeah, seconded. For all cameras of all brands, pop the SD card out and into a reliable reader (I recommend Lexar and Sony hubs).

Never use the camera over USB, the experience is terrible on everything from Canon to Sony to Panasonic to Fuji.

Don't fight it, just buy that $30 USB hub and get on with your day.

I think there was a time when my iCloud name somehow got mixed with people with the same name. My name turned into all uppercase, and IIRC (long time ago) I found someone using that style that had the same name.

I too sometimes use troubleshooting as an excuse to get new hardware I had been meaning to upgrade to.

This is why Apple makes so much fucking money. Because Photos (non-compatibility with anything else) is the moat.

Agreed. Proper troubleshooting technique takes into account not just just swapping out parts, but looking at likelihood and cost. Changing software is highly likely to solve the issue as well as being free and fast to check.

My first thought was “software troubleshooting is a lot cheaper than hardware troubleshooting!” Maybe the author isn’t bound by the same economic realities as some of us are accustomed to.

This person is a nice person, who's published a huge amount of positive work into the Ruby community. I do wish however they'd change their name from the perspective of a figurehead in the community, we have code referencing their repos and it's just awkward with interns to explain.

Whaaa, you don't like tender lovemaking?

This reminds me of a flash games website from 2007. The domain was something like sogay.com. one time I had to spell it to my father. He asked if I'm sure before pressing enter lol

I’m old enough to remember arXiv being hosted by Los Alamos National Laboratory under the domain xxx.lanl.gov.

It’s understandable why they changed their name.

Never thought to suspect Photos itself

I used to see this when I had iCloud Photo Library turned on. It randomly corrupted old photos that were correct. It corrupted both photos taken on the iPhone and photos imported from a real camera.

I have since turned off iCloud Photo Library, downgraded iCloud (no longer needed so much storage), and started using fully open source photo management with flat files on disk.

Well, it might even be a bad sector in RAM or SSD somewhere.

Though, considering the macOS 26, it’s likely the Photos app.

The thing is, in many cases, these products and teams are very siloed from each other. I suspect, having worked in one of these teams, that some of the issues comes from this siloing. Lessons learned aren't shared, and it can be difficult to build integrations.

Another two examples:

* prompts in settings for adding an account recovery contact that never go away, even after months and months of successfully setting it up multiple times.

* OS account profile picture can barely stay associated with the most recently picked option. Happens for non-iCloud local accounts on Mac, happens when I change profile pictures on iOS for iCloud… weird.

* OS account update screens on iPad, iOS, and watchOS will forget that they are in the middle of updating if you navigate away from the settings screen. Thankfully, today they at least recover from it (it’s probably still happening in the background), but it takes several long seconds of spinning for the settings page to remember that it was doing an update two seconds ago before I navigated away from it.

* similar to your ghost pictures bug, deleting a large media file from a media player app moves it to recently deleted, but you can sometimes end up in situations where you can’t permanently delete the file, or it doesn’t show up anywhere but still takes up space. (Talking about 20GB-80GB file sizes where it makes a big difference on OS storage space)

Some of these bugs have been around for a VERY long time.

But the weird thing is I don’t see them in 3rd party apps.

Yeah, I spend a night on writing some python to disentangle my un-amused father's music collection when he stopped using iTunes. What a mess.

iTunes randomly changing album artwork happened to me too. Only thing that fixed it was wiping the iPhone and resyncing with computer.

Apple stole my entire music library. I have had one library going back to the first release of iTunes on Windows (2003?) — thousands of songs, most of them CD rips.

I then subscribed to Apple Music and relied on its matching function. After switching from an Intel Mac to an M2 and redownloading my library from remote, it now believes that each and every song in my library are rented Apple Music copies. Even those it shows as having been added in 2003.

Some songs are missing; some go missing, then inexplicably come back months later. Worse: so far I have found around a dozen which have been replaced by different versions.

It's a real mess.

I have had extremely bad luck, reporting bugs to Apple.

They constantly ask for an example project, even if it's something that is easily demonstrated, simply by running existing Apple software, and creating a project, would be a huge pain.

They also ignore reports. Very rarely, I may get a ping on one of my reports, asking me to verify that it was fixed in some release. Otherwise, there's no sign that they ever even read it.

I usually end up closing my bug reports and feature requests, after a few months, because I'm tired of looking at them.

It's clear that they consider every bug report to be a burden. That's a very strange stance, but then, they are not a typical company.

I guess you can't argue with the results, as they have a market value North of 3 trillion dollars, but that does not make it any less annoying.

What's worse about the Apple ecosystem is that because of how tightly coupled it is, a bug fix for Photos would only come as part of a macOS update.

Which means that if that bug has been present since the (now unsupported) Mavericks, tough luck!

You don't need repro steps if Apple is serious about quality. Just the description of what's happening should give enough to a senior Apple engineer to intuit where this is possibly happening and create tests that will stress their software to repro this.

Have you tried copying the files to the local disk before importing?

I'd be interested in knowing if he was multitasking and using a lot of memory. I know wedding photos are usually something you feel rushed to upload so maybe this issue can be made worse depending on system resource availability.

> I'd report it to Apple

What's the point of it? It is well known in the industry they ignore bugreports.

Also, this bug doesn't affect the majority of users, so it won't ever be fixed.

Why? A new framework gets you new bugs instead of the old ones, but not necessarily fewer or less severe ones.

It’s more likely that things will be reversed: the old, battle-tested framework may have bugs, but it’s is less likely to have serious ones.

They should try to hunt down bugs in the existing code. A partial rewrite of parts that historically have many bugs may be in order, but a complete replacement? Unlikely to be an improvement.

My workflow is don't delete after import but format the card in the camera afterwards. I have XXXL cards and it is not such a problem if I forget to format.

I had one case where I screwed up a shoot and thought file corruption might have been involved (it wasn't) Even though I had formatted the card with the camera and shot maybe 5 test shots I was able to recover most of the images with Disk Drill

https://www.cleverfiles.com/data-recovery-software.html

which has both Windows and Mac versions and looking at a sample of them confirmed it wasn't corruption, it was user error.

There is a very popular professional audio website called Gearspace that had a much spicier name for a long, long time.

https://gearspace.com/

https://www.reddit.com/r/audioengineering/comments/mftc0g/ge...

In the late 90s my then-wife was watching over my shoulder one day and saw the domain “freshmeat.net” pop up as a possible auto-completion in my address bar. She was justifiably suspicious until I showed her it was just a software distribution site.

As if "tender lovemaking" is so shocking?

Site belongs to Aaron Patterson, one off the most prolific Ruby developers in the world.

Why? It's brilliant.

You work in IT right? always backup

I completely agree about there being a fundamental design flaw.

I still use Macs because data on a physical disk seems perfectly reliable, but I've been bitten by so many of these bugs in their apps. iCloud files completely disappear, then reappear a day later. Highlight a couple chapters of a PDF in Preview, then reopen the file and they're gone because iCloud thinks the older unhighlighted version is newer or something. Madness. I don't touch any of these Apple services/apps anymore.

There's very clearly a fundamental bug in whatever sync framework they seem to share across everything. It's bad enough to have data disappear entirely or deleted data reappear, but then when data shows up in the completely wrong place, and this has been happening for years and years and still isn't fixed... I don't know what to think.

You're right. There's no other word for it but "insane". They can engineer their A-series and M-series microchips, but it's been over a decade now and their sync is still fundamentally broken.

The clipboard is no longer reliable.

Not sure when exactly that changed, but it was probably a few OS releases ago?

And she wasn’t suspicious of amazon.com? ;)

Ha ha, I remember that name.

Obviously there must be bureaucracy and an RFP involved!

ZScaler gets pissed off going to frame.work just because of a “malicious TLD”.

I don’t even want to know what ZScaler thinks of “tender love making”.

How long do you keep your backups? A backup taken last night is great if your computer gets hit by a bus, but isn't so great if you just discovered that photos you took ten years ago were corrupted sometime between then and now.

> There's no other word for it but "insane". They can engineer their A-series and M-series microchips

There are certainly other words for it. Lazy, anticompetitive, disinterested, any of those are more plausible than all of Apple being insane. They sold you a microchip that you knew you wanted, now they are beholden to little else. For over a decade, Apple didn't even offer the iOS APIs for third-parties to implement cloud storage. They know you need their software services, regardless of how shit they are.

Insanity would be a pretty satisfying explanation. Fickleness fits a lot better with Apple's track record though.

Could be because of shared clipboard between devices?

Apple's hardware is top class, but the software has always been lacking. The only time I've seen both in perfect synergy was when the iPod was released (and even then there was iTunes). Not even the iPhone reveal had that.

Yes, two or three to make sure.

Happend to my father as well, his songs were all over the place with the same albums even sharded over multiple folders etc. A big mess. Left him pretty sour indeed, he had spend a lot of time on it.

Btw, it was fine from withing iTunes, just never stop using iTunes I guess...

You presumably would process the pen inputs, not the resulting image produced by the handwriting. No different from how you handle conflicts in online gaming.

Sounds like they don't.

Right, zfs snapshots are for the case myself, or any of the software i use (e.g. immich) messes up something.

Oh wow, I'm surprised the name change appears to be so universally appreciated on reddit.

It doesn't strike me as different from "porn" i.e. "unix porn" "food porn" etc, which are at least somewhat widely accepted. I assumed it was self-aware/deprecating humor, as in the people there recognized they were frequently replacing which gear they used beyond what might be strictly necessary.

It was colorful, in the way a lot of music and art is colorful. It's not like it's a sysadmin forum...

Modwiggler changed name around the same time.

before stackoverflow there was expertsexchange.com and they were forced to add a hyphen to the name because people kept making fun of the expertSEXchange, it became experts-exchange.com

I guess the reason why modern times feel so bland is because we all agree on the lowest common denominator, and then celebrate that as "iNcLuSiViTy". If anything you do has any personality, aka deviates from the standard workflow, it immediately gets a disadvantaged position on the free market.

It's like, we collectively prioritize efficiency over fun and then we wonder why life is not fun even though it is efficient.

Something something Railed.

Infohazard warning:

C++ reference is one of these.

The URL might be mistaken for some different content?

What's brilliant about it? What's the reference, for those of us unfamiliar?

Clipboard has been unstable on every OS (especially on Desktop - and I mean Linux, Windows and Mac), and I think part of the culprit is apps like Teams and Discord, if you Ctrl + C by mistake on an empty text box, IT COPIES THE EMPTY TEXT BOX effectively wiping your clipboard. It's the most irritating UX and it took me years to figure out. Always right click copy and right click paste, you'll notice it works 100% of the time as it used to.

Still can't get rid of that U2 album I'm guessing

People, including me, had a lot of playlists of ripped cds and downloaded mp3s, all categorized, rated, and with years of play count history.

Then apple fucked everyones libraries up completely in an auto update, destroying the metadata and making them unusable, except for songs bought via apple music that is...

Gosh I hoped all wedding photographers thought to do the same...

They asked me for a sysdiagnose when I complained about how crappy their new Finder disk icon looks on macOS 26. See this rant by Jeff Johnson, who called for a boycott on filing bugs with Apple a couple years back (I stuck to the boycott except for two obvious UI design issues in the latest OS because neither required repro steps (so why the sysdiagnose?)).

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/8/7.html

Edit: accidentally called sysdiagnose a spindump.

"Very rarely, I may get a ping on one of my reports"

Hm. That is more than I ever got, but I also never bothered to report anything to any company after being ignored the first tries.

I see you've never used Feedback Assistant

I use Lightroom, but always with this workflow (copy files from memory card to disk, then use LR to do the import / move / build previews).

If nothing else, it lets you get your card back much more quickly, as a file-system copy runs at ~1500MBps, which makes a difference when importing 50-100GB of photos.

I also don't delete the images off the memory card until they've been backed up from the disk to some additional medium.

yeah copying can take a loooooooong time and so you multitask.

maybe the randomness is based on the other apps he's using at the same time.

Well I'd imagine the new framework wouldn't rewrite old but wrap the existing low level APIs in a way that is not error prone. Centralize the tricky bits so Photos and third party apps don’t each have to reinvent them?

If only people who liked a certain GNU image editing app were so appreciative of such an idea...

From what to what?

Nah that's just a one off

Wow, I probably haven't logged into EE into 20 years. I just tried now and somehow guessed my username and 5 letter password first time. They want $9.99 to let me in, though, but they claim to have all my achievements still...

Well, then don't browse from the church computer

On Linux you can just select the text and simply paste it using middle click. It works everywhere on Xorg, on some environments on Wayland. And it will only copy what you selected... everytime.

Clipboard managers help a lot there.

I just use KDE's default one, Klipper, and I raise the max entry number.

If something bad replaces your copy, you can get the good one back from the history.

There are nice features like QR code generation for your copied text if you want to quickly share something with someone else's phone as well.

Copying empty text is a configurable flag in some linux environments, at least, but I'm not sure if that behavior is faithfully preserved in teams / discord / etc as I've never really had it on.

Oh that's easy, just download this extra piece of software which removes the album for you.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29208540

You'd be surprised. I've seen and heard some real horror stories.

My $dayjob is IT/infrastructure ops, so backup hygiene is engraved in me as a core value. A shocking amount of people outside of tech have no concept of backups or redundancy.

"Purposely" seems strong, though. Is it believed that Apple intended this corruption?

Not to hand wave-- but this feels industry standard IMO. I have a dozen PRs sitting unacknowledged and stale across a handful of FAANG (and other) repos, including Apple's.

I start my first day @ Apple in a few weeks, so I ACK that my opinion might be a little biased here.

how is this different from any product with a billion users and 100,000+ live bug reports?

I've had pretty good luck reporting bugs to Google (notoriously bad!):

1. provide simple, crystal clear examples that cannot be due to third parties, misconfiguration or user error.

2. show that it's happening to a large number of mainstream users (not niche)

3. show that it breaks critical workflows and has no easy workaround (incl partial workarounds).

4. if you meet #1-3, then wait 6-9 months minimum (more if hard to fix). If not, wait 3-5+ years.

---

Favorite example: in the mid-2000s, I caught google maps confusing suite/apt numbers for street numbers. It got flagged as low priority. So, to get the team's attention, I reproduced the bug on a large Google offices. Six month later, bug fixed.

After that experience, I report everything to Google that breaks my workflow. Like clockwork, the biggies get fixed a couple of quarters later.

---

Want long? Try improving/fixing core issues with the API design of Linux or PostgreSQL: fix times can be measured in decades. Backward compatibility is insufficient - they rightfully worry about libraries and tools adopting the new APIs and then breaking legacy systems that cannot be upgraded even for mission-critical security issues.

---

NOTE: OP bug feels P0 and the better strategy is either mass media (incl HN) or networking to someone inside the company. I've hit those too over the years and can usually find someone at the company to send directly.

> I guess you can't argue with the results, as they have a market value North of 3 trillion dollars

This was financed by equally massive technical debt.

> I have had extremely bad luck, reporting bugs to Apple.

From your description, your experience is quite typical.

Unless you get paid by Apple, why would you spend any amount of time doing work for them?

MacOS updates are several per year though. If a fixes found (and the bug considered a high enough priority) it could show up before 2025 is up.

I still don't under stand why Apple limits updates to their first party apps to OS updates.

They could really benefit from how Google does it on Android and decouple it. Push updates to their first party apps via the app store like everyone else, and let the OS update on its own separate schedule.

This is what I always do. Rather than go directly from the card reader or camera into Photos or Lightroom, I copy the files onto an SSD, and then bring them in from the SSD. The entire process goes faster.

I also want to point out that I've seen similar corruption in the past, only in Lightroom. The culprit ended up being hardware, not software. Specifically, the card reader's USB cable. I've actually had two of these cables fail on different readers. On the most recent one, I replaced it with a nicer Micro B to USB C cable, and haven't had an issue.

I worked on the Photos team a decade ago — some of what you're saying I can vouch for. If it is a rare occurrence, that lowers the priority of the bug. Data corruption though? That moves it to the top.

I'll tell you a secret though that kind of pisses me off. If you have shipped with a bug, that automatically lowers the perceived priority as well. You know, as opposed to introducing a new bug in a new release. "We've already lived with that old bug…" seems to be the mind set. Oh well.

To be sure though, if you saw the number of bugs that queue up for a popular app like Photos, you'd know that fixing all of them is not going to be possible — some kind of system of prioritization is required.

Dumb frat-boy innuendos count as personality now, huh?

Let's just leave aside the fact that the name genuinely made many people uncomfortable and unwelcome there (it did), it was also just teenage and immature. There's ways to inject personality and fun into a social experience without giggling about sex. Talk about lowest common denominator...

See also: Experts Exchange, Pen Island

The author's name is tenderlove. He has been a famous contributor to Ruby and Rails for at least 10 years. If this is objectionable to you, it shows your lack of expertise.

It is simply hilarious to make grown adults visit a website called tender love making dot com (a sexual reference) to read a very specific and niche blog about technology.

I’ve copied with right click out of chatGPT on Firefox and the contents not ending up on my clipboard. Not reliably.

mmm, it was better than the "closed as duplicate" (of an internal bug that you can't access) path that used to be the big complaint about radar...

Because you want them to fix a bug they might not be aware of, and bug reports are also votes of importance

It’s a way to force you to update those apps. They don’t want you on the latest OS and on an old Music or Photos.

> if you saw the number of bugs that queue up for a popular app like Photos, you'd know that fixing all of them is not going to be possible

Why? If your app is used by billions of people, surely you can afford a few additional testers and engineers? Your app doesn't have an unlimited number of bugs: if you are solving them faster than you are introducing them, the number of bugs will eventually approach zero.

Sure, you'll always have newly-introduced bugs which are still waiting to get fixed, but if you've got an ever-increasing pile of bugs which have been around for years - even when they have been reported with easy-to-reproduce steps - then something has gone horribly wrong with your development process. At a certain point you have to stop shoveling new crap, rethink the workflow which is introducing so many new bugs, and slowly start fixing old bugs. The alternative is that your code will inevitably degrade into 100% bugs and become completely unusable and unmaintainable.

I haven't had actual corruption but had imports take an excessive long time or fail to complete in Lightroom because of bad USB cables or (I think) bad USB jack.

Generally I'm frustrated with the state of USB. Bad cables are all over the place and I'm inclined to throw cables out if I have the slightest problem with them. My take is that the import process with Lightroom is fast and reliable if I am using good readers and good cables; it is fine importing photos from my Sony a7iv off a CFExpress card but my Sony a7ii has always been problematic and benefits greatly from taking the memory card out and putting it in a dedicated reader, sometimes I use the second slot in the a7iv.

Yeah, I have had friends in Apple and they have described pretty much the same approach. It's perfectly understood.

There is one more thing that gets factored into the bug triage. If the bug affects professional users (as in, data corruption from external media) - fuck them. Apple couldn't care less about professional users. The priority is to fix Photos.app for utility gauge pics and preferably in HEIC and other default settings.

something something "things I don't find funny are objectively bad and wrong and you're a bad person, be a boring serious miserable adult like everyone else" something something

Isn't pen island intentional though?

Just a nit — your post would have been fine without that last sentence, no need to be prickly. I haven’t touched RoR in 15 years and was not familiar with the name.

Thats chatgpt doing ott wrapping and breaking web standards in a way chrome accepts but firefox doesnt last i looked

Maybe you can help bump FB13400242, a bug that is _literally_ going to kill people. (The bug is that to make an emergency call, even from lock screen, you're supposed to be able to squeeze buttons on either side of the phone. But it only works with the volume buttons on the left - the Action button didn't get supported, when that button was added. So now the rule for teaching a small child isn't just "squeeze both sides" it's "oh but not that one!")

(Yes, this came close to killing someone close to me. Fortunately someone else happened to come along to help.)

If you ever get the chance, maybe you can be the one that improves that process some day.

Even if it's standard among tech giants, you could be the one that makes a new standard! Good luck in your new role, btw.

Did you take a job at Apple just so you can accept one or more of those PR's that's been bugging you? :)

Wasn't there an xkcd about that scenario...

How does one finance a project or a company with increased maintenance costs and lower quality production?

That’s what technical debt is. It’s the cost for moving forward quickly. I’m not sure I understand what you’re trying to state.

They somehow separate out certain apps, like Safari (on occasion), the iWork suite, and the Pro apps, but I have no idea why they insist on coupling apps like Photos and Music to OS updates.

> I'll tell you a secret though that kind of pisses me off. If you have shipped with a bug, that automatically lowers the perceived priority as well. You know, as opposed to introducing a new bug in a new release.

This mentality is all over BigTech: This bug didn't block release X-1, why should it block release X? So, it inevitably just sits in the backlog forever. If your releases are 90 days apart, any bug found has an average of 45 days to be fixed, or it ends up on the "we lived with it last time" list.

> Dumb frat-boy innuendos count as personality now, huh?

There are many personalities. Not everything has to be mature

There was also a website for a mole station, but I'm not sure if that one was satire.

"tender love making" and then the specific URL mention photos and corruption... it could look really bad!

A bug that has been reported that is down prioritized that then leads to killing people would be a pretty bad case for Apple when it came to court.

> you're supposed to be able to squeeze buttons on either side of the phone. But it only works with the volume buttons on the left

I don't recall there ever being any official language about "squeezing both sides of the phone" to make emergency calls. Doesn't the feature description in Settings explicitly reference which buttons to press?

Just gotta be careful...

https://xkcd.com/1739/

If you have more bugs than you can fix in a given amount of time then you have to prioritize somehow.

“This bug didn't block release X-1, why should it block release X?” Is actually a pretty strong argument and tough, but not impossible, to counter.

And the bug backlog only gets longer with time. It’s the price of greatly increased software complexity.

Safari is interesting. It's been separate, except for major macOS updates, which had it bundled. But if you had a newer Safari on an older macOS, and upgraded macOS to anything else that the latest version, then your Safari was downgraded, often causing data loss..

In Sonoma or Sequoia they started bundling all Safari updates with macOS, but right now Safari 26 appeared as a separate update in Sonoma/Sequoia—-and it will likely stay that way.

Each thing separately can be explained, but when put together it’s somewhat messy..

I feel like there's confusion regarding the word "mature". It's supposed to mean that someone has lots of experience and draws knowledge from it, but in reality often people use the word "mature" to describe a certain specific societal ideal of a person that we're supposed to grow into.

The problem is that societal consesus is often wrong, and that image of a perfectly mature person actually does have a lot of problems with it. Every generation discovers this, and redefines that ideal.

40 years ago in my country a "mature man" was expected to take part in alcohol drinking contests until blackout. Nowadays a "mature man" is expected to drink as little alcohol as possible.

Neither attitude is actually about learning and forming a personal, informed opinion, both of them are about following whatever is currently in fashion.

You are welcome not to visit it if you do not want to hear from a Rails contributor for over 10 years.

Consider hitting up some Apple "watcher" people (e.g. 9to5mac) to see if they can give you a boost on their social media. It's pretty obnoxious that it's come to needing to make a stink like that to get eyeballs on something, but here we are.

I think a faster / easier approach is to just press the biggest button repeatedly until it makes an emergency call for you.

Unless one's title is going to be "VP" or "SVP", the chance that someone joins BigTech and gets to "improve the process" is usually miniscule. You're being hired as cog #21 on team #54 and there is a large backlog of JIRA (well, in this case, Radar) tickets to grind through. There will be people who tell you what the processes are, and to not deviate from them. And you shouldn't get mad at those people, either--they're just the messengers, and were told what the processes are by people above them on the totem pole and so on.

I'm decades away from being a small child and I can't remember these gestures. The only time I get screenshots or activate emergency mode on my phone is accidentally. Of course I also don't expect my phone to be able to help me much in an emergency.

> How does one finance a project or a company with increased maintenance costs

You seem to be assuming that the company will eventually pay off the technical debt rather than just continue accumulating it and lowering production quality.

well you're already starting off assuming that the kid is holding an iPhone. so its already an "oh but not that one" situation.

This definitely works. When I was at Apple I remember a number of issues in their weekly “bug review board” were classified as being high priority because they were going viral on Twitter.

I don’t know anyone that has any phone but an iphone, so it’s a good assumption.

? This is the system working as designed. The whole game, from startup to fortune 500, is to accumulate market power fast enough to avoid tech debt swallowing you whole.

Once you have market power (which means different things for different companies) you can safely feed the tech debt monster just as little as you feel like.

A five year old is going to find "just squeeze" easier than doing that.

Well, not an Apple fan personally but on this they are just top of class. Even if this story involves an Apple Watch and not an iPhone, my father-in-law some time ago fainted (due to an underlying heart issue we late uncovered), knocked his head on the toilet when he got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. He lost consciousness for a brief moment and when he regained it, there was already someone from the emergency line speaking through the Apple Watch and he got the ambulance at home faster that without wearing the Apple Watch, and surely helped in saving his life.

Btw I wonder if Apple sends some spoken message to the emergency services or some metadata or just connects the phones and that's it.

Edit: oh and I forgot: my wife got a loud message (that bypassed DND) telling her that her father maybe felt, because she is one of his emergency contacts.

Your lack of ambition is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Clearly you've never worked at a large company before :)

Hold on to your optimism, but try not to let that turn into scorn for folks who've seen the other side.

five year olds shouldn't have a phone, and should be supervised. even if they have a phone, they are unlikely to handle it with the care it requires.

More than once I've had a chance to interview (brief) somebody who was about to take a job at a "big tech" company and interview them again (debrief) after they left.

Frequently they were excited to start work at a place where they could "make a difference" and within a year they came to the conclusion that there's wasn't any possibility they could make a difference.

Organizations of that sort have no interest at all in hiring people who aren't going to cooperate on their process.

My phone is off at night and I don't have a watch. I try not to let these huge companies FUD me into thinking that I appreciably change my odds of surviving an accident by buying their technology, but I get that others see it differently.

It’s not a matter of ambition or lack-of. Nobody is going into a 100k+ company and just changing the entire corporate culture around something as broad as bug fixing. These companies have hundreds of teams, and decades of entrenched culture. Sure, go in and improve what you can in your own lane, but be realistic about your scope and reach.

Thread is talking about kids knowing how to request emergency services with a nearby phone in case something happens to their parent(s). Nothing to do with giving kids their own phones.

Maybe you want to rethink that? You're literally responding to a testimonial that it likely saved someone's life. Seconds do matter in some medical emergencies.

Also, you may not be aware of Car Crash Detection https://support.apple.com/en-us/104959

If they were excited to make a difference at a big tech company and gave up in a year, it sounds like they didn't understand what they were getting into at all. Goals take time.

Nobody ever changes anything and new hires should have no aspirations or goals but to be code monkeys.

Your outlook on career growth is nihilistic, not realistic.

To be fair this kind of thing is emotionally manipulative.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has done a lot as a private organization to raise standards for automotive safety but the statistics they publish that show that larger vehicles are safer than larger vehicles are frequently wrongly interpreted -- in many of the cases where the large vehicle does better it's not that you die in the smaller vehicle but instead get a broken bone. Once something is seen as "life or death" some people will think they have no choice but to spend another $50,000, spew another 20 tons of carbon pollution, etc.

To be fair, people have a lot of fear of wasting time, being co-opted, losing their values, etc. I agree that a lot of people lack patience, but a bad situation can be more patient than you can be.