Apple, Still

I have been having feelings about Apple lately. This blog may have drifted a fair way from its original focus on macOS, but I am still, first and foremost, an Apple user – just not an exclusively Apple user, and perhaps not even a particularly obedient one anymore, since I use both Windows and Linux every day and have grown used to judging platforms by what they let me get done rather than by whatever story they are trying to tell about themselves.

That makes the current moment a little awkward. Apple is still extraordinarily good at making hardware I want to pick up and use, and still more coherent than most of the industry in the broad strokes, but it also feels increasingly prone to sanding off the wrong edges, reinventing the UX wheel, and constantly adding paper cuts to their software.

The iPhone is probably the clearest example of that tension. It is still the phone I would rather carry, and the one whose hardware I trust most, but iOS has become steadily more fussy without becoming proportionally more capable.

A lot of it has been the constant UI friction and pointless balkanization of features like screen mirroring, which I would very much like to have – I see zero point in using Messages on my Mac or futzing around with Handoff and AirDrop when I could just, you know, pull up a window into my phone and type stuff in.

And I know Apple could indeed engineer a way to make those features DMA-compliant if it really wanted to – I suppose breaking the user experience across the board with Liquid Glass had enough priority to preempt allocating engineering resources to, you know, proper features.

Sharing things, moving files around, background activity, browser limitations, the endless little inconsistencies in system UI and the ungainly bloat in Settings – that friction accumulates. None of it is fatal on its own, but the aggregate effect is that the platform feels far less light than it used to, even while Apple keeps insisting that everything is becoming more seamless.

I’m going to say it outright: I found Liquid Glass insulting. Not just visually, but also because it tells me that instead of fixing glaring gaps in things like automation (Shortcuts is definitely not in good health, and AppleScript is pretty much dead) that could actually have put Apple in the forefront of automation and AI (never mind the miserable failures in Siri and Apple Intelligence), someone at Apple actually decided breaking visual affordances took priority over stability and providing consistent application intents and hooks across the board.

Even then, macOS is in a better place than iOS, but mostly because it still retains enough of its older character to be workable. Remember, I can just patch the visual inconsistencies away.

There is still a proper filesystem, there is still a shell (even if Apple seems intent on breaking the userland in very small increments across releases), there are still enough escape hatches to route around bad decisions, and Apple Silicon has papered over a remarkable amount of software bloat simply by being absurdly fast and power-efficient.

But the cracks are visible there too. System Settings remains a mess, cross-platform application quality keeps declining, and the old Mac assumption – that a user might actually want to understand how their machine works – seems to matter less every year. Meanwhile iOS keeps borrowing bits of the Mac’s vocabulary without acquiring the Mac’s actual flexibility, which leaves both platforms feeling oddly misaligned.

The iPad remains the device I most want to use more than I actually do. I may pick one up every morning to read the news and get drafts started, but the Neo nullifies any interest I might still have in upgrading my iPad Pro. The hardware is excellent, the battery life is still absurd, the pencil is useful, and for reading, sketching, note-taking and casual browsing it remains hard to beat. Fine.

But every time I try to push it into being a serious general-purpose computer, it reminds me that Apple still has not decided what it wants the iPad to be. It can approximate a laptop for stretches at a time – and sometimes very convincingly – but the moment you need proper peripheral support, predictable file handling or sustained tool switching, the abstraction turns into safety glass – and I’m back to my long-held opinion that the only good iPad is the iPad mini.

That’s what I intend to upgrade this year, even if Apple comes out with a decent foldable iPhone (and, by the way, I really like the “leaked” form factor, because phones have become stupidly tall and unwieldy).

And this is where Fedora comes in, because it has become my most useful point of comparison. Linux on the desktop is still Linux on the desktop – gloriously inconsistent, occasionally infuriating, and always willing to expose its plumbing at the worst possible moment – but my experience over the past few years is very conclusive: Fedora has reached a point where, for a lot of everyday work, it is simply easier to reason about than either macOS or iOS.

That does not make it better in every respect. It is not. But it does mean that a lot of the breakage in Apple software now has a reference point, and even considering I was always a UNIX user and deeply technical, the creature comforts that Linux now provides give me a lot more confidence than Apple’s software.

If Qualcomm wasn’t so obtuse about only supporting Windows and ARM laptops were more open, things would be very interesting indeed.

I still like the hardware, still prefer the overall ecosystem in a number of places, and still find myself evaluating a lot of the rest of the industry by standards Apple set years ago.

But I also think it is getting harder to ignore how much of the original appeal has been traded away due to sheer mismanagement of software QA and Apple’s refusal to acknowledge the gaps across iPad, macOS core applications, and a consistent user experience.

Come on, Tim, get your people in line.