Rotten for a while now

As usual, Michael Tsai assembles a remarkable roundup of opinions and reactions after John Gruber’s recent piece Something is rotten in the State of Cupertino, where he finally criticises Apple for essentially over-over-promising and under-under-underdelivering on Apple Intelligence, especially regarding the announced improvements to Siri.

What I find involuntarily funny in this specific wave of criticism is that for some of these people this has been the straw that broke the camel’s back when it comes to Apple breaking trust and bullshitting their customers and user base.

Siri is the epitome of overpromising and underdelivering in Apple’s history.

The bullshitting isn’t recent either, though perhaps the smell is more pungent now. I love how, in my circles, whenever I ask for an example of vintage bullshitting on Apple’s part, the most remembered episode was the You’re holding it wrong ‘Antennagate’ affair at the time of the iPhone 4, in 2010. While Apple’s (Jobs’s) reaction was certainly defensive and in full damage-control mode, the whole iPhone 4’s signal reception issue was grossly exaggerated. From the Wikipedia entry: “[…] Jobs cited figures from AppleCare which showed that only 0.55 percent of all iPhone 4 users have complained to the company about the issue, while the number of phones returned to Apple was 1.7 percent – 4.3 percentage points less than the number of iPhone 3GS models that were returned in the first month of the phone’s launch.” At the time I easily believed those statistics based on personal experience and second-hand, third-hand, and fourth-hand accounts from other iPhone 4 users. I’ll add that the iPhone 4 was my daily driver from late 2010 to early 2015(!) and in that time frame I never had reception issues or dropped calls.

So no, I wouldn’t really put Antennagate on the bullshitting list. The subtle bullshitting can be found in all instances of design/manufacturing defects or issues where Apple blatantly downplayed the problem or the number of devices (and thus people) affected by it.

Take a look at the list of issues related to the iPhone 6, summarised in this section of its Wikipedia entry. When describing the touchscreen failure (nicknamed ‘touch disease’), the entry reads:

Initially, Apple did not officially acknowledge this issue. The issue was widely discussed on Apple’s support forum—where posts discussing the issue have been subject to censorship. The touchscreen can be repaired via microsoldering: Apple Stores are not equipped with the tools needed to perform the logic board repair, which had led to affected users sending their devices to unofficial, third-party repair services. An Apple Store employee interviewed by Apple Insider reported six months after they first started noticing the problem, Apple had issued guidance instructing them to tell affected users this was a hardware issue that could not be repaired and that their iPhone had to be replaced. However, some in-stock units have also been afflicted with this issue out of the box, leading to an employee stating they were “tired of pulling service stock out of the box, and seeing the exact same problem the customer has on the replacement”.

The iPhone 7’s ‘loop disease’ is also worth mentioning. Here, the related bit in the Wikipedia entry is rather terse, but I remember at the time that it was mentioned frequently, and Apple acknowledged the issue only internally. Note for how long that internal memo lasted (emphasis mine):

Some iPhone 7 devices suffer from a problem that affects audio in the device. Users reported a grayed-out speaker button during calls, grayed-out voice memo icon, and occasional freezing of the device. A few users also complained that lightning EarPods failed to work with the device and that the Wi-Fi button would be grayed out after restarting the iPhone. On May 4, 2018, Apple acknowledged the issue through an internal memo. If an affected iPhone 7 was no longer covered by warranty, Apple said its service providers could request an exception for this particular issue. The exemptions abruptly ended in July 2018 when Apple deleted the internal document. Many customers have complained Apple has charged customers around $350 to fix the issue. Many customers complain the issue first appeared after a software update.

On the Mac front, the obvious reminder is the whole butterfly keyboard fiasco, plaguing different generations of MacBooks from 2015 to 2019. It took Apple an insufferably long time to acknowledge the issue and take remediating actions, and despite the bad press, customer complaints, and lawsuits, the company always tried to downplay the issue, saying it only affected a relatively small percentage of users. I have a sizeable archive of email messages from friends, acquaintances, and readers of my blog telling me their horror stories and dreadful Apple Store experiences, like undergoing 3 or 4 keyboard replacements where only the first (or, in rare cases, the first two) came at no cost for the customer. This happened before the extended keyboard service program Apple finally launched in 2018. I have readers of my blog who wrote me at the time telling me that their MacBook with butterfly keyboard had cost them in keyboard replacements almost as much as the initial cost of the laptop itself, not to mention their forced downtime during repairs.

And many of those who vented their frustration to me shared the same sentiment — they felt betrayed, cheated, and sometimes even gaslit when complaining at Apple Stores. Reader Kelly G. — after bringing her 2015 12-inch retina MacBook to an Apple Store for the third time with unresponsive keys — told me that they made her feel as if the cause of the issue was her mishandling the MacBook rather than a design flaw.

And all these people ultimately made the same remark in their messages: if Apple had handled the whole thing with honesty, candour, and directness from the start, they in turn would have been more understanding and Apple’s reputation wouldn’t have taken the hit it took. Dieter Bohn wrote at The Verge in 2020:

More than anything else, though, the whole butterfly keyboard saga has been a huge reputation hit for Apple.

For those who thought Apple was sacrificing functionality for thinness across its entire product lineup, the butterfly keyboard looked like confirmation. For those who felt Apple was intentionally making its devices harder to repair as a way to further lock them down and also cut out third-party repair shops, it was another data point. For those who felt Apple had stopped paying attention to the Mac, here was a prime example of a problem allowed to languish to years. For those who felt Apple is still trying to create a “reality distortion field” where everything it makes is great but the truth is much more mundane, well… you get the picture.

The butterfly keyboard hurt Apple’s reputation precisely because the outlines of its problems and Apple’s response to them lined up with some of the biggest complaints people have about the company.

Earlier, I called Apple’s attempts to save the butterfly keyboard obstinate, but a less charitable way of putting it is simply to call it hubris. For some, it called Apple’s judgment into question. How could the company fail to see — or refuse to admit — that it was shipping a bad product?

In more recent times there was the display issue affecting 24-inch M1 iMacs. I already talked about it in this post from last September; essentially, customers who bought this iMac, about one year and half after purchase, saw the appearance of persistent horizontal lines at the bottom of the display, a problem caused by a degrading display cable, for which the only solution (due to how the iMac is designed) is to replace the whole LCD. In their reporting for MacRumors in October 2024, Joe Rossignol wrote: Some customers who contacted Apple about the issue said the company offered them an exemption, resulting in their iMac being repaired for free, but other customers said they had to pay for service. My brother-in-law was affected by the issue, and the service cost him around €705. In my post on the matter, I concluded:

Now, back to the iMac display issue, as the technician contacted by “Jotap62” explains, if the iMac’s display flex cable “has to sustain a very high voltage (around 50V) to power the LCD (this despite the iMac’s power supply being 15.9V)”, I find it hard to believe that none of the hardware gurus at Apple didn’t know that. I’m not an engineer, nor a hardware guru, but what I suspect is that those responsible of designing and assembling the innards of the 24-inch M‑series iMac were given the daunting task of fitting everything into that super-thin chassis, and something got to give. And this kind of flex cable was a compromise, the ‘okay-enough’, ‘it’ll last enough’ solution.

What infuriates me is that this is the kind of problem the manufacturer certainly knows about, but they also know it won’t trigger immediately. Customers then are faced with a costly out-of-warranty replacement, where the right thing to do would be to treat this as a known manufacturing issue and offer a free replacement. (Especially considering that — and this is the other infuriating bit — even after a replacement the issue is likely to reoccur). Maybe it’s also a case of components that are below Apple’s standards or requirements, but the outcome is the same — customers shouldn’t pay for these mistakes.

But these are hardware examples. Isn’t the debate focused on software?

Well, yes, but the problem — the bullshitting — has made its way into the company’s attitude since Apple’s main bullshit filter passed away in October 2011. Ever since Cook became CEO and scrambled the org chart of executives, the impression I’ve had is that a lot of other, less apparent things got scrambled inside the company. And the software side suffered as a consequence.

I have given Cook the benefit of the doubt a lot of times, and I’m not putting the blame entirely on him, but for me that something in the State of Cupertino which is rotten now has been rotting for years under Cook’s tenure.

The trajectory taken by user interface design, system software quality and first-party software production has been on a steady decline since… let’s say 2014, with the advent of Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite. Yosemite was a visual departure from its predecessors, and the Mac OS equivalent of iOS 7 on the iPhone, with many similar controversial UI decisions — like loss of depth and contrast in the interface, loss of legibility in redesigned UI elements such as buttons and text fields, but most baffling for me was the change of system font from Lucida Grande to Neue Helvetica, something that thankfully was swiftly rectified in the following release, OS X 10.11 El Capitan.

Just like the iOS releases that came after iOS 7 attempted to correct or attenuate the most radical UI changes and decisions, the same happened on Mac OS from El Capitan to Catalina. Then Big Sur was another ‘iOS 7‑like’ reset, and Monterey to Sequoia the following corrective iterations.

But this is just the visuals, the most superficial aspect. The substance — UI and software quality — has got progressively more brittle. Solid UI foundations have been weakened by constantly ‘fixing’ what was not broken, undoing consistent and well-thought UI decisions often simply for the sake of ‘giving the place a splash of fresh paint’. Important UI elements like buttons and scroll bars have been flattened and ‘disappeared’ in the name of a questionable ultra-minimalist approach coming from a design team seemingly confusing industrial design with haute couture, or taking inspiration from Dieter Rams simply by looking at his designs and not reading about why such designs look like that.

Over the years Mac OS has become more locked-down, more dumbed-down, more bugged, more insidious to troubleshoot when things don’t go as intended. Aspects that ‘just worked’ now work more mediocrely, such as wireless connections, Disk Utility, Time Machine.

Three years ago, in Raw power alone is not enough, I wrote:

Apple’s first-party applications included with Mac OS are mediocre at best. Their pro apps appear to be more maintained than developed with the aim of advancement, with the possible exception of Final Cut Pro (video professionals, feel free to chime in). Apps that were previously good-quality, powerful, and versatile have been neutered and have become ‘just okay’ or ‘good enough’. The Utilities folder in Mac OS has been slowly but surely depopulated over time. iOS apps with an ingenious premise, like Music Memos, are being left behind as flashes in the pan. The consensus with iTunes was that Apple should have split it into different apps so that these could be better at handling specific tasks than the old monolithic media manager. Apple eventually did split iTunes into different apps, but forgot the second part of the assignment. The result is that I still go back to a Mac with iTunes to handle my media, and I’m not the only one.

Aperture overall was a better application than Adobe Lightroom when the two apps coexisted. Apple could have kept improving Aperture and kept making it better than Lightroom. Instead they gave up. We now have Photos as sole ‘sophisticated’ Apple photo tool. Which is neither fish (iPhoto) nor flesh (Aperture).

[…] Apple’s chip and hardware advancements have inspired the competition (Intel) to do better, and that’s a great thing. On the software side, I’ve seen very little from Apple to be considered remotely inspirational.

In that piece I also talk about iWeb and iBooks Author, two applications with great potential, which ended up basically thrown in the rubbish.

iMovie, possibly the oldest prosumer first-party Mac app (it first appeared bundled with the iMac G3 DV in 1999!), kept getting better in future iterations until iMovie ’11. Everything after that was just maintenance and stagnation.

The iWork suite is another example of a series of apps that started out with the best intentions, but from a UI and functionality standpoint the first versions — from iWork ’05 to iWork ’09 — are the better, with iWork ’09 being perhaps the most mature and versatile, in my opinion. After the 2013 overhaul, things got worse. Quoting Wikipedia:

On October 22, 2013, Apple announced an overhaul of the iWork software for both the Mac and iOS. Both suites were made available via the respective App Stores. […]

The new OS X versions have been criticized for losing features such as multiple selection, linked text boxes, bookmarks, 2‑up page views, mail merge, searchable comments, ability to read/export RTF files, default zoom and page count, integration with AppleScript. Apple has provided a road-map for feature re-introduction, stating that it hopes to reintroduce some missing features within the next six months.

Some features were reintroduced later, continues the entry, but the old Apple Support document referenced by Wikipedia is (surprise surprise) no longer available.

I haven’t kept much track of these coming and going features, as I’ve been using Keynote, Pages, and Numbers very sparingly over the years, and for tasks with very limited scope. But ever since that 2013 overhaul, they have all felt pretty much the same, version after version. This is not the ‘good’ consistency, just stagnation.

Okay, this is about software quality. But isn’t the debate focused on Apple damaging their reputation by announcing Apple Intelligence features and then failing to ship them in time, etc.?

Yes, but it is important to understand that things don’t typically happen in a vacuum. Apple’s stance towards hardware blunders, and Apple’s negligence towards their own software are all underlying currents that have been — sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly — shaping the trajectory the company is currently on. And I’m just an outside observer, with almost-zero knowledge of what happens inside Apple Park, but I can’t shake the feeling that the point of origin of this trajectory has been the post-Jobs internal restructuring.

Under Jobs, Apple was rather selective regarding the markets they wanted to be participating in. Under Cook, there’s this constant urge of being present everywhere, whether with a product or a service. Consequence: many more internal departments popping up, more managers micromanaging, more secrecy and fear of leaks probably leading to worse interdepartmental communication, more resource fragmentation. And we see design choices that seem more like the result of too many people having a say, or product directions dictated by teams not directly involved in the product, and so forth.

Of the excerpts reported by Tsai in his post, those that ring the truest to me are by Jesper, Tim Bray, and Pierre Igot.

Jesper absolutely nails it in his piece:

My thought after leaving this to fester a bit is that Apple today is focused on being Apple, and some might say on staying Apple. Apple before was focused on building products. […]

The things John Gruber noted, pretty much to a T, would not have been issues if Apple was all about just building the product. Most of the hot water that Apple is in, no matter what the reason, it wouldn’t be in if it was not first focused on being Apple.

Which is a charitable way of saying what I would have said — that today Apple is more focused on style and brand than on substance. And Bray’s remark, in all its bluntness, is the correct answer to the question I and many others have routinely raised: Why do Apple’s priorities seem so fucked up? — the most recent example being Apple Intelligence and the rumoured interface overhaul coming for iOS 19 and Mac OS 16.

And Pierre Igot’s observation, not mincing words either: Something IS indeed rotten in the State of Cupertino, but that rot is not new. To me, it feels like the Apple Intelligence fiasco is the accumulation of Apple’s software failures over the past 10–15 years finally coming to a head. They are just not very good at making software anymore.

Let’s remember these words at the next WWDC, when Federighi will tell us all about Mac OS’s ‘new look’ and superficial retouches, while we’re aching for better quality software, fixing what is indeed broken, and a more usable and useful operating system.