apple

Apple, we’ve got a problem. What are you doing? There are at least three things that bug me every time I use your stuff.

Your phones don’t register clicks. I click things two, three times, nothing happens. I see the ui register that it’s been touched, the color changes in your Liquid Glass UI, but still nothing happens. So I click again, again. From your perspective, I’m sure there is a good reason for this. But from mine, your stuff is just broke.

The predictive text is never, I mean ever, the right word choices. It’s never the word ending that I am aiming for. Sometimes it’s not even any of the words I could be aiming for. It’s trash. I’m about to turn off predictive text, just like I have turned off autocorrect.

The one that I just discovered today is that deleting bookmarks from the homepage is some junk rigmarole. It’s not just Shortcuts that need this weird hack to get rid of, but also Web Apps too. It’s not nice.

Of course there are more things than this, more than the rest of the paragraph too, this is just off the top of my head. Slippy typing for short words is not great; you can’t just ignore words like “we” or “as” or “see”. The slide-to-type for long words isn’t great either, but at least I can tell that it’s me that’s going all wrong. Spotlight on my iPad is slow slow slow for no reason; it’s an M1 Pro, not new but no reason for this action to drag. And, opening the camera with the side button just doesn’t work most of the time. The camera opens. Then the camera closes again.

I’m not saying that I’ll be shopping around, but it is one reason I still like to throw my phone in a lake every weekend, and that one day I too will retire from tech to live offline.¹ It’s not only these interaction challenges that lead me here, it’s also the content that your product is a conducting vessel for. You should not be satisfied that a happy customer needs to take a happiness break every week from your wares.

jg