I agree. App store is really horrible. Why is it that when I'm searching for a first party or a very very popular, the first result and many of the other results are weird scammy malware like things? I don't particularly care about the stupid homepage ads tho, I think thats just because I have "personalize app store recommendations" turned off.

Search inside Settings (both mac and ios) was also really really stupid for a long while. Why are you taking me to some random accessibility toggle when I'm looking for "displays" ? But I checked right now and it's good.

LOL at the risk of sounding like a shill, I think Apple was right on time with these features. They added it after on-device CPU/neural engine was finally powerful and efficient enough. These features arrived at once on macs, iphones and ipads, and they arrived at the same time on your friends' devices.

IMO Android suffers from not controlling it's hardware. I can't ever be sure if the hyped new feature will come to my phone because I'm not using a Pixel or a Samsung.

I just have a cheap second hand PC with a couple of good drives running LAN only Immich and a few other backup tools. This, in parallel to cloud backup, makes the setup both mobile and reasonably fault tolerant.

I'm quite wary of using SD card for backup. Too easy for me to lose.

There is a list of valid characters accepted for a passcode. That list was created, the characters debated, and a consensus reached by Apple engineers (I hope, for all our sakes. I don't want to imagine a world where this bare minimum level of engineering diligence wasn't done by a trillion dollar company)

Just have an automated keyboard test for every new release to ensure those characters aren't broken.

Agreed, but just to be clear; I was asking how would you test that assuming you still wanted to remove a character that was previously present.

That's the thing: you don't! The charset for passwords should be always inputable even if no one is using it.

If you wanted to reduce the size of the charset, you'd basically create a transition plan, and ask everyone in the world with a passcode to set a new passcode and validate that against the new charset/rules. A company that can perfectly transition the world from x86 to ARM can surely manage that.

He famously shipped the original Macintosh with a keyboard without arrow keys to force buyers to use the mouse.

His vision of perfection didn't always match common sense. There are quite a few examples of this.

I always cringe a little when I read these "jobs would have rolled over in his grave" comments.

Jobs was a perfectionist and a minimalist. Part of minimalism is that sometimes you delete marginal features (arrow keys) that you still end up wanting back.

If you never delete too many features, you aren’t deleting enough features.

He would've not let the abysmal slop like iOS 26 UI to ship ever.

Some things he didn't appear to care much about, the polished UX was his schtick.

I am 100% sure that Steve Jobs could have shipped a broken Czech keyboard if that was in pursuit of some random abstract like purity or minimalism. "iOS keyboard has too many keys. Reduce keys make them larger. People should not use these obscure symbols anyway". (extrapolated from a couple of biographies and a couple of books on 1980s Apple I read, this is very consistent with his character).

As for iOS 26, no reasonable person would have let it ship. From one source (John Gruber -> "Bad Dye Job") the previous head of Apple's UI design team who lead the UI team was just not a UX designer, he was just a visual designer or something. I think it shows.

You are over-exaggerating.

As much of a snob that Jobs was it's nonsensical to say that he would've knowingly insisted on changes that locked users out from their devices. That's just nonsense. At the very least there would've been a prompt to change the password phrase or some such in upgrade. And if it did happen as an oversight, it would've been patched on the first report and some heads would've rolled.

But that's the difference. Jobs might've done something like this for a reason. That's not what happened here. He probably wouldn't have tolerated it as a bug.

Depends on whether using someone else’s windows machine leaves you crazy annoyed.

My windows machine is also “fine” for the most part because i turned off whatever I could and tried to mod whatever I could not. Even so, every once in a while, typing “code” and being taken to an edge bing search makes me want to rip it to shreds.

And I delay every update as far as possible and am filled with dread when it finally wont let me postpone it.

It isn’t that fine now that I think about it.

So you switched something as fundamental as the OS, and were pissed that it was … different?

You can fault Linux as the primary desktop environment for a few things, but that it’s different to MS is not one of those.

Do you also rant about having no windows key on a MacBook?

Yeah, it's kind of annoying. But middle click scroll is something I use literally every single second of every single day on my web browser. It's a deal-breaker.

Ok that's fair ig. I used to be a fairly heavy user of the middle click scroll feature on windows like a decade ago. Made the switch to Debian w/ Awesome, and that habit just casually fell away. The switch is probably a 3 day annoyance at most. IMO arrow keys and scroll are fine. On laptop trackpads two finger scrolling and momentum scrolling are far more accurate IMO. Also if you have the mx master mouse, it has a crazy good scroll wheel that you can "throw".

Also you can turn on Firefox specific middle click scroll feature "autoscroll" which is the same thing. They may have similar stuff for other browsers. Long story short, in less clicks than it takes you to turn off stupid notifications and ads on Windows, you can get a semi decent middle-click-scroll feature where you need it the most.

being fined != physical, possibly fatal violence with body-cam turned off and irrevocable immunity

Outside corporate setting, it is also the fact that most windows systems you encounter are installed on cheap machines by people who just care that their word processor works a few times a month. And you were probably forced to fix it.

At the same time, as someone with a well maintained Windows gaming rig, I don't like spending time in the OS these days. Something about transparently doing stuff that puts money in their pocket while inconveniencing me gives me the ick.

And Windows laptops are such a commodity business that prices are incredibly low. So PC makers load ‘em up with junk because they get paid for those deals.

They are more incentivized by that than the few lost sales from people who know better to look for low crud machines.

And on more expensive machines they’d just be leaving money on the table. So they still often ship bundled crud.

Similar to spyware on TVs. Margins are razor thin. They’re going to make them up somewhere.

> did not care enough to make the experience good

Part of that good experience is talking to a genuine human

thats a fair point. I think my reaction was more about the company not trying, not really about the AI itself. but yeah if you are meeting your potential employer for the first time a real person just sets a different tone. hard to argue with that.