Dear Apple,
When the latest round of updates were announced earlier this month I was really hopeful that some of the bugs I’ve been seeing on my Apple devices would be squashed and all would be right in It Just Works land.
Apparently I was very, very wrong on holding out hope.
HomeKit continues to be awful and unfortunately progress on that front is headed in the wrong direction. I finally realized that you made some subtle changes to Siri. Before the latest update I could say, “Hey Siri, get ready for bed” and she would run the automation I created two years ago called “Get Ready For Bed”. Since the latest update she can no longer do that and now I must say, “Hey Sir, turn on Get Ready For Bed”. Because Siri apparently has a considerably different grasp of “natural language” interfaces when it comes to English. When I do this new song and dance she’ll try to turn on “Get Ready For Bed” but will tell me that she can’t talk to some of my devices while turning the same lights at a brightness of 5%. (The automation sets the brightness at 30%).
Then we move to iOS and iPadOS, where I’m apparently being punished on a daily basis for having the audacity to use my personal email server instead of relying on iCloud email. I realize the IMAP protocol used by email servers has only been around since 1990, so it’s hard to plan on what’s going to endure, but the built in Mail client is REALLY struggling with IMAP now. All my non-Apple devices (GASP, but I must to maintain sanity) have absolutely zero, nada, zip issues with accessing the exact same account but Mail.app tells me there’s email when there isn’t, there isn’t email when there is, hangs on prompts with “Connecting…” for an inordinate amount of time and now has the trick of leaving the body of my email in the window after I’ve deleted it, so anyone that might steal my iDevice can see the contents of the email I deleted because I had the audacity to think that delete would delete.
That’s a run on sentence up there that makes the writer seem out of breath because that’s exactly how I feel when it comes to iDevices. Exasperated.
I have a very functional M1 Mac mini for personal use. The latest version of MacOS is so riddled with bugs and questionable UI design choices, I’m finding myself using my non-iDevices more than ever. And what’s up with Stage Manager? What is it really suppose to do? And why did you enshittify the settings panel in MacOS?
I’ve always been a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to life. It’s just the way my brain is wired. Much of the reason I pay the Apple Tax for your devices is because you were headed in that direction back in the day, but on top of the “same old, same old” approach you’re taking on everything you release (hardware, software, services) and telling us that it’s brand new, these bugs are really detracting from the Apple experience. I’m going to be looking for a new laptop in the not-so-distant future. If things continue as they are right now, there are plenty of non-iDevice options out there that will fit the bill just fine for me.
And as for your HomeKit travesty, I’m going to end up just building my own private ecosystem with plenty of free and open-source alternatives out there. I simply can’t trust you to do the home automation thing with any sort of reliability or consistency anymore.
