Every single day, my computers do terrible things, for no apparent reason, that waste my time. It’s a fact of life whether working or playing on a modern electronic device. Every time we connect for a work call, my friend Jada’s wireless headphones may or may not connect, maybe with or without microphone or sound, maybe requiring a full reboot of her expensive Surface laptop. The thing doesn’t have a headphone jack, so basically, fuck you.
I’m running macOS 10.14 (which, let me remind you, is only 2 years old, and most OS updates used to happen on a 2- to 4-year interval, shipped on disks, and were expected to work with constant patching). I do light web and software development, run 5 different chat apps because we live in all kinds of hell, listen to music, and browse the web. I have to restart my laptop at least once a day, because no matter which combination of these things I do, it starts getting slow. Every Apple engineer should scream when they read that, because they are exactly where Microsoft was two decades ago. Except MS had these problems while admirably maintaining compatibility with old software; most Mac software from more than a couple years ago just straight-up won’t run on modern macOS, either because 32-bit was deprecated (presumably just to make Apple’s job easier), or because APIs change and break often enough that software just can’t keep up.
There are dozens of smaller and larger examples every single day, that I complain about briefly (or don’t, because it’s not worth it), and then move on from, because there’s nothing to do about any of it. The people who make fortunes on hot software don’t seem to listen. Apple is an impenetrable shell, bent on making their platforms “new!” and worse annually. It’s all fucked.
AND, none of this is important, in the big picture, compared with, like, anything. Except in the daily stress and loss of productive time for billions of people every day. Which, who cares? Apple’s got two trillion dollars. The new watch is brighter. Go fuck yourself.
This post by Nikita (via Michael Tsai) is a great illustration and summary of the problem.
The point is, this happens all the time, every day, multiple times a day, and one person can dedicate only so much time to dealing with it. The stream of minor annoyances is so large people just got tired of dealing with it! And no, there’re no better alternatives.
To prove my point, I decided to record every broken interaction I had during one day. Here’s the full list I wrote yesterday, September 24, 2020.
It’s cathartic — and dispiriting — to read this litany of tiny assholes, some of which I encounter (Slack, get fucked), many of which I don’t. Which shows it isn’t just me. Anything you try to do on a computer is a quiet nightmare. Just now, trying to select and copy text on my iPhone that updated itself to iOS 14, I… couldn’t. The cursor was going ABOVE my thumb, presumably because they removed the useful loupe, presumably because it didn’t “look clean,” and anyway I couldn’t get the text to select even when I moved my thumb down, because it just kept hovering around. Eventually it worked. Why? I dunno. It worked fine 2 years ago.
…
To end on a lighter note, I’d love for you to go to Nikita’s site and click the day/night toggle in the upper right. It does something small that surprised and delighted me. That’s all we want! Work well, surprise nicely.
