There's a website called Bugs Apple Loves that tracks how much collective human time has been wasted because Apple refuses to fix long-standing bugs. It even lets you edit the estimates yourself. The fact that it exists, and that it resonates with so many people, tells you everything about where Apple's relationship with its users has gone. I've been an Apple user for years. I'm typing this on a Mac because, honestly, it's still the best laptop hardware you can buy for the price. It's light, it's fast, the build quality is unmatched. But the software? The experience of actually using these devices day to day? Something broke a long time ago, and nobody at Apple seems to care enough to fix it.

The UX philosophy that died with Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was obsessive about user experience in a way that bordered on irrational. He insisted that the circuit boards inside the original Macintosh be beautiful, even though no customer would ever see them. His father taught him to make the back of a fence just as good as the front, because "you will know." That philosophy permeated everything Apple built during his era. Jobs believed that the best experience is always simple. Apple's success wasn't built on having the most features. It was built on making things feel like they "just work." When users felt that, they were grateful. They told their friends. They came back. After Jobs died in October 2011, that philosophy started to erode. A former Apple engineer publicly claimed that the company "went rotten," that quality control over software and design collapsed, and that many products being released wouldn't have gotten approved under Jobs. Whether or not that's entirely fair, the sentiment has only grown louder over the years. Fast Company noted that while Apple is doing better than even an optimist would have predicted by most business metrics, the company still has a "Steve Jobs-shaped hole in it." The gap isn't in revenue or market cap. It's in taste. It's in the relentless, sometimes unreasonable insistence that every detail matters.

The butterfly keyboard: five years of denial

If you want a case study in how post-Jobs Apple handles product flaws, look no further than the butterfly keyboard. In 2015, Apple introduced a new keyboard mechanism for the MacBook that was thinner but catastrophically unreliable. A single speck of dust could cause keys to stick, repeat, or stop working entirely. The repair required replacing the entire top assembly of the laptop, a process that was neither cheap nor quick. Apple spent five years trying to fix this keyboard. Three generations of revisions. A membrane layer added in 2018. A service program. And eventually, a $50 million class-action settlement. The lawsuit alleged that Apple knew about the problems and sold the devices anyway. It wasn't until May 2020 that Apple finally gave up and switched its entire laptop line back to scissor-switch keyboards. Five years. For a keyboard. On machines that started at $2,399. Under Jobs, this kind of multi-year, publicly embarrassing hardware defect would have been treated as a crisis. Under Cook, it was managed like a PR inconvenience.

The iOS keyboard is somehow worse

I hate typing on my iPhone. There, I said it. iOS autocorrect is genuinely awful. It regularly changes correct words into wrong ones. If you backspace and retype the same word, it autocorrects it again to the same wrong word. The swipe-to-type feature feels like an afterthought. Next-word suggestions are often useless. This isn't just me being picky. Reddit threads and Hacker News discussions are filled with thousands of users sharing the same frustration. One popular thread on r/iphone titled "How is typing on iOS so terrible after all these years?!" captured it perfectly: the poster reported spending 60% of their typing time correcting autocorrect. In early 2025, a video analysis went viral explaining that the iOS keyboard's touch targets appear to be miscalibrated, causing systematic typing errors. The keyboard literally registers taps in the wrong place. This is a fundamental input mechanism on a device people use for hours every day, and Apple either can't or won't fix it.

Missing basics that everyone else figured out

Here's something that still baffles me: you cannot close all apps at once on iOS. You have to swipe up on each app individually. Android has had a "Close All" button for years. Apple's official position is that you shouldn't need to close apps because iOS manages memory intelligently. Fine. But the app switcher still exists, and people still use it, and forcing them to swipe away 30 apps one at a time is a terrible experience. The lack of this basic affordance isn't a principled design choice. It's stubbornness. iPadOS multitasking has been its own saga. For years, Apple resisted giving the iPad proper windowing, insisting on a simplified model that frustrated power users. They finally caved with iPadOS 26, adding real overlapping windows, and the response from the Six Colors report card panelists was telling: "iPadOS 26 has brought me back to the iPad in a big way. I feel like Apple has finally taken off the training wheels." They could have done this years ago.

Cool features nobody uses

Apple loves to demo features like Universal Clipboard, AirDrop, Continuity Camera, and Handoff. They look magical on stage. In practice, I've used cross-device copy and paste maybe once or twice. AirDrop a handful of times. Continuity features occasionally. These are genuinely clever ideas, but they're unreliable enough and infrequent enough in actual use that they feel more like tech demos than core features. The setup requirements are fussy, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi handshakes sometimes fail silently, and when things don't work, there's no useful error message. Just nothing happening. Apple markets these as reasons to stay in the ecosystem. But for most people, they're cool party tricks you show someone once and then forget about. The ecosystem lock-in comes from iMessage, not from Handoff.

Software quality in free fall

The 2025 Six Colors Apple Report Card, a respected annual survey of tech journalists and Apple watchers, gave Apple OS quality a D+ with an average score of 2.7 out of 5. App quality got a C. These are historically terrible scores for a company that built its reputation on software excellence. The Liquid Glass redesign introduced in macOS Tahoe and iOS 26 was described by panelists in terms usually reserved for genuine disasters. John Siracusa called it "the worst user interface update in the history of the Mac." John Gruber said it was "so bad that I'm refusing to install it." Multiple panelists noted they received more unsolicited negative comments from friends and family about this update than any other in recent memory. Beyond aesthetics, the complaints are about basic reliability. Camera failures, Face ID becoming unresponsive, Wi-Fi issues, broken VPN software, alarm clocks that don't go off. These aren't edge cases. These are fundamental things that people depend on. Craig Hockenberry captured the core problem: "I'd love to see Apple take a release cycle to focus on quality." John Siracusa went deeper: "The process of polishing existing features is vastly undervalued by today's Apple."

The golden cage

Here's the thing that makes all of this so frustrating: Apple is still, in many ways, the only option. Mac hardware is genuinely excellent. The MacBook Air is light, powerful, silent, and reasonably priced. Apple Silicon delivers performance and battery life that no competitor can match. The Six Colors report card gave hardware reliability an A, with a score of 4.5 out of 5. Federico Viticci noted he hasn't had a major hardware issue in 17 years of writing about Apple. So you're stuck. The hardware is the best it's ever been. The software is the worst it's been in years. And because the ecosystem is designed to keep you in, switching means giving up the best laptops, the best phones (hardware-wise), and the best tablets on the market. Tim Cook's legacy, as one panelist put it, will be "unbeatable hardware anchored by mediocre software and design." That's a brutal epitaph for a company that once stood for the seamless union of both.

What would Jobs do?

It's easy to romanticize the past. Jobs-era Apple had its own problems. MobileMe was a disaster. The iPhone 4 antenna issue was real. Final Cut Pro X's launch alienated professional users. But the difference was in the response. When something was broken, there was a sense of urgency, a sense of shame about it. Jobs famously said that when the sales and marketing people run the company instead of the product people, "the product people get driven out of the decision making." He was talking about what happened to Apple the first time he left. It's hard not to see the same pattern repeating. Apple doesn't need more features. It doesn't need another redesign. It needs someone at the top who looks at the iOS keyboard and feels personally offended that it doesn't work properly. Someone who would rather delay a release than ship something half-baked. Someone who understands that the back of the fence matters. Until that happens, we're stuck in the golden cage: beautiful hardware, frustrating software, and a company that stopped caring about the details that once made it great.

References