I’ve been using Apple products for almost 18 years now. I adore their hardware and used to be a big fan of their software ecosystem. However, the software quality has plummeted lately, to the point where I’ve decided not to buy any new Apple products for the time being.

Because it just does not work (reliably).

I will continue using the devices I already have, and I do have quite a few. But I will actively resist the urge to acquire new flashy products from Cupertino until I feel that Apple gets its act together again.

Here are just a few random examples:

  1. My new Airpods Pro (2nd Gen) just do not appear in Find My.
  2. The for us essential Screen Time feature often doesn’t work at all on my youngest son’s iPhone.
  3. Both of my Macs often lose all their entries in System Settings / Accessibility, rendering a bunch of apps useless until I manually add them back in.
  4. System Settings itself are a nightmare.
  5. Messages ALWAYS informs me that my son has enabled “do not disturb mode,” preventing him from receiving incoming messages. Of course, that is not true at all.
  6. Screen Time requests from my son show up in a group chat with him and my wife. I have to delete all messages daily in that chat because the Screen Time messages make the thread unresponsive. It even crashes on macOS. So, the chat becomes unusable for communication. We have to use another app - WTF?
  7. Preview under macOS loses text notes for annotations I’ve made after saving a PDF. This is a complete showstopper for the entire app. Data loss should be unacceptable.
  8. My Home Pod mini in the kitchen often forgets timers. This really makes me happy during cooking.
  9. Don’t even get me started on the general reliability of Siri.
  10. Recently, I discovered that many files do not appear in Spotlight search. It’s frustrating when I know a file is there, but it simply cannot be found. This is almost as bad as data loss.
  11. And then there all those little bugs I just ignore on a daily basis. There are definitely enough to start a “a bug a day” series …