Have they solved GPT5.6 SOL's propensity to over-engineer and over-complicate? You'd ask SOL to do something relatively simple, and find four single-use methods, an interface, and a factory-factory.
I actually preferred 5.6-Terra not because it is technically superior (it isn't) but because it had better instincts to NOT do this stuff.
PS - Speaking of better instincts, have they closed the UI-design gap at all? I keep a Claude subscription just because /design produces significantly higher quality UI design/UI feedback/UI refinement than anything I've seen from OpenAI.
I force OpenAI models to use image generation for design, then an iteration loop until it matches the image gen.
This is frustratingly manual and takes many more repetitions compared to Claude (and especially Claude Design) which "just work", but it's a big step change over the default.
FWIW, Codex's "Product Design" plugin basically is this workflow (minus built-in iteration, but the model in one prompt will still do its own internal iteration), it'll generate 3 images for you to choose from and then build from that + feedback
The UI design gap is something I’ve noticed as well, in things as simple as ASCII diagrams. Claude has a more human touch. All the diagrams GPT 5.6 generated for me were dressed up lists with too many pipe symbols.
Astra 6 was a huge improvement over Sol 5.6 for UI work. I haven't tried Sol 6 yet for it (it's only been a few minutes).
The GPT / Codex models have always been "overengineer" personalities. I prefer that to "I left a pile of race conditions lying around and big gaps in testing" though, which is what I was getting from Opus at times.
But yes both Astra and Sol veer on the side of paranoid. And honestly that's better for team work. For solo work where you just want to yeet something, it can be tiring.
You learn to tame the GPT "personality" on this front by combing over once a week and asking it to find and exterminate pointless tests, clean abstractions etc.
Not the person you're responding to, but I have the same feelings they do and to answer your question for me at least, yes.
IMO 5.6 Sol had this weird dead zone between medium and high where medium under engineered and took short cuts and high over engineered and ignored instructions it didn't agree under the guise of trying being helpful. The whole 5.6 line was the first release from OpenAI where it felt like reasoning level really mattered and was incredibly finicky.
I haven't felt similar issues with GPT 6 though and am very happy with Astra low/med/high as my default choices depending on the task.
In general, I felt like with 5.6 the effort level did less than previous to make the models smarter and more just increased the complexity of the response. I have a half joke theory based only on vibes that OpenAI splitting 5.6 into Sol/Terra/Luna is where the intelligence split happened and so the effort levels were just like "think harder about the decision you already made". So like if the model decided the earth was flat on low effort it'd just say something like "the earth is flat because the horizon is flat". If it was on xhigh reasoning it'd give you a massively complex answer about how the sun reflects light because of the ozone layer and why people flying in planes can see a curve. In both cases though, adding more effort wouldn't get it to realize the earth was round. It just made the answer about it being flat more complex.
To be clear, that theory is not meant to be taken too seriously. It's not based on anything other than vibes. It's just my way of explaining to myself something I'm frustrated about to myself.
You forgot to include whatever you're proposing instead.
"Trust me bro, Astra is better" isn't perhaps as useful as you seem to believe. I'm not even saying it is right or wrong, just that my opinion on this topic is still just one additional subjective data-point.
Only thing I wish with these benchmarks is that they would run repeat tests every couple of months. Then re-rank based on that too. We've seen a lot of performance fall-off after a couple of weeks with new releases.
Yeah unfortunately the benchmarks are usually provided by the company themselves, unquantized, thinking set to extra-extra-ultra-high, best of 10 runs, etc etc. It's hard to know how that's going to map to real world users.
For people with any kind of budget, Opus 5.5's [Medium] actually can make sense dollar per intelligence/dollar per task wise. Heck, it puts some other models to shame. [Max]'s cost is completely unhinged.
My most exciting recent release is actually 5.6 Luna, not because it is the best on any index, but the dollar per work is insane value for money. I find myself more exciting by "value" than hypothetical ceilings because I'm just not in that budget category.
That was true for me four weeks ago, but 2-3 weeks ago Luna turned into drivel in essentially the same complexity of task. I feel it came back somewhat in recent days but does feel like it's being manipulated.
I'm going to age myself real-bad here, but I remember back when RAD ("Rapid Application Development") was the hotness of the 90s. Microsoft Access, Visual Basic (6), and even web-development itself (e.g. PHP/Wordpress).
People today likely cannot relate, but a big concern back then was identical: If the non-tech users can write their own code/and or code is easier to write, why even learn to be a programmer? What's the point?
It seems absurd now but legitimately it was exactly the same stuff. Like then, programmers will fall into two camps, those that keep up and those that fall behind. The thing with LLMs (and agentic) is that it doesn't change WHAT we do but rather HOW we do it.
So will programmers exist in the early 2000s after RAD? Well turns out, yes, and in expanded numbers. Businesses just expected more from technology, and the personnel gap never really closed. With LLMs the same will likely happen - same number of people, higher expectation.
The limit on how many programmers they'd hire was never "wants." They always wanted more than they could get. The limit was budgets/money. Now more "wants" can be fulfilled (just like post-RAD/web), but the budgets are more or less similar.
PS - Although it should be noted that the economy is not in a good place currently, and we're seeing an unusual employment environment. A lot of which "AI" is blamed on, least of all because companies can save face that way.
I flagged this and wanted to explain my reasoning.
At the time of writing, the article states something that its own link doesn't support (i.e. it is inaccurate). CBP hasn't "suspended all personal prescription importation." What they've done is removed De Minimis Exemption (i.e. duty free below $800), and that's it. Meaning you can still important personal medication before and after Oct 22nd, what has changed is that now it is subject to normal duty.
Do I think this is bad for people importing personal medication? Absolutely I do, and I oppose it. However, I don't think misstating the argument is constructive nor warranted. You could make the argument using the facts on the ground, and then re-state that in the thread title.
So the story is worthy of discussion, and interesting (even the personal medication POV). But this link and this title aren't "it." Hopefully we can get a higher quality source and title on this topic.
It's not as simple as "You will now pay duty." Senders will be required to pay bond, and there will be a crushing load of new paperwork. Combined with extra duty, that will have the same effect as an outright ban.
This will be financially catastrophic for many Americans who may suddenly have to find hundreds of dollars a month.
That's standard operating procedure for any non-de-minimis importer. The $800 limit was only imposed in 2016, historically it was a lot lower than that.
This is commonly why, on Reddit in particular, you can get eaten alive.
Someone confident but incorrect, can often sound more convincing than someone with actual expertise. The expert must add caveats/hedge, because those are the facts on the ground, whereas the person reciting google can be entirely confident.
Of course the people judging aren't experts, so they side with confidence and simplicity. Heck, just writing shorter replies on Reddit is rewarded. Nobody reads the articles, let alone a paragraph-long reply.
That all being said though, there are limits. Sometimes LLMs on high-thinking go off on full tangents based on little, and don't have the self-awareness to bring it back.
I consider, on the contrary, caveating and hedging annoying 'typical redditor'/internet behaviors: they care more about being "technically correct" than conveying the message. On the internet, if you make even the tiniest mistake or simplification, someone will criticize you, so you're trained to always hedge. In normal discussions with friends you can just make general statements and people get what you mean.
You aren't arguing a "contrary" to what I actually wrote above. You're arguing with a strawman Redditor, and a point adjacent to what I was posting about - experts responding to topics within their actual realm of expertise.
So I won't be addressing this, for those reasons and others.
My experience has been very much the opposite of yours.
To an expert communicating with a layperson is a form of compression. You must turn some very complex idea into one that you suppose the other person can grasp given their limited frame of reference. It's always lossy, and you have to guess how much you can remove without sounding patronizing or being inaccurate. It's tough, and the more you know the tougher it gets.
Ever done that "explain what happens when I visit Google in my web browser" interview question?
A sales guy will answer in a sentence. An engineer might be able to talk about it for several days and still not be sure they didn't miss anything important. That much knowledge can actually be detrimental to communication.
What you're describing sounds precisely like the state of politics. The most successful politicians on both sides just scream "simple" solutions that don't stand up to even cursory examination. On the one hand, Trump, with 90% of his pronouncements being of that variety. And the DSA type, who just scream that we can fix everything if only we had much higher taxes (but ONLY for "billionaires" who would definitely pay them, perpetually, and wouldn't just leave).
I've been using it for several months since the developer beta came out; overall I'm extremely positive on it. One of their better releases that seemingly focused more on quality and refinements than new-features.
Siri is definitely worth using now, even if it remains still a work-in-progress/needs continued refinement. It can surprise you in good ways, but it isn't consistently good yet.
The keyboard remains unfixed, as is tradition. The same issues they've "fixed" like three or four releases now, seemingly are identically broken, and I'm lost faith they CAN fix it.
The iOS Keyboard and Search on Windows, are like the perpetually broken things that both companies have "fixed" every year for the last ten+ years and yet... It is almost farcical as this point.
Apple's search is so comically bad. For example, I can click on my applications, and I have an app called Chess. I can often type letters C-H-E-S-S and have it not show the Chess app. This is inside the applications folder!
Many people have complained before. Honestly I ONLY search for app names in spotlight search or application window, it should be trivial to make it actually work. Maybe i just need to vibecode some alternative search bar :(
It’s so much worse than that. This happens to me on a daily basis with both MacOS and iOS. Say I’m searching for Chess, I’ll get to the C-H and it’ll show the Chess app, but enter that next -E and it’s totally gone. It feels like the system is designed like “Well, I showed them Chess when they entered CH, but they kept typing, so they must not actually want Chess.” This ends up breaking for me like 95% of the time, and the only way around it is to search like “C”…wait for results…”H”…wait for results…etc. It’s maddening.
This, and then, if you notice, and backspace to remove the 'e', it doesn't put chess back into the search results, since it figures that everything that matches 'che' also matches 'ch', and so doesn't update it. Sometimes, if you add the 'e' again, it _will_ find chess, sometimes you need to type the 's', or even the final 's' before it gives you chess back again.
And sometimes, it finds what you want, but before you can select it, it decides that it has found something better, and places that in the place where you wanted to select, causing you to select the wrong thing. And then it thinks that because you selected this, it must be what you want, and starts to push it to the top…
Weird, the same stupid crap happens with Windows. I’ve had to learn the exact N character search to find the things I use often; any more or less and the result with that name is buried. It’s like Microsoft and Apple are just pip installing same broken search package.
I switched to Everything for search a while ago and haven’t looked back. For the start menu I replace it with Open Shell, which seems to find apps much more reliably.
Always turn off searching the internet as much as possible on both. Helps a ton. I think I set both windows and iOS to only search local applications and settings
Firefox's "awesome bar" behaves the same way. I guess it's either inherent to the problem somehow, or else everyone is sharing a library (unlikely), or else everyone just makes the same mistakes.
It's worse than this! You Type C-H-E then you go to press enter, and it changes the results as you're pressing it, opening the wrong thing! I've turned off all the search targets, except for applications and folders.
Yes. "UI Speed" should be a configurable thing, so that if the UI changes as you're choosing an item, it acts instead on _what was there_ at a brief moment in the past, e.g. 20-50ms ago.
Don't worry, airdrop does it too! I've accidentally sent airdrop requests to strangers from their profile picture moving under my finger as I'm approaching to touch someone else's. The single most idiotic design I've ever seen in UI. I don't use airdrop for anything sensitive anymore, obviously.
I really wish apps stopped doing that "search on type" thing in search boxes. You either need to have only a couple miliseconds of response time, or you need to confirm that you want the search process to start. Or maybe at least have some feedback showing "more content is loading, watch out, don't click".
The amount of misclicks daily because of crappy slow-but-should-be-fast search probably offsets by 10x the amount of time required to hit "enter" for the search to start.
For me search has been that way since the first MacOS 26.0 upgrade and apparently never fixed.
But speaking of quality overall (outside of the search glitch) - I use dual 5k LG monitors with my work MacBook and can get the MacOS Display Manager process to crash if I just enable variable rate refresh and put the computer to sleep, then wake it up. Apparently a known issue for a few years, still not fixed.
It's probably asynchronous reranking doing something weird. My guess is that the underlying ranking algorithms in these desktop search bars are very ropey, and they can't debug or diagnose because privacy reasons means the developers don't get to see what results were generated for different query/index combos. Also search is probably just not staffed most of the time.
So many platforms with search have a variation of this problem now.
The other issue with Mac search is that it never tells you when it’s done, so you can’t tell if it searched and failed to find something or is still searching.
'calc' used to bring up calculator, but now it becomes some widget to calculate distance inside the spotlight box. The worst thing is you can't even backspace out of it.
I'd take the widget! For me typing "calc" finds the "com.apple.calculator" folder. If I continue to "calcu" etc, it suggests "com.apple.ncplugin.calculator" instead. Brilliant intelligence right there.
For me the big one is whenever I type "sys" to get system settings, it pops up for a half second and then for some reason the top result is like "reset some system setting" and then I invariably get flashbanged because it turns off dark mode and there's no confirmation dialogue lmao. Maddening.
I've deactivated every single type of data in Spotlight except Applications. It goes out of its way to still suggest files like C system files or header files, like "system_library.c". It didn't wait for AI to turn against us.
I was trying to see what happens here. It does give the Sound settings panel as the first hit. But when I then press Return, it opens System Settings, but does not actually go to the Sound settings, but General.
Also, search inside the Settings app has been broken for many releases now. I always wonder if anyone inside Apple is actually using macOS or iOS.
I had this problem on Spotlight, I solved it once and never happened to me again, there is a setting to reindex all the files, which solves the issue. On iOS however I still have this problem.
I wish all this shit would just stop trying to search as I’m fucking typing. It’s like that person we all know that can’t hold their tongue for five fucking seconds and let you finish a sentence before the blurt something out.
Ah, but hitting enter now takes you to the top result! Therefore it has to search as you type, so there's something to activate as soon as you hit enter! /s
...I've been seeing this search style in more and more places recently, and I hate it. Let me type my search, then hit enter, then you can go find what I asked for. Don't slow everything down by searching on every character I type.
It’s called incremental search and it’s useful, but only when there’s some debouncing involved and the search results is presented at once or the items are sorted by the order they are found.
I can't search for Apples own Notes app. I've tried the name in my local language, I've tried the original english name of the app. Nothing. It will show me OneNote which isn't even installed anymore, but not the Notes app. Very strange.
- Or is the goal to disturb the user and make something impractical like in Google, so that people click on ads? Software has turned into a curse. The machines have risen.
I always assumed that was intentional to save you arriving through options. I find that behaviour quite useful as I can hit anything beginning with CHE just by typing more letters.
>> the only way around it is to search like “C”…wait for results…”H”…wait for results…
Some people don’t like that. I don’t know why you like having to wait but if they showed Chess for CHE you could still find other apps if you kept typing.
Maybe there are also people who like the lottery of results changing the instant you click on the app you want because it adds excitement to their lives.
FWIW, I find if I’m pushing the disk limit, Spotlight search becomes unusable. So I free up ~100GB (easy to do with iOS/Android dev artifacts, emulators, etc.) and then force a Spotlight re-index from the command line:
sudo mdutil -E /
You can check indexing status with:
mdutil -s /
After that it’s usually fine again until I start pushing the disk limit.
Every sibling comment's issues I've experienced. But a reindex after freeing enough disk space seems to be a semi-stable solution for me. If only I could write a tool to remind me to free disk space before it screws up spotlight. It would be nice if MacOS put the index on its own partition.
Spotlight worked best in OS X 10.4. It was near instantaneous on what is now considered ancient hardware. It's been steadily downhill from there.
Mostly because people still expect to use it to find "Recipe for Egg Salad.docx" without searching the entire Internet or executing some bizarre natural language query.
A common one I hit is "blu" showing bluetooth settings, but "blue" does not. Very frustrating to see the thing you are hoping for popup, but then go away as you type more if its name.
Android keyboard does that too. When I start typing my email address, for example, the keyboard app suggests the correct email after a few characters, but if I keep typing it disappears from the suggestions.
I have to send a daily email that always has the subject starting with "Work Diary". If I type "W", it doesn't come up. If I type "Wo" it comes up as the 3rd auto-complete suggestion. If I type any more characters, I have to type the entire two words. This is on Android, but I have a feeling it's no better on iOS.
I'd love to know the algorithm they're using for this. Fuzzy search seems like it was a mostly solved problem 20 years ago, and it's definitely worse than it was 10 years ago.
It would be interesting to learn what over engineered solution to fuzzy string matching is being used here to exhibit this behavior, so we never make the same mistake.
Seems like someone got updated KPIs and decided to try the most ham-fisted enshittification move to raise registrations. Oh, it is now possible again to see about five top reviews per item. Seems like loss of traffic was rough.
Just tried this on iOS 27 and both blu and blue showed me bluetooth settings. I saw someone in a different thread of this discussion mention resetting dictionaries helping with autocorrect, I wonder if there is something that would apply to this situation which helps.
At some point I got the damn Chess app every time I wanted to switch to Chrome. You know, typing cmd-space, ch and enter. I've learned I can't remove Chess from my computer. After numerous incantations of various spells and reboots and updates I think it started working normally again.
Breaking interfaces, Linus Torvalds had something to say about it that Apple should heed.
I struggle daily with Finder's search. It cannot find files in my Downloads folder even if I type the exact name. Do I need to rebuild some index or some other setting?
It couldn't hurt. I don't have problems like that.
mdutil -E -a
That command will erase and rebuild Spotlight index on all volumes.
Since Tahoe, Spotlight has multiple modes. You might have better luck forcing it into folder & files mode. That's command-2. So command-space, spotlight UI appears, keep holding command key, press 2. There's also 1 for applications only, 3 for "actions" and 4 for clipboard history.
The annoying thing with Finder is when you're in a folder, you start to search, and then it defaults to "This Mac" and not the god damn folder you're in.
That's because you have that set in your Finder Settings.
With the Finder open, go to Settings > Advanced, and change the drop-down at the bottom to "Search the Current Folder". This is something I do on the first run of every new Mac I set up.
On my incredibly midrange PC that has a midrange SSD in it, the Linux `find` and `grep` commands usually can find stuff much quicker than any 'accelerated' and 'cached' desktop search, even though the only caching they usually get is when the files are in the page cache because I have interacted with them. Even when that's not the case, it's faster AND more accurate that GNOME search or whatever search is in Windows Explorer.
Windows is the same - searching the fs is faster and more accurate than using these 'quick search' tools, which are borderline broken.
Search feels like it used to be much better in finding a balance between showing app vs files vs web - feels really broken somehow and I wonder if there’s any setting I can change.
The good part is you have the source so you can just fork it, fix the code to prioritize results properly, compile and install it to fix Ubuntu, then see if you can get your patch upstreamed. /s
For me it's gotten way better in iOS/macOS 27. It's also way faster. They claim to have rewritten the spotlight index to handle the new Siri integration.
The new Siri UX needs improvement and to match the UX of talking to chatGPT. At least in settings have an option to keep the Siri window always on top (just have a prominent X out to go to the screen below) and always listening ready to continue your conversation like the experience is with chatGPT.
Been running the beta since June -- on the latest beta now and 8 out of ten times to continue the conversation with Siri (most notably in the car with my phone docked) I have to constantly say "Hey Siri."
One thing it's current UX has over chatGPT voice tech as it shows you the text and provides visuals while chatGPT's UI shows no text and or visuals.
I did just that. Took me half a day. I haven't used Spotlight since. I did try alternative launchers, but they are all bloated. I just need an app launcher and simple arithmetic - that's all it does.
Check out TinyStart. It’s 5€, and the best 5€ I’ve spent in ages. It’s super fast, and handles basic math. Even lets you put the results on the pasteboard!
Spotlight works for me across files and apps on Mac, iOS, visionOS, pretty well - it has failed occasionally but usually it's because my disk is full. I haven't really found anything better (Alfred is good but is just a wrapper around Spotlight)
I quit Apple Mail (due to its poor handling of Gmail accounts) and started using Mimestream years ago. Truly excellent mail client. Actively and thoughtfully developed.
They did fix it (macOS 27, my experience). I have like 600,000 mail messages - there was a period where Mail search was awful but these days it's fast and accurate. It really comes down to whether you need to rebuild your index.
I’ll have it not show Xcode. It’s apples main developer ide. Most of the time it works. Then it gets into some weird loop. Only shows the Xcode website. Very helpful.
Raycast2 has its own index and it's way more reliable and fast.
I don't understand how Apple does not care about many of the core services of their OS. Searching in Mail is a coinflip
Ever since they re-did Spotlight I've had issues. When I type something and press Return it should activate. I shouldn't have to wait for it to populate the results and then press Return a second time. Moreover they've broken the ability for me to use Cmd to locate files quickly. I have to awkwardly Cmd-double-click the result with my cursor because trying to Cmd-Return triggers Ask Siri!
Turn off all the web search and other domains that the index uses. Apple took a really brain dead decision to include web search in the results, and they are the worst. It is completely useless, and even though the recall has expanded, the precision is abysmal.
Alfred is wonderful for launching applications and custom actions, but it’s actually worse than Spotlight search for searching for files and folders. It finds a lot of results but inexplicably it likes to rank partial matches ahead of exact matches.
It’s really sad, because they mostly aped search from BeOS and had best in class search for a decade or so. Now indexing frequently breaks or works when an external disk is not attached, but won’t find local files after it’s connected.
It is sad, and as one of the several former BeOS employees who went to Apple to add our experience to OSX, I can say that most of us have moved on. This isn't to say that others can't do what we did; they certainly should be able to. The OSX team back then was much smaller and we all had a maniacal attention to detail. One reason is that we were micromanaged by Steve J. and did lengthy weekly reviews with him and he was direct and brutal. He wasn't always right, but he did have the final say. This is all gone and even though Steve Lemay (now head of UX) was there during this time, he was also present during the overall rot of the user experience.
/meta let me just say how cool it is to cool it is to make a comment on HN and have responses from folks who worked on legendary teams. Thanks for your work on BeOS.
Now that we are living in The Future, I am dumbfounded how e.g. dynamically populated lists change their content reliably to something I did not want, during the phase of interaction where my finger is descending onto the target. Click! Not what I want.
Feels like a lost art which will be "discovered" again in the next 15 years.
Why do filesystem indices get stale? The OS can track what files get accessed, isn't inotify watertight?
I know that Windows has some equivalent stuff, that the antivirus uses to disallow opening files before they got scanned, so I'd wager that API is functionally required to not miss any changes.
Yet Windows indexing is one of the worst pieces of software in existence and frequently gets out of sync.
Even with inotify failing, if the system is plugged in and idle, it could quickly do a scan for files with update date > last known indexed time and index those. Like once per day maybe. Wouldn't take much load or memory, IMHO.
Any improvements to voice to text? I use iPhone 13 Mini and so keyboard has always been hard to type on. But voice to text..man..it is an absolutly miserable experience that I wish I could swap out for any other competitor.
I normally don't complain that iOS/MacOS isn't customizable because the defaults are good enough to work for me but that voice to text man its like they completely forgot about it.
Hear hear. The insistence upon prioritizing names in my extensive contacts list as well as certain geographic names leads to so many unnecessary manual edits.
They have some nasty "dynamic tap zones" algorithm that dynamically resizes the hitbox for keys based on what it predicts you will type in order to reduce miss-taps. Anecdotally, it has just steadily been getting worse with every update. I swear I can be pressing the center of a key and it will select the next one over and immediately autocorrect to a completely different word than what I typed.
I had the pleasure of typing something on an Android the other day and it was such a breath of fresh air when it actually accepted the keys I was pressing...
In addition to this, there is a delay in the suggested word such that when you see the options above the keyboard, decide you see the word you want, stop typing and move to select it, it changes right as you land your finger.
That drives me crazy. What's crazier happens when the suggested word is the one you are going to type. You hit the next letter in the word, recognize that it has already been suggested, yet right after you hit the letter, it decides to suggest another word.
Compliments of product managers, engineers, etc making millions and millions of dollars to produce a much worse end user experience, if it wasn’t painful enough
Oh wonderful. That’s what’s happening to me. I’m an author and Apple‘s dictionary appears to be missing about half the more uncommon words in the English language. It’ll never recognize “prescient” in dictation for example. Some words it marks in red because it thinks it’s a spelling error. I know it’s not because I’ve used it, read it, and it’s in online dictionaries.
At least I’m macOS I can use Talon instead of the system dictation.
Thank you for putting a name to this phenomenon. I hadn't gone through my yearly attempt to figure out why iOS was terrible for text entry. I figured since I only have an iPad and not an iPhone, and infrequently type in it, that it just hadn't learned my habits or words. It's incredible that they've developed these kinds of algorithms that have made every facet of text entry from speech to text to spell checking to typing itself such a miserable experience.
Try turning off slide to type. It's under Settings > General > Keyboard.
I did it earlier this year. It seems to be much more accurate and confident with which key it thinks I want. I do occasionally miss the sliding but it's worth it overall.
Yeah, I’m not a dedicated iPhone user and my personal phones are androids so my iOS experience has been iPod Touch 2G -> employer owned iPhone 8 -> employer owned iPhone XR -> iPad Air M3. Each of those big gaps have seen the UI shift and the keyboard decline.
Interesting. Because I have a much harder time typing on my Pixel. In fact, I hate it. I wish I had a blackberry.
When I use iOS devices, it feels better but I don't use them enough to have used them in anger. Ok, well, yes they have made me angry but for other reasons than the keyboard hence why I'm on Android lol.
I used a Clicks keyboard with a folded Moto Razr for a while and it was Blackberry-esque. The keyboard is a little narrow compared to the Blackberries of yore, though. I'm somewhat hopeful about the Clicks Communicator which is wider, but sadly still only a four row keyboard.
To be clear, I only kind of recommend the keyboard. I stopped using mine after a while because of how awkward it was with the Razr unfolded and never actually found it faster or more accurate than the on screen keyboard.
someone posted high speed videos a few months ago where the keyboard will popup the key you thought you pressed (therefore did press, as far as the UI is concerned) but iOS will insert a different character anyway.
Some of those videos are misleading. They sometimes slide a finger off one key onto another: taps need to not move.
Personally, I use the slyde to type rather than tapping to type and have gboard installed for when slyde doesn't work (I think the Apple algos are not quite as good as Google's).
Yep; this has been the case since the very first iPhone, it can't be disabled, and there is no feedback it happens other than the typos. It is very crazy making and mind boggling.
The best way to put it is it really wants to type what it wants to type, and if you deviate from that it will often end up just ignoring it. Whether it's the dynamic tap zones as mentioned elsewhere, or just auto correcting backwards and changing words you've already typed. Also when you go back and change a word it will also often insert additional spaces around the changed word. Or worse still if you mistype a word like say banana then backspan to ban and retype ana, it will display banana... Until you hit space and it turns it into "ban ana".
Try an android keyboard and go back to an iphone. Having switched back and forth between both systems it’s quite remarkable how bad the iphone keyboard is. In practice , typing on an iphone means constant typos, bad autofix, and bad suggestions.
Completely agree. I switched from Android to iOS... 6 years ago now? and the keyboard immediately felt off. I thought it was just something related to needing to adjust, but I reused my old Android (Pixel 3a) for the first time a few days ago (cuz I'm working on an Android app and wanted to try it on an actual phone) and the keyboard just works. No typo, no ass completions, I can actually type fast as I feel it and the text ends up mostly (99%) correct on the first try. On iOS I sometimes really struggle writing exactly what I want (the worst offending situation is iOS "correcting" a word when I hit send, so what's sent is literally not what I typed)
As someone who has had an iPhone since the 3GS (I'm so old), but tries Android out every now and then - I can wholeheartedly agree.
The only real advantages iOS have left are not being run by an advertising/tracking company (which is reducing as Apple looks for services revenue) and the quality and variety of indie iPhone and iPad apps (yet Apple are happy to make those same devs extremely unhappy).
I used to have galaxy S phones with some aftermarket keyboard whose name I forget. It was quite popular at the time, and was fairly happy with it.
When I moved from a gs5 to an iPhone 7, I was amazed at how much better the typing experience was. But it has now gotten to a point where I feel like a drunk monkey would type better than I do.
I would actually go one step further and claim that typing has not come back to the speed and accuracy of Blackberry and Nokia phones with physical keyboard. It's taking so long that we may actually destroy humanity with AI before we have fast and accurate keyboards again.
I switch between Android and iPhone every few cycles, and I really do miss my swipe keyboard on Android.
iPhone swipe and tap keyboard always gives me trouble. I hate that it keeps trying to type my contacts’ names.
Also, text selection OSS frequently maddening. Yes, I swiped “is” and it decided I’m a fan of open source software… When I try to select some words or position my cursor, iOS always wants to put the cursor far away from where I held my finger. Doesn’t make a lick of sense.
I personally use the swiping keyboard on ios and it seems to detect the wrong word with an almost malicious frequency. It also randomly Capitalizes things.
Unfortunately for us swipers, disabling slide to type on an iPhone makes typing significantly more accurate. I can only guess as to why, but after seeing anecdotal reports over the last year or so from people raving about how much better typing was with swiping disabled I finally got fed up enough to give it a shot myself. It is much, much better, to the point where I'd never re-enable slide to type until Apple finally fixes this.
Sometimes I swipe the same word 5 times in a row and it gets it wrong every time, despite me being slower and more precise each time. I give up and type it by hand. Note: this is NOT the censorship issue, that's separate (where it will not allow you to swipe certain words or phrases AT ALL, no matter how hard you try. Like if you type "kill" it won't let you swipe "him" or "her" after it, though some other words work. There are many instances of this)
For some reason, the one word that it just will not let me swipe is “and”. Which is, you know, somewhat common. I get all kinds of random things instead.
And’s! Fucking and’s! Every goddamned time, regardless of the fact that I have never once intentionally typed and’s (until now, which probably means that it’ll now either appear constantly or never again).
This drives me crazy. Sometimes I'll just put the phone down and move to a proper keyboard to type what I want. It definitely makes me use my phone less, maybe that's a good thing overall.
you most likely have an Abe in your contacts, I don’t have an Abe but have a similar issue with a last name from mine. the behavior sort of makes sense if I squint and crane my neck around a bit but I have no idea how the weightings are so bad.
That is common. The one that I haven’t seen lately is “Abbas”, like the Palestinian politician. Except, I don’t ever write about Middle Eastern politics. At all.
I know the autocorrect is broken -- I consistently hit a bottom row character like "n" instead of spacebar, and it's simply unable to comprehend that you might have hit a letter instead of space. It comes up with all kinds of insane, implausible suggestions for the autocorrect, but never the obvious one that's 1 character from what i typed.
Yes! The way it tries to be smart about what you actually wanted to press but has certain areas that are exceptions to that rule — like space bar — drives me crazy.
It's unclear to me if they're alleging that it's recently broken. I switched to iPhone at my wife's insistence 3-4 years ago and I have pined for Swype the entire time. It's so bad and I was spoiled by Android.
You can install a different keyboard if you want. I used 3rd party swiping keyboards but ended up using the system one for the last few years because it doesn't bother me.
I switched to iPhone for 2-3 months but the keyboard was so back I switched back to Android. If Apple can't get a keyboard (any keyboard!) to work in a decade, I'm going to an OS that works.
It's crazy that SwiftKey was terrible too, even though it's the one I use exclusively on Android.
I can't comment knowledgeably. I just regularly have to try over and over again to get it to produce the word I want, and my memory is that this happened rarely on Android.
Wait! I do have a specific criticism!
There are certain two-word sequences it will not produce ("kill myself", "white women") and I could do without that little bit of editorial oversight thank you very much.
And expletives. If I want to say fuck, that's my business, I don't need my phone refusing to allow it. If not for how embedded I am right now in the ecosystem, this keyboard & vocabulary behavior they force on me might be enough to make me switch.
Yep, there's a whole set of censored phrases. Kill won't let you type a lot of things after it, including "him" and "her" (well, I haven't tested on iOS 27 yet). I haven't tried the white woman one though, that is cracking me up.
update: Okay I tried and sure enough, I'm laughing even harder now. The closest I could get it to swipe was "womanhood". Lots of Wohan's though.
Lmao I never noticed this. I wonder if this is just risk aversion, since they don’t care if I type “white women make me want to kill myself” normally and even autocorrect half the sentence.
I am so very glad to see all of my complaints with ios text entry so thoroughly articulated in this thread. My first thought with the iphone duo is "how many people are going to develop a repetitive stress injury with these awful text entry interfaces and giant heavy devices?"
Typing is more important than ever. We're a ways off from BCIs and there should be responsible and serious consideration for this problem.
I have an English/Italian bilingual keyboard set up as my default.
Every single f**n time I begin a sentence with "È" (Italian for "she/he/it is") - which is an extremely deliberate gesture - you have to keep the E tapped until the accents pop up - it will immediately correct it back to an unaccented "E". It's nuts.
There is a metric ton of intent behind my selecting, keeping tapped, waiting for the accents, picking one - it's so obviously NOT accidental, and this utterly cretinous piece of junk changes it .
Can't "autocorrect" be replaced to "autosuggest" instead like on android devices?
I have never been fan of autocorrection tools (especially as I am regularly writing in 4 different languages) regardless of the OS but definitely use autosuggestions to correct potential spelling errors.
Yes, the keyboard is pretty bad in various ways. I’m still surprised how many comments in this thread (and similar threads in the past) are mentioning the autocorrection, implying that they haven’t turned it off.
I have French / English and every time I start my sentence with "The" (obviously the start of an English sentence), it autocorrects as "Thé" (tea). There's veeeery few situations in French where a sentence can start with "Thé".
Typing German and Swiss German is entirely broken while English is fine on the Swiss German keyboard layout. It very often registers the wrong key even though a slow motion video shows very clearly that the finger hits the correct key initially.
try using swipe-type on an android and you'll see. the funny thing is it's been this way since the iphone 1 because iphone 1 didn't have swipe-type while very early android did (via "swype").
This! So many times have I hit one of the keys in the row above space. I think this might actually be caused by them resizing the hitbox because I am not that fat-fingered.
1. Auto-correct inserts the wrong words into my sentences despite correct spelling and grammar. Think, "what a ducking joke". This has suddenly gotten better recently when it comes to typos, though.
2. The keyboard's AI will also helpfully misinterpret key presses and sub the wrong letter, which doesn't get corrected. For example, common acronyms get corrected to other acronyms I _never_ use. FFS turns into FFA regularly.
Your specific usecase has a native solve. Tap the status bar on any scrollable content view to scroll immediately to the top of the page. This has been around since, I believe, iPhone OS 1.
Command+up arrow and down arrow behave exactly as you say on my computer: like home and end do on PC/Linux. Command left and right for how it also behaves on Linux/PC if you're in a text field. They always have? I use that combo all the time and only have issues in Safari tabs that overload the arrow keys with bullshit.
Marginally better? What kind of queries are you giving it? It's obviously not as capable as GPT, etc, but it's leaps and bounds better than the old Siri. There's no question about that.
I don’t recall exact queries. What I do remember is giving a demo of the developer beta to friends thinking it’s gotten much closer to ChatGPT and it embarrassing me. And being much slower, requiring a gesture at the top of the screen to dismiss etc just made me deactivate Apple Intelligence. It’s embarrassing in 2026 for Apple.
Meh, I don't think it's so clear cut. It's so much worse than the AI that all of us are used to using, that's it's not worth using as AI. And it's now much slower at the few tasks it used to be good at (phone calls, timers, etc..)
So while yes, I would say overall it is much more powerful than it used to be, it still sits in the "every few reasons to use it" bucket for me. I'd sooner just reach for Grok/Chat/Claude
edit: keep in mind this is my experience over several months of beta. I haven't installed the public release yet.
In my experience the new Siri is marginally worse for everything that I used to use Siri for. It's much slower to respond. It asks for obnoxious classifications. It doesn't know that when I say "call Mike" I mean the Mike I call every day vs the other Mike in my contact I have never called in my life. It defaults back to Apple products for everything, old Siri knew I liked Spotify but now if I ask it to play a song it will complain about my Apple Music subscription. I could go on.
My experience with the new Siri is objectively worse. I am on an Iphone 17 Pro Max and all searches are very slow, accessing utilities has slowed down quite a bit, lagginess when settings timers. Failure to make new notes or reminders. Stuff just not working. I've been using the OS since the RC. I give it a flat 0/10
> Siri is definitely worth using now, even if it remains still a work-in-progress/needs continued refinement. It can surprise you in good ways, but it isn't consistently good yet.
I really wish we could add our own custom prompts for the new Siri. My most common usage of Siri is "Remind me at XX:00 to do XYZ." The most common response from Siri now is, "Sorry, did you say XYZ or XZY?", where XYZ and XZY are two very similar things between which the difference is inconsequential.
Dealing with this "Sorry" response has made reminders take annoying extra steps. Wish I could throw in a "If I'm setting a reminder and you don't quite hear me, just put both things in one reminder and I'll figure it out myself" to the prompt.
One pretty bad regression is that the Spotify client now from time to time has pretty bad audio glitches on my M1 Pro Mac (of course this may end up as a typical fingerpointing issue, e.g. whether the bug is in macOS or in Chromium - but it definitely regressed from macOS 26 to 27).
Otherwise macOS 27 is mostly okay-ish though, especially compared to 26.
The first part of this one is more hilarious when you ask "Find me the nearest Starbucks" while CarPlay is actively providing you navigation: "I'm sorry, I don't know your location".
"""One of their better releases that seemingly focused more on quality and refinements than new-features.""" - Compared to a lot of others, this one have introduced more bugs than I have ever experienced in more than 10 years.
I have stopped submitting bugs because of the tedious bug reporting app, only submit really bad ones. Can't they give some helping functions to finding the correct categories based on problem description?
Search on Mac has been very broken for a while, whatever they use to get the text results from files just can’t handle code, one node_modules folder and that list will just be hundreds of JavaScript files no matter what you type.
What is the issue with the iOS keyboard? The support for third party keyboards is garbage but the default keyboard is reliable for me. Search is horrible on iOS and Mac though
Sure I feel that the Apple bundled apps are better, the design is better, but frankly Golden Gate broke more third-party apps than Tahoe did, including some third-party apps where I had an old perpetual license and had not updated for many years.
I was starting to think I was getting old and senile with how hard typing has become on the iPhone. It's a misery. I have to type so insanely slow to have any chance of getting the right keys now. I don't have this issue on other virtual keyboards, iPad etc.
Even weather was/is comically bad. Ask it anything specific and it would fall over, repeating the broadest, least helpful version of weather data, even if all that data is clearly available in the ios weather app. Specifics on wind, precipitation hourly, etc.
So no, you can't really ask a homepod for the weather either - Homepod's weather was more like a shitty version of sticking your head outside and looking up at the sky.
Yeah; plus we know they're designing with potential future local-only Vs. hybrid Vs. cloud-only in mind depending on hardware/market changes. So having it be this flexible buys them a ton of future potential.
People have speculated that with FPGAs or even an ASIC you could take some smaller models we have today, turn the chip into essentially that model-as-hardware, and get some really compelling performance/power-usage characteristics.
At that point running a GOOD quantized Q8 model on a phone is not beyond the realm.
This is such a funny comment. I’d been hearing about the un-repairability of Apple products for years and I believed it. Then I went to Shenzhen and walked past an entire floor of individuals doing all sorts of “impossible” repairs right in front of the customer.
My speculation: "impossible" repairs work a lot better when you buy replacements parts for near-market price from a competitively priced seller next door, rather than having to order your parts online from one of a handful of distributors substantially upcharging even for the off-brand version.
> Isn't that exactly what Flock are doing to tens of thousands of people a day? So why the double-standard.
It's not the same thing. Flock cameras have terrible privacy implications but at least when I pass by one of them they are also filming everyone else passing by. I'm not being singled out.
They are also sometimes used by stalkers that have access to improperly track people, so if I do acquire a stalker they might help my stalker.
If some person is following me personally around and filming me then I am clearly being singled out.
> one should be held to a different standard than the other.
harassing a worker is not the way to fix the problem. The worker has no agency to affect the changes desired by the harasser. It's an issue with the gov't, and needs civic procedures to change.
This behaviour is the same as harassing hospitality staff for bad prices. Harassers would be considered borderline committing terrorism if they go further.
The worker does have agency. They did not have to take a job installing mass surveillance systems. They're directly doing the bad thing, and the "harassers" are literally doing the same thing the worker is doing, but back to the worker.
It actually looks really nice; and I'd consider myself their target demographic conceptually. My last iPhone was a Pro for context.
But at a $2K starting price, plus likely another $200 for the storage size they really expect people to purchase, in this economy, it is so far outside of my price range it is dead to me.
Which is to say: Cool tech, but I've already dismissed it as something I want evaluate for my next phone just based on price alone.
That's maybe the real death-nail for folding phones: Price hasn't yet shifted to allow them to be mass market rather than enthusiast phones.
In my location I can order the Z Fold 8 for cheaper than the 18 Pro Max, and I can see in the price history that it has also been available for cheaper than the regular 18 Pro.
If I wouldn't at the moment focus on developing iOS apps, the Z Fold 8 would be very tempting.
> But at a $2K starting price, plus likely another $200 for the storage size they really expect people to purchase
Idk why I’d need a lot of storage on the phone. Photos/videos get backed up elsewhere. The only thing that eats storage like that is downloading a lot of offline movies, or taking lots of videos. But this doesn’t have the same camera chops as the iPhone pro.
I actually preferred 5.6-Terra not because it is technically superior (it isn't) but because it had better instincts to NOT do this stuff.
PS - Speaking of better instincts, have they closed the UI-design gap at all? I keep a Claude subscription just because /design produces significantly higher quality UI design/UI feedback/UI refinement than anything I've seen from OpenAI.
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