Updated a bit ago to give Siri AI a go for some basic stuff I've been wanting it to do with personal context. It had some false positives in there, but it's notably better now, pretty fast, and handled context well. It allows you to see where it got the context from, which is great considering that doesn't sound like a very Apple thing to do.

I believe it's a Gemini derived model that they are running on isolated hardware. So it's not the same servers as Gemini and thus will have potentially different performance.

Apple themselves says it's a combination of on device and hosted Gemini models. But it seems Apple is hosting Gemini models themselves with far better privacy than the regular Gemini product.

I jumped from Ventura to Sequoia when 26 was first released, and I can safely say it's been around the same.

I'd probably make a similar leap to 27 when 28 gets released.

Sequoia it's quite fast and stable.

Also, I really really really abhor the new UI.

I definitely wanted to skip Tahoe by any means and was reluctant about this new version. I recently installed it because the wm I was using (omniwm) wasn't compatible with Tahoe anymore so I had to choose. I have to say it has been completely usable to me after reducing the liquid glass thing as much as the system allows.

Same. In addition to UX regression, we’re two major revs in, there’s nothing that’s a compelling enough value-add to be worth the trade-off, let alone the risk of unexpected side effects on any OS upgrade.

On my Xcode dev machine, I’ll be biting the bullet soon out of necessity, but my personal machine will stay Sequoia until they course-correct on “style over substance” (and not holding my breath).

They already have several such deals, such as Resident Evil.

For casual kids gaming, Apple TV and Apple Arcade is a fantastic combo. It's been plenty enough to keep my kid occupied, using hardware I already owned.

Gaming is a license game, not a hardware game.

Gaming is also a software support game.

Especially in the last few years, preservation has been a big topic. Gamers want their purchases to keep working in the future, not being broken by an OS update as it often happens with macOS (compared to Windows)

What happens when Jim wins the lottery?

so much better framing than typical truck hit :))

love it

It streams videos. It works. I'd rather they don't mess with it.

However, the guy who decided to put a useless button on the side of the remote that interrupts whatever you're watching, should get fired immediately. It's almost every day I grab the remote and press it by accident, and have to switch back to what I was watching, and resume playback, because Netflix exits out of the stream.

Sadly, Apple TV is the only Hollywood-approved streaming device that isn't a total trash heap.

No disrespect to you for posting this, but those iOS/iPadOS/MacOS are almost identical launch pages. Feels like a waste of time even having them be separate.

Can we please have a 1 release focus on fixing bugs? not more ai but fixing bugs, 1 release where you can disable AI... 1 release to make it faster again, 1 release to polish... not to push the next "game changing UI design..."

the "upgrade to 18.4" took my iphone to 26.whatever and siri got even worst... siri set an alarm for 10:40 (creates one at 12:08)... NO, delete that one, 10 40 (does nothing)... hey siri... (ajum), delete the previous alarm... (done!) now set an alarm at 10:40 (alarm at 4pm....)... eventually you get tired... you go to the alarms app.. and then there is the previous "deleted" alarm and the other one...

That could be a factor for sure, but this iOS upgrade basically broke mu iPhone as switching between apps got noticeably slower and sometimes the UI gets stuck for a second or two especially when switching between the camera and other apps. I'm so sorry I gave in and installed it.

Oof! Mine is still the original one, and it’s incidentally also at 89% after maybe 3.5 years of being my daily driver.

I reviewed the battery test results for iOS versions 26 (26.2, 26.3, 26.4, 26.6) and 27. The comparison covered the iPhone 14 series and newer models. The batteries in each model retain their charge 10–15% less effectively on iOS 27.

Interesting. Bugs on mine were from using core apps, IIRC. I wonder if bugs manifest on some iPhone hardware versions? Or maybe even which iOS version the phone was upgrade from?

I concur with gekoxyz - I've been using the iOS and macOS 27 developer betas since about beta 3 on my personal devices, and had actually forgotten to a large extent that I was running beta software. It's been excellent - a marked difference to the 26 releases.

Also, being able to run x86 Linux binaries is important for developers:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...

Apple can’t wait to ditch rosetta2, and dump all the development work on fex for supporting old legacy x86 software.

The warning dialog I received the other day while running macOS 27 Beta said that it will be removed in macOS 28.

There's approximately zero chance Google would go along with the changes that Apple would have had to make to support EU's DMA.

My basic point is that the EU DMA is a good idea, but it's still stupid - and I live here.

I do get the point of it, stuff needs to be interchangeable. BUT. Security and privacy need to be taken into account.

Apple has a track record of picking user privacy even if it makes their services objectively worse. Now EU makes them open up the APIs. Cool, I'm all for it.

Now who makes sure that Joe-Bobs Trusty AI is as secure as Apple Private Compute and won't just store my chat transcripts verbatim on an open S3 folder? EU law doesn't say.

The PR flack will 100% hit Apple though, the fact that the user whose data was leaked used JBTAI is buried in the second to last paragraph under the fold between two ads. Apple will be in the headline with all caps.

Same goes for Google, they don't want their AI to be interchangeable with something, because the lack of analytics will hurt their ad revenue. And maybe some lip service to privacy too.

(And my infinite pet peeve, why is Apple App Store bad and needs to be opened up, but Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo app stores are cool and 3rd party options aren't enforced by law?)

Safari does in fact feel snappier.

Good point about the whole new language as a tool for eliminating many thousands(?) as a whole category

It's also worth pointing out that the developers at Mozilla literally decided to make a brand new programming language (Rust)

In my memory, that does not seem 100% right. And indeed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language)#20... says a single developer who happened to work at Mozilla started it as a personal project.

After a few years Mozilla became interested in it and then sponsored its development, transforming it into the language it is today.

They've already come?15.8 has a long list of vulns fixed

You have the same long list for Sequoia 15.8, so how is that better? Besides, newer OSes are also more likely to have uniquely knew bugs from both AI slop and in general all the shiny new broken features

Yes, I should have been clear - I don't mind AI working on patches or vuln-hunting; my issue with MacOS 27 is the amount of AI included in the OS that is not opt-in. I use Claude Code everyday - but it doesn't run locally on my main production machines.

If Apple wanted to make the OS more secure, they would make the OS more modular, allowing users to reduce the surface risk by not installing bloated components

In theory that makes sense, in practice I've never had any issues with updating on day one and it's often necessary if you want to develop for iOS / macOS anyway unless you have a dedicated developer machine.

I’ve been running it for a couple months, I’d say we’re pretty much out of danger.

Good advice.

You don't have to! I always update the day of. So far, no regrets!

Yes, 27 is the final Rosetta version. The warnings are worded in a way that makes sense if you already know that but are easy to misunderstand if you don’t. I think they initially didn’t want to commit to the next version being called macOS 28. The final 27 release has started explicitly saying it’s going away in 28 which makes it a lot more straightforward.

I thought they weren't removing Rosetta until macOS 28. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102527

you’re right, thanks for clarifying!

yes. I have been waiting 12 months already because Tahoe didn't convince many people, and I dread the moment I upgrade my mpb m3. Maybe I should just keep the factory OS

Figured it might be slightly less painful to update one major version at a time.

iPadOS 27 also isn't looking so hot that I'd believe macOS 27 to be a magic bullet.

I used to always do this but I hate liquid glass with such passion that I even upgraded to an iOS beta just to get any improvements to it. Worst UI update in the history of the company.

Without any warranty, you need to get rid of NotificationCenter and usernoted. The first gets rid of the gui, the second of the entire infrastructure.

launchctl disable "gui/$(id -u)/com.apple.notificationcenterui" killall NotificationCenter 2>/dev/null || true

launchctl disable "gui/$(id -u)/com.apple.usernoted" killall usernoted 2>/dev/null || true

To refine my statement on lazy or non-design. Notifications can be valuable, for me i'd like backup notifications and find my messages. Only those, ever. When only those are enabled, MacOS has their own secret settings and is allowed to nag about updates, incompatibility and maybe some other things i don't remember. Part of the problem is the illusion of control, and being spammy about self-importance of new OS versions. Great for some users, insulting to me.

This is made even worse by "focus" which still shows notifications but without the text. Then i'm distracted AND i don't know why.

I think it’s because apple has no competition with regards to audio, there is close to no pressure to document and QA things properly

I normally suggest the same, but 26 has been universally bad. This is the "point release" or "Snow Leopard" edition of 26.

I was on Sequoia as well, and just updated ... first thing I noticed is LaunchPad is gone.

The Tahoe Dock "App View" / Spotlight just lists my 30 installed apps intermingled with Apple System Apps, which I hardly ever use. Hard coded categories, no way to re-order as far as I can tell.

Seems like the closest thing to LaunchPad is dragging ~/Applications to the Dock.

The other thing I have noticed is scrolling in Firefox is more choppy, and animations are more Janky than Sequoia on this old MacBook Air M1.

Me too. I was just thinking recently about updating from Sequoia, now I've got to take a while and reconsider everything.

I'm staying on Sequoia for at least one more year.

iOS 27 is pretty good though.

This seems to be the consensus viewpoint but outside of a few highly specific and known-in-advance incompatibilities on work laptops, I have been essentially a day-one adopter since Leopard and I cannot recall any issues that rose above a minor annoyance.

There have certainly been changes like Liquid Glass that were for the worse overall (though the degree of which had been highly overblown). But outside of directional disagreement with a release, I can’t say I’ve ever seen an issue where I’ve regretted pulling the trigger on an update.

yep last time it completely broke Internet but fortunately there was a workaround available via cellular

Taking this at face value they say wait for the incremental updates. I think some big rollouts have had fringe issues and they are saying to minimize the probability you get a random bug it's better to wait for a 27.x or 27.0.x before upgrading, and to upgrade to that one, not 27.0

I don’t understand what you mean by snappy. Apple is notorious for releasing buggy macOS major versions. You wait 6 months, then upgrade without having to be their tester. Snappiness has nothing to do with that, any macOS version on apple silicon is snappy

There have been far more buggy iOS releases than stable ones. A few years in particular were absolute disasters until December or January. It is very sound graybeard advice to wait until the .1 release. Apple has not earned the trust to upgrade on day 1.

There is not much point in asking if you're so imperceptive

So far, I haven’t read many complains about GG. Only the huge amount of space that the AI takes on the disk

As it stands Sequoia is the last good version of the OS.

I finally upgraded to Tahoe a couple weeks ago after putting it off for ages. As soon as it came up, my external monitor (connected by DVI to a caldigit dock) started being flaky af. I have to reconnect 2-3 times to get it to properly detect.

cool beans.

Maybe it's time to upgrade from Sequoia? But a few more months can't hurt :)

Yeah, the 15 owners got hosed badly by it, especially since they were marketing it as the "AI iPhone" when it launched.

Personally, new Siri is the only reason to upgrade from 13 Pro, and it's just not worth the money to bother.

Even for iCloud subscribers with newer hardware, as the cloud version should be faster. You’d have the choice between privacy and better performance.

I have a 16 Pro, who’s sales pitch was “built for Apple Intelligence”, or something to that effect. I can’t customize the Siri voice. I’m a bit shocked that they would have all the features on the 16 to avoid a class action based on their sales pitch of that phone. Tweaking the voice didn’t seem like it would be all that demanding.

Without the local agent, you are shuttling off all your data to be persisted by an AI cloud provider in case they need it.

I'm aware of the privacy implications. I'm talking about Apple's "private cloud". All of this data is already on iCloud anyway.

The foundation models run on the device for access to the local graph database and to interact with local actions (intents).

This does not require an on-device model.

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").

Tap? With your fingers?

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.

Command + up/down is pg up/pg dn. Command + left/right is home/end.

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.

But it was a favorite for a while.

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.

I get “is” more often than “and”, though nowhere near what I got with Swype on Android ten years ago.

Considering that Microsoft bought Swype, I have no idea why SwiftKey isn’t absolutely amazing, but it isn’t.

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.

It's intriguing. Danny! Infuriating.

I think it's slightly worded if you swore. No. Slightly worded. No. Slightly worse if you swipe left handed. Yes. At last.

I also use it all the time and I hate it very much. It almost never works right on the first try.

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)

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.

It used to be there but a few releases ago the option disappeared.

Would have been totally gaslit by my iPad on this only I have an android phone to compare my typing accuracy on.

Have to wonder how often you hit the wrong letter and the keyboard corrects it to what you actually wanted though.

Poor word choices. Backwards "corrections" that are incorrect.

Swipe keyboard has given up and let’s me type fuck now

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.

I may be mistaken but I'm pretty sure it's been the case since at least 2022 when I switched from Android

Who’re women

Blank women

Chinese women

Indian women

Jewish women

Black men love Chinese women

Black woken live Ellie men

Kill your

Kill mussels

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 tried SwiftKey but decided it was worse

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45662685

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.

Yay, I found my people…

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.

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 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.

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)

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45662685

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.

Same. Glad to know I'm not alone

Yes, it was a solved problem. Then they had to figure out how to utilize the ML features of their chips... and fucked it all up.

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

Sounds like a third-party keyboard opportunity: “Just like the standard Apple keyboard but not ML”.

It's been getting noticeably worse with every update. iOS 26 was a significant step down from whatever version was before that.

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.

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.

OMG you're giving me PTSD just reading about it. It happens every single time!!!

This happens everywhere. On menu items to. You would think they would invalidate a click id the item changes in the last 0.1 seconds. But no.

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.

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.

http://clicks.tech/

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.

JFC I hate this so much. Why can't they simply add a setting to disable this.

This explains so much... Never knew, just constantly gets frustrated because even if my thumbs are big, no way I press wrong that often...

If you turn off swipe or whatever the hell they call it the keyboard is a lot better.

Gboard on Android though is way better

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.

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.

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.

This is the “dynamic key area” in action

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.

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".

Largely because the auto correction is needed to undo the damage caused by the tap target shenanigans.

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".

https://youtu.be/hksVvXONrIo - [It's Not Just You - The iOS Keyboard is Broken]

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.

Oooh that's what's happening! I sometimes end up with garbage like "so ' I'll" instead of, say, "someone" and I wondered how it happened.

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.

"O can" instead of "I can" on the iPhone is the one which has been driving me bonkers for at least a couple of years now.

While we're complaining about the iOS keyboard, I just want a number row.

its when you type it wrong two times, and then slowly type it. Then it works.

Turn off Swipe or Slide or whatever they call it now in the keyboard settings

What's better about it in your usage?

If the iOS keyboard is broken in terms of auto correct suggestions, try resetting its dictionary. I found it was much improved after that.

— Open the garage door, Siri.

— I'm sorry, OptionOfT. I'm afraid I can't do that.

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.

i’ve been using the beta for a few months now, and the speech to text is significantly better. Put in parentheses using apple speech to text

Some stuff, as you can see, isn’t perfect :-)

I don’t think it is parakeet v2 level, but it’s good enough to not be frustrating

Can you clarify, you like third party? Or you like the larger Apple model

This is GREAT! It’s not possible to enable local-only dictation on iOS with the OS alone. :(

I use it constantly and it mostly works well for me since as long as I can remember. My biggest gripe with it is all the random ass commas it puts.

try this: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ghostspeech-agentic-keyboard/i....

Have you tried wispr flow?

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.

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.

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.

Absolutely the same experience here. Pretty much worse in every way.

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

that space is probably sold to the same ad network by both OSs

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.

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.

I bet it's some obscure MIT/BSD-licensed fuzzy matching library that both macOS and Windows uses.

Just do a fresh install every two weeks.

Aah those were the days.

These are too, but those were as well.

KDE gets it right, too.

And it offers me THREE different chess games I could install!

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.

To be fair "Bill Hader" should be the top result no matter what you type.

Good info, I’ll check it out. Thanks!

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

I don't find this to be the case at all.

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.

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.

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 have the same problem when i touch a result and it changes the result line at the exact moment.

I'm hit by this problem often. I wonder why UI updates which could well be incremental instead just replace the whole results from under your fingers!

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.

Absolutely. The mac spotlight search / bar was one of my favourite features, maybe 10 years ago? But now it’s useless.

It also has some strange behaviour when it’s not in focus, but hasn’t been closed.

I just leave every application open and command tab to them now.

This one drives me particularly crazy.

I feel attacked, but it’s probably the same reason, we both think we know the answer before you finished.

It’s called layout shift.

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.

Don't they perform user testing?

- Do "normies" perform better with this behavior?

- 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.

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.

> 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.

Either same guy got promoted over and over again or someone thought we must copy this genius search bar as is

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.

I find this theory pretty compelling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49703471

Maybe they are overthinking it.

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.

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.

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 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.

The best part is when you click on or press enter when you see "chess", but this is just as "cheese.com" is appearing so you open that instead.

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.

Why vibecode - obsidian

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.

No, that's because it's a default value, so the complain is 100% spot on. Bad defaults should be treated as a bug.

"Search this Mac" should be confined to Spotlight OR as a fallback if the local folder doesn't return anything.

Same example: I search Spotlight for “Voice Memos,” a built-in Apple app. Nothing. Ask Siri? It’s horrible.

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.

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.

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.

Exactly this. Spotlight remains the best local search but it falls apart with disk space limits.

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 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.

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!

True, but it's way better in my experience.

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

It works fine for me but my wife has this exact problem. It’s absolutely mystifying how something so basic could get so messed up.

Windows 10 start menu is the same way. How is it these things are so bad??

Alfred afaik uses the spotlight index too, so if that's the problem you're out of luck.

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.

i still use alfred. wish it was there for ios

Cmd+space, cmd+1 to search apps only

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!

https://tinystart.app/

By default finder search searches all files rather than the current folder. You have to go to finder preferences to change it.

The number one thing I want to use it for is opening folders eg Downloads. It has such a hard time ever recommending the right thing.

alfred and quicksilver etc. all work surprisingly well.

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.

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.

Paid but worth every penny.

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.

This should be the top comment!!!

It is so incredibly bad that for years I have assumed it must be me or my specific laptop. And then the years go by I just accept it.

Anytime Apple is mentioned "comically bad search" should be mentioned. It is the association I have in my mind.

What makes it amazingly worse is that all of this USED to work SO much better!

Use EasyFind for no-nonsense file search: https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/freeware

You mean, like this?

https://imgur.com/a/pmtihO1

That's a user error, you simply had "This Mac" selected (preselected) instead of narrowing scope to be Applications.

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)

Use Raycast, and never look back

I thought i was going to greener pastures when I switched from Windows to Ubuntu but Ubuntu native search is pretty bad too.

I typed "printer" so I can get to my printer settings and the first three are printer icons/emoji. I cant imagine why these would be more important

Is Gemini-backed siri active ?

I realise this is a joke, but I have to pile on.

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.

The keyboard remains unfixed, as is tradition.

Jeez. I wish they could just roll the keyboard back to iOS 7. That's the last version where it was good.

How’s messages? Oh still 2008?

doubtful, I am sure they fired QA long ago

Would you say that it's ready for prime-time on a developer machine?

Hi Pavel. I remember your work on Eddie and Tracker and Queries. Do you still follow the development of Haiku (even if infrequently)?

Cool.

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.

Dominic Giampaolo may be who you’re thinking of. He’s shown up on HN before, IIRC.

/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.

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.

You'd be surprised how well a T9 keyboard works on iPhone. You should give Type Nine a shot! https://apps.apple.com/dk/app/type-nine-t9-keyboard/id926008... Here's some promo codes for anyone interested XRF4TMKJHTYY NYX7TELHTAEN 74HXFT9K6H7H 47X4MR96K6YE NNTRRJFPH49E L6JMLEAAMKPP TEMNHXXJRA3T TK7KX9MEJHPX NFWPHALHTH6M 3J9TRR3MAKKE

The keyboard on iOS is so frustrating.

in the mean time Android has full gemini from a button click :(

Compared to ios 26?

I see the same happening on iOS, but on Plexamp. I wonder if this is a shared subsystem or some weird JS bug.

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.

Siri: "Sorry I don't understand"

Every other morning I get out of the shower to my wife cussing out siri because it can't handle the simple task of snoozing an alarm...

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

This sounds like some kind of conflict with your privacy settings

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".

Can the new AI browse the web?

same, I saw the exact same weird transition from 27 -> 26.7... def seems like a bug

It did both. I didn’t get offered 26.7 until noon. I did it. Then it offered 27. I did it. But instead it showed that it was updating to… 26.7.

Except when it was complete it actually had done 27.

Lots and lots of Reddit posts with the same bug. It’s not just you… Apple botched the meta that shows during the 27 upgrade.

Good news is the upgrade worked fine.

Yep. You could choose "26.7" or "upgrade to iOS27" but after tapping "upgrade to iOS 27", the next option was JUST 26.7 I think it did both upgrades in series though, I don't think I had to manually select 27 again later.

In moments like this I kind of assume that I should do 26.7 first because probably they test incremental transitions more thoroughly? I wish I had more faith in software updates.

There was a bug in my update UI. I selected iOS 27, told it to install, and then it said it was downloading and installing 26.7 the whole time. When it rebooted it did come back up on 27 though.

Having exact same experience as of 2:11p EDT.

If it does then do much for focus on quality in this release…

same. and at the bottom it says "Also Available : iOS 27" with a button which leads right back to iOS 26.7.

Same here. It’s over 5 GB, therefore is not 26.7. Upgrading, let’s see.

just a visual bug.

Out of the gate, that isn't a good sign.

Yes, it does 26.7 -> 27 sequentially, IIRC.

That’s what the beta released at wwdc is for! To test software before the release, to get build breaks before the general public and fix them then.

Finally Apple has a screen time that allows different configurations for different time segments. What took them so long? /j

I mean, this is nice:

"Apple framed WWDC 2026 around three pillars: platform improvements, trust and safety, and Apple Intelligence."

and it could have been mentioned in the launch announcement post.

Compare it to 18 before the UI fail and you might have a non-dud of a response. And no, it wasn't the whole point, just read the announcement to see how much space is devoted to other points

Snow Leopard was one of the most celebrated Mac OS X updates for a reason.