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AI CEOs from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft set aside their rivalry to warn Congress AI is making it too easy to design and create bioweapons

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Social Security faces a 24% cut in 2032—that's a $345 billion hit to retirees nationwide, watchdog says

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MacKenzie Scott's approach to her $26 billion giving spree was inspired by a book she read in college about writing
Apple

27 points of pain: Software and services Apple needs to fix

By
Philip Elmer-DeWitt
Philip Elmer-DeWitt
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By
Philip Elmer-DeWitt
Philip Elmer-DeWitt
Down Arrow Button Icon
January 11, 2015, 1:32 PM ET

Has your Mac been crashing more than usual lately? Have your iPhone apps started to misbehave?

You are not alone. Following up the alarm issued last week by Marco Arment — one Arment now regrets in part because he didn’t offer enough specifics — veteran Apple watcher Glenn Fleishman has filled in the blanks.

“The point of owning a Mac,” he writes, “is to not have to reboot it regularly.”

Drawing on his and his Twitter followers’ experiences, Fleishman assembled a list of 27 persistent problems in Apple’s recent software releases. What follows is a summary. Full details here: The Software and Services Apple Needs To Fix.

Mac OS X:

  • General reliability. Apps will spontaneously quit for no reason, sometimes in cascades.
  • Massive accumulation of paging files. Over time, virtual memory or other related “paging” files accumulate to the tune of 20 to 30 GB.
  • User interface slowdowns until reboot. A common problem. It may be related to swapping.
  • Network shares and printers disappear.
  • The attack of the 50-foot save sheet. Yosemite’s save sheet (or save dialog) grows by 22 pixels every time you invoke it until you lose your mind.
  • Incremental Bonjour network names. So you see “Glenn’s MacBook Air (2)”, “3”, and so on.
  • Screen Sharing either slows down, isn’t available, or becomes unreliable.
  • Messages. The failure to sync across platforms and devices remains terrible. The number of times Messages dies on me and tells me an internal error occurs is very large.
  • Spaces, the feature that lets you have multiple desktops, works horribly across both my regular systems.
  • Mail. I’ve had the app suddenly tell me all connections are broken and refuse to fix them. Quitting and launching sometimes helps; other times, a system reboot is required.
  • Wi-Fi remains inconsistent and unreliable.
  • iPhoto has been underpowered and wonky from the start.
  • Aperture was never brought to its full potential, and is now abandoned.
  • iTunes has been a dog’s lunch of unrelated features crammed into the same sack for years.
  • iWork ’12 was a giant step back from iWork ’09.
  • iBooks reliability issues abound, including a failure to sync annotations.
  • Spontaneous logout of all users. There’s no solution on Apple’s discussion forums.
  • Failure to support 4K at 60 Hz reliably.

.

iOS software:

  • Bad performance on older devices:Even relatively well-powered devices not at the far end of backward compatibility for iOS 8 suffer under the new releases.
  • AirDrop, even in iOS 8, remains scattershot and unreliable even when all system requirements are met.
  • Podcast app stalls on downloads and requires a system restart to begin downloads again.
  • App search routinely fails in Spotlight after a restart. It appears later, sometimes much later, for no apparent reason.
  • Bluetooth pairing is unreliable. Whether that’s an OS X or iOS feature problem, I’m not sure.
  • Third-party keyboards crash in Apple apps. It’s hard to know whom to blame.

.

Services:

  • Apple IDs can’t be merged. You would expect it would be possible to merge purchases and other data into a single master account. It is not.
  • Family Sharing isn’t ready for prime time. A recent Upgrade podcast suggested that Family Sharing was designed by people without families.
  • Apple can choose to unlock Apple ID accounts locked for security purposes and generally chooses not to.

.

Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter at @philiped. Read his Apple AAPL -0.95% coverage at fortune.com/ped or subscribe via his RSS feed.

Learn more about Apple’s software updates from Fortune’s video team:

About the Author
By Philip Elmer-DeWitt
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