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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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