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Maybe Apple should do the same and kill their many half-baked software products.


Which ones? In my experience, a lot of Apples products have incredible longevity. Notes, Calendar, Pages all just get better and better.


Alarms, Photos, Siri, Books..


How are any of these half baked? (Aside from obvious Siri deficiencies)


Alarms is unreliable for the basic functionality of waking you up.

Photos redesign makes it really hard to use.

Siri works half of the times, maybe even less than that.

Books lacks of basic functionalities such as downloading and keeping books on device.


How are alarms unreliable?

Photos redesign maybe something you don’t like, but you can hardly call it half baked. All of the functionality is there and there’s a new consistency in how it works that wasn’t there previously.

Books automatically downloads to device. There isn’t a way to read a book without it local.


> How are alarms unreliable?

A simple google search will answer this question

https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/9/24340238/apple-iphone-alar...

Even an hn search is fine, if you do not trust the Verge (notice these are comments from the last 3 months so not an old issue):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42705217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41887505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41962418

> Books automatically downloads to device. There isn’t a way to read a book without it local.

Have you used Books extensively or just skimmed it? There's no way to keep books on device, make another Google search if you do not believe me.

> Photos redesign maybe something you don’t like, but you can hardly call it half baked.

Perfect, then keep Photos and kill only alarms, books and Siri.


I’ve never had my alarm fail, but it looks like others have hit this bug. So by your definition if a product has a bug (even if rare but intrinsic to the functionality), then it’s half baked. Given (effectively) all software has bugs, then by your definition there are no fully baked software products. I think we have very different definitions of what makes a product half or fully baked.

I haven’t used Books extensively outside of audiobooks. So it sounds like there’s offloading of caching going on that’s iCloud wide; disabling iCloud sync would fix this. I can imagine that being frustrating if the book you want isn’t there when you’re on a flight (which should only happen if you haven’t recently accessed it). I agree there should be a way to prevent this. I wouldn’t call that half baked, but it’s a big enough problem I’d agree that’s not fully thought through (or more likely, they did think through it but came to a different conclusion).


> Have you used Books extensively or just skimmed it? There's no way to keep books on device, make another Google search if you do not believe me.

Once you download a book to a device, it stays downloaded. There is a setting to automatically remove downloads once you're finished with the book, but that defaults to off (and I didn't even realize it was there until I went looking just now).


>Once you download a book to a device, it stays downloaded.

This is objectively false. I suggest you do a simple google search or read my other comment.


I read your other comment. It looks like you're talking about iCloud Storage there. Books downloaded from the Apple Books Store do not go into iCloud Storage. Books you've uploaded are stored in iCloud.

I just checked my phone, I have 169 books downloaded. This includes many books I haven't looked at for years and years. This includes many books that I bought 3, 4, 5 iPhones ago and are still present, copied from device to device, because Books does not remove store downloads unless asked to.


Probably a few times every quarter I have iOS alarms that didn't go off for some reason on my iPhone.

It's happened for years: it was pretty bad about 5/6 years ago, but Apple claimed they fixed it, but it's still happening a bit.

In fact, when I really need to wake up at a particular time (say for a flight), I set two alarms 1 minutes apart.


Seems like there is more to this. I have been using iPhones since they came out and can't think of a time my alarm never worked, and I use them multiple times a day.


They are not. I haven't seen an unreliable alarm since the digital age. 1980s LED alarm clocks were reliable.


What are you talking about? I’ve got the books app open now, I can see all of my downloaded books. In fact there’s a whole section in the library for my downloaded books!

Go to library > collections > downloaded.

I can see books I purchased and other PDFs that I uploaded.

I do agree on the Photos redesign. I feel like I constantly get stuck on certain pages.


> What are you talking about?

Your tone is aggressive and uncalled for. In fact, the fact that you have never found a very common bug says a lot about your inattention to detail.

There's no "keep forever on device" button, which to me seems like a basic functionality. If the app decides to delete them, it will.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1b04rzy/apple_what_wer...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23736536

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/344271/books-autom...


Oh okay, but that’s not what you said? You implied that no books could be downloaded at all which is just not true.

iCloud offload is a pretty common feature on Apple devices and one that I find pretty handy. I understand why it doesn’t work for others though.

You can turn off iCloud sync in general for the device.


I don't think I have implied that. I have said that there's no functionality to download and keep files on device, which is true, because you cannot trust the device will not delete your files without your permission (or even without warning you first). But I'm not a native speaker so I could have been misunderstood.




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