When I set up this blog I told myself I wouldn’t let it devolve into constant complaining and bellyaching like so much of my social media experience.
Don’t get me wrong, I love complaining. And it’s cathartic. But sometimes all I see on social media is just complaint after complaint after complaint and sometimes it is too much.
But sometimes it you just gotta complain. And today will hopefully be one of those rare times.
I am really starting to get sick of Apple software. I don’t know if there’s a better experience, but my experience with Apple software has severely degraded in recent years. Let me get some of it off my chest:
A recent software update completely changed how my work Macbook Pro handles my external monitor. I have a USB-C hub on my desk to give me a single cord to my work laptop, I can plug my laptop into this one cord and it gets power, my external web-cam, my wireless keyboard (which is not bluetooth), and my external display. For a year this worked perfect. After the most recent Mac update, if my Mac wakes up before my display, all the text and images are blocky. It’s like the resolution is turned down way low but the display is blowing it up, but I’ve checked (and tried changing) the resolution a few times and it never fixes it. The only solution has been to unplug the USB-C dock, let the Mac go back to sleep, then wake up the Mac again before the display sleeps. Sometimes this takes a few tries.
I haven’t even been able to get this to work by turning the display on first. The past 2 or 3 weeks I have been consigned to trying to get this to work by spending the first five minutes of my day fiddling with cables and trying to get the timing right.
Heaven forbid I should leave for a bit and come back to my Mac going to sleep or I get to do this all over again.
My AirPod Pros are stalking me. If I take my AirPod Pros anywhere, when I arrive home I get a notification that someone else’s Airpods are being used to follow me. I appreciate the privacy alert, but these are my AirPods.
I think there may be something wrong with how they are set up. When I go to ‘Find My’, it tells me it can’t locate my AirPods (even when they are in my hand, connected to my phone and Find My tells me they are ‘with you’) and that my setup may be incomplete. If I follow the support article for how to ‘complete’ my setup, the button it tells me to push does not exist.
AirTags are great but please for the love of all that is holy allow us to share location with family members. We have an AirTag on the dog, it’s awesome. It’s on my wife’s account. I take my dog for walkies every day, and every day when I get home I get a notification that someone can track me with a stray AirTag. I know! We share our phone’s locations. It’s not a big deal.
If you’re not going to give me AirTags that are feature complete with the rest of the Find My devices (I can see locations of all of her devices, and she can see mine) at least allow me to disable this notification for this AirTag. I’m only allowed to disable this notification for 1 day, which means the next time we go for walkies I get the notification again. Apple if you are going to say that you know best — well, you just don’t.
Speaking of USB-C and displays, an update broke my Dell USB-C display, then another update fixed it. I have another display on my desk that I recently got from Dell which is natively USB-C. I put my personal MacBook Air on this next to my work display. When I first got it, the USB-C cable worked great. It delivered power, connected the ports on the display, and connected the display.
Inextricably after a Mac update, the display stopped working. Power delivery worked, but not the display. I’d get a notice on the display that there was no signal detected. As a work around, I connected two cables, the USB-C one for power, and another HDMI->USB-C adaptor so I could still use the display.
Fortunately another Mac update a few weeks later fixed this so I’m back to my single cable glory, but I am really starting to worry about applying software updates.
There is more I could say but this has been cathartic enough. Maybe I’m just getting old but the thought of trying to switch to Windows or Linux just sounds too much. I’ll just pray that Apple gets their crap together.