Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator

On mobile devices, Apple’s Calculator app has always been one of the most frustrating apps I’ve ever used, and I’m surprised it’s a stock app by the company itself. If you press buttons quickly, like you would a normal calculator, many of the key presses simply don’t register at all. I’m not sure if they’re prioritizing some pretty little visual animation over actual functionality, but it’s incredibly surprising from a company that focuses on user interaction, supposedly.

Apple's greatest weakness is that many of it's fans and I'd assume people in house assume they are the epitome of UI design when actually it's not. The thoughtlessness/pixel ratio might be worse than Microsoft in some cases, which can be hard to believe.

> Apple's greatest weakness is that many of it's fans and I'd assume people in house assume they are the epitome of UI design when actually it's not.

Which led to people like me making a fool out of themselves. Always been using Android, and listened to iPhone users singing the praise of the amazing UI and UX of iOS. Well, eventually iPhone 12 Mini released so I figured, "why not give it a try, can't be worse than my current Motorola Moto G gen4 right?"

Well, it is worse. I still have the phone because it still works, but that was my first and last iPhone. Everything is dog slow, not because poor performance but because of slow animations. Same on Android by default, but at least I can speed it up. And the UX makes you jump through hoops, things are impossible to discover unless you watch tutorials on YouTube, and the amount of UI bugs seems sky-high for something that sells itself as "Premium".

And then CarPlay is just an abomination! Even the most basic things like "I'd like to answer a call while still being able to see the map I use for navigation" seems to be completely ignored and it honestly doesn't make any sense at all.

Ugh, I almost look forward to accidentally dropping the phone so I can go back to having a non-distracting experience in the car again.

Edit: I just remembered the most egregious issue: How can I see the current year without having to open up a separate calendar application/put a huge widget on my home screen?

I've used a few apple products -- the iPhone 3 was my first smartphone, and an iPad mini back when tablets were starting out. At the time of the switch to android, I didn't think too much of it, but definitely enjoyed the customisation.

A couple years ago I was gonna get a new phone and, half my family being Apple devotees, I was considering switching again so I could stop hearing the 'blue bubble' nagging, plus they seem to genuinely enjoy their phone.

In pure luck, a friend had a new iPhone 13 and hadn't switched from his old phone yet, and allowed me to use it for a couple days so I could see just how incredible the phones are and I should switch. After about 48 hrs, I was so done with the product, and like you, preferred to switch back to my old 'crummy' phone until I bought my next flagship.

I can't imagine being locked in till it dies, because as you said, the iPhone is such a miserable product. I'm sure you could resell and get a flagship for a similar price. You'd still net loss, but IMO it would be better than keeping the phone since you don't like it.

Along these same lines, the tabletification of Mac OS is annoying. A friend asked me to help with importing photos from the Apple Photo app on his brand new desktop Mac.

The sequence of events was:

Lightroom Legacy needs photos imported because the new Lightroom (cloud/subscription version I believe) has a different workflow, interface and apparently, features, so he's using both for the time being.

So he follows guides on Adobe to import from iPhoto through a plugin.

I had to learn after much google-fu that iPhoto has been replaced by the new Photo app. No compatible libraries found, says the unhelpful error message.

No way to import his Photos library into it without first exporting all photos into a separate folder and importing that one into Lightroom Legacy. Why there is no compatibility shim/layer for that functionality I will never understand...

He refuses to export and reimport all his photos because he has A LOT of them. He does photography as a hobby primarily, but has been using his iPad and iPhone for a while without a Mac PC and was astonished at not being able to do such a simple process.

Part of my troubleshooting involved looking for a potential directory where the Photos app stored the files. It's some sort of package file that creates what seems to be the equivalent of a virtual directory. So I search for the Mac Drive icon... that took me to google, to then Finder, settings, and enable showing the drive. Why the hell does Apple hide the frigging storage device?!!! (I know why... but it's maddening)

One more reason to never want to use or support any Apple product in the future.

See, the file system is a fine system for general data, but if you have data of a specific kind, then there’s often a better way than just dumping them in the file system. That’s always been Apple’s approach: let data assigned to a specific app be handled by that app [1].

Apple’s approach has also been to allow export of that data into standard interoperable formats (be it music, photos, emails, contacts, calendars, etc.).

And FWIW, the photos are in “~/Pictures/Photos Library” - that must have been very difficult to find.

[1] it had two pieces of metadata, content type and creator, for files in Mac OSes prior to OS X, when it regressed to the windows/Unix way of handling things with inelegant file extensions.