by joecool1029 | 2025-11-23 21:57:32+00:00
I'm an outsider to the big tech companies so I don't know how it looks on the inside, but I have thoughts and maybe it will spur some discussion.

I've heard it said that there is manager culture, push to ship new features to pad resumes, etc. So you have these teams building new projects/products and some of it is a miss. There's an escalation path from outside and inside that allows for radars to be filed for major issues. I remember tracking one when I got the original iPhone SE they had a bug in the bluetooth stack that made handsfree calls sound all full of static for the first release or two after launch. We all know bluetooth is a pain and they handled fixing this well. I assume logically with most projects you expect to field lots of bugs early on at launch and then you take resources off once it's been live for a bit and the problem reports slow down. Then it's just debt or not important and how does it ever get handled?

With Apple, there are little ongoing bugs I would like to file, I have submitted on-device feedbacks before but it feels like sending into a black hole. Here is a simple bug, very easy to describe: Accessibility > Audio & Visual > Flash for Alerts (enable it). It flashes the camera light when you get a notification so you can visually see alerts while the phone is silent and not in a pocket. This works on its own, but if you are using the camera light as flashlight and people begin to message you, it will flash and turn the flashlight off. It should remember the state of the flashlight before it flashes but it doesn't and turns it off each time. This is not a new regression.

I guess I write this comment because we have these large companies lots of resources, some unique divisions like Google's Project Zero; but are there any non-project tied teams inside these companies that deal specifically with 'tech debt' and company internal interoperability issues and can pad resumes with that? We knew US gov had 18F, thinking of a division that fixes issues between the teams that might not usually talk.

The most dysfunctional large company at this time seems to be Microsoft and I could write a whole series on how the most basic things are broken (stuff like Share icon for photos only trying to share using Windows Mail and not Outlook). Or the fact that IMAP was broken on the Android Outlook client from August until the past week (it's almost fixed can delete mail again, just can't move it automatically to trash, has to be permanently deleted). And you just feel the different divisions across platforms don't talk to each other and the consumer slop is separate from the paying business stuff and that's split between the Outlook and chromium Outlook, and that's all a totally different thing than the Sharepoint/Teams stuff. But also the mandate of god says Copilot must be everywhere and if you are using classic outlook on monthly channel you must accept your lord and savior Copilot into your Outlook life and there's not a current way to turn it off (officially).

With Apple and quality: They do appear to still be doing 'the good stuff under the hood' most don't pay attention to. I look at their iPhone Air, people confused as to who it's made for, fashion item or whatever I heard in another thread. But I am laser focused on connectivity/modem stuff, before I had the RCS issue the last time I walked into an Apple store was to look at the 16e, not to buy it (I have a 15 pro) but because I'm happy to see another modem vendor on the market that might know what they are doing. The Air is an evolution of this, it will eventually go into flagships when it's ready. This is the good stuff under the hood, besides the increased margin for Apple at not having to pay Qualcomm... there is room for improvement. I guess sub-6 performance is looking much better. I know something that was noticed awhile back is Mediatek seems to have much better latency than Qualcomm modems, but they don't really have flagship modems in handsets in the US market, just in AP stuff like the T-Mobile Home Internet (where I've had units with both Qualcomm and Mediatek and can say the latter wins). Would really want to know how Apple compares to it.