On the subject of annoying iOS bugs…

I found and reported a bug in Apple’s new “Quartiles” game:

• Tap “ab cd ef”.
• Click the checkmark. The tiles at the top turn red because it’s a bad guess.
• Quickly tap “ab”.
• “ef” will be selected.

Not a world-ender yet still so annoying.

Little Snitch 6 came out yesterday with many quality of life improvements.

It’s always the first app I install on a new Mac. New versions are no-brainer upgrades for me. I still wish it had a way to sync rulesets between Macs so that I don’t have to train each one independently.

There’s a certain Apple ecosystem notetaking app I heard of from a paid blog post. I downloaded it; it was fine, but not my thing. Today I saw there’s a new version with a new name, and still very few App Store reviews. I googled for it and saw they issued a press release for the renaming.

I’m kinda curious how their focus on PR will work out. Will it keep it on people’s minds until they buy it? It’s not a small-app strategy I recall seeing before.

Apple announced their new iPad Pro and I couldn’t care less. The hardware itself is brilliant, yet Apple insists on artificially limiting what you can do with it for reasons I don’t understand. A “pro” device would let me run Mac-style apps like Nova and a real local terminal. It would let me compile and run the software I write when Shortcuts scripting isn’t good enough. It would be more like a hyper-portable MacBook for doing things that don’t require a heavier and more powerful computer, and less like a giant iPhone that gives me free rein of a walled garden.

I bought a 2018 iPad Pro 13" when they were released and used it constantly. It was overpowered for the software available to run on it, to the point that my kid in college still uses it for classwork today. The hardware was never the limiting factor in what I could do with it. I finally replaced it last summer with a MacBook Air that’s worse for my wants and needs in every way but one: Apple’s OS for Macs lets me do the professional things that the as-powerful iPad can’t do. Apple ran an ad when that iPad Pro came out, asking “what’s a computer?” I wish Apple would ask themselves, “what’s a professional?”

My vision for the iPad doesn’t align with Apple’s. That’s OK. They know their target market. They’ll still sell a gazillion of these.

Just not to me.

I spent 1 hour and 25 minutes on a call with Goldman Sachs about their mistakes on my Apple Card statement. It’s not resolved but I think we’re finally making progress.

I’m a stickler about reconciling my monthly account statements. My dad taught me how to balance a checkbook when I was a kid and I’m diligent about that. This was the first time I’ve ever been unable to make sense of a statement. The process normally looks like this:

1. Start with last month’s balance.
2. Subtract any money you paid toward that balance.
3. Add any new transactions.
4. Add any fees and interest.
5. Compare the result to what the bank says your new closing balance is, and if it’s not an exact match, go back to the beginning until you find the missing piece.

Last month’s Apple Card statement worked like that. So did the month before that. And the month before that, all the way back 5 years. This month they threw a twist:

1. Start with last month’s balance, $1000.00¹.
2. Subtract the $500.00 payment I made.
3. Add $100.00 in new transactions.
4. Add $50 in fees and interest.
5. My arithmetic came out to a new balance of $650. Goldman Sachs computed my new balance as $425.

However I juggled the numbers, I couldn’t reproduce their result. I gave up and contacted the support chat. That was useless. The conversation went like this:

Me: There’s a problem with my statement.
Them: Your balance is $425! Is there anything else I can help you with? disconnect
Me: reconnecting There’s a problem with my statement.
Them: Oh no! It looks like that’s $425. Have a nice day! disconnect

I asked them to escalate, which resulted in someone sending me an email like:

Here’s how we resolved your case: Start with $1000.00. Now, the moon weighs more than a duck, so carry the 5 and you get $893. Add the length of the Titanic and subtract purple. That’s $425. Share and enjoy!

Today I called them and repeated “talk to a human” into the phone tree until it connected me to a person. This time I got to explain my situation to a sentient being, who went off to repeat my calculations before uttering those magic tech support words: “huh, that’s strange.” It sure is! The agent was able to reproduce my math and couldn’t figure out how to compute Goldman Sachs’s balance. I can’t exaggerate the relief I felt. I’m not alone. It’s not my imagination or inability to add a few numbers together.

Although we haven’t fixed the problem, a thinking person wrote up my problem and opened an official inquiry for me. I’m optimistic.

And don’t waste your time on Apple Card’s online chat. Nothing good comes from it.

I’ve seen things that looked like ads for apps in the iOS App Store. Today, I saw an ad for something else altogether. It’s a public service announcement warning viewers about potentially lethal fake prescription pills:

That’s a good thing to warn people about. However, it couldn’t be more out of place between the regular listings for games and useful apps. This is the app store, not a random website. And a PSA is one thing. The first time I see a commercial ad for a non-app thing here, I’ll probably have to buy a new phone to replace the one I’m likely to throw out my window.

Apple release macOS 14 Sonoma today. I always install the major OS beta versions on my work Mac when they’re first released, to see if anything critical breaks before it affects my coworkers. That happens sometimes, like when macOS 11 Big Sur deprecated kernel extensions and affected some software we used. Sonoma and its 1st-party apps were in good shape from the start.

I stumbled across a few glitches with 3rd-party software:

• Little Snitch version 5.7 adds Sonoma support.
• Rogue Amoeba’s apps that use their Audio Capture Engine (ACE) need to be updated.
• SpamSieve version 2 doesn’t work because Mail.app removed support for plugins in favor of a new extensions API. Version 3 (a paid upgrade) works with Sonoma.
• Marked 2 crashes when loading docs with fewer than 999 visible bytes. It’s still broken as of today. Workaround: Add a bunch of lorem ipsum to the bottom of the file.
• Bartender 4 doesn’t work. A paid upgrade to Bartender 5 fixes it.
• Finbar didn’t work until version 1.10.

Summary: Sonoma is a good upgrade and I’ve installed it on my Macs. You may need to upgrade some of your other software at the same time.

Apple’s email apps and services don’t allow users to completely block senders. If someone is sending you messages you don’t want to receive, tough. You’re going to get them.

The iCloud.com website’s Mail app doesn’t have a sender block mechanism. Instead, it offers a way to create rules based on each message’s attributes, such as its sender. Rules support these actions:

• Move to Folder
• Move to Trash
• Forward to
• Mark as Read
• Move to Folder and Mark as Read
• Move to Trash and Mark as Read
• Forward to an Email Address and Mark as Read

None of those actions are the same as bouncing or silently discarding an email. At most, you can have the email sent to your Trash folder.

Mail.app on a Mac allows you to mark senders as “blocked”. You can configure Mail.app’s junk mail filters to either “Mark [their message] as blocked mail, but leave it in my Inbox” or “Move it to the Trash”. Again, you can’t bounce or discard it.

I tried to be clever and write an AppleScript program to delete messages from my Mac’s Trash folder. That was a dead end because AppleScript’s idea of deleting an email is moving it to Trash, even if it’s already in there. Neither does it offer a way to automatically empty the trash.

Apple, this is disappointing. If I’m blocking someone, I don’t want to hear from them at all, ever. It’s not enough to send their messages to the Trash folder. I don’t want them to be in my email account at all.

Apple’s iPadOS 16 features a new multitasking mechanism called Stage Manager, but only on very new iPad models equipped with Apple’s M1 CPU. The ludicrous reason Apple gave for this limitation is that the recent M1 chip is the first iPad CPU capable of using swap space.

If you listen quietly, you can hear millions of computer science graduates rolling their eyes at that ridiculous excuse. Far less capable computers have supported swap space for decades, and I won’t bother going into details of how nervy Apple’s claim is. Admit it, gang: you want to give people a reason to buy new hardware to use the shiny new feature. I could respect an honest explanation that doesn’t insult my intelligence.

But because of this dishonesty, I’m holding onto my still-overpowered 2018 iPad Pro until it dies, or until Apple releases a feature I can’t live without. If there were a legitimate technical reason to hold back new features on older hardware, I might use that as a reason to upgrade. Now, though, I don’t trust Apple not to pull the same trick next year. If I bought a 2022 iPad Pro because of this, and next year they released a feature in iPadOS 17 that would only work on 2023 models for another contrived reason, I’d be livid.

Apple’s trick isn’t going to make me upgrade more often, but less often. I’m not risking my hard-earned money until I have to.