
Try quickly typing 1+ 2 + 3 into the iOS 11 Calculator - danso
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/782250/try_quickly_typing_1_2_3_into_the_ios_11/
======
kemayo
People are talking about "lag" and performance, as if this was a "the system
can't handle it!" issue. This is a misleading description. The actual issue is
that some developer at Apple screwed up their animation configuration when
implementing the calculator redesign, and nobody tested adding more than two
numbers together quickly. Multiple failures, none involving system
performance.

What's happening is: the operator buttons have an animation on them, and they
don't register inputs while the animation is running. The animation is pretty
long, so it's quite easy to tap an operator, tap a number, then tap the
operator again and have your input be missed.

Conveniently, this should be a trivial fix. Just abort the animation when a
second input is received while it's still running and register the touch. (Or,
lazily, make the animations a lot faster.)

Edit: I got operator/operand mixed up while writing this. :P

~~~
whalesalad
Your solutions are a little off the mark. Treating the animation as the
problem is merely treating the symptoms.

What needs to happen here is pressing the button needs to immediately register
the press elsewhere in the code. The UI animations and the button tap should
be decoupled entirely.

Then the user can tap away as fast as their heart desires and only the
animations are going to continue on. That’s an easy problem to solve... by
doing as you say and aborting them or shortening them.

But you should NEVER have UI animations and effects block your logic path.
They should be parallel operations not serial.

~~~
mcny
My professor likes to tell this story about keyboard buffers that I never
quite understood. Basically, in this old time terminal setup he would start
typing the password before the prompt showed up or something and when it did,
it would just sail through. Sort of like how I can apt upgrade while apt
update is still running but fancier and a couple of decades before...

~~~
whatever_dude
That's what happens when you read from a keyboard buffer. Since the buffer is
not being read (and not cleared) until a prompt is in the screen, you can type
whether you want and it'll get dumped and processed whenever needed. Not that
long ago really, that's how it worked in DOS and most other terminals.

~~~
chasd00
Isn't the keyboard buffer a part of the physical keyboard circuitry and
interface? Hitting enter triggers an IRQ to flush the buffer, so if the CPU is
too busy to handle the IRQ then things queue up until the CPU can get around
to handling it. If that's the case, for this "feature" not to work would
require a very low level architectural change to keyboards. (it's been many
years since i've thought about this though)

~~~
singingboyo
Keyboard buffers are decidedly not on the physical keyboard. The keyboard
might have a very small one, but the IRQ is triggered on every input.

The buffer in question is, for a tty, a driver-level buffer that holds on to
the data until something reads it. If a command doesn't read it (which things
like apt-get update don't) then it'll get read as the next command.

Of course, most terminals these days are ptys accessed via emulators, so the
buffer is actually part of the emulator, but the same idea applies.

~~~
chasd00
ah, the more you know :) I would have been shocked if i remembered all that
correctly

~~~
exikyut
For some reason my brain still finds it important to remember that the BIOS
keyboard buffer is 15 bytes by default, but that you could load tiny little
devices drivers in CONFIG.SYS in MS-DOS to make it a whole 31 bytes.

------
laichzeit0
Let's just be frank: If Jobs was in charge, everyone that remotely touched
that app would pulled into a room, berated and told how fucking dumb they are,
and told to pack their shit and find another job. Remember, he was obsessive
about the first calculator app and hand-tuned it to his liking, so it's not
hyperbole to suggest that he would be fucking livvid. [1]

Asshole, but perfection requires assholes. Apple is regressing. Their products
are too expensive to tolerate regression.

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/macintosh-
calculator-2011-10](http://www.businessinsider.com/macintosh-
calculator-2011-10)

~~~
silviot
TIL some people think berating your employees when they do a mistake is a good
way to run a company.

WOW!

It's just so wrong at so many levels, I don't even know where to start.

I'll leave a link to this video:
[https://www.ted.com/talks/brian_goldman_doctors_make_mistake...](https://www.ted.com/talks/brian_goldman_doctors_make_mistakes_can_we_talk_about_that)

~~~
solatic
Grandparent isn't trying to condone the practice of berating employees but to
demonstrate how Apple under Steve Jobs would've been much more likely to catch
these kinds of screwups before production and much less likely to tolerate
them once they occurred. The means of correction are less important than the
standard of quality which was effectively enforced.

------
11thEarlOfMar
As soon as I upgraded my 6s to 11, I saw performance seriously degrade. It
takes -seconds- to bring up the iMessage editor.

My immediate thought was that Apple had liberally sprinkled wait() into the
iOS 11 code base so that I'd feel like my ole A9 CPU just wasn't cutting it
any more and I'd realize, as they do, it's time to upgrade.

Or... maybe they are running every key stroke through the new Azure-enabled
Cray computers to better predict what I am going to type so that overall, my
typing is more efficient and I'm actually spending _less_ time typing...

Yeah. Yeah, that's it!

~~~
AVTizzle
>>As soon as I upgraded my 6s to 11, I saw performance seriously degrade. It
takes -seconds- to bring up the iMessage editor.

THIS! My exact experience and sentiment. The lag frustrates me every time I
open almost any app (and then I get frustrated with myself for letting myself
succumb to such a first-world-problem)

Is there any recourse? Can we disable some animations or other unnecessary
features in settings?

Can we expect 11.0.4 or 11.1 to fix?

~~~
AVTizzle
Just googled, found this...

"Some reddit users claim that resetting their settings (Settings --> General
---> Reset --> Reset All Settings) fixed all of the app issues, while others
have restored their devices and set it up as new to solve the problem. Others
have backed up and restored and had better results."

[https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/25/ios-11-app-slowdowns-
pe...](https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/25/ios-11-app-slowdowns-performance-
issues/)

~~~
lzecon
I did a backup and complete restore. It went from completely unusable to
annoyingly usable. Still considering downgrading to 10.3

~~~
nathancahill
Signing window has closed on 10.x.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Not for 6S. It has some issues and Apple still lets users downgrade.

------
cocktailpeanuts
I probably own more Apple devices than most people here (even considering this
is HN we're talking about) because I do a lot of iOS programming and I have to
use them as test devices. I also own the latest devices.

But this problem is not some stupid complaint coming from uninformed people.
This calculator thing was a perfect symbolism for all this bullshit that's
been going on since iOS 11 release because the bug is so easy to replicate,
but there's much more going on than just this calculator bug.

Before I go on, note that I have the latest iOS installed, and I do iOS
development. I'm not a clueless newbie.

Anyway here are some examples:

1\. my iPhone apps crash 50% of the times when I bring them back from sleep.

2\. Even the ones that DO load, takes around 8 seconds on average to start up.
This includes Email and iMessage. Yes, I have to wait 8 seconds for my mail
app and messages app to "boot up" before being able to check a message I just
received. This is ridiculous. I have talked to several of my friends who have
been experiencing the same thing.

3\. I had to turn off animations. Otherwise I couldn't my screen will freeze
when i try to type into imessage, etc. Remember, all of the above are
happening WITHOUT the animation turned on.

4\. I started getting emails from "No Sender" with empty content, couple of
times a day. I'm just assuming this has something to do with some fucked
internal clock (I have double checked and my iCal and preferences are
correctly set) but who knows.

5\. Yesterday I was trying to take a picture and opened the camera. And YES, I
mean the native camera app that ships with iOS. I saw the camera UI launch,
but there was no "camera". It was just a black screen. I've become accustomed
to this type of lag in app loading so i waited for my camera to "boot up". It
never did. The camera app was open and there were all the UI components, but
it wasn't capturing anything. I have never seen anything like this before.

Please stop saying "haha it's funny how these idiots think some calculator
problem means Apple's future is doomed" because last time something like this
happened was when I switched from Windows to Mac.

~~~
dvt
Was going to upgrade to an iPhone X. After this iOS 11 nonsense, I'm honestly
considering going back to Android. It's absolutely unforgivable how terrible
my iPhone 6S has been running since the update. Same as you: constant crashes,
random freezes and reboots, abysmal battery life, not to mention an _insane_
bug where when someone calls you (or you call them), they can't hear you and
you can't hear them. This bug persists until you _reboot your phone_. Like,
wtf?

This feels like Apple has crossed the Rubicon. The Steve Jobs era is
officially over.

~~~
ekzy
Same here. My 6S quite often freezes. I also sometimes have a network problem
that I never had before, no internet connection at all even when I have a full
4G signal, and I have to reboot the phone. Does anyone else experience this
issue?

~~~
JustSomeNobody
I have a 6S. I suggest doing a DFU and set up as new.

------
sogen
As the thread says, I can confirm this bug, the answer: 24

:(

iOS 11 must be the buggiest piece of s I've ever tried. Stuck animations, apps
that take ages to load, widgets not working, more stuck animations, text
overlapping everywhere.

Related: Flat design was supposed to make things leaner...

EDIT: Worst of all, every single operation is wrong: 7+8+9 = 96 4+5+6 = 60

~~~
prawn
I'm with you. Updated my 6+ and everything is tragically slow. 4-5 seconds
just to get the Settings or Messages apps to open. Typing anything is
unbearable - every time, the first word capitalises and then botches
everything from then on. Basic functions within apps or opening the camera
take so long as to render them near-useless.

I have switched off any animations and performance tweaks that I thought might
help, but no luck.

If you have a 6, I'd recommend avoiding iOS 11 as much as you can.

~~~
ak39
iPhone 6 Plus here. Can confirm exact same issues.

I ended up backing up everything and reinstalling from fresh. It's only just
bearable now. Still noticeable 2s+ delays to open iMessage & and to get into
Settings. Using the device for me has become completely joyless. In fact I
have incipient resentment just looking at this p.o.s. It was once a great
device. It's now hamstrung with bloat. I have stopped using it much now - I
haven't yet installed Twitter & GMail or any of the many apps I had again. An
entire 25 GB cache of Music library has yet to be re-installed. The phone sits
almost the entire day unused. Battery life at end at night for a recharge?
80%!

If Apple doesn't fix these issues quickly and restore confidence in the
already dwindling user base, they will suffer greatly at the hands of the
Huawei's of the market. You don't need a fascist type of Jobs to get these
types of issues fixed.

Come on Apple!

~~~
MaxBarraclough
Vageuly related: Menuet ships with a perfectly functional calculator

[https://youtu.be/fpEwOXzYBi8?t=5m34s](https://youtu.be/fpEwOXzYBi8?t=5m34s)

------
epistasis
Almost all of the animations on iOS are about 2x-3x as long as they should be.

First off, they look terrible, the slooooooow change from one thing to
another. Secondly, they severely impede usability because you have to wait
wait wait for 1000ms here, 1000ms there, and another 1000ms there after every
action.

It's enough to make me want to give up privacy and switch to Android.

Soooo pissed at slow animations. 500ms, TOPS devs. NO MORE, and ideally
something like 200ms. /rant

~~~
colanderman
> It's enough to make me want to give up privacy and switch to Android.

It's sadly no better on the Android side of the fence either. How many times
I've had to wait for the keyboard app to decide to load…

~~~
kbenson
I think that might be dependent on the keyboard your flagship provider ships
with, and some are better than others. Thankfully, you can switch out the
keyboard handler. That is, Android suffers from similar problems, some
_sometimes_ Android's modularity and allowing for choices comes through to
save you.

But still, the perverse incentives of Google make privacy a real question.
Then again, if I was willing to put up or shut up, I would probably be running
a de-googled AOSP based version of Android. :/

~~~
colanderman
Gboard here. I have a Motorola, which I've found tend to be pretty stock.

------
veidr

        "Jony wants you to take time
         and appreciate the simplicity 
         of the slowly dimming animations.
    
         Or we’re just using it wrong."
    

Apple has lots of issues like this, in iOS and macOS, where they choose visual
appeal over functionality, or where animation impedes usability.

This is a pretty sad bug, though.

My (very expensive, "high-end") Japanese induction stove has a similar issue.
Its capacitive touch controls take _just an extra beat_ to register, so you
have to turn on the stove, pause 700ms, turn on the burner, pause another
500ms or so, then turn the burner up to max to boil your kettle.

I'm totally used to it by now, and never get it wrong any more, but it still
bugs me every single fucking morning.

~~~
Nition
Capacitive buttons are a plague, man. Even the cheap new stoves have them now.
Monitors and TVs have had them for a while. Cars are going for touch displays.
There's a delay, they don't work every time, and you can't feel them out.

Are they cheaper? I don't understand the point of them in the cases where
they're literally just replacing a real button. The worst is when they don't
even indicate clearly where the buttons actually are.

~~~
krastanov
They certainly must be cheaper - no mechanical components, just a single wire
(instead of two) connecting the pad to the micro-controller. And they are
"fancy"/"futuristic".

My lab placed fancy touch-screens in the place of the light switches. Now
turning the lights on or off takes at least 15 seconds but we get to pretend
to be luxurious :(

~~~
blackguardx
Switches are usually connected to digital inputs with one wire as well. The
other wire is connected to either power or ground. The wire to the
microcontroller is either pulled up or down with a resistor to power or
ground, respecively.

~~~
krastanov
Yes, but capsense does not require that power/ground wire.

------
plainOldText
I absolutely abhor the new Calculator app on the iOS 11. The old interface was
way more elegant, the buttons were squares (and had a larger touch area), and
it worked even when you typed fast.

Sometimes I wonder why individuals working for these multibillion dollar
companies, who affect the lives of millions of people, decide to change things
for the worse. Imagine having spent all those hours overhauling the calculator
app, on I don't know, fixing things that actually are broken.

~~~
grzm
I agree that the described bug is a very frustrating bug. As for old squares
vs the new circles, that's an aesthetic choice I'm sure some will like and
some won't. My impression is that the old UI is more in keeping with the HP
calculator it emulated. Personally it's not something I'm overly concerned
about but I can understand how some may be. (Don't get me started on the
Contacts icon which I can never seem to be able to find.)

> _" and had a larger touch area"_

Your comment regarding touch area made me curious. While the button image area
is smaller, in my very simple and admittedly limited tests I seem to be able
to activate the button with touching the button only tangentially. Even with
my pinky I can't _not_ activate a button when attempting to avoid them by
pressing in the space between them. This leads me to believe either the active
area extends beyond the button image area, or, more pragmatically, fingers are
large enough that they're going to end up activating the buttons regardless.
Would you mind going into more detail in how you determined that the touch
area is reduced in the iOS 11 calculator?

~~~
plainOldText
Here's how I see it:

I look at a button as defined by its shape as "perceived touchable area".

A circle enclosed in a square has a smaller area than the square enclosing the
circle. You're seeing the new buttons as circles (thus smaller area), even
though behind the scenes (as your little experiment has demonstrated) the
buttons are still squares (real touchable area) on a grid.

I would also argue the eyes have a harder time parsing the layout, as the
visual boundaries between the circular buttons have more complex shapes than
the old UI, where the boundaries were very thin lines.

If you want to run another "experiment" – albeit theoretical – imagine we
shrink the "perceived touchable area" of each button even further, say we get
rid of the circular background and keep solely the digit displayed on the
button. Your eyes will now perceive the visual representation of the button,
as only the digit, and I would say our initial impulse is to touch what we see
and not some imaginary boundary we know exists.

~~~
grzm
I see what you’re saying, but I don’t think at the end of the day this ends up
mattering much, if at all. For example, when trying to press the buttons
quickly to reproduce the bug, I didn’t feel the slightest need to be precise.
Similarly, if the buttons were physical, I believe they’re large enough that
people wouldn’t feel much (if any) need to be more precise due to the inherent
“slop” buttons have. Though, if you have reference to UX tests that show
otherwise, I’d be interested in reading it.

------
MarkSweep
The calculator in Windows 10 got a similar "upgrade". It now has a loading
screen that eats keystrokes. The Windows 7 just launched instantly and took
10% the RAM and threads (seriously, the Win10 calc.exe has 28 threads!)

It would be one thing if these companies were making greenfield apps and
choose Electron to make their calculator app. But both Apple and Microsoft had
perfectly functional calculator apps before, why spend the effort to make them
worse?

~~~
kristianp
Both the lock screen and the start menu have loading delays that eat
keystrokes. It seems to be acceptable to the Windows team that this happens.

~~~
jasomill
I agree that this behavior is terrible, and arguably even worse when menu
animations are disabled, yet the Start menu delay remains more or less the
same.

What appears to be happening — I have no idea what's _actually_ happening, but
my guess as to what the problem may be, is that there's no special handling of
Start menu keyboard input, just a set of systemwide shortcuts that tell
Explorer to open the Start menu _and then_ to steal keyboard focus.

My fear is that the reason that no special effort appears to have been made to
fix this is not some significant technical difficulty, but out of some
explicit or implicit management decision that time spent fixing a bug that's
only visible to the very few users who even realize the Start menu accepts
keyboard input in the first place would be better spent on "important stuff",
like, um, making the taskbar "more social"[1].

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/26/windows-10-gets-more-
socia...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/26/windows-10-gets-more-social-with-
my-people-a-taskbar-feature-focused-on-sharing-communication/)

------
ars
Summary:

It animates the + button when you press it, and blocks any further touches
till the animation is done.

Video: [https://streamable.com/4xsh9](https://streamable.com/4xsh9)

~~~
teddyh
Correction: It doesn’t block _any_ further touches, just _operator button_
touches. So 1+234 won’t miss the 3, but 1+2+3 misses the second +.

------
andrewf
Similar issue (seen in iOS 10 as well): when setting an alarm, swipe the am/pm
selector and then hit "Done" before the animation completes...

Yeah I missed a meeting once.

~~~
jasongill
This one gets me all the time - if the system thinks the "wheel" is still
moving, it doesn't update the value. So I am always having my alarms go off at
the wrong time for the same reason - I set them in a hurry and click Done
while the "wheel" is still animating but my selected time is in view, and the
time I wanted doesn't register.

I'm not sure why it doesn't just set the time to the number that is mostly in
the selection box and is being "snapped" to, instead of waiting for the
animation to stop

------
tzhenghao
I'm feeling extremely uncomfortable looking at these kinds of regressions.
There's probably some Boeing/NASA engineer pulling out his iPhone and making
"simple" but potentially dangerous back-of-the-envelope calculations like
this. We already solved the calculator many decades ago, then brought it into
many portable devices, the first iPhone and now we see a broken version of it
on iOS 11.

~~~
badestrand
That is what really astonishes me about technology: Stuff can get worse. As
you said, it is a solved problem, but unless someone somewhere is pushing
hard, it will keep getting worse. People in charge make stupid decisions and
the creators probably don't care because calculators are unsexy. Next thing we
know, there is a billion dollar startup with a calculator app because the
current ones are so shitty.

------
kirubakaran
Do people really need that kind of accuracy? Are you launching rockets or
something? The answers are close enough for regular people and more
importantly, the animation is beautiful. If you want such insane accuracy,
perhaps you're not Apple's target market. /s

~~~
likelynew
If you type 1+2+3+4, it comes out to be 470. Still, it is in the range that
should not matter to most unless you are launching rockets.

------
mempko
Just tried on my 2011 HP veer which ran webOS.

[https://twitter.com/mempko/status/922673699752308737](https://twitter.com/mempko/status/922673699752308737)

I like to fire up older tech (2011 is not that old) to remind myself all the
forks in the roads society had to take that led us to where we are today. RIP
webOS.

------
itbeho
Remember when Steve Jobs introduced Snow Leopard as a stability/maintenance
release without much in the way of new shiny features? Maybe Apple can revisit
that idea.

Aside from bugs, don't even get me started on the giant fucking labels in the
iOS 11 mail app telling me which folder I'm in....

~~~
kalleboo
That's what both El Capitan and High Sierra have been sold as on the Mac, so
it's not as if Apple has forgotten the tactic. On iOS they have too much
competition from Android to take a step back like that.

~~~
notatoad
Android's last couple releases have been more focused on internals and
performance as well - For Android 8 the standout user-facing features are new
emoji and they changed the notification shade colour from dark grey to white.

------
colanderman
I'd been considering switching to iOS from Android due to Android's horribly
laggy UI. Glad to hear it's just as miserable on the other side of the fence.

~~~
thenickdude
In Developer Options, set the animation duration to 0, which kills the
animations. It's like having a brand new phone not having to wait for stupid
animation fluff to complete.

Take care though, because I've used an app in the past which was broken with
animations disabled. I can't remember which one it was, but it relied on an
animation completing to trigger an event when a soft button was held down for
a certain interval.

~~~
colanderman
Good advice but I did that long ago :)

------
Larrikin
This is the first version of iOS I have actually held off on installing on day
one, simply because of all the problems Apple has had on macOS and previous
versions of iOS. The last update my iPad 3 got basically killed it.

Doesn't seem to be getting any better and I plan on holding off on updating
for as long as I possibly can.

~~~
MBCook
This is the first time I’ve ever had real battery life issues with an update.
I’m really hoping 11.1 fixes it because otherwise this version is going to
become infamous for its problems.

------
Aardappel
This very problem is also an eternal struggle in game development when it
comes to player character animation.

There's some people who wish to start blending into the next animation the
moment a new player input comes in. This is great for responsive gameplay, but
causes wonkey looking animations, feet sliding etc.

Then there's the people that simply want to always let an animation complete.
It looks great, but obviously is very frustrating as your inputs get ignored
and you can't react to things when you want to. Buffering inputs is not viable
either.

Sadly, it seems in modern games the latter group is winning more and more. For
example, in the Witcher 3 (which is otherwise an amazing game) orienting your
character such that it is looking at (and the right distance from) a pickup is
almost a minigame, since every time you tap a directional key to move in the a
direction, an animation plays, which inevitably moves you too far.

I can't really resist playing games like The Witcher 3 anyway, but if I could
I would "vote with my wallet" and not play any games that prefer animation
fidelity over good player controls. Sigh.

------
pmalynin
If anyone at Apple is reading this, can you please look into the WindowServer
memory leak in High Sierra... every 3 days my Mac crashes because WindowServer
decides to consume >26 GB of virtual memory.

------
akhatri_aus
Apple has really degraded with regards to the quality of their products with
Tim Cook at the helm.

------
chubs
Very simple fix: all they need to do is pass
UIViewAnimationOptions.allowUserInteraction to UIView.animate(...) when
animating the flash of the buttons. Simple oversight.

------
United857
I've not worked at Apple before, but it wouldn't surprise me that a lot of
these quality issues come from their supposed culture of secrecy and
compartmentalization where no one knows what anyone else is doing for the most
part. This makes it hard to test things end-to-end as an integrated whole
before things get released.

At my employer, our culture is almost the polar opposite -- everything is open
unless there's a need not to. Every employee dogfoods the latest builds of our
apps/website/hardware before it goes out to the public, and culturally,
internal feedback is encouraged. This is invaluable QA signal (in addition to
automated testing and traditional manual testing) and a key part of why we can
release as fast as we can.

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
They did just fine while Steve Jobs was around. It's not the secrecy (although
it does help to have transparency), it's complacency.

------
alextooter
It's not just about animates, Apple's software quality is getting worse those
days. Not only the iOS,macOS is getting worse too.

Seems they fired all software QA engineers, and hire more ppt engineer, stop
saying awesome and check your code.

------
deathanatos
There was — and I think it's still present — a similar bug in OS X's WM. ^→
and ^← switch spaces; the active (keyboard focused) window is not switched
until the _end_ of the animation, and subsequent keyboard input isn't withheld
in the meantime. Meaning that if you type:

    
    
      123 ^→ abc
    

Which window gets "abc" is entirely dependent on how _fast_ you type it. (If
you wait long enough, the top window in the destination workspace gets it. If
you don't, the top window in the source workspace.)

This gets doubly fun when both windows are terminals with ssh to production
machines open…

------
wruza
I know I’m pretty late on this, but can I have my iOS 6 back? You know, it
still fits all my needs the same way buttoned phones did (except the internet,
which is a distinct program) and looks not like modern crap.

------
ACow_Adonis
Not on apple, but I remember for an old job interview I had to do an online
timed basic math proficiency test. You were allowed/expected to use a
calculator.

Thank god they had practice questions. Because here was silly old me thinking
"well I've got a smart phone, I can just use that".

One iteration through the practice questions using my smartphone calculator,
and off I went to the newsagent to pick up the old version for the real
thing...

Of course,the rant for why they were testing me on manually-done math for a
data analytics job can be saved for another thread :)

------
walterbell
Try disabling "Smart Invert", then toggling invert mode by triple-clicking the
home button .. iOS11 goes back to "Smart" Invert, it cannot be turned off.

------
makecheck
Maybe product regressions are inevitable at highly successful conpanies,
becoming victims of their own success.

Important people leave companies sometimes, which can be a real pain but
probably not a disaster.

On the other hand, _this_ company overworks people, and the stock that
employees have is probably worth a small fortune. They may have lost lots of
good people, and cracks are starting to show.

------
xxxxxxxx
It's not only Apple that is regressing. calc.exe crashes at startup my Win 10
machine 50% of the time. It needs a remote procedure call to work now.

Activation of application Microsoft.WindowsCalculator_8wekyb3d8bbwe!App failed
with error: The remote procedure call failed. See the Microsoft-Windows-
TWinUI/Operational log for additional information.

------
jcims
I just bought my first iPhone in four years after a run on Android. Obviously
neither are perfect but the experience so far has been startlingly
underwhelming. I’m chalking it up to new release OS bugs as the hardware (8
plus) doesn’t seem different enough to warrant any issues.

This kind of thing just seems like par for the course. I don't get it.

~~~
hedora
I felt the same way when I switched from Windows Phone to iOS.

I’m still bummed they killed it. There are a few IOS apps I use that it was
missing, but no dealbreakers.

I really wish someone would undercut the big three (on laptops and mobile)
with an OS that was bulletproof, covered 90% of use cases well (and is ~10% as
complex as the competition), and didn’t rely on ads/telemetry for revenue.

Screw platforms + ecosystems; just make it not suck.

------
tdrnd
For anyone that want to see this in action, but doesn't have immediate access
to an iOS 11 device, here is an quick video that shows what happens:

[https://twitter.com/yarnichat/status/922051344185348096](https://twitter.com/yarnichat/status/922051344185348096)

------
zaf
Was about to get depressed and write a real nasty, down and dirty sarcastic
comment, I mean, 1 + 2 + 3 = 24 , WTF?!?! Woz! What's your thoughts?

But then chilled out. I didn't even pay for my shiny new iPhone.

Kids, theres plenty of software to be (re)written, be grateful to be
employable for a very long time.

------
ancarda
Why is there no way on iOS to disable all animations? It isn’t just the
calculator, usually when an animation is playing, there’s no input. My phone
feels so slow all the time, I hate it.

Reduce Motion helps a bit, but honestly I’d disable all animations that aren’t
absolutely non-blocking.

------
planetjones
Maybe the iPhone X will have enough power to add three numbers together
without lag.

Seriously what are Apple doing. The fundamentals are gone. I literally don’t
know what day it is anymore in iOS 11. I use google calendar which is stuck on
31 because apple don’t let third party devs have updatable icons. I used to
swipe left to find the date, but that no longer works. Now I have to pull down
from the top, which I find a rather cumbersome experience. I am not an expert
on android but the latest pixel phones promo shots show the date on the home
screen (or can be configured to do with widgets I guess). It’s getting
tempting to jump ship.

~~~
bobbles
If I swipe down from the top of the screen I see the clock and the date, do
you get that?

~~~
planetjones
Yes. But it’s cumbersome. With a plus model I can swipe left one handed. I
need two hands to swipe down from the top.

~~~
saline
Do you have the reachability feature enabled? It should allow you to reach the
top for gestures while still using the phone one handed.

There's also assistive touch, which can help with gestures and other settings.

------
IncRnd
The software quality of Apple products that I use has fallen significantly in
the past few years.

Updates slow down my phone, every single update, as well as introducing errors
like this or where I double tap home to change applications and instead get a
blur on the screen. Desktop OS updates have incrementally slowed down the
computers, notably since Mavericks (and even earlier), so ever-slower desktops
are actually expected by now.

I've used iOS products for years, refusing for example to use Android, but the
issues I am encountering on the phone have become ridiculous. It may be time
for an old school flip phone with a week long battery.

~~~
vostrocity
I still use Mavericks for personal stuff. Ditched iOS for MIUI (more polished
than iOS these days).

~~~
IncRnd
I know some people who refuse to go past Mavericks in their business. They
perform video processing and streaming.

Thanks for letting me know about MIUI.

------
Jtsummers
Given that they managed to break volume control for iPhone 7 users like me
(other versions too?), this isn't surprising in the least. Volume control
mostly works now (11.0.3). However, half the time now it'll _show_ the volume
changing, but the actual audio output will be unchanged (may be an app issue,
happens mostly with WhatsApp voice calls, but have had it happen some with the
built-in Music app, not as reliably flawed there).

I'm still rebooting every couple days to keep bluetooth working reliably with
my car. Maybe by 11.1 I can tell my sister and parents that it's safe to
upgrade.

~~~
sogen
I'm on 11.1, still sucks

------
mmorearty
Original source:
[https://twitter.com/dangerdave/status/921790333905641472](https://twitter.com/dangerdave/status/921790333905641472)

------
patwolf
Another UX issue I've seen with the iPhone calculator:

My wife is a nurse and uses the iPhone calculator to calculate doses. She
performed a calculation like

    
    
      2.25
      /
      1.5
      =
    

It did give the correct answer of _1.5_. However, there was no animation or
blanking out of the display to easily distinguish between the operand of 1.5
and the result of 1.5. She thought it was a bug and wasn't giving her an
answer. I always thought it was a little scary that such a horribly designed
calculator was being used by so many medical professionals.

~~~
jonandersense
I just tested this and it does animate (a brief flash). This is on iOS 11, so
maybe you have a different version?

~~~
patwolf
yes, this was iOS 9 or 10

------
ratiofarming
I see so many people here saying that their performance in older iPhones has
declined with iOS 11.

I would like to point out that most (if not all) the lag issues and other
performance related issues can be reproduced on a current iPhone 8. I have
one. The flashlight has a noticeable delay when turning it on, the calculator
is broken as described, the UI gets stuck a lot, apps crash a lot etc.

This is not a money grabbing scheme by apple. iOS 11 is just really bad
software. Not the calculator though, this problem is older and has been there
in iOS 10 aswell.

------
jacquesm
Form over function sucks.

------
agotterer
I’ve also been able to reproduce this bug. I found that if you pause and wait
for the animation to finish before hitting the next number it will work as
expected.

iOS usually launches with a bunch of bugs and issues. But this particular
release has been one of the buggiest I can remember. There’s so many UI
inconsistencies and other issues that feel incredibly rushed. I really hope
the next minor patch addresses these, especially the battery issues. I’m
charging my iphone7 2-3 times a day.

------
kbenson
I do have to say, it was refreshing that it wasn't what I expected. I expected
a floating point bug. This is in some ways worse and in some ways better.

------
borski
Every time I see a race condition like this the only thing I can think of is
the Therac-25: [https://blog.bugsnag.com/bug-day-race-condition-
therac-25/](https://blog.bugsnag.com/bug-day-race-condition-therac-25/)

This isn't that, obviously, but it underscores the importance of testing. This
clearly should have been caught in QA.

------
manigandham
Animations are the _worst_ part of every single UI I use.

Also constantly hiding basic functions behind more menus and adding way too
much white-space.

------
zaroth
Not a problem in 10.3.1 on a 6S. Is this a joke - it's so lagging it doesn't
process the taps in sequence?

~~~
sah2ed
I get 24 on iOS 10.3.3 so it appears the bug has existed before iOS 11.

------
lifeisstillgood
Thank you ! I have been getting really annoyed with the ios 11 UI. podcast
feels like molasses - click the play button on a downloaded podcast -
literally count 3 seconds before the UI responds and another before I hear
anything

I just assumed it was my phone.

The excellent Working Copy is now non-functional for me.

------
jasonlotito
This type of thing isn't new. Even on the latest hardware with up to date
software. Countless times I've searched for an app, seen it popup, stop
searching, and go to tap and something else comes up and I've now tapped on
that.

~~~
inopinatus
That problem is frustrating but not unique to Apple. Many asynchronous search
interfaces break usability in this fashion. I have never understood how any
front-end developer can tolerate this behaviour.

------
csomar
iOS 11 is buggy as hell. I'm quite disappointed that I upgraded. That, and
there already was two patches that I went through. That fixed stuff and
brought other buggy stuff.

This is Apple flagship device and milk cow. This is not what I paid for.

------
xcadaverx
Animation of the plus button is blocking touch events. What a bad apple
example.

... ;)

------
5_minutes
I dont understand why there’s no calculator on the iPad included....

------
sashk
Just tested out on iOS 10.3.2 with iPhone SE and it has exactly same bug.
Trying to add 1+4+7 will result in answer being 48. So it's more than a year-
old bug.

------
sunpazed
For the record, I’ve never touched the native calculator. I’ve been using an
RPN tool called CALX. It’s great. I’d more than happily pay to use it, but
it’s free!

------
dingo_bat
Isn't it pretty basic to run animations in background, without blocking
anything else? Sad that we're going backwards with basic user interface stuff.

------
Too
Old Swedish joke: What's the result of entering 1+2 into a Norweigian
calculator? >> "Please wait"

------
uptownfunk
I really like my iphone because the hardware is so damn reliable. I haven't
had my iphone 6 fail on me in over 2 years. It's also pretty tough, I treat it
like crap and it still works.

The software definitely blows.

Does anyone know of another smartphone brand where the hardware is close to
being as good as the iphone?

~~~
sogen
two years ago I used for a couple months a sony xperia, very nice and solid.

------
Jzush
Pressing 1+2+3 quicky = 24, pressing 1+2+3 slowly = 6. Odd.

~~~
gnulinux
It is a race condition. Nothing odd, they need to fix it though.

------
mzzter
Try evaluating 2^3^4 on some native Android calculators ;)

------
Jzush
So, quickly hit 1+2+3 = 24, if I do it slowly, I get 6.

------
jordache
3.11-3.1 ? LOL Apple.. Get your sh*t together!

------
temp8748
It does this in iOS 10 too (just tested)

------
leetbulb
Try 1<<63 on macOS calculator.

------
mrfusion
I seem to get 23 when I try this.

------
geetfun
I'm a little upset that every one is getting 24, and I only get 23. Am I doing
this wrong?

~~~
tedunangst
Press equals. You're seeing the 23 you entered, not the sum. If you enter it
very slowly, you'll see 3 until you press =.

------
banned1
Apple is now Microsoft.

------
aj7
Use Wolfram Alpha.

------
jijji
1+2+3=24

~~~
quickthrower2
If you redefine juxtaposition as +

------
partycoder
[https://xkcd.com/937/](https://xkcd.com/937/)

