Is there a reason why Apple's iPhone spellcheck is often really poor, significantly worse than both LLMs and just...human eyes?
I often find myself butchering the spelling of a word in a way where the correct answer is obvious to human eyes (probably because of "typoglycemia" [1]) and an AI LLM immediately understands what I meant to say, but Apple's spellcheck has "No Guesses Found."
Yes but it’s much broader. Just in general the lack of Steve Jobs noticing these glaring issues and coming down hard to solve them is pretty clear.
I remember when macbooks briefly came out with a ridiculously bright standby led that required
Black electrical tape over if you wanted to sleep with it in the house. Shortly after no more status leds on any MacBook (thank you!).
Nowadays i find non stop little annoyances with threads from others on the same issues on Apple devices. From.the.overly.prominent.full.stop when searching textually in the url bar to the crappy spell check and crappy spam filtering. As much as Jobs apparently came across as an asshole there’s a need for someone at the top to say ‘WTF is this, fix it or get fired!’.
I worked at Apple and heard a lot of Steve stories. He really did personally approve everything. He would be sitting in a room, and team leads would all line up to give their quick 2-minute update. So it's the MacBook Air guy's turn. He comes in and places his prototype down in front of Steve. Steve opens the lid. Two seconds later he picks up the laptop and heaves it so hard it skipped across the table like a stone on water: "I said fxxking INSTANT ON!!" The poor guy collected his prototype and exited the room. Later the MacBook Air launched... it fxxking turned on the moment you open the lid
Good product development really does seem to require some sort of leader who demands quality and smacks people when they don't deliver. Linux is nice because of Torvalds for example.
I was given a small electric fan. It’s great in that it’s portable and I can use it in some of the crummy hotels I have to stay in.
Unfortunately, it has a bright blue LED on it so it’s a pain to use at night when you’re trying to sleep.
It’s so bright that even covered with tape it still shines through the thin plastic of the fan body.
What really gets me is why they bothered putting an operating light on it in the first place?
It’s a fan. The fact that it’s working tells you it’s working.
A Jobs or Torvalds type character would have pointed that out.
I suspect though that it’s often a case of people noticing these type of design flaws but not having the authority to fix them while those with the authority don’t care.
I've worked in physical product development at some companies that include names you'd recognize.
More often than not, those annoying features are direct requests from the person up top who smacks people. They want that feature because they think it will sell, and it's no use trying to argue with them because you'll just get smacked again.
Oh yeah, it's definitely solvable if you can be bothered with it.
It was more just the observation that an unnecessary light had been included that degrades the performance of the product.
I find it intriguing how that comes to be. On paper it seems like adding the light wouldn't hurt the product even if not useful but no body actually used it it seems.
There is a chance the led is also used as a important diode in the circuit, plainly removing it can greatly reduce the lifespan of the device. (more common in cheaper products)
Adding a appropiate diode in it's place is advised.
> I suspect though that it’s often a case of people noticing these type of design flaws but not having the authority to fix them while those with the authority don’t care.
Kinda related but also not really, my own pet peeve is the pouring spout in many products, coffee machine, water jugs, buckets... they might look effective but I find that more often than not, they are curved too much and drip all over when actually pouring.
And I always have to wonder, after serving coffee from one of those things, did the person who design it never even try it just once? Didn't they ever use such a thing, they never ever poured water from a pot?
I have to agree with that as a lead. Most developers claim to be done with a task without taking care of the small details that users will immediately notice. It’s a constant struggle to try to get them to care about what is actually the value of the feature they are implementing, let alone chase on their own initiative the small issues unless painfully listed in some requirements document.
As a dev Im always noticing these little problems in my designs but my boss just wants the thing done asap without worrying too much about it being nice to use.
Same here to the point when I do leave it’s going to be one of the reasons given.
One example is how this product manager type, because of company politics, isn’t really under the same department as the other software teams.
Because of his very very narrow horse blinkers approach, he doesn’t see or even comprehend why we’d want to align with literally anything in any other team and that includes visual UI stuff.
That’s why we have a bright neon pink “Back” button. Right in the literal center of the screen. It’s insane.
In this case, both fair and fare are words in English. Which shows that spell checking needs to know a lot about grammar and context to work in general. Basically you need an LLM. Or if not a 'large language model', perhaps at least a small language model.
I wonder how it does work, I remember MS Word having a fairly decent grammar checker when I was using it in school - which predated LLMs by many years!
I suspect an LLM wouldn’t be the most optimal choice
Latency is actually an interesting case, because it’s one of those things that, by default, nobody owns end-to-end
If you’re booting a computer or building web search, every subsystem can contribute to latency. If you have more teams and more features, you’re likely to have more latency.
In the early days of Google, Larry Page would push hard on this as well, in person. So Google search was fast.
But later the company became larger and bureaucratized, so nobody was in charge of latency. So then each team contributes a bit to latency, and that’s what ends up shipping.
Google products used to be known for being fast, but they’ve reverted to the mean
The instant on thing actually bothered me enough to make switch from windows back to Mac( by proxy the idle battery drain on windows was also pretty terrible)
Alignment of incentives. I'm sure the personal humiliation of being yelled at by Jobs was a reasonably strong incentive, but I'm certain the perception that failing to deliver would have him personally sending you to the dole queue asap was even more of a strong incentive.
Compare to most corporations where the only thing you can do to get fired is fail at office politics and failure to deliver/delivering the lowest quality crap that can be passed off is just business as usual.
Alas, human don't come fully customisable. You get to pick from the packages on offer. And it seemed like for Apple Steve Jobs' good parts only came as part of a package that also included his bad parts.
Most macbooks I remember since a long time ago were pretty much instant on way before apple sillicon. Maybe you had some corporate crapware installed in yours/.
I've also found a lot of this stuff is due to naysayers telling people that things can't be fixed (because really they don't want to bother). You need a strong leader to say "no it can and we will".
It takes a village. Also to be successful in tech it takes an asshole. No way around it. At some point all successful companies share an overly aggressive visionary. The entire company doesn’t need to be toxic, but the apex does. If you don’t like it, don’t climb the ladder.
I don't know, maybe he wouldn't raise his voice, but I can't imagine it would be fun to be a subordinate of LKY at the moment he decided you were wasting his time.
Warren Buffet is a very carefully crafted “aww shucks” persona. He’s spent megabucks inventing it and keeping it safe. And I lose the argument because I cannot find the article from a decade ago that really dug into it. Either SEO has vanished it or he has it removed.
Digital's Ken Olsen is probably one of the most relevant examples. Though it probably helped that Olsen was largely working with the grain at DEC, building digital playsets which engineers themselves loved, rather than constantly forcing them to adopt a non-technical consumer's perspective.
Skill issue. There are other ways to get those results, but being an asshole is the lowest-hanging, and is nearly free if the people around you don't have the self-respect to walk away.
Not just that, but the strong leader needs to ensure that it can be fixed.
Yelling at a rank-and-file to unfuck some random system, then not giving them any time, resources, or tools to fix it is just being a dictatorial dickhead.
Wait until you realize that the icon of the period and spacebar don't at all line up to the touch area due to touch gravitation. You can tap slightly more on the spacebar side and still end up with a period. https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1ekszul/comment/lgn...
So if you suffer from this it's not even your fault. You're literally hitting the spacebar but some incentive at Apple in their org structure has led to the period literally having waaaay too much weighting and the lack of exec oversight at Apple in the post Jobs days is leading to us all.typing.periods.whenever.we.just.wanted.to.search.
It's hard to pinpoint exactly what it is, but yes, there seems to be an increasing number of small issue with Apple devices. They aren't major stuff simply not work, but yes, spam filter being pretty terrible, text overlapping on non flagship phones (e.g. the iPhone SE). All sorts of minor annoyances.
Yep I've worked at other big tech where they had periodic "executive bug filing" where executives would flag minor things that are annoying. These minor issues would then have higher than normal priority purely by virtue of being flagged by an exec. I have a likely controversial opinion that this executive bug filing actually led to better outcomes.
It did break prioritization in the opinion of the ground level teams and their goals but I argue it's not bad to at least periodically do this since grating against the current org structure prioritization and goals is not a bad thing to do on occasion.
Chances are they'll find there's no team that considers themselves the owners of spell check or spam filtering and the goals the keyboard team are going for is likely some silly thing like "number of sentences with correct punctuation" leading to the current ridiculous outcomes where the period in the URL is way too prominent, especially considering we don't even type full URLS into the search bar that often these days.
Dear Apple leads: if you're reading this do a short initiative where execs aim to file an annoyance a day. It's not hard to find such. There will be some complaints at the ground level that these executive annoyances get too much priority but part of that will be because you're questioning lower level org priorities (a healthy thing to do!), not because the issues don't matter. The end result will bring Apple a bit more in line with the quality we saw during the Jobs period since this is exactly the kind of shake up he did on occasion.
Currrent MBPs have bright green/orange charging lights on both sides of the magsafe connector. They're bright enough I have to block them when I'm in a hotel and my laptop is in the same room.
That light was really helpful to do the occasional late night visit to the bathroom in a home where I lived where there were no light controls at the bedside.
There has to be something going on with iOS Safari and the keyboard because my typing goes to complete shit in ways it never does in any other application.
Here are some random examples I thought of for this comment. Notice how everything is spelled wrong as though the screen input doesn’t match the location of the buttons.
I notice this as well, i think it is because the autocorrect is turned off and we may just be so used to it learning our typing habits that our "raw" typing is really that bad
> I remember when macbooks briefly came out with a ridiculously bright standby led that required Black electrical tape over if you wanted to sleep with it in the house. Shortly after no more status leds on any MacBook (thank you!).
The lack of status LEDs is actually the only thing I really REALLY hate about MacBooks!
Too often I have been bitten by the thing not properly going to sleep because SOMETHING keeps a wake lock (and of course macOS doesn't indicate this anywhere outside of Energy Monitor, nested in System Activity) and overheating in my bag as a result. A simple LED would have been a good visual indicator that it is still awake.
There's nothing more frustrating than when you type the word you want to type, it changes it to a different word, you delete it and type the word you wanted to type again and then rinse/repeat 3 to 4 times before you have the word you actually wanted.
And if you're not paying attention, your message ends up looking like you're having a stroke.
It used to be that if you typed, deleted the correction, and retyped, that spelling would now be the preferred and you wouldn’t have to play that game anymore. Apple broke that years ago.
> they focus too much on the first letter of the word
They also do that in Apple Notes. On the iPad the search can only match word prefixes. So if you type "oo" and the entire note consists of just the word "foo", it will find nothing. This doesn't even require fuzzy search, yet they couldn't be bothered while solving the much more difficult handwriting recognition problem.
Also the iPhone's Settings app still doesn't have all settings in the search index. So it's impossible to find the section "headphone safety" & "reduce loud audio" using words like "headphone", "audio" or "safety". This setting was introduced five years ago, by the way.
> they really don’t want you saying bad words of any kind.
Not true anymore, I just typed fuck in this comment without having to fight it. They made a change I think last year and they even announced it.
> they do not look at context at all
Also not true. It's true that they're not perfect at it, but replacement after you typed 2 more words happen specifically because it can tell better what you want to say. Sometimes works against you because language is highly personal.
Here are some nice examples (excluding obvious edit distance based ones which it does right)
"snowbalfight" --> "snowball fight"
"unrelevant" --> "irrelevant"
"fone" --> "phone"
"the the" --> "The"
And all of this with auto capitalization if it notices you're at the start of a sentence, and stuff like handling proper nouns, punctuations, etc,.
What I find really interesting is swipe-type spell checking (its basically word prediction) on phones. That is a really cool problem to solve well. Sometimes it works like a dream and other times it's annoying. I wonder how they write those.
Bit off-topic - macOS has excellent built-in dictionary. Just select the word in any app, press Ctrl+Command+D and it opens it. It even guesses most incorrect words correctly. Also translation available if it exist for current keyboard locales.
E.g.
> No entries for "typoglycemia", did you mean "hypoglycemia"?
These user activated dictionaries tend to be excellent (even in vim, a pretty barebones system, I tend to get fantastic guesses from the machine).
Actually, come to think of it, the problem must be a bit easier than on smartphones, right? Real keyboard input is very precise. Smartphone keyboards already guess what word you were trying to spell, so they are influencing the typos in the direction of likely words… cannibalizing the very guess list that the dictionary uses!
Alfred ties into it nicely too, you can type `spell someword` and the completions below have the various spellings of words, fuzzy matched. Select one and the word goes onto your clipboard
that's great. I usually use the context menu on MacOS and the "Define" option on long press on iOS
That said, trying to use long press on iOS (or whatever it actually is), is one of those places that often drives me nuts. I don't know if the issue is a specific app or the OS or what but sometimes I want the popup menu to appear and I can't get it to appear. Or I do something to make it appear but it doesn't appear for x hundred milliseconds, during which I think it didn't get my gesture so I start a new one, just as it's finally responding in which case my new gesture dismisses it. Repeat 3-4 times before I'm ready to tear my hair out
It also shows why canvas based websites suck. Open Google Docs, select a word, press Cmd-Ctrl-D, ... nothing. Try it in gmail (which is not canvas based) and it works.
Yes. I just typed in "Tipografical earer" - and iOS 18.6 suggested "Tipograxical" for the first word, and one of "eared", "eager", and "eater" for the second word.
The spell check is truly bad. It boggles the mind how this is even possible given how solved the problem is everywhere else. Also the period being to the right of the spacebar such that it gets hit instead of space. So annoying!
I feel the same way about Android's. It just seems like spell check used to be so much better then years ago. But I'm not sure whether it's comparing mobile with desktop expectations. It really seems extremely dumb on Android.
When I used Windows Phone 8.1 I felt like I was typing text twice as fast as on Android. Better suggestions, more accurate keyboard inputs on the same screen size, and selecting an entire word was just a single tap which made fixing a typo very quick as well. Meanwhile back then it was impossible to make certain text selections without a bluetooth keyboard because of how Android constantly tried "fixing" touch-based selections. It's sad that Microsoft shut down the only system & UI that felt like the developers were actually thinking of the user when designing it. To this day no other mobile OS is as friendly to left-handed users.
"Hypo", meaning low; "glyc-", meaning sugar; and "emia", meaning of the blood. "Low sugar of the blood". (With apologies to chubbyemu.)
Since "typo" comes from "typography", it roughly means "symbolic". So "typoglycemia" should mean "symbolic sugar of the blood". Low typos in your blood would be "hypotypemia".
I have no idea why "typoglycemia" refers to a human ability to autocorrect, but it brings me joy, so I'm not going to question it ^_^
I mean, TBH I would expect this to be true: an LLM is trained over a massive corpus of internet data, which contains many typos, and is required to accurately predict tokens despite edit errors. A spellchecker is typically running a deterministic algorithm really, really quickly, and has hardcoded limits on acceptable edit distance (and has no learned knowledge of what looks correct/incorrect to human eyes). An LLM should generally trounce a spellchecker at figuring out what you meant to type, unless the spellchecker is secretly a tiny LLM / ML model of some kind under the hood.
I have definitely noticed this too. I also use the built in swipe to type feature, and it may as well be a coin flip as to whether it gets the word right. I get that swiping is vague, but even a little bit of frequency prediction would tell you that “sounds good” is going to be more likely than “sings hood”. It’s an absolutely infuriating feature.
I use the swipe feature because I guess I have wide fingertips and frequently hit unintended, adjacent keys when pecking on the keyboard (especially as I’ve gotten older). The words produced by swiping often make no grammatical sense, and are frequently esoteric words that I just can’t believe rank high enough on a basic frequency list to suggest. Not to mention my own vocabulary, which apparently is not considered by the keyboard at all.
I had a way better experience using SwiftKey on my android phone 15 years ago.
I often find myself butchering the spelling of a word in a way where the correct answer is obvious to human eyes (probably because of "typoglycemia" [1]) and an AI LLM immediately understands what I meant to say, but Apple's spellcheck has "No Guesses Found."
Does anyone else have this experience?
1. https://www.dictionary.com/e/typoglycemia/