Notice Anything Missing in the WWDC Keynote? (Premium)

Many Apple fans are complaining that the firm didn’t announce new MacBooks at WWDC. But there was a much bigger omission.

Right. Even the smallest indication of humility.

Don’t get me wrong, Apple is woefully behind in delivering updated Macs. But the company’s inability to deliver more modern components in its expensive computers is only a tiny piece of evidence in a sea of much bigger problems.

And those problems are obvious. Apple’s product design has gone downhill in recent years. And its product quality—an even bigger issue, frankly—has nose-dived. In just the past few weeks, Apple has been hit by a third class-action lawsuit related to its incredibly-buggy MacBook Pro “butterfly” keyboards and was found to have known that the iPhone 6 line of handsets was up to 700 percent more bendable than previous models. Even its new corporate campus is poorly designed, with employees continually walking into its clear glass walls. Doh.

That’s embarrassing, but Apple has always relied on two things to stay ahead of bad PR.

Its rabid fan base, which hypocritically awards Apple with high customer service marks when buggy products returned to Apple retail stores are quietly fixed or replaced for free.

And its epic, almost pathological lack of humility.

I can’t help Apple’s fan base wake up. But I can point out the hypocrisy. Let’s consider how Apple presented some of the updates it is making to its various products and services during yesterday’s WWDC 2018 keynote address. And let’s just focus on iOS, since it is Apple’s most important and popular software by far and got the most attention in the keynote.

Arriving later this year, iOS 12 will include at least two major new features, and each addresses major shortcomings in the platform. This was an excellent opportunity for an Apple mea culpa in which the firm could simply claim that it overlooked the basics in its drive to making iOS better each year. Instead, it presented these long-overdue changes as gifts that its user base should simply—if belatedly—cheer.

The first and most obvious is performance: If iOS is infamous for anything, it’s the ongoing claims that each new version seems specifically designed to slow down anything but new devices, forcing users to buy expensive iPhone or iPad upgrades. The problem was so bad, in fact, that Apple actually admitted that it was purposefully slowing down older iPhones after being found out.

Well, good news, folks. For perhaps the first time in iOS history, the next version of this system will actually offer performance improvements when compared to its predecessors. Something that Apple should have worked on with each release. And, worse, an implicit admission from Apple that its previous releases, especially the buggy iOS 11, were inefficiently designed. Claiming that a software release will improve app launch times by up to an incredible 40 percent is not something to brag about: What the hell were Apple engineers working on for the past ten years? No version upgrade should ever be that dramatic, performance-wise.

Second, Siri is best-known in the industry for being the worst digital personal assistant on the market. The reasons for this failure are many. Apple has simply lacked the AI and cloud expertise that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft could bring to their own competing efforts, of course. And there’s an inside story about how the firm launched Siri and then essentially stopped updating it immediately, triggering an exodus from that team that included both of Siri’s co-founders. (Apple acquired Siri. You didn’t think they invented this?)

Siri is so bad that even Microsoft was able to launch a smart speaker last year before Apple did. And Apple’s entry, the poorly-received HomePod, arrived both late and feature-incomplete. So now, seven years after Siri launched (“is it raining?”), Apple is finally moving to improve the technology in meaningful ways. A new feature called Shortcuts will finally let you tie multiple actions together into a script-like named entity. This is a feature that other assistants have had for years. And yes, it sounds an awful lot like IFTTT. Useful? Of course. Too little, too late? I think so.

I will also throw in an honorable mention for iOS’s new Screen Time feature, which is aimed at “digital well-being.” This is a concept no one would have ever heard of were it not for the addictive nature of the iPhone and its Android copiers. Rather than admit its role in this mess, as, say, Facebook is doing now with privacy and fake news, Apple instead blamed its users. And it basically argued that it needed to create the technological equivalent of a motorcycle helmet or a seatbelt so that it could paternalistically save them from themselves.

Don’t get me wrong, Screen Time is potentially useful, especially for children. But even a joking Apple apology here—“hey, sorry we made products so popular that you can’t put them down”—would have rung true.

And there are some other truly useful new features in iOS 12, for sure. Not everything Apple does—or makes—is terrible. In fact, much of it is quite good. But as a company, Apple is tough to root for. It throws much of the rest of the industry under the bus, as it did with Facebook during the keynote despite news this very week that Apple once collaborated with the firm to provide it with user data. It blames its users for problems and then pretends to clean up after them like some benevolent overlord. And it adds features belatedly to all of its platforms and then celebrates itself for getting it right.

When you combine all that with Apple’s growing design and quality issues, you have the makings of a disaster. For any company but Apple. And that’s perhaps the most irritating thing about Apple, that it is not judged by the same criteria as its competitors.

For example, Microsoft is still suffering from a Consumer Reports blasting of Surface product quality that is based on generations-old products. But Apple’s current Macs are marred by all kinds of issues, including the three class action lawsuits noted above. But they get a pass. No, not just a pass. They are literally the most highly-rated laptop by quality. Somehow.

“Apple stands out as being the most reliable laptop brand,” Consumer Reports explains. “Microsoft, on the other hand, is less reliable than most other brands. Due to its comparatively higher breakage rate, Microsoft laptops cannot be recommended by Consumer Reports at this time.”

Welcome to my world.