How to fix iCloud Safari tabs syncing bug
02 March 2023
Since iOS 15 and and macOS 12, or whenever Apple launched the new “Start Page” for Safari, I’ve had various issues getting tabs to sync across my devices. It seems to be a common problem.
turing complete with a stack of 0xdeadbeef
Since iOS 15 and and macOS 12, or whenever Apple launched the new “Start Page” for Safari, I’ve had various issues getting tabs to sync across my devices. It seems to be a common problem.
I have been experiencing bizarre kernel panics with my Mac lately. I have a 2020 Intel MacBook Pro, the last Intel model before the M1 debuted. It has generally been working fine. Despite poor software quality and numerous bugs lurking around in macOS, I rarely see kernel panics anymore. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I had a kernel panic before this issue. There have been no major changes on my machine and I’m on the latest version of Monterey.
As a user, the recent issues with iCloud are extremely frustrating — especially if you’ve paid for iCloud and paid for apps that use iCloud. It seems like the iCloud team is having a difficult time preventing and avoiding clusterfucks. The lack of reliability should be a concern to everyone.
Speaking of drunk software and not being in service to our possessions, Screen Time on iOS and macOS has been shockingly buggy for me lately. It reports that I spent over 22 hours on my devices in a single day last week, and nearly 10 hours on another day this week. In both instances, a significant portion of the usage is supposedly occurring after midnight.
iMessage is in the news again recently with a revival of years-old stories about “green bubbles” versus “blue bubbles” — and the social dynamics among teens who prefer blue bubbles while ostracizing their peers with green bubbles. There’s a lot to like and dislike about iMessage, but one thing that amazes me is that there is still no way to easily report abuse and the process for blocking spam is needlessly difficult.
As I wrote previously, I really like iOS App Library. Automatically organize all of my apps for me? Yes, please and thank you. However, I’ve recently experienced some bizarre bugs with it in iOS 15.
One of the things I mentioned in my Apple Watch first impressions post was how awful third-party apps seem to be. This week Uber silently dropped support for its watch app in a comically terrible way — opening the app now displays a poorly-worded message and a sad face emoji. What a ridiculous thing to do.
Despite the many things about Apple Watch that I enjoy, there is one major issue — wrist tattoos. For users like me, the full functionality of Apple Watch is still encumbered by wrist tattoos. Specifically, wrist detection fails to work properly.
I decided to finally get my first Apple Watch with the Series 7 this year. I am typically never one to get a first-generation product — my first iPod back in the day was the iPod Photo and my first iPhone was the 3G (or maybe the 3GS?) — but I rarely wait this long if I’m interested in something. The original Apple Watch had little appeal to me at the time, and the mere existence of the $10,000 gold Edition model made the entire thing feel all the more ridiculous. But over the years as the watch hardware and watchOS improved, and as I got more into fitness, I became more interested. I’ve always felt like there’s a lot of hype around the Apple Watch — people really seem to love it. After wearing and using one for about two months, now I understand. It’s pretty damn good.
I think App Library is one of the best features added to iOS in the past few years. I’m not being sarcastic, I know some folks dislike it. However, I absolutely loathe trying to organize apps on my phone into folders, because many apps do not have a singular, definitive category.
I upgraded to Big Sur three months ago. I know I’m (fashionably?) late to this party, but here I am. This is the longest I have ever waited to upgrade macOS. It feels weird, considering WWDC is next week where we will see what is next for macOS. Big Sur still feels new to me, and announcing the next major release already feels too soon. I was avoiding Big Sur based on various reports about bugs and instability. There were not any ‘killer’ features I was eager to have, thus the main reason I upgraded was because Xcode 12.5 required it.
Over the past few years, Apple seems increasingly willing to cooperate with authoritarian governments, uninterested in protecting its own users, and unwilling to actually standup for human rights in broad terms, as often portrayed by its marketing department or direct statements from CEO Tim Cook.
This is a first for me. I returned to my MacBook after leaving it for a couple of hours, and it was shutdown even though I left it powered on. The machine was idle. I didn’t have any specific tasks running. I figured it might have been a macOS kernel panic, but upon rebooting I discovered that the crash was caused by bridgeOS.
You know, the thing that is actually most disheartening, disappointing, frustrating, and plainly sad about Apple’s surprise announcement today is that we will not receive any sort of response to our collective dismay. There will be no public acknowledgment, much less an apology (not that it would help much). Only silence.
Today Apple announced at their media event that the final public release of iOS 14 ships tomorrow, which came as quite a shock to all third-party developers.
I like to keep my devices for a long time — as long as possible, actually. I do not need (nor want) a new iPhone and MacBook every year, or even every other year. (Or more!) Putting Apple’s issues aside, the company is quite good at keeping old hardware running the latest software, and generally their hardware is very high quality (except for the utter clusterfuck that was “keyboard gate”). I find it pretty easy to keep devices for 4-6 years, if they are taken care of.
Unfortunately, iCloud does not have a good reputation for being reliable, especially during beta releases of iOS and macOS. Yet a lot people still use it, often without any problems. I still use it, despite a few bad experiences in the past, because the best alternatives are questionable for other reasons. I’ve had good luck with iCloud Drive for the past few years, but I am terrified and paranoid of getting caught in the middle of an iCloud clusterfuck, so I backup what I have in iCloud periodically using rsync.
When you file a radar for a bug on one of Apple’s platforms, you should (usually) always attach a sysdiagnose. A sysdiagnose provides a lot of helpful information for the person who is trying to understand how the bug happened. Amongst other things, it contains logs from various parts of the OS, and all recent crash logs. Without it, the person on the other end of your report inside Apple may not be of much help. On macOS running sysdiagnose is somewhat common, but what about iOS?