📱 Hey, Siri, play dumb. (It’s update time.)

Has anyone else noticed Siri getting worse as a better version looms on the horizon?

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that Apple throttles their old devices before introducing new ones.  And while that’s true for hardware, with a major Siri update upcoming (iOS 18), lately she’s been playing dumb.  Really dumb.

I’m not necessarily complaining—I want to upgrade this cycle.  My 12 has lasted the first four years of marriage and the first six months of my son’s life, with decent pictures to boot.

But it’s old and buggy.

I wanted to share five glitches I’ve been seeing and ask if anyone else has been seeing the same.

1. Playing downloaded music from CarPlay

I still use iTunes Music like it’s 2007, downloading music and creating playlists.  Ever since I’ve had CarPlay in 2022, when I request an album, Siri pretends there’s no locally downloaded music. (“There was an error in finding…”)  But lately, she flat out refuses to find my music, forcing me to use my phone while driving.

Side Rant: Does anyone else remember the last version of iTunes-the-music-app on iOS?  It displayed song length.  Why on Earth did they delete that feature?

2. Dumb Dictation

So far iOS 16 had the best dictation.  Siri rarely missed words, obeyed your punctuation requests, and even handled homophones fairly well.  Then came iOS 17.  I disabled the automatic punctuation within a week. Now with on-device processing, Siri drops words, flat out ignores punctuation, and inserts the wrong homophones.  Many times, you’ll speak and she just does… nothing.  I find myself shouting the same punctuation over and over, but… nothing.  Her cognitive decline here has been frustrating.

Side Rant: As Siri got smarter, she can’t tell the difference between parentheses ( ) and brackets [ ].  Which sucks if you start checklists verbally, because “left bracket underscore underscore right bracket” now gets you (__) on a good day. 

3. Broken Blinkers

Once upon a time, you pressed the screen, a magnifying glass appeared, and you could drag around the text without issue.  Now, if a word has been autocorrected in any way, it hijacks the blinker.  It won’t move.  The mistakes become cursor magnets, rendering any movement impossible.  If you want to adjust a space or revise a word, you’re better off deleting the entire paragraph and typing from scratch.  Correctly—with their recently crappy keyboard.  This feature bug makes iOS almost completely unusable at times.

4. Camera Glitches

Newborns don’t pose for pictures, so when cute moments come around, I fumble for my phone and open the camera from the lock screen.  Except these days, the Camera button becomes the Glitch button. My phone frequently freezes and goes black.  Sometimes, it even refuses resets.  I’d say one out of fifteen times? Once, while reseting from this glitch, my phone appeared to call 911.  I freaked out.  I mean, this glitch is bad, but not 911 bad. Thankfully, because the camera refused to work, I don’t remember what cute moments I missed. It’s not like I don’t have 500 pictures of my newborn already.

5. The 88% Problem

Like gravity, the iPhone battery whittles and whittles until it hits 88% and traveling across the room without a charging cord feels like scaling a mountain without at least a Cliff Bar.  Once you hit 88%, it may as well be 50%, because checking Messages or Notifications just drains 10% off the top.  I’ve really wish Apple played into Steve Wozniak here, because if we could repair our devices and switch out components, I’d replace the battery each year, just like an oil change.

This list wasn’t academic or anything.  I just wondered if anyone else had the same problems.

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🎉 While you’re here, check out some other posts from my side blog, HappyCasserole.

• iPhones Need a “Classic iPod” mode. Sometimes your music player shouldn’t interrupt with Amazon flash deals.

• Terrible Audiobooks (Listen then Delete). When audiobooks resemble neither albums nor books.  Bad UI’s render them disposable.

• Awful Coffee, Abandoned Shopping Carts, and Fake Art. A summer Note scrapbook complete with flying pigs.

🏆 Also, check out some other posts from my teaching newsletter, The Paste Eaters Blog.

• 1. Ten Life Lessons I Wish I Knew at Seventeen

• 2. Teachers do NOT make 1,500 decisions per day*

• 3. Teachers, Begin Your School Year with Regret (And Hope)

• 4. Touchscreens are intuitive. Word processors aren’t

• 5. Dual Coding Theory, Old Schoolbooks, and Flan (An Interview)