Apple fixes stuff it needs to use

From Jason Snell’s “emptying the notebook” post about WWDC at Six Colors. A lot of frustrating bugs sit, untouched, for years. Apple has its priorities, and shiny new features get the love while rickety old stuff never rises to the level of being important enough to fix. Until, that is, Apple needs to have that feature work right in order to serve one of its priorities for the latest OS release. At that point, you’ll find that old, broken features suddenly get the attention and fixes they’ve needed for years. That’s why some of the seemingly random big fixes and improvements scattered across the 27 releases aren’t actually random! They’re side effects of Apple’s larger feature pushes. For example, imagine that you’re building a new Siri AI system that needs to lean on searching through a user’s local files in order to apply an important level of personal context. Perhaps when you’re building that system, you realize that you can’t actually rely on Spotlight to supply all of that…