Anecdote but I've never had issues with the keyboard, or with Siri mishearing me (just to touch on another common pain point that people talk about re: Apple tech). I've always interpreted stories like this as the people who are most affected by it being vocal and speaking out (as they should), while the majority who aren't just have nothing to say because it all works fine.

> Worse, it seems that proprietary means you can't do anything to fix them yourself.

We can install third-party keyboards on iOS, so I'm not sure why that's not being considered here.

> the majority who aren't just have nothing to say because it all works fine.

This is a bad way to go through life with this reasoning. It is pretty well understood that in normal situations the vast majority of people are not vocal even if they feel the same way about things the vocal people are saying. As an example I use a lot, congress critters use a formula to get the pulse of the constituents. If they receive a hand written letter (yes, I learned about the formula when people did that), they'd multiply that by some factor knowing that if one person felt strongly enough to send in a letter that others also felt that way. Phone calls were the same, but with a smaller multiplier as it was easier to make a call that write a letter followed by emails with yet a smaller mult. This was all well before social media, but I'd imagine searching tweets would give a pretty good indicator as well now. A single tweet would be worth something, but tweets with lots of retweets and heavy comment activity would be something else. Even if a tweet is something done pretty much on a whim with little thought behind it like that letter.

The silent majority is called that for a reason. It doesn't mean they are happy or content. Ignore that reality at your own peril.

'Lots of people say this, but I don't agree' really doesn't logically lead to

'therefore, the majority of people probably agree with me'.

Lots of people say they love in India, and that is not true for new. That doesn't make the likeliest fact that a majority of the world lives in the UK and, while India is an oddly vocal 'minority'.

    …or with Siri mishearing…

I just want a small set of commands that are easy to differentiate from each other, and a readback before executing the command. This is what phones did back in the days of Symbian, and I could reliably use one from a motorcycle helmet intercom without ever touching my phone. It's what air traffic controllers do, because even people can't reliably understand each other.

We've had decades of Apple and Google pretending that their voice recognition is so flawless it can understand anything and execute it immediately, but for petty much everyone except yourself they can't, so I can no longer use a hands-free phone. I'm glad I'm not blind.

anecdatum: I've encountered the dumb keyboard behavior and haven't written any scathing blog posts about it, I've just grumbled out loud and upvoted the ones I've seen.

So consider the possibility that many people are affected but haven't reached the threshold of writing something about it.

I'm part of the silent majority and I'm not speaking up because I have so little trust in Apple to ever fix anything that I'm just riding out my 2nd gen SE on IOS 17 until it physically stops working. At which point I'm going to seriously consider whether I actually need a smart phone at all.

When I had iPhone for work, the first thing I did was install gboard. Iphone's native keyboard has always been less accurate. I have no idea how to describe it because I haven't researched it.