HACKER Q&A
📣 nowherebeen

Why is autocorrect on Mac so bad?


I recently switch back to Mac after a 5 year hiatus and started using Notes. The autocorrect keeps on highlighting correct words and suggesting incorrect words to replace. I got so annoyed with it, I turned it off. Why is autocorrect so bad on MacOS?


  👤 innagadadavida Accepted Answer ✓
Apple has been trying to do various fancy things to solve this problem using AI, ML, PFL in recent times and I feel these have made things just worse and lose focus for the team.

The team in SWE that’s responsible for this feature is basically totally checked out and this is very apparent from how bad this is. On iOS the built in dictionaries are missing some very common words and probably hasn’t been updated for ages to include common tech terms and acronyms. All this is true for macOS as well as the code and data is shared.

A great example of AIML can make things much worse for users when every engineer wants to get something on the resume and is trying to get promoted or increase comp. Epic fail.