Adam Engst at TidBits did the lord’s work of transforming the “sweating details” slide from WWDC26’s opening keynote…

…into a nice, human-readable list of 264 items.

It’s an impressive list that garnered universally positive reactions, but I have one observation:

• “Fast” and variants thereof appear on this list 59 times.
• “Reliable” and similar words appear 22 times.

It’s true that everything could be faster and a whole many things should. Speed is paramount to great user experience. Speed is also more than just speed; there are nonlinear aspects when latency or delays cross invisible thresholds that can drastically change app usage for the better.

But in my experience, much more often the things that frustrate me about using Apple’s products are not issues of speed, but issues of reliability:

• I don’t need faster network connectivity in Finder, but I struggle with computers not appearing, a pizza cursor that occasionally just dies spinning, or randomly being thrown to the root of the networking volume.
• I don’t need AirDrop to be faster. I just want it to connect reliably every single time, give me consistent and understandable UI feedback, and stop forgetting I’m not just “everyone” when sending stuff to myself.
• I don’t need Messages to be faster. I need them to just, you know, not haphazardly stop syncing across computers on occasion.
• We just talked about undo being profoundly broken, and I have many more examples like that. (Often from apps like Finder and Settings that are not on the list at all.)

It’s not just me. 15 out of 17 bugs listed on the Bugs Apple Loves site are about reliability. None seem to be directly about speed, although more on that in a second. Or, here’s a recent list from Ilya Birman – different issues, but a similar shape.

I’m going to say it: Speed is an easier problem. Not easier in an engineering sense; I’ve seen an engineer try to carve ten milliseconds out a busy computer’s schedule, and in that moment, one must truly imagine Sisyphus happy. But it’s easier as a problem: it often comes with a lot of pre-built telemetry, plus a clear goal of “here’s Xms and X now needs to be smaller.”

Reliability is much harder, more difficult to debug, reproduce, agree on metrics for, even find ownership of – just generally fuzzy around the edges, and less obviously thrilling as a challenge. It needs more champions and structures.

I know a simple marketing slide is not meant to be an accurate representation of Apple’s efforts. I wasn’t at WWDC so perhaps the vibe in the room was different than what this slide represents. Yet, the slide exists and I’m allowed to judge it.

(And yeah, I know in some cases speed and reliability are correlated. After all, if you have a timeout, making something finish faster and do so before the timeout will turn it from unreliable to reliable. But hey, I wasn’t the one choosing the words on the slide.)

I just… I would be a lot more excited if the 3:1 ratio of fast-to-reliable on that slide went the other way.