iPhone 12 Pro Apple, once cream of the crop has begun to curdle.

[ericwn]

I use Shortcuts quite a bit. However, what you are suggesting to the OP will not resolve the situation where you speak a command and Siri performs the wrong action or maybe just states it did not understand the request. This can get especially frustrating in the car where you need to have hands free the most.

Exactly. I’ve had custom made playlists with rather simple names for years, and Siri would play them no problem. Siri, shuffle my Eric playlist, as an example. With the launch of iOS 15, this no longer works reliably on any device I have, except for my HomePods. Totally bizarre.

 

[ahurst]

With the exception of a few Intel Mac models I defy you to find a model of Intel Mac that matches the build quality of PowerPC Macs.

As the owner of several PowerPC Macs and a few Intel ones, I half-agree. In general PowerPC Macs have great design and are pretty reliable/well-built (with a few exceptions like the G5 Quad and the iMac G5’s with bad caps), but *holy heck* are they awful to repair. Anyone who complained about repairability of Macs in the 2006-2015 era has clearly never had to replace an failed iBook HDD (seriously, look it up on iFixit).

Apple's software quality has indeed downgraded over the years. I've been an apple user since 2006, and it's been getting worse every year.

But the competition, let it be Windows or Android, is slightly worse.

When’s the last time you used a Mac from 2006? Tiger was a fantastic OS and put XP to total shame (even Microsoft execs noted this in internal emails), but try using it next to a modern Mac and you’ll start to notice its rough spots pretty quickly.

The lack of Quick Look, the still-evolving Aqua UI, the heavy use of the old Carbon APIs in Finder and throughout... still a great OS, but as someone who still uses Tiger regularly for recovering old lab data created with 90’s Mac software I can safely say that modern macOS is *at least* as stable and polished, if not more so.

My main issue with modern macOS is the fast release cycle and deprecation of old versions. A larger upgrade every 2 years with more polishing in between would be a nice change of pace: even if macOS is less buggy than in 2006, it would still benefit from extra QC.

 

[eyoungren]

As the owner of several PowerPC Macs and a few Intel ones, I half-agree. In general PowerPC Macs have great design and are pretty reliable/well-built (with a few exceptions like the G5 Quad and the iMac G5’s with bad caps), but *holy heck* are they awful to repair. Anyone who complained about repairability of Macs in the 2006-2015 era has clearly never had to replace an failed iBook HDD (seriously, look it up on iFixit).

Oh, totally agree. I only own the one iBook I have because it was a purchase for my daughter when she was much younger. The DC-In board went out years ago and it's just sat there because I don't want to go through the torture of replacing it. She ended up with a PC after that, and is on her second PC now.

I have a 12" PowerBook G4 I bought for my wife years ago before she went to PC. That was a nightmare! I had to replace the screen. By the time I was done, a sleep light and three keys had been broken. And a hacksaw got involved. All that eventually got fixed but it's mainly used by me now (when I use it at all).

I have replaced multiple parts on 17" PowerBook G4s, including logicboards, DC-In boards, inverters and top and bottom cases. While much easier they are still a doozy to work in with all the small screws and parts.

I've not had any trouble with my G5 Quad though. I got that in 2017 and it was my daily driver for two and a half years. Pretty solid, no leaks and performed well. I maxed it out to 16GB ram. I still have it, it's just not being used at the moment.

 

[HDFan]

It isn't a coincidence that these issues have become progressively worse since the passing of Steve Jobs. For Steve, the quality of the product was paramount. But since his passing, it seems that Apple's priority is about the bottom line and keeping shareholders happy, rather than the quality of the product.

If you have ever worked supporting very large code bases then you know how difficult it is. When you have multiple codelines (Mac, iPhone, Apple TV, Carplay, HomePod, etc.) which all have to work together the possible ways things can fail are astronomical. You could fault Apple for releasing things too early, but do you want to wait multiple years for new features? Even then things will still fail since millions of creative users will always come up with some combination of hardware, software which even Apples' best engineers couldn't foresee.

If you wait 5 years for new phone features then people won't be buying phones. With no phone revenue you don't have the money to pay the engineers to write and debug the code.

Personally I don't want to wait 5 years for new features so that Apple can exhaustively test them. Even then there will be something that fails because of some very special user configuration. That's what the betas are for - try to find as many of these combinations as possible as soon as you can. When you get the worst bugs fixed you then decide how long it would take to fix the rest. It's a tradeoff. 100% bug removal is impossible with millions of lines of code. You may be unhappy that a bug which is important to you isn't fixed, but others will be happy as theirs are. What you think is a critical bug management may not when they weigh all of the factors.

If you have read any of the Jobs books you'll know how many times he did presentations with his fingers crossed hoping that the demo would't fail due to bugs. They were very carefully orchestrated to avoid them. And this was when the code base was multiple times smaller than those in use today.

Siri is in some ways different. It isn't as much a relatively fixed code base but is very open ended. You want the latest sports scores? You have to find the relevant databases, link to them, and write the code for the interface. Traffic, restaurant open times - all require separate interfaces to get and appropriately deliver the data. Then you have to integrate the databases "Your reservation for dinner is 8 pm. It will take you x minutes to drive there". How much this can be automated is unclear, but the combinations are again infinite.

The need for AI for such things as remembering your conversation [which I believe is a goal] and giving results based on context, while preserving your privacy is all totally new, in a sense experimental. It is a totally new software frontier. Not that I am defending Siri, not sure why Apple fell behind, but it isn't a simple thing to "fix Siri".

Apple certainly makes mistakes and we should certainly keep their feet to the fire, but we are never going to get perfection. You can always buy a reliable car built decades ago which doesn't have as many things to fail, but I want my GPS navigation, Radar, Weather, iPhone integration, and all of the other things which are built into new and much more complex cars.

 

[danny842003]

Oh well. I'll just move on to the next thing.

But I agree about Siri. Siri is bad. Ten years and I really don't want to use it because it just isn't good. Fortunately I don't rely on it for my needs out of a mobile phone.

What don’t you want to use it for? I always here google is better and I’m not saying it isn’t but what exactly are people actually doing with it?
I have a strong UK regional accent and 10 years ago it was totally hopeless. In the last few years it has improved and now works for directions in the car, playing music and HomeKit. at least in my experience.
I know it’s useless for acting random facts but how often do people really want to treat it like Wikipedia? I don’t think that’s a use case I would ever actually use.

 

[GuruZac]

I know it can be quite frustrating to have multiple apple products with issues, but the 13 Pro, my 2021 iPad Pro, Magic Keyboard, and M1 MacBook Air have been absolutely fantastic.

 

[hrMACnstuff]

one word. siri.

 

[clevins]

On this forum, it is the answer to anyone who is negative towards Apple.

And why not? First off, the OP is presuming a lot of things (that the 'quality of coding' is down, that this would be different under Steve, that what they see is common). Most of those are opinions and not really something they or we can demonstrate.

It's fine to say "I don't see Apple's quality as being as good as it was" but past that simple opinion... OK? Unless we can quantify that somehow, it's just not a productive discussion, no discussion of the form "I think X" really is.

But at some point, if someone feels Apple gear is that bad, the suggestion to move away from it isn't a bad one.

 

[clevins]

I'm not here to make jokes. You sound like a shareholder.

And I am not alone in my discontentment. Whenever I look up support on the Apple discussion forms for fixes or "work-arounds", THOUSANDS of people are posting with the same issues.

There are over 1 billion iPhones out there. They have roughly 50% market share in the US which means what, 150m or so? Almost any issue, even if it only affects .1% of the users, can attract thousands of complaints.

It's not that Apple shouldn't TRY to be perfect, it's just that it's incredibly hard to do that. Even very high quality will run afoul of the law of large numbers here.

 

[ignatius345]

I think you make a good point. It seems to do well with simple canned queries like:
What is the weather?
Take me home
Text contact
Etc.
I’ve noticed that when you give it a query where it has to dynamically build its search criteria is when it craps in itself.

Sometimes phrasing things in specific ways can help, but at that point I'm doing more work than I'd care to.

I noticed the other day that it had a little bit of context awareness around adding grocery items. If I say "add pickles to the grocery list" and then after it's added say "add peanut butter," it will add that to the same list. I'm sure there are other little tricks, but largely it's better to stick with the basics as you say.

 

[Taz Mangus]

That is something that puzzles me... claims of diminished battery life. I can get three days out of one charge. I think battery life is one of the things at which Apple excels.

And that right there is the crux of the situation. Not everyone experiences the same issue or even has the issue. Think of that the way you said "That is something that puzzles me" and then apply that to others that respond that they have not seen the issue. There is always going to be issues and when you have as many customers as Apple, it gets magnified even more because more people are seeing the issues. And on these forums, it looks like a lot of people reporting issues but in reality it is probably more the case of the same people playing their issues in more than one thread.

I can relate first hand what it is like to code, test and release a complex system. I am a embedded software engineer by trade and from the outside observer it may look like it should be no issue to release a stable and reliable software. Things need to be prioritized and that means some things will be released broken. I do personally think it is far too ambitious to do a complete new OS release every year. It takes time to test and fix bugs and make sure the system is stable and can run reliably. It takes a lot of coordinated effort to make sure everything is running smoothly in a software release cycle. There could be some politics involved where different managers are trying to prioritize their features and that can shift what is released.

 

[PsykX]

The lack of Quick Look, the still-evolving Aqua UI, the heavy use of the old Carbon APIs in Finder and throughout... still a great OS, but as someone who still uses Tiger regularly for recovering old lab data created with 90’s Mac software I can safely say that modern macOS is *at least* as stable and polished, if not more so.

I've gotta say, I don't remember having showstopper bugs or being frustrated by bugs back in 2006. After switching from XP to Tiger, it was day and night. Things just worked. Nowadays, I use Windows 10 at work and macOS in my personal life, and Windows has improved while macOS has gotten worse. I think iOS is fine though, it's not as buggy as macOS.

My biggest gripe is iCloud. iCloud has always been, by far, the least stable cloud solution on the market. I wouldn't be able to recommend it in a business. It frustrated me countless times and for various reasons. I even stopped helping my friends when they have issues with it, because I realized I just don't understand how it works.

I even called Apple Tech Support for the first time in my life, 2 years ago, when I couldn't even connect to iCloud anymore on my Mac. It kept asking me my password even though I input the good one. They ended up escalating my problem to engineering, which basically said "we don't know, but try to reinstall the OS". No need to tell you, it didn't even fix my issue. It got fixed 3 months later in a macOS update. During all this time, I couldn't even take notes, sync and edit photos, etc. that's absurd. And I did pay for this service.

It's obvious that the original Mobile Me team had a major impact on the foundation of what is called iCloud today.

 

[oliverades]

People have been writing basically this same post every few months for years and years and years. Yes, even before Steve Jobs died. If you go off all these posters, apple has been “no longer the cream of the crop” since before the iPhone, always due to vague “bugginess” and sentiments like “they just don’t care about the product anymore, it’s all about money now”. These posts have never been particularly insightful or interesting, and serve to make people mad at each other. If you genuinely think that Apple is “no longer good” as countless others have at various points for as long as it’s been a company, good on you. Go experiment with other companies. Or write a post about a specific issue you have so we can discuss whether apple is handling it appropriately. But these generalized “apple bad now” posts are dull, repetitive and ultimately bring absolutely nothing to the table.

 

[ikramerica]

The annoying thing for me is it got worse instead of better. I used to be able to start my playlists via Siri. Not anymore, it doesn’t understand the commands in 90% of the cases, ballpark guess.

The big issue is that because it’s unreliable, people slowly stop using it, and you end up with a lot of long time Mac users who don’t use it at all. This hurts their ecosystem.

Considering Alexa is more reliable and still Amazon found that 1/3rd of smart device owners stop using it after 2-4 weeks and stop exploring new features in a matter of days, what hope does Apple have if Siri isn’t useful?

 

[ikramerica]

I've gotta say, I don't remember having showstopper bugs or being frustrated by bugs back in 2006. After switching from XP to Tiger, it was day and night. Things just worked. Nowadays, I use Windows 10 at work and macOS in my personal life, and Windows has improved while macOS has gotten worse. I think iOS is fine though, it's not as buggy as macOS.

My biggest gripe is iCloud. iCloud has always been, by far, the least stable cloud solution on the market. I wouldn't be able to recommend it in a business. It frustrated me countless times and for various reasons. I even stopped helping my friends when they have issues with it, because I realized I just don't understand how it works.

I even called Apple Tech Support for the first time in my life, 2 years ago, when I couldn't even connect to iCloud anymore on my Mac. It kept asking me my password even though I input the good one. They ended up escalating my problem to engineering, which basically said "we don't know, but try to reinstall the OS". No need to tell you, it didn't even fix my issue. It got fixed 3 months later in a macOS update. During all this time, I couldn't even take notes, sync and edit photos, etc. that's absurd. And I did pay for this service.

It's obvious that the original Mobile Me team had a major impact on the foundation of what is called iCloud today.

Yep. Even just now, I added a file to iCloud drive and it was stuck on 0% uploaded. The only fix was to turn off iCloud Drive, then reenable it and force everything to download again. Then I retried adding the file and it worked. This shouldn’t happen. But it happens too often.

 

[ikramerica]

As the owner of several PowerPC Macs and a few Intel ones, I half-agree. In general PowerPC Macs have great design and are pretty reliable/well-built (with a few exceptions like the G5 Quad and the iMac G5’s with bad caps), but *holy heck* are they awful to repair. Anyone who complained about repairability of Macs in the 2006-2015 era has clearly never had to replace an failed iBook HDD (seriously, look it up on iFixit).

When’s the last time you used a Mac from 2006? Tiger was a fantastic OS and put XP to total shame (even Microsoft execs noted this in internal emails), but try using it next to a modern Mac and you’ll start to notice its rough spots pretty quickly.

The lack of Quick Look, the still-evolving Aqua UI, the heavy use of the old Carbon APIs in Finder and throughout... still a great OS, but as someone who still uses Tiger regularly for recovering old lab data created with 90’s Mac software I can safely say that modern macOS is *at least* as stable and polished, if not more so.

My main issue with modern macOS is the fast release cycle and deprecation of old versions. A larger upgrade every 2 years with more polishing in between would be a nice change of pace: even if macOS is less buggy than in 2006, it would still benefit from extra QC.

The Uninody MBP was very well made and easy to upgrade since the back panel just came off.

The iBooks were nuts!! And I opened mine up many times. And it was infuriating because on the PC side, HDs were just under a little door.

Now the only reason I can think of for not doing this is that it leaves them open to having the HD stolen out of them in a school or business environment.

 

[tedley]

Sometimes phrasing things in specific ways can help, but at that point I'm doing more work than I'd care to.

I noticed the other day that it had a little bit of context awareness around adding grocery items. If I say "add pickles to the grocery list" and then after it's added say "add peanut butter," it will add that to the same list. I'm sure there are other little tricks, but largely it's better to stick with the basics as you say.

Yeah. Natural language processing (NLP) is a complex problem for a variety of reasons. Even though Siri seems limited and unusable at times, you gotta give Apple credit for tackling such a complex problem. They do have a long way to go here, but they will get it eventually.

 

[renderingpixels]

My first iPhone was the 3GS. Currently, I own the iPhone 12 Pro. There have been many iPhones released between these two, the large majority of which I have owned. But the iPhone 12 Pro is the first of the iPhones that have left me completely disappointed. And as I research fixes and work-arounds to cope with the abundance of glitches, I have come to realize that it isn't the iPhone 12, but Apple in general whose quality has been on the decline.

Most recently, I began to research why Siri suddenly began asking me to repeat commands, right after saying "hey Siri". A quick search of the Apple discussion forums showed that over one thousand users had the same problem. And a Google search of the problem showed that this issue wasn't limited to the iPhone. There were people experiencing this issue with the Apple Watch and with Siri on the New MacBook Pro.

When the same problem spans many devices, the common denominator is coding. And this is sad as one of the most appealing things for me about Apple's products over the years has smooth and reliable operation of its devices.

It isn't a coincidence that these issues have become progressively worse since the passing of Steve Jobs. For Steve, the quality of the product was paramount. But since his passing, it seems that Apple's priority is about the bottom line and keeping shareholders happy, rather than the quality of the product.

Steve Jobs must be twisting in his grave.

As if the first few iPhones under the leadership of Steve Jobs didn’t have problems…

 

[ahurst]

The Uninody MBP was very well made and easy to upgrade since the back panel just came off.

The iBooks were nuts!! And I opened mine up many times. And it was infuriating because on the PC side, HDs were just under a little door.

Once I replaced the failed HDD in a 12" PB G4 with one from a FireWire enclosure that I'd forgotten had some weird hardware encryption. Basically, the drive was showing up as unreadable in OS X and I thought it was a hardware issue (just needed to reformat), but best believe I disassembled and reassembled it twice trying to make sure the connector and drive were connected properly. A fun way to spend 3 hours!

I've gotta say, I don't remember having showstopper bugs or being frustrated by bugs back in 2006. After switching from XP to Tiger, it was day and night. Things just worked. Nowadays, I use Windows 10 at work and macOS in my personal life, and Windows has improved while macOS has gotten worse. I think iOS is fine though, it's not as buggy as macOS.

My biggest gripe is iCloud. iCloud has always been, by far, the least stable cloud solution on the market. I wouldn't be able to recommend it in a business. It frustrated me countless times and for various reasons. I even stopped helping my friends when they have issues with it, because I realized I just don't understand how it works.

I even called Apple Tech Support for the first time in my life, 2 years ago, when I couldn't even connect to iCloud anymore on my Mac. It kept asking me my password even though I input the good one. They ended up escalating my problem to engineering, which basically said "we don't know, but try to reinstall the OS". No need to tell you, it didn't even fix my issue. It got fixed 3 months later in a macOS update. During all this time, I couldn't even take notes, sync and edit photos, etc. that's absurd. And I did pay for this service.

It's obvious that the original Mobile Me team had a major impact on the foundation of what is called iCloud today.

I've never really bothered with iCloud so I can't say much, but my few brushes with it haven't been great. I *will* say that I think macOS has favoured adding new features over polishing/improving existing ones, and would benefit from less frequent releases.

However, despite being a much simpler OS, Tiger was not without bugs. In fact, a few months ago while trying to convert a bunch of old floppy images to regular folders on an iMac G4, I learned that you can kernel panic the whole computer instantly if you try to mount a DOS-formatted floppy image using Finder (or hdiutil from the terminal). I thought it was a one-off bug, but it happens reliably with every one I try to mount. In later versions of macOS, the disk image mounting code is separated from the kernel so an error won't bring down the whole system. Also, the Classic Environment (RIP) could be very buggy and crash-prone with certain pieces of software that it didn't play nice with.

My point is that the passage of time and the nostalgia factor of the Tiger era make it easy to forget all the little annoyances and only remember the good stuff. There have been bugs in recent versions I've been frustrated with (e.g. PDF annotations in 10.12's Preview being broken when opening a document on a PC or on older Macs), but at minimum I'd say El Capitan is as stable and polished as any release that came before.

 

[ahurst]

I have a 12" PowerBook G4 I bought for my wife years ago before she went to PC. That was a nightmare! I had to replace the screen. By the time I was done, a sleep light and three keys had been broken. And a hacksaw got involved. All that eventually got fixed but it's mainly used by me now (when I use it at all).

I have replaced multiple parts on 17" PowerBook G4s, including logicboards, DC-In boards, inverters and top and bottom cases. While much easier they are still a doozy to work in with all the small screws and parts.

I've not had any trouble with my G5 Quad though. I got that in 2017 and it was my daily driver for two and a half years. Pretty solid, no leaks and performed well. I maxed it out to 16GB ram. I still have it, it's just not being used at the moment.

I have to replace the screen on my 12" PBG4 as well, I've been putting it off for years now for reasons I'm sure you understand! I have a replacement IPS panel from a ThinkPad X41, it just needs to be modified a bit to make it fit.

Glad to hear your Quad's been reliable! Extremely cool and rare machines. I remember seeing a few G5's killed by leaks back when I worked e-waste in High School. I have a somewhat beat-up second-hand Dual 2.3 G5 (Late 2005), which is nice for peace of mind as the fastest air-cooled G5 ever.

 

[Drs247]

My first iPhone was the 3GS. Currently, I own the iPhone 12 Pro. There have been many iPhones released between these two, the large majority of which I have owned. But the iPhone 12 Pro is the first of the iPhones that have left me completely disappointed. And as I research fixes and work-arounds to cope with the abundance of glitches, I have come to realize that it isn't the iPhone 12, but Apple in general whose quality has been on the decline.

Most recently, I began to research why Siri suddenly began asking me to repeat commands, right after saying "hey Siri". A quick search of the Apple discussion forums showed that over one thousand users had the same problem. And a Google search of the problem showed that this issue wasn't limited to the iPhone. There were people experiencing this issue with the Apple Watch and with Siri on the New MacBook Pro.

When the same problem spans many devices, the common denominator is coding. And this is sad as one of the most appealing things for me about Apple's products over the years has smooth and reliable operation of its devices.

It isn't a coincidence that these issues have become progressively worse since the passing of Steve Jobs. For Steve, the quality of the product was paramount. But since his passing, it seems that Apple's priority is about the bottom line and keeping shareholders happy, rather than the quality of the product.

Steve Jobs must be twisting in his grave.

You’re spot on.
While I haven’t had this specific problem, I have had many others.
The latest this morning was a repeated issue I’ve had with the music app and wifi sync (my own music = not ones I downloaded from Apple Music) between Mac and iPhone/iPad.

Also, I’ve stopped calling customer care cause have often found their knowledge of Apple products and functionalities to be archaic. Most times I end up explaining them how a certain feature works.

 

[James Godfrey]

Let’s be honest here… Apple had many issues with products even while steve jobs was in charge… the death grip on the iPhone 4/4S is the most obvious but there were several other issues.

The main issue Apple have had since Jobs passing is mainly software related, but overall I would say my experience with Apple has gradually improved over time… yeah there are more bugs in the software etc than times past, but you have to remember how much more simpler products were back in Steves hey day, there weren’t as many features which needed bugs ironed out.

On top of this I do think all software issues aren’t being ironed out as quickly due to the pandemic and people working from home etc…

I think if Steve Jobs was still here there would be many products we likely would still not have seen including…

Various iPhone sizes
Larger iPad sizes
Apple Watch
HomePod/mini
AirPods to name a few

Tim Cook has done well by Apple IMO, however, I do think at this point a fresh head needs to lead the company as they are starting to become a bit stagnant.

 

[TheGeneralist]

Why are you angry with comments that suggest that the op clarify specific points to best get some constructive discussion? I am not against what you write. But if op makes general complaints and baits, then expect to get some confrontational responses. I don’t consider myself to be ignorant.

I'll tell you specifically what I find disturbing about your arguments.
First, nothing wrong about asking someone for clarification. But that's just not what you did, as I see this:
With your first posting in this thread, I perceive that you mainly did not ask for clarification, but more implied that the OP did not refer to a clear point or aspect and that his formulations were not constructive enough, and that this is a hindrance towards a good dialogue. As the OP reacted to this and made clear again what his point is (...which is shared and understood by many others here btw), you just answered this to him:

That’s your view. I do not see same overall quality slippage. I don’t see any justification for claims you make. Another apparent troll ignored.

From my perception, arguing like "I don't experience the same as you do, so your position is not justified and you're nothing but a troll to me" is at the very heart of ignoring someone's position. As you can see in this thread, many people argue against quality degradation like you, but many others also argue more like the OP, so doubtlessly both positions can be justified and are relevant in this discussion.

Glad to hear that you're not aiming at ignoring someone, but statements like the one quoted directly above are just not helpful, at least from my perspective.
Again, absolutely nothing wrong about taking a different position and arguing from that, but implications like "that's not what I experience, so it has to be wrong" are just not logical and do not contribute to a constructive discussion either.

 

[fluxtransistor]

So, Steve died in October of 2011. That's five and a half years after the Intel transition. So, for five or more years (Steve was involved in the planning of course) you had Intel Mac product under his purview. With the exception of a few Intel Mac models I defy you to find a model of Intel Mac that matches the build quality of PowerPC Macs.

The iPhone 5, which released in 2011, he was a part of and probably the 5s and 6/6+. In any case, the 5 had Scuffgate.

With the iPhone 4/4s he publicly announced that YOU, the user, were holding the damn phone wrong.

And you're blaming the people after Jobs?

I'm sorry, which PowerPC Macs are we talking about? As someone who owns (and uses) a few aluminium PowerBooks, I really don't see how their bendy chassis exhibits any kind of superior build quality.

 

[eyoungren]

I'm sorry, which PowerPC Macs are we talking about? As someone who owns (and uses) a few aluminium PowerBooks, I really don't see how their bendy chassis exhibits any kind of superior build quality.

PowerMac G3, G4, G5. The original iMac G3 and G4 to name a few.

I own a 12" and a 17" PowerBook G4. Except for when these are dropped or otherwise given an excessive amount of force I don't see them as being 'bendy'. At least my two have never 'bent' during normal use. I've had a G5 that had it's handles bent, but that was during shipping.