The features that had me the most excited with the advent of iOS 8 and Yosemite fall under Apple’s Continuity umbrella. From the marketing page:

Apple products have always been designed to work together beautifully. But now they may really surprise you. With iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, you’ll be able to do more wonderful things than ever before.

Answer phone calls and send SMS messages from my laptop? Yes! AirDrop between my phone and my Mac? I’ve been asking for that since 2013!

Why, oh why, can’t I AirDrop from my Mac to my phone? Seems only logical. Mavericks?

— Jerod Santo (@jerodsanto) September 24, 2013

Unfortunately, sometimes the most-awaited features become the most disappointing.

The ONE feature I was looking forward to in iOS 8 / Yosemite – AirDrop between phone and mac – has never worked for me.

— Jerod Santo (@jerodsanto) January 22, 2015

It turns out that AirDrop’s problem is that my mid-2011 Macbook Air is too old to support the feature¹. OK. Apple gets a pass on that one. But what of the other promises? Can Continuity keep them? Not so much:

Continuity means never having to say “I missed your iMessage.”

— Jerod Santo (@jerodsanto) January 21, 2015

Now instead of just my phone buzzing incessantly when someone iMessages me, all of my devices beep and buzz. It’s like an Apple-branded flash mob. That’s not all.

Continuity means swiping up/away a notification on my phone only to have it appear as unread on my laptop, iPad, and —you guessed it— phone.

— Jerod Santo (@jerodsanto) March 11, 2015

Am I taking crazy pills or should swiping away a notification mark it as acknowledged? iOS doesn’t think so. And thanks to Continuity, Yosemite doesn’t think so either. “Connected like never before” means that both operating systems now propagate their annoying bugs to the other. And there’s more.

Continuity means my Mac telling me I missed a call right after I hang up the call.

— Jerod Santo (@jerodsanto) February 7, 2015

Mac-based phone calls might be the most disappointing feature of the lot. The ring is delayed. The connection often fails. When I silence a call on my phone it rings on my Mac instead. It’s a hot mess².

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There’s no doubt in my mind that these things are difficult to get right. It’s a cocktail of software, hardware interfaces, networking protocols³, context, presence, and more. But still, I think we’d all be better off if Apple would’ve held off on Continuity until they really had it figured out. Half-baked features are sometimes worse than no features at all.

Oh well, maybe they’ll get it right in iOS 9.