iMovie

Raised as a usability problem by 18 people on Hacker News over 18 years (2009–2026), in 16 threads.

People raised many different problems with iMovie, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 19 complaints

Couldn't discover how to save the edited video file2026-09-07
App is inconsistent and unintuitive, feels actively user-hostile2025-09-23
Redesign made the app so stripped-down that the commenter finds it unusable2024-07-11
Redesigned version has a different interface and paradigm, can't read old projects, and lacks features2023-10-20
IMovie lacked basics, forcing a video that didn't match the intended result2023-05-09
App became extremely laggy for about six months on iPad2022-10-19
Half the screen wasted on a media library most users bypass2022-09-02
Works only on the happy path; anything Apple doesn't expect becomes frustrating2022-04-13
IMovie is impossible to figure out and was easier in the past2022-04-13
Simplified layout is almost unrecognizable, so the commenter can't use it compared to pro apps2022-04-12
IMovie becomes jittery and unusable on newest iPad Pro after iOS 152022-01-18
Confusing projects-versus-files model; took a long time to understand the workflow2020-12-24
Hard to adjust to the new iMovie, so the user avoids it and renews a different editor's trial2020-05-02
Took two weeks to sync a song to clips; interface is unfamiliar and hard to figure out2020-05-02
Editing clips synced to music became a frustrating, convoluted process after redesign2018-03-28
Must copy whole video files into project folder, doubling disk space2018-02-01
Timeline UI makes it difficult to enter subtitle text and set timings2017-12-21
Took a long time to find how to turn off the automatic Ken Burns effect2012-09-14
Couldn't figure out how to save the exported video file2009-04-27