[rsynnott]

I honestly think a lot of it is just (bad) prioritization. An analogous situation; remember when Mac laptops had far, far better battery life than PC laptops? Like ridiculously better. People usually thought it was some magic property of the PowerPC; then Intel Mac laptops came out and they were still ridiculously better. Then Intel started taking it seriously, and a few Centrino revisions later the gap had narrowed dramatically.

I remember reading at the time that, when idle, the chipset in many PC laptops used more power than the CPU...

[karatestomp]

All Apple stuff's that way, it seems. A lot of it's the software. Just compare the effect of Safari versus Firefox or Chrome on MacBook battery life. One of these projects clearly gives a quite a large damn about power use—the other two... not so much.

I worked on software for phones and tablets right around the 2/3 split for Android, up through Android 5 or so. We had lots of testing devices of all quality levels. The joke-but-actually-100%-true around the office was that an Android tablet left unplugged on a desk over the weekend was always dead when you got back on Monday, while an iPad forgotten in a drawer for a month would have a useful amount of charge left on it (and come to life instantly, of course, as if it had never been asleep). Didn't seem to matter how much the Android device cost.

[wpietri]

Totally. I own Android phones and tablets. But when I pick up a friend's iPhone or iPad, it's clear that the user experience is more polished. Is that because Google has a lower caliber engineers than Apple? I doubt it. Certainly the people I know at both companies are equally smart.

[baq]

it's simply what is P1 and thus gets engineering bandwidth to fix. looks like UX is P1 at apple and just isn't at other companies ('isn't perfect but works', 'takes one click more than it could', etc.)

[ashtonkem]

I’d argue that Google has lower caliber designers than Apple.

[rsynnott]

I'd be surprised if that was the case; they should be in a similar hiring position to Apple. They just seem... less interested in it.

And it's not just designers; it's everything around user experience. For instance, both Terminal.app and the Apple bluetooth keyboard (when plugged into USB) have class-leading latency. That wasn't designers, but it probably also wasn't accidental.

Mind you, the Apple today arguably isn't as good at this stuff as the Apple of a decade or so, and they really fall down in some areas (Apple Music grumble mutter).

[ashtonkem]

Fair, from the outside it’s hard to tell the difference between low quality, poor management, or under staffing. What I can say is that Google’s design is somewhere between bad and inconsistent.