[tinotopia]

It's not that I see the greater flexibility of, well, nearly all non-Apple product as being a bug, exactly. There are certainly tremendous advantages to being flexible, adaptable, and extensible. It's just that there are also some advantages to being less flexible; these advantages are subtle and often missed.

The big win in an inflexible system like the iPhone — aside from it being inherently more discoverable and predictable — is that it's much easier and more reliable to get an intelligent, thinking, learning human to adapt to an inflexible system than it is to build a system that can deftly adapt to various imagined human desires.

It's this inflexibility, oddly enough, that gives Apple its reputation for ease of use: it's possible to make much more concrete statements about the operation of a Mac or an iPhone or iPad than it is about most competing systems and devices. The system perceived as 'friendly' is, oddly enough, the one that imposes its will upon the user.