> Apple quality and design, especially in UI, has been steadily declining for over a decade.
Remember when you had to make software updates through iTunes? This was probably the worst piece of UX ever in a mainstream OS, even worse than clicking "Start" to shut down the computer in Windows. So quality steadily declining is not an accurate description.
Debatable. They are harder to repair than ever, they eat disk IO for breakfast as swap and there's no native Linux yet because Appe can't be bothered to move a finger to help in that front.
That's just an unfounded blanket statement. There have been wild jumps in quality as well as incremental improvements and incremental deterioration in places.
Take, for example, iOS 7 which came out 7 years ago. On the one hand it brought some sorely needed modernity, on the other, it replaced a well-polished, albeit dated, style. However, on its own UI-wise it was really bad. Subsequent releases have had tremendous improvements to its many faults while introducing others, and I can't see how that could be called "a steady decline."
In addition, I hypothesize that as existing users tend to age[1], that they typically desire less change. However, newer and/or younger users entering an ecosystem may desire other things, such as the appearance of modernity or newer stylings (eg. "Not your parent's OS"). MacOS 10.x has been around for 20 years now. iOS for 13 years. Even if you were to assume that the "core segment" was 20 to 40 year old working professionals (just an example), a huge cohort has moved into, and another out of, that segment over the past 10+ years!
This is seen in many areas outside software, so I would imagine it exists here as well.
[1]: Both age as in their physical age, as well as age as in a "have been users in this ecosystem longer" sense.
Yes, plenty of it. But one of the gift I think Steve had was to completely change course once he acknowledge something as wrong. Whether that is persuaded by someone he trust or the market.
The QuickTime Player wasn't that bad considering that all other media players like boxes and the best 2nd place looked like RealPlayer. Taste shifts over time and display technologies also add to our preference. It may be bad today but back then, we wanted the UI on computers to look like real electronics with a 'brushed aluminum' material finish.
Having been near the epicenter of it, this was more than just a "skeuomorphism was in" thing. It was a complete aesthetic and functional nightmare at the time. Apple employees, customers, developers, and press were horrified.
That being said, I understand that sometimes one needs to push boundaries of taste in order to make advances. I'm just sad that QuickTime Player had to be one of the sacrificial pikes upon which skeuomorphism died.
Steve Jobs would also have been a relatively old man, whose favourite artists are still recording music the same way the were in the '60s and '70s. His design choices are unlikely to resemble that of the average consumer today.
I think this is becoming less and less true. I think Mac OS isn't as good as people say it is and Windows is better than people say it is. I can't speak either way to desktop Linux.
I rarely look at the control panel. It's usually easier for me to type in what settings I'm looking for in the windows taskbar search and it pops up immediately. Although I can type in "Control panel" and go straight there as well. Seems like it may have been a while since you've used Windows.
I was a full time Windows developer (WinForms, WPF, and ASP.NET) for three years until January. I used Windows 10. Still hated it. The search worked sometimes, but that's no excuse for having more than one place to go to change system settings. Microsoft have not released a completed operating system since Windows XP.
I'm not exactly sure which settings you're talking about, but it seems like you're saying that there are multiple places a user can go to change specific settings.
If that's accurate, that is a GOOD thing from a usability perspective.
There's the "Settings" UWP app, and the older Control Panel, which itself launches lots of even older settings dialogs at various points. It's not actually good for usability that there are multiple places to change the same settings, but what's worse is that they have disjoint functionality. Some things can only be accomplished with the older Control Panel, and some things can only be accomplished with Settings. I find it hard to believe you haven't discovered this, it was an almost daily annoyance for me.
The main page of System Preferences has more icons than then equivalent "Settings" page in Windows 10, are you talking about something else? Sure, you can find more complex control panels further down in Windows, but the equivalent in OS X is the "defaults write" interface, which is hardly Mac-like.
I was just uninstalling a program on windows. So I find the icon in the start menu, right click to open the menu and uninstall. That should run the uninstall process, right? WRONG! It opens the dated and derelict control panel. And it has a bunch of icons for all the programs I have on the computer. And the one I just right-clicked to uninstall? Not selected. Oh, but let's find it, where is it in that icon list? There is no search box to type in the name, I try typing to filter but nothing happens. I need to visually find it myself and select the icon. A new panel appears at the bottom with some nonsense info about the app. But how do I uninstall? Oh, the uninstall button actually appears at the top of the icon list, distant to the icon itself. Such and old ux paradigm, contextual buttons that appear in a random part of the interface (looks like a quick prototype by a programmer and they never bothered to get a ux person to design it).
Windows works for people because they are used to its idiosyncrasies. You know how people think their browser icon is to open the internet? It's the same with Windows, to most it's what makes the computer, they don't know otherwise. And these idiosyncrasies are taught in schools and universities in computer classes. How to use a computer has become how to do stuff in Windows and MS Office. Brings back memories from my childhood when I was the "computer expert", helping my parents and their friends fix problems in old Windows 98 and XP. At least the old windows ui was somewhat consistent.
Windows is constantly turning on features for me like I searched for a file on my computer, and it went ahead and reached out to Bing and did a web search. I had to go into Regedit and do some arcane incantations to get it to stop. I feel like it has turned itself back on several times. Thank god I got it to stop downloading Candy Crush and Bubble Witch Saga or whatever nonsense they’re hoping my kid will click so they can get some sweet sweet ad impressions or whatever.
My OS is supposed to be a tool, and windows is super annoying unless you literally download Enterprise edition. Mac is okay, and I’ve been pretty pleased with how capable Linux Mint is, as long as things don’t randomly get broken (looking at you, package manager corrupting and acting weird for weeks before I finally googled and fixed it).
Windows has been improving steadily. You can only tell by the decrease in the amount of high-profile coverage of UI gaffes. No one wants to write an article about how a new OS release just does what it should.
I bought this video game, and when I tried to find it using windows search, not only could windows search not find the video game, it literally gave me ads to purchase the video game again.
(I wholeheartedly agree that Windows has been getting better in many respects, but the hostility of that experience felt really stark to me. Quit using Ubuntu for the same reason.)
mac seems to unfortunately be on the path to selling iphones, ipads and chromebook type devices running ios. i really wish steve jobs had believed in modern medicine. if he had, i believe we’d have much better machines.
I am concerned that Apple may try to move away from general purpose computing and more towards an Ios walled garden, but today things aren’t that bad.
The M1 is the absolute best mobile processor on the market, soundly dominating what’s available from intel and it was just released. For mobile computing Apple is very far ahead. Could we have had something better? Maybe, but better than the best is a lot to ask and these advances came largely because of the iPad and iPhone. Without apples focus there, we wouldn’t have the M1 chip.
You also bring up chromebooks which are a google product and we’re predated by “netbooks” pushed by intel. From my perspective Apple is the only company of those 3 that has not resisted selling underperforming hardware. I don’t know of any chromebooks that perform as well as the iPad Air.
i agree with everything you said for our current situation. I can still use homebrew and 3rd party dmg’s to install should I choose to. my concern is for the future, based on how ios/macos convergence seems to be progressing.
I really want to get on board with Linux as the desktop, but it’s not there yet for the average person. My package manager broke in Mint, not sure why, and I had to do some Googling and fix it. I had to reformat my wife’s Linux laptop for some reason. They both run great when they’re running, I was surprised even Microsoft Teams has a Linux binary, so it’s definitely improving. But it’s still tough to recommend to grandma.
Remember when you had to make software updates through iTunes? This was probably the worst piece of UX ever in a mainstream OS, even worse than clicking "Start" to shut down the computer in Windows. So quality steadily declining is not an accurate description.