[tptacek]

I can't think of much I would trade from now for something in the Jobs era. I can do without the rich Corinthian leather, the PowerPC, and the colored plastic. The new keyboards aren't great, but I've dropped this MBP at least 30 times and it still keeps chugging; I'm pretty sure an errant dust particle could have take out my first Intel Macbook.

[dilap]

With the glaring exception of the butterfly keyboard debacle (typing on, what, my fourth right now? and already showing some signs of wonkiness), I agree hardware quality is amazing & best its ever been.

The software though... Fit and finish has fallen off a cliff. So many weird glitchy anims and dumb usability issues.

[kevinmchugh]

The wireless mouse that can't be used while being charged is the one that gets me. I don't know that Jobs would've approved that

[duderific]

It seems likely that he would have, because the port being on the bottom (making it so you can't use it while charging) allows the form factor to be that much sleeker. Jobs would generally opt for the form factor over convenience - ever making phones/laptops slimmer and lighter at the cost of battery life, for example.

[prawn]

Was he there for the hockey puck mouse?

[tptacek]

I've been a OS X user since the Titanium Powerbook and wouldn't trade Mojave for any cat version --- and, in particular, wouldn't swap the aesthetics of Mojave for any of them either.

This is a thread about Steve Jobs, and, again, when I think of Jobs, I think of rich Corinthian leather. What a nightmare.

[dilap]

Haha, yeah I'm not going to argue for rich Corinthian leather, or the aesthetics of the old iTunes UI or brushed metal or whatever. The visual style now is great. But the usability and quality of the animations and general fit-and-finish is much lower now, I think.

Some examples of pretty glaring failures that exist now:

Tabs in mac Safari: Very unobvious, sometimes even anti-obvious, which tab is currently selected.

The Today tab in the iphone App Store app: Try scrolling when your finger starts its drag on a button. The scroll is completely lost. In practice, this just feels like sometimes you try to scroll and it doesn't work. Way back when the iPhone first came out, Apple wrote a whole detailed tech paper on how to get this right. (It's a little tricky because at the start of the touch, you're in a quantum state: is this a button tap, or the start of a scrolling drag?) That institutional knowledge and attention to detail seems to have been completely lost.

On iPhone notifications, check out the animation as you long-tap to see options on a notification. The default behavior is a fade-transition to a slightly-smaller copy of the same content. Very jarring, almost glitchy.

Check out in mac Safari the awful opening and closing bookmarks side area animation: As you open and close the bookmark area, the icons don't animate with it, and just jump into place after the anim is done. (I wanted to share a screen recording, but surprisingly there doesn't seem to be an easy, imgur-esqe site to share videos??)

And on and on. Those are just the recent ones I remember. Overall both iOS and macOS are flickery, badly animated messes. (I guess arguably the level of polish was never high for macOS, but for iOS, it used to be very high indeed.)

[reayn]

>but surprisingly there doesn't seem to be an easy, imgur-esqe site to share videos??

I thought you could upload videos to imgur? Anyhow:

Quick and easy:

https://filebin.net

https://litterbox.catbox.moe

Signing up (free tier) is worth it imo:

https://blackhole.run

My personal favorite[0]:

https://0x0.st

0. try out this little script i use to make uploading files from a CLI dead easy: https://gitlab.com/co1ncidence/dotless/-/blob/master/usr/bin...

[dilap]

Lovely, thank you!

Unfortunately, all I have to give in return in this video of a sloppy Safari animation. :-)

https://filebin.net/59kjnt15u834j7xl/safari-anim.mov

[reayn]

lol it's no problem.

I've noticed the same animation issues in safari, and tbh, its very unlike apple.

There are other apps in macOS which have collapsible sidebars (preview and finder come to mind), but they don't suffer with the same icon lag issue.

And as far as I know, catalyst (which I assume is what's being used now for almost all of the new mac apps with the blurry sidebar) should handle these things inherently, it's strange that this seems to be a safari exclusive problem.

[actusual]

But this isn't the point, and comparing the two eras is useless IMO. It isn't where we were that matters, it where we could have been if Steve were still driving the ship.

[allturtles]

> rich Corinthian leather

What does this mean? Is this a metonymy for skeumorphic design?

[wtallis]

Yes, and specifically the phase Apple went through with excessively over-the-top skeuomorphism. As I recall, after the brushed metal fad had finally ended Mac OS X settled on a decent and fairly consistent look by 10.6, then in 10.7 there was a fresh excess including actual stitched leather textures: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/5/

That OS X release would have been frustrating for its usability and feature regressions even without the skeuomorphic textures, so also getting such heavy-handed, in-your-face design excesses made it a really disappointing release.

[Apocryphon]

I wouldn't mind having Ping back. Yesterday's events demonstrate the world still has room for more social networks, even if only for a few hours.

[UIZealot]

> I can't think of much I would trade from now for something in the Jobs era. I can do without

> the rich Corinthian leather

Taste, you either have it or you don't. Steve certainly did.

> the PowerPC,

The Mac switched to Intel in the Jobs era.

> and the colored plastic

Again, all Mac laptops and desktops switched to Aluminum in the Jobs era.

It seems to me you're going out of your way to not give credit whom (Steve Jobs) it's due, why is that?