[mevodig]

Ultimately, for me, this is about creating a reasonable user experience for the majority of users.

While it's easy to forget this when spending a lot of time in forums such as HN, _we_ are not that majority. This constant expectation that platforms used everyday by millions of people should be tailored to us is untenable.

[jiggy2011]

I don't know.. I think allot of people here underestimate the average user. I see allot of comments on this site of people basically saying "everyone else just uses the computer for facebook".

That's not really true, although there are users like that. I know allot of people who are not technical or CS people in the HN sense but who use their computers for allot of stuff including some pretty sophisticated creative or business tasks and are actually quite capable of doing technical stuff assuming it is explained properly to them.

Also people on HN have probably spent more time using computers and seeing lots of different users use computers that we probably have more of a long term feel of what would work well and what wouldn't, and if we are all developing the next generation of apps etc for the masses then our opinions and requirements are actually pretty important.

If you have an over restrictive platform that does not allow developers to innovate in ways that they want then whilst end users may appreciate the simplicity, they will become frustrated if this platform fails to deliver the flexible applications that they really want. For example I know many non tech users who use literally hundreds of firefox plugins.

Of course there are a few people I know who are of the opinion that all hardware & software for everything should just be developed by Apple end of story.

[iaskwhy]

That can be a really dangerous way of thinking if you apply it to everything else. It reminds me of when people define democracy as the will of the majority when in reality it should be the voice of the minority. Sure, we should aim to simplify everything but whenever someone makes a call to silence the minority it's not going to be a good thing.

[keeperofdakeys]

You know what, you are a user too. The platform should perform well for everybody, not just the majority. This is what makes me feel Unity and Gnome Shell aren't the best way to go, not just simplifying, but totally removing configurability. There is a central ground, where an interface can be learn-able by a normal user, and not inhibit power users.

The thing with OSX appstore sandbox isn't that it hurts power users, it hurts the majority. It limits what developers can make applications do, preventing many types of applications that users would expect to be possible. Sandboxing itself isn't bad, it is just this implementation that is bad.