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by ChuckNorris89 1202 days ago
>I think Apple's probably got well over 99% of the userbase covered with the defaults and opinions here.

The vast amount of MacOS apps built by the community to undo Apple's terrible and backwards UX choices, and the amounts of sales those apps get, disproves your theory that over 99% of people are fine with the defaults Apple forces on its users.
2 comments
gumby 1202 days ago
The existence of such programs merely says there are enough users willing to install such programs that it's worth making them available (and that macs have the affordances -- APIs -- to make these kinds of changes, which ios does not have). There are so many macs in use that a tiny percentage is enough.

I suspect the same is true in the general case in the ios app store: that there is a long tail of apps used by a tiny %age of users, but with an enormous user base that's enough to make a free or even paid app.

And after about 35 years of mousing and about four years of iphoning I expected to want to revert apple's change to mouse-gesture-scrolling with Lion, but after only a few seconds I was sold. YMMV, of course, but I agree with the "99%" hypothesis.

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mtrower 1202 days ago
Does it? Or is it possible that 1% is still pretty large?
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ChuckNorris89 1202 days ago
Maybe it's bigger than 1%.
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mtrower 1197 days ago
Maybe! Or maybe not.

The more settings you have, the more inevitable this becomes... Assume for a moment that any given default you set, works well for 99% of your userbase. Then, the number of users satisfied with every last default breaks down as follows:

1 setting -> 99% of users satisfied 2 settings -> 98% of users satisfied 20 settings -> 81% of users satisfied 200 settings -> 13% of users satisfied

Apple has a lot of settings. Even if their defaults in general work for greater than 99% of their users, it becomes unrealistic at scale that every single default will satisfy any particular user, let alone all of them. Thus, those third-party apps that you see become popular in aggregate. That doesn't necessarily mean that Apple's defaults are wrong. They could be absolutely killing it on the defaults, and you would still expect to see these results -- in which case you would expect them to devote their attention to the common case, and to let the third-parties pick up the edge cases.

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