[m_dupont]

I see articles like this a lot and I haven't yet thought of a way to categorize them properly.

I think the author is simply being melodromatic and faulting companies like apple for not designing user interfaces that are perfect.

His concrete complaints against apple boil down to two points really:

* there's a lot of bloatware. / too many apps

* the apps/settings menus are hard to navigate.

My day job has me in the trenches right now trying to make good UIs and I can simply say that its hard. Moreover, if you ask the average consumer what they think of apple's UI I bet that most would praise it. If apple, the best company in the world at UI/UX can't make this guy happy, then I'm not sure who will.

His complaints against google have a similar tone. He complains that SEO has slowly eroded the quality of search results, which is true, but also SEO is an adversarial process. Given the value of being at the front page of search, people are strongly incentivised to game the system as hard as they can. It's a hard problem.

Not to be glib, but I'd like to see him try to tackle these problems before saying that big tech is "selling basic usability back to consumers".

Yes, the flaws he points out with usability of big tech products may be real, but I dont think it warrants the venom with which he writes the article.

[mmmpetrichor]

Even to me, as a tech person, the level of SEO allowed to infiltrate google results seems way out of proportion to what they should allow. There are several obvious URLs that always come up with "top 10 lists" that seem wholly designed for SEO referral links for any type of recommendation you might be looking for. There's a reason everyone just ignores google and adds "reddit.com" to certain searches now to get real results.

[jmye]

Google isn’t, to all outward appearances, trying to do search well, though. I mean, you can want them to deal with SEO better/differently, but it’s clear the goal is to drive advertising and to do whatever it can to serve you more ads. We need more neeva/Kagi search tools, if we want companies incented to get away from blogspam/SEO.

[eternityforest]

I don't believe that Apple is the best at UI, from by limited experience with them. I have close to zero complaints about Android or Windows UI, besides pull to refresh.

Apple is the best at making tech not feel like it's actually tech, and creating a sense that it's just a transparent window to your content, the way that hand tools are transparent extensions of your hand, rather than interpreters that filter and alter your actions.

People who are already really good at doing stuff in the real world and comfortable in 3D space(The kind who probably gravitated towards skateboards and oil painting instead of video games) feel at home, and don't experience and loss of confidence which would cause them to give up.

It's not really easy to use, they have a ton of gestures and shortcuts. Windows/android is like doing what a screen says, Apple is like learning a dance.

If you have a very active mind that always tries to find patterns of logic, Apple gives you clarity and directness, but it doesn't spell things out and hold your hand as much as some stuff.

[drewcoo]

> Not to be glib, but I'd like to see him try to tackle these problems before saying that big tech is "selling basic usability back to consumers".

A problem statement is not invalid just because someone pointing it out can't solve it.

The tech industry has incentive ($$$) to improve click rates but very little incentive to improve UI beyond what A/B testing says makes the most money. The author was just claiming that from a consumer point of view.

[JohnFen]

> I bet that most would praise it.

Maybe so, but I curse it. It hides too much and is opaque and unintuitive. I can never really figure out how to do anything in it without doing a web search to get the answer.