[doctorpangloss]

> It's a true testament to the intuitiveness of Apple UX.

I think it's much simpler than that. For normal people, the aesthetics of an experience is the experience. There is no functionality, form is functionality.

Apple does this more than anyone else as a side effect of different design goals. An iPhone competes with the 1990s-era cable TV-equipped television, not an Android phone, especially for older adults. In that comparison, you can see how the iPhone "UX" could be "improved:" how could it achieve the same level of effortlessness as switching a channel, an idea of an aesthetic experience distilled to a brand name and a button press, and then having the aesthetic experiences you like transferred to you continuously, nonstop, throughout the day, affordably?

You are talking about watching YouTube specifically, and consider that if your grandma could "just" watch a channel with a mix of Chinese and English content she "likes," she would be even "happier." I am not trying to get into the normative argument over which aesthetic experiences are more meaningful or preferred or whatever. It's a way of looking at things differently, without the myopic point of view of frontend web development.

Once you deconstruct your lived experience of watching your grandma, "Apple UX" looks more like a marketing idea that is inferior to many alternatives.

[tim333]

That's a bit of an unusual way of looking at iPhones. They seem to do much the same as Android phones and very different from 90s TVs especially when if comes to taking photos, doing banking, making calls and the like.

[doctorpangloss]

> That's a bit of an unusual way of looking at iPhones.

This is the kind of comment that becomes a downvote magnet. An unusual look is the point.

I don't think it's true that there's some frontend-web-developer-graphic-design-nerd-sense-of-UX superiority to iPhones compared to Android phones. That's what this is about. There's a bunch of observations written here by non-elderly people trying to reason about why iPhones work better for the elderly than Android phones or whatever. Man, just get them a cable TV subscription and pay for it, because that's what they really want: free TV. That's what everyone wants.

It's only in this country that iPhones have such high market share. The fact is, Android or iPhone, the end user is mostly using it to consume the same garbage - mindless freakshow television in TikTok and YouTube.

Mostly couldn't be more true of a generalization either. The sum of the time spent on consuming linear video content on phones is probably like, 90-99% of the time spent on the devices. Even accounting for people playing long session video games in Asia, because children are overall a small part of the population, and adults are for the most part not playing games.

All of these hard, true facts about how utterly narrow an average user's usage of phones attacks sacrosanct magical thoughts in HN readers' heads regarding the diversity of the experiences people are having on computers. They think it's this wondrous world of diverse meaning. There's some truth to that. It may be you and I are having wondrous diverse meaningful experiences. But the average person is scrolling TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook.

People who disagree and downvote: at the end of the day, how do you know? I mean, have you ever seen the engagement statistics for Apple Photos? For a banking app? Making phone calls? No! But there are countless surveys, all pointing to ridiculous numbers of hours spent in TikTok. 90m a day on average for Americans. That means 1 in 5 people may be spending 180m too! Who do you know spends 90m a day taking photos, banking, making calls? It's far more rare. You can look at the engagement for Google Maps and Spotify, which may be the only non-social media, non-TV apps with high engagement, but it would be intellectually dishonest to count Google Maps - you're using your car for navigation with an appliance, not your phone - and Spotify is an aberration, although still passive mindless consumption, a better more affordable UX compared to radio. If you could watch TV while driving a car, people would, and that would be it for radio and Spotify.

So of course a phone can converge a bunch of other activities. But it doesn't mean that I'm wrong. I know they have a bunch of functionality. The question is, does it matter? No. The average person wants freakshow TV. I'm not the first or the last person to say this. It has never been so stark though.

[tim333]

My mum's 88 and found the iPhone's esim facility useful recently recently when she flew to NYC to represent a British womens group at the UN. I think you overgeneralize a bit about old people just wanting to click dumb content.

[emodendroket]

I don't think I agree with your starting premise that watching cable television is anything like using social media, even at its least edifying.

[FrontierProject]

This type of comment gets downvoted because its right on the border of incoherent rambling. You say there's no ux difference for the elderly between iPhones and Androids, I say you're dead wrong. I've invariably become the IT guy for most of my extended family, and all of the elderly members found an iPhone easier to manage. Once I got one of them to switch, they convinced the rest.

Your argument is basically pure conjecture, everyone in the thread was talking about their personal experience with elderly family members. And your argument is there is no difference between the two devices, based on surveys for the usage percentage of TikTok? Are you kidding me? Has the thought not occured to you that elderly people might be a minority and outlier in such a survey?

Even granting that 90% of elderly screen time is spent watching TikTok, that does absolutely nothing to prove your claim that there is no difference between Android or iPhone for this purpose. Someone above mentioned a simple example of the differences between the two. Androids have an airplane mode toggle in their notification tray while iPhones don't. This is pretty much the sole reason for elderly Android users constantly turning on airplane mode, a problem which is almost nonexistent with iPhone users.

[doctorpangloss]

I'm saying that the difference between the UX of Android and iPhone for the purpose of watching free TV is small, while the difference between a real cable television subscription and an iPhone/Android phone is large. Frontend web developers have zero relevant experience that would give them some insight as to how to "design" "better" television.

I am not really talking about IT burden for your family or whatever, which I also think is erroneously attributed to UX. Of course, if you wanted to reduce your IT burden, you could just say, "No," and nothing bad would happen. They would figure things out.

> And your argument is there is no difference between the two devices, based on surveys for the usage percentage of TikTok?

Yes. I mean, isn't that the definition of form versus function? I'm trying to show you that the primary function of these devices is really, "Watch TikTok," which is a colorful way of saying, consume linear video content effortlessly. Everything else is dwarfed. Another POV is, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube all agree with me: they don't charge more to show ads to Android users compared to iOS users, they charge more for targeting and the size of that audience in unexpected ways, but not in a way that makes sense for, "iOS users are better." Even if I agree with you that they are!

What people observe is true: Do I think the aesthetic experience of an iPhone makes these normal educated people more confident in solving their problems themselves rather than asking you? Yes, but that's a different thing than UX. There are lots of grandmas using Samsung phones, and I think that's because Samsung, as a manufacturer, cares about the aesthetics more. Maybe not OUR grandmas, but grandmas everywhere else in the world.

> Has the thought not occurred to you that elderly people might be a minority and outlier in such a survey?

Elderly people definitely watch average, meaning LARGE, amounts of television. I think they are also going to be average users of TikTok. Everybody who touches TikTok likes it.