Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by JoeAltmaier 182 days ago
Hm. The one-button mouse? That was part of the design impact - for user experience, it wasn't much of a win.

Likewise the faulty power cords and noisy power supplies (no choke on the power cable, because it looks ugly!)

How about the soldered-down components and device cases with special screws to keep users from ever opening them? That was not 'for the user', that was more 'walled garden'.

In fact, I'm not sure where this myth of 'quality and user experience' came from. It was all about selling, baby.

1 comments

These critiques are so tiresome. Like he forced people to buy macs or something. You're not the audience. For the average consumer the fact they don't even have to think about unscrewing something is a major part of the appeal. The walled garden is a plus for them not a negative.

And then ending with the sanctimonious line about selling. Like you eat off of selling nothing. Go screw in whatever you like just understand your critique comes across as little more than entitled griping against a majority. You're the people he fought against the entire time, people obsessed with their own personal agenda/minutia with no understanding of the overarching mission or who the customer is. This video comes to mind https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o

Design without an audience in mind is not design. Don't dismiss the work simply because you're not the audience.

I get it. Lots of people fall for design over usefulness. Not very technical, so a mac is enough.

but lets never fool ourselves into thinking they are more useful, more efficient or flexible. That's tiresome, and it's repeated endlessly as well.

People buy all sorts of things that are not very good. Audience is an excuse; salesmanship is not about selling what the customer needs.

I'm no newb, just ranting about macs. I've been around, even before the mac existed. Written code for them, for nearly every platform around. I'm not sanctimonious; I'm educated. The Mac OS was a pile of bad code. The current Mac OS, dev tools, documentation, deployment environment is among the worst.

Not entitled; just very tired of fighting it.

I started on Macs and I tend to agree.

They have some good things on the hardware side but you have pay a lot for it, and it's not just about the money.