[leptons]

It honestly doesn't surprise me. Apple is not some bastion of good design. They are mediocre at best, always have been.

It was pretty hilarious to me that for so many years the keyboard on iOS only had CAPITAL letters. No matter the state of the shift key, the letters on the keyboard just stayed the same. After many years they finally figured it out, but it's one example of many about how Apple just doesn't have the great UX people claim they do.

[RupertSalt]

I have some kind of mental block that prevents me from figuring out the state of touchscreen controls.

"Is that a Play button because it's currently playing, or because it is paused/stopped, and will play when I tap it?"

"Is Bluetooth on or off? That depends if Dark Mode on?"

I end up tapping the control 3 times or so. The latter dilemma could sometimes be worked out by surveying the state of every surrounding control, but tunnel vision and impatience keep winning.

[tambourine_man]

I actually prefer the all caps keyboard and switch it on on iOS. It looks like a physical keyboard and the constant flicking between upper/lowercase is distracting and annoying

[b112]

As bfinn once said on IRC, as he wrote in caps:

<BFINN/#debian> ALL BIG LETTER ON KEYBOARD HERE!!

<CosmicRay/#debian> haha

<BFINN/#debian> TO NO LITTLE LETTER!

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.misc/c/7AdXvE7KQz...

[Daneel_]

There are dozens of us!

[leptons]

Well good for you, I guess?

[brookst]

Apple has fantastic UX people. Also really bad ones. It’s a mistake to think a company that size is homogenuous.

In general, IMO they are better than most companies but far from perfect. Maybe 80th percentile. I’m hard pressed to think of a top 10 tech company that’s better. Lots of smaller companies are.

[nashashmi]

they are not bastion of good design. they are the bastion of intentional opinionated design. Meaning they don't listen to feedback. ("we don't have focus groups" - Steve Jobs).

[viraptor]

Looking at every UI/UX implementation around be and on my devices... I'm not sure anyone does anymore. Not in a haha way, I actually see so many trivial issues all around, I don't understand how they passed any contact with testing and user feedback.

[smugtrain]

This was not poor design, but a decision to restrict the user from copy pasting entire articles and the like. Most unfair and this iPhone 3G to iPhone 17 Pro user is seriously considering ditching them over select all

[nehal3m]

Yeah that doesn’t surprise me. You can’t copy magnet links either.

[beowulfey]

where did you hear this?

[smugtrain]

I’m reading between the lines

[lobf]

> They are mediocre at best, always have been.

Come on. OSX was a paradigm shift in desktop usability and intuitive design.

My 85 year old grandpa asked me about 20 years ago how he should go about learning how to use computers. We were a windows family at home but I was using Macs in school and OSX was relatively new and I thought it blew Windows out of the water as far as usability.

Didn’t take long for my grandpa to be sending me emails and news links, and becoming an overall competent and comfortable computer user, in his late 80s, and I credit that to Apple’s fantastic design.

I think maybe we forget how using Windows 98 and XP was day-to-day.

[nativeit]

This is accurate. Apple’s been losing its soul ever since they spent a billion dollars making a headquarters that’s shaped like the “Home” button that they then immediately got rid of.

[lucketone]

So what I’m reading, is they are able to dumb-down the design to fit less tech savvy people.

When tailoring for one audience you usually do tale away something from other audiences.

[insensible]

I understand your point and have a long list of bitter grievances against Apple, but OS X triggered a large influx of geeks to the Mac world. It was a Unix that just worked, and there were all kinds of important ways that appealed to key tech people.

[leptons]

>Come on. OSX was a paradigm shift in desktop usability and intuitive design.

OSX was born by moving from a real crap OS that couldn't even multitask property, to slapping the same UX paradigms on a Unix base.

The first release of OSX wasn't meaningfully different from OS9 in UX. They had the same goofy window gadgets for minimizing and maximizing a window, and still couldn't resize a window from any corner/side.

Finder is still just as much garbage as it ever was, nothing has really changed there. "About this software" is still the first thing on the first menu, because of course that's the most important thing a user could do with MacOS software is to look at what version they are using.

There's a reason MacOS has never gone above 15% market share - part of that is the extortionate cost of Apple hardware, as well as their shitty UX.

I will gladly take Windows XP over any version of MacOS.

[abanana]

Not always, if we go back to the 1980s. But in very modern times, they've lost all the learnings from back then.

[jasonfarnon]

old school apple design stubborness: I remember they insisted on putting the grooves on the "D" and "K" keys instead of the "F" and "J" keys. So you had to find home base on the keyboard with your middle fingers on an apple rather than index fingers like on everything else. No, that place has always been a design shop run amok.

[projektfu]

It made sense because the numeric keypad had the dot on the 5. Early IBM keyboards (Model F) didn't have home markers, IIRC. But the PC world standardized on F and J, and eventually everyone else, too.

[1718627440]

echo "It made sense because the numeric keypad had the dot on the 5." | sed 's/had/has/'

[leptons]

lol, no, they sucked even more in the 1980s.

Did you ever notice that "About this software" is the first thing on the first menu of every application? Is that because people have to know what version of the software they are using every time they start it? It's still like that today, and it's very very stupid. Other OSs get it right and put the version information on the last menu, where it doesn't clutter up the most prominent area in the most used menus.

Finder was crap in the 1980s. Still is crap, but it used to be crap too.

The window system in the 80s and 90s was also crap. Could not resize a window from any side or corner of the window except the lower right. Windows has had resizing from any edge or corner since forever.

Apple "design" is just not as good as people seem to think it is.

They've also had plenty of weird and unloved hardware designs... the infamous trash can, the clamshell laptop, the weird anniversary macs, a mouse with a charging port on the bottom so that you can't use the mouse while it's charging, and the list goes on and on and on.

[muppetman]

As someone who has switched from Windows to Apple recently, my God the Finder is terrible. I can't understand how people aren't flipping tables over how bad it is.

[seec]

Finder has to be used with the Miller columns; otherwise, it doesn't make sense.

But since the switch to the new filesystem, it's kinda slow and annoying.

They have built some proprietary stuff around their filesystem to increase their walled garden height. Which is kind of stupid in the era of cloud computing, because you cannot use any of it if you share files/directories with other people who don't use Macs.

[hollandheese]

Because Mac OS X Finder has always been kinda terrible. There was a lot of talk about this in the early 2000s and it's just faded away since the people using macOS now probably never experienced the good old Mac OS 9 Finder.

And its Windows competition Windows Explorer has likewise gotten worse and worse each revision of Windows.

[ChoGGi]

Oh... Finder is the name of the default file browser? I always thought it was the search results that popped down from the top right search area.

Last Mac I was on still had OSX on it.

Thank goodness for Dopus.

[leptons]

lol, directory opus? I was using that on the Amiga way back in the day. I tried it like a decade ago, but it didn't stick for me. It doesn't seem to run on Linux, and it costs $$$, so no chance I'll try it again.

[ethbr1]

I can't think of a better rationale for the ubiquitous worsening of local search than increasing ignorance of comp sci fundamentals.

There's no reason a senior at undergrad level shouldn't be able to write an efficient, fast, deterministic, precomputed search function.

... and yet, professional developers at major companies seem completely incapable.

Minimum acceptance criteria for any proposed shipping search feature should be "There is no file / object in the local system that fails to show up if you type its visible name" ffs.

[seec]

The whole window management system is an exercise in contrarianism. They basically chose to do things in the opposite manner of their competitor and mostly against what intuition would dictate for the sole reason of being different.

macOS is very frustrating to use without utility apps that provide the necessary improvements. But they are never as well integrated, cost money or are a hassle to set up.

Apple just wins because they make good-looking, well-built hardware, and sometimes they win on some performance metrics (in the Apple Silicon era, it's mostly about efficiency and single-core speed, which is not as useful as some like to believe).

[leptons]

Apple only "wins" by charging exorbitant prices that idiots are willing to pay to have a digital status symbol. What they have not "won" is market share. They have always been an "also-ran" in market share.

Android (70%) beats iOS (30%). Windows (68%) beats MacOS (13%).

[seec]

Well, I agree with that if we are talking about the general population. But Apple does have some niches it serves very well that make the prices worth it for some. But of course, this is a very tiny minority of their customers.

For example, they always have been focusing on video editing since the PPC days, starting with the iMac DV. And nowadays, Macs are still quite good for video editing; even when you factor in the price, it's not that bad of a deal. Previously it was about DTP and desktop graphics generally.

But it's always the same playbook; they are first to offer the possibilities of a new usage, but that comes with their high price; over time they lose competitiveness, and they end up switching to something else.

The question is always if the asking price is going to be worth it for whatever you try to accomplish with a computer at the moment. If you are doing work that doesn't require being on the bleeding edge, the answer is probably no.

However, in general, people buy Apple stuff for the status, very often as an ego trip (to prove they are better) and not infrequently out of ignorance/incompetence (it's crazy how much stupid shit Apple fans believe).

[tzs]

What makes you think the first menu is one of the most used menus?

[leptons]

Well it probably isn't because Apple doesn't put useful things there, which is completely stupid from a UX perspective.

[anonymars]

Heh, you're going to mention a mouse without bringing up the puck?!

[ChoGGi]

I'm a little surprised they never came out with some oversized mouse pad and a mouse that charges from it.

Always seemed like an apple sort of idea.

[happymellon]

> a mouse with a charging port on the bottom so that you can't use the mouse while it's charging

I'm surprised you went for that over the puck. At least when you unplugged it, you could use it. The puck was just terrible. And old.

[PcChip]

>This was not poor design, but a decision to restrict the user from copy pasting entire articles

do you have a source for that?

[hbs18]

The physical keyboard on your computer is also always in capital letters. Is that bad design too?

[Matl]

The advantage of software is the 'soft' part i.e. it's much easier to change than hardware.

Unless physical keyboards had mini displays for every key, they're a good design given the 'physical' limitation of their design.

A touchscreen displays 'soft'ware that's easy to change and make smarter than physical items.