How Apple is giving design a bad name

November 17, 2015 3:58 AM

For years, Apple followed user-centered design principles. Then something went wrong. Former Apple designers Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini on how Apple has sacrificed core principles of usability and good interface design on the altar of visual simplicity and prettiness.
posted by starzero (270 comments total)

They really do have a problem here. Especially with 3D Touch: am I supposed to press increasingly hard all over the screen to work out what can be touched? Could they not just have added a shadow to icons that have "depth" and so can be pressed in? Eugh.

But, like I suspect with all matters Apple these days, it's like when Homer's trying to talk to Moe at the height of the Flaming Moe extravaganza: all the complaints are drowned out by the whole world trying to give their money to Apple all at once.

I may be an outlier though: I still miss Balloon Help, ffs.
posted by bonaldi at 4:17 AM on November 17, 2015 [24 favorites]

*ahem*
posted by Fizz at 4:21 AM on November 17, 2015 [33 favorites]

Consider the on-screen keyboard on the iPhone and iPad. The Apple keyboard shows the letters in upper case, no matter what is actually being typed.

I never used iOS until this past year when I had to test a web app we were developing on an iPhone and wow is the keyboard annoying. I'm used to Android showing if it's upper or lower case and I had the hardest time putting passwords into the iPhone because I could never remember which color indicated which case.
posted by octothorpe at 4:25 AM on November 17, 2015 [14 favorites]

"The product is beautiful! And fun. As a result, when people have difficulties, they blame themselves. Good for Apple. Bad for the customer."

How apt that this change should come as the U.S. has lurched toward plutocracy.

It costs money ... and more importantly, salaries ... to make a usable product. There are people who specialize in human factors and UX design. I think what's also going on here is that it's quicker and cheaper to reduce design to rules in CSS so that a programmer can just follow a blueprint.

And of course Apple knows that few people will give up their phones and iPads altogether because of these issues. So does Google.

There's some language in the essay that I found ableist. Even so: nice to start the day with a usability jeremiad. Reminds me of the nineties. (BTW, a lot of software companies marginalized their UX people back then, too.)
posted by Sheydem-tants at 4:26 AM on November 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

I was waiting for this Onion article to come true.

I still get a lot of things done with my apple products, but I haven't seen any super great user-centric design come from them in a while. Major OS X upgrades seem defensive rather than proactive. Major iOS upgrades simply obsolete my very expensive phablets, which kind of really pisses me off.

Regarding design, some app developers still get it, and it's so refreshing to cautiously open a new app and get the old Apple treatment - easy, simple, explanatory, up and running in 2 minutes, no confusion.
posted by sidereal at 4:27 AM on November 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

I'm a pretty much exclusive Apple user since '79, and while I like a lot about what's being produced (iOS is a revelation to me as a musician, for instance), there's definitely a dumbing-down in progress. Saw something recently about how babies using iPads is claimed to be a sign that babies are smart and sophisticated when it really comes down to iOS being simplified to the point that a stupid baby can use it and had to grimly shake my head. The old Apple paradigm of surface friendliness overlaid over accessible depth seems to be waning, unless I'm missing something, and the alternative seems to be entirely the ten thousand foot dive into Linux impenetrability. Agh.
posted by sonascope at 4:29 AM on November 17, 2015 [7 favorites]

For the record, something I learned from this article: you can shake an iOS device to undo an action.
I have been a Mac user since 2005, have been using iPhones since the 3G came out and I'm on my 2nd iPad and never knew.
posted by starzero at 4:30 AM on November 17, 2015 [11 favorites]

@starzero if you press the home button and the power button simultaneously it makes candy. Go on, try it.
posted by sidereal at 4:33 AM on November 17, 2015 [22 favorites]

To be fair, I had to disable javascript to be able to read the article because there didn't seem to be any other way to get rid of that Deloite ad blocking half the page on my tablet so Fast Company doesn't win any usability awards either.
posted by octothorpe at 4:34 AM on November 17, 2015 [26 favorites]

Does anyone else work at a company that holds apple up as the quintessential example of design?
posted by rebent at 4:37 AM on November 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

I recall one designer calling the current Apple ethos "Keynote Design" or something like that - do stuff that looks incredible on giant screens and on tech sites, but actual usability is almost an after-thought.
posted by lmfsilva at 4:42 AM on November 17, 2015 [17 favorites]

I understand the ranting of the graybeards regarding the good ol' days of Apple. I remember those days. But Apple was tiny company then selling into niche markets by comparison to today. The old Apple OSs were very nice but look at the competition of the day. They really sucked by comparison.

Apple is a consumer products company now with the iPhone and iPad. Things are different. The focus of the company is different. iOS has evolved and will continue to evolve just like any software.

I think the current Windows Phone OS is actually pretty nice. To bad it's 5 years to late to market thus doomed. Thank Balmer for having his head in the sand and blowing that opportunity.
posted by LoveHam at 4:44 AM on November 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

... all the complaints are drowned out by the whole world trying to give their money to Apple all at once.

And therein lies the current hell of information technology: companies are tripping over each other's feet in the race to design for the idiot (*ahem* layperson).

The tragedy of this is that software gives us the option of allowing for increasing functionality along with increasing ability, with a smooth transition according to user behavior. But that costs too much to implement (and, to be fair, introduces a lot of complexity into telephone support).
posted by oheso at 4:51 AM on November 17, 2015

sonascope: the alternative seems to be entirely the ten thousand foot dive into Linux impenetrability. Agh.

I, too, considered Linux to be difficult and ugly. Then I tried Mint.
posted by Too-Ticky at 4:52 AM on November 17, 2015 [16 favorites]

That said (designing for the layperson), Tog's point shouldn't be lost: in oversimplifying and making the interface too pretty, they're failing to accommodate both tyros and experts alike.
posted by oheso at 4:53 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

But, like I suspect with all matters Apple these days, it's like when Homer's trying to talk to Moe at the height of the Flaming Moe extravaganza: all the complaints are drowned out by the whole world trying to give their money to Apple all at once.

That is a very apt analogy.

/blows out flame, chugs.
posted by Drinky Die at 4:57 AM on November 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

But the Mac has always had obscure keyboard shortcuts. I used to keep a pdf of shortcuts handy; since I could never remember infrequently used ones. And I only knew about those shortcuts by visiting tech sites.
posted by dhruva at 4:58 AM on November 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

Then I tried Mint.

Mint is a good general-purpose Linux distro. But every tool for its purpose. I support hundreds of users on Windows, Mac and iOS for their desktop/mobile devices. I use Linux for servers, and there the power and flexibility of the command line provide the best user interface, even as I RTFM for every other operation.
posted by oheso at 4:58 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Does anyone else work at a company that holds apple up as the quintessential example of design?

I have met a whole lot of marketing people who seems to have somehow had the same three sentences in the same order installed in their heads. With no exaggeration, I have heard at least five or six unconnected marketing types say these same three sentences almost verbatim:

"Everyone loves Apple. Apple is a great example of innovative design. Apple invented the mouse and the GUI."

To which my inner contrarian always reels off: "No, not everyone. In marketing maybe but in technology no. Poor Douglas Engelbart."
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:59 AM on November 17, 2015 [21 favorites]

The old Apple OSs were very nice but look at the competition of the day. They really sucked by comparison.

ive never been an apple user, grew up with an Atari ST, but OS VIII and OS IX were actually really pleasant to use if you didn't need multitasking or the internet. I think the phrase is total "quality of service" ie just about everything was sane and totally consistent down to the little details. it's the sorts of things you only notice when they are gone. OS X was flashy and annoying in comparison... and Apple made bank so I guess that tells you where commitment to actual human usability principles gets you.
posted by ennui.bz at 5:03 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

They lost me when they said the first iPhone was the downfall of apple design. They lost me again when they said the gestures that have made my life so much better (on both Mac and iPhone) are useless and impenetrable.

Apple design is not perfect, and they make mistakes like anyone else. But the core of Apple design to me is complexity hidden behind simplicity. It's not about how pretty it is. They present you with a simple, face that anyone can understand and then give more complex and power user controls underneath to anyone who wants to dig in and discover them. And they use this philosophy on everything from iPads to watches to Final Cut. I think it's smart, and it's changed the way electronics have been shaped ever since.
posted by fungible at 5:06 AM on November 17, 2015 [27 favorites]

One of the best parts of my the job at the end of my fulltime employment phase, a decade ago, was getting to be the fly on the wall during Board of Trustee meetings, watching Don be the cantankerous old man of design. Put him in a room with 3 such others, and you could basically get an entire year's worth of design education (you won't catch me say thinking in my unpaid moments) in a day full of board meetings.
posted by infini at 5:06 AM on November 17, 2015 [10 favorites]

From a usability point of view, OS 8-9 rocked. Stability, not so much.

Pity Apple threw out the baby with the bathwater ...
posted by oheso at 5:07 AM on November 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

"Apple invented ..."

Apple have invented very little. Their genius lies in taking things that already exists and applying a design and usability ethos that means your mum wants one and is able to use it without calling you up every 5 minutes.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 5:07 AM on November 17, 2015 [40 favorites]

But the Mac has always had obscure keyboard shortcuts.

For about 5 years now, a Macbook has been my primary at-home computer. I am a very experienced computer user, having been programming professionally for about 15 years on a variety of platforms. I am no stranger to commandlines, obscure interfaces, complicated shortcuts, etc.

Despite this, it drives me up the wall that Apple uses symbols (instead of text) to describe the keyboard modifier keys -- symbols that do not exist on the keyboard itself! I kid you not, to this day, I can never remember what goddamn key one of those symbols refers to when I encounter it, and I end up googling it (turns out it's 'Opt', as opposed to 'Alt' and as opposed to 'Control').

Apple: would it fucking kill you to have that symbol appear on the keyboard, or, alternately, just refer to it in drop-down menus as "Opt" instead of whatever the fuck that symbol is?
posted by tocts at 5:09 AM on November 17, 2015 [97 favorites]

As for Apple design, this does indeed capture the essence of my own rant on mouse batteries a couple of years ago:

The product is beautiful! And fun. As a result, when people have difficulties, they blame themselves. Good for Apple. Bad for the customer.

I had to borrow someone's Apple designed laptop for a few days, along with mouse. The mouse kept cutting in and out and acting up so I asked the owner what was the problem and should we consider changing the batteries. She said it'd been this way from the beginning and her engineer father didn't know what the problem was.

I opened it up to discover that her father had inserted the two gold top batteries PERFECTLY - one gold top up and the other one down.

EXCEPT the design morons at Apple had set it up so that both the gold tops would be up together, once you peered deep into the case to actually look at the little plastic raised symbology.

Once we put the batteries in the wrong way around, both heads up together, the mouse worked perfectly.

Dear Apple, I love the way you're changing decades of electrical convention with one mouse.
posted by infini at 5:12 AM on November 17, 2015 [16 favorites]

I support both Mac and Windows users of a generally similar age (older) and proficiency (low) and I've not noticed any difference in how usable either set of users find their operating systems.

I do want to know who at Apple thought a default web experience devoid of scroll bars was a good idea, though.
posted by soren_lorensen at 5:13 AM on November 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

Apple Design as she is spoke.
posted by blue_beetle at 5:15 AM on November 17, 2015 [7 favorites]

That said (designing for the layperson), Tog's point shouldn't be lost: in oversimplifying and making the interface too pretty, they're failing to accommodate both tyros and experts alike.

Isn't this an entire course/class/curriculum/theme/doctoral/ongoing topic in the user centered design industry? Or am I too old?
posted by infini at 5:20 AM on November 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

Please, consumers of tech, Ignore the Shiny.

Ignore the Shiny.

Please find the products that actually _help you do what's important_ and reward those designers.
posted by amtho at 5:21 AM on November 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

Please find the products that actually _help you do what's important_ and reward those designers.

The problem with this plea is that the vast majority of people aren't actually doing anything important with their devices, they're just killing time on social media.
posted by aught at 5:27 AM on November 17, 2015 [19 favorites]

No, you can't have cursor keys. I gave you a mouse.

I think the trouble is - there's nothing left to do but muck things up and engage in one-upping the opposition with stuff that gives the fans an excuse to nya-nyah the other side but doesn't do anything good. That's true all over, between Apple and Android, and between Android OEMs (I do not NEED a different UI - but I get one. I DO need the simple ability to set font, font size and colours. I do not get it.)

Perhaps there is a fundamental new UI concept that will change things for the better, but I have no idea what it is. So - change for marketing's sake, and damn the users.

It's doubly ironic, in that Apple is held up as the exemplar for design and successful capitalism, but it's neither. The idea is not to keep redesigning stuff that works, and the idea is not to get all the money and keep it in a huge pile.
posted by Devonian at 5:30 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

"It remains to be seen if the wheel will catch on in the business world, where people use computers for actual work and not just dicking around."
posted by jbickers at 5:31 AM on November 17, 2015 [11 favorites]

Apple is a strong company, but their strengths lie in psychology and elegance wrapped around an unusually solid R&D department. I'm sure Metafilter has covered this fairly damning article at some point about the Apple Distortion Field.

Apple's public messaging is actually pretty far off-focus from their strengths as a company. I think that their sometimes laughable we-did-it-first self-reverence leaves them vulnerable to advertising attack. It's really a testament to how poor the rest of the consumer technology field in general handles PR that they don't get comprehensively called out. On both sides, too--journalists are afraid to not play along with Apple, in fear of getting blacklisted. Other companies just don't have smart enough marketing departments to challenge them.

I had a general (if modest) level of respect for market analysts and speakers (like TedX people) until I noticed that almost nobody who talks about Apple on a stage actually knows what their strengths and weaknesses are. I gradually realized that Apple was just their favorite company, so of course they listened to whatever their favorite company said about themselves. But I instantly lose respect for the people who wander up and say "Apple creates everything." That's the message, not the reality. Troublingly, as the very well-reasoned design article shows, Apple seems to be in danger of internalizing its own marketing maxims. They may be controlling the message a little too well.
posted by Phyltre at 5:32 AM on November 17, 2015 [8 favorites]

(Even worse for my rant, I messed it up again -- the key whose not-on-the-keyboard obscure symbol I can never remember is Opt, which is also the same as Alt, and which, when I encounter the symbol, I basically guess at whether that's supposed to be Alt or Control. Control and Command are the other two modifier keys, which usually I get right, but not always.)
posted by tocts at 5:32 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

That's really the shift that's taken place over the past couple of decades... tools that were primarily used by designers themselves (Ive: "I design for me" etc) have been consumerized for mass market. Someone mentioned this shift above.

Maybe a designer edition of products are required?

/mind you, I can't use the underlying single button interface due to 30 years of muscle memory
posted by infini at 5:32 AM on November 17, 2015

As a tech journalist, I can't help but wonder if my colleagues aren't part of the problem here. It's a lot easier (and, critically, faster) to write a rave review on the basis of "this is freaking beautiful" than it is to dive deeply into usability and human/computer interaction stuff.

I'm pretty sure that a lot of the people who write device reviews even for widely read publications simply don't have the kind of design knowledge you'd need to do that in the first place, so it's probably not quite fair to blame them personally.

(And, as an aside, that's a personal pet peeve of mine - the sort of reader/commentor who shreds any review that isn't scientifically rigorous enough for them. Yes, Tom's Hardware and AnandTech do great work, but that doesn't mean a thoughtful review of the basic experience of using a given gizmo isn't useful to plenty of people.)

In any case, it's just another sign of the times in technology journalism - we'd much rather have punchy, eyeball-grabbing raves about beauty than thoughtful, considered reviews of things like usability factors.
posted by ColdOfTheIsleOfMan at 5:33 AM on November 17, 2015 [10 favorites]

tocts: the key whose not-on-the-keyboard obscure symbol I can never remember is Opt

You have to read the symbol as two alternative paths ( a branching tree), i.e. from left to right.
posted by dhruva at 5:34 AM on November 17, 2015 [7 favorites]

Phyltre's comment makes an extremely valuable point and offers me insight on an article I was ranting about just last night.

I mean, seriously, mr fanboi? Apple's P2P payments will never be able to help poor farmers in African because their fundamental approach will ensure its a closed ecosystem possible only between iphones, which are frankly not robust enough for the agricultural operating environment. 9 out of 10 farmers I've met use candybars, usually old Nokias which survive the rigours of their environment.
posted by infini at 5:38 AM on November 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

The article is frustrating. To give an example: it suggests that iOS was designed without undo and then Apple had to backtrack and restore the functionality. It implies the decision was bizarre in the face of how simple it is to add a button on-screen.

This is, apologies to Tog, a pretty dumb way of describing a period in which a really new interface was under active development (inside and outside Apple). If they'd just put a button on screen for every essential desktop feature, and added a stylus so they wouldn't have to throw out all the essential pointer based UI, congratulations you've got WindowsCE.

This is dressed up as user centric design, but it sounds like a lot of opinion. Would be more interesting with data, or original counterexamples. I feel like we've moved past the pronouncement-centric era of UX.
posted by ~ at 5:38 AM on November 17, 2015 [24 favorites]

/mind you, I can't use the underlying single button interface due to 30 years of muscle memory

Apple hasn't sold a one button mouse since 2005. Go to System Preferences. Open the Mouse preference pane.
posted by blob at 5:40 AM on November 17, 2015 [13 favorites]

This is, apologies to Tog, a pretty dumb way of describing a period in which a really new interface was under active development (inside and outside Apple). If they'd just put a button on screen for every essential desktop feature, and added a stylus so they wouldn't have to throw out all the essential pointer based UI, congratulations you've got WindowsCE.

This is dressed up as user centric design, but it sounds like a lot of opinion. Would be more interesting with data, or original counterexamples. I feel like we've moved past the pronouncement-centric era of UX.

I wonder if this might be due to Tog's co-author having something to do with UCD being his own opinion?
posted by infini at 5:40 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Their designs have flaws, yes. Serious flaws, in some cases.

The belief that the hundreds of millions of consumers who use their products are slackjawed rubes with the intelligence of a "baby" who can't quit hitting themselves and (hello, Linux help forum cliche) want the "wrong" thing is quite a bit more than flawed.
posted by middleclasstool at 5:41 AM on November 17, 2015 [25 favorites]

blob, "underlying"... the two button thingie is an overlay to the logic of a system I've seen evolve in parallel since 1982
posted by infini at 5:41 AM on November 17, 2015

If you click the "usability" tag on this post, you'll see that usability used to be relatively big around here as a topic for discussion, starting with a couple posts from mathowie, but lately the usability posts are few and far between. Is an interest in usability no longer cool? Or are all the designers just talked out on the subject?
posted by pracowity at 5:42 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

"Especially with 3D Touch: am I supposed to press increasingly hard all over the screen to work out what can be touched?" Yes. You can press a little harder to see if there's something extra there.

This nails a key shift in design that's totally lost on these guys, and some other really smart people I know, which is the shift away from everything being super organized and obvious and predictable and to a more natural, discordant state. Is the Snapchat UI confusing? Are you worried about pressing the wrong button and losing data? Depends a lot on how "old" you are.
posted by frijole at 5:42 AM on November 17, 2015 [9 favorites]

I hate 3D Touch. I hate gestural browsing. Both ruin the things that made the iPhone great. I can't get the screen to do what I want any more.

My current office has a Mac in it, which I have to use sometimes and I also hate. Product design and UI design have diverged: the objects are great but the experience of using them is lousy. It's almost like Apple was worried that its competitors were too far behind and so has decided to hobble itself for fairness.
posted by anotherpanacea at 5:47 AM on November 17, 2015

Touch-sensitive screens, especially on relatively small devices, offer multiple opportunities for things to go wrong when an active link or button is accidentally touched.

I usually prefer the regular version of a site to the mobile one on my iPad, but when I am trying to scroll or zoom on a site that's cluttered with links (I'm looking at you, salon.com!) it drives me nuts when I suddenly end up looking at "57 celebrities you didn't know were ambidextrous!" or something. This is as much the website's fault as Apple's, though.


Do you swipe left or right, up or down, with one finger, two, or even as many as five? Do you swipe or tap, and if you tap is it a single tap or double? Is that text on the screen really text or is it a critically important button disguised as text? So often, the user has to try touching everything on the screen just to find out what are actually touchable objects.

I remember the first time I inadvertently touched my iPhone with three fingers (which zooms the screen all the way in) and had no idea what was going on. I eventually figured out it was zoomed in all the way, but could not scroll around enough to do anything and eventually had to find a computer and Google the problem to figure out what I had done and how to undo it.

I always enjoy hearing Norman and Tog's thoughts on usability; it really helps me understand why some things just seem to work better than others. I deal with a lot of user interfaces at work, and most of them are horrible. I feel like Steve Jobs could have revolutionized health care by bringing the original Mac design principles to medical equipment.

If you haven't read it, Norman's book The Design of Everyday Things is excellent. It is one of the few books I have read that really changed my life; since a colleague/mentor introduced me to it many years ago I feel like I understand much better why mistakes happen both at work and in daily life.
posted by TedW at 5:47 AM on November 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

I wonder if this might be due to Tog's co-author having something to do with UCD being his own opinion?

I'm not a designer. I think it's telling as to how smart and influential those two people are that I have books by both of them on my bookshelf. Just responding to the article, not their influence.
posted by ~ at 5:52 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

I started to read the article, then an ad popped up, blocking my view of it. Had to click another button to make ad go away. So I clicked the back button.

Which pretty much sums my thoughts. Design is a great tool and often overlooked, but sometimes the reality of having to pay for it get in the way, be it obvious or subtle.

No OS is perfect, all could stand improvement in some areas, but for the most part there's a enough choice in OSes to find a favorite.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:55 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

I know what you're saying ~ not arguing with you, but wondering if some of what we'd perceive as gaps, may not occur to the author themself. This is making me think about things - what is a PhD dissertation for one person was just a blog to another.
posted by infini at 5:59 AM on November 17, 2015

One thing that might signal a change is the new Apple pencil. Drawing on the iPad has always been kind of effed up. Artists have paid ridiculous money for styii with flakey bluetooth hacks that required ongoing hardware, app and iOS support. Of course, I've been waiting years for an Apple engineered machine like the Cintiq Companion, which might allow me to get actual work done.


Also, at some point in the 90s, Apple changed how you select and drag text and I've never figured it out. Also, thank god for the preview button here, because my iPad keyboard generally flakes out at some point if I try to make any changes.
posted by bonobothegreat at 6:02 AM on November 17, 2015

Consider the on-screen keyboard on the iPhone and iPad. The Apple keyboard shows the letters in upper case, no matter what is actually being typed

When was this written? iOS 9 changed this behavior; now shift toggles lowercase/uppercase letters on the keyboard.
posted by whitecedar at 6:04 AM on November 17, 2015 [12 favorites]

I was thinking about my previous comment while driving to work and was remembering back when I had a corporate Blackberry and my wife had an Windows Mobile phone (the old Microsoft OS that actually had a Start button).

The first iPhone I used was in 2010 when my wife got an iPhone 4 and we were both BLOWN AWAY. I knew then that Blackberry was doomed.

The article complains about the usability quirks of iOS, but it was light years ahead of the incumbents when it was released. It has been interesting to watch the mobile phone industry experience the shock wave of the iPhone.
posted by LoveHam at 6:06 AM on November 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

Tog has been ragging on Apple's UI literally since OS X debuted. I seem to recall him writing about stockpiling G4s or something so that he'd be able to continue running MacOS 9.

It's worth bearing in mind that he and Don Norman have a business selling their usability consulting services. Articles like this have marketing value: they create attention and let them show off how smart they are.
posted by adamrice at 6:06 AM on November 17, 2015 [22 favorites]

When was this written?

A bunch of it was in some early Don Norman interviews (August?)
posted by DigDoug at 6:07 AM on November 17, 2015

Predictably, writing that last comment made me realize what I actually think is Apple's problem here, and in some ways, it's not specifically Apple's problem at all. I think Apple's name since the iPod has grown because they have made new things that weren't constrained by pre-existing usage scenarios and compatibility problems, where Apple has been free to design and control the ecosystem in ways that made sense and worked together, without having to deal exclusively with users who were used to doing it "the old way."

Meanwhile Microsoft (and in their relative absence in mobile, Android) has had to support the broader everything-works-with-everything-else ecosystem, which means decades of backwards compatibility and more importantly--is this a word?--user backwards compatibility. This is harder. Most people want a simpler UI, but more experienced/hardware-diverse users will not be willing to take a hit on fiddly options they need to keep their own functionality status quo.

All of Apple's use systems have now gotten to the point where to accommodate the sheer numbers of users they have, they are forced to have many nested menus with many options. Apple is, of course, allergic to this because they are used to (they're not dumb, it's their users who are used to it) new shiny UIs which are uncluttered with options and controls, simply by virtue of having been designed with exactly as many options as were designed for. Their response is to obscure most of it and leave it "discoverable." I submit that this is a short-term solution, and inevitable feature creep and user preference will make it less tenable than Apple would like.

I also think it's why Apple staunchly refuses to do what Microsoft did with the Surface. They know that their iOS users won't all make good OSX users. They probably know that the illusion they've maintained so far--Apple just does UIs better innately, not through carefully controlling new systems designed from the start to be simple, and specifically focusing only on new systems--will fade a little in the face of people realizing that ultimately, we have more desire for more options in more places to do more advanced things, but hate what more options in more places actually and necessarily looks like.

I actually wouldn't put it past Apple to just come up with another completely new UI to subvert this inevitable creep. In fact I wonder if that watch isn't a stab at that--keep the newest UI the simplest, keep your "intuitive" users on the newest UI unencumbered by legacy of any kind.
posted by Phyltre at 6:09 AM on November 17, 2015 [11 favorites]

My meticulously designed and maintained lawn, get off it....
posted by photoslob at 6:20 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Poor Douglas Engelbart.

It is impossible to describe how profoundly we've failed him.

I will tell you, as flaky and idiosyncratic as I find Apple's software recently - and honestly, they're strangling their ecosystem and they don't seem to realize it - I wish that I could buy hardware that was fractionally as nice from anyone else for any amount of money, and I wish that some other OEM would take it upon themselves to actually have a set of design principles of their own and commit to them to the same depth and level of detail.
posted by mhoye at 6:20 AM on November 17, 2015 [10 favorites]

If they'd just put a button on screen for every essential desktop feature, and added a stylus so they wouldn't have to throw out all the essential pointer based UI, congratulations you've got WindowsCE.

I realize that this will give Steve Jobs's corpse a heart attack, but is there anyone left who DOESN'T use a stylus for touchscreen devices, including iGadgets? The new fiber-tipped ones are really nice and it's a substantial step up in accuracy and ease of use.
posted by delfin at 6:20 AM on November 17, 2015

Here's an example of what the authors are talking about:

I've had an iPad for a few years, but I probably only use it to check email once every couple of months. As a result, the Inbox fills up, but the Mail app helpfully leaves the scroll position for the email list wherever I last put it. What this has meant is that I've had to do that swipe/drag thing with the Inbox to try to get back to the top. Now you can't drag the scrollbar, so it's swipe/drag, swipe/drag, swipe/drag for up to 15 minutes to get to the most recent emails.

And then someone told me how to get to the top of the Inbox.... you tap a piece of empty space above the label that says 'Inbox'. No, not the label itself - the blank space in the toolbar above it, next to the wireless icon. I forget this piece of information every time I use the iPad for email... I know there's some hidden way to get there, but usually I have to look it up again. It's like one of those secret bookcase doors that people have.
posted by pipeski at 6:21 AM on November 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

"I realize that this will give Steve Jobs's corpse a heart attack, but is there anyone left who DOESN'T use a stylus for touchscreen devices, including iGadgets?"

My dad is the only person I've ever seen using a stylus for a touchscreen device in the modern era.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 6:23 AM on November 17, 2015 [22 favorites]

"is there anyone left who DOESN'T use a stylus for touchscreen devices, including iGadgets?"

Uh, me, and everyone else I ever see using touchscreen devices.
posted by synecdoche at 6:25 AM on November 17, 2015 [54 favorites]

I initially jumped on the iPhone bandwagon because Apple by far had the most responsive and well-designed music app. Flash forward six years, and now I am pretty sure the music app, which 99% of the time I using in the car, is actively trying to kill me.
posted by lefty lucky cat at 6:26 AM on November 17, 2015 [20 favorites]

A stylus is pretty much indispensible for Draw Something, but not much else. I think people with long fingernails can benefit, and maybe also people who do a lot of sketching/handwritten stuff, but no, I don't know anyone who uses one. I tried one for a while, but with a screen protector the stylus became really flaky to use. I'm sure there are better styli now though.
posted by pipeski at 6:28 AM on November 17, 2015

Yeah, I'm not even sure I would need a whole hand to count the number of people I've ever witnessed using a stylus with a modern touchscreen device. My first portable computer with that kind of input was a Palm Pilot (RIP), and stylus use has been on a major downswing ever since, to the point of it not even being a thing outside of artists that I am aware of right now.
posted by tocts at 6:30 AM on November 17, 2015

Is this where I can complain about my Apple TV remote? How it doesn't have an "Off" button? And how the simplest act of task switching requires repeatedly pressing the "MENU" button, with one-second waits between each press? And how its paper-clip-like dimensions are anything but ergonomic?
posted by paper chromatographologist at 6:33 AM on November 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

I like Apple products generally but don't think they are above reproach. They do a lot of things well, usability-wise, but there are a lot of head scratchers. (I will never understand ditching the scroll bar-even if I am not using it to scroll, I do want to know where I am. And I hated "natural" scrolling and disabled it until a few weeks ago when I gave, and now I've made my peace with it.)

I do feel that there are so many gestures now that I can't keep straight what does what, leaving me terribly confused when I activate one by accident. The ones that correspond to the user's existing frame of reference--flipping a page, for instance--are great but there are many that are not so well-designed. Then there is moving from iOS to OSX, where they seem to want to have it behave like a touchscreen device via the touchpad but not exactly so things are a bit of a mash.
posted by synecdoche at 6:34 AM on November 17, 2015

And yes, the Apple TV is TERRIBLE UI-wise.
posted by synecdoche at 6:35 AM on November 17, 2015

I actually like my Apple Watch and its interface. They managed to take something that as usual Samsung et al couldn't think through at all, and deliver at least 50 percent of it. Now I'm looking at notifications on it (they go away if you don't do more than glance and it works in that invisible Apple way), paying on the trains and buses with it, calling an Uber with it...
posted by colie at 6:35 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

I recently did a "girls learning code" event as a mentor, on one of the kids insisted on using a stylus with her fancy touchscreen notebook.

Worst interface ever for a coder, but she's gonna have to figure this out on her own.
posted by clvrmnky at 6:36 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Heh. Don't even get me started on the fact that it took years before they added a 'Restart' option to reboot an Apple TV without having to physically unplug it (because why would you ever need to restart Apple's flawless systems?!). And then, when they did add it, they put it in a menu quite literally adjacent to 'Reset', which instead of meaning 'Power-cycle this device' means 'Erase all your settings and revert to the factory settings for everything'.

Yeah, nobody will ever mess that up; it's not like anyone has ever described power-cycling an electronic device as 'resetting' it ...
posted by tocts at 6:37 AM on November 17, 2015 [7 favorites]

Is this where I can complain about my Apple TV remote?

My kids lost that tiny sliver of metal so many months ago I can barely remember what it looked like. We've been using the remote app on our iPhones for ages. I would love some way to make that thing beep or something.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 6:37 AM on November 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

Symbian (never mind, don't talk to me about my lawn) and stylus was a thing. And would still be if I could ever get another one.
posted by infini at 6:38 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

which means decades of backwards compatibility and more importantly--is this a word?--user backwards compatibility. This is harder.

Say what? Microsoft positively loves make major changes to the interface with every release! That's the biggest frustration I have with them. Interface habits that I have from MacOS 6 still work on OS X 10.10. Microsoft changed the interface completely in NT4, then again in 2003/XP, then again in Vista/2008, then again in 8/2012, and then again in 10. The User Backwards Compatibility of Windows is "Fuck you, learn it all over again."

Changed the start menu, got rid if it, changed how the task bar worked, move where system settings were (god, I hate that) added the "if you drag a window to the top of the screen, make it full screen (simply KILL the person who did that. KILL THEM) and on and on and on.

If MS *stopped fucking with a working interface* it would be vastly better. Nope. "Gotta put big squares on it so it looks like the Windows Phone!" Do you know why iOS and OS X look so different? Completely different physical interfaces. No keyboard and mouse on an iPhone, so you need huge targets to hit, and you don't have control/option keys, so chorded keystrokes are useless. Big screens, keyboard and mice on a Mac, targets can be vastly smaller, and chorded keystrokes are useful. There's an explicit reason Apple did not make the phone OS and desktop OS look the same.

Microsoft did. But don't worry. Windows 11 (or whatever they call it) will have a different one because I have time to figure out what they consider a control panel and what they consider an admin toll *this* release OH WAIT I DON'T!

Do I have problem with Apple's OS right now? YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT. I think the annual release cycle has been a disaster. MacOS/iOS are *not products.* They don't earn any money. It's the hardware that earns money, you don't need to keep shoving releases out -- and shoving out big mistakes like Discoveryd, the service that replaced a working DNS lookup library with...a complete and utter disaster, and it wasn't until 10.10.4 that they finally rolled it back and Mac networking became reliable again.

I forgive interface changes like Force Tap on the iPhone because touchscreen interfaces are vastly newer^* and having what amounts to a Control-tap and Option-Tap is a theoretically very useful thing. Is it obvious? No. Is the fact that Option-C is copy and Option-X cut obvious? No -- but once learned, very powerful and handy things. Yes, there will be a learning curve, but stabilizing the MacOS took at least 15 years -- not helped by changing hardware that enabled behavior that didn't exist before. iOS, seeing even faster hardware changes, is still reacting and still trying to find the best way to use that hardware.

And yes, the Apple TV is TERRIBLE UI-wise.

It's also Apple's 2nd newest interface (the watch is the newest.) There's a reason it doesn't look like iOS -- because it doesn't work like iOS. It also has the Microsoft problem of "Change all the things!" but that's because the interface is so new.

Having said that, yes, it's pretty horrible. Still love my ATV, but nothing about the interface.



* Yes, touch screens have been around a long time. But touch screens were almost never used in computing because the monitor was at arms length and vertical. This resulted in the "gorilla arm" effect trying to use a touch screen.

It was only recently that touch screens became accurate, reliable and small enough to use on handheld devices, where the screen is typically horizontal and below, so instead of fighting gravity to use it, gravity helps keep your hand on the device. So, while they've been around for decades, actual real iterative interface work didn't start happening until this century.
posted by eriko at 6:38 AM on November 17, 2015 [10 favorites]

It also has the Microsoft problem of "Change all the things!" but that's because the interface is so new.

Not only does the AppleTV eschew a lot of UI design elements from other Apple devices, they've also changed it radically over the years. I still maintain it was significantly more usable 3 or 4 years ago, before they at some point switched to a very faux-iOS-looking grid of buttons with an absolutely terrible, low-contrast selection box. I am always finding myself temporarily lost as to which of the buttons I've actually got selected at the moment.
posted by tocts at 6:41 AM on November 17, 2015

A stylus-less plate of networked glass was one of Jobs' last, great visions of design and its licensing and manufacture by international supply lines produced the global phenomenon of "tech-neck" in about two years beginning in 2007 with the iPhone's release-- the affordability of leased iterations was cumulative and convergent and without precedent (maybe the transistor radio). Its disruption, however, has no precedent except fire and the wheel. Young people across the planet (12-25) are wired and communal (sets of shared reference) by shared abstractions and rapidly evolving. Most of Africa will be included, soon, far faster than any tech/advancement has ever proven inclusive.

Now, I name my mac machines' hard drive Woz and have read everything I could ever find on what Woz comphrehended about the intricate clock of adders he configured on paper before soldering anything, and The Mother of All Demos and the stock deal Jobs made with Xerox...

So when OS X started to bug me about updates with "dialogue" widgets that prod me to update "later" and reply, "in a few hours", "tonight"? some great faith was lost entirely that iTunes had thoroughly shaken.

Jobs' refusal of a stylus was of a particular time of development and an example of a successful intuition. Having ushered a sea-change, I doubt very much the option of one for certain tasks would bother him at all-- he'd sell the hell out of them.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 6:47 AM on November 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

I buy and use Apple devices because they are currently the best options out of a pretty unimpressive set of choices. If there was something better I would buy it in a heartbeat, but right now there isn't. That doesn't excuse Apple's poor design choices, of which there are many, but it is even more damning for the other manufacturers. I have to use a Windows computer for work, and holy crap is it bad. Right now all my security updates seem to be blocked by the "download Windows 10" thing, and I can guarantee once I fix that there will be another issue within a few weeks.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:56 AM on November 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

I'm always a little irked by this notion of Apple products being intuitively easy to understand and use.

I'm certainly in the minority here but I have always found them constraining and infuriating.

I've not really used a mac properly except for a brief few minutes of swearing here and there as I try and do a simple task on a borrowed one. I'm sure if I needed to use one regularly I would be able to, but I just don't see it as being a two minutes to pick up thing. Everything about it feels wrong to me.

I used to have an iPhone (the 3G which was light years ahead of any competition) but 18 months later I swapped it out for an Android. It just had some weird restraints, like it should be able to do things, but was limited by the design. I'm sure those issues are fixed now, of course.
I just don't think they're at all intuitive, to me.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 6:58 AM on November 17, 2015 [13 favorites]

I don't know what you're all talking about, delfin's right on the money. We all use styluses down at the quantum research facility where I work -- although it looks like I won't be working there much for the next few weeks, while they clean up after that mysterious explosion that flung me through a portal of dazzling light! Now, does anyone know where I can catch a hovercraft to Reptopolis, the city inhabited by humanoids evolved from dinosaurs? I understand that President Palin is giving a speech there.
posted by No-sword at 7:06 AM on November 17, 2015 [9 favorites]

People keep telling me that I need to get my dad a Mac for exactly that reason (it's so INTUITIVE!) and I reply that they don't understand old people. If he'd never owned a computer before, sure, it's a great way to start, but he's been using PCs for years and is thus susceptible to Anita Syndrome, named after a legendary cow orker at a previous place of employment.

Anita was very good at her job, which involved using Computer A running OS B and Programs C and D to complete tasks E and F. She was a wizard at it; she knew all the shortcuts and hotkeys, she could crank out E and F very efficiently, and she could show any of us how to best use A-F.

If you changed any part of A, B, C, D, E or F in any way, even slightly, she was HOPELESS. It was like trying to teach a squirrel to touch-type and smoke cigarillos.

I have a hard enough time keeping him functional through various Windows upgrades (and the developers of Classic Shell deserve a million fruit baskets for doing God's work). Trying to teach him OS X -- particularly when I don't have a Mac of my own to try to reproduce what he does -- would be a fool's errand.
posted by delfin at 7:09 AM on November 17, 2015 [11 favorites]

You think Apple is bad? Look at the UK! I heard they drive on the wrong side of the street over there! How is that possible?

I've got 36 years experience driving on the correct side of the street. I'd be dead in a heartbeat if i tried to drive through Webley, or Shortshire or where ever. How do they do it without crashing into each other all the time?
posted by valkane at 7:13 AM on November 17, 2015 [11 favorites]

To me, Microsoft's handling of the menu bar within desktop Windows as something that each individual program has within its own window-rectangle is about a bajillion times more intuitive than OS X's weird thing where one menu bar up top changes depending on which program you currently have open. It's like how each book has its own table of contents, say, as opposed to you owning a magical sheet of paper that displays only the table of contents of whichever book you currently have in front of you. But also there are system-wide functions on it as well like spotlight, internet connection settings, power options etc? Ugh.

Also the taskbar instead of the dock is much better for handling those situations where you have a tonne of instances of one program open at a time: documents, browser windows, etc
posted by Quilford at 7:13 AM on November 17, 2015 [7 favorites]

iOS has evolved and will continue to evolve just like any software.

Right, "evolve," that's what they call zero interest in backwards compatibility and planned obsolescence of (three year) old devices.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 7:14 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Also the fact that Apple ever decided to use Helvetica as a system font is just I can't even
posted by Quilford at 7:15 AM on November 17, 2015

I just wish they'd go back to making an iPhone small enough for me to use one handed without dropping the device or developing carpal tunnel
posted by iotic at 7:15 AM on November 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

Jobs' refusal of a stylus was of a particular time of development and an example of a successful intuition. Having ushered a sea-change, I doubt very much the option of one for certain tasks would bother him at all-- he'd sell the hell out of them.

And indeed his company does now. Though only because they managed to apply a few layers of INNOVATION! and INSIGHT! and PATENTABLE TECHNOLOGY! to an otherwise straightforward concept to raise its asking price.

I don't mean to sound anti-Apple. I've owned a IIc, a IIgs, a Mac IIfx, a G3 iMac and several iPods so far. I've just never understood how styluses went from useful to mockable in the portable world when they provide what Apple's own linked sales pitch above describes -- increased precision. I mean, fingerpainting is fun but everyone from Van Gogh to Bob Ross used brushes for a reason, right?
posted by delfin at 7:23 AM on November 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

But also yes Google is complicit in some of this monstrosity as well. I don't know if the experience of Hangouts becoming the default texting app on Android could have been done in a worse way. There is also no way to view which apps are currently running in the Apps section in Settings so if one is malfunctioning I have to scroll through a list of every single app on my phone in alphabetical order. I can have my screen in 'portrait' or 'auto-rotate' but not 'landscape'/'horizontal'. I can no longer stop the phone from sleeping after 30 mins of inactivity. I can't even choose separate lock screen and home screen background pictures. Aaargh.
posted by Quilford at 7:24 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Some people drive to work in an Audi. Some drive there in a BMW. Others choose to take the train!
posted by jeff-o-matic at 7:26 AM on November 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

I've been an Apple guy most of my life, but I got this iphone 6, and i find myself shouting at the phone. Stop interpreting what you think I want to do and fucking do what I want you to do.

I didn't want to do this, why are you doing this, why am I here, how I get back to the main page?

I feel like my grandpa when we told him that he could record one channel and watch another.
posted by Sphinx at 7:27 AM on November 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

Apple should ask new recruits to design for them a new power supply within three days, and only keep the 99% who design something objectively better than what Apple produces now.
posted by Navelgazer at 7:28 AM on November 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

All the styluses I've used don't feel anything like actually writing with a pen on paper. They're too big, the time it takes for the lines to appear in the screen is too long...

If the apple pencil actually is as responsive as writing with a real pen, well, that would be super useful to me. I could write lecture notes and have them digitized. I could have my research notes on my iPad instead of in composition books. It's super compelling.
posted by leahwrenn at 7:34 AM on November 17, 2015

Somehow all these terrible ui choices don't stop my 16-year-old from sending ~9,000 texts a month... :-(
posted by Huck500 at 7:37 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Usability-as-a-thing (or is it UX now?) is hard work to be involved in. I've always been a very vocal proponent of taking it as seriously as any other aspect of product design - in fact, giving it primacy wherever possible - but after decades in this business I'm pretty much beaten. Back in the early 90s, PC Magazine UK had full-time usability and deputy usability editors, both with academic qualifications and industry experience in the field - can you imagine that now? The sad thing is, usability does not repay investment. Computers change too much, too quickly; people do not select on usability (in corporate computing, it's not even a word) ; feature-led marketing comes far, far higher up the scale of where the money is spent. People are adaptable and learn terrible UIs, then come to prefer them.

Now and again, there's a seismic change, but it crufts up soon enough.

The one point of light, I think, is that now we can instrument user interactions on connected apps and profile them, improving UI could be becoming cheap and painless enough to be folded into the standard product life cycle. But that's more hope than faith.
posted by Devonian at 7:39 AM on November 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

lately the usability posts are few and far between. Is an interest in usability no longer cool?

It's been beaten out of people. The right tool for every job is now a touch-screen fondleslab, by definition. If you think you want a keyboard, or a precise pointing device that doesn't force you to choose between having your screen so low it hurts your neck or your hands too high it hurts your elbows, you're just wrong.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a huge greasy thumbprint obscuring a human face — forever.
posted by flabdablet at 7:39 AM on November 17, 2015 [34 favorites]

Some people drive to work in an Audi. Some drive there in a BMW. Others choose to take the train!

Does anyone drive to work in a vehicle that can't reverse? Because apparently iOS doesn't have a back button.
posted by Quilford at 7:44 AM on November 17, 2015

Also, an Audi driver can reasonably expect to get into a BMW and drive off without having to learn a whole new UX paradigm.
posted by octothorpe at 7:46 AM on November 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

The Mac was and is great because it implemented the WIMP interface (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers) really well. Windows allowed for easy multitasking; icons allowed users to manipulate files and folders in an almost real-world way; menus allowed for compact and easy access to ALL an app's functionality; and pointers made interacting with the computer intuitive. OS X matured until 10.6 (Snow Leopard). In fact, looking back, one might consider Snow Leopard feature complete, meaning it's hard to know where to go from there in terms of adding features.

About that time, iOS took off, which did away with Windows, Menus, and Pointers. A new design and interaction vocabulary came to the fore, and inevitably, this affected the development of OS X. For instance, forget windows, we'll run apps full screen! Forget menus, we'll just use pretty icons and sidebars full of controls. I used to wonder about OS 11 (XI?), but now I realize OS X is dead (or at least stagnant, and living on borrowed time). OS X is only necessary for programming apps for iOS, but not for much else. Not that I like using iPads for anything other than watching Youtube videos. But that's the reality.
posted by jabah at 7:47 AM on November 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

My wife and I were talking about this not too long ago. It has seemed for a while (post-Jobs?) that Apple is more interested in doing things for the sake of doing them. My 2006 OSX Tiger Macbook was great, very intuitive. My old iPhones were great. But recently things have seemed overcomplicated. I have an iPhone 4S and an old iPad (iPad 2maybe?), and no desire to upgrade to something newer. I don't feel like the newer models have made significant improvements to usability, just prettification. And things like the Apple Watch seem superfluous to me.

But I'm generally pretty curmudgeonly, so I doubt Apple's really targeting me.
posted by kevinbelt at 7:47 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Does anyone drive to work in a vehicle that can't reverse? Because apparently iOS doesn't have a back button.

Swipe from the left of the screen.
posted by vogon_poet at 7:48 AM on November 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

Right, "evolve," that's what they call zero interest in backwards compatibility and planned obsolescence of (three year) old devices.

My 4s from 2011 still works and runs the newest iOS.
My iPad3 from 2012 is still used daily and runs the newest iOS.
The iPhone 4 from 2010 still works but admittedly doesn't run the latest iOS.

Not expecting the hardware and software to advance over the years seems nonsensical.

Apple does need to introduce new hardware and software features to compel people to upgrade. They are a for profit company after all.
posted by LoveHam at 7:50 AM on November 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

*clutches fullkeyboardlaptop, digitalcamerawithoutwifi, candybarnokia even closer to aged, hunchedover chest*

*hobbles out of room*
posted by infini at 7:53 AM on November 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

Not expecting the hardware and software to advance over the years seems nonsensical.

Whatever else you think about Apple, they support older hardware - especially mobile hardware - better than anyone else making consumer gear. Android support is a crime scene in comparison.
posted by mhoye at 7:57 AM on November 17, 2015 [15 favorites]

I just wish they'd go back to making an iPhone small enough for me to use one handed without dropping the device or developing carpal tunnel

You may be in luck.

Being a tall guy with big hands, I feel like my 6+ is a phone that's finally my size. My wife, on the other hand, is holding out for them to produce another 4 inch phone.
posted by Fleebnork at 8:08 AM on November 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm always a little irked by this notion of Apple products being intuitively easy to understand and use.
I'm certainly in the minority here but I have always found them constraining and infuriating.

When the iPod came out I had a friend who said "It's really intuitive once you figure it out".

I'm not sure if he noticed my Spock eyebrow.
posted by srboisvert at 8:13 AM on November 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

Consider the on-screen keyboard on the iPhone and iPad. The Apple keyboard shows the letters in upper case, no matter what is actually being typed.

This was terrible design, it's true, but it's been fixed. The onscreen keyboard now displays the case of the characters you are typing.
posted by dirtdirt at 8:14 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

jabah, just curious - what do you see as the final pieces in the puzzle that weren't in OS X 10.5 but were in 10.6 and made it feature complete?
posted by No-sword at 8:15 AM on November 17, 2015

There is also no way to view which apps are currently running in the Apps section in Settings so if one is malfunctioning I have to scroll through a list of every single app on my phone in alphabetical order.

They used to have a set of column headings you could scroll, with "running" as one, but they changed it! What the hell, Google?

I can have my screen in 'portrait' or 'auto-rotate' but not 'landscape'/'horizontal'.

You can, but you need to be in an app that is landscapable (like a web browser), then go into quick settings and freeze it. Of course, your home screen is still portrait.
posted by dirigibleman at 8:16 AM on November 17, 2015

Despite the "it ain't like the good old days" vibe of the article, this has always been an issue for Apple, along with every other tech company. It's just that technology now gives us so many more options that even more stuff is hidden or obscure.

I am a huge Apple fan. I've always bought Macs as my main computers, and have "converted" many people. My wife and I both have Macs, iPads, and iPhones, and I even got an iPad for my 83 year old step-dad. (He loves it! It has opened a whole new world to him, much more than with any computer he has owned, even Macs.) I've had an AppleTV for years, and just bought the latest one (which is pretty much magical!) and will be giving AppleTVs for Christmas to a few people.

But these design complaints have been an issue since the beginning. My first Mac ran on System 7, and many people who sought advice from me about buying a computer had heard of the Mac's legendary "ease of use." I would affirm that it was, indeed, easier to use, more stable, etc. than Windows, but would always give the caveat: "Most things are easy, but they may not be obvious. So if you can't figure something out, it's not your fault!"

As a long-time Apple fan and iPhone user, it can be frustrating when something that should be easy to do is hard to figure out. The only saving grace is that Google is a tap away on the very device I hold in my hand. Should it be this way? Probably not. 3D Touch on the iPhone 6s now has some contextual menus, but I think more can be added. Perhaps even a dedicated place or pressable icon when swiping down that shows available commands.
posted by The Deej at 8:25 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

God knows that I'm frequently infuriated by Apple's decisions, but I also find it baffling that Apple is being held up as having especially terrible design on mobile. I know dozens of people who are using iPhones and iPads to talk to friends, surf the web, watch videos, write emails, look at photos, etc., who previously used Windows or Macs to do the same (albeit less often). And even more broadly, not only are they growing and retaining customers, but they're getting a lot of converts from Android, so it can't be all that bad.

That said, OS X is a different beast, and there's certainly lots of room for improvement. Thank god they improved the keyboard in iOS 9.
posted by adrianhon at 8:26 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

I realize that this will give Steve Jobs's corpse a heart attack, but is there anyone left who DOESN'T use a stylus for touchscreen devices, including iGadgets? The new fiber-tipped ones are really nice and it's a substantial step up in accuracy and ease of use.

....yes? I have literally never seen anyone use a stylus with an iOS device.
posted by Automocar at 8:34 AM on November 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

Apple just don't make computers I want to buy anymore.
Pretty, loud, and hot.
I wonder if any of the upper management at apple have seen the prices that second hand mac pros go for these days and taken a clue.
posted by Homemade Interossiter at 8:36 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

The right tool for every job is now a touch-screen fondleslab, by definition.

I am one of somewhere between 100,000 to 150,000 users in my organization hanging on like grim death to my 2008 slider phone WITH A REAL KEYBOARD. We replace the batteries every few years, but people refuse, just refuse to switch away from their BBs. Keyboards are one of the major reasons for this. Email, messaging and phone are all they are used for. Text usability is a key purchasing decision.

There was a brief flirtation at the top with Apple products, but when it was pointed out on no uncertain terms just how hackable they were, that stopped dead so fast heads still haven't stopped spinning. No one with a data plan is allowed anything other than a BB device.

The Priv is a pretty important for this crowd. Many are hungry to get their hands on one. I know there are similar pent-up needs in similar organizations. Someone will figure out how to do this soon, but I very much doubt it will be Apple or Google. Microsoft, perhaps. They alone of those three seem to be taking the data security parts of it seriously.
posted by bonehead at 8:37 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Also, I know a post production facility where they employ a guy to build and maintain hackintoshes because the new mac pros don't make any sense to them.
posted by Homemade Interossiter at 8:38 AM on November 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

I've only seen older people (as in close in age to senior citizens) use modern touchscreen devices with add-on styluses (excluding touchscreen devices that are designed with stylus input in mind like the Surface or the Note).
posted by gyc at 8:39 AM on November 17, 2015

Jesus, what an annoying article.

Some things like the forced-uppercase keyboard text have been resolved. But just in general... no?

I know we had a meta fairly recently on not saying "so simple your mom can use it" or something to that effect, but iOS has been a revelation for my mom(my dad is staunchly anti smartphone or i'd say my parents), and a lot of non-technical older clients and extended family. I didn't really ever have to give her any instruction on how to use it. She just bought an iphone, and a couple days later when we met up again it was full of apps organized how she wanted them with custom wallpaper set and all kinds of other stuff tweaked.

She had previously owned an android phone(this would have been like, android 2.1-2.3, this was a while ago) that i got nearly constant support questions on. And before that, windows problems. She uses her ipad now for everything and her laptops battery needs to be replaced because it sat on the charger unused for so long.

I hear people complain all the time about the "dumbing down" or non-intuitiveness of apple interfaces, but they almost always seem to be coming at it from a designer or technical angle and not as a layperson. I can't think of a single non-technical person who had similar "why does it do this thing that doesn't make sense!" complaints.

Grumpy designers, it might be tough to imagine, but maybe they test this stuff with real people and you're wrong? Barring some actual shit decisions like the iOS 7 shift/caps lock button, most of this stuff strikes me as old-man-yells-at-icloud. I've always really REALLY been bugged by the whole "ugh why are people so stupid, why do they keep giving apple money for these stuuuupid products? what sheep" narrative, and i'm not any less tired of it now.

My biggest critique of this article would be that it seems to be written from the perspective of someone with strong muscle memory for the desktop mistaking things going against that as poor design.

The standard, simple way of correcting for these occasional mis-touches is to have a Back control: Android phones have Back built into the phone as a universal control that is always available

And it works like shit. It's horribly inconsistent and you never know what it's going to do. It's like mr toads wild ride. And it's been this way since android 1.5 on the G1

Please don’t tell us stories of grandparents who can now use technological devices such as tablets whereas before they could never master computers. Just how much of the new technology have they mastered? Yes, gesture-controlled devices, tablets, and phones have easier barriers to initial use. But they have huge barriers to anything advanced, such as selecting three photos to send in an email, or formatting some text, or combining the results of several different operations. These and myriad other operations are far easier and more efficient on traditional computers.

Interesting disqualifier here. Except, no. I've been doing user support for like, a decade at this point. Getting people to start using something and feel comfortable with it is the hardest part! If the basic tasks are easy, they're more confident and more willing to try the complex ones. And you know what, all that stuff is pretty damn easy. There's nothing weird about selecting multiple photos and mailing them, in fact it's easier than on a mac because you don't have to open some mail site(and be real, everyone uses gmail, and most people don't configure mail.app on the desktop) and select attachments. You can select the photos in the photos app and just tap mail, or send them to an app.

Just because some of these things are done differently doesn't mean they're harder or less intuitive. I've gotten repeated questions on how to attach something to a mail client. I've never heard that about iOS. You can copy paste ANYTHING into the mail app, and selecting things in the photo viewer(or elsewhere) always gives you a mail option, just for example.

I was going to write like a several thousand word rebuttal to this, but i don't have time. It's a bunch of bullshit though.
posted by emptythought at 8:40 AM on November 17, 2015 [24 favorites]

My only major complaint is that in too many cases "simplifying" the UI means "dumbing it down to annoy the power users".

Like, for example, the removal of "web sharing" a few versions back. Yes, I can install something from the App Store to turn it back on. But it ticks me off that they not only went out of the way to hide this, but they also overwrite my httpd.conf file after every major OS update. Gee, thanks. (I haven't even tried to see if postfix is running after upgrading to El Capitan.)

Or, more recently, turning off the ability to use text selection in QuickLook. Why? No reason. It was a hidden option to begin with, but a damn useful one. And it isn't like disabling this made QuickLook actually work any faster either! I am still pissed that this is missing. The command to enable it doesn't trigger any error, it just doesn't respect the setting.

These are the kinds of things that I find most obnoxious. The average end user isn't going to run a command line argument to turn on a hidden feature, or edit a configuration file to fiddle with server settings. For the average user, disabling these features doesn't change anything. But for those of us who DO use the system that way, it's just a kick in the teeth. They seem to be intentionally pushing power users away from the platform.
posted by caution live frogs at 8:43 AM on November 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

Every time I hear somebody try to defend the Android back button, they assume users have knowledge of how Android works at a low level.

How is somebody to infer "It takes you to the last View in the View stack" if they don't know what a View or a Stack is, and the OS and marketplace abstracts everything away as an app and/or widget? And given that apps are expected to remap it to "undo," when an app doesn't do that, users get confused when often a different app pops up.

Then again, that's probably better than having a back button that does nothing unless an app has logic for it, but it's still ambiguous and confusing.
posted by mccarty.tim at 8:46 AM on November 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

Is this where I loudly complain about pinch and spread to zoom and drag to pan? Because, I love that! Except now they have allowed all their developers to disable it. So, now I can't just zoom a picture or link or piece of text or to enlarge a button I want to click on. There is no doubt in my mind that usability has gone down on as time has gone on with some of my most frequently used apps. Yes, I'm looking at you Facebook. At least I can now go back and forth between Facebook and Safari links with about five touches where it used to take three.
posted by meinvt at 8:46 AM on November 17, 2015

Because apparently iOS doesn't have a back button.

It does now. If you click on a link in one app that opens another app, in the top left of the screen you'll see "Back to $PREVIOUS_APP".

But it's not like the generic back button is without its own problems. Say you click a link in an email that opens in a browser. Then on the the resulting page you click on another link. If you hit the back button at that point, where should it take you? Back to the previous page, or back to the previous app?
posted by asterix at 8:47 AM on November 17, 2015

EXCEPT the design morons at Apple had set it up so that both the gold tops would be up together, once you peered deep into the case to actually look at the little plastic raised symbology.

wait, so people don't even check how batteries are supposed to fit in the thing before they cram batteries in there? I honestly never even noticed there was a standard for how batteries get installed, to be perfectly honest. I've always checked the symbols and never had this issue. Even without looking at the little symbols you could probably see the connectors are the same on both sides, no?

My biggest complaint about Mac is that when a 2-year-old mashes the keyboard for approximately half a second, weird shit happens that I have to figure out by googling on my phone. The first time, she mashed the kyboard and this black box popped up and read everything on the screen aloud. It was some kind of accessibility feature but I have no idea how she triggered it. The second time, she managed to disable the click function on the mouse. I could move the pointer but clicking did nothing. It would be nice if a simple tiny-handed mash didn't put the computer into bizarro mode but this is probably not anyone's biggest concern when designing a computer so I will just live with it I guess.
posted by Hoopo at 8:48 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

My mom (75) had as her main requirement that the phone be easy to type on. She does a lot of volunteer work and email is essential to her. She took to a BB like a fish to water. Touchscreens were the worst idea ever as far as she was concerned. She has arthritis and hand mobility issues that make fat-finger syndrome unbearable on a touchscreen. Being able to positively locate a key (and the BB key board is excellent for this) is huge for her.

My mother-in-law, of similar generation, OTOH, is happy as a clam with her S5 touchscreen. It took a bit of getting used to, but she loves that she can get email, and most importantly, use it as a camera. She has much less issues with hand mobility though.

Both my father and father-in-law don't see the point of having a computer on them at all times. They both strongly dislike modern touchscreens. Dad doesn't carry a phone, FIL uses a flip phone. Both are happy with their arrangements.
posted by bonehead at 8:48 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

There was a brief flirtation at the top with Apple products, but when it was pointed out on no uncertain terms just how hackable they were, that stopped dead so fast heads still haven't stopped spinning. No one with a data plan is allowed anything other than a BB device.

Can you expand on this? My understanding (from security professionals) is that a non-jailbroken iOS device is about as secure as it gets.
posted by asterix at 8:48 AM on November 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

Disclaimer: I have both an iPhone and an android phone.

Now that is over with, I think what is interesting thing is more the notion that there is something called design research or worse, design theory, that has any validity.

Their argument for a long way is "NO, Apple ignores the knowledge!! That is bad!! People who buy the products are stupid!! Journos who review the products are stupid!! Knowledge, knowledge we said!! This can't work because knowledge! We have one old aunt who can't program on her phone, but research, theory, thinking!!" (OK that last one went a bit too far, sorry..)
However, the whole field of design research was hijacked almost from the outset by engineers, anthropologists and computer science people who transformed the whole concept and methodology of design into something they could handle, which has very little to do with design in the sense of giving form to products, including tech products and interfaces. In other words, there is (almost) no "knowledge", no research or theory, and very little thinking.

Just a few years ago, when I had a design student lecturing me (their professor) on usability, I could just project Jacob Nielsens website on the screen in the auditorium. Argument closed. Now they have obviously had a real designer shine it up after they put up business together. Still I'd say they are the guys selling hot air. You just have to look a bit deeper. Look at this article. No wonder they find the iPhone difficult.. Back to the hot air: the whole methodology they imply, that you can somehow figure out how to design a succesfull product by following their one thousand not very easy or simple steps and pay them for "research based"-guidance all the way is near snake-oil IMO.
posted by mumimor at 8:50 AM on November 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

You may be in luck.

This reminds me of making a wish with a cruel genie:

People: "I just want a new iPhone I can use one-handed."
Apple: "Here you go." [plonks iPhone with old processor and minimal storage on counter]
People: "This thing is underpowered and stupid."
Apple: "Mmmmmmyeeeeesssss, but you didn't say you wanted it with modern specs."
posted by entropicamericana at 8:52 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

I just wish they'd go back to making an iPhone small enough for me to use one handed without dropping the device or developing carpal tunnel.

I'm a grown-ass man with fingers like Li'l Sizzlers, and the iPhone 6s is indeed A Stretch Too Far. But a double-tap on the home button slides the screen down within reach, even for short-fingered vulgarians.*

(*I'm not a vulgarian, but I am short-fingered. But I can never hear about short fingers without thinking of that phrase for Donald Trump coined in Spy.)
posted by The Deej at 8:53 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

My iPad3 from 2012 is still used daily and runs the newest iOS.

Mine also has the newest OS, and it runs much slower than it did before (the startup time in particular has tripled). I notice you didn't mention the software backwards compatibility, because it is a horrorshow. App developers must constantly update or have their apps broken. The economics for this simply don't pan out for most small-time developers, I imagine.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 8:54 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

My understanding (from security professionals) is that a non-jailbroken iOS device is about as secure as it gets.

Concerns are similar to those expressed here. This isn't to single out US agencies only, indeed they're not viewed as the greatest concern. Events occurred in the 2012-2013 timeframe. I know of this only through rumors, but they were related to me by people I've learned to trust.

There are great concerns additionally about where Apple locates data, and who could force them to reveal that data without informing the data's owners. Like I say only BB does this right currently, and MS is showing some awareness of the problem and is willing to work with clients to solve the problem of who retains data and where. Google and Apple want to do it themselves, in their own facilities, and that's not viewed as good enough.
posted by bonehead at 8:56 AM on November 17, 2015

Concerns are similar to those expressed here. This isn't to single out US agencies only, indeed they're not viewed as the greatest concern. Events occurred in the 2012-2013 timeframe.

Oh, okay, you're talking about data stored on Apple's servers, not the actual devices themselves. Still, got anything more concrete? I mean, the very first hit is this, which has Apple taking a very strong stand on protecting user data.

Like I say only BB does this right currently

You sure about that?
posted by asterix at 9:04 AM on November 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

jabah, just curious - what do you see as the final pieces in the puzzle that weren't in OS X 10.5 but were in 10.6 and made it feature complete?

I could tell (as a programmer and as an OS X user since 10.1) that much of the underlying guts of OS X were rewritten in 10.5 with the aim of extending the life of OS X and making it more flexible. The 10.6 release was the 'fix up' release where they smoothed over the rough edges from 10.5. They even advertised 10.6 with the tagline "No new features!".

10.7 was the first release where you get crazy things like "disappearing" scrollbars and the bolted-on method to save app states à la iOS.
posted by jabah at 9:09 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

People keep telling me that I need to get my dad a Mac for exactly that reason (it's so INTUITIVE!) and I reply that they don't understand old people.

Just as a contrary data point, my parents had PCs of various types from the mid-80s until a couple years ago, when I finally convinced them to get a Mac laptop. They were really happy after making the switch. That said, they've always been fairly self-reliant and I haven't had to serve as IT support very much, so maybe I'm just lucky.
posted by A dead Quaker at 9:10 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure I buy the premise that everything was rosy before the iPhone came along and messed everything up. Even before then Apple were into aggressively 80/20ing everything and had a few Frankensteinish design monsters under their belt - Finder and iTunes for instance.

Skeumorphism and then the backtracking into Win8 like flatness have definitely left some eyesores on the UI landscape, but that's all after the initial launch of the iPhone - id say the UI conventions it launched with were rock solid, and it's difficult to argue they aren't easily graspable when 3 year olds pick them up regularly.

Could be he's just worried about the inevitable convergence and what will be lost when the two approaches mix. That's valid, I guess.
posted by Artw at 9:12 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

you're talking about data stored on Apple's servers, not the actual devices themselves.

No, I'm talking about the devices themselves. And I'm sorry, I can't add a lot more detail on the specifics. I don't think that's public info.

You sure about that?

About the Priv, no, no one is sure about BB on Android at all, at this point. BB6 and BB10 are the only devices that are ok to use right now.
posted by bonehead at 9:12 AM on November 17, 2015

I work in Health IT where the software is incredibly arcane, and there's sort of a "giving up" mentality across the board -- "this shit is really complicated, there are a ton of requirements that we have to meet for bare minimum functionality, so let's just throw all the shit on the wall and hopefully it sticks."

Usability is a huge issue, and someone hit the nail on the head when they said that Apple kind of duped people into thinking they were UI experts by completely overhauling mobile computing devices into specific use cases with very specific usage patterns, starting with the iPod, and then iPhone, and then iPad.

I built a touch screen patient tracking system used at my previous employer. It runs on Windows and is amazingly intuitive to use. I used "iPad Apps that Don't Suck" as my inspiration. There is very little doubt what anything does. If you want to update a patient's status, you touch them on the screen, and then suddenly some controls show up. You touch the room you want them to move to, or whatever, and then touch "Update" and the controls disappear. It was an absolute joy to watch this roll out and see the end users pick it up with zero training. I felt very good about myself. "I can design highly usable software!"

The trick though is that I basically made a purpose-built appliance. It takes over the entire screen, does a single thing, and does it well. If you want healthcare software to be this intuitive you basically end up with either a billion little disorienting screens with little logical flow between them (in other words, someone else's idea of a flow that no doctors will agree on) or screens with an enormous insurmountable number of controls.

I got a lot of positive feedback and might be able to influence a major EHR vendor with some of my ideas, because the EHR itself can be customized and you can build your own .NET modules to overcome some of its limitations. But I did achieve a certain mythological status as "super smart guy who can make amazingly intuitive software" because the requirements were so minimalistic in the first place -- "give me a grid that shows me where my patients are in the clinic, and make it easy for me to update it."
posted by aydeejones at 9:19 AM on November 17, 2015 [9 favorites]

Oh and the real magic was using the entire damn screen intelligently so that the application essentially is in two modes ("everything visible in wide-screen mode / everything visible 4:3 with controls taking up some of the space"), making everything super readable with good font sizes and colors, and spending a shit-ton of time just making the UI as un-cluttered as possible, using just a few very obvious icons that rely on things people are already familiar with (left-facing arrow = "back," swirly-curly arrows = "refresh"). Those details aren't intuitive for someone who has never used a computer, but luckily that wasn't my user base.
posted by aydeejones at 9:23 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

I would affirm that it was, indeed, easier to use, more stable, etc. than Windows, but would always give the caveat: "Most things are easy, but they may not be obvious. So if you can't figure something out, it's not your fault!"

Quoted for truth. I've always been an early adapter and my history of past computers and devices includes Microsoft, an early Mac, Palm, Blackberry, Sony, Android devices galore, many mp3 iterations, every species of iPod and finally, reluctantly, my first iPhone. Which did it for me. Now I have the latest iPhone, a big 27 inch Mac at home, a Macbook Pro at work, an Apple watch, an iPad Air 2, etc. I live in an Apple world by choice and I'm still stunned at how completely dysfunctional everyone else is by comparison. (I know this well as I still am in a Windows environment at work.) Apple makes everything so much easier and more functional and more secure -- PLUS more beautiful -- than its competition. Is it perfect? No. Is it always intuitive? Hell no. But it takes less time and it is more enjoyable by far than using anyone else's operating systems.

Also, this article is, ironically, overwritten, poorly edited, ranty and on many points simply stupid. So not a great model for criticizing Apple anyway.
posted by bearwife at 9:25 AM on November 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

Also it's unfair to say that Apple "duped" people into thinking they were good at design, because they clearly were and are, but they did get away with a lot by starting from scratch. By doing that you can also sort of simmer in denial when power-users clamor for features, waiting until the chorus turns into a roar.

I knew from the beginning that iOS was going to need copy and paste because I was using a BlackBerry for quite some time when the iPhone debuted and it was invaluable, and I remember everyone poo-pooing the idea of wanting to be efficient with text manipulation on a mobile device. Silly BlackBerry users, your mobile device isn't supposed to do everything that your PC can do. But sorry Apple, you can't simultaneously encourage people to type on a touch screen and tell people they're not going to ever need to copy text. I knew they avoided it because it was going to be tricky and "clutter-y" to implement it, but it was inevitable. I enjoy seeing how they figure those things out, to their credit.

I was professionally involved in health IT throughout this whole iOS revolution and doctors clearly love iOS and Apple, for good reason, but it's impossible to get them to convey how anything they do would work in a more minimalistic way. First, you have to get a bunch of doctors to agree on something. LOL
posted by aydeejones at 9:30 AM on November 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm a grown-ass man with fingers like Li'l Sizzlers, and the iPhone 6s is indeed A Stretch Too Far. But a double-tap on the home button slides the screen down within reach, even for short-fingered vulgarians.

I do that. But it is a pain the ass. And such an awful hacky solution to the problem, really. Give me an iPhone I can use the way I was able to use all the previous ones, any day. I'm seriously considering downgrading to a 5S from my 6 (4.7"). I've dropped the 6 several times, compared to never for my previous three iPhones. The 4 was probably about the best for me, in terms of screen size and comfort - the 5's extra height already made things a little worse. And I have fairly large hands - it's just I really like always using my phone one handed, rather than being forced to drop everything else and hunch like an idiot every time i want to use the damn thing.
posted by iotic at 9:30 AM on November 17, 2015

I live in an Apple world by choice and I'm still stunned at how completely dysfunctional everyone else is by comparison.

As a counterpoint, I find pretty much all Apple products to be incomprehensible to the point where I generally have to give up and look for something with Windows on it.

These days I tend to advise my non-technical friends and relations to go with the next iteration of whatever they've used before.
posted by pipeski at 9:31 AM on November 17, 2015 [10 favorites]

Is it always intuitive? Hell no. But it takes less time and it is more enjoyable by far than using anyone else's operating systems.

This is pretty much how I feel as well. When I was finally able to switch to a Mac at home after years of Windows computers, I felt such a sense of relief. With Windows I felt like I was always having to learn some fiddly techy thing like "drivers" and such to do anything. That (mostly) stopped happening when I got a Mac. The first time I ever installed a Mac app and all I had to do was drag and drop it into the Applications folder? I barely believed that was all it took. I had been conditioned by over a decade of Windows to think that it just could not be that simple.

Now, sure, not everything Mac is "intuitive" the first time. Like the first time I needed to type an "e" with an accent mark. I had to look it up online. But "hold the 'e' key down til a menu pops up" is still far easier than "Click start button, scroll through nested menus to dig for the Character Map application, search for the right character, then either copy it to clipboard or memorize the 'alt+number' code, then go back to where you were working and either paste or type the code." (If there ever actually was an easier way to do that in Windows, I never heard of it, and still don't know it.)

There is one thing Apple has made that I do well and truly hate, and that's the current Music application on iOS. In the first iteration of it, earlier this year, there was no "shuffle all by this artist" command. There always had been: click artist name from the list to see the list of their songs, and at the top was "shuffle all." They took it away, and replaced it with instead of clicking the artist's name, you were supposed to click the picture of the artist to instantly "shuffle all" by them. But there was NO way to know that or figure it out. They've put the command back in the current version, thankfully. And true, clicking the picture is one less click, I suppose. But it aggravated me a lot. Everything about the current music app seems designed from the assumption that you surely want only to stream music from their new subscription service. Functions useful to people like me who are sticking quite happily with playing my own local files seem buried.
posted by dnash at 9:41 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

There is one thing Apple has made that I do well and truly hate, and that's the current Music application on iOS.

Yes, Apple's weak point for sure. But I have no love for anyone else's either. In fact I've always disliked iTunes, from the get go, for clunkiness, memory hogging, endlessly overhauled and confusing interface. But anything beats Windows media player and I can't think of a good replacement right now for the Music app.
posted by bearwife at 9:47 AM on November 17, 2015

But anything beats Windows media player and I can't think of a good replacement right now for the Music app.

If you don't just want to use something like Spotify, Ecoute is a great choice on the iPhone.
posted by protocoach at 9:52 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

There is one thing Apple has made that I do well and truly hate, and that's the current Music application on iOS.

Totally concur! Most hated thing: needing to jump back top of "My Music" list to change view between "Albums," "Artists," and "Songs." And all that space available at the bottom of the screen for those options after you disable "Show Apple Music" in prefs?

Worst. Design. Ever.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 9:53 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'll be honest, since iOS 9, I've stopped using the Music app directly and mostly interact with it through my car's (simple, old-timey) interface. I just now, since I'm thinking about it, Googled how to get it to stop sorting albums by artist instead of by album title. Why would that be the default? It makes no sense.

Other than that ... I am fully invested in the Apple ecosystem, and it works for me. Although the new hardware is sort of questionable -- soldered-in RAM? I'm a little concerned about what I'll do when my iMac gives up the ghost.
posted by uncleozzy at 9:56 AM on November 17, 2015

User-centered design principles would include things like interoperability and adherence to standards. In that regard Apple has never been user-centered, instead embracing proprietary interfaces or proprietary flavors of standard interfaces (USB in particular). They do this for one reason above all others: to maintain a monopoly on cables, adapters, and connected peripherals so they can overcharge their users by almost criminal margins.
That people willingly accept and excuse this behavior because the brand is "hip" speaks to their marketing genius and the power of identity marketing in general.
posted by rocket88 at 9:57 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

I still use Winamp Classic, but I suspect that's not useful for people who want software curation of their library.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:58 AM on November 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

I was home visiting my parents last month when my mom's 4s died. My dad decided it was time to get new phones, so not only did my mom get a new iPhone my dad (previously using a free-with-plan flip dumbphone ca. 2009) did, too. It was a very exciting moment.

I wasn't too worried about my mom since she had at least had an iPhone before and can ask pretty much anyone she knows other than me for help with it, but my dad...I had my concerns. (30 seconds after activating the phone he did a test call, "HELLO, HELLO? I CAN'T HEAR YOU" "dad, the protective tape film is covering your speaker" "WHAT I CAN'T HEAR YOU" etc.)

So the next day I suggested to him, "hey dad, you should sit down and google 'best iPhone 6s features' to give yourself an idea of what your phone can do." "I've got it covered," he says, and tosses this in my lap.
posted by phunniemee at 10:03 AM on November 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

You can take my

mplayer artist/album/*

out of my cold, nerdy, hands when I'm dead.

alternate options:

mplayer -shuffle artist/*/* # shuffles tracks in all albums by artist

mplayer -playlist foo.pls # sometimes it's nice to have a playlist, sure

posted by idiopath at 10:04 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

That people willingly accept and excuse this behavior because the brand is "hip" speaks to their marketing genius and the power of identity marketing in general.

Yep. Everybody who likes their stuff is just an idiot whose mind has been swayed by propaganda. You've seen through it, though! Good job. Here I was, thinking I appreciated not having to worry about whether the charging cable is in the right direction, or enjoying the fact that a chair catching my cable in a coffee shop didn't mean my computer got tossed on to the floor, but actually I was just tricked into thinking I liked those things by genius identity marketing.
posted by protocoach at 10:05 AM on November 17, 2015 [11 favorites]

To follow up on my own comment above:

What's hard to imagine about something like this is that it IS NOT the result of a conscious decision to degrade this particular use case (i.e. listening to local music, not Apple's streaming service), especially since it required removing functionality available in the previous version. So I imagine a design review session where there's effort applied to explicitly cripple features, rather than improve them. That's just baffling to me.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 10:05 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

I, too, considered Linux to be difficult and ugly. Then I tried Mint.

But do I want MATE edition for stability and tradition, Xfce edition for lightness and simplicity, or Cinnamon for sleekness and innovation?

Yes. You can press a little harder to see if there's something extra there.

Reminds me of the Jobs anecdote when he’s pushing the original Mac team to shave a single second off the boot time, and points out that this thing is going to be a huge success, which means those seconds will add up to hours, months, years — the team will save lives if they shave that second.

Now, with the iPhone massively more successful than the Mac could have dreamed of, how many lifetimes globally are they spunking away with people prodding randomly at a bit of glass curious to see if something will happen?

This nails a key shift in design that's totally lost on these guys … Is the Snapchat UI confusing? Are you worried about pressing the wrong button and losing data? Depends a lot on how "old" you are.

No. What it nails is a fuck-up that has been allowed to fester for so long that younger people don’t even notice the extra effort they’re having to expend to use things because things have “always been like this”.

I blame the web, right back to imagemaps, and attendant mystery-meat UIs. Now sure, that doesn’t mean you need to be all worried about pressing the wrong button or scared by Snapchat’s shitshow, but it also doesn’t mean that Snapchat’s UI is in any sense good or worthy of emulation.
posted by bonaldi at 10:06 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'm sorry, if you're going to hold up the Android back button as a gold standard of great design, you've been in the industry too long. My mother (I know) simply doesn't understand the computer concepts behind that processing logic. The iOS home button -- no problem.

I do agree that Apple sometimes loses track of discoverability, and their continuous reworking of iTunes is a major pain. But they're still, in the hand-held space anyway, miles ahead. The original goal of iOS was that simplicity would trump discoverability, and to a large degree that worked. As the power of hand-held devices increases, however, the demand for more features increases as well, and the tension between the two becomes greater. Apple won't get it right the first time, nor will they get everything right, but in general, they do pretty well.

As a side note, the whole "Steve Jobs hates styluses" thing is a canard. I'm quite sure he'd be pushing the Pencil as a gorgeous and iinnovative. Again, it's a question of the trade-off between simplicity and features. In the early days, a stylus was a distraction: easy to lose, time consuming to extract and replace. He was right to ban it. Now, however, when you have an iPad that doubles as an artist's canvas, and you have the technology to make the stylus smart (pressure sensitive, immune to palm pressure), it makes sense to sell it. But I still shouldn't be forced to use one on my phone.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 10:07 AM on November 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

Dear people who find OSX hard to use,

I agree! Fortunately, it's relatively easy to make it a delight to use. All you have to do is go to application->utilities, find the icon for "terminal," then drag it to the dock. Open terminal and go to the preferences, and set the colors to something reasonable (white on black, say, or green on black if you're feeling extra 1337). Congratulations, you now have a usable, powerful Unix system, without any of the hassle of getting Linux running on a laptop.

(protip: type "open [filename]" to open any file with the default program for that filetype. also, "open ." will open the current directory in finder. )
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 10:08 AM on November 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

If you click the "usability" tag on this post, you'll see that usability used to be relatively big around here as a topic for discussion, starting with a couple posts from mathowie, but lately the usability posts are few and far between. Is an interest in usability no longer cool? Or are all the designers just talked out on the subject?
posted by pracowity

Usability as a profession has been absorbed into user experience or UX, which concerns itself with objective and subjective needs. This started being a thing roughly ten years ago; one of the major usability groups renamed and repurposed themselves 3-4 years ago. Usability is important, but it's not as cool as it used to be. User experience bleeds into other fields, and is in high demand as a profession these days.

I await the day when designers focus on UX for developers and engineers, and how being able to use their products is not the same as actually liking them.
posted by ZeusHumms at 10:16 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

No, I'm talking about the devices themselves. And I'm sorry, I can't add a lot more detail on the specifics. I don't think that's public info.

Oh come on. Why exactly should I believe you over security professionals I know and trust?
posted by asterix at 10:17 AM on November 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

I await the day when designers focus on UX for developers and engineers

Given that devs and engineers are A. a tiny, tiny subset of people who actually use most devices and B. are, in the modern world, pretty much the only people who might actually be able to change their own UX to suit their own preferences, that would be an incredibly foolish focus. (Oh, and C. devs and engineers are never satisfied or happy with any change to their UX, so trying to please them tends to be a thankless task, whereas if you can make writing emails and looking at pictures of their kids/grandkids 10% easier for my parents and grandparents, they will regard you as a genius and your products like they're gifts from God.)
posted by protocoach at 10:22 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

I await the day when designers focus on UX for developers and engineers, and how being able to use their products is not the same as actually liking them.

I'd settle for designers not being kidnapped and turned into pod people who think "looks like a mobile app = good" is self-evident, as became widespread around the time the iPhone took off.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:23 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Between work, home and school, I jump back and forth between Windows 8, Windows 10, OSX, Xubuntu, and ChromeOS and they all basically do the same things in more or less similar ways. OSX is probably my least favorite of all of those mostly because of the top menus and the awful, terrible Finder but I can be reasonably productive in any of them without a whole lot of pain.
posted by octothorpe at 10:24 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

I await the day when designers focus on UX for developers and engineers,

Most developers I work with are still using Emacs or vim so I doubt that you're going to impress them with any UX improvements.
posted by octothorpe at 10:25 AM on November 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

I think there is too much mythologizing about Apple's usability. Take the lack of a forward delete key on their computers. Maybe it has changed by now, I don't know, as except for my iPad (no forward delete!), all my new machines are windows. My Apple computer experience starts with a IIc and ends with a Cube, with a number of machines in between. Such a pain in the ass to get forward delete functionality on old Macintoshes, and even then you had to use two buttons to do it. It still drives me crazy whenever I try to edit something on the ipad. That and the above-mentioned one-button mice. Why, Apple, why?!?
posted by fimbulvetr at 10:27 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Most developers I work with are still using Emacs or vim so I doubt that you're going to impress them with any UX improvements.

Contrariwise IME SublimeText has basically obliterated Emacs and vim's market share among developers. (Which is a shame for me, since I'm vim 4 lyfe.)
posted by asterix at 10:27 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

As a counterpoint, I find pretty much all Apple products to be incomprehensible to the point where I generally have to give up and look for something with Windows on it.

I thought I was the only one! I hate the broken home/end/pgup/pgdn behavior, key combos to do trivial things like forward delete, disappearing scrollbars, slow cheesy animations, wonky mouse pointer acceleration, the green button that does anything except just maximizing the damn window, inconsistent use of Cmd vs Ctrl, not being able to interact with windows until you bring them to the foreground (and not being able to readily tell whether or not it already is), the horrid file manager that gives me Win3.1 flashbacks, etc, etc. I really tried to like it and give it a fair shot, but after 6 months I gave up and just started booting into Windows. I've really never understood all the love for Apple's UX.
posted by segfaultxr7 at 10:27 AM on November 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

I find pretty much all Apple products to be incomprehensible to the point where I generally have to give up and look for something with Windows on it

It's weird because the last 2 Windows platforms I've used (8.1 & 10 I guess?) are just weird and confusing to me. I grew up with Windows. Everything from 3.1, to 95, to ME to 2000. 9 & 10 make zero sense to me and I have no idea why their pdf and picture viewing stuff comes up and takes over my whole monitor, I have no idea how to minimize it, and then find it again. There's like a desktop and another umbrella thing full of colored squares and rectangles? What is even going on here? Did I just become old?
posted by Hoopo at 10:27 AM on November 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

Because, as I mentioned, modern UX design consists in large part of "MOBILE = GOOD!!!!1!!" and Windows had to be sacrificed on the altar of forcing everybody to use fucking touchscreens, with mouse and keyboard use being made increasingly obnoxious so we'll all get on board with the future.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:29 AM on November 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

apple is now a consumer electronics company. the ui is consumer centric...
posted by judson at 10:36 AM on November 17, 2015

Why exactly should I believe you over security professionals I know and trust?

You certainly don't have to. I'm just a bunch of electrons on your screen.
posted by bonehead at 10:39 AM on November 17, 2015

Can we talk about the hardware for a sec? The physical ergonomics of the 15" mbp are horrible. In particular, the trackpad location coupled with the 4 inches between the keyboard and the edge of the case. That distance makes the angle your wrists have to be at to type (and swipe etc., yes interface is part of it too) godawful for strain.

I have RSI, and my physio tells me she had six patients this week with the same problem along the brachioradialis (not sure from which devices, some were tablet fans, I guess).
posted by cotton dress sock at 10:39 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

What is even going on here? Did I just become old?

Yeah, pretty much. Same thing happened to me with Windows; I went away for a few years and they changed it and now I have a gaming tower with 10 on it and I frequently wind up in the wrong place, doing something I didn't want to do. I pretty much just leave Steam open and ignore the rest of the system. We're in good company, though; there's a whole lotta Grandpa Simpson going on in this thread. It's weird how technology, like music and the quality of Saturday Night Live, always seems to have peaked right around the time whoever's speaking was really into it and it's just been going downhill ever since.
posted by protocoach at 10:40 AM on November 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

(ah I see some have touched on it, sorry)
posted by cotton dress sock at 10:45 AM on November 17, 2015

bonaldi: do I want MATE edition for stability and tradition, Xfce edition for lightness and simplicity, or Cinnamon for sleekness and innovation?

Short answer: yes.
Longer answer: Yes, you do.
Actually somewhat useful answer: the differences between MATE and Cinnamon aren't all that large, I like them both. If your hardware can handle it, Cinnamon is very pleasant to use. I haven't tried Xfce or KDE.
posted by Too-Ticky at 10:45 AM on November 17, 2015

I hold that the UX for engineers already exists, that it's been developed incrementally over the course of over four decades, that deep wisdom exists inside it, and that it is best understood less as a UX and more as the Gilgamesh epic of the hacker community. Loving UNIX isn't a Grandpa Simpson thing: it's the sine qua non of being a good computer engineer.

which is not to say that I'm a good computer engineer, of course. loving unix is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 10:50 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Win7 but UNIX underneath would basically be the best rig of all time.
posted by Artw at 10:52 AM on November 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

I do agree about iTunes and Music. They need to stop fucking around; it's a mess. How hard can it be to just focus on letting people use and sort through their own damned collection by name, album, and artist, and have the pay stuff be a button click away? Really by default a music player should be a list of my music that lets me control what I want on the device and what I want in the cloud with a simple check. If I want everything to have big pictures of album art, or to use your new streaming service, or to put stuff in the cloud, or to buy new shit, I will tell you so, iTunes/Music. I don't need you to take this on yourself, or make me navigate through stuff I'm not interested in for no reason. The current mobile version makes me wish I hadn't updated.
posted by Hoopo at 10:53 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

delfin: Anita Syndrome

That's a great name for it. It reminds me of one of the early reviews of the Macintosh by someone who thought that the mouse was the worst thing to ever happen to computers. His reason? Like many of us, he'd learned to type from teachers who mostly taught future secretaries and clerks who were judged, in no small part, on their word-per-minute (WPM) rate; you may still occasionally see a space on employment applications for your WPM rate (I was graded on such when I took the Illinois civil service test for library clerk, way back in the day). A lot of secretarial/clerking/typing pool jobs involved transcribing dictation and retyping drafts and whatnot, and speed was key. (It was also key to development of RSI, aka carpal tunnel syndrome, as witness the wrist braces that one of my colleagues at my first library job had to wear. But I digress.) So we were taught to never take our fingers off the home keys (asdfjkl;) or our eyes off the source material unless it was absolutely necessary. Periodically taking one hand off the keyboard to wiggle a mouse around? Inconceivable! Unpossible!
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:54 AM on November 17, 2015

The design ideas need to be taken in context with reality. The average Joe/Jane who buys a Mac will open it and it will be ready to use exactly as its design was intended. Jane/Joe buys a PC (as a non-computer savvy buyer) and the thing is loaded with 3rd party crap, McAfee warning pop-ups, requests to install more tool bars into browsers, etc.

Yes a tech savvy person can work around that, but these things are as a whole going to people who don't know or don't care or don't know there are options.

So yeah, my PC brother complains about Mac's phot app, just doesn't realize there are workarounds to managing photos on a Mac. Vice versa I'm sure.
posted by jeff-o-matic at 11:06 AM on November 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

"I do agree about iTunes and Music. They need to stop fucking around; it's a mess."

Down to its very icon! They change the color of it every OS upgrade... Why? iTunes needs to be blown up and remade. Call it iMedia or whatever. The "tunes" part is just a piece of it now, the name is a fossil from the iPod, pre-iPhone days.
posted by jeff-o-matic at 11:11 AM on November 17, 2015

We're in good company, though; there's a whole lotta Grandpa Simpson going on in this thread. It's weird how technology, like music and the quality of Saturday Night Live, always seems to have peaked right around the time whoever's speaking was really into it and it's just been going downhill ever since.

Right? Who are these upstarts? It's been all downhill since Jacquard. You kids get off my loom.
posted by The Bellman at 11:14 AM on November 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

I realize that this will give Steve Jobs's corpse a heart attack, but is there anyone left who DOESN'T use a stylus for touchscreen devices, including iGadgets?

Styluses? You mean those things I used to find all the time lying in parking lots or on sidewalks?

As far as I'm concerned, a stylus is just another Stupid Thing to Lose. I'd have to buy about twenty of those damn things, and replace them constantly. Styluses are for professional artists using Wacom tablets, and that's it.
posted by happyroach at 11:20 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

I remember when you could buy a little bag of three Palm stylli for about 12 or 15 bucks when you lost one. Apple has revolutionized the stylus by charging $99 for one. I can't figure out how a company with 14.5% of the global smartphone market has 94% of the total global smartphone profits, can you?
posted by entropicamericana at 11:28 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

I remember when you could buy a little bag of three Palm stylli for about 12 or 15 bucks when you lost one.

How's Palm doing, these days?
posted by protocoach at 11:33 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

stylii

tee hee

I'm just a bunch of electrons on your screen. has to be our next t-shirt.

k, this thread has given me much food for thought. I feel like I've been zinged by Athena's arrow of blinding insight.

I will compose it coherently in the next comment

oh and ArtW nails it - Win 7 please, else we'll run out of producers to feed the consumers
posted by infini at 11:39 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

You don't think 12 or 15 bucks is a fair price for three pieces of molded plastic that maybe cost a dollar to manufacture and ship? (If that.)

Palm was an early market leader whose founder left to start another company which later merged with the first company. Palm went on to develop an innovative operating system with many innovations that were quickly adopted by its competitors. Does this story sound familiar at all? Unfortunately, this one doesn't have a happy ending.
posted by entropicamericana at 11:47 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

It's a real bad thing Apple doesn't have anybody whose job it is to listen to us telling them how bad they are at making computers. Maybe they'd be able to turn a profit for once.

It's a good thing I exclusively use Android phones, instead of devices made by a company that attempts to use psychology to sell products
posted by rorgy at 11:48 AM on November 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

This reminds me of making a wish with a cruel genie:


16gb of storage I can't argue against, but apples CPU from last year is faster than almost everyone's CPUs this year. As was their storage, etc.

Just because it isn't as fast as the best apple can do doesn't mean it isn't in the top percentile of phone performance still. The A8 is still a monster chip, and the rest of that generation of hardware still makes a very solid showing compared to the best Samsung and Qualcomm can put out.

As it is, the 5s still wins a lot of benchmarks sitting behind only the newest iPhones and at best tying some high end android models. The 6 is basically just in second place.

If apple brings out a $450 phone with those specs, it will be competitive with all the other $400 phones like the moto x(and likely beat them at most things) even if it's "old" hardware. Apple isn't hosing people here. The people getting hosed are the ones buying android devices that are "premium" priced but can't have the best CPU available for the platform because either its exclusive to Samsung or it overheats depending on the option.(and even the ones below it do, as well)
posted by emptythought at 11:50 AM on November 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

I remember when you could buy a little bag of three Palm stylli for about 12 or 15 bucks when you lost one. Apple has revolutionized the stylus by charging $99 for one.

The Palm stylli were basically nothing more than pieces of plastic -- charging $5/ea in year-2000-dollars was an absolutely huge money grab. The pen/stylus that goes with the iPad Pro is many many orders of magnitude more complex than a plastic stylus. It's probably a bit overpriced but not by much -- Wacom and others will sell you a Bluetooth connected stylus for $80-90.
posted by nathan_teske at 11:52 AM on November 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

12 or 15 bucks for a generic stylus? Where are you shopping, off the rack at Sears?

I buy them by the handful for much less than that off of Amazon -- Friendly Swede and amPen are reliable brands. They now come with microfiber tips to make them last much longer and make less mess on your screen (certainly much less than a finger), some models have replaceable tips, and if you don't care about features and just want something capacitive and pointy you can get a pack of generics for under $.50 each.

The miniature ones are likely sitting in a bubble gum machine at a grocery store near you right now.

The Apple Pencil costs far more, but yes, it is more than a metal tube with a soft end on it.
posted by delfin at 11:55 AM on November 17, 2015

(Clarifying - Palm styli and modern styli are different animals, though neither is particularly complex or expensive to make.)

As for modern uses, anyone who's played Puzzle and Dragons or similar games requiring precise, fast movements knows how useful these can be.
posted by delfin at 11:57 AM on November 17, 2015

These are the kinds of things that I find most obnoxious. The average end user isn't going to run a command line argument to turn on a hidden feature, or edit a configuration file to fiddle with server settings. For the average user, disabling these features doesn't change anything. But for those of us who DO use the system that way, it's just a kick in the teeth. They seem to be intentionally pushing power users away from the platform.

Well, as someone pointed out they do still need us to buy OSX machines to make iOS apps. A wide majority of web devs I know are on OSX too. But yeah, every time I upgrade I dread having to undo all the little things they changed for no reason. But that's been Apple my whole life (i.e. most of the Mac era) - good old ideas + good new (or "new" ideas) + bad new ideas + bad old ideas they've been hung up on since forever.
posted by atoxyl at 11:59 AM on November 17, 2015

Disclaimer: Pure conjecture


This visible* shift in the way we perceive Apple's design seems to have emerged after Jobs. Synthesizing the thread, one could say that there's been an increasing lack of coherence in the tightly knit ecosystem that defined Apple, its design language and its subsequent manifestation in the product/service/business model ecosystem, starting around the time of the iPod/iTunes/99 cents consumer facing launch.

While I personally may not find the Apple system usable for myself, intellectually I can see the reasons why Apple Design began to develop its reputation in the past decade or little more. There were elements of their strategy - the product/service ecosystem for example - which were extremely effective integrators of design and marketing into a business strategy for market share growth.

Ditto when the iPhone first came out.

This leads me to conjecture whether what's missing now in Apple is the role that design planning plays and its ability to envision the whole concept, not just the product alone or the software, but also its marketing, messaging, positioning, business model and the look and feel of it all that binds together. Unlike many firms, Apple was innovating along many other areas simultaneously, not just product form or UI or "design" - their retail, their business model, their packaging etc etc

The fact that this sense of fragmentation is more visible now makes me wonder if Steve Jobs was the company's sole planner and/or driver of this pre-design activity. That is, before a product or service can be designed, someone/s figure out for whom, for what, for why, and how, etc

I think thats what Jobs did, drawing on his own knowledge and information as well as accessing information and input externally but ultimately conceptualizing the whole, which he then transmitted and controlled throughout the organization in order to manifest his 'vision' exactly as he had conceived of it. Its a little known function in the broader discipline of design, and has more in common with corporate strategy/planning than engineering or software or whatever.

Designers in the pool from which Apple would draw upon would tend to either come from various backgrounds common to the rise of the software/virtual industry i.e the Valley, or from traditional design education which focuses on giving form i.e. making it tangible. Few would have a foot in business - sales, consumers, marketing, business models, payment plans etc

I could be wrong, but I wonder if I'm right.


*OP article
posted by infini at 12:05 PM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

When the iTunes icon showed up red, I thought there was a problem, because red means trouble. It was hard to shake.

Guys. GUYS. Red means Trouble, m'kay?
posted by sidereal at 12:13 PM on November 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

Consider the on-screen keyboard on the iPhone and iPad. The Apple keyboard shows the letters in upper case, no matter what is actually being typed.

a) Not true any more; they fixed it in iOS 9.

b) Anyway, sensible folks use Swype, SwiftKey, or some other third-party keyboard now Apple support them.
posted by cstross at 12:28 PM on November 17, 2015

Now, sure, not everything Mac is "intuitive" the first time. Like the first time I needed to type an "e" with an accent mark. I had to look it up online. But "hold the 'e' key down til a menu pops up"...

I learned something new today.
posted by fairmettle at 12:43 PM on November 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

Guys. GUYS. Red means Trouble, m'kay?

Exactly, the iTunes icon is warning you.

This leads me to conjecture whether what's missing now in Apple is the role that design planning plays and its ability to envision the whole concept, not just the product alone or the software, but also its marketing, messaging, positioning, business model and the look and feel of it all that binds together.

This is exactly it. Remember how simple Apple's product line used to be? iBook versus Powerbook? Now it's Macbook, Macbook Air, Retina Macbook Pro, and non-retina Macbook Pro. And remember when Macbooks where the cheap, sometimes pudgy, entry-level model and the Macbook Air was the pricey thin model? Now the Macbook makes the Macbook Air look like Sidney Greenstreet and costs the same as the Retina Macbook Pro. And let's not even get started on the iPad clusterfuck---how many different versions of those are they selling, not even factoring in the different configurations? You are missed, Steve.
posted by entropicamericana at 12:49 PM on November 17, 2015

For better or worse, Apple is no longer sentimental. That means something that might work well today may be replaced with something less functional tomorrow, but the flip side of that is that something that is broken will more often than not get replaced with something that works or works better. That's why we Apple users no longer have the Newton, the hockey puck mouse, or the iPod Hi-Fi. It's also why iOS has copy-and-paste, choice of input managers, better default keyboards, multitasking, etc.

Lack of sentimentality is also why the company rakes in nearly all profits in cellphones. Those numbers demonstrate that they give people what they want — and discard what is unwanted or does not work — more often than they deliberately give people what they don't want.

From an empirical standpoint, their financial success implies that complaints about bad design are likely about more personal or subjective dislikes. People would not buy devices, year after year, that are not functional.

Subjective dislike of design aspects is fine — we all have opinions about what we like and do not like — but the larger usage numbers suggest that the issues the writers describe are probably not indicative of what people who use these devices actually care about. The question remains: Is it certain designers who need to update their understanding or training, to actually reflect what people find usable in today's devices?
posted by a lungful of dragon at 12:49 PM on November 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

This entire thread reminds me of the time that I asked, out of genuine curiosity, who the best and most innovative UX designers were across the span of the Linux community, and the most highly-rated answer was that it was probably the person who invented the pipe.

I find it fascinating that, among people who were asked about how satisfied they were about the Apple Watch, a product that has seemingly received a great deal of criticism from people who were expecting it to be the next iPhone, the most satisfied users were the ones who said they had the least experience with technology. There've been plenty of articles by designers and developers about how they would completely rearrange the watch's interface to better make sense to them, but not only was overall user satisfaction at a 97%, non-techies, the people who ought to be the most dissatisfied by a new and confusing interface, were half as likely to call themselves dissatisfied, and fifteen percent more likely to describe themselves as "delighted" rather than merely "satisfied" with the product.

Apple has been criticized along precisely these lines since OS X first became a thing. Edward Tufte critiqued the original iPhone's use of information visualization, making similar assumptions to the one Norman (whose work I similarly love) makes in this article. John Siracusa famously criticized OS X's Finder app for the entire decade that he wrote his massive, novella-length OS X reviews. Apple's been criticized for violating its own Human Interface Guidelines for just as long—I don't know how I'd Google to find links to those articles, but I know they were under fire since way before I started using OS X in 2008. But for just as long, they've received both critical and popular adulation.

ASCI and JD Power surveys show that iPhone users tend to be among the most satisfied users of their devices of any/all phone users; Samsung, to their credit, has become competitive in the last few years, so this isn't an "only Apple" thing, but that's a fairly recent development—for half a decade, the iPhone effectively had no competition as far as customer satisfaction is concerned. My Google-fu is failing me somewhat, but I know that this isn't an iPhone-only phenomenon; in general, Apple is as successful as it is because people who use Apple products love them.

Right now is a pretty fascinating time to be a UX enthusiast, because Apple, Google, and even Microsoft are pushing their products closer to the cutting edge of user experience than I can recall consumer-level products ever being. What's more, they're each going about it in pretty radically different ways. I'm pretty firmly in the camp of thinking that Apple's approach is hands-down the most advantageous, but they're going about things in ways that mean their products are less aping Google and Microsoft's approaches, and that Google and Microsoft in turn are really forging their own paths as well, and that is awesome. Better work is being done and released to the public than ever before.

Which is why, as a user, it frustrates me that MetaFilter is essentially in the same curmudgeonly mindset as a community that it was when the iPod first got released in 2001. At least some of the recent Apple product threads have seen people pointing back ironically to those iPod complaints before making their Apple Watch/3D Touch/new MacBook/iPad Pro complaints, but the amount of progress in 14-ish years feels pretty minimal to me, while the progress in the fields of user experience that're purportedly being "discussed" here has been enormous. And we've probably seen more progress in the last three years than ever before.

This isn't the only subject that MetaFilter Does Not Do Well, of course, and it's significantly less frustrating than most of the other ones that we suck at as a whole, but it's disappointing nonetheless. Jon Ive, the guy who made Apple's hardware iconic from the start of Steve Jobs' "second coming", just got handed the keys to the company's software design as well, and immediately started pushing things in a direction that I doubt we've seen before in technology, period. Google finally stopped being absolute garbage at UI with its Material Design, which, for all the criticisms I'd make of it, is a genuinely thorough system with a lot of thought put into it. Microsoft is going utterly insane with its Windows iterations, and I say this lovingly; Windows 8 was 50% amazing and 50% infuriating, and I hear that Windows 10 does some incredible things as well. (I am one of the rare weirdos who loves Windows 8.1 too much to immediately upgrade; granted, I only use it for about three programs ever, so an enormous start page instead of a desktop is pretty much my dream experience.)

But we're not at the point yet, culturally speaking, where it's expected that we understand UI/UX on the same terms that we understand, say, film or literature. Procedural/ludic art follows an entirely different set of rules from narrative art, in the same way that narrative is distinctly different from the visual arts; it's especially tricky, I think, because our conception of what defines a computer has shifted radically in the last decade (thanks in very large part to Apple, not that I'm keeping score [I'm keeping score]). Understanding the Apple Watch or Apple TV on the same terms that we understand the iPhone, or the iPad Pro on the same terms as either, or the MacBook on the same terms as the MacBook Air, is fundamentally impossible; understanding the differences between Android and iOS requires you to have some rudimentary grasp of the manner in which these massive, multi-platform approaches to user experience go about tackling the problems that define UX as a contemporary field.

I'm generally of the opinion that even some of the biggest professionals in the field have a pretty limited grasp of what they're talking about; I know that my own perspective is pretty limited, but within that frame I see a lot of gaping ignorances among the other purported experts, Norman/Tognazzini included, in how they talk about these things. Often I like to compare computer-related design (both application UX and gaming combined) to the early decades of cinema, which were similarly grasping to understand all-new concepts, but the things we're dealing with today are orders of magnitude more profound and all-encompassing, to the point where we're examining the rest of our culture to understand how it fits in with this new set of mediums that're increasingly underpinning everything we do. That's gonna go on for a while more; I'm genuinely curious to see how far into my lifetime we get before things settle down, and if I died with all of this still up in the air I'd only be moderately surprised.

Anyway, I really do wish that this was something we could have an enlightened conversation about, because this stuff makes me feel like a kid in a candy store. Apple particularly, and this year in particular versus any other year. They've released 8-9 new products this year that are each doing something tremendously exciting, including three (three!) separate approaches to designing a keyboard, each of which are genuinely intriguing to me. I think that the last two years were Apple re-orienting itself to handle a much huger ambition than it had even previously, and that we're about to see it make some tremendous leaps forward. Articles like this one are thought-provoking, but I think ultimately minor in the scope of exactly what Apple's doing with its product lines; this has been an absolutely thrilling decade for product design, and it's only gonna get better from here.

(I will say that the one thing I agree with wholeheartedly as a criticism of Apple is that its music apps are ridiculously confused right now. But that's understandable, to me, because they've been caught in two crossfires simultaneously. The first was the Forstall/Ive scuffle that led to all of Apple's stuff getting confused simultaneously; the second was the development of the Apple Music team, which, from what I understand, is almost entirely and uncompromisingly under Trent Reznor's direction, and is trying to assimilate Beats Music into the existing iTunes muddle. My suspicion is that we've got another 2-3 years before Apple works this out entirely, with a couple of slight adjustments in the meantime. Really my pet peeve is that they're phasing out iTunes Match, which was remarkably stable, for the iCloud Music Library, which is about a hundred more times more complex on the backend and fails to remember which things I've told it to download to my device. Hopefully I'll be able to get all my music downloaded once and then forget about all this, but it's been a serious pain for me since they made the switch this summer.)
posted by rorgy at 12:59 PM on November 17, 2015 [16 favorites]

Is it certain designers who need to update their understanding or training, to actually reflect what people find usable in today's devices?

Definitely, when designing for those who've never known a digital world other than that of this century. However, I do also wonder how much of this is inertia and lack of viable alternatives in their current dominant markets? I suspect this is their peak "iphone profit" year.
posted by infini at 1:02 PM on November 17, 2015

The legibility of the text is only one of Apple’s many design failures. Today’s devices lack discoverability: There is no way to discover what operations are possible just by looking at the screen. Do you swipe left or right, up or down, with one finger, two, or even as many as five? Do you swipe or tap, and if you tap is it a single tap or double? Is that text on the screen really text or is it a critically important button disguised as text? So often, the user has to try touching everything on the screen just to find out what are actually touchable objects.

THIS THIS THIS THIS.

Look, I really like Apple products. I like my iMac, I like my iPod, I like my iPhone. My 80-year old mother (who never really used computers) is continually delighted by her own progress in learning to use her iPad. But helping her out is a fantastic way to see the places where Apple has abandoned good design in favor of hopelessly obscure "simplicity." The above passage is pretty much my rant not only for her experience, but for mine as well (and I'm 40, I grew up watching these conventions evolve!) How the FUCK is anyone supposed to know which gesture to use as a command from app to app, or which tiny little dot hides a menu, or how to anticipate the options that may or may not be accessible through a gesture or menu.
posted by desuetude at 1:32 PM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Googled how to get it to stop sorting albums by artist instead of by album title. Why would that be the default?

Because sometimes there's a lot of albums with the same name.
posted by Gygesringtone at 1:36 PM on November 17, 2015

> OS VIII and OS IX.

No such thing. The last two releases of the old System were called System 8 and System 9. The whole OS thing didn't appear till OS/X.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 1:37 PM on November 17, 2015

Anyway, sensible folks use Swype, SwiftKey, or some other third-party keyboard now Apple support them.

Unfortunately a) Swype has gone backwards in terms of usability over the past couple of years (I can't reliably get it to capitalize letters by swiping up from the keyboard anymore) and b) Apple's still not giving third-party developers quite the access they need to make their keyboards as responsive as the default one. (It's gotten better in iOS 9, but Swype is still noticeably laggier and less accurate than the system keyboard, and more importantly than it was on Android 3 years ago.)
posted by asterix at 1:47 PM on November 17, 2015

"How the FUCK is anyone supposed to know which gesture to use as a command from app to app, or which tiny little dot hides a menu, or how to anticipate the options that may or may not be accessible through a gesture or menu."

How do you know what that thing does? You try it and you learn. Or you look it up and you learn. Or you ask someone and you learn. But however you do it, you figure it out, and you learn.

When the phones first came out, everyone in the stores spend months teaching everyone who came through the doors things like pinch and zoom and other stuff we take for granted now while we complain about having to learn about the new new things, as though we didn't have to learn about the old new things we now take for granted.

We like to think that things we're used to are totally obvious and clear and what we're not is confusing and opaque, but there's two problems with that. First: it probably wasn't as easy as we think it was, and second: we've come so far and can do so much now that we just can't have every single thing laid out in front of us, totally obvious in what it does and what will happen and how to get back. So we can either complain about that and try to force the complexity into the old simple models, or we can resign ourselves to the fact that things change and the most effective way to keep moving forward isn't to look back, its to get over ourselves and realize that we just need to keep learning.
posted by frijole at 1:56 PM on November 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

an Audi driver can reasonably expect to get into a BMW and drive off without having to learn a whole new UX paradigm.

This is an old comment, but as someone who sold a B6 (2002) Audi A4, for a comparable generation E46 (2001) BMW 3er, this is not exactly true.

Where's your back button, aka reverse? The Audi's 6-speed manual puts it underneath (push down) first gear. The BMW's is to the left of first gear.

How do you move your windows? Audi: all windows on the driver's armrest. BMW: all windows on the center console, split either side of the shifter.

How do you open the sunroof? Audi: turn a knob to the position you want it to go. BMW: either slide or push up on a 2-way switch.

All of these are recognized UX methods for anyone who's driven cars before, but they differ significantly between platforms. Note that neither of these cars have a computer-based info system like current cars, which would add even more proprietary complexity. If you move from an older to a newer BMW, they might make more sense, but changing platforms always involves a fair amount of adjustment.

Also: you can use option-`, option-^, option-u, etc to build accented characters from their accent + underlying letter.
posted by a halcyon day at 1:58 PM on November 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

User-centered design principles would include things like interoperability and adherence to standards. In that regard Apple has never been user-centered, instead embracing proprietary interfaces or proprietary flavors of standard interfaces (USB in particular). They do this for one reason above all others: to maintain a monopoly on cables, adapters, and connected peripherals so they can overcharge their users by almost criminal margins.
That people willingly accept and excuse this behavior because the brand is "hip" speaks to their marketing genius and the power of identity marketing in general.

This makes sense on the surface, but no.

When the original 30 pin connector came out, what would the alternative have been. USB-B? Go look at stuff like the nomad jukebox. Mini USB ports were also completely terrible, fell out constantly, and wore faster than almost any other port to being loose unreliable messes. There also wasn't a good solution for direct audio or video output. The 30 pin was a reliable, secure connector that was cheap and easy to implement on 3rd party accessories.

Even more so, the Lightning connector was an answer to the incredible shittiness of microusb. Do you have any idea how many busted connectors and ports I've seen from that? How many were unreliable from day 1? Not to mention how easy it was to plug them in the wrong way without much resistance and ruin the port(or worse). Hell, did you see how shitty microusb 3.0 was? Every manufacturer went back to 2.0 within 6 months.

Even the most hardcore anti Apple or just pro android people I know admit lightning is mechanically a superior connector. Even review sites like Linus tech tips that perpetually make fun of Apple acknowledge that. Even now with the "answer" of USB type C, which is superior feature wise, there's still the point that those cables require WAY too much force to connect and disconnect. It's similar, but still not quite as good usability wise.

And as for magsafe... So what? Every laptop has had proprietary power supplies since the dawn of time. Even not using a barrel connector isn't unusual. Lenovo and a bunch of others are doing it right now, and I have a dell from like 1999 they had a weird square plug.

Now if you want to talk about how their cables are made like shit and fall apart too quickly, and how everyone is always super victim blamey about it, I'll get on board with that. The actual cords themselves are awful quality and break far too easily. But the connectors are a great idea.
posted by emptythought at 2:03 PM on November 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

rorgy, I think we just fundamentally disagree on some core metrics. For instance you have

"...the most satisfied users were the ones who said they had the least experience with technology. There've been plenty of articles by designers and developers about how they would completely rearrange the watch's interface to better make sense to them, but not only was overall user satisfaction at a 97%, non-techies, the people who ought to be the most dissatisfied by a new and confusing interface, were half as likely to call themselves dissatisfied, and fifteen percent more likely to describe themselves as "delighted" rather than merely "satisfied" with the product."

In my post I tried to point towards the ways in which that is a negative rather than a positive--you can always design new, pretty, intuitive, shiny things that do things well! (As long as you have as much money as Apple, of course.) The problem is your users who are used to doing it the old way and know the old way and want the same options. You can always cheat with a new paradigm. Microsoft tried that with Windows 8.0 and had to subsequently backtrack through 8.1 and 10 into a middle ground that is only now beginning to do away with the Control Panel, because they could not afford to shake off their old users.

Where Microsoft and Apple disagree today, fundamentally they only way they disagree about the future, is Apple wants iOS to be the future and OSX to be dead. Microsoft wants (or has learned to pretend to want, for the foreseeable future, in response to the market) the inverse for their own products. Microsoft tried to build an RT-esque, 8.0 style curated ecosystem to match iOS, but the market rejected it--their "old users" want x86 and real Windows runtimes. As a result, they have pushed full x86 Windows into smaller and more agile footprints like the Surface lineup. Soon they're likely to do the same with the Surface Phone.

Apple is on the other side, they are pushing iOS paradigms into larger and more capable form factors. Still, it's primarily touch and consumption rather than production based. As you say, people new to technology love it! They don't have to learn anything about what people have been able to do with technology for the last 20 years. The "legacy" side is limited (although have you noticed how many questions an iPhone asks you today when you turn it on for the first time?) through deliberate decisions made at the OS level. They're very successful at selling devices built to be as simple as possible. But I'm very reticent to say that success in the marketplace makes Apple a better company. In fact, I'd say (knowing nothing else) that a company that has ~15% of the market but ~94% of the profits is probably ripping people off! Isn't the best product for the consumer the one with the least unnecessary margin? I don't believe Apple is ripping people off, of course. And I really don't think anyone else in the consumer electronics space is any better. I'm just curious why you're evaluating the marketplace that way.
posted by Phyltre at 2:05 PM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think both Apple and Tog are wrong. Tog is less wrong, but his article is inarticulate. I also think that Tufte has it right, and Stallman, and others, of course Englebart. Siracusa too. I also think it's a symptom that we've largely forgotten about the Newton tablets.
posted by polymodus at 2:22 PM on November 17, 2015

All of these are recognized UX methods for anyone who's driven cars before, but they differ significantly between platforms.

I think the first part of that sentence is really important. A lot of the discussion about whether design is "intuitive" or not seems to rely on prior assumptions that were not themselves originally intuitive, but we view them as such because we're so used to them. A car right now that didn't use pedals to control acceleration and braking would be non-intuitive, but that's not because pedal controls are inherently intuitive, it's because years of pedals being a standard control, and people learning how to drive in cars with pedals, has given us a standard mental schema for interacting with cars. But that's a heuristic that's only about a century old. It could change tomorrow if somebody came up with a better system. If autonomous cars become a thing, our great-grandchildren will view a car from our era as wildly counter-intuitive.

you can always design new, pretty, intuitive, shiny things that do things well!

You can? Really? You should talk to ASUS. Or HP. Or Nokia. Or Compaq. Or Creative. Or...[continues on into infinity]

But I'm very reticent to say that success in the marketplace makes Apple a better company.

I actually can't really think of a better metric to measure a business by than "Do they successfully sell well-made products that people like and use at sufficient volume and price to cover their costs and make profits?" You can certainly make the argument that businesses should also strive to do more, but that seems to be a pretty textbook definition of what a good business is.

In fact, I'd say (knowing nothing else) that a company that has ~15% of the market but ~94% of the profits is probably ripping people off!

An alternative reading is that everyone else in the market is underpricing their goods and subsidizing the losses from that underpricing with money from somewhere else. Which, of course, is what's actually happening, since basically everyone but Apple is consistently posting losses in their mobile divisions.
posted by protocoach at 2:25 PM on November 17, 2015 [9 favorites]

An alternative reading is that everyone else in the market is underpricing their goods and subsidizing the losses from that underpricing with money from somewhere else. Which, of course, is what's actually happening, since basically everyone but Apple is consistently posting losses in their mobile divisions.

It's absolutely true that non-Apple mobile producers can manage to survive by subsidy via, say, having mobile service providers sell usage plans to consumers. But there are other factors - for example Apple's advertising and brand image manipulates consumer perception and choice; and that its products tend to engage a particular socio-economic demographic. These economic considerations are not as easy to measure numerically, but there have long been qualitative arguments from these directions.
posted by polymodus at 2:48 PM on November 17, 2015

Yes, protocoach, you can invent shiny new things that work, when you have Apple's money, as I said. Nowhere did I assert that very many companies are bothering to actually invest in what that takes, though. Many things are trivially possible with bottomless warchests and resolve. Again though, Apple can't owe its earlier successes in the iPod to their current status. I'm not trying to minimize their earlier successes in that context.

Apple is great at extracting the most money from their customers. That makes them a great company from an investor perspective, but not the kind I as an informed consumer should want to buy things from, generally speaking.
posted by Phyltre at 2:49 PM on November 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

The (cr)App Store app store on OSX makes me cry whenever I am forced to interact with it.
posted by parki at 2:52 PM on November 17, 2015

Metafilter: every job is now a touch-screen fondleslab, by definition
posted by lalochezia at 3:08 PM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

This article is all sorts of muddled and occasionally very off-target, but the core point that Apple has recently seemed to favor simplicity over usability rings true for me. I'd like a USB port, please. Just one?

I suspect it's a bit of the Stephen King syndrome repackaged in the somewhat smoother lines of Jony Ive. The man is a great and perhaps singular talent, but that doesn't mean we benefit by all bowing low to his every decision and whim, even the bad ones, and it sure doesn't mean that he no longer needs editors or criticism in order to do his best work.

I get the distinct feeling that he isn't challenged by coworkers often anymore, and without Steve around to tell him he's Just Wrong sometimes... well. That all-pastel, all-skinny Helvetica iOS 8 was not a highlight in UI history, fellas, and the weird placements of Lightning connectors for charging the new Apple Mouse and Pencil are... well, these decisions almost look like pranks.

Maybe the addition of Marc Newson, a man Ive allegedly respects and may even listen to sometimes, will help. Maybe. But then again, Newson has himself made a design empire that's included more than a little bit of form over function from time to time.

Pardon the pun.
posted by rokusan at 3:43 PM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

And for what it's worth, add me to the gang that's tired of hearing that Macs and iPhones and all things Apple are for idiots, babies or other beginners.

Sure, they might be the best choice for those people. But they're also probably best for most human beings of all ilks, because (when Apple does it right), the damn OS gets out of the way and lets you get things done, rather than requiring you to spend half your day fiddling with the computer itself just trying to make it do what you want.

And, apologies in advance but yes, I'm speaking as someone who can code (respectably if not brilliantly) in several languages, has a rack full of Unix boxes in the closet of his very wired house just because, uses everything from Windows 10 to ArdOS almost every day, can crimp RJ45 with his eyes closed*, has built Android and even Windows RT apps (ugh) and has been compiling Linux kernels for many, many, many years. There's a BeBox here somewhere, for crying out loud. But if I need to do something of real world function, from reading MeFi to shopping on Amazon to working on The Novel, I always, always pull out an Apple device.

And while I might be an idiot, indeed, I'm not a computer newbie, a grandparent, or a clueless teenaged girl, all right? Stop, already.

* orange feels very slightly different, a little bit smoother, than orange-and-white.
posted by rokusan at 3:52 PM on November 17, 2015 [10 favorites]

I'd say teenaged girls probably know more about the devices being discussed in this thread, with one hand tied behind their back, than most of us. That's where I do agree with rorgy - there's more here than meets the eye and Granny needs lessons. Otoh rokusan captures the essence of the problem very well. Ive is not a planner.
posted by infini at 3:57 PM on November 17, 2015

how am I supposed to press the completely natural and intuitive Alt-F4 to quit a program on a TOUCHSCREEN
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:11 PM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Now if you want to talk about how their cables are made like shit and fall apart too quickly, and how everyone is always super victim blamey about it, I'll get on board with that.

That stupid Macbook power cord was the only real thing I absolutely hated about switching to Macs, because I used to have to replace it every year and half or so, but the new power cord has been great. Are people still having problems with the new iteration of it? I'm coming up on three years now with my new Macbook, and haven't had any problems with the new cord at all, no fraying or alarming burning smell or anything.

I had to set up a Windows 8 laptop this week and ahahahahahahaha the amount of rage I was filled with at literally every turn. Windows 8 is horrifying, I hate it more than I can express. Go try to find the fucking control panel in Windows 8 and then tell me OSX is user unfriendly.
posted by yasaman at 4:49 PM on November 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

Honestly, virtually every complaint I've seen of Mac OS or iOS comes from some variant of "things were better back when I learned how to use a computer," whether it's glossing over just how awful computers in general were in the '90s (be they Windows or Mac — remember back when a single program pooping the bed would bring down your entire system? And remember how that happened once or twice a week?) or just refusing to acknowledge that familiarizing oneself with arcane instructions and commands is not at all necessarily equivalent to a system being well designed.
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:27 PM on November 17, 2015 [5 favorites]

Just because I do this for a living, and I like sharing knowledge, here are some answers to questions posed in many of the comments here:

Scrollbars:
System Preferences > General > Show scroll bars: •Automatically based on mouse or trackpad, •When scrolling, • Always

Pick one. System wide effect on all applications.

Modifier keys:
Command (formerly known as the Apple key), Option (Alt), Control, fn (Function)

Command ⌘ (Unicode U+2318), Option ⌥, Contol cntl, and function fn.

html code for that is 2318

I mean, I get that these are useful for explaining things, but they are really rarely used, but knowing how to get to them isn't all that hard. In any application, press Control+Command+Spacebar to bring up the character menu, then search for either the unicode entry (if you know it), or search for the name of the symbol (like, just type in the english word for the symbol, and it will show up). You can then copy and paste it into whatever you want. In html, the symbol is &(amprisand) #(pound) 2318 ;(semicolon), all smooshed together. Hard to do here because it will register is as html code and display the symbol.

Forward delete on Mac OS X:
fn+delete (on compact keyboards)

on the full size keyboard (with the numberpad), it's over next to the end key, where the cluster of functionality keys are located (above the arrow keys). It is one button.


Now to go on about design and some things that I really dislike about people who feel that their negativity is somehow insightful or critical in any useful way:



The introduction of the Apple Pencil is actually incredibly interesting, because it blows away literally every stylus that has existed previously. The reason it is $99 is because it is much more than just a stylus. It has single pixel precision on an iPad Pro retina display. The pixel density of the iPad Pro is 264 pixels per inch. SINGLE PIXEL PRECISION AT 264 PPI. It utilizes the pressure sensativity on both the display and the pencil itself to give you the ability to change the weight of the line you are drawing solely based on pressure, just like a read pencil or felt-tipped pen. The fact that you can do shading simply be angling/tilting the pencil is achieved by 2 tilt sensors in the tip of the pencil. That was not possible until now to do reliably and cheaply. There are no buttons, because you don't need buttons (I have a Surface Pro 3, with the Microsoft Stylus, which has 3 buttons on it, in very odd positions, and are pretty much unusable if you do not hold a pen/pencil/stylus in any way other than the "correct" way, which my god do I hate when people notice that I cannot write legibly using the "correct" method. I wish I could find the listing of various pencil grip techniques so I could just name the way I hold a pencil, which is apparently "wrong", but it is the only way I can write legibly and without getting hand cramps. Anyway, the buttons on the Microsoft Stylus are also way up the body of the stylus, making clicking with them very awkward, even for normal users). All of the interactions with the Apple Pencil are based on the same touch methods you would have with your finger. Also, when using the Apple Pencil, the iPad knows to ignore the input that would be registered by resting your palm on the screen while you write/draw (known as Palm Rejection), which is something that a simple, cheap, dumb stylus cannot do, and with existing stylus' by Wacom and others, you have to install their 3rd party app to get it to work, and it isn't always system wide.

I really used to love talking to people about design. But more and more, the people I talk to really get on my nerves when all they can do is repeat verbatim things they read by "smart people", and can't go into the full reasoning. At best they will just say "ugh, it's just so ugly", or "it's not really intuitive".

And of course, that's where I really start to get angry. Of course it's not intuitive, because statistics and demographics.

Here's something I learned and have been putting into practice when I work with people and their computers (yes, I work in IT. I am also apparently a very rare bird, because I loath the Nick Burns scetches from SNL, with the passion of a million black holes). The first thing you have to establish is if they have ever been told of the Desktop Metaphor. The second thing you have to establish is if they have ever heard of, or made the associationg with the Paper Paradigm. What is so astounding is how many people, people who have been using computers almost their entire lives, have never had those two simple concepts explained to them. Then, the thing that was one of the greatest bits of short video that communicated so much was Evolution of the Desk, which came out of a project by the Harvard Innovation Lab. It is great at communicating what a lot of people really seem to have missed about the evolution of the personal computer.

And my point? This is where relying on "intuitive design principals" is ignoring that fact that a majority of the world has never seen a filing cabinet. They have never seen an office with a desk. They have never seen a typewriter. It was just assumed by the original designers of computer operating systems and application designers that people would be coming in with a whole host of culturally relavent information before they even touch a computer for the first time. So what happens? People end up making up their own metaphors for how to use a computer. They use what is relavent to their own experiences and try to apply them to how they interact with a the computer. Half the time they get close enough to be competent. A quarter of the time they think it is supposed to work one way, when it was designed to work the opposite. And the final quarter of the time they are so far off from anything close to reality that they are not even wrong. I can sort of see where sonascope is coming from, when talking about "simplified to the point that a stupid baby can use it". Honestly, that is actually "good" design. But it is also limiting, in so many ways. And for the most part, it's an okay trade-off. But not always.

That part is really where a lot of the talk about design just falls apart. I mean, it's one thing to say that good design is all about being user focused. But when you start talking about things like simplified interfaces and things like that, you really need to look at what the app is facilitating. You know why a lot of apps are simple? Because the real-world thing they are emulating, or even enhancing, was pretty simple to begin with. You know why some products that have been with us for decades feel like bloated bags of convoluted bad ideas? Because they started as simple things (Word essentially replaced a typewriter), and new features were added on and layered over each other and iterated to death by a thousand committees.

But that's just one little part of the whole thing. You get outside of the local computing space and into the internet and things just go screwy. Suddenly you have actual culture wars, because so much about culture is this implicit acceptance of "that's just how things are", yet different cultures have different ideas about "how things are".

Using a computer is really just using a tool, and using a computer well is using the tool the way it was designed to be used. Using it great is using it beyond the way it was designed to be used, and extending the functionality into even more creative ways of producing data (because, really, anything in a computer is just data. From the videos on Youtube to the music on Pandora, to everything, everywhere that involves a computer. It's just data. Lots and lots of data).

So hate all you want about Apple's design. Hate about Microsoft's lack of design (or, rather, really odd design most of the time). Hate about Linix's inability to even bother with design. It's just a tool, and you use it every day. Might as well use it well, since trying to hammer a nail with a screwdriver just makes you look odd.

Also, anyone saying that Apple is going to EOL Mac OS X and replace it with some Fischer-Price looking iOS abomination really does not know anything at all about how fundamental Mac OS X dev is to Apple, and how much they know they are making a workstation/server OS, versus iOS and it's core use scenario (i.e. end point consumption of content). They do include some features that are similar or mimic behavior seen in iOS (like the Dashboard and Launchpad), but those are bells and whisltes compared to the core OS itself. I mean, in Mac OS X 10.11, they instituted a new rootless security model, where core components of the system CANNOT be altered, even by the root user, essentially making the OS rootkit proof (unless you manually turn off the rootless feature, which is an option if your 3rd party developers can't be bothered to code to the spec of the OS. I'm looking at you, Oracle). I get it, you don't like the fact that the most popular computing platform is really just an end point consumption device. Do you have e-book readers like the Kindle? Do you hate information kiosks too? Does everything have to be a super versitile workstation that you can run AutoCAD on? No? Good. Then shut up about design, as you apparently think a screwdriver is good for hammering in a nail (I like that joke).
posted by daq at 5:39 PM on November 17, 2015 [14 favorites]

Go try to find the fucking control panel in Windows 8 and then tell me OSX is user unfriendly.

I've never used 8 but in 8.1, I'm pretty sure that you just right-click on the start button and select Control Panel.
posted by octothorpe at 6:00 PM on November 17, 2015

I've never used 8 but in 8.1, I'm pretty sure that you just right-click on the start button and select Control Panel.

Wow. To be fair, the most recent Windows I've ever used is 7, but I would definitely never figure that out on my own. That's a pretty major functionality change from pre-8 versions of Windows - here on my Windows 7 office laptop, if you right-click on the Start button you get a context menu with two entries: Properties (which makes sense given the standard right-click paradigm in Windows) and Open Windows Explorer (defaulting to my Libraries folder).

Out of curiosity, what else is available by right-clicking the Windows 8+ start button?
posted by cobra_high_tigers at 6:09 PM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Once you take all teh apprprate steps to make 8 behave like 7 it isn't bad... but then you're using an OS you've gone out of you way to make behave like it's predecessor.

(I have not tried 10 yet, but I believe it does some of this for you. Even so... WTF?)
posted by Artw at 6:10 PM on November 17, 2015

I've never used 8 but in 8.1, I'm pretty sure that you just right-click on the start button and select Control Panel.

this is kind of a major issue because, prior to Windows 8, you could readily get to the Control Panel by left-clicking on the Start button, because it was just considered a major and significant item
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:21 PM on November 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

I am so old that I still flinch when I hear or read the word "intuitive" used to describe software or hardware, and really want to ask whether the speaker actually means "intuitable".

Even though I know, with soft resignation, that that battle was lost many decades ago.
posted by rokusan at 6:27 PM on November 17, 2015 [7 favorites]

My experience of Win10 is that Microsoft is trying to shunt the user away from the Control Panel and toward the Metrotastic Settings, which does less than the Control Panel and therefore must be killed with fire.

Every time you remove enduser functionality, you are spitting in the face of the user.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:14 PM on November 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

You use Android phones? I thought I remembered you being obsessed with Apple; I'm surprised you don't use an iPhone!

I am like 90% sure that you're saying this with a heavy dollop of irony, but on the off-change that you were asking this sincerely, nah, I've got a 6S+, and have already written about four essays about how I will never be able to use devices that don't let me push them to make magic happen. I will touch everything.
posted by rorgy at 7:16 PM on November 17, 2015

Dear Apple, I love the way you're changing decades of electrical convention with one mouse.

That's not a design convention for batteries, it's more like just the easiest way to have batteries in a circuit in serial which is when you want to add voltage. Batteries in a circuit in parallel to add amperage or run time will almost always have the anodes all pointing one way & cathodes pointing the other way. The design convention is to clearly mark the orientation of the batteries on the compartment. Even if you were supposed to put them in facing opposite directions, you could still wind up putting them both in backwards without looking at the markings. Note that I'm not excusing the laziness of design here, just stating that Apple is not a special case. The whole thing is bonkers. See also USB cables that you have to flip like nine times to figure out how to plug in.

For a little while there was a company (Microsoft?) with a patented widget that let you put in the batteries any way you liked and had a separate contact to engage the tab or bottom of the battery depending which way you put it in, but as far as I know that's the only real design consideration for battery orientation.
posted by BrotherCaine at 7:24 PM on November 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

Two things that I'm actually bitter fanboy towards Apple about:

1. OpenDoc, i.e. the lack thereof:

"OpenDoc was soon discontinued, with Steve Jobs (who had been at NeXT during this development) noting that they "put a bullet through [OpenDoc's] head", and most of the Apple Advanced Technology Group was laid off in a big reduction in force in March 1997" - wikipedia

2. AppleScript

These are/were two vectors of innovation that have held so much promise. When I think UI design, I'm asking what the hardware-software interface can do to offer a paradigmatic difference in how we use computation. Tog's article was about buttons/gestures and text rendering, but discussing that belies the philosophical problems of how computers relate to humans, particularly the question of how humans can be empowered by computational devices through innovative, or at least, appropriate, structural choices.

The introduction of the Apple Pencil is actually incredibly interesting, because it blows away literally every stylus that has existed previously. The reason it is $99 is because it is much more than just a stylus. It has single pixel precision on an iPad Pro retina display.

And the reason I personally would not use one is because contrary to Apple's claims in their ad copy, the latency is perceptible, and nontrivial for serious note-taking. I tried it on multiple apps at my local Apple Store.
posted by polymodus at 7:33 PM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

See also: HyperCard
posted by Artw at 7:44 PM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

> How do you know what that thing does? You try it and you learn. Or you look it up and you learn. Or you ask someone and you learn. But however you do it, you figure it out, and you learn.

If you don't have well-developed expectations of what sorts of things a program should probably be offering as options, you don't have any reason (or the vocabulary!) to look it up to figure out how to do it.

You can "try" menu options but if you aren't recognizing what hard-to-see mostly-transparent little shape is triggering the menu, it's bewildering.

Likewise, if a gesture is something that you can do accidentally, it disrupts the way you're using attempting to use the app, causing panic or at least frustration. If it's deliberate enough to not be triggered accidentally, you're neither going to stumble across it nor be able to remember it easily -- because most gestures are NOT actually deployed in a standard fashion across different apps, that "common language" is still very much in flux.
posted by desuetude at 8:24 PM on November 17, 2015

Phyltre:

rorgy, I think we just fundamentally disagree on some core metrics. [...]

Where Microsoft and Apple disagree today, fundamentally they only way they disagree about the future, is Apple wants iOS to be the future and OSX to be dead. Microsoft wants (or has learned to pretend to want, for the foreseeable future, in response to the market) the inverse for their own products. Microsoft tried to build an RT-esque, 8.0 style curated ecosystem to match iOS, but the market rejected it--their "old users" want x86 and real Windows runtimes. As a result, they have pushed full x86 Windows into smaller and more agile footprints like the Surface lineup. Soon they're likely to do the same with the Surface Phone.

Apple is on the other side, they are pushing iOS paradigms into larger and more capable form factors. Still, it's primarily touch and consumption rather than production based. As you say, people new to technology love it! They don't have to learn anything about what people have been able to do with technology for the last 20 years. The "legacy" side is limited (although have you noticed how many questions an iPhone asks you today when you turn it on for the first time?) through deliberate decisions made at the OS level. They're very successful at selling devices built to be as simple as possible. But I'm very reticent to say that success in the marketplace makes Apple a better company.

I think you're right in saying that we fundamentally disagree about some things here, because I disagree wholeheartedly with your analysis here. I don't agree with your take on where Microsoft and Apple part ways, and I don't agree with your take on how Apple's products have evolved — neither in the last 8 years, since the iPhone was released, or in the last 4 years, since Jobs died and Apple's approach took a significant turn for the better.

(A quick not-you-related aside: all the people here talking about how Steve Jobs must've been the one responsible for Apple's product cohesion/Apple sure is going downhill since Steve Jobs died! are conveniently forgetting that Apple has never, never released products that were consistent and flawless and incapable of generating complaints. Maybe the closest they ever got was Leopard/Snow Leopard, which were admittedly pretty great, but right after that they released Lion and people started complaining again. iOS, meanwhile, has had detractors since literally the first OS, and hasn't ever had a version which people unanimously agreed was great—except, perhaps, for iOS 6, which people hated for not being nearly innovative enough at the time, but is conveniently lovable in retrospect, as the most polished skeuomorph-variant iOS and with the advance knowledge that iOSes 7-8 delivered on all the system-level innovation that people'd been complaining wasn't there for literally years.)

Microsoft's approach to product unification has arguably been the most radical of any of the major companies who're working across multiple platforms today. The Metro UI was clearly designed for phones and touch devices first, everything else second. This has its benefits and downsides. I think that iOS could learn a lot from Metro's tile system, which is brilliantly good at allowing you to organize apps alongside files and to create micro-organization without requiring drill-down; I think that some of that (the app/file fluidity especially) is virulently opposed to Apple's philosophy, but the convenience of having every possible entry-point to an app or process be listed on the base level of my OS is pretty fantastic, as is the ability to group things more subtly than just "on a page" or "in a folder". (My hunch has been that Springboard (aka iOS's home screen) is due for a significant revamp, and that iOS 10 might be the release that Apple wants to target that for, since iOS 9 really tied up a lot of the ends that've been loose since the 6->7 transition post-Forstall.)

The downside to the Metro system is that it simply doesn't scale gracefully with screen sizes. Even on my not-enormous laptop, Windows apps on Metro look bloated and cartoonish; they stretch out somewhat awfully to take up that extra real estate. Pre-Metro Windows feels pretty data-dense, leaving Metro feeling sparse by comparison. I think that was the major reason behind the Windows 8 complaints—they hid a lot of previously-reliable functionality in some pretty stupid ways. That still felt like the right decision to me, because Windows was ailing pretty terribly, but they made a radical decision and they suffered some of the consequences to it. The impression I've had of Windows 10 is that it's somewhat of a compromise between the stark Metro layouts of 8 and the previous design of 7-and-under, which is one of the reasons I haven't been eager to jump. But they're sticking to an attempted unification of their systems, which I admire and am terribly skeptical of at the same time.

Apple, meanwhile, isn't killing OS X; iOS was initially a variant of OS X with a new interface layer to it, and the two are still pretty unified under the surface. Here's where I disagree fervently with your analysis: I don't think Apple is porting "iOS paradigms" whatsoever. In fact, the past 12 months have seen them release two new standalone operating systems, tvOS and watchOS, each of which corresponds to a different interface paradigm than iOS does. iOS will almost certainly start borrowing concepts from each, just as OS X borrows concepts from iOS, but the exchange goes both ways. iOS gets OS X-like features with every new release, and certainly the next Apple Watch will borrow something from the iPhones 6S and 6S+.

The thing Apple's really playing at, which I think is brilliant, is hardware-contextual UX. Their vision of computing is a singular, underpinning system, with unique user interfaces that incorporate the idiosyncrasies of whichever hardware platform they're operating with. Each system's sensors, screen size, external controls, and so forth determine which inputs determine the user interface, but they're all reaching towards the same set of abstractions, which Apple's OSes are attempting to manifest in formats that correspond to physical objects, can be manipulated with physical interactions, etc. That's why you get a watch with a force-sensitive screen and a manual crown, a trackpad that responds to dozens of layers of press, a larger tablet whose two major selling points are its peripheral keyboard and stylus, and a new phone OS that allows you to execute commands using screen pressure rather than button manipulation. Their hardware-first approach is why I think people who're used to software-driven feedback can get a little frustrated with the ways in which their systems work; it is also, I'm positive, why they receive such rapturous consumer responses.

Not only do I not think that OS X is going anywhere, but I think that Apple is probably invested in making it considerably better than it presently is. But Apple is going to do that the same way it improves its phones: by creating hardware with new functionality for its software to reach into. Their trackpads have supported two-finger swipes for a long time, but only recently have they started getting into four-finger app switches, and this year they incorporated the Force Touch paradigm that's suddenly swept across Apple's entire product line. Contrary to popular belief, Apple loves trackpads; the best new iOS feature on both iPads and iPhones is that, through either multitouch or 3D touch, you can use any system keyboard as a trackpad, including selecting text, moving the cursor, or performing manipulations on the documents you're working on. And iOS 9 also added extensive keyboard support for most of its apps—it is now mostly possible to switch between apps, scroll within them, and trigger shortcuts using an external keyboard, and in some ways iOS's keyboard support is better than OS X's, because they got a chance to bake learnable keyboard shortcuts into the system in a way that OS X never really had to do (though I assume that'll be coming to OS X within a year as well).

Meanwhile, tvOS introduces Apple's second OS meant to be manipulated via an external selector rather than touched directly, so they're clearly aware of the limitations of touch screens as much as anybody. It also shows that, given a chance, Apple's fine with creating new hardware buttons, and that their relatively button-less approach on iPhones and iPads is a contextual thing rather than a hard-baked design philosophy. If anything, I suspect that Apple's gonna continue to get looser and more playful with its hardware approach as time goes on, with OSes that are built to incorporate a wide variety of potential inputs.

When you say, "People new to technology love it! They don't have to learn anything about what people have been able to do with technology for the last 20 years", my response is that this is where computers should get to. People shouldn't need to understand the history of the devices they're using in order to use them. Apple's approach to UX within iOS has been simple: every application that launches dominates the screen, and provides you with a new way of using it. iOS's interface is limited to a homepage, a notification center that itself runs miniature applications, and a series of universal methods by which applications can pass data to one another (mostly either "pass this somewhere else" or "execute whatever function another app made universally available"). iOS 9 brought us side-by-side apps, a notification-driven back button that returns you to whatever context you were in pre-notification, and a few 3D Touch-driven functions, like drilling down into an app from the home screen, or opening the app switcher by swiping out from the side of the device, rather than double-pressing on the home button. Siri's another "external" interface component in that it can either take you into an app or execute a function outside of the app you're in, but isn't required to get things done within the thing that you're using (and, if you use voice dictation, Apple explicitly refrains from calling it Siri, because they don't want you thinking of Siri as anything but an outside presence).

I think it's telling that tvOS is seemingly built around the idea that people are going to bring in outside controllers to use whatever apps they purchase for their device; I think it's just as telling that Apple didn't build a gamelike controller themselves, leaving that to the purview of third-party developers. Again, the apps themselves design the user experience. All Apple does is provide a method of getting into those. And, while watchOS is considerably more restrained, offering as it does its hierarchy of Glances, Complications, and the apps themselves, Apple's approach is once more to step out of the way and let individual apps shine. The question I'd ask, as a critic of Apple's designs, is: "How easily can I find the application I want to look at or launch?" Past that, Apple's delegating its responsibility somewhat, and the result is the robust library of apps that exists today.

This, by the way, is the central disagreement I have with the article in the FPP. I don't think that Apple's operating systems benefit from the consistency or simplicity that it's erroneously claimed they once had. Apple's violated its own Human Interface Guidelines since literally the beginning of OS X, treating nearly all their apps like playgrounds for potential new design approaches; this is semi-famously because Apple gives individual app teams a lot of freedom to create things they way they feel is best, although I've read that post-Jobs, there's been more of an emphasis on big-picture collaboration that certainly wasn't there when I started using OS X. That app-centric approach to UX, with the OS providing a means to relate different programs together without defining the function of each one, can lead to some awful stuff (and, cynically, I think the reason that Google's Material Design is as comprehensive as it is about how apps ought to function is because Android's apps were so often terribly designed, enough so that authoritative pressure was needed to establish even a baseline). It also, however, yields some absolutely incredible work, to the point that I'd call Fantastical the best calendar application, Unread the best RSS reader, Editorial the best word processor, and Paper the best freeform drawing tool across any operating system, and that's just off the top of my head. I'll also mention that I think the iOS-first social networks, such as Snapchat and Instagram, are incredibly well-designed for what they do; even Uber, which I despise on principle, is easily one of the best-designed apps I've ever seen somebody else use. (Facebook's also done some great work here, and I think it's wholly unsurprising that their best UX on any system is an iOS-exclusive app.)

I'd also bicker with the meme that iOS devices are primarily consumption-first tools—I wrote full-length essays on my 4-inch iPhone, and my upgrade to a phone with an enormous screen has seen me writing pretty much nonstop on it, not to mention how great its drawing/photography/film tools are—but that's a whole other long argument, and I feel as-is that I've thrown myself more into this discussion than I'm comfortable with. The problem with the state of these discussions on MetaFilter is that, if I want to quibble with even two paragraphs of an argument, the disagreement winds up being longer and more comprehensive than I'd like, because I think that assertions like yours are pretty fundamentally-misguided, and if I want to do my enthusiasms justice I wind up finding a dozen different things I want to bring up before I feel like my disagreement makes any sense at all. That happened in the first thing I wrote in this thread, and it's happened again now, and it's why I made myself promise not to say anything in this thread at all immediately before I jumped in and started saying a bunch of things. Now I'll have to look at myself sternly in the mirror for a while and try not to think about why I'll disagree with whatever you'll say in response to me, or about how many more ways I want to disagree with people here when I could be prototyping my phone app instead.
posted by rorgy at 8:27 PM on November 17, 2015 [11 favorites]

That makes them a great company from an investor perspective, but not the kind I as an informed consumer should want to buy things from, generally speaking.

At the same time, the flipside of this is that every other company is selling things on the absolute thinnest margins and it shows. Every other "metal" laptop i've tried actually had a bunch of plastic pieces on it(or a plastic bottom, or a plastic screen surround, or something) that felt super duper cheap. And the metal was always MUCH thinner and flimsier. There's a few exceptions, but they... also cost about as much as a macbook. Most laptops also have really cheap and shitty feeling keyboards and especially trackpads. This wasn't always true! The clunky dell business laptop i had in high school and college had a glorious keyboard and although it was plastic, it felt like a fucking tank and survived multiple drops including falling down a stairway warner bros style.

Sure, an "informed consumer" could buy a much lower priced machine with similar specs, but a lot of them not only feel like they would break very easily but do. Until recently when i cleaned it out, there was a straight up pile of broken laptops next to my workbench. Hinges that just snapped off of their mounting points from the stress of opening and closing, screens that died from very little pressure in a backpack(and one that died from heat when the laptop failed to fall asleep and froze?!?), ports that just kind of fell off. Not just power jacks, but all kinds of sockets.

This gets even worse when you look at tablets. Apple, essentially, makes the only tablets that don't feel like utter garbage. Go play around with a samsung tab S2 or a nexus 9 or something similarly priced. With the exception of possibly the new pixel, and the microsoft surface, it all REALLY feels like garbage even when it costs $4-500.

Phones are the only real market where there's actual competition in hardware quality, and even then the only close competitors like samsung and HTC both have serious flaws and are *much* larger in their minimum size. Other brands like huawei are catching up, but it's essentially taken the big brands 3-5 years to catch up to the bomb dropped with the iphone 4 in 2010. And for a couple years, it was pretty much *just* HTC. And apple and samsung ran HTC almost out of business at this point because this shit is expensive to make. Samsung had to cheat by using a lot of plastic internally to even get something comparable feeling out the door.

Somehow, apple is manufacturing higher quality products for similar manufacturing costs and charging more. The profit margin isn't what you should be looking at here, it's how the competitors are spending similar coin to make much shittier products and selling them closer to cost.

This argument seems like a slightly longer version of "apple consumers r sheep lol". You can potentially argue on the price point, but i think it's pretty well established that you can't spend much less and get comparable *quality*, and i think it's fairly hard to argue they don't make high quality hardware. They might make stupid design or component choices choices sometimes(like the 5400rpm laptop drives in the 21in imac, ugh) but the actual *functional* design is generally good.

Barring the magic mouse of course. Fuck that thing.
posted by emptythought at 8:33 PM on November 17, 2015 [9 favorites]

it's almost as though everyone else in the market has spent so long trying to drive prices down to the exclusion of all other design factors that they've forgotten how to make something that doesn't feel awful, even when competing at higher price points
posted by DoctorFedora at 12:59 AM on November 18, 2015

remember back when a single program pooping the bed would bring down your entire system?

If this analogy has any basis in reality, you must have a very forbearing partner.
posted by fairmettle at 2:22 AM on November 18, 2015

segfaultxr7: "the horrid file manager that gives me Win3.1 flashbacks, etc, etc. "

.... and don't forget that with recent editions of OSX you've had to use a third-party file manager add-on to be able to have Finder sort your files and always keep the directories on the top of the list, or to use control-x/control-v copy/paste. And of course, El Capitan has broken all of those and no one told me before I upgraded and long story short screw this noise I've been using my PC a lot more since EC came out. Grr.
posted by barnacles at 3:28 AM on November 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

El capitan also broke the shit out of Office, which is a pretty impressively clueless thing for an OS update to break.
posted by Pope Guilty at 4:19 AM on November 18, 2015

Apple used to make humanistic computers. Now they make rectangular status symbols.
posted by Zarkonnen at 4:34 AM on November 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

lupus_yonderboy: Sorry to outnerd you, but actually, the operating system was called System until version 7.5 and Mac OS from 7.6 onwards.
posted by Zarkonnen at 4:44 AM on November 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

I do find the "status symbols" claim about Apple sort of amusing, but maybe it's because I am in that sub-subsection of the market that uses those "rectangular status symbols" to make music.

Call it some sort of pretense or status-seeking thing if you like, but, with a few exceptions for noble attempts to circumvent the anti-creation bias baked into Android, you can't make music with an Android tablet, and there is no such thing as an Android subtablet like the iPod Touch range that I use for all manner of things in my gigs. I just did a gig at the National Electronics Museum using a beat-up old Casio CZ, which I could edit in real time for modular-grade West Coast complex oscillator amazingness with the CZ Touch app running on a 6th gen A8 iPod Touch that's also running a full chain of effects processing at the same time using Audiobus, processing signal with a Nord Micro Modular controlled by a Lemur patch running on a 4th gen iPod Touch and looping live audio with the twelve [stereo] channel Loopy HD app running on a 1st gen iPad in an Alesis iO Dock, all of which can happen because, while Apple is prioritizing their marketing efforts and eyecandy design, there is at least still a thread within the company that understands that engaging creative types is important.

There's no reason why these things couldn't exist on Android…except Android's designers just don't care enough to make consistent low-latency audio drivers, or to implement connection standards like Core Audio/Core MIDI to make their devices usable with hardware built for serious musicians.

So, yeah, maybe there's a hipness to Apple, but for me, it's because their devices work and make it possible for me to make things, and any anxiety I have about the possibly increasing inclination of Apple to descend to the rest-of-the-market level of colorful clumsification comes down to what they're giving away in this pursuit instead of what they lack.
posted by sonascope at 5:40 AM on November 18, 2015 [14 favorites]

So we can either complain about that and try to force the complexity into the old simple models, or we can resign ourselves to the fact that things change and the most effective way to keep moving forward isn't to look back, its to get over ourselves and realize that we just need to keep learning.

This really is such patronising nonsense. The old models weren't simplistic, and probably led to massively more complexity than the current ones. But there's a distinction you're not allowing between "not looking back" and "forgetting valuable lessons".

Affordances, for instance, are pretty fundamental to interfaces, physical or virtual. So why were they removed in the bonfire that was iOS 7? I know it's an Ive staple, but you'd have thought even he would have learned from the v1 puck mouse.

Why shouldn't 3D Touch have affordances to show where it can be used? They would make things simpler, and easier to use. What possible justification is there for not having them? "I fetishise the new and people who don't know about them don't mind not having them also lol old" isn't really a justification.
posted by bonaldi at 5:47 AM on November 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

There's no reason why these things couldn't exist on Android…except Android's designers just don't care enough to make consistent low-latency audio drivers, or to implement connection standards like Core Audio/Core MIDI to make their devices usable with hardware built for serious musicians.

There might be architectural reasons why it's not easy to do that on Android but I assume it's mostly that it's a pretty small niche use of a tablet and most people just use them to browse the web and watch Netflix.
posted by octothorpe at 6:44 AM on November 18, 2015

remember back when a single program pooping the bed would bring down your entire system? And remember how that happened once or twice a week?

My career has been spent working with Adobe software. I remember when it would bring down my entire system several times a day.
posted by Fleebnork at 6:58 AM on November 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

I assume it's mostly that it's a pretty small niche use of a tablet and most people just use them to browse the web and watch Netflix.

Also "being late to the party". Serious musicians who have looked into using tablets as an option to compose on the road or even to cut their road gear are already using iPads. Because the audio latency issue was overlooked, serious developers (like Korg, Detune, Arturia, etc) also never put any weight behind the platform. This formed a vicious circle that I don't know how Google can break up, short of investing on, dunno, Native Instruments, Applied Acoustics and Ableton or Image-Line to bring some of their flagship products to Android once drivers are responsive to show the platform is legit.
posted by lmfsilva at 7:37 AM on November 18, 2015

(also, given the platform is open-source, I'm imagining some hardware makers could look into creating some 25-key midi MIDI controllers with a built-in Android platform and a standardized VST-like technology that allows virtual instruments to be played in a number of Android keyboards, as opposed to the "plug an iPad" solutions I've seen around)
posted by lmfsilva at 7:52 AM on November 18, 2015

Anyway, backing away from my initial snark: I think that this conflict between aesthetics and usability was baked into the Apple Macintosh right from the beginning. Jef Raskin, the original project leader, wanted a computer that could be treated as an "appliance" - reliable and straightforward to use. Jobs saw the resulting one-size-fits-all concept (the original Mac famously had no way of being expanded and hardly any way of attaching peripherals) and liked it from an aesthetic point of view. This ended up creating compromises like refusing to add holes in the front to improve the sound and refusing to add active cooling systems, leading to early reliability troubles.
posted by Zarkonnen at 8:42 AM on November 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

Google maps become more attractive and more confusing with each iteration.

A thousand times yes.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:44 AM on November 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

OK, after reading all this debate over the differences between Apple and Windows and Android, heres my take-away:

The differences you are arguing about are pretty much trivial, and this is a sign if the overall moribund state of development in the software field.

Honestly, for all that there's been great strides in miniaturization and memory, were still dicking around with interfaces that were set decades ago. Windows, icons, all date back to the 80s even the 70s. Hell, the most original thing we've been arguing about, the touch screen, was out on the market in 1993. There are kids going to college who are younger than your current edge technology.

This is less an innovation debate as a "rearrange the deck chairs" argument. Maybe someday we'll see an actually new user interface-out, or maybe for the foreseeable future the computer interface developers will be like Detroit in the 60s, fighting over who puts the most chrome on the bumpers.
posted by happyroach at 8:47 AM on November 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

Serious musicians who have looked into using tablets as an option to compose on the road or even to cut their road gear are already using iPads.

Sadly, the audio latency problem is OS-level on Android and continues to exist because all but a very few manufacturers just don't care or don't count creatives as worthy of their engineering. If you're running something entirely self-contained and based on rendering on Android, like the excellent ANS, that's not a problem, but if you're running anything in which the delay between triggering a note and hearing a note, or in processing an incoming signal and sending it to an output is important, Android's utterly worthless.

At this point, if Android suddenly became a viable platform for music, why would I want to reward those people for giving me the big "fuck you" for so long? Apple made an effort—Google didn't. The irony is that some the very best apps for music have roots in academia, which is normally all about Linux and open source, but no platform is no platform.
posted by sonascope at 8:47 AM on November 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

"I fetishise the new and people who don't know about them don't mind not having them also lol old" isn't really a justification.

I didn't justify it, I just said that's the way it is. I keep using old things that I prefer to newer ones, but at the same time I have given up being locked in to how some things work because the effort required to try and lock them in time isn't worth it compared to going with the flow and learning as I go. Fortunately, every one of us can find our own balance of old and new and updating and learning and yelling at clouds!

But far as "Why shouldn't 3D Touch have affordances to show where it can be used?" I totally hear where you're coming from and think it would be great, but unfortunately the view from the trenches is not as clear, and as a developer I could go to great length as to how it would be infeasible to attempt to implement a shared, common way to indicate its availability that would work universally across all apps, both technically and politically, but I should probably get back to work...
posted by frijole at 8:48 AM on November 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

I am one of an (apparently) rare breed: I like the Finder, and find all other file managers unusable. It's got enormous warts, sure, but nobody else has a workable version of Finder's column view. I love column view in finder because it offers a very effective and keyboard-driven way to interact with the filesystem. Arrow keys to navigate, start typing a name to jump within a long list, Command+down arrow to open something, enter to edit a name. Most of these are available in any finder view, but column view is best because you get a good sense of where you are in the hierarchy at all times and moving within a folder is the same as moving between folders, just left/right instead of up/down

Once I found the right settings to make it never show me anything but column view, I never looked back.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 8:56 AM on November 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

To hell with "Opt" or "Command" or whatever.

⌘ is the waffle key, and always will be.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 10:03 AM on November 18, 2015 [6 favorites]

This is the kind of thread that raises my blood pressure, and I've been happier just following along with the "Add to Activity" button[*]. But in case you're stilll following this thread:

polymodus: the reason I personally would not use [an Apple Pencil] is because contrary to Apple's claims in their ad copy, the latency is perceptible, and nontrivial for serious note-taking. I tried it on multiple apps at my local Apple Store.

There's enough anecdotal evidence (Twitter, no links, sorry) to support the inference that apps have to be updated to use new APIs in order to perform without lag when using the new Pencil. Apps that have been updated do, in fact, show pretty lag-free performance; others that haven't been updated can (in some cases) look terribly laggy and even stutter-y in some cases. That includes some Apple apps too.

That's unsurprising to me - software needs to be updated to use new hardware capabilities, and devs have barely had a chance to do so yet.

[*] Thank you MeFi and pb for indulging that pony request!
posted by RedOrGreen at 10:17 AM on November 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

⌘ is the waffle key, and always will be.

You can take the propeller key from my cold, dead hands.
posted by frijole at 11:22 AM on November 18, 2015

vibratory: I am one of an (apparently) rare breed: I like the Finder, and find all other file managers unusable. It's got enormous warts, sure, but nobody else has a workable version of Finder's column view.

I've been pretty happy with PathFinder for a while now, though I can't use it exclusively to be able to kill the Finder altogether. (And I miss Greg's Browser most of all from OS9.) I presume you've tried PathFinder - can you elaborate?

But when I need to drop to the Finder, I agree that Column view is the least-bad way to get around the filesystem. I find having two such windows arranged as source and destination work best.
posted by AbnerRavenwood at 12:12 PM on November 18, 2015

the horrid file manager that gives me Win3.1 flashbacks

I may be misremembering, but I can't think of a simpler file manager than Win 3.1. It was a bunch of folders and subfolders, wasn't it? What was wrong with that?
posted by Hoopo at 12:36 PM on November 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

The Origin of The Apple Command Icon - It's actually a castle.
posted by Artw at 1:21 PM on November 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

Finder seems like it's basically just a re-skinned NextStep File Browser.
posted by octothorpe at 1:24 PM on November 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

I presume you've tried PathFinder - can you elaborate?

Sorry, yeah. PathFinder is fine, and the exception to that statement. I just didn't find any reason to switch to it when I tried it out. It's definitely got some interesting stuff, but nothing that I personally needed. On top of that, the Finder bugs I used to run into regularly (which related to working on remote filesystems) seem to have been fixed recently, so I'm not really looking right now. I find that most people's complaints about Finder relate to parts of it I don't use much, e.g. Siracusa and the spatial finder (RIP).

The bigger peeve for me is that weren't any good Miller column file browser for other operating systems last time I looked. I tried the version of the NextStep File Browser that's part of GNUStep, and maybe I just didn't find them but it was really lacking in keyboard bindings and a lot clunkier than finder in general. Of the rest on that list, of the ones that aren't discontinued, I don't think they were there when I was trying to find a reasonable file browser for X11, so I haven't tried them. Maybe they're good now! I don't really know. Windows also appears to have grown a few implementations in the past 5 or so years, so I'll retract my generalization.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 2:00 PM on November 18, 2015

Spinner. Pretzel. Castle. Loopy-loop. Double infinity.

I kind of miss Open-Apple and Closed-Apple, myself.
posted by rokusan at 3:30 PM on November 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

As a UX designer I've had so many thoughts while reading this thread. Here are a few:

1. Successful UX is hard. The design of every new feature needs to take into consideration every other existing feature and the interaction and visual language you've developed for them. Sometimes a critical new feature throws many other existing pieces into question*.

2. The tension between new functions and existing expectations/habits is fundamental to the field, and always difficult to manage. Generally you can either make existing users happy and not move forward, or you can move forward and piss your existing users off. (Or, terrible option C, toss in new functionality along with your old functionality and end up with bloated software that ticks all the feature boxes and is a nightmare for everyone to use!).

3. Apple (and so many other folks working in this space) are on the frontier of UX. They're inventing interactions that have no real precedent. The moment we're in now is especially challenging: how to make these touch interfaces allow for more complex interactions? It's brand new territory. On one hand I am jealous that folks at Apple get to work on it; on another I don't envy them one bit.

4. 3D Touch really could/should have some affordances; designing a single, successful affordance for all 3D touch cases is super difficult and may be impossible. I think there's a good chance that Apple will come out with something in a future iOS that provides these affordances. They may be waiting to let app developers play around with options and see what best practices develop.

Swiping absolutely and all gestural controls could absolutely use some affordance. I haven't seen anybody do it well, though (please show me some good examples if you've got 'em!). Balancing the desired affordance design elements with the content you need to show, the size of the screen, and the overall visual balance of an app is not easy, and in many cases it may make sense to err on the side of "something you have to learn" if it means the rest of the concerns work out.

In general with these, Apple makes what I think is a very reasonable decision: gestures and 3D Touch are shortcuts to actions you can take in other ways via traditional button taps. If you never learn about the gesture or the 3D Touch, you're losing out only on speed, not on functionality.

5. I've got my own slate of UX complaints about the current state of Apple's products (3D Touch should always provide click feedback, even if it doesn't take any action, to let you know that, yes, you've pressed hard enough! The 6 ~is~ too damn big! The side lock button means I hit it inadvertently all the damn time!). I hate the narrative that they've lost the mojo, though. They are doing this stuff better than anyone else that I've seen, and I challenge anyone to prove me wrong (seriously: show me discoverability for touch gestures anywhere. please!).


* I think the original concept of a 'paradigm shift' is really useful here. When you create a design language for a product you make a number of assumptions about its scope, and you make decisions and choices within that. As the product grows, some features don't quite fit in and you start to see that some of the assumptions you made are incorrect. Eventually you do a redesign that accounts for your new understanding of what your product is and leaves space for what you're planning it to be. Rinse, repeat. I think 3D touch is a great example of something that doesn't quite fit in the current iOS design paradigm, but with future iterations may become incorporated much more cleanly.
posted by wemayfreeze at 3:58 PM on November 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

show me discoverability for touch gestures anywhere. please!

hey there Windows 8 slide-from-the-top-of-the-screen-to-the-bottom-to-quit
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:30 PM on November 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

rum-soaked space hobo: "⌘ is the waffle key, and always will be."

I call it "Squiggle". Squiggle-N to make a new document. Control, Alt, Shift, Squiggle.
posted by barnacles at 6:44 PM on November 18, 2015

I seem to recall "splat" was always a popular nickname too.
posted by DoctorFedora at 7:04 PM on November 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

daq: "Also, anyone saying that Apple is going to EOL Mac OS X and replace it with some Fischer-Price looking iOS abomination really does not know anything at all about how fundamental Mac OS X dev is to Apple"

A few years ago, I would have said the same thing about Apple's dedication to the professional creative industry, which has been Apple's "bread and butter" for most of the company's existence.

These days..... go ask some video editors about their opinions about Apple. "Betrayal" doesn't even begin to describe how badly Apple fucked over that industry. After creating an elaborate, proprietary, and lucrative ecosystem that gradually dominated the entire industry, Apple..... just quietly walked away from it without explanation.

Also, maybe we can talk about the fact that iWork somehow lost the ability to open files that were created in previous versions. This is inexplicable and glaring incompetence.

I've been a Mac user for something like 20 years at this point. I'm typing this from my Macbook, which I quite like. Apple still makes great hardware. As far as software goes, Apple has lost its way, and is only surviving because the remainder of the industry is falling over itself to imitate Apple (and is therefore repeating their mistakes).

I've also been a dedicated Android user since 2010. Android is TERRIBLE. I've been pretty happy with the HTC devices that I've owned, but Apple definitely still has the upper hand, particularly with regards to build quality and battery life. I only say all this to provide a reference point for the unusable catastrophe that iOS has become, which has only managed to get even worse with recent releases.
posted by schmod at 8:01 PM on November 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

fungible: "they use this philosophy on everything from iPads to watches to Final Cut"

If you want to praise Apple's performance in recent years, Final Cut is unequivocally not the example that you want to be holding up.
posted by schmod at 8:02 PM on November 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

Oh, hey, circling back to the "how easy is it to hack an iOS device" conversation, some data. (TL;DR: iOS 0-day exploits are priced at 5x any other. Blackberry's not on the list. I suppose it's possible that's because they're unhackable, but that seems... unlikely.)
posted by asterix at 6:01 PM on November 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

As an interesting comparison on where the mammoths are going, Microsoft is integrating a package manager with Windows 10, and one taking from and extending on a community project at that.

Apple has, particularly with El Capitan, been working to shut out Homebrew, the main thing which makes any sort of real development on a Mac reasonable.

I don't mind the hardware, but it's amazing how often the OS gets in the way of my wanting to do basic things. But, y'know, it's what I'm being paid to use, so I have my price. They're no friend of developers & design for developers, that's for sure.
posted by CrystalDave at 8:48 PM on November 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Apple has, particularly with El Capitan, been working to shut out Homebrew

They're not trying to shut out Homebrew specifically, they're taking (reasonable) steps to secure their OS. If Homebrew didn't insist on installing stuff in /usr/local, this wouldn't be an issue.

(I use Homebrew and I generally prefer to install instance-specific software in /usr/local, but it *is* pretty braindead on Homebrew's part that it's so opinionated about where it installs things. I should be able to do it in /opt just as easily.)
posted by asterix at 9:58 PM on November 19, 2015 [6 favorites]

Apple has, particularly with El Capitan, been working to shut out Homebrew, the main thing which makes any sort of real development on a Mac reasonable.

Oh come on. Asterix already pointed out that SIP only affects Homebrew in a limited way. More specifically (as far as I understand it), if you already have an existing /usr/local, there's no problem; and if you don't have /usr/local, you can create it with no issues. It's only if you have, but then choose to completely delete /usr/local that you run into an issue when trying to re-create it. I agree that's stupid, but it is (or ought to be) a remote corner case: why are you deleting your entire /usr/local? Don't you have other important stuff in there that you've hand-compiled?

And if you use a package manager like MacPorts instead, everything can live in /opt and you have no worries at all.
posted by RedOrGreen at 10:29 AM on November 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

Microsoft is integrating a package manager with Windows 10

No, they're integrating a package manager management framework with Windows 10.

Fucking architecture astronauts. How do they work?
posted by flabdablet at 3:28 AM on November 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

What was it, really? The idea that the future operating system was on the net, on Microsoft's cloud, and you would log onto everything with Windows Passport and all your stuff would be up there. It turns out: nobody needed this place for all their stuff. And nobody trusted Microsoft with all their stuff. And Hailstorm went away.

Kind of weird reading this 2008 article pouring such scorn on this concept in 2015, where everyone and their dog is doing some variant on it.
posted by Artw at 6:48 AM on November 21, 2015

everyone and their dog is doing some variant on it

And yes, that is definitely uh, that's definitely something that people do
posted by flabdablet at 8:05 AM on November 21, 2015 [1 favorite]