Why I Left Academic Philosophy - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/story/why-i-left-academic-philosophy-dc0049ea4f3a <comment><USER2> This is just a list of the usual gripes about academia. It applies to almost every subject. Including Biology, which I work in. I like how the author explains the pyramid scheme of academia:

>The task of standing out is nearly impossible. Usually it comes down to informal factors, like having an influential advisor or coming from a "top program." My school was ranked ~25–30ish (in the world) for its philosophy PhD program, and it would be polite to say most grad students struggled on the job market. "Struggling" doesn't begin to describe the pain and anguish of sending hundreds of job applications and not landing a single interview. That's not uncommon.

As a PhD dropout and research assistant in a large lab filled with overworked students, it hurts me to think about their futures. Because of my position I can't say much, but I would love for them to look around and take note of the ratio of post-docs to PhD students. If every lab has 5 students for each post- doc, then the odds can't be good.

<comment><USER3> > Because of my position I can't say much...

Of course you can. Maybe not at work, "on the record", but if there's a social gathering, you might, say, offer your view in a frank conversation about their future prospects.

<comment><USER2> I can, and do. But I am mostly ignored by my friends and co-workers who are PhD students. All of the Postdocs I know seem to be far more aware of their situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reminds me of an anecdote. GE Moore's wife met Wittgenstein, at the time GE Moore and Wittgenstein were some of the most famous philosophers in the world. Wittgenstein asked what she did, and she said "I work at a jam factory". Wittgenstein was apparently delighted and said, "thank god someone is doing something useful."

<comment><USER5> After all, Wittgenstein also studied mechanical engineering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some of the things described are eerily similar to what I observe in IT.

> As an end-result, academic papers usually end up popularity contests, a game > of who's-who where the goal is to develop incestuous citation networks so > that your impact factor will look better for hiring and/or tenure > committees.

Not specific to IT: This description applies to management behavior in large corps as well. In fact, a lot of things humans do end up popularity contests.

> I could hear [the protesters outside the lecture hall] chanting; the stark > contrast between the esoteric subtleties of meta-ethics vs. the concrete > realities of what would be considered "applied ethics" — a term usually > uttered with slight contempt — made me deeply uncomfortable.

Programmers arguing about indentation styles while their inventions drastically change how society works on all scales.

> [Image]

> An accurate representation of your average philosophy grad student.

Also an accurate representation of your average Silicon Valley startup "C" "E" "O" if you add a Macbook and a Starbucks cup.

<comment><USER7> I'm pretty sure the grad student has the MacBook and coffee too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is some point in history of a profession where the people engaging in this profession begin to look and sound like a parody of it. When the stereotype (stuff of jokes) is status quo and any deviance or individualism is considered "not serious enough" or unprofessional. Why is that? Is that a thing of _academia_? Can we do something about it, or is it just the way it goes?

<comment><USER9> _Is that a thing of academia?_

Middle management.

(Disclosure: I was a middle manager).

<comment><USER10> In academia though?

<comment><USER9> In business. I'm kind of a jerk of all trades, with a science degree and some tech skills that got me into an engineering job. From there, to project management, and eventually to people management. I got sick of it and went back to being a regular worker. Oddly enough they were willing to promote me out of management, so I made out OK in the bargain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I realize it's a bit cynical of me to say this, but this is the free market at work.

There can only be oh so many philosophy professors. Assuming a professor career lasts 40 years and each of these programs produces 10 graduates a year, how can they fit in academia? Maybe before you enroll you need to be made to sign a disclaimer that the opportunities are very scarce in the field.

<comment><USER12> Why does everything have to be labelled a "market"?

Is it really helpful to talk about an exchange of "goods" to explain the poor treatment of PhD students in academia?

<comment><USER13> It's not goods, it's a labor market. And when supply is out of whack with demand, your bargaining power goes through the floor -- which leads to situations like this.

<comment><USER14> What is really nasty is the fact that there is a huge demand for phd students as they drive research forward. So they deduce there will be demand once they graduate, which is not the case.

<comment><USER15> Elastic demand for labor - people want more when it's cheap, as much as they can get when it's free (or the government pays you for each student)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For those who care about the shortcomings of academic philosophy, I just wrote a blog post on why I'm switching from academic philosophy to computer science at least for a while. [https://dstrohmaier.github.io/life/2018/04/20/restarting- my-...](https://dstrohmaier.github.io/life/2018/04/20/restarting-my-life.html)

I recognise at least some of the points, although I'm much less bothered by philosophy having little connection to the pragmatic purposes of many people. The abstract she uses to illustrate her point is also a infelicitous choice. It is from Sinhababu's "Possible Girls" and that guy is a weirdo, in the best sense of the word, even for philosophy.

</comment><comment><USER17> I admire the work of academic philosophers like Nick Bostrom, Peter Singer or David Chalmers (which, yes, includes the "metametaphysics" mocked in the OP). And the few philosophers I've talked to in person, like Huw Price, left a very good impression on me. And their work is important to the future of humanity: I've talked to many people who changed their whole careers after reading Singer's _The Life You Can Save_ or Bostrom's _Superintelligence_.

At the same time, it's true that academic careers are surprisingly terrible on average and fewer people should choose them.

</comment><comment><USER18> Philosophy was actually pretty popular in the US up until 1950 or so. In particular, for the latter part of the 19th and first part of the 20th century the country had Pragmatism, a philosophy designed for America.

But then the field got taken over by Logical Positivists and Analytic philosophers following Russell and early Wittgenstein,and they tried to turn it into a rigorous and mostly irrelevant science. And in the meantime in the humanities people turned to continental philosophy and eventually postmodernism,and in political science there were the Straussians. All of these went off in very different directions from the country, and as a consequence attracted followers who didn't have much useful or persuasive to say to the vast majority of people.

There are exceptions, like Martha Nussbaum or Peter Singer. But academic philosophy today is mostly irrelevant.

</comment><comment><USER19> How can you be smart enough to get into an elite graduate program in Philosophy and not be aware that this is exactly what academic life is going to be like?

In the 1990s in Computer Science people were well aware that being an academic could result in Professors getting less money than their graduates first jobs.

Is it because everyone still thinks they are a special snowflake and they will get great prizes immediately or something?

(edit) Should have added. Some of the smarted people I know also went into academia and some have really made it. It's just that well, there are so many academic 'refugees' who leave because the job prospects are dire and this has been the case for decades. And so many of those people are very bright and hardworking too.

<comment><USER12> Lets consider the other side, how can a "elite" graduate program in philosophy be dumb enough to accept someone with very incorrect expectations? A PhD student dropping out is costly for them too.

<comment><USER19> The graduate program gets money and cheap labour from enrolling students.

<comment><USER20> Then a smart program will find ones who won't drop out

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> You don't become a philosopher when you are a researcher at a philosophy department. If departments do this, they are mistaken. What you do is basically history of philosophy. You can be a philosopher / thinker at the same time, but you are not necessarily a philosopher if you are a researcher in philosophy, or you don't necessarily need to participate in academia if you want to do philosophy.

</comment><comment><USER12> Summary: it was academic and she didn`t like it, finding it too abstract and disconnected from the real world.

I don`t see much else, sure there is the section on sexism, but she spends more time talking about how boring her chosen subject was.

<comment><USER22> You left out the combativeness, the fact that hardly anyone will read your work, the unnecessary inaccessibility of the field, the low pay of post-grad work and poor odds of getting tenure, and the academic equivalent of pagerank gaming to gain notice.

Even by an analytic philosopher's standard, your summary is rather uncharitable and reductive.

<comment><USER12> I would characterize that as the standard "I didn't like it" for academia, listing its well known problems. More interesting would be a discussion about why the support systems in place didn't protect her from them, but this is simply a list of common problems.

<comment><USER22> Sure, but you might be surprised how many undergrads go in not realizing how common these are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Seems true for academia in general. Most CS papers are utterly useless drivel, too (speaking from my own stuff; nice projects, but completely useless from an academic point of view).

</comment><comment><USER24> The 97% white men stat is easy to explain: I imagine it difficult to really prove yourself against implicit bias in the humanities.

<comment><USER25> Bias is certainly possible, but you need proof of racism before you proclaim it

<comment><USER26> Ha! Since when has that ever stopped anyone?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> HN has a fascination for the downfall of humanities career.</comment>


How to Live a Better Life with Less - <AUTHOR> http://zenhabits.net/2009/08/how-to-live-a-better-life-with-less/ <comment><USER2> I agree wholeheartedly with this.

For anyone who's interested, my wish list is:

1\. No debt

2\. Index linked income stream of about $100,000 annually

3\. Camper van

4\. Second hand Porsche ( can't help that, I'm 45)

5\. Happy, healthy family</comment>


Show HN: Receive desktop notifications from your web apps - <AUTHOR> https://notiapp.com/

<comment><USER2> Coming soon to a browser near you, the HTML5 Notification API:

<http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/notifications/quick/> <http://dangercove.github.com/html5-notifications/>

<comment><AUTHOR> That's cool, if you happen to have the web app open. With Noti, the app just runs all the time (out of the way) and lets you receive messages at any time.

<comment><USER2> Nice! Thanks for pointing that out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cool concept, but even using Zapier, I can't find any of the things I'd actually like to be notified about.

To provide a couple easy examples, I want notifications for time-wasting sites like reddit and facebook so that I spend less time visiting those sites to check for notifications. In the case of facebook, I want to know about anything that triggers a notification, or about incoming messages. On reddit, I want to be notified about a comment reply, PM, mod mail or new modqueue item.

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting, could you shed some light on the tech behind this? For example, does this use a custom solution to display notifications or Growl / ML notifications?

<comment><AUTHOR> On Mountain Lion, we use the Notification Centre by default although you can opt to use Growl if you would prefer. In Lion, only Growl is available (obviously) :)

<comment><USER4> And are you poling the noti server? I'm wondering how realtime it is :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> We use a socket-based connection on the clients. Messages should be delivered in very near to real-time. There's no polling here ;)

<comment><USER5> is this mac only?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks really useful. Do you have plans to monetize it?

<comment><AUTHOR> No immediate plans for this, no. We developed the app for use in our own apps (namely, <http://sirportly.com>) but thought we'd share the awesomeness :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best Business Credit Card - <AUTHOR>

Hi there, I am looking for a business credit card to put thousands of dollars of expenses on.  I was wondering what card you guys recommend and why?<p>Right now I am considering CapitalOne NoHassle, but I've seen a lot of companies using various AmEx cards. <comment><USER2> I like American Express especially for the customer services and some protection policies they have.

For example I remember when I bought the first iPhone for $600, after Apple reduced the price by $200 and refunded $100 with a gift card, Amex refunded (even if the iPhone wasn't covered by their policy) everyone by the $100 to make up for the difference.

<comment><USER3> I second American Express -- awesome customer support.

<comment><USER4> Yep American Express - Plum card rocks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are you looking for a _credit_ card or a _charge_ card? There are important differences, and its not clear from your question which you really mean.

Amex has credit cards, but they are mostly (IME) associated with charge card accounts.

<comment><AUTHOR> What's the key difference between a charge card and a credit card?

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_card>

"A charge card is a plastic card that provides an alternative payment to cash when making purchases in which the issuer and the cardholder enter into an agreement that the debt incurred on the charge account will be paid in full and by due date (usually every thirty days) or be subject to severe late fees and restrictions on card use"</comment></comment></comment>


This Is Your Brain on Architecture  - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/michael-cannell/cannell/your-brain-architecture

<comment><USER2> "So if your staff is, say, proofreading or debriefing they're better off in a red room. But if they're brainstorming ideas for a new marketing campaign, red is the color."

Clearly his proofreaders were in a blue room.

<comment><USER3> Great catch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Abstract and attention-to-details are opposites, and it's difficult to do both simultaneously. Both are valuable.

I wonder if this is applicable to programming languages. Because lisp enables abstractions, do users tend to focus on abstractions more than on details? Whereas C encourages more attention-to-detail at the expense of abstractions. It's not just what these languages are good at, but what type of thinking they encourage.

Of course, abstraction and attention-to-details are not mutually exclusive and there are ways of attending to both; but I'm intrigued by the article's suggestion of a trade-off.

</comment><comment><USER5> i remember seeing a recent HN post about the correlation between hackerthink and spacial orientation. this is a great follow up to that story. it would be nice if there was a feature that would connect the two (something like a suggested thread merge).</comment>


A 12-year-old girl is facing criminal charges for using certain emoji - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2016/02/27/a-12-year-old-girl-is-facing-criminal-charges-for-using-emoji-shes-not-alone/ <comment><USER2> Emojis-even more dangerous than clocks ...</comment>


Pay $35 once and get a VPS for life: too good to be true? - <AUTHOR> http://cloudatcost.com/ <comment><USER2> Well, if nothing else, it's only for the life of the company, not your life.

The T&Cs include several outs for them, too: [http://www.cloudatcost.com/terms.php](http://www.cloudatcost.com/terms.php) Including, but not limited to, an open clause that allows them to change the pricing any time (arguably intended for the monthly service but not so restricted in the T&Cs), 10.4 and 10.5 defines "abusive usage" and allows them to shut off VMs according to certain standards, but they get to judge them entirely, and section 20 has the standard "The terms of this Agreement, including fees, charges, features, content or any other aspects of a Service, may change at any time and without prior notice."

These are not particularly unusual clauses, which you know if you are in the habit of reading these agreements, so I'm not making any accusations that cloudatcost is trying to defraud you, or that they have any intentions at this time of not honoring the agreement. I am only pointing out that in the future they have several escape hatches, if you were for some reason _counting_ on this service. If you are interested, go ahead and sign up, I would just account for every month after the 4th or 5th one as a nice bonus, rather than your right. Have a backup plan.

</comment><comment><USER3> "For life" aka until the company lasts. The problem with these "for life" promises that it is hard to believe that they are going to be around longer than a year or so. If there was a big company behind such a project I would be more inclined to take it seriously.

<comment><USER4> In theory, a for-life service could operate similarly to financial instruments such as annuities and life insurance. Insurance and reinsurance could cover "catastrophic" events such as the company failing. Essentially, actuarial science could underpin such a venture.

Not that I think that's happening here or that the price would be anywhere near as attractive...but then again, a bet on cheaper computing and network bandwidth in the future seems like a sound one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Don't be surprised when you get the bill for the service you've never ordered: You currently have a balance of $1,568.00 due on your account with Cloud At Cost.

Invoice Description:

#40761 - CloudPRO / CloudPRO - 1 Month (10/11/2015 - 11/10/2015) $0.00 #40761 - CloudPRO - CPU's: 100 Cores (10/11/2015 - 11/10/2015) $300.00 #40761 - CloudPRO - RAM: 512 GB (10/11/2015 - 11/10/2015) $768.00 #40761 - CloudPRO - Storage: 2000 GB (10/11/2015 - 11/10/2015) $500.00

Total Due: $1,568.00 Paid: $0.00 Balance Due: $1,568.00

And don't be surprised that nobody at that company is going to answer your questions (support, billing, etc).

<comment><USER6> So you signed up for the $35 one time fee VPC and you are now getting charged $1,568.00 for the first month of service?

<comment><USER5> They just added a new service to my account without my wish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You only get 1CPU (probably heavily limited), 512MB of RAM and 10GB of storage.

This is basically the AWS micro instance which you get for free: "AWS Free Tier includes 750 hours of Linux and Windows t2.micro instances each month for one year" (If you want it free for life, just create another AWS account ;)).

These instances are way to limited to run anything even remotely intensive at best you'll be able to use it as some VPN/Proxy or a small scale hosted VOIP server, but what more often than not will happen is that tons of people (hopefully) will register pay the 35$ and never use them, this is pretty much the Gym membership business model.

With thin provisioning at the fact that at best one out of 10 registered instances will actually be used they can make a huge profit, especially in the short term and considering that with how hardware scales overtime and the fact that more of the few actual users that they'll on board that would actually use that instance will drop off as time passes, it will become exponentially cheaper for them to support this type of business model with time.

This is a pretty ingenious quick cash grab if they'll manage to attract a large amount of people because 2 years down the line they'll probably could support their entire actual user base with a few RasPi's in a broom closet some where (And yes I'm aware that you can purchase much bigger VPS's from them for a much higher (onetime) cost, but the overall premise still stands)....

</comment><comment><USER8> We have been here before. Check out the history of Textdrive and Joyent. If the company succeeds (receives funding and has to answer to investors) then it will need to eventually push these accounts out. If it doesn't succeed, then it will eventually die.

Further, as the hosting landscape changes, any sort of hosting environment may become obsolete and less useful. The first "lifetime" hosting offers from Textdrive were for shared hosting. Today, I would consider shared hosting next to worthless for my purposes. The same could happen to with VPS hosting.

Will they be upgrading these things over time? You would likely be continuing to shell out money over time to upgrade your resources.

The world of the internets is constantly changing. Anything which is "for life" doesn't reflect that. This is a marketing campaign which doesn't reflect reality.

I would rather pay the monthly fee. Cloud hosting providers are driving costs always lower. Container hosting on these clouds provide even cheaper options.

Who knows, maybe one day we'll be able to live forever through the blockchain. ;)

</comment><comment><USER9> 1) Those aren't necessarily scam offers. You probably get a very low service and performance, and the company is betting that a lot of people will subscribe to their service because of the attractiveness, but then won't use it 2) At the same time they're betting on the fact that the price of hardware and bandwidth goes down with time, making your server less and less expensive for them, and at the same time power requirements go up for applications, making the server useless for you, so you'll basically stop using it. 3) If those bets pay, they stay in business and possibly charge for other, different plans. If those bets don't pay, they close and you lose your money.

</comment><comment><USER10> I got a "for life" server years ago. I didn't expect it to really be for my life, but I at least hoped it would be for the life of the company. It wasn't.

Oh well. At least I got a few years out of it and learned never to deal with Joyent.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've bought a few. They work but they're slow and unreliable. The network goes down semi-regularly while they deal with spam too.

</comment><comment><USER12> These servers have a real bad performance. I would suggest to avoid them if possible.

</comment><comment><USER13> i was going to flag as spam like, but yeah any service that is for life especially in the cloud is too good to be true.</comment>


Best design practices from popular Alexa Skills (+ PDF cheat sheet) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/tortu-blog/voice-and-conversation-ui-design-best-practices-pdf-cheat-sheet-2f0e59adea3c <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! There is plenty of VUI design articles without any real-world examples at all. I think that the best way to learn something is to check out real- world examples of that thing.

So I talked with a bunch of popular Alexa Skills, wrote down the best design practices, and compiled them in one article. And I also made a PDF cheat sheet with all the examples put in short.

I'm thinking about writing the next part of the article with more advanced practices, so let me know if you'd be interested in it.

Happy to answer any of your questions!</comment>


Apple's products are getting harder to use, ignore principles of design (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://jnd.org/apples_products_are_getting_harder_to_use_because_they_ignore_principles_of_design/ <comment><USER4> The iPad was my gateway into the Apple orchard. I had never purchased an Apple product until about a decade ago, when I got the first Retina iPad as a gift for someone who didn't use computers. I was so impressed by how intuitive the device and OS was for them, that I installed macOS in a VM on Windows to try iOS development. I fell in love with macOS (back during Lion) shortly before getting my first MacBook and leaving Windows forever behind, never to return.

Fast forward to a month ago. I purchased one of the newer low-end iPads as another gift for someone else who didn't use computers.

It was depressing.

The setup process was kinda annoying. No, we don't want Apple Pay, thank you. I had to enter the Apple/iCloud account credentials multiple times at different points before it stopped asking me to sign in again.

There were a lot of bugs in the system UI and the preinstalled apps.

I had to disable the multitasking gestures because they would be confusing for a new user.

They have removed labels for the Dock icons with no way to restore them, so I had to keep apps with less obvious icons out of the Dock, so they could have labels. Because a flower for photos is not a connection that many people can intuitively make.

I had to explain that dragging down from the right corner of the top edge brings up the brightness control.

Dragging down from anywhere else on the top edge brings up the notifications.

Dragging down on a blank part of the home screen's background, away from edges, brings up the search bar.

Fuck.

<comment><USER5> Oh, you want to updates your apps? That's easy. Open up the App Store and then click on your profile picture.

Wait, what?

<comment><USER6> Hold the App Store icon until a menu appears. Choose "Updates" and done.

I'm not defending Apple here. I only accidentally discovered this shortcut. I feel that designers these days expect users to explore a lot of things out of blind faith in order to discover functionality.

<comment><USER7> only works if you know where your app store icon is. i dont use the icons from the launcher screens anymore, everything goes in one folder bar the 'sticky apps'

find it much faster to just pull down and search for apps

<comment><USER8> On the Iphone it works when long pressing in the search results too. (iOS 13.3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I never owned an iOS device personally and when I offered my help to an older relative who wanted to bookmark a page on their home screen, it took me like 10 minutes to find out that I have to scroll horizontally on that Safari share menu. Due to the auto-hiding scrollbar and no cut off icons to the right, I had no idea that scrolling horizontally was possible.

This gets worse whenever I see new Apple keynotes about their latest iPad gestures for multitasking or text editing. On the computer I have visible menus where I can peek the shortcut for each action but is there anything like that on i(Pad)OS? Just adding more and more gestures without giving the user some intuitive hints/signifiers seems like a degradation of usability. The scrollbar tells me that there is more to show and auto-hiding it was a first step into the wrong direction.

I am glad that Android got rid of the dedicated menu button which only worked in very special places without showing any on-screen indication for its availability and I feel like the Option key on Macs is still hiding important things from their users.

The now deprecated(?) 3D Touch on iPhones also seems to suffer from this issue. I was expecting some sort of visual clues to the user (like differently colored buttons) that certain elements offered special actions with a harder press but instead the 3D Touch-enabled elements continued to look the same and mostly the tech-savvy users kept up with where this feature was enabled and where not.

<comment><USER10> A couple of decades ago I worked at a company that had about 200 Mac's and a similar number of PC's. One of our favorite practical jokes was to disable the mouse on Mac's. The victim quite literally could not do a thing with the computer until the mouse was re-enabled. In sharp contrast to this most Windows users could function reasonably well without the mouse.

This, of course, was a long time ago. My guess is that today this would be the case for any computer user, Windows or MacOS. At the time this was simply hilarious.

In terms of iOS, the overloading of buttons and gestures makes for a situation where most users don't use any of that stuff. The simplest example I have of this is using the volume switch to take a picture, nobody does not. I know about it and never do it. In fact, when I do it is because I pressed it by accident and end-up unintentionally taking a picture or more.

I have another example that is unrelated to computers. We have these dimming light switches in several areas of our home. If you want to turn on the lights to the pre-established dimming level you single-click the switch. If, on the other hand, you want to go to full intensity, you double-click them. Despite having explained this, everyone uses the little tiny dimming lever on the side of the large push-button plate to go up to full intensity. And visitors, of course, have no clue because the feature isn't discoverable except for a fortuitous accident.

Progress isn't without side effects I guess.

<comment><USER11> There's a much more evil prank than that:

A user was having a really bizarre problem: They could log in when they were sitting down in a seat in front of the keyboard, but when they were standing in front of the keyboard, their password didn't work! The problem happened every time, so they called for support, who finally figured it out after watching them demonstrate the problem many times:

It turned out that some joker had rearranged the numbers keys on the keyboard, so they were ordered "0123456789" instead of "1234567890". And the user's password had a digit in it. When the user was sitting down comfortably in front of the keyboard, they looked at the screen while they touch-typed their password, and were able to log in. But when they were standing in front of the computer, they looked at the keyboard and pressed the numbers they saw, which were wrong!

<comment><USER10> That's hilarious!

What's sad in this little sub-thread is to watch people down-voting and taking this too seriously. These are healthy jokes, just good fun. Nobody is saying Macs are bad or inferior in any way. Heck, I own a bunch of them, PC's as well. Lighten-up people!

...and then there was this time when I spent a full hour with an x-acto knife above the dropped ceiling carefully, silently, carving a hole right behind one of my co-workers to drop a firecracker right behind him. Yeah, that's how we rolled.

I have a feeling that today's workplace has become far more rigid and intolerant of, well, being human. People would get fired for probably every single thing we did back then...like wiring-up a fire extinguisher to discharge into someone's crotch (male coworker, 'cause someone is likely to assume the worst) when they sat at their desk. Or how about jumping out of the bushes with two water hoses to hose down someone when they got to work? There's more...we had lots of fun and worked 14 to 16 hour days. That was twenty years ago, we are still good friends.

Oh, I have to mention one more. I bought a new car and proudly showed it off to everyone in the team at the time. One of the other engineers rented a crashed version of exactly the same car from a junk yard. He had the tow truck swap my car for the utterly destroyed car in the parking lot. He also swapped the license plates. My car was towed and parked around the corner. Imagine my reaction when I came out of the office to get lunch and my car looked like Optimus Prime stomped on it! It was absolutely hilarious beyond description.

<comment><USER11> The crashed car prank is epic! Sounds like something Bertram Gilfoyle would do to Dinesh Chugtai's Tesla.

I wrote a "Flakey Keyboard Simulator" in 6502 assembly on the Apple ][ to drive my brother crazy.

<comment><USER10> All of this definitely required everyone to have a sense of humor. It developed over years of working together. The participants could take it as well as they dished it out. It sure makes for a lot of great stories to remember.

Here's a quick one: One of my coworkers watched my frustration level rise throughout the day as I was debugging one of my hardware designs. The thing was failing intermittently and I just couldn't figure out what was going on. Being a hardware + embedded software project made it that much more difficult.

At the end of the day he calls me over to his workbench. He doesn't say a thing. He opens a drawer, grabs hold of a large knob on a variac, turns it down and all the alarms on my workbench --at the other end of the room-- go off. He turns it back up to 120 V, looks at me and smiles. The SOB got me good. Brilliant!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have a desktop Windows only product that I sell (10s of thousands of clients). It does not have the most eye pleasing UI design but it is very functional and ergonomic. All possible actions are clearly visible and / or discoverable. And every action can be accessed in less clicks then in any of competitor's products. I actually get some praises for it.

Still every once in a while I get support email telling me that the product sucks "cause it is ugly". Most of those complaining were Apple users who installed a product using Parallels. One of the emails actually was written by pro UX designer (at least this is who the author claimed to be). This got me curios to find out what is really wrong in my GUI that irritates some users so I asked for short interview on Skype/Phone. We had a discussion. Among the things he showed me the example of light gray text on white background and told me that is very eye pleasing an mine are too contrast. For fuck sake I could not read the example he showed to me without glasses and when I complained he said that the beauty trumps usability/ergonomics. I just bailed out. Maybe he is right but I'll stick to what I believe works.

<comment><USER13> I have had conversations with several "designers", some from FAANG, and all have held the general belief that having strong authority over how the UI looks and getting eye-candy at the cost of usability and ergonomics was 'without doubt the right choice'.

In my frank opinion, many designers hold a position of subjective judgement and thrive on the power that comes with that. This is like a developer making arbitrary decisions about a product because they like the technical implementation better.

Data, and actual user preference, should always be the key decider. Not some arbitrary rule-decider.

<comment><USER14> Who could be right, the multiple designers who do this every day, or my opinion about data (which I don't see backed up by any data)? If Steve Jobs had followed user preference he'd have made a faster flip phone.

On another topic, putting someone's job into quotes just isn't a good look for any argument. If you have to straw man to get your point across, it might not be that great.

<comment><USER12> "Who could be right, the multiple designers who do this every day..."

Those designer might actually be very good one's but they might have different goals. Their design might be all about eye pleasing hoping that mos potential customers will glance at it, like it and buy it. Ergonomics might not be their concern at all.

There are other UX designers though, making GUI for pilots, nuclear station operators etc. etc. They have somewhat different goals. I feel that my brain digests what they do way better then the stuff coming from a first group

I come from a different background where I learned to value reaching the goal in most clear and shortest way

<comment><USER15> If you read The Design of Everyday Things, you'd gladly remember that to each user-unfriendly design, the author sarcastically added "but it won a lot of design awards". Which implied that the givers of those awards had one-track mind. And since the book's author co-wrote the article that we discuss, aesthetics at the cost of usability is a major sin for him.

On the other hand, since (insert obligatory joke about $1000 monitor stands), losing customers is no longer their worry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> You know what I hate? I hate the fact that every time I open an app (most of which I use relatively rarely), I get a bunch of popups trying to introduce me to a variety of features I never needed in the first place. That goes beyond iOS, but also websites including Slack.

E.g. Why does iOS, instead of silently allowing me to use it's new version, feeds me this gamified introduction to "what's new in 13.x.y.z?".

What I want is a piece of software that doesn't change. Or when it changes, it doesn't notify me of it - it just keeps working until I find enough time to actually go on my own journey of discovery.

I am not-so-subtly exhausted by every single half-capable developer spoon- feeding me their "new features". I've downloaded your app because of the features it _had_ - I mostly don't care about what you add later on.

<comment><USER17> A contrary indie developer perspective: some features are just really hard to discover even when you know what are you looking for. I don't have time for making those introductions, and end up getting feedback requests for some features my app already has.

<comment><USER18> _A contrary indie developer perspective: some features are just really hard to discover_

Maybe tackle _this_ problem first, then fall back to exposition.

One suggestion might be to start by removing hieroglyphic icons, or at least augmenting them with text labels.

<comment><USER17> > Maybe tackle this problem first, then fall back to exposition.

You assume it can be tackled. Here's a concrete example:

The tool automatically snaps new windows to where user wants them to be. Rarely the user wants to undo that. The core functionality (autosnap) does not require any visible interface whatsoever. If I want user to see the undo button, I have to place it somewhere over his app's window, which bloats the interface (the undo is uncommon), or outright impossible, since some windows have custom titlebars.

So there's a hotkey, configurable in settings. How can you make it more discoverable?

<comment><USER19> Popup at the bottom of the screen "Autolayout applied. <Undo button (shortcut in parenthesis)> [don't show again checkbox]"

<comment><USER17> What if it happens to many windows at once? What if they end up covering each other? Are you sure user wants to see that popup he'd hardly ever use every time he starts an app?

<comment><USER20> not gp, but wouldn't that "don't show again" checkbox they mentioned fix this problem?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I remember as a child showing my mother how to do stuff on our family Mac with OS 7.5 and being baffled that she didn't 'get' the UI.

A decade ago I wrote some Cocoa stuff and read the HIG religiously.

Now I'm in my 30s. I can't work out how to do stuff on my iPhone (Android makes perfect sense). mac OS, of which I have used every major version of since 6, is starting to break with the mental model I understand and is becoming slowly less usable to me.

Suddenly I feel old.

<comment><USER22> I don't know if android is immune anymore. The latest update to my tablet dispensed with the labels on the desktop icons and I didn't figure out how to get them back.

It's a sad state of affairs across the board.

<comment><USER23> > The latest update to my tablet dispensed with the labels on the desktop > icons

Try using a third party launcher, maybe? Nova is a great alternative.

<comment><USER24> LOL, this is exactly the problem. You shouldn't have to download a third party launcher, desktop, app screen to use the device efficiently.

I think iOS and Android are both shit shows. I pick up an android device and it's a pain in the ass to figure out. That's terrible design.

iOS seems to break their own rules and hide more and more in the name of minimalism. It's asinine. 3D Touch was moronic. More than three gestures is moronic. Context sensitive swipes off the screen are moronic.

All of this became abundantly clear seeing my 77 year old grandma, who used a old android phone for years, have so many WTF moments on iOS 13. It's not clear what is a button. She accidentally gestures and thinks her phone is busted.

<comment><USER25> My father literally can not send an iMessage without triggering "gentle effect." It has been highly annoying getting that every time he sends a message for the past three years with no way of disabling it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> matthew-wegner New gestures introduced in iOS 13:

      Copy: three-finger pinch
      Cut: three-finger double pinch
      Paste: three-finger pinch out (expand)
      Undo: three-finger swipe left (or three-finger double tap)
      Redo: three-finger swipe right
      Shortcut menu: three-finger single tap

<comment><USER26> This is fucking horrible. Worth an episode in Silicon Valley horrible. What I hate most about the new Apple devices is that I always do something that produces a gesture or a hidden function. Grab iPhone quickly by the sides - get a screenshot. Swipe with four fingers looking North shaking - <USER2> something else. Who the hell needs all this crap?

<comment><USER27> > Grab iPhone quickly by the sides - get a screenshot.

That's not a gesture, that's you pressing the side buttons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is anyone trying to back this up with a proper scientific study of whether users find it easier or harder to use? Seems just like opinion and debates about aesthetics otherwise?

If I wanted to claim that JavaScriptCore was getting slower and I didn't post any data to back that up people would laugh me out of the conversation.

<comment><USER29> As long as we miss SI unit for the "hard to use" attribute we will have to fall back to user opinions and debates - and potential randomly constructed half cooked polls.

The opinions and debates are not looking well for Apple though.

<comment><USER30> We already have usability testing, but there are more dimensions to usability than can be encapsulated by one SI unit. As an example one measure might be the number of seconds required to perform a set sequence of actions such as copying text from a web page to a Notes entry. That's a completely different task to copying a pre-written comment from Notes into a web page, even though they both involve the same apps and are measured in seconds.

<comment><USER29> Nice isolated example that tells nothing about the "hard to use" factor. We can repeat such for days without yielding reliable empirical results. The issue is too compound.

Opinion of the users, especially repeated ones ought to be enough to justify a concern. There are too many to doubt its validity even without exact but half cooked partial numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Apple has fallen into the same trap that Microsoft has -- changing their UI not to advance the state of the art, but just for the sake of changing it so they have something new to sell.

<comment><USER32> This comment makes no sense.

Apple hasn't fundamentally changed the UI on iOS or OSX since the initial releases apart from say the iOS look & feel refresh and gestures to support iPhone X. And in the last few releases there have been almost no UI changes.

It's actually one of the disappointments of the Apple platforms.

<comment><USER33> > Apple hasn't fundamentally changed the UI on iOS or OSX since the initial > releases apart from say the iOS look & feel refresh and gestures to support > iPhone X.

So for the iPhone alone Apple has changed the 1. look and feel to be more "modern" (which means showing less accordances), 2. fashionably removed the very affordable home-button for no functional reason and 3. replaced it with non-discoverable, complex gestures.

Pardon my math but to me that sounds like ignoring 3 core design-principles just to appear trendy and have something new to sell.

<comment><USER34> I'm increasingly frustrated with iOS 13 text selection, copy, and paste semantics.

I had the first iPhone and I remember it was really good at selecting text. A far cry from the painful experience today.

Rearranging icons is also pretty awful, it takes me multiple tries to move something into a folder and then rearrange said folder.

<comment><USER35> I was gonna post about this as well.

How do they expect me to be able to position the cursor precisely when my finger is right over it and they removed the "magnifying glass" that used to appear above it?

The keyboard "hold & swipe the space bar" trick doesn't really work. It's really hard to go down vertically (since the space bar is all the way at the bottom), it's slow especially if you need multiple attempt as each attempt has a delay before the feature activates (3D Touch solves this on my iPhone 8 but they removed it from the new models).

Finally, what the fuck is that idea of moving the cursor by grabbing it directly? It makes no sense, has no "prior art" so nobody is used to it (and why would there be prior art for the dumbest UX ever) and it _always_ gets in the way when trying to scroll (in fact I tried the space bar trick first to avoid this but couldn't move down with it so had to scroll the text box directly and ended up moving the cursor instead). If I recall correctly even _themselves_ had an embarrassing moment trying to demo it at the Keynote.

<comment><USER36> > Finally, what the fuck is that idea of moving the cursor by grabbing it > directly?

I didn't know you could do that. Thanks. It's definitely not great, but better than tap-and-hold where you want the cursor to go, and then giving up in frustration because the whole word gets selected.

<comment><USER35> Tap and hold _between_ words used to bring up a cursor and a magnifying glass above your finger so you could move it and know where you were. Plus moving it away from the currently visible line would start scrolling infinitely allowing you to navigate beyond what you see on the screen.

Both of those behaviours are now gone. Moving the cursor with the finger now scrolls both the text field _and_ the outer page, at a speed high enough to make it unusable.

The "space bar trick" on the other hand doesn't scroll the text beyond a couple of characters, making it impossible to get to the end of a long URL in the address bar for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The silver lining is, now that we've all lived through Apple's Jobs years, we at least know that that kind of quality, consistency, attention to detail, etc. is possible.

Sooner or later somebody will take all the good ideas from Apple's heyday and make another good OS. Maybe, if we're lucky, it'll even be open-source.

It's the kind of thing I dream of doing myself one day. But if someone beats me to it, that's fine too :)

<comment><USER38> I share your optimism, that people who remember what good Apple design felt like, will carry on the torch.

The generational knowledge transfer seems to have broke down somewhere within Apple, that only the superficial aesthetic is being carried on, while the fundamentals - user-friendly design, repairability, extensibility - <USER3> getting left behind.

> ..take all the good ideas from Apple's heyday and make another good OS. > Maybe, if we're lucky, it'll even be open-source.

There are a number of open-source community projects that impressed me as having such a vision, going back to the roots, keeping the dream alive and designing the way forward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> One of the biggest gripes I have with modern UI (both Apple and Android) is animation times. Try exporting an image from Dropbox app to Photos app on the iPhone. There are so many animations that take up precious time. Do it 10 times and you're _tired_.

I feel like designers today want "sleekness" more because it sells when people look at it. Ohh...look at that shiny animation, so impressive.

I want instant actions at the expense of not knowing where something poped-up from. This is usually the case made by designers that animations help you understand the "Context" of where something came from. I feel like this needs to be toned down a bit. UI would feel 1000% faster.

<comment><USER40> An easy solution for developers would be to decrease the animation duration the more often a feature is used. But I have yet to see this approach in the wild.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Fearing (correctly) that the laptop I had refurbished for my mother was soon to die, I bought her an iPad. She is not in any way computer literate and dislikes change. Surely, I thought, they would have some "cheat sheets" available to boil down the basics. I bought a few on Amazon and found them to be either insufficient or crowded with esoterica.

So I set about making a set of laminated cheat sheets of my own, with a consistent design, using screenshots of all of the applications I had installed, and so on. One points out all of the buttons on the iPad, another one shows the different screens, and a third was a diagram of common gestures.

Finding the gesture list itself was ... well, quite a bit harder than I thought it ought to be. Everything seems opaque. I am reminded of one of those escape room puzzles where one must painstakingly iterate through an array of taps, drags, swipes against each and every corner, edge and pixel. It seems that one must flail about against all of the idols, oh, I'm sorry, _icons_ , hoping that one of the motions I have just performed will propitiate the gods. Watch for signs.

It seems, from my vantage, that learning the Apple Way was done with the very first Apple products and that now there is an expectation that everyone has been following along all this time. Certainly, that was my experience with my first smartphone, the iPhone SE. I was constantly having to look up how to do the smallest things and hoping that the information I found was not outdated. I also had to pester other Apple users for tips. My high school computer science teacher would be appalled at the lack of forthrightness.

While I think I did an alright job with the cheat sheets, she never _did_ use that iPad much.

<comment><USER42> The sad part is, it doesn't have to be that way.

The problem is, the gesture metaphor is deeply rooted in manipulation of window pane of desktop based OS, which normally has menu bar and controls.

What does iOS lack? Both. Most gesture-based controls are torturous workaround the absence.

I have new ipad and it pains me to look at this cheat sheet.

[https://www.cnet.com/how-to/16-gestures-that-will-make- you-l...](https://www.cnet.com/how-to/16-gestures-that-will-make-you-love- using-your-ipad/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> There's one key difference in modern, big company software, vs. the software of yesteryear, in my opinion - 20 years ago, most software was written by people who would use the software. Today, software is written and designed by people completely disconnected from the user, or, in the case of things like apple, people whose status as a designer matters more (legitimately) than what they design.

<comment><USER44> This is the case with most of open source software. Three notable cases:

1\. GIMP, which is unusable to such a degree that somebody actually decided to make a version with a decent interface, called GIMPshop... what happened to GIMPshop you can only guess [1].

2\. LibreOffice which is much much worse interface-wise than Apache OpenOffice, although hyper-aggressively promoted. That being said, neither of them are even remotely capable of licking the knee of Microsoft Office.

3\. systemd, which "suddenly" found its way in all distributions, even though it goes against everything that GNU/Linux or Unix-like philosophy represents.

All this makes me think that unusable interfaces are an intentional "feature" of "some" software.

[1] [https://web.archive.org/web/20190608205114/https://en.wikipe...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190608205114/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMPshop)

<comment><USER45> I actually think the real problem with those is the exact opposite. Those projects were initially hacked together for their own specific workflow, and are now going through the "growing pains" of becoming popular and somewhat ubiquitous.

On GIMP: There have been various forks throughout the years led by various groups of artists, but they have typically been very hacky. Currently the Glimpse fork is planning to do a redesign of the UI.

On Libreoffice: This is the result of the split from Oracle -- the project is now driven by consultants and ISVs. It works if you're willing to pay one of those or become one yourself. If you pay $0 and expect to get a perfect clone of MS Office then you will be disappointed.

On systemd: The design seems to be heavily inspired by the "giant ball of C" design that is already used by the Linux kernel. I would argue that GNU/Linux in general is too decentralized to have an overarching philosophy.

From my perspective as someone who does UI on open source projects, ultimately a lot of the high-level problems come down to lack of resources. It's hard to find good designers who are willing to contribute to open source, and it's expensive to put together a focus group to gather feedback. The typical corporate methods of gathering telemetry and doing A/B testing are not really useful to any of those projects you mentioned.

<comment><USER44> First of all, they won't get more popular than they are now. Second, I doubt any person who uses said software for professional or amateur reasons has the skills or time to cobble it together. Because they either do one thing or the other.

GIMP: "Groups of artists." See, there's your problem. As much as I despise Steve Jobs, I finally came to understand why he was so appreciated.

Libreoffice: What you said doesn't explain why Apache OpenOffice is still better. I do not expect an MS Office clone (although an MS Word clone would be welcome) but I do expect those writing the software to check out MS Word and point out why it is better... and then slowly but surely move in that direction, not away from it.

systemd: You can't compare an init system, which has the role of starting daemons and whatnot, to a kernel which is basically hardware drivers.

As for your perspective... if you are working for 0$ do not complain about lack of resources. You said it yourself, didn't you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Apple made a huge mistake when it launched iOS 7: it failed to improve its UI. I don't know if it was a matter of the best and most capable designers leaving the company or bad decisions by the managers, but the truth is that iOS 7 was never a good UI for iPhones, especially the biggest ones. There are many things that are missing that are obvious, such as being able to organize the icons on your Home screen as you wish like you can do in Android, and I suspect that many of the things that are excellently solved in Android's Material Design, at Apple can't because of patents. I think it all boils down to patents because I don't believe that a company like Apple has such a poorly designed operating system.

<comment><USER32> Not sure why you are talking about iOS7 since it was released 7 years.

But anyway the reason Apple doesn't allow for customisation of the home screen is because it adds complexity. And given they are trying to sell to people who are computer and technology illiterate you don't want complexity.

<comment><USER42> I feel ios7 had lasting negative impact not just on ios, but also general usability on the web. Even Apple back peddled on some of its design decision in subsequent updates.

iOS has gotten already too complex that I don't think avoiding complexity is a strong enough reason for not offering home screen customization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> One of my "favorite" paradigmatic UI changes (Mac): the Finder and Open/Save dialog sidebar. Up to and including Snow Leopard, these would include custom icons, once the flagship feature of user customization and personalization. However, this also served productivity, just assign a simple colored bubble icon to any of your current project folders and a few decent, but recognizable ones to the major entry points into your file structure, and these were easily recognized and located in any file list at a glance, without even reading a single character.

Then, Apple decided that this may endanger their precious industrial design. Finder icons, especially those for folders, are to be clean and uniform – and to be exclusively chosen and delivered by Apple. (Also, color must not serve a purpose and isn't allowed to transport any information.) Icons are not for everyone, quot licet Iovi non licet bovi. Now, it's all about reading, or, if you maintain a really clean and short sidebar, about position. Still, every time a Finder window or file dialog is accessed, some precious seconds and some maybe even more precious focus is lost. However, these are apparently not that precious as Apple's pristine looks. – OK, Apple, now I know, where I rank in your esteem. Thanks for letting me know.

</comment><comment><USER48> I feel that for OSX, everything past Mavericks has been a downgrade. What's the point in having a beautiful hiDPI display if you're going to flatten all UI elements into a solid color?

<comment><USER49> Everything past _Snow Leopard_. Lion was a disaster, and there is literally no feature I use that I prefer in any Mac OS created since then. What's more, the OS has become uglier and buggier.

Edit: actually, I like the addition of Finder > Cut, and Finder > Rename. So, hey, there _is_ something!

<comment><USER50> Snow Leopard (10.6) also lacks batch file rename, automatic file versioning, full screen app support, trackpad gestures, and autosave. IMO that last one is huge—I remember losing many hours of work in Snow Leopard as a high school student, because whenever I got into the "zone" of writing I'd stop remembering to hit ⌘S.

Lion (10.7) has all of these features—Apple added a lot in that release. And while Lion itself was a buggy mess, Mountain Lion (10.8) and Mavericks (10.9) are basically just Lion with stability fixes.

I do prefer Snow Leopard aesthetically for it's higher contrast UI, but 10.7–10.9 are still well ahead of modern macOS in that respect, and there are even some individual visual elements I prefer in those versions, such as the Dock.

Mavericks is my favorite release overall. Launchpad is stupid, and probably the first place where Apple really began to break OS X's internal consistency, but it can be hidden away easily enough. Yosemite (10.10) is where things got really bad.

(Just for fun: Mavericks > Snow Leopard > Mountain Lion > High Sierra > Sierra > El Capitan > Mojave > Lion > Yosemite > Catalina)

<comment><USER51> autosave is awful when mandatory, as it is in FCPX. when optional, like Office, it's great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> They made lot "invisible" improvements in 10.15 (apfs is finished, kern speedup, metal, ml, fonts on 4k etc..) but not sure about this iOS look on my MacBookPro, Now my os look like web page from '98\. Way too flat. Icons are broken on toolbar, hated how it looks.

Suggestion:

1\. One Pro OSX version for Pro users (cut all services that eat ram and can be security hole) and add more options for advanced users.

2\. Cut price around $800 or if you can cut more without damage in "real" performance and quality. Because not all apps use all power anyway.

3\. And most important, fix broken flat UI, find balance. We have lot talented designers without job.

4\. Don't break old apps with new update, find way for LTS.

MacOS is still my favourite BSD distro and mac from 2013/15 is perfect HW. So, if you do not know how to improve it, then keep what works and what users like or ask.

</comment><comment><USER53> One of the biggest time wasting annoyances Apple has created is the touch bar virtual escape key. I'm triggering it constantly. How did they not know this was a problem before they brought it to market?

Thankfully, they're going back to a real escape key in the latest MacBook Pro.

And what happened to the backlit Apple on the lid? Another sacrifice to the god of thinness?

Like getting rid of the Kensington security slot. My first MacBook had that and I used it with a cable lock in coffee shops. Also sacrificed to eliminate size and weight, I suppose.

<comment><USER54> As a developer, the Touch Bar as a whole is trash. I want to type without looking at the keyboard, and now I suddenly always have to look at the keyboard.

Accidentally pressing the escape key is just one of many issues I have with that "feature".

<comment><USER53> I really doubt Steve Jobs would have given the touch bar a green light.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I've wanted to like Apple's way of doing things for years - Unix-like and support for MS Office, "ecosystem" integration - but every time I've used their products I've returned them or passed them off to my family members hoping they'd get more use out of them.

Nowadays, I get more questions than ever asking for help on how to do X Y or Z thing that seems really trivial on Android/Linux/Windows systems (like copying files without iTunes/iCloud, a frustration I remember dealing with even almost 10 years ago). It's now to the point where I just recommend 3rd party apps and alternatives for basic utilities for Apple's macOS and iOS to my family.

<comment><USER56> I never got how people could even get past Mac window management or rather lack of window management. They've never had a Maximize function and they always pushed that stupid Zoom functionality instead, which every window implements differently. Then they moved onto making Full Screen the default which I find utterly frustrating as I wait for some junior programmer, who chose a Macbook, swiping furiously to find that lost window. Many other times, they'll put the pointer too close to the top of a full screen window and window chrome will expand downwards to get in their way.

And that's just one tiny facet of a single set of features that they got terribly wrong. There's so many other things wrong with Macs, macOS, iPhones and iOS... I could go on for hours and hours detailing these things.

Despite all of that, like you, I will happily recommend a Mac to beginners because they do have system stability down to a science. I also use an iPhone and I recommend them to everyone since they're just safer and more secure than Android as far as I have seen. I'm hoping one day I can stop giving Apple money though because I don't want to support their shit attitude towards power users. I used to only buy used iPhones, but now I stay about 2 or 3 models behind their current offering (and I buy them at a deep discount - my new iPhone 8 was only $350 with no contract from Boost Mobile which works just great for my needs).

I'm really hoping my iPhone 8 will be my last iPhone because the task switching shortcut for the newer home button-less iPhones is very finicky from what I can tell experimenting in stores. Maybe they'll bring the home button back one day or I'll finally switch back to some other mobile OS.

<comment><USER57> BetterTouchTools for window management and Alfred for feature discovery is indispensable to my MacOS use. I couldn't imagine using MacOS without them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The original Mac would pop up a dialog with a threatening icon of a bomb with a lit fuse, whenever it crashed!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(icon)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_\(icon\))

>The Bomb icon is a symbol designed by Susan Kare that was displayed inside the System Error alert box when the "classic" Macintosh operating system (pre- Mac OS X) had a crash which the system decided was unrecoverable. It was similar to a dialog box in Windows 9x that said "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." Since the classic Mac OS offered little memory protection, an application crash would often take down the entire system.

Unfortunately, the Mac's error dialog could cause naive users to jump up out of their seat and run away from the computer in terror, because they though it was going to explode!

And Window's error message was just as bad: it could cause naive users to fear they might get arrested for accidentally doing something illegal!

<comment><USER58> > Unfortunately, the Mac's error dialog could cause naive users to jump up out > of their seat and run away from the computer in terror, because they though > it was going to explode!

'''could'''?

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> There's a point where a device's insane amount of computational capability has to be balanced with usability given its available inputs.

I definitely agree with the general idea of the article, but, on the other hand, a typical non-technical user doesn't have to know every little nuance of the system to use it effectively.

The original iPhone didn't do 10% of what smartphones are capable of now. It couldn't install apps. It couldn't copy and paste. A massive amount of functionality has been added since 2007.

In the end we are limited to a small screen that can fit in our pockets. Adding buttons to the phone really isn't an option. Adding a plethora of menus and buttons to the screen UI to make everything infinitely discoverable isn't really an option, either: again, you're working with a relatively small screen here.

Since the article was written some improvements have been made. I find that the new pop-up long-press menus you can find around iOS 13, like on the home screen icons, are an improvement. Removing 3D Touch is an improvement.

Things like the three-finger copy, cut, and paste gestures sound completely ridiculous, but they aren't for non-technical users. They are for power users who will absolutely remember those gestures. macOS is praised for its extremely smooth, useful trackpad gestures but it isn't like my parents are using _any_ of them.

I see a lot of comments complaining about things like the multitasking gestures in iPadOS, the app switching gestures on iPhone X and above, or those aforementioned undo/copy/cut/paste gestures, but on a smartphone or tablet, very few people actually end up needing them. Remember, there are still copy/cut/paste context menus when you select text.

Not only that, when you look at the competition, I don't think Android has a standardized Undo function at all? I could be wrong about that. If you Google that sort of thing you are met with a good amount of confusion, or suggestions to install add-on apps.

Is Alt-Tab (Command-Tab) discoverable? How about Command-`? Or any keyboard shortcuts that power users insist on during their daily lives? No, they're not discoverable outside of a manual or keyboard shortcut screen. But we wouldn't live without them. And the fact that non-technical users may never learn those shortcuts doesn't make the rest of the system unusable or unintuitive.

<comment><USER60> >There's a point where a device's insane amount of computational capability has to be balanced with usability given its available inputs.

Exactly the same could have been said 40 years ago. Computers have (almost) always been outperforming humans and certain tasks, even if just calculus. The increase in capabilities due to more computation power has been happening constantly for several decades. It lead to some revolutions in terms of human- computer interaction, like the switch from text-based UIs to graphical ones.

The challenge of spreading between simplicity, discoverability, and capabilities has always been around, just the topics are shifting over the years. The reason for the decline in user-friendliness as in the article lies in the motivation of companies building software: They expect higher returns by oversimplifying things (as plain-looking sells easier), or nagging users about registration (as they can send promotional content later), even though they're perfectly aware about the usability trade-off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> When Jobs came back to Apple, and continuing after his passing, there seems to have been a conscious decision away from "the computer for the rest of us" (aka 'entry level' 'easy' computer, and thus hard to sell to the aspirational) branding to various forms of luxury branding. The point of the UI in the iOS and OS X era is not so much to be easy to use, but to provide a consistent luxurious experience. A kind of marketing sheen -- like the styling of the interior of a BMW or Mercedes -- more than a UX approach.

<comment><USER62> I think that an opaque interface actually helps sell a luxury product and making it more difficult is intentional and strategic up to a point. A lot of features on, say, a BMW don't actually improve the experience, like say soft- closing doors or automatic wipers. But what they do is they constantly remind you that you have a luxury product while you are getting used to it, and after you have gotten used to it, you are constantly reminded if you drive anything else, because your reflexes and expectations are tuned for the "special" way of doing things.

It's a way to inhibit people from switching to a competitor, but of course it's possible to go too far. People joke about BMW drivers not using their turn signals, and as it happens, the traditional turn signals on their car work quite differently than on other cars, so quite likely many drivers simply never figured them out. Recently they have changed them to work the same way as on Japanese cars.

"Good" design is insufficient for aspirational/luxury products in general, because you can get it on mid-range products and incrementally higher pricing can't pay for substantially better design. So anything for the high end has to be ostentatiously or subtly _different_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> This article is just a rant without many concrete examples, studies, or suggestions for improvements.

<comment><USER64> My suggestion would be to just stop adding new features to iOS, macOS, Windows, etc... They are done and only need updates to add support for new hardware, fix bugs, reduce resource consumption, and close security holes.

<comment><USER63> At least the Mac needs a few things.

\- a low power mode

\- a restricted data mode

\- a modern scripting interface , basically port Workflows to the Mac

<comment><USER65> > \- a modern scripting interface , basically port Workflows to the Mac

What's wrong with AppleScript? Genuine question as I don't use macOS.

<comment><USER63> AppleScript is like the uncanny valley of programming languages. It tries to be English like but it ends up being more verbose and trying to figure out the right syntax is obtuse.

It's also been around since the early 90s and was the spiritual successor to HyperTalk - which was much better because it had a smaller domain.

Apple dismantled the original automation team ([https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1359425](https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1359425)) years ago.

Workflow is much more modern and is already partially ported to the Mac.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> As an iOS user since late 2008 I recently tried to use GarageBand on my iPhone 8+ - it was such a non-intuitive nightmare.

(Actually, I just wanted to create a custom ringtone out of an song fragment. It was the most epic fail I've ever had on a macOS and an iOS device).

</comment><comment><USER67> So true.

I used to be an iPhone user for many years until iPhone 5. My Android phone broke and even though I also own an iPhone 6 for testing, it was so frustrating to use that I'm using my Android tablet as a phone until I fix my actual phone.

iOS is just stupid. You have to memorize all these gestures for no reason. No discoverability, I bet most people don't know about 80% of all available gestures. To go back to the previous screen I have to press firmly, then swipe—but all the way to the right, or if I stop I trigger overview mode or whatever is called.

macOS suffers the same problem, but to a lesser extend.

Unfortunately, Johnny Hive has completely lost it. He's been obsessed with out things _look_ instead of how people are going to use them—and that's why people keep hitting his glass walls at Apple's HQ. Steve Jobs kept design at bay and insured a mix of beauty and usability. Now that he's gone you can tell that products got worse and worse in terms of usability (but 1.2 millimiters thinner, and so beautiful).

Maybe with Hives gone things will improve. The MacBook Pro 16 is a step forward (besides ports).

<comment><USER68> Ive, not Hive. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jony_Ive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jony_Ive)

<comment><USER67> Ha! You're right. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> On MacOs, the behavior of Home/End/PageUp/PageDown (or Cmd/Fn + Left/Right/Up/Down), and further on, combined with Ctrl/Shift, varies dramatically across different apps. I can never predict what will happen when I press these keys on the first acquaintance of any random app. It's never been a problem on Windows.

</comment><comment><USER70> Previous threads from 2015:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10559387](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10559387)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10552932](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10552932)

</comment><comment><USER71> I just inherited a 2009 MacBook 13" Pro from a family member. It has 2 gb of ram and a hard drive, which I plan to upgrade for about 50$. Note that it is trivial to upgrade these things. Even without these upgrades it works fine.

I have a 2013 MacBook Pro that I bought refurbished during undergrad that has been the best computer that I've ever had.

I prefer both to my work computer, a Touch Bar 13" MacBook Pro. In fact I suspect the 2009 will become my daily driver soon. Making a solid computer that lasts over a decade doesn't erode Apples profits- in fact I suspect this opposite is true. It is the same reason Toyota is the biggest auto mfg there is.

Imagine if the newest Camry was unreliable or something.

</comment><comment><USER72> iOS was never designed to be a general computing platform. It was designed to be minimalist mobile consumption only and light interaction.

You can tell this in the original iOS which lacked multi-tasking completely. Only later was it shoe-horned in (along with undo, copy/paste, the concept of a cursor, etc)

The result of what we have now has been an iterative journey, the product of a bunch of user requests who insist on trying to create the same experience on a mobile phone with limited and far different interaction modalities.

At a certain point, you need to know when to stop and just open up your laptop rather than cursing something that was never originally designed for the task you're trying to accomplish.

Right tool for the right job!

<comment><USER73> Or perhaps Apple wanted to get the iPhone out to the market quickly, so they kept multitasking, copy/paste, and other features for later iterations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> "The fonts are pleasant to the eye, but difficult to read". Felt joy seeing someone who actually worked for Apple says this.

</comment><comment><USER75> I recently went to the Genius Bar to get a replacement Airpod since the left ear stopped pairing. They told me to go home, charge the device for 10 minutes and it should "just work."

Guess what, it didn't. I was following the instructions online for more than an hour. I was about to schedule another Genuis bar appointment when I decided to try a factory reset. Sure enough, that worked! I wish they just put that in the instructions as something else to try. A quick Google search revealed that I was not the only one confused as to how to re-pair replacement parts.

</comment><comment><USER76> After a lifetime use of Android and Windows I switched a month ago to Catalina MacOS, as my very first mac experience. The experience has been amazing so far, at the moment of unlocking I instantly fell in love with the instantness of the logging in. On windows this will, always, take atleast 1 second of black screen.

While I am relatively up to speed with most basic things of this OS, I must admit that I severely underestimated the scope of change. All the tiny things, like copy pasting a snipping tool screenshot into a chat, or just saving a file to a certain location, need another approach. I enormously miss the omnipowerful CTRL x/c/v combination windows had, and I still have a hard time teaching my motorics to differ between the CTRL and CMD and OPTION when manipulating the cursor. Also the WINDOWS LOGO BUTTON + arrow keys, to move screens around the display is missing and I need to buy an App for that. The price seemed to be around 8eu for a 2 year license but I'd wager that'd be pretty default behavior for an OS - even Ubuntu has it. Though it's somewhat refreshing to buy an app and knowing you're not still the product, but I expected to be their either way.

Overall I really do love the experience on Mac and I think that in a year's time I am above and beyond my productivity on Windows. Also one thing I'd like to commend Apple for is the readability of their privacy policy regarding their use of data for advertising.

<comment><USER77> Look at spectacle for snapping windows to left half right half etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Some where, some place in the past, I read that Ford had made a very successful car, maybe the Sable, but was unable to figure out why or how it happened. Apple made things of beauty - but it seems now that they do not understand why or how they did that. If it wasn't so sad it would be funny.

Personally, I believe that Apple products used to be works of art that were the result of a combination of talents and skills orchestrated by a master artist. Now they are just products.

</comment><comment><USER79> I agree with most of the stuff the author is mentioning. But i think most of his points only apply to large devices (iPads, and Macs). Small devices such as iPhones and Apple Watches are so limited in their screen real-estate that helpful UI decisions - e.g. putting labels next to cryptic icons - will only clutter up the UI, making the user even more distracted.

</comment><comment><USER80> I'm not an Apple enthusiast and the main reason is their products' underpowered, oversimplified user interfaces, from the standpoint of a power user like me. One manifestation of this is a chronic lack of buttons on their hardware. I've long preferred the extra functionality afforded by a right- click button on mice and a middle button or scroll wheel. I've preferred the extra buttons on Android phones over iPhones. Not a lot of buttons, mind you, but enough to perform certain common tasks through tactile memory, without having to look at the screen. My latest gripe is with the Apple TV remote. (My family was recently lent an older Apple TV model.) This remote could definitely use a home button, since as it stands, I frequently need to press the Menu button around 5 to 8 times to get back to the main screen (to get from watching a Netflix video to watching a YouTube video.)

</comment><comment><USER81> Went to jnd.org on my 14" thinkpad.

Thin, small grey fonts on white background, makes me want to tear out my own eyeballs.

Eat your dogfood, perhaps ?

<comment><USER82> > 14" thinkpad

That would make me cry too.

<comment><USER81> the thinkpad?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> I bought my first Macbook Pro when OSX was first released, having previously been a fan of NextStep. Was a loyal Apple user until earlier this year. Bought a ThinkPad P1 Extreme. Running Windows 10 Pro with WSL for unixy stuff. Could not be happier. The only thing I miss from my 2015 vintage Macbook Pro is the gesture to click and drag with 3 fingers. I have to tap and drag with one finger.

I bought an iPad for my mom this year. I likely won't buy another one, period. Not sure there is a good enough alternative to my iPhone for when I need to upgrade next but I'll be looking.

AAPL needs to stop making jewelry and start making proper computing machines again.

</comment><comment><USER84> Undo on iOS manages to be ineffective and embarrassing at the same time. I give the phone one good shake, feeling like I'm playing D&D, rolling for a saving throw or whatever. Maybe you roll a good number, maybe you don't. It's embarrassing to pay so much money and still feel like you're begging and the technology is deciding whether to work for you or not. I know from spending enough time around people using iPhones in public that the vast majority of the population has decided it's too awkward and attention-getting to be worth trying at all. Being old, married, and less susceptible to embarrassment, I do give it that one shake, and sometimes it works.

</comment><comment><USER85> The Apple Mail client in iOS 13 has terrible half-thought out UX. Open a message you get a bar on the bottom with a trash icon and a reply icon. It is laid out for right handed users only with both icons on the right side. The icons are adjacent and the delete operation requires no confirmation. The reply action is actually the menu for all of the mail actions. Why it is reply icon rather than the more common "…" ellipses icon when it does not actually reply?

Besides being extremely buggy, the UI for the new Reminders app is even worse. I can't imagine the iOS 13 UI would do well in user testing at all. I can only assume they didn't do user testing.

</comment><comment><USER86> I don't have much to complain about the usability of the software, but they are making hardware that should not be made.

I'm the unfortunate user of a MacBook Pro company laptop with 8GB RAM and just two USB-C ports.

This sort of hardware should not be made anymore. The memory is insufficient (my laptop is always paging) and the USB-C is forcing me to always carry a dongle, not to mention that just two is not enough considering that one of them is used for the power cable.

It really feels like the people who designed this laptop never actually had to use it.

I wish they would be forced to use it for a while to get a feeling of how crappy it is, so they stop making such terrible hardware anymore.

<comment><USER51> nobody that knows better is buying this spec hardware. it is made to satisfy purchasing departments. i'm sure it's fine for word or google docs users that want to feel like they have an elite ("pro") laptop so it also ticks that box.

rather than be upset that it is made, be upset that you had this spec hardware forced on you by your company policy.

<comment><USER57> > nobody that knows better is buying this spec hardware.

He literally showed you that some companies do buy that spec.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> I switched to Android after 5 years of iOS. Here are the reasons: 1\. The price, no explanation needed. 2\. Short of functionalities, such as split screen and Miracast. 3\. Browser, android Firefox can install adblocker.

</comment><comment><USER88> Has anyone tried the free "Getting Started" sessions that Apple offers, when you buy a device? (Edit: I think they're online. In-store would be easier to learn the UI.)

Although you probably need an annual refresher.

Edit2: [https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/11/06/apple- offers-30-m...](https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/11/06/apple- offers-30-minute-online-training-sessions-to-iphone-x-purchasers)

<comment><USER89> I think you mean the user guides.

\- [https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/welcome/ipados](https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/welcome/ipados)

\- [https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/welcome/ios](https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/welcome/ios)

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> There was a good reason for Apple to fire John Ive

      * butterfly-switch keyboards are uncomfortable for many and unreliable
      * touch-bar was missing esc-key driving many pros away form Macbooks
      * Apple TV remote is beautiful, but entirely impractical
      * MacBook Pro 2018 and Mac Pro 2013 had cpu overheating issues
      * until releases 2019, iPhone and MacBook Pro had less that day battery life for many users

</comment><comment><USER91> Agreed. As Apple's made more money, they have this pressure of growing at any cost. Some of the recent decisions of pop ups in your face and a whole of magic hidden gestures really make it seem they aren't doing their due diligence like they used to.

I have as much respect for iOS/OSX as I did for pre-we-track-everything- Windows. It's just clunky and shit gets complicated and slower on every version

</comment><comment><USER92> I just made the move from Android 10 to iOS 13. I was shocked how complicated the process was. Not saying that one is more intuitive than the other.

But man...

No back button. The password manager didn't integrate well. The keyboard didn't adapt to the language I was typing in. Parameters were hidden in the settings app but sometimes also in the app itself. Force touch is impossible to predict without trying it (actionable notifications). The cloud is incompatible (I lost my WhatsApp history). The lock screen and the notification panel look the same but don't show the same information (some notifications only show up in the nOtification panel). What the hell... the notification panel looks like the lock screen... Some control are stuck on an inaccessible and not obvious corner (abort the reorganization mode of main app starting panel).

I felt a bit stupid and understood the frustration of my 70 year old mother trying to learn how to use an iPhone. How am I supposed to explain it to her if it doesn't make sense to me?

Nothing in the tech is really intuitive unless you truly know the product.

I felt hopeless and a bit depressed for y couple of days.

Thank god the hardware is gorgeous and the product feels great! :)

<comment><USER27> > No back button.

Swipe from the left edge of the screen, or tap the chevron in the top left.

> The lock screen and the notification panel look the same but don't show the > same information (some notifications only show up in the nOtification > panel).

The lock screen hides historical notifications. You can scroll down to see them.

<comment><USER92> I'm sure I'll get used to it, those were first impressions. Controls aren't as visible as they used to be.

Thanks for the tip with the lock screen!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> I think this trend is seen in many areas, e.g. architecture and landscape design that looks and sounds great in a magazine but is actively hostile to humans. Products vying for the attention of a society obsessed with the latest shiny thing. Is Apple catering for the market, or creating the market?

</comment><comment><USER94> The thing that annoys me is that devices like iPad and iPhone have so much trouble doing simple things such as uploading a set of PDFs so you can read the PDFs offline.

Maybe I am just dumb who can't get it working, but it involved some sort of syncing with a computer with iTunes and an iBook app.

</comment><comment><USER95> Just like the original Mac OS became complex as the hardware and software added features, smartphones now are feature-rich computers.

Part of me misses the early gen iPhones because of the simplicity.

I'm not really sure what the solution is, aside from swiping left and searching. Or Alfred on Mac OS, or the search bar in Win 10.

</comment><comment><USER96> The massive amounts of white empty space in iOS 7+ makes me long for the skeuomorphic days.

The dark theme helped, but should have been an option since day one. Pre iOS 13, the sheer amounts of white space drove me nuts.

And why did they remove visible UIButtons? I miss the real days of iOS.

<comment><USER97> > And why did they remove visible UIButtons? I miss the real days of iOS.

As a developer that meant a ton of work to fix the UI of my existing apps. Just a floating blue word instead of a real button. You used to just drag a UIButton into Interface Builder and call it a day, the current default is super confusing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> Glad to see Don Norman getting some attention. I've always liked him. _The Design of Everyday Things_ should, IMO, be required reading for anyone that designs anything.

I think that Tog feels similarly. When OSX came out, he wrote a polemic, slamming the Dock.

</comment><comment><USER99> My biggest gripe is how ridiculous bluetooth connection is on iPhones. Apple for some dumb reason decided to remove headphone jack before making Bluetooth connections easy and convenient. How does this make any sense? It still is bad - long pressing bluetooth button still takes multiple steps and is buggy (doesn't register, or long pressing leads to mistakenly pressing on the following pop up screen listing the available connections).

There should've been software/interface changes before ever even thinking to make hardware changes (removing headphone jack).

</comment><comment><USER100> Interestingly, they criticise Apple's choice of OS font, but he's using the default system font on his blog.

</comment><comment><USER101> Yeah.still haven't figured out the odd diagonal new ios13 swipes. Esp since second phone is still on ios12.

</comment><comment><USER102> Disagree with this wholeheartedly. iOS is the only platform I used which seems to make regular usability upgrades. Not new features but actual workflow improvements. I used iOS to get 70% of my work done and it all works together very nicely. You might call me a technical user though. I watch all the keynotes and learn to use the new/different features.

</comment><comment><USER103> I remember having to install standard system software updates through iTunes. In windows you have to press the "start" button to shutdown the machine, but in iOS you have to open a music player to upgrade your OS (or at least, it used to be the case). Which is worse?

</comment><comment><USER104> First I'll say that accumulated knowledge counts for a lot here. There's a vast difference between someone starting to use these devices now and someone who started 10 years ago who slowly adds to their repertoire of knowledge.

This, I think, is why I personally find Android devices so incredibly hard to use. I don't have 5-10 years of built up knowledge on how to use them and they seem utterly unintuitive to me. I also think the multiple hardware buttons were a huge mistake.

I really do think though that Apple has really suffered without having Steve Jobs to say "no" to Johnny Ive as a lot of the bad ideas of the last 5-8 years I don't think ever would've gotten passed Steve Jobs and seem to have the user less in mind and seem solely aimed at increasing ASP (average selling price) of various product lines. Examples:

\- Force Touch. This added weight and cost to devices for a feature that had no discoverability and was used inconsistently by developers. This from a company that for decades eschewed a second mouse button for lack of discoverability. I honestly think this never would've gotten passed Steve.

\- The 12" Macbook with _one_ port. So began the dongle blues. This was a terrible design that was an ode to thinness that had Johnny Ive's fingerprints all over it. Compare it to the 2011-2015 era Macbook Air, which was a fantastic device and a nice compromise between price, weight and power. The 12" Macbook shows what happens when you solely optimize for one metric: thinness. And it wasn't good.

\- The 2015+ butterly keyboard. Absolutely terrible. A rare reversal by Apple to ditch it in the 16" MBP.

\- The Touch Bar. A great example of a solution looking for a problem. Again, the motivation seemed to be to drive up MBP ASPs.

\- Face ID. This one actually works OKish on a phone but is awful on an iPad. It's also an accessibility nightmare as anyone who is visually impaired has to move the phone further away to get the right field of view for Face ID to work. What I'd give for Touch ID back. Also the false negative rate on Face ID is really high.

This one is motivated by making the full front face of the phone a screen by getting rid of the home button. I'd really like a fingerprint sensor on the back (like a Galaxy S9 I tried to use for 5 months had). Apple claims the false positive rate was too high,. I call bollocks on that. And that should be my choice.

But getting rid of the (great) home button now creates a UX problem. How do you get to the home screen? Well, you swipe up of course. But wait, which direction you swipe from depends on the orientation of the app you're using, which isn't always clear. Some apps auto-rotate orientation and some don't. You know what always worked? Pressing Home.

\- USB-C. Not only was this a loss of MagSafe (/cry) but we moved from a world of where if the plug fits, it works to a world where every plug fits and nothing works because it's now based on what the cable is designed to do and there's no visibility to that. Some carry power, some don't. Some carry data, some don't. The amount of power or data they can carry can vary. Do they carry a video signal? Maybe. No cable can do everything.

\- I think the current version of copy/paste on iOS is decidedly worse than the original version, probably because the unintended gestures that now exist.

\- The other day I couldn't move a tab on Safari on an iPad without iOS thinking I wanted to split screen. I still don't understand split screen gestures and the fact that I get this as unintended behaviour is an indictment of the implementation.

<comment><USER58> USB-C cables desperately need better labeling but it's not as bad as that. They all carry 60 watts, and they all support USB 2.0 to give you >300Mbps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> What about their password reset?

Does it take several weeks? For every user?

</comment><comment><USER106> I just do not understand apple.

I have an iphone through work. I have no choice.

In a text box if I misspell a word, such as impaitant, I cannot go to the middle of that word and delete 'ti' and replace with 'it'.

On their file browser if the file name is long the middle is truncated with '...' and if i hold down my finger on the file to see 'info', that too has the truncated name, despite it being the only file name on the screen.

There are many other frustrations. It's inferior to Android. Yes the privacy thing is better, but most aren't buying for that.

Itunes was horrible also. Apple make terrible software. I am frequently annoyed by their un-intuitive interface.

Seems to me apple are really good at advertising and people cannot think.

<comment><USER107> >> In a text box if I misspell a word, such as impaitant, I cannot go to the middle of that word and delete 'ti' and replace with 'it'.

If you hold your finger on the textbox it should turn into a cursor which you can drag to the required position to make the edits.

<comment><USER108> Or just highlight the word and a spelling correction will be suggested, or just use the backspace when you make the mistake instead of continuing to type.

<comment><USER106> Thought of another one in the same spirit: never mistype a word. And never use a word that is not in the dictionary!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> Apple is just a cult. if Steve Jobs was great at anything, he knew how to create a cult and then the money will follow. It's not about engineering, design, users or any bullshit you see in the ads, press, your annoying friends shilling, etc.. . It's pointless to argue with cult believers. Cults are only removed with new cults.</comment>


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