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Comment by abalone | Hacker News Reader

It's very interesting that Apple just adopted a hamburger menu for their apple.com redesign (mobile version). They even told everyone not to use hamburger menus at last year's WWDC! [1]

[1] WWDC 2014 Session 211 Designing Intuitive User Experiences @ 32:00, available here: https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/

Addendum: It's a responsive design so you can see this even on a desktop browser just by shrinking the width of the window. The top menubar collapses into a hamburger.

Addendum 2: Illustrated transcript here: http://blog.manbolo.com/2014/06/30/apple-on-hamburger-menus

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To be completely truthful though (and to make it even more cryptic) they decided to go for just two slices of bread — vego style menu.

https://i.imgur.com/aIxIpmU.png

It seems like they chose two lines to make a cleaner SVG animation to the "x" when you click on it.

Apple is very very good at telling everybody else what not to do, then going and doing it themselves.

Nobody should buy the iPhone 6 according to them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O99m7lebirE

Apple, under Jobs in particular, reminded me of the schoolyard "cool kids" that would verbally piss all over something until they themselves could afford it.

Jobs loudly proclaimed that people didn't read, yet within a year Apple was selling ebooks.

The difference is that Apple still has links at the bottom of the page for when the reader gets there. In fact the first link is "Shop & Learn" which expands out to be the same product listing as the Hamburger menu up the top.

So hamburger menus are ok as long as they're duplicated elsewhere? That would be kind of an odd rationale. Why have the hamburger in the first place?

No silly, hamburger menus are ok as long as Apple is doing them.

To provide one convenient location for all the links you might find interesting. Like the Windows Start menu.

As an aside, not specifically in response to your comment: I find it fascinating that most clients I work with have an immediate dislike of duplication that doesn't seem to be based on any reasonable argument (at least from where I'm standing...).

For example, I've been in a number of situations where a client did not want a 'pricing' menu item and a 'check out plans/pricing' link somewhere on the page. The only argument they really had was that 'it would be confusing to the user'.

This argument doesn't make sense to me, as the average user will just kind of scroll around and if there's a logical point for them to check pricing, they would surely be appreciative rather than confused that there are multiple ways to get to the pricing page?

I can only conclude that it's one of those things where people think 'logically' and prefer some kind of clean hierarchy, rather than consider the end goal ('funnel the user to a particular page').

Or am I missing something important?

Possibly consistent in that the no-hamburger rule mainly applies to apps, not mobile-optimized web pages.

Why is that? What makes the web different in this case?

Basic, significant factors like screen real estate, input devices & processor speed.

If you read the reasoning against the hamburger menu (i.e. it is basically a "misc" option that doesn't indicate its contents), then you'd know that none of those factors matter here. Screen real estate isn't even usually a difference between web/native.

They matter on desktop vs mobile.

You're not constantly hopping around to different sections on a website the same way you are when you spend a lot of time in an app.

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