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Comment by mrks_ | Hacker News Reader

This issue has been getting worse in OS X, too. I find myself continuously finding hidden functionality by holding in the option or command button while clicking or dragging.

Frankly, and this may just be cynicism, I speculate that these hidden functions are a way for Apple to hold consumers hostage to their platform. If someone spends a few years learning all the idiosyncrasies of OS X and iOS, they may be too intimidated to switch to another platform, since they've invested so much time into learning Apple's OS.

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Nah, the original Mac had all that too. You'd select multiple files by shift-clicking. Command-option-escape would force-quit an app. Numerous corruption & crashing issues would be fixed by holding down Command-option-P-R on startup. MacOS 8 gave us Ctrl-clicking to pop open popup menus. Option-click would often do a number of strange app-specific things.

I suspect it's more that you're becoming a power user. Power users have always had a lot more functionality available at their fingertips, in exchange for investing time learning a platform really well. It's just market segmentation: you don't have room to put all the functionality that everyone might need on screen, so you put the stuff that most people need all the time on screen, get them hooked, and hide other stuff in an obscure reference manual so it can spread through tips & tricks blogs.

I don't think so. The functionality is hidden on purpose to keep from distracting novice users. Every program's basic functionality is accessible without any modifier keys. If you're "finding" new features, it simply means that you're past the stage of a novice user. Most of these hidden commands are variations too, so they even make sense logically. I'm curious if there's a specific "hidden" function that you're referring to that doesn't logically make sense as a modification of an existing function.

I think something has happened at Apple. I would consider a playlist or dynamic filter (eg. Rock songs or Beatles songs) would be a beginner's desire. It's one step beyond "play". Yet, the new Apple Music app is highly cryptic. It's been engineered to steer you toward the new subscription service. Usability for novices and pros has been crippled. I could say similar about Apple maps. It just doesn't work properly. Google has really taken the crown here. It's sad to see Apple lose focus when they've held the benchmark so high for so long.

I've been using Mac OS since it was System 6, and I feel like power user features have been commonly hidden behind things like "hold option" for about that long. The difference now seems to be that it's not always power user features.

Example of a good feature to hide behind "hold option": removing the "..." from "Sleep...", "Shut Down...", etc. in the apple menu, meaning that selecting them won't prompt you before executing the command.

Example of a bad feature to hide behind "hold option": clicking the green window button to maximize instead of going to full screen.

Why is that a bad feature? It seems pretty logical to me that clicking "Option" would give you a variation (another Option) of the chosen operation. In that case, clicking the green "full screen" button gives you a "full screen" on the current desktop instead of creating a new one.

Because requiring the use of two hands on two different input devices to access a feature that is not advertised to the user in any fashion is completely and utterly unintuitive.

Two hands? The alt-button is 3cm from my trackpad.

The first is a power user function that few people will want, and those who do will know to go looking for it. The second is a function with common utility, arguably more utility than the default use of that button,* and most people who would want to use it will never know it exists.

*Especially on recent versions of MacOS, where fullscreening an app moves it to a different desktop.

> I speculate that these hidden functions are a way for Apple to hold consumers hostage to their platform.

Whether on purpose or not, it's definitely a form of switching costs. It's the same reason I stay on windows. Though windows 8 changed so many things I basically had to learn all over again. I can't do basic tasks at times and have to Google instructions for how to do them. Simply because they changed the interface.

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