Did Apple Just Give Up?
medium.com
medium.com
Because if you disagree with me, it can only be because you're blinded by your loyalty, not because your experience is different from mine.
Beyond that, I have a genuine question: why are users so stupid? If it's so obvious to this person that Apple's UI is a series of design failures, why do users continue to buy them, year after year? Both as brand new devices and as replacements for broken ones, otherwise rational individuals continue to purchase substandardly designed products.
Why did people watch Happy Days long after it started to suck? Fonzie Jumping the Shark was two seasons into the pain. But it didn't lose ratings until that episode.
What's popular is not always good. and what's good is not always popular.
I'll answer my own question: Users aren't stupid, they just have priorities that differ than those of technology bloggers.
Dismissing your users is an excellent way to ship a frustrating product. Apple has done the opposite, but the use-cases between the masses and the tech elite have drifted far enough that those who don't work on Apple's UX team can drive clicks using smug elitism -- the yin to the 'Apple Fanboy' yang.
why not just edit the grandparent post, rather than waste time with a response?
Try again: are you really mystified by mob mentality?
"Mob mentality" is that assumption. Customers are more than capable of returning their devices to the carrier if they really dislike their devices. They can also sell them, and many do.
But many more do not. Apple's OS is not broken, this blogger just hasn't taken the time to research why people prefer something he doesn't.
Let's consider phones. They're over 50% of Apple's revenue, so they're currently the biggest piece of Apple.
Early non-Apple phones were a craptastic fucking joke. E.g. my daughter had some cheapo phone (an LG I think). It was becoming slower and slower by the day. The local AT&T store couldn't fix it. They gave me the address of a special service center about 1/2 hr away. We had to drive there and wait while they attempted to restore the phone. In the end they gave up and gave us a new phone.
This wasn't a hardware problem. Under typical "stress" of a teenager using a phone to send text messages, etc., the phone software degraded itself into unusability.
That was typical "state of the art" before Apple came in and kicked ass with far superior products. Not flawless, but still superior.
Add to that the other typical problems with phones: 1) manufacturers allowing themselves to be the carriers' bitches, meaning phones come preloaded with tons of crapware apps, and 2) both carrier and manufacturer indifference to any sort of software updates, either to fix bugs or to update features, and the end result is:
Apple phones might have minor problems, but they suck a lot lot less than typical alternatives. And Apple's service (if you live close to an Apple store) is usually far superior to the competition.
Maybe there are good alternatives. But can I be sure they will survive? E.g. some people like Nexus. But I sure don't trust Google. Almost everything except search (and its concurrent advertising) is treated as a hobby by them. Why would I switch to Google? They routinely discontinue products on a whim.
Until a Google phone is considerably better than Apple, and I feel that it will remain better for a number of years, then I will continue to stay in the Apple ecosystem.
In short, Apple sucks the least of all the phone companies out there, and inertia will keep me with Apple until I'm convinced that a competitor is far superior.
IMO the peak for a company is when they build a grandiose edifice, e.g. the Apple spaceship campus. It's downhill from there.
If the answer to most/all of these questions is "no" you may be dealing with another example of time-wasting BS.