Apple's attention to detail
floodlite.tumblr.com
floodlite.tumblr.com
I think many companies see the features (windows flying around in Exposé, brightly colored window management buttons, pulsing status light, etc.) but don't understand that generally Apple doesn't just throw something in for looks and has thoroughly researched and iterated internally on a particular solution.
At the expense of sounding fanatic, generally an Apple feature looks the way it does as a result of its function. (What is the problem: make window management easy. how is that solved: make all open windows easy to see by spreading them out). When other companies attempt to copy, they look at what Apple's solution looks like, not realizing what it _does_. (e.g. Areo Flip 3D: what should it look like: windows flying all over the place. what problem does this solve: ???)
This reminds me of a post by Tog or someone similarly luminary. He explained that the Mac OS submenu behavior arose from multiple iterations, refining until everything worked easily. A big part of that was letting the user move their pointer at an angle into the next submenu region. A Fitts' law consideration -- this didn't require the user to be too methodical in their movements through the menus.
Then, when Microsoft borrowed the UI, getting into submenus required the user to exactingly follow the path of the currently-highlighted menu item in order to traverse into the next. Breathe the wrong way and your whole drill-down progress just disappears. Microsoft's solution? Insert a brief delay as you hover over a drillable menu option.
Result without intent.
As it happens, this reminds me of the UI for Windows Phone 7. It's like a suit said, "Hey, go design me something that looks really modern. And hip. With sans serif fonts. Apple uses those right? They're really hip."
And we end up with a UI that looks more like a magazine layout than a tool for using your phone.
I've been using Macs exclusively for the past two years and, after starting to use Windows again last week, I couldn't really point out why the menus annoyed me so much.
And it's exactly what you describe: on Mac OS, if a submenu is open I can go in a diagonal to the sub-item I want, even if I hover another item in the menu on the way. On Windows, as soon as I'm not hovering the original parent item, the submenu disappears, so I'm constantly going back and forth to reopen the submenu.
I do have one outstanding gripe about Mac OS menus, though, which is that if you misclick on some non-reactive part of the menu (a greyed-out option or divider line), it simply closes the menu. I can't think of any reason why this would be better behavior than leaving the menu open, since at least 90% of the time my intent was to actually click on something that would respond.
I just tested this in Firefox on Windows, and it does support going in a triangle across other menu items at the same level as the one with a submenu. The delay permitted is a bit short though, which might be what they've tweaked better on the Mac. No Apple machine here, so I can't comment more directly.
Ubuntu 8.04: http://polishlinux.org/reviews/ubuntu-8-04/default.png
Ubuntu 10.10 Preview: http://design.canonical.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/ambia...
Since the whole point of a window manager is to manage my windows so I don't have to, I use xmonad. If you want simplicity, give that a try :)
I haven't looked into Divvy, I'll take a look.
Also, why does the dock not stretch across the bottom? Apple certainly knows about Fitt's law - what's the reason for ignoring it?
remember that the dock can go the full width; you just have to fill it with crap. :)
The screen space at the sides of the dock are already wasted aren't they? Do you keep anything important there (without it getting partially covered by the dock itself)?
The items don't need to be evenly spaced out. They can just be packed in from left to right.
remember that the dock can go the full width; you just have to fill it with crap. :)
You can do some plist magic to make the dock flush to the left or right but can't make it take up the full width, alas.
My guess is because these are rarely ever used. I just use expose instead of minimizing windows, and I typically kill an app before I consider closing its window.
What they do right on the dock and menus is extend the hit area all the way to the edges of the screen and adjacent items. You can drag your cursor all the way to the bottom of the screen and still hit the icon in the doc even though it's ~20px above. Likewise the apple and spotlight menus can be activated by clicking the the very corners. Much easier to hit because they have "infinite" height.
"Edges and corners of the computer display (e.g., Start button in Microsoft Windows and the menus and Dock of Mac OS X) are particularly easy to acquire because the pointer remains at the screen edge regardless of how much further the mouse is moved, thus can be considered as having infinite width.
"Similarly, top-of-screen menus (e.g., Mac OS) are easier to acquire than top-of-window menus (e.g., Windows OS)."
The icons don't need to be evenly spaced. Windows gets this part right. When you don't stretch it out all the way then the position of the elements keep changing as apps get added to the dock. So, for example, dropping something into the trash or opening a new finder window (or any other app you have permanently in the dock) can't be done by muscle memory. You need to locate it with the mouse each time.
What would you do with the extra space on the 2 sides of the dock anyway? You can't really populate them with windows since the dock will, in all likelihood be covering part of the window.
I agree with the menus at the top. That's the classic example of Fitt's law at work.
Can you imagine a left-aligned dock? Or a dock in two parts - pinned apps and open apps/minimized windows? I think it'd look horrible and the benefits would be minimal. They may have erred on the side of aesthetics and decided the usability tradeoff was minimal.
You don't have to imagine it:
defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string start ;
killall Dock
I'll concede that the current model is more aesthetically pleasing, if less efficient.
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -bool YESNot sure if that's the reason (more probably just fashion sense) but I like it.
I think the best example of this is all the custom Android skins out there. Without exception they are all worse (at usability) than what they are trying to improve, but the first Droid was the last Android phone to ship stock. Just look cool in the ad and you're done.
Admittedly, they made the LED way too bright on the earlier MBPs, such that it would distract you if you were trying to sleep in a dark room. The newer MBPs have gotten the brightness just right, however.
Also, none of this ignores the fact that Apple routinely privileges superficial aesthetics over ergonomics, utility, etc. (Magic Mouse, hard edges on MBP, glossy displays), but that rarely stops the whole package from being the best on the market.
The truth is that they're good at making great things that are genuinely fun to use. That kind of stuff sells itself.
Regardless of how you feel about him, it's impossible not to be at least a little captivated by a Steve Jobs keynote. The joy of watching someone stand up and just be proud of how honestly hard his company works – it's refreshing.
Apple has managed to figure out how to be risky in their behavior without being destructive. They've learned that you can actually jump out of plane if you have a parachute.
I think when engineering types hear the word "marketing", they immediately take it as dismissive. But Apple is an example of a company who owes their skin to phenomenal marketing over the long term.
Apple's marketing in the mid-to-late 90's was poor to nonexistent, frankly, while on a technical level Macs weren't any worse than PC's (both crashed a lot and came with fairly comparable hardware, but the Mac OS 7/8/9 UI was very arguably better than the Windows 95/98 UI). Apple's user loyalty was fantastic (and fanatic) in the mid-to-late 90's, but the company itself didn't do anywhere near the kind of promotion they did once Jobs returned.
Yes, Mac OS 9 had technical disadvantages compared to Windows NT and Windows 2000, and Apple had a second-system effect of legendary proportions with Copland. 90's Apple wasn't that great at technology. But they were abysmal at marketing, while Microsoft were fantastic at it.
Apple had overall high product quality but their focus was lacking and they weren't terribly ballsy. They had a distinct feeling of running on the fumes of the Mac's initial success. But it was (and is) a sufficiently great product that those fumes informed an OS that, from a user perspective, remained the best. Mac OS got long in the tooth, but I'd still take it over Win95/98/NT any day.
Both windows (95/98) and macs had their share of shortcomings, you just had to pick, which set you can tolerate.
The pervasive Marketing==Advertising mindset is a little short-sighted.
I'm just running with the definition given to me by my marketing professor at my university's business school :)
Look at 37Signals. I contend that everything they do is marketing, even if it's not writing commercials or buying ads.
..in Gary Hustwit's documentary "Objectified", for those interested in exposure to more sweet, reality-distorting Ive radiation. Recommended viewing.
That interview for sure shows passion and obsession for details. It gives an impression that Ive is one of the greatest industrial designers of our time partly because his obsession and understanding of manufacturing processes. He knows the limitations and possibilities of his tools.
Jobs has been talking about anthropomorphic technology for quite a bit [1]. I've always liked to imagine Jobs had some influence on WALL-E's EVE. It was a Pixar movie, after all...
1. Longer than this, but it's the only reference I could find: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/3533.html
Jobs doesn't do the actual industrial design - he knows what he likes, and he has a great eye for it (or so I hear) but the man behind Apple's design aesthetic is Jonathan Ive. And he did design Eve.
http://gizmodo.com/389772/wall+e-movie-is-jonathan-ives-late...
The power multiplier that Jobs brings to the company comes from two things: his uncompromising sense of good taste and his idealism for the role of technology in our lives.
The things that Jonathan Ive builds are reflections of his own deep commitment to those values. He gets it.
I'd have to think that letting the design guy worry about design would probably be the better route, rather than clouding with all of the other business decisions and realities in a major way
Indeed, the story of Jony Ive reflects this: toiling in relative obscurity before Jobs' return, Steve immediately recognizes his talent and promotes him aggressively.
Here's a design patent for the glass staircase, listing Jobs as lead designer: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...
Amusing if true: the glass cube outside the Manhattan Apple Store was designed by Steve Jobs himself, and the lease stipulates that it is his personal property and he has the right to remove it at the end of the lease: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/05/12/05/jobs_wants_32_...
(If I ever had the balls to ask Steve Jobs a completely inane question, I would ask what the hell it was with him and cubes.)
I've always liked to imagine Jobs had some influence on
WALL-E's EVE. It was a Pixar movie, after all...
Close. Jonathan Ive (Apple's chief designer) helped design EVE: http://gizmodo.com/389772/wall+e-movie-is-jonathan-ives-late...
That's because the sleep LED adjusts to the ambient brightness. Try this: watch that LED in a dark room, then turn on the lights, keeping your eye on it. You'll notice it gets quite a bit brighter in reaction to the light.
This is definitely a detail that is appreciated.
5 layers later, and it was about 1/2 the brightness of my MBP's snoozer. About right for a dark room. A couple months later, when I packed my tower up for xmas vacation... the post-its were bleached white, all the way through, in front of the LED. Way too much power.
My MBP? Still too bright for the night, IMO, but I tend to like dark. It's at least not annoying, like damn-near every other light-emissive device in my house at night.
Best solution? Electrical tape. You can't even see it unless you look close and I really couldn't care less about the led. If the router isn't working I'll know.
The other day, I noticed that my friend’s Dell laptop had a similar feature but with a shorter fade-in-fade-out period. Its rate was around 40 blinks per second, or the average respiratory rate for adults during strenuous exercise—not very indicative of something in sleep-mode.
As to why Dell didn't copy it exactly... perhaps they reviewed the patent and decided they would get in trouble?
Personally, I think we should not personify our computing hardware. It's a tool, not your friend. When my machine goes to sleep, its lights turn off. If I want to wake it from sleep, I press the power button. If it was off instead of asleep, I would press the same power button. No need for an LED to tell me what's going on.
For example, somewhat like the Fibonacci sequence like it is incorporated in the Lateralus song by Tool. That would be awesome.
A sleeping computer could softly snore. Or the logo text on the lid could blur like tired vision. Neither of those is a blinking light.
(I think Mozilla has an oscillating status bar they use, which is called a "Cylon".)
Ok, that's done, Apple took it. What's next? What's even more intuitive or revolutionary?
We'll never know if major companies with insanely great designers constantly regurgitate what Apple did years before.
I don't think its unreasonable to hold companies other than Apple to the same design standards. Certainly most large consumer electronics companies have similar resources (human, industrial, capital, etc.) to use.
Personally, I am satisfied with Android 2.2's, Ubuntu's, and even Windows 7's UIs and prefer the richer sets of features (not that I dislike iOS or Apple products; I actually use them at work on a daily basis). I think there are benefits to doing software both ways and I think the range of program complexity and power in the consumer software market reflects that.
I think the breathing LED is great precisely because it's a subtle form of personification that manages to be "friendly" without actually going far enough to be "your friend". (Remember: technophobes.)
Also, it's relaxing. Sometimes this is exactly the cue you want after a stressful session at the computer.
It's a device for a human, so you use natural cues to tell the user something. Your computer is on, but it's in sleep mode, so here's signals that naturally signify sleep.
You should notice that it's MS that came up with that retarded paperclip and Microsoft BOB. There are cartoony characters all over its history. That's real cheap personality.
What does Mac OS or iPhone have?
A sad mac.
A bouncing beach ball.
Cute naming using words like "mighty", "magic", "Newton", "Lisa", "Macintosh" and the prefix "i-" and "Power-" or the postfix "-book"
Software named after cats.
Codenames after scientists, swords and other stuff.
Funny shapes for hardware: cubes, circles, etc. etc.
Humans personify everything they interact with -- including simple hand tools. We like one better than the other; it feels like it has a personality. Of course, we know, intellectually, that it doesn't, but that doesn't matter.
We're hardwired for judging and feeling personalities. And faces. That's why car look like they have "faces" on the front and why people have historically referred to vehicles like ships, boats, and cars as if they are (at least) simple beasts rather than just things.
Computers are by far the most complex tool the typical person uses, and we treat interaction with a computer much like we treat interaction with a person from a psychological perspective. That's why it's so infuriating when a computer fails to respond to input -- it's the same mechanism that gets triggered when you're talking to a person who looks at you but doesn't acknowledge you in any way.
Apple isn't trying to make the computer your friend, it's honoring the implicit personification you're doing anyway.
When you turn the orientation in the camera app, the little flash button and flip-camera buttons don't simple become horizontal...they fall down gently.
The damn thing never blinks.
I hear most BB users like it a lot.
1) Notification blinking: It is quite useful to have an indicator that there is a missed call/email/text message without having to turn on the screen.
2) Transitions: I run my phone with every transition disabled. I never found much value with the phone being unresponsive for 100 or so ms as it animates.
IBM went with the constantly illuminated moon. I've never laid down to sleep to it, but its worked as a great, at a glance, indicator that the computer is sleeping, and not off or on.
http://i.engadget.com/2010/03/02/apple-vs-htc-a-patent-break...
Unless you meant out of defence of the right to make more profit, in which case yes I totally agree, completely defensive.
Seriously though, that's a brilliant feature. Most companies wouldn't give the time or money for developers to come up with that.
(And for the record, I love Android and would gladly cast every iDevice I own into a fire if I didn't need them for work).
The other thing I liked about that Jonathan Ives bit was how he went beyond the physical aspects and talked a lot about how much effort they went into the construction process as well. No one else in the documentary even mentioned that as far as I can recall.
(Incidentally, that reminded me of this: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/smartabstractions For example, Paul Bucheit worrying about disk access times)
Bucheit -> Buchheit
It baffles me how anyone can program a server without worrying about disk access times, much less a service like Gmail. Similarly, what do designers spend all of their time doing if they aren't worrying about the construction process? Nobody cares how pretty your design is if you can't mass-produce it at low cost.
Really?
http://www.objectifiedfilm.com/blog/the-next-film-urbanized/
Also, Objectified is on Netflix streaming now, I believe.
http://www.objectifiedfilm.com/screenings/
I'm planning on heading to the one @ the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn on October 1.
It's cool to see the patent, but from what I know of various people who work in usability, this sort of thing is not at all unusual.
"12-20 breathes per minute" should be "12-20 breaths per minute"
"40 blinks per second" should be "40 blinks per minute"
Well, it's plugged in... I can tell because I see the plug in the computer. And it's charged because the light is green. Blinking light? Seriously?
Yes, Apple have an eye on detail (but they aren't the only one on the earth, for sure), yes, they patent they findings so they can be the only kids on the block with that particular cool look.
When I first saw the MacBook indicator, it was a lot of fun to finally see my talent put to use in an additional dimension. I remember seeing the modulation and thinking: oh cool, the entire duty cycle remains constant as they increase the on while decreasing the off.
"The electrical pulses as shown in FIG. 3 have varied pulse widths because of the operation of PWM, and their actual pulse widths depend on the associated sinusoidal duty cycle function. The PWM frequency used in this embodiment is 125 Hz. In fact, preferred frequencies include any frequency sufficiently greater than that can be effectively distinguished by the human eye. However, power consideration for portable devices further prefer PWM frequencies to range within, for example, 100-200 Hz. ... It was determined through experiment that increasing the duty cycle according to a non-linear function gives the most pleasing visual effect while a simple linear ramp does not seem as natural."
Take a camera and set the shutter speed long enough so that you can blur the light, and you'll see the blinking effect that I do. The patent can claim it's not noticable, but it's pretty noticable to me. Interesting that they market even in their patents.
LEDs and the like are usually set up to be either on or off (a square wave) causing the flicker much more apparent. Street lamps are sort of a hybrid, they "flicker" at 60hz, but their flicker is not a square wave, but rather a sine wave.
Also, the worst are cheap projectors that seem to alternate between red, green, and blue, so you see a rainbow every time you move your eyes between the projector image or your own notes.
It's so frustrating to me, but no one ever believed me about it, so I guess not everyone has this curse.
If you were curious, those would be single-chip DLP projectors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Light_Processing
I listen to foreign language lessons on part of my commute and have for several years. After I got my iPad I transferred everything there and started listening as normal. For some reason (don't remember why) I needed to stop listening. So I pulled the headphones out, dig the iPad out of my bag to pause the player since I don't want to miss anything. As I take the iPad out I'm expecting to hear someone speaking but they're not. I pause for a second but nothing. I open the case to make sure I didn't accidentally pause it somehow and check the volume. Volume is fine and some other app was in the foreground. I switch to the Ipod app and sure enough, it was paused. Seems so obvious but no other device I've owned did this (I've never owned an iPod or iPhone).
The Apple Bluetooth keyboard has an option in OS X to show the battery life. It does not when connected to Vista.
I really dislike this community conflation of attention to aesthetic detail with "detail". Apple does fantastic work on aesthetics. Wonderful little details like the pulsing sleep led. Their hardware is generally pleasant to look at, their OS...though starting to show its 9 year old age still holds its own.
While important, and often imitated, aesthetic detail is a superficial kind of detail. And it's not wholesale "attention to detail" not matter how many breathless fan posts in blogs on threads there are. Apple products in general have a great many areas where they have piss poor attention to actual detail, and let it slide for years without attention and instead build a marketing campaign around the font they use on their keyboards.
They substitute shiny too often for substance and the vast majority of Apple fans fall for it, "ooh shiny!". There isn't even a single post here in this thread (and there are 171 right now) that says something to effect of "This LED thing is cool, but Apple drops the ball on <insert xyz widely known problem>". And that list of problems is long and ranges in everything from technical issues to hardware reliability to usability problems to yes...aesthetics. Instead we get north of 170 posts, all breathlessly agreeing that they wish Apple could have their child.
Aesthetic detail is "nice to have" but not a "must have". Detail in other areas are probably more important. And sadly, Apple often falls down in those areas. It doesn't really matter if my MBP is cut from a single piece of aluminum and the leds pulse at some certain rhythm when its asleep. It's far more impressive to me that when I open it up, it resumes in under 10 seconds (which BTW is thankfully one of those areas that Apple did turn the attention to detail gun on, Macs sleep and resume fantastically better than any Windows machine I've ever used). But it also matters to me if I have to send it back for repair due to manufacturing defect more often than my dell -- particularly if I've paid a huge price premium to have a pulsing sleep led, the damn thing better be more reliable than a $12 toaster...and sadly it isn't.
I'm certainly not claiming the opposite, that other vendors and software makers are better than Apple in the detail department. Just that Apple has many failures as well, but the community of Apple users religiously ignores those little problems without a peep -- a massive display of this phenomenon is on display here. They stop recognizing that their stuff is just stuff, and Apple makes stuff that's pretty nice to use, but in the end it's just stuff and it's full of flaws.
just trying to provide the voice of reason here
Here's two:
Why does Cmd-W close some dialog windows but not others? I frequently hit Cmd-O, realize I'm in the wrong application, then hit Cmd-W to make it go away. Occasionally this works. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1052118/how-to-make-a-key...
Why do some clicks on background windows cause actions, and others are ignored? I don't want autoraise, I just want explicit clicks, say, on links or buttons in web pages, to be obeyed. http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/04/settling-osx-focus-f...
Some of my hating goes towards applications (why does Acrobat insist on popping up windows off the screen? why does printing work from Preview but not from Illustrator?) but a lot of it goes toward the basic interface. In my opinion, it's very well polished, but not very consistent or well designed.
Similarly, if I know that a window is in the background, I might manage to remember to Command-click (only needed on the links, not the icons in the title bar?). Occasionally when the stars align I can even copy text from a window without bringing it (and all other windows belonging to that application?) forward.
But my real question is why I should have to distinguish a small 'window' from a large 'dialog'? Shouldn't Cmd-W work in both?
And why should I have to distinguish between a foreground and a background app? Especially in the multi-monitor situation she has set up, it seems like it would be more 'polished' to have all the apps act the same.
This is ignoring the non-standard applications, and the absurdity that clicking on one window often brings many of them to the foreground. My point is not that there aren't workarounds that one can warp one's behaviour to, but that I don't think the mental model itself is that coherent.
Uh, yes there is. My post, which is currently right below yours (edit: well, it was), explicitly acknowledges that fact. I also wrote another comment about a Mac OS menu behavior that I dislike, which has been voted up, not down. mkramlich also mentioned his problems with iOS 4 on an iPhone 3G here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1635018.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that Apple fans "religiously ignore" problems with their products. Do you actually spend time on the support forums, or various Apple-centric sites? I've never met an Apple fan that thought Apple was 100% perfect. Does every single thread appreciative of something a company is good at need to prominently feature criticisms of everything that company is bad at as well? Of course not. Your criticism is silly, and smacks of typical, petty anti-Apple resentment.
> Instead we get north of 170 posts, all breathlessly agreeing that they wish Apple could have their child.
You lost any pretense of trying to provide the voice of reason here.
I'm actually impressed that you can bring yourself to acknowledge minor bubbles in posts like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1634581. But that same post waxed on to almost absurd levels of pseudo philosophical anthropomorphism. And that's the type hystrionics I'm talking about.
"almost absurd levels of pseudo philosophical anthropomorphism"? Are you reading that post correctly? When I said "Truly personal computers," I'm not saying the computers are like persons. I'm saying that they fit people to a far greater degree than any other PC I've ever seen.
For example I remember a post by a famous developer that complained when Apple introduced the 3D dock... because the prospective of the dock was not the same as those the HGI asked for the icons... and so it looked wrong.
In the same period, people also complained that the 3D dock didn't work well when the dock was put on the left/right of the screen... eventually Apple moved back to the old version for those cases.
There's been complains about font changes, about inconsistent looks, about too much colour or too little colour, and the list goes on.
In almost every case, when some positiv story A about X is posted, some people feel the need for some reason to point out some unrelated negative stuff B about X.
If you want to talk about B, do that in the specific HN post, not in the unrelated post about A.
If you have the feeling that people have talked to less about B in general and there is no good post on HN about it, write an own story and post it.
But an interesting LED scheme is immediately extrapolated in the article and by the vast majority of the posts here as indicative of the overall attention to detail Apple puts into its products. I'm simply trying to point out that this extrapolation is nonsensical and wrong by bringing up that Apple actually is good at detail in some areas, not so good in others. Therefore, attention to the detail in how the lights blink is not necessarily indicative of attention to detail in all areas. That seems pretty straightforward and logical to me. Supporting my supposition that critical thinking is clearly not part of the grotesque fawning going on here, here is the kinds of responses I get for putting forward an entirely logical, critical statement.
dieterrams - who is about as gushing a fanboy as the Apple ecosystem can produce.
"Your criticism is silly, and smacks of typical, petty anti-Apple resentment."
"You lost any pretense of trying to provide the voice of reason here."
This is the same person who's response to the OT was "The moment I realized the LED was mimicking breathing (I first experienced it with a white iMac) was the moment I realized just how far Apple goes to make computers for humans. Truly personal computers." Very poetic and followed by a few dozen responses about how, yes, Apple is truly breathtaking and Ive and Jobs are geniuses, etc. etc.
epochwolf & powrtoch - who both asked a variation of the same question.
"Would you mind providing a few examples instead of citing an amorphous large list?"
And at risk of incurring more downvotes from the dieterrams of the world, I responded that no, I won't. All anybody has to do is use their products and read a bit of tech news. Apple's products are full of problems and issues. From lower than average hardware reliability for the industry to wireless signal loss, industry trailing video card drivers or just outright poor design decisions like various gafaws with their input devices -- even things that simple extended reliability testing should expose occur far too frequently and don't appear nearly as often in competitor's products like poor material selection. I shouldn't have to go and research and provide a list of all the nit picky problems Apple has in their products line-up.
Anybody who is paying attention should be able to see them if they aren't spending their entire day trying not to.
The printing system sucks. I have a large selection of printers, most of which cannot print the same paper sizes that the others can print; one of the sizes most commonly lacking is a #10 envelope. Because of this and the way OS X remembers your printer settings, printing and envelope is a very tedious chore. To do something as simple as this in Pages, I have to open the template, go to Page Setup, select the target printer, select the target paper size, change the page orientation to landscape, go to the Print dialog, select the target printer again, and finally click Print.
The OS will not associate the source document size with the actual matching paper size in the printer driver. If I don't go through all those steps, the envelope prints rotated off by 90 degrees. Saving a template with the Page Setup stuff configured does not preserve it either.
Since it is all private, and you can only see your own bugs, the most common result is that they mark your bug as a duplicate to some other bug that you can't see. At that point, you can't track the status anymore. The other option is that they just leave it in the open status for years. It's very frustrating.
Don't lead with that crap. I usually stop reading when I see that.
Also its good to have the voice of reason but after reading through the rest of your comment all I see is a complaint about Apple fans and Mac's reliability. You mention <xyz widely known problem> but don't mention anything specific. Whether or not your point is valid it is a good point to make but non-constructive criticism doesn't get anywhere.
I think this is just Apple applying those same software HCI principles to their hardware design. It's merely one more tool in Apple's arsenal that their hardware competitors lack.
A few years ago, a friend got one of the first of the x86 iMacs with integrated displays. Initially I thought it was a neat design but still didn't "get" what the big deal was about them and Apple's design ethos in general.
I picked up the small handheld remote that came with it, and frowned. "Hmm, OK, it comes with a remote media control. That's neat, but it's just one more rarely-used gadget that's going to get lost in the clutter on peoples' desks. What they should have done was, oh, I dunno, put a magnet in the side of the monitor frame to keep the remote out of the way when it's not needed, you know, like this..."
snap
"Oh."
I bought 100 shares of AAPL that night.
</Cool story, bro>
It is trivial but lots of trivial things put together can make for the improved user experience that distinguishes products you can charge top dollar for from the sort of mass market machines Dell turn out.
Today, if you have a problem with the USPTO's policy of rubber-stamping trivial, obvious, and abstract patents (and I most certainly do), the proper targets for venting are your Congressmen. It's safe to say they don't read Hacker News (hint, hint).
This is why I'm frustrated by the UX of iOS 4.0 running on my iPhone 3G. It is plagued with these unpredictable freezes, especially in Safari, which makes it unusable sometimes. We're talking total UI non-responsiveness for anywhere from 15-120 seconds, right smack in the middle of you're doing something. Very let down by them in this area. I've already learned of an unofficial way to downgrade back to 3.x, however, I've been reluctant to do it because I have some legacy contract projects who want me to support 4.0, so I need to keep something running it.
Other than this issue, though, Apple provides an awesome UX and has been a no-brainer choice over Microsoft -- a company I had also noticed many times in the past was copying the surface aspect of what a competitor did, often Apple, but not getting the fundamentals right, and making themselves look like idiots.
#fail
Maybe only Americans can afford such frivolity. The difference in price between a good Dell laptop and Apple one is same as wage for 1-2 months for a middle class person in most parts of the worlds.
>Maybe only Americans can afford such frivolity.
Tell us more about how you're better than us, please.
And you can buy a HP/Dell that costs exactly the same as your Mac, if you looked at the more expensive end of their lineup.
Apple does not make cheap computers. HP/Dell make both.
And who really cares about faster these days?
Edit: I guess I should make it clear that I am agreeing with you.
Ever tried ThinkPad? :)
Evidence of this abounds: my favorite example is the multitouch touchpad that Apple uses. If somebody is saying something good about a pointing device on a non-Apple laptop, odds are good that they've never spent time with Apple's touchpad. It's that much better, but if you haven't used it and you don't trust Apple or anybody who uses Apple products, you'll probably never assign it more than about $5 of value, when experienced users would easily value it at ten times that. (That's why it isn't insane for apple to release a standalone touchpad for $70).
Fortunately for Apple, far more people have been willing to try the iPhone than have been willing to try their computers, and many of them have discovered that "not sucking" is worth more than a few hundred megahertz. The "halo effect" is real, and is not due entirely to people "buying in" to an Apple lifestyle.
The people who have strong technical or financial barriers to using Apple computers are far outnumbered by the proud Apple haters who haven't actually used a Mac long enough to appreciate the little things. However, unless somebody else starts releasing well designed computer hardware and software, Apple will eventually win over most of the haters through sheer ubiquity. (I expect that at some point, there will be a tipping point where hating Apple becomes uncool. If we pass that tipping point before Apple has serious competition, Apple will probably achieve a near-monopoly.)
Most people I know that have (and love) the iPhone today hated it before they tried it. I had a friend who kept saying his Windows Mobile phone was fine for all the stuff he needed, and there was no reason to get an iPhone. After he moved in with me in Vancouver (from New Brunswick) and saw how fluid it was for me to use my iPhone, and how I never had to dick around with it uselessly like he did with his just to get it to work, he switched.
Two years of me telling him it was great, and he didn't believe me. A week of seeing me use it changed his mind.
Personally, I despise the acceleration curve Apple uses when I'm using a mouse with my MBP. I went through all kinds of contortions to deal with it or change it. I tossed out my mighty mouse after a couple months due to crud build-up and returned the magic mouse because it was virtually impossible to use without hand cramps or having it slide across my desk.
The only thing I really think is special about the trackpad on my MBP is its size, but I've found that the pad on my Dell just seems to work better with higher accuracy and less padding around and the ergonomics "feel" better to me.
I'd pay extra money for them to un-suck their pointy interface devices and software. They're really that bad.
Why I can't I hook up something like an iPad to my Mac as an interface device? Mirror the screen on it so I have some direct eye-finger synergy? I'd pay for something like that, with a nice capacitive touch screen.
My life is full of crappy cheap gadgets and things. Nearly everything I deal with on a day to day basis has been designed to be manufactured as cheaply and as quickly as possible, and it's evident. I like using my little MacBook; it's slim, it's light, it's beautifully built, it's aesthetically pleasing, it has a great keyboard, there's nothing else out there that comes close to the trackpad, it's full of nice touches and it feels like someone has put a lot of thought into it's design.
About the same time, my sister bought herself a Toshiba laptop that, on paper, was equivalent to my macbook, but it cost her about 25% less. The toshiba is almost twice as fat, has a horrid keyboard, an even worse touch pad, a battery life of about two hours and flexes like you wouldn't believe.
I guess it's similar to buying expensive clothes or paying more for a nice car (I have neither)
You know what is intelligent? Having a counter argument. All you have is snotty insults.
Kinda proves my point for me.
The thing I've learned is that people often value things differently to how I do, and for reasons I don't often understand.
Personally, I find Windows to be a hugely annoying OS to use, and very limiting, but I understand that for almost everybody else it suits their needs fine and they like it. I'm a big fan of Linux, but I realise that may not suit everyone.
Same with music; you wouldn't believe what I listen to, and I don't imagine for a second you'd like it (hint: if an album doesn't have at least a few tracks that go for over 10 minutes, I'm not interested), and the reverse is possibly true as well.
What am I getting at here? Thankfully, we're not all clones of each other, and often personal tastes are very different. Expecting some stranger to justify their choices to you kind of indicates you haven't figured this yet.
You like it simply because you like it. You recognize some people may not like it, and may like other things. And that's ok. You think your Mac is fine for you, and does what you want to do the way you want to do them and it may or may not be the case for other people and find that to be and alright way for the world to be.
Enlightened.
I love the aesthetics of a Macbook Air for instance, but I'd be terrified to travel with one the way I travel.
And newer SUV's are even worse. You can't even see out of the back of a fucking 08 Explorer.
I have about 6 different brands of laptop, which I use as my desktop and carry with me on my long commute. Every one of them started having odd hardware issues. The latest was a Acer. Within 2 weeks the backlight stopped working. I got it fixed (no laptop for at least 2 weeks) and within another month it was broken again. It continued to be a problem until the warranty expired. I'll never touch another Acer product as long as I live.
Mac can and will have lemons like any company does, but their support makes me not have to fear this. That alone is worth any little extra I pay.
For those who disliked the comment didn't the POTUS [Obama] himself comment that iPad was a distraction.