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> Apple won't fare as well if they were to be evaluated by an audience unfamiliar with their brand and devices all together.

Haven't they spent the last decade expanding into new markets successfully though? And from what I gather their new customer retention and satisfaction is among the best in the industry.

People like to explain away Apple's success as merely the product of "fanboys" they've had for decades, as though the same 10 million guys who bought the first iphone are somehow responsible for the 50+ million phones apple sells each quarter. The truth is simpler: (1) yes they do have many loyal customers and (2) those customers keep buying Apple products because they have good experiences with them. It's also true that their design priorities are not universal and some are especially ornery for power users. But the idea that their UI design is inherently bad seems off and the fact that people keep copying them [1] seems like the best evidence.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17988564/chinese-phone-s... , money quote: "judging by the accuracy and specificity of the rip-offs, the camera app from iOS 7 has a serious claim to being one of the most influential software designs of the past decade."

> People like to explain away Apple's success as merely the product of "fanboys" they've had for decades, as though the same 10 million guys who bought the first iphone are somehow responsible for the 50+ million phones apple sells each quarter.

Given the world's fashion industry is worth trillions, it will take a more persuasive argument than that to convince me it's not heavily influenced by people's perception of it as a status symbol.

> those customers keep buying Apple products because they have good experiences with them.

Or they've bought into the hype and that's all they experience on a regular basis anymore. My mom has driven a Mercedes for decades. My sister drove a cheaper one as her first car, and recently bought a much nicer one. Even if I wanted to spend that much money on a car, I don't like them, and have always had bad experiences with them. My mom's car was a lemon, in and out of the shop multiple times every year for the first 15 years, until it's been too unreliable to drive on a regular basis the last 5 years.

She's in a market for a new car, and both she and my sister are excited to get her a Mercedes. Their experiences should have driven then away from the brand years ago, but they haven't. Why do you suppose that is? I have my own theories.

Do you mean fashion, or luxury? Fashion and apparel is 1.2 trillion. But that includes clothing, which is a necessary item.

The luxury goods industry, by contrast, is only worth 250 billion.

https://www.statista.com/topics/1110/global-luxury-goods-ind...

I feel your analogy is not very well founded.

> Do you mean fashion, or luxury? Fashion and apparel is 1.2 trillion. But that includes clothing, which is a necessary item.

I was using https://fashionunited.com/global-fashion-industry-statistics, which has slightly different values (but it's likely including labor force).

And yes, I meant fashion, including clothing. Either works in this case, as both are very large numbers, and a large amount of the general apparel category is also carried by brands and brand awareness. Just because it's not Louis Vuitton doesn't mean people aren't opting for the Gap instead of Walmart, Target, or in years past, Kmart because of perceived value and status.

> I feel your analogy is not very well founded.

Feel free to provide a counter example, or explain why the specifics you called out change the point I was trying to express. Maybe you thought what you already provided was self-evident, but I don't see it that way so I don't see how you've provided any evidence that it's not well founded.

> But that includes clothing, which is a necessary item.

In XXI century, in a western country, a smartphone is pretty much a necessary item too. Not on the clothing level yet, but it's definitely not a luxury category.

Most likely some kind of signalling behaviour.

Status signalling is what a particular kind of "rich" person does to indicate they are rich or high value. Often also used to bolster social capital. You see it when women buy extraordinarily expensive designer brand hand bags. Men buying sports cars but have no clue what is under the hood. The key element is not the actual product but the visible cost involved in actually purchasing it - expense as a feature.

When the Android phones came on the market, I was extatic. Linux, in my pocket!

However, Android did not live up to my expectations at all. I don’t know what I was hoping for, but Android was not it.

After a while I came to understand that for me personally Android was a bad fit, and everything I had envisioned about running Linux on my phone was ill-adviced. Linux and FreeBSD are my main two operating systems I run on my own computers and servers, and I would not trade them for anything in the world on my main laptop, main desktop and servers. But on phones neither have anything to offer that is of use to me actually.

I don’t really understand what kind of “advanced” things you are referring to not being possible on iOS. Could you expand on that?

I use my iPhone for web browsing, watching videos, making music, playing some games, taking photos, 2nd factor auth, sending and receiving money, SSH client in my pocket, GPS with updated maps, listening to music, writing down notes, setting alarms, keeping track of my schedule, keeping in touch with people, creating PDFs that are indistinguishable from the scan a full size flatbed scanner would give me. The list goes on.

Everything I thought I wanted when I imagined having Linux in my pocket turned out to be a distraction. When I need Linux or FreeBSD, I have my laptop, desktop and servers for that.

Anyway, the point is to say that I don’t identify with the two groups of people you said are their target audience, but I find myself a very happy iPhone user.

But I am not married to Apple, and I am a loyal customer only because of 1. their stance on privacy and security and 2. their product fits me so well.

If they mess up with my trust then they will lose me as a customer. If they make changes to iOS that make using it bothersome, they will lose me as a customer.

I have had the same experience with iPhones - being unable to figure out how to do things should have been easy. Ended up having to use my Android to look up how to do things.

It's not that things aren't possible (sometimes), it's that they're not discoverable.

I've done extensive user testing with people on both Android and iOS devices (and, comparatively on Windows and MacOS devices) and the common thread that I see is that Android users coming to an iPhone try to use it exactly the same way that they use their Android device and then get frustrated that it doesn't work the same way. Windows users try to use a Mac exactly the same way they use Windows and get frustrated when it doesn't work that way. Inversely, the same is try for iPhone users trying to use Android and Mac users trying to use Windows. They ignore the intuitive features of both sides simply because they're used to working with one or the other.

If you can't figure out how to do things on an iPhone and think it's difficult, I'd wager a argument that it's because you're not just looking at what's there, you're trying to project your existing experience onto a different device and expecting it to work the same way. In other words (and I don't really say this sarcastically), you're using it wrong. If they were meant to be used the same way, they'd be the same products and they're not.

> I don’t really understand what kind of “advanced” things you are referring to not being possible on iOS. Could you expand on that?

I could give you one. An actual user-accessible filesystem instead of having only iCloud plus siloed app-specific storage. (No, Apple's eventual capitulation to include a "Files" app which just aggregates files from different apps doesn't count.)

Seconded. Hiding the filesystem is both destroying productivity and fucking up people's mental model of computing. I hate when people build abstractions that lie to you about the way things work - because lies are always inconsistent, they'll eventually leak and confuse people.

Proficient users aren't born, they're made. Or, increasingly, not made, thanks to contemporary UX trends.

What do you need the filesystem for on your device?

I've had direct access to my filesystem on my iOS devices since 2012 and it is very very rare that I use it. And when I do it is mostly for fun and exploration, nothing a normal user would be doing anyway.

I am not sure that the way files are usually presented is actually that much better.

You and I know that a file is data and a file format is defined by the structure of the data.

Most regular users I have talked to don’t know this. If you ask them what a file format is they will say that the file format is determined by the extension of the file.

Even with a file system presented to the user you still end up with most people not having a real understanding of what files actually are.

Likewise, a lot of users will insist that certain file formats “belong” to some particular program, just because the extension associated with the format is handled by that program on their computer.

Furthermore, most users have no idea what really happens when you open a file in a program.

In fact I would bet that at least some are completely unable to distinguish the data of the file from the interface that they are using to edit the file.

A file system is a powerful abstraction, but I don’t think it teaches the “truth” on its own.

Neither do I think knowing about files is the most important for someone wishing to understand computation.

The most important to understand is what a data format is, and knowing that knowing the details of the byte-level structure of the data is what allows software to be implemented to interact with and optionally transform that data.

Furthermore, I wish more people knew some fundamental things about data like

- the difference between text and an image of text

- the difference between bitmap and vector graphics

- the difference between lossy and lossless compression, and how these work

- why some formats are hard to work with, for example extracting data from PDF files

Etc.

Understanding these things does not require a user visible fs, nor will a user visible fs help most people understand these things for reasons I stated earlier in this comment.

All abstractions eventually leak and confuse people. The file system itself is an imperfect abstraction.

>Hiding the filesystem is both destroying productivity and fucking up people's mental model of computing

That's nonsense. Most users don't care that there's a file system and they surely don't care how it works. They care that, when they open up Microsoft Word, they can find the document they last created or an older document. They care that, when they open an app called Photos, they see their pictures. They don't care how they're stored by the computer or how they're organized, they only care that they can find what they're looking for when they're looking for it.

It may be easier for you to navigate through a file system because that's how you've adapted your workflow but to say that not having one is somehow destroying productivity is crazy nonsense. You're taking your individual experience and extrapolating it on populations that are not similar to you at all.

I mean... do you honestly thing that Donald Trump/your grandmother/a teenager cares that there's a file system on his iPhone?

We must use the phone in very different ways. I spend hours a day in a terminal, so I live by a file system on a computer. Yet I've never felt the need for a filesystem on an iPhone.

When android first came out they were apps like tasker (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch....) almost immediately that showcased pretty clearly a lot of things you could do on android but not iOS, a lot of examples are here: http://www.crunchytricks.com/2016/10/tasker-profiles.html

My personal favorites are to turn off wifi if I'm not at home or work, turn off bluetooth if I'm not home, turn down brightness at night and shaking your phone to turn on the flashlight.

I've a fun one: The BlackBerry KEYone and KEY2 have a physical button called the Convenience Key that can be set to any app or shortcut. I set mine to a Tasker shortcut that changes what it does based on the day and time (mostly based around my daily commute, for bus prediction times and an e-reader).

> I don’t really understand what kind of “advanced” things you are referring to not being possible on iOS. Could you expand on that?

Personally I'm still pretty annoyed you can't replace the default url handlers for stuff like Maps and Mail. Every time Apple Maps pops up I curse them.

on the maps front it annoys me they're all silos, and there isn't, at the very least, easy switching between map apps for the same coordinates&zoom. The location api exposes a notion of 'here'/'location', I want a shared notion of 'there'/'destination' (useful not only for mapping, but eg transport apps).

Pipe dream level: Apple Maps gains api-accessible import/export of geodata, (POIs, tracks, layers...?), so opening any compatible map app can both open at the 'there' location and can display the shared geodata.

(typically I use google maps for urban stuff, maps.me for pre-downloaded offline maps and POIs, ordnance survey for uk outdoors, michelin maps for france (the search is terrible, but having roads marked as scenic is fantastic), bikehub for cycle routes... and more. I switch maps a lot...but never to Apple Maps)

I had nearly every iPhone until the LG G5 came out and I switched to Android. Whenever I use my wife's phone I honestly feel like an idiot because I can't figure out 3d touch and a bunch of the other features since I missed their 'introduction' of sorts and don't know that they exist or how they are supposed to be used.

You shouldn't be downvoted for this. I was missing new apple features for years, until I started browsing the apple subreddit. There are a lot of hidden features.

Seems there is a good manual online, but it's poorly advertised. The new features are often mainly announced once when you first open a system app after an ios update.

I've seem my parents repeatedly close them in a rush to get to the app. There's no "show me these tips later" option either, so they never learn the new features.

There are many advantages to the simplicity, but it's not wrong to say that new stuff is poorly discoverable. For pros and casual users alike.

That said, basic useability is great. Both of my parents figured out how to use iphones for their day to day with basically no tech support requests. Same with a mac. I was impressed, they always asked for help on Windows.

> There's no "show me these tips later" option either, so they never learn the new features.

There is a Tips app which is visible on the Home Screen that contains general information such as "Welcome to iPhone" and "What's New" that contains tips on how to use the new features.

The app sometimes even nags you with "Tip of the Day" notifications.

Tips is nice, but it only has a fraction of the info that is displayed on those splash screens. That info is displayed exactly once.

It's a mystery to me why they don't have a list of tips for each stock app in the tips app.

I feel the same way, but in reverse.

I've been using iOS since the iPhone 3G and have built apps for it. I know iOS inside out. I recently started a new job where the vast majority of our customers use Android. I therefore chose my work phone to be Android, so I could use the same platform that our customers use.

Wow - is it confusing! Nothing is intuitive, and I genuinely find it very hard to use and get into a rhythm with. It's a Galaxy S9, so hardly a "bad" Android phone.

My takeaway is that so much of the way we use our devices, especially our phones, becomes muscle memory. Android is not badly designed, neither is iOS, it's just that I've built up a decade's worth of muscle memory, coming from hundreds of interactions a day with the device, that switching to a different paradigm is going to feel jarring.

Most people use different devices in the same way they use their preferred devices and get frustrated when they don't produce the exact same results.

What a ridiculous response. Man used to using Android find iOS frustrating, predicts doom for Apple.

When iPhones first came out they were a dream to use - but I think that was largely because they didn't do very much. Picking up an iPhone 3GS (the first one I saw in real life) the interface was fast, intuitive and accessible.

However, as more features were added, Apple's desire to keep things appearing to be simple and clean, and their refusal to increase screen size, meant features get hidden away, behind swipes, long presses and double presses from different parts of the screen. I find iPhones really hard to use nowadays - even though they now have a lot of features which stopped me from buying them initially.

Are you joking? On the iPhone 3 I couldn't even copy paste....

>because they didn't do very much

They also didn't send MMS. No Flash, at a time when the web was highly reliant on it. No front facing camera. No practical way to share files. But the interface was definitely simple and easy to understand.

Very strange experience. As far as sharing anecdotes go I have witnessed two people coming to Apple without previous experience and having zero problems. You yourself state how happy you were to go back to familiar land of Android. So it may be, that Apple is not an issue here.

You realize 15 years ago was 2003.

I'm the same way. I've gotten used to using a Mac for work; there are the few things I need to know how to run, and I've more or less figured those out. Even after that, though, I was utterly useless last week trying to send an email for my mom on her iPhone.

1. Open Mail

2. Click compose button

How could that possibly be difficult of all things?

I've never been able to understand why mail apps insist on the word Compose. Is it an American thing? I've never wanted to compose a piece of text, and never heard the word used in that way.

Sounds a bit grandiose from here in California.

It's the word gmail uses as well.

no the word gmail uses is "+"

https://imgur.com/a/dFx48CV

I do see a "+" front and center though,which is not the case on apple devices. even if I don't know what compose means, I do know that + probably means creating a email

What word would you use to describe the action of creating a new message?

write or create or new

To be clear: whatever the button is called, it doesn't have any text on iOS (which, as far as I can tell, is what OP was talking about). It's just an icon of a pencil writing on paper.

To be even clearer: It's literally one of only 4 buttons on the main Mail screen (the others being Back, Edit, and Filter). If you just go to Mail and don't even attempt a guess, that's on you.

It's from the older phrase "compose a letter". Since letters were replaced with email, the phrase became "compose an email".

Compose is defined as putting together many pieces into one coherent work. Most people associate it with music, where composers put together notes until they make up a piece of music. In the mail app context it also makes perfect sense as you are composing a larger piece of work (your letter) from smaller individual elements (words).

TL;DR - Compose is the correct word to use.