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Comment by spiderfarmer | Hacker News Reader

It feels like how older tech nerds get, the more nostalgic and conservative they become. Remember when your parents said "everything is moving so quickly, and it's not getting better"? You're now reaching a point in live where you wish for simpler times.

Apple is not perfect. I also agree their quality is getting worse. I understand why people say that everything used to be better. But their customers can now do things with their hard- and software that we couldn't imagine 10 years ago. That progress has a cost. Apple can't be everything to everyone. They're fine with the churn rate as it is.

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“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

Regarding 3) However, this time it's not solely about tech, but about workflows. Apple was once leading in human-computer symbiosis, now, seeing Big Sur, Apple has become actually bad about this.

(I get that Apple is now a media house, but the Big iOS won't do for all purposes. A computer, and we may say, historically especially the Mac, isn't only about consuming and a virtual kaleidoscope, it's also the universal means of production since a few decades ago.)

What's so bad about Big Sur (except the bypassing firewalls) ?

From what little experience i have with it (being recently released), everything still just works as expected. They changed the layout of a few things, but at least from my usage perspective it still works every bit as well as the previous versions.

Granted, i mostly use mail, text editors, terminals and browsers with the occational hobby photo editing and 3d printing slicers, but for my programming and photo workflows it still fits the bill nicely.

I use Windows 10 at work every day, and while it runs well enough there are still countless "little things" that bug me.

About 10-15 years ago i stopped doing "point and click" to open applications, and instead rely on Spotlight to find and open apps. This works 99% of the time. On windows ... not so much. Press the windows key, start typing, and it either doesn't find what you're trying to open, or it finds it, but in the time it takes my brain to register the correct result i have typed another (correct) letter, and the wanted result is gone, replaced by some annoying Bing website.

Control Panel ? Why do we need 3-4 of them ?

It's the look and feel – and more than this. E.g., when Apple decided that customizable icons in the sidebar were bad for their corporate identity, this didn't cost me just a few moments of lifetime whenever I use a file dialog, it also puts some extra stress on me. Now, since visual orientation doesn't work anymore, I've to actually read the list to identify a project folder. Moreover, this also means unloading some of the working memory (just 7 chunks, but there are more than this in the sidebar!) and having to get back into the workflow after having finished what should have been a task as modeless as possible. Big Sur iterates on this, just think centered text and vertically stacked buttons for prompts (as opposed to everywhere else). It's a zoo of micro modes. Another example, the now-you-don't-see-me – now-you-see-me game of the proxy icon, varying window geometry (Mail), etc.

These are all examples you can get used to. Like you've gotten used the current version of MacOS. Big Sur has a lot of improvements. Sometimes you just have to take the good with the bad.

> These are all examples you can get used to.

Actually, no. All these examples are about orientation and how the UI paradigms integrate with the human neural physis. This isn't simply changeable by accustomization. E.g., if the primary structure of the visual field breaks (like the one given by the primary horizontal contours), our brain blocks for a full situational update (which takes about 0.2 secs). Similarly, visual orientation is considerably faster than reading lists. Identifying a colored dot on the screen chips just a single bit from your stack of working memory. Aiming at an invisible point target is difficult and requires extra attention. This isn't subject to negotiation, it's just how we are wired.

Edit, another perspective on this: Toys tend to be robust and to grab as much attention as possible. Professional tools, on the other hand, are sometimes delicate, you should know what you're doing, and they are also highly optimized to facilitate a trade and not to get in its way. From this perspective, Big Sur progresses on the toy scale. This is good news for a media house that uses this contraption as the primary outlet, but it may be bad news for those who use it as professional tool.

But I could do those things and had a free environment. And non-Apple users can do these things too.

On the contrary, I think younger people seem to get worse with tech, which should not happen but can easily be explained by manufacturers locking down environments.

Maybe they just aren't that interested, true, but I don't think Apple is revolutionary on any one feature to be honest.

I think the M1 processor is quite revolutionary honestly.

Yes, kids these days have less fundamental knowledge about tech. But that's because a lot of problems that were interesting to us are now solved. My son doesn't have to know anything about modems, BBS'es, sound cards and MP3 codecs in order to listen to music. He can just start Spotify on almost every device in our household. It took me months to know how to do that.

I came of age just as Macs were getting really "cool" again, around the mid 00's. In college, as soon as I got a little money in my pocket from scholarships and grants I went out and bought a Macbook.

If anything the nostalgic conservative position for me to take would be that Macs are still awesome and cool despite any critiques.

What big innovation would be scaring me away at this point? Changing architectures? That's happened in the past. Macbooks are still macbooks more or less.

Locking down the system more and more each generation isn't innovation. It isn't "conservative" to criticize vendor lock in or to prefer more user freedom over the familiar comfort of Apple's design language.

Is it a case of things are getting worse, the costs are more evident, or priorities change?

Each case is different, yet they often seem to be placed in the same bin. Take one of the big discussion points this week, verification of software. It is hard to say whether it is better or worse. System security is more important than ever, so it can be argued it is better. At the same time, there is a cost. There are times when it may not be reliable and there is a potential to use it for planned obsolecence. Planned obsolecence may not be an issue for the first time buyer or someone who is experiencing a lot of change in their life (mostly the young), yet it will have an impact upon people who have progressed beyond that stage and have other priorities in life.

> their customers can now do things with their hard- and software that we couldn't imagine 10 years ago. That progress has a cost. Apple can't be everything to everyone.

That is definitely not the point of the article. In the author's experience he has a direct loss of functionality, like the throttling or the inability to install not verified software.

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