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Comment by queuebert | Hacker News Reader

Since this opinion seems near universal, is there any explanation for what the heck Apple is doing?

Project manager driven decision-making. Everyone wants to make a name for themselves, so every update gets a big UI overhaul even when it doesn't need one. Features get taken away when they don't need to be. Workflows get redone when they don't have to be redone. Imagine if this were to happen for something as important as Bash, people would revolt and fork, but in the big tech world you are beholden to these corporate products.

It's not just apple, its everything in big tech. Venmo just released an update where they moved key workflows around for no reason at all, and now I don't have muscle memory for the app anymore, but I'm sure some project manager justified it with telemetry and got a huge bonus for rolling out an update and showing downloads grew by 1% (which they probably would have anyway).

“Project” or “product?”

Apple doesn’t have product managers and the project managers don’t make these decisions. (They have regular managers instead.)

It's rose-tinted glasses. Every release meets the same same level of criticism as to how it's the end of macOS, how the interface design is a regression towards infantilism. It has been ever thus, even in the System/OS 7, 8, 9 days. The difference now is that macOS is more mainstream.

Yep. Everyone is cool with all the change that was necessary to get software to the point where they were most emotionally attached to it, and all change after that is “useless meddling that no one likes and is only done to give PMs and designers a job.”

This massively oversimplifies the state of technology and is unfairly dismissive of the significant productivity hit that some changes can inflict on the most loyal and experienced users.

It’s certainly possible for changes in UI to significantly harm productivity, but you would need to systematically gather evidence to know if this is happening. Whether it’s happening is almost completely independent of anyone’s individual feeling of frustration at needing to learn about and adapt to new UI changes.

But more importantly, they existence of change is inherently important to the large-scale advancement of computing over time. Even if it is the case that a certain UI overhaul of a major operating system harmed productivity, the solution is not “permanently halt all software changes after this specific version that I have learned and enjoy using.” We ought to reject arguments that forced stasis is the solution any time changes introduce risk.

We ought to reject arguments that forced stasis is the solution any time changes introduce risk.

We also ought to reject the idea that forced change is the solution.

Mh, I don't know. Some of the changes that people complain the most about (from Leopard's 3D dock to Safari 15 tabs) were undone by Apple. And for some changes that haven't been undone, like monochrome icons everywhere, I still mis-click things so often that I doubt it's just nostalgia.

If you'd let people mix and match elements from different eras of macOS, I'm sure you'd see some patterns regardless of when people got into Macs; similar to how people have lots of abstract opinions about architecture, but somehow the tourist buses always stop at the same cozy-looking old towns. Beauty and usability are not entirely subjective.

I’ve been an Apple user since the early 80’s. Apple being simultaneously the gods of UI and scourge of UI have been a constant, along with the ‘doomed’ narrative. A lot of this is the peanut gallery repeating what they’ve heard, as well as exaggeration of the issues individuals face. For instance, in the 40 or so years that I’ve used computers, I believe they have never been more user-friendly than they are now for the typical user. Not just Macs, but Windows and Linux’s desktops too. Reading opinions here would make you think the opposite is true, but here is full of people that love to tinker, and fewer seem to want to go back to the “good old days”. Hence the ‘rose tinted glasses’ comment. I was there, it wasn’t that great! I jest, well a little bit anyway. I remember Tiger being released and a-not-insignificant-amount of people complaining about brushed metal. As I said, it has been ever this. Long may it continue - it makes us that do care think.

The iPhone.

Look at the MacOS release feature lists before and after the iPhone. It's pretty clear that the Mac teams got cannibalized and didn't recover for years.

It’s not universal, people just don’t bother writing posts with the opposite perspective because it’s boring. Tiger was my first version of OS X and I think what we have now looks much better.

The UIs are designed for the monitors of their time and it’s not fair to compare them on the same screen. 2000s computers had shitty TN LCDs with low contrast which is why the UI had so much kitsch.

They are in the Windows 8 phase of design. They want to merge mouse and keyboard systems with touch systems, and are thusly forcing mouse and keyboard users to use interface conventions that are derived from touch platforms.

Mobile platforms benefit more from high contrast, very simple and flat designs.

Beyond just the touch screen convenience features -- A significant portion of users is seeig their UI under conditions of extreme sunlight, water droplets, or cracked screen at any given time. These things all inform design choices for mobile.

Now then, why is Apple making the same mistake as Microsoft Windows 8 by forcing these design elements onto Desktop and Laptop market segments? Apple doesn't really think of the PC market much. According to their financial reports, they make more money selling chargers for their mobile devices than they do on the entire PC market.

The answer, I assume, is apathy.

Apple isn’t merging mouse and keyboard systems, though. Not in macOS. So that hypothesis is complete bunk.

This design move is at this point getting to be a decade old. So this explanation from you makes zero sense.

This. macOS has been in an incremental phase for several years now. Windows 8 was a major overhaul from Microsoft which ended up as a big mistake since they didn't consider the impact of such an overhaul in terms of user experience. macOS on the other hand is quite mature and Apple knows that any major change would hurt users in the end.

Was Big Sur one of those "incremental" updates?

Yes.

Just an "incremental" update where they added touch screen apps (from the iPhone and iPad) to the desktop and laptop experience. Oh, they also changed the system tray to mimic the touch functionality of iPads 1:1 as well, despite being a (far more precise) mouse pointer controlled system. Incremental they say. I was way off base and taking crazy pills when I saw any relationship between these design elements and touch interfaces.

The latest design elements feel straight from iPad OS imo. They also have had a focus on allowing iOS installs onto MacOS. This is from BigSur onward.

I was mostly describing my feelings and guesses of it.

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