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Comment by nsxwolf | Hacker News Reader

I like "workarounds become a reflex". This is a very succinct way of describing one of the causes of why people often claim to have no issues using something that universally has issues.

A great example is the gaming PC vs gaming console war. PC gamers often seem to refuse to admit there's untold little quirks you have to deal with when using a general-purpose operating system and modular hardware to play games. They don't notice the workarounds they are continuously employing, because it's become a reflex.

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This sentiment is seen in almost every response on http://discussions.apple.com, on Apple's subreddits and often in HN comments as well.

People are just too eager to jump on behalf on Apple - "but why you would rather not do this instead" (Why? Because I was looking for something else and I mentioned it for heaven's sake!) and these hacks and workarounds stack up while "Apple products and services just work" stays where it was in such Apple users' imaginations.

This is frustratingly weird and quite niche to Apple's user-fans.

For instance Apple's online services - the whole iCloud charade is a living and growing mess.

The SMS sync between phone and mac and in fact difference of basic UX options ("you can't select multiple messages on Catalina Messages app - not sure if it is added in later versions -- if you delete an SMS on phone it will still be synced to your mac Messages). And there apps are opaque in the guise of "simplicity" you just end up getting frustrated. I can go on for hours. Now as an Apple fan - but why would you not want those SMS to sync to mac as well? Yes, even if you delete them! What's the use of multiple message selection on mac Messages app - that's bad use case! Yes, yes, even though it is supported on iPhone - you don't get it!

The problem is the essential duopoly - Android and iOS - rock and a hard place.

Any time I search the internet for a solution to a problem with an Apple product or device, I intentionally exclude discussions.apple.com domains from my search results. I have never found a solution there, and the forums seem to be dominated — and I mean DOMINATED — by two or three ‘experts’ whose bottom-line is that Apple’s products work, so you must be doing something wrong.

One guy is convinced that uninstalling Chrome is the solution.

The go-to first response is “run Etrecheck,” after which they’ll chastise you for having installed anything they don’t recognize. And god help you if you’ve installed CleanMyMac. The only solution is to reinstall macOS and never do that again!

(They all seem to ignore that CleanMyMac X is now notarized and sold in the App Store...)

Stackoverflow > Apple’s community support. Every time.

> the forums seem to be dominated — and I mean DOMINATED — by two or three ‘experts’ whose bottom-line is that Apple’s products work, so you must be doing something wrong.

I've experience this first-hand, and it's annoying AF.

I wrote a post on Apple's forum about the years-old iOS celluar-draining bug[1], and one of these high-reputation "experts" (read: Apple apologist/shill) kept insisting that the OS corrupting its own settings and not handling the corruption gracefully was somehow all my fault - when I pointed out this was a clear OS bug (even linking to the Wikipedia definition for 'software bug'), his long-winded pushback reply boiled down to him essentially saying that "bugs aren't bugs". Beyond useless as a help forum with these clowns being allowed to earn those "reputation" points.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29764360

> The only solution is to reinstall macOS and never do that again!

Fuck the apple forums, they are usefulness. I'd like to add another type: return to apple for repairs alongside the 'reinstall os'.

There's gotta be a better answer than reinstalling the os! That's a nuclear option that should be a last resort. But it's recommended all the time.

Reinstalling macOS is no longer nuclear, in that it doesn’t materially touch your home folder.

Now it’s just a phenomenal waste of time.

Apple's stuff _always_ have issues and annoying ones. My Homepod stopped seeing any HomeKit devices. Reboot didn't help. I didn't feel like digging into it so I just went to bed. Couple days later out of all a sudden they start seeing stuff again.

Recently my Hue bulbs have decided to sometimes all show as unavailable in HomeKit, which is annoying. They normally revive themselves in a few minutes but I can’t figure it out.

Unfortunately no other home automation platform (Google, Amazon) lets you keep everything on your local network, and using Home Assistant would make using Siri for it harder, so I’m stuck with an annoyingly buggy platform.

> Unfortunately no other home automation platform (Google, Amazon) lets you keep everything on your local network

Exactly the reason I keep dealing with HomeKit annoyances.

You can use home assistant and HomeKit together pretty seamlessly. We have all our lighting automation as a zwave network though hass, and the lights are also included in HomeKit. We can use Siri or hass app or the native home app/widgets in iOS without any issues. And everything runs locally too.

At least their issues are relatively benign compared to the hot mess that is Windows. Had to re-install a friend's Asus all-in-one PC last weekend and god this was not fun. Took over a day worth of downloading Windows updates, battling Realtek's audio driver and Intel's chipset drivers until everything was finally working as expected (and most of the drivers are from 2016 - only God knows how much exploit surface these have!). Anything Bluetooth on Windows is still a hit-and-miss. And then you have to research on how to disable all the phone home crap, the ads and other bloat.

Linux is even worse, where even basic stuff such as suspend to disk or 3D acceleration regularly takes days or weeks worth of sifting through StackExchange posts, mailing lists, obscure blogs and 2010-era Debian Wiki posts.

And don't get me started on the clusterfuck that is Android. Got a new iPhone? No problem, transferring all the data is painless. Migrating in the Android world? Good luck getting even half of your stuff working.

Compared to all that, Apple is a fucking breeze to work with, because the competition is just mind bogglingly bad.

It's only bad for 3D because nVidia has their secret sauce (and corner cutting) in the driver and locked down firmware blobs that have very restrictive distribution.

If you have an Intel or AMD GPU everything either just works, or works with the latest drivers (might require an added repo if the card came out after the last stable release).

Yeah, Apple is a breeze but only if you stay within the crib prison they put you in.

New Pixel data transfer? Plugged in iPhone with the supplied USB-C -> A adapter, and all my contacts, photos, calendar data, etc. migrated to the new phone. Took less time than my mom migrating from an iPhone 6s to an iPhone 13.

Android isn't a fair comparison, since Apple is a single-manufacturer monoculture.

Samsung-to-samsung: I can give anecdata only but moving to a new samsung phone was completely effortless. The only things that broke, broke because there was a newer android OS version on the target (not much of that). This would of course break (and maybe worse) on iPhone -> newer iPhone.

> Apple's stuff _always_ have issues and annoying ones

True. I’m fully into apple ecosystem with iMac, Apple tv, macbook and phones. So, naturally I use airdrop a lot, to the point that sometimes I depend on it to work. But, every few days it just stops working. Even after turning off Bluetooth, wifi on phone and mac it just doesn’t shows the device. Sometimes I just give up and sometimes when I don’t feel like giving up I go up to even restarting devices. This is something that I don’t expect from Apple.

Tell me about it.

My last three MacBooks, including the new 16” M1, have inexplicably had issues syncing to iCloud for several days (sometimes weeks) until magically everything seems to just work as expected and I forget all about it.

It’s all part of the magic of owning Apple devices. They’re annoyances, but minor and usually easy enough to fix.

> PC gamers often seem to refuse to admit there's untold little quirks you have to deal with when using a general-purpose operating system and modular hardware to play games. They don't notice the workarounds they are continuously employing, because it's become a reflex.

Not just a reflex, a cargo-cult reflex.

Look at the litany of optimization/debugging nonsense that is parroted across the internet. Registry fiddling, disabling Windows services, setting core affinities, divination by chicken bones, all sorts of nonsense - the impact of which is, of course, not ever empirically measured.

That one's actually a good argument for open source software, in my experience. While the cargo-cult culture exists everywhere less experienced users are involved, in FOSS land there's a decent chance some developer or power user (any developer, not just a project member) will stumble upon the problem and either figure out the real issue themselves or coordinate with the project devs to do so. I've done this many, many times over the years. Complete nonsense cargo-cult stuff doesn't tend to survive forever in this ecosystem, because someone eventually realizes it's nonsense.

In Windows land? Decades can go by without anyone knowing what's going on, unless someone motivated enough to reverse engineer the binaries involved shows up and finds the issue. That isn't very common. Though when it happens it can be hilarious [1].

[1] https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...

Yep. For one game, the launcher screen depends on an old version of a Microsoft .NET runtime that is no longer distributed by Microsoft, and the current version (theoretically compatible) is disallowed because the launcher has apparently hardcoded a dependency to a specific version.

Then there was another game where I had to install a different DLL to get it to run.

Then there was IL2 Sturmovik that was just plain broken for a long time on more recent versions of Windows. I of course didn't discover this until after the refund window...

I found the same about moving to GIMP from Photoshop. Granted, Photoshop has more conveniences and fancy features. But a good deal of the frustration is not GIMP's so-called confusing interface, just the habits I formed while using Photoshop. Now that I'm a GIMP user for a time, every time I go back to Photoshop, I find myself annoyed in the same way. I think this just boils down to people's natural resistance to change.

The more minimalist a system is, the less people seem to think in terms of "annoyances". In fact, simplicity fans seem to pride themselves on doing a bit more themselves.

Like, manual transmission people think of the constant need to manage it yourself as just how driving is supposed to be.

It's a big problem in Linux, where things can totally break and nobody bats an eye.

I guess I'm eligible to answer this as I'm both a Linux user and a stick shifter.

I hate Linux for when things fall-apart. But I also know most of the things are being made by devs because of their passion. My hardware doesn't fail because Linux is blindly arrogant, but because of the hardware vendors who don't support the platform or me (as I paid them money)

Manual transmissions are an extra level of engagement that's fun to drive and useful in many casses. My 86bhp car lacks torque and power, specially combined with its heavy metal body. When I need to overtake and I lack the power for it I can downshift and pass. Add in the rev matching, and it makes it sweeter and perfect.

In a country like India, you pay a good price for a reliable automatic. So that's money saved.

It's the same difference as a home cooked meal and a takeout.

Apple doesn't get slack from me because they know the hardware, the software and still manage to mess it up with loyal fans defending their bad decisions

> there's untold little quirks you have to deal with when using a general-purpose operating system

"Though initial iterations of the software for the original Xbox and Xbox 360 were based on heavily modified versions of Windows, the newer consoles feature operating systems that are highly compatible with Microsoft's desktop operating systems, allowing for shared applications and ease-of-development between personal computers and the Xbox line." Wikipedia

> and modular hardware

This is true. There are, e.g., fake GPUs that will make your experience quite bad. I always buy pre-build PCs from my favorite tech store, and I have personally avoided the problem. But Steam forums show that some people is not so fortunate. Also there is people trying to run modern games in very old PCs, consoles solve that problem by not running new games in previous generation consoles.

> newer consoles feature operating systems that are highly compatible with Microsoft's desktop operating systems, allowing for shared applications and ease-of-development between personal computers and the Xbox line

Microsoft created its Universal Windows Platform (UWP) to enable software to run across multiple Windows devices from desktops to tablets to consoles. It has not really been a resounding success, though it has some inconvenient limitations as well as business restrictions such as being tied to the Windows Store.

Even the Windows Store has moved away from UWP by supporting Win32 apps.

It's not about the OS technology in use, it's about all the practicalities of how it is deployed on consoles vs. on desktops. Things like immutable OS volumes, fixed configuration tested on the hardware, the extent to which they build higher level automation to do what the user expects, etc. "The Xbox One runs Windows" ignores all these details which make it a much more seamless experience than on a PC. The PS4 runs FreeBSD, but try gaming on FreeBSD and let me know how it goes in comparison...

Honestly, it's plainly obvious that gaming on consoles is much more seamless than on PCs. If you don't think so, you're not recognizing all the little quirks you're dealing with on a PC. When was the last time a driver update broke a game on a console? Ever had to install support software to make a game work well with a particular controller? Issues with overlays and system feature integration? Unexpected performance loss due to a weird configuration? Mysterious DRM malfunction issues? Windows Update gone wrong? Those things (mostly) just don't happen on consoles because it's a much more controlled ecosystem.

> When was the last time a driver update broke game on a console? Ever had to install support software to make a game work well with a particular controller? Issues with overlays and system feature integration? Unexpected performance loss due to weird configuration? Mysterious DRM malfunction issues? Windows Update gone wrong?

I agree (I don't get why people downvotes). My argument is that a quality PC does not have that problems. The fact that you can get a very cheap PC creates many of this situations. But I get into "No true Scotsman" territory with that logic. And that is why I agree with your arguments.

But those things I mentioned happen regardless of the hardware build quality. Hardware quality will avoid hardware issues, things like overheating or stability problems. The things I mentioned are software integration problems that are a natural consequence of the PC ecosystem being much more heterogeneous. It doesn't matter how good your hardware is.

There's just no way around the fact that when your ecosystem gives people much more choice and flexibility, it's going to be jankier than one which doesn't. It's just math. As you add dimensions to the problem space you reduce the fraction of the problem space you can test to ensure the user experience is good, and you rely on users to figure out how to reach a good point in that space, since you can't do it for them. If your dimensions are at least separable you might have a better chance (linear scaling instead of exponential), but modern systems are too complex to keep one issue from influencing others. It's a massive engineering problem.

The cost or "quality" of the PC is not a factor.

Just the simple fact that you have to manually install graphics drivers is a basic issue that you don't have to deal with on console. Just visit any of the PCgaming subreddits and you'll find plenty of examples to do with troubleshooting graphics issues, with people suggesting using Graphics Driver Uninstaller to try and completely remove conflicting driver versions etc.etc.

I remember when there were annoying stutters after the initial BF1 launch and one of the workarounds was to use task manager to change the CPU priority for the task. Here's an example thread for ModernWarfare https://www.reddit.com/r/modernwarfare/comments/j26zli/stutt...

Literally none of those issues affect console gaming. It's sit down and start gaming without any hassles within 15 sec of turning the machine on.

I've been a PC gamer for 30 years and it's a pain in the ass compared to console. With the new generation of consoles targeting 60fps, my final annoyance with console gaming has disappeared.

>My argument is that a quality PC does not have that problems.

Part of nvidia's drivers often contain workarounds and hacks specific to games. Sometimes they have gone wrong and bricked a game until the developer or nvidia can fix it. Buying a "quality" PC doesn't alleviate you from having to use nvidia drivers.

There's also a lot of little things. Like, you launch a game and there's no audio. Well, Windows at some point decided to switch audio outputs on you. You may have a lot of them. Line out, headphones, a bluetooth headset, a virtual out for streaming software, a monitor with built-in speakers - and now you've got to click the little speaker icon and try to figure out what should be selected, which may be named after the driver or hardware vendor and not totally obvious.

That's the sort of thing that for the most part just doesn't happen with the consoles, because they're limited and tuned for the intended experience.

> Well, Windows at some point decided to switch audio outputs on you. You may have a lot of them. Line out, headphones, a bluetooth headset, a virtual out for streaming software, a monitor with built-in speakers

I agree that I have found that problems. I just get the same problems with my TV (Samsung) when I have several audio devices. Maybe one can argue that is a TV problem, not a console problem. But non-portable consoles need a TV to work. So, the problem exists but it's moved somewhere else.

After your comment I realize that portable consoles are that ideal all-in-one, at least older ones without HDMI or Bluetooth.

On my PC each legitimate output device has a duplicate with the same name that does nothing. Every once in a while when I launch a game it will switch to the duplicate entry and I will have to switch it back. It's a quirk where the fix has become a reflex.

I've never had to deal with this on any console I've owned.

Disabling all the duplicate entries might help.

Or not. Shrug. Sound configuration is one of worst aspects of Windows.

I remember it being pretty good on Windows XP. I’d run programs like reaper with full control of my soundcard and it’s IO. It wasn’t until win10 that everything sound related became a chore. I can still find snippets of XP UI in win10 hidden under many layers of new age UX. Stuff like the “listen to this device” checkbox

You can rename audio devices to be something just friendly.

Right. You can. A workaround. This is something you don't have to do on an XBox or PS5.

And that's a workaround to make it easier to perform another workaround, the "why can't I hear my game" problem. So we're in workaround Inception now, nested workarounds.

Yeah, there's something to be said for playing an online game in which everyone has the same exact hardware (mostly). This is coming from a person who occasionally plays competitive games on a 2012 Thinkpad and comforts himself when he loses by saying, "it's ok, their computer cost as much as a used car. Don't feel bad about losing".

Happy 10th birthday T-530, 1 decade and still trucking!

i feel like i can't identify issues in my life because I am so used to doing workarounds. this is why everything needs to be tested by someone else that is completely separate from the work, their fresh perspective will point out such obvious issues and your first reaction should never be to balk and say "no but you just do it like this"

>A great example is the gaming PC vs gaming console war.

Which war was that? A bunch of teenagers and man-children arguing online between PC vs console superiority is in no way a 'war' and is anything but a great example for "workarounds become a reflex". Online squabbles between rabid fanboys and brand loyalists should be left alone and not be used in logical debates.

>PC gamers often seem to refuse to admit there's untold little quirks you have to deal with when using a general-purpose operating system and modular hardware to play games.

I highly doubt your broad generalization is accurate. Do you have any sources for your claims? Every PC owner and gamer I know both online and IRL openly admits this hobby is not a smooth sailing endeavor. Again, I would love to see your sources for your claims, otherwise I feel HN is degrading into reddit where people make broad fact-less generalizations with no arguments and others upvote regardless because it gives them self-approval and dopamine hits.

>They don't notice the workarounds they are continuously employing, because it's become a reflex.

My personal example would be MacOS, when I, an outsider who never regularly used MacOS, point out various UX quirks that trip me up and cause issues for me rather than make my life easier as I was promised, I saw that everyone I know who is a long time user of MacOS got so used to the quirks that they formed some workarounds that turned into reflexes and just became part of the experience and not viewed as issue anymore but as tolerated and expected behavior. Basically for them MacOS is simpler because they already know the quirks and workarounds inside and out, not because it's objectively simpler than the alternatives. Same goes for long time users of Linux and Windows if you're coming from the other side.

So in the end it's not about one being objectively better than the other, it's about people always will have more issues with the things they don't know very well and be subjectively biased towards the things they already know and like. It's the nature of humanity.

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