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Comment by peanut_worm | Hacker News Reader

I feel like Apple has a hard time making all of the features of their products easily discoverable.

There is a cost to making features discoverable. The cost is visual complexity. Apple can present only one UI to every first time user. They need to make hard choices about what to keep and what to remove so that the most non-technical user does not feel overwhelmed. At the same time, they have to figure out subtle ways to gauge user intent and carefully make a feature discoverable such that only the user who might consider using it (a power user) discovers and acts on it, while not getting in the way of the average Joe. It’s more art than science and I watch this with fascination. Not many companies seem to have the attitude of being totally OK with hiding features that took time and money to make.

To me, it’s quite clear that Apple is OK with letting a hundred power users miss a hidden feature than having even one non-techie overwhelmed with choice anxiety (I am exaggerating the numbers surely).

I’m sure it’s the exact opposite. Better to have hundreds if not thousands of non techies be comfortable than one power user have an extra feature.

One thing that power users used to do, is explore the control panels and preferences for the system and the apps they use to see what features can be turned on.

One of the Youtubers, who had previously been a lifetime Windows user, complained that he loved using iMessage on his laptop, but it didn't receive his SMS messages like his phone does.

After getting a ton of comments suggesting that it was a feature you have to turn on in the preferences, his next video was him being amazed that the phone would not only forward him the SMS messages, but that the Mac would recognize SMS messages with two factor verification codes and offer to fill them into the proper place automatically.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8Xjz5v0jDw

It’s those little QoL upgrades which puts macOS/iOS etc. in a league of its own. The integration you get out of the box is what sells me on Apple stuff now. I think the average person doesn’t notice or care about these little things, and so windows does the job for them. I live in my computer though, so I notice everything.

Another thing is that those less prominently exposed features can be taken away from the few of their users without causing much uproar when they don’t catch on with a wider audience.

I disagree, it was perfectly integrated into messages and spotlight. He discovered it as soon as it came up. The paradigm is "I have to have an app for that." Fwiw, for how poorly siri, spotlight, and shortcuts are utilized by end users Google has it even worse on Android.

I would go further and say discoverability seems to be a low or nonexistent priority industry-wide.

Just looking at iOS settings backs up this hypothesis.

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