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Comment by MaxPengwing | Hacker News Reader

Apple gets a lot of flack for keeping design constant over the years, but this is the reason why they do it.

People hate changes to their workflow.

People crave consistency. McDonald’s isn’t popular because it’s good, but because the burger you eat in Santa Monica is the same you’d get in Pigeon Forge, TN.

McDonalds’ fries are actually good. But point taken

They're hot fries.

Warm greasy potatoes with a bit of crunch are always good.

In 30 minutes? Not good fries.

Wow, you are very lucky if you've never had really bad fries. I've been to places and had undercooked fries, burnt fries, fries with almost no potato in them, soggy fries. McDonald's fries are very okay but they are always okay. They are very rarely hot though, usually quite old, but at least not stone cold like KFC fries (in the UK and Europe we have fries instead of mash with fried chicken). The fries in Belgium are by far the best, but there are some great ones here in Germany.

I've eaten some potato based food crimes in my day. Agreed that Belgium has consistently good fries everywhere.

Consistently mediocre (3/5, thoroughly passable) is the value prop of fast food.

What they do in the UK is horrifying. The soggy oily mass that you eat with a prong thing.

I even went to the current winner of ‘best fish and chips’ that year, in Whitby. Argh.

UK chips are my favourite in the world, but they are qualitatively different in every way. I always get annoyed when other countries claim to copy fish and chips but serve them with fries. There isn't anywhere else in the world that you can get chips like that, so inevitably the fish and chips that try and copy it are always disappointing. I know it's controversial, but are supposed to be soggy and oily, not crunchy. It's supposed to be like eating oily potatoes. There is a reason why fish and chips is so renowned and loved, and the chips are a big part of it. They are the best in the world bar none. I only didn't mention it earlier because people find it quite offensive, because they are so much different from other chips.

I understand everything you're saying, but I somehow keep reading it as "they're supposed to be bad, that's why fish and chips are so loved, they're the best in the world at being bad".

I mean, yes, but still, I want my potatoes crunchy, not soggy and oily.

I'm a sucker for thin, salty fries. I know they're low quality but my mouth enjoys them

I don't know where Santa Monica and Pigeon Forge are. But traveling around Asia... McDonalds doesn't taste the same between Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand.

Infact Thailand burgers are VERY salty...

I wonder if this is an intentional choice to adapt to the tastes of local markets?

I would assume so, Singapore for some reason HATES salt. They don't put salt on fries from mcdonalds, so you always end up with a bag of soggy fries.

https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/singapore-hear...

Taiwan has burger king burgers with peanut butter on them...

https://www.burgerking.com.tw/jps9805

Throw some sriracha on that BK PB burger and that would be _magnificent_.

*Adds "peanut butter and sriracha" to list of improbable combinations to investigate*

You could pretend it was satay?

It is beautiful. Do it. Works best with sweetish-savory items. I first stumbled upon it when I put peanut butter & Sriracha on an omelette filled with pork sausage, bacon, and browned onions / mushrooms.

I wonder if that's particular to Asia, because I've noticed McDonalds is the same as the US in Latin America (gringo safe space), aside from a couple extra menu items

But unfortunately not true in other countries! In Hong Kong the menu is very different and even the fries are different!

mc donald in italy has espresso and croissants

Quite to the contrary, Apple makes gratuitous changes to the UI of their OSes on an annual basis.

Not on things that makes people feel like they can find what they are looking for. The Apple drop down menu hasn't changed its place since the original Mac OS.

The UI skin might change a bit from year to year, but the UX of Key components haven't changed much for 40 years.

Used to work at AppleCare special programs support in Ireland, and when we did change something like hide certain menues in the Server appbecasue we wanted to disincentive usage of parts that were going to be depricated, all hell brekas loose with the older sysadmins calling in furious over having to read change notes. Thing is Apple makes sure to communicate a lot of these changes in emails sent to users, in change notes, and in popups, and people just refuse to take notice.

Or when Final Cut Pro X changed it's library management. There were good reasons for these changes, but people at first hated them since it disturbed an otherwise uninterrupted workflow. But when these changes are made, it's usually for a very good reason based on user feedback.

This did however highlight a serious behavioural issue with the users. Some users rarely update, so they never get the incremental changes, and instead opt to jump 3-5 major release versions which breaks everything. This in turn makes the user wary of ANY updates as they now associate it with breaking everything and changing everything. Which is a problem that they would not have if they did follow best update practices.

I saw the exact same issue at HPE, Nikon, Salesforce, Microsoft, when I worked there.

> Apple gets a lot of flack for keeping design constant over the years, but this is the reason why they do it.

I am not so sure, they are turning system preferences into an iPhone app on macOS.

Not sure what you mean by that?

The UI/UX design of the System Preferences hasn't really changed since Snow Leopard imho. Cant speak to much about before Snow Leopard as that predates my personal experience.

I'd love to get an example of what you mean?

You can eventually learn to use a bad UI, but you'll never learn a constantly changing one.

Very true. This is why I rage quit Using Windows at Windows 8... adn barely accept the horrific state of Win 10. Im particularly pissed off about having system preference settings in at least 4 different places that are all counter intuitive.

I really liked windows 7, and was grumpy about first using Mac OS, but what won me over was that I didn't have to fight the OS in finding what I was looking for in settings.

Also the reason why I like Linux and BSD. there is a standard to where you find the setting files.

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