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Comment by gherkinnn | Hacker News Reader

Hello. I am rational developer. I am very clever and very rational. Devoid of emotion. Oh what is this? The pixels in my screen have changed. What is this bubbling feeling in me? An emotional response? No way. I am rational. Therefore these changes must be objectively stupid and dumb and wrong. Let me explain why.

This is how I understand all these posts. It’s fine not to like something. You don’t even need a good reason. That is what taste is all about. Just don’t pretend that your emotional response is grounded in objective and universal fact.

Am I being facetious? Not really. Calling a benign (and in my view long overdue) update to the settings panel “a fucking joke” is nothing but an emotional screech.

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> The new System Settings and Stage Manager in Mac OS Ventura, to put it bluntly, are a fucking joke.

So these are the pet peeves that are mainly meant to back the author's point.

> With this (and more) in mind, you can see how difficult and painful upgrading to a new Mac becomes for me

I updated to Ventura something like a month ago. At first I was disoriented by the new System settings, as it broke my habits, yet I still managed to find what I needed to, only with a bit of drag because it's reorganised. But then I went back to my work laptop which has the old prefpane stuff, and... the sysprefs I was so used to ever since Tiger just seemed infuriatingly backwards to me, having accreted tons of preferences over time in preexisting places that made increasingly little sense.

So, sysprefs is revamped, things have been shuffled around to hopefully make more sense (personal take: it does), and it's hardly in your face any time of the day.

Then, Stage Manager. I didn't even try it (so can't share an opinion on that) because when you're upgrading it's disabled by default, so the argument that upgrading is difficult and painful falls flat on its face as you're literally left with the same desktop you had before. (I will try the feature eventually, I just didn't get to it yet because time is a scarce resource).

I could reasonably hear some arguments about macOS "losing its way", or being increasingly incompatible with one's values, but these two are not it.

I think a lot of these types of articles are related to the fact that a lot of passionate computer users use Macs. And let's be honest, they also tend to get tons of views. People have been ripping on Windows since it came out so another windows rant doesn't matter. Relatively no one uses Linux desktops so no one cares about those rants. MacOS though falls right in the sweet spot for a good rant though.

For the record I agree with you. I've been running Venture since beta 1. The new system preferences is better and allows for future growth, but they have some bugs to get worked out visually.

I upgraded yesterday. Stage Manager mostly stays out of your way even when it's enabled. Its addition means macOS now has 3 modes of interacting with windows:

- The Classic way, with piles of overlapping windows in a single desktop, and the ability to minimize and hide them.

- The Spaces way, allowing for full screen apps and also multiple desktops containing separate sets of windows.

- The Stages way, which allows to arrange groups of windows from a desktop into different sets, defaulting to one stage per application, but allowing for arbitrary groupings.

The key aspect is these three modes complement each other. Stage Manager really makes the system more efficient, productive, and even nicer-looking. It's 100% an old-timer Apple feature.

I got a feeling this person would hate Spotlight or Quick Look if those features were to be released nowadays instead of 15 years ago.

> Hello. I am rational developer. I am very clever and very rational. Devoid of emotion. Oh what is this? [Something has changed that I don't like]. What is this bubbling feeling in me? An emotional response? No way. I am rational. Therefore these changes must be objectively stupid and dumb and wrong. Let me explain why.

I certainly do this a lot.

I'm going to put that paragraph on a postcard and put it up in my office to try to remind me about it.

(It would also be helpful to come up with a name for this phenomenon).

I think anyone who thinks they don’t do this should think again, and refer to the postcard. Myself included!

>It would also be helpful to come up with a name for this phenomenon

I believe it would be called rationalization[0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(psychology)

We all do it a lot. We are primary emotional beings and we go around pretending we are rational. Life gets a lot easier and more comprehensible when you start paying attention to it.

I highly recommend reading "Who Moved My Cheese?" By Dr Spencer Johnson. I'm not one for self-help books, but this really did make me think about how I look at change generally.

This sentence triggered me:

> Ever since the misguided visual redesign of Mac OS when it transitioned from 10.15 Catalina to 11 Big Sur, and the questionable UI choices embedded in such redesign

This is just so condescending, like that redesign was just obviously wrong and Apple designers are morons for not seeing it. As you say, it's ok not to like a redesign but there's no need to be a dick about it and present it like it's an objective fact and not just a subjective opinion.

Hello. I am rational developer. I am very clever and very rational. Devoid of emotion. Oh what is this? Someone implies that there are objective standards of quality in a field I know little about? Someone who has used something for decades to do deep work, and has built up deep experience, implies they know better than Joe R. Random, or the people who are currently maintaining it? What is this bubbling feeling in me? Insecurity? No way. I am rational. Therefor these opinions must be objectively stupid and purely based in taste and emotional and wrong. I can tell because the author used a swear word, and swear words mean they are angry and thus incorrect.

Two can play at this game.

Just from a visual balance point of view, the new settings panel doesn't remotely match the intent of Aqua UI. The fact that they are then putting scrollable panels in the _middle_ of a _side_ of a window, with a sticky part both on top and at the bottom, shows you they don't particularly know where shit should go.

Making changes for the sake of making changes is by itself pointless busywork. But ignoring the established practices of desktop UIs to make them more in-line with touch UIs is destructive.

Agreed. I kept waiting for some justification of why these UI changes were terrible—it’s always interesting to read a well-reasoned design critique—but the entire essay was a long-winded emotional screed.

If all these posts are just emotional venting maybe we should listen to them more carefully. Don't dismiss them or trivialize the issue/question as a matter of taste.

> Don't dismiss them or trivialize the issue/question as a matter of taste.

I wouldn't even regard taste as trivial. It is not. An OS not being to taste is reason enough to bin it. In fact, I prefer working with something that is more appealing even if it is inferior on paper. And maybe I'll write about what do or don't like.

Just don't dress it up as objective fact.

The author didn't do that. Literally in paragraph 3 he uses the word "I feel" multiple times.

This type of person is not very representative of the average mac buyer though. So I’m not sure their opinions should be given much weight.

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