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Comment by lanna | Hacker News Reader

Why does a desktop OS need to be consistent with a 5" touchscreen phone?

This obsession with “unifying” disparate things under One True API / UI / Language is all over software. It’s probably the same mentality behind what what Microsoft was doing with Windows 8 and Metro. Unnecessary abstraction is the bad Software Engineer’s bread and butter. We’ve all worked with That Guy who kept arguing “We could call X and Y the same way if we just had a unifying abstraction Z. It would simplify everything!” Z becomes the worst of both X and Y and the customer is less satisfied just wants to keep X and Y separate. But the developer is more comfortable now, and that’s what matters.

Everything seems to get sacrificed at the altar of Developer Comfort. Performance gets thrown under the bus so we can write everything in JavaScript. Platform-specific features get abandoned or neutered in a cross-platform framework so we only have to target one API. We ship gigs of Docker containers so we don’t have to get our software to work on all the customers’ computers.

This is just another example. Wouldn’t it be great if iOS apps and Mac applications converged on the same thing? Only a developer would want this.

Right? It’s a middle finger to mac users with an external screen. It was too hard to make it scale horizontally, or even prefetch the settings in the background and not have a lag between clicks. Not the end of the world, but backwards

To improve the user experience of the many Apple customers deciding to buy an old fashioned Mac.

The very argument that was presented when iOS first came out, as well as whenever touchscreens on MacBooks come up, is that the UX is fundamentally different.

So why would it suddenly be a good idea to import this from iOS?

Perhaps the people against touchscreen on MacOS finally retired or gave up the fight, so Apple is slowly preparing what Microsoft did years ago with Windows 8.

What Microsoft did, and still hasn’t finished. System preferences still contain massive amount of details contained in Windows 7 (and older!) style windows.

At least Apple managed to move all their settings from one paradigm to the next in one year. I’m looking forward to the improvements they make to the app in the future.

They didn't finish it because they went hard, all in one go, and suffered consumer backlash as a result. From this Apple learned that you have to boil the frog slowly.

Because it's confusing to have two ways of doing things when one way works just fine.

Why would you ever want added cognitive complexity?

If things need to be different then sure. But if they can be unified in a way that works great for both then please do!

Honestly, with their tight integration, I don't even think of watchOS and iOS and macOS as being so separate. They're all just a kind of "appleOS" that gets applied to different form factors. So UX unification is ideal wherever it makes sense.

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For the majority of the world, their primary computing device is their touchscreen phone.

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