Macs used to be so easy to use on Classic Mac OS. Mac OS X really left a lot of people behind on the usability front. It became much more of a power user OS. Then iPads came along and stole that group (of ordinary users) away.
But now it seems they’re adding more and more power user features to iOS, complicating things again (with even less discoverability due to complex gestures). History seems to be repeating itself.
I gather classic Mac OS was done so you can get on with whatever you're doing and nothing bothered you.
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/turn-a-focus-on-or-...
Applications stealing focus is a plague though. Maybe Apple will finally figure out that it's not worth having in their API.
Both Apple and Microsoft have regressed in this respect. Minimalism and prettiness have taken priority over usability in both modern macOS and modern Windows and they are far more inconsistent and harder to learn to use as a result. Often something that you learn in one place place or app now doesn't work in another.
In Apple's case this has been mostly as a result of their efforts to make macOS and iOS more alike and to share applications/components across the two, which often creates weird-feeling results and awkward app designs. In Microsoft's case this is mostly because they have more UI frameworks than sense and each new one introduces more problems than solutions. Electron-adjacent apps probably don't help matters either, since they also generally break all of the platform rules and implement their own UI controls anyway.
[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.5555/573097 [2] https://ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Micro...
Just keep consuming those ads and don't think about it.
The same will be true of most cars within a generation, and is effectively true for most car owners now; they do not really know how to do much with their car beyond drive it, use the infotainment as-is and bring it in for repair when anything seems off.
... if you don't get a lot of things done.
The main quality of a laptop is the keyboard is solidly attached to the screen. That means you can use it anywhere and you don't need to dedicate a desk like space for the keyboard.
With an iPad you need a stand, space for the keyboard and then you're close to the space taken by a monitor with peripherals and a desktop under the desk. Might as well get a desktop then since it's more powerful.
It may be useful for tasks that only need a keyboard 1% of the time though.
Full literacy involves writing, not just reading. At one point the same held for computer literacy. I would not call someone "literate" if they could only read words they already recognized from viewing forms and their writing ability was limited to filling out those forms using a limited but appropriate vocabulary. I would likewise not consider someone computer literate if they were limited to using software written by others.
For more eloquent words in this vein:
https://citejournal.org/volume-2/issue-3-02/seminal-articles...
I don’t see anything wrong with people excelling at some tasks, such as CAD/medicine/construction/editing media/law/etc, and not excelling at understanding all the details about how their tools work.
My appliances have also been working fine for 5+ years. LG inverter motor is dead silent in my fridge, and I get the benefits of having a French door fridge on top and freezer drawer on the bottom. Same for all the other appliances I have too. I don’t expect them to last 20 years, but as long as I get 5 to 10, I’m ok with it considering the price I paid.
My brother printers have been working fine for many years, and at least as of 2021, the MFC printers did not need a subscription.
Maybe things have changed and I haven’t needed to buy anything in the last couple years.
It has. Good luck finding a new printer that doesn't (figuratively) spit in your face repeatedly.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/11nnkix/brot...
The biggest problems I run into with iPadOS are not related to the OS, but stripped-down apps, or apps that don’t use the file picker and other iPad features. In a few cases I have to use web apps (which work perfectly) instead of iPad apps, for example with Google Docs, since the iPad apps are more like stripped-down phone apps.
It’s still a far sight better than the Android tablet situation though, where stretched out phone apps are the norm instead of the exception.
If i didn't need to program on my computer, i'd use an ipad as a single computing device for everything. It's perfect for couch consumption, and with stage manager, an external bluetooth keyboard and mouse, it's more than adequate for anything else you'd expect from a computer: office, photo and video editing and watching, internet browsing, email, etc.
For 95% of all use cases, the ipad already is the best laptop.
The thing I always think about: how fast it is to play an MP3 from "device in pocket" state with an MP3 player vs a computer (or my phone!). iOS affordances around that are good.
Having said that... maybe there's a new shell that MacOS could use to get there. They seem to be trying with some changes though I don't really enjoy the changes so far
This is a very important metric! Jeff Hawkins famously walked around with a piece of wood in his pocket the planned size of the Palm Pilot, and when he wanted to do something (write down a note) he would work through how many key presses it would take on the new device. His limit was three.
When I tried a BlackBerry I was infuriated by how many key presses everything took. What a horrible experience.
> Having said that... maybe there's a new shell that MacOS could use to get there
Like it or not, Apple’s plan for this remains Siri.