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Comment by flumpcakes | Hacker News Reader

It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved with much acclaim, why is their software getting progressively worse?

It's not Microsoft-add-all-the-bloatware-and-adverts-we-can worse, but it's 20-year-old-operating-systems-were-better-designed worse.

We're getting to a point where I think Linux windowing systems like KDE are better designed. And it seems that all they had to do was not change much over the span of a few decades.

Or am I out of touch? It feels like I could use a computer better back when XP was the mainstay.

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It's quite simple: Most people who work in software now aren't actually very good at their jobs, at least in terms of how that job would have been defined 15 years ago.

This is because incentives have changed such that being good at your job in your average mega-corp has very little to do with the outcome: To climb their ladder, you optimise for impact and move before you have to deal with the consequences.

When company is small and the leader is competent, it's easy to weed out incompetent employees. But beyond certain size, or when the leader themselves is incompetent, this becomes impossible, and the whole company starts to rot.

The other issue is the general organizational challenge of ensuring people good at their jobs are stacked into every part of your organization.

The default is that it’s not the case, and it requires eternal vigilance to do otherwise. Everything good is a fluke.

Maybe Apple just got so many things right early on, then the people with experience slowly left and inexperienced people kept showing up and they felt compelled to keep making changes to justify their jobs. How do they justify their job if they can't roll out huge visible changes? So they rationalize whatever change they wanna make and keep advocating for it until they get the green light, regardless of whether or not it's a good idea. The best part is that cleaning up this mess will probably lead to a whole bunch of promotions, even if just ends up circling back to what they should've already known.

I think a lot of key lessons that were studied and learned back in the day weren't adequately transferred to the new generation.

When a feature reaches maturity, you have to be willing to shrink the team.

>How do they justify their job if they can't roll out huge visible changes?

This is the core rotting value in so much of big tech. So much of your bonus, performance review, promotion package, etc is hinging on "delivering impact" (ie: doing the flashy stuff). Imagine a world where some internal R&D team took a risk on liquid design but then thought it was okay to not ship it because it didn't work out.

To push the problem up a level, why can’t the company change the incentives to “happy customers”?

The issue is that so long as you play the "performance" game, you'll run into Goodhart's law:

> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

All this data driven BS about impact is really just that. So much of it is just gaming the system.

Problem is that “the same” isn’t good enough. To get a promotion, you’d need to somehow prove that your specific change was so good that more customers are happy now than before.

To prove that, you need some data to compare before/after. Hm, how about how much time people send in the software? Seems like a decent proxy. Well, plenty of people are very unhappily addicted to social media. and yet that’s what companies and investors frequently look at.

It’s very hard to come up with an incentive where just keeping things the same is acceptable. I mean it’s basically an admission that you as a company cannot innovate or invent better ways for people to interact with a computer.

We used to treat macOS and Windows like direct competitors. They used to channel their efforts into competing for market share and routing one another from weak customer-bases. For a while, they did give us better operating systems.

Today, both software products are treated like monopolies. macOS is satisfied being an insular underdog, and Microsoft has no motivation to compete if Apple won't get off their ass.

Yeah I think this is a well known problem. Humans tend to get a lot of stuff right on the first try, and then it's subsequently thrown away in the name of "progress".

It used to be the opposite! From the end of the PowerPC era throughout most of the Intel era, the Mac OS X was the main selling point, while the hardware was slow, overpriced and overheating (they've had some nice touches like MagSafe and "ears" on power supplies for the cable, but that didn't make up for everything else).

People used to build hackintoshes to get Mac OS X without paying Apple's RAM tax or suffer having mid-range laptop GPUs in the top-of-the-line desktops.

Apple's outstanding success with their ARM chips is more of an exception than the rule.

To be fair, they also made several infamous hardware design choices back in 2016, all of which they’ve later reverted.

I'm hopeful Apple will correct course about all these awful UI decisions but it'll take some time.

Yes, we can all look forward to the breathless bots lauding Apple's visionary hardware prowess when they remove that damned stupid notch ten years from now, while replacing it with something equally egregious.

I’m optimistic that will happen soon.

My personal theory is that making the menu bar transparent by default (and shifting/ritating backgrounds) on Tahoe is preparing for OLED laptops and displays, which maybe will get under screen cameras or just a nicer cutout.

Not all reverted. Still waiting for my USB-A ports and the SD card reader, on laptops described as "Pro". It's as if Apple forgot that "Pro" is a shorthand for "professional" instead of a meaningless marketing term.

All 14" and 16" MacBook Pros (which is all Apple Silicon MacBook Pros except the 13" ones with base M1 or M2) have an SD card reader.

Did not know that, thanks for the info. But Apple lost me as a customer 10 years ago with their hostile actions. Even if they added back USB-A, I wouldn't go back.

Hardware improvements are easier to quantify and progress naturally comes in incremental steps.

Software however especially from UX point of view, is more likely to be more or less ready at some point. Any improvements are marginal and subjective. What are the large UX teams at Apple going to do if not redesigns for the sake of redesigning? I wish it would happen, but it’s hard to imagine Apple shipping an annual OS release without noticeable visual changes.

> It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved with much acclaim, why is their software getting progressively worse?

It's not so different from the rationale for many consumer electronics products: novelty for marketing's sake rather than functionality. Similarly, notice the ridiculous trend of removing most physical buttons from car dashboards, started by Tesla and mindlessly aped by the other carmakers.

There's plenty to criticize them for on the hardware front. Why design round edges on your macbook pro and then put cheese grater vent holes on the sides where you're most likely to pick it up? Same goes for the Apple TV remote.

I'm feeling they're veering towards a "common ui" where every action is an icon like on a phone where every app is an icon.

Maybe someday they'll completely remove the text to just keep the icons like the Office ribbon did, and I'm still confused with it.

In the early 2000s I helped an engineering from transitioning from the CAD software CATIAv4 to v5.

While v4 was pretty much text based in early v5 every item and action had an icon, often only an icon. The manual read something like this:

"To do ⌘ you navigate from the ⌙ page to the ⌟, while holding the middle mouse button. The⌇will open and you will see the ⌆."

I think they did that with good intentions. CATIA being a French product sold all over Europe and beyond, localization must have been a significant line item. The result was a nightmare though and they to toned the reliance on symbols down in subsequent versions.

Imagine how usable computers will be once we remove every instance of text!

As a user of OLauncher on android, it's hard to imagine.

> with every extreme of inventiveness of visualization in its most exaggerated form, what did we have every fifteen seconds? An utter halt to the action, while words flashed on the screen.

"The Ancient and The Ultimate"

https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v044n01_...

> It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved.

To be fair, the bar is really really low in terms of mobile hardware. It’s just really hard (and expensive) for new players to design, build and manufacture hardware with competitive processing power.

It's just enshittification.

Going to continue to get worse as time goes on.

Even the hardware will go at some point I'm betting.

It's just entropy. It takes a special kind of person to be able to fight it in a big org. Jobs, Musk et. al. are assholes but they do manage to push their vision through. Probably because they are assholes.

Jobs and Musk are CEOs; of course they can push their visions!

It seems like apple is missing a design dictator

> It's just enshittification.

That’s not what enshittification means.

Somehow its usage has quickly devolved from a very specific pattern companies used to squeeze “value” out of their customers over time into just “something getting worse in any way” or even just “something I don’t like now but I did before” which is not at all the point.

Last time pointed that out here, Cory Doctorow himself popped up to tell me it's okay, we don't need to word police other people.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44776712

Man I really disliked him for creating that word that got so overused that I saw it in practically every single comment thread this past year. Now I dislike him even more for actively promoting its overuse. Ugh.

So let's run this shit into the ground then until it's meaningless. Got it.

It’s the enshittification of the word, to use the new definition

Liquid Glass has worse performance implications, which is bad for older devices with slow processors, and older devices with older batteries. It's also very difficult to use on older devices with smaller screens, like the 2022 iPhone SE. Further, Apple stopped making it possible to upgrade to minor releases for security patches.

All these give someone a reason to replace their otherwise perfectly-working iPhone sooner.

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