> Not quite at the point I'd recommend them for grandma and grandpa, but not that far off, either.
But at this point grandma and grandpa are the only ones I'd recommend to use Apple devices.
Now what we appear to have is "someone's opinion" design. A bunch of artists decided their portfolios were a little light and they needed to get their paintbrushes out to do something. I don't work at Apple, but my guess is that their HI area slowly morphed from actual HCI experts into an art department, yet retained their power as experts in machine interaction.
So here we are, we still have Opinionated design, but it might just be based on some VP's vibes rather than research.
Hackers by and large don't want opinionated, because they're willing to spend the time configuring & customizing AND have the knowledge to do so.
Just about everyone else (as far as I can tell) very specifically do not want this, and for those who do, the amount of customizeability e.g. MacOS offers is enough. Having an immediately-useable computer (recent problems notwithstanding) is of much greater value.
So when you say "The main problem is that Apple wants to be opinionated" I can only conclude that you're coming at this from the 'hacker' POV. But I may be misunderstanding your comment.
But every user is in many ways non-average.
Thus if you create a system tailored at the average user, then none of your users will be happy.
This is objectively true. There's an excellent 99PI about exactly this: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/on-average/
> Thus if you create a system tailored at the average user, then none of your users will be happy.
This is objectively false. Some users will find some frustration or unhappiness with certain things, but remarkably, there are plenty of software UIs that get the job done for just about everyone.