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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

It's a common mistake on the web to take entire groups of individuals, with varied and nuanced individual opinions, and to group them together and then complain about inconsistency and hypocrisy.

People say things like, apple users are foo or the new york times is bar or americans are baz. Well, of course any large group of people with divergent opinions will be self-conflicting when examined as a whole.

I understand why we do it; our brains pattern-match people into camps and construct narratives on our behalf to make sense of the world.

But, in general, I think it's a waste of everyone's time to complain that Apple bloggers all hated flat design before Apple decided to use flat design. Instead, perhaps you could show an example of an individual who has frustrated you in their inconsistency.

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We do it for 2 reasons, I think:

1) We want to broadly dismiss a group of people.

2) We want to call out people who were wrong (huge thing on the internet is not ever being wrong; nothing is worse than changing your mind), but it's too hard to keep track of everyone you disagree with, and worse you can't as easily get away with calling out an individual as you can a group.

This is pretty interesting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outgroup_homogeneity_bias

I don't think those are the reasons, but rather the negative side effects. I think the reason we stereotype is because historically is has been extremely advantageous, biologically/sociologically speaking, to be able to predict certains things based on someone's appearance or background.

Here's an example of inconsistency from the the very article under discussion:

Why did Android and Windows Phone move away from photorealistic buttons? "partly just for differentiation’s sake".

Why did Apple (eventually) do the same:

"... we’ve grown up. We don’t require hand-holding to tell us what to click or tap. Interactivity is a matter of invitation, and physical cues are only one specific type. iOS 7 is an iOS for a more mature consumer, who understands that digital surfaces are interactive, and who doesn’t want anything getting in the way of their content."

Got that, this is the way forward, it's the right thing to do, it's better than what iOS < 7 was doing, and it broadly reflects design trends in other fields like the web but we can't quite bring ourselves to admit that the competition might actually be able to hire a random interface designer that is aware of this. No, they have to accidentally stumble into a better way to do interfaces just because they were trying so hard to look different from iOS6.

This childish sophistry is SOP for Apple blogs, it's the number one reason I (someone who adopted OSX and iPods as soon as they were available) think the Apple-sphere is mentally diseased and worth distancing yourself from.

Thats's really not fair to Gemmell. If you read the augmented paper article he links (from a year ago), you'll find him very positive about this stuff in Metro and much more sympathetic to the design motivations behind it (and Android).

I agree that the snarky comment you quoted isn't that helpful, but it's clearly an aside, tucked away in parenthesis, not his main thoughts on other platforms' aesthetics.

Fwiw, most of what I imagine you mean by the 'Apple-sphere' (Gruber, Gemmell, Marco, etc) have been generally positive about Microsoft's new design ethos. Criticisms have tended to focus on its implementation, not the design itself.

I just assumed they didn't feel threatened by it due to its paltry sales, and if anything hoped it would distract potential Android customers.

But I've been reading this stuff for so long I remember when Gruber was railing against Mac OS X for straying from Aqua and embracing brushed metal, now apparently we're not allowed to criticize iOS 7 because, unlike Mac OS X, even though that's the cited precedent they give for their argument, it's guaranteed to simply get better with no potential for mis-steps along the way.

You just get jaded by this stuff after a while.

Thank you for explaining exactly what the parent's comment made me feel better than I could. If you read a bunch of different people's opinions, then you shouldn't be surprised that what you get is a bunch of different opinions.

Furthermore, why is the parent so interested in this idea of "Apple Users" as a group, anyway? There isn't really any such group (or, to the extent that there is, it's a very small group).

There was a significant group of vocal "Apple Users" who have spent a great deal of time over the last couple of years slagging off WP and Android for "bad design" and "stealing". It's to be expected that when Apple borrowed so heavily from WP and Android in this release that there are going to be strong reactions.

It's perfectly normal for companies to be inspired by eachother and to incorporate the best elements of rival platforms (and Apple have done a good job in many respects, particularly the default apps), but Apple's litigation and the comments of the most vocal Apple supporters meant that they really have invited this backlash.

Maybe I don't spend enough time in the forums, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone say anything bad about windows phone, other than the lack of apps, which really isn't the fault of the OS. I've seen pretty universal praise.

Even Gruber at Daring Fireball has heaped praise on Windows Phone's design since it came out.

Maybe that explains the similarities in Windows phone and ios7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM8NSSzxNGM

There's cognitive bias in action. It's been about equal from both sides.

I've seen nothing but acclaim for the advances made by WP to the design language used on Mobile Devices. Gruber, TheVerge, MG Siegler - some pro-apple pundits, all seemed to really like WP7/8.

Can you point me to any prominent individual (pro apple or otherwise) who cast any dispersion on Windows Phone?

I believe you meant aspersion?

The only interesting criticism I've seen of Windows Phone's design language is that by eschewing most forms of visual affordance, it erases a lot of distinctions between actionable and non-actionable elements onscreen. I don't personally see this as a good or bad thing, though; it just requires a different set of conceptual tools to build affordance.

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