Habits, UI changes, and OS stagnation

&gt; &quot;Is this really bad UI, or is it just you who are averse to change?&quot;<p><i>It doesn&#x27;t matter!</i><p>The funny thing about human-computer interfaces is that they are used by <i>humans</i>. Humans are adverse to change; ergo, a constantly-changing interface is also a <i>bad</i> interface.<p>When you change something—be it a GUI or an API—you need to take into account not <i>just</i> whether the change is better, but also whether it&#x27;s worth the <i>very high</i> inherent cost of change. I don&#x27;t think the modern tech industry does this anywhere near enough.

To be blunt, while the macOS 11 UI is not all bad, it contains <i>very</i> serious design <i>mistakes</i>, ruining things that everyone has no choice but to use (like notifications and alerts). Somehow Apple doesn’t get how terrible this trend is, and that it is damaging their entire <i>brand</i>. I can only assume the hierarchy at Apple is broken to the point where the people in charge are either unreachable, or unresponding to feedback, while having entirely too much control.<p>And as far as dumbed-down tools, it really feels like literally no one inside Apple even <i>uses</i> their tools (or they have access to better stuff and don’t care). For instance, “Console” - once the simplest imaginable concept with an implementation that everyone would expect - is now a pointless mess. An app that <i>should</i> have obvious behavior and usability is now just confusing every time I open it, leaving me feeling defeated because I cannot even find what I need. They messed it up and <i>moved on</i>, like many other things.

&gt;But making previous features or UI elements less discoverable because you want them to appear only when needed (and who decides when I need something out of the way? Maybe I like to see it all the time) — that’s not progress.<p>It seems it&#x27;s a trend to make everything require more clicks for &#x27;cleanliness&#x27;. In the end, it just makes everything frustrating. You end up having to add search to make anything usable. Windows 10 and Android settings are both great examples of this.

&gt; Now you have overpaid “““designers””” that need to show “““impact””” every year, so they have to reinvent the wheel over and over.<p>This is such an ignorant and oversimplified argument. The only reason one could assume that it’s the designers at Apple who “need to show impact” instead of PR project management shenanigans is if you’ve never worked with design at a large scale. I’m pretty sure some random designer at Apple has already redesigned something like Mission Control (which has been pretty much unchanged in the last few OS iterations) but it just isn’t the right time to launch said upgrade so it just sits on the back burner for years.

I feel like Apple has generally done a good job containing churn to the superficial parts of the OS. That said, I wish the Linux&#x2F;BSD mindshare had chosen to invest its desktop efforts into creating a rock solid OpenStep implementation.<p>Had GNUStep or something like it been able to marshal the resources that have been poured into multiple rewrites of Gnome &amp; KDE, I think we’d have the basis for the low-churn system we wish Apple had provided us.<p>Maybe if someone like this had come along 20 years ago things would be different <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;trunkmaster&#x2F;nextspace" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;trunkmaster&#x2F;nextspace</a>

Ironically, the thing that first got me really into Linux (which I consider a functional and pragmatic system at its core) was having lots of window managers, some of which did frivolous things like having waves lapping on my desktop. I think there are worse things than operating systems looking pretty. Your computer might be a tool, mine’s the spaceship I spend most of my life inside.

At work I mostly use Linux and at home mostly a 2017 Macbook Air. I do have a Windows PC that I put together in ~2012. I recently used the PC again because there was some Windows only software I needed to use and it was shocking going from Mac to that. Windows gets a lot of shit, but it felt way more responsive than Mac. I think due to the lack of animations on everything.<p>The author of the article is on to something with regards to Apple focusing on what demos well rather than what is good to use.

It&#x27;s like fashion. When is skeuomorphism coming back?

I do not understand what this author is talking about.<p>Apple has always been focused on superficial interface changes. Every single release of OS X has had minor, sometimes major, revisions to the interface.<p>Remember when Sheets were gonna be a thing? And Drawers? And Metal (the UI, not the GL)?<p>Show me an OS release and I&#x27;ll show you things Apple moved around.<p>Go back further, and you&#x27;ll see it&#x27;s always been the case.<p>System 7 was a massive change from System 6. Mac OS 8 was a HUGE departure from System 7. Mac OS 9 had substation changes from Mac OS 8.<p>This whole &quot;remember the good ole days when nothing changed?&quot; schtick people pull to make bad points is insanely frustrating if you actually pay attention to things as they change.

My friend was trying to pitch anal sex to me, and one of the things he said was - <i>&quot;Well, the anus might adjust and accommodate to you inserting stuff in it, but it doesn&#x27;t mean it likes things shoved into it.&quot;</i><p>That&#x27;s exactly how I feel about the crappy design changes that Windows and macOS have been increasingly forcing on us. We get used to it not because we like it, but often because there is no other way.<p>As a long time Windows user migrant to macOS, I find this more true of macOS now (it really pisses me off that you still can&#x27;t maximise a window consistently on macOS). Both get a lot of things right, but I feel Windows UI still has an edge (if you choose to ignore Windows 8). (For the Apple lovers - I say this confidently after I deliberately chose not to customize macOS to be like Windows And really embraced the whole <i>&quot;Apple way of doing things&quot;</i> to really experience if it is better. I can honestly say no, it isn&#x27;t.)<p>But just as the Americans stubbornly decided to drive on the right when the the rest of the world drove on the left, Windows and macOS too deliberately choose different UI paradigm and approach more for business reasons than functional ones.<p>It&#x27;s often irritating because sometimes it feels as if the changes in UI are just a way to try to differentiate the products without any improvement in usability - it took me nearly a year and half to get as comfortable with macOS as I was with Windows. But I still feel Windows UI is more productive, and less irritating, than macOS. (The only thing I like on the macOS desktop environment is the unified Menubar on top and Spotlight.)

Bit odd to see the author of this article seems to be so vested in all things Apple and he still spells macOS incorrectly.<p>Anyway:<p>&gt; First, we’re going to have a single OS strategy at Apple. We’re not going to have a dual or a triple or a quadruple OS strategy like some others. We’re going to have one OS, and that’s very important to us.<p>And twenty years later, Apple still doesn&#x27;t have a single OS.

It&#x27;s pretty ironic to review Jobs&#x27; goals to &quot;Make the next great personal computer operating system&quot;, since they precisely highlight some of the biggest issues with MacOS today. Apple is no longer shipping a &quot;single OS&quot;, they&#x27;re maintaining a series of progressive LTS releases that seems to be a middle-ground nobody can appreciate. MacOS&#x27;s metaphorical &quot;plumbing&quot; is far from state-of-the-art, too: the networking APIs are continuing to be gimped, while the userspace continues to be overhauled in confusing, highly abstracted ways. Oh, and killer graphics? MacOS has the least-supported, most esoteric graphics interface available today. I&#x27;ve heard people say that it&#x27;s easier to write graphics code for the Nintendo Switch, because at least that doesn&#x27;t force you to use Metal.<p>All for all, I wholeheartedly agree with what&#x27;s being said here. After Mojave was released, I get the feeling that Apple started to panic, and began some unnecessary design regressions that <i>really</i> drove people like me away. They started gutting 32-bit apps and libraries, bloating one of the most space-efficient UIs on the market, and undoing a lot of the personalization options that I loved MacOS for. One day, I hope that Apple can put this all aside and make a genuinely great computer. They&#x27;re holding a lot of the cards, but I still can&#x27;t recommend the M1 to others yet, much less integrate it into my own professional workflow.