The Third User or Why Apple Keeps Doing Foolish Things (2013)

Using a Mac for work but not play, I’m struck all the time not only by things like disappearing scroll bars (sometimes too quickly) but also by a general lack of attention to Fitt’s Law and high density of secret handshakes. (How do you see hidden files in Finder? As a default? How do you copy-paste file or folder paths between terminal and Finder? Anyone?) For daily usefulness, at least the Windows UI gets usefulness and discovery generally right. I know this’ll garner a lot of downvotes, but a single gesture to get to the top or bottom of a doc or page is extremely handy instead of finding the scroll bar and holding down the button as the window pages, or just mashing the down-arrow.<p>Apple wins the Pepsi Challenge for the same reasons, sweet and fizzy in your first taste. Some like the full drink, many don’t.

Perhaps I am unsophisticated, but as a regular user of both Windows and Mac - Mac for work - I find Macs to have exceptional UX. I do not feel the pain that is regularly elaborated in blog posts such as this.<p>Among the best parts that Windows cannot come close to matching:<p>* I can use it precisely as just another unix machine, with Terminal (zsh is default!)<p>* Terminal integrates well with GUI tools<p>* GUI discoverability is straightforward, and Spotlight search almost always knows what I want<p>* Preferences are unburdened by crufted abstractions built atop one another (Control Panel and descendants)<p>* apps are clearly files, are easy to interact with using just the filesystem, are well-controlled by TCC, and poorly built installers are the exception, not the rule<p>* system notifications are respectful, controllable, and not a morass of spam<p>* the keychain is both secure and easy to interact with for non-technical users<p>* support.apple.com documentation is correct and easy to find<p>* &quot;Help&quot; menu item for a system utility never opens bing and searches $utility_name, which is Windows&#x27; latest laziness<p>* Wiping and reinstalling is not an ordeal<p>* iCloud backup just works<p>On the whole macOS pleases me immensely in comparison to Windows or Ubuntu+Gnome. The scrollbars are my most salient complaint, but merely launch regedit.exe to see how a GUI might be truly unusable.

I&#x27;ve long found Apple machines and devices to be difficult and unintuitive to use (and it seems getting more so as time goes on). It&#x27;s a &quot;death by a thousand cuts&quot; sort of thing rather than a big showstopper. This article provides a very plausible explanation as to why.<p>Really, 80% of my problem with Apple devices is that their user interfaces lack discoverability by hiding things so if you don&#x27;t already know they&#x27;re there, too bad for you. Windows seems to be following the same path, starting around Win 8, I think.

&gt; What do most buyers not want? They don’t want to see all kinds of scary-looking controls surrounding a media player. They don’t want to see a whole bunch of buttons they don’t understand.<p>Funny. When I first switched from iPhone to Android, I downloaded a podcast player app one day. It has about 9000 knobs, levers and other controls to customize everything you could possibly imagine. Years later, I still have no idea what most of them do. But a few of them have been incredibly useful over the years. Advanced, complicated options that I had to Google or read Reddit threads to understand. Things that I could have survived without, are probably not used by very many people, but for those that do use those features, life is better with them.<p>Anyway, as soon as I had a cursory glance around the app, I immediately purchased the paid&#x2F;pro version, not yet even knowing if I&#x27;d ever use the app again (at the time I didn&#x27;t know when I&#x27;d even have time to listen to podcasts). These were my people.

There&#x27;s a very simple, prosaic, explanation of the &quot;foolish things&quot;: Apple employees need to make changes to justify their jobs.<p>That&#x27;s it. No changes, no job. If they can&#x27;t demonstrate the usefulness of their current assignment, they might be instead tasked to work on the clusterfuck that is iTunes, err Music.<p>Here&#x27;s a simple pet peeve, it can best be explained as change for the sake of change: Open System Preferences. Why did the location of all the icons get shuffled around between macOS versions?<p>It&#x27;s no better now than before. But, hey, at least it kept the programmers from being forced to work on iTunes.

The large blue scrollbars and the aqua design language is something that I miss the most. It would make me love the windows and have a sense of the computer being a proper tool. Now nothing feels sturdy or built to last cause it can suddenly hide itself and be deprecated next release. Honestly the windows 10 ux at least is more keyboard friendly.

I spend much more time as a user of my computers than I do a potential user&#x2F;buyer of them.<p>Design your UI for the long game. Make the years of quotidian slog I have to spend on your machine as friction-free as possible.<p>Or expect me, at a minimum, to scrape off your OS and replace it with something else.

(2013)

What&#x27;s the problem with the Dock?