19 ms·

iPadOS Discoverability Trouble

94 points by LaSombra 7y ago

close04 7y ago
Some of the conclusions are only looking at a single factor and ignoring the rest. > The most natural explanation for the decline [in sales] is that the iPad failed to fulfill initial expectations that it would be a general-purpose device that could replace our Macs and PCs. People didn't buy iPads in 2014 because they actually thought they would replace their PC, or for the the promise that a future model will in 2021. They bought them because they were leaps and bounds better than the one they already had, they did more and better. My iPad 1 was woefully outdated by the time the iPad 3 came out just 2 years later. You could feel it in the performance, the screen resolution, etc. My 5 year old iPad Air 2 is still kicking ass and has easily at least another year or 2 left in it. And when I upgrade it's because of the lack of support, not that I can feel it buckling under the workload. As markets mature the improvements are getting smaller and smaller and the product is more than adequate for longer periods. That's the real benefit of the maturity of the market. Today it's harder to justify the upgrade even if it would be perfectly able to replace your PC.
- alistairSH 7y ago
  Agreed. I don't buy iPads frequently because, like laptops, they last a long time and the gains from generation to generation are quite small. I have owned three - all iPad Minis - and two are still working just fine. I bought a Mini 1, then replaced it with a Mini 2. At some point after that, I adde a Mini 4. The 2 stays by my bedside for quick surfing, checking weather, etc. The 4 is my main tablet. I may eventually replace the Mini 2 with an iPad Pro in an attempt to replace my aging MacBook Air, but that's a lot of money and I haven't convinced myself that's the way I want to go. There's still something to be said for a proper laptop.
- scarface74 7y ago
  You’re giving the iPad 1 way too much credit. It was outdated the day it came out. It only had 256MB of RAM. The iPhone 4 released 3 months later had 512MB of RAM. The iPhone 4 ran up to iOS 7. The iPad stopped at iOS 5 and ran it badly. The iPad 2 released a year later with 512MB of RAM ran up to iOS 9.
  - close04 7y ago
    I compared iPad 1 because I had it. The story of iPad 2 is not much different. When the 4 came out it was faster, had more RAM, much better screen, etc. Every product reaches a stage where improvements stop being so obvious year over year and the upgrade seems less and less justified. What used to be a 2-3 year upgrade cycle can now easily be a 5+ year one.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      The difference being that the iPad 1 was already underpowered when it was released compared to its contemporary. The iPad needed more RAM than the iPhone 4 that was being designed at the same time but had less. The iPad 4 was better than the iPad 2 but the iPad 2 was at least using the best SOC they had at the time. The iPad 2 was sold from 2011-2014. It actually got a bug fix update about 3 or 4 months ago. By 2011 when iOS 5 came out, the original iPad was crashing because of too little memory.
      - close04 7y ago
        This still supports what I wrote originally: there was a time when a 1 or 2 year gap brought massive improvements. Not anymore. Now it takes 4, 5, or more. Which is why people bought more often then, and less often now. Same thing happened to smartphones. Explosive evolution at the beginning and a subsequent slowdown when the generation gap started being so small that you can go more time between upgrades.
  - m45t3r 7y ago
    Both the first iPad and the third iPad (the first retina one) were pretty bad. The third iPad, thanks to its retina screen and its anemic GPU to drive its high resolution screen was outdated pretty fast (iPad 4 was released only 7 months later).
- deltron3030 7y ago
  >They bought them because they were leaps and bounds better than the one they already had, they did more and better. In my opinion it's all about the apps, the overall adoption is just a reflection of apps conquering certain hobby niches and activities that already exist outside of the Appstore, activities that favor some kind of tactile interaction. That's why music making and painting apps are so popular on the iPad, people use them as replacements for actual physical devices, not for replacing computers. That's why coding on an iPad is still very niche and not a thing, desktops and laptops are already perfect for that.
- simonh 7y ago
  I suspect the surge of sales was due to broad publicity and pent up demand for a simpler approach to computing. If you look at the customer satisfaction numbers, they're almost unnaturally good, so I can' see any evidence of customer disappointment. I think the fallback was simply a return to a long term mean.
baggy_trough 7y ago
I've never discovered, and therefore never use, any features of iPadOS that go beyond iOS. I probably don't even know half of the iOS features. Discoverability is a huge problem. Another huge problem is slight variations in gestures or press duration that have widely varying and confusing results.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
It does take some effort to learn how to use newer features. My biggest complaint was figuring out how to activate “search everything on my iPad” because they changed to location/gesture. An iPad is much less valuable if you can’t simply search local content. Anyway, relief was had after twenty minutes of web searching. I use my iPad more than all my laptops and iPhone combined. It is my default device. I use my iPhone much less since I tend to leave it at home and just use my AppleWatch for getting calls, text messages, and listening to audio books/podcasts/music on my AirPods. I only use laptops for deep learning (I have one with a good GPU) and programming.
- sjy 7y ago
  May I ask how you use the "search everything on my iPad" feature? Do you depend on iCloud to store the master copy of all your files on all your devices? I don't, and I assume that's why I've never been able to get anything useful out of the system-wide search feature, but I'd be interested in making it work if I could.
  - mark_l_watson 7y ago
    No, the search is active when on the desktop and you swipe down from the center of the screen. The search functionality searches the data associated with most apps on my iPad, and shows internet search results below results for files in your iPad.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
Totally agree. I have experienced several times that somehow I managed to get two apps onto the split screen but I have no idea how I did it and it was not obvious how to get back to normal. Same with things like undo and other text input features . It seems there are a ton of features but there is just no way of finding them. I think around the time of Windows 95 and macOS back then they put a lot of emphasis on consistent user experience and discoverability. The current state of affairs feels like a big regression.
- shantly 7y ago
  I liked it better when it was a slab of glass that could become a bunch of different tools on-demand, with some light ability to pass info between the tools. And I think discoverability in iOS generally has been trending down fast since iOS7 came out. I don't know any of the new crap, I just accidentally do new stuff sometimes then have to figure out how to make it go away. iOS6+iPad: the most recent mainstream OS & device I'd feel sort-of OK about saddling my elderly computer-illiterate relatives with.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    Especially with iPadOS I feel they are slowly back to building a full size desktop OS but they don’t want to admit that to themselves so they keep pretending to be as simple as the first iOS versions were.
    - josteink 7y ago
      We have gigabytes of RAM, multiple CPU cores and terabyte of storage. We’re also allowing concurrent multitasking. Even more: We’re going full USB-C, you can connect hard drives, mice, keyboards and monitors. But no, no, no! This is not a PC! Yeah, I don’t buy it either.
    - chooseaname 7y ago
      Maybe because a lot of people don't want a desktop OS that is that locked down, so Apple is slowly trying to get people used to it?
trimbo 7y ago
Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini said this years ago https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-design-a-bad-name https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-desi...
- dmix 7y ago
  > No more discoverability, no more recoverability, just the barest remnants of feedback. Why? Not because this was to be a gestural interface, but because Apple simultaneously made a radical move toward visual simplicity and elegance at the expense of learnability, usability, and productivity. Bingo, this is the thing that designers always mistake with minimalism. It doesn't just mean taking everything away, it's about minimal amount of headaches and avoiding information overload. But that ranks far lower on the problem totem pole than not knowing how to do anything because it's all hidden or simply not obvious or explained.
tonyedgecombe 7y ago
The iPad seems squeezed at both ends, from the bottom phones are nearly as powerful and at the top laptops aren't much heavier. They are good for ageing parents and grandparents though, my mother in law loves hers and we like not having to deal with PC issues.
- rbritton 7y ago
  I’m split on that. On one hand, I have fewer tech support calls because my mom generally has fewer problems with an iPad, but when she does have problems, there is no option to use any kind of remote desktop software. For me, the killer “parental help” feature would be a way to remotely see what’s on their screen and either annotate it somehow or be able to interact with it.
  - Someone1234 7y ago
    I never really thought about that before but you're absolutely right. I've literally had to video call someone and had them point their phone at the iPad just to provide basic technical support. Why can't we remote into an iPad?
    - drcross 7y ago
      Have you seen any of the scambaiting YouTube videos? Remote access products are the reason those scammers prey on the elderly.
      - rbritton 7y ago
        I could imagine it tied into Find My iPhone and associated login stuff where the tech support member of the family can link in to it rather than making it a class of app that can be built.
- leggomylibro 7y ago
  There is still a bit of a gap in the market for small 10-12" laptops, but Chromebooks are eating those customers pretty quickly. IMO, tablets are still a decent choice for people who think that 13" is too big for a laptop, although iPads may not work well for that because you're stuck with the default OS.
sylens 7y ago
Watching the WWDC keynote this year, I knew that I would never use 90% of what they were showing. It's too esoteric to discover and I would use it infrequently so it would never become a habit.
ryuukk_ 7y ago
19Q2 63 millions desktop/laptop PCs 19Q2 13 millions iPads People have just no idea what they talk about, iPad + AR = your best bet in the future, there is one more equipment that'll rise, but i'll keep that for myself, for obvious reasons :p
Someone1234 7y ago
This was a large criticism I had of Force Touch ("3D Touch"), and why I was not at all surprised when it "died." Force Touch may have been an impressive technological showpiece, but at its core it had no discoverability and you couldn't really even describe how to use it, new users just had to experiment. This resulted in apps being unable to use it for important functionality, because it would never be found. Which ultimately resulted in most UI designs ignoring it entirely and leading to its own irrelevance. A mouse's right click has the same issue, and many users never "discover" that either. I've met people who only know how to use the clipboard in Microsoft Office applications because it has a UI for it (via the Clipboard section in the ribbon). They simply don't right click, ever.
- robenkleene 7y ago
  Curious what you think the conclusion should be from that? E.g., if 3D Touch should be removed because not enough people used it, does that mean right click should be removed for the same reason? It seems really obvious to me that computers should scale from the most basic of users to the most skilled of users, and features that only benefit a small percentage of users are still important because they let skilled users be more effective. This is the fatal flaw in modern Apple's design approach of allocating resources based on how popular features are (at least that's how it appears from the outside), rather than addressing areas where the device fails to scale to the needs to skilled users. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy to keep the device from reaching its full potential. This is directly why the iPad, while a great device for unskilled users, has failed to capture any market share in any of the skilled tasks that people use desktop computers for[1]. There's so much backwards thinking that come out of Apple because they can't seem to make anything for skilled users anymore, like Apple pitching the iPad as the future ("what's a computer"), while everything that Apple makes is made using Macs. [1]: https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/08/07/apples-app-stores-have-failed-creative-apps/ https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/08/07/apples-app-stores-ha...
  - ridiculous_fish 7y ago
    Right click should be an accelerator. Everything you can accomplish via right click should be also be available via the menu bar, or other easily discoverable UI. 3D touch should have been an accelerator for long press. https://medium.com/@eliz_kilic/how-apple-can-fix-3d-touch-2f0ca5ea589e https://medium.com/@eliz_kilic/how-apple-can-fix-3d-touch-2f...
FerretFred 7y ago
Files! I bought an iPad Mini 2019 and loved it - it replaced my iPad 2 which was no longer getting updates and that still works fine as a music player. But FILES! Gah! What a MESS. With 13.1.x it improved, but I still manage to lose files that I mail to myself from the PC. They go to "My iPad" apparently, but not always. I wanted to use MiniKeepass with a password and a keyfile, but despite following the dev's instructions and some experimentation I just could not get it to find the key file. So it's deleted for now. I hope they fix it soon..
- dingus 7y ago
  Beware: don't share dot files with the Files app. I tried to sync a git directory and now my Files app is filled with several hundred git object files (bf13ee59588b878f1d780c5cc8cd2e3410eaba, etc) that cannot be selected, moved, or deleted because they allegedly "do not exist" according to the error dialog.
  - sjy 7y ago
    That sucks. Do you know of any way to fix it, other than backing up the data in each app separately using means other than iTunes/iCloud backup, and then restoring the iPad to factory state, which would take hours? What did you use to sync? I've been able to sync Git repositories in GoodReader and Working Copy, but I have found the Files app's SMB support, and integration with apps like Secure Shellfish, to be buggy and unreliable.
    - dingus 7y ago
      The device needs a factory reset. Deleting the Files app itself does nothing, even though this warns you that all associated data will be deleted. Which is unsurprising at this point. The latest OS updates feel like I'm a beta tester for Windows ME.
- sjy 7y ago
  I got super excited about the USB drive support and started telling everyone who would listen about how it would solve all our work-related problems with transferring gigabytes of documents onto iPads securely. Then I tried using it with about 10 different USB devices, and was unable to use any of them to successfully copy a 10 GB folder with thousands of files in it into 'On My iPad.' Working with one file at a time was OK, but I managed to get Files into an unresponsive state that could only be cured with a reboot more than once by accessing and copying large folders. I’m convinced nobody at Apple actually tried to use iOS's USB support for “Pro” tasks – it doesn't work.
jccalhoun 7y ago
After hearing about how great ios was I finally bought the new ipad after being android only for years (I had an ipod touch years ago). Maybe I've just been into the Android ecosystem too long but there are a lot of things about ios/ipados that I just can't stand. How is there no way on ios to just see a list of all the apps I have installed? Having to spend time thinking about where an icon should be or if it it should be in a folder or not seems to antiquated. Someone told me i could swipe to search for an app but as the article says that is totally undiscovered. I can't install an app from a web browser on my desktop computer? I guess I took for granted that you could just go to the google play store and have an app installed on your phone or tablet. People always talked about how bad apps looked on android tablets because they weren't designed for tablets. I never noticed it but I can say the way ios does it is not better. Having the app in a little window with a huge black border? Ok, so you expand it but there are still black bars on the sides? How is that better? I know that with recent versions of android that google has been moving away from dedicated back button but I am in the habit of flicking up to get the back button and using that. I know you can swipe from the left to go back but I'm just not used to that. Is there a way to stop apps from begging for reviews and notification access? I know I could do that on android but I don't know how to do it on ios.
- eitland 7y ago
  Upvoted you, but I have a very different experience: I have an iPad now as my first iOS device. I think it is wonderful, the reason I waited so long before getting one was because of how utterly disappointed I was with Macbook Pro and OSX a decade ago. Yes, some things are crazy annoying on iOS as well like - the missing scroll bars - and the fact that every app seems to have to do things in their own weird way, - and the fact that it cannot remember that I want to use the SwiftKey keyboard but some things are extremely much zbetter it seems: for example it was amazing when I realized I could drag a thing with one finger and then use the other hand to navigate to the correct app, navigate in the app to the correct spot and only then realize the dragged object. The pencil also works, and became even more responsive with the update a few weeks ago. For me I'm still years away from giving their computer OS a chance at all, but given how well the iPad works for me I have considered taking the risk and buying an iPhone next time. That doesn't invalidate your experience however, it only proves that UX is highly subjective.
annoyingnoob 7y ago
Just give it to a kid, with no instructions. I would have eaten it up as kid, and figured it all out. My first computer experience was on a PC with MS-DOS booted from a floppy. There was no help and no documentation, discover-ability was based on your ability to find commands and understand how they worked. It took a while but I mastered MS-DOS. Comparatively, we've come a long way and the iPad is easy to use. I think I'm going to get my daughter an iPad Pro for her 10th birthday. She can run all the apps she likes on her iPod and do all of her school work (mostly on Google Docs). Its perfect for her and has everything she needs. She will have no trouble with discover-ability, she will use her time and intuition to figure it out.
- jarjoura 7y ago
  I'd argue this is mostly because kids have the time to sit there and figure it out. They also have zero expectations for the way things should work, so they can try to do something until it does what they want. Not sure this is valid argument for building a device that the majority of users will find frustrating. I think the problem I have with iOS/iPad OS 13 is that Apple went into this as a zero-sum game. Replace how it worked before, because trust their designers who know better, it's MUCH better now, right? Instead of giving people the option to try something new, to see if it makes their lives better by removing friction, they've instead added friction to some set of users. Inherent in this is genuinely a smugness and lack of empathy, that's all. People will adapt and learn to love the changes over time, but it's really not ok to do this to your users.
  - annoyingnoob 7y ago
    The complaints seem kind of minor to me. Is moving from one major release of Android to another any different? I think adults are capable of adjusting their expectations and engaging curiosity.
  - pfranz 7y ago
    This isn't specifically speaking to your point about iPad OS 13, but I actually think that example fits very well to the desktops of the 90s everyone talks about those as thoughtfully designed and discoverable. Kids at the time took the time to learn all it. Parents needed to take classes to learn the basics to do their job. Even now, those former kids get called in when something "breaks."
idoh 7y ago
As an iPad Pro user for work, here is one area where discoverability is better on the iPad than the Mac - learning keyboard shortcuts: On the iPad, hold down ⌘, then keyboard shortcuts show up. So much easier than on a Mac. My tip is to gradually add these keyboard shortcuts to your Anki deck.
ActorNightly 7y ago
"he original Macintosh is a good example of great product. The mouse pointing device took seconds to understand and just few more as it grew buttons and a wheel. Technopriests argued, perhaps “correctly”, that they could do more with the Command Line, but the Mac’s graphical user interface, with its pull-down menus and movable windows, gave the Rest of Us a power we’d never known, it did more — and did it better — than we initially perceived." I dunno if just forgot or have a bad memory from childhood, but I specifically remember things taking insanely long on a Mac compared to a Windows PC. Our high school got new iMac G3s in 2002, whereas at home we had a Windows 95 as our family computer. Applications ran way faster on our home computer, whereas the iMacs would just lock up and not respond for the longest time.
baby 7y ago
I still don’t have a clue how to do a lot of the splitscreen stuff with my ipad pro. I sometimes do it by accident, or get stuck in a multitask UI. Discoverability is horrible.

94 points by LaSombra 7y ago

Some of the conclusions are only looking at a single factor and ignoring the rest. > The most natural explanation for the decline [in sales] is that the iPad failed to fulfill initial expectations that it would be a general-purpose device that could replace our Macs and PCs. People didn't buy iPads in 2014 because they actually thought they would replace their PC, or for the the promise that a future model will in 2021. They bought them because they were leaps and bounds better than the one they already had, they did more and better. My iPad 1 was woefully outdated by the time the iPad 3 came out just 2 years later. You could feel it in the performance, the screen resolution, etc. My 5 year old iPad Air 2 is still kicking ass and has easily at least another year or 2 left in it. And when I upgrade it's because of the lack of support, not that I can feel it buckling under the workload. As markets mature the improvements are getting smaller and smaller and the product is more than adequate for longer periods. That's the real benefit of the maturity of the market. Today it's harder to justify the upgrade even if it would be perfectly able to replace your PC.

alistairSH 7y ago
Agreed. I don't buy iPads frequently because, like laptops, they last a long time and the gains from generation to generation are quite small. I have owned three - all iPad Minis - and two are still working just fine. I bought a Mini 1, then replaced it with a Mini 2. At some point after that, I adde a Mini 4. The 2 stays by my bedside for quick surfing, checking weather, etc. The 4 is my main tablet. I may eventually replace the Mini 2 with an iPad Pro in an attempt to replace my aging MacBook Air, but that's a lot of money and I haven't convinced myself that's the way I want to go. There's still something to be said for a proper laptop.
scarface74 7y ago
You’re giving the iPad 1 way too much credit. It was outdated the day it came out. It only had 256MB of RAM. The iPhone 4 released 3 months later had 512MB of RAM. The iPhone 4 ran up to iOS 7. The iPad stopped at iOS 5 and ran it badly. The iPad 2 released a year later with 512MB of RAM ran up to iOS 9.
- close04 7y ago
  I compared iPad 1 because I had it. The story of iPad 2 is not much different. When the 4 came out it was faster, had more RAM, much better screen, etc. Every product reaches a stage where improvements stop being so obvious year over year and the upgrade seems less and less justified. What used to be a 2-3 year upgrade cycle can now easily be a 5+ year one.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    The difference being that the iPad 1 was already underpowered when it was released compared to its contemporary. The iPad needed more RAM than the iPhone 4 that was being designed at the same time but had less. The iPad 4 was better than the iPad 2 but the iPad 2 was at least using the best SOC they had at the time. The iPad 2 was sold from 2011-2014. It actually got a bug fix update about 3 or 4 months ago. By 2011 when iOS 5 came out, the original iPad was crashing because of too little memory.
    - close04 7y ago
      This still supports what I wrote originally: there was a time when a 1 or 2 year gap brought massive improvements. Not anymore. Now it takes 4, 5, or more. Which is why people bought more often then, and less often now. Same thing happened to smartphones. Explosive evolution at the beginning and a subsequent slowdown when the generation gap started being so small that you can go more time between upgrades.
- m45t3r 7y ago
  Both the first iPad and the third iPad (the first retina one) were pretty bad. The third iPad, thanks to its retina screen and its anemic GPU to drive its high resolution screen was outdated pretty fast (iPad 4 was released only 7 months later).
deltron3030 7y ago
>They bought them because they were leaps and bounds better than the one they already had, they did more and better. In my opinion it's all about the apps, the overall adoption is just a reflection of apps conquering certain hobby niches and activities that already exist outside of the Appstore, activities that favor some kind of tactile interaction. That's why music making and painting apps are so popular on the iPad, people use them as replacements for actual physical devices, not for replacing computers. That's why coding on an iPad is still very niche and not a thing, desktops and laptops are already perfect for that.
simonh 7y ago
I suspect the surge of sales was due to broad publicity and pent up demand for a simpler approach to computing. If you look at the customer satisfaction numbers, they're almost unnaturally good, so I can' see any evidence of customer disappointment. I think the fallback was simply a return to a long term mean.

baggy_trough 7y ago

I've never discovered, and therefore never use, any features of iPadOS that go beyond iOS. I probably don't even know half of the iOS features. Discoverability is a huge problem. Another huge problem is slight variations in gestures or press duration that have widely varying and confusing results.

mark_l_watson 7y ago

It does take some effort to learn how to use newer features. My biggest complaint was figuring out how to activate “search everything on my iPad” because they changed to location/gesture. An iPad is much less valuable if you can’t simply search local content. Anyway, relief was had after twenty minutes of web searching. I use my iPad more than all my laptops and iPhone combined. It is my default device. I use my iPhone much less since I tend to leave it at home and just use my AppleWatch for getting calls, text messages, and listening to audio books/podcasts/music on my AirPods. I only use laptops for deep learning (I have one with a good GPU) and programming.

sjy 7y ago
May I ask how you use the "search everything on my iPad" feature? Do you depend on iCloud to store the master copy of all your files on all your devices? I don't, and I assume that's why I've never been able to get anything useful out of the system-wide search feature, but I'd be interested in making it work if I could.
- mark_l_watson 7y ago
  No, the search is active when on the desktop and you swipe down from the center of the screen. The search functionality searches the data associated with most apps on my iPad, and shows internet search results below results for files in your iPad.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

Totally agree. I have experienced several times that somehow I managed to get two apps onto the split screen but I have no idea how I did it and it was not obvious how to get back to normal. Same with things like undo and other text input features . It seems there are a ton of features but there is just no way of finding them. I think around the time of Windows 95 and macOS back then they put a lot of emphasis on consistent user experience and discoverability. The current state of affairs feels like a big regression.

shantly 7y ago
I liked it better when it was a slab of glass that could become a bunch of different tools on-demand, with some light ability to pass info between the tools. And I think discoverability in iOS generally has been trending down fast since iOS7 came out. I don't know any of the new crap, I just accidentally do new stuff sometimes then have to figure out how to make it go away. iOS6+iPad: the most recent mainstream OS & device I'd feel sort-of OK about saddling my elderly computer-illiterate relatives with.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  Especially with iPadOS I feel they are slowly back to building a full size desktop OS but they don’t want to admit that to themselves so they keep pretending to be as simple as the first iOS versions were.
  - josteink 7y ago
    We have gigabytes of RAM, multiple CPU cores and terabyte of storage. We’re also allowing concurrent multitasking. Even more: We’re going full USB-C, you can connect hard drives, mice, keyboards and monitors. But no, no, no! This is not a PC! Yeah, I don’t buy it either.
  - chooseaname 7y ago
    Maybe because a lot of people don't want a desktop OS that is that locked down, so Apple is slowly trying to get people used to it?

trimbo 7y ago

Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini said this years ago https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-design-a-bad-name https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-desi...

dmix 7y ago
> No more discoverability, no more recoverability, just the barest remnants of feedback. Why? Not because this was to be a gestural interface, but because Apple simultaneously made a radical move toward visual simplicity and elegance at the expense of learnability, usability, and productivity. Bingo, this is the thing that designers always mistake with minimalism. It doesn't just mean taking everything away, it's about minimal amount of headaches and avoiding information overload. But that ranks far lower on the problem totem pole than not knowing how to do anything because it's all hidden or simply not obvious or explained.

tonyedgecombe 7y ago

The iPad seems squeezed at both ends, from the bottom phones are nearly as powerful and at the top laptops aren't much heavier. They are good for ageing parents and grandparents though, my mother in law loves hers and we like not having to deal with PC issues.

rbritton 7y ago
I’m split on that. On one hand, I have fewer tech support calls because my mom generally has fewer problems with an iPad, but when she does have problems, there is no option to use any kind of remote desktop software. For me, the killer “parental help” feature would be a way to remotely see what’s on their screen and either annotate it somehow or be able to interact with it.
- Someone1234 7y ago
  I never really thought about that before but you're absolutely right. I've literally had to video call someone and had them point their phone at the iPad just to provide basic technical support. Why can't we remote into an iPad?
  - drcross 7y ago
    Have you seen any of the scambaiting YouTube videos? Remote access products are the reason those scammers prey on the elderly.
    - rbritton 7y ago
      I could imagine it tied into Find My iPhone and associated login stuff where the tech support member of the family can link in to it rather than making it a class of app that can be built.
leggomylibro 7y ago
There is still a bit of a gap in the market for small 10-12" laptops, but Chromebooks are eating those customers pretty quickly. IMO, tablets are still a decent choice for people who think that 13" is too big for a laptop, although iPads may not work well for that because you're stuck with the default OS.

sylens 7y ago

Watching the WWDC keynote this year, I knew that I would never use 90% of what they were showing. It's too esoteric to discover and I would use it infrequently so it would never become a habit.

ryuukk_ 7y ago

19Q2 63 millions desktop/laptop PCs 19Q2 13 millions iPads People have just no idea what they talk about, iPad + AR = your best bet in the future, there is one more equipment that'll rise, but i'll keep that for myself, for obvious reasons :p

Someone1234 7y ago

This was a large criticism I had of Force Touch ("3D Touch"), and why I was not at all surprised when it "died." Force Touch may have been an impressive technological showpiece, but at its core it had no discoverability and you couldn't really even describe how to use it, new users just had to experiment. This resulted in apps being unable to use it for important functionality, because it would never be found. Which ultimately resulted in most UI designs ignoring it entirely and leading to its own irrelevance. A mouse's right click has the same issue, and many users never "discover" that either. I've met people who only know how to use the clipboard in Microsoft Office applications because it has a UI for it (via the Clipboard section in the ribbon). They simply don't right click, ever.

robenkleene 7y ago
Curious what you think the conclusion should be from that? E.g., if 3D Touch should be removed because not enough people used it, does that mean right click should be removed for the same reason? It seems really obvious to me that computers should scale from the most basic of users to the most skilled of users, and features that only benefit a small percentage of users are still important because they let skilled users be more effective. This is the fatal flaw in modern Apple's design approach of allocating resources based on how popular features are (at least that's how it appears from the outside), rather than addressing areas where the device fails to scale to the needs to skilled users. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy to keep the device from reaching its full potential. This is directly why the iPad, while a great device for unskilled users, has failed to capture any market share in any of the skilled tasks that people use desktop computers for[1]. There's so much backwards thinking that come out of Apple because they can't seem to make anything for skilled users anymore, like Apple pitching the iPad as the future ("what's a computer"), while everything that Apple makes is made using Macs. [1]: https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/08/07/apples-app-stores-have-failed-creative-apps/ https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/08/07/apples-app-stores-ha...
- ridiculous_fish 7y ago
  Right click should be an accelerator. Everything you can accomplish via right click should be also be available via the menu bar, or other easily discoverable UI. 3D touch should have been an accelerator for long press. https://medium.com/@eliz_kilic/how-apple-can-fix-3d-touch-2f0ca5ea589e https://medium.com/@eliz_kilic/how-apple-can-fix-3d-touch-2f...

FerretFred 7y ago

Files! I bought an iPad Mini 2019 and loved it - it replaced my iPad 2 which was no longer getting updates and that still works fine as a music player. But FILES! Gah! What a MESS. With 13.1.x it improved, but I still manage to lose files that I mail to myself from the PC. They go to "My iPad" apparently, but not always. I wanted to use MiniKeepass with a password and a keyfile, but despite following the dev's instructions and some experimentation I just could not get it to find the key file. So it's deleted for now. I hope they fix it soon..

dingus 7y ago
Beware: don't share dot files with the Files app. I tried to sync a git directory and now my Files app is filled with several hundred git object files (bf13ee59588b878f1d780c5cc8cd2e3410eaba, etc) that cannot be selected, moved, or deleted because they allegedly "do not exist" according to the error dialog.
- sjy 7y ago
  That sucks. Do you know of any way to fix it, other than backing up the data in each app separately using means other than iTunes/iCloud backup, and then restoring the iPad to factory state, which would take hours? What did you use to sync? I've been able to sync Git repositories in GoodReader and Working Copy, but I have found the Files app's SMB support, and integration with apps like Secure Shellfish, to be buggy and unreliable.
  - dingus 7y ago
    The device needs a factory reset. Deleting the Files app itself does nothing, even though this warns you that all associated data will be deleted. Which is unsurprising at this point. The latest OS updates feel like I'm a beta tester for Windows ME.
sjy 7y ago
I got super excited about the USB drive support and started telling everyone who would listen about how it would solve all our work-related problems with transferring gigabytes of documents onto iPads securely. Then I tried using it with about 10 different USB devices, and was unable to use any of them to successfully copy a 10 GB folder with thousands of files in it into 'On My iPad.' Working with one file at a time was OK, but I managed to get Files into an unresponsive state that could only be cured with a reboot more than once by accessing and copying large folders. I’m convinced nobody at Apple actually tried to use iOS's USB support for “Pro” tasks – it doesn't work.

jccalhoun 7y ago

After hearing about how great ios was I finally bought the new ipad after being android only for years (I had an ipod touch years ago). Maybe I've just been into the Android ecosystem too long but there are a lot of things about ios/ipados that I just can't stand. How is there no way on ios to just see a list of all the apps I have installed? Having to spend time thinking about where an icon should be or if it it should be in a folder or not seems to antiquated. Someone told me i could swipe to search for an app but as the article says that is totally undiscovered. I can't install an app from a web browser on my desktop computer? I guess I took for granted that you could just go to the google play store and have an app installed on your phone or tablet. People always talked about how bad apps looked on android tablets because they weren't designed for tablets. I never noticed it but I can say the way ios does it is not better. Having the app in a little window with a huge black border? Ok, so you expand it but there are still black bars on the sides? How is that better? I know that with recent versions of android that google has been moving away from dedicated back button but I am in the habit of flicking up to get the back button and using that. I know you can swipe from the left to go back but I'm just not used to that. Is there a way to stop apps from begging for reviews and notification access? I know I could do that on android but I don't know how to do it on ios.

eitland 7y ago
Upvoted you, but I have a very different experience: I have an iPad now as my first iOS device. I think it is wonderful, the reason I waited so long before getting one was because of how utterly disappointed I was with Macbook Pro and OSX a decade ago. Yes, some things are crazy annoying on iOS as well like - the missing scroll bars - and the fact that every app seems to have to do things in their own weird way, - and the fact that it cannot remember that I want to use the SwiftKey keyboard but some things are extremely much zbetter it seems: for example it was amazing when I realized I could drag a thing with one finger and then use the other hand to navigate to the correct app, navigate in the app to the correct spot and only then realize the dragged object. The pencil also works, and became even more responsive with the update a few weeks ago. For me I'm still years away from giving their computer OS a chance at all, but given how well the iPad works for me I have considered taking the risk and buying an iPhone next time. That doesn't invalidate your experience however, it only proves that UX is highly subjective.

annoyingnoob 7y ago

Just give it to a kid, with no instructions. I would have eaten it up as kid, and figured it all out. My first computer experience was on a PC with MS-DOS booted from a floppy. There was no help and no documentation, discover-ability was based on your ability to find commands and understand how they worked. It took a while but I mastered MS-DOS. Comparatively, we've come a long way and the iPad is easy to use. I think I'm going to get my daughter an iPad Pro for her 10th birthday. She can run all the apps she likes on her iPod and do all of her school work (mostly on Google Docs). Its perfect for her and has everything she needs. She will have no trouble with discover-ability, she will use her time and intuition to figure it out.

jarjoura 7y ago
I'd argue this is mostly because kids have the time to sit there and figure it out. They also have zero expectations for the way things should work, so they can try to do something until it does what they want. Not sure this is valid argument for building a device that the majority of users will find frustrating. I think the problem I have with iOS/iPad OS 13 is that Apple went into this as a zero-sum game. Replace how it worked before, because trust their designers who know better, it's MUCH better now, right? Instead of giving people the option to try something new, to see if it makes their lives better by removing friction, they've instead added friction to some set of users. Inherent in this is genuinely a smugness and lack of empathy, that's all. People will adapt and learn to love the changes over time, but it's really not ok to do this to your users.
- annoyingnoob 7y ago
  The complaints seem kind of minor to me. Is moving from one major release of Android to another any different? I think adults are capable of adjusting their expectations and engaging curiosity.
- pfranz 7y ago
  This isn't specifically speaking to your point about iPad OS 13, but I actually think that example fits very well to the desktops of the 90s everyone talks about those as thoughtfully designed and discoverable. Kids at the time took the time to learn all it. Parents needed to take classes to learn the basics to do their job. Even now, those former kids get called in when something "breaks."

idoh 7y ago

As an iPad Pro user for work, here is one area where discoverability is better on the iPad than the Mac - learning keyboard shortcuts: On the iPad, hold down ⌘, then keyboard shortcuts show up. So much easier than on a Mac. My tip is to gradually add these keyboard shortcuts to your Anki deck.

ActorNightly 7y ago

"he original Macintosh is a good example of great product. The mouse pointing device took seconds to understand and just few more as it grew buttons and a wheel. Technopriests argued, perhaps “correctly”, that they could do more with the Command Line, but the Mac’s graphical user interface, with its pull-down menus and movable windows, gave the Rest of Us a power we’d never known, it did more — and did it better — than we initially perceived." I dunno if just forgot or have a bad memory from childhood, but I specifically remember things taking insanely long on a Mac compared to a Windows PC. Our high school got new iMac G3s in 2002, whereas at home we had a Windows 95 as our family computer. Applications ran way faster on our home computer, whereas the iMacs would just lock up and not respond for the longest time.

baby 7y ago

I still don’t have a clue how to do a lot of the splitscreen stuff with my ipad pro. I sometimes do it by accident, or get stuck in a multitask UI. Discoverability is horrible.