Past 5 years? Maybe closer to the past 25 years. Ever since Apple decided OS X would be the successor to classic Mac OS. This is when Apple finally left their i

Past 5 years? Maybe closer to the past 25 years. Ever since Apple decided OS X would be the successor to classic Mac OS. This is when Apple finally left their incredibly rigorous user interface guidelines behind [1] and made technical considerations (preemptive multitasking, multithreading, and virtual memory) the priority, along with “lickability.” [2] The classic Macs were the last truly easy to use desktop computers. My father and all of my older relatives of his generation had no problems using classic Macs. OS X however? Completely baffled. Might as well have sat them down in front of a terminal connected to an old Unix mainframe. Yeah, it has a lot of superficial similarities to classic Mac OS, but it violates the principle of least surprise far too often to be called easy to use. iOS is easy to use though. Hand an iPad to any of those same relatives and they get along fine. It’s way less powerful though, despite running on a computer several orders of magnitude faster. [1] https://archive.arstechnica.com/reviews/4q00/macosx-pb1/macos-x-beta-14.html https://archive.arstechnica.com/reviews/4q00/macosx-pb1/maco... [2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/lickable-buttons/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/lickable-buttons/