I watched the Hustwit documentary on Rams this year too, and while I liked the documentary (my review: https://www.gwern.net/Movie-reviews#rams https://www.gwer

I watched the Hustwit documentary on Rams this year too, and while I liked the documentary (my review: https://www.gwern.net/Movie-reviews#rams https://www.gwern.net/Movie-reviews#rams ), I felt it put a finger on why Apple imitates Rams's surface but doesn't actually live up to his philosophy. Rams's radio and chair etc are all fully functional. Rams removed the accidental complexity by careful design, leaving only the essential complexity (the user still has to choose a radio channel, the radio can't choose it for him!). But there is a difference between removing accidental complexity and hiding intrinsic complexity. Apple's approach is, all too often, to avoid intrinsic complexity and optimize for a surface simplicity which actually shoves away all the hard problems by either forbidding them or relegating them to the CLI or 'power user' tools or makes it the devs' problem. This makes for products which look great sitting in the Apple Store, but then as you try to do anything complex or hard... You run straight into Tog's "third-user" critique: https://asktog.com/atc/the-third-user/ https://asktog.com/atc/the-third-user/ Apple's products are far more shiny than empowering or deep solutions. (Who would ever dare compare an iPad with a Smalltalk or Lisp Machine?) So you get inordinate attention to making the perfect squircled corner, but meanwhile, you have to grip your iPhone right for the antenna to work, or your keyboard breaks at the dust from the drop of a hat, and as always, the web browser lags half a decade behind and can't play basic audio file formats like OGG Vorbis, and Mac OS X ships with breaking bugs; this isn't even reaching the standards of basic competence, much less truly fulfilling Rams's 10 principles and creating user-empowering interfaces and violins of the mind.