68 ms·

How Intuitive Are Macs Really?

• gandalfian 5y ago
  I think apple lost interest in the desktop years ago and are eternally surprised it's still lasting, run as an afterthough. Why is deleting a file from a usb stick to free up space so fiddly? No one has ever taken the time to really think through how things work.
  • enos_feedler 5y ago
    Are you fucking kidding? How do you explain the M1?
    • Nextgrid 5y ago
      M1 can be explained by consolidating iOS and macOS so that less effort is spent on the desktop. M1 machines are very close to iPhones when it comes to the boot process and security model, and iOS features are now infiltrating the desktop like widgets and even the ability to run iOS apps on desktop (used to be Marzipan/Catalyst but it still meant the apps had to be compiled for it, but now macOS on M1 is technically capable of running raw iOS apps directly).
      • enos_feedler 5y ago
        M1 is about capturing growth in the laptop/desktop/workstation market, it isn't about cost savings a dying market. Consolidation isn't the right word. It's about taking their mobile "opinions" and saying if we bring these to the desktop we can grow the market. The ROI does not make sense otherwise. Might as well pay Intel and keep milking it then.
• CarVac 5y ago
  I find the dock terribly unintuitive every time I use a Mac.
  • kristofferR 5y ago
    How so? It can't get much more intuitive in my view, it's a collection of your favorite apps with dots under each running one.
    • echelon 5y ago
      Then why do I have to keep unpinning iTunes? Why does it come back when I remove it? Why does it only have colorful icons instead of icons+text? I use a bunch of IDEs that visually look the same, but their functionality is wildly different. This is a usability nightmare.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
• rchaud 5y ago
  I bought a Mac in 2014 after a lifetime of using Windows. I never understood why people called it easier to use than Windows. Maybe this sentiment is a holdover from an earlier era when people would mindlessly run executables and zip files attached in emails and AIM messages. From a UI perspective, it's 90% identical to windows. From a UX perspective though, something fundamental like Finder is still not up to the job IMO. Why is it that when I click Finder, nothing actually opens? I have to hit Option+N to actually display a Finder window. Don't even get me started on the sort options. What kind of file manager applies a Sort view to every single directory, instead of the one you actually set the Sort view to?
  • chrisseaton 5y ago
    > Why is it that when I click Finder, nothing actually opens? I'm not sure what you're doing wrong here - when I click the Finder icon it shows me the top Finder window, or opens a new one if there is no window. Is this not what it does for you?
    • scotty79 5y ago
      Maybe it's a bug. I had plenty of those accumulating using mac for few months.
      • bombcar 5y ago
        If finder has a window anywhere clicking on the finder in the dock doesn't open a new finder window - it just tries to bring the current one forward. If you have many windows, it can be hard to notice (especially if you have many monitors).
        • vladvasiliu 5y ago
          But this is the standard behavior for pretty much all apps on Mac OS, so if their complaint is specifically about Finder and not about the general behavior, that sounds like a bug to me.
• j-pb 5y ago
  The entire thing used to be super intuitive and consistent. Disk images were the mac equivalent of a compressed folder, e.g. zip. And I find the "compressedd virtual usb-stick" idea a lot more intuitive than the whole "we cram files into other files and loose all metadata" shenanigans. Apps used to be simple files in the finest unix tradition. No weird installer that does who knows what, no wizards, no special system files, no uninstaller. Want to take your app from one computer to another? Just send the file. App stores, installer, and the whole sandboxing gunk, is a million times more complex and unintuitive. The author seems to be oblivious to the simplicity of the old ways, and thus suspects some hidden magic going on in loading the disk image. Loading the disk image doesn't do "something" and then displays an IKEA esque installer window. The window is literally a finder window with hidden borders. The idea was: "If a user can drag and drop files, they can install apps." The workflow described is composed of several orthogonal concepts that each on their own are super intuitive, or at least were, when unix philosophy, file system usage and user empowerment were still at the core of Mac Os values.
  • pantulis 5y ago
    Or "uninstalling" apps, always kind of confusing on Windows. Not on the Mac. Still, I think it's not that the Mac is not that intuitive any more, it's that Windows has more or less caught up.
    • lbriner 5y ago
      That depends on your opinion. Deleting an app folder on MacOS is no less intuitive than right-clicking an app in windows and choosing Uninstall. Certainly in most OSs (I think), there is a good chance that more got installed than just a single folder so anyone who isn't exclusively on a Mac is going to think that deleting a folder is asking for trouble.
      • jolux 5y ago
        >Deleting an app folder on MacOS is no less intuitive than right-clicking an app in windows and choosing Uninstall. Here's a question though: What are you right-clicking in Windows that gives you an uninstall option? Windows is so complicated that most of the time it's not even the app itself. You certainly won't get an Uninstall option right-clicking the executable in Program Files, you have to find a magic shortcut somewhere that is keyed up in the registry with the relevant uninstaller package.
• nabla9 5y ago
  It's unfortunate that the intuitive user interface for a new user is the goal for commercial reasons. Many people use computers 2-8 hour per day for their whole life. It would be worth of the effort to create secondary consistent UI that takes weeks to learn, even if it would increase productivity just 5%.
  • goldcd 5y ago
    But I don't think there are people out there happily burning 5% productivity to compensate for poor UI. Normally people are burning productivity by not learning/knowing what their existing UI provides. e.g. In windows windows-key+arrow, lets you snap windows to the side of the screen (or minimize, mazimize, shift monitor etc). Now I've absolutely no idea when this feature was introduced - but plenty of people are still reaching for their pointer device to drag stuff about. It's a nice feature. You don't forget it - but it's bad UX as I swear usage of it only spreads by word-of-mouth. No idea if MS invented it - or it was 'borrowed' from another OS.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    I don't see any reason OSs cannot be both more intuitive and afford more productivity than they currently do. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell neither is a goal of modern Desktop OSs.
• anothernewdude 5y ago
  Biggest thing that makes a computer intuitive is being the same interface I've already used. So of course all three major platforms have made breaking changes to their UIs.
• severak_cz 5y ago
  It's not about to be intuitive. It's about: - discoverability (you need to discover how to do it) - consistency (you don't need to discover it again done in other way) - helpful error messages (e.g. "Chrome not found...") If you have these three things done, even something ancient like DOS can be usable.
• lordnacho 5y ago
  Once I got to a certain place in my coding knowledge, I stopped caring so much about the different OSes. Once you see the abstractions you know what layer to look for. Is the thing a UI problem or a network config problem? Normally it's clear once you've coded a bit. I like my MacBook mainly because of the screen, and a little bit because of the touchpad. Those are both hardware considerations rather than OS. In terms of using it, I have a terminal on shortcut, which I also do on my backup Linux machine. If I had a Windows as my daily machine I think I'd do the same. In terms of installed apps, all the IDEs are on all platforms, and all chat programs are on all platforms. Just about everything else is in a browser. So it hardly matters too much what you pick.
  • baryphonic 5y ago
    I don't really care between macOS or various *nix, but I really despise using Windows. The last time I seriously used Windows (granted, probably about seven years ago), I was astonished that the OS still required (or at least strongly urged) me to reboot after I installed anything. Small little shoddy UI quirks on Windows kept me frustrated, e.g. not being able to find anything in the control panel, or especially that a window must have focus for me to scroll (on macOS, scrolling affects whatever is under the mouse cursor regardless of focus). They were all small but added up to a horribly frustrating user experience. When I started seeing ads pop up in my start menu, I decided my Windows days were over and I wiped that machine in favor of Linux Mint.
    • input_sh 5y ago
      My favourite unintuitive action comes from Windows 8 (before 8.1). Here I was, with an IT education, unable to figure out how to shut down the computer! It wasn't in the start menu like in every other Windows version before and after. No, to do that you needed to swipe from the right side of the screen for some sort of a system sidebar to appear (I believe it was called "charms"). I've used the cmd command I was familiar with for months (shutdown -s -t 0) before finally deciding to consult with a search engine, and oh boy, was I pissed when I found out where it was. Super glad I never have to touch Windows to do my work now.
    • 5y ago
• rationalData 5y ago
  My grandparents got iPhones (during COVID) because they were supposed to be easy. Wow, that's just the marketing. The jargon was outside their understanding, and unless we were physically looking at the phone, we couldn't guess what word in the Appstore meant Download. And it got worse, the requests/requirement to login with Apple ID on various occasions were frustrating. And from a tech geek, I had a work IPhone where I struggled to change settings and found annoyances with bugs.
  • echelon 5y ago
    > I struggled to change settings Apple's posture is that the defaults are good for most people. Their settings management is second class in all of their products compared to Windows and (especially) Linux and Android.
    • pram 5y ago
      The implication of there being some kind of cohesive "settings management" in Linux is amusing.
      • echelon 5y ago
        I didn't say cohesive. I don't have any trouble getting Linux to behave the way I want.
• piokoch 5y ago
  Intuitiveness is a strange topic. Think of moving to the beginning and the end on the command line in the terminal. This is done using Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E keys. Is this intuitive? Yes, it is for someone who was using Emacs for 20 years as it uses same keys. Is this intuitive for a typical MS Windows user who uses Notepad++ and MS Word? Hell, no. Same with operation systems. For someone accustomed to Windows conventions things like lack of Ctrl-X on Mac for cutting files (so after Ctrl-V they are removed from old location) will be counter-intuitive. For people living in Mac ecosystem this is natural and does not affect their workflow (they are even epic discussions on the topic in the Internet).
  • cferr 5y ago
    I just use the Home and End keys in the terminal, which seems intuitive enough to me.
• Shadonototro 5y ago
  yes they are, that is why they are popular among non-tech people
  • anonleb4 5y ago
    They have a tiny market share worldwide. Apart from the USA not many people in the world own them.
    • Shadonototro 5y ago
      # Worldwide shares: - Windows: 74% - macOS: 16% - chromeOS: 2% # NA shares: - Windows: 63% - macOS: 26% - chromeOS: 5% # Europe shares: - Windows: 76% - macOS: 16% - chromeOS: 1% # Asia shares: - Windows: 80% - macOS: 8% - chromeOS: 0% -- So if we only take NA + EU - Windows 69% - macOS 21% That's not bad at all Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/ https://gs.statcounter.com/ EDIT: Asia doesn't make lot of sense, they are more of a smartphone oriented market than desktop Asia: https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet/asia/#monthly-202004-202104 https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mob... What's interesting, smartphones became the most used type of device last year Worldwide: https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet/worldwide/#monthly-202004-202104 https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mob... Today: Smartphone: 54% Desktop: 42% And if we compare Windows vs iOS in NA: - Windows: 31% - iOS: 27% - macOS: 13% So yeah, it doesn't look good for windows and microsoft
    • Retric 5y ago
      Exclude business PC’s and OSX’s market share is surprisingly large. Tablets and smartphones have eaten into the ultra cheap PC sales in a big way which has been shifting the market.
• brainzap 5y ago
  What I like is that the System Settings stayed somewhat the same. What still hurts is the Finder, there is just something missing, file management is painful.
• heresie-dabord 5y ago
  In the early period of Apple computers, they offered more affordance ("intuitiveness", the user's immediate sense of how to use the tooling) than $competingOS. This is in part because of the simple WIMP [0] affordance, some humane design choices such as smiling faces and long filenames, and because a few applications were pre-eminent in their categories. Adobe Photoshop, for example. What people did with Apple computers, they knew how to do and what to expect. The reputation for ease of use persisted for a long time after it became less of a differentiating characteristic. "Reputation" is sometimes perpetuated by marketing, not by a consensus of thoughtful users. An OS such a ChromeOS can make a claim to "ease of use" by limiting the user's ability to cause damage. These days and for some time, I use Linux (Debian), Android, ChromeOS, and M-Windows in that order of frequency. Linux gives me all the tools that I want, Android is mobile, ChromeOS is hard-to-break for restricted computing. For M-Windows, the typical driver requirements make it necessary. [0] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing)
• TheMagicHorsey 5y ago
  Mac's are not intuitive. But then, neither are Windows machines or Ubuntu machines. I've yet to use an intuitive machine. The most intuitive thing is the command line ... but you have to learn so much before you can use your machine from the command line ... its not an investment worth making unless you're a developer.
  • lbriner 5y ago
    > The most intuitive thing is the command line Are you joking? Searching in a windowed app usally brings up a dialog with various search options that can be ticked. Learning options for grep/awk/sed etc. is incredible tedious. Like most things, there is a difference between intuitive for person A and person B and this is not the same as whether a power user can invest time learning a tool and then become super fast at it. An expert in Grep could probably find something in a file much more quickly than someone in Windows or MacOS but I would argue many people would find windowed apps more intuitive.
    • Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
      Of course it’s intuitive. It’s a conversation. It’s a weird and complicated language, but you talk to the computer and it talks back. Don’t confuse intuitive with easy or familiar.
• alkonaut 5y ago
  The app install process is a bloody joke. I have installed programs my whole life on probably 5 desktop OS:es and I work full time since 20 years with desktop software installers. Yet I had to Google several times to just install a single piece of MacOS software. The windows exe installer system isn’t perfect but it beats that…
• shp0ngle 5y ago
  macOS app installation is broken for about 20 years now. It's not a new thing. Instead of clicking "next-next-next" as you do on Windows, you have at least 3 competing versions of installing things. * you have pkg installers (sometimes zipped, sometimes just .pkg files) * you have those .app bundles that you need to manually move to Application (they are sometimes in a zip and sometimes in a DMG, further complicating things) * you now also have an app store (that keeps requiring you to enter iCloud password - different from OS password - all the time for some weird reason) And don't try to even uninstall anything. * app store apps are uninstalled by ... holding them in Launchpad view, which is never needed anywhere else * other apps... just are not un-installable, really.
  • goldcd 5y ago
    I wouldn't say MS has 'completely' sovlved the installer problem. "Just download the windows version" 'OK.. am I x86, x64 or ARM? I think it's Windows 10' 'Do I want the zip, the exe, the MSI or standalone?' It's almost enough just to tell them to use the MS app store.
  • viktorcode 5y ago
    The whole idea that programs have to be installed to run and uninstalled when no longer needed shows how many people were trained (mostly by Microsoft) to follow along the lines of poor user experience. As it is the norm, people call that 'intuitive'.
• richrichardsson 5y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with this at all. Just to test I donwloaded the .dmg for Chrome. Like A LOT of .dmg based "installers" there is a Chrome application and a link to /Applications, with a nice obvious "arrow" between them. I've always found this to be pretty self evident that I must put the Chrome app into the Applications folder.
  • jermaustin1 5y ago
    My sister interpreted that as drag it onto the application icon that was in her task bar, so she kept trying to drag it onto the App Store icon because it looked kind of similar.
    • bombcar 5y ago
      Yeah, it's easy to understand if you already understand it (some will have a "Drag to Applications" text to help) - but I prefer the applications where if you start it from the DMG it asks if you'd like to move it to Applications, and then does so and ejects the DMG for you. How many times have we found a friend's Mac with 10-20 DMGs mounted?
• rasfincher 5y ago
  I'm convinced 90% of my love of the Mac was the customizing I had done to it.
• matchbok 5y ago
  Still light years ahead of whatever they use on Windows. To each their own.
  • sidlls 5y ago
    I recently switched to a Macbook. Formerly used mostly linux, with an occasional boot into Windows for gaming now and then, so it's not like I'm comparing to some nirvana experience here (linux is laughably bad and unintuitive). I've used a macbook for work for over 6 years now, though. The MacOS desktop is...a poor experience even compared with linux. And don't get me started on the Finder app. That has to be one of the most infuriatingly bad applications I've ever used. It's opinionated in mostly the wrong ways and is cumbersome to use to navigate around to actually find anything.
  • jermaustin1 5y ago
    I actually like APT on ubuntu (and probably Debian), but the disk-image-based install mechanism of MacOS is just WEIRD. Windows has installers, which makes since for "installing", but I agree there is a lot of inconsistency in windows installers. And at least Mac is consistently weird.
    • wk_end 5y ago
      Well, it used to be consistent, maybe back in the days of System 6. Nowadays some apps you install from the App Store, some you install by opening a disk image and dragging to Applications, some you install by running an installer, some you install via Homebrew...
• dsabanin 5y ago
  Stopped reading after "and I still think windows is the superior operating system".
  • Helmut10001 5y ago
    I agree. We should all head over to Linux. However, Windows+WSL is indeed a valid alternative to Linux only. Never considered Mac.
  • echelon 5y ago
    Is that an invalid opinion? I'm forced to use Mac at work, and I find both Windows and Linux to be more powerful and less constrained as technical work environments. Too much of MacOS is designed around hiding functionality and protecting non-technical users, but the way they do it is uneven and awkward. Building code requires you to accept license agreements in ten different inconsistent places, you have to hit hotkeys to delete things or mark them as executable. File paths are hidden unless you jump through hoops, Apple is always shoving Safari and iTunes down your throat, the context menu is littered with useless garbage like "Look up X", the desktop environment requires 3rd party plugins for power use, XCode is the single worst IDE I've ever had to use, ... Finder is the worst file browser in the world. This is probably my top complaint and sums up why Apple is so frustrating. It's like Apple is trying to hide information from you and gives me the impression that they only care about the superficial appearance of their Finder app over its actual functionality. Explorer and Nautilus are miles better in every use case: finding files, listing files, managing files, navigating directory trees, mounting remove volumes, ... Finder makes all of these tasks incredibly tedious, hiding them as much as possible so the app looks minimal and uncluttered. It's horrible. Apple even removed the escape key from their laptops at one point, which should go to show you that technical users are not their primary audience. I'd recommend Mac for editing text documents, but not much else. Even file management feels second class to the point I'd want to work on video and 3d workflows in Windows instead. I'd never want to program on a Mac.
  • jermaustin1 5y ago
    I'm glad you made it almost to the end :) - thanks for at least reading that far.
• bdcravens 5y ago
  I wouldn't call it intuitive, but highly consistent.
• chovybizzass 5y ago
  my mom (76) hated the mac when i got her one...so I installed ubuntu and she hated that too....back to windows vista. lol
• amelius 5y ago
  I remember having to use iTunes to update the OS on one family Apple PC. Crazy experience.
• whatever1 5y ago
  Window management is even greater s*show. To the point that you need 3rd party apps to make it usable.
  • jermaustin1 5y ago
    I actually gave up on having my windows maximized, or side by side, they are now just all overlapping, and its whatever. I try to keep a portion of every window visible on the screen so I can quickly click between them, it looks like a disorganized mess, but it is MY disorganized mess.
    • mjburgess 5y ago
      err... try "Spectacle"
      • Rebelgecko 5y ago
        Rectangle is another great tool in the same vein (and it's still actively being developed)
  • city41 5y ago
    And even then it doesn't work very well. The problem is the app remains in control, unlike in say Xorg where the window manager has the final say. When I used a Mac I found many apps outright ignored the window manager.
  • wraptile 5y ago
    It's absolutely awful. My 2500$ macbook's window processing is at least 10 times slower than my 250$ thinkpad with linux. It's insane that such simple things don't work on such an established and valuable brand.
    • Hammershaft 5y ago
      My 2019 16" Macbook pro drops more animation frames then the aging $400 windows laptop I helped my grandmother use.
• js2 5y ago
  The macOS user guide: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/welcome/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/welcome/mac
• speeder 5y ago
  I concluded Mac interface designers are out of touch with reality when I found out that to "eject" pendrives you had to drag them to the trash bin. I mean, now they do show a convenient "eject" symbol next to the name of the remove-able drive on the Finder, but the "drag to trash" thing still work, and it always surprises people, they always assume it means you want to delete all files in a disk, not that you want to eject the disk.
  • Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
    Or you could use ⌘+E to eject it.
    • thunderbong 5y ago
      That's not really the correct answer from the user experience perspective, is it?
  • bsanr2 5y ago
    It IS a good way to ingrain a behavior that, when used on a Windows system, will bias the user forever.
  • selimthegrim 5y ago
    That has been around since classic MacOS
  • jbverschoor 5y ago
    It's to "remove the icon from the desktop"
    • IshKebab 5y ago
      That doesn't really make it any more reasonable.
  • qubitcoder 5y ago
    To be fair, I don't think I've ejected something by dragging it to the trash can in eons (well, at least it was so long ago that I don't remember).
• cstross 5y ago
  Youngsters these days! Back in the 1980s and 90s, the differences between MacOS and Windows were as day and night. (Windows 1 didn't even support overlapping windows. Windows 3 had weird stuff like icons that didn't map to underlying filesystem objects so when you dragged a "file" to the "trash" you weren't actually deleting a file, you were deleting a symbolic representation of the file. Windows put a separate menu bar in every window, unlike MacOS, which was a significant waste of screen real estate back in an age when VGA -- 480x640 pixel -- screens were normal. And Windows font handling was horrendous.) Circa Windows 95, Microsoft found workarounds for the most obstructive of Apple and Xerox's patents on GUIs. There were still weird differences, though. Mac had pull-down menus, Windows had drop-down. (Today, macOS has drop-down menus because that ship sailed decades ago.) Anyway, the story of macOS vs. Windows is one of convergent evolution over a period of about 3 decades, and in the meantime, each of those operating systems has been substantially replaced under the hood -- Windows is no longer a graphical shell running on top of DOS, and MacOS is no longer a cooperative-tasking 68000 based system: Windows has VMS heritage rather than DOS, and Mac has BSD UNIX heritage rather than MacOS. TLDR: in the age of the dinosaurs (1984-94) Macs clearly were easier to learn and use than Windows. Today, not so much.
  • Hammershaft 5y ago
    What is the difference between a pull down menu and a drop down menu?
• throwawayboise 5y ago
  I think it 90% what you are used to. If you're used to using Windows, it's intuitive. If you're used to MacOS, same. I was used to Microsoft Office, then they added the Ribbon. I know it's been years and years but I still feel it's unintuitive. I'm used to Android. Whenever I need to do something on an iPhone I'm lost. It's all just what you know.
• bumbada 5y ago
  Very few things are intuitive. Is it intuitive to brush your teeth? No it is not. I spent years brushing my teeth incorrectly and paid for that as a kid until a dentist showed it to me. Is it intuitive to tie your shoelaces? No, you learn it. Your tie knot? Is it intuitive learning to read and write? No, it takes years of practice. Is it intuitive memorizing the presidents or the States of the US, the capitals and countries of the world? I had to learn to memorize much more effective as an adult in order to do things like learning Chinese script. As a kid nobody taught me how to memorize well and I did poorly. As an adult I look like a genius compared with others. Is it intuitive all the Spanish compound verb tenses, or German people compound separated verbs at the end? No it is not, but Spaniards or Germans do it naturally and without effort. I find the mac idiosyncrasies way easier to understand than the Microsoft Windows ones. When I used Windows I used to to the things one way, like going to Control panel, devices or whatever, only for the next version to change it, or having Clippy then removing Clippy, for shutting down the computer do something, and now with surface is something different. Most people comply about macs however because they have only used Windows for a long time, and they are used to it, like a German complying that compound verbs are together and he is used to ending the phrases with them,backwards.
  • quacked 5y ago
    How did you learn to memorize more effectively?
  • LambdaComplex 5y ago
    Well now I'm worried that I'm brushing my teeth wrong. What were you doing wrong?
• lbriner 5y ago
  I think my pet peeve is the icons in the Finder. I don't consider them intuitive in the slightest, you just have to learn what they are by Googling it or clicking them. I also learn about hidden key strokes for navigating the Finder to actually find stuff. Very useful once you learn them but otherwise they are hidden away so it seems virtually impossible to see the file system as a single entity.
• 627467 5y ago
  In my experience, growing up in parts of the world and segments of it's population where macos has never been pervasive, a non-techy user that had to use my Mac laptop for casual browsing struggles to understand how to even start (I hide my dock). In my view, the idea that Mac has been more usable and democratizing (for personal computing) is not backed by either market data or personal anecdote. Pre-iOS, Windows was the most prevasive computing UX.
  • drdec 5y ago
    A few years ago I was in front of a Mac for the first time in twenty years trying to browse the web. I couldn't figure out how to scroll the window. There were no scrollbars and no mouse wheel. I had to get someone to show me. Once I was shown, it felt to me like I was supposed to pretend that the mouse has a scroll wheel and stroke the mouse where the scroll wheel would be. I didn't find it intuitive at all.
  • mattl 5y ago
    This is why the Guest Account feature is good. You can give someone a vanilla Mac OS X account to play with.
• dfxm12 5y ago
  I feel like describing the application installation process is being obtuse. The installation process can basically be distilled to copying the app to your local desktop. Counting closing windows among the steps? How will anyone figure that one out?! Even if you can't, it's easy to understand and remember after you do it once. Anyway, going back many, many years, I feel like there was a time where if you gave a mac or a windows computer to someone who had never used a computer before, they'd more easily understand OSX (or even going back to system 7) before they understood Windows. The OSX experience today is pretty much the same as Windows though, and most people nowadays "learn computers" from their parents' OSX or Android devices, so, new users' intuition is nurtured by the time they get behind a mouse and keyboard.
  • FabHK 5y ago
    I agree, though have to add that it adds stumbling blocks to people that don't come with the implicit knowledge (that was a matter of course when everything worked with floppy disks). I have seen people start the application directly from the disk image always, and accumulating mounted disk images that they don't unmount/delete.
• ezzzzz 5y ago
  Pure speculation here, but I imagine that Apple is probably working on a unified OS between IOS and MacOS. The pieces are there between Catalyst and now the new ARM macs. MacOS is pretty outdated from a UX perspective, but I reckon there is something in the pipeline. This is likely to continue to push the walled-garden approach where folks go to the app-store for downloads, but even my MIL had the same confusion with not being able to find certain software on the Windows store. Hopefully Apple keeps things open for power users, giving us the ability to install things from outside the app store. I don't think I would ever choose Windows as my first choice for doing development even with WSL (although Windows has become much more developer friendly within the last few years). At the end of the day, I don't care to spend much time configuring any machine I use to do work and would prefer stability over customization.
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  I've been using Macs since 1986 (Mac Plus). I've been through all the various OS iterations. Each has had pluses and minuses (often -significant pluses and minuses). I write code for Apple devices. Native Swift code, so that means that I need to use a native IDE (Xcode or AppCode), on MacOS. If they are able to port Xcode to iPadOS (might be awhile), then I might consider iPads. Windows 10 is fine. I'm just not familiar with it. My "muscle memory" is MacOS, so it's painful and frustrating for me to switch to Windows. I generally recommend to folks that they stay with whatever operating system they have "muscle memory" on. The hardware for all of them usually includes high-quality, performative choices (naturally, for a significant cost). Just my $0.02. I'm not a zealot. I don't get a commission from Apple if people use their products; especially with this crowd, who are just as likely to be CLI jockeys, as GUI users.
• taylodl 5y ago
  My main machine is a Mac, but being a developer I also have occasion to run Linux and Windows. I like Mac the best, but it has its warts. Linux and Windows likewise have their bright spots. I like Macs best because its the best platform for me for all my hobbies: software development, photography, and making music. As always, YMMV. That's why we used to call these thing personal computers.
• amelius 5y ago
  What are those images on the "Command" and "Option" keys supposed to express?
  • cytzol 5y ago
    I mean obviously the Command key is the Swedish Campground symbol: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Swedish_Campground.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Swedish_Campgrou... And of course, the Option key's symbol is the diagram that Doc draws in Back to the Future when he's explaining alternate timelines.
• dahart 5y ago
  Are there any thorough UX studies of modern OSX vs Windows, for many of the OS UI choices and applications? While I’d agree that the OSX install process is quirky, it’s just a single example and it’s not compared to anything. It’s easy to complain about single examples of unintuitiveness in any OS - they all have them, many of them. It would be interesting to see a more complete and fair comparison, if such a thing exists.
• geraneum 5y ago
  If a certain way of doing things which I am very much used to does not apply to a different environment, it does not mean the subject is not intuitive whether it's macOS, Windows, etc. To me, intuitiveness means how easy it is to operate the system correctly without prior training. Honestly, for a non-tech savvy, macOS and Windows both have many quirks and don't let me start with Linux distros (Fedora is my daily driver). We've had a lot of good progress so far but we need to do better. As an example, reading the comments here, one person likes the sorting on macOS and another one despises it! Apparently, the term "intuitive" has a different meaning to different people. If we want to measure it we at least need to be on the same page about what it even means?
  • rapsey 5y ago
    What keeps me on macOS is keyboard shortcuts. Typing on windows or linux is so much more annoying.
    • Steltek 5y ago
      GP's point is that things like favorable shortcuts are due to your personal background. For myself, I was forced on to Mac and the shortcuts are excruciatingly frustrating to use. It feels like I've forgotten how to use a computer sometimes! I prefer non-native apps and overlaid keymaps (in VScode, etc) as much as possible to escape from them.
    • qq4 5y ago
      That's funny, I feel the opposite regarding OS X and Linux. Fwiw I have never used macOS, but I imagine it's very similar to OS X.
    • tomtheelder 5y ago
      What shortcuts do you have in macOS and not in Windows/Linux?
    • qubitcoder 5y ago
      Same here. This is one of the biggest selling points for macOS as a power user. I've used Windows and linux for years, and continue to do so on a daily basis. But on macOS, one can absolutely fly due to the consistent keyboard shortcuts. - Standard keyboard shortcuts across all apps: done - Standard Unix/bash shortcuts for moving the cursor/manipulating text: done But, to the OP's point, unless you invest the time to learn how they work in macOS, they'll largely remain hidden and unknown. When helping friends and colleagues transition to macOS, explaining how keyboard shortcuts work (and how powerful they are!) is the first thing I do--followed by the window/app paradigm, and then Finder. As far as discoverability, you can use Command+Shift+/ pretty much anywhere. That keyboard shortcut displays the Help menu for the current application, with the search box already focused. So, for example, in the Mail app, if you wanted to forward an email: Command+Shift+/. Start typing "forward" Then hover your mouse over the "Forward" result. You'll immediately see the location in the menu bar, along with the corresponding keyboard shortcut: ⇧⌘F (Shift+Command+F), in this case. And, of course, Command+; will open the Preferences for any application. Apple actually has fairly great documentation on standard keyboard shortcuts [0]. [0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236
• ppetty 5y ago
  I would love to see a post like this that depicts all the ways you can install on Windows, macOS & Linux (as both a consumer & developer). The DMG experience is a little off as the author suggests & the App store is super easy (as are shared purchases). I briefly set up a Mac mini to use Ubuntu & Mint and found Snap and other ways of installing much more cumbersome; especially when I installed something and wanted an app shortcut to appear in a specific menu (sounds simple but was inconsistent). I’m not that familiar with Windows these days, but is downloading an .exe that different from a .dmg? Is the Windows store as easy as the App Store? Or are there particular apps’ websites that don’t do a great job explaining how to install their software?
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    > I briefly set up a Mac mini to use Ubuntu & Mint and found Snap and other ways of installing much more cumbersome; especially when I installed something and wanted an app shortcut to appear in a specific menu (sounds simple but was inconsistent). I personally find it infuriating how Linux manages to screw this up. I blame a lot of things, like the propensity to hardcode paths and separate files by type leading to the (in my opinion) awful .desktop file standard. In older versions of Windows, the menu was just a menuized view of a folder structure (which largely contained shortucts but could contain anything).
• klelatti 5y ago
  I have a 2020 MacBook Pro (Intel) and a Windows Surface Laptop 3. SL3 is objectively faster (i7 vs i5). I'm reasonably familiar with both OS's. I'd agree that MacOS is no more intuitive than Windows. But I'd use the Mac over Windows every time. Why? Because the Mac is so much more 'fluid'. I must use Expose hundreds of times a day - it's instantaneous on the Mac. On Windows there is enough of a delay for me to try to avoid using the equivalent feature. There are lots of similar comparisons. The little pieces of friction may seem small but they really make a difference. I feel like I'm driving a sports car with the Mac - not so with Windows. Edit: If you're going to vote me down then please make a constructive comment to tell me why I'm wrong or where Windows is more 'fluid' than the Mac.
• agustif 5y ago
  For the souls that have to suffer through the context switch of using both OS X and Windows or Linux at different workstations. htps://kinto.sh is a great open source app that let's you have the same keyboard commands and such in every OS, really recommend it!
  • lioeters 5y ago
    Link is missing a "t". It redirects to: https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto
    • agustif 5y ago
      This is the repo I wanted to redirect to, yes
• drewg123 5y ago
  I just helped a friend who is a lifetime windows user set up her new MBP M1. I was reminded how un-intuitive things are and how useful UI elements are hidden in the name of "simplicity". A lot of it for her is centered around the finder and accessing files in general. The two biggest issues she had was: 1) finder not easily acting as an image viewer. Eg, she had an SD card from her camera, and wanted to quickly scan through the photos and decide what to keep and what to throw away. The problem was that it took a while to find a view where finder showed images ( think it was called "icon view") and once we found that, it took a while to expose a hidden ui element that we could use to make the images larger. 2) "open file" dialog boxes don't show your home directory by default. She'd have a file in /Users/name/folder and the open file dialog would only show Documents, Pictures, etc, and not her home directory. I finally helped her make symlinks from folders that the file dialog deigned to show her to where she really wanted to go. But why is there no "home" view?
  • agustif 5y ago
    1) Just use [spacebar] on any view to open up the image in spotlight? The problem with the mac is that much has been done on top of older patterns, etc.... If you're a hardcore user though, I'd take Mac over windows or linux any day.
    • BurningFrog 5y ago
      I've used Macs since 1988, and had no idea this hidden feature existed! UI features don't just need to work well, they also need to be discoverable, or they might as well not exist. The old school Apple was good at that stuff. Recent decades, not so much. PS Thanks for teaching me this trick!
      • FabHK 5y ago
        Quick Look is super useful indeed. Introduced 2007. Plugins make it even more useful (eg for json, torrents, etc.) https://github.com/sindresorhus/quick-look-plugins https://github.com/sindresorhus/quick-look-plugins
• egypturnash 5y ago
  The dmg install process has always been a mess. But note that Little Sister was pretty instinctively going to the App Store. If Chrome was in there she would've probably gotten it with no problems.
  • kokey 5y ago
    I also think the reducing friction for the installation of downloaded DMGs from somewhere on the internet is not being done on purpose. There's so many points that MacOS makes you have to think 'do I really have to install this and do I trust this?' instead of just double click and tapping 'next' and 'ok' until it's installed. I think Google also not really participating in adopting the preferred installation flow on Apple devices is also done on purpose.
    • egypturnash 5y ago
      It's been like this since long before the App Store existed. Google's got a pretty good attempt at "here is how to install this thing" on their download page (https://www.google.com/chrome/thank-you.html?statcb=0&installdataindex=empty&defaultbrowser=0 https://www.google.com/chrome/thank-you.html?statcb=0&instal...) though evidently it could use some improvement given that Little Sister still couldn't parse those images properly. I do wonder how "intuitive" the process for installing something a Windows user downloaded outside of their app store is now. I've been a Mac girl ever since I gave up on the Amiga so I really have no idea how easy it is for someone to fuck up if you're at the same level of general computer knowledge + OS-specific knowledge as Little Sister is for Macs.
• AshamedCaptain 5y ago
  Funny, I remember 20 years ago people being excited about the "Drag to Applications" to install and calling it an example of extremely good -- as they would call it today -- UX.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    And that is actually as old as Mac itself, only it used to be even more intuitive because the application was a single file on an actual disk instead of a disk image. "Installation" didn't even really have much meaning, you had applications and you had disks and applications were just another thing that could be on a disk. I miss this.
• antipaul 5y ago
  The iPad is increasingly the personal computer 2.0 for so many people (not all), and it’s quite a step up in usability
• cytzol 5y ago
  This post illuminates two ways in which users' expectations of computers have changed since the '80s, which is when this UX was designed: 1) Users don't deal with external storage nearly as much anymore, so the "disk image" paradigm feels out of place. Before the Internet, it was more common to insert a floppy disk, drag the application from the disk to the hard drive, and then eject it again. Users were accustomed to opening and ejecting disks based on the icons on the desktop, so when disk images started to be a thing, it worked exactly like floppies did. 2) Users think of applications that have to be explicitly installed, rather than just copied, like any other kind of file. The second one is the really surprising one: when we think of how to get applications onto our computers these days, the word is "install". You need to install a program before you can start using it. On Windows, you ran an installer program. On Linux, you ran a command. How else can you do it? But on Classic Mac, an application was just a special kind of file, which you could drag, drop, and manipulate just like any other kind of file. It didn't even need to be in the Applications folder! You could put it in a subdirectory, you could put it on the Desktop, you could put it wherever you liked, and it would work just the same. I think it's a darn shame that this isn't a guarantee anymore. The other day, I tried putting all of the Microsoft Office applications into /Applications/Office instead of just in /Applications, and the next time the Office updater ran, it installed into /Applications, even though that's not where the apps lived, so now I had two copies of everything. Bleh. Why is this so much better than running a program or running a command? Well, think about how you would uninstall a program. On Windows, you'd have to run an uninstaller or find the entry in Add/Remove programs; on Linux, you'd have to run a different command. In both cases, you'd have to do something you hadn't done before — you have to know how to do something before you can do it. On Classic Mac OS, you can just delete the application by dragging it to the Trash — something you already know how to do. Anyway, I'm not defending this approach to installing applications. But I do think it made sense at the time, and the computing landscape changed around it.
  • ftio 5y ago
    Spot on. I had a similar thought. Another major change is that the App Store is now the default way for 99% of users to download and install software. Pre-App Store (say, in the Tiger-Snow Leopard days), Mac users with even limited experience knew the `Mount DMG → Drag to Applications` ritual. At the time, it was one of the two primary ways of installing Mac software, the other being using Package Installer to run .pkg installations. As a Certified Technical Consultant in those days, I found that almost everyone was able to do the Package Manager method; the DMG method created a lot of chaos for about 50% of people. You'd find people running Firefox or Chrome from the DMG, which they'd leave mounted and visible on their desktops in perpetuity. As a Windows switcher (in 2006) I always felt that the drag-and-drop model was really elegant, but it was unintuitive because, to your point, I had been exposed to the installation model for so long.
• FabHK 5y ago
  To be fair, it all makes sense if you a) adopt the view that an application is just a file like any other, and b) remember the pre-network days: to install a program, you insert a disk, and then just pull (=copy) the program from the disk to where you keep your applications. And with the internet and downloads, the process has not changed much except that the disk is replaced by a disk image. With that mental image, the process seems straightforward enough. And the App store, of course, enables one-click installation as on smartphones. So, I guess the impediments are that people don't know how to deal with disks and disk images, and the idea that one ought to "install" software, rather than just copying to where one wants it.
• enos_feedler 5y ago
  Sounds like Chrome just needs to be in the App Store
• Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
  I’m a lifelong Mac user who always thought of it as intuitive, so I suggested a relative get one, thinking I would get fewer support calls, and when I do actually know the answer. And of course not have to deal with bloatware. I couldn’t have been more wrong. That superior trackpad with foolproof palm rejection? Useless. She was inadvertently triggering weird gestures all the time. But it behaved normally when I tried it. Years back I was using a Thinkpad and I was the one with the problem, I had to unplug the trackpad to be able to type. Neither of us are idiots or spastics, so maybe it’s just about being unconsciously trained for one system or the other. Also the Mac came with preinstalled bloatware.
  • FabHK 5y ago
    As with any OS, you can adjust the trackpad settings though, and eg require a click instead of a tap, for example, and disable most of the "advanced" gestures.
• flohofwoe 5y ago
  My favourite Mac-ism is dragging an USB-stick icon onto the Trashcan to safely remove it. I wish macOS would steal some ideas from Windows instead of iOS. And Windows really needs to stop stealing ideas from macOS, macOS hasn't been on the forefront of UX since at least the late 90's.
• cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  The second coming of Jobs came along with a transition from "The computer for the rest of us", and "Easy to use" to "Think Different", "Lickable" and eventaully luxury lifestlye branding. It's understandably hard to market a computer with the line that it is "easy to use" -- customers don't want to feel "stupid." And Apple has had a lot more financial success as a computing analog to BMW, Mercedes, Miele, Bosch, etc. than as the "friendly computer." The transition to OS X came with a focus on "it just works" rather than "easy to use" -- and from my perspective many things, like the Finder and window management, became more difficult than in classic Mac OS. NeXTstep was a powerful operating system for power users (marketed towards education and science, not your mom and dad.) Its focus was not on ease of use, though it did have a consistent high quality GUI (better than OS X, IMHO). Mac OS X is in many ways just a reskinning of NeXTstep. (IMHO the Lisa Office System was the height of usable, intuitive, usable Apple GUIs.) Finally, Apple has an intuitive easy to use operating system to sell, and it makes them a lot more money than Macs do: iOS.
• jonstaab 5y ago
  I just went through the same 2012 Air -> 2020 Air process last week. I gave in after spending two weeks trying to get Ubuntu working on a Dell XPS 13 with bluetooth, my dock, wifi, a retina display, USB, etc, etc. I gave up when connecting my bluetooth speaker sent my kernel into a loop and sent the computer back to Dell. There are a million dumb things to quibble over with MacOS, but at least it's not Ubuntu.
• Popegaf 5y ago
  They aren't. The first time using it about 10 years ago was confusing: Single button mouse --> no instructions, can't find out how to right click Double click on window --> fullscreen; uh... move mouse around edges to find how to get back to other windows Drag window to side of the screen to split window --> nothing; search the application menu --> nothing; Cmd+Right? --> nothing; oook, I have to actually resize everything manually Try to install software from app store: - you must login --> failed (server was down that day) - search "how to install XYZ on mac" --> download .dmg and follow these steps "Natural scrolling" still confuses me everytime I touch one even after a whole week it didn't feel "natural". Especially diagonal scrolls felt off; does moving your 2 fingers right scroll left or right? I remember trying to help out a friend download music on her iphone to play it there. We finally had to download it on the mac, import it into itunes and sync the iphone with it. No idea if things are better. More recently, video calling was quite the experience. The browser couldn't access the camera, so a popup came up and I had to restart the browser. Then I wanted to share my screen, another popup came up follow by another restart. Finally, I wanted to share audio from a short clip being played, well that isn't in mac so some trial version of something had to be downloaded and I never actually got it to work.
  • philliphaydon 5y ago
    > Single button mouse --> no instructions, can't find out how to right click I can’t stand OSX, but I’m pretty proficient. I think the right click is a symptom of you being so used to Windows or linux. The average user probably never needs to right click. I bought my mum a MacBook Air and she’s never needed to right click in the 4-5 years of owning it. I think it’s hidden for good reason. She also never asks if she should right or left click. Cos the mouse has 1 button.
    • toomanybeersies 5y ago
      I think GP was referring to the Macintosh of old, where the mice only had a single button, and right click literally didn't exist. You needed to ctrl+click to "right click". You do make a good point though. From a zero-knowledge perspective, using a mouse with left-click for primary interactions and right-click for secondary interactions isn't the most intuitive concept.
• allie1 5y ago
  It’s a commercial linux distro without bugs, and pretty. As a dev, I like how most things work exactly as they would on a linux host, yet the laptop (hardware) is decent and usability of the OS on par. For non-devs, just the shared folders via icloud, airdrop, photos shared/synced - most things that aren’t even that advanced bring most value imo
  • hocuspocus 5y ago
    You must not use macOS that much if you think it's close to linux or has no bugs.
• yalogin 5y ago
  If anything for a first time user Macs are less intuitive. The whole window system is very different from everything out there. The app does not die when you close the window. One other thing the author forgot to mention is, in most cases one has to eject the DMG manually and then delete it if you want to clean up your downloads folder. Else you will just have this mounted until the next reboot. I know many people that just just the app from the mounted DMG itself without ever using the one in applications.
  • cytzol 5y ago
    > The whole window system is very different from everything out there. The app does not die when you close the window. But that's one of my favourite things about it! I remember one time when I had to use Windows after being away from its window-based paradigm (rather than an application-based paradigm) for several years. I had a single window open in Sublime Text, and I wanted to close that window then open a new one. So I closed that window, then instinctively reached for the menu bar to select 'Open Project'. Of course, the menu bar was no longer there, because it was part of the window I just closed. And then when I opened Sublime Text to get the menu bar back, it re-opened its last open document, which was the window I was trying to get rid of.
    • alkonaut 5y ago
      Keeping the application running when the last main form is closed is a Mac-ism enabled only by global application menu. It has benefits and drawbacks, but it's pretty clear that without it there is no intuitive way to do that. I can assure you that I repeat the fumbling you describe but the other way around on mac. It's just two different UXes and which operations they allow (or can be intuitively done) will differ because of some fundamental earlier choices such as e.g. how many mouse buttons the user can be expected to have, or whether a program can show a global menu.
  • robertoandred 5y ago
    > The app does not die when you close the window. Thank goodness for that. The way Windows conflates apps and windows is just a mess.
• NicoJuicy 5y ago
  Glad this popped up. I'm a Windows user and had to help a Mac user. Let's just say Mac definitely is my cup of tea. And since those that i was helping ( an architect and a large property owner) didn't even remember their password to install an application. I wouldn't consider them a actual user of the OS either ( just a consumer). If they have OS X, they are free to search for someone who can actually help them, but it's not me. And it's almost the first thing i say on the phone.
• turkeywelder 5y ago
  Recent M1 user here - I had a PowerPC mac back in the Leopard/Tiger days. I thought OSx would have come on leaps and bounds since then. It's....more or less unchanged. As well as this crazy installer thing, there's quite a bit about Macs that just seems off.. My list of "things that don't seem right" as a long term Windows/ChromeOS user - Window snapping isn't built in outside of fullscreen mode (seriously?!) - Sleeping the mac does not sleep the mac, it wakes up at all sorts of times - Every time the OS updates, I have to go through a setup process again, trying to upsell me on iCloud drive. Nothing updates as nicely as ChromeOS but I'd hope for at least a reboot and back to where I left off - TouchID for login works....but not often enough - it constantly pesters me for a password - Pressing enter renames a file rather than opens it. What? - The Finder is either named ironically or I'm not getting it - file paths are obscured, seeing file details is hidden behind a dialog. We bought the M1 because ChromeOS didn't like our old Samsung printer and the VPN software my partner uses and Google had killed the update life for it for...reasons. In an expensive lesson of "whoops", the Mac doesn't like the printer either. A lot of this is me getting back into it and getting used to things, but I sort of miss ChromeOS. In Apple's defence, the hardware is amazing and the bluetooth is fantastic. Could have put a port on either side to make charging nicer though.
  • sjg007 5y ago
    How performant is chromeos? I'm thinking of getting one as it is basically linux.
    • turkeywelder 5y ago
      In our use it was perfectly fine, it'll run fine with 4gb of ram and a Celeron. I wouldn't want to do hardcore software dev on one because they're usually low end screens and CPUs, but as a "here's a safe machine you can't break" they're absolutely brilliant for family. Boot time is instant, OS updates are instant, battery life is great, if there was ever "linux for the desktop" it's ChromeOS. It's not all roses though: full disclosure: our Chromebook is stuck on Chrome 68 so these might not apply any more. - The file management is poor, a zip file can and will confuse it - Bluetooth is Windows XP levels of stable, if you get a device it likes you're good, but it can be finicky. - The device has a fixed expiry date where they stop getting software updates, this is the big kicker for me, because we had a perfectly functional machine that was a bit old that just got turned into E waste because nobody wanted to support the software any more. Shame because it was a fantastic machine. I'm hoping our Mac lasts longer than the Chromebook it's replacing
• coldtea 5y ago
  >they ARE NOT that intuitive unless you live on the App Store, or only consume the Apple-made software which might be fine for 70% of the population, but the moment one ventures outside of the walled garden, one might get lost. Well, condidering the different ways to do the same thing in Windows and Linux, it's still quite easy. But admittedly it could be easier.
• Yaina 5y ago
  So, I won't claim that installing software that is not in the Mac App Store is a totally intuitive process. Still...I kinda think it's neat. On Windows you download an installer, it does some magic (usually asking for administrator rights. scary) and then somehow the program is...somewhere. It's linked on the desktop, you can search for it, but it's unclear what happened. On macOS Programs are essentially treated as files. You download them in their (admittedly weird) containers, drag them into your Applications folder (which is just convention, you could put them anywhere) and then they are there. Want to remove a Program again? Move it to the trash! I love it, I think it's a very neat concept once you've understood it. Sadly Apple doesn't seem too keen anymore on people understanding it. The invention of the Mac App Store and the "Launchpad", followed by the removal of the Application folder from the Dock tried to abstract this neat feature away from people and naturally they don't understand it anymore. But this is Apple, actively trying to make their system less intuitive for monetary gain and control over the device, and not an inherent flaw of macOS.
  • alkonaut 5y ago
    > On Windows you download an installer, it does some magic (usually asking for administrator rights. scary) and then somehow the program is...somewhere. It's linked on the desktop, you can search for it, but it's unclear what happened. The downside of the legacy windows install process is that it's "scary", prone to accidentally installing malware etc. However, the process is straightforward. The intuitive thing (going to whatever you downloaded and opening the file i.e. the default action of enter or double click) and then answering only yes/ok will let you install the program. Exactly where it ends up is of course not obvious - but for most software you'll find it the "normal" way - you hit the start button and type something. What baffles me about the MacOS one is that it's opaque. I expect the default action for a downloaded piece of software is to make me able to use it, as quickly as possible. I get how the whole drag dance works (barely) but other than for security-through-obscurity reasons I have no idea why it can't be the default action (e.g. if I double click a downloaded file, it would ask me if I meant to install the program)! > drag them into your Applications folder (which is just convention, you could put them anywhere) I think it's close to being great, and it certainly has more potential than the windows legacy system (which for obvious reasons can't be improved upon much!). But if I'm forced to google a few times before installing a downloaded container something is not intuitive. Meanwhile my kid can install any app, and some malware, on my windows machine. Just by guessing.
• rvalue 5y ago
  quoting from the post >> but I switched to Mac because the hardware is just better than even the best Windows hardware for the same price, and the software typically JUST WORKS. author claims Windows to be a superior operating system but "just works", isn't that the clearer signal to better software?
• irrational 5y ago
  I think it really depends on what you are used to. I used Windows up through Windows XP, but in the early 2000s I got a job where they only used Macs, so I have solely used OSX/MacOS for nearly 20 years. Recently someone asked me for help with their Windows 10 machine. I was lost. I felt like a complete novice to the world of computers. I couldn't find anything and it took forever to figure out how to help this person. I finally had to resort to googling the issue and finding some step by step instructions. I don't think this is because Windows is less intuitive than MacOS. I think it is just a matter of what you are used to becomes intuitive.
• mcv 5y ago
  For a long time I enjoyed my late 2011 unibody Macbook Pro, and it was pretty great. Certainly more intuitive than anything from Windows or Linux at the time. It died a few years ago. I recently got a Macbook Pro from work, and weird stuff just keeps happening. I'm happily doing something, and suddenly everything goes all wobbly, or something suddenly zooms in. I have to put effort into hunting down the window I want, because alt-tab doesn't switch windows, only apps. ctrl+down gets me the windows from that app. Except when something is maximized, because then I need to remember where I left it if I want to switch to it. I can't shake the impression that somewhere down the line, Apple lost their direction and started messing things up. The crappy keyboards they added are pretty infamous, but they also managed to make the desktop unintuitive. Edit: also, why can't you drag and drop files anymore? This used to just work.
  • ftio 5y ago
    Protip: Cmd+tilde (~) cycles through windows in the current app. Coming from Windows, it can be annoying, but once you build the muscle memory, it can actually be quite nice to have the two methods separated.
• alexeiz 5y ago
  He praises the quality of the Apple hardware... He should watch Louis Rossmann's Mac repair videos on Youtube. Apple hardware design is crap. There are hardware design mistakes Louis points out that only rookies would do. Mac repair business is flourishing for a reason (even though Apple is trying to squash it by any means possible).
• danity 5y ago
  Hooray, another Apple-hating circle jerk post!
  • jermaustin1 5y ago
    Author here... I exclusively use Mac and Apple products (other than my Kindle Paper White), thanks for reading.
  • dang 5y ago
    Please don't do this here. Everyone with strong feelings on $X (such as a BigCo or any other topic really) thinks that the community gets way too much anti-$X hate. The people who feel the opposite way think the forum is biased in exactly the opposite direction. These biases are in the eye of the beholder—they are predictable from your own passions. That makes comments like yours here particularly unhelpful, because they'll mostly just provoke the other side into passion wars, which are predictable and tedious and usually turn nasty. I don't mean to pick on you personally. You're far from the only person suffering from this condition—in fact it seems universal in some form. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20dislike%20notice&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20false%20feelings%20of%20generality&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
• jtdev 5y ago
  You know what’s really unintuitive? Finding an official solution to a basic problem in Windows that requires a reg-edit… the number of times I encountered this while working daily with Windows was astounding. Never have I encountered an equivalent scenario on MacOS.
• viktorcode 5y ago
  If a heavy Windows user finds themselves more at home there than on macOS, it's great! Just use bootcamp, and let's hope we'll have one for Apple Silicon soon too. Just please, please, don't try making macOS into something that works anything like Windows. There are people who like it this way.
• mrexroad 5y ago
  The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned. -- Bruce Ediger Reality: “There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It's all learned.“
• kazinator 5y ago
  Macs were intuitive in the 80s and 90s. Hands down the best thing in the consumer computing scene in that regard (not to mention non-consumer computing scene, which was a joke in terms of usability). Apple basically wrote the book on UX. Now it's a has-been reputation, based on ancient history attached to the brand name, which only brand loyalists blindly believe. It's like believing that a Toyota is good because of hearing your dad reminisce about that good old 4Runner truck or Supra he had in 1988.
• robinj6 5y ago
  I’ve used a PC heavily for 15 years and 6 months ago switched cold turkey to a Mac. There is only one thing I found Windows to handle better and that is file system navigation (via UI). I just cannot get used to finder, from the default lack of an address bar, to individual windows not showing up on your tab switcher, to the lack of an equivalent run dialogue, etc. It just isn’t as intuitive to me and dealing with the file system is unpleasant.
  • jbverschoor 5y ago
    cmd-~ for window switching in an app you can modify some settings and "defaults write" to show full paths and extensions. cmd-shift-g to go to any folder (with tab completion and ~) cmd-up -> up a folder cmd-down -> open/go in cmd-shift-h -> home dir cmd-shift-a -> apps dir cmd-shift-u -> utils dir cmd-k -> connect to server Don't forget the proxy icon drag/drop. It works with file dialogs, but since big sur, press shift to show the icon :-( cmd-1234 to toggle views
• crazygringo 5y ago
  IMHO installing apps is definitely one of the top two non-intuitive things about Macs. Not to mention it's not even consistent -- sometimes you drag to Applications, sometimes you double-click a .pkg file, sometimes you go to the App Store. The other thing, of course, being an application open without any windows but a menubar present. Start QuickTime and... nothing happens except for the menubar changing, which is incredibly easy not to notice at all. Even worse, some apps automatically close when closing the last window (e.g. System Preferences) while others don't (most other apps). The installation one should be easy to Apple to fix -- when you double-click a .dmg, auto-detect if it contains an .app or .pkg, and just automagically expand, mount, copy or run, unmount, delete expanded file and leave just the original .dmg behind (perhaps asking if you want to delete that too). (Also, macOS needs a centralized place for uninstalling apps as well, particularly .pkg ones.) The menubar one is trickier. But it doesn't seem unreasonable to either expect an application to quit when closing its main window (e.g. Activity Monitor should follow System Preferences in this), or else for document-centric apps, to open a standardized "start" window with options for types of new documents, a list of recent documents, etc. when all document windows are closed (e.g. what TextEdit and QuickTime could do).
  • m463 5y ago
    The .dmg drag thing has benefits - many times you can run an app from within the .dmg You can also drag into locations that are not /Applications
    • crazygringo 5y ago
      Sure, and that can be reserved for power users. You can right-click on applications to open them as folders, and the same could be done with DMG's. 99% of people just want to install or uninstall with a click, which is why I wish Finder made that the default workflow.
      • m463 5y ago
        The dmg is just one drag. Meanwhile an installer flow seems to be more of a gauntlet you have to get through. For macos it is several mostly standardized pages, for windows it is more annoying, complete with dark patterns.
• perryizgr8 5y ago
  I get confused and irritated all the time by the inconsistent behavior of the home, end, page up and page down keys. Sometimes ends takes you to the end of the line, sometimes it scrolls to the bottom of the page, sometimes it does nothing. Sometimes Ctrl+right arrow is end, sometimes Cmd+right arrow and other times even fn+right arrow. It's just a huge mess. And who thought having no delete key was fine? And then they went and mislabeled backspace as delete! WTF!
• makecheck 5y ago
  Installation is definitely weird. Now that /Applications is protected anyway (it is a virtual folder showing content from both the built-in system image and the stuff you installed), I wonder why they don’t just streamline it and make disk images auto-install. Those who did not use Macs before Mac OS X may not realize that Mac OS X started out approximating Mac OS 9 behaviors and never really completely ported over all its nice behaviors. The Finder in particular was a joy to use on Mac OS 9, and is somehow still clunky today. Even when they sort of move forward it does not seem as well thought out, e.g. pop-up windows worked beautifully on Mac OS 8.5 but Stacks seem like a kludge by comparison.
• jayd16 5y ago
  I feel like Apple just trades discoverability for visual simplicity and "power features" aka users just knowing the shortcuts or what to click. I think its a lot less intuitive but others seem to suffocate in analysis paralysis when presented with too many options so ymmv.
• scelerat 5y ago
  The OP is making a general argument about "intuitiveness" of an interface when the difficulty arises because of strategic decision by both Apple and Google. Also, echoes of the '90s OS wars with some similar blind spots: - no real definition of what is meant by "intuitive" - experience with another OS bias one's expectations to the equally arbitrary UI decisions the other OS made Not saying that the install-from-dmg experience the OP describes is some ideal installation process, but it certainly is well within the established UI paradigms. Disks and disk images are a thing. If you want to move a thing from one place to another, you drag it there. Apps go in the Application folder, so if you download an app from somewhere other than the App store, either drag it from the disk image or the downloads folder, to the Applications folder. You don't even have to do that; the app will still work from wherever you put it. In essence the OP is making a complaint about a standard UI feature which is being used to navigate around the elephant in the room, which is that Apple and Google can't agree on a way to get Chrome into the App store.
• dmitriid 5y ago
  In the past few years Apple has dropped the ball on HIG and MacOS. Here's AppStore mini-review: https://grumpy.website/post/0RsaxCu3P https://grumpy.website/post/0RsaxCu3P "Get 15 people, put them in 15 different offices with no communication between them, set them to work on one feature at a time. You will get something very similar to the App Store." Here's Apple Music review (spoiler: swearing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE8ZikfrpFU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE8ZikfrpFU
• blackoil 5y ago
  For me maximize to full screen and multiple desktops is most useless feature of Mac. For me cmd+tab never works even for 1st party apps like Terminal if it is maximized. Cmd+tab always shows all apps so you can't use multiple Desktops for mental separation. and being Mac you can't change default behaviour of button to maximize
  • jbverschoor 5y ago
    I agree about the mental separation. However, there's only 1 app instance. tbh, my ideal desktop situation is 2 or 3 computers with synergy in between. separation of applications / tabs.
• eptcyka 5y ago
  I can't stress enough how bad apple devices are for the uninitiated. I got my mom an iPad for her birthday, as she needed something to read medical books with color and watch YouTube. It took her a week to get youtube working, and copying over PDFs is still done piecmeal - sending each file from her Windows PC one by one using a messaging app. She tried to install apps, but the app store progress thing was just spinning. With no indication as to what she was doing wrong. Turns out she just needed to upgrade to the latest iOS. And the instructions that I had looked up before buying the iPad on how to copy PDFs to an iPad have been deprecated as of the latest iTunes release. And iCloud Drive's upload button is greyed out, with the tooltip informing us that _uploading is disabled_. Since I can't travel 1000 miles to help her out in person, the fact that I have to debug this over a video call is even worse. Why is copying a file such a hard thing to do? Why is updating the iPad something my mother would have to think about? This is the UX I'd expect from some cheap Samsung tablet, yet I'm sure that with a Samsung tablet, copying a file onto a device over USB wouldn't be an issue.
  • jmrm 5y ago
    I haven't done something like that on an iPad, but I think that Apple want people to use these devices in a way that every app have their files, like for example iPods used to store the music (you could drop files on the iPod storage but you need iTunes to insert your MP3s on the "player app"). The best thing you could do is looking for a tutorial to do that, and also a software to control that iPad remotely, so you don't have to videocall your mother to give her instructions.
    • eptcyka 5y ago
      I based my purchasing decision on existing tutorials. But a recent iTunes update obsoleted those (iTunes won't manage your books anymore).
      • vkou 5y ago
        Your first mistake was dancing with the devil that is iTunes. It is one of the worst pieces of software I've had the dubious privilege of using, and I have used HP Quality Center and SeaPine Source Control.
• deleted 5y ago
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• toomanybeersies 5y ago
  I've been using MacBooks for 8 hours a decade, for over half a decade now, and I still can't figure finder out. Why does the delete key not delete files? How do I create a new file? I can't even figure out how to navigate down a directory. I suppose it's not an issue with Finder specifically, but the fact that macOS defaults to saving your screenshots to Desktop is just terrible. At one point I had hundreds of screenshots on my "Desktop" before I got around to changing the screenshot folder to `~/screenshots`. I never actually bothered to learn how to use the macOS UI, I went straight from being a Windows user to using zsh for anything that wasn't typing code (never quite got into using vim or emacs as a daily driver). I've become one of those guys who complains when an application doesn't have a CLI. I don't even own a mouse. The only great thing about the macOS UI is Spotlight, and I use it solely for launching applications, and for adding numbers together. In fairness, I don't think macOS is any better or worse than Windows (or Gnome, KDE, et al). I just think that if you're sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours a day, a mouse is a waste of time.
  • vinw 5y ago
    > 8 hours a decade, for over half a decade now For a grand total of 4 hours?
  • berelig 5y ago
    > I've been using MacBooks for 8 hours a decade, for over half a decade now To be fair, 4 hours is not a lot of time to learn a new OS :)
  • w0de0 5y ago
    If you like spotlight and living in zsh, checkout mdfind!
  • robertoandred 5y ago
    Cmd-Delete deletes files. You create a file in an app. Not sure what you mean about navigating down a directory.
• kevinob11 5y ago
  Interestingly after reading other comments I think I agree that it isn't very intuitive. I say that as someone who switched from windows to mac about 6 years ago and don't really want to go back. I think Windows is more intuitive when you first sit down in front of it. You click an app and it opens, click it again and you get another one (usually). All context for the app is on the window for the app, physically connected. The start menu allows you to get to almost everything, things are in 5 different places on a mac (dock, spotlight, apple menu, etc.). I think all of that adds up to make windows vastly more intuitive (discoverable?), especially for a first time user. Where I really love my mac is in the first tier of shortcuts and features below the discoverable level. I find the hotkeys to be more reachable and intuitive (easy for my brain to remember the associations) than the windows equivalents. I love spotlight and find it to be much better at opening programs than windows search, though this seems largely fixed in windows 10 I think. I really like the swipe gestures on my touchpad, enough that I bought a magic trackpad for use when at a desk. Swiping between workspaces is glorious. I'm a consultant, and jump between client meetings all the time. I set up each client in a workspace and just slide over to that workspace when I'm ready for that meeting or work session. Then I can jump to the next client without cleaning up and just do a full cleanup later in the day of all of them at once. I have no idea how I lived before cmd+left and cmd+right go to start and end of line without taking a hand off the home row to reach over to home / end. As I say this though I realize the arrow keys are just below home and end, so maybe it's weird that I love this. Better on a mobile keyboard I suppose. I'm not someone who could never see going back to windows, I like it plenty, but the M1 has probably locked me in for the next few years.
• gumby 5y ago
  A big difference is direct manipulation in the Mac interface. Windows makes greater use of select and then select verb (e.g. cut/copy, move, paste to move a file is canonical). The mac also supportes this in many cases (like windows has some direct manipulation too of course), so if you come from windows you’ll use what’s familiar to you and not see the difference. But that approach is not primary in the Mac interface. It’s more common to drag or manipulate elements directly. So window titles and such are actually manipulatable objects, inputs and destinations for actions. I think this misunderstanding a big reason for “I don’t get it” posts. Don’t get me wrong: there are plenty of problems with the Mac. I use it because I feel it sucks less. I just think that a lot of articles like this don’t manage to get to the real point, for understandable reasons.
• thayne 5y ago
  As someone who has used Linux for over a decade, I find macs rather counterintuitive. Especially if I need to do anything off the beaten path. Maybe it's because I'm not a visual thinker.
• PennRobotics 5y ago
  I transitioned from Ubuntu to Mac for work. As others here stated, there are often keystroke and click combinations that do perform many tasks a user might want, and it's clear this isn't the main problem. In almost every case, my first ten guesses for a particular action would be wrong: deleting URL suggestions, split screen, forward delete, open terminal, switching windows within an application, search and replace, and so on. My opinion goes deeper. There's a fundamental problem of aesthetics over functionality in Apple's designs. As I sat in front of my fresh workplace iMac, I had no idea how to turn the machine on. I looked in the back and didn't notice anything other than ports. I looked on the edge... the front... the back again... the front again... the screen... Finally, I took my phone three levels higher in the building where I knew I got 2G signal. The power button on an dark grey iMac---I discovered after 15 minutes---is in a bottom corner of the back, essentially flush with the rest of the monitor body in the place a person is least likely to look. The fact that multiple prominent websites exist with this information tells me all I need to know about whether Don Norman would state Apple makes intuitive products or not.
• mancerayder 5y ago
  What hurts me (or maybe I'm blind or a dummy) is, it's not obvious which window is in focus because the dock doesn't highlight anything. The dock has a little dot under the icon if it's running, but that's all you get. Most of the icons have the same dot, but aren't in focus. This can be confusing. Windows highlights the running program in the start bar. Also, Windows lets you minimize or restore by clicking on that. The Dock is inferior to the Windows equivalent jn functionality. One hopes it's made up with the window/taskbar at the top.
• yawaworht1978 5y ago
  I have worked professionally with both. Let compare some features. Sticky notes, windows wins. Simpler, does not change background color of pasted text. Keyboard layout, crtl key is simply more ergonomically placed on a windows keyboard. Keyboard shortcuts for browsers, some of the shortcuts appear to be missing on Mac. MS office suite, no comparison. More hardware choice. Updates are less of a hassle on Mac, her iOS wins imo. Peripherals and price is windows all the way. Search and settings appear better to me on windows, this could be subjective. More freeware on windows. Desktop management is better on windows. Cortana and Siri equally suck. Mac's look better on average, only the top of the line windows machines look and feel equal or better.
  • robertoandred 5y ago
    How is ctrl more ergonomic? Command is directly under your thumb.
• skeletal88 5y ago
  What infuriates me the most is the behaviour of the end and home keys. In IntelliJ they work like they should. In some other applications also - editing some text, home moves to beginning of line, end to the end of line. But noooo. Some Apple designer thought that when you press End then you really want to get to the end of the current document, whatever that is. For example - writing a bug report/story in the browser in the text area, want to correct something or change the first word on the line, I press Home to get there, like I would do on Linux or Windows, but on Mac it takes me to the beginning of the website. Why on earth would anyone ever want that to be the default behaviour? Same with the End key. This is just beyond stupid. I guess I can get there with cmd-left/right arrow, but why not make the most used functionality the default?
• rootsudo 5y ago
  With Big sur and more permissions, it's harder. I understand them, I appreciate them but I hate how every app has to ask my permission and how I have to go into the settings menu to allow stuff. At this point, SElinux sounds usable as a daily driver.
• phendrenad2 5y ago
  Apple is always coming up with new "trust us this is better" ways to do things, seemingly without thought for how they interact with older "trust us this is better" things. TFA has a great example. MacOS made the "Applications" directory because Steve Jobs thought installing an application should be something you do via a "drag". Everything should be a drag! Eject a CD? Drag it? Where? Uh, hell, the trash can! Want to copy files? Don't copy-paste like a rube, instead drag it! And the App Store is an abstraction where the user doesn't need to know that the Applications directory exists, oops.
• travelbyphone 5y ago
  I switched from windows to Mac in 2005 and find macOS second nature now. Finder is getting a lot of heat here, but I live it’s simplicity. Column view is the best view, quick look is amazing and I don’t know how one can live without it on other OSes. I know a million tricks but one that I see as really superior is how you can drag a folder to a save menu in order to quickly access it to save the file. Also macOS is smart enough to have two files with the same name open. And you can even move them while open. One feature I believe not many people use but I can’t go by without is active corners. It just makes Mac OS so fluid with your mouse, it’s a beauty.
• musicale 5y ago
  > And at this I realized how silly the entire install process for Mac is. Apple Menu > App Store > Search > Buy > Install > Open It's basically the same as iOS.
• therealmitchel 5y ago
  How measurable is intuitiveness, really? People have biases and software has quirks.
• smsm42 5y ago
  I don't actually hate it when people have an opinionated product and say it upfront. What I do hate is when they call their opinion "intuitive" and pretend all normal people agree with them and if you don't, you must be some kind of freak (or even worse, that you know they're right but insist on the contrary just out of spite). And this seems to be how Apple interfaces are designed.
• Tsiklon 5y ago
  I always thought the Mac OS way of installing apps was quite intuitive; there’s the .DMG way where the user opens the DMG and typically drags the app to their applications directory. I thought this was pretty clever as it’s a glorified disk image containing a .app file, a shortcut to the applications directory, a picture which usually shows an arrow with a box and some metadata that tells finder how to display the whole lot. So the work flow is, open the .DMG, which opens a special minimal finder window showing the picture and the two icons the user then drags the .APP to their applications directory. Then there’s the wizard format version which consists of a .PKG file which gets sent through the package manager. This like a windows installer.
• simonh 5y ago
  Every time I open System Preferences on a Mac, after having had to change system settings on windows, I say a little prayer of thanks.
  • Hammershaft 5y ago
    I don't think you'll hear any windows users defend windows settings.