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Intuitiveness is just what you are used to at this point. If you've been in the Apple ecosystem your whole life, then their UX seems intuitive to you. If you h

by doix 4y ago

Intuitiveness is just what you are used to at this point. If you've been in the Apple ecosystem your whole life, then their UX seems intuitive to you. If you haven't, then it makes absolutely no sense. I first touched an apple device in my 20's, there was nothing intuitive about it. I couldn't do anything and was extremely frustrated. I'm sure the same applies to apple folks trying gnome/KDE/windows. People are getting introduced to touch devices from a young age now days. I bet they will find things intuitive based on the devices their parents gave them. It's kind of like religion at this point, did you grow up using Android or iOS? Switching would be a deliberate effort, like not following your families religion (with hopefully significantly less judgement).

fps_doug 4y ago
Absolutely this. UIs have been "good enough" for a very long time now. There were some minor breakthroughs/inventions along the way, but half of them were probably just responses to shifting usage patterns. You build up muscle memory and you're set. One example that comes to mind is more powerful/prominent search features. In the 90s, as a home user, you had a folder with some documents and in total, the number of installed games plus apps was probably around a dozen. So it was ok that on Windows, searching for files was hidden in a sub-menu and rather slow. Today, you have a bazillion tools and apps, games, documents from 30 years of migrating to a new system, backups, so you make search faster to access. People value consistency and gradual development, not failed, half-baked overhauls like the Windows 8 debacle. And obviously that stuff actually works. Which is continuing to be a big downside of KDE or Linux in general. Too many components working together, maintained by different teams and ever-changing. It's basically up to the Distros to find the perfect combination of library and software versions to get a good experience.
uniqueuid 4y ago
I don't really agree. The really interesting part of intuitiveness is how it scales once you became familiar with the basic set of UX primitives. At least from my experience with ~15 years of mac, ~15 years of on-and-off linux and windows, macOS has remained more consistent, because the primitives are much more universal. Take, for example copying. You can alt-drag a surprising number of things across many different apps and have them just work. Or holding alt in menus to show additional entries. Or holding shift or alt to resize items to preserve ratio on one or two sides. Or take dragging and dropping references to the current file from the proxy icon in the window top bar. Or dragging and dropping selected text as snippets. Or looking up words in the built-in dictionary. The amount of effort the mac team invested to re-use ux interaction modes is really crazy coming from other platforms, and it extends to abstractions such as disk images. One of the things that impressed me the most was how you could clone mac volumes to usb or firewire disks, boot from them, clone volumes to compressed images and restore them - all seamlessly, without messing with disk sizes, sectors, boot records or bioses - and it would just magically work. Granted, the story is no longer that easy with APFS and M1/M2 macs, but I still think this is a bar that no other operating system has reached.
- doix 4y ago
  > I don't really agree. The really interesting part of intuitiveness is how it scales once you became familiar with the basic set of UX primitives. Is intuitiveness the right word? I make the same arguments about Vim, that it's one of the most logically consistent editors once you learn the basic set of primitives (not perfect of course). But I don't think anyone would call it intuitive. > Take, for example copying. You can alt-drag a surprising number of things across many different apps and have them just work. Why do you need to alt drag? Why can't you just drag? You can drag a lot of stuff in windows and it "just works". > Or holding alt in menus to show additional entries. Why does it not show all the options all the time? How are you supposed to know to press alt? > Or holding shift or alt to resize items to preserve ratio on one or two sides. This is pretty universal. > Or take dragging and dropping references to the current file from the proxy icon in the window top bar. Or dragging and dropping selected text as snippets. I have no idea what you mean, but you can drag lots of stuff in windows to different places and stuff happens. The disk image stuff is cool I guess, but I'm guessing it's possible because Apple controls the hardware and software. I'd be pretty pissed off if some tool automagically changed my boot records.
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    IMO this consistency and composability is a large part of intuitiveness if nothing else. It does help with a different part of the learning curve than what people often are obsessing about with the word “intuitive” though.
  - sirn 4y ago
    >I have no idea what you mean, but you can drag lots of stuff in windows to different places and stuff happens. On macOS, there's a concept called "Proxy Icons". These are little icons that are shown in a title bar of a document-based applications (e.g. "[ICON] My File.txt"). You can interact with these icons as if they are an actual file on the disk. For example, you have "My File.txt" open in TextEdit, and you want to reference them in Terminal, you can just drag the icon into Terminal.app window and it will resolve the full path. Or you're editing the file, but realized you need to make a copy of that file before making changes, you can alt-drag on the icon and copy it elsewhere. Or you're working on a file and want to navigate to the containing directory, you can right click on the proxy icon and it will show the full hierarchy for navigation, etc. This is something I missed quite a lot when using other OSes.
rhaway84773 4y ago
MacOS is interesting in that I know regular users who have used it for over a decade who still don’t grasp some of its basics. For example, the post actually makes a mistake when mentioning macOS doesn’t have Alt+TAB window switching. It does. You just have to do Alt+’. That being said, even though the OP is wrong, there’s a massive kernel of truth in that the majority of ordinary Mac users are unaware of this. Another one is that many regular users cannot distinguish between closing all windows and closing the app. See a regular users desktop and you will often see open but unused apps sitting in their dock because they closed all the windows and didn’t realize they had to do something different to close the app as well.
- licebmi__at__ 4y ago
  And to add to the point, Alt+’ is not the same as alt+tab, which will switch between all the available windows while the former will only switch between the windows on the current selected application. And it’s also even worse, because Alt+’ as a natural partner of alt+tab won’t even work if you use a different keyboard layout; and it won’t even work if you set an application on a workspace.
  - rhaway84773 4y ago
    The keyboard layout issue is very real! If you do have a regular layout, the 2 ALTs are indeed supposed to work together. I remember when I first used a Mac in like 2004 I thought this was fantastic. That’s because at the time Windows (or at least the machine I had windows on), was incapable of rendering individual windows when Alt+Tabbing… So you’d Alt+Tab and try and distinguish between the window you wanted by the name or just plain luck. However, computers ar better now and are capable of showing little images of the windows in Alt+Tab. The MacOS style is strictly inferior at this point IMO.
- chii 4y ago
  and the thing is, the alt-tab is not even really a native idea for macs - Exposé is the way to switch windows (which, for me is the 4 finger swipe up on the touch pad - but some people can choose to use hot corner on the screen, or the dedicated hardware button).
dcminter 4y ago
> If you haven't, then it makes absolutely no sense. In the Lion era I was issued a Mac as a work laptop on a contract. Plugged into an external monitor, and that worked fine. Maximised one screen and... the other one displayed only the brushed metal background. Because, obviously, intuitively, you would only be able to have one maximised app at a time, right? Right? For a Linux (by choice) and Windows (under duress) user who'd totally bought the "Macs have better usability" myth before that it was astounding. My father had a lot of trouble getting used to his Android phone (he came to smart phones late) despite a highly technical background, just because a lot of stuff wasn't obviously something you could tap on. He did get used to it, but it was a slog for him to figure out. The death of skeuomorphism was a tragedy and I hope it comes back. Personally I also miss proper manuals. There's so much software I use where googling around for someone who was trying to solve the same task is a more productive solution than reading the meagre documentation.
- Tsiklon 4y ago
  Lion was a bit of a stinker in that regard, prior to that there was no “full screen” applications in that more traditional sense, only borderless full screen for video and games - anything else used “smart maximise” where the window size would increase to fit the content (again a bit of a poor choice, but that’s my personal opinion)
  - dcminter 4y ago
    That makes sense in context - but I think it reinforces the parent's point; if you don't arrive with that context it's just plain weird!
    - Tsiklon 4y ago
      Older mac applications used to have the running state of an application utterly divorced from the windows the application presents. This has fallen away with time now, which saddens me.
vegai_ 4y ago
That's a bit silly. I was a Linux user from 1996 to 2015ish, then went to use macbooks almost exclusively. Apple's UI immediately made sense, even if it was remains tad unoptimal for serious use, when comparing to UX masterpieces like i3 and sway. KDE has always been bit of an awkward horror, and I've given it a shot now and then for their whole existence. The latest incarnation, Plasma, is quite a lot better than it used to be, granted.
- mmis1000 4y ago
  The reason KDE looks horrible to you is probably due to the history you use computer. KDE is just 90% similar to the logic you use windows. The system tray area, task bar, start button works just like the way you expect in windows. It probably has the least resistance to use if you are a windows user that try the linux desktop the first time.
lucideer 4y ago
Another hard disagree here. My daily driver personal laptop is a macbook, it's the best machine I've ever owned & my next laptop will most likely be a macbook. My work machine is also a macbook. But they are not intuitive nor highly "usable". After many years going through various osx/macOS transitions, it's an OS with objectively bad ux in many ways. That's not to say it's bad software. Apart from the hardware of my personal laptop being great, I also like the OS for a few reasons. UX has multiple components outside of intuitiveness & ease of use: 1. reliability. Things work. It has its bugs but generally speaking the utility functions within the OS work well much much more frequently than windows or linux. Peripherals work. Suspend/sleep/hibernate work. Wifi works. Bluetooth works. Everything works. Without fiddling. 2. Builtin apps are sensibly functional & comprehensive. Disk tools have been built-in & better than Windows forever (even Linux usually has none unless you install gparted). Preview supports pdf editing & annotation (& saved signatures!) - these are things that literally every person needs at some point & I'm not even aware of any windows/linux apps that do these other than paid Adobe Acrobat. That's absurd. Screenshot/image preview support better image annotation than Windows (& still trying multiple linux utilities for this that don't have any annotation at all). Very basic day-to-day shit like this has actually been priorities and covered. 3. Unix-y stuff is good enough. I'm a linux guy so this is still a bit of a step down but it's actually fine. Anything that takes place in a terminal is very comparable to linux (& the builtin emulator is a lot better than what comes bundled with many linux DEs). But. Everything about the macOS desktop experience is terribly unintuitive and bad. Maximising doesn't work (not configurable, ctrl-click remains hassle forever). Multiple windows within one app is badly supported. Finder window closing behaves different to everything - alt-tabbing to it rarely brings anything to the fore. It took them years to add a way to manually lock your screen without a hot corner. All of these things are bad for both experienced users & new. There's no trade-off: you don't get some hidden benefit by learning to work around these difficulties. They remain bad. TL;DR: People use macOS for good logical reasons, despite its objectively bad usability.
- ubercow13 4y ago
  >Multiple windows within one app is badly supported. Finder window closing behaves different to everything - alt-tabbing to it rarely brings anything to the fore. How so? Finder seems to behave the same way as other multi-window apps, if you cmd-tab to it and a window is open, it will appear, and if there isn't the app will focus and you can press cmd-t to open a new window. This is consistent and in line with how macos deals with apps vs windows/documents in every app.
interpol_p 4y ago
There's a mix, I think. Some of it is what you are used to, and some things just plain make more sense to humans. I remember when I first came to macOS from Windows (around 2003), these were the things that made me wonder why they were ever done any other way: - Volumes simply had names! No "C:/" drive or "D:/" drive. Just "Macintosh HD" or whatever name the mounted volume was given. I felt the names were more intuitive than arbitrary "drive letters" - Installing an app: drag it into /Applications. Uninstalling, delete it from /Applications. Felt way more intuitive than Windows - File organisation felt more sensible. There was /Library for all my system files, and then ~/Library for all my user level system files. Each one had the same directories, it was really easy to understand - Not having to install drivers - Every app appeared to have the same shortcuts and the same common menu items. Preferences was always Cmd+, or App Name -> Preferences... in the menu. - Drag and drop appeared to work everywhere. The OS clearly indicated via the icon being dragged, previewed things, in a way that Windows never did - My Mac laptops went to sleep when closing the lid. And woke up instantly when opening the lid. I don't know if you remember Windows laptops in the 2000s and even the 2010s, but they did not sleep consistently, wake up consistently, they would crash, etc. These were a few of the things I found more intuitive on Mac. There were other things I liked better (but weren't necessarily more intuitive)
tyfon 4y ago
I actually switched to an iphone around 2.5 years ago since teams wouldn't run properly on my old android and the offerings from my company instead of iphone (huawei and samsung) didn't really appeal to me. Now 2.5 years later I switched back due to not being able to make friends with the apple UI despite trying for that long. It feels so constrained and inconsistent to me. The pixel phone I got now is a dream in comparison. The keyboard just works, sharing between apps just works. Keepass didn't really integrate with ios, in android I can select it as my own "autofill provider". I can have firefox with ublock. The Switching either way was not really a pain for me as I never go all in on something so I just had to find app replacement. As a note to the article itself, I also run KDE on arch linux on both my work and private computers and since it matured from the 4.0 transition mess it has just been great I think. Having used linux as my desktop os since ~94-95 I am just a huge question mark when someone puts me down in front of mac os!
- sidlls 4y ago
  For context: I'd been a "linux person" since undergrad (mid-90s). I picked up a really early Android model after my BlackBerry expired. I have almost the exact opposite experience as you describe: I switched from Android to iPhone a couple of years ago for two reasons: 1) my Google phones (I had a pixel at the time: previously had written it was a Nexus, but it was not) kept bricking; 2) I got an old model iPhone (it was an iPhone 8) to use as my work phone. The iPhone 8 performed better and had a much better UX than my then-current Nexus. It just wasn't even a fair comparison, really. I upgraded my personal device to the latest iPhone and haven't looked back. I haven't even touched an Android phone since then, and unless something really compelling happens to force it I probably never will again. Same thing with my laptop, actually: around the same time I decided to give a macbook a go. I haven't regretted it at all.
  - tyfon 4y ago
    Apple fits a lot of people, just not me :) I think for me the major issue is that I don't like any of the default options in the iphone and the 3rd party keyboards kept bugging out, even swiftkey and gboard would act really weird. Also the undocumented gestures drove me nuts. And not being able to just have a normal browser with proper ad block and simple things like that.
mromanuk 4y ago
Counterpoint, a not tech friend of mine, switched to a macbook air M1 from Wintel, she's loving MacOS and keynote, couldn't be happier. Was pretty intuitive for her.
koonsolo 4y ago
I don't agree. I have an Android, and when I go to a product page on the app store, there is this huge "install" button clearly in a different color. Very good UX. I remember receiving a company iPhone years ago. I went to an app store product page, and couldn't find any install button. Totally confused I looked for some menu options or whatever. Turned out you had to click the "free" text behind the app title. Not a button at all, not clear at all. That is just bad UX.
- sofixa 4y ago
  To expand on this, when you click that install button, you get a progress bar and a notification with that progress, so you can know what's happening and where it's at. Just got an iPad through work, and i tried to install an app - there was just a loading circle animation, without any context or information. Guess what, it didn't work (but of course it wouldn't say it isn't working, it just kept spinning for tens of minutes), i had to set up a payment method first (for a free app, Obsidian, that supports payments for extra features). What the hell? Why no error message? Why no actual status instead of a useless animation? Similarly, on macOS, the scroll direction cannot be changed between mouse and trackpad. There is a parameter in both menus, but they switch each other. Yes, that is terrible UX.
  - koonsolo 4y ago
    > Similarly, on macOS, the scroll direction cannot be changed between mouse and trackpad. Ha that's funny, because I'm also struggling with that one! The general idea that Apple is good at UX is very wrong.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Probably iOS 7 or shortly after. They murdered what had been hands-down the best UI for non-nerds of any OS I've ever seen, with that version. Lots of "buttons" that were just text and other terrible flat-UI garbage. They undid some of that since, but it's still not back to being as good as 6 was.
selfhoster11 4y ago
> Intuitiveness is just what you are used to at this point. No, it is not. The word "intuitive" is defined by Merriam-Webster as "readily learned or understood" and "knowable by intuition". If the UI is not one of these things, then it is not "intuitive" in the general sense of the word.
- mro_name 4y ago
  there are few intuitive things other than a mother breast. Take doors handles or light switches. Must be learned.
  - selfhoster11 4y ago
    I disagree. Both of those are relatively simple mechanisms with one, perhaps two degrees of motion, and provide immediate feedback when operated successfully. Take an alien who’s never been to Earth and give them ten minutes to master each of those, and they’ll be able to.
- zeendo 4y ago
  I think their point is that what is readily learned or understood (and one's own intuition) are both informed by what they're already used to. So many of us are used to the UI of one or more ecosystems that you're going to report on the subjective intuitiveness of any UI based on what we're already used to. For all intents and purposes intuition is subjective and so is "intuitive". There's value in building things that are "intuitive" to people who are used to existing UIs/systems _even if those existing UIs are bad_. There is also value (harder earned, for sure) in ignoring those existing patterns and bringing something truly better to the table...but you'll have people CORRECTLY pointing out that it's counter intuitive along the way.
blackhaz 4y ago
I recall Snow Leopard was quite intuitive after Windows, and iPhone 4. Definitely not what MacOS and iOS have become.
ihatepython 4y ago
The most intuitive UI that I have ever used is Intuition on the Amiga. It's in the name, after all

by doix 4y ago

fps_doug 4y ago

Absolutely this. UIs have been "good enough" for a very long time now. There were some minor breakthroughs/inventions along the way, but half of them were probably just responses to shifting usage patterns. You build up muscle memory and you're set. One example that comes to mind is more powerful/prominent search features. In the 90s, as a home user, you had a folder with some documents and in total, the number of installed games plus apps was probably around a dozen. So it was ok that on Windows, searching for files was hidden in a sub-menu and rather slow. Today, you have a bazillion tools and apps, games, documents from 30 years of migrating to a new system, backups, so you make search faster to access. People value consistency and gradual development, not failed, half-baked overhauls like the Windows 8 debacle. And obviously that stuff actually works. Which is continuing to be a big downside of KDE or Linux in general. Too many components working together, maintained by different teams and ever-changing. It's basically up to the Distros to find the perfect combination of library and software versions to get a good experience.

uniqueuid 4y ago

I don't really agree. The really interesting part of intuitiveness is how it scales once you became familiar with the basic set of UX primitives. At least from my experience with ~15 years of mac, ~15 years of on-and-off linux and windows, macOS has remained more consistent, because the primitives are much more universal. Take, for example copying. You can alt-drag a surprising number of things across many different apps and have them just work. Or holding alt in menus to show additional entries. Or holding shift or alt to resize items to preserve ratio on one or two sides. Or take dragging and dropping references to the current file from the proxy icon in the window top bar. Or dragging and dropping selected text as snippets. Or looking up words in the built-in dictionary. The amount of effort the mac team invested to re-use ux interaction modes is really crazy coming from other platforms, and it extends to abstractions such as disk images. One of the things that impressed me the most was how you could clone mac volumes to usb or firewire disks, boot from them, clone volumes to compressed images and restore them - all seamlessly, without messing with disk sizes, sectors, boot records or bioses - and it would just magically work. Granted, the story is no longer that easy with APFS and M1/M2 macs, but I still think this is a bar that no other operating system has reached.

doix 4y ago
> I don't really agree. The really interesting part of intuitiveness is how it scales once you became familiar with the basic set of UX primitives. Is intuitiveness the right word? I make the same arguments about Vim, that it's one of the most logically consistent editors once you learn the basic set of primitives (not perfect of course). But I don't think anyone would call it intuitive. > Take, for example copying. You can alt-drag a surprising number of things across many different apps and have them just work. Why do you need to alt drag? Why can't you just drag? You can drag a lot of stuff in windows and it "just works". > Or holding alt in menus to show additional entries. Why does it not show all the options all the time? How are you supposed to know to press alt? > Or holding shift or alt to resize items to preserve ratio on one or two sides. This is pretty universal. > Or take dragging and dropping references to the current file from the proxy icon in the window top bar. Or dragging and dropping selected text as snippets. I have no idea what you mean, but you can drag lots of stuff in windows to different places and stuff happens. The disk image stuff is cool I guess, but I'm guessing it's possible because Apple controls the hardware and software. I'd be pretty pissed off if some tool automagically changed my boot records.
- ethanbond 4y ago
  IMO this consistency and composability is a large part of intuitiveness if nothing else. It does help with a different part of the learning curve than what people often are obsessing about with the word “intuitive” though.
- sirn 4y ago
  >I have no idea what you mean, but you can drag lots of stuff in windows to different places and stuff happens. On macOS, there's a concept called "Proxy Icons". These are little icons that are shown in a title bar of a document-based applications (e.g. "[ICON] My File.txt"). You can interact with these icons as if they are an actual file on the disk. For example, you have "My File.txt" open in TextEdit, and you want to reference them in Terminal, you can just drag the icon into Terminal.app window and it will resolve the full path. Or you're editing the file, but realized you need to make a copy of that file before making changes, you can alt-drag on the icon and copy it elsewhere. Or you're working on a file and want to navigate to the containing directory, you can right click on the proxy icon and it will show the full hierarchy for navigation, etc. This is something I missed quite a lot when using other OSes.

rhaway84773 4y ago

MacOS is interesting in that I know regular users who have used it for over a decade who still don’t grasp some of its basics. For example, the post actually makes a mistake when mentioning macOS doesn’t have Alt+TAB window switching. It does. You just have to do Alt+’. That being said, even though the OP is wrong, there’s a massive kernel of truth in that the majority of ordinary Mac users are unaware of this. Another one is that many regular users cannot distinguish between closing all windows and closing the app. See a regular users desktop and you will often see open but unused apps sitting in their dock because they closed all the windows and didn’t realize they had to do something different to close the app as well.

licebmi__at__ 4y ago
And to add to the point, Alt+’ is not the same as alt+tab, which will switch between all the available windows while the former will only switch between the windows on the current selected application. And it’s also even worse, because Alt+’ as a natural partner of alt+tab won’t even work if you use a different keyboard layout; and it won’t even work if you set an application on a workspace.
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  The keyboard layout issue is very real! If you do have a regular layout, the 2 ALTs are indeed supposed to work together. I remember when I first used a Mac in like 2004 I thought this was fantastic. That’s because at the time Windows (or at least the machine I had windows on), was incapable of rendering individual windows when Alt+Tabbing… So you’d Alt+Tab and try and distinguish between the window you wanted by the name or just plain luck. However, computers ar better now and are capable of showing little images of the windows in Alt+Tab. The MacOS style is strictly inferior at this point IMO.
chii 4y ago
and the thing is, the alt-tab is not even really a native idea for macs - Exposé is the way to switch windows (which, for me is the 4 finger swipe up on the touch pad - but some people can choose to use hot corner on the screen, or the dedicated hardware button).

dcminter 4y ago

> If you haven't, then it makes absolutely no sense. In the Lion era I was issued a Mac as a work laptop on a contract. Plugged into an external monitor, and that worked fine. Maximised one screen and... the other one displayed only the brushed metal background. Because, obviously, intuitively, you would only be able to have one maximised app at a time, right? Right? For a Linux (by choice) and Windows (under duress) user who'd totally bought the "Macs have better usability" myth before that it was astounding. My father had a lot of trouble getting used to his Android phone (he came to smart phones late) despite a highly technical background, just because a lot of stuff wasn't obviously something you could tap on. He did get used to it, but it was a slog for him to figure out. The death of skeuomorphism was a tragedy and I hope it comes back. Personally I also miss proper manuals. There's so much software I use where googling around for someone who was trying to solve the same task is a more productive solution than reading the meagre documentation.

Tsiklon 4y ago
Lion was a bit of a stinker in that regard, prior to that there was no “full screen” applications in that more traditional sense, only borderless full screen for video and games - anything else used “smart maximise” where the window size would increase to fit the content (again a bit of a poor choice, but that’s my personal opinion)
- dcminter 4y ago
  That makes sense in context - but I think it reinforces the parent's point; if you don't arrive with that context it's just plain weird!
  - Tsiklon 4y ago
    Older mac applications used to have the running state of an application utterly divorced from the windows the application presents. This has fallen away with time now, which saddens me.

vegai_ 4y ago

That's a bit silly. I was a Linux user from 1996 to 2015ish, then went to use macbooks almost exclusively. Apple's UI immediately made sense, even if it was remains tad unoptimal for serious use, when comparing to UX masterpieces like i3 and sway. KDE has always been bit of an awkward horror, and I've given it a shot now and then for their whole existence. The latest incarnation, Plasma, is quite a lot better than it used to be, granted.

mmis1000 4y ago
The reason KDE looks horrible to you is probably due to the history you use computer. KDE is just 90% similar to the logic you use windows. The system tray area, task bar, start button works just like the way you expect in windows. It probably has the least resistance to use if you are a windows user that try the linux desktop the first time.

lucideer 4y ago

Another hard disagree here. My daily driver personal laptop is a macbook, it's the best machine I've ever owned & my next laptop will most likely be a macbook. My work machine is also a macbook. But they are not intuitive nor highly "usable". After many years going through various osx/macOS transitions, it's an OS with objectively bad ux in many ways. That's not to say it's bad software. Apart from the hardware of my personal laptop being great, I also like the OS for a few reasons. UX has multiple components outside of intuitiveness & ease of use: 1. reliability. Things work. It has its bugs but generally speaking the utility functions within the OS work well much much more frequently than windows or linux. Peripherals work. Suspend/sleep/hibernate work. Wifi works. Bluetooth works. Everything works. Without fiddling. 2. Builtin apps are sensibly functional & comprehensive. Disk tools have been built-in & better than Windows forever (even Linux usually has none unless you install gparted). Preview supports pdf editing & annotation (& saved signatures!) - these are things that literally every person needs at some point & I'm not even aware of any windows/linux apps that do these other than paid Adobe Acrobat. That's absurd. Screenshot/image preview support better image annotation than Windows (& still trying multiple linux utilities for this that don't have any annotation at all). Very basic day-to-day shit like this has actually been priorities and covered. 3. Unix-y stuff is good enough. I'm a linux guy so this is still a bit of a step down but it's actually fine. Anything that takes place in a terminal is very comparable to linux (& the builtin emulator is a lot better than what comes bundled with many linux DEs). But. Everything about the macOS desktop experience is terribly unintuitive and bad. Maximising doesn't work (not configurable, ctrl-click remains hassle forever). Multiple windows within one app is badly supported. Finder window closing behaves different to everything - alt-tabbing to it rarely brings anything to the fore. It took them years to add a way to manually lock your screen without a hot corner. All of these things are bad for both experienced users & new. There's no trade-off: you don't get some hidden benefit by learning to work around these difficulties. They remain bad. TL;DR: People use macOS for good logical reasons, despite its objectively bad usability.

ubercow13 4y ago
>Multiple windows within one app is badly supported. Finder window closing behaves different to everything - alt-tabbing to it rarely brings anything to the fore. How so? Finder seems to behave the same way as other multi-window apps, if you cmd-tab to it and a window is open, it will appear, and if there isn't the app will focus and you can press cmd-t to open a new window. This is consistent and in line with how macos deals with apps vs windows/documents in every app.

interpol_p 4y ago

There's a mix, I think. Some of it is what you are used to, and some things just plain make more sense to humans. I remember when I first came to macOS from Windows (around 2003), these were the things that made me wonder why they were ever done any other way: - Volumes simply had names! No "C:/" drive or "D:/" drive. Just "Macintosh HD" or whatever name the mounted volume was given. I felt the names were more intuitive than arbitrary "drive letters" - Installing an app: drag it into /Applications. Uninstalling, delete it from /Applications. Felt way more intuitive than Windows - File organisation felt more sensible. There was /Library for all my system files, and then ~/Library for all my user level system files. Each one had the same directories, it was really easy to understand - Not having to install drivers - Every app appeared to have the same shortcuts and the same common menu items. Preferences was always Cmd+, or App Name -> Preferences... in the menu. - Drag and drop appeared to work everywhere. The OS clearly indicated via the icon being dragged, previewed things, in a way that Windows never did - My Mac laptops went to sleep when closing the lid. And woke up instantly when opening the lid. I don't know if you remember Windows laptops in the 2000s and even the 2010s, but they did not sleep consistently, wake up consistently, they would crash, etc. These were a few of the things I found more intuitive on Mac. There were other things I liked better (but weren't necessarily more intuitive)

tyfon 4y ago

I actually switched to an iphone around 2.5 years ago since teams wouldn't run properly on my old android and the offerings from my company instead of iphone (huawei and samsung) didn't really appeal to me. Now 2.5 years later I switched back due to not being able to make friends with the apple UI despite trying for that long. It feels so constrained and inconsistent to me. The pixel phone I got now is a dream in comparison. The keyboard just works, sharing between apps just works. Keepass didn't really integrate with ios, in android I can select it as my own "autofill provider". I can have firefox with ublock. The Switching either way was not really a pain for me as I never go all in on something so I just had to find app replacement. As a note to the article itself, I also run KDE on arch linux on both my work and private computers and since it matured from the 4.0 transition mess it has just been great I think. Having used linux as my desktop os since ~94-95 I am just a huge question mark when someone puts me down in front of mac os!

sidlls 4y ago
For context: I'd been a "linux person" since undergrad (mid-90s). I picked up a really early Android model after my BlackBerry expired. I have almost the exact opposite experience as you describe: I switched from Android to iPhone a couple of years ago for two reasons: 1) my Google phones (I had a pixel at the time: previously had written it was a Nexus, but it was not) kept bricking; 2) I got an old model iPhone (it was an iPhone 8) to use as my work phone. The iPhone 8 performed better and had a much better UX than my then-current Nexus. It just wasn't even a fair comparison, really. I upgraded my personal device to the latest iPhone and haven't looked back. I haven't even touched an Android phone since then, and unless something really compelling happens to force it I probably never will again. Same thing with my laptop, actually: around the same time I decided to give a macbook a go. I haven't regretted it at all.
- tyfon 4y ago
  Apple fits a lot of people, just not me :) I think for me the major issue is that I don't like any of the default options in the iphone and the 3rd party keyboards kept bugging out, even swiftkey and gboard would act really weird. Also the undocumented gestures drove me nuts. And not being able to just have a normal browser with proper ad block and simple things like that.

mromanuk 4y ago

Counterpoint, a not tech friend of mine, switched to a macbook air M1 from Wintel, she's loving MacOS and keynote, couldn't be happier. Was pretty intuitive for her.

koonsolo 4y ago

I don't agree. I have an Android, and when I go to a product page on the app store, there is this huge "install" button clearly in a different color. Very good UX. I remember receiving a company iPhone years ago. I went to an app store product page, and couldn't find any install button. Totally confused I looked for some menu options or whatever. Turned out you had to click the "free" text behind the app title. Not a button at all, not clear at all. That is just bad UX.

sofixa 4y ago
To expand on this, when you click that install button, you get a progress bar and a notification with that progress, so you can know what's happening and where it's at. Just got an iPad through work, and i tried to install an app - there was just a loading circle animation, without any context or information. Guess what, it didn't work (but of course it wouldn't say it isn't working, it just kept spinning for tens of minutes), i had to set up a payment method first (for a free app, Obsidian, that supports payments for extra features). What the hell? Why no error message? Why no actual status instead of a useless animation? Similarly, on macOS, the scroll direction cannot be changed between mouse and trackpad. There is a parameter in both menus, but they switch each other. Yes, that is terrible UX.
- koonsolo 4y ago
  > Similarly, on macOS, the scroll direction cannot be changed between mouse and trackpad. Ha that's funny, because I'm also struggling with that one! The general idea that Apple is good at UX is very wrong.
yamtaddle 4y ago
Probably iOS 7 or shortly after. They murdered what had been hands-down the best UI for non-nerds of any OS I've ever seen, with that version. Lots of "buttons" that were just text and other terrible flat-UI garbage. They undid some of that since, but it's still not back to being as good as 6 was.

selfhoster11 4y ago

> Intuitiveness is just what you are used to at this point. No, it is not. The word "intuitive" is defined by Merriam-Webster as "readily learned or understood" and "knowable by intuition". If the UI is not one of these things, then it is not "intuitive" in the general sense of the word.

mro_name 4y ago
there are few intuitive things other than a mother breast. Take doors handles or light switches. Must be learned.
- selfhoster11 4y ago
  I disagree. Both of those are relatively simple mechanisms with one, perhaps two degrees of motion, and provide immediate feedback when operated successfully. Take an alien who’s never been to Earth and give them ten minutes to master each of those, and they’ll be able to.
zeendo 4y ago
I think their point is that what is readily learned or understood (and one's own intuition) are both informed by what they're already used to. So many of us are used to the UI of one or more ecosystems that you're going to report on the subjective intuitiveness of any UI based on what we're already used to. For all intents and purposes intuition is subjective and so is "intuitive". There's value in building things that are "intuitive" to people who are used to existing UIs/systems _even if those existing UIs are bad_. There is also value (harder earned, for sure) in ignoring those existing patterns and bringing something truly better to the table...but you'll have people CORRECTLY pointing out that it's counter intuitive along the way.

blackhaz 4y ago

I recall Snow Leopard was quite intuitive after Windows, and iPhone 4. Definitely not what MacOS and iOS have become.

ihatepython 4y ago

The most intuitive UI that I have ever used is Intuition on the Amiga. It's in the name, after all