Speaking as an engineer-designer: Apple's devices are better designed than a lot of the stuff out there, but they're still not that great. You can kick their as

Speaking as an engineer-designer: Apple's devices are better designed than a lot of the stuff out there, but they're still not that great. You can kick their asses on design if you actually find a case where there's a sufficient financial incentive to do so. It's just, it's really hard to make money at scale on physical products. There's not much incentive to complete on this. Plus, many people have been trained to evaluate design quality as "looks like Apple products" ... which some days gets to the point where I just fire-bomb the place and take a vacation in Nepal, Tibet, one of those places with mountains. Interface design specifically is a case where it often comes down to "stop breaking it" vs. "how do I add more awesome" - people make this horrible unusable goop and think it's good design. The Google refresh? Lord knows how much money they threw at that ... and while the old version wasn't all pretty with colors and gradients everywhere, it had fairly decent usability. The new version is riddled with issues, after putting substantially more effort into making it. WTF?