19 ms·

Am I An Outlier, Or Are Apple Products No Longer Easy To Use?

256 points by rkudeshi 14y ago

omi 14y ago
They have never been easy to use. You have to think in APPLE way, if you do that it probably makes sense.
Tichy 14y ago
"you’ll need to restore your iPhone to reclaim the space occupied by Other." I can't get the picture out of my mind, of some mysterious entity creeping up on our iPhones like cancer. Soon they will all sync up with each other and then initiate the battle for world domination. Come to think about it, the iPhones of the world might make for a pretty good attack vector for alien aggressors. A lot of earth's elite is bound to carry one around. If you can disable all of them at once, the rest of the battle might a walk in the garden.
bkorte 14y ago
So, your device hit an edge case bug. Why aren't you talking to Apple? They'll have a fix for it, get you to bring it in or send it in. Worst case scenario your edge case cost you some data loss. That certainly doesn't mean their products are no longer easy to use.
- acuozzo 14y ago
  > Worst case scenario your edge case cost you some data loss. How is this __ever__ acceptable?
  - Wawl 14y ago
    Is it not possible to make backups of your iPhone ? (I do not own one).
    - waiwai933 14y ago
      A backup is automatically made every time you sync your iPhone to your computer. (You can also set it up to backup to iCloud instead of to your computer.) In theory, at least, it should be simple for the OP to restore his phone from backup.
    - pooriaazimi 14y ago
      Every time you plug your iThing to your Mac/Windows it backs it up. And as of iOS 5 you don't even have to plug it in. They only have to be on the same network and the device automatically backs it up daily. Oh, and if you feel nervous, you can right click on the iThing in iTunes and select backup to manually backup again.
  - bkorte 14y ago
    I shouldn't have used the words data loss. Of course it isn't, but he should have backups of his iPhone.
    - lwhi 14y ago
      If you'd correctly assimilated the contents of the Genius training manual you wouldn't have made that mistake ;-)
- eckyptang 14y ago
  a) Apple won't fix anything if you tell them from experience. b) No data loss is acceptable. Any data loss is simply "product doesn't work".
  - se85 14y ago
    b) No data loss is acceptable. Any data loss is simply "product doesn't work". So Windows XP never worked for me because of all the blue screens of death where I lost data from time to time? Consumer grade technology can and does lose data, too bad! but its the reality we have to live with for now until better hardware/software floods the consumer market that handles the data loss problem at an enterprise level. In this day and age, if you lose data because you didn't take the necessary backup precautions, I don't see that as being Microsoft or Apple's fault, it's your fault!
    - Zak 14y ago
      A lot of people did consider Windows 9x unusable because of problems with stability and reliability. XP Mostly fixed those problems, though it did get off to a bit of a rough start.
      - se85 14y ago
        I do remember those days, and 9x to XP was a big upgrade so I'm sure they fixed some of the issues however It was not until Vista that Microsoft finally fixed the memory management architecture that was a large source of the blue screens of death messages in XP. I'm not sure how similar the architecture was in this respect between 9x and XP, so I'm not sure exactly what was and wasn't fixed during this upgrade. I do know that in my own experiences across dozens and dozens of windows xp powered machines across many different companies who unfortunately still use XP, blue screens of death still run rampant, and if not a blue screen of death, then the screen randomly freezing or apps randomly crashing and taking your data with you.
        eckyptang 14y ago
        It's not a memory management issue. It's because poorly written kernel mode drivers could piss all over memory at will. If the drivers were WHQL cert, they won't do that. Cheap ass kit with b-grade hardware (realtek, cheap gateway and no brand machines) will just bring you pain. Buy a Dell optiplex or precision series machine or a Lenovo laptop and it'd be bomb proof both software and hardware wise. 9x and XP are two completely different operating systems with different kernels and some shared userland. You need to find someone to fix all that i.e. buy some decent hardware - it's not normal.
vosper 14y ago
Welcome to Microsoft's world in the early/mid nineties - turns out software isn't as simple as we thought, and when you become really popular the 0.01% of turns out to be a lot of actual disaffected customers.
DHowett 14y ago
"I restored my phone" => "I lost all my apps and data": Did you not back it up? Did you not restore that backup? iTunes warns you that it will erase your phone and reset it to factory settings. "I can't hit the tiny search button": Have you tried scrolling to the top of the list? The index bar's magnifying class is a mnemonic identifying that "the search is at the top of the list." When you scroll up there, in fact, it's shown at the top of the list. You can disable keyboards you don't want. You can disable any keyboard you want save for the one tied to your phone's language. Why is Kanji even enabled if you don't want it there? Keyboards do not just turn themselves on (except when the phone's language has changed, but we do not see herein a rant about the phone suddenly displaying everything in Japanese.) The other concerns outlined are honestly valid, these simply stuck out to me as being more than a little absurd. It wouldn't be a rant if it didn't involve every problem, no matter how insignificant, of which you could possibly think (and that's not necessarily a bad thing.)
- sohamsankaran 14y ago
  I suspect that in the author's situation, with "thousands of contacts" in his list, scrolling to the top might be a rather time consuming enterprise. And of course you can disable keyboards you don't want, but the author seems to be questioning the purpose of having the Internationalization button in a prime (and extremely accidental-touch prone location) on the keyboard at all.
  - DHowett 14y ago
    I won't say that any of these are particularly discoverable, but there are a couple solutions to the contact search issue - one is to tap the stausbar, which scrolls directly to the top of the list, and the other is to use the letter-index on the side, as the entire region is a high-speed thumbscroller (tap anywhere, fling to top). The internationalization button certainly does suck when and only when keyboards you do not want to use are activated, however. :P
    - p0ppe 14y ago
      I regularly write in three different languages and use emoji. The internationalization button is a godsend.
eckyptang 14y ago
I'd agree. This is the sort of stuff that lead to me dumping my MacBook in 2009. I found that most of OS X worked pretty well and the UI looked good, but when it came down to actually being consistent and productive, it fell over pretty quickly. There were a lot of nuances and rather basic problems which got in the way of literally everything I did from my iPod not playing certain mp3s (very frustrating!) to import and export problems in iWork, automator deadlocking, iCal losing data, Mail sending emtpy messages. I had some hardware problems as well (not charging and cable fraying after about a month) and while they dealt with them instantly, they shouldn't have occured. Not a great experience. I've switched to Lenovo and Windows and everything pretty much just works.
- tsahyt 14y ago
  I'll risk a downvote for a non-constructive comment now, but I have to say this. "switched to [..] Windows and everything pretty much just works". That sentence pretty much just beat OSX with its own slogan!
  - w1ntermute 14y ago
    Windows 7 really does just work. I don't know why more web developers don't try it when files are usually stored/executed on a remote Linux server anyway. The Lenovo X1 Carbon is a great example of a solid device.
    - WiseWeasel 14y ago
      WAMP is a pain in my ass. If I have to do my dev work in a VM just to get my dev environment to somewhat match my deployment environment, that's a problem. MAMP for web development is where it's at, or LAMP if you can swing it.
      - w1ntermute 14y ago
        > WAMP is a pain in my ass. Did I ever say to use WAMP or run a VM? I said to run everything remotely. Just set up a Samba share on the Linux server and mount it on the Windows machine. My SSH client of choice is KiTTY[0], though there are obviously a million options out there. Then you can use whatever editor you want. I usually use Notepad++, but Vim, Sublime Text, etc. are available. 0: http://kitty.9bis.com/ http://kitty.9bis.com/
ghshephard 14y ago
I've read the article front to back twice. Carefully - and I'm still not 100% certain whether it's a troll, or for real. The interesting thing is, many of this persons problems come from Apple trying to support multiple platforms, instead of locking the person into a single unified environment. Others (like iPhoto starting to suck after 10,000 pictures) were an issue in the first couple releases - but it's not uncommon for people to have north of 100,000 photos, and get reasonable performance in recent releases. The difficulty hitting the search magnifying glass was interesting - I wasn't even aware that magnifying glass existed. You normally just scroll to the top - now I can do it faster. But - it makes sense - what's just one above the letter "A" - the search icon. All in all - I'm believing it's an article whose genesis was a user who got hit by an edgecase/bug on their iPhone, and then turned it into a generic rant about all things Apple. But the problems this person are having do seem to make it clear to me why, if anything, the OS X platform / iPhone are too flexible. There are lots (lots!) of users out there who would trade some of that flexibility for more predictable performance/ease of use. And thus, Sandboxing.
- fauigerzigerk 14y ago
  So do you really think that Mac Mail, Calendar and Adress Book are good tools for poeple who have a lot of mails, appointments and contacts? I'm not so much complaining about Apple's software as I am quietly accepting of the fact that Apple makes pretty consumer gadgets not tools for professionals. Actually, I think it's a good thing that Apple's software is unsuitable for intensive use. It leaves space for actual software developers (us) to provide that.
  - taligent 14y ago
    I have 120,000 messages in Mail with 5 accounts going back about 6 years and about 20+ smart mailboxes. Mail was one part of OSX I never actually had any problems with.
    - overcyn 14y ago
      I am jealous. 10000 messages and it very often takes 5+ seconds to switch between smart mailboxes. Admittedly the smart mailbox filters I have set up are pretty crazy but still... It's not like email metadata changes. The results should be cached.
sohamsankaran 14y ago
Several of the article's points really resonate, specifically the ones concerning iPhoto, the Internationalization 'feature' of iOS and iChat/iMessage. It does seem, to me, that Apple has begun to sacrifice usability at the altar of aesthetics, or worse, are unable to engineer stable and resilient applications.
- deleted 14y ago
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se85 14y ago
I understand the authors experiences and how that may have tarnished his thoughts on Apple products. Under normal operating conditions however which applies to the majority of iOS users out there, iOS is just as easy to use as it was when it first came out, it really hasn't changed that much from a UX point of view at all. In regards to his gripes with OSX, well.... It is silly to expect any OS to be magical, even an Apple one. From a UX point of view it is better than every other OS, but from a package management point of view, Debian/Ubuntu is far superior to OSX and from a hardware support point of view, Windows beats both of them. It seems the author wants the perfect OS, where problems never happen, unfortunately it doesn't exist yet, and it may never exist! In the meantime, if you specifically want "ease of use", regardless of the authors troubles, your best bet for the meantime is the Apple ecosystem.
pooriaazimi 14y ago
> Have you ever done a search in your iPhone contacts? You need the fingers of a poorly fed six-year-old to activate that search function. No, really, I must waste four or five minutes a day trying to make that damn thing work. > Seriously, how can an adult finger ever touch that little search icon without either hitting the “A” or the “+”???? You're not supposed to touch the minuscule magnifying button; you're supposed to drag the content down to display the search button. This is standard in iOS (almost all system apps do this, and thanks to the "rubber banding" effect it must be pretty damn easy to discover. But I think the fact that the OP hasn't discovered such a basic thing proves his point that maybe apple products aren't so easy to use anymore! (Though I personally disagree wholeheartedly. It's anecdotal so I don't get into that)
perfunctory 14y ago
I really wonder why don't we see any new PC platforms coming to the market. Where are all the startups taking on Microsoft and Apple? And by new I don't mean Linux.
- nihonjon 14y ago
  I really hope Valve takes them on in some shape or form, even if it's their own flavor of Linux. Then Windows will be good for just Microsoft Office. And that's it. http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/07/steams-newell-windows-8-catastrophe-driving-valve-to-embrace-linux/ http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/07/steams-newell-windows-...
  - ajanuary 14y ago
    Much as I love Valve, Steams usability is pretty poor. I wouldn't trust them to make good OS X replacement any time soon.
- hoi 14y ago
  Maybe they are but they can't get the distribution to hardware or ecosystem to develop apps for it. Most PCs are sold with the OS pre-installed. As for mobile... there is still hopes for plenty of competition. Jolla Mobile being one of the future hopes created out of the remnants of the Nokia Meego team.
- cheald 14y ago
  ChromeOS is one very conspicuous example. Android is also beginning to make inroads in hybrid computing use cases. Both of those are Linux kernels, though. The more conclusive answer, though, is that writing OSes is hard. Just look at Linux - driver issues due to lack of hardware manufacturer support is practically expected. Any startup has to deal with a tremendous barrier to entry in hardware compatibility that neither Microsoft (for whose operating system practically all non-Mac hardware is made) or Apple (who actually produces the hardware that their software runs on), and experience makes it pretty clear that they aren't likely to get it right for a very long time. Windows got the vast majority of its "buggy and crashy" reputation from crappy third-party device drivers, because as it turns out, doing compatibility for however many millions of hardware profiles is Really Freaking Hard. Apple sidestepped that issue by not even trying (ever try to build a Hackintosh?) and just limiting their target profiles to a known set, much like the console manufacturers. Anyone that wanted to challenge them would either need to be in the hardware business, or develop relationships with hardware vendors that would get them preferential treatment that Linux developers haven't been able to get for decades, and that's not going to happen without a truly obscene amount of capital.
richardw 14y ago
I think it's a case of optimization. You can either build a handles-all-situations MS-Office, or you can optimize for an 80/20. When your feature set grows out of the 80/20 you run into issues. For me, a perfect example is locking/unlocking the pivot on the iPhone by double-clicking the home button, sliding the bottom bar rightwards, clicking an icon with a turny-lock on it. That's total madness, but I understand how it got there. When I finally discovered that I mailed all my iPhone-owning friends, none who knew the trick. Similarly, killing apps that remain in memory. Double-click home, hold down one of the icons until all the in-memory apps show a (-), then delete each of them. Granny will never get that. I'd personally like a settings page that just lets me set a default on/off for in-memory for each app so I don't have to keep cleaning up apps that want to use GPS and memory. So, rather than having 10 buttons on your iPhone you now have one button and have to use morse-code to tell the thing what you want. Rather than an ugly screen menu, you have to use Google to figure out how to take a screenshot or un-lock the swivel. When all you have is a home-button, everything looks like a nail. Or something. I've made similar optimizations/(later possible "mistakes") myself. I tend to put a lot of effort into few features to do exactly what's required, but that always has to be balanced with possible future feature expectations. It's possible to paint myself into a corner with that, so I often think "is this app meant to be 'tight' like an Apple app, or should I optimize for extensibility?"
- robryan 14y ago
  I knew about the double click and clearing apps from memory, never thought to look off to the left of the list though. Good to know, thanks.
- minikites 14y ago
  Those aren't necessarily apps that remain in memory. The first few might be, but not if they haven't been used in a while. The rest of the entries are merely a list of recently used apps that are neither using processor time nor in memory. http://speirs.org/blog/2012/1/2/misconceptions-about-ios-multitasking.html http://speirs.org/blog/2012/1/2/misconceptions-about-ios-mul...
  - richardw 14y ago
zaptheimpaler 14y ago
Absolutely. Apple always has, and always will cater to extremely simplistic use cases. Apple products are a lot like a conspicuously clean room - dont look around too much and you'll be fine, but the second you open that bulging cupboard, all the shit piled in there comes crashing down on you. I still think that Mac OS (not necessarily iOS) is much much more reliable and has a better UI than Windows, but this brings to light an important point. Apple's software tends to have a lot of nasty little edge cases that you run into (and not as a power user either). Its also unfair to marginalize the view point as a minority (for example, until recently, you couldn't even properly set up google calendar to work with multiple calendars on iOS. the issue about a 19 GB other is definitely not an uncommon occurrence either). Further, its not functionality being sacrificed for aesthetics. It's aesthetics being prioritized over functionality consistently leading to bugs which we have to put up with for years.
chalst 14y ago
Case in point: my last purchase of Apple hardware was a Mac Mini in December 2010. Nice installation, I like Time Machine. Max OS X Server is obviously a broken product, but there is a BSD-like OS underneath so no problem. Two weeks later internet connection dies. After spending huge amounts of time investigating all kinds of things that seem that they might be relevant, I use the Time Machine "revert OS to a previous state" option and it works again. I spend more time on support forums, &c, and find out more about how to diagnose problems with the wireless, in case it happens again, which it does, 2 weeks later. With this new-found knowledge, I figure out that the firewall is blocking DHCP lease renewal, a problem easily fixed with an ipfw command. Every two weeks since then, 30 or so times, I guess, the same thing happens, and I have to fix this. I have stopped trying to understand why my installation of OSX seems to think it should periodically block DHCP lease renewal. It's my impression that, based on my experience trying to find help, that the Mac OS user world is different to that for Linux or Windows in that the people who get known as Mac OS experts generally don't have much in the way of detailed knowledge of what the OS does at initialise (despite Singh's out-of-date documentation of that in Max OSX Internals), how to query device state, &c, but instead have cookery book knowledge of things like tricks you can do with the defaults command. And this seems to be the way that Apple likes it. They make a polished product that you are not meant to mess with in ways they did not anticipate, with the OS exposing a limited API.
- taligent 14y ago
  > with the OS exposing a limited API. Can you be more specific ? OSX's problem for me is that it exposes too many APIs (FS/BSD/Carbon/Cocoa) which can overlap in odd scenarios e.g. accessing the AddressBook.
  - chalst 14y ago
    I only dabble with OSX internals so it is not much more than an impression, but when I try to dig deep, I find that not much of the internals is on display. And I should say, by "exposing", I really mean "documenting" - clearly there are people who do know the internals well, they are just not sharing their "how to" knowledge much. For example, OSX has the library com.apple.iokit.IO80211Family which provides the interface to its wifi hardware. It is completely undocumented. By contrast, Linux has the internals completely exposed because we have the liberally documented source and lots of open developer mailing lists, while MSDN has literally thousands of pages with documentation and developer discussions about hacking and developing drivers to fit into and make use of the Windows 802.11 interface.
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sgdesign 14y ago
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, Apple's products are the hardest to use, except for all the other product out there...
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jpxxx 14y ago
Much of this is dopey nonsense but he's correctly describing a few Real Problems. -- iOS devices blowing their asset layout and 'Othering' out is a Real Problem that used to happen far too often. The only fix beyond a backup+restore is to remove and re-add photos and music. If that doesn't work? Time to restore up to 60GB over USB2! Whee. Good luck explaining this to mom. -- The built in Mac applications and frameworks are frightfully poor - it's unacceptable from a company that prides itself on quality. SyncServices is still a flaming travesty, Mail.app spontaneously corrupts messages and passwords, Spotlight can die in twenty different ways, iCal is a UI disaster, Address Book has completely broken sync options... the list goes on and on and on. Of all of these, I think Mail is the absolute worst. Three total rewrites and it's still neurotic on a good day. -- iPhoto is goddamn slow. No matter what, no matter where, no matter when. iOS is an order of magnitude more usable for two orders of magnitude more people with an order of magnitude fewer issues and two orders of magnitude fewer things to go wrong that makes an order of magnitude more money for them. So I think that's where he Lion's share (haha) of Apple's QA is spent. Sadly, I fear OS X will never receive that same level of care.
- pagejim 14y ago
  Hi, I am not an iPhone user, but if what you have described above are problems that a significant number of iPhone users face, then I am pretty surprised/disappointed. All of these would be hampering user experience ( something Apple excels at ) irrespective of whether the user is a casual one or a heavy one. Also, if these problems are easily reproducible and quite prevalent, isn't Apple solving these in upcoming upgrades? In other words, they must be getting some kind of feedback/bug-reports and these problems should surely have to be part of that.
  - jpxxx 14y ago
    Given its financial performance, I can only imagine that iOS's quality is priority #0, #1, and #2 through 10 at Apple. From an anecdotal perspective, it has all gotten a great deal better over the years.
  - entropy_ 14y ago
    Those are mostly problems with Mac OSX(except the storage issue on the iPhone).
ajanuary 14y ago
The search actually has the largest touch area of all the letters, because it extends to the top of the pane. There are a lot of ways to get there: * Tap the status bar, which takes you to the to of most scrollable areas. * Be conservative, if you accidentally hit A, scroll up. * Hold your finger down on the letters to activate scrubbing mode, then slide your finger to the top. I'm not saying they're all perfect usability wise, but picking out search as a small touch target seems a little odd to me. But then I've probably spent a lot longer than most obsessing over every pixel and touch target of the UI. To me it seems like a trade off. Is searching contacts important enough to have a big button for? Where would you put it without completely overhauling the iOS UI? Is it of more or equal importance than any of the current elements? Admittedly annecdotal, but I see far more people scrubbing to the first letter of the contact and flicking through the list, because typing takes time (though a 'hard to find/activate' search feature might contribute to that). It seems to me putting it where it is allows for a good cross-platform solution to an unobtrusive search function.
forgottenpaswrd 14y ago
This is like saying that my car is not easy to use as a bus for carrying 50 people. (In Africa you see cars with 15 people onboard). If you have 10.000 photos and thousands of contacts you are not a normal user anymore, you are a pro and you need pro tools. I have tens of times more big photos in my computers, and huge videos but I don't use Iphoto, this would be so non sense, Iphoto would make a local copy of everything it touches, like iTunes. Apple is selling this thing called iPads like hotcakes because the intended audience is normal people, people that can't use a pc, like my father, who are much much more than those that can.
Derbasti 14y ago
I am still using OSX, and modestly enjoying it. But I feel the same way the author does. (Here is my list of complaints: http://bastibe.de/how-apple-is-failing-me.html http://bastibe.de/how-apple-is-failing-me.html ) Still, I find that OSX is a fine environment to run Unix software. Most of my computer interaction these days revolves around Emacs, a terminal and a web browser. Which is fine. It is a nice system. But really, I used to feel that OSX had a certain elegance to it that other OSes lacked. And that feeling is fading. Thus, I doubt that my next computer will come with an Apple logo. And incidentally, neither will my next smartphone or tablet. Sad.
- taligent 14y ago
  Sure. I thoroughly look forward to you trying out Ubuntu 12.04 and Windows 8 and seeing how they compare. I think you will find that both are orders of magnitude worse than OSX. Why ? Because from a UI perspective both are complete rewrites and are reminiscent of 10.0 beta. Lot of potential but a lot of polish required as well.
  - Derbasti 14y ago
    I know and use both Ubuntu and Windows regularly. At the moment, OSX is still my operating system of choice mainly because the hardware is seriously great. The OS itself is becoming more and more awkward to me.
  - manaskarekar 14y ago
    Ubuntu is not the only option. Look into tons of other great distros including the excellent Lubuntu. And I personally feel Windows 7 is a golden OS. Have to agree with you about Windows 8.
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  - recoiledsnake 14y ago
unabridged 14y ago
iOS has never been about easy to use, its been about hard to fuck up. I find it hard to believe that so many people who use windows but own an iphone/ipad are afraid of a filesystem. You show them a commercial where you plug an android phone/tablet in, then you are instantly dragging and dropping files just like a thumb drive without having to sync, then they are opening up an excel file using preinstalled open office (or for commericals airing on the internet maybe a video file being played using preinstalled vlc). Say the words "out of the box", no extra cost for these apps. If HTC and/or Samsung threw a hanful of programmers at porting open source apps to android and started this kind of advertising, iOS would be on the way out quickly.
rickmb 14y ago
Even though I'm a big Apple fanboy, I have to admit I avoid using Apple's desktop applications. The one exception is Mail.app, but even there I'm always eagerly looking for any possible alternative. iPhoto, Addressbook, iCal, none of those have ever appealed to me, and I've always use (mostly web-based) alternatives. And enough has already been said over the years over that piece of bloatware called iTunes. So as far as I'm concerned, this isn't something new. IMO, with some rare exceptions, Apple has never been very good at application software.
npguy 14y ago
I think the issue is that user expectations have gone way up, and that results in disappointments that get amplified when coupled with frustrations.
angelortega 14y ago
That's another myth. Apple products had never been easy to use. iTunes is heavy and cumbersome and play lists never work as expected. Wheel iPods had erratic behaviour and its random/shuffling were crap. And please don't start talking about XCode and development in general. Things have worsen these times. "Acceptably understandable" is not the same as "easy".
nicholassmith 14y ago
I've been a Mac user for nearly a decade (and now I feel old), which isn't as long as some people but a bit longer than others and if I'm honest I have to agree with many things. OS X has been through a couple of really big leaps really, which whilst I think were necessary they've come at a great cost in terms of usability. I'm going to pick on one Apple application for a minute, XCode. I used XCode on Tiger, on a very late model iBook and did my final year uni project on it and it was great. It was a genuinely good, solid and stable IDE, very easy to use and very easy to navigate and work with. Then incrementally it started acquiring new functionality that was needed, then the UI changes started coming in, then more functionality, then more UI and also in a cycle it kept amassing additional cruft. It's now a lot more difficult to use, a lot more overbearing. This is kind of where the entire platform is starting to shift, Apple has been forced to jump the platform ahead but it's trying too many clever things and adding more and more functionality at the expense of usability. I still think it's one of the nicer operating systems and I'm not going to be switching anytime soon, but it's definitely not as gloriously user friendly as it used to be. In my opinion, different strokes for different folks after all.
- wsc981 14y ago
  Well, if you compare Xcode with Visual Studio or Eclipse, I'd say Xcode is a lot easier to use. The UI is a lot more streamlined, much less buttons for example. And I wonder if you've used Xcode back when it was called Project Builder. In my experience Project Builder also had a more complex UI than Xcode. But if you're looking for a good alternative to Xcode, perhaps AppCode is a nice replacement? http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/ http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/
  - nicholassmith 14y ago
    Oh it's definitely nicer than VS or Eclipse or NetBeans or the many other IDEs with crap design and poor layouts and even worse stability, but it's still gotten worse over the period of time I've been using it. I'll still use it as it's still significantly better than most IDEs, but I do hope they take some time to refine it again. I missed Project Builder, it was just slightly before my time so I won't comment too much on that.
willholloway 14y ago
What Apple really gets right is it's hardware. The Macbook Air is in my opinion the best laptop on the market. The touch pad really shines. Apple gets the hardware support perfect. That's where its greatness ends for me. OS X is just not as good for developers as Debian sid. Debian wins for me hands down for three simple reasons: 1. Package management. With apt I can install any open source tool with one command, and update my entire system with another. Homebrew is a good effort, but just isn't nearly as good. 2. With Debian I can install any window manager I like without hack jobs. I like ratpoison because its simple and gets out of my way. 3. As a python hacker I like to develop on a system that is nearly identical to the server I deploy my code on. That is why I work in Debian. I need OS X to run the hardware, but that is all. I do everything besides watch Netflix inside a virtualbox Debian sid install.
- gregsq 14y ago
  Whether the hardware is right depends on the usage. In my case I've found the hardware terribly inadequate for what I need to do. I have an early 2011 MacBook pro, and it has proved to be incredibly frustrating for me as a general purpose computing platform. The main issue is lack of inputs, removal of inputs, and a lack of options for inputs. Having only two USB2 ports, removal of ExpressCard34 slots used for third party hard drive adapters on the 15", and a thunderbolt port largely unusable by the cost conscious makes shuffling things quite painful. Some usage paths lead backwards. For example, video editors using a MacBook pro 15 who used the ExpressCard34 for sata drives lost that capability with the upgrade. You had two ways to go, either downgrade to FireWire 800, which was still available, and if the reduction in transfer speed was acceptable, or try and find a thunderbolt setup that was both cost effective and mature. Good luck on that! If you went the FireWire path, the next model from 2012 left you needing a thunderbolt adapter, as the FireWire port was dropped. They are quite well built, but they certainly have shortcomings.
Hari_Seldon 14y ago
Apple products are as good and better than they have always been, the problem is that users now have this entitled attitude and nothing is good enough for them. Witness the tech press' reaction to the iPhone 5, they're bored because it doesn't look new, irrespective of it's actual merits. it's very tedious and a shame to see this attitude here on HN, where the discussion threads were usually more considered and the level of debate generally higher.
bede 14y ago
Does anyone else feel that OS X has gone downhill since Snow Leopard? I can sympathise with much if not all of what this guy is saying. My Aunt recently bought a new Mac, not really knowing how to use OS X. I'm pretty familiar with most versions of OS X, but found myself struggling to justify to her the usefulness of quite a lot of the UI mechanics of the OS. What annoyed me the most was that the parts of the OS she found most confusing seemed almost universally to have been introduced since 10.6. The 10.7+ habit of remembering open windows seemed to flummox my Aunt and continues to irritate me on a daily basis. "But I closed that window, why has it come back?" Take Mission Control. Exposé was incredibly simple conceptually and worked very well for most people. I don't hate Mission Control, but explaining its workings to my Aunt was somewhat difficult, and I'm still not convinced that it's better than Exposé. I feel like a lot of the simplicity that originally attracted me to OS X has been convoluted recently. And don't get me started on stability, performance and skeuomorphism...
- city41 14y ago
  I agree, Snow Leopard was my favorite. I'd like to go back to it but I have a retina display, so Lion and up it is for me. As for remembering open windows, which is indeed very annoying, you can turn it off at System Preferences > General > Close windows when quitting an application
- jvm 14y ago
  The day I went back to Snow Leopard I realized that the only thing I miss from [Mountain] Lion is the non-ugly scrollbars. Everything else was just better.
- corporalagumbo 14y ago
  Well said. I completely agree. They just keep hammering stuff into the same old WIMP interface and making it more and more contorted. Microsoft has the right idea I think with Windows 8. Apple no longer seems to know what to do with usability.
randv 14y ago
finding the search on contacts has never been easy on iphone!
headShrinker 14y ago
Intuitive design is a myth. This idea that a company could build something that is just simply better for everyone is a fallacy. Apple products, considering their competition, are really good and believe it or not, cost effective. However, some people do things that certain systems don't like. This isn't the users fault. They were not considered in the design of the software. Over 1,000 contacts; sorry. iWork and want to export your workflow to other suite; sorry. Music collection and you want to tag and organize in a way that iTunes wasn't designed to do; sorry. I have been professionally troubleshooting Mac and PC computers for 13 years, and I have seen it all. One of my clients had 10,000 messages... in his inbox. Mac Mail would launch and freeze. Beach ball. This idea that you don't have to do maintenance to a computer was started by Apple, and it's a fallacy too. Apple has done a better job of assembling a set of well rounded tools for the average man, go out side of average and you are on your own. But then you are were you would be on any other platform. iPhoto not doing it anymore? Picasa. iTunes not doing it? Winamp or Songbird for mac. Mac Mail not doing it? thunderbird. Safari? Chrome. I used to have an iPod 60GB and it would about every 4 month get harddrive corruption, then I would have wipe and transfer 60GB via USB. It would take hours. I haven't corrupted my iPhone yet. I don't rock the boat, I try to stay average. I don't change default settings unless its to turn off face recognition or auto-copy. That being said, I have GBs of email going back 6 years (another 6y archived), a 12,000 song 70GB library, and 60GB Aperture library. While I have had my problems, I have never had catastrophic loss, and it works. I am at a loss with all of this ragging. I know there are problem with programs, but that is the essence of programs, no one size fits all.
smoyer 14y ago
One of the comments says "I have been developing my own theory that Apple products are the technological equivalent to junk food, psychologically fattening an already physically obese populace." If you have a completely bullet-proof OS and your applications are solid, locking down the system should ultimately make it easier for the user. As soon as there are even minor flaws, locking the system down is going to keep the user from helping themselves. I don't think this phenomena only applies to Apple products, there are similar issues with Android phones and even those of us creating web applications can create systems that frustrate our users. If you're putting a wall between a user and their data/assets, you could be next.
PaulHoule 14y ago
I've slowly fallen out of love with MacOS X. The final straw was when I installed Mountain Lion and a number of highly annoying things started to happen. (For instance, on reboot it would try to restart the game which switched the video mode to something my HDTV won't read) Since then I've been booting it into Windows 7, and honestly I think Windows 7 has a better GUI than Mac OS. I'll grant that bash is better than CMD.EXE. In terms of bulls--t per mile on the desktop, I think Windows today does better than anything else, and it gets much better with Win8. There's really a pervasive attitude in Mac software that I don't like. When I first used iMovie it took me a long time to figure out how to turn off the "Ken Burns Effect", which automatically applies zooms and pans to photos you add to a video. I'll grant it's a nice feature to have, but I feel that my creativity is disrespected when the default is turn on all the gimmicks.
- manaskarekar 14y ago
  I'm probably being a simpleton here, but are you aware of cygwin? It's not the same as a terminal, but it's really useful. http://www.cygwin.com/ http://www.cygwin.com/
  - falcolas 14y ago
    I would also recommend learning PowerShell. Your knowledge of bash will not help you through it, but it's easily as powerful as bash, and native to the Windows environment.
    - rbanffy 14y ago
      The problem with PowerShell is that it's a Windows thing. Whatever you learn will only be useful on Windows and everything you develop with it will tie you further to the platform (and make it harder for you to move on once something better for you appears) Seriously, it's much smarter to just install Cygwin and forget about Windows-only solutions. You are probably going to deploy whatever you develop on Unix-like servers anyway...
  - mmagin 14y ago
tacogordito 14y ago
I was really disappointed when Apple started making their IPod's into touch screens. When I'm going for a run or walking around with my ipod in my pocket, theres nothing i despise more than pulling out my ipod, having to tap the specific spots of the screen 3 times just so i can skip to the next song. The click wheel used to be very easy to use. I could skip songs without taking it out of my pocket.
padobson 14y ago
Recent Story: My 8 year old has an iPad that was setup by her and her grandmother. She recently had it replaced at the Apple Store because of a busted WIFI antenna. A few days ago, she wanted to buy the 2.99 version of Draw Something. I happened to have a iTunes gift card worth 15 dollars. I opened her iTunes account on the iPad, punched in the gift card code, and the money was added to her account without ceremony. So she goes to buy Draw Something,and 15 minutes later I hear "It's not working." I figure she must have broken something, so I take the iPad from her and click the 2.99 Draw Something button to download the app. This is where the fun begins. The App store asks for the username and password. We entered both. Then it tells us that the iTunes account has not been activated on the iPad, so we need to answer two security questions - I look at my daughter and my wife and only get blank expressions. I call my mother-in-law and she doesn't know either. So the next step is to reset the password by sending an email to a failsafe account - some AOL email address that nobody can access either. Normally, at this point, I would just say we screwed up and start a new iTunes account - but why in the hell did they let us put the 15 dollar gift card on the account if they weren't going to let us do anything until the account was activated? Epic fail.
- driverdan 14y ago
  So let me get this straight. You lost your account password, your email password, and your security questions and somehow Apple is at fault for making it easy to add gift cards to your account?
  - nchlswu 14y ago
    To be fair to the parent, this was setup by the daughter and the grandmother. In Apple's current world, a case like this is hardly farfetched. I don't think this a weird edge case that I Apple overlooks or one you can blame on the user since it's one of Apple's key markets
  - padobson 14y ago
    That is not straight. We had the correct username and password. We lost the security questions. It asked us for neither when we wanted to redeem gift cards, and then wanted answers to the security questions after we had already given it the correct username and password before we could purchase anything using the gift card money. If it's going to inconvenience me to spend the gift card money, then it should do it before I redeem the card so that the card money isn't trapped within the account if the account is currently inaccessible. --edit Accounts are pretty broken on iOS in general. I once logged into my appleID using my Dad's iPhone to download an app for him because he hadn't setup his own appleID yet. Later, he setup his appleID. The problem was, whenever he went to update his apps, it would ask for my appleID password when it wanted to update the app that I installed - only it didn't mention anywhere why it was asking for the password to my appleID. My account credentials did not appear anywhere else on the phone. We checked the settings, looked up things online, and even asked support. No idea why it was asking for my password. Eventually we traced the problem back to the update feature, and deleted a bunch of apps we thought I may have installed. It solved the problem and it doesn't prompt for my password anymore, but there was no way for us to know which app was causing the problem.
inthewoods 14y ago
I find iOS and the iPhone/iPad/iTunes interaction particularly frustrating - a case where it really should just work. Some of my issues: - Restoring from a backup does not, for some reason, does not consistently restore the folder structure - thus I spend an hour or two recreating the structure. Waste of time. - iCloud syncs a lot of things - but for some reason does not allow me to sync apps. There should be an easy way to do this such that if I buy an app on my iPhone (and it is compatible with my iPad) it should be synced. - Moving purchased music from one phone to another. Maybe somebody can enlighten me, but moving my iTunes purchased music from one device to another, as far as can tell, is still a stupid, manual process. - In general, iTunes should be in the cloud - when I buy a new device, I should be able to enter my account information and then have it automatically pull down all my stuff - and offer me choices for what I want to pull. To me this seems so basic. This is stuff that is all generated by the way my wife interacts with these technologies - and she gets very frustrated by the hoops that have to be jumped through to make it all work. Next week, I'm likely buying my wife an iPhone 4S (AT&T or Verizon - suggestions from anyone in the Boston area?) I'm not looking forward to getting her setup - I anticipate pain.
dr_ 14y ago
Just as a note to anyone with the same problem, I had difficulty renting a movie recently on my iPad because I was told I have no storage space available. This was unusual because I have hardly any photos on my iPad and almost no music. I later realized that movies that you rent, even after they expire, remain on your device and take up storage until you actually delete them.
costacoast 14y ago
I think he may be a bit more alarmist than I can agree with but I will definitely attest to the fact that Apple is having some serious UX growing pains as they try to accomodate the largest and most international user base they have had to date. Possibly the best one-liner comes from one of the comments: "I have been developing my own theory that Apple products are the technological equivalent to junk food, psychologically fattening an already physically obese populace. Like the Sun newspaper their products are encouraging us to be lazy and dumb down our intellectual capacities."
dev1n 14y ago
"This stuff is too complicated. There has to be a better way." and to the comment on the blog saying how Apple is our "junk food." Raspberry Pi might be the solution. It's literally a blank slate. Users, with some tech knowledge, have the ability to update and move stuff around without being dragged into an iCloud sort of mess. It's as clear as it gets IMO.
pnathan 14y ago
I don't have his problems. I have other problems, not as bad (I've started to wonder about that Other space on the iPhone too...). I think this could be all summed up as: Desktop OS's ain't tablet OSs. I don't like OSX Mountain Lion. I anticipate that 10.9 will be extra smartphoney, and I won't be upgrading. I will, however, be looking at well-designed Linux laptop solutions for my XFCE/Enlightenment needs.
lubujackson 14y ago
It's amazing to me the level of cognitive dissonance many Apple fans have. Like the script of how easy and simple to use everything is can be so unrelated to their actual experience. If you've ever gone to the "Genius Bar" for any reason, you've wasted more time with customer service than I have in the last 10 years of using PCs. The problem is, when you have an issue of any size with Apple, there is just no way to resolve it yourself without nuking your system. I'm sure there are 1000 reasons why I'm supposedly wrong or trolling or whatever, but that's MY experience with Apple, minus what Apple would have me believe.
- mitchty 14y ago
  The only time i've gone to a genius bar was to show them the dead pixels on a macbook pro. Got a new one right then too. Personal anecdotes are not data.
  - lubujackson 14y ago
    Sure they are. What would constitute data if not actual use cases? I'm not defending Windows or Linux as great alternatives, but at least "wipe and restore" is not the default answer to minor problems.
enraged_camel 14y ago
I was visiting home over summer, and my 85 year-old grandmother got a chance to use my iPad. I basically handed the device to her, went to the restroom, came back, and found her editing some photos of my sister she had just taken. She described the red-eye reduction feature as "magic." Seriously, if my 85 year-old grandma can figure this stuff out, then the author is an outlier. Apple devices are ridiculously easy to use. edit: gotta love it when people downvote without giving a reason. Must have hit a soft spot.
- danudey 14y ago
  I was tired of my mother always calling me for help with her laptop, so I bought her an iPad with 3G for Christmas. After two phone calls to get her into the swing of things, she's never called me for tech support again. She updates it when it tells her to, she uses it to navigate when she goes into town with her neighbour, she uses it to place orders for supplies when someone comes into her store to make a custom order. It's pretty great, all in all, and she's never once called me for help in two years.
Joeri 14y ago
From what I've noticed there are many apple issues experienced by a smallish set of users, which in aggregate affect many people, but not all with the same issues. For me the list is: (1) early deterioration of plastic in macbook, (2) wifi connectivity issues on leopard, (3) wifi connectivity issues on snow leopard, (4) unexplained time machine failures, (5) major performance issues on lion. And that's just for my macs. My ipad suffered from unexplained app crashes every ten minutes, which were due to memory shortage problems that i could only solve by disabling mail sync (i use purely gmail in the browser now). On the other side, with windows and android, i've had roughly the same amount of problems. In my experience, apple's stuff breaks as often, but has a different "feel".
shinratdr 14y ago
> Have you ever done a search in your iPhone contacts? You need the fingers of a poorly fed six-year-old to activate that search function. No, really, I must waste four or five minutes a day trying to make that damn thing work. > Seriously, how can an adult finger ever touch that little search icon without either hitting the “A” or the “+”???? Why exactly do I have a hard time believing someone this stupid would be as diligent as he claims to be in attempting to solve his issues? I'm supposed to simultaneously believe that he is competent enough to understand and solve a corruption issue, yet he can't figure out the single most discoverable gesture on any phone, "swipe down"? $20 says he restored his iPhone from the corrupted backup and then rushed off to write an article on the experience instead of performing the due diligence he claims he already has. Bullshit. Nobody has this kind of laundry list of whining complaints unless their actual motivation to solve problems is almost zero. He sounds like one of those people that put all Apple products on this ridiculous pedestal where they are shit if they cause you any frustration or confusion ever. Sorry, it's not magic. It's just a really nice computer. Expect some problems and issues, and expect to spend some time troubleshooting them. Just like any other machine on the planet. If your first thought when seeing a 4x4 icon on a high res 3.5 inch touchscreen is "Stupid Apple, how am I supposed to hit that!?" then you are looking for things to complain about instead of actively trying to improve your experience with the phone by, oh I don't know... learning things? Apple products are getting more complex and the older classics are getting bloated. There is an interesting discussion to be had on the topic. This isn't it. This couldn't be further from it. This article is basically just idiotic whining.

256 points by rkudeshi 14y ago

omi 14y ago

They have never been easy to use. You have to think in APPLE way, if you do that it probably makes sense.

Tichy 14y ago

"you’ll need to restore your iPhone to reclaim the space occupied by Other." I can't get the picture out of my mind, of some mysterious entity creeping up on our iPhones like cancer. Soon they will all sync up with each other and then initiate the battle for world domination. Come to think about it, the iPhones of the world might make for a pretty good attack vector for alien aggressors. A lot of earth's elite is bound to carry one around. If you can disable all of them at once, the rest of the battle might a walk in the garden.

bkorte 14y ago

So, your device hit an edge case bug. Why aren't you talking to Apple? They'll have a fix for it, get you to bring it in or send it in. Worst case scenario your edge case cost you some data loss. That certainly doesn't mean their products are no longer easy to use.

acuozzo 14y ago
> Worst case scenario your edge case cost you some data loss. How is this __ever__ acceptable?
- Wawl 14y ago
  Is it not possible to make backups of your iPhone ? (I do not own one).
  - waiwai933 14y ago
    A backup is automatically made every time you sync your iPhone to your computer. (You can also set it up to backup to iCloud instead of to your computer.) In theory, at least, it should be simple for the OP to restore his phone from backup.
  - pooriaazimi 14y ago
    Every time you plug your iThing to your Mac/Windows it backs it up. And as of iOS 5 you don't even have to plug it in. They only have to be on the same network and the device automatically backs it up daily. Oh, and if you feel nervous, you can right click on the iThing in iTunes and select backup to manually backup again.
- bkorte 14y ago
  I shouldn't have used the words data loss. Of course it isn't, but he should have backups of his iPhone.
  - lwhi 14y ago
    If you'd correctly assimilated the contents of the Genius training manual you wouldn't have made that mistake ;-)
eckyptang 14y ago
a) Apple won't fix anything if you tell them from experience. b) No data loss is acceptable. Any data loss is simply "product doesn't work".
- se85 14y ago
  b) No data loss is acceptable. Any data loss is simply "product doesn't work". So Windows XP never worked for me because of all the blue screens of death where I lost data from time to time? Consumer grade technology can and does lose data, too bad! but its the reality we have to live with for now until better hardware/software floods the consumer market that handles the data loss problem at an enterprise level. In this day and age, if you lose data because you didn't take the necessary backup precautions, I don't see that as being Microsoft or Apple's fault, it's your fault!
  - Zak 14y ago
    A lot of people did consider Windows 9x unusable because of problems with stability and reliability. XP Mostly fixed those problems, though it did get off to a bit of a rough start.
    - se85 14y ago
      I do remember those days, and 9x to XP was a big upgrade so I'm sure they fixed some of the issues however It was not until Vista that Microsoft finally fixed the memory management architecture that was a large source of the blue screens of death messages in XP. I'm not sure how similar the architecture was in this respect between 9x and XP, so I'm not sure exactly what was and wasn't fixed during this upgrade. I do know that in my own experiences across dozens and dozens of windows xp powered machines across many different companies who unfortunately still use XP, blue screens of death still run rampant, and if not a blue screen of death, then the screen randomly freezing or apps randomly crashing and taking your data with you.
      - eckyptang 14y ago
        It's not a memory management issue. It's because poorly written kernel mode drivers could piss all over memory at will. If the drivers were WHQL cert, they won't do that. Cheap ass kit with b-grade hardware (realtek, cheap gateway and no brand machines) will just bring you pain. Buy a Dell optiplex or precision series machine or a Lenovo laptop and it'd be bomb proof both software and hardware wise. 9x and XP are two completely different operating systems with different kernels and some shared userland. You need to find someone to fix all that i.e. buy some decent hardware - it's not normal.

vosper 14y ago

Welcome to Microsoft's world in the early/mid nineties - turns out software isn't as simple as we thought, and when you become really popular the 0.01% of turns out to be a lot of actual disaffected customers.

DHowett 14y ago

"I restored my phone" => "I lost all my apps and data": Did you not back it up? Did you not restore that backup? iTunes warns you that it will erase your phone and reset it to factory settings. "I can't hit the tiny search button": Have you tried scrolling to the top of the list? The index bar's magnifying class is a mnemonic identifying that "the search is at the top of the list." When you scroll up there, in fact, it's shown at the top of the list. You can disable keyboards you don't want. You can disable any keyboard you want save for the one tied to your phone's language. Why is Kanji even enabled if you don't want it there? Keyboards do not just turn themselves on (except when the phone's language has changed, but we do not see herein a rant about the phone suddenly displaying everything in Japanese.) The other concerns outlined are honestly valid, these simply stuck out to me as being more than a little absurd. It wouldn't be a rant if it didn't involve every problem, no matter how insignificant, of which you could possibly think (and that's not necessarily a bad thing.)

sohamsankaran 14y ago
I suspect that in the author's situation, with "thousands of contacts" in his list, scrolling to the top might be a rather time consuming enterprise. And of course you can disable keyboards you don't want, but the author seems to be questioning the purpose of having the Internationalization button in a prime (and extremely accidental-touch prone location) on the keyboard at all.
- DHowett 14y ago
  I won't say that any of these are particularly discoverable, but there are a couple solutions to the contact search issue - one is to tap the stausbar, which scrolls directly to the top of the list, and the other is to use the letter-index on the side, as the entire region is a high-speed thumbscroller (tap anywhere, fling to top). The internationalization button certainly does suck when and only when keyboards you do not want to use are activated, however. :P
  - p0ppe 14y ago
    I regularly write in three different languages and use emoji. The internationalization button is a godsend.

eckyptang 14y ago

I'd agree. This is the sort of stuff that lead to me dumping my MacBook in 2009. I found that most of OS X worked pretty well and the UI looked good, but when it came down to actually being consistent and productive, it fell over pretty quickly. There were a lot of nuances and rather basic problems which got in the way of literally everything I did from my iPod not playing certain mp3s (very frustrating!) to import and export problems in iWork, automator deadlocking, iCal losing data, Mail sending emtpy messages. I had some hardware problems as well (not charging and cable fraying after about a month) and while they dealt with them instantly, they shouldn't have occured. Not a great experience. I've switched to Lenovo and Windows and everything pretty much just works.

tsahyt 14y ago
I'll risk a downvote for a non-constructive comment now, but I have to say this. "switched to [..] Windows and everything pretty much just works". That sentence pretty much just beat OSX with its own slogan!
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  Windows 7 really does just work. I don't know why more web developers don't try it when files are usually stored/executed on a remote Linux server anyway. The Lenovo X1 Carbon is a great example of a solid device.
  - WiseWeasel 14y ago
    WAMP is a pain in my ass. If I have to do my dev work in a VM just to get my dev environment to somewhat match my deployment environment, that's a problem. MAMP for web development is where it's at, or LAMP if you can swing it.
    - w1ntermute 14y ago
      > WAMP is a pain in my ass. Did I ever say to use WAMP or run a VM? I said to run everything remotely. Just set up a Samba share on the Linux server and mount it on the Windows machine. My SSH client of choice is KiTTY[0], though there are obviously a million options out there. Then you can use whatever editor you want. I usually use Notepad++, but Vim, Sublime Text, etc. are available. 0: http://kitty.9bis.com/ http://kitty.9bis.com/

ghshephard 14y ago

I've read the article front to back twice. Carefully - and I'm still not 100% certain whether it's a troll, or for real. The interesting thing is, many of this persons problems come from Apple trying to support multiple platforms, instead of locking the person into a single unified environment. Others (like iPhoto starting to suck after 10,000 pictures) were an issue in the first couple releases - but it's not uncommon for people to have north of 100,000 photos, and get reasonable performance in recent releases. The difficulty hitting the search magnifying glass was interesting - I wasn't even aware that magnifying glass existed. You normally just scroll to the top - now I can do it faster. But - it makes sense - what's just one above the letter "A" - the search icon. All in all - I'm believing it's an article whose genesis was a user who got hit by an edgecase/bug on their iPhone, and then turned it into a generic rant about all things Apple. But the problems this person are having do seem to make it clear to me why, if anything, the OS X platform / iPhone are too flexible. There are lots (lots!) of users out there who would trade some of that flexibility for more predictable performance/ease of use. And thus, Sandboxing.

fauigerzigerk 14y ago
So do you really think that Mac Mail, Calendar and Adress Book are good tools for poeple who have a lot of mails, appointments and contacts? I'm not so much complaining about Apple's software as I am quietly accepting of the fact that Apple makes pretty consumer gadgets not tools for professionals. Actually, I think it's a good thing that Apple's software is unsuitable for intensive use. It leaves space for actual software developers (us) to provide that.
- taligent 14y ago
  I have 120,000 messages in Mail with 5 accounts going back about 6 years and about 20+ smart mailboxes. Mail was one part of OSX I never actually had any problems with.
  - overcyn 14y ago
    I am jealous. 10000 messages and it very often takes 5+ seconds to switch between smart mailboxes. Admittedly the smart mailbox filters I have set up are pretty crazy but still... It's not like email metadata changes. The results should be cached.

sohamsankaran 14y ago

Several of the article's points really resonate, specifically the ones concerning iPhoto, the Internationalization 'feature' of iOS and iChat/iMessage. It does seem, to me, that Apple has begun to sacrifice usability at the altar of aesthetics, or worse, are unable to engineer stable and resilient applications.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

se85 14y ago

I understand the authors experiences and how that may have tarnished his thoughts on Apple products. Under normal operating conditions however which applies to the majority of iOS users out there, iOS is just as easy to use as it was when it first came out, it really hasn't changed that much from a UX point of view at all. In regards to his gripes with OSX, well.... It is silly to expect any OS to be magical, even an Apple one. From a UX point of view it is better than every other OS, but from a package management point of view, Debian/Ubuntu is far superior to OSX and from a hardware support point of view, Windows beats both of them. It seems the author wants the perfect OS, where problems never happen, unfortunately it doesn't exist yet, and it may never exist! In the meantime, if you specifically want "ease of use", regardless of the authors troubles, your best bet for the meantime is the Apple ecosystem.

pooriaazimi 14y ago

perfunctory 14y ago

I really wonder why don't we see any new PC platforms coming to the market. Where are all the startups taking on Microsoft and Apple? And by new I don't mean Linux.

nihonjon 14y ago
I really hope Valve takes them on in some shape or form, even if it's their own flavor of Linux. Then Windows will be good for just Microsoft Office. And that's it. http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/07/steams-newell-windows-8-catastrophe-driving-valve-to-embrace-linux/ http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/07/steams-newell-windows-...
- ajanuary 14y ago
  Much as I love Valve, Steams usability is pretty poor. I wouldn't trust them to make good OS X replacement any time soon.
hoi 14y ago
Maybe they are but they can't get the distribution to hardware or ecosystem to develop apps for it. Most PCs are sold with the OS pre-installed. As for mobile... there is still hopes for plenty of competition. Jolla Mobile being one of the future hopes created out of the remnants of the Nokia Meego team.
cheald 14y ago
ChromeOS is one very conspicuous example. Android is also beginning to make inroads in hybrid computing use cases. Both of those are Linux kernels, though. The more conclusive answer, though, is that writing OSes is hard. Just look at Linux - driver issues due to lack of hardware manufacturer support is practically expected. Any startup has to deal with a tremendous barrier to entry in hardware compatibility that neither Microsoft (for whose operating system practically all non-Mac hardware is made) or Apple (who actually produces the hardware that their software runs on), and experience makes it pretty clear that they aren't likely to get it right for a very long time. Windows got the vast majority of its "buggy and crashy" reputation from crappy third-party device drivers, because as it turns out, doing compatibility for however many millions of hardware profiles is Really Freaking Hard. Apple sidestepped that issue by not even trying (ever try to build a Hackintosh?) and just limiting their target profiles to a known set, much like the console manufacturers. Anyone that wanted to challenge them would either need to be in the hardware business, or develop relationships with hardware vendors that would get them preferential treatment that Linux developers haven't been able to get for decades, and that's not going to happen without a truly obscene amount of capital.

richardw 14y ago

I think it's a case of optimization. You can either build a handles-all-situations MS-Office, or you can optimize for an 80/20. When your feature set grows out of the 80/20 you run into issues. For me, a perfect example is locking/unlocking the pivot on the iPhone by double-clicking the home button, sliding the bottom bar rightwards, clicking an icon with a turny-lock on it. That's total madness, but I understand how it got there. When I finally discovered that I mailed all my iPhone-owning friends, none who knew the trick. Similarly, killing apps that remain in memory. Double-click home, hold down one of the icons until all the in-memory apps show a (-), then delete each of them. Granny will never get that. I'd personally like a settings page that just lets me set a default on/off for in-memory for each app so I don't have to keep cleaning up apps that want to use GPS and memory. So, rather than having 10 buttons on your iPhone you now have one button and have to use morse-code to tell the thing what you want. Rather than an ugly screen menu, you have to use Google to figure out how to take a screenshot or un-lock the swivel. When all you have is a home-button, everything looks like a nail. Or something. I've made similar optimizations/(later possible "mistakes") myself. I tend to put a lot of effort into few features to do exactly what's required, but that always has to be balanced with possible future feature expectations. It's possible to paint myself into a corner with that, so I often think "is this app meant to be 'tight' like an Apple app, or should I optimize for extensibility?"

robryan 14y ago
I knew about the double click and clearing apps from memory, never thought to look off to the left of the list though. Good to know, thanks.
minikites 14y ago
Those aren't necessarily apps that remain in memory. The first few might be, but not if they haven't been used in a while. The rest of the entries are merely a list of recently used apps that are neither using processor time nor in memory. http://speirs.org/blog/2012/1/2/misconceptions-about-ios-multitasking.html http://speirs.org/blog/2012/1/2/misconceptions-about-ios-mul...
- richardw 14y ago

zaptheimpaler 14y ago

Absolutely. Apple always has, and always will cater to extremely simplistic use cases. Apple products are a lot like a conspicuously clean room - dont look around too much and you'll be fine, but the second you open that bulging cupboard, all the shit piled in there comes crashing down on you. I still think that Mac OS (not necessarily iOS) is much much more reliable and has a better UI than Windows, but this brings to light an important point. Apple's software tends to have a lot of nasty little edge cases that you run into (and not as a power user either). Its also unfair to marginalize the view point as a minority (for example, until recently, you couldn't even properly set up google calendar to work with multiple calendars on iOS. the issue about a 19 GB other is definitely not an uncommon occurrence either). Further, its not functionality being sacrificed for aesthetics. It's aesthetics being prioritized over functionality consistently leading to bugs which we have to put up with for years.

chalst 14y ago

Case in point: my last purchase of Apple hardware was a Mac Mini in December 2010. Nice installation, I like Time Machine. Max OS X Server is obviously a broken product, but there is a BSD-like OS underneath so no problem. Two weeks later internet connection dies. After spending huge amounts of time investigating all kinds of things that seem that they might be relevant, I use the Time Machine "revert OS to a previous state" option and it works again. I spend more time on support forums, &c, and find out more about how to diagnose problems with the wireless, in case it happens again, which it does, 2 weeks later. With this new-found knowledge, I figure out that the firewall is blocking DHCP lease renewal, a problem easily fixed with an ipfw command. Every two weeks since then, 30 or so times, I guess, the same thing happens, and I have to fix this. I have stopped trying to understand why my installation of OSX seems to think it should periodically block DHCP lease renewal. It's my impression that, based on my experience trying to find help, that the Mac OS user world is different to that for Linux or Windows in that the people who get known as Mac OS experts generally don't have much in the way of detailed knowledge of what the OS does at initialise (despite Singh's out-of-date documentation of that in Max OSX Internals), how to query device state, &c, but instead have cookery book knowledge of things like tricks you can do with the defaults command. And this seems to be the way that Apple likes it. They make a polished product that you are not meant to mess with in ways they did not anticipate, with the OS exposing a limited API.

taligent 14y ago
> with the OS exposing a limited API. Can you be more specific ? OSX's problem for me is that it exposes too many APIs (FS/BSD/Carbon/Cocoa) which can overlap in odd scenarios e.g. accessing the AddressBook.
- chalst 14y ago
  I only dabble with OSX internals so it is not much more than an impression, but when I try to dig deep, I find that not much of the internals is on display. And I should say, by "exposing", I really mean "documenting" - clearly there are people who do know the internals well, they are just not sharing their "how to" knowledge much. For example, OSX has the library com.apple.iokit.IO80211Family which provides the interface to its wifi hardware. It is completely undocumented. By contrast, Linux has the internals completely exposed because we have the liberally documented source and lots of open developer mailing lists, while MSDN has literally thousands of pages with documentation and developer discussions about hacking and developing drivers to fit into and make use of the Windows 802.11 interface.

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sgdesign 14y ago

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, Apple's products are the hardest to use, except for all the other product out there...

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jpxxx 14y ago

Much of this is dopey nonsense but he's correctly describing a few Real Problems. -- iOS devices blowing their asset layout and 'Othering' out is a Real Problem that used to happen far too often. The only fix beyond a backup+restore is to remove and re-add photos and music. If that doesn't work? Time to restore up to 60GB over USB2! Whee. Good luck explaining this to mom. -- The built in Mac applications and frameworks are frightfully poor - it's unacceptable from a company that prides itself on quality. SyncServices is still a flaming travesty, Mail.app spontaneously corrupts messages and passwords, Spotlight can die in twenty different ways, iCal is a UI disaster, Address Book has completely broken sync options... the list goes on and on and on. Of all of these, I think Mail is the absolute worst. Three total rewrites and it's still neurotic on a good day. -- iPhoto is goddamn slow. No matter what, no matter where, no matter when. iOS is an order of magnitude more usable for two orders of magnitude more people with an order of magnitude fewer issues and two orders of magnitude fewer things to go wrong that makes an order of magnitude more money for them. So I think that's where he Lion's share (haha) of Apple's QA is spent. Sadly, I fear OS X will never receive that same level of care.

pagejim 14y ago
Hi, I am not an iPhone user, but if what you have described above are problems that a significant number of iPhone users face, then I am pretty surprised/disappointed. All of these would be hampering user experience ( something Apple excels at ) irrespective of whether the user is a casual one or a heavy one. Also, if these problems are easily reproducible and quite prevalent, isn't Apple solving these in upcoming upgrades? In other words, they must be getting some kind of feedback/bug-reports and these problems should surely have to be part of that.
- jpxxx 14y ago
  Given its financial performance, I can only imagine that iOS's quality is priority #0, #1, and #2 through 10 at Apple. From an anecdotal perspective, it has all gotten a great deal better over the years.
- entropy_ 14y ago
  Those are mostly problems with Mac OSX(except the storage issue on the iPhone).

ajanuary 14y ago

The search actually has the largest touch area of all the letters, because it extends to the top of the pane. There are a lot of ways to get there: * Tap the status bar, which takes you to the to of most scrollable areas. * Be conservative, if you accidentally hit A, scroll up. * Hold your finger down on the letters to activate scrubbing mode, then slide your finger to the top. I'm not saying they're all perfect usability wise, but picking out search as a small touch target seems a little odd to me. But then I've probably spent a lot longer than most obsessing over every pixel and touch target of the UI. To me it seems like a trade off. Is searching contacts important enough to have a big button for? Where would you put it without completely overhauling the iOS UI? Is it of more or equal importance than any of the current elements? Admittedly annecdotal, but I see far more people scrubbing to the first letter of the contact and flicking through the list, because typing takes time (though a 'hard to find/activate' search feature might contribute to that). It seems to me putting it where it is allows for a good cross-platform solution to an unobtrusive search function.

forgottenpaswrd 14y ago

This is like saying that my car is not easy to use as a bus for carrying 50 people. (In Africa you see cars with 15 people onboard). If you have 10.000 photos and thousands of contacts you are not a normal user anymore, you are a pro and you need pro tools. I have tens of times more big photos in my computers, and huge videos but I don't use Iphoto, this would be so non sense, Iphoto would make a local copy of everything it touches, like iTunes. Apple is selling this thing called iPads like hotcakes because the intended audience is normal people, people that can't use a pc, like my father, who are much much more than those that can.

Derbasti 14y ago

I am still using OSX, and modestly enjoying it. But I feel the same way the author does. (Here is my list of complaints: http://bastibe.de/how-apple-is-failing-me.html http://bastibe.de/how-apple-is-failing-me.html ) Still, I find that OSX is a fine environment to run Unix software. Most of my computer interaction these days revolves around Emacs, a terminal and a web browser. Which is fine. It is a nice system. But really, I used to feel that OSX had a certain elegance to it that other OSes lacked. And that feeling is fading. Thus, I doubt that my next computer will come with an Apple logo. And incidentally, neither will my next smartphone or tablet. Sad.

taligent 14y ago
Sure. I thoroughly look forward to you trying out Ubuntu 12.04 and Windows 8 and seeing how they compare. I think you will find that both are orders of magnitude worse than OSX. Why ? Because from a UI perspective both are complete rewrites and are reminiscent of 10.0 beta. Lot of potential but a lot of polish required as well.
- Derbasti 14y ago
  I know and use both Ubuntu and Windows regularly. At the moment, OSX is still my operating system of choice mainly because the hardware is seriously great. The OS itself is becoming more and more awkward to me.
- manaskarekar 14y ago
  Ubuntu is not the only option. Look into tons of other great distros including the excellent Lubuntu. And I personally feel Windows 7 is a golden OS. Have to agree with you about Windows 8.
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- recoiledsnake 14y ago

unabridged 14y ago

iOS has never been about easy to use, its been about hard to fuck up. I find it hard to believe that so many people who use windows but own an iphone/ipad are afraid of a filesystem. You show them a commercial where you plug an android phone/tablet in, then you are instantly dragging and dropping files just like a thumb drive without having to sync, then they are opening up an excel file using preinstalled open office (or for commericals airing on the internet maybe a video file being played using preinstalled vlc). Say the words "out of the box", no extra cost for these apps. If HTC and/or Samsung threw a hanful of programmers at porting open source apps to android and started this kind of advertising, iOS would be on the way out quickly.

rickmb 14y ago

Even though I'm a big Apple fanboy, I have to admit I avoid using Apple's desktop applications. The one exception is Mail.app, but even there I'm always eagerly looking for any possible alternative. iPhoto, Addressbook, iCal, none of those have ever appealed to me, and I've always use (mostly web-based) alternatives. And enough has already been said over the years over that piece of bloatware called iTunes. So as far as I'm concerned, this isn't something new. IMO, with some rare exceptions, Apple has never been very good at application software.

npguy 14y ago

I think the issue is that user expectations have gone way up, and that results in disappointments that get amplified when coupled with frustrations.

angelortega 14y ago

That's another myth. Apple products had never been easy to use. iTunes is heavy and cumbersome and play lists never work as expected. Wheel iPods had erratic behaviour and its random/shuffling were crap. And please don't start talking about XCode and development in general. Things have worsen these times. "Acceptably understandable" is not the same as "easy".

nicholassmith 14y ago

I've been a Mac user for nearly a decade (and now I feel old), which isn't as long as some people but a bit longer than others and if I'm honest I have to agree with many things. OS X has been through a couple of really big leaps really, which whilst I think were necessary they've come at a great cost in terms of usability. I'm going to pick on one Apple application for a minute, XCode. I used XCode on Tiger, on a very late model iBook and did my final year uni project on it and it was great. It was a genuinely good, solid and stable IDE, very easy to use and very easy to navigate and work with. Then incrementally it started acquiring new functionality that was needed, then the UI changes started coming in, then more functionality, then more UI and also in a cycle it kept amassing additional cruft. It's now a lot more difficult to use, a lot more overbearing. This is kind of where the entire platform is starting to shift, Apple has been forced to jump the platform ahead but it's trying too many clever things and adding more and more functionality at the expense of usability. I still think it's one of the nicer operating systems and I'm not going to be switching anytime soon, but it's definitely not as gloriously user friendly as it used to be. In my opinion, different strokes for different folks after all.

wsc981 14y ago
Well, if you compare Xcode with Visual Studio or Eclipse, I'd say Xcode is a lot easier to use. The UI is a lot more streamlined, much less buttons for example. And I wonder if you've used Xcode back when it was called Project Builder. In my experience Project Builder also had a more complex UI than Xcode. But if you're looking for a good alternative to Xcode, perhaps AppCode is a nice replacement? http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/ http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  Oh it's definitely nicer than VS or Eclipse or NetBeans or the many other IDEs with crap design and poor layouts and even worse stability, but it's still gotten worse over the period of time I've been using it. I'll still use it as it's still significantly better than most IDEs, but I do hope they take some time to refine it again. I missed Project Builder, it was just slightly before my time so I won't comment too much on that.

willholloway 14y ago

What Apple really gets right is it's hardware. The Macbook Air is in my opinion the best laptop on the market. The touch pad really shines. Apple gets the hardware support perfect. That's where its greatness ends for me. OS X is just not as good for developers as Debian sid. Debian wins for me hands down for three simple reasons: 1. Package management. With apt I can install any open source tool with one command, and update my entire system with another. Homebrew is a good effort, but just isn't nearly as good. 2. With Debian I can install any window manager I like without hack jobs. I like ratpoison because its simple and gets out of my way. 3. As a python hacker I like to develop on a system that is nearly identical to the server I deploy my code on. That is why I work in Debian. I need OS X to run the hardware, but that is all. I do everything besides watch Netflix inside a virtualbox Debian sid install.

gregsq 14y ago
Whether the hardware is right depends on the usage. In my case I've found the hardware terribly inadequate for what I need to do. I have an early 2011 MacBook pro, and it has proved to be incredibly frustrating for me as a general purpose computing platform. The main issue is lack of inputs, removal of inputs, and a lack of options for inputs. Having only two USB2 ports, removal of ExpressCard34 slots used for third party hard drive adapters on the 15", and a thunderbolt port largely unusable by the cost conscious makes shuffling things quite painful. Some usage paths lead backwards. For example, video editors using a MacBook pro 15 who used the ExpressCard34 for sata drives lost that capability with the upgrade. You had two ways to go, either downgrade to FireWire 800, which was still available, and if the reduction in transfer speed was acceptable, or try and find a thunderbolt setup that was both cost effective and mature. Good luck on that! If you went the FireWire path, the next model from 2012 left you needing a thunderbolt adapter, as the FireWire port was dropped. They are quite well built, but they certainly have shortcomings.

Hari_Seldon 14y ago

Apple products are as good and better than they have always been, the problem is that users now have this entitled attitude and nothing is good enough for them. Witness the tech press' reaction to the iPhone 5, they're bored because it doesn't look new, irrespective of it's actual merits. it's very tedious and a shame to see this attitude here on HN, where the discussion threads were usually more considered and the level of debate generally higher.

bede 14y ago

Does anyone else feel that OS X has gone downhill since Snow Leopard? I can sympathise with much if not all of what this guy is saying. My Aunt recently bought a new Mac, not really knowing how to use OS X. I'm pretty familiar with most versions of OS X, but found myself struggling to justify to her the usefulness of quite a lot of the UI mechanics of the OS. What annoyed me the most was that the parts of the OS she found most confusing seemed almost universally to have been introduced since 10.6. The 10.7+ habit of remembering open windows seemed to flummox my Aunt and continues to irritate me on a daily basis. "But I closed that window, why has it come back?" Take Mission Control. Exposé was incredibly simple conceptually and worked very well for most people. I don't hate Mission Control, but explaining its workings to my Aunt was somewhat difficult, and I'm still not convinced that it's better than Exposé. I feel like a lot of the simplicity that originally attracted me to OS X has been convoluted recently. And don't get me started on stability, performance and skeuomorphism...

city41 14y ago
I agree, Snow Leopard was my favorite. I'd like to go back to it but I have a retina display, so Lion and up it is for me. As for remembering open windows, which is indeed very annoying, you can turn it off at System Preferences > General > Close windows when quitting an application
jvm 14y ago
The day I went back to Snow Leopard I realized that the only thing I miss from [Mountain] Lion is the non-ugly scrollbars. Everything else was just better.
corporalagumbo 14y ago
Well said. I completely agree. They just keep hammering stuff into the same old WIMP interface and making it more and more contorted. Microsoft has the right idea I think with Windows 8. Apple no longer seems to know what to do with usability.

randv 14y ago

finding the search on contacts has never been easy on iphone!

headShrinker 14y ago

Intuitive design is a myth. This idea that a company could build something that is just simply better for everyone is a fallacy. Apple products, considering their competition, are really good and believe it or not, cost effective. However, some people do things that certain systems don't like. This isn't the users fault. They were not considered in the design of the software. Over 1,000 contacts; sorry. iWork and want to export your workflow to other suite; sorry. Music collection and you want to tag and organize in a way that iTunes wasn't designed to do; sorry. I have been professionally troubleshooting Mac and PC computers for 13 years, and I have seen it all. One of my clients had 10,000 messages... in his inbox. Mac Mail would launch and freeze. Beach ball. This idea that you don't have to do maintenance to a computer was started by Apple, and it's a fallacy too. Apple has done a better job of assembling a set of well rounded tools for the average man, go out side of average and you are on your own. But then you are were you would be on any other platform. iPhoto not doing it anymore? Picasa. iTunes not doing it? Winamp or Songbird for mac. Mac Mail not doing it? thunderbird. Safari? Chrome. I used to have an iPod 60GB and it would about every 4 month get harddrive corruption, then I would have wipe and transfer 60GB via USB. It would take hours. I haven't corrupted my iPhone yet. I don't rock the boat, I try to stay average. I don't change default settings unless its to turn off face recognition or auto-copy. That being said, I have GBs of email going back 6 years (another 6y archived), a 12,000 song 70GB library, and 60GB Aperture library. While I have had my problems, I have never had catastrophic loss, and it works. I am at a loss with all of this ragging. I know there are problem with programs, but that is the essence of programs, no one size fits all.

smoyer 14y ago

One of the comments says "I have been developing my own theory that Apple products are the technological equivalent to junk food, psychologically fattening an already physically obese populace." If you have a completely bullet-proof OS and your applications are solid, locking down the system should ultimately make it easier for the user. As soon as there are even minor flaws, locking the system down is going to keep the user from helping themselves. I don't think this phenomena only applies to Apple products, there are similar issues with Android phones and even those of us creating web applications can create systems that frustrate our users. If you're putting a wall between a user and their data/assets, you could be next.

PaulHoule 14y ago

I've slowly fallen out of love with MacOS X. The final straw was when I installed Mountain Lion and a number of highly annoying things started to happen. (For instance, on reboot it would try to restart the game which switched the video mode to something my HDTV won't read) Since then I've been booting it into Windows 7, and honestly I think Windows 7 has a better GUI than Mac OS. I'll grant that bash is better than CMD.EXE. In terms of bulls--t per mile on the desktop, I think Windows today does better than anything else, and it gets much better with Win8. There's really a pervasive attitude in Mac software that I don't like. When I first used iMovie it took me a long time to figure out how to turn off the "Ken Burns Effect", which automatically applies zooms and pans to photos you add to a video. I'll grant it's a nice feature to have, but I feel that my creativity is disrespected when the default is turn on all the gimmicks.

manaskarekar 14y ago
I'm probably being a simpleton here, but are you aware of cygwin? It's not the same as a terminal, but it's really useful. http://www.cygwin.com/ http://www.cygwin.com/
- falcolas 14y ago
  I would also recommend learning PowerShell. Your knowledge of bash will not help you through it, but it's easily as powerful as bash, and native to the Windows environment.
  - rbanffy 14y ago
    The problem with PowerShell is that it's a Windows thing. Whatever you learn will only be useful on Windows and everything you develop with it will tie you further to the platform (and make it harder for you to move on once something better for you appears) Seriously, it's much smarter to just install Cygwin and forget about Windows-only solutions. You are probably going to deploy whatever you develop on Unix-like servers anyway...
- mmagin 14y ago

tacogordito 14y ago

I was really disappointed when Apple started making their IPod's into touch screens. When I'm going for a run or walking around with my ipod in my pocket, theres nothing i despise more than pulling out my ipod, having to tap the specific spots of the screen 3 times just so i can skip to the next song. The click wheel used to be very easy to use. I could skip songs without taking it out of my pocket.

padobson 14y ago

Recent Story: My 8 year old has an iPad that was setup by her and her grandmother. She recently had it replaced at the Apple Store because of a busted WIFI antenna. A few days ago, she wanted to buy the 2.99 version of Draw Something. I happened to have a iTunes gift card worth 15 dollars. I opened her iTunes account on the iPad, punched in the gift card code, and the money was added to her account without ceremony. So she goes to buy Draw Something,and 15 minutes later I hear "It's not working." I figure she must have broken something, so I take the iPad from her and click the 2.99 Draw Something button to download the app. This is where the fun begins. The App store asks for the username and password. We entered both. Then it tells us that the iTunes account has not been activated on the iPad, so we need to answer two security questions - I look at my daughter and my wife and only get blank expressions. I call my mother-in-law and she doesn't know either. So the next step is to reset the password by sending an email to a failsafe account - some AOL email address that nobody can access either. Normally, at this point, I would just say we screwed up and start a new iTunes account - but why in the hell did they let us put the 15 dollar gift card on the account if they weren't going to let us do anything until the account was activated? Epic fail.

driverdan 14y ago
So let me get this straight. You lost your account password, your email password, and your security questions and somehow Apple is at fault for making it easy to add gift cards to your account?
- nchlswu 14y ago
  To be fair to the parent, this was setup by the daughter and the grandmother. In Apple's current world, a case like this is hardly farfetched. I don't think this a weird edge case that I Apple overlooks or one you can blame on the user since it's one of Apple's key markets
- padobson 14y ago
  That is not straight. We had the correct username and password. We lost the security questions. It asked us for neither when we wanted to redeem gift cards, and then wanted answers to the security questions after we had already given it the correct username and password before we could purchase anything using the gift card money. If it's going to inconvenience me to spend the gift card money, then it should do it before I redeem the card so that the card money isn't trapped within the account if the account is currently inaccessible. --edit Accounts are pretty broken on iOS in general. I once logged into my appleID using my Dad's iPhone to download an app for him because he hadn't setup his own appleID yet. Later, he setup his appleID. The problem was, whenever he went to update his apps, it would ask for my appleID password when it wanted to update the app that I installed - only it didn't mention anywhere why it was asking for the password to my appleID. My account credentials did not appear anywhere else on the phone. We checked the settings, looked up things online, and even asked support. No idea why it was asking for my password. Eventually we traced the problem back to the update feature, and deleted a bunch of apps we thought I may have installed. It solved the problem and it doesn't prompt for my password anymore, but there was no way for us to know which app was causing the problem.

inthewoods 14y ago

I find iOS and the iPhone/iPad/iTunes interaction particularly frustrating - a case where it really should just work. Some of my issues: - Restoring from a backup does not, for some reason, does not consistently restore the folder structure - thus I spend an hour or two recreating the structure. Waste of time. - iCloud syncs a lot of things - but for some reason does not allow me to sync apps. There should be an easy way to do this such that if I buy an app on my iPhone (and it is compatible with my iPad) it should be synced. - Moving purchased music from one phone to another. Maybe somebody can enlighten me, but moving my iTunes purchased music from one device to another, as far as can tell, is still a stupid, manual process. - In general, iTunes should be in the cloud - when I buy a new device, I should be able to enter my account information and then have it automatically pull down all my stuff - and offer me choices for what I want to pull. To me this seems so basic. This is stuff that is all generated by the way my wife interacts with these technologies - and she gets very frustrated by the hoops that have to be jumped through to make it all work. Next week, I'm likely buying my wife an iPhone 4S (AT&T or Verizon - suggestions from anyone in the Boston area?) I'm not looking forward to getting her setup - I anticipate pain.

dr_ 14y ago

Just as a note to anyone with the same problem, I had difficulty renting a movie recently on my iPad because I was told I have no storage space available. This was unusual because I have hardly any photos on my iPad and almost no music. I later realized that movies that you rent, even after they expire, remain on your device and take up storage until you actually delete them.

costacoast 14y ago

I think he may be a bit more alarmist than I can agree with but I will definitely attest to the fact that Apple is having some serious UX growing pains as they try to accomodate the largest and most international user base they have had to date. Possibly the best one-liner comes from one of the comments: "I have been developing my own theory that Apple products are the technological equivalent to junk food, psychologically fattening an already physically obese populace. Like the Sun newspaper their products are encouraging us to be lazy and dumb down our intellectual capacities."

dev1n 14y ago

"This stuff is too complicated. There has to be a better way." and to the comment on the blog saying how Apple is our "junk food." Raspberry Pi might be the solution. It's literally a blank slate. Users, with some tech knowledge, have the ability to update and move stuff around without being dragged into an iCloud sort of mess. It's as clear as it gets IMO.

pnathan 14y ago

I don't have his problems. I have other problems, not as bad (I've started to wonder about that Other space on the iPhone too...). I think this could be all summed up as: Desktop OS's ain't tablet OSs. I don't like OSX Mountain Lion. I anticipate that 10.9 will be extra smartphoney, and I won't be upgrading. I will, however, be looking at well-designed Linux laptop solutions for my XFCE/Enlightenment needs.

lubujackson 14y ago

It's amazing to me the level of cognitive dissonance many Apple fans have. Like the script of how easy and simple to use everything is can be so unrelated to their actual experience. If you've ever gone to the "Genius Bar" for any reason, you've wasted more time with customer service than I have in the last 10 years of using PCs. The problem is, when you have an issue of any size with Apple, there is just no way to resolve it yourself without nuking your system. I'm sure there are 1000 reasons why I'm supposedly wrong or trolling or whatever, but that's MY experience with Apple, minus what Apple would have me believe.

mitchty 14y ago
The only time i've gone to a genius bar was to show them the dead pixels on a macbook pro. Got a new one right then too. Personal anecdotes are not data.
- lubujackson 14y ago
  Sure they are. What would constitute data if not actual use cases? I'm not defending Windows or Linux as great alternatives, but at least "wipe and restore" is not the default answer to minor problems.

enraged_camel 14y ago

I was visiting home over summer, and my 85 year-old grandmother got a chance to use my iPad. I basically handed the device to her, went to the restroom, came back, and found her editing some photos of my sister she had just taken. She described the red-eye reduction feature as "magic." Seriously, if my 85 year-old grandma can figure this stuff out, then the author is an outlier. Apple devices are ridiculously easy to use. edit: gotta love it when people downvote without giving a reason. Must have hit a soft spot.

danudey 14y ago
I was tired of my mother always calling me for help with her laptop, so I bought her an iPad with 3G for Christmas. After two phone calls to get her into the swing of things, she's never called me for tech support again. She updates it when it tells her to, she uses it to navigate when she goes into town with her neighbour, she uses it to place orders for supplies when someone comes into her store to make a custom order. It's pretty great, all in all, and she's never once called me for help in two years.

Joeri 14y ago

From what I've noticed there are many apple issues experienced by a smallish set of users, which in aggregate affect many people, but not all with the same issues. For me the list is: (1) early deterioration of plastic in macbook, (2) wifi connectivity issues on leopard, (3) wifi connectivity issues on snow leopard, (4) unexplained time machine failures, (5) major performance issues on lion. And that's just for my macs. My ipad suffered from unexplained app crashes every ten minutes, which were due to memory shortage problems that i could only solve by disabling mail sync (i use purely gmail in the browser now). On the other side, with windows and android, i've had roughly the same amount of problems. In my experience, apple's stuff breaks as often, but has a different "feel".

shinratdr 14y ago

> Have you ever done a search in your iPhone contacts? You need the fingers of a poorly fed six-year-old to activate that search function. No, really, I must waste four or five minutes a day trying to make that damn thing work. > Seriously, how can an adult finger ever touch that little search icon without either hitting the “A” or the “+”???? Why exactly do I have a hard time believing someone this stupid would be as diligent as he claims to be in attempting to solve his issues? I'm supposed to simultaneously believe that he is competent enough to understand and solve a corruption issue, yet he can't figure out the single most discoverable gesture on any phone, "swipe down"? $20 says he restored his iPhone from the corrupted backup and then rushed off to write an article on the experience instead of performing the due diligence he claims he already has. Bullshit. Nobody has this kind of laundry list of whining complaints unless their actual motivation to solve problems is almost zero. He sounds like one of those people that put all Apple products on this ridiculous pedestal where they are shit if they cause you any frustration or confusion ever. Sorry, it's not magic. It's just a really nice computer. Expect some problems and issues, and expect to spend some time troubleshooting them. Just like any other machine on the planet. If your first thought when seeing a 4x4 icon on a high res 3.5 inch touchscreen is "Stupid Apple, how am I supposed to hit that!?" then you are looking for things to complain about instead of actively trying to improve your experience with the phone by, oh I don't know... learning things? Apple products are getting more complex and the older classics are getting bloated. There is an interesting discussion to be had on the topic. This isn't it. This couldn't be further from it. This article is basically just idiotic whining.