4 ms·

It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved with much acclaim, why is their software getting progressively worse? It's not Microsoft-add-all-the

It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved with much acclaim, why is their software getting progressively worse? It's not Microsoft-add-all-the-bloatware-and-adverts-we-can worse, but it's 20-year-old-operating-systems-were-better-designed worse. We're getting to a point where I think Linux windowing systems like KDE are better designed. And it seems that all they had to do was not change much over the span of a few decades. Or am I out of touch? It feels like I could use a computer better back when XP was the mainstay.

teddy-smith 10mo ago
It's just enshittification. Going to continue to get worse as time goes on. Even the hardware will go at some point I'm betting.
- Maxion 10mo ago
  It's just entropy. It takes a special kind of person to be able to fight it in a big org. Jobs, Musk et. al. are assholes but they do manage to push their vision through. Probably because they are assholes.
  - ex-aws-dude 10mo ago
    It seems like apple is missing a design dictator
  - esafak 10mo ago
    Jobs and Musk are CEOs; of course they can push their visions!
- einsteinx2 10mo ago
  > It's just enshittification. That’s not what enshittification means. Somehow its usage has quickly devolved from a very specific pattern companies used to squeeze “value” out of their customers over time into just “something getting worse in any way” or even just “something I don’t like now but I did before” which is not at all the point.
  - fragmede 10mo ago
    Last time pointed that out here, Cory Doctorow himself popped up to tell me it's okay, we don't need to word police other people. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44776712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44776712
    - einsteinx2 10mo ago
      Man I really disliked him for creating that word that got so overused that I saw it in practically every single comment thread this past year. Now I dislike him even more for actively promoting its overuse. Ugh.
    - AlexandrB 10mo ago
      So let's run this shit into the ground then until it's meaningless. Got it.
      - einsteinx2 10mo ago
        It’s the enshittification of the word, to use the new definition
  - lynndotpy 10mo ago
    Liquid Glass has worse performance implications, which is bad for older devices with slow processors, and older devices with older batteries. It's also very difficult to use on older devices with smaller screens, like the 2022 iPhone SE. Further, Apple stopped making it possible to upgrade to minor releases for security patches. All these give someone a reason to replace their otherwise perfectly-working iPhone sooner.
TheAceOfHearts 10mo ago
Maybe Apple just got so many things right early on, then the people with experience slowly left and inexperienced people kept showing up and they felt compelled to keep making changes to justify their jobs. How do they justify their job if they can't roll out huge visible changes? So they rationalize whatever change they wanna make and keep advocating for it until they get the green light, regardless of whether or not it's a good idea. The best part is that cleaning up this mess will probably lead to a whole bunch of promotions, even if just ends up circling back to what they should've already known. I think a lot of key lessons that were studied and learned back in the day weren't adequately transferred to the new generation.
- esafak 10mo ago
  When a feature reaches maturity, you have to be willing to shrink the team.
- goalieca 10mo ago
  >How do they justify their job if they can't roll out huge visible changes? This is the core rotting value in so much of big tech. So much of your bonus, performance review, promotion package, etc is hinging on "delivering impact" (ie: doing the flashy stuff). Imagine a world where some internal R&D team took a risk on liquid design but then thought it was okay to not ship it because it didn't work out.
  - hyperhello 10mo ago
    To push the problem up a level, why can’t the company change the incentives to “happy customers”?
    - goalieca 10mo ago
      The issue is that so long as you play the "performance" game, you'll run into Goodhart's law: > When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. All this data driven BS about impact is really just that. So much of it is just gaming the system.
    - 10mo ago
Sharlin 10mo ago
To be fair, they also made several infamous hardware design choices back in 2016, all of which they’ve later reverted.
- pier25 10mo ago
  I'm hopeful Apple will correct course about all these awful UI decisions but it'll take some time.
- kibwen 10mo ago
  Yes, we can all look forward to the breathless bots lauding Apple's visionary hardware prowess when they remove that damned stupid notch ten years from now, while replacing it with something equally egregious.
  - data-ottawa 10mo ago
    I’m optimistic that will happen soon. My personal theory is that making the menu bar transparent by default (and shifting/ritating backgrounds) on Tahoe is preparing for OLED laptops and displays, which maybe will get under screen cameras or just a nicer cutout.
- bxparks 10mo ago
  Not all reverted. Still waiting for my USB-A ports and the SD card reader, on laptops described as "Pro". It's as if Apple forgot that "Pro" is a shorthand for "professional" instead of a meaningless marketing term.
  - Aaron2222 10mo ago
    All 14" and 16" MacBook Pros (which is all Apple Silicon MacBook Pros except the 13" ones with base M1 or M2) have an SD card reader.
    - bxparks 10mo ago
      Did not know that, thanks for the info. But Apple lost me as a customer 10 years ago with their hostile actions. Even if they added back USB-A, I wouldn't go back.
rane 10mo ago
Hardware improvements are easier to quantify and progress naturally comes in incremental steps. Software however especially from UX point of view, is more likely to be more or less ready at some point. Any improvements are marginal and subjective. What are the large UX teams at Apple going to do if not redesigns for the sake of redesigning? I wish it would happen, but it’s hard to imagine Apple shipping an annual OS release without noticeable visual changes.
whynotmaybe 10mo ago
I'm feeling they're veering towards a "common ui" where every action is an icon like on a phone where every app is an icon. Maybe someday they'll completely remove the text to just keep the icons like the Office ribbon did, and I'm still confused with it.
- weinzierl 10mo ago
  In the early 2000s I helped an engineering from transitioning from the CAD software CATIAv4 to v5. While v4 was pretty much text based in early v5 every item and action had an icon, often only an icon. The manual read something like this: "To do ⌘ you navigate from the ⌙ page to the ⌟, while holding the middle mouse button. The⌇will open and you will see the ⌆." I think they did that with good intentions. CATIA being a French product sold all over Europe and beyond, localization must have been a significant line item. The result was a nightmare though and they to toned the reliance on symbols down in subsequent versions.
- marcosdumay 10mo ago
  Imagine how usable computers will be once we remove every instance of text!
  - whynotmaybe 10mo ago
    As a user of OLauncher on android, it's hard to imagine.
  - RunSet 10mo ago
    > with every extreme of inventiveness of visualization in its most exaggerated form, what did we have every fifteen seconds? An utter halt to the action, while words flashed on the screen. "The Ancient and The Ultimate" https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v044n01_1973-01/page/n119/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v044n01_...
throwaway132448 10mo ago
It's quite simple: Most people who work in software now aren't actually very good at their jobs, at least in terms of how that job would have been defined 15 years ago. This is because incentives have changed such that being good at your job in your average mega-corp has very little to do with the outcome: To climb their ladder, you optimise for impact and move before you have to deal with the consequences.
- anal_reactor 10mo ago
  When company is small and the leader is competent, it's easy to weed out incompetent employees. But beyond certain size, or when the leader themselves is incompetent, this becomes impossible, and the whole company starts to rot.
- hombre_fatal 10mo ago
  The other issue is the general organizational challenge of ensuring people good at their jobs are stacked into every part of your organization. The default is that it’s not the case, and it requires eternal vigilance to do otherwise. Everything good is a fluke.
ajam1507 10mo ago
There's plenty to criticize them for on the hardware front. Why design round edges on your macbook pro and then put cheese grater vent holes on the sides where you're most likely to pick it up? Same goes for the Apple TV remote.
danans 10mo ago
> It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved with much acclaim, why is their software getting progressively worse? It's not so different from the rationale for many consumer electronics products: novelty for marketing's sake rather than functionality. Similarly, notice the ridiculous trend of removing most physical buttons from car dashboards, started by Tesla and mindlessly aped by the other carmakers.
WhyNotHugo 10mo ago
> It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved. To be fair, the bar is really really low in terms of mobile hardware. It’s just really hard (and expensive) for new players to design, build and manufacture hardware with competitive processing power.
pornel 10mo ago
It used to be the opposite! From the end of the PowerPC era throughout most of the Intel era, the Mac OS X was the main selling point, while the hardware was slow, overpriced and overheating (they've had some nice touches like MagSafe and "ears" on power supplies for the cable, but that didn't make up for everything else). People used to build hackintoshes to get Mac OS X without paying Apple's RAM tax or suffer having mid-range laptop GPUs in the top-of-the-line desktops. Apple's outstanding success with their ARM chips is more of an exception than the rule.

teddy-smith 10mo ago

It's just enshittification. Going to continue to get worse as time goes on. Even the hardware will go at some point I'm betting.

Maxion 10mo ago
It's just entropy. It takes a special kind of person to be able to fight it in a big org. Jobs, Musk et. al. are assholes but they do manage to push their vision through. Probably because they are assholes.
- ex-aws-dude 10mo ago
  It seems like apple is missing a design dictator
- esafak 10mo ago
  Jobs and Musk are CEOs; of course they can push their visions!
einsteinx2 10mo ago
> It's just enshittification. That’s not what enshittification means. Somehow its usage has quickly devolved from a very specific pattern companies used to squeeze “value” out of their customers over time into just “something getting worse in any way” or even just “something I don’t like now but I did before” which is not at all the point.
- fragmede 10mo ago
  Last time pointed that out here, Cory Doctorow himself popped up to tell me it's okay, we don't need to word police other people. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44776712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44776712
  - einsteinx2 10mo ago
    Man I really disliked him for creating that word that got so overused that I saw it in practically every single comment thread this past year. Now I dislike him even more for actively promoting its overuse. Ugh.
  - AlexandrB 10mo ago
    So let's run this shit into the ground then until it's meaningless. Got it.
    - einsteinx2 10mo ago
      It’s the enshittification of the word, to use the new definition
- lynndotpy 10mo ago
  Liquid Glass has worse performance implications, which is bad for older devices with slow processors, and older devices with older batteries. It's also very difficult to use on older devices with smaller screens, like the 2022 iPhone SE. Further, Apple stopped making it possible to upgrade to minor releases for security patches. All these give someone a reason to replace their otherwise perfectly-working iPhone sooner.

TheAceOfHearts 10mo ago

Maybe Apple just got so many things right early on, then the people with experience slowly left and inexperienced people kept showing up and they felt compelled to keep making changes to justify their jobs. How do they justify their job if they can't roll out huge visible changes? So they rationalize whatever change they wanna make and keep advocating for it until they get the green light, regardless of whether or not it's a good idea. The best part is that cleaning up this mess will probably lead to a whole bunch of promotions, even if just ends up circling back to what they should've already known. I think a lot of key lessons that were studied and learned back in the day weren't adequately transferred to the new generation.

esafak 10mo ago
When a feature reaches maturity, you have to be willing to shrink the team.
goalieca 10mo ago
>How do they justify their job if they can't roll out huge visible changes? This is the core rotting value in so much of big tech. So much of your bonus, performance review, promotion package, etc is hinging on "delivering impact" (ie: doing the flashy stuff). Imagine a world where some internal R&D team took a risk on liquid design but then thought it was okay to not ship it because it didn't work out.
- hyperhello 10mo ago
  To push the problem up a level, why can’t the company change the incentives to “happy customers”?
  - goalieca 10mo ago
    The issue is that so long as you play the "performance" game, you'll run into Goodhart's law: > When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. All this data driven BS about impact is really just that. So much of it is just gaming the system.
  - 10mo ago

Sharlin 10mo ago

To be fair, they also made several infamous hardware design choices back in 2016, all of which they’ve later reverted.

pier25 10mo ago
I'm hopeful Apple will correct course about all these awful UI decisions but it'll take some time.
kibwen 10mo ago
Yes, we can all look forward to the breathless bots lauding Apple's visionary hardware prowess when they remove that damned stupid notch ten years from now, while replacing it with something equally egregious.
- data-ottawa 10mo ago
  I’m optimistic that will happen soon. My personal theory is that making the menu bar transparent by default (and shifting/ritating backgrounds) on Tahoe is preparing for OLED laptops and displays, which maybe will get under screen cameras or just a nicer cutout.
bxparks 10mo ago
Not all reverted. Still waiting for my USB-A ports and the SD card reader, on laptops described as "Pro". It's as if Apple forgot that "Pro" is a shorthand for "professional" instead of a meaningless marketing term.
- Aaron2222 10mo ago
  All 14" and 16" MacBook Pros (which is all Apple Silicon MacBook Pros except the 13" ones with base M1 or M2) have an SD card reader.
  - bxparks 10mo ago
    Did not know that, thanks for the info. But Apple lost me as a customer 10 years ago with their hostile actions. Even if they added back USB-A, I wouldn't go back.

rane 10mo ago

Hardware improvements are easier to quantify and progress naturally comes in incremental steps. Software however especially from UX point of view, is more likely to be more or less ready at some point. Any improvements are marginal and subjective. What are the large UX teams at Apple going to do if not redesigns for the sake of redesigning? I wish it would happen, but it’s hard to imagine Apple shipping an annual OS release without noticeable visual changes.

whynotmaybe 10mo ago

I'm feeling they're veering towards a "common ui" where every action is an icon like on a phone where every app is an icon. Maybe someday they'll completely remove the text to just keep the icons like the Office ribbon did, and I'm still confused with it.

weinzierl 10mo ago
In the early 2000s I helped an engineering from transitioning from the CAD software CATIAv4 to v5. While v4 was pretty much text based in early v5 every item and action had an icon, often only an icon. The manual read something like this: "To do ⌘ you navigate from the ⌙ page to the ⌟, while holding the middle mouse button. The⌇will open and you will see the ⌆." I think they did that with good intentions. CATIA being a French product sold all over Europe and beyond, localization must have been a significant line item. The result was a nightmare though and they to toned the reliance on symbols down in subsequent versions.
marcosdumay 10mo ago
Imagine how usable computers will be once we remove every instance of text!
- whynotmaybe 10mo ago
  As a user of OLauncher on android, it's hard to imagine.
- RunSet 10mo ago
  > with every extreme of inventiveness of visualization in its most exaggerated form, what did we have every fifteen seconds? An utter halt to the action, while words flashed on the screen. "The Ancient and The Ultimate" https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v044n01_1973-01/page/n119/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v044n01_...

throwaway132448 10mo ago

It's quite simple: Most people who work in software now aren't actually very good at their jobs, at least in terms of how that job would have been defined 15 years ago. This is because incentives have changed such that being good at your job in your average mega-corp has very little to do with the outcome: To climb their ladder, you optimise for impact and move before you have to deal with the consequences.

anal_reactor 10mo ago
When company is small and the leader is competent, it's easy to weed out incompetent employees. But beyond certain size, or when the leader themselves is incompetent, this becomes impossible, and the whole company starts to rot.
hombre_fatal 10mo ago
The other issue is the general organizational challenge of ensuring people good at their jobs are stacked into every part of your organization. The default is that it’s not the case, and it requires eternal vigilance to do otherwise. Everything good is a fluke.

ajam1507 10mo ago

There's plenty to criticize them for on the hardware front. Why design round edges on your macbook pro and then put cheese grater vent holes on the sides where you're most likely to pick it up? Same goes for the Apple TV remote.

danans 10mo ago

> It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved with much acclaim, why is their software getting progressively worse? It's not so different from the rationale for many consumer electronics products: novelty for marketing's sake rather than functionality. Similarly, notice the ridiculous trend of removing most physical buttons from car dashboards, started by Tesla and mindlessly aped by the other carmakers.

WhyNotHugo 10mo ago

> It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved. To be fair, the bar is really really low in terms of mobile hardware. It’s just really hard (and expensive) for new players to design, build and manufacture hardware with competitive processing power.

pornel 10mo ago

It used to be the opposite! From the end of the PowerPC era throughout most of the Intel era, the Mac OS X was the main selling point, while the hardware was slow, overpriced and overheating (they've had some nice touches like MagSafe and "ears" on power supplies for the cable, but that didn't make up for everything else). People used to build hackintoshes to get Mac OS X without paying Apple's RAM tax or suffer having mid-range laptop GPUs in the top-of-the-line desktops. Apple's outstanding success with their ARM chips is more of an exception than the rule.