8 ms·

“Gravity is worth asking about”

228 points by nozzlegear 3mo ago

alex-moon 3mo ago
I am struck by the resemblance between this logic and the logic behind drinking. I remember back in my 20s one of the devs would come over at the end of the day and go, "Coming to the pub?" The standard answer was, of course, "I might come for one." The word "one" was a kind of punchline all on its own of course, a running joke.
jdub 3mo ago
That's part of the philosophical change that led to GNOME 2.0 https://ometer.com/preferences.html https://ometer.com/preferences.html
- applfanboysbgon 3mo ago
  And yet, VSCode has ~70% developer share, largely because it can be everything to everyone, but no more than what you personally need. Just put a search bar in your preferences dialogue, it ain't that hard.
- JoshTriplett 3mo ago
  Yup. GNOME 2.0 was a little rough because they swung far enough the other way, but it was still a huge improvement to remove all the "unbreak me" obvious preferences that only had one sensible answer. A few versions later, it was a delight to use.
  - willtemperley 3mo ago
    GNOME 2 was lovely. Then GNOME 3 came and I switched to Mac.
    - floriankarsten 3mo ago
      Interesting because i kept reading that people dislike GNOME 3 because it's like Mac.
    - JoshTriplett 3mo ago
      My experience with GNOME 3 was exactly the same as with GNOME 2: GNOME 3.0 was a little rough, but a couple of versions in, it felt great.
- VorpalWay 3mo ago
  And yet, KDE Plasma is so more usable than Gnome these days, because they swung too far into removing settings. You needed to install a separate Gnome Tweak tool to even be able to change font antialiasing settings last I looked, which is preposterous. I get literal headaches from the defaults.
  - floriankarsten 3mo ago
    You can't change font antialiasing on macos either. It might be the case that majority people wouldn't even touch whats in gnome tweaks. I use gnome on two machines and don't touch it. The font antialiasing seems fine?
    - VorpalWay 3mo ago
      It might be fine for some, but it is an accessibility issue. Just like some people can't deal long term with either light mode or dark mode (and some are fine with both).
Michelangelo11 3mo ago
This is good, but I think it's missing a discussion of the business logic, which is IMO the mechanism behind the gravity we're discussing here. And really it's just about the fact that you always get more positive attention in an org (and therefore a better shot at promotion etc.) for suggesting and implementing new stuff than pruning what's already there. Pruning only becomes possible when there's a coherent vision, for which you need a small-to-medium team (at most) and one person with the vision in charge of it.
thomassmith65 3mo ago
This reminded me of a 20 year old 'viral' video "Microsoft Designs the iPod Package": https://youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k https://youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k
matusp 3mo ago
The minimalist approach is great until it isn't. You can cover 98% of use cases with a single button is a great motto, until you are in the other 2%. I often fail to find basic functionality in software today, because some smart product manager decided that nobody really needs it. For example, it is now often impossible to load all elements from a list and filter/sort it along basic properties.
- dwattttt 3mo ago
  Does it satisfy 98% of users always? Or does it satisfy each user 98% of the time?
  - detourdog 3mo ago
    I would say I'm about 90% satisfied. Yesterday I just did a bunch of batch graphic conversations by opening multiple images in Preview. Selecting all the images in the sidebar. I could then batch process manual using preview. It was an awesome experience and the first really exciting improvement I have seen in a long time.
- iso1631 3mo ago
  You can make something customisable "links to show with screenshots" I always want to either copy and delete or save and forget, so I'd select those two options (or rather have the old behaviour) and ignore the rest. You can choose other things. Same with adverts. I would select "zero adverts", but you could select "upto six adverts" or whatever. After all adverts are for the benefit of the customer right - that's what advert apologists say.
- dgellow 3mo ago
  I wouldn’t call Apple style minimalist. It was more focused on being approachable, in a way that works for both beginners and advanced users. That means something consistent, discoverable. It looks easy to get started, but has depth when needed. If you look at or used macOS 9 and the early OS X none of that expresses minimalism
- pixlmint 3mo ago
vnorilo 3mo ago
Screenshot and share functionality get massively overloaded on iOS, but it's not because a product person / designer lacks the necessary taste, vision or "courage". It's because the OS is not capable of composing apps well: "I want to X, but with Y". As a result, functionality like screenshots, sharing, clipboard get overloaded with all kinds of adhoc half-baked workflows to work around the single app mindset.
- jon-wood 3mo ago
  I kind of agree with what you're saying, in that screenshot and share functionality is increasingly overloaded with options and things that just don't make any sense in that context. I disagree that this isn't because a product designer lacks vision, Apple control the entire stack on iOS, and there's nothing stopping them from rethinking things so that "Share" isn't a weird synonym for "Junk drawer menu". There is no justifiable reason that Safari's find in page option is under the share menu, hidden underneath a View More button. Finding within a page has nothing to do with sharing, and even if somehow a user guessed that it might be in that menu without searching the web for it, they're probably going to dismiss it because they haven't expanded the view more menu. iOS and macOS are riddled with illogical decisions like this. The menu bar is an unusable mess of icons that things have added, a problem that Windows (kind of) solved about a decade ago by allowing me to select which icons appear by default. The Dock seems to choose at random whether an app remains pinned or not, with particular confusion brought by apps updating themselves. Shortcuts is a wonderful idea in principle while in practice anytime I try to do something with it some part is missing. I used to be a huge proponent of macOS in particular, and I would like to be one again, but currently its incredibly hard to do that.
  - vnorilo 3mo ago
    Totally agreed; I was talking from the POV of someone designing an iOS app. Apple could fix a lot of this jank with better design, individual apps less so.
danangReader 3mo ago
Fyi this article is not about gravity.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
ymolodtsov 3mo ago
The same people who want minimalism here in the comments are angry at Microsoft for removing half the features in any control panel inside Windows with every release. Shows how difficult it is to design and build software at scale.
- vor_ 3mo ago
  The same people? Who are they? And since when is Microsoft removing half the features in "any control panel" in every release?
  - picofarad 3mo ago
    This is a fallacy and needs a name. I always read it so it is not a fallacy, just so I dont argue. My change: "where are the people who are against X now that the proponents of X are posting" However it only makes sense in places like HN that have a "tone". I think arguments in general get downvoted, or at least not upvoted, so perhaps people (other than me) are less likely to give a different opinion than the current thread.
- swiftcoder 3mo ago
  > angry at Microsoft for removing half the features in any control panel inside Windows Tbf, I'm not sure anyone is any at Microsoft for removing things. They are angry because Microsoft does not actually remove those settings, they just don't allow them to be changed from the new UI, and instead hide them away somewhere in the same classic control panel that has existed since Windows NT...
- StilesCrisis 3mo ago
  I think the real issue is that they have a clean, pretty window with five options and then a "more options" button--which, when clicked, brings up the exact settings pane from Windows NT 4 with no improvements. So we have to endure two parallel implementations, each flawed in its own way.
eviks 3mo ago
> This is why it’s important to hire and recognize people who will understand that those limitations have to be imposed arbitrarily Better get the folks that recognize users exist and are different, so instead of arbitrary mistakes UI should be tailored to a user. Case in point: > five options I have to choose from, every time, even if I never touch four of them: So the way out is to allow you to remove those 4 rather than arbitrarily stop at 3 where you don't need 2 instead of 4?
- yoz-y 3mo ago
  There is no good middle. Either have no options, or have many and make them configurable. I use 4 of those 5 options all the time. But there are other places where options make me slow because I need to was through them.
  - senko 3mo ago
    Some people, when they want to hide an option, think: "I know, I'll use an option." Well, now they have two options.
    - layer8 3mo ago
      It’s good to have options.
    - zamadatix 3mo ago
      Options are pretty nice, it's being forced to always have a long list of options you never want to see that sucks.
      - yoz-y 3mo ago
        Yeah. This is something that existed in pro software forever. You can have unlimited toolbars and all the buttons you want. But don’t have to. Web and mobile apps just removed the UI customization altogether.
- swiftcoder 3mo ago
jonplackett 3mo ago
The worst thing about Apple AppStore ads is they create a who-can-pay-more rises to the top situation, where previously it was more based on merit. And In order to make an ad campaign make financial sense, you MUST have a subscription app. Because just getting one download will cost you at least $3 which is already over the cost an app used to cost. and your conversion rate to paid might be only 10 or 20:1. So you need to make $30 per customer So as well as being annoying at the moment of seeing them, ads in the AppStore are directly contributing to the general enshitification of apps.
- realusername 3mo ago
  > So as well as being annoying at the moment of seeing them, ads in the AppStore are directly contributing to the general enshitification of apps. You can even cut the word "apps" from the analysis here, the appstore just gets most of its money from games which are pretty much slot machines. That's exactly why every time they promote the appstore somewhere, they put a productivity app as an example, they would like to avoid to be classified with gambling regulations, which is essentially what they are.
zahlman 3mo ago
I don't understand what the title has to do with the content.
- nizmow 3mo ago
  The context for that is in Gruber’s original post, I believe.
- SCdF 3mo ago
  Ditto. It's not a reference to anything that I can find, and the concept of gravity is sort of mentioned once but never expanded upon enough for me to really understand what they mean.
  - Oarch 3mo ago
    It might be the term "financial gravity" I've seen used sometimes. That makes sense in this context.
- dwroberts 3mo ago
  They reference gravity in this paragraph and I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean > Not only is it very hard to create interfaces that have limitations, but a bad decision is not just precedent – it’s code that can be copied and reused. Existing code always had tons of… well, gravity, even before LLMs. I assume this is just LLM nonsense?
  - actionfromafar 3mo ago
    It makes a lot of sense to me. You go in to a code base and start looking for the ways things are done. You copy the precedent. LLMs do that, even harder, they don't really have taste like a human might.
- graemep 3mo ago
  I think they mean inertia, not "gravity"
  - 3mo ago
microtonal 3mo ago
Even the 'own stickers' joke doesn't really apply anymore. I recently saw ads for Apple Fitness+ and Apple Intelligence in the system settings (!, I'll forgive the ads for Apple Care). Apple Creator Studio ads in the former iWork Apps (including abusing toolbar icons for it). Finally (luckily I haven't experienced it), ads for their F1 movie in Apple Wallet. It is gross and destroys what Apple stood for. Their introduction of more and more ads shows that they want to optimize the Services category at all cost. Hardware hasn't grown as much as historically and they haven't been able to start new categories in recent history (e.g. AVP failure), plus Services is high-margin. Since they are now on this gravy train, they will increasingly use behavioral data to target ads, etc.
- TeMPOraL 3mo ago
  It looks like Apple is literally copying Samsung, and not only in hardware (upcoming foldable iPhone), but in the services and in advertising them inside the UI. Even the names are similar. This is not a good thing. Not for Apple, and not for Android, as in terms of exerting gravity on the market, Apple is a supermassive black hole. Anything they do instantly becomes normalized as a business practice.
  - microtonal 3mo ago
    Definitely. But at least on Samsung phones, you can uninstall the packages from the user partition and in that way rip most of that stuff out (like the McAfee scanner in security, Bixby, Gemini, OneDrive, etc.). So, yeah, they are copying, but by virtue of the ecosystem being less open, you are mostly stuck with it.
    - grishka 3mo ago
      You can disable Samsung's system apps using adb as well. The command is `adb uninstall --user 0 com.package.name`
      - microtonal 3mo ago
        That is what I was alluding to, though I recommend people to use UAD-ng, since it explains what each package is and they are separated in safety-based categories. One note though: removal of system apps with adb is blocked in Android 17. You can only disable system apps on Android 17: https://github.com/Universal-Debloater-Alliance/universal-android-debloater-next-generation/issues/1426#issuecomment-4899337274 https://github.com/Universal-Debloater-Alliance/universal-an...
po1nt 3mo ago
I daily drive linux (arch btw) with all the adblocking bells and whistles and I was dumbfounded when I saw my grandma's PC with all the clutter and ads. Really makes you miss the old era.
- steve1977 3mo ago
  When was the ad-free era on Windows (Home)? I don't remember it.
  - andreareina 3mo ago
    XP had crapware trial versions but you could disable them and there were never ads on the actual UI.
  - ben_w 3mo ago
    My memory of 24 years ago is a bit fuzzy, but I don't recall any ads on XP; the main complaint at the time was the UI was "fisher price".
    - picofarad 3mo ago
      Jellybean start menu
- dguest 3mo ago
  You don't even need add blocking for most open source software: the threat of forking backs a culture where the software is just there to to its job and not to sell something. I started using the f-droid app "store" recently and it's amazing: bare bones stuff that just does what you want.
  - po1nt 3mo ago
    I meant user experience as a whole including browser and proprietary apps. The amount of ads I perceive a day using my PC can be counted on my fingers. And it's not just something we would consider calling ads, but just the clutter on the web. - Limited offer modals - "Hey we have a useless AI chatbot" popups - Cookie banners - Newsletter popups - 3 tiered subscription offers for everything - Sign in to XYZ with google - This site wants to know your position And don't even get me started on things you can't change as a user like really bad full text searches and stuff. And I'm still yet to find that hot single in my area.
brador 3mo ago
It's easy to get so caught up in the false moat of minimalism that you forget you are selling a tool.
- kibwen 3mo ago
  Slapping ads on a tool doesn't improve the functionality of the tool.
atemerev 3mo ago
Broken Windows Theory works.
glimshe 3mo ago
I really wanted to hear the opinion from Mac diehards about modern MacOS. I've used Windows for decades but bought a Mac M2 a while ago. I really like it so I'm not trying to say "Apple Bad". But I'm yet to see Apple's legendary simplicity, minimalism and attention to detail. I keep complaining about the fact Mac OS asks me whether I want to allow chrome to access the local network with every update. I tried to dig deeper and discovered a privacy settings UI with dozens of entries written "Google Chrome" with the permission disabled. One for each time I said "No". This is absolutely embarrassing. I wouldn't call it a bug, but a lazy and incompetent design that I thought could not happen in a Apple product. I'll give you another example. Lately I've noticed a progress bar under the Apps icon on the dock. At first I didn't even know it was a progress bar because I use the Dock vertically - it looked like a separator - and the progress bar made no progress. One day, the progress bar actually made progress and stayed stuck at 80%. I thought something had crashed and rebooted the machine. It stayed there. I eventually discovered by trial and error that the problem was that a running WhatsApp app prevented the WhatsApp update process to finish. Since it was always open as I used the computer, that annoying UI element stayed around forever. By closing WhatsApp, the bar unlocked and the update finished. Pretty horrible. Is Apple learning from Microsoft?
- KoolKat23 3mo ago
  Don't get me started on the whole iCloud thing, and apple account sign in (although to be fair to them they've improved this it was way too onerous in the past).
- tomashubelbauer 3mo ago
  I have been using macOS for I think fewer than ten years and I think the attention of detail may always have been just about the hardware... macOs and iOS have presented me with some of the clunkiest edge cases and mishandled situations and a lot of them are damn near undebuggable. I think Windows is very tasteless OS making macOS seem good in comparison but in isolation there is a lot that could a should be improved
- layer8 3mo ago
  I went through this around 15 years ago, even migrating my parents from Windows to MacOS on the promise of simplicity and better UI. No, it’s not simpler or more intuitive, instead it has its own world of quirks, issues, and annoyances. And both Apple and Microsoft have become worse since.
layer8 3mo ago
Regarding stickers on PCs, once one PC manufacturer added a sticker for feature X, they would have an advantage in physical stores over the other manufacturer’s PC next to it, because consumers overwhelmed by the available choices would rather buy the PC with the indicated feature over the one that might not have it. If Macs were available from different manufacturers and displayed in stores side by side, I’m not sure that Apple could escape that mechanism.
- StilesCrisis 3mo ago
  Is "Intel inside" even a feature? It's not like the other laptop will be lacking a CPU.
  - layer8 3mo ago
    You can read up the history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Intel_Inside https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Intel_Inside. Nowadays the considerations aren’t exactly the same anymore as 20-30 years ago, but by some measure Intel CPUs are still the most interoperable x86 CPUs, due to their market share.
    - StilesCrisis 3mo ago
      I'm not sure this explains anything? It is the story of one successful marketing campaign in the 90s. Intel's reputation in the 2020s is not what it was then.
alexpotato 3mo ago
I know that "Great Man" theory is considered debunked. That being said, it seems a LOT of drops in quality trace back to some very senior person who cared about quality and put resources behind delivering quality and then either: - stops caring - leaves (retires, switches jobs or gets pushed out). Jobs is the classic example of this but I'm sure if you are reading this then you have an example from your own career history.
- StilesCrisis 3mo ago
  Blizzard changed as soon as Morhaime left.
- wizzwizz4 3mo ago
  I would call this the "bus factor" theory. If a process (here, quality control) revolves around one person, and then that person stops doing the work, the work stops getting done.
- hvs 3mo ago
  The "Great Man" theory of history is considered debunked. The idea that visionary leadership in a single organization can make a difference is very true.
- esafak 3mo ago
  That's not the great man theory that's called having a user advocate in the C Suite.
hnd9q09qk4 3mo ago
Yeah that's the hard part
hn9zmdcaou 3mo ago
Good catch
conception 3mo ago
https://youtu.be/P4VBqTViEx4?si=JkqbTRS0NxOhYn9B https://youtu.be/P4VBqTViEx4?si=JkqbTRS0NxOhYn9B Steve Jobs talking about Apple of the future. (His comments on product people running a company vs sales)
DiscourseFan 3mo ago
“the moment you open the door to One, Infinity starts exerting its pull” Reads like it’s from some esoteric medieval Philosphy/theology book.

228 points by nozzlegear 3mo ago

I am struck by the resemblance between this logic and the logic behind drinking. I remember back in my 20s one of the devs would come over at the end of the day and go, "Coming to the pub?" The standard answer was, of course, "I might come for one." The word "one" was a kind of punchline all on its own of course, a running joke.

jdub 3mo ago

That's part of the philosophical change that led to GNOME 2.0 https://ometer.com/preferences.html https://ometer.com/preferences.html

applfanboysbgon 3mo ago
And yet, VSCode has ~70% developer share, largely because it can be everything to everyone, but no more than what you personally need. Just put a search bar in your preferences dialogue, it ain't that hard.
JoshTriplett 3mo ago
Yup. GNOME 2.0 was a little rough because they swung far enough the other way, but it was still a huge improvement to remove all the "unbreak me" obvious preferences that only had one sensible answer. A few versions later, it was a delight to use.
- willtemperley 3mo ago
  GNOME 2 was lovely. Then GNOME 3 came and I switched to Mac.
  - floriankarsten 3mo ago
    Interesting because i kept reading that people dislike GNOME 3 because it's like Mac.
  - JoshTriplett 3mo ago
    My experience with GNOME 3 was exactly the same as with GNOME 2: GNOME 3.0 was a little rough, but a couple of versions in, it felt great.
VorpalWay 3mo ago
And yet, KDE Plasma is so more usable than Gnome these days, because they swung too far into removing settings. You needed to install a separate Gnome Tweak tool to even be able to change font antialiasing settings last I looked, which is preposterous. I get literal headaches from the defaults.
- floriankarsten 3mo ago
  You can't change font antialiasing on macos either. It might be the case that majority people wouldn't even touch whats in gnome tweaks. I use gnome on two machines and don't touch it. The font antialiasing seems fine?
  - VorpalWay 3mo ago
    It might be fine for some, but it is an accessibility issue. Just like some people can't deal long term with either light mode or dark mode (and some are fine with both).

Michelangelo11 3mo ago

This is good, but I think it's missing a discussion of the business logic, which is IMO the mechanism behind the gravity we're discussing here. And really it's just about the fact that you always get more positive attention in an org (and therefore a better shot at promotion etc.) for suggesting and implementing new stuff than pruning what's already there. Pruning only becomes possible when there's a coherent vision, for which you need a small-to-medium team (at most) and one person with the vision in charge of it.

thomassmith65 3mo ago

This reminded me of a 20 year old 'viral' video "Microsoft Designs the iPod Package": https://youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k https://youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k

matusp 3mo ago

The minimalist approach is great until it isn't. You can cover 98% of use cases with a single button is a great motto, until you are in the other 2%. I often fail to find basic functionality in software today, because some smart product manager decided that nobody really needs it. For example, it is now often impossible to load all elements from a list and filter/sort it along basic properties.

dwattttt 3mo ago
Does it satisfy 98% of users always? Or does it satisfy each user 98% of the time?
- detourdog 3mo ago
  I would say I'm about 90% satisfied. Yesterday I just did a bunch of batch graphic conversations by opening multiple images in Preview. Selecting all the images in the sidebar. I could then batch process manual using preview. It was an awesome experience and the first really exciting improvement I have seen in a long time.
iso1631 3mo ago
You can make something customisable "links to show with screenshots" I always want to either copy and delete or save and forget, so I'd select those two options (or rather have the old behaviour) and ignore the rest. You can choose other things. Same with adverts. I would select "zero adverts", but you could select "upto six adverts" or whatever. After all adverts are for the benefit of the customer right - that's what advert apologists say.
dgellow 3mo ago
I wouldn’t call Apple style minimalist. It was more focused on being approachable, in a way that works for both beginners and advanced users. That means something consistent, discoverable. It looks easy to get started, but has depth when needed. If you look at or used macOS 9 and the early OS X none of that expresses minimalism
pixlmint 3mo ago

vnorilo 3mo ago

Screenshot and share functionality get massively overloaded on iOS, but it's not because a product person / designer lacks the necessary taste, vision or "courage". It's because the OS is not capable of composing apps well: "I want to X, but with Y". As a result, functionality like screenshots, sharing, clipboard get overloaded with all kinds of adhoc half-baked workflows to work around the single app mindset.

jon-wood 3mo ago
I kind of agree with what you're saying, in that screenshot and share functionality is increasingly overloaded with options and things that just don't make any sense in that context. I disagree that this isn't because a product designer lacks vision, Apple control the entire stack on iOS, and there's nothing stopping them from rethinking things so that "Share" isn't a weird synonym for "Junk drawer menu". There is no justifiable reason that Safari's find in page option is under the share menu, hidden underneath a View More button. Finding within a page has nothing to do with sharing, and even if somehow a user guessed that it might be in that menu without searching the web for it, they're probably going to dismiss it because they haven't expanded the view more menu. iOS and macOS are riddled with illogical decisions like this. The menu bar is an unusable mess of icons that things have added, a problem that Windows (kind of) solved about a decade ago by allowing me to select which icons appear by default. The Dock seems to choose at random whether an app remains pinned or not, with particular confusion brought by apps updating themselves. Shortcuts is a wonderful idea in principle while in practice anytime I try to do something with it some part is missing. I used to be a huge proponent of macOS in particular, and I would like to be one again, but currently its incredibly hard to do that.
- vnorilo 3mo ago
  Totally agreed; I was talking from the POV of someone designing an iOS app. Apple could fix a lot of this jank with better design, individual apps less so.

danangReader 3mo ago

Fyi this article is not about gravity.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

ymolodtsov 3mo ago

The same people who want minimalism here in the comments are angry at Microsoft for removing half the features in any control panel inside Windows with every release. Shows how difficult it is to design and build software at scale.

vor_ 3mo ago
The same people? Who are they? And since when is Microsoft removing half the features in "any control panel" in every release?
- picofarad 3mo ago
  This is a fallacy and needs a name. I always read it so it is not a fallacy, just so I dont argue. My change: "where are the people who are against X now that the proponents of X are posting" However it only makes sense in places like HN that have a "tone". I think arguments in general get downvoted, or at least not upvoted, so perhaps people (other than me) are less likely to give a different opinion than the current thread.
swiftcoder 3mo ago
> angry at Microsoft for removing half the features in any control panel inside Windows Tbf, I'm not sure anyone is any at Microsoft for removing things. They are angry because Microsoft does not actually remove those settings, they just don't allow them to be changed from the new UI, and instead hide them away somewhere in the same classic control panel that has existed since Windows NT...
StilesCrisis 3mo ago
I think the real issue is that they have a clean, pretty window with five options and then a "more options" button--which, when clicked, brings up the exact settings pane from Windows NT 4 with no improvements. So we have to endure two parallel implementations, each flawed in its own way.

eviks 3mo ago

> This is why it’s important to hire and recognize people who will understand that those limitations have to be imposed arbitrarily Better get the folks that recognize users exist and are different, so instead of arbitrary mistakes UI should be tailored to a user. Case in point: > five options I have to choose from, every time, even if I never touch four of them: So the way out is to allow you to remove those 4 rather than arbitrarily stop at 3 where you don't need 2 instead of 4?

yoz-y 3mo ago
There is no good middle. Either have no options, or have many and make them configurable. I use 4 of those 5 options all the time. But there are other places where options make me slow because I need to was through them.
- senko 3mo ago
  Some people, when they want to hide an option, think: "I know, I'll use an option." Well, now they have two options.
  - layer8 3mo ago
    It’s good to have options.
  - zamadatix 3mo ago
    Options are pretty nice, it's being forced to always have a long list of options you never want to see that sucks.
    - yoz-y 3mo ago
      Yeah. This is something that existed in pro software forever. You can have unlimited toolbars and all the buttons you want. But don’t have to. Web and mobile apps just removed the UI customization altogether.
swiftcoder 3mo ago

jonplackett 3mo ago

The worst thing about Apple AppStore ads is they create a who-can-pay-more rises to the top situation, where previously it was more based on merit. And In order to make an ad campaign make financial sense, you MUST have a subscription app. Because just getting one download will cost you at least $3 which is already over the cost an app used to cost. and your conversion rate to paid might be only 10 or 20:1. So you need to make $30 per customer So as well as being annoying at the moment of seeing them, ads in the AppStore are directly contributing to the general enshitification of apps.

realusername 3mo ago
> So as well as being annoying at the moment of seeing them, ads in the AppStore are directly contributing to the general enshitification of apps. You can even cut the word "apps" from the analysis here, the appstore just gets most of its money from games which are pretty much slot machines. That's exactly why every time they promote the appstore somewhere, they put a productivity app as an example, they would like to avoid to be classified with gambling regulations, which is essentially what they are.

zahlman 3mo ago

I don't understand what the title has to do with the content.

nizmow 3mo ago
The context for that is in Gruber’s original post, I believe.
SCdF 3mo ago
Ditto. It's not a reference to anything that I can find, and the concept of gravity is sort of mentioned once but never expanded upon enough for me to really understand what they mean.
- Oarch 3mo ago
  It might be the term "financial gravity" I've seen used sometimes. That makes sense in this context.
dwroberts 3mo ago
They reference gravity in this paragraph and I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean > Not only is it very hard to create interfaces that have limitations, but a bad decision is not just precedent – it’s code that can be copied and reused. Existing code always had tons of… well, gravity, even before LLMs. I assume this is just LLM nonsense?
- actionfromafar 3mo ago
  It makes a lot of sense to me. You go in to a code base and start looking for the ways things are done. You copy the precedent. LLMs do that, even harder, they don't really have taste like a human might.
graemep 3mo ago
I think they mean inertia, not "gravity"
- 3mo ago

microtonal 3mo ago

Even the 'own stickers' joke doesn't really apply anymore. I recently saw ads for Apple Fitness+ and Apple Intelligence in the system settings (!, I'll forgive the ads for Apple Care). Apple Creator Studio ads in the former iWork Apps (including abusing toolbar icons for it). Finally (luckily I haven't experienced it), ads for their F1 movie in Apple Wallet. It is gross and destroys what Apple stood for. Their introduction of more and more ads shows that they want to optimize the Services category at all cost. Hardware hasn't grown as much as historically and they haven't been able to start new categories in recent history (e.g. AVP failure), plus Services is high-margin. Since they are now on this gravy train, they will increasingly use behavioral data to target ads, etc.

TeMPOraL 3mo ago
It looks like Apple is literally copying Samsung, and not only in hardware (upcoming foldable iPhone), but in the services and in advertising them inside the UI. Even the names are similar. This is not a good thing. Not for Apple, and not for Android, as in terms of exerting gravity on the market, Apple is a supermassive black hole. Anything they do instantly becomes normalized as a business practice.
- microtonal 3mo ago
  Definitely. But at least on Samsung phones, you can uninstall the packages from the user partition and in that way rip most of that stuff out (like the McAfee scanner in security, Bixby, Gemini, OneDrive, etc.). So, yeah, they are copying, but by virtue of the ecosystem being less open, you are mostly stuck with it.
  - grishka 3mo ago
    You can disable Samsung's system apps using adb as well. The command is `adb uninstall --user 0 com.package.name`
    - microtonal 3mo ago
      That is what I was alluding to, though I recommend people to use UAD-ng, since it explains what each package is and they are separated in safety-based categories. One note though: removal of system apps with adb is blocked in Android 17. You can only disable system apps on Android 17: https://github.com/Universal-Debloater-Alliance/universal-android-debloater-next-generation/issues/1426#issuecomment-4899337274 https://github.com/Universal-Debloater-Alliance/universal-an...

po1nt 3mo ago

I daily drive linux (arch btw) with all the adblocking bells and whistles and I was dumbfounded when I saw my grandma's PC with all the clutter and ads. Really makes you miss the old era.

steve1977 3mo ago
When was the ad-free era on Windows (Home)? I don't remember it.
- andreareina 3mo ago
  XP had crapware trial versions but you could disable them and there were never ads on the actual UI.
- ben_w 3mo ago
  My memory of 24 years ago is a bit fuzzy, but I don't recall any ads on XP; the main complaint at the time was the UI was "fisher price".
  - picofarad 3mo ago
    Jellybean start menu
dguest 3mo ago
You don't even need add blocking for most open source software: the threat of forking backs a culture where the software is just there to to its job and not to sell something. I started using the f-droid app "store" recently and it's amazing: bare bones stuff that just does what you want.
- po1nt 3mo ago
  I meant user experience as a whole including browser and proprietary apps. The amount of ads I perceive a day using my PC can be counted on my fingers. And it's not just something we would consider calling ads, but just the clutter on the web. - Limited offer modals - "Hey we have a useless AI chatbot" popups - Cookie banners - Newsletter popups - 3 tiered subscription offers for everything - Sign in to XYZ with google - This site wants to know your position And don't even get me started on things you can't change as a user like really bad full text searches and stuff. And I'm still yet to find that hot single in my area.

brador 3mo ago

It's easy to get so caught up in the false moat of minimalism that you forget you are selling a tool.

kibwen 3mo ago
Slapping ads on a tool doesn't improve the functionality of the tool.

atemerev 3mo ago

Broken Windows Theory works.

glimshe 3mo ago

I really wanted to hear the opinion from Mac diehards about modern MacOS. I've used Windows for decades but bought a Mac M2 a while ago. I really like it so I'm not trying to say "Apple Bad". But I'm yet to see Apple's legendary simplicity, minimalism and attention to detail. I keep complaining about the fact Mac OS asks me whether I want to allow chrome to access the local network with every update. I tried to dig deeper and discovered a privacy settings UI with dozens of entries written "Google Chrome" with the permission disabled. One for each time I said "No". This is absolutely embarrassing. I wouldn't call it a bug, but a lazy and incompetent design that I thought could not happen in a Apple product. I'll give you another example. Lately I've noticed a progress bar under the Apps icon on the dock. At first I didn't even know it was a progress bar because I use the Dock vertically - it looked like a separator - and the progress bar made no progress. One day, the progress bar actually made progress and stayed stuck at 80%. I thought something had crashed and rebooted the machine. It stayed there. I eventually discovered by trial and error that the problem was that a running WhatsApp app prevented the WhatsApp update process to finish. Since it was always open as I used the computer, that annoying UI element stayed around forever. By closing WhatsApp, the bar unlocked and the update finished. Pretty horrible. Is Apple learning from Microsoft?

KoolKat23 3mo ago
Don't get me started on the whole iCloud thing, and apple account sign in (although to be fair to them they've improved this it was way too onerous in the past).
tomashubelbauer 3mo ago
I have been using macOS for I think fewer than ten years and I think the attention of detail may always have been just about the hardware... macOs and iOS have presented me with some of the clunkiest edge cases and mishandled situations and a lot of them are damn near undebuggable. I think Windows is very tasteless OS making macOS seem good in comparison but in isolation there is a lot that could a should be improved
layer8 3mo ago
I went through this around 15 years ago, even migrating my parents from Windows to MacOS on the promise of simplicity and better UI. No, it’s not simpler or more intuitive, instead it has its own world of quirks, issues, and annoyances. And both Apple and Microsoft have become worse since.

layer8 3mo ago

Regarding stickers on PCs, once one PC manufacturer added a sticker for feature X, they would have an advantage in physical stores over the other manufacturer’s PC next to it, because consumers overwhelmed by the available choices would rather buy the PC with the indicated feature over the one that might not have it. If Macs were available from different manufacturers and displayed in stores side by side, I’m not sure that Apple could escape that mechanism.

StilesCrisis 3mo ago
Is "Intel inside" even a feature? It's not like the other laptop will be lacking a CPU.
- layer8 3mo ago
  You can read up the history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Intel_Inside https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Intel_Inside. Nowadays the considerations aren’t exactly the same anymore as 20-30 years ago, but by some measure Intel CPUs are still the most interoperable x86 CPUs, due to their market share.
  - StilesCrisis 3mo ago
    I'm not sure this explains anything? It is the story of one successful marketing campaign in the 90s. Intel's reputation in the 2020s is not what it was then.

alexpotato 3mo ago

I know that "Great Man" theory is considered debunked. That being said, it seems a LOT of drops in quality trace back to some very senior person who cared about quality and put resources behind delivering quality and then either: - stops caring - leaves (retires, switches jobs or gets pushed out). Jobs is the classic example of this but I'm sure if you are reading this then you have an example from your own career history.

StilesCrisis 3mo ago
Blizzard changed as soon as Morhaime left.
wizzwizz4 3mo ago
I would call this the "bus factor" theory. If a process (here, quality control) revolves around one person, and then that person stops doing the work, the work stops getting done.
hvs 3mo ago
The "Great Man" theory of history is considered debunked. The idea that visionary leadership in a single organization can make a difference is very true.
esafak 3mo ago
That's not the great man theory that's called having a user advocate in the C Suite.

hnd9q09qk4 3mo ago

Yeah that's the hard part

hn9zmdcaou 3mo ago

Good catch

conception 3mo ago

https://youtu.be/P4VBqTViEx4?si=JkqbTRS0NxOhYn9B https://youtu.be/P4VBqTViEx4?si=JkqbTRS0NxOhYn9B Steve Jobs talking about Apple of the future. (His comments on product people running a company vs sales)

DiscourseFan 3mo ago

“the moment you open the door to One, Infinity starts exerting its pull” Reads like it’s from some esoteric medieval Philosphy/theology book.