[zmb_]

Let me give a concrete example: I have had iPad Pro for years now. A primary use case for me is to watch a lecture and take notes, or read a book and take notes. The way this should obviously work is that I have my iPad in portrait orientation, split the screen vertically so that I have the video playing or the book open on the top half and notes on the bottom half. This was solved perfectly by the original Macintosh. It is still not solved by iOS (even though I've had tickets for years in Radar).

For some reason I cannot comprehend, I can split the screen horizontally, which results in two thin strips side-by-side that are useless for anything that I can think of. It is not possible to split it vertically so that I would have two reasonable aspect ratio apps on top of each other. Now they added a convoluted "multitasking" mechanism that kind of lets me solve this for reading, where I can have two 3/4 sized apps overlapping each other, but I still cannot just split the screen or have freely resizable apps (which, again, is a problem solved already in the original Macintosh).

This type of terrible UX has become endemic, and is even worse in non-Apple products. The root cause I believe is "authoritarian simplicity", where some UX designer or team thinks they know the best and force a single, over-simplified, over-specified solution on everyone.