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.
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.
>- 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.
Most of it is anecdotal YMMV kind of problems.
I, for one, never had any problems with Mail.app, and I have 2 Gmail accounts synced to it, and a third party IMAP one -- around 40,000 messages in total.
I also use iCal and AddressBook with no problems. Some UI issues that could be better? Sure. Then again, everything else has similar problems in any platform.
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.
Apple should stop making their own productivity software as it is pretty poorly done. Mail is OK, but I would not recommend anyone to use it. I works is probably some of Apple's weakest software. They should really just retire the suite.
Sorry but what does OSX have to do with your iPod not playing MP3s ?
And I don't really understand why you think your anecdote is relevant considering you switched 3 years ago to Windows Vista. Which lets be honest was universally recognised as not being Window's finest release.
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.
Pretty sure it's not a troll. He's pretty well known for his writings on search engines. It's a sign of the times when longtime Mac users are complaining. That's how bad things have gotten.
I've watched people struggle like he's describing. Too many upgrades. Too many authorizations. Too many restrictions. They are jumping through hoop after hoop just to do basic stuff. If they are young they probably don't know any better. But for anyone who has been around, this has gotten to be a joke.
If you have stuck with Apple over the long haul, then you remember what it was like before OSX. When OSX was first introduced you had to upgrade your Mac hardware just to run it or it would be dog slow. Then it got better over time as we all upgraded but it has gradually become more and more annoying. How many people are staring at a spinning beachball at this very moment? Trying to appeal to PC users, all the Mac vs PC nonsense. Then trying to lock down people's music and other files and make them "subscribers", like they are some sort of media licensing company. Apple is no longer an alternative to the typical computer hassles. They have become a primary source of them!
But only if you have been using Macs for many years can you see this. Noobs and fanboys are not going to notice. They will wait minutes for their Mac to boot and stare endlessly at the beachball and accept that this is "fast, start-of-the-art computing".
While noobs suffer through iPhoto staring at beachballs, I will boot in seconds and process my photos, running in a background process, in half the time, using a more traditional UNIX without the Cocoa cruft. No hassles.
My iPhoto Library grew rapidly over the years. As in: it doubled its size, even though I did not add many photos. Thus, after a few years, I ended up with an iPhoto Library of 60 gigs that contained 30 gigs worth of photos.
And apparently, I am not the only one with this problem. And there seems to be no way to fix this. At all.
Luckily, at some point I found some 3rd party software that can rebuild an iPhoto library by basically simulating the user dragging all his images there manually and re-applying all the tags and stuff by hand. Honestly, what they are doing is quite an achievement in the face of an utterly defective piece of software.
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.
So you are saying that the right away to face the challenge of supporting multiple platforms is to outright not do it?
I can't respect a product/company whose future vision is less integration and not more.
I really dislike Apple as a brand, but I admit they bring a lot to the table and that means driving competing products to raise theirs standards, though if their answer to difficult problems is to throw in the towel, then their role may progressively decline in importance.
I do share his frustration with the contact list on the iPhone. I also have over 1000 contacts, which built up over the years of painstakingly migrating them between models of Nokia phones, often having to write scripts to do it with. Then I got a Macbook and it paired with my Nokia phone so easily and painlessly I was really impressed, and when I got an iPhone my contacts magically ended up on it and I was impressed even further.
However, with this number of contacts, finding one is quite difficult. Apart from the alphabetical sorting by surname, scrolling to the top is impractical, or even through one letter of the alphabet. So, I have to rely on the search, and the button is hard to get to.
A similar problem happens when you want to phone someone you've been messaging. If the message history is long, it's a long scroll to get to the top of it to get to the contacts options.
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.
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.
I just can't stand some of the crappy 90s-era UI decisions that Windows still has. Like how the mouse wheel scrolls the currently focused control rather than where you're pointing. Or the stupid Ok/Cancel/Apply everywhere rather than decisions just applying instantly and being reversible. Or the complete lack of consistent keyboard shortcuts.
The other day I was using a Samsung laptop to test something out. It also had "multi-touch"... only I would constantly activate the rotation gesture by accident while scrolling, and the trackpad surface was so abysmal my finger kept sticking as I moved around.
People may bitch and whine, but Apple still gets the basics right while at least trying to evolve the desktop.
"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.)
The thing is, you are beginning to 'blame the user' because they 'don't get it'. Isn't the purpose is that there isn't anything to get? It should 'just work' with minimal thinking, with no frustration. It doesn;t matter that Kanji is enabled... maybe it was enabled by accident? But it doesn;t resolve his problem? Maybe he doesn;t know how to easily enable/disable languages because he finds it hard to configure? If anything, this is useful data for Apple (and any UX designers) to look at to resolve potential usability problems.
When my wife's iphone recently stopped paying attention to the headphone remote, we had a bit of a schizophrenic experience. We made an appointment at the genius bar and the instructions told us to back up the phone.
So when we went in, they very quickly diagnosed the problem and handed over a replacement phone, which was a huge cut above what you would typically be used to in customer service. However, when I restored it from backups, I find that the music (from itunes match) and the apps were all gone.
Now I realise that technically the backup must mean the app data, and the settings etc. So it was a bit of a relief as when we redownloaded the apps nothing appeared to be lost. And there is perhaps a very good reason why a backup wouldn't include the apps you had, their arrangement, and the music you had downloaded etc. But there's got to be a better reason to actually do it, or cater for that situation in a better way.
The whole process felt like it had fallen down. The semantics of 'backup' was changed. If I backup something, and then I restore it, I would expect it to be the same as when I had originally backed it up. Instead she had to go through all the apps, and the music etc that she wanted and redownload them. First world problem agreed, but a waste of time and a flaw where I was expecting something to work.
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.
In the past I've run into iTunes doing a backup and everything seems fine, but when I go to restore my device it turns out the backup is actually empty. This happened to me after the iOS 5 upgrade actually. Maybe the author ran into this situation?
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
[+] [-] jpxxx|13 years ago|reply
-- 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|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] norswap|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] batista|13 years ago|reply
Most of it is anecdotal YMMV kind of problems.
I, for one, never had any problems with Mail.app, and I have 2 Gmail accounts synced to it, and a third party IMAP one -- around 40,000 messages in total.
I also use iCal and AddressBook with no problems. Some UI issues that could be better? Sure. Then again, everything else has similar problems in any platform.
[+] [-] eckyptang|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
"switched to [..] Windows and everything pretty much just works". That sentence pretty much just beat OSX with its own slogan!
[+] [-] kyrra|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taligent|13 years ago|reply
And I don't really understand why you think your anecdote is relevant considering you switched 3 years ago to Windows Vista. Which lets be honest was universally recognised as not being Window's finest release.
[+] [-] ghshephard|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nope0|13 years ago|reply
I've watched people struggle like he's describing. Too many upgrades. Too many authorizations. Too many restrictions. They are jumping through hoop after hoop just to do basic stuff. If they are young they probably don't know any better. But for anyone who has been around, this has gotten to be a joke.
If you have stuck with Apple over the long haul, then you remember what it was like before OSX. When OSX was first introduced you had to upgrade your Mac hardware just to run it or it would be dog slow. Then it got better over time as we all upgraded but it has gradually become more and more annoying. How many people are staring at a spinning beachball at this very moment? Trying to appeal to PC users, all the Mac vs PC nonsense. Then trying to lock down people's music and other files and make them "subscribers", like they are some sort of media licensing company. Apple is no longer an alternative to the typical computer hassles. They have become a primary source of them!
But only if you have been using Macs for many years can you see this. Noobs and fanboys are not going to notice. They will wait minutes for their Mac to boot and stare endlessly at the beachball and accept that this is "fast, start-of-the-art computing".
While noobs suffer through iPhoto staring at beachballs, I will boot in seconds and process my photos, running in a background process, in half the time, using a more traditional UNIX without the Cocoa cruft. No hassles.
[+] [-] Derbasti|13 years ago|reply
And apparently, I am not the only one with this problem. And there seems to be no way to fix this. At all.
Luckily, at some point I found some 3rd party software that can rebuild an iPhoto library by basically simulating the user dragging all his images there manually and re-applying all the tags and stuff by hand. Honestly, what they are doing is quite an achievement in the face of an utterly defective piece of software.
Edit:
For the record, I used this tool to salvage my library: http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/
[+] [-] fauigerzigerk|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ttt_|13 years ago|reply
I can't respect a product/company whose future vision is less integration and not more.
I really dislike Apple as a brand, but I admit they bring a lot to the table and that means driving competing products to raise theirs standards, though if their answer to difficult problems is to throw in the towel, then their role may progressively decline in importance.
[+] [-] kokey|13 years ago|reply
However, with this number of contacts, finding one is quite difficult. Apart from the alphabetical sorting by surname, scrolling to the top is impractical, or even through one letter of the alphabet. So, I have to rely on the search, and the button is hard to get to.
A similar problem happens when you want to phone someone you've been messaging. If the message history is long, it's a long scroll to get to the top of it to get to the contacts options.
[+] [-] zaptheimpaler|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unconed|13 years ago|reply
The other day I was using a Samsung laptop to test something out. It also had "multi-touch"... only I would constantly activate the rotation gesture by accident while scrolling, and the trackpad surface was so abysmal my finger kept sticking as I moved around.
People may bitch and whine, but Apple still gets the basics right while at least trying to evolve the desktop.
[+] [-] DHowett|13 years ago|reply
"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.)
[+] [-] hoi|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] konradb|13 years ago|reply
So when we went in, they very quickly diagnosed the problem and handed over a replacement phone, which was a huge cut above what you would typically be used to in customer service. However, when I restored it from backups, I find that the music (from itunes match) and the apps were all gone.
Now I realise that technically the backup must mean the app data, and the settings etc. So it was a bit of a relief as when we redownloaded the apps nothing appeared to be lost. And there is perhaps a very good reason why a backup wouldn't include the apps you had, their arrangement, and the music you had downloaded etc. But there's got to be a better reason to actually do it, or cater for that situation in a better way.
The whole process felt like it had fallen down. The semantics of 'backup' was changed. If I backup something, and then I restore it, I would expect it to be the same as when I had originally backed it up. Instead she had to go through all the apps, and the music etc that she wanted and redownload them. First world problem agreed, but a waste of time and a flaw where I was expecting something to work.
[+] [-] sohamsankaran|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] myko|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bede|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] corporalagumbo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jvm|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chalst|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vosper|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] richardw|13 years ago|reply
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?"
[+] [-] minikites|13 years ago|reply
http://speirs.org/blog/2012/1/2/misconceptions-about-ios-mul...
[+] [-] robryan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicholassmith|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haldean|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lubujackson|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mitchty|13 years ago|reply
Personal anecdotes are not data.
[+] [-] sohamsankaran|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pooriaazimi|13 years ago|reply
> 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)
[+] [-] Derbasti|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] smoyer|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] angelortega|13 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] padobson|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bkorte|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
How is this __ever__ acceptable?
[+] [-] eckyptang|13 years ago|reply
b) No data loss is acceptable. Any data loss is simply "product doesn't work".
[+] [-] se85|13 years ago|reply
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.