I can't See Apple's Vision
31 points by weaksauce
31 points by weaksauce
Tiniest, tiniest nitpick:
Why did you cut off the word "Finder" from Force Quit?
It was never there - what happened is if you hold down shift the menu item transforms from "open force quit dialog" to "force quit current app", changing both the item name and shortcut. And the keyboard shortcut to take a screenshot happens to have shift in it.
A long rant about everything sucks. And yet here I am as a very happy Mac and iPhone user being productive on these devices. I have zero issues with Tahoe
Can we agree that most of this is subjective?
No, actually: I do NOT think it is all subjective. I think some of it is objectively bad design, but it bothers some people a lot and bothers other people very little so that they still feel "productive".
Would anyone defend creating windows with a large radius of curvature in the corners, but not adjusting the click target for resize so it no longer actually covers the corner? This might not bother some people, but surely no one claims it is desired, right?
Would anyone actually prefer menus with the exact degree of translucency that makes it impossible to read the text of the menu or the content behind it?
Would anyone claim that the appearance of the "Scene or Accessory" button in Mat Duggan's screenshot is actually the best way to render that control?
I am not going to claim the Tahoe is unusable. I'm not even going to argue that some other OS has a better UI. But I will claim that it makes many small design choices that are objectively bad.
Also people have done qualitative measurement of how good UIs are by measuring how quickly and reliably users can complete tasks with them.
I'm not sure if it requires a longer timeline, but I've been on the Mac for 24 years and it's definitely declined. I'm not talking (here) about reliability, or bugginess, or speed, or focus. Just on UI clarity, vision, consistency, and beauty, it's taken a very sad turn.
Rants like these where the specific complaints are either wrong or misguided or just not important dilute the complaint pool. This is just not a good list even if I don’t doubt it’s the list that bothers the author and is valid for them.
The article detailing the window resize regressions was great. I would love to see articles detailing the huge UX regressions in spotlight (which this author only praises) or the systemic, productivity destroying bugs that persist for decades (like Apple Mail’s search which works for exactly 0% of everyone I ask). Or any one of 100 actually important widespread issues.
Large succesful corporations are destined to become inefficient and mediocre. I think that's worth celebrating because it's of the of the few ways we have left to protect ourselves against them, generally. There's different levels of bad and as far as corporations go Apple seems relatively neutral. But I'm looking forward the the next wave of OS disruption. We're due!
But good on them for managing to ship a clipboard manager.
Someone was moaning at work earlier about a SaaS product being enshit-ai-ified. I wondered how easy it would be to produce a competitor to their core offering without the AI or gigantic markup. Feels like perhaps there’s a corollary there.
I think there is a corollary. Established players get disrupted all the time, precisely because they become slower, less efficient, and inevitably face incentives to enshittify.
An example possibly playing out right now is Chinese car manufacturing. Young vibrant industry that might outcompete western companies that appear to be slower and less efficient.
Alternative way of saying it, greenfield development proceeds faster than brownfield (whether with building software or with building companies or with car manufacturing).
I didn’t even know about the clipboard management, thanks! Maybe it’ll be good enough to let me uninstall Maccy.
There is also already a clear way to communicate this information to me. The application icon adds an exclamation point or bounces up and down in the dock. With Notifications you end up with just garbage noise taking up your screen for no reason.
I couldn't disagree more. If I want information from an app not in the foreground, I much prefer a notification that I can read immediately; it's much more legible than a sporadically bouncing icon that moves fast enough that I don't have a chance to even recognize which app it is.
I agree that the latest visual update was not great. But it's not horrible either, really—switch to the opaque theme and it doesn't get in your way.