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.
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.
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.
this is a discussion we often have where I work, where we're debating removing a feature due to difficulties maintaining it and few people needing it. I usually fight to keep it, with the argument "we aren't doing it for the people that don't need it, but for the ones that do." But at the end of the day, I'm not the one who has to pay for it.
yeah like i do find apple software is now full of ads, bugs and often feels very unpolished. but i also think they have recently increased complexity in a bunch of places and i like that a lot haha...
like being able to customize your homescreen more or even the screenshot example! i def use like 3 of those options at least weekly...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Using an Apple device these days is to be spoken to in a weird language that invites you become one of those people who lives at the genius bar, if you are so lucky to live within range of one. Like the touch id failed on my iPad and I got some really strange messages. I also get weird dialogs about failing things on my Mac (like some "widget" having to do with Find My) that usually center Apple brand names. It just makes those brands sound shoddy. [1]
I was delighted with my iPhone when I first got it but about six months later I was always getting important phone calls... and it wouldn't ring, I was getting important texts... some of which would appear on my iPhone, some of which would appear on my Ipad, some of which would never appear at all, I was getting important notifications... and I couldn't find them, or they would disappear before I could tap on them, it was like my phone was possessed by the devil.
I turned off filtering and grouping for notifications and went through the menus, deleted every app that I didn't use, turned off notifications for apps unless I absolutely needed them, etc. After spending an hour digging through the settings my phone now rings when people call.
And don't get me started on AirPods; like they sorta kinda work if you stay in the Apple ecosystem, but if you pair them with Windows they will do everything in their power to punish you, including force you to reboot your phone so you can talk on the microphones.
The most amusing thing is that so many of the ads and nags in MacOS use the Liquid Glass refresh of the 2001 Mac OS X version of the dialog box from the 1984 Mac Classic. Microsoft nags are based on web technology and look kinda appealing, but Apple nags are a blast from the past.
[1] ... if only your XBOX could show a Playstation logo when it is acting like an ADHD kid rather than an XBOX logo!
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.
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?
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
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.
Roughly 2002-2010 that attention to detail was on display and the OS struck an impressive balance between features, ease of use, and power user access.
Since then it’s been straight downhill. First they stopped investing in desktop in favor of mobile. Then they underwent some rewrites to OS and bundled apps that dumbed things down and exploded the defect rate. Then they started setting the stage for a touch experience on desktop at the expense of UI density. Around the same time they started to prioritize short term profit over UX — spamming with notifications to try to get you to sign in, upgrade, etc. And then there’s the travesty that is Tahoe.
I don't get asked about access for Chrome at every update.
I have bigger issues with the way a lot of MacOS apps are just poorly designed.
Like screen capture - I want to be able to save to my choice of destination folder after clicking. But instead you get a selection of preset choices, and the option to select a destination before you capture the file, which is unnaturally distracting.
Finder hasn't changed for decades. It should be possible to have source and destination trees visible in the same window, but it isn't.
Mac Mail has threaded conversations, which means some emails don't appear in searches.
App Store search was designed by cynics, idiots, or both. If you know the exact name of an app, search will probably show it but it probably won't be anywhere near the first hit.
Xcode - I can't even...
Meanwhile a lot of clever and useful features remain hidden or ignored. Automator and AppleScript would have been gamechangers if Apple had promoted them, but they were just left on a shelf to moulder.
I can't imagine ever swapping back to Windows, but these annoyances are an insult to the quality of the hardware, which is on another level.
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).
Apple's days of simplicity out of the box are over. The simplicity is still in there somewhere. Through a combination of turning off a lot of features in settings and using a few defaults shell command it can be made simple.
Apple got complex due to dynamic workspaces that result in windows unexpectedly flying off screen or popping up as one mouses's around and the new security model which no longer trusts defaults to local applications trusting each other.
This security model is why each application needs to be granted local access. I believe Apple encourages all apps to stick to their own sandbox to the extent possible.
I'm currently trying to figure out how to give Image Events access to my local hard disk. My old applescripts using Image Events have broken due to the loss of access.
I bought an original 128K Mac, and then used them professionally for decades --- Snow Leopard, 10.6.8, which I view as the most perfect Mac OS ever, was the last version I really liked, or found comfortable.
I need to replace a MacBook Pro w/ Touchbar, and am _not_ excited about the options, and I find the OS version numbering/naming baffling (why they couldn't've counted versions, started at the next letter of the alphabet, and then cycled through the alphabet in the California Gazetteer when they switched place names from there on out mystifies me) --- probably I'll end up w/ a hand-me-down iMac, but I'd be a bit more interested if there was a portable Mac tablet w/ a stylus and touch, having preferred that form-factor for portable usage since Go Corp.'s PenPoint on an NCR-3125 (which I paired w/ a NeXT Cube and represents the highwatermark of my GUI experience).
I wish that there was an option to limit the OS to only Cocoa/SwiftUI/equivalent "native" apps, and I really wish that Preferences.app would arrive at a simplified and stable state which makes sense.
I use and have used Windows and macOS for decades. I think Windows is better, but both are doing their best to drive users to Linux. Their relentless focus on extracting subscription and "service" revenue from others is fundamentally undermining the user experience in countless ways. Ads. Dark patterns. Nags windows. Auto-bundled games and software. Telemetry. Every year they make their operating systems just a little bit worse.
I can tell you that Apple grows closer and closer to Microsoft-level annoying every year. The update situation is just stupid at this point. 10:30am and "hey, we'd like to take your computer offline for 45 minutes? Want to defer until this evening? Yeah? put your password in anyway.
iOS has gotten gross as well. You see that email notification on your lock screen? Wanna see what it says? Tap it. HAHA, that just expands the stack. Tap it again... that reveals a bit.... TAP IT AGAIN - ah, now we're unlocking and revealing it in the app....
Both of your examples are software from Meta and Google. Those companies ship what cannot be called anything else than malware. But it is possible to stop Chrome from updating and messing with your system in the background. I forgot which guide I followed, but search and you shall find.
> 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".
IMO the party that should be blamed here is Google. Why do they keep asking you for local network access when you've already denied it? Why do they just prompt for access without first showing a page telling you why they want access along with a button to go through with the prompt? Ironically, this is what Google and the other browser vendors force websites to do when they want to ask users to grant certain permissions.
Here are some things that existed for a long time but still blow my mind (note: this is not "modern macOS", I migrated to Linux long time ago, so forgive me ignoring modern flaws).
- The preview app - document editing at its best
- Apple Mail Search - you can filter by nearly every aspect, even between dates
- the mighty Alt key (alt+click unlocks an extra feature all the time, alt + shift + volume makes smaller steps, etc)
- apple headphone remotes also work on macbooks
- you can turn off the display by setting 0 brightness
I'm in the same position ... just got my first mac, love the hardware, but man, I don't know why everyone is so smug about the software - it has a fairly similar number of annoyances as Windows (not qiute as much, but it's close).
I have a massive screen and the right most application has it's menu ... at the very, very left of my screen. It's soo far away it is just crazy. And that menu can't be moved to teh side or turned off or whatever.
Applications that get closed aren't really closed ... you have to quit them. I don't know why. Or if they are minimised, then I can't alt-tab to them .. or I actually can ... but they don't actually OPEN!
Windows insist on opening to some arbitrary width and height instead of neatly snapping to a side etc.
Anyway, at lot of it is fixable with add-ons etc, but it's still annoying. I'll be happier when I can jsut run linux.
> Applications that get closed aren't really closed ... you have to quit them.
This is the classic Mac behavior since the 1980s. Except now some apps are identical with their single window and will exit when that window is closed. So you no longer know what to expect. Sigh.
Why have this behavior ever? It used to be that apps took a while to start up. Switching to an open-but-no-window app was a lot faster than launching it from scratch. That’s not so important now that most apps start quickly.
Now the main advantage is that you can use keyboard shortcuts to make a new window in open apps (CMD-tab, CMD-n gets a new window in the previously used open app, for example)
How is the Chrome example an Apple issue and not a Google issue? Chrome in fact likely doesn’t need mDNS-SD in most cases, so why is it asking for that permission (to browse services on your local network, no doubt sending all findings back to Google and closely associating the things it found with your Google account and more) the moment it launches every new copy? Why are they treating updates as unique copies? How would it be the fault of macOS if any app behaved this way? Clearly not all apps behave this way, so how is it an OS level issue?
Think almost all of that is purely visuals. For example, there are many Windows apps with blurry fonts due to poor dpi support, and that's not common on Macs.
Otherwise it's mostly about... the visuals again, but in the hardware side - how the hardware looks better, though, to be fair, that also has a bunch of "doesn't flex like cheap plastic" improvements)
Maybe also the fact that you're less frequently exposed to a garbage sea of complexity like the registry (sure, it exists and is even worse because there is no built in GUI)
But ultimately you're asking about legends, that's the stuff of history, not something you should expect to experience
Apple is learning from Microsoft, sometimes as counterexample.
You won’t know Apple joy until you replace the one you have with another. If you’re backed up via Time Machine — because you are, right? — then you plug in your new machine, hit “restore” or whatever it’s called, and head off to sleep. In the morning all your data, applications, and settings will be there. Your new machine will be indistinguishable from the old but for the grime.
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.
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.
52 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 21.7 ms ] threadhttps://ometer.com/preferences.html
https://youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k
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.
Shows how difficult it is to design and build software at scale.
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?
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.
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.
Using an Apple device these days is to be spoken to in a weird language that invites you become one of those people who lives at the genius bar, if you are so lucky to live within range of one. Like the touch id failed on my iPad and I got some really strange messages. I also get weird dialogs about failing things on my Mac (like some "widget" having to do with Find My) that usually center Apple brand names. It just makes those brands sound shoddy. [1]
I was delighted with my iPhone when I first got it but about six months later I was always getting important phone calls... and it wouldn't ring, I was getting important texts... some of which would appear on my iPhone, some of which would appear on my Ipad, some of which would never appear at all, I was getting important notifications... and I couldn't find them, or they would disappear before I could tap on them, it was like my phone was possessed by the devil.
I turned off filtering and grouping for notifications and went through the menus, deleted every app that I didn't use, turned off notifications for apps unless I absolutely needed them, etc. After spending an hour digging through the settings my phone now rings when people call.
And don't get me started on AirPods; like they sorta kinda work if you stay in the Apple ecosystem, but if you pair them with Windows they will do everything in their power to punish you, including force you to reboot your phone so you can talk on the microphones.
The most amusing thing is that so many of the ads and nags in MacOS use the Liquid Glass refresh of the 2001 Mac OS X version of the dialog box from the 1984 Mac Classic. Microsoft nags are based on web technology and look kinda appealing, but Apple nags are a blast from the past.
[1] ... if only your XBOX could show a Playstation logo when it is acting like an ADHD kid rather than an XBOX logo!
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?
Since then it’s been straight downhill. First they stopped investing in desktop in favor of mobile. Then they underwent some rewrites to OS and bundled apps that dumbed things down and exploded the defect rate. Then they started setting the stage for a touch experience on desktop at the expense of UI density. Around the same time they started to prioritize short term profit over UX — spamming with notifications to try to get you to sign in, upgrade, etc. And then there’s the travesty that is Tahoe.
Having said that, the OS felt better a few years ago. I feel like they have less attention to detail and don’t care for Liquid Glass.
Still blazingly fast machines compared to my intel windows corporate workstation though.
I have bigger issues with the way a lot of MacOS apps are just poorly designed.
Like screen capture - I want to be able to save to my choice of destination folder after clicking. But instead you get a selection of preset choices, and the option to select a destination before you capture the file, which is unnaturally distracting.
Finder hasn't changed for decades. It should be possible to have source and destination trees visible in the same window, but it isn't.
Mac Mail has threaded conversations, which means some emails don't appear in searches.
App Store search was designed by cynics, idiots, or both. If you know the exact name of an app, search will probably show it but it probably won't be anywhere near the first hit.
Xcode - I can't even...
Meanwhile a lot of clever and useful features remain hidden or ignored. Automator and AppleScript would have been gamechangers if Apple had promoted them, but they were just left on a shelf to moulder.
I can't imagine ever swapping back to Windows, but these annoyances are an insult to the quality of the hardware, which is on another level.
> the problem was that a running WhatsApp app prevented the WhatsApp update process to finish.
Oh so that’s what it is. Thought it was a desync between UI state and software logic.
Apple got complex due to dynamic workspaces that result in windows unexpectedly flying off screen or popping up as one mouses's around and the new security model which no longer trusts defaults to local applications trusting each other.
This security model is why each application needs to be granted local access. I believe Apple encourages all apps to stick to their own sandbox to the extent possible.
I'm currently trying to figure out how to give Image Events access to my local hard disk. My old applescripts using Image Events have broken due to the loss of access.
I need to replace a MacBook Pro w/ Touchbar, and am _not_ excited about the options, and I find the OS version numbering/naming baffling (why they couldn't've counted versions, started at the next letter of the alphabet, and then cycled through the alphabet in the California Gazetteer when they switched place names from there on out mystifies me) --- probably I'll end up w/ a hand-me-down iMac, but I'd be a bit more interested if there was a portable Mac tablet w/ a stylus and touch, having preferred that form-factor for portable usage since Go Corp.'s PenPoint on an NCR-3125 (which I paired w/ a NeXT Cube and represents the highwatermark of my GUI experience).
I wish that there was an option to limit the OS to only Cocoa/SwiftUI/equivalent "native" apps, and I really wish that Preferences.app would arrive at a simplified and stable state which makes sense.
Trying to push poorly done, rushed UI frameworks to match iOS in the wrong form factor has trashed the OS.
iOS has gotten gross as well. You see that email notification on your lock screen? Wanna see what it says? Tap it. HAHA, that just expands the stack. Tap it again... that reveals a bit.... TAP IT AGAIN - ah, now we're unlocking and revealing it in the app....
Not sure if you can get the entire email in the notif, I think the only stock options are 'previews' or nothing
IMO the party that should be blamed here is Google. Why do they keep asking you for local network access when you've already denied it? Why do they just prompt for access without first showing a page telling you why they want access along with a button to go through with the prompt? Ironically, this is what Google and the other browser vendors force websites to do when they want to ask users to grant certain permissions.
- The preview app - document editing at its best
- Apple Mail Search - you can filter by nearly every aspect, even between dates
- the mighty Alt key (alt+click unlocks an extra feature all the time, alt + shift + volume makes smaller steps, etc)
- apple headphone remotes also work on macbooks
- you can turn off the display by setting 0 brightness
- Printing just works - everywhere
- the trackpad integration
- brew is just awesome
I have a massive screen and the right most application has it's menu ... at the very, very left of my screen. It's soo far away it is just crazy. And that menu can't be moved to teh side or turned off or whatever.
Applications that get closed aren't really closed ... you have to quit them. I don't know why. Or if they are minimised, then I can't alt-tab to them .. or I actually can ... but they don't actually OPEN!
Windows insist on opening to some arbitrary width and height instead of neatly snapping to a side etc.
Anyway, at lot of it is fixable with add-ons etc, but it's still annoying. I'll be happier when I can jsut run linux.
This is the classic Mac behavior since the 1980s. Except now some apps are identical with their single window and will exit when that window is closed. So you no longer know what to expect. Sigh.
Why have this behavior ever? It used to be that apps took a while to start up. Switching to an open-but-no-window app was a lot faster than launching it from scratch. That’s not so important now that most apps start quickly.
Now the main advantage is that you can use keyboard shortcuts to make a new window in open apps (CMD-tab, CMD-n gets a new window in the previously used open app, for example)
Otherwise it's mostly about... the visuals again, but in the hardware side - how the hardware looks better, though, to be fair, that also has a bunch of "doesn't flex like cheap plastic" improvements)
Maybe also the fact that you're less frequently exposed to a garbage sea of complexity like the registry (sure, it exists and is even worse because there is no built in GUI)
But ultimately you're asking about legends, that's the stuff of history, not something you should expect to experience
You won’t know Apple joy until you replace the one you have with another. If you’re backed up via Time Machine — because you are, right? — then you plug in your new machine, hit “restore” or whatever it’s called, and head off to sleep. In the morning all your data, applications, and settings will be there. Your new machine will be indistinguishable from the old but for the grime.
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.
Steve Jobs talking about Apple of the future. (His comments on product people running a company vs sales)
Reads like it’s from some esoteric medieval Philosphy/theology book.