alt Hacker NewsI think Apple is making a really fatal flaw. Tbh Microsoft is doing it too.
Design good interfaces, with sane defaults but do not handcuff power users!!!
I often hear people say no one should care because there aren't many power users. They're a small portion, but that's absurd framing. They matter a lot because they're the ones that push your design language, develop new ideas, influence the general community, build new programs, find your bugs, and all of that. Apple and Microsoft are closing the ecosystems to get more control not only to exploit the users more (scrape their data) but to reduce bugs and things. But more and more people are trying these random programs because they can't figure out how to do things the right way. It's exactly why people are getting more frustrated with computers. The general public still doesn't care about data harvesting but they do care that the restrictions are handcuffing them now.
Funny enough this is also why Linux is becoming more popular. You've always had complete control but in the last 5 years the barrier to entry has plummeted. It's still not right for the average joe but it's on its way and a few more specialty distros are already there (e.g. steamos). The irony is Apple had the right idea before, even if not as modifiable as Linux, it used to be easier. But now it's more like a power trip. Consolidating control because they don't know what else to do
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> Design good interfaces, with sane defaults
They're not doing that either. And unfortunately bad designs are rarely fatal, so can linger for decades. And animation time waste has little to do with power use, everyone suffers
> They matter a lot because they're the ones that push your design language, develop new ideas, influence the general community, build new programs, find your bugs, and all of that
they used to care, but they don't now, because these corps have sufficient monopolistic control to not require "outsiders" to push their design language, develop new ideas, influence or programs.
In fact, it seems to me that these big corps want power users out, as they disrupt the agenda, find workarounds for "features" being pushed out that should have been mandatory for pleb users!
> [Linux is] still not right for the average joe but it's on its way and a few more specialty distros are already there (e.g. steamos).
i hope that is the future, because it's the only road to freedom for general computation. Unfortunately, the hard part is not the end user's acceptance of it, but the hardware manufacturers, who are being gripped by the balls one way or another. Unless they're willing to sacrifice any microsoft certification etc, they will be somehow beholden to them (may be not now, but certainly in the future when linux truly threatens window's dominance).
I mean this could be solved really easily if the team that works on this exposed some settings to tweak the animation speed. They don't even need UI, people would find them anyway. The problem is the people who work on this do all the animations for windows etc. and I have no idea how they develop this stuff but presumably HI just comes down to them with some number they hardcode into their software so nobody can ever change it.
> I often hear people say no one should care because there aren't many power users.
You also have to consider that not all power users are the same. I’ve been using macOS since the G4 PB days, and would consider myself a power user. I get around in the os just fine and have for years. I also have never felt handcuffed. Some of the macOS 26 visual decisions are/were (some were already changed) questionable, but overall it was a solid upgrade IMO.