alt Hacker News“Gravity is worth asking about”
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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.
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 reminded me of a 20 year old 'viral' video "Microsoft Designs the iPod Package":
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.
> This is why it’s important to hire and recognize people who will understand that those limitations have to be imposed arbitrarily
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?
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 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.
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 don't understand what the title has to do with the content.
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.
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.
That's part of the philosophical change that led to GNOME 2.0
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.
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.
Yeah that's the hard part
Broken Windows Theory works.
It's easy to get so caught up in the false moat of minimalism that you forget you are selling a tool.
Good catch
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?