Comment by _0xdd
17 hours ago
It's still a bit jarring to me to see how far Apple embraced form over function with iOS and subsequently macOS. I remember reading the Human Interface Guidelines from the late Mac OS 9/early Mac OS X days and being taken aback by the level of detail and thought that went into those interfaces. Don't get me wrong, some things made no sense (brushed metal was... a choice) but there was a certain level of polish that I don't think exists anymore.
Yeah, for a decade now it's been a UX disaster. It "works", because so many people are used to it, but look at a new user trying to navigate iOS, it's bonkers. Swiping from random directions achieves different things (and how would you even know you can?). The home button has like 11 different functions depending on how you press it and when.
Im an iPhone user. I want it to take as little space as possible physically and mentally, and try to use it as little as possible. My experience has been that it was easy learning to use it by just bumbling around.
That is, until two weeks ago when I got my new iPhone. I had to, the old one couldnt upgrade to the newest iOS.
I feel ashamed to admit, that I had one or two days of extreme frustration just learning to do basic stuff. It was not about the shape of icons, but more along the lines of what you write. Swiping patterns, button press sequences, and the time you should hold down a button. It is ridiculous.
Some of the blame is on me for not being mobile phone savvy, but it is indisputable that the UX has deterioted significantly. I suspect it will just get worse going forward.
This seems exaggerated. I recently moved to iOS 26 from iOS 16. They work exactly the same in my experience.
Except for the fact that you can’t scrub on the native video player by swiping anywhere, you now have to use the time-bar. Drives me nuts.
Something that I ended up loving about iOS was the relative simplicity it had compared to Android at the time I started using the iPhone in 2017. iOS 10 and 11 were great. People complained about things like all apps needing to be on the homescreen or not being able to place apps arbitrarily, but at the same time that "lack" of function is part of what made iOS easy to use and understand.
I find nowadays iOS is as complex as the Android I remember. I can navigate it just fine because I'm used to it but even my parents who've been using iPhones longer than me have found themselves getting lost in the OS with iOS 26 in particular.
It was even better before 2017.
I used to describe iPhone being an Appliance, with some smart function added to it. Android was a PC trying to made into a Phone form factor and act like an appliance.
It was that simplicity of iPhone that was great.
And you are right now iPhone and Android have converge in many ways it has added complexity. And no one seems to be doing anything about it. And somehow after 15 years of UX Craig Federighi is still popular and gets no blame for it.
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I have an ipad that I mainly use to open YouTube... If I had q nickel for every time some random gesture accidentally triggered some weird feature, I'd certainly have a few nickels.
> Swiping from random directions achieves different things
I haven't used iOS 27 yet, but from what I've seen it's going to get worse. We already have swiping down from the top left or top right bringing up different things, while swiping down anywhere else in the middle of the screen brings up search... unless you're swiping down at the bottom of the screen, then it's Reachability. From what I understand, iOS 27 will also bring swiping down from the Dynamic Island to trigger Siri. So that's 3 different behaviors from a swipe down from somewhere on the top of a <3" wide screen, with no real way to know what's going on intuitively.
1. Ive been using apple iphone since 2010 and i jave an iphone air right now. I still dont know how/why/when i seem to accidentally call the AI thing where the side of my acreen go all all funny. Ive never done it intentionally and i dont know how but every so often i trigger it.
2. Can apple ‘regress’ the camera app so the it is easy to use. The interface is a disaster of mixed inputs and over loaded widgets. Theres so many modes and sub modes. Swipe to zoom works mostly except when it changes modes. I spend about 10 seconds every tone inise the camera app just making it take a picture because accidentally touching it in the wrong place switches to some other mode.
3. The genrel consistency has went downhill. Its difficult sometimes now to know just how to interact with an app.
4. Search box. If i do another attempt at a web search when i am in mail search box i dunno. Either unify it or make it distinct. Also sometime its at the top sometimes the bottom
About (2), it reminds me of a video I saw once of someone trying to take a picture at a sport event, or how my parents try to do it. Hold the phone with an awkward grip to point it towards what you want, with one hand free. Accidentally touch the edge of the screen and click something with the gripping hand. Then try to zoom in with your free hand, but one finger hits the screen first due to the angle of the phone so you do a swipe instead and go to selfie mode. Swipe fervently to get back. Try again, click screen to focus. But just as you click a notification pops up and you press it.
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1. This is generally from holding in the lock button (the upper button on the right side). Maybe you're accidentally holding it in while gripping the phone. Some people tend to rest their thumb there and might start holding it on accident.
4. The top vs bottom search boxes drive me nuts. I still instinctively reach for the top of the screen for search, so going to the bottom is weird. The move to the bottom is also a symptom of the phones being too large, so they have to move all the UI users interact with down to the bottom. Not being 100% consistent with it makes it hard to retrain my habits around it.
For me, the swipe to go to home gesture on iOS very often conflicts with my swipe to go to all tabs in Safari.
That's what made me switch to Android.
At least you can have 3-button navigation
I moved over from my old Android to an iPhone (needed to develop an iOS app for a freelance thing too) and that was the first thing that cause me off guard - it’s like controls that should be buttons of some kind were just omitted.
Its just as bad. Please define ‘back’
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Even thats slowly being depreciated for gestures as the default option. A bunch of Google's own apps won't play nice with it anymore on the flagship Pixel, drawing buttons underneath
> Swiping from random directions achieves different things (and how would you even know you can?)
Cultural context, the same way you'd know tapping on an icon opens an app.
Tapping something is discoverable and a basic human instinct. How the hell do you discover "swipe up from the bottom edge and then slightly right" to open the app switcher?
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No, tapping something visible and seeing what happens is discoverable. And Apple used to have skeuomorphism to help with affordance. Swiping from various directions and other hidden shortcuts aren't discoverable, and my guess is most users can't find half of the features of their phone.
> brushed metal was... a choice
Man... I stand by it being an interesting idea that they fumbled by not following their own HIG.
Even if it is a bit of a silly line of reasoning, there was (at least originally) a purpose to the brushed metal UI. Anything that was capable of external IO (quicktime for ingesting firewire feed from camera, itunes for syncing with an iPod, finder for disks) was supposed to have a brushed metal interface. There's a world where 2 different classes of windows stuck around (one for things INSIDE the computer, one for things OUTSIDE of the computer) and I bet we would've gotten a lot more afforadances for real-life devices. Maybe a predictable device status UI in those sorts of windows or something. Maybe they'd just be those white panes with fancy animated product shots that show up when you get an Apple-blessed bluetooth device near an iPhone. There's at least some reasoning to treat external IO windows as sharing some sort of common UX. (Answering pretty common gadget questions like: is it connected, is it charging, is it lost, etc etc etc)
But then the waters get muddied with the calculator being brushed metal because it's trying to look like a calculator. And safari... because I guess the network is external but...?
I think a little after John wrote this blog post I'm using to jog my memory, all pinstripe windows were gone except maybe the preferences panes... so it was definitely arbitrary form over function at that point.
(Jogging my memory from: https://daringfireball.net/2004/10/brushed-metal)
I think OS 9 (and that entire era of computer graphics design) had the perfect mix of form and function. I won't comment on it aesthetically as that is entirely subjective, but its use of shape and depth made things very human friendly. Buttons looked distinctly buttonable. The icon design was also great, they were skeuomorphic enough that you generally got the idea of what you were clicking but also flat enough that they weren't distracting
The past 10 years have been a sad, slow decline for Apple's UIs. I'm really hoping for them to reclaim some of their former UI glory. At least, in Golden Gate, they reverted their own HIG violation of excessive icons back to factory: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/11/macos-27-golden-gate-me...
The time span and visible effect are both fully attributable to Alan Dye being head of design. It (what we have today) was his style. He made this world.
He’s out now. We can start to do something else.
it's market changed
it started as a computer for professionals
now its for people who want to look cool. so form is much more important than function, it's literally what you buy
Haha yeah! Mac users just buy them to look cool while they write their whatever in the coffee shop! This is definitely not a preposterous and outdated observation/joke!
Wasn't there a trend where kids were just wearing dead apple watches as accessories? It's just a status symbol, like gold bracelets.
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Sounds like it hit a nerve to be honest
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> it started as a computer for professionals
I feel as if it was the opposite. It started as a true "home computer," and nowadays, it's used to do work.
The fact that MacOS is probably the worst gaming platform on Earth (and Apple doesn't seem to lose sleep over it -although I think they'd like iPad to be a better gaming platform), is an indicator that people use the computer to get work done; whether at home, or in the office.
But there's a lot of pretty visceral hatred for Apple -especially in tech circles- so I don't expect much reasoned discourse about it.
Is that why their laptops routinely beat the competition year after year in reviews and reliability surveys? Because they “look cool”? I’m going to need some more numbers on that one.
All my devices are Apple: laptop, Studio, display, phone, iPad, watch...
I will say that Apple has solidified on the design and reliability "recently". But let's not pretend that the MBP line, to pick on one, didn't go through some rough rough days. I've had laptops that had the delaminating screen, the 'single grain of sand can ruin it' butterfly keyboard, hell, I've had two models that had recalled logic boards. Early Magsafe connectors (fantastic invention) where the rubber would routinely fail even without tension (I had two that failed, exposing bare wire, even though they spent the entirety of their life on a desk, routed through a cable organizer, far away from any UV sunlight hitting them directly.
But now? Things are much, much more solid.
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MacBooks have the best value/money ratio at the moment. The combination of battery life, processing power and touch pad UX are unmatched
I dare to say that this market change works both ways. Software is now created by people who have little idea about UI concepts, or even who don't want to bother themselves with these. Because the dominant type of a device is no longer a desktop computer. This isn't about strictly Apple as other companies also create, or allow to exist "awful" interfaces with no substance.
Is it a bad thing? Not necessary. Smartphones revolution made Internet truly accessible to everyone by cost of dumbing down software by features and UI - turning effectively these devices to work like any other home appliance. Software today has to have that captivating appearance so user wouldn't be scared away. But nothing is perfect and there are examples where users are being treated with this nasty infantile approach by literally showing confetti and balloons as the satisfaction derived from interaction.
The peak was flat style which not only introduced maximum simplified interfaces, design but also provided grounds for all sorts of darkpatterns where content is indistinguishable from active element. That let companies manipulate the user's informed choice.
I challenge you to find a laptop that can do what my macbook air m1 with 8gb of ram does at the $899 it was through the education store. No fan, awesome battery life, good trackpad and keyboard, the ability to not get hot while using it.
I'm a senior platform engineer who at the time I bought it was a senior software developer, who can still use it for my daily tasks despite it having 8gb of ram. Until very recently the 32gb T14 I had ad work was frankly worse performant than the little air, while having a battery life of around 45 minutes a fan sounding like a jetengine and a keyboard so hot it made the sun jealous. My new model is way faster than my macbook air though, but the old model was technically newer than the air. Obviously the comparisson isn't completely fair since we run a lot of corporate enterprise stuff on our laptops, but still.
I'd really like a Linux laptop, but a Framework laptop is expensive (and it has loud fans and runs hot). A tuxedo is even more expensive and has fans where you'd place it on your legs for whatever reason, and runs hot. Looking at the laptop market now, I can't see what you'd buy. A week ago I would've said the Neo (if the 8gb of ram holds up as well on the mobile chip as it does on the m1), but today I'm guessing a refurbished air with 16gb would be the only real option for someone who want's a cool low noise machine with decent battery time.
Whether you run OS/X or Asahi, I really can't see what you'd buy other than these. At least if you actually use it on your lap and don't just have it sit in a dock on a table.
Then again, I'm the sort of person who would buy the pink neo because it would fuck with the perception people have of my mid 40 Scandinavian conservativeish dad look. So maybe it is just about the message?
Are there any laptops where the cooling is handled by the screen backside?
A Framework isn't loud at all. I regularly do simulations on mine and it works perfectly without noise.
I think if you just compare cost then yes the Mac is a good deal but there is more than cost that matters. I think flexibility, reparibility and so on matter.
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> $899 it was through the education store
Comparing a subsidised computer for children to one that isn't isn't exactly a fair comparison, is it?
> No fan,
You know why Macbooks don't need a fan? It's because they aren't powerful enough to draw heat in the first place. A month ago, for the same price as a $1700 Macbook Pro (before the recent increase) I got a laptop with a CPU that is literally twice as fast on parellelisable workloads, has a 5070 Ti vs. nothing at all, and 32GB RAM. A superior screen, keyboard, and I can install my own choice of OS on it, too. Now that same dingy Macbook Pro costs $2000, or $2400 if you want 32GB RAM. Apple's greatest coup was convincing people that paying twice as much for half the hardware was a killer feature, and now everyone goes on and on about how Macbooks are the most premium hardware money can buy because they're so weak they don't need a fan to keep them cool. It's truly remarkable how susceptible people are to status-culture-based marketing.
Username related.
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It's such a shame because back then even Windows was motivated by actual human user research and had thorough guidelines. https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-06-16/0/POSTING-en.html was an interesting look at Win2K's UI controls and how much clearer they are compared to modern UIs.