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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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 really annoying thing to me about the "Ads" in the system settings for various things like Apple Music, iCloud, Fitness, etc (other than the fact they're there in the first place) is that they appear after a bit of a delay (around 500 ms?), so other items I actually want have to slide down to make space as I'm about to click something.
Old Apple would never have done that I don't think.
My massive Apple annoyance at the moment is how there's an unremovable nag screen for an Apple Music subscription on the iOS app, when all I ever want to do is sync local music to an iphone like it's an ipod in 2006. They just can't take 'no' for an answer, I'm happy with my current streaming service and I'll never want the hassle of migration.
In my view there really needs to be some 'no means no, not maybe later' legislation against this burdensome dark pattern.
This is something that I find extremely annoying about pretty much everything on computers these days. I have noticed recently that play buttons on pretty much every music player do not work consistently and often show the wrong play/pause state (showing a pause button when there is nothing playing, showing play buttons when something is playing) and obviously that doesn't break any real functionality, but it's just annoying and shows a complete disregard for the quality of the user experience across the board. I honestly don't know of a single audio only app that has a play button that works properly.
It looks like Apple is literally copying Samsung, and not only in hardware (upcoming foldable iPhone), but in the services and in advertising them inside the UI. Even the names are similar.
This is not a good thing. Not for Apple, and not for Android, as in terms of exerting gravity on the market, Apple is a supermassive black hole. Anything they do instantly becomes normalized as a business practice.
Definitely. But at least on Samsung phones, you can uninstall the packages from the user partition and in that way rip most of that stuff out (like the McAfee scanner in security, Bixby, Gemini, OneDrive, etc.).
So, yeah, they are copying, but by virtue of the ecosystem being less open, you are mostly stuck with it.
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 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 would call this the "bus factor" theory. If a process (here, quality control) revolves around one person, and then that person stops doing the work, the work stops getting done.
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.
I would say I'm about 90% satisfied. Yesterday I just did a bunch of batch graphic conversations by opening multiple images in Preview. Selecting all the images in the sidebar. I could then batch process manual using preview.
It was an awesome experience and the first really exciting improvement I have seen in a long time.
I wouldn’t call Apple style minimalist. It was more focused on being approachable, in a way that works for both beginners and advanced users. That means something consistent, discoverable. It looks easy to get started, but has depth when needed.
If you look at or used macOS 9 and the early OS X none of that expresses minimalism
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.
I always want to either copy and delete or save and forget, so I'd select those two options (or rather have the old behaviour) and ignore the rest. You can choose other things.
Same with adverts. I would select "zero adverts", but you could select "upto six adverts" or whatever. After all adverts are for the benefit of the customer right - that's what advert apologists say.
Having the menu exist at all is already well onto the slippery slope - once upon a time the screenshots went directly into the photo library, without any interstitial at all...
And at the time, everyone was perfectly fine with opening the photo library to access the options that are now in that menu
I disagree. It was annoying to always have to delete the screenshot photos that you really only wanted to have on the clipboard to paste somewhere, or only wanted to extract text out of. I was very pleasantly surprised when the new options were added, and I regularly make use of the different available choices.
Instead, what I dislike is that you can’t keep the screenshot dialog open in the background. It would be fine for screenshots to go straight to photos if the screenshot dialog was still available from there for each individual screenshot taken (including the options under discussion).
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.
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.
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 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.
You don't even need add blocking for most open source software: the threat of forking backs a culture where the software is just there to to its job and not to sell something.
I started using the f-droid app "store" recently and it's amazing: bare bones stuff that just does what you want.
The article has a link to a previous Gruber article that mentions things falling to the ground because of "gravity" as an analogy for asking about seemingly basic questions about "why things happen".
It's an article that inadvertently confuses readers with too many layers of indirection and requires reading another article to get the prerequisite "Insider Baseball" knowledge to connect all the metaphors together.
So... asking "why not Intel stickers on MacBooks?" ... analogous to asking about gravity. And "too many confusing options on GUIs" ... lines of code to enable extra options has a gravity.
The text quoted in a sibling comment implies the author is describing an effect whereby poor ux decisions - even if seemingly small - serve as a foundation to "attract" further negative patterns, gravity being the analogy.
Ditto. It's not a reference to anything that I can find, and the concept of gravity is sort of mentioned once but never expanded upon enough for me to really understand what they mean.
No, if add something, it's gravity will increase and start pulling in more shit. Then the death spiral begins, and before you know it, you have a black hole of crap, like Windows 11 Home Edition or Android.
They reference gravity in this paragraph and I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean
> Not only is it very hard to create interfaces that have limitations, but a bad decision is not just precedent – it’s code that can be copied and reused. Existing code always had tons of… well, gravity, even before LLMs.
It makes a lot of sense to me. You go in to a code base and start looking for the ways things are done. You copy the precedent. LLMs do that, even harder, they don't really have taste like a human might.
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.
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.
> angry at Microsoft for removing half the features in any control panel inside Windows
Tbf, I'm not sure anyone is any at Microsoft for removing things. They are angry because Microsoft does not actually remove those settings, they just don't allow them to be changed from the new UI, and instead hide them away somewhere in the same classic control panel that has existed since Windows NT...
Yup. GNOME 2.0 was a little rough because they swung far enough the other way, but it was still a huge improvement to remove all the "unbreak me" obvious preferences that only had one sensible answer. A few versions later, it was a delight to use.
And yet, KDE Plasma is so more usable than Gnome these days, because they swung too far into removing settings. You needed to install a separate Gnome Tweak tool to even be able to change font antialiasing settings last I looked, which is preposterous. I get literal headaches from the defaults.
And yet, VSCode has ~70% developer share, largely because it can be everything to everyone, but no more than what you personally need. Just put a search bar in your preferences dialogue, it ain't that hard.
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.
> 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.
You can even cut the word "apps" from the analysis here, the appstore just gets most of its money from games which are pretty much slot machines.
That's exactly why every time they promote the appstore somewhere, they put a productivity app as an example, they would like to avoid to be classified with gambling regulations, which is essentially what they are.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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've been using macbooks since 2015 and I feel like every single update has made it worse somehow
> the progress bar actually made progress and stayed stuck at 80%.
> 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.
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).
With Apple, the stuff I want to do just works. I actually like the granularity in permissions, because I only give them out sparingly.
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.
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 really annoying thing to me about the "Ads" in the system settings for various things like Apple Music, iCloud, Fitness, etc (other than the fact they're there in the first place) is that they appear after a bit of a delay (around 500 ms?), so other items I actually want have to slide down to make space as I'm about to click something.
Old Apple would never have done that I don't think.
My massive Apple annoyance at the moment is how there's an unremovable nag screen for an Apple Music subscription on the iOS app, when all I ever want to do is sync local music to an iphone like it's an ipod in 2006. They just can't take 'no' for an answer, I'm happy with my current streaming service and I'll never want the hassle of migration.
In my view there really needs to be some 'no means no, not maybe later' legislation against this burdensome dark pattern.
No they would not. This is probably biggest betrayal of Apple users I have experienced. Apple should never confuse their OS's as ad delivery systems.
Not even if it means an exec can get the yacht with a helipad?
This is something that I find extremely annoying about pretty much everything on computers these days. I have noticed recently that play buttons on pretty much every music player do not work consistently and often show the wrong play/pause state (showing a pause button when there is nothing playing, showing play buttons when something is playing) and obviously that doesn't break any real functionality, but it's just annoying and shows a complete disregard for the quality of the user experience across the board. I honestly don't know of a single audio only app that has a play button that works properly.
It looks like Apple is literally copying Samsung, and not only in hardware (upcoming foldable iPhone), but in the services and in advertising them inside the UI. Even the names are similar.
This is not a good thing. Not for Apple, and not for Android, as in terms of exerting gravity on the market, Apple is a supermassive black hole. Anything they do instantly becomes normalized as a business practice.
Definitely. But at least on Samsung phones, you can uninstall the packages from the user partition and in that way rip most of that stuff out (like the McAfee scanner in security, Bixby, Gemini, OneDrive, etc.).
So, yeah, they are copying, but by virtue of the ecosystem being less open, you are mostly stuck with it.
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 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.
Blizzard changed as soon as Morhaime left.
I would call this the "bus factor" theory. If a process (here, quality control) revolves around one person, and then that person stops doing the work, the work stops getting done.
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.
Does it satisfy 98% of users always? Or does it satisfy each user 98% of the time?
I would say I'm about 90% satisfied. Yesterday I just did a bunch of batch graphic conversations by opening multiple images in Preview. Selecting all the images in the sidebar. I could then batch process manual using preview.
It was an awesome experience and the first really exciting improvement I have seen in a long time.
I wouldn’t call Apple style minimalist. It was more focused on being approachable, in a way that works for both beginners and advanced users. That means something consistent, discoverable. It looks easy to get started, but has depth when needed.
If you look at or used macOS 9 and the early OS X none of that expresses minimalism
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.
The adage that nobody uses more than 25% of MS Word’s features — but it’s a different 25% for each user.
You can make something customisable
"links to show with screenshots"
I always want to either copy and delete or save and forget, so I'd select those two options (or rather have the old behaviour) and ignore the rest. You can choose other things.
Same with adverts. I would select "zero adverts", but you could select "upto six adverts" or whatever. After all adverts are for the benefit of the customer right - that's what advert apologists say.
> 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?
There is no good middle. Either have no options, or have many and make them configurable.
I use 4 of those 5 options all the time. But there are other places where options make me slow because I need to was through them.
Some people, when they want to hide an option, think: "I know, I'll use an option."
Well, now they have two options.
It’s good to have options.
Having the menu exist at all is already well onto the slippery slope - once upon a time the screenshots went directly into the photo library, without any interstitial at all...
And at the time, everyone was perfectly fine with opening the photo library to access the options that are now in that menu
I disagree. It was annoying to always have to delete the screenshot photos that you really only wanted to have on the clipboard to paste somewhere, or only wanted to extract text out of. I was very pleasantly surprised when the new options were added, and I regularly make use of the different available choices.
Instead, what I dislike is that you can’t keep the screenshot dialog open in the background. It would be fine for screenshots to go straight to photos if the screenshot dialog was still available from there for each individual screenshot taken (including the options under discussion).
That would turn it into an app, but on iOS there’s no way to draw UI elements on top of other apps.
> everyone was perfectly fine
This was never true, of course. You've slipped way down the slope of the mythical golden past.
But also, having the option not to show an empty menu is a trivial part of customization, so this is also solved in my suggested approach.
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 reminded me of a 20 year old 'viral' video "Microsoft Designs the iPod Package":
https://youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k
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.
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.
Is "Intel inside" even a feature? It's not like the other laptop will be lacking a CPU.
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.
You don't even need add blocking for most open source software: the threat of forking backs a culture where the software is just there to to its job and not to sell something.
I started using the f-droid app "store" recently and it's amazing: bare bones stuff that just does what you want.
When was the ad-free era on Windows (Home)? I don't remember it.
My memory of 24 years ago is a bit fuzzy, but I don't recall any ads on XP; the main complaint at the time was the UI was "fisher price".
XP had crapware trial versions but you could disable them and there were never ads on the actual UI.
I don't understand what the title has to do with the content.
The article has a link to a previous Gruber article that mentions things falling to the ground because of "gravity" as an analogy for asking about seemingly basic questions about "why things happen".
It's an article that inadvertently confuses readers with too many layers of indirection and requires reading another article to get the prerequisite "Insider Baseball" knowledge to connect all the metaphors together.
So... asking "why not Intel stickers on MacBooks?" ... analogous to asking about gravity. And "too many confusing options on GUIs" ... lines of code to enable extra options has a gravity.
The text quoted in a sibling comment implies the author is describing an effect whereby poor ux decisions - even if seemingly small - serve as a foundation to "attract" further negative patterns, gravity being the analogy.
Ditto. It's not a reference to anything that I can find, and the concept of gravity is sort of mentioned once but never expanded upon enough for me to really understand what they mean.
It might be the term "financial gravity" I've seen used sometimes. That makes sense in this context.
Some decisions, once made, exert a noticeable pull on others, so exceptions quickly turn into standard practice.
The context for that is in Gruber’s original post, I believe.
I think they mean inertia, not "gravity"
No, if add something, it's gravity will increase and start pulling in more shit. Then the death spiral begins, and before you know it, you have a black hole of crap, like Windows 11 Home Edition or Android.
They reference gravity in this paragraph and I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean
> Not only is it very hard to create interfaces that have limitations, but a bad decision is not just precedent – it’s code that can be copied and reused. Existing code always had tons of… well, gravity, even before LLMs.
I assume this is just LLM nonsense?
It makes a lot of sense to me. You go in to a code base and start looking for the ways things are done. You copy the precedent. LLMs do that, even harder, they don't really have taste like a human might.
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.
Fyi this article is not about gravity.
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.
> angry at Microsoft for removing half the features in any control panel inside Windows
Tbf, I'm not sure anyone is any at Microsoft for removing things. They are angry because Microsoft does not actually remove those settings, they just don't allow them to be changed from the new UI, and instead hide them away somewhere in the same classic control panel that has existed since Windows NT...
The same people? Who are they? And since when is Microsoft removing half the features in "any control panel" in every release?
That's part of the philosophical change that led to GNOME 2.0
https://ometer.com/preferences.html
Yup. GNOME 2.0 was a little rough because they swung far enough the other way, but it was still a huge improvement to remove all the "unbreak me" obvious preferences that only had one sensible answer. A few versions later, it was a delight to use.
GNOME 2 was lovely.
Then GNOME 3 came and I switched to Mac.
And yet, KDE Plasma is so more usable than Gnome these days, because they swung too far into removing settings. You needed to install a separate Gnome Tweak tool to even be able to change font antialiasing settings last I looked, which is preposterous. I get literal headaches from the defaults.
And yet, VSCode has ~70% developer share, largely because it can be everything to everyone, but no more than what you personally need. Just put a search bar in your preferences dialogue, it ain't that hard.
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.
> 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.
You can even cut the word "apps" from the analysis here, the appstore just gets most of its money from games which are pretty much slot machines.
That's exactly why every time they promote the appstore somewhere, they put a productivity app as an example, they would like to avoid to be classified with gambling regulations, which is essentially what they are.
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.
Slapping ads on a tool doesn't improve the functionality of the tool.