The value of Apple products is mostly based on marketing. Apple sells products by appealing to people's insecurities. Apple products appeal to status-focused people who want to see themselves as cool and sophisticated to the point that they are willing to overlook the terrible UX.

The mouse is so flat, it makes your hand sore. The keys are so low and sensitive that you keep hitting the wrong keys and they easily break. The navigation for most of their UI makes no sense. If you open the laptop while it's sitting on your laps, it will pinch you when you open it. Having to use Command+C to copy stuff by pushing with your thumb is awkward even after years of use. Siri will keep popping up when your finger accidentally touches some random key. Switching between multiple desktops/windows is a pain (e.g. even compared to Ubuntu). Finder is shockingly bad; it's a struggle to navigate; merely copying the current directory path is infeasible... The list of UX problems goes on and on; I'm not even a UX designer but I can see all these problems.

And it's also completely different from removing a headphone jack – you could actually see that as a form of progress. But charging a mouse without being able to use it – try and convince me that is progress.

Or the glued-shut, unrepairable gadgets?

Or "Maybe you're holding it wrong"? Or firing the antenna guy after?

Or trying to eliminate cursor arrow keys so users would have to always use the mouse?

The mouse charge port that makes it unusable while charging is far from an isolated example. Apple changing something to actually benefit the customer at the expense of Apple is almost unheard of.

If you're going to be furious at Jony Ive for the Macbook Pro, why not be angry at his competitors who can't seem to make a credible competitor? And if that is incorrect and there is a credible competitor, why not buy it and ignore Apple?

Anyways, producing nice-looking stuff that doesn't work all that well has long been in the Apple DNA, I think. Anybody remember the circular Apple mouse? And who actually enjoyed using a Magic Mouse over, say, a Logitech mx518?

There's nothing to get used to; design isn't new on Apple's platforms. If anything, Apple has driven software design more than any other platform or company.

Apple's customers value -- and paid for -- a consistent ecosystem, on which Apple defines design guidelines and HIG requirements. Apple developers and designers work together to maintain a consistent ecosystem and the resulting mutual benefit.

Get used to it.

But during the Jobs days at least, despite Apple's reputation for user experience excellence, I think it was a company that was at best indifferent towards the experience of its users per se. What it was focused on was delivering a clean, powerful, beautiful device.

In a lot of ways, that focus created, as a side effect, a good user experience. Things like really smooth scrolling were born out of a desire to not have the device ever seem janky or struggling, for example, but it resulted in a pleasant user experience.

The App Store featured extremely strong reviews and protections to make sure that people's dumb apps couldn't screw over your battery or slow down your phone or otherwise compromise your experience. That limited utility, but created a clear, consistent, easy user experience.

In other ways, it led to shitty user experiences. My wife could never tell when her phone was ringing. Its ring was soft compared to Android phones and the vibration was much more subtle. But a loud ring or an emphatic vibration don't lead to a prettier, more iconic device. They'll never be features that a tech reporter will do a feature on. They're easy for other phones to do as well. So Apple didn't care.

The keyboard for iPhones was awful for years. Only a single spelling suggestion, no ability to get anything other than letters without hitting a chord key, hard to tell if you were in capitalization or lower-case. But it was a pretty, uncrowded keyboard, despite being just incredibly slower and more painful to use than equivalent Android keyboards. So Apple didn't care.

It was an interesting time, full of UI highs and lows for Apple.

Sure, they make mistakes. Probably quite a number of them. Nobody is perfect. But I'd say their mistakes are insignificant compared to their achievements.

Plus, sometimes they're not mistakes; they just don't target power users. A single-button mouse is an example of that. And to some extent choosing aesthetics over usability can be an example of this too. A non-tech person might prefer a pretty mouse and keyboard because he only checks his email occasionally and he's not a great typist anyways.

(mind, I do realize Apple often did not 'invent' these things. They just were clever enough to polish these things up and productize them, which rather bafflingly few companies did before them)

- I honestly don't think the Watch is anything more than a niche product because there's really no compelling use case for it. Having another device to charge just to have a notification screen seems like a lot to pay $500+ for;

- Force Touch is (IMHO) a disaster. Steve Jobs' Apple steadfastly refused to have more than one button on the Mac mouse. I think this is a rare case where Jobs was proven wrong as the right click is just too useful. But Force Touch adds weight to the phone and cost and doesn't have a compelling use. What's worse is that there is zero discoverability.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the iPhone 7 drops this feature after the 5SE didn't have it and that would be quite an admission of failure.

- I'm constantly frustrated by Apple's apparent distaste for the Macbook Air line. When the 12" Macbook came out I thought this was the end of the line for the Air and that makes me sad as, to me, the Macbook is too much of a compromise (horrible keyboard, no feedback on the trackpad, too low power CPU, only one port which is also for power). The Macbook proved they could release an Air with a retina display if they wanted to. They clearly don't want to.

I honestly don't get Apple's hate for the Macbook Air.

- Steve Jobs famously called touch displays on laptops terrible from an ergonomic point of view. I agreed then and nothing has changed my mind. Every time I try one of these devices (eg iPad Pro with a keyboard), I wonder why anyone would want to lift their hand from the keyboard to touch something on the screen. The 13" iPad Pro has other things going for it but I just don't see an iPad as ever being a replacement for a laptop for most people. And I say this who has owned 5 iPads (including the latest 9.7" iPad Pro).

- I kept my iPhone 5 for 3 years because I hated the larger phones. I finally relented and bought the 6S under protest. Apple finally relented and released the 5SE, which I take as correcting a mistake. Some people may want larger phones. It's fine to have those. But many people don't. I expect the 5SE form factor to be a big seller for Apple.

Tim Cook seems to be a great logistics man and I think was largely responsible for building the supply chain that could build 200M+ devices a year. This includes innovations in how Apple used their cash hoard as vendor finance to get exclusive supply for awhile and cut their costs in the long term.

But Cook just isn't the visionary that Jobs was (who is?) and Apple's much vaunted simplicity does seem to have at least partially fallen by the wayside.

Also their web design has been accessibility-hostile often enough with the landing pages of Trashcan Mac Pro, iPhone 12 etc all taking over your scroll…

I remember user interface design class at my university ca. 2005 where 20 out of the 30 best practice interaction design patterns originated at Apple!

Steve Jobs for the most part really cared and you could feel those priorities clearly: "it's how it works, not how it looks!"

Aside from some natural missteps, the "form over function" critique at the time was predominantly false. Apple is slowly getting there though, joining "ignorant web" as correctly called out here by Nikita.

The thing is that none of this is a joke or could be taken however lightly. It's 2024 and by now we've fundamentally realized the "Software is Eating the World" prophecy; living in a digitally permeated world.

Bad design is a moral issue, in worst case scenarios it has been killing people before and will increasingly kill or harm even more going forward. It always starts with the little things, especially so in design / engineering.

I desperately hope that Zoomers at least will start to realize that Millenials really fucked it up in that regard. I know, I know it also were the bosses pushing for this but we clearly should have said "no" much more often as the professionals (?) implementing this stuff.

There is much satisfaction waiting in learning; a full-grown craft with deep history.

Zoomers: Alan Cooper's "About Face" is a great start, probably super cheap these days as seemingly no one cares anymore.

It's form over function (see: laptop so thin that the keyboard doesn't work, you can't fit any port, etc. etc.), which is definitely NOT good design.

Both Apple's hardware and software have been nosediving for the past 5 years. So much so that I'm still using a 2015 MacBook Pro, and only because of macOS because Microsoft Surface Book looks about 1000 times better than anything Apple's ever made—and it has a detachable touchscreen with pen.

I hope this is good news for Apple to get better at design again.

They are following the trends set by others (Microsoft and Google) and I think that is what is infuriating designers.

They sell products that work for 80% of people. I can't use the Apple mouse because it gives me wrist pain. My partner can't use Airpods because they hurt her ears. Their products work for some people, but if you're unlucky you can only go buy some other companies product.

It always struck me as odd, that despite all their focus on accessibility in software, they seem to ignore ergonomics for the most part. Probably because offering the smallest number of hardware models is more important to them than covering the whole market.

My guess is that all of this is a lot more complicated than the author thinks and the road to simplicity is a very difficult one that has changed our technical devices for the better (overall). We’d still have plastic phones with “ergonomic” slide out keyboards if it was up to the author.