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Apple has lost the functional high ground(marco.org)

almost 9 years ago from Jason Fuller, Director

  • Cody Cowan, almost 9 years ago

    Obviously no OS is going to be 100 perfect, and Apple has never truly "just worked", but with every new feature comes added complexity, and with every redesign come interaction changes. Spent christmas watching my parents struggle to try to use their iPads because every option and control keeps changing.

    Not that one molehill makes a mountain, but look at iOS 7 airplay and iOS 8 airplay. Originally, when watching a video on your iPhone, you hit the airplay button and, like magic, it showed up on your AppleTV. The button didn't show up when you weren't near an AppleTV. It "just worked". Now, in iOS 8, you have to turn on Airplay in Control Center (definitely not intuitive), and you can turn it on or off whenever you want - when connected to an AppleTV, when watching a movie, or when sitting in a subway not connected to any network. No indication of whether its on or not. No guidance. Very confusing. Much more Windows95 taskbar than iOS simplicity.

    6 points
    • Christoph OChristoph O, almost 9 years ago

      Well said about Airplay. This has been the biggest issue for me, too, in that it put cracks in the "it just works" perception. Outside of usability, I'm assuming something else broke as well in the Airplay integration of Apple TV. It has become incredibly unreliable, and since I can't be sure now whether I need to first spend 20 minutes fiddling around, I started preferring Chromecast now.

      Hopefully 2015 will be (outside of Apple Watch), a year of refinement. 2014 was certainly a year of pushing the envelope.

      1 point
    • Darth BaneDarth Bane, almost 9 years ago

      I'm not a fan of the "If Steve was still here..." argument, but in this case it's pretty safe to say that this issue would be one of those things that Steve would complain about, and probably never allow to be changed.

      His death has allowed Apple to relax a little bit about the smallest details, and in some cases you can tell. It's still high quality hardware and software, but the attention to microscopic detail has been lost a little bit since Steve joined the PowerPCs in limbo.

      0 points
    • James WilliamsJames Williams, almost 9 years ago

      I've noticed the same problems at work with connecting to share a presentation in a conference room.

      I think people blindly parrot the "conventional wisdom" about desktop Linux. I've used it as a secondary OS since about 2003. The number of tweaks I have to do with a typical Ubuntu install isn't any less than I have to do on a clean Mac install in the past few years. I generally order from a company that specializes in Linux laptops so I don't have any hardware issues. Ubuntu in 2003 was beyond painful to setup. Now it (or something like Linux Mint) is a breeze.

      0 points