Under Jobs, UX was king. Devices had to be intuitive, and features discoverable. Today, all that user-friendliness is gone. The devices are no longer approachable for a newbie: you have to just know how to use them.
Yep. The secret "gestures," the peek-a-boo UI, and now "transparent" UI that overlaps other junk on the screen.
It's not even consistent with itself. Example: On iOS, bring up the list of open pages in Safari; each thumbnail has an X in the corner to close it. Pretty intuitive and standard. But now bring up the list of apps running on your phone. There's nothing. No X or other affordance. Who the hell would guess he has to flip the thumbnail up off the top of the screen to quit the application? You've probably forgotten how stupid this is, but that's just complacency for hideous design setting in.
Except Jobs approved the design of that screen, which hasn't fundamentally changed since early versions of iOS (iPhoneOS). And it's that way because quitting apps isn't supposed to be something you do very often, if at all. Nowadays people clear the app history by habit, but it was really only supposed to be for misbehaving apps that were burning your battery, so having an affordance to make it easy was never the point, despite how people use it today.
Also, please stop doing this, it breaks apps. It's unnecessary and just forces your apps to cold launch every time you use them.
That's not Apple, that's just current design trends everywhere. Jobs was popularizing UX idioms for yet-new hardware to the customer. Now we live in a world where children grow up with tablets.
If you go to Google's design you're not going to see an alternative take from the same playground of design, plus or minus some glassiness, emoji, bounce, etc.
Crappy? I use MacOS everyday, and it's a goddamn delight compared to the (perfectly reasonable) experience of Windows 11 + WSL. Anything that doesn't "just work" was replaced by very thoughtfully written third party software a long time ago.
Yeah, like you I lived in Linux for years and delighted in the freedom to recompile my video driver with every upgrade, but then I had kids, and a life to live, and found that accepting some limitations of the excellent OSX was a worthwhile tradeoff. Today I couldn't tell you what I'm missing that can't be fixed with a 30s Google + `brew install`.
And complaints about default choices, or limitations with easy work arounds, on Hacker News are just weird. No one typing on this message board runs default anything.
Please share specific (legitimate) gripes and win my sympathy.
Take a photo on your iPhone and wait for it to sync on your Mac. You might get lucky and it syncs nearly immediately (which is still typically a minute or so, even if your phone and Mac are on the same network and have gigabit internet). But you won't know when. And it might not be immediate.
Both sides will tell you they're up to date. You can't force a sync. They'll be synced when Photos is ready, not you. And if that's ten minutes or more later? So be it. You'll just deal with it.
Saying that it sucks less than the execrable mess that is Windows doesn't prove anything.
Apple appears to be chasing Microsoft down the toilet. Its exhumation of the circa-2002 "transparent" UI fad is one example, coupled with other baffling UI regressions.
Mac OS examples: Apple removed the "get new mail" button from the Mail toolbar. So all those millions of people who log into their bank accounts and are told to check their mail for 2FA are left hunting for it or simply waiting for Mail's next poll. There's no excuse for removing one of the most-used buttons from a sparsely-populated toolbar. What is driving this attack on usefulness? It used to be Jony Ive.
Then take a look at Music. Apple moved the playback controls from the empty area at the top of the screen to the bottom of the content browser, and made them "transparent." Now they overlap and blend with the thumbnails and text in the content browser.
Garbage like this is scattered all over the UI now. I needn't beat the dead horse of the hated System Preferences panel here.
Meanwhile, Spotlight still doesn't show you WHERE it found stuff, and neither does the inappropriately-named Finder. "Location" or "path" isn't even an OPTION in the column headers you can add to the results list. So you can't discriminate between identically-named files or irrelevant volumes or backups as you scan the list to find what you're looking for, or sort by location.
The removal of Launchpad is another blunder. Apple didn't even replace it with anything. So now you have no comparable way to group your applications.
"Center Stage" is a profoundly defective POS that ruins my family's weekly Zooms by randomly swooping the camera view around and cropping one of my parents out, when they're sitting side by side. Utter trash that there's no universal way to disable, shoved on all users by default without permission. That's Apple today.
You can easily see a totally different perspective on all of these if you try a little.
> You can't repair your device.
Everything is increasingly integrated for dust/water proofing, components are integrated to reduce the power envelope and push performance. Repairability is the tradeoff.
> They're intently focused on locking you in as much as possible
All of their products and services are tightly integrated and have privileged access to hardware that would be insecure to open to 3rd parties.
> They try their best to force app developers to pay them their 30% tax, even when the devs brought the customers in from elsewhere.
If you want to list on their marketplace it's not unreasonable to expect to pay for access. We can haggle on the fairness of 30%
> They, for so long, refused to support RCS and downgraded the messaging experience with android.
As a consumer I just can't possibly be made to care about this.
> They were trying to intentionally downgrade SPAs so people again need to go through their app store.
SPAs perform poorly and eat battery life and have super heterogeneous user experiences, I don't want them on my phone.
As a consumer I like that they don't open the gates on the phone ecosystem to all of the absolute slop we see on android.
> Everything is increasingly integrated for dust/water proofing, components are integrated to reduce the power envelope and push performance. Repairability is the tradeoff.
This is a fair point. But when I hear "you can't repair your device" I also think "you can't take it to someone of your choice to repair", which is often true, too, even though that limitation is artificial - witness the Rossmans and others of the world who can absolutely repair these devices. There's a whole YouTube channel of a guy who makes ASMR videos of him doing things like removing iPhone/iPad/MBP storage and replacing it with large capacity chips.
> I also think "you can't take it to someone of your choice to repair", which is often true, too, even though that limitation is artificial
This I think is a fair enough criticism. Screen and battery replacement by 3rd party professionals should be easier. Both of these things would tackle the biggest reasons that iPhones become useless before Apple drops OS support which is quite long compared to Android OEMs.
You might find that you are in the minority though. Nothing wrong with this at all but apple makes some of the best selling products in the market place and that has largely been because of Tim Cook.
Nothing you say is in disagreement with the comment you're responding to. And yeah, Apple is doing really well, in part because of their anti competitive practices. Good for them, bad for us.
These responses talking about Apple's bottom line kind of feel like this convo:
> Cigarettes are bad, they cause cancer. Philip Morris shouldn't be selling them
> Yeah but they sell so many cigarettes! Isn't that great?
I don’t think any of the original articles complaints are wrong but I don’t agree with the thesis. They are one of the best selling device manufacturers because the product and ecosystem is so good. My point was that folks, maybe like yourself, who don’t find the ecosystem open enough or the devices repairable enough, are outliers compared to the average consumer.
I think maybe part of the argument is that Apple’s closed system was a benevolent dictator-style ecosystem that was actually benevolent. Until it wasn’t.
Cook made sure that the iPhone's battery replacement cost was so high that an upgrade would be more viable. His innovation was to extend that to MacBooks.
Unlike Google, Apple makes you jump through the hoops of their small business program, if it's available, before they'll drop it to 15%, otherwise you're stuck at 30.
> What’s not talked about is the long-term consequences of falling into these groups where excessive drug self-experimentation is normalized.
Lots of people from the 2010-ish era of "aesthetics" and steroids are having heart issues now in their 30s (or earlier). Pretty sad to see.
To me it's fairly clear where this comes from: ambitious people convinced they've figured out some secret cheat code that no-one else has. I'm yet to see that path end well for anyone.
> You should recognize that they are a bad person
Maybe I'm giving them too much credit but I don't really think they're bad people. Young, arrogant, stupid, unaware of the consequences of what they're doing sure... but I don't think it comes from a malicious place where they're intentionally trying to hurt others.
That comment seemed to revolve around consent. Willful, nonconsensual dosing of anyone with any drug is a violation, and yes doing it and bragging about it is reprehensible.
Is malicious intent required? I don't think most people I would consider bad see themselves as such - everyone has their reasons after all. There can certainly be extenuating circumstances but in general I'd take the combination of stupid, arrogant, and unaware as making someone a bad person. More generally I tend to view those who repeatedly display an unwillingness to consider the impact of their actions on others as being bad people.
> skimming through an alien looking codebase, scratching your head trying to figure what crazy abstraction the last person who touched this code had in mind. Oh shit it was me? That made so much more sense back then
This is exactly how you learn to create better abstractions and write clear code that future you will understand.
You are right about the learning part. But I’ve been at this for 20 years. Even the best, most pristine and organizad code I’ve seen has not been “clear”. The average LLM code today is a lot more clear than the average developer code.
I wish more was being invested in AI autocomplete workflows. That was a nice middle-ground.
But yeah my hunch is "the old way" - although not sure we can even call it that - is likely still on par with an "agentic" workflow if you view it through a wider lens. You retain much better knowledge of the codebase. You improve your understanding over coding concepts (active recall is far stronger than passive recognition).
I've had a lot of enjoyment flipping the agentic workflow around: code manually and ask the agent for code review. Keeps my coding skills and knowledge of the codebase sharp, and catches bugs before I commit them!
It also writes lots of bugs which it'll catch some of, in an independent review chat.
This is bogus. If you think LLMs write less buggy software, you haven't worked with seriously capable engineers. And now, of course, everyone can become such an engineer if they put in the effort to learn.
But why not just use the AI? Because you can still use the AI once you're seriously good.
This is definitely not correct in my opinion. You’re essentially saying, instead of a person actually getting better at the craft, just give up and let someone else do it.
IME, not really. When you prompt it to review its own written code, it will end up finding out a bunch of stuff that should have been otherwise. And then you can add different "dimensions" in your prompt as well like performance, memory safety, idiomatic code, etc.
Man, same here, those early days of Cursor were mindblowing; but since then autocomplete has stagnated, and even the new Cursor version is veering agentic like everything else.
I hope if/when diffusion models get a little more traction down the line it'll put some new life into autocomplete(-adjacent) workflows. The virtually instantaneous responses of Inception's Mercury models [0] still feel a little like magic; all it's missing is the refinement and deep editor integration of Cursor.
On the subject of diffusion models, it's a shame there aren't any significant open-weight models out there, because it seems like such a perfect fit for local use.
I can see the logic behind "manual coding" but it feels like driving across country vs taking the airplane. Once I've taken the airplane once, its so hard to go back...
Can't understand this mentality. If I had the time I would much rather never set foot in an airport again. I would drive everywhere. And I would much rather write my own code than pilot an LLM too
The fact so many people think businesses need to do do do, faster faster faster, now now now, at all costs is a major reason everything sucks, everything is fucked up, everyone is exploited.
Exactly. When you're operating as a business you need to be executing and AI helps a lot in brainstorming, developing, testing etc.
I have ADHD and just by brainstorming with AI helps me initiate.
Of course, you need to be the ultimate gatekeeper or else there will be quality issues. But isn't that the same when we write manual code? AI is just another tool in your toolkit.
No, they are not. Even ignoring business where using AI would have consequences for you (medical is one example), there are plenty "normal" software companies that value quality over slop.
That's why I added "across the country". I guess its a bad analogy.
I agree with the premise of the article but I just don't think going back to manual coding is the solution.
Here's my new attempt using puzzle as an analogy which I wrote yesterday:
Starting last year, I noticed coding was getting less fun. It’s like buying a puzzle set and finding out there’s an auto-complete button. Press it and the puzzle solves itself. Faster than me, better than me, prettier than me. It’s like playing a game with cheats on.
I don’t even have to touch the pieces anymore. I just tell the auto-solver what I want. Tell it I want a bird, it gives me a bird. A pirate ship? Here’s a pirate ship. At first I never imagined it could do a rocket, but with its help, that went from fantasy to reality fast.
Sometimes it doesn’t quite match what I wanted, but usually just telling it what’s wrong fixes things. The whole process is so fast that, if nothing’s broken, I don’t even bother looking at how it actually solved it. That would just waste time.
But coding felt less fun with this new assist mode.
The fun of puzzle-solving is gone. That feeling of trekking through the hard parts and finally reaching the summit is gone. Now it’s like taking a cable car up.
Before, I had to think alone for a long time, try things, experiment, until I finally cracked the problem. Now with the assist mode, it’s like doing college homework where the teacher already has the answer key. I just ask and I get a standard answer.
Coding went from craft to management. “I” went from a craftsman with standards to a foreman watching workers do the job. It’s just not the same. And “foreman” sounds kind of weak.
This is like saying "EV charging is soooo slooooow" and thinking you need to stand next to the car holding the nozzle in the charging port like with a petrol car.
Of course you go do something else unless it's a literal 30 second operation.
LLM auto-complete is the most useful experience I've had with LLMs by quite a margin, and those were the early GitHub Copilot versions as well. In terms of models and cost it overperformed. It wasn't always good but it was more immediately useful than vibecoding and spec-driven development (or vibecoding-in-a-nice-dress).
I think most people "moved on" because they both thought the agent workflow is cooler and were told by other people that it works. The latter was false for quite some time, and is only correct now insofar that you can probably get something that does what you asked for, but executed exceedingly poorly no matter how much SpecLang you layer on top of the prompting problem.
In some codebases, autocomplete is the most accurate and efficient way to get things done, because "agentic" workflows only produce unmaintainable mess there.
I know that because there are several times where I completely removed generated code and instead coded by hand.
Why? I thought it was pretty good, just get the rest of your function a lot of times and no context switching to type to an agent or whatever. It just happens immediately and if it's wrong just keep typing till it isn't. You can still use an agent for more complex things.
I just wish I knew of a good Emacs AI auto complete solution.
Figma's stock has been on a sharp downward trend over the last year. This isn't a notice-able change to their stock price at all. They're down 30% just in the last month, with many days being -5% to -10%.
There have been studies showing aesthetics matter quite a bit for UX - users perceive things that are attractive as being easier to use and less frustrating.
Anthropic is the exact same way, I think they're just trying to avoid having 5 different subscription tiers visible. Probably needing 20x is very niche
You can't repair your device.
They're intently focused on locking you in as much as possible, making it hard to leave, and not by making such a good product.
They try their best to force app developers to pay them their 30% tax, even when the devs brought the customers in from elsewhere.
They, for so long, refused to support RCS and downgraded the messaging experience with android.
They were trying to intentionally downgrade SPAs so people again need to go through their app store.
Anything I missed?
They make good hardware, yes, but I can't support them as a company.
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