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Comment by nicce | Hacker News Reader

> Today when you generate a PDF from you own content (from Apple Notes app) you are asked about opening links you click on.

Or they don't have any usability studies. A hard regression in efficiency in many places.

E.g. Safari in iOS 26 forces you to do 50% more button presses. E.g. if you want to close a tab, you need to press one button more these days. Also one button press more to see the current tabs. These are likely the most used scenarios when you use the browser and they add one button press more?

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UI/UX seems more like something driven, at Apple and industry wide, by vibes and dogma than it is actual usability.

The sad thing is that Apple used to have people like Bill Atkinson (RIP), Larry Tesler (RIP), Bruce Tognazzini, and Don Norman who cared deeply about usability. What made the Mac special wasn’t its looks, especially in the pre-iMac and pre-Mac OS X days when the computers were mostly beige and the classic Mac OS UI was quite plain-looking (though still good-looking, IMO) compared to Mac OS X and later. Rather, what made the Mac special was its attentiveness to UI.

Somewhere along the line Apple products became luxury goods that were appealing due to their visual design. I am particularly fond of Apple’s early 2000s design, with beautiful hardware such as the iMac G4 and the Power Mac G4 Cube running early Mac OS X. Apple still makes very visually-appealing hardware and software. However, I feel that under Tim Cook Apple has heavily leaned into its visual appeal at the expense of what made Apple great: the emphasis on usability.

Well I don't use Safari anymore. A few years ago, it stopped syncing passwords correctly with my iPhone and nothing I did could fix the problem (there is an issue in the backend on their part, maybe it has been fixed since). On top of that it didn't show favicon for bookmarks which was quite annoying and was slow/worked poorly with some web apps. So I went to Chrome, monopoly be damned.

At the rate it's going, there isn't going to be a single app from Apple that I want to keep using, quite soon.

By the way, the PDF export for Notes is ridiculously bad. It's an old note and there is some migration bug, all the links have the same target. I haven't bothered to investigate yet, but the plan is to stop using Notes as well, so whatever.

"They pass more time with this! They like it a lot! Engagement achieved!!!11one11eleven" said the developer.

"Why is this slower? Why do I have to burn time massaging the interface instead of doing it fast and continuing with my life? What a waste..." said the user.

Over the last two decades "the user is the product, milking machines to 110%!!!" has leaked all over the computing world, infecting where the user is (and will be forever, let's hope) the user.

You can swipe up from the url bar instead, that will open the current tabs as well.

Good to know! I wonder if this is documented anywhere...

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