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Comment by nationcrafting | Hacker News Reader

>Design has always taken more prominence at apple over usability

I strongly disagree with you there. In fact, I'd say the exact opposite.

The experience of using the product has always been at the very core of Apple's design philosophy. The entire desktop metaphor, include the Trash, the files in folders, etc. is about simplifying the user experience with the computer.

The fact that anyone can just pick up an iPhone and pretty much immediately know what they should be doing, without reading a manual, tells you exactly that usability has been so thought out that it has become invisible. You just do what you want to do, without having to think about how to do it. So, it's the embodiment of the Steve Krug "Don't make me think" mindset: usability is design.

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> The entire desktop metaphor, include the Trash, the files in folders, etc. is about simplifying the user experience with the computer.

The work of the first iPhone team including Jony Ive might fit into Apple's philosophy, but those individuals deserve so much credit for Apple's small-device turnaround because iPhone wasn't inevitable and neither was Apple's recent success. Apple actually struggled for years in the personal computer market, made lots of now-forgotten stinker products with huge flaws, and mostly just continued to sell computers to a fanatical but tiny following. For example: yes, certainly I'll drag my floppy disk to the trash when I'm done working with it because there is no eject button, that sounds safe enough not to think about. What? To Apple's hardcore fans, that was always intuitive, and it does remove an ugly button from the front, but it is not "usable." It's just characteristic Apple. Apple never had a monopoly on usability.

iPhone was inevitable because it was basically a iPod with a mobile radio.

Its main selling point of the day (besides visual voice mail) was that it could hook into the existing ITMS infrastructure without the limitations that their previous cooperation with Motorola was saddled with.

Back when it launched, all but the highest capacity iPods were competing with cheaper and cheaper featurephones packing more and more storage.

The press was basically screaming for Apple to get a phone out the door or go down in flames.

I think the biggest turnaround for Apple was when they got Jobs off the "tech hub" idea he was riding. The idea that the Mac would the center of "your" (his) technological life.

This turned the company from a computer company into a consumer electronics company.

As someone who is a big fan of "don't make me think" (just bought the third edition a few days ago, actually) I can attest that there are things that apple has done/designed that make me think or pause. I Don't think it's core to their philosophy - perhaps it is a part of it, but not front and center. I get snagged on too many things for that to be the case; and it's become noticeable in the past few years to the point of hindrance for me in some cases.

Their keyboards and mice particularly showcase this: they look pretty and sleek, but try using them all day, and then try using a regular keyboard and mouse. They weren't thinking about the human who has to use it, they were thinking of appeal and looks.

You're not wrong about the approachability of IOS; that's no accident, and required a good deal of thought and attention. But I think whenever there is a tie, and they can either improve the aesthetics or improve the usability, they lean towards the former, because it's sexier and will sell.

Good point re: keyboard and mouse. Especially the round mouse, just looking at that gives me a funny feeling in the metacarpals.

Do you mean the round one-button mouse from the 1998 iMac?

Indeed. Sorry, I guess I'm showing my age assuming everyone knows which one I meant.

Here it is: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Apple_iM...

> Their keyboards and mice particularly showcase this: they look pretty and sleek, but try using them all day, and then try using a regular keyboard and mouse.

Having done this, I prefer the Apple products:

1. The keyboards have very little travel so it is considerably less effort to type on them then to type on a standard keyboard.

2. The Magic Mouse has a large multitouch surface on it that enables gestures that I have a hard time going without. Also, it fits my hand. YMMV.

Matter of taste or what you're accustomed to. I use a mechanical keyboard on my MacMini but genuinely like both the Apple Bluetooth trackpad and mouse--and have gotten beyond the trackballs I used for ages without much in the way of angst.

Have you tried the new keyboard and trackpad on the new macbook? the keyboard feels like buttons more than keys, and the trackpad is... not good.

but, still; matter of taste. there will always be lovers and haters, and you're certainly welcome to prefer one over the other.

I haven't tried the USB MacBook yet.

I'd say the entire history of Apple products compared to any other popular product that is a 'computing device' indicates that you're wrong. They've consistently made traditionally complex things easy enough for mainstream adoption and perhaps more importantly, enjoyment.

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)

Not that I disagree, but have you tried an Apple Watch? The UI is bewildering.

Haven't used it yet, but it seemed that the focus on apps was the wrong place to start. I think Marco Arment said something about the priority being notifications, glances and _then_ apps. Totally makes sense to me - in a UI meant to save you from the relatively cumbersome interaction with a phone, you don't want to replicate the functionality of the app. That's what the phone is still for. Any time saved not pulling the phone out would be spent navigating a smaller screen.

Not surprised that developers would start on the wrong end, but I wonder what Apple could've done to get them to start with glances. Perhaps not even include app support in v1 of the Watch OS.

>The fact that anyone can just pick up an iPhone and pretty much immediately know what they should be doing

Because every last TV ad Apple ran for years were "here is how you get to map/music/web" under the guise of "see how simple iPhone is to use".

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