This fails to include Thunderbolt in the discussion, which is a major omission.
93 karma · joined February 13, 2019
Not to mention media-centric phones without headphone jacks. Remember how services like Apple Music are supposed to be the company's future? Hey, let's make it HARDER for users to consume those services, by removing the audio output and battery life! COURAGE!
Ive's (and others') asinine "flat" look tells you nothing. Buttons masquerade as plain text, and colored boxes next to each other are supposed to tell you which one (out of two) is active.
Apple's childish and ridiculous "skeuomorphism" wasn't just over the top and cheesy; it was just plain INCORRECT. They had controls designed to look like the paint on the felt surface of a blackjack table. WTF? You don't interact with the paint on a blackjack table in real life, so why the hell would I expect to do so in a program?
iTunes had a similarly defective UI: The "LCD" panel at the top (which was even depicted as having a sheen over it, to represent a glass cover) had controls in it you could click on. Again, WTF? You can't poke at the sealed LCD display on a tape deck, so... this is laughably stupid.
Yet year after year, very few decry the fallacy of reacting to plain old bad UI with even worse: the failure and design dereliction that is "flat" UI.
What a great human achievement.
Even dumber: Apple didn't make it work with the Pencil. WTF? Now THAT would be far more useful than the emoji bar.
But putting the ports millimeters apart on the side of a computer that offers at least nine inches of space is idiotic: https://i.imgur.com/0HGp7O0.jpg
The new keyboard is insufferable; you might as well just go to a membrane keyboard at this point. The deletion of a dozen keys for the sake of the emoji bar is embarrassing, especially on a "pro" computer. Now programmers are supposed to step through code with a featureless strip that goes to sleep every few seconds? The crowning offense is not even OFFERING the option of real keys, when the "consumer" Air has them.
The big trackpad is a mistake because the heels of your hands are in contact with it all the time, necessitating who knows how much spurious-touch-rejection logic that simply fails occasionally and sends your cursor to some other part of the screen or document... or your hand simply executes an unintended click or right-click.
Another baffling failure: Why doesn't the Pencil work on those giant touchpads? Now THAT would be useful!
This is after deleting a dozen useful keys and replacing them with an asinine and embarrassing emoji bar... again on a "pro" computer without even offering the option to get rid of it... and yet that option exists on the non-"pro" Air.
The designer who declared that you don't want more battery capacity in your mobile device, so users are carrying power bricks and wads of wire around with them and begging bartenders to plug their iPhones in, or crawling under tables in public places to do so.
The designer who removed headphone jacks from MEDIA-CENTRIC phones, phones that are supposed to provide access to streaming-media services and the future of Apple.
The designer who turned out a computer with, in effect, no I/O ports.
The designer who championed peek-a-boo UI and the idiotic "flat" look, where using software is now an Easter-egg hunt with many controls disguised as plain text and the states of others indistinguishable.
And I don't even care if he ripped off earlier designers. The real problem is that he has waged a war on USEFULNESS that has driven the mobile-phone market and computer markets BACKWARD.
For Apple's and consumers' sake, I hope NOT.
See: Santa Monica, CA
DON'T CALL IT CROSS-PLATFORM WHEN IT ISN'T.
Lying isn't acceptable just because a president does it.
"JPMorgan agreed to pay $110 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over its procedures for charging customers overdraft fees. It was among more than a dozen big banks sued by their customers for reordering debits from their accounts to maximize the possibility that the accounts would become overdrawn, which would generate more fees."
This is about as cravenly stupid as California's "red flag alert." WTF does that mean? Red flags will be falling from the sky, snarling traffic and causing mayhem?
Human stupidity is boundless.
"Sby" would've made way more sense. Or heaven forbid we use one more character to make the nearly obvious "sbdy."
We'll see what, if anything, becomes of the Terrafugia too.
Apple suddenly decided on the amateur-hour policy of forcing users to use an E-mail address as their user ID. And more recently they've doubled down on that stupidity by requiring that it be a WORKING E-mail address, giving you no way to specify (in your user profile) a real E-mail address at which you can be contacted.
The public at large isn't all that savvy about how this works; so when asked to set up an account with their E-mail address and password, what percentage would you guess assumes that they have to use the same password as their actual E-mail account?
I'm guessing that percentage is very high, maybe 50%.
When sites implement this asinine policy, they become responsible not just for the user's security on that one site, but the security of the user's E-mail account. Talk about a ripe opportunity for identity theft or more, if the site's database is hacked or stolen.
You don't see banks or brokerage houses forcing people to log in with an E-mail address. Apple's ignorance of online services continues...
This "problem" has been routinely solved by free forum software and other systems for decades now.
Let's use real words that tell the listener or reader what we're talking about.
"Flat" UI is both lazy and an overreaction to the ridiculous skeuomorphism that plagued us years ago.