It could be argued that is not "discoverability". IMO, that's a feature to handle bad discoverability and unintuitive UI.
Discoverability is when you can see what/how to do something by just looking or clicking around a bit.
i would say that i think recent windows 8/10 are considerably worse than OS X - they approach iOS levels of undiscoverability.
maybe i am overstating it a bit - maybe unforgivable sounds really bad, but what i find it hard to believe that most people couldn't trivially improve on the more confusing or poorly implemented UI elements.
Oops, years, not hours. I should proofread.
Also, to be specific, the standard menus and searching etc. come with AppKit, which is part of Cocoa.
> "zero discoverability" is an undeserved hyperbole.
Actually, it's a deserved hyperbole.
It's not like Apple haven't realized their mistakes... They wrote a book in the late 80s about UI and it's still one of the best works. But they've abandoned many of their most-important guidelines, and almost always for the worse.
They threw out the discoverability baby with the skeuomorphic bathwater.
Which book are you referring to?
See [1] in a comment somewhere else in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12529428
As a PC-only user since the days of DOS up till Windows 8, and having used Windows 10 after jumping ship to Macs a few hours ago, macOS has demonstrably more discoverability than Windows.
One example: Just click on the Help menu, in any app, and type something like "show" or "find" or any other operation, and it will show you all the menu items which have that word in their name.
That feature is a part of the Cocoa subsystem and comes for free with every app, and very handy when you know an app has a certain feature but you're not sure which menu it's buried in (like standard operations and filters in different image editing apps.)
Also, all the shortcuts and standard menus are the same in every macOS app, and can be discovered/modified from System Preferences -> Keyboard, again for any app.
Take "Preferences", which in Windows is sometimes under Edit, Tools, or the app name menu (which imitates macOS.)
I could go on and on, but "zero discoverability" is an undeserved hyperbole.