The Apple question "why isn't this easy" is missing from 95% of UX in modern software. Stop acting as if software devs are the only users of software. And even then: computers should do work and not produce work or mental overhead.
I switched to a MacBook at work a few months ago, and it's been an epic of frustration and Googling: e.g.,
1. I set the keyboard layout to UK PC, but it kept switching back to default. (I was accidentally mashing a keyboard shortcut designed to do just that. I've since disabled it.)
2. Clicking on a link or other web-page element will, occasionally and apparently randomly, take me back a page or two in my history rather than opening the link or activating the element. (At least in Chrome: I've not used another browser on macOS yet.)
3. Command-tabbing to a minimised application does not, as one would naively expect, automatically unminimise it. Instead I'm left staring at an apparently unchanged screen.
4. If I open Finder in a given folder, there is, as best can tell, no easy way to navigate to that folder's parent.
Now arguably #1 was the fault of my own ignorance (though some kind of obvious feedback as to what was happening and why would have been nice), and #2 may be down to Google rather than Apple.
But #3 and #4 are plain bad design, bordering on user-hostile.
So far I'm not seeing that Apple's reputation for superior UX is justified, at least not in laptops.
Finder is just god awful and does all it can to obscure your actual filesystem location but the go to folder (cmd+g?) can get you where you need to go.
At this point I think Apple still deserves their reputation for superior UX, however that's a result of how epically bad Google, MS, and Facebook are at UX, not Apple doing a great job like they used to.
You can add a button to the toolbar in Finder (customize it from options) that when dropped down will show the complete path to the current folder as a list. You can use that to move up the tree.
I think that's marketing, and not borne out of real experience.
Try setting up a new Apple device, there is very little in IT that is as frustrating and confusing.
It's a 5 minute process, and there's very little to it that it's not optimized for ease. Any champ can do it, and millions do.
Not sure what you're on about.
>I think that's marketing, and not borne out of real experience.
Yes, all those people are delluded.
And good luck if you're setting up a family account for several devices with different iOS versions. You're gonna really need it.
I've tried it tons of times, have over 20 iOS/macOS devices over the years, and for some pervese reason, on macOS/OS X I like to install every major update on a clean disk too (and then re-import my data. It's an old Windows 95/XP-era reflex), so I do it at least once every year for my main driver (plus different new iOS devices).
What part of this sounds difficult?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70u0x8Kf6j4
And the whole "optimized for selling you bullshit Apple services" is a couple of screens you can skip with one click -- and you might want to legitimately use too.
So the kind of minds we want?
"Why isn't this easy?" should be the bread and butter question of a programmer...
I dunno, personally that's why I've used Apple products for the past decade, and I think it's also maybe part of why they have a 2T market cap, and are the most liquid publicly traded stock in the world?
Most people don't really know how their car works, and shouldn't have to. Same goes here.
You gotta be careful about these arguments. They often have a slippery slope to a superiority complex (of "leet" NIX users over the unwashed "proles") hiding deep within.
Needlessly complex or powerful user interfaces aren't necessarily good. They were quite commonplace before Apple. Apple understood the value of minimalism, of cutting away interaction noise until there's nothing left to subtract. Aesthetically speaking, this is approach has a long, storied history with respect to mechanical design. It's successful because it works.
What Apple understood really acutely and mastered is human interface design. They perfected making human centric interfaces that look and feel like fluid prosthetic extensions of one's body, rather than computational interface where power is achieved by anchoring ones tasks around the machine for maximal efficiency. Briefly, they understood intuition. Are you arguing that intuition is somehow worse than mastering arcana, simple because you've done the latter?
Now, I'm not going to say that one is better than the other. I love my command line vim workflow dearly, and you'll have to pry my keyboard out of my cold dead hands. But there's definitely the idea of "right tool for the right job" that you might be sweeping by here. Remember, simplicity is as much a function of cherished *NIX tools you probably know and love. It's where they derive their power. Be careful of surface level dismissals (visual interfaces versus textual) that come from tasting it in a different flavor. You might miss the forest for the trees!
As an example, read how the one-man-band of Execution Unit manages to, in house, write and test his game on three operating systems. https://www.executionunit.com/blog/2019/01/02/how-i-support-...
It's not a matter of "this is too hard", Blow just does not want to do it, let's be honest.
preferably over a twitch stream..