As a "tech person" I feel like we've all been told for 20+ years that we can't have UX that makes any sense to us, or lets us do simple things we want to do, because we are power users and software has to cater to some imagined demographic of incredibly dumb people who can't understand basic computing metaphors. It can get frustrating.

I'm a Growth Engineer. What that actually means is "make the UI so incredibly simple people who are functionally illiterate somehow make their way to the place you want them to be so you can eventually monetize them".

I view users moving through interfaces in a mass abstracted form like electrical or hydrological currents. My job is to widen the pipes.

Well, cynically that fits with my own experience. :) But I don't know if I'd say it's simpler, just that you don't have any choices. For me Apple UX often feels complicated and I can't figure out how to do what I want, or figure out what is going to happen when I accept some dialog they want me to accept. But I guess I end up going through the pipe eventually, out of frustration.

My impression of my non-tech friends is that they aren't too dumb to follow instructions, they just don't enjoy operating a computer like I do, so they are more okay with their choices being restricted if they don't have to waste time doing something they find boring.

Which would be fine if they easily allowed us to write software and scripts for our own devices.

Shortcuts.app exists, you can even tie those scripts to a hardware button now or ask Siri to execute them or place them as app-like icons or as interactive widgets on your home screen or Lock Screen, or tie them to automation events (schedules, but even more fine grained like "when I get a message from this person, send them an email", or "when I get home, log the current weather to a new line in a table on a spreadsheet". A script gallery even exists where scripts can easily be shared and ran by anyone or shared across iMessages.

Not everything is available like on a rooted Android of course, but I can at least create a Shortcut script and give it to any iOS user regardless of their technical expertise and they can utilize it, which is leagues ahead of the situation amongst non-rooted Android and non-technical Android users.

> apple isnt building to impress internet neckbeards like us. they are building for the normies. features they understand intuitively and cannot fuck up. maybe wait til it gets in the normies hands to judge.

Apple has lost its way, just look at how the "normies" and the "neckbeards" responded to the Vision Pro. Apple doesn't know how to innovate anymore, just how to market, and mass produce things, which is honestly good enough to keep making money for now.

> Apple has lost its way, just look at how the "normies" and the "neckbeards" responded to the Vision Pro.

Such people are likely confused. The AVP makes sense as a high end POC and dev kit. It takes a minute for a new modality of computing to make sense to people, even for Apple's own devs to figure out how people can use it, to iterate the OS and default app suite for a few years.

you’re suggesting apple planned to sell a $3.5k headset to normies? That doesn’t make sense. Sure, many normies had an opinion on it. Most normies never tried it so i don’t care what they think. It’s like asking a normie 20 years ago about what driving an electric car is like.

Vision pro was an over-hyped dev kit that offers a taste of the future. That’s it.

They have classes full of "normies" trying them out every time I pass by my local store. Sure looks like its meant to be something other than a dev kit to me.

Agreed, and Apple's differentiator has always been seamless integration. With the iPhone, they own the boundary layer between the physical and digital worlds. It's an obvious place to introduce AI for daily tasks without requiring any behavioral changes from the users.

I agree but all the normies I know say Siri is shit or just have it disabled

They aren’t that dumb to think calling it now Apple intelligence powered will make Siri work

Highly doubt normies give a crap about any of this.

Asking when your moms flight gets in, to pull up the picture of you and your partner on vacation at the beach or to take a picture of a restaurant from afar at 5x zoom and get reviews is insanely nice.

This is the perfect use of AI, at least for me.

What? How could you possibly say that? They can take a picture of something and then auto make a note, or a reminder, or an email, or find out what it is.

Normies struggle with the nuance of devices. They understand what they want, they don't understand steps, like start here then do this, then go here and copy this, then go there. This SKIPS all the steps. This is huge for them, but (probably) just mildly convenient for others.

>find out what it is

Google Googles did this 13 years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Goggles

It remains interesting to me how much we have been able to do, already, with technology. But discoverability, walled gardens, and <hand waving>marketing/positioning/hype</hand waving> have obscured awareness/adoption.

This is really really old tech that normies definitely do not care about.