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A comment on 27-year-old Apple iBooks can connect to Wi-Fi and download official updates. Parent comment

Re:27-year-old Apple iBooks can connect to Wi-Fi and downloa... by delecti on Thursday February 19, 2026 @09:07AM (#47073870)
Regarding your second edit, there was 100 years of automobile development (or more, depending on how far back you consider things to be in the lineage of a car, vs the predecessors of them) before the first car had a steering wheel. It's just ahistorical to say we quickly outgrew the tiller. We're less than 100 years from the first emergence of digital computers and screens, let alone putting those two together and needing an interface on them.

I think your broader point is accurate, but computers aren't old enough yet to really compare the evolution of their interfaces to other technologies.

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Re:27-year-old Apple iBooks can connect to Wi-Fi and downloa... by olyjohn on Thursday February 19, 2026 @01:11PM (#47076961)
Yeah but we can take lessons from that 100 years of car experience of how humans interact with objects and apply a lot of it to computers. Its not like we are starting from scratch like we were 200 years ago.
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Re:27-year-old Apple iBooks can connect to Wi-Fi and downloa... by delecti on Thursday February 19, 2026 @01:50PM (#47077505)
They weren't starting from scratch 200 years ago either. Tillers were standard in boats for thousands of years, it was a perfectly reasonable way to steer a vehicle.

Likewise, at first a purely textual interface was a perfectly reasonable way to interact with a computer terminal, but the addition of mice changed the game, as did higher resolution displays and widespread adoption of touchscreens. We're 80 years into screens, 60 years into computer mice, and 20 years into touchscreens. Clearly lots of interface changes are just to keep the designers at a company busy, but it's also silly to be confident that we've nailed UX/UI standards.

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Re:27-year-old Apple iBooks can connect to Wi-Fi and downloa... by jcgrillo on Thursday February 19, 2026 @01:41PM (#47077368)
Once we settled on the steering wheel, though, we didn't keep trying to make tillers work. That's what I was trying to get at--in other examples of human-machine interfaces we generally don't regress once we've figured it out. But with computers that's exactly what we're doing.
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