Am I An Outlier, Or Are Apple Products No Longer Easy To Use?

http://battellemedia.com/archives/2012/09/am-i-an-outlier-or-are-apple-products-no-longer-easy-to-use.php

by rkudeshi • 14 years ago

256 255 14 years ago

bkorte2• 14 years ago

So, your device hit an edge case bug. Why aren't you talking to Apple? They'll have a fix for it, get you to bring it in or send it in.

Worst case scenario your edge case cost you some data loss.

That certainly doesn't mean their products are no longer easy to use.

acuozzo• 14 years ago

> Worst case scenario your edge case cost you some data loss.

How is this __ever__ acceptable?

Wawl• 14 years ago

Is it not possible to make backups of your iPhone ? (I do not own one).

bkorte2• 14 years ago

I shouldn't have used the words data loss.

Of course it isn't, but he should have backups of his iPhone.

eckyptang13• 14 years ago

a) Apple won't fix anything if you tell them from experience.

b) No data loss is acceptable. Any data loss is simply "product doesn't work".

se855• 14 years ago

b) No data loss is acceptable. Any data loss is simply "product doesn't work".

So Windows XP never worked for me because of all the blue screens of death where I lost data from time to time?

Consumer grade technology can and does lose data, too bad! but its the reality we have to live with for now until better hardware/software floods the consumer market that handles the data loss problem at an enterprise level.

In this day and age, if you lose data because you didn't take the necessary backup precautions, I don't see that as being Microsoft or Apple's fault, it's your fault!

duiker101• 14 years ago

b is even worse, because it might be i had that data and it was important to me.

vosper• 14 years ago

Welcome to Microsoft's world in the early/mid nineties - turns out software isn't as simple as we thought, and when you become really popular the 0.01% of turns out to be a lot of actual disaffected customers.

DHowett3• 14 years ago

"I restored my phone" => "I lost all my apps and data": Did you not back it up? Did you not restore that backup? iTunes warns you that it will erase your phone and reset it to factory settings.

"I can't hit the tiny search button": Have you tried scrolling to the top of the list? The index bar's magnifying class is a mnemonic identifying that "the search is at the top of the list." When you scroll up there, in fact, it's shown at the top of the list.

You can disable keyboards you don't want. You can disable any keyboard you want save for the one tied to your phone's language. Why is Kanji even enabled if you don't want it there? Keyboards do not just turn themselves on (except when the phone's language has changed, but we do not see herein a rant about the phone suddenly displaying everything in Japanese.)

The other concerns outlined are honestly valid, these simply stuck out to me as being more than a little absurd. It wouldn't be a rant if it didn't involve every problem, no matter how insignificant, of which you could possibly think (and that's not necessarily a bad thing.)

sohamsankaran2• 14 years ago

I suspect that in the author's situation, with "thousands of contacts" in his list, scrolling to the top might be a rather time consuming enterprise. And of course you can disable keyboards you don't want, but the author seems to be questioning the purpose of having the Internationalization button in a prime (and extremely accidental-touch prone location) on the keyboard at all.

DHowett3• 14 years ago

I won't say that any of these are particularly discoverable, but there are a couple solutions to the contact search issue - one is to tap the stausbar, which scrolls directly to the top of the list, and the other is to use the letter-index on the side, as the entire region is a high-speed thumbscroller (tap anywhere, fling to top).

The internationalization button certainly does suck when and only when keyboards you do not want to use are activated, however. :P

hoi3• 14 years ago

The thing is, you are beginning to 'blame the user' because they 'don't get it'. Isn't the purpose is that there isn't anything to get? It should 'just work' with minimal thinking, with no frustration. It doesn;t matter that Kanji is enabled... maybe it was enabled by accident? But it doesn;t resolve his problem? Maybe he doesn;t know how to easily enable/disable languages because he finds it hard to configure? If anything, this is useful data for Apple (and any UX designers) to look at to resolve potential usability problems.

DHowett3• 14 years ago

The real-world analogues of the devices he's interacting with do just work with minimal thinking, and this is what the letter index mimics. In an indexed book, you find the letter and quickly flip open the book to the proper page. In an indexed scrolling list, you touch it and scroll directly to that letter (or magnifying glass). I really don't intend to 'blame the user,' but I'd respect the 'user' at least a little bit more if the user would explore the software. The options are very clearly laid out, in the user's language (especially wherein a user can use said language to write such an in-depth rant!), and they are discoverable with even the most casual searching.

Touching the screen isn't going to get your fingers sawed off or anything. It's there to be touched, and destructive actions are insulated from touch. A little exploration goes more than a long way.

pooriaazimi3• 14 years ago

Guy activated kanji in preferences, but doesn't like it. I don't know who else should be blamed! The iPhone comes with only your local keyboard layouts.

Do you expect apple to display a pop up every time you change the language saying "did you know you can disable unwanted keyboard layouts?"

tsahyt2• 14 years ago

"Isn't the purpose is that there isn't anything to get?"

I know what you're trying to say, but you're entering a very dangerous area here. There is no useful system, anywhere, that doesn't require some amount of understanding. Even intuition doesn't come out of nowhere. Our intuition is only based on what we've learned so far. That is why we click on things that look like buttons and that is why, when facing a steak, we intuitively "know" it's edible. In both cases the outcome may not be as expected, but that's a different story.

My point is, that a system which requires no prior knowledge whatsoever and no understanding is essentially useless, because it literally couldn't do anything, for it would just be a void. I'm getting philosophical here, I know. Even the simplest of systems require a user to grok its basics to become useful.

myko• 14 years ago

In the past I've run into iTunes doing a backup and everything seems fine, but when I go to restore my device it turns out the backup is actually empty. This happened to me after the iOS 5 upgrade actually. Maybe the author ran into this situation?

konradb• 14 years ago

When my wife's iphone recently stopped paying attention to the headphone remote, we had a bit of a schizophrenic experience. We made an appointment at the genius bar and the instructions told us to back up the phone.

So when we went in, they very quickly diagnosed the problem and handed over a replacement phone, which was a huge cut above what you would typically be used to in customer service. However, when I restored it from backups, I find that the music (from itunes match) and the apps were all gone.

Now I realise that technically the backup must mean the app data, and the settings etc. So it was a bit of a relief as when we redownloaded the apps nothing appeared to be lost. And there is perhaps a very good reason why a backup wouldn't include the apps you had, their arrangement, and the music you had downloaded etc. But there's got to be a better reason to actually do it, or cater for that situation in a better way.

The whole process felt like it had fallen down. The semantics of 'backup' was changed. If I backup something, and then I restore it, I would expect it to be the same as when I had originally backed it up. Instead she had to go through all the apps, and the music etc that she wanted and redownload them. First world problem agreed, but a waste of time and a flaw where I was expecting something to work.

roc• 14 years ago

Whenever I've restored from a backup, it's included all the device music, playlists, contacts, all apps, all app data, icon positions, etc. Basically everything, just the way I left it.

This has even held when restoring an old backup to a new phone the one time I upgraded and the one time I got a replacement device due a defect.

This has also been my experience with my iPads. The only time I had a problem with restore, was with my out-of-the-box 'new iPad' not restoring properly, which turned out to be due a failure of the unit. When that was replaced at the Apple store, the new device restored from the old backup flawlessly. Apps, music, movies, layouts - everything.

This is why I can't imagine what was going though the author's mind during the whole digression about his trouble with "Other" space in the article. Backing up is the default. Restoring is a straightforward process clearly marked and almost-uncomfortably up-front and accessible.

So why didn't he even try that before declaring all his wasted time Apple's fault?

A normal user would try the wipe-and-restore. Clearly, I'm not saying backup/restore never fails. But unless the author had it fail, it makes no logical sense to use his experience in paranoia as a 'point' about usability.

eckyptang13• 14 years ago

I'd agree. This is the sort of stuff that lead to me dumping my MacBook in 2009.

I found that most of OS X worked pretty well and the UI looked good, but when it came down to actually being consistent and productive, it fell over pretty quickly. There were a lot of nuances and rather basic problems which got in the way of literally everything I did from my iPod not playing certain mp3s (very frustrating!) to import and export problems in iWork, automator deadlocking, iCal losing data, Mail sending emtpy messages.

I had some hardware problems as well (not charging and cable fraying after about a month) and while they dealt with them instantly, they shouldn't have occured.

Not a great experience. I've switched to Lenovo and Windows and everything pretty much just works.

tsahyt2• 14 years ago

I'll risk a downvote for a non-constructive comment now, but I have to say this.

"switched to [..] Windows and everything pretty much just works". That sentence pretty much just beat OSX with its own slogan!

w1ntermute7• 14 years ago

Windows 7 really does just work. I don't know why more web developers don't try it when files are usually stored/executed on a remote Linux server anyway. The Lenovo X1 Carbon is a great example of a solid device.

bunderbunder• 14 years ago

At a mini-conference I attended recently, I noticed that practically every speaker with a Mac was having a hard time getting their computer to play nice with the projector. The PC users were not having this problem.

I'm still quite happily using both, but OS X has been spiraling downward and Windows has been spiraling upward for a while now. I wonder if I might find myself thinking back on that conference as the moment when I realized that one overtook the other.

taligent5• 14 years ago

Sorry but what does OSX have to do with your iPod not playing MP3s ?

And I don't really understand why you think your anecdote is relevant considering you switched 3 years ago to Windows Vista. Which lets be honest was universally recognised as not being Window's finest release.

eckyptang13• 14 years ago

Because it and iTunes do not handle id3 tags correctly and consistently.

I switched to windows 7.

lmm3• 14 years ago

I don't understand the hate for windows vista. I used it happily for years; XP didn't work on my motherboard. It was basically windows 2000 with a stupid skin on top, but so was XP.

kyrra• 14 years ago

Apple should stop making their own productivity software as it is pretty poorly done. Mail is OK, but I would not recommend anyone to use it. I works is probably some of Apple's weakest software. They should really just retire the suite.

arrrg4• 14 years ago

I love iWork! Keynote is a masterpiece!

freyr6• 14 years ago

The three components to "I works" (or iWork, as it's more commonly known) are now sold individually through the App Store. And they vary in quality from poor to excellent.

Keynote is probably the best presentation software available on any platform, in my experience.

Pages is the word processor and page layout tool. It's just OK for light word processing but pretty good at page layout.

I haven't used Numbers much, but apparently it doesn't provide the advanced functionality offered by Excel. But I certainly prefer it to the Google's web-based spreadsheet tool.

flatline34• 14 years ago

I have no idea what is wrong with Mail or why you wouldn't recommend someone use it.

Mail was Steve Jobs' baby ever since NeXT, and it was built to be used (and useful) internally at NeXT/Apple. It's the best mail client I've ever used, in a sea of extremely poor mail clients.

ghshephard3• 14 years ago

I've read the article front to back twice. Carefully - and I'm still not 100% certain whether it's a troll, or for real.

The interesting thing is, many of this persons problems come from Apple trying to support multiple platforms, instead of locking the person into a single unified environment.

Others (like iPhoto starting to suck after 10,000 pictures) were an issue in the first couple releases - but it's not uncommon for people to have north of 100,000 photos, and get reasonable performance in recent releases.

The difficulty hitting the search magnifying glass was interesting - I wasn't even aware that magnifying glass existed. You normally just scroll to the top - now I can do it faster. But - it makes sense - what's just one above the letter "A" - the search icon.

All in all - I'm believing it's an article whose genesis was a user who got hit by an edgecase/bug on their iPhone, and then turned it into a generic rant about all things Apple.

But the problems this person are having do seem to make it clear to me why, if anything, the OS X platform / iPhone are too flexible. There are lots (lots!) of users out there who would trade some of that flexibility for more predictable performance/ease of use.

And thus, Sandboxing.

fauigerzigerk2• 14 years ago

So do you really think that Mac Mail, Calendar and Adress Book are good tools for poeple who have a lot of mails, appointments and contacts?

I'm not so much complaining about Apple's software as I am quietly accepting of the fact that Apple makes pretty consumer gadgets not tools for professionals.

Actually, I think it's a good thing that Apple's software is unsuitable for intensive use. It leaves space for actual software developers (us) to provide that.

taligent5• 14 years ago

I have 120,000 messages in Mail with 5 accounts going back about 6 years and about 20+ smart mailboxes.

Mail was one part of OSX I never actually had any problems with.

ghshephard3• 14 years ago

Those tools fall down when you connect them to external services - particularly exchange. Mail.App, in particular, was flawed in how it read from exchange servers from 10.7 through 10.7.3 - It's gotten somewhat better in 10.7.4, and I hear most of my remaining bugs have been resolved in ML. Calendar and Address book are fine as standalone tools, but never really (and still don't) cut it as "Enterprise workflow" tools. Microsoft Exchange + Outlook own the calendar work in the enterprise.

The point I was really trying to make was that Apple's recent failings have been their attempt to work with others - they don't understand how to design/deploy/develop internet services. And they don't play (very) well with others.

They succeed best when you stick to their walled garden, with perhaps the one exception that proves the rule being their web browser - which is pretty spiffy on both the mobile and OS X platform.

moystard2• 14 years ago

I don't know which one I hate the most between Calendar and Mail.

Calendar~ I use it with an Exchange server and often accept appointments or meeting, but if I restart the application, it seems to forget about it and the event is marked as new. Problem: If I reply to the invitation once again, the creator of the event will receive another email, bad bad bad... I also hate when Calendar complains 10 times in a row that it cannot connect to the platform when I am actually offline, extremely frustrating to have to deal with all these modal dialogs.

Mail~ Not mentioning the poor user experience, the modal dialogs complaint apply as well, mails are not often sent, HTML signature is a pain to setup, often becomes unresponsive, or simply crashes.

All this to say that for a development environment, OSX is my OS of choice, but it is about emails, contacts, meetings and so on, the embedded applications are not good at best.

I had a laugh yesterday when the MacWorld editor said about Apple that they were not only doing good OSes, but excellent applications as well during the TechCrunch talk about the iPhone 5. In my experience, I have always found Apple applications average at best, even on the iPhone.

Derbasti5• 14 years ago

My iPhoto Library grew rapidly over the years. As in: it doubled its size, even though I did not add many photos. Thus, after a few years, I ended up with an iPhoto Library of 60 gigs that contained 30 gigs worth of photos.

And apparently, I am not the only one with this problem. And there seems to be no way to fix this. At all.

Luckily, at some point I found some 3rd party software that can rebuild an iPhoto library by basically simulating the user dragging all his images there manually and re-applying all the tags and stuff by hand. Honestly, what they are doing is quite an achievement in the face of an utterly defective piece of software.

Edit:

For the record, I used this tool to salvage my library: http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/

astrange• 14 years ago

If you run into something like that, look inside the bundle with OmniDiskSweeper and see what's using up space.

(For instance you might have switched your camera to RAW unintentionally, or told iPhoto to save pictures as 16-bit raw TIFF)

jpxxx4• 14 years ago

If you're feeling up for a safari (har), go to your iPhoto Library, right-click -> Show Package Contents, and check out the sizes of each folder inside of here.

(the terminal command 'du' or the freeware GrandPerspective.app works well)

Pay close attention to the "iPod Photo Cache". Any sync to an iOS device that requires a down-res means a huge volume of quasi-thumbnails get stuffed here, one set for each target resolution.

steve8918• 14 years ago

I think the reason why your photos are doubling is because I believe you are importing them into iPhoto and then back into the iPhone. You will get two copies of all your photos on your iPhone because they get imported into iPhoto and then back out. It's super annoying, so I shut iPhoto completely off.

droithomme• 14 years ago

When you double-click a photo in iPhoto to look at it full screen, it makes a copy of it on the chance that you intend to edit it. It stores that in a shadow directory called "Modified". Even if you don't edit it, the copy is retained.

Right click on iPhoto Library, Show Package Contents, look at size of Modified vs Originals folders to see if this is the cause behind your library doubling. If it is the case, please report back, I'd like to know as I also do not care for the implementation of this functionality.

If you crop and such your photos then you can't just delete the Modified ones without trouble.

nope07• 14 years ago

Pretty sure it's not a troll. He's pretty well known for his writings on search engines. It's a sign of the times when longtime Mac users are complaining. That's how bad things have gotten.

I've watched people struggle like he's describing. Too many upgrades. Too many authorizations. Too many restrictions. They are jumping through hoop after hoop just to do basic stuff. If they are young they probably don't know any better. But for anyone who has been around, this has gotten to be a joke.

If you have stuck with Apple over the long haul, then you remember what it was like before OSX. When OSX was first introduced you had to upgrade your Mac hardware just to run it or it would be dog slow. Then it got better over time as we all upgraded but it has gradually become more and more annoying. How many people are staring at a spinning beachball at this very moment? Trying to appeal to PC users, all the Mac vs PC nonsense. Then trying to lock down people's music and other files and make them "subscribers", like they are some sort of media licensing company. Apple is no longer an alternative to the typical computer hassles. They have become a primary source of them!

But only if you have been using Macs for many years can you see this. Noobs and fanboys are not going to notice. They will wait minutes for their Mac to boot and stare endlessly at the beachball and accept that this is "fast, start-of-the-art computing".

While noobs suffer through iPhoto staring at beachballs, I will boot in seconds and process my photos, running in a background process, in half the time, using a more traditional UNIX without the Cocoa cruft. No hassles.

ghshephard3• 14 years ago

I supported the Macintosh Labs at SFU from 1991-1993. Those systems booted off of floppies (which I handed out at the front desk) - and one of my jobs at Harbor Center was, on a weekly basis, running anti-virus off the boot floppies to clean them off.

I also supported the Macintosh Platform at Netscape (HUGE Macintosh house) from 1996-1998. A good portion of the time we ran into a tough problem on the Macs there (by then we had hard drives), our Mac Lead (which I was not) - had us do a "Fresh Install" of the operating system. That pretty much always resolved the problem, but seems kind of invasive nowadays.

I sometimes think we view Mac History through rose colored glasses.

I will agree with you - that damn beachball is annoying. Though, I am happy to say, that as of 10.7.4, it probably only spins for about 5-10 minutes of my day now in aggregate, as compared to the 20-30 minutes a day back in the 10.7.1 era.

gaius2• 14 years ago

On my old Atari ST, which I still use, the busy bee comes on the screen only when the machine is doing useful work for me, that I have explicitly asked it to do. If it's not busy, the machine is always responsive. On OSX, the beach ball appears at random seemingly, when doing something as trivial as scrolling a document (or web page), or clicking on the menubar at the top of the screen! And the machine is useless until it finishes whatever it's doing.

The ST has 1 8Mhz processor and 1M RAM and a floppy drive. The Mac has 4x3Ghz cores and 8G of RAM, HD not SSD like that's an excuse. And remember we are talking about simple GUI updating tasks here. There is simply no getting around that the interactive parts of OSX are appallingly badly written. Processing a mouse click and drawing a menu, for crying out loud!

freyr6• 14 years ago

You've got to be kidding me. He may be the world's leading expert in search engines (I doubt it), but this post is ridiculous.

My favorite part is when he receives simple, straightforward advice from Apple on how to fix his iPhone issue, but he chooses to ignore it. Instead he scours the web for alternatives, and spots one suggestion that is applicable to jailbroken phones.

"Are you frickin’ kidding me? I have to jailbreak my phone to fix this problem?"

Uh, or you could just try any one of the four easy solutions you've been offered so far.

But that would make way too much sense, so he continues his search. He ends up at iphonefaq.org, a site that "looked pretty official." Are you freaking kidding me?

Finally, after hours of searching, he arrives at this gem:

"The only option that was relatively straightforward and seemed to work, according to many forums, was to restore the phone."

As in, the original solution provided by Apple's tech support. Apparently it's Apple's fault that he can't follow directions or readily accept simple solutions. I can't go on, I'm getting dumber just reading this.

kokey2• 14 years ago

I do share his frustration with the contact list on the iPhone. I also have over 1000 contacts, which built up over the years of painstakingly migrating them between models of Nokia phones, often having to write scripts to do it with. Then I got a Macbook and it paired with my Nokia phone so easily and painlessly I was really impressed, and when I got an iPhone my contacts magically ended up on it and I was impressed even further.

However, with this number of contacts, finding one is quite difficult. Apart from the alphabetical sorting by surname, scrolling to the top is impractical, or even through one letter of the alphabet. So, I have to rely on the search, and the button is hard to get to.

A similar problem happens when you want to phone someone you've been messaging. If the message history is long, it's a long scroll to get to the top of it to get to the contacts options.

Game_Ender• 14 years ago

Tapping the bar which displays the time and battery life at the top of the screen will quickly scroll you top of most content on the iPhone, Contacts App and Safari included.

justincormack• 14 years ago

Doesn't touching the top bat take you to the top any more? It used to but maybe the new notifications messed with it?

vikramls• 14 years ago

For contacts, I have been using a CardDAV server called Davical (OSS). This is supported on iOS and Macs since it implements the CardDAV standard. With 1000+ contacts, it is a more robust solution than scripts for every new phone.

On a similar vein, I also use CalDAV which does the same thing for calendars.

ttt_• 14 years ago

So you are saying that the right away to face the challenge of supporting multiple platforms is to outright not do it?

I can't respect a product/company whose future vision is less integration and not more.

I really dislike Apple as a brand, but I admit they bring a lot to the table and that means driving competing products to raise theirs standards, though if their answer to difficult problems is to throw in the towel, then their role may progressively decline in importance.

sohamsankaran2• 14 years ago

Several of the article's points really resonate, specifically the ones concerning iPhoto, the Internationalization 'feature' of iOS and iChat/iMessage. It does seem, to me, that Apple has begun to sacrifice usability at the altar of aesthetics, or worse, are unable to engineer stable and resilient applications.

se855• 14 years ago

I understand the authors experiences and how that may have tarnished his thoughts on Apple products.

Under normal operating conditions however which applies to the majority of iOS users out there, iOS is just as easy to use as it was when it first came out, it really hasn't changed that much from a UX point of view at all.

In regards to his gripes with OSX, well.... It is silly to expect any OS to be magical, even an Apple one. From a UX point of view it is better than every other OS, but from a package management point of view, Debian/Ubuntu is far superior to OSX and from a hardware support point of view, Windows beats both of them.

It seems the author wants the perfect OS, where problems never happen, unfortunately it doesn't exist yet, and it may never exist!

In the meantime, if you specifically want "ease of use", regardless of the authors troubles, your best bet for the meantime is the Apple ecosystem.

pooriaazimi3• 14 years ago

> Have you ever done a search in your iPhone contacts? You need the fingers of a poorly fed six-year-old to activate that search function. No, really, I must waste four or five minutes a day trying to make that damn thing work.

> Seriously, how can an adult finger ever touch that little search icon without either hitting the “A” or the “+”????

You're not supposed to touch the minuscule magnifying button; you're supposed to drag the content down to display the search button. This is standard in iOS (almost all system apps do this, and thanks to the "rubber banding" effect it must be pretty damn easy to discover.

But I think the fact that the OP hasn't discovered such a basic thing proves his point that maybe apple products aren't so easy to use anymore! (Though I personally disagree wholeheartedly. It's anecdotal so I don't get into that)

perfunctory• 14 years ago

I really wonder why don't we see any new PC platforms coming to the market. Where are all the startups taking on Microsoft and Apple?

And by new I don't mean Linux.

nihonjon• 14 years ago

I really hope Valve takes them on in some shape or form, even if it's their own flavor of Linux. Then Windows will be good for just Microsoft Office. And that's it. http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/07/steams-newell-windows-...

ajanuary2• 14 years ago

Much as I love Valve, Steams usability is pretty poor. I wouldn't trust them to make good OS X replacement any time soon.

hoi3• 14 years ago

Maybe they are but they can't get the distribution to hardware or ecosystem to develop apps for it. Most PCs are sold with the OS pre-installed. As for mobile... there is still hopes for plenty of competition. Jolla Mobile being one of the future hopes created out of the remnants of the Nokia Meego team.

cheald• 14 years ago

ChromeOS is one very conspicuous example. Android is also beginning to make inroads in hybrid computing use cases. Both of those are Linux kernels, though.

The more conclusive answer, though, is that writing OSes is hard. Just look at Linux - driver issues due to lack of hardware manufacturer support is practically expected. Any startup has to deal with a tremendous barrier to entry in hardware compatibility that neither Microsoft (for whose operating system practically all non-Mac hardware is made) or Apple (who actually produces the hardware that their software runs on), and experience makes it pretty clear that they aren't likely to get it right for a very long time.

Windows got the vast majority of its "buggy and crashy" reputation from crappy third-party device drivers, because as it turns out, doing compatibility for however many millions of hardware profiles is Really Freaking Hard. Apple sidestepped that issue by not even trying (ever try to build a Hackintosh?) and just limiting their target profiles to a known set, much like the console manufacturers. Anyone that wanted to challenge them would either need to be in the hardware business, or develop relationships with hardware vendors that would get them preferential treatment that Linux developers haven't been able to get for decades, and that's not going to happen without a truly obscene amount of capital.

Tichy• 14 years ago

"you’ll need to restore your iPhone to reclaim the space occupied by Other."

I can't get the picture out of my mind, of some mysterious entity creeping up on our iPhones like cancer. Soon they will all sync up with each other and then initiate the battle for world domination.

Come to think about it, the iPhones of the world might make for a pretty good attack vector for alien aggressors. A lot of earth's elite is bound to carry one around. If you can disable all of them at once, the rest of the battle might a walk in the garden.

richardw2• 14 years ago

I think it's a case of optimization. You can either build a handles-all-situations MS-Office, or you can optimize for an 80/20. When your feature set grows out of the 80/20 you run into issues.

For me, a perfect example is locking/unlocking the pivot on the iPhone by double-clicking the home button, sliding the bottom bar rightwards, clicking an icon with a turny-lock on it. That's total madness, but I understand how it got there. When I finally discovered that I mailed all my iPhone-owning friends, none who knew the trick.

Similarly, killing apps that remain in memory. Double-click home, hold down one of the icons until all the in-memory apps show a (-), then delete each of them. Granny will never get that. I'd personally like a settings page that just lets me set a default on/off for in-memory for each app so I don't have to keep cleaning up apps that want to use GPS and memory.

So, rather than having 10 buttons on your iPhone you now have one button and have to use morse-code to tell the thing what you want. Rather than an ugly screen menu, you have to use Google to figure out how to take a screenshot or un-lock the swivel.

When all you have is a home-button, everything looks like a nail. Or something.

I've made similar optimizations/(later possible "mistakes") myself. I tend to put a lot of effort into few features to do exactly what's required, but that always has to be balanced with possible future feature expectations. It's possible to paint myself into a corner with that, so I often think "is this app meant to be 'tight' like an Apple app, or should I optimize for extensibility?"

robryan• 14 years ago

I knew about the double click and clearing apps from memory, never thought to look off to the left of the list though. Good to know, thanks.

minikites• 14 years ago

Those aren't necessarily apps that remain in memory. The first few might be, but not if they haven't been used in a while. The rest of the entries are merely a list of recently used apps that are neither using processor time nor in memory.

http://speirs.org/blog/2012/1/2/misconceptions-about-ios-mul...

richardw2• 14 years ago

Point taken, but when I want to remove a GPS-using app because the GPS indicator is still on, I need to go there and kill it. Usually I do this for recently-used apps because I no longer need them. Granny wouldn't have a clue, even though she's now "stopped" the app. And I do try to make sure all apps know to not run in the background, but even that's extra admin.

zaptheimpaler• 14 years ago

Absolutely. Apple always has, and always will cater to extremely simplistic use cases. Apple products are a lot like a conspicuously clean room - dont look around too much and you'll be fine, but the second you open that bulging cupboard, all the shit piled in there comes crashing down on you.

I still think that Mac OS (not necessarily iOS) is much much more reliable and has a better UI than Windows, but this brings to light an important point. Apple's software tends to have a lot of nasty little edge cases that you run into (and not as a power user either). Its also unfair to marginalize the view point as a minority (for example, until recently, you couldn't even properly set up google calendar to work with multiple calendars on iOS. the issue about a 19 GB other is definitely not an uncommon occurrence either). Further, its not functionality being sacrificed for aesthetics. It's aesthetics being prioritized over functionality consistently leading to bugs which we have to put up with for years.

chalst2• 14 years ago

Case in point: my last purchase of Apple hardware was a Mac Mini in December 2010. Nice installation, I like Time Machine. Max OS X Server is obviously a broken product, but there is a BSD-like OS underneath so no problem.

Two weeks later internet connection dies. After spending huge amounts of time investigating all kinds of things that seem that they might be relevant, I use the Time Machine "revert OS to a previous state" option and it works again. I spend more time on support forums, &c, and find out more about how to diagnose problems with the wireless, in case it happens again, which it does, 2 weeks later. With this new-found knowledge, I figure out that the firewall is blocking DHCP lease renewal, a problem easily fixed with an ipfw command. Every two weeks since then, 30 or so times, I guess, the same thing happens, and I have to fix this. I have stopped trying to understand why my installation of OSX seems to think it should periodically block DHCP lease renewal.

It's my impression that, based on my experience trying to find help, that the Mac OS user world is different to that for Linux or Windows in that the people who get known as Mac OS experts generally don't have much in the way of detailed knowledge of what the OS does at initialise (despite Singh's out-of-date documentation of that in Max OSX Internals), how to query device state, &c, but instead have cookery book knowledge of things like tricks you can do with the defaults command.

And this seems to be the way that Apple likes it. They make a polished product that you are not meant to mess with in ways they did not anticipate, with the OS exposing a limited API.

taligent5• 14 years ago

> with the OS exposing a limited API.

Can you be more specific ?

OSX's problem for me is that it exposes too many APIs (FS/BSD/Carbon/Cocoa) which can overlap in odd scenarios e.g. accessing the AddressBook.

chalst2• 14 years ago

I only dabble with OSX internals so it is not much more than an impression, but when I try to dig deep, I find that not much of the internals is on display. And I should say, by "exposing", I really mean "documenting" - clearly there are people who do know the internals well, they are just not sharing their "how to" knowledge much.

For example, OSX has the library com.apple.iokit.IO80211Family which provides the interface to its wifi hardware. It is completely undocumented. By contrast, Linux has the internals completely exposed because we have the liberally documented source and lots of open developer mailing lists, while MSDN has literally thousands of pages with documentation and developer discussions about hacking and developing drivers to fit into and make use of the Windows 802.11 interface.

sgdesign• 14 years ago

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, Apple's products are the hardest to use, except for all the other product out there...

jpxxx4• 14 years ago

Much of this is dopey nonsense but he's correctly describing a few Real Problems.

-- iOS devices blowing their asset layout and 'Othering' out is a Real Problem that used to happen far too often. The only fix beyond a backup+restore is to remove and re-add photos and music. If that doesn't work? Time to restore up to 60GB over USB2! Whee. Good luck explaining this to mom.

-- The built in Mac applications and frameworks are frightfully poor - it's unacceptable from a company that prides itself on quality. SyncServices is still a flaming travesty, Mail.app spontaneously corrupts messages and passwords, Spotlight can die in twenty different ways, iCal is a UI disaster, Address Book has completely broken sync options... the list goes on and on and on. Of all of these, I think Mail is the absolute worst. Three total rewrites and it's still neurotic on a good day.

-- iPhoto is goddamn slow. No matter what, no matter where, no matter when.

iOS is an order of magnitude more usable for two orders of magnitude more people with an order of magnitude fewer issues and two orders of magnitude fewer things to go wrong that makes an order of magnitude more money for them. So I think that's where he Lion's share (haha) of Apple's QA is spent. Sadly, I fear OS X will never receive that same level of care.

pagejim• 14 years ago

Hi,

I am not an iPhone user, but if what you have described above are problems that a significant number of iPhone users face, then I am pretty surprised/disappointed.

All of these would be hampering user experience ( something Apple excels at ) irrespective of whether the user is a casual one or a heavy one.

Also, if these problems are easily reproducible and quite prevalent, isn't Apple solving these in upcoming upgrades? In other words, they must be getting some kind of feedback/bug-reports and these problems should surely have to be part of that.

jpxxx4• 14 years ago

Given its financial performance, I can only imagine that iOS's quality is priority #0, #1, and #2 through 10 at Apple. From an anecdotal perspective, it has all gotten a great deal better over the years.

entropy_• 14 years ago

Those are mostly problems with Mac OSX(except the storage issue on the iPhone).

cube13• 14 years ago

>I am not an iPhone user, but if what you have described above are problems that a significant number of iPhone users face, then I am pretty surprised/disappointed.

As noted by other posts, most of the issues are with OSX applications rather than with iOS.

To be honest, I think that the storage/backup issue is a legacy design issue with iOS. Unlike Android, iOS was never originally designed to be a standalone OS. Apple designed iOS to sync heavily with iTunes, which led to a lot of this "if you just restore from a backup, it'll magically be fixed" nonsense. Apple's started to move away from that, and more towards iOS being it's own thing with the OTA updates and by giving users a lot more control over storage usage through the device itself instead of iTunes, but they still haven't really broken away from it's necessity.

pbreit• 14 years ago

norswap• 14 years ago

More usable than what? If it's android, I beg to differ.

bad_user2• 14 years ago

He clearly was referring to OS X. Do we really need another flame on Android versus iOS?

ImprovedSilence2• 14 years ago

My HTC thunderbolt blows dick. I've had dumb phones that were more functional half the time...

batista• 14 years ago

>- The built in Mac applications and frameworks are frightfully poor - it's unacceptable from a company that prides itself on quality. SyncServices is still a flaming travesty, Mail.app spontaneously corrupts messages and passwords, Spotlight can die in twenty different ways, iCal is a UI disaster, Address Book has completely broken sync options... the list goes on and on and on. Of all of these, I think Mail is the absolute worst. Three total rewrites and it's still neurotic on a good day.

Most of it is anecdotal YMMV kind of problems.

I, for one, never had any problems with Mail.app, and I have 2 Gmail accounts synced to it, and a third party IMAP one -- around 40,000 messages in total.

I also use iCal and AddressBook with no problems. Some UI issues that could be better? Sure. Then again, everything else has similar problems in any platform.

jpxxx4• 14 years ago

shrug I do this for a living, and these glitches and problems are consistently putting food on my table.

ajanuary2• 14 years ago

The search actually has the largest touch area of all the letters, because it extends to the top of the pane.

There are a lot of ways to get there: * Tap the status bar, which takes you to the to of most scrollable areas. * Be conservative, if you accidentally hit A, scroll up. * Hold your finger down on the letters to activate scrubbing mode, then slide your finger to the top.

I'm not saying they're all perfect usability wise, but picking out search as a small touch target seems a little odd to me. But then I've probably spent a lot longer than most obsessing over every pixel and touch target of the UI.

To me it seems like a trade off. Is searching contacts important enough to have a big button for? Where would you put it without completely overhauling the iOS UI? Is it of more or equal importance than any of the current elements? Admittedly annecdotal, but I see far more people scrubbing to the first letter of the contact and flicking through the list, because typing takes time (though a 'hard to find/activate' search feature might contribute to that). It seems to me putting it where it is allows for a good cross-platform solution to an unobtrusive search function.

forgottenpaswrd• 14 years ago

This is like saying that my car is not easy to use as a bus for carrying 50 people. (In Africa you see cars with 15 people onboard).

If you have 10.000 photos and thousands of contacts you are not a normal user anymore, you are a pro and you need pro tools. I have tens of times more big photos in my computers, and huge videos but I don't use Iphoto, this would be so non sense, Iphoto would make a local copy of everything it touches, like iTunes.

Apple is selling this thing called iPads like hotcakes because the intended audience is normal people, people that can't use a pc, like my father, who are much much more than those that can.

Derbasti5• 14 years ago

I am still using OSX, and modestly enjoying it. But I feel the same way the author does. (Here is my list of complaints: http://bastibe.de/how-apple-is-failing-me.html )

Still, I find that OSX is a fine environment to run Unix software. Most of my computer interaction these days revolves around Emacs, a terminal and a web browser. Which is fine. It is a nice system. But really, I used to feel that OSX had a certain elegance to it that other OSes lacked. And that feeling is fading. Thus, I doubt that my next computer will come with an Apple logo. And incidentally, neither will my next smartphone or tablet.

Sad.

taligent5• 14 years ago

Sure. I thoroughly look forward to you trying out Ubuntu 12.04 and Windows 8 and seeing how they compare.

I think you will find that both are orders of magnitude worse than OSX. Why ? Because from a UI perspective both are complete rewrites and are reminiscent of 10.0 beta. Lot of potential but a lot of polish required as well.

Derbasti5• 14 years ago

I know and use both Ubuntu and Windows regularly. At the moment, OSX is still my operating system of choice mainly because the hardware is seriously great. The OS itself is becoming more and more awkward to me.

manaskarekar2• 14 years ago

Ubuntu is not the only option. Look into tons of other great distros including the excellent Lubuntu.

And I personally feel Windows 7 is a golden OS. Have to agree with you about Windows 8.

recoiledsnake• 14 years ago

The funny thing is for people switching from other platform, rewrites are not a big concern because they're learning everything from scratch and some of the new stuff actually makes sense. For people upgrading, things being switched and moved is extremely annoying, at least at first.

unabridged• 14 years ago

iOS has never been about easy to use, its been about hard to fuck up. I find it hard to believe that so many people who use windows but own an iphone/ipad are afraid of a filesystem. You show them a commercial where you plug an android phone/tablet in, then you are instantly dragging and dropping files just like a thumb drive without having to sync, then they are opening up an excel file using preinstalled open office (or for commericals airing on the internet maybe a video file being played using preinstalled vlc). Say the words "out of the box", no extra cost for these apps. If HTC and/or Samsung threw a hanful of programmers at porting open source apps to android and started this kind of advertising, iOS would be on the way out quickly.

rickmb• 14 years ago

Even though I'm a big Apple fanboy, I have to admit I avoid using Apple's desktop applications. The one exception is Mail.app, but even there I'm always eagerly looking for any possible alternative. iPhoto, Addressbook, iCal, none of those have ever appealed to me, and I've always use (mostly web-based) alternatives. And enough has already been said over the years over that piece of bloatware called iTunes.

So as far as I'm concerned, this isn't something new. IMO, with some rare exceptions, Apple has never been very good at application software.

npguy• 14 years ago

I think the issue is that user expectations have gone way up, and that results in disappointments that get amplified when coupled with frustrations.

angelortega• 14 years ago

That's another myth. Apple products had never been easy to use. iTunes is heavy and cumbersome and play lists never work as expected. Wheel iPods had erratic behaviour and its random/shuffling were crap.

And please don't start talking about XCode and development in general.

Things have worsen these times. "Acceptably understandable" is not the same as "easy".

nicholassmith2• 14 years ago

I've been a Mac user for nearly a decade (and now I feel old), which isn't as long as some people but a bit longer than others and if I'm honest I have to agree with many things.

OS X has been through a couple of really big leaps really, which whilst I think were necessary they've come at a great cost in terms of usability. I'm going to pick on one Apple application for a minute, XCode.

I used XCode on Tiger, on a very late model iBook and did my final year uni project on it and it was great. It was a genuinely good, solid and stable IDE, very easy to use and very easy to navigate and work with. Then incrementally it started acquiring new functionality that was needed, then the UI changes started coming in, then more functionality, then more UI and also in a cycle it kept amassing additional cruft. It's now a lot more difficult to use, a lot more overbearing.

This is kind of where the entire platform is starting to shift, Apple has been forced to jump the platform ahead but it's trying too many clever things and adding more and more functionality at the expense of usability. I still think it's one of the nicer operating systems and I'm not going to be switching anytime soon, but it's definitely not as gloriously user friendly as it used to be. In my opinion, different strokes for different folks after all.

wsc981• 14 years ago

Well, if you compare Xcode with Visual Studio or Eclipse, I'd say Xcode is a lot easier to use. The UI is a lot more streamlined, much less buttons for example. And I wonder if you've used Xcode back when it was called Project Builder. In my experience Project Builder also had a more complex UI than Xcode. But if you're looking for a good alternative to Xcode, perhaps AppCode is a nice replacement? http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/

nicholassmith2• 14 years ago

Oh it's definitely nicer than VS or Eclipse or NetBeans or the many other IDEs with crap design and poor layouts and even worse stability, but it's still gotten worse over the period of time I've been using it. I'll still use it as it's still significantly better than most IDEs, but I do hope they take some time to refine it again.

I missed Project Builder, it was just slightly before my time so I won't comment too much on that.

haldean• 14 years ago

My biggest issue with Xcode is stability. I shouldn't have to kill -9 my IDE a few times a day.

willholloway• 14 years ago

What Apple really gets right is it's hardware. The Macbook Air is in my opinion the best laptop on the market. The touch pad really shines. Apple gets the hardware support perfect.

That's where its greatness ends for me. OS X is just not as good for developers as Debian sid.

Debian wins for me hands down for three simple reasons:

1. Package management. With apt I can install any open source tool with one command, and update my entire system with another. Homebrew is a good effort, but just isn't nearly as good.

2. With Debian I can install any window manager I like without hack jobs. I like ratpoison because its simple and gets out of my way.

3. As a python hacker I like to develop on a system that is nearly identical to the server I deploy my code on. That is why I work in Debian.

I need OS X to run the hardware, but that is all. I do everything besides watch Netflix inside a virtualbox Debian sid install.

gregsq• 14 years ago

Whether the hardware is right depends on the usage. In my case I've found the hardware terribly inadequate for what I need to do. I have an early 2011 MacBook pro, and it has proved to be incredibly frustrating for me as a general purpose computing platform. The main issue is lack of inputs, removal of inputs, and a lack of options for inputs.

Having only two USB2 ports, removal of ExpressCard34 slots used for third party hard drive adapters on the 15", and a thunderbolt port largely unusable by the cost conscious makes shuffling things quite painful.

Some usage paths lead backwards. For example, video editors using a MacBook pro 15 who used the ExpressCard34 for sata drives lost that capability with the upgrade. You had two ways to go, either downgrade to FireWire 800, which was still available, and if the reduction in transfer speed was acceptable, or try and find a thunderbolt setup that was both cost effective and mature. Good luck on that! If you went the FireWire path, the next model from 2012 left you needing a thunderbolt adapter, as the FireWire port was dropped.

They are quite well built, but they certainly have shortcomings.

Hari_Seldon• 14 years ago

Apple products are as good and better than they have always been, the problem is that users now have this entitled attitude and nothing is good enough for them. Witness the tech press' reaction to the iPhone 5, they're bored because it doesn't look new, irrespective of it's actual merits. it's very tedious and a shame to see this attitude here on HN, where the discussion threads were usually more considered and the level of debate generally higher.

bede• 14 years ago

Does anyone else feel that OS X has gone downhill since Snow Leopard?

I can sympathise with much if not all of what this guy is saying. My Aunt recently bought a new Mac, not really knowing how to use OS X. I'm pretty familiar with most versions of OS X, but found myself struggling to justify to her the usefulness of quite a lot of the UI mechanics of the OS. What annoyed me the most was that the parts of the OS she found most confusing seemed almost universally to have been introduced since 10.6.

The 10.7+ habit of remembering open windows seemed to flummox my Aunt and continues to irritate me on a daily basis. "But I closed that window, why has it come back?"

Take Mission Control. Exposé was incredibly simple conceptually and worked very well for most people. I don't hate Mission Control, but explaining its workings to my Aunt was somewhat difficult, and I'm still not convinced that it's better than Exposé.

I feel like a lot of the simplicity that originally attracted me to OS X has been convoluted recently. And don't get me started on stability, performance and skeuomorphism...

city41• 14 years ago

I agree, Snow Leopard was my favorite. I'd like to go back to it but I have a retina display, so Lion and up it is for me.

As for remembering open windows, which is indeed very annoying, you can turn it off at System Preferences > General > Close windows when quitting an application

jvm• 14 years ago

The day I went back to Snow Leopard I realized that the only thing I miss from [Mountain] Lion is the non-ugly scrollbars. Everything else was just better.

corporalagumbo• 14 years ago

Well said. I completely agree. They just keep hammering stuff into the same old WIMP interface and making it more and more contorted. Microsoft has the right idea I think with Windows 8. Apple no longer seems to know what to do with usability.

randv• 14 years ago

finding the search on contacts has never been easy on iphone!

headShrinker• 14 years ago

Intuitive design is a myth. This idea that a company could build something that is just simply better for everyone is a fallacy.

Apple products, considering their competition, are really good and believe it or not, cost effective.

However, some people do things that certain systems don't like. This isn't the users fault. They were not considered in the design of the software. Over 1,000 contacts; sorry. iWork and want to export your workflow to other suite; sorry. Music collection and you want to tag and organize in a way that iTunes wasn't designed to do; sorry.

I have been professionally troubleshooting Mac and PC computers for 13 years, and I have seen it all. One of my clients had 10,000 messages... in his inbox. Mac Mail would launch and freeze. Beach ball.

This idea that you don't have to do maintenance to a computer was started by Apple, and it's a fallacy too.

Apple has done a better job of assembling a set of well rounded tools for the average man, go out side of average and you are on your own. But then you are were you would be on any other platform. iPhoto not doing it anymore? Picasa. iTunes not doing it? Winamp or Songbird for mac. Mac Mail not doing it? thunderbird. Safari? Chrome.

I used to have an iPod 60GB and it would about every 4 month get harddrive corruption, then I would have wipe and transfer 60GB via USB. It would take hours. I haven't corrupted my iPhone yet.

I don't rock the boat, I try to stay average. I don't change default settings unless its to turn off face recognition or auto-copy. That being said, I have GBs of email going back 6 years (another 6y archived), a 12,000 song 70GB library, and 60GB Aperture library. While I have had my problems, I have never had catastrophic loss, and it works.

I am at a loss with all of this ragging. I know there are problem with programs, but that is the essence of programs, no one size fits all.

smoyer2• 14 years ago

One of the comments says "I have been developing my own theory that Apple products are the technological equivalent to junk food, psychologically fattening an already physically obese populace."

If you have a completely bullet-proof OS and your applications are solid, locking down the system should ultimately make it easier for the user. As soon as there are even minor flaws, locking the system down is going to keep the user from helping themselves.

I don't think this phenomena only applies to Apple products, there are similar issues with Android phones and even those of us creating web applications can create systems that frustrate our users. If you're putting a wall between a user and their data/assets, you could be next.

PaulHoule2• 14 years ago

I've slowly fallen out of love with MacOS X. The final straw was when I installed Mountain Lion and a number of highly annoying things started to happen. (For instance, on reboot it would try to restart the game which switched the video mode to something my HDTV won't read)

Since then I've been booting it into Windows 7, and honestly I think Windows 7 has a better GUI than Mac OS. I'll grant that bash is better than CMD.EXE. In terms of bulls--t per mile on the desktop, I think Windows today does better than anything else, and it gets much better with Win8.

There's really a pervasive attitude in Mac software that I don't like. When I first used iMovie it took me a long time to figure out how to turn off the "Ken Burns Effect", which automatically applies zooms and pans to photos you add to a video. I'll grant it's a nice feature to have, but I feel that my creativity is disrespected when the default is turn on all the gimmicks.

manaskarekar2• 14 years ago

I'm probably being a simpleton here, but are you aware of cygwin? It's not the same as a terminal, but it's really useful.

http://www.cygwin.com/

falcolas• 14 years ago

I would also recommend learning PowerShell. Your knowledge of bash will not help you through it, but it's easily as powerful as bash, and native to the Windows environment.

mmagin• 14 years ago

Personally, I find Cygwin to be a horrible substitute for a real Unix, in large part because so many emulated Unix operations like fork() are horribly slow. Sometime try running a "configure" script, and see how much slower it runs than on Linux or Mac OS X on similar hardware.

PaulHoule2• 14 years ago

I love cygwin even though, as another guy points out, is has many little deficiencies that may or may not give you trouble.

Recently I wanted to hitch three Windows machines in my house together to make a Hadoop cluster, and I first tried to do it with Cygwin. I ran into a lot of trouble so I just used Virtualbox to run Linux on the machines; I take a performance hit, but it works pretty well.

unconed• 14 years ago

I just can't stand some of the crappy 90s-era UI decisions that Windows still has. Like how the mouse wheel scrolls the currently focused control rather than where you're pointing. Or the stupid Ok/Cancel/Apply everywhere rather than decisions just applying instantly and being reversible. Or the complete lack of consistent keyboard shortcuts.

The other day I was using a Samsung laptop to test something out. It also had "multi-touch"... only I would constantly activate the rotation gesture by accident while scrolling, and the trackpad surface was so abysmal my finger kept sticking as I moved around.

People may bitch and whine, but Apple still gets the basics right while at least trying to evolve the desktop.

tacogordito• 14 years ago

I was really disappointed when Apple started making their IPod's into touch screens. When I'm going for a run or walking around with my ipod in my pocket, theres nothing i despise more than pulling out my ipod, having to tap the specific spots of the screen 3 times just so i can skip to the next song. The click wheel used to be very easy to use. I could skip songs without taking it out of my pocket.

padobson2• 14 years ago

Recent Story:

My 8 year old has an iPad that was setup by her and her grandmother. She recently had it replaced at the Apple Store because of a busted WIFI antenna.

A few days ago, she wanted to buy the 2.99 version of Draw Something. I happened to have a iTunes gift card worth 15 dollars. I opened her iTunes account on the iPad, punched in the gift card code, and the money was added to her account without ceremony.

So she goes to buy Draw Something,and 15 minutes later I hear "It's not working." I figure she must have broken something, so I take the iPad from her and click the 2.99 Draw Something button to download the app.

This is where the fun begins.

The App store asks for the username and password. We entered both. Then it tells us that the iTunes account has not been activated on the iPad, so we need to answer two security questions - I look at my daughter and my wife and only get blank expressions. I call my mother-in-law and she doesn't know either. So the next step is to reset the password by sending an email to a failsafe account - some AOL email address that nobody can access either.

Normally, at this point, I would just say we screwed up and start a new iTunes account - but why in the hell did they let us put the 15 dollar gift card on the account if they weren't going to let us do anything until the account was activated?

Epic fail.

driverdan3• 14 years ago

So let me get this straight. You lost your account password, your email password, and your security questions and somehow Apple is at fault for making it easy to add gift cards to your account?

nchlswu• 14 years ago

To be fair to the parent, this was setup by the daughter and the grandmother. In Apple's current world, a case like this is hardly farfetched. I don't think this a weird edge case that I Apple overlooks or one you can blame on the user since it's one of Apple's key markets

padobson2• 14 years ago

That is not straight. We had the correct username and password. We lost the security questions.

It asked us for neither when we wanted to redeem gift cards, and then wanted answers to the security questions after we had already given it the correct username and password before we could purchase anything using the gift card money.

If it's going to inconvenience me to spend the gift card money, then it should do it before I redeem the card so that the card money isn't trapped within the account if the account is currently inaccessible.

--edit

Accounts are pretty broken on iOS in general. I once logged into my appleID using my Dad's iPhone to download an app for him because he hadn't setup his own appleID yet. Later, he setup his appleID. The problem was, whenever he went to update his apps, it would ask for my appleID password when it wanted to update the app that I installed - only it didn't mention anywhere why it was asking for the password to my appleID. My account credentials did not appear anywhere else on the phone. We checked the settings, looked up things online, and even asked support. No idea why it was asking for my password. Eventually we traced the problem back to the update feature, and deleted a bunch of apps we thought I may have installed. It solved the problem and it doesn't prompt for my password anymore, but there was no way for us to know which app was causing the problem.

inthewoods• 14 years ago

I find iOS and the iPhone/iPad/iTunes interaction particularly frustrating - a case where it really should just work.

Some of my issues: - Restoring from a backup does not, for some reason, does not consistently restore the folder structure - thus I spend an hour or two recreating the structure. Waste of time. - iCloud syncs a lot of things - but for some reason does not allow me to sync apps. There should be an easy way to do this such that if I buy an app on my iPhone (and it is compatible with my iPad) it should be synced. - Moving purchased music from one phone to another. Maybe somebody can enlighten me, but moving my iTunes purchased music from one device to another, as far as can tell, is still a stupid, manual process. - In general, iTunes should be in the cloud - when I buy a new device, I should be able to enter my account information and then have it automatically pull down all my stuff - and offer me choices for what I want to pull. To me this seems so basic.

This is stuff that is all generated by the way my wife interacts with these technologies - and she gets very frustrated by the hoops that have to be jumped through to make it all work.

Next week, I'm likely buying my wife an iPhone 4S (AT&T or Verizon - suggestions from anyone in the Boston area?) I'm not looking forward to getting her setup - I anticipate pain.

dr_• 14 years ago

Just as a note to anyone with the same problem, I had difficulty renting a movie recently on my iPad because I was told I have no storage space available. This was unusual because I have hardly any photos on my iPad and almost no music. I later realized that movies that you rent, even after they expire, remain on your device and take up storage until you actually delete them.

costacoast• 14 years ago

I think he may be a bit more alarmist than I can agree with but I will definitely attest to the fact that Apple is having some serious UX growing pains as they try to accomodate the largest and most international user base they have had to date.

Possibly the best one-liner comes from one of the comments: "I have been developing my own theory that Apple products are the technological equivalent to junk food, psychologically fattening an already physically obese populace. Like the Sun newspaper their products are encouraging us to be lazy and dumb down our intellectual capacities."

dev1n• 14 years ago

"This stuff is too complicated. There has to be a better way."

and to the comment on the blog saying how Apple is our "junk food."

Raspberry Pi might be the solution. It's literally a blank slate. Users, with some tech knowledge, have the ability to update and move stuff around without being dragged into an iCloud sort of mess. It's as clear as it gets IMO.

pnathan• 14 years ago

I don't have his problems. I have other problems, not as bad (I've started to wonder about that Other space on the iPhone too...). I think this could be all summed up as: Desktop OS's ain't tablet OSs.

I don't like OSX Mountain Lion. I anticipate that 10.9 will be extra smartphoney, and I won't be upgrading. I will, however, be looking at well-designed Linux laptop solutions for my XFCE/Enlightenment needs.

lubujackson2• 14 years ago

It's amazing to me the level of cognitive dissonance many Apple fans have. Like the script of how easy and simple to use everything is can be so unrelated to their actual experience. If you've ever gone to the "Genius Bar" for any reason, you've wasted more time with customer service than I have in the last 10 years of using PCs. The problem is, when you have an issue of any size with Apple, there is just no way to resolve it yourself without nuking your system. I'm sure there are 1000 reasons why I'm supposedly wrong or trolling or whatever, but that's MY experience with Apple, minus what Apple would have me believe.

mitchty• 14 years ago

The only time i've gone to a genius bar was to show them the dead pixels on a macbook pro. Got a new one right then too.

Personal anecdotes are not data.

lubujackson2• 14 years ago

Sure they are. What would constitute data if not actual use cases? I'm not defending Windows or Linux as great alternatives, but at least "wipe and restore" is not the default answer to minor problems.

enraged_camel• 14 years ago

I was visiting home over summer, and my 85 year-old grandmother got a chance to use my iPad. I basically handed the device to her, went to the restroom, came back, and found her editing some photos of my sister she had just taken. She described the red-eye reduction feature as "magic."

Seriously, if my 85 year-old grandma can figure this stuff out, then the author is an outlier. Apple devices are ridiculously easy to use.

edit: gotta love it when people downvote without giving a reason. Must have hit a soft spot.

danudey3• 14 years ago

I was tired of my mother always calling me for help with her laptop, so I bought her an iPad with 3G for Christmas. After two phone calls to get her into the swing of things, she's never called me for tech support again. She updates it when it tells her to, she uses it to navigate when she goes into town with her neighbour, she uses it to place orders for supplies when someone comes into her store to make a custom order. It's pretty great, all in all, and she's never once called me for help in two years.

Joeri• 14 years ago

From what I've noticed there are many apple issues experienced by a smallish set of users, which in aggregate affect many people, but not all with the same issues.

For me the list is: (1) early deterioration of plastic in macbook, (2) wifi connectivity issues on leopard, (3) wifi connectivity issues on snow leopard, (4) unexplained time machine failures, (5) major performance issues on lion. And that's just for my macs. My ipad suffered from unexplained app crashes every ten minutes, which were due to memory shortage problems that i could only solve by disabling mail sync (i use purely gmail in the browser now).

On the other side, with windows and android, i've had roughly the same amount of problems. In my experience, apple's stuff breaks as often, but has a different "feel".

shinratdr2• 14 years ago

> Seriously, how can an adult finger ever touch that little search icon without either hitting the “A” or the “+”????

Why exactly do I have a hard time believing someone this stupid would be as diligent as he claims to be in attempting to solve his issues?

I'm supposed to simultaneously believe that he is competent enough to understand and solve a corruption issue, yet he can't figure out the single most discoverable gesture on any phone, "swipe down"?

$20 says he restored his iPhone from the corrupted backup and then rushed off to write an article on the experience instead of performing the due diligence he claims he already has.

Bullshit. Nobody has this kind of laundry list of whining complaints unless their actual motivation to solve problems is almost zero. He sounds like one of those people that put all Apple products on this ridiculous pedestal where they are shit if they cause you any frustration or confusion ever.

Sorry, it's not magic. It's just a really nice computer. Expect some problems and issues, and expect to spend some time troubleshooting them. Just like any other machine on the planet.

If your first thought when seeing a 4x4 icon on a high res 3.5 inch touchscreen is "Stupid Apple, how am I supposed to hit that!?" then you are looking for things to complain about instead of actively trying to improve your experience with the phone by, oh I don't know... learning things?

Apple products are getting more complex and the older classics are getting bloated. There is an interesting discussion to be had on the topic. This isn't it. This couldn't be further from it. This article is basically just idiotic whining.

Am I An Outlier, Or Are Apple Products No Longer Easy To Use?

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