
Am I An Outlier, Or Are Apple Products No Longer Easy To Use? - rkudeshi
http://battellemedia.com/archives/2012/09/am-i-an-outlier-or-are-apple-products-no-longer-easy-to-use.php
======
jpxxx
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
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.

~~~
jpxxx
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.

------
eckyptang
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.

~~~
kyrra
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.

~~~
freyr
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.

~~~
goatforce5
Keynote was originally designed for Jobs, and so i'd guess it got a
disproportionate amount of attention from him:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynote_(presentation_software)...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynote_\(presentation_software\)#History)

And, FWIW, I only occasionally need a spreadsheet at home and Numbers works
perfectly for my limited requirements.

~~~
freyr
I actually agree, I don't use Numbers often, but it does whatever I need for
basic at-home use without a hitch.

In Numbers' case, I was going by claims I've heard from Excel power users, who
say it lacks Excel's advanced functionality. I edited my original post to
reflect this.

------
ghshephard
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.

~~~
Derbasti
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/>

~~~
droithomme
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.

~~~
kaffeinecoma
Are you serious? I double click pretty much every photo I find interesting in
my collection. Is that not the natural way to view a photo full-size? Editing
requires you to click "edit". Why would they needlessly allow this to bloat if
no edits are made?

I currently have:

    
    
        1.2G Previews
        7.8G Masters
    

(BTW in my version at least, Modified/Originals are symlinks to
Previews/Masters.)

~~~
myspy
Same here, as far as I understand it, when you rotate a pic, or make some
other changes, it creates a new version.

------
zaptheimpaler
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.

------
PaulHoule
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.

~~~
manaskarekar
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
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.

~~~
rbanffy
The problem with PowerShell is that it's a Windows thing. Whatever you learn
will only be useful on Windows and everything you develop with it will tie you
further to the platform (and make it harder for you to move on once something
better for you appears)

Seriously, it's much smarter to just install Cygwin and forget about Windows-
only solutions. You are probably going to deploy whatever you develop on Unix-
like servers anyway...

------
DHowett
"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.)

~~~
hoi
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.

~~~
pooriaazimi
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?"

~~~
tijs
He actually needs to switch to Kanji several times a day as he says clearly "I
must turn my texts and emails into Kanji ten times a day." The gripe is with
the layout of the Kanji keyboard which, looking at that screenshot, is indeed
pretty ridiculous.

~~~
ryannielsen
First, he had to very explicitly enable that keyboard (not easily done by
accident, considering it's about 7 taps deep in Settings). After enabling, it
is rather simple to activate that keyboard – hitting the globe icon on the
keyboard will cycle through all enabled keyboards.

Second, the keyboard isn't ridiculous. It's actually quite powerful. He took a
screenshot of the Chinese – Simplified (Handwriting) keyboard, which allows
users to draw characters in the blank area. I hear it's an incredibly popular
input method in China. Of course, the iPhone offers 6 other Chinese input
methods, ranging from traditional keyboards to the drawing methods.

~~~
lmm
I thought apple was all about picking the best method for you rather than
having you make decisions.

~~~
jopt
And you think that principle applies well to... keyboard layouts?

~~~
lmm
Within a single language, yes. Obviously you want a different method for
Chinese than for English, but I don't want to choose between six different
ways of inputting Chinese.

~~~
ryannielsen
Check out the input method list on whatever OSs you use, and I expect you'll
see multiple Chinese input methods. OS X 10.8 has 10, Windows 7 has dozens, a
quick Google search shows that Ubuntu 12 around 13.

It turns out that, with over a billion people and dozens of dialects, many
different writing styles, and a long history of different electronic input
methods, Chinese speakers really do need multiple different ways of inputing
Chinese.

------
bede
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
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

------
chalst
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.

~~~
taligent
> 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.

~~~
chalst
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.

------
vosper
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.

------
richardw
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?"

~~~
minikites
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...](http://speirs.org/blog/2012/1/2/misconceptions-about-ios-
multitasking.html)

~~~
richardw
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.

------
nicholassmith
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
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/>

~~~
nicholassmith
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.

------
lubujackson
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
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.

~~~
lubujackson
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.

------
sohamsankaran
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.

------
pooriaazimi
> _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)

------
Derbasti
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.

~~~
taligent
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.

~~~
Derbasti
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.

------
smoyer
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.

------
angelortega
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".

------
padobson
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.

~~~
driverdan
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?

~~~
padobson
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.

~~~
driverdan
Ok, that makes more sense. From reading your original post I thought all the
login info had been lost.

I agree that their account system is poor and it isn't clear when you need to
authenticate.

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

How is this __ever__ acceptable?

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

~~~
pooriaazimi
Every time you plug your iThing to your Mac/Windows it backs it up. And as of
iOS 5 you don't even have to plug it in. They only have to be on the same
network and the device automatically backs it up daily.

Oh, and if you feel nervous, you can right click on the iThing in iTunes and
select backup to manually backup again.

------
se85
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.

------
rickmb
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.

------
inthewoods
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.

------
ajanuary
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.

------
perfunctory
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
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-...](http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/07/steams-newell-
windows-8-catastrophe-driving-valve-to-embrace-linux/)

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

------
shinratdr
> 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 “+”????

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.

------
willholloway
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
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.

------
Joeri
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".

------
unabridged
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.

------
forgottenpaswrd
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.

------
costacoast
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."

------
Tichy
"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.

------
enraged_camel
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.

~~~
danudey
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.

------
Hari_Seldon
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.

------
tacogordito
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.

------
pnathan
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.

------
dr_
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.

------
dev1n
"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.

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

------
headShrinker
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.

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

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

