I agree some things here aren't backed up, and there are half-truths. The guy says he's going to list bugs, then he really doesn't, he just bitches in bulletpoint form.
HOWEVER: He's totally right about everything behind all this. Apple is really fucking up OS X, and clearly it has no desire to keep any users that don't see their iMac as a giant iPhone.
My wife just got a brand new MacBook, and I was disgusted by the way the OS behaves now. There's NO way to get to the hard drive: they just hide everything and give you Documents, Pictures, etc.... The OS itself has removed hot keys and functionality in favor of "ease of use" but really, it's just being dumbed down.
The Mac OS was always for casuals, but when they added Unix, it changed and both casual and hardcore could love the same OS. But clearly the hardcore are no longer of any interest to Apple. It's a real shame because the Mac OS was very stable and useable for many years. Now, it's just a toy.
Oh, and Apple changed it so you need an Appstore account to update software. Real pain in the dick.
And finally, Apple doesn't need ZFS, necessarily. They need a standardized FS though. HFS+ is ghetto, and a drive formatted HFS+ is essentially useless to any other type of machine.
> The guy says he's going to list bugs, then he really doesn't, he just bitches in bulletpoint form.
Did you miss the pages following the first? He provides numerous specific examples. He even says in the original article (though it's easy to miss, which makes me think you missed it):
"The pages that follow are those personally encountered— not 3rd party reports."
I completely agree with some of what you're saying but it's criticisms like "There's NO way to get to the hard drive: they just hide everything and give you Documents, Pictures, etc...." that seem misguided: of course you should hide the inner workings of the OS from the average user, but it's absolutely trivial for anybody to see their hard drive if they want to (including hidden files). The easiest of which doesn't require any advanced knowledge, but is just a matter of going into Finder preferences and checking "Show these items on the desktop: [] Hard disks"
Criticising Apple for hiding things that the average user shouldn't know about seems to be getting in the way of completely valid criticisms like what you say about OS X needing a more modern FS.
Its somewhat strange to on the one hand argue that the OS should be super simple (so simple as to hide the hard drive from the user), and in the next breath describe changing a preference as trivial: its not, stuff like that is really confusing to precisely those non-computer people -- especially Finder preferences which is often confused with System Preferences or Finder's other preferences (known as "View Options").
The argument is not that Apple should not make things easy. It is that Apple is increasingly doing this in the laziest way possible as opposed to actually thinking about the problem. The hard drive is confusing? Oh just hide it by default and add a preference. Ugh. They used to hate preferences, now there's one for strange trivial stuff.
I realize this is flogging a dead horse, but the point is that the OS is super simple for novices/casual users, but is trivially adjustable for power users. It doesn't matter if those adjustments are confusing to non-computer people - that can be a good thing - but it's nice that with a bit of computer knowledge, you can essentially be running a solid Unix machine with a pretty, though not universally perfect, interface.
My point is that I don't think (from my own experience), that these things have necessarily been made any more understandable in OS X land by half-porting some of these iOS metaphors. My concern is precisely that the experience really has not gotten much easier for novices, but more convoluted by competing ideas of the way computers should work shoved together.
Let's look at the hard drive example in more detail. What did we lose by hiding the hard drive? Arguably the most important thing was access to Apps. This has been a critique of OS X for a while, that the main way to access Apps is this strange folder that lives in the hard drive. Perfectly fair thing to want to fix. Spotlight made it simpler to launch for pros, but you can't expect the primary way to launch an app to go from recognizing an icon to remembering the name and typing it into a textfield that appears when you click on the top right, especially if the goal is to move to a world where people buy LOTS of apps. So to remove the hard drive, you need another easy "visual" way of moving through your apps. What they chose to do was introduce the "application picker mode" to replicate the home screen of iOS.
But the problem is that this is NOT the home screen of OS X, and so the experience is jarring and scary vs. a safe place to return to. Perhaps had they done something bold and said, look, by default now this is what you look at, then maybe it would have been interesting. Instead it is literally a bolted on feature. In iOS, there is no question how to launch an app, you see them all in front of you. In OS X, you start with a strangely empty desktop and a few "blessed" apps in the dock, and you are supposed to divine that a chrome spaceship means "show me the rest of my apps" Or perhaps you are supposed to figure out that a five finger gesture does that.
I have not done extensive user studies of course (but then again, neither has Apple), but I have witnessed this feeling scary to people like my mother. They don't know how to get out of it and are afraid to touch anything. It is not the safe "home" of iOS, it is the exact opposite: bizarro desktop-is-blurred-out mode. Touching most things on the screen now leads to launching some application, and since OS X comes standard with a ton of apps you'll never use, the app they launch is probably a random app they've never heard of which results in me getting a phone call asking whether they should be scared because they launched Time Machine or Game Center or some other thing.
Again, my point is not that Apple is not worrying about novice users, its that these features feel exactly like a pro user lazily saying "fine they want iOS, here's iOS". Apple understood that desktop metaphors wouldn't necessarily work on a phone, that's why they took the time to think up new ones. It would be nice if they'd also realize that phone metaphors don't always work on the desktop. Or at least think these things through a little more before just dumping them in.
I 100% think there is a system that is 1000 times easier to comprehend for people and hides the hard drive in a way where the common user will never need or care for it. OS X is NOT that system.
Now that I think about it, perhaps the "the big empty desktop" should go away. We have a proper documents folder, so it shouldn't be a dumping ground for all kinds of junk, which is usually what happens.
I consider myself a power user, and I've trained myself to stop dumping shit onto the desktop. And now it's empty. After reading your post, I think it's a great idea for the desktop to be replaced by launchpad. Currently, I keep my applications folder in my dock (in non-stack form).
If they made Launchpad the desktop, and reduced the mouse travel between app icons (I don't know why there's so much space between them... Macs don't have touch screens), I'd be very pleased.
The file system hierarchy exists for a reason: to organize information. Having the UI hide that organization in the name of "simplicity" and display it as a flattened list defies explanation.
The users that can't handle a hierarchical structure probably just puts all files on the Desktop anyway, so what's the advantage here?
I agree, Apple can hide things to make the OS less complex. But what irritates me is that, as a user, I upgrade to the new OS, and the most basic of functionalities is hidden from me. They've literally taken something away. You cannot put a link to your compputer or hard drive on the desktop anymore. Is it not unreasonable to think that your users might want to be able to do this as you've had this hard-drive-on-desktop paradigm for well over 30 years now? I'm glad there's a check box to show the computer on the desktop now. I would never have found that. I mean, 30 years of interface paradigms teaching me to make an alias or simlink there was obviously just some mental retardation on my part...
> My wife just got a brand new MacBook, and I was disgusted by the way the OS behaves now. There's NO way to get to the hard drive: they just hide everything and give you Documents, Pictures, etc.... The OS itself has removed hot keys and functionality in favor of "ease of use" but really, it's just being dumbed down.
What the heck are you talking about? The only thing I can think of is the Finder defaults to not showing hard drives on the desktop, when it used to default to showing them. That's it. I can still go to Finder preferences and re-enable "Hard disks". I can also put them back into the sidebar if they're missing there. And of course the Go→Computer menuitem (shortcut: ⌘⇧C) still works as it always has. As does Go→Go To Folder… (shortcut: ⌘⇧G).
Thank you for the dose of logic. Truth be told, I hate not seeing it, but having turned it on, I use it less than I'd expected. If I could just disable the option if saving to desktop, home and work would be beautiful.
Sort of related to HD options, the default of having no display of remaining storage space is irritating to me, especially on the MacBook Air.
And finally, Apple doesn't need ZFS, necessarily. They need a standardized FS though. HFS+ is ghetto, and a drive formatted HFS+ is essentially useless to any other type of machine.
I could make the argument about Reiser or ExtN outside of *nix, or NTFS outside of windows. There's a better attack here to be made than this one.
See, the reason I want HFS+ gone is that NOTHING supports it. NTFS is supported on Mac OS, albeit read-only. NTFS is readable on most Linux's. EXT is readable by a number of OS's. And I don't want ReiserFS on my Mac. I don't want to be killed and stuffed in a suitcase by my filesystem.
I know aliases and such still work, but you cannot, as far as I can tell, make an alias of yer HD on the desktop. Clearly yer not supposed to, but it just irked me.
Thanks for the HFS links. I've never seen either of those before. Coulda saved me a lot of time and money!
HOWEVER: He's totally right about everything behind all this. Apple is really fucking up OS X, and clearly it has no desire to keep any users that don't see their iMac as a giant iPhone.
My wife just got a brand new MacBook, and I was disgusted by the way the OS behaves now. There's NO way to get to the hard drive: they just hide everything and give you Documents, Pictures, etc.... The OS itself has removed hot keys and functionality in favor of "ease of use" but really, it's just being dumbed down.
The Mac OS was always for casuals, but when they added Unix, it changed and both casual and hardcore could love the same OS. But clearly the hardcore are no longer of any interest to Apple. It's a real shame because the Mac OS was very stable and useable for many years. Now, it's just a toy.
Oh, and Apple changed it so you need an Appstore account to update software. Real pain in the dick.
And finally, Apple doesn't need ZFS, necessarily. They need a standardized FS though. HFS+ is ghetto, and a drive formatted HFS+ is essentially useless to any other type of machine.