And geeky engineers don’t recognize good design when they see it, which is why 25 years later, Linux desktops still use X Windows and their proponents think no one recognizes the obvious genius of 1970s and 80s shitty UX.
I work in open source for a living and see shitty design and poor UX every day of the week as my penalty for doing so. Shit isn’t a feature just because you like the smell, personally.
Engineers make horrible UX designers. It turns out that what people want is good design that actually works for them, no matter how much you might sneer at it lacking buttons and knobs to play with. Dismissing everyone who likes the iPhone as “plebes!” with a technocratic sneer doesn’t really convince me that something like a billion people are idiots and that you know better than all of them because they’re just buying shiny things.
Look how dumb is an average person. (Ever worked techsupport?)
Then realize that half is even worse.
At 7 billions, if only one billion were idiots, it’d be a much nicer world to live in. (Edit: assuming homogeneous distribution.)
Edit: Imagine one of the features of a better world where enough of the plebes have brains. The microwave oven power dial would not be just a zero-to-full knob but would be actually marked in watts, in all the different models. So you know that the 400-watt setting for three minutes that is the right one for your food is the same on the home oven, office oven, and friend’s house oven, despite one being 2 kW, one 800 W, and one 1200 W. The things of course generally do not have the power quoted in any easily accessible way, so even interpolation within the relative-power dial is a guesswork.
It’s not just the fondleslabs. It’s the general tendency to hide the reality behind fake simplicity.
Possible painted in that arsenic green or cobalt blue hammerite type finish that you get on all the scientific instruments that came out of Czechoslovakia.
People can also feel economically coerced and browbeaten by ads and sales reps to excuse anti-democratic tech and to confess the superiority of the latest consumer product zeitgeist.
People who like to tinker or secretly prefer other options can feel steamrolled … like homebrewers reading an obnoxious, bullying screed from “Micro-Soft” about DOS tapes.
Like a fairytale stepmother, Apple products are beautiful on the outside and ugly on the inside.
I won’t say any more, I am supposed to be on holiday, not getting involved in pointless holy wars. Then again, I am supposed to be in a desert and it has been raining today.
(I also dont know what the problem is with stepmothers. Were the fairytale authors stroppy teenagers who had been told to tidy their room by their own stepmothers?)
