First I'll say that accumulated knowledge counts for a lot here. There's a vast difference between someone starting to use these devices now and someone who started 10 years ago who slowly adds to their repertoire of knowledge.
This, I think, is why I personally find Android devices so incredibly hard to use. I don't have 5-10 years of built up knowledge on how to use them and they seem utterly unintuitive to me. I also think the multiple hardware buttons were a huge mistake.
I really do think though that Apple has really suffered without having Steve Jobs to say "no" to Johnny Ive as a lot of the bad ideas of the last 5-8 years I don't think ever would've gotten passed Steve Jobs and seem to have the user less in mind and seem solely aimed at increasing ASP (average selling price) of various product lines. Examples:
- Force Touch. This added weight and cost to devices for a feature that had no discoverability and was used inconsistently by developers. This from a company that for decades eschewed a second mouse button for lack of discoverability. I honestly think this never would've gotten passed Steve.
- The 12" Macbook with _one_ port. So began the dongle blues. This was a terrible design that was an ode to thinness that had Johnny Ive's fingerprints all over it. Compare it to the 2011-2015 era Macbook Air, which was a fantastic device and a nice compromise between price, weight and power. The 12" Macbook shows what happens when you solely optimize for one metric: thinness. And it wasn't good.
- The 2015+ butterly keyboard. Absolutely terrible. A rare reversal by Apple to ditch it in the 16" MBP.
- The Touch Bar. A great example of a solution looking for a problem. Again, the motivation seemed to be to drive up MBP ASPs.
- Face ID. This one actually works OKish on a phone but is awful on an iPad. It's also an accessibility nightmare as anyone who is visually impaired has to move the phone further away to get the right field of view for Face ID to work. What I'd give for Touch ID back. Also the false negative rate on Face ID is really high.
This one is motivated by making the full front face of the phone a screen by getting rid of the home button. I'd really like a fingerprint sensor on the back (like a Galaxy S9 I tried to use for 5 months had). Apple claims the false positive rate was too high,. I call bollocks on that. And that should be my choice.
But getting rid of the (great) home button now creates a UX problem. How do you get to the home screen? Well, you swipe up of course. But wait, which direction you swipe from depends on the orientation of the app you're using, which isn't always clear. Some apps auto-rotate orientation and some don't. You know what always worked? Pressing Home.
- USB-C. Not only was this a loss of MagSafe (/cry) but we moved from a world of where if the plug fits, it works to a world where every plug fits and nothing works because it's now based on what the cable is designed to do and there's no visibility to that. Some carry power, some don't. Some carry data, some don't. The amount of power or data they can carry can vary. Do they carry a video signal? Maybe. No cable can do everything.
- I think the current version of copy/paste on iOS is decidedly worse than the original version, probably because the unintended gestures that now exist.
- The other day I couldn't move a tab on Safari on an iPad without iOS thinking I wanted to split screen. I still don't understand split screen gestures and the fact that I get this as unintended behaviour is an indictment of the implementation.
This, I think, is why I personally find Android devices so incredibly hard to use. I don't have 5-10 years of built up knowledge on how to use them and they seem utterly unintuitive to me. I also think the multiple hardware buttons were a huge mistake.
I really do think though that Apple has really suffered without having Steve Jobs to say "no" to Johnny Ive as a lot of the bad ideas of the last 5-8 years I don't think ever would've gotten passed Steve Jobs and seem to have the user less in mind and seem solely aimed at increasing ASP (average selling price) of various product lines. Examples:
- Force Touch. This added weight and cost to devices for a feature that had no discoverability and was used inconsistently by developers. This from a company that for decades eschewed a second mouse button for lack of discoverability. I honestly think this never would've gotten passed Steve.
- The 12" Macbook with _one_ port. So began the dongle blues. This was a terrible design that was an ode to thinness that had Johnny Ive's fingerprints all over it. Compare it to the 2011-2015 era Macbook Air, which was a fantastic device and a nice compromise between price, weight and power. The 12" Macbook shows what happens when you solely optimize for one metric: thinness. And it wasn't good.
- The 2015+ butterly keyboard. Absolutely terrible. A rare reversal by Apple to ditch it in the 16" MBP.
- The Touch Bar. A great example of a solution looking for a problem. Again, the motivation seemed to be to drive up MBP ASPs.
- Face ID. This one actually works OKish on a phone but is awful on an iPad. It's also an accessibility nightmare as anyone who is visually impaired has to move the phone further away to get the right field of view for Face ID to work. What I'd give for Touch ID back. Also the false negative rate on Face ID is really high.
This one is motivated by making the full front face of the phone a screen by getting rid of the home button. I'd really like a fingerprint sensor on the back (like a Galaxy S9 I tried to use for 5 months had). Apple claims the false positive rate was too high,. I call bollocks on that. And that should be my choice.
But getting rid of the (great) home button now creates a UX problem. How do you get to the home screen? Well, you swipe up of course. But wait, which direction you swipe from depends on the orientation of the app you're using, which isn't always clear. Some apps auto-rotate orientation and some don't. You know what always worked? Pressing Home.
- USB-C. Not only was this a loss of MagSafe (/cry) but we moved from a world of where if the plug fits, it works to a world where every plug fits and nothing works because it's now based on what the cable is designed to do and there's no visibility to that. Some carry power, some don't. Some carry data, some don't. The amount of power or data they can carry can vary. Do they carry a video signal? Maybe. No cable can do everything.
- I think the current version of copy/paste on iOS is decidedly worse than the original version, probably because the unintended gestures that now exist.
- The other day I couldn't move a tab on Safari on an iPad without iOS thinking I wanted to split screen. I still don't understand split screen gestures and the fact that I get this as unintended behaviour is an indictment of the implementation.