The iPhone - and macOS too - used to be a paragon of simplicity.
Today the setup experience on a brand-new iPhone or Mac is abysmal. Entering the same username and password multiple times - then sometimes a different username and password - competing notifications, irrelevant feature nags, a popup from some random product manager about their pet thingy. Permission questions from some meddlesome privacy team about the feature you just said you wanted to turn on. Uncertainty about whether you’ll break something irreparably by “skipping” the expected setup path. A choice of several inscrutable interface modes because no one has the balls to commit to a single solution. Just terrible.
I guess this is what happens without a dictator to tell people they’re fired for shipping garbage, and when a company worries about meeting quarterly KPIs rather than doing something great.
I have a couple of older relatives with Macs, and every time you fire them up for the first time in a while (these people might go several months without using their computer) the Apple ID sign-in nagging is insane. It'll pop up the same sign-in notification a dozen times and seems to lock up the settings app until you deal with it. I usually think of myself as quite patient but when I see that little window it inspires strong feelings.
Ug. Apple is bad (I don’t really want Apple Music thanks..). Being using Linux lately and it’s great.
I got a window machine and a month later “my computers config isn’t done” because I didn’t sign up for windows cloud and office 365 , oh do I want game pass?
I guess comercial OSs are just advertising platforms now which is kind of sad.
It really is sad. They are convinced that “growth” (insert worshipful gesture by executives) can only be most efficiently pursued via “services revenue” rather than quaint old ideas like convincing you to buy new OS versions on their merits, or to stay loyal to the platform because it was good. In 2000, this meant Microsoft set your homepage to MSN and dropped an MSN ISP icon on your desktop. Now every touchpoint in both Mac OS and Windows is an opportunity to advertise another Service.
My kid (10) got one of my old computers from work. I put linux on it. He doesn't use it a ton, but other than showing him that the windows key opens the menu to search for programs, I've never shown him a single thing.
I think kids aren't the best comparison with senior citizens when it comes to technology. I've got senior citizen parents and I've got nieces and nephews who are all under 10 years old. The kids are so much more adept at pretty much any technology they get their hands on when compared to my parents (iphones, nintendo switch, tv remotes, etc). They start off about as poorly as my parents do but quickly overcome them. My parents aren't tech illiterate, either -- my dad especially was quite a DOS power user back in the day, and to some degree has kept it up with his Windows usage too.
I think part of it might be due to the neural pathways still forming in the kids brains, but I also think a lot of it has to do with who they're around. The kids are around their parents who are using this tech all the time, while my parents don't have that benefit except for in comparatively small doses.
Unironically yes, the most intuitive designs you'll find are on linux.
Keyword: intuitive. This is the problem. People who have seen stuff before have way too much baggage and preconceived notions. People who have used MacOS before, and especially Windows, struggle on linux.
Because linux isn't that. And, heavy on the Windows here. Pretty much every way that Windows does stuff is stupid, unintuitive, and poorly thought out. It is truly the black sheep of Operating Systems. It does stuff different just cuz. Just to fuck with you.
Want to add a ? or a . in a file name? What about name it CON? No. Why not? Fuck you, that's why, this is Windows.
But it's not actually the black sheep, because it's the most popular desktop OS. So people move to Linux or MacOS and they're anticipating Windows weirdness.
Like, they'll open up a web browser and download a random EXE to install a program and then be mad it doesn't work. When the much more obvious thing, opening up a software center and searching for what you want, WOULD work.
Seriously, Windows and MacOS can learn a lot from KDE, Gnome, and their associated applications.
The Apple ID sign in is insane in the first place. Why does Apple want to feel so frickin special and require a working iPhone for 2FA and passkeys, instead of adopting standards?
One day the eu will yell at them to do things normally and then Cook will go on stage to showcase what an awesome idea they had that nobody thought of before: “standards!”. Wait no, that’s usb c.
My elderly parents have managed to destroy more than one iPhone / Mac (dropped a glass of wine on the keyboard on the last one). Using the "Restore from iCloud" is a god send to get all their messages and settings back. So I'm willing to go through some pain / privacy invasion for that.
Kind of off topic, but is "spilled liquid on keyboard" still this unfathomable engineering barrier that nobody can break to make a more robust laptop for one of the most common causes of damage?
What do you mean? "Old" (up to Sandy Bridge) Thinkpads had no issue with that, it just meant no keyboard backlighting (which is why the ThinkLight exists).
You can destroy the keyboard but they're replaceable and usually contained the spill to just the keyboard so it didn't damage any of the more expensive components like the main board. The goal wasn't an invulnerable keyboard but to limit the damage to a cheap replaceable subcomponent that kept the laptop alive.
It’s complicated, especially as laptops have gotten thinner and tolerances tighter. Dell and Lenovo/IBM used to have laptops with drains.
Lenovo definitely has splash resistant laptops, and most semi-rugged devices are spill-safe, but spilling coffee is still a service event as the cream ruins the keyboard.
Doesnt hardware getting smaller and with tighter tolerances mean they it's easier to waterproof something? Less surface area to protect and tighter joints means there's less gaps to fill.
Most electronics are just fine. A few capacitors, and LCD displays are not fine with water, and probably a few other things I'm not aware of. However most electronics parts are encased in plastic or ceramic and just fine. In general mineral build up from washing in tap water once or twice is not significant, though if you are talking about hundreds of washings it will become a problem (depending on the quality of your local tap water). Deionized water is best if you can get it, but even that will harm a few components.
In general if you can wash it once (meaning components that cannot handle water are not used in this), the screws rusting out will be the next thing that gets you from washing.
Yeah but there are solutions. After years of being vulnerable to water the iphones are now waterproof. Cars have had engine electronics in boxes with wax in for decades. The cheapest stuff you buy in supermarkets comes in waterproof packaging.
All the things you listed arent things you interact with by pressing on them thousands of times in a day. Its a hard problem to make a keyboard that feels nice, looks nice and is waterproof. Its even harder if you know that the payoff isnt that marketable, I dont think I have ever seen a mainstream laptop advertisment talking about that you can spill stuff on it. Phones barely have buttons or holes anymore and it took us quite a while for the flagship-phones to be water-resistant.
All the keys are wearing hats, so the switches should be fine. Probably needs a couple of drain holes and some acrylic spray over the circuitry. 2¢ per keyboard.
Problem is, then they sell 40% less keyboards.
If instead they thin down the metal in the switches ever so slightly, then they break 2 months after the warranty expires and they sell 40% more...
The old IBM model Ms were often washed in a dishwasher - don't use soap, but hot water cleaned them out. Most circuit boards are (or were - I haven't looked in 20 years) washed in hot water near the end of their assembly. Just air dry for a day before use. Ideally you should was in deionized water (or at least rinse with distilled), but if you don't do this often most regular tap water is good enough)
The old model M's also had easy to replace keycaps so you could take them off and wash as often as you want. Only downside is the need to put them back on in the right place each time, which is tedious.
Not all electronic components are water safe, but most are. I have no idea how you figure out if your device is or not without taking it apart. If you do this "often" expect that screws will rust, or minerals will build up - each causing problems. However if you just wash once a year you can get a lot of junk out.
I dishwash my keyboards (Kinesis contoured) every year or so. Just rinse thoroughly, don't use high-temperature drying, and wait for it dry completely before powering on.
I have put multiple cheaper keyboards through the dishwasher over the years. No heat, no soap, and I make sure to thoroughly dry it of course. I wouldn't do it with a mechanical keyboard for obvious reasons, but I have done it many times with membrane keyboards.
I suspect the Model M was dishwasher safe (if you popped off the keycaps so they don't get lost - put them in a separate dishwasher bag). ... and there's a fair bit of material out there of people trying some variation of it.
There is nothing preventing storing standard 2FA secrets on iCloud. You shouldn’t blindly accept substandard behaviour because of imagined technical requirements.
I don't have an Apple ID and I don't have a Microsoft ID. I won't have either, ever. I do have a Google ID and I can't wait for the day that I can finally retire it. All of these feel like the exact opposite of what the internet should have been, this centralization and abuse of critical mass is a serious problem.
Google a/c was the easiest to retire for me. Stopped using Android [0], Gmail - done!
Apple ID, on the other hand - if you use an Apple device then a whole lot of (safety) features are literally tied to an Apple a/c and don't even exist without it. I can't remember I ever had a MSFT ID.
I dream of a day when device makers are forced to expose APIs where one can add a device account provider a/c or device id provider a/c which offers various features like theft protection, remote lock et cetera or a self hosted solution. Yeah, that's just a dream.
[0] I do use one for work/testing and there's a throwaway Google a/c added on that created using a disposable email from SimpleLogin.
> I don't have an Apple ID and I don't have a Microsoft ID. I won't have either, ever.
I don't know whether I have a Microsoft account or not.
I didn't want to have one, obviously. But at some point I wanted to use Visual Studio and setting that up required me to create a Microsoft account. I continued not to use that account as an account on my computer, because why on earth would I do that.
So, other than using Visual Studio, that account never did anything at all, sort of like you'd expect from an account that you forced someone to create under duress.
One day I opened Visual Studio and a popup message displayed, telling me that because of what appeared to be fraudulent behavior by my Microsoft account, it was being revoked or disabled or whatever. (But I was still free to continue using Visual Studio.)
They just can't help themselves. It's as if someone's career depends on the number of users in the system, no matter whether or not they actually provide value to the users by having them in the system. Everybody and their dog wants you to be part of their eco-system. The best way to get me to not use a service is to have an account requirement that does not provide any functionality that I could have had without that account. It is also why pianojacq.com does not have any accounts, there simply isn't anything that you could do with an account that you can not do without.
> Everybody and their dog wants you to be part of their eco-system.
And that's the core problem. We stopped making tech and started making walled-garden "ecosystems." Apple is the most egregious, but everyone else is doing it too.
What ever happened to open standards, cross-platform, interoperability?
I never wanted a world where I have to choose all Apple tech, or all Google tech, or All Microsoft, or whatever just to get devices and software that integrate and play nicely together. When I was younger I remember being relatively platform agnostic. I had windows and Linux PCs, they dual booted without Windows killing grub every update, I didn't need to have my kernel signed with Microsoft's key. I had a macbook, an Android phone, wired headphones. My music was local on a network share and I used it with local music players across all my computers.
None of those ever pestered me for an account, or tried to push me to buy more of their "ecosystem," or sell me a subscription to use basic features.
Now everything is a sales funnel. Every app or service wants your email, every device wants an account, everybody is always trying to upsell you on something. We stopped making great tech products a long time ago and are now just extracting rent.
I used to be optimistic about tech. I dreamed of a world of openness and interoperability, not lock-in and ecosystems.
The only problem here is apple. Just don't buy apple products and you're fine. You can have. A windows or Linux pc and use Google sheets or whatever. I don't know whether the office suite is available on Linux but you have options for creating files that are office compatible.
The only problem here is apple, I don't think it seems fair to include MS and Google, they're much less walled than apple is. Maybe they could do better too, but apple is much worse.
Fair enough, Windows still plenty open (outside of the MS account requirement for home edition), but I think we can safely include Google now with the sideloading changes on Android, they clearly have seen Apple's rent revenue and want a slice of the pie.
I refuse to update to windows 11 because it requires setting up a Microsoft account. So all new computers (and some of the old ones) in our family have had their disks wiped and Ubuntu installed instead. We started doing this even before the Cortana/AI bs.
There's usually a way to convince windows to let you use a local account. Less so for the Home versions, Pro lets you do it pretty easily though. But good on you for switching... windows seems hellbent on sliding into oblivion.
And Apple being Apple, they designed their own solution. I actually like having a Secure Enclave on my device with easy biometric authentication across all of my devices
Calling for standards is a great thing usually but to be perfectly honest, the current ecosystem of FIDO, webauthn, TOTP, etc is a nightmare. I have three yubikeys and three or four protocols to manage on them.
People won’t adopt that, but they will adopt Apple’s.
Really? I've never really had a problem adding TOTP codes to the password manager of my choice on the device of my choice. Apple's 2fa where they assume I have an iPhone just because I own a Mac or just because I want to log in to some Apple service has definitely given me trouble though. It often feels like an iPhone is an assumed accessory with Mac OS sometimes.
> Why does Apple want to feel so frickin special and require a working iPhone for 2FA and passkeys, instead of adopting standards?
Mind elaborating on this? I used a Mac without an iPhone for years when the M1 came out. SMS 2FA, and then later enrolling two Yubikeys, worked just fine for 2FA, as did using the Mac itself as a passkey.
> Why does Apple want to feel so frickin special and require a working iPhone for 2FA and passkeys, instead of adopting standards?
Ever since the Great iCloud Hack of 2014, Apple dialed up their end user auth to the max. [1]
It was after that hack when bad actors from around the world realized getting into someone's Apple account could be as lucrative (or more) than their bank or email, and so here we are today.
I'm not sure what else Apple can do here. People have made it a habit to store their most sensitive and private secrets in iCloud, stuff which can't be refunded or bought back. I think having such an annoying, stringent, and walled-in auth system is probably the only way Apple PMs are able to move past the disaster of 2014.
>People have made it a habit to store their most sensitive and private secrets in iCloud
Totally absurd to blame anyone but apple for that. Apple pushes features, like iCloud, so they can do show and tell every year and make their stock go up. More a stock go up business than anything else. Features, like iCloud, are the problem. People who like that stuff are also the loudest fanboys and often the least technologically literate too.
Glad to know I was correct. They didn’t claim it was new or “never thought of before” at all—they even specifically pointed out how they already did it on their other products.
I’m pretty sure they almost spent more time talking about the colours of the phone.
I’ve been a Mac user for >20 years, Linux before that, and lots of FreeBSD on the side. The rewrite from System Preferences to System Settings was one of the worst changes I’ve seen.
Preference panes used to be customized for each function to do what was necessary. Often there were hidden sheets with additional features for power users.
Now everything is just lists. Lists of identical looking, but actually very different settings. List of permissions that drill down into more lists which may or may not be what you want. The lists are unsortable and the order seems arbitrary.
I’m sure there was some push to SwiftUI preferences, but in my opinion, Scott Forstall’s Maps decision pales in comparison to the mess that Settings continues to be.
I was told that I was stupid and simply "didn't get it" when I complained about System Settings. It sucks on the iPhone, it sucks on macOS. You can't find anything, and certainly not the settings you do want to change.
I use it like twice a year and can't say I ever had a thought about the new design vs the old one. When I want to do something I just crack it open and use the search bar. The amount people freak out about stuff like this online is completely unwarranted.
In fact it's one step faster because cmd + space > "settings" actually finds it whereas in the past I would do that, get no results, and then remember the correct name.
Basic windowing barely works on it. On macOS is can click anywhere on a window to bring it into focus and make it active.
System Settings is 50/50 if it works. I might still be able to interact with a control as it’ll click through, but the top bar is still lightly greyed out indicating it is still not in focus.
It was the first big sign that trouble was brewing. macOS is being destroyed from within.
I'm glad it's not just me! The System Preferences is terrible, the search doesn't work well, and it's really hard to find what you need without having to go into another subwindow.
not being in osx development any more: is custom UI no longer possible at all, or is it just significantly easier to go with the flow?
though I have seen settings sections that are simply a "launch the actual config" button. but Wacom was doing that back in System Preferences days, so I'm not sure what to think.
It’s possible, and some exist, it’s just less common now. Previously each preference category would take over the whole window. Now it gets a vertically oriented list. Previously all content fit within the window. Now all of the categories require vertical scrolling of some overly padded list control.
I would mind Settings much less if they at least fixed some bullshit. For example, there's no easy way to find the network in the Wifi network list. There's no search field for it, in 2025!
And the whole window can not be resized horizontally. It's just jaw-droppingly bad.
Not to defend the new System Settings, but the old Preferences app was some 1999 iMac CRT stuff. Everything crammed into different tabs and sub-dialogs, (and secret tabs and sub-dialogs), just to "keep it small". Some of the panes had 'character', but it really was not a good UI on modern systems.
Calling it some 1999 iMac stuff is fair, but in that case it was replaced with some 2007 iPhone stuff. I’m not so sure that’s a step forward for a desktop OS.
That weird grid of icons (I could never find anything in) with the goofy search that put spotlights on the icons, then the separate full-window ‘panels’ of inconsistent controls would (also?..) be laughed at if it was a new design.
I've been a software engineer for quite a number of years now. I bought a mac and iphone a few months back because I wanted to look into iphone development and there was a lot of cursing involved.
First the forms were incredibly bad for a new Swedish user. Then there turned out to be some kind of sync issue between account creation and when it can be used, but the error message did not reflect that in any way whatsoever. The next day the same thing worked.
On the one hand they have a support chat to contact and it's great, just being able to contact an actual person was a shock. On the other hand support couldn't help with my problem and I would not recommend the onboarding experience to anyone.
Yeah, as somebody who switched from Linux to Mac recently, I feel that MacOS is a nuisance. Yet it's a nuisance I can tolerate with some tweaking, when in return I get much better battery life, screen and keyboard compared to any other options provided by my company.
> I've been a software engineer for quite a number of years now. ... I bought a mac and iphone a few months back ... and there was a lot of cursing involved.
I'm not sure what's worse: the inane keyboard compared to Linux or the ridiculously dumbed-down featureset that makes it effectively impossible for a power user to even try to transition into macOS.
When I see someone calling the keyboard things like 'inane' I read 'not what I'm used to'.
Personally I found the keyboard a breath of fresh air when I switched from Windows/Linux. The whole text editing experience is gloriously consistent and logical, though marred by a growing number of cross-platform apps that don't behave correctly.
What I think of as inane is Linux's having a slightly different key combo for copy depending on what context you're in. Or all the mad extended keyboard keys I used to use that were in a different place on every laptop.
[the keyboard experience is much less well thought out on non-English keyboards though, as another comment points out, come on Apple sort it out]
That's a fair argument to be made. But in my case, I grew up on Mac OS 9 which had mostly the same key sequences. I transitioned to Windows, and that was definitely "not what I'm used to". But then moving into Linux, almost everything can be configured and the user experience across apps is consistent. Except for the terminal that needs control-shift-c instead of control-c, but that's because terminals inherit control-c for tty control.
On macOS/X? Nope, I've made up my mind: macOS has inane keyboard layouts, reduced key availability, and many things can't be reached at all by just by tabbing around a few times.
I wish it was slightly easier to type a #. But OTOH it's /way/ easier to type accented characters (in either the fast way for regular use or the slow way that's much more discoverable) or different types of punctuation. Without memorising numerical codes, which is what I remember from Windows.
I certainly don't miss all the extra navigation keys, when I have the meta-keys and cursors right under my fingers, exactly the same on any Mac I use.
I'm struggling to remember more than minor differences from a PC keyboard. N.B. I'm in the UK so that might make a difference.
> No keypad, no pageup/pagedown/home/end/delete (I use all of them very frequently), arrow keys are misplaced and tiny (also use them a lot), no F1-F12 keys, no screenshot button, funky command key instead of using control key like any sane OS, and the command key is where the option key belongs, blah blah.
I had all of those keys when I was using Mac OS 9, 25 years ago.
What drive me crazy when using Windows for work is the abysmal copy/paste support.
Just 2 minutes ago I started an email, was composing a numbered list of steps, saw that a co-worker sent another email to the same thread, so I copied the text I was working on and replied to the latest mail.
The numbered list of steps was no longer a numbered list that I could continue auto-incrementing, but just plain text.
And that's just from one Microsoft program to itself. Copying text between two different Microsoft apps rarely preserves the formatting I want. Copying text between Microsoft and a 3rd party application is guaranteed to be an exercise in frustration.
On the other hand I cannot stand it when copy/paste preserves formatting. The last thing I want when I paste some text somewhere else is fonts, colors, hyperlinks, and numbered lists coming along with it. 90% (or more) of the time I just want the plain text.
Same. But there are a few rare instances I do want formatting preserved.
I've resorted to using PowerToys on Windows for this, it has a little utility called Advanced Paste. Win+Shift+V brings up a little modal and you can choose to paste as plain text, markdown, json, and a bunch of other functions, or you can give it your OpenAI API key and have ChatGPT format clipboard contents for you.
The keyboard issue when switching from Windows/Linux to Mac is understated. It's a pain and I think it's worse for non-english keyboards/characters. You have to use plugins/3rd party software and relearn new keys.
No keypad, no pageup/pagedown/home/end/delete (I use all of them very frequently), arrow keys are misplaced and tiny (also use them a lot), no F1-F12 keys, no screenshot button, funky command key instead of using control key like any sane OS, and the command key is where the option key belongs, blah blah.
>funky command key instead of using control key like any sane OS
That "funky" command key makes it so you can copy paste into/out of a terminal with the same keyboard combo you use everywhere else. Ctrl being used to send signals to the terminal and also all over the place for different thingsin the GUI stinks.
Home and End are mapped to C-a and C-e literally everywhere in Cocoa. Same as in the terminal.
Methinks you're just annoyed because it's different than what you're used to. There's nothing wrong with that, but arguing about subjective preferences as if they are objective facts is silly. There's nothing wrong with the Mac's keyboard shortcuts out of the box, and they can all be customized with a NeXTSTEP style plist placed at ~/Library/Keybindings/DefaultKeybindings.dict (There's a default set inside of the AppKit framework bundle's Resources folder, or grab a commented copy here https://github.com/ttscoff/KeyBindings/blob/master/DefaultKe...).
Like, I'm annoyed X and thus all of desktop Linux just copied Windows' dumb keyboard combos that put everything on Ctrl, but that's hardly a reason for me to slag off the entire platform, because its minor, and I can just change them if I really wanted to.
The OS supports all of those keys still. Yeah you don't get them on a laptop keyboard but I rarely use the laptop keyboard as is, it's docked 80+% of the time for me at my desk so I have a nice full size keyboard I use.
Never missed a dedicated screenshot button though, I always just Cmd+Shift+4
Control key is easy to reach for me when it's placed in the bottom left corner instead of where it doesn't belong, beside a worse-then-useless Fn key, which is in the control key's place in the bottom left corner, which decides to make random (undocumented, even) functions of so many of the normal keys, and those normal keys don't even have labels for what the Fn key does in that combination like other keys with eg sound, brightness, etc controls.
Fn + A, for example. What the hell is that doing? It opens a fucking emoji window. Do you know how many times I've accidentally control-A to select all and then... oops no more keyboard input unless I press escape, and by the time I realize the mistake, I've already typed a bunch of other things and even more unwanted things happen.
And the control key is where the power key belongs, the command key is where the alt key belongs.
On linux I can type 120+ words/actions per minute on a bad day, around 160 on a good day. On a macbook air? I'm lucky to do an even dozen per minute because I have to slow the fuck down and soooooo many features are missing that I have to actually move a hand to the mouse to figure out a workaround.
Oh speaking of mouse, I literally detest touchpads. Apple's touchpad is not really much better despite the hype. Nothing like trying to position your cursor somewhere then try to click on something but moved the cursor off of it instead. Rinse and repeat until you finally press the touchpad in just the way it likes to activate a button click without also moving the cursor off of the object I wanted to press.
I'm only just now using a Mac again after not using them since elementary school. Tucking my thumbs under the rest of my hand to press the command key is a motion I'm really not used to, while as before I was really used to using my pinky to press/hold the control key often.
I do have to say though, its nice not having to worry about situations where I need to remember some odd shortcut for something that actually supports control characters like text consoles. I never need to worry about "does ctrl+c actually copy here, or does it kill things?" They're just different button presses. I get the logic these days of having those things be different keypresses than control key logic.
A lot of keyboard shortcuts I use daily now feel quite alien because of tucking my thumb under to reach the command key. And boy is it sometimes annoying having so many shortcuts using number keys in them. And the common jump between words or jump to the end or start of a line seem to be backwards in my mind (command+arrow versus option+arrow), I tend to get mixed up on those a bit right now.
> I never need to worry about "does ctrl+c actually copy here, or does it kill things?"
I've never had that trouble. Terminals are the only place where it's something different, for historical reasons. Copying/pasting in well-designed terminals is shift-control-click, which is easily pressed when the control key is where it belongs. Pinky on control, ring finger on shift, index finger on C.
Terminals are the most common place, I agree. I spend a lot of time in terminals, definitely more than an average user.
> Copying/pasting in well-designed terminals
This implies there are less well designed terminals.that do it otherwise, which is kind of my point. I don't think I've ever done the shortcut you mentioned. Some would copy on select, some on a click on the marked area, some other ways as well. Pasting has been a click, or shift+insert, or Ctrl+shift+v, or a few others.
On a Mac, it's command+c/command+v, everywhere. It's a shortcut that doesn't change.
I'm far from a Mac fanboy but that's a nice little thing.
So the biggest thing is the laptop keyboard layout isn't great, and not every input field is tabbable? And that prevents powers users from even trying to migrate?
> that prevents powers users from even trying to migrate?
Prevents? No. Hinders? Absolutely.
I only have a mac because it was issued by work as a loaner while they set up my new Linux laptop. I wouldn't want to use it as a daily driver at all because I still exclusively use Linux at home, and likely would never get over the keyboard differences.
I know I’m pretty much repeating what the GP said, but it’s crazy how far they have strayed.
Around 20 years ago (which, on reflection, is quite a long time) I, as a developer, moved to mac, as the way it all just worked without having to wade through the weeds was unbelievably refreshing. Couldn’t be more different to the experience you describe.
I bought my last Mac over a decade ago now - I’m now back on windows, as if I’m going to be nagged in an adware UI, I may as well use the one that gets in my way less.
Don't forget how some of the default shortcuts can't be typed on a keyboard layout that uses alt-gr to type things like @.
How the fuck did that get past QC? KDE on Linux has a reputation of being janky, but I have never had to put up with things being actually unusable by design.
I'd also like to add the impossibility of knowing what all the gesture controls are. Currently they seem to assume that you have been using an iPhone for years and pay close attention to every product launch. In other words, they assume that you learned them as they evolved. If you didn't, there's not a very good way to uncover them or customize them. Individual apps behave differently as well, and it's pretty vague regarding how you do different things.
This is what fucked me off about apple and their fandom from the get go. They called this gesture bs 'intuitive'. It isnt. Randomly swiping around the screen until something happens is not intuitive UX design.
My mum used her iphone for 4 years before she learned how to multitask with it, under my tuition, and she still struggles. She is good with computers.
Even if you haven't. My partner is an iphone loyalist for years and was very disappointed that they removed the "open tabs" button out of safari. I (new to iPhone) had to show them the pinch-out gesture to show your tabs.
It's beyond unintuitive. At least in the latest OS release, they've stopped hiding the searchbar in the ridiculous 'scroll past the top of the list' idiom.
The verge also has this wonderful paywall which completely breaks safari scroll such that you can't show the toolbar. The only way to 'go back' once you're hit with the paywall is to know about the hidden 'swipe from the far side' gesture in safari (cumbersome given the size of phones).
I sometimes wonder if people actually use the devices they make.
Took 3 tech savvy family members to figure out why mom couldn’t sign back into an app she was paying for: every time she “signed in with Apple” she also hit “hide my email” (first option) and so registered with a new random email address every time she signed in
It was also illuminating how complex sharing app purchases can be. Some apps allow it, some apps it’s a different payment tier to enable it. It was unclear who had paid for what app and why they didn’t show up on some devices.
This is part of why I absolutely LOATHE the multiple "sign-in-with-Y" prompts on everything.
Federation's not a terrible idea for people who don't "get it," but many places are then starting to _hide_ the standard email-based login form... it's bonkers.
Google can go DIAF for their browser-based forced popover that so many sites have opted-in to (so they can sell more expensive ads, of course). [I use Vivaldi which is Chromium-based and AFAIK there's no way to shut off those prompts]
That sounds like an issue with the app rather than the sign-in with Apple feature. I use it with hide my email for everything that offers it, and it always remembers that I previously created an account with an alias if I ever have to sign-in again.
Hide my email replaces your email with an apple controlled intermediate address, right? Is there any reason apple couldn't reuse the same intermediate address for you?
I thought the main things were making it so they don't have your actual email to track/trace, that when you unsubscribed they couldn't continue to spam you, and maybe let apple track spammers, all of which would be fine with a persistent fake email...
I mean, facilitating multiple accounts, while it could be nice, seems way beyond the UX apple provides and isn't a typical paradigm for most software... this seems like an apple issue.
>making it so they don't have your actual email to track/trace
Indeed solved with persistent email (also solved by creating random new Gmail one time without paying for iCloud+)
>when you unsubscribed they couldn't continue to spam you
Once pwned (or in case of dishonest company selling data or changing outbound sending domains), it’d be one email to get spammed from all over the place
>maybe let apple track spammers
Suppose they could do this if folks used a single regular @iCloud email too, but it’s very important it’s a new email every time to prevent spam as mentioned before.
Big big point: we don’t want to be tracked by data brokers buying data then correlating emails across services. (Sorry for ineloquent reply, someone can do better but I’m pretty sure I’m barking up the right tree)
> >making it so they don't have your actual email to track/trace
> Indeed solved with persistent email (also solved by creating random new Gmail one time without paying for iCloud+)
If you make a “random new Gmail one time” and use that everywhere, that email address, for the purpose of tracking, is your actual email. People correlating your data across sites will not be able to infer your name from your email address, but that’s it.
Assistive access mode for an iPhone is fantastic for the elderly. It's the only way my 85-year-old father can even use a phone. One of the best features is that it can be set to allow incoming calls only from people in his contacts. It's such a lifesaver.
What if it's police or the hospital trying to call?
I suppose it'd be "simple" for the device to answer the call and then prompt for a password before ringing for the user, but then the random caller needs to know the password. But then again, it could be as simple as "This is Siri, please say the name of the person you're trying to reach.", and since spammers usually don't have a name associated with the number they just randomly dialled, they'll be stumped.
I strongly suspect the people who throw all these roadblocks if an unknown number calls them don’t have kids, elderly relatives, various medical visits, etc. personally I’m not going to make myself hard to reach because of the cost of a spam call now and then.
If it works for you fine. But understand that different people have different needs.
I used to feel the same, but nowadays, I have very few normal calls, mostly from close relatives only, but a dozen of spam calls a week. And that used not to be the case before 2024. I know robocalls are/were a terrible affliction in the US for like the last 10 years, but they were very few of these in Hungary.
I wish I'd know what caused this change..
It's hard to say why people's experiences differ so much in the US I get maybe 3 a week or so. I would probably be more aggressive about adding businesses and people to my contact list if I were more aggressive about blocking possible SPAM. For me, the SPAM is one of life's lesser annoyances but I should probably check out some of the prevent features Apple has built into iOS.
iOS 26 can sort-of do what you suggest in your second paragraph. The device answers the call, asks who is calling and the purpose of the call, then (if the caller doesn’t hang up) presents the answers textually in the call-answering UI to allow you to decide whether to answer or not.
At the moment, most spam callers just hang up so I never even get to the choice to answer, although I do wonder if that’ll change if the feature gets popular.
Younger people struggle with this, too. I was getting my teeth cleaned this morning and the hygienist had a lengthy story about transferring data to a new iPhone (her prior phone was 2.5 years old). It's anecdata but the experience is challenging, especially for something people have to do and do rarely.
This is everything outside of Linux now. Every freaking device or service is now just a sales funnel, and the whole industry has stopped making good products and are just rent seeking now.
It's a damn shame the hardware is so good for laptops, and that Qualcomm is taking their sweet time getting device trees for the Snapdragon X elite stuff into Linux, so the one laptop that's even remotely comparable to my Macbook (my Surface laptop 7) can't run Linux either. No other OEM seems to give a crap about putting out a decent laptop without compromises.
I got stuck in a fullscreen YouTube video the first time I tried an iPhone. Simplicity is relative. For years, the lack of a back button resulted in this weird behavior of having to learn how each app wants you to navigate it. Even now that everyone has settled into the same list of 5ish methodologies, it can be cumbersome to figure out.
I guess this is what happens without a dictator to tell people they’re fired for shipping garbage, and when a company worries about meeting quarterly KPIs rather than doing something great.
Instead, the whole company has become a dictator of its "users".
I've been really disappointed in iOS 26 for this reason. I thought it was going in the completely wrong direction, but maybe that was just me being grumpy. Then I noticed that the less computer savvy were having an absolutely abysmal time with it. We're back to computers being really hard for the normies, with apparently no mainstream option that's simple and easy for Grandma.
Unless you want to ship her over to Linux Mint or something similarly not mainstream, but actually user friendly.
I doubt Jobs would have let things get this bad. He would have been ruthless if he had noticed the setup and nagging being this bad.
Jobs seemed like he actually used everything himself, and he wanted a good experience as a customer. I don’t actually believe Tim Cook uses most of the stuff Apple makes, nothing beyond the basics, and he’s likely willing to compromise that experience to increase the stock price.
I’m still of the opinion that iOS 6 was peak iPhone. Say what you will about skeuomorphism, it was easy to understand, apps were visually unique from one another, and the friendly UI was a nice juxtaposition to the clean minimalist hardware.
iOS6 peak iPhone? Finally someone says it!
Also buttons had titles like “Done“ instead of icons, touches wouldn‘t end in accidental swipes all the time and Safaris toolbar was fixed.
All things I recently failed to explain to an elderly person.
> I’m still of the opinion that iOS 6 was peak iPhone.
You’re not alone. The release of iOS7 basically took us from having one OS that didn’t constantly confuse the non-tech-savvy, back to having zero of those. And it’s gotten a little better in a couple releases, but overall the trend is that it’s moving even farther from that over time.
>> We're back to computers being really hard for the normies
I'm not sure that smartphones qualify as computers anymore, they feel more like pop-up picture books that only work when you now how to finesse them. And unfortunately that UX has been bleeding into computer OSes for a while now, most notably with the decimation of scrollbars.
I recently tried helping out my parents setup the latest Windows. I don’t wish that on my worst enemies. What a pile of garbage that OS has become. Xbox? Copilot? OneDrive? Why am I seeing ads? Bro leave me the fuck alone I just want a browser.
It’s so bad that at one point I considered having them try another OS, even though all they know is Windows.
Unfortunately everything is crap now. Chrome OS would have been a great option because they only need a browser, but just navigating the site is a mess. What the fuck Google, why do you always have to work against your potential customers.
And don’t get me started on Linux distros, I don’t see my parents fixing the inevitable issues in the terminal.
> I don’t see my parents fixing the inevitable issues in the terminal.
Really good chance now a days that they won't ever run into issues, as long as the hardware is well supported. Slap something like Mint or Debian on there with XFCE and it'll happily run forever.
I set my mom up with Linux Mint a little over a decade ago, she used it without issue for a few years before changing computers. I don’t think that distro is a thing anymore, but it was Ubuntu based. You might be surprised, there is lots of very user friendly Linux out there.
> Chrome OS would have been a great option because they only need a browser, but just navigating the site is a mess. What the fuck Google, why do you always have to work against your potential customers.
Navigating the google sales site? You don't need to do that, just go to a computer store and pick out a chromebook from there. Try to get one with a nice processor (ryzen or intel core), and a good amount of ram, and check the expiration date. Most major computer makers have some chromebooks, so you can stick with a brand you like.
Of course, Google is cancelling Chrome OS, so it might not be worth training your parents on it, because you'll need to do something else next time.
Why not Linux with SSH open, ready for you to login in case some troubleshooting is needed?
OK, I have SSH open on a non-standard port on my homemade NAS, and I notice the many many visitors from all over the world trying to bust through my SSH door... (I've implemented a web page to open the port when I enter a password there)
Changing wallpapers alone on iPhones is super complex nowadays. Still have no idea why I can't just set a photo as the wallpaper only while not removing the existing widgets already set.
The new wallpaper/lockscreen customization is so insane to me. You can't select any of Apple's built-in wallpapers without creating a new lock screen first (which requires re setting up all your widgets). Whose idea was that?
Trying to set a photo from photos as your wallpaper also creates a new lockscreen.
the only way to modify an existing, already set up lock screen is to long press, tap customize, and then tap the little photo square.
Did a UX designer even look at this? Because it sure doesn't seem like it.
You know, you guys might just be getting old. Maybe ask a kid to help? Back when we were kids we probably all had adults asking us how to do tech stuff all the time, because we had the time and curiosity to explore and learn it.
My son is 4 and has autism and he knows how to change his wallpaper and likes to switch between the different home screens he's made when he gets some iPad time. Now I can do it too because I've watched him do it lol.
But I've got a job, groceries to buy, cooking and cleaning to do, yard work, etc. I don't have the time or energy to devote to making 7 different home screens to match all my outfits or whatever people are doing with it.
It's not a matter of not knowing how to do it, that part is easy.
It's the lack of options or a clean way to replace an existing wallpaper without adding a new lock screen and re-customizing. E.g., clicking the share sheet from photos and choosing "Set as wallpaper" creates a brand new lock screen instead of just replacing your existing wallpaper.
At the very least, it should ask which option you want to do.
Good UX is not about whether or not something is possible to do. It's about how easy and obvious it is to do.
Also someone being able to switch between different home screens is not what I am complaining about. I am talking about inability to easily apply the current photo in Photos app as wallpaper without losing all the already setup widgets.
So you know how to do it. You had no trouble figuring it out. It just doesn't work exactly how you want it to.
> I'm upset that I have to change my existing wallpaper from the existing wallpaper rather than from the Photos app
This would have been much more accurate than trying to portray it as complex and broken. Bad UX isn't when something doesn't work exactly the way you personally think it should. Overall, it's fine. People just fucking love to complain.
I never tried it with FaceID specifically, but all the other red bubbles I've encountered behaved the same way: You say "not now" during the initial setup, then you get a nag/reminder in the settings app. If you tap on the reminder and say "not now" or "don't use feature XYZ" or whatever again, it goes away permanently.
In my experience, it lasts between indefinitely and until the next major system update. I think, that has been the default behavior for all of Apple’s „use our services“-reminders since they started showing those.
Last week I spent hours debugging our application. Something was broken in the remote request layer, and I spent quite a bit of time debugging it with curl.
The culprit? Apple. I missed a notification hidden below all the windows that iTerm was requesting access to my local network. So curl installed via Homebrew and activated using direnv was not working because it was not getting the required entitlement.
But curl in the `/usr/bin` directory was working just fine because it has the necessary entitlement from Apple. So "/usr/bin/curl http://192.168.20.1" was working just fine, while "/opt/homebrew/bin/curl http://192.168.20.1" was silently failing.
Fun. Fun. Fun.
Can you disable this bullshit? Nope. Permission grants need to be renewed every 30 days. And they pop up at the most inopportune moments.
Desktop Docker (eww, yuck) and it’s permissions, path hell and general bs.
Can <permissions dialogue> it <permissions dialogue> be <permissions dialogue> any <permissions dialogue> other <permissions dialogue> way? <permissions dialogue>
I want a headless mac mini running docker. Why is it so hard?
Yeah, you can get a little Beelink with AMD's new chips and a boatload of RAM for around the price of a mac mini (cheaper if you are trying to max out the mini). The Ryzen AI 9 can run at about 28W I believe, it's not too bad.
I’m running the mini on 7w (averaged over a month).
It’s networked at 10gb, which is hard to do on mini pc/nuc without using a lot more power. My other Nucs use 70ish (nuc 9 extreme) or 35 (nuc 10 with thunderbolt dongle).
The mini is also much more powerful.
The is was a bit of a nightmare to tame but I’ve got it sorted now.
There was a joy of tech comic a long time ago, in which Johnny Ives was discussing with Steve Jobs all the complexity of a smartphone, so many apps, so many buttons, that he had made a brand new phone: No apps, mo screen, it just makes calls!
A few years ago at least a feature phone probably was the right answer for many people. But smartphones are so normalized that they’re increasingly essentially a requirement for a lot of services.
Well, when iOS was simple, people here moaned that it was too simple, a toy, and how so advanced glorious Android was and sacrificed their firstborns to Google and now where are we
I switched to iOS about 4 years ago (want small phone, so iPhone 12 mini), from a OnePlus3 with Lineage.
I thought indeed that it was all going to be much better, simpler, more elegant (phone was 2x the price so), but I ran into a lot of issues that I wrote down at the time (some things have been fixed by now):
* Tried installing Signal 4 times, it failed on the apple account generation and no further clues that it didn't or did install Signal (it didn't)
* Can't put icons on the bottom of screen, where your thumb is... need to fill other icons to get important stuff on the bottom. (Fixed!)
* App store does not start with search... So one feels a bit lost, where are the apps? (Fixed! Now a beautiful bubble at the bottom, does require good eye-sight to notice). Still think app store is not really about apps? IDK, it's screaming, there are anime cat girls everywhere; feels cheap.
* Absolutely maddening that it keeps correcting my .nl email adres to .nul (android leaves non txt field alone as far as I'm aware)
* No intro at all into UI (although nowadays I see some hints in "sets")
* Top suggestion in app store is never what you are looking for. Pretty strange. Can we change that? -> Later found out the top suggestion with dark blue around it is always sponsored... And since has NEVER been what I was looking for, never, I instinctively ignore it now like a vibrating "100.000th visitor" badge on a 90s webpage.
* Spouse got stuck searching for app in the Apple store instead of the App store..
* Many controls are at the top (this was pre-swipe, man am I happy with swipe gestures, really fixed iOS for me). Although again: How do you find out?
* My wife, after 3 years still can't remember how to close badly behaving apps to restart them.
* (Old remark) Video pauzes when taking a quick look at notification tray -> In the new bubbly iOS this is much worse even, I often quickly pulled down the notification tray for quick peaks, then let go. But in bubbly iOS there is 0 contrast until you let your finger go, and then the screen will sleep soon.
* You can't dismiss all notifications, since iOS 16 or so there is a dismiss button but it is still, to this day, unclear to me what subset of notifications it allows me to dismiss.
* Screen often goes to sleep as I'm curating notifications.
* Can't drag to folder onder lower bar/icon area (Fixed!)
* Pull down in center of screen gives Siri/search, not notifications, I'd swap that, now notifications requires hand stretching even on iPhone mini.
* I set Firefox as the standard browser yet both telegram and Signal (so far) always open Safari (Fixed I think)
* No notification grouping. (Fixed, but still not as nice as Android, where I spent quite some time in the notification center triaging)
* auto correct does not un-correct on backspace, autocorrect corrects the last word AFTER hitting send (still drives me mad, I just end every message with a space now to avoid looking dumb). Language switching does seem to go very well.
* To close a picture, swipe down, that really took a while. Although not all apps implement it.
* Red dots are not synced with open notifications, when I dismiss a notification I want the red dot gone.
* Hotspot keeps shutting down (it just remains on on Android, usually that is what you want)
* A couple of days in I had 652 mb of data on iCloud, no idea what it was. Then at some limit it starts to nag and it is not obvious how to make it stop nagging. I don't even want anything on iCloud, nobody asked me if I did.
* Alarms are very confusing. Your morning alarm clock is set in the health section (and under alarm) and is linked to your sleep schedule... OK, this changed many times a week, and irregularly... Spouse still has way too loud alarm sometimes because she refuses the "Health based morning alarm", yeah I know how that sounds to a non iOS user. Please also offer a decoupled version of the morning alarm. It's different from messaging alarms.
* Switching "Focus" by holding the lock screen is just very annoying. First you have to swipe down your notifications, then you have to hold the screen. But just long enough until you feel that it didn't work and start to squeeze more. My father asked me some weeks back: "What is this, why does this happen?? That thing you just did!!" And I explained him I was "switching focusses". He does not understand, he does not want it. He turns his phone off if he does not want to be disturbed (yeah and complains when we send messages in the night, because the night is for sleeping and thus only for emergencies... life was simpler back in the days).
* It took me more than a year to find out why my notes app keeps saying: "Restore writing" when walking through the DIY store with the notes app open. Drove me mad! Turns out, shaking is a trigger for un-doing things.. Or something... :s
* Replying to an email and adding a couple of consecutive pictures is a nightmare -> Switched to much better Proton mail now. Apple mail, idk, it works until it doesn't.
* One gets a "Screen use" report every week, when you tap it, it takes you to the current week, where you havent used you phone yet :s. Still don't understand how to see previous weeks.
There were also a lot of nice things though, ie widgets are much better, feel more connected. Swiping feels much more integrated and still works when apps crash etc. Overal I got used to things pretty quickly, but many, many things are very much not obvious (anymore) indeed.
Yeah it's a lot, I once thought about making a blog post about the switch but never did, just kept the notes and adding to it as I pulled my hair out over my iPhone.
I’ve experienced most of your annoyances but maybe I can help with a few of them!
> .nl to .nul
If you undo the correction on the prompt that comes up in the correction instead of fixing it with backspace or whatever it will stop doing that autocorrect
> No intro at all into UI
There is a very long series of tutorials for using the interface on first phone setup and then for each major update
> Video pauses while when looking at notifications
This depends on the behavior defined by the app. It did not happen when I just checked with YouTube (premium)
> pulldown on center is Siri
It has always been and still is notifications for me, maybe a setting?
> Safari instead of default browser
App defined. Some apps open a safari browser and some open my defined browser (Orion)
> Swipe up to close a picture
And some apps are double tap or even swipe up! What the heck?
> Alarms confusing
You can still set your daily/weekly/whatever alarms in the alarm section of the clock app. I believe this is the main way people set their alarms.
> switching focus by “holding”
Not sure what process you’re talking about but the control tray (swipe down from right side of screen) has a simple focus mode switcher with no acrobatics needed
I had to setup one from scratch recently for the first time in years. The experience was terrible.
However, I can see why it might not be a concern for device manufacturers. We’ve had the iPhone for almost 20 years. The number of people setting up a phone from scratch who have never used a smartphone before must be minuscule at this point and will continue to dwindle. 80 year olds were still working when the iPhone was released. They will have experience using computers at the very least and more than likely have used smartphones for a long time.
Yes but I assume (perhaps incorrectly) they will be technically literate enough to not have any issues. The process is a bit of a pain but it's not exactly difficult for someone that's used any modern technology before.
Feature-packed software can be simple though if it's well-designed (in terms of UX, not necessarily aesthetics).
It just seems that Apple actually isn't all that good at it, despite that being their brand selling point. Once they started adding in more and more features due to pressure from Android, they lost the plot and ended up more complicated and disjointed. The cracks in Apple's ability to make software are showing.
Dunno man, I have used Android phones and they are way worse than my iPhone in my opinion - I assume you have an Android phone, so it’s fun we both consider the other ecosystem more aggressively demanding of attention and naggy.
Ultimately I think they both suck and we’ve all gotten used to the one evil we’ve chosen.
If you're a neurotic obsessive who wants to pretend that all kinds of dastardly forces are trying to spy on you and your data, then yes, you want more security checks and more permission prompts.
For literally everyone else - these are only obstacles to their intended use of the device, and every one of them is objectively worse!
Safari prompts me _every single time I use Google_ about whether I want to share my location. I literally couldn't care less whether Google knows this, and I click yes every time, but Apple, in their infinite wisdom, DOES NOT GIVE ME THE OPTION to say "Always Allow". Thanks to some overbearing, self-important privacy dweeb, no doubt, and no leadership at Apple confident enough to override them.
It can be argued as good the first time. I now have multiple apps that I would like to use on my Mac that I can't rely on because my computer just decides that since they aren't verified developers that it is ok to turn off random permissions to the file system no matter how many times I approve.
I don't know what kind of pro-authoritarian sane-washing statement you're trying to make with this line. Jobs himself would tell you that it's a consequence of letting a salesperson run the company rather than a product person.
Is there an example of a platform that serves almost 2 billion users, across 40+ languages and many more geographic locales, countless possible hardware configurations etc., introducing dozens/hundreds of new features a year, without falling into all those traps?
Of course I wholeheartedly agree with your critiques. But the original iPhone - or even macOS circa 2005 - were very different products, much more limited in scope and capability.
It's already hard enough to make a product a paragon of simplicity when the number of things it needs to do are so limited (as evidenced by all the products out there that are even more confusing than Apple products, doing even less), but I'm not sure it's even possible to do it when you reach such planetary scale.
Seems to me that the only way to have a product that's a paragon of simplicity is to have a product that does much, much less. But you don't become a trillion dollar company with 2 billion active users by doing less.
given this is in a thread about simplicity: I think "dozens/hundreds of new features a year" speaks for itself why it's a problem.
but Apple (and Windows) nowadays reeks of promotion-driven development. ship a new feature and make sure people use it by making it as annoyingly in-your-face as possible, so you can show "impact". do that for just a few years and you're reliably left with a confusing, inconsistent, and extremely chaotic new user experience as each of those features jockeys for prime eyeball real estate.
mobile games with tons of features to spend money on are often a prime example of this, where new users a year after it launched are stuck in hours of tutorials and broken UI due to dozens of notifications that barely fit on screen, and Windows is not far behind with some sellers' junkware. Apple hasn't reached that far yet (AFAICT), but it's clearly headed in the same direction.
Linux has many, many flaws as a user-friendly desktop environment, but this is not one of them. take a clean install. boot up the first time. it's very likely you'll be greeted by a single "welcome" window (a normal one that you can just close) or nothing at all, just a working environment, regardless of the version you chose. that's unambiguously a more simple, less annoying, less spammy experience. Apple used to be almost this smooth.
I don't know man. It's easy to wax poetic about simplicity behind a keyboard, but again - they're maintaining an operating system that has to work for blind users, for people using their AirPods as hearing aids, for people who want to make the font XXXL, for people who read in (one of dozens of languages, all with their own quirks as to how they should be displayed), people who want to interact with their phone by talking to it, people who want to plug in their phone to their car, people who use their phone as a transit pass/credit card/digital ID in (one of the dozens of countries supported, each with its own regulatory quirks), people who mostly care about using their phone as a camera, people who are using their phone for work purposes with arcane legacy requirements...
Etc etc etc. With all that in mind, a few dozen/hundred features a year (depending on what you count as a feature) sounds quite tame to me. If you look at each individual app, they honestly get way less churn and change for the sake of change than most products on the market do. For example my usage of Notes.app has remained more or less unchanged over the last 15 years, while in a fraction of that time apps like Notion will shift stuff around and force workflows on me a half dozen times. I don't even remember Apple killing a core app that people relied on? That can't be said for most any competitor.
The hate towards the new design system that feels rushed and is riddled with inconsistencies and legibility problems is justified. Comparing macOS to Windows - an operating system that has been literally shoving ads in our faces, or saying "well they should just take inspiration from Linux and just not ship new features" feels... as weak of an argument as it gets.
but yes, Windows is worse here. that doesn't make current-Apple good at it though. they've just collaboratively lowered the hurdle quite a lot, and still trip on it frequently.
and Linux ships tons of features, but they don't throw it in your face. it does that so quietly you apparently didn't even notice. (this is not in any way meant to claim Linux handles feature changes well, or helps you find stuff you might need, or much of anything, because it does not. just that it doesn't advertise to you, in the vast majority of distros)
>ship a new feature and make sure people use it by making it as annoyingly in-your-face as possible, so you can show "impact".
Modern consumer tech in a nutshell. It's less about serving the paying end-user and more about self promotion. There's so much neediness and entitlement in the design.
You're quite right about the relative calm in Linux. It knows it's an operating system, and an OS is supposed to stay out of the way and simply support the user's needs, not be a billboard for junk.
If there is a definition of doing it right then it is a better experience in following that rather than adding new features that don't match the definition no matter what it is.
And if the definition changes then you should be changing everything which takes resources away from new features. Unfortunately new features grab the attention of media an influencers and so that is what gets you the money.
It is ideal for the elderly or those with cognitive disabilities. It removes almost every complex feature and reduces the rest to large clearly labelled buttons. And it doesn't take that long to enable.
Earlier this year I set an iPad up for my elderly dad - it was going to be used for podcasts and YouTube, only - and it looked like it was going to be ideal. "What a great feature," I thought!
Except... There is no way to turn off screen rotation. None. It can't be done in the Assistive Access menu, and doesn't respect the setting in normal mode. It just always rotates. I spent an hour on the phone with Apple Support, and there's nothing to be done about it.
My dad couldn't deal with his icons rotating around on the screen, nor not being able to watch videos while lying down. It gathered dust.
I think this comment is the essence of this post and the general sentiment. They make software the user is scared to interact with. This is backwards Apple. They just need to do the opposite of what they're doing and they nail it.
> They make software the user is scared to interact with.
Apple isn't unique here either. This is a sentiment across nearly all OSes, on mobile and on desktop.
It's one of the primary sources of help desk tickets where I work (I'm IT manager, grew up doing helpdesk->sysadmin). People are afraid to even try some basic troubleshooting, afraid to click on dialog boxes, afraid to mess with settings. Even auto-save in Office freaks people out, they are afraid to close their documents because that Ctrl+S feedback loop is gone, and autosave is ambiguous. Is it instant? How do I know it's saved the change I just made? So now there's users that need to go and double check the modified timestamp on the file before closing the document.
I get downvoted and called old every time I say this but Win 95/98 was peak UX. We are chasing aesthetics now instead of actual usability design. Marketing got too involved in how things looked, everything needs to be a customized, branded "experience" and it's causing severe learning curves vs. just following OS conventions and widgets where every app more or less looked and operated the same way.
Where's all the UX designers and researchers? Oh right, we've laid them all off or just spent too many years not listening to what they had to say and letting the rent seeking marketing and accounting folks drive the products.
It's because we've pushed and pushed so much for simplicity and dumbing things down that we've obliterated any semblance of confidence.
When Windows puts up an error message like 'oopsy doospy window's made a fucky wucky!" I don't feel safe! I don't trust this magic box!
Modern software will just lie straight to your face and hide things from you. Like the autosave thing. People don't trust it because it lies. The saving stuff is hidden away, and if it says 'saved', it might not be!
Which, great, fantastic, amazing - when it works. When it doesn't, we don't get any feedback. Things just start magically breaking. Things become unpredictable. And that's scary. We lose confidence in the system.
Like, imagine you have a car with lane keep assist. Lane keep assist makes mistakes, sure. But it beeps, it says "hey we're doing this", and you can trivially override it.
Imagine it didn't do that. Imagine it didn't beep, maybe you didn't even know about the system. Imagine you can't turn it off, or imagine you can't override it. You're just driving one day... and then the car is veering off the road. You push the steering wheel to the right, but it keeps going to the left. How much confidence would you have in that car? Would you get in it again?
A lot of them are still working at these tech companies, gazing at their navels and worrying more about how dynamic their artistic portfolio is, than how their users are actually using their designs.
> Where's all the UX designers and researchers? Oh right, we've laid them all off or just spent too many years not listening to what they had to say and letting the rent seeking marketing and accounting folks drive the products.
I think this is too generous to UX designers. They still exist and are very much involved in shipping unusable trash. I have been through multiple UX design reviews as a user and every time the UX designers are flabbergasted when I show them how their product is actually used. They never have any concept of a real user doing a thing. It’s a widespread cultural failure in the discipline.
I had the same worry but after pressing "next" like 15 times and waiting for 15 pages to load, the last page of Apple's documentation on Assistive Access tells you that you can exit it by triple clicking the "side button" (pointing to the power button, so not the side volume buttons I guess but idk). I went ahead after that and while it needed a few more presses, it ended up working that way, so you can enter and exit at will (at least, once you managed to enter; see my other comment for issues on that front...)
I asked the same question of the Apple Tier 3 Support person with whom I eventually spoke. Tier 1 and 2 were sympathetic, and as surprised as I was by this behavior, and ran me through various series of convoluted setting changes, none of which worked.
[Edit: If I recall correctly, we even set it up again from scratch, to try out an idea the Tier 2 guy had. Tier 1 and 2 really were excellent to work with, despite their inability to solve the problem. Both knew the system well, weren't following scripts, and were able to think outside the box and try creative solutions. It was my first experience with Apple Support, and Gold Stars: would call again.]
Tier 3 was brusque, and acted like I was the first person who'd ever raised the topic (which, given the previous surprise, maybe I was). I explained that my dad was bedridden, and wanted to watch YouTube videos without the damn screen spinning around on him, and recall a palpable lack of sympathy. I didn't get an answer as to whether it's a bug or not, and I'm pretty sure the ticket died at Tier 3, so I doubt anyone knowledgeable will ever know about it.
> The phones are too fiddly now, and pressing random things as they try to hold the phone meant the phone got lost in a sea of opening stuff up. So, I tried the assistive access, but why isn’t this an option from the get-go? It asks you the age of setup; why not have a 65+ or something for a senior mode?
> why not have a 65+ or something for a senior mode?
Damn... I'm guessing OP is pretty young or something. I know people 80+ who have hardly any problems with regular iOS. I also know people under 60 who do. Age isn't a great thing to assume ability from.
I need to remember that I don't represent the norm, when it comes to stuff like that.
I guess the saddest thing (to me), is seeing people that consider learning to be a pain point. Even young folks don't want to learn. Us geeks aren't exactly representative of the vast majority of folks. That often makes it difficult for us to design stuff for them.
Dam' right (he says, still developing at 70). Getting older may be compulsory, but I regularly have to help the youngsters out with tech-related matters.
Maybe it's the best compromise, but there's something sad about Apple essentially making an entire second set of apps because they couldn't make the main ones accessible enough. It's like siloing people off into their own universe instead of making this one comfortable for them.
I can’t speak to whether it’s the _best_ compromise but if you see a screenshot of the way they dumb down the Camera app I think it does make it more clear that for example perhaps not a single reader of this website would ever find it remotely acceptable.
Like no video if I recall correctly. I mean I’m sure with infinite time someone would find a better compromise.
Yes, and hitting a nail is very hairy from a safety perspective. That doesn't mean there should be 1 single blessed company with a license to carpentry.
Triple tap with three fingers to zoom in and zoom out. While you're zoomed, drag with three fingers to pan the view.
But I also kinda feel like just saying that says a lot about Apple's UX these days, especially in the accessibility department. Because those swipe gestures can be confusing and require too much manual dexterity for many people who need a feature like screen magnification.
Re the other reply here, what's missing is discoverability -- at minimum a little circled letter "i" in the corner that would pop up a big sketch of the required gesture.
Discoverability is important, but elderly people are unlikely to be able to reliably (or at all) triple-tap with three fingers, regardless of discoverability. Many already have problems with double-pressing buttons (like for Apple Pay).
I just tried going through the setup on a friend's work phone to try it out because it looked useful for my grandpa (he currently has a dumbphone due to eyesight issues, can't really use a touchscreen, but maybe this mode might work with big enough buttons and TTS)
Issues:
1. It says "no results" if you look for "assi" in the settings. I wondered if this phone model doesn't support it, but ended up finding it manually near the bottom of the accessibility settings
2. The setup process is confusing, asking questions we don't know. E.g. need to confirm we know the "passcode" without saying what that is or having a field to try it out on. Does it mean lockscreen PIN? Then sure. We just pressed continue and hoped for the best. It also asks whether apps, that have been on the phone since forever, suddenly need a bunch of permissions. Will this mess with the friend's old settings outside of this special mode? We have no idea what was set and what to pick, e.g. does WhatsApp need contact access to work? Speech recognition? One of them even says "this is unexpected, please report this" How? Where? To what end?
3. Eventually got to the last screen and pressed the button for "Ok, we're ready now, enable!" and it pops up an error message: can't enable with the SIM PIN active, disable this in "settings" (ok which settings, where? Why not link it?)
4. Thankfully, this time we can find that in settings' search and... it's already disabled. I go back to assistive access and the error persists
I literally can't get this set up...
Edit: wanted to show the friend whose work phone this is the silliness of an error that says X and another screen saying the opposite. Now the SIM PIN shows up as enabled! So I pressed disable, they entered the PIN, and it gave another error message. But upon closing the screen, it showed as disabled again. Hoping it was real this time, went back to assistive access and now it could be enabled!
Turns out... assistive access only works for the standard apps: Phone/dialer, SMS, camera, gallery, magnifier
You can enable e.g. Google Maps but it has no idea that you're in assistive mode and shows you the normal UI. It also tells you to go and enable location access in settings, which you can't do in this mode. (I had enabled precise location during the setup of assistive access, but apparently it's broken.)
This does have TTS for the SMS messages, that's nice, but he'd not be able to answer them and have a conversation anyway
The magnifier is too jittery to be useful (his dumbphone has the same feature and issue)
Going back out of assistive access mode, it seems the new app permission levels persisted outside this mode and some things are messed up now (whatsapp complaining it is missing access, for example)
TL;DR same functionality as the 60€ dumbphone / flip phone my grandpa has, except (pro) you also get SMS TTS, (con) it's all non-tactile buttons, and (con) you can't flip the phone open to unlock the screen or accept a call. Especially that last one turned out to be really easy for the two grandparents that can't use a smartphone (one with visual, one with mental impairments). I'd recommend saving 500€ and going for the more accessible option instead
> assistive access only works for the standard apps
Other apps can offer a proper Assistive Access mode [0], but when most developers these days put writing a real app in the ‘too hard’ basket, getting them to actually use platform features feels like an impossibly long shot.
Thanks, that is good to know! Sad to learn that even the most mainstream of apps with incredible profit margins don't seem to find this worth implementing. This would have been a reason to switch some of my family onto Apple
There's a quote from Bjarne Stroustrup showing it's not just Seniors having trouble:
I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.
He was around 40 years old when he said it and he wasn't talking about smartphones - at least what we call smartphones today.
> "I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone".
> I said that after a frustrating attempt to use a "feature-rich" telephone sometime around 1990. I'm sure the sentiment wasn't original, and probably not even the overall phrasing; someone must have thought of that before me.
He worked for AT&T at the time, right? Those corporate PBX systems had all sorts of crazy features which people mastered by pounding the 12 keys really fast. And he was probably on the bleeding edge of that. (In many places digital voice mail commonly predated email.)
edit to agree: obv Stroustrup in 1990 was not talking about your cell phone.
Just recently I wanted to change the default AI assistant from Gemini to Perplexity and after having found the option once, somehow, it took me ages to find it again.
It's wild how phones went from being the simplest tech in our lives to these over-personalized, over-contextualized systems that require a user manual just to change a ringtone or wallpaper
I'm a technology librarian and I spend around 20 hours a week helping seniors with their devices. I really wish that phone and TV engineers could shadow me for a few weeks and see what problems people really have using their devices (yes, people drag their TV to the library for me to look at). The number 1 complaint by far is getting rid of the home button on iphones and ipads. I've had a few patrons switch to android because it has fewer touch controls.
Even with Android I had to enable the "3-button navigation" at the bottom because they defaulted to Gestures whenever they introduced that (google search says it was Android 10 in 2019).
On my last two phones I have been asked what I prefer. When I selected gestures, I had to do a course.
Which is better than iOS in every way, because there is just one way to go back and there being no indicator in the app how you should do it. Do I swipe or do I look for a back button?
I'm really tired of this (now long lasting) UX trend of getting rid of physical buttons and sometimes software buttons, and replacing them with vague "gestures." Totally undiscoverable, and also, by the way, not easy for people with limited dexterity. I'm hanging on to my iPhone 7 for dear life, even as Apple and 3rd party developers abandon it and try to shame me for keeping it. The last time I tried to use my wife's newer phone, I had no idea what to do. I just kept randomly swiping from top to bottom and bottom to top and all over the place at random speeds until it did what I wanted it to do. Infuriating.
Even if touch screens are not remembered as one of the worst inventions of the early 21st century, they are going to at least be remembered as enablers of terrible human-computer interaction patterns.
1. Swipe down on the center of the screen to get to Siri suggestions / search
2. Swipe down on the top edge of the screen to get notifications
3. Swipe down on the bottom edge of the screen to move the screen down
4. Swipe down from the top right corner of the screen to get the control center
5. Swipe up from the bottom of the screen and hold for a moment to get the app switcher
6. Swipe right from the middle of the screen to get to the widgets screen
7. Swipe right on the bottom edge of the screen to get to the previously activated app.
8. Long-press on an app icon to get the contextual menu for that app
9. Long-press on an empty spot on the home screen to edit the home screen
If you include buttons:
B1. Click or hold volume up to increase volume
B2. Click or hold volume down to decrease volume
B3. Click the lock button to lock the screen
B4. Hold the lock button to start Siri
B5. Click lock and volume up simultaneously to take a screenshot. (But not lock and volume-down, that locks the screen. Lock and Action Button does nothing.)
B6. Hold lock and volume up simultaneously for a few seconds to bring up the shutdown screen
B7. Whatever your action button is programmed to do.
B8. Click the camera control button to launch the camera
B9. Hold the camera control button to launch visual intelligence, which looks kinda like the regular camera but then does AI things after you take a picture
B10. Hold lock and volume up simultaneously for even longer to activate Emergency SOS
B11. Double-click the lock button to bring up Wallet
B12. Triple-click the lock button to activate your Accessibility Shortcut
If you have a Live Activity on your Dynamic Island, such as a video playing:
10. Tap the Dynamic Island to take you to the app
11. Long-press the Dynamic Island™ to bring up the controls for that activity
12. Swipe left or right on the Dynamic Island to hide the little activity indicator
13. If the activity indicator is hidden, swipe left, right, up, or down to un-hide the little activity indicator.
(Note that this is about a 5mm difference from gesture #1.)
In iOS 26, if you're in Safari, gestures #2, #3, #4, #5 and all the buttons still apply, but you also get:
14. Swipe left on the bottom edge of the screen to switch back to the next app in your app switcher, assuming you switched to this app using gesture #7.
15. Tap the top left corner of the screen to go back to the app that launched Safari, if applicable.
16. Swipe up from the bottom of the screen briefly to go to the home screen. (Note the subtle difference from gesture #5)
and these Safari-specific gestures:
S1. Swipe down to scroll up and hide the URL bar, back button, and ... menu.
S2. Swipe up to scroll down and minimize the URL bar, back button, and ... menu.
S3. Swipe right to scroll left
S4. Swipe left to scroll right
S5. Swipe down while already at the top of a page to refresh
S6. Pinch to zoom out
S7. Unpinch to zoom in
S8. Pinch while already fully zoomed out to get to the list of tabs (literally just discovered this by accident)
S9. Swipe right on the URL bar to switch to the previous tab (Only about 5mm difference from gesture #7)
S10. Swipe left on the URL bar to switch to the next tab (Only about 5mm difference from gesture #12)
S11. Swipe up on the URL bar to get to the list of tabs. Note that this is only about 5mm different from gestures #5 and #16, and even looks very similar to bringing up the app switcher until you release your finger -- the previous tab shows up on the left side of your current tab, but when you release your finger you get a 2xN grid of tabs.
S12. Swipe right from the left edge of the screen to go back to the previous page, OR if your current page was launched on a new tab from a link on a different tab, then it closes your current tab and switches to the previous tab.
S13. Swipe left from the right edge of the screen to go forward to the next page in your history. Note that this doesn't work if your S12 gesture closed your tab.
S14. Tap on the URL bar to edit the URL and bring up your Favorites
S15. Long-press the URL bar to bring up a contextual menu
As a long-time iPhone user, I've had time to learn all of these gradually as they added them. Originally you had volume up/down, lock, and home buttons. They added double-click and long-press behaviors to some of these, as well as chords for screenshots. When they got rid of the home button, all the things that you used to do with the home button became gestures (e.g. app switcher) or moved to other buttons (Siri, screenshots, shutdown menu), so I found the migration fairly intuitive (click home button -> short swipe from bottom of screen; long-press home button -> long swipe from bottom of screen.)
But I don't envy new smartphone users or people switching from iPhones with a home button. This is a lot of stuff to learn. Even I get frustrated with this sometimes -- the loss of the tab button on the Safari bottom bar in iOS 26 combined with the finickyness of gesture S11 made it a lot harder to get to my tab list until I discovered S8.
That's not a great list for this case. A lot of these are not even gestures, just trivial operations. Click volume up to increase volume? The lock button to lock? On the other hand, others are obscure and not everyone needs to know them. You're not too be lost in any way if you don't know B9 for example. The ones actually need for typical operations are possible to learn from just reading the list once.
I wrote the content above in context of "The last time I tried to use my wife's newer phone, I had no idea what to do" - for use like this you need very few examples from the list.
You can opt to not add a passcode, but the option to skip on setup is hidden, and people generally aren't going to go back to the settings to remove it once it's added. It's a dark pattern I kind of get, but it's still not ideal, especially for a market segment like the elderly.
Again, I did that, but then iOS keeps asking until it reaches someone who doesn't realize that there's no option. Effectively you have to reject it regularly, which isn't practical in this context (the elderly)
I agree with that. I was just disputing the 'a non-dismissable screen that forces them to add it' of your comment. It is skippable, but it's hidden in a way your Grandma isn't going to discover.
oh come on, you just need to buy a Mac so you can use one of the management toolkits to prevent that from happening. it Just Works!
_deeply_ /s of course
(and I say this as someone who is basically 100% a Mac user who admins Linux for a living... Apple makes a lot of stupid / frustrating decisions that I don't agree with, but I still prefer it over the alternatives)
Hmmm, I don't have a solution but if it was common for elderly people to have no passcode then they'd be a huge target for stealing them and emptying their bank accounts.
That's why I get that the default should be a passcode. Same reason Windows Update probably should automatically update. We live in a problematic world and these options are the least bad.
My Grandma's solution to this problem is to not bring her phone with her when going to public places, and that's probably the right call if you can swing it.
It's one thing to be a default. It's another thing entirely to employ dark patterns and annoyances to coerce/trick the user into doing something they don't want to. The user should ultimately be in charge, and the machine should get out of the user's way.
Which bank allows you to empty someone's bank account if you find yourself with an unlocked device in your hand?? If was a criminal I'd be waiting outside their branch and snatching people's phones out of their hands right there, so I'm pretty confident that's not a real scenario.
While Apple tries their best to avoid it, once you remove the passcode you can just open the Passwords app and see all the passwords. I wish they let me keep the passcode on device but don't require it after only 4 hours of idle.
Had the same terrible experience. Opting out from the passcode is only possible for people who know that words can also be a button. It’s a dark pattern urging you into a passcode, and another dark pattern for using numbers and letters in said passcode. And it happens every stupid iOS update. I used to tell my parents: please make these updates! Now I say: please don’t. Honestly, it was years ago when iOS updates made the device better. Now it is always worse. Not a single feature in the last 5 years was added but you have to update so often.
I switched from Android to iOS and I must say: both UX are completely enshittified.
For me (IT person) not a problem, but for elderly rare occasion users it is absolutely terrible.
On one hand you can now talk to ChatGPT in natural voice, but figuring out how to make a cell phone call on iOS on your own: impossible (spoiler: WhatsApp calls are also in the phone app‘s call list).
Sure, you could buy them a dumb phone, but for online banking etc you do need a smartphone. Good luck tackling the App Store if you only use it once a year….
Encryption by default is always scary, especially when it's very, very strong. If you forget the key, your data is gone forever. I don't think most people in the world need that level of security; those who do already know who they are. Everyone else may be willing to accept the risk that someone unauthorised may gain access, if it means reducing the risk of losing access themsleves.
What's the point? If the encryption is weak enough to be broken by the average owner it's weak enough to be broken by anyone.
I think this is primarily a UX issue, encryption should be strong but users should be "forced" to create backups of their keys, with options to store the full key in a safe place themselves, or to distribute parts of their key to trusted people using Shamir's secret sharing.
In other words don't weaken encryption, allow users to weaken their key storage after informing them about the trade-offs, if they so desire.
Users should be the ones in charge of their computers, not the OS vendor. They should not be "forced" to do anything. Sane, secure defaults are fine, but ultimately, the user should decide.
Regarding passcodes, for Android phones I've learned to avoid under-display fingerprint readers - they're okay for you and me but just hard enough to use that some people never converge on the right angle/pressure/duration combination to get them to work reliably. Several of my relatives have gone back to typing in their password (or to no password) after moving from a device with a back-of-phone to an under-display reader.
Mostly agree, but also - if someone's genuinely new to phones, they might not actually know what's possible that they might want to do. You have to be a little bit opinionated on how to use the phone, at least until they know enough to have opinions of their own.
Isn't that an acknowledgement that the UX is essentially worse than a PC?
On a PC, are you inclined to show your mom how the terminal works or to install Xcode? You don't because these components are not forced onto you, or may not even be installed. They are out of sight until you ask for them.
OTOH on the iPhone, instead of starting with barebones functionality and allowing you to enable the parts that are relevant to you, building your own UX, they try to make you fully buy into the Apple ecosystem. This is essentially the result of the "batteries included" design philosophy of the iPhone (which is good!) when combined with Apple aggressive marketing policies.
It took me a very long time to get my parents to understand the file browser, and they still just find folders by remembering the exact clicks to make rather than understanding where they are in relation to everything else
Sometimes the answer is your parents are just bad at this.
File browsers have been around for 50 years, and they haven't changed much at all. But even if you've never used one, fine - they're as intuitive at they can get.
They work just like actual real life files. I have folders, or maybe a cabinet (drive). Inside a folder I can have another folder or tab, or another inside that. And then I have files, with data of some kind on them.
Don't like that level of organization? Fine. Just don't then. You can throw all your papers in one drawer. Or, you can just dump all your files on the desktop.
The Design of Everyday Things should be required reading for Apple's UX designers. This used to be a book that informed the core of their design philosophy. Unfortunately, that seems long gone.
If a user can't figure out how to do something, the user is not to blame. The designer is. With so many features in iOS now completely invisible to the naked eye, it's very clear who is responsible for this mess. And it ain't the users.
I don't think it's a failure of design, but rather a symptom of too much functionality.
The original iPhone had ~30 features it had to make work in harmony with each other. The current version of iOS has thousands. Each additional feature is an increase in difficulty in making it feel harmonious, and it's beyond the remit of what a single designer with a single vision can handle. It's grown to a scope such that no single person can contain a mental map of every aspect of it at once.
Gotta strongly disagree on this. For example, I know there's a way to get to the app switching screen, which shows all of the apps in a grid. You just have to drag up from the bottom the right amount in order to get the grid to stay. Despite knowing this, I fail to do it half the times I try. I just can't figure out how much to "drag" up from the bottom. Too much or too little and it just doesn't work. So frustrating. And so many other similar examples.
In this case there is both time a distance limit to the gesture. If the gesture is too fast the switcher won’t appear even if the distance was long enough.
That said, personally I’ve always found the gesture navigation very intuitive.
It’s not just iPhones (although I fully expect folks to jump all over Apple. They’re an easy target). It’s pretty much everything. That includes things like kitchen gadgets, Web sites, government services, phone support, automobiles, etc.
Android is every bit as bad as iOS. Windows is as bad as MacOS, and Linux is as bad as either of them.
And it’s not just older folks. I routinely run into problems explaining technology to relatively younger folks; even highly educated ones.
I’ll bet that the author would have been just as frustrated, teaching Android to a room full of doctors and lawyers.
My doctor just sold his practice to NYU Langone, a very good organization (and he got lots of money, I’m sure). They installed a really intense (and expensive) IT setup in his office. I’ve been watching him and his staff, struggling with it. It’s actually an excellent system, and I’m sure that many folks here, would be proud of it, but they still struggle. He has a full-time staff member, supplied by Langone, whose only job, is to come in and help staff use the IT services. She’s very busy (and patient).
I feel like Accessibility needs to include discoverability, affordance, and usability, as principal axes.
The terminology we use, the words we pick, in user interface and feedback are vital. The design of affordances, the placement of UI elements, etc.
Glossaries are really important, and I watch people’s eyes glaze over, when I start talking about them. You can have Design Language glossaries; not just text ones.
It’s a huge topic, and not a particularly popular one.
I feel that a good start, is highlighting examples of products that get it right, with discussion on how they do it. I get pretty tired of everyone complaining about the failures. That’s just discouraging, and tends to get people circling their wagons. I think good examples would be very helpful.
I’ll start. My wife likes OXO kitchen gadgets a lot. So do I. She tends to buy stuff that I’d never get, if I were making the decision, but I find really good, once I start using it.
Yeah. I have an engineering degree, a PhD in physics, I code, and I build IoTs for fun -- and I did not manage to use the new water cooler at the office.
I tried all the tricks gathered over 40 years of dealing with ever-evolving technology and then this WTF of not being able to switch on water.
It happens, not everyone catches on to new tech. And then I heard my whole team explain among them where a "working water cooler" is. Fortunately, one of them knew how to use the closest one. The whole herd (me included) trotted for a demonstration and now I know that I have to press 3 buttons, then when the incorrect button is lit up, I need to continuously press the small "start" triangle which you see in video programs. All the lights flicker, something something and, tadaaam, the water flows.
I have the same problem when I have to use a shower I do not know. This reminds me a time when I was trekking and saw my friends taking a shower under the faucet of the shower (yeah, the shower had a faucet) because they did not work out what needed to be pulled, turned, pushed, and whatnot.
I’m seeing this happening in real time in my company. The product keeps getting worse.
It should have been a form and about 3 buttons but instead it’s an increasingly complex UI with incoherent, overlapping, confusing features, many of them are footguns. The things you actually want the product to do are hard to find and are like 10 clicks away.
Having complex features is a form of moat I suppose. Companies might not actively seek out complexity, but thanks to the moat-iness of the problem they aren't as discouraged to remove complexity as they should be.
unfortunately this is an inherent property of a system (software in this case) that punishes stability and rewards changes for the sake of changes
if you don't modify your library, app, OS, etc for 2 years, it's perceived as abandoned or obsolete, meaning even if you're achieved perfection in your product in terms of ui, you can't stay there, you must move forward and break it (i'm not talking about bugs or security vulnerabilities here, only the functionality itself)
prominent example is w/ microsoft word, where they kept adding an absurd number of features simply bc they felt like they had to, since ppl were paying for it, and this will KEEP HAPPENING TO EVERYONE so long as the software keeps moving at breakneck speed and backwards compatibility and stability are thrown out of the window...
Yup. That’s one of the great things about the OXO stuff we have. I have a new vegetable peeler, that replaced one we had for over a decade. It’s basically, exactly the same one. I suspect the parts would be interchangeable.
I think that Apple’s Snow Leopard MacOS release was almost identical, in surface features, to its predecessor, but is considered one of their best releases, ever, because it fixed so many bugs, and improved a lot of important functionality. Internally, it also established a technical fabric for the new architecture, but that wasn’t visible to users.
Panic’s Playdate has been easy to pass around to friends to try. The device intro is a lot of fun and shows the main interactions, and then the games a snappy and easy to jump into.
Definitely would recommend playing with one if you get the chance. Buying one… it depends on how much the device appeals to you, mine got active use for a couple months and then has fallen off
> I feel like Accessibility needs to include discoverability, affordance, and usability, as principal axes.
Would most people who struggle with modern UI/UX would customize the discovery in their own way i.e. should every UI be configurable in a way it aligns with each user's mental model? And how would a UX system *behave* to find the "best" model for the job?
Not sure if you are an iOS user, or not, but the Accessibility customization is batshit crazy. Lots of cool things to tweak, but there's way too many knobs and switches. Also, and this is an issue with settings/preferences in almost all apps, regardless of platform, the damn settings aren't where they are supposed to be. They get placed into screens that match the designer's structure, but not that match the user's mental model.
I'd like to see customization models that match user mental models, and maybe better support for adapting to the user.
"AI" may be helpful, here. I think previous "wizards" have not been up to the task.
I wonder what might be more formal ways to extract such mental models.
1. Most people have been exposed to some sort of a computing device in their lifetimes, if that experience had enough UI/UX to support what the user wants from the new platform/os then a new UI/UX start with that, no matter how "ugly" it looked. Maybe give the option to make the desktop os windowing and nav look just like the mobile OS, if the user knows the latter, so that challenged users can just start cold if they know the other. This could solve problems like: Most people know how to do attachments on one platform do not know how to do it on the other.
2. If one does not have any mental model you could gamify it and reward the user for learning a UI/UX and decrease the reward over time as the user gets better.
3. Too many times people forget compound actions e.g. publising an ad on Facebook or knowing how
to do 2 fac auth. A strong voice driven navigator could aid in overcoming discovery difficulties, it would know how to do X and the user knows what(X) they want. Ideally since these things are done in a sequence, sequence models like LSTMs could learn what trips up people the most and it would reflect ones own mental model.
I’m lucky my dad worked in IT and has kept up on things. He’s retired now and has started teaching classes through AARP. He’s done a few on the iPhone. More recently he did one on ChatGPT. The ChatGPT class was so popular they are moving to a bigger venue for the next one.
The important thing is to keep it focused on what people might actually use and care about. For the ChatGPT class, he wasn’t talking about generating code, he talked about how he used ChatGPT to help him understand results from medical tests, which led to getting bypass surgery 6+ months sooner than if he had waited for the doctors to call him every time.
I’ve found most people want to know the bare minimum to get what they need done. People are busy and they aren’t looking to be technology experts. They just want to know how to do the basics they used to know how to do without feeling lost.
These days, for someone who had issues with the complexity. I’d turn on Assistive Access[0].
There is also the option to refer them to Apple. That’s what my dad would do during his class if someone needed more hands-on help than he could provide when teaching a whole room of people. Apple offers classes at their stores, and people can call support. So he made sure to cover that to shift some of that to the experts.
I wouldn’t recommend this explanation. Even still-sharp older folks accuse me of complicating things. It’s very hard to successfully advocate the benefits of these systems while keeping their attention span.
I always refer to chat interfaces as a computer. A single episode of dialogue with a thing with no mind.
Feh, fine, as I commented, I did think about my own anecdote. To ELI75 it: I had a chance to interact with Sony's Aibo dog, the salesgirl said if you put your hand in front of it, it will yelp. Same as if you stroke the sensor pad on its back. It took a few tries, it did it, and I was delighed. Then I realized it was just some algorithms responding to input/"seeing" someone's hand with motor movements and an audio file of dog barks, there's no dog there happy to see you...
Does he talk about the risks with using ChatGPT or other LLMs? I'm all for teaching elderly people this if it can help them, but I'm also very worried about side effects.
Also, when you age your skin dries out and touch screens are less sensitive to your presses. So not only are these things exceptionally complex to use (eg many abstract concepts) the interface also does not really function well, making it a double whammy. I've had multiple cases watching my aging parents where I say press that or drag this, and it literally does not work, and makes them feel completely inept.
For the sake of our parents, we (as technology builders and buyers) need to be more comfortable saying the latest iPoop Galaxy S might be just not the right choice for a big segment of our society, and we need to make phones with buttons.
I'm starting to run into that and I'm not even retired yet.
Mom uses a stylus with a conductive rubber tip to operate her Pixel. Which shouldn't be necessary.
With regard to learning to use a new release - since Apple (and no one else either it seems) ships a manual with their pocket computer these days, they need to have a group of people creating videos that explain how to use it.
Of course, if you can't get past the OOTB setup, that might of of minimal use...
I empathize. My dad is 98 and can mostly use his iPhone fine, but I just wish I could turn off all the “shortcuts”: He doesn’t get swiping down from different edges of the screen for control panel vs notifications. He doesn’t get hard-pressing on icons for different options (like the flashlight), and so on. Wish I could turn off Siri and Apple Pay, because hitting the “sleep” button just slightly wrong can invoke them and then he’s stumped.
Not just your dad but the vast majority don't use these features either.
The human brain has a natural upper limit in how many times it's beliefs can update per year. If the Total new features shipped by every company in the land, every year exceeds that limit, most of it is a gigantic waste.
Large, cash rich companies beyond a point attract opportunists. And soon they outnumber innovators.
After that happens we get run away Involution (change without purpose).
There is never ending amount of work going on, hyper specialization, elon/trump style self glorification/back patting, and all happening with very little purpose or meaning being produced.
The solution is well known. Orgs which have purpose are tuned into the Limits baked into the system.
Try Settings -> Apple Intelligence & Siri -> Talk and Type to Siri
You can individually turn off 1) voice activation phrases, 2) press and hold side button, and 3) double tap bottom edge to type
For the flashlight, I assume you're talking about on the lock screen. You can customize the lock screen and remove that button entirely. If he has a newer iPhone, flashlight is probably a good use for the "Action Button" on the left, if he doesn't want to use that for toggling ringer/vibrate.
I've always thought it's a bit unfortunate how having a smartphone (which almost always also means having an Apple or Google account to download third-party apps) is slowly becoming a near-necessity in today's society, rather than a nice-to-have. Even some places like national parks (in the USA) require you to download an app just to enter.
Where on that page does it show that it is a necessity?
I haven’t been to Rocky Mountain recently (and when I did go right before
COVID don’t need one) but am an avid National Parks visitor and have never once needed a phone. You can print the timed entry codes (which I often do because of lack of cell service in some).
>"and have never once needed a phone. You can print the timed entry codes (which I often do because of lack of cell service in some)."
I mean OK, fair enough; it's not NEEDED to have a phone. But short of printing out, they heavily incentivize timed entry codes being shared by phone; either by screenshot or sharing your phone for the code.
When we do group visits to Estes Park from here in Denver, all members of the group use a phone.
Agreed, it's becoming silly. Particularly for thing that are infrequent. Like no I don't want to install an app to check into a flight given that I fly once a year. And of course each airline would have their own app. Forcing an app on me when your service is not a primarily digital product, or there's no reason why your product needs a special unique app, is a great shortcut to me hating your organisation.
and the whole swiping from the button [bottom?] kept making the screen go down to the bottom half
This happens to me way more than I would like. For the life of me, I can't figure out the utility in being able to move my lock screen 1/2 way down the phone and have blank space on top. I don't know what this feature is or how I would activate it if I actually wanted to.
That feature is called "reachability" and is designed to let the user access controls at the top of the screen with their thumb. It's a nice idea but triggers unintentionally too often IMO.
Thank you! I couldn't remember the name of it (and didn't feel like digging through menus to find it), so I haven't been able to disable until just now!
It made way more sense when it was introduced with the iPhone 6 Plus because there was still a home button. Much less likely to accidentally trigger it with that compared to the full screens we have now. It’s triggered by swiping down on the bottom of the screen, nowadays essentially the opposite motion of how you’d exit an app. Anyway, you can disable it in Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Reachability.
Apple never sold a flagship ("Pro") iPhone mini. If you wanted the better cameras (particularly the telephoto camera), you had to get the 12 pro or 13 pro. By the 11, they had given the non-Pro models dual lenses, but with the gimmicky 0.5x instead of the more applicable 2x camera.
In the Android ecosystem, to get a good small screen these days you need to get expensive and fragile foldables. The mini phones like Jelly are too compromised on hardware and software.
The last iOS device I owned was an iPad Mini and I basically interact with iOS now only in emulators, besides doing small things on someone's phone when their hands are tied or whatever.
To an outsider, the iPhone UX is heavily dependent on non-discoverable gestures. Some of the gestures are obvious and shared with the design languages in other operating systems, but some aren't. Some of them "make sense" once you learn them, but others feel arbitrary and non-obvious.
If I was ever handed an iPhone and asked to contact someone specific in an emergency, I'd probably end up fumbling around for a dumb amount of time. I'm sure the necessary steps are easy once you know them, the issue is going in blind not knowing them.
Having worked a job getting seniors acquainted with using desktop computers as a teen, I don't imagine the same task would be easier today with iPhones. It feels like the UX assumes you're already fluent in their language.
I taught my now 83 year old mother to use an Android phone 10+ years ago and now I use Nova Launcher to do my best to emulate the experience she's used to every time there is an OS update. She does pretty well, but recently Google changed the default Phone app and she hates it. It's tricky keeping the experience stable once they have learned it. There are also several "senior" launchers meant to simply the UI but all of them have been a little too restrictive.
Lately I've been ranting about the Grandma Test. Simply stated, if Grandma cannot understand the technology enough to use it, (in many situations just the UX) it is objectively bad. You are losing customers to frustration. Rote memorization is the hack that got her to this point in life in her world, and constantly and consistently shifting things is breaking her hack. Key takeaway: You could have thousands of additional customers if a lightweight 2nd UI that materially does not change existed for your product.
It's incredibly hard to teach a senior how to angle the phone correctly for face unlock to work (there's also no feedback that you've done it wrong). If you're using the power button, then you have to teach how to not hold it too long, or else, siri shows up. Or maybe you want them to use siri voice command, then you have to teach them to hold it down long enough (and there's no feedback if you're off of the spot you're supposed to swipe up from). Swipe to unlock (password or otherwise) was impossible.
I gave up and returned the phone.
I was desperately wishing some hipster had refurbished an old style rotary or physical push button phone with a Sim card, but not even that exists.
Hijacking the power button for marketing of new features was evil from the get go.
I mean, I get it. It's the perfect engagement metric-driven design. It's the perfect dark pattern. I'm sure you switch that on and whoa!!! Look at how many people are using Siri!!! They must loooooove Siri!!!
It's a thing on Android too. I switch it off. I know it exists and I know not to activate it, and I still switch it off.
1. The setup process should have a heavily simplified mode right at the beginning. It may not be simple for Apple to decide what to exclude from the standard setup process, but there are several obviously time consuming, annoying and unnecessary steps in it. A lot of behaviors with side button double click, camera button swipe, etc., should be off by default.
2. There should be a very short test on finding out the accessibility needs of the user (to the extent possible, because some people may not know how to follow written or spoken instructions).
These are not just for the elderly, but also for many others who have accessibility needs, who lack knowledge about gadgets (or can’t be bothered keeping up with changes in interfaces and disappearing physical buttons), who just need something simple that serves a few actions (like phone calls, video calls, taking photos, viewing received photos and videos, etc.).
Older/earlier iOS was more simple, intuitive, and usable from my point of view (mid 30s tech oriented male). Now even i find myself getting lost in the endless settings menus and too many different home screen / option screen / extra screens. I don't even use MacOS Launchpad. Just give me a desktop, window manager, and simple notifications.
I dread the day my older mom updates her iOS and calls me for help.
What really has been added in terms of endless menus? Control Center was like 2013, Widgets were like 2014. Today, 90% of things are still controlled via the settings app, except for a few app-specific settings that are controlled via the specific app. The latest iOS has some rougher edges, but I can't see how it's confusing.
Here is a practical example: When I simply want to switch wifi networks at home or work or the coffee shop, or I want to disconnect my car from bluetooth and go with just my AirPods (for a private call with the kids in the car), it takes more than 3-4 clicks to do the "right thing" from that slide down menu.
The UI reaction feels more delayed now. If i'm in the middle of a call and want to go private, or some how got connected to the slow network, and i want to switch to the other one.
I feel like I used to be able to do it with 2 or 3 simple clicks. Now i cant remember if i need to click once, or click and hold, and by then the animation changed and now I tapped again and its doing something i did not expect.
For me personally, I used to be a wiz at navigating this phone on older OS versions - and now i feel like a klutz and it doesn't do the thing I expected anymore.
Not to nitpick, but just because it's the example you gave: Wi-Fi settings in the control center are the same as they have been for years (or easier, as I don't remember the dropdown menu in the earliest versions).
The UX paradigm of a tap for the primary function and a press for alternate functions (for Wi-Fi: On/off, or to select networks) is the same across much of iOS, including Safari and 3rd party apps.
Admittedly it's not the best for discoverability, and the elimination of Haptic Touch has made it slightly more awkward to trigger, but it's not a totally new behavior to learn.
Are you on a significantly older device that might be having some performance issues? Supposedly the new glass UI is heavier and could be slowing down the device enough to cause issues.
Don’t you just need to put the AirPods in your ears for them to connect to the phone (and for the phone to switch from the car automatically?) Unless you’re always wearing them while driving..
It’s still 3 clicks for both operations (slide from corner, 1. Tap the wireless cluster where there’s a group of four small icons, 2. Tap either WiFi or Bluetooth where there’s a list with up/down arrows. 3. Select from that list)
On OSX there is a bug where if you have automatic ear detection on, even with latest AirPods, it will connect back properly but the OS will not switch the output to it, but it will think it did. You will have to turn off bluetooth and turn it back on again, even disconnecting from airpod and reconnecting doesn't fix it.
I mean, Apple software quality has gotten so abyssmal, I haven't updated TailScale to latest version because when it updates, briefly a notification appears telling me to go into settings to approve something but even when I click that notification, it doesn't take me there. And I know the location it is talking about, when I go there, there are no pending requests.
It is all so tiresome. Except for battery life, it is literally a terrible platform now. And just several years ago, it was light-years ahead.
the fact that it allows more screen space for content is appreciated, but the way it was forced on everyone pisses me off.
You can change it in settings -> Apps -> Safari, under the "Tabs" section - "Bottom" is like what it used to be. I immediately switched to that after the update to 26, but once I realized you could swipe up from the address bar to get to the tab view, I switched back so I could get more content space.
I don't like that it's two taps to get to the share button now though.
I am continually surprised that Apple doesn't offer an "older" user set of options, as part of accessibility.
My mother in law is confused between contacts, contacts in messages, contacts in phone (we should have one place to do one thing: store names she wants to contact. She doesn't get that it's the same thing in each app).
She routinely long taps on things accidentally, turning on or off functions she doesn't understand. No easy way to figure out what she reconfigured from miles away.
Tap targets are all small, with non-scaling buttons even in Apple's app. Making everything large across every setting I can find either breaks apps or has inconsistent effects.
Having all settings in one Settings tool means having to leave an app to change how it works, which is counter-intuitive (to change the toast time, go to the fridge and move the butter around) to many folks.
I've stripped the device to just her favorite apps, but I can't limit access to settings, controls, or other aspects. I just want an extra step so she can pause and "cancel" things she doesn't understand. Apple gives no option: everyone is a user with benefits (no super users in iOS).
I tried the child protections, but she's not a child. She should be open to watch what she wants, chat with whom she wants (yes, there is risk there) and that's the opposite of of what child protections do.
Long time Apple fan, but the complexity and lack of controls is becoming really painful. For folks who need simplicity and consistency, Apple appears to have left that far behind.
My fear, of course, is that she is future me: my interactions will suffer with mixes of gestures and mental controls and smell-ux, and my kid won't be able to set the device to work with my needs.
> My mother in law is confused between contacts, contacts in messages, contacts in phone (we should have one place to do one thing: store names she wants to contact. She doesn't get that it's the same thing in each app).
I am confused too (o, Android), after discussing with developers and reading documentation. Some things simply do not work despite the producer telling you they do.
Most of the western world population is about to become a lot older and hence more % disabled in the next decade. Wouldn't it be wonderful if someone just asked the user what were the main features they used and configured only those services on the OS?
Settings could be super simplified. People using, for e.g. mail and browser only, could ask for an integrated UI/UX experience for both. There could be a remote assistance escape hatch as a permanent UX feature for the early days of use for someone you trusted to help you. Power users can ask for more stuff and add more features.
Another thing would be for a AI to do just one thing. e.g. you can configure it at set up to just help one how to do X. This is really not easy. e.g. an AI would need access to your windowing system and peripherals and then infer from your prompt where you are stuck to help you.
So many wonderful things could be done if they invested more into user research and figured out how to help people. It would boost adoption — and more importantly brand love — up the wazoo.
Two years ago I set up an android tablet for my grandmother to make and receive WhatsApp calls. Was a fun challenge to have the setup compensate for her never having used a touch screen before.
One interaction that missed the cut was using the tablet's accelerometer to answer calls so she wouldn't have to interact with the screen at all. Simply tilting the tablet forward and back on it's stand would have answered the call. You just can't beat the customizability of Android (with Tasker) for things like this.
Touch screens can be difficult for seniors to use due to the reduced moisture in their fingertips, which often leads to multiple attempts for the device to register a touch. I'm not yet a senior, and I'm already experiencing this issue myself.
This is why I believe the future lies in touchless technology, like META Glasses. We should be able to control devices using voice commands or simple hand gestures. The need to touch icons or swipe feels outdated.
From a quick read in TFA and the comments, it is interesting that nobody questions iPhone as the right device for seniors. It is pretty much unquestionably presented as the only device option, even though it is pretty obvious that a lot of seniors are just not interested into its features.
I'm not sure where this can be pinpointed. Monoculture? Mimicry? FOMO?
Fall Detection requires a satellite connection, cellular connection,
or Wi-Fi Calling with an internet connection from your Apple Watch
or nearby iPhone. You can use cellular models of Apple Watch to make
an emergency call in many locations, provided that cellular service
is available.
If an iPhone is indeed required even if your Apple Watch has a cellular connection, then that's just a lock-in "feature".
- install one of WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram, Signal
- install one of Gmail, Outlook, Proton Mail
- protect/hide away settings and app store
- lock homescreen icons
Done.
It's a pretty foolproof setup. And I'm not sure why you would need a brand specialist to get help for such basic stuff. Walk with a Motorola into a Samsung store, I'm pretty sure they will be able to help you, especially if you are a polite senior.
This is a difficult task generally, not just with smartphone or Apple products.
I have helped many a tech challenged person (of all ages) learn to better use their devices. You need a lot of patience and to actively resist succumbing to the curse of knowledge.
The first and most common roadblock is that they often don’t know their passwords!
I kinda think that most commenters here haven’t read the article, and are not appreciating the scale of the problem here.
An iPhone 1 wouldn’t have met their needs either. Old keypad Nokias had already been deemed unsuitable because they couldn’t use them safely.
From the post:
none of them could understand how to unlock the phone. Entering a passcode was a nightmare because they kept forgetting it, even though it was a birthday they knew, lol.
…
I left there achieving nothing because they couldn’t figure out their old Nokia phones. The unlock thing on the keypad was too difficult, and if I turned that off, they kept dialing 999 in their pockets for some reason. That’s why I was there: they were calling emergency services 100 times a day, lol.
One of the things I’ve noticed with senior people is that fine motor control tends to start to go,
Things like double click a mouse is difficult to perform two very fast clicks, without also moving the mouse,
Same with iPhone, swiping without deviating, pressing TINY buttons, and even what constitutes a tap are difficult for the elderly. Yes there’s zoom but that only makes it 10% better, as I watch them
So one thing I feel is that many old folk find it impossible to understand and build with multiple UI/UX abstractions they are not familar with. Take the file explorer(or whatever mac has for viewing files) abstraction.
If you aren't familiar with the concept of where files are found — e.g. where are downloaded files — it becomes infinitely more difficult to them to remember and add another UX/UI abstraction e.g. how to open a file using a suitable application. Lack of homogenity between OSes and Platforms makes it all the more harder.
This just keeps repeating for everything. Making attachments, knowing how to clear browser history, bookmarking, opening and searching through mail etc.
We tried to get my grandma to use an iPad (not my idea), she ended up locking it in a drawer because she got upset with it. I can't blame her.
Ultimately, I don't think it's to her detriment. There would be some ease of mind if she had a cell phone and were comfortable using it (over a home phone) but tech is not for everyone.
From what I read in the comments, the core problem (for any UI/UX) is that users need time to discover and learn where the features are. On iOS (and now also macOS), some features end up in places where we wouldn't naturally expect them. When we first discover a new OS (yes... OS), how much time are we willing to spend on learning? I bet not much (as paradoxal as it may sounds).
In my opinion, standardizing almost everything into uniform list-based UIs actually makes it harder for the brain to remember. Variation and distinct visual cues help us build stronger mental maps. But in the end, it's a matter of time and practice until things feel 'in the right place'.
Apple should definitely have a R&D team working on such approaches.
One of my elderly neighbors is happy with the generally-fine iOS defaults. Another elderly neighbor (I'm the "helpful computer guy" on our street, paid in appreciation, good karma, and baked goods) is a tech enthusiast, loves to play with his devices, and is no more intimidated by an iPhone than a Gen Z'er. My mom-in-law is 87, and we tried Guided Access with her but it was "too weird", so we use FaceTime's "remote control" feature if she needs help. https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/request-give-remote-con...
I'm not blindly cheerleading Apple here, beyond just noting that they're the most accessible choice of mainstream smartphones if the Apple ecosystem is the best solution for that particular elderly person and their support network.
There are several very good non-Apple options for "semi-smart" phones like the Jitterbug Smart4, as well as good old-fashioned dumb-phones with big buttons, any of which may be a better choice than an iPhone for a particular senior. My understanding is that there are many Android launcher-replacement options designed for seniors and the visually impaired as well.
I would also say that for pre-elderly cohort iPhones are also hard to learn. Gestures are completely baffling for unfamiliar people, and Apple generously removed basic on-screen buttons. Dealing with files is nightmare (yes, people still dare to use files in a year of our lord 2025). Back button being inconsistent and badly placed doesn't help. Native mail app works unpredictably (I couldn't be bothered to debug if it was a user error or not), so I've installed them gmail. Other random minor issues often rise up too. For instance I had to teach them icons in a Safari at least three times on separate occasions.
> Dealing with files is nightmare (yes, people still dare to use files in a year of our lord 2025).
This is one of the largest detriments for iPhones for me, personally.
On Android phones I can just connect via usb and drop ebooks, movies, audio, pictures whatever quickly with no fanfare on Linux/Windows/MacOS (I think? with some android file explorer thing)
My parents are seniors. My dad has never had interest in computers, and only used them to the extent he had to. But my mom has mastered the iphone/ipad stuff.
> Nokia "dumb" phone
I don't think this exists anymore. I got one for my dad because it has an emergency button on the side to call mom. But its really some android front-end with a bunch of modes, and not at all 'easy' if you weren't into this interface back in the day. He has lots of problems with it. Next plan is Apple's 'Assistive Access' on an old iPhone.
I think there are still Nokia branded "dumb" phones being released. It seems they are now developed by HMD Global, another Finnish company who brought the Nokia mobile phone business. Seems like they still run the same software. They might only be widespread in some parts of the world though. Perhaps not available at all where you are.
Yeah, thanks, it was a 2780 which runs KaiOS (and not android).
I am really disputing the premise that this interface is really in any way easier or "dumber" than an iPhone. It is more primitive and maybe people learned it's ways a long time ago and don't want to learn anything new. But it has loads of modes and it's really easy to get stuck in some place where you can't do something basic. It is not at all a "dumbphone", it is a complete smartphone with a dumb interface.
(IMO it was a total mistake on my part, and the only thing good about it is the emergency button.)
Some of my folks have iPhones and I think it is a punishment they accept in return for the high social perception they get, of using an expensive phone. I feel for them.
Apple sold the abysmal usability under the disguise of high-class label and durability.
Example: They are scared to use their camera, as the camera app applied a myriad of it's own settings and effects that they don't have a clue how to take a simple stupid photo without any effects.
And the reason why this flood of complexity hits an unsuspecting user is, the businesses were under peer pressure to boast of more features and options while not recognizing the negative effect of the complexity on the usability.
I switched to iPhone from Android for a few months earlier this year. I don't think I qualify as an elderly person yet (I'm 47) but even I had trouble figuring things out. I don't think it was super-hard to use, but I often found myself asking "Why would they do it like this? Who uses a smart-phone like this?". I just found some things very unintuitive. Take for example re-arranging icons. I don't know if I would ever have figured out this technique without looking it up:
I went through many iPhones, my first iPhone 3G is still lying around. But nowadays I need to look for howto vidoes and blogs for rather simple things. The simplicity is gone, there are too many settings and bugs. Looking for used Google Pixel 9 or 10 Pro Fold to install GrapheneOS and give it a try. It can’t be worse than my iPhone 14 pro max with broken mail.
It used to be simpler. I remember it taking years before Apple finally added this ability to move more than one icon at a time, and it’s a change for the better in my opinion. Using it as a reordering technique is a knock-on effect I’d never really thought about, but I think using this to move multiple icons to another page or into a folder makes a lot of sense. I’m not sure how you’d do it better (though I’m sure I’m lacking in UI imagination).
I definitely agree that Apple have buried the complexity of some features, but moving icons on the Home Screen is press + hold and then drag by default, same as android.
The single biggest change in both ios and android is the swiping everywhere, and lack of button depth. Now it's impossible to navigate, and impossible to know what's a button or not. The only way is to just try tapping and swiping everything.
I remember a bug/feature report for some Android ROM complaining that switching the 3-button navigation layout to have the back button on the right side, and someone mentioned that they probably wouldn't do that, since button navigation was going to be deprecated in favour of gestures anyway, so no point in putting in the effort.
The comments following that one weren't very kind. And I agree with them. I'd hate for gestures to be the only option, and find the 3-button layout option to be the saving grace saving me from dreading to use my phone. I can't imagine that option disappearing, precisely because Grandmas and the like need that option to use their phones, but the fact that there are people out there who see that option as deprecated, and not even as an accessibility option at best, scares me. That thought is the start of process that eventually ends with some critical functionality being removed and never coming back, breaking a category of device for a large group of people, in a similar way to how the X11 to Wayland migration has broken several accessibility features on Linux.
My Father-in-law resisted smart phones for much longer than most, but he's had an android phone for a couple years now and it's really cool how much he's adapted it to his own personal use style. Nobody showed him the "usual" way to do things so he made his own system of sorts.
He almost never uses search or menus for anything. Instead he has a bunch of home screens that he customized with quick links. Like he has one for each of his children with a one shortcut to text them, one to call, one to send a Facebook message, one link to their Facebook profile, and a note with special dates (birthdays, anniversaries) for each so he can remember to call them then. He's got another home page he has for stuff related to the Marines, websites and meme pages, etc.
He's very meticulous with getting everything exactly how he wants it, and is so proud to show it off. Sometimes he still needs help (last time I was there he asked me to help him set "Battle Hymn of the Republic" as his ring tone), but I'm honestly really impressed with how well he's adapted.
Meanwhile another older family member handed me their phone to fix, and it's completely unusable from malware that's highjacking everything they try to click, then they try to install something else to fix it themselves and somehow add even more malware. Took me like half an hour to track everything down and disable it so it was usable again, couldn't convince him to factory reset it. We had a nice long chat about installing things after that. I can't imagine he used anything other than the playstore, but man, it was wild.
I placed a Facebook Portal at my 90-year-old grandma's and she video calls me with it. Extremely easy to use.
I fear the day Facebook finally kills it and I have to navigate the nightmare that are tablets, their ever-changing UIs, and endless unprompted prompts.
You could look into MDM solutions. These are meant for unattended devices like kiosks in public spaces. You should be able to control devices remotely and lock them down to only the essentials.
As an Android-only user, and occasional iphone user (my wife's phone) I agree that the iphone is not as intuitive an interface as it is was. Especially compared to Android.
I would also add that overly designing things usually makes interfaces worse over time. Designers assume some sort of prerequisite knowledge from a user which is not always the case.
On the other hand, having observed kids explore the interface I'm always amazed at how quickly they intuit everything.
> On the other hand, having observed kids explore the interface I'm always amazed at how quickly they intuit everything.
I believe (for some reason) that to be true for anything a kid has an interest in. As a kid we figured out how to navigate games in black and white, Japanese and without any guide/tutorial/internet, just because we wanted to play Captain Tsubasa on our PSX.
Maybe the game was nicely and intuitively designed or maybe we just put the effort and time to figure stuff out.
Conversely, you get people (regardless of the age) unable to figure out the simplest systems (from a 2 buttons espresso maker to kettles and toasters) just because they can't contemplate having to sit down more than 5s to understand things out.
It's possible to simplify all of this significantly in the settings if you know what you're doing, but I also think a lot of older people would benefit from just not having a smartphone to deal with in the first place.
While the set up can be easier, I think there's a few self-inflicted problems at play here:
First: Giving a senior with aptitude or dexterity hindrances is already a mistake. Even if they are set up they're going to be having trouble with much harder to use apps such as banking, ticketing and government apps which seemingly delight themselves in publishing rubbish.
Third: The apple stores are help centres. Not only do they provide free guided setup (and help with forgotten passwords), but they also provide free training on how to use different functions of the phone, both in person or online.
Fourth: At any age we already know that some people use and understand technology better than others. (It's interesting to watch different people set up touch-id, some will resist reading any instructions provided on the screen over their own intuition for how the set up should work.) Grouping a room of seniors together to set up a phone is like getting kids from school years 1 through 10 together and expecting them all to perform equally.
Finally: Like giving a car to a teenager, one must take some responsibility in dumping such a product on a person who might not be able to handle it. Seniors are still autonomous and will look for help if you're not providing it - scammers enjoy "helping" seniors part with their money this way.
> Also, the whole phone setup process needs to be delayed; having to go through it for an hour puts them off from even wanting to bother
This is also an issue with Android. When I changed phones a month ago, I ran into trouble with my Google account. The only internet connection I had was my cellular data plan and during the mandatory initial set-up I could not enable hotspot on the new phone to do online 2FA on the old device.
It's not just software. I have witnessed seniors grabbing their device 'wrong' when they pick up the phone to answer a call. They cannot hear the caller because they are literally holding the volume button down when they pick up the device and don't notice. There is no easy way for me to disable the hardware volume buttons.
It won't keep. The UI hides so much behind modals, hamburgers, indescribable gestures (swipe, press, hard press, hold, corners). A user interface used to be a describable map from desired actions to low-state inputs (press this key, click on this image ...). Now it is just a state filled soup.
> why not have a 65+ or something for a senior mode?
No thank you. Why should my phone assume that because I'm nearly 70 that I'm unable to think. In fact why should my phone know how old I am in the first place, or anything about me at all?
Much of the UI on modern electronic items is just total crap regardless of how old the user is. And the few things that are currently reasonable soon get changed for no good reason. One example is Google's Android Photos app. Extracting a fram from a video use to be a single tap, last week the app was 'upgraded' and now it takes three taps.
- Well-run companies prioritize against a bell curve of core customers vs long tail customers
- Today, many of us are inside that curve. Products are made intuitive to us
- But many people (elderly) are not in the middle of that bell curve
And the kicker:
- One day, all of us will move out of that bell curve. Therefore, many products will suddenly become maddeningly frustrating to understand, at once
What's the solution? There's definitely a market opportunity for the long tail customers. But, it's tough to build a smartphone for a (relatively) smaller market. Maybe that's a startup opportunity
This is unfortunately accurate, at least, for those with dementia. They need to already know how it works otherwise it's just not happening. imho the solution is skeuomorphism i.e. make the experience as close as possible to that of a landline phone made ~30 years ago. Tie it to a physical phone book with their main contacts written in a large font. (They don't necessarily need to key in the full numbers each time, a carer can pre-program "speed dial")
Have any unknown/invalid numbers go through to a default primary point of contact.
I have given my old Sumsung to my father, who barely know how to send a mail, and enabled the ultra power mode.
What it does is restrict the phone to the home screen, you can have a maximum of 8 apps (which are all shown on the home screen) and barely anything else. He does have notification but it's only for these 8 apps.
And somehow he managed to get it working, he only make phone call, send messages and take photo. That's all.
Before I had bought him one of these senior flipflop phone. The thing was expensive, horrible and the battery was absolute crap. It died in 2 years.
My Sumsung xcover pro on the other hand, battery last 2 weeks and he is running it since 5 years without complaints.
> There were too many apps; all they wanted was the phone app, but it doesn’t default to the keypad, which was too much for them to find.
Then why buy an iPhone? There are phones designed for seniors that do just that. You don't need to pay 10-30x more for functionality you don't need and can't understand. Buy a Doro if you just want to call.
The thing is that even the elderly want to do more than just that. Some want to be on Facebook. Some want to do their banking, especially if their PC is 17 years old and a smartphone makes for a cheaper purchase than a new PC.
A Doro or equivalent is if you literally only call (and maybe text), but even the elderly generally want to (or are functionally forced/compelled to) do more on their phones.
This. If they can't make a trivial call, do not ever ever let them touch web browser or anything like that. They'll click on a first lottery ad and be scammed instantly.
I'll never forget teaching my elderly aunt how to use a desktop computer. She put her hand over the mouse and rotated it left and right like a steering wheel.
Things many of us take for granted need to be learned if you've never experienced it.
Counterpoint: I have two senior citizens living with me (my inlaws). They are 75 years old. They have no trouble using their IPhone 13 Maxes. Yes, I did set it up for them 2 years ago but after that they've been on their own. Maybe once every few months they can't figure something out and they ask for help but for the most part experience has been largely painless. They have a decent range of apps they use - youtube, facebook, viber, some games, some utilities, family ToDo shopping lists, translation apps, camera, messaging. I wouldn't call them power users by any stretch but they definitely feel comfortable with their devices.
That's where I really appreciated Android's ability to sub-out its entire UI to something totally customizable, accessible and able to be locked down. Drag my face contacts of myself and siblings onto the home screen so Mom can just click a face and it calls her contact. On the desktop, Windows is terrible for seniors, MacOS too. iPad can be decent but there are alot of areas where seniors get confuddled and have to call someone in.
It's also worth noting that every little ecosystem acts as if:
1) You actually care to learn their ecosystem in the first place.
2) You don't have to learn tens or hundreds of other ecosystems.
This shows up all over the tech space, and no one seems to recognize that I don't want to learn another UI, to learn other conventions, etc. It's all being pushed on us because teams just have this desperate, insane need to add a small bit of complexity every year until their product is an unwieldy mess. Attempts to "simplify" and "modernize" often go badly sideways as well.
The single most powerful tool I had for helping my mom with tech, was remote control of her laptop screen. This was a hack, using (on Linux) x0vncserver and an ssh reverse tunnel. No approval needed at her end. If the thing had internet connectivity I could see and manipulate her screen.
All this has been sacrificed at the altar of privacy and security. How I wished I could have similar remote control over her Android phone. That would have saved sooo much trouble. But it was impossible.
> How I wished I could have similar remote control over her Android phone.
A bit of work (and it's not free) to set up initially, but you could use an MDM for this. Most allow remote access/ screen control over Android devices, with the bonus that you also can remotely install & uninstall apps for her, control settings, etc.
TBH I think there's a market opportunity for a consumer-oriented MDM for families. There's a lot of features and control that's only possible for businesses with these devices, and I'm not sure why no one is making any kind of centralized management but for consumers.
Smartphones feel like a saturated devices in terms of functionality. Way too many things depend on it and interface is riddled with so many functions.
I miss the very first iPhone. Perhaps it was the novelty at that time. It was slower and had way less functionality but easy to use.
I guess it is hard to balance functionality and ease of use. It is becoming a hodgepodge of apps/things. Sorry to echo the sentiments expressed here.
Yes. Based on that thread, which is a fairly good representation of my experience on the Internet, we all could use that. Anyone who interacts with computers in a different way is someone a UX person must sit with and a developer should sit with. Instead of opening ourselves to new ideas, we tend to do what the folks in the thread did: attack the author as wrong, say the author is overstating the problem because a parent is just fine right this second or just get upset anyone would attack Apple/ Brand I Have Attached Myself To.
My sister recently asked a group of us coders how to help the blind folks she works with complete a Gov.UK One Login signup that requires a passport and matching selfie. I consider myself relatively conversant with accessibility issues but none of us could find a sure thing workaround.
Accessibility for seniors is a real problem and an iPhone is a terrible choice for people who can’t use their thumbs or see the screen very well.
But an article about some very elderly people who cannot remember their own birthday has triggered the exact same Apple-UX-is-in-decline rants that a post about Liquid Glass or literally any other HN post about Apple does. I agree with some of the criticism but it’s not really engaging the point.
> They don’t need passcodes, accounts, and a sea of information.
I would go further and make they case the don't need all the smart features either and all they need is to make calls and that an iPhone, or any touch phone, isn't the right tool for the job. One might argue "well I want to face time and send them pictures" or whatever. Print them favorite pictures. A missing product is a video calling devices, similar to a dumb phone, that all it does is take and receive video calls. But the issue you'll run into is Apple's closed protocols or having to support a slew of other applications, like Signal or WhatsApp.
Having elderly relatives in other countries, I've resorted to making a touchless video phone with a raspberry pi, a big screen, speakers, a mic and a camera. I made a similar one for all relatives that want to talk as well. The "dialer" is just buttons that connect to other relatives directly. The software on them connects through a server I set up. I spent near 1 grand, or a price of a modern iphone, and managed to get 4 households connected.
Anyone who realises that AI would be ideal for this is going to make a fortune. "Send this photo to its-kostya" instead of "Open Photo app, click send, click the send channel, scroll down the list of names, click the one/s you want to use, click send if you can find it again."
We've inherited dumb a tradition of dumb procedural UIs which are effectively manual scripts that have to be repeated for each action.
There's been next to no useful progress on automating this. Siri looked like it was going to do it, but then it died on the vine. There's a very basic "Call XYZ" feature but the entire OS should have that level of accessibility, from Settings upwards.
Apple hasn't had a User Champion for well over a decade now, and it shows. There's the occasional Nice Feature™ - "Hey we need a nice feature for the presentation this year" - but there's no longer a Nice OS, and no one at Apple seems to have any interest in creating one.
My parents both have android phones, and all I needed to do (recently) was teach them how to ask Gemini stuff. So now they can hassle Gemini instead of me when trying to figure out how to look at their pictures or turn on speaker phone.
iPhone is full of unintuitive, undiscoverable “features” that you either stumble upon by accident, or someone shows you, or you just never find them. Even within their own apps they are not consistent, let alone what third parties do. It’s a pretty terrible experience but Android isn’t much better so we just have to tolerate it.
Yeah, I'm in my 40s, and I can barely operate any type of smart phone. UI and UX design is out the window, and people expect phone to do more and more. I'd argue that the current form fact simply isn't suitable for what we ask if it.
If you don't care about the phone, like many seniors, and just want a tiny slice of the functionality it can bring you, then modern smart phones are insane difficult to use.
When people ask if I can help with their phone, and they aren't my parents, then the answer is always "No". I don't understand smart phone and I don't care to learn. They are forced upon me by others, they are hard to operate, they hurt my eyes and makes me feel sick if I have to look at the screen for more than a few minutes.
Oh, it opens a little toolbar with that option. I literally just discovered this because of your comment.
This highlights my experience with these controls pretty well... I have no idea what is n-finger touchable or holdable anymore and I just stumble into features accidentally.
I think some of the comments on the post summarize it nicely: if an iPhone is a struggle, maybe that person doesn’t need it at all.
Alternatively, I think OP actually should look into the accessibility mode (“Assistive Access”) because it doesn’t take “hours” to configure. It basically turns the iPhone into a wildly easy dumb phone-like experience.
I remember I last counted iOS and macOS features in 2022, since 2012 I barely count 5 features that is useful to me.
Without Steve Jobs, everyone work with their own incentives, if shipping features is how you get promotion and raise. That is what we end up with.
I know this is controversial take on HN. 10 years spend on Swift and SwiftUI. It would have been better if we continue some small and iterative improvement with both C23 and Objective C.
Every year we see Apple SoC improvements, but my iOS or macOS is still not instantaneous. Safari 18 got better, and now 26 as well. But comparatively speaking it is still behind Chrome and Firefox in terms of responsiveness, and resource usage.
In terms of Design, the Home Screen is still a mess.
Compare to Old Apple, new Apple's rate of improvement and productivity has dropped significantly , with double or triple the resource but half of the execution in terms of Software. ( Hardware they are doing fine if not exceptional )
But if Apple software is really this bad, it just shows Microsoft and Google have been absolutely appalling in the past 10-20 years.
My parents were always good with tech, we always had the latest PC at home. As they now enter their 80s their patience / resilience has evaporated to nothing. If it doesn’t work immediately the get stressed and give up (or ask me).
I’m not sure as developers how you get round that.
If you came up with a rotary phone, a keypad might feel unintuitive or even difficult to learn a new technique- even though it’s faster and easier. For the first 60+ years of life for this cohort the only option was to remember phone numbers or keep records of them. The concept of not having to “know” a phone number anymore, and of a searchable contact list is pretty far out. In the past 20 years there have been plenty of people who saw no problem with what they had. Now we can push virtual buttons on glass to do things that used to take a phone call. Some people really enjoy talking on the phone. Some people need it. The fact that the smartphone is so mutable means it’s a phone new relationship with a device and its makers. Not everyone is ready to commit to that sort of relationship, and I think that is a freedom we should fight to maintain. App-only services aren’t really accessible, and says they only care about a certain kind of customer.
My mom wanted conservative social media. I just had to install it, and off she went.
She barely answers phone calls correctly. She can't pull up her contacts or voicemail. Google maps is something that somebody else needs to do. The refusal to learn is solid and hard.
My mother's brain immediately blanks out the moment I tap something on screen. I can see it. If it's 3 taps she says "oh it can do so much, I'll never remember it"
And that's it. Complete refusal to learn. She uses her phone daily but struggles "to go back," pressing every x and back button until there's nothing, then finally swipe up to reach the iPad/iPhone's Home Screen. She's not that old.
I would've refused to give her the cesspool that is conservative social media, but I guess if she's explicitly asking for it she's probably too far gone to remediate
I'm a retired 72. I've been programming in C, C++, Fortran, ASM etc. etc. for over 40 years, and used just about every OS/GUI going.
But, but, but I really cannot get along with mobile phones! Whenever I pick one up I swipe or press the wrong thing. Just answering a call usually goes horribly wrong! And I have literal nightmares about it. So I am pretty much stuck with my VOIP landline, but am worrying things like my bank will stop supporting the tech.
Luckily, I guess I've done my three-score-years-and-ten, so I don't probably need to retrain. But I can completely understand non-techie oldies having problems.
We have an iPad sitting in its box for over half a year. Taking it into use was such a harrowing experience that I could never find the will to complete it.
Every time I hear people say that Mac os/iOS is so logical and intuitive I wonder if it is all just a big conspiracy where I am the only one who get's a phone or a computer that is so full of bat-crap stupid decisions that I want to scream. Mac os is not intuitive. iPhones are not intuitive. I have had to use one for years and I am still confused about when I should use the settings app and when I should change the settings in the app.
And to whomever thought it was good idea to get camera access by swiping the lock screen: Did you ever meet a three year old? Why can't I turn it off?
Because they might need it (or at-least want it) for one stupid little thing, be that Facebook or their bank (and general computing defaults to phones these days for normies apparently, plus it's generally cheaper than buying a laptop).
My experience helping my Grandma begs to differ. Not to mention that Facebook and banking is what they're actually trying to do. That's the end-goal they're motivated to achieve. Random account setup bullshit and notifications about shit they don't care about is nothing but a hindrance placed in their path for nebulous reasons they don't understand.
if those people don't need passwords and accounts, they probably want to do very little with their phone. hence they don't need an iPhone.
Otherwise, if they want to use email, whatsapp, etc., they also want passwords and accounts, hence security measures must be there. Someone has to help them.
You'll find old folk think they just need phone calls but then they want to see their kids photos on insta etc and access their bank if it switches to app only and the like.
I do this fortnightly, and the feedback I'd give their UI /UX would be very explicit: you're letting a significant cohort down badly by some confusing choices.
"Why can't I delete those photos in icloud from here"
"Why does the thing I have to select move around?"
"What are all these ghost windows in safari and email and how do I get rid of them?"
"How do I yell at the clouds when this does not work?"
"How do I tell which bits are decoration and which bits are active?"
"What do you mean I can't take over my dead husbands account or move data from his account to my account"
I hate to be crass about this, but to be frank: This is a temporary problem that the world will solve for Apple. Modes which help accommodate age, degrading motor and visual function, etc, are awesome; and Apple truly leads the pack on this. But software complexity is different; if you have this sense that "the iphone is simpler than alternatives", you seriously need to re-frame what the word "simple" means.
Here's how you should frame it: The only definition of "simple" that matters is "What I'm Used To". Currently, and again, I'm going to be crass here so prepare your sensibilities: we have a dying population of boomers who are not used to any kind of technology; but aging into their place is a population of substantially more tech-literate Gen X and younger individuals who won't need a different experience beyond, again, normal degradation of motor, visual, and hearing function.
My mom (~70s) refuses to get an iPhone. Why? Because she's always had a Galaxy S9. I've tried to buy her an S24, to at least get a newer phone, but its so different that she won't go for it. So, we've replaced this old S9 like 3 times now lol. My dad (~70s) switched to an iPhone, and we've told her, at least if you switch to the iPhone you'll be on the same device and be able to solve problems for each other a bit more easily; no dice.
The nokia anecdote in the post is awesome because it illustrates this beautifully: There is nothing Apple could do which could help. Oftentimes it isn't even about the phone being simpler; its just an inability or unwillingness to learn anything new. What we do, as younger people helping them where they're at, is probably the only thing that can really make a difference.
The modern Apple experience is defined by removing the head phone jack, the silent switch, and worse, the home button.
My dad has used an iPhone and an iPad for years and occasionally uses a Mac at home. He's not terribly old and is fairly competent with tech. One day he randomly said to me, "I'm afraid about when I'm older. I won't be able to understand how to use my devices because they've become so complicated and keep changing every year."
And I realized it's so true. Removing the home button on the iPhone and iPad was a massive mistake. It's the one interaction my 85 year-old grandma who doesn't understand computers could interact with. She couldn't even change the volume, but she knew that one button on her iPad exited things.
When I set up a new Mac, I wanted to display the Bluetooth icon in the menu bar for quick pairing because it wasn't there by default. When I searched online for how to add it, I got four different results for the past few years of MacOS updates that kept changing where the setting was. When I updated my Mac the other day, the Bluetooth icon was gone again! Once again, I had to search for how to add it to the menu bar because that setting is not located within the Bluetooth settings page. When I went to see how I could display if I was using Ethernet in my menu bar, I discovered that I needed a third-party app and had to spend time researching which one to download.
Meanwhile I get all of those features on KDE out of the box, and any more niche changes I want to make are much easier to discover because the settings and UI have looked the same for years. KDE is so simple. I'm currently using arch Linux, which is wonderful for me but will certainly be more complicated for the average user. That's where I'm very excited for KDE Linux[0]. Switching to KDE has been a revolution. I know more about computers than most people I know. And yet I feel like I possess significantly less domain-specific knowledge than my mom who is a MacOS power user or my dad who uses Windows at work. My mom's knowledge of macOS is impressive, yet I don't need half of that expertise to use KDE. It's the same feeling I had when I switched away from accounting where people were writing insane formulas, using VBA macros, and Alteryx to software engineering where I learned python and could write twenty lines of code to accomplish the same task. However, KDE is even easier to pick up than a programming language!
Unfortunately, I don't know what to do about phones or tablets or what to tell my dad. He's starting to think he should go to the sessions at the Apple Store every time a major update releases annually, which significantly changes his daily-use devices. The regular crowd at those events is normally the elderly who grew up without computers. My dad doesn't quite fit in. But Apple has built devices that require you to have grown with every iteration and built up a deep level of context. Every time he upgrades his iPhone after five or six years, the new phone is unrecognizable to him.
Apple famously had a mouse with one button. Begrudgingly, they accepted the right click despite it being a less than intuitive interface. They've taken that design pattern to the extreme, and it has infested their approach to everything. The designers are too much of Apple experts to understand how far they've gone with the context requirement for successfully navigating their devices.
> The modern Apple experience is defined by removing the head phone jack, the silent switch, and worse, the home button.
I only "upgrade" phones every 4 years or so, typically to a new old-stock model off eBay and I've been floored by how new phones don't include chargers anymore.
I used to work as a UI/UX designer when we bought our, now late, grandmother an iPad Air 2 so she could "stay connected." This was around the iOS 8 era, and helping her through the setup process turned out to be an eye-opening experience for me – and for my then-profession:
"Yes, yes, darling, I see all these cryptic hieroglyphs [icons] – but I don’t know what they mean. Am I supposed to? Where can I look them up?"
I used to volunteer at an independent living facility for seniors. With a few others, we spent several days teaching them how to use tablets and smart phones. The one thing I came away with is what I called the "try it" mentality. A lot of people who came of age with computers,
through the 80s and 90s, and especially tech enthusiasts, are more comfortable with this. If you don't know how to do something on a device, try something. Imagine how you would do it in real life without the device, and then try to replicate that on the device.
Unfortunately, a lot of non-technical people, especially older people, are deathly afraid they are going to break something. They worry about this so much that they are not willing to just try things, and figure it out.
We had to get them comfortable with making mistakes, and that it was OK to make mistakes with these devices, because they are mostly locked down and you can't break them. Especially if you're 73 years old, trying to play bingo.
what I always found hard is that my grandfather doesn’t have great memory. It took me 10 years to teach him what a username and the password was and what it meant for logging in, or what logging in was for that matter.
I am convinced that someday, device manufacturers will realize that complicated, small touchscreen UIs are a horrible idea. They're even worse for seniors, because our fingers are losing dexterity, may be slightly swollen and stiff, and are prone to tremors. So, at a point in our lives when merely holding the phone can be a challenge, navigating some ambiguous UI while our fingers are obscuring the very thing we're trying to use is insanity.
But Apple is the worst because of its Apple ID requirement. I tried to resurrect an old iPhone of mine only to get stuck in a week-long perpetual ID recovery loop with Apple. Enter the new password wrong too many times, and you have to wait another week to try again. Want to create a new Apple ID? Nope. No duplicate IDs attached to the same phone number. I finally just recycled the phone. I'm old. I don't have time to waste on an iPhone.
My mom used an iPhone quite successfully up until a few weeks before her death at age 82. Maybe she was just brilliant. Or maybe some of these horror stories are contrived.
I watched my dad - a fine craftsman - utterly fail to comprehend pointing and dragging with a computer mouse when introduced to one in his late 60s. My mom would end up printing out emails for him to read. She, enthusiastically adopting this new technology in the early 2000s when she herself was in her early 60s, gradually lost the neuroplasticity to adapt to new things, and clung to her Windows XP laptop (32 bit) until that was obsoleted by Gmail POP/SMTP access going to Oauth, which the obsolete software couldn't accommodate.
It was still possible to teach her Whatsapp, SMS and Gmail on an Android smartphone when she was around 80, but that was the window of opportunity closing; by a couple of years later, while she could still use those skills (and still had the finger dexterity and vision to do it) nothing new would go in. This was an issue when her hands got less steady and she sometimes would tap or click the wrong thing and then get confused. The concept that a message, ever so slightly clumsily tapped so the tap was seen as a right swipe and therefore "archive" was getting difficult.
So it goes with old folks. At one point someone got her a "Doro Phone Easy", a retro flip phone with big buttons and simplified UI. She never took to that one, but I can see the point of it.
And why not just set up your elders with tech that they are familiar with? You can take an old landline phone - even a rotary dial one! - and plug it into a VOIP adapter and register that with, say, voip.ms, and provide the old familiar calling experience. Didn't work for my mom, because long before becoming uncomfortable with technology, she was already deaf enough to not be able to hold phone conversations - so email was crucial to her.
As for iphones and confusion. As they got more and more locked down, they didn't just get locked down against purse snatchers and such. I've seen several otherwise still fine iphones become ewaste because the giver couldn't figure out how to unlink them from "Find my phone" or activation lock or whatever it's called. These are people who can't fathom the difference between their Google account password and their Apple password. Not old people. Just people who can't give a crap about any of that, they just have a phone that someone helped them set up, and it works and that's that. That was one of Steve Jobs's talents - to see technology as a neurotypical non-geek sees it and make it work for them.
>So it goes with old folks. At one point someone got her a "Doro Phone Easy", a retro flip phone with big buttons and simplified UI. She never took to that one, but I can see the point of it.
We've got to keep churning UX constantly, for no reason whatsoever. The elderly be damned, usability be damned! What matters is that UI conventions always change and often get worse, and most importantly that this happens for no reason whatsoever.
technology builds on itself in organic ways, but it feels increasingly inaccessible for people who weren't present for the previous wave of UI. Especially with how developers are using AI as an opportunity to "reimagine how we engage with tech"--that divergence is gonna increase. There are so many creators nowadays helping make AI more accessible and that stems from this broad sentiment from most people outside of silicon valley that they can't keep up with the pace of change
Maybe the solution is more education programs that help people catch-up. And teaching kids that the most important skill is to constantly experiment with what's new
I think that if it were simpler, I'd be less inclined to do more with it than it is actually useful for.
In particular.
Selecting anything is a struggle. No exceptions. And selecting more than one screenful is a horror.
Scrolling often clicks on something I didn't want to click. And just try grabbing that invisible scroll bar.
Any auto correct or suggest is ludicrous. I had to kill them all.
Swipe text refuses to type "and". I get Anna's or Ava ( that was a live demo) regularly.
Searching for an image is good for laughs, except for ocr'ed text.
Paste? HOLEY MOLEY. Any "action after a delay" infuriates me, especially when it's hit-or-miss. Give me a paste button!
These are "99%" things, not outlying operations.
Disclaimer: the ipad with keyboard case, trackpad, pencil, ARROW KEYS!!!, and BT mouse is better. Almost a laptop, but right/control click is NOT macos like.
Okay, enough rant. It's basically the clumsiness, compared to the precision of a desktop, that gets me.
Advantage? I can use it on the easy chair in the living room.
No $1800 computer chair. The desktop is harder on my anatomy.
Just to say that some "features" stink regardless of user age, though no doubt harder in seniors. I figure out one of the 140,000 obscure options/tricks via internet search, something that decades of experience helps me do, but especially in recent years, is next to useless for normal people.
And! When switching apps, more often than not, safari loses all my typing in a text area!!!
One feature I like about Chrome is somehow it saves it if you go back, so if I've got a long ass comment I've typed out, and then I get distracted, I'll go back to the tab, the text I wrote won't be there, but when I go back, it reappears.
I recently got an Apple Watch for my kids and… OMG the setup process was painful. So. Many. Questions. I couldn’t believe it and I could tell when the whole ordeal was going to end.
I'm a software engineer, I've been using MacOS for five years already, and I still don't know how to use Finder, and I randomly open up some emoji app and also Dictionary. Literally the worst UI design I've ever seen, because such nonsense never happened to me on any other platform. Two months ago I switched to Linux and the distribution I chose is ten times more intuitive than MacOS.
Smartphones are just the dumbest fucking human interface design and iOS and Android are the most vile OSes for multiple reasons. Why corrupt innocent old people with that trash?
Apparently somehow needed to have an "Apple account." Don't want one -- don't want to be subservient, subordinate to, dependent on Apple or hurt my privacy -- but relented and applied -- refused!!!!!
The phone rang, apparently with someone from Apple Help who somehow noticed that my frustration (wasting time) was about to explode with some gigatons of TNT, enough to level everything from me to CA on to Hawaii. Soooo, apparently Apple HQ is somehow always online -- outrageous privacy threat. Since I was trying to make the phone work for even the simplest things, I could not receive the call.
Heck, could not even get an Apple account.
Super, semi-quasi, pseudo bright: The phone isn't working so to help call the phone that isn't working.
Apple, to communicate with a new user, use some REAL computing, including email. Understand???
New user? That iPhone is my first cell phone, first Apple product, and hope my last.
Using some computing that has a real keyboard, 30" screen, an 8 core AMD processor, and Windows and actually works, eventually got to Apple online help. Was advised to press the "Down Volume" button. I asked which one of the five was that button, and the help staff didn't know. Soooo, not even the Apple help operation knows what the buttons do. Disney with Donald Duck could make total riot out of this disaster!
I declared the iPhone 16 Plus a disaster, expensive, useless, worthless, at best a puzzle box, and will return it to Xfinity.
Actually, of course, the iPhone is a grand triumph of electronic engineering, optics, software, etc. -- still for new users is useless and worthless as a phone, i.e., won't make or receive calls, just won't; several hours a day of absurd mud wrestling in the dark for several days yielded no utility at all.
Useless? First big problem: Apple, apparently with rock solid, ironclad determination, deliberately, totally refuses to DOCUMENT, say, with an easy to find, COMPETENTLY, BEAUTIFULLY, EFFECTIVELY written PDF of D.O.C.U.M.E.N.T.A.T.I.O.N. Go bankrupt, maybe. Write documentation for new users, NEVER. Won't do it.
Me? Can I read tricky material from good documentation? Hold a Ph.D. in applied math with plenty of pure math where learned lots of tricky stuff, but from well-written books.
Apple, shut up, sit down, and listen up -- until you DOCUMENT, for new users your expensive phones are worse than worthless junk. Sure, maybe high school girls form little groups and share some of the basics they discovered somehow, but I'm out of high school.
Sometimes, I wish this documentation was a bit more technical, but it’s not bad at all.
The film on the front of a new iPhone, that you remove to reveal the screen during unboxing, provides pictorial icons of what each button on the phone does. For volume down, you can see a minus in a circle. It’s the bottommost button on the left.
I’m not sure why you had so much trouble creating an Apple ID, but you can still skip that when it prompts you to do so. I believe it’s under “Forgot password or don’t have an account”.
> I don't understand how you could have
trouble finding the volume down button.
Read again: It was Apple Online Help that
didn't know where the Volume Down button
was.
I wasn't asking them; in a 'chat' session
as part of an effort to get the phone
working, they were asking me, asking me to
press that button, and not for sound
volume; to be sure, I asked them just
where the button was, and they didn't
know.
In simple terms, I unpacked the phone,
read the documentation, plugged it in to
charge its battery, tried to use it to
make and receive calls, and it didn't
work. "Just work"? No, didn't work.
Whatever, this was one HORRIBLE end-user
experience, and I'm way past putting up
with it, returning the iPhone, and going
to look at something from Samsung. Before
spending any money, I will want to see
their DOCUMENTATION.
I've been using an iPhone for the first time in 10 years, and it confuses me as to how Apple has somehow managed to make them as opaque and arcane as they are today. Most interactions with the phone are noticeably and negatively affected by bizarre UI decisions. With how much it frustrates me, I can't imagine what it would be like trying to learn it as an elderly person.
Someday the cellphone will "come to us". The standard telephone did that and was a marvelous success for a century and a half. Cellphones will likely suck until manufacturers figure out what their customers really want/need.
Time spent learning, training and relearning your cellphone is time forever lost. I chose a different path and refused a cellphone for years. A year ago I got one. I use it for "away" situations only (when I'm out of pocket). Otherwise it sits in my office, just like my old AT&T phone did. If someone needs to get me, there's always e-mail.
The iPhone - and macOS too - used to be a paragon of simplicity.
Today the setup experience on a brand-new iPhone or Mac is abysmal. Entering the same username and password multiple times - then sometimes a different username and password - competing notifications, irrelevant feature nags, a popup from some random product manager about their pet thingy. Permission questions from some meddlesome privacy team about the feature you just said you wanted to turn on. Uncertainty about whether you’ll break something irreparably by “skipping” the expected setup path. A choice of several inscrutable interface modes because no one has the balls to commit to a single solution. Just terrible.
I guess this is what happens without a dictator to tell people they’re fired for shipping garbage, and when a company worries about meeting quarterly KPIs rather than doing something great.
I have a couple of older relatives with Macs, and every time you fire them up for the first time in a while (these people might go several months without using their computer) the Apple ID sign-in nagging is insane. It'll pop up the same sign-in notification a dozen times and seems to lock up the settings app until you deal with it. I usually think of myself as quite patient but when I see that little window it inspires strong feelings.
These are my favorite two DENY rules on my PiHole blacklist:
(\.|^)apple\.com$
(\.|^)icloud\.com$
Also, set your Mac's `do not disturb` feature to turn on at 3:01AM, off at 3:00AM == no more notifications
You can then download OS updates directly from Apple's CDN via https://mrmacintosh.com/
Ug. Apple is bad (I don’t really want Apple Music thanks..). Being using Linux lately and it’s great.
I got a window machine and a month later “my computers config isn’t done” because I didn’t sign up for windows cloud and office 365 , oh do I want game pass?
I guess comercial OSs are just advertising platforms now which is kind of sad.
It really is sad. They are convinced that “growth” (insert worshipful gesture by executives) can only be most efficiently pursued via “services revenue” rather than quaint old ideas like convincing you to buy new OS versions on their merits, or to stay loyal to the platform because it was good. In 2000, this meant Microsoft set your homepage to MSN and dropped an MSN ISP icon on your desktop. Now every touchpoint in both Mac OS and Windows is an opportunity to advertise another Service.
My kid (10) got one of my old computers from work. I put linux on it. He doesn't use it a ton, but other than showing him that the windows key opens the menu to search for programs, I've never shown him a single thing.
I think kids aren't the best comparison with senior citizens when it comes to technology. I've got senior citizen parents and I've got nieces and nephews who are all under 10 years old. The kids are so much more adept at pretty much any technology they get their hands on when compared to my parents (iphones, nintendo switch, tv remotes, etc). They start off about as poorly as my parents do but quickly overcome them. My parents aren't tech illiterate, either -- my dad especially was quite a DOS power user back in the day, and to some degree has kept it up with his Windows usage too.
I think part of it might be due to the neural pathways still forming in the kids brains, but I also think a lot of it has to do with who they're around. The kids are around their parents who are using this tech all the time, while my parents don't have that benefit except for in comparatively small doses.
Yeah, also kids naturally just try things whereas older people have some concern that they might mess it up.
wow, linux must be super easy to use! very insightful
Unironically yes, the most intuitive designs you'll find are on linux.
Keyword: intuitive. This is the problem. People who have seen stuff before have way too much baggage and preconceived notions. People who have used MacOS before, and especially Windows, struggle on linux.
Because linux isn't that. And, heavy on the Windows here. Pretty much every way that Windows does stuff is stupid, unintuitive, and poorly thought out. It is truly the black sheep of Operating Systems. It does stuff different just cuz. Just to fuck with you.
Want to add a ? or a . in a file name? What about name it CON? No. Why not? Fuck you, that's why, this is Windows.
But it's not actually the black sheep, because it's the most popular desktop OS. So people move to Linux or MacOS and they're anticipating Windows weirdness.
Like, they'll open up a web browser and download a random EXE to install a program and then be mad it doesn't work. When the much more obvious thing, opening up a software center and searching for what you want, WOULD work.
Seriously, Windows and MacOS can learn a lot from KDE, Gnome, and their associated applications.
it doesn't nag the shit out of you to sign up for paid stuff that you don't need.
The Apple ID sign in is insane in the first place. Why does Apple want to feel so frickin special and require a working iPhone for 2FA and passkeys, instead of adopting standards?
One day the eu will yell at them to do things normally and then Cook will go on stage to showcase what an awesome idea they had that nobody thought of before: “standards!”. Wait no, that’s usb c.
Side-rant over.
My elderly parents have managed to destroy more than one iPhone / Mac (dropped a glass of wine on the keyboard on the last one). Using the "Restore from iCloud" is a god send to get all their messages and settings back. So I'm willing to go through some pain / privacy invasion for that.
Kind of off topic, but is "spilled liquid on keyboard" still this unfathomable engineering barrier that nobody can break to make a more robust laptop for one of the most common causes of damage?
What do you mean? "Old" (up to Sandy Bridge) Thinkpads had no issue with that, it just meant no keyboard backlighting (which is why the ThinkLight exists).
See the drainage holes at the bottom: https://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/_processed_/csm_IMG_...
I must be imagining that I destroyed an older Thinkpad keyboard with a spill.
You can destroy the keyboard but they're replaceable and usually contained the spill to just the keyboard so it didn't damage any of the more expensive components like the main board. The goal wasn't an invulnerable keyboard but to limit the damage to a cheap replaceable subcomponent that kept the laptop alive.
Man I've been using MacBookPros for so long I forgot how many greebles laptops used to have on the bottom.
I've had Thinkpads with backlit keys that still had functional drain holes. I know because they were used a few times.
Transparent silicone exists so I don't see why it would be a problem
It’s complicated, especially as laptops have gotten thinner and tolerances tighter. Dell and Lenovo/IBM used to have laptops with drains.
Lenovo definitely has splash resistant laptops, and most semi-rugged devices are spill-safe, but spilling coffee is still a service event as the cream ruins the keyboard.
Doesnt hardware getting smaller and with tighter tolerances mean they it's easier to waterproof something? Less surface area to protect and tighter joints means there's less gaps to fill.
No, Thinkpads have even had drain holes (!) under the keyboard for over a decade now. There's a reason basically every serious corp issues Thinkpads.
Mine doesn't, P53. Ask me how I know :/
IIRC Old thinkpad has drain hole in the keyboard to prevent this.
https://youtu.be/ig3xI8dUdm0 Rossman running benchmark suite after spilling water all over his Thinkpad keyboard (about 28:00 in)
Electronics and liquids are just not a great combination.
Unless of course you stick to pure alcohol or distilled water…
Most electronics are just fine. A few capacitors, and LCD displays are not fine with water, and probably a few other things I'm not aware of. However most electronics parts are encased in plastic or ceramic and just fine. In general mineral build up from washing in tap water once or twice is not significant, though if you are talking about hundreds of washings it will become a problem (depending on the quality of your local tap water). Deionized water is best if you can get it, but even that will harm a few components.
In general if you can wash it once (meaning components that cannot handle water are not used in this), the screws rusting out will be the next thing that gets you from washing.
Yeah but there are solutions. After years of being vulnerable to water the iphones are now waterproof. Cars have had engine electronics in boxes with wax in for decades. The cheapest stuff you buy in supermarkets comes in waterproof packaging.
All the things you listed arent things you interact with by pressing on them thousands of times in a day. Its a hard problem to make a keyboard that feels nice, looks nice and is waterproof. Its even harder if you know that the payoff isnt that marketable, I dont think I have ever seen a mainstream laptop advertisment talking about that you can spill stuff on it. Phones barely have buttons or holes anymore and it took us quite a while for the flagship-phones to be water-resistant.
I interact with my iphone by pressing it many times per day.
I'll give you that keyboards are hard but my thinkpad had a good keyboard with a drip tray and drainage hole.
Here's one on Amazon with good reviews https://www.amazon.co.uk/Keyboard-Waterproof-Ultra-Compact-P...
You touch it. You're not actuating any mechanisms.
I'd imagine it's cost, right? I'm sure Apple or Microsoft COULD make a waterproof body, but would people pay more for it?
If it cost an extra $100 to make my laptop keyboard water proof, I think it'd be a hard sell for me.
All the keys are wearing hats, so the switches should be fine. Probably needs a couple of drain holes and some acrylic spray over the circuitry. 2¢ per keyboard.
Problem is, then they sell 40% less keyboards.
If instead they thin down the metal in the switches ever so slightly, then they break 2 months after the warranty expires and they sell 40% more...
Not just cost, but typically some volume/mass as well. For a keyboard I think there'd be some sacrifice in "key feel".
Still waiting for dish washer safe keyboard and mouse…
The old IBM model Ms were often washed in a dishwasher - don't use soap, but hot water cleaned them out. Most circuit boards are (or were - I haven't looked in 20 years) washed in hot water near the end of their assembly. Just air dry for a day before use. Ideally you should was in deionized water (or at least rinse with distilled), but if you don't do this often most regular tap water is good enough)
The old model M's also had easy to replace keycaps so you could take them off and wash as often as you want. Only downside is the need to put them back on in the right place each time, which is tedious.
Not all electronic components are water safe, but most are. I have no idea how you figure out if your device is or not without taking it apart. If you do this "often" expect that screws will rust, or minerals will build up - each causing problems. However if you just wash once a year you can get a lot of junk out.
I dishwash my keyboards (Kinesis contoured) every year or so. Just rinse thoroughly, don't use high-temperature drying, and wait for it dry completely before powering on.
I have put multiple cheaper keyboards through the dishwasher over the years. No heat, no soap, and I make sure to thoroughly dry it of course. I wouldn't do it with a mechanical keyboard for obvious reasons, but I have done it many times with membrane keyboards.
I suspect the Model M was dishwasher safe (if you popped off the keycaps so they don't get lost - put them in a separate dishwasher bag). ... and there's a fair bit of material out there of people trying some variation of it.
Didnt the TV shop have a rolling keyboard?
Plug the ending of the usb somehow (3d printed part?) and it would work?
I’m not paying for that.
Unfathomable engineering barrier?
My guy have you use a water bottle? There's plenty of experience in making waterproof containers although maybe not by SWEs.
The manufacturers dont want to do that because this increases costs and also makes them sell less laptops.
Iphones have glass backs for a reason. Sales boost
Although a premium brand could do it.
There is nothing preventing storing standard 2FA secrets on iCloud. You shouldn’t blindly accept substandard behaviour because of imagined technical requirements.
> Why does Apple want to feel so frickin special and require a working iPhone for 2FA and passkeys, instead of adopting standards?
Walled gardeners be gardening
Nah gardening would be if they were improving the platform. They be walling.
I don't know. Some people just spray insecticide and herbicide everywhere.
I don't have an Apple ID and I don't have a Microsoft ID. I won't have either, ever. I do have a Google ID and I can't wait for the day that I can finally retire it. All of these feel like the exact opposite of what the internet should have been, this centralization and abuse of critical mass is a serious problem.
Google a/c was the easiest to retire for me. Stopped using Android [0], Gmail - done!
Apple ID, on the other hand - if you use an Apple device then a whole lot of (safety) features are literally tied to an Apple a/c and don't even exist without it. I can't remember I ever had a MSFT ID.
I dream of a day when device makers are forced to expose APIs where one can add a device account provider a/c or device id provider a/c which offers various features like theft protection, remote lock et cetera or a self hosted solution. Yeah, that's just a dream.
[0] I do use one for work/testing and there's a throwaway Google a/c added on that created using a disposable email from SimpleLogin.
> I don't have an Apple ID and I don't have a Microsoft ID. I won't have either, ever.
I don't know whether I have a Microsoft account or not.
I didn't want to have one, obviously. But at some point I wanted to use Visual Studio and setting that up required me to create a Microsoft account. I continued not to use that account as an account on my computer, because why on earth would I do that.
So, other than using Visual Studio, that account never did anything at all, sort of like you'd expect from an account that you forced someone to create under duress.
One day I opened Visual Studio and a popup message displayed, telling me that because of what appeared to be fraudulent behavior by my Microsoft account, it was being revoked or disabled or whatever. (But I was still free to continue using Visual Studio.)
OK.
They just can't help themselves. It's as if someone's career depends on the number of users in the system, no matter whether or not they actually provide value to the users by having them in the system. Everybody and their dog wants you to be part of their eco-system. The best way to get me to not use a service is to have an account requirement that does not provide any functionality that I could have had without that account. It is also why pianojacq.com does not have any accounts, there simply isn't anything that you could do with an account that you can not do without.
> Everybody and their dog wants you to be part of their eco-system.
And that's the core problem. We stopped making tech and started making walled-garden "ecosystems." Apple is the most egregious, but everyone else is doing it too.
What ever happened to open standards, cross-platform, interoperability?
I never wanted a world where I have to choose all Apple tech, or all Google tech, or All Microsoft, or whatever just to get devices and software that integrate and play nicely together. When I was younger I remember being relatively platform agnostic. I had windows and Linux PCs, they dual booted without Windows killing grub every update, I didn't need to have my kernel signed with Microsoft's key. I had a macbook, an Android phone, wired headphones. My music was local on a network share and I used it with local music players across all my computers.
None of those ever pestered me for an account, or tried to push me to buy more of their "ecosystem," or sell me a subscription to use basic features.
Now everything is a sales funnel. Every app or service wants your email, every device wants an account, everybody is always trying to upsell you on something. We stopped making great tech products a long time ago and are now just extracting rent.
I used to be optimistic about tech. I dreamed of a world of openness and interoperability, not lock-in and ecosystems.
The only problem here is apple. Just don't buy apple products and you're fine. You can have. A windows or Linux pc and use Google sheets or whatever. I don't know whether the office suite is available on Linux but you have options for creating files that are office compatible.
The only problem here is apple, I don't think it seems fair to include MS and Google, they're much less walled than apple is. Maybe they could do better too, but apple is much worse.
Fair enough, Windows still plenty open (outside of the MS account requirement for home edition), but I think we can safely include Google now with the sideloading changes on Android, they clearly have seen Apple's rent revenue and want a slice of the pie.
I refuse to update to windows 11 because it requires setting up a Microsoft account. So all new computers (and some of the old ones) in our family have had their disks wiped and Ubuntu installed instead. We started doing this even before the Cortana/AI bs.
There's usually a way to convince windows to let you use a local account. Less so for the Home versions, Pro lets you do it pretty easily though. But good on you for switching... windows seems hellbent on sliding into oblivion.
I believe the 2FA stuff became mandatory after all those celebrities with weak passwords had their nudes leaked
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_celebrity_nude_photo_le...
And Apple being Apple, they designed their own solution. I actually like having a Secure Enclave on my device with easy biometric authentication across all of my devices
Calling for standards is a great thing usually but to be perfectly honest, the current ecosystem of FIDO, webauthn, TOTP, etc is a nightmare. I have three yubikeys and three or four protocols to manage on them.
People won’t adopt that, but they will adopt Apple’s.
Really? I've never really had a problem adding TOTP codes to the password manager of my choice on the device of my choice. Apple's 2fa where they assume I have an iPhone just because I own a Mac or just because I want to log in to some Apple service has definitely given me trouble though. It often feels like an iPhone is an assumed accessory with Mac OS sometimes.
Do you know if Apple opensourced or FRAND'd their alteratives in this area?
> Why does Apple want to feel so frickin special and require a working iPhone for 2FA and passkeys, instead of adopting standards?
Mind elaborating on this? I used a Mac without an iPhone for years when the M1 came out. SMS 2FA, and then later enrolling two Yubikeys, worked just fine for 2FA, as did using the Mac itself as a passkey.
> Why does Apple want to feel so frickin special and require a working iPhone for 2FA and passkeys, instead of adopting standards?
Ever since the Great iCloud Hack of 2014, Apple dialed up their end user auth to the max. [1]
It was after that hack when bad actors from around the world realized getting into someone's Apple account could be as lucrative (or more) than their bank or email, and so here we are today.
I'm not sure what else Apple can do here. People have made it a habit to store their most sensitive and private secrets in iCloud, stuff which can't be refunded or bought back. I think having such an annoying, stringent, and walled-in auth system is probably the only way Apple PMs are able to move past the disaster of 2014.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/tim-cook-says-apple-to-add-secu...
>People have made it a habit to store their most sensitive and private secrets in iCloud
Totally absurd to blame anyone but apple for that. Apple pushes features, like iCloud, so they can do show and tell every year and make their stock go up. More a stock go up business than anything else. Features, like iCloud, are the problem. People who like that stuff are also the loudest fanboys and often the least technologically literate too.
It may be absurd, but people would blame Apple if they kept sensitive data in iCloud and it was stolen.
I’m not even sure if it’s absurd, frankly.
> then Cook will go on stage to showcase what an awesome idea they had that nobody thought of before: “standards!”. Wait no, that’s usb c.
That never happened.
https://youtu.be/d9JblG0O3Io Timestamp 6min.
Wasn’t Tim, I guess it’d have been too embarrassing…
Glad to know I was correct. They didn’t claim it was new or “never thought of before” at all—they even specifically pointed out how they already did it on their other products.
I’m pretty sure they almost spent more time talking about the colours of the phone.
I’ve been a Mac user for >20 years, Linux before that, and lots of FreeBSD on the side. The rewrite from System Preferences to System Settings was one of the worst changes I’ve seen.
Preference panes used to be customized for each function to do what was necessary. Often there were hidden sheets with additional features for power users.
Now everything is just lists. Lists of identical looking, but actually very different settings. List of permissions that drill down into more lists which may or may not be what you want. The lists are unsortable and the order seems arbitrary.
I’m sure there was some push to SwiftUI preferences, but in my opinion, Scott Forstall’s Maps decision pales in comparison to the mess that Settings continues to be.
I was told that I was stupid and simply "didn't get it" when I complained about System Settings. It sucks on the iPhone, it sucks on macOS. You can't find anything, and certainly not the settings you do want to change.
Don't worry, even if you manage to somehow change it, the next system update is going to randomly change it back.
The only thing that makes my work laptop halfway usable is nix-darwin.
Agreed, the surrounding OS has never mattered less. Each time my nix config encroaches a bit deeper into MacOS territory feels like a tiny victory.
I use it like twice a year and can't say I ever had a thought about the new design vs the old one. When I want to do something I just crack it open and use the search bar. The amount people freak out about stuff like this online is completely unwarranted.
In fact it's one step faster because cmd + space > "settings" actually finds it whereas in the past I would do that, get no results, and then remember the correct name.
> You can't find anything, and certainly not the settings you do want to change.
Well, come on, that might interfere with other people's desire for you not to change the settings.
Some times Apples approach to settings do seem to be best summarized by the old ILL WiLL Press Hunted Toaster video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KyRCQp32p8&t=60s
Besides the bad design, the implementation is awful as well. Slow and flickery.
Basic windowing barely works on it. On macOS is can click anywhere on a window to bring it into focus and make it active.
System Settings is 50/50 if it works. I might still be able to interact with a control as it’ll click through, but the top bar is still lightly greyed out indicating it is still not in focus.
It was the first big sign that trouble was brewing. macOS is being destroyed from within.
I'm glad it's not just me! The System Preferences is terrible, the search doesn't work well, and it's really hard to find what you need without having to go into another subwindow.
not being in osx development any more: is custom UI no longer possible at all, or is it just significantly easier to go with the flow?
though I have seen settings sections that are simply a "launch the actual config" button. but Wacom was doing that back in System Preferences days, so I'm not sure what to think.
It’s possible, and some exist, it’s just less common now. Previously each preference category would take over the whole window. Now it gets a vertically oriented list. Previously all content fit within the window. Now all of the categories require vertical scrolling of some overly padded list control.
And the new Xcode’s settings just adopted the new design, it’s awful.
I actually love the new design of System Settings.
I would mind Settings much less if they at least fixed some bullshit. For example, there's no easy way to find the network in the Wifi network list. There's no search field for it, in 2025!
And the whole window can not be resized horizontally. It's just jaw-droppingly bad.
Not to defend the new System Settings, but the old Preferences app was some 1999 iMac CRT stuff. Everything crammed into different tabs and sub-dialogs, (and secret tabs and sub-dialogs), just to "keep it small". Some of the panes had 'character', but it really was not a good UI on modern systems.
Calling it some 1999 iMac stuff is fair, but in that case it was replaced with some 2007 iPhone stuff. I’m not so sure that’s a step forward for a desktop OS.
Definitely many steps back. Software companies still, today, have major problems making competent desktop software that was everywhere 20 years ago.
I don’t get the complaints either, FWIW.
That weird grid of icons (I could never find anything in) with the goofy search that put spotlights on the icons, then the separate full-window ‘panels’ of inconsistent controls would (also?..) be laughed at if it was a new design.
I've been a software engineer for quite a number of years now. I bought a mac and iphone a few months back because I wanted to look into iphone development and there was a lot of cursing involved.
First the forms were incredibly bad for a new Swedish user. Then there turned out to be some kind of sync issue between account creation and when it can be used, but the error message did not reflect that in any way whatsoever. The next day the same thing worked.
On the one hand they have a support chat to contact and it's great, just being able to contact an actual person was a shock. On the other hand support couldn't help with my problem and I would not recommend the onboarding experience to anyone.
I'm never buying a mac again if I can avoid it.
Yeah, as somebody who switched from Linux to Mac recently, I feel that MacOS is a nuisance. Yet it's a nuisance I can tolerate with some tweaking, when in return I get much better battery life, screen and keyboard compared to any other options provided by my company.
> I've been a software engineer for quite a number of years now. ... I bought a mac and iphone a few months back ... and there was a lot of cursing involved.
I'm not sure what's worse: the inane keyboard compared to Linux or the ridiculously dumbed-down featureset that makes it effectively impossible for a power user to even try to transition into macOS.
When I see someone calling the keyboard things like 'inane' I read 'not what I'm used to'.
Personally I found the keyboard a breath of fresh air when I switched from Windows/Linux. The whole text editing experience is gloriously consistent and logical, though marred by a growing number of cross-platform apps that don't behave correctly.
What I think of as inane is Linux's having a slightly different key combo for copy depending on what context you're in. Or all the mad extended keyboard keys I used to use that were in a different place on every laptop.
[the keyboard experience is much less well thought out on non-English keyboards though, as another comment points out, come on Apple sort it out]
> I read 'not what I'm used to'
That's a fair argument to be made. But in my case, I grew up on Mac OS 9 which had mostly the same key sequences. I transitioned to Windows, and that was definitely "not what I'm used to". But then moving into Linux, almost everything can be configured and the user experience across apps is consistent. Except for the terminal that needs control-shift-c instead of control-c, but that's because terminals inherit control-c for tty control.
On macOS/X? Nope, I've made up my mind: macOS has inane keyboard layouts, reduced key availability, and many things can't be reached at all by just by tabbing around a few times.
> reduced key availability
Genuine question, what do you think is missing?
I wish it was slightly easier to type a #. But OTOH it's /way/ easier to type accented characters (in either the fast way for regular use or the slow way that's much more discoverable) or different types of punctuation. Without memorising numerical codes, which is what I remember from Windows.
I certainly don't miss all the extra navigation keys, when I have the meta-keys and cursors right under my fingers, exactly the same on any Mac I use.
I'm struggling to remember more than minor differences from a PC keyboard. N.B. I'm in the UK so that might make a difference.
> Genuine question, what do you think is missing?
See my reply to the comment next to yours.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45462739
> No keypad, no pageup/pagedown/home/end/delete (I use all of them very frequently), arrow keys are misplaced and tiny (also use them a lot), no F1-F12 keys, no screenshot button, funky command key instead of using control key like any sane OS, and the command key is where the option key belongs, blah blah.
I had all of those keys when I was using Mac OS 9, 25 years ago.
Don't they have a command key and a control key?
What drive me crazy when using Windows for work is the abysmal copy/paste support.
Just 2 minutes ago I started an email, was composing a numbered list of steps, saw that a co-worker sent another email to the same thread, so I copied the text I was working on and replied to the latest mail.
The numbered list of steps was no longer a numbered list that I could continue auto-incrementing, but just plain text.
And that's just from one Microsoft program to itself. Copying text between two different Microsoft apps rarely preserves the formatting I want. Copying text between Microsoft and a 3rd party application is guaranteed to be an exercise in frustration.
On the other hand I cannot stand it when copy/paste preserves formatting. The last thing I want when I paste some text somewhere else is fonts, colors, hyperlinks, and numbered lists coming along with it. 90% (or more) of the time I just want the plain text.
Same. But there are a few rare instances I do want formatting preserved.
I've resorted to using PowerToys on Windows for this, it has a little utility called Advanced Paste. Win+Shift+V brings up a little modal and you can choose to paste as plain text, markdown, json, and a bunch of other functions, or you can give it your OpenAI API key and have ChatGPT format clipboard contents for you.
Yeah, even easier, SHIFT-CTRL-V on most systems is unformatted. But, I always forget, so pasting is like: CTRL-V -- goddammit -- CTRL-Z; SHIFT-CTRL-V.
The keyboard issue when switching from Windows/Linux to Mac is understated. It's a pain and I think it's worse for non-english keyboards/characters. You have to use plugins/3rd party software and relearn new keys.
Inane? You have readline/emacs keyboard shortcuts out of the box everywhere an app uses a system text box object. Even in Electron apps.
No keypad, no pageup/pagedown/home/end/delete (I use all of them very frequently), arrow keys are misplaced and tiny (also use them a lot), no F1-F12 keys, no screenshot button, funky command key instead of using control key like any sane OS, and the command key is where the option key belongs, blah blah.
Yes, inane.
>funky command key instead of using control key like any sane OS
That "funky" command key makes it so you can copy paste into/out of a terminal with the same keyboard combo you use everywhere else. Ctrl being used to send signals to the terminal and also all over the place for different thingsin the GUI stinks.
Home and End are mapped to C-a and C-e literally everywhere in Cocoa. Same as in the terminal.
Methinks you're just annoyed because it's different than what you're used to. There's nothing wrong with that, but arguing about subjective preferences as if they are objective facts is silly. There's nothing wrong with the Mac's keyboard shortcuts out of the box, and they can all be customized with a NeXTSTEP style plist placed at ~/Library/Keybindings/DefaultKeybindings.dict (There's a default set inside of the AppKit framework bundle's Resources folder, or grab a commented copy here https://github.com/ttscoff/KeyBindings/blob/master/DefaultKe...).
Like, I'm annoyed X and thus all of desktop Linux just copied Windows' dumb keyboard combos that put everything on Ctrl, but that's hardly a reason for me to slag off the entire platform, because its minor, and I can just change them if I really wanted to.
The OS supports all of those keys still. Yeah you don't get them on a laptop keyboard but I rarely use the laptop keyboard as is, it's docked 80+% of the time for me at my desk so I have a nice full size keyboard I use.
Never missed a dedicated screenshot button though, I always just Cmd+Shift+4
Why would you want to use a Control key that's hard to reach when the Command key is right under your thumb?
Sir, that's a you problem.
Control key is easy to reach for me when it's placed in the bottom left corner instead of where it doesn't belong, beside a worse-then-useless Fn key, which is in the control key's place in the bottom left corner, which decides to make random (undocumented, even) functions of so many of the normal keys, and those normal keys don't even have labels for what the Fn key does in that combination like other keys with eg sound, brightness, etc controls.
Fn + A, for example. What the hell is that doing? It opens a fucking emoji window. Do you know how many times I've accidentally control-A to select all and then... oops no more keyboard input unless I press escape, and by the time I realize the mistake, I've already typed a bunch of other things and even more unwanted things happen.
And the control key is where the power key belongs, the command key is where the alt key belongs.
On linux I can type 120+ words/actions per minute on a bad day, around 160 on a good day. On a macbook air? I'm lucky to do an even dozen per minute because I have to slow the fuck down and soooooo many features are missing that I have to actually move a hand to the mouse to figure out a workaround.
Oh speaking of mouse, I literally detest touchpads. Apple's touchpad is not really much better despite the hype. Nothing like trying to position your cursor somewhere then try to click on something but moved the cursor off of it instead. Rinse and repeat until you finally press the touchpad in just the way it likes to activate a button click without also moving the cursor off of the object I wanted to press.
I'm only just now using a Mac again after not using them since elementary school. Tucking my thumbs under the rest of my hand to press the command key is a motion I'm really not used to, while as before I was really used to using my pinky to press/hold the control key often.
I do have to say though, its nice not having to worry about situations where I need to remember some odd shortcut for something that actually supports control characters like text consoles. I never need to worry about "does ctrl+c actually copy here, or does it kill things?" They're just different button presses. I get the logic these days of having those things be different keypresses than control key logic.
A lot of keyboard shortcuts I use daily now feel quite alien because of tucking my thumb under to reach the command key. And boy is it sometimes annoying having so many shortcuts using number keys in them. And the common jump between words or jump to the end or start of a line seem to be backwards in my mind (command+arrow versus option+arrow), I tend to get mixed up on those a bit right now.
> I never need to worry about "does ctrl+c actually copy here, or does it kill things?"
I've never had that trouble. Terminals are the only place where it's something different, for historical reasons. Copying/pasting in well-designed terminals is shift-control-click, which is easily pressed when the control key is where it belongs. Pinky on control, ring finger on shift, index finger on C.
Terminals are the most common place, I agree. I spend a lot of time in terminals, definitely more than an average user.
> Copying/pasting in well-designed terminals
This implies there are less well designed terminals.that do it otherwise, which is kind of my point. I don't think I've ever done the shortcut you mentioned. Some would copy on select, some on a click on the marked area, some other ways as well. Pasting has been a click, or shift+insert, or Ctrl+shift+v, or a few others.
On a Mac, it's command+c/command+v, everywhere. It's a shortcut that doesn't change.
I'm far from a Mac fanboy but that's a nice little thing.
What powers are you missing?
Zsh works the same. You of course have to learn a real (BSD) Unix userspace instead of some silly GNU amalgamation, but that is usually quick.
> Zsh works the same.
zsh is nice, but I don't like it. I use bash.
As for what powers am I missing? Absolutely missing keys, and not every input field is tabbable.
If it was just the key sequences that were different, I would cope with that.
So the biggest thing is the laptop keyboard layout isn't great, and not every input field is tabbable? And that prevents powers users from even trying to migrate?
> that prevents powers users from even trying to migrate?
Prevents? No. Hinders? Absolutely.
I only have a mac because it was issued by work as a loaner while they set up my new Linux laptop. I wouldn't want to use it as a daily driver at all because I still exclusively use Linux at home, and likely would never get over the keyboard differences.
It's a serious annoyance, and when all I really need is Chrome and proper GNU userspace and terminal to access it, why bother?
That plus the nagging is hardly better than Windows at this point.
I know I’m pretty much repeating what the GP said, but it’s crazy how far they have strayed.
Around 20 years ago (which, on reflection, is quite a long time) I, as a developer, moved to mac, as the way it all just worked without having to wade through the weeds was unbelievably refreshing. Couldn’t be more different to the experience you describe.
I bought my last Mac over a decade ago now - I’m now back on windows, as if I’m going to be nagged in an adware UI, I may as well use the one that gets in my way less.
Don't forget how some of the default shortcuts can't be typed on a keyboard layout that uses alt-gr to type things like @.
How the fuck did that get past QC? KDE on Linux has a reputation of being janky, but I have never had to put up with things being actually unusable by design.
I'd also like to add the impossibility of knowing what all the gesture controls are. Currently they seem to assume that you have been using an iPhone for years and pay close attention to every product launch. In other words, they assume that you learned them as they evolved. If you didn't, there's not a very good way to uncover them or customize them. Individual apps behave differently as well, and it's pretty vague regarding how you do different things.
This is what fucked me off about apple and their fandom from the get go. They called this gesture bs 'intuitive'. It isnt. Randomly swiping around the screen until something happens is not intuitive UX design.
My mum used her iphone for 4 years before she learned how to multitask with it, under my tuition, and she still struggles. She is good with computers.
the situation is ripe for a new gesture protocol of some kind :pray:
Even if you haven't. My partner is an iphone loyalist for years and was very disappointed that they removed the "open tabs" button out of safari. I (new to iPhone) had to show them the pinch-out gesture to show your tabs.
It's beyond unintuitive. At least in the latest OS release, they've stopped hiding the searchbar in the ridiculous 'scroll past the top of the list' idiom.
The verge also has this wonderful paywall which completely breaks safari scroll such that you can't show the toolbar. The only way to 'go back' once you're hit with the paywall is to know about the hidden 'swipe from the far side' gesture in safari (cumbersome given the size of phones).
I sometimes wonder if people actually use the devices they make.
Took 3 tech savvy family members to figure out why mom couldn’t sign back into an app she was paying for: every time she “signed in with Apple” she also hit “hide my email” (first option) and so registered with a new random email address every time she signed in
It was also illuminating how complex sharing app purchases can be. Some apps allow it, some apps it’s a different payment tier to enable it. It was unclear who had paid for what app and why they didn’t show up on some devices.
This is part of why I absolutely LOATHE the multiple "sign-in-with-Y" prompts on everything.
Federation's not a terrible idea for people who don't "get it," but many places are then starting to _hide_ the standard email-based login form... it's bonkers.
Google can go DIAF for their browser-based forced popover that so many sites have opted-in to (so they can sell more expensive ads, of course). [I use Vivaldi which is Chromium-based and AFAIK there's no way to shut off those prompts]
Don’t bother switching to a better browser either, those prompts will be replaced with prompts to download chrome
That sounds like an issue with the app rather than the sign-in with Apple feature. I use it with hide my email for everything that offers it, and it always remembers that I previously created an account with an alias if I ever have to sign-in again.
Hide my email replaces your email with an apple controlled intermediate address, right? Is there any reason apple couldn't reuse the same intermediate address for you?
I thought the main things were making it so they don't have your actual email to track/trace, that when you unsubscribed they couldn't continue to spam you, and maybe let apple track spammers, all of which would be fine with a persistent fake email...
I mean, facilitating multiple accounts, while it could be nice, seems way beyond the UX apple provides and isn't a typical paradigm for most software... this seems like an apple issue.
It’s because the Sign in with Apple dialogue failed to recognize that it already has an account with said service.
I never encountered that. It seems like an implementation problem with the app.
>making it so they don't have your actual email to track/trace
Indeed solved with persistent email (also solved by creating random new Gmail one time without paying for iCloud+)
>when you unsubscribed they couldn't continue to spam you
Once pwned (or in case of dishonest company selling data or changing outbound sending domains), it’d be one email to get spammed from all over the place
>maybe let apple track spammers
Suppose they could do this if folks used a single regular @iCloud email too, but it’s very important it’s a new email every time to prevent spam as mentioned before.
Big big point: we don’t want to be tracked by data brokers buying data then correlating emails across services. (Sorry for ineloquent reply, someone can do better but I’m pretty sure I’m barking up the right tree)
> >making it so they don't have your actual email to track/trace
> Indeed solved with persistent email (also solved by creating random new Gmail one time without paying for iCloud+)
If you make a “random new Gmail one time” and use that everywhere, that email address, for the purpose of tracking, is your actual email. People correlating your data across sites will not be able to infer your name from your email address, but that’s it.
Apple’s hide my email isn’t one alias for everything it creates a new alias for each different app/service.
I have probably 50+ aliases now so I can have a brand new unique email for everything different service that wants an email address to do anything.
Assistive access mode for an iPhone is fantastic for the elderly. It's the only way my 85-year-old father can even use a phone. One of the best features is that it can be set to allow incoming calls only from people in his contacts. It's such a lifesaver.
What if it's police or the hospital trying to call?
I suppose it'd be "simple" for the device to answer the call and then prompt for a password before ringing for the user, but then the random caller needs to know the password. But then again, it could be as simple as "This is Siri, please say the name of the person you're trying to reach.", and since spammers usually don't have a name associated with the number they just randomly dialled, they'll be stumped.
I strongly suspect the people who throw all these roadblocks if an unknown number calls them don’t have kids, elderly relatives, various medical visits, etc. personally I’m not going to make myself hard to reach because of the cost of a spam call now and then.
If it works for you fine. But understand that different people have different needs.
I used to feel the same, but nowadays, I have very few normal calls, mostly from close relatives only, but a dozen of spam calls a week. And that used not to be the case before 2024. I know robocalls are/were a terrible affliction in the US for like the last 10 years, but they were very few of these in Hungary. I wish I'd know what caused this change..
It's hard to say why people's experiences differ so much in the US I get maybe 3 a week or so. I would probably be more aggressive about adding businesses and people to my contact list if I were more aggressive about blocking possible SPAM. For me, the SPAM is one of life's lesser annoyances but I should probably check out some of the prevent features Apple has built into iOS.
> What if it's police or the hospital trying to call?
They leave a message and you call them back if it's actually important? Do you really answer every call you get?
iOS 26 can sort-of do what you suggest in your second paragraph. The device answers the call, asks who is calling and the purpose of the call, then (if the caller doesn’t hang up) presents the answers textually in the call-answering UI to allow you to decide whether to answer or not.
At the moment, most spam callers just hang up so I never even get to the choice to answer, although I do wonder if that’ll change if the feature gets popular.
Younger people struggle with this, too. I was getting my teeth cleaned this morning and the hygienist had a lengthy story about transferring data to a new iPhone (her prior phone was 2.5 years old). It's anecdata but the experience is challenging, especially for something people have to do and do rarely.
They turned macOS into an iCloud client and subscription sales funnel.
This is everything outside of Linux now. Every freaking device or service is now just a sales funnel, and the whole industry has stopped making good products and are just rent seeking now.
It's a damn shame the hardware is so good for laptops, and that Qualcomm is taking their sweet time getting device trees for the Snapdragon X elite stuff into Linux, so the one laptop that's even remotely comparable to my Macbook (my Surface laptop 7) can't run Linux either. No other OEM seems to give a crap about putting out a decent laptop without compromises.
macOS with its popups that iCloud is full with no way to disable it.
I got stuck in a fullscreen YouTube video the first time I tried an iPhone. Simplicity is relative. For years, the lack of a back button resulted in this weird behavior of having to learn how each app wants you to navigate it. Even now that everyone has settled into the same list of 5ish methodologies, it can be cumbersome to figure out.
I guess this is what happens without a dictator to tell people they’re fired for shipping garbage, and when a company worries about meeting quarterly KPIs rather than doing something great.
Instead, the whole company has become a dictator of its "users".
I've been really disappointed in iOS 26 for this reason. I thought it was going in the completely wrong direction, but maybe that was just me being grumpy. Then I noticed that the less computer savvy were having an absolutely abysmal time with it. We're back to computers being really hard for the normies, with apparently no mainstream option that's simple and easy for Grandma.
Unless you want to ship her over to Linux Mint or something similarly not mainstream, but actually user friendly.
I doubt Jobs would have let things get this bad. He would have been ruthless if he had noticed the setup and nagging being this bad.
Jobs seemed like he actually used everything himself, and he wanted a good experience as a customer. I don’t actually believe Tim Cook uses most of the stuff Apple makes, nothing beyond the basics, and he’s likely willing to compromise that experience to increase the stock price.
I’m still of the opinion that iOS 6 was peak iPhone. Say what you will about skeuomorphism, it was easy to understand, apps were visually unique from one another, and the friendly UI was a nice juxtaposition to the clean minimalist hardware.
iOS6 peak iPhone? Finally someone says it! Also buttons had titles like “Done“ instead of icons, touches wouldn‘t end in accidental swipes all the time and Safaris toolbar was fixed.
All things I recently failed to explain to an elderly person.
The question is then, what are these people using instead?
I loved skeuomorphism. It seemed to add some human touch to apps.
Yes flat/material design makes UIs so much harder to read.
+1, may be the style and graphics design needs some updating. But I love the idea.
> I’m still of the opinion that iOS 6 was peak iPhone.
You’re not alone. The release of iOS7 basically took us from having one OS that didn’t constantly confuse the non-tech-savvy, back to having zero of those. And it’s gotten a little better in a couple releases, but overall the trend is that it’s moving even farther from that over time.
iOS 6 really was the sweet spot. It had personality, clarity, and just enough visual cues to guide users without being overwhelming
>> We're back to computers being really hard for the normies
I'm not sure that smartphones qualify as computers anymore, they feel more like pop-up picture books that only work when you now how to finesse them. And unfortunately that UX has been bleeding into computer OSes for a while now, most notably with the decimation of scrollbars.
I recently tried helping out my parents setup the latest Windows. I don’t wish that on my worst enemies. What a pile of garbage that OS has become. Xbox? Copilot? OneDrive? Why am I seeing ads? Bro leave me the fuck alone I just want a browser.
It’s so bad that at one point I considered having them try another OS, even though all they know is Windows.
Unfortunately everything is crap now. Chrome OS would have been a great option because they only need a browser, but just navigating the site is a mess. What the fuck Google, why do you always have to work against your potential customers.
And don’t get me started on Linux distros, I don’t see my parents fixing the inevitable issues in the terminal.
Can we just go back to Windows 98 or something?
> I don’t see my parents fixing the inevitable issues in the terminal.
Really good chance now a days that they won't ever run into issues, as long as the hardware is well supported. Slap something like Mint or Debian on there with XFCE and it'll happily run forever.
I set my mom up with Linux Mint a little over a decade ago, she used it without issue for a few years before changing computers. I don’t think that distro is a thing anymore, but it was Ubuntu based. You might be surprised, there is lots of very user friendly Linux out there.
I had to replace my mother's laptop (Win 7) one year ago. I installed mint for her and she has not realized it's a different OS.
For my father I have installed win 11 ltsc which is way cleaner.
Mint is still very much around.
> Chrome OS would have been a great option because they only need a browser, but just navigating the site is a mess. What the fuck Google, why do you always have to work against your potential customers.
Navigating the google sales site? You don't need to do that, just go to a computer store and pick out a chromebook from there. Try to get one with a nice processor (ryzen or intel core), and a good amount of ram, and check the expiration date. Most major computer makers have some chromebooks, so you can stick with a brand you like.
Of course, Google is cancelling Chrome OS, so it might not be worth training your parents on it, because you'll need to do something else next time.
Why not Linux with SSH open, ready for you to login in case some troubleshooting is needed?
OK, I have SSH open on a non-standard port on my homemade NAS, and I notice the many many visitors from all over the world trying to bust through my SSH door... (I've implemented a web page to open the port when I enter a password there)
I set up tailscale for my older family members. I can always login and fix stuff. In a pinch - AnyDesk.
We miss you Steve.
Changing wallpapers alone on iPhones is super complex nowadays. Still have no idea why I can't just set a photo as the wallpaper only while not removing the existing widgets already set.
The new wallpaper/lockscreen customization is so insane to me. You can't select any of Apple's built-in wallpapers without creating a new lock screen first (which requires re setting up all your widgets). Whose idea was that?
Trying to set a photo from photos as your wallpaper also creates a new lockscreen.
the only way to modify an existing, already set up lock screen is to long press, tap customize, and then tap the little photo square.
Did a UX designer even look at this? Because it sure doesn't seem like it.
Yep. And despite many people sending that feedback over the last 2 iOS versions, they haven't fixed the UX. It's absurd.
You know, you guys might just be getting old. Maybe ask a kid to help? Back when we were kids we probably all had adults asking us how to do tech stuff all the time, because we had the time and curiosity to explore and learn it.
My son is 4 and has autism and he knows how to change his wallpaper and likes to switch between the different home screens he's made when he gets some iPad time. Now I can do it too because I've watched him do it lol.
But I've got a job, groceries to buy, cooking and cleaning to do, yard work, etc. I don't have the time or energy to devote to making 7 different home screens to match all my outfits or whatever people are doing with it.
It's not a matter of not knowing how to do it, that part is easy.
It's the lack of options or a clean way to replace an existing wallpaper without adding a new lock screen and re-customizing. E.g., clicking the share sheet from photos and choosing "Set as wallpaper" creates a brand new lock screen instead of just replacing your existing wallpaper.
At the very least, it should ask which option you want to do.
Good UX is not about whether or not something is possible to do. It's about how easy and obvious it is to do.
Also someone being able to switch between different home screens is not what I am complaining about. I am talking about inability to easily apply the current photo in Photos app as wallpaper without losing all the already setup widgets.
So you know how to do it. You had no trouble figuring it out. It just doesn't work exactly how you want it to.
> I'm upset that I have to change my existing wallpaper from the existing wallpaper rather than from the Photos app
This would have been much more accurate than trying to portray it as complex and broken. Bad UX isn't when something doesn't work exactly the way you personally think it should. Overall, it's fine. People just fucking love to complain.
You have once again missed the point of good UX.
This is insane to me. How could they make the simplest thing so complicated?
It's the perfect example of Apple overengineering something
The magic is gone when just getting to the home screen feels like an obstacle course
And after all of that there are still red bubbles nagging you to sign up for various services and to enable features you already said no to.
I remember switching to Mac years ago to avoid this type of user-hostile crap in Windows.
lol yes. I’ve had my iPhone for a few years now and there’s still a red bubble on settings because I never set up Face ID.
Annoying - familiar with the workaround? (disabling the badge, or you need it in case a software update ships?)
I never tried it with FaceID specifically, but all the other red bubbles I've encountered behaved the same way: You say "not now" during the initial setup, then you get a nag/reminder in the settings app. If you tap on the reminder and say "not now" or "don't use feature XYZ" or whatever again, it goes away permanently.
Huh -- you're right. I went in to FaceID setup, immediately canceled out of it, and the bubble is gone. We'll see for how long I guess.
In my experience, it lasts between indefinitely and until the next major system update. I think, that has been the default behavior for all of Apple’s „use our services“-reminders since they started showing those.
A couple of times I’ve been offered a backend contract position for Apple at $110/hr.
They couldn’t go any higher. lol.
No thanks.
Billions in the bank and they’re cheaping out on talent.
El cheapos.
los cheapos, my gringo amigo
Los codos, mi amigo gringo
Las cheapas
Couldn't agree more that they completely butchered the ease of use for anyone who isn't technical.
Last week I spent hours debugging our application. Something was broken in the remote request layer, and I spent quite a bit of time debugging it with curl.
The culprit? Apple. I missed a notification hidden below all the windows that iTerm was requesting access to my local network. So curl installed via Homebrew and activated using direnv was not working because it was not getting the required entitlement.
But curl in the `/usr/bin` directory was working just fine because it has the necessary entitlement from Apple. So "/usr/bin/curl http://192.168.20.1" was working just fine, while "/opt/homebrew/bin/curl http://192.168.20.1" was silently failing.
Fun. Fun. Fun.
Can you disable this bullshit? Nope. Permission grants need to be renewed every 30 days. And they pop up at the most inopportune moments.
You’re making me twitchy.
Desktop Docker (eww, yuck) and it’s permissions, path hell and general bs.
Can <permissions dialogue> it <permissions dialogue> be <permissions dialogue> any <permissions dialogue> other <permissions dialogue> way? <permissions dialogue>
I want a headless mac mini running docker. Why is it so hard?
It’s better to take the hit on power and have a mini pc running linux. Macos is not great if you’re not using user facing apps.
Yeah, you can get a little Beelink with AMD's new chips and a boatload of RAM for around the price of a mac mini (cheaper if you are trying to max out the mini). The Ryzen AI 9 can run at about 28W I believe, it's not too bad.
I’m running the mini on 7w (averaged over a month). It’s networked at 10gb, which is hard to do on mini pc/nuc without using a lot more power. My other Nucs use 70ish (nuc 9 extreme) or 35 (nuc 10 with thunderbolt dongle).
The mini is also much more powerful.
The is was a bit of a nightmare to tame but I’ve got it sorted now.
There was a joy of tech comic a long time ago, in which Johnny Ives was discussing with Steve Jobs all the complexity of a smartphone, so many apps, so many buttons, that he had made a brand new phone: No apps, mo screen, it just makes calls!
A few years ago at least a feature phone probably was the right answer for many people. But smartphones are so normalized that they’re increasingly essentially a requirement for a lot of services.
this is the actual driver for AI
Well, when iOS was simple, people here moaned that it was too simple, a toy, and how so advanced glorious Android was and sacrificed their firstborns to Google and now where are we
[dead]
I switched to iOS about 4 years ago (want small phone, so iPhone 12 mini), from a OnePlus3 with Lineage.
I thought indeed that it was all going to be much better, simpler, more elegant (phone was 2x the price so), but I ran into a lot of issues that I wrote down at the time (some things have been fixed by now):
* Tried installing Signal 4 times, it failed on the apple account generation and no further clues that it didn't or did install Signal (it didn't)
* Can't put icons on the bottom of screen, where your thumb is... need to fill other icons to get important stuff on the bottom. (Fixed!)
* App store does not start with search... So one feels a bit lost, where are the apps? (Fixed! Now a beautiful bubble at the bottom, does require good eye-sight to notice). Still think app store is not really about apps? IDK, it's screaming, there are anime cat girls everywhere; feels cheap.
* Absolutely maddening that it keeps correcting my .nl email adres to .nul (android leaves non txt field alone as far as I'm aware)
* No intro at all into UI (although nowadays I see some hints in "sets")
* Top suggestion in app store is never what you are looking for. Pretty strange. Can we change that? -> Later found out the top suggestion with dark blue around it is always sponsored... And since has NEVER been what I was looking for, never, I instinctively ignore it now like a vibrating "100.000th visitor" badge on a 90s webpage.
* Spouse got stuck searching for app in the Apple store instead of the App store..
* Many controls are at the top (this was pre-swipe, man am I happy with swipe gestures, really fixed iOS for me). Although again: How do you find out?
* My wife, after 3 years still can't remember how to close badly behaving apps to restart them.
* (Old remark) Video pauzes when taking a quick look at notification tray -> In the new bubbly iOS this is much worse even, I often quickly pulled down the notification tray for quick peaks, then let go. But in bubbly iOS there is 0 contrast until you let your finger go, and then the screen will sleep soon.
* You can't dismiss all notifications, since iOS 16 or so there is a dismiss button but it is still, to this day, unclear to me what subset of notifications it allows me to dismiss.
* Screen often goes to sleep as I'm curating notifications.
* Can't drag to folder onder lower bar/icon area (Fixed!)
* Pull down in center of screen gives Siri/search, not notifications, I'd swap that, now notifications requires hand stretching even on iPhone mini.
* I set Firefox as the standard browser yet both telegram and Signal (so far) always open Safari (Fixed I think)
* No notification grouping. (Fixed, but still not as nice as Android, where I spent quite some time in the notification center triaging)
* auto correct does not un-correct on backspace, autocorrect corrects the last word AFTER hitting send (still drives me mad, I just end every message with a space now to avoid looking dumb). Language switching does seem to go very well.
* To close a picture, swipe down, that really took a while. Although not all apps implement it.
* Red dots are not synced with open notifications, when I dismiss a notification I want the red dot gone.
* Hotspot keeps shutting down (it just remains on on Android, usually that is what you want)
* A couple of days in I had 652 mb of data on iCloud, no idea what it was. Then at some limit it starts to nag and it is not obvious how to make it stop nagging. I don't even want anything on iCloud, nobody asked me if I did.
* Alarms are very confusing. Your morning alarm clock is set in the health section (and under alarm) and is linked to your sleep schedule... OK, this changed many times a week, and irregularly... Spouse still has way too loud alarm sometimes because she refuses the "Health based morning alarm", yeah I know how that sounds to a non iOS user. Please also offer a decoupled version of the morning alarm. It's different from messaging alarms.
* Switching "Focus" by holding the lock screen is just very annoying. First you have to swipe down your notifications, then you have to hold the screen. But just long enough until you feel that it didn't work and start to squeeze more. My father asked me some weeks back: "What is this, why does this happen?? That thing you just did!!" And I explained him I was "switching focusses". He does not understand, he does not want it. He turns his phone off if he does not want to be disturbed (yeah and complains when we send messages in the night, because the night is for sleeping and thus only for emergencies... life was simpler back in the days).
* It took me more than a year to find out why my notes app keeps saying: "Restore writing" when walking through the DIY store with the notes app open. Drove me mad! Turns out, shaking is a trigger for un-doing things.. Or something... :s
* Replying to an email and adding a couple of consecutive pictures is a nightmare -> Switched to much better Proton mail now. Apple mail, idk, it works until it doesn't.
* One gets a "Screen use" report every week, when you tap it, it takes you to the current week, where you havent used you phone yet :s. Still don't understand how to see previous weeks.
There were also a lot of nice things though, ie widgets are much better, feel more connected. Swiping feels much more integrated and still works when apps crash etc. Overal I got used to things pretty quickly, but many, many things are very much not obvious (anymore) indeed.
Yeah it's a lot, I once thought about making a blog post about the switch but never did, just kept the notes and adding to it as I pulled my hair out over my iPhone.
I’ve experienced most of your annoyances but maybe I can help with a few of them!
> .nl to .nul
If you undo the correction on the prompt that comes up in the correction instead of fixing it with backspace or whatever it will stop doing that autocorrect
> No intro at all into UI
There is a very long series of tutorials for using the interface on first phone setup and then for each major update
> Video pauses while when looking at notifications
This depends on the behavior defined by the app. It did not happen when I just checked with YouTube (premium)
> pulldown on center is Siri
It has always been and still is notifications for me, maybe a setting?
> Safari instead of default browser
App defined. Some apps open a safari browser and some open my defined browser (Orion)
> Swipe up to close a picture
And some apps are double tap or even swipe up! What the heck?
> Alarms confusing
You can still set your daily/weekly/whatever alarms in the alarm section of the clock app. I believe this is the main way people set their alarms.
> switching focus by “holding”
Not sure what process you’re talking about but the control tray (swipe down from right side of screen) has a simple focus mode switcher with no acrobatics needed
I had to setup one from scratch recently for the first time in years. The experience was terrible.
However, I can see why it might not be a concern for device manufacturers. We’ve had the iPhone for almost 20 years. The number of people setting up a phone from scratch who have never used a smartphone before must be minuscule at this point and will continue to dwindle. 80 year olds were still working when the iPhone was released. They will have experience using computers at the very least and more than likely have used smartphones for a long time.
Plenty of new people are created every year, many of whom eventually gets their first ever phone.
Yes but I assume (perhaps incorrectly) they will be technically literate enough to not have any issues. The process is a bit of a pain but it's not exactly difficult for someone that's used any modern technology before.
> used to be a paragon of simplicity.
Yes, this is because in the beginning, like all systems, there was not much functionality.
The first iPhone lacked important functions.
But of course, this being Apple, users translate "this device is simple" into "this device is simple to use".
Feature-packed software can be simple though if it's well-designed (in terms of UX, not necessarily aesthetics).
It just seems that Apple actually isn't all that good at it, despite that being their brand selling point. Once they started adding in more and more features due to pressure from Android, they lost the plot and ended up more complicated and disjointed. The cracks in Apple's ability to make software are showing.
Dunno man, I have used Android phones and they are way worse than my iPhone in my opinion - I assume you have an Android phone, so it’s fun we both consider the other ecosystem more aggressively demanding of attention and naggy.
Ultimately I think they both suck and we’ve all gotten used to the one evil we’ve chosen.
The number of authentication and permission prompts is noticeably higher with macOS and iOS, there's really no comparison.
Interesting - I find the opposite, Android much naggier and attention-demanding than iOS. To each their own, I guess.
Which is objectively a good thing, right?
No, not objectively good at all.
If you're a neurotic obsessive who wants to pretend that all kinds of dastardly forces are trying to spy on you and your data, then yes, you want more security checks and more permission prompts.
For literally everyone else - these are only obstacles to their intended use of the device, and every one of them is objectively worse!
Safari prompts me _every single time I use Google_ about whether I want to share my location. I literally couldn't care less whether Google knows this, and I click yes every time, but Apple, in their infinite wisdom, DOES NOT GIVE ME THE OPTION to say "Always Allow". Thanks to some overbearing, self-important privacy dweeb, no doubt, and no leadership at Apple confident enough to override them.
> If you're a neurotic obsessive who wants to pretend that all kinds of dastardly forces are trying to spy on you and your data
I’m a bit confused here. Why do you think it’s pretending or neurotic and obsessive to believe organizations spy on our data?
This has been common knowledge for at least 10 years and is central to many large business models.
It’s neurotic to think that it matters or harms you.
that's crazy, I always deny because I'm already on the damn search results at that point and don't want to repeat the search for little to no benefit.
It can be argued as good the first time. I now have multiple apps that I would like to use on my Mac that I can't rely on because my computer just decides that since they aren't verified developers that it is ok to turn off random permissions to the file system no matter how many times I approve.
Teaching users to mindlessly enter credentials or approve authorization prompts is a bad thing.
> without a dictator
I don't know what kind of pro-authoritarian sane-washing statement you're trying to make with this line. Jobs himself would tell you that it's a consequence of letting a salesperson run the company rather than a product person.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K1WrHH-WtaA
> pro-authoritarian sane-washing
The general use of the word dictator for someone in role like Jobs had or with his temperment has been around almost as long as the word dictator.
A cursory Google search for "steve jobs dictator" reveals references going back to 2007 at least. Several references even refer to him as Hitler.
Many people who worked with Steve, both those who liked him and those who hated him, described him as a dictator.
Is there an example of a platform that serves almost 2 billion users, across 40+ languages and many more geographic locales, countless possible hardware configurations etc., introducing dozens/hundreds of new features a year, without falling into all those traps?
Of course I wholeheartedly agree with your critiques. But the original iPhone - or even macOS circa 2005 - were very different products, much more limited in scope and capability.
It's already hard enough to make a product a paragon of simplicity when the number of things it needs to do are so limited (as evidenced by all the products out there that are even more confusing than Apple products, doing even less), but I'm not sure it's even possible to do it when you reach such planetary scale.
Seems to me that the only way to have a product that's a paragon of simplicity is to have a product that does much, much less. But you don't become a trillion dollar company with 2 billion active users by doing less.
>Is there an example of a platform that [does this right]
no, because
>introducing dozens/hundreds of new features a year
is antithetical to "doing it right". doing that is sufficient to prove you are not doing it right.
Would love to read your manifesto of what "doing it right" entails.
given this is in a thread about simplicity: I think "dozens/hundreds of new features a year" speaks for itself why it's a problem.
but Apple (and Windows) nowadays reeks of promotion-driven development. ship a new feature and make sure people use it by making it as annoyingly in-your-face as possible, so you can show "impact". do that for just a few years and you're reliably left with a confusing, inconsistent, and extremely chaotic new user experience as each of those features jockeys for prime eyeball real estate.
mobile games with tons of features to spend money on are often a prime example of this, where new users a year after it launched are stuck in hours of tutorials and broken UI due to dozens of notifications that barely fit on screen, and Windows is not far behind with some sellers' junkware. Apple hasn't reached that far yet (AFAICT), but it's clearly headed in the same direction.
Linux has many, many flaws as a user-friendly desktop environment, but this is not one of them. take a clean install. boot up the first time. it's very likely you'll be greeted by a single "welcome" window (a normal one that you can just close) or nothing at all, just a working environment, regardless of the version you chose. that's unambiguously a more simple, less annoying, less spammy experience. Apple used to be almost this smooth.
I don't know man. It's easy to wax poetic about simplicity behind a keyboard, but again - they're maintaining an operating system that has to work for blind users, for people using their AirPods as hearing aids, for people who want to make the font XXXL, for people who read in (one of dozens of languages, all with their own quirks as to how they should be displayed), people who want to interact with their phone by talking to it, people who want to plug in their phone to their car, people who use their phone as a transit pass/credit card/digital ID in (one of the dozens of countries supported, each with its own regulatory quirks), people who mostly care about using their phone as a camera, people who are using their phone for work purposes with arcane legacy requirements...
Etc etc etc. With all that in mind, a few dozen/hundred features a year (depending on what you count as a feature) sounds quite tame to me. If you look at each individual app, they honestly get way less churn and change for the sake of change than most products on the market do. For example my usage of Notes.app has remained more or less unchanged over the last 15 years, while in a fraction of that time apps like Notion will shift stuff around and force workflows on me a half dozen times. I don't even remember Apple killing a core app that people relied on? That can't be said for most any competitor.
The hate towards the new design system that feels rushed and is riddled with inconsistencies and legibility problems is justified. Comparing macOS to Windows - an operating system that has been literally shoving ads in our faces, or saying "well they should just take inspiration from Linux and just not ship new features" feels... as weak of an argument as it gets.
I suspect you are signed into iCloud, and haven't seen the nonsense they throw at you to upsell it if you don't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45459074
but yes, Windows is worse here. that doesn't make current-Apple good at it though. they've just collaboratively lowered the hurdle quite a lot, and still trip on it frequently.
and Linux ships tons of features, but they don't throw it in your face. it does that so quietly you apparently didn't even notice. (this is not in any way meant to claim Linux handles feature changes well, or helps you find stuff you might need, or much of anything, because it does not. just that it doesn't advertise to you, in the vast majority of distros)
>ship a new feature and make sure people use it by making it as annoyingly in-your-face as possible, so you can show "impact".
Modern consumer tech in a nutshell. It's less about serving the paying end-user and more about self promotion. There's so much neediness and entitlement in the design.
You're quite right about the relative calm in Linux. It knows it's an operating system, and an OS is supposed to stay out of the way and simply support the user's needs, not be a billboard for junk.
It doesn't matter.
If there is a definition of doing it right then it is a better experience in following that rather than adding new features that don't match the definition no matter what it is.
And if the definition changes then you should be changing everything which takes resources away from new features. Unfortunately new features grab the attention of media an influencers and so that is what gets you the money.
> countless possible hardware configurations
Are you talking about Apple? This sounds like the PC or Android world.
The post says this:
"I know there are accessibility modes, but you don’t want to have to go through all that and spend hours trying to customize the phone."
I don't think the author has actually tried "Assistive Access" mode: https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/abou...
It is ideal for the elderly or those with cognitive disabilities. It removes almost every complex feature and reduces the rest to large clearly labelled buttons. And it doesn't take that long to enable.
I highly recommend it.
Earlier this year I set an iPad up for my elderly dad - it was going to be used for podcasts and YouTube, only - and it looked like it was going to be ideal. "What a great feature," I thought!
Except... There is no way to turn off screen rotation. None. It can't be done in the Assistive Access menu, and doesn't respect the setting in normal mode. It just always rotates. I spent an hour on the phone with Apple Support, and there's nothing to be done about it.
My dad couldn't deal with his icons rotating around on the screen, nor not being able to watch videos while lying down. It gathered dust.
> There is no way to turn off screen rotation
Control Center > Rotation Lock [1]. It's been a feature for years for pilots.
[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/rotate-your-iphone-sc...
Does this work in Assistive Access?
I would try it myself but I’m scared I will get trapped.
I think this comment is the essence of this post and the general sentiment. They make software the user is scared to interact with. This is backwards Apple. They just need to do the opposite of what they're doing and they nail it.
> They make software the user is scared to interact with.
Apple isn't unique here either. This is a sentiment across nearly all OSes, on mobile and on desktop.
It's one of the primary sources of help desk tickets where I work (I'm IT manager, grew up doing helpdesk->sysadmin). People are afraid to even try some basic troubleshooting, afraid to click on dialog boxes, afraid to mess with settings. Even auto-save in Office freaks people out, they are afraid to close their documents because that Ctrl+S feedback loop is gone, and autosave is ambiguous. Is it instant? How do I know it's saved the change I just made? So now there's users that need to go and double check the modified timestamp on the file before closing the document.
I get downvoted and called old every time I say this but Win 95/98 was peak UX. We are chasing aesthetics now instead of actual usability design. Marketing got too involved in how things looked, everything needs to be a customized, branded "experience" and it's causing severe learning curves vs. just following OS conventions and widgets where every app more or less looked and operated the same way.
Where's all the UX designers and researchers? Oh right, we've laid them all off or just spent too many years not listening to what they had to say and letting the rent seeking marketing and accounting folks drive the products.
It's because we've pushed and pushed so much for simplicity and dumbing things down that we've obliterated any semblance of confidence.
When Windows puts up an error message like 'oopsy doospy window's made a fucky wucky!" I don't feel safe! I don't trust this magic box!
Modern software will just lie straight to your face and hide things from you. Like the autosave thing. People don't trust it because it lies. The saving stuff is hidden away, and if it says 'saved', it might not be!
Which, great, fantastic, amazing - when it works. When it doesn't, we don't get any feedback. Things just start magically breaking. Things become unpredictable. And that's scary. We lose confidence in the system.
Like, imagine you have a car with lane keep assist. Lane keep assist makes mistakes, sure. But it beeps, it says "hey we're doing this", and you can trivially override it.
Imagine it didn't do that. Imagine it didn't beep, maybe you didn't even know about the system. Imagine you can't turn it off, or imagine you can't override it. You're just driving one day... and then the car is veering off the road. You push the steering wheel to the right, but it keeps going to the left. How much confidence would you have in that car? Would you get in it again?
That's basically modern software UX in my eyes.
> Where's all the UX designers and researchers?
A lot of them are still working at these tech companies, gazing at their navels and worrying more about how dynamic their artistic portfolio is, than how their users are actually using their designs.
> Where's all the UX designers and researchers? Oh right, we've laid them all off or just spent too many years not listening to what they had to say and letting the rent seeking marketing and accounting folks drive the products.
I think this is too generous to UX designers. They still exist and are very much involved in shipping unusable trash. I have been through multiple UX design reviews as a user and every time the UX designers are flabbergasted when I show them how their product is actually used. They never have any concept of a real user doing a thing. It’s a widespread cultural failure in the discipline.
I had the same worry but after pressing "next" like 15 times and waiting for 15 pages to load, the last page of Apple's documentation on Assistive Access tells you that you can exit it by triple clicking the "side button" (pointing to the power button, so not the side volume buttons I guess but idk). I went ahead after that and while it needed a few more presses, it ended up working that way, so you can enter and exit at will (at least, once you managed to enter; see my other comment for issues on that front...)
Does rotation lock work in Assistive Access?
Sorry, I'm not at the friend's place anymore whose work device I tried this on so I can't try it now
GP already said it doesn't respect that setting.
iOS 18.6.2 does disable rotation lock whether you've turned it on or off; I just tried Assistive Access in both configurations.
Why doesn't it respect the setting? Is it a bug?
I asked the same question of the Apple Tier 3 Support person with whom I eventually spoke. Tier 1 and 2 were sympathetic, and as surprised as I was by this behavior, and ran me through various series of convoluted setting changes, none of which worked.
[Edit: If I recall correctly, we even set it up again from scratch, to try out an idea the Tier 2 guy had. Tier 1 and 2 really were excellent to work with, despite their inability to solve the problem. Both knew the system well, weren't following scripts, and were able to think outside the box and try creative solutions. It was my first experience with Apple Support, and Gold Stars: would call again.]
Tier 3 was brusque, and acted like I was the first person who'd ever raised the topic (which, given the previous surprise, maybe I was). I explained that my dad was bedridden, and wanted to watch YouTube videos without the damn screen spinning around on him, and recall a palpable lack of sympathy. I didn't get an answer as to whether it's a bug or not, and I'm pretty sure the ticket died at Tier 3, so I doubt anyone knowledgeable will ever know about it.
Thanks, guess I’d try upgrading or downgrading the OS until working. As my rotation lock works.
Re rotation lock: iOS 18.6.2 does disable rotation lock whether you've turned it on or off; I just tried Assistive Access in both configurations.
The author says this in their OP:
> The phones are too fiddly now, and pressing random things as they try to hold the phone meant the phone got lost in a sea of opening stuff up. So, I tried the assistive access, but why isn’t this an option from the get-go? It asks you the age of setup; why not have a 65+ or something for a senior mode?
> why not have a 65+ or something for a senior mode?
Damn... I'm guessing OP is pretty young or something. I know people 80+ who have hardly any problems with regular iOS. I also know people under 60 who do. Age isn't a great thing to assume ability from.
63, and I learn new stuff, every day.
I need to remember that I don't represent the norm, when it comes to stuff like that.
I guess the saddest thing (to me), is seeing people that consider learning to be a pain point. Even young folks don't want to learn. Us geeks aren't exactly representative of the vast majority of folks. That often makes it difficult for us to design stuff for them.
There are plenty of people who want to learn, but don’t want to learn about everchanging and inane software design decisions.
There are plenty of geeks who don’t want to have to learn about that.
Knowing what to learn about, is one of the advantages of gray hair.
There’s ten thousand jargon-driven primrose paths. When I was younger, I went down a couple.
Dam' right (he says, still developing at 70). Getting older may be compulsory, but I regularly have to help the youngsters out with tech-related matters.
they might want to switch to a Samsung phone, which has an "Easy Mode" setting for exactly this reason.
Maybe it's the best compromise, but there's something sad about Apple essentially making an entire second set of apps because they couldn't make the main ones accessible enough. It's like siloing people off into their own universe instead of making this one comfortable for them.
I can’t speak to whether it’s the _best_ compromise but if you see a screenshot of the way they dumb down the Camera app I think it does make it more clear that for example perhaps not a single reader of this website would ever find it remotely acceptable.
Like no video if I recall correctly. I mean I’m sure with infinite time someone would find a better compromise.
You can turn on video in assistive access, but it’s off by default.
Forgot about that, yes!
And nobody can write an app that helps the user use other apps, because apps are not allowed to do that. Only Apple is allowed.
Thank you Apple nanny state.
It's an understandable limitation because such app permissions seem quite hairy from a security perspective.
Yes, and hitting a nail is very hairy from a safety perspective. That doesn't mean there should be 1 single blessed company with a license to carpentry.
It’s also very limiting, though. You can’t even zoom into photos, which elders with bad eyesight like to do.
For that you need to use screen magnification.
Triple tap with three fingers to zoom in and zoom out. While you're zoomed, drag with three fingers to pan the view.
But I also kinda feel like just saying that says a lot about Apple's UX these days, especially in the accessibility department. Because those swipe gestures can be confusing and require too much manual dexterity for many people who need a feature like screen magnification.
> Triple tap with three fingers
Honestly, that’s a non-starter.
Re the other reply here, what's missing is discoverability -- at minimum a little circled letter "i" in the corner that would pop up a big sketch of the required gesture.
Discoverability is important, but elderly people are unlikely to be able to reliably (or at all) triple-tap with three fingers, regardless of discoverability. Many already have problems with double-pressing buttons (like for Apple Pay).
Someone later on in the thread very gently tells OP about them, but how frustrating is that!
I just tried going through the setup on a friend's work phone to try it out because it looked useful for my grandpa (he currently has a dumbphone due to eyesight issues, can't really use a touchscreen, but maybe this mode might work with big enough buttons and TTS)
Issues:
1. It says "no results" if you look for "assi" in the settings. I wondered if this phone model doesn't support it, but ended up finding it manually near the bottom of the accessibility settings
2. The setup process is confusing, asking questions we don't know. E.g. need to confirm we know the "passcode" without saying what that is or having a field to try it out on. Does it mean lockscreen PIN? Then sure. We just pressed continue and hoped for the best. It also asks whether apps, that have been on the phone since forever, suddenly need a bunch of permissions. Will this mess with the friend's old settings outside of this special mode? We have no idea what was set and what to pick, e.g. does WhatsApp need contact access to work? Speech recognition? One of them even says "this is unexpected, please report this" How? Where? To what end?
3. Eventually got to the last screen and pressed the button for "Ok, we're ready now, enable!" and it pops up an error message: can't enable with the SIM PIN active, disable this in "settings" (ok which settings, where? Why not link it?)
4. Thankfully, this time we can find that in settings' search and... it's already disabled. I go back to assistive access and the error persists
I literally can't get this set up...
Edit: wanted to show the friend whose work phone this is the silliness of an error that says X and another screen saying the opposite. Now the SIM PIN shows up as enabled! So I pressed disable, they entered the PIN, and it gave another error message. But upon closing the screen, it showed as disabled again. Hoping it was real this time, went back to assistive access and now it could be enabled!
Turns out... assistive access only works for the standard apps: Phone/dialer, SMS, camera, gallery, magnifier
You can enable e.g. Google Maps but it has no idea that you're in assistive mode and shows you the normal UI. It also tells you to go and enable location access in settings, which you can't do in this mode. (I had enabled precise location during the setup of assistive access, but apparently it's broken.)
This does have TTS for the SMS messages, that's nice, but he'd not be able to answer them and have a conversation anyway
The magnifier is too jittery to be useful (his dumbphone has the same feature and issue)
Going back out of assistive access mode, it seems the new app permission levels persisted outside this mode and some things are messed up now (whatsapp complaining it is missing access, for example)
TL;DR same functionality as the 60€ dumbphone / flip phone my grandpa has, except (pro) you also get SMS TTS, (con) it's all non-tactile buttons, and (con) you can't flip the phone open to unlock the screen or accept a call. Especially that last one turned out to be really easy for the two grandparents that can't use a smartphone (one with visual, one with mental impairments). I'd recommend saving 500€ and going for the more accessible option instead
> assistive access only works for the standard apps
Other apps can offer a proper Assistive Access mode [0], but when most developers these days put writing a real app in the ‘too hard’ basket, getting them to actually use platform features feels like an impossibly long shot.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/accessibility/assi...
Thanks, that is good to know! Sad to learn that even the most mainstream of apps with incredible profit margins don't seem to find this worth implementing. This would have been a reason to switch some of my family onto Apple
There's a quote from Bjarne Stroustrup showing it's not just Seniors having trouble:
I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.
Bjarne Stroustrup is 74, so he probably counts as a senior too at this point, although surely more technically literate than the stereotypes.
Still, I'm in my early 40s and I find myself baffled when I help my mom with her iPhone. I've been an Android guy ever since that was an option.
He was around 40 years old when he said it and he wasn't talking about smartphones - at least what we call smartphones today.
> "I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone".
> I said that after a frustrating attempt to use a "feature-rich" telephone sometime around 1990. I'm sure the sentiment wasn't original, and probably not even the overall phrasing; someone must have thought of that before me.
https://www.stroustrup.com/quotes.html
He worked for AT&T at the time, right? Those corporate PBX systems had all sorts of crazy features which people mastered by pounding the 12 keys really fast. And he was probably on the bleeding edge of that. (In many places digital voice mail commonly predated email.)
edit to agree: obv Stroustrup in 1990 was not talking about your cell phone.
The terminal menu driven interfaces were archaic but a dream.
You had help, everything was explained in manuals, they rejected invalid outputs. Now everything is close eyes, press enter and pray it works.
Siemens ISDX was what I worked with. To build a new corporate extension was something like option 5-2-1-1 ext code Y 2-4-7 and then 9 to confirm.
Simpler times.
> The terminal menu driven interfaces were archaic but a dream.
MicroCenter (by me, at least) still uses what looks like some terminal interface for checkout and such in stores.
It's a riot cause it's all young kids and all the keyboards are RGB gamer ones. I've never seen a faster checkout at a register.
A lot of nerve from the guy that invented the hardest programming language to use right, and the easiest to use wrong.
Even Androids are so confusing to be honest.
Just recently I wanted to change the default AI assistant from Gemini to Perplexity and after having found the option once, somehow, it took me ages to find it again.
Telephones only seem intuitive because we got taught to use them as kids. If you look back, there was a massive effort to teach people to use them.
You can still find some of the educational films: https://youtu.be/p45T7U5oi9Q?si=5fiNEiqccg41nxQb
It's wild how phones went from being the simplest tech in our lives to these over-personalized, over-contextualized systems that require a user manual just to change a ringtone or wallpaper
I'm a technology librarian and I spend around 20 hours a week helping seniors with their devices. I really wish that phone and TV engineers could shadow me for a few weeks and see what problems people really have using their devices (yes, people drag their TV to the library for me to look at). The number 1 complaint by far is getting rid of the home button on iphones and ipads. I've had a few patrons switch to android because it has fewer touch controls.
Even with Android I had to enable the "3-button navigation" at the bottom because they defaulted to Gestures whenever they introduced that (google search says it was Android 10 in 2019).
On my last two phones I have been asked what I prefer. When I selected gestures, I had to do a course.
Which is better than iOS in every way, because there is just one way to go back and there being no indicator in the app how you should do it. Do I swipe or do I look for a back button?
Depends on the vendor, Samsung still defaults to three button navigation.
I'm really tired of this (now long lasting) UX trend of getting rid of physical buttons and sometimes software buttons, and replacing them with vague "gestures." Totally undiscoverable, and also, by the way, not easy for people with limited dexterity. I'm hanging on to my iPhone 7 for dear life, even as Apple and 3rd party developers abandon it and try to shame me for keeping it. The last time I tried to use my wife's newer phone, I had no idea what to do. I just kept randomly swiping from top to bottom and bottom to top and all over the place at random speeds until it did what I wanted it to do. Infuriating.
Even if touch screens are not remembered as one of the worst inventions of the early 21st century, they are going to at least be remembered as enablers of terrible human-computer interaction patterns.
I get the dexterity and many other arguments, but... if it's just new and unfamiliar, why not read https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/iphone/iphfdf164cac/io... ? There really aren't that many gestures.
> There really aren't that many gestures.
From the home screen alone:
If you include buttons: If you have a Live Activity on your Dynamic Island, such as a video playing: In iOS 26, if you're in Safari, gestures #2, #3, #4, #5 and all the buttons still apply, but you also get: and these Safari-specific gestures: As a long-time iPhone user, I've had time to learn all of these gradually as they added them. Originally you had volume up/down, lock, and home buttons. They added double-click and long-press behaviors to some of these, as well as chords for screenshots. When they got rid of the home button, all the things that you used to do with the home button became gestures (e.g. app switcher) or moved to other buttons (Siri, screenshots, shutdown menu), so I found the migration fairly intuitive (click home button -> short swipe from bottom of screen; long-press home button -> long swipe from bottom of screen.)But I don't envy new smartphone users or people switching from iPhones with a home button. This is a lot of stuff to learn. Even I get frustrated with this sometimes -- the loss of the tab button on the Safari bottom bar in iOS 26 combined with the finickyness of gesture S11 made it a lot harder to get to my tab list until I discovered S8.
good summary actually ! thanks
That's not a great list for this case. A lot of these are not even gestures, just trivial operations. Click volume up to increase volume? The lock button to lock? On the other hand, others are obscure and not everyone needs to know them. You're not too be lost in any way if you don't know B9 for example. The ones actually need for typical operations are possible to learn from just reading the list once.
I wrote the content above in context of "The last time I tried to use my wife's newer phone, I had no idea what to do" - for use like this you need very few examples from the list.
The biggest thing when teaching someone to use an iPhone - do NOT assume they need to know all the things YOU know how to do.
Instead, ask them what they want to be able to do, and show just that. The temptation is to show too many things.
Also, you can still configure an iPhone with no passcode, which is honestly the way to go, probably.
Oh yes, you can, then an update is installed overnight and now they're presented with a non-dismissable screen that forces them to add it.
Literally happened this month with iOS 26 on my family iPad. Suddenly it had a passcode and I knew exactly why.
You can opt to not add a passcode, but the option to skip on setup is hidden, and people generally aren't going to go back to the settings to remove it once it's added. It's a dark pattern I kind of get, but it's still not ideal, especially for a market segment like the elderly.
Again, I did that, but then iOS keeps asking until it reaches someone who doesn't realize that there's no option. Effectively you have to reject it regularly, which isn't practical in this context (the elderly)
I agree with that. I was just disputing the 'a non-dismissable screen that forces them to add it' of your comment. It is skippable, but it's hidden in a way your Grandma isn't going to discover.
oh come on, you just need to buy a Mac so you can use one of the management toolkits to prevent that from happening. it Just Works!
_deeply_ /s of course
(and I say this as someone who is basically 100% a Mac user who admins Linux for a living... Apple makes a lot of stupid / frustrating decisions that I don't agree with, but I still prefer it over the alternatives)
Hmmm, I don't have a solution but if it was common for elderly people to have no passcode then they'd be a huge target for stealing them and emptying their bank accounts.
That's why I get that the default should be a passcode. Same reason Windows Update probably should automatically update. We live in a problematic world and these options are the least bad.
My Grandma's solution to this problem is to not bring her phone with her when going to public places, and that's probably the right call if you can swing it.
It's one thing to be a default. It's another thing entirely to employ dark patterns and annoyances to coerce/trick the user into doing something they don't want to. The user should ultimately be in charge, and the machine should get out of the user's way.
> stealing them and emptying their bank accounts.
Which bank allows you to empty someone's bank account if you find yourself with an unlocked device in your hand?? If was a criminal I'd be waiting outside their branch and snatching people's phones out of their hands right there, so I'm pretty confident that's not a real scenario.
While Apple tries their best to avoid it, once you remove the passcode you can just open the Passwords app and see all the passwords. I wish they let me keep the passcode on device but don't require it after only 4 hours of idle.
Ones which only need a login saved in their browser and a 2fa code which is also on their phone.
I assume you mean a password that can be saved in the browser ?
Still, blame the bank, this is an issue they should have fixed even before smartphones became popular.
Absolutely. Pickpockets would know to target them, text whoever has the most common last name, all kinds of scams.
Had the same terrible experience. Opting out from the passcode is only possible for people who know that words can also be a button. It’s a dark pattern urging you into a passcode, and another dark pattern for using numbers and letters in said passcode. And it happens every stupid iOS update. I used to tell my parents: please make these updates! Now I say: please don’t. Honestly, it was years ago when iOS updates made the device better. Now it is always worse. Not a single feature in the last 5 years was added but you have to update so often.
I switched from Android to iOS and I must say: both UX are completely enshittified. For me (IT person) not a problem, but for elderly rare occasion users it is absolutely terrible.
On one hand you can now talk to ChatGPT in natural voice, but figuring out how to make a cell phone call on iOS on your own: impossible (spoiler: WhatsApp calls are also in the phone app‘s call list).
Sure, you could buy them a dumb phone, but for online banking etc you do need a smartphone. Good luck tackling the App Store if you only use it once a year….
Online banking can do 2FA through texts, which is probably the least bad option these days.
>family iPad
Are you sure you’re allowed to do that? There’s a reason multiple user accounts aren’t supported (“buy one iPad per person please!)
Encryption by default is always scary, especially when it's very, very strong. If you forget the key, your data is gone forever. I don't think most people in the world need that level of security; those who do already know who they are. Everyone else may be willing to accept the risk that someone unauthorised may gain access, if it means reducing the risk of losing access themsleves.
(I have some very sad stories on this topic.)
What's the point? If the encryption is weak enough to be broken by the average owner it's weak enough to be broken by anyone.
I think this is primarily a UX issue, encryption should be strong but users should be "forced" to create backups of their keys, with options to store the full key in a safe place themselves, or to distribute parts of their key to trusted people using Shamir's secret sharing.
In other words don't weaken encryption, allow users to weaken their key storage after informing them about the trade-offs, if they so desire.
Users should be the ones in charge of their computers, not the OS vendor. They should not be "forced" to do anything. Sane, secure defaults are fine, but ultimately, the user should decide.
The important bit that you left out is "with how much effort ?"
Both too weak and too strong shouldn't be the default.
Regarding passcodes, for Android phones I've learned to avoid under-display fingerprint readers - they're okay for you and me but just hard enough to use that some people never converge on the right angle/pressure/duration combination to get them to work reliably. Several of my relatives have gone back to typing in their password (or to no password) after moving from a device with a back-of-phone to an under-display reader.
Mostly agree, but also - if someone's genuinely new to phones, they might not actually know what's possible that they might want to do. You have to be a little bit opinionated on how to use the phone, at least until they know enough to have opinions of their own.
Isn't that an acknowledgement that the UX is essentially worse than a PC?
On a PC, are you inclined to show your mom how the terminal works or to install Xcode? You don't because these components are not forced onto you, or may not even be installed. They are out of sight until you ask for them.
OTOH on the iPhone, instead of starting with barebones functionality and allowing you to enable the parts that are relevant to you, building your own UX, they try to make you fully buy into the Apple ecosystem. This is essentially the result of the "batteries included" design philosophy of the iPhone (which is good!) when combined with Apple aggressive marketing policies.
No, the PC is much worse.
It took me a very long time to get my parents to understand the file browser, and they still just find folders by remembering the exact clicks to make rather than understanding where they are in relation to everything else
Sometimes the answer is your parents are just bad at this.
File browsers have been around for 50 years, and they haven't changed much at all. But even if you've never used one, fine - they're as intuitive at they can get.
They work just like actual real life files. I have folders, or maybe a cabinet (drive). Inside a folder I can have another folder or tab, or another inside that. And then I have files, with data of some kind on them.
Don't like that level of organization? Fine. Just don't then. You can throw all your papers in one drawer. Or, you can just dump all your files on the desktop.
It's the perfect analogy in my mind.
I’m not sure anything could help the people in the OP post since they were unable to hold the phone, type passcodes or even use an old Nokia phone.
The Design of Everyday Things should be required reading for Apple's UX designers. This used to be a book that informed the core of their design philosophy. Unfortunately, that seems long gone.
If a user can't figure out how to do something, the user is not to blame. The designer is. With so many features in iOS now completely invisible to the naked eye, it's very clear who is responsible for this mess. And it ain't the users.
I don't think it's a failure of design, but rather a symptom of too much functionality.
The original iPhone had ~30 features it had to make work in harmony with each other. The current version of iOS has thousands. Each additional feature is an increase in difficulty in making it feel harmonious, and it's beyond the remit of what a single designer with a single vision can handle. It's grown to a scope such that no single person can contain a mental map of every aspect of it at once.
Gotta strongly disagree on this. For example, I know there's a way to get to the app switching screen, which shows all of the apps in a grid. You just have to drag up from the bottom the right amount in order to get the grid to stay. Despite knowing this, I fail to do it half the times I try. I just can't figure out how much to "drag" up from the bottom. Too much or too little and it just doesn't work. So frustrating. And so many other similar examples.
In this case there is both time a distance limit to the gesture. If the gesture is too fast the switcher won’t appear even if the distance was long enough.
That said, personally I’ve always found the gesture navigation very intuitive.
The iPhone vibrates when you swipe up just enough to reach the app switching screen.
The iPad doesn't.
Joel Spolsky disagrees with you: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/12/09/simplicity/
I think Joel is actually agreeing with Norman in that article? What am I missing?
It’s not just iPhones (although I fully expect folks to jump all over Apple. They’re an easy target). It’s pretty much everything. That includes things like kitchen gadgets, Web sites, government services, phone support, automobiles, etc.
Android is every bit as bad as iOS. Windows is as bad as MacOS, and Linux is as bad as either of them.
And it’s not just older folks. I routinely run into problems explaining technology to relatively younger folks; even highly educated ones.
I’ll bet that the author would have been just as frustrated, teaching Android to a room full of doctors and lawyers.
My doctor just sold his practice to NYU Langone, a very good organization (and he got lots of money, I’m sure). They installed a really intense (and expensive) IT setup in his office. I’ve been watching him and his staff, struggling with it. It’s actually an excellent system, and I’m sure that many folks here, would be proud of it, but they still struggle. He has a full-time staff member, supplied by Langone, whose only job, is to come in and help staff use the IT services. She’s very busy (and patient).
I feel like Accessibility needs to include discoverability, affordance, and usability, as principal axes.
The terminology we use, the words we pick, in user interface and feedback are vital. The design of affordances, the placement of UI elements, etc.
Glossaries are really important, and I watch people’s eyes glaze over, when I start talking about them. You can have Design Language glossaries; not just text ones.
It’s a huge topic, and not a particularly popular one.
I feel that a good start, is highlighting examples of products that get it right, with discussion on how they do it. I get pretty tired of everyone complaining about the failures. That’s just discouraging, and tends to get people circling their wagons. I think good examples would be very helpful.
I’ll start. My wife likes OXO kitchen gadgets a lot. So do I. She tends to buy stuff that I’d never get, if I were making the decision, but I find really good, once I start using it.
Yeah. I have an engineering degree, a PhD in physics, I code, and I build IoTs for fun -- and I did not manage to use the new water cooler at the office.
I tried all the tricks gathered over 40 years of dealing with ever-evolving technology and then this WTF of not being able to switch on water.
It happens, not everyone catches on to new tech. And then I heard my whole team explain among them where a "working water cooler" is. Fortunately, one of them knew how to use the closest one. The whole herd (me included) trotted for a demonstration and now I know that I have to press 3 buttons, then when the incorrect button is lit up, I need to continuously press the small "start" triangle which you see in video programs. All the lights flicker, something something and, tadaaam, the water flows.
I have the same problem when I have to use a shower I do not know. This reminds me a time when I was trekking and saw my friends taking a shower under the faucet of the shower (yeah, the shower had a faucet) because they did not work out what needed to be pulled, turned, pushed, and whatnot.
I’m seeing this happening in real time in my company. The product keeps getting worse.
It should have been a form and about 3 buttons but instead it’s an increasingly complex UI with incoherent, overlapping, confusing features, many of them are footguns. The things you actually want the product to do are hard to find and are like 10 clicks away.
Having complex features is a form of moat I suppose. Companies might not actively seek out complexity, but thanks to the moat-iness of the problem they aren't as discouraged to remove complexity as they should be.
unfortunately this is an inherent property of a system (software in this case) that punishes stability and rewards changes for the sake of changes
if you don't modify your library, app, OS, etc for 2 years, it's perceived as abandoned or obsolete, meaning even if you're achieved perfection in your product in terms of ui, you can't stay there, you must move forward and break it (i'm not talking about bugs or security vulnerabilities here, only the functionality itself)
prominent example is w/ microsoft word, where they kept adding an absurd number of features simply bc they felt like they had to, since ppl were paying for it, and this will KEEP HAPPENING TO EVERYONE so long as the software keeps moving at breakneck speed and backwards compatibility and stability are thrown out of the window...
Yup. That’s one of the great things about the OXO stuff we have. I have a new vegetable peeler, that replaced one we had for over a decade. It’s basically, exactly the same one. I suspect the parts would be interchangeable.
I think that Apple’s Snow Leopard MacOS release was almost identical, in surface features, to its predecessor, but is considered one of their best releases, ever, because it fixed so many bugs, and improved a lot of important functionality. Internally, it also established a technical fabric for the new architecture, but that wasn’t visible to users.
Panic’s Playdate has been easy to pass around to friends to try. The device intro is a lot of fun and shows the main interactions, and then the games a snappy and easy to jump into.
Definitely would recommend playing with one if you get the chance. Buying one… it depends on how much the device appeals to you, mine got active use for a couple months and then has fallen off
> I feel like Accessibility needs to include discoverability, affordance, and usability, as principal axes.
Would most people who struggle with modern UI/UX would customize the discovery in their own way i.e. should every UI be configurable in a way it aligns with each user's mental model? And how would a UX system *behave* to find the "best" model for the job?
The customization seems to be the issue.
Not sure if you are an iOS user, or not, but the Accessibility customization is batshit crazy. Lots of cool things to tweak, but there's way too many knobs and switches. Also, and this is an issue with settings/preferences in almost all apps, regardless of platform, the damn settings aren't where they are supposed to be. They get placed into screens that match the designer's structure, but not that match the user's mental model.
I'd like to see customization models that match user mental models, and maybe better support for adapting to the user.
"AI" may be helpful, here. I think previous "wizards" have not been up to the task.
I wonder what might be more formal ways to extract such mental models.
1. Most people have been exposed to some sort of a computing device in their lifetimes, if that experience had enough UI/UX to support what the user wants from the new platform/os then a new UI/UX start with that, no matter how "ugly" it looked. Maybe give the option to make the desktop os windowing and nav look just like the mobile OS, if the user knows the latter, so that challenged users can just start cold if they know the other. This could solve problems like: Most people know how to do attachments on one platform do not know how to do it on the other.
2. If one does not have any mental model you could gamify it and reward the user for learning a UI/UX and decrease the reward over time as the user gets better.
3. Too many times people forget compound actions e.g. publising an ad on Facebook or knowing how to do 2 fac auth. A strong voice driven navigator could aid in overcoming discovery difficulties, it would know how to do X and the user knows what(X) they want. Ideally since these things are done in a sequence, sequence models like LSTMs could learn what trips up people the most and it would reflect ones own mental model.
I’m lucky my dad worked in IT and has kept up on things. He’s retired now and has started teaching classes through AARP. He’s done a few on the iPhone. More recently he did one on ChatGPT. The ChatGPT class was so popular they are moving to a bigger venue for the next one.
The important thing is to keep it focused on what people might actually use and care about. For the ChatGPT class, he wasn’t talking about generating code, he talked about how he used ChatGPT to help him understand results from medical tests, which led to getting bypass surgery 6+ months sooner than if he had waited for the doctors to call him every time.
I’ve found most people want to know the bare minimum to get what they need done. People are busy and they aren’t looking to be technology experts. They just want to know how to do the basics they used to know how to do without feeling lost.
These days, for someone who had issues with the complexity. I’d turn on Assistive Access[0].
There is also the option to refer them to Apple. That’s what my dad would do during his class if someone needed more hands-on help than he could provide when teaching a whole room of people. Apple offers classes at their stores, and people can call support. So he made sure to cover that to shift some of that to the experts.
[0] https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/welc...
I hope he explains the Chinese Room thought experiment when teaching ChatGPT...
I wouldn’t recommend this explanation. Even still-sharp older folks accuse me of complicating things. It’s very hard to successfully advocate the benefits of these systems while keeping their attention span.
I always refer to chat interfaces as a computer. A single episode of dialogue with a thing with no mind.
Feh, fine, as I commented, I did think about my own anecdote. To ELI75 it: I had a chance to interact with Sony's Aibo dog, the salesgirl said if you put your hand in front of it, it will yelp. Same as if you stroke the sensor pad on its back. It took a few tries, it did it, and I was delighed. Then I realized it was just some algorithms responding to input/"seeing" someone's hand with motor movements and an audio file of dog barks, there's no dog there happy to see you...
Does he talk about the risks with using ChatGPT or other LLMs? I'm all for teaching elderly people this if it can help them, but I'm also very worried about side effects.
Also, when you age your skin dries out and touch screens are less sensitive to your presses. So not only are these things exceptionally complex to use (eg many abstract concepts) the interface also does not really function well, making it a double whammy. I've had multiple cases watching my aging parents where I say press that or drag this, and it literally does not work, and makes them feel completely inept.
For the sake of our parents, we (as technology builders and buyers) need to be more comfortable saying the latest iPoop Galaxy S might be just not the right choice for a big segment of our society, and we need to make phones with buttons.
I'm starting to run into that and I'm not even retired yet.
Mom uses a stylus with a conductive rubber tip to operate her Pixel. Which shouldn't be necessary.
With regard to learning to use a new release - since Apple (and no one else either it seems) ships a manual with their pocket computer these days, they need to have a group of people creating videos that explain how to use it.
Of course, if you can't get past the OOTB setup, that might of of minimal use...
I empathize. My dad is 98 and can mostly use his iPhone fine, but I just wish I could turn off all the “shortcuts”: He doesn’t get swiping down from different edges of the screen for control panel vs notifications. He doesn’t get hard-pressing on icons for different options (like the flashlight), and so on. Wish I could turn off Siri and Apple Pay, because hitting the “sleep” button just slightly wrong can invoke them and then he’s stumped.
Not just your dad but the vast majority don't use these features either.
The human brain has a natural upper limit in how many times it's beliefs can update per year. If the Total new features shipped by every company in the land, every year exceeds that limit, most of it is a gigantic waste.
Large, cash rich companies beyond a point attract opportunists. And soon they outnumber innovators.
After that happens we get run away Involution (change without purpose).
There is never ending amount of work going on, hyper specialization, elon/trump style self glorification/back patting, and all happening with very little purpose or meaning being produced.
The solution is well known. Orgs which have purpose are tuned into the Limits baked into the system.
Try Settings -> Apple Intelligence & Siri -> Talk and Type to Siri
You can individually turn off 1) voice activation phrases, 2) press and hold side button, and 3) double tap bottom edge to type
For the flashlight, I assume you're talking about on the lock screen. You can customize the lock screen and remove that button entirely. If he has a newer iPhone, flashlight is probably a good use for the "Action Button" on the left, if he doesn't want to use that for toggling ringer/vibrate.
Disable Apple Pay:
1. Search settings for Apple Pay
2. Tap Apple Pay Defaults
3. Toggle off Double-Click Side Button
(Siri disable instructions in sibling)
> Wish I could turn off Siri and Apple Pay, because hitting the “sleep” button just slightly wrong can invoke them and then he’s stumped.
This should be possible? Or at-least it was when I was still using an iPhone, which was less than a year ago.
I've always thought it's a bit unfortunate how having a smartphone (which almost always also means having an Apple or Google account to download third-party apps) is slowly becoming a near-necessity in today's society, rather than a nice-to-have. Even some places like national parks (in the USA) require you to download an app just to enter.
What national park requires an app to enter?
Rocky Mountain National Park here in Colorado does - both for timed entry and - I believe - for location pinging in case of S&R
https://www.nps.gov/romo/learn/discover-the-nps-app.htm
Where on that page does it show that it is a necessity? I haven’t been to Rocky Mountain recently (and when I did go right before COVID don’t need one) but am an avid National Parks visitor and have never once needed a phone. You can print the timed entry codes (which I often do because of lack of cell service in some).
>"and have never once needed a phone. You can print the timed entry codes (which I often do because of lack of cell service in some)."
I mean OK, fair enough; it's not NEEDED to have a phone. But short of printing out, they heavily incentivize timed entry codes being shared by phone; either by screenshot or sharing your phone for the code.
When we do group visits to Estes Park from here in Denver, all members of the group use a phone.
Agreed, it's becoming silly. Particularly for thing that are infrequent. Like no I don't want to install an app to check into a flight given that I fly once a year. And of course each airline would have their own app. Forcing an app on me when your service is not a primarily digital product, or there's no reason why your product needs a special unique app, is a great shortcut to me hating your organisation.
Refuse the app and use the website. If there’s no website, complain.
and the whole swiping from the button [bottom?] kept making the screen go down to the bottom half
This happens to me way more than I would like. For the life of me, I can't figure out the utility in being able to move my lock screen 1/2 way down the phone and have blank space on top. I don't know what this feature is or how I would activate it if I actually wanted to.
That feature is called "reachability" and is designed to let the user access controls at the top of the screen with their thumb. It's a nice idea but triggers unintentionally too often IMO.
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-reachability-iph1...
Thank you! I couldn't remember the name of it (and didn't feel like digging through menus to find it), so I haven't been able to disable until just now!
I preferred the original "reachability": Making a phone that is small enough for my hand to reach the entire screen.
I pivot between small phones and phablets every upgrade cycle.
Currently enjoying a Pro Max and loving it, but I'll hate everything about it in two years and go for the smallest current gen iphone
It made way more sense when it was introduced with the iPhone 6 Plus because there was still a home button. Much less likely to accidentally trigger it with that compared to the full screens we have now. It’s triggered by swiping down on the bottom of the screen, nowadays essentially the opposite motion of how you’d exit an app. Anyway, you can disable it in Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Reachability.
FWIW, you can turn Reachability off under Settings > Accessibility > Touch.
I've found my people! Going to shut that setting off right now.
It’s so you can reach the top half of the screen when using the phone with one hand
Because the phones are too freaking big.
Very few people bought the smaller phones available on the market.
Apple never sold a flagship ("Pro") iPhone mini. If you wanted the better cameras (particularly the telephoto camera), you had to get the 12 pro or 13 pro. By the 11, they had given the non-Pro models dual lenses, but with the gimmicky 0.5x instead of the more applicable 2x camera.
In the Android ecosystem, to get a good small screen these days you need to get expensive and fragile foldables. The mini phones like Jelly are too compromised on hardware and software.
Because it needs more pixels to hypnotize you better.
The last iOS device I owned was an iPad Mini and I basically interact with iOS now only in emulators, besides doing small things on someone's phone when their hands are tied or whatever.
To an outsider, the iPhone UX is heavily dependent on non-discoverable gestures. Some of the gestures are obvious and shared with the design languages in other operating systems, but some aren't. Some of them "make sense" once you learn them, but others feel arbitrary and non-obvious.
If I was ever handed an iPhone and asked to contact someone specific in an emergency, I'd probably end up fumbling around for a dumb amount of time. I'm sure the necessary steps are easy once you know them, the issue is going in blind not knowing them.
Having worked a job getting seniors acquainted with using desktop computers as a teen, I don't imagine the same task would be easier today with iPhones. It feels like the UX assumes you're already fluent in their language.
Undiscoverable gestures to avoid (gasp) extra icons(!!) are really rough.
Control Center is hard, Apple. (Not for my generation but millions of people)
> If I was ever handed an iPhone and asked to contact someone specific in an emergency, I'd probably end up fumbling around for a dumb amount of time.
True for a dumb phone also. I remember then because i'm old
I taught my now 83 year old mother to use an Android phone 10+ years ago and now I use Nova Launcher to do my best to emulate the experience she's used to every time there is an OS update. She does pretty well, but recently Google changed the default Phone app and she hates it. It's tricky keeping the experience stable once they have learned it. There are also several "senior" launchers meant to simply the UI but all of them have been a little too restrictive.
Might be worth it to try Fossify Phone as an alternative phone app. If anything, it's less likely to change overnight.
Lately I've been ranting about the Grandma Test. Simply stated, if Grandma cannot understand the technology enough to use it, (in many situations just the UX) it is objectively bad. You are losing customers to frustration. Rote memorization is the hack that got her to this point in life in her world, and constantly and consistently shifting things is breaking her hack. Key takeaway: You could have thousands of additional customers if a lightweight 2nd UI that materially does not change existed for your product.
It's incredibly hard to teach a senior how to angle the phone correctly for face unlock to work (there's also no feedback that you've done it wrong). If you're using the power button, then you have to teach how to not hold it too long, or else, siri shows up. Or maybe you want them to use siri voice command, then you have to teach them to hold it down long enough (and there's no feedback if you're off of the spot you're supposed to swipe up from). Swipe to unlock (password or otherwise) was impossible.
I gave up and returned the phone.
I was desperately wishing some hipster had refurbished an old style rotary or physical push button phone with a Sim card, but not even that exists.
https://www.amazon.com/Opis-60s-mobile-4G-Phone/dp/B0CV5XN9H...
$200
no way, gotta try this!
Hijacking the power button for marketing of new features was evil from the get go.
I mean, I get it. It's the perfect engagement metric-driven design. It's the perfect dark pattern. I'm sure you switch that on and whoa!!! Look at how many people are using Siri!!! They must loooooove Siri!!!
It's a thing on Android too. I switch it off. I know it exists and I know not to activate it, and I still switch it off.
Two things stand out:
1. The setup process should have a heavily simplified mode right at the beginning. It may not be simple for Apple to decide what to exclude from the standard setup process, but there are several obviously time consuming, annoying and unnecessary steps in it. A lot of behaviors with side button double click, camera button swipe, etc., should be off by default.
2. There should be a very short test on finding out the accessibility needs of the user (to the extent possible, because some people may not know how to follow written or spoken instructions).
These are not just for the elderly, but also for many others who have accessibility needs, who lack knowledge about gadgets (or can’t be bothered keeping up with changes in interfaces and disappearing physical buttons), who just need something simple that serves a few actions (like phone calls, video calls, taking photos, viewing received photos and videos, etc.).
Older/earlier iOS was more simple, intuitive, and usable from my point of view (mid 30s tech oriented male). Now even i find myself getting lost in the endless settings menus and too many different home screen / option screen / extra screens. I don't even use MacOS Launchpad. Just give me a desktop, window manager, and simple notifications.
I dread the day my older mom updates her iOS and calls me for help.
What really has been added in terms of endless menus? Control Center was like 2013, Widgets were like 2014. Today, 90% of things are still controlled via the settings app, except for a few app-specific settings that are controlled via the specific app. The latest iOS has some rougher edges, but I can't see how it's confusing.
Here is a practical example: When I simply want to switch wifi networks at home or work or the coffee shop, or I want to disconnect my car from bluetooth and go with just my AirPods (for a private call with the kids in the car), it takes more than 3-4 clicks to do the "right thing" from that slide down menu.
The UI reaction feels more delayed now. If i'm in the middle of a call and want to go private, or some how got connected to the slow network, and i want to switch to the other one.
I feel like I used to be able to do it with 2 or 3 simple clicks. Now i cant remember if i need to click once, or click and hold, and by then the animation changed and now I tapped again and its doing something i did not expect.
For me personally, I used to be a wiz at navigating this phone on older OS versions - and now i feel like a klutz and it doesn't do the thing I expected anymore.
Not to nitpick, but just because it's the example you gave: Wi-Fi settings in the control center are the same as they have been for years (or easier, as I don't remember the dropdown menu in the earliest versions).
The UX paradigm of a tap for the primary function and a press for alternate functions (for Wi-Fi: On/off, or to select networks) is the same across much of iOS, including Safari and 3rd party apps.
Admittedly it's not the best for discoverability, and the elimination of Haptic Touch has made it slightly more awkward to trigger, but it's not a totally new behavior to learn.
Are you on a significantly older device that might be having some performance issues? Supposedly the new glass UI is heavier and could be slowing down the device enough to cause issues.
Don’t you just need to put the AirPods in your ears for them to connect to the phone (and for the phone to switch from the car automatically?) Unless you’re always wearing them while driving..
It’s still 3 clicks for both operations (slide from corner, 1. Tap the wireless cluster where there’s a group of four small icons, 2. Tap either WiFi or Bluetooth where there’s a list with up/down arrows. 3. Select from that list)
On OSX there is a bug where if you have automatic ear detection on, even with latest AirPods, it will connect back properly but the OS will not switch the output to it, but it will think it did. You will have to turn off bluetooth and turn it back on again, even disconnecting from airpod and reconnecting doesn't fix it.
I mean, Apple software quality has gotten so abyssmal, I haven't updated TailScale to latest version because when it updates, briefly a notification appears telling me to go into settings to approve something but even when I click that notification, it doesn't take me there. And I know the location it is talking about, when I go there, there are no pending requests.
It is all so tiresome. Except for battery life, it is literally a terrible platform now. And just several years ago, it was light-years ahead.
Don’t get me started on the new mobile safari UI
the fact that it allows more screen space for content is appreciated, but the way it was forced on everyone pisses me off.
You can change it in settings -> Apps -> Safari, under the "Tabs" section - "Bottom" is like what it used to be. I immediately switched to that after the update to 26, but once I realized you could swipe up from the address bar to get to the tab view, I switched back so I could get more content space.
I don't like that it's two taps to get to the share button now though.
I am continually surprised that Apple doesn't offer an "older" user set of options, as part of accessibility.
My mother in law is confused between contacts, contacts in messages, contacts in phone (we should have one place to do one thing: store names she wants to contact. She doesn't get that it's the same thing in each app).
She routinely long taps on things accidentally, turning on or off functions she doesn't understand. No easy way to figure out what she reconfigured from miles away.
Tap targets are all small, with non-scaling buttons even in Apple's app. Making everything large across every setting I can find either breaks apps or has inconsistent effects.
Having all settings in one Settings tool means having to leave an app to change how it works, which is counter-intuitive (to change the toast time, go to the fridge and move the butter around) to many folks.
I've stripped the device to just her favorite apps, but I can't limit access to settings, controls, or other aspects. I just want an extra step so she can pause and "cancel" things she doesn't understand. Apple gives no option: everyone is a user with benefits (no super users in iOS).
I tried the child protections, but she's not a child. She should be open to watch what she wants, chat with whom she wants (yes, there is risk there) and that's the opposite of of what child protections do.
Long time Apple fan, but the complexity and lack of controls is becoming really painful. For folks who need simplicity and consistency, Apple appears to have left that far behind.
My fear, of course, is that she is future me: my interactions will suffer with mixes of gestures and mental controls and smell-ux, and my kid won't be able to set the device to work with my needs.
> My mother in law is confused between contacts, contacts in messages, contacts in phone (we should have one place to do one thing: store names she wants to contact. She doesn't get that it's the same thing in each app).
I am confused too (o, Android), after discussing with developers and reading documentation. Some things simply do not work despite the producer telling you they do.
Contacts is one of the worst offenders.
They do: https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/welc...
Most of the western world population is about to become a lot older and hence more % disabled in the next decade. Wouldn't it be wonderful if someone just asked the user what were the main features they used and configured only those services on the OS?
Settings could be super simplified. People using, for e.g. mail and browser only, could ask for an integrated UI/UX experience for both. There could be a remote assistance escape hatch as a permanent UX feature for the early days of use for someone you trusted to help you. Power users can ask for more stuff and add more features.
Another thing would be for a AI to do just one thing. e.g. you can configure it at set up to just help one how to do X. This is really not easy. e.g. an AI would need access to your windowing system and peripherals and then infer from your prompt where you are stuck to help you.
So many wonderful things could be done if they invested more into user research and figured out how to help people. It would boost adoption — and more importantly brand love — up the wazoo.
> Most of the western world population is about to become a lot older
All of the world population. Nobody can escape aging.
But specifically the old-age dependency ratio changing from 48% to 60% could pass a tipping point which presents a shock.
Two years ago I set up an android tablet for my grandmother to make and receive WhatsApp calls. Was a fun challenge to have the setup compensate for her never having used a touch screen before.
One interaction that missed the cut was using the tablet's accelerometer to answer calls so she wouldn't have to interact with the screen at all. Simply tilting the tablet forward and back on it's stand would have answered the call. You just can't beat the customizability of Android (with Tasker) for things like this.
https://kavi.sblmnl.co.za/grandmother-communicator/ https://kavi.sblmnl.co.za/grandmother-communicator-part-2/
I believe this is doable through iOS shortcuts or accessibility - a gesture can be programmed to simulate a tap on a part of the screen.
Touch screens can be difficult for seniors to use due to the reduced moisture in their fingertips, which often leads to multiple attempts for the device to register a touch. I'm not yet a senior, and I'm already experiencing this issue myself.
This is why I believe the future lies in touchless technology, like META Glasses. We should be able to control devices using voice commands or simple hand gestures. The need to touch icons or swipe feels outdated.
From a quick read in TFA and the comments, it is interesting that nobody questions iPhone as the right device for seniors. It is pretty much unquestionably presented as the only device option, even though it is pretty obvious that a lot of seniors are just not interested into its features.
I'm not sure where this can be pinpointed. Monoculture? Mimicry? FOMO?
It’s MacRumors forums, basically a definition of a monoculture/fandom.
Apple Watch fall detection. I believe it’s only fully effective if an iPhone is nearby.
I'm not sure that's the case (see [1]):
If an iPhone is indeed required even if your Apple Watch has a cellular connection, then that's just a lock-in "feature".[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/108896
Awesome, til
Let's assume a smartphone is the requirement. Secure communication via text and video, as well as email access.
Who do you recommend otherwise? Particularly for professional assistance when I am not around?
Every Best Buy and Apple Store is trained on it. Samsung would be the only other option.
Literally any Android smartphone should do:
Done.It's a pretty foolproof setup. And I'm not sure why you would need a brand specialist to get help for such basic stuff. Walk with a Motorola into a Samsung store, I'm pretty sure they will be able to help you, especially if you are a polite senior.
An Android smartphone would have the same usability problems for geezers.
In my experience with technophobe seniors, concierge service would be a bonus.
And I wouldn't assume competing brands would help each other beyond "is this thing on" level checks.
But he's there are ways to lock the system so things don't move around much.
This is a difficult task generally, not just with smartphone or Apple products.
I have helped many a tech challenged person (of all ages) learn to better use their devices. You need a lot of patience and to actively resist succumbing to the curse of knowledge.
The first and most common roadblock is that they often don’t know their passwords!
"All they wanted was the phone app. " This is key. A smartphone, any smartphone, was never going to be the answer for these folks.
I kinda think that most commenters here haven’t read the article, and are not appreciating the scale of the problem here.
An iPhone 1 wouldn’t have met their needs either. Old keypad Nokias had already been deemed unsuitable because they couldn’t use them safely.
From the post:
none of them could understand how to unlock the phone. Entering a passcode was a nightmare because they kept forgetting it, even though it was a birthday they knew, lol.
…
I left there achieving nothing because they couldn’t figure out their old Nokia phones. The unlock thing on the keypad was too difficult, and if I turned that off, they kept dialing 999 in their pockets for some reason. That’s why I was there: they were calling emergency services 100 times a day, lol.
One of the things I’ve noticed with senior people is that fine motor control tends to start to go,
Things like double click a mouse is difficult to perform two very fast clicks, without also moving the mouse,
Same with iPhone, swiping without deviating, pressing TINY buttons, and even what constitutes a tap are difficult for the elderly. Yes there’s zoom but that only makes it 10% better, as I watch them
Also tiny fonts and poor contrast.
So one thing I feel is that many old folk find it impossible to understand and build with multiple UI/UX abstractions they are not familar with. Take the file explorer(or whatever mac has for viewing files) abstraction.
If you aren't familiar with the concept of where files are found — e.g. where are downloaded files — it becomes infinitely more difficult to them to remember and add another UX/UI abstraction e.g. how to open a file using a suitable application. Lack of homogenity between OSes and Platforms makes it all the more harder.
This just keeps repeating for everything. Making attachments, knowing how to clear browser history, bookmarking, opening and searching through mail etc.
We tried to get my grandma to use an iPad (not my idea), she ended up locking it in a drawer because she got upset with it. I can't blame her.
Ultimately, I don't think it's to her detriment. There would be some ease of mind if she had a cell phone and were comfortable using it (over a home phone) but tech is not for everyone.
From what I read in the comments, the core problem (for any UI/UX) is that users need time to discover and learn where the features are. On iOS (and now also macOS), some features end up in places where we wouldn't naturally expect them. When we first discover a new OS (yes... OS), how much time are we willing to spend on learning? I bet not much (as paradoxal as it may sounds).
In my opinion, standardizing almost everything into uniform list-based UIs actually makes it harder for the brain to remember. Variation and distinct visual cues help us build stronger mental maps. But in the end, it's a matter of time and practice until things feel 'in the right place'.
Apple should definitely have a R&D team working on such approaches.
An awful lot of the functionality is superfluous for an awful lot of us.
I'd love to switch off the App Library page, the Today View, Tab Groups in Safari. I frequently open these and it's always unintentional.
In my experience, "seniors" aren't a monolith.
One of my elderly neighbors is happy with the generally-fine iOS defaults. Another elderly neighbor (I'm the "helpful computer guy" on our street, paid in appreciation, good karma, and baked goods) is a tech enthusiast, loves to play with his devices, and is no more intimidated by an iPhone than a Gen Z'er. My mom-in-law is 87, and we tried Guided Access with her but it was "too weird", so we use FaceTime's "remote control" feature if she needs help. https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/request-give-remote-con...
I'm not blindly cheerleading Apple here, beyond just noting that they're the most accessible choice of mainstream smartphones if the Apple ecosystem is the best solution for that particular elderly person and their support network.
There are several very good non-Apple options for "semi-smart" phones like the Jitterbug Smart4, as well as good old-fashioned dumb-phones with big buttons, any of which may be a better choice than an iPhone for a particular senior. My understanding is that there are many Android launcher-replacement options designed for seniors and the visually impaired as well.
" Note: Remote control isn’t currently available in the European Union. "
Infuriating.
I would also say that for pre-elderly cohort iPhones are also hard to learn. Gestures are completely baffling for unfamiliar people, and Apple generously removed basic on-screen buttons. Dealing with files is nightmare (yes, people still dare to use files in a year of our lord 2025). Back button being inconsistent and badly placed doesn't help. Native mail app works unpredictably (I couldn't be bothered to debug if it was a user error or not), so I've installed them gmail. Other random minor issues often rise up too. For instance I had to teach them icons in a Safari at least three times on separate occasions.
> Dealing with files is nightmare (yes, people still dare to use files in a year of our lord 2025).
This is one of the largest detriments for iPhones for me, personally.
On Android phones I can just connect via usb and drop ebooks, movies, audio, pictures whatever quickly with no fanfare on Linux/Windows/MacOS (I think? with some android file explorer thing)
My parents are seniors. My dad has never had interest in computers, and only used them to the extent he had to. But my mom has mastered the iphone/ipad stuff.
> Nokia "dumb" phone
I don't think this exists anymore. I got one for my dad because it has an emergency button on the side to call mom. But its really some android front-end with a bunch of modes, and not at all 'easy' if you weren't into this interface back in the day. He has lots of problems with it. Next plan is Apple's 'Assistive Access' on an old iPhone.
https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/welc...
I think there are still Nokia branded "dumb" phones being released. It seems they are now developed by HMD Global, another Finnish company who brought the Nokia mobile phone business. Seems like they still run the same software. They might only be widespread in some parts of the world though. Perhaps not available at all where you are.
Here's one, which is some sort of retro-revival. I've just chosen that because there is a Wikipedia page for it.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3210_(2024)
There are quite a few other examples here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HMD_Global_products
Yeah, thanks, it was a 2780 which runs KaiOS (and not android).
I am really disputing the premise that this interface is really in any way easier or "dumber" than an iPhone. It is more primitive and maybe people learned it's ways a long time ago and don't want to learn anything new. But it has loads of modes and it's really easy to get stuck in some place where you can't do something basic. It is not at all a "dumbphone", it is a complete smartphone with a dumb interface.
(IMO it was a total mistake on my part, and the only thing good about it is the emergency button.)
Some of my folks have iPhones and I think it is a punishment they accept in return for the high social perception they get, of using an expensive phone. I feel for them.
Apple sold the abysmal usability under the disguise of high-class label and durability.
Example: They are scared to use their camera, as the camera app applied a myriad of it's own settings and effects that they don't have a clue how to take a simple stupid photo without any effects.
And the reason why this flood of complexity hits an unsuspecting user is, the businesses were under peer pressure to boast of more features and options while not recognizing the negative effect of the complexity on the usability.
I switched to iPhone from Android for a few months earlier this year. I don't think I qualify as an elderly person yet (I'm 47) but even I had trouble figuring things out. I don't think it was super-hard to use, but I often found myself asking "Why would they do it like this? Who uses a smart-phone like this?". I just found some things very unintuitive. Take for example re-arranging icons. I don't know if I would ever have figured out this technique without looking it up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTdZLY9r4lg
I went through many iPhones, my first iPhone 3G is still lying around. But nowadays I need to look for howto vidoes and blogs for rather simple things. The simplicity is gone, there are too many settings and bugs. Looking for used Google Pixel 9 or 10 Pro Fold to install GrapheneOS and give it a try. It can’t be worse than my iPhone 14 pro max with broken mail.
It used to be simpler. I remember it taking years before Apple finally added this ability to move more than one icon at a time, and it’s a change for the better in my opinion. Using it as a reordering technique is a knock-on effect I’d never really thought about, but I think using this to move multiple icons to another page or into a folder makes a lot of sense. I’m not sure how you’d do it better (though I’m sure I’m lacking in UI imagination).
I definitely agree that Apple have buried the complexity of some features, but moving icons on the Home Screen is press + hold and then drag by default, same as android.
I'm referring specifically to the technique mentioned in that video. Yeah it's cool that it's there, but that doesn't seem intuitive at all.
Sure but the same can be said about any number of windows, android, Linux features.
The single biggest change in both ios and android is the swiping everywhere, and lack of button depth. Now it's impossible to navigate, and impossible to know what's a button or not. The only way is to just try tapping and swiping everything.
I remember a bug/feature report for some Android ROM complaining that switching the 3-button navigation layout to have the back button on the right side, and someone mentioned that they probably wouldn't do that, since button navigation was going to be deprecated in favour of gestures anyway, so no point in putting in the effort.
The comments following that one weren't very kind. And I agree with them. I'd hate for gestures to be the only option, and find the 3-button layout option to be the saving grace saving me from dreading to use my phone. I can't imagine that option disappearing, precisely because Grandmas and the like need that option to use their phones, but the fact that there are people out there who see that option as deprecated, and not even as an accessibility option at best, scares me. That thought is the start of process that eventually ends with some critical functionality being removed and never coming back, breaking a category of device for a large group of people, in a similar way to how the X11 to Wayland migration has broken several accessibility features on Linux.
My Father-in-law resisted smart phones for much longer than most, but he's had an android phone for a couple years now and it's really cool how much he's adapted it to his own personal use style. Nobody showed him the "usual" way to do things so he made his own system of sorts.
He almost never uses search or menus for anything. Instead he has a bunch of home screens that he customized with quick links. Like he has one for each of his children with a one shortcut to text them, one to call, one to send a Facebook message, one link to their Facebook profile, and a note with special dates (birthdays, anniversaries) for each so he can remember to call them then. He's got another home page he has for stuff related to the Marines, websites and meme pages, etc.
He's very meticulous with getting everything exactly how he wants it, and is so proud to show it off. Sometimes he still needs help (last time I was there he asked me to help him set "Battle Hymn of the Republic" as his ring tone), but I'm honestly really impressed with how well he's adapted.
Meanwhile another older family member handed me their phone to fix, and it's completely unusable from malware that's highjacking everything they try to click, then they try to install something else to fix it themselves and somehow add even more malware. Took me like half an hour to track everything down and disable it so it was usable again, couldn't convince him to factory reset it. We had a nice long chat about installing things after that. I can't imagine he used anything other than the playstore, but man, it was wild.
I placed a Facebook Portal at my 90-year-old grandma's and she video calls me with it. Extremely easy to use.
I fear the day Facebook finally kills it and I have to navigate the nightmare that are tablets, their ever-changing UIs, and endless unprompted prompts.
You could look into MDM solutions. These are meant for unattended devices like kiosks in public spaces. You should be able to control devices remotely and lock them down to only the essentials.
Chromebooks work pretty well for seniors, IMO. Cheaper than iPads too.
As an Android-only user, and occasional iphone user (my wife's phone) I agree that the iphone is not as intuitive an interface as it is was. Especially compared to Android.
I would also add that overly designing things usually makes interfaces worse over time. Designers assume some sort of prerequisite knowledge from a user which is not always the case.
On the other hand, having observed kids explore the interface I'm always amazed at how quickly they intuit everything.
> On the other hand, having observed kids explore the interface I'm always amazed at how quickly they intuit everything.
I believe (for some reason) that to be true for anything a kid has an interest in. As a kid we figured out how to navigate games in black and white, Japanese and without any guide/tutorial/internet, just because we wanted to play Captain Tsubasa on our PSX.
Maybe the game was nicely and intuitively designed or maybe we just put the effort and time to figure stuff out.
Conversely, you get people (regardless of the age) unable to figure out the simplest systems (from a 2 buttons espresso maker to kettles and toasters) just because they can't contemplate having to sit down more than 5s to understand things out.
It's possible to simplify all of this significantly in the settings if you know what you're doing, but I also think a lot of older people would benefit from just not having a smartphone to deal with in the first place.
While the set up can be easier, I think there's a few self-inflicted problems at play here:
First: Giving a senior with aptitude or dexterity hindrances is already a mistake. Even if they are set up they're going to be having trouble with much harder to use apps such as banking, ticketing and government apps which seemingly delight themselves in publishing rubbish.
Second: iPhones have assistive access modes which preserve core phone functions while addressing accessibility impairment: https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/
Third: The apple stores are help centres. Not only do they provide free guided setup (and help with forgotten passwords), but they also provide free training on how to use different functions of the phone, both in person or online.
Fourth: At any age we already know that some people use and understand technology better than others. (It's interesting to watch different people set up touch-id, some will resist reading any instructions provided on the screen over their own intuition for how the set up should work.) Grouping a room of seniors together to set up a phone is like getting kids from school years 1 through 10 together and expecting them all to perform equally.
Finally: Like giving a car to a teenager, one must take some responsibility in dumping such a product on a person who might not be able to handle it. Seniors are still autonomous and will look for help if you're not providing it - scammers enjoy "helping" seniors part with their money this way.
> Also, the whole phone setup process needs to be delayed; having to go through it for an hour puts them off from even wanting to bother
This is also an issue with Android. When I changed phones a month ago, I ran into trouble with my Google account. The only internet connection I had was my cellular data plan and during the mandatory initial set-up I could not enable hotspot on the new phone to do online 2FA on the old device.
It's not just software. I have witnessed seniors grabbing their device 'wrong' when they pick up the phone to answer a call. They cannot hear the caller because they are literally holding the volume button down when they pick up the device and don't notice. There is no easy way for me to disable the hardware volume buttons.
It won't keep. The UI hides so much behind modals, hamburgers, indescribable gestures (swipe, press, hard press, hold, corners). A user interface used to be a describable map from desired actions to low-state inputs (press this key, click on this image ...). Now it is just a state filled soup.
> why not have a 65+ or something for a senior mode?
No thank you. Why should my phone assume that because I'm nearly 70 that I'm unable to think. In fact why should my phone know how old I am in the first place, or anything about me at all?
Much of the UI on modern electronic items is just total crap regardless of how old the user is. And the few things that are currently reasonable soon get changed for no good reason. One example is Google's Android Photos app. Extracting a fram from a video use to be a single tap, last week the app was 'upgraded' and now it takes three taps.
I don't get it, the elderly of today (80-90) we're in their prime when the whole microcomputer revolution took place
You need to be actively avoiding technology for the last 50 years to not be able to use a smartphone or PC today
An evening of tutoring won't undo that mindset
I remember teaching an elderly person how to use an iphone.
Just the phone app itself is a NIGHTMARE. Why would I say such a thing? Because touching anything will dial.
Because of this, the person was super anxious every time they used the phone.
You can touch the spam caller in the call log and it will CALL back.
I've done this myself, accidentally calling back spammers, or "butt dialing" friends and family accidentally at ridiculous times.
This is really easy to fix:
- have a setting (turned on by default) to confirm before dialing. (a butt dial should never happen)
- it might also be nice to add "call <person> (local time 4:37 am)"
there's a thing where you can enable phone wide delay for touch events (accessibility). But yeah it's not a good solution. Phone app is terrible...
A sad realization I had:
- Well-run companies prioritize against a bell curve of core customers vs long tail customers
- Today, many of us are inside that curve. Products are made intuitive to us
- But many people (elderly) are not in the middle of that bell curve
And the kicker:
- One day, all of us will move out of that bell curve. Therefore, many products will suddenly become maddeningly frustrating to understand, at once
What's the solution? There's definitely a market opportunity for the long tail customers. But, it's tough to build a smartphone for a (relatively) smaller market. Maybe that's a startup opportunity
It’s just like Groundhogs Day. They forget as quickly as you teach them, and the next day it starts over.
This is unfortunately accurate, at least, for those with dementia. They need to already know how it works otherwise it's just not happening. imho the solution is skeuomorphism i.e. make the experience as close as possible to that of a landline phone made ~30 years ago. Tie it to a physical phone book with their main contacts written in a large font. (They don't necessarily need to key in the full numbers each time, a carer can pre-program "speed dial")
Have any unknown/invalid numbers go through to a default primary point of contact.
I have given my old Sumsung to my father, who barely know how to send a mail, and enabled the ultra power mode.
What it does is restrict the phone to the home screen, you can have a maximum of 8 apps (which are all shown on the home screen) and barely anything else. He does have notification but it's only for these 8 apps.
And somehow he managed to get it working, he only make phone call, send messages and take photo. That's all.
Before I had bought him one of these senior flipflop phone. The thing was expensive, horrible and the battery was absolute crap. It died in 2 years.
My Sumsung xcover pro on the other hand, battery last 2 weeks and he is running it since 5 years without complaints.
> There were too many apps; all they wanted was the phone app, but it doesn’t default to the keypad, which was too much for them to find.
Then why buy an iPhone? There are phones designed for seniors that do just that. You don't need to pay 10-30x more for functionality you don't need and can't understand. Buy a Doro if you just want to call.
> Buy a Doro if you just want to call.
The thing is that even the elderly want to do more than just that. Some want to be on Facebook. Some want to do their banking, especially if their PC is 17 years old and a smartphone makes for a cheaper purchase than a new PC.
A Doro or equivalent is if you literally only call (and maybe text), but even the elderly generally want to (or are functionally forced/compelled to) do more on their phones.
Can a person who can’t find the keypad tab at the bottom of the Apple Phone app really use Facebook or internet banking?
This. If they can't make a trivial call, do not ever ever let them touch web browser or anything like that. They'll click on a first lottery ad and be scammed instantly.
You'd be surprised what sufficient motivation can achieve.
The Jitterbug was made for these seniors that insist on calling when a text would suffice.
I'll never forget teaching my elderly aunt how to use a desktop computer. She put her hand over the mouse and rotated it left and right like a steering wheel.
Things many of us take for granted need to be learned if you've never experienced it.
Counterpoint: I have two senior citizens living with me (my inlaws). They are 75 years old. They have no trouble using their IPhone 13 Maxes. Yes, I did set it up for them 2 years ago but after that they've been on their own. Maybe once every few months they can't figure something out and they ask for help but for the most part experience has been largely painless. They have a decent range of apps they use - youtube, facebook, viber, some games, some utilities, family ToDo shopping lists, translation apps, camera, messaging. I wouldn't call them power users by any stretch but they definitely feel comfortable with their devices.
That's where I really appreciated Android's ability to sub-out its entire UI to something totally customizable, accessible and able to be locked down. Drag my face contacts of myself and siblings onto the home screen so Mom can just click a face and it calls her contact. On the desktop, Windows is terrible for seniors, MacOS too. iPad can be decent but there are alot of areas where seniors get confuddled and have to call someone in.
It's also worth noting that every little ecosystem acts as if:
This shows up all over the tech space, and no one seems to recognize that I don't want to learn another UI, to learn other conventions, etc. It's all being pushed on us because teams just have this desperate, insane need to add a small bit of complexity every year until their product is an unwieldy mess. Attempts to "simplify" and "modernize" often go badly sideways as well.The single most powerful tool I had for helping my mom with tech, was remote control of her laptop screen. This was a hack, using (on Linux) x0vncserver and an ssh reverse tunnel. No approval needed at her end. If the thing had internet connectivity I could see and manipulate her screen.
All this has been sacrificed at the altar of privacy and security. How I wished I could have similar remote control over her Android phone. That would have saved sooo much trouble. But it was impossible.
> How I wished I could have similar remote control over her Android phone.
A bit of work (and it's not free) to set up initially, but you could use an MDM for this. Most allow remote access/ screen control over Android devices, with the bonus that you also can remotely install & uninstall apps for her, control settings, etc.
TBH I think there's a market opportunity for a consumer-oriented MDM for families. There's a lot of features and control that's only possible for businesses with these devices, and I'm not sure why no one is making any kind of centralized management but for consumers.
Determinism, determinism, determinism.
The three main principles of UI/UX design, particularly for seniors, but honestly, for everyone who doesn't have "learn new software" as a hobby.
Smartphones feel like a saturated devices in terms of functionality. Way too many things depend on it and interface is riddled with so many functions. I miss the very first iPhone. Perhaps it was the novelty at that time. It was slower and had way less functionality but easy to use. I guess it is hard to balance functionality and ease of use. It is becoming a hodgepodge of apps/things. Sorry to echo the sentiments expressed here.
The Apple UX teams need to do this on a regular basis.
Yes. Based on that thread, which is a fairly good representation of my experience on the Internet, we all could use that. Anyone who interacts with computers in a different way is someone a UX person must sit with and a developer should sit with. Instead of opening ourselves to new ideas, we tend to do what the folks in the thread did: attack the author as wrong, say the author is overstating the problem because a parent is just fine right this second or just get upset anyone would attack Apple/ Brand I Have Attached Myself To.
My sister recently asked a group of us coders how to help the blind folks she works with complete a Gov.UK One Login signup that requires a passport and matching selfie. I consider myself relatively conversant with accessibility issues but none of us could find a sure thing workaround.
This is a great UX test case, if you can't go into a senior center and get someone using your software, you need to try again.
Color-blindness filters are good or a monochrome monitor.
Some dark sunglasses and vaseline get the low vision point across too.
Rubber gloves for touch issues.
Accessibility for seniors is a real problem and an iPhone is a terrible choice for people who can’t use their thumbs or see the screen very well.
But an article about some very elderly people who cannot remember their own birthday has triggered the exact same Apple-UX-is-in-decline rants that a post about Liquid Glass or literally any other HN post about Apple does. I agree with some of the criticism but it’s not really engaging the point.
> They don’t need passcodes, accounts, and a sea of information.
I would go further and make they case the don't need all the smart features either and all they need is to make calls and that an iPhone, or any touch phone, isn't the right tool for the job. One might argue "well I want to face time and send them pictures" or whatever. Print them favorite pictures. A missing product is a video calling devices, similar to a dumb phone, that all it does is take and receive video calls. But the issue you'll run into is Apple's closed protocols or having to support a slew of other applications, like Signal or WhatsApp.
Having elderly relatives in other countries, I've resorted to making a touchless video phone with a raspberry pi, a big screen, speakers, a mic and a camera. I made a similar one for all relatives that want to talk as well. The "dialer" is just buttons that connect to other relatives directly. The software on them connects through a server I set up. I spent near 1 grand, or a price of a modern iphone, and managed to get 4 households connected.
Anyone who realises that AI would be ideal for this is going to make a fortune. "Send this photo to its-kostya" instead of "Open Photo app, click send, click the send channel, scroll down the list of names, click the one/s you want to use, click send if you can find it again."
We've inherited dumb a tradition of dumb procedural UIs which are effectively manual scripts that have to be repeated for each action.
There's been next to no useful progress on automating this. Siri looked like it was going to do it, but then it died on the vine. There's a very basic "Call XYZ" feature but the entire OS should have that level of accessibility, from Settings upwards.
Apple hasn't had a User Champion for well over a decade now, and it shows. There's the occasional Nice Feature™ - "Hey we need a nice feature for the presentation this year" - but there's no longer a Nice OS, and no one at Apple seems to have any interest in creating one.
Ah yes, voice assistance and the elderly... a famously compatible combination! :)
Seniors created the iPhone
My parents both have android phones, and all I needed to do (recently) was teach them how to ask Gemini stuff. So now they can hassle Gemini instead of me when trying to figure out how to look at their pictures or turn on speaker phone.
iPhone is full of unintuitive, undiscoverable “features” that you either stumble upon by accident, or someone shows you, or you just never find them. Even within their own apps they are not consistent, let alone what third parties do. It’s a pretty terrible experience but Android isn’t much better so we just have to tolerate it.
Yeah, I'm in my 40s, and I can barely operate any type of smart phone. UI and UX design is out the window, and people expect phone to do more and more. I'd argue that the current form fact simply isn't suitable for what we ask if it.
If you don't care about the phone, like many seniors, and just want a tiny slice of the functionality it can bring you, then modern smart phones are insane difficult to use.
When people ask if I can help with their phone, and they aren't my parents, then the answer is always "No". I don't understand smart phone and I don't care to learn. They are forced upon me by others, they are hard to operate, they hurt my eyes and makes me feel sick if I have to look at the screen for more than a few minutes.
Oh god. iOS has undo in text areas if you three finger tap. How the hell was I supposed to find that?
Oh, it opens a little toolbar with that option. I literally just discovered this because of your comment.
This highlights my experience with these controls pretty well... I have no idea what is n-finger touchable or holdable anymore and I just stumble into features accidentally.
I think some of the comments on the post summarize it nicely: if an iPhone is a struggle, maybe that person doesn’t need it at all.
Alternatively, I think OP actually should look into the accessibility mode (“Assistive Access”) because it doesn’t take “hours” to configure. It basically turns the iPhone into a wildly easy dumb phone-like experience.
Sounds like a very expensive dump phone
If you buy the most expensive kind, sure. But there are carriers that’ll sell you an iPhone 13 for $50 or 14 for $99.
And it’s not like the phone doesn’t have apps, you just configure it so that the desired apps are on the simplified home page.
I remember I last counted iOS and macOS features in 2022, since 2012 I barely count 5 features that is useful to me.
Without Steve Jobs, everyone work with their own incentives, if shipping features is how you get promotion and raise. That is what we end up with.
I know this is controversial take on HN. 10 years spend on Swift and SwiftUI. It would have been better if we continue some small and iterative improvement with both C23 and Objective C.
Every year we see Apple SoC improvements, but my iOS or macOS is still not instantaneous. Safari 18 got better, and now 26 as well. But comparatively speaking it is still behind Chrome and Firefox in terms of responsiveness, and resource usage.
In terms of Design, the Home Screen is still a mess.
Compare to Old Apple, new Apple's rate of improvement and productivity has dropped significantly , with double or triple the resource but half of the execution in terms of Software. ( Hardware they are doing fine if not exceptional )
But if Apple software is really this bad, it just shows Microsoft and Google have been absolutely appalling in the past 10-20 years.
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My parents were always good with tech, we always had the latest PC at home. As they now enter their 80s their patience / resilience has evaporated to nothing. If it doesn’t work immediately the get stressed and give up (or ask me).
I’m not sure as developers how you get round that.
If you came up with a rotary phone, a keypad might feel unintuitive or even difficult to learn a new technique- even though it’s faster and easier. For the first 60+ years of life for this cohort the only option was to remember phone numbers or keep records of them. The concept of not having to “know” a phone number anymore, and of a searchable contact list is pretty far out. In the past 20 years there have been plenty of people who saw no problem with what they had. Now we can push virtual buttons on glass to do things that used to take a phone call. Some people really enjoy talking on the phone. Some people need it. The fact that the smartphone is so mutable means it’s a phone new relationship with a device and its makers. Not everyone is ready to commit to that sort of relationship, and I think that is a freedom we should fight to maintain. App-only services aren’t really accessible, and says they only care about a certain kind of customer.
The question is what motivates them.
My mom wanted conservative social media. I just had to install it, and off she went.
She barely answers phone calls correctly. She can't pull up her contacts or voicemail. Google maps is something that somebody else needs to do. The refusal to learn is solid and hard.
What to do? Parents.
My mother's brain immediately blanks out the moment I tap something on screen. I can see it. If it's 3 taps she says "oh it can do so much, I'll never remember it"
And that's it. Complete refusal to learn. She uses her phone daily but struggles "to go back," pressing every x and back button until there's nothing, then finally swipe up to reach the iPad/iPhone's Home Screen. She's not that old.
My relationship is not like yours, but...
What's her favorite novel?
Load it as an epub and spend as much time as you wish in visits reading it to each other.
Make her run the ereader app. Expand on that.
If you don't want to spend time in this way, connect her to the grandchildren on facetime. Wow is that a critical function that I was not expecting.
I would've refused to give her the cesspool that is conservative social media, but I guess if she's explicitly asking for it she's probably too far gone to remediate
The question is, how much would you pay for fake conservative social media?
I'm a retired 72. I've been programming in C, C++, Fortran, ASM etc. etc. for over 40 years, and used just about every OS/GUI going.
But, but, but I really cannot get along with mobile phones! Whenever I pick one up I swipe or press the wrong thing. Just answering a call usually goes horribly wrong! And I have literal nightmares about it. So I am pretty much stuck with my VOIP landline, but am worrying things like my bank will stop supporting the tech.
Luckily, I guess I've done my three-score-years-and-ten, so I don't probably need to retrain. But I can completely understand non-techie oldies having problems.
I think the market is screaming for a dead-simple, modern flip phone that works like an old Nokia but with 2025 reliability
I don't think there's any real evidence for that.
We have an iPad sitting in its box for over half a year. Taking it into use was such a harrowing experience that I could never find the will to complete it.
Every time I hear people say that Mac os/iOS is so logical and intuitive I wonder if it is all just a big conspiracy where I am the only one who get's a phone or a computer that is so full of bat-crap stupid decisions that I want to scream. Mac os is not intuitive. iPhones are not intuitive. I have had to use one for years and I am still confused about when I should use the settings app and when I should change the settings in the app.
And to whomever thought it was good idea to get camera access by swiping the lock screen: Did you ever meet a three year old? Why can't I turn it off?
"...the Siri thing kept popping up on the phones with Touch ID, despite turning it off"
Sad.
Why try and force a smartphone onto someone who doesn't need it? It's like trying to get someone to use Excel when they just need to add two numbers.
Because they might need it (or at-least want it) for one stupid little thing, be that Facebook or their bank (and general computing defaults to phones these days for normies apparently, plus it's generally cheaper than buying a laptop).
But Facebook or banking is likely harder than the basic phone usage they're trying to get them through, including the same account setup issues.
My experience helping my Grandma begs to differ. Not to mention that Facebook and banking is what they're actually trying to do. That's the end-goal they're motivated to achieve. Random account setup bullshit and notifications about shit they don't care about is nothing but a hindrance placed in their path for nebulous reasons they don't understand.
Video calls or video in general. Even photos. My grandma loves her Portal's photo slideshow.
Apple has rotten to the core and should be composted. It would be good for the planet!
Good skills to have for when they move into that great big walled garden in the sky.
if those people don't need passwords and accounts, they probably want to do very little with their phone. hence they don't need an iPhone.
Otherwise, if they want to use email, whatsapp, etc., they also want passwords and accounts, hence security measures must be there. Someone has to help them.
You'll find old folk think they just need phone calls but then they want to see their kids photos on insta etc and access their bank if it switches to app only and the like.
I do this fortnightly, and the feedback I'd give their UI /UX would be very explicit: you're letting a significant cohort down badly by some confusing choices.
"Why can't I delete those photos in icloud from here"
"Why does the thing I have to select move around?"
"What are all these ghost windows in safari and email and how do I get rid of them?"
"How do I yell at the clouds when this does not work?"
"How do I tell which bits are decoration and which bits are active?"
"What do you mean I can't take over my dead husbands account or move data from his account to my account"
I hate to be crass about this, but to be frank: This is a temporary problem that the world will solve for Apple. Modes which help accommodate age, degrading motor and visual function, etc, are awesome; and Apple truly leads the pack on this. But software complexity is different; if you have this sense that "the iphone is simpler than alternatives", you seriously need to re-frame what the word "simple" means.
Here's how you should frame it: The only definition of "simple" that matters is "What I'm Used To". Currently, and again, I'm going to be crass here so prepare your sensibilities: we have a dying population of boomers who are not used to any kind of technology; but aging into their place is a population of substantially more tech-literate Gen X and younger individuals who won't need a different experience beyond, again, normal degradation of motor, visual, and hearing function.
My mom (~70s) refuses to get an iPhone. Why? Because she's always had a Galaxy S9. I've tried to buy her an S24, to at least get a newer phone, but its so different that she won't go for it. So, we've replaced this old S9 like 3 times now lol. My dad (~70s) switched to an iPhone, and we've told her, at least if you switch to the iPhone you'll be on the same device and be able to solve problems for each other a bit more easily; no dice.
The nokia anecdote in the post is awesome because it illustrates this beautifully: There is nothing Apple could do which could help. Oftentimes it isn't even about the phone being simpler; its just an inability or unwillingness to learn anything new. What we do, as younger people helping them where they're at, is probably the only thing that can really make a difference.
The modern Apple experience is defined by removing the head phone jack, the silent switch, and worse, the home button.
My dad has used an iPhone and an iPad for years and occasionally uses a Mac at home. He's not terribly old and is fairly competent with tech. One day he randomly said to me, "I'm afraid about when I'm older. I won't be able to understand how to use my devices because they've become so complicated and keep changing every year."
And I realized it's so true. Removing the home button on the iPhone and iPad was a massive mistake. It's the one interaction my 85 year-old grandma who doesn't understand computers could interact with. She couldn't even change the volume, but she knew that one button on her iPad exited things.
When I set up a new Mac, I wanted to display the Bluetooth icon in the menu bar for quick pairing because it wasn't there by default. When I searched online for how to add it, I got four different results for the past few years of MacOS updates that kept changing where the setting was. When I updated my Mac the other day, the Bluetooth icon was gone again! Once again, I had to search for how to add it to the menu bar because that setting is not located within the Bluetooth settings page. When I went to see how I could display if I was using Ethernet in my menu bar, I discovered that I needed a third-party app and had to spend time researching which one to download.
Meanwhile I get all of those features on KDE out of the box, and any more niche changes I want to make are much easier to discover because the settings and UI have looked the same for years. KDE is so simple. I'm currently using arch Linux, which is wonderful for me but will certainly be more complicated for the average user. That's where I'm very excited for KDE Linux[0]. Switching to KDE has been a revolution. I know more about computers than most people I know. And yet I feel like I possess significantly less domain-specific knowledge than my mom who is a MacOS power user or my dad who uses Windows at work. My mom's knowledge of macOS is impressive, yet I don't need half of that expertise to use KDE. It's the same feeling I had when I switched away from accounting where people were writing insane formulas, using VBA macros, and Alteryx to software engineering where I learned python and could write twenty lines of code to accomplish the same task. However, KDE is even easier to pick up than a programming language!
Unfortunately, I don't know what to do about phones or tablets or what to tell my dad. He's starting to think he should go to the sessions at the Apple Store every time a major update releases annually, which significantly changes his daily-use devices. The regular crowd at those events is normally the elderly who grew up without computers. My dad doesn't quite fit in. But Apple has built devices that require you to have grown with every iteration and built up a deep level of context. Every time he upgrades his iPhone after five or six years, the new phone is unrecognizable to him.
Apple famously had a mouse with one button. Begrudgingly, they accepted the right click despite it being a less than intuitive interface. They've taken that design pattern to the extreme, and it has infested their approach to everything. The designers are too much of Apple experts to understand how far they've gone with the context requirement for successfully navigating their devices.
[0]: https://kde.org/linux/
> The modern Apple experience is defined by removing the head phone jack, the silent switch, and worse, the home button.
I only "upgrade" phones every 4 years or so, typically to a new old-stock model off eBay and I've been floored by how new phones don't include chargers anymore.
How is this considered acceptable?
I used to work as a UI/UX designer when we bought our, now late, grandmother an iPad Air 2 so she could "stay connected." This was around the iOS 8 era, and helping her through the setup process turned out to be an eye-opening experience for me – and for my then-profession:
"Yes, yes, darling, I see all these cryptic hieroglyphs [icons] – but I don’t know what they mean. Am I supposed to? Where can I look them up?"
That was a long day.
I used to volunteer at an independent living facility for seniors. With a few others, we spent several days teaching them how to use tablets and smart phones. The one thing I came away with is what I called the "try it" mentality. A lot of people who came of age with computers, through the 80s and 90s, and especially tech enthusiasts, are more comfortable with this. If you don't know how to do something on a device, try something. Imagine how you would do it in real life without the device, and then try to replicate that on the device.
Unfortunately, a lot of non-technical people, especially older people, are deathly afraid they are going to break something. They worry about this so much that they are not willing to just try things, and figure it out.
We had to get them comfortable with making mistakes, and that it was OK to make mistakes with these devices, because they are mostly locked down and you can't break them. Especially if you're 73 years old, trying to play bingo.
what I always found hard is that my grandfather doesn’t have great memory. It took me 10 years to teach him what a username and the password was and what it meant for logging in, or what logging in was for that matter.
I am convinced that someday, device manufacturers will realize that complicated, small touchscreen UIs are a horrible idea. They're even worse for seniors, because our fingers are losing dexterity, may be slightly swollen and stiff, and are prone to tremors. So, at a point in our lives when merely holding the phone can be a challenge, navigating some ambiguous UI while our fingers are obscuring the very thing we're trying to use is insanity.
But Apple is the worst because of its Apple ID requirement. I tried to resurrect an old iPhone of mine only to get stuck in a week-long perpetual ID recovery loop with Apple. Enter the new password wrong too many times, and you have to wait another week to try again. Want to create a new Apple ID? Nope. No duplicate IDs attached to the same phone number. I finally just recycled the phone. I'm old. I don't have time to waste on an iPhone.
My mom used an iPhone quite successfully up until a few weeks before her death at age 82. Maybe she was just brilliant. Or maybe some of these horror stories are contrived.
my grandma (87 years old) uses an iphone 12 mini no passcode, no touch id, no face id
I watched my dad - a fine craftsman - utterly fail to comprehend pointing and dragging with a computer mouse when introduced to one in his late 60s. My mom would end up printing out emails for him to read. She, enthusiastically adopting this new technology in the early 2000s when she herself was in her early 60s, gradually lost the neuroplasticity to adapt to new things, and clung to her Windows XP laptop (32 bit) until that was obsoleted by Gmail POP/SMTP access going to Oauth, which the obsolete software couldn't accommodate.
It was still possible to teach her Whatsapp, SMS and Gmail on an Android smartphone when she was around 80, but that was the window of opportunity closing; by a couple of years later, while she could still use those skills (and still had the finger dexterity and vision to do it) nothing new would go in. This was an issue when her hands got less steady and she sometimes would tap or click the wrong thing and then get confused. The concept that a message, ever so slightly clumsily tapped so the tap was seen as a right swipe and therefore "archive" was getting difficult.
So it goes with old folks. At one point someone got her a "Doro Phone Easy", a retro flip phone with big buttons and simplified UI. She never took to that one, but I can see the point of it.
And why not just set up your elders with tech that they are familiar with? You can take an old landline phone - even a rotary dial one! - and plug it into a VOIP adapter and register that with, say, voip.ms, and provide the old familiar calling experience. Didn't work for my mom, because long before becoming uncomfortable with technology, she was already deaf enough to not be able to hold phone conversations - so email was crucial to her.
As for iphones and confusion. As they got more and more locked down, they didn't just get locked down against purse snatchers and such. I've seen several otherwise still fine iphones become ewaste because the giver couldn't figure out how to unlink them from "Find my phone" or activation lock or whatever it's called. These are people who can't fathom the difference between their Google account password and their Apple password. Not old people. Just people who can't give a crap about any of that, they just have a phone that someone helped them set up, and it works and that's that. That was one of Steve Jobs's talents - to see technology as a neurotypical non-geek sees it and make it work for them.
>So it goes with old folks. At one point someone got her a "Doro Phone Easy", a retro flip phone with big buttons and simplified UI. She never took to that one, but I can see the point of it.
We've got to keep churning UX constantly, for no reason whatsoever. The elderly be damned, usability be damned! What matters is that UI conventions always change and often get worse, and most importantly that this happens for no reason whatsoever.
Yes, its terrible.
I did a similar thing with my dad when he was going through parkinsons.
When I got him a book for seniors it turned out to be really thick, and justifiably so.
Egregious bits of the interface include the parts you can drag from the bottom and the top.
As well as things at the ends of the springboard.
There is so much in there its way too much to explain.
That's before you get to stuff like the difference between ordinary calls and say WhatsApp.
technology builds on itself in organic ways, but it feels increasingly inaccessible for people who weren't present for the previous wave of UI. Especially with how developers are using AI as an opportunity to "reimagine how we engage with tech"--that divergence is gonna increase. There are so many creators nowadays helping make AI more accessible and that stems from this broad sentiment from most people outside of silicon valley that they can't keep up with the pace of change
Maybe the solution is more education programs that help people catch-up. And teaching kids that the most important skill is to constantly experiment with what's new
I am a senior and a techie all my life.
I think that if it were simpler, I'd be less inclined to do more with it than it is actually useful for.
In particular.
Selecting anything is a struggle. No exceptions. And selecting more than one screenful is a horror.
Scrolling often clicks on something I didn't want to click. And just try grabbing that invisible scroll bar.
Any auto correct or suggest is ludicrous. I had to kill them all.
Swipe text refuses to type "and". I get Anna's or Ava ( that was a live demo) regularly.
Searching for an image is good for laughs, except for ocr'ed text.
Paste? HOLEY MOLEY. Any "action after a delay" infuriates me, especially when it's hit-or-miss. Give me a paste button!
These are "99%" things, not outlying operations.
Disclaimer: the ipad with keyboard case, trackpad, pencil, ARROW KEYS!!!, and BT mouse is better. Almost a laptop, but right/control click is NOT macos like.
Okay, enough rant. It's basically the clumsiness, compared to the precision of a desktop, that gets me.
Advantage? I can use it on the easy chair in the living room.
No $1800 computer chair. The desktop is harder on my anatomy.
Just to say that some "features" stink regardless of user age, though no doubt harder in seniors. I figure out one of the 140,000 obscure options/tricks via internet search, something that decades of experience helps me do, but especially in recent years, is next to useless for normal people.
And! When switching apps, more often than not, safari loses all my typing in a text area!!!
I lucked out this time.
> safari loses all my typing in a text area!!!
One feature I like about Chrome is somehow it saves it if you go back, so if I've got a long ass comment I've typed out, and then I get distracted, I'll go back to the tab, the text I wrote won't be there, but when I go back, it reappears.
I recently got an Apple Watch for my kids and… OMG the setup process was painful. So. Many. Questions. I couldn’t believe it and I could tell when the whole ordeal was going to end.
I'm a software engineer, I've been using MacOS for five years already, and I still don't know how to use Finder, and I randomly open up some emoji app and also Dictionary. Literally the worst UI design I've ever seen, because such nonsense never happened to me on any other platform. Two months ago I switched to Linux and the distribution I chose is ten times more intuitive than MacOS.
I wonder what percentage of senior fraud has to do with phone UI madness - must not be irrelevant.
Smartphones are just the dumbest fucking human interface design and iOS and Android are the most vile OSes for multiple reasons. Why corrupt innocent old people with that trash?
Got an iPhone 16 Plus:
Apparently somehow needed to have an "Apple account." Don't want one -- don't want to be subservient, subordinate to, dependent on Apple or hurt my privacy -- but relented and applied -- refused!!!!!
The phone rang, apparently with someone from Apple Help who somehow noticed that my frustration (wasting time) was about to explode with some gigatons of TNT, enough to level everything from me to CA on to Hawaii. Soooo, apparently Apple HQ is somehow always online -- outrageous privacy threat. Since I was trying to make the phone work for even the simplest things, I could not receive the call.
Heck, could not even get an Apple account.
Super, semi-quasi, pseudo bright: The phone isn't working so to help call the phone that isn't working.
Apple, to communicate with a new user, use some REAL computing, including email. Understand???
New user? That iPhone is my first cell phone, first Apple product, and hope my last.
Using some computing that has a real keyboard, 30" screen, an 8 core AMD processor, and Windows and actually works, eventually got to Apple online help. Was advised to press the "Down Volume" button. I asked which one of the five was that button, and the help staff didn't know. Soooo, not even the Apple help operation knows what the buttons do. Disney with Donald Duck could make total riot out of this disaster!
I declared the iPhone 16 Plus a disaster, expensive, useless, worthless, at best a puzzle box, and will return it to Xfinity.
Actually, of course, the iPhone is a grand triumph of electronic engineering, optics, software, etc. -- still for new users is useless and worthless as a phone, i.e., won't make or receive calls, just won't; several hours a day of absurd mud wrestling in the dark for several days yielded no utility at all.
Useless? First big problem: Apple, apparently with rock solid, ironclad determination, deliberately, totally refuses to DOCUMENT, say, with an easy to find, COMPETENTLY, BEAUTIFULLY, EFFECTIVELY written PDF of D.O.C.U.M.E.N.T.A.T.I.O.N. Go bankrupt, maybe. Write documentation for new users, NEVER. Won't do it.
Me? Can I read tricky material from good documentation? Hold a Ph.D. in applied math with plenty of pure math where learned lots of tricky stuff, but from well-written books.
Apple, shut up, sit down, and listen up -- until you DOCUMENT, for new users your expensive phones are worse than worthless junk. Sure, maybe high school girls form little groups and share some of the basics they discovered somehow, but I'm out of high school.
One word Apple -- DOCUMENT.
Here’s the first time setup documentation: https://support.apple.com/en-us/105132
And the general iPhone documentation: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/welcome/ios
Sometimes, I wish this documentation was a bit more technical, but it’s not bad at all.
The film on the front of a new iPhone, that you remove to reveal the screen during unboxing, provides pictorial icons of what each button on the phone does. For volume down, you can see a minus in a circle. It’s the bottommost button on the left.
I’m not sure why you had so much trouble creating an Apple ID, but you can still skip that when it prompts you to do so. I believe it’s under “Forgot password or don’t have an account”.
Very strange comment.
Literally hundreds of millions of people have set up an Iphone, it's trivial if your aren't cognitively impaired and/or very elderly.
I don't understand how you could have trouble finding the volume down button.
It's quite obviously placed, and is one google search away if not...
> I don't understand how you could have trouble finding the volume down button.
Read again: It was Apple Online Help that didn't know where the Volume Down button was.
I wasn't asking them; in a 'chat' session as part of an effort to get the phone working, they were asking me, asking me to press that button, and not for sound volume; to be sure, I asked them just where the button was, and they didn't know.
In simple terms, I unpacked the phone, read the documentation, plugged it in to charge its battery, tried to use it to make and receive calls, and it didn't work. "Just work"? No, didn't work.
Whatever, this was one HORRIBLE end-user experience, and I'm way past putting up with it, returning the iPhone, and going to look at something from Samsung. Before spending any money, I will want to see their DOCUMENTATION.
I reckon OOP will spend another day or two doing so looking at the shitfest of iOS 26
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I've been using an iPhone for the first time in 10 years, and it confuses me as to how Apple has somehow managed to make them as opaque and arcane as they are today. Most interactions with the phone are noticeably and negatively affected by bizarre UI decisions. With how much it frustrates me, I can't imagine what it would be like trying to learn it as an elderly person.
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Someday the cellphone will "come to us". The standard telephone did that and was a marvelous success for a century and a half. Cellphones will likely suck until manufacturers figure out what their customers really want/need.
Time spent learning, training and relearning your cellphone is time forever lost. I chose a different path and refused a cellphone for years. A year ago I got one. I use it for "away" situations only (when I'm out of pocket). Otherwise it sits in my office, just like my old AT&T phone did. If someone needs to get me, there's always e-mail.