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iPhones are hard to use

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Re: iPhones are hard to use

#301

Post by gtvwill »

I have an iPhone 7s for work and a Xiaomi A2 for personal.

Not going to lie but the iPhone hands down is a pain in the ass. Battery life is shite compared to the China phone, the thing constantly goes to emergency menus in my pocket or tries to tap pay for shit.

Reception on it is AVG at best (both phones on same network) and it's general usability sucks. Like can't even just plug it in to transfer files, the fingerprint sensor has about 1/3rd the hit rate of my China phone, the thing can't shoot video while in a phone call, hell I can't use my earbuds for hands-free while it's on the charge because it has no headphone jack (oh and the stock headphones are about the tinniest worse quality sound I've had in half a decade). Christ I could rant for dayz but you get the point the list goes on.

Tbh all these things suprise me, I've avoided iPhones like the plague for moral reasons but I figured/assumed the phones would have decent usability. Apparently I was wrong as I have been forced to discover thanks to work.

I would have to agree with the article, shit that is simple and fairly easy to do elsewhere becomes a tedious task W/ iPhones.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#302

Post by bb88 »

reitanqild wrote: post #292
rangibaby wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steve Jobs was heavily against hidden functionality (sorry there is a word for it I can't remember off the top of my head). It's why Macs had one-button mice for so long. It wasn't until the third major revision of the OS that iPhones got copy+paste!

> Steve Jobs was heavily against hidden functionality (sorry there is a word for it I can't remember off the top of my head). It's why Macs had one-button mice for so long. That doesn't make sense at all to me: The right click button on a mouse is visible. The Mac way of hiding it behind the ctrl key was non-discoverable and non-obvious to me.

Or under pull down menus... or context menus... or...

Force touch just seems like a different form of right mouse clicking.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#303

Post by eridius »

entee wrote: post #137
varenc wrote: post #110

Most of this article just lists semi-advanced features that people don't know about. I think that’s Apple’s intention... Having every feature and option up in your face can reduce usability and make simple tasks harder for the average user. Apple wants a product that's easy for anyone to use and that often means keeping non-essential features out of the way. I’d be more interesting in seeing feedback for Apple on how…

I think the points that are well taken are those around identity, relationships and contacts. I've been using iPhones for something like 8-9 years and I didn't know I could specify a contact as a specific family relationship. A while ago when I wanted to configure emergency contact information it took me a google search to figure out that I needed to find the Health app buried on the last screen of the phone. At the…

I'm not about to try it right now (don't want to mess up my contacts) but I'm pretty sure you can just tell Siri that "suchandsuch is my wife" and she'll update the relevant Contact cards for you.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#304

Post by eridius »

reitanqild wrote: post #292
rangibaby wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steve Jobs was heavily against hidden functionality (sorry there is a word for it I can't remember off the top of my head). It's why Macs had one-button mice for so long. It wasn't until the third major revision of the OS that iPhones got copy+paste!

> Steve Jobs was heavily against hidden functionality (sorry there is a word for it I can't remember off the top of my head). It's why Macs had one-button mice for so long. That doesn't make sense at all to me: The right click button on a mouse is visible. The Mac way of hiding it behind the ctrl key was non-discoverable and non-obvious to me.

Every single action that was available in the contextual menu (hidden "behind the ctrl key") was supposed to be available elsewhere as well, typically as an actual app menu item.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#305

Post by rorykoehler »

new_here wrote: post #275

This is another case of Apple being held to a higher standard than competitors in the market. Apple literally revolutionised the smartphone market with the simple usability of the iPhone. Of course, there are things that can be improved (with many decent suggestions from the author that most power users would agree with) but based on the author’s mild annoyances and casual observations that elderly, visibly challenge…

>This is another case of Apple being held to a higher standard than competitors in the market.

My phone cost $300

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#306

Post by brokenmachine »

homonculus1 wrote: post #267
brokenmachine wrote: post #31

It's not surprising at all to me that people who don't take the time to learn how to use the supercomputers in our pockets are unable to use them. It's like typing. Learning to touchtype was one of the best things I've ever done on a return for investment basis. All I did was stick a little printout of the keyboard layout under the monitor, and committed to not look at the physical keyboard ever again. It was slow fo…

The standard layout of a keyboard has remained completely unchanged for literal decades. It doesn't update every year with invisible gestures, nor does it remove keys that used to be there in favor of those gestures.

I was trying to make the point that you need to actually find the motivation to spend the time to learn something in order to be able to use it, and not just expect to be able to use it with no time spent learning at all.

Most of those extra gestures you can get away without knowing, can't you? I'm not on iPhone but on Android you could get away with just using the home button and tapping on icons on the screen to do almost anything. Tapping on a touchscreen to activate an icon hasn't changed since the first touch devices in the 90's.

I guess the larger point I was trying to make is that not everything has to be obvious, and in my opinion it is ok to have some learning curve for advanced operation, in the same way that many of us have spent extra time learning to touchtype in order to save time over the long run.

If you dumb the device down completely for the lowest capability user, then it will limit how a person willing to put in that learning time will be able to operate it.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#307

Post by jhabdas »

Missed two of my favorite: (1) enabling flash the camera light on notifications and (2) double-tap physical home button to access the to of the screen one-handed.

This diatribe fails however to make a point. If they really cared about helping others learn to use emergency features they would've included more detailed instructions for others.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#308

Post by macintux »

mszczepanczyk wrote: post #180

A couple of things I absolutely hate about Apple's products: 1. Whenever switching an app in iOS and going back to the same app I don't know if I'll find it in the same state as before, even after only few seconds. It's unbelievably annoying to read an article opened in embedded browser in Facebook app, check something quickly in Chrome and be forced to look for the same article again. 2. Some apps don't allow me to…

If you haven’t discovered this, TripMode handles #3.

https://www.tripmode.ch/

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#309

Post by kalleboo »

codetrotter wrote: post #87
screye wrote: post #32

I have been an android-windows user for the longest time, and using Apple devices is among the most difficult things I've had to do. I have used windows phone, linux, chrome OS, Blackberry's palm-like UI over the years, but I have gotten the hang of each over a small period of time. Apple devices however, are simply counter intuitive for me. Apple seems to design UI for 2 types of people. 1. Old Apple users 2. The pe…

When the Android phones came on the market, I was extatic. Linux, in my pocket! However, Android did not live up to my expectations at all. I don’t know what I was hoping for, but Android was not it. After a while I came to understand that for me personally Android was a bad fit, and everything I had envisioned about running Linux on my phone was ill-adviced. Linux and FreeBSD are my main two operating systems I run…

> I don’t really understand what kind of “advanced” things you are referring to not being possible on iOS. Could you expand on that?

Personally I'm still pretty annoyed you can't replace the default url handlers for stuff like Maps and Mail. Every time Apple Maps pops up I curse them.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#310

Post by philliphaydon »

CarVac wrote: post #281
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess they end up being soft buttons on the screen.

In inconsistent places. In many UIs they're on the top left. In the browser it's on the bottom left? So weird.

That's something I loved about Windows Phone, UI was very consistent.
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