How Intuitive Are Macs Really? • Hacker News Board

Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?

#61

Post by Shadonototro » Mon, May 24, 2021, 1:51 PM UTC

anonleb4 wrote: post #45

Shadonototro wrote: post #30

yes they are, that is why they are popular among non-tech people

They have a tiny market share worldwide. Apart from the USA not many people in the world own them.

# Worldwide shares:

- Windows: 74%

- macOS: 16%

- chromeOS: 2%

# NA shares:

- Windows: 63%

- macOS: 26%

- chromeOS: 5%

# Europe shares:

- Windows: 76%

- macOS: 16%

- chromeOS: 1%

# Asia shares:

- Windows: 80%

- macOS: 8%

- chromeOS: 0%

--

So if we only take NA + EU

- Windows 69%

- macOS 21%

That's not bad at all

Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/

EDIT:

Asia doesn't make lot of sense, they are more of a smartphone oriented market than desktop

Asia:

https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mob...

What's interesting, smartphones became the most used type of device last year

Worldwide:

https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mob...

Today:

Smartphone: 54%

Desktop: 42%

And if we compare Windows vs iOS in NA:

- Windows: 31%

- iOS: 27%

- macOS: 13%

So yeah, it doesn't look good for windows and microsoft

Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?

#62

Post by 627467 » Mon, May 24, 2021, 1:51 PM UTC

In my experience, growing up in parts of the world and segments of it's population where macos has never been pervasive, a non-techy user that had to use my Mac laptop for casual browsing struggles to understand how to even start (I hide my dock).

In my view, the idea that Mac has been more usable and democratizing (for personal computing) is not backed by either market data or personal anecdote.

Pre-iOS, Windows was the most prevasive computing UX.

Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?

#63

Post by dfxm12 » Mon, May 24, 2021, 1:52 PM UTC

I feel like describing the application installation process is being obtuse. The installation process can basically be distilled to copying the app to your local desktop. Counting closing windows among the steps? How will anyone figure that one out?! Even if you can't, it's easy to understand and remember after you do it once.

Anyway, going back many, many years, I feel like there was a time where if you gave a mac or a windows computer to someone who had never used a computer before, they'd more easily understand OSX (or even going back to system 7) before they understood Windows.

The OSX experience today is pretty much the same as Windows though, and most people nowadays "learn computers" from their parents' OSX or Android devices, so, new users' intuition is nurtured by the time they get behind a mouse and keyboard.

Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?

#64

Post by ezzzzz » Mon, May 24, 2021, 1:55 PM UTC

Pure speculation here, but I imagine that Apple is probably working on a unified OS between IOS and MacOS. The pieces are there between Catalyst and now the new ARM macs. MacOS is pretty outdated from a UX perspective, but I reckon there is something in the pipeline. This is likely to continue to push the walled-garden approach where folks go to the app-store for downloads, but even my MIL had the same confusion with not being able to find certain software on the Windows store. Hopefully Apple keeps things open for power users, giving us the ability to install things from outside the app store. I don't think I would ever choose Windows as my first choice for doing development even with WSL (although Windows has become much more developer friendly within the last few years). At the end of the day, I don't care to spend much time configuring any machine I use to do work and would prefer stability over customization.

Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?

#65

Post by jermaustin1 » Mon, May 24, 2021, 1:55 PM UTC

richrichardsson wrote: post #46

I'm not sure I agree with this at all. Just to test I donwloaded the .dmg for Chrome. Like A LOT of .dmg based "installers" there is a Chrome application and a link to /Applications, with a nice obvious "arrow" between them. I've always found this to be pretty self evident that I must put the Chrome app into the Applications folder.

My sister interpreted that as drag it onto the application icon that was in her task bar, so she kept trying to drag it onto the App Store icon because it looked kind of similar.

Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?

#66

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Mon, May 24, 2021, 1:55 PM UTC

I've been using Macs since 1986 (Mac Plus). I've been through all the various OS iterations.

Each has had pluses and minuses (often -significant pluses and minuses).

I write code for Apple devices. Native Swift code, so that means that I need to use a native IDE (Xcode or AppCode), on MacOS. If they are able to port Xcode to iPadOS (might be awhile), then I might consider iPads.

Windows 10 is fine. I'm just not familiar with it. My "muscle memory" is MacOS, so it's painful and frustrating for me to switch to Windows.

I generally recommend to folks that they stay with whatever operating system they have "muscle memory" on. The hardware for all of them usually includes high-quality, performative choices (naturally, for a significant cost).

Just my $0.02. I'm not a zealot. I don't get a commission from Apple if people use their products; especially with this crowd, who are just as likely to be CLI jockeys, as GUI users.

Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?

#67

Post by drdec » Mon, May 24, 2021, 1:57 PM UTC

627467 wrote: post #62

In my experience, growing up in parts of the world and segments of it's population where macos has never been pervasive, a non-techy user that had to use my Mac laptop for casual browsing struggles to understand how to even start (I hide my dock). In my view, the idea that Mac has been more usable and democratizing (for personal computing) is not backed by either market data or personal anecdote. Pre-iOS, Windows was…

A few years ago I was in front of a Mac for the first time in twenty years trying to browse the web. I couldn't figure out how to scroll the window. There were no scrollbars and no mouse wheel. I had to get someone to show me.

Once I was shown, it felt to me like I was supposed to pretend that the mouse has a scroll wheel and stroke the mouse where the scroll wheel would be. I didn't find it intuitive at all.

Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?

#68

Post by baryphonic » Mon, May 24, 2021, 1:57 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #21

Once I got to a certain place in my coding knowledge, I stopped caring so much about the different OSes. Once you see the abstractions you know what layer to look for. Is the thing a UI problem or a network config problem? Normally it's clear once you've coded a bit. I like my MacBook mainly because of the screen, and a little bit because of the touchpad. Those are both hardware considerations rather than OS. In term…

I don't really care between macOS or various *nix, but I really despise using Windows. The last time I seriously used Windows (granted, probably about seven years ago), I was astonished that the OS still required (or at least strongly urged) me to reboot after I installed anything. Small little shoddy UI quirks on Windows kept me frustrated, e.g. not being able to find anything in the control panel, or especially that a window must have focus for me to scroll (on macOS, scrolling affects whatever is under the mouse cursor regardless of focus). They were all small but added up to a horribly frustrating user experience. When I started seeing ads pop up in my start menu, I decided my Windows days were over and I wiped that machine in favor of Linux Mint.

Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?

#69

Post by dahart » Mon, May 24, 2021, 2:00 PM UTC

asattarmd wrote: post #49

rchaud wrote: post #14

I bought a Mac in 2014 after a lifetime of using Windows. I never understood why people called it easier to use than Windows. Maybe this sentiment is a holdover from an earlier era when people would mindlessly run executables and zip files attached in emails and AIM messages. From a UI perspective, it's 90% identical to windows. From a UX perspective though, something fundamental like Finder is still not up to the jo…

The worst: pressing Enter to rename a file in finder. Command + Down arrow to open it. WTF!

So true, this is a bizarre choice that tells the user that renaming a folder is more important and more frequent than navigating. It makes keyboard navigating in the Finder pretty annoying (unless you only live in column view, which feels very claustrophobic to me). IMO the Finder has a bunch of bad UX, it’s like they never figured out what to do with it during the OSX transition, and then refused to improve it or do anything to it to change old behavior or take it closer to what any other OSes had done.

Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?

#70

Post by wraptile » Mon, May 24, 2021, 2:00 PM UTC

rchaud wrote: post #14

I bought a Mac in 2014 after a lifetime of using Windows. I never understood why people called it easier to use than Windows. Maybe this sentiment is a holdover from an earlier era when people would mindlessly run executables and zip files attached in emails and AIM messages. From a UI perspective, it's 90% identical to windows. From a UX perspective though, something fundamental like Finder is still not up to the jo…

As someone who recently switched to MacOs (not by their own choice) there are hundreds of little annoying, broken or inconsistent OS things I find.

One of my favorites just happened yesterday with finder - I was trying to figure out how to rename a file, well the usual fx keys aren't doing it so the common process was to go to the toolbar context menu where hotkey is indicated next to the action's text. Rename for some reason had no hotkey indication! [1] so naturally I'm thinking it's somehow not bounded, google around for hotkey editing etc just to findout it's the least obvious key: return.

1 - https://i.imgur.com/LtcrBPU.png