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Setting the bozo bit on Apple

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Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#141

Post by RajT88 »

sjsdaiuasgdia wrote: post #72
RajT88 wrote: post #52

The bozo bit as described is how I thought about Sony for a long time. I had a different name for it, "The idiot engineer". That for all the amazing premium quality products Sony releases, every product has at least one extremely poorly thought out area. It was like there was some designer/engineer who was the son of the CEO or something, and got to work on every project.

My favorite example of this with Sony: the WH-1000XM series noise cancelling headphones are absolutely great and they would be the only headphones I ever use if only there was a way to mute the microphone from the headphones themselves. There's even a touch-sensitive panel on the earpiece and several control options you can pick to have available through it, but mute is not one of the options.

My example for a similar product is Sony NW-S703F, a noise-canceling MP3 player.

It was a thing of beauty, just terribly pleasurable to use. The noise canceling and audio quality was great.

But - it only supported a proprietary audio format, and everything had to be transcoded instead of just copied over. Took forever, and it couldn't successfully transcode every format.

And that's how Sony stays in business. It was such a good music player once the music was on there, I am tempted to buy another one as long as it's cheap.

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#142

Post by danuker »

miohtama wrote: post #128
eptcyka wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple never really wanted to have the concept of files seep into iOS.

Is it discussed somewhere the ideology behind this? Users are too dumb for files? Pay extra for App Store apps just to open your own files? Prevent privacy? Security?

I think all of the above, except they won't say it in public. They'll let you figure it out. It just works.

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#145

Post by gumby »

Apple still sucks less, but years of internal disincentives of some sort have let the competition make progress. They need a come to $DIETY moment and to do a "snow leopard" across the board.

What they really need is to go back to the focus on functionality and dependability that made the original mac such a success. But even a periodic "snow leopard" effort would be much better than what we have today.

(For those who didn't remember it, Snow leopard was a widely acclaimed Mac OS X release that supposedly focused on reliability and performance and not on new features)

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#146

Post by rmckayfleming »

formerly_proven wrote: post #92
leipert wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most annoying for me: the need to be connected to the internet for a lot of views. I leave the apartment, enter the elevator, put headphones in my ears and literally cannot do anything in the Music App, because it thinks it is still connected to my WiFi. Why can’t the default views be offline first.

I kinda like random/automatic autoplay but because Apple Music only seems to buffer the next 0.002 seconds of music any interruption of network service tends to just ... stop playback. And when you manually start it again, it switches to a "random autoplay, but from downloaded songs only" mode and you have to futz around to get back to the "random autoplay from all music" mode by clearing the queue with that one-song…

Interesting you say that about the Airpods. In my experience I've found that Airpods work extremely well so long as they're only paired with your Apple devices. Once I paired them to my PC I started having issues where they'd drop from my iPhone randomly in the middle of playback. After unpairing them from the PC altogether the problems went away.

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#147

Post by matwood »

SoftTalker wrote: post #122
kruuuder wrote: post #17

> How can such basic functionality be this incredibly broken? That's what I'm thinking almost every day when working with Apple devices. There is so, so much basic stuff broken on both macOS and iOS. I truly miss the days where Apple devices were a reliable tool, even a source of inspiration.

Yeah I got an iPhone for Christmas. I never thought Android was great but it's what I've used since I first had a smartphone. It's hard for me to figure anything out on the iPhone. Nothing seems obvious or discoverable beyond the basic "tap an app tile to open it." Some of that is just differences from Android but the various gestures and the way settings are scattered all over the place just seems almost arbitrary.…

What you're used to matters unless you're willing to put in some effort to learn the differences. I used (and developed for both) iPhones for years, then Android, then back to iPhone. During my Android time I got my wife an Android phone to use, and she tried for a couple days then said basically what you said. She had no idea how anything worked, and if she did take the time to figure it out, what is she really gaining over her iPhone? I returned her Android phone.

At this point there is so little difference in phones (particularly the flagships) for the average person, they should just pick what they like/are used to, and move on with their life.

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#148

Post by Nevermark »

bredren wrote: post #107
orev wrote: post #75

My biggest issue right now is that the iOS Music app has been almost completely hobbled by Apple Music (the service). I just want an app I can use to play my existing media files, but it’s always pushing you to subscribe to the service. Especially annoying is that they have hidden the previously free access to streaming terrestrial radio stations (not the same thing as the Apple Radio subscription). You can only acce…

I suspect the entertainment industries, (film, tv and music), have fundamental differences from technology products in how they operate. The necessity of an integrated stack of content and delivery has had corrupting influence on Apple products. In Music, pushing content on For You and elimination of free radio as described to drive revenue at the clear expense of customer experience. In Apple TV, the company has to…

The content-value mismatch is ok with me, given they distribute other studio's films that Apple's leadership has expressed issues with. I.e. Danny Boyle's "Steve Jobs".

They can be a consistently indulgent distributor, or a consistently selective content producer, but not consistent in both roles. I prefer the former.

(I found Boyle's movie brilliant, when interpreted as a serious comedic drug dream, subsequent to a marathon reading of Steve Jobs bios, articles and opinion pieces. Of varying questionability and authenticity. In random order. On a plane.)

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#149

Post by jacobr1 »

chongli wrote: post #55
eptcyka wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple never really wanted to have the concept of files seep into iOS.

Which in hindsight seems extremely naïve. Files are just too damn useful a concept. Their main rival, databases, have a bunch of peculiarities that limit their generality. When people want to share information any longer than a paragraph or two, they send a file. You can’t beat files!

I think the model they'd prefer are references. URIs to cloud resources.

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#150

Post by Nevermark »

jchw wrote: post #93

I like this concept of a "bozo bit" and have to agree, the arbitrary difficulty of making Apple software do things slightly outside the happy path can border on insanity, like that "Malcom in the Middle" Fixing the Lightbulb clip/GIF that goes around from time to time. I would like to extend this concept. I do not, in fact, have the bozo bit set for my Linux desktop setup. I do, however, have the "fields of broken gl…

In the past Apple seemed to organize software design around minimizing the cognitive load that poor interfaces and poorly chosen features sets created for users.

But now, the ease-of-use "bicycle for the mind" vision has faded.

Today Apple seems to view computing devices through the lenses of "service kiosks", "media sales points", and "social portals".

Some specific complaints, where they used to do better:

1. Overly "Flat" interfaces, that translate to "poor visual affordances", instead of "uncluttered, clear, simple, obvious".

2. Seemingly arbitrary variations in interfaces between device-types, where the differences don't seem to result from useful adaptations to each device-type.

3. Consistent interfaces across device-types, when the result is overly simple and clumsy interfaces.

4. Features of inconsistent presence across devices. ("Open in Safari" in News, available on Mac but not iOS, because ... ?)

5. Lots of small but odd interface glitches, that suggest interfaces hacked onto an unreliable data-communication model. (Apple Music, Apple TV, ...)

6. Weak, unattractive template-style interfaces. (I.e. Home app)

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