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ezst • yesterday at 11:48 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

I don't understand how we keep hearing so often here about Apple OSes being so amazingly simple, approachable and cleverly designed with a lot of attention paid to detail, while every practical productivity advice involves some undiscoverable trick, or combinations of tricks, that seems so arbitrary and obtuse. I don't like Mac, in large parts because of that. No amount of marketing and peer pressure will convince me of the superior elegance and sophistication of something that hates you for wanting windows maximised. Those hidden tricks only add insult to injury as pervasive reminders of your presumed inadequacy, that you need to suffer to have things your way, and that Apple is magnanimous to even let you have them.

Replies

al_borland • today at 12:02 AM

Every system has its issues. It's really a question of which issues you can live with and which system ultimately fits your workflow best.

After I got used to working in windows instead of full screen all the time, I can't really go back. Even on Windows I find myself working the way I do on macOS. Full screening every app made more sense on a 1024x768 screen (or smaller). Once I moved to a widescreen display (which happened to coincide with getting my first mac) running full screen felt like the wrong move most of time.

Web pages would look something like this:

  |     <- whitespace ->     |  <- content ->  |     <- whitespace ->     |
  |                          | Lorem ipsum     |                          |
  |                          | dolor sit amet, |                          |
  |                          | consectetur     |                          |
  |                          | adipiscing      |                          |
  |                          | elit. Morbi     |                          |
  |                          | convallis ante  |                          |
Making the window smaller meant less wasted space and less blinding white space. Once I got used to that idea, it carried over to most other apps.
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chongli • today at 12:57 AM

Apple OSes being so amazingly simple, approachable and cleverly designed with a lot of attention paid to detail

That was the Mac in the 1990s. It was designed for, and highly usable with, a one-button mouse. It didn't have hidden context menus or obscure keyboard shortcuts. Everything was visible in the menu bar and discoverable. The Finder was spatially aware with a high degree of persistence that allowed you to develop muscle memory for where icons would appear onscreen every time you opened a folder.

There was almost nothing hidden or lurking in the background, unlike today (my modern Mac system has 500 running processes right now, despite having only 15 applications open). We've had decades of feature creep since the classic Mac OS, which has made modern Macs extremely hard to use (relatively speaking).