Past 5 years? Maybe closer to the past 25 years. Ever since Apple decided OS X would be the successor to classic Mac OS. This is when Apple finally left their incredibly rigorous user interface guidelines behind [1] and made technical considerations (preemptive multitasking, multithreading, and virtual memory) the priority, along with “lickability.” [2]

The classic Macs were the last truly easy to use desktop computers. My father and all of my older relatives of his generation had no problems using classic Macs. OS X however? Completely baffled. Might as well have sat them down in front of a terminal connected to an old Unix mainframe. Yeah, it has a lot of superficial similarities to classic Mac OS, but it violates the principle of least surprise far too often to be called easy to use.

iOS is easy to use though. Hand an iPad to any of those same relatives and they get along fine. It’s way less powerful though, despite running on a computer several orders of magnitude faster.

[1] https://archive.arstechnica.com/reviews/4q00/macosx-pb1/maco...

[2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/lickable-buttons/

I agree with this - I feel like Windows has gotten much better at catering to delivering (or allowing other people to deliver) more targeted UX improvements. Once upon a time Fences was a requirement to be alive - now instant searching in the start menu means I hardly ever see my desktop - similarly universal key combinations (and global key capture) have let things like media keys really take off - being able to pause a video that skipped to the next entry in the playlist without ever backing out of a different fullscreen app is kinda beautiful.

Heck, I've got, and regularly use, an iPad and had no idea you could go into split screen mode - the UX is entirely invisible and un-intuitive - especially if you pick up something running older iOS and need to remember how to pull up the carousel.

Itunes was utterly terrible. My iphone is terrible.

Apple make very, very bad software. And their hardware is overpriced. And they deliberately make people pay more for accessories like their pointless new audio port.

Android is superior in every way, except (I'm told) on privacy.

I cannot comprehend why anyone buys apple. I have to have apple for my work phone, and I hate it. Just today I was wrestling with their dreadful podcast app to try to figure out how to get it to play the podcasts in the order the episodes are enumerated in, which isn't the default. I still haven't found the 'playlist' part. Find in page on a web page took me ages to find. I cannot select the middle of a word. Their auto-correct corrects words that are nicknames or abbreviations by default to some totally inappropriate word. Their files app truncates the name, so when I download several episodes of a podcast, all of which have the format "long podcast name episode #" all I see is "long podcast name ..." eight times. Moving icons from one virtual page to another is clunky. The equivalent of a drop down where you have some weird rotating drum thing is awkward. Adding a contact from a text from an unknown number was convoluted. There are no timestamps on incoming text messages on the text app. On and on. Every single bit sucks.

And no I don't want to hear how I can "just do x,y,z, it's easy". Their software is not intuitive and sucks.

Today at least I got the audio jack to stop constantly disconnecting. The problem? Lint in the audio jack. Never had that on the old one but Apple couldn't charge me $10 to connect my existing headphones to their device so I guess it was worth it.

I think it has been way longer than that, it's just that they were (and many fans still are) in denial for a long time. But there were plenty of things about iOS that were non-intuitive from the get go.

Way back when, I got an iPad for my mom. She loved the idea of a device that basically doesn't need support, but it took a while for her to get the hang of it, and her main complaint was that it was "inconsistent and unpredictable". She pretty much had to poke at things to figure out what they do - the opposite of good UX.

She's on Android now, and happy as a clam.

As soon as they fixed text control, they broke URL handling. Long press on a link? Congrats, now you've got a weird floating popup Safari window with no Close button! Enjoy trying to use the finicky "drag between two invisible targets to open the app switcher" gesture to find and close the unwanted window.

They never nailed copy/paste nor select on any form of iOS.

And undo is also terrible.