It's not Microsoft-add-all-the-bloatware-and-adverts-we-can worse, but it's 20-year-old-operating-systems-were-better-designed worse.
We're getting to a point where I think Linux windowing systems like KDE are better designed. And it seems that all they had to do was not change much over the span of a few decades.
Or am I out of touch? It feels like I could use a computer better back when XP was the mainstay.
This is because incentives have changed such that being good at your job in your average mega-corp has very little to do with the outcome: To climb their ladder, you optimise for impact and move before you have to deal with the consequences.
The default is that it’s not the case, and it requires eternal vigilance to do otherwise. Everything good is a fluke.
I think a lot of key lessons that were studied and learned back in the day weren't adequately transferred to the new generation.
This is the core rotting value in so much of big tech. So much of your bonus, performance review, promotion package, etc is hinging on "delivering impact" (ie: doing the flashy stuff). Imagine a world where some internal R&D team took a risk on liquid design but then thought it was okay to not ship it because it didn't work out.
Today, both software products are treated like monopolies. macOS is satisfied being an insular underdog, and Microsoft has no motivation to compete if Apple won't get off their ass.
People used to build hackintoshes to get Mac OS X without paying Apple's RAM tax or suffer having mid-range laptop GPUs in the top-of-the-line desktops.
Apple's outstanding success with their ARM chips is more of an exception than the rule.
My personal theory is that making the menu bar transparent by default (and shifting/ritating backgrounds) on Tahoe is preparing for OLED laptops and displays, which maybe will get under screen cameras or just a nicer cutout.
Software however especially from UX point of view, is more likely to be more or less ready at some point. Any improvements are marginal and subjective. What are the large UX teams at Apple going to do if not redesigns for the sake of redesigning? I wish it would happen, but it’s hard to imagine Apple shipping an annual OS release without noticeable visual changes.
It's not so different from the rationale for many consumer electronics products: novelty for marketing's sake rather than functionality. Similarly, notice the ridiculous trend of removing most physical buttons from car dashboards, started by Tesla and mindlessly aped by the other carmakers.
Maybe someday they'll completely remove the text to just keep the icons like the Office ribbon did, and I'm still confused with it.
While v4 was pretty much text based in early v5 every item and action had an icon, often only an icon. The manual read something like this:
"To do ⌘ you navigate from the ⌙ page to the ⌟, while holding the middle mouse button. The⌇will open and you will see the ⌆."
I think they did that with good intentions. CATIA being a French product sold all over Europe and beyond, localization must have been a significant line item. The result was a nightmare though and they to toned the reliance on symbols down in subsequent versions.
"The Ancient and The Ultimate"
https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v044n01_...
To be fair, the bar is really really low in terms of mobile hardware. It’s just really hard (and expensive) for new players to design, build and manufacture hardware with competitive processing power.
Going to continue to get worse as time goes on.
Even the hardware will go at some point I'm betting.
That’s not what enshittification means.
Somehow its usage has quickly devolved from a very specific pattern companies used to squeeze “value” out of their customers over time into just “something getting worse in any way” or even just “something I don’t like now but I did before” which is not at all the point.
All these give someone a reason to replace their otherwise perfectly-working iPhone sooner.
