Sunday, September 7, 2003

Apples and Oranges

I've had my Powerbook G4 for about three months now. And now that I've grown used to some of its idiosyncrasies, I like it just fine.

However.

The operating system (OX 10.2.6) is not as intuitive as Apple (and the hardcore Mac addicts) would have you believe. In fact, I find it about as inutitive as Windows XP. This is not to say that Windows XP is perfect: far from it. I have to tinker a lot "under the hood" to fix the stuff that goes wrong with Windows, which I haven't yet had to do with my Mac. But here's the thing: both interfaces are still too damn hard. The level of sophisitication needed to operate both operating systems effectively is still very high. There is still a lot of the guts of the computer exposed. Which is great for power users. But I think about my grandfather, who is basically deaf. The computer would be an excellent thing for him to use to communicate with people, but if I plopped an Apple or PC down in front of him, he'd never figure it out.

Yes, we are raising a group of hyperwired kids (my daughter can click and drag with a mouse to play games on the computer at age 2), but there's probably a huge underserved market out there who could use some sort of operating system that was powerful enough to run what they need and yet be hassle free: the elderly, the very young, the uneducated. These people, however, are also often poor. Which is probably why this hasn't happened yet.

It's the same deal with my cell phone. There's three or four features I use all the time (voice mail, ringer off/on, missed calls, make a phone call). All pretty basic cell phone features. And yet it's a pain to get to them. It's just poor design.

I'd love to design an operating system that's as clean and simple to use as most cars. You don't need to know how the engine works to drive a car. You shouldn't need to know how an operating system works to use a computer.

Apple, in some ways, blew it. OS X is nice and all, but it isn't substantially different than the Mac OS I had 10 years ago. Yes, the insides are different. But there was an opportunity to jump ahead of Windows again, to show us the future. Instead, we got a cleaner interface with a few new bits and pieces for fun. There wasn't a complete rethinking, just a slightly better version. That's not really what one expects of Apple. It's what one expects from Microsoft.

Posted at 03:45 PM | comments (0) | trackback (1)