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Apple Piles On the Features, and Users Say, 'Enough!' (nytimes.com)

Posted by msmash on from the what-we-want-what-we-get dept.

In a few hours, Apple will kickstart its annual developer conference. At the event, the company is expected to announce new MacBook laptops, the next major updates for iOS and MacOS, new features of Siri, and a home-speaker. Ahead of the conference, The New York Times has run a story that talks some of the headline announcements that Apple announced last year: one of which was, the ability to order food, scribble doodles and send funny images known as stickers in chats on its Messages app. Speaking with users, engineers and industry insiders, the Times reports that many of its existing features -- including expansion of Messages -- are too complicated for many users to figure out (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source). From the report: The idea was to make Messages, one of the most popular apps on the iPhone, into an all-purpose tool like China's WeChat. But the process of finding and installing other apps in Messages is so tricky that most users have no idea they can even do it, developers and analysts say.

5 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. What happened to "it just works"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seems a case of "it just bloats" from now on.

    1. Re:What happened to "it just works"? by TWX · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Apple has a history of going off-the-rails when Jobs wasn't involved. Say what you want about him as a person, he was pretty good at figuring out what people wanted and giving it to them just in time for them to figure it out themselves. He also worked with something of a minimalist approach, at times to a fault, but with a great degree of success. Without that restraint this could become a problem.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
  2. Slashdot likes to rag on Apple by wtbman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Users say: Enough!

  3. Re:Sadly This is a rerun by hey! · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Jobs uniquely understood how important choosing things not to do was. Engineers and designers do brilliant work every day, but the vast majority of that achievement gets lost in the clutter and quickly forgotten.

    Better to leave consumers wanting more than to leave them confused. Best of all, you can sell them that something more next year. That way you don't have to hit it out of the park every single time. It's more like loading the bases and then getting to first, time and time again.

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  4. Re:Longtime Apple Support Specialist by Moof123 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Strong agreement here.

    I have been annoyed for a while with what they have done to music on iOS since they integrated streaming. It is hard to do something as simple as switch to shuffle on a currently playing playlist for Pete's sake. Then I took my old ipod touch that is stuck at iOS 6 on a road trip. Holy cow did things "Just work". I'd forgotten just how bad iOS had gotten that I could easily do more of what I wanted on a widget I've barely used in 2 years than on the iPad I use almost daily.

    I'd rather have fewer gimmicks that worked really well than heaps of buggy features I never use.