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Apple is Really Bad At Design (theoutline.com)
Joshua Topolsky, writing for the Outline: Once upon a time, Apple could do little wrong. As one of the first mainstream computer companies to equally value design and technical simplicity, it upended our expectations about what PCs could be. "Macintosh works the way people work," read one 1992 ad. Rather than requiring downloads and installations and extra memory to get things right (as often required by Windows machines), Apple made it so you could just plug in a mouse or start up a program and it would just... work. Marrying that functionality with the groundbreaking design the company has embodied since the early Macs, it's easy to see how Apple became the darling of designers, artists, and the rest of the creative class. The work was downright elegant; unheard of for an electronics company. [...] But things changed. In 2013 I wrote about the confusing and visually abrasive turn Apple had made with the introduction of iOS 7, the operating system refresh that would set the stage for almost all of Apple's recent design. The product, the first piece of software overseen by Jony Ive, was confusing, amateur, and relatively unfinished upon launch. [...] It's almost as if the company is being buried under the weight of its products. Unable to cut ties with past concepts (for instance, the abomination that is iTunes), unable to choose clear paths forward (USB-C or Lightning guys?), compromising core elements to make room for splashy features, and executing haphazardly to solve long-term issues. [...] Pundits will respond to these arguments by detailing Apple's meteoric and sustained market-value gains. Apple fans will shout justifications for a stylus that must be charged by sticking it into the bottom of an iPad, a "back" button jammed weirdly into the status bar, a system of dongles for connecting oft-used devices, a notch that rudely juts into the display of a $1,000 phone. But the reality is that for all the phones Apple sells and for all the people who buy them, the company is stuck in idea-quicksand, like Microsoft in the early 2000s, or Apple in the 90s.
He didn't teach anybody to approach problems the way he did. Apple did poorly when the board kicked him out. That SHOULD have been a warning. Apple's doing poorly again, and this time, unless there is a genuine miracle, Steve ain't coming back.
For all his ability to pitch to the public, Steve Jobs took direct interest in the products his company sold, rather than just focus on managing the company and leaving the decisions to be hashed out by committees developing a consensus several levels below him. The result is what you see now in Apple products - a muddled mess of different ideas that just don't fit together right, and very little actual customer value. The whole "facial recognition as your password" business for example, is certainly not worth the cost to regular consumers, and absolutely not so to people who care about actual security (for several obvious reasons I don't need to remind nerds about).
Like it or not, the world needs Simon Cowell types, who can simply act for the consumer and say "no - not good enough". They may be hard to work for, but without them you get stagnation, as we're seeing here.
I'm typing this on a 2015 MBP, given to me by my employer. It definitely has some things to recommend it, e.g. it's light weight, decent battery life, easy access to *nix tools (via Homebrew), speaker capability and screen brightness. In other respects though, I have to agree with the submitter. Hardware-wise, it's about on par with my 2010 Thinkpad. OS-wise there are a bunch of deficiencies which are not just my opinion about look-and-feel, but actual missing features. I'll just describe one quickly, which I feel is emblematic of Apple's general issues.
On a Mac, you can switch through display elements (windows, dialogs, full screen apps) in two segregated ways. Cmd-tab switches applications, cmd-backtick switches windows within an application. On one level, the segregation is logical, but in practice it leads to some really inelegant behaviors. It's impossible to place one window on top of a fullscreen application, so among other things you can't take notes while watching a fullscreen video. Full screen applications create their own workspaces which are children of the original workspace, and switching back to other workspaces isn't allowed. Actually, you can switch, but it will immediately scroll back to the full screen application.
Windows, on the other hand, simply has alt-tab (or win-tab), which cycles through all display elements without regard for parent application. It naturally allows windows to be displayed above fullscreen applications, and for fullscreen applications to be left in fullscreen mode when switching away or minimizing. It's more simplistic, but also more functional. Again, that's not an opinion, it's a missing feature: on a Windows PC one can take notes on a fullscreen video, and on a Mac one cannot.
It's a basic design choice that seems logical and elegant, but ends up handicapping the window system down the line. Another similar example is the total lack of a hotkey to restore minimized windows. There is Hide (cmd-H), but it only works on entire applications at a time.
.:Semper Absurda:.
What's supposed to happen in the comments here, mods? I'll start: Define good.
This is a very good question and you do not deserve the downmods. Although the answer is very clear and well documented it's very much widely unknown and even more widely ignored.
Key elements of "good" industrial design would include (in approximate order of priority):
There are many web pages, such as this one giving 10 principles of good design which can help you learn more.
Good design often involves many compromises, however one of the crucial things that it should involve is identifying which compromises you shouldn't make. During the time of Steve Jobs there were many apple products that weren't released because they couldn't fix some problem with the technology available. The ugly layout of the iphone X is probably an example of this. They should have waited another five years for smaller facial sensors which could be put properly on the edge of the screen with only a minimal loss of screen space or they should have waited for a technology to do infra-red sensing through the existing screen. As it is, the design compromise is a) ugly and b) make using many apps more difficult. Probably that's an example of a design compromise which Apple would not have made in the past.