Mac fans: criticism is a good thing
Call me naïve (“You’re naïve” – World), but I thought the age of the rabid Apple fan was on the decline, possibly replaced by a new brand of crazy army: Love Android Or Die. And then I wrote Mac App Store UI is so hideous that it makes me want to kick a swan, which spread fairly wide and attracted the loving gaze of those who feel the need to coddle Steve Jobs in cotton wool.
What’s interesting is the lack of balance in many of the comments, despite balance existing in what I wrote. While I laid into the UI of the Mac App Store (which I think is a perfectly justifiable thing to do, given that it’s awful) and the lack of UI care in general at Apple since the days of brushed metal, I also said the process of buying apps “seems flawless” and that “Apple’s also done some extremely aggressive pricing on its own products, which is great to see and should encourage more people to buy rather than copy software”.
The measured, calm response from a surprising influx of commenters included gems such as “You’re a fucking idiot and a shitty designer”, and my personal favourite:
You people wouldn’t know good design if it turned into a swan and kicked you back in the balls. Apple has hit another HOME RUN with the mac app store and you people just don’t get it.
I’m sometimes guilty of rushing to the defence of Apple, but I certainly don’t believe the company is above criticism, even in its best products. The iPhone 4 is an amazing piece of hardware. It’s convergence that truly works, with a perfect screen, great camera, decent videocamera, and so much functionality that if you took it back to the 1990s and showed it to someone, their head would probably explode. But the glass back is an odd decision, the antennae break placement has caused problems for many users, and proximity bugs mean that while the iPhone 4 is generally a fantastic handheld device, it can be a shitty phone that cuts off calls.
Had everyone just kissed Steve Jobs’s balls, Apple would have gone away smug and happy. But they didn’t. Instead, Apple got (admittedly over the top) criticism, and I bet the majority of flaws in the iPhone 4 will be gone in the iPhone 5. That device in turn will likely have its own exciting new flaws, which people will criticise, and that will be dealt with for the iPhone 6, and so on.
The same is true for all other Apple products. Many perceived holes in iOS were fixed in iOS 4.x, and Steve Jobs said that many of the changes were due to user feedback. Updates to iPhoto were driven in part by user demand and criticism. And so with the Mac App Store, it makes perfect sense to complain and criticise when you see something that doesn’t work as you’d like it to.
Clearly, I and others who hate the UI might be in the minority. If that’s the case, our wishes will vanish into the ether. But maybe users will love the weirdo toolbar but complain that prices are indistinct on the entry pages, and perhaps enough criticisms along those lines will tip the balance at Cupertino. Regardless, constructive criticism is one of the things that helps Apple improve its products, and many Apple fans (and fans of other companies) need to realise that critique is not the same as attack; instead, it’s often helpful, beneficial and useful.
I’m really not fussed either way about the UI of the Mac App Store but I really do think Apple need to respond to problems quicker. The bug in the keyboard in OS4 has not been fixed even with subsequent updates.
Ha, welcome to our world, Craig. Now that you’ve displayed the tiniest criticism, you are off the roster forever.
I’ve jokingly compared Apple fandom to Scientology before (http://www.micait.co.uk/mikelanders/blog.aspx?postid=114) and it still seems to hold true for a frighteningly large number of people.
Anyway, reading the article you are right. I don’t have the Mac App Store installed yet but your points about Apple losing its UI way are completely valid. Apple more than anything stands for great design and user experience and recent stuff from them, iTunes especially, has been quite horrible.
@Mike: Well, I’ve been ranting about Apple for a decade, so the response of Mac zealots isn’t new to me. I did, however, think fewer of them were about these days, but, clearly, there are still plenty to descend on sites such as this when someone has the audacity to say something from Apple isn’t perfect. (Gotta love how most of the anti crowd’s arguments were basically: Well, you’re a shit designer, so there.)
Criticism is good, valid, useful stuff. And I, more often than not, engage in it. Your criticism of the App Store to me, however, struck me as more than usually criticising the final 1% of a job.
The problem is that it becomes progressive harder and harder to create achieve perfection as you approach it; it’s Zeno’s paradox, but for software/hardware. For my money, the App Store is A Bloody Good Thing™, and kvetching, however legitimately, about things that I genuinely believe to be peripheral to the overall experience sounds anachronistic to my ears. I have a design degree, I hold toweringly high standards for UI and UX regardless of platform, and i think the MAS is actually pretty bloody good, and that the (valid, useful) criticisms that are made of it are much less significant than those making them seem to think they are.
For me it mostly boils down to Things Don’t Work As People Expect They Should. Maybe Apple did loads of A/B testing and have genuinely found something people find works better than the conventions they try to get everyone but themselves to follow. If so, fab. To me, the MAS UI seems more thrown together than that: a mix of ideas that works despite itself (as in, the process of installation and the ease of purchase overrides the often poor aesthetics and UX snafus). I don’t deny that the MAS is a Very Good Thing overall, but to me it—like many other bits of Apple software—lacks the cohesiveness I used to love in Apple (software) products, or that final bit of polish. Still, at least it’s not GarageBand’s odd wood thing or another ‘fake desk thing’ for iOS.
If it hadn’t been by Apple, the MAS would have been, well, not the kind of thing that’d show up on that ‘Read the Fucking HIG’ blog, but certainly getting the same WTF? complaints as CS4 and 5. And I still find the app pages ugly as sin when compared to the much nicer web page ‘preview’ layouts, which were presumably by someone ‘in the next office’.
(Regarding significance of what I’m writing, I don’t really have any misconceptions about my place in the scheme of things, that’s for sure. I write RTS because it’s fun and I hope people are entertained for the most part and, now and again, get to think about something they might not have otherwise thought about. Someone once referred to me as a ‘D-list web celebrity’ for my web design work/books/writing, and I suspect my ranking in blogging and journoing is similar. I’m still happy to fire my 2p at the moon though.)