Oh Apple, what happened to the days when you were the interface of choice because you were easier to understand than any other tech product?
If you have experienced the company’s recent products you know that those days are far in the past, sacrificed to thinner, lighter, more beautiful hardware sold with any old software the company can push out.
I think the entire UX/UI team needs to be fired, and the company needs to start from the beginning on the software that accompanies Jony Ive’s stunning designs.
The Apple Watch was not a simple piece of consumer electronics to pick up and use. It took me quite a while to learn how to launch the apps, and I still don’t understand how to add complications to the watchfaces without reading forums. There are several ways to do just about everything on the Watch, and the result is that I’ve come to do very little with my Watch beyond look at it to count steps and tell time.
And the apps themselves? Almost to a one, Apple’s recent apps are awful on WatchOS, desktop and iOS — inferior in every way to third-party competitors. I don’t know anyone who uses Apple’s desktop apps or the desktop app store, and every iPhone I see has a folder named “Apple” into which all the apps that came with the phone (and can’t be deleted) can be tucked away out of sight.
The cherry on top of my miserable experience is a calendar that won’t let me hide birthdays and a cloud that carefully duplicates all my contacts every time I sync devices. If any other company made this software it would be derided as bloatware, but with Apple everyone maintains a tactful silence.
You can tell I was already getting angry at Apple.
But the Apple TV just threw me over the edge.
I have spent the entire weekend setting it up. And that’s because the interface on the new Apple TV is the same as that of the old Apple TV: you have to type on the screen using the remote, in much the same way that you had to punch out letters to make a word on the old flip phone keyboards.
Adding insult to injury, you can’t transfer your app registrations or data from the old Apple TV to the new one like you can when you get a new Macbook; you have to start from scratch. I first had to download all the apps that I wanted, and re-register for each one. I have an email address that’s pretty long, and a password that has upper and lower case letters and numbers. This took hours.
The reason i’m so insulted by this inconvenience is that Apple already has this information, and I should have been able to transfer it either from my iTunes account or from my iPhone. The big hype about the Apple TV is that you can set it up using your phone, but that’s simply not true. You can connect it to your Wi-Fi and pair it from your phone, but that’s where it ends.
And no, you can’t use the old iOS Remote app on the new Apple TV, although I can’t understand why. The remote that comes with the device is only slightly larger than the old one, and it’s black — which means it will be lost in the couch on Day 2. It has a minimal control theme, as the old one did, but it’s a different one, so if you got used to the old remote you have to learn the new one. The only good thing I noticed is the track pad, which works well.
I learned a new phrase this week: “cognitive load.” As near as I can tell, it refers to the junk you have to go through to learn how to work every new gadget and app that comes out — only to find out that it won’t be useful in your everyday life anyway.
Right now I am struggling under my cognitive load.