I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while now, and, while I work on more ambitious projects (which you’ll be hearing about soon), I can find some time for a rant.

Anyone familiar with me knows that I have zero patience for the canard that Apple is “the UX company”. To the extent that Apple does boast better UX than Microsoft or Android, the reason is straightforward, and has nothing to do with an active focus on UX design. It boils down to this:

• Apple has traditionally been a hardware rather than a software company, unlike Microsoft or Google.

• Hardware lends itself to classic models of ownership in which you pay for the thing, and therefore it exists to serve you.

• Software-first companies can no longer sell software as a shrinkwrapped physical product, and thus have devolved into glorified advertising channels for monetizatoin, turning their products into crap.

• Unlike pure hardware companies, Apple makes their own software specially tailored to their hardware. They expressly avoid making it work on other hardware, meaning there are no design compromises made for interoperability. This means that the software is more stable.

Apple won its reputation for good user experience because (A) they weren’t weaponizing their products against their users, (B) their software glitches out less. This admittedly raises the floor for the user experience, by preventing some of the most common UX blunders. And yet, within those constraints, Apple has consistently innovated black swans of bad UX, which the most devious dark pattern pushers could have never dreamed of.

And, as much as I’d love to list enough Apple UX flubs to completely cover the doors of half the cathedrals in Northern Europe, that’s not going to happen tonight. You’ll have to wait for that. Instead, I’ve got a single story that demonstrates my point (that Apple sucks at UX) by the sheer density of UX failures in a short period of time. Ready?

Throughout the 2000s, I was a Windows user through and through. I built my own computers, but for some reason I couldn’t be bothered to switch to Linux. It was only when I started using laptops that things changed. I regard anyone who builds their own laptops as somewhat suspect. After dealing with a Dell—the first Windows machine that I hadn’t built, for four years—I bought a MacBook. Indeed, I was impressed with how smoothly it worked. Of course, I used Microsoft keyboard and a Logitech mouse because Apple’s peripherals blow goats. But, other than that, I was a convert.

Two years later, in 2015, I decided I needed something with more horsepower than the MacBook, so I bought an iMac with a Retina display. This is where the trouble began.

As before, the new computer worked very smoothly and the high resolution monitor was pleasing to just look at. I wasn’t doing a lot of gaming, and to the extent I did, I was playing stuff from years before that I had missed out on, so anything I wanted to play was available.

Just a year in, however, I would discover how Apple’s cultural values lead to bad products. The screen failed, meaning I had to take it in to get serviced. That was annoying enough on its own, but then I realized just how bad the industrial design of an iMac is. Can you spot the problem?

Believe me when I say there is no good way to carry this thing. The stand is not removable meaning it always adds extra weight and unwieldiness. Not only does the computer have no grab handles, but every single edge is painfully sharp. The iMac’s physical housing was designed to be “art” rather than a functional tool. Great for impressing low-T hipsters, but shit for actually handling.

Then, after that, the computer functioned well enough for the next couple years. Until it didn’t. I forgot to mention earlier that my iMac had a feature that has rightly been buried by the sands of time due to its blowing of goats. I am referring to the Fusion drive. It was a pair of hard drives, one solid state and one physical, cabled together and treated by the file management system as a single drive. The idea was that you’d get the lower cost per terabyte of a physical drive plus the speed of an SSD for applications that need fast access. Clever idea. Also a shit idea.

At some point unbeknownst to me, the iMac just stopped synquing [sic] to iCloud. I never much understood iCloud to begin with, due to its also having bad UX, but I figured my stuff was safe in there, somewhere. Silly me. I had backed up a lot of the stuff on my hard drive to an external already as a matter of course. I was a Windows user in the 2000s, after all. But my Apple notes were not included in those backups.

By 2019, my iMac was acting weird. Some stuff just stopped working. Other inexplicable things were happening. But I figured, the computer was just getting laggy and it needed a reformat. It didn’t matter since I was building a new Windows computer. My urge to game had returned., and this thing was a VR monster.

Nonetheless, I was getting a bit concerned about the reliability of the Mac, and I wanted to save my Apple notes to my backup drive. And Apple Notes did seem to offer an export feature. But when I finally went to export all my notes, I discovered something strange. I could not bulk export all the files. It seemed like I had to do it one by one, but I had hundreds and hundreds of them. I was told by multiple people at Apple tech support that I could not bulk export, and believe me, I called back several times because I didn’t believe it. So I just didn’t bother. I figured I had time.

Then, the day I actually turned on my new Windows machine for the first time, that’s when my iMac died for good. The good fortune of having a backup computer come online the very moment my old one died notwithstanding, this was bad. I still had those Notes files, and I was quickly discovering nothing had been backed up on iCloud.

My first recourse was to open up the computer, yank the hard drive out, and put it into my “toaster” to retrieve the data. That’s what I would have done on a Windows machine. Of course, getting the damn thing open was the first obstacle. It was immediately clear Apple did not want me to service my own computer. But that wasn’t going to stop me, even if I had to go buy a specialized screwdriver because of course Apple uses wack custom screws. Once I had it open, I got the Pisces looking conjoined hard drives out and disconnected them, figuring I could just pull the data off each drive individually. I was wrong.

When I plugged each of them into the reader, it refused to actually read them. The file system was totally alien. It became clear I was going to need professional help. For my computer, I mean. The repair shop told me that the two drives were designed to be read as a single drive by the operating system and they could not function independently, and that I was lucky that attempting to independly read either drive didn’t corrupt my files permanently. The data rescue, ultimately successful, set me back $600.

So, happy ending, right? Wallet was a bit lighter, but all my data was back safely in my hands, right?

LOL

They gave me my 1 TB external backup drive, loaded up with the recovered files, and I figured that was that. I didn’t even really hurry to start pulling the files off the external. But then, when I decided it was time to recover my data, I discovered something: I couldn’t find my Apple notes. I had plugged the drive into my old MacBook, the 2012 model which still worked, and I was browsing through the files, trying to find the folder which included my notes.

During all this time, despite all the other stupid crap that Apple had pulled, I had just sort of assumed there was a folder with a bunch of XML files, and those were my notes. Worst case scenario, I’d have to read them as text, and clean out a bunch of angle brackets. I was, once again, placing way too much faith in Apple and their army of pin-dick contrarians.

You might be thinking “oh, crap, so there’s some sort of proprietary Apple note file format like “.not” or something. You’d still be thinking too rationally. The fact is, I never found even the folder that contained the notes, let alone the files.

Instead, what happened was, I had to be escalated up three levels of Apple support to an actual engineer. Yes, all to help me find some goddamn text files. And, even then, their solution involved giving me a free upgrade to a newer version of OS on my MacBook—yeah, Apple Notes are not backwards compatible—so I could read the files in the Notes app. They had me copy a fairly high-level OS folder from my backup drive into the MacBook and replace what was there before. And, sure enough, that worked. My rescued notes were now readable with the Apple Notes app.

So, all’s well that ends well, right?

Right?

Fucking LOL

Remember how I said that I couldn’t bulk export my notes? Yeah, that never stopped applying. So I had to spend God-knows-how-long individually exporting each note to a PDF format. Only PDF was available. No DOC, no RTF, no XML. Just PDF.

And then, when that chore was over, then I had to copy the contents of those PDFs into Evernote which I’d switched to (I’ll dunk on Evernote another time). And, let me tell you, those PDFs suck. My text was mutilated by the export process. Line breaks were added where they didn’t belong. There were hundreds of extra em dashes or hyphens or something in each file. For notes that had images in them, the images had to be copied one-by-one, as they couldn’t be bulk copied.

It’s actually impressive how much bad UX Apple managed to shoehorn into a single experience. Normal minds cannot fathom designing anything the way Apple designed each of the functions that were involved in this story. But, once you consider the cultural ideas that define Apple as a company, you can’t expect any other outcome.

For one thing, Apples are designed as art pieces, as I said before. They are designed by soft urban yupsters who don’t know adversity. As such, they are not intended to encounter circumstances that don’t track to the lifestyle of the average Apple employee. The user experience feels good until the slightest thing goes wrong, and suddenly everything is a disasater. When the screen broke, the computer was hard to carry to my car, and from my car to the Apple Store. When iCloud failed, I couldn’t manually recover my data with normal tools. When I tried to access the rescued notes, Apple made it almost impossible to do so without help from actual engineers.

For all the talk about how Apple products are durable, they aren’t. Their materials might be good, but their architecture is fragile. The slightest disorder in the system, and the whole thing fails. This is similar to the iPhone’s use of a glass backing. They can boast all they want about “Gorilla Glass”, but that shit still shatters. And when it does, you have extra tough shards in your finger. And, just like the pointy-edged iMac, the iPhone is designed to be hard to hold. This awkward thing below is considered the default grip for an iPhone:

The other problem with Apple products is that they are infamously hostile to interoperability. They want to wall you in. The horrendous design of Apple Notes might be sloppiness, but it might also be an attempt to keep you from migrating your data to some other note format, because they know once you do, you won’t ever come back. Only now is Apple finally being forced by the government to open up the App Store. If they had it their way, their censors would be the ultimate arbiters of what software goes on your phone that you paid for.

Apple claim to be, and your typical UX NPC hails them as the UX company. They surely have the best UX culture, the best designers, the best design. But, just on its own, this story proves otherwise. While Microsoft has lots of bad design, it is largely the product of sloppiness. Apple builds bad UX into their products as a matter of company values. They can’t imagine why you’d use their products in a way they didn’t intend. After all, “you’re holding it wrong”. And they also can’t imagine why you’d ever want to leave. And they’ll punish you for trying.

Side effects may include simply being who you are