Comment by thewebguyd

> They make software the user is scared to interact with.

Apple isn't unique here either. This is a sentiment across nearly all OSes, on mobile and on desktop.

It's one of the primary sources of help desk tickets where I work (I'm IT manager, grew up doing helpdesk->sysadmin). People are afraid to even try some basic troubleshooting, afraid to click on dialog boxes, afraid to mess with settings. Even auto-save in Office freaks people out, they are afraid to close their documents because that Ctrl+S feedback loop is gone, and autosave is ambiguous. Is it instant? How do I know it's saved the change I just made? So now there's users that need to go and double check the modified timestamp on the file before closing the document.

I get downvoted and called old every time I say this but Win 95/98 was peak UX. We are chasing aesthetics now instead of actual usability design. Marketing got too involved in how things looked, everything needs to be a customized, branded "experience" and it's causing severe learning curves vs. just following OS conventions and widgets where every app more or less looked and operated the same way.

Where's all the UX designers and researchers? Oh right, we've laid them all off or just spent too many years not listening to what they had to say and letting the rent seeking marketing and accounting folks drive the products.