Where's your evidence for that? The argument that it "treats users as dumb" and that doing so is "profitable" is oft trotted out, but I never see any substantiation for it. Plenty of companies do that. What's so special about Apple, then? I mean, it's gotta be something.
You gotta be careful about these arguments. They often have a slippery slope to a superiority complex (of "leet" NIX users over the unwashed "proles") hiding deep within.
Needlessly complex or powerful user interfaces aren't necessarily good. They were quite commonplace before Apple. Apple understood the value of minimalism, of cutting away interaction noise until there's nothing left to subtract. Aesthetically speaking, this is approach has a long, storied history with respect to mechanical design. It's successful because it works.
What Apple understood really acutely and mastered is human interface design. They perfected making human centric interfaces that look and feel like fluid prosthetic extensions of one's body, rather than computational interface where power is achieved by anchoring ones tasks around the machine for maximal efficiency. Briefly, they understood intuition. Are you arguing that intuition is somehow worse than mastering arcana, simple because you've done the latter?
Now, I'm not going to say that one is better than the other. I love my command line vim workflow dearly, and you'll have to pry my keyboard out of my cold dead hands. But there's definitely the idea of "right tool for the right job" that you might be sweeping by here. Remember, simplicity is as much a function of cherished *NIX tools you probably know and love. It's where they derive their power. Be careful of surface level dismissals (visual interfaces versus textual) that come from tasting it in a different flavor. You might miss the forest for the trees!
You gotta be careful about these arguments. They often have a slippery slope to a superiority complex (of "leet" NIX users over the unwashed "proles") hiding deep within.
Needlessly complex or powerful user interfaces aren't necessarily good. They were quite commonplace before Apple. Apple understood the value of minimalism, of cutting away interaction noise until there's nothing left to subtract. Aesthetically speaking, this is approach has a long, storied history with respect to mechanical design. It's successful because it works.
What Apple understood really acutely and mastered is human interface design. They perfected making human centric interfaces that look and feel like fluid prosthetic extensions of one's body, rather than computational interface where power is achieved by anchoring ones tasks around the machine for maximal efficiency. Briefly, they understood intuition. Are you arguing that intuition is somehow worse than mastering arcana, simple because you've done the latter?
Now, I'm not going to say that one is better than the other. I love my command line vim workflow dearly, and you'll have to pry my keyboard out of my cold dead hands. But there's definitely the idea of "right tool for the right job" that you might be sweeping by here. Remember, simplicity is as much a function of cherished *NIX tools you probably know and love. It's where they derive their power. Be careful of surface level dismissals (visual interfaces versus textual) that come from tasting it in a different flavor. You might miss the forest for the trees!