Overwhelmingly, it does "just work" as Apple intended.
However, it's often quite opinionated. So Apple's intended functionality may or may not jive with your preferences. This is neither a defense nor criticism of Apple, and it's not a defense or criticism of your preferences either.
I will point out that anecdotally, I don't hear too many people wanting their mouse's scrolling to work in the opposite direction as their trackpad. I think Apple's probably got well over 99% of the userbase covered with the defaults and opinions here. From a software/QA/UX perspective things get wild pretty quickly if you cover every < 1% use case.
That setting is particularly terrible because they mirror it in both "mouse" and "trackpad" settings or at least that's how they used to do it. So it SEEMS like you can have independent settings for a mouse and trackpad but they control the same thing (which is equally weird, does any other setting do that?).
FWIW, I think the phrase "just works" implies that you, the user, should expect it to work without any tweaks or workarounds. So, the user's preferences are implied. Saying that it just works in many cases, or that it just works for Apple is not what is implied by that marketing. It's a strong promise that was chosen for a reason, and in many cases they do not live up to it.
you, the user, should expect it to work without any tweaks or workarounds
I think that, for any reasonable definition of "it just works", it would clearly refer to essential functionality and not the extremely long tail of niche tweaks that at least one user out of millions might want to perform.
For example on Apple devices I've often wanted a feature that would let me skip PIN/FaceID authentication when connected to my home network. No such feature exists. But I'd say there's a clear distinction between a missing feature and "not just working."
Of course, "it just works" is a vague marketing phrase that they haven't used in a long time, perhaps a decade or more? So, whatever. You have the power to decide it means whatever you want it to mean, and then decide if Apple meets your made-up standard or not. I freely admit that's what I'm doing.
> I think that, for any reasonable definition of "it just works", it would clearly refer to essential functionality
Really? I always heard it as something more like "we've thought of everything, all the details, and you don't have to fiddle with our products like with Windows." I think essential functionality is always implied, with any product, but with Apple, it seemed like their promise was for a higher level of user experience than that.
Acknowledged that this is an old marketing statement (I believe it was a Jobs-ism, which dates it), but please look at the context of the thread.
it seemed like their promise was for a higher
level of user experience than that.
I think they've clearly pursued a more polished level of out-of-the-box integration and functionality for their products, not the most endlessly tweakable experience. (Whether they hit the mark or not is up to the individual to decide, but it's clearly what they shoot for)
Whether this is your cup of tea or your worst nightmare, I don't think this is particularly controversial!
Additionally, I think it's also uncontroversial that they're able to pursue/achieve a higher level of polish specifically thanks to the fact that they choose not to pursue the infinitely long tail of hardware combinations and software configurability. After all, as engineers we know that N possible feature toggles and knobs quickly can quickly approach 2^N or even N! combinations that need to be thought about and tested.
In short, I think it's sort of baffling to think that the omission of some pet niche feature equates to a piece of software "not working."
In contrast, if that omission makes you think the software stinks or simply isn't for you, that would make total sense to me.
Do they still use that line? While some of their newer stuff does meet that standard, a lot more “just works if you already know what it does“ (eg. AirPods need to be in the case to pair… why?) and still more seems kinda random (fk you iOS keyboard.)
I don't think they do, but I was responding to a comment about the applicability of the phrase to current Apple products. Maybe "it just works" is like Google's "do the right thing": both make sense if you append "(for us)" to the end.
> I will point out that anecdotally, I don't hear too many people wanting their mouse's scrolling to work in the opposite direction as their trackpad. I think Apple's probably got well over 99% of the userbase covered with the defaults and opinions here.
OK, this is my biggest pain point after switching to MacOS for work, so let me go on a rant. Not only can't I imagine this particular scenario covering 99% of the userbase - I can't imagine anyone wanting this behavior with a regular mouse that has a scroll wheel (as opposed to buying Apple's Magic crap, which Apple wants you to do). Literally every other system is set up so that scrolling the wheel down would scroll the page down. And pretty much every laptop I've used had natural scrolling on a touchpad either by default, or as an option (a separate option from the mouse setting).
I could maybe see it sort of working if your mouse wheel has an infinite scroll feature, but even then it's super unintuitive.
But OK, let's buy into "think different" approach (AKA "we will break every convention ever set by man 'cause we're quirky like that") and assume that this is somehow more convenient if you haven't been contaminated by using other systems. What's the harm in providing a setting for other people? Like you said - it's a preference and a very simple one and a very common one, clearly not a 1% use case. How is this not a part of the system? The only answer I can find is: "we want you to buy Apple Magic Mouse, it feels natural there". The way the Apple pushes you into their shitty ecosystem is so anti-consumer that it boggles my mind that there's not that much pushback for it.
So far my experience after switching to MacOS had a very clear pattern:
How do I enable "feature x"? -> Wait, I can't, seriously? This is basic OS functionality, how in the world is this not a default feature? -> (dig through dozens of "you're using it wrong" comments) -> OK, let's download yet another third party app then, I'm sure it will never serve as a vector for a supply-chain attack.
> I can't imagine anyone wanting this behavior with a regular mouse that has a scroll wheel (as opposed to buying Apple's Magic crap, which Apple wants you to do).
I had to edit some values in Windows Registry to get my gaming machine with Windows and a scroll wheel to scroll the same way my Mac does (which I prefer). Now you can imagine.
>I think Apple's probably got well over 99% of the userbase covered with the defaults and opinions here.
The vast amount of MacOS apps built by the community to undo Apple's terrible and backwards UX choices, and the amounts of sales those apps get, disproves your theory that over 99% of people are fine with the defaults Apple forces on its users.
The existence of such programs merely says there are enough users willing to install such programs that it's worth making them available (and that macs have the affordances -- APIs -- to make these kinds of changes, which ios does not have). There are so many macs in use that a tiny percentage is enough.
I suspect the same is true in the general case in the ios app store: that there is a long tail of apps used by a tiny %age of users, but with an enormous user base that's enough to make a free or even paid app.
And after about 35 years of mousing and about four years of iphoning I expected to want to revert apple's change to mouse-gesture-scrolling with Lion, but after only a few seconds I was sold. YMMV, of course, but I agree with the "99%" hypothesis.
The more settings you have, the more inevitable this becomes...
Assume for a moment that any given default you set, works well for 99% of your userbase. Then, the number of users satisfied with every last default breaks down as follows:
1 setting -> 99% of users satisfied
2 settings -> 98% of users satisfied
20 settings -> 81% of users satisfied
200 settings -> 13% of users satisfied
Apple has a lot of settings. Even if their defaults in general work for greater than 99% of their users, it becomes unrealistic at scale that every single default will satisfy any particular user, let alone all of them. Thus, those third-party apps that you see become popular in aggregate. That doesn't necessarily mean that Apple's defaults are wrong. They could be absolutely killing it on the defaults, and you would still expect to see these results -- in which case you would expect them to devote their attention to the common case, and to let the third-parties pick up the edge cases.
> Overwhelmingly, it does "just work" as Apple intended.
that's a creative re-wording of "you're holding it the wrong way."
Not all Apple fans have been on board with the slow morph from general purpose computer to walled-garden console -- although admittedly that audience is probably mostly gone, anyway.
The "if you hold your iPhone 4 in a particularly contrived way, reception suffers" thing was a total farce.
Apparently you had to use your iPhone 4 without a case and press a finger horizontally over the antenna line. I wasn't even able to trigger it in that pathological way. It was about as realistic as complaining your laptop doesn't work while being roasted in a microwave oven.
There are countless reasons to dislike Apple, including many factual reasons and of course personal taste. Not the biggest fan myself.
But when I see that iPhone 4 antenna issue mentioned, I know there's a particular sort of sentiment behind it.
The zoom scroll is disconnected from the scroll direction as well. I'm not sure if they fixed it by now or if I just got used to it, but it was super disorienting when I noticed it.
you can just use hammerspoon to get the same effect, turning off the bluetooth/wifi right after entering sleep mode and turning them back on when the Mac is unlocked.
