apple: subordinating function to silliness

A clock should tell the time.  How well does this clock do that:

Not bad, in that you can tell the time from it.  But why obscure part of the last digit?  Just to be cute?  It makes it harder to read.

This kind of thing is a very active kind of stupidity.  It didn't just happen like that.  A whole team of renegade employees probably conspired to do it, wrote "codes" and "algorithms" to make it happen, and managed to slip it past management and the entire quality management process, to despoil the front screen of the iphone.  On its way, the "codes" probably got reviewed in a "codes" review system, someone commented on a better way this or that could be computed, and someone checked if the graphics algorithm worked for edge cases.  Some east asians then manually tested it.

And it would have been better if all of them had done nothing.

This is similar to all the effort put into things sliding around the screen and transitioning: huge amounts of effort with negative value.  It would of been better without any of it.

The iphone by default has enough skidding around to make many people feel sick, including me.  I'd like an option of simply "change instantly", or perhaps "fade in one sixteenth of a second".  Instead, the best apple offers is under Settings -> Accessibility, "Reduce Motion" and "Prefer Cross-Fade Transitions".  This doesn't seem to speed things up, or not by much.  There is less skidding around.  But now it seems to wait, and then do its thing with a fade instead of a skid.  It feels like it takes around a second in total.  The delay means you're not sure if what you've done is going to have an effect.  It's a user-interface disaster.  But it's better than the default skidding around.

Anyone with a cartesian subjective experience knows they are being put into micro-trances by all these sliding transitions.  The eyes follow it, but no one is home, until the performance has finished.  No thinking takes place during it, except perhaps "this is annoying".  Muscle memory can't really come into play, except in a much-diminished form. This is the sort of thing that ends up having "studies" about it, that people say "studies show blah blah".  Given that most studies are bullshit, and that every person with a subjective experience knows this by common sense, a "studies" would not add anything.  Even if it involved a parts of the brain scanner.

The smartphone market is dominated by two platforms: apple and google, aka iOS and android.  They are both a bit shit, in fairly stable ways over time.  Returning to one platform or the other, after years on the other one, the same old annoyances are there.  And, indeed, some nice things are also stable.

Coming from Android, the apple hardware is much higher quality than any flagship from samsung, LG or Huwei.  I don't know about google themselves.

Android has its settings for mobile data (enabled, for each SIM, and whether data roaming is enabled) spread out across different settings, in an unmemorable way.  Enabling a personal wifi hotspot is a faff, and every app which promises to put this on the front screen is shitware.

Samsung compasses are bad. The apple compass is good.

Apple almost insists that the apple account has a payment mechanism set up, but you can choose voucher balance of zero or something as a placeholder option.  Whenever you install something, for which you have to touch, it says processing payment briefly, even when there's no payment, which is always for my account.  Are Apple just trying to desensitise people to being nickeled and dimed whenever they do anything?