Probably all of the above, but as I've said since the beginning of the resistance, the problem with Apple is a deep fundamental philosophical thing. It really amounts to prioritizing putting one over on customers, instead of serving them.

Every move in the UI is geared to trying to impress some imagined demographic (retarded digikid)... instead of coming at the problem from a design and usability standpoint. OS X is what you get when you put marketing ahead of function. You get a lot of glitzy, big, wasteful effects that aren't grounded in making the computer easy to use.

In fact, sometimes to get the effect to work, Apple throws usability out the window... hangs way out on a limb to make the nonsense work, and the end up sacrificing common sense.

In other words, they're so worried about having transparency, and getting it to impress the gullible, that nobody ever asked what that effect could be GOOD for. I know there ARE uses where it would make sense (like ghosting out things that aren't in use)... but instead we get the effect used counterintuitively. Sometimes stuff we really need to SEE, becomes harder to see because it had to be fucking see-through.

Same with fonts. Getting the zoom and suck and smooshy aliasing to work, meant sacrificing readability and contrast. Now fonts don't really work well at small sizes, to get the full monty of the effect, they had to upscale. They did this without realizing that pros by definition need a compact, out-of-the-way interface. By that I mean that every pixel wasted by the interface, is a pixel robbed from what's truly important to our work.

There was not enough designers or engineers asking WHY make it look this way. They did much of the crap "because they could." And because the way geeks show off, is to do goofy spinning gears shit that doesn't really function, but has POSSIBILITIES. OS X has always struck me as a sales pitch for developers. So much of it is left half-assed, as if to say: maybe you guys can do something cool with these effects, here are a few ideas.

Well, an operating system needs to be more than a proposal of half-baked ideas. Some of those ideas need to be applied. Very few of the promises of OS X were kept. Very few of the major "advances" are worth a damn. I still defy anyone to tell me they use "Services" regularly and consider them essential functionality.

I think if we went down the laundry list of what's truly essential functionality to operate a Macintosh, we'd find very little we could point to and say it wasn't shot full of usability or functionality holes.

Do you brothers remember me saying that the real test of the OS is its barebones stripped-down version. Before you trick it out and tweak it and customize it. Whatever the baseline UI is, is very telling about what the intent of the design is. We all know in our heart of hearts that OS X has not taken the shape it has to make our lives easier. It looks and acts the way it does for ulterior motives. The "bottom line" isn't effective personal computer use for customers. The bottom line is showing off, and attracting users who don't know any better.

As you know, one of my favorite Jon Ive quotes is the one about focus groups. That they represent a symptom of a corporation's creative bankruptcy.

OS X is a cobb job. The result of a strategy to rehash NeXTStep, plus attract Windows users, and harness the great unwashed talent of opensource geeks. That's why it's all over the place.

The original legacy Mac had a singular mission. It put the user, and usability first. If it wasn't intuitive and consistent, it didn't make it in. When anybody designed an app with a fancy schmantzy "skin" that went against the Mac interface guidelines, they got laughed out of town, and got terrible reviews. Now? How times have changed. It's no longer about how an app works, now it's all about the friggin' skin.

We have garbage that's basically one command-line's worth of code... but skinned up with a ton of happy horseshit, and then called an application. Fucking WIDGETS, which are no more than mini web-sites, are like the favorite apps of those squirrel-attention-span digikids and X-Men. They care more about the turd splash and the 3-D rendering than they do about what the thing does.

When the MacLash comes, it's going to come because people will stop being satisfied with mediocre crap that barely works. They'll start getting proficient, and will start yearning for software that really does something. It's not that time-wasting and twiddling isn't FUN, it's just that there will come a time when it's not enough anymore. And people will start asking the ages-old question that the legacy made famous: "What can I DO with this?"

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When the MacLash comes, it's going to come because people will stop being satisfied with mediocre crap that barely works. They'll start getting proficient, and will start yearning for software that really does something. It's not that time-wasting and twiddling isn't FUN, it's just that there will come a time when it's not enough anymore. And people will start asking the ages-old question that the legacy made famous: "What can I DO with this?"

I see a small chance of something like a MacLash coming in the near future.
M$ Vista is coming very soon, first beta is out now. Typical of M$ they overdid the cheesy thing, trying to copy OS X. PERHAPS companies and users will finally realize that this FX crap leads nowhere and the whole viscious circle thing is changing direction towards reduction and effectiveness.

I want to add i created this poll out of pure frustration about the poor situation of UI in mainstream OS-Business. Sometimes I still can't believe that it's so crappy. If somebody told me 10 years ago that UIs will be the way they are now I would have laughed out loud.

Now I'm an old fart using an old OS, not because it's so advanced but because the latest OS is IMHO simply annoying.

The mainstream OS World is so stiff these days. A lil' bit of one copying a feature from the competitor. Some different UI-themes. That's about it.

I want a REAL competitor OS/Company that builds an OS from scratch that is fresh, not tied to any board of directors or mad-cow leader, uses the latest technological software techniques. That is highly configurable. (I know this will propably not happen). I'm soo tired of the M$ & Apple OS soap opera. 10000 issues and just repacked stories.
The so called "space-age", "future-technology" computer-biz is frozen in an unholy state of repeating itself over and over. Imagine a world with only 2 big car-producing companies. Ok, i will stop moaning now and have a nice glass of wine.

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If somebody told me 10 years ago that UIs will be the way they are now I would have laughed out loud.

Same here. The same stuff greybeards used to RIP on about UI designers, is the stuff now that digikids are slurping up like GoGurt.

I always laughed at some of the small developers that would overdesign their interfaces, trying to improve on perfection. But the further they got from the generic Mac look, the more scorn got heaped on them. Now the tables have turned. Eye candy is more important than consistent, logical, and intuitive function.

I wonder if it's just slacker culture has gotten so pervasive, that nobody works anymore. Computers are, for most casual users, just an entertainment device. A crib toy with little controls to fiddle with, that do nothing important.

I think the percentage of people out there who really want to CREATE things, is so small. OS X is not out to give everyone pro power... they assume that personal computer users are losers, retards, and lazy slobs who don't really produce anything of value, so they gear it for UI use as something to consume, rather than a tool for producing work, or liberating individual creativity.

These days it's like: need a web site? Here's a few templates and skins... just plug in a few things and let us do all the work... rather than giving people the tools to do it themselves from scratch their own way.

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Computers are, for most casual users, just an entertainment device. A crib toy with little controls to fiddle with, that do nothing important.

I think the percentage of people out there who really want to CREATE things, is so small.

I think that's the point. The fact that even Apple creates a more pro-oriented UI for their pro-apps like e.g. FinalCut, DVD-Studio makes e.g. the finder scream "Hey, I'm a cheesy bowl of candy sausage! Just click or lick me - I'm shiny and cute" :-)