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631 points wojtczyk | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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jb1991 ◴[] No.41407501[source]
On mobile devices, Apple’s Calculator app has always been one of the most frustrating apps I’ve ever used, and I’m surprised it’s a stock app by the company itself. If you press buttons quickly, like you would a normal calculator, many of the key presses simply don’t register at all. I’m not sure if they’re prioritizing some pretty little visual animation over actual functionality, but it’s incredibly surprising from a company that focuses on user interaction, supposedly.
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PaulHoule ◴[] No.41408727[source]
Apple's greatest weakness is that many of it's fans and I'd assume people in house assume they are the epitome of UI design when actually it's not. The thoughtlessness/pixel ratio might be worse than Microsoft in some cases, which can be hard to believe.
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diggan ◴[] No.41408807[source]
> Apple's greatest weakness is that many of it's fans and I'd assume people in house assume they are the epitome of UI design when actually it's not.

Which led to people like me making a fool out of themselves. Always been using Android, and listened to iPhone users singing the praise of the amazing UI and UX of iOS. Well, eventually iPhone 12 Mini released so I figured, "why not give it a try, can't be worse than my current Motorola Moto G gen4 right?"

Well, it is worse. I still have the phone because it still works, but that was my first and last iPhone. Everything is dog slow, not because poor performance but because of slow animations. Same on Android by default, but at least I can speed it up. And the UX makes you jump through hoops, things are impossible to discover unless you watch tutorials on YouTube, and the amount of UI bugs seems sky-high for something that sells itself as "Premium".

And then CarPlay is just an abomination! Even the most basic things like "I'd like to answer a call while still being able to see the map I use for navigation" seems to be completely ignored and it honestly doesn't make any sense at all.

Ugh, I almost look forward to accidentally dropping the phone so I can go back to having a non-distracting experience in the car again.

Edit: I just remembered the most egregious issue: How can I see the current year without having to open up a separate calendar application/put a huge widget on my home screen?

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ein0p ◴[] No.41410451[source]
You could disable animations on iOS through accessibility options. As a rule a flagship iPhone is at least 30% faster than flagship Android (by which I basically mean Samsung Galaxy) on realistic workloads.
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Dylan16807 ◴[] No.41410864[source]
A phone doesn't spend much time doing "workloads". UI animations in particular should never be close to CPU or GPU bound.
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ein0p ◴[] No.41411116[source]
And they aren’t. The op probably just didn’t like some hyperparameter, like duration, because it had a different value than on Android.
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Dylan16807 ◴[] No.41411762[source]
Yes, I agree, that is what they meant by slow animations. So why did you bring up compute power? They specifically said "not because poor performance".

Also I don't think "just" is the word to use here. Slow is slow, and when it's on purpose it's harder to avoid.

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1. ein0p ◴[] No.41411846[source]
Slow is in the eye of the beholder. Of all the legitimate complaints one could make about Apple, “slow” is somewhere towards the bottom of the list.
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2. Dylan16807 ◴[] No.41412184[source]
The threshold of what is too slow is in the eye of the beholder, but there have been good studies done on that topic and small delays do cause problems.

But the general idea of things being slowed down by animations is objective. It could be done in a frame or two, it takes X frames. And you can add up those delays when you're navigating and reach significant numbers.