I may have worked for that company, but I came away with a different take.
People are User Interface bigots!
People get used to something and that's all they want. The amazing thing Apple was able to do was get people to use the mouse, then the scrollwheel, and then the touchscreen. Usually, that doesn't mean that you get rid of an interface that already exists, but when you create a new device you can rethink the interface. I used the scroll wheel for the iPod before it came out and it was not intuitive, but the ads showed how it worked, and once you used it 20-50x it just seemed right... and everything else was wrong! People would tell me how intuitive it was, and I would laugh, because without the ads and other people using it, it was not at all.
Now we're in a weird space, because an entire generation is growing up with swipe interfaces (and a bit of game controller), and that's going to shape their UI attitudes for another generation. I think the keyboard will have a large space, but with LLM prediction, maybe not as much as we've come to expect.
I could go on about Fitts testing and cognitive load and the performance of various interfaces, but frankly people ignore it.
Strangely, apple sucks at mice. A multi-button mouse with a scroll wheel is way better than any apple mouse I've used (especially the round one).
That said, the touchpad on some of their laptops is pretty good when you can't carry a mouse, but nowhere near a good mouse.
(I have owned all their mice, all their trackpads, etc)
Their keyboards have gone downhill too. I like the light feel of current keyboards, but the lack of sculpted keys to center and cushion fingers and arranged keys for the hands has really replaced function with form.
all the people who knew these kinds of truth have probably retired. sigh.
The multiple-button mouse predates the one-button Apple mouse by 2 decades.
The one-button mouse paired to a GUI was an innovative solution: Xerox couldn’t find a way to make a GUI work with one button only, as per their design 1983 article on designing the Alto UI. They tried, did a lot of HMI research but were trap in local maxima in terms of GUI.
Jeff Raskin and others from PARC who moved to Apple (Tesler if I recall well) had seen how three buttons brought confusion even amongst the people who were themselves designing the UI!
So Raskin insisted that with one button, every user would always click the right button every time. He invented drag diagonally to select items, and all the other small interactions we still use. Atkinson then created the ruffling drop down menus, a perfect fit for a one-button mouse.
They designed all the interface elements you know today around and for the one-button mouse. That’s why you can still use a PC or Mac without using the ‘context’ command attached to the secondary button.
I think that's all purist nonsense. It's like tesla removing the turn signal and drive selector stalks from their cars, or people that use super-minimalist keyboards.
Sometimes dedicated buttons for certain functions are GOOD.
People playing FPS games use two buttons to great effect. Maybe one button for aim, another for fire. People with MMOs can use as many buttons as the mouse allows. Creative types in tune with their environment can assign buttons to frequently used functions and flow through their tasks.
Yes, there are ways to double up functions and use less hardware. In macos you can use control + single mouse button for a context menu.
And I understand that poorly designed products use buttons willy-nilly and create a mess. Many remote controls are rows and columns of identical dedicated buttons that are lazy designs.
But why extra-minimal? I think it is a kind of designer-induced technical poverty.
> People get used to something and that's all they want.
It's more than "getting used to." Learning to type (or to edit text fast using a mouse) is a non-trivial investment of time and energy. I don't think wanting to leverage hard-earned skills is bigotry, seems more like pragmatism to me. Unless the "new way" has obvious advantages (and is not handicapped by suboptimal implementation) the switching cost will seem too high.
It's not just that people don't want to waste an investment into learning something; that investment can actually enable you way more than a more easily accessible interaction method, and you stick to it because it's _better_.
Once you've learned to use the keyboard property, it's simply faster for many applications. Having buttons at your fingertips beats pointing a cursor and clicking at a succession of targets. For example, I can jump through contexts in a tyling window manager and manipulate windows and their contents much faster with a keyboard, than wading through a stack of windows and clicking things with a mouse.
It all depends on what you're interacting with, and how often. I mostly have to deal with text, and do not need to manipulate arbitrary 2d or 3d image data.
But suggesting that I am simply too set in my ways to ditch the keyboard in favor of poking things with a pointy thing or talking into a box is just too reductive.
I do use touchscreens when I've got one on a laptop or on a tablet with keyboard and desktop apps. The reason is precisely what you wrote: pushing buttons in front of us at close reach is faster than reaching for a mouse, aiming and clicking. When the screen is at 50 cm or less from our belly it's not hard to raise a hand and use it.
That also builds on a lifelong investment on pushing buttons, physical and on screen with mice. Using the Tab key to navigate a UI, or shortcuts or hjkl is something that only a few people (comparatively) did so it's can not become mainstream.
The last time I truly learned something new was swyping on my phone keyboard, some 15 years ago. It's extremely niche. I'm the only person doing it among everybody I know. I invested some time but the reward is great, especially when holding the phone with one hand or when there are many vibrations and the screen moves a little. A swiping finger never loses contact. And it's faster for me than two fingers tapping.
On the other side, that's another way to cement the qwerty layout because I swype on it and I would have to adjust to a different layout, so why bother?
Finally, voice. I realized that I used to dictate text to my keyboard on the early 10s, then I stopped. It worked well even back then without all the new technology. I don't remember why I stopped but if I did it means that I didn't lose anything. I wouldn't start again now because I think that there are very few keyboards with only local speech to text.
I agree with this. The cases are rare. Still there are cases like the current sad state of motion control in video game consoles, where I have to agree to the opposite. Pretty much everyone who's put the time to play with motion controls outperforms those who don't and can play to satisfaction even without aim assist (which is relentlessly ubiquitous, for those unaware). But the tech started out kinda ass, and the Xbox still don't have a built in gyroscope, so the adoption is artificially stunted. The result? The masses still call it "waggle" with disdain.
The scroll wheel is a step up over both d-pad and touch screen. I also had a Creative Zen which has a scroll lane and it was great too. Why? Because interaction was a factor of motion control and it has great feedback. Same with Apple touchpad. Yep you still have to learn it, but it was something done in a few minutes and fairly visual.
There's a reason a lot of actually important interfaces still have a lot of buttons, knob, lights, and levers and other human shaped controls. Because, they rely on more than visual to actually convey information.
People are User Interface bigots!
People get used to something and that's all they want. The amazing thing Apple was able to do was get people to use the mouse, then the scrollwheel, and then the touchscreen. Usually, that doesn't mean that you get rid of an interface that already exists, but when you create a new device you can rethink the interface. I used the scroll wheel for the iPod before it came out and it was not intuitive, but the ads showed how it worked, and once you used it 20-50x it just seemed right... and everything else was wrong! People would tell me how intuitive it was, and I would laugh, because without the ads and other people using it, it was not at all.
Now we're in a weird space, because an entire generation is growing up with swipe interfaces (and a bit of game controller), and that's going to shape their UI attitudes for another generation. I think the keyboard will have a large space, but with LLM prediction, maybe not as much as we've come to expect.
I could go on about Fitts testing and cognitive load and the performance of various interfaces, but frankly people ignore it.