I'm mystified by the whole scene these days: Apple UIs are trash simply because there's supposedly a point-and-click interface but every bit of turf is modal with poor visual cues and ever growing mystery-meat.
It's like there's a Apple dept of unpleasantness working to make everything difficult to discern, unintuitive and gimpy.
Modes and controls are inconsistent, contradict each other, behave indeterminately, and are full of bugs which moonlight as features and vise versa.
Try to find a place to click and drag a Finder window since Big Sur. And controls resize and jump around.
If a Finder spotlight search produces no results, is it because no match exists, no match has been found yet, or because indexing is skrogged? How long should you wait? The more I use Finder search the longer it takes to produce results. Sometimes it will sleep on it and offer results minutes later, then eventually offer no results at all. Or it will offer specific search results, but recents never populates, or only provides a few arbitrary items. If I kill Finder, it works again for a while. Ever tried to really get to the bottom of Spotlight config with mdutil? Joy! It's impossible to determine what's going on.
Finder Sidebar is another total mystery, it just does what it wants, but if you pet it enough it will settle down and nap instead of spontaneously fidgeting and rearranging itself. There are bugs there that have been around for almost a decade!
So older Mac is no refuge. Things that work break with security updates. In Catalina it's decided I can no longer enable or disable file sharing, where sometimes you can check the boxes but they just don't work, then spontaneously reset, and other times the boxes are there but don't respond to clicks at all. This is an OS that no longer gets support that they are breaking!
iPhone is horrible for all this and more: The disaster is in the design. The camera app makes the experience of photography completely suck! It's pretty hard to just hold the device because it's entire touchable surface has side effects. Try changing the zoom in camera without switching the entire camera mode! Suddenly I'm doing video or panorama; whoops my fingers are in the shot; now I'm losing my grip; how long should I wait with this unsteady grip for the shutter to cycle? Did I hit the button? Oh noes blurry shot due to tap on screen that causes rotation perpendicular to axis of the shot; let's see, to delete I need to follow an arrow in some corner, top-or-bottom left-or-right, to the photos app and pick through the library and go to that little trashcan, and — what was I shooting again? hey I just got a text message! — ok and back to camera but with an arrow, no ok swipe up and pick from fan of open apps no not messages, camera, and ok reset the zoom (gar! panorama again?!) I'll use the side button to snap, which side button? Damn! That's Power (which is not actually power but blank the screen, where the next big thing is a screen that never fully blanks — I am not making this up) hold-on, I used Accessibility to overload clicks on that other button, but which one?
And on and on... I am not being even slightly hyperbolic, it actually feels even worse than I make it sound.
Ok now for a million laughs, try googling details on apple photos.
EVEN THE APPLE TAXONOMY IS INSANE!
The phone app is just as bad. I defy anyone to make sense of "Add to existing contact" Which phone number is the one you just added?! Do I want to call a number or update metadata? Why is "edit" sometimes on left versus on right? When can I swipe? What does "cancel" mean? Which label goes with which address entry? Is the little red do-not-enter telling me to avoid the entry or that i can't do something to it in this mode, or that there's something I should do. Contacts now provides an experience, where it points out work I need to do to maintain it, and modally offers temporally limited feedback like i'm in a vid game! Something will flash on the screen and I'm going "Wait I didn't catch that what happened? Did my contact turn into a pokemon and I need to chase it around the house?
When i drop my phone on the couch, it composes email!
It's mind numbing. It's like putting a touchscreen on a car radio...
Dumbfoundingly bad design.
So I'm at a loss as to nostalgia for the old candy look and feel. WTH does the current or old Music app icon have to do with anything?!
I'll take a break for a while, so frustrated with this shiiii (beep!)
