Oct 19 10:00 am

The desktop is broken

Compared to my iPhone, my MacBook Pro has an order of magnitude more processing power, more memory, more storage space, and more screen space.

In every possible respect (except portability), my laptop’s hardware is not just superior to my iPhone, it’s far far far far superior.

And yet, for the programs and websites that I use on both my iPhone and my laptop (email, Facebook, Tweetie, Twitter Search, Flickr, Maps, Calendar, Safari, iPod, etc.), I’d rather use them on my iPhone than my MacBook. The experience for every app is better on my iPhone than on my Mac.

I don’t think the 25+ year old Mac desktop metaphor UI is solely to blame… but it’s probably the single biggest reason. Starting with a fresh slate gave the UI designers at Apple a chance to fix old mistakes, make better decisions, and tune those pixels for how we use computers now. The desktop metaphor was the right interface when no one knew what a computer was.

The desktop metaphor doesn’t work anymore.

Instead of making things easier to understand for an audience new to computers (few in number), it hobbles us and makes things slower and less efficient for people who grew up with them (many).

Nothing I’m saying here is new. But it makes me wince when I see websites ape the broken desktop metaphor on a wholly new platform. (I’m looking at you, Google Docs.)

I can only hope that this Apple tablet is for real. Because if a large-format computer with a reinvented iPhone-like UI gains popularity, the desktop metaphor will die away, slowly but surely.

24 notes

  1. justinlowery reblogged this from superamit
  2. socmoth reblogged this from superamit and added:
    dude! so awesome
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