Enough already

I am only a Level 2 Mac fanboy; the Higher Mysteries of the RDF have not been revealed to me. Like a lot of people, I switched because of the Apple design concept, and like many people I was introduced to its pleasures by the iPod. (This is the model that I thought was so brilliant, back in 2004.)

It strikes me that the essence of the iDesign philosophy is metadictatorship. Steve Jobs does not control what I do to my iDevices, but he does control how I can use or change them. Thus, I can customize, but only to a certain point. This chafes at people who believe they are better computer programmers and designers than those in Apple's employ, including even a few people who actually are better computer programmers. For the rest of us, complaining that our phones aren't jailbroken is like complaining that we can't replace the engines in our Prius.

All of this is just a prelude to say that I have been spoiled by this benevolent dictatorship. I noticed this morning when I went to the New York Times, as I have been doing now for fourteen years, that the site is awful. Beyond awful. There are 1903 words on the home page.

Nineteen hundred and three words.

I copied and pasted the page into Word. It was 16 pages long.

Some of that is page formatting. But most of it is cruft. Look at your NYT app on your iPhone and then look at NYTimes.com. Design matters.

Creative Commons image by Incase.