Mac App Installation: A Surreal Drag-and-Drop Ritual

I think the most confusing concept in this process for new users is the shortcut inside the disk image because it breaks the isolation metaphor.

So, you download a file, and it's something called an "image" which opens in Finder like you'd inserted an external thumb drive. Fine. You open the image, and inside is... Your own Applications folder? Wait, how can the file I downloaded contain all of my apps?

This kind of indirection is natural to developers and other advanced users: the file you got from the internet doesn't really know about your Applications, it's a link to a generic system location that gets resolved by Finder. But for less advanced users it's oddly circular: this virtual disk that came from the internet has my data in it. It's something that never happens with an actual thumb drive.

When I first got a Macbook, I tried installing an app and had no idea what to do once I saw the app icon, arrow and Applications folder with no additional instructions. I didn't figure it out and had to look it up. For an ecosystem praised for its "user friendliness", this was certainly not the best first impression.

It really depends what you grew up with I guess.

As someone originally coming off of RISC OS[1] way back when, the mac way is closer to intuitive than the windows way, while Linux's approach of splitting files across the entire FS so that you can't possibly find all of them is "The Real WTF".

(Nixos is even further from that original intuition in a lot of ways. Oh for the days of drag-dropping the !App dir to wherever you happen to have space; and maybe dragging it to !menon if you needed to actually find it back )

[1] The operating system that came with a thin welcome booklet with reassuring pencil art explaining how to hold a mouse, and what the difference between a click and a doubleclick was. [2]

[2] https://archive.org/details/risc-os-5.28-user-guide/page/6/m... Oh wow, still exists in the RISC OS 5 manual. This kind of manual used to be famed : Eg. Chapter 1 introduces what a desktop is; Chapter 2 explains the mouse; 3 Explains the keyboard ; 4 explains what a window is. Give a motivated naive user this guide and there's a small chance they might actually grok the thing when they're done.

FYI - You don't have to drag the app to the applications folder in the install window.

You can drag the app to a different location. I have an entry level mini 8GB/255 GB SSD with 1TB external SSD. Everything goes on the external.

There are only a handful of apps that insist on being installed in the system Application folder. Even had xCode running on the external.

Uninstalling is supposed to be as simple as moving the app to trash but often that leaves a load of stuff behind that no one tells you about.

I think that if every app has to explain to the user how to use their own operating system, that operating system is not intuitive. I’ve been using Macs for a long time but I had to look up how to install an app the first time I did it.

The dmg thing makes no sense. I do like that the app is self-contained, unlike Windows where it's always an installer, but don't like how deleting the app doesn't clear whatever files it put all over the place.

Counterpoint: as a Mac user it is surreal to click Next Next Next to install a program on Windows.

Same for uninstalling. Move to Trash and poof, unistalled.

There is no standard way to install stuff, so neither MacOS nor Windows deviates from something. For all the bickering about it here in the comments, no one proposed an “ideal” solution to install a program on Mac.