http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2006/11/richard_thaler_1.html

I said “The transformation from Disneyland (OS/9) to libertarian paternalism (OS/X) is an amazing shift of philosophy.”

Yes, I stand by this statement. The original design of OS/X and, later, Windows Vista, is Disneyland. It’s all sunshine and smiles and always in your field of attention, asking for something and otherwise reminding you of its existence. MS apps have the dreaded Talking Paperclip or -shudder- the new redesigned interface, which is even worse. By contrast, OS/X stops you from doing the dumb stuff that toasts your computer and handles all the things an OS is supposed to do, pretty much invisibly (unless you want to dive into a terminal window, in which case you are back in Unix). There’s no more “sad Mac.” No grandiose entrance theme. No Claritin commercial default background suggesting how happy you’re supposed to be.

BTW, the term libertarian paternalism is not one I coined. In fact, there’s an entire book by that title, by Sunnstein and Thaler. The tenets of the basic philosophy are, IMO, a sensible:

-Because most users will just use the defaults, set them up to be good choices for most users.
-Don’t overwhelm the user with choices, especially those about which he likely has little information (anyone who had to use OS/2 back in the old days can talk about too many choices).

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_paternalism and links.

Haha, and you try to call yourself not a typical Mac user.

Bonus points for specifically pointing out you aren’t the common ‘mac-user’, something everyone who uses one does.

Um, sure. You really don’t know me.

Anyway, how ’bout we take my decidedly unhip sixty-something stepmom? She was finally convinced by my stereotypical Mac marketing poster boy brother to buy a Mac after she destroyed her old Dell through viruses, trojans and spyware she constantly picked up from crap her friends would always forward and injudicious use of the web. My dad had it with reinstalling Windows and fixing things on a regular basis. (This wasn’t helped by the fact that they were too cheap to get broadband and wouldn’t run Windows update regularly.) Now she has no problem at all—things just work. Libertarian paternalism in action.

Haha, and you try to call yourself not a typical Mac user.

Bonus points for specifically pointing out you aren’t the common ‘mac-user’, something everyone who uses one does.