Interesting take, there's 0 doubt that iPads are incredibly more intuitive to use, and anecdotally, I've also seen the same observations regarding young and elderly. I think a good portion of that is the indirect pointing method (mouse or trackpad) that takes some use to, but there are certainly inherited conventions, features based on past limitations and other things that look just weird to a new audience picking it up.
It's certainly not impossible but one could argue that some oddities could be cleaned up. Releasing software as dmg on Mac is really terrible for new users (and I hate that I did it for Aerial's companion app), it's inherited from the olden days of CD-ROMs and the fact that you have to unmount it is really something that could be improved on.
Now, one could argue Apple has very low incentive to provide something better and push for a new norm (most software nowadays does zip and detect if user launches from the Downloads folder, complaining/moving the file in Applications for you), but that's definitely a relic of the past that, while you can still support it for legacy reasons, should be phased out for something better officially pushed by Apple (that is not just the App Store).
The Apple approach to feature changes/simplifications on macOS though seems solely based on design. Hiding the document proxy icons on windows in Big Sur is a good example of this [1].
If you've seen Monterey betas, Safari tabs are also losing functionalities (favicons worked a bit like document proxy icons, that's gone now) and while they rolled back some of the most egregious changes (they had made a utter mess with toolbar buttons in beta 1), the new UI is still clunky in terms of general usability and readability.
I guess it looks epurated and consistent with the new Safari iPad UI, but do those change help in any way the new users to get around the inherited "peculiarities" of the Mac ? I don't think so.
And when Apple does "line up" features to make them consistent accross platforms, it's always the Mac that loses. The phasing out of plugins in Safari for app extensions killed uBlock Origin for example, and the alternatives are certainly not as great.
Have you tried creating a .pkg file instead of .dmg? Much better user experience, in my opinion. The developer controls where the .app goes, and there’s nothing for the user to unmount when finished.
It's certainly not impossible but one could argue that some oddities could be cleaned up. Releasing software as dmg on Mac is really terrible for new users (and I hate that I did it for Aerial's companion app), it's inherited from the olden days of CD-ROMs and the fact that you have to unmount it is really something that could be improved on.
Now, one could argue Apple has very low incentive to provide something better and push for a new norm (most software nowadays does zip and detect if user launches from the Downloads folder, complaining/moving the file in Applications for you), but that's definitely a relic of the past that, while you can still support it for legacy reasons, should be phased out for something better officially pushed by Apple (that is not just the App Store).
The Apple approach to feature changes/simplifications on macOS though seems solely based on design. Hiding the document proxy icons on windows in Big Sur is a good example of this [1].
If you've seen Monterey betas, Safari tabs are also losing functionalities (favicons worked a bit like document proxy icons, that's gone now) and while they rolled back some of the most egregious changes (they had made a utter mess with toolbar buttons in beta 1), the new UI is still clunky in terms of general usability and readability.
I guess it looks epurated and consistent with the new Safari iPad UI, but do those change help in any way the new users to get around the inherited "peculiarities" of the Mac ? I don't think so.
And when Apple does "line up" features to make them consistent accross platforms, it's always the Mac that loses. The phasing out of plugins in Safari for app extensions killed uBlock Origin for example, and the alternatives are certainly not as great.
[1] : https://daringfireball.net/2021/07/document_proxy_icons_maco...