I strongly disagree.

Your comment shows a very common view among us techies that being a member of "tech-competent demographic", is somehow a badge of honor, or at least of accomplishment. It's an accomplishment to be sure, but an accomplishment of little more than our willingness to sacrifice untold man-hours on learning the intricacies of near-universally bad UI inflicted on us all (usually in our youth, when time we are willing to puzzle out the details in something that interests us is nearly unlimited).

This experience molds our perspective on what is "normal" and "usable" UI, because our minds are already bent into the kitten-bonsai shapes that make it mostly-intuitive to us, and where we can use pattern matching to make a reasonable guess at a solution, iterating quickly with each failure. This process of "encounter unfamiliarity, guesswork, random clicking, reading docs, google other mentions of error, guesswork, final solution" is so quick and natural for us that we forget that most people do not have this mental toolkit ready. When a user with no previous exposure to it comes along and is confused, we tend to dismiss their concerns as trivial, because the answers to their bafflements are obvious to us through previous experience, and the process of searching out unknowns is so ingrained.

The actual fact that "tech-competent demographic" is a reasonable term to use in a conversation at all is in and of itself a bit of a tragic commentary on the sad state of our UX design as an industry.

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I'm exaggerating above, perhaps, but not by much. Apple's accomplishment is that they actually manage to make UI that is intuitive to normal humans at best, and mostly not too terrible at worst. There's still a lot of failures even in their designs, but I think it's unfair to say that Apple's goals are to intentionally frustrate power users, as you seem to say. I would say, when power users hit those limitations, it's really just another reminder that intuitive and powerful UI is a really really difficult problem with no single correct objective answer for any given problem.

It's actually rather amusing how vocal the power users are when they hit limitations of the unfamiliar systems, and how dismissive they are when normal humans hit the limitations of the systems they are already familiar with. The problem is with UI/UX in both cases, they are two sides of the same experience, but it seems difficult for some people to recognize that.

And of course, when new UI/UX is designed by people whose minds are already shaped by the existing UI conventions, it will tend to follow the same patterns. Software UI is a near-monoculture currently, and the huge infrastructure of existing code and libraries makes it difficult for anyone to explore new concepts, and it takes time for any new concepts to grow into their strength.

iOS took many releases to really hit its stride in terms of features and usability, and a lot of the speed of progress is really limited by time and resources available. Throwing more people at the problem doesn't speed it up or make the quality better - most things really do need to be worked out by a small/medium team, so it does take time and experience.

(PS: I think Surface is an awesome piece of kit, and I can't wait for Microsoft to keep making it better and better - but I think it's silly to pretend that the Windows touch UI is good as it is because it's targeted at power users - no, it's just still really really young, and needs to grow and improve more. I'm certain there must be very smart people at Microsoft working very hard on making the UX better)