Why does apple hide things in menus?

Question

On a number of occasions, I've needed to change something in the settings of my mac, and I cannot see it in the relevant menu. After some googling, in emerges that the reason I cannot see this option is because it's actually hidden. I picked the right "system preferences" category, found the right tab, but naturally didn't realise that the button wouldn't exist until I selected an unrelated item while holding down some modifier key. It's like looking for easter eggs in a video game, only less fun.

Recent examples include detecting an external display, and setting the refresh rate of an external display.

I don't like GUI's to start with, but if they have one advantage, it's that the options are normally clear without reading a manual. Here, the options are not displayed, and there is no clear reference guide. I cannot type man Display_options and get the canonical manual for my version, I have to search third party sites till I find someone who's interface looks like mine. So why would options be hidden like this?

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Edit; OK, having read that first answer I feel like this question lacks a degree of empathy and doesn't reflect very well on me. The world is not designed around my use case, and it's a very good thing if a product can be made more accessible. I will wait a little while for any more input before accepting the current answer.

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Just last night I installed an update, and now the "detect displays" button doesn't appear at all. Spent 2 hours this morning on the phone to apple support, who confirmed that it's a bug, and there is no workaround and no cli tool for this. Some googling shows that this has happened before. Feeling considerably less charitable towards apple software interfaces in general today.

Answer 1

This is a huge mistake, period. It assumes internet connection for you to search for the solution, otherwise how would you figure it out?

Some hypothesis as to why it happened:

1. [From user J...], my emphasis:

Apple also likes to have Apple branded products plug-and-play seamlessly with each other. OP's use case seems to be manually detecting and setting display settings and I'd bet it's likely for a non-Apple branded device. Apple monitors just work, after all. Apple's UX philosophy also tends to bury any settings you may need when using non-Apple hardware in the hopes that the user gives up when it doesn't work right away and returns to the store to get an Apple branded whatever instead... at several times the typical market cost.

2. That GUI developer may think that users driven away by even a decent amount of choices and that this outweighs easily presenting the option itself.

Answer 2

Generally speaking there are a bunch of UX principles and best practices advocating for a minimalistic UI. This makes sense in terms of human cognition (viewing Attention as a finite resource), perception and memory, Fitts' law (advocating for larger target areas, hence less items in a fixed real estate), Hick's law (less choice leads to quicker decisions), a UX technique called Progressive Disclosure, which means that large amounts of information should be split into several steps, Nielsen's aesthetic/minimalist UI heuristic, and many other guidelines.

Taken together, these principles mean that we often aim to reduce the number of items on display for our main personas (target user audiences), deferring more advanced options to more remote locations. Another of Nielsen's Heuristics promotes the use of hidden shortcuts and other "power features" for more advanced users, without using up the real estate seen by all users.

All of these decisions require a fine balance which is ultimately at the discretion of the designer - because displaying all of these actions for you also means providing a more cluttered and difficult interface for all users, including yourself whenever you don't need these options (which is probably 99% of the time). Ideally the exact point of equilibrium will be based on user research, but even then it won't fit all of the users all of the time.

Specifically Apple is sometimes accused of taking this to the extreme, and only supporting the lowest common denominator, or what they view as the main use case, making it difficult to do anything they treat as a non-standard way of doing things (AKA "you're holding it wrong"). Microsoft typically adopts a "wider" approach, supporting more use-cases with more ease, at the price of making the main ones less well-tailored to the persona, because that's the tradeoff you get between a generic and a bespoke UX.

I don't work at Apple, but I believe this is why they hide things in menus :).

*EDIT

As some commentators have pointed out, one of the most important UX principles is Findability / Discoverability, meaning that options need to be discoverable directly via the UI without involving additional means. In your case this principle is sacrificed in favor of others - here it is at odds with the Minimalism idea, because it requires more use of real estate. This is not uncommon, as many UX principles can contradict each other, and the gist of the whole domain is to manage these tradeoffs according to the relevant goals. Since we aren't aware of the business goals behind this decision I personally don't think we can state that this is necessarily "bad UX", and as others have also pointed out, some of Apple's business principles are to discourage the use of other vendors' devices with its OS - so this decision may have been made to serve that purpose.