Who is "they"? The employees at Apple when the HIG was first published in 1986, 40 years ago? That Apple is dead, what you see before you is an empty and rotted husk.
I watched as Steve Jobs came back to Apple—he really took hold of the reins of UX (aided by his team of designers).
Personally, (and I say this as it is often a matter of taste) I didn't care for a lot of it.
A simple example: the URL field of Safari should have been, to my Tog sensibilities, an editable text field. Perhaps somewhere (below?, to the right?) you include a progress bar. But a designer (I will not name, ha ha) came up a combined textfield/progress bar. It looked to my eye as though, as the page loaded, the text was being selected.
Jobs loved it!
It was then I think that Apple departed "Tog" for these "one-off" UX experiments.
I have rationalized this move away from a standard since, with the advent of the web, the customer is now being bombarded with all manner of UX—ought to be comfortable with one-off UX.
(Thankfully I see that now we have a thin line that seems to grow along the lower edge of the URL field.)
Introduced a concept decades ago in no way implies that their current implementation of the concept is at all ideal or market leading.
Perhaps you shouldn't encourage them. Based on recent software releases from Apple they might see it as a challenge.
Sick of this weasel word. Either argue it or don't.
It's not hypothetical if you are here, in the current tense, arguing that. I've mostly cured myself of the habit, but its tough.
Arguably:
- used to say that a statement is very possibly true even if it is not certain (merriam-webster)
- in a way that can be shown to be true (cambridge)
ie. you can be prove it through argument, not “you can make the argument”