The flat area and now liquid glass are all post-Jobs creations. Apple needs a true product person back in charge with taste to get this ship back into a better place.
Jobs acted as an editor and sounding board. You can't just let designers (or engineers) run wild.
The thing killing me with Apple design now is not just the look of UIs but the UX of how they actually work. I swear they move buttons every year for no reason other to move them. Workflows randomly take an extra click that didn't before.
I'm not sure if the phone or the Mac OS changes are worse, maybe its a tie.
One pet peeve is on the iPhone messages app if you accidentally tap into the search bar they inserted at the bottom, it clears the list of messages (rather than waiting for you to type and start filtering based on context). First time it happened I thought sync failed and the phone didn't have a copy of any of my texts.
Peak UI / UX was some years ago, exactly when depends on any given persons particular preference.
What we have now is akin to a Sheperd tone[1], where the design has to get intentionally worse so that corps. can then go on to boast about how the new design in following years is better than ever, but on the whole no real progress is made.
1. A Shepard tone, named after Roger Shepard, is a sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves. When played with the bass pitch of the tone moving upward or downward, it is referred to as the Shepard scale. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that seems to continually ascend or descend in pitch, yet which ultimately gets no higher or lower. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone
> Jobs acted as an editor and sounding board. You can't just let designers (or engineers) run wild.
Apple went way too far with the skeuomorphism, and Ives & co. may have over-corrected. Speaking of running wild: I'd consider painstakingly reproducing the stitching on the seats in Job's jet in the icon for an Apple app (Notes, IIRC) to be going overboard. Apple was rightly mocked for taking skeuomorphism too far, and as a result making onscreen, virtual objects mimick real objects became outdated, and people are now nostalgic for it because the backlash has been forgotten.
> people are now nostalgic for it because the backlash has been forgotten.
What backslash? Only backslash I remember is when flat design was introduced. The only people complaining about skeumorphism was designers chasing latest fad.
> The only people complaining about skeumorphism was designers chasing latest fad.
You're just proving my point. Notice how all of these were posted after Zune/Metro/Windows Phone/8/whatever it's called flat design craziness started.
Just look at this quote from Gruber's blog post:
...these hallmarks of modern UI graphic design style are (almost) never used in good print graphic design. They’re unnecessary in print...
No shit, guess what also wasn't needed in print: Buttons to be pressed and radioboxes to be selected. The whole fad just built on "old design is old and designers need to be employed".
Apple had an internal clash over which design direction they should go after the release of Windows 8 but every user rightfully hated Windows 8 flat design. The resonance to skeuomorphism was very positive back then.
I don't know when Windows 8 was released, but by 2012-2013, skeuomorphic design had become very unpopular, tacky even. See the links I included in response to sibling comment.
The pitch from Bezos -- and it's a dumb pitch -- was basically just to make checking out faster by avoiding interacting with humans (but this can be achieved by increasing the number of cashiers and baggers). The pitch was never lower prices. The combo of all the tech and the army of Indians watching video was not cheap.
And because they were relying on computer vision and Indian vision, they had to get rid of all their fresh meals because they were too hard to calculate prices for. So, it ended up being a half-assed 7-Eleven concept. The whole concept was made by someone who hates humanity.
I personally prefer stores with actual cashiers. What I don't like are lines, but that is very solvable. The organic grocer near me is super fast to check out.
There is also the story about Steve throwing a MacBook Air on a conference room table and asking why does the iPad wake from sleep so much faster? And then he told them to fix it and make Mac laptops sleep/wake just as well as iOS.
Sleep/Wake is one area where MacOS absolutely destroys Windows.
How can MacOS possibly sleep/wake any faster than Windows? My Lenovo X1C wakes up so quickly that the limiting factor is how fast I can enter my PIN on the keyboard. Well below 1 second, maybe 0.5 seconds. Going to sleep is the same, I'm not going to measure it but it feels like it's about 0.3 seconds.
Yes, provided it's not dead because it didn't actually sleep or you have to boot it up because it decided to shut itself down at some point (windows update?)
Sleep on windows is a hot mess, I've never had an experience I had any amount of confidence in.
It's become unreliable under linux as well. It used to work fine. The whole UEFI including the new si0x or whatever that word is again destroyed a perfectly fine experience all because it seemed like a good idea by microsoft.
They just need to feel superior about their Macs.
My experience is that Windows wake just as fast if not faster.
But in typical Apple fanboy fashion, they will compare a 2K laptop to a random 500 cheapo laptop.
Apple real strength is in the efficiency, but there are many things it can't run and they leave top end performance on the table (outside of video editing).
Maybe Windows, I haven't used it in a long time. But I have noticed my son's MacBook pro (used to be my work laptop) only pretends to be available after "waking". It'll repeatedly fail to actually take input in the user login password field. It does so silently, leading to missing characters in the password and needs several attempts to actually fill out fully. I don't know what it's doing in this time, but not having the "busy beachball" is a lie.
> There is also the story about Steve throwing a MacBook Air on a conference room table and asking why does the iPad wake from sleep so much faster?
As someone who has owned two Apple laptops before the iPad was introduced (my first was a PowerBook G4 in 2005), I've always just closed the lid of my laptop instead of shutting them down. They've always resumed quickly.
If this story was true, it probably wasn't an iPad.
I'm a Mac user, but I recently played around with a beefy laptop at work to see how games ran on it, and I was shocked at how bad and user-hostile Windows 11 is. I had previously used Windows 98, 2000, XP, Vista, and 7, but 11 is just so janky. It's feestoned with Co-pilot/AI jank, and seems to be filled with ads and spyware.
If I didn't know better, I'd assume Windows was a free, ad-supported product. If I ever pick up a dedicated PC for gaming, it's going to be a Steam Machine and/or Steam Deck. Microsoft is basically lighting Xbox and Windows on fire to chase AI clanker slop.
(I've been a cross platform numerical developer in GIS and geophysics for decades)
serious windows power users, current and former windows developers and engineers, swear by Chris Titus Tech's Windows Utility.
It's an open powershell suite collaboration by hundreds maintained by an opinionated coordinater that allows easy installation of common tools, easy setting of update behaviours, easy tweaking of telemetry and AI addons, and easy creation of custom ISO installs and images for VM application (dedicated stripped down windows OS for games or a Qubes shard)
It's got a lot of help hover tooltip's to assist in choices and avoiding suprises, you can always look to the scripts that are run if you're suspicious.
" Windows isn't that bad if you clean it out with a stiff enough broom "
That said, I'm setting my grandkids up with Bazzite decks and forcing them to work in CLI's for a lot of things to get them used to seeing things under the hood.
Bazzite is nice but its not very CLI centric I think because of the immutability. Its a great OS, but I found Cachy a lot better if you want to work from CLI in normal ways
Fascinating how this got leaked. A TV station in Canada accidentally ran the original episode version, implying that this was pulled super late and the episode was completely in the can.
It was completely finished. There's an article out today that says the main reporter on the story complained that the censor Bari Weiss had not bothered to appear at the previous five earlier screenings and reviews by the editorial team.
Probably as accidental as the people doing the censorship of the latest Epstein files released today that had "accidents" about how they censured stuff.
Fascinating how this got leaked. A TV station in Canada accidentally ran the original episode version, implying that this was pulled super late and the episode was completely in the can.
A grammar nazi thing to do would be me complaining about you using an en dash when you meant to use an em dash. Or using single quotes when you should be using double quotes. But I don't really care because you're just making a short Internet comment.
Capitalizing sentences is basic usability and readability. We should care about usability and readability.
At some point it won't even matter if they have a plan. I'm comparing it to throwing a stone off a mountain. You might not achieve much, or you might start an avalanche and good luck trying to control that once it gets going. Then it's just gravity and mass and until that has run it's course you're along for the ride.
The plan is to make the midterms a Republican offer you can’t refuse, so to speak. One thing on the menu or the count, at least. Or something to similar effect. Why swear in any democrat in the house at all?
The two longest shutdowns in the history of the United States of America have occurred under Donald J. Trump.
Trump is hosting Great Gatsby parties, traveling, golfing, and doing everything except trying to end the shutdown. He doesn't seem to care that much that it is happening. And the entire reason it is happening is because Trump's Big Beautiful Bill did not contain Affordable Care Act subsidies.
It is incorrect to say that what is happening is common under all administrations. This dysfunction is uniquely Trumpian.
Jobs acted as an editor and sounding board. You can't just let designers (or engineers) run wild.
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