Sixteen

Jesper, at take:

My hope is that there are Mac lovers within Apple who bite their tongue at every silly icon redesign, title bar-shrinking design reorganization, misty shower window—re-skin—love letter that they are forced to enact instead of taking what was once (and partially still is) that rarest of jewels, a long-term, continuously updated, well-designed user interface and mass market operating system and iterating on it to make it better. That there are people who, in so many words, bleed six colors; who have found not just a sterile tool, but a culture and a community. And who, like so many others in so many other situations, recently had to see what they love, what they value, what shaped them, torn apart by shifting, switching or recently starkly exposed priorities of people above them who either don’t know what they have, or are happy to use it as a vehicle and ride it to places they care more about.

My hope is that Macintosh is not just one of these empires that was at the height of its power and then disintegrated because of warring factions, satiated and uncurious rulers, and droughts for which no one was prepared, ruining crops no one realized were essential for survival.

My hope is that there remains a primordial spark, a glimpse of genius, to rediscover, to reconnect to - to serve not annual trends or constant phonification, but the needs of the user to use the computer as a tool to get something done.

My hope is that, just as Apple crawled out of a hardware nightmare pockmarked by thermal throttling, keyboards incapacitated by strands of human hair and lack of respect for its users needs, it can choose to refocus its software and its humility too, and stop doing this to the bicycle for the mind.

A wonderful post which ends with these beautiful sentiments calling to mind my personal fears about Apple. I genuinely hope Jesper is correct here and my pessimism proves wrong in the long run—that the current version of Apple has been so damaged by a decade of simplification and profit obsession, losing so many valuable people who could effect meaningful change along the way.

John Gruber, in his Daring Fireball post responding to an article of the same name by Kyle Chayka at The New Yorker:

Saving a whole pile of notes to yourself as text files on your desktop, with no organization into sub-folders, isn’t wrong. The whole point of “just put it on the desktop” is to absolve yourself of thinking about where to file something properly. That’s friction, and if you face a bit of friction every time you want to jot something down, it increases the likelihood that you won’t jot it down because you didn’t want to deal with the friction.

This exact scenario is what led me—22 years ago, in 2004!—to create xPad for macOS.

I had been hired by a web design agency with a list of existing client projects, all of which were in some state of disrepair, and it was my job, day-in and day-out, to dig into ancient codebases and fix critical bugs as quickly as possible. These were the days before large-scale use of version management systems like Git, so I had to be extremely careful to keep many nippets of code and notes as I tore apart pages and services. And, at the end of each day, I would end up with 50 text files in TextEdit that I needed to save manually. The next day, I’d have to open them all up again.

I realized quickly in 2004 what I needed was a simple way to have a single UI that would allow me to create and edit text documents, but which completely removed the friction of saving, opening, categorizing and labeling. I solved this problem by building my first native app, xPad.

xPad would automatically store and retrieve all your documents for you, and had simple support for visual categorization (which you could completely ignore if you so desired)¹ . The best part was that it was very fast and had no cognitive overhead—it was just was the place all of your text went. While it didn’t make much money in the beginning, after I made it freeware it ended up being quite popular because I wasn’t the only person who needed a tool like that.

Chayka, in his article, wrote:

I’ve tried out other software for keeping track of my random thoughts and ideas in progress—the personal note-storage app Evernote; the task-management board Trello; the collaborative digital workspace Notion, which can store and share company information. Each encourages you to adapt to a certain philosophy of organization, with its own formats and filing systems. But nothing has served me better than the brute simplicity of TextEdit, which doesn’t try to help you at all with the process of thinking. Using the app is the closest you can get to writing longhand on a screen.

Part of my goal with xPad (and, later, the iOS app we created at Karbon called Scratch² ), was that it didn’t force you to adopt any philosophy, format or filing system. It was simply a fast way to create text, with zero managerial duties for saving, retrieving or managing files.

Modern Apple OSes have adopted the same basic strategy for their core Notes feature (Notes today is very similar in concept to, but significantly more feature-rich than xPad and Scratch were), and the default operating system behavior to generally save and reopen documents without user action helps a lot.

Norbert Heger describes the absolute embarrassment that is the struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe:

A lot has already been said about the absurdly large corner radius of windows on macOS Tahoe. People are calling the way it looks comical, like a child’s toy, or downright insane.

Setting all the aesthetic issues aside—which are to some extent a matter of taste—it also comes at a cost in terms of usability.

Since upgrading to macOS Tahoe, I’ve noticed that quite often my attempts to resize a window are failing.

This never happened to me before in almost 40 years of using computers. So why all of a sudden?

I have struggled with this every single day since Tahoe was released. I fail on nearly every first attempt at resizing a window. I have used computers since 1990. I dealt with SCSI chain termination and BIOS IRQ conflicts, and that bullshit never made me nearly as frustrated as this does.

Every once in a while, I get lucky and just happen to grab the magical invisible handle floating in the air off the coast of the window’s giant corner radius, but it’s rare. Instead, I find myself clicking and dragging over and over to do something that should be simple and effortless.

Imagine taking one of the most core, we-take-this-for-granted features of a windowing system and throwing it away. And why? Oh, because iPhones have rounded corners and therefore so should all windows on every Apple platform. This logic is so obviously flawed—what is this, the Battlestar Galactica universe?—but it’s even worse that this breaks an essential operating system feature for zero gain other than to cater to the aesthetic taste of a small team of fixated designers.

Jason Snell, in his Six Colors post, “Apple design’s luxury bubble”:

In the wake of Steve Jobs’s death, Apple elevated Jony Ive to a position of total design authority as a way of signaling to the wider world that the company was going to be okay after losing its co-founder and leader. In that era, there was a genuine fear that a company led by an operations guy was not going to be able to keep the magic going. (Certainly, that’s a narrative that current and former Apple designers have been happy to push ever since.)

The more I think about it, the more this (perfectly reasonable!) tactical decision has come to feel like the original sin of the Tim Cook era. An unchained and elevated Ive sent the right message to the world, and Ive really is a talented designer who built beautiful things. But without Steve Jobs to rein things in, Apple’s design sense got more insular, more obscure, more minimal.

Eric Schwarz also touches on the link between Jobs’ death and the push toward metal and glass design in his post, “Aluminum Rounded Rectangles”, but rightly points out the wheels were in motion even before Jobs died:

… this passage got me thinking about when Apple actually started on this trajectory. While a lot of this happened immediately after the passing of Steve Jobs and continued through Jony Ive’s tenure, I’d argue that this trend started in 2001 with the Titanium PowerBook G4 and was cemented with the white iBook G3. While that PowerBook G4 had a bit of personality (it was painted and had a port door!), a revision later gave us the legendary 12″ aluminum model, and set the stage for Macs that basically look like what we have today. The iBook gave way to the plastic MacBooks, but again, an understated folding slab of computer.

I don’t think we can completely blame the vacuum created by Jobs’ death (as Eric notes), but I think it was certainly accelerated dramatically when Ive became the single source of all things hardware design at Apple with no oversight or pushback.

Snell touches on this as well:

It’s one reason I’m so critical about Ive, his overlong tenure at Apple when he was obviously burned out, and the fatal mistake of placing software design in the clutches of him and his lieutenants: I just get the sense that those designers became untethered from the rest of us, chasing idealized product dreams based on the expensive luxury brands they wore, drove, and otherwise used every day. Not that Apple designs ugly stuff, but there is undoubtedly an antiseptic sameness to a lot of it that smacks of a design team that has disappeared up its own white void.

By the time Ive was given the reigns to user interface, he was already noticeably burned out with hardware. Every Ive introduction video was the same word salad, every piece of hardware looked (effectively) the same. Giving Ive control over both sides of the house at the peak of his disinterest was an enormous mistake. He stuck around for six years after the release of iOS 7, but seemed much less involved after the first release. This worked in iOS’ favor, as it allowed others in the design group to slowly fix myriad issues the first major release created. But that took years.

By contrast, in the case of Liquid Glass, Alan Dye bailed only a few months after its release. One of my least favorite “leadership” patterns is stubborn, sure-of-themselves fraudsters who use political skills to force their bad ideas through at great cost only to immediately jump ship for something else, leaving the damage behind for everyone else to clean up. At least in Ive’s case he gave us many years of amazing hardware. Dye simply rode the coattails of many others (Ive included), dropped a bomb and then left for one of the worst companies on earth.