Wade Tregaskis:

28% fewer pixels for 34% fewer dollars—so technically better value, if you don’t really care about screen real-estate. But that extra real estate is really valuable, and Apple have now apparently ceded the large display market to… well, mostly the tumbleweeds. Sure, there’s technically other 6k displays, like the LG, the Dell, or the Asus, but while they have some advantages—less than half the price, most notably—they have real big disadvantages—like low brightness and poor contrast ratios.

[…]

After more than six years, I was hoping for an improved Pro Display XDR, not merely a small version.

I am so disappointed Apple decided to discontinue the 32-inch Pro Display XDR. After so many years, I assumed Apple would at least maintain the product and push an update similar to the 27-inch version they just released, but obviously they didn’t see enough traction with this high-end, limited-audience display and just decided to scrap it entirely. As Wade said, while the new 27-inch Studio Display XDR features are welcome improvements, downgrading to a 27-inch main display is not something I’m interested in. I will likely just accept the lower brightness and contrast ratios of something like the LG UltraFine evo because, for me, the screen real estate and density are far too valuable.

The Pro Display XDR had the price tag of a high-end computer, and while I could personally justify that cost—it’s something I look at all day, every day for years—I understand that for most people a $5,000 display was not even a consideration. Everyone I know who owns a Pro Display XDR loves it (even with its flaws like blooming, et cetera), and we were all hopeful there’d be a new version at some point.

For now, I’ll hold onto my current display for as long as I can, hoping LG and others continue to improve features of their 6K 32-inch versions. But at some point this Pro Display XDR will have to be replaced, and I’m very disappointed it won’t be with another Apple display.

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 snippets 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.