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.

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.

9to5mac:

Personas launched in beta when the Vision Pro first debuted, and it was easily one of the most criticized features. Apple’s first attempt at Personas was a technical marvel in some ways, but for many it felt too close to the uncanny valley.

visionOS 26, however, graduated the feature out of beta and was a remarkably lifelike upgrade.

“Uncanny valley” doesn’t quite explain just how bizarre and awkward the first version of Personas were. I didn’t have a single conversation with someone as my Persona that didn’t start with an exclamation or gasp. The difference in visionOS 26 is exponential.

And regarding the Dual Knit band: It has finally made Vision Pro comfortable for me. I tried many different options in the past (two Solo Kit bands with 3D-printed attachment points, Globular Cluster, the Belkin Head Strap), and nothing allowed me to use AVP for more than an hour or so without pain in my cheeks, nose and forehead.

Apple never should have shipped Vision Pro without this Dual Knit band to begin with, but I’m just glad it exists today. I can wear AVP for hours comfortably now.