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Grabbing Air

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.

And Stay Out

Louie Mantia, in his post reacting to the upcoming departure of Alan Dye:

There’s no doubt Jony has good taste, by the way. He and his team designed great products during the first half of his tenure at Apple. But as he became wealthier, he started to conflate good taste with luxury. [...]

Not to put too fine a point on it, but they started making products that appealed to themselves. Because since Steve Jobs died, Apple, its executives, and its corporate employees got significantly wealthier. It wasn’t just Jony who took an interest in luxury. The whole company did. Anyone with even a little bit of power in the company started to dress more expensively. They all look like they could walk right out of a fashion advertisement.

I sometimes think about what we lost along the way as Apple chased ultra-simplicity and luxury. Jony Ive spent a decade slowly removing any trace of personality from every product Apple released. Apple went from the original translucent-colored plastic aesthetic of the "Bondi blue" iMac G3 and the Power Mac G3 "Blue & White" to the more refined and unique design of the iMac G4 to... a bunch of aluminum rounded rectangles for decades. Chasing thinness, removing ports, simplifying everything down to metal and glass with no differentiation.

I have an iMac G4 sitting on my garage workbench, and simply moving the display around is a source of delight. On a shelf nearby, a beaten up graphite "Clamshell" iBook G3 makes me smile every time I open it. Booting up Mac OS 9 and clicking around, listening to the old hard drive chug… is this simply nostalgia? Perhaps. But there is undoubtedly so much personality in the design of these products.