If you're a designer at a top 10 S&P 500 company making 6 figures, you owe it to yourself to have some love for your craft. If a PM tells you to shove a UI style meant for an unsuccessful VR device onto desktop and mobile platforms, say no. Get your colleagues to say no. Make that PM read everything the Nielsen Norman group has ever written. Read it too.
More than likely designers are making up work to justify their jobs. Not good for your career if you admit the desktop interface was perfected in ~1995.
Apple looked at innovations in hardware form factor and, rather than trying to out-innovate in that sphere, said, instead: how do we make something in software that nobody would ever try to imitate, and thus position ourselves as the innovators once again?
And the monkey's paw curled and said: Liquid Glass is a set of translucency interactions that are technically near-impossible to imitate, sure, but the real reason nobody will try to imitate is because they are user-hostile to a brand-breaking extent.
And Apple had nobody willing to see this trainwreck happening and press the brakes.
Where what we really needed was a stable release version (now a year late from the original promised date) so we can build out UI components for the content editors to use that don't require constant design tweaks.
You know the designers are:
a) Just fucking around having fun
b) Making busy work to drag it out as long as possible
As it's now 4 years since they began working on the "design system", there's a good chance it will get canned as there's some more modern design they will want to use.
Edit: On Linux, you have desktop environments like LXQt for this. Unfortunately, last time I checked, Wayland was not supported.
- Arguably the dock, though it's probably contentious - Ubiquitous instant search (e.g. Spotlight) - Gesture-based automatic tiling of windows to left/right side of the screen, tiling presets - Smooth scrolling, either via scroll wheel or trackpad - Gesture-based multi tasking, etc - Virtual desktops/multiple workspaces - Autosave - Folder stacks, grouping of items in file lists - Tabbed windows - Full-screen mode - Separate system-wide light and dark modes - Enhanced IME input for non-latin languages - App stores, automatic updating - Automatic backup, file versioning - Compositing Window Managers (Quartz, Compiz, DWM, modern Wayland compositors...) - The "sources bar" UI pattern - Centralized notification centers - Stack view controlelr style navigation for settings (back/forward buttons) - Multi device clipboard synchronization - Other handoff features - Many accessibility features - The many iteration of Widgets - Installable web apps - Virtual printers ("print to PDF") - Autocomplete/autocorrect - PIP video playback - Tags/Labels - File proxies/"representations" - Built-in clipboard management - Wiggle the mouse to find the pointer
None of these can be said to be at their final/"perfect" form today, and there are hundreds if not thousand of papercuts and refinements that can be made.
The real issue is probably due to management misunderstanding designer's jobs, and allocating them incorrectly. The focus should be more on the interactions and behaviors than necessarily on the visuals.
The Dock came from NeXtSTEP circa 1989. It had square edges and no Happy Mac. (So did Mail.app, TextEdit, some of the OS X Finder, and a whole bunch of other things.)
To the untrained eye it looks like an Apple innovation because most people couldn't afford NeXt computers unless you worked in a university or research lab.
Though if we could get the newer settings panel of macOS a few versions back, before they inexplicably ruined the best OS GUI settings interface I’ve ever used, that’d be great.
I don't need or want art, eye candy, or animations. I need to get work done and the rest of the OS to stay tf out of my way.
User interfaces are not art.
> No project manager ever got promoted for saying "let's keep things the same".
Designers at Balenciaga don't have to justify their jobs when they make oversized t-shirts, neither do the ones at Apple.
Maybe stakeholders were calling the shots and everyone was like, "Fine. If you want us to reuse the same icon for different purposes, you're the boss. We are done trying to explain why this is a bad idea."
The anti-design bias in this forum is genuinely unhinged. I see some saying the entire destruction of the natural world stems from design lol.
Things got pretty bad. More than 95% of all employees (and I'm guessing 99% of designers) were using iPhones at the time. There would be rough edges all over the Android app, but as one of our designers said "people with taste don't use Android".
Imagine knowing that most of your new users were getting a subpar experience, and that not being enough motivation to expense a flagship Android and drive it daily.
But the new users kept coming, and despite mostly being Android users, they still used the product. Turns out that legacy taxis are themselves an ugly interface, and ugliness is relative.
I don't think anyone seriously believes Uber, Airbnb and Robinhood won because of "beautiful apps".
It is 2026 and UIs are still abysmally slow in many cases. How is that even remotely possible? Now, with that in mind, consider (just for a moment) why people might think that UX people don't know what they're doing.
It's slow, bloated, buggy and ugly. Probably one of the worst apps running on my phone.
In my opinion, this article had very clear and direct criticisms; they were hardly "anti-design bias". The increase in visual clutter is, for sure, a net loss for MacOS Tahoe.
Many top bars have become a group of bubbles over the content, which we’ve been conditioned to see as floating notifications for years. Things shine and move when they don’t require attention, just because.
The end result is that my OS feels like a browser without ad blocker. As much as people hated flat design, at least it didn’t grab your attention with tacky casino tricks.
Genuinely believe Apple’s design team are rudderless or have unintentionally been forced to produce something to justify someone’s career, because this whole thing is disastrous.
This is the curse of being a UI designer for a long lived product. Once a thing has been created and future work consists of 99% code and 1% UI, your UI designer job has evaporated. And so we see that everything changes every major release of an operating system, so the UI people can justify their pay checks.
It’s relatively recent in iOS history that Safari’s address bar is at the bottom. There’s a setting to move it back to the top. This specific example is probably as innocent as a default getting accidentally changed during the development process.
Can't you swipe past the end on the tab bar (along the bottom by default) to create a new tab?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSzjcVZXolc
https://tjkelly.com/blog/ios-7-sucks/
And he also takes credit for the dynamic island. It is an assault on my senses to see everything constantly moving around on my screen.
I have been working with Macs since 1995, but this year is my first using Pixel with GrapheneOS, that is how done I am with Apple. Unfortunately I know the UI will not change for years and I just could not take it.
Cook doesn't seem to a have any taste for product design, isn't he a logistics guy?
But he clearly falls afoul of Steve Jobs'warning about leaders with no taste.
I don't think that's fully accurate, unless you have a link that confirms it? That Dye designed it, I mean, not that it was horrible...
Jony Ive was the head of design at that point (both hardware and UI). Wikipedia says Dye "contributed greatly to the design language of iOS 7" but Ive would have had final say. Certainly at the time as I recall it, iOS 7 was seen as Ive's baby.
Also, I'm not defending iOS 7, but I reckon its visual design was a lot more influential than it gets credit for. Think of those ubiquitous Prime bottles, with their bright saturated color gradients; the first place I remember seeing that style was iOS 7. I bet they picked that style for Prime because kids liked it, and kids liked it because kids like iPhones.
Edit to add: "bright saturated colors" goes back a long way to Fisher Price toys and the like, of course, but it's the gradients specifically that I think iOS 7 popularized.
How does that benefit anyone?
Just that usually the forcefed initiatives have to do with corporate profits for shareholders, or trends like shoving AI into everything. Imagine saying no to that!
Even at the supra-corporate and supra-national level, if the organizing principle is competition, no actor not even a CEO or a corporate board or a government can afford to stop racing towards disaster. There is a simple mantra: “If we don’t achieve AGI first, China will and then they’ll dominate.”
Once in a while, the world comes together to successfully ban eg chemical weapons or CFCs, and repair the hole in the ozone layer. Cooperation and restraint takes effort.
Judging by the way we’ve drained all the aquifers, overfished the last fish, destroyed the kelp forests, cut down the rainforsts, bleached the corals, and polluted the world with plastic, I don’t think there is much hope of stopping.
Insects and pollinators are way down, and many larger species are practically extinct, 95% of the world’s animal biomass is humans and their food, and people still pretend environmental catastrophe is all about a few degrees of temperature.
PS: Yes, that escalated quickly. In the real world, it has taken only 80 years… :-/
Corporate structure is driven by exploiting and using value for and by a de facto nobility (the c-suite).
Finance “capitalism” seeks to extract value, be it short or long term.
Engineers are motivated by building and creating value.
Creatives are driven by changes for changing’s sake to remain or get a seat at the table.
The uncomfortable reality is that these are inherently conflicting interests that are pulling and pushing each other, but mostly top down.
It’s essentially the “colonialist” exploitative model of existence using creators to leverage rather than extract natural resources, a system that is increasingly not suitable for the modern, technological, commoditized world. AI is a good example of that; it arguably diminishes the value to n degrees of both engineers and creatives, while also leaving the “nobility” and their neo-aristocratic corporate system out in the open exposed as revealing it not only as having no clothes on, but utterly abusive, useless, and downright evil. And no, that’s across the whole political spectrum, not just the opposite of your silly system approved political sport team.
"Icons that look like shit!"
and
"Notification summaries that may not be correct!"
In general I feel as if Apple's software feels buggier and less solid lately across my iPhone and my computers. Won't be upgrading the personal computer for as long as possible
Agreed. Rendering is very flaky. Input events are dropped.
Blinky. Laggy. Two of the Seven Dwarves of Liquid Glass.
I've never really liked macOS but it feels like someone at Apple was hired just to make it even less likable for me personally lol
Also what happened to their filters? I get daily spam from Apple email addresses now.
I would really appreciate it if the next macOS would be about stability instead of some fancy features barely anyone asked for.
The major reason to stay on macOS is stability. Hopefully they stop breaking things on the Mac front.
A lot of us felt at the time that surely laptops and tablets would converge. Otherwise, what a waste of hardware.
But it hasn't really happened. From a hardware perspective, things have gotten closer with the iPad's magnetic keyboard. But, I still find that the iPad as laptop replacement to be a compromise that I may tolerate for travel but don't love for a lot of laptop work.
It’s just stupid people doing stupid things.
There are some things that are nice. The dock looks nice. The transparent menu bar is nice enough too and there is a toggle off switch if it doesn't work for you. Spotlight looks fine. But the rest is so bad that I just cannot fathom how someone at Apple did not stop it before release. I would be throwing a fit to stop it from being released if I was in Apple and had any sway at all. I assume the executive team was all looking at it and using it before release. So how did this happen? The new side bar and the new tool bars are abominations. I cringe every time I have to use the finder; it is just a blob of various shades of white or, if you prefer, dark mode, grey.
My hope is that if nothing else they roll back the sidebar and the tool bar changes or do a complete rethink on how they are implemented. If they rolled back the extra rounded corners I wouldn't complain either.
It’s dreadful, it still blows my mind that out of Windows, macOS and Linux, my Linux desktop with KDE has the most premium experience now.
Even Apple's own marketing material had screenshots where text was near impossible to read, even for someone with good eyesight: grey text on top of highly transparent glass... what were they thinking!?
Keyword “looks”. Because considering behavior, there’s tons of delay introduced and results change under your finger as you’re selecting them, causing you to get the wrong thing.
My first rebuttal was going to be Windows 8, but that was actually a lot better.
Windows 11 is, I think, worse than MacOS these days, half for still dragging the past along with it, and half for introducing a second start menu just for ads.
The only UI change that I've found useful since Yosemite was Mojave's introduction of a dark mode. They made the fonts look worse on non-Retina displays, threw out the Preference pane in favor of a weird list that can only be resized vertically, added transparent everything, and banned any icon that's not in a squircle. Such UI, many differentiation, much insanely great, wow!
Anyway, I bought a ThinkPad.
If you run your own design agency, you've got your own company's reputation and yours on the line, so be as opinionated as you find necessary, but otherwise if you're just an employee without an inordinate amount of clear authority within the scope of your discipline at the large company (you know if you do or don't) then don't try and create a mutiny, it will more than likely be a childish assumption of personal risk on your part, much more so than it costs the company, much more so than anyone else needs to care, because someone on a forum told you to be passionate about round rects or small icons or whatever. If you need to tell your boss "google NN group", you probably don't have the trust or experience to be successful with such a play.
It's okay to have a personal hatred of it and do what you can to steer the work appropriately, but when you're tasked with a dumbass plan, let it be the decision-makers' dumbass plan, unless it's your decision to make. Let it be the project we tried and it didn't and couldn't have worked out, which sometimes happens, but you learn and then leave if it's pervasive and you have other options.
It would be remarkably stupid to single yourself out as the person who thinks of themselves as the reincarnation of Steve Jobs and risk your livelihood to save Apple's reputation. The unlikely upside is that you get your way and that can boost your confidence, but the downside is that you fumble your best shot at financial security for the rest of your life because you thought you'd be received well.
That's not to say you shouldn't say no to nothing, or have love for your craft, just don't pretend it's your job to, unless it is, which it's probably not. Disagree and let it be a failure if it's going to be, feel vindicated if it is, but the money is there for you if not. The people who worked on the Vision Pro aren't responsible for it being a dud product, and they can be proud of what they did design-wise and technologically despite that.
In the long run, no you don't want to set that much of your taste or expertise aside forever, but you shouldn't have to, it comes with all the things I said, trust & agency.
Also absurd is that tabs and menus are not attached to their elements.
Few days ago I booted a very old device running High Sierra and the UI and old Dock look so clean.
That desktop was peak for me, and the age starts showing a bit in Finder, but it's still more usable than today's versions.
I bet they’ve sold approx as many as they thought they would.
This product is a placeholder for a cheaper and lighter one in the future.
- UI/UX pros who understand this stuff: “I hate it” - everyone else: “I didn’t notice until you pointed it out”
... your career requires constantly chasing after what amounts to fashion trends every few years, otherwise it's a solved problem and probably does not provide much of a career
I think you've unintentionally illustrated the root of the problem here.
People motivated by profit are not incentivized to produce high-quality results. Rather, people motivated by profit are only incentivized to do the least effort that they can get away with.
People motivated by pride are those who are incentivized to produce good results, because the result reflects on them personally.
Which is all to say, pride motives produce a race to the top, whereas profit motives produce a race to the bottom. It's no wonder our modern economy can only produce slop.
