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This time it’s not fatigue, but disconnection

2025-11-27 04:24:39

For the past two months I’ve been busy in ways that, as it sometimes happened in the past, have left me sort of looking at the tech world from outside. It’s no mystery for those who have been reading this blog or have been following me on social media for a long time, that my enthusiasm for technology has been dwindling for a while — I’d say for at least two years, maybe more — with occasional sparks that have brought me back from a general state of tech ennui.

The terms associated with that word, ennui, like listlessness or dissatisfaction or even apathy make the feeling sound almost as if it mysteriously originated from within and your worldview is impacted as a consequence of that. But that’s not the case. At least, it’s not the case here. As I wrote on Mastodon the other day, I feel that my current tech headspace is a sort of limbo made of distrust and uncaring-ness. These feelings are pretty much reactive and defensive. They are a response to what tech has become and is becoming nowadays.

I was chatting with two of my best friends last week, and among the various personal updates, we touched on this for a bit, as they, too, have been feeling a sort of tech burnout as of late. And the image I’ve used to sum up my feelings on the matter was this — I told them, It’s like I’ve been playing this game called Tech for the past 30+ years of my life and I just don’t feel engaged anymore, but not because I got bored of the game — like it happens with many regular games. It’s not boredom or fatigue. It’s more because the game has gone through a series of updates that have ultimately made it so much worse.

Technology has been a significant part of my life since I was a young boy. First it was my fascination with digital watches and calculators, then the avalanche of the 8‑bit home computer era — Commodore computers, Sinclair computers, Atari consoles, the Apple ][ at a friend’s place, where he used to show me all the cool programs his engineer uncle was making for him and his younger brother. All this pushed me towards… more of this. I learnt BASIC and even some rudiments of Assembly code; with two other friends we made a couple of simple games for the Commodore 64; I felt drawn to this world and told my parents I wanted to pursue a career in technology, become an engineer and whatnot. Too bad that in high school I discovered I completely sucked at maths and that I was much more interested in literature, art, languages, and writing.

But tech changed in a way that I was still able to reconcile these different directions: when DTP, Desktop Publishing, was suddenly all the rage thanks to the Macintosh platform in the mid-1980s, I was right there, like a surfer riding this massive wave. I was lucky enough to be doing a bit of apprenticeship at an advertising agency, and for 3–4 hours a day I could have a little workstation (a Macintosh SE connected to one of the first LaserWriter printers) all to myself. And there I was, learning QuarkXPress, playing with text and words, getting passionate about user interfaces and the Macintosh in general. It felt like being immersed in an environment that had such an incredible potential. I was thinking of all the possible applications and contexts where machines like that little Macintosh I was using could be utilised to make a difference.

I went on writing but also designing books during my university years, using more powerful Macintosh computers and trying different software solutions. The World Wide Web was coming, and I realised at least part of its future impact already in the early stages, thanks to a chat with the father of a high school mate; he was an engineer working at CERN when Tim Berners-Lee was developing his idea to put hypertext and the Internet together. It was an unforgettable chat that helped me understand what was coming and how big of a deal it would be. And though some of this engineer’s specific predictions didn’t really materialise, there was this moment in our conversation where he would get quiet and with this air of ‘I’m going to say this carefully because it’s a really wild guess so don’t quote me on that’, he said to me: It [the Web] is probably going to be so effective and so ubiquitous it will ruin people’s lives. Well, Mr [REDACTED], here I am, 34 years later, actually quoting you.

The 1990s, my 1990s, were exciting — the Web, the CD-ROM, the multimedia projects, my first mobile phone, my first email address, my first engaging online with people across the world (my parents found my enthusiasm for that somewhat amusing, and reminded me that when I was in secondary school I hated the ‘pen pal initiative’, that involved an exchange of letters with other young students from abroad, and didn’t want anything to do with it). A dear friend of mine suggested I could mix my interest for literature, technology, and my fluency in a second language to do translations as a side job to have more financial independence as I was finishing my studies. Shortly after, it became my main occupation as a freelancer. I translated books, manuals, a lot of assorted tech documentation. I learnt a lot and absorbed a lot. While I still didn’t have a direct involvement in tech like, say, a software developer or a hardware engineer or a computer scientist, my relationship with tech was still pretty much symbiotic. And it felt good. Technology felt like a force for good, an ally that could really improve people’s lives. The huge impact it had on mine certainly felt positive. My job wasn’t making me rich, but it was giving me independence from the corporate world, a world I had experienced for just about 3 years, enough to realise we were tragically incompatible.

In the late 1990s I was an Apple evangelist, just as the company was nearing the abyss and was truly ‘doomed’. But then Steve Jobs saved it, and I found myself riding Apple’s comeback just like a surfer riding this massive wave. Tech-wise, the 2000–2011 years to me probably felt like the Swinging Sixties for the previous generation. The Apple ecosystem was getting stronger, the products were exceptional and fun. Around 2001–2005, my studio was littered with Apple products: an iMac G3, an iBook G3, a 12-inch PowerBook G4, older compact Macs and PowerBooks and peripherals; and when I was on the go I didn’t leave home without my iPod and my Newton MessagePad. I was full-in with Jobs’s vision of ‘the Digital Hub’. During those years, every thing Apple introduced, every direction Apple was taking, felt like genuine progress.

I had to wait one year and a half, and the next iteration of the product, before getting my hands on an iPhone, as the first-generation iPhone that was introduced in 2007 wasn’t available in my country and I didn’t feel like importing one from the US and jailbreaking it. So I had a lot of time to mull over it as I was stuck with a Sony dumbphone and my impatience was growing. As the media was talking about the iPhone success and impact, I couldn’t help but go back to that conversation with my schoolfriend’s dad about the World Wide Web back in late 1991. I couldn’t help thinking of what he had said: It is probably going to be so effective and so ubiquitous it will ruin people’s lives.

Of course it’s not that black-and-white. Of course the argument is nuanced. Of course a third-party iOS developer can chime in and tell me that actually it’s thanks to the iPhone that they’re putting bread on the table, and so forth. But something happened with the introduction of the iPhone. Something was put in motion. A snowball effect. Some kind of Pandora’s Box got opened. The App Store changed software and its value. Whether it’s for the worse or the better depends on where you stand. As a tech-savvy customer, I’m firmly on the for the worse side. The general devaluation of software brought on by the App Store market created the race to the bottom of unsustainable free or $0.99 apps, which in turn created the subsequent whiplash where everything was transformed into a subscription-based service. Whether that turned out to be sustainable depends on where you stand. As a tech-savvy customer, I’m firmly on the unsustainable side.

But these forces that have little to do with technology and technological progress have created two of the worst trends I’ve seen in a while, fused in one single strategy: monetise and weaponise. Putting the absolute pursuit of money and the general product weaponisation before everything else is, from where I stand, the primary cause of the disconnect I’m feeling towards tech today. At least towards most of the mainstream tech.

To be clear, I’m not that naïve and idealistic as to think that money shouldn’t be involved in this business. It always was and it always will be. But the problem today is the way money is involved. It’s all about this quest for infinite growth that has become an obsession in Silicon Valley and environs. It’s a model where a product isn’t created with the goal of being an excellent product people will buy because of its apparent merits and because it clearly has been designed to improve their lives. It’s a model where a product becomes a pretext, becomes bait to lock people in an ecosystem made of other products and of habits that are engineered to keep people hooked. And bait only has to be good enough to do its job.

In a sense, part of technology today has lost its ‘altruistic’ roots I felt it had in decades past. Products increasingly feel like they’re meant not to make your life better, but meant to make Big Tech people’s life better. Not to empower you, but to empower someone else. I miss the days where a new piece of software, or hardware, or even a service felt like a groundbreaking moment and something that could be so useful as to become indispensable and to constitute actual progress. Now I mostly feel distrust. Now I just see shallow hype and find myself routinely asking, What’s the catch? — and if it’s free, what am I actually giving you in return? (Spoiler: personal data, digital profiling).

And as someone who genuinely cares about technological progress, actual progress, it’s disheartening to see the effects of this growth-driven change in tech companies. For not only do a lot of products today feel like customer bait and little else, tech companies are also prioritising their profits over actual tech progress. ‘The future’ has become a trite narrative where technological advancements are little more than hyped concepts or half-baked ideas tech companies want you to believe are the Next Big Thing. Like ‘artificial intelligence’. Steve Jobs famously said that Apple was at its worst when business and marketing guys were at the helm. Well, now marketing people are leading the whole tech industry.

A tech industry that is gasping for air. Since naturally groundbreaking products are nowhere to be seen, the industry is doing its utmost to conjure up some. And big companies are using their legacy and reputation to make people believe that this new snake oil is really miraculous and is really ‘the future’.

I understand that we can’t always live in times of constant innovation. The curve that has been climbing for the past thirty years is flattening a bit, and we’re definitely experiencing a lull, a stabilisation phase after what’s probably been a saturation point. In an ideal world, in a sane market, tech companies would use this somewhat stagnant interval to improve their products, the quality of their software, the quality of their designs, focusing less on quantity and slowing down this mad technological pace they feel they have to maintain. Better quality and more reliability in products would certainly reinforce user loyalty and would unquestionably benefit the relationship with customers as it would help slow down this progressive erosion of trust we’re currently witnessing in various degrees.

This of course would happen if tech companies were to do what they used to do up until the 2010s — prioritise end users, customers, developers and, ultimately, prioritise technology as a means towards a better world for everyone.

What is happening with the monetise & weaponise strategy, instead, is this progressive fracture and disconnect between tech companies and regular people. A disconnect where people at various levels of tech-savvy feel equally at odds with the behaviour of many tech companies. I certainly don’t view tech as an ally or as something that should benefit me or improve my life anymore. More like a user of technology, I increasingly feel used and lied to by it; I feel like a mere instrument that exists to guarantee its survival — a battery, like humans are to machines in The Matrix universe.

And what’s worse is that other industries are getting increasingly comfortable with that monetise & weaponise strategy I was mentioning above. The mainstream gaming industry, which has weaponised fun and entertainment and monetised the hell out of it with online services, microtransactions, and gambling-like tactics that have turned players into ludopaths. The car industry, which has transformed cars into smartphones or tablets on wheels, and showered them with tech gadgets while almost forgetting basic stuff like offering vehicles that are pleasant to drive simply for the sake of driving and that can help people disconnect from a daily routine already drowning in tech and bad habits. Or basic stuff like providing a driving experience that is more focused on security than infotainment systems that distract drivers and passengers, and ‘smart solutions’ that dangerously lull drivers into a false sense of security (hi, Tesla!)

And the advertising industry, of course. Which probably deserves a 3,000-word piece all by itself. An industry that was full of creativity and proper visual art when I first got into it so many years ago, and which has gradually turned into an ever-spreading, intrusive, data-sucking cancer.

All this money-making tactics focused on growth at all costs are making these industries more and more self-absorbed, and are also draining the creative and innovative forces I used to witness in past decades. I see car companies like Renault being praised for introducing cars like the new Renault 4 and Renault 5, whose designs are essentially inspired… by past successful designs. Same with Fiat and Volkswagen. So many industries are weaponising and monetising nostalgia in a desperate search of ‘what used to work to win people over’, instead of trying truly new and fresh approaches. Same with films and TV shows and this ubiquitous insistence on remakes, reboots, prequels, sequels, franchises, and methods of consumption that are entirely focused on hooking the viewers — who cares if a story is original, or if the script is actually well-written and doesn’t insult people’s intelligence.

You may argue that these tactics are mostly working, because the public buys into them and regular people don’t seem really all that bothered with what the tech industry and these other industries are throwing at them today. Well, in part it’s because people really don’t have much choice, and many tend to choose the path of least friction when making tech-based choices — something tech companies are well aware of, given that they have worked relentlessly at eliminating friction for the past 15 years at least. In part the lack of viable choices comes from what I call ‘legacy loyalty’ and ‘legacy lock-in’, like when you hear people say something like, I know Apple is not as good an actor as it used to be, and I don’t like the direction it is going, but I’ve been using Apple products for so many years, I can’t just switch to another platform overnight, or I wish I could get rid of everything Microsoft, but I have to use their stuff at work, and so forth. It’s another thing tech companies have worked a lot to achieve: giving people the idea that changing platforms (and therefore habits) is much more daunting a task than it actually is.

In all this personal limbo made of distrust and uncaring-ness towards tech, I’m trying to find and trying to focus on whatever entity behaves like an exception to the mainstream. I’m trying to focus on products and software applications that are made by people who still care and even feel the same as I do about technology today. Valve’s recently-announced new products (the Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and Steam Frame) look cool and interesting. But what I find most exciting is that they all seem very focused. As in, designed with a specific purpose in mind, and in service of that purpose. Which, frankly, today is an increasingly rare sight in tech. Product design before profit design. No-nonsense offerings instead of hyped solutions. The Steam Frame doesn’t want to ‘revolutionise computing’ or be the perfect vessel for ‘spatial computing’. You can use it to play games from your Steam Library, or for specific VR stuff. That’s it. And it makes me more interested in getting one than the vague and pretentious Vision Pro.

Finally, I’m also trying to educate other people to look past all the vacuous hype tech companies and (some) tech influencers are putting before our noses. I feel I’m in a sort of ‘survival mode’ at present, a luddite who is not against technology, change, and technological progress — despite what some hate-mail writers may think. Rather, my idea of being a luddite is more like someone who keeps advocating that technology should be in our service, and not vice-versa. Technology seems to be on a path of eroding people’s agency, whereas I want people to have more agency and to be less ‘personal data fodder’.

The awe keeps dropping

2025-09-16 02:35:06

A first version of this piece was almost ready to be published two days ago, but after writing more than 2,000 words, I grew increasingly angry and exasperated, and that made the article become too meandering and rant-like, so I deleted everything, and started afresh several hours later.

This, of course, is about Awe-dropping, Apple’s September 9 event, where they presented the new iPhone lineup, the new AirPods Pro, and the new Apple Watches. And the honest truth here is that I’m becoming less and less inclined to talk about Apple, because it’s a company that I feel has lost its alignment with me and other long-time Apple users and customers.

The more Apple talks and moves like other big tech companies, the less special it gets; the less special and distinctive it gets, the less I’m interested in finding ways to talk about it. Yes, I have admitted that Apple makes me mad lately, so they still elicit a response that isn’t utter indifference on my part. And yes, you could argue that if Apple makes me mad, it means that in the end I still care.

But things aren’t this clear-cut. I currently don’t really care about Apple — I care that their bad software design decisions and their constant user-interface dumbing down may become trends and get picked up by other tech companies. So, what I still care about that’s related to Apple is essentially the consequences of their actions.

The Steve Jobs quote

The event kicked off with the famous Steve Jobs quote,

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

and I immediately felt the whiplash.

Why that quote? Why now, after months of criticism towards the new design æsthetic of Liquid Glass? I gave this choice three possible interpretations — I still may be missing something here; I’m sure my readers will let me know.

It’s Apple’s way of trolling the critics, who have repeatedly resorted to Steve Jobs’s words to criticise the several misguided UI choices in Liquid Glass. It’s the same kind of response as Phil Schiller famously blurting, Can’t innovate anymore, my ass! in 2013 during the presentation of the then-redesigned Mac Pro. But it feels like a less genuine, more passive-aggressive response (if this is the way we’re supposed to read their use of that quote).
Apple used the quote in earnest. As in, they really believe that what they’re doing is in line with Jobs’s words. If that’s the case, this is utter self-deception. The quote doesn’t reflect at all what Apple is doing in the UI and software department — the Liquid Glass design is more ‘look & feel’ than ‘work’. And the very introduction of the iPhone Air proves that Jobs’s words are falling on deaf ears on the hardware front as well.
Apple used the quote ‘for effect’. As if Meta started a keynote by saying, Our mission is to connect people, no more no less. You know, something that makes you sound great and noble, but not necessarily something you truly believe (or something that is actually true, for that matter).

I can’t know for sure which of these might be the correct interpretation. I think it heavily depends on whose Apple executive came up with the idea. Whatever the case may be, the effect was the same — it felt really jarring and tone-deaf.

AirPods and Watches

If you’re not new here, you’ll know that these are the Apple products I care the least, together with HomePods and Apple TV. I always tune out when Apple presents these, so browse Apple’s website or go read the technical breakdown elsewhere. Personally, I’m too much into traditional horology and therefore the design of the Apple Watch has always felt unimaginative at best, and plain ugly at worst.

From a UI standpoint, the Apple Watch continues to feel too complicated to use, and too overburdened with features. I wouldn’t say it’s design by committee, but more like designed to appeal to a whole committee. Apple wants the watch to appeal to a wide range of customers, therefore this little device comes stuffed with all kinds of bells and whistles. As I said more than once, the real feature I would love to see implemented is the ability to just turn off entire feature sets, so that if you only want to use it as a step counter and heart rate monitor, you can tell the watch to be just that; this would be more than just having a watchface that shows you time, steps, heart rate — it would be like having a watch that does only that. With all the features you deem unnecessary effectively disabled, imagine how simpler interacting with it would be, and imagine how longer its battery life would be.

What really got on my nerves during the Apple Watch segment of the event, though, is this: Apple always, always inserts a montage of sob stories about how the Apple Watch has saved lives, and what an indispensable life-saving device it is. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad those lives were saved. But this kind of ‘showcase’ every year is made in such poor taste. It’s clear to me that it’s all marketing above everything else, that they just want to sell the product, and these people’s stories end up being used as a marketing tactic. It’s depressing.

As for the AirPods, and true wireless earbuds in general, I find this product category to be the most wasteful. Unless someone comes up with a type of earbuds that have easily replaceable batteries, I’m not interested in buying something that’s bound to become e‑waste in a relatively short period of time.

The new iPhones

Don’t buy them. Don’t waste your money, unless you have money to waste and don’t care about a company with this kind of leadership. Read How Tim Cook sold out Steve Jobs by Anil Dash to understand how I feel. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

I’d wrap up my article here, but then I’d receive a lot of emails asking me why I didn’t talk about the iPhones, so here are a few stray observations:

One, maybe involuntary, user-friendly move Apple did with this new iPhone lineup is that now we have three very distinct iPhone models, whose nature and price should really help people decide which to purchase.

The regular iPhone 17 is the safe, iterative solution. It looks like an iPhone 16, it works like an iPhone 16 that has now better features. It’s the ideal phone for the average user (tech-savvy or not). It’s the safe choice and the best value iPhone overall.

The iPhone 17 Pro is possibly the most Pro iPhone to date. During its presentation, I felt like Apple wants you to consider this more like a pro camera for videographers and filmmakers rather than just a smartphone with a good camera array. People who have no use for all these pro video recording features shouldn’t waste their money on it. Unless they want a big chunky iPhone with the best camera array and/or have money to burn. In my country (Spain), the 6.3‑inch iPhone 17 Pro starts at €1,319 with 256GB of storage, and goes up to €1,819 with 1TB of storage. For the bigger iPhone 17 Pro, those prices become €1,469 and €1,969 respectively, and if you want the iPhone 17 Pro Max with 2TB of storage, it’ll cost you €2,469. You do you, but I think these are insane prices for phones (and SSDs).

The iPhone Air is just… odd. I was curious to know about other techies’ reactions, and of all the major tech YouTubers, I think the one I’m agreeing the most on their first impressions of the iPhone Air is Marques Brownlee. At this point in his video, he says:

I really think this phone is gonna be a hard sell, because if you subtract emotions from it, it’s just… the worst one. This is gonna jump in the lineup at $999 — it replaces essentially the Plus phones in the lineup — and it is surrounded by other iPhones that are better than it in basically every way, other than being super thin and light. So it’s a fascinating gamble.

This phone has the same A19 Pro chip in it as the Pro phones, minus one GPU core. Interesting choice: apparently it’s a bit more efficient than the base A19, so that’s good for battery life. But we also just heard a whole long list of choices Apple made with the Pro phones to make them more thermally efficient to not overheat — switching from titanium to aluminium, and adding a vapour chamber to the back. But this phone is still titanium, and absolutely does not have room for an advanced thermal solution or any sort of vapour chamber, so it sounds like this phone could get much hotter and throttle performance much quicker. It’s a red flag.

Now we also know that ultra-thin phones have a tendency to be a little bit less durable. They’ve bent over the years. And I’m not gonna be the first one to point this out. […] And Apple of course has thought about this. They’ve for sure tested this, and they’re telling us it’s the most durable iPhone ever. But, I mean, I’m looking at the phone and I think it qualifies also as a red flag. And then we already know there is just no way battery life can be good on this phone, right? There’s just no way. I’ve been reviewing phones for more than a decade, and all signs point to it being trash.

There was a slide in the keynote today about how they were still proud to achieve ‘all-day battery life’. But, like, come on. Really? I mean they still do the thing where they rearranged the components up into the little plateau at the top to make room for more battery at the bottom. But there’s just absolutely not enough room in this phone for a large battery. And it doesn’t appear to be silicon-carbon, or any sort of a special ultra-high density battery.

And Apple also announced it alongside a special dedicated MagSafe battery accessory, just for this phone, that adds 3,149 mAh, and just barely, combined, will match the 17 Pro in terms of quoted video playback. So if that doesn’t scream red flag, I don’t know what to tell you.

It is also e‑SIM-only, globally, ’cause there’s no room in any version of this phone for a plastic SIM card. There’s also no millimeter-wave 5G. And like I said, it’s coming in at $1,000, which is more expensive than the base iPhone, which will have a better camera system, and better battery life, and may overheat less.

So look, I think there’s two ways to look at this phone. This is either Apple just throwing something new at the wall and seeing if it sticks. […] Or you can see this as a visionary, long-time-in-the-making preview at the future of all phones. Like, maybe someday in the future every phone will be this thin. And Apple is just now, today, getting the tech together with the battery and display and modem and Apple Silicon to make this phone possible. Maybe kind of like how the first MacBook Air sucked, and was underpowered, but then eventually all laptops became that thin. Maybe that’s also what’s gonna happen to smartphones. And maybe the same way Samsung made the ultra-thin S25 Edge, and then a few months later they came out with their super-thin foldable, the Z Fold7, and I felt like the Edge phone was one half of that foldable. Maybe that’s also what Apple’s doing. Maybe we’re gonna see an ultra-thin foldable iPhone next year. Maybe.

Yeah, I’m firmly in the “Apple throwing something new at the wall and seeing if it sticks” camp. Because what’s that innovative in having thin smartphones? What’s the usefulness when the other two dimensions keep increasing? Making a thin and light and relatively compact MacBook and calling it ‘Air’ made sense back when virtually no other laptop was that thin and light. It was, and is, a great solution for when you’re out and about or travelling, and space is at a premium; and you also don’t want a bulky computer to lug around.

Then Apple applied the ‘Air’ moniker to the iPad, and that started to make less sense. It’s not that a regular or Pro iPad were and are that cumbersome to begin with. And then Apple felt the need to have MacBook Airs that are 13- and 15-inch in size, instead of 11- and 13-inch. A 15-inch MacBook Air makes little sense, too, as an ‘Air’ laptop. It may be somewhat thin, somewhat light, but it’s not exactly compact.

And now we have the iPhone Air — which is just thin for thinness’ sake. It’s still a big 6.5‑inch phone that’s hardly pocketable. I still happen to handle and use a few older iPhones in the household, and the dimensions of the iPhone 5/5S/SE make this iPhone more ‘Air’ than the iPhone Air. If you want a slightly more recent example, the iPhone 12 mini and 13 mini have the real lightness that could make sense in a phone. Perhaps you’ll once again remind me that the iPhone 12 mini and 13 mini weren’t a success, but I keep finding people telling me they would favour a more compact phone than a big-but-thin phone. I’ll be truly surprised if the iPhone Air turns out to be a bigger success than the ‘mini’ iPhones. It is a striking device in person, no doubt, but once this first impact is gone and you start thinking it over and making your decision, what Marques Brownlee said above is kind of hard to deny.

Also, I find the whole MagSafe battery accessory affair particularly hilarious. Apple creates a super-thin, super-light phone, proudly showcases its striking design, and immediately neutralises this bold move and thin design by offering an accessory 1) that you’ll clearly need if you want to have a decently-lasting battery (thus admitting that that thinness certainly came with an important compromise); and 2) that instantly defeats the purpose of a thin design by returning the bulk that was shaved away in making the phone.

What should I be in awe of?

I found a lot of reactions to these products to be weirdly optimistic. Either I’m becoming more cynical with age and general tech fatigue, or certain people are easily impressed. What usually impresses me is some technological breakthrough I didn’t see coming, or a clever new device, or some clever system software features and applications that give new purposes to a device I’ve known well for a while. This event, and what was presented, didn’t show any of this.

Didn’t you expect Apple to be able to produce yet another iteration of Apple Watches and AirPods that were better than the previous one? Didn’t you expect Apple to be able to make a unibody iPhone after years of making unibody computers? Didn’t you expect Apple to be able to have iPhones with better cameras and recording capabilities than last year’s iPhones? Didn’t you expect Apple to be able to make a thinner iPhone? To come up with better chips? Or a vapour chamber to prevent overheating? Or a ‘centre stage’ feature for the selfie camera? Are these things I should be in awe of?

I will probably be genuinely amazed when Apple is finally able to come up with a solution that entirely removes the dynamic island from the front of the iPhone while still having a front-facing camera up there.

I’ll be similarly amazed when Apple finally gets rid of people who have shown to know very little about software design and user interfaces, and comes up with operating systems that are, once again, intuitive, discoverable, easy to use, and that both look and work well. Because the iOS, iPadOS, and Mac OS 26 releases are not it — and these new iPhones might be awe-inspiring all you want, but you’ll still have to deal with iOS 26 on them. These new iPhones may have a fantastic hardware and all, but what makes any hardware tick is the software. You’ve probably heard that famous quote by Alan Kay, People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. Steve Jobs himself quoted it, adding that “this is how we feel about it” at his Apple. Today’s Apple needs to hear a revised version of that quote, something like, People who are this serious about their hardware should make better software for it.

The level of good-enough-ism Apple has reached today in software is downright baffling. This widening gap between their hardware and software competence is going to be really damaging if the course isn’t corrected. The tight integration between hardware and software has always been what made Apple platforms stand out. This integration is going to get lost if Apple keeps having wizards for hardware engineers on one side, and software and UI people producing amateurish results on the other side. Relying on legacy and unquestioning fanpeople, for whom everything Apple does is good and awesome and there’s nothing wrong with it, can only go so far. Steve Jobs always knew that software is comparatively more important than the hardware. In a 1994 interview with Jeff Goodell, published by Rolling Stone in 2010 (archived link), Jobs said:

The problem is, in hardware you can’t build a computer that’s twice as good as anyone else’s anymore. Too many people know how to do it. You’re lucky if you can do one that’s one and a third times better or one and a half times better. And then it’s only six months before everybody else catches up. But you can do it in software.

But not if you keep crippling it because you want to bring all your major platforms to the lowest common denominator.

Smoke break

2025-08-27 06:53:26

Ever since publishing my three articles criticising Apple’s Liquid Glass redesign, I’ve been getting a lot of reaction and feedback emails. A lot. More than when I published my four-part series of articles criticising Mac OS 10.15 Catalina back in 2019–2020. In one of the most recent emails I’ve received, the sender wrote this about me: You’re the Rust Cohle of tech commentary. If you haven’t watched the first season of True Detective, you probably won’t get the reference. Reading the complete background on Rust Cohle in the dedicated Wikipedia entry, one would think that this comparison isn’t one of the most flattering. But I guess one doesn’t have to dig too deep. I assume the sender of that email wants to reference the character’s cynicism and the charismatic way he delivers his views. I take it as a compliment. I don’t have a tragic past and am not an alcoholic. I used to smoke. Now it’s just some occasional pipe smoking.

Time for a break. A break that breaks my one-month silence here, but still a break. Like when at work there’s mostly a somber and awkwardly quiet atmosphere, then someone says, Let’s talk outside.

But about what?

August, which in my corner of the world is usually considered the summer holidays month, has been mostly spent listlessly surviving being stewed either by the excess heat or, sometimes, excess humidity. I’ve worked but also had time to do a quick check-up of most of my vintage computers — at least those I still manage to routinely use. And most still work. The one glaring fatality was promptly replaced after a surgical strike on eBay. As it often happens, the replacement turned out to be twice better in specs, and almost half the investment compared to the replaced machine.

Ah, tech. What’s there to talk about now?

Not much, to be honest. One day, nothing feels wrong. The day after, nothing feels right. It’s a pendulum. There’s a growing disconnect between the games big tech and billionaires are playing in their Mount Olympus, and the street-level, home-level, studio-level everyday tech made of our little tools, our rants-in-a-box on social media, our debates and defence of such tools or ecosystems, whether it’s against a fanboy, or someone who isn’t enough of a fanboy, or even a company’s attempt at reshaping those tools in ways that fit more the company’s grand strategy than the end user’s needs.

In those days where nothing feels wrong, you’re just doing your things at your desk in front of your computer and you think about big tech and the billionaires and their games and you’re like, Just play your stupid games and leave me alone, I have real work to do. You’re feeling equally unfazed by all the ‘AI’ hype. Let them believe that an LLM ‘reasons’ and that ChatGPT ‘thinks’ and it’s a great companion that understands you. Let them allow their delusions to drive their cars until they inevitably crash and burn. You can’t do much against the overwhelming stupidity. You have just enough energy to carry on with your stuff, so if today stupidity loses a bit with an own goal, well, you can’t complain too much.

When nothing feels right, you feel friction — the bad friction — everywhere. At the personal level, you realise for instance that you can’t trust Apple anymore to keep providing the same quality software environment you’ve depended on for years, because the people who cared about providing that kind of software are gone, and the people who are present now simply throw their sandbox visual experiments at your face, and while they consider their work done, they don’t give a shit about your work. The user interface and user interaction experts are nowhere to be found — these are aspiring interior designers, and their idea of user interface is the back cover blurb of a book on feng shui.

So, no, you look at this Mac OS abomination and you sigh, realising that no, you can’t upgrade to it. You just can’t. The cost-benefit analysis is quickly over, you don’t even need pen and napkin. The cost is unnecessarily high, the benefits are non-existent. Where are the It’s just a beta! people? Time’s running out. This beta doesn’t look that much different from the first beta. The die is cast. You get back to your internal monologue. You think, This is another Yosemite moment, I can wait it out and hope history repeats itself and in late 2026 we get another El Capitan.

But this time nothing feels right. You look at those stupid transparency effects, at the thoughtless UI decisions and you wonder, What if they haven’t reached the bottom of the barrel yet? What if the spiral still moves downward for a while? What if they keep removing all the meat from Mac OS until there’s just bone? Meanwhile, people working with this operating system have to accept the spoon-feeding, otherwise sooner or later they’re going to be cut off via planned software obsolescence.

When nothing feels right, you remember that quote from the WarGames film — “The only winning move is not to play” — and actually you feel like you’re damned if you play, damned if you don’t.

And all this thinking about cost and benefits reminds you of the ‘artificial intelligence’ problem. Of the ‘AI’ tech industry games, of people like Sam Altman who wants to (and likely will) raise billions of dollars to develop some NothingBurger AI that will be marginally more capable of writing up a stupid summary for you while its data centres consume millions of litres of fresh water and gigawatts of electricity. All while the utter morons who endorse and spread the ‘AI’ credo keep spewing utter nonsense about ‘AI’ being the solution to problems that could be resolved with 1/100th of the resources burnt to maintain chatbots, and 100 times the common sense. People so invested in this shit that they truly believe in the ‘intelligence’ part of ‘artificial intelligence’ — and that’s because to a complete idiot, everything seems intelligent.

Will real intelligence prevail? It’s another good day, you still feel some hope for humanity. You’re a humanist after all. You’re back to work, you’re back to your plans for the rest of the week, you skim through your RSS feeds with the confidence of someone who has learnt the art of not giving a shit; in a good way, though — it isn’t ‘not caring’, it’s more like ‘letting this rain roll down my raincoat’; you like the rain but don’t like getting soaked, especially when the things you read online are acid rain and you don’t want it to dissolve your mental health.

(It’s a smoke break, bear with the mixed metaphors).

You feel again in control for a while. You understand that you have to find your particular thrill if you care about tech. You have to find it, not let a company tell you what it is and where to find it. You understand that the only entity having your interests at heart out there is yourself. And maybe a scrappy band of software developers and small tech companies. You understand that the best ecosystem is the one you take care of yourself. You see past all the convenience tech throws at you, and you feel that, at the end of the day, you’re not that busy to delegate everything to some tool or tools. You feel you prefer finding yourself, not losing yourself in all this. You look at the physical and digital stuff surrounding you in your home office and start mentally putting labels on everything — labels like I did choose this and This was a mistake and That was the result of peer pressure and I was fooled into believing I needed this and— you know.

– What did you want to talk about?

– Will we survive these dystopian times?

– As long as we keep this “I won’t act on [issue] until it affects me directly” mindset — at any level — nothing will change. The rich will keep getting away with it. The powerful will keep getting away with it while pushing their agendas. Individualism can be useful when growing up. You have to learn to be self-sufficient in many situations. But the sense of community, society, common good is an equally important value in our toolkit. We have to preserve it at all costs. We have to keep caring.

– Thanks for the chat.

– Anytime.

New email notification.

Hi Rick. Just a quick message to tell you I’ve read your pieces on Liquid Glass and it was an illuminating read. I didn’t agree on everything, but many points you made had me stop and ponder these matters more seriously…

Back to communicating. (Look up the etymology of communicate).

The cost of selfishness

2025-07-20 00:34:38

Ever since Manuel Moreale contacted me and asked me for an interview for his People & Blogs series (it’s here, if you want to read it), I’ve followed his blog with interest and pleasure. From what I’ve read so far, we share similar views on technology and related matters, and reading his posts has me nodding along most of the time.

One of his recent pieces, On using Apple products, hit differently. It’s not that I disagree with him, but I feel it’s worth building on it and looking at it from a broader perspective. I very much sympathise with the general sentiment when — after explaining that he is an Apple customer and uses Apple products — he writes:

Because all these I listed are tools, tools that I replace if and when I have to upgrade, either because they break down or because they no longer do what I need them to do. I don’t give a shit about Apple the company, the same way I don’t give a shit about any other company. Most of my time in front of this screen is spent using software not built by Apple, often by independent developers and small studios. I care about them. But Apple? Nah.

I also agree with this, which he writes in the next paragraph:

Tools are tools; they either do the job you need them to do or they don’t.

In fact, I’d say this is the central point of the post. We choose and use the tools that are most suitable for us and for what we have to do (work) and what we like to do (leisure and personal projects) — it doesn’t mean we have to care about the companies that make them, right? Manuel says so himself immediately after:

And the sad reality of this world we live in is that most big companies out there are awful. If you spend some time digging, you’ll find despicable things done by probably 99% of CEOs of big companies.

If I find out that the Volvo CEO is eating babies in their spare time, what should I do? Sell my car? Do I need to check if the Suunto CEO is a piece of shit to make sure I can wear this watch on my wrist and still feel at peace with myself? Frankly, I think it’s an exhausting way to live a life, and I’d be better off focusing all those energies somewhere else, trying to make something good, something that has a positive impact on the people around me.

I’ve joked about this kind of frustration myself on Mastodon, even before Manuel published his piece:

“Don’t use this company’s services, the company gives money to right-wing morons.”

“Don’t use that company’s product, the company doesn’t support clean energy.”

“Don’t subscribe to that! It’s a centralised solution and who knows what’s gonna happen to your data!”

“Don’t download that app! The company’s CEO is an AI worshipper and backed a memecoin!”

“Don’t—”

Me: “You know what? I’ll just switch back to this:”

[Picture of an old Nokia 3310 dumbphone]

“Digital minimalism is not the answer!”

Me: I’m tired.

Here’s where things gets complicated for me. A lot of people share Manuel’s sentiments and attitude. Myself included — to an extent. And the problem is that if we want things to change in technology, it’s necessary to start reflecting on our attitude and considering whether perhaps we should care a bit more about the companies that make the products we use.

That’s why I always chuckle bitterly when I hear people say We should vote with our wallet, meaning we can sort of change the course of a company’s success by refusing to buy whatever said company shoves in our faces. It’s not going to happen. Because, deep down, we don’t care. When we take the stance of I only care about what are the best tools for me, I don’t care about the companies that make them, it’s this not caring and this selfishness what makes these companies ‘win’, and what makes these companies too big to fail. And ultimately what makes the status quo so hard to change.

Even our selfishness as users and customers — what makes us feel better about the choices we make or the choices we don’t make — is turned against us, in a sense.

Changing things is hard, requires time and energy to do our homework before purchasing a product or subscribing to a service, and often requires introducing friction in our lives — because we have to learn to use a different tool, a different operating system; we have to create new habits and different workflows, even. And tech companies know people hate friction. Everything I’ve seen in tech for the past 25 years or so has been aimed at eliminating friction in a way or another. The more convenience you give people, the more change-averse you make them.

Before saying that Tools are tools; they either do the job you need them to do or they don’t, Manuel writes:

Could I switch away from Apple? Sure, I could ditch my iPhone and buy another phone, and I could ditch my Mac and buy a laptop with Linux, I guess. But the only thing I’d be accomplishing is to make life easier for myself, and I’d also stop using software developed by those developers I care about. And also, nobody would care. Because nobody should.

When it’s virtue-signalling, I agree, nobody should care. But the more time passes, the more I’m convinced that people should start caring more about this stuff. Especially those who routinely moan and complain about Big Tech while also continuing to use Big Tech products because [insert reasons/excuses here].

If you think I’m taking the high moral ground here, I’m not. I’ve been gradually disappointed and dissatisfied with technology in general, and Apple in particular, for the past decade or so. I’ve been more and more critical about Apple’s design choices and general direction. Cook’s $1M donation to Donald Trump angered me immensely, and I decided right then and there to stop giving my money to this company for the foreseeable future unless something radically changes at Apple’s executive level (I doubt it).

At the same time, I’m not in a position to exit the Apple ecosystem on a whim. Most of my work consists of localising Mac OS and iOS/iPadOS apps. Often, after an app has been localised in the target language, I’m asked to test the app to see if the translated interface is fine or if some strings need adjusting. This requires having around at least one Mac and one iOS device that are reasonably updated. On a personal level, I’ve been using Macs for decades. I have different projects and materials scattered across a variety of Macs. Fortunately I can still work on those projects using older Macs and older versions of Mac OS I actually enjoy using.

But I’m trying to change my attitude towards this stuff, even if it means introducing more friction in my workflows. I’m trying to focus on companies that seem genuinely interested in going against the big players and in providing users with alternatives that are more environmentally conscious and more on the customer’s side when it comes to warranties, sustainability and repairability. In this regard, companies like Framework and Fairphone look like very good candidates to me. It’s in this direction I would like to move in my future tech purchases, and if I must buy an upgraded Mac or iOS device for work, it’s going to be a second-hand machine. Less e‑waste, and one fewer unit sold by Apple.

And the sad reality of this world we live in is that most big companies out there are awful.

The sad reality is that these companies will keep being relevant and awful as long as people maintain this shrugging Watcha gonna do? attitude. It’s an extremely hard battle — the good, uncorrupted alternatives are few and may look a bit arcane or abstruse. Choosing Linux, for example, looks daunting to a lot of people, especially those who are not tech-savvy. And even those who are tech-savvy aren’t thrilled to start anew with a different operating system; they don’t particularly like to be novices again. This is the friction. Hopefully, however, it’s friction that hits the hardest only at the beginning of the journey. I didn’t think I could switch to an Android phone as primary phone, but the discomfort only lasted so much. I didn’t think I could ‘get’ Linux, now I think I ‘get’ it more than five years ago. (My Linux journey is still in the first stages, mind you, but it has begun).

Just like Manuel doesn’t judge those who do differently than he does, I’m not really passing judgment here either. I’m not criticising Manuel specifically. I’m simply observing that, at the individual level, this kind of selfish pragmatism (I care for the tools and focus on them, I don’t care for Apple or Microsoft or Google or Meta, etc.) is undoubtedly understandable. And for some people it isn’t even a matter of being selfish, as they may not have the luxury of cherry-picking the software or the hardware manufacturer of the tools they use or have to use.

At the same time, though, whether people care or not about tech companies, they end up purchasing their products, and perpetuate a vicious circle at the macro level: these companies remain in business, thrive, and grow. And keep being bad actors. That’s why I’m always glad when there’s governmental regulation aimed at protecting the citizens and customers. But that’s not enough.

I’m perfectly aware that today it feels that our choices — especially the ‘good’ ones, the responsible ones — don’t seem to matter. I understand my friend who tells me, Oh, I’d love to ditch WhatsApp and switch to Signal, or get a Linux laptop, but in the grand scheme of things, what difference does it make? But then don’t be surprised if, say, Apple keeps making billions of dollars despite their design blunders or mediocre software. Or don’t be angry that 90% of technology today is shaped and controlled by a handful of stupidly rich and powerful companies. Change — if that’s what you want — isn’t coming from the top. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, are not going to fail on their own. It’s a matter of tough personal decisions and it’s a matter of evangelising such decisions — constantly. All while these companies count on our natural selfishness and love of convenience as their life support.

More stray observations — on Liquid Glass, on Apple’s lack of direction, then zooming out, on technological progress

2025-06-29 04:30:07

What sparked my long-form article on Liquid Glass, and all the criticism I’ve posted on Mastodon since the WWDC25 keynote is just that the Liquid Glass redesign made me angry. Yes, there are better things to get angry about in the world right now, and I want you to know that I’m very angry about them all.

In the past, technology used to be my coping space. A place for a knowledge worker like me to nerd about his tools and related passions — user interfaces, UI/UX design, typography, etc. And if I have developed these passions and interest is largely because of Apple. Apple had a huge impact on my life ever since I started using their computers. I carried out my apprenticeship in Desktop Publishing on a workstation that was comprised of a Macintosh SE, a Bernoulli Box external drive, and a LaserWriter printer back in 1989. I’ve always appreciated the care and attention to detail Apple put in their hardware design but also in their UI design.

But it’s true — something important died with Steve Jobs. He was really Apple’s kernel, for better and for… less better. This Apple has been dismantling Mac OS, as if it’s a foreign tool to them. They’ve bashed its UI around. And they seem to have done that not for the purpose of improving it, but simply for the purpose of changing it; adapting it to their (mostly misguided) idea of unifying the interface of different devices to bring it down to the simplest common denominator.

And this Liquid Glass facelift just makes me almost irrationally furious. Everything I’m seeing of Liquid Glass — at least on Mac OS — is a terrible regression. And I don’t want it on my production Mac. I do not want to look at that shit 14 hours a day. It’s ultimately that simple.

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in January 2007, speaking about the software powering the iPhone, he said:

Now, software on mobile phones is like baby software. It’s not so powerful, and today we’re going to show you a software breakthrough. Software that’s at least five years ahead of what’s on any other phone. Now how do we do this? Well, we start with a strong foundation. iPhone runs OS X.

Now, why would we want to run such a sophisticated operating system on a mobile device? Well, because it’s got everything we need. It’s got multi-tasking. It’s got the best networking. It already knows how to power manage. We’ve been doing this on mobile computers for years. It’s got awesome security. And the right apps. It’s got everything from Cocoa and the graphics and it’s got core animation built in and it’s got the audio and video that OS X is famous for. It’s got all the stuff we want. And it’s built right in to iPhone. And that has let us create desktop-class applications and networking. Not the crippled stuff that you find on most phones. This is real, desktop-class applications.

Now it’s all going backwards, with Macs running a version of Mac OS that feels more and more simplified and fossilised iteration after iteration. The process isn’t yet complete, but I dread what’s coming next: Macs running something that is more iOS than Mac OS. Functionally interchangeable. To reuse Jobs’s words above, Macs running the crippled stuff that you find on most phones and tablets. Macs running smartphone-class applications (this is, sadly, already happening, as I’m painfully reminded every time I open an app whose interface and interaction design were clearly meant for a phone or tablet).

I’ve often wondered why we’ve come to this. Why Apple has come to this. On one side we have developers and expert users asking for more functionality, versatility, and features, while on the other side Apple just adds a few little things here and there, seemingly more interested in continuously retouching the Mac’s user interface at a cosmetic level — and doing that with a kind of awkwardness (incompetence?) that still manages to interfere with the UI’s functionality.

Francisco Tolmasky, during an exchange we had on Mastodon, expressed with great clarity a sinking feeling I’ve had for a while, a feeling I was actually trying to verbalise for an upcoming article (emphasis mine):

Well I think it is very clear that Apple does not believe there are new ideas to be had. This is a much deeper discussion, but to me all of their actions are representative of a company that believes technology is ‘mature’ and all that is left to do, at best, is polish. Setting aside whether one agrees with Apple’s decisions/taste/whatever, I think it is not up for discussion that while these changes may be disruptive, they are not, nor are intended to be, “transformative”.

Baked into the explanation that Liquid Glass “frees your content from the tyranny of the UI” is the inescapable admission that you have determined that the highest priority item left for iOS is to “return roughly 40px of screen real estate, or 3% of the vertical space of an iPhone, to users”. That is the important part here. Not whether Liquid Glass does or doesn’t deliver, but rather that Apple did not find, and thus does not believe there exists, anything more interesting to do in all of 2025.

This is the thing that should actually be concerning about Apple. Not whether or not they’ve lost their design skills, but whether they no longer believe they have any good new ideas. This better explains all their recent behavior than ‘greed’ or ‘hubris’. They waste time on redesigns because they don’t know what else to do. They fight so hard for recurring revenue and the App Store cut not because they’re dicks… but because they think there probably isn’t another Mac or iPhone in their future.

By the way, that ‘freeing the content from the tyranny of the UI’ is just tragicomic to me, and a sign that content for Apple is just something you consume passively or stare at. The act of creating things on a computer, working with them, interacting with them in any way, very much implies the reliance on a UI. And when I’m writing, translating, switching between documents, editing photos, engaging in a written conversation with someone, extracting information from a web browser, etc., I don’t want the UI to ‘recede’, I don’t want affordances out of my way.

Tolmasky then makes another valid point, bringing up something I admit I hadn’t even noticed:

Image: Apple, Inc.

This screenshot from their marketing page told me everything I needed to know about this year’s iPadOS update. No one plans a trip, reads a recipe, emails, and… learns violin at once. This is nonsensical. Cartoonish multitasking is not what multi-window support is for. But then you realize… they don’t know what it’s for. They don’t know why people keep asking for it. They actually have no idea why anyone would want it. There’s a reason the Mac is more single-window every day.

This screenshot is not some anomaly. It’s true across all their marketing materials and the keynote. You quickly realize that there isn’t a single mildly interesting example, let alone a ‘killer use case’. The entire pitch is, “You asked for it, here it is”. They make no effort to appeal to someone who didn’t already want this. During the keynote they play off the absurd demos as part of the ‘jokey act’, but notice they can come up with practical uses for the iPhone features that they show.

I’ve been sifting through my blog’s archives looking for a particular piece where I’m sure I expressed my concern towards Apple’s seemingly lack of direction (and ideas). After a couple of hours I still haven’t found it, but I found a lot of breadcrumbs of the same nature — quick notes, passing observations before or after past WWDCs. To bring the discourse back to user interface concerns, there’s this bit from This nine-year chasm (October 2020):

As I’ve repeatedly stated in my observations about Big Sur now that I’ve been testing the betas since August, the next version of Mac OS shines when it comes to performance, responsiveness, and stability — that’s my experience, at least — but when we examine the look and feel of its user interface, it mostly feels directionless. Where is the purpose? Why these changes? Is it to make the interface more usable? Is it to make that interaction work better or to make that element just look sleeker? It’s often hard to see the intention or even the logic behind some of them. The background colour of the System Preferences pane has subtly changed at least three times in the course of five betas. Things you used to make with one click, now take two or more clicks, just because someone at Apple felt like touching up a certain part of the interface for no apparent reason other than ‘trying something different’ or ‘fixing a previous, equally arbitrary cosmetic change’.

Ah, I think I found the article I was looking for. It’s from July 2021, but for the most part I could have written it last week: Habits, UI changes, and OS stagnation. It’s hard to extract brief quotes from it, so I urge you to read it in full when you have time. Here are a few bits that hopefully can stand on their own, with the last one being perhaps the closest to what Tolmasky was saying:

Under Cook and the new executive branch, Apple has app-ified Mac OS. Forgive the atrocious expression, but that’s how it feels to me. While I don’t deny that there have been significant innovations under the bonnet […], Apple’s approach when presenting the last few major Mac OS releases has always felt as if the most important thing to work on an operating system were its look & feel, rather than how this foundational tool can actually improve people’s work or tasks.

[…] I’ve had a lot of experience dealing with regular, non-tech-savvy users over the years. What some geeks may be shocked to know is that most regular people don’t really care about these changes in the way an application or operating system looks. What matters to them is continuity and reliability. Again, this isn’t being change-averse. Regular users typically welcome change if it brings something interesting to the table and, most of all, if it improves functionality in meaningful ways. Like saving mouse clicks or making a multi-step workflow more intuitive and streamlined.

But making previous features or UI elements less discoverable because you want them to appear only when needed (and who decides when I need something out of the way? Maybe I like to see it all the time) — that’s not progress. It’s change for change’s sake. […]

The self-imposed yearly OS update cycle doesn’t help, either. Apple feels compelled to present something ‘new’ every year, but you can’t treat Mac OS development as iPhone hardware development. […]

I’ve also been thinking that this self-imposed yearly update cycle is ultimately an obstacle to a deeper kind of development — the kind that makes an operating system evolve as a tool. In a recent discussion on Twitter, note Léo Natan’s response, the reason he gives as to why older operating systems were essentially less user-hostile than what we have today:

That’s because they were trying to make a difficult concept, computing, easier for the mass public. That has, to a large extent, been achieved. Now you have overpaid “““designers””” that need to show “““impact””” every year, so they have to reinvent the wheel over and over.

This act of ‘reinventing the wheel over and over’ has been incredibly stifling and has, in my opinion, largely led to operating system stagnation. Roughly since Mac OS X 10.7 Lion onward, Mac OS has gained a few cool features, but it has been losing entire apps, services, and certain facilities — like Disk Utility — have been dumbed down. Meanwhile the system hasn’t really gone anywhere. On mobile, iOS started out excitingly, and admittedly still seems to be moving in an evolving trajectory, but on the iPad’s front there has been a lot of wheel reinventing to make the device behave more like a traditional computer, instead of embarking both the device and its operating system in a journey of revolution and redefinition of the tablet experience in order to truly start a ‘Post-PC era’.

And with Mac OS it feels like its journey is over, the operating system has found a place to settle and has remained there for years. Building new stuff, renovating, rearranging, etc., but always on site, so to speak.

In other words, if we look at Mac OS as a metro railway line, it’s like Apple has stopped extending it and creating new stations. What they’ve been doing for a while now has been routine maintenance, and giving the stations a fresh coat of paint every year. Only basic and cosmetic concerns, yet sometimes mixing things up to show that more work has gone into it, a process that invariably results in inexplicable and arbitrary choices like moving station entrances around, shutting down facilities, making the train timetables less legible, making the passages that lead to emergency exits more convoluted and longer to traverse, and so on — hopefully you know what I mean here.

However, at every yearly iteration of all operating systems and platforms Apple maintains, it’s starting to become clearer and clearer to me that Mac OS isn’t the only one in trouble. The atrophy is spreading. And if your next objection is, Rick, it’s virtually impossible to make technological leaps and bounds every year. You can’t expect innovation at every corner, then re-read the quoted passage above.

When you self-impose timelines and cadences that are essentially marketing-driven and do not really reflect technological research and development, then you become prisoner in a prison of your own making. Your goal and your priorities start becoming narrower in scope. You reduce your freedom of movement because you stop thinking in terms of creating the next technological breakthrough or innovative device; you just look at the calendar and you have to come up with something by end of next trimester, while you also have to take care of fixing bugs that are the result of the previous rush job… which keep accumulating on top of the bugs of the rush job that came before, and so forth.

This is what I mean when sometimes I say that Apple feels progressively more directionless to me. Rather than actually going somewhere, they’re moving in circles more and more often. The very shape of Apple Park is hugely symbolical here.

Of course the classic pushback I get after many of my long-form critiques is people asking me for solutions, people asking me what kind of technological innovation I want to see.

Instead of merely copy-pasting a quote from a piece I wrote more than five years ago, I’ll rephrase it. From what I’ve understood by examining the evolution of computer science and computer history, scientists and technologists of past decades seemed to have an approach that could be described as, ‘ideas & concepts first, technology later’. Many figures in the history of computing are rightly considered visionaries because they had visions — sometimes very detailed ones — of what they wanted computers to become, of applications where computers could make a difference, of ways in which a computer could improve a process, or could help solve a real problem.

And sometimes there were no detailed plans, but intuitions, insights, that were enough to point towards a direction. When a technological advancement was achieved, such as the microprocessor, it made previously-theorised designs and applications happen for real. Ideas were tested, put in practice, re-tested and refined. But no one sat on their laurels. There was always the urge of ‘what’s next?’ — ‘what kind of opportunities and avenues this stage has opened now?’

The reason I published the revised transcripts of the interviews with Larry Tesler, Steve Jobs, and Alan Kay (Part 1, Part 2) of the 1992 documentary series The Machine that Changed the World; the reason I published the annotated transcription of the lecture Origins of the Apple human interface, given in 1997 by Larry Tesler and Chris Espinosa at the Computer History Museum in California, is because I wanted my readers to understand how these people thought and worked. And to realise just how dramatically things have changed in tech.

What I’m seeing today is more like the opposite approach — ‘technology first, ideas & concepts later’: a laser focus on profit-driven technological advancements to hopefully extract some good ideas and use cases from. Where there are some ideas, or sparks, they seem hopelessly limited in scope or unimaginatively iterative, short-sightedly anchored to the previous incarnation or design. The questions are something like, How can we make this look better, sleeker, more polished?

Steve Jobs once said, There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.’ And we’ve always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very, very beginning. And we always will. If I may take that image, I’d say that today a lot of tech companies seem more concerned with the skating itself and with continuing to hit the puck in profitable ways.

Today I don’t see many thinkers, visionaries, technologists asking questions like, What’s next? Where do we go from here? How can we circumvent these interface limitations? How can we meaningfully change the way X is done? Can we create new advanced methods to achieve X, to actually make things better? — and so forth. You know, general questions, larger in scope, not tied to a single product or even the previous iteration of the same product. Not tied to what can make them the most money in the shortest term.

Today, both manufacturers and users have this fascination for the product, the gadget, the tool. People want the faster horse, tech companies give them faster horses and focus almost exclusively on how to make the next horses even faster. It’s why so many people appear fascinated by all the ‘AI’ hype and tech companies — utterly starved for ideas and mostly atrophied when it comes to actual research and development — are happy to play along and try to make the most out of that.

Perhaps I’m being hopelessly idealistic here, but I would like to see more fascination for the purpose, for the exploration of different ways to do things and achieve goals, for the end more than the mere means to an end. For things that help us evolve rather than making us dumber and ever-entertained. (Please go and watch, or rewatch, WALL·E).

Making icons less iconic

In the Design section of the guidelines for App icons, we find this:

Find a concept or element that captures the essence of your app or game, make it the core idea of your icon, and express it in a simple, unique way with a minimal number of shapes. Prefer a simple background, such as a solid color or gradient […]

Not only is this the recipe for blandness, it’s also borderline contradictory. Like, Make a unique dish using a minimal number of simple ingredients. While it’s possible to make a few different dishes using just two or three things, you touch the ceiling of uniqueness and variety pretty damn soon.

Another thing that irks me about this obsession with icon simplification is that when you abstract things this much, you dilute their meaning instead of distilling it. Take the progressive degradation of the Dictionary icon, for example. In its subsequent iterations (as soon as it loses the ‘book’ shape), it could just be the icon for a font managing app. Because it ends up losing a lot (if not all) of its uniqueness.

This image is taken by this post on the history of some of Mac OS icons by Basic Apple Guy. Go take a look at that post and you’ll see a pattern emerge with application icons: they get progressively abstracted to the point that they barely represent what they should represent: the icon for Stickies goes from being an actual depiction of a few yellow sticky notes to being some small vague rounded rectangles inside a clear rounded rectangle. The icon for Notes goes from representing an actual notepad to being a flat square with two lines and a coloured top area. The icon for Calculator, same thing: from depicting a calculator to being what looks more like a security keypad. Game Centre: from an icon representing different types of games, to… a group of colourful bubbles.

The most recent iteration of Migration Assistant’s icon is yet another example:

Migration Assistant icon in Mac OS 15 Sequoia (left) and how it appears in Mac OS 26 Tahoe Beta 2 (right)

Look at it. It’s utterly meaningless. Maybe it can work in an airport to mark an emergency exit or something. The old one is so simple and clear. From an ‘old, now inactive’ system to a ‘fresh new one’. Migration, indeed. Right there. All while preserving the Mac identity. This once again feels like changing things for change’s sake and nothing else.

I’m pretty sure that if you were to interview one of the designers at Apple responsible for this icon devolution, they would say something about reducing icons to their essence. To me, this looks more like squeezing all life out of them. Icons in Mac OS X used to be inventive, well crafted, distinctive, with a touch of fun and personality. Mac OS X’s user interface was sober, utilitarian, intuitive, peppered with descriptive icons that made the user experience fun without signalling ‘this is a kid’s toy’.

Same for NeXTSTEP, from which Mac OS X originates. Here, some icons have a more 3D effect, others are flatter; some are logos (like the icon for the Webster’s Dictionary), others are descriptive to a fault (the user’s Home folder is an illustration of a tiny house), but they’re instantly memorable. They do what icons are supposed to do and they take full advantage of the high resolution monitors NeXT sold for their workstations (also remember that some of those monitors were greyscale, so icons had to work even with limited palettes).

In recent years, the reverse has happened: Apple has been infantilising and dumbing down Mac OS’s user interface in order to be more similar to simpler mobile devices and to their UIs, while transforming the icons into something bland and ‘corporate’.

But it gets worse.

In the iOS 5 days, the HIG for icons weren’t too restrictive, apart from some basic requirements and guidance. This gave developers plenty of freedom, and the results (if you exclude the usual trash apps) were tasteful and varied; some opted for a rich, skeuomorphic look; others for flatter designs; others for something in between. Apps were instantly recognisable.

Now Apple gives you the option of removing colour and depth to all icons. To make everything look samey and nondescript…

…So that you can “complement your wallpaper.”

On my main Mac I’ve left the default Ventura wallpaper because the only time I see it is when I wake the Mac mini from sleep and I’m presented with the Login screen. People who actually work with computers and mobile devices don’t stare at wallpapers and matching icons.

But it’s not just that, it’s that these ‘Icon Appearances’ also remove colour, depth, and personality from third-party app icons too. This further dictates (and interferes with) what kind of design a third-party developer may choose for their apps. All this after recommending employing “a minimal number of shapes” and “prefer[ring] a simple background”.

As C.M. Harrington rightly notes:

I’ve said this before, but Apple is forcing third party devs to be in service of Apple. The guidelines and rules are meant to sublimate the brands of the third party, and replace it with Apple.

And I also must quote Louie Mantia who, in his brilliant piece Rose-Gold-Tinted Liquid Glasses writes (emphasis mine):

Apple has effectively infinite resources and operates on their own timeline, but everyone else does not have this kind of luxury. Springing big changes like this all at once forces so many independent developers, entire companies, and the industry as a whole to freeze their own development schedules to accommodate Apple’s design system.

It’s asking a lot. For almost nothing in return. I keep looking at all the changes Liquid Glass brings, and I cannot find one instance where it has markedly improved the experience in any way.

Everything that got rounder—except for the things that didn’t — why? Everything that got inset that wasn’t before — why? Everything that is now blurry — why? I don’t think it’s a secret that the content area of some apps decreased. The margins and padding increased — except where it didn’t.

In some ways, there’s almost more UI variance than there was before, which doesn’t make any sense. But in other ways, everything feels far more restrictive than it once was. Which I admit, also doesn’t make much sense. App icons weren’t just more expressive on OS X, they could be a much wider-range of materials than merely glass.

I know I can still draw anything I want within that square, and that the glass appearance on objects inside of it is purely optional. But the edge of every icon now has a glass appearance I can’t do anything about. If my icon is paper, wood, metal, or—god forbid—leather? It has a glass specular highlight. On macOS, it’s currently locked at a 45° angle. Which is not something I agreed to.

Swinging for the fences like this comes with substantial risk. Especially for matured products like macOS. This product is almost 25 years old, and I would hope there would be a little more caution when expecting effort from and forcing changes upon a developer community you’ve largely lost your goodwill with. These kinds of decisions have long-lasting effects and I’m sure many developers would’ve appreciated their time being considered before asking them to incorporate a design they did not sign up for.

And in the paragraph just preceding this section I’ve quoted, Mantia writes (emphasis his):

In a way, one could say Liquid Glass is like a new version of Aqua. It has reflective properties reminiscent of that. One could also say it’s an evolution of whatever iOS 7 was, leaning into the frosted panels and bright accent colors. But whatever Liquid Glass seems to be, it isn’t what many of us were hoping for.

Mantia’s piece is so good it’s difficult to extract a few quick quotes. Please take your time and go read it in full.

In Adopting Liquid Glass there are a few passages that unequivocally convey the message that Apple is in control of your app’s appearance (or part of it). Take for example this, in the Visual Refresh section:

Any custom backgrounds and appearances you use in these elements might overlay or interfere with Liquid Glass or other effects that the system provides, such as the scroll edge effect. […] Prefer to remove custom effects and let the system determine the background appearance […]

Or this, under App icons:

Let the system handle applying masking, blurring, and other visual effects, rather than factoring them into your design.

Compare and contrast this with the language used in the 2010 iOS Human Interface Guidelines under Application Icons:

Try to balance eye appeal and clarity of meaning in your icon so that it’s rich and beautiful and clearly conveys the essence of your application’s purpose. Also, it’s a good idea to investigate how your choice of image and color might be interpreted by people from different cultures.

After recommending to create different sizes of your application icon for different devices, the guidelines note that

When it’s displayed on an iPhone Home screen, iOS adds rounded corners, a drop shadow, and a reflected shine.

But:

You can prevent iOS from adding the shine to your application icon. To do this, you need to add the UIPrerenderedicon key to your application’s Info.plist file […]

Sure, even back then there were visual requirements for icons, but I wouldn’t define this short list as particularly restrictive:

Ensure your icon is eligible for the visual enhancements iOS provides. You should produce an image that:

Has 90° corners

Does not have any shine or gloss (unless you’ve chosen to prevent the addition of the reflective shine)

Does not use alpha transparency

The language in these guidelines from 2010 strikes me as supportive, like in this passage:

Create a 512×512 pixel version of your application icon for display in the App Store. Although it’s important that this version be instantly recognizable as your application icon, it can be subtly richer and more detailed. There are no visual effects added to this version of your application icon.

The language in the Adopting Liquid Glass document is overall more prescriptive and impersonal, and as I was reading all the various recommendations, I couldn’t help but feel the underlying message, We created this beautiful look based on glass effects, don’t you dare ruin it with your custom designs, effects, materials, brand identity.

The language in the current guidelines for app icons isn’t much different. It also reflects Apple’s current philosophy of ‘keeping it simple’ which, out of context, could be valid design advice — you’re designing icons with small-ish dimensions, not full-page detailed illustrations for a book, so striving for simplicity isn’t a bad thing.

And yet — and I might be wrong here — I keep reading between the lines and feel that these guidelines are more concerned with ensuring that developers maintain the same level of blandness and unimaginativeness of Apple’s own redesigned app icons:

Embrace simplicity in your icon design. Simple icons tend to be easiest for people to understand and recognize. An icon with fine visual features might look busy when rendered with system-provided shadows and highlights, and details may be hard to discern at smaller sizes. Find a concept or element that captures the essence of your app or game, make it the core idea of your icon, and express it in a simple, unique way with a minimal number of shapes. Prefer a simple background, such as a solid color or gradient, that puts the emphasis on your primary design — you don’t need to fill the entire icon canvas with content.

Going back to the Mac OS X Human Interface Guidelines from 2009 is like entering a different dimension. The chapter dedicated to icon design starts off like this:

Aqua offers a photo-illustrative icon style — it approaches the realism of photography but uses the features of illustrations to convey a lot of information in a small space. Icons can be represented in 512×512 pixels to allow ample room for detail. Anti-aliasing makes curves and nonrectilinear lines possible. Alpha channels and translucency allow for complex shading and dimensionality. All of these qualities allow you to create lush, vibrant icons that capture the user’s attention. […]

Icon genres help communicate what users can do with an application before they open it. Applications are classified by role — user applications, software utilities, and so on — and each category, or genre, has its own icon style. Creating icons that express this differentiation helps users distinguish between types of icons in the Dock.

For example, the icons for user applications are colorful and inviting, whereas icons for utilities have a more serious appearance. Figure 11–2 shows user application icons in the top row and utility icons in the bottom row.

You may argue that these are simply different icon design guidelines from different eras reflecting different tastes and aesthetic sense, and that it’s not a matter of one being better than the other, or a matter of right versus wrong, and I’ll concede that. But the older guidelines were informed in such a thoughtful way as to give third-party developers a lot of room for creativity and a wide range of choices while remaining within the required system-wide aesthetics of the time. If you look at the Figure 11–2 above, you could have very illustrative icons like the ones for Disk Utility (the hard disk with a stethoscope) or Front Row (the theatre armchair), but also more minimalistic designs such as the icon for the Terminal and AirPort Utility applications.

Tangentially, I found this bit ironic given where we are now:

Use transparency only when it is convincing and when it helps complete the story the icon is telling. You would never see a transparent sneaker, for example, so don’t use one in your icon.

This piece of advice is reiterated in the 2013 edition of Mac OS X’s Human Interface Guidelines:

Use transparency when it makes sense. Transparency in an icon can help depict glass or plastic, but it can be tricky to use convincingly. You would never see a transparent tree, for example, so don’t use one in your icon. The Preview and Pages app icons incorporate transparency effectively.

Also, since the introduction of retina (high-resolution, high-density) displays in 2012, this part was added in the HIG:

Take Advantage of High-Resolution Display

Retina display allows you to show high-resolution versions of your art and icons. If you merely scale up your existing artwork, you miss out on the opportunity to provide the beautiful, captivating images users expect. Instead, you should rework your existing image resources to create large, higher-quality versions that are:

Richer in texture

More detailed

More realistic

The aesthetics for icon design may have changed dramatically in the intervening years, but I just find it sad that, with the gorgeous displays we have today, Apple recommends simple designs made out of a few boring shapes, and everything is now in service of a ‘liquid glass’ effect the system superimposes on every aspect of the user interface — as if this surface gimmick is more important than the elements it distorts.

I’m sorry to sound like a broken record by now, but this is, once again, form before function, looks before workings. And don’t bother deviating from this new norm, because your app will be assimilated.

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