Agreed. When I think of good (Apple) design, I think of the 2012-2015 first generation retina MacBook Pros -- a slight refinement of the previous era, thinning

Agreed. When I think of good (Apple) design, I think of the 2012-2015 first generation retina MacBook Pros -- a slight refinement of the previous era, thinning the chassis when possible, upgrading ports, improving the screen, but largely preserving the best elements of the old design. There were some losses -- the sleep indicator light, the battery LEDs, ethernet, maybe some of the reliability of the Magsafe 1 connection -- but I would say that they largely improved on an existing design. Similar with OS X releases in that time period, Apple largely iterated on the existing Snow Leopard-ish design instead of blowing things up with fancy new designs. Funnily enough, I remember many, many tech reviewers in 2014, 2015 criticizing the MacBook Pro for that "ancient" design. And Apple eventually gave in and redesigned both the laptops (yuck) and OS X (maybe even more yuck). UI/UX is tricky, I think, because in an industry where folks move around every couple of years to maximize their salaries, people aren't rewarded for being good, iterative stewards of an existing system. Instead, they change jobs, someone new comes in, and they try to make a name for themselves by redesigning everything through a big bang redesign. And then they move on a couple years later, and then someone else comes in and redesigns... etc. etc. Sidenote: Holy cow, this also explains why the government sucks so much.