4 ms·

I think I know what happened. The A-squad design team left Apple 15 years ago. The B-squad left 5 years ago. What remains is a sea of Gen Z designers who wer

by mvkel 1y ago

I think I know what happened. The A-squad design team left Apple 15 years ago. The B-squad left 5 years ago. What remains is a sea of Gen Z designers who weren't yet alive when the foggy glass of Windows Vista seemed like a good idea. Meanwhile, the talent wars are raging, with every AI company offering 7-figure salaries to the best of Apple's prodigies. Apple is now the old guard. They're no longer cool, and as a public company, cost controls are too stringent; they can't pay as much. What is Apple to do? They can give the designers a sense of ownership. It's not a question of how (un)qualified the team is; it's a retention play. Is the design good? The A and B squads would say no. But this is the best Apple can do these days to keep critical talent engaged. They'll burn a cycle re-learning fundamental lessons in accessibility, retain talent, and cling to the hope that next year they'll have a midwit Siri than can book a flight with a decent looking UI.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
matusp 1y ago
I like to observe how organization affects how a company operates. As soon as you create a department, that department will start to generate reasons why it should remain being a department, as a sort of self preservation instinct. If you establish a design department, they will start planning complete redesigns sooner or later -- they need to have something going on to justify their existence. When I see this type of redesign, I can't help but wonder whether it is something that was cooked so that the design department can have a place at the table. As a tangent, HR departments are very often affected by this as well. As soon as you have large enough HR, they will start generating ideas about how to waste other teams time. They have to justify their existence by organizing some events, trainings, activities, even if they actively harm the bottom line.
- ngrilly 1y ago
  Agreed. But what is the alternative? No departments at all? Everybody belonging to one giant single team?
  - v5v3 1y ago
    In large companies, each project is approved at each stage by a steering committee. And then as appropriate more senior committes, senior leaders and eventually the CEO and the board. The poster above is right in that if you create a design team they will want to justify their existence but it's the controls above and around it that is responsible for keeping them in check.
    - drw85 1y ago
      In my experience that then leads to the politics game. People will cling to those senior leaders and make themselves visible and important to be kept around and be validated and enabled.
- jajko 1y ago
  I see this daily in our banking megacorp. We have IT security team(s), which permeates all other IT activities like ink on paper. On its own its a good approach obviously, we weren't for example hacked or scammed in any high profile case, ever. But there is no limit to how much additional security you can bring, so they do bring all of it. Recently had to get new Tomcat distribution deployed via Chef tool, of course our own package of it. Now it runs under 2 unix users, each owns various parts of Tomcat. Main startup config (options.sh) is owned by root, to which we will never ever get access, one has to do all changes in a complex approval and build process via Chef. Servers disconnect you after 2-3 mins of inactivity, if you deal with a small cluster you need literally ie 16 putty sessions open which constantly try to logout. And similar stuff everywhere, in all apps, laptops, network etc. All this means that previously simple debugging now becomes a small circus and fight with ecosystem. Deliveries take longer, everything takes longer. Nobody relevant dares to speak up (or even understands the situation), to not be branded a fool who doesn't want the most security for the bank. I would be mad if this would be my company, but I go there to collect paychecks and sponsor actual life for me and my family so can handle this. For now at least.
  - signal11 1y ago
    Conway’s Law is a bear. Alternative approach, also from a financial services world: VMs are created with a DSL on top of qemu/firecracker, containers with Dockerfiles. Cyber are part of an image review group alongside other engineers that validates the base images. But: no interactive access to any of these VMs at all. There’s hypervisors running on bare metal, but SRE teams have that scripted pretty well to the point a physical server can be added in a day or so. It does mean you’ve to be serious about logging, monitoring and health. This is one instance where we got it right (I think). We do have some legacy servers we’re trying to get rid of. But we’ve learnt we can run even complex vendor apps this way. Conway’s Law comes to bite us in other ways though! Like I said, it’s a bear.
- teddyh 1y ago
  “Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.” — <https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html>
jl6 1y ago
What? Nobody is retaining AI people by giving them UX work. These are very different skills.
- csande17 1y ago
  Who do you think is designing the UX for all the new AI products and services?
- Ecstatify 1y ago
  I don’t really believe the narrative that this is the C-team running things now. A complete redesign like this would require approval from numerous executive stakeholders. My guess is that it’s connected to the Apple Vision project - possibly they’re working on a new device at a more consumer-friendly price point.
farzd 1y ago
It seems like they are trying to unify the UX for vision OS and other devices and have them finally morph with the AR interfaces that are to come. There is probably a bigger vision behind this than just shiny visuals.
- edhelas 1y ago
  Occam's razor. Maybe they just made a bad UI/UX change.
  - djfivyvusn 1y ago
    My computer company would never do such a thing.
    - farzd 1y ago
      Im not an Apple fan boy but Apple has been at the forefront of alot of design decisions that other companies later follow. So whilst I don’t agree with the liquid design. I suspect there’s more to it than meets the eye.
      - intrasight 1y ago
        I get the impression that most (myself included) think there is nothing more than meets the eye - which is why some say that Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave.
- calmbell 1y ago
  They have been doing this slowly over the past several years. I decided to move from macOS to Linux the day settings turned into a scrolling iOS-style list rather than an actual settings menu.
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  I think this too. Microsoft thought something similar when they tried to unify Windows, Xbox, Windows Phone, and Windows RT in one design language. With how badly Apple's VR headset actually sold, I don't think they're going to for a unified AR-first approach just yet. Then again, Apple did think their VR headset was a good idea, so maybe they're just high on their own supply.
v5v3 1y ago
"... and as a public company, cost controls are too stringent;" Is that because a public company or because Tim Cook is a bottom line finance guy? "they can't pay as much." Why not? Thought apple had enormous cash reserves.
gyomu 1y ago
Alan Dye is the interface design lead at Apple, he's been there since 2006. One of the lead designers on Liquid Glass is Chan Karunamuni, who's been at Apple since the early 2010s. If you search for more of the names of the design presenters at this WWDC, you'll find a lot of people with similarly long tenure. So the theory that it's all Gen Z designers with no experience or talent seems pretty weak.
- aquariusDue 1y ago
  Yeah, sure. But it's more fun to talk in hypotheticals and point fingers at straw people and those young kids that make a fetish of old Nokia phones and dumb tech. So I'm sure there's 3 Gen Z folks in a trench coat approving the work of those other Gen Z designers. All this is just delegating to flavor of the domain "higher powers" instead of trying to grapple with the complexity of reality. We just have to wait for Gen Alpha to bring back flat design 10 or so years from today.
  - willis936 1y ago
    And to think this is the same field that has an issue with ageism as indicated by this post yesterday. I take serious issue with people over 40 being protected while discrimination against young people "just doesn't exist". It's a clear case of the law being constructed to advantage the already advantaged. It's politically expedient because old people have wealth and influence and young people don't. Could you hire someone who can't demonstrate competence in an interview to do the job? Why does it matter if they're 20 or 100? Yet the two cases are treated very differently. You can say you won't hire a 20 year old because they don't know what they're doing, but can you not hire the 100 year old because their mental faculties have deteriorated? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44269225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44269225 Edit: this appears to be a hot take, so I challenge others to take a step back and consider other protected classes and anti-discrimination laws. They don't call out one race or sex, they say they're all protected and the very act of discriminating is not allowed during hiring. They don't say "you can't discriminate against white people or men but others are fine". That's what the ADEA does.
- trippsydrippsy 1y ago
Kwpolska 1y ago
Aero Glass in Windows Vista and 7 worked quite well. Virtually no applications had the glass everywhere. Many stayed with the default of only having a glass title bar and window border. Some apps extended it a little to cover a toolbar or two. Also, the glass effect was simpler, and had enough contrast by default (and the colour and transparency were customizable), whereas Apple has the glass everywhere and often with unreadable text.
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  In some Vista betas, where Aero wasn't finished yet, Aero's glass was a lot more transparent. This video shows some of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCDcekzU3cQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCDcekzU3cQ There were parts of Vista that were mostly glass and they still looked fine. The widget picker comes to mind: https://istartedsomething.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/gadget_1.jpg https://istartedsomething.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/gad... What Apple demonstrated in their first OS demo is not yet finished, and I'm sure they'll add some more frosted glass efects for legibility and such. What they show off in the video looks fine to me, and the explanation that comes with the visuals show that at least from a designer point of view, all of the weird stuff that jumps out in the macOS demo was violating the design principles. I loved Aero and I bet once Apple adds the diffuse glass to the places it need to for legibility, I'm sure this will look great too.
martin-adams 1y ago
Siri to book a flight? I just want it to reliably tell me what time a specific meeting is tomorrow, know that when I ask for where Mount Etna is, I don’t mean a city in the USA, and stop just ignoring me randomly when I talk to it. Apple are much further behind with Siri than they realise.
- latexr 1y ago
  > Apple are much further behind with Siri than they realise. I think Apple realises it way better than you’re giving them credit for. They simply weren’t able to do anything about it yet, even though they’re clearly trying.
HellDunkel 1y ago
This view is very „hackernewsy“ and reveals a lot more about the mindset around here than the what is going on with apple. Firstly i don‘t think there is much fluctuation with the apple design team except when Ive left but i guess that was mainly due to the ceo change. I remember a time when microsoft came around the corner with flat design on their phones and the iphone all of a sudden looked outdated. They adopted a flat look shortly after. They did that pretty well. Thirdly and most important: noone does gaussian blurs, macro and micro transitions better than apple and it‘s a key part of their success. They are taking it one step further now. Even if it doesn‘t improve the experience for users it could help distinguish themselves visually. And there is nothing wrong with that.
- hackyhacky 1y ago
  > Even if it doesn‘t improve the experience for users it could help distinguish themselves visually. And there is nothing wrong with that. I think a lot of folks here would say that there is something wrong with degrading the user experience to achieve a win for branding.
  - user____name 1y ago
    I think the above comment is implying that the glass effects are more or less neutral, not degrading.
conradfr 1y ago
That sounds more like a false good idea that should have been stopped at some point. When I read "liquid glass" and saw a thumbnail of it I thought I was going to be impressed. Well, no. Also that Finder screenshot is hilarious, I'm not even sure it's real.
ivape 1y ago
Liquid Glass looks really good, so not sure what you're talking about their A team being gone. All these other companies wish they had Apple's design team.
GreenVulpine 1y ago
Aero is leaps and bounds more aesthetically pleasing and easier to work with than flat crap. Sooo glad we don't have to suffer more of that after a decade+.
throw0101c 1y ago
> The A-squad design team left Apple 15 years ago. Does the A-squad include Steve Jobs, who seemed to have been a fan of skeuomorphism: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph#Virtual_examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph#Virtual_examples Does the A-squad include Johnny Ive, who gave us butterfly keyboards and the Touch Bar (where (IIRC) the initial revision of which did not have a separate physical key for ESC)? Though Ive did get rid of skeuomorphism.
- simondotau 1y ago
  > Though Ive did get rid of skeuomorphism. By replacing skeuomorphism with minimalism, Ive's anti-skeu was a cure nearly as worse as the disease. They were right to move away from skeuomorphism, but they did so recklessly, giving us a UX where almost all cues for an element being "clickable" were stripped away. Ive hasn't done a single impressive thing after Jobs' departure. To the extent that Ive did anything noteworthy, it was with Jobs as visionary, product director and tastemaker. Outside of that relationship, his work has been derivative of prior Apple design success, or embarrassingly wrong-footed. Factoring in the lag time of product cycles, it's astonishing how rapidly Apple improved after Ive's departure.
  - abcd_f 1y ago
    I've been in agreement with you up until this point - > it's astonishing how rapidly Apple improved after Ive's departure Is there another Apple? What improvements are you talking about, leave alone astonishing ones?
    - matwood 1y ago
      The MBP went from few ports and thinner at all costs, back towards functionality.
    - mixmastamyk 1y ago
      Keyboard and touch bar reverted. Not exactly improvements in the traditional sense. More likely cleaning up an intentional mess.
mrafii 1y ago
Exactly. You sums up very efficiently.
lvl155 1y ago
That’s BS take. iOS design is one of the most coveted roles if not the most important role you can get as a designer. It reaches billions and influences everything else. Just because we are not impressed with Apple’s direction, doesn’t mean these roles at Apple are not highly sought after. People would work for free to have that on their cv. Not everyone is motivated by pay and this is especially true among people with actual talent.
wpm 1y ago
I think more accurately, Apple’s, while imperfect, A-tier editor passed away in 2011, and no one replaced him. It has been a downward slope since then after the momentum dissipated after his death. Turns out, I didn’t like the operating system Apple made. I liked the OS Apple made while being curated and directed by Steve Jobs. His taste matched mine in a lot of important ways. I have no tastes in common with Alan Dye.
okdood64 1y ago
Low quality comment that is provably untrue based on the team's leadership. Can we stop blaming Gen Z for everything? This happens with every generation.

by mvkel 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

matusp 1y ago

I like to observe how organization affects how a company operates. As soon as you create a department, that department will start to generate reasons why it should remain being a department, as a sort of self preservation instinct. If you establish a design department, they will start planning complete redesigns sooner or later -- they need to have something going on to justify their existence. When I see this type of redesign, I can't help but wonder whether it is something that was cooked so that the design department can have a place at the table. As a tangent, HR departments are very often affected by this as well. As soon as you have large enough HR, they will start generating ideas about how to waste other teams time. They have to justify their existence by organizing some events, trainings, activities, even if they actively harm the bottom line.

ngrilly 1y ago
Agreed. But what is the alternative? No departments at all? Everybody belonging to one giant single team?
- v5v3 1y ago
  In large companies, each project is approved at each stage by a steering committee. And then as appropriate more senior committes, senior leaders and eventually the CEO and the board. The poster above is right in that if you create a design team they will want to justify their existence but it's the controls above and around it that is responsible for keeping them in check.
  - drw85 1y ago
    In my experience that then leads to the politics game. People will cling to those senior leaders and make themselves visible and important to be kept around and be validated and enabled.
jajko 1y ago
I see this daily in our banking megacorp. We have IT security team(s), which permeates all other IT activities like ink on paper. On its own its a good approach obviously, we weren't for example hacked or scammed in any high profile case, ever. But there is no limit to how much additional security you can bring, so they do bring all of it. Recently had to get new Tomcat distribution deployed via Chef tool, of course our own package of it. Now it runs under 2 unix users, each owns various parts of Tomcat. Main startup config (options.sh) is owned by root, to which we will never ever get access, one has to do all changes in a complex approval and build process via Chef. Servers disconnect you after 2-3 mins of inactivity, if you deal with a small cluster you need literally ie 16 putty sessions open which constantly try to logout. And similar stuff everywhere, in all apps, laptops, network etc. All this means that previously simple debugging now becomes a small circus and fight with ecosystem. Deliveries take longer, everything takes longer. Nobody relevant dares to speak up (or even understands the situation), to not be branded a fool who doesn't want the most security for the bank. I would be mad if this would be my company, but I go there to collect paychecks and sponsor actual life for me and my family so can handle this. For now at least.
- signal11 1y ago
  Conway’s Law is a bear. Alternative approach, also from a financial services world: VMs are created with a DSL on top of qemu/firecracker, containers with Dockerfiles. Cyber are part of an image review group alongside other engineers that validates the base images. But: no interactive access to any of these VMs at all. There’s hypervisors running on bare metal, but SRE teams have that scripted pretty well to the point a physical server can be added in a day or so. It does mean you’ve to be serious about logging, monitoring and health. This is one instance where we got it right (I think). We do have some legacy servers we’re trying to get rid of. But we’ve learnt we can run even complex vendor apps this way. Conway’s Law comes to bite us in other ways though! Like I said, it’s a bear.
teddyh 1y ago
“Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.” — <https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html>

jl6 1y ago

What? Nobody is retaining AI people by giving them UX work. These are very different skills.

csande17 1y ago
Who do you think is designing the UX for all the new AI products and services?
Ecstatify 1y ago
I don’t really believe the narrative that this is the C-team running things now. A complete redesign like this would require approval from numerous executive stakeholders. My guess is that it’s connected to the Apple Vision project - possibly they’re working on a new device at a more consumer-friendly price point.

farzd 1y ago

It seems like they are trying to unify the UX for vision OS and other devices and have them finally morph with the AR interfaces that are to come. There is probably a bigger vision behind this than just shiny visuals.

edhelas 1y ago
Occam's razor. Maybe they just made a bad UI/UX change.
- djfivyvusn 1y ago
  My computer company would never do such a thing.
  - farzd 1y ago
    Im not an Apple fan boy but Apple has been at the forefront of alot of design decisions that other companies later follow. So whilst I don’t agree with the liquid design. I suspect there’s more to it than meets the eye.
    - intrasight 1y ago
      I get the impression that most (myself included) think there is nothing more than meets the eye - which is why some say that Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave.
calmbell 1y ago
They have been doing this slowly over the past several years. I decided to move from macOS to Linux the day settings turned into a scrolling iOS-style list rather than an actual settings menu.
jeroenhd 1y ago
I think this too. Microsoft thought something similar when they tried to unify Windows, Xbox, Windows Phone, and Windows RT in one design language. With how badly Apple's VR headset actually sold, I don't think they're going to for a unified AR-first approach just yet. Then again, Apple did think their VR headset was a good idea, so maybe they're just high on their own supply.

v5v3 1y ago

"... and as a public company, cost controls are too stringent;" Is that because a public company or because Tim Cook is a bottom line finance guy? "they can't pay as much." Why not? Thought apple had enormous cash reserves.

gyomu 1y ago

Alan Dye is the interface design lead at Apple, he's been there since 2006. One of the lead designers on Liquid Glass is Chan Karunamuni, who's been at Apple since the early 2010s. If you search for more of the names of the design presenters at this WWDC, you'll find a lot of people with similarly long tenure. So the theory that it's all Gen Z designers with no experience or talent seems pretty weak.

aquariusDue 1y ago
Yeah, sure. But it's more fun to talk in hypotheticals and point fingers at straw people and those young kids that make a fetish of old Nokia phones and dumb tech. So I'm sure there's 3 Gen Z folks in a trench coat approving the work of those other Gen Z designers. All this is just delegating to flavor of the domain "higher powers" instead of trying to grapple with the complexity of reality. We just have to wait for Gen Alpha to bring back flat design 10 or so years from today.
- willis936 1y ago
  And to think this is the same field that has an issue with ageism as indicated by this post yesterday. I take serious issue with people over 40 being protected while discrimination against young people "just doesn't exist". It's a clear case of the law being constructed to advantage the already advantaged. It's politically expedient because old people have wealth and influence and young people don't. Could you hire someone who can't demonstrate competence in an interview to do the job? Why does it matter if they're 20 or 100? Yet the two cases are treated very differently. You can say you won't hire a 20 year old because they don't know what they're doing, but can you not hire the 100 year old because their mental faculties have deteriorated? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44269225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44269225 Edit: this appears to be a hot take, so I challenge others to take a step back and consider other protected classes and anti-discrimination laws. They don't call out one race or sex, they say they're all protected and the very act of discriminating is not allowed during hiring. They don't say "you can't discriminate against white people or men but others are fine". That's what the ADEA does.
trippsydrippsy 1y ago

Kwpolska 1y ago

Aero Glass in Windows Vista and 7 worked quite well. Virtually no applications had the glass everywhere. Many stayed with the default of only having a glass title bar and window border. Some apps extended it a little to cover a toolbar or two. Also, the glass effect was simpler, and had enough contrast by default (and the colour and transparency were customizable), whereas Apple has the glass everywhere and often with unreadable text.

jeroenhd 1y ago
In some Vista betas, where Aero wasn't finished yet, Aero's glass was a lot more transparent. This video shows some of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCDcekzU3cQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCDcekzU3cQ There were parts of Vista that were mostly glass and they still looked fine. The widget picker comes to mind: https://istartedsomething.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/gadget_1.jpg https://istartedsomething.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/gad... What Apple demonstrated in their first OS demo is not yet finished, and I'm sure they'll add some more frosted glass efects for legibility and such. What they show off in the video looks fine to me, and the explanation that comes with the visuals show that at least from a designer point of view, all of the weird stuff that jumps out in the macOS demo was violating the design principles. I loved Aero and I bet once Apple adds the diffuse glass to the places it need to for legibility, I'm sure this will look great too.

martin-adams 1y ago

Siri to book a flight? I just want it to reliably tell me what time a specific meeting is tomorrow, know that when I ask for where Mount Etna is, I don’t mean a city in the USA, and stop just ignoring me randomly when I talk to it. Apple are much further behind with Siri than they realise.

latexr 1y ago
> Apple are much further behind with Siri than they realise. I think Apple realises it way better than you’re giving them credit for. They simply weren’t able to do anything about it yet, even though they’re clearly trying.

HellDunkel 1y ago

This view is very „hackernewsy“ and reveals a lot more about the mindset around here than the what is going on with apple. Firstly i don‘t think there is much fluctuation with the apple design team except when Ive left but i guess that was mainly due to the ceo change. I remember a time when microsoft came around the corner with flat design on their phones and the iphone all of a sudden looked outdated. They adopted a flat look shortly after. They did that pretty well. Thirdly and most important: noone does gaussian blurs, macro and micro transitions better than apple and it‘s a key part of their success. They are taking it one step further now. Even if it doesn‘t improve the experience for users it could help distinguish themselves visually. And there is nothing wrong with that.

hackyhacky 1y ago
> Even if it doesn‘t improve the experience for users it could help distinguish themselves visually. And there is nothing wrong with that. I think a lot of folks here would say that there is something wrong with degrading the user experience to achieve a win for branding.
- user____name 1y ago
  I think the above comment is implying that the glass effects are more or less neutral, not degrading.

conradfr 1y ago

That sounds more like a false good idea that should have been stopped at some point. When I read "liquid glass" and saw a thumbnail of it I thought I was going to be impressed. Well, no. Also that Finder screenshot is hilarious, I'm not even sure it's real.

ivape 1y ago

Liquid Glass looks really good, so not sure what you're talking about their A team being gone. All these other companies wish they had Apple's design team.

GreenVulpine 1y ago

Aero is leaps and bounds more aesthetically pleasing and easier to work with than flat crap. Sooo glad we don't have to suffer more of that after a decade+.

throw0101c 1y ago

> The A-squad design team left Apple 15 years ago. Does the A-squad include Steve Jobs, who seemed to have been a fan of skeuomorphism: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph#Virtual_examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph#Virtual_examples Does the A-squad include Johnny Ive, who gave us butterfly keyboards and the Touch Bar (where (IIRC) the initial revision of which did not have a separate physical key for ESC)? Though Ive did get rid of skeuomorphism.

simondotau 1y ago
> Though Ive did get rid of skeuomorphism. By replacing skeuomorphism with minimalism, Ive's anti-skeu was a cure nearly as worse as the disease. They were right to move away from skeuomorphism, but they did so recklessly, giving us a UX where almost all cues for an element being "clickable" were stripped away. Ive hasn't done a single impressive thing after Jobs' departure. To the extent that Ive did anything noteworthy, it was with Jobs as visionary, product director and tastemaker. Outside of that relationship, his work has been derivative of prior Apple design success, or embarrassingly wrong-footed. Factoring in the lag time of product cycles, it's astonishing how rapidly Apple improved after Ive's departure.
- abcd_f 1y ago
  I've been in agreement with you up until this point - > it's astonishing how rapidly Apple improved after Ive's departure Is there another Apple? What improvements are you talking about, leave alone astonishing ones?
  - matwood 1y ago
    The MBP went from few ports and thinner at all costs, back towards functionality.
  - mixmastamyk 1y ago
    Keyboard and touch bar reverted. Not exactly improvements in the traditional sense. More likely cleaning up an intentional mess.

mrafii 1y ago

Exactly. You sums up very efficiently.

lvl155 1y ago

That’s BS take. iOS design is one of the most coveted roles if not the most important role you can get as a designer. It reaches billions and influences everything else. Just because we are not impressed with Apple’s direction, doesn’t mean these roles at Apple are not highly sought after. People would work for free to have that on their cv. Not everyone is motivated by pay and this is especially true among people with actual talent.

wpm 1y ago

I think more accurately, Apple’s, while imperfect, A-tier editor passed away in 2011, and no one replaced him. It has been a downward slope since then after the momentum dissipated after his death. Turns out, I didn’t like the operating system Apple made. I liked the OS Apple made while being curated and directed by Steve Jobs. His taste matched mine in a lot of important ways. I have no tastes in common with Alan Dye.

okdood64 1y ago

Low quality comment that is provably untrue based on the team's leadership. Can we stop blaming Gen Z for everything? This happens with every generation.