Steve Jobs would have fired everyone

The "it would have been different under Steve Jobs" trope is coming up every so often when Apple introduces a radical new feature. Oftentimes I don't agree but in this case I absolutely do. A huge amount of engineering to get these shader effects right, but the outcome will be that the platforms will look more like a fruit salad and less coherent. Companies that invested in React Native, Flutter, Tauri, or alternatives in the past years will not necessarily be willing to redo their whole app just so that the controls get the glass look. At the same time replicating this in every cross platform toolkit might be difficult, and so I think this will lead to many apps looking out of place which worsens the overall experience.

This is something I posted on Threads yesterday, but this kind of thing comes up every WWDC and every September.

> It’s WWDC week. Every time this rolls around, I see people saying the same sort of thing. “Steve Jobs wouldn’t have done this”.

> Firstly, Jobs wasn’t perfect. He got a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong. His opinion wasn’t the end of the argument when he was alive, and it’s certainly not now that he’s been dead 14 years.

> But more importantly: Stop putting your opinion in a dead man’s mouth to give it more credibility. It’s ghoulish. Let your opinion stand on its own two feet.

I can't get over this from Apple specifically, I offer joke about how UI/UX designers just make work for themselves but here someone was missing to call these things out.

The rounded edges are all a hodgepodge, the different levels of transparency is uncomfortable and the overall lack of coherence is really bad..

Apple used to care about accessibility by default. Even their cherrypicked and ultrapolished Keynote demo had issues with readability on almost every single screen they’ve shown. Windows 7 designers were smart enough to blur the glassy background behind the rare cases the text was shown on glassy backgrounds, and generally tended to avoid it altogether. Apple instead went full “tech demo” without considering any practical aspects.

Sure, you’ll be able to tone down glass effects in the Accessibility menu, but is making the text legible by default is too much to ask for?

I know people hate this but it shows a huge problem: innovation in operating system design. It's really a tough one. You really want the basic functionality to be very stable and unchanging to save yourself and others incompatibility pain over the next decades. OTOH, you need to release a new OS every now and again to show the markets that you are doing something. So they did a cosmetic upgrade like changing the graphic theme. Which, depending on your PoV, might be a very good thing.

Not sure why they think this improves in any way what they got, as am not sure why they thought the previous redesign improved what they got in the first place. This one can be nothing but a huge blow to readability and accessibility.

I think people would probably feel less strongly about design decisions like these if their customization weren't confined to the Accessibility settings.

Same thing goes for, say, the caption settings on tvOS.

It's an interesting UX decision to always confine those settings to just that category when it's perfectly normal to change and customize settings to their own personal preference. But Apple are also big believers in only putting settings in one place, and obviously people with disabilities in particular might become outright unableto use Apple devices and software without them.

But maybe it feels like a design concessions to give people are more direct way to change your design decisions on Apple's part.

People have lots of opinions about Microsoft's designs, but most of them aren't as important when there are (somewhat) straightforward settings to tweak them.

I think Apple is well aware that this Liquid Glass design is harder to read and it's intentional. They want to train/prepare users for upcoming lighter AR glasses UI experience, where everything will be superimposed over "reality" with some glass-style UI and will be harder to read.

Wow, I didn't care enough about the news to actually look at any pictures, I just read the name and heard the general idea. That is truly awful. On top of the multiple visible layers of stuff everywhere, those are some of the ugliest "squircle" shapes that I've ever seen, beaten only by the app icons in Samsung's Android skin.

Look at how the red notification icon of a folder gets mirrored and stretched near the top of the media widget. It makes the widgets look particularly odd (it seems like an optical illusion, I find that the straight edges of squares look bent out, until I look right at them and see them as straight). The only positive I can give them if that someone worked hard on figuring out how to distort the images underneath.

I watched the video on this and I just really hate that they seemingly market it in a way that is somewhat suggestive of it being a new type of glass. After watching the video I was slightly confused as to whether they were just being grandiose with the name or they had actual new hardware with some fancy glass that was being explained poorly. It’s clearly the former but man that is dumb

I’ll reserve judgement until I can play around with a final release version for a bit. the screenshots so far don’t look great but the idea of minimizing UI elements to maximize content area display does make sense, if it’s done well

The other possibility is he would have managed the development into a release with successful user scenarios. I think it short changes his management ability to think firing was the only thing he brought to the table.

I think it outlines a bigger problem we have in the tech industry: innovation for the sake of innovation.

When you have an in-house design team, or development team, you will, inevitably, reach a point where your product is "ready": design was finalized, functionality is there, and aside from minor bug fixes, there is nothing else really to do. Then you ask yourself, what should you do with the in-house teams? The logical answer would be to let them go, or focus on different projects.

But this is not how our industry works. Instead, teams are sitting there, coming up with problems in order to create solutions, because otherwise you are getting paid for doing nothing. This, eventually, leads to enshittification of everything.

This new apple design is one example. Another example is a not-so-recent redesign of whatsapp where they went from blue color scheme to green. It's works for the sake of work.

Stupid comment, why someone who is not Steve Jobs can say what SJ would do. Because anyone who is not him can say his own point of view and tag it as « Steve Jobs would have … »

I even think someone at Apple might have said « SJ would have loved it ».

SJ apparently said to Tim Cook : « Don't Do What I Would Do--Just Do What's Right ». In other words, do whatever you want. So only time will tell if he’s right and people complained a lot about the atrocity of the notch and it still made them billions (witch matters most at the end for a company I guess)

Looks like the coolest KDE setup of 2005.

It will be hilarious if Apple's telemetry shows that most people go out of their way to disable this in the Accessibility settings.

Yeah there needs to be more background blur but I think that would fix it.

I've been on the fence about whether or not I should upgrade my 2017 iPad Pro (which recently fell out of support, but is still getting critical patches).

I'm thinking I'll just go with an Android tablet from here on. Any recommendations?

Ooof that's bad lol. At least increase the blur or reduce the transparency or anything to make the settings stand out more from the background...

My biggest complaint as a loyal Apple consumer and perhaps maybe more importantly shareholder is… What happened to one more thing? Literally all their events are bland, lacking any explosive or gasps from the crowd. Same old, minor tweaks and dumb innovation such as genmoji. Honestly who’s coming up with this crap?

The last thing Apple did that actually got people excited and real innovation was apple silicon.

Lest we forget, Jobs LOVED the original iMac Hockey Puck Mouse and wanted the iPhone to only run a handful of Apple-designed apps.

It feels like harder to read

Windows 7 was better in that regard

Honestly, it doesn’t look as bad of a redesign as iOS 7 was. I remember people hating the new flat look, and how worse it was by all measures.

But time passes, and a generation of UI designers has grown up who never knew better. Now it’s their turn to be baffled, then they too will just become old and grumpy.

I love the new design. Like Windows 7/Aero but with dynamic effects instead of the static stripes.

When I come across these "Steve Jobs would've never done this" clickbait posts, I always wonder who knew Steve better -- random poster on the internet or folks at Apple.

The second i saw Liquid Glass I started laughing out loud in the office - it made me think of The Abyss (1989) when the liquid tentacles come into the habitat...

The kind Vladimir Illych would have shot everyone here.

Why does it say Tesla at the top?

Needs more Compiz, imo

I'm also pretty sure he wouldn't have released a phone with the notch.

I think the general move is towards more monochromatic interface and I for one welcome it. It will take a while to adjust, but I think we might end up with much more "peaceful" interface. I'm tired of icons jumping at me.

I really like what they’re going for but I’m disappointed in the outcome (so far). Then again, Apple has always managed to have a glaring oversight in design somewhere — “just hold your phone differently!”