Six ColorsApple design’s luxury bubble (Link) https://sixcolors.com/link/2025/12/apple-designs-luxury-bubble/
🇨🇦 Maverick ✊🇲🇲🇺🇦🇻🇪🇬🇱@sixcolors I go a different direction when attempting to describe the descent of Apple design… Apple became an absolute behemoth in the industry – the world, actually – and in so doing, the people that Apple hired were no longer “the best of the best” & probably didn’t really buy into “the Apple way”. Basically, Apple started hiring Windows programmers. (1/7)
What this article is talking about is Apple hardware (how stuff looks) but where Apple has obviously lost its way is Apple software (how it works). In that regard, the shift has been huge. The software simply doesn’t work for users. It gets in its own way. All the OS 26s are *HORRIBLE*, you can’t convince me Steve Jobs would allow an invisible UI to ship. It’s so obviously a stupid idea. (2/7)
But beyond the OSs, Every bit of software I can think of grates me the wrong way now with some Ui or UX decision that I don’t believe Apple would have shipped in the Jobs era. Two “close boxes” beside each other (safari), dithering issues on menu bar text (Apple TV) – these people would be fired in the Jobs era, no doubt about it. But Apple is too big & the core of Apple executives that remember the old ways is too small or don’t care anymore. (3/7)
While writing this my wife was trying to play a song on the HomePod. She used a voice command but no audio played (it was playing on the Apple TV), so she switched to the Apple TV remote, changed the output to the HomePod and… it stopped playing. She told it to resume. Nothing. She switched back to the Apple TV remote and went to the search function in music & then pressed the microphone button and recited the name of the song… nope. (4/7)
She’s was doing a general system search , not a “music” search and gets movie titles returned. I told her she needs to select the “search” field and then recite the song name. (5/7)
She does this correctly, but the song still doesn’t show up… oh you have to go down to that tab and select “Apple Music”, I tell her… then the song she wants is 2nd in the list — a super famous song by the original artist but that version is displayed after a totally different song by an unknown artist first. — omfg, how are real humans supposed to use this stuff! (6/7)
That interaction my wife just had is the stuff Apple used to sweat over so users would never have that shitty experience. I get it. It’s hard and these systems have gotten exponentially more complicated but if Apple isn’t going to solve these types of problems for real users then Apple isn’t really Apple any longer. (7/7)