Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump
This sense of a decline in software craft has been building for years, but it wasn’t until Apple released the iPad Magic Keyboard that I felt the pain of this hardware-software gap so acutely.
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Apple’s hardware is ever-more refined. While far from flawless, the entire lineup is now (finally) largely free from these “foundational” issues you see in software.3
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Between the messiness of Catalina and the almost-but-not-quite-there-ness of iPadOS, what’s most needed now are not splashy masthead features but a reconsideration of the boring nuts and bolts, the paint on the back of the cabinets, the smoothing over of all the bumps and stutters as needed to enable device fluency — and not just a single year of cleaning up the mucky infrastructure of our compute landscape, but a reworking of the internal software culture of companies like Apple to elevate user fluency to first-class rank.
The footnote is for the Touch Bar.
Previously:
Update (2020-06-22): Nick Heer:
It’s not just two apps — it’s all three.
See also: Marco Arment, Jon Stokes, Jonathan Blow, Adam Engst.
1 Comment RSS · Twitter
Yeah I suppose all the hardware developments are iterative - whereas software developments are accumulative ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
