Thursday, June 11, 2020

Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump

Craig Mod (tweet):

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.

[…]

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

[…]

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

Niall O'Mara

Yeah I suppose all the hardware developments are iterative - whereas software developments are accumulative ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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