John Gruber (Mastodon, Bluesky, Hacker News, MacRumors, Mac Power Users, AppleInsider):
But we didn’t see all aspects of Apple Intelligence demoed. None of the “more personalized Siri” features, the ones that Apple, in its own statement announcing their postponement, described as having “more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps”. […] There were no demonstrations of any of that. Those features were all at level 0 on my hierarchy. That level is called vaporware. […] What Apple showed regarding the upcoming “personalized Siri” at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis.
[…]
Careers will end before Apple might ever return to the level of “if they say it, you can believe it” credibility the company had earned at the start of June 2024.
Damaged is arguably too passive. It was squandered. This didn’t happen to Apple. Decision makers within the company did it.
Who decided these features should go in the WWDC keynote, with a promise they’d arrive in the coming year, when, at the time, they were in such an unfinished state they could not be demoed to the media even in a controlled environment? Three months later, who decided Apple should double down and advertise these features in a TV commercial, and promote them as a selling point of the iPhone 16 lineup — not just any products, but the very crown jewels of the company and the envy of the entire industry — when those features still remained in such an unfinished or perhaps even downright non-functional state that they still could not be demoed to the press? Not just couldn’t be shipped as beta software. Not just couldn’t be used by members of the press in a hands-on experience, but could not even be shown to work by Apple employees on Apple-controlled devices in an Apple-controlled environment? But yet they advertised them in a commercial for the iPhone 16, when it turns out they won’t ship, in the best case scenario, until months after the iPhone 17 lineup is unveiled?
Who said “Sure, let’s promise this” and then “Sure, let’s advertise it”? And who said “Are you crazy, this isn’t ready, this doesn’t work, we can’t promote this now?” And most important, who made the call which side to listen to? Presumably, that person was Tim Cook.
[…]
It’s easy to imagine someone in the executive ranks arguing “We need to show something that only Apple can do.” But it turns out they announced something Apple couldn’t do. And now they look so out of their depth, so in over their heads, that not only are they years behind the state-of-the-art in AI, but they don’t even know what they can ship or when. Their headline features from nine months ago not only haven’t shipped but still haven’t even been demonstrated, which I, for one, now presume means they can’t be demonstrated because they don’t work.
jeanlucp:
Wow. As an ex employee, this will create a tsunami. Good for you. We all felt this way. It’s all smoke and mirrors. They don’t have a serious plan. Siri should have been everyone’s wake up call. Your framing around “credibility” was excellent and just might move mountains. Hope so.
Sebastiaan de With:
Ex-MobileMe team here. This was a brutal time.
It was so bad that when he presented iCloud onstage, Steve said “I know what you’re thinking: why should I trust them? They’re the ones who gave us MobileMe!”
Ben Lovejoy:
Gruber has never been an Apple shill – he has voiced criticisms of the company on many occasions – but he has been someone who clearly has a close relationship with the iPhone maker. He’s one of a number of friendly ears Apple uses from time-to-time to help get a message out. So when Gruber goes thermonuclear in this way, that’s no small thing.
Nick Farina:
I’ve read Daring Fireball for 23 years and he has never come close to this level of criticism about the company. It reads like an obituary, and I agree with every word.
Ben Thompson:
Nailed it
Ryan Jones:
Alarm bells have rung in Cupertino. Their reaction sets the tenor.
Dave B.:
I think a lot of people are missing the point of Gruber’s piece.
The problem here isn’t that Apple Intelligence is bad/behind. That’s a symptom.
The problem is that the culture at Apple is broken and Apple has devolved into a company that will lie and promote mediocrity.
Zac Alan Cichy:
The road I’d have preferred?
“AI is early, but we’re all over it. Right now a lot of these early products don’t deliver at the quality and standards our customers expect. We’re focused on what matters to our customers, today.”
Eric Schwarz:
Rewatching the keynote after reading Gruber’s post jogged my memory and while I still have no interest in many of those features, it really does seem like Apple sold everyone a bill of goods.
With this failure, longstanding bugs, products like the Vision Pro that can’t justify their existence, and even the general arrogance towards regulators worldwide, Apple needs to step back and reflect why some of its biggest supporters have been so vocal lately. The company may still be successful on paper, but it does feel similar to the ineptitude that eventually led to the “bad” days in the ’90s.
M.G. Siegler:
My own mistake was that I assumed I would see it and that it would still suck. I did not expect not to see it. That’s the surprise here to me. Apple touted vaporware on stage.
[…]
Some believe this change may be related to security. Because this is Apple’s AI — Siri — handling your very personal data stored on your devices, there’s a far greater risk than with more “general” AI services, the thinking goes. It’s possible, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple uses that as an excuse/rationale regardless, as it fits their overall narrative well. But I think it’s just as likely — if not more so — that such features simply don’t work. That Siri simply doesn’t work. Again.
[…]
Yes, I was holding out hope that the innovations behind AI would start to slow enough that Apple could be the one to best productize such advances. But we’re not there yet. And so, in a weird way, it still feels as if Apple is too early in AI, at least for them.
They clearly — clearly — felt pressured by Wall Street into rushing Apple Intelligence out the door. Cook can say he doesn’t “consider the bloody ROI” all he wants, he obviously does at least somewhat!
Juli Clover:
According to Kuo, Apple is already aware of Apple Intelligence’s “underwhelming performance,” and has provided suppliers with conservative iPhone shipment forecasts as a result.
Amy Worrall (Mastodon):
No, the smart Siri will need buy-in from developers. Devs will tell the system about nouns and verbs that their apps know about — the semantics of the app’s data model objects, and the actions users can take upon them. Additionally, using this structured data, apps will tell the system what the user is doing right now, thus providing the context that Siri can become aware of. It’s all built on top of the existing Intents and UserActivities that apps have already been using to integrate with Shortcuts, Spotlight, and a bunch of other bits of the system. But using those is optional, and even for an app that’s got a head start, the new supercharged versions will require extra work to adopt.
I suspect Apple was hoping that, by pre-announcing what’s coming, devs would rush to adopt these intents, so when smart Siri does ship, there’d be a bunch of apps ready for it. After all, if Apple shipped a user-facing feature that didn’t do anything yet because apps hadn’t adopted it, that wouldn’t be a good look either.
I don’t think that this was the entire reason for the pre-announcement, and nor do I think the pre-announcement was made with conscious knowledge that this delay would come. I see it more as something that might have tipped the balance slightly on an already contentious internal decision, and that it went hand in hand with a bit of naïve optimism about what could be accomplished in time.
However, even the APIs didn’t ship to developers until iOS 18.4 (which is still in beta).
max oakland:
Apple will need devs to buy in to their new tech. Too bad they spent the last decade + crapping all over devs
Goodwill isn’t just a nice thing. It’s self serving too. Apple forgot that in their rush to squeeze every dime from every person they could.
mtconleyuk:
Don’t really care about Apple Intelligence, don’t really care about ChatGPT, don’t really care about the whole AI bullshit fest, other than that it has the potential to destroy education, literacy, numeracy, and the planetary ecosystem. Those concerns aside, however, I do care that Apple management have caved to the hype to the extent that they feel they have to lie about this shit or they’ll be ‘left behind’.
Kaveh:
Something I haven't really seen anyone touch on relates to an example you point to in this article where Siri takes action for you across apps ala ”Send the email I drafted to April and Lilly”
Do you really trust Siri to do that? I don’t. I still have a hard time talking to Siri and trusting that it interpreted me correctly. At this point, I don't understand why they don't leave it behind and rebrand.
Trust is earned. Siri lacks trust.
Bicycle For Your Mind:
Reminded me of a Guy Kawasaki concept call “bozosity.” I think Apple is afflicted with that.
Om Malik:
I have my own explanation, something my readers are familiar with, and it is the most obvious one. Just as Google is trapped in the 10-blue-link prison, which prevents it from doing something radical, Apple has its own golden handcuffs. It’s a company weighed down by its market capitalization and what stock market expects from it.
They lack the moral authority of Steve Jobs to defy the markets, streamline their product lineup, and focus the company. Instead, they do what a complex business often does: they do more. Could they have done a better job with iPadOS? Should Vision Pro receive more attention?
The answer to all those is yes. Apple has become a complex entity that can’t seem to ever have enough resources to provide the real Apple experience. What you get is “good enough.” And most of the time, I think it is enough – because what others have on the market is worse. They know how to build great hardware; it’s the software where they falter.
Matt Birchler:
Another thing that came to mind for me recently is how many misses Apple has had with marketing in the past 12 months. Things started with the iPad Pro ad where they destroyed tons of creative tools, which people did not react well to, and Apple soon apologized for. Then there were the Apple Intelligence ads that were celebrating people being shitty employees and spouses with AI to trick people into thinking they were competent and loving. And now we have Apple pulling one of their premiere ads from the internet because it advertises an iPhone 16 feature that they have confirmed will not ship until at least the iPhone 17 is released later this year. It’s simply the sort of messiness I’m not used to seeing from Apple.
Rob Jonson:
If the iPhone was a properly open computer - then other folks would have figured out how to provide an amazing assistant.
Apple wouldn’t be in control - but their platform would be stronger - and their devices more valuable to own.
Previously:
Update (2025-03-14): Joe Rosensteel:
Apple very rarely has the time to refine anything they ship. Version one of a thing tends to stick around for a long time with only extras bolted on, or omitted, because the people involved are simply too busy for a second pass. Because the bar to ship quality software is so low, and the need to revise quickly is nearly nonexistent, there was never any chance that they’d meet expectations for the robust features Apple was promising.
Let’s review what Apple actually shipped as Apple Intelligence.
[…]
This takes us to another thing about Visual Intelligence: you can’t run Visual Intelligence on a photo that you already took. Unlike a Google image search, or similar, it will only accept your fake shutter button non-photos as input. Again, this is worse than existing products.
[…]
So, just in that little run-through, you can hopefully see what I see. The problem isn’t just “More Personalized Siri” not shipping, the problem is what did ship, and what that portends for all future releases. Software quality is out the window, so for “More Personalized Siri” to not meet the low bar of something like Visual Intelligence…
[…]
The only thing they did with Siri in the past year that was significant was add the new visual language for Siri. I believe every Apple pundit under the sun has been in agreement that that was a huge mistake because it signaled change where there was no meaningful change.
Nick Heer:
Note how the “Cafe Grenel” ad involves what I take to be the simplest version of personalized Siri, and even that is unable to be shown to the press.
[…]
If Apple could demonstrate a more functional Siri, I imagine it would have done so by now. That feels like the bare minimum and it seems not even that modest Spotlight-based improvement is able to be shown.
[…]
I do not trust Siri and, right now, I also do not trust Apple to tell me what the status is with Siri, either.
Jesper:
My thought after leaving this to fester a bit is that Apple today is focused on being Apple, and some might say on staying Apple. Apple before was focused on building products.
There's an NBC Brian Williams interview with Steve Jobs from 2006 which elucidates this; rather than quoting exact lines, Brian tries to corner Steve into seeing his silhouette as a captain of industry in the annals of history, and Steve is very uncomfortable because he just wants to go on to do the next thing. (And notes that a lot of products are just "technology in search of a problem".)
The things John Gruber noted, pretty much to a T, would not have been issues if Apple was all about just building the product. Most of the hot water that Apple is in, no matter what the reason, it wouldn't be in if it was not first focused on being Apple.
Tim Bray:
I think he’s overthinking it. What happened was, Board-level people and Wall Street both yelled the same thing at Tim Cook: “Make grandiose AI announcements or your share price goes down.” In 2025 capitalism, those voices can’t be ignored or resisted. So they made the announcement.
John Gruber:
That’s what makes this whole thing so inexplicable to me. What’s the point of building up so much capital -- both literal cash and figurative faith -- if not to use it to hold one’s fire when catching up
AAPL was the most valuable company in the world a year ago. They had no need to overpromise and risk underdelivering.
Pierre Igot:
The thing about John Gruber’s “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino” is that it fails to link the Apple Intelligence fiasco to the general level of decrepitude of Apple’s software offerings. There are so many bugs in Apple’s software these days that it is simply impossible to trust that they might be able to build a tool that, say, can RELIABLY respond to requests such as “Add this address to their contact card”.
Something IS indeed rotten in the State of Cupertino, but that rot is not new. To me, it feels like the Apple Intelligence fiasco is the accumulation of Apple’s software failures over the past 10-15 years finally coming to a head. They are just not very good at making software anymore.
See also: Jim Dalrymple and Dithering.
Update (2025-03-17): Rui Carmo:
The main issue I have with Apple Intelligence is that all the features that have been surfaced so far (except perhaps Writing Tools, which can actually be a powerful accessibility enabler) are utterly pointless, and even if Private Cloud Compute seems like a major technical achievement to the uninitiated, there are loads of confidential computing solutions out there right now.
But here’s another thing: any confidential AI computing solution, regardless of how it manages context and compute, requires a working AI model–preferably one smarter than the one powering Writing Tools. And Apple has, so far, shown zero public interest in creating the kind of frontier models that people like me deal with on a daily basis.
I initially thought that their punting on some replies and deferring to ChatGPT was a way to defer accountability (although they had no compunction in having “older” Siri defer to Wolfram Alpha, something that seems to have stopped), but now I think that Apple is simply incapable (or, most likely, unwilling) to invest in training their own large-scale models and is sticking to gemma and phi grade on-device SLMs for the time being.
[…]
Just go into Shortcuts and check what actions you can automate in any of Apple’s core apps (at least the ones that seem relevant to me in the context of a “Smarter Siri”)[…] There is pretty much zero “public” API surface to do anything remotely like what Apple Intelligence requires to fulfill its promises where it regards context awareness or application actions. […] As someone who relied a lot on e-mail plugins until Apple effectively killed them, still tries to use JXA and Shortcuts to automate their workflows and bore witness to AppleScript’s progressive demise over the years, I’d say Apple not just painted themselves into a corner here, but they did that to themselves due to their general neglect of macOS and iOS foundational technology.
Nick Heer:
Would any of this happened during the live keynote era? Sure, Apple had to contend with the many issues of prototype iPhones for the Macworld 2007 presentation — there were lots of iPhones onstage because memory management was so poor that Jobs would likely need to switch units several times, and the network connectivity was fudged to work more reliably. But it was real.
treblewoe (Threadreader):
So how is the current mess Tim’s fault? Doing something well doesn’t require being first, and Apple seldom has been in the past. Two reasons: profit margins vs. product headroom, and HW vs. SW lead times to pivot. Tim screwed Apple on both counts by being incredibly greedy.
[…]
That $800 iPhone 15 you bought nine months ago will never be able to use AI because it only has 6GB of RAM. […] How much did Tim Cook profit by holding back 2GB from your $800 phone? $3-5 tops. That is one half of one percent profit margin, a rounding error.
This is exactly why Tim is always talking about “customer sat[isfaction].” As long as people say they’re alright with whatever they have, he can convince the gullible board the products are good. But that’s not how any of this works, and we all know it.
[…]
It will be SEVEN YEARS before Apple can ship any AI models that are larger than 2GB which will work on all supported iPhones. And 2GB models are a joke, no matter how clever they get implementing them (MoE)
Manton Reece:
But what if Apple has discovered that it’s not actually possible? AI is entirely new, with new requirements that stress the limits of hardware. Apple is attempting to cram a clever intermingling of data and Siri features into 8 GB of RAM. As a comparison, the largest version of DeepSeek R1 can only be run on a brand new Mac Studio with the M3 Ultra and 512 GB of RAM.
Apple does have an out if on-device models fall over: private cloud compute. But scaling that out to hundreds of millions of iPhone users goes well beyond what Apple had presumed was needed when they talked last year about ramping up production of M2-based servers for AI.
Marc Kalmes:
While I do not care much about Apple Intelligence, other products get worse and that affects me every day.
I’m a long-time user of Fantastical to manage my personal and professional calendars. When macOS 15 was announced, I had the idea to test the new Calendar.app and see if I could live with just the default calendar. After upgrading to macOS 15, I noticed that one of my calendars had a warning symbol and informed me that calendar events couldn’t be refreshed. When macOS 15.1 didn’t fix the issue, I contacted Apple. After many hours of debugging and assembling logs, to this day, Calendar.app still can’t sync my events.
Filipe Espósito:
We shouldn’t worry about having major software updates every year. Instead, it would be great if Apple engineers had more time to fix things before moving on with new features. Apple needs another Snow Leopard.
Riccardo Mori:
What I find involuntarily funny in this specific wave of criticism is that for some of these people this has been the straw that broke the camel’s back when it comes to Apple breaking trust and bullshitting their customers and user base.
Siri is the epitome of overpromising and underdelivering in Apple’s history.
[…]
I have given Cook the benefit of the doubt a lot of times, and I’m not putting the blame entirely on him, but for me that something in the State of Cupertino which is rotten now has been rotting for years under Cook’s tenure.
The trajectory taken by user interface design, system software quality and first-party software production has been on a steady decline since… let’s say 2014, with the advent of Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite.
[…]
Under Jobs, Apple was rather selective regarding the markets they wanted to be participating in. Under Cook, there’s this constant urge of being present everywhere, whether with a product or a service. Consequence: many more internal departments popping up, more managers micromanaging, more secrecy and fear of leaks probably leading to worse interdepartmental communication, more resource fragmentation. And we see design choices that seem more like the result of too many people having a say, or product directions dictated by teams not directly involved in the product, and so forth.
Marcin Krzyzanowski:
I keep hearing stories like that: apple is understaffed
Dave DeLong:
Every single team is understaffed. It’s almost become a joke amongst engineers how understaffed teams are.
[…]
A lot of it is the inertia of corporate culture from Steve’s purge when coming back from NeXT and the difficulty in getting budget allocated to hire more people.
Óscar Morales Vivó:
Some teams are understaffed some are not. The ones that are understaffed rarely do much of anything about it.
I hear the Messages team is 3-4 times the size it was when I left. What are all those people doing, I can’t know. But I’d bet $20 it involves the interest payments for 25 years of tech debt.
David Pierce:
On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk about exactly where things went wrong with Siri[…]
Previously:
Update (2025-03-24): Riccardo Mori:
Software-wise, well, I have a bit of a bias, having used Macs since 1989. I clearly know the Mac (and iOS/iPadOS) ecosystem and software selection far better than any other platform. But in recent years I’ve been familiarising myself with Linux (mainly Ubuntu and Crunchbangplusplus) and have been using Windows 10 and 11 on my ThinkPads, my Surface Pro, and my Lenovo Legion 7i gaming laptop. And overall it’s been a pleasant experience. With hiccups here and there, but again, mostly deriving from lack of habit or familiarity. I think Windows 10 and Windows 11 have been good examples of UI improvement on Microsoft’s part. And as far as reliability goes, I’ve been using my Legion 7i gaming laptop for more than a year now, and I’ve had zero issues with Windows 11. No weird crashes, no instability, no misbehaving apps, nothing.
See also: Accidental Tech Podcast and The Talk Show.
Update (2025-03-26): M.G. Siegler:
But still, if you believe that Apple needs to do something dramatic to get back into the game, as it were, here are five ideas[…]
[…]
Just to be crystal clear, none of these deals seem particularly likely, of course. Simply because Apple, historically, has tended not to do such deals. And it’s entirely possible that they could still do some M&A in AI but that it would be a smaller, more under-the-radar deal (or a few of them). Still, if you buy the notion that such a deal wouldn’t just be about buying up a product, but instead getting a team in place to build in this space (and perhaps sending a message to the market – certainly the AI talent market with each of these listed), and to shift the mentality internally at Apple, you can almost see this happening.
Update (2025-03-28): Patrick Smith (Mastodon):
A demo acts as a forcing function to produce real, working software. And preceding that was an inner forcing function of the software being demoed by its creator within Apple to Steve Jobs, who was notorious for nit-picking and finding where it broke.
[…]
Apple’s high production event videos today often introduce new features using slick motion graphics. An animated version of the UI is recreated that looks to my eyes more impressive than using the software itself. The danger is that leads to a team making an ad for software that the team creating it has yet to create.
Update (2025-04-01): Brad DeLong:
Today, I am thinking about (4): Apple Computer as a strategic actor that manipulates the situation to grab the lion's share of the surplus from the current production network. How that may bring the whole thing crashing down over the next decade. And I am wondering whether the extraordinary success at (1) and (2) of the Apple Silicon hardware project may turn out in retrospect to have been a true catastrophe. By masking the emergence of other weaknesses, it may turn out to have been a truly catastrophic success. That will turn out to be the case if the past decade has seen them grow to such a degree that by the time they became visible to those with the power to change them, they were too set in stone for that to be possible.
What were and are those weaknesses? I see them as twofold:
A belief that Apple Computer deserves to continue to see its profits compounding, via the squeezing of every single possible dollar out of Services revenue.
An enormous fear of losing control of the situation and thus becoming once again, as in the late 1990s, dependent for its very existence on the goodwill of other companies—companies that could and would squash it like a bug if not for the vicissitudes of short run, profit-potential and long-run antitrust-enforcement fear.
Update (2025-04-07): Tyler Brandt:
Former Apple employee, left because there is zero focus on making a good product and 100% focus on politics and value extraction from the company.
Extremely difficult to get fired results in a many people literally just hanging out and collecting checks.
If you start to actually get something done they throw things in your way to slow you down and stop you so they don’t look bad.
It will rot from the inside out.
Update (2025-04-21): Hartley Charlton (video):
Daring Fireball’s John Gruber joins us on this week’s episode of The MacRumors Show to discuss Apple Intelligence and the future of the company.
We talk through the reaction to John’s influential “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino” piece on Daring Fireball, which pointed out that Apple’s credibility has been “damaged” by the delay in releasing key Apple Intelligence features such as personalized Siri.
App Intents Apple Apple Intelligence Apple Software Quality Artificial Intelligence Image Playground iOS iOS 18 Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Siri The Media Tim Cook Top Posts
Mark Gurman (Mastodon, MacRumors):
Apple Inc. is preparing one of the most dramatic software overhauls in the company’s history, aiming to transform the interface of the iPhone, iPad and Mac for a new generation of users.
The revamp — due later this year — will fundamentally change the look of the operating systems and make Apple’s various software platforms more consistent, according to people familiar with the effort. That includes updating the style of icons, menus, apps, windows and system buttons.
[…]
A key goal of the overhaul is to make Apple’s different operating systems look similar and more consistent. Right now, the applications, icons and window styles vary across macOS, iOS and visionOS. That can make it jarring to hop from one device to another.
I feel like we just had a major redesign, and it mostly made things worse. So, surely, there are many areas that need refinement, but this sounds like not that. With bugs everywhere and Apple Intelligence in disarray, why is Apple choosing to introduce even more chaos? Plus, they should not be doubling down on the mistaken idea that the problem with macOS is that it doesn’t look enough like iOS.
Nick Heer:
This is the same thing said by Alan Dye in introducing MacOS Big Sur’s overhaul less than five years ago: “we wanted consistency throughout the ecosystem, so users can move fluidly between their Apple devices”. I do not think this is a worthwhile goal unto itself. It is unclear to me how today’s Apple operating systems are insufficiently consistent in ways that are not beneficial to the user experience. I do not think MacOS, iOS, and VisionOS should all look and work the same because they are all used in completely different ways.
[…]
This has me excited and worried in similar measure. There are things on all of these products which could use rethinking. This could be the culmination of many years of rethinking every component and interaction to figure out what works best. But I do not think it is worth getting too hopeful for a rethink or even a reintroduction of depth and texture across Apple’s systems. This set of redesigns may be described here as “dramatic” but, given the number of users who depend on these operating systems, I doubt it will be. I do not think much re-learning will be expected, despite Gurman’s belief this will “go well beyond a new coat of paint like iOS 7”.
I am trying not to get too far in my thoughts until I see it for real, but I do not like the sound of more glassy, translucent effects. One of the most common phrases I have used in recent years of filing Apple bug reports is “insufficient contrast”. I am not optimistic that pattern will not continue.
Mario Guzmán:
“Consistency” is bullshit. Because it always tends to give way to the lowest common denominator.
Let the Mac be a Mac. Let the iPhone be an iPhone. Let the iPad be an even better iPhone. Lend to the individual strengths of each platform.
Maybe if each platform OS utilized its unique platform strengths, we wouldn’t need redesigns every 3-4 years. They’re expensive for them (and us, as devs).
They need to stop making my powerful desktop look/behave like an iPhone.
Pierre Igot:
I don’t know anyone who has ever complained that the differences between their phone’s UI and their computer’s UI made the experience of going from one device to the other “jarring”. There’s lots to complain about in iOS and in macOS, but none of it has anything to do with the fact that they are different.
John Gruber:
Gurman’s story is acting like Apple hadn’t already done this years ago.
Ben Lovejoy:
While the report is light on detail, the few clues it provide does make it sound like the upcoming software updates could almost a complete reversal of the flat look we’ve had for more than a decade …
With iOS 7, Apple ditched all the 3D and skeuomorphic elements in the UI in favor of very flat graphics which have remained in use ever since.
The report – which of course may or may not turn out to be accurate – says that the new look will be “loosely” based on visionOS.
Please not the circular app icons.
Joe Rossignol:
Israeli website The Verifier was first to report about the potential visionOS-like redesign, but it said the changes were coming in iOS 18. It is possible that this report was accurate about the details, but wrong about the timeframe.
Then, earlier this year, Jon Prosser claimed that iOS 19 will feature a redesigned Camera app. In a video uploaded to his YouTube channel Front Page Tech, he shared renders of the app's alleged new design, revealing translucent menus and other visionOS-like elements. He speculated that the changes could extend to the Home Screen and beyond.
[…]
At a minimum, you can expect iOS 19 to have a more simplified and translucent appearance, if these rumors are true.
John Gruber:
Basic idea is something very much akin to the look and feel of VisionOS, but brought to the Camera app, and perhaps throughout the entire system (or just parts of it) in iOS 19. Seems cool, seems fresh, and seems aligned with where Apple has been heading.
M.G. Siegler:
Some recent iPadOS tweaks seem awfully visionOS-inspired. Same with some of the Apple Intelligence elements – well, the parts Apple has managed to ship, at least. And certainly Apple’s new Invites software follows some of these new paradigms. And it’s undoubtedly not a coincidence, as Parker Ortolani pointed out last month, that an entirely new app created by Apple was built using some new design ideas.
Apple has a long history of borrowing from their newer OSes and devices to extend older ones – just think about how much of iOS/iPadOS and even macOS started with watchOS ideas. While Apple may maintain that they absolutely positively do not want to merge the Mac and the iPad, they’ve essentially been doing so through software UI regardless.
Craig Hockenberry:
If Apple modifies the look of platform user interfaces, I’m guessing that SwiftUI will play a huge part in a successful transition.
[…]
Those of you who have been digging around in UIKit to accomplish things will have regrets.
[…]
Similarly, if you’ve been building apps with all kinds of wild design elements to make them look cool, you’re going to a bit of a rude awakening.
Those of us who were around for [iOS 7] and Aqua remember exactly what that felt like 😀
Steve Troughton-Smith:
I figured that was the case before the launch of visionOS, but that turned out to be UIKit all the way down and neither SwiftUI nor UIKit had any particular advantage for matching new system UI. And that was a whole new platform.
I really don't think it's going to be the case this time, either. Any SwiftUI app striving for high quality is going to have just as much of a pain in the ass working across both old and new styles as native code.
Only vanilla apps will have it easy.
what is almost guaranteed, by the unforgiving yearly cycle and the engineering effort otherwise wasted on AI, is that any major redesign in 2025 is not going to have anywhere near enough resources or time in the oven, so I expect a lot of pain and churn over the summer no matter which UI framework you choose
Amy Worrall:
Rumours: Apple are redesigning their operating systems
Us: Oh god, please no!
Twenty years ago, we’d have heard this and been excited for what delights it would bring. These days, not so much.
Cabel Sasser:
To these veteran Mac coders, the reaction to Aqua was universally negative. People were actively very angry. It’s a waste! It’s ugly! It’s confusing! How could you. It went on and on, and I was surprised because Aqua looked cool and fun to me.
John Gruber:
The Aqua look and feel was definitely polarizing. And Apple dialed back its most exuberant details with each subsequent Mac OS X update — less transparency, subtler pinstripes (pinstripes!), etc. But iOS 7 was equally polarizing, and its excesses also got dialed back (or perhaps better, said, dialed back up) with each successive iOS release — a little more depth, some subtle hints of texture.
Either Apple is never going to ship an altogether new UI theme, or they’ll ship one and a large number of people will declare it utter garbage and proof that Apple has completely lost its way.
Why does that have to be the cycle? Why can’t they iterate internally and ship something that’s more refined instead of a design at the outset that’s obviously too much? Why do they have to throw out the old design soon after its excesses have mostly been fixed? It’s the same modus operandi as forcing an annual major OS release so that new features and bugs are being introduced just as the next major version goes into beta. It’s a treadmill that never arrives at a polished version.
CM Harrington:
I want to be on record saying that iOS7 and later still sucks in comparison to having actual buttons and other affordances.
Same with this ‘courageous’ new world of overloaded titlebars, overflow menus, and touch-centric controls on a mouse-centric UI.
Sure, maybe that wasn’t 20 years ago, but aside from System 7 to MacOS 8, and classic to OSX (the bones were good), Apple has been terrible at UI changes.
Scott:
Am I the only one who sees the news that Apple is having SIGNIFICANT problems with A.I./Siri running head first into the news that Apple is planning a significant UI/UX change with iOS 19/macOS 16?
Is everyone at Apple on crazy pills?? Last thing we need is MOAR upheaval.
Alex:
I am just wanting a new snow leopard release where they just stop features and actually fix stuff so it works
Jeff Johnson:
Besides destroying the interface for users, every Apple OS redesign creates a massive amount of unpaid make-work for 3rd party developers.
Steve Troughton-Smith:
I dunno about other developers, but I’m not sure I have the energy to redesign all my apps this year if iOS is getting an iOS-7-style revamp 😐
Sean Heber:
Not exactly looking forward to that. Still haven't fully recovered from the psychic wounds of the iOS 7 redesign, tbh.
Isaiah Carew:
if i imagine all of macOS redesigned from the ground up with the same user hostile thoughtlessness of the System Settings…
…maybe it really is the year of Linux on the desktop.
Diego Barros:
they did a shit job with System Settings, and they reckon they are now doing the whole OS?
Kyle Hughes:
As if the SwiftUI community isn’t fragmented enough, wait until SwiftUI × iOS 19 is using a different design language 🙂
John Gruber (Mastodon):
If that’s the way it works out — with a new visual look drawing attention from lackluster progress on the AI front — surely the timing will be coincidental, but some accidents are happy accidents, as Bob Ross used to say.
[…]
There should be no question that all of what Lovejoy is saying here is true. If Apple launches an all-new systemwide UI theme for iOS 19, something even half as radical a change as iOS 7’s theme was, it will be the only thing most users notice or opine about.
[…]
Part of what makes Apple Apple is that the company is (or at least should be) led by people who both have great taste and trust their own instincts.
Jeff Johnson:
No, John, Apple was the company led by people who have great taste.
There is literally NOBODY remaining in Apple leadership who has great taste.
Reminder that Federighi thought the Catalyst apps got really good in the Catalina public beta and likes the new System Settings.
Gus Mueller:
Gripe #47853 of UI things on the Mac / from Apple slipping through QA.
This button is colored blue and looks like it would absolutely be the default button, but pressing return / enter does not activate it.
Mario Guzmán:
A lot of Mac apps coming out of Apple these days no longer behave like Mac apps. Is it SwiftUI? Is it Mac Catalyst? Not sure because at least in AppKit, it would just be standard out-of-the-box default behavior for this key button to accept return/enter from the keyboard.
You may think we’re being cynical or overreacting but this is now death by a thousand papercuts and we’re just not used to this being life-long Mac users (me since the 90s).
freediverx:
While the Apple Intelligence fiasco is recent, I’ve been complaining about the decline of Apple’s software for ten years.
It’s not just quality control, sloppiness, and inconsistency, but fundamentally bad user interface design glazed with inadequate AI features.
Previously:
Update (2025-03-14): Craig Grannell:
Not looking forward to this, because it inevitably means months of interfaces that haven’t been tested for vestibular disorders and other accessibility issues. I just hope the problems don’t last as long as they did for iOS 7, which caused all kinds of issues for countless users.
Also, it’s never complete, is it? macOS and iOS are the interface equivalents of that XKCD standards cartoon.
Steve Streza:
Apple will have a hard time convincing the world to redesign apps with translucent Vista glass everywhere (and not just because of all the developer goodwill they’ve burned lately). The iOS 7 redesign, for all its problems, was following the tide. Apps were already moving toward flat design because it’s simpler to build tooling for the triumvirate of iOS, Android, and web.
“Design for the platform first” would’ve been great, but outside of indie space, it lost to Figma and design systems.
See also: Accidental Tech Podcast.
Update (2025-03-17): Marcin Krzyzanowski:
At Apple our team made no user testing, no user studies and we shipped a whole system app to 500M+ iPhones
that live rent free in my head when i hear about apple redoing ios ui in 2025
Michael Burkhardt:
Now, Bloomberg reports that Apple executives are “confident” that users will love this visionOS-inspired design.
According to Gurman, the overhauls for iOS 19, iPadOS 19, and macOS 16 go “well beyond a fresh coat of paint,” and will “alter the way people interact with their devices for many years to come.”
The redesigns, which will span across Apple’s biggest platforms, will take inspiration from Apple’s latest platform, visionOS[…]
Mario Guzmán:
More “familiar”?
By giving all OSes the look and feel of an OS (visionOS) that hardly anyone has? Got it.
Jeff Barbose:
just what the world needs, low-contrast UI that’s also translucent, where touch targets are all the same shape: round.
David Smith:
I’ve decided that it is essential that I develop a practice of optimism to navigate this complicated season in the Apple developer world.
Optimism isn’t enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a feeling, optimism is a choice. I have much less of the enthusiastic feelings these days about my relationship to Apple and its technologies (discussed here on Under the Radar 312), but I can still choose to optimistically look for the positives in any situation.
[…]
So with that in mind…here are six positive reasons for optimism about a possible major redesign coming to iOS 19.
Update (2025-04-01): Mark Gurman:
Solarium is the codename for the iOS 19 and macOS 16 redesigns - explains a lot about what’s to come.
Update (2025-04-08): Joe Rossignol:
The video contains re-created renders of iOS 19, which are allegedly based on real footage of the software update, provided by sources within Apple. Overall, iOS 19 is expected to have a more glass-like, visionOS-inspired design, with added translucency for user interface elements like buttons, menus, notifications, and more.
The most notable new detail in today’s video is that Front Page Tech host Jon Prosser now believes that iOS 19 will feature rounder app icons, although he is not sure if they will be entirely circular like they are on visionOS.
So far this is looking like a new coat of ugly paint rather than a rethinking.
Steve Troughton-Smith:
It’s really unwise to make conclusions based on early builds, if any of this is true. So many things are hidden behind a web of feature flags that don’t make sense individually until they all come together. All that you can take out of this is that change is afoot.
Design Icons iOS iOS 19 Mac macOS 16 Rumor SwiftUI visionOS visionOS 2
