The Fallen Apple
Matt Gemmell (Mastodon, Hacker News):
Executives, experts, engineers, and designers are all leaving for more lucrative positions at even less scrupulous companies. Apple is currently the GUI laughing stock of the industry, a position once firmly held by Microsoft for decades, and the walking-back of poor decisions in followup point-releases has become normal. Liquid Glass is the sort of folly that was once limited to portfolio pieces and fanciful blog posts, complete with clumsy attempts to replicate Apple’s style of marketing copy; pretty little animations that showed as much inexperience in UX as they did proficiency in Photoshop. Now, these missteps come from the company itself.
[…]
Interface designers must have the same maxim as doctors: primum non nocere, and Apple could previously always be relied upon to remember and demonstrate it. Those days are apparently gone for now, replaced with whim and indulgence; tech demos canonised by whatever shoehorning is necessary. Putting aside the ugliness, and both inaptness and ineptness of the implementation, the largest problem with Liquid Glass is that it is so damned ominous. It portends, or perhaps reveals, a rot; an erosion in the core where Apple has always been distinct and steadfast.
[…]
The thing is, for now at least, none of this seems to matter, because the investors are happy. Apple is the gold standard for hyper-profitability and predatory monetisation. Huge margins, hardware which runs only their own operating systems, operating systems that run only approved software (with even the Mac creeping ever-closer to an iOS-style lockdown), and software which pays its tithe to Cupertino at every stage. Leverage upon leverage, incompatible with our quaint old-world perceptions of ownership, so long as the money flows.
[…]
The company feels like a performance of itself[…]
Unlike him, I think Apple’s hardware is mostly going fine, but I agree with the general thrust that Apple’s success has hidden problems. The last line really resonates. At times, the company seems like a cargo cult, repeating mantras from a previous era without actually following them and applying the same strategies as before even though they no longer make sense.
We are experiencing a period of great angst in the Apple community, and most of it is the result of Tim Cook’s leadership. Cook has done a tremendous job over the years, building on Apple’s success and taking the company to new heights. For years, the Macalope skewered pundits who suggested Cook was a failure for not delivering a product as successful as the iPhone, as if it were reasonable to suggest he deliver another once-in-a-lifetime product. Cook’s tenure has been one of mature, stable stewardship, and over the more than decade and a half he’s led the company, Apple continued to ship hits like the Apple Watch and AirPods.
The problem is that we didn’t get stable stewardship. Apple’s software and developer relations fell apart on his watch.
The Apple indie dev community is undergoing an identity crisis. For decades, whatever Apple said was good, was good. People mostly agreed with their ethics, design priorities, way of doing business.
Now that all of that has, well, severely degraded, it leaves us in the dark. The north star is gone.
See also: Warner Crocker, Dare Obasanjo, Kevin Renskers, Matt Gemmell.
Previously:
- Sebastiaan de With Rejoining Apple
- Apple’s Q1 2026 Results
- Liquid Glass Disbelief
- Apple Succession Planning
- Design Is How It Works
- The Tim Cook Era
- Apple Turnaround
- Soured
- Rotten
3 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Old farts like me will rememeber the iBook G4, a marvel in repairability and sturdiness. I had that machine running well into the Intel era, replacing defective keyboards, worn out batteries and bugged drives all by myself. Today if look a Macbook wrong it may not boot anymore, even if you have an external drive, so... Yeah. I don't think the hardware is good enough anymore. It's pretty and fully featured, sure, but sturdy and reliable? I would want to use my expensive piece of hardware without having the fear of it breaking apart for no reason, specially with the outrageous repair prices that Apple bills. And Apple Care is just ransom, a "give us more money or else" type of business. Thanks, but no thanks.
Cargo cult is a good description and I think was one of the things that makes people have such a visceral reaction to Dye. Not only was he the one who proudly brought us this disaster, he kept quoting Steve Jobs while he was doing it. Almost literal insult to injury.
Also:
"Liquid Glass is the sort of folly that was once limited to portfolio pieces and fanciful blog posts, complete with clumsy attempts to replicate Apple’s style of marketing copy; pretty little animations that showed as much inexperience in UX as they did proficiency in Photoshop."
Ouch, this was brutal. The saddest thing to me is that I agree completely.
