Was I wrong about Gruber or is this a proverbial canary in the coal mine?
I'll add that the blue one doesn't even look like a wrench. I know that the old icons are dated and need to go, but the new ones are just bad.
To be frank, Apple earns (earned?) the majority of its applause.
It's not a nit that has to be picked, but it does dim Apple's "whoa, they thought that through?" aura.
Edit: So, upon doing some more inspection, it looks like Apple's Script Editor already does use this fallen-over paper. So that should challenge our assumptions about what the rotation may or may not mean as a portent for Apple's design competency. https://help.apple.com/assets/65DFB44F6D920677C90E20C9/65DFB...
This is where I'm at with Apple at the moment.
I know this sounds crazy or stupid, and people on reddit made sure to tell me as much, but the recent iOS, macOS, and watchOS betas have actually caused me to abandon the Apple ecosystem. As far as I'm concerned, there isn't one bird dead, but a whole bunch of birds. I suppose I'm a little more sensitive than Gruber. I find the design language (or lack thereof?) in Apple's recent work to be largely void of life, inspiration, purpose, craft, or anything else I'd come to expect over the last 25 years of using their platform. The quality in terms of performance, efficiency, bugs, intuitive user interfaces, and so on has been dropping for years now. The last OS revision is exemplary of this decline in a deeply concerning way.
I've been so disheartened by things like this, and I'm confident it represents the end of an era so to speak, that I've already come to terms with it and started moving off of Apple's ecosystem.
For me, the move is a matter of pursuing systems which allow me a bit more freedom. Apple has restricted me in ways that I permitted for decades now, but I permitted it because the compromise was worth it. I don't see it being worth it in 5 or 10 years, so I'm starting the transition now. I sold my watch, gave away my iPhone, and started shopping for a ThinkPad.
It's hard to give up macOS and Apple hardware (the value prop has become kind of insane, really), but seeing their recent OS work takes the sting away. I'd love to see them recognize their mistakes and correct course, but... I don't think I'm their target customer anymore, frankly. The people who think I'm an idiot on reddit are their target market, I suppose. That's fine. I'll learn to love Linux and Windows for different reasons and regain some privacy and control over my machines.
My family will certainly stay on Apple's ecosystem.
> Apps that haven’t been updated with Tahoe-compliant everything-fits-in-a-squircle icons are put in “squircle jail” — their non-Tahoe-compliant icons are shrunk and placed atop a drab gray Tahoe squircle background, to force them into squircle compliance.
I've been replacing some app icons with their older, non-square versions for years (Firefox is probably my favorite). Will be disappointing to lose that option -- I've never understood why Apple feels the need to standardize app icons like this.
But from where I'm sitting, everyone else is doing what Apple's doing times 100. The latest Windows releases are aesthetically groetesque, both Google and Microsoft are trying to jam chatbots into everything, both Windows and Android are jammed full of ads and nagging "suggestions" to try some useless feature. Now Google is cracking down on Android sideloading.
Desktop Linux I guess? I don't have time for that, and the hardware is so much worse than a MacBook.
There's simply no winning, unfortunately.
might have been better off simply going with the bolt metaphor, sans wrench, even though it's less apparent... though the squircle also kind of fights with other shapes as containers
the old stethoscope on a disk icon is super cheesy, but at least it means something
Your comment makes it seem like Gruber is a big critic of Liquid Glass like many commenters on HN are, but that's not the case. He's certainly critical of some of the execution details like icons or translucency that can hinder reading, but his stance on it is pretty nuanced leaning toward cautiously optimistic.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/09/apple-intro-liq...
The icons for Leopard-era programs were outstanding. Look at that dark indigo ink jar for Pages, or that wormhole graphic for Time Machine. The comforting smooth grey gradient of window title bars, contrasted with the large, globular traffic light buttons. A typeface that worked well with the lower-resolution displays of the time, and unique icons for everything at every single size. Apple actually had a massive human interface guidelines document, which was promptly binned with Yosemite.
On Windows, that dark blue Start orb and the cool dark task bar, signalling a whole new OS experience. The new Welcome Centre. Freshly rewritten programs and new ones like Windows Media Player and Windows Photo Viewer, and the absolute beauty that was the Windows Media Centre. Flip 3D, customising the glass window borders, and the huge, high-resolution 512 × 512 icons of the high-quality, no-ads games shipped with Windows Vista and 7, which still stand up to this day.
Happy to die on this hill defending this opinion.
To me this post sounds like a typical "Steve Jobs wouldn't do this" nonsense.
I've recently (finally) managed to purge the last instance of Windows from my life when I replaced Windows on my gaming desktop with Linux. So I've got Linux on the (gaming) desktop, a Steam Deck and Debian stable on a server, which is great.
But I mean, that covers my home office? I still need a phone (iPhone), a smart watch (Apple Watch) and while not critical, certainly adds a lot of value for me. The things that connects to the TV (AppleTV) is the best of all I've tried when compared to any other type of solution (Firestick, Chrome Cast, Home Media Server, Built-in TV Smarts). I've also got an M4 MacBook for dev, which is frankly fantastic when compared to whatever other hardware I could get here in NZ and would involve going back to Windows anyway?
So I mean, what are the actual valid options really? Apple still offer great devices and the integrations between them are the best on the market imo.
Perhaps in a perfect world Pine64 devices would be rock solid and I could run Linux everywhere, but failing that, what else ya gunna do?
For all it's flaws: Vista was a truly breathtakingly beautiful operating system. I still remember fondly the matte frosted dark tinted hue from the start menu and the strong deep red of the shutdown button. Everything shimmered and refracted, with almost a tactile feel. My first iPhone felt like I was interacting beyond the current dimension, the retina display with the skeumorphic design made it feel like I wasn't just interacting with software, I was interacting with another digital world... and my first Macbook was similar; every application was gorgeously rendered natively: something even Windows couldn't manage despite having the lions share of developers.
All this, on LCD panels that were comically abysmal compared to the colour accuracy of the displays we take for granted today, and with less than a quarter of the pixels.
The thing is: I think the same issue plagues software also, that when it becomes a place where good money can be made, you attract people who want to make money and, by necessity, push out all the people who were there for the passion.
Diminishing quality of art and engineering sort of go hand-in-hand if MBAs need to make room for themselves and set up fiefdoms.
At this point, does it need that residual variation or is this just adding noise? Also, a shape inside a shape inside a shape inside a shape isn't anything anyone is likely to parse – how many bits of information is this? So maybe just go with a simple default wrench icon for all of them?
As many others have said elsewhere in these comments, Apple has been stagnating in quality for a long time. Even the Jobs-era iPhones were buggier than anyone inside the Reality Distortion Field (and most of the tech press at the time) would admit. I'd have to really squint to think of anything good that came from bringing iPhone tech to the Mac.
All that said, the sorts of things I need a computer for have been a mostly-solved problem, by Apple, for most of this millennium. There were year-on-year improvements in the early years of X, but I can't tell you the last Mac feature that made me go "OMG I want that."
Unfortunately, the "by Apple" part of that sentence is load-bearing. So far as I can tell, desktop Linux is still largely the work of hobbyists on GitHub. I don't expect there to be a unified design philosophy, and I do expect it to need constant tweaking to get each package to work how I'd like and to keep them working with one another.
Even if Apple's desktops have been stagnating for at least as long as they've been naming them after landmarks, I don't know of an alternative that's worth the effort of switching.
Maybe. Some developers get really passionate about their work and try hard. The results can often fail on execution, but often show signs of overthinking things, and wanting to work.
I’ve been working with a design studio on a data science domain that isn’t your every day (ag tech analytics) and I find the results really disappointing. They can make things conventionally nice. It’s better than a generative solution, yet it’s still very “conventional” and “safe”. Every time we get to a chance to do some innovative infographic, they give it a half hearted effort and then say “let’s just use words” and get all typography geeky.
Point being, my experience is that quality iconographics are not the automatic domain of the gatekeepy designer profression (to be fair, I have worked with some design people that just have a knack).
I'd say Vista introduced or changed—for the better—a ton of Windows paradigms, most of which still endure. User account control, dwm.exe and the WDDM, improved user profiles, the ribbon UI, and more. Vista had the most pervasive changes to Windows in the past two decades, from UI and UX to fundamental OS primitives, APIs, and syscalls.
Disdain levelled at Vista is unfair—it was a heavyweight OS that needed better hardware than was really commonplace at the time.
As for money now being the end game... I have no words. The stupid Weather app (sorry, no, WebView2 wrapper) on Windows 10 and 11 is exasperating.
I think only BlackBerry OS was more polished, but it had significantly fewer things that people actually wanted.
There were bugs, sure, but I was working at Nokia at the time and what was cooking us was not "the luxury brand experience" (because, that comes later): it was that Apple had gotten the software of a mini-computer right, and they executed on it really well.
Android distributors tended to throw much more powerful hardware at the problem to achieve similar results to the consistency of experience.
Even today, you look at screenshots of ios 6, and it's still timelessly beautiful. Some apps were atrocious, but you recognize them from a mile away.
As someone who lived Apple stuff were between a rock and a hard place. What we loved is dissolving away into mediocrity or worse. And we don’t like the competition better. If we did we’d already be over there.
Add in that lots of companies like to follow Apple’s design leads, for better or worse, and we’re left with nowhere to go.
So we really want the thing we liked to be good again. Or at least to stop getting worse for no good reason.
It’s more “This? You can’t even get this right? You could have left it alone and it would have been better. You have to crap up everything no matter how small with a poorly conceived bad redesign?”
Nobody. It's possible to be the best without being good.
I'm surprised a consumer-focused RedHat hasn't come along to build an offering of just-works-but-still-open devices. There are companies out there that do parts of it but nobody does the full personal device stack thing like Apple. I'm still disappointed they went the cloud route instead of everything lives on your AirPort. If I ever win the lottery ten times this is the startup I'll build.
Gruber has criticized Apple, but never to this extent.
- Form (Formal Blueprint of Ideas) vs Appearances (Actual Manifestation of Ideas) (Plato)
- Noumenal (how things are in themselves) vs Phenomenal (how things appear) (Immanuel Kant)
Gruber has been an idealistic and longtime Apple observer. This is probably why he seems to invoke the Idea of Apple to compare and critique the current Appearance of Apple.
Fascinated to see a remark on HN that reminds me of this concept in philosophy.
What I'd give for a modern OS with an interface designed with the principles of people like Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini in mind, combined with rock-solid underpinnings taking advantage of the best that OS research had to offer in the past 30 years. In other words, I want an updated Smalltalk/Lisp machine with a classic Mac interface brought up to 2020s standards regarding networking, security, and other concerns.
Modern macOS to me is a disappointment compared to Mac OS X Snow Leopard, and don't get me started on the lack of user-upgradeable RAM in modern Macs. However, Windows 10/11 is even more disappointing to me compared to Windows 7, which was a nice OS and is my second favorite version of Windows, my favorite being Windows 2000. Desktop Linux seems to be in an eternal Sisyphean cycle of churn.
So, today I begrudgingly use Windows on my personal machines and macOS on my work-issued MacBook Pro, longing for a compelling alternative to appear one day that pushes personal computing forward.
I don't get it, you've already been poisoned by those gases and can hardly breath, why do you need to look at dead birds for any signal?
At least 3 of the 4 previous icons were pretty easy to recognize on sight (all but expansion slot utility). I would never guess 3/4 of the new ones (only wireless utility), and I probably would have a hard time recognizing them even after I knew what they were.
I really think a big chunk of the problem is that it’s very hard for anyone to say to their employer that they shouldn’t be doing work. People like having a job and finding work not to do feels scary.
(In my experience, if an interface elements raises questions, even more so, if these are fundamental questions, you do have a problem. If not for other reasons, just for the few more bits of awareness spent on these questions, every time you see them.)
When Tahoe came out, I tried it for a day, liked some of it, hated most of it. I gave it a week. Still hated most of it.
The end of that week I bought a used ThinkPad and installed Arch on it. My future is no longer on the Mac. I have a few years to try and transition, but I am otherwise done with them. Butt ugly uber-rounded bouba squircles for fucking windows that cut off the content in my PDFs? That can't even help but cut off the buttom of the scroll bars? This piss ugly grey on light grey on grey with the most pathetic, cowardly whisper of texture they call "glass"? It's fucking over. At least until Alan Dye crawls back into whatever print ad shithole he crawled out of.
And we would have laughed at it.
By all means there are plenty of things to judge in macOS and there have been for a very long time. These for icons today are not it. The canary has left a very long time ago.
I can think of a few times people have been waiting for a refresh of something only to be slightly disappointed that not much or nothing changed: even when there was really nothing wrong.
Hardware-wise: The Volvo X60 and X90 series of cars.
Software wise: Chrome, perhaps, only one major visual change in 15 years.
If one has only ever used modern forged steel spanners, then one might think that they aren't this width, and have the jaws at an angle. But try looking at antique tools. There have been a lot of spanners over the past couple of centuries that have looked like the picture.
If I saw a spanner like this in real life, I'd be thinking first half 20th century, possibly from a motorcycling kit, and Imperial and useless. (-:
It’s also known as “Intel GMA”, if that helps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_GMA
How many iterations does it take before you get it right?
I get that there's a certain sense of fashion to it, but so often these changes are either neutral or worse, and it just seems so pointless. I don't see any concrete benefits of this year's UI design over what was already there 10-20 years ago.
"Gases such as ammonia and chlorine are ir- ritating to the skin, eyes, and throat and have a very definite smell. CO, however, has no odor or other warning properties." [1]
1- https://www.msha.gov/sites/default/files/Alerts%20and%20Haza...
He is wrong... It's the glass disk that Tim handed over to Donald in the White House.
When they switched from the original physical-looking icons, whichever designer drew the new one wasn't paying attention and apparently didn't understand the physical context of the previous logo and they screwed up the revision by keeping the (now-nonsensical) tilt.
https://web.archive.org/web/20101207035423if_/http://upload....
If your icon loses to a yellow cube, it is not a good icon.
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/05/29/no-apple-executives-tal...
I was surprised when the article originally leaped to the insane conclusion that someone who created a stylized software icon with (what may not even be) a less-than-perfectly-accurate depiction of a wrench has never used one, but I’m not surprised to see this kind of doubling down on the absurdity from the HN comment section.
Has the word "objectively" recently taken on the alternative meaning of "subjectively", similar to how "literally" can also mean "figuratively"?
I also don't love the new icons, and he does raise a few objective facts to support his argument - but I don't think it's possible for an icon to be "objectively terrible".
People also have a tendency to be resistant to design changes at first, but over time as they become more familiar they become less offensive. I find myself running into this with new car designs a lot.
All that said, there has been a marked change since John's "Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino". Reading between the lines, it's pretty clear that Apple leadership did not like this article and snubbed him for his liveshow. Since then, there have been many more articles critical of Apple on daringfireball.net.
- Disk Utility: not an improvement but not a loss either. "Disks" haven't looked like that in a long time, so it makes sense that it's updated. "Disk" as intended now, it's an abstract concept, so I sort of see why the icon would be abstract.
- Expansion Slot Utility: if you looked at a Mac Pro's expansion slots, you'd see exactly why the new icon makes a lot more sense, it has 3 slots in it.
- Wireless Diagnostics: looks perfect to me.
- Apple Script Utility: both suck equally, I struggle to see why an editor/compiler share the same icon style as configuration/diagnostic apps.
So they're either just as bad or slightly better. Neither version shines for quality. The old one only looked slightly "better" because the individual pieces were in high quality, but once overlapped they just looked like slop.
All I'm saying is that these icons have obviously never mattered to anyone, you'd expect more from the author.
It's not about polishing to get it right nowadays but rather making a change for sake of changes because that looks good in terms of marketing.
As for this particular Apple case with all "26" versions and Liquid Glass: the backlash they got in June puts their actions along Microsoft's with Windows 8/8.1.
It's a tired trope, but Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave.
And for the overall style, these kinda look like taken from pling.com where people share their packages of customized icons that try to mimic MacOS "squircle" style on Linux
The worst part to me is that I don't think any systemic solution (like antitrust) can ensure it remains that way, or make the others fix their shit. Apple is this way because of the decisions, personalities and whims of a handful of individuals that lead Apple. The other companies are fuckups for the same reason. Maybe the only safeguard is ideology (i.e., up-and-coming Apple employees who dogmatically believe in their marketing on privacy, energy efficiency, speed, etc). From the outside all we can do is impose a PR cost on them and their competitors when they fall short, and on the margin, that helps strengthen that internal faction of dogmatically principled employees against their colleagues who don't care.
As it stands, both the old and the new icons depict handles at 0 degrees, and the old ones depict octagonal open wrenches and not hexagonal ones.
I think it's a mistake to pick apart the wrench icon, but if you're going to make a major issue out of it, at least be exhaustive and consistent in your criticism.
Its the same with websites, where I routinely see people unhappy with flat website design, but I deliberately made my website a lot more flat because I think it just looks better. Not to detract from your opinion at all, you can like what you like, but I've just never understood the appeal of vista/xp era UI design over flat design
https://www.printmag.com/podcasts/2025/design-matters-craig-...
I suppose life is very different inside the citadel. You get curated and triaged feedback from users, Tim Cook doesn't really have opinions about usability and design choices, so there's no one in charge of the classroom.
The reality is in spite of nice touches like call filtering, software quality and usability are both clearly going down.
And Apple's moat, which is a combination of ecosystem lock-in and graphic design, is threatened from one side by AI and from the other by whatever Liquid Glass is supposed to be.
As for Time Machine, a screenshot won't do it justice[2].
[1]: https://mastodon.social/@BasicAppleGuy/115033200191662888
UNIX was developed as an headless OS for timesharing terminals, and to this day it shows that doing proper UIs as never been a strong UNIX culture, which Steve Jobs famously didn't had in high regard.
The butterfly keyboard catastrophe whereby Apple sold broken laptops for 4 years just because they didn't want to waste money retooling, would never have happened under Jobs. Jobs had the courage to say fuck the shareholders when necessary, Cook does not and it's a recurring theme of his leadership.
The canary is for the latter scenario.
If the EPA says it can kill "in minutes" [1], then I'd be inclined to believe them over "you'll feel it if you're exposed to it for hours".
1- https://www.epa.gov/indoor-air-quality-iaq/protect-your-fami...
No doubt Apple's icons have worsened, but Daring Fireball is throwing rocks from its exceedingly brittle glass house.
"These are the not the work of carpenters who care about the backs of the cabinets they’re building. These icons are so bad, they look like the work of untrained “How hard can it be?” dilettante carpenters who only last a few days on the job before sawing off one of their own fingers. The whole collection looks like the work from someone with no artistic ability nor an eye for detail. From Apple, of all companies."
For a long time now, I find that Apple and Microsoft get in the way and solve the wrong problems. The Walled Garden, GateKeeper, the "Recall" misfeature, invasive CoPilot LLM bling, abusive telemetry exfiltration...
I use Linux exactly because it solves (or provides a solution for) the problems that are important to me.
> I can't tell you the last Mac feature that made me go "OMG I want that."
I can tell you that I look at the OS and often say, "OMG I don't want that!"
Microsoft relented to Intel and allowed it to be classified as "Vista capable" despite not being able to run WDDM.
This is a decent writeup of the situation:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/microsoft-e-mails-re...
The key thing to make macOS feel welcoming to everybody from noobs to the nerdiest of power users: Pretty much all functionality used to be accessible using an easy GUI, and keyboard shortcuts, and scripting and command line interface.
At some point Apple Script support started to thin out. I started to worry a bit at this point. Apps that power users care about rely on scripting support. I felt that advanced users have fallen outside the target audience of the product.
Then the new Notification Center came out. And suddenly there was no way of reacting to individual notifications from the keyboard. Two interfaces were no out! No keyboard shortcuts. No scriptability. You HAVE to use the mouse!
Core functionality was suddenly inaccessible using the PRIMARY input device!
How is it possible that the accessibility of such major OS functionality is this poor!
At this point I felt that it's not about target audiences, but about indifference. They don't much care.
Someone once said that monopolies are often never toppled - instead they just become irrelevant over time. This is what happened to Windows. The OS monopoly still exists, but it's no longer the center of anyone's attention.
The same seems to have happened to MacOS. It's as if it has become unimportant inside Apple.
Icons were not meant to be text to read.
That's not true. You can see the history of the Disk Utility icon here: https://basicappleguy.com/basicappleblog/macos-icon-history
Look at the original 2001-2007 version, which was the nicest. It's only gotten worse over time, unfortunately. The 2020 version got an unnecessary rounded rect because macOS Big Sur introduced iOS rounded rects as a new style, and then the 2025 went completely rounded rect because Tahoe enforces it on every app.
I personally have Disk Utility in my Dock, by the way.
Are you one of those people who think you can’t criticize a movie unless you’re a director yourself?
* what would you have done in Jim Allchin's position? He disagreed once finding out but ultimately trusted his team's judgement and stood by their decision (isn't that exactly the manager you want to work for?) Yet, look at the results
* hypothetically how do you think Steve Jobs would have handled it, by contrast?
* but Windows is a whole ecosystem with many stakeholders, while Apple is not, so the balancing act between Intel and HP is much more delicate. (Apple ultimately ditched Intel, right? But could Microsoft?)
(edit: clarify some wording)
I think Gruber would be the first to admit that he's not a designer but rather a writer. His business is one person, himself. In contrast, Apple has over a hundred thousand employees, including quite a few professional full-time designers. You would expect Apple to do vastly better at design than Gruber.
What's ironic is if Alan Dye is no better at design than John Gruber.
We were promised that the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One generation of hardware would be significantly more powerful than it ended up being.
The amount of backlash we received because the quality of the final product we produced was lower than what we showed to the public was insane and continues to this day.
For context, I worked at Ubisoft on Tom Clancy’s The Division. this was the same period where watch dogs released.
I think we did the right thing, not because we chose to and that we were being an altruistic; but because we were forced to- by the first party console manufacturers as part of certification requirements.
If you release something that you know will perform poorly, that’s on you. It doesn’t matter if you’re Intel in this situation or if your Microsoft in this situation they are both equally guilty of allowing it to happen.
How do you assign blame in that situation? You don’t. they both should’ve done better.
as soon as Microsoft realised that Windows Vista would perform poorly on current generation hardware that the majority of the population had they should’ve worked to downgrade the visual elements and optimise the bloat away even at the cost of features.
When Intel realised that the 98% desktop market leader was going to release something that had graphical intensity requirements, they should have put more emphasis and effort into producing higher quality graphics processing capabilities- it’s not like Windows Vista had a short time it was in development for many many years
count me in.
May I throw in BeOs' icons [1] for good measure?
What would Intel have done, only supply chips to.. what? Linux machines? Macs? A funny fantasy, obviously unthinkable. Or go wage a marketing campaign against MS? That too in effect would cause lower sales of new machines if anything, directly hurting Intel.
MS would've seen large benefits especially in the long term.
Now this is all very easy to say in 2025, but I think MS should've known this, yet greatly underestimated the negative effects that this would have. The people making the decision probably thought "it'll be okay, and worth staying super chummy with Intel". Probably plenty of golf trips and steak dinners were exchanged.
This is exactly what's motivating my decisions.
This is the hard truth, I think. All options available require significant compromises.
As far as privacy goes, I'd depend on Linux. As for nice user interfaces, cohesion, consistency, any kind of unification: I just have to leave it behind.
But I think I can eventually develop and find something 'good enough' that isn't dependent on Apple to maintain and improve. No mandatory regressions.
But if even its die hard fans cant find excuses for the appalling Ads they are putting out, design changes that makes no sense, and App icons etc. May be Apple has really changed.
As someone on HN recently stated, in many ways Google Pixel and Android now feels more old school Apple than modern Apple.
But with release of Office 2007 and Windows Live suite they started changing interface again and Windows 7 was based upon slight plastic flatness and ribbons all over the place.
There was a community ran project Windows Taskforce that tried to catch up all sorts of interface quirks and with provided mockups they wanted MS to further polish their flagship project between Vista and 7. Sadly all these efforts were gone when MS decided to go Metro in Windows 8.
I love SwiftUI. I know it inside and out and I’ve talked to its creators. It’s not “done” yet but it is a joy to use. And its power is in saving you from doing “the other 80%” of the work for all the myriad a11y jobs most people don’t bother doing.
Yes of course it panders to web devs. Apple has the same problem MSFT did when webapps with js were invented: if good software can exist in the browser, who cares what OS you have?
SwiftUI is existential for Apple. They are betting the farm on it and Liquid Glass in the hope that native apps are more appealing to users than web apps.
Apple dies if everyone moves to a Google desktop and mobile stack.
Let me spell it out for you:
Daring Fireball has a really ugly website. On that really ugly website, they are criticizing Apple's ugly icons. This is ironic.
> Are you one of those people who think you can’t criticize a movie unless you’re a director yourself?
No.
He can’t criticize Apple unless he first makes a really pretty website.
You can’t criticize the movie unless you first direct a better one.
some low points:
- low-contrast low-color shading
- thin fonts that are less readable
- hidden toolbars requiring multiple taps or drag to expose
- links or buttons with no visual clue they are selectable
I think the only thing I hate more is "touch anything in ios phone app to immediately place a call, even to a phone spammer"
unfortunately all of this got picked up by tesla, where you get all of these "features", but while driving a moving, bouncing car you have to control.
> I’m an old school Cocoa dev. I even wrote the UI for a bunch of the built in apps on your iPhone.
i do have to say though that while i love it for the paradigm and design, i don't love it for the bugs/holes of which are many compared to uikit/appkit..
swiftui itself needs a "snowleopard" release imo
> I also don't love the new icons, and he does raise a few objective facts to support his argument - but I don't think it's possible for an icon to be "objectively terrible".
for example, ask a user to find disk utility app in old ui vs new, measure both time and brain activity it takes to find it etc, there are ways, just takes money and time
> The end of that week I bought a used ThinkPad and installed Arch on it. My future is no longer on the Mac.
> I'm honestly curious why Apple (and other OS vendors like MS and various Linux distributions) still feel the need to tweak their UIs many, many years after having reached maturity.
though one then has to wonder, why do we need a new os every year...