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I don't follow him closely, but I'd always thought that John Gruber - while often a very good writer - got a little too much exposure to the Reality Distortion Field. So I'm a little surprised to see him come down so hard on this.

Was I wrong about Gruber or is this a proverbial canary in the coal mine?

I find his takes all over the place, but I agree that the new icons are terrible and he makes some very good points.

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.

Gruber seemed like an Apple sycophant for a while because his values and tastes aligned very closely with Apple's (though he still criticized them from time to time). Now, Apple is drifting away from those values and tastes and so Gruber and others in that sphere of Apple blogs are coming down harder on Apple, especially after Alan Dye made such a mess with "Liquid Glass".

I follow him, and despite being an Apple commentator, he can be very critical of Apple. You might have missed this from earlier this year: https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/something_is_rotten_in_th...

Apple enthusiasts like John Gruber believe in an ideal Apple. (See his reference to the Founder's "backs of the cabinets" quote.) The real company is distinct from this ideal. Believers support the company's actions so long as they can be plausibly squared with the ideal. But when the company strays—by phoning in design, or being stingy (iCloud's 5 GB free tier)—they respond with equally vocal criticism.

I think it's more the case that Apple is just one of those companies where people tend to leap to the "sycophant" accusation to describe anybody who likes Apple more than a little, because of the (perhaps historical) visibility of their super-fans.

To be frank, Apple earns (earned?) the majority of its applause.

> especially after Alan Dye made such a mess with "Liquid Glass".

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...

Listen to the episode of The Talk Show with Louie Mantia. They really rip on Alan Dye and Liquid Glass. Not so much the _idea_ of Liquid Glass, which I think they appreciate, but its execution, which is shoddy, inconsistent, and reveals a dearth of holistic thinking about UI design.

One thing nobody can take away from him is that he explains his opinions very thoroughly.

For that reason, even if one thought he agreed with Apple too often at least one always knew why.

Yes this is a proverbial canary in the coal mine.

Gruber has criticized Apple, but never to this extent.

This comment reminds of me of these such philosophical dualisms:

- 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.

I feel that he became critical of Apple only post-Jobs.

I don't remember how common it was, but there are definitely examples of him being critical before, e.g. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/05/11/facetime-standa...

Steve Jobs was a huge part of Apple. They're just not the same anymore.

I recently got a newer iPhone and moved to iOS 18 with the hardware change. I had to watch some youtube tutorials explaining navigation and swipe locations. Over and over I've had the thought "this never would have flown under Steve."

This year the Apple leadership didn't visit his Talkshow anymore. Likely as a response to this article.

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/05/29/no-apple-executives-tal...

This is the answer. Gruber has and will continue to criticize Apple, but there has generally been very little room for daylight between his values and those of the company (either as expressed in their products or by their leadership). Also, while he doesn't say it, but I suspect that there has long been a feedback loop where his articles defending the company line are well-received internally and have helped him get press access to executives (for his WWDC live show) and preview hardware.

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.

This is revealingly cringe and shows an almost complete absence of self awareness.

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.

Being a 70's child, thus having lived through most Apple consumer history, I would say it slowly feels like the Apple of old, when Steve Jobs was busy with NeXT and Pixar, the main difference is that now they have enough money to burn and make dumb decisions.

Cook makes shareholders happy but he's not much of a leader. Jobs was a leader.

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.

From TFA, to illustrate:

"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."

No, he shared on Dithering that there was a back-and-forth email exchange about the execs appearing on the Talk Show as usual, but they couldn't come to an agreement on details of the event.