What the heck is going on at Apple?

3 retirements and a VP taking an obvious promotion at Meta: not really the "sky is falling" event they try to paint. Tim Cook stepping down would (if it even happens) be a big deal, but he's not the heart of the company. He's been an extremely compentent accountant; enjoy your retirement party and gold watch. And to suggest they are falling behind because they're not investing hundreds of billions in an AI "strategy" that shows no pay-off - while the other tech companies start to scale back their capital investments? I've never been a huge Apple fan as a company but their current situation makes me more bullish than ever.

> Alan Dye, vice president of human interface design, who is joining Meta as its chief design officer.

If this person had any role to play in the user interface decisions of macos Tahoe, then good riddance.

He did, along with a lot of earlier decisions. The underlying problem is that neither he nor Jony Ive had experience doing user interface design—Ive was a hardware designer, and Dye was the packaging guy—so they kept making things which looked good in demos and the screenshots on boxes, but aren’t usable and flagrantly violated Apple own Human Interface Guidelines in ways which weren’t just “we tried to do something innovative” but more like “I never knew this concept in someone else’s field existed”.

There’s a bit more here but I think this opens the possibility of actual UX professionals fixing decisions without the problem of having to avoid saying their boss made a mistake.

https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/12/in-a-major-coup-for-someo...

https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job

I would worry if I worked at Facebook since their VR work is likely to get the same “looked awesome in the demo” demands which will push the hardware budget and lower usability.