What Happened to Apple's Legendary Attention to Detail?
46 points by carlana
46 points by carlana
The font on this page is so thin I can’t read it; probably the high contrast makes it worse. Now I’m wondering if WCAG has guidance for font weight.
This may have something to do with weird MacOS font rendering, which apparently makes font-weight: normal appear a bit too bold for many people.
it does not, as far as I know, however it says that your contrast ratio depends on font size (smaller font - bigger ratio) and that every text must be scalable up to 200% without any issues, so you can use your default scale (zoom) config from the browser.
so thin I can’t read it
No attention to detail, or maybe forcing people to pay attention to detail.
I don't understand why every app has to be redesigned all the time. This is at least part of the cause.
from my experience redesign happens to show users (and stakeholders) that there are some exciting changes coming. For new/not-super users UI redesign means company is actively growing and shipping new features. For super/old users it's obvious that nothing important has changed, and they get irritated because the only change they experience is spending more of their time looking for a way to do the same thing they did before.
all of these redesigns is an artificial and temporary way to increase revenue while in the long run it does not change anything. If there was a real competitor to apple - they would have lost tons of customers, but there isn't much competition on the market, so they can innovate with UI changes and keep getting promoted
I like this expression from the debian wiki: Shiny New Stuff Syndrome. In the wiki it is about a slightly different context, but the name works here too.
It is possible to redesign things in such a gradual way that you don't notice that it's being redesigned. Unfortunately it seems that many designers don't have the will or discipline to approach it this way.
What are some good examples of such redesigns?
FastMail’s web app. I used to sing its praises as a tool that never, ever changed anything the user could see. They’ve started changing things as of a couple years ago and applying some new paint, but they change one small thing at a time (the padding, the margins, making checkboxes icons that turn back into checkboxes on hover, whatever) over the span of many months per change, and often provide settings toggles to undo the change, too.
FastMail is a “I never want you to change my UI/UX because it is already perfect” user’s dream.
Due to the very nature of the thing, it's hard to point at, but one example was Foursquare I think back when the mobile apps were designed by some of the best app designers in the business.
Steve Jobs is no longer at Apple. It happened before in the 90s when he wasn't at Apple.
Yeah, much as I disliked Jobs, I think this is the key.
In my opinion, one of the most important components of a good product is dogfooding. Dogfooding doesn't fix everything, but it helps a lot. My perception is that Jobs used Apple's products constantly and he would not allow stuff to ship he didn't think was good enough.
And the important thing is... most other products I use clearly don't seem to have anyone in a position of power preventing something broken from shipping. Things will ship all the time with features that only product managers want, but no user wants.
And sometimes those features come from greediness; they allow the company to make more money at the expense of the user... but sometimes I don't think it's greed- I think it's incompetence.
And I don't think this is profit margins above everything else! Apple did well economically! It might be waning, but Apple got to print money in my opinion because they didn't ship broken things, and it's increasingly difficult to get non-broken things, even if you want to pay more! Why is it so hard to buy things that work well?
I am increasingly frustrated at using my TV. The UI is slow. The built-in streaming services app were horrible, and they are probably broken nowadays, or they're missing something important. My Chromecasts are slow and buggy, and the streaming services apps are even more buggy.
I really dislike using a pointer device on my TV, but I'm pondering a Logitech K400 and a desktop OS just because I think a full-screen browser on a powerful desktop CPU will fix most of my problems. I don't think the Shield will fix the brokenness of some streaming apps, and I'm reading that the Apple TV is not as cracked up to be as I imagined.
Streaming is a huge market, and streaming services on TVs are broken. It's just sad.
Not trying to change minds, wouldn’t die to defend it, but the Apple TV experience is at least much better than the other Stick-likes I tried. All the stick-likes have this 1-3 second input lag (completely, embarrassingly unacceptable) that the Apple TV at least doesn’t have on the Home Screen (the apps are slightly better I think too, but still dogshit)
It's something I've thought of, but I hear also criticism so... I already have a gaming PC hooked to the TV. I think I'll try that first, even though I hate the idea of having to use a pointing device.
Not the main point of your comment, I know, but I had the same experience with my TV and ended up getting an Nvidia Shield. I never touch the built-in apps any more; the TV is just a dumb display device that stays set to an HDMI input. The Shield seems like it has a faster CPU/GPU than any of the smart TVs I've used, so the UI feels snappier (though still not fast, sadly). I also switched from the default AndroidTV launcher to a third-party one called Projectivy that lets me configure the home screen to be clear of unwanted clutter.
Yeah, the TV functionality is not even connected to any network, of course.
I know the Shield is better, but it costs a good chunk of money, and it's still not good.
I think having to use a pointing device is going to suck, but I think I'll try desktop PC. I actually already have a gaming PC connected to the TV.
90s Apple did produce top-notch software, like Mac OS 7.5 to 9.
You may criticize their underlying tech (lack of memory protection etc) but from the user perspective they were practically flawless.
In the age of AI code slop, I expect things (overall industry software quality) to only get worse.
The decline of Apple's UI is inarguable. What's the cause? Perhaps they're trying to do too many things at once, or they lost the hunger of being a fast-follower and now they have the bloat of the entrenched encumbent, or their growth strategy is no longer "convert Microsoft customers" and it's now "lure Apple customers to upgrade". Alas there is no mainstream company now prioritizing usable software for most people, much less for the older minority of users. Apple's superior hardware makes it even harder for the next Apple to arise: a company that makes software that's simple and obvious to use.
Is there a 6-part compound German word for when a company was legendarily good at X so they cultivated an audience obsessed with it, then got much worse at X and, while they are still much better at X than everyone else, they get so much shit for it because of their audience? Apple and UI, Mozilla and privacy, etc.
This is an intro that I've been reading since 2003 or so:
In my mind, "Apple" as a brand used to be synonymous with "attention to detail" but sadly, over the course of the last 8 - 10 years, their choices have become anything but detail oriented.
Probably earlier, too, but I didn't have access to a Mac at the time.
Having been around for both the second Jobs era and the post-Jobs era... honestly, I think nothing happened. You use something for long enough and you start noticing how it evolves in ways that the marketing around it can't explain.
Remember, say, when:
And that's just on the software side.
Some of this is also clearly driven by some design thought. The search bar in the Maps, for example, is on the left because that's where the pane it searches through is. Old version had it on the right, and the pane also popped up on the right, but since the search bar wasn't in the pane itself, there was probably some argument to be made that it's not obvious it searches through that pane.
macOS and desktops in general are probably not Apple's main focus anymore, and it shows, but a lot of "attention to detail" is just habit that's easy to pick up when you come up with the expectation that this is the best thing humanity has come up with since toilet paper, and far harder to let go once the ritual redesign of a UI that was working just fine takes place.
I wonder how much of this is a result of market capture/monopolization. Apple used to be the UX/UI leaders. They had to be in order to capture the market share they have today. They had to be the best to get adoption from the masses and that's been proven over time.
I still think many companies consider it to be a UX leader which is insane, look at youtube update right after liquid glass was announced. I have several other apps that changed their UI to something similar what apple has now right after new design was announced.
And while youtube redesign stays usable I was perfectly happy with what it was before
That YouTube up date is so trash IMO. White buttons on top of white video content is not very readable, and it just subjectively looks ugly.
ahaha, man, I don't like it either but not to that degree, I read that Norwegians are one of the happiest people on earth, apparently youtube is on the mission to change that
So Apple (even Apple) is not protected from enshittification. I think it is a good thing Apple aficionados realize this. May this realization lead to redirecting their money, time and energy towards contributing to community-led FLOSS software. Nothing else can prevent enshittification, how many more examples of this do we need?
Unfortunately FLOSS is not the saviour tou want it to be here. Look at what the Gnome folks have been doing for a while now. All power-user features are getting stripped over time, compatibility with the rest of the world be damned. Luckily the KDE folks are doing a stellar job of shipping tiny improvements on top of tiny improvements, with very little regressions. Plasma is IMO the best DE at the moment.
I don't believe in saviors of any kind. I don't like Gnome either, but some people do. FLOSS is not a silver bullet. FLOSS is not a sufficient, but a necessary condition for long-term alignment with user's interests. Corporate greed always leads to enshittification.
Unfortunately, lack of enshittification is not enough for something to be a good product. Strong vision and readiness to enforce it are very important as well and that is where most open-source apps historically failed. Apple had strong vision. It feels like they do not anymore.
I think you underestimate how much available resource (people's time, from designers to testers) matter. Look at how much FLOSS does, oftentimes with ridiculous resource compared to what FAANG has. If we managed to get the attention of designers, UX people, testers, we can reach the level of polish Apple aficionados are nostalgic about. Not having to align with shareholder's objectives is a huge advantage.
Also, there is some cult of personality going on with Steve Jobs. Come on, he was an authoritarian megalomaniac rich guy, what am supposed to like about this dude?
I think you underestimate…
I don't! There were some great examples when designers propagated their vision in floss projects. GNOME 2 is a classic example of this. Another great older example is Enlightenment. The problem is that they still do not last long enough when leadership is gone.
and I can't say I like Steve Jobs as a person. but the UX-quality he delivered was outstanding.
I don't! [...]
Fair enough, apologies for going too far too fast in my assumptions.
problem is that they still do not last long enough when leadership is gone.
So, somewhat similar to what happened at Apple? I don't have an all-made solution, but it feels to me that community democratic processes should be more stable in the long run than relying on any individual, no matter how good they are. This has yet to be invented and probably requires cultural changes that go beyond software engineering.
the UX-quality he delivered was outstanding
I think we tend to overestimate the contributions of "great men" in all fields. I like a good Darwin or Einstein story as much as the next scientist out there, but stories we tell are what just they are: stories. There are so many biases that lead us to believe in "great men", ignoring the importance of chance, the fact that they stood on the shoulders of giants, or not wondering who had interest in writing and perpetuating said stories (this list is absolutely not exhaustive).
Getting back to the subject of Jobs, someone pointed out in a sibling comment that he used the things his company produced ("dogfooding"). He was not very technically-versed AFAIK, so the story sounds to me like "non-technical user feedback taken very seriously (because he can fire anyone anytime)" which I believe has not much to do with vision, or leadership, or whatever grandiose attribute he is often associated with.
I don't think you have to think Jobs was a solo great man to appreciate his contribution.
My understanding of what he did was be a loud arrogant jerk, but one who spoke for the users (being one).
His assholery could let him say things like "no, that is not ready to ship yet" that gave others, the brilliant engineers, the political cover they needed to be able to deliver uncompromising work
I must confess that I was never attracted by any of Apple's design. During 3 years I had a MacBook M1 though, for work. I really liked the battery life and (very) fast waking up from sleep. But I hated all the software with all my heart. I have the tiling WM disease, so floating windows and non-straightforward virtual desktop management irritate me, among other things. Anyway, a lot of this is a matter of taste (and trends).
I know that Jobs died long before I had my first Apple device, so maybe it was so much better before. Or maybe this is just another case of anemoia (I didn't know this word but since a search engine helped me find it, I couldn't resist the urge to be pedantic).