You see this a lot in the absurd “modernist” design of clean lines, sharp edges, and lack of texture and depth across all industries.

Whether that’s your Thuma furniture where the price is high and your marketed to be told that the design is good, but it’s not at all - devoid of meaning and a sense of place, never mind that the quality of the materials are low and have no specific origin, or your run of the mill drone light show where we are fooling ourselves into thinking that drawing pictures of things like the Statue of Liberty (oh after the drones do the ads, brought to you by your local auto dealer) are good and should be appreciated instead of the vibrancy and brilliance of fireworks instead.

Apple has begun to transition this way too. There aren’t any designers working there. Look at the Calculator app as a great example.

They say perfection is not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. But there is a point where you take away more and more and more and your left with creations devoid of meaning or purpose.

Once you start seeing this in your day to day life you can’t unsee it. Sorry ahead of time for those who read this comment and become more attune to this phenomenon.

Note that, in this UX-design paradigm, the icon on (in?) a button still can be its own standalone object of arbitrary shape, rather than being forced to be button-shaped itself (see e.g. the Stickies or Game Center icons in TFA.) But that standalone object has to then be "encased" in the "app button" glass (as if encasing something in a puck of pourable resin), to make it visually obvious that this object is functionally a button, rather than just being some random 3D object with its own arbitrary interaction semantics.

Funny enough, this is almost exactly the complement to the problem of visually differentiating action buttons from 2D content. In a 2D UI, you want to make the action buttons more 3D-looking than the 2D stuff around them, to help them stand out. Thus the Windows XP / macOS 9 era of "jelly" buttons with that visually bulge toward the screen — standing proud of the content, affording touch.

But if everything is 3D / stands proud in arbitrary ways, then overlaid actions will stand out better if they're less 3D — making it clear that they're sitting "on the HUD" rather than "in the world." Such objects can be literal 2D — or you can get fancy and choose some unusual middle-ground, like the sort of 2.5D papercut-diorama look that "liquid glass" achieves.

This is a dumb “no true Scotsman” argument, there are undoubtedly designers working there by any stretch of the imagination.

The more interesting discussion to have is why the field of software design has come to the point it’s at today, and why many designers think that work like the kind Apple is doing is good design.

This was one of the things I loved when I switched to OS X in 2007. The Photo Booth, Pages, Preview, etc. were so beautiful. Also very easy to distinguish apps by icons. Now they all look the same-ish.

There was a lot more whimsy as well. The Adium instant messenger had its green bird logo as an icon. And the bird icon in the Dock flapped its wings when you had a new message (this was pre-native notifications, though Adium may have had Growl support already). I think it would also open its eyes when you started the app.

I was also surprised at how many times I didn’t choose the final icon as my favorite, annd more so how many times it was one of the even older ones.

This sort of thing smells of group decisions.

Jobs and Ives were the voices of reason at Apple. They need someone to fill-in for them.

Brushed Metal springs to mind.

Yes, it looks weird to old eyes on the desktop, where the button-like shape is more familiar as a touch target, but we still recognize that they're apps.

It also allows the developer some control over the canvas that their arbitrarily-shaped logo is painted on, rather than just dropping it right on your user's wallpaper of their kids birthday party.

(As an aside, I'm on a Pixel that uses circles, but the Play Store (whose logo is a triangle) uses roundrects, so there's also a certain flexibility in app icons being a canvas within a platform-variable container shape, even if that's not a roundrect everywhere.)

Squircle.

But designers don’t get paid to keep things the same.

Companies see design as gold plating rather than something that gives a competitive advantage. This means they copy what's popular or outsource.

There's also probably fewer design firms working with these companies. This means fewer original ideas.

I feel like peak Apple icon design was around 2014, where they were high-resolution and clearly depicted what the application was. Since then, they are all moving towards these indistinct, abstract hieroglyphics.

Still might not address your concerns, but I also don’t think the site currently shows them accurately

Now we have icons where you basically can't tell what this is about and more and more icons look extremely similar. Not sure this is better.

Why do you believe that? Is an icon a pictogram or ideogram?

An icon should indicate what the program does, and with higher quality displays, there's no reason why more detail in the icon would be worse. Icons aren't logos in the sense they have to be adapted for every possible use case (where those use cases may have technical limitations), e.g. on a huge box truck, embroidered on a shirt, or as a favicon.

It’s a rhetorical device, not an argument. Of course there are people with that title working there.

I don’t think it has too much to do with software though, I meant to address a general cultural malaise that we can see (or I can see) surface in design broadly across industries. The software industry (writing code and papers about it and such) is probably, I say as I haven’t really felt the need to commit to an opinion here, one of the better design oriented industries precisely because the design of software, elegant code that is efficient and elastic to demand, reliable, and performant, seems to me to be progressing quite nicely.

But software by its very nature isn’t meant to be superfluous - unlike say, good architecture with ornamentation and carefully selected materials that are adapted for a given environment.

To serve the purpose of an interesting conversation, I don’t think focusing on a rhetorical comment as very important. Maybe engage with the substance (or lack thereof if that’s your opinion) of the content instead? Not to sound like a jerk I don’t mean to - just that it may be more interesting.

Photorealism is pretty good at that, since objects tend to look like themselves and nothing else, meaning they are unambiguous, and afford familiarity because even if your trash can at your desk looks nothing like the old photorealistic silver mesh trash can from Macs of yore, you can still probably figure out what it is really fast.

I am sick and tired of overwrought artsy fartsy mimmimulizsm hierogplyhic “icons” instead of something I can actually fucking see and recognize.

https://blog.minimal.app/rounded-corners-in-the-apple-ecosys...

I miss that feeling. No part of me would agree that Apple is a more impressive company today than it was 13 years ago, despite its market cap.

It looks like sometimes this approach has led to more details or an entirely different design, and sometimes less details. Almost like a normalization of sorts to better standardize around a level of details and amount of contrast and brightness.

And "Photo Booth" looks like a mouth with a strange tongue sticking out.

- With some models you could open the battery with a simple handle.

- Some models had a small LED bar that you could check the battery status with, without opening the lid.

- Replaceable RAM and disk. In one Pro I replaced the hard drive with an SSD (almost nobody had an SSD yet) and it would fly. I could open all Creative Suite apps (which were still optimized for spinning rust) in three seconds.

After that started the dark ages. Soldered RAM, soldered SSD, no more MagSafe, only USB-C ports, keyboards that could be destroyed with specs of dust. And the overheating Intel CPUs.

In 2019-2021 there was a rebound. First the scissor keyboard returned, then Apple Silicon, and good amounts of ports again.

It was really hard to be a Mac user ~2016-2020.

And that is what I believe to be the crux of the problem. The trends have been regressions rather than improvements.

I have a few theories as to why this happens too but none of them are particularly complimentary towards Apple, et al.

And to be clear, Apple are far from the worst offenders here. Pretty much every company that releases new software or hardware feels the need to change things so it looks “fresh” and people keep buying their stuff. It doesn’t matter if it results in design regressions because by the time people realise they don’t like it, they’ve already bought that shiny new thing.

On older Mac’s (2009-10?), the LEDs were built into the battery. Very handy to quickly check if your spare has more charge than the one you’re using.

Build quality was also stunning. It’s still good, but the gap between brands is shrinking.

Arguably the worst part about modern MacBooks is software. I don’t know anyone who finds it more stable/convenient to use or pleasant to develop for :(

I also do not like that Apple has completely removed all USB type A ports on the newer MacBooks. USB type A plugs are still very common and I wish Apple left one or two on the newer MacBooks in addition to the USB-C ports. Yes, you can use USB-C to USB type A adapters but it is annoying.

I also do not like that Apple has removed the Ethernet and microphone jacks. Both jacks are still useful to have on modern computers. I'll make an exception for removing the Ethernet jack on the MacBook Air to accommodate a thinner chassis but wish the MacBook Pro chassis was kept thick enough to accommodate the Ethernet jack.

Ethernet is available over the ports via fairly cheap adapters if you need it. There's so much bandwidth on a thunderbolt port that it can do that and a display or two at the same time.

I simultaneously agree with you and also look at the other operating systems and realize Macs are still the best option (at least for a laptop). I want to like Linux more, but it feels like I start from scratch every time I do a major upgrade.

> goes into barring the competition from accessing the current nodes at TSMC

I know it’s en vogue to hate on Apple and make them out to be this big evil corporation, but you’re naming it sound as if they’ve been jerking off while sitting on TSMC’s capacity just to fuck with the competition and purely to make it impossible to compete, when in reality they’ve continued to make exponential improvements on their silicon platform.

> making Apple look good on benchmarks for 12-18 months or so

What are you on about? They’ve essentially been in a league of their own since the M1, especially if you take into consideration the power envelope and how performance is available with just passive cooling.

There isn’t really anything like it.

Even the salty argument of Apple hogging TMSC nodes just crumbles apart if you give more than a second of thought.

For starters, yes, sure Apple is great at managing their logistics and supply chain, which is why, when Cook was in charge of that, it impressed Jobs so much and it proved to be so essential to Apple’s success, that Jobs decided to hand pick Cook as his successor. I don’t see how that is a useful argument against Apple, moral or otherwise.

Nothing is stopping competitors from optimizing their process to the point where they can call TSMC and offer to buy their capacity for the next year or two. To say nothing of the efforts made outside of TSMC like Samsung GAAFET 3nm and MBCFET 2nm process and whatever Intel is dicking around with on their 2nm process.

More importantly though, it’s silly to make it seem as if that’s the only reason for the fruits of Apple’s labor.

Take AMD’s HX 370 for example, released last year, courtesy of TSMC’s N4P process. It still struggled to provide a PPA similar to the M1 Pro, which wasn’t only 3 years older at the time, it was a product of TSMC’s older N5 process.

Clearly having access to newer TSMC nodes isn’t a guaranteed win.

> and couldn't care less about performance

You’ve got it mixed up. Apple has never cared about raw specs, but they always have and always will care about performance.

If you’re inclined to read their every move through the big bad filter then you might say they never cared about raw performance because they’ve always been able to get more out of less and this way they could charge high spec prices without the high spec cost (and without, historically, advertising specs), and it clearly worked out for them.

Their stuff is being sold as if it’s given away for free, in doing so they’ve proven that the average user couldn’t give two fucks about bigger numbers as long as it works well, and their competitors have to pack their phones and other devices with higher specs and cooling solutions like vapor chambers (something Apple has managed to avoid so far) to keep up.

In a way they’ve always had to care more about performance than their competitors because they’ve mostly worked with hardware that’s “lesser” on paper to maximize their margins.

> to offer, a sense of novelty, excitement, taste

I don’t know about you but single-handedly making x86_64 look like an ancient joke with something that would’ve been considered a silly mobile processor 10 years ago is quite novel and exiting. If nothing else it lit a fire under Intel, even if they’ve seemed to have decided to let themselves be turned into a well done steak.

This was essentially what Intel had in mind with their Atom series for netbooks back in the day and Intel never managed to crack the code.

I remember being amazed when I received my developer transition kit, running macOS on an A12Z like it was nothing.

Even now, if I want to be more comfortable and do some coding or video editing work on the couch I can use my off-the-shelve base model M3 MacBook Air to do most of what I can on my M1 Max, that’s quite the leap in performance in such a short time.

There’s no accounting for taste or course and what I like might not be to your liking, and there is plenty about Apple that deserve legitimate criticism, so I don’t understand the need to make something out of nothing in this instance.

What a way to out yourself as some kind of irrational zealot.

>> goes into barring the competition from accessing the current nodes at TSMC

> I know it’s en vogue to hate on Apple […] when in reality they’ve continued to make exponential improvements on their silicon platform.

Have they? M3 to M4 is roughly 20% more perfs for 10% higher TDP.

> What are you on about? They’ve essentially been in a league of their own since the M1

Are they?

> Take AMD’s HX 370 for example,

Indeed, AMD is *very* close perfs-wise, while sitting on TSMC's 4nm, versus the new M4 Pro's 3mn Gen2.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6143vs6346/AMD-Ryzen-AI...

> It still struggled to provide a PPA similar to the M1 Pro

…and not far-off when talking energy efficiency, again, with a whole gen of difference

https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Zen-5-Strix-Point-CPU-anal...

so, within single digit precents.

I'm not taking away from Apple's push towards ARM, that was ballsy, and well executed (also, they had little choice but to ditch Intel, and with AMD not being an option it's pretty obvious in retrospect). That said, I'm tired of the rhetoric and attitude that somehow Apple's chips are made of angel dust or something, especially on this "tech"/"science" forum.

> You’ve got it mixed up. Apple has never cared about raw specs, but they always have and always will care about performance.

Apple a decade and a half ago was selling you "unique" products or clever features. Today's Apple announcements is Tim showing you benchmarks.

> I don’t know about you but single-handedly making x86_64 look like an ancient joke

No, they haven't. They did put intel to shame, but so did AMD, and that came as a surprise to nobody.

In fact, now is the best time in the last 20 years for either: fully integrated SoC’s inside laptops (with all the pros and cons of better battery life, lower heat, smaller size - but irrepairability) and almost entirely modular laptops.

I understand that most people want socketed CPU’s in machines, but speaking genuinely storage used to be upgraded more than ram, and ram more than a CPU; CPU’s limit how much ram we can have so having soldered RAM isn’t that big of a deal in reality to most people.

I feel like a heathen saying it, because emotionally I don’t want it to be true, but it’s definitely the truth.

> In fact, now is the best time in the last 20 years for either

> having soldered RAM isn’t that big of a deal in reality to most people.

Precisely. This whole sub-thread is a response to sacralising Apple for their M chips, pretending there is no compelling alternative, and subsequently giving Apple a free pass for consumer-hostile/commercially-dubious practices.

At any point in time, Apple has the lead, there's no argument there, but if you can afford to wait 12/18 months, you get about the same performance in a repairable/extensible package. That makes Apple's performance less stellar, especially when the same people laud those devices' life expectancy (my daily-driver ThinkPad is specced from early 2017, in 2025 it wouldn't care having bought it "old" in 2018).

I get it, this is an affluent forum, people like the latest and greatest, and a lot of Apple's marketing strategy is about validation and status, that's not terribly rational and healthy, though.

So, there's the rub, and it should be clear: repairability is coming with a trade-off.. Sleekness, performance, battery life.

We as consumers would rather have ultra portable, high performance laptops that feel rigid in our hands over bulky devices that could be useful for 1.5x as long (or survive more wear potentially).

Framework is banking on people who are aware of this tradeoff and want to buy a device going the opposite direction; which is GREAT!.

For example all smartphones are going larger and there's no choice for someone like me to get a small phone these days: I am forced. You're not! Someone is allowing you to make the tradeoff, and instead of understanding that these are actual trade-offs, you'd rather complain that they exist at all.

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