Last week I was driving and a popup from apple music to accept more terms and conditions showed up on top of Maps.
It was a tense 25 minutes of interchanges without nav before traffic was clear enough to deny the terms, and I purged the app and cancelled the subscription afterward.
The first time I connected my iPhone to my car through apple car play, it started popping up whatsapp notifications over my map!
Very bad first impression! I was shocked that they think some notification is more important than being able to know where you are driving. Notifications should not be on by default!
I don't know because I don't drive with turn-by-turn audio.
For the record, I actually like Maps for driving. I find the level of detail just right for how I use it.
My main complaint happens when you are not driving: if you let it have access to your location, Maps is constantly resetting your pan/zoom if the app becomes inactive. So on MacOS I block location, but a phone has to have your location for nav of course.
So I, too, was motivated to watch Steve Jobs unveil Aqua [^0] and compare it against Alan Dye's Liquid Glass reveal [^1]. The difference is unbelievable.
Jobs might have been an asshole, but his enthusiasm for the details is incontestable. He couldn't wait to show people the Save window, in its many forms. That he cared about the small details in everything is easy to see.
Contrast that with Alan Dye's inspiration reel for Liquid Glass. He's clearly reading from a script, which is quite a downgrade but understandable given the production value of keynotes these days. However, the real problem is that this intro is all about how it looks, not how it functions.
Microsoft tried this move with Vista (and their Aero design, which mostly failed), then again with Metro (which also by and large failed). Meanwhile, the key concepts of Aqua remain timelessly in macOS 25 years later. Function over form always!
His statement “prior to today never heard much about [Steve Lemay]” leads me to think he doesn’t have intimate access to anyone deeply familiar with design decisions, because anyone who’s spent a little bit of time behind closed doors in that space absolutely knows who Lemay is.
But then he quotes sources who are supposedly “in a position to know the choices”, which would imply they are quite embedded in the design org…
Maybe it’s all voluntary misdirection on his behalf.
If you think about Gruber as a gossip columnist, then it's quite natural that people who just do their job well don't generate much gossip that would reach his ears.
Fair enough, I guess I was just surprised to read from someone who makes their living from Apple insider baseball and Cupertinology that they have “never heard much” about one of the most influential software designers at the company over the last 20 years.
Me feeling is that his sources are mostly programmers and perhaps some managers.
It's also possible he has very few sources left: he's an outsider to the company, and it's hard to maintain sources since people leave, move to different positions etc.
His Something rotten in the state of Cupertino piece earlier this year broke his relationship with the upper echelons of Apple, and to be frank he's no longer inevitable as an Apple commenter. He cannot understand the European Union at all, so he devolves into saying they're idiots. Really? The EU, the whole thing, idiots? Really?
I don’t think we should conclude that a tech columnist who regularly shits on EU tech policy really intends to attack the EU writ large. If he sounds like he’s generalising to the “whole thing,” I’m pretty sure he understands most readers know he’s not talking about the entire EU experiment. Just the backward tech regulation.
Oh no, John criticizes at large. He complains that the EU itself is too obtuse, that the way they enact laws is obtuse, that the nomination process for officials is obtuse.
No. He criticizes quite specific things that show how completely clueless he is, as it is immediately pointed out both by people in the comments and his blogger/influencer/programmer friends.
He really is unique in how consistently wrong and clueless he keeps on being.
Oh, there also was the mildly sensational "I wonder too, what taste Cheetos-dusted 78-year-old testicles leave in one’s mouth. Whatever the flavor, I hope it lingers."
Well excommunication is not appropriate as a term. Apple has cut off access to the most important cardinals for interviews, not told John he's out of the Catholic Church.
Funny enough, my phone upgraded to iOS 26 tonight, and I am like - what is this garbage, who though this is a good idea? And lo and behold, now I know...
Immediately went Tinted mode, yet there is transparency where it shouldn't be, text overlays other text, etc...
26.1 feels significantly less laggy (UI frame rate), especially on low power mode, than 26.0.1. But it's still not back to 18.x level of performance. Battery seems to be improved on 26.1 over 26.0.1 also but that seems to be hardware-generation dependent.
The man left prior to Apple facing, and losing, a class action lawsuit over his favored keyboard design. Screens also died left and right in designs approved by him, and his next great innovation would be the Touch Bar.
Everyone focuses on M1 as supposedly super chip that fixed all the "intel problems" of Macbooks, but similarly large difference was how first M1 series reversed a bunch of Johnny Ive era designs including how forcibly thin it was.
It was a big mistake to leave Jony Ive in charge of design after Steve Jobs left. Jobs had a good design sense that was key to grounding Ive's work.
Ive's vision of Apple as a luxury brand certainly aligned with Cook's focus on profit, and the results of that sadly still echo through the company today.
Leaving him there was an even bigger mistake that Apple allowed and never corrected--Alan Dye had to correct that himself. Any dis post-departure only points the blame back at Apple's management.
> particularly his attention to detail and craftsmanship
I can get on board with this. I feel as if that has fallen off a cliff, in the last decade.
I just released a rewritten version of an app, and spent many days, running it over, and over, and over again, looking for subtle "pain points." Sadly, some will remain, because SwiftUI is so limited, but I think it came out well.
I do feel that "polishing the fenders" is a big deal. I spent most of my career at a company that would have day-long cage mat- er, meetings, over seemingly insignificant details of user experience.
It will be an equally good news if Zuck poaches the person or team that manages Apple's feedback assistant tool, the one that's used to report bugs. Asking customers to file issues there and then not at all responding to those for months and years even after repeated pings should definitely generate some interest from Meta. Zuck, some more poaching please?
I recently took the time, despite having committed to never bother again, to write some feedback to Apple. I can’t even remember what it was about, but it was a big deal for me to break my commitment. I spent 15 minutes writing it up, getting screenshots marked up…
And the form refused to submit. I was on my iPhone. I clicked the button. Nothing happened. I clicked it again. Nothing.
I reminded myself of the reason I had my commitment: Apple does not want my feedback.
I was actually in the feedback form a few days (just to leave a quick rant what an absolute mess this 'liquid glass' iOS-update is after I sadly chose to update...)
And look what happens, it turns out if you switch app-focus and go back to the app (now immediately focused on the text input) your on-screen keyboard becomes pretty much unreadable (white on light grey...)
The feedback is probably going straight to the bin but I couldn't help myself to file a second bug with a screenshot from the first feedback submission with a broken keyboard.
His podcast with Louie Mantia in July was pretty clear with it, though it also suggests why he’s given significant criticism of the design direction, but mostly just has quips and shade thrown at Alan Dye on the blog:
> I get to ask Alan Dye about [the shadows on Apple Watch faces]. And he was like, oh, we render a shadow? And I was like, oh, you never even looked. I just instantly realised he’d never really even looked at it. Like, somebody at Apple has, but Alan Dye didn't. […] It just suddenly came to me, oh, he doesn't do the job I thought he did.
Quickly googled his website and found this from January 2021:
> [...] I’m reminded of all the UI and interaction designs and changes in iOS and MacOS that are just bad. There’s a real sense that Apple’s current HI team, under Alan Dye, is a “design is what it looks like” group, not a “design is how it works” group.
And this, from June of this year:
> Re-watching Jobs’s introduction of Aqua for the umpteenth time, I still find it enthralling. I found Alan Dye’s introduction of Liquid Glass to be soporific, if not downright horseshitty.
He has been even more critical on his podcast. This has been a repeated refrain and increasing over the years. My first reaction, when I read the news, was "Apple bloggers and podcasters will be THRILLED."
Let's all pretend he totally wasn't going out of his way to prevent burning bridges with his Apple connections but starts throwing Alan under the bus after he's gone like he was so obviously the problem at Apple.
You seem to have an axe to grind against Gruber, are immune to all evidence against your preconceived worldview, and are projecting this behavior onto the other side of the discussion.
How about this sarcastic and brutal bit, on his podcast (end of July):
"But maybe instead of firing him, they start selling pizzas out of the back of Apple stores and Alan Dye can run that and do the graphic design on the boxes. Do the menus. I think Alan Dye could kill that with his Levi's experience, right?"
That's rougher than anything he has said post-firing, in my opinion.
I’m excited for the new energy this will bring to UI design at Apple. The same way that Jony Ive leaving opened up the opportunity for thicker more functional machines. Never underestimate the power of a group of passionate people who’ve been repressed and now get a chance to set things right.
For a good while, Mac hardware was held back because of hardware design. That changed soon after Ive left. Maybe the same can happen with software now.
I want the home button back, TouchID or no. It's (I'm not joking) among the best applications of computer UI ever and it has not been obsoleted, they just abandoned it for worse options.
Cell phones from other brands have Touch ID and it works great. Apple has Touch ID on their iPads and it also works great. As it does on the MacBooks. As it does on the iPhone SE. It should be brought back.
It works OK for me on Mac, but all touchID drops to about 50/50 for me in Winter, under the (otherwise) best circumstances. Dry air, I guess.
On iPhone, specifically, it was awful for me. I was too likely to have wet hands (raining, just got out of shower, whatever—even dried, the higher moisture in my skin meant it didn't work) or gloves on or some other problem that made it fail. Trying to hold it the right way, one-handed, to get a finger in the right position (waaaaay down near the bottom) was also a high-risk maneuver for a drop, and was not a way I'd otherwise have tried to hold the device.
I am not a fan, simply because of the screen real estate that needs to be sacrificed.
Other phones tend to have it on the back, and I have heard there's good progress in having embedded thumbprint readers in the screen.
I have, however, really come to like Face ID.
[UPDATED TO ADD] I think that it's interesting that folks ding comments they disagree with. I upvoted all the responses to my comment, even though they may disagree with me, because they were made in good faith, and contribute to the discussion.
> My Google Pixel 10 has both an in-the-screen fingerprint reader, and a Face ID, and I use both. They're both useful in different situations.
That sounds great.
> Some iPads have the finger print reader on the side of the device, on the power button.
My main iPad is a Mini (latest gen). It has the Touch ID on the top. I find it to be a bit "flaky." It often misses prints. However, I think it works amazingly well, given that it's just a strip.
I also have an iPad Pro, with FaceID. That works nicely. I like that it works in both portrait and landscape. That didn't happen in my older phones, but seems to be the case in my latest (17 Pro).
>I have heard there's good progress in having embedded thumbprint readers in the screen.
Samsung phones have had a perfectly working finger print reader under the screen for many years now. There is no more progress to be made, it is complete.
Face ID is severely lacking compared to MS Hello, simple as. It's at best 50:50 hit/miss compared to Hello which logs me in always. Granted, that figure doesn't include false positives, but the difference is substantial and makes Apple's implementation look really lame, to the point I'd like to see it removed.
See there are users who like Liquid Glass, just as there are users who like TouchID. A lot of Apple’s best work turned out to be quite polarizing at the time.
iOS 7’s design language was almost universally panned, but if it were “the wrong decision,” other phones wouldn’t have adopted similar design language. Material appeared just a year later in 2014. It wasn’t bad, it was just arbitrary.
(“I like Liquid Glass! I like Liquid Glass!” I insist as i slowly shrink down into the size of a corn cob)
On the topic of Alan Dye and the home button though, the swipe gesture interface they introduced when they removed the home button strikes me as one of few genuinely successful system-level Apple design innovations in recent years. That at least seems to have happened under his leadership. Can’t think of much else good to say about what I associate with design under him.
It’s my understanding that Chan Karunamuni was largely responsible for leading the iPhone X home buttonless interface, which, I agree, is fantastic and probably the best bit of UI to come out of Apple in years. Also, the Dynamic Island, which is less impactful, but really good and clever! Anyway, he’s excited about Lemay, so I am too. https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/05/acclaimed-apple-designer-says...
At this point, they are still as high on their own supply on the software side as they were on the hardware side in the heyday of butterfly keyboards, slow/overheating CPUs and broken screens.
I'm not willing to cede the point on hardware design for as long as their primary mouse product cannot be charged during use. It's such a simple and obvious mistake, like a throwback to the days of hockey-puck mice.
Not to mention its ergonomics issues. I held onto mine as long as possible because I loved the capacitive shell. Eventually I had to ditch it though to keep my wrist healthy.
My hope is this will lead to the reversal of the insane "HDR auto-brightness" behavior that causes any photo marked as HDR to go extreme brightness mode while the rest of the screen darkens:
I think Apple have jumped the shark, personally. Sure, trillion-dollar business and all that - but at the folk level, they have become the very thing they were always resisting: a tired old monopoly enforcing principles on their customers which are not in the customers' best interests.
OS vendors have lost the plot. Where a company decides to try to build an operating system for mass acceptance at scale these days, they build an ad delivery platform - not an operating system. The interests of far too many third parties have been elevated at the kernel-extension layer, and lower, and this is as troubling as it ever was.
Its the 21st century and people still don't understand how to manage the filesystem, having given all agency to the task to the backend/cloud, which harvests their data instead of granting the user more agency. In fact, most people have less agency over their data - and simply do not care about it - because they have been lulled into accepting the state of affairs by OS vendors who simply don't want to write a better Finder/File Explorer for the end user - choosing instead, to write an operating system for ad agencies to harvest user eyeballs.
Apple have traditionally avoided the usual pretence of 'ads in the start bar' by leveraging their platforms, and this is starting to fall apart at the seams. Convergence is going to be a joke, and will turn off a lot of computer users until a generation is raised, who will just accept the doctrine of their masters, and in so doing, lose knowledge to the generations.
I yearn for an OS vendor to build an operating system that really makes the user control over their computer and their data, a number one priority. Apple isn't it. Microsoft certainly isn't it. There are multiple Linux OS vendors who could be it, if only they'd get their hardware act into shape. There are hardware vendors struggling to attain this goal, too.
My next laptop won't be an Apple, after 30+ years of adoption of the platform. I fear the future that Apple is laying out ahead of us - just as I feared that of Microsoft and Oracle and IBM too, through the decades.
If there is hope, it lays with the (low-end open source hardware/software-agency-protecting) proles.
I have concerns too, but the file manager on macOS is not among them. The Finder has barely changed since its OS X 10.2 incarnation over two decades ago, except for gaining features (many of which were demanded by power users). A few settings need toggling on a fresh install (turning on status bar and path bar are musts, as is ~/Library visibility), but that’s the worst of it. Neither it nor the rest of macOS do much to go out of their way to obfuscate the filesystem.
iOS still needs work despite its file manager having become much more capable, but part of that comes down to the differing filesystem arrangement where user documents are kept within app bundles. If raw filesystem access were enabled, that model wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense even to many who are familiar with navigating filesystems. I could see the argument that it should be switched to a traditional desktop OS model, but that’s a deep architectural change.
Windows on the other hand… Explorer just keeps getting slower even if it’s not losing functionality, and Windows has always been poor when it comes to misrepresenting or obfuscating the filesystem. I hate trying to track down where files have been deposited in Windows boxes, and I would agree that it’s been contributing to users not understanding filesystems.
People being able to organise their lives with their computers has been a thing since the beginning of the personal computer. The filesystems we have were never really the 'best' - just the most viable.
The filesystem UI has been abandoned in favour of newer, better abstractions, such as 'just throw it all at the Cloud and let our analysis software give you a front-end to it, eventually..'
I think users not understanding filesystems isn't really a computing problem, but a literacy one. In some senses, computing becomes the victim of itself.
I would seriously question if “throw it at the cloud” is actually better or if it only became popular because that’s what’s most profitable for companies to push users into using. Local hierarchical storage doesn’t give nearly as many opportunities for rent seeking and data harvesting.
Cloud storage certainly has a convenience factor which is worth considering, but at the same time most people don’t actually need everything available everywhere at all times and only have a handful of files that can intentionally be synced as needed. I really don’t believe that supplanting traditional filesystems with a big bag of data that lives in the cloud is the right answer.
I think the point is that agency of the user over the locality of, and control over their data is based on decisions made by operating system vendors who, having 'given up' on trying to get users to understand the difference between folders and files, has figured out its better to just put everything in the cloud and 'own the tags and other abstractions' which come from a subscription service.
In any case, we see eye to eye on the convenience factor - it is inescapable, the success rate is clear - but we are looking at the edge case of things anyway, no? The future of Apple is an interesting one - we long term users surely can have an opinion. (Hacked my first Apple in 1981, haven't stopped since.)
Unfortunately the hardware is peerless. The 15" Air is outstanding. No fan, no lag, no sleep/wake issues, no trackpad issues. Impossible to use a PC laptop after such quality. The software though is a steaming pile of foolish UI decisions.
My favorite reaction to today’s news is this one-liner from a guy on Twitter/X: “The average IQ of both companies has increased.”
My friend, that was NZ prime minister Robert Muldoon who was quoted as saying “every time a New Zealander emigrates to sun themselves on the beaches of Bondi, the average IQ of both countries increases.”
Here is an unpopular opinion, how about Craig Federighi replaced with Scott Forstall.
It isn't just about UI design. But the whole software stack as well. iOS is still 90% the same as it was launched, and yet the apps management is still inconvenient to say the least. Along with copying all Android features, if I wanted an Android I would have brought one.
The software stack, how many years has Swift been announced? how many years have they announced Swift UI? Xcode? HN discussed macOS problems not long ago [1]. It would have been far better they just stick to Objective-C for the past 10 years and actually get things done.
Cocoa was so good. I even liked old-school Interface Builder’s IoC. Now there are controls where it’s obvious drag and/or drop should be supported but it isn’t or simple things like opening a custom SwiftUI (né Preferences) settings window from legacy AppKit code is unsupported.
Unfortunately, Objective-C added modern language features too late. IB never used the term IoC or anything else devs coming from other ecosystems would understand. A lot of great stuff that NeXT built 30 years ago is still great today, but never had the notoriety of lesser frameworks and languages.
> Here is an unpopular opinion, how about Craig Federighi replaced with Scott Forstall.
I'm with you there.
Forstall's skeuomorphism gets a lot of hate. It certainly got pretty weird visually. Especially on OS X where a leather-bound Calendar had to interact with other normal windows. But unlike what Ive and Dye have given us, Forstall's UX remained functional overall. I'm glad skeuomorphism is gone, but much of it was done to help the user. Just maybe a bit misguided.
At one point years ago, there was an iOS release where the recently used apps would render, then re-order themselves after a second or two. You could tell it was caching then dynamically updating. It was frustrating from a UX perspective because you would go to tap on an app and by the time you tapped, it would open a different app because they had re-ordered themselves.
It was fixed in an update, but to me that's the canary in the coal mine that priority is wrong. Apple will be ok without Steve as long as somebody is obsessed with the UX being very good. When I see the quality of the UX experience degrading while other UX changes are made that don't improve the basic UX, then there's a problem.
I subscribe to Apple Music, and have built playlists on the service. The fact that I have to enable sync (which then wastes 70G of space on my iPhone) to use my playlists is BS. I don't see a technical reason for it. The only conclusion I can come to is they want to drive storage subscriptions by taking up space using music sync. If anybody wants to explain why sync needs to be enabled, that would be cool, but is a really concerning product management decision IMO.
I hope this improves things. The difference in attention to detail between classic Mac OS (as easily seen in Apple's "Macintosh" dynamic screen saver/wallpaper) and current macOS Tahoe is stark.
But I suspect that Apple Services have too much power so the platforms will continue to be corrupted with ever-more-intrusive advertising.
Hopefully this trend continues, there's too many dogshit people in positions they shouldn't have at Apple.
Two of the three worst interviews I've ever had were with them. Basically got flown out twice to be insulted by team leads or upper management. Everyone insists I'm supposed to keep trying until I don't encounter someone like that but that doesn't seem right to me, not for a company like this. I can wait
He is literally the primary person at the latest Apple event to introduce Liquid Glass, his face and name is on Apple's promotional material. If he wants to live a secluded life where his name is not referenced maybe he should not agree to blast it to millions of people and star in video interviews.
While I’m not a fan of mobbing on someone as it easily escalates to bullying an gratuitous attacks, parodying his name is the least of my concerns. And he is a public figure. Being the head designer at Apple grants you that status and don’t even doubt for a second anyone who wants that type of job doesn’t play the fame/status game.
This is cope dressed up in the stereotypical Gruber sycophancy.
The decision to align iOS and MacOS with the glassy design of VisionOS was a broader corporate strategy that would have required buy-in from more execs than just the "chief design officer". If you accept that this particular bozo wasn't forced out but instead was tempted away by the scent of lucre wafting from Zuck's pockets, then that implies that there are still plenty of clowns left at Apple to fill out the circus.
The problem is, Liquid Glass isn’t all that closely aligned with the visionOS UI, despite both having glass-like qualities. Most notably, the iOS and macOS versions are missing the usability affordances that the visionOS version has, and more superficially the visionOS version looks nicer.
Yes, but it could have been as simple that the UIs should look like they come from the same company - and that is the correct path IMO. At that point, it's the Chief Design/Product person's responsibility to execute on that order.
I know a fraudster that everyone speaks highly of. Outright fraud and advocates against fraud themself. Whenever I read "everyone speaks highly of" I stop reading.
I also think Apple knew they rather wanted to move on without him. They probably gave him some targets that were to high and then reduced/dropped his bonuses based on low achievements.
Last week I was driving and a popup from apple music to accept more terms and conditions showed up on top of Maps.
It was a tense 25 minutes of interchanges without nav before traffic was clear enough to deny the terms, and I purged the app and cancelled the subscription afterward.
Something similar, except it was a map alert that covered the map to see upcoming exits -- and there wasn't a clear way to dismiss it. It was FU UX.
The first time I connected my iPhone to my car through apple car play, it started popping up whatsapp notifications over my map!
Very bad first impression! I was shocked that they think some notification is more important than being able to know where you are driving. Notifications should not be on by default!
Did it block the audio from your maps app, too?
I don't know because I don't drive with turn-by-turn audio.
For the record, I actually like Maps for driving. I find the level of detail just right for how I use it.
My main complaint happens when you are not driving: if you let it have access to your location, Maps is constantly resetting your pan/zoom if the app becomes inactive. So on MacOS I block location, but a phone has to have your location for nav of course.
If your nav audio is muted when the popup appears, you can’t unmute it until the popup is cleared.
[dead]
So I, too, was motivated to watch Steve Jobs unveil Aqua [^0] and compare it against Alan Dye's Liquid Glass reveal [^1]. The difference is unbelievable.
Jobs might have been an asshole, but his enthusiasm for the details is incontestable. He couldn't wait to show people the Save window, in its many forms. That he cared about the small details in everything is easy to see.
Contrast that with Alan Dye's inspiration reel for Liquid Glass. He's clearly reading from a script, which is quite a downgrade but understandable given the production value of keynotes these days. However, the real problem is that this intro is all about how it looks, not how it functions.
Microsoft tried this move with Vista (and their Aero design, which mostly failed), then again with Metro (which also by and large failed). Meanwhile, the key concepts of Aqua remain timelessly in macOS 25 years later. Function over form always!
[^0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHrVGk0WwYM&t=381s
[^1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGztGfRujSE
I really have to wonder who Gruber’s sources are.
His statement “prior to today never heard much about [Steve Lemay]” leads me to think he doesn’t have intimate access to anyone deeply familiar with design decisions, because anyone who’s spent a little bit of time behind closed doors in that space absolutely knows who Lemay is.
But then he quotes sources who are supposedly “in a position to know the choices”, which would imply they are quite embedded in the design org…
Maybe it’s all voluntary misdirection on his behalf.
I’m not sure you’re drawing the right conclusion. It’s possible that Gruber’s regular sources know who Lemay is and just never talked about him much.
If you think about Gruber as a gossip columnist, then it's quite natural that people who just do their job well don't generate much gossip that would reach his ears.
Fair enough, I guess I was just surprised to read from someone who makes their living from Apple insider baseball and Cupertinology that they have “never heard much” about one of the most influential software designers at the company over the last 20 years.
I took it as him not knowing the person then asking about the person from sources within the company.
Me feeling is that his sources are mostly programmers and perhaps some managers.
It's also possible he has very few sources left: he's an outsider to the company, and it's hard to maintain sources since people leave, move to different positions etc.
His Something rotten in the state of Cupertino piece earlier this year broke his relationship with the upper echelons of Apple, and to be frank he's no longer inevitable as an Apple commenter. He cannot understand the European Union at all, so he devolves into saying they're idiots. Really? The EU, the whole thing, idiots? Really?
I don’t think we should conclude that a tech columnist who regularly shits on EU tech policy really intends to attack the EU writ large. If he sounds like he’s generalising to the “whole thing,” I’m pretty sure he understands most readers know he’s not talking about the entire EU experiment. Just the backward tech regulation.
Oh no, John criticizes at large. He complains that the EU itself is too obtuse, that the way they enact laws is obtuse, that the nomination process for officials is obtuse.
No. He criticizes quite specific things that show how completely clueless he is, as it is immediately pointed out both by people in the comments and his blogger/influencer/programmer friends.
He really is unique in how consistently wrong and clueless he keeps on being.
https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/something_is_rotten_in_th...
This article? If it caused consternation it boggles the mind. These are all completely normal reactions to Apple's AI missteps.
If detailed but milquetoast criticisms are grounds for excommunication, maybe the company really does have serious management issues.
Oh, there also was the mildly sensational "I wonder too, what taste Cheetos-dusted 78-year-old testicles leave in one’s mouth. Whatever the flavor, I hope it lingers."
https://daringfireball.net/2024/11/i_wonder
Well excommunication is not appropriate as a term. Apple has cut off access to the most important cardinals for interviews, not told John he's out of the Catholic Church.
> If detailed but milquetoast criticisms are grounds for excommunication, maybe the company really does have serious management issues.
This has always been the case at Apple. Tons of ex-employees have commented about challenges in criticism.
Funny enough, my phone upgraded to iOS 26 tonight, and I am like - what is this garbage, who though this is a good idea? And lo and behold, now I know...
Immediately went Tinted mode, yet there is transparency where it shouldn't be, text overlays other text, etc...
I also went tinted as soon as 26.1 came out. There is a step further, under "accessibility" -> "Reduce Transparency".
For me Tinted is ok. Original was indeed very hard to read in places (ie, quick peeks at the notification tray).
Reduce transparency brings it back to acceptable levels, thanks!
When users work together they can overcome Apple's software!
I'm still on 18. I keep waiting for the all clear sign to upgrade. I take it, not yet?
26.1 feels significantly less laggy (UI frame rate), especially on low power mode, than 26.0.1. But it's still not back to 18.x level of performance. Battery seems to be improved on 26.1 over 26.0.1 also but that seems to be hardware-generation dependent.
> Putting Alan Dye in charge of user interface design was the one big mistake Jony Ive made as Apple’s Chief Design Officer.
_One_??? Talk about rose tinted liquid glass(es).
The man left prior to Apple facing, and losing, a class action lawsuit over his favored keyboard design. Screens also died left and right in designs approved by him, and his next great innovation would be the Touch Bar.
It was a precipitous fall from grace
Everyone focuses on M1 as supposedly super chip that fixed all the "intel problems" of Macbooks, but similarly large difference was how first M1 series reversed a bunch of Johnny Ive era designs including how forcibly thin it was.
It was a big mistake to leave Jony Ive in charge of design after Steve Jobs left. Jobs had a good design sense that was key to grounding Ive's work.
Ive's vision of Apple as a luxury brand certainly aligned with Cook's focus on profit, and the results of that sadly still echo through the company today.
Leaving him there was an even bigger mistake that Apple allowed and never corrected--Alan Dye had to correct that himself. Any dis post-departure only points the blame back at Apple's management.
So was Dye behind the super-flat butterfly keyboard, too? ;)
> particularly his attention to detail and craftsmanship
I can get on board with this. I feel as if that has fallen off a cliff, in the last decade.
I just released a rewritten version of an app, and spent many days, running it over, and over, and over again, looking for subtle "pain points." Sadly, some will remain, because SwiftUI is so limited, but I think it came out well.
I do feel that "polishing the fenders" is a big deal. I spent most of my career at a company that would have day-long cage mat- er, meetings, over seemingly insignificant details of user experience.
It will be an equally good news if Zuck poaches the person or team that manages Apple's feedback assistant tool, the one that's used to report bugs. Asking customers to file issues there and then not at all responding to those for months and years even after repeated pings should definitely generate some interest from Meta. Zuck, some more poaching please?
I recently took the time, despite having committed to never bother again, to write some feedback to Apple. I can’t even remember what it was about, but it was a big deal for me to break my commitment. I spent 15 minutes writing it up, getting screenshots marked up…
And the form refused to submit. I was on my iPhone. I clicked the button. Nothing happened. I clicked it again. Nothing.
I reminded myself of the reason I had my commitment: Apple does not want my feedback.
I was actually in the feedback form a few days (just to leave a quick rant what an absolute mess this 'liquid glass' iOS-update is after I sadly chose to update...)
And look what happens, it turns out if you switch app-focus and go back to the app (now immediately focused on the text input) your on-screen keyboard becomes pretty much unreadable (white on light grey...)
The feedback is probably going straight to the bin but I couldn't help myself to file a second bug with a screenshot from the first feedback submission with a broken keyboard.
Screenshot of this absolute disaster: https://imgur.com/a/CyXiVy2
I am starting to think John Gruber doesn't like Alan Dye.
Where were Gruber’s posts about Dye so obviously being a problem before his exit?
His podcast with Louie Mantia in July was pretty clear with it, though it also suggests why he’s given significant criticism of the design direction, but mostly just has quips and shade thrown at Alan Dye on the blog:
> I get to ask Alan Dye about [the shadows on Apple Watch faces]. And he was like, oh, we render a shadow? And I was like, oh, you never even looked. I just instantly realised he’d never really even looked at it. Like, somebody at Apple has, but Alan Dye didn't. […] It just suddenly came to me, oh, he doesn't do the job I thought he did.
Quickly googled his website and found this from January 2021:
> [...] I’m reminded of all the UI and interaction designs and changes in iOS and MacOS that are just bad. There’s a real sense that Apple’s current HI team, under Alan Dye, is a “design is what it looks like” group, not a “design is how it works” group.
And this, from June of this year:
> Re-watching Jobs’s introduction of Aqua for the umpteenth time, I still find it enthralling. I found Alan Dye’s introduction of Liquid Glass to be soporific, if not downright horseshitty.
He has been even more critical on his podcast. This has been a repeated refrain and increasing over the years. My first reaction, when I read the news, was "Apple bloggers and podcasters will be THRILLED."
He’s had the position for 10 years and you found two mentions?
There are a lot more. Here’s another I found in under half a minute:
https://daringfireball.net/2025/08/macos_26_tahoes_dead_cana...
You seem to have already had your mind made up, though, and are maybe not actually interested in evidence.
He doesn't even mention his name in this article.
Let's all pretend he totally wasn't going out of his way to prevent burning bridges with his Apple connections but starts throwing Alan under the bus after he's gone like he was so obviously the problem at Apple.
We don’t have to pretend; there’s ample evidence. Here’s one from 2020 that specifically calls Dye out: https://daringfireball.net/2021/01/my_2020_apple_report_card
You seem to have an axe to grind against Gruber, are immune to all evidence against your preconceived worldview, and are projecting this behavior onto the other side of the discussion.
The same example shared upthread.
So two mentions in 5 years?
How many times would appease you?
At least 50% as harsh before his departure than he is afterwards.
How about this sarcastic and brutal bit, on his podcast (end of July):
"But maybe instead of firing him, they start selling pizzas out of the back of Apple stores and Alan Dye can run that and do the graphic design on the boxes. Do the menus. I think Alan Dye could kill that with his Levi's experience, right?"
That's rougher than anything he has said post-firing, in my opinion.
All criticism of Apple’s UI would count, as Dye was in charge of it and ultimately responsible, whether he is named in the article or not.
And Gruber has been at least this harsh on the UI before.
I’m excited for the new energy this will bring to UI design at Apple. The same way that Jony Ive leaving opened up the opportunity for thicker more functional machines. Never underestimate the power of a group of passionate people who’ve been repressed and now get a chance to set things right.
For a good while, Mac hardware was held back because of hardware design. That changed soon after Ive left. Maybe the same can happen with software now.
The healing begins with a joint HW/SW effort: bring iPhone touch ID back, and strip Liquid Glass down to the bare wood and fix it.
I spoke with an Apple designer who told me that Lemay has been deeply involved in designing Liquid Glass. Don't get your hopes too high
+1 for the return of TouchID, but it’ll never happen. Having to orient the phone and stare into a bright screen all the time is sub optimal.
I want the home button back, TouchID or no. It's (I'm not joking) among the best applications of computer UI ever and it has not been obsoleted, they just abandoned it for worse options.
Liquid Glass I agree with. Not sure if the Touch ID comment is intended as a joke.
Cell phones from other brands have Touch ID and it works great. Apple has Touch ID on their iPads and it also works great. As it does on the MacBooks. As it does on the iPhone SE. It should be brought back.
It's a lost cause by now, but I really liked Sony's implementation with their Xperia Z5 -- the fingerprint sensor was on the power button.
This is how it's implemented on iPads without Face ID (like the Air)
And Macs.
TouchID doesn't really for me on my Macbook or iPad. It has about a 25% success rate. I think one issue is that I work with my hands a lot.
It works OK for me on Mac, but all touchID drops to about 50/50 for me in Winter, under the (otherwise) best circumstances. Dry air, I guess.
On iPhone, specifically, it was awful for me. I was too likely to have wet hands (raining, just got out of shower, whatever—even dried, the higher moisture in my skin meant it didn't work) or gloves on or some other problem that made it fail. Trying to hold it the right way, one-handed, to get a finger in the right position (waaaaay down near the bottom) was also a high-risk maneuver for a drop, and was not a way I'd otherwise have tried to hold the device.
I am not a fan, simply because of the screen real estate that needs to be sacrificed.
Other phones tend to have it on the back, and I have heard there's good progress in having embedded thumbprint readers in the screen.
I have, however, really come to like Face ID.
[UPDATED TO ADD] I think that it's interesting that folks ding comments they disagree with. I upvoted all the responses to my comment, even though they may disagree with me, because they were made in good faith, and contribute to the discussion.
"needs to be sacrificed"? You yourself give other options.
* Some iPads have the finger print reader on the side of the device, on the power button.
* Old Google Pixels had it on the back, conveniently able to be accessed with your index finger as you take the phone out of your pocket.
* Current Google Pixels have it where you just touch the screen.
My Google Pixel 10 has both an in-the-screen fingerprint reader, and a Face ID, and I use both. They're both useful in different situations.
> My Google Pixel 10 has both an in-the-screen fingerprint reader, and a Face ID, and I use both. They're both useful in different situations.
That sounds great.
> Some iPads have the finger print reader on the side of the device, on the power button.
My main iPad is a Mini (latest gen). It has the Touch ID on the top. I find it to be a bit "flaky." It often misses prints. However, I think it works amazingly well, given that it's just a strip.
I also have an iPad Pro, with FaceID. That works nicely. I like that it works in both portrait and landscape. That didn't happen in my older phones, but seems to be the case in my latest (17 Pro).
>I have heard there's good progress in having embedded thumbprint readers in the screen.
Samsung phones have had a perfectly working finger print reader under the screen for many years now. There is no more progress to be made, it is complete.
Face ID is severely lacking compared to MS Hello, simple as. It's at best 50:50 hit/miss compared to Hello which logs me in always. Granted, that figure doesn't include false positives, but the difference is substantial and makes Apple's implementation look really lame, to the point I'd like to see it removed.
I haven't had that happen, so I think it works fairly well. Even with a mask.
In fact, it works so well, for me, that I was worried that it was too generous, but it is actually very secure.
My phone has the fingerprint reader under the display. It sacrifices no space.
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See there are users who like Liquid Glass, just as there are users who like TouchID. A lot of Apple’s best work turned out to be quite polarizing at the time.
iOS 7’s design language was almost universally panned, but if it were “the wrong decision,” other phones wouldn’t have adopted similar design language. Material appeared just a year later in 2014. It wasn’t bad, it was just arbitrary.
(“I like Liquid Glass! I like Liquid Glass!” I insist as i slowly shrink down into the size of a corn cob)
On the topic of Alan Dye and the home button though, the swipe gesture interface they introduced when they removed the home button strikes me as one of few genuinely successful system-level Apple design innovations in recent years. That at least seems to have happened under his leadership. Can’t think of much else good to say about what I associate with design under him.
It’s my understanding that Chan Karunamuni was largely responsible for leading the iPhone X home buttonless interface, which, I agree, is fantastic and probably the best bit of UI to come out of Apple in years. Also, the Dynamic Island, which is less impactful, but really good and clever! Anyway, he’s excited about Lemay, so I am too. https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/05/acclaimed-apple-designer-says...
Here’s a video with him discussing the iPhone X interface around its introduction in 2018 that I find fascinating https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/803/
TIL people have very strong feelings about bringing back Touch ID, to the point where a comment like the above is getting downvotes.
That's the hope.
At this point, they are still as high on their own supply on the software side as they were on the hardware side in the heyday of butterfly keyboards, slow/overheating CPUs and broken screens.
Seriously. Craig is asleep at the wheel.
> Software: please!
Didn't Apples AI guy just get fired? That will have effects on software.
Good effects.
I'm not willing to cede the point on hardware design for as long as their primary mouse product cannot be charged during use. It's such a simple and obvious mistake, like a throwback to the days of hockey-puck mice.
On the plus side, that one's easy to avoid by using literally any other mouse
Not to mention its ergonomics issues. I held onto mine as long as possible because I loved the capacitive shell. Eventually I had to ditch it though to keep my wrist healthy.
My hope is this will lead to the reversal of the insane "HDR auto-brightness" behavior that causes any photo marked as HDR to go extreme brightness mode while the rest of the screen darkens:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254050878 https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/436949/why-are-som...
I think Apple have jumped the shark, personally. Sure, trillion-dollar business and all that - but at the folk level, they have become the very thing they were always resisting: a tired old monopoly enforcing principles on their customers which are not in the customers' best interests.
OS vendors have lost the plot. Where a company decides to try to build an operating system for mass acceptance at scale these days, they build an ad delivery platform - not an operating system. The interests of far too many third parties have been elevated at the kernel-extension layer, and lower, and this is as troubling as it ever was.
Its the 21st century and people still don't understand how to manage the filesystem, having given all agency to the task to the backend/cloud, which harvests their data instead of granting the user more agency. In fact, most people have less agency over their data - and simply do not care about it - because they have been lulled into accepting the state of affairs by OS vendors who simply don't want to write a better Finder/File Explorer for the end user - choosing instead, to write an operating system for ad agencies to harvest user eyeballs.
Apple have traditionally avoided the usual pretence of 'ads in the start bar' by leveraging their platforms, and this is starting to fall apart at the seams. Convergence is going to be a joke, and will turn off a lot of computer users until a generation is raised, who will just accept the doctrine of their masters, and in so doing, lose knowledge to the generations.
I yearn for an OS vendor to build an operating system that really makes the user control over their computer and their data, a number one priority. Apple isn't it. Microsoft certainly isn't it. There are multiple Linux OS vendors who could be it, if only they'd get their hardware act into shape. There are hardware vendors struggling to attain this goal, too.
My next laptop won't be an Apple, after 30+ years of adoption of the platform. I fear the future that Apple is laying out ahead of us - just as I feared that of Microsoft and Oracle and IBM too, through the decades.
If there is hope, it lays with the (low-end open source hardware/software-agency-protecting) proles.
I have concerns too, but the file manager on macOS is not among them. The Finder has barely changed since its OS X 10.2 incarnation over two decades ago, except for gaining features (many of which were demanded by power users). A few settings need toggling on a fresh install (turning on status bar and path bar are musts, as is ~/Library visibility), but that’s the worst of it. Neither it nor the rest of macOS do much to go out of their way to obfuscate the filesystem.
iOS still needs work despite its file manager having become much more capable, but part of that comes down to the differing filesystem arrangement where user documents are kept within app bundles. If raw filesystem access were enabled, that model wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense even to many who are familiar with navigating filesystems. I could see the argument that it should be switched to a traditional desktop OS model, but that’s a deep architectural change.
Windows on the other hand… Explorer just keeps getting slower even if it’s not losing functionality, and Windows has always been poor when it comes to misrepresenting or obfuscating the filesystem. I hate trying to track down where files have been deposited in Windows boxes, and I would agree that it’s been contributing to users not understanding filesystems.
People being able to organise their lives with their computers has been a thing since the beginning of the personal computer. The filesystems we have were never really the 'best' - just the most viable.
The filesystem UI has been abandoned in favour of newer, better abstractions, such as 'just throw it all at the Cloud and let our analysis software give you a front-end to it, eventually..'
I think users not understanding filesystems isn't really a computing problem, but a literacy one. In some senses, computing becomes the victim of itself.
I would seriously question if “throw it at the cloud” is actually better or if it only became popular because that’s what’s most profitable for companies to push users into using. Local hierarchical storage doesn’t give nearly as many opportunities for rent seeking and data harvesting.
Cloud storage certainly has a convenience factor which is worth considering, but at the same time most people don’t actually need everything available everywhere at all times and only have a handful of files that can intentionally be synced as needed. I really don’t believe that supplanting traditional filesystems with a big bag of data that lives in the cloud is the right answer.
I think the point is that agency of the user over the locality of, and control over their data is based on decisions made by operating system vendors who, having 'given up' on trying to get users to understand the difference between folders and files, has figured out its better to just put everything in the cloud and 'own the tags and other abstractions' which come from a subscription service.
In any case, we see eye to eye on the convenience factor - it is inescapable, the success rate is clear - but we are looking at the edge case of things anyway, no? The future of Apple is an interesting one - we long term users surely can have an opinion. (Hacked my first Apple in 1981, haven't stopped since.)
Unfortunately the hardware is peerless. The 15" Air is outstanding. No fan, no lag, no sleep/wake issues, no trackpad issues. Impossible to use a PC laptop after such quality. The software though is a steaming pile of foolish UI decisions.
My favorite reaction to today’s news is this one-liner from a guy on Twitter/X: “The average IQ of both companies has increased.”
My friend, that was NZ prime minister Robert Muldoon who was quoted as saying “every time a New Zealander emigrates to sun themselves on the beaches of Bondi, the average IQ of both countries increases.”
This is not a new saying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Rogers_phenomenon
Indeed!
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/570584/it-raises-the-iq...
Here is an unpopular opinion, how about Craig Federighi replaced with Scott Forstall.
It isn't just about UI design. But the whole software stack as well. iOS is still 90% the same as it was launched, and yet the apps management is still inconvenient to say the least. Along with copying all Android features, if I wanted an Android I would have brought one.
The software stack, how many years has Swift been announced? how many years have they announced Swift UI? Xcode? HN discussed macOS problems not long ago [1]. It would have been far better they just stick to Objective-C for the past 10 years and actually get things done.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46114599
Cocoa was so good. I even liked old-school Interface Builder’s IoC. Now there are controls where it’s obvious drag and/or drop should be supported but it isn’t or simple things like opening a custom SwiftUI (né Preferences) settings window from legacy AppKit code is unsupported.
Unfortunately, Objective-C added modern language features too late. IB never used the term IoC or anything else devs coming from other ecosystems would understand. A lot of great stuff that NeXT built 30 years ago is still great today, but never had the notoriety of lesser frameworks and languages.
> Here is an unpopular opinion, how about Craig Federighi replaced with Scott Forstall.
I'm with you there.
Forstall's skeuomorphism gets a lot of hate. It certainly got pretty weird visually. Especially on OS X where a leather-bound Calendar had to interact with other normal windows. But unlike what Ive and Dye have given us, Forstall's UX remained functional overall. I'm glad skeuomorphism is gone, but much of it was done to help the user. Just maybe a bit misguided.
At one point years ago, there was an iOS release where the recently used apps would render, then re-order themselves after a second or two. You could tell it was caching then dynamically updating. It was frustrating from a UX perspective because you would go to tap on an app and by the time you tapped, it would open a different app because they had re-ordered themselves.
It was fixed in an update, but to me that's the canary in the coal mine that priority is wrong. Apple will be ok without Steve as long as somebody is obsessed with the UX being very good. When I see the quality of the UX experience degrading while other UX changes are made that don't improve the basic UX, then there's a problem.
I subscribe to Apple Music, and have built playlists on the service. The fact that I have to enable sync (which then wastes 70G of space on my iPhone) to use my playlists is BS. I don't see a technical reason for it. The only conclusion I can come to is they want to drive storage subscriptions by taking up space using music sync. If anybody wants to explain why sync needs to be enabled, that would be cool, but is a really concerning product management decision IMO.
I hope this improves things. The difference in attention to detail between classic Mac OS (as easily seen in Apple's "Macintosh" dynamic screen saver/wallpaper) and current macOS Tahoe is stark.
But I suspect that Apple Services have too much power so the platforms will continue to be corrupted with ever-more-intrusive advertising.
Related previously:
Apple Design Official Alan Dye Poached by Meta in Major Coup
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46142843
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46139145
> but everyone I’ve spoken to is happy — if not downright giddy — at the news that Lemay is replacing Dye.
Count me in.
Some previous discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46153852
This is like a Man United fan discussing a player who just left for a rival team. You sort of expect a large amount of bitterness.
More like a fan who had long been complaining loudly and publicly about one of the coaches rejoicing when they left.
This is a positive transformation for Apple
Hopefully this trend continues, there's too many dogshit people in positions they shouldn't have at Apple.
Two of the three worst interviews I've ever had were with them. Basically got flown out twice to be insulted by team leads or upper management. Everyone insists I'm supposed to keep trying until I don't encounter someone like that but that doesn't seem right to me, not for a company like this. I can wait
In the article, he asks why Apple didn't replace Dye with a "Dye acolyte".
Nerd that i am, I immediately thought perhaps the phrase "Dye acolyte" raises a null pointer exception.
Another post of his that isnt shadow banned!
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Well this is Hacker News, after all
I mostly get my tech news from hacks.
Apple bootlicker for sure, but he knows his stuff
Well, it's a daringfireball article after all... Who else should he cite apart from Apple bootlickers?
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He is literally the primary person at the latest Apple event to introduce Liquid Glass, his face and name is on Apple's promotional material. If he wants to live a secluded life where his name is not referenced maybe he should not agree to blast it to millions of people and star in video interviews.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGztGfRujSE (Apple promo) and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z73NELDwyhQ (iJustine interview)
While I’m not a fan of mobbing on someone as it easily escalates to bullying an gratuitous attacks, parodying his name is the least of my concerns. And he is a public figure. Being the head designer at Apple grants you that status and don’t even doubt for a second anyone who wants that type of job doesn’t play the fame/status game.
Doesn't being a CxO at a fortune 100 company implicitly make you a public figure?
All things considered, this is a pretty mild pun. It isn't making fun of his name or replacing it with a slur or something.
The pun on Dye's name is probably the least mean thing Gruber has to say about him.
He's earned it.
This is cope dressed up in the stereotypical Gruber sycophancy.
The decision to align iOS and MacOS with the glassy design of VisionOS was a broader corporate strategy that would have required buy-in from more execs than just the "chief design officer". If you accept that this particular bozo wasn't forced out but instead was tempted away by the scent of lucre wafting from Zuck's pockets, then that implies that there are still plenty of clowns left at Apple to fill out the circus.
The problem is, Liquid Glass isn’t all that closely aligned with the visionOS UI, despite both having glass-like qualities. Most notably, the iOS and macOS versions are missing the usability affordances that the visionOS version has, and more superficially the visionOS version looks nicer.
Yes, but it could have been as simple that the UIs should look like they come from the same company - and that is the correct path IMO. At that point, it's the Chief Design/Product person's responsibility to execute on that order.
I know a fraudster that everyone speaks highly of. Outright fraud and advocates against fraud themself. Whenever I read "everyone speaks highly of" I stop reading.
I also think Apple knew they rather wanted to move on without him. They probably gave him some targets that were to high and then reduced/dropped his bonuses based on low achievements.
He got the message, Meta got the carrot.
He might even be a better fit for Meta.