Lemay has been at Apple for 27 years and has a track record that implies the future of Apple software under his leadership is extraordinarily bright.
I don't share the optimism. I mean, he was there when Liquid Glass was designed and presumably in a good position if he became an executive leader now. Sure, Alan Dye may be the face, but Liquid Glass was made by a very large department. And it is not like Apple's design rot started with liquid glass, this recent post shows that it is regression after regression after regression (which is also my impression after having used Macs since 2007):
It is sad that Apple is still extremely good at hardware (I have the iPhone 17 Pro and the design is stellar), but software has become worse and worse over the years. They can only get away with it because almost all of the rest of the industry is even worse (macOS is still a glass of ice water if you are in the hellscape that is Windows).
As a heavy user of both operating systems, I really don’t feel that either has changed much in the last decade. Visually, sure, things go through cycles, but from a “how do I use it?” perspective my work flows on neither OS have changed.
Visually, it has been an ongoing degradation over the past 15-ish years, in the sense of UI controls versus content having become progressively harder to distinguish and less self-explanatory. Functionally, there is less consistency between apps and in UI idioms than there used to be.
And while UI controls have been becoming harder to recognize, they've also been inflating to waste more screen space. Liquid Glass is a big jump in that respect. Though the web has been afflicted much worse, because everything online is now designed with a touch-first UI in mind and information density is not a priority at all.
Well, duh, they're not rethinking the UI to work differently.
They just make the UX worse in tons of subtle and not so subtle ways. Less differentiation between controls, more wasted space, UI widgets that become unreadable based on what content scrolls under them, more samey (thus harder to find) icons, and 1000s of such paper cuts.
>I mean, he was there when Liquid Glass was designed and presumably in a good position if he became an executive leader now.
That position could be as the guy who argued against it, but didn't have the power to call the shots, which is especially likely "if he became an executive leader now" due to the backlash.
> Sure, Alan Dye may be the face, but Liquid Glass was made by a very large department
And the board is ultimately the culpable party here. The executives are just useful idiots. The board has clearly lost whatever direction they ever had of why the company they're running has value—and they can't just hire Steve Jobs back anymore.
They can get away with it because Apple fans (even the ones who are tech-literate) react with visceral disgust when anyone suggests and Android phone or a non-Mac PC.
It does not hurt that Android and iOS are both kind of the same OS now. Yes, I get that there are a million differences between the two, but now that we're at almost two straight decades of the platforms copying features from one another, the difference is academic for most people.
I don't share the optimism. I mean, he was there when Liquid Glass was designed and presumably in a good position if he became an executive leader now. Sure, Alan Dye may be the face, but Liquid Glass was made by a very large department. And it is not like Apple's design rot started with liquid glass, this recent post shows that it is regression after regression after regression (which is also my impression after having used Macs since 2007):
https://pxlnv.com/blog/window-chrome-of-our-discontent/
It is sad that Apple is still extremely good at hardware (I have the iPhone 17 Pro and the design is stellar), but software has become worse and worse over the years. They can only get away with it because almost all of the rest of the industry is even worse (macOS is still a glass of ice water if you are in the hellscape that is Windows).