Apple added too many features too fast, so they fell into the Feature Whirlpool. They're going to try and get out of it by adding more Features, Faster (I hope I'm wrong!).
Instead, they should have stayed on the Straigth and Narrow of Quality - where they were for many years - where you move up to computing paradise by having fewer features but more time spent perfecting them.
Oh, come on, having your brand-new AirPod Pro 3s listed in the Bluetooth summary of your also-pretty-recent iPhone as ACCESSORY_MODEL_NAME is a small price to pay for the 3 months of free Apple Music that take up so much more space in the UI anyway...
I mean, some people are just impossible to please!
"If you were a ‘product person’ at IBM or Xerox: so you make a better copier or better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market-share, the company’s not any more successful. So the people who make the company more successful are the sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the ‘product people’ get run out of the decision-making forums.
The companies forget how to make great products. The product sensibility and product genius that brought them to this monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts about wanting to help the costumers.”
What happened is the same thing that tends to happen to almost all successful organisation. The uber exceptional people who initially built it, defined the culture, and enforced it with an iron fist are gone. Now a bunch of people are in charge who trained under the first generation, but who themselves just don't quite have that kind of singular personality. So things start slipping over time.
I don't use a Mac anymore, but I do use an iPhone. This is the worst version of iOS I can recall. Everything is low contrast and more difficult to see. The colors look washed out. The icons look blurry. In my opinion, Liquid Glass is a total bust. I don't know what these people are thinking. Times have certainly changed.
For me it's the notch... I'm still on a 2nd gen se (no notch) but I hate the notch on my laptop.
I think we're stuck with the notch forever on iPhones. Even if apple uses an on-screen fingerprint reader in the future like a billion phones already do they're not going to go back from the face scanner. The only thing that will work is if the face scanner can read from behind the display.
I've always been a big fan of apple and have defended them in the past, but iOS 26 is a dumpster fire. There are visual corruptions and glitches all over the place and transparent text floating over transparent text. It's not even whether I like the style or not, it's just broken. Who signed off on this? No product in this state would ever leave one of my teams, I'd resign first.
About $1B (billion) in stock incentives for top-level execs in 2025 (Tim alone is $76m I believe). Apple stock is up. They are happy imho. Very, very few humans would care about "detail" vs. this outcome. Satya is close to $100M I believe, and we are shocked the M$FT is trading-in on ads/telemtry in Win11. These guys are just human.
I'm surprised the author didn't mention my personal biggest frustration I've had since I made the mistake of upgrading.
Everything seems to be lazily done now - by that I mean, a modal pops-up and then it resizes to fit the content. Never seen this before.
Or, you open settings (settings!) and it's not ready to use until a full second later because things need to pop in and shift.
And it's animated- with animation time, so you just have to wait for the transitions to finish.
And "reduce motion" removes visual feedback of moving things (e.g. closing apps) so I find it entirely unusable.
And as others have noted the performance is completely unacceptable. I have a 16 pro and things are slow... And forget "low battery mode" - it's now awful.
I'm not doing anything weird and keep like all apps closed and things off when I don't use them and battery life is significantly worse. (Noticed the same on M4 + Tahoe, upgraded at the same time)
Very disappointed and I very much regret upgrading.
I'm starting to believe that customer satisfaction signals an inefficiency to be found and optimized away. The most financially successful companies have customers who are unhappy but not as unhappy that they leave.
In this case the inefficiency was attention to detail but in other companies it might be something else.
Many complain about sw bugs as a sign of decline. I think it’s not correct — every software has bugs. Hell, even hardware and device may have bugs. Remember antennagate? I think poor interface design is a sign of poor product engineering. And this is a sign of decline.
I believe it was always more myth than fact. There's always been rough edges in Apple products line. If anything its more an indication of where the real focus is now. And it's not iOS.
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[ 13.9 ms ] story [ 90.2 ms ] threadInstead, they should have stayed on the Straigth and Narrow of Quality - where they were for many years - where you move up to computing paradise by having fewer features but more time spent perfecting them.
I mean, some people are just impossible to please!
The companies forget how to make great products. The product sensibility and product genius that brought them to this monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts about wanting to help the costumers.”
- Steve Jobs - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs:_The_Lost_Interview
I don't use a Mac anymore, but I do use an iPhone. This is the worst version of iOS I can recall. Everything is low contrast and more difficult to see. The colors look washed out. The icons look blurry. In my opinion, Liquid Glass is a total bust. I don't know what these people are thinking. Times have certainly changed.
I think we're stuck with the notch forever on iPhones. Even if apple uses an on-screen fingerprint reader in the future like a billion phones already do they're not going to go back from the face scanner. The only thing that will work is if the face scanner can read from behind the display.
ironically I don't really mind the new design language, whatever, if the damned thing worked.
Everything seems to be lazily done now - by that I mean, a modal pops-up and then it resizes to fit the content. Never seen this before.
Or, you open settings (settings!) and it's not ready to use until a full second later because things need to pop in and shift.
And it's animated- with animation time, so you just have to wait for the transitions to finish.
And "reduce motion" removes visual feedback of moving things (e.g. closing apps) so I find it entirely unusable.
And as others have noted the performance is completely unacceptable. I have a 16 pro and things are slow... And forget "low battery mode" - it's now awful.
I'm not doing anything weird and keep like all apps closed and things off when I don't use them and battery life is significantly worse. (Noticed the same on M4 + Tahoe, upgraded at the same time)
Very disappointed and I very much regret upgrading.
In this case the inefficiency was attention to detail but in other companies it might be something else.