Nick Heer, a few days ago, posed a question:

This is a good and wide-ranging interview that dances around a question I have been thinking about for a while now: what capabilities do high-performance products like these [the Mac Studio] unlock for a creative professional? It is great to see how much faster they are at compiling applications or rendering video, but I wonder what new things people will attempt on machines like these which may have been too daunting before. 

New applications, new endeavours, are certainly made possible by technological advancements in hardware, chip design and engineering. I’m looking at my Power Mac G4 Cube on this other desk. It was introduced 22 years ago, it has a 450 MHz CPU, 1.5 GB of RAM, and a 60 GB spinning hard drive. Its graphics card has 16 MB (megabytes) of memory. When you look at the specs of an M1 Ultra Mac Studio, you have a pretty good idea of the progress that has been made in 22 years when it comes to storage, memory, graphical & computational power, and overall speed and responsiveness. A rendering job that takes a new Mac Studio a couple of minutes, this poor G4 Cube would probably take a whole day to compute — provided it could even do it in the first place.

But there’s another crucial thing to consider: software. There’s always a car analogy when talking about computers, and this time is no different — and software is the fuel in this analogy. You can have an astoundingly powerful, astoundingly energy-efficient engine that makes the car reach 300 km/h in 2 seconds. But without fuel, the car won’t go anywhere.

However, software in a computer system does more than just making the engine run. It also gives the system a purpose, a direction. It gives the system applications, both in the sense of software programs, and in the sense of uses for a machine.

Without innovation in software, all we’re doing with these new powerful machines is essentially the same we were doing 20 years ago on PowerPC G4 and G5 computers, but faster and more conveniently. Granted, it is progress, especially in those fields involving CPU- and GPU-intensive tasks and greatly benefitting by having lots and lots of calculations made in the shortest possible time.

But progress can’t be just about quantitative aspects of computing, as great and beneficial as they are. What new applications can an amazing M1-Ultra-powered Mac Studio unlock, if there are no new types of software applications that could provide new directions and uses?

This is the personal beef I have with tech innovation today, which I feel still revolving around the concept of ‘reinventing the wheel and making it spin faster’. I might be wrong on this, and it might just be an inaccurate subjective impression, but today I feel a distinct dearth of vision when it comes to what a computer can do. If the sheer raw power of computers has increased orders of magnitude in the last 30 years, the range of applications (in both senses) for a computer hasn’t increased or spread in a comparable way. 

(If you’re thinking, But what about AR/VR and the Metaverse, for example? — you know that these concepts are decades old, right? And that their applications are only underwhelmingly better than what was produced in the 1990s? And that the user interface and interaction hurdles to make these concepts work really seamlessly haven’t changed that much since?)

This reflection ties with what I was talking about in my two pieces (see here and the follow-up here) on Mac software stagnation. These past few years — after a period of Mac hardware stagnation and hardware design fiascos like the MacBook butterfly keyboard and the 2013 Mac Pro — Apple has got back on track and has really, positively pushed the envelope with their in-house designed systems on a chip, on mobile devices and then finally on Macs. What an iPad Air, iPad Pro, and even a base M1 Mac can achieve with their M‑class chips is remarkable in terms of raw power (and efficiency). But I’m not seeing the same kind of advancement in software. 

Apple’s first-party applications included with Mac OS are mediocre at best. Their pro apps appear to be more maintained than developed with the aim of advancement, with the possible exception of Final Cut Pro (video professionals, feel free to chime in). Apps that were previously good-quality, powerful, and versatile have been neutered and have become ‘just okay’ or ‘good enough’. The Utilities folder in Mac OS has been slowly but surely depopulated over time. iOS apps with an ingenious premise, like Music Memos, are being left behind as flashes in the pan. The consensus with iTunes was that Apple should have split it into different apps so that these could be better at handling specific tasks than the old monolithic media manager. Apple eventually did split iTunes into different apps, but forgot the second part of the assignment. The result is that I still go back to a Mac with iTunes to handle my media, and I’m not the only one.

Aperture overall was a better application than Adobe Lightroom when the two apps coexisted. Apple could have kept improving Aperture and kept making it better than Lightroom. Instead they gave up. We now have Photos as sole ‘sophisticated’ Apple photo tool. Which is neither fish (iPhoto) nor flesh (Aperture).

And then there are two applications I must mention because I’m still profoundly annoyed by their discontinuation: iWeb and iBooks Author. Have I made you raise an eyebrow? Good. Hear me out. 

iWeb certainly had its flaws. It was the typical app with a good premise that was never cultivated properly, never really optimised, never made better, and just left to wither. But let’s look at iWeb within a broader context: it’s 2022 — shouldn’t we have a powerful yet simple-to-use WYSIWYG tool to craft a website? Sure, there are accessible platforms that let you set up a blog with relative ease, and there are simple-enough tools to set up a static site, but a non-tech-savvy person will still find these tools to be sophisticated enough to be a bit off-putting. 

The Web has been around for thirty years now, why do HTML, CSS, etc., still exist? It’s a hyperbole, hopefully you’re getting my point here. Why aren’t there standardised tools to just create online spaces in a perfectly accessible WYSIWYG way? Why do regular people still have to struggle with strings of code and magical syntax to make trivial customisations to the websites they’ve patiently managed to create?

iWeb could have been a great tool, because it had this spirit — the Macintosh spirit — of attempting to help people make hard stuff in a simple, visual, intuitive way. 

iBooks Author wasn’t perfect either, and had some glaring omissions (an ebook authoring tool that doesn’t even have appropriate facilities to handle footnotes is laughable), but it had the potential of becoming a good application to create books. By the way, do you know any good-quality application to make ebooks that is sophisticated, relatively easy to use, with a good UI, and well-designed overall? On the Mac, only Vellum comes to mind. On other platforms I honestly have no idea, but I’m not terribly optimistic. Even Vellum needs you to install Kindle Previewer if you intend to publish using Amazon’s formats for the Kindle platform.

iBooks Author could have been overhauled and further developed, but apparently the only professionals Apple knows are in the audio/video departments. What about professional tools for authors and writers? The Pages app? Because that’s what Apple suggested to use when they discontinued iBooks Author in 2020 (which was already on life support by then). Come on.

I’m not saying that there are absolutely no tools available today for Web development or book designing. What I’m saying is that software as an abstract concept has aged worse than hardware in the history of computing. Software today still comes with much more friction than it should have, given the context of general technological advancement that has happened for the past 40 years or so. Most programming languages are old. The old foundations are getting more and more impractical to handle modern applications (uses) but the new foundations and new programming tools are still too immature to be an effectual replacement or successor. 

And don’t get me wrong — I’m not blaming third-party developers and indie developers here. They’re working as hard and as best as they can given the increasingly difficult conditions they’re put in, especially those developing for Apple platforms. It’s a maddening scenario: with their unnecessarily tight restrictions in the name of security (theatre), with their capricious and petty App review checkpoints, Apple seems to be actively obstructing innovation in software. And the company isn’t even doing it as a way to push aside third-party solutions to instead show off their software innovations and breakthroughs, because those are increasingly rare sights.

So, again, we have absurdly powerful machines like the Mac Studio and soon we’ll have the even more mind-boggling Apple silicon Mac Pro, and what kind of software will they run? A handful of professional apps which hopefully will take advantage of these machines’ capabilities to make the same things professional Macs did twenty years ago, ten years ago, but better and faster. Though the question is: what kind of software innovation will these impossibly powerful Macs unlock or facilitate? What kinds of new applications (uses) will these Macs allow? I have no idea. And I have no idea whether we’ll see something moving in this direction.

Apple’s chip and hardware advancements have inspired the competition (Intel) to do better, and that’s a great thing. On the software side, I’ve seen very little from Apple to be considered remotely inspirational. What I’ve seen are platform management techniques that have pushed things like subscriptions and lock-in, and a generally toxic gatekeeping behaviour. What I’ve seen is an operating system like Mac OS — based on strong UNIX foundations and rigorous, well-thought-out human interface guidelines — become a brittle, hollow shell, with questionable UI design choices, and bugs that get dragged from one iteration to another. When Apple’s own software has generally worsened over time; when they treat third-party developers as a necessary nuisance that has to be begrudgingly dealt with on a regular basis — instead of, you know, actually celebrate them and inspire them to write even better software for the Apple ecosystem; when their insistence with security through lock-down and lock-in leads to an ecosystem whose overall thriving is stifled at worst and corralled at best… How can Apple be an inspirational force in software?