It’s been almost a month since the last update here. Not that I usually update this blog with great frequency, but this has been another period of ‘low tide’ for me. Just like it happened four years ago, as I wrote in Tech’s high speed, and my low tide. If you don’t want to read that piece before proceeding with this one, make sure you read it afterwards. Nothing has changed in four years. As I re-read that piece myself before starting to write this, I realised it’s something I could have written today. 

In that piece I wrote, As for technology, it’s one of those periods when I’m feeling overwhelmed by everything revolving around it. Debates are exhausting. Debates are exhausting indeed. You see, on 28 October I started a draft in iA Writer with this working title: ‘My next Mac might be the last’ follow-up: discussing feedback and a few notes on User experience homogenisation. The idea was to talk about the many email messages I have been receiving since publishing that article (I haven’t replied to anybody privately, my apologies; work and personal stuff got in the way). 

And also to talk about one particular aspect — User experience homogenisation — that was touched on in Episode 841 of MacBreak Weekly, when Leo Laporte quoted my article, which seems to have resonated with him, blowing my mind in the process. As I was watching the episode, I feared the worse, like These veterans are going to make fun of me or something like that. They didn’t, but they also didn’t give much importance to my observations. This was the part Laporte quoted for discussion:

I actually quite like most of what Apple is doing with the Mac, hardware-wise. The problem is I just can’t stand the software anymore. The problem is that I feel there is a troubling ungluing going on between Mac hardware and Mac OS, a substantial difference in quality between the two components, that doesn’t make me feel what I used to feel in previous versions of Mac OS X: seamless integration.

I think it all stems from Apple’s desire to simplify things for themselves, architecture-wise — Apple Silicon is quite innovative in bringing the advantages of iOS devices to Macs (performance + power efficiency). The terrible decision, in my view, has been to also want to bring the iOS look and feel to the Mac. It was unnecessary, it has broken so many tried-and-true Mac interface guidelines, and it has delivered a massive blow to the whole operating system’s identity. Just to make the Mac what, more fashionable? 

The consensus among the MacBreak Weekly regular guests was that actually what Apple is doing to Mac OS is a good thing, that maybe some UI changes go a bit too far, but that typically Apple corrects them afterwards in case the pushback is strong. That a more visually cohesive look between the various Apple platforms is good for the ecosystem.

What I originally planned to write in the follow-up article, then, were a few observations stemming from this core question: Should the user experience on Mac OS be as similar as possible to iOS for the Apple ecosystem’s sake?

But then I dropped everything. This nagging voice inside me kept repeating: Is it worth it? Will anyone care? And I know that someone somewhere would care, but then I was overcome with the feeling that whatever I say, I will end up being treated like that famous Simpsons meme — “Old Man Yells At Cloud”.

This is where we are today in the ever-exhausting tech debate: either you happily embrace whatever kind of shit tech throws at you, or you’re an Old Man Yelling At Cloud. I may be wrong about this, because it’s based on personal, subjective experience, but more and more I end up feeling like these debates go nowhere. I still think it’s worth criticising and pointing out what I think is wrong — especially, crucially, when it comes to Apple — but there are periods just like this one in which it all feels so tiring and pointless. My observations and criticism will resonate with like-minded people, we’ll talk about them for a bit, and then everything will be business as usual. At the beginning of November, I blurted out this tweet: Funny how so many people tell me in private how they enjoy my blog and my tech commentary, but they so often forget to mention it in public when sharing recommendations on who to read in tech. 35+ years of experience in this stupid field and [I’m] still made to feel not good enough. “teknisktsett” replied that Some people don’t dare to agree on “hot topics”, publicly. I received a similar, longer response, via private email: “Don’t expect prominent writers and figures in tech to amplify your (always excellent and on-point) criticisms. They may agree with you ‘at home’, but ‘at work’ they’ll keep their facade because it’s counterproductive for them to agree with you”.

So here we are. 

By the way, of course my answer to that question — Should the user experience on Mac OS be as similar as possible to iOS for the Apple ecosystem’s sake? — was going to be No. The short, simple example is that Mac OS and iOS have coexisted for years without problems, each interface taking advantage of each platform’s strengths and user interaction paradigms, and people didn’t seem to protest. Mac sales didn’t wane because Mac OS was sooo unfamiliar when coming from iOS. Macs didn’t sell well whenever there was something more immediately wrong with them, like Touch Bars replacing an entire row of useful keys, or MacBooks with keyboards that broke down on their own due to atrocious design decisions, or Macs with poorly-designed thermal management.

I’m not entirely against the spirit of bringing a more unified look to all the different operating systems within a bigger ecosystem like Apple’s, mind you, but I find worrying and incompetent to just cut certain parts (or certain visual aspects) of the UI of iOS and paste them onto Mac OS. The user interaction on a traditional computer with mouse/trackpad and keyboard is different from the interaction you find on a touch-based and Multi-touch interface. What severely annoys me about Mac OS Ventura’s new System Settings is that 

1. They don’t solve what was supposedly a problem with the earlier implementation of System Preferences, i.e. making settings easier to find. In my opinion, things have actually worsened on this front. If you removed the Search feature in both the older System Preferences and the new System Settings, I’m pretty sure you’d still find stuff more quickly in the older System Preferences.
2. The interface of System Settings is just ‘off’ and inadequate on a traditional computer. Since it’s copy-pasted from iOS, the whole look & feel of it invites you to navigate it by touch, suddenly making interactions with mouse + keyboard more awkward. I saw with my own eyes someone at the local Apple Store trying to change the system appearance from light to dark by directly touching the MacBook Air’s display. Yes, for a moment one smiles at things like this. Then you realise just how bad the UI/UX situation has become on Mac OS.

There, I said it. This will have zero impact on anything, naturally, but it’s out of my system now. 

Aside 1 — In After WWDC 2020: bittersweet Mac, written in July 2020, I said: 

I’d hate to see a progressive oversimplification of the Mac’s UI that could potentially introduce the same discoverability issues that are still present in iPadOS.

I’ve always considered the look of an operating system to be a by-product of how it works, rather than a goal to achieve, if you know what I mean. If something is well-designed in the sense that it works well, provides little to no friction during use, and makes you work better, it’s very rare that it also ends up being something ugly or inelegant from a visual standpoint. How it works shapes how it looks. If you put the look before the how-it-works, you may end up with a gorgeous-looking interface that doesn’t work as well as it looks. 

Or, as it’s happening more frequently now, a gorgeous-looking interface that misleads you because it’s made to look and feel like another user interface which was designed for an entirely different kind of device.

Aside 2 — In What about the M1 Macs?, written in December 2020, I said: 

So, what about the M1 Macs? They’re unbelievably good machines, and everything that is genuinely good about them and future Apple Silicon-based Macs — sheer performance, astounding power-efficiency, and great backward compatibility with Intel software thanks to Rosetta 2 — will also allow Apple to get away with a lot of things with regard to platform control, design decisions, and so forth. 

Guess what happened.

I’m just tired of seeing this passive attitude a lot of people seem to have towards tech companies and Apple in particular; the constant excuses made in Apple’s defence even when changes to the interface design break or interfere with their workflow. So much so that when you point out all those changes for change’s sake, they look at you as if you were the weird one; as if you were less smart for not wanting to adapt every single time and at every Apple designer’s whim. 

I’m tired of hearing the same old song, Apple keeps beating financial records at every quarter, so they must be doing something right. Yes, yes, they make desirable products. Yes, the hardware is still attractive enough to make enough people want to purchase Apple’s products. And yes, Apple Silicon is groundbreaking, an undeniable innovation — but as I’ve kept saying for a while now, this groundbreaking technological advance is used to do the same things we used to do before, only faster and more efficiently. For some, this is enough progress. For me, it’s wasted potential.

I’ve already said it — I’ve never seen such stagnancy in software like in the past decade or so. What I do on my 2020 eighth-generation iPad I can do on my 2012 third-generation iPad. And sure, the eighth-generation iPad is faster and more efficient, but its sole software advantage is that a lot of the services behind certain apps work on iOS 16 but are deprecated on iOS 9. What I do on my 2015 13-inch retina MacBook Pro running Mac OS Monterey is essentially the same that I can do on my 2009 15-inch MacBook Pro with OS X 10.11 El Capitan. Here, some things are faster on the more recent MacBook Pro with Monterey, but from an interface standpoint in many situations I just work better under El Capitan on the older MacBook Pro. 

Where’s the innovation here? Instead of researching and pushing out new software ideas to truly make people’s lives better, the latest Mac OS release’s highlights are… yet another way of working with application windows, redesigned System Preferences, and some other minor things I’m having a hard time recalling. But even if I’m forgetting a cute new feature, or the new Freeform app, my beloved pedants, what matters here is the big picture. And the big picture is that there simply is no real vision behind this technology. Even with something as big as Apple Silicon. What’s the plan? What I see from here boils down to, Let’s make these devices faster and more efficient. Okay, and… That’s it. Let’s make their operating systems look more homogeneous, too. It’s like watching an artist who has basically exhausted their inspiration or creativity and just keeps touching and retouching their last artwork.

That’s why, when people take the time to email me to tell me I’m an Old Man Yelling At Cloud because I don’t want things to change in tech, I laugh out loud in the privacy of my studio. What change!? Nothing has fundamentally changed in tech for a good while. I see ‘faster horses’ everywhere. What irritates me are the unnecessary changes inflicted on things and designs that were provably already working well, just to make them look different and behave differently; just to have the excuse that you’re now offering something ‘new and improved’ where in reality in most cases your lack of ideas and vision is making things worse.

I’m tired of seeing sloppy, borderline incompetent design work. I’m tired of seeing lowering standards when it comes to the user interface. (Jeff Johnson said it well back at the beginning of 2021: The selling point of the Macintosh was never the hardware, it was the user interface. So if the selling point now is the hardware, that’s a damning indictment of the current user interface. I cannot emphasize enough how everyone seems to have lowered their standards with regard to the user interface. He was right then — inspiring me to write The reshaped Mac experience — and he’s right now). I’m also tired of all these pundits and tech journalists who don’t want to openly criticise Apple for fear of ‘losing access’ with the company. Where’s the journalistic ‘speaking truth to power’ here? 

Anyway, this is just the tip of the tech fatigue iceberg I’ve been experiencing as of late, and all these things do tire me, but they also make me mad, and that’s why I ultimately keep writing. I probably care more than I should, really.

Another period of tech fatigue was first published by Riccardo Mori on Morrick.me on 18 November 2022.