Riccardo Mori

Yesterday, a short Twitter thread by the excellent Jeff Johnson caught my eye. Since he often deletes past tweets, I’ll quote the relevant ones here (emphasis mine):

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. The “Overton window” has moved. The Overton window now has rounded rects.

 

We’ve gone from “insanely great” and “It just works” to “Catalyst is good enough for most people.”

That’s fucking BS, and I won’t tolerate it.

 

Windows is “good enough for most people”. That’s why Windows has a 90% market share. Why should we aspire to that level, shouldn’t we have much higher aspirations? Mac is a niche. “Most people” are not even using Macs, so the majority is not even relevant. Mac is a premium brand.

 

The way I see it, the Mac now is merely milking the brand reputation and loyalty it previously built. That Jobs previously built. But neither Cook nor the current Mac deserves that reputation or loyalty.

 

Steve Jobs wasn’t an engineer. Not a hardware engineer, not a software engineer. At Apple, his role was as “proxy” for the users.

Apple no longer has a proxy for the users. Tim Cook is a proxy for the shareholders, nothing more.

Jeff himself says that this criticism is hardly new, that these are things he already pointed out “a thousand times, to no effect”. While I am in no position to affect Apple or Mac development, this short Twitter rant had the effect of reminding me of something I, too, believe in; something I myself should emphasise more frequently. It’s those first two tweets I’ve quoted above.

As someone who still puts vintage Macs and older computers and devices to good use, the Mac’s user interface and user experience are in large part what still makes using 15–20-year-old machines enjoyable. This, by the way, also applies to other products of course. It’s thanks to well-designed user interfaces that we enjoy driving a classic car, or shooting with a 50-year-old film camera, or listening to vinyl records on a 40-year-old record-player and hi-fi stereo.

A couple of weeks ago I was on a group videochat with some friends and when I said that, frankly, using my 12-inch PowerBook G4 (2003) with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was more enjoyable than using my 13-inch retina MacBook Pro (2015) with Mac OS 11 Big Sur, the common reaction was that I was just being ‘nostalgic’; that surely my MacBook Pro was the better choice because it is orders of magnitude faster, with a ‘more modern’ OS, and that the sum of those parts was a better Mac experience. That I should ‘be rational’ and accept that.

Here, bringing up nostalgia is missing the point. And the point is that an admittedly faster hardware plus a purportedly ‘more modern’ operating system do not necessarily equal a better Mac experience. It’s interesting that my friends’ reaction was not to ask me why I was finding using an 18-year-old machine more enjoyable than an up-to-date Mac, but to promptly want to readjust my enjoyment, implying that there was something ‘wrong’ with it.

I’m finding that many people not only have lowered their standards with regard to the user interface, but more and more often when I bring up the subject, they seem to consider it a somewhat secondary aspect, something that’s only good for ‘geek talk’. The same kind of amused reaction laymen have to wine or coffee connoisseurs when they describe flavours and characteristics using specific lingo. Something that makes sense only to wine or coffee geeks but has little to no meaning or impact for the regular person.

The problem is that if an increasing number of people start viewing user interface design as an afterthought, or something that isn’t fundamental to the design of a product or experience — it’s all just ‘geek talk’ — then there is a reduced incentive to care about it on the part of the maker of the product. It’s more like a vicious circle, really; if Apple software’s quality declines but only a bunch of professional users and enthusiasts point that out, then Apple isn’t particularly incentivised to do a better job at it — the “good enough for most people” is really a dangerous, self-indulgent excuse. And in turn most people are fine with it, and in turn Apple think they’re on a ‘good’ path, and so forth.

At the very end of my piece What about the M1 Macs?, I wrote:

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.

If you take a look at Jason Snell’s Apple in 2020: The Six Colors report card, the Mac scored very good points overall, 4.7 out of 5, with a year-over-year increment of 1.1 points. The main reason has been of course the M1 Macs and Apple Silicon. Don’t get me wrong, Apple Silicon is groundbreaking, and Rosetta 2 is really an incredible performer on the software side. But what I contend is that a leap in hardware architecture and performance doesn’t necessarily mean that suddenly all is fine with the Mac as a platform or as an experience.

The Mac’s user interface is undergoing plastic surgery by the hand of surgeons who have studied on iOS books. The result is pretty much the same as when you see a favourite celebrity after a procedure. They look ‘younger’ but there’s also something weird about their appearance. Their traits have changed a bit. In certain cases you almost fail to recognise the person at first glance.

Similarly, the Mac experience today feels disjointed. The hardware has unquestionably improved with the introduction of Apple Silicon, and yes, it’s something worth celebrating and it’s something worth praising. On the other hand, the software that drives this hardware is a bit of a paradox: Big Sur and Apple Silicon Macs fit and work together well from a technical, architectural standpoint. From a user interface standpoint, however, Big Sur embodies what I’ve been fearing in recent years — a progressive iOS-ification of Mac OS. Big Sur provides a general user experience that is the least Mac-like in the history of the Mac. Going through Big Sur’s user interface with a fine-tooth comb reveals arbitrary design decisions that prioritise looks over function, and therefore reflect an un-learning of tried-and-true user interface and usability mechanics that used to make for a seamless, thoughtful, enjoyable Mac experience.

iOS was born as a ‘spinoff’ of Mac OS X, a sort of Lite version aimed at mobile devices like the iPhone and the iPod touch. The two platforms have maintained their separate paths and trajectories for years, and for a while using a Mac and an iPhone (or iPad) felt like having the best experience of each world. Then Apple became obsessed with thoughts of convergence, and features, UI ideas, paradigms, started bleeding through both platforms and in turn the respective experiences have become less clear-cut over time, with the software not fully capable of bringing out all that hardware power and potential.

This convergence will continue, of course, with Macs becoming more and more like ‘senior iOS devices’ from a UI and user experience standpoint. It seems clear to me that Apple is prioritising ecosystem experience because, let’s be honest, having a unified ‘operating system core’ underlying all platforms means having fewer framework-specific headaches and probably a faster, streamlined process when deploying new features. But this loss of differentiation is especially detrimental to Mac OS, which is being reduced to the lowest common denominator and loses an increasing amount of user interface ideas and conventions that were central to its superior user experience and ease of use.

I’m not annoyed because I see pieces of UI history fading away. I’m annoyed because I see pieces of good UI design fading away and being replaced by decisions that are puzzling and arbitrary, or the product of a trial-and-error process, rather than a meaningful, purposeful design.

You want an example that I find particularly glaring? Big Sur’s UI features a general increase of space between elements — icons, menus, labels, toolbars, sidebars, pretty much everywhere. On the surface it doesn’t seem like a bad decision. If you zoom in on certain parts of the user interface, you could say that more space between elements means that things looks cleaner, airier, sleeker.

But you’re looking at it on a 27-inch retina display. What about a display half that size? What about an 11-inch, non-retina display, like the one of the older 2013–2015 MacBook Airs that can be updated to Big Sur? It’s less pretty.

I usually work with a lot of app windows and Finder windows, but when I’m using my 13-inch retina MacBook Pro with Big Sur, the workspace constantly feels cramped, while on the other hand I have no problems using High Sierra on my 11-inch MacBook Air. Sometimes it feels like looking at a zoomed-in interface. That increased space between elements becomes less of a good idea because it doesn’t scale gracefully when the overall screen real estate is reduced. It becomes an interference. Before installing Big Sur, the amount of icons on the right of the menu bar had never really been a concern. Now, the simple addition of a couple of third-party apps like Dropbox and iStat Menus — both essential for me — is enough to make that menu bar look crowded. (And thankfully Apple has been reducing the space between menu icons, because in the first Big Sur betas icon padding was so bad I had to remove a few icons and use Control Centre to check on their status).

This, like other UI design decisions in Big Sur, feels like watching a chess player who only thinks about a move without considering the next one — or the next several ones, like good chess players do. As I tested beta after beta of Big Sur, I often asked myself the reasons behind a certain change in the UI. When the answer clearly wasn’t To make it look more like iOS, I tried to replicate the thought process behind it but I was often left with the feeling that another possible answer could be, It seemed like a good idea at the time. But an interface designer — who really should think like a chess player in these circumstances — can’t simply say It seemed like a good idea at the time to justify a UI change. There has to be a plan, a design. “Let’s try this, let’s try that” is not a strategy. It’s the way I played chess against my dad when I was 8 years old. I didn’t plan my moves ahead. I just reacted to what was before me. And I never won a game, of course.

These are all notes from an external observer, mind you. I don’t have inside information. I don’t know anything about how the Design team works at Apple. I’m just trying to make deductions based on what I’m seeing when I’m using Big Sur compared to all Mac OS versions I used previously and still use along with Big Sur. As I tweeted yesterday in response to Jeff Johnson, every time I point out some terrible or questionable UI design decision in Big Sur, there’s always, always someone who tells me “You’re just resisting change! You’re not willing to adapt!” without even entertaining the thought that, hey, maybe it is terrible UI design.

I am, in fact, willing to adapt — I will certainly purchase an Apple Silicon Mac in the future, and for all Big Sur’s user interface shortcomings, at least it’s not an unstable, unpredictable mess like Catalina. But again, great hardware performance plus software efficiency are not enough (for me) to create an enjoyable user experience if user interface design is neglected in the process. For years, decades, there has been a deep-seated user interface culture at Apple, and I feel it’s withering away. Unless it regains importance on the priority list, and depth in terms of knowledge (know your past) and thoughtfulness (apply all the best lessons learnt, and build on them), I guess I’ll keep using Macs, enjoying their performance and efficiency without a doubt, but merely putting up with them when it comes to user experience.