The awe keeps dropping

A first version of this piece was almost ready to be published two days ago, but after writing more than 2,000 words, I grew increasingly angry and exasperated, and that made the article become too meandering and rant-like, so I deleted everything, and started afresh several hours later.

This, of course, is about Awe-dropping, Apple’s September 9 event, where they presented the new iPhone lineup, the new AirPods Pro, and the new Apple Watches. And the honest truth here is that I’m becoming less and less inclined to talk about Apple, because it’s a company that I feel has lost its alignment with me and other long-time Apple users and customers.

The more Apple talks and moves like other big tech companies, the less special it gets; the less special and distinctive it gets, the less I’m interested in finding ways to talk about it. Yes, I have admitted that Apple makes me mad lately, so they still elicit a response that isn’t utter indifference on my part. And yes, you could argue that if Apple makes me mad, it means that in the end I still care.

But things aren’t this clear-cut. I currently don’t really care about Apple — I care that their bad software design decisions and their constant user-interface dumbing down may become trends and get picked up by other tech companies. So, what I still care about that’s related to Apple is essentially the consequences of their actions.

The Steve Jobs quote

The event kicked off with the famous Steve Jobs quote,

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

and I immediately felt the whiplash.

Why that quote? Why now, after months of criticism towards the new design æsthetic of Liquid Glass? I gave this choice three possible interpretations — I still may be missing something here; I’m sure my readers will let me know.

It’s Apple’s way of trolling the critics, who have repeatedly resorted to Steve Jobs’s words to criticise the several misguided UI choices in Liquid Glass. It’s the same kind of response as Phil Schiller famously blurting, Can’t innovate anymore, my ass! in 2013 during the presentation of the then-redesigned Mac Pro. But it feels like a less genuine, more passive-aggressive response (if this is the way we’re supposed to read their use of that quote).

Apple used the quote in earnest. As in, they really believe that what they’re doing is in line with Jobs’s words. If that’s the case, this is utter self-deception. The quote doesn’t reflect at all what Apple is doing in the UI and software department — the Liquid Glass design is more ‘look & feel’ than ‘work’. And the very introduction of the iPhone Air proves that Jobs’s words are falling on deaf ears on the hardware front as well.

Apple used the quote ‘for effect’. As if Meta started a keynote by saying, Our mission is to connect people, no more no less. You know, something that makes you sound great and noble, but not necessarily something you truly believe (or something that is actually true, for that matter).

I can’t know for sure which of these might be the correct interpretation. I think it heavily depends on whose Apple executive came up with the idea. Whatever the case may be, the effect was the same — it felt really jarring and tone-deaf.

AirPods and Watches

If you’re not new here, you’ll know that these are the Apple products I care the least, together with HomePods and Apple TV. I always tune out when Apple presents these, so browse Apple’s website or go read the technical breakdown elsewhere. Personally, I’m too much into traditional horology and therefore the design of the Apple Watch has always felt unimaginative at best, and plain ugly at worst.

From a UI standpoint, the Apple Watch continues to feel too complicated to use, and too overburdened with features. I wouldn’t say it’s design by committee, but more like designed to appeal to a whole committee. Apple wants the watch to appeal to a wide range of customers, therefore this little device comes stuffed with all kinds of bells and whistles. As I said more than once, the real feature I would love to see implemented is the ability to just turn off entire feature sets, so that if you only want to use it as a step counter and heart rate monitor, you can tell the watch to be just that; this would be more than just having a watchface that shows you time, steps, heart rate — it would be like having a watch that does only that. With all the features you deem unnecessary effectively disabled, imagine how simpler interacting with it would be, and imagine how longer its battery life would be.

What really got on my nerves during the Apple Watch segment of the event, though, is this: Apple always, always inserts a montage of sob stories about how the Apple Watch has saved lives, and what an indispensable life-saving device it is. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad those lives were saved. But this kind of ‘showcase’ every year is made in such poor taste. It’s clear to me that it’s all marketing above everything else, that they just want to sell the product, and these people’s stories end up being used as a marketing tactic. It’s depressing.

As for the AirPods, and true wireless earbuds in general, I find this product category to be the most wasteful. Unless someone comes up with a type of earbuds that have easily replaceable batteries, I’m not interested in buying something that’s bound to become e‑waste in a relatively short period of time.

The new iPhones

Don’t buy them. Don’t waste your money, unless you have money to waste and don’t care about a company with this kind of leadership. Read How Tim Cook sold out Steve Jobs by Anil Dash to understand how I feel. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

I’d wrap up my article here, but then I’d receive a lot of emails asking me why I didn’t talk about the iPhones, so here are a few stray observations:

One, maybe involuntary, user-friendly move Apple did with this new iPhone lineup is that now we have three very distinct iPhone models, whose nature and price should really help people decide which to purchase.

The regular iPhone 17 is the safe, iterative solution. It looks like an iPhone 16, it works like an iPhone 16 that has now better features. It’s the ideal phone for the average user (tech-savvy or not). It’s the safe choice and the best value iPhone overall.

The iPhone 17 Pro is possibly the most Pro iPhone to date. During its presentation, I felt like Apple wants you to consider this more like a pro camera for videographers and filmmakers rather than just a smartphone with a good camera array. People who have no use for all these pro video recording features shouldn’t waste their money on it. Unless they want a big chunky iPhone with the best camera array and/or have money to burn. In my country (Spain), the 6.3‑inch iPhone 17 Pro starts at €1,319 with 256GB of storage, and goes up to €1,819 with 1TB of storage. For the bigger iPhone 17 Pro, those prices become €1,469 and €1,969 respectively, and if you want the iPhone 17 Pro Max with 2TB of storage, it’ll cost you €2,469. You do you, but I think these are insane prices for phones (and SSDs).

The iPhone Air is just… odd. I was curious to know about other techies’ reactions, and of all the major tech YouTubers, I think the one I’m agreeing the most on their first impressions of the iPhone Air is Marques Brownlee. At this point in his video, he says:

I really think this phone is gonna be a hard sell, because if you subtract emotions from it, it’s just… the worst one. This is gonna jump in the lineup at $999 — it replaces essentially the Plus phones in the lineup — and it is surrounded by other iPhones that are better than it in basically every way, other than being super thin and light. So it’s a fascinating gamble.

This phone has the same A19 Pro chip in it as the Pro phones, minus one GPU core. Interesting choice: apparently it’s a bit more efficient than the base A19, so that’s good for battery life. But we also just heard a whole long list of choices Apple made with the Pro phones to make them more thermally efficient to not overheat — switching from titanium to aluminium, and adding a vapour chamber to the back. But this phone is still titanium, and absolutely does not have room for an advanced thermal solution or any sort of vapour chamber, so it sounds like this phone could get much hotter and throttle performance much quicker. It’s a red flag.

Now we also know that ultra-thin phones have a tendency to be a little bit less durable. They’ve bent over the years. And I’m not gonna be the first one to point this out. […] And Apple of course has thought about this. They’ve for sure tested this, and they’re telling us it’s the most durable iPhone ever. But, I mean, I’m looking at the phone and I think it qualifies also as a red flag. And then we already know there is just no way battery life can be good on this phone, right? There’s just no way. I’ve been reviewing phones for more than a decade, and all signs point to it being trash.

There was a slide in the keynote today about how they were still proud to achieve ‘all-day battery life’. But, like, come on. Really? I mean they still do the thing where they rearranged the components up into the little plateau at the top to make room for more battery at the bottom. But there’s just absolutely not enough room in this phone for a large battery. And it doesn’t appear to be silicon-carbon, or any sort of a special ultra-high density battery.

And Apple also announced it alongside a special dedicated MagSafe battery accessory, just for this phone, that adds 3,149 mAh, and just barely, combined, will match the 17 Pro in terms of quoted video playback. So if that doesn’t scream red flag, I don’t know what to tell you.

It is also e‑SIM-only, globally, ’cause there’s no room in any version of this phone for a plastic SIM card. There’s also no millimeter-wave 5G. And like I said, it’s coming in at $1,000, which is more expensive than the base iPhone, which will have a better camera system, and better battery life, and may overheat less.

So look, I think there’s two ways to look at this phone. This is either Apple just throwing something new at the wall and seeing if it sticks. […] Or you can see this as a visionary, long-time-in-the-making preview at the future of all phones. Like, maybe someday in the future every phone will be this thin. And Apple is just now, today, getting the tech together with the battery and display and modem and Apple Silicon to make this phone possible. Maybe kind of like how the first MacBook Air sucked, and was underpowered, but then eventually all laptops became that thin. Maybe that’s also what’s gonna happen to smartphones. And maybe the same way Samsung made the ultra-thin S25 Edge, and then a few months later they came out with their super-thin foldable, the Z Fold7, and I felt like the Edge phone was one half of that foldable. Maybe that’s also what Apple’s doing. Maybe we’re gonna see an ultra-thin foldable iPhone next year. Maybe.

Yeah, I’m firmly in the “Apple throwing something new at the wall and seeing if it sticks” camp. Because what’s that innovative in having thin smartphones? What’s the usefulness when the other two dimensions keep increasing? Making a thin and light and relatively compact MacBook and calling it ‘Air’ made sense back when virtually no other laptop was that thin and light. It was, and is, a great solution for when you’re out and about or travelling, and space is at a premium; and you also don’t want a bulky computer to lug around.

Then Apple applied the ‘Air’ moniker to the iPad, and that started to make less sense. It’s not that a regular or Pro iPad were and are that cumbersome to begin with. And then Apple felt the need to have MacBook Airs that are 13- and 15-inch in size, instead of 11- and 13-inch. A 15-inch MacBook Air makes little sense, too, as an ‘Air’ laptop. It may be somewhat thin, somewhat light, but it’s not exactly compact.

And now we have the iPhone Air — which is just thin for thinness’ sake. It’s still a big 6.5‑inch phone that’s hardly pocketable. I still happen to handle and use a few older iPhones in the household, and the dimensions of the iPhone 5/5S/SE make this iPhone more ‘Air’ than the iPhone Air. If you want a slightly more recent example, the iPhone 12 mini and 13 mini have the real lightness that could make sense in a phone. Perhaps you’ll once again remind me that the iPhone 12 mini and 13 mini weren’t a success, but I keep finding people telling me they would favour a more compact phone than a big-but-thin phone. I’ll be truly surprised if the iPhone Air turns out to be a bigger success than the ‘mini’ iPhones. It is a striking device in person, no doubt, but once this first impact is gone and you start thinking it over and making your decision, what Marques Brownlee said above is kind of hard to deny.

Also, I find the whole MagSafe battery accessory affair particularly hilarious. Apple creates a super-thin, super-light phone, proudly showcases its striking design, and immediately neutralises this bold move and thin design by offering an accessory 1) that you’ll clearly need if you want to have a decently-lasting battery (thus admitting that that thinness certainly came with an important compromise); and 2) that instantly defeats the purpose of a thin design by returning the bulk that was shaved away in making the phone.

What should I be in awe of?

I found a lot of reactions to these products to be weirdly optimistic. Either I’m becoming more cynical with age and general tech fatigue, or certain people are easily impressed. What usually impresses me is some technological breakthrough I didn’t see coming, or a clever new device, or some clever system software features and applications that give new purposes to a device I’ve known well for a while. This event, and what was presented, didn’t show any of this.

Didn’t you expect Apple to be able to produce yet another iteration of Apple Watches and AirPods that were better than the previous one? Didn’t you expect Apple to be able to make a unibody iPhone after years of making unibody computers? Didn’t you expect Apple to be able to have iPhones with better cameras and recording capabilities than last year’s iPhones? Didn’t you expect Apple to be able to make a thinner iPhone? To come up with better chips? Or a vapour chamber to prevent overheating? Or a ‘centre stage’ feature for the selfie camera? Are these things I should be in awe of?

I will probably be genuinely amazed when Apple is finally able to come up with a solution that entirely removes the dynamic island from the front of the iPhone while still having a front-facing camera up there.

I’ll be similarly amazed when Apple finally gets rid of people who have shown to know very little about software design and user interfaces, and comes up with operating systems that are, once again, intuitive, discoverable, easy to use, and that both look and work well. Because the iOS, iPadOS, and Mac OS 26 releases are not it — and these new iPhones might be awe-inspiring all you want, but you’ll still have to deal with iOS 26 on them. These new iPhones may have a fantastic hardware and all, but what makes any hardware tick is the software. You’ve probably heard that famous quote by Alan Kay, People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. Steve Jobs himself quoted it, adding that “this is how we feel about it” at his Apple. Today’s Apple needs to hear a revised version of that quote, something like, People who are this serious about their hardware should make better software for it.

The level of good-enough-ism Apple has reached today in software is downright baffling. This widening gap between their hardware and software competence is going to be really damaging if the course isn’t corrected. The tight integration between hardware and software has always been what made Apple platforms stand out. This integration is going to get lost if Apple keeps having wizards for hardware engineers on one side, and software and UI people producing amateurish results on the other side. Relying on legacy and unquestioning fanpeople, for whom everything Apple does is good and awesome and there’s nothing wrong with it, can only go so far. Steve Jobs always knew that software is comparatively more important than the hardware. In a 1994 interview with Jeff Goodell, published by Rolling Stone in 2010 (archived link), Jobs said:

The problem is, in hardware you can’t build a computer that’s twice as good as anyone else’s anymore. Too many people know how to do it. You’re lucky if you can do one that’s one and a third times better or one and a half times better. And then it’s only six months before everybody else catches up. But you can do it in software.

But not if you keep crippling it because you want to bring all your major platforms to the lowest common denominator.