We have been secretly, for the last 18 months, been designing a completely new user interface. And that user interface builds on Apple’s legacy and carries it into the next century. And we call that new user interface Aqua, because it’s liquid. One of the design goals was that when you saw it you wanted to lick it. But it’s important to remember that this part came several minutes after outlining Mac OS X’s underlying architecture. Jobs began talking about Mac OS X by stating its goals, then the architecture used to attain those goals, and then there was a mention of how the new OS looked.

Sure, a lot has changed in the technology landscape over the past twenty years, but the Mac OS X introduction in 2000 is almost disarming in how clearly and precisely focused it is. It is framed in such a way that you understand Jobs is talking about a new powerful tool. Sure, it also looks cool, but it feels as if it’s simply a consequence of a grander scheme. A tool can be powerful in itself, but making it attractive and user-friendly is a crucial extension of its power.

But over the years (and to be fair, this started to happen when Jobs was still CEO), I’ve noticed that, iteration after iteration, the focus of each introduction of a new version of Mac OS X shifted towards more superficial features and the general look of the system. As if users were more interested in stopping and admiring just how gorgeous Mac OS looks, rather than having a versatile, robust and reliable foundation with which to operate their computers and be productive.

What some geeks may be shocked to know is that most regular people don’t really care about these changes in the way an application or operating system looks. What matters to them is continuity and reliability. Again, this isn’t being change-averse. Regular users typically welcome change if it brings something interesting to the table and, most of all, if it improves functionality in meaningful ways. Like saving mouse clicks or making a multi-step workflow more intuitive and streamlined.

But making previous features or UI elements less discoverable because you want them to appear only when needed (and who decides when I need something out of the way? Maybe I like to see it all the time) — that’s not progress. It’s change for change’s sake. It’s rearranging the shelves in your supermarket in a way that seems cool and marketable to you but leaves your customers baffled and bewildered.

This yearly cycle forces Apple engineers — and worse, Apple designers — to come up with ‘new stuff’, and this diverts focus from fixing underlying bugs and UI friction that inevitably accumulate over time.

Microsoft may leave entire layers of legacy code in Windows, turning Windows into a mastodontic operating system with a clean surface and decades of baggage underneath. Apple has been cleaning and rearranging the surface for a while now, and has been getting rid of so much baggage that they went to the other extreme. They’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater, and Mac OS’s user interface has become more brittle after all the changes and inconsistent applications of those Human Interface Guidelines that have informed good UI design in Apple software for so long.

Meanwhile the system hasn’t really gone anywhere. On mobile, iOS started out excitingly, and admittedly still seems to be moving in an evolving trajectory, but on the iPad’s front there has been a lot of wheel reinventing to make the device behave more like a traditional computer, instead of embarking both the device and its operating system in a journey of revolution and redefinition of the tablet experience in order to truly start a ‘Post-PC era’.

An operating system is something that shouldn’t be treated as an ‘app’, or as something people should stop and admire for its æsthetic elegance, or a product whose updates should be marketed as if it’s the next iPhone iteration. An operating system is something that needs a separate, tailored development cycle. Something that needs time so that you can devise an evolution plan about it; so that you can keep working on its robustness by correcting bugs that have been unaddressed for years, and present features that really improve workflows and productivity while building organically on what came before. This way, user-facing UI changes will look reasonable, predictable, intuitive, easily assimilable, and not just arbitrary, cosmetic, and of questionable usefulness.

In a way, one could say Liquid Glass is like a new version of Aqua. It has reflective properties reminiscent of that. One could also say it’s an evolution of whatever iOS 7 was, leaning into the frosted panels and bright accent colors. But whatever Liquid Glass seems to be, it isn’t what many of us were hoping for.

I am exhausted from hearing that Steve Jobs has been apparently rolling in his grave at the sole discretion of whoever didn’t have their expectations of Apple met. Instead of remarking that he would be displeased, maybe it’s better to mark his death as a point in time when things would invariably shift.

It is macOS that is the backbone of the company. Despite years of all the wishing and promising that another device will one day capture the market computers have a hold on, my Mac is still the only device that can make something for all those other devices. In that alone, it feels like Mac should be the one leading everything else. Not following behind. Yet, it’s the visual style from iOS and now visionOS that are dictating the visual style of macOS. It does not feel like a breath of fresh air as much as another nail in the coffin.

Liquid Glass and the general implementation of it will not meaningfully change during the beta phase of the “26” release cycle. They’re not going to backtrack. And they’re not going to address long-standing concerns all of a sudden. The general adoption of this may test the patience of an already weary community of developers who feel tired of toiling away on trivial changes such as this. As I said, I don’t think there is any meaningful benefit to it, and designers and developers may themselves feel that as they implement it.

Over the years, it feels harder and harder to relate with the general atmosphere Apple surrounds itself in. It wasn’t always this pristine. Everyone who presented wasn’t always so stylish. Not everyone used to talk like this. What is that, by the way? Why does everyone sound like a voice assistant?

Apple didn’t used to craft a narrative around every decision in order to justify it. I feel like their presentations are burdened by reason and rationale, and their individual WWDC sessions feel increasingly pretentious like each of them are gods coming down to share their wisdom with us plebs.

It’d be nice if they were knocked off their pedestal, because I think they’re better when they’re trying to outdo someone else rather than themselves.

I’m pretty sure that if you were to interview one of the designers at Apple responsible for this icon devolution, they would say something about reducing icons to their essence. To me, this looks more like squeezing all life out of them. Icons in Mac OS X used to be inventive, well crafted, distinctive, with a touch of fun and personality. Mac OS X’s user interface was sober, utilitarian, intuitive, peppered by descriptive icons that made the user experience fun without signalling ‘this is a kid’s toy’.

Not only is this the recipe for blandness, it’s also borderline contradictory. Like, Make a unique dish using a minimal number of simple ingredients. While it’s possible to make a few different dishes using just two or three things, you touch the ceiling of uniqueness and variety pretty damn soon.

The language in the current guidelines for app icons isn’t much different. It also reflects Apple’s current philosophy of ‘keeping it simple’ which, out of context, could be valid design advice — you’re designing icons with small-ish dimensions, not full-page detailed illustrations for a book, so striving for simplicity isn’t a bad thing. And yet — and I might be wrong here — I keep reading between the lines and feel that these guidelines are more concerned with ensuring that developers maintain the same level of blandness and unimaginativeness of Apple’s own redesigned app icons:

Steve didn’t just read a script for the presentation. He’d been telling a version of that same story every single day for months and months during development—to us, to his friends, his family. He was constantly working on it, refining it. Every time he’d get a puzzled look or a request for clarification from his unwitting early audience, he’d sand it down, tweak it slightly, until it was perfectly polished.

He talked for a while about regular mobile phones and smartphones and the problems of each before he dove into the features of the new iPhone. He used a technique I later came to call the virus of doubt. It’s a way to get into people’s heads, remind them about a daily frustration, get them annoyed about it all over again. If you can infect them with the virus of doubt—“maybe my experience isn’t as good as I thought, maybe it could be better”—then you prime them for your solution. You get them angry about how it works now so they can get excited about a new way of doing things.

when I say “story,” I don’t just mean words. Your product’s story is its design, its features, images and videos, quotes from customers, tips from reviewers, conversations with support agents. It’s the sum of what people see and feel about this thing that you’ve created.

When you get wrapped up in the “what,” you get ahead of people. You think everyone can see what you see. But they don’t. They haven’t been working on it for weeks, months, years. So you need to pause and clearly articulate the “why” before you can convince anyone to care about the “what.”

That’s the case no matter what you make—even if you sell B2B payments software. Even if you build deep-tech solutions for customers who don’t exist yet. Even if you sell lubricants to a factory that’s been buying the same thing for twenty years.

If your competitors are telling better stories than you, if they’re playing the game and you’re not, then it doesn’t matter if their product is worse. They will get the attention. To any customers, investors, partners, or talent doing a cursory search, they will appear to be the leaders in the category. The more people talk about them, the greater their mind share, and the more people will talk about them.

A good story is an act of empathy. It recognizes the needs of its audience. And it blends facts and feelings so the customer gets enough of both. First you need enough instincts and concrete information that your argument doesn’t feel too floaty and insubstantial. It doesn’t have to be definitive data, but there has to be enough to feel meaty, to convince people that you’re anchored in real facts. But you can overdo it—if your story is only informational, then it’s entirely possible that people will agree with you but decide it’s not compelling enough to act on just yet. Maybe next month. Maybe next year.

So you have to appeal to their emotions—connect with something they care about. Their worries, their fears. Or show them a compelling vision of the future: give a human example. Walk through how a real person will experience this product—their day, their family, their work, the change they’ll experience. Just don’t lean so far into the emotional connection that what you’re arguing for feels novel, but not necessary.

And always remember that your customers’ brains don’t always work like yours. Sometimes your rational argument will make an emotional connection. Sometimes your emotional story will give people the rational ammunition to buy your product. Certain Nest customers looked at the beautiful thermostat that we lovingly crafted to appeal to their heart and soul and said, “Sure, okay. It’s pretty” and then had a thrilled, emotional reaction to the potential of saving twenty-three dollars on their energy bill.

everyone will read your story differently. That’s why analogies can be such a useful tool in storytelling. They create a shorthand for complicated concepts—a bridge directly to a common experience.

That’s another thing I learned from Steve Jobs. He’d always say that analogies give customers superpowers. A great analogy allows a customer to instantly grasp a difficult feature and then describe that feature to others. That’s why “1,000 songs in your pocket” was so powerful. Everyone had CDs and tapes in bulky players that only let you listen to 10-15 songs, one album at a time. So “1,000 songs in your pocket” was an incredible contrast—it let people visualize this intangible thing—all the music they loved all together in one place, easy to find, easy to hold—and gave them a way to tell their friends and family why this new iPod thing was so cool.

Because to truly understand many of the features of our products, you’d need a deep well of knowledge about HVAC systems and power grids and the way smoke refracts through a laser to detect fire—knowledge almost nobody had. So we cheated. We didn’t try to explain everything. We just used an analogy. I remember there was one complex feature that was designed to lighten the load on power plants on the hottest or coldest days of the year when everyone cranked up the heat or AC at once. It usually came down to just a few hours in the afternoon, a few days a year—one or more coal power plants would be brought on line to avoid blackouts. So we designed a feature that predicted when these moments would come, then the Nest Thermostat would crank the AC or heat up extra before the crucial peak hours and turn it down when everyone else was turning it up. Anyone who signed up for the program got a credit on their energy bill. As more and more people joined the program, the result was a win-win—people stayed comfortable, they saved money, and the energy companies didn’t have to turn on their dirtiest plants. And that is all well and good, but it just took me 150 word to explain. So after countless hours of thinking about it and trying all the possible solutions, we settled on doing it in three: Rush Hour Rewards.

Everyone understands the concept of rush hour—the moment when way too many people get on the road together and traffic slows to a creep. Same thing happens with energy. We didn’t need to explain much more than that—rush hours are a problem, but when there’s an energy rush hour, you can get something out of it. You can get a reward. You can actually save money rather than getting stuck with everyone else.

Quick stories are easy to remember. And, more importantly, easy to repeat. Someone else telling your story will always reach more people and do more to convince them to buy your product than any amount of talking you do about yourself on your own platforms. You should always be striving to tell a story so good that it stops being yours—so your customer learns it, loves it, internalizes it, owns it. And tells it to everyone they know.

A good product story has three elements: It appeals to people’s rational and emotional sides. It takes complicated concepts and makes them simple. It reminds people of the problem that’s being solved—it focuses on the “why.”

Wealthy tech executives spending their fortunes on real estate or more imaginative adventures is a staple of Silicon Valley culture. Some buy islands, others build yachts longer than a football field or fund quixotic flying car projects. Mr. Ive’s fixation on a single city block, by comparison, seems modest.

At LoveFrom, he has tried to trust his instincts. Buying one building led to buying another. A discussion about a new yarn led to his first fashion apparel. Work with one client, Brian Chesky, the chief executive of Airbnb, led to meeting Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI.

He bought it for $8.5 million and discovered its backdoor led to a parking lot encircled by the block’s buildings. He wanted to turn the parking lot into a green space, but learned that he needed to own another building on the block to control the parking lot. So a year later, he bought a neighboring, 33,000-square-foot building for $17 million.

Mr. Weeks cringed. San Francisco’s commercial real estate market would crash during the pandemic, and more than a third of its offices remain vacant. “I don’t really think you need to do that,” Mr. Weeks told Mr. Ive. “I can get you office space.”

worries faded after neighbors met Mr. Ive. He offered to reduce some tenants’ rents, did free design work for others and won over Mr. Peskin, a frequent critic of development in his district, with his plans to preserve the existing buildings.

Over five years, Mr. Ive and Mr. Newson hired architects, graphic designers, writers and a cinematic special effects developer who work across three areas: work for the love of it, which they do without pay; work for clients, which includes Airbnb and Ferrari; and work for themselves, which includes the building renovation.

The project has given Mr. Elkann an appreciation for LoveFrom’s process. In January, he visited the firm’s studio for an hourslong meeting about the car’s steering wheel. He listened as Mr. Ive and others talked about the appropriate steering wheel length and how a driver should hold it. Ferrari’s chief test driver tested an early prototype of the wheel, which borrowed design elements from the company’s sports car and racecar history, to assess how it would perform. “Paying attention to the steering wheel in a car that you want to drive and what the physicality of what that means is something that Jony was very clear about,” Mr. Elkann said. He added that the result is “something really, really different.”

I’d posit that a reason why people love CarPlay so much is because the media, communication, and navigation experiences have traditionally been pretty poor. CarPlay supplants those, and it does so with aplomb because people use those same media, communication, and navigation features that are personalized to them with their phones when they’re not in their cars.

No one is walking around with a speedometer and a tachometer on their iPhone that need to have a familiar look and feel, rendered exclusively in San Francisco. As long as automakers supply the existing level of CarPlay support, which isn’t a given, then customers like us would be content with the status quo, or even a slight improvement.

In my humble opinion, Next-Gen CarPlay is dead on arrival. Too late, too complicated, and it doesn’t solve the needs of automakers or customers. Instead of letting the vehicle’s interface peak through, Apple should consider letting CarPlay peak through for the non-critical systems people prefer to use with CarPlay.

Design a CarPlay that can output multiple display streams (which Apple already over-designed) and display that in the cluster. Integrate with the existing controls for managing the interfaces in the vehicle. When the phone isn’t there, the vehicle will still be the same vehicle. When the phone is there, it’s got Apple Maps right in the cluster how you like it without changing the gauges, or the climate controls, or where the seat massage button is.

The everyday irritations people have are mundane, practical, and are not related to how Apple-like their car displays can look.

As for a Hall of Shame thing? That would be the slow but steady encroachment of single-window applications in MacOS, especially via Catalyst and Electron. The reason I gravitated toward MacOS in the first place is the same reason I continue to use it: it fits my mental model of how an operating system ought to work.

In recent years Sketch’s Mac-ness has become a liability. Requiring every person in a large design organization to use a Mac is not an easy sell. Plus, a new generation of “internet native” users expect different things from their software than old-school Mac connoisseurs: Multiplayer editing, inline commenting, and cloud sync are now table-stakes for any successful creative app.

At the time of Sketch’s launch most UX designers were using Photoshop or Illustrator. Both were expensive and overwrought, and neither were actually created for UX design. Sketch’s innovation wasn’t any particular feature — if anything it was the lack of features. It did a few things really well, and those were exactly the things UX designers wanted. In that way it really embodied the Mac ethos: simple, single-purpose, and fun to use.

Apple pushed hard to attract artists, filmmakers, musicians, and other creative professionals. It started a virtuous cycle. More creatives using Macs meant more potential customers for creative Mac software, which meant more developers started building that software, which in turn attracted even more customers to the platform.And so the Mac ended up with an abundance of improbably-good creative tools. Usually these apps weren’t as feature-rich or powerful as their PC counterparts, but were faster and easier and cheaper and just overall more conducive to the creative process.

Apple is still very interested in selling Macs — precision-milled aluminum computers with custom-designed chips and “XDR” screens. But they no longer care much about The Mac: The operating system, the software platform, its design sensibilities, its unique features, its vibes.

The term-of-art for this style is “skeuomorphism”: modern designs inspired by their antecedents — calculator apps that look like calculators, password-entry fields that look like bank vaults, reminders that look like sticky notes, etc.This skeuomorphic playfulness made downloading a new Mac app delightful. The discomfort of opening a new unfamiliar piece of software was totally offset by the joy of seeing a glossy pixel-perfect rendition of a bookshelf or a bodega or a poker table, complete with surprising little animations.

There are literally dozens of ways to develop cross-platform apps, including Apple’s own Catalyst — but so far, none of these tools can create anything quite as polished as native implementations.So it comes down to user preference: Would you rather have the absolute best app experience, or do you want the ability to use an acceptably-functional app from any of your devices? It seems that users have shifted to prefer the latter.

Unfortunately the appeal of native Mac software was, at its core, driven by brand strategy. Mac users were sold on the idea that they were buying not just a device but an ecosystem, an experience. Apple extended this branding for third-party developers with its yearly Apple Design Awards.

for the first time since the introduction of the original Mac, they’re just computers. Yes, they were technically always “just computers”, but they used to feel like something bigger. Now Macs have become just another way, perhaps the best way, to use Slack or VSCode or Figma or Chrome or Excel.

visionOS’s story diverges from that of the Mac. Apple is no longer a scrappy upstart. Rather, they’re the largest company in the world by market cap. It’s not so much that Apple doesn’t care about indie developers anymore, it’s just that indie developers often end up as the ants crushed beneath Apple’s giant corporate feet.

I think we’ll see a lot of cool indie software for visionOS, but also I think most of it will be small utilities or toys. It takes a lot of effort to build and support apps that people rely on for their productivity or creativity. If even the wildly-popular Mac platform can’t support those kinds of projects anymore, what chance does a luxury headset have?

Inspired by biological form and motion, the Dynamic Island is designed to feel like a living organism, with a deliberate elasticity that serves as a playful contrast to the fixed nature of the hardware it embodies.

The products that we build contain complex flows and highly interactive elements. As a result, there's so many important decisions that we need to make. SwiftUI helps by quickly surfacing all of those important details that need your attention, for example, how an image should look when it's loading or how a button appears when it's pressed. These are the types of things that make a product feel complete. They're easily hidden in static design tools but are quickly surfaced when working in a dynamic tool like SwiftUI.That's because SwiftUI makes it easy to build your designs on device. In doing this, you gain a more complete understanding of what you're making. Separate parts now interact together, and you can begin to evaluate the experience as a whole. This process quickly reveals what's working in your design and what still needs attention or polish. On Maps, we've found this to be tremendously helpful.

A lot of people see software as a list of features, hardware as a list of specs. But when you think about how much time we spend with these things, maybe they just aren’t that utilitarian. We think of buildings not just as volumes of conditioned air — but also as something architected, as something that can have a profound effect on how you feel, something that can have value in itself (historical buildings and such).

Rather than debate the merits of these “let’s bring back some ports from five years ago” decisions piecemeal, I think they’re best explained by Apple revisiting what the pro in “MacBook Pro” means. What it stands for. Apple uses the word pro in so many products. Sometimes they really do mean it as professional. Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro, for example, truly are tools for professionals. With something like AirPods Pro, though, the word pro really just means something more like nicer or deluxe. A couth euphemism for premium.

One thing I learned long ago is that people who prioritize design, UI, and UX in the software they prefer can empathize with and understand the choices made by people who prioritize other factors (e.g. raw feature count, or the ability to tinker with their software at the system level, or software being free-of-charge). But it doesn’t work the other way: most people who prioritize other things can’t fathom why anyone cares deeply about design/UI/UX because they don’t perceive it. Thus they chalk up iOS and native Mac-app enthusiasm to being hypnotized by marketing, Pied Piper style.

Those who see and value the artistic value in software and interface design have overwhelmingly wound up on iOS; those who don’t have wound up on Android. Of course there are exceptions. Of course there are iOS users and developers who are envious of Android’s more open nature. Of course there are Android users and developers who do see how crude the UIs are for that platform’s best-of-breed apps. But we’re left with two entirely different ecosystems with entirely different cultural values — nothing like (to re-use my example from yesterday) the Coke-vs.-Pepsi state of affairs in console gaming platforms.

the desire to ship quickly was counterbalanced by a demanding, comprehensive perfectionism. Most commercial projects are driven by commercial values, where the goal is to maximize profits by outperforming your competition. In contrast, the Macintosh was driven more by artistic values, oblivious to competition, where the goal was to be transcendently brilliant and insanely great.

Unlike other parts of Apple, which were becoming more conservative and bureaucratic as the company grew, the early Mac team was organized more like a start-up company. We eschewed formal structure and hierarchy, in favor of a flat meritocracy with minimal managerial oversight, like the band of revolutionaries we aspired to be.

Mainframes were followed by PCs, and then the web, and then smartphones. Each of these new models started out looking limited and insignificant, but each of them unlocked a new market that was so much bigger that it pulled in all of the investment, innovation and company creation and so grew to overtake the old one. Meanwhile, the old models didn’t go away, and neither, mostly, did the companies that had been created by them. Mainframes are still a big business and so is IBM; PCs are still a big business and so is Microsoft. But they don’t set the agenda anymore - no-one is afraid of them.

We’ve spent the last few decades getting to the point that we can now give everyone on earth a cheap, reliable, easy-to-use pocket computer with access to a global information network. But so far, though over 4bn people have one of these things, we’ve only just scratched the surface of what we can do with them.

There’s an old saying that the first fifty years of the car industry were about creating car companies and working out what cars should look like, and the second fifty years were about what happened once everyone had a car - they were about McDonalds and Walmart, suburbs and the remaking of the world around the car, for good and of course bad. The innovation in cars became everything around the car. One could suggest the same today about smartphones - now the innovation comes from everything else that happens around them.