Comment by doodpants
8 days ago
Opinionated design was great back when Apple's Human Interface Guidelines were based on concrete user testing and accessibility principles. The farther we get from the Steve Jobs era, the more their UI design is based on whatever they think looks pretty, with usability concerns taking a back seat.
It was good because it was both Opinionated (in other words, the path to write software that follows the design was easy, and the paths to write software that violated the design were hard), and also well-researched by human interface experts.
Now what we appear to have is "someone's opinion" design. A bunch of artists decided their portfolios were a little light and they needed to get their paintbrushes out to do something. I don't work at Apple, but my guess is that their HI area slowly morphed from actual HCI experts into an art department, yet retained their power as experts in machine interaction.
So here we are, we still have Opinionated design, but it might just be based on some VP's vibes rather than research.
I don't like to paint Apple as being completely incompetent (but damn have they been screwing stuff up), but I do think trying to solidify the experiences around a common codebase has become untenable. The idea is great thought - write one app that works on macOS, iPadOS, iPhoneOS, visionOS, etc. What a time saver that is for developers - but the problem is that screen sizes and interactions with those different platforms vary. Yes, resizing a window with your clunky finger needs a bit more wriggle room, while a pixel precise mouse or touchpad is a lot different.
And ironically, it has also gotten far less pretty. Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger was beautiful. Tahoe is flat and generic looking.