Comment by veber-alex

It gets through because Cook has no eye for design or usability (he's a supply chain guy) and Alan Dye, who Cook put in charge of software design, wanted it that way. I'm sure there are designers who hated it, but they don't have the final say.

Apple is hurt by being so centralized Cupertino IMO. A company that big in city that small and frankly, boring, isn't going to have the best hiring pool.

I know plenty of very talented people who simply won't apply to Apple. They don't want to live in Cupertino or have to commute 2+ hours each day to go to work.

Steve Jobs was a middle-class guy trying to find his place in the world; the kind to travel India to to meet Neem Karoli Baba, shaved head, barefoot, wearing kurtas [1]. 50 years later, who grows up in Cupertino? It's no longer "middle-class". I'm sure Cupertino produces some excellent talent that did great at some top university, but I'm also sure it's not the kind that rocks the boat, or the kind that will push a "dumb decision" out of principle at work and get fired, like Jobs did back in 1985.

When I think Cupertino, the city, I don't think vibrancy of the built environment, diversity of professions, or wealth of ideas. I think comfort, complacency and quiet. The type of place that repels the kind of people who want to fight in the trenches, and slowly milds the fight out of those who do move there.

I can only assume Apple, like a lot of the Bay at this point, survives from imported talent. The kind that is hungry enough to move across the country, or across the globe, to achieve something. But if you're in demand, why would you want to work in Cupertino and not San Francisco? Or better yet New York, Shenzhen, London, Tokyo, Shanghai, Paris, etc. Money only motivates people so much, and people who are in it for the money don't stand up for or against things in the same way.

[1]: https://medium.com/macoclock/how-much-did-coming-to-india-co...

This isn’t unique to Apple. The Windows developers were very vocal about a full screen start menu in Windows 8 being a bad change. We were told that we weren’t allowed to talk about it anymore on the large mailing list about the product. The decision had been made and complaints would no longer be read or responded to.

It's significantly worse on Mac than iOS, which gives you the answer. On iOS it's fine, even good. I prefer it, as a designer. On Mac it's a mess, and obviously spent less time baking.

> Maybe Apple engineers are afraid to push back on management?

I can tell you with confidence that this isn't the issue. HIG (Human Interface Guidelines: a design spec that became a department / org) overrides them.

It's not meant to be an insult, I have a phone in my pocket with one of those chips. back when I was using Android I was like "why do people get so excited about apps?" but the iPhone experience is all different. They are "rejects" because a lot of them have a busted core which can be fused off.

If there's a problem w/ the Neo in it's current incarnation is that are going to run out of those chips and find something else. It takes an advantage of the opportunity and might be the beginning of a new market segment for Mac which will hold PC and Chromebooks accountable.

(Funny a pink netbook served me really well back in the day! I remember using one to log ham radio contacts from a mountaintop near San Luis Obispo into a sqlite database and then using it as the best ever car computer in the passenger seat of a car with Microsoft Streets & Trips and a music player)

No, it's the chips that could've been used in those flagship phones, but that were rejected. Rejection isn't ideological here, it's the QA process.

This is exactly my thought as well.

Soo many things either work buggy, laggy, inconsistent, or don’t work at all

Filling bugs doesn’t help. And I don’t think anyone is inventive to fix bugs. Resolving sure. But closing WONTFIX or NEEDSINFO is also a resolution.

Most of what I do is chrome +Linux terminals and vscode anyway

And the only reason I’m on Mac is because of hardware, encryption, and ease of backup/restore/wipe, and the power struggle of Linux distros. freeBSD is not really an option

Steve Jobs knew what he wanted and was willing to put his foot down in order to get it. Yea, I’m sure he was difficult to work with and drove people insane, but he was the plumb line that kept Apple driving in (mostly) the right direction. Now, it seems like they have bored designers trying to make a name for themselves with a “new” and “revolutionary” interface in Liquid Glass, which nobody likes and is less usable than its predecessor. But nobody ever got promoted for maintaining the status quo, so they are going to push forward. Steve’s advantage was that he never needed to be promoted.

I have not been impressed with Cook in the slightest. He came from Compaq, if I am not mistaken, and in many ways, I feel like Apple has become more Compaq-like during his tenure.

Interesting. I have worked with a CEO that did exactly that.

The product quality was just insane.

I have also worked with people in power who believed they were doing the same, but actually just had weird taste in interfaces and ended up screwing up the product.

So YMMV.

The thing / issue at this point is though: how much is Jobs still responsible for Apple's ongoing success? He died 15 years ago, two years after Apple introduced "flat design" (to much criticism at the time but people got used to it). But after his passing, Apple's market value went from ~500 billion to ~4 trillion today, more than an 8-fold multiplication.

I find it hard to believe that his influence was so strong that it had an inertia that lasted for 15 years. Ive left his mark on it for longer.

> My pet opinion is that Steve Jobs was an asshole but an asshole that used his own products and used his powers of complaining to steer the whole ship to fix major "this annoys me everyday" bugs.

I think you are right. He was not perfect and not always nice, but man that dude CARED. Nobody at Apple cares any more.

Starting to wonder what he DOES use. I guess just the cameras since they seem to be the only things that change.

I've heard this advice before and I've tried it, and I really didn't notice a difference. I also, unfortunately, use swipe to type a lot. If I'm typing one handed I'm pretty much always using swipe. Sure it barely works, but that's the same as if I was typing normally so feels like a wash.

In case anyone else is going crazy trying to find this setting, it’s called slide to type

Whats the alternative? Android not, because it's absolutely not perfectly good

I'm on 26.4 on a brand new 17 Pro Max, recently upgraded from a 13 Pro Max, and I have noticed absolutely no difference in the keyboard. It's still awful.

But then you'd have to upgrade past 18, meaning the liquid glass abomination.