He was talking about Excel. Google Sheets with a tiny fraction of Excel features destroyed Excel except for a tiny minority of hardcore finance and Windows users.
My hope is that the new generation of designers/UX people question and reject many of the UI/UX patterns made popular in the past 15 years and go back to the 90s for inspiration. Resources like the Apple Design Guidelines from 1992 linked in the OP is excellent!
Perhaps my biggest gripe is that many of these terrible UI/UX patterns are built in at such a low level, it is near impossible for developers to override them in the software they build. For example, I really dislike flat UI and particularly flat scrollbars. But it is near impossible to add scrollbars that look like these in any Windows or Mac app I build: https://flowingdata.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/evolution...
Usability has become theatre across Apple products. The sad part is that since Microsoft just seems to copy Apple, over time Windows usability has also degraded severely. I am so frustrated by what Apple, Microsoft and Google have done.
IMHO, the "new generation" of designers is the problem. Same goes for the "new generation" of developers. Want to make a basic HTML page with a contact form? Better get React + 300 dependencies, require the backend to provide a REST endpoint... fast forward six months...
Why has this happened? Everything is too easy. You used to have to have pretty good intelligence to break into UI design and software development. Now, anyone can do it with 30 minutes of "e-learning", and, therefore, the average IQ of a UI designer/or software engineer has decreased, dramatically.
Fair enough. But tides do shift. A lot of today’s terrible patterns (like flat design) were born in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The current generation of UI and UX folks—for simplicity, designers in their 20s—who are empowered to make both big and small decisions at Big Tech are largely riding that inherited wave. There’s still time for their taste to evolve as their confidence and seniority grow.
The problem is that CSS continues to be a pain in the ass, even as it evolves. There is no other reason why something like tailwind should have the traction it has.
No. I don’t want Apple to make LLM Siri. I do wish they would become the company unlocking creativity instead of shackling it. I will give you one specific example: iOS has extreme limitations on what it allows app developers to display on the Lock Screen. The area each app gets is limited. What gets displayed and how is very limited. How often the data gets displayed is limited.
This might sound like nitpick. But I guarantee you that if they removed many of these limitations, it will reduce total screen time: because many things that make people unlock their phone can be done from the Lock Screen…if only Apple leadership would allow and incentivize their product and engineering teams. Instead, they want people to force unlocking of the screen to do actual productive tasks because the next thing people instinctively do is…doom scroll. And doom scrolling is profitable for Apple.
It is 2025. I have to unlock and open Google Maps to reliably tell when the next train will arrive. Why? I’ve tried many apps that attempt to fix this. They are all severely limited by the iOS restrictions. Why? What are they optimizing for?
The Camera Roll app is a clusterfuck.
Apple Maps is considering introducing ads.
iOS makes little attempt to tell you about trials: I download an app, I enable the trial, I conclude within minutes this app is not it. Now to cancel, I have to make 5+ taps. Often, I forget until I get the receipt from Apple. You’re telling me no PM at Apple has proposed mechanisms like a reminder or popup a day before my trial ends asking if I want to cancel or keep the subscription? Apple knows after all that I have barely used this app!
I can keep going. Like OP said, it is pretty obvious the focus is on milking the cow. This is unfortunate because Apple’s positioning was to do the right thing for the user who paid a premium for the device. They are increasingly and consistently doing things that makes the CFO happy at the expense of its user base.
Frankly I think it’s the opposite - Apple is one of the only BigCo without an advertising based biz model. Unlike say Meta, Apple didn’t profit directly from increased engagement with your iPhone (at least to a sizable extent), they profit when you purchase a new device. This alignment of incentives is what allows Apple to at least marginally prioritize user privacy in a way Meta/ Google just structurally cannot.
40% (and growing) of Apple’s profits are from services. Margins on services are 3x of hardware.
Apple doesn’t make money directly when you doom scroll but a lot of App Store revenue is a by product of people simply using their device in unlocked state.
Dumb question: why do news websites have such a hard time keeping users logged in? Like I can go an entire year without getting logged out of gmail. But can't go more than a few days before getting logged out of news websites.
I have subscribed to news sites and still use something like archive.is because it is faster than my paid experience.
I've been stunned by how many smart people talk so casually about LLMs becoming better at math. Do they just forget that a calculator that is wrong 1% of the time is a de facto calculator that doesn't work and should not be used?
Doing math is not the same as calculating. LLMs can be very useful in doing math; for calculating they are the wrong tool (and even there they can be very useful, but you ask them to use calculating tools, not to do the calculations themselves—both Claude and ChatGPT are set up to do this).
If you're curious, check out how mathematicians like Robert Ghrist or Terence Tao are using LLMs for math research, both have written about it online repeatedly (along with an increasing number of other researchers).
Apart from assisting with research, their ability on e.g. math olympiad problems is periodically measured and objectively rapidly improving, so this isn't just a matter of opinion.
You realize that when typing into a calculator, you probably hit a wrong key more than 1% of the time? Which is why you always type important calculations twice?
I've been stunned by how many smart people talk so casually about how because LLMs aren't perfect, they therefore have no value. Do they just forget that nothing in the world is perfect, and the values of things are measured in degrees?
There’s a big difference between mistyping 1% of the time yourself (human error) and a calculator failing 1% of the time (machine error) and I am willing to bet there isn’t a company out there (maybe a handful of less scrupulous ones) that has knowingly shipped a calculator that got it wrong 1% of the time. Especially in previous decades when countless people were using a dedicated calculator dozens of times a day. Hard to imagine a 1% margin of error was acceptable.
Not to mention now you have the compounded problem of your mistakes plus the calculator’s mistakes.
The computer on your desk has a number of errors just holding values in memory.
Yes, it's not 1%, but the argument is about them being imperfect devices. It's not a horrible thing to start with the presumption that calculators are not perfect.
Yes but I don’t depend on the output of my comp’s memory in such explicit terms and it doesn’t have lasting consequences. If my calculator literally gives me the wrong answer 1% of the time that’s a bigger problem.
There isn't a difference in the big picture. Error is error. Even when we have incredibly reliable things, there's error when they interface with humans. Humans have error interfacing with each other.
But you seem to have missed the main point I was making. See? Another error. They're everwhere! ;)
Good luck. I lost access to my Facebook account of 18 years a few years ago due to some 2fa bug (it tells me to enter a code from the fb app which doesn’t have that code.) Despite sending copies of my passport, license etc, the automated systems are of no help.
Downside is it doesn’t allow mp3s. I’ve been making my own meditation mp3s using AI tools and wish I could listen to them when I’m on my walk with mighty and no phone.
