Apple has lost their attention to detail.
My first Mac was, like for many people, when I was in Secondary School. It was 2012 I was in my penultimate year before leaving to go study TV and Film and after slumming it for the entirety of school with a hand me down Toshiba Satellite laptop still running windows XP my parents decided to get me a MacBook Pro for my Birthday (After I had been begging them for years at this point for one of course), I remember it like it was yesterday opening the box for the first time, lifting the lid and hearing the booooong as it booted up.
It shipped out the box with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, I remember the sentiment being generally getting positive and as the name suggests while it did bring new features of its own like replacing iChat with Messages, Airplay Mirroring, and other iOS apps like Notes and Reminders with iCloud syncing it was mostly a bug fixing update from its predecessor 10.7 Lion. This was also at the time when Apple still charged an upgrade fee of £13.99 ($19.00) for their OS X updates so they did actually have to earn their keep to get people to upgrade, a far reality from today.
When I turned it on and went through the setup wizard I was greeted for the first time by a the desktop, and the first thing my still adolescent mind could thing is "Wow!". It just felt like there was so much to take in especially compared to the Windows XP I was used to using. On top of that the Default wallpaper of what I would later learn is the NGC 3190 Galaxy just inspired wonder and awe in my mind.
OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion default desktop configuration.
But most importantly every app had its nice hand crafted expertly made icon, the safari compass with its chrome effects, the mail app being a postage stamp with a post mark on it, the contacts app being an actual book, the notes app being a legal pad, when you compare them to todays facsimiles of these icons it is sad in many ways. Yes they are all recognisable, Safari still has a the idea of a compass in it, the mail app is now an envelope (I can let that one slide), the contacts app is now a a vague recollection of a book but unless you saw the original you wouldn't know, and the notes app is now a white paper with a yellow binder again super oversimplified at this point.
Mac OS 26 Tahoe default desktop configuration.
Its not just the icons though it was clear that apple had a Set of guidelines that everyone adhered to, and because apple adhered to them so did many 3rd party developers windows had consistent corner radius buttons used the same glyphs the whole thing felt like it had consistency and attention to detail. Don't get me wrong there was still bugs and issues back then but it was nothing like the MacOS we have today. Back even just 15 years ago when I got this machine Apples Mac strong suit was their software. while my 2012 MacBook pro had great feel with its unibody aluminium frame and its for the time super high resolution 1920x1200 screen the best in class keyboard and trackpad the actual compute hardware was arguably lacking or at least commodity sporting a quad core Sandy Bridge intel i7 and only 8GB of RAM (That I would later upgrade to 16GB) but its real weakness was the AMD Radeon HD 6770M discreet GPU this is what would ultimately lead to this laptops demise, as after I was done with it I gave it back to my father who used it all the way until 2022 when the GPU finally started to kick the bucket.
However these days I think the script has been flipped in that the hardware is the best hardware Apple has ever made and arguably the best consumer laptop and desktop hardware anyone is making right now. The M4 Macbook Air is literally more compute than any normal person will need forever and is the best £999 you can spend on a computer considering it will easily last someone like my father another 10-15 years easily. Its already at the point where some people with M1 chips are still struggling to justify an upgrade 6 years after they purchased their machine. The biggest weak point is now the software. MacOS feels like it has become confused and worst of all inconsistent it feels like the guidelines have been thrown out the window and its left the the best judgment for the lead developer for the that app within apples Corporate structure rather than an overall vision and experience.
M4 Macbook Air
This is not to say I hate everything in modern MacOS there are some nice additions for example we finally have colour coded folders as well as the first party ability to stamp glyphs into a folder in the finder, making it more easy to highlight common folders within your finder which for brains like mine is a god send since I mostly rely on icons rather than the text to navigate the computer. I also really like the new "Apps" interface that replaced the lauchpad having a neat little window that pops up in the middle of your screen rather than a jarring full screen experiance is miles better in my opinion. Much to the chagrin of many Mac old heads I also generally like the new settings app, its not perfect by any means but generally I think its the right move and is a much improved version from the previous MacOS versions and was needed considering that while the original System Preferances app was nicley thought out it really did not have much thought in the way of expandability for future features and settings to be added.
The New "Apps" Interface that replaced the LaunchPad
The story is the same on the iOS side, the iPhone 17 base model is an absolutly solid phone for its price, 120Hz VRR, A19 chip an awesome camera suite great battery life and the Pro only gets better but they are let down by the software, back when I got my first iPhone, again as a birthday present, I got the iPhone 4 in 2010 and just like the Mac at the time the hardware had nice hand feel, a awesome screen but the internals while top of the game for its time still had room for improvement. This was infact the first device Apple outfitted with its own custom silicon chip the A4 so in a way this phone is the distant relaitve of everything in the modern Apple device linup. But what put Apple ahead in these times whas not their custom silicon, it was their Software, iOS was miles ahead of android in terms of smoothness and consistency so much so that it lead Google to launch Project Butter within the comming years to try and get on top of their OS and get it to have the spit and shine that iOS was famous for.
Ultimately I think this is a reflection of the company as a whole at this point, Hardware on point with software lagging behind, to the point where many people would be okay with forging any new features at all in the next major versions of iOS, WatcOS, tvOS, MacOS and iPadOS (side note they should really rename iOS to back to iPhone OS at this point since there is no iPod touch anymore) and just put time and effort into fixing the software so it works, consistently, it looks consistent and most importantly get back that attention to detail!
There is one thing getting in the way of that though, Tim Cook, while he has unboutedly done a brilliant job scaling Apple from the Steve Jobs company that made products for nerds first and foremost, to a company that makes products for all kinds of people but with that has come even more emphasis on the yearly release cycle and getting something out in September of every year even if it isnt done which has happend more than once in recent times where the softwhere doesn't start to feel done til the X.1 or even X.2 release. This has been boiling up for many people and I think Liqid Glass is just the straw that broke the camels back. The design itself aside it just shows that the company under Tims leadership would rather prioritise a glossy coat of paint and subscription services rather than to fix the issues under the hood.
Honestly at this point in my opinion Tim Cook has overstayed his welcome in more ways than one at this point and its time for Someone else (John Ternus hopefully) to take the helm and steer this ship away from the rocks they are currently careening towards.
Last Edited: 1 month, 2 weeks ago.