What’s New in macOS Big Sur: Human Interface Guidelines

Imagine: you're in charge of Apple's new keyboard. You spend a bunch of time and money making the thing as thin as possible, because that's the overall design trajectory.

Of course, you test this thing internally, and it's okay. It takes a little while to get used to, but isn't awful to type on, and a few months of stress testing seem to indicate that this thing will work in the real world with an acceptable defect rate.

Besides, your management chain loves this thing, because It's Thinner(tm).

And then, you ship it, and discover that this thing breaks way more often in the real world.

But, because Apple, you're a company that never publicly admits to doing anything wrong (because lawsuits), which takes customer feedback with an overly-critical eye (philistines must be using it wrong), and which is more likely to spend it's entire capitalization on cat treats than it is to interrupt an ongoing hardware design cycle.

It's not just management -- it's the company culture.

On the one hand, this enables them to do bold things and endure incredible criticism before being proven right. The iPod, no optical disks, bundled GPUs, AirPods, etc.

On the other hand, this enables them to do bold things and endure incredible criticism before being shown horribly, horribly wrong. The snowflake keyboard, the touchbar, the iPhone antenna, etc.

I also suspect this is why Apple's hardware design is just so overall excellent. They identify perfection, and relentlessly pursue it. Sometimes Apple gets it wrong, and it shows, but when they get it right, they get it really right.

For one thing, it’s not like cohesion was achieved by bringing in the best parts of OSX and the best parts of iOS. Cohesion has been achieved by transforming the OSX UI into iOS’s to the extent possible. Apple has been clever to do it bit by bit but using OSX from 10 years ago to today, you can feel the alienation.

The other part is that until a few years ago Apple was the biggest proponent of the idea that a Mac, with its pixel perfect input mechanism, and a keyboard, and iOS whose input was fingers, should not have a similar UI. Their execs scoffed at Microsoft’s attempts to make a device which when in laptop mode ran traditional windows but in tablet mode ran a version of windows optimized for touch. Somehow those UI concerns have evaporated for no good reason.

Or have things changed since I left the Apple ecosystem? I'm assuming you don't need to be a registered developer to use things like "make" or download IntelliJ IDEA?

When the iPad first came out: "OMG, you can't print! How insane." Probably forgetting other things.

Apple does a ton of things wrong and arguably forces some changes before a lot of the world is ready for them. But they've never prioritized supporting legacy and, in fact, arguably have had a pretty consistent strategy of eliminating legacy at least one or two beats early relative to other companies. Certainly I've found some changes too aggressive. OTOH, there are usually ways to adapt that I've found no more than mildly annoying at first.