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Free the Icons

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Re: Free the Icons

#201

Post by pocketsand »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #149
pocketsand wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is untethered from reality. Apple Silicon at present beats every single laptop on the market at CPU-bound workloads using a fraction of the power draw. Exceptions exist but usually those cases are break even or close calls. It trails GPU workflows on the high end but wins on the low end. It still wins on efficiency. It falls over on storage and RAM prices (well, for about 6 months it was competitive here…

> Apple Silicon at present beats every single laptop on the market at CPU-bound workloads [citation needed] > It is implausible that mass market products with mass adoption find their success solely on status. People still pay a massive premium for blood diamonds over physically indistinguishable lab diamonds. You underestimate how wildly irrational the market is when it comes to status perception.

Obvious massive asterisk that benchmarks are not always realworld use:

Apple M5, Single core Geekbench: ~4,200 (https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-14-inch-2025)

Apple M5 Pro (15-core, lower core version), multicore: ~26,000 (https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/18535781)

compare this to the top of the line Intel Panther Lake chips, which have comparable battery life. I cherry picked a 16" Dell XPS machine, which has the best thermal headroom, for its best score: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/18390748

Single core: ~2,900 Multicore (16-cores): 16,900

Geekbench is bursty, so we can look at more sustained test, Cinebench 2024:

https://nanoreview.net/en/laptop-compare/dell-xps-16-2026-vs...

Single core:

XPS 16 (2026): 111 MacBook Pro 16 (M5, 2026): 203

Multicore: XPS 16 (2026): 613 MacBook Pro 16 (M5, 2026): 2065

on GPU, https://spylab.ai/seo/v5/C54a/

"Despite the XPS 16's discrete Nvidia RTX 4070 laptop GPU, the MacBook Pro M4 Pro's unified memory architecture outpaced the Dell in 4K video export and machine learning inference benchmarks by 22 percent on average."

For GPU, this is not comprehensive. It depends heavily on whether it needs raw grunt, where Nvidia discrete chips will win. When the processes uses the NPUs on Apple's chips, it will often win. They trade blows.

Efficiency I think is close to a wash on the latest machine, but before Panther Lake, Apple's win handily. My Framework 13 on AMD would last me about 2 hours doing regular work; my Macbook Pro doing the same workload would last over 10 hours. Thank goodness Intel caught up here.

I do scientific computing where Apple has some disadvantages. Matrix math heavy things lose out to discrete GPUs, as do -- I'm told -- things depending on 512-bit extensions (e.g., AVX).

Until last week, prices on Framework/Dell vs. Apple were similar. I think Apple is probably 10-20% expesnive at this point, but adjusting for performance, Apple still comes out ahead.

Apple's displays used to have a huge advantage. Now that you can get OLED displays on performant, efficient Panther Lake machines, this is far less of an Apple advantage.

The upshot is that the new Panther Lake machines caught up considerably to Apple, but they're still about 20-30% slower (sometimes more) in most workloads, and IMO the build quality is still not quite as good. I think many of them actually have better displays. Battery life is comparable on better equipped PCs. IMO once you can work an entire day and a little more unplugged, you're good to go.

It's not hard to find this data and evaluate it objectively.

Re: Free the Icons

#202

Post by skydhash »

amelius wrote: post #192
skydhash wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A physical thing has more degree of freedom to differentiate things. Loke distance and form. So much that you can be blind and still be able to use them. A conputer interface does not have those. You need to track the cursor and then decide how you want to move it. There’s no muscle memory. And no tactile perception. What’s left is visual differentiation and it should be slightly exaggerated.

> and it should be slightly exaggerated The problem is that you can go too far here, and it is in fact reminding me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

It can be. But I prefer slighty more than slightly less for things that I’m using daily. My apple tv remote is more beautiful than my AVR remote, but I strongly prefer the latter. Same with my big mechanical keyboard vs my apple one.

Re: Free the Icons

#204

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

vintagedave wrote: post #191
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great article -but the image has issues with Safari (invisible drag corner), and iOS (a mess). I have found that we need to be very, very careful, when making the UI more "fun." Things like rounded affordances, short transition animations, easy-to-understand elements, etc., are good. They remove the "friction." However, cute icons, unprompted animations, and overuse of whitespace for the sake of design aesthetics, ca…

Thanks, very nice of you to note that, and I'll fix. The SSG behind it has some updates coming to improve mobile rendering for sidenotes etc already, will add more :) Drag corner... hmm... seems a change in recent browsers - that has not changed in the website implementation since it worked in all three (FireFox, Chrome, Safari.) And I may have to break my no-Javascript ethos to get it working again!

> my no-Javascript ethos

I can absolutely support that.

Wouldn’t surprise me, if modern CSS can handle it.

Re: Free the Icons

#205

Post by jaffa2 »

MayeulC wrote: post #183
jaffa2 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its just as bad. Please define ‘back’

1. Hide virtual keyboard if shown 2. Go to previous app view. This is app-dependent though it will probably, successively with each press: a. Close menus if open (context, sidebar, etc) b. Go to previous (web)page if web/file browser c. Go out of submenus (ex: settings/WiFi -> settings) if not in a browser or if the oldest page has been reached. Keeps walking the tree upwards. 3. Reach the main app view (usually the…

brilliant. when i last used an android google apps were the worst for abusing the back button. maybe it's changed since then. sometimes it went up. sometimes previous. sometimes quit.

Re: Free the Icons

#206

Post by ivorius »

_0xdd wrote: post #59

It's still a bit jarring to me to see how far Apple embraced form over function with iOS and subsequently macOS. I remember reading the Human Interface Guidelines from the late Mac OS 9/early Mac OS X days and being taken aback by the level of detail and thought that went into those interfaces. Don't get me wrong, some things made no sense (brushed metal was... a choice) but there was a certain level of polish that I…

The past 10 years have been a sad, slow decline for Apple's UIs. I'm really hoping for them to reclaim some of their former UI glory. At least, in Golden Gate, they reverted their own HIG violation of excessive icons back to factory: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/11/macos-27-golden-gate-me...

Re: Free the Icons

#207

Post by jaffa2 »

matsemann wrote: post #195
jaffa2 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Ive been using apple iphone since 2010 and i jave an iphone air right now. I still dont know how/why/when i seem to accidentally call the AI thing where the side of my acreen go all all funny. Ive never done it intentionally and i dont know how but every so often i trigger it. 2. Can apple ‘regress’ the camera app so the it is easy to use. The interface is a disaster of mixed inputs and over loaded widgets. Theres…

About (2), it reminds me of a video I saw once of someone trying to take a picture at a sport event, or how my parents try to do it. Hold the phone with an awkward grip to point it towards what you want, with one hand free. Accidentally touch the edge of the screen and click something with the gripping hand. Then try to zoom in with your free hand, but one finger hits the screen first due to the angle of the phone so…

EXACTLY. I'm a tech savvy user and know about all these things. But it's still too damn difficult to use without all that jeopardy. It didn't used to be like this.

Re: Free the Icons

#208

Post by mghackerlady »

_0xdd wrote: post #59

It's still a bit jarring to me to see how far Apple embraced form over function with iOS and subsequently macOS. I remember reading the Human Interface Guidelines from the late Mac OS 9/early Mac OS X days and being taken aback by the level of detail and thought that went into those interfaces. Don't get me wrong, some things made no sense (brushed metal was... a choice) but there was a certain level of polish that I…

I think OS 9 (and that entire era of computer graphics design) had the perfect mix of form and function. I won't comment on it aesthetically as that is entirely subjective, but its use of shape and depth made things very human friendly. Buttons looked distinctly buttonable. The icon design was also great, they were skeuomorphic enough that you generally got the idea of what you were clicking but also flat enough that they weren't distracting

Re: Free the Icons

#209

Post by Vuska »

shresthjain wrote: post #198

Don't know if this is what you want to do or not, but you can actually change app icons for Applications however you like if you have the alternate that you want it to be. I'll tell you how Applications Folder (in Finder) -> Right-click on the target app -> Get Info -> Drag-and-drop the intended icon file to the top-left corner where the original icon is present. Ik it's just a way to customise and not something offi…

Even Apple has forgotten about this it seems. There are various places in the UI where this change is not respected, e.g. Stage Manager.

Re: Free the Icons

#210

Post by al_borland »

matsemann wrote: post #142
_0xdd wrote: post #59

It's still a bit jarring to me to see how far Apple embraced form over function with iOS and subsequently macOS. I remember reading the Human Interface Guidelines from the late Mac OS 9/early Mac OS X days and being taken aback by the level of detail and thought that went into those interfaces. Don't get me wrong, some things made no sense (brushed metal was... a choice) but there was a certain level of polish that I…

Yeah, for a decade now it's been a UX disaster. It "works", because so many people are used to it, but look at a new user trying to navigate iOS, it's bonkers. Swiping from random directions achieves different things (and how would you even know you can?). The home button has like 11 different functions depending on how you press it and when.

> Swiping from random directions achieves different things

I haven't used iOS 27 yet, but from what I've seen it's going to get worse. We already have swiping down from the top left or top right bringing up different things, while swiping down anywhere else in the middle of the screen brings up search... unless you're swiping down at the bottom of the screen, then it's Reachability. From what I understand, iOS 27 will also bring swiping down from the Dynamic Island to trigger Siri. So that's 3 different behaviors from a swipe down from somewhere on the top of a <3" wide screen, with no real way to know what's going on intuitively.

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