LMNT

I swear to god… no matter where my attention wanders, the world around me seems hellbent on reminding me that the industry doesn’t value the craft of making software, all because of AI-assisted coding. Apparently, “everyone” is using LLMs to write and debug their apps. It’s big companies. It’s small companies. It’s individual people. I bet it’s absolutely obliterating careers.

Thankfully, my values are not tied to whatever the industry values. And since I value my own skill of making things, I’m going to keep doing that.

I have to tell you, I am seeing lots of trash lately. And part of it is clearly because more people can “make” an app than ever before. It’s crazy because I feel as if being an indie app developer has not been a very lucrative business for most. Yet the App Store “jackpot” dream is really alive, isn’t it?

Very few companies “win” on the App Store. It’s all the same companies who always win anyway. You can maybe make a living with your little app, but if developers can’t make that happen by coding an app by hand, how does anyone think vibe-coding has any chance at all? Especially if everyone else is trying to do exactly that. Why compete in the biggest space doing exactly what your competitors do?

How are we not just going to end up with a billion apps that do one thing slightly differently than the thousand other apps in the same space, just with a different tint color?

This ain’t it.

I think we’re in a design drought. I really do.

Over time, as Apple has provided design resources like UI templates and icons, software engineers have taken over more of the responsibility of designing apps. That would be great if that meant the overall design of apps has improved, but I think we can see that it has not.

People love to repeat what Steve Jobs once said, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” And that’s true! Design is all three of these things: how it looks, how it feels, and how it works.

I dare say, however, that while we may have apps that work (admittedly, sometimes that’s arguable), most of them do not look or feel as great as they could.

I’ve noticed that lots of apps ship with what appears like the most stock, standard UI, only changing the tint color. This is not enough.

Apps should be beautiful. They should be much more beautiful than they are now. Don’t you think so? Years ago, when I worked at Apple, my official role was Visual Designer. Think about that for a minute. I think about it a lot. My job was primarily to make things look good. I would get a wireframe from a UI designer and turn that into something that users want to look at and interact with. (It was a cool job.)

Where is that now? I don’t see it that much. Where are the apps that you look at and think, “Damn, that looks nice”?

This is not about “skeuomorphism.” This is about style. It’s about injecting flavor and color, setting the tone in an app. Right now, to me, it just looks like 90% of all the apps out there are just wireframes that haven’t been painted yet.

Virtually every app is owned and directed by an engineer. (Before you jump in, I know there are exceptions. And I know some are marketing or business-driven.) But designers generally don’t own or direct the apps they work on. At best, they’re still ranked below the engineer who owns the product. It’s been this way for nearly 15–20 years. Before that, I think there were a lot more designer-and-engineer partnerships. I think that can still work if anyone wanted to give it a try, but it’s hard to convince engineers to split their earnings after it’s already been split with Apple.

Interesting to think about the possibility that Apple’s 30% cut might directly be responsible for eating into the design budget of indie apps. It’s something to chew on at least.

I think what we’re seeing is that not just engineers, not just designers, but lots of people from lots of interests and backgrounds are suddenly feeling capable of something they were previously unable to do. Maybe, they think, a one-person operation could actually be financially sustainable if they partner with AI (which is decidedly not a person). Maybe, they think, they don’t need to actually write all the code, or any of the code.

I don’t know how you feel, but so far the collective output from this experiment has me convinced that this approach is neither financially viable nor a mechanism for making good products. It’s just a lot of people pumping out apps that—generally speaking—no one but them wants to use, because the entire direction of each of these vibe-coded apps only ever seem to satisfy one person, the person who “made” it.

Everyone’s trying to go at this alone, and I think that’s why it’s not working or going to work.

May I then suggest an alternative, where we work together to build things? Partnering with another person to make an app doesn’t just mean that you have to split the profits, you get to split the responsibility and the expertise too.

So you’re not a designer. Don’t spin your wheels on design. Don’t make your best guess based on a loose understanding of platform guidance. Don’t try to pick colors if you don’t know what looks good.

If you can’t afford to hire a designer, try partnering with one instead. We should’t be building more apps. We should be building better apps. And we can do it if people stop trying to do it alone. If you see another person trying to build the same thing you are? They won’t have to be your competitor if you partner with them! Build the better app that either of you couldn’t build alone.

Build an app where you lean on each other to do the things each of you are good at, and you’ll outdo every vibe-coded app. The only reason we don’t know what that looks like is because nearly everyone gave up.

This could’ve easily been 12 blog posts, but I opted for one that comprehensively captures how I feel about design on Apple platforms right now.

The Pendulum Swing

There was immediate criticism of iOS 7’s visual design. Concerns mounted pretty quickly about both style and accessibility. Some people remarked, “It’s only the beta,” implying significant change during the beta release phase was not just possible but probable. Yet, after it was released to the public largely the same as it was introduced, they said, “Give it time.”

The first few years of Apple’s new design language, most of the app icons I made and apps I designed were fairly simple and in line with expectations of the platform’s direction. Few colors, subtle or no gradients, definitely no edge effects or glossy treatments. It was really restrictive compared to the icons and UI that we used to make. You know, the style that made Apple the richest company in the world.

Years went by, and public tone shifted from defeat to hope. “The pendulum will swing back,” people said, wistfully. It became a common refrain in the last decade. People really expected Apple to shift back toward the kinds of things that made us all fall in love with their platforms and products to begin with.

And in spite of Apple’s renewed year-after-year commitment to this restrictive visual style, my clients increasingly asked for more illustrative, visually rich icons. That’s what they wanted. That’s what I wanted.

But the pendulum never swung back. Instead, we got Liquid Glass.

In a way, one could say Liquid Glass is like a new version of Aqua. It has reflective properties reminiscent of that. One could also say it’s an evolution of whatever iOS 7 was, leaning into the frosted panels and bright accent colors. But whatever Liquid Glass seems to be, it isn’t what many of us were hoping for.

Understanding It

I love new interpretations of older things. Sequels. Remakes. I will never tire of how new perspectives can create all-new versions of familiar things. Which is good, because it seems to be happening more and more, because kids who grew up on something are now the age they get to work on it. And I love that.

I also recognize that every creator’s mind changes through time and they will inevitably move on from one style in favor of the next.

But there’s one nagging feeling I have about reinterpreting beloved things, which is that before anyone attempts to do it, they must first seek to understand why it is beloved. It is only through understanding it that anyone can do the job well.

In order not to be mistaken, I do not think someone has to be a fan to make a good version of that thing. I also don’t think being a fan makes you the arbiter of whether it’s a good version of that thing or not. (This often is difficult for superfans to accept.)

And so it seems to me that the people who spearheaded both iOS 7 (2013) and iOS 26 (2025) either did not understand that the visually-rich style from 2001–2013 played such a significant role in Apple’s success or they simply did not care that it did.

Rest in Peace

I am exhausted from hearing that Steve Jobs has been apparently rolling in his grave at the sole discretion of whoever didn’t have their expectations of Apple met. Instead of remarking that he would be displeased, maybe it’s better to mark his death as a point in time when things would invariably shift.

Prior to Steve’s death, there was a not-so-secret effort internally to discover Apple’s DNA, which would presumably mitigate the eventual loss of its founder. The hope—I suspect—was that when Steve would die, Apple could sail off on a trajectory that continued the spirit not of Steve, but of the company he started with Woz.

Woz himself might argue that ship already had sailed. But for many of us, Mac OS X marked the moment Apple came into itself. The era of iMac, iPod, and Mac OS X solidified Apple as the industry leader, even if they were not yet in that position. These products and that aesthetic is what carried Apple to where it is now. It was the Apple of that era that built the iPhone.

I often think back to when Steve Jobs proudly stated, “iPhone runs OS X.” That says so much, even without his followup of everything they would get “for free” on iPhone just because they already built it for the Mac. iPhone would never have taken off had Mac OS X not paved the runway.

I am not quiet about how much I love my Mac. If I had to choose one device to keep, my Mac is it. That’s why it feels so odd for me to see macOS visually drift so far from where it started. It is macOS that is the backbone of the company. Despite years of all the wishing and promising that another device will one day capture the market computers have a hold on, my Mac is still the only device that can make something for all those other devices. In that alone, it feels like Mac should be the one leading everything else. Not following behind.

Yet, it’s the visual style from iOS and now visionOS that are dictating the visual style of macOS. It does not feel like a breath of fresh air as much as another nail in the coffin.

Rose Gold Retrospection

Am I selectively choosing the positive parts of the past, ignoring the negative parts? Am I just looking through Rose-Gold-tinted Liquid Glasses?

Yes, I am. I am looking selectively at the good things. That is a huge advantage of being able to create in the future we now live in: We get to observe and learn from the past, taking the best parts of it while discarding the rest. That is how technology is supposed to work.

Yet as years go by, we seem to lose more of OS X’s good things. Year after year, draggable borders and frames became thinner until they disappeared. Scrollbars vanished. Stronger contrast softened. We lost the visually rich design in applications and icons. And now, we’ve even lost the ability to make unique icon silhouettes that Apple once specifically retained when introducing the iOS 7 aesthetic to macOS because that was a distinct element of its heritage.

In fact, the rounded square icons that became the hallmark visual design characteristic of iPhone and iPhoneOS originated as a way to differentiate proper OS X apps from Dashboard widgets. And to be fair, at the time, a lot of iPhone apps felt like they were little widgets themselves. Even though the platform was forked from OS X, the little screen and low resolution encouraged smaller apps on iPhone.

Perceived Platform Stability

The form factor of iPhone really made the square app icons make sense. With touch input, maximizing the hit area for an app icon was a smart move. But it was smart in more ways than one.

By only requiring edge-to-edge square artwork, the glossy effect and rounded corners would be applied automatically. That makes it significantly easier for anyone to plop in anything they want as an app icon and have it look “okay” on device.

Decisions like this gave iPhoneOS some perceived platform stability. People interpreted that as having some shared understanding between apps and how they work.

But these platforms and their expectations have changed significantly since OS X and the original iPhoneOS. The smaller developer community once embraced Apple’s aesthetic and interface guidelines, sometimes leaning further in than Apple did, which generally worked pretty well.

However, iOS 7’s design took this to an extreme. By lowering the bar for visual design across the board, apps no longer had an obvious differentiator to mark the ones that didn’t behave as expected.

Simply put, when you saw an app that put a lot of effort into the visual design to look like an Apple app in the days of yore (including any novel material aesthetics), it generally signaled a desire to match the platform’s goals insofar as interaction as well. Custom (non-native) controls were once made with a level of care not just in their aesthetics, but also to replicate their functionality correctly.

Therefore, apps that did not have these visual design characteristics probably did not behave as you expected either.

However, the era we live in now has apps that don’t just outright reject the way a user expects to use an app (instead favoring their own method). That has always existed. But now they can more easily and effectively disguise themselves into looking almost identical to the “good” apps that do aim to meet user interaction expectations. All because the bar for matching the platform’s visual style is practically nonexistent.

The problem I see is that the people who really do care about their apps—you know, the Mac developers who are proud of being Mac only, not just Mac-first or Mac-compatible—they look no different from the big businesses who came into this market without a goal of meeting user expectations of native functionality.

It may seem like a good idea to automatically mask and apply a glass style to a stubborn third-party developer’s app icon to make it harmonize with the rest of the system. But now it’s just more difficult to see which apps don’t care about the platform they’re on.

Everyone can look decent without actually being decent. And that’s bad for perceived platform stability. That’s bad for users.

Take a Scroll With Me

Ye olde OS X that we fell in love with may very well be dead, but there’s so much we can all still learn from it.

Why did we move away from a system of explicit affordances that help users understand what will happen when they interact with a user interface? There are dozens of examples. But here’s one: Scrollbars.

Scrollbars clearly existed on Mac and iPod before Apple debuted the disappearing-reappearing trick on iPhone.

As iPhone was a low-resolution device at 320×480 with touch input, it could be understood why they went that route for that platform. All vertical views were likely truncated, so instead of always showing scrollbars, a decision was made to hide them. Users would later develop habits of flicking views up and down, and for those who remember the time well, you will also remember how odd it felt to use apps that did not feature vertical scrolling. Even if the view was short enough to not require it, it felt wrong without the rubber band effect.

Furthermore, fairly early on in the life of iPhone, designers would ensure the content view truncated at the bottom of the screen with half an item or half a line of text visible to let people know there was more “below the fold,” a term previously used for the front page of newspapers, and later, websites.

Apple may have started hiding scrollbars since the original iPhone, but when that decision came to the Mac, the same constraints did not apply. A Mac display is much larger and more dense than iPhone. A window can be any size, with any amount of content. Given this reality, an app designer cannot reliably control where a window truncates the content to communicate that there’s more there.

Scrollbars do not merely provide the ability to scroll. The first iPods did not have touch or mouse input, but a scrollbar still existed to indicate the current position and relative length of the view. The best analogy I can think of is how you can easily flip pages in a book, clearly see your position in it, and understand the overall length of the book based on the density of the current page.

The scrollbar simulates the depth of a book by giving you a visual, interactive control that simultaneously indicates the length and current position. If it is invisible, you get none of that.

While drafting this blog post in the Notes app, I have no idea how much text is above or below this very paragraph without a visible scrollbar. This issue has become so bad that some websites with articles will show a horizontal progress bar under its header that fills up as you scroll through an article.

Accessibility is for Everyone

Yes, I can optionally select a preference to show scrollbars always. But good usability is just good design. Good accessibility is just good design. That’s the whole job.

For how much Apple claims to care about accessibility, Apple fell flat with iOS 7. And everyone was right to criticize that then. What is remarkable is that in the 10 years that followed, there were still frosted buttons with unreadable low-contrast red text on them. No one should have to turn on an accessibility setting for a Delete button to be readable. That is the definition of a minimum viable product.

It’s one thing when it’s just one thing. But it’s been immeasurable over the years because of Apple’s influence and impact. This has infiltrated every rounded corner of the industry, because designers often use Apple as an example of doing it well. People offload their design responsibility when they can point to an example from Apple doing something a certain way.

And the thing that hurts so much is that Apple is good about accessibility and usability in so many ways. So how is it they exhibit such a large blind spot? We can all see it. For years, we have yearned for them to address these decade-old concerns.

But instead, they double-down with Liquid Glass. Issues that were once bad seem to now be reflected, refracted, and magnified.

Some details are genuinely really nice. Yet, some of the longest-standing issues remain unresolved. The design team that delivers the broadest change for a three-trillion-dollar company cannot be bothered to consider legibility as a primary function of the operating system?

User Experience

I suppose many people thought the purpose of user experience designers was to ensure this sort of thing would never happen. Yet here we are. And that frustrates me.

The experience of using an app was always the responsibility of everyone involved in creating it, especially the user interface designer. This wasn’t something that simply no one considered before UX designers came into the scene years after the development of the modern operating system.

I’d argue that while many experiences have improved, we have way more bad experiences in apps than ever before, dragging down the average considerably from where it used to be. Somehow, the introduction of UX designers into the field has marked an era with worse user experiences across every platform.

And yet here we are, signing ourselves up for another decade?

Asking a Lot

Apple has effectively infinite resources and operates on their own timeline, but everyone else does not have this kind of luxury. Springing big changes like this all at once forces so many independent developers, entire companies, and the industry as a whole to freeze their own development schedules to accommodate Apple’s design system.

It’s asking a lot. For almost nothing in return. I keep looking at all the changes Liquid Glass brings, and I cannot find one instance where it has markedly improved the experience in any way.

Everything that got rounder—except for the things that didn’t—why? Everything that got inset that wasn’t before—why? Everything that is now blurry—why? I don’t think it’s a secret that the content area of some apps decreased. The margins and padding increased—except where it didn’t.

In some ways, there’s almost more UI variance than there was before, which doesn’t make any sense. But in other ways, everything feels far more restrictive than it once was. Which I admit, also doesn’t make much sense. App icons weren’t just more expressive on OS X, they could be a much wider-range of materials than merely glass.

I know I can still draw anything I want within that square, and that the glass appearance on objects inside of it is purely optional. But the edge of every icon now has a glass appearance I can’t do anything about. If my icon is paper, wood, metal, or—god forbid—leather? It has a glass specular highlight. On macOS, it’s currently locked at a 45° angle. Which is not something I agreed to.

Swinging for the fences like this comes with substantial risk. Especially for matured products like macOS. This product is almost 25 years old, and I would hope there would be a little more caution when expecting effort from and forcing changes upon a developer community you’ve largely lost your goodwill with. These kinds of decisions have long-lasting effects and I’m sure many developers would’ve appreciated their time being considered before asking them to incorporate a design they did not sign up for.

Actually, Who Is in Charge Now? And Why?

Back in the day, Steve Jobs had an incredible vision for the future that mostly materialized. And as it was being constructed, everyone who went to work at Apple deferred to that vision.

That’s what happened to me. I knew I would give up a certain amount of control, but I trusted that vision. More than that, the fact that everyone else would do the same spoke volumes, and the result was a technological renaissance that has already passed.

I think many of us were pretty okay with Steve in charge.

But now when I see Liquid Glass, part of it feels like it just resets us back to where we were ten years ago. The pendulum didn’t swing back. Giving it time didn’t make it better. After ten years, it all feels like this is someone who just dug their heels in.

There’s a whole design team at Apple which I can only guess is a great mix of people, with varying levels of platform experience. I must assume some people know the platform very well, while others are undoubtedly fairly new to it, which is great. I can only hope that everyone on that team attempts to understand the platform’s history before they make drastic changes to it.

But what I am now absolutely sure of is that if the last decade represents Alan Dye’s vision for this platform, then I disagree with it. I don’t trust this direction. I didn’t need the last ten years to see that, but I’m disappointed that in ten years he still doesn’t see it.

I don’t understand why this guy’s in charge of the Human Interface group at Apple. It makes no sense to me.

The Next Ten Years

I know this largely doesn’t matter. And I know that I will continue to enjoy making icons even under arbitrary design constraints that I disagree with. I know Parakeet will continue to make the nicest icons on any platform well into the future.

I already made 15 different Liquid Glass versions of our clients’ icons as experiments. And I think they all work really well with just a touch of that glass effect. I don’t think everything needs it. Chromatic shadows are nice, and reusing layers for different color modes is very useful. I generally think icon production is a fair bit simpler for me, which I appreciate.

Looking back at the app icons we made over the last ten years for over a hundred clients at Parakeet, I can see exactly when things shifted. I think it will happen again, just faster this time.

So if I have any predictions, it’s that the adoption of Liquid Glass will be relatively quick, but developers and companies will probably deviate from it more quickly than they did with the previous style of iOS. A lot of these companies have matured in their own right, with their own established styles, having done their own research, with their own formed opinions. I doubt they will abandon that in any meaningful way in favor of an aesthetic that is more distinctly Apple’s.

Liquid Glass and the general implementation of it will not meaningfully change during the beta phase of the “26” release cycle. They’re not going to backtrack. And they’re not going to address long-standing concerns all of a sudden.

The general adoption of this may test the patience of an already weary community of developers who feel tired of toiling away on trivial changes such as this. As I said, I don’t think there is any meaningful benefit to it, and designers and developers may themselves feel that as they implement it.

Larger companies may take a hard look at whether it makes sense to have native apps at all versus just web apps. With so much eroded goodwill and Apple profiting immense amounts from third party developers, larger companies may reasonably question the benefit. I think they’d be right to do so. The web’s capabilities likely cover a lot of use cases that many apps need.

By the Way

Over the years, it feels harder and harder to relate with the general atmosphere Apple surrounds itself in. It wasn’t always this pristine. Everyone who presented wasn’t always so stylish. Not everyone used to talk like this. What is that, by the way? Why does everyone sound like a voice assistant? Or is it that voice assistants got their speaking style from Apple’s presentation style?

Apple didn’t used to craft a narrative around every decision in order to justify it. I feel like their presentations are burdened by reason and rationale, and their individual WWDC sessions feel increasingly pretentious like each of them are gods coming down to share their wisdom with us plebs.

It’d be nice if they were knocked off their pedestal, because I think they’re better when they’re trying to outdo someone else rather than themselves.

Remember The Good Place? The point system for individual decisions lives rent free in my head.

You can’t adhere to this concept too strictly. There’s a long list of decisions that lead to the decision you actually get to make. One of the examples from the show was making a salad, but the tomato you bought was grown in pesticide-rich farmland, farmed by underpaid workers, shipped from Mexico to Indiana using fuel-inefficient vehicles.

There are a lot of little trade-offs we’re willing to make for the things we want. But how many trade-offs are we willing to make? And how big can a trade-off get before we just can’t justify it anymore?

If this sounds like my Where’s the Line? post, I admit that it kinda sounds like that to me too. This stuff is not black and white. Morals are not always clear cut. There’s nuance.

But sometimes, there really isn’t any nuance. Sometimes it really is clear cut.

For example, J.K. Rowling is an asshole. We’ve known this for quite some time. I’ve said it before. And I hate beating that drum, because I have so many other things I would like to do in my life.

I promise, I don’t really want every other blog post to be about how disgusted I am at the state things, but—if I’m being honest—I’m finding myself meta-disgusted at the moment. The disgust I am feeling lately is less about how awful the actual thing is and more about how there is a lack of collective disgust about it.

How is it that everyone seems unwilling to give up on Harry Potter to spite J.K. Rowling? I understand that the universe she created captivated people. I understand that books and films are enjoyable. But J.K. Rowling is and has been funneling a lot of her money—that was once your money—into anti-transgender causes. If that’s not enough, she uses her entire online existence to spread this revolting viewpoint.

Far too many people are far too comfortable ignoring the damage she is actively doing. And I just want to be clear: it’s fine to put her out of your mind as long as you are not also financially supporting her in any way.

It’s not worth it. In this very specific case, it is definitely not worth it.

The entertainment we have in this world is so vast. There are so many things to appreciate and enjoy that are not created by such a reprehensible human being. Find some of those things. Please.

Do not be a person who facilitates her hatred. Do not turn a blind eye to the money you spend on Harry Potter. You can’t justify it. You can only make excuses. Do not make excuses. Your money is better spent almost anywhere else. Your admiration for that story is better invested in something else. Stop introducing Harry Potter to your children.

On a personal note, while I don’t watch, read, or buy anything Harry Potter anymore, I’ve been feeling really guilty about having Harry Potter wallpapers on my website. So I removed them from the wallpapers index page. For the moment, the files are still in the archive directory, and the pages for the wallpapers still exist, but they are completely orphaned from the rest of the site. I think that’s the right thing to do, but I might remove them entirely later.

Well, it’s finally here, the dystopian dream team. Jony Ive and Sam Altman hitched their carts together to create god knows what. While some people are “excited” or “intrigued,” I am frankly “disgusted.” In an intro video with special thanks to the Coppola family and Café Zoetrope for the location, and Harry Gregson-Williams for letting them borrow The Martian score, the two gush about the city of San Francisco, a city not devoid of problems that people like these two men helped create.

Jony Ive may be a brilliant designer, and he may have assembled a brilliant team. They very well may be enjoying having every tool at their disposal to create anything they could ever dream of. I don’t doubt it. But Jony himself does not strike me as a person who ever really liked computers. He and his team are great at constructing a beautiful arrangement of parts, inside a pristine enclosure, with novel mechanics to open and close it. No doubt. But there’s never been any indication he even likes computers.

Sam Altman has built an entire business around theft. Taking everything he can find—but not pay for—he has constructed a monstrous machine that uses an unbelievable amount of energy and an unfathomable amount of water to keep cool. It is an ecological nightmare. In addition, ChatGPT doesn’t just itself fail to recognize the difference between fact and fiction, it presents these answers to people who are themselves unable to discern the difference. Sam Altman is a person who thinks today’s limitation of a laptop is waiting for ChatGPT to respond. He said this.

Both of these men are made for each other in the worst way imaginable. They both seemingly have a disdain for computers. None of what they spoke about in that ten-minute masturbatory video showed any ounce of wonder and amazement for what humans are able to do with computers. I don’t think these men are here to save us.

On that note, I don’t think we need to be saved. I don’t love my phone that much anymore. But I do appreciate its value as a communication device, a camera, and an iPod. The thing is, I actually really love my Mac. But there’s this unkillable idea in Silicon Valley right now that there will be another thing someday. The promise of a theoretical future device that does something worth having. Billionaires keep pretending like they’re doing research to find it, but I feel like we’re already living the dream. I can draw and write and create whatever I want, and publish it or send it to people around the world to see instantaneously. And I can access whatever everyone else shares instantly from my devices too. That’s the peak. We’re at the summit!

Computers and phones have stopped making the big leaps they once did. That’s fine! That’s okay. We did it! We largely accomplished the goals, maximizing what these objects should be. From here on out, big changes are no longer possible, nor are they necessary. These kinds of devices have reached the point where they have just joined refrigerators, washing machines, and microwaves. I understand that’s no longer glamorous, but the exciting part may just be over. We’re not going to have a new device that supersedes a computer is or what we consider a phone to be today.

For this general category of computing devices, I think we already figured it out. Right now, with all these new products created around AI features, we’re not witnessing another leap or a new product category that will overtake the devices we have today.

What we’re seeing right now is not innovation, we’re seeing people struggle to contend with the reality that it’s over. They’re coping with the fact that the innovation phase for computing devices has finished. They’re grasping for continued relevance.

Even Nintendo made more of a direct sequel to their hardware than they have before. While every previous console was just one weird thing after another, this one’s built on what they had that worked best. It incorporates all these weird ideas they’ve had over the years in a form factor that they simply already figured out.

Despite none of us really needing another new device with all new things to learn and adapt to for modest—if any—gain, the tech magnates just simply have more money than they know what to do with. And they have to prove to themselves over and over again that their past successes weren’t flukes. Surely, they think, they can repeat past successes with entirely new products. Surely those successes weren’t just the product of the period of time that kind of innovation needed to happen. Right?

I don’t think any new product (or new product category) that we’re seeing lately is done with the goal of improving our lives. Instead, it’s done out of sheer hubris. I cannot and will not be convinced that the guy who pushed for a $17,000 gold watch has absolutely any idea how to enrich my life.

A lot of people respect Jony Ive and admire him for the legacy he left behind at Apple, which is why a lot of Apple fans are falling for this in a way they initially fell for Humane—even if they won’t admit they did, I saw them do it. Jony lends that credibility to someone without any. It’s awful to see Sam Altman spend six and a half billion dollars to buy Jony’s credibility. It’s worse to see Jony sell his credibility.

Do not mistake these men as anything but a couple of rich dudes who are remarkably unrelatable. They are too far removed to understand what anyone else’s life is like. And that’s what makes them awful candidates to create anything for everyone else.

I’m not curious to see what they make. I’m not excited about the potential of it. There is no third primary device. There’s no reason to believe that it could exist. There is no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I’ve seen this all before. Too many times. And so have you.

Masa

Louie, what does “time” mean when ordering?

Me

What?

Masa

Like, “One time cappuccino, one time latte, one time special morning set…”

Me

…What in the world? “Time”? Who said this? Are you sure they said “time”? Where were they from?

Masa

I don’t know. But… ヨーロッパ style.

Me

Hold on. Let me think about this.

two minutes later

Me

OK. I understand. In German, people order things using “einmal” kind of like 一つ. When translating literally, it could mean “one-time,” so when Germans speak English, they might say “one-time cappuccino, one-time latte, one-time special morning set.” It’s not normal English. You don’t have to remember it.

Almost every day in my little local café, there are a decent amount of tourists, because it’s one of the only places nearby that serves breakfast, and at an earlier hour than anywhere else. The tourists are often from Asia, North America, and Europe. Not everyone speaks English natively, but it might be their second language. That makes English the lingua franca in the café for all non-Japanese tourists.

Being the resident English expert, the staff often asks me to help them with English. I’m all too happy to help, but this one was so bizarre. My initial thought was that there’s no variation of English I know where this would make any sense.

But now it makes sense. It’s not really English at all. When ordering sets of things in German, “mal” can be indicative of multiplication. Like “one-time” or “one of the.”

1 × Cappuccino

1 × Latte

1 × Special Morning Set

This is just one, small, foreign language quirk from today. There were others.

I was roaming the underground shopping area outside Tokyo Station, and walked past a miniature Don Quixote, a discount shop. The normal size one is almost intolerable, so I never ever go there.

As I walked by, I saw an orange bag with a Reese’s logo on it, and I finally understood what Peter Arnell was on about with the gravitational pull of Pepsi, because my body involuntarily shifted into the shop. But upon closer inspection, it was actually a bag of Reese’s Dipped Pretzels, which is not at all what I wanted. I was gutted. It’s impossible to find peanut butter cups. No other Reese’s product existed in the entire store. How could this happen to me?

[Download the video.]

Yes, someone in the government is breaking the law, and yes, that other politician is being a hypocrite, and yes again, that one over there is clearly a nazi.

It’s all anybody can see.

We’re past the point of calling it out. There’s no one left to convince. They’re openly doing it now because there are no consequences. After pointing it out for the thousandth time, they’re not going to feel guilty; they’re going to ask, “Yeah, so what? What are you gonna do about it?”

So?

There’s a lot to take away from Humane’s story, but first, I want to share something I said on Twitter in July 2022, a full year before Humane revealed their product, the Ai Pin:

me

I can’t imagine that product being successful.

Which makes me wonder— is the whole idea for Humane to patent any technologies it develops in the hopes of licensing those technologies to big companies? Maybe the product is effectively a demo to facilitate Humane selling patents.

👀

Even prior to posting this, in response to any skepticism I had about Humane, people told me—publicly and privately—to “wait and see.” Some of these people knew Imran Chaudhri, Humane’s founder. Others had no idea who he was. Either way, a lot of people were giving him and Humane the benefit of the doubt from the start. I think we have to stop doing that in this industry.

Next time, let’s not “wait and see.” Instead, let’s spot the red flags more easily and have them be addressed.

Claiming credibility through patents

Paying editors to create Wikipedia articles about you

Manufacturing hype before manufacturing products

Pivoting the product to AI, even before shipping

Pitching products via a TED talk

Having no plan for inevitable electronic waste

Before Humane, Imran Chaudhri was not a person that many people outside of Apple knew of. After he was fired, to aid his credibility going forward, he boasted about his patent collection on his personal website.

At a company like Apple, patent authorship is politicized, and only a few people are usually listed on any given patent. Being one of those few people listed as a patent author can make someone feel really special and inflate their ego.

To give you an example, Ken Kocienda is an early employee of Humane who also boasts about his Apple inventions. I don’t think there are many people left who haven’t heard Ken tell his story of how he “invented” iPhone autocorrect. He rests on this singular laurel. That claim should make you wonder, if Ken was not on that team, wouldn’t someone else have done it? Yes. The answer is definitely yes. Did anyone else work on this other than Ken? I’d bet on it. But he’s the only person making this claim, so it’s the only story you hear. Pro Tip™: Always ask if someone’s trying to sell you their book. (He is.)

A cornerstone of working at Apple is recognizing that most things are collaborations, sometimes with people and teams that you never interact with, and it is rather humbling to know that you are just one small piece of a much larger puzzle. But from the outside, it can seem like a person who has a thousand patents is a certified genius.

Imran has claimed to have “invented” many, many things that were surely done in collaboration with others and definitely would have been done without his involvement.

There’s no reason to believe that a person listed as an Apple patent author makes them capable of inventing anything on their own that was made possible by the enormous teams and vast resources Apple has at its disposal.

When people make claims, please check them.

However, what was a little more troubling to me was how his contributions at Apple—including those patents—became the basis for an encyclopedic entry on Wikipedia.

Around when the company was founded, a Wikipedia article suddenly appeared about Imran Chaudhri that he paid for, proven by a disclaimer left on the article’s Talk page, which I’m sure very few people look at. I don’t think any media outlet ever picked up on this.

In 2018, like Imran himself, Humane was barely something anyone knew about. They were in “stealth mode” for three years. Before manufacturing any product for customers, the company was manufacturing hype for itself. People were simping for Humane, hanging on every word about a product that quite literally had not existed yet.

In October 2022, Imran tweeted:

Imran Chaudhri

the rumors are true… the smartphone is dead

and coming next year from @Humane, the world’s first device built from the ground up for AI

The thing that strikes me is that before then, it was not clear Humane was making an AI-powered product at all. They probably weren’t. Earlier patents they filed focused on the “laser ink” display which maybe they hoped would play a bigger role. AI was likely a pivot after realizing the vision wasn’t materializing into a meaningful product or because investors were feeling the industry’s AI pressure. I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think this was supposed to be an AI product. It just became one.

It’s hard for me—as someone who has been in this industry for 15 years—to understand the fundamental difference between startup “stealth mode” and the entire period of time before you announce a product, so even though it took three years to emerge from said “stealth mode,” it still took two more years to announce their first product, which Imran did via a TED Talk.

If you watched the video of that talk, you know how cringe it was. Imran is not the first—nor will he be the last—to attempt a Steve Jobs or Jony Ive impersonation to introduce a product. But as he made his attempt, he noticeably lacked Steve’s charming stage presence and the elegant way Jony reads a script. Instead, Imran made a strange pitch that made me curious if he lives in the same reality I do.

It had been fifteen years since Steve introduced the iPhone, where making a call on stage was—for the last time—impressive. Imran opens with this, and only a few people in the audience seemed impressed.

Next, he has has the device translate his words, which after it does, he claims was “fluent French.” He then sprinkles in a statement he thinks sound smart but is so unconvincing.

Imran Chaudhri

This is not a deepfake. In fact, it’s deeply profound.

Live translation is a dream feature for lots of people. Getting it right would be incredible. But does this deliver on that promise? Not quite.

Like many AI demos, Imran has the voice assistant answer a question he already knows the answer to, holding up a candy bar so the the voice assistant can say he should avoid eating it due to his cocoa butter intolerance. There’s a delayed, polite applause. He reminds the audience that he, not the AI voice assistant, is in control. “I’m going to eat it anyway,” he says. To which the voice assistant responds, “Enjoy it.” The audience laughs, while I wonder who thinks this device would in any way stop him from eating it.

Watching how this was pitched to the public, I wonder how was this pitched to TED. I’d love to know who signed off.

A few months later, Humane’s product was dubbed the Ai Pin, and a few months later from that, it was listed as one the Best 200 Inventions of 2023 by Time, before it was ever released and—more importantly—before anyone at Time was able to even try it. Some noted that Time is co-chaired by a couple of Humane’s investors. Whether it was a favor or not, it certainly looked like one.

When the price was revealed to be $699 plus a $24/mo. service fee, anyone who hadn’t already dropped off was certain to have by then.

Humane’s CEO, Bethany Bongiorno—who is married to Imran—replied to casual criticism on Twitter in November 2023:

Bethany Bongiorno

our goal was never to solve smartphone addiction or deter phone usage.

it was to build a new contextual compute device and platform to unlock the full capabilities of ai. we are just at the start of what is possible.

contextual queries and operations, building your own ai, visual search with the world as your operating system - this is all what gets unlocked.

and the by product will be that you use your phone less, or differently - just like with every shift in technology that brings around a new form factor.

Surely Bethany remembers when her husband—and chairman of their company—posted “the smartphone is dead” just one year earlier.

Humane sold just 10,000 of the 100,000 they expected to. I’d love to know how many were actually produced. I’d also like to know how many were returned in total, because it was reported that the new sales were lower than the units returned. I can’t blame anyone who returned theirs. If I had bought one and it was was overheating, I would sooner seek a refund than a replacement battery. For a device clipped to your clothing, overheating is something I’d like to avoid.

The device’s problems were well-documented. The response time was awful. The battery life was abysmal. Even when it worked, it offered little value.

Didn’t Humane test this device? If they didn’t know about these problems until after it shipped, that’s a huge blind spot. If they did, that’s even worse. With these problems, low sales numbers and a high return rate was inevitable. It is—of course—not the fault of any reporter who rightly criticized the device, but rather Humane, its founders, and its investors who are responsible for shipping it like this.

This all paints a grim picture for electronic waste. In the future, this should be addressed at the very beginning of any hardware company. People should know what the end-of-life plans are for devices before they’re sold. It’s unlikely, because without regulation, why would any company care? But as consumers, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect companies to have their own plans to properly dispose of their own devices after customers are finished using them.

After it was clear to most people that Humane was not going to come back from those poor sales numbers, they pivoted once again. But rather than pivoting the product, they pivoted the company’s marketing. They pretended to have forgotten the supposedly valuable part of their proposition, the “operating system” they call CosmOS. So they reintroduced it with flowcharts and videos that I’m sure did not instill any confidence among customers that Humane would continue to support their product. Instead, it signaled pretty clearly Humane was seeking a buyer for the whole company.

As a side note, I am not an expert on what constitutes an operating system, but to me, CosmOS doesn’t seem like an operating system. It seems like a series of API calls the device or service makes via a voice assistant and a web portal interface for the customers’ data. On top of an operating system.

And at this point, it might be a good time to point out that the web portal interface called .Center was the primary—if not the only—method for users to interact with their data outside of the Ai Pin itself. That means photos and videos captured or notes recorded could only be viewed, edited, or exported from that website. By storing all of this stuff on a server for only this product to access and having no synced local copy anywhere—even on the device itself for direct syncing or export to other services—customers were forced into this model which undoubtedly duplicates functionality their other devices already have. I don’t blame Humane for lacking integration with Apple’s services, but I blame them for not building proper desktop or phone software that kept user data in a format their users could easily migrate elsewhere.

With reports of the company hoping for an acquisition in the 750 million–1 billion dollar range, I suspect everyone was finally laughing. I’ve brought this up before, but Instagram was once sold for a billion dollars. Star Wars was sold for four billion dollars. It takes a planet-sized ego to think this company could be worth a billion dollars.

But maybe customers were not laughing. For them, the future of this device was decidedly unclear, until just the other day when Humane announced that HP was acquiring some of Humane. HP is not acquiring the product or the customer base, but instead CosmOS and the team that built it. It would not be an Imran Chaudhri statement if it didn’t mention their patents, so Humane made it abundantly clear that part of what HP is acquiring includes “more than 300 patents and patent applications.”

In a separate statement for their customers, Humane said the device will cease to function in any meaningful way after February 28, 2025. That’s less than 10 days from the acquisition announcement. Adding insult to injury, customers will only be able to access and export their data from the only place it was ever made available, the .Center website. For data on the Ai Pin that hasn’t been retrieved, it must first upload to the service before customers can access it. All within less than 10 days. After that, the data will be inaccessible, even if it’s still on the device.

The way this product is being shut down reveals so much about the company.

To all the journalists out there, please don’t repeat that Humane is “winding down.” That phrase should be used only when the availability of services are being phased out over a decent period of time. Decent is not 10 days. This is being immediately shut down. This device, its services, and support will no longer be available by the end of this month.

The remaining hardware will likely be disposed of, by the company and its customers. Humane suggests to customers that they handle that on their own, which I find insulting, as I think the company is responsible for the waste.

Humane existed for six years, which is quite a long time, but it collapsed quicker than any other company I have seen before. I hope that in the future, people can see red flags more clearly and that journalists identify them much earlier, without giving companies the benefit of the doubt. It’s better to be skeptical until proof is presented.

There’s really no reason to believe that people who were good individual contributors would be good entrepreneurs. It’s a completely different skillset with entirely different challenges. Yet, the industry reports on “former Apple employees” like they’re going to be the next Steve Jobs.

Stop idolizing these people.

Modern cartography should not be determined via political pressure. If we all can’t agree on that, we really should.

That’s the basis of why it was so cowardly for both Google and Apple to rename the Gulf of Mexico in their maps. As far as I know, there is no law in the United States that compels any private company to draw or label their maps according to what that country considers its official naming. And because there isn’t means that any company that complies with any country’s official naming—specifically as outlined by the executive branch of the United States government—did so completely voluntarily.

I just want to say right out of the gate that if the argument is that the name is official, it should go without saying that it is official only in one country in the world. Even people who speak US English and have their devices set to US English may not live—shocker—in the United States. But if we do care about official names, there is a long list of place names, including indisputable names of countries themselves that are not recognized across regions and languages. In just one example, Japan is not the official name of the country inside of Japan. It’s officially Nippon (or Nihon in everyday conversation). In kanji it’s represented as 日本, but Nippon is the romanized name. And yet that isn’t the name the rest of the world uses, because of long-standing misrepresentations of its name from Europeans that cascaded the world over. (In Japanese maps, 日本 is used.)

Maybe that doesn’t seem so weird to you, so let me show you what happens in the other direction. In Japanese, people call the United Kingdom Igirisu. That’s derived from “English,” which I think we all know represents only one country inside the country known as the United Kingdom. That’s genuinely confusing. And if you’re curious, England is called Ingurando, which is about as close as you can get in Japanese.

I bring this up because in the global arena, if we can’t even let countries name themselves, then arguing about the names of bodies of water in the open sea must seem ridiculous even within this broader scope of the same topic. But, I admit that I’ve digressed.

For weeks now, I’ve noticed a common refrain, “pick your battles.” It’s a phrase I have heard many times in my life as a very opinionated person who loves to fight every battle. People say it as a way to remind you that there’s likely a larger battle in the future you’ll want to save your strength for, as if holding your strength in reserve will make your argument stronger in a theoretical future argument. Everyone knows it doesn’t work that way. People in power say it to keep others from having power themselves. It’s not a mechanism to help you be stronger; it’s a mechanism to keep you quiet.

But this whole Gulf of Mexico thing was an easy battle to fight. And there’s some value in winning the small battles that we can. The name of this body of water was not disputed by anyone. And yes, while it’s not the most important issue facing the world today, I’d like to think we’re capable of fighting more than one battle at a time, which we’re going to have to do going forward. Any one battle cannot be won before we can shift focus to the next. Get used to trying to fight multiple battles simultaneously.

That’s what makes this one feel so awful. It wasn’t a particularly difficult battle because there was no actual dispute happening. There are longer-standing, actual disagreements on some bodies of water, namely S-23, commonly known as the Sea of Japan. This name has been disputed formally for decades, with evidence from over 1000 years ago supporting naming it the East Sea. North Korea and South Korea agree on this. And though Russia shares comparatively very little coastline with it and China shares absolutely zero coastline with it, they too have qualms with the name.

For reference, Apple Maps—by my checking right now (in US English, in Japan)—does not label this body of water at all. Searching “Sea of Japan” will pinpoint its coordinates, but that’s as far as it goes. Google, on the other hand, does label it as the “Sea of Japan.”

If you give this broader issue any thought whatsoever, all bodies of water in the open sea should be named poetically by neighboring countries rather than named for any neighboring countries. But also earlier, longer-standing names should probably be respected. That’s why it should be Denali. That’s why it should be the Gulf of Mexico. These names have heritage and history.

John Gruber says because they’re regionally tailored, maps from Google and Apple aren’t singular global atlases. The Oxford English Dictionary, he argues, is the same for everyone. A definition changes for everyone simultaneously.

Every publisher—just as every cartographer—gets to do what they think is right, not what they are dictated to do by any government. While it’s true there is only one “OED,” there are a few English dictionaries from Oxford, including the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, the New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD), and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Also, not everyone uses the Oxford English Dictionary. There are obviously other English dictionaries, at least the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. The OED is like Google Maps and Apple Maps in that it is not the singular (English) dictionary either. Changing one dictionary does not change every dictionary.

Whether MapQuest renames the Gulf of Mexico is truly their own decision. And I hope they make the right one, because Apple and Google did not. They had an opportunity to resist authoritarianism, but instead obeyed in advance, without any legal requirement to do so.

This is not as trivial as it is being made out to be. Donald Trump just demonstrated the influence he has over tech companies. They did exactly as he asked even though they were not forced to. That frightens me.

Just as I asked where the line is for individuals, I’m curious where the line is for companies like Apple and Google too. Because though undoubtedly Donald Trump would’ve been pissed had either company not renamed the body of water, I’d like to have seen him try to force them to do it. It would have necessitated much more visible authoritarianism, and people would have got way more upset about that.

Apple is a big, powerful company with the capability of doing what’s right even in the face of potential retaliation. They had the power to resist but didn’t. I cannot even begin to describe how disappointing that feels. I don’t think my anger or disappointment is misplaced. This decision wasn’t Trump’s decision. It was Tim Cook’s decision.

In a footnote comparison about the Associated Press losing part of their White House access because they refuse to call it the Gulf of America, John quips that it’d be ridiculous if Apple stopped inviting him to events if he styled MacOS with a capital M, instead of macOS with a lowercase m. Sure, that would be ridiculous, but Apple has revoked press access for petty reasons before. But writing 5000 words in defense of Apple’s decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico is also in service of staying on the invitation list.

Donald Trump asked Tim Cook to kiss the ring, and Tim didn’t seem to hesitate. If I worked at Apple, I would not only be ashamed to work there after this, I would quit. I would feel absolutely awful to continue exchanging the value of my time for any amount of money from a company that quickly surrenders to one man.

Where’s the line that can’t be crossed?

Surely there’s something so vile, so intolerable, so universal in its horror that there’s no other choice but to stop and shut everything down. Something where a hashtag would be insulting, where a march or protest would be insufficient. Something that necessitates an absolute refusal to comply, withholding all work and diverting all focus to rioting, property damage, and violence. Complete civil disobedience.

If the pitcher pulls out a pistol and shoots the batter, then I’m sorry to say we’re not playing baseball anymore. When the government disregards the rules of the game, what sense is there in the rest of us playing by the rules?

People need to become comfortable with the idea of violence as a means to political ends. It is the only rational answer to oppression. We’re not going to vote our way out of this.

A gun owner has decided—by purchasing a gun—that they’re okay with using it. Being comfortable killing another human is something I am not comfortable with. I want to believe that puts me on moral high ground, but it really just makes me vulnerable to someone who doesn’t care.

When any of us are faced with violence, we may have to respond with violence ourselves. By not responding with violence, we simply permit others to kill us. That’s a really tough moral dilemma. We’re over here debating whether punching fascists is okay when that’s the absolute least we should be doing.

Most people left-of-center have not quite contended with this. The Democratic Party is still largely led and influenced by the Obamas, and Michelle has famously said, “when they go low, we go high.” As a reminder, we’re no longer playing baseball. The virtue of going high is no longer of any value.

Can any of us really claim to maintain a moral high ground?

So again, where’s the line that—if crossed—you’d feel totally justified in being violent?

Most people would say they’d intervene violently if their family’s lives were in danger. Does the answer change when it’s the police putting your family in danger? What about when you remove your family from the equation, and instead it’s your friend? Your neighbor? It’s astounding how much these variables factor into the calculus.

Clearly, proximity is a factor. Five shot dead in a nearby neighborhood registers totally differently from five shot dead in a faraway war.

But it’s also in how we tend to classify things. It’s easier to dismiss something if we call it a tragedy rather than an atrocity, because that makes it easier to accept.

As migrants are detained, as trans people lose their rights, as Black people are murdered by police, will we continue to label these as tragedies we can’t do anything about? When will they be atrocities that cannot be tolerated with threat of public retaliation? Would the people of the United States of America permit another genocide? I fear so.

So where is the line? If none of these things that have already happened crossed that line, then where is it?

Ponder and debate where that line is that can’t be crossed, but while we do, we’ll witness a progression of a thousand more terrible things leading up to it. They’ll have no trouble committing atrocities that don’t cross that line, we’ll call them tragedies to cope, and we’ll think we can social-media post our way out of fascism, even though we know—deep down—we can’t.

Yes, there’ll be protests when police kill more Black people. There’ll be marches when more basic human rights are revoked. But most of these will be self-proclaimed peaceful protests. You have to know the government is fine with peaceful protests that pose no direct threat. They don’t care how you vote in four years. They only care if you’re going to stop them now.

Without a threat, there is no incentive to abide. That works both ways. The government threatens the wellbeing of the civilians so that civilians comply. But if the civilians are unwilling to be a threat themselves, then the government has no reason to comply.

Sure, we can say none of these awful things are tolerable, yet we provably tolerate them every day by going about our lives as usual the very next day. Because we’re tired and scared, with everything to lose.

But they’re not tired and scared. They’re quite comfortable. They know people left-of-center are unwilling to be violent for fear of losing the moral high ground. That allows them to walk right up to the line and step right over it.