Maybe “next year” meant “next next year”?

(They’re still accepting $100 deposits for pre-orders.)

Caitlin Callenson’s courage in the face of insane danger is just remarkable.

This 2021 post from Jason Fried is a good chaser to his “The Big Regression” this week (which I linked to yesterday):

Much of the tension in product development and interface design comes from trying to balance the obvious, the easy, and the possible. Figuring out which things go in which bucket is critical to fully understanding how to make something useful.

Shouldn’t everything be obvious? Unless you’re making a product that just does one thing — like a paperclip, for example — everything won’t be obvious. You have to make tough calls about what needs to be obvious, what should be easy, and what should be possible. The more things something (a product, a feature, a screen, etc) does, the more calls you have to make.

This isn’t the same as prioritizing things. High, medium, low priority doesn’t tell you enough about the problem. “What needs to be obvious?” is a better question to ask than “What’s high priority?” Further, priority doesn’t tell you anything about cost. And the first thing to internalize is that everything has a cost.

Obvious / easy / possible is a good filter through which to create — and critique — designs. To borrow an example from yesterday: old-fashioned analog light switches are exemplars of obviousness; most new-fashioned smart switches are exemplars of possibility.

Howard Oakley, writing at The Eclectic Light Company

macOS Tahoe’s visual interface:

• Fits largely rectangular contents into windows with excessively rounded corners.
• Enlarges controls without any functional benefit.
• Results in app icons being more uniform, thus less distinguishable and memorable.
• Fails to distinguish tools, controls and other interface elements using differences in tone, so making them harder to use.
• Makes a mess where transparent layers are superimposed, and won’t reduce transparency when that’s needed to render its interface more accessible.

Maybe this is because I’m getting older, but that gives me the benefit of having experienced Apple’s older interfaces, with their exceptional quality and functionality.

It’s just remarkable how much better-looking MacOS was 10 years ago, compared to MacOS 26 Tahoe at its best. And it’s equally remarkable just how bad MacOS 26 Tahoe looks in many typical, non-contrived situations, where entire menus, search fields, and window titles are rendered completely illegible.

Jim Nielsen:

It’s extra noise to me. It’s not that I think menu items should never have icons. I think they can be incredibly useful (more on that below). It’s more that I don’t like the idea of “give each menu item an icon” being the default approach.

This posture lends itself to a practice where designers have an attitude of “I need an icon to fill up this space” instead of an attitude of “Does the addition of an icon here, and the cognitive load of parsing and understanding it, help or hurt how someone would use this menu system?”

The former doesn’t require thinking. It’s just templating — they all have icons, so we need to put something there. The latter requires care and thoughtfulness for each use case and its context.

To defend my point, one of the examples I always pointed to was macOS. For the longest time, Apple’s OS-level menus seemed to avoid this default approach of sticking icons in every menu item.

That is, until macOS Tahoe shipped.

Nielsen’s post on MacOS 26 Tahoe’s tragic “icons for every menu item” design edict was published a month ago, before Nikita Prokopov’s post on the same subject yesterday. Both posts are crackerjack good, and complement each other. Nielsen makes the point that the Mac stood as a counter to platforms and systems that put icons next to every menu item. Of course Google Docs has icons next to every menu item. It sucks. Google sucks at UI design. We Mac users laugh at their crappy designs.

Well, who’s laughing now? It might sound hyperbolic but this change is the reason why I’ve decided not to upgrade to MacOS 26 Tahoe. I could put up with the rest of Liquid Glass’s half-baked who-thought-this-was-OK-to-ship? nonsense, but not the whole menu bar. I can tolerate being angry about UI changes Apple makes to the Mac. But I can’t tolerate being heartbroken.