Apple Executive Departures Could Signal Welcome Changes

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Originally published at: Apple Executive Departures Could Signal Welcome Changes - TidBITS

I rarely write about Apple’s infrequent executive shuffles. People come and go, but most of the time, it doesn’t significantly affect everyday Apple users. However, this week’s changes could have a greater impact. First, Apple announced the retirement of John Giannandrea, the company’s senior vice president for Machine Learning and AI Strategy. Later, Alan Dye, the head of Apple’s user interface design team, left Apple to join Meta. To cap it off, Apple said that Lisa Jackson, vice president for Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, will retire in January 2026, and Kate Adams, Apple’s general counsel, will retire late next year.

Others have done a good job with the inside-baseball coverage of the first two of these moves—see Dan Moren’s thoughts on Giannandrea’s retirement and John Gruber’s excellent analysis of Dye’s departure, respectively. I’m less interested in the specifics and more excited about the potential for change in their respective areas. Giannandrea’s group failed to deliver the so-called “more personalized Siri” that Apple promised as part of Apple Intelligence, while Dye’s group was responsible for the much-maligned Liquid Glass. (Dan Moren also covered the Jackson/Adams retirements; neither is likely to have much impact on users.)

On the AI front, Apple continues to fall further behind as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic race to release increasingly advanced models and systems. Apple needs to launch a significantly enhanced version of Siri just to qualify for being mentioned in the same breath as the others. After its most recent update, Google’s Gemini now has 650 million monthly active users, but even that pales in comparison to ChatGPT’s 800 million weekly active users. Both of those numbers have doubled since early 2025. People are becoming accustomed to what’s possible with the latest AI systems, and if Apple can’t deliver comparable features, its products risk being relegated to merely providing the infrastructure through which users access other companies’ AI services.

With Liquid Glass, while I recognize the value of a consistent design language across all of Apple’s platforms, I can’t help but think of Eudora’s “Waste cycles drawing trendy 3D junk” setting. Liquid Glass can look elegant, particularly on the iPhone, but iOS wasn’t unattractive before. More importantly, I haven’t yet felt that Liquid Glass’s vaunted transparency does anything to make me more productive. Despite Dye’s departure (which appears to have been a surprise to upper management), Apple is unlikely to reverse course on Liquid Glass. We can hope that Dye’s successor focuses more on enhancing functionality to better align with the Steve Jobs quote that Apple badly misused when introducing Liquid Glass: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

With luck, we’ll start to see movement in the right direction for both Siri and Liquid Glass refinements early next year, and perhaps more substantive improvements in the OS 27 cycle.

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My views on AI are very different: the “I” is misplaced and I think Apple was smart (whether it was by accident or misreading what is currently “cool”) to not invest enormous sums in LLM chatbots. (Has anyone noticed that chatbots are taking huge resources - high speed ram prices are surging due to the needs of data centers. Electricity prices will also likely go up.) Further, the rest of the industry doesn’t seem to be doing “personal assistants” (except in artificial demos) very well.

The departure of the design chief was very welcome and his replacement by someone with a great deal of experience in UI design is very good news. I find liquid glass moderately pleasant in iOS 26 (compared to the unattractive flat look in iOS 18) but very poorly implemented in macOS. Hopefully the latter will get the improvements it deserves.

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I’ll gladly take skeumorphism over both.

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I agree 100%.

I don’t understand why skeuomorphism got a bad rap - the key to the Mac’s success is that it had features that resembled real-life objects: buttons, windows, switches, etc. I feel very nostalgic when I watch Jobs introducing the original iPhone, which was a thing of beauty and had a very natural UI. The flat look in iOS 7 was one of the biggest cases of UI malpractice I have ever seen. The Mac was headed in the same direction - hopefully it will be saved by the new guy.

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It was the features that were silly. The green felt background in Game Center. The calendar pages that would tear off when you went from one month to another (not sure why that animation was better than transparency as far as wasted cpu cycles are concerned), plus the appearance of stitched leather at the top of the calendar. The reel-to-reel tapes that spun when you listened to a podcast. I don’t think depth of field for buttons and controls, shadow backgrounds, etc., were hated - but, again, many of those things also didn’t exactly add to productivity, either, and cost space on the screen and consumed CPU cycles, too. But some people obviously liked the whimsy, which is why some people like the whimsy of the 26 OS’s Liquid Glass. (That capitalization was a text replacement, as was Game Center :roll_eyes:).

Of all the things that Alan Dye was responsible for, I think the worst things were things like the loss of controls unless you hovered over a particular spot with the mouse pointer, or the non-obvious controls that you simply needed to know and memorize (long-press or right-click on a particular spot to get to another screen or control.) Well, I guess all the hardware that I won’t buy from Meta will have software that works that way now.

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That old Eudora setting reminded me of something. I still have a 2010 13” MacBook Air, and these days it runs Linux Mint. It runs it just as fast and responsively as my M2 MBA runs Tahoe. Makes you think that today’s Macs could really scream if they didn’t ‘waste cycles’ on Liquid Glass and the like.

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Which highlights that this has been an issue with Apple since well before Cook replaced Jobs.

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The kind of skeuomorphism used by Susan Kare’s designs in the original Mac served the important purpose of making on-screen artifacts recognizable to a world that had never seen such things. So the Trash looked like a Behrens fluted-steel garbage can, and sliders looked like a light dimmer. But Kare was limited by the (comparatively) low-resolution, black-and-white screen, so she was forced to be abstract and minimalist in her designs, as well.

Those technical limitations disappeared over the years, which meant designers could, well, waste cycles drawing trendy junk. And that meant that the designs became not only richer, but busier and less clear about what was functional and what was ornamental.

I agree; my biggest problem with the Apple’s UI design over the past 12 or so years seems to be the keynote-driven-design. That hasn’t changed, even as the dominant theme has gone from richly skeuomorphic to flat to “Liquid Glass.” The goal always seems to be something that looks flashy in a scripted demo, rather than something that supports the user through a complex task. The demos tend to highlight a carefully curated screen with…one Apple app running on it, the better to show off whatever the executive wants to show off. (Maybe three or four carefully-staged windows if they’re demoing their latest app-switcher feature.) Apple’s demos don’t look at all like the way I use my Mac.

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I STILL miss Eurora. It was a great example of “do the important things well, and don’t add gratuitous user interface junk”. Apple should learn from how easy it was to add rules in Eudora, and NOT with some AI-enabled “let me organize your mailbox for you” crapware.

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The thing that has always bugged me is the obsession with transparency. Over the years Apple has tried to introduce this feature in several contexts and to my memory has always been met with pushback. The transparency in Liquid Glass is just the latest incarnation. I remember years ago Apple made the menu bar in MacOS transparent, only to later add a setting to make it opaque again.

The thing that bugs me about transparency is that it make the user interface less readable. This is important for those of us with older eyes, and for those who use Apple GUIs in less than ideal lighting conditions. Apple’s current approach of blurring the background only goes so far.

Please, Apple, give up this hobby horse.

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Transparency has acquired an air of “futurism” in entertainment over the years, and I think that’s what Apple has picked up on. I still remember back in the '90s seeing Babylon 5 characters trying to read documents printed in an unreadable font on transparent sheets of “paper”, thinking that it was possibly the most impractical way to present documents. I never imagined that the reality would include not just transparency, but also motion. At least we’re not forced to use a horrible font on our screens. Yet.

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Unfortunarely, in my opinion, the executive that needs to depart that is not, is Tim Cook. Under his managment, innoviation has suffered with change only being minor updates to existing technology as most anything else was either on the drawing board when Steve Jobs was alive, or bought or stolen from other companies/developers. Under his management there have been major failures such as Apple Vision, the Apple Car and major executives are leaving. If one is looking for how to create great GUI’s they should check with Bruce Tognizini who originally wrote Apple Interface Guidlines in the 80’s and holds patents for some of the GUI tools used today. His website that has these concepts is www.asktog.com They are their for everyone to read. If only Apple still followed his design concepts, Apple’s GUI’s might be loved and embracedn by all.

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Apple surely has the talent to design great UI. But the management, baggage, and red tape are preventing it from happening.

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Luminous Landscape just did a post about surging SD card prices, especially on the higher end. I initially read it as clickbait-y, when I looked at prices I’m still seeing low prices in general but then I noted my preferred Sony Tough cards have gone up quite a bit.

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I read all of these departures as folks moving ahead of Tim Cook’s departure, getting out in front of that. The question is surely who will replace him, and if it is John Ternus as widely rumored, perhaps it also speaks to their relationship to him. They could be doing him a favor or themselves, who knows.

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I agree with the analysis: without a credible Siri, Apple risks being reduced to a hardware provider. With Gemini replacing Siri in the short term, Apple faces an uphill battle—having to build a Siri strong enough to reclaim that role while Gemini continues to advance by leaps and bounds. If they deliver an inferior Siri, they face customer backlash for going backwards. I think the next departure will be Tim.

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Apple has certainly lost its way with the interfaces between its devices and humans. These recent interface modifications are descending into giving low grade enjoyment for users. The ‘Liquid Glass’ brain fade is the latest showing of bad management and bad design within Apple. Gruber paints this clearly. Sure it is good to have some commonality of interface symbols as Apple users have multiple Apple devices, but these devices are used differently and the one-size-fits-all syndrome ignores what Apple users do.

There’s nothing special about the Liquid Glass interface - it offers no gains in productivity, enjoyment, speed of use, or adaption. I am struggling to realise what was wrong with the previous interface - no critical restraints from my perspective. Moreover, there is the newly added extra steps to work a function - if you can find them wherever they have been hidden away.

Take for example, the ‘new’ Alarms and Timers. Previously we had a button to turn off an alarm or to stop a timer. Now we have a slider. A slider is a variable control. We don’t need a range of values; we don’t want to half turn off the alarm or to half stop a timer. But now we have a ridiculous slider control when the former button was very fit for purpose.

Tim Cook has let program and programming standards decline and new initiatives become half-baked or not implemented. It is probably time for Cook to go.

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Let me make a constructive suggestion - It would help immensely if a new executive at Apple could enforce some requirement that interface designers have training in and understanding of the design concepts that Apple (and others) spearheaded with 20+ years of actual research and use before IOS was introduced. Apple GUI people, please read Don Norman. Please.

:slightly_smiling_face:

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Maybe I just missed it, but I haven’t seen anyone give a good explanation of why Apple needs to be in the race for AI supremacy in the first place.

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Why do any design elements go in and out of style? Bell bottoms, beehive hairdos, fins on cars, cars with only rounded surfaces, cars with only angular surfaces, ornate text, sans serif, avocado green in kitchens?

Designers got to design or they don’t have a job. Flat design is a fad, as is liquid glass. Skeuomorphism will come back in style, you can bet your bitcoin on it.

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