Please correct me if I'm wrong - it is after all just a feeling.
There’s obviously new talent coming in to the industry but the attitudes are different, and talented people like to make new things not work on someone else’s legacy code.
So yeah I think it’ll continue to get worse until something new replaces iOS/Android/macOs/Windows hegemony.
Well Microsoft too, but their customers are long used to working/living in a dumpster fire.
The problem is that software design as a discipline has changed fundamentally in terms of core values. “Old school” designers had a bit more of a human factors training and would think about things like discoverability, information hierarchy, error recovery, etc. And the software from that era tended to be stable for many years in terms of design, in no small part because it shipped in boxes.
Current day designers work almost exclusively from a visual bling/marketing angle - what’s going to look good in a 5 second sizzle reel? And because software can be updated 5 times a day if you want, design is much more subject to the whims of a random exec/PM wanting to push their feature/whatever AB test is popular that week rather than stable, proven foundations.
The web, rather than desktop, being the primarily delivery vehicle for software also changes what kind of design gets built.
And with more and more software being AI designed in the years to come, this won’t get much better I’m afraid.
I'm not saying it's dead, not by far, but it has become stale. The biggest innovation it has made in 10+ years was using their mobile processors in laptops.
Its true of many businesses outside tech too.
Someone who deeply understands how to qualify the product.
But with enough political sway to tell entire orgs of 1000s employees to shred their timelines and planning docs and go back to the lab until it’s right.
Without those two pieces, the problem is that individual devs and leaders know that there’s a problem. But the KPIs and timelines must lurch onwards!
They should stick to Claude Code, like everyone else.
They have been last to get Widgets. They don't have apps I use (terminals, emulators, pulse wave generators). Not to mention Gemini AI is actually really nice for scanning a screen and doing actions with it.
Apple is always 2nd place or worse. Except marketing, they are #1.
And in the meantime, they did use those first two years of Skylake for the 12" MacBook; the next update to the MacBook Air was after the last update the 12" MacBook ever got. For a while, the 12" MacBook was the more premium, thinner and lighter alternative to the MacBook Air with more advanced technology (and could plausibly have been construed as the intended successor to the MacBook Air), then in 2018 they merged back together with the introduction of the first MacBook Air with a Retina Display.
On desktop? Uh... There is a reason Nvidia is #1. Wake me up when I can get Nvidia on Apple.
I had to downgrade to Mojave so the wheels likely came off internally around then.
