Let’s talk about software lag.

By “lag” I don’t mean things that take time in general. I mean delays that interrupt the flow of interaction, causing frustration. If your computer is downloading five gigabytes of data, compiling a large project, or rendering a video, those tasks may take a while — but that’s not lag. You asked the computer to do work, and it’s working. Now imagine the render finishes after an hour. The status changes to “Completed”, and the finished file appears on the desktop a second later. The first hour wasn’t lag, that last second was.

Theorem: every instance of lag is a bug, and can be fixed.

Technically, even displaying a status update or reacting to user input is work, just like rendering a video. However, this work must be completed in less time than a human can perceive. We’ll call that “instantly”.

Examples of lag in modern software:

• you open an app and you have to wait before you can actually use it;
• parts of the interface appear on the screen one by one;
• clicking a button doesn’t produce an instant response;
• characters don’t appear instantly as you type;
• scrolling isn’t smooth or lags behind the user’s input;
• while scrolling, content appears in front of the user instead of already being there as it enters the view;
• when resizing a window, different parts of the interface redraw at different speeds or in several visible “jumps”;
• when dragging an object, an app doesn’t instantly recognize that it can accept the drop;
• after a menu opens, items are added or reordered in front of the user;
• different parts of the interface respond to the user’s actions with different delays.

In the early days of computing, lag was unavoidable. Hardware simply wasn’t fast enough to make everything feel instant. That hasn’t been true for at least the last twenty years. The computers have long been orders of magnitude faster than what is required to achieve instantness and therefore eliminate all lag entirely.

If an application lags, it simply means that, at the moment it should have displayed something or responded to the user’s action instantly, it was busy doing something else. That “something else” is unnecessary work at that particular moment. That’s a bug, and it should be fixed. The unnecessary work should stop getting in the way of the user.

So lag cannot be blamed on weak hardware; it is solely the weakness of its author.

I came away from this year’s WWDC keynote surprisingly optimistic.

For the past decade, I’ve been waiting for Apple’s marketing department to stop chasing spectacle and let the designers and engineers get back to doing their jobs. Every year the company tried harder to impress us with the scale of its announcements, while the substance kept shrinking and the quality of execution kept deteriorating. Great features from the past were left to rot. The system became less reliable year after year. Time Machine got flaky. Spotlight got worse. Even something as basic as drag and drop became less dependable. And on top of all that, they created Liquid Glass, making everything not only work poorly, but look bad too.

When Alan Dye left, I started hoping that Apple’s design culture might finally begin to change. The company was never going to come out and say, “We are reverting the changes”. But I kept telling friends that we’d be able to tell from the small details whether there was any reason for optimism. You don’t have to say “Liquid Glass was a mistake” (even though it clearly was) — you can make a handful of changes, call them an “evolution” of Liquid Glass, and anyone paying attention will understand that a different era has begun.

That’s pretty much what happened.

First, the interface changes were presented by an actual interface designer. He opened by saying something along the lines of: “It’s okay not to get everything right on the first try. We listen to feedback and improve based on what we hear.” On the one hand, that’s a terrible message: it’s not okay, that’s how design works in corporations that don’t really know how to design. Apple has the expertise to get things right from the start. But on the other hand, it’s a very encouraging message. It’s about as close as Apple can get to publicly admitting that last year’s design direction was wrong. More importantly, it shows self-awareness: “We know we shipped shit, and we know you think so too”. That’s the foundation of meaningful improvement.

Second, they fixed some of the most baffling design decisions. Toolbars are back. The awkward floating sidebar is gone. Window corners finally make sense again. Menu icons have been removed. Safari still looks crappy, but maybe there’s a setting for that somewhere, or maybe they’ll keep refining it over the summer. These are small changes. But if Apple keeps moving in this direction for a few years, the Mac might eventually become nice again. They also added an interface for accessing menu bar items that don’t fit on screen. It’s not particularly elegant, but at least it exists.

The design problems weren’t the only issues that had been piling up over the years, the implementation was also bad. The announced transition from Tim Cook to John Ternus gave me some hope. Cook is fundamentally a manager; Ternus is fundamentally an engineer. Still, I wasn’t expecting much.

Yet the keynote delivered several encouraging signals on the engineering side as well.

For one thing, Apple effectively admitted that Spotlight search — once one of the company’s proudest achievements — had degraded to the point of being genuinely unreliable. They announced significant improvements, and I hope they’re real. That said, I’ve learned not to get too excited. Apple has been promising keyboard autocorrect improvements every year for as long as I can remember, and it remains stubbornly bad.

More importantly, they acknowledged that many parts of their systems have become inexplicably slow, and they showed a slide listing dozens of performance improvements across the platform. Again, I’m trying not to get ahead of myself. But recognizing the problem is an essential step toward fixing it. One moment was hilarious: Apple said that the Files app on iOS would become five times faster, bringing it up to the speed of Finder on the Mac. I hadn’t used the Files app, but does this mean they were even slower than Finder?.. At that point you could argue it barely worked at all.

I noticed several popular tech commentators complaining that this WWDC wasn’t particularly exciting. That reaction makes me sad. The obsession with putting on an impressive show instead of building better products is exactly what got Apple into this mess in the first place. It reminds me of voters who reward the loudest populists, reject sensible alternatives, and then act surprised by the outcome. If anything, we should be encouraging Apple in this direction. Stop spending so much energy trying to impress us. Spend that energy making the products better, and we’ll be impressed.

I’d love every WWDC to look like this. Not “Here are ten revolutionary new things.” Instead: “Here are two hundred small things you use every day. We made all of them a little better.”

Dear Steve Lemay,

Please consider paying some attention to fixing the user interface problems Jony Ive and Alan Dye have made during their years.

This list is a mix of general interaction problems, performance issues, inconsistencies, missing feedback, data-loss bugs, and seemingly minor annoyances. These are the things I happen to encounter in my own workflows every day. Another user would produce another list, and that’s what worries me. No single person can even keep track of all the problems anymore. User interface quality has decayed at every level, from fundamental interaction design to tiny details that used to be polished.

A matter of honour:

• Fix scrolling and interaction during drag and drop. Mac has been famous for its great drag and drop support: everything stayed interactive during drag and drop. Now it works only sometimes. In Music, if I drag a new song and try to scroll the list to put the song in a particular place, it would not scroll. In Finder, if I drag a file, it usually lets me scroll, but no longer lets me press Space to open folders.
• Fix drag and drop to the Dock according to Fitts’s Law. After the Dock has been detached from the screen edge, clicking the Dock icons at the very edge still works, but drag and drop to the Dock icons now requires precise aiming. The very fact that clicking still works means that somebody hard-coded this sloppily instead of actually architecting the hit area to extend to the screen edge.
• In Liquid Glass, stop providing feedback on touch when the touch is not actually doing anything.

Text input on Mac:

• When a typing suggestion appears, and I continue typing the very suggested text, the suggestion should not disappear. Let’s say I mean to enter the word “something”. I type “som”, the system suggests “ething”. If I miss the suggestion and continue typing “e”, the suggestion disappears. This happens all over the system including email and Safari address bar.
• Fix text selection, where pressing ↑, ↓, Shift ↑, or Shift ↓ would sometimes stop extending selection for no reason.
• Keyboard layout switching should be instantaneous on Mac. It has been painfully slow forever, this one is not Ive’s fault. When you switch layouts and start typing, a few characters may get entered in the previous layout.

Text input on iPhone:

• iPhone Keyboard has been slow to open and slow to type for many years. Sometimes it gets slightly better, sometimes slightly worse, but there is no reason for it not to be absolutely instant all the time.
• When moving the text caret freely with the Space bar, it would sometimes land in a completely random place after I had positioned it exactly where I wanted. The same with adjusting selection.
• When you select a piece of text (usually in Notes app) while the keyboard is not visible, there is no way to delete or cut it. So you have to tap to reveal the keyboard, which resets the selection.
• When I tap in a text field, show the Cut / Copy / Paste controls immediately, instead of randomly between “immediately”, “in 1 second”, “never”, or “show some other set of controls”.
• When pasting with Universal Clipboard, stop showing the dialog box with fake “pasting” progress bar after the text has already been pasted anyway.
• Keyboard layout switching order should be predictable on iPhone. It makes no sense and feels even worse than random. When you have three layouts installed, layout 1 is active and you want to switch to layout 2, it somehow “guesses” to switch to 3 (why?), then back to 1 (why!?) and only afterwards, to 2.

Finder:

• Fix space bar not opening folders during drag-and-drop, as mentioned earlier.
• Fix free space not updating for hours in the Status Bar.
• Fix displaying “0 items” in the Status Bar when there are actually items.
• Fix “Loading” sometimes displaying in folders right over the items which have long loaded.
• Fix preview pane forgetting to show or update file measurements.
• Fix the Enter key not working in the “Rename files” dialog.
• Fix Search not finding files that are in iCloud, while displaying them without any problem.
• When I rename a file, don’t rename it back to its previous name for a second and then rename to what I wanted, while animating the file around the screen like crazy. Just immediately rename to what I wanted and don’t animate anything for God’s sake.
• When I drag a file from Safari or Mail onto the Desktop, show it there immediately, not after a three-second delay.

Safari:

• When I type an address, then press Enter, then change my mind and press Escape, don’t erase the whole address, just stop loading! I just want to fix a typo and press Enter again. How could any sane person come up with the idea to erase the address on Escape?
• Just always remember what I typed into the address bar. Even if the website is not responding, or I try to move the tab to another window, or whatever happens. Don’t be confused, it’s just a string, you can remember it.
• When I type an address, and Safari suggests something, and I press backspace because I don’t like the suggestion, don’t put the suggestion back because you know better; I’m the one who knows better, and I just pressed backspace, so respect it.
• When I accidentally press Sign in with Apple somewhere, Safari hangs for a couple of seconds before displaying the dialog; display the dialog immediately and let me close it with Escape immediately.
• When I change the zoom level, don’t snap back to default zoom level in one second.

Photos app:

• Fix the absent or inadequate feedback in the Sync now / Resume / Stop syncing / Settings (Not enough local storage) control (works badly on all platforms).

Preview app:

• When I open a document while there are already some other documents open, don’t first close all other documents, then reopen them in random order in random desktops; just open the one I asked for, and in the desktop I was in.

Settings app:

• Fix Settings app resetting to General after some time of inactivity. Why, why?
• Fix search never finding obvious things or remove it altogether, if school-level engineering to implement text search is no longer present at Apple.
• Fix Desktop wallpaper selection UI not providing any feedback.

Music app (this is so broken that nothing would help, but still):

• Fix search and navigation that are completely insane right now.
• Fix ⌘N/⌘P in Get Info dialog not working when “Genre” field is in focus.
• Fix the “Genre” field itself being wrong size and buggy as hell.
• Fix text fields ignoring Capitalize / Make Lower Case commands and just leaving text unchanged.

Notes app:

• Fix clipboard not working after some time. This is a data-loss bug that stays unfixed for many years already.
• Fix sloppy style copying. Sometimes if you copy and paste text (when clipboard is still working in Notes), it would sometimes copy the style of only a part of that text, but match style for one or several final lines.
• Fix caret speed degradation. The older the note, the slower the caret is moving inside it. After a couple of months of many edits a day, a note becomes so slow to work with, that you have to create a new one, copy the text to it and delete the old one. And then spend time re-linking all linked notes to the new one.
• Fix text selection forgetting its direction mid-way. Sometimes you start selecting from right to left (i.e. by holding Shift + left arrow) and while you are still trying to extend selection to the left, Notes app accidentally decides to start shrinking your selection from the right.
• When reopening the app, sometimes it decides to collapse all folders in the list of the left. Don’t do that.

All Mac apps:

• When I press ⌘P accidentally, the system hangs for several seconds before displaying the Print dialog (which I don’t need, of course, because I don’t have a printer and I have no idea why anyone would have it). Since I hadn’t intended to press ⌘P, I have no idea why the system hung, so for me the system just hangs for no reason, and after several seconds I learn: oh, it’s because I pressed the wrong button. All this is to say, there is no reason on Earth to take time to display the Print dialog, just display it immediately!

Quick Look

• Fix window resize hit area not matching with cursor reaction area (make no mistake, this has been a problem long before Tahoe).
• Fix window dragging. Quick Look used to have a nice property where you could drag its window from anywhere, but now you need to aim at the window title.

Spaces:

• Stop randomly switching spaces when I switch between apps whose windows are available in multiple spaces.
• When I switch from space to space when the active app is set to display in all spaces, don’t leave the app in the outgoing space and then suddenly bring it to front in the incoming spaces (sometimes); just leave the app stable where it was for the whole process and never change the active app.
• When I click a link and it opens in Safari, don’t switch me to another Space with another Safari window for no reason.

Wi-Fi on Mac:

• Fix Wi-Fi icon and network selection on Mac. When I disconnect from a particular network, don’t randomly decide to turn off Wi-Fi completely, just disconnect from the one network. If I change a network while trying to connect to another network, don’t then randomly connect to the first network anyway because it finally responded. If I turn off Wi-Fi while trying to connect to a network, don’t turn it back on when the network finally responded. Always respect my latest choice.
• Fix the list of Wi-Fi networks jumping down in a second after opening and having me aimed at a particular network because it finally realized it should also display Personal Hotspot before everything.
• Fix select-by-typing not working in the Wi-Fi networks list menu.

Wi-Fi on iPhone:

• Fix Wi-Fi management on iPhone. I had never understood what the third “neither off nor on” Wi-Fi state means and how exactly it works, but at least make the feedback consistent. Sometimes I tap the Wi-Fi icon in the Control Center several times, and it doesn’t change state, it just responds with something like “Disconnecting until tomorrow” on every tap, and there is no way to connect. Sometimes tapping does not turn Wi-Fi off or turns it off some time later than you tap, or turns it off, but then back on in a few seconds.
• Fix Wi-Fi status display consistency. This has been a problem forever: sometimes you would see LTE in the Status Bar, but a clearly connected Wi-Fi network in the network list; other times you would see the three perfect Wi-Fi waves in the Status Bar, but some intermediate “connecting” state in the network list. This is crazy, they should both get their information from the same source.

Screenshots and screen recording:

• Remove the delay before the screenshot tool appears after I press the shortcut.
• Fix the bug where a couple of seconds after I start screen recording are not actually recorded.
• Remove the delay before the screenshot file appears on the Desktop after I make the screenshot.

Again, this is far from being complete, of course, it’s just something that bothers me every day and comes to mind automatically. These are not just my pet bugs. Fixing every single one of them will make the platforms only marginally better. This list demonstrates how Apple platforms increasingly feel unpredictable, unresponsive, and disrespectful to the user’s intent. The decline in user interface quality, especially on the Mac, has been profound, and Apple needs years to recover. I don’t expect Mac to quickly become as good, consistent, and fast as it was twenty years ago.

But I’d like to see some evidence that Apple at least understands the problem and takes some steps towards fixing it.

Good luck!

There’s no design in digital products anymore. It’s been replaced by evolution.

When I was reading Richard Dawkins about evolution, one example stuck with me: the giraffe’s laryngeal nerve. It connects the larynx to the brain, but in a giraffe it runs all the way down the long neck, loops around the aorta, and then comes back up. Logically, it should run straight from the head to the larynx. But the giraffe evolved from a short-necked ancestor that already had this loop around the aorta. As the neck grew, the nerve simply stretched.

Here’s another example: Instagram. It used to be a timeline of photos from the creators you liked. Then direct messaging was added, and the feed got scrambled with ads and videos. Then the developers copied Stories from Snapchat. They didn’t really fit the feed, so they were stuck on top as little circles that live separately from the feed and use different gestures. Then, in various places, they shoved in live streams (not the same as videos), something called IGTV (also different), and Reels lifted from TikTok (different again). Reels got their own tab with its own set of gestures.

There was a time when products were designed with intent. Sections were organized into a hierarchy, features were given logical places. You could feel a system behind the product: what parts it consists of, how screens are organized, what kinds of data it has. Users didn’t analyze it consciously, but it helped them navigate and gave them a sense of control.

That’s not how it works now. Instead, teams make hundreds of random changes, keep the winners, roll back the losers. In the end, nobody sees any logic in the product. Users post the same photos in Stories “just in case” (because nobody finds them in the feed anymore, and users know that). Reels, in turn, somehow leak into the main feed (because lots of people never visit the Reels tab, and the developers know that).

Just as a giraffe is a messy tangle of nerves, guts, and bones, Instagram is a mess of features with no logic, order, or plan. In neither case do you feel the hand of a Creator who carefully thought through how everything should be structured.

This shift from design to evolution is happening in most digital products around us. Sometimes it’s framed as the change in the designer’s role: we’re told that a modern designer should test hypotheses and analyze metrics. But that work can’t be part of design; it’s literally the antonym of design. Nobody designs anything; instead, people take random steps and keep the ones that happen to work.

You can call this evolution operator a “designer” if you want — words can change their meanings. But you don’t actually need a human at all to generate variants and see which ones survive: nature was doing it for billions of years before humans existed. Some people find the insides of a human more beautiful than the insides of a MacBook. That’s a matter of taste. The fact remains: to create human insides, a human wasn’t needed.

The internet is celebrating the news that Alan Dye, Apple’s head of design, is leaving.

Alan has been the face of Apple’s interface decline in recent years. There was a time when the core principles of good interface design were easiest to explain using Apple as the example. Now Apple mostly serves to show how not to do it. Dye ended up with enormous power despite minimal competence: he simply doesn’t understand what makes an interface good; he lacks the education and isn’t even aware of it. Looks and surface-level effects completely defeated depth and thoughtfulness, and things still work only thanks to the extraordinary foundation laid long ago. Dye neither understood nor respected that foundation.

Steve Lemay is taking over. I hadn’t heard the name before, but he has been an interface designer at Apple since 1999, so there’s no doubt he actually understands what the job of an interface designer is. And judging by the reaction, the designers inside Apple can’t believe their luck and seem genuinely hopeful. Maybe he’s someone for whom “design is how it works” isn’t just nice-sounding words. And only a couple of weeks ago there was another rumor that this year Apple will focus on polishing and refinement rather than new features.

I very much hope Apple is headed for a revival. Maybe window sizes will once again be chosen so that elements actually fit instead of triggering a three-pixel scroll bar. Maybe we’ll get back the wonderful world where elements and their labels aren’t pushed as far apart as possible. Maybe animations will once again work to explain spatial relationships or bringing joy, instead of being accidental artifacts of implementation.

One more thing I hope for: Apple once led the world in making drag-and-drop a truly comfortable gesture. On Windows, it was basically unusable — if you dragged a file, nothing else worked until you finished. On the Mac, while “holding” a file with the mouse, you could scroll windows with the wheel to drop the file where you needed, and you could even hit space bar to activate an element under the cursor while the mouse button was already pressed. Today these things work only sometimes, in the places where Apple hasn’t yet broken them. Maybe Apple will suddenly remember the implications of Fitts’s law, and we’ll once again be able to drag files to the very edge of the screen to drop them into the Dock, instead of having to aim at the icon.

When Steve Jobs introduced Quick Look about twenty years ago, he explained that PDF parsing was built deep into the system, so even complex PDFs opened instantly, like ordinary image files. Today on the Mac, not only PDFs — even a regular JPEG takes noticeable time to appear. Just open a folder full of JPEGs and press the down arrow key to move through them. On the old Mac, the JPEGs would flicker past your eyes as they changed. Today, the Mac waits until you release the key, and only then lazily draws the JPEG you stopped on.

You simply have to not know how good things can be — how good they were — to believe that today’s Mac is good. The only reason to tolerate this misery is that everything else is even worse. If only that stopped being the only reason. Please.

How much can a design change when adapting it for mobile?

I go by this rule: the mobile and desktop versions should be mutually recognizable. If I’ve used a website on my computer and then open it on my phone, everything should be where I expect it to be — and vice versa.

If, say, there’s a row of six images on desktop and on mobile it becomes two rows of three — that’s fine. But if the images are replaced by a “View Photos” button that opens a popup — that’s not fine anymore. If there’s a large block of text on desktop and on mobile part of it becomes hidden with “Show more” — that’s fine. But if the text is edited down just for mobile — that’s not fine anymore.

I disagree with the idea of separating scenarios where people say things like: “On mobile, users are usually in a hurry, for them section X is more important than section Y, so let’s move it up”. That breaks the mutual recognizability.

You can put the mobile and desktop designs side by side and ask yourself: do they feel like two views of the same thing, just rearranged for screen size? Will someone who knows one version find their way around the other? If not — I’d ask for a redesign.