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.”