When Jobs came back to Apple in the latter 1990's "Design" slowly came to have an outsized role. I was one half of the engineering team that owned Preview (the application) when Steve Lemay became a seemingly regular presence in the hallway. As the new "Aqua" UI elements arrived in the OS like the "drawer" and toolbar, Steve and his boss (forgetting his name right now—Greg Somebody?) were often making calls about our UI implementation.

The bigger argument I remember with Steve revolved around the drawer UI element. With regard to PDF's, (the half of Preview that I worked on, another engineer handled images), the drawer was to display thumbnails for each page. If the PDF had a TOC (table of contents) the drawer is where we would display that as well.

So when you opened a PDF in Preview, the PDF content of course would appear in the large window—thumbnails, TOC (later search) would be relegated to a vertical strip of drawer real estate alongside the window—the user could open/close the drawer if they liked to focus perhaps on the content.

Steve Lemay insisted the drawer live on the right side of the window [1]. This was inexplicable to me. I saw the layout of Preview as hierarchical: the left side of the content driving the right side. You click a thumbnail on the left (in the drawer) the window content on the right changes to reflect the thumbnail clicked on.

Steve said, no, drawer on the right.

"Why? Why the hell would we do that?"

Steve was quick: "The Preview app is about the content. The content is king."

I admit that I still disagreed with him after the exchange, but I had a new respect for him as a designer because he was able to articulate a rationale for his decision. I suppose I was prejudiced to expect hand-waving from designers.

(Coda: some years later after I had left the Preview team, an engineer still on the app let me know that the thumbnails, etc, were at last moving to the left side of the app. The "drawer" as as a UI element had by this time gone away: resizable split-views were the replacement.)

(Addendum: Steve also invented the early Safari URL text field that also doubled as a progress bar. Instant hate from me when I saw it: it was as if the text of the URL you entered was being selected as the page loaded. So I'm old-school and Steve had some new ideas…)

[1] Localization was such that in countries where right-to-left was dominant, the drawer would of course follow suit.

I don't share the optimism. I mean, he was there when Liquid Glass was designed and presumably in a good position if he became an executive leader now. Sure, Alan Dye may be the face, but Liquid Glass was made by a very large department. And it is not like Apple's design rot started with liquid glass, this recent post shows that it is regression after regression after regression (which is also my impression after having used Macs since 2007):

https://pxlnv.com/blog/window-chrome-of-our-discontent/

It is sad that Apple is still extremely good at hardware (I have the iPhone 17 Pro and the design is stellar), but software has become worse and worse over the years. They can only get away with it because almost all of the rest of the industry is even worse (macOS is still a glass of ice water if you are in the hellscape that is Windows).

I've held off upgrading past Sequoia because of it, or wanting to buy M4/M5 Macs.

I've tried and absolutely love the iPhone 17 Pro hardware, but the camera app is an unusable monstrosity.

Out of curiosity, why?

I'd love to be proven wrong. But to me it feels regressive. I guess the only positive spin on it I can think of is that this is designed for kids in schools.

That Macbook Neo wallpaper [1] does not give me confidence.

[1] https://9to5mac.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2026/03/MacBo...

But the Touch Bar, butterfly keyboard and Face ID have been so laughably bad that I wonder what the hell was going on. Or was I the only one who hated them.

Face ID in particular is probably one of the most annoying things about the iPhone. Constantly misses.

My biggest complaint is actually the positioning of the USB-C ports. The USB2 port should have been the one in the corner where most people will connect a charger, and the one in front should have been USB3 where most people would be plugging anything else. For the current layout, it seems like they’re counting on the buyer to get a dock of some kind… but this is meant to be budget?

> The MacBook Neo is a new kind of product for Apple

It's just a laptop with a dumbed down CPU. It is not a NEW KIND of product. Apple already sells laptop with different CPUs..

The 599 price point is just there to justify recycling the A18 chip (8GB limit is due to the chip). It will pivot and the price will climb back up (699, 799 probably) after a cycle or two.

There is no ‘new’ Apple.

Could someone explain what the OP means here?

Federighi answers only to Cook and God (not sure about God though), and he and his minions have been happily implementing every single bullshit under the sun, and praising it on stage. They spent probably millions of man-hours on Liquid Glass. And shipped it in the state it is in.

For the new Apple to "begin to emerge" you need more than meaningless web page updates. You need a leadership that cares. When is the last time you've seen any of Apple's senior leadership care?

> But Mr. Cook is also preparing several other internal candidates to be his potential successor, two of the people said. They could include Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software; Eddy Cue, its head of services; Greg Joswiak, its head of worldwide marketing; and Deirdre O’Brien, its head of retail and human resources.

Personally I wouldn't like to see any of these. Especially services needs to calm the fuck down and stop giving into the temptation to milk their captive audience; that's absolutely not what Apple is supposed to stand for.