If there’s one thing Apple is famous for, it’s user interface design.
The company basically invented — or at least, popularized — all the major shifts in computing, from the first truly personal computer (Apple II) to the graphical user interface (Mac) and today’s multitouch (iPhone and iPad) — and let’s not forget the iPod’s brilliant scroll wheel.
Like Steve Jobs said: “Software is the user experience. As the iPod and iTunes prove, it has become the driving technology not just of computers but of consumer electronics.”
As Alan Dye, Apple’s former head of user interface design, departs for Meta, a lot of Apple fans are celebrating. Dye’s tenure as Mr. Interface at Apple is controversial. On the one hand, he oversaw misfires like Liquid Glass. But he also managed triumphs like visionOS.
The good news is that his replacement is an Apple user interface veteran, a Cupertino lifer who’s worked on just about everything the company has shipped since 1999, when he came aboard.
Meet Stephen Lemay — who Steve Jobs nicknamed “Margaret” for a pretty amusing reason.
Also in today’s newsletter:
Meta’s been making headlines for recruiting important staffers with eye-watering sums. The company is positioning itself to be Apple’s main rival in the next decade — and here's a roundup of execs that recently quit Apple for Meta.
It’s always interesting to see what Apple chooses as its top apps and games every year — there are always surprises.
Thanks to up-and-coming budget brands, there are a lot of genuinely good inexpensive earbuds on the market. Mr. Golden Ears himself, Cult of Mac writer David Snow, rounds up his favorites.
This is a really interesting bit of Apple history. A secret skunkworks project at Apple had the Mac operating system running on Intel processors a full decade before Steve Jobs announced that Apple was switching to Intel. I remember being in the audience at Macworld and being truly shocked when he announced it. It was unthinkable — but it was a long time coming.
— Leander Kahney, EIC.
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I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me.
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