Marco Arment

You know, they were building Apple Park at the time.

That was that was a massive undertaking for for everybody.

But also, you know, in particular for Johnny Ive, he involved himself in lots of the design of that.

They were doing you know, he was he was designing everything at Apple and even some things outside of Apple.

Yeah, but it was very clear that Johnny Ive was spread very thin at that time.

So while Johnny Ive was the one in charge of all design at Apple, I don't think there's that much of a distinction between the Alan Dye era and the Johnny Ive era in terms of software design because I think –

Alan Dye was kind of always that person.

There are obviously some questions about how many filters these people have to go through on the way up the chain to get things approved and get things out the door, how much power they have, how many checks and balances different needs and departments have.

That all changes over time, and we don't have a great insight into that except for occasional random things we hear.

But

I don't think we can really draw a distinction between these two because I think the Alan Dye era that we call it today is just an extension of the Johnny Ive era, which both of which were extensions of Tim Cook putting all design on Johnny because Tim Cook doesn't understand design or computers or humanity.

Yeah, I think if we're comparing... If we take the people's names off of it, and if we compare the big iOS 7 redesign to the big iOS 26 redesign, I agree.

iOS 7 did have a lot of problems.

But I think where iOS 7 was better is that...

it left a lot more room to tweak it into something that ended up being pretty good.

Whereas the 26 OSs, I mean, maybe because they're just brand new and it's hard for us to see right now, but like a lot of the changes that 26 made, it's hard to look at them and find a good path out that isn't just like going back to a different style entirely.

Yeah.

Yeah, but ultimately, neither one of them really showed that much of a respect for UI design.

Right, like that's the whole, you know, original sin here.

What set Apple off in a bad direction with software design was basically a disregard or an ignorance of UI design as a separate discipline from visual design, like graphic design,