Summary

Gruber offers an extensive critique of Apple's new Creator Studio bundle, using its app icons as a springboard to indict Apple's broader software design decline under Liquid Glass. He argues that Apple's hardware remains confidently excellent while its software UI has regressed dramatically over the past decade, with MacOS 10.11 El Capitan from 2015 looking better in every way than MacOS 26 Tahoe. He examines the Liquid Glass 'content-first' philosophy and finds it disastrous for complex desktop productivity apps. On the business side, he questions gating useful iWork AI features behind the Creator Studio subscription while praising the overall pricing, and speculates that Photomator's conspicuous absence signals a future ambitious update rather than abandonment.

Key Insight

Apple's software design has been in dramatic decline for a decade, with Liquid Glass representing the latest step backward, even as the company's hardware design remains at a historic peak of excellence.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 8

  If you put the Apple icons in reverse it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really really good at icon design.

• 9

  That's like saying one group of kids has pretty good haircuts, relatively speaking, at a summer camp where the rule is that the kids all cut each others' hair using only fingernail clippers.

• 7

  You need confidence to ship something new that looks like the old version, because you know it's still the best design.

• 7

  All of them agree that MacOS's UI has gotten drastically worse over the last 10 years, in ways that seem so obviously worse that it boggles the mind how it happened.

• 8

  We would rejoice if MacOS 27 simply reverted to the UI of MacOS 10.11 from a decade ago.

• 5

  It would be disastrous to eliminate the instrument panel and project every control status indicator as HUD elements on the windshield.

• 7

  In the entire 50-year history of the company, Apple has never been on a longer sustained streak of excellent hardware than they are today. No one feels the same way about Apple's software, services, or marketing.

• 7

  Apple One is no longer one bundle that includes all of Apple's subscription offerings. It's more like Apple Most now.

Tone

critical, opinionated, detailed