![[CleanShot 2025-06-10 at 10.51.44.png]] Apple [just announced](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/apple-introduces-a-delightful-and-elegant-new-software-design/) a new look and feel for their apps and systems. The gist is: More transparency! This is underwhelming, and frankly a step backwards. Does the contrast of text on a background mean nothing now? Can you read the artists name in the screenshot above (taken from their website)? What is going on here? At the very least I'd hope that designers within Apple could agree with the statement "Text should be legible". Beyond mere aesthetics, this creates genuine accessibility barriers. Apple has historically claimed to champion accessibility, but this new direction seems to abandon those principles in favor of visual spectacle, effectively telling users with accessibility needs that Apple's aesthetic preferences matter more than their ability to use the device. Now I will speculate on why Apple has gone down this path. # Assume they know what they're doing You'd be hard pressed to make a case that the decision-makers at apple are dumb, or unaware, or incompetent. My base assumption is that they are highly intelligent and competent, which makes the speculation much more interesting. Here are the reasons I think Apple may be going down this route. - Apple must _feel like_ Apple in a way that's hard to mimic with web tech - If there's one thing Apple does not want it's a challenge to their tax collection on iOS distribution. The web is a natural alternative to shipping an "app" in the app store, so they've made it difficult (if not impossible) to achieve native-feeling UX with a web app. - Case in point, moving text boxes around in response to showing and hiding the keyboard. - The more graphical flourishes iOS adds to standard UI components the more tedious, or even impossible, it will be to copy in a website. - So, perhaps they're adding more graphical flourishes simply because it's more distinctive than circles and rectangles with opaque backgrounds. - Keynote-driven development - Another possibility is that it looks nifty in slides, videos and images. All that transparency _looks cool_, and seeing its faults requires looking forward to the possibility of actually using it day to day. - Keeping app developers updating - Apple wants to keep app developers beholden. One way to do this is to (indirectly) require them to continuously submit updates to Apple's review process. - If developers don't have to update their apps regularly they can go through the bureaucratic schlep of shipping their app once and then forget about it. This would not please Apple. In this example the relationship is one-sided, but not ongoing. - Apple wants an _ongoing_, one-sided relationship where they can dictate terms to developers. If the relationship is not ongoing then developers can ignore Apple's shifting whims. Once approved i suspect Apple is relatively loath to reach into user's devices and remove an app. This would make it harder to blame the developer than if they can claim "the dev didn't update their app as they should" - Degraded performance (as a feature!) - Yet another possibility is that Apple's devices are too fast for Apple's liking. User's need a reason to upgrade to a new device every year and a camera that goes from spectacular to slightly more spectacular is not going to move the needle. - If Apple can convince you to install an update that requires much more from your device than before, they can effectively slow down your device. A slow device is a very compelling reason to upgrade, especially if the user doesn't blame the manufacturer for intentionally slowing it down. - Looks cool in Apple Vision - Transparent interfaces look even cooler in augmented reality. - This doesn't make them any more useful—The lack of contrast on text is still horrible. However, it makes for very compelling demos. - So perhaps apple is just trying to unify iOS macOS and visionOS into a low-contrast, battery-draining orgasm of translucency. # Battery Life This last point is a bit harder to understand in my opinion. All those transparency effects require computation, which will drain the battery. Lower battery life is an unqualified anti-feature. Users hate when their phones run out of battery. Apple undoubtedly know this, so perhaps their hardware really can support this without significant battery drain. The press release linked above noted: > The new design takes advantage of Apple’s powerful advances in hardware. Indeed? Well we must do _something_ with that increased capacity for computation! # A horrible update Yes, I think this is a terrible update to Apple's UI. In addition to the reasons listed above (decreased performance, low legibility, decreased battery life, etc...) this update implicitly says "we don't need that performance anywhere else". If you've ever used an iphone you know apps _do NOT launch instantly_. For all our vaunted computation we still have to wait for many apps to launch. "Perhaps this is the devs fault" i hear you thinking. Certainly possible, but even Apple's built-in animations drop frames _all the time_. As of this writing I have the latest device[^1] and the OS still drops frames. Let that sink in. On their latest hardware, running the latest OS[^2] that was developed specifically with this device in mind, the operating system drops frames. In an ideal world i'd like to disable animations entirely. They take time, my time. However, if you "disable" animations in iOS you simply get fading animations rather than motion animations. Everything takes just as long. So, my greatest source of disappointment here is that they are not utilizing their vaunted hardware to make device interactions more snappy. Rather, they're going to make them _less snappy_ and increase the graphical burden on the system. I'm quite disappointed in this update, but since it is not yet released only time will tell if it's as bad as I suspect it will be. [^1]: If you're wondering why, that's a reasonable question! The reason is that I wanted to use the camera for Youtube videos. I bought the phone for its camera, that's all. Certainly not for the OS. [^2]: NOTE: the latest OS is _not_ the future update I'm lamenting in this post. Hopefully that's not overly confusing.