What Happened to Apple's Legendary Attention to Detail?

There's the Hello System[0]... not sure if it counts.

[0] https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/

Not entirely, though; there is joy and playfulness at the core of Liquid Glass. But delight is not that common, and refinement and focus are definitely lacking. They could have used more nos and fewer yeses.

That's the bed they made themselves and lay in it willingly.

No one is forcing them to do huge yearly releases. No one is forcing them to do yearly releases. No one is forcing them to tie new features which are all software anyway to yearly releases (and in recent years actual features are shipping later and later after the announcement, so they are not really tied to releases either anymore).

They could easily wait longer between releasing devices. An M1 Macbook is still in 2025 a massive upgrade for anybody switching from PC - five years after release.

If Apple included fully fledged apps for photo editing and video editing, and maybe small business tools like invoicing, there would be no reason for any consumer in any segment to purchase anything other than a Mac.

I generally see complaints about advancement aimed at the hardware. Some are unreasonable standards, some are backlash to the idea of continuing to buy a new iphone every year or two as the differences shrink, but either way software feature spam is a bad response.

And then what? Mac users would buy some janky Acer with Windows 11 and bunch of preinstalled malware instead?

I was in a (tech) meetup last week. We meet regularly, we are somewhere between acquaintances and friends. One thing that came up was a very candid comment about how "we should be able to tell someone 'that is just stupid' whenever the situation warrants it".

I believe that does more good than harm, even to the person it is being directed to. It is a nice covenant to have, "we'll call you on your bs whenever you bring it in", that's what a good friend would do. Embracing high standards in a community makes everyone in it better.

The Linux kernel would be absolutely trash if Linus were not allowed to be Linus. Some contexts do and must require a high level of expertise before you can collaborate properly in them.

This is a huge misunderstanding at best and a malicious re-framing of serious issues within portions of the tech industry at worst.

If you take a hardline attitude on keeping the gates up, you're just going to end up with a monoculture that stagnates.

Another example is that a hobby I loved is now dead to me for lack of gatekeeping; Magic the Gathering. Wizards of the Coast started putting out products that were not for their core playerbase, and when players complained, were told "these products are not for you; but you should accept that because there's no harm in making products for different groups of people". That seems fair enough on its face. Fast forward a couple of years, and Magic's core playerbase has been completely discarded. Now Magic simply whores itself out to third party IPs; this year we'll get or have gotten Final Fantasy, Spiderman, Spongebob Squarepants, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles card sets. They've found it more lucrative in the short-term to tap into the millions of fans of other media franchises while ditching the fanbase that had played Magic for 30 years. "This product is not for you" very rapidly became "this game is not for you", which is pretty unpleasant for people who've been playing it for most or all of their lives.

My take away is that diversity at a global level, and in some specific contexts, is a great thing. But diversity in some other specific contexts is entirely destructive and analogous to rot or decomposition.

When we rely on a core societal function (firefighting, accounting, waterworks maintenance, property rights, etc.) the people responsible for maintaining these functions need to maintain in themselves a set of core characteristics (values as patterns of action), and there is room to play outside of those cores, but those cores shouldn't be jeopardized as a tradeoff for diversity and inclusion.

For example, if constructive core values of a railroad system is consistency and reliability, then these shouldnt be diminished in the name of diversity and inclusion, but if diversity and inclusion can be achieved secondarily without a tradeoff (or even to somehow further amplify the core values) then it is constructive. One has to thoughtfully weigh the tradeoffs in each context, and ensure that the most important values in that context to maintain the relevant function are treated as most important. The universe seems to favor pragmatism over ideology, at least in the long run.

So in a company if the core values that make it successful are diluted in exchange for diversity, it's no longer what it was, and it might not be able to do keep doing what it did. That said, it also might have gained something else. One thing diversity tends to offer huge complex systems is stability, especially when its incorporated into other values and not held up singularily.

In other words, my take on diversity (and by extension, inclusion) is that we need a diversity of diversity. Sometimes a lot of diversity is best, and sometimes very little diversity is best.

It's good to not exclude people for arbitrary reasons (though even this requires the caveat that one man's "arbitrary" is another man's "important part of our identity"). But we also need to recognize that it's ok for something to not be everyone's cup of tea. There isn't some kind of moral mandate that everything must be maximally welcoming to all. Unfortunately, we don't recognize that in our current culture, and in fact we stigmatize it as "gatekeeping" which is deemed to be toxic. But the culture is wrong about this.

Im sceptical. I've never seen what you describe outside of toxic "culture war clickbait videos", what i have seen is nepotism, class privileges and sprint culture pushed by investors - you know the exact opposite of what you describe.

I do not for the life of me understand your point. Gatekeeping, as its most commonly used, means controlling access to something (be it a resource, information etc) to deliberately and negatively affect others that are not part of a "blessed" group. Its not objective, and certainly is not a practice reliant on merit. Its an artificial constraint applied selectively at the whim of the gatekeeper(s).

>There's been a shift where everyone wants to welcome everyone, but the problem is it erodes your company culture and lowers the average quality.

The first assertion and the second one are not related. Being welcoming to everyone is not the same thing as holding people to different standards. Company culture sets company inertia and how employees are incentivized to behave and what they care about. You can have the most brilliant engineers in the world, like Google most certainly does have its fair share, and as we have seen, with the wrong incentives it doesn't matter. Look at Google's chat offerings, the Google Graveyard, many of their policies becoming hostile to users as time goes on etc.

Yet you can have a company with what you may deem "average quality" but exceeds in its business goals because its oriented its culture to do so. I don't think Mailchimp was ever lauded for its engineering talent like Google has been, for example, but they dominated their marketplace and built a really successful company culture, at least before the Intuit acquisition.

I'm pretty sure this would also render the dot-com bubble the nerds fault?

Let's not go back to how nerd culture used to be regarding diversity... or lack thereof.

I remember when Bill Gates was on magazine covers, viewed as a genius, a wonderful philanthropist, even spoofed in Animaniacs as "Bill Greats."

I guess my point is, "It used to be hard and a liability to be a nerd" was never true, and is nothing but industry cope. The good old days were just smaller, more homogenous, had more mutually-shared good old toxicity and misogyny (to levels that would probably get permabans here within minutes; there's been a lot of collective memory-holing on that), combined with greater idolization of tech billionaires.

I’ve been hearing this substituting in YYYY+1 every YYYY for the last quarter century.

The year of Linux desktop will never come. Why?

- Money. Hardware manufacturers make more money selling computers that are optimized for Windows and there is nothing on the horizon that will change that meaning that the Linux desktop experience is always the worst of the three main options for hardware compatibility.

- Microsoft. Call me when Office runs natively in Linux. You might be happy with LibreOffice or Google Docs, but MS Office still dominates the space (and as someone who does a lot of writing and has a number of options, I find Word to be better than any of the alternatives, something that 30 years ago I would have scoffed at).

- Fidgetiness. All the tweaking and customizing that Linux fans like is an annoyance for most people. Every customization I have on my computer is one more thing I need to keep track of if I get a new computer and frankly it’s more than a little bit of a pain.

DHH was someone I kinda read him online, but he's been going full-in on these racist talking points, e.g., https://paulbjensen.co.uk/2025/09/17/on-dhhs-as-i-remember-l... :(