Take

It feels dark and mean-spirited to talk about wanting someone gone from a job. But considering the track record of Mr. Dye, considering the increasing number of OS releases, design language shifts and swerving over the years, considering the sense of impending doom that has begun to haunt the annual OS upgrades, if Mr. Dye is responsible for the general direction, it is a rational feeling to have.

Apple is a company with a culture and a set of values that have informed traditions throughout the decades. It touches many industries and many efforts, but in developer relations and human interface, the culture, the values and the traditions are all in the process of slowly decomposing – or of being set alight on the Apple Park lawn. The profound is reduced to platitude, by people who do not grasp what it means. The interaction design is haunted by the spirit of gimmicky movie effect bullshit trying to liven up what would better fly as desktop layout PDFs.

Pixar's Ed Catmull famously asked: What's more important: ideas or people? and came to the conclusion that some people will be unable to deliver on good ideas, but that good people will fix bad ideas. And in the abstract, "what if an OS, throughout, used cinematic level material effects" is a thought-provoking tentpole for a UI shift to last the next decade. Liquid Glass is one of the worst imaginable implementations of this idea.

What ended up summed up as skeumorphism eventually wore thin and looked dated (to some) because of the feeling that it was an unimpressive veneer that lacked dynamism and that forced designers to care too much about vain visuals. Reimagining the general thrust of the pre-iOS 7 world and, just to poke Google in the eye, delivering an actual "material"-focused design could have been a great innovation. Make different things look and feel different; have different textures and atmospheres. Provide the things that the typical iOS 6 app wished to deliver but with less effort and more sophistication; make every app feel easy to read visually (in both senses of the phrase) and assent to the fundamental idea that what helped people move through applications twenty and ten years ago still help them today.

Instead, the road towards blurry transparency-ism on top of denatured, austere UIs was taken. As a follow-up for the goofy reduction of title bars and streamlining of all conceivable apps to one general, see-through-sidebar-heavy layout, dipped in bleached white, it bled the platforms equally of usability and personality.

I don't believe that Mr. Dye lacks talent; I just would be hard pressed to point to good examples of it in his position at Apple. (Assuming that he has stayed well clear of hardware design and mostly influenced software design, the Dynamic Island of newer iPhones is the only successful thing that I think sort of bears his fingerprints.) I struggle to find anyone, even the few fans of Liquid Glass, who would point to Mr. Dye's decade as design chief as the zenith of what Apple can do. Apparently, people inside Apple agree with this take.

There are plenty of things to be worried about in the world today, but personally, I have definitely felt straight-out depressed by the direction set by Liquid Glass for the future. Apple is known as little for making apologetic, self-critical u-turns as they are for changing their direction on a dime these days. I'm holding out for Stephen Lemay's tenure to at least bring the creativity, innate understanding and discipline that still lives within Apple to bear on their future. Mr. Dye is right about one thing – Apple doesn't need to dwell on what has been, just to find where they should have been going and start heading there.