/ Blog / / Blog /Alan Dye may have left for a more lucrative offer from Meta, but this is absolutely a good thing for Apple, which also benefitted from “losing” Jony Ive.
There’s no doubt Jony has good taste, by the way. He and his team designed great products during the first half of his tenure at Apple. But as he became wealthier, he started to conflate good taste with luxury. Jony often described Apple products with words about craft, material, and precision, all things that appeal to a luxury market. Apple shifted away from making products “for the rest of us” and started making products that appealed specifically to rich people.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but they started making products that appealed to themselves. Because since Steve Jobs died, Apple, its executives, and its corporate employees got significantly wealthier. It wasn’t just Jony who took an interest in luxury. The whole company did. Anyone with even a little bit of power in the company started to dress more expensively. They all look like they could walk right out of a fashion advertisement.
This is all to say Apple’s restyling was not just with iOS 7 or even Liquid Glass. It was in how Apple presented themselves as people who had good taste, because that’s their way of communicating authority on the subject of design.
It’s like the trope of overlaying the golden ratio on a logo, or drawing excessive guidelines to “prove” it was thought through. To me, if you have to explain it for people to get it, then it’s not that good, actually. And that’s how all those video presentations from Jony or Alan sound to me. It’s just marketing with a veneer of design. I think we all know that.
Speaking of those video presentations, I recall Jony’s use of the word “familiar” during the introduction of Apple Watch. He used it as a way to bridge the gap between iPhone and Apple Watch. If I remember correctly, Alan Dye also used this word when introducing Liquid Glass. Despite using this word, modern UI design has drifted away from what’s familiar, both in real world analogs—that we called skeuomorphism—and from traditional UI elements and arrangements that many of us have used for many years.
Familiarity is a great tool designers can use to get people quickly to an understanding about what they’re using. Not just in software, but in real life, you can utilize certain forms and materials to encourage people to use something in a way they already know how. It’s only when something feels unfamiliar that we become puzzled and ask for help.
And hasn’t this been happening—ironically—more since they started using this word? How many of us have searched the Internet for ways to “turn off” a new thing or “revert” to a previous arrangement of UI to feel more familiar? How many times has Apple specifically introduced a new setting just so we can do that? I use the “Tinted” setting for Liquid Glass, the “Bottom” tab style in iOS Safari, the “Classic” view for Phone, and “List View” rather than “Categories” in Mail.
Neither Jony nor Alan should ever have been in charge of UI design or product design. Elevating Jony was a bad decision on Tim Cook’s part. And it’s unfortunate that resulted in Jony putting Alan into this position to begin with, because it only lengthened this period of time where bad taste and poor sensibility in software prevailed. There was no reason to believe Jony would be good at this, and there was never any evidence Alan would be good at this either. I’ve never found any examples of Alan’s professional work prior to having this job. In any case, I hope neither of them step foot inside Apple ever again.
I don’t have much to say about Steve Lemay. He was the hiring manager for my first interview at Apple fifteen years ago. It didn’t work out, and I went to work on iTunes and iLife instead. But he had already been at Apple for a long time, and I have lots of respect for him for his platform knowledge and expertise. I don’t expect any big changes because I don’t think he or Apple are looking at this as an opportunity to undo Jony and Alan’s influence on the company, but I do sincerely think this will all feel better with Lemay’s leadership. I wish him the best.