This is about Liquid Glass and Apple's design team. Wasn't clear from the title, but it's an interesting read.
PaulHoule•6mo ago
It's already making life worse on the Meta Quest 3.
I think a lot of what Big Tech does these days is about kneecapping their competitors. Meta is selling much weaker hardware than Apple, so if Apple manages to trick Meta into making a fancier-but-more-expensive interface for their XR headsets, Meta headsets get laggier, less reliable, maybe they screw up and you go VR-to-ER.
To little fanfare in the wider world [1], Meta rolled out an update for the MQ3 that adds more transparency. It isn't really bad, it isn't really that fancy, it probably doesn't lag the headset much. But I see it as a regression. It used to be if I wanted to follow somebody I was playing with in Beat Saber I could hit the Meta button and the screen was right there. Now I have to hit the Meta button, and I have to click on the Meta icon, then I have to pick "People" (I think) from the app library, and then it is open to the wrong tab so I have to pick a certain tab and finally I have a choice to follow somebody I'm playing with.
Being a leader in social software is not about being good at social software at all, it's just about your customers being locked into a two-sided market. It's about being careless, even about the bottom line -- it's not like they "enshittified" the UI to make money, they just made it worse carelessly and I think they did it to ape Apple.
[1] what a luxury it is to be able to live your life unexamined by the breathless -- Thomas Frank pointed out how frickin' lame it was that youth culture was worked over in the media which leaves me feeling today that being a Generation Xer meant I could have my youth (and middle age) without being a bug on a slide.
brandonb•6mo ago
PaulHoule•6mo ago
I think a lot of what Big Tech does these days is about kneecapping their competitors. Meta is selling much weaker hardware than Apple, so if Apple manages to trick Meta into making a fancier-but-more-expensive interface for their XR headsets, Meta headsets get laggier, less reliable, maybe they screw up and you go VR-to-ER.
To little fanfare in the wider world [1], Meta rolled out an update for the MQ3 that adds more transparency. It isn't really bad, it isn't really that fancy, it probably doesn't lag the headset much. But I see it as a regression. It used to be if I wanted to follow somebody I was playing with in Beat Saber I could hit the Meta button and the screen was right there. Now I have to hit the Meta button, and I have to click on the Meta icon, then I have to pick "People" (I think) from the app library, and then it is open to the wrong tab so I have to pick a certain tab and finally I have a choice to follow somebody I'm playing with.
Being a leader in social software is not about being good at social software at all, it's just about your customers being locked into a two-sided market. It's about being careless, even about the bottom line -- it's not like they "enshittified" the UI to make money, they just made it worse carelessly and I think they did it to ape Apple.
[1] what a luxury it is to be able to live your life unexamined by the breathless -- Thomas Frank pointed out how frickin' lame it was that youth culture was worked over in the media which leaves me feeling today that being a Generation Xer meant I could have my youth (and middle age) without being a bug on a slide.