If you're disabled, and going to the Accessibility settings to make the experience work for you, Apple has failed.

We're all disabled now.

This was sort of the idea of some of QNX. The kernel never crashed, but display, keyboard, networking, uart, etc was all user space. So yes you had a kernel that never crashed but frequently turned into a useless brick until rebooted

Yes, actual progress in meaningful operating system changes in terms of how one might write a program, or access fundamentals like identity, have really stagnated in terms of making their way down to end users.

We have high-concept things like Urbit that wanted to remake identity and secure communication that are utterly inaccessible to most savvy folks, never mind average end users. And in the meantime we're shipping entire Unix environments around inside OCI images to make up for the lack of consistency and portability on the backend.

Regular users are left with a tragedy of the commons as paid/saas programs support integrations with other specific paid products instead of with general open standards that could foster more diversity and interoperability. Everything is tacked on at the application layer - imagine going back to the folks who designed Kerberos decades ago and telling them that bouncing the browser back and forth between websites is what we settled on!

I like the new transparent theme, but yeah, it's just a GUI theme. Bring me back a consistent GUI where I can get themes from a modding community that apply to every app on the system and give me control over my look and feel! Instead, we get Wayland and a loss of 90% of the classic Linux desktop software. Bring me an OS that I can seamlessly deploy in a near-stateless/immutable fashion everywhere without falling into the trap of Nix! Instead, we get yet another rewrite of the fuckin' Ubuntu installer that still doesn't make the resulting system any more appealing for someone who would administer a corporate fleet of Linux workstations.

You've got to be a bit more specific when comparing 'Windows' to 'Linux'! Both operating systems are used with a dozen different graphics libraries, each with multiple possible configurations, and sometimes more than one for a single application.

The culture of various Linux-related communities also varies considerably. I guarantee you that the KDE community, for instance, is not going to stand for a label getting clipped. They are absolutely meticulous, especially where accessibility is concerned.

This argument makes no sense, because if it's so obvious what the designers are up to, it should be easy for the bean counters to take that into consideration when deciding whether to fire the designers.

  If the pontiff is chief designer*, and bean counters the cardinals..

> When the company employs designers on a permanent salaried basis, those designers must make changes in order to assure their continued employment.

I don't think it's exactly this, but it's close. Every so many years you have a new crop of talent rotate in and someone wants to make their mark and shake things up in order to be promoted. Rinse and repeat.

The problem with this explanation is that it also requires multiple parties to be unaware of things which you seem to think are obvious or even self-evident:

1. The designers must be unaware that "no one wants" these new designs (or perhaps they're incapable of creating new designs that people do want).

2. The executives must be unaware that "no one wants" these new designs.

3. The executives must be unaware of the designers' plot to prevent themselves from being fired.

Another framing of the same phenomenon:

If the company makes cellphones, the cellphones need to sell. In order for people to buy the cellphone, they first have to want it, and so the cellphone needs to be universally desirable. The company hires a design team on a permanent salaried basis to do exactly this. Accounting really needs the number of phones sold to keep going up every year, so they really need the designers to think of new things that people might desire to include in the phones each year.

This was first done with cars, and that is why car companies also hire design teams on a permanent salaried basis.

You could apply precisely the same cynical calculus to engineering but I suspect a lot of the people nodding along with this could suddenly find it offensive when applied to their mission-critical DevSecOps roadmap.

The reality is there's always work to done responding to changing user needs, market forces and organisational objectives and it's not uncommon that UI design overhauls are driven by an abstract desire to make things seem 'fresh' but that doesn't come (solely) from designers, it's often a top-down strategic directive.

The feels like a cousin of “everyone protesting against my views is a paid protestor”.

My Mac screen isn't transparent. Why should its UI be?

If there is "some sort of AR glasses and something smaller form factor than the Vision Pro that will require transparency so you can see through to the real world", limit the transparent interface only to that device.

It is possible for different devices to have different interfaces optimized for those different interaction models. Apple has the money to support this.

Apple re-running the entire Windows Vista Metro arc.

... could be the point of Liquid Glass on Vision Pro is to make AR on Meta's platform look bad. I mean, the MQ3 is a medium-spec smartphone on your face, the Vision Pro is a laptop on your face. The latter can support a much fancier UI without slowing down to the point where the video lags and you start crashing into things.

AR glasses will have fixed-distance 2D overlays like your car's HUD. If they're preparing for a Vision Pro experience in spectacles form factor, they're about 10 to 20 years early with this glass UI change.

Not to mention the lack of discoverable shortcuts on desktop. On touchscreen devices you get random gestures that are hard to do half the time.

Off topic, but I wonder if the youth of today will have nostalgia for hideous flat corporate design the same way I have a certain fondness for all those high gloss buttons from 2007.

Every time I spend significant time on my Mac with the Tahoe beta and then go back to an Android phone (with near Pixel UI) I experience genuine relief. Everything is just a simple color and a label, and I love that because it's so easy to descern. Tahoe legitimately makes me tired to look at sometimes. I vastly prefer clarity and flatness over decorations.

This is what's confusing to me as well, but I'm willing to admit that growing up with a mouse and other types of input devices gives me a bit of a bias. For someone that's only every used the input devices attached to their hands would probably be biased the other way. So maybe harmony will be reached when all of the olds finally phase out?? I've seen plenty of younger people touch my laptop screen in an attempt to interact with the laptop as if it were a touch screen. I've also seen the iPad keyboard/trackpad devices that just look weird with the cursor.

People who used to be able to get by with default settings are now going to Accessibility -> Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast. Those are settings designed for disabled users. That so many will need those settings is Apple literally disabling users with their fashion choices. That's effed up.