Apple Executive Departures Could Signal Welcome Changes
I rarely write about Apple’s infrequent executive shuffles. People come and go, but most of the time, it doesn’t significantly affect everyday Apple users. However, this week’s changes could have a greater impact. First, Apple announced the retirement of John Giannandrea, the company’s senior vice president for Machine Learning and AI Strategy. Later, Alan Dye, the head of Apple’s user interface design team, left Apple to join Meta. To cap it off, Apple said that Lisa Jackson, vice president for Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, will retire in January 2026, and Kate Adams, Apple’s general counsel, will retire late next year.
Others have done a good job with the inside-baseball coverage of the first two of these moves—see Dan Moren’s thoughts on Giannandrea’s retirement and John Gruber’s excellent analysis of Dye’s departure, respectively. I’m less interested in the specifics and more excited about the potential for change in their respective areas. Giannandrea’s group failed to deliver the so-called “more personalized Siri” that Apple promised as part of Apple Intelligence, while Dye’s group was responsible for the much-maligned Liquid Glass. (Dan Moren also covered the Jackson/Adams retirements; neither is likely to have much impact on users.)
On the AI front, Apple continues to fall further behind as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic race to release increasingly advanced models and systems. Apple needs to launch a significantly enhanced version of Siri just to qualify for being mentioned in the same breath as the others. After its most recent update, Google’s Gemini now has 650 million monthly active users, but even that pales in comparison to ChatGPT’s 800 million weekly active users. Both of those numbers have doubled since early 2025. People are becoming accustomed to what’s possible with the latest AI systems, and if Apple can’t deliver comparable features, its products risk being relegated to merely providing the infrastructure through which users access other companies’ AI services.
With Liquid Glass, while I recognize the value of a consistent design language across all of Apple’s platforms, I can’t help but think of Eudora’s “Waste cycles drawing trendy 3D junk” setting. Liquid Glass can look elegant, particularly on the iPhone, but iOS wasn’t unattractive before. More importantly, I haven’t yet felt that Liquid Glass’s vaunted transparency does anything to make me more productive. Despite Dye’s departure (which appears to have been a surprise to upper management), Apple is unlikely to reverse course on Liquid Glass. We can hope that Dye’s successor focuses more on enhancing functionality to better align with the Steve Jobs quote that Apple badly misused when introducing Liquid Glass: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
With luck, we’ll start to see movement in the right direction for both Siri and Liquid Glass refinements early next year, and perhaps more substantive improvements in the OS 27 cycle.
My views on AI are very different: the “I” is misplaced and I think Apple was smart (whether it was by accident or misreading what is currently “cool”) to not invest enormous sums in LLM chatbots. (Has anyone noticed that chatbots are taking huge resources - high speed ram prices are surging due to the needs of data centers. Electricity prices will also likely go up.) Further, the rest of the industry doesn’t seem to be doing “personal assistants” (except in artificial demos) very well.
The departure of the design chief was very welcome and his replacement by someone with a great deal of experience in UI design is very good news. I find liquid glass moderately pleasant in iOS 26 (compared to the unattractive flat look in iOS 18) but very poorly implemented in macOS. Hopefully the latter will get the improvements it deserves.
I’ll gladly take skeumorphism over both.
I agree 100%.
I don’t understand why skeuomorphism got a bad rap - the key to the Mac’s success is that it had features that resembled real-life objects: buttons, windows, switches, etc. I feel very nostalgic when I watch Jobs introducing the original iPhone, which was a thing of beauty and had a very natural UI. The flat look in iOS 7 was one of the biggest cases of UI malpractice I have ever seen. The Mac was headed in the same direction - hopefully it will be saved by the new guy.
It was the features that were silly. The green felt background in Game Center. The calendar pages that would tear off when you went from one month to another (not sure why that animation was better than transparency as far as wasted cpu cycles are concerned), plus the appearance of stitched leather at the top of the calendar. The reel-to-reel tapes that spun when you listened to a podcast. I don’t think depth of field for buttons and controls, shadow backgrounds, etc., were hated - but, again, many of those things also didn’t exactly add to productivity, either, and cost space on the screen and consumed CPU cycles, too. But some people obviously liked the whimsy, which is why some people like the whimsy of the 26 OS’s Liquid Glass. (That capitalization was a text replacement, as was Game Center
).
Of all the things that Alan Dye was responsible for, I think the worst things were things like the loss of controls unless you hovered over a particular spot with the mouse pointer, or the non-obvious controls that you simply needed to know and memorize (long-press or right-click on a particular spot to get to another screen or control.) Well, I guess all the hardware that I won’t buy from Meta will have software that works that way now.
That old Eudora setting reminded me of something. I still have a 2010 13” MacBook Air, and these days it runs Linux Mint. It runs it just as fast and responsively as my M2 MBA runs Tahoe. Makes you think that today’s Macs could really scream if they didn’t ‘waste cycles’ on Liquid Glass and the like.
Which highlights that this has been an issue with Apple since well before Cook replaced Jobs.
The kind of skeuomorphism used by Susan Kare’s designs in the original Mac served the important purpose of making on-screen artifacts recognizable to a world that had never seen such things. So the Trash looked like a Behrens fluted-steel garbage can, and sliders looked like a light dimmer. But Kare was limited by the (comparatively) low-resolution, black-and-white screen, so she was forced to be abstract and minimalist in her designs, as well.
Those technical limitations disappeared over the years, which meant designers could, well, waste cycles drawing trendy junk. And that meant that the designs became not only richer, but busier and less clear about what was functional and what was ornamental.
I agree; my biggest problem with the Apple’s UI design over the past 12 or so years seems to be the keynote-driven-design. That hasn’t changed, even as the dominant theme has gone from richly skeuomorphic to flat to “Liquid Glass.” The goal always seems to be something that looks flashy in a scripted demo, rather than something that supports the user through a complex task. The demos tend to highlight a carefully curated screen with…one Apple app running on it, the better to show off whatever the executive wants to show off. (Maybe three or four carefully-staged windows if they’re demoing their latest app-switcher feature.) Apple’s demos don’t look at all like the way I use my Mac.
I STILL miss Eurora. It was a great example of “do the important things well, and don’t add gratuitous user interface junk”. Apple should learn from how easy it was to add rules in Eudora, and NOT with some AI-enabled “let me organize your mailbox for you” crapware.
The thing that has always bugged me is the obsession with transparency. Over the years Apple has tried to introduce this feature in several contexts and to my memory has always been met with pushback. The transparency in Liquid Glass is just the latest incarnation. I remember years ago Apple made the menu bar in MacOS transparent, only to later add a setting to make it opaque again.
The thing that bugs me about transparency is that it make the user interface less readable. This is important for those of us with older eyes, and for those who use Apple GUIs in less than ideal lighting conditions. Apple’s current approach of blurring the background only goes so far.
Please, Apple, give up this hobby horse.
Transparency has acquired an air of “futurism” in entertainment over the years, and I think that’s what Apple has picked up on. I still remember back in the '90s seeing Babylon 5 characters trying to read documents printed in an unreadable font on transparent sheets of “paper”, thinking that it was possibly the most impractical way to present documents. I never imagined that the reality would include not just transparency, but also motion. At least we’re not forced to use a horrible font on our screens. Yet.
Unfortunarely, in my opinion, the executive that needs to depart that is not, is Tim Cook. Under his managment, innoviation has suffered with change only being minor updates to existing technology as most anything else was either on the drawing board when Steve Jobs was alive, or bought or stolen from other companies/developers. Under his management there have been major failures such as Apple Vision, the Apple Car and major executives are leaving. If one is looking for how to create great GUI’s they should check with Bruce Tognizini who originally wrote Apple Interface Guidlines in the 80’s and holds patents for some of the GUI tools used today. His website that has these concepts is www.asktog.com They are their for everyone to read. If only Apple still followed his design concepts, Apple’s GUI’s might be loved and embracedn by all.
Apple surely has the talent to design great UI. But the management, baggage, and red tape are preventing it from happening.
Luminous Landscape just did a post about surging SD card prices, especially on the higher end. I initially read it as clickbait-y, when I looked at prices I’m still seeing low prices in general but then I noted my preferred Sony Tough cards have gone up quite a bit.
I read all of these departures as folks moving ahead of Tim Cook’s departure, getting out in front of that. The question is surely who will replace him, and if it is John Ternus as widely rumored, perhaps it also speaks to their relationship to him. They could be doing him a favor or themselves, who knows.
I agree with the analysis: without a credible Siri, Apple risks being reduced to a hardware provider. With Gemini replacing Siri in the short term, Apple faces an uphill battle—having to build a Siri strong enough to reclaim that role while Gemini continues to advance by leaps and bounds. If they deliver an inferior Siri, they face customer backlash for going backwards. I think the next departure will be Tim.
Apple has certainly lost its way with the interfaces between its devices and humans. These recent interface modifications are descending into giving low grade enjoyment for users. The ‘Liquid Glass’ brain fade is the latest showing of bad management and bad design within Apple. Gruber paints this clearly. Sure it is good to have some commonality of interface symbols as Apple users have multiple Apple devices, but these devices are used differently and the one-size-fits-all syndrome ignores what Apple users do.
There’s nothing special about the Liquid Glass interface - it offers no gains in productivity, enjoyment, speed of use, or adaption. I am struggling to realise what was wrong with the previous interface - no critical restraints from my perspective. Moreover, there is the newly added extra steps to work a function - if you can find them wherever they have been hidden away.
Take for example, the ‘new’ Alarms and Timers. Previously we had a button to turn off an alarm or to stop a timer. Now we have a slider. A slider is a variable control. We don’t need a range of values; we don’t want to half turn off the alarm or to half stop a timer. But now we have a ridiculous slider control when the former button was very fit for purpose.
Tim Cook has let program and programming standards decline and new initiatives become half-baked or not implemented. It is probably time for Cook to go.
Let me make a constructive suggestion - It would help immensely if a new executive at Apple could enforce some requirement that interface designers have training in and understanding of the design concepts that Apple (and others) spearheaded with 20+ years of actual research and use before IOS was introduced. Apple GUI people, please read Don Norman. Please.
Maybe I just missed it, but I haven’t seen anyone give a good explanation of why Apple needs to be in the race for AI supremacy in the first place.
Why do any design elements go in and out of style? Bell bottoms, beehive hairdos, fins on cars, cars with only rounded surfaces, cars with only angular surfaces, ornate text, sans serif, avocado green in kitchens?
Designers got to design or they don’t have a job. Flat design is a fad, as is liquid glass. Skeuomorphism will come back in style, you can bet your bitcoin on it.
I can’t agree at all. Apple’s design has grown remarkably in the last twenty years. They make the best general-purpose computer chips - better than companies like Intel and AMD, which is their only business. Mac’s, iPhones, ipads, Apple Watches are amazingly reliable, far better than the laptops and phones of twenty years ago.
And while I realize that many people don’t like the new Liquid Glass interface, I think it’s just fine, in some ways better than what came before. And Apple has ways to reduce the transparency and animations that so many people seem to dislike.
It’s simply amazing that I never need to plug my phone or iPad or watch into anything in order to sync data between them - as long as I have a good internet or Bluetooth connection, it’s extremely rare when my devices don’t contain up-to-date data. I can open a web page on my phone, then open my Mac or iPad, and see an icon that will quickly open that page there. Or open an email on a device and switch to another to pick up that email. My photo library remains synced between my devices. My music library as well.
If Apple’s internal apps don’t work the way I need them, I can almost always find a well-designed third party app that does. This year I’ve dropped a few Mac apps that I was using (Alfred and Ice, a Bartender replacement) because the stock MacOS behavior no longer requires them.
if one of my Apple devices breaks, I can get a replacement up and running with all of my data intact in practically no time, particularly compared with even ten years ago.
I support clients that use Windows computers and, boy, I am so glad that I switched to using Apple’s devices. And I occasionally run Linux OSes and I still prefer MacOS to them.
For everything everyone gripes about Apple OSes, I think nobody else even comes close. Maybe Android and ChromeOS, but that’s about as close as it comes. And Apple is not trying to monetize my internet activity anywhere near as badly as Google does.
Exactly. I don’t want an Apple AI that isn’t markedly more accurate than the others. The last thing I want is for my phone to be hallucinatory. I am perfectly fine with incremental improvements to Siri and other tools as long as they actually work.
One reason—I’m not saying if I agree or don’t agree that Apple is striving for “AI supremacy”—is that unless Apple wants its customer base to begin shrinking and to be limited to users who are reactionaries or nostalgists (and are unlikely to upgrade or replace hardware frequently), it needs to make its products fit into how people use their devices today and in the near future.
I will say that I wouldn’t like Apple to become even more of a premium-priced brand than it already is. In car terms, I’m fine with Apple being a BMW or Mercedes but not a Lamborghini or McLaren.
The iPhone doesn’t have to be a full-blown AI agent to give users access to AI-enhanced activities by using iOS apps as well as the internet. Ditto for the iPad and the Mac. Personally, I am very far from being a gung-ho AI freak, but I’m using AI-powered search every time I use Google and I have three different AI apps on my iPhone. Anyone who is interested in this stuff can play.
I don’t know that Apple needs to be at the bleeding edge when it comes to AI, but they definitely need to be in the conversation in order to retain talent. Part of the reason some of these employees are leaving is because they want to do cutting edge work and if Apple is years behind in AI research, then top people will go to companies being more innovative in AI.
Apple’s AI status also has ramifications to their stock price and Apple needs their stock high in order to attract talent and retain existing talent.
So while Apple AI isn’t the most important thing for Apple, it is important.
It seems possible that falling too far behind could open the way for others to create hardware devices that can do things people really value which Apple’s own products can’t match.
That’s at the cost of user privacy. One reason I am very interested in Apple’s AI strategy is Apple goes with a privacy-first approach. With other AI companies, I don’t know what they are doing with my information.
I don’t want other companies having access to my contacts, emails, and other personal data on my phone. For AI to be truly useful, it needs to know a lot about me – and I want that info to stay private and not shared with advertisers.
Also, I like Apple’s approach of doing as much AI on-device as possible (which will only increase as AI chips get better). This keeps my data private, works off-line, and is faster that cloud-based AI.
My original comment was focussed on human interface failures: just look at the MacOS Tahoe interface nonsense that proves my point. But you have taken a wider scope.
The Apple phone and tablet hardware is ok, but not outstandingly better when compared to offerings from Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo and others. Take Apple’s wasted obsession with thinness of devices. As thin as they are, you still have to buy a case so you have something large enough to hang on to. The thinness obsession has meant small batteries and the need for constant recharging.
Apple apps are generally second rate (take Files as an example) and Apple seems reluctant to make any improvements, but then Apple is renowned for not taking any suggestions from users. Just have a look through the posts on Apple support to see what is wrong with Apple applications. Apple managers and employees obviously don’t bother looking through the problems listed to avoid being embarrassed by the convoluted hacks needed to bypass such problems.
Machine learning and neural processing is a critical part of any computing infrastructure, whether or not you want to call it “AI” (I don’t), and whether or not you care about chatbots (I don’t).
Look, for example, at some of the “Apple Intelligence” features that have nothing to do with chatbots. Like summarizing text documents, or editing photos. These involve just as much ML/NN skills as chatbot development, so Apple needs to retain skilled talent.
If it’s necessary to integrate with commercial chatbots or add similar functionality to Siri in order to hire and retain that talent, then I completely understand, even though those are features I will rarely, if ever, be interested in using.
Loved the reference to Eudora, and wish there were similar settings on iOS.
…and I still live at the P.O.
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I agree I just want Siri to work
You could ask the same question about any of the companies investing in AI. The NY Times podcast The Daily covered this topic recently. It boils down to an expectation that AI will pay off tremendously in the future and the fear that it will be a winner-takes-all situation. If the expectations are right, it would be best if Apple didn’t have to rely on another company, like Google or Meta, for what turns out to be a core technology.
Two things can be true at the same time. MacOS may be generally superior to the other desktop OS’s, and macOS could be a lot better than it is now. I don’t think users are wrong about the general decline in Apple software quality, in respect to bugginess and in respect to the UI.
Eh. Having used the Mac since 1984, I think both things are about in the same range they’ve usually been.
We’re back to form and function. What the product looks like versus what it does….
To what extent does the hardware actually do something better or something new? In some areas there is clear progress. I believe the iPhone camera/image processing represents a hardware-software duet that is hard to beat. Macs, well, what do they do now that they could not do a few years ago? That question takes more thought and requires more nuanced interpretation, in my opinion. One thing that the newer Macs can’t do anymore is let the user add in more RAM or storage, which is a major turnoff to many. Sadly, many PCs are also going the LPDDR route for RAM, too.
But most of this discussion has been about what it all looks like. Design has fads and trends. If you like the way it is going, it’s a trend. If you don’t, it’s a fad, I suppose. But once the designing community began to believe that digital interfaces needed to look more “digital” somehow, then interfaces that resembled the analog world were clearly too retro for polite designer company, and here we are. It reminds me of trying to adjust controls on a new car, or a rental, and trying to move about on a touch-screen while driving. Not a safety improvement!
As for AI, I like the way Apple has taken small steps to make app functionality and inter-app communication smarter with the machine-learning approach. But it’s not as flashy. But in another area, Apple made the pointed decision not to build its own search engine. So its systems allow the user to choose a preferred search engine. They could do the same with “AI” – let the user choose, according to his or her own priorities or concerns about privacy, ethics, and so on.
As a “design” side note, I spend more time online pursuing my Linux education than anything related to Mac these days. I’ve noticed that as much as some Linux people like to disparage anything Apple, others are proud of how they are able to make their favorite Desktop Environment (GNOME, KDE, etc.) “look just like a Mac!” I’ll take my humor where I can best find it.
As others have said, it’s not about supremacy; it’s about relevance. AI will be a very large part of the future of computing in every imaginable way. If Apple wants to influence that future, it needs to step up soon.
I’d hope to see these leadership changes (and the next…) result in Apple showing more respect for their users, treating their users as their customers, not their product.
Speaking of which, I have to ask, did Tim Cook got to the “Melania” screening? Macalope says he did, others say he was on the guest list but a noshow.
Sebastiaan de With is joining Apple’s UI team. He is behind the design of Halide and is a well-respected interface champion.
9-to-5 Mac
He did.
Seb previously worked at Apple during the corinthian leather skeumorphic phase.