alt Hacker NewsIt's still a bit jarring to me to see how far Apple embraced form over function with iOS and subsequently macOS. I remember reading the Human Interface Guidelines from the late Mac OS 9/early Mac OS X days and being taken aback by the level of detail and thought that went into those interfaces. Don't get me wrong, some things made no sense (brushed metal was... a choice) but there was a certain level of polish that I don't think exists anymore.
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> brushed metal was... a choice
Man... I stand by it being an interesting idea that they fumbled by not following their own HIG.
Even if it is a bit of a silly line of reasoning, there was (at least originally) a purpose to the brushed metal UI. Anything that was capable of external IO (quicktime for ingesting firewire feed from camera, itunes for syncing with an iPod, finder for disks) was supposed to have a brushed metal interface. There's a world where 2 different classes of windows stuck around (one for things INSIDE the computer, one for things OUTSIDE of the computer) and I bet we would've gotten a lot more afforadances for real-life devices. Maybe a predictable device status UI in those sorts of windows or something. Maybe they'd just be those white panes with fancy animated product shots that show up when you get an Apple-blessed bluetooth device near an iPhone. There's at least some reasoning to treat external IO windows as sharing some sort of common UX. (Answering pretty common gadget questions like: is it connected, is it charging, is it lost, etc etc etc)
But then the waters get muddied with the calculator being brushed metal because it's trying to look like a calculator. And safari... because I guess the network is external but...?
I think a little after John wrote this blog post I'm using to jog my memory, all pinstripe windows were gone except maybe the preferences panes... so it was definitely arbitrary form over function at that point.
(Jogging my memory from: https://daringfireball.net/2004/10/brushed-metal)
I think OS 9 (and that entire era of computer graphics design) had the perfect mix of form and function. I won't comment on it aesthetically as that is entirely subjective, but its use of shape and depth made things very human friendly. Buttons looked distinctly buttonable. The icon design was also great, they were skeuomorphic enough that you generally got the idea of what you were clicking but also flat enough that they weren't distracting
it's market changed
it started as a computer for professionals
now its for people who want to look cool. so form is much more important than function, it's literally what you buy
The past 10 years have been a sad, slow decline for Apple's UIs. I'm really hoping for them to reclaim some of their former UI glory. At least, in Golden Gate, they reverted their own HIG violation of excessive icons back to factory: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/11/macos-27-golden-gate-me...
It's such a shame because back then even Windows was motivated by actual human user research and had thorough guidelines. https://ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Micro... (HN discussion from a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22475521 .)
https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-06-16/0/POSTING-en.html was an interesting look at Win2K's UI controls and how much clearer they are compared to modern UIs.
Yeah, for a decade now it's been a UX disaster. It "works", because so many people are used to it, but look at a new user trying to navigate iOS, it's bonkers. Swiping from random directions achieves different things (and how would you even know you can?). The home button has like 11 different functions depending on how you press it and when.