Matisyahu's Blog

I’ve been following the development of iOS 26 and macOS 26 to see what ends up happening – I’ve held off from any major criticism because when a product in beta is released the focus is seeing how well an idea works in the real world when normal people use it then make tweaks accordingly. I found a video that really articulates the issue I have with the direction taken by Apple:

For me, I liked Aqua when it was first launched with the ‘lickable’ interface elements, the pinstripe look – then combine that with the fun colours of the iMac, it made the idea of using a computer ‘fun’ rather than some burdensome thing that one wishes to avoid at any cost. What I see with the ‘liquid glass’ is a faux futurism of glass surfaces, the sort of see through touch screens you see in movies like the ‘Minority Report’, a substitute for actual genuinely improving products so instead giving them the thin veneer of progress in much the same way that Trump uses guilding to make an another wise cheap item appear to be luxurious to those who believe money can buy class.

As I come back to what I said about iCloud, Webkit and other key parts of the Apple platform ecosystem, they’re not making the investment in the areas that matter – they may not be something the user know about but they certainly know when something goes wrong. A bit like water pipes and water treatement, no one thinks about it when it is working fine but they certainly are thinking about it when things go pear shaped.

When Apple fails to keep up with web standards in terms of compliance and fixing implementation bugs then it isn’t surprising that Chrome has a massive lead in market share on macOS. It should be a wake up call to Apple that even though Safari is bundled with macOS that people are going out of their way to install Chrome on macOS. Why does that matter? because market dominance dictates how much influence Apple has when it comes to shaping the web standards of today and in the future, whether certain standards gain traction based on if or when they’re implemented – does Apple want to be a follower or a leader? Do they want to have a chair at the big table where the decisions are being made or are they going to let the likes of Microsoft and Google shape the future of the internet?

The other problem is halo effect of the ‘friend who is good with computers’ or the ‘family member who is good with computers’ where Apple may have won them with their hardware and macOS but lost them when they cannot run their favourite extensions on Safari because the implementation of MV3 is half baked at best. Such individuals have a halo effect in that they also influence their friends and family – if you lose them then you lose the normies. This is the big problem that impacted Windows Vista, they lost the ‘friend who is good with computers’ or the ‘family member who is good with computers’ to the point that normies would repeat ‘I heard Windows Vista sucks’ even before giving it a chance (don’t get me wrong, it was far from perfect but after the first service pack many of the issues were resolved – see the ‘Mojave Experiment’).

It reminds me of the customer satisfaction survey term called Net Promoter Score (NPS) where a customer will rate their customer service experience from 1-10 and the score given by the customer that customer is categorised as either a detractor, neutral or a promoter. The best way to visualise a promoter is someone who will talk positively about your company to friends and family, for example, you’re talking about banks and they’ll talk positively about the bank they bank with – they would be considered a promoter. You can spend all you want on marketing but what has the biggest impact are the experiences friends and family relay to each other because they are considered to have come from a trustworthy source whereas the only impact marketing has is to tell people that the product exists but it is very rare to win over the hearts and minds to the same extent as endorsements from those they trust.