>The sentiment within the ranks at Apple is that today’s news is almost too good to be true. People had given up hope that Dye would ever get squeezed out, and no one expected that he’d just up and leave on his own. [...]
>It’s rather extraordinary in today’s hyper-partisan world that there’s nearly universal agreement amongst actual practitioners of user-interface design that Alan Dye is a fraud who led the company deeply astray. It was a big problem inside the company too. I’m aware of dozens of designers who’ve left Apple, out of frustration over the company’s direction, to work at places like LoveFrom, OpenAI, and their secretive joint venture io. I’m not sure there are any interaction designers at io who aren’t ex-Apple, and if there are, it’s only a handful. From the stories I’m aware of, the theme is identical: these are designers driven to do great work, and under Alan Dye, “doing great work” was no longer the guiding principle at Apple. [...]
>That alone will be a win for everyone — even though the change was seemingly driven by Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to poach Dye, not Tim Cook and Apple’s senior leadership realizing they should have shitcanned him long ago. [...]
>My favorite reaction to today’s news is this one-liner from a guy on Twitter/X: “The average IQ of both companies has increased.”
It didn't say 26-year-old, it said 26 year, according to your own quote. You inserted the word "old", which changes the meaning entirely. If he's been working on design for 26 years then he is a veteran, not hired as a child.
I'd far prefer a kid with actual HCI usability design skills and compassion for users, than a middle aged superficial cosmetician who scoffs at "programmer talk" and prides himself on not knowing what a "key window" or "Fitts' Law" is.
>After I published that post, I got a note from a designer friend who left Apple, in frustration, a few years ago. After watching Jobs’s Aqua introduction for the first time in years, he told me, “I’m really struck by Steve directly speaking to ‘radio buttons’ and ‘the key window’.” He had the feeling that Dye and his team looked down on interface designers who used terms like Jobs himself once used — in a public keynote, no less. That to Dye’s circle, such terms felt too much like “programmer talk”. But the history of Apple (and NeXT) user interface design is the opposite. Designers and programmers used to — and still should — speak the exact same language about such concepts. Steve Jobs certainly did, and something feels profoundly broken about that disconnect under Alan Dye’s leadership. It’s like the head of cinematography for a movie telling the camera team to stop talking about nerdy shit like “f-stops”. The head of cinematography shouldn’t just abide talking about f-stops and focal lengths, but love it. Said my friend to me, regarding his interactions with Dye and his team at Apple, “I swear I had conversations in which I mentioned ‘key window’ and no one knew what I meant.”
