The Comeback iKid
This is a chance to right the ship. Can Apple pull off a major refresh of all of their platforms in a way that's well-received by the fans?
Tough reading long-form these days?
Listen to the audio edition of this issue here, as read by a real human…me! 👋😊
This issue marks a bit of a comeback for yours truly (Jared White, in case you've forgotten!), plus my hopes & fears for the upcoming Apple WWDC25.
Addressing the elephant in the room
'Tis true, I was gone a while. In case you're curious, I've been spending the spring traveling as a "digital nomad" around the Pacific Northwest in the U.S (details all at the #NomadLifestyle hashtag on my personal blog).
My hiatus was not for naught, as it helped me find some real clarity into what I wanted to focus on as a content creator for the rest of 2025. And dear reader, you're in luck! This very newsletter lies at the beating heart of my renewed efforts, and I'm feeling quite enthusiastic to be back.
In this so-called "age of AI" we now find ourselves in, it is more vital than ever to find our people on the Indie Web, and I hope you stick around as we dive reeeeal deep into how we can foster that sense of community and expertise in human-sourced art and factual grounding of truth claims.
But right now I want to have a bit of fun and talk about Apple; yes, I know, it's been hard to remain an Apple nerd with all their misdeeds over the past few years, but that's precisely what I'd like to touch on as we head into the WWDC news cycle.
Design intention
This year marks the twelfth anniversary of one of my favorite bits of Apple propaganda stagecraft, the Intention ad for Apple's design ethos.
If it's been a while since you've seen it, I encourage you to watch it. What's most remarkable about revisiting this ad twelve years later isn't that I think it hasn't aged well. It's that I don't recognize the company which put it out. The Apple of today has felt adrift, lost in an ocean of lawsuits, developer angst, keeping up with the AI jonses, and a remarkable lack of focus when it comes to the design of its core platforms.
Listen, there have always been grumpy people who don't like Apple. And they've always had their reasons, whether I agreed with them or not. But the sad fact about Apple's detractors nowadays is that many of them were until very recently part of Apple's loud-and-proud fanbase.
We were the true believers. And in many respects, we wish we could remain so. Our grumpiness hasn't been that Apple was too Apple-y, but quite the opposite. This isn't a matter of What-Would-Steve-Jobs-Do?-ism, because we certainly don't expect Apple to stay locked into a past era of business choices and technology limitations.
Rather, we are asking Apple to stay true to its own core values, it's own raison d'être.
An Apple with deep respect for original artistry.
An Apple with keen intuition on what customers really want.
An Apple that goes out of its way not to compromise user experience for the sake of crass marketing or maximizing short-term revenue.
An Apple that understands the Jobs-to-be-Done for each of its product categories.
An Apple which would never jump on a trendy industry bandwagon just for the favorable press.
An Apple which leads the industry in design.
This, THIS is what I'm hoping to see a glimpse of once again at Apple's annual conference where the tone is set for the next 12 months of user experience. Don't give me more awful Apple Intelligence pablum, and don't act like developers are still fawning all over your platforms. Don't tell us how great you are. Show us how great you still can be.
One UI to rule them all
The rumor mill has been on overdrive with the expectation that a whole new design language for all of Apple's operating systems will be unveiled. People are musing that this might be the biggest shift in platform user interface since the iOS 7 revolution, which itself was the biggest shift since Mac OS X's Aqua.
My body is ready. It's not that I particularly hate any of Apple's current OS interfaces, but there has been a real lack of clarity and consistency in a wide variety of specific ways; death by a thousand paper cuts if you will. In particular with regard to the "future of personal computing" as the iPad was once deemed by Apple, it's been a nauseating slog dealing with the same routine each release cycle: "the hardware is really amazing and powerful, but the OS is underpowered and missing many key features". See? I just wrote the summary of every damn article about a new iPad for nearly a decade now. It's so old, so tired.
This is a chance to right the ship. I don't believe Apple's glory days are solely behind them. I do believe there's a chance they can pull off a major refresh of all of their platforms in a way that's well-received by the fans, and in particular beef up iPadOS in a big way. A company as large and as famous as Apple must certainly still possess a staggering amount of top-tier talent. These people simply need to be empowered by the folks in charge to dream big and put the user first above all other considerations.
Steve Jobs' gift wasn't that he personally was the best at any one design or technical skill. It's that he was well-rounded and knew enough about those areas to be the ultimate tastemaker and to empower the right talent to execute on those decisions. Who at Apple today is The Tastemaker?™ Whoever was The Tastemaker and gave the green light to the abomination that is Image Playground/Genmoji is hopefully out on their fucking ear. Gawd, that stuff is horrifying.
I hope cooler heads have prevailed and we'll see evidence now in 2025 that Apple still knows how to design a world-class operating system(s) with a set of core apps that people are delighted to use.
Yes, I want to gaze upon a computer UI and drool a little. Is that too much to ask?!
Just getting started
I agree with some long-time Apple fanboys, such as the lads of the Accidental Tech Podcast, who have been on record stating that there's no way we're past "peak desktop computing" when it comes to UI design. The idea that somehow Apple and the industry at large solved everything the best way possible some time in the past, and the only way to evolve Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) into the future is to come up with novel device types, is simply absurd.
I am ready for the next computer UI revolution. I happen to think there is a ton of low-hanging fruit, a myriad of possibilities for how to make desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones even more attractive, easier to use, and simultaneously more powerful than ever before—without shoehorning in nonsense like "AI agents" or even 3D goggles. Look, is there a future for "spatial computing"? Maybe, I won't rule it out. But it's going to be a niche for a long time yet. Meanwhile, we're dying out here in 2D screen-land for comprehensive UI that is truly gorgeous and also extremely functional. It's a sad commentary on how far Apple fell that I actually prefer modern GNOME to macOS (and certainly kudos to the Linux community for their excellent work in recent years!).
That said, there's only one company which can inspire us, impress us, and wow us when it comes to the full ecosystem of computer UI available today. That's Apple. Even if you don't intend to be an Apple customer going forward, you should be rooting for them to find their footing again. Because where Apple leads, others will follow. That's a feature, not a bug.
And with the ridiculous hype of AI having dominated the tech news cycle for far too long already, real honest-to-goodness computer UI needs all the attention it can get.
🤲 Share Early, Share Often!
I hope you enjoyed this issue of Cycles Hyped No More. Please share with your friends, family, enemies, and everyone in between! 😅
Cheers,
Jared White
🤔🌩️ Things that make you think:
One might learn things through the use of an AI agent, but claiming to have written a paper or code or whatever is dishonest and opaque; you may have, to some degree, contributed to the production of an artifact. To some degree, your management and validation may have been involved, but supervisors, CEOs, and QA testers aren’t the same as engineers, designers, authors, and creators.
Yet despite my protests and provocations, I firmly believe that we are witnessing a definitional shift at a philosophical level. Generative AI and agent-based AI are changing what it means to “say” and “do” things. That, in turn, shifts who we are.
–Machine utterance: what does it mean for humanity to say something? by Frank Elavsky