Lemay has been at Apple for 27 years and has a track record that implies the future of Apple software under his leadership is extraordinarily bright.
I don't share the optimism. I mean, he was there when Liquid Glass was designed and presumably in a good position if he became an executive leader now. Sure, Alan Dye may be the face, but Liquid Glass was made by a very large department. And it is not like Apple's design rot started with liquid glass, this recent post shows that it is regression after regression after regression (which is also my impression after having used Macs since 2007):
https://pxlnv.com/blog/window-chrome-of-our-discontent/
It is sad that Apple is still extremely good at hardware (I have the iPhone 17 Pro and the design is stellar), but software has become worse and worse over the years. They can only get away with it because almost all of the rest of the industry is even worse (macOS is still a glass of ice water if you are in the hellscape that is Windows).
> I care about Apple holistically, as a living breathing entity not just their products.
Out of curiosity, why?
I really hope Steve Lemay fixes liquid glAss in macOS and iOS 27.
I've held off upgrading past Sequoia because of it, or wanting to buy M4/M5 Macs.
I've tried and absolutely love the iPhone 17 Pro hardware, but the camera app is an unusable monstrosity.
Do people like the Macbook Neo? When I saw it was announced I groaned thinking this was Apple's chromebook, cheap, representative of a disposable mindset. Underpowered and even more locked into the ecosystem..
I'd love to be proven wrong. But to me it feels regressive. I guess the only positive spin on it I can think of is that this is designed for kids in schools.
The MacBook Neo is there to redefine the floor for the product line-up. Thereâs a reason why it didnât take the âMacBookâ moniker: theyâre going to phase the Air out, introduce a more expensive âMacBookâ and eventually shuffle the Pro line around so itâs MacBook Neo -> MacBook (???) -> MacBook Ultra
The 599 price point is just there to justify recycling the A18 chip (8GB limit is due to the chip). It will pivot and the price will climb back up (699, 799 probably) after a cycle or two.
There is no ânewâ Apple.
Hey New Apple, can you guys fix the nearly weekly prompt I get to reject local network access for the browser? I don't have that on my windows or Linux machines so it's fixable!
Stop giving Alan Dye the Package Designer God-like powers. As if he was alone reaponsible for any design changes.
Federighi answers only to Cook and God (not sure about God though), and he and his minions have been happily implementing every single bullshit under the sun, and praising it on stage. They spent probably millions of man-hours on Liquid Glass. And shipped it in the state it is in.
For the new Apple to "begin to emerge" you need more than meaningless web page updates. You need a leadership that cares. When is the last time you've seen any of Apple's senior leadership care?
Lemay has been at Apple for 27 years and has a track record that implies the future of Apple software under his leadership is extraordinarily bright.
That Macbook Neo wallpaper [1] does not give me confidence.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2026/03/MacBo...
> the marketing is radically different. Appleâs advertising materials for the Neo are a radical departure from their typical work. Itâs drawing exactly the kind of attention that they need to. Itâs fun, itâs different, and itâs most importantly current. Not just following trends, but taking what makes Apple, Apple and meshing it together with whatâs expected of brands in 2026.
Could someone explain what the OP means here?
So, the biggest signal here is Apple caring enough about the low-end of the market to make a laptop for it, and they didnât just continue making the M1 (as has been the case up to now at Walmart). Apple instead chose to bring back color, to provide better cooling to a newer and more power efficient chip, and thereby deliver better performance than M1. They didnât skimp on materials. They didnât skimp on the screen. The Neo is a premium device, itâs just low on RAM and GPU cores. For a student who just needs Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and Safari, thatâs fine. For the average HN reader, itâs not fine, but the Neo isnât intended for HN readers.
My biggest complaint is actually the positioning of the USB-C ports. The USB2 port should have been the one in the corner where most people will connect a charger, and the one in front should have been USB3 where most people would be plugging anything else. For the current layout, it seems like theyâre counting on the buyer to get a dock of some kind⌠but this is meant to be budget?
I look up to apple as a company that has good taste as opposed to Samsung that immediately appears as bloated.
But the Touch Bar, butterfly keyboard and Face ID have been so laughably bad that I wonder what the hell was going on. Or was I the only one who hated them.
Face ID in particular is probably one of the most annoying things about the iPhone. Constantly misses.
Hopefully Apple is humble enough to course correct, while being wildly successful. Itâs easy to ignore criticism when your books are overflowing with cash, but the cracks are spreading and the foundation will eventually crumble if they donât start taking their problems seriously.
The ânew materialsâ at the end of the post is a bit weird, arent they using âoldâ A type chips?
Unless I'm missing something, I hate fanboys
> The MacBook Neo is a new kind of product for Apple
It's just a laptop with a dumbed down CPU. It is not a NEW KIND of product. Apple already sells laptop with different CPUs..
Hardly what I would label as âlongformâ, though the author did.
I really hope Ternus gets the next CEO spot. I haven't seen much of him, but I watched part of an interview with him and he seems very reminiscent of Jobs, in the good way. Reportedly Tim Cook is preparing runner-ups from all the top-level divisions, not just engineering:
> But Mr. Cook is also preparing several other internal candidates to be his potential successor, two of the people said. They could include Craig Federighi, Appleâs head of software; Eddy Cue, its head of services; Greg Joswiak, its head of worldwide marketing; and Deirdre OâBrien, its head of retail and human resources.
Personally I wouldn't like to see any of these. Especially services needs to calm the fuck down and stop giving into the temptation to milk their captive audience; that's absolutely not what Apple is supposed to stand for.
I think Steve Lemay is a good guy. I kind of fought with him when I was an engineer, he was a young, new designer (at Apple). But I always respected his point of viewâeven when we argued.
When Jobs came back to Apple in the latter 1990's "Design" slowly came to have an outsized role. I was one half of the engineering team that owned Preview (the application) when Steve Lemay became a seemingly regular presence in the hallway. As the new "Aqua" UI elements arrived in the OS like the "drawer" and toolbar, Steve and his boss (forgetting his name right nowâGreg Somebody?) were often making calls about our UI implementation.
The bigger argument I remember with Steve revolved around the drawer UI element. With regard to PDF's, (the half of Preview that I worked on, another engineer handled images), the drawer was to display thumbnails for each page. If the PDF had a TOC (table of contents) the drawer is where we would display that as well.
So when you opened a PDF in Preview, the PDF content of course would appear in the large windowâthumbnails, TOC (later search) would be relegated to a vertical strip of drawer real estate alongside the windowâthe user could open/close the drawer if they liked to focus perhaps on the content.
Steve Lemay insisted the drawer live on the right side of the window [1]. This was inexplicable to me. I saw the layout of Preview as hierarchical: the left side of the content driving the right side. You click a thumbnail on the left (in the drawer) the window content on the right changes to reflect the thumbnail clicked on.
Steve said, no, drawer on the right.
"Why? Why the hell would we do that?"
Steve was quick: "The Preview app is about the content. The content is king."
I admit that I still disagreed with him after the exchange, but I had a new respect for him as a designer because he was able to articulate a rationale for his decision. I suppose I was prejudiced to expect hand-waving from designers.
(Coda: some years later after I had left the Preview team, an engineer still on the app let me know that the thumbnails, etc, were at last moving to the left side of the app. The "drawer" as as a UI element had by this time gone away: resizable split-views were the replacement.)
(Addendum: Steve also invented the early Safari URL text field that also doubled as a progress bar. Instant hate from me when I saw it: it was as if the text of the URL you entered was being selected as the page loaded. So I'm old-school and Steve had some new ideasâŚ)
[1] Localization was such that in countries where right-to-left was dominant, the drawer would of course follow suit.