🍎 An Open Rant About Apple's UX

This is a living document. It will grow every time Apple pisses me off again.

Liquid Glass

Liquid glass is absolute shit. Everything looks like a smeared shower door. Depth cues are gone. Contrast is gone. You can't tell what's a button and what's decoration. It's design that exists to be admired in a keynote, not to be used by a human being with things to do.

And it drains your battery for the privilege. Every frame, your GPU is compositing translucent blur layers so that Apple's UI can look like Apple's UI and nothing else. That's the real function of liquid glass — it's not a design language, it's a visual watermark. An inimitable signature burned into every screen so that no other platform can replicate the look without paying the same absurd rendering cost. It's anticompetitive branding disguised as aesthetics. You are paying for it in watts, in heat, in battery life, and you are getting nothing in return except the assurance that your phone looks like an iPhone.

The Gesture Trap

You're swiping left and right. Natural. Symmetric. You're in a flow. Then you swipe one too many times and you're suddenly in a completely different screen — and now the axis has changed. Now you must swipe up or down to escape. Of course, you must already know which direction. There's no indication. No affordance. You are expected to have internalized the secret choreography.

The gesture model is not symmetric. You enter horizontally and exit vertically. That is not a navigation system. That is a trap.

The One-Click-to-Two-Click Pipeline

Something that used to be one tap is now two taps. A button moved. A menu got nested. A direct action became a submenu became a long-press became a gesture. Every release, the thing you trained your muscle memory to do gets relocated. But don't worry — there's a new gesture! A double-tap, or a shake, or a three-finger pinch. Of course there's no visible UI for it. You're just supposed to know. You should be reading the release notes like scripture. You should be watching the WWDC sessions like a well-behaved fixture in Apple's ecosystem.

Double tap. Shake it twice. Wiggle your goddamn nose. That's the new UX.

"Natural" Sort Order

They call it "natural" sort. My apps are sorted in whatever order Apple's algorithm has decided is best for me. Not alphabetical. Not by frequency. Not by recency. Some inscrutable blend of all three, optimized for engagement metrics that have nothing to do with my workflow. I had a system. I knew where things were. Now I don't.

Apps I Cannot Delete

There are apps on my phone that I have never opened. I will never open them. I do not want them. I cannot uninstall them. They sit there, taking up space in my home screen, in my storage, in my psyche. They are Apple's apps, on Apple's phone, and I am merely the person who paid for it.

Apple TV+ Nagware

There is a "Not Now" button. There is no "Fuck Off Forever" button. Apple uses its position as the operating system vendor to nag me — relentlessly, permanently, undismissably — about subscribing to Apple TV+. A $13/month subscription service I do not want. Have never wanted. Will never want. And I cannot make the asking stop.

They abuse my notifications. My lock screen. The TV app itself. Every surface they control — which is all of them, because they are the platform — becomes a billboard for their subscription service. There is no "no." There is only "not now," which means "ask me again tomorrow," which means "I am an inevitable conversion in Apple's funnel metrics."

And they fused this unwanted subscription service into my movie library. I spent over a thousand dollars buying movies through iTunes. My movies. Purchased. Owned. And now they live inside the Apple TV app, marinated in upsell, surrounded by content I didn't ask for, organized to make Apple's catalog look like part of my collection. My library is now their storefront. They moved into my house and started rearranging my furniture to make room for their merchandise.

Not Root on My Own Machine

I bought this computer. I paid for it with money. It is physically in my house. And I am not root. I cannot do what I want with the hardware I own. Apple decides what software I can run, what permissions I can grant, what system files I can touch. My machine is not my machine. It is Apple's machine that I am renting with my dignity.

Blank Screens

Sometimes you open an app and it's just... blank. A white screen. Or a black screen. Nothing loads. Nothing happens. You wait. You kill the app. You reopen it. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't. This is a trillion-dollar company.

Apple will never fix this because the incentives are broken. Bugs on older iPhones are good for business. Every blank screen, every stutter, every inexplicable hang is a data point that whispers "maybe it's time to upgrade." QA on legacy devices is a cost center that actively works against the sales funnel. Why would they invest in making your three-year-old phone feel fast when they could let it rot and sell you a new one? The degradation isn't a bug. It's a conversion strategy.

Finder Is Broken

Finder sucks. Specifically: sorting and grouping are broken beyond repair.

Try grouping files by date on the desktop. Sounds reasonable, right? Except Apple's brilliant engineers didn't think to check whether any of the files inside a directory have changed. So a directory I use every single day — touching files in it constantly — is buried at the bottom of the list under December of last year, because the directory's own metadata hasn't changed. The contents are hot. The container is cold. And Finder doesn't know the difference.

There is no argument in favor of this behavior. None. It is not a design tradeoff. It is not an edge case they deprioritized. They simply did not think about it. The Apple braintrust of institutional amnesiacs shipped a grouping feature without considering that people might group directories by when they were actually used. They just... didn't think.

And what's the alternative? Gallery View — where your filesystem becomes a carousel. A carousel. The UX antipattern so universally reviled that it's literally a textbook example of what not to build. That's Apple's dogfood. That's what they think file browsing should look like. Finder used to be good. It used to respect that some people have hundreds of files and need real sorting. Now it's a showroom.

But the real insult is this: when you group by date, the files within each group are sorted by Apple's "smart" sort rules. What are those rules? Nobody knows. It is not documented anywhere. The sort order is determined by an opaque algorithm that you cannot inspect, cannot override, and cannot disable — not even as root. You don't know why your files are in the order they're in, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Finder is no longer a file manager. It's a guided tour of your own filesystem, curated by people who don't use it.

The Rant Continues

This document is not finished. It will never be finished. Apple will keep shipping, and I will keep updating this page. If you have your own entry, you know where to find me.