I Love My Mac, but Apple Just Isn’t Fun Anymore – Info Gadgets

Mac has seen the biggest changes. I suppose iOS has lost a bit of the Apple charm (e.g., in skeuomorphism, though generally I much prefer the flat design of iOS 7+), although I’m not sure it had a lot to begin with.³ Most of the fun of using an iPhone in 2007 was the novelty of the interface. Scrolling was so cool.

I love my Mac, but using a Mac is a different experience today than it was five or 10 years ago. Upon setting up a new Mac or upgrading to a new version of OS X, you used to be greeted with a welcome video and pleasant background music. This was your first interaction with your new Mac, and it was, for lack of a better word, friendly. Apple was giving you an indication of what the experience of using your new Mac would be. While I know some people — particularly those who had to set up a lot of computers — found these videos annoying, they always made me happy. They made setting up a new computer or upgrading my operating system (a process that admittedly isn’t much of a big deal anymore) feel special. The last time we were greeted with these videos was in Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6).

Setting up a new Mac is, well, kind of boring now. This represents a bigger shift in the daily experience of Mac users. I don’t expect using a Mac to be constantly exhilarating, but Apple seems to be removing many of the small aesthetic features that have given Macs character. When OS X was first introduced, Apple made it possible to slow down animations so that Steve Jobs could demonstrate minimizing a window in slow motion, and this has remained in macOS: If you hold down the shift key before certain animations start, they play in slow motion. This was just a (tiny) fun feature that didn’t have any practical value, but it made a small contribution to the “different” experience of the Mac. In High Sierra, Apple has moved WindowServer to Metal 2 and in doing so has removed this Easter egg. In terms of features, it’s a totally harmless change. In terms of character? It’s a little sad.

With OS X Yosemite in 2014, Apple removed skeuomorphism from the Mac and introduced an iOS 7-like flat design. Along with this change, Apple redesigned application icons. Many of them lost a bit of character. The “crazy ones” text disappeared from the icons for Notes.app and TextEdit.app. The text on the stamp on the Mail.app icon removed the reference to Apple’s hometown by changing the words “Cupertino, CA” to “California.” The Game Center icon changed from a depiction of games to four colored bubbles, for a reason that still isn’t quite clear. One of the only icons that retained its pre-Yosemite charm is the Finder icon, which I think is too, um, iconic to ever change.⁴ Changes to application icons were not the only aesthetic changes Yosemite brought, of course. Icons no longer vanish with a puff of smoke when they’re removed from the dock, though oddly enough the puff sound effect still plays. Instead of extending the science fiction metaphor by bringing the user into space, Yosemite displays a blurred-out version of the user’s desktop background when Time Machine is invoked.

The changes that have taken place in the Mac experience over the past few years aren’t limited to Yosemite. I haven’t been able to figure out exactly when they disappeared, but Apple no longer ships the novelty voices like Zarvox and Trinoids for text-to-speech, though they can still be downloaded through System Preferences. To the best of my knowledge, Bruce the Wonder Yak doesn’t exist in Final Cut Pro X. While I understand why Apple stopped bundling third-party software, as a kid I always enjoyed when a Mac would come with games like Cro-Mag Rally or Marble Blast Gold. Last year’s introduction of the redesigned MacBook Pros was another hit to the charm of the Mac, as we watched Apple tragically kill both the glowing Apple logo (whose death really began with the 12-inch MacBook in 2015) and the startup chime (as well as MagSafe, which is an entirely different issue).

The elephant in the room here is the change in leadership that has occurred at Apple over the past six years.⁵ It’s impossible to say how Steve Jobs would have run Apple in 2017, so I’ll simply invoke Newton’s flaming laser sword and not talk about it.⁶ However, I can’t help making a few comments. First of all, anyone who thinks Tim Cook isn’t doing a good job hasn’t seen Apple’s stock price recently. (I don’t want to say anything remotely political here, but I have to mention that I also respect and appreciate that Cook is vocal about Apple’s moral responsibility to help the United States and the world, as well as protect its users’ privacy.)

With that said, Cook doesn’t seem like the type of person who would ever consider dressing up as Willy Wonka to meet the person who found the golden ticket hidden inside of an iMac box. I can’t imagine Cook deciding that a drawing of a man should appear every thousand times a user opens a menu, complete with references to his backstory in the manuals.

A bit more seriously (and less speculatively), a good point of comparison here is in the way that Apple keynotes⁷ have changed since Cook took over. A software funeral would feel totally out of place today, as would Phil Schiller jumping onto a mattress to celebrate “one giant leap for wireless networking.” There’s no drama anymore. If you have two hours to kill, watch the original iPhone introduction and compare it to the original Apple Watch introduction. The difference is striking. When Jobs introduced the iPhone, he spent quite a bit of time explaining the issues with smartphones of the time and how Apple aimed to address them; Cook began his introduction of the Apple Watch with a video reminiscent of an iPod nano ad and never gave much of a motivation for the existence of the device (i.e., the product category) itself, other than effectively saying, “Smartwatches are getting popular and we think we can make a better one.” I wanted an iPhone from the minute it was introduced, though I didn’t get one until the iPhone 3G came out. I wasn’t convinced that I wanted an Apple Watch until I realized that it would be released close to my birthday.

As much as I’d like to avoid the topic of Jobs himself, it’s impossible to have a real discussion of Steve Jobs-era keynotes without talking about his presentation style. Steve was the keynote. Theatrics aside, no one can give a keynote like Jobs; his keynotes were so legendary that they were dubbed “Stevenotes.” As much as I love the Craig Federighi comedy hour (and I really do), there’s nothing quite like the Stevenote anymore. Regardless of what people may say about his reality distortion field, Jobs had a way of showing the audience that he loved the products he was introducing. He sometimes seemed as impressed with them as he wanted us to be. He told us how to feel when using Apple products. Now when Apple executives demonstrate their products, it feels just like that — like a demonstration — rather than like the presenters are having the “magical” experience they want us to have. Apple’s style is a bit more corporate now.