Hacker News Reader

Comment by renaudg | Hacker News Reader

Liquid Glass appears to be the culmination of the Alan Dye era at Apple, where UI terms like "radio buttons" were derided as "programmer talk".

https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job

Thankfully he has now left. Things could hopefully pick up again usability-wise within 2-3 years.

View on HN

The worrying thing is that his departure seems in no way like a consequence of his terrible job. He wasn't squeezed out by upper management, he left because Meta made him a better offer. I'm sure Apple's software quality will go up now that he's gone and his replacement is allegedly liked by Apple's competent UX people who disliked Dye; but Cook clearly doesn't recognise the problems, lest he'd have planned to get rid of Dye by now.

It’s honestly hard to tell from outside - execs at that level are very rarely fired. They tend to be asked politely to find something new to do with their time

They also tend to not be featured very prominently on a huge product launch event while in the process of "finding something new to do with their time". If he's actually being squeezed out, that process must've started after the public launch of iOS 26.

EDIT: though I guess you could also read it as, iOS 26 had come too far to stop it, so they let Dye be the visible face of it so that he'd be the fall guy and the next guy would get the credits for fixing it... I don't know, I guess we don't really have enough info to speculate one way or the other

I’d also believe that he was able to ride his past reputation and his sponsor’s memory enough to get the commitment to ship Liquid Glass, but that gamble blew up once most reviews revolve around how they’ll probably make it less bad in an update. Apple values keeping users on current releases and this is the first one where so many experienced users and fans have been advising people to hold back. I think Dye knows he had enough capital to bull the release through but not to recover from making the story about the release about his shortcomings.

I'm hopefully optimistic that he can destroy Meta in less time than that!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com