Junk Drawer Design Makes the World a Worse Place

In a moment of gratitude journal celebration, I went to record a few seconds of my son talking, in Voice Memos on my brand new iPhone 17 Pro. I simply wanted to Trim the audio, then add it to his Day One journal. It was a special moment. But instead, I had a real moment of distress and frustration. I nearly threw my phone against the wall. Something that should have taken five seconds (and always had, in the past) now took like five minutes, feeling like I was being trolled: the Trim button in Voice Memos was nowhere to be seen.

Never fear, Siri can answer questions about applications on the iPhone. Except Siri was just as confused as I was when I asked how to trim an audio recording in the Voice Memos app. It never said to hit the Edit button, and then the Junk Drawer DOT DOT DOT button on the top left, and behold, egregious animation would reveal the sacred Trim button, which I eventually had to figure out on my own, after I almost butchered the audio recording itself. Instead Siri simply said to tap on the ICON THAT LOOKS LIKE A NATURAL SYMBOL IN MUSIC NOTATION. Which wasn't there. Which is why I asked Siri for help in the first place. Then I asked again and it said to hit the Trim button. Which was not there. I felt gaslit and confused.

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it's this veneer - that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

— Steve Jobs

Let me spell this out in an actionable manner: making every action that I do all day every day (tap to open a new tab on Safari) take 50% more taps (5 instead of 3) is unconscionable. It is not an improvement. Design is how it works, and this works worse, objectively. I would have stayed on iOS 18 on my iPhone 17 Pro if given the choice, and I knew all this beforehand. But Alan Dye did not even give me that choice, much less do his job to avoid making me wish I could even make that choice.

Invoking the ghost of Steve Jobs is always dangerous, but here I think if he had felt on iota of this feeling of frustration, he would have had it immediately fixed, or heads would have rolled. Instead Tim Cook thinks this stuff is great? What is going on? At first the changes with iOS 26, all that huge OS-visual-update-undertaking for almost no reason (see above quote) were merely eye-rolling. But now it's personal.

I usually don't wish anyone ill, especially not publicly, but there is a special cricle of hell in Dante's Inferno for interface designers who make things worse and then blow smoke up their own arse that they are making things better (having the gall to quote Steve Jobs, etc.), when they are clearly not improving anything—as proven by their shoddy voice assistant being just as confused as me. And I'm an expert user, a developer and close Apple watcher, I pay attention, I care about this stuff—if I'm confused, then think of the children!

As an Apple investor, I'm pleased to see Alan Dye leave, so someone with a clearer sense of intuitiveness (Stephen Lemay, you're our only hope) may have a sliver of a chance to bring Apple's OSes back to the level they were at when iOS 18 reigned. (As in, I could find a button I knew was there without wishing ill of the Software Design lead at Apple and wanting to destroy my brand new phone in a fit of righteous indignation. I know who to blame, and it isn't me.) But I also want to see Tim Cook move on as CEO as well, because the Siri-Being-Truly-Awful Problem (well documented by much smarter people than myself) is all on Cook as well. As an investor, I want to see excellence, not excuse making. I'm tired of some of the higher-ups at Apple being oblivious to the backsliding in Apple's software quality, and Siri being 5-10 years behind, for like 15 years now.

This is not about aesthetics or disagreeing about taste. This is about making great software objectively worse and not being able to tell the difference. Multiply my five minutes of frustration by a million or billion users, and you get quite a lot of pointless, but real suffering, with only a few people to blame. Alan Dye, good riddance. And Tim Cook, you have done a lot of great things for Apple—thank you for your service—but the era of you holding back Apple's products, with your lack of taste, has come to an end.