Back to the Future

Apple's announcement at the WWDC in June that they were finally ditching OSX and moving to macOS 11 is, on the face of it, a trivial piece of news, but it is more than just a change of version number and a cosmetic upgrade. It augers significant change in the direction the company's computing division will be taking in the foreseeable future.

    Apple's intention is to both ditch it's current Intel processors in favour of ARM-made chips, bringing their laptops and desktop machines into line with the iPad and the iPhone lines and, more significantly to ultimately conflate the user experiences from both platforms. This is potentially the most radical shift in Apple's thinking since they brought the now ubiquitous desktop and pointer environment to the public with the original Macintosh in 1984.

    Back in those days, Jef Raskin's design completely turned the idea of a personal computer, as they were called, on it's head and Steve Jobs' vision for it was computer-as-domestic-appliance; something that gradually faded into the background during Jobs' wilderness years outside of apple.

    While the purity and consistency of Apple's original interface design remained pretty much untouched save for cosmetics, their computers were still pretty much that: computers, with a necessary learning-curve and still harbouring some idiosyncrasies in the way that individual application GUI's were allowed to work - a world away from the basket-case that was Windows, but far from the perfect vision originally conceived by Raskin and Jobs.

    The iOS-based tablets and phones arrived pretty much out of nowhere in much the same way as the original Macintosh, changing the way we use and consume computer technology forever with an almost learning-curve-free interface: most people could pick up the first iPads and start using them within a couple of minutes. The iPhone similarly created the modern smartphone idiom, with all others following Apple's lead to this day - changes tend to be hardware, cosmetics and services. The paradigm is holding for now.

    Where Apple goes with the upcoming platform/OS conflation is difficult to spot - it could either further open up developer possibilities for iOS or it could even close down the same for macOS devs, although I doubt they'll go down that route - there are too many design and music pros in what is still a lucrative and prestigious market segment. The Mac Pro and it's high-end laptops are still consistently flagship designs and always capable of generating good copy in the industry press - especially as there is little more to be said about phones and tablets that excites.

    And that is the Jobs paradox - design a device that is transparent to use, beautiful and utilitarian: it should be a complete end in itself, resolved and final. One could argue that the Braun-manufactured designs of Dieter Rams in many instances - I'm thinking in particular of his iconic pocket calculator - were definitive in the purest sense of the word - the interface had achieved it's apogee and any change would no longer improve it. A true Classic. Design not Fashion. As beautiful as Apple's product design still is, it hasn't yet produced anything close to Ram's calculator since the original Macintosh and even that has aged in a way that the Braun calculator never will.