alt Hacker NewsApple Design Official Alan Dye Poached by Meta in Major Coup
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It is only fitting that Meta Glass becomes as opaque as iOS 26.
My initial thought was that I wanted someone like Bruce Tognazzini or Don Norman to return, but then I looked up their ages; the former is 80 and the latter is in his 90s. They’re probably enjoying their retirements.
As a long-time Mac user who has switched back to PCs for personal use but who still uses a work-issued Mac, one of my wishes for the Mac is for Apple to fully embrace the notion of the Mac being a desktop operating system and to be very cautious about adopting iOS design principles. Desktops have different use cases than mobile devices, and the UI/UX for desktops should reflect this.
It’s not that we have to return to the 1990s-era Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines; it’s almost 2026, and I’m sure there have been plenty of advances in HCI research since the 1990s. However, there’s a lot of treasure in the old UI guidelines that needs to be rediscovered by today’s software designers. It seems to me that contemporary UI design is a mess across the board, not just with Apple, but in the entire industry, affecting both proprietary and open-source software.
I want to be optimistic, but Dye was just a symptom. The rot in modern Apple design must run much deeper.
I wouldn’t associate anything Meta does with the word 'design'. Instagram’s UI changes every two months for no good reason, and now there’s a big, ugly, and completely useless 'Ask Meta AI' button in WhatsApp, right under your thumb. Maybe we’ll even get some liquid glass effects next.