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.