Will Apple's Tacky Software-Design Philosophy Cause A Revolt?
By now it's almost inevitable given the company's track record: No matter what Apple unveils tomorrow at the Yerba Buena Center (an iPad Mini? iPhone 5?), pundits will herald the company for its innovative thinking and bold hardware design.
Context & Ripple Effects
This critique lands on the eve of Apple's confirmed Wednesday event at Yerba Buena Center, where an iPhone 5 unveiling is expected and an iPad Mini is rumored — meaning the design argument is running directly against the tide of punditry the piece predicts will hail Apple's hardware. It also rhymes with older skepticism in the corpus: Business Week asked how Apple could mess up again back in January 2006, and VentureBeat argued a March 2012 press conference showed the brand unraveling, so 'Apple loses its way' is a recurring genre this piece reopens on the software side.
What makes it travel is timing and breadth: the same-day pickup by Forbes, Business Insider, MacRumors, iMore, AppleInsider, OSNews, Branch and designer Sacha Greif shows the skeuomorphism-and-taste debate escaping design blogs into mainstream Apple coverage, just as confirmed changes like pulling the preinstalled YouTube app from iOS 6 give critics concrete evidence that Apple's software choices are in flux.
First-order effects
- Apple takes the stage tomorrow facing a split narrative: hardware praise is near-certain per the piece's own framing, while its software-design direction — already visible in iOS 6 dropping the built-in YouTube app — becomes the contested ground.
- Google is pushed into shipping a standalone YouTube app for iOS, a direct consequence of Apple's removal decision that hands a rival control over a marquee experience on Apple's own platform.
Second-order effects
- Design commentators and Apple-focused outlets now have a standing frame — taste versus function — to apply to every iOS release, raising the reputational cost of each interface choice Apple makes at precisely the moment a rumored record upgrade cycle would amplify whatever ships.
- Rivals reading the same coverage get an opening to differentiate on usability rather than spec sheets, the way Samsung's patent-loss position makes design language itself the legal and marketing battleground after Apple's completed lawsuit victory.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, interface aesthetics stop being a follower of hardware and become the primary axis on which Apple's brand is judged — the 'fashionized computing' critique hardening into a structural tension between style-led design and long-term usability trust.
- A sustained design backlash would pressure Apple to formalize a new visual language for iOS, since the current one is increasingly defended by incumbency rather than consensus among the design press covering it.
The trend: Consumer computing is splitting between fashion-first interface design and usability-driven criticism, with Apple's post-PC software choices as the flashpoint.