A lot of confident guesswork is done at HN regarding companies' motivations.
I'm confused here. What do you think is the relationship between round icons and eye tracking?
I remember reading it in the HIG when VisionOS came out and everyone was complaining about the shape. I went looking to see if there was a reason, and there was.
> In general, give an interactive item a rounded shape. People’s eyes tend to be drawn toward the corners in a shape, making it difficult to keep looking at the shape’s center. The more rounded an item’s shape, the easier it is for people to use their eyes to target it.
The page also talks about leaving enough visual space between elements as well as many other considerations for this type of interface.
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
I think things are fine on iOS. I don’t mind the rectangles, they fit the grid. That’s how it’s always been.
I don’t care about VisionOS. Circles are odd, whatever.
But the Mac shouldn’t be forced to lose great design because iOS was under different constraints almost 20 years ago. That’s just dumb.
I don't like it, but I believe that's the reason why.
Sure it’s more consistent, but at what cost? You lose all the benefits. It’s like Chesterton’s Fence, except it has a big sign on it saying “beware of bull” and there is a guy nearby saying “you don’t want to let that bull out dude, it’s vicious”.
But you want to take down the fence because it’s not the same style as the one on the pen for the chickens.
The foundation may share resources, but everything else was tailor made. And that is what used to make Apple so good.
The moment you try to make one size fits all you will start to make compromise. And the good old Apple would try to do things the hard way rather than making unnecessary compromises.
It is sad.
Since the eyes are the cursor, this is a problem. Desktop and mobile don’t have this issue.
And Apple decided this was a problem with icons, rather than a problem with the way they implemented their vision tracking? Believable, and laughable.
What a waste of resource to invent the whole Tahoe "design language" only for nothing.
When trying to create a new category, customers need to have some faith it’s going to stick around and they won’t be abandoned. So it’s important to have that long term vision and conviction that the decisions made were the right ones.
That said, I bought the M5 Vision Pro and returned it after a week. It doesn’t feel like a product yet. Vision Pro as a future product might be questionable, but will they abandon spacial computing all together or switch to more of a true AR setup? I think real AR would be much better.
I think now that Cook is stepping down, we could see more change. Cooked seemed a little desperate to make sure Apple looked like an innovative company, when he clearly wasn’t a product guy. I don’t think a a full computer is needed on the face, that was the first mistake, they need a more purpose built device for the few things that make sense in the context of a HUD.