Why macOS Tahoe Makes Me Want to Scream Now (And Why Apple’s Chief Designer Finally Left Under Pressure)
When the person leading your OS design doesn’t understand interface fundamentals, you get Liquid Glass: pretty, slow, and professionally useless.
I’ve been wanting to write this for a while. I wanted to talk about Liquid Glass, and today we’re going to discuss it from a different angle.
We’re not just going to talk about Liquid Glass aesthetics, though we’ll touch on that. We’re going to discuss the real reasons behind the departure of Apple’s head designer and what it reveals about the company’s design crisis.
Consider this article as the next episode of the previous article below. I encourage anyone to read it to understand the context of this article.
Apple Just Fired the Designer Who Made iOS 26 Unreadable. Here’s What Truly Happened.
Now he’s going to Meta, Stephen Lemay is taking over, and Apple employees are publicly celebrating. Here’s the full…medium.com
The Departure Everyone Celebrated
Alan Dye left Apple in late 2025, one of many executives who abandoned ship during a mass exodus from the company. He was Apple’s Chief Design Officer, theoretically the equivalent of Jony Ive.
But not really. Unlike Alan Dye, Jony Ive was respected.
Ive was a trained designer, a multifunctional talent who could work on product packaging, hardware design, and, toward the end of his Apple career, user interfaces. He understood the full spectrum of design challenges Apple faced.
Alan Dye? Not so much.
Here’s what nobody outside Apple wants to admit: Alan Dye was unqualified for the role he held. And his tenure as Chief Design Officer resulted in some of the worst design decisions Apple has made in years.
Let me explain why.
A Brief History of Apple’s Interface Design
To understand why Dye’s departure matters, you need to understand Apple’s design DNA.
Apple brought graphical user interfaces to the mass market before Windows, before everyone. The Macintosh introduced the mouse, pointer, windows you could move, close, and minimize. This entire interface paradigm that seems so obvious now? Steve Jobs brought it to life with the Macintosh.
They refined it further at NeXT. When NeXT was acquired by Apple, macOS essentially became a continuation of NeXTSTEP. You are now privy to that knowledge. macOS X’s origins trace back to NeXTSTEP, which was built upon the Macintosh and Lisa systems.
This history matters because it represents decades of accumulated interface design knowledge. Understanding window management, spatial relationships, and user interaction patterns isn’t something you pick up by designing packaging.
And that’s exactly where Alan Dye came from: packaging.
Alan Dye joined Apple around the iPhone 6 era to work specifically on iPhone packaging. That’s it. Packaging design. A very particular, very specific job that has essentially nothing to do with software, operating systems, or user interface design.
When Jony Ive left Apple, the company turned to Dye to oversee macOS, iOS, and the entire software design suite.
This decision was not well-received internally. Many Apple designers were shocked that someone without deep historical knowledge of Apple’s interface development, someone who didn’t speak the technical language of UI/UX design, would be given such responsibility.
Dye was oriented toward aesthetics, packaging, something very material and tactile. An extremely important skill, but incompatible with being a UX Designer or UI Designer like Scott Forstall or the person who would eventually replace Dye: Stephen Lemay.
Lemay is an Apple veteran who worked with Steve Jobs, who has been there since the beginning, and who holds many patents for iPhone, iPad, and macOS. He’s a real designer who understands user interface and interaction design.
Dye was focused on looks, aesthetics, surface appearance, not the technical interaction itself.
The Difference Between Beautiful and Usable
Here’s something crucial to understand: making something easy to use doesn’t mean it’s beautiful. And vice versa, something beautiful isn’t necessarily easy to use.
