Louie Mantia on The Talk Show

August 3, 2025

The latest episode of John Gruber’s The Talk Show was really cathartic. Gruber is joined by Louie Mantia, and they discuss the current state of Apple’s design leadership… among many other things. The episode is over three hours long, but I really enjoyed the whole thing. If you want to skip to the design leadership stuff, it starts at 1:40:10 (yes, 1 hour and forty minutes in).

Mantia has written several posts about the direction that Apple’s UI design has taken in the recent past. The one that resonated most with me was I’ve Got Better Things To Do Than This, and Yet, which I was still thinking about when iOS beta 3 hit.

The more distant we are from WWDC (and those pieces of glass being shuffled around on a table), the more I’ve soured on the design of Apple’s version 26 OSs. Extra especially on macOS. At its best, the liquid glass material looks very nice, but it’s often just making things harder to read. Add to that, almost all of the other underlying changes make Apple’s devices worse to use. Louie and John do a great job exploring why.

At one point in the discussion, Gruber tells a story about an in-person meeting with Alan Dye, Apple’s VP of Human Interface Design. When asked about how the watch hands cast shadows when rendered in watchOS, Dye didn’t know they cast shadows. Design at this level is all about the details, and I don’t think details are Dye’s strong suit.

Maybe those in leadership roles at Apple should give serious consideration to Gruber’s Caffè Macs idea.