If Apple can manage it, a shift to legible UI, with clearly designed hierarchies will feel like a breath of fresh air.
Similar to how Ive’s departure from industrial design lead to a trend towards more functional product design (eg thicker MacBook pros, the iPhone 17 pro, Apple Watch Ultra).
Hopefully Dye’s replacement is not just cut from the same cloth as Dye himself.
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.