Has the apple fallen too far from the tree?

Just another post about the Glowtime event that seems to have polarised designers and professionals and almost about everyone.

As designers with about a decade, we have been brought up on case studies, article and pages upon pages across books with the words Apple, Design, innovation, Steve Jobs, consumer, marketing etc. entwined in beautiful ways.

I also remember my early years as a starry eyed kid, waiting for relatives to ferry burnished new iPods, iPhones and MacBooks back to India.

The 'Design Gap' was more of a gaping chasm when I looked at my father’s corporate flip-phone or the mean Thinkpad with the red trackball (which moonlighted as a mean machine for our prized GTA vice city).

Cut to 2022, and ominous whispers of migrating to other tech-laden bendable ecosystems began surfacing in my family. I refuted my father and my brother with emotional callbacks of the beloved iPhone 6 they had revered for years and somehow kept them faithful to suit my ‘designer ego’ for over 2 years.

And then a day ago…instead of glowing with relief leave alone joy, I slept through the launch event. Before you come at me, I did notice the innovation and advances here and there but nothing that could keep my tech-neck propped brain engaged.

I too joined the fickle crowd in equivocation of the apple falling far from Design.

However with some retrospection, I realised how I’ve proudly pitched to my C-suites that the truest form of design is in it not being felt across as waves and ripples of change but rather in imperceptible ways of making things incrementally easier, smarter, intuitive.

Playing the devil’s advocate, when you know you have reached the stage of design maturity, speculative design or radical design is maybe not their next move. You could add smaller stacks of usability and experience to something that people love rather than feature loading like the rest of the world. And so you might choose to utilise the existing products and services to make life better for some more people or blend existing services into a unified experience. But then, tech plateaus are short lived in this AI world.

And so I stand, as a fickle user ready to face the kidney jokes and hear the rants of switching ecosystems on our family Facetimes. I would love to hear everyones thoughts on how you stand because after all we live in a polarised world with no apparent middle paths.?