Some thoughts after reading this great blog post from Columbia’s Stats blog:

Where we are today, Large Language Models (LLMs) have become skilled at mimicking human intuition— taking into consideration all of the individual’s (well, the LLM’s scraping of the internet, in this case) experiences and perceptions and providing heuristic responses to prompts.

What’s really exiting is as we move out of the nascent phase of LLM AI we can now attempt to recreate the higher level of human cognition: reasoning. The question now is which LLM AI product will be the one to realize that a large investment in bringing in psychologists will help them reach that goal first?

Whoever approved this as a solution should be fired, but I think MURAL is basically a Microsoft property by now meaning they’ll probably be promoted instead.

Though really, why does MURAL even exist when you can just use FigJam?

“Hey what symbol should we use to show a track is popular?”

“How about the universally accepted symbol for ‘New’ in a list view?”

“Perfect. And what should the user interaction be when you hover over it?”

“I dunno, how about the Favorite functionality?”

“Sounds good to me! Ship it!”

What the fuck

It’s even more offensive considering they already use “🔥 Trending” in the Maps app to show when a POI is being frequently viewed.

The Slack redesign team didn’t account for me.

Considering how good iOS’s image-to-text processing is (especially compared to competitors), Apple Maps should be able to convert menus into standardized POI metadata.

• For those that require assistive devices to read a menu, they could just load the restaurant POI
• Keeps users who are interested in delivery in the Apple Maps app longer, since they don’t need to jump immediately to DoorDash to check the menu if a restaurant looks good
  • Eventually you should be able to order (via applet) directly from the Apple Maps POI card
• Assuming it’s easy for a restaurant owner to upload the menu, it incentivizes businesses to engage with / update Apple Maps content

“You know when you…”, the start to many a good design metaphor.

It’s always sobering to accidentally leave an adblocker off and visit a couple websites. They really are trying to cram ads into any available whitespace.

Updated the home page with a fun new simulation 🙂

Addendum: I thought about this a bit more, and while I still agree with my original sentiments, I figured I’d expand my thinking slightly. But, yes, I think the event was 100% “this could have been an email” territory.

The iPhone and Apple Watch incremental updates absolutely should have been a Newsroom press release.
Sending out announcements and building up expectations only to not deliver to those expectations erodes the positive sentiment people have generated towards Apple announcement events. If you do that too many times, nobody will take them seriously anymore.

The carbon neutral achievements are impressive, but they would have been better utilized in an ad campaign.
Average consumers don’t watch these keynotes. Sure, they get trickle-down information of what Apple released eventually, but you know what people do pay attention to? Apple ads. They have a very distinct style and are (almost) always effective at communicating the benefits of Apple product releases. If anything, having an ad campaign that Apple have revamped the materials of most of their accessories is compelling to get people into stores simple to see (and more importantly) touch the new materials.

Today’s Apple event might have been the first time I didn’t actively watch or follow the updates. When I went back to check what had been announced, I saw that there was nothing of particular significance. This felt like such a non-event that it made me genuinely wonder what these teams have been doing for an entire year.

Perhaps the iPhone is soon reaching the same point MacBook Pros did a few years ago, where a complete overhaul saved the line from being the joke had it become.

So hear me out:

You’d end up with something like this:

I’m actually surprised I haven’t already seen this yet:

• In apartment buildings your garage is often far from your front door
• These wagons have become incredibly popular for this reason, and they’re honestly a great solution for large shopping trips
• In many cars there is usually already a space under the floor of the trunk for a spare tire, with some reconfiguration a tunnel could fit to hold the collapsed wagon