Veteran Apple expert and commentator Jason Snell asked of me the question that’s the title of this post. This was after I (playfully) responded to his thoughts about Apple working on a “new, consistent design” with an XKCD klaxon jibe.

The actual answer to the question, in true Betteridge’s Law fashion, is no. But really: it’s complicated. 

In the full Mastodon thread, Snell suggested we should praise optimism over negativity, and called the latter “no way to live”. Similar sentiments about Apple have recently been expressed by Federico Viticci and David Smith. And, despite my often cynical and curmudgeonly demeanour, I think there’s value in that way of thinking. Being relentlessly negative is no fun.

But.

I’m not keen on recent trends that suggest where Apple might head, hiding or removing yet more UI, including iPhone app tabs and iPad app sidebars. More importantly, every single major Apple redesign – even more so than ‘standard’ annual OS updates – results in a slew of vestibular accessibility issues that slip through the net.

I’m not sure why this is the case. And, to be fair, Apple’s iOS team has been very responsive ever since the iOS 7 days. Multiple requests that I’ve made have been rolled into iOS, which remains far ahead of Apple’s other operating systems in terms of usability for people who have vestibular conditions. (Stern glare @ tvOS team…)

Even so, more proactive support would be welcome. And so, returning to the question posed at the start, I’m not afraid of a major iOS redesign per se, but I am concerned that it will render my devices unusable for weeks or even months until fixes are made. If that’s primarily for a coat of fresh paint, that will be particularly dispiriting.

Writer Matt Gemmell decided eight years ago to go all-in on iPad. Now, he’s switched back to the Mac. This should set alarm bells ringing on Apple’s iPad team, but I imagine Apple as a whole won’t really be fussed. After all, Matt simply swapped one Apple product for another. And he’s keeping the iPad. If anything, this is a victory for Apple and precisely what it wants people to do.

In his post, Matt notes part of the problem with the iPad is that it’s never been strongly defined. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, it was positioned somewhere between a phone and a laptop. Since then, users have argued for it to take over the capabilities of both devices – but especially the latter. However, while the iPad has the power of Apple’s ‘proper’ computers, it lacks the flexibility and, in some cases, utility. All of which is by design.

What some people tend to forget is that Apple is very opinionated on wanting people to buy (at least one) Mac alongside any Apple mobile devices. It’s my ongoing belief that arbitrary barriers have therefore been – at best – left in place for that purpose. Friction exists in part not because Apple cannot find a solution that works on a tablet, but because Apple wants more of your money, and it gets that through hardware sales.

Right now, any current-gen iPhone is more than powerful enough to run the vast majority of software the average person would want to use. And more. Mine happily runs Korg Gadget projects with an absurd number of tracks. But Apple absolutely does not want your iPhone to become the one device to rule them all. It hates the idea of you getting home and plugging your iPhone into a dock, and using it with a keyboard, display and pointing device. Because then you’d only buy one thousand-buck device, rather than two – or several. The iPad isn’t quite in the same space. After all, Apple is quite happy about selling iPad keyboards that cost as much as entry-level iPads. But it would still prefer for you to own an iPad and a Mac. And an iPhone. And maybe a second Mac. And so on.

I’ve struggled with the same issues as Matt. I for a time really wanted an iPad to become more. I love using the device. But I stuck with an iMac for the day job, primarily due to iPad frictions relating to external display support. Even when Stage Manager arrived, it was far, far too slow and clunky to replace my Mac set-up. My iPad subsequently largely turned into a combination of comics reader and sofa-based music-creation sketchpad, with the odd smattering of video and games. One holiday, I took only the iPad and found myself frustrated by how much longer key tasks took when I was trying to work at speed, in order to enjoy more of my spare time.

From a personal standpoint, things have changed a little since last September, in terms of my iPad usage. Although that’s not really been down to the iPad itself. There’s something very off for me about the iPhone 16 Pro. I’m reasonably certain I cannot use it for any extended length of time without getting dizzy. Despite my issues with vestibular triggers, I’ve never had this with any other Apple display when a device has Reduce Motion active. Perhaps something has changed with the display and PWM. I don’t know. But this does mean my iPad is now doing more work again, in being the device I read on at breakfast or noodle around on of an evening. Notably, though, the iPad is still not being used more for work. And I’m not sure that will ever change.

In 2013, I wrote a piece for The Guardian about iOS 7 causing motion sickness. This followed under-the-radar pieces about how animations could cause nausea and other symptoms in users. Fortunately, The Guardian piece got a lot of eyeballs on it, including – I was informed at the time – sufficiently senior people at Apple.

I remain deeply grateful to the iOS team in particular for subsequently taking vestibular accessibility seriously. The majority of issues I’ve flagged over the years have been acted upon. I vividly remember getting a wonderful surprise on the sole WWDC I was flown out to, on attending a developer session on accessibility and seeing someone on stage proudly noting that slide transitions in menus had been added to Reduce Motion. That was one of my last major issues on the platform, which I’d been bugging the iOS team about fixing. And, yes, reader, I may have welled up a bit.

But what I find disappointing is that, all these years after that Guardian piece broke, vestibular accessibility remains reactive rather than proactive. Nothing illustrates that better than Apple breaking Reduce Motion in Safari of all apps. When Reduce Motion is on, the zooms in the tab view should be replaced by crossfades. They were for a long time. But that went away in iOS 18. I dutifully mentioned this to Apple. It looks like this might be fixed in iOS 18.2. But the problem should never have come back in the first place – and it wouldn’t have if there was even the most rudimentary of testing by someone with Reduce Motion active.

Again, Apple’s iOS team has been the best of them, so I don’t want to slam its efforts. Other teams at Apple have been less responsive. And outside of Apple, my requests to help people with vestibular disorders have mostly been met with responses ranging from indifference to outright hostility. Fortunately, there are a few who do things right. I sent feedback to one major brand this year and received a call the very next day, asking how it could put things right. A month or so later, the app just worked. The animations had gone. But that’s rare. And it’s even rarer that this stuff is baked in from day one. It really shouldn’t be.

Australian Financial Review yesterday got the scoop that Canva had eaten Serif. Today, the news was confirmed. Wisely, Serif’s CEO then attempted to reassure the community that all was good, actually.

Although the press has in recent years often positioned Serif as a kind of scrappy underdog newcomer, the company has a long history. It was founded in 1987, which makes it only five years younger than Adobe. Most of its recent history has been tied up in becoming a direct competitor to Adobe – and also a direct competitor to Adobe’s business model. Through its Affinity suite, Serif offered an alternative: buy-once apps rather than subscriptions. And although I can’t imagine Serif makes anything other than a minority of its sales on iPad, the company’s superb Affinity apps for Apple’s tablet – compared to Adobe’s comparatively stumbling efforts – haven’t hurt the company’s reputation any.

Which brings us to today’s announcement. Canva now owns Serif. According to Serif’s CEO, not much will change. He claims Canva is a kindred spirit – that Canva and Serif have complementary products, hence the buyout making sense. He says the Affinity brand will continue, the apps will be developed by the same British team, and that no changes to the pricing model are planned “at this time”. But then he would say that, wouldn’t he?

I very much hope this British success story doesn’t get crushed under the weight of a comparative giant. Canva imposing its will on opinionated software with a business model that people love would be a big risk. While Affinity users might love the interface and feature set, a large number of them were drawn – and remain loyal – to the product primarily because of the business model. That’s where much of the goodwill lies. Any switch to a subscription could fatally damage the brand. I suspect Adobe would be quick to counter by unveiling a ‘designer’ Creative Cloud tier comprising Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign that just happened to be priced competitively, in an attempt to win people back.

Version 3 of the Affinity suite will probably be the moment we’ll know. You can already picture a press release stating that Canva has made the “difficult decision” to move Affinity apps to subscriptions, and a “hard choice” to move development from Nottingham to Canva HQ in Australia. I hope this won’t be the case, but we’ve seen this scenario play out so many times before. We’ll find out for sure one way or another within a year or two, and I do hope that in the same way Affinity bucked the trend with modern software, Serif bucks the trend when it comes to modern buyouts.

Apple’s being walloped by regulators, and it’s increasingly clear most of the tech press doesn’t understand antitrust. Fortunately, Ian Betteridge does, so go and read his blog.

My take, honestly, is all this just makes me feel a bit sad. I like a lot of what Apple does. Even if I didn’t write about Apple, I’d have an iMac, an Apple TV or two, an iPhone, and an iPad. But Apple as it grows (and is expected by the markets to continue doing so) has overreached in some cases, and enacted dark patterns elsewhere.

I imagine a lot of people are rushing to defend Apple by default because, in part, they remember when the company nearly winked out of existence. Others, perhaps, because the company does objectively do an awful lot of things really well, and seems to care more than most rivals about what matters. But that doesn’t excuse the bad stuff, nor that in some cases Apple has decided it’s OK to just be ‘least bad’. That isn’t good enough.

I don’t want an MLS nav item forced on me in Apple TV. I want to install Retroarch on my iPhone. I don’t want ads in the App Store trying to trick me into installing something other than what I searched for. And I don’t want devs of apps I love to partake in a lottery with every single update they file. Small things, of course, but all of these little pieces – from millions and millions of users, businesses and creators – add up.

If nothing else, what happens next will be interesting. But mostly, I hope it will be beneficial, leading to a better future for consumers and Apple alike, even if the Apple that emerges is in key ways different from the one we have today.