I've been thinking about this line from a video essay about Victorian London. Sheehan Quirke stands on the Thames embankment, pointing at two lampposts. One is a typical modern fixture; functional, unremarkable, doing its job and nothing else. The other, from the 1870s, features ornate dolphins and decorative flourishes, cast iron shaped into something that suggests its makers believed even street furniture deserved consideration.
The argument is familiar: we've lost something. We used to care about ordinary beauty, and now we don't. But what struck me wasn't the nostalgia. It was the specific claim about what these objects reveal. The Victorians, he argues, saw no contradiction between startling modernity and time-honored tradition. Those lampposts were among the first public electric lighting in the world; the iPhone of their era. Crowds gathered to watch them light up. And yet they were decorated.
We don't associate decoration with cutting-edge technology. That association tells us something. There's a blog post making rounds about macOS Tahoe's window resizing. The complaint is specific: the aggressively rounded corners on windows now make it difficult to grab the resize handle. As Norbert Heger puts it:
Living on this planet for quite a few decades, I have learned that it rarely works to grab things if you don't actually touch them.
This is a small frustration. It will be patched, probably. But it's symptomatic of something larger; a design philosophy where the visual impression takes precedence over the mechanical reality. The window looks softer, friendlier, more approachable. It is also, in a small but measurable way, harder to use.
I don't think this is Apple's fault specifically. It's a tendency that has spread through software design like an airborne pathogen. Flat design eliminated the visual affordances that made buttons look clickable. Glassy UIs prioritize aesthetics over contrast. Micro-interactions add delight but break keyboard navigation. The same companies that once shipped interfaces where every element communicated its function now ship interfaces where you have to hover over things to discover what they do. Charles and Ray Eames had a famous design philosophy:
We want to make the best, for the most, for the least.
This sounds like a efficiency mantra, but it contains a hidden assumption. The Eameses believed that good design was not a luxury good. Their bent plywood chairs, their molded fiberglass shells, their experiments with new materials. All of it was aimed at democratizing access to well-made things. The work was underpinned, as one account puts it, "by a democratic instinct."
But here's what gets lost in most discussions of the Eames legacy: they were not minimalists in the modern sense. They didn't strip things down for aesthetic purity. They stripped things down until they worked, and then they stopped. The simplicity serves function, not appearance.
Jony Ive, during his years at Apple, articulated a version of this philosophy.
Simplicity is not the absence of complexity, just removing clutter would result in an uncomplicated but meaningless product. Simplicity is about bringing order to complexity.
His famous line gets quoted often, but the second half is crucial: order, not elimination. There's a passage from his introduction to Designed by Apple in California that deserves more attention:
Above all, I have come to feel sure that human beings sense care in the same way we sense carelessness. I do think we respond, maybe not consciously, to something much bigger than the object. We sense the group of people behind the products, people who do more than make something work, people who sincerely care about the smallest unseen details.
Care. Not optimization. Not delight. Care.
This is what the Victorian lampposts communicated. Someone thought about this. Someone decided that even a lamppost on a sewage embankment deserved to be considered.
We no longer think this way. Our data centers are windowless boxes. Our office parks are interchangeable. Our software interfaces prioritize metrics over meaning. This isn't a moral failing. It's a revealed preference. We have decided, collectively and implicitly, that efficiency and convenience matter more than care. The video essay puts it plainly:
Modern design tells the truth very loudly: that we are technologically superior and very efficient but also a little bit boring and unimaginative. And it says that we no longer believe in the idea of ordinary beauty or in the idea of a public that deserves ordinary beauty.
This isn't quite right, I think. We believe in beauty. We just believe it belongs in museums and galleries and premium tiers. The democratizing impulse of the Eameses—the best, for the most, for the least—has inverted. Good design is now a luxury. Ordinary things are permitted to be careless.
In 40 years of using computers, Heger writes in his macOS blog post, he never had trouble resizing a window until now.
That's the thing about infrastructure. You don't notice it until it fails. And when it fails in small ways it's easy to dismiss as nitpicking. Who cares about 19 pixels?
The Victorians would have cared. Not because they were better people, but maybe because they operated under different assumptions about what ordinary things deserved.