I have never liked the Apple ecosystem, mostly due to its intolerable lack of customisation (please, let me disable all animations!), but I always had to grant it one real advantage. Unfortunately, it seems like over the last decade or so, they’ve been steadily burning it.

The advantage was that as a developer, you could basically assume that everyone was on the same hardware.

While Android and web devs had to test their work on a matrix of different screen sizes, UI scales, accessibility settings and input methods, an Apple developer had the iPhone, the Macbook, and (occasionally) the iPad. That was basically it.

It’s the difference between a tailor who sews for three clients whose measurements he knows by heart, and a factory cutting ready-to-wear from XS to XXL. The factory jacket fits everyone tolerably, sometimes with some amount of jank, but the tailor fits one person perfectly, and the “Apple feel” people were happy to pay for was mostly the perfect fit.

Now there are multiple mainline iPhone screen sizes, and the new Duo with its own special UI design considerations. On top of that, some Macbooks will ship with a touchscreen, so every Mac app has to know whether it’s being clicked or poked.

Apple hardware is still really nice, but I expect the explosion of screen sizes to be a usability disaster, at least for a few years. A good part of what we call craft is simply what a narrow problem lets you do well, and Apple developers are about to find out how much of their polish was skill and how much was the size of the matrix.

Speaking as someone who has written for the browser for over a decade, I can’t say I’m entirely sorry.