Apple convinced an entire generation that computers could be beautiful. Then they shipped Notes.

What happened to the company that obsessed over the curve of an icon, the weight of a font, the perfect spacing between elements? Apple Notes, in its present visual form, exists as evidence that even Apple has forgotten why design matters.

The Core Principle We Lost

Steve Jobs didn't just want functional products—he wanted products that felt inevitable. Every placement and design feature served a functional and aesthetic purpose. Every interaction felt natural. Beauty wasn't applied decoration; it was the manifestation of refined function.

This philosophy died somewhere. We traded soul for efficiency, craft for scalability, beauty for mere usability.

Notes: Apple's Aesthetic Surrender

Apple Notes works. It syncs across devices. It has search. It does everything a notes app should do. But, it now feels like software produced rather than designed.

Compare Notes to the original iPhone's interface—the app that made skeuomorphism feel magical before flat design flattened everything into corporate sterility. Notes now feels as if it has no personality, only functional purpose, but no reason to make you want to open it apart from the need to find brain dumped information.

Let me be more specific about what's wrong with Apple Notes. Open the app right now and examine it critically. Every piece of text appears in the same bland, uniform typeface whether you're writing a grocery list or drafting an important document. The interface itself is a study in sterile efficiency: incongruous off white backgrounds, messy navigation, and poor methods of structuring different notes. Obsidian has a novel approach, arguably better.

Notes treats all thoughts as equally mundane entries in a simple list, which reflects Apple's broader retreat from design leadership to functional adequacy. It is an uninspiring interface overlayed on great function. Not, as it should be, delightful interaction with great function.

This is functional software, not beautifully functional software. Apple used to know the difference.

The Notion Alternative: Power Through Complexity

Whilst Apple may have abandoned elegant note-taking, the market responded somewhat with Notion; a supposed "Swiss Army" knife of productivity, but one that mistakes complexity for capability. It has not filled the vacuum.

Notion asks users to become database administrators of their own thoughts. Every page requires architectural decisions. Every note becomes a project in configuration management. The cognitive overhead overwhelms the cognitive purpose of those not technically or programmatically minded.

Notion succeeded because it offered power when Apple offered only banality. But power without elegance is just elaborate suffering.

The Template Industrial Complex

Notion's template marketplace reveals everything wrong with modern productivity culture. Instead of tools that adapt to how you think, we get tools that force you to think like everyone else.

Templates are the antithesis of Apple's original vision. Jobs would have been appalled by software that requires instruction manuals for basic note-taking.

What We Actually Need

Consumer software should feel consumer-grade, delightful, intuitive, worth paying for because it makes your life demonstrably better.

Enterprise software optimizes for features. Consumer software optimizes for feelings. Apple used to understand this distinction religiously.

The best consumer apps make you want to use them. They respect your time, your intelligence, and your aesthetic sense. They don't make you choose between beauty and functionality.

The Missing Category

We're left with a false choice: Apple's beautiful-but-basic apps or complex productivity monsters that require engineering degrees to configure.

Where is the software that respects both your intelligence and your aesthetic sense? Where are the apps that make personal computing feel personal again?

The market gap is obvious. Apple Notes is too simple. Notion is too complex. The middle ground—powerful yet beautiful, flexible yet intuitive—remains largely unexplored.

Fighting the Vacuum: An Independent Response

Those of us who still believe aesthetics should be integral to computing don't have Apple's billions or Notion's venture capital. We have something else: the conviction that beautiful software matters.

I built NoteSub as a partial response to this design vacuum. Something designed for people who believe their thoughts deserve better.

But it is a small attempt to prove that individual developers can still create software that honours Apple's original vision, even when Apple has abandoned it themselves. I do not think I have mastered even my own criticism, however.

Looking Forward: The Return of Craft

A new generation of developers is rediscovering that craft matters. That users deserve better than startup chaos with false momentum. Sometimes beauty is not vanity it is a necessity.

The next breakthrough in personal computing won't come from adding more features. It will come from rediscovering why we fell in love with computers in the first place, actually to be specific, why we fell in love with the iPhone's interpretation of a personal computer. But, it will come in the form of software. Hardware is done, for now.

Your Thoughts?

Do you remember when software felt magical? What happened to apps that made you excited to use them? Are we settling for "good enough" when we deserve "impossibly great"?

When did functional become the enemy of beautiful? `