Thoughts on Tech News of Note - Week ending 12-05-2025

• Chief design officer Alan Dye leaves Apple for Meta
• Samsung unveils its dual-fold 10” foldable
• Micron stops selling memory to consumers; RAM is for AI now
• Netflix agrees to buy Warner Bros Studios and HBO Max

Alan Dye - Apple and Meta

I am not intimately familiar with Alan Dye; I barely remember him speaking at the last WWDC event although it seems he covered the new Liquid Glass design approach in the keynote, which I definitely watched. This may be because he didn’t make much of an impression on me or it may be because Liquid Glass didn’t make much of an impression on me, or it may be that I’m just not tightly tuned into design decisions. If I notice that design is bad, it’s undoubtedly terrible. I grew up using MS DOS and haven’t hated any particular version of Windows except maybe Windows XP, which was a little too bubbly and happy for me. I tend to like design that is understated and not overly fluffy or flamboyant. I think most design across modern operating systems is now more similar than dissimilar and most apps are now like more alike than unalike. So for me to take note of a design approach and actively hate it means it’s either really bad or it has hampered me in some way from using the product in the manner in which I would like to use it. So also, I don’t have anything to say in particular about Dye’s departure from its effect on future Apple design. I don’t hate Liquid Glass but I’m not using it on my daily driver phone. It exists for me only on my iPad Pro, which is a backup machine at best that I pull out more because I really like the Magic Keyboard than I like the tablet itself. Most of my icons are dark and the change in design hasn’t really gotten in my way. There hasn’t been a point in time where I’ve thought I couldn’t see or read something I needed to see or read. I have seen plenty of videos where people show very clearly and mainly very calmly how Liquid Glass is actively working against usability and I empathize (contrary to what some might tell you, empathy is NOT a sin nor is it weakness) with them but realistically, do not care all that much. No, what I find more interesting is that Dye left to go to Meta. Now, most people will say that money talks and I have to assume that it was probably literally yelling at him the way Zuckerburg likes to throw money at things and people he wants to use in his quest to win the internet. I just took time to ask Gemini how old Alan Dye is and it was not able to tell me. But I suspect he belongs to Gen X and while he has several more years he could work, he doesn’t necessarily need to work. And if he were driven just by money he probably could have left before now to do a variety of things tied to making more money. It may be that if he was as despised internally by other designers as John Gruber says he is/was, then this could be the right time to leave, and money may have been the icing on the cake. But Gruber also said that Dye was safe in his spot and his departure was unexpected, so unless he was truly unhappy living with that resentment (and I have observed over the years that most powerful men do not care who resents them if they are at or below them on the paygrade ladder), it also seems like an odd time to leave a place that has so much more prestige and gravitas in the tech world. It is rather beloved, at least in comparison to Meta. But people with power like power and often want more of it. If Zuckerburg pitched not only the right amount of money, but also the right amount of more apparent power, that could outweigh the prestige of being chief interface officer (or whatever his title was) at Apple vs. being chief design officer at a company most people actively hate even if they continue using its products. The bigger question to me is Zuckerburg’s angle on this move. Does he actually appreciate Dye’s design aesthetic and want him to replicate it at Meta, or does he believe the halo of having been chief design guy at Apple will lend some extra light to design at Meta just by gracing them with his presence? If you are a regular person, most of whom don’t have strong feelings about Liquid Glass one way or another, then if you learn that the new design stuff that comes out of Meta is the result of Meta having hired an Apple guy, you might have warmer feelings toward that design due to your warmer feelings for most things Apple. But, at the same time, most people aren’t clued into these power moves. Unless Zuckerburg goes way out of his way to make this known to people, no one will know or care. And for those same regular people, design changes are typically more annoying than beneficial, especially at first, because that button or menu isn’t in the same place anymore and now you have to learn to which unfamiliar places all the familiar things went. It would seem to me that Meta will now need to overhaul its interfaces to justify the expense of hiring a new interface guy. That might not actually work out in their favor, most especially since it does not seem that Dye is even a good interface guy. My guess is that this is an expense Zuckerburg will end up writing off as a loss, even if not in a balance sheet sense.

Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold

I first bought into the Samsung foldable world with the Z Fold 3, which I still have and is semi-permanently attached to a 24” 4K monitor due to the usefulness of Samsung DeX. It is my Ring monitor and Mastodon dashboard. My last foldable was the Z Fold 5, which I traded in for the S25 Ultra after I learned that the Z Fold 7 (see, I was buying on the odd years) would not have stylus support. The Z Fold 3 still lives in its case with the pen holder and the Z Fold 5 also lived in its case with the pen slot on the rear before I removed it for the last time. I hadn’t had a Samsung phone without pen support since the S3. I started out with the original Note and just kept going. So for me, the Z TriFold is a non-starter as it does not seem to have any kind of pen support. This is really a tragedy as far as I’m concerned. To have a nice large screen on which you can’t draw or take notes is a bit of a waste. I have had the Note and S Tabs with pen support for as long as Samsung has been making them. Apple reinforced the benefits of pen support when they came out with the Apple pencil. I have no idea why Samsung seems so determined to slowly walk away from this feature. Perhaps it’s not as popular in South Korea as it used to be? For me, the benefits of having my phone also be my tablet aren’t quite as appealing if I can’t use the tablet the way I tend to use my tablets. I either use them in their keyboard cases like the M1 iPad Pro I own, which almost never leaves its Magic Keyboard, or I use them with a stylus for both navigation and note-taking. I even buy Windows machines that are pen-enabled and have given up on buying regular laptops, even if this means I end up stuck with 2-in-1 tablets in the Surface or my newest fascination, my ASUS ROG Flow Z13. Even if I could use the pen only on the front screen that would be enough for me to consider it, were the price not a much larger obstacle for me to overcome. I do not want to pay more for my phone than what I paid for my Z13. I’ll just keep carrying around my S25 Ultra and a tablet, thank you very much. My biggest real complaint about the TriFold is that it doesn’t seem to be quite as versatile as the Huawei foldable, which can fold out to look like a Z Fold but then open up again to be a full-size tablet. I like that approach better even though I understand Samsung wanted to keep the soft inner screen protected. I damaged the screen on my Z Fold 3 within a few weeks of getting it, so I understand very well how fragile those screens are. Nevertheless, that extra usage posture (as those in the industry say, right?) would make the phone more useful to me. I’m one of those oddballs that used my foldables open almost all of the time. I rarely used the front screen. So for me, having the extra front screen isn’t a huge pro. If I had the Huawei, I would probably use it 2/3 open more often than not. After all, I bought the big phone because I wanted the big screen. I want to use the big screen, but at the same time it is not always cool to whip out a 10” screen. That’s just big enough to be unwieldy in many situations, especially on the go. On the go, I mainly want the 2/3 size and maybe just 1/3 if I’m simply checking a notification. I want more options, not fewer.

Micron Shuts Down Crucial Brand

I guess I bought my Z13 at just the right time, seeing as I opted for the 64GB version and refused to settle for 32GB after years of buying machines with 32GB as the top option. I wanted a machine that was reasonably thin and light with pen support that would also be able to edit 4K video in DaVinci Resolve. I knew the extra RAM would be beneficial for that task, even if it was overkill for pretty much everything else I’d do with the machine. I haven’t built a PC in many years, but I remember those days fondly, probably because I know I’ll never have to do it again as it was a bit of a pain just as much as it was a real learning experience. I know people still build machines for gaming and other specialized purposes and I know people who can upgrade RAM in a machine prize the ability to do so and will prioritize machines that allow them this luxury. Nevertheless, I don’t like what this will do to the market. I don’t like how it will make building machines more difficult. I don’t like how it will probably also drive up the price of RAM in pre-configured systems. RAM was already expensive. There is a part of me that wants to be hopeful that we are in an AI bubble and when it bursts, things will go back to something closer to normal, but I don’t think that will happen. I think the AI effusiveness will last just long enough that it will kill off the DIY market and the closest thing people will get to that will be custom ordering PCs like we did back in the early days of Alienware, iBuyPower, CyberPowerPC, etc. Quite often, when we lose something in the PC world, it’s gone for good. And that’s only the case if Linux gaming and/or game streaming doesn’t finally take off and people would still have any inclination to build PCs for gaming. I think the winds of change are blowing up into a nice tropical storm here.

Netflix Agrees to Buy Warner Bros Studios & Games and HBO Max

In the United States, it sometimes seems that everyone who has held down a job for any amount of time has either had a cable subscription that included HBO or has paid for (or mooched off someone else’s) Netflix. Even I, a person who rarely watches anything that isn’t YouTube, has had a Netflix account in the past. The idea of the famous/infamous streaming platform buying what is left of HBO was a little hard for me to grasp at first. It wasn’t that I couldn’t understand why Netflix would spend the money; Warner Bros and HBO Max are big gets for the company. I just wasn’t paying enough attention to understand that this was a thing that could happen. It hadn’t occurred to me that Netflix had the money to compete with Paramount and whatever other big billionaire-funded machines that were aiming to get their mitts on those properties. I do wonder what the long-term plan is that Netflix has for this acquisition. Would they leave them as they are but just load up Netflix with more of their content? Or would they wind down HBO Max and bring all those shows direct to Netflix? Or would they create a new streaming platform that brings the content of both together under a new and likely terrible name? Would they create new tiers offering different genres or types of shows, something like the bundles you can get today that combine other streaming services for one price that is, in theory, a better deal than buying them separately? Perhaps they would offer certain content only in a pay-per-play model. If this deal goes through - and smart people on the internet have already noted that due to this offer being out in the world the streaming market is unlikely to change much until the deal goes through or is ended due to antitrust concerns - this will be an interesting scenario to watch unfold, even for me, a person who generally isn’t watching much of anything.