Whether Apple Crate or Cracker Barrel, Change Ain't Improvement

The Cracker Barrel rebrand ought to remind everyone, change and improvement are not the same. Amongst others, I hope Apple is listening.

Change constantly masquerades as improvement and we blindly believe it nearly as often. Only when change for change’s sake goes so far off the rails we have a cultural moment about it do we briefly realize our error.

Hello, Cracker Barrel.

Cracker Barrel is definitely guilty of conflating the two. In light of the rebranding, it is clear any issues people had with the restaurant weren’t to do with the old-timey logo or the delightfully yesteryear interiors. No, it was things like restaurant cleanliness. In my best Yogi Berra impression, I often avoided anything other than carryout not out of distaste for the nostalgic logo or sentimental decor, but because they were too busy.

No, Cracker Barrel is not the trendsetting restaurant some others might be. It never has been. But, near as I can tell, it also isn’t going the way of successive waves of trendier chains.

Misdirected change fixes nothing. Coca-Cola came up repeatedly over Cracker Barrel’s nightmarish week because it was the soda giant’s New Coke saga on replay. Sure Coke was “old,” but people didn’t really want a hip Pepsi clone in its place, no matter what a Pepsi Challenge might suggest.

Nor does a TikTok-er focus group change why we go to Cracker Barrel. We go to feel comforted, stepping into memories made and feeling like we can return right to them. Sterilizing the restaurant with a 2020s-drab logo and matching decade late Magnolia-ization of decor is a punch in our sentimental gut.

If you’re going to make a change, make sure you know what your purpose is and make the change enhance that purpose.

The tech world is a particularly bad offender. Dennis E. Powell’s column from last week referred to some of that impulse from the Linux world, breaking perfectly good interfaces for the sake of change.

Microsoft played the same game in parallel when it unveiled the disaster otherwise known as Windows 8. Under the direction of CEO Steve Balmer, the company severely underestimated what was going to happen in the mobile world, particularly via the iPhone and its imitators. Instead of a focused initiative to catch up, Microsoft blew up its strengths in pursuit of change.

They should have known better. In 2006, Windows Vista had unnecessarily changed too many things, serving up users a soup of bugs and confusion. It took another major release, Windows 7, to get things back on a sane track.

It didn’t last. The change winds beckoned again and Microsoft was soon out-Vista-ing Vista. Windows 8 trashed the familiarity of a user interface ingrained in users over decades for a touch-first design. A touch-first design, mind you, that would primarily run on non-touch devices.

People don’t use Microsoft Windows to live in an experimental concept; they use it because it is a comfortably staid tool. A place where even ancient software keeps running, the way you do things remains largely the same, and the cheapest hardware runs it passably.

Rarely — if ever — great, but predictable. That’s its lane.

Windows 7 had long ignored corners that needed updating, sure. But no one was asking for a completely new, discordant layer on top that ran poorly on existing systems. That was change unattached to improvement. It was shiplap in Cracker Barrel when all we want is more chicken fried steak.

The story went as it usually does: Microsoft only saw its error after sales plummeted. Three years of misery later, Windows 10 provided a reset, putting extra distance between it and infamous 8 by skipping 9 altogether.

Time and again, change for change’s sake gets rightly and resoundingly rejected. We’re watching the same in cars now as companies like Volkswagen back off of all touchscreen designs. Turns out removing tactile buttons arbitrarily is a bad idea when it involves multi-ton machines. Never could have seen that coming, right?

The best leaders understand the need to keep change focused on improvement. The late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs understood the concept of beneficial change. He famously replaced the wildly successful iPod Mini, but not for mere change’s sake. The phenomenal iPod Nano toppled the Mini because Apple could make something better not just different.

This exemplified most of the Jobs-helmed Apple. The growing pains of moving from Classic Mac OS to the early Mac OS X, for example. The change was radical, and the early releases had their issues, but behind the gloss of the shiny new Aqua interface was a robust UNIX core foundational to virtually everything the company has released since.

The striking interface exemplified the Jobsian ideal that design is how things work, not just how they look. While 24 years into its modern OS era the design has evolved, so much of what OS X introduced remains a part of interacting with any Apple device.

Notably, much of the design that wasn’t established during Jobs’ second tenure at the company came from his first run there. The landmark 1984 Mac OS design continues to influence every modern interface because its design-and-function marriage was impeccably timeless.

To be sure, Apple’s exploration of vividly physical world-like interfaces went from tasteful bits in nascent Aqua to over-the-top skeuomorphism in the early iPhone era. Meant to encourage users to learn new ways of interacting with devices, we suddenly had apps filled with leather, wood and felt textured backgrounds and buttons.

After their initial charm as training wheels for the digital world, it was time for change. Here change could be beneficial and it was. Apple ushered in a new aesthetic with iOS 7. It was clean, simple and discarded those training wheels so that those of us who had used digital devices for years could see our content, not cutesy interface clutter.

Arguably, though, a balance was still needed. Apple, Google and virtually everyone else were rightly trying to improve the interface, but went too far, well beyond ditching those training wheels. Much like removing physical buttons in cars, cleanliness started to be at the cost of intuitive or functional choices.

That’s what excited me when Apple previewed their new Liquid Glass design language earlier this year. The promise is a return to an interface with dimensionality to highlight functions, much as Aqua had a quarter century ago. Apple sounded like it understood adding back a touch of real world materials — this time glass — could be used in service of greater functionality.

Early betas of Liquid Glass in June and July were critiqued for their overly transparent, downright illegible overlays, but I was optimistic. I took these complaints as pre-release growing pains for an Apple genuinely focused on usability.

Just two weeks away from the launch event for the next iPhones, many of the problems remain worrisomely unresolved, however. That suggests Apple’s move away from flatness is not for the usability enhancement tasteful dimensionality could provide, but simply flash for its own sake.

Other interface modifications seemingly confirm a “just because” attitude where I hoped a quest to improve usability dwelt. This week, critics pointed out Apple had adopted new icon designs for different functions that make disparate tools harder to distinguish at a glance. How do I read that optimistically?

New iPhones are still likely a month away from shipping, so more improvements are possible. But if Apple’s designers let it get this far as is, that does not bode well.

Uncorrected, Liquid Glass risks being the ghost of Aqua without its heart.

This is a growing year-over-year pattern. Apple keeps promising to fix everyday struggles, but then stumbles over the difference between “fixing” and “changing.”

I’ve previously critiqued the mess of Apple’s revised Photos app, a clear example of change for change’s sake. Ostensibly aimed at simplifying management of our burgeoning photo libraries, Apple made wholesale change but few improvements. Common functions became buried, not more easily found.

Obscuring the most used parts of an app is even worse than removing Uncle Herschel from a restaurant logo.

Apple has somewhat softened the design in the intervening year, but if their North Star had been to improved usability rather than a flashy new design, a lot less user pain would have been involved. The ill-fated changes to Safari a couple of years ago pointed to a similarly aimless penchant for change. At least those changes were reverted during the beta releases.

Whether you build cars, own a restaurant, pastor a church or program an app, this is the truth: not all change is improvement.

When we get the urge for change, it may be a sign improvement is needed, but if change itself becomes the goal, there’s a huge chance it ends badly.

Logos revert, but is the underlying idolatry of change corrected when the reversion comes? I don’t know if Cracker Barrel has learned its lesson, but Liquid Glass hints Apple may not have.

Imagine what Windows 10 and 11 could have been like if Microsoft hadn’t wasted countless millions on a dead end before essentially dusting off what they had with Windows 7. Imagine what Cracker Barrel could do if it just made what people love better, rather than chasing after New York TikTok-ers.

Imagine if Apple recommitted to “design is how it works.”

Critics of Apple and its users often suggested the products were all about style over productivity. But what made Aqua Aqua was not its lickable glitz. Aqua’s brilliance was leveraging cutting-edge tech to produce useful beauty.

Contrary to those naysayers, the impressive effects conveyed meaningful information more intuitively than older designs. It wasn’t change for change’s sake.

Past clones of Apple design failed to match or exceed Aqua because they were designed based on the critics’ mistaken understanding. Will Liquid Glass ultimately do better? That depends on if today’s Apple remembers what guided it previously or if it, too, sees only the spectacle of a shiny new change.

Change for change’s sake may be temporarily amusing or exciting, but such frivolity ultimately proves frustrating. We may think we want change, but what we truly crave is improvement.

Such is far more elusive. It’s easier to kick Uncle Herschel to the curb and call it a successful day. The crazy ones, the geniuses, the visionaries know better. They focus on improvement and we’re better for it.

Full Disclosure: Tim does own some Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT) stock.