If it's coming down from the C suite, that just makes it worse. That's cheap marketing tricks winning priority over lasting intent. It's not just the design folks trying to justify their job at that point, it's the executives surrendering to the "stock must go up during my quarters at all costs" mentality.
If Company X didn’t reinvigorate their product line then consumers might switch to Company Ys products because they look shiny and new. Which is literally why people switched from BlackBerry et al to iPhones in the previous decade.
Consumers are fickle and want that dopamine hit when they spend money. I know this and even I find myself chasing shiny things. So there’s no way we can change that kind of consumer behaviour.
To be clear, I’m not saying it’s right that companies do this, but I do think they’d go out of business if they didn’t because consumer trends will continue like this regardless of how ethical companies tried to be.
So the problem here isnt that Apple tried to refresh its operating system look. It’s that they completely jumped the shark and created something that was too focused on aesthetics while failing in literally every other metric.
People switched from BlackBerry to iPhone for far more than just iPhones being "shiny and new." Visual voicemail, Safari, touchscreen, etc. The recent UI redesign effort is not remotely comparable to the investment and strategy that went into distinguishing the iPhone from the rest of the cell phone market.
We're discussing this on one of the most bare and plain sites on the popular internet. Folks who are attracted to value don't care if stuff isn't redesigned if it works well. It's a bad sign if executives at Apple feel the need to invest in cheap dopamine hacks for the sake of novelty farming.
A company that stagnates or even shrinks to a healthy size can be more valuable to society, and the stock market in the long term, than one that mutilates itself in chase of unnecessary growth.
