Portrait mode launched 10 years ago today. I think it resonated with people because it didn’t feel digital. It felt analog. And this was likely because the inspiration behind its technique went all the way back to oil painting. Sometimes pure math isn’t enough; you need to combine it with insights from the liberal arts. If you recall Portrait mode shipped a month after the iPhone did. This was because this insight about oil painting took a while to figure out. Initially, Portrait mode was seen as a giant math problem. You’d do disparity calculations on the two sensors and output a depth map. The problem was this approach feels and looks digital; it feels fake. In areas without texture, it’s impossible to do this calculation. In areas with ultra fine detail, a lower resolution depth map leads to terrible transitions and a full resolution depth map takes forever to compute. One solution would be to reduce the amount of bokeh so the issues are not as obvious. But then you lose the whole point of the feature, which was to make it look like you had a large, wide-open lens. The solution to this conundrum—the tradeoff between artifacts and the amount of blur— was quite elegant, but it took a while to stumble across. There’s a saying in painting that if you get the eyes right, nothing else matters. Inspired by this principle from oil painting, the idea was to make sure we never got the eyes wrong. We brought in a machine learning block to find the eyes, and draw a mask layer that protected them, then paired that with the disparity depth map. Counterintuitively, the solution was not to decrease the amount of blur, it was to increase it. The additional blur that we could add once the eyes were protected allowed us to hide the artifacts that were create by bad depth calculation. We let the ears go soft, let the nose go a bit soft. This is that wide open look that people loved, even if people didn’t realize that the ears going soft was why. I was thinking about this recently with regard to AI. We’ll be able to do more amazing things… we just need to study the masters who came before us.

The second I saw that transition I thought “here’s the next ‘change the whole industry’ design from Chan”.

I’ve gotten this question enough times that I figured I’d just post it: The iPhone Duo cameras are not as good as your 17 Pro (or 18 Pro). So please do not preorder it then complain to me that you aren’t happy with the low light or sharpness. And yes, Apple could just make an absolutely massive camera bump on the back to resolve this problem, but that was seen as the wrong tradeoff.

This is another example of something that I thought would take years to solve and yet here we are.

After Steve died there was a lot of debate in Silicon Valley around “Who is the next Steve Jobs?” Who would be not just making innovative products, but serving as the spiritual guide for the tech industry, and an elder statesman on difficult social issues. It’s been 15 years, and the more time passes, the more singular Steve appears to be.

If your product isn’t safe, don’t release it. I worked on FaceID, the pitch wasn’t “this is useful, but there’s a 10% chance the lasers will blind you.” The internal testing protocols for that were incredibly strict.

The best product people have intense clarity in their point of view. I remember a meeting many years ago where people took Jony Ive through the state of the art foldable display technology for that time. This was back with plastic-feeling screens that had a big crease down the middle. His feedback was simply: “Your idea is a big display. But this isn’t a great display. So you don’t have an idea.” It might have taken about 10 years after that to make a great foldable display— nano texture, updated hinge mechanisms, behind display camera.

This single transition says so much about how Apple approaches a problem. Other companies copied the aspect ratio, more or less, but because they didn’t understand the motivation and reasoning behind it, they couldn’t copy the essence of what makes it so successful. If you have this aspect ratio, and do a lot of work in software, it’s no longer two products glued together, it appears as one seamless, continuous product. This is complicated to do when the inside display is a different display technology, with a different bezel thickness, and a camera in a different location (hence putting it behind the display on the inside). You don’t begin with a product size and shape, you begin with the idea that this is one singular product and make every decision in service of that idea.

At a lot of companies, the internal concepts look good but what ships lacks the same level of craft. This iPhone Duo transition is even better in the shipping form than what it looked like internally when I last saw it. This isn’t luck or something that occurs easily; people are putting in long hours to make this happen.

Steve Jobs’ greatest product wasn’t the iPhone or the Mac, it was Apple itself: the machine that makes the machine. When Tim Cook took over, conventional wisdom was that Apple would slide into irrelevance, because Steve’s system required a singular product visionary driving the entire company. I would argue Tim’s greatest product and legacy isn’t the Watch or Services or scaling the iPhone, it was showing how to run a disciplined, top-down company with a team vs an individual. Maybe if his talent in operations was scaling, you could say he not only scaled the products, he showed how to scale the company, too.

Sugar Bowl found my iPhone that I lost in December snowboarding. It was sitting under the Disney lift for 7 months buried snow and sitting in the sun. Not a scratch on it. Works perfectly. Incredible.

Just flew over WWDC. Shade structure is looking good!

User interfaces are about to go through another big transformation, on the scale of command line to GUI, if not bigger. The new tools aren’t about making the old designs more efficiently, they are about making entirely new experiences.

My contrarian belief is that this was a great UI.

I’ve been using this for UI design, and it’s incredible. I’m old enough to remember when getting a video to loop seamlessly was a whole project unto itself.

I’ve joined the Google DeepMind design team. I’ve spent my professional career working as a toolmaker, and while I’ve been lucky to have contributed to some incredible products in the past, I may well look back on the work here as the most important when it comes to building tools that are helpful, delightful, and genuinely enriching to people’s lives.

I haven’t worked at Apple in 6 months and the multi lens switching to hit focus on this still gives me anxiety. (It starts Macro on the Super Wide lens because the bottom of the window is in focus then realizes it needs to hop to the Tele.)

A student asked me to help her with an interview question. She asked for a good reply to: “What do you do if you’re given a project you don’t like?” I said this isn’t even a hypothetical, it will for sure happen. My answer was that, counterintuitively, you need to do the best work of your life on those projects. If you do bad work you doomloop your career— they will become worried about giving a more important project, you get stuck, you do more bad work, repeat. If they ask you to design a “blow dryer for a fish”, you need to design the best damn fish blow dryer the world has ever seen. Yes it will fail commercially, but then when you ask to help the “blow dryer for barbers” team, you have leverage to move over, and that team will be pulling you in.