In the early iPhone era, Apple’s design mimicked physical textures(leather stitching in Calendar, felt in Game Center, the green felt of iBooks’ shelves). This skeuomorphism gives digital things tactile analogs was arguably the last mainstream attempt to preserve a sense of touch through sight.
Then came iOS 7 led by Jony Ive, where Apple decisively flattened everything: gradients gone, shadows gone, buttons became text. It was a move toward visual minimalism, but also toward what Victor warns against. The glass stopped pretending to be wood, or leather, or paper. It simply became glass.
Victor’s essay makes me realize that friction is information. When you open a book or turn a knob, your hand is in dialogue with resistance; you feel the world push back. That pushback is not inefficiency. It’s meaning.
What’s fascinating is that Apple, perhaps subconsciously, has been quietly circling back to Victor’s point. The Apple Vision Pro’s “spatial computing” rhetoric reintroduces physical space and hand gestures, but ironically, without touch. You can see and move objects in 3D, but you can’t feel them. It’s embodiment without embodiment. Victor’s “hands without feedback” problem all over again.
Every major design philosophy of the 2010s has quietly absorbed the “frictionless” ethos. Uber, Tinder, and Amazon all measure success by how little thought or effort stands between desire and fulfillment. You tap once and the world rearranges itself.
But Victor’s warning, when applied here, becomes almost moral: when everything becomes too smooth, we lose the feedback loops that teach us how the world works. Swiping on a screen doesn’t just numb the fingers, it numbs cause and effect. It’s a design culture that erases the material consequences of our actions.