Reprinted from TidBITS by permission; reuse governed by Creative Commons license BY-NC-ND 3.0. TidBITS has offered years of thoughtful commentary on Apple and Internet topics. For free email subscriptions and access to the entire TidBITS archive, visit http://www.tidbits.com/ Here's to "Unreasonable Standards" Adam Engst [1]Seth Godin writes: 42 years ago, Apple's 1984 ad ran on the Super Bowl. Once. It's generally considered the most effective ad of its kind, creating a legend and also a trap. Godin doesn't attribute the Mac's success to that ad, or even Regis McKenna's work in getting Steve Jobs on the cover of 20 magazines when the Mac launched. Instead, he lauds the work of [2]Guy Kawasaki in evangelizing the platform to developers and the 'unreasonable standards' of [3]Susan Kare and [4]Bill Atkinson. Invoking Kare, who designed the original Mac's icons, is particularly apropos as criticism of Liquid Glass in macOS 26 Tahoe continues to build'from [5]window corners that hinder resizing to [6]scrollbars that obscure Finder controls. [7]Read original article References 1. https://seths.blog/2026/01/the-big-splash/ 2. https://guykawasaki.com/ 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Kare 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Atkinson 5. https://noheger.at/blog/2026/01/11/the-struggle-of-resizing-windows-on-macos-tahoe/ 6. https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2026/1/4.html 7. https://seths.blog/2026/01/the-big-splash/ .