Insight
Same Box, Different Product
When every app opens on the same input box, the screen stops telling products apart. The design work didn't disappear — it moved below the surface, into what the product does with the sentence you typed.
Every app, the same shape
Product screens from the last few years converging, frame by frame, into one shape: a box with a prompt. Software's version of every crustacean ending up as a crab.
Same box, diverging stacks
Two identical input boxes; underneath, two very different stacks — what each product knows, what it can do, what it shows as proof — returning different results for the same typed sentence.
Luke Wroblewski just wrote about design convergence — TVs, cars, phones all ending at the same shape, and then a video of app after app getting a chat box. I've seen it in my own files: mockups for completely different products, all starting with the same box at the top.
It reads like bad news for UI designers, but the screen was never the product — it was where the difference showed. When the surface converges, the difference sinks: into the verbs the product owns, the defaults it picks for you, the proof it shows, how it behaves when it's wrong. Two identical boxes can hide two completely different products.