Why Apple Abandoned the World’s Most Beloved Typeface

The world’s most beloved typeface has been dumped.

After two rocky years as Apple’s typographical identity, Helvetica Neue is being replaced by a bespoke font, San Francisco, as the default font on both OS X El Capitan and iOS 9 this fall.

San Francisco is the first in-house typeface Cupertino has designed in more than 20 years. With its clean, compact shapes, subtle roundness, and ample space between letters, San Francisco was no doubt designed for maximum legibility on the Apple Watch. But at WWDC yesterday, amid the hoopla around new operating systems and streaming music, Apple snuck in another development: San Francisco was always meant for more than the Watch’s tiny screen. It was designed for your phone and desktop, too.

Apple didn’t come right out and say this, of course, but the clues were everywhere. Jackets given to attendees featured “WWDC 2015” embroidered in white San Francisco letters. Screenshots plastered on the enormous screen before the audience showed San Francisco implemented in the new operating systems. Twitter lit up with type enthusiasts weighing in on whether it was San Francisco or Helvetica Neue onscreen, and the pros and cons of each.

For a company whose fortune stems in no small part from its commitment to design, you’d think Apple would be quick to extol its typographical handiwork, but it was low key about it all. Why?

It could be that Apple wants to save face.

“Apple is really, really behind when it comes to typography,” says famed German typographer Erik Spiekermann. Google introduced its custom font, Roboto, in 2011, and Spiekermann developed Fira Sans for Mozilla a few years back.

That’s a bit harsh. After all, Apple has been so dominant in other areas that anything less than stellar typography is going to draw critics. San Francisco isn’t perfect, says Tal Leming, a typographer and programmer at Type Supply. He has quibbles, for instance, with some of San Francisco’s numbers—the top of the “6,” for instance, loops so far down that it can be mistaken for an “8.” But, he says, such things can be overlooked. The company has moved the needle so far in so many areas, that it simply doesn’t matter. “When it comes to design in general,” Leming says, “Apple is in their own universe.”

Apple does a history of championing type design, most notably commissioning typefaces from Susan Kare in the 1980s, but it’s just that—history. Apple has in more recent history relied upon off-the-shelf fonts for its user interfaces. The company used Lucida Grande on OSX from 2000 to 2014. Two years ago, with the launch of iOS 7, Apple announced it would be updating its system-wide font to Helvetica Neue Light. The choice was almost universally panned by designers. The typeface was too light, too thin for small, lower-res mobile screens. Apple ultimately ditched Neue Light in favor of the meatier Helvetica Neue. Now, just two years later, Apple is updating its system font yet again.