Aptos
Aptos is the current default font on Microsoft Office products. It is not the most professional-looking font, which is kind of ironic because people don't exactly use Microsoft Office for fun. Microsoft changed it to the default font in 2024, and then made an announcement that Aptos was the new default font.
Alternative theories[edit | edit source]
There were some people who didn't like the default font getting changed to Aptos. This author, for one, thinks it looks unprofessional and does not want to use it for work emails. He also finds it suspicious that Aptos just happened to be the font at the top of the list of fonts. This led him to think a conspiracy theory had to be involved. His current theory is that some software engineer at Microsoft made a mistake in the code which switched everybody using the software to the font at the top of the list, and Microsoft declared it the new default font to cover it up. The blog post explaining the change kind of sounded like it was written by the AI technology that Microsoft is salivating over right now (not least because it just had to go into wordy detail about the history of fonts and typefaces), which strikes this author as a hasty move, which would make sense if the change was not planned ahead of time.
Another theory he came up with is that Microsoft was essentially telling the truth: one of the things they said was that they added a few fonts a few years before, and tracked which ones people actually used the most, and then chose the most popular one as the new default font. However, the problem with this is that Office is basically just used by people at work, and boring workers aren't going to be looking at fonts to evaluate which of them look good and still appropriate for work at the same time. It's not unfeasible, however, that sometimes people could just switch to the font at the top of the list by mistake, which looks like what happened here.
Another theory that somebody might propose is that Microsoft started using AI as a sort of divination tool and it said to change the default font to Aptos. I don't find this theory very convincing, because they actually added the font before ChatGPT came out and made a lot of people totally irrational about AI. It's not entirely out of the question, though.
