The UX on MacOS is so bad here. First, a notification prompts you to enable Apple Intelligence. When you dismiss the notification by clicking the "x" in the corner, it instead opens the system settings and proceeds to download something (?) before showing you a checkbox where you can enable/disable it. It feels quite forced.
My company is tiny comparatively (~150ish employees) and even I've heard various PMs unironically say things like "Let's enable it by default for everyone, because we have those KPIs to hit!"
I've fought back against so much BS like this, but it's just endless and I can't win'em all. Who cares about good UX, not nagging our (paying) customers incessantly about stupid features nobody has ever asked for while the core product languishes and 80% of our customer feedback is "Please make the platform more stable"? All that matters is AI, and that EVERYONE is forced into using AI so our CEO can say in a slidedeck that we've gained X% usage of our shiny new AI thing (that everyone subsequently disables as soon as they can).
It's a fucking joke honestly, this whole industry is a complete farce.
I don't know -- I don't think that there's a particular social contract (much less a legal one) between companies and users that the offering they provide today will be unchanged forever.
I don't mean to defend the dark pattern in this particular case, I'm responding to you saying "this whole industry is a complete farce". If a company decides that The Way to use their product needs to be nudged in a different direction, they can. (Almost) nobody complained when macs started shipping with Rosetta [0] installed.
I'm nowhere near as confident that Apple Intelligence is worth betting the goodwill of users on as I was about apple silicon + rosetta for intel binaries, but it's Apple's bet to make.
[0] okay, a stub launcher for intel binaries that made it super quick and easy to get Rosetta installed
It's really pathetic. Reminds me of when phone manufacturers make a hardware button stop doing what people are used to and make it do Feature-Of-The-Month. Sorry, your power button now turns on FeatureX instead of toggling power. All so a fraction of a percent of users accidentally and unintentionally invoke unwanted features.
It's not just "product owners." When you're one of 100 teams in BigCorp, your team might own Feature X, and another team owns Feature Y. If teams with more "successful" features grow faster, get more funding, get more compute time, get bigger, fatter org charts, then your whole team is incentivized to fight to make Feature X more prominent and elbow out Feature Y.
As an end user, when you start your device or application or web page, know that the features that are exposed in the first screen, and "above the fold" as they say, that premium placement was likely fought bitterly over, through epic corporate political battles and backstabbing. They're not there because research showed that users want them conveniently located.
> I often find myself saying, “I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature.” “That feature” is something aggressively user-hostile, like forcing a shortcut into the Quick Launch bar or the Favorites menu, like automatically turning on a taskbar toolbar, like adding an icon to the notification area that conveys no useful information but merely adds to the clutter, or (my favorite) like adding an extra item to the desktop context menu that takes several seconds to initialize and gives the user the ability to change some obscure feature of their video card.
> The thing is, all of these bad features were probably justified by some manager somewhere because it’s the only way their feature would get noticed. They have to justify their salary by pushing all these stupid ideas in the user’s faces. “Hey, look at me! I’m so cool!” After all, when the boss asks, “So, what did you accomplish in the past six months,” a manager can’t say, “Um, a bunch of stuff you can’t see. It just works better.” They have to say, “Oh, check out this feature, and that icon, and this dialog box.” Even if it’s a stupid feature.
This bullshit has been with us since there have been desktop computers with notification areas.
The actual feature set is rather disappointing, too. I don’t want magical summaries of texts or notifications. I don’t want a poor implementation of an email categorization feature that’s years late to market. I do want better Siri, but that means more actual capabilities to control things, especially when triggered from a watch. I don’t want slow, unreliable language models that still can’t get “call so-and-so on Bluetooth right” [0].
What I do want is privacy-preserving AI-assisted search, over my own data, when (and only when) I ask for it. And maybe other AI features, again when and only when I ask for it. Give me hints that I can ask for such assistance, but don’t shove the assistance in my face.
[0] Somewhere along the line this improved from complete fail to calling, with Bluetooth selected, but audio still routed to the watch until I touch the phone.
