I don't think anyone is alleging they went to the UX designers and told them they needed some form of distraction. What is plausible is that the UX designers were working on one or more possibilities for a major redesign and apple executives decided to push one out even though it might not have been good enough/ready because they needed something splashy in the absence of their promised AI features.
> they needed something splashy in the absence of their promised AI features
Yes - they showed their hand when Apple execs declined to appear at the annualThe Talk Show Live shortly after the host of the show publicly questioned the Apple about the failure to deliver on Apple Intelligence. They clearly did not want anyone talking to them about that, and the myriad of friendly interviews they did post with other tech folks danced beautifully around the lack of anything in Apple's AI offering.
It would still be a year or more before launch. They had to have the toolkit ready for internal apps way back when.
And any time you make a massive change in design system, you’re faced with a choice of maintaining two systems (which sucks) or ripping the bandaid off and shipping when the new one is not completely ready (which sucks)
The distraction thing is just a totally unnecessary conspiracy theory. It’s sufficient to observe that LG just doesn’t seem ready.
The whole system and apps are half-baked overall, filled with bugs, and obvious UI/UX mistakes. I do believe [speculation warning] there's plausibility in the idea it has been pushed by C suite, even against the advice from designers and engineers at Apple. It is inconceivable to me as a designer myself that they let so many amateurish readability and usability flaws, all over the place across the entire system.
I experimented with SwiftUI recently to get my hands in the Liquid Glass system itself, just by curiosity. Customization of the amount of blurriness is non existent at all, it is very hard to control aspects of it, super opinionated, bugs that had to be overcome with workarounds which didn't happen with previous versions of the toolkit.
To add fuel to the fire... nobody is talking about "the lack of AI" in latest macOS & iOS, and everybody seems to focus on the, overall, bad experience of Liquid Glass. So... if the strategy of serving as a distraction was true, it... worked? Not that I wanted "AI" personally (rather, I would love if they let people install any apps they want in their own phones they purchased with their own money...) but I can understand they having some pressure from certain segments of society and/or investors to have something, given the current state of affairs.
You need to make your way through 1-5 to get to 6, but I specifically excluded 5 (organization of militias).
There are rumours of this but if it's true, these militias must be very secret indeed.
One problem is that violent criminals run rampant and the state seemingly has little desire to stop them, and zero capacity to do so. Meanwhile prominent politicians sing songs whose lyrics include machine gun sounds and calls for the murder of whites.
Parallel to this, there are job restrictions limiting the maximum number of whites companies may employ or promote. Franchises limit the number of white owners. White business owners are strong-armed through law and government contracts to give up some of their equity. There's regular talk about seizing white-owned property.
Whatever label you want to put on all that, I think the it's fucked up.
The worst part is, the average poor black South African is innocent in all this and now has to live in a place with a spiraling economy, power & water outages, even worse crime than the whites have to face, terrible standards of education, and much more.
>You need to make your way through 1-5 to get to 6
This isn't true. As the genocide watch page says "The process is not linear."
White South Africans are less likely to be victims of crime, make more money, live longer, and are over-represented among corporate and political leadership. Taking steps to undo the damage done by apartheid isn't fucked up, it's necessary as evidenced by the aforementioned inequalities.
And I'm telling you that 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 are the ones that are active right now.
> "Taking steps to undo the damage ... it's necessary"
What a bullshit argument.
How does any of that help "undo" the damage done by apartheid? The government of SA prizes ideology over outcome. The ideology is to attack Western things, even if the outcome is that black South Africans are now very much worse off than they would've been if SA was thriving.
And to cite this as a defence for the abuses and outrages that has literally landed white SA'ns - despite their relative wealth - on a genocide watch.
>And I'm telling you that 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 are the ones that are active right now.
I trust genocide watch more than you to determine which of the genocide watch stages of genocide are underway,
>How does any of that help "undo" the damage done by apartheid?
White South Africans make up 8% of the population but own 72% of farmland. This is a direct result of apartheid and colonial racism more broadly. Expropriating some of this land and returning it to black South Africans is directly undoing this damage.
