Louie Mantia: I’ve Got Better Things To Do Than This, and Yet

But my gosh, this is a multi-trillion dollar company that’s getting free design critique from people who love and rely on these platforms the most. For free. Absolutely nothing in return. It’s almost as if we’re all posting about it because of desperation. So many of us are hoping this really isn’t what we have to live with for the next five or ten years. Despite knowing it will take time away from the things we’d much rather be doing, we’re writing blog posts and recording podcasts and posting on social media anyway.

The pedantic part of me wants to say, "well, technically, you get an operating system that you enjoy in return," but let's not be pedantic, I know this is coming from a place of frustration. What I will contest is the idea that we don't want to be writing blog posts and podcasts about design critiques…quite a few of us actually do enjoy that! In fact, I am writing this post after my work day is done and it's a delight to be able to think about this stuff with people with similar interests to myself. Also, I will say that despite the frustration, the first few developer betas across the board have shown that clearly Apple has heard the feedback and they're making changes to try and appease those complaints. Ideally I guess it would come right out of the oven without any issues, but I personally can live with this.

I know Apple employees are listening. I know they’re seeing what people are posting about. I know that when I write about these kinds of things, they get passed around internally. So part of me feels an obligation to say something.

One of the things that often goes unsaid, and I'm glad Louie mentioned it here, is that if you have a bit of a following in the Apple ecosystem, it's honestly more impactful for you to use your platform to explain why something doesn't work rather than to file a feedback item. It's not fair and it's not ideal, but people at Apple read about Apple, and posts and videos do have a real impact.