Item — HN Reader

The problem is the oblivious users who aren't tech savvy. Enable a feature like this by default for every user, and you've got a big chunk of people "using" it, which leads to some product manager or sales person or whatever somewhere deep in the pits of the hell that is the corporate ladder getting a nice bonus and possibly a raise.

It's precisely why we need more stringent regulation that kills any kind of bullshit like this. Leave my fucking device alone you vultures.

2 comments

That doesn’t make sense. That idea of launching products in a company to get promoted was popularised by a Google employee spilling the beans on how it works there, but I’ve yet to see any evidence that’s how it works inside of Apple or most other companies.

Apple Intelligence is a flagship feature. They don’t shut up about it and it got its own “one more thing” section at the last WWDC. Reportedly it began its life from Federighi himself being impressed by LLMs. Claiming it exists because of “some product manager or sales person” is ridiculous. This is a feature approved from high up on the ladder, not some run of the mill side app like Journal or Clips.

according to people i know at apple, the place is basically run by the marketing department

the very wide angle lens in the Studio Display for there purpose Center Stage, which is awful, is clear evidence of this. they promote the hell out of the worst aspect of the device.

the imac webcam is superior as a result :/

I see this take all the time and it's absurd. You would have every new feature in a piece of software disabled by default? There's no conspiracy to game metrics with this, anything you would seriously consider shipping default-off you would just not ship.

I agree the take is absurd for this situation, because they wouldn’t give such prominence to a feature created by a random product manager or sales person.

That said, I disagree you shouldn’t consider shipping things default off, and Apple does it all the time for things which have tradeoffs, which is exactly the case here. This is a controversial feature that has been getting a ton of backlash, takes huge amounts of disk space, and is still treated as a beta. Asking first makes sense.