Categories showed up on my phone one day. I immediately noticed how stupid it was and turned it off.
Ditto the new Contact Photos. I’ve had to help a couple of clients turn that off on their phones. It’s just a space waster.
I wish Apple would spend their time making programs more reliable rather than larding them up with dysfunctional eye candy.
Yes, I’m just a septuagenarian who doesn’t like change!
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On point 1: for reasons having to do with the bumpy and/or delayed rollout of “Apple Intelligence,” I believe Apple has no choice but to do these highly visible UI tweaks. They painted themselves into a corner by doing a very un-Apple-like Thing: trying to come to the AI party before the technology had a chance to settle down and start behaving. Making Mail creak through a few more little party tricks is a way to distract us while they presumably continue to polish up the product.
On point 2: I’m sept-adjacent, and I agree in principle. On the particulars, though, I find change for good reason refreshing and stimulating. I’m glad that that the septs (and octs, and nons) that I’ve worked with over the years aren’t trying to text with numeric keypads that require 3 presses of the 2 key to get the letter “C”. 
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I think one can make a fair comparison with the time when Apple launched their Maps service. It got widespread, and deserved, ridicule, because they jumped in long before they were really ready.
On the other hand, I think one can also reasonably argue that they pretty much had to jump, ready or not (in the case of Maps, because their relationship with Google had become so poisonous).
As regards AI…again Apple have jumped in well before they were really ready (I won’t try to talk about why, others have already done that better than I can). And again, they had strong reasons to jump in, ready or not.
With Maps, Apple’s service improved fast and today is world-class. I suspect that Apple is working damn hard to make Apple Intelligence improve at a similar speed.
Right now, we’re caught in the early-pain period (and, yes, it’s painful). I don’t think it’ll last forever. Meanwhile, we can at least turn off many of the more painful aspects.
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Way back then I learned the hard way about the disastrous early days of Apple Maps.I had a job interview out in the wilds of Brooklyn one day, and my husband drove me there because it was snowing and sleeting. He had to get to work and wasn’t able to pick me up afterwards.
In order to get to my job in Manhattan after the interview, I needed to take the NYC subway system. So I opened up my wonderful new and brilliant and beautiful iPhone and asked Siri to take me to the nearest subway terminal. And Siri quickly directed me to a long and freezing walk-in the slippery, snowy to a Subway eat in or out Subway restaurant.
I did call Siri a very lot of bad names.
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I suspect AI in smartphones will increase the trend to ban them from classrooms.
On point 1: for reasons having to do with the bumpy and/or delayed rollout of “Apple Intelligence,” I believe Apple has no choice but to do these highly visible UI tweaks.
My complaint is 10+ years long. Maybe the most recent example has to do with Apple AI, but it’s been a trend for much longer, and not just with Apple.
“No choice”? Change for change’s sake is a waste of time. Fewer cupholders and better gas mileage would be preferable.
As for point 2, I’m just being a grouchy old person riffing on a previous comment. Your point is taken about three keypresses to get the letter C. Now how about something useful for us old farts like some touchscreen setting that is forgiving of hand tremor? I’ve been waiting for this for years.
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All fair points, and I only avoided talking about Apple Maps 1.0 because I’ve mentioned it in other threads.
Both the Maps and the AI launches were “un-Applelike” because they lacked the exacting, irritating, and relentless oversight and attention to detail that Jobs would have brought to the project. Who knows how he would have responded to the two business challenges you mention? But I expect he would have allowed Google to go on its merry way with its mapping product while Apple quietly jumped right to Maps 2.0. He would have introduced it like iPhone.
“We’ve been working on three new products. One of them helps visualize your address book. The second product is a revolutionary new way to guide you anywhere in the world. And the third product helps you find the businesses and places you love. And it all fits in your iPhone…”
The most important thing is that it would have all just worked without the mortifying errors and mislabelings and sloppy cartography of Maps 1.0.
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And I completely got that! 
How about Touch Accommodations? That seems custom-made for dealing with hand tremors.
Settings-> Accessibility → Touch → Touch Accommodations will show the settings that help desensitize the touch screen to accidental touches.
I’ve attempted to break this out into a new topic since discussion of the Mail categories feature stopped long ago.
If people aren’t just interested in complaining (and I hope not, since that’s boring), it might be worth considering why Apple feels the need to make these changes and how they might be done to better serve multiple audiences.
I suspect the changes come from a desire to help users. For instance, most people don’t know how to make mailboxes and set up filters, so Mail’s categories attempt to help people prioritize their email reading without forcing them to take manual actions. Obviously, that won’t work well for people with their own categorisation system, or those who have just become accustomed to everything in one stream. But Apple did this one right in terms of making it an easy thing to switch on and off.
Other changes may have different motivations, and some may be as simple as some people at Apple saying, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” and running with it. (Let’s face it, that’s where a lot of tech comes from.) But the diversity of users of Apple platforms now means that no feature will appeal to everyone, and our Do You Use It? polls show just how differently users view certain features. And a lot of the questions here reveal that often there is an answer, it just wasn’t sufficiently obvious because most people didn’t have the question.
The last point that’s worth considering is that the tech world is driven by change, which is why we’re not still using 68000-based Macs with System 7’s descendants. And with tech becoming ever more of the real world, it becomes harder to avoid. You can’t get off the train as easily as you used to be able to do.
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I think many changes stem from an effort to automate tasks to make users’ lives easier and can count as another feature Apple has added. However, we all have different needs, and what Apple tech and marketing departments thinks is a “feature” can be a “bug” to some users. This can become a problem when the new “feature” is not evaluated for problems it can cause. Google’s “Promotions” category, for example, seems to be intended to identify advertising that you might want to avoid, but why I hate it is that it also catches emails intended to warn that your credit card has expired and you need to renew it to pay an important bill.
I sometimes wonder if Apple marketing thinks some of these new “features” should be new gifts to users that should be surprises that would make them smile. What I would like to see is a brief description of what the new feature is, what it does, and how to manage it when it is introduced. I learned long ago not to do any upgrades until I have finished all urgent tasks to make sure nothing important had been changed when I wasn’t in control.
I wonder if Apple should try packaging options for certain types of users. For example, you might want incoming email on your home computer to carefully screen out incoming from unknown sources, but someone in sales would not want to lose potential new customers.
OK, I take most of your message as a general reproach about being complainy
There’s an upside and downside that these things get turned on by default. On the downside, why can’t they just, like, pop up a notification that this new feature is available and would we like to try it…?
On the upside, it provides job security for me. I’ve already helped several people who thought they were losing mail because they didn’t notice the new categories feature, or helping people turn off the space-wasting contact picture feature.
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Yes, a description would be nice. I have a brief recollection that there may have been some slight notification when categories appeared (although I wish it had not been turned on by default.) However, since several of my friends were mystified by the reorganization of their mail—even panicked that mail appeared to be missing—that notification might need some rethinking.
I last revisited that setting a few months ago. I’ll look again.
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I had an analogous discussion yesterday about the complexity of modern cameras. I used to be able to pick up any old film camera and use it without instruction or user manual. These days I need to study a lengthy tome to work out some of the most basic functions of modern cameras as they’ve become feature bloated, and are often poorly designed - especially their OS/menu systems.
I’m finding the same with my current Apple experience. After an update I’m left scratching my head on where things have gone and why things are now hidden - except it’s happening to my existing device - not some new modern hardware. I’m often horrified at the ‘upgrade’ to my carefully curated systems because someone in the bowels of the Cupertino spaceship has deemed it ‘cool’.
I’m all for changes and improvements but Apple has become more ‘show’ than ‘go’ and I’m typically finding their new features underwhelming. As both a user and a shareholder I find this disappointing.
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Notifications alerting users to a new feature are tough because people largely ignore them, especially when they come at inopportune times and are thus dismissed without reading.
The best approach is probably a notification that a new feature has arrived and has been turned on, with instructions on how to turn it off if you don’t like it.
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… along with a link to a web page with the feature’s full documentation.
I also think that the Books app should be pre-populated with a reference to the official manual for the device and OS release. So you can, with one click/tap, download and read the manual.
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For MacOS, maybe, but maybe on mobile it should be the Tips app. Unless I’m mistaken, I think installing the major version of iOS and iPadOS includes a prompt to see what’s new in the Tips app. I bet a lot of people skip that, though.
Looking at the Tips app, there is nothing about mail categories, perhaps because Apple added it late. It should be there. But it’s probably worth perusing the app for people who want to see what is changed.
You know? This is really interesting!
How should we take UI and function changes? It’s messy. Some changes provide a real improvement; others a delightful change in interaction. But when you’ve developed years of hand-eye habit that’s efficient and the new way is different are they that much of a benefit? Spread over millions of users? It’s a complicated equation.
For the last 30+ years I’ve had the habit of reading the entire manual for new OS’s and hardware. It’s one way how I made my money—providing instant answers for people who do not read manuals. But now, in my retirement, I’m loath to do that. For one thing, there are so many changes in each new release and so many of them are often extremely arcane: “Now supports H.264 Non-dimensional transforms in P1 Space.” Right. So excited about that!
Colleen’s suggestion for advertising “opt-in” on new features is a good one. But as others have said, many people simply ignore surprising dialogs and mindlessly click OK so they can get to the latest TikTok. Apple, and everyone else, have tried things over the years to advertise new functions and ways of doing things (Tips ain’t bad, really) but with millions, billions, of users it’s a hard row to hoe. With my software, I got so frustrated with tech support queries where it was obvious the user simply assumed the way they thought it should work is the way and were outraged when it didn’t work that I prepared a fast intro for each new version that they couldn’t escape. I could just hear the groans and muttered imprecations of quick persons but you know what? Tech support queries about basic functions dropped like a stone.
Hm.
Dave
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Another way to look at this is to ask “how many options do we need?” A while back I tried to adjust colors on the screen using f.lux and messed it up so bad I had to use Time Machine to back a couple of days to before I started fiddling. Fortunately it worked. But it made me wonder how many things we need to fiddle around with? Why on Earth do I need 477 fonts (nearly 200 of which are inactive) on my MacMini?
All the user guides are in the Tips app now, so it should be possible to link directly on the device. I should do a quick article about that. For instance, @ddmiller:
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