On the one hand, I don’t disagree with his assessment that products have turned into relationships that require constant attention. And yes, there could be a lot less asking.
On the other hand, I’m unconvinced that’s the unalloyed ill that he seems to paint it as. I like my iPhone and my Apple Watch, and when I feel they’re being pushy about something, I resolve the problem. I don’t like Focus or all of Apple’s machine-learning-enhanced notification schemes because they create unpredictability—I just shut off notifications that are too frequent or use Do Not Disturb when I need quiet.
Perhaps the difference is that I do feel as though I have a relationship with my technology, and I like it that way. I like to understand how it thinks, why it works the way it does, how it fails in certain circumstances, and so on. Tonya and I always name our cars, and she refers to her iPhone and Apple Watch as her digital friends (mostly as in statements like “I got up early and left my digital friends in the bedroom.”)
Anyway, I’m not sure I’ve thought this through enough for TidBITS, but it’s thought-provoking.
Not metaphorically. A job with tasks and troubleshooting and problem-solving and no compensation. A job you didn’t apply for and can’t quit.
And — this is the part worth sitting with — a job that used to belong to someone else. A support team. An IT department. That labor didn’t vanish. It was externalized onto you so gradually you didn’t think to call it what it was.
I’ve been meaning to comment on the earlier “Apple auto-updated my spouse to iOS 26 (grr)” thread. My sister’s iPhone 16 unexpectedly “upgraded” to iOS 26 a few weeks ago, and to say she has not had a good experience is understating things by a mile.
The quote from Godier’s article captures at least some of what my sister has been experiencing. It is very frustrating for her because while she gladly embraces tech for helping to perform important tasks, she does not want to be a “techie” at all. To her, the balance between tool use and tool maintenance/management (not to mention trust) has been lost.
a job that used to belong to someone else. A support team. An IT department.
Uh, what? I don’t remember having an IT department for any of my personal computers in the 1980s and 1990s. I do remember that they required a lot of maintenance, tasks, troubleshooting, and problem-solving.
(I also remember a lot of devices being really needy back then: a phone ringing demands attention; an answering machine has to be listened to, erased, reset; a doorbell requires interaction; a car needs to be started, choked, tire pressure tended to, oil checked, warning lights figured out).
I think he has a point, but is way overstating it.
Yeah, and you could use ResEdit to customize things! I agree—I don’t think I had any less of a relationship with my tech back in the day either. I may have initiated more of it since things didn’t prompt or ask basically at all, but I sought it out every day.
Notifications definitely have their place and use. But most of the downsides of them stem from their being an all-or-nothing choice when you first open an app. Ideally, in a lot of cases, there would be at least an ‘only important stuff’ in the middle. Or apps would let you specify how you want to be notified.
Yes, you can change the setting afterwards, but that means going out of the app and into Settings > Notifications, then possibly back into the app if that has any notification settings of its own.
And you’re right about Focus not being a cure-all for notification overload, Adam. I’m not sure what Apple’s motivation was behind that feature — it feels like making it the user’s problem and offering a solution, rather than getting to the root of why notifications can be problematic and providing carrot and/or stick to developers to tackle that.
A quick note: Recently I’ve been using a different tool to (almost) instantly turn off notifications for a particular app. I tend to “try out” notifications for an app when first installing it, and at least nine times out of ten end up turning them off, curiosity satisfied.
Sliding a notification to the left and choosing “Options” presents a handy “Turn Off” choice, in helpful red. Perhaps that will speed up things a bit and reduce frustration.