[philsnow]

I don't know -- I don't think that there's a particular social contract (much less a legal one) between companies and users that the offering they provide today will be unchanged forever.

I don't mean to defend the dark pattern in this particular case, I'm responding to you saying "this whole industry is a complete farce". If a company decides that The Way to use their product needs to be nudged in a different direction, they can. (Almost) nobody complained when macs started shipping with Rosetta [0] installed.

I'm nowhere near as confident that Apple Intelligence is worth betting the goodwill of users on as I was about apple silicon + rosetta for intel binaries, but it's Apple's bet to make.

[0] okay, a stub launcher for intel binaries that made it super quick and easy to get Rosetta installed