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by jahller 20 days ago
you really underestimate the will of people to not change anything that annoys them about their OS. they will click 1 million times a popup away before even considering that it could be resolved indefinitely by an option change. i think Apple's system works well to keep the average user safe.
3 comments

Agreed. It just doesn't occur to most people. To even come up with the idea that maybe there's a setting for something, never mind searching for a tutorial on how to change it, you already have to be a power user for some values of "power".
The grandma is going to follow the video on how to disable system security because scammers are making these videos and she think she has a virus.

Not because she wants to install brew or something.

Good point.
This is evidenced by the people who constantly dismissed the Wi-Fi pop-up on iOS. Which is just about everyone I know with an iPhone.
Which pop-up do you mean?
It's a setting that iPhones had for a long time, where they would prompt you to join the nearby WiFi networks. I don't currently have one, so I don't know what it's currently like, but a large number of people would pull out their phones, start doing something, dismiss the pop-up, and continue, many times in a day. Probably they almost never actually used it to join a WiFi network at all. You could turn it off in settings but they didn't.
"they will click 1 million times a popup away before even considering that it could be resolved indefinitely by an option change. i think Apple's system works well to keep the average user safe."

I find this reasoning backward. I have been saying what you just said for years, in defense of NOT making changes a giant pain in the ass for knowledgeable users. The vast, vast majority of people will not imagine that there's an option; much less go looking for it. Therefore if the user goes digging around in Settings, everything should be there all the time, with no further hassles required.

By the same logic, a lot of Apple's recent decisions are anti-user stupidity. For example, removing the "Get new mail" button from Mail. If my mom tries to log into her bank account and the site says "We just sent a confirmation code to your E-mail," she's going to go there and try to fetch mail. But nope... now she has to sit there and wait for it to poll the server at some unknown interval.

Apologists rush to say, "Oh but you can simply customize the toolbar and put it back." NO. Give me a break. Why on earth would the average user even imagine that you could customize the fundamental UI of the application, let alone figure out where to perform that task? It's so out of touch with real-world users.