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Comment by MichaelZuo | Hacker News Reader

Let’s not beat around the bush. Whoever made this decision in Apple seems pretty close to flat out evil.

There must be at least tens of thousands of ipad users globally (on ipads capable of upgrading to 27) who would would find this a critical loss.

To not mention this at all, not even in fine print release notes, while pushing people to upgrade knowing they cant ever downgrade back in the future, is just sabotage one step removed.

Especially as they did not offer any alternative way to access the functionality.

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This is bonkers take.

If you read this article, the author is basically saying “the way this worked before was very opaque and probably almost no one figured it out, but _I_ knew how it worked, and so the change is bad for me”.

Do they have a good point that they have a valid use case? Yes. Do they have the only use case? No. Did Apple do this to try to make things better? Yes. That doesn’t make them “evil”, that makes them trying to make things better.

No.

Flat out removing a functionality that is 100% certain to be critical to many without any way of regaining it via any combination of features found on the iPad…

And without any notice whatsoever, and with no way to downgrade back, gets pretty close to flat out evil.

Don’t try to talk out of both sides of your mouth.

Even if they clownishly made it more buried and difficult to find under a dozen submenus… it would still be much less bad in comparison.

(If they never advertised or implied the iPad as being suitable for presentations, education, etc., then that have lessened the severity, but clearly that’s not the case)

> Whoever made this decision in Apple seems pretty close to flat out evil.

Could not be further from the truth. Let’s stop such nasty hate for the most minor of things; there are lots of choices one makes when designing software / interfaces / hardware and not every edge case is immediately apparent.

Disclosure: I work at Apple. I also had nothing to do with this change.

Even though it’s one step removed from literal sabotage, there’s no angle I can see that would render it just a “minor thing”.

It effectively makes it useless for anyone where not showing the presenter’s screen content was critically important.

Unless you know of some alternative method?

I think they understand the problem, it's just not as dire a thing to see to the rest of us as you seem to feel.

It's easy to be outraged about everything, it's hard for everyone to do everything right 100% of the time for use cases most have never even heard of.

(I don't work at Apple).

I doubt anyone at Apple was sitting in a meeting and was like, "I hated all my teachers in school, let's make it impossible for them to use iPads as presentation devices", and then everyone else agreed with them.

It's also quite possible that there is new under-documneted and opaque way to do what the teacher wants to do.

>> Whoever made this decision in Apple seems pretty close to flat out evil.

> Could not be further from the truth. Let’s stop such nasty hate for the most minor of things; there are lots of choices one makes when designing software / interfaces / hardware and not every edge case is immediately apparent.

> Disclosure: I work at Apple. I also had nothing to do with this change.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

- Upton Sinclair

What a stupid (and unnecessarily ad hominem) take. OP’s salary very much depends on understanding when their company produces crap.

I wonder who is paying you to read Upton Sinclair.

Ill welcome your donation made on my behalf to the EFF.

In other words, even for Apple, Harlow's razor applies...

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