The iPhone, one of the most popular consumer products of all time, has become a usability nightmare. A new one comes with 38 preinstalled apps, of which you can delete 27. Once you’ve downloaded your favorite personal finance, social media and productivity apps, you’re now sitting at 46 or more.
This “innovation” of artificial intelligence in your iPhone and throughout the world is not the creation of something new, or revolutionary, but simply corporations selling you back basic usability after decades of messy, thoughtless and bloated design choices. We need to call out what is going on here: tech firms are charging us more to fix their mistakes and slapping an AI label on the shakedown.
Alexa and Siri have become replacements for conscious and intentional computing. They aggregate commands into voice interfaces that, while convenient, utterly sacrifice “what we can do” to “what Amazon or Apple allows us to do.” We have been trained to hoard apps and files, while tech companies have failed to provide any intuitive or easy way to organize them. And their solution isn’t to make things more organized or usable.