It would annoy me a lot less if Apple (and the rest of them, to be honest) didn't just change stuff for the sake of change. Like oh hey, let's change four finger swipe up gesture to not be a toggle. Just because. Or, oh hey, let's just remove your battery life indicator. Ugh. Makes me scared to update anything.

Is it really just because? I've seen this mentioned before, but there must be some reason right?

I've never owned an iPhone (or any i* devices), so I have no experience here, but aren't the folks at Apple likely to do stuff for a reason? Or are things really that bad?

I try very hard to understand why they do some things, and come up short. With a lot of the minor UI tweaks, it's certainly not based on any real-world research, because some of the tweaks go against what's already established or being published in journals.

They probably do have reasons, but as to what they are, no idea. And as to whether their reasons are beneficial to the user, in many cases I can say no, absolutely not.

They've recently screwed up enough things badly enough to severely abrogate user trust, and I don't think they even realize it.