If you turn Apple Intelligence off, how is the UI in iOS 18 any different than the previous version?

Mail is dogshit. Photos is dogshit. Image playground is streaming hot dog shit. Etc etc.

You can modify the Photos app to be just like pre iOS 18 just by using “Customize and Reorder”.

Absolutely nothing has changed about mail if you turn off Apple Intelligence and Image Playgrounds is just an app that you don’t have to use.

I see mail now has mandatory images next to each mail item, how can that be turned off?

Settings -> Apps -> Mail -> Show Contact Photos

Wow as simple as that, thank you.

I did not know that, thanks. But still - if I have to research now how to do that it‘s still going in the wrong direction, no? Besides, it‘s rare that Apple gives a choice, usually you have to adapt at whatever they decide.

So Apple shouldn’t make things more customizable?

There is no way to get the old Photos interface back.

Not an Apple user here. What's changed? Can you share more details about what made them "dogshit"?

Mail got category buttons on top that split your inbox so now to check your mail you have to click around because shipping notification are in a separate list from work emails. Photos had a perfectly fine interface with tabs that got changed into a long list of often redundant categories. Thankfully it can be customized a bit. New control center (wifi toggles etc.) was replaced with a customizable grid of widgets that is buggy, slow and looks ugly and unprofessional in comparison with the old interface. Gimmick. Home screen icon size and color is customizable now and it looks out of place. Gimmick. If you have a dark theme enabled then icons in settings become themed and look different than icons on the home screen with is weird and inconsistent with the rest of the interface. All animations were reworked and feel like crap. There is a delay to every action and it feels like animation smoothness takes priority over interface responsiveness. Home screen swiping animation stutters every time. Even though there is not a single new feature available for EU users other than the interface changes the entire OS feels sluggish, bloated and unfinished. Performance is terrible. This update made my iPhone 12 slow down to a crawl. Feels like running Vista on a Windows XP machine and since they dropped security updates for iOS 17 I had no choice but to upgrade. This combined with the recent news about iPhones listening to people at homes makes me want to get rid of my phone entirely. I don’t want a new iPhone and I sure as hell don’t want an Android.

Mail: top right (...) menu -> List View

Yes I had to do that, which is my entire point - everything worked, and they made it worse.

Your definition of worse is others definition of better.

Clearly there are more than a few of us.

amen

home screen icon theming hit like an empty bus

Usually when they shamelessly copy from Android they made some improvements, this isn’t even close to material on Pixel, which is pretty nice.

(Not a fanboy of either; use both.)

> Photos had a perfectly fine interface with tabs that got changed into a long list of often redundant categories

“Pin” the categories you want access to.

Bluetooth is horrible. I see spinning loader (connection indicator) even when I switch bluetooth off. It’s been stuck at it for days. You’d think that this would be core functionality and ultra stable by now.

reboot your phone at that point ...

Mail has been terrible since inception. It’s just more terrible now. Photos in iOS 17 was fantastic but the new version in iOS 18 is unforgivably bad. It’s the new “pc load letter”…

I have it off, it still uses 5GB of storage...

Hey, just pay extortion prices for more storage!

It's called enshittification, and it's pervasive throughout our entire economy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

It's called monopolization, and it's dependent on those companies selling products that you can't switch for another competitor.

Or, some times it's plain simple cartelization, making sure no competitor is better. That seems to be the case with smart TVs for example.

It's good to have a word for the impact it causes, but focusing on that novelty makes it looks like it's a new phenomenon that we don't know the causes or how to fix.

Absolutely. I don't mean to imply that it's "just happening." It's happening for very good reasons, like the ones you mentioned.

The natural state of a ex-free-market economy sliding into feudalism without a systemic competition present.

Apple doesn't have PMs.

I’m sure they have some “magical” Cupertino world for infighting assholes putting their careers before users, whatever that may be.

Doesn’t seem so.

https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200318153/get-connected...

That is not in the OS. I also sort of suspect they're being hired as a prank because there is basically no power structure for them to have control over anything. Execs and designers have all the power.

(Note: there are "EPMs" but it's a totally different thing.)

My team at Apple had PMs.

> Nothing [insert company] is shipping seems to be for me, the user.

I have a 90/10 rule when it comes to new products/features these days: they're 90% benefit to the company and 10% benefit to me.

> and something has to give

Well yes, the user.

> but then I’d have to relieve the horror of being forced to submit my email address to Microsoft to install the damn OS.

all it takes to install Windows 11 without an account is to press SHIFT + F10 on the "Connect your internet"-screen and execute this command: OOBE\BYPASSNRO

never in my life have i linked an MS-Account to my personal windows, i always use a local account.

> all it takes to install Windows 11 without an account

Well, that does not really look very user-friendly, does it? Which probably only underlines the point of the parent.

We're on a tech-focused site where someone mentioned that they don't install windows, because they don't want to login with an online-account. i agree that my described work-around is not made for the common enduser and i hate that this feature is so hidden, but i think executing a single command you find after 30 seconds of googling is not too much to ask for from a tech-adjacent person :)

i see posts on here of people reverse-engineering firmwares, hacking together new things, finding and using exploits etc., not sure why installing a windows seems to be a huge topic, then.

Because they made it a worse product, they made it my job to fix it. That’s the point.

> but i think executing a single command you find after 30 seconds of googling is not too much to ask for from a tech-adjacent person

I would be very wary. That instruction sounds like an “unsupported” hack that’s likely to lead to future problems.

Why is this a hack? This just a toggle to disable the new “feature”.

It makes total sense for the Windows engineers to have this kind of feature flag.

And i dont think they are going to rip out the code that runs and supports local accounts.

it’s actually not even as “simple” as that comment they’ve changed it to be a bit more obtuse to get to the command part, exemplifying exactly why going along with it is a problem.

what do you mean? i did exactly this, two hours ago.

I wonder if 'OOBE\BYPASSNRO' will be the FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT... for the new generation of people entering the IT world.

Doubt it. Kids today are phoners who live on mobile devices.

At what point in time were “kids today” into computers? If it wasn’t phones, it was video games or comic books or serial Dickens. It’s always been a subset who want to play with the tech beneath.

it's certainly a step i teach to kids coming into the IT-space, right before teaching them about Mass Activation Scripts :)

Oh that's all? Just some obscure magical incantations which will probably be gone as soon as Microsoft management learns of it. Brilliant.

Microsoft knows about this. Its why they included the option in the command line. The fact that Massgavel's activation scripts still work on windows is telling of how much they'll care.

it's been confirmed that MS uses these scripts themselves, internally :)

sibling, we are on _hacker_ news. if a single command is too much to ask for, i don't know what to think.

ever installed Linux? takes exponentially more knowledge than this windows-local-only workaround.

i'm sure that management is aware of this feature, as it exists for years now and can be trivially found, it's not like this is hidden somewhere in a vault, you know. Same as MAS.

i'm not even a defender of Windows and only use it at home because i game, but if i see that someone has never installed a windows just because they don't want to give M$ their e-mail address (hope they don't have a github or linkedin account, but, you know...), then i want to give them the hint they need :) i use them same functionality to install windows for my parents etc., as they want to have local-only accounts as well. even without this weird work-around, i would still be the one installing windows. OS installation is not hard, but already too difficult or confusing for lots of endusers.

not sure why you chose to reply in such a snarky tone :(

I use linux because it's much easier than fixing Windows. I lost interest in tinkering with my computer years ago.

i understand that. i have a linux server at home and linux is my niche at work. the problem for me is that i game a lot of different games and although gaming on linux technically works, i got sick of debugging basically every game and loosing performance. thus, sadly, i am forced to use windows. of course with an offline account, debloated etc.

Step 1: add online login as an option

Step 2: make online login the default option

Step 3: make online login mandatory, leave an escape hatch for technical users

<we are here>

Step 4: remove the escape hatch

If I wanted to type in commands to install my OS I’d use Linux desktop.

Sounds like your ready for some flavor of Linux

I use Linux all day on the server, but I’ve never liked it on desktop. I do think I’ll be forced into it within a few years.