Apple’s design is getting a little more human-friendly — sort of - The Verge
Apple’s iOS 16, iPadOS 16, and macOS Ventura updates will be more forgiving of human mistakes, like typos and emails sent in error. But, even with new personalization options and MacBook Air colors that aren’t gray, it’s all very much on Apple’s terms.
Apple’s WWDC 2022 announcements lacked big, splashy new features, and Siri was largely MIA. But in the absence of Apple’s virtual assistant, we got a lot of small but potentially meaningful software updates centered around a very real individual: you. And me. Developers know us as “end users,” but we’re otherwise known as humans.
Humans are different from end users, because we forget words, make typos, and accidentally hit send on an important email before it’s ready. Humans also have individual personalities and strong opinions about typefaces, and we’d like it if the devices we carry around 24/7 reflected that a little more. Historically, Apple has preferred to keep a tight grip on every aspect of its devices, from how they look to the way humans are allowed to interact with them. This year’s WWDC gave us a glimpse of Apple softening that grasp just a little to acknowledge the humans on the other side of its product pipelines. It’s a welcome development, but don’t be mistaken — Apple isn’t handing over too much control.
For starters, Macs, iPads, and iPhones will be more forgiving of the mistakes we make. The Messages app on all three platforms will allow you a 15-minute grace period after you send an iMessage to correct typos or undo send altogether. Likewise, Mail will let you recall an email within 10 seconds after pressing send. Search within the Mail app is also getting an update to correct typos and use synonyms, because words are hard sometimes.
Apple also has a tendency to insist on its products being used a certain way, sometimes ignoring the reality of how humans actually want to use its products. Remember all of the years we spent tapping on our iPhone’s alarms as nothing happened because Apple wanted us to tap “edit” first? Apple finally relented on that one in iOS 15.
This year, it’s acknowledging another reality: that we can’t always reply to a text or an email the minute we read it, but we don’t want it to disappear into a sea of message threads. Rather than hacking a workaround like pinning a text thread to the top of your screen, Apple will let you mark a text as unread, essentially letting you set a little reminder flag to send a reply. Mail will also move sent messages up to the top of your inbox for follow-up — because our inboxes actually double as to-do lists. That’s not what an email app is really for, but that’s how we use it.
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