Comment by onnimonni

There was a time when I would have agreed pretty whole-heartedly with you and dismissed this as a "simple stupid design flaw". I've been writing production code for over 20 years, and the existence of solutions like Bartender is evidence that the problem can't be that hard, right?

And then I became a product manager for a large suite of capabilities for which large customers would spend millions/year, and my mind changed pretty significantly. Every release, I was forced to choose the 10-15 things that we could reasonably accomplish from a list of hundreds. Many dozens of the things that we didn't do could be classified as "simple stupid design flaws".

There was one of these flaws in particular that I was determined to fix when I took the role. "This makes us look stupid" I thought. It had been a gap in the product for years, and I always marveled at the fact that no one had fixed it. But the reality was, the product was architected to be extensible, and to allow 3rd party developers to build their own solutions. And in this case, there were numerous solutions in the community that solved the problem quite well. When faced with the reality of a mile-long backlog, and many of those items having no solution at all, and no affordance for developers to solve them, the already-solved design flaw always fell below the cut line for each release, despite my best efforts to prioritize it. And I begrudgingly had to acknowledge that this was the right choice at the time.

I have a slightly different view on these types of issues now. It's easy to call this a design flaw, but on the flip side, Apple has clearly made it possible for the community to solve this issue. I'm 100% positive someone at Apple is trying their hardest to get this thing fixed, but most likely keeps getting thwarted by more critical issues, and the realities of managing a large and complex platform/ecosystem.

"Apple has all the money; they should just scale up the dev team". And if they did, those new devs would be assigned to the next 10-15 items on that mile-long list that are still more important than a 1st party solution to a solved problem.

It does show the cracks in Apple's marketing, but it's also far more understandable and reasonable than I once would have believed.

(I don't/didn't work for Apple).

It still makes no sense to me because I don't see how it is relevant that it is fixing what you see as a design flaw from Apple.

If the gutters on one side of my house frequently get clogged up with needles because the builder planted some pine and fir trees close to the house (but not so close as to be against any codes or regulations), I'm not going to just live with it because it is the builder's fault and so I'm not going to spend money to install gutter guards or have the trees removed.

I think it is a design flaw in many car mirror systems that when a car that is overtaking you gets close enough to no longer be visible in the center mirror it isn't yet visible in the side mirror. It is never occurred to me to just live with it because fixing it means spending money to fix the car's design flaw.

I fix this by buying a cheap little stick on convex mirror and sticking it on the side mirror. Then there is overlap between what I can see in the center mirror and what I can see in the side mirror, and I can see overtaking cars at all times. (Or bicyclists and motorcyclists that are lane splitting).