Apple CEO John Ternus pressured Apple senior VP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi to “accelerate the company’s road map and move quickly beyond merely making necessary improvements to Siri,” reports Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter.
Citing anonymous sources, Gurman writes that Ternus is “frustrated by what he sees as a reluctance to embrace AI with the same urgency as competitors,” and pushed Federighi for changes in a meeting behind closed doors. Federighi, Gurman points out, has been considered an AI skeptic with concerns “about the technology’s privacy, security, societal and employment implications.”
So, over the last couple or years, Samsung has been updating the OS of my Galaxy Smartphone repeatedly. With each iteration more and more AI features have appeared as new buttons with ambiguous icons.
Using AI features on my phone requires opening a Samsung account so it cat track my token use. This requires providing personal information, and making up a password I will remember since the Samsung account app isn’t compatible with password managers (except Samsung’s proprietary manager, which I do not use). I also anticipate Samsung will want a credit card number to quietly charge me as I use compute.
I haven’t made a Samsung account.
And so all these buttons with weird icons are now productivity potholes, since tapping any of them accidentally switches me to the create a Samsung account page, interrupting my workflow.
Like tyranny, enshitification is more about incompetence than malevolence.
Samsung has also been taking away bootloader unlocking so you can’t escape without buying something else.
Can’t you use a different launcher? Samsung launcher has always been shit. I had a misfortune of using Samsung phone 10 years ago or so and even then it was excellent hardware mated to absolute trash software that slowed everything down.
Not OP, but I still haven’t found anything worthy of replacing (the now radioactive) Nova Launcher
I switched to octopi launcher
https://lawnchair.app/
The software has gotten a LOT better since 10 years ago. They also offer much longer updates. I still use a third party launcher with mine, but the default has become less offensive than back then.