I don't think you are necessarily disagreeing with what they are saying.

First of all, there are surely many people who influenced the creation and release of this feature and I don't think it would be accurate to assign a single motivation to all their work.

Second, I don't think it's wrong to say that "boneheaded management cutting corners" by prioritizing the needs of other internal teams over the needs of the user is in some sense them "wanting to own your Mac". Although that is a dramatic way to describe it.

> I don't think it's wrong to say that "boneheaded management cutting corners" by prioritizing the needs of other internal teams over the needs of the user is in some sense them "wanting to own your Mac". Although that is a dramatic way to describe it.

It’s beyond dramatic. It’s absurd. I’ve worked on so many projects and deadlines that have had to make such decisions, even decisions that eventually fell to me. In numerous cases I could cast aspersions on some of the management motivations, but even so I couldn’t describe it as them trying to own the product they’d sold to customers. In most cases it was a balance of market pressure and resources. In the cases where I’ve had to make those calls, it’s been balancing market pressure specifically so I had more room to satisfy users.

I don’t think Apple engineers are immune to this. They have to ship big things on a tight deadline. When they can’t satisfy everyone they have to make choices. Sometimes they don’t make the best choices.

Hopefully you don’t have these weights in your job. But lots of us do.

Of course nobody is immune. I believe it takes active work from the users of any vendor's software to disincentivize similar user hostile "improvements". That is just the way that business works in a human society.