I was triggered by the following tweet:
Maybe Be Careful with OSX Sierra. (This is exactly what Apple has never gotten right. Use Dropbox.) https://t.co/I2U4wH41Yu
— Dave Winer (@davewiner) September 24, 2016
I quickly read the article and saw what was going on. Indeed I did notice it, but I knew to expect the kind of behaviour. The good news is, the feature seems to be working correctly: with a single Apple ID, you can login to any device and get access to your desktop and documents thanks to iCloud. The bad news is, most people will easily overlook the single Apple ID part, they’d only think about each device they’re using and would not make the mental link to a single iCloud account. Apple, with their clout, are bound to know this and should be expected to anticipate on it. However, as far as I can tell, people weren’t explicitly forewarned, and they’re probably supposed to be obviously aware of owning a single iCloud account (as in Duh, what else are you thinking?). And that is precisely the problem, this kind of logical behaviour, although intuitive at first sight, doesn’t take into account the long established mindset that we all have. Therefore, while upgrading the OS you wouldn’t think twice before enabling iCloud sync.
In my personal experience, iCloud did the right thing. The first computer I upgraded was my MacBook. My Desktop and Document were all properly sync’ed to iCloud. Then a few days later, I upgraded my Mac Mini, this time iCloud added a new folder on my ubiquitous iCloud backed-up desktop, prefixing the folder name with my Mac Mini’s hostname. In an instant I could recognise what had happened and weren’t surprised. It seems that the gentleman who posted the article didn’t get the same nice experience that I did. I won’t speculate on that particular case, but had Apple said something about this topic loudly and clearly as they geared up for the official launch, people wouldn’t get startled and maybe some would have thought things through before upgrading.
To my mind, this is a perfect illustration of the kind of problem I was referring to when I wrote the following post: When the UX interaction can be too subtle.
Maybe this article won’t go anywhere, many having got a good experience. Or maybe, since the twitterati is always ready for some outrage-tweetstorm, there will be plenty of chatter and not just compliments to go about. We’ll see. Funny enough, I was actually pondering this weekend, the apparently lack of something-gate to do with MacOs and iOS10 in social media. I didn’t have to wait for too long. 😉
The original article is here, exactly as it’s title reads: