Mark Gurman, Power On:

Steve Jobs used to say that consumers don’t know what they want and trust Apple to make decisions for them.

And:

That way of thinking has helped make Apple one of the most successful companies ever, topping $2 trillion in market value and selling billions of iPhones, iPads, Macs, AirPods and Apple Watches. Those products wouldn’t be the hits they are today without Apple’s approach. But it has also created problems for the technology giant.

One major example:

It took Apple about four years and several lawsuits before it admitted and fixed serious problems with its “butterfly” keyboards introduced in 2015.

All this leads to the point raised in the headline:

For iOS 15’s release this year, Apple planned to make some of the biggest changes ever to the design of the Safari web browser on the iPhone. The fundamental shift: moving the address bar from the top of the screen to the bottom, erasing nearly 15 years of muscle memory.

This past week, after mounting complains from users, including by me in Power On, Apple reversed course, making the new design an option in the Settings app. With that change, Apple will offer users two distinct interfaces for a core app, a rarity in the iOS world.

Interesting take. Mark’s Power On newsletter is a consistently good read.

I can’t remember the last time Apple made such a dramatic interface change in response to feedback from the user base. Of course, this assumes that feedback from users, as opposed to internal design feedback, is what caused the change.