I think this is also a way of getting ahead of any “ban social media for teens and preteens” bills that might pop up in the US. They do not want repeats of Australia! By adding age verification into the operating system they can deflect responsibility but also respond to legislators with a scalpel rather than getting sledge-hammered.

I use the password manager built into the OS (iCloud Keychain) which doesn’t put an icon into that bar.

We’re talking about a limited resource (a few inches of screen real estate at the top of the screen) that tons of app developers feel entitled to occupy. Now we could have some kind of system whereby excess icons get dumped into a … menu, but that defeats the entire purpose since they’re no longer on the screen all the time!

There are plenty of apps out there which do not feel entitled to a slice of this precious screen real estate. I think it’s worth supporting them!

Yes, though SSDs that can sustain 1.5G/s and an OS that transparently compresses memory before swapping yield a lot better experience than Win95 swapping.

The firmware could be flashed to the device in factory and then write-protected by burning a fuse in the circuit.

I just uninstalled the Dropbox app to get rid of that icon because it was annoying me. I guess we have different priorities!