Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think compartmentalization is good, but the fundamental question is one of who is in control. I completely agree that interaction between apps is fundamental. It acts as a multiplier, such that the whole is much more than the sum of its parts. Poor facilities for inter-app interaction is why iOS is such a toy compared to other OSes. It's great for browsing the web and reading your e-mail and such, but it sucks for…
> ...Apple has decided that users are too stupid to make their own decisions... Sadly this is true for many, if not most users: http://arstechnica.com/security/2008/09/study-confirms-users... It's a few years old, but it seems unlikely that things have changed much since it was done: "Some researchers have tested how college students respond to fake dialog boxes in browser popup windows and found that the students ar…
At least there were 9 who "did the right thing" - 21% - which to me suggests that not all users are idiots and a fair number of them are knowledgeable. It would be interesting to do this study again, nearly 7 years later, and compare the results.
The real danger of assuming that users are stupid is that it means they'll likely stay stupid, as then even fewer will learn due to the lack of any motivation to. My cynical opinion of why this happens is that for these companies, it's actually advantageous to keep users stupid; you can extract more profit from them if they're kept happy, unquestioningly complacent, and consuming. To paraphrase an old analogy: if you keep someone from learning how to fish, you can keep selling them fish.