Regular readers of Revert to Saved — and indeed my other writing — will be well aware I can be opinionated. But something I aim to do — even here — is ensure snark and rants are underpinned by facts and reason. Of late, it appears tech reporting has vanished down a rabbit-hole of link-bait madness.

On watching Apple’s latest event, where it unveiled the new MacBook, more details about Apple Watch, and my personal favourite new Apple thing, ResearchKit, I knew people would fire up their gripe cannons. I just wasn’t entirely prepared for how far they’d go.

First came a piece in the Guardian, where Hannah Jane Parkinson helpfully suggested that “only a tool would buy the Apple Watch”. The feature’s clearly open-minded approach defined, she went on to offer a load of ridiculous interpretation, spin and FUD about Apple’s new product that reminded me of the kind of garbage you’d read on a mindless Apple blog, rather than a supposedly respectable publication like The Guardian.

Next, TechCrunch’s Matt Burns referred to Apple’s new MacBook as the company’s “latest betrayal”, because Apple has had the audacity to do what it’s done only loads of times before and omit what it considers soon-to-be-obsolete technology. If anything, the piece injects even more stupid sauce into the mix than The Guardian’s. Gems included arguing the new MacBook has “more in common with a tablet than most laptops”, and the ridiculous suggestion the Intel chipset inside the machine “likely doesn’t provide enough oomph to play computer games, but it should render GIFs just fine”. Ooh, you BURN, Burns! Plus that will come as a shock to all the professionals I know doing highly complex work on older and far less powerful Mac notebooks.

As the internet and tech coverage evolves, it feels like we’re witnessing a shift from survival of the fittest to survival of the inane. Pieces more often resemble personal soapboxes, omitting facts to fit agendas, and punching intelligence until it’s bloodied and broken. This does readers a disservice, and should be left for personal blogs.

Barry Collins has written a piece for Expert Reviews on Björk’s reluctance to release her new music on Spotify. She says it simply doesn’t feel right to essentially give away something you’ve spent years working on. It’s a point of view that aligns with my own, and while revenue from streaming services is better than nothing, there are plenty of reports online that showcase how little bands and artists actually receive from the likes of Spotify.

Naturally, Spotify itself was bullish in response. CEO Daniel Ek argued:

We’ve already paid more than $2 billion in royalties to the music industry and if that money is not flowing to the creative community in a timely and transparent way, that’s a big problem

So it’s the fault of the labels in not getting money to artists, apparently. But what stood out to me more is the figure. Apple plays this trick too: talk about the BILLIONS that have been paid out, but entirely remove the context. A billion sounds like a lot when you’re talking about US dollars, Sterling or Euros. To the individual, a billion is a lot. But when that amount is divided up among every artist or developer on a service, across the entire amount of time the service has been running, a swift bit of maths leads you to a very different conclusion.

The recent Flipboard discussion and my ongoing issues with OS X Yosemite and accessibility brought to mind a piece I wrote for the dearly departed MacUser last year. It’s still very relevant (sadly), in part relating to major accessibility issues I’ve been writing to Apple’s accessibility team about since 2012, and so I’m republishing it here.

Apple might be a tech champion when it comes to accessibility, but it still has blind spots and a propensity to frustrate by using accessibility settings as a fix for contentious design

Perhaps the most laudable goal throughout Apple’s history has been a desire to make its products accessible to everyone who wants to use them. A combination of technological leaps and advancements in understanding wider user needs has resulted in astonishing accessibility controls lurking at the heart of OS X and iOS. Chances are, if you’ve poor vision, hearing or motor control, you’ll still be able to use Apple’s products. Given that you interact with an iPhone by pawing at a pane of glass, it’s quite something you can do so even if you’re unable to see the interface.

But for all of Apple’s success in terms of accessibility, the company still has work to do. It stubbornly retains an odd and frustrating tendency to erect barriers that make the going tougher than it needs to be for many users. It’s unclear why this is the case, but recent changes to iOS and OS X suggest a combination of ignorance and arrogance.

With iOS, Apple created a mobile operating system second-to-none when it comes to accessibility. A quick glance at relevant options in the Settings app compared to the equivalents in vanilla Android show just how far ahead Apple is. And yet when iOS 7 appeared, many users found it made them feel sick and dizzy, because of excessive zooming and swiping animations that could not be disabled; others complained of headaches, due to the brighter, starker interface.

On OS X, similar balance/motion concerns have existed since OS X Lion, and elsewhere the ‘iOSification’ of OS X has introduced further problems: ditching scroll bar arrows has made things tough for some people with motor issues; the upcoming OS X Yosemite includes transparency that dramatically reduces contrast for many interface components, bringing to mind ‘trendy’ (i.e. unreadable) grey-on-grey early-2000s web design; and several updated apps boast toolbars with tiny hit areas, meaning they can only be dragged if you have the dexterity to precisely aim and grab.

But perhaps the most disturbing trend is Apple’s inclination to seemingly use accessibility settings as a kind of band-aid for questionable and divisive design decisions. Not happy about iOS using a spindly font? Change that in accessibility! Hate the fact you can barely read menu items in OS X Yosemite’s dark mode? Change that in accessibility! And so on.

It’s hard to argue Apple should adjust the default state of everything that could potentially reduce accessibility. The swooping, zoomy nature of iOS 7 provides a sense of place if it doesn’t make you throw up, and Yosemite’s revamp has generally gone down very well (at least with anyone who’s forgotten about Mac users laughing at Windows Vista’s transparency seven years ago).

However, if Apple won’t make smarter design decisions and avoid giving into the temptation to sometimes push the shiny over the usable, it should make the means to adjust irksome pain-points more readily available and not bury them in a System Preferences pane or Settings section relatively few people are aware of. For remaining issues, Apple must be faster to address concerns. It’s great iOS now boasts a ‘Reduce Motion’ option, but unacceptable OS X doesn’t after several major revisions, nor properly old-school scroll-bars for those who truly need them.

If accessibility is a checklist, Apple still ticks more boxes than most, but the list is huge, and some of Apple’s nagging reminders date back to 2011. It’s time ‘access for all’ really meant that, especially when the changes would barely affect the majority yet improve the OS X and iOS experience for many thousands of people beyond measure.

Faruk Ateş was one of several designers to tear into the new Flipboard website, which throws accessibility under the bus, in order to offer a more fluid app-like experience online. On Daring Fireball, John Gruber essentially defended the move:

I’ve been a proponent of accessibility for as long as I can remember. It does not follow, however, that what Flipboard chose to do is wrong.

It is true that Flipboard’s engineering decisions prioritize animation and scrolling performance above accessibility. That’s no secret — the title of their how-we-build-this post was “60 FPS on the Mobile Web”. It does not mean they don’t care about accessibility. My understanding is that accessibility is coming — they’re working on it, but it isn’t ready yet.

John’s a smart guy, but I think he’s got this wrong. Accessibility shouldn’t be something a company ‘works on’, trying to figure out how to retro-fit it to a flashy new solution. It should just exist from day one. It’s absurd that Flipboard, a tool for reading, is now no more accessible to blind people than a Flash website would have once been. That’s not progress — that’s regression.

MacUser UK is to close. Gutted isn’t really the word for how I’m feeling right now about this news, so I can only imagine what editor Adam Banks must feel like.

MacUser was one of the first titles to commission me when I started writing for a living, and I’ve bought it on and off since the mid-1990s. When Adam took over again a few years ago, he very rapidly transformed the magazine into something else—a technology title that dared to be different, in a manner echoing Apple.

Within the pages of MacUser, you’d not find a great deal of templated fare, and sometimes not even a great deal of content directly about the Mac. What you would find was interesting opinion and analysis about technology, brilliant insight into design and creativity, and in-depth features on all kinds of creative fare. All this was wrapped up in stunning design and layout work that let the content breathe and positively begged you to explore every page.

In short, MacUser felt like a magazine created for me.

It’s terrible to think that just one more edition will drop through the letterbox and then that’s it—no more MacUser. The publishing world just feels wrong without it.