Sorting Out Apple’s New Mail And Photos

Hi y’all, WWDC24 has come and gone. I slurped up all the info about it until my brain exploded. Fun times. I have thoughts; here I’m covering the new Photos and Mail features.

Photos

A big redesign, eh?

The iOS app is getting a pretty big refresh that, at first glance, doesn’t look all that great to me. So I’ll have to wait until this Fall to see if it’s actually good nor not. It’s supposed to make finding and enjoying photos easier. I think the intent is to organize your images for you into “Collections.” That fancy new stuff might work okay, but I hope you can also just keep things old-school and manually sort pictures into Albums yourself.

Here’s the thing about auto-sorting or prioritizing: the intent to be helpful and save effort is good. But it means I must completely trust the system to get it right. And when it doesn’t, it requires that I figure out how the system is supposed to work, determine what went wrong, and find a fix. So its failures create new effort for me. Then I lose trust in it and must abandon the “smart sort” system, relying on good ol’ fashioned manual control of my stuff.

Take, for example, email.

Mail

For the first time I think, the Mail app — which I rely on across my iPhone, iPad, and Mac — will feature prioritized inboxes. Instead of keeping up with just one inbox, now there will be multiple inboxes to reach zero. How does that help? Divide and conquer, I guess?

Here’s the promise:

“On-device categorization organizes your messages and helps you stay up to date across all your accounts. The Primary category includes your most essential emails — like those from people you know and time-sensitive messages. And the rest of your email will be organized into new categories like Transactions for receipts and order confirmations, Promotions for marketing and sales messages, and Updates for newsletters and everything else.“

So the “smart sort system” will “figure out” what’s important, what’s not, and put new email into different categories. Gmail already does this, I’ve used it, and I dislike it. Whether Outlook at my job or Gmail, I always turn these inboxes off. The system never sorts emails 100% correctly. So I don’t rely on it.

Instead, I keep it simple. All new email all goes in one place: Inbox. That’s it. And — get this — all my email is always sorted 100% correctly by my own brain and fingertips. The effort is minimal, really.

If/when I make a mistake, I know why (I goofed). It happens. But if the “smart system” sorts in a way that doesn’t make sense to me, how do I know it didn’t make an error? How do I learn what it thinks it’s doing and distinguish what it should do/how it should work so I can know when it’s not working correctly?

A good example of this inaccurate sorting is Apple’s own junk mail filtering. It does well overall. But I always must check my junk mail folder just in case an email was sent to it that shouldn’t have. And guess what? Though not often, it happens regularly enough that I must check two places (inbox and junk) to be sure I get all my mail. This is why almost every new email you choose to sign up for tells you to check your junk mail folder for the confirmation email in case the “smart” computer makes a dumb move. It’s a thing.

I will give Apple’s version of sorting in Mail a (half-hearted) try. And I’ll probably drop it after it fails twice.

Summary

I sort of get the need to add The Sorting Hat magic to Apple’s core apps like Mail and Photos. We have thousands of emails and pictures with important info. Searching and surfacing the right data in the right place at the right time is vital.

Yet while sometimes the Apple magic “just works,” sometimes tech still fails. To its great credit, Apple’s solutions are typically simple, elegant, and reliable. The company has earned its multi-trillion dollar value. 

But we’ll see if and how well these new things work. If they do, great. I’ll keep opening my ever-thinning wallet to Apple. If they don’t, no worries. Everything I already use on Apple gear is good enough as-is. Not perfect, sometimes even less than ideal. But quite good all-in-all.