> I'm not sure we have the same understanding of "acknowledge". Apple can acknowledge criticism and still decide not to act on it.

We do, but what I'm suggesting is that Apple might exercise a third choice, which would be ignoring the criticism and pretending it doesn't exist if they don't think it will affect their sales.

That argument is moot, because it's not a third option. Apple won't release iOS 26.1 rolling back any of this. Their path is set, they will tweak forward only.

Towards developers they will apply "acknowledge and ignore" as the communication strategy, towards users they will continue to express the usual confidence to know best what he needs, because that's what their users like and that's the only thing they can do now anyway.

In a grander scheme of things, Apple needs to prepare a transition of their locked-in userbase to AR, because there is a risk that AR replaces the smartphone and their users move away from Apple then. So they have to transfer the stickyness of iOS to AR before that happens, to have a ecosystem headstart against all competitors.

The actual interest of users and developers are secondary, they need to smoothly transfer them to a new world without alienating them too much. The only way is forward.

Agreed, I think we're saying the same thing. Apple's already made up their mind on it and they're going to ship it no matter what at this point. To admit that it's not the best design for non-AR devices, whether rightly or wrongly (I personally don't mind it), would be to admit that their overall strategy is flawed.