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Wow this debate is funny. Imho the blame is solely with the user. To rely on your phone for autocorrecting difficult medication brands and then blame the phone

Wow this debate is funny. Imho the blame is solely with the user. To rely on your phone for autocorrecting difficult medication brands and then blame the phone manufacturer when it doesn't work is really a 1st world problem. I'm not saying that Apple is unable to remedy this situation. I'm just saying the users are unrealistic in belieiving that Apple has thought of this situation beforehand and made any changes to aide in the autocorrecting of medicine brands. Because they are brand names. And there are thousands of them.

TheRealPomax 9y ago
Why? Apple has been in the business of automating daily tasks on the iphone for a decade now, holding them to account when it comes to when autocorrect could lead to a person's death, and when it is trivially innocent, is at this point perfectly fair. There are thousands of brands, so having a cherry-picked list of just a few of them preinstalled in the dictionary is something anyone who specialises in autocorrect (say: someone who's worked on it for 10 years and has run into virtually every edge case loads of times by now) knows you should not be doing. Instead of having autocorrect kick in at all, it should simply go "I do not know this word", so that the blame does lie with the user when they tell the phone to add their medication to the dictionary.
kalleboo 9y ago
This is on a desktop/laptop not a phone. macOS also does autocorrect by default
stordoff 9y ago
They aren't brand names (e.g. if you wanted the brand name for duloxetine, you'd probably want "Cymbalta"), they are the actual name of the drug. Further, the Twitter link specifically mentions MacBooks, not phones. "Correcting" a correct word to a different one can _solely_ be blamed on Apple - the user might not even know that the OS does autocorrections, so can hardly be blamed for the system silently changing something they typed correctly (at most you can say they should proof-read the statement). It's an understandable issue, but an issue nonetheless. Especially on desktop, it seems like an easy problem to avoid - just prompt the user that there may be a mistake rather than changing it without their knowledge.

TheRealPomax 9y ago

Why? Apple has been in the business of automating daily tasks on the iphone for a decade now, holding them to account when it comes to when autocorrect could lead to a person's death, and when it is trivially innocent, is at this point perfectly fair. There are thousands of brands, so having a cherry-picked list of just a few of them preinstalled in the dictionary is something anyone who specialises in autocorrect (say: someone who's worked on it for 10 years and has run into virtually every edge case loads of times by now) knows you should not be doing. Instead of having autocorrect kick in at all, it should simply go "I do not know this word", so that the blame does lie with the user when they tell the phone to add their medication to the dictionary.

kalleboo 9y ago

This is on a desktop/laptop not a phone. macOS also does autocorrect by default

stordoff 9y ago

They aren't brand names (e.g. if you wanted the brand name for duloxetine, you'd probably want "Cymbalta"), they are the actual name of the drug. Further, the Twitter link specifically mentions MacBooks, not phones. "Correcting" a correct word to a different one can _solely_ be blamed on Apple - the user might not even know that the OS does autocorrections, so can hardly be blamed for the system silently changing something they typed correctly (at most you can say they should proof-read the statement). It's an understandable issue, but an issue nonetheless. Especially on desktop, it seems like an easy problem to avoid - just prompt the user that there may be a mistake rather than changing it without their knowledge.