iMessage counteracts this slightly, with the addition of delivery and read receipts. Read receipts are optional, which does give us a little control over people knowing whether or not we’ve read their messages. But because the feature is optoinal, we might start to wonder why someone hasn’t read our message when it turns out that they actually just don’t have that feature enabled.

But it still doesn’t nearly approach the kind of state capabilities that IM clients allow for. Online status is such a cornerstone of instant messaging as a service that it’s jarring in Messages to switch back and forth between conversations and change mental gears in terms of whether or not people are present in our conversations—even in the case of going between iMessage and IM conversations with the same person.

Typically, I’m only logged into instant messaging on a single device. (Sometimes I log onto a second device, whether it be my MacBook Air, iPhone, or iPad, but it’s rare, and I usually try to log off the other device first.) The key point is that it’s ; I can choose which device I want to be associated with at any point in time.

It’s not quite the same with iMessage. On iOS devices, you’d have to navigate into Settings and flip iMessage off or on every single time. On your Mac you can at least disable your iMessage account in Messages. But Apple clearly intends for you to always be available for iMessages—case in point, Messages on the Mac will continue to receive messages even when it’s not open, displaying an unread count on its Dock icon. That also means that we get the same message on multiple devices—for me, up to four or five—at the same time, along with a cavalcade of alert sounds.