[HN Gopher] You Might Also Like
___________________________________________________________________
You Might Also Like
Author : mgrayson
Score : 535 points
Date : 2022-11-07 18:27 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (basicappleguy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (basicappleguy.com)
| sebastien_b wrote:
| > _" I willingly paid a tremendous amount for the hardware, and I
| choose to pay nearly $500 annually to access Apple services, but
| seeing ads being further promulgated across the software feels,
| well, gross."_
|
| I stopped paying to see ads when I quit subscription TV. I feel I
| will soon have to quit paying for ads when getting a new phone.
| aendruk wrote:
| Been feeling similarly about Spotify lately. I pay, yet still
| they've been trashing the UI with full screen ads every day.
| tristor wrote:
| This infuriates the shit out of me, and I'm a heavy Apple user
| and a Product Manager. The role of PMs is to be tastemakers,
| among other things, and I have no idea which PM wrote the
| PRD/6-pager for adding ads everywhere in iOS, but they should be
| fired immediately. This experience is the epitome of un-premium,
| and is a huge step towards there being no experience
| differentiation in the product between Apple and Android. Apple
| is able to charge significantly more than competitors for its
| products /because/ the experience has a premium look and feel
| compared to the ghetto that is Android. Turning iOS into a ghetto
| too is definitely not a reasonable product vision.
| [deleted]
| spacemadness wrote:
| That's painting PMs with a wide brush. I wish this was always
| the case, but PMs help bring all sorts of terrible things to
| light in the world.
| i_like_apis wrote:
| Yeah screw that. I typically loathe Apple criticism - it's
| usually so confused and biased. But this makes me ask, as a
| former employee:
|
| Why is Apple loosing its way again?
|
| Is this what happens when Steve is gone for long enough?
|
| Get back to your roots!
| valleyer wrote:
| I'll answer, also as a former employee. Craig and Tim figured
| out that there was a lot of slack in Apple's software quality.
| That is, they could skimp on quality, favoring a strict
| schedule and flashy if half-baked features, and adding user-
| unfriendly stuff like ads, and nothing bad happened to them or
| to the company. Therefore, they're going to continue to probe
| in that direction until they meet resistance.
|
| Also: Craig and Tim, and probably some other execs, have
| started to make Apple decisions with an eye toward burnishing
| their personal brands. This is why we get annual OS releases
| presented by a freshly-hairstyled Craig putting himself into
| Web-meme-ready poses. This is why we get Tim waving the flag at
| a Formula One race and being obsequious toward Donald Trump.
| i_like_apis wrote:
| I never minded Craig really. Yes they are all politicians
| though. At least Craig's org has the real hardcore engineers.
| I assume the majority of this stuff falls under Eddie's org.
| (Speaking of flashy personalities)
| valleyer wrote:
| As someone who worked in Craig's org, I can assure you that
| there is plenty of non-"hardcore" engineering going on
| (whatever that means, anyway). Plenty of bullshit.
|
| Plenty of incredibly smart, creative people (engineers and
| managers both), too.
| pzo wrote:
| Looks like there are to make stockholders happy and forced to
| keep growing revenues instead of making great products.
|
| - their biggest revenue (iPhone) stalled in the last few years.
| Each year it's around 250 millions sales. Whoever wanted to
| have/switch to iPhone it already bought one.
|
| - people upgrading iPhones less often, because there is not
| much innovation or devices are good enough. It's similar like
| with PC market - between 1995 - 2010 there was a lot of
| innovation in PC and few years your desktop improved a lot.
| Then later you could have ~10 years old laptop that was good
| enough for most people. I'm still using 4 year old iPhone XS
| that is good enough. And my old Macbook Pro 2012 still good
| enough for my mother.
|
| - number of internet users also almost saturated from 2
| billions in 2012 to 5 billions in 2022 so that's ~65% of users.
| It will never be 100% because toddlers and kids <5 years old
| don't/own use smartphones.
|
| - those kids are more likely to be given android tablet first
| because it's cheaper for parents, such as Kindle Fire. Once
| they get used to android they will be less likely to switch to
| different OS. In similar way apple has great potential to
| increase sales of MacOS devices but probably just most people
| are used to Windows.
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| shmde wrote:
| My brain just melted reading this. I am sorry but this doesn't
| make sense and reads like a GPT-3 prompt. Which part of the
| comment is supposed to be related to the advertisement on app
| store of apple ?
| noduerme wrote:
| As with GPT-3, the production of endless amounts of pseudo-
| academic-sounding gobbledegook is a feature of Marxist
| ideology, not a bug.
| languageserver wrote:
| The day of the AI has already arrived, as online marxists
| fail the Turing test
| thrown_22 wrote:
| That's been the case for quite a while. Especially US
| Marxists:
|
| >The key struggle of workers is that of getting enough
| minority representation in corporate board rooms.
|
| Like the problem with the Irish Potato famine being that
| Queen Victoria wasn't queer enough.
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| Identity politics are antithetical to Marxism. Marxists
| focus on _class_.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Yes, I wish someone would explain this to US Marxists. Go
| to any university and see what the Marxists club is like.
|
| >I'm a bi trans demi boy who is disabled due to anxiety
| and also the president of the society. Anyone who doesn't
| sleep with me is transphobic.
|
| >>Ok but what about helping organize the proletariat?
|
| >Ew, they are reactionary bigots who we need to
| deplatformed.
|
| >>...
|
| >You seem problematic. You're not allowed back here until
| you write an apology for the original land owners and
| sleep with me.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Identity politics are antithetical to _marxist theory_
| but not necessarily to the marxist _movements_ as they
| actually existed.
|
| Here, things get more complicated because there were
| marxist movements all over the world, from Africa to Asia
| to Russia, and each had different motivations and often
| different goals.
|
| In Russia, marxism was always about identity first and
| foremost, primarily the identity of various
| outcast/conquered groups: poles, jews, germans,
| lithuanians, etc. that were in the conquered regions in
| the Western part of the Empire - primarily the regions
| that used to be held by Poland. The abstruse economic
| theories served as a type of schelling point for a
| coalition of minorites against the Russian Orthodox
| majority, and after the revolution there was a systematic
| effort to suppress Russian identity and replace it with a
| new "Soviet" identity -- e.g. if you look at the list of
| Soviet general secretaries, only one of them was Russian
| (although there is some debate as several of the
| secretaties had mysterious, and in some cases, clearly
| invented pasts). There were explicit anti-Russian
| policies put in place, for example there were communist
| parties in all the provinces except the Russian province,
| which had no communist party, and thus no road for
| advancement except to join the overall Soviet Communist
| Party, but that preferenced non-Russians for membership.
|
| Similarly when the Soviets drew the borders of various
| provinces, they explicitly made the minority provinces
| much larger, dragging in traditional Russian lands, even
| as they created local minority communist parties that
| barred Russians from participation, effectively meaning
| that 1/3 of Russians were living in an explicitly non-
| Russian province, even though often times they were the
| majority population in that province.
|
| A good book that covers this topic in depth is Terry
| Martin's "Affirmative Action Empire" -
| https://www.amazon.com/Affirmative-Action-Empire-
| Nationalism...
|
| At the same time, Marxism in other areas had a decidedly
| nationalist tone - for example in Africa, Indonesia,
| Vietnam or other nations fighting colonialism. Here, too,
| it was identity and nationalism that was the motivating
| factor and not the economic theories.
|
| Really class-based movements are generally limited to the
| "West" -- e.g. Western Europe and North America. I'm not
| saying that class isn't important elsewhere, but when you
| look at what animates radical movements throughout the
| world, it's almost always race/religion/language that
| plays the dominant role, and this is as true for marxist
| movements as for other types of movements.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Recently I find Amazon Alexa constantly asking "Did you know..."
| or "By the way..." at the end of most exchanges to introduce or
| sell me new features, and it drives me completely nuts. Just f-
| off and do the thing I told you to!
|
| Imagine if your hammer had a little LCD running ads for new nails
| (and other less relevant crap).
| indigodaddy wrote:
| How does one spend $500/mo on Apple services?
| projektfu wrote:
| "I willingly paid a tremendous amount for the hardware, and I
| choose to pay nearly $500 annually to access Apple services"
|
| It says $500/yr or more like $40/month.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Woops, reading appears to be fundamental. Thanks :)
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I remember a friend saying Apple should have bought YouTube
| before Google did, and thinking this person just doesn't get
| Apple. YouTube is/was a chaotic low quality mess, and Apple only
| does high quality, beautiful products, with a top quality
| experience. Now it seems like the idea of Apple owning YouTube
| doesn't seem off-brand at all.
|
| This is really disappointing. I am not willing to see ads at all
| in my daily life, and am willing to pay for the privileged. It
| seems Apple is now making that impossible.
| guggalugalug wrote:
| I just got my first iphone. A 3rd gen(?) SE. I love the device.
| I'm not a big computers guy, but have used two different mac book
| pros and most recently a household imac for personal since 2008.
| On mobile, after BlackBerry, I went samsung / android in large
| part to intentionally fragment my device / os ecosystem, not put
| all my eggs in one cart. Samsung devices are very clever. They do
| not have the same cozy feel as apple, but they are smart. Now my
| work buddy texts me a twitter link, and it shows on my desktop
| when i open up safari to check my mail. I don't like that, I
| don't want that. Maybe I am not ready for ambient computing? I
| love apple devices, but the os increasingly seems openly
| confrontational if not hostile. In part I finally switched to
| apple on mobile because i was tired of android bloat, but it has
| followed me, just in a different form. A lot of the angst in this
| thread seems to be borne of the competing incentives of hardware,
| software, and services. Apple used to be more of a walled garden
| than they are today. And that, before they were a trillion dollar
| concern, maybe gave them latitude to execute purely on creative
| vision.
| thfuran wrote:
| >Apple used to be more of a walled garden than they are today.
|
| Very briefly, perhaps. But before that, they weren't.
| krono wrote:
| The pushing and pulling was there all along:
|
| The play/pause media key automatically starting the Music app,
| suggestions defaulting to include content from paid services (hey
| that movie is available on Apple TV!), maps links only working
| with Apple Maps, searching for selected text opens Safari and
| disregards your primary browser, permanently enabled share menu
| options for iCloud and Airdrop.
|
| Privacy settings increasingly spread out and opaquely named. No
| more central unique identifier reset button, but individual ones
| for each app placed in different submenus. Completely disabling
| Siri has become some sort of Easter egg hunt. Not that it'll
| actually stop the data outflow, though.
|
| Aggressive surfacing of ecosystem capabilities such as proximity
| unlock by nearby Apple watch, wake on bluetooth or network, etc.
| These features were previously configurable through the GUI, but
| those conveniences have been removed and the features are enabled
| by default.
|
| Local configuration profiles (a free, easy, local, and accessible
| way to configure your system) are being slowly phased out in
| favour of third party remote Mobile Device Management services
| such as Jamf or, of course, the one Apple launched not too long
| ago.
|
| These new advertisements are so prominent and the implementation
| so obviously bad, that I'm almost suspecting them to be merely a
| distraction from the much more insidious tricks they've been
| pulling in the background.
| bound008 wrote:
| > The play/pause media key automatically starting the Music app
|
| $ sudo chmod -x /Applications/Music.app
|
| This was a common complaint I have heard from those coming from
| Windows/Android and even Linux... It's unix.
|
| Also, the play/pause key works with other apps. Other default
| apps can be set.
|
| Many other valid points in this article and thread, but I don't
| know why people expect the default behavior of the play button
| to behave any differently when no media is playing. Music.app
| may have an upsell, but it's still a place to organize your own
| personal music library. No cloud or SaaS required.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| > It's unix.
|
| Unix has ads?
| krono wrote:
| Solutions aplenty yes, just not for, say, my mother. Not
| providing a normal way for users to select a an alternative
| default (like competitor Spotify), is disproportionally
| inconvenient relative to the benefits for Apple.
|
| Accidental music app launches by my pinky finger brushing the
| play/pause touchbar control strip button, well.. let's just
| say it happened more then once. Absolutely maddening.
| throwup wrote:
| There are solutions, but on some level this is no different
| from telling Windows users to just tweak some registry keys.
| It all leads to the same place.
| dont__panic wrote:
| Play/pause always starts the Music app, regardless of your
| preferred music player. It's annoying for those of us who
| don't use the built-in Music app at all.
|
| Your command doesn't work. The music app actually lives at
| `/System/Applications/Music.app`. And since Monterey, I
| think, even sudo won't let you modify data in that folder
| because of macOS's built-in protections that cannot be
| disabled: chmod: Unable to change file mode
| on /System/Applications/Music.app: Read-only file system
|
| Even disabling SIP and booting into safe mode doesn't let you
| do this.
| Neff wrote:
| If you haven't seen it yet, NoTunes[1] does a great job of
| fixing the hijacking of the play button or when bluetooth
| headphones are connected or disconnected.
|
| 1: https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes
| deafpolygon wrote:
| I think the complaint is that it shouldn't hijack the
| button in the first place.
| grishka wrote:
| Firstly, .app is a bundle, so
|
| sudo chmod -x /Applications/Music.app/Contents/MacOS/Music
|
| Secondly, on modern macOS you'll have to disable system
| integrity protection for this to have a chance of succeeding.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Until they make ads an OS-level feature, this doesn't bother me
| on a practical level, because I don't use any first party apps of
| theirs. I'm thinking about how this affects, me, and I don't
| think I use any Apple apps on a daily basis. I guess I never
| thought about how none of the best apps (imho) in any category I
| use on iOS are made by Apple. I agree with the premise of the
| article, but I can work around this phase of Apple's heel turn.
| djitz wrote:
| The ad auction model is just so ridiculously profitable. You have
| companies literally trying to out-spend each other for the same
| service. It's insane.
| rchaud wrote:
| Depressing to see Apple going toe to toe with Android for the
| worst app store experience possible.
|
| Used to be that people chose MacOS/iOS specifically because it
| wasn't crawling with ads for dumpster-quality apps.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| OTOH, many people have been complaining that the Apple App
| Store is not more like the Android one(s).
| max51 wrote:
| In my entire life, I have never heard a single human being
| ask for more ads to interrupt their workflow or search
| results.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| I don't think I've heard that. Do you mean complaints that
| iOS should be more like Android and not require all software
| go through the App Store? I've definitely heard _that_
| complaint. (And made it, at least on general principle.)
| imoverclocked wrote:
| If not all apps have to go through the Apple App Store and
| multiple App Stores are allowed that are controlled by
| third parties (ie: not Apple,) what makes you think those
| stores would be ad-free? Simply put, I think that having
| multiple app sources naturally leads to ads in the App
| Store space.
|
| Mind you, I hate ads and am in no way arguing in favor of
| them.
| thfuran wrote:
| Specifically in its lack of ads or is it generally some other
| features they miss?
| interpol_p wrote:
| I don't know about Google Play, but Apple's App Store has
| absolutely horrific search. More often than not, I am
| googling the app name then finding the App Store link from
| Google Search results
|
| App Store search is abysmal
| leetnewb wrote:
| In case you are curious about Google Play's search, you
| can try it on play.google.com
| [deleted]
| mikestew wrote:
| As I read TFA, I thought to myself, "if it gets bad enough, I'll
| just load Linux on my Macs." And then it occurred to me how I got
| started using Apple products. So grab a cuppa for story time. It
| was a time that I worked for Microsoft, and mmm, mmm, wasn't that
| uncarbonated company soft drink tasty. But as I dicked with some
| Plays for Sure(tm) device for the last time, I got fed up and
| told the spouse, "get in the car, we're going to BellSquare to
| buy iPods." iPods turned into ditching the Windows Phones for
| iPhones, then a hackintosh to get a feel for OS X Leopard, then
| "fine, I'll get a MacBook if I'm going to do iOS development on
| the side".
|
| Fast-forward fifteen years, and it's a house full of HomeKit,
| Apple Watches (loving that new Ultra), MacBooks, HomePods, etc.
| It all works well together, so it's easy to justify ditching
| $DEVICE for an Apple product. And when Apple Premium (one price
| for all of Apple's services such as TV+, iCloud storage, et. al.)
| came around, well, of course I said "put that on the Apple Card,
| please."
|
| The point I'm driving at is that a household of Apple products
| started with one simple purchase of a couple of music players.
| But keep up the advertising crap to the point that I'm loading a
| non-Apple OS on Apple hardware, and that unravelling thread might
| take the rest with it. "It all works so well together" is a
| blessing and a curse. I'm pretty sure that if, whatever the
| reason, we ditch the iPhones the rest of it goes with them.
| cglong wrote:
| What you're describing was my exact journey.
|
| 1. Have Apple everything 2. Through an internship at Microsoft,
| get a Windows laptop and Windows Phone 3. Fall in love with
| both experiences 4. Switch to Android 5. Decide my next
| computer will be a Linux gaming machine
|
| Over time, I learned that most parts of the ecosystem can be
| swapped out for alternatives that are _almost_ as good, but
| without nearly as much vendor lock-in. As soon as you
| experience this, the value proposition of Apple comes into
| question.
| sneak wrote:
| Apple is also ramping up the lock-in. You can't use iOS 16
| passkeys without using iCloud and iCloud Keychain. You can't
| activate HomePods without an iOS device logged in to iCloud.
|
| They really want you to be logged in and identified across all
| products now and forever.
| lancesells wrote:
| I was a very happy Windows user and purchased legit licenses
| for myself and my business. I didn't hate the Mac but I had
| only used it since OS 9 and I felt Windows was much more stable
| and customizable. Years go by and I find myself not being able
| to get a Windows XP license to install because my activation
| code from the box didn't work. I spend 5+ hours talking to all
| kinds of support. No one can help me get past this activation
| code.
|
| And that was it. I switched everything to Apple. Anything
| purchased new for myself or my business was Apple. Windows,
| Microsoft, Xbox, etc. I won't even consider. The only thing
| I've used that's Microsoft in the last 20+ years is Github.
|
| With their present moves, I know my relationship with Apple
| products will end with a similar sentiment.
| bombcar wrote:
| Which is hilariously amusing, because FCKGW probably still
| activates just fine.
| layer8 wrote:
| FCKGW stopped working with XP SP1.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Haha how does the rest go... RHQQ2 ?
| prottog wrote:
| I just typed it out to see if I could remember, despite
| not having used it in over a decade. It's funny what
| sticks to your mind.
| gleenn wrote:
| YXRKP next I think
| faitswulff wrote:
| Close, it's YXRKT. Unfortunately that's where my memory
| ends.
| bombcar wrote:
| Something like that, back in the day I had it memorized
| and would use it even when I had purchased a perfectly
| valid license, too hard to look around at the back of the
| computer (even with a valid sticker you were supposed to
| put it in a place that wasn't "removable").
|
| I think the "FCK" made it super memorable.
| bitwize wrote:
| FuCKinG Windows
| bombcar wrote:
| I'm not sure what revision of Windows Phone it was (they
| restarted that thing so often) but there was one with Tiles I
| believe (looked like the Windows 7 start menu) that was pretty
| nice. Friend had it; Microsoft really made a HUGE mistake here
| by not just continuing it for years and years, they'd now have
| a solid third place offering that could be very business
| friendly by now if they'd done the standard Microsoft
| incremental improvement.
| mikestew wrote:
| Oh, no, we were still on Windows Phone 6.0 at that point.
| I've still got the device pictured in this article:
|
| https://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-
| communications/mobi...
|
| But ignore the device, and notice how the UI looks at lot
| like a Windows PC desktop of era. Now imagine that against
| even the earliest of iPhones. Ballmer going on about how the
| iPhone was going to fail sure aged well.
|
| Later versions of Windows Phone would improve on it in a big
| way, as you point out, but by then it was way too late.
| Perhaps if they poured more money into it as you suggest, but
| Microsoft was already paying devs to port their apps, and
| there were still big holes in the app lineup.
| guestbest wrote:
| Windows ce 6 phone? They haven't been made since 2009, I
| believe. They topped out at 256meg of ram, if I remember
| correctly with the last models before everyone switched to
| Android 2 point something. Can it do 4g? I know 2g has been
| shut down and 3g is on its last legs if any carriers even
| support it. Those wince models cant even do WPA2 for Wi-Fi.
| How do you set it up as an internet device?
|
| I'm genuinely curious since the software is so out of date
| I can't even get it setup with visual studio 2008 on an xp
| computer to develop apps for it. Their are so many hoops to
| jump through and it maybe that the usb doesn't work with it
| in the end that I gave up.
| mikestew wrote:
| You might be confusing my use of "still <have> the
| device" with "used in the last ten years". I don't even
| know if the thing will boot anymore. I'm not a collector,
| I just don't throw things away anywhere near as quickly
| as I should.
|
| Free to a good home (as in, you won't just tie it in the
| backyard and never pay attention to it) if anyone has a
| hankering for an old HTC Advantage. Great machine in the
| day, I even edited Word docs on it (albeit, painfully),
| but I wouldn't let it anywhere near an Internet
| connection.
| guestbest wrote:
| HTC made the best wince devices. The best thing about the
| platform was the built in handwriting recognition on
| every wince device regardless of manufacturer which was
| designed by the same develops who worked on the Apple
| Newton handwriting software. It was just more buried on
| some devices. Of course, Microsoft killed this with
| windows phone 7. Just a different era
| bombcar wrote:
| It'll probably boot just fine, and yeah, I wouldn't take
| it online, but old hardware is like hobbits - difficult
| to daunt or kill. It's like the cell network wouldn't
| even connect (though if it is old enough it might).
| bombcar wrote:
| I think the killer was just how many times they changed
| what "Windows Phone" was, and they were major breaking
| changes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile
|
| My friend had a Windows Phone 7 device, which was 90000%
| different from what you have in every way, and not
| compatible, either.
|
| Then they trashed that and tried something else that looked
| similar but was completely different. Just an entirely
| broken strategy. You can't kill your few supporters every
| single generation!
|
| It would have been like OS X not being able to run
| applications from System 7/8/9 or dropping PPC applications
| entirely on the x86 Macs.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| They had some developers going with Phone 7, half
| intrigued by the slickness of the 7 OS on the Nokia. (I
| think it was Nokia?) It didn't help that MS did weird
| things to Nokia, MSs reputation wasn't very good back
| then for other reasons too. The Ballmer memos were still
| recent.
|
| Phone 7 was really nice though, way faster than iOS as I
| recall it and with some cool tiles on the home screen.
|
| Then they changed so apps made for 7 didn't work with 8.
|
| That was it, the little developer base they had just
| packed up and left.
| smaudet wrote:
| Their UI strategy was super weird, ever used Xamarin?
|
| Let's just say it was like they hired a college grad to
| build it for a summer, then they built a heavy wrapper
| around Android UI libraries...so weird.
|
| I think they were trying to pull a "dev on all platforms"
| but only years late to the game and with no real value
| proposition, other than supporting a vanishing small
| portion of users...
| endemic wrote:
| Yeah, the unique Metro UI and good-looking Nokia phones
| had me interested. Though it wasn't enough for me to
| actually pony up the cash to buy one. Guess that was part
| of the problem!
| sylens wrote:
| Yes, they had a bit of momentum behind Windows Phone 7
| and they threw it all away with the breaking change for
| Windows Phone 8. And that was it for that platform.
| runjake wrote:
| This was Windows Phone 7 and 7.5 "Mango".
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| I have sort of a reverse story. It was trying to manage an iPod
| without a Macintosh that swore me off Apple forever. Jobs
| described iTunes for Windows as "a glass of ice water in hell".
| From where I was sitting Windows was the ice water.
| echelon wrote:
| > But keep up the advertising crap to the point that I'm
| loading a non-Apple OS on Apple hardware, and that unravelling
| thread might take the rest with it.
|
| Not everyone can do this or will do this.
|
| Apple captured way too much power, and now they're free to boil
| us all. They basically own American consumer computing and
| mobile business computing. 51+% of it all, anyway.
|
| By taking moves like this, I think it shows the platform is too
| powerful a market entity and that the government needs to put
| restrictions on what Apple can and cannot do, and lift Apple's
| own restrictions against app developers and competing
| businesses.
| brookst wrote:
| I just don't see it. Windows, Android, and Linux are all
| viable and people can (and do) prefer them.
|
| It seems profoundly weird to say that Apple is succeeding in
| the market because they offer a more closed, curated, even
| censored ecosystem... so the government must force them to
| operate more like the platforms that users like less.
|
| And it gets even weirder to say that in the name of freedom
| and free markets we must protect consumers from ecosystems
| that work the way they want.
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| I would generally agree with you if it weren't for the fact
| that not only has Apple, among others like Microsoft,
| totally captured and compromised the government, but the
| very point of government is to protect and preserve
| fundamental concepts that are core to the society, one of
| which is fair and real competition, not this fake illusion
| of competition where, you are free to leave for a
| competitor if you can make it across the minefield alive,
| and give up all the pleasantries of the golden cage.
|
| You even seemingly contradict yourself within two
| sentences; if alternatives are viable, then government
| wouldn't even need to enforce anything users like less,
| because they would actually be viable and real alternatives
| that are competitive. When people are starting to discuss
| government stepping in to enforce fair and actual
| competition, generally things are extremely out of whack
| already and in a functioning society and government that
| government would have already stepped in a long time ago.
| Alas, our government and society are neither healthy nor
| even have legitimacy.
|
| For some perspective; the same people who tend to lament
| "slavery" of a very specific narrow historical narrative,
| are also the ones who do not see the obvious that
| plantation slavery was essentially the practical outcome of
| the communism con job, equally poor outcomes for the masses
| that the very few "more equal than the rest" benefited
| from.
|
| So yes, in the name of freedom, government should have,
| prior to it having had been too late, severely reigned in
| corruption of the whole American and global system by
| organized, aka, corporate efforts to do that very thing.
| Because what is freedom but the only meaningful state of
| competition, your ability to decide for yourself over your
| life without others being able to, let alone being
| supported in controlling it for you.
|
| We are currently in an extremely darkening state where
| people have been even so manipulated that they cannot even
| understand what freedom is, let alone insist on it being
| enforced. Hence, we are getting more and more plantation
| slaves turning on their own lot trying to fight for their
| freedom because plantation life is easy and fits within the
| constraints imposed by the true slavery, mental slavery.
| brookst wrote:
| Well that certainly spiraled. I'm suspicious of any
| technology regulation argument that builds its foundation
| on plantation slaves. That seems more emotionally
| manipulative than well-reasoned.
|
| I'm a happy apple ecosystem user. Maybe I'm a plantation
| slave and don't realize it, but it doesn't feel that way?
|
| I know plenty of non-Apple users also happy with their
| purchasing choices.
|
| From where I sit the calls to prohibit me from choosing
| an ecosystem that works like Apple's are generally either
| from competitors losing in the market or from ideologues
| who object to Apple's model in principle and want to
| force me to use systems that don't work as well, for my
| own good , apparently because I'm too dumb to know I've
| been literally enslaved.
|
| You're not really convincing me here.
| gretch wrote:
| This is an unsupported hypothesis.
|
| I am a big Apple user (iPhone, air tags, air pods, MacBook
| etc) but I definitely don't feel "captured" in any way. If
| their products start sucking then I'm voting with my feet and
| my wallet.
|
| I'd much rather support the market driven approach than to
| assign this responsibility and authority over to the Govt.
| echelon wrote:
| There is little market anymore. You want to reach
| Americans, you bow to Apple or Google, jump through absurd
| hoops, and pay a tax for something you don't even want or
| need.
|
| There was nothing wrong with the desktop software model.
| It's all artificial process now. Manual review, no ability
| to deploy on your own ("release trains" shouldn't be a
| thing), unnecessary mandatory engineering work to meet new
| interface guidelines, required opt-ins to programs that
| further erode your customer relationship ("login with").
|
| I vastly prefer the government to keep hands off, but in
| this case we've reached the impenetrable event horizon and
| need a Deus Ex to restore reasonable competition.
|
| Companies should be free to deploy technology to customers
| without being unduly taxed.
| brookst wrote:
| > Companies should be free to deploy technology to
| customers without being unduly taxed.
|
| "Companies _except Apple_ ", right? Apple you want to be
| taxed, in the form of giving up profits that you feel are
| excessive, but which only grow because more users and
| developers find the deal valuable.
|
| I made a couple of hundred thousand dollars in the App
| Store. You know how much I would have made without the
| App Store? Approximately $0. I have no regrets
| whatsoever, and feel I got plenty of value for the 30% I
| paid (this was before the 15% rate for SMB).
| cco wrote:
| > ...I'll just load Linux on my Macs.
|
| Not really an option with M1, no? I know various groups have
| managed to get something running on Apple silicon, but my
| impression is that largely this isn't going to be a viable
| option. I could definitely be wrong.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| The Asahi team have really done a great job, and I get the
| feeling M1 Linux is poised to be suitable as a daily driver.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Actually Linux consistently got worse battery life everywhere
| I've installed it, PCs and Macs. And it often had quirks with
| things not working workout much fiddling.
|
| I may go back someday when I'm retired, with free time on my
| hands. Or when forced off the easier proprietary OS's by a
| thousand cuts.
| Miraste wrote:
| With laptops it's best to go with a System76 or a Framework
| or something else with manufacturer-tested drivers and
| optimizations, rather than installing on a non-Linux
| machine. There's just too much work put into modern power
| efficiency for a one-size-fits-all OS to match. The most
| recent run in I had with this was an HP OLED laptop I
| bought, put Linux on, and found out that the kernel had no
| ability to adjust brightness on the OLED so it was at
| maximum all the time. I had to return it.
| fiedzia wrote:
| +1 for buying something with Linux preinstalled. Beside
| the ones mentioned there is Dell XPS and HP dev one
| available, so there is a choice.
| mikestew wrote:
| _Not really an option with M1, no?_
|
| I'll let you know when I buy one. :-) Nothing but Intel Macs
| at the moment.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| Asahi Linux is working on it.
| runjake wrote:
| It's close to being a viable option and it's improving
| rapidly.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| It's hard to see it now but the mobile phone is a dying product
| category. Apple in a way acknowledged this when they started
| their pivot to services and the market acknowledged this when
| they became fixated on whether Apple could maintain revenues
| for iPhone upgrades (they can't). They are capturing the value
| they can from iPhone before its completely unprofitable because
| of new paradigms of computing that Apple themselves will be
| delivering. Nearly every major change or product release in
| Apple is well gamed out and planned for 5-10 years in advance,
| some of these moves longer. Withering the iPhone with Ads is a
| very deliberate decision and done so on a timetable with many
| other priorities and strategies. Part of maintaining relevancy
| is cannibalizing your own business with newer, better ways of
| delivering value. This is a way that Apple can extract the most
| profit from their cannibalization of iPhone.
| dwallin wrote:
| You are giving Apple way too much credit. All it shows is
| that the team responsible for driving increases to service
| revenue has been gaining influence relative to the more user-
| centric teams. These moves are also very dangerously raising
| their antitrust profile which seems massively short-sighted.
|
| Companies this large behave much more like some sort of
| octopus / slime mold hybrid than a primate and giving them
| credit as if all the moves are well thought out top down
| plans is rarely correct.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| You've not been paying close enough attention to Apple for
| the last 25 years and are undervaluing Apple's executive
| team. Planned execution and road mapping have led Apple to
| where they are. Methodical and steady.
| system16 wrote:
| Similar story here. 20 years ago I was a Windows user. I had no
| love for Windows, but I put up with it. I had never even
| considered buying a Mac because to me they were just overpriced
| dumbed down PCs for people who were not technical. I didn't
| know anything about them.
|
| Then I bought an iPod with click wheel.
|
| I fell in love with it from the minute I opened the packaging.
| It just felt like a device that a lot of care was put into. I
| loved holding it and it was a pleasure to use. It made me
| rethink Apple.
|
| When it was time to buy a new laptop, I bought the 2006 black
| MacBook. I felt the same thing all over again, but now for my
| primary computing device. I loved OS X.
|
| Fast forward to today and I also have a house full of Apple
| products. Just in my line of sight I have several Mac laptops,
| Magic Keyboard/touchpad, a few iPhones, an iPad, AirPods...
| over the years I've purchased dozens of Apple products. Not to
| mention my subscriptions to Apple TV+, iCloud Storage, Apple
| Music...
|
| But Apple is increasingly a very different company than before.
| I now feel like they are nickel and diming me at every possible
| turn and it's no longer even subtle. When I picked up my iPhone
| 14 Pro at the Apple Store, I was in disbelief at how hard the
| Apple Employee tried to upsell Apple Care using hard sell scare
| tactics.
|
| I doubt anything will ever change under Tim Cook. Maybe some
| day Scott Forstall will return in Jobs-like fashion and correct
| the company's course.
| nikodunk wrote:
| Very nice stories. I just switched to Linux on my laptop to
| avoid all the iCloud ads. Now I'm considering ditching my
| iPhone too because as you say my laptop and my iPhone no
| longer work together perfectly anyway. So I have a bunch more
| options for phones!
|
| I'm actively looking into running mainline Linux on a
| Snapdragon 845 phone, actually:
| https://nikodunk.com/2022-11-05-gnome-shell-mobile-with-
| post...
| davidcollantes wrote:
| You truly switched to Linux to avoid iCloud ads?
| eastbound wrote:
| Funny how a lot of companies should just hire a designer to
| become as good as Apple, but that never happens. Companies
| insist on naming their product WX1000 (hi Sony), or adding a
| BOM to SOAP requests to make their products incompatible (hi
| Microsoft).
|
| So yes, Apple gear is ultraexpensive, does little, cable
| breaks and lifelong souvenir photos are locked up in iCloud.
|
| Unfortunately, this is still a much better experience than
| the Linux or Windows world.
|
| It's only a matter of various companies having to do fewer
| dark patterns to win over the market, but that never happens.
| smaudet wrote:
| 100% just because they control their hardware. Not a design
| thing, mostly.
|
| Linux is like living in the engine room - fantastic if you
| love engines. Windows is like a mirror house where someone
| tried to renovate but left all the mirrors in, Mac is a
| pretty jail cell.
|
| The former two have their quirks, but are livable, the
| later only if you like prison cells...
|
| I don't think many people will enjoy ads in their prison
| cells, though.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| The thing that the other manufacturers seem to struggle
| with is that you can't phone in major aspects of your
| product and expect it to be "apple tier". You have to own
| it end to end, and sometimes even go so far as to fund new
| manufacturing techniques and machinery to make your product
| in its fullest form a reality.
|
| This is a bitter pill to swallow in an industry that's
| thrived on loosely tying together off-the-shelf components
| and contracting out the rest to the lowest bidders to
| produce products that often barely make it past the line of
| "somewhat acceptable", because the "apple way" is hard,
| expensive, and risky.
| ilyt wrote:
| I think the main problem is that industry is focused more
| on keeping users in their little bubble than on actually
| making better product. And that of course means no actual
| talk with "competition", because making both of your
| products work together better might mean some of your
| customers might go to them for something.
| wtmt wrote:
| > I doubt anything will ever change under Tim Cook. Maybe
| some day Scott Forstall will return in Jobs-like fashion and
| correct the company's course.
|
| I really disliked Scott Forstall being fired from Apple, and
| have felt that he could've added a lot more value to Apple's
| products if he'd been around. Apple Maps is still terrible
| (outside the US and a couple of other countries). So it's not
| like firing him resulted in great progress quickly.
|
| Recently John Gruber had posted about it being 10 years since
| Forstall was forced out of Apple. [1] I'm guessing many
| others feel similarly that his presence could've made a
| positive difference. Now it's Tim Cook's ego that would block
| him from being hired at Apple again.
|
| [1]: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/10/31/forstall-10
| kashunstva wrote:
| I'd like to say that I have a similar story here, but I skipped
| the Windows/IBM-PC phase and went straight from TRS-80 to the
| very first Macintosh.
|
| This all feels like a betrayal of the slightly rebellious,
| iconoclastic attitudes of the early Apple days. But untangling
| my family from this web of lock-in? Oy. You want to switch to
| Linux? My spouse, maybe. My 14 y/o, never. And even if I were
| to succeed, I would have a new full-time job as household IT
| help desk.
|
| For every person who cares about avoiding surveillance
| capitalism, ads, and distractions, there are ten thousand who
| shrug their shoulders and keep scrolling.
| p0pcult wrote:
| Advertising is a virus that will filter through its hosts until
| the host is killed.
| w1nst0nsm1th wrote:
| You should have a look at Idiocracy :)
| maupin wrote:
| When I saw ads in the Windows Start menu, I switched to Ubuntu.
| Haven't looked back and life is good. Except that the command
| line command apt-get sometimes displays an ad for Ubuntu Pro...
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| You may be interested in learning we're currently having a
| special deal on Frustration Premium, only $5/month. Use code
| marginalia at checkout.
| TrueSlacker0 wrote:
| Don't forget the fact that you had to see a command line, no
| general user should ever see a command line.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| You don't have to use the command line to update. Ubuntu
| comes with a GUI for apt. I think it's just called Discover.
| mellavora wrote:
| > no general user should ever see a command line.
|
| Gack! Why not?
|
| If the computer is supposed to be a "bicycle for the mind",
| then shouldn't it be designed to enhance our thinking, and
| also to force us to "think differently"?
|
| You have to learn how to ride a bike. It involves some
| scraped knees.
| Johanx64 wrote:
| How does typing cryptic, badly named two-three letter
| commands (with no less idiotic and inconsistent flags)
| enhance your thinking?
|
| The default shell and utter lack of well designed
| autocomplete or hints is a like a bad trip back to tape
| machines, punch codes and weird idiosyncracies from a
| bygone PDP11 era.
|
| It's absolute piss and nobody should be dealing with it
| unless they want to for whatever reason.
| bakugo wrote:
| If 'apt install name-of-software' is cryptic to you, I'm
| sorry but you should get that checked out.
| Johanx64 wrote:
| How is apt not crypic? It's the bona fide definition of
| it, every part of it.
|
| 1. It spits out mountains of cryptic gibberish when you
| use it.
|
| 2. It literally contains "Advanced" in it's textbook
| nondescript three letter abbreviation.
|
| 3. Without a fairly intimate understanding of it's hairy
| inner workings on how exactly dependency and package
| conflicts are resolved, it will fuck things up and fuck
| things up quite royaly. Matter of time really.
|
| Case in point:
|
| Linus from LTT removing DE when installing Steam
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD3HAS257Kk)
|
| 4. In fact, I'd go a step further and say that it WILL
| fuck things up even if you do understand that whole house
| of cards, but you will atleast know how to duct tape your
| way out of it.
|
| Again reminder: How exactly does this enchance "our
| thinking" in any shape or form exactly?
| sylens wrote:
| Consider that many users of computers think any search
| box is Google and any word processor is Microsoft Word
| bakugo wrote:
| Maybe those people should take some time out of their
| lives to learn the basics of how computers work instead
| of expecting the computers to be dumbed down to their
| level at the expense of their usefulness to others.
| rchaud wrote:
| Imagine a stationary bike that you have in your home.
|
| Do you want to place it smack dab in your living room? Or
| leave it in the garage, out of plain sight, and access it
| only when needed?
| user_ wrote:
| Definitely in the living room.
|
| Tools like the command line and exercise equipment help
| improve capability and personal agency. Hiding either
| away pushes the default toward passive consumption.
| Karsteski wrote:
| Even though I agree with you on a personal level, this
| kind of thinking does not lead to mainstream adoption. If
| there were a Linux distro that "just worked", we could
| have the best of both worlds. Unfortunately, this does
| not seem to be something that will happen in the
| foreseeable future.
|
| I'd love for a company like System76 to come out with
| such a solution, but it is certainly an expensive,
| difficult endeavour.
| sp1rit wrote:
| Keep in mind that Cannonical Ubuntu used to display
| ads/"recommendations " for Amazon products in their launch
| center thingy.
| MerelyMortal wrote:
| Yep, Cannonical backed down on that advertising/revenue
| stream. Has Google ever backed down on advertising? It
| remains to be seen if Apple does.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| Canonical has ads in the terminal MOTD now
| deafpolygon wrote:
| Well, Canoncial products aren't on my shortlist of
| possible OS alternative anymore. That's ridiculous.
| teddyh wrote:
| Ubuntu is just an OEM rebranding of Debian - why not just
| use Debian?
| deafpolygon wrote:
| My impression is that Debian doesn't support the latest
| hardware nor have the latest software?
| teddyh wrote:
| If Ubuntu had it, Debian has it too, at least in the
| "testing" (rolling release) distribution.
|
| And Debian recently decided to allow non-free firmware in
| their official installation images, so the latest
| hardware should also be supported.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| Just tried it out today - works on my laptop. Fedora 37
| (and I believe Ubuntu has 5.15) has Kernel 5.19, am I
| missing anything by staying on 5.10?
| teddyh wrote:
| If you _want_ a later kernel than the default one, just
| install the package. Debian _just_ released packages of
| Linux 6.0.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| I've never seen such an ad... Maybe it's only an apt-get thing?
| Try using apt.
| 1f60c wrote:
| I _think_ Ubuntu Pro is free for personal use, but whether the
| terminal is the right place to put ads is a different question.
| pshirshov wrote:
| Build yourself a Nix. Or Gentoo.
| fsflover wrote:
| Perhaps you could switch to something like PopOS without ads.
| [deleted]
| bakugo wrote:
| > Except that the command line command apt-get sometimes
| displays an ad for Ubuntu Pro.. sudo truncate
| -s 0 /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20apt-esm-hook.conf
| noduerme wrote:
| I do all my work on Macs, and I love the ergonomics of MacOS, but
| I refuse to use any Apple apps. I hate how Apple broke its own
| Save/Save As paradigm, and the iOS-ification of things like
| iTunes/music on the desktop. I use Little Snitch to block all
| Apple services except in rare instances where I want to download
| something from the App Store.
| MandieD wrote:
| I'm a business-hours Windows user who drifted into Apple for all
| my personal devices, aside from a Windows box for amateur radio
| stuff, and an ever-changing fleet of Linux VMs at Hetzner.
|
| It's about time for a new phone, but the selection of suitable
| (that is, small) Android devices is dire, and I don't think I
| want to get sucked further into Google's ecosystem, either.
|
| So I'll buy myself what might be one last iPhone 13 mini, and
| start copying my iCloud photo collection off onto my still-
| capable 2013 MacBook Pro, and then my NAS, a month at a time.
|
| That should give me a couple years to figure out what comes next.
| fsflover wrote:
| > That should give me a couple years to figure out what comes
| next.
|
| Next could come GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 and Pinephone.
| MandieD wrote:
| As long as any of those will run the "compulsory" apps
| (banking and parking apps available only on Google Play or
| Apple's App Store), they'll be on my radar.
|
| To keep my options open, I'm starting a slow detachment now.
| fsflover wrote:
| These apps can work with Waydroid, unless they have special
| protection against rooting your phone. In such case, you're
| out of luck and should ask your government for an action...
| doitLP wrote:
| The problem is he incentive to squeeze money out of ads because
| there's less innovation happening elsewhere. Yes they're M* chips
| but I mean big innovation.
|
| how do we ever break the cycle of growth at all costs demanded of
| public companies?
| fsflover wrote:
| By supporting Social Purpose Corporations and the like. See:
| Purism.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Karl Marx had the answer, but you're not gonna like it.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| But that seems to work even less well. Can you name any
| successful implementation of it?
| greenie_beans wrote:
| incomplete list:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_cooperatives
| Mistletoe wrote:
| That's very different than a country-wide implementation.
| Maybe it only works when you have a small group of
| committed people doing it.
| peaky_blinder wrote:
| Marx never specified how "country-wide implementation"
| should look like, Marxism-Leninism was the most common
| one. Escaping capitalism in today's world is impossible
| because the moment you decide to work on different
| economic model and distance yourself from IMF you'll sign
| your death sentence. Big players will never allow that.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| a worker owned cooperative is the very definition of the
| workers owning the means of production, so i responded
| with marxist examples to your comment.
|
| you assume that a country-wide implementation is the only
| way that marx's ideas can be implemented and that is a
| wrong assumption.
|
| if organizing as cooperatives was the most common way to
| structure businesses (rather than a capitalist
| organization), then you'd have a different, arguably
| better society. in that situation, you can organize as a
| capitalistic endeavor if you want, but you'd have a hard
| time competing with co-ops for labor and other resources.
| it would be decentralized, entrepreneurs would still get
| rewarded, there would still be free enterprise, it would
| be a free labor market, etc.
| w1nst0nsm1th wrote:
| If we consider average life expectency to be the best
| indicator of successful implementation (considering once
| you're dead nothing else matter anymore), Cuba succeded
| pretty well... Or at least better than the US.
| interpol_p wrote:
| Do execs not consider long term brand damage? It is hard believe
| that very smart people, who likely use these products themselves,
| can be blind to the damage they are doing long term, eroding the
| trust they have earned.
|
| Surely this leads to lower profits in the future (say, in a
| decade), and should be considered a bad business decision now
| niek_pas wrote:
| > (say, in a decade)
|
| Tim Cook will likely be gone by then, so what does he care?
|
| https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/04/05/tim-cook-probably...
| OisinMoran wrote:
| Reminds me of this SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2490
|
| I wonder if Apple will offer an opt-out subscription for ads once
| they get annoying enough.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| I started moving my things out of Apple two years ago. Two years
| on, I'm still entrenched in a few places. I can tell you, Apple
| does everything they can to keep you in. Slow download rates,
| surprisingly frequent failed downloads from iCloud.com,
| requesting your data from Apple takes at least a week while they
| put it together, etc.
|
| One of last form of lock-in that I'm struggling with is iCloud
| Photo Library. A service that has been a blessing and a curse.
| I've been saving my photos there for the better part of a decade.
|
| I'm working on getting my photos out (first by requesting my data
| from Apple, then from iCloud Drive on Windows) and I'm appalled -
| everything gets dumped into one directory. Inconsistent file
| naming. Timestamps not always accurate, and "Date Taken" seems to
| have disappeared from a number of my photos. Albums are not
| included (unless you count them being a list dumped into a csv).
| All of that data is kept inside iCloud.. only for them- not for
| you.
|
| So what comes next is a long journey to re-organize all of my
| photos by year, month. I'm not even sure if my Hidden photos got
| copied over.
|
| This is all 100% a dark pattern to keep users locked into Apple.
| How many people would get this far? Not many- my wife would have
| given up at having to request her data from Apple. Then how many
| would stop when they find out all of your photos get dumped into
| a single directory (30k photos!) if you try to leave?
|
| All of this is to say, I'm done with Apple. I want control of my
| data, not this circus show.
| msh wrote:
| Its simple to do proper photo export if you have a mac, hard if
| you dont.
|
| If you set photos to store originals on disk you get a nice
| year/month directory structure with proper metadata that you
| can copy around.
| grwthckrmstr wrote:
| Perhaps Proton ecosystem is a viable alternative?
|
| https://proton.me/drive
| majou wrote:
| Consider using ifuse from https://libimobiledevice.org/ to
| access the SQLite database with all your Photos metadata.
| emiliosic wrote:
| Apple has an iCloud connector for Windows. Wouldn't that work
| for you? For some of my pictures and media in general, I like
| Plex very much.
| radicality wrote:
| For photos, I could perhaps recommend the following sequence:
| 1) Get an apple device where you're able to sync the _whole_
| photos albums. This can be on an external drive, you can
| relocate the main library there. Make sure to select the option
| to download full pics and not to optimize storage. 2) Use this
| library help parse the photos.db database and write out your
| data however you wish (by album, or whatever).
| https://pypi.org/project/osxphotos/
|
| I believe you can also do 2) just by itself and it will
| download photos as required, but I would still recommend
| fetching the whole photos library via Photos first.
| orange_fritter wrote:
| I lost about 6 years of photos through boring laziness.
|
| A few years ago, I canceled my extra iCloud storage. Photos
| that I assumed were stored on my phone, because I was looking
| at them on my phone, were immediately deleted. I should have
| downloaded everything to a hard drive where I could see the
| files offline, but it was a pain(intentionally?) so I didn't.
| daitangio wrote:
| Thank you for sharing. I think Apple wants to replace Facebook
| advertising with its own, isn't it?
|
| I am fighting Apple with Microsoft. I pay for 300GB iPhone
| Family backup, but I am moving all my other data on
| OneDrive+Office365.
|
| It costs a bit more (50EUR/yearly) but at least I avoid lock-in
| on a single provider.
|
| I have experienced issue while trying to download all my photos
| on my Mac: it seems iPhoto does not really download them until
| you try to open them, one by one.
|
| It seems it try to avoid you own all your photos on a local
| drive/single iPhone (cfr "optimize storage" functionality on
| low-mem iPhones)!
| galaktus wrote:
| > This is all 100% a dark pattern to keep users locked into
| Apple.
|
| Quite a bold statement that it is like that to lock in users. I
| highly doubt that. This is rather negligence as Apple still has
| a hard time to catch up with the main product features.
| xu_ituairo wrote:
| I imagine it's selective negligence. I doubt making the off-
| boarding experience super is high on their priority list, so
| it becomes as good as a dark pattern.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| Have you tried 'offboarding' 200gb of photos and videos
| from icloud photo library?
| msh wrote:
| Its easy if you have a mac. Set the photo app to store
| originals on disc and you can just copy the files out of
| the photo folder.
| firecall wrote:
| I'm deep into the Apple ecosystem.
|
| However my sentiment/thinking isn't far behind yours...
|
| I haven't made any serious moves to decouple and go independent
| and self-hosted. Mostly due to the overheads of dealing with it
| all, and knowing I have other things to do that actually earn
| me money,
|
| My photos I do sync to multiple sources, and files are an easy
| one.
|
| I could ditch Apple and Google and survive. I'd have to take my
| medicine and it wouldn't be pleasant at first, but I could do
| it.
| Renaud wrote:
| I recently help family set up their Synology NAS as a photo
| station and it works fairly well.
|
| A dedicated photo folder can be shared amongst users but each
| user can also have their private repository in their home
| directory.
|
| Pictures are accessed by the NAS webapp or a desicated Photo
| app on mobile. The app has a fast mode to backup existing files
| so you can leave it on overnight for the first backup.
|
| Downloaded pictures are sorted in year/month folders and it
| does decent face recognition (not as well as Apple though) and
| will use geo localisation data for maps and for keywords search
| of locations.
|
| Apple photo data processing is much better at autotagging
| pictures, and it's probably going to be difficult or impossible
| to find something as good, but at least your pictures stay
| private and remain accessible wherever you are.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| The thing that gets me is the autotagging data is kept by
| Apple. You don't get to have it, when you leave.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| How do you sync photos from iOS to the Synology? I didn't
| know that was an option.
| msh wrote:
| Synology have a app you can install on the phone.
| danieldk wrote:
| _I 'm working on getting my photos out (first by requesting my
| data from Apple, then from iCloud Drive on Windows) and I'm
| appalled - everything gets dumped into one directory.
| Inconsistent file naming. Timestamps not always accurate, and
| "Date Taken" seems to have disappeared from a number of my
| photos._
|
| Thank you for posting this! We currently use organized Dropbox
| folders, but we were considering to use the new Family Album
| functionality. This sounds like we'd regret this in the future.
|
| I am not sure if it is malice on Apple's part though. They have
| traditionally been bad at cloud services. It sounds like export
| is a hacky half-working implementation, which sounds like most
| of iCloud...
| deafpolygon wrote:
| > I am not sure if it is malice on Apple's part though. They
| have traditionally been bad at cloud services.
|
| With a market cap of 2.2T, I don't think they have a good
| excuse at this point. Traditionally bad at this point is
| negligence. They certainly have the money to "do the right
| thing", but they won't.
| ilyt wrote:
| There is no money in committing engineers to feature that
| helps people leave your platform, it's as simple as that.
|
| It's for profit company. There is no "do right thing" in
| their dictionary
| danieldk wrote:
| Well, these outcomes are not only driven by money or
| incentives to lock in users. A dysfunctional organization
| in the services group would also lead to the outcomes we
| see.
|
| I mean, look at Google. Constantly launching and abandoning
| chat apps is not in their or their user's interest. But
| their organization is such that launching new features is
| better for your career than polishing what exists.
|
| Looking more broadly at Apple, it suffers from the same
| issues. We often get a bunch of new features, but they are
| never really polished like they used to (like we now have a
| bunch of half-working ways to manage windows).
|
| Not to pull the Steve Jobs card, but I think when he was
| annoyed by a lack of polish he'd force teams so work on
| that rather than chasing features.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| >I am not sure if it is malice on Apple's part though.
|
| We're talking about replicating a folder structure and/or not
| mangling existing tags. I have a hard time it is anything but
| malicious.
| mtn92 wrote:
| I always have the same issue when copying files over from my
| iPhone to my Windows PC, all photos are given a random name.
| They really do their best to keep you locked in.
|
| However, if you are lucky files might still preserve the
| modification timestamp from the time they were created. I use a
| little script to rename all those files chronologically. I'm
| sharing it below if it helps ;)
|
| https://github.com/monti-python/utils/blob/master/rename_chr...
| deafpolygon wrote:
| I wrote a little script in PowerShell myself, and what I
| found was modification times were wildly incorrect. Creation
| time couldn't be relied on because it would default to the
| day it was copied over. The script checks the EXIF data for
| "Date Taken", and was able to reduce the number of pictures I
| needed to sort from 30k to around 4k left. That's still a lot
| of photos to sort through, though.
| beaker52 wrote:
| It's funny because I'm just onboarding into the Apple eco-
| system. I'm happily leveraging all their services.
|
| I'm escaping Google after 15+ years.
|
| I swear it's just a game of keeping yourself busy switching
| from this to that.
| mgaunard wrote:
| I'd download Spread Sheets.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Apple is a 2+T dollar company. How much is enough? Is is really
| such a priority to introduce ads to keep growing each and every
| damned quarter? And what if people stop buying their hardware
| because of the crap they're doing with their software; will they
| stop ads to refocus on hardware or will they milk the fuck out of
| the people who do keep buying their hardware?
| Karsteski wrote:
| It's never enough for investors (all of us, really). That's the
| difference between public and private companies. One must seek
| profit over all, and the other is run by people can choose not
| to do so.
| shmde wrote:
| There is an increase of click baity titles on hn. Titles should
| be like the "Subject" field of Email. Short, crisp, giving a tldr
| of the body.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| I thought the rule was they could not be editorialized. I've
| never read anything about them needing to read like an email
| title.
| rchaud wrote:
| What part of "You Might Also Like" is clickbait?
| shmde wrote:
| What does that even mean in the context of the article. The
| article is about apple introducing ads in their store.
| Something like "My take on Apple introducing ads on their
| store" would be way better.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| It's the tagline in the Apple App store.
|
| When they show advertising it's below the text "You might
| also like". Or at least they used to.
| ianbutler wrote:
| Between Google Search decreasing in usability and accuracy for
| pretty much everyone I know in service of more Ads, Netflix Ad
| tier causing an exodus and now Apple poisoning what was their
| premium brand to squeeze ad revenue I can't help but think these
| businesses are starting to cannibalize their core value to their
| users in service to their shareholders. Companies with Ads are
| like Rats in that experiment with the button and a wire going to
| their pleasure center. Tap the button all day but they won't
| actually do anything useful and everything else wastes away.
|
| For a while I've been thinking about the public markets and each
| time I arrive at the conclusion that the public markets can be
| really bad for consumers and bad for the businesses themselves.
| In the end the pursuit of higher stock value for share holders in
| the short term puts a company at odds with it's customers and
| it's own initial value proposition. Obviously an IPO is a
| desirable goal for founders, and maybe (very obviously?) more so
| their investors because it's a liquidity event and everyone get's
| paid, but I think for any one running a successful company
| thinking about what you shackle you and your company to by going
| public should be a long and hard think, because you're going to
| wind up making choices at the expense of literally every value
| and use your business purported to represent.
|
| This is also why when choosing to make a startup, as defined by a
| high growth company designed to quickly arrive at a liquidity
| event (IPO and publicly traded obviously included) you should
| really understand if you want exactly that. I've watched at least
| one founder realize she didn't want that and that she did want to
| run a business for the customers and the value they were being
| provided and try to get off the train and it basically wrecked
| the business.
|
| When I read stuff like this I'm always reminded of the line in
| Aesop Rock's song "None Shall Pass":
|
| "Fine, sign of the swine in the swarm when a king is a whore who
| comply and conform"
|
| I guess this was a really long winded way of saying, know the
| game you're playing before you choose to play it and know who's
| actually calling the shots.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I think ad driven markets are a trap in themselves, even
| outside the public market itself.
|
| You have a large portion of end users themselves that will
| never pay for the product but gladly use the product 'for
| free'. You have users that would pay for the product, but
| again, why would they pay for the product if it's "free"? This
| leaves the only viable products in the market as free products.
| The only model I know for free service is ad and data
| collection driven.
|
| The business world won't be able to escape this trap
| themselves, it will be driven by consumer protections and data
| privacy making targeted advertising via data collection more
| risky at a legal/compliance level.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Why the hell are they entering this grubby, grubby industry? They
| leave money on the table all the time - they have banged on for
| years about their whole philosophy of saying No to a thousand
| things for everything they say Yes to - why have they said yes to
| this?
|
| Aside from a handful of RPIs, my entire family uses Apple gear.
| But for the first time in 2 decades, I'm wondering what a
| platform change might look like.
|
| Considering my investment in Apple gear, even getting me to the
| "only looking" phase is pretty remarkable.
| swaggalicious wrote:
| You mistake "they" referring to Apple with Steve Jobs.
|
| Yes it's cliche. That doesn't make it wrong. Steve Jobs was
| responsible for keeping Apple pure.
|
| I really feel like an inflection point in human history will be
| Steve Jobs dying in 2011, right after releasing revolutionary
| products (iPhone and iPad), but not being able to be around to
| steer the ship and be the voice of reason and ethics as the
| products became more influential.
|
| Steve Jobs once said (in the D8 interview I believe) that apps
| which defamed people were not allowed on the App Store. I
| wonder how he would feel about social media today, Twitter in
| particular.
|
| He would have had the courage, power, and conviction to fight
| against some of the things happening today, in terms of
| widespread outrage culture, slandering and libel, cancel
| culture, etc.
|
| I guess we'll never know.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| Not to deride your comment, but
|
| > Steve Jobs
|
| > the voice of reason and ethics
|
| Honestly, I never expected to see that in one sentence.
| romanovcode wrote:
| Context matters, he might be a terrible person to work
| under but he clearly was the voice of reason for Apple.
|
| Just remember how he said that Apple is not interested in
| games. It was somewhat of a shocker since they would lose
| so much clients because of that but look where we are now.
| The Apple Arcade and other pathetic attempts just proves
| how right he was. Why enter a market where your results
| will be laughably bad? It is pathetic how they present
| "Lara Croft Tomb Raider" which is 4+ year old game
| benchmarks in 2022 on 1080p 60fps and 4k 30fps as if it's
| somehow good.
|
| And remember the cringe moment where they presented Touch
| Bar with some DJ? Jesus...
| interpol_p wrote:
| To be fair, Apple Arcade is pretty good. Great, even. And
| Apple keeps it completely pure -- no ads, no in-app
| purchases, and some really great games
|
| They may not be publishing games for hardcode gamers, but
| there are some great indie titles, and it's the only
| place on the App Store I let my kids have free reign to
| download what they like, knowing that they will never see
| an ad or be lured into some grindy game mechanic to tempt
| them into an in-app purchase
| pipo234 wrote:
| Nothing wrong with those indie games, but what role does
| Apple play here, that justifies crediting them for
| innovation, asking money, etc?! Isn't that like praising
| Amazon Web services for this great FOSS ecosystem they
| "innovated"?
|
| Wouldn't it make more sense to pay indie developers
| instead of Apple? Apple could still offer a curated list
| to promote their hardware etc. but in the store front
| setup it looks like the only "innovation" they made was
| tax.
| interpol_p wrote:
| I think my message came off unclear. I wasn't praising
| Apple for the games themselves, but rather the policy of:
|
| - No ads
|
| - No in app purchase
|
| - Curating a collection of good games to include on the
| platform
|
| Apple does pay the developers for being on Apple Arcade.
| Including funding the development of bespoke titles, as
| well as ongoing payments for the duration the game is
| listed on the Arcade service.
| macintux wrote:
| Unfortunately Apple's in a tough spot.
|
| Their gear is too good: I'm on year 4 with my Watch, my iPad is
| 3 or 4 years old, and the only reason I upgrade my iPhone every
| couple of years is for the camera.
|
| And there just aren't that many Android users willing to
| switch.
|
| Dividends and stock buybacks are keeping their shareholders
| happy, but at some point they need a growth story, and the
| iPhone set an incredible bar to hurdle.
|
| (I'm not defending their ad business, to be clear, but it's
| hardly shocking that they're trying to find something to bring
| in new revenue.)
| p0pcult wrote:
| "If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a
| better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly
| market share, the company's not any more successful.
|
| So the people that can make the company more successful are
| sales and marketing people, and they end up running the
| companies. And the product people get driven out of the
| decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means
| to make great products. The product sensibility and the product
| genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets
| rotted out by people running these companies that have no
| conception of a good product versus a bad product."
|
| -Steve Jobs
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Apple is still better than the competition in many ways but
| cracks started appearing. This quote from Steve Jobs is spot
| on at this time when Apple has become so big that they can't
| focus on creating a good product anymore because the money is
| too good. I don't wish to see this but I'm wondering if
| things were to go the bad direction for Apple, how long would
| the inertia of good apple of Steve Jobs vision would last.
| Probably something like a decade if not more...
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Yeah - I didn't want to invoke the Ghost of Steve but ... why
| stop with your storefront? Why not start slapping Candy Crush
| Saga stickers on the front of iPhones?
|
| But unlike other products, this advertising will provide zero
| value to Apple customers. We already pay full price for our
| gear. We pay for Apple One. Unlike most other companies where
| advertising offsets the sticker price of things, advertising
| at Apple does not benefit us in any way.
|
| For me, being free of advertising is a key benefit of
| participating in the Apple ecosystem, and one that I assign a
| significant financial value to. I absolutely hate it.
| chaostheory wrote:
| If only they could make even more money from video games. Too
| bad Apple hates video games and they only tolerate them now
| since it's a sizable chunk of revenue. Yet it still feels that
| they have yet to make a large enough bet / investment on games.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| I'm fully bought in to the Apple ecosystem and I have always been
| puzzled when I hear about Apple perverting their product with the
| taint of advertisements. I recently realized that my puzzlement
| is because I don't use Apple News or Stocks and I do all app
| discovery away from the (cr)Appstore.
|
| Unfortunately, I guess that the advertising infection will spread
| to the point where it is unavoidable. At that point, I will drop
| Apple and pray that there is a functional alternative.
| 369548684892826 wrote:
| What's a good alternative to the Appstore for finding apps?
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| There are no good alternatives, but I mostly use reddit and
| general websearches (filtering out the ever prevalent
| blogspam). I'd probably pay for a ton more apps if the
| appstore wasn't so terrible.
| sylens wrote:
| I usually rely on word of mouth through people I know or
| follow on Discord, Twitter, Reddit, etc. I can't recall a
| time recently where I've sat down, opened up the App Store,
| browsed for something useful
| epolanski wrote:
| > What angers me about this trend is that many of the experiences
| I treasure are being devalued in order to prioritize more revenue
|
| How naive to think the richest company in the world sees you as
| anything but $.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| Feels like when the App Store first launched and was quickly
| dominated by fart apps, except this isn't being driven by devs
| polluting the App Store, it's being driven by Apple to an already
| polluted App Store.
| [deleted]
| hrbf wrote:
| There used to be a time when Apple hard- and software delighted
| me. It was expensive but the cost could be justified.
|
| Today, Apple hardware gets ever more expensive while adding ever
| less value for me. With the recent push towards growing service
| revenue, I fear Apple is going to betray parts of their original
| DNA.
|
| I usually never invoke this, but in this context it feels
| justified: this would have been impossible with Steve Jobs alive.
| He would have shut this shit down with a vengeance.
|
| Despite being a capitalist with every fibre of his being, he knew
| where not to go, which line not to cross. If done anyway, in
| error, he reversed course immediately. I don't see even a faint
| shadow of this in Tim Cook.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I love my Apple products but I am incredibly worried about
| Apple's future. I hate ads, I never see them, if something is
| showing me ads I pay to remove them or stop using that
| app/service. Currently I'm incessed by Zoom showing me ads after
| calls even though I pay for it monthly, I wish I could drop it.
|
| It's incredibly saddening to see Apple start to put ads in more
| things. It's not the premium experience I'm looking for (and
| paying for). I love linux for servers but I'm sorry, the desktop
| is just not my cup of tea. One things on the mac that I enjoy is
| the quality and style of most 3rd party apps that I use. It's a
| level of polish that I don't see anywhere else, at least at the
| same consistency. Call me vain, call me whatever you want but I
| like looking at pretty UI, I'm staring at my monitors for 8+
| hours a day, I'd like to enjoy what I'm doing. An ugly UI isn't
| unusable but it adds a small subconscious "tax" that is real and
| does add up (at least for me).
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Yeah I see ads as the biggest threat to my future in their
| ecosystem. It's a revenue stream that seems to so reliably ruin
| any company that dips more than the tiniest bit of a toe into
| it. Which sucks because they're by _such a large margin_ the
| least-bad option that I hate to be stuck with any of the
| alternatives. Of which the largest (Microsoft, Google) are at
| least as bad on the advertising front, so that leaves me
| with... Linux. And just no remotely-OK solution for phones and
| tablets, at all. I have so very little interesting in
| "tinkering" with those platforms.
|
| Damnit, Microsoft, why'd you have to ruin your OS with ad and
| spying garbage and shittifying your calculator and notepad apps
| et c. just as you were starting to add useful stuff like WSL
| that might have made it a viable OS for actual work and not
| just playing video games?
|
| So I guess it's Linux. Ugh. Or maybe the FreeBSD driver
| situation will get better before then and I can use that.
| That'd be... fine, I guess.
| amoghs wrote:
| It's so tough taking stances to defend things of 'intangible'
| (or at least hard to quantify) value like Apple has. I worry
| it's almost 'inevitable' for companies to cave in.
| [deleted]
| Terretta wrote:
| > _It 's not the premium experience I'm looking for (and paying
| for)._
|
| This is the only way to feel about it: it's un-premium.
| leokennis wrote:
| I pay Apple $20 a month for Apple One. I refuse to pay and see
| ads at the same time.
|
| If I am going to see only 1 ad in a normal Apple app (Maps,
| Music, Podcasts etc.) Apple can kiss that money goodbye.
|
| For every Apple Service there's a good alternative. I'll turn
| my iPhone into a piece of Apple hardware with minimal
| affiliation to Apple software within the afternoon.
|
| From there on out, I'll start investigating to replace my Apple
| hardware with alternatives at their next renewal cycle.
|
| For Apple end users, Tim Cook is the worst CEO you could
| imagine. A human Excel sheet.
| shikshake wrote:
| Is Tim Cook really the problem? Apple has to answer to the
| shareholders and board of directors first, and Tim Cook can
| only stay CEO as long as he's acting in their interests.
| Maybe it's too easy to blame the system, but I don't see how
| Tim Cook should take the majority blame.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Apple has to answer to the shareholders and board of
| directors first_
|
| First, no. That's a gross oversimplification of the
| situation, and there are thousands of counter-examples.
| It's one of those things people see on HN and then pass
| along as if it was the absolute truth. It isn't.
|
| But, for fun, let's pretend it is true. Then the way Tim
| Cook answers to shareholders is to preserve the long-term
| value of Apple as a brand and a company, and not to sell
| out for short-term gains.
|
| The majority of Apple shareholders are massive corporations
| that invest for the long-haul, not day traders trying to
| make a quick buck.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| If not him, then who? Ultimately he is the one who makes
| the decisions; that's why he has the title of CEO and not
| "Puppet Of The Board."
|
| I suppose we could simply blame the entire customer base of
| Apple, but that seems less than productive.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| > Apple has to answer to the shareholders and board of
| directors first, and Tim Cook can only stay CEO as long as
| he's acting in their interests.
|
| And it is his job to explain to them that plastering ads
| all over the UI is going to destroy the entire privacy-
| conscious image that Apple has built up over the past
| decade, specially the past five or so years.
|
| You can't just say "There was no alternative but to show
| ads", it's a reductio ad (lol) absurdum by which you can
| excuse _any_ bad decisions that a CEO makes by saying
| "Well, the board made them do it".
| Mistletoe wrote:
| The problem goes deeper and is one we see everywhere- the
| stock price has to always go up. This is only good for
| shareholders, for everyone else it is usually bad. How does
| humanity solve this feedback loop? The free market dream
| doesn't seem to be working.
| umutcankus wrote:
| "A human Excel sheet" is the phrase I need but cannot find
| for some people I know. Thanks (:
| reaperducer wrote:
| _If I am going to see only 1 ad in a normal Apple app (Maps,
| Music, Podcasts etc.) Apple can kiss that money goodbye._
|
| Don't open Settings, then. There's been ads in there for
| three years.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Only one I've seen for a while is the one trying to get me
| to try Apple Arcade for free for 3 months. I don't know how
| long I have to ignore it before they get the message that I
| barely game on my phone and tablets, don't want to game on
| them more than I do, and have no interest whatsoever in the
| service.
|
| But yeah, it's an ad. At least you can dismiss it. Dunno
| how long it'll stay gone (this just prompted me to go tell
| it "not now", so we'll see).
| nono-no-no wrote:
| This new "not now" rhetoric is annoying me so much. It is
| so user-unfriendly to deny them the definitive in their
| decision. These dark patterns creep in anywhere that I
| get the impression that every eco-system and operating
| system becomes actively hostile to the user.
| system16 wrote:
| I miss the days when Jobs would tell shareholders to pound sand
| rather than make product compromises.
|
| Under Tim Cook, there is no possible way things will get
| better, and I suspect they will get much worse. They'll
| continue making whatever comprises to the user experience are
| necessary to obtain quarterly growth. And the more difficult
| that becomes, the more drastic and user hostile the changes
| will be.
|
| It's bizarrely short-sighted, and I can't figure out why. I
| mean there are several videos of Steve Jobs himself warning
| about this exact trajectory, and I'm sure Tim Cook must have
| seen them.
| [deleted]
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Unfortunately, Tim Cook does not have the force of
| personality to stop it. Nobody does. Only Steve Jobs could do
| it, and that is likely exclusively down to the fact (whether
| you consider it as such or not is beside the point) that he
| saved Apple. The fact is, if you tell the shareholders no too
| frequently, you stop being in charge. And even if the next
| guy shares your vision, will his replacement? How many CEOs
| does it take until you get someone who will pursue short-term
| profit at any long-term cost?
| tomrod wrote:
| CEOs have force, be it personality or investiture by the
| board.
|
| No, if Cook fails to "stop" ads that's pretty clearly
| evidence he's okay with them.
| runjake wrote:
| Tim _caused_ ads, so Tim doesn 't need the force of
| personality to stop ads.
|
| Tim _wants_ ads. Tim is a money guy, not a product guy.
| spacemadness wrote:
| And if everyone is doing it to scrape more profit, then there
| are few options to turn to protest with your consumption
| habits.
| ISL wrote:
| _> Currently I 'm incensed by Zoom showing me ads after calls
| even though I pay for it monthly, I wish I could drop it._
|
| I use Meet extensively across my professional engagements with
| GSuite/Workspace. Works great. No ads.
| baxtr wrote:
| Meet is Google's product right? So you're sure your not
| targeted after you mentioned things in a call?
| georgehaake wrote:
| Back to the time of sculley.
| indymike wrote:
| > Currently I'm incessed by Zoom showing me ads after calls
| even though I pay for it monthly, I wish I could drop it.
|
| Zoom has plenty of competitors that don't show ads after calls.
| Try a few out. Some of them are a much better experience for
| participants and hosts alike.
| bombcar wrote:
| Zoom shows ads now?
| joshstrange wrote:
| They have in-app ads like this:
| https://cs.joshstrange.com/zTpdlC (Note: dismissing this does
| next to nothing, it's back almost every day or at least as
| often as Zoom restarts)
|
| And then post-meeting popup ads (that are always on top until
| you dismiss them) like this:
| https://cs.joshstrange.com/BizVwE
|
| I've gone through almost all the settings I could think of
| but I don't see a way to disable it. I pay monthly for Zoom
| and I'm logged into that account. I find it beyond the pale
| that Zoom wastes my time/energy in this way especially since
| most ads are about a product I will never use. If I need a
| tool to run a 500+ person webinar my life has taken a
| horrible turn, and if I did I wouldn't use Zoom since they do
| crap like this.
| bombcar wrote:
| Huh, I can't recall seeing those and maybe it's because we
| have an "enterprise" account but wowo.
| iansinnott wrote:
| Completely agree with the sentiment in the article. I'd
| generalize even more and say that Apple software has been going
| downhill for several years now, and adding in more ads is just a
| continuation of that trend.
|
| On the other hand, they still create phenomenal hardware. The
| compromise of using Apple hardware and non-Apple software (often
| paid) has worked well enough for me so far.
|
| Some examples:
|
| - Podcasts < Overcast
|
| - iCloud Drive < Nextcloud (as Hetzner-hosted service)
|
| - Notes < Obsidian
|
| - Safari < Orion, Arc
|
| - Apple Mail < Superhuman (or Spark, or Gmail)
|
| - Apple Maps < Google Maps
|
| - Pages, Keynote, etc < Google Suite
|
| - Terminal < iTerm
|
| Likely more I'm forgetting.
|
| edit: formatting
| vinay427 wrote:
| As a counter-example, I recently moved to the Apple ecosystem
| (after 10+ years, my entire adolescence and adult life, on
| various Linux distros and Android) primarily for the software
| and the hardware was, if anything, a drawback in some cases.
| The suite of first-party native apps that are generally
| friendly, usable, and well-integrated with iOS/macOS, other
| apps, and other devices is far better than what I was dealing
| with on Android and Linux. Those OSs still lack (to my taste) a
| cohesive native cross-platform experience for email, calendars,
| shortcuts/scripting, notes, cloud backups, etc.
|
| The main Apple apps I tend to avoid are Podcasts and Music due
| to their user experience and Maps due to its lack of POI data.
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| Unlimited greed. As if they needed this ad money.
| shuntress wrote:
| Advertising is not inherently or automatically bad.
|
| Spam is bad. Being overrun by low quality ads is bad.
|
| I don't mind ads when its GOOD advertising.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Advertising isn't neutral. It defaults to bad. It is, by its
| nature, a distraction. It makes the world worse. It
| incentivizes a business model where you attract people's
| attention by any means necessary and then sell off that
| attention.
|
| Sometimes advertising turns out to be helpful. Sometimes you
| learn about something that you wouldn't have known to look for
| that you really care about. Sometimes you're looking for
| something and find out there's a cheaper competitor product
| that's perfect for your needs. Advertisers love pointing these
| situations out because it makes what they do sound helpful. But
| they are by no means the most common case. A giant Pepsi
| billboard is not making anybody's life better in any way.
| shuntress wrote:
| > Advertisers love pointing these situations out because it
| makes what they do sound helpful. But they are by no means
| the most common case.
|
| This is my point.
|
| Advertising is not inherently bad. To explain that further
| for the back of the class, _advertising is not inherently
| good_. Advertising can be _GOOD OR BAD_.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Eh, I guess it really depends on how you define "inherently
| bad." For example, I'd also call "shooting people"
| inherently bad, but there are certainly cases where a
| specific shooting is a net good (self defense, etc). It
| sounds like your definition is different and may require
| any possible instance to be bad.
| shuntress wrote:
| We could spend all day spinning our wheels on
| increasingly pedantic hypotheticals but it's not exactly
| productive discussion.
|
| Non-consensual acts of violence are always inherently bad
| even when they are "provoked" by reprehensible acts
| (three rights make a left and all that).
|
| "shooting people" with X-Rays to image their internal
| structures for medical purposes is generally accepted to
| be good.
| santoshalper wrote:
| Yes, and I'd say the same thing about advertising, though
| obviously on a lesser scale. All advertising is bad. Some
| advertising is merely less bad.
|
| Advertising that appears in Apps or Software I paid for
| is hot garbage 100% of the time.
| shkkmo wrote:
| By your own argument and definition, advertising is
| inherently bad: Advertising being good is a edge case
| that requires specific circumstances.
| SuperCuber wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that is the point GP was trying to make
| bombcar wrote:
| I think it general we can say "advertising is not wanted" -
| bar exceptional side cases like the Super Bowl ads, very
| few people seek out the _advertising that costs big money_.
|
| I love catalogs from the companies I buy from, and I love
| their websites, but those are _marketing_ not advertising.
|
| The vast majority of advertising is at best a "necessary
| bad" (not per se evil, perhaps).
| shuntress wrote:
| I think in general we can say "BAD advertising is not
| wanted".
|
| Good advertising (like, for example, catalogues from the
| companies you love and buy from) is, in general,
| desirable.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Companies intensely track the percentage of catalogs
| mailed out that result in an order. They call this number
| the "order rate," and it's a very important stat for
| catalogs. You know what's generally seen as a very good
| order rate? Two percent. Even within that genre, actually
| deriving any enjoyment or finding a useful product is the
| exception rather than the rule, and in a time when anyone
| who wants to see what that company has to offer can check
| the website, they're effectively useless now.
|
| There are a very small number of catalogs that people are
| excited to get because the contents are neat. The Sears
| Holiday Wishbook. Hobbyist magazines. Insane ads for 3D
| glasses and plans to convert a vacuum cleaner into a
| hovercraft in Boy Scout magazines. But these are needles
| in a haystack of recycled paper.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's probably not at all the "industry" terms, but I
| would divide "push advertising" (TV, radio, web ads, blah
| blah blah) from "pull advertising" (going to the company
| website, asking for the catalog, etc).
|
| What is sad is how "push advertising" can become
| something actually desired - once you buy into a luxury
| brand, for example, you WANT advertising that reinforces
| just how good and sexy you are for having bought product.
| nehal3m wrote:
| Found the advertiser.
| ketralnis wrote:
| > Advertising is not inherently or automatically bad.
|
| I don't agree.
|
| I don't want to convince you or change your mind but I believe
| that most advertising is default immoral with few exceptions.
| Of course feeling that way myself I believe that it's a valid
| point of view, and I do make purchasing decisions based on it.
| In line with the article's thesis:
|
| > feeling appalled and perplexed why a billion-dollar giant
| tech company would willingly cheapen their flagship product
| merely for a bit more money
|
| I too am surprised that as little as this revenue can be in
| relation to the hardware and app store revenue that they're
| leaning into it this hard.
| shuntress wrote:
| I would agree with you that _" most advertising"_ (your
| words) is currently immoral in that it tends to be a sub-par
| product pushed out the door for reasons based in greed. Or:
| *Spam*
|
| But I don't think that is due to _advertising in general_
| being "default immoral". There is nothing fundamentally
| immoral about accepting payment in exchange for raising
| awareness of something.
|
| As an aside: Accepting money in exchange for promotion
| without making it clear that you have been paid _is_
| certainly immoral.
| ketralnis wrote:
| > tends to be a sub-par product pushed out the door for
| reasons based in greed
|
| I don't think bad products are immoral, just bad.
|
| > There is nothing fundamentally immoral about accepting
| payment in exchange for raising awareness of something.
|
| There's a difference between _paying to get something_, and
| _paying me to do something_. For instance, we can probably
| agree that paying to receive a stolen television and paying
| me to build you a television are different even if the
| buyer-side transaction characteristics are the same.
|
| That's where advertising breaks down in morality. When
| party A pays party B to receive party C's attention without
| party C agreeing to be a part of this transaction at all.
|
| That's why I say "most": sometimes party C is in fact
| knowingly participating. Maybe they get something in
| exchange for their attention (access to a costly-to-run
| website, or a reduced rate on an otherwise costly-to-print
| magazine). Obviously that line is fuzzy for something like
| the App Store where the money is going to Apple's margins
| which are kinda sorta part of the product pricing but
| clearly the price of the hardware isn't going down but
| Apple's clearly within their rights to set their own
| pricing and...? It's fuzzy for sure but I sure didn't
| knowingly agree to be advertised to on a device that I
| bought before they started doing this. And consent is hard
| to talk about in a duopoly environment as well.
|
| Anyway again I'm not here to argue with you about it and I
| don't care one way or the other if you agree with me. I
| just wanted to point out that your axioms about
| "fundamentally immoral" aren't everybody's axioms.
| w1nst0nsm1th wrote:
| The most you pay for advertising, the less you pay for the
| product.
|
| If you have a 10$ capital to start a company and you
| allocate 9$ for advertising (and marketing), you're left
| with 1$ to build a shitty product.
|
| It's a simple mathematical formula : For a given selling
| price tag, the amount dedicated for advertising your
| product is inversely proportional to the amount dedicated
| to build your product.
| aussieshibe wrote:
| Nothing is "inherently or automatically bad". Good and bad are
| matters of opinion, not fact.
|
| In my opinion, all ads are bad, and the world would be a better
| place if advertising were strictly limited to publishing
| product details in some kind of directory (think along the
| lines of a phone book).
| technoooooost wrote:
| Is this a way of rationalizing your adtech position?
| w1nst0nsm1th wrote:
| Browndo, the thirst mutilator...
|
| Have a look at Idiocracy to have an idea of how wrong ads can
| be.
| mrkeen wrote:
| What would you pay to see a GOOD ad?
| zaik wrote:
| Don't worry, we know exactly what products you might like.
| imoreno wrote:
| This. Advertising is a fair idea in principle. When you make a
| new company that truly revolutionizes a product or service,
| people won't magically find out about it overnight. Word of
| mouth takes time. As a customer, I don't want to wait years for
| a good product to get memed before I find out about it. I want
| to know right away! But the ads are never for revolutionary
| products that just came out, that I would love to buy. They're
| always for crap I would never pay for in a million years.
|
| I know there's all the studies about mere exposure effect and
| what not. Yaawn. It seems like the dominant paradigm by far is
| that no matter how shitty your product, no matter how much you
| hate your customers (and vice versa), you can just nag them
| into buying it with enough saturation marketing. I don't get
| how people just accept this uncritically as a law of nature.
|
| Why can't the ads be for quality stuff that people actually
| care about? Everyone's so obsessed with tracking every aspect
| of my life, so how come they just show the same slot app ad to
| every single person regardless, even if I've never shown
| interest in anything similar in a million years?
|
| I remember back in the 90s-ternet, I would get lots of relevant
| ads for products, sites relevant to me. I loved looking at and
| clicking at ads, since they made me discover companies that I
| enjoyed for years after. I don't think they did any of this
| modern analytics stuff, they probably just had some guy with a
| good intuitive understanding of a site's userbase and what they
| care about go on his gut feeling. Maybe we should go back.
| juliushuijnk wrote:
| Funny, I rather have bad ads that fail to influence me.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| I don't mind magazine advertising, because those are hyper-
| specific to the topic you're actually interested in, because
| you bought a magazine all about it. If I'm reading a
| woodworking magazine and I see an ad for a new type of clamp or
| jig a company is advertising, yeah I'm interested! (Free
| "magazines" are trash, I'm talking about Fine Homebuilding,
| Ontario Out of Doors, etc.)
|
| Online advertising is almost universally trash for me, and I'm
| not sure I've ever spent a cent because of it. It's always
| useless and irrelevant (no I don't need a car, or lipstick,
| alcohol, or iced tea, I'm super not interested in any of
| those). And yet, someone must be clicking those ads. I listened
| to a podcast where the (female) hosts said they had spent
| hundreds of dollars by clicking on Instagram ads for random
| products, and I was floored! Who clicks ads?!
| shuntress wrote:
| I don't understand what point you are trying to make.
|
| Are you just trying to say that advertising only exists
| because _" women be shopping"_?
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| I don't understand your comment. Where did I say that? My
| point is that I don't mind magazine advertising because
| it's hyper-specific to a topic I actively wanted to read,
| but online advertising is so random that none of it is ever
| relevant.
| shuntress wrote:
| > I listened to a podcast where the (female) hosts said
| they had spent hundreds of dollars by clicking on
| Instagram ads for random products
|
| So, you would agree then that when the content and
| relevance of an ad surpasses some threshold, the ad is
| good and that when ads are "useless and irrelevant" they
| are bad?
| rchaud wrote:
| There is no such thing as 'good advertising', least of all on a
| mobile platform that has to fit the maximum possible ads into a
| small phone screen viewport.
|
| As a child, I remember very creative ads for Smirnoff vodka;
| those would not be possible today because marketing budgets
| simply see more ROI in targeted advertising, which tends to be
| bland text search ads or ugly display ads like this.
|
| The days of Mad Men style aspirational, full-page, high
| production quality ads are gone, thanks to Real Time Bidding ad
| networks that made Google and Facebook their fortune. We've
| been living in the RTB world for close to 20 years.
| boxed wrote:
| Ads on A PAGE FOR A SPECIFIC APP in the damn store is 100%
| super bad and evil. Apple should be ashamed.
| fredrikholm wrote:
| This general trend of deteriorating UX in widespread services is
| extremely exhausting and depressing.
|
| The accuracy you could get with Google searches in 2005-2010-ish
| was amazing. Knowing _how_ to Google was a secret weapon of
| computer literacy, you could find _anything_. Now I save links on
| a small server (I work on many machines) unless something is
| posted here on HN, as it 's one of increasingly few places where
| I can search and actually find things.
|
| Same story with YouTube, searching for a video there has become
| an exercise in self flagellation.
|
| I don't know if it was Netflix that started the ball on
| nonsensical, avant garde categories followed by thousands of
| auto-playing calls to action, but combined with intrusive ads and
| obfuscation the day-to-day experience on mainstream internet
| really sucks the joy out of whatever amazing content that lurks
| in the cracks of what is actually a set of amazingly marvelous
| technology.
| epolanski wrote:
| > Same story with YouTube, searching for a video there has
| become an exercise in self flagellation.
|
| This so much, I don't know what's wrong with Youtube search,
| but on desktop it gives me like 10/20 genuine results then a
| block of suggestions and no other results.
|
| I came to the conclusion that some PO and data guy figured out
| that if instead of me seeing what I want and leaving they can
| hook me on some Youtube journey they'll make more money.
| XCSme wrote:
| > instead of me seeing what I want and leaving they can hook
| me on some Youtube journey they'll make more money
|
| This sounds so stupid, but it makes a lot of sense and
| explains so many issues. Why make you click on the video X
| that you were looking for instead of sending you on a 1 hour
| rabbit-hole, bonus points if at the end you even had
| forgotten what you were looking for.
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| I firmly believe (as in assuming, no proof) that it was both
| a cost saving measure and what you describe as increasing
| revenue - think about it in terms of statistics, if you give
| the user the most relevant videos as the top 5 suggestions,
| you can cut down the cost of a query substantially and so
| cheaply so that you spend micro-cents per query, whereas
| before you'd arbitrarily cut off search results related to
| the user query after ~50 pages or potentially more, costing
| maybe thousanths-cents per query
|
| The new scenario gets you the user conversion to a watched
| video and subsequently to a relevant ad, all the way to the
| 95th percentile, and maybe even 99th percentile conversion,
| at a fraction of the cost, and doubled with the fact that the
| extremely relevant result got the user to a video, got more
| monetization as a result. Your cost is then simply the query
| time to the cheap edge model, and then the search that
| provides the most relevant videos to search top-n (in this
| case 5)
|
| It's not working for some people - but who cares, you hit
| 99th percentile of all users and you've cut down the spending
| of a black hole that YouTube is, in fact you might've even
| made the experience better for 99% of users. I have nothing
| to substantiate my claims, but knowing how I'd reason about
| it, this would be my assumption for the state YouTube search
| is in
|
| I also hate this and it has made me move away from YouTube
| search, unfortunately YouTube recommended is quite good at
| giving me relevant videos to myself
| heartbreak wrote:
| > Knowing how to Google was a secret weapon of computer
| literacy
|
| I think it is still a matter of knowing the right techniques.
| You'll hear people recommend features like `site:` and such
| (which are great), but really it's a matter of learning and
| adapting to how to _phrase_ queries for Google. It's still a
| skill.
| 3-cheese-sundae wrote:
| Most of the old tricks don't work anymore. Instead of using
| operators and syntax to refine results, now one needs to
| rephrase their question, which is far more subjective and
| imprecise. It's no longer tailored for the searcher.
| TillE wrote:
| The default experience is far worse than it used to be. A
| common situation is I'll search for a 3-4 word phrase and the
| top results contain _one_ of those words. If I 'm really
| lucky Google will have attempted to match some terrible
| synonym of the other words, but frequently it doesn't even do
| that!
|
| If you put everything in quotes, it's better, but there's so
| much SEO spam in the first page of results. I can't remember
| the last time I found anything really interesting with
| Google, for software development it's basically just a
| mediocre way to search Stack Overflow, GitHub, and MSDN. It's
| depressing.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| The old adage that if your not paying, your definitely not the
| customer still holds true. If you are paying, but at an
| affordable consumer rate, your likely still not entirely the
| main customer, especially for anything as complex as search
| over the entire internet.
| sirmarksalot wrote:
| I'm gonna go out and assert that the statement "if you're not
| paying, you're the product" has never been true on a large
| scale. Rather, the two are unrelated. In this day and age,
| you are always the product, whether you're paying or not. And
| back in the 2000s when I first started hearing that adage, it
| was only true on the most transparently awful platforms. It
| was really just a thought-terminating cliche meant to shush
| anyone who bothered to complain about a free website doing
| something bad. The difference between then and now is that we
| now know how to monetize somebody's data in a way that solo
| startup founders in the early 2000s didn't. Sure the science
| probably existed, but it wasn't obvious to somebody making a
| website that that was how you make money.
|
| Nowadays, the process of converting daily active users into
| monetizable data is trivial, so that's what everybody does,
| again regardless of whether or not you paid. When you think
| about the economics of it, your value as a commodity does not
| decrease just because you paid for something. No matter how
| much you pay for your subscription, your data is always
| valuable, and the only reason Netflix doesn't force ads on
| all their subscribers is because it'd look bad for them. But
| behind the scenes, do you really think they're not selling
| your interaction data just because you subscribe to the most
| expensive package? Monetizing users has always been a
| function of ease of implementation, not the out-of-pocket
| expense of the user.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Okay?
|
| I think this was implicit in my second sentence: "If you
| are paying, but at an affordable consumer rate, your likely
| still not entirely the main customer, especially for
| anything as complex as search over the entire internet."
| Toutouxc wrote:
| I've been using Kagi ($10/month user-oriented search engine)
| for a few months now and it's what finally scratched my
| Googling itch. The quality of results is almost like Google a
| few years ago, plus you can buff, nerf or even block certain
| sites! Goodbye Quora, Pinterest, Yahoo Answers and other crap,
| hello Wikipedia and StackOverflow results always at the top.
| And of course, no ads.
| csomar wrote:
| Google Search is completely dysfunctional now. I use Github own
| search (as bad as it is) to search for code. Searching for an
| exact code text (with quotes) yields no result despite having
| multiple results in Github; and these repositories are public.
| dzikimarian wrote:
| That's why open ecosystem is a must, so you can easily migrate.
|
| Constantly repeated argument from Apple users is that
| Appstore/iMessage/iOS is closed/doesn't allow
| sideloading/alternative clients in order to protect the users.
|
| Now you can see what happens if you put company in the position,
| where you have to spend thousands of dollars, multiple hours
| hours and lots of explaining to your friends in order to leave
| their walled garden.
| santoshalper wrote:
| I feel genuine empathy and a little vicarious sadness (not
| sarcastic or ironic) for all the Apple diehards who loyally went
| through thick and thin with Apple, including them nearly going
| out of business, only to discover that Apple is not Different or
| Exceptional and is, in reality, just another large publicly
| traded company with the goal of maximizing shareholder returns.
| errantmind wrote:
| Are there any examples of large public companies that have
| reversed course on ads and purged them from their products?
|
| It seems once they are in place, they infest and eventually
| permeate to all levels of the product, like cockroaches.
|
| I suspect it is just impossible for executives to argue against
| something tangible (ad-revenue) in favor of something intangible
| (ad-free experience).
| danuker wrote:
| The only times my experience changes for the better is when I
| take action.
|
| Reddit pushing mobile app? Here I am, commenting on this
| reliable and ad-free website with an incredible signal to noise
| ratio.
| teddyh wrote:
| Not a public company, but Sao Paulo did this in 2006.
| thefz wrote:
| Anyone thinking Apple was heralding privacy was wrong, they were
| just preparing the ground to be the only one to profit on your
| data.
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| If this is the direction Apple takes, I will be leaving their
| ecosystem. My attention is finite, and advertising is attention
| theft.
| confounded wrote:
| Where will you go?
| dimva wrote:
| It's funny remembering how people would say stuff like "if you
| aren't paying for the product, you ARE the product", and someone
| even tried to make a Twitter clone where the only differentiator
| was that you'd pay for it to "prevent" ads and tracking.
|
| I thought back then that even if it succeeded in gaining enough
| users to beat Twitter, it would fail because eventually
| investors' demand for growth would force them to add ads anyway.
| You see this happening with cable TV, Roku, and now even Apple.
|
| The only way to prevent this is to have a company motivated by
| something other than growing profits, but that comes with its own
| problems: stagnation, bloated bureaucracy, and capture by special
| interests without profit to keep the organization honest and
| lean.
|
| I don't know what the right solution is, only that in very
| competitive for-profit markets, companies don't dare to worsen
| the user experience with ads lest they lose customers to a
| competitor. Given the barriers to entry for developing a new
| smartphone, including the strong network effect of the app store
| and OS APIs, this is not that type of market. Most androids
| already have ads and bloatware, so Apple isn't facing any
| competitive pressure on this front, sadly.
| [deleted]
| fsflover wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33512547
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