[HN Gopher] Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line
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Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line
Author : zdw
Score : 520 points
Date : 2025-11-07 20:05 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (kensegall.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (kensegall.com)
| duxup wrote:
| Ads in Maps and how that contrasts with the customer experience
| is the message here.
|
| I'll be honest, I'm tired of the "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple
| dying" articles, they're oh so shrill and tiresome and I think
| Steve would have changed with the times too ...
|
| Steve aside, I find this particular article's observation that
| ads in maps is a bad customer experience something I can agree
| with.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _I think Steve would have changed with the times too_
|
| That's the thing that annoys me whenever someone says "what
| would $DECEASED_PERSON do?" We can't know! Maybe we can make an
| accurate guess about what Steve Jobs would have done in 2011,
| but it's really hard to say what he would have done in 2025,
| had he lived. Not just because people change over time (he was
| 56 when he died, and would be 70 today), but because business
| requirements and practices change over time, and executives --
| even Jobs -- adapt to those changes.
|
| Maybe this is _exactly_ what Jobs would have done: resist
| adding advertising for years and years, but finally in 2025
| decide it 's necessary for the business in some cases.
|
| (But I _also_ agree that this sort of thing is garbage for the
| user experience. In my fantasy world, advertising doesn 't
| exist, at all.)
| wrs wrote:
| Of course we don't know. But regarding this specific example,
| bear in mind that Apple is in _vastly_ better shape as a
| business than it was in 1999. So if that argument didn't work
| on him then, it doesn't seem implausible that it wouldn't
| work now.
| pqtyw wrote:
| Or the opposite. The Apple might and/or its execs might
| think that they are in such a dominant position that
| purposefully lowering UX to extract a few extra pennies
| from their users won't cause any short term harm.
|
| While back in the 90s the brand/reputational damage might
| have destroyed them.
| tadfisher wrote:
| Back in the 90s, Apple had zero brand or reputation. It
| had a few die-hard Mac fans and a bunch of inherited
| deals with public school district purchasing departments
| from when the Apple II dominated. They licensed Mac OS to
| clone manufacturers like Microsoft did with Windows. They
| were essentially already destroyed and waiting for the
| eviction notice.
|
| Jobs, with Mac OS X and the iMac, absolutely created the
| unassailable perception of quality and user experience
| Apple is known for today. The term "reality distortion
| field" was used a lot in relation to how much Jobs sold
| Apple and the Mac in keynotes.
|
| So it's completely fair to use his well-known positions
| against the company's current practices.
| pqtyw wrote:
| Yes, exactly. They couldn't afford to crapify their
| products for short term again and hope to survive. They
| wouldn't be here if they did that. Now they can.
|
| > well-known positions against the company's current
| practices
|
| Companies generally don't really have values besides
| maximizing profits. People working or leading them might.
| But that almost never lasts more than a few decades at
| most.
| xp84 wrote:
| > decide it's necessary for the business
|
| Necessary? That implies that there is some real threat to the
| business that needs to be countered this way -- which is
| laughable.
|
| Even Tim Cook had enough spine to make a principled stand
| once: he told activist investors in 2014 that if they didn't
| like Apple's commitment to environmental responsibility, they
| should sell their shares. Steve had twice the principles as
| Cook (on issues he cared about at least), so I don't think
| he'd allow "the investors want even greater growth" to force
| him do something he found gross and degrading to the
| experience.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Necessary?_
|
| Necessary, beneficial, has more upside than downside,
| whatever way you want to slice it.
|
| > _Even Tim Cook had enough spine to make a principled
| stand once: he told activist investors in 2014 that if they
| didn't like Apple's commitment to environmental
| responsibility, they should sell their shares_
|
| I feel like this is actually _support_ for my argument that
| people change over time (either naturally, or to adapt to
| the times themselves changing): I cannot for a second
| imagine Cook making this sort of statement today.
| xp84 wrote:
| > I cannot for a second imagine Cook making this sort of
| statement today.
|
| Agree, but personally I don't respect Cook and agree he
| seems to have sold his spine sometime around when he sold
| his soul. I got the sense that Jobs wasn't drifting
| toward increased greed but rather, a knowledge that he
| and Apple both had more than enough "F-you money" -- to
| do what they thought was best for the product, knowing
| that that was also exactly aligned with the long-term
| interests of the company anyway.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| There are lots of good experiences from ads in maps:
|
| - I search for "restaurants" and someone is having a special
|
| - A trampoline park opens near me, I'd like it to catch my eye
|
| - I've been googling chocolates recently, so populate the map
| with chocolate shops
|
| - Maybe I'm bored as a car passenger and watching the map
| screen so my attention is free anyway
| kelnos wrote:
| That sounds absolutely awful, honestly. I wouldn't want to
| see any of those things mess with the "natural" order of
| search results for whatever I've explicitly searched for.
| servercobra wrote:
| The 1st and 3rd are better served by Apple choosing the best
| result rather than who's paid for an ad.
| xp84 wrote:
| I do agree with you in theory, though their 'attempts' at
| this kind of thing are comical if not absurd (witness the
| organic search results in the App Store).
| ses1984 wrote:
| I don't want my phone to consume any of my "free" attention,
| ever, but holy cow especially not while driving.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| > as a car passenger
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Sometimes the driver looks at the map screen too. That's
| most of the reason it's there.
| normie3000 wrote:
| > Maybe I'm bored as a car passenger and watching the map
| screen so my attention is free anyway
|
| I'm glad there are always ads available to stop my mind from
| wandering.
| dkdcio wrote:
| genuinely the worst opinion I've seen on HackerNews
|
| there are such better ways to enable these experiences
| without introducing the zero-sum, scam-inducing, corporate
| fuckery game that making it a pay-to-win ad-driven experience
| gives you
|
| I'm also concerned that boredom makes you want to see ads
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| I want to challenge the idea that any of these is an
| unqualified "good experience". I desire none of this.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Ads in the App Store continue to be a bad customer experience
| as well.
| waylandsmithers wrote:
| Anything you search for, the first thing at the top of the
| list is an ad from a competitor!
| ndepoel wrote:
| Honestly, I think that if Steve Jobs had lived, he would have
| continued to push the industry in a direction more aligned with
| his tastes, others would have followed suit, and whatever hot
| topics we'd be discussing today, they would be _very_ different
| from the ones we are discussing now.
| xp84 wrote:
| Sad but probably true. I hadn't really considered that
| aspect. Anyone so influential no doubt changed the whole
| Zeitgeist, not just their own company's course.
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| Correct. This is something that is becoming increasingly
| apparent with time.
| apples_oranges wrote:
| He seemed very content in the end that Apple is on the right
| track and set up correctly for the future. I don't think he
| was talking about profit margins, but rather about the soul
| of the company, if there is such a thing.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I think he would have been all over AI, and would have pushed
| Siri ahead instead of letting the product stagnate. I
| _suspect_ he 'd have pushed into robotics as well, especially
| home automation robots. Home automation in general, in fact.
|
| His whole thing was being the smartest, most tasteful, and
| most creative person in the room. There was a lot of
| illusion/delusion there, but even with his failures he was
| absolutely focused on product design, user experience, and
| aesthetics in a way that Cook's Apple isn't.
|
| Cook's Apple is a hugely successful predatory and cynical
| cash extraction bureaucracy, with a world-leading hardware
| division and a shockingly mediocre and failing software
| division.
|
| The goal is penny-pinching acquisition, so we can expect more
| and more of this from Apple until there's a change of
| leadership. (If we're lucky...)
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| The magic of Jobs is/was he truly was a self-starter and
| self-taught man; he had the rare mix of traits necessary to
| be a visionary.
|
| Frankly I think Jobs saw Cook as a key operator to ensure
| the firms future survival and future growth; I'd imagine
| Jobs foresaw the tremendous impact the smartphone would
| have and all Cook had to do was be a shrewd operator as
| Apple had built such a huge advantage over competitors by
| the time he was dead.
| m463 wrote:
| > "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple dying" ... shrill
|
| I think these are fans of apple who have lost something.
|
| Personally I think steve jobs was a good integrator - he got
| people together. Sometimes the people were apple <-> customers,
| sometimes music industry <-> computers, etc
|
| If there was controversy, he stepped in and lead - and stepped
| into the spotlight and explained.
|
| I don't see the same sort of leadership nowadays. Controversies
| like the app store woes, pricing, monopoly behavior, bad
| service to developers, even tariff stuff.
|
| Also he was good at creating/choosing new next products and
| killing not-quite-there products.
|
| yeah, but that ship has sailed.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I think what Steve added to Apple more than anything was
| being the biggest asshole in the room who was willing to
| point at a fellow high-up person and tell them their idea
| sucked ass, and you may be surprised to read what comes next,
| I think that's critical to a good product line. There are
| numerous problems caused by having too many stakeholders, too
| many cooks in the kitchen if you will, steering your given
| ship, and sometimes exactly what you need is one guy who
| knows damn well what needs to be made, and isn't afraid to
| tell you to take a hike if you want to die on the hill in
| question.
|
| That all being said, he got it wrong a lot too. You have the
| good decisions: the original Macs, the iPhone, banning Flash
| from iOS, backing Pixar, demanding the iPad Mini be better
| before it goes to market, etc. But he got it wrong a lot too:
| the Apple III, very strict App Store policies, not
| replaceable batteries in the iPhone which would eventually
| infect every Apple product, and I'm sure there's plenty more.
|
| The one thing though that prevents me from truly looking up
| to him though is he was, by all accounts, an absolute fucking
| asshole to work for. I appreciate a man with a vision
| absolutely, as should be evident, but there's also something
| to be said for being able to navigate those difficult
| conversations with class and kindness, even when you need to
| tell someone their idea sucks ass, you can do it in such a
| way where they don't want to quit outright. And those
| failings were mirrored in Jobs' personal life, too. Dude just
| had no fucking ability to People at all.
|
| So yeah. Complicated guy. I think he represents both the best
| and worst of what can happen when you empower one person with
| a lot of good ideas- and some bad- to lead a company. I think
| it's broadly a good thing; and I also think if I worked under
| him, I probably would've ended up knocking a tooth of his
| out.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I'm convinced you can't have your cake and eat it too.
| There's no _nice_ way to call someone's baby ugly. They're
| going to be upset, no matter how delicately you phrase it.
|
| Worse still, if you're too polite, many people won't "get"
| the message.
|
| _"Oh, he just thinks my baby has interesting and unique
| features."_
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > I'm convinced you can't have your cake and eat it too.
| There's no nice way to call someone's baby ugly. They're
| going to be upset, no matter how delicately you phrase
| it.
|
| I agree in a vacuum, but we're not in a vacuum, we're
| talking about Steve Jobs. A dude who would semi-regularly
| send coworkers and subordinates out of rooms in tears,
| throw shit around the office, and in general make a
| complete ass of himself.
|
| Like, I agree with you, it's gonna be hard to tell
| someone their baby is ugly. There's a better way to do it
| than throwing a stapler at the wall above their head and
| calling them ugly too.
|
| I don't mean to pick on you in particular but we
| seriously need to shred this societal idea that
| visionaries, rockstar devs, auteurs, whatever, have to be
| anti-social fucking monsters to make whatever they happen
| to make. It's stupid and it sucks and it excuses tons of
| abusive behavior. I'm all for making great shit but if
| you have to hurt people to do it, then I don't think it's
| worth it at all.
| com2kid wrote:
| I once worked for a leader who wanted to be like Jobs,
| complete with the black shirts.
|
| So anyways, going into a design review I (UI dev lead)
| had warned early on that the new design was bad. I said
| it was going to be bad. Listed why it was going to be
| bad, and politely gave my feedback to UX, and I was
| ignored.
|
| Walk into the review, it gets torn apart. It was really
| horrible. The GM looks over at me, asks for my take. I
| reply that I gave my feedback weeks ago and I hadn't
| approved of the design.
|
| GM proceeds to lay into the UX team, swearing, yelling,
| and such, and basically asking why they hadn't listed to
| my initial feedback. It ended with an ultimatum that
| henceforth the design team was going to listen to me if I
| said no to a design before they wasted his time.
|
| We were at the time outsourcing UX work to an obscenely
| expensive design firm who hasn't done software work
| before, just physical media. Some of the team was good,
| but a few of the designers were violently incompetent.
|
| (A short time later we nixed the entire team, hired the
| good ones, and built our own,amazing, internal UX team.)
|
| I'm not sure how I feel about the situation. It was nice
| to be vindicated, and rockstar personalities rarely
| listen to polite level feedback. "Fuck you don't bring me
| shitty designs and bill me tens of thousands of dollars
| for them when the fucking dev team can tell the design is
| shit" is kind of a legit response to people who just
| won't listen.
|
| It does sour relationships though, and IMHO some of that
| relationship between me and the UX lead took years to
| rebuild.
| Pamar wrote:
| About non-replaceable batteries: from what I understand, if
| a battery can be replaced by any random device owner you
| must design it with a robust cell to avoid risk of it being
| punctured, breaking, being crushed.
|
| And therefore you have more shell, less actual battery and
| therefore it lasts less.
|
| This does _not_ mean that I believe this was done
| exclusively for altruistic reasons. More like: this will
| result in a slightly better experience for the user... and
| more revenue for Apple. So let 's do it.
| com2kid wrote:
| I've worked in consumer electronics, batteries are built
| in because reviewers will endlessly trash a product that
| is just 1mm thicker than anything apple puts out, and
| they fawn over apple because the products are so thin.
|
| If anyone releases a product that is just a tiny bit
| thicker than last year, except headlines like "new super-
| thick phone doesn't fit in pockets, causes back
| problems".
|
| A small exaggeration? Not by far, reviewers nasty about
| device thickness.
|
| Then 70% of people shove a case on and it really doesn't
| matter.
|
| There are good water ingress reasons for non-replaceable
| batteries, making a device water proof and have a
| replaceable battery does add a good deal of thickness.
|
| Anyway, you can get a battery replaced at a phone shop
| for a reasonable rate anyway, so IMHO it isn't as big of
| a deal now days.
| ryandrake wrote:
| We need to stop making products for reviewers.
| com2kid wrote:
| No one wants to, but that is how many consumers decide on
| what to buy. It is especially how early adopters tuned
| into the review scene for their favorite products decide
| what to buy.
| kakacik wrote:
| Well he was a textbook high performing sociopath, if that's
| a coined medical term. Very low emotional EQ, very high IQ,
| and the ability to rationally turn some part of EQ on if
| motivation is high enough... but nothing of that comes
| naturally and in stressful situations its elephant in the
| porcelain shop.
|
| His biggest regrets before dying is how he treated his own
| family when looking back - again a textbook of what I write
| above.
|
| Some people have immediate kneejerk reaction to the part
| with "sociopath" but I don't look at it as some sort of
| insult, rather just description of certain quality or lack
| of it of given person. No need to dance around the fact
| with many words, it is (was) what it is. If he knew better
| he would do it, nothing one can choose easily. And there
| would be some negative impact on his professional life, no
| doubt (some positive too but if you look at ultra rich guys
| not only in tech, they are +- the same stuff, it seems this
| is really prerequisite to rise meteorically, nice guys
| normally don't make it that far).
|
| musk is similar albeit another unique mix of above. Bezos
| too. And so on and on.
| xeromal wrote:
| I appreciate this comment end to end and wish I could write
| as effectively. Thanks for sharing.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| The ads in Google Maps are fairly tame by modern standards. Of
| course, Apple can afford to not make this change and I hope
| they abstain. But it's really not too offensive in my opinion.
| qwerpy wrote:
| > fairly tame by modern standards
|
| That means they're still early in the ad-ification of the
| product. After a few dozen "what if we increase the ad
| density" A/B tests later, we'll get to the point Google
| search is now. Except with maps you're stuck using the app
| without an ad blocker.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I usually don't like those articles, but I think this one has a
| pretty good point.
|
| If it was just "Steve said no to ads in MacOS X, so it's a
| betrayal to put ads in Maps" then I'd be right there with you.
| We got a lot of these. "Steve wouldn't have accepted the
| notch." "Steve wouldn't have made a VR headset." These are both
| baseless and boring. Even if it's true, so what? Steve
| specifically told his successors _not_ to ask "what would
| Steve do?" And the objection is vague stuff about aesthetics or
| customer appeal or whatever.
|
| This one is more interesting than that by focusing on the
| customer experience angle, and there's little room for
| disagreement on that. I might argue that the notch makes for a
| better customer experience, you might argue it would have been
| better without it, and we're really just putting our opinions
| onto a dead man. But it's very hard to make the argument that
| adding ads to Maps makes for a better customer experience.
| Doing it isn't a matter of having different tastes or opinions
| than Steve had. It's directly going against a fundamental
| principle he had for the company. "Steve wouldn't have made
| Maps look like that" would be tedious, but "Steve wouldn't have
| deliberately made the customer experience worse in order to
| make more money" is a message I can get behind.
| furyofantares wrote:
| Ads is a red line for me too. They're in the App Store and I
| hate it.
|
| Adding ads to anything is going to make it significantly worse
| for me immediately - and I expect it only to get worse from
| there as the customer of the device or service is no longer the
| only customer of the product, and the more money the ads bring
| in, the more the needs of the advertisers will be weighted.
| microtherion wrote:
| Yes, I agree that ads in maps would be a bad customer
| experience.
|
| But "The customer experience was all-important" is a bit
| reductionist. The hockey puck mouse stuck around for years
| after it became clear it was a poor customer experience. And I
| have cursed desktop Macs countless times for having all their
| ports in the back, because Jobs disliked seeing them, customer
| experience be damned.
| gretch wrote:
| Or how the iphone 4 antenna was obstructed by normal holding
| of the phone (including poses in apple marketing materials),
| and then steve just told everyone they were holding their
| phones wrong.
| Y-bar wrote:
| Yeah. The phone was faulty from a hardware design
| standpoint, and the manner Steve Jobs handled it was bad.
| But he was correct on one point:
|
| Every other manufacturer at the time had a paragraph and
| illustration in their manual telling people not to hold
| their phone in a certain manner.
|
| I think much of his bad attitude came from this fact that
| he felt Apple was unfailingly singled out.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >Yes, I agree that ads in maps would be a bad customer
| experience.
|
| If I search for a nearby cafe on Apple Maps it pulls in data
| from Trip Advisor. I suspect you could provide a better
| experience than that even with ads (although I doubt they
| will).
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Ads are a good way to be spammed with low-quality options
| that choose to pay apple.
| TZubiri wrote:
| >I'll be honest, I'm tired of the "steve jobs wouldn't" and
| "apple dying" articles, they're oh so shrill and tiresome and I
| think Steve would have changed with the times too ...
|
| Ok, but it's true, the man died, the company is public, and
| like all companies they will eventually profit off the brand by
| making a shitty product.
|
| It's all rug pulls, try a Hershey's chocolate bar, mine had soy
| in it.
| bowsamic wrote:
| I agree I'm also tired of it. It's all so hypothetical, trying
| to guess what a dead man would think. Who cares anyway? He made
| loads of bad decisions
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Google maps is better, except for the ads. If Apple Maps gets
| ads, I'll just switch to Google. So weird that Apple wouldn't
| comprehend that privacy (which requires no ads) is their moat.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| They will _always_ put ads into everything. Doesn 't matter what
| they say, eventually someone's gonna show up and notice that
| money is being left on the table by not advertising to all those
| users. Paying them just makes your attention even more valuable.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The trouble with any ad-free tier is that anybody who can't
| afford the ad-free tier can't afford what is being advertised.
| bigyabai wrote:
| There is some amusing "leopards ate my face" logic in paying a
| company to _not_ pester you for further monetization.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Never pay them. You're essentially paying to segment yourself
| into the upper echelons of the market.
| generalpf wrote:
| It doesn't matter what Steve Jobs would or wouldn't do, Tim Cook
| took Apple to a $3T company and that's where we are.
| mason_mpls wrote:
| Yeah every action a company takes is immediately and completely
| reflected in the market cap /s
| graemep wrote:
| It should be, or, to be precise, everything it is publicly
| known to have done is reflected in its share price.
|
| its called the semi-strong form of the efficient markets
| hypothesis.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Money isn't everything. We can, and should, shun businessmen
| who try to eke out every ounce of profit by making their
| products terrible.
| FrankWilhoit wrote:
| Jobs's focus on the customer experience was useless because he
| judged the customer by himself. "Be like me and you will have a
| good experience" is not clever marketing; it is abuse.
| pclowes wrote:
| I dunno, for a while it was the most valuable company on the
| planet. While you might not like his judgment it seems plenty
| of people did.
| eviks wrote:
| So you approve of ads then since it makes the company more
| valuable?
| bsimpson wrote:
| This might be the worst take I've ever read on this website.
|
| I'm a lifetime Mac user who has bought exactly one iPhone (the
| 3G S) before switching to Android. I'm definitely not in the
| Jobs reality distortion field.
|
| But I do remember how the iPod was better than every similar
| thing at the time, and how people spent _years_ clamoring for
| Apple to harness that same focus to make a phone. Apple had to
| go out and buy the iPhone name because that's what it had been
| colloquially called for years before it was announced.
|
| There are plenty of things Apple has done wrong, many by Steve
| personally, but you can't seriously claim that his taste was
| only applicable to him.
|
| Don't denigrate the meaning of the word "abuse" to make your
| hot take spicier.
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| as someone who bought the creativelabs mp3 player back in the
| day, the ipod was absolutely better and I was just being some
| combination of cheap and contrarian
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I had a Zen Stone, which was made by... Creative!
|
| It was much, much better than an iPod. I had an iPod first.
| I gave it away, because it was too heavy to carry around.
|
| The Zen Stone was essentially weightless and could be
| operated without looking at it. The only problem I ever had
| with it was that it couldn't charge and play at the same
| time.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Saying it's abuse is quite the overstatement. It's certainly
| opinionated design.
|
| Contrasted to Microsoft's philosophy where _no one_ is allowed
| to have a good experience, it 's a breath of fresh air.
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| for something useless it worked very, extraordinarily well
| hylaride wrote:
| Use an MP3 player from before the iPod existed and then try an
| iPod classic. Same with smart phones. There is no way you're
| going to convince most people that what you say is true in any
| general sense.
|
| Sure, simplification means having to have some opinionated ways
| of doing things because you're removing options, but there's a
| very real benefit that can come out of it.
|
| If anything, it makes the current state of Apple that much more
| sad.
| cyberax wrote:
| I had an MP3 player before the iPod. It was a CD-based
| player, and it was pretty good.
|
| I think, iPod was really one of the first users of 1.8" hard
| drives, so it was better than the competition simply because
| Apple had access to better hardware.
| hylaride wrote:
| I disagree. Apple had no monopoly on 1.8" hard drives nor
| most of the other components in the original iPod (except
| maybe the scroll wheel itself?); they were merely among the
| first to apply it into a media player. It was the UI that
| was groundbreaking. You could switch from an album, to and
| artist, to a playlist, to a specific song all within
| seconds with your thumb. CD-based mp3 players were ok, but
| were battery hogs and updating playlists/music/etc was a
| hassle as one had to burn CDs. The UIs for most were
| "useable" at best.
|
| Apple did have clever, original, and good marketing, but
| the product (iPod) was so clearly better than anything that
| came before it, either way. And that was my original point
| against the prior comment that the customer experience was
| just "be like Steve Jobs" and then it's good.
| cyberax wrote:
| The first Apple iPods only had FireWire which was exotic
| here, so they were not at all popular. I had a Rio
| (Nitrus, I think?) that was released within a year from
| iPod's release. When I first interacted with an iPod a
| couple of years later, I was not at all impressed.
|
| I didn't have a NOMAD, but Slashdot's "no wireless, less
| space than a NOMAD, lame" tagline was pretty much on
| point. Its marketing was great, however.
| daft_pink wrote:
| To me the really question is how that impacts my privacy. I'm
| okay with Ads in their software as long as it doesn't negatively
| impact my privacy.
|
| It's obvious that many of google services have huge negative
| impacts on my privacy, which is why I buy from apple.
| nomel wrote:
| I buy from Apple for privacy and the their respecting users and
| being "classier" by not putting ads in their apps. That _is_
| the reason I pay the "Apple tax". I think this is very
| unfortunate.
| bigyabai wrote:
| It's very likely that the "privacy" advertising is largely a
| sham too. As Senator Wyden proved, Apple can be compelled by
| the federal government to conceal spyware in iOS and its
| supporting systems: https://arstechnica.com/tech-
| policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
|
| Hardly surprising given how they reneged their stance on in-
| OS advertising though.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Is that AI Steve Jobs in the header image? Pretty uncanny and
| takes away from the article.
| sjm wrote:
| Yes. Pretty hypocritical for an article about "crossing red
| lines" to use AI slop for an image of a real person. Very
| disrespectful.
| roywiggins wrote:
| it also just looks awful and only about 80% like the guy
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's not hypocritical for an article about crossing someone
| else's red line to simultaneously be crossing _your_ red
| line.
| sjm wrote:
| Depicting deceased people with AI is objectively
| distasteful, especially from a self-described "ad guy" who
| should know better.
| wat10000 wrote:
| That's not what "objectively" means.
| amatecha wrote:
| Yeah especially since it probably wouldn't take long to scrub
| through some WWDC presentations of his to find him holding up
| his hands like that (or a gesture of comparable meaning)
| asadotzler wrote:
| It's death porn gross AI slop, 100% and immediately obvious to
| anyone who isn't coming of age in the slop era.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| > death porn gross AI slop
|
| Once again in English, please.
| skylurk wrote:
| Gross AI death porn slop?
| jaredcwhite wrote:
| There's something way off about that image, I'd bet money it's
| AI. Gross.
| fpauser wrote:
| One word: Enshittification.
| kace91 wrote:
| I don't care about whatever Jobs thought, but honestly I do care
| about apple forgetting that the walled garden's walls are
| tolerated only because the experience inside is better.
|
| Their hardware is still amazing, but I've had enough issues with
| software quality and Cook's penny pinching philosophy that I've
| bought a second hand laptop to explore moving to Linux.
|
| So far, the experience is making me question whether my next main
| driver will be a MacBook.
| jabwd wrote:
| Yeah for me it has been degrading ever since the Settings app
| became an upsell app. I'm sorry I came here to change a setting
| not dismiss a notification on your latest failed service thing
| that requires 20,- a month.
| kace91 wrote:
| It's the push for services.
|
| It's the product ladder with artificial limitations like low
| fps screens or small storage to push you a bit more.
|
| It's bugs piling up because Marketing needs the next buzzword
| released.
|
| It's the aesthetics optimized for a screenshot rather than
| real usability.
|
| It's the feeling that their top talent is not able to deliver
| anymore, like their camera's processing or AI features.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > It's the product ladder with artificial limitations like
| low fps screens
|
| This one really pisses me off as someone who just had to
| upgrade their 2018 iPad Pro. The air would've been great,
| if it had a 120hz screen. I really don't need any other
| "pro" feature but I refused to tolerate 60hz in 2025 when
| every other device I own including my big desktop monitor
| is 120hz or more. But no, I have to spend an extra $500 for
| a higher refresh rate. I didn't even want the pro, I want a
| 120hz air so I can get the colors I want.
|
| Nonetheless, because my screen was broken and I needed a
| new iPad, I forked over the money for the pro.
| Conveniently, they use two different magic keyboards so now
| that I'm "locked in" to the pro ecosystem, I'm forever
| stuck buying iPad pros unless I also want to have to buy a
| new magic keyboard that works with the Air line if they
| ever release a 120hz air.
|
| Apple can easily differentiate the air from the pro in
| numerous other ways besides refresh rate, and yet they
| still continue to ship 60hz screens.
| accrual wrote:
| Yep. I have two un-dismissable notifications in the Settings
| app for two different AppleCare products. Can't dismiss them
| - you just have to have a red notification icon until they
| expire. Just turn off badges for the Settings app right?
| Sorry, the Settings app is mysteriously missing from the
| Notifications options.
| basisword wrote:
| >> Yeah for me it has been degrading ever since the Settings
| app became an upsell app.
|
| I didn't really notice this until I setup an iPhone from
| scratch for someone. I normally just move from one to the
| other. The nagging from Settings is outrageous. It will never
| stop telling you to setup Apple Pay and Siri and offering
| Apple Care. It was like the experience of buying a PC in the
| 2000's.
| cyberax wrote:
| > I do care about apple forgetting that the walled garden's
| walls are tolerated only because the experience inside is
| better.
|
| Why would they care if they can just lock the gates and put
| some barbed wire on top of the walls? What are you going to do,
| move to Android?
| kace91 wrote:
| >What are you going to do, move to Android?
|
| Why not? If ads are coming anyway why pay the apple tax.
| cyberax wrote:
| But Blue Bubbles! And iMessage, and you will need to move
| your photos. Also Music, movies and other stuff.
| pzo wrote:
| iMessage is only popular in US, I rarely seen someone
| using it in europe or asia. For movies and music people
| have spotify and netflix these days. There is only small
| hassle for non-tech savvy to move photos.
| racl101 wrote:
| Yep. For the first time I'm really considering Linux as a
| personal / desktop OS. Currently I just use it for servers. But
| now for the first time I don't think I have much to lose by
| leaving the Apple ecosystem.
| int_19h wrote:
| They don't actually have to be good. They just need to be
| better than viable alternatives.
| beej71 wrote:
| I also don't care what Jobs would have thought, but I do refuse
| to use forced advertising products, so...
|
| Related to your second paragraph, I have a 2017 MBP that just
| end-of-lifed so we're gonna try Linux on that.
|
| And the M line is _fast_. A pretty good computer for the money.
| That said, I hear getting Linux running on those platforms is
| troublesome and may be a path that Apple is actively fighting
| against. And if I can 't install Linux, that makes the computer
| premature landfill fodder which pisses me off.
|
| I love the Framework concept, but you'll pay for the privilege.
| Not sure what's next for me.
| immibis wrote:
| Perhaps Tim Cook, like many of us, now believes users are so
| accustomed to the walled garden they won't think to question
| the existence of anything outside the wall.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| The main thing it'd take me to _start_ considering switching to
| Linux is a laptop vendor taking battery life, power states, and
| sleep under Linux as seriously as Valve has with the Steam
| Deck. Once you've had real life 15h+ battery life, zero
| performance drop when unplugging, sleep that works correctly
| without "vampire" power drain, and cooling that's effective and
| inaudible 80-90% of the time it's hard to go back.
|
| I already have a ThinkPad X series running Linux as a secondary
| machine, so I can see what that side of the fence is like and
| it's going to take either a colossal screwup on Apple's part or
| a massive improvement on the x86 laptop industry's part of
| switching to be possibility.
| bigyabai wrote:
| > it's going to take either a colossal screwup on Apple's
| part
|
| How hot does the water have to be before the frogs admit it's
| boiling? I feel like everyone forgot the macOS OCSP outage
| where your desktop apps wouldn't launch because of broken
| DRM. Or Ron Wyden's Push Notification whistleblowing. Or that
| gold statue Tim Cook gave out a few months ago - were those
| not real mistakes, yet?
|
| I'm not opposed to a good Linux ARM laptop. I just can't
| tolerate Asahi-level driver support, nor can I live with
| macOS while running my workflow in UTM. The main thing
| stopping me from dailying Apple Silicon is Apple's complete
| neglect of macOS as a computing platform. macOS isn't just
| "bad like Windows" anymore, it's not even certain if Apple
| will support it in 10 years.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| > How hot does the water have to be before the frogs admit
| it's boiling?
|
| It's on its way, but it's not there yet. The extent to
| which other laptop manufacturers have been dropping the
| ball on building laptops that are excellent at being
| laptops cannot be understated, and that's without holding
| them to the standard that Apple has achieved where their
| laptops accomplish that while also blurring the lines
| between laptop and desktop in terms of power. Add in issues
| relating to build quality, Linux compatibility, etc and
| you're left with a tiny handful of machines that still
| aren't true peers to their counterpart MacBooks. Frankly,
| it's absurd.
|
| Even formerly good manufacturers have been goofing around,
| like Lenovo's attempt to frog-boil its ThinkPad buyers
| until they're convinced that features like trackpoints and
| quality keyboards can be excluded or Dell faceplanting into
| the exact same follies that Apple did with the Touch Bar
| MacBooks.
| kace91 wrote:
| Honestly, the XPS I bought second hand works close enough
| with kubuntu that I might not mind.
|
| So far I get enough unplugged gas for a worrylesss
| morning/evening session, with lid movement causing instant
| sleep/wake and night battery drain of ~6%. Fans stay silent
| 90% of time, there is sometimes a weird sound on usage like a
| hdd read but it's very subtle.
|
| As a plus beyond the software, I get a touchscreen 4k
| display, larger storage, and disks/battery that can be
| replaced if it shits the bed. Considering that the device
| cost me less than one third of the price it's not a bad deal
| at all.
|
| Important to say, I tried 5 distros and only Ubuntu managed
| this. Fedora put fans on full blast, couldn't wake from lid
| down and refused to talk to my external monitor, arch had
| weird scaling issues and popos desktop was working weirdly.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| > Important to say, I tried 5 distros and only Ubuntu
| managed this. Fedora put fans on full blast, couldn't wake
| from lid down and refused to talk to my external monitor,
| arch had weird scaling issues and popos desktop was working
| weirdly.
|
| That is one of the offputting aspects of the experience, in
| my opinion. Some machines work better out of the box with
| Ubuntu (or derivatives), some work better with Fedora, some
| with Arch, etc. Of course it's possible to isolate what the
| distro that works best for a machine is doing that makes it
| that way so it can be applied to your preferred distro, but
| frankly who has the time for that?
| uvaursi2 wrote:
| Click bait headline. Is that a real photo of SJ? Flagged and
| moving on.
| bell-cot wrote:
| > What would Steve Jobs do?
|
| > ... I was in the room when Steve was presented with an eerily
| similar "opportunity." ... 1999-ish ... Lee Clow and I were
| invited to a hastily scheduled meeting with Steve and his top
| lieutenants. The topic was building advertising into the Mac
| system software. ...
|
| Not that I like ads, but - Late 90's Apple, fresh out of a near-
| death experience, is an extremely different context from today's
| Apple, with it's 12-digit annual profits and #4 spot on the
| Fortune 500 list.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Speaking simply to your comment because I'm not aware enough of
| their behaviors myself, wouldn't the 12-digit profits and a
| high Fortune 500 listing potentially be enough to make Steve
| say "We have enough honestly" obviously that's not the norm,
| most companies just seem to find any way to extract every ounce
| of our souls but I thought that was where Apple was supposed to
| differ, at least under Steve.
|
| I honestly don't know this is just a question.
| bell-cot wrote:
| My thinking was that recently-near-death 1999 Apple, with no
| deep moats nor cash cows, needed to present itself as premium
| and squeaky-clean.
|
| > ... wouldn't the 12-digit profits and a high Fortune 500
| listing potentially be enough to make Steve say "We have
| enough honestly" ...
|
| It'd be nice to imagine. But given Steve's documented
| horrible behaviors at a number of points in his life...I
| sadly doubt it.
| bamboozled wrote:
| If I see ads in their proprietary software, I'm done as a
| customer.
| radley wrote:
| Uhm, have you opened your Settings app? It's had Apple ads for
| years. And the Wallet app showed a promo notification for the
| F1 movie.
| intrasight wrote:
| I see no ads there
| metabagel wrote:
| I ran a reverse image search on the image of Steve Jobs, and
| couldn't come up with anything, so it does appear that it might
| be AI generated, which I don't approve of.
| furyofantares wrote:
| It sure looks it. It was my assumption the moment I saw it.
| monitron wrote:
| Same reaction here. I think the author certainly crossed a line
| by using a diffusion model to publish an image of a dead famous
| person doing something he never did.
| amelius wrote:
| Does that somehow invalidate the message of the article?
| 6031769 wrote:
| It weakens the message because knowing that the image is
| fake casts equal doubt on anything which the text says.
| amelius wrote:
| This is total nonsense. Every reader will understand that
| Jobs was never photographed like that while saying "stop"
| to anyone crossing his red lines. Even if the photo
| exists, it would have been out of context.
|
| The only question here is if using that image is tasteful
| or not.
|
| Also, suggesting that Jobs did not have these red lines
| is not making the situation any better.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Well, I'm another person who shares that opinion. When I
| see AI in an article, I think: If an author will use AI
| to fake one thing, what else is he willing to fake? It
| totally draws into question the credibility of the whole
| article.
| amelius wrote:
| No it does not. Give some real arguments against the
| article otherwise I'm going to assume bad faith.
| ryandrake wrote:
| We are at an impasse then. You can't prove an opinion.
| Have a great day.
| asadotzler wrote:
| It isn't obvious to you that it's AI? You had to look it up?
| Please get more familiar with actual photographs, maybe skim a
| few AI free photo sites or, oh, I don't know, buy a few coffee
| table photo books and develop some discernment, because that
| one is about as obvious a fake photo as a stick figure would
| be. It's truly gross.
| halapro wrote:
| Right? I only generated a single AI picture of myself and it
| had _that exact_ shading seen in this picture. Extremely
| obvious.
| blondie9x wrote:
| I'm glad he tried to look it up. But we shouldn't have to,
| all AI generated images/videos should be watermarked full
| stop.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| it's super distasteful, i thought, having seen steve jobs in
| person face to face
| richiebful1 wrote:
| Honestly, there should be laws against gen AI models creating
| fake media with real individuals. We're going to end up with a
| massive mess on our hands once the video starts looking more
| realistic
| ethmarks wrote:
| How to you expect those laws to be enforced?
|
| It's impossible to determine with 100% confidence whether or
| not an image/video was AI generated. If the AI-generated
| image of Steve Jobs had been copied a bunch on the web, a
| reverse image search would have turned up lots of sources.
| Watermarks are imperfect and can be removed. There will
| always be ambiguity.
|
| So either you're underzealous and if there's ambiguity, you
| err on the side of treating potentially AI-generated images
| as real. So now you only catch _some_ deepfakes. This is
| extra bad because by cracking down on AI-generated content,
| you condition people to believe any image they see. "If it
| was AI generated, they would have taken it down by now. It
| must be real".
|
| The alternative is being overzealous and erring on the side
| of treating potentially genuine images as AI-generated. Now
| if a journalist takes a photo of a politician doing something
| scandalous, the politician can just claim it was AI-generated
| and have it taken down.
|
| It's a no-win situation. I don't believe that the answer is
| regulation. It'd be great if we could put the genie back in
| the bottle, but lots of gen-AI tools are local and open-
| source, so they will _always_ exist and there 's nothing to
| do be done about it. The best thing is to just treat images
| and videos with a healthy amount of skepticism.
| InMice wrote:
| Same here, ironic since the article is about crossing lines.
| mannanj wrote:
| This author is a man who worked closely with Steve Jobs, and
| the photo was obviously AI generated, so I think this gives him
| leeway to do such a thing.
| asddubs wrote:
| ???
|
| If someone I knew generated AI images of me I wouldn't think
| it was okay
| JimDabell wrote:
| This is something that really grates with me, but it's made so
| much worse with the AI-generated image of him. If you want to
| say that you don't think Apple should do that, then fine. But
| stop using Jobs to fight your battles, and _especially_ don't
| generate images of him with that attention-seeking YouTube
| thumbnail face.
|
| > It's WWDC week. Every time this rolls around, I see people
| saying the same sort of thing. "Steve Jobs wouldn't have done
| this".
|
| > Firstly, Jobs wasn't perfect. He got a lot of things right
| and a lot of things wrong. His opinion wasn't the end of the
| argument when he was alive, and it's certainly not now that
| he's been dead 14 years.
|
| > But more importantly: Stop putting your opinion in a dead
| man's mouth to give it more credibility. It's ghoulish. Let
| your opinion stand on its own two feet.
|
| -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44246274
| asddubs wrote:
| I also instantly asked myself if the image was AI and reverse
| searched it when I saw it.
| iJohnDoe wrote:
| Very ironic using an AI image of Steve Jobs.
| skhameneh wrote:
| The very first thing I saw from Apple that, IMO, Jobs would have
| vehemently stopped was the two-toned back on the iPhone 5.
|
| That said, the iOS 26 release is abysmal. The only redeeming
| thing for me has been the enhancements to Stage Manager,
| everything else with the UI/UX is such a mess that every day it
| seems like I'm discovering something new in the realm of awful
| design. And this isn't limited to minor nitpicks, there are major
| CTAs that are essentially "black on black" and practically not
| visible below 50% screen brightness and not acceptably visible at
| max brightness. Just last night I noticed the browser tabs will
| render full color content behind the text. It's so bad I've been
| considering cataloging screenshots and writing about it, because
| some of it's laughably bad.
| hbn wrote:
| > The very first thing I saw from Apple that, IMO, Jobs would
| have vehemently stopped was the two-toned back on the iPhone 5.
|
| The iPhone 5 was revealed a year after Jobs stepped down as CEO
| and his death shortly after. The design was almost surely
| locked in while he was still CEO.
|
| The original iPhone had a 2-toned back too.
| tartoran wrote:
| Iphone user here. I have to admit that the IOS UI/UX has become
| really tiring and at times I'm utterly confused by
| inconsistency, a total contrast from the early days IOS when
| everything was consistent and intuitive. The silver lining is
| that I am using my Iphone less and less.
| btown wrote:
| I have no doubt that the team behind Liquid Glass had the same
| noble motivations as the team behind Microsoft's Metro Design
| Language in 2010.
|
| In a crowded market, making a completely innovative visual
| identity is often the only option. One hopes that the result is
| that the words "forward-looking" and "trend-setting" and
| "loyalty-inspiring" and "inimitable" begin to apply. And if
| they pull it off, more power to them!
|
| But there's a matter of taste as well as novelty. And while
| there were many incredible things about Metro, history bears
| witness to how much Zune and Windows Phone and Windows 8 have
| become beloved household names in the decade-and-a-half since.
|
| I do think that Jobs would have signed off on the _motivation_
| behind Liquid Glass. I do not think he would have signed off on
| Liquid Glass itself.
| conductr wrote:
| > I do think that Jobs would have signed off on the
| motivation behind Liquid Glass. I do not think he would have
| signed off on Liquid Glass itself.
|
| Agree. Jobs took big swings like Liquid Glass but, perhaps
| the most important part that's missing in present Apple, he
| was obsessive about ensuring the swings were executed to a
| high standard. He was hands on in this pursuit.
|
| It's actually weird to me that a company so large, so well
| compensated, so profitable, so prolific, etc can't seem to
| care enough about the details without a Jobs-esque foot on
| their neck type leader to be afraid of.
| wpm wrote:
| Without a Jobs-esque foot, the bozos have nothing to fear.
| They flourish and spread, gain power by impressing other
| bozos, and push out anyone with half a brain.
|
| MobileMe's devs were brought into an auditorium for a
| dressing down that included the lines "you should all hate
| each other for letting each other down" and in response to
| "what is MobileMe supposed to do" got a "Why the fuck
| doesn't it do that"
|
| The smug dopes that are left over in the design department
| are probably clapping each other in the back over shipping
| liquid glass. Tim doesn't give a shit about how ugly,
| troublesome, and problematic it is. Stock price go up,
| whatever!
| bigyabai wrote:
| Bozos can still manipulate top-down executives. It might
| be argued they're the _only_ ones who can influence them
| - technical domain experts will eventually give up or
| leave without middle management, like we saw from Woz.
|
| There's merit in having a principled hardass, but most
| people end up glossing over the "principled" part to
| dissect the merits of hardass management.
| int_19h wrote:
| I don't think Metro died because it was bad as a matter of
| taste. Quite the opposite actually, I wasn't a huge fan of
| its aesthetics but I was surprised by how many people liked
| it.
|
| No, the real problem was functionality. Not of Metro itself -
| it was actually very good in that department, arguably still
| the best mobile UI as far as pure function goes. But the
| devices ended up being very limited overall because there
| were so few apps, and what was there was shoddy. Which was in
| part because Microsoft screwed up with the dev story, and
| partly because Google didn't play ball (so not only no
| official YouTube app, but they proactively killed third party
| ones that could do what the app does on oter platforms).
| busymom0 wrote:
| I am running the latest iOS 26.1 and it's still very buggy. The
| most annoying one is that anytime I either restart my phone or
| update the phone (which restarts it), the wallpaper changes to
| all black.
|
| That wouldn't be so bad if the borders around the Home Screen
| icons didn't look so ugly with black background.
| miiiiiike wrote:
| I spent a few hours trying to debug some fixed position issues
| with my JS/CSS code recently.Found out that iOS Safari
| fundamentally broke fixed positioning. How do you break
| `position: fixed`?
|
| Apple devs are constantly attacking people on Twitter for
| complaining about Safari bugs but the front-end workflow is a
| waterfall because of Safari. You get your code working in every
| other browser and then rewrite it to work around all of the
| Safari issues.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| I don't understand why car-based things can have ads or updates
| that popup or things like that. My car (2024 Subaru) + Android
| Auto is so restrictive that I can't even type a search query into
| the screen while I'm parked, I _have_ to speak to it. Yet, while
| I was out grocery shopping the other day the thing popped up
| multiple times asking me if I wanted to start an update "That
| would require you to turn your car off for 5-10 minutes"
|
| It popped up a second time as I _SLOWED DOWN_ at a red light. I
| didn 't even come to a complete stop but apparently that was
| "stopped" enough for it to pop up.
|
| Not to mention while you're using Google Maps the whole time it's
| popping up asking "Is that cop still there? Is there still
| construction?" and they're looking for you to click on a button
| on the car's screen that indicates yes/no. However, when I'm
| parked at a rest area trying to look for the nearest cracker
| barrel it'll start navigating me automatically to one that's
| 45min in the wrong direction instead of just letting me pick
| which one I want to go to.
|
| And now, ads will show in Apple Maps? Ah yeah, when I'm driving
| is definitely the best time to distract me for your own greed!
|
| It's asinine. Obviously the "Safety features" are just
| performative. Probably so they can force us to have a mic enabled
| or something. It's bs.
| tartoran wrote:
| Whoever designs these should be fired and never allowed in this
| space again.
| radley wrote:
| Uhm, _is crossing_?? Mate, you 're going to have to reverse
| direction and travel back about eight years to find that line.
|
| I feel like most of this is Microsoft's fault. As MS lowers the
| bar for what's acceptable on Windows, Apple just has to be
| somewhat-obviously better.
|
| Additionally, Google's ad-driven economy set a low bar with
| Android, but that platform has always been that way. Together,
| those platforms make it really easy for Apple to posture as being
| considerate.
| spankalee wrote:
| I don't know... ads in maps is very, very different from ads in
| the OS.
|
| Users buy the OS with the computer, and Apple doesn't incur any
| extra cost from users using it (maybe cloud-based AI will change
| this though?), and it doesn't require additional payments.
| Meanwhile, services like iCloud+ do require payment.
|
| Maps is a service, like iCloud, but users have been trained to
| expect it for free, with basically every other maps provider
| using ads to fund it. I suspect that most users think that ads
| are a better user experience than not using it at all because
| they won't pay $9.99/month for maps.
|
| Maps is also a search engine, and ads are the primary way to fund
| search engines. I guarantee that if Apple every launches iSearch
| they will eventually fund it with ads.
| zakki wrote:
| I just hope they won't change Calculator as a service app.
| tartoran wrote:
| Eventually it could get there if that's the direction Apple
| stays on.
| xp84 wrote:
| > basically every other maps provider using ads to fund it.
|
| > iSearch they will eventually fund it with ads.
|
| See, I disagree with your entire premise here. Apple, unlike
| Google, has a _very very profitable_ hardware business which
| provides so much to the bottom line that they don 't have to
| operate Apple Maps or Apple Search or Calculator as a self-
| sustaining business with its own P&L. It's stupid to operate as
| though they must.
|
| The correct thinking (in my not so humble opinion) for a long-
| term-minded company is to recognize:
|
| 1. That massive firehose of money allows them to make Maps
| markedly better than what Google can afford to do. Since Apple
| gave up on UI/UX design excellence, this ability to not rely on
| ads is arguably their only remaining differentiated advantage.
|
| 2. Part of what allows Apple to command such monster-sized
| margins is that (usually... so far... outside of the App Stores
| at least) their product is not packed full of sleazy ads that
| significantly detract from the experience. You don't just get
| to fully enshittify the product and still command the same high
| prices as you did when you were offering a premium product. A
| Porsche covered in wraps advertising porn sites and penis
| pills, which plays loud AI-generated ads on every screen all
| day long would not sell at the price a normal one does.
| cyberax wrote:
| > You don't just get to fully enshittify the product and
| still command the same high prices as you did when you were
| offering a premium product
|
| "Challenge accepted" - Tim Apple.
| Marsymars wrote:
| I'd pay $10/m for ad-free Apple/Google maps.
| twsted wrote:
| I am checking this carefully. The red line is here, for me and I
| think for many Apple customers. I choose Apple for being
| different from other companies, for valuing customer experiences
| and for rejecting ads and other "insults" for users. I think that
| if they cross the line, me and many other customers will leave.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > I choose Apple for being different from other companies, for
| valuing customer experiences and for rejecting ads and other
| "insults" for users
|
| Yes. The point of willingly putting yourself in the walled
| garden was that the experience was definitively better than the
| other options.
|
| When the walled garden ceases to be better and starts adopting
| all the same dark patterns and user hostile experience as
| everyone else, what point is there in staying inside?
| qwerpy wrote:
| The hardware is still marginally better but the experience is
| no longer better. In fact with android at least you can
| sideload and install full powered ad blockers. At some point
| once the iOS experience degrades beyond a certain threshold,
| android will be a more attractive option.
| int_19h wrote:
| From the perspective of a casual user, on Android you get
| mobile Chrome which doesn't do extensions at all, while on
| iOS mobile Safari has extensions including ad blockers.
| cmckn wrote:
| Where will you go? The alternatives seem worse in almost every
| way.
|
| > and I think for many Apple customers
|
| Unfortunately, I think people who care about this enough to
| leave are a rounding error. It's why the entire consumer
| product market looks the way it does.
| retskrad wrote:
| Look at the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad. It's constantly
| nudging you to subscribe to some Apple service, like AppleCare,
| or to pay for more iCloud storage because your measly 5 GB is
| running out. If Tim Cook is this shameless, then ads in Maps are
| practically old-school Apple by comparison.
| gdulli wrote:
| I don't understand why people are so tolerant of this first-
| party advertising.
| cyberax wrote:
| We develop for iOS, so we need to register a bunch of Apple
| test accounts once in a while. Every time an account is
| registered, you get around 5 emails of ads. WITHOUT ANY
| UNSUBSCRIBE links.
| zeld4 wrote:
| Everything breaks.
|
| Jobs, if lived, will bow to ads or get fired.
| dilap wrote:
| They crossed it definitively, and still unbelievably, to me, when
| they started showing ads as the first result in App Store search.
| For a long time searching "ChatGPT" in the AppStore would surface
| a rip-off clone w/ a lookalike icon as the first result. How many
| thousands of users inadvertently downloaded the clone, paid for
| it, and were, basically, victims of a scam, facilitated by Apple?
| (Now the first result for ChatGPT, Claude, Grok is at least the
| correct first party ad, though this almost seems like extortion
| on the part of Apple.)
|
| (Software quality has also fallen off a cliff, though that's more
| a loss of instutional competence, I think, than active anti-user
| behavior motivated by avarice.)
| bspammer wrote:
| My mother fell for exactly this. Downloaded a ChatGPT clone and
| paid for it. She was quite upset with herself when I had to
| tell her.
|
| Until now I blamed Google, but now it seems much more likely
| that it was Apple's fault.
| bambax wrote:
| Could be wrong, but the photo of Steve Jobs at the top of the
| article looks AI. Disturbing suspicion.
| roxolotl wrote:
| Yea the sizing seems wrong. Hands are way too big compared to
| his head. Could be a weird lens/angle though.
|
| If it is AI wtf is it even doing there though? It adds nothing.
| A quick search returns a bunch of images where Jobs looks
| annoyed or trying to stop something.
| xd1936 wrote:
| Am I the only one that remembers Steve introducing the iAd
| platform?
| zahirbmirza wrote:
| Apple has already cross a red line, it stepped over to one that
| has little interest in user experience. Recent releases of MacOS
| and iOS and iPadOS have given rise to Windowsesque complexity and
| ugliness. I have used Macs since the Classic, and am sad to say I
| no longer ascribe to the cult of Apple.
| al_borland wrote:
| I will never understand why some companies turn away from some of
| the core principles that got them to their position.
|
| If it's market pressure, it tells me that Cook doesn't really
| believe their future roadmap is good enough for growth, so he
| needs to hedge with other things that make the product worse. Of
| course those very things will hurt future growth. That's how an
| upward spiral turns downward.
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| the thing that you're missing here is that Cook is gonna get
| roasted if he doesn't take every opportunity to maximize
| growth. That means the future roadmap as written PLUS ads in
| maps and other decisions like that. There's no such thing as
| enough.
| al_borland wrote:
| Not having ads was the thing that separated Apple from
| Google. Apple was winning by selling hardware with software
| that didn't need ads to support the business model. Ads just
| feel greedy, especially when they are still charging a
| premium price on many things. How tolerant will people be of
| high prices when the resulting product feels cheap? This is a
| race to the bottom, which was a race Jobs was unwilling to
| compete in.
| sumedh wrote:
| The people who helped them reach that position are probably
| retired, so the new leadership wants to make more money and
| leave their own mark.
| al_borland wrote:
| I have a lot of problems with people like this. Not all marks
| are worth making. Change for the sake of change or ego is
| almost always bad.
|
| If someone hands me a golden goose I'm not going to enter it
| in a cock fight. I'd be wise to continue with the golden egg
| strategy.
| sumedh wrote:
| I agree but the people who want to climb the corporate
| ladder usually want to leave their own mark.
| al_borland wrote:
| This is where the person at the top of the ladder needs
| to be the voice of reason. Cook has no more rungs on the
| ladder to step to. He left his mark already with his
| supply chain skills to get where he is. Apple silicon,
| watch, and Vision Pro were also released with him at the
| helm. Does he really need to add pollution of the user
| space to his resume? That would hurt his legacy, not help
| it.
|
| Following Jobs was not an easy task, and Apple had done
| better than most probably expected in a post-Jobs world.
| It feels like Cook is getting dangerously close to
| throwing it all away.
| upboundspiral wrote:
| I feel this strongly. From a business perspective, when your
| competitors expand their revenue avenues through ads you have
| three options: copy them to catch up, do nothing and perish, or
| lobby the government for increased consumer protections. The
| third option isn't being taken, but I believe its the right one
| for many companies that want to remain customer-centric, and
| that have real values.
| wagwang wrote:
| Very ironic but so much of tech ultimately comes down to taste
| and Tim Cook obviously just doesn't have it.
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| Much of life does frankly...
| gwd wrote:
| > From that point on, Steve would go on to spend lavishly on
| things that improved the experience, and he would reject--often
| brutally--any idea that diluted or harmed the experience. ...I'll
| go out on a limb and say that uninvited advertising is not
| normally equated with a better customer experience.
|
| YES!!! SOO much of the Apple user experience has degraded due to
| this. I can't listen to my own music that I bought on the Music
| app, without being interrupted asking if I want Apple Music. I
| open up the Books app to read Winnie the Pooh to my son, and the
| opening screen has loads of random trashy romances to try to sell
| me. I go to comfort read Ender's Game, which I did buy though the
| store a decade ago, and it helpfully "groups" it with the other
| four (!?) books in that series which I haven't bought, as if to
| say, "Don't you want to buy these too?" NO! If I want to buy
| them, I know where to find them!
|
| It is SUCH an unpleasant experience. EVERY time I open the App
| Store to update some apps, I'm angry that I have to wander past
| advertising assaults to do it. EVERY time I open the music app to
| play an old favorite, I'm angry that I have to go past the
| advertising assault. EVERY time I open up the book app, I'm angry
| that I have to go past the advertising assault.
|
| I very much doubt the execs understand how much they're damaging
| the brand for that little bit of extra revenue. The see the extra
| revenue, but they don't see the lost brand, or the people that
| switch away. Is it really worth it?
|
| ETA: I don't think it's an exaggeration to say:
|
| Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a
| music store, that you happen to be able to put your own music
| into. But it's not structured to help you play your music, it's
| structured to sell you what they want to sell you.
|
| Modern iPhones don't come with an e-book app. They come with a
| book store that you happen to be able to upload some of your own
| books into. But it's not structured to help you organize and read
| your books -- even the ones you've bought; it's structured to
| sell you more books.
| delusional wrote:
| > I can't listen to my own music that I bought on the Music app
|
| That doesn't change if you buy the subscription even. I moved
| to YT Music only because the Apple Music app asked me to
| subscribe every time I used it. I was already subscribed.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| What do you mean "modern"? I'm using iPhones since 4S and I
| don't think that Music or iBooks workflow changed, it's largely
| the same. So probably Steve Jobs was OK with that.
| gwd wrote:
| Um, no? Apple Music wasn't even a thing in the iPhone 4S
| timeframe. You used to buy music in the iTunes Store, and
| play it in the music player app.
|
| It used to be if you clicked the App Store, and you had apps
| to update, it would take you to the "Update" tab immediately.
|
| Then they changed it to take you to the main page, and you
| had to click the "Update" tab.
|
| Then they changed the updates to be under your account; so
| you have to find this little corner thing and scroll down,
| wading through all the ads for the new apps you haven't
| installed.
|
| Books always had a store, but your library was primary. You
| managed it; it had books that you'd bought, not empty
| placeholders for books you hadn't bought. There was a store,
| but it was the second tab.
|
| Now the store is the main tab, and your library is the second
| tab.
|
| And, as I said, they've now started reorganizing _my_
| library, adding "empty placeholder" books in. I don't see
| Enders Game in my library any more; I see the Ender Series,
| and if I click on that, I see all five titles, the first of
| which I can actually read (since that's the only one I
| bought).
|
| If I honestly thought Android would be any different, I might
| consider jumping ship.
| mrandish wrote:
| > If I honestly thought Android would be any different
|
| I haven't used an iOS device for over a decade so I'm not
| familiar with exactly how it may be different now - but it
| sounds quite different. Here's how I use media on Android.
| All files are DRM-free generic formats (MP3, FLAC, EPUB)
| organized in folders on a removable 512GB micro SD card
| which auto-syncs between my desktop, laptop, Android
| tablet, phone and a generic cloud backup folder with
| SyncThing. I don't subscribe to any media service (and
| never have).
|
| My music library/player is PowerAmp, my ebook reader is the
| open source KOReader and my podcast app is Podcast Addict.
| None of them has a store and they are all free (although I
| did upgrade to the plus version of PowerAmp to support the
| developer). They all get regular updates, are highly
| customizable and have every feature I want or can imagine
| wanting. My browser is Android Firefox with uBlock Origin
| so I don't see any ads and for YouTube I side-loaded
| Revanced Extended from the open F-Droid store, which is a
| clone of the YouTube app with no ads and all dark patterns
| removed. I also run a side-loaded open-source DNS-level ad
| blocker for the occasional social media app.
|
| My phone is a Samsung Galaxy Note 20 that still works great
| (I did replace the original battery last year which took
| ~20 mins). I'm using a five year old phone _not_ because I
| 'm cost conscious, I'd happily pay >$1,500 for a new phone
| and I keep looking at new models every year but never see
| anything that would be a noticeable improvement for my
| usage. Really... I swear I'm NOT _trying_ to be @SimpleLife
| or minimalist /retro, I have a _significant_ yearly budget
| for discretionary toys, but some years I struggle to spend
| it all because I 'm also allergic to things that are
| constantly low-grade annoying or that I can't customize to
| my prefs. I just refuse to adopt anything that wants to own
| me instead of me owning it.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| I do it similar to you, except that I use PlexAmp for my
| music.
|
| But I have to note that you and I are the exception. The
| VAST majority of users are, I think, doing it through, if
| not the Play Store itself, then some other service (e.g.,
| Spotify).
|
| That said, though, at least we have this option. But is
| there any reason that an iPhone user can't just use
| PlexAmp like I do? I'm pretty sure that Firefox is
| available to them as well.
| mrandish wrote:
| My understanding is that Firefox on iOS is substantially
| limited from Windows and Android. Like they can only run
| uBlock Origin Lite and many add-ons aren't available.
| Something about Apple policy blocking browser extensions
| that can run scripts/code, as it might compete with
| Apple's app store. But that's just what I've read online
| from other people. It also might be somewhat different
| recently in the EU, at least about the installing alt app
| stores. As I said, I haven't used an iOS device in over a
| decade, so have no first hand knowledge.
| dgfl wrote:
| I haven't used an android device in 2 years, but I was
| just like you for almost a decade. At some point I got
| tired of all the micro-annoyances that I had with android
| and my oneplus phones (my last one was the oneplus 7T),
| such as awful brightness sensor, terrible compass,
| suboptimal gps, and low quality vibration engine. All
| stuff that you'll never hear about in an actual review,
| for some reason. My music player is an app called
| "Music", and my ebook reader is an app called "Books". I
| have spent exactly zero seconds looking for these apps
| since they're already included with the phone, and are
| not developed by an unknown hero that could be hit by a
| bus at any moment. On books I read books that I bought
| from the iTunes Store, and epubs or pdfs that I
| downloaded online. I can access the epub files of both my
| own and the store-bought stuff from my mac's filesystem.
| Everything is fully synced to all of my other devices
| through iCloud, a service which I've spent zero minutes
| setting up and zero minutes maintaining. These apps have
| all features I need, since all I want them to do is open
| my files and keep track of progress. They're not
| customizable and I don't care about it. I could download
| open source apps from the App Store or alt-store if I
| wanted to. I pay 3 euros/month for my cloud storage. It
| works and I haven't had problems with it. I share it with
| some family members. My browser is safari with uBlock
| origin lite. Admittedly I had to spend some time looking
| for a decent ad blocker, it's not as easy as android. I'm
| also not trying to live a minimalist or retro life,
| although I appreciate the ideology. My main philosophy
| right now is just that my phone is a tool through which I
| read books and listen to music (among other things). It
| has some limitations, but they're not important. I don't
| want to have to think about setting up a media server to
| listen to music, or figuring out syncthing settings once
| again because it's been 3 years since I last set it up
| and it now broke all of a sudden. I just want to not have
| to think about this and get on to more important aspects
| of life.
| 05 wrote:
| I'm sure the SD thing works for you but some people need
| music discovery and open source options are lacking
| there. When you can set up a radio station backed by
| RED/Lidarr and not have your account go on ratio watch in
| hours, then we'll talk..
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that PlexAmp, backed by Plex Media
| Server, is the pinnacle of music discovery, within
| whatever you've got in your library. I've got that
| serving an enormous library that I've compiled through my
| whole life, but there's no reason (well, other than
| legalities) you couldn't feed this through the *arrs.
|
| The discovery algorithm works based on fundamental
| metadata, additional data pulled from Last.fm (e.g.,
| "related artists" and "popular tracks"), as well as its
| own acoustic matching algorithm.
|
| This arrangement obviates the SD card, and also any other
| external syncing (PlexAmp plays live from the server, or
| has its own scheme for downloading to a local cache).
| immibis wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that it's not really "discovery" if you
| had to have already found and downloaded the thing you're
| "discovering".
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| I guess that gets to what each of us means by
| "discovery". I think you're talking about the existence
| of a given artist/track. But for me, with a sufficiently
| large library, it can be difficult to remember what you
| have, and what would go well in a given context. So
| PlexAmp's "discovery" helps me to navigate through that
| large library to find and re-experience stuff I'd
| forgotten about or overlooked.
| immibis wrote:
| The thing about Android is that it lets you install apps
| (for now). In my opinion, that's the killer feature (for
| now). If you don't like how Google's music app works...
| install something else. If you want something Google won't
| allow in their play store... download it somewhere else and
| install it.
|
| Yes, it still has a billion things wrong with it, including
| not being able to uninstall the shovelware, and not being
| able to modify the OS, and I'd rather have a third choice
| better than both these two.
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| The Music app on iPhones went from simple and usable to an
| absolute dumpster fire pushing a subscription. Even with a
| subscription it's incredibly maddening because of the
| terrible UX and show-stopping bugs (Literally failing at
| playing music!).
|
| The Library tab is now the last one, with the rest (Which are
| lazy-loaded and slow!) are pushing content much of which is
| locked behind a subscription. It's now even worse with iOS 26
| since tabs get groups and requires 2 taps to into my own
| library.
|
| The Music app has been getting worse and worse every year.
| seec wrote:
| My favorite "bug" was when that dumb thing refused to play
| because I forgot to stop playing music on my Mac for
| whatever reason (sometimes the play was actually stopped,
| it was just unable to resolve state).
|
| Spotify has other issues, but at least as a streaming
| player, it is smart enough to tell me when there is
| something playing somewhere else and it even allows me to
| keep playing while just switching the output.
|
| If at least they had kept it as a good app to manage local
| music, but even that has regressed. Don't get me started on
| suboptimal use of space.
|
| I have a hard time following the Apple advocates, it has
| become quite bad for the price you pay, there is really no
| other conclusion that is reasonable.
| strictnein wrote:
| This is how Amazon is too with the movies and tv shows you
| bought. There's no way to search your owned library anymore.
| You just have to page through it to find what you want. And
| your library is hidden away behind a tiny little unlabeled icon
| in the upper right corner.
|
| And, to make matters worse, you have things like the Charlie
| Brown Halloween Special, which Apple now owns the rights to.
| You cannot in any way search for the version you bought from
| Amazon. The only result Amazon shows is the result that would
| require you to pay for Apple TV. So you can either look through
| all of the stuff you bought from them, or find the original
| email for the purchase and click the link in there.
| oh_my_goodness wrote:
| It's true, and it sucks. But at least I didn't pay Amazon
| $1800 for hardware first.
| delecti wrote:
| How are you browsing your Amazon content? I see search bars
| on the 'All Content' [1] page, and also on each individual
| page, like my movies and shows [2].
|
| Though it seems like the interface is pretty rubbish in the
| Prime Video section [3], so maybe that's where you're
| looking?
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/hz/mycd/digital-
| console/contentlist/a... [2]
| https://www.amazon.com/hz/mycd/digital-
| console/contentlist/v... [3]
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/mystuff/library
| strictnein wrote:
| Roku based TVs and their mobile app. And the website - #3
| in your list above. Never seen those other two links, and
| they don't show up when you're trying to watch things on
| your tv.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Torrent sites have amazing search ... just saying
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Yeah shame it's hidden behind 50 pop-under triggers and
| infectious scam ads. Literally unusable without an ad
| blocker. (Which you should use anyway but it means they're
| not a great choice for Joe user on his unprotected windows
| pc)
| petralithic wrote:
| One, people should be using uBlock Origin as you
| mentioned. Two, there are many search engines without
| such ads. Three, qBittorrent has a search right inside
| the client, there is no need to even access the websites
| to perform searches.
| wafflemaker wrote:
| And the client has optional web UI, so you can order a
| download from your phone and watch it on your TV (through
| jellyfin or plex).
| ChoGGi wrote:
| Better ads with free stuff than ads with paid stuff.
| lukan wrote:
| A bit deeper into the scene, there are no ads anymore.
| And the biggest problem for most people in the west, is
| rather just using torrents without a VPN will get you
| lawyers letters quite quickly. But Joe average can use
| youtube downloader without danger.
| wafflemaker wrote:
| Even with full encryption?
| lukan wrote:
| What do you want to encrypt?
|
| The principle of torrents are, everyone downloading has
| the ip of all the other participants for p2p to work. All
| it takes is one node recording that other nodes send
| copywrited data to them, to get the real adresses of them
| (via ISP).
|
| They hire dedectives to do that.
| Gud wrote:
| I've torrented for decades, never received such a letter.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| They only send them to ISPs in major markets such as the
| US, and some providers just redirect them to /dev/null,
| but a lot of providers that are larger will terminate
| your service for repeated violatioins.
| sabellito wrote:
| Very few countries in Europe have that issue, and afaik
| no country in the americas.
| Jnr wrote:
| There is https://github.com/Prowlarr/Prowlarr
| 93po wrote:
| yep: seedbox + this + jeyllfin = unlimited streaming of
| anything i want for $15/month. no ads, no terrible app
| UIs, no autoplaying previews, no content getting removed,
| not having 4 different streaming subscriptions that are
| hard to cancel, no fuckery at all.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| I set this up for my husband who barely knows which end
| of a PC to use. He's filled up the 4TB media array and
| now I need more disks (or better retention policies)
| wafflemaker wrote:
| It means it gets a lot of use, so you can justify larger
| disks! Isn't that great?
| jerojero wrote:
| 4tb is not a lot, but I've realised if its for personal
| use you could just delete things you've already watched.
|
| particularly tv shows, unless you really really want to
| keep them.
|
| its not necessary to delete movies, IMO, as a 4k HDR 5.1
| movie will go for about 30gbs. Not that much.
| happymellon wrote:
| And nzb360
| davidwritesbugs wrote:
| Ahhhhh, nzbs
| sugarpimpdorsey wrote:
| > you have things like the Charlie Brown Halloween Special
|
| People made fun of me for continuing to hoard physical media
| all these years. I predicted this hellscape might come one
| day. Man I love being right.
| waste_monk wrote:
| I appreciate the attempt, but have never seen the point
| personally.
|
| That is, many physical media collectors do it to have nice
| box sets to display, or in an attempt to have off-line
| copies of media, but I have never met anyone who goes to
| the effort of ensuring long-term readability - which is
| understandable, it is a huge hassle. Unless you are copying
| the content to new physical media every so often it will
| eventually rot and become unplayable.
|
| For example, for optical media the expected lifetime is
| only a couple of decades depending on the type of media
| [1]. I believe commercially pressed DVD and blueray are
| somewhere around 10-20 years.
|
| [1] https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-
| institute/services/con... , see table 2.
| LtWorf wrote:
| I think you're thinking of the CD-R
| Cpoll wrote:
| You're citing a report about recordable CD and DVDs.
| Movie DVDs should be expected to last much longer than
| that.
| blihp wrote:
| Not necessarily as even the factory produced optical
| discs have had issues with de-lamination, oxidation etc.
| Of course a lot of that had to do with companies cheaping
| out on manufacturing in order to make that last tenth of
| a cent of profit as they tend to do.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| Outside of manufacturing defects you can expect HTL blu-
| rays to last for more than a hundred years when stored
| properly. Some estimates are as high as 300 years. Don't
| buy the cheap ones or store them outdoors and you'll be
| fine.
|
| Some archival grade disc's are estimated to last 700
| years or more and dont cost THAT much more.
|
| DVD's and CDR'S used organic dies that broke down
| quickly. Blu-rays mostly use inorganic dies that last
| forever. Cheap LTH disc's being the exception.
|
| MOST manufacturers like Verbatimm do not even produce the
| organic die LTH disc's anymore as people stopped buying
| them. There are still some floating around for sale, so
| avoid them.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I would still make fun of you for hoarding physical media.
| Mine now lives on my NAS, a black box of spinning HHDs
| sitting in my living room, to which i have saved copies of
| everything i care about. My music exists as files which i
| coppy to my phone's music folder, my movies as files that i
| can stream to my tablet without any mention of clouds. With
| recent improvements in storage tech, short of a raging
| fire, "my" media is safer there on my personal server than
| it is with apple.
|
| My nas has moved to a new house now three times. Even
| before i have internet setup in my new place, if i want to
| rewatch some old movie i dont check to see whether Apple or
| google still has it, i just open up VLC and find it right
| where i saved it on my nas a decade ago.
| davidwritesbugs wrote:
| I did the same: tended to use Apple services then when I
| hit poverty I was able to use my NAS copies of music and
| videos after cancelling subscriptions. Had a "so why was
| I paying for years?" moment especially with all the
| enshitification issues
| randycupertino wrote:
| > This is how Amazon is too with the movies and tv shows you
| bought. There's no way to search your owned library anymore.
| You just have to page through it to find what you want. And
| your library is hidden away behind a tiny little unlabeled
| icon in the upper right corner.
|
| This happened with (amazon owned) audible now too. When you
| try to search your own library instead it shows you books for
| sale. Even if you search for a book you know you already
| bought in your own library it will promote different versions
| of the book you don't own and try to see you those instead of
| showing you the one you own. It's incredibly frustrating and
| really manipulative and really sucks!
| cameldrv wrote:
| Look kid, buy something or get out!
| bbarnett wrote:
| I pirated a lot when I was younger.
|
| Downloaded movies, books especially. Back then, ebooks were
| barely a thing(early 2000s), and scanned/OCR copies were
| the only way to get most books to read on a device.
|
| I even contacted a few authors and sent them money directly
| via paypal.
|
| But then the market matured. I bought what I could on
| Amazon. Exported to epub to read as I pleased.
|
| Then the Kindle app became horrendous. Now exporting is not
| a thing. So I just pirate books again.
|
| It's too much effort otherwise.
|
| And on top of that, if people will only lease me a book,
| and not sell it (Amazon), I'm not paying either.
| someguyiguess wrote:
| They're stealing from us. It's only fair we steal from
| them.
| happymellon wrote:
| I'm not stealing, I'm just training an AI.
| wredcoll wrote:
| Ok that was funny
| georgeecollins wrote:
| I don't think you should rationalize theft.
| jerojero wrote:
| its incredible how much easier and convenient pirating
| ebooks is to buying them.
|
| when you pirate them versus buying them: 1a. searching
| for them has become incredibly easy 1b. searching for
| them is easy as well
|
| 2a. putting them on multiple devices is incredibly easy
| 2b. depending on the store, then you're going to be
| restricted to a particular device or app
|
| 3a. ten years from now, you'll have the same copy you
| bought 3b. in the case of amazon, they might arbitrarily
| modify the copy you "own"
|
| Setting up a system for tv shows is a bit cumbersome, and
| of course disk consuming, but with a little bit of
| knowledge you get an extremely good and reliable system.
| kakacik wrote:
| > its incredible how much easier and convenient pirating
| ebooks is to buying them.
|
| Pirating _everything_ is easier than buying, copyright
| owners have firmly adopted this mindset. It keeps
| swinging across the line of comfort up and down over the
| decades and these days its mostly back down. Games don 't
| have OS Ring 0 level denuvo style crap making your
| computer more vulnerable and slower, and these days all
| big ones have all patches available pretty quickly after
| release. Plus sometimes its good to wait few days before
| applying if its not a disaster, instead of auto-update.
|
| Remember those unskippable FBI warnings in beginning of
| official movies? Unknown in pirated version. Even these
| days with say Netflix stuff that is in EU, but isn't in
| Switzerland (or it is but only in german voiceover, even
| though I live in french part FFS. Where is original
| voice? Who knows). Movies keep disappearing from
| collection. I know, not a fault of Netflix as much as
| copyright owners, but at the end I don't care. So I have
| 10 TB local drive, 1080p/4K in quality I prefer, with
| audio and subs I prefer.
|
| Music - nothing beats local collection of flacs, I can
| listen to them on plane or elsewhere without any signal
| (or half around the world with no good roaming), top
| quality streamed via aptx lossless to Sennheiser plugs,
| absolute top. For discovery free Spotify is enough, not
| forking 20 bucks for me & my wife monthly, thats a
| ridiculous sum just for (average quality) music.
|
| Books - I feel like if I buy/bought I would be re/buying
| them over my life numerous times, collection stability
| and ease of use of shops isn't something I trust long
| term. I agree with all you write above.
| StackRanker3000 wrote:
| Spotify offers lossless now. But before that the highest
| quality was 320 kbps AAC, and if you're able to
| differentiate between that and lossless even on state of
| the art equipment under perfect conditions, for the vast
| majority of songs, you're an extreme outlier (and in that
| case, sure - go for the lossless option)
|
| You can also download up to 10,000 songs per device for
| offline use, which should be enough for a plane ride
|
| I can see other issues one might have with Spotify, but I
| don't really think those are among them. I've had it for
| about 15 years, and I've been consistently happy with it
| for my own use
| wredcoll wrote:
| We really have completely forgotten the whole
| napster/itunes lessons.
|
| I'm old now, I've got disposable income, I'm morally
| inclined to pay book authors but the stores and systems
| make the experience so completely unpleasant that I
| rarely use them.
| zeagle wrote:
| I feel like about the only thing not worth pirating these
| days due to enshitification is games and podcasts. Steam
| still makes it easy, questions about licensing aside.
| jasomill wrote:
| As a Disney+ subscriber, I occasionally pirate content
| because the Web app acts up and refuses to play content
| I'm entitled to, even at degraded resolution.
|
| I do this even though my desktop display is a smart TV
| that's perfectly capable of streaming 4K content, because
| side-by-side display of app and HDMI content is not an
| option.
|
| Speaking of which, how do Disney and other streaming
| providers benefit from blocking 4K streaming in browsers
| once the 4K version is readily available to torrent,
| often at higher Blu-ray bitrates? Is this part of some
| backroom deal with TV and streaming device vendors?
|
| As for e-books, I only buy them if they're either DRM-
| free or DRM is easily strippable.
|
| I also check out physical books, CDs, and Blu-ray discs
| from libraries when possible, not because I believe DRM
| on borrowed library materials is unfair _per se_ , but
| because I don't agree with the business models it has
| enabled.
| m-schuetz wrote:
| I've canceled Amazon Prime precisely due to this issue. All I
| wanted was to browse the videos that are included in the
| subscription, but instead I'm bombarded with videos that I
| need to pay extra for. Which made me recognzize that the
| subscription is useless, so I'll watch videos at other
| streaming platforms.
| bombcar wrote:
| You used to be able to see "free with prime" but that's
| nearly impossible to find; "free with ads" works better.
|
| The local library works much better still
| dangus wrote:
| This analogy to Amazon is why I submit the idea that
| customers don't care and expect advertising.
|
| Look up the brand perception of Amazon. It's one of the
| highest in the business including high trust scores. High
| trust scores, for a company that sells counterfeit products!
| Perception is not reality.
|
| Your average consumer (I.e., complete dumbass) barely
| recognizes advertisements and often reports enjoying them
| when they do recognize them. I can't count how many people
| tell me that they see products advertised to them in
| Instagram that are exactly what they wanted/like.
|
| When Steve Jobs ran Apple it was a niche premium computer
| company who had customers with above average incomes and
| education levels. It was different time. He died more than 10
| years ago.
|
| That's not exactly what Apple is today. iPhones are used by
| over half of all Americans. You can't really buy a decent
| computer that's cheaper or a better value proposition than
| the previous generation MacBook Air $550 Walmart special.
|
| As a side note, I would note that Apple Maps already has
| "ads," because it has a Yelp integration. I think this whole
| thing is a part of removing that and bringing the same
| functionality in-house.
|
| I think you'd be insane not to monetize Maps with Apple being
| the size that it is. It costs a huge amount of money to
| operate as a free service, and your median customer expects
| ads to be there.
|
| If you want that niche, discerning customer experience, buy a
| Framework or System76: Linux has the same marketshare now
| that Apple had when Jobs returned to Apple.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| You are YASsing a ChatGPT authored screed...
| ngcazz wrote:
| Now where'd you cop that?
| card_zero wrote:
| Disconcertingly many em dashes, but they're used correctly,
| without spaces, and are easy to type on MacOS.
| staplers wrote:
| I very much doubt the execs understand how much they're
| damaging the brand for that little bit of extra revenue.
|
| Our entire societal system is based on increasing revenue (due
| to inflation). Until we measure, define, and value experience
| in nominal terms through data, most leaders won't care because
| it will remain an estimate against hard data.
| edoceo wrote:
| Consumers need actual choice too. Choosing between ad-
| infested music and no-music is crap. The option of music,
| sans PM-bloat doesn't exist.
|
| Sub music with the thing you like.
|
| Freaking heck, I've gotta dismiss ads on my BANKING APP just
| to deposit a check.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| It does exist. I ripped my CD collection ~20 years ago. VLC
| and Finamp both work great as players depending on whether
| you want to just load up files in a directory, or have a
| more advanced media server (jellyfin) that can do stuff
| like transcode FLAC to opus on the fly for mobile clients.
| PrairieFire wrote:
| Yes, profoundly true and sadly profoundly not understood by
| most. Levers can be pulled for near term quantitative gains
| at the expense of long term qualitative experience. ERP
| systems and the like largely measure the quantitative, all
| things pegged to the almighty dollar. Most orgs have no such
| system or competency (with the exception of siloed martech
| systems) for measuring the qualitative. And the customer
| journey isn't set up in such a way to reliably and
| consistently throw off the needed data in the first place.
| I've been preaching that orgs looking for true longevity need
| to make measuring experiences and sentiment a core
| competency, so the qualitative impact of levers being pulled
| can be measured and reported on in realtime, allowing short
| sighted decisions to be backtracked, and ideally, long term,
| putting functional guard rails in place that prevent those
| decisions from being made in the first place.
| czl wrote:
| > Our entire societal system is based on increasing revenue
| (due to inflation).
|
| Yes that is capitalism however if inflation cuts value of
| money in half and in the same time your revenue doubles, did
| you actually double your revenue? Do you even need to change
| your service or product to justify raising prices when the
| currency is being devalued? For both these questions there is
| a strong case that the answer is no.
| tharne wrote:
| > I very much doubt the execs understand how much they're
| damaging the brand for that little bit of extra revenue.
|
| I disagree. They know exactly what they're doing. Executives
| get paid and promoted based on quarterly profitability, not
| long-term vision or a sustainable business model. By the time
| the damage from what they've done is apparent and felt, the
| execs responsible will have long since retired to a beach
| somewhere in the tropics, or taken a higher paying role at
| another company where they'll start the process anew.
| gdulli wrote:
| > Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with
| a music store
|
| > Modern iPhones don't come with an e-book app. They come with
| a book store
|
| As a Windows person I see these as features, not criticisms.
| Windows not having good builtin versions of these or other apps
| is either a cause or effect of there being a robust ecosystem
| of third-party choices, both open-source and commercial.
|
| My frustration with Apple when I tried it out was that you
| either use iTunes or there's little other choice. Technically
| some choice, yes, but because most people are passive and use
| the Apple stuff by default, there's a smaller community of
| developers who are motivated to try to compete.
|
| When I see people criticize Notepad in Windows (for example) it
| feels irrelevant because you're not expected to use Notepad for
| anything but the most trivial use cases. There are so many
| other, better options, and the platform has a culture of
| exploring those options.
| com2kid wrote:
| Microsoft used to have one of the best media players around!
| Windows used to have built in streaming support from device
| to device. You could load up music on your personal PC and
| play it on your home theater through your Xbox360! Windows
| Media Player was huge, only eclipsed by Winamp at the time.
|
| Eventually MS released the Zune app, which was also awesome
| but lacked many of the WMP features. (But it looked amazing!)
|
| They also were huge in the ebook space for years before amzn
| sucked all the air out of the room.
|
| They also tried to popularize a standards based in car stereo
| system a decade before car play became a thing, and the first
| Windows tablets were released in the 1990s!
|
| Oh and they tried to make a smart TV box in 1999, because of
| course they did. (Nearly 20 years too early, oops!)
| mulmen wrote:
| Microsoft had so many opportunities that they just failed
| to execute. How did they miss on _everything_?
|
| Home servers
|
| Media streaming
|
| Smartphones
|
| Touchscreens
|
| Tablets
|
| They even had media production with MSNBC.
|
| All of this was available from Microsoft in the XP era. How
| did they fail at literally all of it? There has to be a
| lesson.
| com2kid wrote:
| I call it the first mover disadvantage!
|
| (I was there first hand to witness it again and again!)
|
| Bill Gates is terrifyingly smart. He sees trends decades
| ahead. But knowing something is coming (smart TVs) does
| you no good without timing.
|
| You build a first gen product, accrue mountains of legacy
| tech debt in the process (being first is hard! There is
| no one else to learn lessons from!) and then a competitor
| comes along and makes a V2 when the market is more ready
| and they can implement it better than you because they
| can learn from everything you did wrong (possibly also
| hiring half your team away).
|
| Timing is equally important as product. Making a smart TV
| before widespread broadband adoption? Before streaming
| video had a flood of high quality content? Oops.
|
| Real Player was doing streaming video in the 90s!
| Everyone knew it was the future, it was obviously the
| future! The future is now and the majority of video is
| streaming from a server somewhere!
|
| Great idea, but ouch that timing. (That said, founders
| got rich anyway, and real video was a necessary step to
| where we are now!)
| mulmen wrote:
| So what's the lesson for future business leaders? Someone
| has to be first. What can a first mover do to get to that
| second generation product?
| com2kid wrote:
| Apple is the often sung master of this.
|
| Jobs waited for the right time for mobile and tablets.
| Apple also waited for smart watches as well. Same goes
| for Car Play. They seemed to have ran out of patience
| waiting for AR/VR.0
|
| There was a company called Kosmo (Kosmo?) during the
| first .com bubble. Basically door dash / Uber eats but
| way too early.
| mulmen wrote:
| Sure but "be second" doesn't help that first mover. What
| incentive is there to innovate if your product is doomed
| to fail? What can a company do to both innovate and
| develop a viable product?
|
| Are the corporate structures and cultures necessary for
| this just that different?
| com2kid wrote:
| First movers do sometimes win, Netflix, Uber, Amazon.
|
| Also VCs have to invest their funds in something! :D
|
| The key is matching innovation with timing. History is
| filled with great ideas done decades, or even a century,
| too early.
| toast0 wrote:
| > So what's the lesson for future business leaders?
| Someone has to be first.
|
| Let it be someone else. Maybe spinoff promising new ideas
| where you can't follow others. If you can find ideas to
| be second on, look at old product annpuncements from
| companies that tend to be too early and shut down
| products that don't have engagement. Microsoft and Yahoo
| are good ones.
|
| Or, do the new idea, patent the hell out of it, let it
| die, and when the idea comes around again, get some
| licensing revenue.
|
| The problem with Microsoft being a first mover is they're
| too big. A small line of business is a problem for most
| big companies. It acrues too little customer oriented
| development to grow, because the numbers don't justify
| investment; but it acrues all the corporate cruft
| development and the product becomes hard to pivot under
| the weight of three rebrands.
| blibble wrote:
| they only win when they're able to anti-competitively
| lock out their competitors by bundling
|
| because their products are universally shit
|
| see: Teams
| DarKraD wrote:
| The iBooks one situation is the worst for me. Underneaths it's
| actually a really good epub reader with the infinite scroll set
| up. Perfect for one hand reading.
|
| The front page got so annoying with all these trashy books that
| I eventually had to DNS blocking some iTunes/Apple endpoints.
| And now it just displays my current reading books, the previous
| titles and the daily goal every time I open iBooks.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Would love to know that block list.
| DarKraD wrote:
| Here are the two I have for iBooks. I'm using NextDNS so it
| will still get blocked when I'm outside the house. I only
| read my local epubs so I don't know if blocking these will
| affect anything you bought on the store.
| *.amp-api.books.apple.com *.p2-buy.itunes.apple.com
| tern wrote:
| Thank you for this! I applied using AdGuard Pro and it
| works great
|
| ||amp-api.books.apple.com^ ||p2-buy.itunes.apple.com^
|
| In AdGuard syntax, in case it saves someone time
| shantara wrote:
| One huge downside of iBooks is that it would happily
| deauthorize access to the (DRM free) epub files you've added
| to the app manually after a couple of days without internet
| connection. I made a mistake of going on a long distance
| hiking trip and thinking can read some books in the tent
| before falling asleep. Nope, eBooks refused me until I
| returned to the mobile coverage area and resynced my library
| with their cloud service. I switched to an offline-first 3rd
| party app immediately after.
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| You're better off with a local first reader/ebook /library
| manager like Yomu or Marvin.
| tgma wrote:
| Modern iPhones? iTunes/iPod sync still works just fine.
| However, you have to question if that's what most people who
| use iPhone want. For one thing, mobile users don't necessarily
| have a PC. Mobile is the main device for most users not PC
| which is different from 2007. Also, I bet many users prefer ad
| supported free music streaming services if they never pay for
| music over a system of organizing custom MP3 downloaded.
|
| Arguably Android has a much worse and fragmented default
| experience with respect to having a decent jukebox music player
| that does it the old school way.
| xethos wrote:
| Android allows changing, and disabling, the default though.
| Last I checked, trying to open an MP3 will demand the Music
| app on an iPhone, and clicking an Apple Music link will do
| the same instead of allowing one to open a webpage
| jmyeet wrote:
| I have to rant about search in the App Store.
|
| Pick any app you want and search for it. Ideally it has a
| pretty unique name and not just a dictionary wod. What will you
| see? The first result will _always_ be an ad for a completely
| different app.
|
| Google has long dealt with this problem with AdWords and search
| results. Google still tries to make the exact thing your
| searching for be the #1 organic result. Yes there are promoted
| links but they're not as prominent.
|
| The App Store #1 result, which is always an ad, is quite
| literally half the screen.
|
| I don't know how advertising works on the App STore but I
| suspect it's a CPM model not a CPC model (like AdWords). So
| Apple just doesn't care. But I don't think this would ever have
| happpened in the Steve Jobs era.
| kogepathic wrote:
| > Pick any app you want and search for it. Ideally it has a
| pretty unique name and not just a dictionary wod. What will
| you see? The first result will always be an ad for a
| completely different app.
|
| This is also the case on the Play Store. Google *always*
| places the ad above the actual result, even if you search by
| the app ID (e.g. org.videolan.vlc)
| deaux wrote:
| > I don't know how advertising works on the App STore but I
| suspect it's a CPM model not a CPC model (like AdWords). So
| Apple just doesn't care. But I don't think this would ever
| have happpened in the Steve Jobs era.
|
| Nope, it's CPC (they call it CPT as it's mobile) and it cost
| less time to find out than writing this comment ;)
| robotresearcher wrote:
| > The first result will always be an ad for a completely
| different app.
|
| I just tried Things, Excel, Photoshop Elements, and Grand
| Theft Auto. Each was the first result.
|
| So I guess YMMV on this.
|
| Like you, I hate it when ads trump organic results.
| znpy wrote:
| This is why you should always pirate digital media, even if you
| bought it.
|
| A pdf or epub file will never bother you in that way. And if
| they do, you can edit it and remove that trash.
|
| I _always_ pirate the media i buy and /or the physical books i
| buy.
|
| Loading pdf documents into GoodNotes (regularly bought) is the
| quickest way to make them usable (no bullshit, no ads AND i can
| take... good notes on the pages).
| basisword wrote:
| >> Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come
| with a music store, that you happen to be able to put your own
| music into. But it's not structured to help you play your
| music, it's structured to sell you what they want to sell you.
|
| I would have argued against this in the past. But in iOS 26
| they introduced the ability to 'pin' 6 favourite playlists or
| albums to the top of your library. Really useful. If you don't
| have a subscription (to Apple Music or iTunes Match) you don't
| get the feature. There is zero reason to do this other than to
| milk people for more money when they've already spent over $1k
| on the device and likely spent hundreds purchasing the music
| from iTunes Store.
| amelius wrote:
| An iPhone is a vending machine in your pocket.
|
| (owned and operated by Apple, and __you__ paid for it.)
| portaouflop wrote:
| I disagree. You can disable all the apps--in fact never use
| _any_ app if you can avoid it altogether. Apps are inherently
| bad, and the web version is always better.
|
| It didn't have to be like this, but here we are.
|
| I often go weeks without opening any app but the browser on
| my phone.
| amelius wrote:
| Good for you, but if you never buy from the vending machine
| that doesn't mean it's not a vending machine.
| iamtedd wrote:
| That's a very, very expensive browser.
| portaouflop wrote:
| I haven't used Apple devices back when they were good so I have
| always avoided all the built-in Apple bloat/adware.
|
| Because I came from Windows this was already my standard
| assumption - I need to violently throw out all the built-in
| stuff and replace it with free and good software.
|
| It's funny because that means I never felt the same pain you
| feel; I just assumed that's how operating systems are.
| kmac_ wrote:
| As a Linux user, I feel like a different breed here: I'm
| pretty sure the software I'll be using 10 years from now will
| be pretty much the same, and I'm happy about that.
| mulmen wrote:
| I recently dusted off a CentOS 5 file server that hadn't
| been powered on in a decade. It's familiar but a lot has
| changed.
|
| But to your point it has changed less than Windows or
| MacOS.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > I'm pretty sure the software I'll be using 10 years from
| now will be pretty much the same
|
| It will be better, in ways I can't predict. But almost
| every detail of the interaction will improve somehow. But
| probably no big changes on the more mature parts.
|
| Oh, and it will have one infuriating thing that people keep
| doing wrong because everybody insists it's the right way.
| I'll lose some small functionality for disabling it.
|
| That's how it has ever been.
| layer8 wrote:
| That means you also haven't used Windows back when it was
| good.
| portaouflop wrote:
| I did use win98 briefly, which was bearable but it also
| wasn't good. You are probably referring to an even older
| version
| layer8 wrote:
| I'm referring to the era from Windows 2000 to Windows 7.
| freefaler wrote:
| It's a general trend with hired managers who optimize for their
| bonuses. Also many founder led companies when they got sold to
| the shareholders are also optmizing for that. Some founder led
| companies are optimizing for something else, not profits only,
| but that's rare and that's what Jobs had the leeway to do when
| he got back to the almost bankrupt company. Current minions
| will try to squeeze more profit from any screen the incentives
| are such that they'd do that.
|
| Enshitification is possible where there is some kind of lock-in
| and the pain of leaving is greater than the level of annoyance
| of the product. Apple has one of the strongest lock-in
| ecosystems and it's rational for them to do so.
|
| I'm not sure there is a better way, because max freedom = open
| source, but that equals mostly subpar experience for the
| average user. Let's hope for more platforms and data transfer
| from one to the other.
| sugarpimpdorsey wrote:
| You forgot they broke iTunes Home Sharing on iOS some years ago
| and have refused to fix it.
|
| Takes over a minute to connect now. (Allegedly the fault of a
| new, yet horribly inefficient, parser that chokes on large
| libraries which worked fine a decade ago on phones with half
| the CPU and RAM.)
|
| Once connected, it won't play DRM-protected tracks I PAID FOR,
| says I'm not authorized.
|
| I ended up having to break the DRM because Apple can't be
| bothered to include a functioning music player anymore.
|
| An "iPod with touch controls" is no longer part of iPhone.
|
| An ad-filled music subscription consumption software is.
| seec wrote:
| Apple has stopped caring and producing local/personal
| software for a while now. Which is absolutely brain dead
| because that was the primary reason to buy their hardware in
| the first place. Why spend the premium for a Mac if you are
| going to run some shitty cloud software anyway.
|
| For now the illusion is maintained because they are
| dominating with their chips, but that won't last forever and
| the competition is almost caught up (it's not that relevant
| for non mobile computers anyway).
|
| iTunes had it's flaw but at least it was a very useful
| software and it worked quite well (at some point I had a
| library of over 100k tracks); the replacement while trying to
| keep some of the fundamentals is a joke in comparison.
| pwg wrote:
| It sounds like they are well on their way down the
| "Enshittification" [1] path. Eventually they will
| enshittify sufficiently that the illusion will shatter.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Apple's beancounters have figured out that they just have to be
| more polished than Microsoft and Google's environments, and
| despite the legitimate complaints you've made, _they still
| are_.
| 0manrho wrote:
| Precisely. This is their "Have the cake and eat it too"
| strategy, where so long as they aren't _as egregious_ as
| their competitors, they know it 's a Net gain as most of
| their customers will still feel the grass is still greener in
| their wall garden than elsewhere. Even if the grass isn't
| near as green or well kept so to speak as it used to be.
| asdhtjkujh wrote:
| This is especially egregious in the Books app on all platforms.
| I dream of a version that presents you with your library on
| launch instead of the store -- good user experience would
| expect you to be opening the app to read books 99% of the time,
| not to purchase new ones.
|
| Thankfully, on macOS, you can disable the store in the Music
| app entirely. This will probably be removed at some point. When
| disabled, the only remnant is a small username in the bottom-
| left corner of the screen. I would love to see this gone as
| well, but local libraries are increasingly of no concern to
| Apple or the general public so I doubt they will fix this.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| > Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with
| a music store, that you happen to be able to put your own music
| into. But it's not structured to help you play your music, it's
| structured to sell you what they want to sell you.
|
| VLC is your friend.
| int_19h wrote:
| The worst part of it is that despite all this, Apple still has
| the least frustrating desktop experience overall, at least for
| the casual user who needs things to "just work", because the
| bar is plummeting that fast. Especially when looking at
| Windows.
| amelius wrote:
| AI will soon make this difference (if it even exists)
| irrelevant.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| How will AI change this situation? I don't catch your
| drift.
| mort96 wrote:
| The only thing I can imagine is that both Apple and
| Microsoft will bog down the desktop equally in AI
| garbage, to the point where both are approximately
| equally unusable.
| amelius wrote:
| Briefly, with an example: instead of going through menus
| looking for the option you need, you can just tell the AI
| (with a voice command) what you want to do. At that point
| it does not matter who has the nicest menus.
|
| Advanced users are already seeing this. You don't need
| HandBrake anymore. You can just use ffmpeg directly and
| ChatGPT will tell you the command line arguments.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > you can just tell the AI (with a voice command) what
| you want to do
|
| Hard no. Not happening.
| Xiol wrote:
| > you can just tell the AI (with a voice command) what
| you want to do
|
| I would rather stop using computers all together.
| fwip wrote:
| In that both Windows and Mac will be equally shit?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| If Apple puts ads in its Maps, there will be an opening for a
| gorgeously-skinned OpenStreetMaps app. Possibly even with a
| $1/year WhatsApp-style subscription.
|
| I really fucking hate ads. I'll first pay to avoid them. If I
| can't, I'll bail. Because we live in a capitalist society, I'll
| take folks with me.
|
| _nose boops Kagi_
| HacklesRaised wrote:
| Big ups for mentioning KAGI
| shantara wrote:
| Organic Maps is very close to be that gorgeous OSM app.
| Unfortunately, it still lacks a lot of functionality that's
| missing from OSM dataset, and is present in most commercial
| mapping apps, like the opening hours for businesses, public
| transport schedules or user reviews.
| tempodox wrote:
| Once upon a time, Apple used to be different. Now they're just
| another megacorp that abuses you with enshittification, like
| they all do.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Not really. 15 years ago it was "you're holding it wrong" and
| 50 years ago it was Steve Jobs swindling Woz to close Atari
| contracts.
|
| "Apple used to mean something" is a postmodern catechism to
| make you feel better when Apple reveals themselves as a
| federally-backdoored shoggoth.
| rasz wrote:
| Different indeed, like that time Jobs pushed U2 album into
| every iphone.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > I open up the Books app to read Winnie the Pooh to my son,
| and the opening screen has loads of random trashy romances to
| try to sell me.
|
| The books app itself is infuriating. It's more like a store
| with a list of purchases attached. Every single time I want to
| pull up my audiobooks, for instance, I hit the "audiobooks"
| button.... just to find the store instead. Every time I want to
| search through my library, I use the "search" box... just to
| find the store instead. Maddening.
|
| The apple music app I actual really like, probably because it's
| not actually easy to purchase anything through it. The only
| major ask is that they stop limiting the number of recently
| added so I can actually find music I added
| kamma4434 wrote:
| Like fitness where they want you to activate Fitness+. This
| means the one they are shipping is trash? Plus, thank you, I
| know where the App store is in case I need it
| kccqzy wrote:
| I haven't seen ads on the App Store for a long time. To update
| my apps I just long press the App Store icon and tap Updates.
| It leads you directly to the updates without going to the
| homepage.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I just opened up App Store and the first screen is a full
| screen ad for Roblox. Then you scroll down and it's 4 "now
| trending" ads, then below that another full screen as. The
| entire "Today" tab is a scroll full of ads.
| kccqzy wrote:
| That's why I don't open the App Store's first screen or the
| Today tab. I usually open the App Store to look at the
| release notes for my updatable apps. To find new apps, I
| use Google to find an app's page. A web-based search engine
| has blockable ads, the App Store app does not.
| InvertedRhodium wrote:
| The today tab is the default one that opens when you
| start the App Store. At least on my 16Pro.
| kccqzy wrote:
| That's my point. I don't start the App Store by tapping
| on its icon. I go to a specific page within the App
| Store.
| bombcar wrote:
| I prefer my music through CarPlay because at least that doesn't
| shit everything up with Apple Music.
|
| Hell, I'd be happy if they stopped defaulting the search to
| Apple Music instead of local library.
|
| That's not even to begin talking about how having Apple Music
| subscription once fucks your iTunes library forever.
| port11 wrote:
| I don't know what you're complaining about, this is obviously
| about making user interactions delightful. Of course most
| people will cherish the bundling opportunities of Apple
| products, and would be offended if similar books weren't shown
| in their libraries as easy purchases. It's delightful.
|
| /s
|
| More seriously: Apple, please never rework the compass, I don't
| need ads for Apple Compass+ when I'm hoping to figure out which
| was is north.
| hexahedroid wrote:
| I hated using the Books app without the book store disabled.
| The setting is buried in Settings -> Screen Time -> Content &
| Privacy Restrictions -> Allowed Apps & Features -> Book Store
| dangus wrote:
| Apple's services pull in more revenue than Macs and iPads
| combined.
|
| The expectation that they won't advertise them is,
| unfortunately, not a reasonable one.
|
| You can turn off Apple Music the service entirely from the
| music app. If you stick to the library tab in books you'll
| never see an ad. It's really not anywhere close to the worst
| offender in the industry.
|
| Is it a great thing? No.
| musicale wrote:
| > uninvited advertising is not normally equated with a better
| customer experience
|
| It's bad, and it's probably going to get worse as services gain
| more control over product design.
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| I'm actually an apple convert, and I'm going back with my next
| new laptop purchase. About 8 years ago I got my first macbook at
| my first tech job and really loved what I was able to do with it
| as, essentially, a really fancy linux UI. Now it's a bloated
| linux UI that disrupts my ability to get work done, so I'm
| switching to a machine and OS that respect me.
| asadotzler wrote:
| Decent short article built around a personal anecdote with SJ.
| The AI slop image of SJ at the top was such a turn off it was
| hard for me to respect anything this fellow had to say. It's a
| real shame that people feel the need to include images like that,
| presumably to draw attention on social media embeds, but it's
| just gross seeing death porn like that.
| manoDev wrote:
| To be fair, ads on a map aren't the same as Windows 11 start menu
| ads - the former are useful and contextual.
|
| I feel the story being told would be more equivalent to what
| Microsoft is doing rather than Google.
|
| That said, advertising is like a virus, and every company and
| product is eventually infected by it. It's too tempting to _not_
| monetize your customer 's eyeballs once you have enough of them.
| qwerpy wrote:
| I actually consider the windows start menu ads less
| objectionable. At least you can turn them off (for now). There
| is no way to disable ads embedded in the maps app. And it's
| only useful and contextual if you're using the map to look for
| somewhere to spend money. I rarely do this. I'm using it to
| check traffic, get directions to somewhere, or exploring out of
| geographical curiosity. In all of these use cases, ads are an
| unwanted distraction.
| pzo wrote:
| Sadly iPhone sales and revenue saturated like 4 years ago (and
| the same for Mac, Wearables and iPad [0]). They focus now a lot
| on growing revenue from services. Which is kind of sad because
| they have still much room to grow Mac and iPad:
|
| - just make iPad more useful and support MacOS - it's not gonna
| canibalize Mac, they sale each year 2x more iPads than Macs and
| 12x more iPhones than Macs.
|
| - make macbook Pro standard with 32GB RAM / 1TB drive (macbook
| air with 500GB) and cheaper upgrades. It's not like those chips
| are expensive. Better to sell 2x more devices with smaller margin
| than holding to your margin like virginity.
|
| As for services they could go other way:
|
| - be AI gateway like OpenRouter and charge user 10% for token
| credits topup like electricity bill. Devs then don't have to
| setup back-end, protect API key, setup billings, auth etc or
| charge end user more with subscription.
|
| - make powerful Apple TV or cheaper Mac Mini for all users.
| Create a distributed computing platform that user can opt-in. Now
| you are competing with CloudFlare. Those devices normally do
| nothing during night but could generate/compute stuff, execute
| some lambda in sandbox, work as a proxy. Give 30-50% for device
| upgrades for such users that opted-in for 2 years.
|
| [0] https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/aapl/metrics/revenue-by-
| seg...
| polyomino wrote:
| They don't put MacOS on iPad because they want MacOS to slowly
| die and make App Store the only way to install software. This
| has nothing to do with cannibalizing Mac.
| skylurk wrote:
| You might be right, but if MacOS dies, how will Apple develop
| for iOS etc?
| iknowstuff wrote:
| probably some subscription cloud environments
| hshdhdhehd wrote:
| And app developers too. Maybe sister comment about
| something cloud. Can fleece devs for more money too, bonus!
| WorldPeas wrote:
| probably some sort of "ai" app builder interface. They've
| always flirted with the layperson programming with their
| languages like hypertalk. I wouldn't be surprised if they
| figure out a way to achieve even greater lock-in capture
| Thorrez wrote:
| They could improve the development environment on iPadOS,
| or make it possible to develop for iOS on Linux.
| hshdhdhehd wrote:
| It is worrying that the machines many of HN rely on are the
| minority of their revenue so they'd not even flinch
| financially to mess up that product line. TF for
| Linux/x86/arm as an alternative ecosystem that is not
| controlled by one party.
| dbtc wrote:
| If they did, I would also replace my iPhone, and I'd help
| family do the same.
| imglorp wrote:
| > They focus now a lot on growing revenue
|
| Explain like I'm five, how does a multi trillion dollar company
| expect to keep growing revenue forever? Are they planning to
| keep enshittifying user experience until revenue dives?
| pzo wrote:
| you omitted the most important 2 words from my quote:
| "growing revenue _from_ _services_ ". If you read other part
| of my post I shared ideas how they could grow revenue without
| enshitification.
|
| After that saturate they can keep innovating like xiaomi -
| they build plenty of useful home products so apple can as
| well.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| No one knows, they are just trying to kick the can as far as
| they can and escape the inevitable coming back to Eartb of
| the stock price. P/E is currently 36. Everything plateaus.
| The human population is plateauing. The SP500 is now 2
| standard deviations from the mean and that's as far as it has
| ever gone.
|
| https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/s&p500-mean-
| re...
| basisword wrote:
| Maybe they should stop focussing on 'growing'. Isn't nearly
| $100bn in profit per year enough??
| wpm wrote:
| Timmy is too worried about the goddamn stock price for that.
| They could easily just transition to a company that isn't
| promising stupid growth every quarter and just pays fat
| dividends on a portion of the profits.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| This is easily disapproved by just looking at their charts.
| Especially if you remove the Covid bump.
|
| https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/11/apples-fiscal-2025-in-cha...
|
| And even a little bit of analysis will show none of your ideas
| will grow the bottom line.
| pzo wrote:
| your chart shows _total_ revenue but not per category but
| even so it shows the last 4 years revenue didn 't grow that
| much as before and its mostly growing because grow in
| services revenue.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| The last chart
|
| https://i0.wp.com/sixcolors.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2025/10/2...
| pzo wrote:
| you can see in your linked chart that everything is
| pretty much flat except services in the last 4 years.
| iPhone revenue in 2022: 205B, then next to years down
| (201B) and in 2025: 210B.
| pacifika wrote:
| Where is the analysis?
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| What's the average price of a laptop? Hint: it's much less
| than $1000. Do you think that people are going to start
| buying more expensive laptops?
|
| For the iPad, how have the convertible Windows Surfaces
| been doing?
|
| You really don't see a problem with creating a "token
| router"? He also wants to create a distributed CDN where
| every computer is a node - ignoring the fact that most
| people have asymmetric internet access with low upload
| speeds and the entire value proposition of a CDN is that
| there are colocated servers at ISPs. Bit torrent (basically
| what he is proposing) is not exactly fast.
| ethmarks wrote:
| I do think that people will buy more expensive laptops if
| they are higher quality. People spend multiple thousands
| of dollars on laptops, especially if they are powerful.
|
| I own a Windows Surface. I personally find it very
| convenient, although I'll concede this point if you say
| the economics aren't working out.
|
| I _don 't_ see the problem with creating a token router.
| Openrouter exists and seems to be doing fine. I'd love if
| you could actually elaborate on your concerns.
|
| I agree that the CDN idea is pretty weak, but you could
| make it a bit better by rewarding users based on uptime.
| Rather than basing the rewards on total time opted in,
| base it off of total successful requests.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Apple made 112 billion dollars in profit fof the fiscal
| year that just ended. Do you really think an idea like
| open router would even sell as much as the AppleTV?
|
| A CDN's entire purpose for existing is high bandwidth
| colocated in ISPs data center.
|
| Microsoft Surface sales peaked at $6.7 billion in 2022.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/26/microsoft-surface-is-
| nearly-...
|
| With a 3% market share and it's been declining since.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/30/24209519/microsoft-q4-
| 202...
| etothet wrote:
| A _cheaper_ Mac Mini? $599 for the entry level is a pretty
| great deal (assuming you view macOS and the ecosystem as a
| feature and not a bug).
|
| Genuine question: is there a comparable Windows machine in a
| mini desktop form factor at a similar or lower price?
| layer8 wrote:
| If you just need a desktop for random browsing and run-off-
| the-mill office work, there are $250-300 mini PCs you can get
| for that no problem.
| dbtc wrote:
| Anything that beats a refurb m1 mac mini for $250?
| NaomiLehman wrote:
| by saturated i think you mean saturated the market. i would
| argue that almost every person that is their target has in
| iPhone.
|
| https://www.macrumors.com/2025/04/09/teen-iphone-ownership-c...
| layer8 wrote:
| That's in the US. Also I'm their target, but given their
| trajectory I'm increasingly inclined to switch to the other
| side, and I know that others are too.
| akho wrote:
| if only the other side did not have their own trajectory
| nashashmi wrote:
| + Make iPhones as powerful as iPads when plugged into docking
| stations. That would cannibalize everything
| bombcar wrote:
| Give me iCloud++ or something that costs me $20/mo and shits
| off all the fucking ads and I'll help grow the revenue.
| 827a wrote:
| I think you can point to the actual day Apple started this
| decline they're still on: September 16 2015. That was the day
| Apple News was released, which I think as a product perfectly
| encapsulates near-everything wrong with Apple in one convenient
| package.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Steve Jobs created iAd
| conductr wrote:
| I think they're trying to replace the hole they expect when the
| app stores are forced to be open. It is sad they lack any plan
| other than ads, it's a complete lack of imagination from what is
| supposed to the one of the most innovative companies on earth. I
| feel this is a more worrisome signal than anything.
| raincole wrote:
| What's with this uncanny AI Steve Jobs photo? I hope blog writers
| have red lines too.
|
| The sentiment of this article seems to be praising Jobs as a
| protector of user experience. And the author doesn't have the
| decency to use his real face?
| inshard wrote:
| Local businesses with better quality usually have better ratings
| in maps and better economics--higher margins, repeat customers,
| lower acquisition costs. And since only nearby places can
| compete, you get real competition on merit instead of a race to
| the bottom with faceless actors. Good ads solve a real problem:
| helping people discover great spots in unfamiliar cities.
|
| Jobs saw something with iAd.
|
| The problem is simple auction mechanics favor whoever has the
| deepest pockets. A mediocre chain with fat margins outbids an
| amazing local place, even if the local spot delivers way more
| value. You're optimizing for who can pay, not who's actually
| good.
|
| To fix this, you weight bids by quality signals like ratings,
| time spent and repeat visits.
|
| Now ads amplify what's already great instead of just selling
| visibility.
|
| Users get better recommendations, good businesses win, and Apple
| builds trust. That's how you turn ads from a tax on attention
| into actual product value--and an improved user experience.
| eigencoder wrote:
| Or, you could just use quality signals like ratings, time spent
| and repeat visits and not weight by the bids. All the upside,
| none of the downside.
| inshard wrote:
| This misses the fundamental information problem. Your
| recommendation algorithm is centralized--it only knows what
| its signals can measure. Ads create a decentralized market
| mechanism where businesses themselves can signal "your
| algorithm is underweighting me."
|
| Consider the failure modes of pure algorithmic ranking:
|
| Cold start problem: A phenomenal new restaurant opens. It has
| no ratings, no historical visit data, no repeat customer
| signals. Your algorithm buries it. How does it escape this
| trap? Organic discovery is glacial--it might take months to
| accumulate enough signals while the business burns cash.
|
| Structural bias: Your algorithm might systematically
| underweight certain business types. Maybe sit-down
| restaurants generate longer "time spent" signals than
| excellent quick-service spots. Maybe your visit detection
| misses certain building types. The algorithm doesn't know
| it's biased.
|
| Local knowledge asymmetry: The business owner knows their
| value proposition intimately--they know their recent quality
| improvements, their new chef, their differentiation. The
| algorithm is looking backwards at historical data.
|
| Network effects lock-in: Once a place is highly ranked, it
| gets more visits, more ratings, reinforcing its position.
| Even if quality declines, the algorithm is slow to react.
|
| Quality-weighted ads let businesses with superior local
| information challenge the algorithmic ranking. If you're
| genuinely better than your algorithmic position suggests, you
| can bid to prove it. The quality weighting means you only
| profit if you're right about your own quality--it's costly
| signaling backed by conversion economics. This is "outside-
| in" because you're not trying to perfect a centralized
| algorithm. You're creating a market mechanism where
| distributed information surfaces through economic incentives.
| The businesses that are most undervalued by the algorithm
| have the strongest incentive to correct it.
|
| Pure algorithmic ranking is central planning. Quality-
| weighted ads are a market.
| thr0waway001 wrote:
| Tim Apple is a money grubbing robot with zero taste. Absolutely
| the bean counter type that Steve used to rail against.
|
| He makes IBM look cool in conparison.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Who cares? He's dead. I know that sounds harsh but this obsession
| and worship of founders has to stop. Companies are people or so
| says the Supreme Court. So now that the company exists it's
| bigger than any one person even the founder.
|
| The company he built is now an order of magnitude more valuable
| and hardware is the best it's ever been.
|
| It's maturing. No company stays nimble and vibrant and agile
| forever. It's paying a dividend for Pete's sake.
|
| All these callbacks to oh no apple under Steve never would have
| done this ... yeah well it's 2025 and he unfortunately got cancer
| and died from it. Apple as a company lives on and new leadership
| should be free to take it in any direction they seem justified.
| zahrevsky wrote:
| Hi Tim Cook
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Yea i also think this blind steve worship needs to stop. He was
| great back then but who knows what he would have done nowaday.
|
| The situation is different, the world is different, apple is
| serving much more consumers, the company has much more
| employees, more products, more markets.
|
| And i get it, the software they put out nowadays is pretty
| terrible and could be much better and everyone is frustrated
| but this constant steve ressurrection needs to stop.
| gigatexal wrote:
| To be fair -- and I love my Mac -- macOS isn't as snappy as
| Linux in my experience. And yet I still rock macOS because it
| just works and slow app load times are just a small price to
| pay for things just working. YMMV of course.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| > MacOS [....] it just works and slow app load times are
| just a small price to pay for things just working.
|
| Oxymoron?
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| I don't think apple executives understand what made apple so
| successful.
|
| Or maybe I'm out of touch ? I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
|
| But to me, i buy apple because this a premium device that is well
| thought out and doesn't make me waste time on advertisement, dark
| pattern and other bullshit i don't have the time nor the will to
| care about.
|
| I ditched windows for macos after the candy crush saga in start
| menu and just the overall philosophy of windows 10. For instance,
| not being able to decide if I want to update and when.
|
| I ditched Android because Google made me loose so much time with
| their ad riddled services, and their app professionalism is
| abysmal. It constantly change, no user interface is the same,...
|
| For all these reasons I bought expensive apple devices and I
| tolerated the many bugs, often having to restart my iphone once
| every day.
|
| Now if you're going to monetize me just as the other and make me
| waste my time fiddling around on apple maps checking if one thing
| is an ad or something I actually want to see, I'll just buy the
| cheapest thing I can get.
|
| There is no reason to pay premium for the same quality.
|
| But that's just me, maybe they know something I don't. Brand
| fidelity, especially in the USA is strong, people don't want to
| be that guy who has an Android ? iPhone are status symbols in
| China ?
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I haven't had an iPhone in 15 years, but have been considering
| going back for my next phone as mine is over 5 years old. I had
| no idea it had gotten this bad though. What a pile of garbage.
| Ads in the map app?
| zahrevsky wrote:
| > Some time ago (1999-ish) [...] a number of ways to integrate
| ads were discussed.
|
| > One was to show a cool video from a respected company (such as
| Nike) every time the Mac starts up. [...]
|
| This sounds so weird in 2025. However, I can see that probably in
| those times there was no "norm", and people were trying different
| things.
|
| Who knows, maybe if it weren't for Steve Jobs, ads at startup
| might be the norm. And who knows how many similar things we
| dodged because of people like Jobs.
| int_19h wrote:
| Kindles have been showing ads on their lock screen for the ad-
| supported tier for a very long time now.
|
| These days, we have moved to far more insane schemes. E.g.
| smart TV manufacturers are patenting detection of static frames
| to show you ads while TV is idle (although I don't think anyone
| has actually shipped that yet).
| zahrevsky wrote:
| > Kindles have been showing ads on their lock screen for the
| ad-supported tier for a very long time now.
|
| Wow, this is wild. I've also remembered that Viber puts ads
| among your chats in a chats list. It shocked me first time
| I've seen that.
|
| > patenting
|
| As I understand, big companies are making lots of patents,
| and most of those never come to life.
| eviks wrote:
| > Who knows, maybe if it weren't for Steve Jobs, ads at startup
| might be the norm
|
| Are there video ads at startup on Windows? On Android?
| TZubiri wrote:
| >It didn't matter that customers would be free to choose a
| version with or without ads. He didn't want any user to see the
| OS polluted in this way.
|
| Another subtle but distinct user experience cost of this would be
| that every user is given the option to choose between one option
| or the other, and that is already part of the user experience,
| and it has a cost.
|
| It's similar to the idea that more options are not better, you
| can't just keep adding more settings and levers and pulleys knobs
| on the task bar and the settings and the profile and the
| customization tab and the control panel, and the privacy center,
| etc...
|
| Each choice has a UX cost. Even if it's technically outside of
| the software and it occurs at the shop. The product line is the
| first part of the experience, will you choose a product? a
| product XL? A product XL Pro?
| plussed_reader wrote:
| This 'red line' was quite apparent around 10.14 when macOS and
| iOS were set on the collision course we see today in Ta-hoe. So
| much wasted visual space in the last 5 releases, making room for
| touch.
|
| I doubt we'll see a pseudo macOS mode on mobileOS, but the
| mirroring for iOS in the last 2 major releases of macOS is just a
| jump to the left of local emulation.
| seec wrote:
| Yep. Information density and compact but efficient UIs were
| definitely an advantage of macOS. Now they are on track to
| emulate the big buttons of Windows so what's the point ?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Apple Maps has always had subtle ads. They show various stores
| and shops at different zoom levels in your town, some requiring
| very high zoom levels meaning you wouldn't stumble across them.
| ebbi wrote:
| I probably sound like a broken record, but the death of Apple
| won't come from being behind on AI, from losing developer
| support, from bad products or services. Fundamentally, it'll be
| because it is optimising for being on the stock market and
| chasing endless revenue growth.
|
| All other issues I've outlined is a symptom of that fundamental
| issue. Apple is losing its soul.
|
| The author suggests Steve would have done something based on what
| Steve did in the past in that particular set of circumstances.
| But it's not fair to suggest what Steve would have done today,
| given where Apple is now. Would Steve have said "screw it" to the
| share price and just ran the company with the same ethos? Maybe,
| he was bold like that. But then he also had a Board to answer to.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| I will never understand why "make good things and maintain
| customer loyalty" is not even remotely considered as a viable
| strategy to "make money"
|
| If you sell people things they want and you treat them well
| _they keep buying from you_ instead of tolerating you until
| they stop buying from you.
|
| Capitalism is so fucked
| Crestwave wrote:
| It is a valid strategy for privately owned companies. Look at
| Valve--they have their flaws, but they're investing into open
| technologies and actually improving their product because
| they know they're sitting on an infinite money printer.
|
| If they went public, no amount of profit would be enough.
| They would have to squeeze every last cent out of their users
| for the quarterly reports.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Cool, if they ever fix the broken external monitor support, then
| I can see the ads on my second monitor too!!
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| Ads should be illegal.
| sleight42 wrote:
| There have been ads in Apple News for years now. There were not,
| at its outset.
|
| And I hate them.
|
| Yes. Steve would take a giant dump all over this nonsense.
|
| Apple is increasingly at risk of similar enshittification as
| Google.
| eviks wrote:
| > and he would reject--often brutally--any idea that diluted or
| harmed the experience.
|
| "brutally" is the only factual part, otherwise he harmed the
| experience plenty, often for the sake of appearances
|
| Goggle also had a memo on how ads were bad and rejected the idea
| ... until they didn't, with the same founders, so you don't need
| much of a leadership change for the strong incentive of ad money
| to dilute the resolve.
| sometimes_all wrote:
| Whenever someone says, "oh Steve Jobs would have done / would
| never have done X", I always remember the scene in Silicon Valley
| where Laurie says "Monica, Peter Gregory is dead"[1].
|
| Steve Jobs has been gone for a long time. Other people have taken
| his place, and Apple has been very successful since. While Jobs
| might have been very successful in his vision, a lot of things
| have changed since then, and it's very reasonable that the
| current apple execs might not align with what his philosophy was
| at the time.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JW2-rGVw44A
| wseqyrku wrote:
| I don't use my phone much other than you know, for calling and
| occasional messaging. For me the most annoying is constant asking
| of password in both phone and mac. It's so secure.
| pronik wrote:
| I thought Jobs' red lines went out of the window as far back as
| the Apple Pencil (iPhone presentation 2007: "Stylus? Yuck!").
| lovidico wrote:
| Standards sure have dropped. I saw a new iPad mini in store, on
| display, and it simply couldn't run the home screen without
| stuttering and visible frame rate drops! At least in my mind,
| this seems like a transgression from Apple's former standards and
| that's before the accessibility and visual challenges new iOS
| has.
| carefulfungi wrote:
| How much f'n money do these massive corporations really need?
| testfrequency wrote:
| Most Apple veterans and current will agree and tell you they do
| not like the direction the company has gone/is going.
|
| Most are still there as Apple has one of the most stable
| employment places, ever. I know a lot of old senior Apple folks
| who all come back to Apple to retire as the benefits are good,
| pay is ok, and it's beyond stable.
|
| To this end, including the way Apple operates, it's low noise and
| low friction to just coast and let the leadership team duke it
| out over revenue streams.
| shevy-java wrote:
| > What made Steve an effective and visionary leader was that his
| values were so crystal clear.
|
| Steve also underpaid developers - see the court proceedings here.
|
| I am not saying Steve was not creative and effective, mind you.
| He was that. But he also had a criminal side, and I hate this
| whitewashing of praising Steve without pointing at the criminal
| side at the same time. See reports such as this one here:
|
| https://www.thedrum.com/news/steve-jobs-named-top-conspirato...
|
| The media is often not critical of the superrich, even more so
| when it is owned by them, which is why unaffiliated media must be
| a LOT more critical in general. The whole article here babbles
| about how great Steve Jobs is and how bad Tim Cook is. I'd rather
| like to think that both are or were humans with failure points.
| tedggh wrote:
| I don't think Apple fundamental issues are that hard to fix.
| First, you need to fire whoever is leading the UX on the OS side.
| Hardware design is still pretty good. Then we can argue about
| their lack of innovation and missing the AI train, which btw is
| still not proven to be a bad (lack of) strategy. But until they
| don't get the fundamentals right at the OS UX experience nothing
| else matters. I hate iOS with passion, both on my phone and Apple
| Watch, it feels like a Beta version most of the time.
| prinny_ wrote:
| The ending of the article is such a low quality..
|
| > Whatever his reason, Tim Cook is not as protective of the user
| experience as his predecessor was. If we were to ask Tim why it's
| okay to bring ads into Apple products now, but wasn't okay during
| Steve's reign, the best (only?) answer would probably be,
| "Today's Apple is very different from Steve's Apple."
|
| > Quite true. And that is exactly the problem.
|
| So Ken Segall first admits he doesn't know the reason, then
| speculates the answer Tim Cook would give if they were asked the
| question, then ends the article by contemplating on that
| speculative answer.
|
| And the thumbnail is quite obviously AI generated. Just low
| quality all around. The point could be driven home without
| resorting to either of these two things.
| TheAtomic wrote:
| THIS! Ads, misusing notifications (thank LinkedIn for that idea),
| Tahoe's self-indulgent UI, changes for no reason than some new
| designer has an idea, getting things ready for spatial, the
| stupid dispute with Nvidia...
|
| Apple has a ruthless competitive upper echelon that gets rewarded
| on metrics that prioritize market hits and revenue increases. Get
| ready for more of this.
|
| Obligatory I've been using Macs since the SE comment but I know
| Apple gives 2 damns about that.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| The NVIDIA dispute was from the 2000s when NVIDIA had discrete
| graphics in the Macbook Pro line but they all started failing
| and this was during Steve's tenure.
| etempleton wrote:
| These moves are the dumbest thing Apple can do for the long-
| term. It is one of the few differentiators they have between
| Android and Windows.
|
| The App Store ads are one thing, it is a store after all, but
| adding ads to a core OS functionality like Maps is clear
| degradation of service. When people spend 1 to 2 grand on a
| premium phone they don't expect to see ads, ever.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| > they don't expect to see ads, ever.
|
| Though I'm sure they'll get used to it.
| techscruggs wrote:
| Remember that Steve Jobs appointed his COO Tim Cook to take over
| Apple. Not Ives or Cue or Federighi. I've always seen this as an
| acknowledgment that without Jobs the company would not be able to
| innovate in the same way.
|
| Having acknowledged that, Apple shifted to the value extraction
| phase of its business lifecycle.
|
| It sucks.
|
| It like when your favorite band starts selling out, but as
| publicly traded company, I am not sure it is avoidable.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| > Not Ives or Cue or Federighi.
|
| It's "Ive" and Federighi wasn't a candidate in 2011.
|
| Also, how you think someone is going to work out and how they
| actually work out is still worth commenting on. Not every CEO
| would have extracted value in the same way. You can prioritize
| extracting value by making customers super happy so they buy
| more. That's what the article is about.
| quantum_state wrote:
| Crossing the red line has consequences ... though not
| immediately...
| lvl155 wrote:
| I've been an Apple fan for as long as I can remember. I didn't
| worship Jobs but he had complete control of Apple when he
| returned and molded the company in his vision. The company lacks
| that vision. Vision Pro is an example of that failure. Luckily
| for them iPhone and Mac will continue to dominate. They are here
| for another decade plus and once the AI bubble passes and we
| settle on clear winners, Apple will pounce on that opportunity.
| Am I heartbroken that they're not the trailblazers? Outsiders?
| Hipsters? Yes. The brand has gone from Ferrari to Toyota. That's
| quite literally the most perfect analogy.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| I was a fan post Mac classic. Tim Cook simply doesn't value
| taste or cool the way sj did with integrity, and chases money
| at the expense of everything nearly else. The public bribing of
| Trump was exceptionally sniveling and obsequious.
| sidcool wrote:
| Interesting read. But I avoid deifying Jobs. I won't be surprised
| if he went ahead with Ads for revenue. Who wouldn't! If he were
| around the iPhone would not be dramatically different than what
| it's now.
| codingdave wrote:
| > This is how Steve laid out his plan to us at the ad agency when
| he returned to a nearly bankrupt Apple in the late 1990s. The
| customer experience was all-important.
|
| Yes, it is a well-known truth that CX drives product success, and
| if you want to credit Jobs for that, fine.
|
| But referencing back to the 90s because Jobs talked to you
| directly 25 years ago truly dilutes the message. It is really
| weird, honestly, to claim that a business strategy from decades
| ago when Apple was in a completely different reality is some
| sacrosanct policy that shall never be questioned.
|
| I'm _not_ saying the policy is wrong - I agree with it. So do
| most product managers I know. But all organizations change over
| time. Society changes. Tech changes. A viewpoint wherein you have
| "red lines" that cannot be challenged is short-sighted.
| solatic wrote:
| > Society changes
|
| It's rather disingenuous to claim, in context, that society has
| changed to enjoy advertisements. Indeed, I would make the
| argument that society will _never_ , _ever_ , get to the place
| where we _enjoy_ advertising.
|
| Advertising is like the value-added tax: horrific for everybody
| involved, and society would have killed it a long time ago for
| that reason, if it wasn't for how much money it makes.
| deprave wrote:
| To me, there's a difference between ads that help me learn
| about brands or products, or make me laugh or have some
| positive emotion (Super Bowl ads, billboard signs, and movie
| previews come to mind) and ads that take over search results,
| interfere with the content I want to consume on an already-
| small screen, or are just distasteful to me. I can't say I
| like ads but I recognize that I specifically dislike some ads
| more than others.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| VAT is great, society worked a lot towards inventing it, and
| most countries are still trying hard to adopt some version of
| it while people entrenched in power resist the change.
|
| Ads can be done right too, and have been done right plenty of
| times. If you want to nitpick the GP, do not create such a
| glass ceiling.
| solatic wrote:
| VAT is horrible. It's a regressive tax on consumption, so
| it's doubly economically inefficient and is the worst
| offender for reducing quality of life for the most people.
| Reductions in VAT rates are always populist, but
| governments refuse to pass them because they can't give up
| the revenue stream.
|
| Citation very much needed on your part.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The only problem on VAT is that it's regressive. People
| studied sales taxes until they solved every single of
| their problems, except for this, that in inherent to the
| activity. It's also the least regressive form of commerce
| taxes around, and the easiest one to mess with and so the
| government can take the worst impacts away.
|
| And if you pair it with a capital movement tax, you can
| make it proportional. But we don't have anything
| equivalently good for capital movement, so most
| governments refrain from it.
|
| Either way, if you want to argue that VATs are bad
| because they only tax one part of economical activity,
| that's an incredibly bad argument.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| The "Guides We Love" feature in Apple Maps is my a great example
| of this. When I first saw it I was appalled by its complete
| uselessness. It's hard to understand how an Apple team could have
| created and actually shipped such a waste of space.
|
| Edit: deleted a couple of company references that weren't needed
| to make my point.
| muragekibicho wrote:
| I googled Taboola and Outbrain. I bet you used 'Taboola or
| Outbrain' in the pejorative but I can't tell exactly what's
| wrong with the two companies lol.
| inemesitaffia wrote:
| This means you use an ad blocker.
| ThouYS wrote:
| Apple is far gone, macOS has been buggy for a while. At first I
| thought this was in favor of iOS, but seeing how iOS usability
| has suffered, and how they are squandering their reasources on
| pointless redesigns.. I guess they are just another company now.
|
| I guess it's a melancholic reality that only certain outstanding
| individuals can be relied on to produce greatness. Most of us are
| just not there.
|
| Another such example is Python. Python is slowly being bloated by
| the people in charge, since Guido basically gave up, soon to be
| as shitty as C++ is.
|
| I am afraid Blender and Pytorch will be next, seeing how the
| original visionaries have left or will leave in the not so
| distant future.
| cs702 wrote:
| TL;DR: Steve Jobs shut down efforts to incorporate advertising in
| Apple's software, because it would enshittify[a] the customer
| experience.
|
| Everyone here on HN likely agrees that he was right never to
| cross that red line.
|
| The path from "great user experience" to "enshittified user
| experience" consists of crossing such red lines, one after the
| other, for short-term profit.
|
| ---
|
| [a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
| bigyabai wrote:
| Counterpoint; if Steve Jobs thought that advertising would ruin
| Apple, he would have never advocated for Cook as replacement
| CEO.
| wafriedemann wrote:
| the biggest mistake is thinking the rising revenue share of
| services adds diversification and makes Apple less dependend on
| iPhone revenue because barely anyone would choose Apple services
| if they didn't have an iPhone.
| skeptrune wrote:
| Does nobody else remember Apple intentionally reducing battery
| life so you'd have to buy new phones?
| RestartKernel wrote:
| Did they? I only recall them reducing clock speed to offset
| battery degradation.
| skeptrune wrote:
| Yes, I forgot the details and just looked them up.
| LocalH wrote:
| Jobs was a dick, but so were many visionaries. See: Torvalds,
| Gates, Kildall. All with some dickishness, to varying degrees.
|
| We need people willing to say "fuck you" to bullshit. Otherwise,
| the boards take over and focus on anything that brings them an
| extra few bucks.
|
| Enshittification is real, and we need people willing to fight
| back against it.
| kittikitti wrote:
| It's not just Apple that's suffering, but every other company.
| Since Job's death, the entire tech industry lost its visionary.
| Apple used to be the company that set the high standard for
| others but now they don't think differently from any other.
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| But don't you find it convenient to be connected with products
| you might like based on your preferences? /s
|
| VC-brained morons are literally incapable of not ruining the
| companies and products they get their hands on. I've been a soft
| proponent of a global ban on ads for as long as I can remember,
| and I've only become more convinced over the years that it is
| something we need to agree on and start enforcing as a society.
|
| Ads are evil, the whole incentive structure is fucked, the "free"
| products are brainrot trash. It is time to cut off the limb
| before the infection spreads.
| Gazoche wrote:
| > One [way to integrate ads] was to show a cool video from a
| respected company (such as Nike) every time the Mac starts up.
|
| Of course Jobs blocked this, but it's insane that it was even
| proposed as a serious idea. I'm pretty sure this would have been
| a PR stain on Apple even in the pre-social media era.
| swrobel wrote:
| If it really was a red line, why did Steve even take the meeting,
| and then take days to decide on it?
| novabridge wrote:
| So I wonder what alternatives to iPhone or Mac would you
| recommend? It seems to me that neither Google nor Microsoft is
| doing better. Google appears to prioritize ad-revenue over user
| experience, and Microsoft is following in that direction too.
| bigyabai wrote:
| I quit daily-driving macOS in 2017 and Windows in 2019, GNOME
| on Linux does everything I need.
|
| Smartphones are a bit harder, but it's still possible to flash
| a Google-free ROM onto many Android phones. If push comes to
| shove, I could also see myself dailying a PostmarketOS-style
| handheld for basic SMS, auth and music player capabilities.
| mlmonkey wrote:
| > Why would Apple do such a thing?
|
| Because Steve is not around to rip these MBA-types a new asshole
| for even mentioning such crap.
|
| Tim is not a visionary leader. He is a great manager who can
| manage logistics like nobody else and deliver the finished
| product.
|
| But Steve was the visionary leader: he laid out the plan of where
| they were going, sold his troops on the big picture and Tim
| helped get the troops there.
| wslh wrote:
| Apple has crossed the "no QA here". I found bugs everyday that
| cannot believe an average team cannot detect.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"What made Steve an effective and visionary leader was that his
| values were so crystal clear. He inspired Apple's troops to excel
| in innovation, design and simplicity.
|
| But he was also passionate about something that seems almost "old
| school"--the customer experience. Creating the best experience
| would lure new customers and build brand loyalty."
|
| I find the opinions above very iffy. The only thing that is
| unquestionable to me was the design. Whether one likes it or not
| it is present and prominent.
|
| But I think he was a guru of creating cult.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Are they bathing?
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