> 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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
>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?
Im pretty sure torrenting/piracy is a VERY small subset of people. I think it's been growing again, but everyone still thinks I'm doing things 'old school' when I mention illegally downloading movies for my Plex server
Edit: Google Search Trends for "torrent" suggest it is NOT on it's way back
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.
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.
> 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.
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
>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
Misconception: perfect conditions are what lossy codecs are designed for. You're actually more likely to hear compression artifacts under imperfect conditions that break the assumptions of psychoacoustic masking. Examples include strongly distorted frequency response from poor speakers, accidental comb filtering from room reflections, or even merely listening through a home surround sound system that matrix-decodes a stereo signal into additional channels, thus spatially isolating sounds that were assumed to be masked.
This comment is funny because the one it's replying to could also be read as justifying the theft from the public domain perpetrated by DRM etc. as a fair response to piracy.
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.
It truly warms my heart to see that the entire Hacker News population only pirates things out of pure moral principle. A noble stand for user experience. You PayPal’d the authors too? Beautiful. Inspirational. That is basically philanthropy. Mother Teresa but with a seedbox.
At this point it is obvious that every piece of content worth pirating mysteriously ends up locked behind the “we hired an enterprise consultant who has never used a computer” user experience. Which means pirating is not stealing, it is simply undoing a curse. I used to think taking someone’s work without permission was wrong. But now I understand that if they make me click more than two times or sign up for an account that wants my blood type, the theft automatically becomes a principled act of civil disobedience. Robin Hood with magnet links.
My friend tried to ruin this beautiful moral architecture I’ve built. He goes, “You’re just lying to yourself. This is motivated reasoning. People justify actions after doing them so they don’t feel guilty.” Then he starts rattling off psychological terminology like he’s been waiting his entire life to use the phrase “post-hoc rationalization” in a sentence. He even said cognitive dissonance while maintaining full eye contact, which should honestly be illegal outside of a grad seminar or a cult.
He’s like, “You want the thing. Then you explain to yourself why it was okay to take the thing.”
And I was like: Wow. Incredible. Thank you, professor Brain Surgeon PhD of Human Morality and Meme Piracy. Please invoice me for the lecture. I’ll pay you in exposure and a strongly worded moral shrug.
Because here is the truth:
I am not justifying anything. I am suffering. I am enduring the emotional hardship of navigating a UI that looks like it was designed in Microsoft Access by someone who hates joy. Do you understand the courage it takes to ignore that Buy Now button and instead go spelunking into the digital underworld like I’m Indiana Jones but for PDFs?
This is not theft. This is archaeology.
And yes, sometimes what I excavate is a folder labeled “S04E01–S04E23 (WEB-DL 2160p)” with subtitles and commentary tracks that legally shouldn’t exist. But that is not piracy.
That is restoration of cultural heritage.
The Library of Alexandria burned.
I’m simply making sure Season 4 doesn’t.
The first is people who don't have the money, e.g. students. They will never pay you; they don't have the money.
The second is people who do have the money but value the experience above other things. These would be your best customers, if you provide the better experience.
If you don't provide the better experience, they don't pay. Is that a rationalization? Maybe, but are you better off to whinge about it or to take away their excuse?
Let us be clear from the start. This thread is not about piracy. Everyone pirates. Everyone knows everyone pirates. The internet is a vast floating marketplace of digital oranges stolen from the same tree. The practical question is boring.
The interesting question is psychological.
How do you, personally, live with yourself while doing it?
Why do people in this thread need to build entire theological systems of justification just to sleep at night?
That is the comedy here.
Not the piracy.
The denial.
Because if someone simply said,
“Yes, I stole it because I wanted it and did not feel like paying,”
I would respect that.
Honesty. Integrity, even if dark.
But this thread is packed with people inventing ethical origami to explain why pressing the magnet link was actually a noble act of cultural preservation, spiritual support, intellectual necessity, or cosmic fairness. We are not talking about Kant. We are talking about a TV show and a PDF.
And then there is the classic justification play:
“I already bought the ebook on Kindle years ago. But I need a clean PDF to mark up on my iPad for research. Amazon will not give me a DRM free copy. I refuse to buy the same book twice. So I torrented a pristine academic version. I am simply aligning formats with my rightful ownership.”
The phrasing is beautiful. It sounds like a legal defense and a eulogy at the same time.
But think about it without the internet anesthesia. The bookstore will not give you a hardcover just because you bought the paperback once. You want the hardcover. So you go to the bookstore at night, slip a brick through the window, crawl in, take the hardcover, and walk out. You say to yourself on the way home, “I am merely aligning formats for research purposes.” People do not debate nuance when you break a window. They call the police. They call it theft.
Digital removes the broken glass.
So people remove the guilt.
They fill the empty space with story.
This is what I am calling out. Not piracy. Human psychology. The instinct to preserve self image at any cost. The inability to say a simple sentence:
I pirated it because I wanted it. End of explanation.
Instead we get excuses from the Pirate Justification Vending Machine
I am archiving culture
I am previewing it
I will pay later
I support the creator emotionally
I did buy it once, in 2014, which grants eternal metaphysical ownership across all formats for all time including the direct brain injection edition in the year 2089
And then sometimes someone sends the author twelve dollars via PayPal and walks away like they personally restored the moral balance of the universe. It is adorable. Like a drug lord funding a kid science fair and expecting applause.
So yes, piracy happens. Yes, I do it too. The reason does not matter. But I am not delusional about it. I do not rename theft as cultural stewardship. I do not wrap it in story. I am a thief. Not a romantic one. Not a noble one. Just one who wanted a thing and took it. I can live with that truth.
The problem is not piracy. The problem is the lengths people will go to avoid looking in the mirror.
The thread is not about economics.
It is about ego protection.
And seeing adults twist themselves into philosophical pretzels to avoid saying a simple uncomfortable sentence is the funniest part of all of this.
The broken glass and the physical object are the actual difference in that case. The book store is paying for the glass and the unit cost of printing the hardcover.
You've diverged from criticizing rationalization of not paying to accusing someone who actually paid of doing something wrong. Now who is rationalizing the double dipping and copyrights that last so excessively long the medium they were released in becomes outmoded before they expire?
> I pirated it because I wanted it. End of explanation.
Which isn't a sufficient explanation if it doesn't reveal what it would take for you to pay instead.
Oh simple. Remove the glass and I pick the lock of the front door to your home and walk in at night while you, your wife and your kids are fast asleep and I scan the book that I want with a portable scanner. Not just one book. Many book across many nights. No damage done right? Once your wife and you find out that that’s all I’m doing you guys are totally ok with this.
> Which isn't a sufficient explanation if it doesn't reveal what it would take for you to pay instead.
Easy. What causes people to not steal other than good will? What causes people to not kill other than altruism. The government and society has several methods for this. Jail time? Locks? Etc. It’s just hard to do the same for piracy.
Either way. The topic of this thread is not about what would make me pay. That’s fucking obvious. The topic is about the less obvious thing and why people like you go to elaborate lengths to side step admitting that you’re a fucking thief.
I’m a thief. I sail the high seas. Am I proud of it? No. But I’m not delusional about it like this entire thread.
> Oh simple. Remove the glass and I pick the lock of the front door to your home and walk in at night while you, your wife and your kids are fast asleep and I scan the book that I want with a portable scanner. Not just one book. Many book across many nights. No damage done right? Once your wife and you find out that that’s all I’m doing you guys are totally ok with this.
So now you want to replace the things that aren't happening in the digital case with some other things that aren't happening in the digital case?
Your analogy is barely even an analogy. It's pretty obvious what the physical equivalent would be. You'd make a copy of the paperback as a hardcover, yourself in your own place with your own materials. Which doesn't seem nearly as objectionable as breaking into a bookstore or a house or stealing a physical object with a unit cost, because it isn't.
> What causes people to not steal other than good will? What causes people to not kill other than altruism. The government and society has several methods for this. Jail time? Locks? Etc. It’s just hard to do the same for piracy.
Which is why it would make a lot of sense for the companies selling this stuff to care about and do everything they can to retain that good will, right?
> The topic is about the less obvious thing and why people like you go to elaborate lengths to side step admitting that you’re a fucking thief.
Were the people saying they were returning to piracy not admitting they were returning to piracy, or were they just explaining what it would take to make them not?
>So now you want to replace the things that aren’t happening in the digital case with some other things that aren’t happening in the digital case?
Oh I see. You think the physical break-in imagery is the problem, not the behavior itself. Cute. The point flew over your head so hard it’s now in low Earth orbit.
Nobody is saying the method is identical. The point is the moral equivalence.
If you want a book that you do not have, and you obtain it without permission, the only difference between burglary and piracy is how easy it is to lie to yourself afterward.
Digital theft just comes pre-laundered.
No broken window. No police report. Just a clean conscience and a folder named “Book_Final_FINAL2.pdf.”
>Your analogy is barely even an analogy. It’s pretty obvious what the physical equivalent would be. You’d make a copy of the paperback as a hardcover, yourself in your own place with your own materials.
Fantastic. And where exactly are you getting the paperback to copy, professor?
Are you growing it in a hydroponic book farm? Summoning it from the astral plane? Wishing really, really hard?
To “make your own copy at home” you must first acquire the book.
And if you do not buy it or borrow it, you steal it.
Congratulations. You have just walked right back into the house at night with a scanner, only you changed the lighting and think the ethics changed with it.
The source is the theft. Not the printing method.
This is not subtle. You are just allergic to saying it out loud.
>Which is why it would make a lot of sense for the companies selling this stuff to care about and do everything they can to retain that good will, right?
Yes, and they do, and pirates still pirate.
Spotify. Steam. Netflix. Apple Books. Kindle.
Platforms with instantaneous, frictionless, brain-dead-simple purchasing flows already exist.
And people still torrent.
Because the UX excuse was never the real reason.
It was just the most socially presentable one.
People do not need better UX.
They need better courage to say:
“I wanted it and I took it.”
>Were the people saying they were returning to piracy not admitting they were returning to piracy, or were they just explaining what it would take to make them not?
No. They were explaining how to preserve their self image while returning to piracy.
They were not saying:
“I pirate.”
They were saying:
“I pirate but I am still a good person because I have constructed a beautiful little narrative terrarium where I am the protagonist of justice.”
This thread is not about piracy.
It is about delusion.
⸻
Let me say it plainly so your brain has no escape hatch:
To read a book you do not have, you must obtain it.
If you obtain it without permission in the physical world, you break in somewhere.
If you obtain it without permission in the digital world, you click a link.
The click feels cleaner, so you tell cleaner stories.
Ah, the classic HN Passive Aggressive Concern Troll.
“Are you okay mate?”
Translation: I want to insult you, but I do not want dang to notice.
It is the same genre as:
“I am genuinely confused how someone could think this.”
Translation: I am calling you stupid.
or
“This feels emotional rather than reasoned.”
Translation: I have no counterargument.
You are not being kind. You are being condescending while wearing a cardigan of civility. It is the approved HN way of calling someone unwell without saying the word stupid directly. Very on brand. Very polite venom.
If you think my point is wrong, say why.
If you cannot, do not hide behind a wellness check.
So yes, I am okay.
Are you okay?
Because it seems like making eye contact with your own reasoning gave you altitude sickness.
Setup is tricky first time and permissions can be a horror, but after that it’s ‘Rrs doing it all.
Sonarr, Radarr etc. it’s all automated and if you use lists you don’t actually touch it unless adding a new series, it just works.
I pay for usenet indexers and access, VPNs and Plex. I also pay for Netflix, Sky for Appletv.
The piracy setup costs far more to run the streaming services.
I do it for the quality and the all in 1 nature. I pay for the streaming services too, which makes me feel less bad about it. I should cut one or the other, but haven’t yet.
Yeah I would say you’re the minority use case or you’re lying. People who pay for and therefore fund pirates usually don’t pay for legal services as well.
Setup of an automated media server and the containers it requires was more or less my training for an IT role. Similar setups were maintained by most the staff and all also had streaming accounts.
I can’t fault the training, it helped me out of many jams.
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.
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
You are indeed correct. I'm the type of person who watches movies once and rarely goes back to re-watch them. But there are just a few things I truly wish to support and will go back and enjoy years later.
I went from a 0 movie collection to buying a higher end Blu-Ray player and purchasing UHD movies. Which is deeply ironic because I'm losing the ability to purchase movies locally with stores like BestBuy discarding them to Wal-Mart only having a few and none I wish to own.
Nothing I hate more than "where can I watch X" and the response is "you can't".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Amazon for most of its history has had an extremely generous return policy. People don't trust them to send something good, they trust them to take it back if it's not.
It is still kind of niche in many countries whose population can only dream of US salaries, and will keep that way as Apple will never give up on their margins.
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?
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.
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)
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.
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.
I hadn't done it in years either... Then just recently downloaded a show. Less than 5 minutes later, I have an email from my ISP with the name of the show telling me to stop it.
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).
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
I think you are at least partly right. The period after Jobs left was pretty bad. The Mac was too expensive and not providing enough advantages to be worthwhile. But the work that happened at NeXT basically enabled the Mac to make a comeback (macOS is basically a variant of the NeXT OS).
And indeed this is the period when they did play quite nice but I don't think it was only to get back in the game. I think Steve Jobs really had a goal, a "higher-purpose" towards offering elegant, powerful and easy to use computing devices. If that wasn't true, he would never had started NeXT in the first place, this endeavor nearly bankrupted him, so it wasn't just about greed.
But nowadays the hardware products are quite good (often best in class) but they are way too greedy and very negligent towards what actually matters, the software (having good hardware that cannot run any good software is rather useless).
It sounds like they are well on their way down the "Enshittification" [1] path. Eventually they will enshittify sufficiently that the illusion will shatter.
We need another commercial desktop OS to compete with Microsoft. The problem is Apple is shooting itself in the foot with their greed on hardware pricing.
This is the reasons many heavy/high-duty software never makes it to the Mac, it's just too expensive to outfit everyone with performant enough Mac computers.
It's pretty sad because they don't even need the money, and clearly they have shown in the past 10 years that they are completely unable to do anything better with the surplus money.
It's just self-defeating greed, they could eat a lot of Microsoft market share where it matters but instead they try to push an even more locked-down approach with the iPadOS.
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.
> 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)
> 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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> uninvited advertising is not normally equated with a better customer experience
As Jobs understood (per TFA), pushing ads degrades the user experience - the prime differentiating factor for Apple products in the first place, and what attracted many people to the platform.
It's bad, and it's probably going to get worse as Apple's services businesses increase their share of revenue and exert expanding influence over product design within the company.
Banning Apple from leveraging its platform for advertising Apple services might help, but the fact that we have arrived at the point where we have to rely on antitrust enforcement to make Apple products less intrusive and user-hostile shows that the company has lost its way.
> Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store
Unfortunately, requirements that Apple provide a choice to install Spotify rather than Apple Music, or Kindle rather than Apple Books, on a new iPhone doesn't fix the problem.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
True and if there was a good dumb phone alternative I would prefer that probably.
I do however need to use some apps sometimes unfortunately.
My bank for example implemented some proprietary 2fa method that I need to use an app for (or i buy a special device to it which also seems inconvenient).
Anyway it’s the only phone i ever bought; only used 2hand ones before and I’ll probably won’t buy another
Hey now. If they allowed you to simply enjoy the stuff you have without butting in to remind you of everything you don’t have, you might actually feel a moment of lightness and happiness. If they want you spending money they need to cultivate feelings of covetousness, inadequacy, or fear. Contentment doesn’t sell.
> 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.
When I put it away, I always leave it there (or in an open book) and it always stays there (or in an open book).
At least on Mac, I have noticed the Apple TV app seems to stay on one of the Library tabs indefinitely if I leave it there, but maybe it has just escaped their notice.
On the other hand, there’s no separate tab for “Continue Watching.” (A partial work-around is using the widget.)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I was gifted an iPad for Christmas a few years back and quickly found out there's nothing you can do on it without either looking at ads or paying a subscription. I returned it before the factory battery charge ran out.
> 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
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.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
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
This behaviour deeply bothers me, and my family doesn't get it. I've tried to explain it, but I think they're so accustomed to it that it doesn't really matter to them or occur to them as nefarious or malicious.
The way I see it, this type of behaviour by Apple (or any other company doing this) is an invasion of mental real estate. When you force things in front of my eyes that I didn't ask to see, or in my ears, or whatever, that's occupying my brain cycles and space in ways that are entirely uninvited.
Of course, the EULAs and whatnot all require me to agree to this bullshit, so fine, it's technically invited when I opened the application and said "sure, try to sell me your stuff", but to me this isn't the spirit of the software or operating system at ALL, and has been a signal of worse things to come for some time now. It's essentially enshittification.
My answer has been to stop using it. After 25 years of using Apple's computers and around 12 years on their phones, I'm migrating off. No more iPhone, Apple Watch, Airpods, etc. I'm still on a mac and that'll be hard to change, but it's slowly happening. I spent the last week on the ocean and in the woods on a toughbook, and that was kind of fun. It was eye opening to take a computer where I'd never take a macbook.
I find this kind of behaviour totally deplorable anyway, and I can't tolerate it. It's insidious and damaging to their brand because ultimately it's harmful to their users. They want number to go up, I get it, but I'm not their fodder.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!)
(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!)
> 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.
But this can't work. Then why would anyone innovate? I reject the assertion that it's impossible to innovate and develop a viable product. My question is what makes a company able to do both?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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).
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.
On my case that is achieved by getting down to the local record store, radio, whatever comes up in YouTube algorithms, somehow I get more music than I can manage to listen to.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
> 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.
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.
> I’ve heard the same story about Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and of course, Steve Jobs…
Is this supposed to be a positive point? Gates has exploited numerous legal maneuvers to create yes, a gigantic software company, and one of the absolute largest blights on tech as an industry. Name a Microsoft product that doesn't suck ass. Elon Musk hasn't done a fucking thing, he got lucky with PayPal, bought and booted the founders of Tesla, and has been coasting on it ever since. And since he fired his PR team his public image has gone to shit and all of his companies, save Space X and only because of generous Government contracts, are going down the drain.
> Being an “asshole” is very strongly correlated with the ability to build the best or biggest company in your field.
No, being an asshole is what one can get away with once one has struck it rich in tech. For all the shit talking I would do about Jobs, and do it I will, he is the only one on this list who did it in the direction you're talking about, where he was the asshole first, who THEN built a ridiculously successful business. Gates was a nepo baby who got access to computers at an incredibly young age when that was borderline unheard of. Musk would've never left his mothers basement if not for his father's wealth.
> It’s like girls in dating. They say they want a sensitive guy, but end up getting married to the jock with the big muscles.
Ah, you're also in your mother's basement I see.
> There’s this particularly western notion that no, no, no, millions of years of evolutionary advantage and game theory just doesn’t apply
We haven't been meaningfully part of evolution, survival of the fittest, since the first of our ancestors picked up a rock and tied it to a stick, and leapt to the top of the foodchain. We are by virtue of social networking and tool usage, apex predators. Nothing has been a threat to us in the "nature" way for thousands of years and nobody thinks otherwise apart from weird alpha-male guys who follow incredibly shit nature "science" to justify their unhinged anti-social behavior.
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.
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.
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.
>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).
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
It’s astonishing to me that even so many long-term Apple observers don’t see this, even though they are sorta obvious about it. “Now that the hardware is so close, the systems converge, etc., there is really no reason iPad will not eventually run macOS” – No, macOS will continue to be dumbed and locked down (“security!!11”) until the point where the Macs can be safely switched over from the terribly open legacy OS.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Am I the only one who does not want this? An iPad is an iPad. It's so simple that my old parents have no trouble figuring out how to use it.
By adding macOS to it, I can't get it for my parents anymore because it's way too complicated for them. That's bad for business for Apple since the iPad is designed to be a bigger iPhone.
But wait.. what if you can choose iPad/macOS mode? Ehh... so what should iPad hardware/software engineers optimize for? They're totally different use cases. The market for people wanting to run a hybrid iPad is likely much smaller than you think. Tech communities on the internet is loud but I'm going to guess that 95% of iPad users do not care/want macOS on it.
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.
Macbook Pros already provide excellent value. Where else can you find the fastest and most efficient chips, outstanding high solution display, excellent metal build quality, keyboard, speakers, touchpad, and a polished OS in one? They make the margins on RAM/SSD upgrades. I have no problem with that. The base models provide outstanding value.
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.
Ok if you do that, you'd have to increase warranty cost, calculate complex formulas for electricity, bandwidth for profitability since each customer will have different parameters. I fail to see how this is more efficient than just doing things in the cloud. I don't think customers want this stuff. I think mac Minis are cheap enough. I got my M4 Mini for $500. It's a steal.
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.
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?
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.
you omitted the most important 2 words from my quote: "growing revenue fromservices". 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While it may not be totally sensible, using AI imagery to depict something that never happened definitely does decrease trust. The exact same effect can be seen happening in sports as they added gambling on top. People are losing faith that the truth hasn’t been manipulated because there is ample opportunity to break trust and insert fiction.
But what cause that decrease to happen is by presenting false things as accurate. There will always be someone snooping around and if it’s an obvious false thing then people will make lots of noise about it, the evidence is this post thread.
It doesn’t matter if they actually cheated at sports or if the image is real. The threat of it being untrustworthy is actively eroding trust.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
No. Just fire up apps once and reuse them. Zed stays open all day. Rio stays open all day. As does chrome. Launch once he amortize the overhead over the whole day. Boom.
The same approach that’s Mitchell suggests with Ghostty
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
yup. Honestly, I disliked the idea of ubuntu because it seemed they are borderline building their own walled garden, but after learning that my device had a 'developer edition' with manufacturer's support for that distro, I shrugged and went that way.
For the moment I'm trying to avoid an all-or-nothing approach, if I can get to a workflow I enjoy in such a cheap device it's already a great success. It means that I don't have to say yes to apple no matter the deal, and I'm having a daily 'outgarden' experience so that when the time comes that apple's no longer the best option, I'll notice it naturally.
I'd have loved to see the asahi team achieving full support of at least one device, but it doesn't seem to be on the table for the near future.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
it's not a race to the bottom, it's a zero sum game. someone is gonna lose money but everyone who currently has a stake thinks they can bail out before the crash (or if the people in charge try to abort the game and initiate a more sustainable but less immediately profitable model). Stockholders essentially hold a company hostage like that: maximize short term growth of my asset value right now or I tank the entire org, then when the bad decisions you made today come back to haunt you I dump stock, pull up stakes and haul ass right before the whole thing explodes. These people kill sheep for wool.
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?
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
On Android you can get Firefox with its own rendering engine which can run full uBlock Origin. On iOS sure you can get some ad blockers on Safari but not the full powered uBlock Origin. Or you can get Firefox but it's just a reskinned Safari and can't run the powerful ad blockers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
there are no many nails in the coffin. CSAM. memojies. macos phone home to launch apps. where do i even begin? apple is dead and buried but it will continue to haunt us for decades
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
> 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:
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.
calling steve criminal is delusional. there probably isnt a single person let alone developer who ever worked for him who did not end up making lots of money and being well off
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.
> ... 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.
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.
> 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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
That's a bold move. I use whatsapp and apple pay so it's hard to find an dalternative. Which phone are you using? I’d love to hear how it compares to a smartphone in actual day-to-day use.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
im officially done with apple. they simply don't provide any value. they use their efficient hardware to make their devices thinner instead of having longer battery life… they are anti consumer
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"No wireless, less space than a nomad, but can be fully synced up and fast-charged in a few minutes" is what the review should have been. USB support came after when usb2 was "good enough". Syncing and creating playlists with other players was usually awful, slow, and the bundled software was not much better. iTunes was (at least at the time before the iTunes Store) quite lean and mean, too.
I'm not saying the iPod was perfect, though later versions got pretty close. But the "no wireless" part of the review still makes me chuckle. There were few hand-held anything that leveraged it at any truly useful level until proper smartphones existed.
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.
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
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.
googling, I think I had the nomad zen extra first then the zen vision w the built-in divx player for watching videos (which I never did, and it was an expensive way to learn that I'm not gonna watch a movie on a handheld screen)
I loved them both very much, much more than I love any gadget I own now
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
>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?
Im pretty sure torrenting/piracy is a VERY small subset of people. I think it's been growing again, but everyone still thinks I'm doing things 'old school' when I mention illegally downloading movies for my Plex server
Edit: Google Search Trends for "torrent" suggest it is NOT on it's way back
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.
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.
> 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.
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
>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
Misconception: perfect conditions are what lossy codecs are designed for. You're actually more likely to hear compression artifacts under imperfect conditions that break the assumptions of psychoacoustic masking. Examples include strongly distorted frequency response from poor speakers, accidental comb filtering from room reflections, or even merely listening through a home surround sound system that matrix-decodes a stereo signal into additional channels, thus spatially isolating sounds that were assumed to be masked.
[flagged]
They’re stealing from us. It’s only fair we steal from them.
I'm not stealing, I'm just training an AI.
Ok that was funny
I don't think you should rationalize theft.
This comment is funny because the one it's replying to could also be read as justifying the theft from the public domain perpetrated by DRM etc. as a fair response to piracy.
I just get my ebooks from the library, the same way I get my physical books.
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.
It truly warms my heart to see that the entire Hacker News population only pirates things out of pure moral principle. A noble stand for user experience. You PayPal’d the authors too? Beautiful. Inspirational. That is basically philanthropy. Mother Teresa but with a seedbox.
At this point it is obvious that every piece of content worth pirating mysteriously ends up locked behind the “we hired an enterprise consultant who has never used a computer” user experience. Which means pirating is not stealing, it is simply undoing a curse. I used to think taking someone’s work without permission was wrong. But now I understand that if they make me click more than two times or sign up for an account that wants my blood type, the theft automatically becomes a principled act of civil disobedience. Robin Hood with magnet links.
My friend tried to ruin this beautiful moral architecture I’ve built. He goes, “You’re just lying to yourself. This is motivated reasoning. People justify actions after doing them so they don’t feel guilty.” Then he starts rattling off psychological terminology like he’s been waiting his entire life to use the phrase “post-hoc rationalization” in a sentence. He even said cognitive dissonance while maintaining full eye contact, which should honestly be illegal outside of a grad seminar or a cult.
He’s like, “You want the thing. Then you explain to yourself why it was okay to take the thing.”
And I was like: Wow. Incredible. Thank you, professor Brain Surgeon PhD of Human Morality and Meme Piracy. Please invoice me for the lecture. I’ll pay you in exposure and a strongly worded moral shrug.
Because here is the truth:
I am not justifying anything. I am suffering. I am enduring the emotional hardship of navigating a UI that looks like it was designed in Microsoft Access by someone who hates joy. Do you understand the courage it takes to ignore that Buy Now button and instead go spelunking into the digital underworld like I’m Indiana Jones but for PDFs?
This is not theft. This is archaeology.
And yes, sometimes what I excavate is a folder labeled “S04E01–S04E23 (WEB-DL 2160p)” with subtitles and commentary tracks that legally shouldn’t exist. But that is not piracy.
That is restoration of cultural heritage.
The Library of Alexandria burned. I’m simply making sure Season 4 doesn’t.
There are two major classes of pirates.
The first is people who don't have the money, e.g. students. They will never pay you; they don't have the money.
The second is people who do have the money but value the experience above other things. These would be your best customers, if you provide the better experience.
If you don't provide the better experience, they don't pay. Is that a rationalization? Maybe, but are you better off to whinge about it or to take away their excuse?
Let us be clear from the start. This thread is not about piracy. Everyone pirates. Everyone knows everyone pirates. The internet is a vast floating marketplace of digital oranges stolen from the same tree. The practical question is boring.
The interesting question is psychological. How do you, personally, live with yourself while doing it? Why do people in this thread need to build entire theological systems of justification just to sleep at night?
That is the comedy here. Not the piracy. The denial.
Because if someone simply said, “Yes, I stole it because I wanted it and did not feel like paying,” I would respect that. Honesty. Integrity, even if dark.
But this thread is packed with people inventing ethical origami to explain why pressing the magnet link was actually a noble act of cultural preservation, spiritual support, intellectual necessity, or cosmic fairness. We are not talking about Kant. We are talking about a TV show and a PDF.
And then there is the classic justification play:
“I already bought the ebook on Kindle years ago. But I need a clean PDF to mark up on my iPad for research. Amazon will not give me a DRM free copy. I refuse to buy the same book twice. So I torrented a pristine academic version. I am simply aligning formats with my rightful ownership.”
The phrasing is beautiful. It sounds like a legal defense and a eulogy at the same time.
But think about it without the internet anesthesia. The bookstore will not give you a hardcover just because you bought the paperback once. You want the hardcover. So you go to the bookstore at night, slip a brick through the window, crawl in, take the hardcover, and walk out. You say to yourself on the way home, “I am merely aligning formats for research purposes.” People do not debate nuance when you break a window. They call the police. They call it theft.
Digital removes the broken glass. So people remove the guilt. They fill the empty space with story.
This is what I am calling out. Not piracy. Human psychology. The instinct to preserve self image at any cost. The inability to say a simple sentence:
I pirated it because I wanted it. End of explanation.
Instead we get excuses from the Pirate Justification Vending Machine
And then sometimes someone sends the author twelve dollars via PayPal and walks away like they personally restored the moral balance of the universe. It is adorable. Like a drug lord funding a kid science fair and expecting applause.So yes, piracy happens. Yes, I do it too. The reason does not matter. But I am not delusional about it. I do not rename theft as cultural stewardship. I do not wrap it in story. I am a thief. Not a romantic one. Not a noble one. Just one who wanted a thing and took it. I can live with that truth.
The problem is not piracy. The problem is the lengths people will go to avoid looking in the mirror. The thread is not about economics. It is about ego protection.
And seeing adults twist themselves into philosophical pretzels to avoid saying a simple uncomfortable sentence is the funniest part of all of this.
Not the torrent.
The delusion.
> Digital removes the broken glass.
The broken glass and the physical object are the actual difference in that case. The book store is paying for the glass and the unit cost of printing the hardcover.
You've diverged from criticizing rationalization of not paying to accusing someone who actually paid of doing something wrong. Now who is rationalizing the double dipping and copyrights that last so excessively long the medium they were released in becomes outmoded before they expire?
> I pirated it because I wanted it. End of explanation.
Which isn't a sufficient explanation if it doesn't reveal what it would take for you to pay instead.
Oh simple. Remove the glass and I pick the lock of the front door to your home and walk in at night while you, your wife and your kids are fast asleep and I scan the book that I want with a portable scanner. Not just one book. Many book across many nights. No damage done right? Once your wife and you find out that that’s all I’m doing you guys are totally ok with this.
> Which isn't a sufficient explanation if it doesn't reveal what it would take for you to pay instead.
Easy. What causes people to not steal other than good will? What causes people to not kill other than altruism. The government and society has several methods for this. Jail time? Locks? Etc. It’s just hard to do the same for piracy.
Either way. The topic of this thread is not about what would make me pay. That’s fucking obvious. The topic is about the less obvious thing and why people like you go to elaborate lengths to side step admitting that you’re a fucking thief.
I’m a thief. I sail the high seas. Am I proud of it? No. But I’m not delusional about it like this entire thread.
> Oh simple. Remove the glass and I pick the lock of the front door to your home and walk in at night while you, your wife and your kids are fast asleep and I scan the book that I want with a portable scanner. Not just one book. Many book across many nights. No damage done right? Once your wife and you find out that that’s all I’m doing you guys are totally ok with this.
So now you want to replace the things that aren't happening in the digital case with some other things that aren't happening in the digital case?
Your analogy is barely even an analogy. It's pretty obvious what the physical equivalent would be. You'd make a copy of the paperback as a hardcover, yourself in your own place with your own materials. Which doesn't seem nearly as objectionable as breaking into a bookstore or a house or stealing a physical object with a unit cost, because it isn't.
> What causes people to not steal other than good will? What causes people to not kill other than altruism. The government and society has several methods for this. Jail time? Locks? Etc. It’s just hard to do the same for piracy.
Which is why it would make a lot of sense for the companies selling this stuff to care about and do everything they can to retain that good will, right?
> The topic is about the less obvious thing and why people like you go to elaborate lengths to side step admitting that you’re a fucking thief.
Were the people saying they were returning to piracy not admitting they were returning to piracy, or were they just explaining what it would take to make them not?
>So now you want to replace the things that aren’t happening in the digital case with some other things that aren’t happening in the digital case?
Oh I see. You think the physical break-in imagery is the problem, not the behavior itself. Cute. The point flew over your head so hard it’s now in low Earth orbit.
Nobody is saying the method is identical. The point is the moral equivalence. If you want a book that you do not have, and you obtain it without permission, the only difference between burglary and piracy is how easy it is to lie to yourself afterward.
Digital theft just comes pre-laundered. No broken window. No police report. Just a clean conscience and a folder named “Book_Final_FINAL2.pdf.”
>Your analogy is barely even an analogy. It’s pretty obvious what the physical equivalent would be. You’d make a copy of the paperback as a hardcover, yourself in your own place with your own materials.
Fantastic. And where exactly are you getting the paperback to copy, professor? Are you growing it in a hydroponic book farm? Summoning it from the astral plane? Wishing really, really hard?
To “make your own copy at home” you must first acquire the book. And if you do not buy it or borrow it, you steal it. Congratulations. You have just walked right back into the house at night with a scanner, only you changed the lighting and think the ethics changed with it.
The source is the theft. Not the printing method. This is not subtle. You are just allergic to saying it out loud.
>Which is why it would make a lot of sense for the companies selling this stuff to care about and do everything they can to retain that good will, right?
Yes, and they do, and pirates still pirate. Spotify. Steam. Netflix. Apple Books. Kindle. Platforms with instantaneous, frictionless, brain-dead-simple purchasing flows already exist.
And people still torrent. Because the UX excuse was never the real reason. It was just the most socially presentable one.
People do not need better UX. They need better courage to say: “I wanted it and I took it.”
>Were the people saying they were returning to piracy not admitting they were returning to piracy, or were they just explaining what it would take to make them not?
No. They were explaining how to preserve their self image while returning to piracy.
They were not saying: “I pirate.” They were saying: “I pirate but I am still a good person because I have constructed a beautiful little narrative terrarium where I am the protagonist of justice.”
This thread is not about piracy. It is about delusion.
⸻
Let me say it plainly so your brain has no escape hatch:
To read a book you do not have, you must obtain it. If you obtain it without permission in the physical world, you break in somewhere. If you obtain it without permission in the digital world, you click a link.
The click feels cleaner, so you tell cleaner stories.
The ethics never changed. Only the lighting did.
Are you okay mate? Frankly your comments are absolutely unhinged. And that's not a value judgement, that's an observation.
Ah, the classic HN Passive Aggressive Concern Troll. “Are you okay mate?” Translation: I want to insult you, but I do not want dang to notice.
It is the same genre as:
“I am genuinely confused how someone could think this.” Translation: I am calling you stupid.
or
“This feels emotional rather than reasoned.” Translation: I have no counterargument.
You are not being kind. You are being condescending while wearing a cardigan of civility. It is the approved HN way of calling someone unwell without saying the word stupid directly. Very on brand. Very polite venom.
If you think my point is wrong, say why. If you cannot, do not hide behind a wellness check.
So yes, I am okay. Are you okay? Because it seems like making eye contact with your own reasoning gave you altitude sickness.
You are definitely copying and pasting from an LLM. Perhaps GPT, going by the flavor.
We see you trollin', we hatin', we caught you commenting dirty.
errr no. You're trolling.
These comments feel like an LLM. Which would be peak irony, considering how people feel these models have stolen from humanity.
Cute. You can go to any comment you disagree with and make up lies like this. What's the point?
Torrent? Usenet thank you very much.
Usenet. Right and this is less obscure and more easier to use than Amazon, Spotify, and Netflix? Give me a break.
Setup is tricky first time and permissions can be a horror, but after that it’s ‘Rrs doing it all. Sonarr, Radarr etc. it’s all automated and if you use lists you don’t actually touch it unless adding a new series, it just works.
Same with paying for your software. One time setup and it just works afterwards, but easier.
I use stremio with pirate plugins which provides basically an identical experience to Netflix. Don’t even need a setup.
I think you get it though. You use Usenet because you don’t want to pay right? Pure and simple.
I pay for usenet indexers and access, VPNs and Plex. I also pay for Netflix, Sky for Appletv.
The piracy setup costs far more to run the streaming services.
I do it for the quality and the all in 1 nature. I pay for the streaming services too, which makes me feel less bad about it. I should cut one or the other, but haven’t yet.
Yeah I would say you’re the minority use case or you’re lying. People who pay for and therefore fund pirates usually don’t pay for legal services as well.
Setup of an automated media server and the containers it requires was more or less my training for an IT role. Similar setups were maintained by most the staff and all also had streaming accounts.
I can’t fault the training, it helped me out of many jams.
Found the redditor
Look kid, buy something or get out!
> 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.
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.
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
You are indeed correct. I'm the type of person who watches movies once and rarely goes back to re-watch them. But there are just a few things I truly wish to support and will go back and enjoy years later.
I went from a 0 movie collection to buying a higher end Blu-Ray player and purchasing UHD movies. Which is deeply ironic because I'm losing the ability to purchase movies locally with stores like BestBuy discarding them to Wal-Mart only having a few and none I wish to own.
Nothing I hate more than "where can I watch X" and the response is "you can't".
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.
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.
You're citing a report about recordable CD and DVDs. Movie DVDs should be expected to last much longer than that.
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.
I think you're thinking of the CD-R
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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.
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
It's true, and it sucks. But at least I didn't pay Amazon $1800 for hardware first.
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.
> 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.
Amazon for most of its history has had an extremely generous return policy. People don't trust them to send something good, they trust them to take it back if it's not.
It is still kind of niche in many countries whose population can only dream of US salaries, and will keep that way as Apple will never give up on their margins.
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
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.
Torrent sites have amazing search ... just saying
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)
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.
I’ve torrented for decades, never received such a letter.
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.
I hadn't done it in years either... Then just recently downloaded a show. Less than 5 minutes later, I have an email from my ISP with the name of the show telling me to stop it.
Very few countries in Europe have that issue, and afaik no country in the americas.
Even with full encryption?
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.
There is https://github.com/Prowlarr/Prowlarr
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.
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)
It means it gets a lot of use, so you can justify larger disks! Isn't that great?
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.
Delete things? Never!
And nzb360
Ahhhhh, nzbs
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.
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).
Better ads with free stuff than ads with paid stuff.
>Yeah shame it’s hidden behind 50 pop-under triggers and infectious scam ads.
You don't have to click those.
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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.
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.
In general their products weren't that great, hence why they almost went bankrupt.
They only played nice during the time they were getting back into the game
I think you are at least partly right. The period after Jobs left was pretty bad. The Mac was too expensive and not providing enough advantages to be worthwhile. But the work that happened at NeXT basically enabled the Mac to make a comeback (macOS is basically a variant of the NeXT OS).
And indeed this is the period when they did play quite nice but I don't think it was only to get back in the game. I think Steve Jobs really had a goal, a "higher-purpose" towards offering elegant, powerful and easy to use computing devices. If that wasn't true, he would never had started NeXT in the first place, this endeavor nearly bankrupted him, so it wasn't just about greed.
But nowadays the hardware products are quite good (often best in class) but they are way too greedy and very negligent towards what actually matters, the software (having good hardware that cannot run any good software is rather useless).
To see the mindset of Steve at NeXT there are a few biographies on that subject, e.g. "Steve Jobs & the Next Big Thing".
Also to note there was the other alternative reality where Apple acquired Be instead.
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
It looks like it but it's quite sad.
We need another commercial desktop OS to compete with Microsoft. The problem is Apple is shooting itself in the foot with their greed on hardware pricing.
This is the reasons many heavy/high-duty software never makes it to the Mac, it's just too expensive to outfit everyone with performant enough Mac computers. It's pretty sad because they don't even need the money, and clearly they have shown in the past 10 years that they are completely unable to do anything better with the surplus money. It's just self-defeating greed, they could eat a lot of Microsoft market share where it matters but instead they try to push an even more locked-down approach with the iPadOS.
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.
> 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)
> 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 ;)
> 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.
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.
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.
You're better off with a local first reader/ebook /library manager like Yomu or Marvin.
Yomu is what I’ve switched to
Would love to know that block list.
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.
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
Thank you!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
AI will soon make this difference (if it even exists) irrelevant.
How will AI change this situation? I don't catch your drift.
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.
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.
> you can just tell the AI (with a voice command) what you want to do
I would rather stop using computers all together.
> you can just tell the AI (with a voice command) what you want to do
Hard no. Not happening.
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2025/10/16/makin...
Apple will follow along
AI features that nobody has actually asked for is a big contributor to the overall suckiness of Win11 right now.
In that both Windows and Mac will be equally shit?
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).
> uninvited advertising is not normally equated with a better customer experience
As Jobs understood (per TFA), pushing ads degrades the user experience - the prime differentiating factor for Apple products in the first place, and what attracted many people to the platform.
It's bad, and it's probably going to get worse as Apple's services businesses increase their share of revenue and exert expanding influence over product design within the company.
Banning Apple from leveraging its platform for advertising Apple services might help, but the fact that we have arrived at the point where we have to rely on antitrust enforcement to make Apple products less intrusive and user-hostile shows that the company has lost its way.
> Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store
Unfortunately, requirements that Apple provide a choice to install Spotify rather than Apple Music, or Kindle rather than Apple Books, on a new iPhone doesn't fix the problem.
s/doesn't/won't/
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
The today tab is the default one that opens when you start the App Store. At least on my 16Pro.
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.
An iPhone is a vending machine in your pocket.
(owned and operated by Apple, and __you__ paid for it.)
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.
Good for you, but if you never buy from the vending machine that doesn't mean it's not a vending machine.
That's a very, very expensive browser.
True and if there was a good dumb phone alternative I would prefer that probably.
I do however need to use some apps sometimes unfortunately. My bank for example implemented some proprietary 2fa method that I need to use an app for (or i buy a special device to it which also seems inconvenient).
Anyway it’s the only phone i ever bought; only used 2hand ones before and I’ll probably won’t buy another
Hey now. If they allowed you to simply enjoy the stuff you have without butting in to remind you of everything you don’t have, you might actually feel a moment of lightness and happiness. If they want you spending money they need to cultivate feelings of covetousness, inadequacy, or fear. Contentment doesn’t sell.
> 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.
My Kobo Libra 2 has a “My Books” tab with no ads.
When I put it away, I always leave it there (or in an open book) and it always stays there (or in an open book).
At least on Mac, I have noticed the Apple TV app seems to stay on one of the Library tabs indefinitely if I leave it there, but maybe it has just escaped their notice.
On the other hand, there’s no separate tab for “Continue Watching.” (A partial work-around is using the widget.)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I was gifted an iPad for Christmas a few years back and quickly found out there's nothing you can do on it without either looking at ads or paying a subscription. I returned it before the factory battery charge ran out.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
That means you also haven’t used Windows back when it was good.
I did use win98 briefly, which was bearable but it also wasn’t good. You are probably referring to an even older version
I’m referring to the era from Windows 2000 to Windows 7.
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
> 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.
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
This behaviour deeply bothers me, and my family doesn't get it. I've tried to explain it, but I think they're so accustomed to it that it doesn't really matter to them or occur to them as nefarious or malicious.
The way I see it, this type of behaviour by Apple (or any other company doing this) is an invasion of mental real estate. When you force things in front of my eyes that I didn't ask to see, or in my ears, or whatever, that's occupying my brain cycles and space in ways that are entirely uninvited.
Of course, the EULAs and whatnot all require me to agree to this bullshit, so fine, it's technically invited when I opened the application and said "sure, try to sell me your stuff", but to me this isn't the spirit of the software or operating system at ALL, and has been a signal of worse things to come for some time now. It's essentially enshittification.
My answer has been to stop using it. After 25 years of using Apple's computers and around 12 years on their phones, I'm migrating off. No more iPhone, Apple Watch, Airpods, etc. I'm still on a mac and that'll be hard to change, but it's slowly happening. I spent the last week on the ocean and in the woods on a toughbook, and that was kind of fun. It was eye opening to take a computer where I'd never take a macbook.
I find this kind of behaviour totally deplorable anyway, and I can't tolerate it. It's insidious and damaging to their brand because ultimately it's harmful to their users. They want number to go up, I get it, but I'm not their fodder.
Once upon a time, Apple used to be different. Now they’re just another megacorp that abuses you with enshittification, like they all do.
Different indeed, like that time Jobs pushed U2 album into every iphone.
Steve Jobs died in 2011, that "Songs of Innocence" fiasco was in 2014.
You are right, I misremembered U2 branded iPod as that song debacle.
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.
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
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.
Big ups for mentioning KAGI
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.
You are YASsing a ChatGPT authored screed…
Now where'd you cop that?
Disconcertingly many em dashes, but they're used correctly, without spaces, and are easy to type on MacOS.
> 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.
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!)
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.
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!)
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?
> 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.
> Let it be someone else.
But this can't work. Then why would anyone innovate? I reject the assertion that it's impossible to innovate and develop a viable product. My question is what makes a company able to do both?
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.
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?
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.
they only win when they're able to anti-competitively lock out their competitors by bundling
because their products are universally shit
see: Teams
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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).
I'm pretty sure that it's not really "discovery" if you had to have already found and downloaded the thing you're "discovering".
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.
On my case that is achieved by getting down to the local record store, radio, whatever comes up in YouTube algorithms, somehow I get more music than I can manage to listen to.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
We need to stop making products for reviewers.
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.
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.”
> 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.
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.
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> It’s like girls in dating. They say they want a sensitive guy, but end up getting married to the jock with the big muscles.
Those getting married to the jock never said they just want a sensitive guy. Some value big muscles more than others, but certainly not the majority.
> I’ve heard the same story about Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and of course, Steve Jobs…
Is this supposed to be a positive point? Gates has exploited numerous legal maneuvers to create yes, a gigantic software company, and one of the absolute largest blights on tech as an industry. Name a Microsoft product that doesn't suck ass. Elon Musk hasn't done a fucking thing, he got lucky with PayPal, bought and booted the founders of Tesla, and has been coasting on it ever since. And since he fired his PR team his public image has gone to shit and all of his companies, save Space X and only because of generous Government contracts, are going down the drain.
> Being an “asshole” is very strongly correlated with the ability to build the best or biggest company in your field.
No, being an asshole is what one can get away with once one has struck it rich in tech. For all the shit talking I would do about Jobs, and do it I will, he is the only one on this list who did it in the direction you're talking about, where he was the asshole first, who THEN built a ridiculously successful business. Gates was a nepo baby who got access to computers at an incredibly young age when that was borderline unheard of. Musk would've never left his mothers basement if not for his father's wealth.
> It’s like girls in dating. They say they want a sensitive guy, but end up getting married to the jock with the big muscles.
Ah, you're also in your mother's basement I see.
> There’s this particularly western notion that no, no, no, millions of years of evolutionary advantage and game theory just doesn’t apply
We haven't been meaningfully part of evolution, survival of the fittest, since the first of our ancestors picked up a rock and tied it to a stick, and leapt to the top of the foodchain. We are by virtue of social networking and tool usage, apex predators. Nothing has been a threat to us in the "nature" way for thousands of years and nobody thinks otherwise apart from weird alpha-male guys who follow incredibly shit nature "science" to justify their unhinged anti-social behavior.
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I appreciate this comment end to end and wish I could write as effectively. Thanks for sharing.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
>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).
Ads are a good way to be spammed with low-quality options that choose to pay apple.
Ads in the App Store continue to be a bad customer experience as well.
Anything you search for, the first thing at the top of the list is an ad from a competitor!
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
Correct. This is something that is becoming increasingly apparent with time.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
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
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.
I don’t want my phone to consume any of my “free” attention, ever, but holy cow especially not while driving.
> as a car passenger
Sometimes the driver looks at the map screen too. That's most of the reason it's there.
The 1st and 3rd are better served by Apple choosing the best result rather than who's paid for an ad.
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).
I want to challenge the idea that any of these is an unqualified "good experience". I desire none of this.
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...
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.
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.
If they did, I would also replace my iPhone, and I'd help family do the same.
It’s astonishing to me that even so many long-term Apple observers don’t see this, even though they are sorta obvious about it. “Now that the hardware is so close, the systems converge, etc., there is really no reason iPad will not eventually run macOS” – No, macOS will continue to be dumbed and locked down (“security!!11”) until the point where the Macs can be safely switched over from the terribly open legacy OS.
You might be right, but if MacOS dies, how will Apple develop for iOS etc?
And app developers too. Maybe sister comment about something cloud. Can fleece devs for more money too, bonus!
probably some subscription cloud environments
They could improve the development environment on iPadOS, or make it possible to develop for iOS on Linux.
Have a iPadOS version of a development environment?
A grown up version of Playground.
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
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?
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.
Anything that beats a refurb m1 mac mini for $250?
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.
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.
The last chart
https://i0.wp.com/sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/2...
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.
Where is the analysis?
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.
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.
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...
Give me iCloud++ or something that costs me $20/mo and shits off all the fucking ads and I’ll help grow the revenue.
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...
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.
if only the other side did not have their own trajectory
By adding macOS to it, I can't get it for my parents anymore because it's way too complicated for them. That's bad for business for Apple since the iPad is designed to be a bigger iPhone.
But wait.. what if you can choose iPad/macOS mode? Ehh... so what should iPad hardware/software engineers optimize for? They're totally different use cases. The market for people wanting to run a hybrid iPad is likely much smaller than you think. Tech communities on the internet is loud but I'm going to guess that 95% of iPad users do not care/want macOS on it.
Macbook Pros already provide excellent value. Where else can you find the fastest and most efficient chips, outstanding high solution display, excellent metal build quality, keyboard, speakers, touchpad, and a polished OS in one? They make the margins on RAM/SSD upgrades. I have no problem with that. The base models provide outstanding value. Ok if you do that, you'd have to increase warranty cost, calculate complex formulas for electricity, bandwidth for profitability since each customer will have different parameters. I fail to see how this is more efficient than just doing things in the cloud. I don't think customers want this stuff. I think mac Minis are cheap enough. I got my M4 Mini for $500. It's a steal.+ Make iPhones as powerful as iPads when plugged into docking stations. That would cannibalize everything
Maybe they should stop focussing on 'growing'. Isn't nearly $100bn in profit per year enough??
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.
> 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?
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
Does that somehow invalidate the message of the article?
It weakens the message because knowing that the image is fake casts equal doubt on anything which the text says.
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.
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.
No it does not. Give some real arguments against the article otherwise I'm going to assume bad faith.
While it may not be totally sensible, using AI imagery to depict something that never happened definitely does decrease trust. The exact same effect can be seen happening in sports as they added gambling on top. People are losing faith that the truth hasn’t been manipulated because there is ample opportunity to break trust and insert fiction.
What decreases trust is taking something innocent and blowing it out of proportion, then using it to attack people.
But what cause that decrease to happen is by presenting false things as accurate. There will always be someone snooping around and if it’s an obvious false thing then people will make lots of noise about it, the evidence is this post thread.
It doesn’t matter if they actually cheated at sports or if the image is real. The threat of it being untrustworthy is actively eroding trust.
We are at an impasse then. You can't prove an opinion. Have a great day.
it's super distasteful, i thought, having seen steve jobs in person face to face
Same here, ironic since the article is about crossing lines.
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
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.
It sure looks it. It was my assumption the moment I saw it.
I also instantly asked myself if the image was AI and reverse searched it when I saw it.
Very ironic using an AI image of Steve Jobs.
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.
???
If someone I knew generated AI images of me I wouldn't think it was okay
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.
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.
Right? I only generated a single AI picture of myself and it had that exact shading seen in this picture. Extremely obvious.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Is that AI Steve Jobs in the header image? Pretty uncanny and takes away from the article.
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)
There's something way off about that image, I'd bet money it's AI. Gross.
Yes. Pretty hypocritical for an article about "crossing red lines" to use AI slop for an image of a real person. Very disrespectful.
it also just looks awful and only about 80% like the guy
It's not hypocritical for an article about crossing someone else's red line to simultaneously be crossing your red line.
Depicting deceased people with AI is objectively distasteful, especially from a self-described "ad guy" who should know better.
That’s not what “objectively” means.
"objectively distasteful" - citation needed
It's death porn gross AI slop, 100% and immediately obvious to anyone who isn't coming of age in the slop era.
> death porn gross AI slop
Once again in English, please.
Gross AI death porn slop?
[dead]
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.
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.
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.
> MacOS [....] it just works and slow app load times are just a small price to pay for things just working.
Oxymoron?
No. Just fire up apps once and reuse them. Zed stays open all day. Rio stays open all day. As does chrome. Launch once he amortize the overhead over the whole day. Boom.
The same approach that’s Mitchell suggests with Ghostty
Hi Tim Cook
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
yup. Honestly, I disliked the idea of ubuntu because it seemed they are borderline building their own walled garden, but after learning that my device had a 'developer edition' with manufacturer's support for that distro, I shrugged and went that way.
For the moment I'm trying to avoid an all-or-nothing approach, if I can get to a workflow I enjoy in such a cheap device it's already a great success. It means that I don't have to say yes to apple no matter the deal, and I'm having a daily 'outgarden' experience so that when the time comes that apple's no longer the best option, I'll notice it naturally.
I'd have loved to see the asahi team achieving full support of at least one device, but it doesn't seem to be on the table for the near future.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>> 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.
They don't actually have to be good. They just need to be better than viable alternatives.
> 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?
>What are you going to do, move to Android?
Why not? If ads are coming anyway why pay the apple tax.
But Blue Bubbles! And iMessage, and you will need to move your photos. Also Music, movies and other stuff.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
i saw an interview with ives recently. he wasnt even close to being qualified for that job. it wasnt even an option
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.
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.
I don't understand why people are so tolerant of this first-party advertising.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I agree but the people who want to climb the corporate ladder usually want to leave their own mark.
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.
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.
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.
it's not a race to the bottom, it's a zero sum game. someone is gonna lose money but everyone who currently has a stake thinks they can bail out before the crash (or if the people in charge try to abort the game and initiate a more sustainable but less immediately profitable model). Stockholders essentially hold a company hostage like that: maximize short term growth of my asset value right now or I tank the entire org, then when the bad decisions you made today come back to haunt you I dump stock, pull up stakes and haul ass right before the whole thing explodes. These people kill sheep for wool.
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?
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
On Android you can get Firefox with its own rendering engine which can run full uBlock Origin. On iOS sure you can get some ad blockers on Safari but not the full powered uBlock Origin. Or you can get Firefox but it's just a reskinned Safari and can't run the powerful ad blockers.
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.
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.
Whoever designs these should be fired and never allowed in this space again.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
There is some amusing "leopards ate my face" logic in paying a company to not pester you for further monetization.
Never pay them. You're essentially paying to segment yourself into the upper echelons of the market.
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.
there are no many nails in the coffin. CSAM. memojies. macos phone home to launch apps. where do i even begin? apple is dead and buried but it will continue to haunt us for decades
Very ironic but so much of tech ultimately comes down to taste and Tim Cook obviously just doesn't have it.
Much of life does frankly...
Could be wrong, but the photo of Steve Jobs at the top of the article looks AI. Disturbing suspicion.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If it really was a red line, why did Steve even take the meeting, and then take days to decide on it?
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
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.
he wouldnt have done it. he doesnt need to be a deity for this to be true
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
> 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.
calling steve criminal is delusional. there probably isnt a single person let alone developer who ever worked for him who did not end up making lots of money and being well off
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
If I see ads in their proprietary software, I’m done as a customer.
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.
I see no ads there
> 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.
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).
> 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.
If I remember correctly, it was Roku, which is already doing things like this:
https://www.wired.com/story/roku-tests-showing-video-ads-bef...
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
i am downgrading to a semi-dumb phone. maps, email, calls and text. thats all you need. unfortunately nobody makes a full keyboard dumb phone anymore
That's a bold move. I use whatsapp and apple pay so it's hard to find an dalternative. Which phone are you using? I’d love to hear how it compares to a smartphone in actual day-to-day use.
Cool, if they ever fix the broken external monitor support, then I can see the ads on my second monitor too!!
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.
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.
This means you use an ad blocker.
Only a matter of time now before you have to watch a 30 second ad before any app will open.
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?
How much f'n money do these massive corporations really need?
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.
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.
I just hope they won't change Calculator as a service app.
Eventually it could get there if that's the direction Apple stays on.
> 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.
> 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.
I'd pay $10/m for ad-free Apple/Google maps.
I thought Jobs' red lines went out of the window as far back as the Apple Pencil (iPhone presentation 2007: "Stylus? Yuck!").
Apple has crossed the "no QA here". I found bugs everyday that cannot believe an average team cannot detect.
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.
I stopped using iCloud for just that reason and now with Tahoe.
im officially done with apple. they simply don't provide any value. they use their efficient hardware to make their devices thinner instead of having longer battery life… they are anti consumer
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.
Crossing the red line has consequences … though not immediately…
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.
> they don't expect to see ads, ever.
Though I'm sure they'll get used to it.
This is a market opportunity for windows.
Steve Jobs created iAd
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.
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.
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.
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
>"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.
Does nobody else remember Apple intentionally reducing battery life so you'd have to buy new phones?
Did they? I only recall them reducing clock speed to offset battery degradation.
Yes, I forgot the details and just looked them up.
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.
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.
One word: Enshittification.
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.
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.
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.
Ads should be illegal.
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.
Are they bathing?
Everything breaks.
Jobs, if lived, will bow to ads or get fired.
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
Counterpoint; if Steve Jobs thought that advertising would ruin Apple, he would have never advocated for Cook as replacement CEO.
Am I the only one that remembers Steve introducing the iAd platform?
[dead]
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.
[dead]
Click bait headline. Is that a real photo of SJ? Flagged and moving on.
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.
Money isn't everything. We can, and should, shun businessmen who try to eke out every ounce of profit by making their products terrible.
Yeah every action a company takes is immediately and completely reflected in the market cap /s
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"No wireless, less space than a nomad, but can be fully synced up and fast-charged in a few minutes" is what the review should have been. USB support came after when usb2 was "good enough". Syncing and creating playlists with other players was usually awful, slow, and the bundled software was not much better. iTunes was (at least at the time before the iTunes Store) quite lean and mean, too.
I'm not saying the iPod was perfect, though later versions got pretty close. But the "no wireless" part of the review still makes me chuckle. There were few hand-held anything that leveraged it at any truly useful level until proper smartphones existed.
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.
So you approve of ads then since it makes the company more valuable?
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.
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.
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
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.
googling, I think I had the nomad zen extra first then the zen vision w the built-in divx player for watching videos (which I never did, and it was an expensive way to learn that I'm not gonna watch a movie on a handheld screen)
I loved them both very much, much more than I love any gadget I own now
for something useless it worked very, extraordinarily well
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.